Embodying Geopolitics

Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon

Nicola Pratt

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520957657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

When women took to the streets during the mass protests of the Arab Spring, the subject of feminism in the Middle East and North Africa returned to the international spotlight. In the subsequent years, countless commentators treated the region's gender inequality as a consequence of fundamentally cultural or religious problems. In so doing, they overlooked the specifically political nature of these women's activism. Moving beyond such culturalist accounts, this book turns to the relations of power in regional and international politics to understand women's struggles for their rights. Based on over a hundred extensive personal narratives from women of different generations in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, Nicola Pratt traces women's activism from national independence through to the Arab uprisings, arguing that activist women are critical geopolitical actors. Weaving together these personal accounts with the ongoing legacies of colonialism, Embodying Geopolitics demonstrates how the production and regulation of gender is integrally bound up with the exercise and organization of geopolitical power, with consequences for women's activism and its effects.

ONE

Female Respectability and Embodied National Sovereignty

THIS CHAPTER EXAMINES the relationship between women’s activism, gender, and state building in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, from the moment of formal decolonization until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. This was the period of what Malcolm Kerr (1971) called the Arab Cold War—geopolitical rivalries between pan-Arab republics, led by Egypt, and conservative monarchies, such as Jordan. Lebanon, where political elites were committed to foreign policy neutrality, found itself uncomfortably pulled in both directions, triggering a political crisis in 1958. Meanwhile, during this period, movements inspired by Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s vision of pan-Arabism, freedom from imperialism, and modernization, challenged state sovereignty in Jordan and Lebanon.

Feminist scholarship on decolonization has tended to present women as either active and empowered participants in the anticolonial struggle (Badran 1995; Fleischmann 1999; Hasso 2005a; Jayawardena 1986) or victims of patriarchal nationalist leaders who denied them full rights once liberation was achieved (for example, Enloe 1989; Moghadam 1994; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). This chapter aims to go beyond these seemingly contradictory conceptualizations of the relationship between decolonization and women’s activism, arguing that anticolonial nationalism was simultaneously productive of women’s activism while also contributing to the production of gendered inequalities in the postindependence state. Specifically, anti­colonial nationalism mobilized women but on the basis of an emerging norm of “female respectability,” which was constituted by as well as constitutive of national modernity and of national difference in resistance to the gendered and racialized “rule of colonial difference” (Chatterjee 1993: 10). Reformulated norms of female respectability were embedded within postcolonial state-building projects, enabling women’s participation in national development on the condition that this would not challenge the gendered hierarchies underpinning the state.

Based on personal narratives, the chapter explores the ways in which different women embodied and/or resisted norms of female respectability in the early years of postindependence state building through their professional lives and respective activisms. Despite the apparent constraints of dominant notions of female respectability on women’s agency, many women willingly embodied such norms to pursue professional ambitions and contribute to national development. In this way, they supported the naturalization of the dominant gender order, which, in turn, contributed to producing a “natural state” (Weber 1998: 92) that underpinned regime authority in a context of threats to sovereignty from regional rivals and pan-Arab movements. Meanwhile, some women sought to resignify female respectability through expanding women’s roles within the existing gender order, while others transgressed dominant gender norms by participating in political activism. Specifically, anti-imperialist, pan-Arab, and other radical ideological movements provided a terrain for women to resist existing gendered hierarchies and dominant gender norms in Jordan and Lebanon. Hence, women’s independent activism was a particular target of repression and control for postindependence regimes.

THE GEOPOLITICAL ORIGINS OF WOMEN’S ACTIVISM UNDER COLONIAL RULE

It is impossible to understand the significance, trajectory, and characteristics of women’s activism in the Middle East without being attentive to the geopolitical context in which it emerged. While women (mainly of the peasant and working classes) have always participated in the economic, social, and cultural life of former Ottoman societies (Meriwether and Tucker 1999; Tucker 2008), the substantial public visibility of women—specifically those of the upper classes—was a modern phenomenon, linked to socioeconomic and political changes arising with European economic penetration and, later, colonial rule. The Europeans justified their domination of non-European societies on the basis of their supposed cultural superiority, or what Partha Chatterjee has called the “rule of colonial difference” (Chatterjee 1993). European discourse constructed the “Orient” as backward, irrational, and despotic, blaming Islam (Said 1978). Significantly, the situation of women, such as the existence of domestic seclusion (harem) and veiling, was held up as a marker of the region’s backwardness (Ahmed 1992).

