Ottoman state, through the intensification and
decline of European colonialism, and the advent of
the modern Arab state.
Women living enmeshed in the kin relations and
networks found in these states face a host of conse-
quences that compromise or deny their rights as
citizens. If suspected of sexual relations outside
marriage a girl or woman may face severe repri-
mand ranging from banishment to honor killing, in
which a male family member kills her in order to
restore the family’s honor. In many states this is
sanctioned by the law in that the perpetrator is sub-
jected to a lighter sentence than for a different type
of murder. Women are likewise often barred from
the workplace and from public life. In some cases
the state has even reversed gains made in recent
decades, such as in Iraq during the 1990s, when the
government, pressured by economic sanctions
imposed by the West, introduced policies aimed
at removing some women from the workplace
(Human Rights Watch 2003).Modern Arab states and family
as metaphor
Among modern Arab states there exists consid-
erable diversity in governance, including republics,
single-party military dictatorships, and monar-
chies. But across these diverse Arab states the
metaphor of state leader as father is frequently
invoked and images of the Arab state as a family
writ large are seemingly ubiquitous. Eickelman and
Piscatori (1996, 83) note instances in which Pales-
tinian leader Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of
Jordan referred to their political constituents as
their “family.” Wedeen describes Hafiz al-Asad’s
role as head of the Syrian “national family” which
manifested itself in “a chain of filial piety and
paternal authority that culminates, and stops, in
Asad” (1999, 49–65). The various versions of this
chain are portrayed as both a bottom-up move-
ment, in which “the political leader has been seen
as a family member, an honorary family patriarch”
(Joseph 1997, 87), and a top-down movement of
the kind suggested by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein,
who made a point of being photographed playing
with a child during the start of his 1991 invasion
of Kuwait – a reminder to his followers of “the
extreme need of the vulnerable for protection exer-
cised by an all-powerful father” (Saghieh 2000).
Changes in kinship and gender often accompany,
or are at least expected to accompany, the modern-
ization process. But as Sharabi and others after him
argue, the contemporary Arab state simply re-
shapes and preserves patriarchy, creating a mod-
ernized form of it called “neopatriarchy” that is “in348 kinship and state
many ways no more than a modernized version of
the traditional patriarchal sultanate” (1992, 7).
Sharabi identifies this state’s “central psychological
feature” as “the dominance of the Father (patri-
arch), the center around which the national and
natural family are organized. Thus between ruler
and ruled, between father and child, there exist ver-
tical relations: in both settings, paternal will is the
absolute will mediated by a forced consensus based
on ritual and coercion” (1992, 7).
The central role of kin loyalties in the nascent
modern Arab states was evident from the begin-
ning. Early Arab nationalist Khalil al-Sakakini
wrote in his diary of families in post-First World
War Jerusalem, “The family interest comes before
any other interest... If you assign someone to
vote...he will vote for the elder of his family,
whether or not that person is fit for the job” (al-
Sakakini 1990, 115, cited in Segev 2001, 103).
As the new Arab states searched for their footing,
they both were offered and looked for new father
figures. Thompson describes a 1918 speech by
occupying French general Henri Gourand in which
he welcomed his Lebanese hearers “to France’s
colonial family” (2000, 39) and stated that “colo-
nial children who were loyal would be rewarded”
and resistors punished. Thompson notes that Gou-
rand was, in his subtext, competing with another
father figure, King Faysal (ibid., 40). What had
brought about this “crisis of paternity” in the first
place? The demise of the Ottoman Empire, in which
“each sultan had ruled as a father” (ibid., 41).
In her 2002 presidential address to the Middle
East Studies Association of North America, Lisa
Anderson described the region as featuring “de-
cades of despotism, once fed by Cold War impera-
tives [that] continued as if by inertia.” The “inertia”
she describes might well be the mutual constitution
of state and kinship in the Arab world. Libyan pres-
ident Mu≠amar Qaddafi, one of the major figures of
the “decades of despotism” (presumably her re-
marks apply to Arab North Africa as well as to the
Middle East), lays out his political philosophies in
his Green Book, a tract analogous to Mao’s Little
Red Book. “The nation,” he writes, “is a large fam-
ily which has passed through the stage of the
tribe... The family, likewise, grows into a nation
only after passing through the stages of the tribe
and its ramifications... Inevitably this is achieved
over long periods of time” (Qaddafi 1980, 19–20).
Several pages later (22) he states that he regards a
state as rightly being comprised of a nation.
Qaddafi’s remarks portray a seemingly attractive
sense of nested collective identities and a telos, but
unfortunately whitewash the despotism, marginal-