If the Mountain wont come to Mohammed, then Mohammed will go to the Mountain.

Any planning program seeking to enhance the quality of life of the women of Egypt is proceeding from the premise that there is a critical deficit in this regard, whether or not this point of view is shared by these women. If Egyptian women do not perceive the quality of their life as suffering in important ways, such a program cannot be expected to be successful. Otherwise, any development program is liable to be received as arbitrary and paternalistic. Because the status, identity and quality of life of Egyptian women are inextricably tied to the status, identity and quality of life of Egyptian men and Egyptian children, great progress cannot be expected among women without simultaneously overcoming the resistance and changing the attitudes and actions of men and the patterns of acquisition and development of children. As long as Egyptians are culturally satisfied with the traditional status quo, it cannot be presumed that they will perceive any great need for change, and will most likely resist such change. Egyptian women must feel basic dissatisfactions with their daily life, enough that they are willing to fight to change it, and then they must be empowered with the means--educationally, legally and in leadership--that will give them the chance to do so.

Any such program must take into account a number of interconnected factors of culture, tradition, religious values, economic patterns and social structure. This includes a culture of sexual repression in which women, as the embodiment of sexuality and reproductive power, are regarded with marked ambivalence as fundamentally illicit and potentially dangerous social beings who need to be constantly controlled and supervised.

Sexual repression in males takes the form of rather traumatic rites of separation and transition signaled by the circumcision ceremony, from a previous primary identity of a child that was centered upon the public/domestic boundaries and female world of the mother. The basic ambivalence of Muslim Algerian males is revealed by the rigidity and maladjustment of their basic personality, and by the almost uniform contradiction between the sexual fantasy life of adulterous exploits and a male-dominant value orientation that dictates the husband's murder of an adulterous lover, the public stoning of the adulterous wife, or the father's murder of a deflowered, unmarried daughter. Males living in an urban context demonstrate a greater tolerance and acceptance of the public role of women as something more than merely dangerous temptresses.

Sexual repression in females is marked by the common African custom of cliterodectomy which effectively removes the principle mechanism by which women may achieve sexual satisfaction, and by their seclusion and segregation from a public life.

The sexual de-repression of Muslim society must follow the reinterpretation of the basic tenants of Islamic custom which tend to devalue women and their sexuality as polluting, forbidden and dangerous. Women must be visible, tolerated and allowed unveiled and hair down in public sectors. Men must be encouraged and permitted in domestic spheres that were once the exclusive domain of women. Perhaps the most profound experience I have had as a male has been to attend and take part in the birth of my daughter.

Because this has been a deeply embedded traditional orientation, any planning program must also aim at the primary linkages in its cross-generational transmission. These include the patterns of peer pressure that differentially influence the world of children, adult males and adult females, and the patterns of parental authority in the home which critically influence the socialization and identification of personality. Friends, sisters, mothers, and mothers-in-law may be the greatest purveyors of the persecution of females. They are the midwives, and the agents of both cliterodectomy and the deflowering ceremonies of newlywed brides. Men who dwell publicly in an exclusively male-dominated world will be most influenced by the opinions, attitudes and actions of their Muslim brothers, no matter how backward, ignorant or conservative. The greatest source of change of children's identity outside the home may be by peer pressures and school teachers in the school setting.

A peasant orientation stresses the early induction of the child into the responsibilities and duties of the family concern. Young females in this regard are especially burdened in their nurturing responsibilities to the care for younger siblings. The household of primary socialization is liable to consist of an extended family, including the active role of grand parents, aunts and uncles as disciplinarians and guardians of appropriate traditional values, and the relatively aloof part played by an authoritarian father. Punishment of children by beating is common in Arab culture and is held to be related to rigidity and bodily-preoccupation of the adult personality.

Cross-cultural evidence suggests that a neo-local residence pattern that effectively excludes the paternalism of an extended family and includes the close contact and enhanced child-care role of the husband or father will lead to a greater index of sociability and non-authoritarian orientation of the children. Alternative means of child punishment than beating, such as food deprivation, is correlated with better adjustment and lower levels of rigidity in adult Arab personality.

