Arab Feminisms: Gender and Equality in the Middle East

Jean Makdisi, Noha Bayoumi, Rafif Rida Sidawi, Jean Makdisi, Noha Bayoumi, Rafif Rida Sidawi

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781780766720
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786724595
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Is there a truly Arab feminist movement? Is there such a thing as 'Islamic' feminism? What does it meant to be a 'feminist' in the Arab World today? Does it mean grappling with the main theoretical elements of the movement? Or does it mean involvement at the grassroots level with everyday activism? This book examines the issues and controversies that are hotly debated and contested when it comes to the concept of feminism and gender in Arab society today. It offers explorations of the theoretical issues at play, the latest developments of feminist discourse, literary studies and sociology, as well as empirical data concerning the situation of women in Arab countries, such as Iraq and Palestine. It is certainly not surprising that when looking at the situation on the ground in many countries of the Arab World- particularly Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon, as well as Sudan- issues of war, civil conflict, military occupation and imperialism often override those of gender.
The place of feminism in this context is extremely problemati, as nationalist, sectarian, religious and class interests- not to mention the interests of occupation authorities and the resistance movements that oppose them- supersede feminism as a public concern, even among many women. Arab feminists are thus either co-opted by these interests or find themselves in the frustrating position of negotiating their way through a minefield of contradictory imperatives and loyalties. Arab Feminisms examines these contexts and sheds light upon the difficult position in which feminists often find themselves. It looks at different social and political situations, such as the development of Palestinian feminist discourse in a post-Oslo world, the impact of the civil war in Lebanon on women, and Kuwaiti women's struggles for equality. This book therefore offers valuable theoretical analysis as well as indispensable first-hand accounts of feminism in the Arab World for those researching gender relations in the Middle East and beyond.

PART ONE

Variety in Understanding Feminist Concepts and Discourse

CHAPTER 1

What Do Women Want? A Critical Mapping of Future Directions for Arab Feminisms

Mervat Hatem*

This chapter was the Keynote Address to the conference organized by the Lebanese Women Researchers in October 2009 whose theme was ‘Arab feminism: a critical perspective’. The conference held in Beirut, Lebanon, was attended by many scholars and activists interested in Arab feminism. It offered a critical overview of the literature, discourses and the agendas used to explore and analyse the history of Arab feminism available in Arabic and in English, the two languages with which the author is familiar. A conscious effort was made to be inclusive by making reference to as many of the works and authors available in this field as possible to shed light on the lessons to be learned from the gender struggles in different Arab states. Intellectually, the paper critically examined the founding myths of the modern history of Arab women, especially the role that men played in it, as well as the contributions that modernization and nationalism made to their roles and rights. It also addressed how the state emerged as an important agent in the definition of, response to and the appropriation of the agendas of women following decolonization. Finally, it assessed the rise of political Islam and how it contributed to new discursive and political divisions among middle-class women whose activism was historically identified with the development of Arab feminism.

Sigmund Freud posed the question that is part of the title of this chapter, making it popular in the 1930s and beyond. He said this to Marie Bonaparte, one of his disciples: ‘The great question that has never been answered and that I have not yet been able to answer despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is: What does a woman want?’.¹ Some suggest that Freud was referring to the topic of female desire when he posed that question, but others consider it a rhetorical question that reflected the spirit of the time. Like all rhetorical questions, it assumed that it had no answer, reinforcing the mystery with which the discussion of women has been associated. Some feminists have added the important objection that it used the problematic category of ‘woman’ in a sweeping way that simplified the complex needs of women and their differences.² No such question is ever asked of men, who can be assumed to have innumerable wants and needs, thus making such a question about them nonsensical.

Freud’s question became part of the intellectual and political histories of women’s struggles to realize important political and social goals inside and outside the Arab world. Women’s serious attempts to address the question in public exchanges with men, the state and/or their societies have not yielded the desired effects. The historical record shows that patriarchal societies and their important institutions ignored, devalued or selectively used their responses, distorting their agendas. This leads me to conclude that it is time that we rephrase Freud’s question, asking instead: What do women want of feminism and of each other? I am defining feminism here as a set of analytical and critical tools that can be used to enhance women’s understanding/consciousness of themselves, and their relations with other important national, regional and international groups of men and women. Seen in this light, feminism can improve women’s agency and inform the definition of their strategies for change.

The new questions and/or the definition of feminism reflect the gains made by some women in the last century in education, public works and political rights, which have led them to appreciate the complex differences that exist among different classes and nationalities of women, and the importance of building bridges and/or forming alliances in national, regional/Arab and international contexts. I hope that future debates will provide intellectual and political steps in these important directions.

