Veiled Sentiments

“In the first months, even as I appreciated the warm acceptance I received, I chafed at the restrictions of my role and position in the community. It was difficult being so dependent. Also, although I enjoyed living in the Haj’s household and felt infinitely more comfortable around the people I knew best, I was worried by the idea of what anthropologists were supposed to do.”

During her time with the Haj’s family, Abu-Lughod must suspend her expectations about the experience as a condition of her age and gender. Knowing that her relationship as “dependent” limits her, Abu-Lughod must adjust her ethnographic techniques and listen carefully to the cultural movement around her.

“I found that these poems, called ghinnāwas (literally, little songs), were lyric poems, like Japanese haiku in form but more like American blues in content and emotional tone.”

Throughout the text, Abu-Lughod seeks descriptions of Awlad ‘Ali poems that aptly describe their purpose, sound, and form. The particular combination of elements shapes the way they are received in their social context, and social reception is the key to the poems’ purpose within the Awlad ‘Ali community.

“I intend to show that sentiments can actually symbolize values and that expression of these sentiments by individuals contributes to representations of the self, representations that are tied to morality, which in turn is ultimately tied to politics in its broadest sense.”

The sentiments expressed in poetry can seem outside of the Bedouin culture of morality. For this reason, Abu-Lughod works throughout the text to demonstrate ways in which the poems connect to systems of morality within the Bedouin community. In this sentence, she presents the system of logic with which she approaches this problem.

“The central question that emerges from a consideration of Awlad ‘Ali ghinnāwas, then, concerns the relationship between the Bedouin poetic discourse and the discourse of ordinary social life.”

This central tension, between poetic discourse and social discourse, is the driving tension behind Abu-Lughod’s developing inquiry. She believes that the two discourses are not separate but intertwined in Awlad ‘Ali culture.

“These principles are gathered up in Awlad ‘Ali notions of ‘blood’ (dam), a multi-faceted concept with dense meanings and tremendous cultural force.”

Blood, for the Awlad ‘Ali, represents both the genealogical purity that sets their group apart from the rest and the moral responsibility that comes with that inheritance. Because it comprises so many commingled elements that are separated in Western culture—such as family/biological connections versus moral/intellectual concerns—she must tease apart the term to help the reader.

“The social world of the Awlad ‘Ali is bifurcated into kin versus strangers/outsiders (garīb versus gharīb), a distinction that shapes both sentiment and behavior.”

The idea of bifurcation permeates the Awlad ‘Ali political and social world. Genders split, insiders split from outsiders, and outward behavior splits from intimate behavior. This familiar structure of splitting introduces the idea of complementary forces, groups, or behaviors within the community.

“Living together makes strangers familiar and hence more like kin, who are automatically familiar by virtue of being family.”

Although the patrilineal organization of the Awlad ‘Ali runs strong, each community also welcomes strangers, in the roles of clients and wives, to their space. The more that these people cohabitate, the more they begin to be familiar, and the less often women will veil themselves and their behavior in the outsiders’ company. The use of veils based on familiarity is characteristic of and indicative of the Awlad ‘Ali culture of kinship.

“Sharing blood signifies close social relations only because it, in the Awlad ‘Ali conception, identifies kin with one another. Kin share concerns and honor; ideally they also share residence, property, and livelihood. They express this sense of commonality through visiting, ritual exchanges, and sharing work, emotional responses, and secrets.”

The culture of sharing creates events and occasions for sharing poetry. As Abu-Lughod outlines how sharing helps build kinship bonds, she lays the foundation for an argument that poetry bonds people and groups together through vulnerability and shared experience.

“The Bedouins do not experience any jarring sense of discontinuity, although they acknowledge several ways things were different, say, forty years ago. Their sense of continuity may stem from the stability of the underlying principles of their life, which in new contexts created by sedentarization and market economics produce different configurations.”

Abu-Lughod’s vision of the Bedouin centers on their firm moral habits, which provide a core impermeable to changing habits. Her Afterword confirms the sense that she develops at the time of writing, which identifies “discontinuity” and new influences as mere aberrances on a moral core that is not reorganized except on its surface.

