Introduction: The Background
This book is a response to several issues. These include longstanding concerns about the nuances of the contextual embeddedness of gender entrepreneurship theory (Yousafzai et al. 2019, McAdam and Cunningham 2019, Marlow 2020, Tlaiss and McAdam 2020), the limited range of feminist philosophies that have been used in entrepreneurship research (Ahl and Marlow 2012, Henry et al. 2015), and how entrepreneurship can be central to human capital and growth in developing regions (Ahl and Marlow 2012, Henry et al. 2015, Apostolopoulos et al. 2018, UN Women 2018, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor GEM 2019, UN Women 2020a,b). We recognize that merely describing enterprises and analyzing them in a vacuum offers a relatively limited understanding of entrepreneurship (Henry et al. 2015, Yousafzai et al. 2019, McAdam and Cunningham, 2019). Moreover, the extant work on gender and entrepreneurship has been based on Global North logics (exceptions: Al-Dajani, 2020).
To respond to concerns relating to the necessity for studies that are rooted in the Global South, our aim is to unveil the nuances of context and incorporate social, economic, political, legal, and environmental factors. Although the Middle East as a region has seen some small growth in entrepreneurship for and by women, and scholarship on the Middle East has grown, there is no text in English that has brought critical insights from the Middle East together in a single volume. Further, to make Middle Eastern voices heard, we have drawn on writings in Arabic and Urdu, as well as knowledge of Islamic finance and Islamic government, as it is these fields that will greatly shape venturing opportunities in the future (El Azhary Sonbol, 2016, Bondi 1999, Metcalfe 2020).
Our aim is to illustrate throughout the text how a variety of signifiersāincluding sex, sexuality, religion, family, and classāintersect and are positioned in a specific geography that captures the fluidity of entrepreneurial identities. We aim to produce a text that focuses on the Middle East; to provide critical insights from the Global South; and to question the often-portrayed homogeneity of Islamic framings by the Global North (Metcalfe 2008, 2011, Syed and Metcalfe 2015). Consequently, we explore the very different dimensions of how entrepreneurship is conceived and developed across the MENA region. A thread throughout is the importance of developing entrepreneurial learning and entrepreneurial leadership and endowing human capacity with an entrepreneurial mindset; not only for women but for men, too, as this learning heritage that evolved from the millennium development goals, through the sustainable development goals (SDG), aims to establish knowledge economies and undertake national skills upgrading (Cornwall and Edwards 2014, Ennis 2019).
Currently, there are few studies that review institutional environments, sector contexts, and the socio-material and religiopolitical organizing practices that may shape venturing capacities in the MENA region, and these provide the foci of this text. In line with the de Bruin et al. (2007) special issue on entrepreneurship methodology that used a tree metaphor as a way of framing entrepreneurship studiesāāannualsā (case studies), āperennialsā (fashionable themes), and āsaplingsā (new approaches and insights)āour aim in this text is to open up new avenues of inquiry and to unravel āsaplingā theme,ā although insights from the āannualsā and āperennialsā of start-up and GEM data are also very valuable in guiding this understudied region of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
This illustrates that venturing is a dynamic and fluid process, and that features of entrepreneurial behaviors and processes need to be understood as socially and historically constituted. Through this scrutiny we are then able to see the formations of gendered, racialized, and classed aspects of entrepreneurial action and policy development as they play out in a specific socio-historical and geopolitical context. As we shall go on to argue, the MENA region is quite different from how it is presented in the dominant Global North accounts that present entrepreneurial identities, systems, and approaches in very particular ways. As proposed by the OECD, the time is right to explore how to advance the social and economic markers where there are regions tainted with discord and authoritarianism, together with ongoing conflict, that have heightened the fragility of state mechanisms in the Middle East (OECD 2014) and that continue to present complexities for global cooperation and organization. There are still a wide variety of actors who have joined in a concerted effort to support women's advancement around the world, and many of these are excluded from contemporary entrepreneurship scholarship, as venturing is often treated as if it existed in a vacuum.
The Middle East was the region least impacted by the 2008 financial crisis (Saleem 2010, Al-Sharmani 2014, World Bank 2016). It has investment systems markedly different from those of the West, is largely governed by Islamic Shari'a, and has varying forms of governance and institutional organization (Chapra 1994, World Bank 2016) that are not understood by many; nor how these systems may shape entrepreneurial and industrial development (Metcalfe 2020). The aftermath of the āArab Springā revolutions reconfigured men's and women's laboring in diverse ways, and COVID-19 has created more complex constraints and opportunities for women in the Global South (see Al-Dajani 2020, UN Women 2020a, 2020b). This text aims to bring some of these insights to extend, contribute to, and add new epistemological insights about what venturing is, doing venturing, and how venturing is conceived in the MENA region as part of a globalized ummah (consensus) (Roy 2004, Chaudhri 2002, El Azhary Sonbol 2020).
In this chapter, we will first provide a contextualized view of political economy premised on the Islamic Resurgence, also named Islamism or Progressive Islamism. This has been shaping economic, social, and political, states since the early 1990s. This is extremely important given the large number of Arab states that have introduced political quotas for women only in recent years. We then provide an overview of women's social status in the Arab Middle East, built on 2021 statistics from the World Economic Forum on empowerment among Arab states (WEF 2021 see also Chaudry Shalaby 2016). As part of this discussion, we highlight how Islamic Feminism(s) are providing great impetus for women's development, especially entrepreneurship development. We then illustrate a contextualized model that provides a multi-level and multi-actor frame, which provides a critical understanding of the intersecting dynamics of all actors in the Middle East involved in venture education, international organizations, and state support planning and growth and the associated policies that can support this (Zahidi 2018, Moghadam 2021).
