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Is feminism relevant to Arab women?

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0143659042000191410

1360-2241

Nawar Al‐Hassan Golley,

Islamic Studies and History

Abstract This paper discusses the effects of feminism, nationalism and colonialism on modern Arab women. These three elements are seen as interconnected in the Arab world, as in many other developing countries. However, even though early Arab feminist consciousness developed hand in hand with national consciousness, feminism is an indigenous product of Arabic political and socioeconomic dynamics. The colonialist and counter‐colonialist representations of Arab women need to be challenged. And observers must see that Arab women's need for positive change is no more nor less than that of women anywhere else. Notes Nawar Al‐Hassan Golley is in the Department of English, Translation and Mass Communication, The American University of Sharjah, PO Box 26666, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Email: nhgolley@aus.ac.ae. It goes without saying that change also affected 19th century Egyptian women. Gabriel Baer wrote: 'evidently the traditional structure of the family and the status of women did not undergo any change at all'. Baer, Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969, p 210. But this is an obvious colonialist and orientalist kind of analysis. On the subject of women and change in the Middle East, see Magida Salman, Hamida Kazi, Nira Yuval‐Davis, Laila al‐Hamdani, Salma Botman & Debbie Lerman, Women in the Middle East, Khamsin, London: Zed Books, 1987. See also Susan C Bourque & Donna Robinson Divine (eds), Women Living Change, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1985. Most research on Arab feminism touches on the interconnection between feminism and nationalism in the Arab world. See, for example, the following. Kumari Jaywardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World in the C19th and C20th: History of the Women's Movement. Lecture Series, The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, 1982; Margot Badran & Miriam Cooke (eds), Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, London: Virago, 1990; Elizabeth Warnock Fernea & Basima Qattan Bezirgan (eds), Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1977; Margot Badran, 'Dual liberation: feminism and nationalism in Egypt, 1870s–1925', Feminist Issues, Spring, 1988, pp 15–34. 6‐Jeffrey Louis Decker, 'Terrorism (un)veiled: Frantz Fanon and the women of Algiers', Cultural Critique, 17, 1990–91, pp 177–195. Decker argues that the Algerian nationalist struggle during the late 1950s was also accompanied by a 'struggle over sexism—in relationship to the French occupier as well as the indigenous Muslim male population' (p 183). On the ascendancy of the conservative religious trends, see Nahid Toubia (ed), Women of the Arab World: The Coming Challenge, London: Zed Books, 1988. Over the past 20 years or so, there has been a movement to republish old books on women and Islam by religious authorities, claiming that such books save Muslim society from the danger represented by change. See, for example, Ibn al‐Jawzi, Kitab ahkam al‐nisa' (Statutory Provisions Concerning Women), Beirut: Al‐Maktaba al‐'Asriya, 1980 (the author died in the year 589 of the Hijra); Ibn Taymiyya, Fataw al‐nisa' (Fatwas Concerning Women), Cairo: Maktaba al‐'Irfan, 1983 (the author died in the year 728 of the Hijra; fatwas are judgements by religious authorities on a given subject); and Muhammad Siddiq Hasan Khan al‐Qannuji, Husn al‐uswa bima tabata minha allahi fi al‐niswa, Beirut: Mu'assasa al‐Risala, 1981. All the above are cited in Fatima Mernissi, Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Jaywardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, p 1. Jaywardena extends this argument to include most Asian and African women's movements, as in Turkey, Iran, India, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Japan. Elly Bulkin, 'Semite vs Semite/Feminist vs Feminist', in Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt & Barbara Smith (eds), Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti‐Semitism and Racism, Brooklyn, NY: Long Haul Press, 1984, pp 167–168. Freda Hussain, Muslim Women, New York: St Martin's Press, 1984, p 71. Marina Lazreg, 'Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria', Feminist Studies, 14(1), 1988, p 95. In this paper, I do not engage in debates on women under Islam as such. I do, however, discuss certain important issues which have always been the subject of attacks on and misunderstandings of both Islam and the position of Arab women. I then summarise the development of Arab feminism in the light of nationalist movements and the struggle against colonialism. There are many publications on the subject of Islam and women. See, for example, Mernissi, Women and Islam; and Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male–Female Dynamics in Muslim Society, London: al‐Saqi Books, 1985. Mernissi also published, under the pseudonym Fatna A. Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, New York: Pergamon 1984. See also Aziza al‐Hibri (ed), Women and Islam, Oxford: Pergaman Press, 1982; Madelain Farah, Marriage and Sexuality in Islam, Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1984; and Naila Minai, Women in Islam: Tradition and Transition in the Middle East, New York: Seaview Books, 1981. Laila Ahmed, 'Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem', Feminist Studies, 8, 1982, pp 529, 531. Emily Apter, 'Female trouble in the colonial harem', Difference. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 4, 1992, pp 211–212. Ibid, p 209. Peter A Lienhardt expresses this dilemma: And though the segregation of women from men not closely related to them is one of the things that must at once meet the eye of any visitor to the towns and villages of the Trucial Coast, this segregation makes it difficult for a visitor to gain any precise knowledge of the women's position. Apart from its being difficult for a man to talk to women there, it is not even proper for him to ask very much about them, particularly to ask in any detail about specific cases…one can easily be misled, particularly in assessing the extent of male dominance. Lienhardt, 'Some social aspects of the Trucial States', in Derek Hopwood (ed), The Arabian Peninsula: Society and Politics, London: Allen and Unwin, 1972, p 220. Ahmed, 1982, p 525. Apter, 'Female trouble in the colonial harem', p 211. Mernissi, Women and Islam, p 95. For the development of the wearing of the veil, see ibid, especially ch 5, pp 85–101, and ch 10, pp 180–188. Mervat Hatem, 'The politics of sexuality and gender in segregated patriarchal systems: the case of eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Egypt', Feminist Studies, 12 (2), 1986, pp 253–254. For an account of women's role in the Iranian Revolution, see Guity Nashat (ed), Women and Revolution in Iran, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, p 139. Laila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992, p 104. Even in Classical Greece, Ahmed argues, Alexander the Great, having conquered Persia, tried to compete with Persian kings and kept harems as large as theirs (p 28). Examples of ethnographic writings on the Middle East include Talal Asad, The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe, London: C Hurst, 1970; Donald Cole, 'Social and economic structures of the Murrah: a Saudi Arabian Bedouin tribe', unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1971; Ian Cunnison, The Baggara Arabs: Power and Lineage in a Sudanese Nomad Tribe, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966; and Emmanuel Marx, Bedouin of the Negev, New York: Praeger, 1967. Cynthia Nelson, 'Public and private politics: women in the Middle Eastern world', American Ethnologist, 1 (3), 1974, p 561. Ibid, pp 558–559. Rosemary Sayigh does not specify any studies. However, one can assume that she means works by Nawal el‐Saadawi, Fatima Mernissi and others. Rosemary Sayigh, 'Roles and functions of Arab women: a reappraisal', Arab Studies Quarterly, 3, (3), 1981, pp 258–274, esp pp 257–268. See EL Peters on Libya, 'The Bedouin sheikhs. Aspects of power among Cyrenaican pastoralists', paper presented at a Seminar on Leadership and Development in the Arab World, American University of Beirut, November 1979. 'Wasta' is an Arabic term meaning mediation through influential people. Sayigh, 'Roles and functions of Arab women', p 270. For example, see, Franz Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965, esp chs 1 and 3; C Fluerh‐Lobban, 'The political mobilisation of women in the Arab world', in J Smith (ed), Women in Contemporary Muslim Societies, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980; Fluerh‐Lobban, 'Agitation for change in the Sudan', in A Schlegel (ed), Sexual Stratification: A Cross‐Cultural View, New York: Colombia University Press, 1977; M Molyneux, 'Women and revolution in the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen', Feminist Review, 1, 1977; Y Haddad, 'Palestinian women: pattern of legitimation and domination', in Khalil Nahkleh & Elia Zureik (eds), Sociology of the Palestinians, London: Croom Helm, 1980; and B Rahbek, 'Oppressive and liberating elements in the situation of Palestinian women', mimeo, 1980. Mernissi, Women and Islam, pp 192–195 Ibid, p 529. Ibid. See also the study by Clara Makhlouf‐Obermeyer, Changing Veils: A Study of Women in South Arabia, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1979. Ahmed, 1982, pp 528–529. Lama Abu Odeh, 'Post‐colonial feminism and the veil: thinking the difference', Feminist Review, 43, 1993, pp 26–37. Ibid, p 27. See the example of killing women in the name of family honour. Ibid, p 29. Ibid, p 30. Ibid, p 37. Deniz Kandiyoti, 'Identity and its discontents: women and the nation', in Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post‐Colonial Theory: A Reader, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p 