Modern Arab families are struggling with countless of challenges that hinder their progress toward their ultimate goals—construction and stability. These challenges arise from social and cultural transformations, resulting in distress and hardship instead of happiness, despite improved living standards and the utilization of the achievements of the technological and knowledge revolutions. Among all challenges, moral ones stand out as the most significant due to their connection with the intellectual confusion we face. This confusion manifests as a major conceptual crisis from which we find no escape or solution, threatening the intellectual security of Arab families. Thus, this study focuses on examining the terms of modern Western feminism and its issues, delving into the roots of the concept, tracing its foundations, and analyzing its intellectual frameworks to determine its trajectory and implications in Arab culture.

The discussion here refers specifically to modern Western feminism, which has established itself as an intellectual movement founded on confrontation and disconnection with all institutional and societal structures, viewing them as places of oppression and exploitation of women’s existence and bodies. More dangerously, feminist activism continues its struggle to undermine the family, disrupt its functions, weaken its structural relationships (such as compassion), and breach its privacy in a manner that transcends cultures. Over time, it prepares to dismantle the family’s foundations and eradicate it entirely.

This leads us to the following questions:

• How can we reestablish the central role of the family in an era where the meaning of family is collapsing?
• What is the precise definition of Western feminist terms, and what are their issues and contradictions between Western and Arab cultures in the context of civilizational interaction?
• What are the references of Western feminism? What mechanisms does it employ to target the family? This involves exploring the representations of Western feminism in Arab family culture (its major manifestations and forms) and, prior to that, investigating its roots and references to understand its mechanisms and impact on Arab cultural reality.

To answer these questions, we adopted an interpretative methodological approach to reformulate the concepts of Western feminism after deconstructing them, returning to their intellectual foundations, and examining their ultimate outcomes and effects.

The family remains the fundamental nucleus in shaping personality, building values, and guiding the patterns of contemporary life. It is imperative to intensify efforts to provide it with the necessary immunity for its continuity and sustainability, ensuring its intellectual security to achieve societal security. Consequently, the study aims to understand feminist terminology within its intellectual contexts to clarify its implications and manifestations within the family and society.

First: The Family’s Central Role Amid Globalization of Ideas

Undoubtedly, studying the family is of paramount importance both theoretically and practically because it concerns humanity in its present, future, history, and culture. Therefore, it is essential to understand the requirements of family life in an era of significant exposure to global cultures. This understanding helps identify the problems and dangers facing us and enables us to plan for their prevention to avoid the collapse and disintegration of the family and the erosion of its associated values. ⁽¹⁾

In a tumultuous world filled with competing ideas and crises, hopes and pains coexist while globalization intensifies behaviors and activities. This leads to alienation, cultural detachment, and loss of immunity.

The cultural storms of foreign ideas work relentlessly to destabilize the central role of the family in proper upbringing and the spiritual and intellectual nourishment necessary for civilizational advancement.

Hence, the family emerges as a comprehensive institution for safeguarding generations, as it is the entity in which individuals connect through lineage and develop based on this connection. ⁽²⁾ This definition is crucial in clarifying the family’s concept, particularly regarding its mission, which cannot be entrusted to other organizations or institutions. The family functions like a two-sided coin: separating its two sides corrupts it. It preserves bloodline relationships (protecting lineage), which is its primary function for enhancing human dignity and preventing its fall into a state of bestiality where siblings, mothers, and children become unrecognizable to each other. On the other hand, it maintains faith and morals, which are essential for continuing to strengthen individual relationships and uphold values.

The first component is a material, physical bond, while the second is a spiritual, emotional one. “The family is, therefore, the origin of moral relationships among people, such that there are no human relationships without morals and no morals without family.” ⁽³⁾ From these two components arise attempts to breach the family’s defenses and tools for its corruption and destruction.

1. The Deconstruction of Family Structure

The infiltration of hybrid forms—such as homosexuality, transgender identities, and sexual deviations—is no longer an individual whim or a mere deviation on a personal level. Instead, it has evolved into an ideology aimed at abolishing the male-female binary upon which human civilization and standards are built. ⁽⁴⁾ This threatens to destabilize the family as a fixed system and sacred covenant, leading to sexual chaos, immorality, and lineage confusion. Society transitions from clear social relations to ambiguous transient connections, ⁽⁵⁾ dismantling the foundations of human existence and threatening the family’s demise and humanity’s extinction due to disrupted reproductive continuity.

         2.Undermining the Family’s Core Function

The family’s moral essence is being emptied, disrupting its role in fostering compassion and belonging within a framework of mutual respect. The family’s structural foundation is tied to its existence, while its moral foundation ensures its continuity as it is intertwined with social relationships.

Bloodline connections (lineage) run parallel with moral bonds (values), and together they enable the family’s civilizational role. The family functions through dual purposes: preserving races and upholding morals.

This dual function is interlinked; the elevation of morals cannot occur without the purity of lineages. Conversely, pure lineages mean nothing if morals deteriorate.

We face an urgent and overwhelming challenge in preserving the belief in the family’s importance in this era. Children are growing up without parents, and caregiving has become a mere material exchange or display in a time dominated by existential madness, narcissistic relationships, and excessive consumption. This artificial environment is farfetched from familial compassion and the warmth of human emotions.

Alija Izetbegović summarizes this in “Islam Between East and West”: “Nursing homes for the elderly stand side by side with orphanages for deprived children, both belonging to the same system and representing two sides of the same solution. These homes remind us of artificial birth and artificial death, where comfort is provided, yet love and warmth are absent. Both are contrary to the concept of family and are a consequence of the changing role of women in human life. They share a common feature: the disappearance of parental relationships. In orphanages, there are children without parents, and in nursing homes, there are parents without children.” ⁽⁶⁾ This era is marked by the collapse of the family’s meaning and its significant role in developing morals and lineages.

To be continued...

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1. Ahmed Salem Al-Ahmar, The Sociology of Family: Between Theory and Changing Reality, New United Books, Beirut, Lebanon, 1st Edition, 2004, p. 10.
2. Taha Abdel-Rahman, The Spirit of Modernity, Arab Cultural Center, Casablanca, Morocco, 1st Edition, 2006, p. 99.
3. , p. 100.
4. Abdelwahab El-Messiri, The Issue of Women Between Liberation and Feminist Centrality, 2nd Edition, 2010, p. 11.
5. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love, translated by Hajjaj Abu Jaber, Beirut, 1st Edition, 2016, p. 19.
6. Alija Izetbegović, Islam Between East and West, introduction by Abdelwahab El-Messiri, translated by Mohamed Youssef Adas, Dar Al-Shorouk, 18th Edition, 2021, p. 256.

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