In response to European encroachment, Ottoman officials initiated modernizing reforms, such as, the introduction of European models of administration and education, contributing to the emergence of a new social strata of Western-style educated bureaucrats and professionals, who began to debate the role of Islam in public life (Badran 1995: 10–11; Hourani 1983) and, related to this, the “woman question”—that is, a set of debates about women’s “proper” social roles as “mothers, managers of the domestic realm, as wives of men, and as citizens of the nation” (Abu-Lughod 1998a: 8; see also Baron 2005: 17–39). It is perhaps lawyer Qasim Amin who is best known for advocating the reform of women’s situation with the publication of Tahrir al-ma’ra (The emancipation of woman) in 1899 and Al-ma’ra al-jadida (The new woman) in 1900, in which he insisted on an end to female seclusion and face veiling, the elimination of abuses of divorce and polygamy, and the establishment of women’s education, as necessary for social and national regeneration (Badran 1995: 18–19; Hourani 1983). In fact, women writers such as, Zaynab Fawwaz and Bahithat al-Badiya (Malak Hifni Nassif) and educationalist Nabawiya Musa had already pioneered calls for women to be educated and allowed to play a role beyond the household (Badran 1995: 61–69). Similarly, in Beirut, which from the late nineteenth century was an important center for the Arab cultural and intellectual renaissance (al-nahda), the “woman question” was also taken up (Traboulsi 2007: 52–72). Nahda intellectuals, such as Butrus al-Bustani and Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, argued for the necessity of women’s liberation for the progress of society (Traboulsi 2003: 15, 2007: 67). Women also contributed to these debates through an emerging women’s press (Booth 2001; Fleischmann 1999: 101; Thompson 2000: 120).¹

Public debates over the “woman question” alongside the growing anticolonial nationalist movements opened up new spaces for elite women, many of whom were the wives, daughters, or sisters of male nationalist leaders, to engage in public work. As philanthropists and educationalists, they created charitable associations and intellectual societies. In line with the broader aims of anticolonial nationalism, they sought to contribute to the struggle against national “backwardness” and for social progress, particularly through the provision of services and education to poor women (al-Tal 2014: 31–34; Badran 1995: 48–60; Fleischmann 1999; Thompson 2000: 96). In this way, through their associational work, women activists contributed to the erasure of the “marks of colonial difference” (Chatterjee 1993: 26) in welfare activities that sought “social uplift” but also by their embodiment of the “new woman.” Yet, simultaneously, elite women’s activism also reinscribed the class hierarchies within the nationalist movement (Bier 2011: 29–34; Thompson 2000).

Women’s associational activities were generally encouraged by nationalist elites; however, they were expected to contribute to the national struggle without forgoing notions of modesty, docility, and respectability that marked the “essence” of the nation—that is, to be what Afsaneh Najmabadi has termed “modern-yet-modest” (1991: 49). Although such attitudes were contradictory, they were central to constructions of cultural difference from Europe, reflecting wider contradictions within anticolonial nationalism—which sought to be modern yet different from Europe (Chakrabarty 1997: 373). Notions of female modesty operated to exclude women from the sphere of formal politics. For example, in Egypt, a new constitution promulgated in 1923, following the awarding of nominal independence by the British, failed to grant women the right to vote, despite the important involvement of women in the 1919 uprising against the British (Badran 1995: 86–95). Meanwhile, in Lebanon, women activists were accused by conservatives and religious leaders of acting “contrary to religion” by calling for the right to vote (Thompson 2000: 143). However, rather than directly challenge norms of female respectability, women activists generally deferred to the gendered hierarchies of the nationalist movement, for example, by emphasizing the social and cultural aspects of women’s mission, as well as through their choice of clothing (Badran 1995: 47–48, 58; Thompson 2000: 143). Likewise, in our interview, the late Marie Assaad, born in Cairo in 1932, in the then wealthy neighborhood of Faggala, insisted that women’s activism during this period was not political: “When we think of active women like Huda Sha‘rawi [founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union] and all, they were not really political. They were all volunteering to do something. For other people, for women, for poor women, for service. That was the expression of our participation in society.” Marie herself was raised from an early age to take an interest in “the fate of the poor.” During summer vacations from school, she would give literacy classes to underprivileged children living in her neighborhood. Marie was also a member of the Egyptian branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association, which encouraged women’s public participation through social work and youth activities. Yet, moments of political upheaval and crisis constituted opportunities for transgressing dominant norms of female respectability. During the 1919 uprising against the British, “gender rules were suspended” (Badran 1995: 74) and, for the first time, middle- and upper-class women participated in street demonstrations and other political actions, including organizing petitions, boycotts, and public debates (Badra 1995; see also Philipp 1978). In Lebanon, in the run-up to and during World War II, the participation of middle-class and upper-class Lebanese women in anti-French protests, which even included a collective unveiling by Muslim women, transgressed dominant gendered class norms, sometimes provoking hostile reactions (Thompson 2000: 184–96, 252–59).² In Jordan, during the 1947–48 Palestine war, the Society of the Jordanian Women’s Union (Jami’iyat al-Ittihad al-Nisa’i al-Urdunni) trained women in first aid and nursing (not considered an appropriate activity for “respectable” women, since it would bring them into contact with men) to assist Jordanian soldiers and Palestinian refugees (al-Tal 2014: 157–58). Women created new organizations and initiatives, such as the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU), Egypt’s first independent feminist organization, founded in 1923, which not only provided welfare services to women and low-income groups, but also advocated for women’s political rights, access to education, and changes to personal status laws (Badran 1995). However, these demands were framed in reference to gendered conceptions of citizenship, whereby reform of women’s status was linked to their role as the mothers and nurturers of future citizens (Badran 1995: 128–33; Bier 2011: 33). While these moments of transgression did not dismantle the modesty-modernity boundary, they did enable a renegotiation thereof and a resignification of “female respectability.”