380. See Badran & Cooke, Opening the Gates, p xx. The following passage, from ibid, pp xxiv–xxv, is a brief illustration of the 20th century political map of Arab countries: The Arab East, or the Mashriq excluding Egypt, remained under direct Ottoman rule until after the first World War. In the 1920s, the territory was broken up into the states of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Transjordan under French and British mandates. In the late nineteenth century, Sudan fell under Anglo‐Egyptian control. In the Maghrib or Arab West, Algeria in 1830 and Tunisia in 1881 fell under French colonial rule, while Morocco and Libya were occupied early in the twentieth century by the French and Italians respectively. In the Arabian Peninsula, the Ottoman pressures and controls on the cities and caravan routes in the nineteenth century were eliminated in the early twentieth century. Although the Arabian Peninsula was never colonized, much of the western littoral of the Indian Ocean became Trucial States under British control, and South Yemen (Aden) became a strategic outpost. By the 1960s, most Arab lands had thrown off colonial rule and the final vestiges of foreign occupation. Palestine was the exception. In 1948, it was taken over by the new state of Israel. This argument has been drawn from Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, London: Faber and Faber, 1991, esp Part III. On the argument on the class system in 19th‐century Egypt, I am indebted to Juan Ricardo Cole's 'Feminism, class, and Islam in turn‐of‐the‐century Egypt', International Journal of Middle East Studies, 13, 1981, pp 387–407; and also to Judith Tucker's 'Decline of the family economy in mid‐nineteenth century Egypt', Arab Quarterly, 1 (3), 1979, pp 245–271. The theory of backwardness and decline of Islam is also taken up by Orientalists such as HAR Gibb and Harold Bowen. See Roger Owen, 'The Middle East in the eighteenth century: an "Islamic society" in decline?', Review of Middle East Studies, 1, 1975, pp 101–112. David Waines goes as far as claiming that 'the birth of Islam is also the genesis of its decline'. Quoted in Bryan S Turner, Weber and Islam: A Critical Study, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, p 6. S Zubaida, 'Islam, cultural nationalism and the left', Review of Middle East Studies, 4, 1988, p 7. Jaywardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, pp 21–22. Ibid, p 23. Thomas Philipp, 'Feminism and nationalism in Egypt', in L Beck & Nikki Keddie (eds), Women in the Muslim World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978, p 279. Badran & Cooke, Opening the Gates, p xix. See Kandiyoti, 'Identity and its discontents, p 379. Ibid, p 379. See Miriam Cooke, 'Telling their lives: a hundred years of Arab women's writings', World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma, 60 (2), 1986, pp 212–216. Cited in Eileen Phillips, 'Casting off the veil', Marxism Today, 1986, pp 288–289. This passage, from Badran & Cooke, Opening the Gates, pp xxvii–xxviii, summarises the political participation of women in other countries: In the late 1930s, during the Arab Revolt in Palestine, women from the Mashriq, who had earlier channelled their energy mainly into philanthropic and literary societies, became active as nationalist and feminist militants. In 1938 and 1944, at pan‐Arab conferences in Cairo, they joined forces in cementing Arab feminist consciousness. In 1944, they formed the Arab Feminist Union. Among Palestinian women during the mandate period and after the creation of the state of Israel, women's ntionalism took priority with the impending and actual loss of their country. In Sudan, women participated in the national independence struggle in the mid‐1950s and continued as an organised feminist movement. During the Algerian Revolution, 1954–1962, most of the women who participated were young and only much later did some become feminists. In the late seventies and eighties, Palestinian women increasingly asserted themselves as feminists and nationalists simultaneously. Meanwhile women in the Arabian Peninsula took advantage of new educational opportunities, and state policies to reduce large foreign work forces opened new possibilities for work. In Kuwait, where women have more opportunities to organise and are freer to express controversial views, feminism has the most visible face, while in Saudi Arabia, where greater constraints are imposed upon women and candid expression, it is the least visible. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, p 175. Mineke Schipper (ed), Unheard Words: Women and Literature in Africa, the Arab World, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, London: Allison and Busby, 1984, p 10. Additional informationNotes on contributorsNawar Al‐Hassan Golley Footnote Nawar Al‐Hassan Golley is in the Department of English, Translation and Mass Communication, The American University of Sharjah, PO Box 26666, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Email: nhgolley@aus.ac.ae.