Gender in Middle East and North Africa Research Paper

‘Gender’ studies began to appear in the 1980s, first in the United States and soon afterwards in Europe and parts of the Middle East, in the wake of the new discipline of women’s studies, which was itself an academic and intellectual outcome of the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was a new attempt to reveal unspoken inequalities and power relations between men and women. In contrast to the biological differences highlighted by reference to ‘sexes,’ the term ‘gender’ depicts socially constructed, culturally specific forms of masculinity and femininity that are subject to social interpretation, negotiation, and change. Furthermore, gender is used, not exclusively in relation to women’s issues, but as a constitutive element of all aspects of human society and organizations, such as the family, economy, science, medicine, state, and politics. The analysis of the ways in which different aspects of social life, history, and culture are gendered, namely embedded by culturally perceived differences within a field of power relations, has become a major concern for social sciences. Few concepts have transcended cultural and geographical boundaries so powerfully during the 1980s and 1990s as gender. This has contributed to pioneering work on gender within the field of Middle Eastern history (Keddie and Baron 1991). Gender awareness has changed ways of studying the history of colonization, state building, nationalism, and Islamic identity in the Middle East. At the same time, tracking the distinct trajectories and identity formations followed by Middle Eastern women, both Muslim and non-Muslim, renders a new map for critical reflection in gender studies. As concepts travel in two directions, they create new avenues of learning, dialogue, and interaction between the West and other cultures, ranging from academy and law to citizenship. This new dialogical concern revitalizes an interest in the study of local cultures and in cross-cultural comparative perspectives.

The study of women in the Middle East posits gender as a central issue, an agenda-setting issue for broader historical, political, and cultural processes that have shaped these societies. For at least a century, the problematic link between modernization and cultural identity in the Middle East put women at the heart of political and societal debates. Women’s position and agency in society were central in the shaping of movements of modernization, state-building processes, nationalist ideology, and Islamist protest movements. Discussions on the appropriate position for women in Muslim countries continue to underpin any political discourse aiming at the reorganization of these societies. Women are situated at the crossroads between two distinct sets of values and affinities, namely between universalism, secularism, and feminism on the one hand, and cultural authenticity, religion, and Islam on the other. Or, to put it succinctly, in Middle Eastern societies, gender issues are embedded in civilizational issues in the sense that women’s position in society is the determining factor both in framing and intertwining what were posited as the existing dualities, such as traditional/modern, religion/secularism, Islam/the West, equality/difference, and interior/exterior. Studies on women in the Middle East follow common and overlapping trends with Western feminist thought but also reflect the distinctive centrality of gender issues in Middle Eastern societies.

1. Women’s Civilizing Mission

The social position of women began to be discussed with the onset of modernization attempts in the nineteenth century. As modernization seemed to imply Westernization, the ultimate question that reformists needed to answer was whether Islam was compatible with Western civilization and more particularly with women’s rights and freedom. Different answers to that question—ranging from national modernists and Islamist reformists to religious conservatives—continue to put their stamp on the intellectual and political history of the Middle East. Analysis of these historical debates from the point of view of women’s questions has shown discursive parallels in countries such as Egypt, Turkey, and Iran (Ahmed 1992, Badran 1995, Gole 1996, Najmabadi in Kandiyoti 1991). For progressive nationalists, the emancipation of women from ‘erroneous’ religious prescriptions and traditional ways of life was the prerequisite for national progress. Islamist reformists asserted that Islam was not a barrier to progress and that it was possible in Islam to embrace modern ideals, such as gender equality and human rights. But for conservatives, any change in the direction of Western modernity, especially pertaining to women’s position in society, would have meant a loss in cultural identity and consequently, to preserve moral integrity and social cohesion, gender relationships were to be framed according to the Islamic religious law (Shari’a) as they understood it.

