Thinker Sharabi slams the Arab patriarchal society

BEIRUT - Hussain Abdul-Hussain

Georgetown’s professor emeritus Hisham Sharabi argues that the only way for reform in the Arab world starts with the liberation of women and eventually the dismantling of the dominant patriarchal society.

In a book entitled The Crisis of Arab Intellectuals published in Arabic by Nelson Publishing House in 2002, the renowned Palestinian thinker assembled a selection of articles he had written over the past half century highlighting the role of intellectuals in a potential Arab revival.

Sharabi, whose earlier books such as The Neo Patriarchy and Arab Intellectuals and the West catapulted him to intellectual fame, says that the main reason behind Arab regression has been male dominance which has curtailed female contribution to the progression of the society.Articles in The Crisis of Arab Intellectuals were written in different times and circumstances and are not linked to each other. The book jumps from one topic to another without any logical justification.

Employing heavy academic terminology and lacking illustrations and examples from the Arab world made the book almost purely theoretical and more appealing to students with background in philosophy than average readers.

Sharabi seems aware, however, that his book would find its way to a few select readers. “Since the patriarchal society does not read, our writings would only reach to patriarchs in a distorted way through conversations in house gatherings and cafes where thought is rendered narration and told the way stories, anecdotes and legends are told,” Shaabi wrote.

He says that education alone does not make of a person an intellectual. It is rather education coupled with his/her involvement in public affairs that make of people real intellectuals.

A former admirer of Antoun Saadeh, founder of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), and a former active member of his party, Sharabi retains much of the nationalist rhetoric as he frequently talks about the unexploited potential of the nation.

He also talks about the Arab need to upgrade their technology and the military so as to correct the Arab-Israeli status quo which is currently in favor of the Israelis.

According to Sharabi, problems facing the Arab world have been mostly – though not exclusively – the result of internal failure rather than external intervention. For this reason, he suggests that Arabs start correcting their situation by dismantling their patriarchal society which scraps all constitutions and laws and lives off a special formula of inter-society power relations.

In order to bring the patriarchal society to its end, Sharabi suggests that Arab males and females solve problems of gender equality. This equality, however, can never be achieved through paying women organizations lip service support, but through firm decisions on the level of the political leadership.

The 75 year-old intellectual extensively discusses modernization in the Arab world as compared to the West. “In most Arab countries, a small faction of the society succeeded in reaching superficial modernization through consumerism at the time the social structure remained as is on the level of sectarianism and tribalism,” he argues.

Despite its specialized nature, a couple of recent interviews with Sharabi published in the book’s appendix might be a rewarding compensation for average readers. The second interview, by Palestinian Studies Institution’s Saqer Abou-Fakher, is particularly interesting.

The interview suffices the book with a much-needed realistic dimension as it describes how Sharabi deserted in 1967 SSNP’s thought in favor of Marxism. It also brings to the fore valuable analysis of pending sociopolitical issues such as the status of women in the Arab world and the situation of higher institutes of education.