Nawal El Saadawi

Paper presented at the opening of the Sixth International conference of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association,
Cairo, 3-5 January 2002

I do not enjoin my daughter who will inherit me on the throne to become a god for her people who draws her authority over her people from the divinity of gods, but I enjoin her to be a just and compassionate ruler.
From "Noot" god of the sky to her daughter "Isis" (Ancient Egypt 4988 B.C.)

(1) In the name of the "Sacred":

This advice given by "Noot" to her daughter "Isis" reflects the philosophy that predominated before the era of the slave system in Ancient Egypt five thousand years ago, before the two religions of Judaism and Christianity were born.
In that distant age the ruling system tended towards justice and compassion rather than towards the exercise of political, economic and military power buttressed by the authority of religion and the divinity of gods.
But the day came when this humanistic philosophy was swept away to leave what were no more than minor vestiges in ancient Egypt, and in the subsequent stages of her history. It fell a victim to the blows of the rising class patriarchal forces in society that concealed themselves behind the authority of a godly divinity. The ruling Pharaoh was clothed in godly robes. He became sacred, above criticism or accountability for his actions. As a result the ruling forces were no longer subject to the rules of logic, or right. This has remained unchanged ever since.

Dictatorship and almost absolute authority for rulers is not characteristic only of Arab countries, or what is now called the Middle East, but it characterizes all ruling systems whether in the East or the West. The degree of dictatorship may vary from country to country. Throughout history but more so in our days, a small minority decides and dictates behind a veneer of democracy.
In some countries of the European or American continents people enjoy some personal freedom labeled "democracy", but no where do people decide what will happen to them in their political, economic or cultural life, public or private. Sometimes these freedoms do not go much further than the practice of sex in their bedrooms or elsewhere. The result is an illusion of freedom which gives some satisfaction but distorts the very notion of democracy itself and leads to the blatant contradictions that women and men have to live through in those countries which are considered by many to be more advanced.

We are living in the era of a new colonialism and not in what the ideologists and thinkers of global capitalism describe as post-colonialism a term which is meant to attempt to conceal what is really happening. The term post-colonial was originally coined by academic circles in the United States and Europe but has been taken over by the intellectual elit in Egypt. It shows how language is used to mystify and mislead people, and reveals how the ruling economic, political and military circles use culture, education and the media to reinforce their power and control people's minds.

Since I was a child in the thirties of the twentieth century I have been a witness to killings and massacres in the name of God, the nation and of King who change their denomination to presidents only to yield more power if they can. Systems change from kingdoms, to republics, or people's democracies, or neo-liberal democracies or anything else but the essence remains the same: power and riches for the few, and poverty, deprivation and little freedom for the many.

When the human being (woman or man) began to speak, to develop language in pre-historical times, words were used to clarify, to express natural desires and feelings like love, or the need to cooperate, or to solve a problem in daily life. Yet how is it that as time went by language was transformed from a tool of understanding, a way to obtain knowledge into an instrument used to conceal, mislead and blind?

Language is a system of signs meant to reflect reality, to reduce what is huge and infinitely complex to something more simple express it in letters, or figures or drawings which can be read on stone, or papyri, or paper, or screens, or computer discs.
In this "signifier" system lies the danger. It is the gap that separates reality, the real thing from the sign which can serve to mislead, to stray from the truth, to make languages the reflection and the instrument of the powerful few, to make out of religion, or philosophy, or history, or literature, or medicine, or engineering, or science, or the humanities a body of signs, a language in the service of the few who use it for their ends and move further and further away from the truth, whereas people who wish to serve the cause of humanity struggle to overcome the gap between language, between signs and reality or truth.

Throughout history this gap between the signs and truth has been used by the privileged, ruling few to separate between the reality of people's lives and knowledge, that is language, religion, philosophy, history, literature, medicine and other sciences. Ever since the slavery was born, ruling systems both in the West and the East were able to utilize this gap between reality and language to conceal the truth, to blind the minds of women and men to reality as lived by them or make them forget it in the tortuous alleys of rhetoric and words, or so-called research studies, or in the heat of poetry and the meditations of philosophers, or the sermons of Sheikhs and priests. This process can be described as veiling of the mind, and veiling of the mind is a thousand times more dangerous than veiling of the head or the face even if there is a relation between the two. It is more dangerous because it is not visible to the eye, or palpable to a touch of the hand and so it appears to be absent, not to be there.

When the instrument or weapon used to oppress or kill is not visible then it becomes difficult to resist, to fight against, to confront. In this lies the deadly danger of what can be called veiling of the mind in women and men in the name of thought, or theory, or philosophy, or morality, or politics, or science, or culture.