As markers of cultural identity, women therefore set the agenda for different and competing social projects. Furthermore, the most disputed issues throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, namely polygamy, veiling, gender segregation, women’s education, employment, and participation in public life, remain on the public agenda of Middle Eastern countries in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Middle Eastern model of early modernization, namely the era of colonial, post-colonial, and nationalist state building, can best be summarized by a formula that equates women’s emancipation and national progress. With striking similarities between Turkey, Iran, and Egypt, and also with the North African countries, women’s public visibility and gender equality are considered to be the yardsticks of progress and civility. Turkish Kemalist nationalism articulated and implemented gender equality as an intrinsic part of its modern identity and societal reforms. Women gained full political rights in 1934, and the removal of family law from the jurisdiction of religion with the enactment in 1926 of a secular Civil Code (adapted from Swiss law) in Turkey can be considered as the most radical example of engagement in secular feminism. In Iran, too, women’s rights, free education, and compulsory unveiling in 1936 were implemented by the secular nationalist politics of Reza Shah. In Egypt, alongside nationalism, the Islamic reformist movement (especially in the works of Muhammed Abduh and Qasim Amin) paved the way for women to gain access to public life, to claim a public voice, and to demand educational, work, and political rights. Veiling was criticized as a sign of women’s confinement and as an obstacle to women’s participation in public life. Thus, the removal of the veil and the head covering of women in public became a symbol for women’s emancipation as well as national progress. A well-known Egyptian feminist, Huda Sharawi, announced the start of the feminist movement when, returning from an international feminist meeting in Rome in 1923, she disembarked from her train in Cairo and unveiled her face in public. Therefore, public visibility of women was put forward by the first wave of feminist activism and writing in the Middle East. A pre-Islamic past, whether Anatolian, Zoroastrian, Pharaonic, or Berber, was idealized as egalitarian in gender relations and celebrated in the construction of a new nationalist idiom. Women, especially upper and middle class women, mostly coming from a traditional universe but exposed to modern ideals and education, were called to participate in this nation-building process, as citizens, educators, and role models for a ‘new life’ in the family as well as in the public sphere. The limits of women’s participation in public life and social agency were framed within the terms set by the nationalist movements whether backed up by secular or religious reformist discourse. Feminist scholarship in the Middle East revealed these issues pertaining to gender and nationalism and developed in distancing itself from and in criticism of nationalist idiom (Kandiyoti 1991, Moghadam 1994).

2. Women And Islamist Movements

The revival of Islamist movements marks the second turning point in contemporary Middle Eastern history where women’s issues and agencies once again play a central role, but this time as markers of Islamic difference rather than as transmitters of Western-centered modernity.

Although Islamic movements are far from being monolithic, one can still discern common features in the contemporary Islamist movements that have developed since the end of the 1970s in almost all Muslim countries. Their aim is to transform the whole of society along Islamic lines, ranging from government, law, and science to ways of life, gender relations, and faith. The Iranian Islamic revolution in 1979 provided the political source of reference and legitimacy for such an ideal. Actors of Islam, men and women alike, come mostly from provincial towns and lower social classes, but are an outcome of urban migration and modern education. The pressures generated by the encounter with a modern universe create a need to reinterpret religion and re-adapt gender roles and divisions. A call for a return to the original, unadulterated, fundamental sources of Islam (the Qur’an and the Sayings of the Prophet) has engendered the revival of debates on Islamic knowledge. The interpretation of religious precepts and texts is opened up to public debate in which not only the religious specialists (ulema), but also new Islamist figures, both men and women, participate. In a paradoxical way, contemporary Islamism has instigated the democratization of religious knowledge whereby various actors of Islamism can lay a claim on the interpretation of religion and Islamic jurisprudence. Issues related to the segregation of, and discrimination against, women, such as compulsory veiling (hijab); religious marriages and polygamy; women’s obedience and legal subordination to the husband’s authority; inequalities in divorce, custody, or inheritance; and interdictions put on Muslim women’s access to religious positions, praying in mosques, marriage to non-Muslim men are no longer issues settled under the monopoly of religious ulema but are the subjects of public controversy. Fatima Mernissi has made a pioneering contribution to understanding the specificities of Islamic constructions of female sexuality and spatial social organization, and giving voice to religious women figures in public life and history (Mernissi 1975). Other academic work followed and contributed to new readings of women’s position in religious and legal texts (Stowasser 1994, Yamani 1996, Mayer 1999).

In its criticism of essentialism and reflections on the constructed nature of identity and difference politics, feminist theory has contributed to the development of new approaches to Islamic identity. Islamist identity is distinct from Muslim identity to the extent that it expresses a refutation of given definitions, accepted ways of ‘being a Muslim,’ ‘born being Muslim’ categories, handed down from generation to generation, and asserts a collective and countercultural attitude. Islamism expresses the problematization of Muslim identity both by a return to the origins of religion and by a non-assimilative attitude towards Western modernity. Islamism shares a similar pattern of collective and personal empowerment with other contemporary social movements in the West, namely that of appropriation of their difference (Muslim, woman, or black), the very difference which accounted for their exclusion and stigmatization. Islamism is a collective manifestation of an exacerbated form of Muslim difference. A search for an alternative in Islam endows especially newly urbanized and educated Muslim actors with a very strong quest for an authentic indigenous identity. The covering of women, the ‘veiling,’ is the most visible symbol of this claim for Islamic authenticity and difference.

In all Muslim societies, the Islamist movements gained public visibility through the veiling of women. On the one hand, the veil recalls the traditional definitions of Muslim womanhood based on values of modesty and virtue, the segregation of sexes, and the interdictions put on women with respect to their participation in social and public life. But, on the other hand, the new veiling signifies the political participation and the active voluntary reappropriation of Islam identity. As such, the new veiling does not represent the traditional images of Muslim women: uneducated, docile, passive, devoted to family life. On the contrary, young, urban, educated groups of Muslim girls are politically demanding and publicly visible. The way they readopt the Islamic outfit is different also from its traditional outlook.

