On Shifting Ground

Muslim Women in the Global Era

Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781558618565
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Thoughtful, highly relevant, and frequently brilliant essays on the contemporary ideas, organization, activities, and agency of Muslim women" (Nikki Keddie, author of Women in the Middle East: Past and Present ). The world has drastically changed in recent years due to armed conflict, economic issues, and cultural revolutions both positive and negative. Nowhere have those changes been felt more than in the Middle East and Muslim worlds. And no one within those worlds has been more affected than women, who face new and vital questions. Has Arab Spring made life better for Muslim women? Has new media empowered feminists or is it simply a tool of the opposition? Will the newfound freedoms of Middle Eastern women grow or be taken away by yet more oppressive regimes? This "provocative volume" has been updated with a new introduction and two new essays, offering insider views on how Muslim women are navigating technology, social media, public space, the tension between secularism and fundamentalism, and the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship (Nikki Keddie, Professor Emerita of Middle Eastern and Iranian History, UCLA).

PART TWO

Gender, Communication, and Religion

Postcoloniality and the Gender Narratives of the January 25, 2011, Revolution in Egypt

MERVAT HATEM

INTRODUCTION

The gender narratives used to discuss the revolutions of the Arab Spring in 2011 have tended to bypass the very pronounced postcolonial context and character of the movement’s protests, whose political and social agendas impacted gender relations in the region. In contrast to the national revolutions of the last century, which were the product of a societal consensus built during long national struggles against colonial control for the development of modern postcolonial societies in the Middle East, the Arab Spring of the twenty-first century emerged as a reaction to postcolonial societies that were dominated by authoritarian states and national relations of domination that were only partially shaped by the colonial legacy reflecting postcolonial international and regional alliances with other state and non-state actors. The postcolonial revolutions of 2011 were primarily fought against the enemy within, without losing sight of the roles that international and regional alliances played in propping up authoritarian states.

The Egyptian Revolution took aim at these complex relations of power represented by Hosni Mubarak, the local despot/autocrat, who ruled for thirty years with the assistance of a political class that drew legitimacy from its historical commitment to various modernization projects. Its latest neoliberal incarnation contributed to the development of crony capitalism that left 40 percent of the Egyptian population living below the poverty line. In addition, generational divides segmented labor force participation. The youngest entrants to the labor force, especially young men and women with college degrees, were facing structural unemployment that affected their abilities to emerge as mature adults with jobs, incomes, and families. In this dismal economic picture, joblessness among young women workers was at least five times as high as for young men. Finally, official statistics suggested that 30 percent of all families were headed by women and that those households were more likely to live in poverty. The gap between the rich and the poor, the young and the old, and men and women distinguished the historically specific political and social character of the Egyptian Revolution.

This system of national inequalities was reinforced by an extremely unequal regional order dominated by oil-producing Gulf States, whose small, native populations ruled over an expatriate labor force from the Middle East and other parts of Asia. While employment in the Gulf provided some economic relief for unemployed men and women in Egypt, some Gulf men, who engaged in sexual tourism in different parts of the region, used summer marriages to young, poor working-class women to aggravate already existing unequal class and gender relations. Finally, the US-brokered Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel added a final layer of unequal global power relations to this mix. The existence of the treaty highlighted American interests in the preservation of this complex system of national, regional, and gender inequalities that serve its hegemony, underscoring the superior status of its culture and its gender relations.

Unfortunately, theoretical attempts to come to terms with this complex postcolonial condition and its structures in order to understand and address the concerns of the revolutions of the Arab Spring, including the January 25^th Revolution, have not successfully developed. If one examines the gender narratives used to explain these revolutions, one is struck by the fact that the discussions remain largely captive to the history of the national revolutions of the twentieth century. Not only was there very little discussion of the political economy of the postcolonial era of the last 30 years, but postcoloniality seems to be identified intellectually with the survival of old systems of representation that are silent on new forms of gender inequalities and relations.

The reasons for this are connected to the political history of Arab authoritarian states that had transformed the discussion of the intensifying political and economic crises into a discussion of identity politics. This provided the state with a mechanism for dividing their opponents into secularists, who were their short-term allies, and Islamists, who were long-term enemies, in the discussion of the future Arab societies. This way the old national discourses that first emerged in the nineteenth century using gender issues as part of the struggle between Islam, tradition, and modernity were made relevant to societies that had undergone dramatic changes in terms of women’s levels of education, labor participation, and even formal political representation. The gender narratives of the 1980s were also used to represent the key political actors and their blueprints for Egypt. While secularism and its advocates, including the authoritarian state, were assumed to be the supporters of gender equality, Islamism and its advocates were considered to be its opponents. These representations obscured the fact that both secularists and Islamists offered different but equally conservative constructions of gender relations and agendas.¹

It was not surprising, therefore, that most of the national, regional, and international debates on gender and the revolutions of the Arab Spring seem to be preoccupied with whether or not these revolutions that allowed the representative of political Islam to come to power were women-friendly. This was, in my opinion, the wrong question to ask. It failed to appreciate the complex political economy and the gender dynamics of these revolutions. Many students of gender devoted considerable attention to making claims about all women supporting these revolutions or making the equally preposterous claim that these revolutions were indiscriminately unfriendly to them. While this revolutionary rhetoric was used by all sides of this polemical debate to claim that they represented the interests and the concerns of women, the fact of the matter was that it made very little sense to assume that revolutions could address the complex social, economic, and political interests of all men or of all women.