Since the era of slavery the values of class and patriarchy have infiltrated into, and invaded philosophy, morality, public and private law in the state, and family. Double standards and dichotomies born with slavery have become the essence of thought and philosophy, of the human mind, or brain.

Thus under the name of rationality, or logic, or objectivity a philosophy was born and continued to a philosophy which is irrational and therefore inhuman, and which was imposed by ruling systems and by the thinkers at their beck and call who sold their minds, or their pens, or were tricked into the service of the ruling few starting from the god Amoun in Ancient Egypt down to the rule of George Bush, the father followed by the rule of his son in the United States.

In Ancient Greece this slave philosophy dominated over the minds of thinkers like Plato and Aristotle who lived under the protective wing of the ruling system. Other thinkers who opposed the inhuman philosophy of the system ended their lives by committing suicide in prison, or were banished or assassinated because they dared to oppose the divine ruler, or emperor, or denied the authenticity of the gods behind which they concealed themselves in order to draw their authority from a divine being in the heavens.
Under the name of the divine and the sacred lurks a danger which has lived on to our day. The sacred and the divine have been used to bury the names of philosophers who were more rational and humanistic in their values and aims, philosophers who fought against the morals and thought of slavery irrespective of the different forms which they took on. In our days they have developed a class patriarchal modern or post-modern philosophy, which considers the Greek philosophers of slavery such as Aristotle (322-384 B.C.) as a model, the very Aristotle who considered slavery a just system necessitated by the very nature of the slave and the woman. For him slavery was justice, was nature, was a true philosophy by which men and women could live. Thus it was that in history injustice was transformed into justice, the illogic or the irrational became logic, or reason. And in order to accomplish these transformations it was necessary to distort nature so that it could be adapted to this inhuman philosophy and obey its precepts.

The veiling of the mind led to the distortion of mind, body and spirit, of the natural integration and unity of the three which is born in every woman and man. The names of philosophers (whether women or men) who fought against slavery in all its forms and throughout the ages since the time of Noot, Isis, Akhnatoun, Te, Nephertiti, and Hypathia have been erased from history. Their philosophy, their contributions, their very existence have been buried and forgotten, whether they came from Ancient Egypt, or Greece like Heraclitus and Democritus, or from North Africa like Ibn Rushd, or later from other countries in the world.

To this day women and men who struggle against class patriarchal thought clothed in the glittering and seductive name of post-modern thought are being marginalized and forgotten while names like those of Fukuyama, Foucault, Huntington and others are hailed in the four corners of the world through the use of technology, of satellites and mass media.

Veiling of the mind is not only an Arab or an African or a Muslim problem as some people tend to think. It is a world problem. The centres of global capitalist power propagate the idea that our Arab civilization has fallen behind because of Islam. They portray Islam as being a philosophy, a religion incapable of absorbing modernization processes, as resistant to them, and describe the period in which we are living as being shaken by Islamic terrorism and characterized by the clash between Islam and the West.

This way of thinking, of visualizing the conflicts of our "post-modern" world is fraught with untold dangers, and is being forced upon our minds by the mass media controlled by transnational corporations. It hides the true nature of the merciless struggles going on in many parts of our globe, diverts attention from the main conflict caused by the unleashing of neo-liberal capitalism at the expense of women and the poor.

(2) We refuse to carry loads on our back forever:

The task which faces us today is how to lift the veil from the minds of the intellectual elites which play such an important role in the moulding of public opinion. How can we forge a new philosophy capable of awakening the conscience of the human race, of drawing it out of the deep slumber into which it seems to have fallen, of resurrecting it from what appears to be death? Today who can deny that justice is not to be found anywhere in our globe, that it is absent in both the international and national affairs of the world? Who can deny that freedom and democracy are absent from our personal and public lives, that human massacres continue to take thousands of innocent lives, that terror and violence have spread over the East and West.

Yet in the midst of all these human tragedies, of the rivers of blood, of war and destruction the intellectuals and thinkers of our day continue to repeat the same philosophies which are shot through with class and patriarchal discrimination whether they live in the so-called East or West.

During the last four months I have been living in New York and New Jersey. I witnessed the terrible events of the 11th September from a short distance. I have lived in the midst of the fear raised amongst the American people by what is now called "Islamic terrorism". I returned a short while ago and now live in the midst of the fear raised in the Arab peoples by what is now called "American and Israeli terrorism", or the "Judaeo Christian Crusade" against Islam. This world conflict which has taken the form of a conflict of civilizations between the West and the East, of a religious conflict between Islam on the one hand and Judaism and Christianity on the other is being increasingly nourished and whipped up by so-called thinkers and intellectuals in the Arab countries, and in the West, by people who live on abstractions between the four walls of their comfortable offices and rooms, by Arab intellectuals who write parrot-like repetitions of what their Western counterparts propagate in this new cold/hot war of what Western intellectuals still imbued with ethno centric, neo-overitalist, paternalistic ideas inherited from a distant past have modified to suit a new class patriarchal war.

