Women
Israeli Women, Palestinian Women
Deborah S. Bernstein, ed., Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel (SUNY, 1992).
Barbara Swirski and Marilyn P. Safir, eds., Calling the Equality Bluff: Women in Israel (Pergamon, 1991).
Elise G. Young, Keepers of the History: Women and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Teachers College Press, 1992).
Philippa Strum, The Women Are Marching: The Second Sex and the Palestinian Revolution (Lawrence Hill, 1992).
Orayb Aref Najjar, with Kitty Warnock, Portraits of Palestinian Women (Utah, 1992).
A Campaign Rally in Sanaa
Just within the walls of the old city of Sanaa, southeast of Bab al-Sha‘ub, a large tent has been erected in an open square. People are milling about — mostly children, but also men and women. The candidate is talking to a group of people as one of her opponents drives by in a black Mercedes. The candidate, Ra’ufa Hasan al-Sharqi, has her own white Volvo parked discreetly some distance away.
The neighborhood is a poor one with the walls of all the houses covered with posters for several candidates — but not for al-Sharqi. The independent candidate explains that displaying her posters on residential houses is forbidden, and how could she claim the right to make laws as a deputy if she had broken the law in order to become one.
Universalism and Solidarity
Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam (Addison-Wesley, 1991).
Hisham Sharabi, ed., Theory, Politics and the Arab World: Critical Responses (Routledge, 1990).
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Indiana, 1991).
Gender and Civil Society
Suad Joseph, an editor of this magazine, teaches anthropology at the University of California-Davis and is a founder of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies and the Middle East Research Group in Anthropology. She has published extensively on sectarianism, gender and the family, and constructions of the self and state in Lebanon. Joe Stork spoke with her in early May.
What questions does the idea of civil society raise concerning gender?
Growing Up In Jerusalem
Jamila Freij (Umm Sam‘an) was born in 1930 in “new” Jerusalem, what is now called West Jerusalem. Her family had lived in Jerusalem’s Old City for 15 generations until 1925 when her father and his brother built houses in Bak‘a (which means “beautiful area”), then an unpopulated land outside the Old City walls. The family fled their homes just days before the establishment of the state of Israel. They never returned. Umm Sam‘an describes their life in Bak‘a, their flight in 1948 and return to the Christian Quarter of the Old City, and the family&rsuqo;s disintegration.
Three Intifada Books
F. Robert Hunter, The Palestinian Uprising: A War by Other Means (I. B. Tauris, 1991).
Joost Hiltermann, Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women’s Movements in the Occupied Territories (Princeton, 1991).
Julie Peteet, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (Columbia, 1991).
The Islamist State and Sudanese Women
The Islamist government in Sudan recently celebrated the third anniversary of the military coup that brought it to power by building a huge public park south of the Khartoum airport, featuring hundreds of hurriedly transplanted trees, bushes and flowers. The impressive determination and efficiency the project commanded seemed calculated to prove to Khartoum’s masses that this is a can-do government.
Egyptian Women and the Politics of Protest
In recent years to veiling of Muslim women has become a common image associated with radical Islamist politics. Yet in Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling and Change in Cairo (Columbia, 1990) Arlene Macleod demonstrates that lower middle-class women in Cairo who wear the hijab (new veil) rarely identify with radical Islam. This outstanding book combines feminist privileging of women’s experiences with imaginative deployment of social theory. Macleod’s approach is akin to that of Ph.D. theses by Diane Singerman and Homa Hoodfar that also integrate women’s testimony with gendered class analysis.
Graham-Brown, Images of Women
Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East, 1860-1950 (Quartet, 1988).
The invention of photography in 1839 coincided, Sarah Graham-Brown observes, with a vigorous phase of European global expansion. Egypt and Palestine were among early testing grounds for the camera, which rapidly made its appearance throughout the Middle East.
New Writing On Women, Politics and Social Change
Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991).
Seteney Shami, Lucine Taminian et al, Women in Arab Society: Work Patterns and Gender Relations in Egypt, Jordan and Sudan (Oxford: Berg, 1990).
Bouthaina Shaaban, Both Right and Left Handed: Arab Women Talk About Their Lives (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Kitty Warnock, Land Before Honor: Palestinian Women in the Occupied Territories (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990).
The Egyptian Women’s Health Book Collective
The publication of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s famous and controversial book Our Bodies, Ourselves (1976) created wide repercussions and charted a way for women all over the world to gain personal control, through the possession of objective and necessary information, over their own bodies, health status and lives.
A group of interested Egyptian women started to meet in May 1985, with the idea of finding ways to spread the message of the book to Egyptian and Arab women. They agreed to form a collective to produce a similar book in Arabic.
Gender and Political Change
‘Aziza the Alexandrian is serving a life sentence in her women’s prison in Egypt for the murder of her mother’s husband. ‘Aziza, the main character in Salwa Bakr’s novel The Golden Chariot Won’t Ascend to the Heavens, assassinated this man who had seduced her as well as her mother, and then, following her mother’s death, took another woman as his wife. [1] She plans to flee the prison in a golden chariot destined for the heavens, but she does not plan to leave alone. Bakr’s novel presents the other women prisoners elected to accompany her, 12 life histories that have warranted them a place in ‘Aziza’s chariot.
Feminism or Ventriloquism
Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Indiana, 1990).
Introduced by the editors as “the first collection of Arab women’s feminist writing,” Opening the Gates is both an important and problematic anthology. Following the basic format of two previous collections, Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak and Women and the Family in the Middle East (both edited by Elizabeth Fernea, the first in collaboration with Basima Bezirgan), Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke seek to correct widespread misconceptions and ignorance about Middle Eastern women’s lives by presenting a collage of Middle Eastern women’s voices.
