Gender and Feminist Organizing in the Middle East: Annotations

Nahla Abdo, a Palestinian activist is based in Ottawa Canada, and is professor of sociology and anthropology at Carlton University. In her chapter of Gender and National Identity, she explores the complexities of the gender-social transformation amoung women undergoing a national liberation struggle. She examines this topic in the context of the Palestinian Intafada (1987-93) and the role of women and women's organisations within it. She distinguishes between "official nationalism" and "grassroots nationalism" and although especially critical of the former, Abdo recognises the limitations of the latter, especially for women's rights and equality (Moghadam: 14). Through examining a historical overview of women's activism in Palestine and her own fieldwork, Abdo describes the emergence of women's organisations and the development of consciousness during the intafada. She is "convinced that, at least as far as the Palestinian movement for national liberation in concerned, that there is 'No going Back' for women" (Moghadam: 15).

Yesim Arat is a professor of Political science and international relations at the Bogazici University in Istanbul. In this article, Arat discusses women's experience of citizenship in Turkey. She argues that the way in which women are able to exercise and experience their citizenship depends on their class, religion, and religiosity. The main thesis of the article is that citizenship in Turkey has inherent gender biases in its structure, as it treats women as "a-historical beings who assume neutral gender roles". Women, who bear the brunt of parenting responsibilities, domestic chores can not take full advantage of the rights citizenship brings, even if they have them. Likewise, Arat makes the point that in a country where gender roles are constructed as such that "men own 73.13% of inter-household property and women own 8.71%, the formality of having equal rights to inheritance as equal citizens means little" (162). Arat draws on statistics of literacy and labour participation, as well as three examples of women in Turkey (the Carpet Weavers of Central Anatolia, Islamists and Feminists), to demonstrate the wide variety of ways that citizenship can be used and experienced by Turkish women.

In this article Giacaman, Johnson and Islah, argue in the context of Palestine, the nationalist movement has both inspired and give legitimacy to women's movements, but they do not necessarily promote the transformation of gender relations, promote equality. Although there is a different focus in this article, the thesis echoes other article in this bibliography, such as Julie Peteet's "Mothering in the Danger Zone". The authors show how women have organised outside the bounds of the state, as well as discuss how the experiences of those women who have stayed in Palestine, vs., those in the Diaspora have develo0ped different views. The authors assert that activism must take a multiplicity of forms s and demonstrate how Palestinian women have responded to the various situations that they face. Joseph, Slyomovics: 17).

Nationalism comes in many shapes and with many qualities and is often internally contradictory unleashing simultaneously emancipatory and repressive forces and ideas. This article explores the ideologies and mobilisation strategies of two organisations over a ten year period in the occupied Palestinian territories: a leftist nationalist party in which women became unusually powerful and its affiliated and remarkably successful women's organisation. Hasso identifies two factors that allowed women to become powerful and which facilitated a fruitful co-existence between feminism and nationalism: 1. A commitment to a variant of modernist ideology that was marked by grassroots as opposed to military mobilisation and 2. A concern with providing the cultural worth of Palestinian society to the west, a project that was symbolised by the women's status in important ways. Be comparing international and indigenous feminist discourses, the study also demonstrates how narratives about gender status in the third world are implicated and inextricable from, international economic and political inequalities (Hasso summary: 441)

Maria Holt is an information officer at the council for Arab-British understanding. In this article she seeks to illustrate that the combination of a "pious population", the devastating effects of the Lebanese civil war and the influences of an activist ideology, created an entirely new form of female participation in the Middle East (169). She does this through analysing the actions of Shi'i women in response to the war, and the reasons behind their actions. Holt identifies various complexities which emerge in discussing this topic, including male dominated Shi'a discourse, attitudes of women towards themselves, the nature of war, and the political consciousness of Shi'i women. She describes women in the contemporary Islamist movement, talks specifically about Shi'ism in Lebanon and the women of that community, and examines their involvement in the Amal and Hizbollah movements. Holt investigates the themes of Islamism and its impact on Shi'a women, the Lebanese civil war itself, and the masculine nature of war in general. In the end, Holt draws two what she calls "separate and contradictory" conclusions. The first being that Shi'i women share the aspirations and militancy of their male partners and are prepared to adhere to the to the dictates of the brand of Islamism being practised in Lebanon, the second that the Islamist ideology is flawed in the sense that it is rooted in patriarchal assumptions that have no basis in Islam. She ends her piece with suggesting a more cultural relativist approach, stating that in order to understand Shi'i women one must be open to understanding human rights and women's liberation through a lens other than the liberal western view point. Stating that "the majority of Shi'i women are not political activists they simply feel more comfortable with a more Islamic lifestyle".