“And yet, despite their appreciation of the desert’s natural gifts, the Bedouins think of the territory in which they live primarily in terms of the people and groups who inhabit it. Theirs is an intensely social world in which people’s activities and relationships are riveting, and solitude so abhorred that no one sleeps alone.”

Even though Awlad ‘Ali society is highly structured and “veiling” one’s emotions and reactions to adversity through self-control (‘agl) is critical, Abu-Lughod reminds the reader that the Bedouin world is vitally a social one. The ideology of honor may encourage individuals to keep aspects of their personal worlds private, but the social world is nonetheless the one in which the Awlad ‘Ali come to know themselves and their places in society.

“The Awlad ‘Ali mediate the contradiction between the ideals of equality and the realities of hierarchy by considering relations of inequality not antagonistic but complementary. They invest independence with responsibility and a set of obligations and dependency with the dignity of choice.”

The sense that separate parts of life complement one another is central to the Bedouin rationale for political hierarchy, family structure, and sexual segregation. Abu-Lughod writes that this frame helps those in power to legitimize the inequality that their society would otherwise spurn. For those without power, poetry becomes another means of understanding the disjunction between discourse of equality and structural inequality.

“The familial idiom downplays the potential conflict in relations of inequality by suggesting something other than simple domination versus subordination. It replaces opposition with complementarity, with the forceful notions of unity and identity, emphasizing the bonds between family members: love and identity.”

Viewing complementarity as a natural process, seen in the family, makes the concept appear entirely organic (and unarguable). Because Awlad ‘Ali families are generally loving and close-knit, and because of the insular attitude of the Bedouin community in general, attaching the legitimizing principle of complementarity to the family is a means of entrenching the power of its logic in Awlad ‘Ali, from the least to the most powerful.

“First, there are the values of generosity, honesty, sincerity, loyalty to friends, and keeping one’s word, all implied in the term usually translated as honor (sharaf). Even more important, however, is the complex of values associated with independence.”

The qualities that apply to honor, in Awlad ‘Ali society, apply equally to all within the group. The “values associated with independence” are the source of the greatest complication, in Abu-Lughod’s eyes. Because some group members can be more independent than others, access to independence is unequal. This limited access to honor, compounded with a frame that designates them as inherently immoral and sexualized, prevents Awlad ‘Ali women from being entirely honorable. Poetry, Abu-Lughod claims, is a way to act independently and exhibit honorable comportment while respecting the gendered and hierarchical boundaries of the community.

“Initiated by the dependent, ḥasham is a voluntary act, a sign of independence, and as such, it is part of the honor code, applying to the dignified way of being weak and dependent in a society that values strength and autonomy. This strategy for the honor of the weak thus reinforces the hierarchy by fusing virtue with deference.”

Abu-Lughod notes that it is important for the weak or powerless, who are most often women, to show that their submission is voluntary, even if it is dictated by the honor code of the society. As an outsider, Abu-Lughod uses the idea of this “strategy” in her contention that acts of freedom or rebellion reinforce the authority of patrilineal and unequal social structures.

“Inequality is thus expressed as social distance, which is marked by ḥasham’s formality, effacement, and, ultimately, avoidance. Social intimacy, as between equals and among kin, is expressed in terms both of the absence of ḥasham and of the willingness to share everything, to expose oneself.”

The principles of modesty, shown through ḥasham and the clothing and behavior that expresses it, are examples of the highly social structure of identity among the Awlad ‘Ali. Although it often asks individuals to keep parts of themselves hidden, the hiding that ḥasham implies allows citizens to speak, using what they reveal as a meaningful symbol of how they relate to others.

“I argue that the denial of sexuality that is the mark of ḥasham is a symbolic means of communicating deference to those in the hierarchy who more closely represent the cultural ideals and the social system itself. This denial is necessary because the greatest threat to the social system and to the authority of those preferred by this system is sexuality itself.”

