It's 'eyb to say you don't want to have children
Hello and welcome back to ‘Eyb, the newsletter! Each week I speak frankly about topics that I was told were ‘eyb, or shameful, while growing up. I also share anecdotes, reading recommendations, what I’ve been writing, and more. If you have just subscribed, welcome!
I have never been a particularly maternal person. Throughout my twenties I was adamant that I did not want to have children. I struggled when I visited my girl friends, many of whom had married while we were still at university or in their early twenties, and their young children would run about screaming, climbing on top of my head, or putting sticky hands on my clothes.
It would make me feel like a horrible human being - they were just small children, doing what small children do, why couldn’t I just be “normal” and enjoy being surrounded by them? When it came to relationships, or to trying to meet a future husband, I sought men who were divorced and already had children, or men who like me did not mind not having children.
Whenever I had conversations with my parents about marriage and motherhood and told them that I did not mind not having children they would look back at me aghast. “You can’t say you don’t want children, that’s ‘eyb!” In the Egyptian community I grew up in, first in London, and then in the Gulf, the women who had 4+ children were revered, and those who had 2 or fewer children, or no children at all, were looked upon by other women with pity.
There was a big emphasis on the more children you had, the better. So because of this, my mother (who is English, but mixed with the Egyptian wives of the community) would say, “it’s haram for you to say you don’t want children, and if you keep saying this, one day you might find that you can’t have them, and then you’ll be sorry.”
I remember once having a conversation with my father in my early twenties about life after death. He said that a woman’s reward in Paradise would be to be surrounded by children. “But what if I don’t want that?” I asked. He laughed it off.
Fast forward ten years and now I’m 32 and I have been married for over three years. A recent diagnosis with lupus (on top of having Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) has meant I now really have to pause and think whether or not having a child is a safe option. I wrote it about it recently for The C Word. I would not mind having one child, but again, I don’t feel particularly broody.
Motherhood frightens me for another reason too - if I was ever to have a daughter, how can I ensure that she does not go through any of the pressures to conform that I did?
I have noticed very recently on Arabic Twitter that younger women are openly saying that motherhood is a woman’s choice. This is in stark contrast to the generations before us, where as a woman to say that you have purposely decided not to have children was unthinkable. Religion was usually used as a back-up, where our parents would say that motherhood was part of our faith, and our primary function in life. I searched the Qur’an and the Hadith, and read books written by today’s female Islamic scholars, which said the opposite - nowhere did it say that being a mother was a woman’s primary objective in Islam.
If I do get blessed with one child I will be happy. But I am also equally happy if I don’t have children. And as a woman I should have the agency to make that choice.
What I’ve been watching…
I have just finished watching Kuwaiti soap drama Juman. This review does include spoilers, so if you were planning to watch it, skip this section!
Juman, based on Aliyaa’ Al-Kadhami’s novel of the same name, came out last year, and sparked quite a controversy on Arabic Twitter. It opened conversations for the first time about coercive and controlling behaviour in marriages. I tend to watch Gulf soap dramas as I learned the Gulf dialect of Arabic, and it has been helping me to retain my Arabic vocabulary.
I had wanted to see what this controversy was all about, but being in the UK Juman was unavailable. However, it was recently released on Netflix. Gulf soap dramas tend to talk openly about societal issues, albeit them often being overly dramatized. Juman is a beautiful young woman who has just started studying at university, when she bumps into Hisham, her maternal cousin. She did not get to see Hisham growing up because his father (her maternal uncle) was ex-communicated from the family by their grandfather, after taking a second wife without his approval. You might say the grandfather was justified, however it turns out that Hisham’s father was forced to marry his cousin, and could not stand living with her constantly fiery temper. Juman and Hisham quickly fall in love and want to get married, but they know their grandfather won’t approve, risking Juman’s mother getting ex-communicated too.
The two lovebirds have to overcome many obstacles, before finally being able to get married once the grandfather dies. There were already signs that Hisham was controlling and coercive while they were at university together - he orders Juman to remove her red lipstick in front of everyone, even though they still barely know each other - and she complies, thinking it a sign of jealousy and love. After marriage, he becomes increasingly controlling and coercive. First he stops her from working at the place of her dreams, then he insists she wears the hijab, and then he proceeds to insist she wears a black hijab. He goes from being verbally controlling to becoming physically abusive.
Many viewers on Twitter expressed their disdain at Hisham, which is an interesting shift compared to what viewers 10-15 years ago may have expressed. Older generations would have said that Hisham was Juman’s husband, and that everything he did was out of love and jealousy for her, and that as his wife Juman should obey him. But this is not the view that young Arab men and women take today.
I noticed other interesting shifts in family dynamics that would not have been portrayed in the Gulf soap dramas I watched when I was a teenager.
Juman’s father is fully supportive of his daughter. He gives her agency to make her own decisions, and stands up to her mother and brother. Juman’s mother and brother have more old-fashioned views about the place of a woman in society, but her father is adamant that Juman can wear whatever she chooses, work wherever she chooses, divorce if she wants to, and travel alone if she wants to.
I also noticed that Hisham’s parents did not allow Hisham to get away with his abusive behaviour, and constantly told him off, siding with their daughter-in-law Juman, again something I did not see when I was growing up in the Gulf.
But despite these shifts in family dynamics, there were still elements in views towards women that have remained the same. The mothers’ obsession with getting their daughters married from the moment they graduate from high school, and the brother who makes remarks like “we do not have daughters who get divorced” or “we do not have daughters who travel alone.”
Then there is Juman’s mother, who despite having two daughters, one of whom’s husband beats her and keeps cheating on her, and the other, Juman, who is suffering from Hisham’s coercive behaviour, keeps insisting that “a woman’s place is in her husband’s house,” and insists that they return to their husbands no matter what. By the end of the soap drama, it still felt like men were able to get away with all their misbehavior, and that women were encouraged to return to their abusers.
If you’re interested in learning what life was like for me and my friends when growing up in the Gulf, you can read my debut novel Hijab and Red Lipstick which is based on my own life story.
I wish you all a pleasant week ahead!
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