Traditional Islamic ways of covering change from one region to another, manifesting diverse forms in different national settings (the Iranian chador; the ‘kerchief’ covering the lower part of the face in North Africa; the face mask of the Gulf region; the Afghan burqa). In contrast, contemporary Islamic dress is a new style, almost like a uniform, independent of the national context. Although there is a wide range of styles in Islamic dress, it can be distinguished by a headscarf totally covering the hair and falling to the shoulders, combined with a sort of long and ample overcoat (made of pale-colored industrial fabric) to hide the forms of the body. Overall, the Islamic outfit is a modern reappropriation and reinterpretation of Islamic modesty; the silhouette of women with widened shoulders, carrying big bags, walking in the streets, taking buses, going to the universities, hints at the emergence of a new profile of Muslim women: that of urban, combative women pursuing a career and mixing with men. In short, women are actors of Islamist movements, but they are also following a multifold life and professional strategies, and making part of a modern universe. And this, of course, cannot avoid creating a tension between Islamic precepts, which define the ‘ideal Muslim woman’ as a homemaking, self-sacrificing mother and wife, and the new individual and professional aspirations of these women. Acquired public visibility, social mixing with men, and intellectual and professional aspirations force them into a tension between their collective role as agents of Islam, as markers of ‘authentic Islamic identity,’ and their emerging individualist and feminist consciousness (Gole 1996). Paradoxical it may appear, in promoting the veil as the symbol of their cultural difference, but Islamic movements unintentionally encourage women’s participation and visibility in public life, which, in turn, constitutes a subversive potential for gender consciousness and activism.

Women voice publicly their demands for access to education, employment, and political life (Adelkhah 1991). In the post-Khomeini Iran, women’s periodicals proliferate in which women defend gender equality in their readings of religious texts and criticize Islamic jurisprudence. They argue for women’s rights such as their eligibility to engage in religious studies, to hold juridical positions, to participate in the lawmaking process, to stand for public office, to have custody of children after divorce, to have equal consideration with men in testimony. In these periodicals, Iranian women argue for a women’s rights perspective in their critical readings and interpretations of Islamic law and power.

In Egypt, where there has been a rich tradition of modernist Islamic thought, there is an increasing concern for the feminist consciousness to be religiously rooted in Islam. Whereas in Turkey, where secularism and Islam were radically separated, Islamic women’s claim to have the right both to wear the headscarf and to enter into secular public spaces (to attend the Universities, to be admitted to public service, to be elected to the Parliament) addresses such questions with new urgency to Islam, but also and foremost to secular definitions of feminism and politics. The homogeneous and secular constitution of the public sphere is thus challenged by the emerging claims of religion and difference.

3. Gender And Multiple Modernities

The entrance of the newly veiled women into the public sphere across the Middle East by political, educational, and professional means stands in continuity with the process begun by the upper and middle class women who took off the veil almost a century ago. Both figures of women are products and agents of social change, transforming the relations between tradition and modernity, religion and secularism. If the first generation of women acted for accommodation and aspiration to modernity, framed by nationalism, the second generation searches resources in religion to act upon modernity. Islamism is yet another moment in the indigenization of modernity in the Middle East; it represents a critical reflexive mode of the appropriation of modernity.

Religious and cultural traditions, rather than being immutable, static, and marginalized, emerge as a vibrant force in the processing of modernity (Fernea 1994, Gocek and Balaghi 1994). Traditions are selectively reappropriated and transformed in the light of modern dilemmas that women face at the forefront. Women’s employment, political engagement, public presence, have an impact on the necessity to reconsider the family sphere, the place of motherhood in society, the values of modesty and primacy of community. Rather than assimilating to the liberal values of modernity and encouraging every move from the private to the public in the name of liberation, Islamic politics advances cultural difference as a form of resistance and as a way to articulate an alternative project. Women’s bodies are sites where this politics of difference is inscribed; the new veiling displays the embodied difference. In a similar way that the modernist experience was carried out on unveiled bodies and secularized ways of life, the Islamist difference is crystallized through women. New Muslim subjectivities are worked out by politics of difference, celebrating and disciplining religious self and bodily practices in a modern universe. Muslim women are situated at the crossroads between assimilating modernity and subjugating traditions; gender consciousness provides women with a critical reflexivity, a compass to map out a new trajectory. The interplay between Islam and modernity blurs the distinctions between secular and religious, private and public. New definitions of self, modern and Muslim, are emerging from this conflictual but creative encounter. Women’s agency is decisive in determining the course of this ongoing, dynamic process.

The new combinations and crossbreeding between cultural difference and modernity, Islam and gender equality necessitate a new perspective for understanding simultaneous but different experiences of modernity. Approaches in terms of insufficient and delayed modernity do not account for the centrality of women in the Middle East. Studying gender in the Middle East inevitably reinforces local and a cross-cultural comparative perspective.

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