A few days ago I spent some time with one of our well-known intellectuals who writes a weekly article in the most important Egyptian daily. I told him a few stories about a child that bled to death after being circumcised, about a young girl who was beaten to death by her family because she threw off her veil, about a writer who was on trial because he had criticized the ruling circles in Egypt, about an important minister who had seized the land of a poor woman peasant.

He stared at me with a scornful look on his face, pouted his lips in derision and explained to me that these were definitely areas of concern but did not enter into his preoccupations since he was too involved in more important areas related to world events and to the various changes resulting from the process of globalization. He reminded me of Aristotle who one day received the visit of a small peasant who came to complain that a leading authority in the state had confiscated the land which he cultivated for a living and given it to his son. But Aristotle waved him away explaining that he was too preoccupied with matters related to the land of his country to be able to give attention to just a small plot of land.

In the fourth century B.C. Aristotle was able to make the oppression of women and their inferior status an integral part of philosophy and law. He maintained that women's contribution to the formation of the human embryo was composed only of non-living raw material (namely the uterus). Man was the sole contributor of life to the infant.

As a result all legal rights were bestowed upon the father, since he was the one who gave life and therefore honour, legality, nationality and religion to the child. The had no rights at all. Her name, her efforts mental and physical were lost forever.
The social and political movements initiated by women with the aim of struggling against the injustices of early or later systems built on the concepts of slavery, patriarchy, and class were systematically swept aside, together with the philosophy of "Noot" of matriarchy.

Yet Egyptian and Arab women have never ceased to struggle for their rights since then. Songs handed down from Ancient Egypt vividly reflect the struggles of poor women and men for a change in their lives. One of these songs runs as follows:

It is a fate imposed upon us
To carry on our backs sacks of barley and white wheat throughout the day
The stores are still full with piles of wheat
Yet we are destined to carry sacks for ever

When I was a child in the village I used to accompany my Aunt when she walked home from the field carrying a huge sack of cotton on her back, or a big earthenware pot full of water on her head. I used to hear her sing a song which said almost the same thing except that by her time the words had changed from "on our backs" to " on our heads".

(3) We live in only one civilization:

One of the fallacies which is propagated in the process of "veiling the mind" is an orientalist dichotomy which maintains that Islam and Christianity in the post-modern era of capitalism are two civilizations separated by a divide and are destined to conflict and to clash with one another. This idea conceals an important reality namely that all the peoples of the world are actually living under one civilization that of global class patriarchal capitalism and that despite the social, political, economic and cultural differences between the countries and the regions of the globe.

This civilization is itself built on dichotomies handed down through the ages from the slave system, dichotomies between master and slave, owner and owned, angel and devil, ruler and ruled, body and soul, heaven and earth, believer and heretic, good and evil, virtue and sin, female and male.

If we reflect on the language used by George Bush the son after the 11th September 2001 we will easily detect that he was using a religious Christian language, using the name of God to wage war against the Taliban and against the devil Ben Laden and his followers in the terrorist organization called "Al Qa'ida". George W. Bush keeps moving from church to church, from meeting to meting, from press conference to press conference and on every occasion together with his followers he never ceases chanting politico religious slogans that are the same:

One Nation under God
In God we Trust
God Bless America

After the 11 September the Pope became active in propagating similar politico-religious messages. He rushed off on a visit to Uzbekistan, one of the countries now cooperating militarily with the United States, and to other countries in the region of the Caspian Sea close to Afghanistan calling on God, and Christ and the Holy Ghost to protect the Christian religion, exhorting the crowds that came out to meet him to unite their Christian ranks in order to face what he described as "Islamic terrorism". He was preparing the ground in the name of God for the American and British forces mobilized to fight the war in Afghanistan.
If we reflect even further on what they said we will discover that the religious language used by George Bush the son and by the Pope differs little from that used by Osama Ben Laden and his followers. Each of them depicts the other as being the Devil, or the barbarian terrorist. Each of them declares that God is on his side in the war he is waging for justice, and peace, for good against evil, for civilization against barbarism.

But let us ask ourselves: What is this civilization that leads to all the human massacres we are witnessing whether in Afghanistan, in Palestine, in Iraq, in Somalia, or anywhere else? What is this civilization that unloads thousands of tons of bombs on innocent people, or annihilates the Palestinian people in the search for a "peaceful settlement".

