The Faith,the Honor of Women,the Land: The Druze Women in Israel

The status of women—or, a license to live

Thirty-three of the students interviewed addressed the subject of the Druze woman’s honor; 18 of them were female, 15 were male. The great majority of interviewees (27) agreed that the current situation of the Druze woman is not satisfactory, and that women are discriminated against compared with men. But the women’s replies on this question were textually richer than those of the men, and it was noteworthy that they spoke from the heart and with a lot of pain:

‘I’m not all that much of a feminist, but I’ll tell you frankly, I can’t stand the way things are in my village… they dictate how a woman should live, dictate everything from A to Z, and not necessarily things connected with religion. For example, they’ll come to a girl and tell her that she’s forbidden to get a driver’s license, but they’ll never talk about drugs or other negative things in our society’ (Kauther).

As we will see shortly, for most of the interviewees, the reference that repeatedly recurred as a concrete example of the status of women involved the debate in their society concerning the right of a woman to receive a driver’s license. Metaphorically, this may be viewed as a license that the men give to the women, a license that enables or prevents their freedom of movement in space. A female interviewee said:

‘I feel as though, when I wake up in the morning, they have already begun to interfere in my life. I do things, and don’t do other things, because of what they dictate to us. So I can’t wear trousers, for instance, although I don’t believe in that [prohibition], because the clergy forbid it. Today I’m studying at university despite the tremendous pressure the religious authorities exerted on my parents; it’s my good fortune that I have liberal parents’ (Hanaan).

The main arguments made by the students about the inferior status of women were directed at religious figures. The students claimed repeatedly that the clergy are a kind of commissar, guardians of the cultural life of members of the community. This claim is reinforced because the interviewees think that the prohibitions promulgated by the religious authorities don’t actually exist in the religion per se, but are a species of manipulation by the clerical authorities in order to maintain control over the community.

Some of the women students argue that the religious leaders are really manipulating the faith, but they also claim that the faith itself needs to be improved to conform to modern life:

‘The religion was set down more than a thousand years ago, and we have now reached the year 2000 and we need to change along with the world around us. In my opinion, a woman who works on the outside (outside the village) without a driver’s license, and without a car, can’t do it…’ (Ibtisam).

Most of the male students agreed with the basic argument of the women students that the latter are discriminated against and do not have equality with men. Some of the men concurred with the essential argument and supported women’s liberation and their right to equality with men; but others, coincidentally or not, were supportive for practical reasons:

‘I support the idea of Druze women studying, they should finish high school and even go to university, and I am also in favor of women having the option to get a driver’s license, because these are the basic requirements of life these days’ (Ahmad).

A few interviewees noted specific examples as to why women should be able to drive cars:

‘In our village, the religious authorities ostracize a woman who gets a driver’s license, but why should that be? For instance, we have a woman whose husband is sick, she is the only one who can take care of him, and she would drive him to the hospital, so what do the religious authorities say in that case? It’s not enough to say forbidden, forbidden, forbidden; they have to understand the situation a bit better. They should adjust the tradition to the times we’re living in. You can’t just stay back, all closed in, by yourself’ (Anwar).

Others are in favor of a woman having a driver’s license because it meets an economic need, because it enables her to help support the family.

In contrast to the rebellious majority, who demand far-reaching changes in the tradition in general and the status of women in particular, six of the interviewees—three women and three men—thought that the status of women is fine and that no change is required. Some thought that the situation is very good compared with the past, and expressed satisfaction with the status quo:

‘I personally [said one woman] am very satisfied with our traditions and our leaders; for instance, I get more rights than my mother, I can go out to study at university, I can walk around freely within the village. Ten years ago, these things were impossible’ (Sahara).

The three men go farther and think that the situation today is bad, that there is too much freedom. Najeeb uses the driver’s license issue to make things clear:

‘In my opinion, the prohibition on women’s driving is correct. Once I was in a car with three other guys and we had a flat, and the four of us all got involved in fixing the flat; we were talking about how if this happened to a Druze woman alone, she’d be stuck in the middle of the road with the flat tire, she wouldn’t know how to change the tire, and go figure who would help her and what would happen to her….’