I choose as my specific focus here the discussion of some critical tasks that I consider important in the representation of the Arab feminist agendas. It includes the following: first and foremost, there is a need for a critical retrospective assessment of the history of the feminist projects in the region that reflects and privileges the voices of women instead of the dominant views of men, especially ‘the grand old men of Arab modernity’, who were the privileged representatives of the nation and/or members of modern fraternities. Next, we need to address the broader task of continuing the critique of the Arab modernist projects, which developed in a colonial context and produced new forms of governmentalities that emphasized domesticity and mothering as the critical roles of women, thus putting them in the service of the nation. As part of this project, one needs to cast a critical eye on the nationalist discourses, whose history was tied to the goal of the modernization of Arab societies. Not only have these discourses lost their intellectual critical edge, but also they continue to cling to old, romantic views of modernity, ignoring the many criticisms that have been levelled against this initially European project, and especially against its production of mechanisms of gender, racial and class inequalities in Arab societies. Finally, I shall discuss how some of the failures of Arab nationalist and modernist discourses explained the recent national and regional rise of political Islam, and the present polarization between the dominant secular and the Islamist discourses that have divided middle-class women. This polarization has further weakened women, and has ignored the convergence of these apparently opposing discourses in their emphasis on the domestic/family roles consigned to women, postponing their pressing needs for employment and increased political participation.

Deconstructing the founding myths of Arab feminism

There are two founding myths that are very popular in the construction of the modern history of Arab women, and which need deconstruction.

Men’s role in the liberation of Arab women

The first and most damaging myth is the narrative that men were the earliest advocates of the rights of women. What needs to be challenged in this narrative is not the fact that some men supported the rights of women, which is part of our history, but the partial and patriarchal nature of this historical construction and its valuation of the voices of men at the expense of the voices of women during the early period. A less romantic view of these men and their discussions of women’s roles is needed so that women can begin to appreciate their agency and the role they played in history, which is what feminism is about.

The most powerful two-pronged criticism made of the founding myths of the modern history of women in the region has been comprehensively done in the study of Egypt. The narrative moves from the study of Shaykh Rifaʾa Rafiʾ al-Tahtawi’s almurshid alamin lil-banat wa albaneen (The Faithful Guide for the Education of Girls and Boys), commissioned by Khedive Ismail and published in 1873, to Qasim Amin’s tahrir almar ʾa (The Liberation of the Woman) (1899), to provide founding texts of Egyptian feminism. For al-Tahtawi, women needed education to purge them of ‘foolishness, thoughtlessness and frivolity that result from their living with other ignorant women’. Education would help them overcome the fact that they were inactive with nothing to do with their time, explaining ‘their tendency to malicious gossip and fabrication’! I do not think I can remember the use of such harsh words to describe the lives of ignorant men, who have been exempt from such assumptions. Al-Tahtawi’s views represent a clear devaluation of women’s work (raising children and keeping house, which includes cooking, cleaning and taking care of their husbands).³

Amin is not much less hostile in his representations of women. He singles out Egyptian middle- and upper-class women as ignorant parasites living off the work of others. While he exempts peasant women from these charges, he still regards them as ignorant and needing to be rescued from poverty by others. To Amin, women were the pets and toys of men, which explained how they lost their brains, allowing men to dominate them as masters and guardians.⁴ As a result, they possess overdeveloped cunning and acting skills.⁵ I am not persuaded by the views presented by some historians that Amin’s words were part of the rhetorical strategy of overstatement to exhort men to action regarding the reform of the conditions under which women lived.⁶ Like other Egyptian modernist reformers, including al-Tahtawi, Amin believed these representations to be true of women, explaining the backwardness of their societies. They were part of a powerful discourse, popular at the time, that showed very little appreciation of the more clear-sighted local Islamic belief that ‘secluded women were responsible for the flourishing status of their households’.

Beth Baron’s The Women’s Awakening in Egypt (1994) and Marilyn Booth’s May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (2001) began an important and systematic sideways critique of this dominant narrative by suggesting that a vibrant women’s press had existed since 1892 which documented the existence of the independent voices of women, beginning with Hind Noufal’s (1892) alfatat (The Young Woman) and followed by many others. I think this particular approach provided a sideways attack on the dominant narrative because it was not a frontal attack on the views of al-Tahtawi and Amin, but sought to argue that the early voices of women should be included in the discussion of this early history. In the case of Egypt, the women’s press, which began in 1892 and continued into the twentieth century and was sometimes founded by men, provided a hospitable space for women to express their views of their changing conditions and roles. In Egypt, the women’s press represented the pioneering roles of Levantine (Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian women who settled in Egypt, who were Christian, Jewish, Sunni and Shiʿi) writers whose perspectives offered diverse voices for women. These women emerged as the most ardent supporters of the new modernist definitions of femininity, which put women’s education in the service of modern mothering and domesticity, reflecting the history of that discourse in the West and its attempt to gain social and political legitimacy.