Since the birth of slavery, to this day the blood of innocent men, women and children has been shed under religious and patriotic songs. Religion and patriotism have never been separated whether in the West or the East, whether in Islam, Judaism or Christianity.

George Bush considers American soldiers who are dying in Afghanistan as national heroes and martyrs in the cause of Christianity and Osama Ben Laden considers those of his followers who are being killed in the war as martyrs in the cause of Islam.
We should not be surprised by the obvious similarity in the behaviour, the aims and the language of political leaders who use religion in order to achieve their economic and military aims. Religion has always been used by politicians, has always been at the service of politics ever since both of them came into being. All religious books include political, economic and military texts as well as texts related to morals, worship, and to social, family, and individual life. One of the glaring examples of this fact can be found in the texts of the Old Testament which consecrate discrimination against women on the basis of their sex, which considered Eve as responsible for sin because she coaxed Adam into eating from the "tree of knowledge". She was considered responsible for the "sin of knowledge" and deserved to be punished by God, and as a part of this punishment God ordained that she be subjected to the tutelage of her husband.

From then on was born a male patriarchal authority which assumed a divine and sacred character and was later inherited by subsequent religions.

In the Old Testament also are to be found the texts which legitimized racism by lifting the Jewish people to a level above others by calling them the chosen people of Jehovah and which called upon them to occupy the land of Canaan (Palestine) and kill off its inhabitants since they did not believe in the Jewish god. The land of Canaan thus became the Promised land of the Jews and in return they had to display their complete submission to Jehovah by circumcising their male children as a sign that they were his slaves. Thus it was that the "Torah" legitimized a "Holy war" waged in order to destroy the heretics or non believers.

When I read this in the Torah I asked myself what is the relationship between seizing the territories of others by armed aggression and cutting off the prepuce from the head of the male organ? Was Jehovah branding his chosen people on their male organs as a sign that they were his slaves and should remain everlastingly obedient to him in return for the promised land?

If we read the Holy Scriptures carefully we will find that the veiling of women was another practice that was made sacred by the religion of Judaism. The "Talmud" states that the naked hair of a woman is like her naked body and should be covered. The husband is considered to be the head of the woman he marries, an unmarried woman to be a body without head, and a devout Jewish male is in the habit of saying: "I thank you O God for not having created me a woman " during his morning prayers.

Yet the media machine controlled by the United States and the Zionist lobby has been able to hide the truth from people and to depict Islam as being the sole source on which believers base themselves to propagate the veiling of women. Yet there is not a single verse in the Qur'an which requires that women be circumcised, or cover their head and hair. Nor is their a single verse that accuses Eve of being the source of evil and sin because she ate from the "tree of knowledge". This myth has been handed down specifically from the Torah and has been kept alive in the minds of millions of people to justify discrimination against women.
Economic and military centres of power are continuing to use the media which they own and control to propagate these falsehoods for political purposes and to wage war. The peoples of the world will never live in peace based on freedom and justice unless these mystifications are laid bare, unless the minds of millions of men and women are unveiled.

Comparative studies between the three monotheistic religions show that they have a lot in common. The basic teachings related to justice, compassion, love and peace resemble what was inherent in the philosophy of Isis and Noot the female goddesses in the pre-Pharaonic periods of very ancient Egypt. There are verses in the Old Testament which resemble the chants of Akhnatoun. The image of the Virgin Mary carrying the infant Jesus in her arms is almost a replica of Isis carrying her child Horus. However the Holy Trinity experienced a transformation after the birth of the class patriarchal slave system to become the Father, Son and Holy Ghost (the Mother disappeared) whereas before that it had been the Mother child with the unknown father as the hidden spirit or ghost.
In the early stages of human history the father was unknown, and most gods or prophets were fatherless. The prophet Moses did not have a father, and it was his mother who saved him from death at the hands of the Pharaoh. She was the one that suckled him, brought him up, and helped him to become the prophet of Judaism and the Jews. Jesus Christ too was born without a father, and it was his mother the Virgin Mary who saved him from being killed, escaped with him to Egypt and looked after him until he grew to become the prophet of Christianity. Almost the same story repeated itself in the life of Muhammad the prophet of the Muslims. His mother died when he was still a child but she predicted that he would play a guiding role amongst his people. At the age of twenty he married Al Sayeda "Khadiga" who was twice his age. She became like a mother to him, taught him what she knew, trained him to play a leading role, gave him scope to learn and experience many things by relieving him of all monetary cares. When inspiration descended upon him in the caves of Har'a he hastened back to her shivering asking to be wrapped up in something warm. She took him in her arms like a mother enfolds her child, allayed his fears and she was the first one to address him as the prophet of Allah (God).

