Throughout the semester one of the most common broad themes of the course was the part that gender roles play in popular religion. Examples of these are the female jinn, zar culture, the majduba and shur. The fear of female jinn such as Lala Aisha, implants into the culture a distrust and fear of women, especially beautiful and powerful women. This fear of women leads to the gender roles that they must occupy within their societies. It is through zar, the majduba and shur that women find ways to circumvent these gender roles in which they are placed.
In zar culture, the key characteristics that allow women to break out of their gender roles are twofold. The first is the moment during the “healing ceremony” that the “spirit” uses the woman possessed to voice its grievances. This leads to the potential for women to voice their complaints without seeming to step out of line. The second is the possibility that these instances of possession can come back any number of times during an individuals life, and as such the woman has a kind of trump card on which she can fall back on. As Boneham succinctily notes, “it forces people with responsible relationships to the victim […] to be accountable, ostensibly to the zaar spirit but in fact to the woman herself” (Boneham 71).
The majduba attains her position of power from her utilization of a “male role” among women. Women come to her with their social problems and she tells them what to do in order to be cured. The fact that all of this is occurring in the public rather than the private sphere places the women on a level equal to that of men. As Kapchan notes, “Women’s emergence into the discursive domain of the market requires their complicity to the laws of genre, yet it is their expressive hybridization that ultimately transforms the public sphere” (Kapchan 72).
Women who perform “shur” (magic) have power over both men and women. Specifically, it is noted that magic and gossip are connected, in that the male dislike of gossip often leads to reprisal via magic. Kapchan notes that “Magic in this context is about taking control; talk of magic becomes discourse about empowerment in the face of polygamy, social impotence, and lack of choice in one’s conjugal destiny” (Kapchan 236). Having the ability to perform acts that others do not understand plays on the universal human fear of the unknown. In reality the magic that the women perform are mainly tricks, which have perfectly rational explanations. However because of the societal distrust and fear of powerful women, these tricks take on a supernatural quality in the eyes of men.