For whatever reason, the male and female students alike attribute the responsibility here to the religious authorities. In actuality, the social norms are set by all the members of the Druze community, first of all by the men, but not solely by the religiously observant men. As the interviews reveal, and as we know from reality, when there are religious strictures that the society cannot uphold, they are ignored and, in the end, the religious authorities unbend and make changes.

Freedom has limits—sexual behavior

Here I will present the findings concerning the prohibition on women having sexual relations before marriage. I think this is the most interesting issue, and it is also connected to one of the core religious principles that were presented above, al ‘Ard—the honor, which deals with a woman’s purity and with the demand that she guards her virginity until she marries.

Unlike the considerable openness interviewees demonstrated with respect to the previous question, when it comes to marital relations all agree that limits must be preserved, and the boundaries are set by the relations between the man and woman before marriage. Most of the interviewees, both men and women, accepted these boundaries and don’t see them as something dictated to them.

Forty of the interviewees addressed this issue. Only three of them (two women and one man) thought that young people should have the option of deciding on their own boundaries and did not dismiss the option of premarital sexual relations. All three, however, spoke guardedly and with obvious reservations:

‘Look, about sex, if both sides are ready for it, if it comes from maturity and not from a lack of awareness… because I, as a teacher, see the problems in this area between high school students who do it out of ignorance, and in my opinion it should come from being ready and aware’ (Aisha).

The remaining students, 37 of the 40 who discussed the issue, absolutely and without hesitation dismiss the idea of premarital sex, and almost without exception, they direct this prohibition primarily to women. Here, a certain distinction is discerned between the attitudes of male and female students. While the women see the prohibition as unequivocal and total (especially with respect to women), men are more ambivalent. While they expect women to be totally chaste, they perceive men’s sexual activity as forgivable, if not entirely desirable.

Some of the women students equate protecting women’s honor (that is, remaining a virgin until marriage) with protecting the members of the community:

‘We don’t have to be so open, so much, so much… From my perspective, the boundary is no sex before marriage… From my standpoint, even liberty has to have limits. We as Druze have to protect our customs. Even if I go abroad, I don’t want to forget about or neglect these customs. I don’t agree with that; I belong to something and I need to protect it; I have to protect what I am, my roots. There are things that we have to protect very, very carefully. We don’t have to behave like the Jews or like anyone else. We have our identity and we have to protect it’ (Areej).

A few of the women even see this as something sacred that must not, under any circumstances, be abridged:

‘I believe that a Druze woman’s self-respect should be something sacred. She should protect herself; this is the thing that most distinguishes us from everyone else. She can sit with guys, she can sleep outside [the village], and she can have a driver’s license and go wherever she likes, but when someone tries to get close to her and harm her, she should have the courage, one hundred percent, to protect herself. It’s not important where she is, she can be abroad even, but she should protect herself’ (Afnaan).

Some offer additional reasons, aside from religious ones, for protecting young women. Intisar supports this prohibition for social reasons, and offers examples of the afflictions in societies with openness and freedom: ‘In freer societies than ours, there are a lot of problems with sex before marriage. They have sexually transmitted diseases and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. They have a lot of problems, and that’s why I’m against it.’

Concerning the men, the women students are less categorical. They are aware of the discrimination between men and women in Druze society; hence what is forbidden to women is not necessarily prohibited for men. Some accept this with bitterness, even frustration:

‘From a religious standpoint, it’s forbidden to both women and men, but the reality is that there’s a gap between the religious attitude and the social one… There are a lot of Druze men who go out and have fun, even married ones. People know about it but there are no social sanctions. By contrast, if a woman does the smallest thing, people treat her as if she’s committed some grave sin. The society is very hypocritical’ (Intisar).

To preclude any misunderstanding here, the intent of the women interviewees in drawing comparisons between men and women is not that women should have more freedom, but rather that what is forbidden to women should also be forbidden to men.