Nevertheless the role of women in rearing prophets and preparing them for their role vanished from the annals of a class patriarchal society, and has almost never been mentioned in history, so that the father, could become the origin and the founder of all things and so that his image could merge with that of God in Judaism and Christianity. This is reflected in a verse of the Old Testament which says that when people began to multiply on earth, and females were born into them the sons of God perceived the daughters of people as beautiful. So they took to themselves women of their choice from their midst.

The meaning implied in this verse is that the gods gave birth only to males thus emphasizing the superiority and authority of men, and eliminating the rights of women who were thus considered to be inferior beings.

The duration of human history, since man and woman first appeared on earth has been reduced by those who wrote the Old Testament to a period which does not exceed 3389 years. The history of Egypt was made to become that of the Old Testament, in other words was dropped completely from the annals of the human race. But in the year 1829 the letters or symbols of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic language were discovered, and as a result human history began to go much further back than the limits of the Old Testament, than the stories related to the creation of Adam, or Noah, or Abraham or any other of the old biblical figures.
Year after year the discoveries connected to the history of the universe and of our globe were revealed by new sciences and the fallacies of the so-called absolute truths mentioned in the holy books came to light. What was mentioned in them could no longer be considered as matters to be accepted without discussion since they contradicted with science, with our growing knowledge of the world, and could no longer be considered as the basis for a philosophy of life which could serve to solve the problems of the human race.

The new sciences of the universe and the technological advances related to them especially in the realm of communication and information have transformed our world into what we now call a "global village". Events that occur in any part of the world can be followed on a screen at the very same moment by the inhabitants of a small village situated in the Delta of the Nile, or by people living along the banks of the Mississippi River.

However the progress made by scientific knowledge, and the advances in technology have not led to peace, freedom, prosperity and love amongst the peoples of the world. They have been put at the service of the military machine and of the economic interests of the class patriarchal system ruled over by a small minority mainly composed of men. This system works to accumulate capital and profits for the minority at the expense of the millions of human beings living on our globe. We are witnesses of the massacre of Palestinian people at the hands of Israeli soldiers. During the eighties the holy war against the atheist Soviet Union killed and wounded thousands of men, women and children in Afghanistan and was followed by a fratricidal civil war between the various ethnic and Islamic groups. We witnessed how the cultivation and trade in opium served to buy arms and to pay for the war, to swell profits for the capitalists, so that the time came when opium production in Afghanistan represented 75% of total opium production in the world. Millions of young men and women in the area especially in Pakistan, millions of youth all over the world had their lives destroyed by addiction to opium and its derivatives like cocaine and heroine while others got rich on making out of them human wrecks.

American neo-colonialism has inherited the methods used by British colonialism to impose its hegemony, has had recourse to religion and to opium. In the 19th century Britain fought what was called the opium war against China. In India and Egypt and in other countries British colonialism encouraged conflicts between different religions and ethnic groups in order to rule. The methods of "divide and rule" have continued to be used internationally and nationally to perpetrate the power and the wealth of the few.
Here in the Arab region rulers have had recourse to the same methods in order to impose their will and prevent people from uniting in defense of their rights. We are a part of the same class patriarchal civilization, and the experience of all peoples is essentially the same. We all live under an uncivilized civilization whether in the West or the East.

Corrupt, paternalistic, dictatorial governments in the East or in the South including Arab governments have been supported by the class and patriarchal capitalist rulers of the West under the leadership of the United States. The fundamentalist and terrorist political movements in Islam, Judaism and Christianity have received encouragement and support from the same ruling forces in the West. Taliban and the Qai'da terrorist organization of Ben Laden who where allies of the United States, were given arms and money and logistical support by the United States for many years to fight against the Soviet Union. In Indonesia the Shariat Al Islam fundamentalist movement in cooperation with American ruling circles paved the way for the overthrow of Sukarno and for the massacre of half a million members of the Indonesian Communist Party. In Egypt Sadat allied to the United States assisted Muslim fundamentalists to make a come back in his struggle against those who opposed his policies. Saudi Arabia the faithful ally of America since the thirties of the last century used its petrodollars in connivance with the CIA to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan, and in many Arab and African countries.

These developments are the offspring of a single world system which governs both West and East, a class patriarchal society which is the same in its essentials even if it differs in some ways from country to country and from region to region.
But it is important that people in our region who regard those who live in the West as a homogeneous mass imbued with the values and attitudes of crusading Judeo-Christian beliefs differentiate between the policies followed by rulers and many people in the West who have different attitudes and a wider perspective of the so-called East. At the same time men and women in the West should change their views of Arabs and Islam and not see them as part of a civilization imbued with fanatical traditionalist values and systems of thought "immune to modernization" or resistant to modernization as recently described by the writer Salman Rushdie. This dichotomy between East and West is maintained by those who wish to see the world like that for reasons of their own, or who have been brought up and taught to think that way. Such divisions are not only false and prevent us from understanding the system under which we all live, but they are also extremely harmful in the struggle for justice, freedom and peace.