To begin a more fruitful discussion of the gender dynamics of these postcolonial revolutions, I want to offer a cogent critique of the gender narratives of the Arab Spring that make some of these problematic claims and assumptions. The goal is to make space for alternative narratives that can address the complex postcolonial political economies and conflicting class, generational, and ideological interests. Taking the January 25, 2011, Egyptian Revolution as a case in point, the chapter will identify some feminist, liberal, and conservative (both secular and Islamist) narratives and their attempt to offer representations of the relationship between gender and revolution in the Middle East, the dominant social and political forces (including national, secular, and Islamist parties), and the appropriation of gender issues to serve larger political and economic agendas. In each narrative, I wish to critically review the claims put forth in the hope of shedding light on the insights as well as limits.

GENDER NARRATIVES OF THE JANUARY 25, 2011, REVOLUTION IN EGYPT

Narrative is often employed as a heuristic device to guide our understanding of complex phenomena that are still in the making, as is the case with the revolutions of the Arab Spring. The veracity of the narrative is not what makes it useful, it’s the ability to highlight angles that are either problematic or worthy of theoretical debate. The following are some of the narratives used to discuss the Arab Spring:

The Feminist Narrative on National Revolution

This is the oldest narrative on gender and national revolutions in the Arab world. Feminists, like Egyptian Huda Shaarawi, who participated and discussed the 1919 National Revolution, considered it as offering important historical opportunities for women to demonstrate their maturity as collective political actors and citizens. In exchange, she hoped that the success of the revolution would offer women some new rights. She cited the death of several working-class women in the nationalist activities that took place in the cities and the countryside, as well as the participation of veiled, middle-class women, who were members of the Wafd Party, in mass demonstrations against British occupation as providing the national context for policy changes that were beneficial to women. For example, The Egyptian Feminist Union demanded that the new, formally independent Egyptian governments of the 1920s change the personal status laws (raising the marriage age for young girls to 16 and outlawing polygamy) coupled with the expansion of women’s education.² In response to the Union’s lobbying effort, the state raised the marriage age to 16 for women and 18 for men, expanded women’s access first to secondary education and then to college education, removing restrictions placed on women’s work after their marriage.

Further progress for Egyptian women and their political rights had to wait for a later round of national activism by working and middle-class women who were in support of a more complete independence from Great Britain after the end of the Second World War. The death of Shaarawi, divisions within her feminist Union, and the rise of a new generation of educated women led to a shift in tactics and alliances toward a push for women’s political rights. They stormed the Egyptian Parliament in 1951, a space where women were excluded, suggesting that the representation of women offered a measure of Egyptian independence. Feminist activism continued after the 1952 Revolution with women engaging in hunger strikes in 1954 at the Journalists’ Syndicate to protest their exclusion from membership in the Constituent Assembly that was to draft a new constitution. In response to these visible roles that women played in the larger national and gender struggles, the new 1956 constitution extended women the right to vote and to run for public office, outlawed discrimination based on gender, and expanded their access to education and public work.³

These newly expanded rights not only acknowledged women’s contributions to the national struggle, but they acknowledged the new role that women were to play in national development. The birth of state feminism in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iraq, and South Yemen became the hallmark of successful decolonization and helped to expand definitions of women’s private and public roles in the transformation of society. In Tunisia and South Yemen, progressive personal status laws accompanied new political rights and expanded rights for education and public work. In Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, other less ambitious combinations of public and private rights were offered that made women junior partners of the state. Unfolding economic crises and wars contributed to the reversal and/or the retreat of these forms of state feminism in the 1980s and 90s.

As a result, this feminist narrative, which highlighted positive connections between anti-colonial revolutions and/or the struggle for development and the expanded rights for women, was eventually eclipsed by others that yielded more ambiguous views of the social and political outcomes of national revolutions for women. These narratives relied on the vast literature on the Algerian and Palestinian national struggles as important test cases of how women’s contribution to nation-building was met with limited rewards. Despite the extension of the formal rights to education, work, and political participation, the Algerian state failed to provide women with day-care services and new family laws that would have transformed their roles inside and outside the family. As a result, women’s domestic roles took precedence over their public ones, and gender relations in the family remained for most part unequal. Comparative discussions of North African women often stressed how Algerian women lagged behind many of their regional counterparts, especially neighboring Tunisia where women played less dramatic roles in the national struggle but became trendsetters after independence.⁴

The Palestinian national revolution was another case that cast doubt on the connection between Arab women and national revolution. Palestinian women’s service of nation-building has not been met with sufficient social and political rewards. Faced with continued and increased levels of Israeli violence and repression, Palestinian women have born the reproductive cost of physically producing new generations of fighters. They have had many children while withstanding the losses of fathers, husbands, and sons to the violence of the occupation. These women continue to articulate their commitment to the struggle through the postponement of their challenge to the conservative social traditions and expectations placed upon them by society. Neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Hamas governments have sufficiently acknowledged or addressed these heavy burdens continually carried by women.

While many women have been forced to scale back their expectations of individual rights from the state, they are continually active in n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• I. WOMEN AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF PUBLIC SPACE
• II. GENDER, COMMUNICATION, AND RELIGION
• III. WOMEN AND CITIZENSHIP IN AN INFORMATION SOCIETY
• Acknowledgments