Antun Sa´adeh’s perspective on women and gender equality

By: Dr. Edmond Melhem

FROM the time Antun Sa´adeh worked with his father, Dr Khalil Sa´adeh, in journalism until his execution in 1949, he always promoted the emancipation of women and saw that for democratization to prevail in society women must be given their freedom and equality. His writings reveal that he was against their oppression at home and against their discrimination within society. To him, placing women under men is a psychological illness that his nation must be rid of. As he puts it: “the greatest calamity afflicted the Syrian nation as a result of long ages of deterioration and retrogression caused by the loss of national sovereignty was that of moral decline and psychological illnesses. Placing the woman as a human being under the man is an example of such illnesses.”
In January 1932, Sa´adeh gave a lecture at the invitation of the Association of “Spiritual Endeavour for the Youth” in which he urged his people to adopt the mentality of practical thinking to solve the nation’s social problems and get rid of its decadent beliefs, which hinder the social national unity of his people. In this lecture, he criticized the social system that governs the family in his society. This system, he believed, is based on corrupt principles which lead to self-conquer. To him, the conquered self has become a psychiatric illness preventing us from seeking lofty demands. Sa´adeh criticized this social system of family, which rests on coercion and repression and leads to awful effects on all members of the family, particularly the female, who in most cases spends her life in humiliation, degradation and slavery. He states:
We see some of the manifestations of this corrupt system through the suppression by the father of some of his son’s scientific and artistic desires instead of trying to correct the desires that skewed and directed him on the path that would lead to their achievement. We also see the father suppressing the mother in most of the good things she desires, and both the father and the mother suppressing their daughter’s greatest desires in her life. They decide her fate in a way that crushes her emotions and deprives her of any will in life, leaving her to spend the rest of her life with sadness and a broken heart.
Tell me, gentlemen, when this daughter becomes a mother, can she nourish her children in a spirit of self-confidence, self-reliance, freedom of thought and action, and other virtues without which life is useless and void of satisfaction, happiness and meaningless, and has no meaning other than indolence, humiliation, degradation and slavery? Can children raised under the pressure of oppression and self-humiliation grow into free men and women?
Sa´adeh envisaged women’s emancipation, in particular, and societal reform, in general, to begin within the family as an institution, reinventing relationships within it. This institution, it can be inferred, is regarded as an essential foundation of the nation. The progress of the nation is dependent on the harmony, progress and well-being of the family. To put it differently, every nation’s progress and prosperity depend on the upbringing of educated and self-confident (male and female) citizens capable of dealingwith life’s challenges and equipped to participate effectively in the life of their community. Hence, the upbringing and education of children are the responsibility of both husband and wife who should cooperate and assist each other to empower their children with self-confidence, knowledge, and freedom of thought and action.
Sa´adeh offered a good example of how a husband should treat his wife and how a father should treat his children. His wife’s memoirs are full of stories that attest to the fact that Sa´adeh treated her with high respect and deep affection. Their marriage was based on love, mutual trust and cooperation. They both united in body and spirit and struggled in life towards achieving higher ideals. Juliette states:
I was aware of how difficult it was to take care of the party’s affairs and its organization in an atmosphere dominated by chaos for ages. I tried to help him with my faithfulness and loyalty and by being supportive knowing that my devotion would be worthwhile. Al-Za′im always made me feel that he wanted me to take a participatory role and discuss with him serious cases and he would always come back and talk to me about them saying that a woman has a sixth sense by which she perceives with her heart what the man cannot realize with his mind.
Moreover, Sa´adeh, as his wife reported, used to play with his children whenever the opportunity allowed him. He used to answer their questions and listen to what they said to him. They were very attached to him. Describing her husband’s relationship to his daughters, Juliette wrote:
Raghida was attached tremendously to her father. She would not go to sleep until he came to her. She would know if her father was at home, even if he was away from her. If Sa´adeh opened her room door even marginally she would call him and hug him. From Raghida he would go to the other daughters and play with them as well. Elissar would talk to him about what she did at school.
Recalling her childhood memories, Sa´adeh’s oldest daughter, Safia, recounted that she “earnestly sought to participate with the boys who were climbing the trees to collect blackberries and figs”. Her mother objected for fear that she would hurt herself, but her father offered her encouragement and allowed her to mount the trees and compete with the boys. Sa´adeh, it must be noted saw no difference between a boy and a girl. His wife affirmed that when their youngest daughter Raghida was born, Dr. Mustafa Khalidi who delivered her was sad since he had hoped that this time the leader was going to have a son. Juliette stated:
He had to go and tell the leader himself…When he exited the house the guards wanted to hear the news of a son to start firing their guns as was the custom. The doctor told them nothing. When he met the leader, Sa´adeh told him that there was no difference between a boy and a girl.
Safia asserts that her father implanted her with self-confidence, self-reliance, and ability to face challenges since she was a child:
Despite the incessant coming and going of guests and party members, Dad continued to pay attention to me. When he had a respite, he took me for long walks in the adjacent pine woods. He often purposely stood at quite a far distance away from me and asked me to join him.
I cannot Daddy; there are too many thorns on the way scratching my legs, I screamed.
Find a twig and push the thorns away.
I was unaware at the time of the significance of this unpleasant game. It was much later, when I became a young woman that I realized that he was training me to become independent and rely on myself. He also gave me enough self-confidence to find my solutions to the problems facing me. However, he also taught me, though he might have been unaware of it, to enjoy surmounting challenges. From then on, I always chose the hard, untrodden road.
Sa´adeh looked at women as equal partners to men and as participants in the activities of the public domain. In his opinion, women constitute half of society and must be treated as equals to men. They should not be confined to the private sphere, but they should be active participants in production and national struggle. “National activity should not be restricted to men. Production cannot be considered national unless women participate in it and become active members of society.” In speech and writing, Sa´adeh addressed all Syrians without discrimination and sought to mobilize men and women to win their full participation in the national struggle.
While in jail from early February to early May 1936, Sa´adeh completed writing his book: The Genesis of Nations, which he dedicated “to the men and women of the mighty national renaissance who are striving for the life, existence and glory of Syria.” Furthermore, in a speech at a social function organized by female Syrian Social Nationalists in 1938, Sa´adeh announced: “When I thought about the abilities of Syrian men, I thought also about the ability of the Syrian woman, which had been a fundamental factor in our progress and advancement in all periods of our particular history and in that civilization which we spread to the whole world”. Indeed, if we turn the pages of Syrian history, we find many a woman who became an able queen (such as Zanoubia, the 3rd-century Queen of the Palmyrene Empire who led a famous revolt against the Roman Empire; and Elissar, the founder and first Queen of Carthage), an effective leader and able politician, a `brave soldier, a talented scholar, a reformer of a high calibre and exceptional courage.