Some of the women themselves are very forgiving and understanding toward the men’s behavior, just as the society they criticize is:

‘Wherever the man is, in the end he comes home, comes back to his regular life. But with the woman, how do they put it, if she makes one mistake it’s like a thousand mistakes made by a man, so she has to watch herself’ (Rania).

Some of the women students see conscription into the army as the source of evil on this question, and blame the Druze man’s going out to serve in the army:

‘The army is what messes things up. The young Druze men join the army; it’s like keeping someone bottled up and then releasing the cork; they burst out. At first everything is forbidden; they join the army and suddenly everything is permitted, there are no boundaries, and they take advantage of that in the most terrible way and it harms their own personal and Druze identity’ (Angha’m).

The men students, as noted, relate to this subject differently. Only a few—three—dismiss the idea of premarital sex whether for the woman or the man, and take this position because they are devout believers and deeply religious:

‘I am sharply against this. Don’t take my opposition to ‘honor killings’ of women as a sign that I approve of premarital sex. On the contrary, I am against it. I think that the family is the framework for continuity and for personal relations between man and woman. As we say, to be married is as if you are halfway to devout’ (Abed).

Kamal argues that protecting al ‘Ard—the honor—is one of the central tenets of the Druze religion, and goes on to say that if we don’t guard this fundamental tenet, we are relinquishing the Druze religion overall. Most of the men students, as noted earlier, do have reservations about premarital sex, but they don’t sound unequivocal, and their statements sometimes can be interpreted in more than one way:

‘It [premarital sex] is not such a great thing because, with us, I don’t know… With the Jews, they’ve arrived at a situation where they can be together for four or five years without getting married. I don’t know if we’ve reached that. With us, every man gets what he wants [sexual satisfaction] and leaves. But I don’t think that’s something, I don’t think that’s something good’ (‘Eimad).

Most of the men students express a double standard, as Abed said very well:

‘You’ll find a Druze man who’s willing to go out with six or seven Jewish or Christian women but he isn’t willing to go out with a Druze woman. Why? Because he grew up with the mindset that within the Druze community, this is taboo, and he isn’t willing to do it; but he’s willing with other women, since they’re not from his group.’

In other words, a Druze guy has two parallel social frameworks; in one, he preserves the customs of the community, but when he is outside that framework, he behaves in a completely different manner, and not in accordance with the norms of his society.

Some of the men are uneasy with this double standard; their dilemma is not resolved. They want to behave as they wish their future wives to behave, but in practice they don’t manage to:

‘On the one hand, when I get married, I want my wife to be a virgin. I have a problem with this, I’ll say it frankly, on the one hand I can’t say that I won’t go out with a girl before marriage, it’s really difficult. On the other hand, I can’t accept the scenario that I’d marry someone who had boyfriends before, it’s impossible, I’m looking for some kind of formula but I still haven’t found it’ (Amin).

Some have resolved this dilemma by extending the woman’s boundaries. From their standpoint, a Druze man can go out with whomever he wants so long as he’s not married. Osama doesn’t accept the idea that married Druze men go out with other women. He complains that those who serve in the army and the border police go out freely, and even live with Jewish girlfriends in Jerusalem. Samir resolved his dilemma differently. In his view, the man can do as he pleases, but what he does shouldn’t be disclosed to his society or his village.

Husni sums up this issue as follows:

‘When a man has a chance to have sex, it’s difficult for him to postpone it, but for the woman it’s something else, since we are talking about honor, we’re talking about the honor and purity of the woman. A man has nothing to do with this issue, all this discussion is more about the woman.’

Marriage as a boundary protecting the community

Moving on from the issue of marital relations, the interviewees talked about the issue of inter-faith marriage. Forty of them addressed this question—most, of their own accord, and some as a response to my follow-up question on the previous issue. The overwhelming majority (37 of 40) were totally against the idea of intermarriage, the three that differed on this very sensitive issue where all women. Here, too, as with the previous issue, there was a substantive difference between the men’s and women’s responses, although both women and men agreed in principle that intermarriage is a bad idea.

