Hala Maksoud

Those who try to combat the negative stereotyping in the U.S. of Arab women have their work cut out for them. For even though Americans may no longer believe that all the women of the Arab world live in harems of the kind depicted by Hollywood, they do tend to think of them as little more than cyphers behind veils, who play a passive and submissive role within their own societies.

Hala Maksoud, one of the founders of Washington's Arab Women's Council (AWC) and now its president, is one of those who work very hard to dispel this image. But she concedes ruefully that myths are extremely difficult to overcome.

Says she: "You can tell people dozens of times—and back up what you say with solid documentation—that only a small percentage of Arab women actually wear veils, and that in any case behind those veils you can find doctors, engineers and social workers. But you find it makes no difference. Until they hear it dozens of times more, they'll go right on believing what they always have."

Sending the Message

Mrs. Maksoud's organization tries to put across its message about Arab women in a variety of ways. For example, AWC has established a speaker's bureau staffed by eight Arab and Arab American women academicians, who lecture on aspects of the role of Arab women and on other Arab-related subjects. AWC also plays host at a morning "tea" each month, where about 20 of its members and about 80 female guests hear a talk by an expert on themes ranging from women artists in the Arab world to the rights and duties of women in Islam. AWC hopes eventually to become the primary source in the U.S. for information about Arab women, and is considering establishing a hot-line telephone circuit that would take questions on the subject from all over the U. S. at almost any hour of the day and night.

AWC is by no means a one-issue organization, however. It was established, in fact, during the first couple of days of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June, 1982, when Arab women in Washington were enraged at what the Israelis were doing, and began to carry out organized protests in a number of ways—some of them quite spectacular. A group of Arab ambassadors' wives, including Mrs. Maksoud, went on a hunger strike in Lafayette Park, and they and other Arab and Arab American women conducted candlelight vigils in front of the White House. Teams of Arab women from AWC—also including Mrs. Maksoud—travelled around the U.S., giving the Arab point of view at rallies and on TV talk shows. It was not until some time after the long, hot summer of 1982 that AWC was able to turn its attention to the task of improving the image of Arab women. But informing Americans on political issues—particularly on the background of the Arab-Israeli conflict—remains a major activity.

"Our pet project right now," says Mrs. Maksoud, "is our annual essay contest for students on the theme: 'The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Solution.' The three winners get trips to the Middle East, along with their teachers. And you know what? The students who went to the Middle East last year discovered that an Arab is a human being like anyone else."

Mrs. Maksoud's background amply qualifies her to articulate views on Arab politics, and her career reflects a degree of commitment and accomplishment that defies the prevalent view in the U. S. of what an Arab woman can be.

From Math to Wrath

A native of Lebanon, she received a masters degree in mathematics at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and later taught math at Lebanese University. "I was actually teaching math to secondary school students from the time I was a freshman at AUB," she says, "because I had told my parents that I wanted to be independent." But after the Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, for which she felt all Arabs had to take much of the blame because they had failed to be active and vocal enough in putting forward their views, she abandoned math teaching and went into information work in Beirut. Her efforts in this area included helping establish the Arab Women's Information Committee, participating in the work of the newly-established Fifth of June Society, representing the Lebanese Women's Union at an international conference in Switzerland, and working for four years in the research and publishing division of the Institute for Palestine Studies.

For most of the last decade, Mrs. Maksoud has been in the U.S., where her husband, Ambassador Clovis Maksoud, has been involved in a number of academic and political missions, including one for the past four and one-half years as the Arab League's Permanent Observer to the United Nations and its Chief Representative in the U. S. Mrs. Maksoud frequently helps her husband, giving lectures and interviews in which she expounds the point of view of the Arab League on various issues. In addition, she spends an average of four hours a day on her AWC activities and another four working at a Ph.D. thesis on the "Islamic Content of Arab Nationalist Thought, 1908-44" for Georgetown University. "I am doing this mainly for my own growth," she says.