Abu-Lughod’s thesis, for her chapter on gender ideology, points at the way that women’s desire to achieve honor, by denying the sexuality that tradition dictates renders them impure, is the individual action that reinforces the belief of their impurity. By identifying sexuality as the chief threat to Awlad ‘Ali, Abu-Lughod notices the germ of the social cycles that she has established in the previous chapters.

“Women’s relationship to certain life-cycle rituals also reflects their symbolic association with fertility. Women are more closely linked to life, and men to death.”

Because Awlad ‘Ali women are associated with fertility, they are seen as impure; nonetheless, fertility is highly valuable in a society that needs to expand itself. In the chapter on the rationale of female impurity, Abu-Lughod points out the irony that sexuality is undesirable, yet progeny is desired in Awlad ‘Ali society. This irony mirrors others produced by the ideology of honor.

“In short, through proper action, in particular through ḥasham, a woman can at least partially overcome the inferiority that is hers through her ‘natural’ functions.”

The symbolism rife in Awlad ‘Ali that reminds women of their “inferiority” works with the societal motivation to be honorable. This aims to promote a culture of effort toward the goal of proper comportment. Seeing themselves as permanently insufficient, women must take compensatory measures, continuing in a cycle of effort that will take them as close to honor as they could be with a red belt of shame tied around their waists.

“Veiling is both voluntary and situational. Awlad ‘Ali view it as an act undertaken by women to express their virtue in encounters with particular categories of men. They certainly do not perceive it as forced on women by men.”

Abu-Lughod works to explain how veiling practices among the Bedouin differ from practices in other Muslim communities. Veiling, for the Bedouin, is a means of expressing ḥasham: wearing a veil enables women to signal familiarity and to act in ways that enhance their public honor. She explains how the symbolism of the veil and its use as a tool of social structure shows how veiling is an active negotiation, rather than a fixed custom.

“The Awlad ‘Ali perceive poems as personal statements, even when they know the poems to be conventional and formulaic.”

The dual sense of poetry as a fixed form of personal expression within the established cultural heritage is critical to Abu-Lughod’s understanding of the poetic discourse. The duality enables poetry to straddle the public and the private as well as to have social and personal functions in a way that Awlad ‘Ali society, full of bifurcations, often prevents. The unique role of poetry and how vital it is for those who use and share it deeply interests Abu-Lughod.

“In short, the ghinnāwa is the poetry of personal life, the poetry of intimacy. As we shall see, this discourse on sentiment is also a discourse of defiance.”

In these lines, Abu-Lughod demonstrates the two primary purposes of poetry in Awlad ‘Ali society, which she outlines in the second half of the text. While she initially sees poetry as a means by which individuals can express the otherwise inexpressible, she eventually recognizes its practical function as a means of acting autonomously, fulfilling the element of honor usually inaccessible to women.

“Poems are vehicles for the expression of attachments to sweethearts or spouses that, if communicated in everyday social interaction, would damage reputations and jeopardize claims to respectability and, at the individual level, would ordinarily undermine self-image and self-presentation. In the final chapter I turn to the questions raised by this observation: that contradictory discourses on love coexist, just as do the divergent discourses of honor and vulnerability explored in chapter 6.”

In Awlad ‘Ali society, poems, like veils, are both protection from judgment and action for self-representation. They both hide and reveal qualities about those who wield them. This duality exemplifies the coexistence of two discourses: one of hiding, and one of revealing. Love is both rejected (in sexuality) and revered (in storytelling), but poetry, through its disruptive but mysterious qualities, is the vehicle that connects both functions.

“Granting the authenticity of the discourse of everyday life means that nonpoetic public expressions cannot be dismissed as mere social masks hiding spontaneous inner feelings.”

Abu-Lughod works to remind the reader that the outer (social) life of the Awlad ‘Ali is not merely a shell of real lived experience. Because the Awlad ‘Ali are a deeply social people, their interactions (however mediated by symbols and hierarchies) inform the world of sentiment, rather than “masking” it.