For most, the posture here arose from religious belief or dictate:

‘Religion is the main thing, and according to our religion, one may not marry someone who isn’t a Druze. The religion forbids intermarriage. If you and I don’t do as the faith commands, others will follow us, and we’ll end up without religion, we’ll be like everyone else. I’m against it’ (Afnaan).

Ahlam goes one step farther, speaking of the purity of the race, and says that Druze may not marry non-Druze because it pollutes:

‘The most important thing is not to marry women of other religions. We have to protect the purity of the blood. This is what has strengthened us as pure Druze over the years, the fact that we didn’t mix with others.’

A few of the women used the social argument to reinforce this idea. Rania says that someone who marries a non-Druze woman pays a heavy price and that it isn’t worth it:

‘With us in the village, there’s someone very famous and admired… I am very proud that he cannot come to live in our village; he lives outside the village and has children and a Christian wife. Yes, he’s a good guy and he’s okay as a human being but that’s it, the village took a stance toward him and he can’t live there.’

Among the men as well, the main consideration in opposing interfaith marriage is to protect the community, but to protect it as a social group rather than as a religious community. Their thinking is mainly that the community is a tiny minority and has to be protected from falling apart: ‘I’m not a racist, but we are a small minority here, not even two million, we’re barely a million two hundred thousand, and if we permit intermarriage, we’ll be assimilated into the society around us’ (Kamal).

Muhammad notes that intermarriage is a danger nibbling away at the numbers of the minority community:

‘I understand the stance taken by our community about mixed marriages because if the Christians and Jews and Muslims can’t be Druze… then in order to preserve our existence, we can’t permit intermarriage. Because if I marry someone who isn’t Druze, I stop being Druze, and our numbers will decrease.’

There are two interesting phenomena here. On the one hand, women—who supposedly are more conservative—are the only ones (even if only three of them) who had the courage to come out against this very absolute taboo. On the other hand, within the discussion, among both the women and the men, the only examples of people who married outside the community were of men. Even when discussing the possibility that something like this might occur, only men were mentioned. The interviewees, men and women, didn’t even consider that Druze women might cross that line.

‘The honor complex’

On the rare occasion that the interviewees spoke about the subject of ‘sex’, they mentioned it only indirectly, via two terms: the first, which recurred frequently in various places in the interviews, was al ‘Ard, ‘العرض’, and the other was a woman’s honor. The two in fact express the same thing, since by preserving al ‘Ard one may protect a woman’s honor. Similar to other Palestinians, the narrow meaning of al ‘Ard is protecting a girl’s virginity. The broader meaning, aside from the demand that a single woman preserve her virginity and that a married woman remain faithful to her husband, is the demand that a woman be beyond any suspicion in the eyes of the relevant community (Hassan, 1999).

What is interesting in the concept of a woman’s honor is that the interviewees, including the women, connect a woman’s honor inherently with the honor of the community, and with the fact of the community’s existence and the protection of its heritage and its identity: ‘… If we don’t protect al ‘Ard, meaning to protect a woman’s honor, then our Druze-ness will be harmed’ (Najeeb). The honor of all Druze, or the preservation of Druze identity, depends on the woman’s body, or her lower half, as Alsaadawi (1971) puts it. This phenomenon that the woman symbolizes, holds, and cultivates the collective identity is not unique to the Druze. Much has been written about this phenomenon—to mention only a few: Chatterjee (1989), Accad (1991), Peteet (1993), and Katz (1996). Peteet (1993) discussed this and tried to examine how symbols are constructed, how they represent the culture.

Peteet conducted her research in Palestinian society, and she writes that the nation’s honor is bound up with, and relies on, al ard—the land and al ‘ard—the honor. But after the humiliation of 1948 the order changed and al ard—the land became the symbol of the nation and the revolution. Still this symbol is connected to the woman, who is seen as Mother Earth, and as the Mother of the Shaheeds. Peteet concludes that cultural symbols are indeed born of tradition and history, but they can also change in the course of history as dictated by the male elite and according to the circumstances and needs of those who rule society. This example fits well with our case. We can see that the men in the male-dominated Druze society decide how society will view a woman’s identity, and Druze society links this identity with the honor and the identity of the whole community. The man, meanwhile, is relieved of a great burden. He can behave as he pleases, have sex as he likes, so long as it is not in the public eye, or with women of the community, as most of the students reported.

