THE ZENOBIANS

THE ZENOBIANS

Yesterday I was invited to attend a meeting of the Zenobians, a women’s discussion group run by the British Embassy and named after the famous Desert Queen, Zenobia, whose ambitions made her fall foul of the Roman Empire leading to her being “bound in chains of gold” and taken from Palmyra to Rome where she ended her days incarcerated in a villa. The group meets once a month and an invited speaker gives a talk on a different topic each time.  I thought this month’s topic was herbal medicine, but it turned out that the calendar had been changed and that is the theme of next month’s talk.  

The meeting is held in a basement apartment in Malki.  Mary (the British consul’s wife) and I arrived first because she is in charge of proceedings at the moment as the person usually responsible is in the UK having a baby.  Then a Sri Lankan couple, Fernando and Monica, who are employed to arrange the seating and serve the tea, arrived.  They laid out the bite-sized strawberry tarts and chocolate cakes on platters (they were supposed to be chocolate éclairs but the boy at the bakery was new and did not understand what éclairs were)  and Lady Grey, Prince of Wales and ordinary Liptons tea bags were produced.  All very British.  Among the audience was a lady from Manchester who came to Damascus as the correspondent of the BBC in 1948, married a Syrian doctor and has been here ever since.  She is 73 years old, as bright as a button, and works as an unofficial guide in the Old City.  

The talk was given by a highly articulate Syrian woman, a graduate and PhD from Leicester university, who teaches English literature at Damascus University.  The theme of her talk, which was amply peppered with apt quotations from English poets, was  the trap in which young people find themselves in Syrian society.  What she had to say was gratifying and depressing at the same time: gratifying because I was able to confirm that my own x-ray of the state of affairs was accurate and, precisely because that was so, depressing.  She confirmed that the main concern of all young men was to find a job in order to be able to marry, and that the main goal for 90% or more of young women was to find a husband. The authoritarian patriarchal mould means that individual thought and initiative are actively discouraged and, even when a student expresses an individual opinion in a private interview, the moment his, but particularly her, opinion is sought in an open debate, she will retract her own view and present the socially accepted opinion based on conformity and obedience to authority. The tendency to burden the female with guilt feelings is also widespread.  An American university teacher present then pointed out that the few who do dare to flout the steamroller of society are the ones who apply  for Fulbright scholarships to American universities.  When asked if there was one young girl in each class who dared to be herself, the answer was an unequivocal no: perhaps once every three or four years there will be one girl in the whole year in that particular faculty!

The discussion which followed the talk was also interesting.  The American university  person attributed the sitiuation to the political sphere, but the Syrian women present did not accept this, insisting that the constraints were social rather than political, and I agree with her.  They said  that the government laid down no guidelines regarding these issues and that power in these fields lay within the family.  One of the women offered her own situation as an example.  She told how she was regarded as a liberal mother but that, when her children reached adolescence, she had closed the door of family democracy.  My son can bring his girlfriends home and I treat them well.  Would you allow him to marry one of them?  Yes, because my own brothers married their girlfriends.  What do think about the reputation of these girls who will go out with your son before a formal engagement has been arranged? Their reputation is not my problem.  It’s their family’s problem.  But, if my daughter were to say she had a boyfriend and wanted to bring him home, that would be a different thing altogether.  No way!  Why not?  Because I am divorced and I have to bring up my children.  I must think about safeguarding my daughter’s reputation so she will be able to marry, and at the same time I must safeguard my OWN reputation.  If my daughter were to do something considered incorrect socially, then people would say What do you expect?  She has a liberal mother so ... The speaker then added, But your son is above good and evil simply because he is male.  Correct, the woman replied.


Another Syrian lady who had studied at university in the early sixties expressed her sorrow that on the threshold of the new millenium the issues under discussion should be ones which she and her generation thought were buried long ago.  Thirty years ago the university campus was much more secular than it is today and she found the growing Islamization (at least in terms of external trappings of religiosity) quite sad.  She told how a friend had burned her veil more than forty years ago, and her generation thought that the major battles had been won to allow young women to have more options and a greater say in their lives, but now she sees that they were wrong.  The pressure of society has been too strong and many young girls now cover, not because they believe it is right but because, if they do not, it will prove more difficult to find a husband as more and more young men want veiled wives.  The consensus of opinion was that there is no prospect at the moment of things changing very much.

And when all this basic works still remains to be done in most of the world, the main thrust of the Beijing Conference on Women seemed to centre around the rights of lesbians!!  What is clear is that no change will come until women themselves decide that they are no longer prepared to be at the mercy of society and that they deserve to have a say in the path their own lives take.

July 20th 1998