In the 1990s, the Western image of the Middle Eastern woman's role in politics is contradictory. On the one hand, Hanan Ashrawi appears as the sophisticataed, articulate spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks; on the other, male politicians of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria speak of women as subordinates who should not be allowed to work outside the home, let alone participate in politics.
This contradictory image reflects broad conflicts and debates in the Middle East over the nature of society and the status of women. These conflicts arise in part from the cumulative impact of a century of intense economic change and social dislocation, generating crises that have become particularly acute over the last decade. Women have been active political players throughout this process. They have not always won their battles, but there is no doubt that they have fought them.
As early as 1911, Egyptian writer Malek Hifni Nasif stood up in an all-male nationalist congress and demanded that women have the right to be educated to whatever level they desire. Eighty years later, women have much greater access to education and opportunities to work; in many Middle Eastern countries they have the vote, and some positive changes have been made in the laws governing family and personal status.
Yet there has been no simple, linear "progress." Economic changes have altered expectations and patterns of family life, but not always to women's advantage. The extent and impact of economic, social, and legal changes vary greatly according to social class, geographical location, and ethnic or national group. Today, struggles continue unabated over who should control women's lives, in the family and in the nation.
Most "secular nationalist" states--for example, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Algeria initiated changes affecting women's opportunities for education, health care, and improved access to employment. In these states women's organizations have usually been closely linked with or part of the ruling political party structures. Their main role has been to mobilize women around the goals and tasks set by the party and the state. In Iraq, Suad Joseph argues, the official women's organization pursues goals set by the state; increasing women's participation in the workforce when, as during the Iran-Iraq war, there were labor shortages, or attempting to loosen the bonds of tribe and family in favor of loyalty to the state and the party.
Today there are more individual women's voices to be heard in the political and artistic arenas (art in the Middle East is seldom separate from politics). Yet collectively, women still have little political influence.
In contrast to Western feminist movements, political enfranchisement has not been a major priority of women's struggles in the Middle East. Turkey has been a partial exception to this rule, but it is notable that there are fewer women parliamentarians there today than there were after women first got the vote in 1934. In general, the struggle for democratic rights for men as well as women has yet to be won in most Middle Eastern countries. In this respect, access to the right to vote is less significant than the right to organize without state direction and heavy censorship of unwelcome opinions.
One of the few women's groups to make enfranchisement its main demand was the Egyptian group Bint al-Nil (Daughters of the Nile), led by Duriyya Shafiq, in the early 1950s. Women did gain the vote in Egypt under Nasser in 1956, and subsequently the right to stand for election. Until the introduction of a multi-party system in 1979, only a handful of women were elected or appointed to parliament. Three women have held ministerial posts, all in the Ministry of Social Affairs. Since 1979, more women have been elected or appointed under a quota system of women--only seats. Almost all of these women belong to the government party. Women in parliament have tended to pursue issues important to their party rather than to all women. The only occasion on which both independent opposition women and some women parliament members joined forces was to campaign against the rescinding of Egypt's liberalized personal status law at the beginning of the 1980s.
In the Gulf states, women do not have the vote. Women were not able to vote in Kuwaiti elections in late 1992, despite renewed demands from some Kuwaiti women, emphasizing the role which women played in the resistance to Iraqi occupation.
The increasing importance of Islamic politics has not always prevented women from exercising the vote. Some Islamist groups have recognized the potential of women's votes to boost their own support. For example, women have not been deprived of the vote in Iran under the Islamic Republic, despite the regime's highly misogynistic attitudes which have pushed women out of public life and limited employment in mixed work places.
In Algeria, the Front Islamique du Salut (Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS) has not objected to women voting but does want to limit their employment outside the home. This policy may be motivated as much by high levels of male unemployment as by a moral or religious objection to women working.
The vote alone does not guarantee improvements in the overall status of women. Women can easily become ballot fodder for political parties, whether Islamists or secular. Where they have little liberty in other respects, they can be pressured into voting for the candidates chosen by husbands or male relatives.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC CHANGE
In urban societies, a large percentage of women now pass through the state education system and a larger proportion than in the past are employed outside the home, though the ratio is still low by international standards. Access to education, and housing shortages in many urban areas, have raised the average age of marriage. These changes, however, have not inevitably led to more freedom or autonomy for f women. In some cases, patriarchal controls have grown even stricter as women's new roles have threatened to erode traditional male prerogatives.
Among rural peoples, perhaps the most socially disruptive factor has been land hunger, and the consequent mass migrations to cities and abroad. Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, the Israeli--occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Egypt, and the countries of North Africa have all experienced very high levels of male migration. In regions experiencing war and civil conflict, families may also lose males through imprison: went, exile, or death.
Whatever the cause, prolonged absences of husbands and fathers undermine many of the assumptions of the "classic" patriarchal household, with its head as the provider. Women are left with day-to-day responsibility for the household, unless close male relatives are nearby. Does this increase women's autonomy and power? In practice the outcomes are often ambiguous. Women's responsibilities may increase, but in the long term their status may be unaltered, particularly after husbands or fathers return.
Male unemployment in both rural and urban areas may result in more stringent controls on women. When a man cannot fulfill his side of the "patriarchal bargain" by providing economically for the family, his response may be to assert lost authority through other means physical violence, greater monitoring of women's behavior and dress, confining them to the home, or responding negatively to their demands for education and employment.