The Collapse of "Liberal Democracy"?

Before 11 September resistance to the ferocious assaults launched by global capitalism against the basic rights of people all over the world was growing. Demonstrations organized by a whole range of organizations and movements against the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle during the month of November 1999 was a landmark in this resistance. They brought together people of different views, from different parts of the world; they were able to overcome the age-old divisions which prevented them from uniting, divisions based on class, or religion or ethnic origin, or nationality, or sex, or profession, or political leanings and ideology, All these differences were dissolved in the common struggle against the attempts of the World Trade Organization to lay down rules which would further impoverish the vast majority of the peoples of the world.
Women and men all over the world are realizing that we are living under a single civilization built on patriarchy and class, a civilization which leads to increasing poverty, to more and more massacres, and to widespread brainwashing of the mind every where.

New peoples movements are growing and spreading, are gaining in consciousness of our problems, in understanding and in the variety and effectiveness of their organizations as the realization of the dangers inherent in the patriarchal capitalist system become ever more clear to them. These peoples movements are constituting what is now becoming known as a movement of "globalization from below" against the hegemonic few who own the transnational corporations, the technological means and the nuclear and laser military power and who rule from the top of a hierarchal pyramid over thousands of millions of people who carry its weight on their shoulders.

The wealth of the richest three families in the world surpasses the average of 600 million people. To protect the minute minority of the rich the capitalist system spends 700 billion dollars yearly on war and arms, that is forty times more than what is spent on health, education and clean water.

The philosophy engendered by the class patriarchal system breeds the idea of charity or help to the poor, the marginalized and the destitute in the name of mercy or compassion. These are words used to propagate a deception which would appear as humanism, where as in fact they accentuate the humiliation of the dispossessed.

A popular Arab proverb affirms "The hand of the higher is better than that of the lower". They are words that deceive because they serve to instill the idea that the poor live at the expense of the rich, on their bounty, whereas it is just the opposite, for it is the rich that live on the productive labour of women and men in the factories and fields, and in the other locations where work takes place. Most of the time this work is almost a forced labour since wages are usually low, much lower than the value of what the worker produces.

About 65% of all productive labour is carried out by women whereas they earn only 5% of world income. This often obliges women to live at the expense of the men in the family, whereas the productive labour of women in the home and outside the home exceeds that of the men. However a large proportion of this labour is unpaid.

Women's movements whether in the West or in the East are becoming more and more aware of the exploitation imposed on them. Poor people in the so-called Third World no longer believe the neo-colonialist rulers when they say that it is the "aid" provided by the so-called "First" world or North that keeps them alive. They know that their riches have been plundered by colonialists and neo-colonialists, and that whatever "aid" is given to them represents only a small fraction of this plunder. Besides most of this "aid" goes back to the North in the form of experts hired, commodities, machines, spare parts, and crops bought, transportation costs etc.. The interest on loans (debt servicing) plus the installments paid back amounts to several times the original sum of the loans. Only the crumbs trickle down through the hands of local rulers and capitalist intermediaries to reach those who are said to be the beneficiaries.

Peoples of the "Third World" or South are rebelling against "aid" and "loans" which deprive them of their riches and are a source of humiliation. They lead only to the depletion of national resources and an increasing impoverishment and marginalisation. They demand "fair trade" instead of "aid". Demonstrations and protests demanding the abolition of Third World debts continue to break out in different countries, and to grow in extent. During the world wide demonstrations organized by women on the 8 March 2000 banners, posters and speakers said: "The debts of the Third World are nothing to compare with five centuries of imperialist plunder and war against people".

The demonstrations organized by women every year on the 8 March have become one of the most massive popular rallies in the world. Women from all regions of the world participate in them. They constitute an important and integral part of the global peoples movement against the assault launched by global capitalism in its search for more and more profit. This assault on the rights of women and men all over the world lays bare the links which bind class oppression with gender and racial oppression.

The media at the service of neo-colonialist circles exaggerate the volume and the significance what is called "humanitarian aid", in order to conceal the plunder, the destruction, and the killings suffered by people at the hands of a rapacious, militarized few. Many of us followed the lines of lorries carrying sacks of American flour to the Afghani people as they crossed over the television screens, at the same time as American B52 planes dropped five thousand pound bombs on starving, destitute women and children and old men cowering in the villages in their decrepit homes.