However, following World War II, a new generation of women activists went much further in challenging dominant gender norms. These women were more radical in their ideological orientations and more diverse in their class-basis compared to the previous generation of women activists (Khater and Nelson 1988). For example, women members of the Egyptian communist movement, such as Inji Aflatoun and Latifa al-Zayyat, broke social taboos by mingling with men through their participation in political party work (Botman 1988: 118). They were primarily focused on mobilizing support for the struggle against the British but were also concerned to improve the situation of Egyptian women, linking the struggle against imperialism to the struggle against class and gender inequalities (Botman 1988; Khater and Nelson 1988). Meanwhile, in 1948, Doria Shafik founded the Bint al-Nil organization, which led an occupation of parliament in 1951 to demand Egyptian women’s full political rights (Khater & Nelson 1988). However, all forms of independent women’s activism were banned in Egypt and Jordan in the years following formal decolonization.

As this section has demonstrated, the origins of women’s activism can be traced to the major geopolitical transformations from the end of the nineteenth century onward—namely European colonialism and growing indigenous resistance to it in the form of nationalist movements. Anticolonial nationalism sought to modernize society as proof of readiness for national independence and placed women at the heart of that project. While women from the working classes and peasantry had always contributed to economic, social, and cultural life, for the first time, women from the elite and emerging middle classes were able to enter public life through their participation in the nationalist movement. Norms of female respectability, however, prevented women from becoming involved in overtly political activities. As a result, women, with some exceptions, generally limited their activism to charitable and welfare activities, presenting these as a form of social activism in the service of the nation. The construction of the political/social distinction was constitutive of the norm of female respectability, which, in turn, was a marker of cultural difference from Europe. Therefore, despite insistence to the contrary, women’s social activism was geopolitical, in that it was integral to the nationalist construction of the inner sphere of national sovereignty at the heart of the struggle that finally culminated in formal decolonization.

WOMEN’S ACTIVISM AND POSTINDEPENDENCE STATE BUILDING

The period from formal decolonization until 1967 was a time of regional upheaval and geopolitical contestations. The 1947 UN partition of Palestine triggered the first Arab-Israeli war, resulting in the defeat of the Arab forces and the Nakba, or “catastrophe” for the Palestinians. The loss of Palestine led to the political radicalization of a new generation of Palestinians as well as citizens of Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. New ideological parties emerged across the region espousing pan-Arab unity, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, and social justice, challenging the geopolitical order established by the European powers and their local allies. In Egypt, a group of army officers, calling themselves the Free Officers, launched a coup in July 1952, forcing King Faruq to abdicate, dissolving the government, and paving the way for a full withdrawal of British forces. The new regime, headed by the charismatic Gamal Abdel-Nasser, set about building a new domestic order based on a coalition of popular forces and supplanting the class of wealthy business owners and landlords. Meanwhile, the regime sought to overturn Western influence in the region more broadly and became a leading member of the Non-Aligned Movement. Following the 1956 Tripartite Aggression by Britain, France, and Israel, Gamal Abdel-Nasser became a hero both at home and abroad, inspiring radical movements across the region, which resulted in the toppling of pro-Western regimes in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya, and, if it were not for Western intervention, might have also overturned the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan. Pan-Arabism became a strong norm governing regional Arab politics (Barnett 1998). Even the pro-Western monarchies (Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Jordan) were obliged to at least be seen to act in accordance with pan-Arabism or risk their citizens rising up against them. This section examines the ways in which norms of female respectability, produced through the anticolonial struggle, were deployed in postindependence state-building projects and anti-imperialist movements, and the ways in which women embodied, resisted, and renegotiated these norms through their activism and professional lives.

