The Admonitions – Al-Hal Award for Journalistic Creativity

*This article is published on the website “Al-Hal Net” after winning the Al-Hal Award for Journalistic Creativity — Journalistic Story category (second place) — by Syrian writer Abdullah al-Hariri. (This material is exclusive to Al-Hal Foundation. It is prohibited to publish or quote any part of it without first contacting the foundation and obtaining permission.)


“I am like dozens of my female and male peers who have gone before me; I too will leave soon. But for now, I must live out the rest of my life with the fewest possible losses.” This is what Fadila al-Shami wrote on her Facebook page. By it, she was not announcing that the bus was nearing its final stop, but rather her own decision to finally get off the bus.

She wanted, in her own words, only to build for herself a different world in which she could find enough happiness and freedom to suit her. Victory was never her goal; she simply wanted to live, in all the simplicity and rightful legitimacy the word suggests. She also says she has the right to prepare for a quiet, simple death that suits her, and sees no shame in that, for everyone has the right to decide the shape of their own ending.

Fadila, who comes from a cohesive social structure marked by strict social customs and religious norms, especially regarding women’s marriage, did not ignore the signs pointing to her society’s position toward her end — that is, toward her death. She is not the first to challenge customs and traditions and carry her choices far enough to love and marry by her own free and independent decision. At the end of 2022, Syrian physician Julia Hussein died in the United States. She was the daughter of Prince Fawzi al-Atrash and the first woman from the city of Sweida to study medicine. Yet her biography was nearly erased from the memory of Jabal al-Arab because she married Dr. Luther Hussein and took his surname instead of al-Atrash, becoming Julia Hussein.

Samra al-Hinnawi, Julia’s mother, met the news of her marriage to a “stranger” with an uncompromisingly harsh موقف, and composed a long poem that became part of the oral heritage of the people of Jabal Hauran — not so much for its artistic value as for the way it documents social and religious taboos. Najat Abd al-Samad wrote of the poem: “What is striking is that this poem by Samra al-Hinnawi did not arise when Salim himself married a ‘foreign’ woman before his sister did, whereas the mother’s anger overflowed at her daughter’s marriage to the point that she wished death upon Salim:
(I ask the Almighty …)

And the daughter’s name appeared in the poem only once:
(… O Julia …)
while Salim’s name appeared many times, with grief, reproach, and even fiercer anger:
(Remember, Salim, what I used to urge you … by your father’s life, do not squander the trust
If they were to sell you, kohl of my eye, I would buy you … Salim trades in medicine and gave me none)

It is as though her anger at her daughter was so immense that it drove her to erase her daughter’s existence from her memory, as though this daughter had never been. It is no secret that our mothers used to prefer boys over girls, and the poet here is no different: whatever the son does, her hope in him and her expectation that he may come to his senses and repent do not die:
(Return to your senses, if your Lord guides you … whoever repents before God will still find a place)

Whereas nothing can erase what the daughter has done; indeed, she deserves the harshest human punishment: to be erased from memory and stripped of the right to exist.”

Fidaa Shamiyya (60, homemaker) married a man from a different religious sect thirty years ago. Her family’s long residence in a Western country did not alter their attitude toward her after the marriage; estrangement was their weapon for disowning their daughter’s unforgivable act. Fidaa, who fled her family home while in the first months of pregnancy, admits that she did not try to contact them until four years had passed, out of fear for herself and her daughter. She also realizes the social ostracism her family faced, even from those closest to them, especially her mother, who was blamed for having raised her badly and for producing “bad offspring.” After ten years, Fidaa separated from her husband while mother to a daughter and a son, which prompted her family to respond to the respected religious and social figures she had asked to mediate and repair the relationship. On the night she prepared to sleep in her family home after all those years, her mother took her aside into one of the rooms and presented a list of non-negotiable conditions if she wanted things to return to normal. Chief among them was that she leave her children — who belonged to a different religion — with their father and his family, and marry a man from her own sect whom her mother had already chosen for her. Fidaa refused, left with her children after midnight, and has never slept in that house again.

Fidaa speaks regretfully of her harshness toward her mother after that incident, including the time her mother called to tell her that a very close friend of hers had died immediately after being released from detention in 2013. Fidaa’s reply shocked both her and her mother: “Why should he die while you are still alive?”