This is the double standard referred to by Hassan (1999) in connection with the concept of honor. The man’s honor is fixed by things like achievements, courageous behavior, generosity, affiliations, social status, and family origin. His sexual behavior is overlooked, whereas a woman’s honor is fixed by her sexual behavior, her modesty, and her purity. Strikingly, most of the women students accept this double standard, set by men, and most of the women relate tolerantly to the fact that the Druze men don’t behave in accordance with religious norms, have sex before marriage, and even commit adultery after they are married.

The discourse that emerges from the women students’ statements is that they are willingly relinquishing the option to control their own bodies and sexuality, their feelings and needs, and putting the men in charge of their fate. The women students have internalized the patriarchal male discourse, the goal of which is to subdue women, control them and turn them into objects for the satisfaction of male needs (Foucault, 1972; Hassan, 1999; Hooks, 1999). Indeed the patriarchal discourse in Arab society (and in Druze society, as a part thereof) over the years has created concepts and terminology via which it can control the consciousness of Arab women and hence their behavior.

Possible explanations

In what follows, I list different explanations that are offered in the literature and then present my own position on the issue. There are researchers, such as Mahmood (2005), who interpret women’s choices to obey the patriarchal taboo as a form of agency, arguing that the very expectation that women should want to have free sexual relations is ethnocentric and inadvertently essentialist, as it equates agency with Western ideals of free choice and sexual freedom. I do not accept this interpretation. I believe that one can offer a critical analysis of women’s sexual oppression that is not ethnocentric or essentialist and at the same time does not romanticize Middle Eastern women and culture. My analysis, rather, is critical of both Arab patriarchy and the powers and values set by Western imperialism.

Life-saving strategy

Mahmood (2005) claims that the term agency, as used by English-speaking feminists, is problematic. They assume that agency is based on an active will to resist oppression and to bring about social change. In the research that she conducted on the women’s movement in the mosques of Cairo, she found that the women actively and enthusiastically adopted the patriarchal situation, the veil, and their subservient place in society. They even try and convince their husbands to get closer to religion and abstain from doing things that are contradictory to their religion. In this way they become agents. They do not see the veil as something external that is being forced on them but as something complementary to their inner self. In this way they find harmony between their deep beliefs and their external actions.

Abu Lughod (1998) goes even further and finds good in what seems totally bad for women. With regard to the veil, for example: the veil is very controversial, and there has lately been an ongoing debate about it in Arab society. Abu Oden (1993), Eisenstein (1996), and Abu Lughod (1998) argue that some Muslim women use the veil to defend themselves. By wearing the veil, they can feel more secure going out into society, they can work in public institutions like banks and government agencies, which they would have a hard time doing without the veil. The veil, then, becomes a calling card in the public sphere, and protects them from social criticism and oppression by their own communities.

Applying this to our case, the zealous declaration by the women students about protecting their honor and virginity may be read as a metaphoric veil, a kind of insurance. Phrased differently, by means of this ‘payment’ to the society, they purchase their full freedom in other spheres, including studying at a university. This declaration of faith gives them freedom in all other spheres.

System justification theory (Jost and Banaji, 1994; Jost and Burgers, 2000) provides a similar explanation to the phenomenon we are examining here. According to this theory, members of the minority defend the system in which they find themselves, at the expense of their own interests, particularly when they perceive the system as legitimate and right. If we view the Druze community as a social system, the women may be seen as defending the system, mainly a male system. They justify it passionately, from a deeply-held belief in the rightness of the system, as emerges from their discourse. They are persuaded absolutely of the need to take away their control over their own bodies, so as to protect the community’s identity and keep it whole. Hence they don’t consider that this comes at the expense of their own interests. Tohidi (1991), who examined the role of women in the Khomeini revolution in Iran, found a similar phenomenon, whereby the women there were among those who made the miracle of the revolution possible and demanded a return to tradition and religion, ostensibly against their own interests, against the openness and freedom given to them during the Shah’s era, and for the sake of protecting society.