The capitalist militaristic circles unload their bombs on innocent people at the same time as they launch heartrending appeals for donations, humanitarian aid and for educational loans. These humanitarian appeals are no more than the sickening deceit of a brutal and unjust system seeking a façade behind which to hide its barbarian crimes.

In Afghanistan women and men raised their voices to say that they did not want "aid" or loans which only serve to depict them as a nation of beggars, too backward to do anything for themselves "what we want is to be left alone, to deal with the tasks which face us. We want the American military occupants and their allies to withdraw".

But the roar of planes, the explosion of rockets and bombs, the images flashing from media screens, the clamour of broadcasts overshadow and overwhelm these voices of truth. The media are able to reach every corner of the earth, penetrate to the smallest hamlet in the mountains, in the forests, and on the plains. In countries like ours where the majority neither read, nor write images convey their messages easily. Big and small powers compete to establish television channels, video screens and films. They vie with one another to broadcast from satellites roving in the skies. But the United States is the richest and the most powerful country of all. It produces two thirds of the images produced in the world and no other country can compete. It backs up its military and economic might with its overwhelming control and reach in the media, in order to confuse and destroy and mislead the human mind and paralyze its capacity to think, for in order to control human beings, to impose the will of the powerful few on them it must control their brains above all.

But life is always on the move. Little by little the glimmerings of a new philosophy, of new ways of thought are starting to shine. Movements seeking to liberate the human race from the class patriarchal system are growing everywhere, and with their growth are spreading new ideas. The women and the men suffering exploitation everywhere in the West and the East are seeking to express and define a philosophy of liberation for the human kind. It is a very clear and simple philosophy built on a natural healthy logic of the heart and mind. It is founded on the obvious truths destroyed or distorted since the day when women and men became slaves, on the principle that right is above might, that people are more important than rulers, that human beings are born equal, and have equal rights and obligations whether men or women, white or black, governors or governed. It is a philosophy which refuses all the dichotomies, all the forms of discrimination related to sex, colour, ethnic origin, nationality, class, religion, belief, language, profession or other.

I travelled to the United States one week before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon building. I spent three months teaching as a visiting professor at Montclair State University separated from the World Trade Centre by only nine miles. I was therefore able to follow what happened at a close distance. During this period I visited a number of universities to give lectures, and sometimes to participate in the meetings and demonstrations organized for peace against war by students and faculty in Boston, New York, Auckland and San Francisco as well as in Montclair itself. I was struck by the understanding and the spirit of humanity manifested by the young women and men whom I met. In Montclair a committee for peace against the war in Afghanistan was constituted by students and faculty members. It was wonderful to look into those shining eyes, to see the seriousness, and optimism reflected in those faces. I felt full of hope in the future despite the dark clouds of the war in Afghanistan and the sweeping away of fundamental democratic rights in the United States and other countries of the world in the name of "War against terrorism", inspite of the threats directed against countries in my region and elsewhere with no other aim than to reinforce American hegemony over the world and American control over the oil and other riches in the Caspian Region, West Asia and the Arab Region.

These efforts for peace against war in which American women and men have the courage to participate side by side with women and men from other nationalities and ethnic origins were one more reflection of the humanistic philosophy which is slowly developing, and taking shape, as more and more people join their efforts in a common struggle against paternalistic global capitalism. It is new and yet it is as ancient as the "human conscience" born with man and woman when they peopled the earth, that human conscience which they described as God who rules from the heavens, but lives in the heart of every man and woman. It is the voice deep inside each human being which calls upon him or her to believe in justice, freedom, love compassion and beauty and to act according to this belief.

The class patriarchal system and the successive philosophical beliefs, ideas and values whether secular or religious to which the different stages of its history gave birth have led to the erosion and distortion of the "human conscience" whether individual or collective. It has channelled the struggle of people against "external" political, economic and social injustice in the wrong direction so as to replace it by an "internal struggle" within each human being, a struggle between body and mind, or body and soul (spirit). The spirit or soul was made to mean virtue, to signify the male god. The body was made to signify the sinful female. The philosophy or philosophies engendered by this patriarchal class system fell victim to this everlasting struggle between body and mind (or soul, or spirit). They were drowned in a sea of obscure abstractions, of empty sophistry enclosed within the four walls of the philosophers, study sanctuaries, far removed from the life of people in their homes, or in the streets and work places, far removed from the throngs demonstrating and striking, struggling to survive or fighting for their rights.

In other words the "official" philosophies which have predominated since the times of Aristotle and Plato or from the days of Moses and Abraham have remained isolated from, and unrelated to the everyday life of people and in particular to their political economic, social and cultural preoccupations.

