Arab StatesRecent studies of women, gender, and friendship
in Arab states can be roughly divided into two often
overlapping categories: studies that focus on the
use of the discourse of kinship, broadly defined, in
creating and describing women’s most central friend-
ships; and studies that draw out the relationship
between women’s friendships and the geographies
and practicalities of women’s daily social lives.
Recognizing how women create meaningful social
relationships through the use of a kinship idiom
takes us past a biogenetic, familial-based determin-
ism focusing on the role of the Arab family to a
nuanced understanding of how women create a
range of meaningful relationships. Traditionally,
scholars have emphasized the form and functions
of the genealogically-defined extended family,
while often excluding other meaningful sources of
relationships for women. At issue here is the fact
that many women in communities throughout
Arab states use the idiom of kinship to describe
meaningful relationships of all sorts. Scholars who
take this discourse as a simple reflection of biolog-
ical fact miss the use of the kinship discourse as
commentary on the social construction of mean-
ingful social relationships.
Further, by recognizing the roles of neighbors
and the socially constructed geographical bound-
aries of the social lives of Arab women, we may
learn how key cultural and political economic
forces affect women’s intimate lives. Cultural limi-
tations imposed on women’s movements and, thus,
on women’s opportunities for forming close rela-
tionships, may not necessarily be seen as oppressive
by the women themselves; on the other hand, when
international and nationalist politics create artifi-
cial borders and boundaries between and among
communities, the repercussions for friendships and
families alike are often severe and keenly felt as
inherently oppressive. Yet because they have often
been understood to be both limited to and en-
trapped by the domestic (rather than public) sphere,
women’s social circles have often been simplisti-
cally assumed to be limited to their family members.
Debunking these commonly held misconceptions
about women’s isolation within the family and
carefully delineating the layers of meanings found
Friendship
within the use of the kinship idiom have been cen-
tral goals of recent scholars.
Finally, studying friendships of women in Arab
states may serve to help us consider what exactly
constitutes “friendship” in specific cultural settings
and lead us to a greater recognition of its culturally
and historically constructed qualities, rather than
presuming that friendship is an ahistorical, time-
less, or “natural” relational category.Friendship and family
Recent scholarship emphasizes how, in both
practice and ideology, notions of family and friend
are both closely related to each other and/or distin-
guished from each other, depending upon context.
Thus, although often distinguished linguistically, in
practice friend and kinship relationships may be
difficult to tell apart. For example, as Geertz points
out, although in Morocco speech distinctions are
made between kin and non-kin, “the operative,
everyday, acted-upon premises do not rely on sharp
and simple distinctions among family, friend, and
patron” (1979, 315).
Reflecting the closely related character of good
friends and one’s family is the fact that women’s
most meaningful friendships are often described as
being similar to good kin relations. For example,
Lila Abu-Lughod, in a study of Beduin women in
Egypt, describes how Beduin who live together and
develop close relationships may stress the “link of
paternal kinship” in discourse, whether or not it
exists, as a means of describing the nature of their
friendships; long-time neighbors may thus be con-
sidered “quasi-kin” (Abu-Lughod 1986, 63). Soraya
Altorki similarly notes for elite women in Saudi
Arabia, “old friends are treated as if they were close
kin” (1986, 103). Formality is significantly less-
ened among friends (as it is among family members),
and visits are not based on a strict basis of reci-
procity. Friendship ties may play a key, supportive
role in women’s lives, a role that is at times as
important as the roles played by kin. Anne Mene-
ley, in her study of Yemeni women in the town of
Zabid, notes that the word for “neighbor” has an
“emotionally evocative quality,” calling up a sense
of comfortableness, familiarity, and feeling “like
kin” (1996, 54).
These examples demonstrate that, for many