Women
Women and the Stability of Saudi Arabia
On November 6, 1990, some 50 women met in a supermarket parking lot in Riyadh. The women dismissed their drivers and drove their cars in tandem through the streets of Riyadh, defying publicly an unofficial but strictly observed ban on women’s driving. In Saudi Arabia, where women may not travel without permission from their nearest male relative, work where men are present or even enter most government ministries, and where political gatherings for everyone, men and women, are illegal, the driving demonstration was viewed as revolutionary.
Cooke, War’s Other Voices
Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Cambridge, 1988).
A Woman’s Life on an Algiers Stage
Algeria’s Islamist challenge to secularism and the populist revulsion against the corruption of the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) form the background to “Fatma”, a one-woman show which premiered May 23, 1990, at the El-Mouggar theater in Algiers. “Fatma’’ recounts a day in the life of an Algerian washerwoman who is a maid and a servant to the state, to her employers and to her family.
Sustaining Movement, Creating Space
“Up here at the encampment,” said Abu Tha’ir, peering ahead through the windshield, “we cross the Green Line into ’48. If there is a checkpoint and they stop us, they’ll send me back to prison.” He looked at me as if asking for my opinion, but he did not slow down as we approached the army post perched on the hillside overlooking the road north of Tulkarm.
Our Fate, Our House
Many Palestinian stories are the stories of sons: heroes or victims, Everyman or Superman. In the intifada, the rebellious young men, the shabab, have become the sons of all the people and their exploits legendary.
Sahar Khalifeh’s stories, like her own life, are the stories of daughters, mothers and self. This story about Umm Samih resumes Khalifeh’s exploration of characters from the northern West Bank town of Nablus which figure in her three novels, Wild Thorns, The Sunflower and the semi-autobiographical Memoirs of an Unreliable Woman.
Women, the Hijab and the Intifada
Many accounts have suggested that the intifada has enabled Palestinian women to make great strides toward their social as well as political liberation. While some positive developments have occurred, it is also true that the intifada has been the context for a vicious campaign in Gaza to impose the hijab (headscarf) on all women. The campaign included the threat and use of violence and developed into a comprehensive social offensive. Social acquiescence, political inaction, family pressure and a concurrent ideological transformation created a situation in which only a few committed women in Gaza, one year into the intifada, continued not to wear a headscarf.
State and Gender in the Maghrib
Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco constitute a geocultural entity. They all went through a period of French colonization and they became independent during roughly the same period in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Despite the similarities, though, the three countries engaged in markedly different policies in regard to family law and women’s rights from the time of national independence to the mid-1980s. Tunisia adopted the most far-reaching changes whereas Morocco remained most faithful to the prevailing Islamic legislation and Algeria followed an ambivalent course.
Gender in Hollywood’s Orient
From its very beginning, Western cinema has been fascinated with the mystique of the Orient. Whether in the form of pseudo-Egyptian movie palaces, Biblical spectaculars, or the fondness for “Oriental” settings, Western cinema has returned time and again to the scene of the Orient. [1] Generally these films superimposed the visual traces of civilizations as diverse as Arab, Persian, Chinese and Indian into a single portrayal of the exotic Orient, treating cultural plurality as if it were a monolith. The Arabic language, in most of these films, exists as an indecipherable murmur, while the “real” language is European: the French of Jean Gabin in Pepe le Moko or the English of Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca.
Women, Medicine and Health
Amira is explaining to some village women how to use herbal medicines that grow in their neighborhood. “I learned the skill from my grandmother when I used to help her harvest the wild plants,” she says. Amira describes the plants, carefully differentiating those for colds: babounij (chamomile), khatmiye (athea), na’na (peppermint), zatar (thyme); those for abdominal colics: yansoun (anise), krawya (caraway), shemra (fennel); and those for diuresis, shoushet dura (corn stigma), bakdounes (parsley), and bu‘atheran (millofia). She is also very precise with her instructions.