Looking back on her childhood, Fidaa brightens as she speaks of her strong relationship with her mother until the age of fifteen, but her voice gradually fades until she reaches the point of saying: “I came to hate my mother.” A little later, she says perhaps it was not hatred, but deep reproach. The mother’s life with her husband had not been good. He had concealed his first marriage from her until she discovered it by chance while seven months pregnant with her firstborn, Fidaa. His beating of her — and later of her daughters — was not considered objectionable; indeed, the mother taught her daughters that all wives were beaten like that. This led Fidaa to sympathize with her mother in the early years, and the mother in turn supported her decision to complete her preparatory education and work, enduring the husband’s anger, which he expressed through severe beatings. After Fidaa resumed her education and began her path in work and political activism, she tried to rescue her mother and sisters from their difficult reality. But she gradually realized that it was her mother who had stopped her education and exploited her as a servant in the house while repeatedly bearing children as a kind of competition with female relatives and friends. At that point, aversion began to dominate the daughter’s behavior.

Fidaa now says, with the main figures in the story now dead, that she inherited many of her mother’s traits and is always trying to rid herself of them. With her own daughter, she avoided trying to control or mold her; instead, she left her free in all her choices, even in matters of inclination and sexual life, and has done nothing but support her in every way she can. She sees a daughter’s separation from her mother as an inevitable necessity for mental health and independence. She does not deny how deeply she was shaped by her family reality in the first half of her life, to the point that she felt obliged to serve her brothers in particular and acknowledge their superiority. She insists that she would not have been able to deal with her children — especially her daughter — in this way had she not escaped the toxic reality of her family home and its old conditions.

A researcher will find few non-clinical studies or articles on the mother-daughter relationship — that is, the relationship in ordinary circumstances rather than in pathological cases or care situations such as childhood and old age — quite unlike the abundance of work on parents’ relationships with sons. “Mother-daughter relationships are viewed through assumptions inherited from previous generations: a mixture of perspectives, mostly negative or excessively idealized, about women and mothers and their alleged negative impact on their daughters (and sons).” Traditional schools of psychoanalysis differed in how they viewed this relationship.

Freud was born in 1856 and grew up as a Jewish intellectual at a time when anti-Semitism — especially in Vienna — was at its height.

The circumcised Jewish male was seen as an example of a defective, impaired, diminished condition, and in that sense was paired with the female in terms of bodily inferiority. The clitoris was even called “the little Jew.” From this reality, Sander Gilman explains the basis of Freud’s theory of “penis envy,” which develops in the female when she notices male differentiation — and superiority — through the sexual organ, supposedly granting the male innate biological and psychological superiority, so that possessing a penis becomes her dream, fulfilled by bearing sons. Gilman argues that when Freud set all females against all males, he created an equation in which the Jewish male was no longer beneath the European Aryan male; the two became equivalent. Helene Deutsch adopted Freud’s theory and added to it the necessity of a daughter’s separation from her mother in order to develop normally: “The state of psychological infantilism found in many adult women represents the result of an attachment to the mother that was not resolved during the prepubertal period.” The prevailing cultural climate at the time did not allow opposing views to emerge.

The first feminist wave attacked Freud’s theory and the idealized image of woman — mother and wife — as a cause of entrenching traditional social values such as sacrifice and giving, assigned to women in all their roles, including their sexual lives, while blaming them as deficient beings responsible for society’s flaws, especially with regard to their children, daughters in particular. Hence, “the widespread early feminist position was that mothers are agents of their daughters’ oppression and that women’s mothering may be the central feature in the reproduction of gender inequality.” Although Nancy Chodorow — sociologist, anthropologist, feminist, and psychoanalyst — criticized traditional psychoanalytic theories, she did not fully free herself from them. She still agreed that the female superego is less strict and more inclined toward identification with others, but she focused on the pre-Oedipal period in the daughter-mother relationship and used it to explain males’ sense of independence.