Glick and Fiske (2001) try to explain one of the means by which this apparatus is reinforced. One way for the men to preserve the situation is to be compassionate in defending women willing to play the classic role of the submissive woman who toes the line. They argue that women accept the discriminatory situation with understanding when the men take a compassionate approach, and accept the behavior of the men tolerantly when they perceive it as behavior aiming to defend them and protect them from the violence of other men. As we saw in the statements of the interviewees, particularly the male students, men see themselves as guarding the Druze woman everywhere, at all times, with no connection to the degree of kinship between them.

Women’s moral conservatism and false consciousness

One of the explanations for the seeming enigma of women’s acceptance of this distorted situation refers to consciousness. According to this approach, society, through education beginning in early childhood and through norms that women grow up with, and its social structures come to seem ‘natural’ and self-evident. Mernissi (2002) argues that the nickname given to women in Arab society—alhareem—is part of this discourse. The nickname comes from the root meaning ‘prohibition’, and the transgression of the forbidden brings punishment. Thus the woman, in the consciousness of Arab society, is linked with prohibition and sin, with things that must be prevented and limited, narrowing her movement, as happens to the Arab woman, according to Mernissi.

In his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1987) discussed this phenomenon thoroughly concerning class. Freire claimed that the oppressed tend to adopt the patterns of thinking of their oppressors and many times they even tend to model themselves according to the values and culture of their oppressors. This makes them unaware of their own oppressive situation and even brings them to a point at which they justify the oppressive situation and the behavior of their oppressors towards them. Freire called this phenomenon internalizing oppression and it is similar to Marx’s concept of false consciousness. Fanon (1967) also related to this phenomenon in his book Black Skin, White Masks when he described how the Black person nullifies himself when confronting his White master and often, at the same time, the Black person wants to be like his master.

Hijazi (1998) refers to this same phenomenon using the term inferiority complex and adds that an oppressed person feels insecurity, fear, and helplessness in his relations to his oppressive authority. He claims that, as a whole, in its relations with the West, Arab society suffers from this very complex, and adds that this phenomenon is a product of colonization, since colonizers have relentlessly tried to give natives a feeling of inferiority. By doing that, it was easier for colonizers to control natives. Hijazi also claims that this complex pushes a person to feel shame and humiliation, or as he calls it in Arabic: ‘رعلا’ (alaar). This complex damages the Arab man’s honor and wounds his narcissism. According to Hijazi, a man can be without bread, but he’ll lose his humanity if he loses his honor. The oppressed Arab man projects all of his al ‘Ard, the honor complex, onto the woman, the weaker component of society, and she carries on her back all the sins of the society. By dint of this projection, the man ties his fate and his honor to the sexual behavior of the woman. Thus, as Hijazi puts it, instead of the oppressed man rising up against the source of al ‘Ard—the honor—the person who controls and oppresses him—he finds it easier to project all his frustrations onto the weaker woman, who, from his perspective represents his shame ‘aaru’.

Feminist perspectives

Feminist anthropologists of the non-essentialist school who study the Middle East explain that since women grasp the situation as unchangeable, they try to gain the maximum from it. Kandiyoti (1988) claims that since women cannot really change the patriarchal structure in society, they prefer to know the structure well and to adopt the norms and the values that construct it, and thereby try to benefit from such doors that do open for them, even if only sporadically. In this way their personal needs are met. Indeed, this is what happened with the women in the Druze community, especially in the realm of education. In the last decade, the number of Druze women in universities has more than tripled and today they outnumber the male Druze students. Therefore, we can say that on the declarative level the women submit themselves to the male tyranny, but on the practical level they find ways to benefit from the existing situation.

