Page 191 - Arabian Studies (V)

Women’s Inheritance of Land in Highland Yemen 179
Such caveats should not suggest that the espousal of women’s
cause by religious and state figures was simply some self-serving
ruse. It was as representative of a universal morality, and in tradi­
tional society as inviolable outsider to local political entities that
the Islamic (state) figure could and did defend the cause of women
gravely wronged, even against the women’s own families.29 At the
same time, this special position of religious men as the defenders of
women was not so antithetical to all the ideals of rural society as the
Islamic polemic might insinuate. A fundamental ideal of rural
honour codes is the defense of the dependent and above all of
women, but for a local political figure to take up the cause of the
hurmah of another man of the same community could well threaten
appropriation. Given the extraordinarily ‘embedded’ position of
women in rural society, only an inviolable outsider was able to take
in to his haram) the woman (hurmah) of another man.
The conflict between equity and (male) blood solidarity,
expressed in the Islamic polemic in terms of an (idealised) Islamic
justice versus tribalism, must have always existed at the level of the
individual family also. Thus, in many families the desire to protect
and provide for daughters (who remain closely identified with the
natal family even after marriage) came in sharp conflict with the
need to achieve or maintain the stature of a family based funda­
mentally on the power and wealth of the male members of a patro­
nymic group.

Postscript
Today when the family is no longer the basic unit of production
and of political action, when sons emigrate, land is more market­
able, and the forces of traditional solidarity weaken, women who
were at the heart of the old units are either confined to a shrinking
‘private domain’ or are exposed to what was traditionally ‘public
domain’. So too as the law of the state becomes secularised, the
Islamic judge may rightly fear that his special relationship to the
private (hurmah) domain of women be turned against him in an
expression of derision—hakim al-nisa* ‘the women’s judge’.

The research on which this paper is based was supported by a fellowship from the
Foreign Area Program, S.S.R.C., New York (1972-3), with further support from
U.S.P.H.S. Grant 1R01 DA-00974 (1974-5), and a final six months support from
the Yemeni Studies Centre, San‘a\ in conjunction with Ford Foundation, Amman
(1975-6). I should like to thank Isma ‘II al-Akwa‘ and Ahmad al-Marwani for their
generous help throughout my time in the Yemen. They are of course in no way respon­
sible for the ideas expressed in this article.