Maya Sabbagh (40, journalist) says she did not like being female in early childhood and tried to imitate boys in their behavior and even their interests, avoiding school spinning and weaving activities in favor of drawing. She adds that she did not have a strong bond with her mother before adolescence, replacing it with a strong relationship with her paternal grandmother. While she explains this as an escape from her mother’s many rules governing her behavior as the eldest daughter at home and within a narrow social environment, she also points to her grandmother’s critical stance toward her mother, saying she did not notice it until the age of fourteen, when her relationship with her mother grew stronger and their bond gradually deepened until now, more than twenty years later. Yet this growing closeness did not divert her from her tendency to emulate boys’ habits during adolescence, and she preferred loose clothing that concealed her emerging feminine features.

Customs and traditions did not prevent the mother, Salwa Sabbagh, from expressing her personality, pursuing her activities, and building strong social relationships, but she remained within the general constraints imposed on women in our society, according to her daughter Maya. The mother supported her daughter from an early stage in her professional path, helping her achieve important accomplishments, but she became the stumbling block in her emotional life when Maya fell in love with a man from another sect. The price, had the relationship succeeded, would have been the mother’s divorce. That was the truth with which the mother confronted her daughter’s lover. But Maya does not place all the blame on her mother; rather, she blames the lover who fled from supporting the woman he loved. This path of abandonment comes to her like an inheritance in life, and she accepts and bears it despite knowing all its consequences. She now sees her relationship with her mother as a mixture of sisterhood and friendship, and it is strong enough to keep her in it despite her certainty that she must become independent from her mother if she wants to move forward in her emotional life. Yet she accepts all the expected consequences in order to preserve the person who has been the greatest source of safety and support in her life, and who was — and still is — deserving of better opportunities for a life in which she could express herself more fully: her mother.

In another account, Sarah Haddad (physician, 30) says she tried to imitate her male classmates in primary school and once attempted to urinate standing up — an event she describes as catastrophic. This experience did not generate much interest in the anatomical difference between male and female genitals; indeed, she says she did not become fully certain of that difference until the end of adolescence. But she is sure that this biological difference never made her feel that males were superior. As for her relationship with her mother before puberty, she says her mother was the person closest to her in the family, though she hesitated to describe the relationship as strong. Fixed in her memory is the experience of her first menstruation, which terrified her because she thought she had been struck by a serious illness. But her mother’s smile left a more negative impression on her than a reassuring one; perhaps she needed a mother to hold her, not a mother to teach her how to use sanitary pads. Sarah links, in some way, her lack of confidence in her body during secondary school to her mother, but she does not tend to see the mother-daughter relationship as the main cause of a daughter’s lack of bodily confidence or even her tendency toward sexual submissiveness. She gives the greatest role to the personal factor, explaining that her two older sisters, who were subjected to greater family pressure than she was, did not suffer in the same way, and that at least one of them is extremely confident in her body.

Sarah Haddad describes her relationship with her mother as one of maternal care, and says she inherited from her mother a great deal of pliancy, social compliance, and reluctance to speak or express an opinion, even on many matters concerning her personally. When she does express an opinion, it is often followed by a crying spell or a period of withdrawal and unwillingness to socialize. But she stresses her mother’s role in protecting her and her sisters during a period when their father was influenced by religiously and socially conservative ideas, thus securing for them a window through which they could live with at least a reasonable margin of freedom. Despite all that, she remains deeply attached to her family, and her relationship with her mother is still her favorite among them all. Sarah sees no validity in the view that a daughter must separate from her mother. This is said in the context of all her family members living in a Western country where traditional theories emphasize the naturalness of independence and family separation — especially from the mother — and their necessity for mental health. Sarah confidently denies that her family attachment stems from the estrangement of exile, which points instead to the view that non-Western societies place greater value on family connectedness and human bonds.

Whispering fills the ears of girls standing on the thresholds of adolescence when mothers take old injunctions out of their chests and sigh as they dust them off. Some cast them at their daughters’ feet; some offer them as gifts, their hearts breaking over their daughters’ fate, so similar to their own; and some dictate them like sacred teachings, as though they want all the women of the world to go through what they themselves went through, even if those women are their own daughters. On such moments are built psychological and emotional states that will in turn live through their own experience. If we look closely at the threads of these intertwined relationships in homes, alleys, villages, cities, and across social media, we will find a body of injunctions balanced by an equally weighty body of rebellion and a tendency toward difference, so that life may retain its nature and the dark continent may gradually come into clearer view day after day. Can we still say, then, that a girl inevitably turns out like her mother? Does not something compel us to reconsider our perceptions of women?