Saddeka Arebi - Literary Contributions

Literary Contributions

In May 1994, Arebi published Women and Words in Saudi Arabia: The Politics of Literary Discourse, where she examines the works of nine contemporary Saudi women writers and their influence on Arabic cultural discourse (see Women in Arab societies). Based on interviews and textual analyses, the study maintains that female writers significantly contribute to the definition and interpretation of history, religion and tradition in Saudi Arabia despite the cultural, political and religious constraints placed on them as women and writers. In this groundbreaking work, Arebi draws on ethnographic and literary evidence to establish the uniqueness of Saudi women writers who: “emerged not only as a subject of discourse but also as generators of discourse producing their own texts and forming their own concepts for comprehending the universe. Since the late 1970s and despite the overwhelming power of discourse about them, women's words were unrelenting and daring in their challenge."

She quotes a fatwa (religious legal opinion) by Shaikh Abd-al-Aziz ibn Abd-Allah ibn Baaz from 1978 summarizing the fundamentalist view of women, which the women writers have been trying to change. The opinion states: “Attacking men's guardianship of women is an objection to God and an attack on His Book and on His prudent law. This is great in deity (Kufr akbar) by the consensus of Islam's ulema... It is absolutely necessary that the newspaper be publicly punished by stopping its publication. The woman who wrote and the editor in-chief must be tried and disciplined in a deterring manner."

Her book answers a question she raised: “How do women themselves use words as a means to counter the language of power, and aesthetics as a political strategy for revisions of concepts, ideas, and institutions that are used to control them?"

However, Arebi argues these writers do not necessarily conform to Western feminists’ ideas of resistance or their definitions of patriarchy. In another earlier work, Arebi made an important remark concerning Muslim women:

There are three reasons why Muslim women may generally find it difficult to adopt a western model of feminism predicated on premises deemed universally applicable. First, Muslim women do not perceive `family ties and kinship ties a hindrance to women's liberation'; secondly, there is a resentment of `the West's identification of the "problem" of Muslim women as a religious problem'; and thirdly, wages have not necessarily functioned as a `liberating force' in the sense advocated by western feminists. —S. Arebi, ”Gender Anthropology in the Middle East,” Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (1991)