Theoretical work on the concepts of "women", "religion", "family" and "the state" in the context of the Middle East has been stimulated by the problematization of these concepts in critical political, anthropological, and feminist scholarship (1991: 176). However, when launching into the realm of developing theory concerns arise about the uncritical application of western-based theories in particular, to the context of the Middle East. Through a comparative analysis of state-building strategies pursued by Iraqi and Lebanese elites, Joseph, sketches some of the theoretical concerns to be addressed as a fuller understanding of these concepts in the context of the Middle East is built.

In this interesting investigation, Joseph analyses key aspects of Iraqi and Lebanese state history and structure, focusing on how they relate and impact upon issues of women and family. Key points for her comparison include:

1. The issue of centralised control (Iraq) versus minimalist state policies (Lebanon)
2. The make-up of the ruling elite in each country (A homogenous group based in the Ba'th party in Iraq versus heterogeneous and fractionalised groups with very few based in political parties in Lebanon).
3. Coherence of ideology.
4. The negotiation of tribal and family affiliation in both contexts (encouraged and formative in Lebanon, versus discouraged and undermined in Iraq).
5. The Availability of public resources and resource distribution.
6. The willingness and ability to suppress competing social groups.
7. How issues of personal status, and family were managed in each country.

Joseph spends most of the article describing these strategies and differences and pays particular attention to the impact and importance these strategies have on women and family. It is however, only a preliminary investigation and, as Joseph states, in order to more fully understand the impact of these policies on women and family, a deeper investigation is needed.

In conclusion, Joseph argues that the driving force behind the nature of the relationships between women, family, religion and the state has been the nature and circumstances of the ruling elites' state building project. She flags issues that go unaddressed in her exploration such as international political factors, popular resistance, and market conditions, the impact of war in both Lebanon and Iraq and most critically the actions and reactions of women themselves. This article is essentially provides just a jumping off place for a more detailed investigation which should include these vital elements. In her final paragraph, Joseph suggests three important areas that further evaluation of the dynamics between women, state, religion, and family may help to shed light on:
1. Issues and structure of family processes.
2. Circumstances which are conducive to autonomous women's movements.
3. The development of notions of the individual and citizenship rights in the Middle East.

Rights are most often conceived as boundaries, specially, as ways to limit and contain the bound of a state's power over its citizens. In this article, Joseph suggests that in fact there are multiple ways to conceive of rights. And acknowledging a diversity of constructs and conceptions allows for increased negotiation, play, mediation and empowerment (272). Joseph argues "for a notion of rights that is not constructed around concepts of bounded property or bounded selves", but rather based in relationship (273). Based on her research carried out in a working-class neighbourhood of Lebanon, she shows how relational systems of rights operate, and shift as relationships between people change. A main point in the article is how relational rights are experienced by women in particular. Joseph asserts that men and women experience their rights differently because of the patriarchal nature the family, civil society and state in Lebanon. Specifically, Joseph points to patriarchal kinship idioms that permeate all spheres of Lebanese society as structuring both real and idiomatic relationships between people.

Joseph summarises by identifying three key problems for women when their rights are embedded in patriarchal relationally. Namely, the inability to deviate from the claims and moral dictates of kinship, the constant privileging of males and seniors, and the disadvantage women face because patriarchal relationally "flows between public and domestic spheres". She ends with identifying challenges that must be addressed in contexts of patriarchal relational rights.

Based on over twenty years of research and contact, Suad Joseph, professor of anthropology and women's studies at University of California at Davis, analyses the reproduction of hierarchical patron/client relations in women's organisations in Lebanon. Her main argument this article is that Lebanese women's organisations can reproduce the same hierarchical patron/client relationships that exist in masculine dominated Lebanese society and politics. Her principal point of entry for this analysis is the leadership style and structure of women's organisations. Describing the style as "highly personalistic", tightly controlled, competitive and based in patriarchal family structure, Joseph concludes that although Lebanese women's organisations contribute a female component to civil society, and even succeed in making legislative change for women, they ultimately do not form the basis for a liberatory women's movement. Joseph argues that the organisations ability to work towards transforming gender relations will always be constrained as long as they continue to reproduce these structures of domination, because they are not offering any alternative to the male model. One of the strongest points of the article concerns the class position and background of the women who dominate the organisations. These women are generally upper class and have access to material resources, and site of political decision making. In fact these organisations do not simply reproduce hierarchical structures, they utilise them to achieve their successes. Although Joseph raises excellent points in this article, she does not enter into a discussion about the feminist work that is happening in Lebanon, leading the reader to believe that all women's NGOs are prone to this type of complacency. Nor does Joseph offer reasons as to why the work of addressing issues of women and gender in Lebanon should be so limited, particularly in a country where women have enjoyed more freedom of movement than in neighbouring states but have achieved less in terms of their rights. The article provides the reader with a general picture of mainstream Lebanese women's NGOs, however, does not succeed in going much beyond a description of their style and structure.