Gender and Geopolitical Order in Egypt

Under Nasser’s leadership, Egypt would experience one of the most ambitious national modernization programs of all the Arab countries, including land redistribution, state-led industrialization, rural development, and expansion of free education and health care, which were accompanied by social benefits, including a minimum wage, reduced working hours, access to cheap credit and subsidized goods and services (Yapp 1996: 215–19; Vatikiotis 1991: 393–402). Urban middle and lower-middle classes experienced significant social mobility, as did peasants and workers in the formal sector, whose living standards improved until economic stagnation set in after 1965 (Waterbury 1983: 207–23). These measures not only boosted the popularity of the new regime but also helped to dismantle the power and wealth of the former elites.

An important component of the regime’s state-building project was the implementation of a program of “state feminism” (Hatem 1992; Bier 2011). Important measures in this respect included the 1956 constitution, which granted women the right to vote and stand for office; the amendment of labor laws between 1958 and 1959 to provide maternity leave and workplace crèches for working mothers; a 1964 law guaranteeing jobs in the state sector for all university graduates irrespective of gender, and implementation of a state family planning program (Bier 2011; Hatem 1992: 232).³ Other measures that greatly benefited women and girls included the introduction of free education. Between 1960 and 1976, female primary and secondary education enrolment increased threefold and female university enrolment increased by six times (see Hatem 1988: 413). Commitment to state feminism was part of the raft of social policies that built popular support for the regime, while serving as a means of mobilizing women’s productive and reproductive capabilities in the service of the state’s modernization policies (Hatem 1992). As Laura Bier argues, Nasserist state feminism represented a continuation of earlier nationalist projects to remake women but also transformed the “woman question” in a way that was “consistent with the dictates of a secular nation-state project and the notions of secular modernity that underpinned them” (Bier 2011: 16). State feminism signaled the progressive character of the regime, thereby contributing to the regime’s legitimacy, particularly vis-à-vis its main political rival, the Muslim Brotherhood. Nasser ridiculed the Muslim Brotherhood’s attitudes toward women’s rights, characterizing them as reactionary and a threat to the gains of the Egyptian revolution (ERTU 1965).

Writer, literary critic, and political activist Farida El-Nakkash was one of many young women to benefit from the new regime’s policies, graduating in English Literature from Cairo University in 1962, the same year in which the government announced that all university graduates would be guaranteed state employment. Farida worked for the state-owned Middle East News Agency as a journalist. She recalled: “When women began to get university education on a broader scale, they began to enter into all sorts of professions very actively. From time to time religious groups would say that a woman’s natural place is in her home and that raising the children was her most important job, but the society in general was accepting of women entering the workforce.” This shift in gender norms was also reflected in popular culture. Egyptian films in the 1960s promoted the idea of women working, such as the 1966 film Mirati mudir ‘am (My wife, the gener...

Table of contents

• Imprint
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Embodying Geopolitics in the Middle East and North Africa
• 1  •  Female Respectability and Embodied National Sovereignty
• 2  •  The 1967 Defeat and Its Aftermath: The Breakdown of the Gender Order and the Expansion of Women’s Activism
• 3  •  The Gendered Effects of Political Repression and Violence in the 1970s and 1980s
• 4  •  The Political Economy and Geopolitics of Women’s Activism after the Cold War
• 5  •  Women’s Rights as Geopolitical Discourse: The Struggle over Geography in the Post–Cold War Period
• 6  •  The Struggle over Gender at the Heart of the Arab Uprisings
• 7  •  The Gendered Geopolitics of Fear and Counterrevolution
• Conclusion
• Notes
• List of Interviewees
• List of Organizations
• References
• Index