Underlying this is the general pattern of the sexual division of labor and the productive/reproductive role of women in the society.

When a society achieves a level of industrialization in which more women are inducted into the factory labor force, then their wages, no matter how exploitative, confer upon them a sense of independence and dignity in the world which they come to cherish. As long as a traditional sexual division of labor confines the productive role of women exclusively to domestic reproduction, and as long as a world market economy tends to devalue the role of domestic reproduction, the status-role identity of women cannot hope to be emancipated. A viable alternative is apparent both in areas of Africa as well as in other areas of the Arc of Islam. This is the petite fringe-capitalism of female entrepreneurs in local markets which confers upon these women a role of achievement, economic advantage and a social status of equality and independence separate from that of men. It would be interesting in this regard to investigate the correlation between the economic role of women in such fringe economies and the rate of female initiated separation or divorce. The example in which the young wife whose money made by sewing became the bone of contention and point of conflict between her own interests and the control of her in-laws and husband over her earnings is most revealing in this regard.

The question of the emancipation of the women and the enhancement of their quality of life is important not only to Egypt, nor just to the Islamic world, but to all of the world. As long as women seek to define their identity in a traditional, domestic-bound way, no program aimed at their development can hope to succeed.

Public education aiming at human development is the key to enhancement of both the quality of life of women and the quality of life of a nation. This includes compulsory, state-subsidized, secular co-education of youth, as well as the public extension of adult-education programs for both husbands and wives, aimed at family planning, health and hygiene, literacy, job skills and training, and multiculturalism. The public role of the media in the dissemination of alternative images and values of women, men and family should also not be underestimated in its capacity to penetrate the private, domestic world of the family.

Finally, no program in the enhancement of the quality of life of women can hope to be ultimately successful if it does not also include the legal empowerment and protection of the rights of women. In this regard, leadership training of young women and their organization and mobilization in groups to fight for their rights is a critical step up the mountain. In the Islamic world, part of this battle must include the formal separation of church and state, and the deinstitutionizing of Islamic Shariah law as a primary obstacle to the emancipation of women.

Identity is a complex construction composed of age, gender, social status, ethnicity and culture. Boundaries and emblems of identity are negotiable in relation to significant others within a social continuum of change and conservatism. Identity as both a vehicle and a vessel is analytically separable and partially independent of the cultural values, symbolic elements and phenomenological substance of personality which identity as boundary carriers. Exclusive emphasis upon only one or a few facets, whether gender, nationality, or religion, of one's unique, multidimensional identity, to the renunciation of other possible identities, especially citizenship to humanity, is fundamentally flawed and reveals a basic uncertainty of self and potential crises of identity. "If one is nothing but a Spartan, a capitalist, a proletarian, or a Buddhist, one is next door to being nothing and therefore to not being at all".

Barth, Frederik, "Introduction" in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, edited by Frederik Barth. (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown & Co., 1969) pp. 9-38.

Devereux, George, "Ethnic Identity: Its Logical Foundations and Its Dysfunctions" in Ethnic Identity: Cultural Continuities and Change", edited by George Devos and Lola Romanucci-Ross (Palo Alto, California: Mayfield Publishing Co. 1975) p. 68.

De Vos, George, "Ethnic Pluralism: Conflict and Accommodation" in Ethnic Identity: Cultural Continuities and Change", edited by George Devos and Lola Romanucci-Ross (Palo Alto, California: Mayfield Publishcing Co., 1975) pp. 5-41.

De Vos, George and Miner, Horace, "Casbah and Oasis--A Study in Acculturative Stress" in Culture and Mental Health, edited by M. Opler (New York: The MacMillan Co.,1958) pp. 333-50.

Summers, Lawrence, "The Most Influential Investment" in Scientific American, August,1992:p. 132.

Whiting, Beatrice and Whiting, John M., Children of Six Cultures (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1975).