A frontal attack on the grand old men of Egyptian modernity, al-Tahtawi and Amin, came in the study of the works of ʿAʾisha Taymur, whose published works represented an alternative perspective that integrated the study of gender in that of problems facing Egyptian society. In my work on Taymur, I have tried to show how her fictional work nataʾij alahwal fi alʾaqwal wa alʾaf ʾal (The Consequences of Changing Speech and Actions), published in 1887, blamed the backwardness of Egyptian society on the corrupting practices of some forms of dynastic government that were in need of reform. In her social commentary, entitled mirʾat altaʾmul fi alʾumur (A Reflecting Mirror on Some Matters) and which appeared in 1892, she presented her ijtihad (religious interpretation) of how the concept of qawwamah (male leadership in the family) was not absolute, but contingent on men performing their familial obligations, which included supporting women and being role models in the family. This alternative set of representations of the Islamic ideals for the family and the irresponsible practices of some men that led to the ruin of their families offered a voice for women in diagnosing some of the social ills that accompanied colonial materialism. Taymur’s views provoked debate among public figures, leading them to recruit the Azharite Shaykh Abdallah al-Fayumi to refute her claims. In contrast, Abdallah al-Nadim, the popular nationalist figure who played an important role in the Urabi Revolution, fleeing from the police for eight years through refuge offered by ordinary Egyptians, praised her book, trumping the attack by al-Fayumi. However, while al-Nadim agreed with Taymur’s diagnosis of the problems facing Egyptian families, his solutions were different from hers, and reflected male interests.

Hoda Elsadda’s study of the work of Malak Hifni Nassif moved one step further in challenging the founding myths by arguing that the work of this other pioneering woman, who was a contemporary of Amin, established Nassif as the earliest critic of the modernist project.⁷ Nassif was clear that the views of modernist men about unveiling and women’s education that emphasized the domestic roles of women were not liberating. It represented a new form of dictating to women a male agenda for change. Worse, they attempted to stifle the critical voices of women, like hers, which advocated the gradual abolition of the veil to protect women from the predatory behaviour of men towards unveiled women in the streets. She argued that the public debate at the time ignored the need for the education of men about how to relate to unveiled women in new ways. The modernist men and women at the time, including the literary critic Mayy Ziyyada, who was of Palestinian–Lebanese parentage but became a naturalized Egyptian, did not agree with Nassif’s critique, and accused her of being more conservative than Amin and Ahmed Lutfi al-Sayyid, who were seen as progressive advocates of the expanded rights of women. This provided another example of how some women inadvertently participated in the devaluation of the dissenting views of women and privileged the views of men as part of a new modernist patriarchy.

The sideways challenge of the dominant male narrative that argues that men were not alone in discussing the change of gender roles of women is presently going on in the study of the history of North African women. In two research papers that were presented in the conference organized in Beirut in 2000 by tajammuʾ albahithatallubnaniyat (the Lebanese Association of Women Researchers) on Arab women in the 1920s,⁸ Dalenda al-Arqash provided many examples of Tunisian women coupling their attack on seclusion, represented by the veil, with an interest in education and the support of modern society,⁹ and Fatma al-Zahrʾa Qashi traced the same phenomenon as it took place in Algeria, though at a slower pace.¹⁰

While this is a step forward, the frontal critique that is needed of the work of Taher al-Haddad, whose works are considered the equivalent of those of Amin in the Tunisian context, coupled with a parallel critique of the political agenda of al-Habib Bourguiba, first president of Tunisia after independence, have not developed. They are necessary and important steps that can yield insights as to how their agendas for women privileged male views and the demands of the state, granted women some new rights, but developed a new form of patriarchy.

In Lebanon, Nazeerah Zayn al-Din, a Muslim woman writer who emerged in the 1920s, made a frontal attack on the views of Muslim and Christian religious...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Variety in Understanding Feminist Concepts and Discourse
• Part Two: The Crisis of Feminism in the Context of War, Civil Conflict and Military Intervention
• Part Three: Islamic Feminism: Approaches and Visions
• Part Four: Feminism in a Global Context