These socio-economic changes, and their ambiguous outcomes, form the context for ongoing debates on "the woman question." While the majority of women in the Middle East are not involved in formal organizations, women's groups, trade unions, or community associations, many resort to time-honored methods of resisting or evading male control, mostly with support from kin and neighborhood networks. These methods have long provided a sense of solidarity and strength to individual women, yet they also perpetuate the overall divisions of power and authority between men and women.
There has been a growing awareness among activist women in the Middle East that even where women enjoy greater legal rights (for example, in Turkey or Tunisia) or improved rights to education and employment (as in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq), male control of women's personal lives and sexual behavior is little changed. This is highly controversial terrain. Women who challenge the patriarchal norms of virginity at marriage, male sexual freedom compared with control of women's sexuality, and in some regions, genital mutilation, risk accusations of betraying their culture, their religion, and even their own sex. In the view of many, to challenge these norms is to accept Western norms of sexual and personal behavior. This is despite the fact that many women who are critical of their own culture are also critical of the West and its attitudes toward the Middle East.
While some of the ideas advanced on the politics of personal life may have been "seeded" from the West, their expression is shaped by the region's specific political and social context. Most women who regard themselves as feminists or campaigners for women's rights are acutely aware that they may be regarded as promoting ideas associated with cultures which have challenged and tried to subvert their own.
The Egyptian doctor and writer Nawal el-Saadawi argues that women suffer severe damage from sexual repression and oppression by men, and that this internalized repression is passed from one generation of women to another. While she is highly critical of genital mutilation, she points out that this practice is not in any sense Islamic and is prevalent in many non-Islamic cultures in Africa.
El-Saadawi regards Islam as having progressive potential for women, and objects to conservative interpretations which cast women only in subordinated roles. She also argues that the problems facing Middle Eastern women are compounded by the encroachments of Western cultural and economic imperialism. Women are therefore caught in the repressive social controls of their own society, while they are also prey to some of the worst aspects of Western "commodification" of women. She also points to the impact of poverty and social inequality in determining women's status and opportunities, and contends that the overall lack of democratic rights has limited women's ability to organize.
Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi is an outspoken critic of sexual double standards. She is critical of the role of religion, particularly Islam, in creating or legitimizing patriarchal power. She has argued that Islam regards female sexuality as active, but therefore potent and dangerous--capable of disturbing the social order and male morality. She also asserts that "Arab identity" has been conceived in a way which regards change as threatening to the moral order, and thus impedes the development both of democracy and the emancipation of women.
A prominent trend in the 1980s was the revival or creation of Islamist movements in most countries of the region. These have gained numerous women adherents, including many college graduates. These groups are far from homogenous in their political stances, but have fairly similar views on the "woman question." They have played an influential role in setting the tone of debate in the 1980s, often putting their critics on the defensive. Their strong condemnations, not only of the encroachment of Western values in the Middle East but also of the "corruption of indigenous moral values" have challenged exponents of women's rights in a more secular tradition.
Most Islamist groups stress the importance of male authority and emphasize the primacy of women's roles as wife and mother. They stress sexual purity and control, and the danger of losing it, as a justification for increased male supervision of women and for insisting on self-control by women themselves.
Women activists working within Islamist groups clearly have to tread a fine line between political commitment and the pressure to prioritize the roles of wife and mother. The tension is not always resolved. For example, Zaynab al-Ghazali, who broke with the Egyptian Feminist Union to form the Muslim Women's Association, a group closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, left her first husband over her devotion to political work. She included a clause in the contract for her second marriage that she would be free to do political work. Nonetheless, she frequently emphasized that a woman's first duty is to her family.
While some feminists view Islam, and indeed all major monotheistic religions, as incompatible with women's emancipation or liberation, the majority of Middle Eastern women activists seek some kind of accommodation with religious belief, because of its critical role in indigenous culture. Some women have sought in the earliest days of Islam a model of women's role in society which differs from those which have evolved since. This has been a largely speculative and even polemical exercise, although historical research has helped to revise ideas about women's roles in Middle Eastern societies. Stereotypes of the passivity of Middle Eastern women in the face of oppression are embedded in most histories of the region written by Western and Middle Eastern male historians. Women and their concerns frequently have been omitted entirely from the historical record. Recently, efforts to recoup this hidden history of women have challenged these assumptions and revealed a far more complex picture. Recent historical work has shown that women often played active roles and on occasion resisted oppression, both by the state and by their own men-folk. Some studies also suggest a considerable difference between the way women actually behaved and the prescriptive writings on "proper" female behavior which have come down to us from religious scholars and other male writers. Some recent films, novels, and plays have also challenged this assumption that men monopolized history.
At the present time many Middle Eastern societies are going through particularly intense political and cultural identity crises, generally coupled with severe economic dislocation. In these circumstances, women's symbolic roles tend to take on added significance, and to the detriment of women themselves.
Women themselves, as activists and participants in political and social movements in the Middle East, continue to struggle as they negotiate and renegotiate the way they present themselves at home, in the workplace, and in the larger political arenas of the neighborhood and nation.
Between Defiance and Restraint, EDITED BY SUHA SABBAGH, OLIVE BRANCH PRESS, An imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc. New York