In this article, Deniz Kandiyoti reassesses issues of gender and citizenship, critiquing the orientalist tendency to view every issue in the Middle East and North Africa through the lens of religion (Joseph, Slyomovics: 16). Yet part of the "conundrum" she identifies was the ambiguous incorporation of women into postcolonial states. It is in these situations where women were "part-beings, caught between the contradictions of universalist constitutions defining them as citizens, and of Shari'a derived personal status codes limiting their rights in the family, and of a post-colonial malaise burdening them with being the privileged bearers of national authenticity" (Kandiyoti: 52).

Kandiyoti goes on to describe what she calls the "contingent relationship" between Islam and women's rights and how this statement is based on the proposition that the relationships between Islam, the State and the politics of are comprised of three distinct components: Islam and cultural nationalism, the process of state consolidation and the modes of control the state exercised over kin-based ethnic and religious communities, and finally international pressures that influence priorities and policies. Kandiyoti details each of these and highlights the paradoxes and contradictions within each f them, and the subsequent impact on women concluding that the considerations she raises amount to a "comprehensive repertoire of the flawed and limited nature of women's rights in the Middle East"

Kandiyoti goes on to discuss concepts of women state and civil society. She evaluates two scholarly positions on these matters; namely Shirin Rai and Suad Joseph. In conclusion she makes two assertions for utilising the framework of political society, rather than dichotomies of traditional/modern, religious/secular and Western/indigenous, to discuss the various manifestations of political Islam and the implications for women's rights. She ends the article with a powerful argument against cultural relativism (which she critiqued earlier, calling it neo-orientalism) stating: "It is incumbent upon feminists to refrain from adopting positions that would deny them access to universalist aspirations in the name of their assumed cultural differences"(58).

Catherine Kikoski is a professor in the department of Marriage and Family Therapy in the United States who was born and raised in the Middle East. In this article she states embodies these personal reasons for this paper. It is based on her ethnographic research in the Middle East that seeks to "understand the life world of contemporary young women". The research was conducted on a Beirut college campus, and although it encompasses young women from different religious sects, they are mainly from middle class backgrounds. The paper she states, "gives voice to a young generation of women who reveal their own unique brand of feminism". Four main contextual themes are identified: 1. Gender equality. 2. Independence and autonomy. 3. Career. 4. Marriage and child rearing. The main motif that Kikoski says emerges clearly in these women's stories is the "universal yearning" and "desire of these young women to be free to express themselves and realise their dreams and goals in their own ways and their own cultural contexts". Kikoski argues that these young women want equality and to lead lives that are more autonomous, but not "at the price of the relationships which sustain and nourish them", namely, marriage and children.

Based on her research of a narrow and privileged slice of Lebanese population, Kikoski extrapolates and generalises about feminism in the Middle East. She concludes the article with a statement that clearly leans in towards cultural relativism, claiming that "perhaps, only grounded in each culture's feminism can we see feminism's universality" (143).

This short article, written in 1996 examines the draft of the Declaration of Principals on Women's Rights for Palestinian Women, and in doing sheds light on the politics of addressing women's rights in Palestine. The document is one that women's groups were pushing to be incorporated into the constitution of a new Palestinian state. The article traces the path of this document, discussing the various arguments and disagreements between Palestinian women's NGOs (who are not named) and the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW). Questions are raised about how revisions might proceed, and how the aims of using particular phrasing throughout the document. The general conclusion of the article are that the final draft of the document although more democratic and self assured in tone, does not have the directness in terms of its presentation and argument for women's rights than one of the earlier versions. The Palestinian leadership had responded by saying that the document would be incorporated as long as it did not contradict Islamic Shari'a, which was the latest issue being dealt with at the time the article was written.

This engaged article provides the reader with three case studies of women in the Palestinian Camps of Lebanon. Sayigh gathered these women's oral histories and recorded them in 1992-1992. In the article she seeks to explain and examine why it is that nationalism should still dominate the lives of women, even a decade after the departure of the PLO leadership to Tunis. The 12 years of when the camps were the main sites of resistance, rallies, and recruitment, left a deep imprint on the women there. By recording and analysing the stories of the women, Sayigh allows us to gain insight into how the absence of "official" national history, left space for particular histories shaped by gender, family, class, and city (169). The article reflects on women's narration and identifies the threads of both dominant discourse, and women's appropriations of their national and female identities within in them.