Ifda dossier 47, May/June 1985

As a result, most of the developmental projects designed for
Arab communities, even by Arab policy makers, tend to be
characterized by a blind duplication of conventional Western
measures governed by exogenous centers of economic powers
viewed as the repositories of "Truth", "Civilization", and
"Universality". Like their counterparts in the other "recip-
ient" bloc of countries, Arab ones are pressured into situa-
tions of dependence accentuated by various effects of rela-
tionship of dominance created and nurtured by their "donor"
countries' conceptions and patterns of analysis of develop-
ment.
These situations of dependence are exacerbated by the appli-
cation of the imported analytical tools to Arab development
projects. For example, Nadia Youssef 2/ argues that Arab
development projects, when dealing with women's role in so-
ciety, show that however onerous women's lives are, develop-
ment plans have seldom helped them. In fact, the process of
development has tended to restrict the economic independence
of women as their traditional jobs have been replaced by new
methods and technologies. Accordingly, Western stereotypes
of appropriate roles and occupations for women, exported
with modernization, continuously increase the gap between
men's and women's ability to cope with the modern world.
Those Western stereotypes and images of female domesticity
impinging on Arab cultures were long ago denounced by voices
like Amin Kacem's, who viewed them as forms of manipulation.
As early as 1899, Amin Kacem explained that the conditions
of women in the Arab world were related to the prevailing
types of social organizations that were importing foreign
concepts such as the Byzantine and Persian customs, namely,
imposing the veil on women. He argued that women's seclusion
ans exclusion from social affairs were a direct extension of
such secular customs rather than of Islam.
It can be claimed that Islam is a liberatinq religion:
"Muslim Law, before any other legal system legalized women's
equality with men and asserted their freedom and liberty at
times when women were still in the most debased conditions
in all nations of the world. Islam granted them all human
rights and recognized their legal capacity, equal to that of
men in all matters..." - 3/.
Basing his arguments on the precepts of Islam, Amin Kacem
also contended that women and men are equal in the eyes of
God and advocated their equal share with men in both riqhts
and responsibilities towards their society. Accordingly, he
2/ {India Youssef, "Worner, in Development: Urban Life and Labour" in
Irene Tinker and Michcle Bo-Brunsen fed) Women and DeveZopment
(Washington: Overseas Development Council, 1976).
3/ Amin Kacem, Fi-Tahrir Al Mar 'a [Words Liberation] (Cairo: Unizanal
nakatib Bismisr Walkhar-ij, 1328^ p. 15.