Joseph (1999) follows Kandiyoti and refines her arguments. Joseph challenges as false the argument that Arab society is a collective society, as opposed to Western society, which is individualistic. Joseph prefers the term ‘relational society’ to ‘collective society’. She proposes two terms for describing how this connecting matrix is constructed: embedded self and patriarchal connectivity. Joseph writes that, in Arab society, the family is at the center, not the individual. This structure secures and strengthens the solidarity in the family in order to survive socially, economically, and politically. In a society such as this, with mutual responsibility, there is a patriarchal hierarchy but the woman can also manipulate things so as to get her way in society, enjoy the protection that the man can give, and benefit from her status whenever possible. Joseph also claims that this social structure is not made by the men alone, but also by the women—who, together, in the way they function, create this structure, with the good and the bad that it embodies.

Chatterjee (1989) looks at this same issue, but from different perspectives. Whereas Joseph is concerned with the psychology of the embedded self, Chatterjee talks about aspects of colonialism. He suggests another alternative to analyze the complex encounter between West and East that we have before us. He claims that Indian society coped with the encounter by dividing culture into two spheres, the material and the spiritual. In this way they could adopt advanced western technology while preserving Indian identity and tradition. This was possible since the Indians believed that Eastern culture is spiritually superior to that of the West. The man was in charge of confronting the external, material, and technological world and the woman was given the role of guardian of the home, spirituality, tradition and Indian culture. Because the woman was given such a high role she was also allowed to go out and study. Her studies were seen as a means to train her for her role and at the same time she had to behave in a modest way and dress in traditional clothes.

Although there are many historical differences between the Druze society and Indian society, we can learn from this arrangement. It can help us explain why the Druze women accept the ‘double standard’ that society ‘imposes’ upon them and why they are ready to take upon themselves what from the outside appears to be a double burden. The Druze women have a historical role as carriers of the community’s collective identity, morality, and culture. Since they are the carriers of the heart of the culture, i.e. the religion and the tradition, they are rewarded. In this arrangement, the Druze men are freer and can even develop romantic relations outside of the community, though this freedom also labels them as less moral. In the end we should not forget that the female students go out and study in academic institutions and in this way they can become very ‘modern’ and at the same time very ‘Druze’. This is a position we can call a position of ‘prestige-prestige’, and it helps maintain the existing relations in the community. Men face outward towards ‘freedom’ and women face inward towards prestige as the guardians of the identity of the Druze community.

The imagined West, as it is perceived by the East and in our case by the Druze, disrupts the social order forcing the Druze to protect their culture from the threat of being erased by the West. In order to preserve themselves the woman takes on a role as guardian of the group’s identity. This is a patriarchal deal in which both women and men cooperate. In this ‘deal’ the woman presumably prevents the Druze culture from being overwhelmed by the West. The deal is successful because the woman profits from it. She gains respect as the guardian of the group’s honor while at the same time she enjoys the fruits of modernity. She can go out and obtain higher education and work outside of the home. Another possible explanation may be found in the Arab feminist literature, which holds that the Arab woman is oppressed by the man, but in the same measure is also oppressed by Western imperialism, and that some of her behavior and her protection of tradition is an act in reaction to the West and all that it symbolizes (Ahmed, 1992). Yuval-Davis and Anthias (1989) broaden the scope here and argue that women are the ones who set the boundaries of ethnic/national groups, in being responsible for the biological continuity of their group, and even collaborate in creating the ideology of their group and preserving and passing on its traditions and culture. These arguments are in keeping with the analysis of the role women played in the Khomeini revolution in Iran, as argued by Tohidi (1991). This can also provide a plausible explanation for the willingness of the young Druze women in our study to carry the burden of preserving the Druze identity and protecting the traditions and heritage even if this demands that they relinquish certain of their own wishes.

From the various interpretations that were presented here, I would introduce an explanation that combines those of Kendiyoti (patriarchal bargain), Joseph (embedded self), and Chatterjee (response to imperialism with split consciousness) and fortifies it with Freire (by taking the class perspective and applying it to gender), to highlight the consciousness issue. This concept may provide a more comprehensive explanation of the dilemma with which Druze women are struggling.