The term "man of the street" implies that activity outside the home, and in particular political activity is the sole domain of the man and thus embodies the patriarchal values of predominant secular and religious philosophies. The term "woman of the street" does not refer to a woman who is active outside the home politically or culturally but to a prostitute or "street walker", as though a woman only leaves her home and goes out into the streets to look for a man. This way of seeing women however is reserved only for poor women, for women who go out of their homes in search of bread and food for their children.

Everywhere the ruling forces are using all the coercive means at their disposal to prevent new political and cultural movements from forging a different society. Security and police forces are no less ferocious and violent than the military forces that wage wars in the West and the East. The degree of oppression against the democratic movements of women and men struggling for justice and peace and for greater equality varies in degree from country to country and takes on different forms. Sometimes it is hidden, almost invisible and depends on subtle brain washing or psychological pressure. When exercised against women who rebel they may lead them to commit suicide or to a mental hospital in lieu of prison.

Popular democratic peoples and women's movements continue to unmask the false values propagated by the class patriarchal capitalist society in the areas of politics and morality, and to reveal the true face of so-called liberal democracy defended by post-modern intellectuals and thinkers in the West, by people like Fukuyama who continue to maintain that it is still the best form of government for human societies for no other reason than the fact that it serves the interests of global capitalism and the expansion of the free market. They continue to maintain that the path of liberal democracy will lead the peoples of the world to justice, freedom, peace and love.

Yet the twentieth century has proved without a doubt that liberal democracy at the service of capitalism has led to more wars, more violence and more terror, that it is not built on increasing participation of peoples in politics, economics, in the services and in the media but only to a distorted electoral system in which they cast their votes to elect representatives who have put themselves at the service of the ruling minority against the interests of ordinary people.

The events have followed the 11 September, the war in Afghanistan waged by America and its allies against the Taliban, meant to ensure control of oil, mineral and opium resources in the Caspian area and in the Asian Islamic Republics, and to establish new military bases has shown the flimsy nature of liberal democracy and revealed the true nature of a civilization which is built on class and patriarchy and can never lead to peace based on justice, on political freedom and economic prosperity for peoples of the world, and to popular participation in government.

I lived through the three months which followed the September 11 terrorist attack on the United Stated and witnessed how the liberal democracy of that society launched an all-out attack on what existed in the realm of personal and public freedom. In the name of national security draconian laws where passed by congress which severely restricted the basic rights of American women and men.

I witnessed how George Bush summoned high level people responsible for the media and directed them to impose strict censorship on what was written in newspapers, or broadcast on television. How the American administration abandoned the neo- liberal democratic principles that had been considered an integral part of society for over two centuries, and as something all American citizens should be proud of and has promulgated laws to permit imprisonment on mere suspicion for unspecified periods of time and under conditions of complete isolation and secrecy without a minimum of legal guarantees or support from lawyers.

I witnessed how innocent people, women and men could be hunted down and harassed and even committed to be tried in military courts in secret sessions held in any part of the world including military bases and warships. I witnessed how technology and drugs could be used to torment and torture suspects physically and mentally in order to obtain information.

All these developments have served to prove the false nature of neo-liberal democracy, how it can shed its mask to become an open fascist, dictatorship when faced with any challenge, to show that Western neo-liberal democracy differs little from the autocratic anti-democratic regimes prevalent in the Arab region. This is not surprising since all the systems of our post modern era are founded on class patriarchal relations which continue to breed injustice and double standards.

Democratic and women's movements everywhere have shown that there is a dire need for a philosophy aiming at an awakening of the human conscience which can rid us of class patriarchal values and replace them with authentic human values built on peace, justice and love and on the abolition of double standards and forms of discrimination that sow division and conflict among people.

Nawal El Saadawi
Cairo January 2002

References

• "Isis" (a play by Nawal El Saadawi), page 5. Dar Al Moustakbal Al Arabi, Cairo 1986.
• A'n Al Mara'a "On Women" (by Nawal El Saadawi), page 24. Dar Al Moustakbal Al Arabi, Cairo 1988.
• Salman Rushdie. Article published in the New York Times, 2 November 2001.
• Samuel Huntington. Newsweek magazine, special annual issue, December 2001 - February 2002.
• A'n Al Mara'a "On Women" , page 25
• Ibid , page 18
• Ibid , page 20
• "Taw'am Al Solta Wal Gins" The Twins of State and Sex (by Nawal El Saadawi) Dar Al Mostakbal Al Arabi, page 233, Cairo 1999.
• "Fatrat Al Takween Fi Hayat Al Sadik Al Ameen", The Formative Years in the Life of the Truthful and Honest Man (i.e the Prophet Muhammed), Dara Merit, Cairo 2001.
• The Old Testament, Verses 1 and 2 Chapter six , Sections 5 and 6.