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and Jewish Identity in the Women’s Movement
Zionism made its first entry into global feminist debate at the founding UN Decade for Women conference in Mexico City in 1975. There, during discussions of the introduction to a program of action for the decade, the conference passed wording that called for “the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid, racial discrimination in all its forms.”
Editor’s Bookshelf (July/August 1988)
The defeat of the Arab states in the June 1967 war was more than a military setback. It was also a blow against the radical nationalist project and its modern and secular cultural orientation which bonded the Arab world and the West even as it provided a framework for resistance to Western economic, political and cultural domination. Since 1967, only the Palestinian national movement has continued to advance the flag of radical nationalism. Elsewhere, a romantic Islamism, brandishing the slogan of cultural “authenticity,” has posed the most consistent challenge to continuing Western domination of the Middle East.
Muslim Women and Fundamentalism
When analyzing the dynamics of the Muslim world, one has to discriminate between two distinct dimensions: what people actually do, the decisions they make, the aspirations they secretly entertain or display through their patterns of consumption, and the discourses they develop about themselves, more specifically the ones they use to articulate their political claims. The first dimension is about reality and its harsh time-bound laws, and how people adapt to pitilessly rapid change; the second is about self-presentation and identity building. And you know as well as I do that whenever one has to define oneself to others, whenever one has to define one’s identity, one is on the shaky ground of self-indulging justifications.
Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
This is more than a general treatise about women in Egypt. It is a subtle and adroit analysis of gender and class during the transformation of Egyptian society in the nineteenth century and it is this underlying theme that makes Judith Tucker’s work challenging reading. She provides an interesting theoretical approach in which both an anthropologist, used to working on women’s issues within peripheral, local community settings, and an historian, concerned with the social and economic history of women and social class, can find a common ground. “The history of women,” Tucker states in her introduction,
Prison, Gender, Praxis
Do you, too, believe that I betrayed my motherhood when I left you, against my will, to go to prison?…. I have read an article by the Moroccan writer Hadiya Sa‘id…she expressed a point of view maintained by some of our friends who love me and are concerned about you. She says that I must cease my political work and leave it to Husayn, for the sake of you children…. [1]
So writes Farida al-Naqqash to her daughter in 1981, during her second confinement in the Barrages women’s prison just north of Cairo.
Books on Women in Iran
Guity Nashat, ed., Women and Revolution in Iran (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983).
Farah Azari, ed., Women of Iran: The Conflict with Fundamentalist Islam (London: Ithaca Press, 1983).
Azar Tabari and Nahid Yeganeh, eds., In the Shadow of Islam: The Women’s Movement in Iran (London: Zed Books, 1982).
A unique aspect of the Iranian Revolution was the dramatic presence of women. Masses of Iranian women participated in national level politics. Ironically, most women were emboldened in this new political role by the teachings of Shi‘i thinkers and leaders, those same religious figures who supposedly believe the Muslim woman’s place is at home with her children.
Works on North African Migration
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Reproduction and Emigration,” Zerowork 3 (1984).
Jean Guyot, Ruth Padrun, et al, Des Femmes Immigres Parlent (Paris: L’Harmattan-CETIM, 1977).
Michel Oriol, “Sur la dynamique des relations communautaires chez les immigres d’origine Nord-Africaine,” Peuples Mediterraneens 18 (January-March 1982).
The Wing of the Patriarch
The relationship of women’s emancipation to liberation parties or movements raises a number of questions. The basic one is whether or not women are making their own revolution in their own name or being handed it by “another revolution.” [1]
No Going Back?
During the early stages of national political formation in the Middle East, when crises prevail and mass mobilization is a major organizing strategy, political movements often recruit women and the domestic sector into the political arena. Continuous crises, from which the domestic sector is not immune, compel women to participate. This was the case in the pre-1982 Palestinian community in Lebanon.
