Toward a theory of a Arab-Muslim women as activists in secular and religious movements.

INTRODUCTION

PERHAPS NO OTHER CULTURAL AREA ON EARTH compares with the Arab-Muslim Middle East, in particular, and the Islamic world, in general, in terms of the perceived low status of women, their veiled and secluded existence in the domestic arena, and their general non-participation in public life. In popular images, the West has a powerful conception of the Arab-Muslim woman as veiled, passive, docile, and dominated by men, the antithesis of her Western, emancipated counterpart. The contradictory stereotype of the exotic belly-dancer, which is also a cherished Western view of the Middle Eastern woman, is somehow understood to be more romance than real, and perhaps, part of the larger set of stereotypes associated with the "Hollywood Arab" (Shaheen, 1986). But the former view of the subjugated Arab-Muslim woman has an aura of reality and validity about it, and has broad acceptance in Western society.

The lag between scholarly discourse and popular attitudes is apparent even in a cursory review of the literature over the past two decades dealing with the subject of Arab and Muslim women. Western female, and also male, scholars and Middle Eastern female and male scholars have portrayed a radically different reality in their research and writing. Women are described as powerful figures in domestic life, as increasingly literate and educated, as entering the labor force in growing numbers, as managing household affairs when their male relatives have emigrated to work abroad, as historical and contemporary agitators for social change, and as participants in the public and political life of their communities and nations. A number of edited volumes and collected works have appeared in the past decade-and-a-half that attest to the diversity and the depth of this scholarship in Middle Eastern studies (cf., Beck and Keddie, 1978; Smith, 1981; Hussain, 1984; Fernea and Bezirgan, 1977), and an even more significant number of individual studies or thematic volumes devoted to topics relevant to women have appeared during the same time period (for example, Dwyer, 1978; Esposito, 1982; Rugh, 1984; Mernissi, 1975; Tucker, 1986; Fluehr-Lobban, 1987). One recent volume is devoted to the theme of studying the Middle East from within, and is a series of reflections on fieldwork in the region by women from Arab and Muslim backgrounds (Altorki and Fawzi El-Solh, 1988).

Contemporarily, the subject of women has been tied to the larger issue of Islamic revival or "fundamentalism" in the region (cf. Voll, 1983; Stowasser, 1987; Hoffman-Ladd, 1987), as it has become apparent that women's roles have been a central concern to the internal dialogue within Islam, and as women, themselves, have demonstrated that they are important actors in the context of current events, whether in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia or elsewhere. In the following analysis, facts will replace stereotype and myth and, drawing upon essential features of culture and history of the region, a model representing the complex dynamics of women's status in the Arab-Muslim world will be proposed.

ISLAM AND THE STATUS OF WOMEN

Islam was introduced into a social context that was already decidedly patriarchal, as were the two historically earlier Middle Eastern religions of Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, both Muslim and Western scholars agree that the introduction of Islam meant reform and progress regarding the status of women, with certain rights guaranteed in theology and religious law. Muslim theologists exalt the high status afforded women in Islam, and cite the continuing dignity and integrity women have in Muslim society, as compared with a perception of an increasingly degraded condition of Western women.

For instance, inheritance and property rights were extended to women, and although this is half of male inheritance, it is nevertheless a substantial modification of a strict patrilineal system which can exclude women from all inheritance rights. Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, recognizes men and women as spiritual equals, however men are granted authority over women because men are obliged to support women. The passage of the Qur' an dealing with male authority is much discussed today, and depending on the version of the Qur' an used, it translates as "Men are in charge of women because they spend of their property" (Surat al-Nisa: 34, Pickthall translation), or "Men are the maintainers of women, because God has made the one to excel the other, and because they spend of their property" (Shalaby, 1970:330). This religious obligation to maintain women has traditionally been used as a rationale for the social practice of male authority, even discipline exerted toward women, and it has offered a reasonable justification for the one-half share that women inherit. Traditionally, women did not work outside of the home for wages, and traditionally women enjoyed the legally founded and socially sanctioned support of their fathers, husbands and sons.

In addition to the extension of property rights, Islam reformed women's entitlement in marriage through an innovative dower system, whereupon the dower (mahr) was made the legal right of the woman, not her father. Further, no marriage could be contracted without a dower negotiated by agents of the bride and groom, and social practice developed such that the dower became a very substantial sum of money or valuables in moveable or immoveable property. While dower amounts have come to vary greatly by class and have become rather excessive reflections of elitism and economic inflation, they nevertheless represent a major potential source of financial security for the woman, and an important deterrence to divorce. The legal debt of dower owed to the woman must be paid in full upon divorce by the husband.

The custody of children is first accorded to women in the Shari'a, and this is also a modification of strict patrilineal rules which views the reproductive rights of women as passing to paternal kin with the payment of bride-wealth to the woman's family. Ultimately, in Islamic law, the children of a Muslim marriage are taken into the formal custody of the father's patrilineal kin group, but this is delayed, depending upon interpretation, until seven and nine years, respectively for the boy and girl, or puberty for the boy and the time of the marriage of the girl.

These important modifications of a patrilineal and patriarchal social system need not represent an overstatement of the case. Islamic theology and law support the inferior status of women in society. Men traditionally have had the unilateral right of divorce that remained basically unreformed until the twentieth century. Male authority over women has been interpreted to sanction denial of permission to travel or work outside of the home, or even drive a car. Today some of the more conservative Muslim republics will not authorize a passport for a woman without her father's or husband's permission; it is worth recalling that the conservative case of Saudi Arabia has its injunctions regarding women directed by the revivalist Wahabist tradition. Finally, family honor and good reputation, or the negative consequence of shame, rest most heavily with the conduct of women, echoing a double standard familiar to Western, patriarchal traditions, whether in Christianity or Judaism.

It is wise to point out that Islamic patriarchy is, perhaps, an easy target in the West because it is so similar to social patterns that lie at the foundation of Western civilization and its dominant religious beliefs and practices. Orthodox Jewish law of personal status bears many similarities to the fundamentals of Islamic law, especially with respect to marriage, the proper conduct of women, and divorce. Likewise, Christianity, in its fundamental interpretation, supports a similar view of female inferiority. "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church" (Ephesians, NT 5:21-33). Recently, my own research on the specialized subject of obedience in Muslim marriage (ta' a) has shown the common theological ground it shares with the essentials of Christian marriage (Fluehr-Lobban and Bardsley-Sirois, 1990).

The veil, Hejab or other similar reference, is another complex subject that is frequently associated in the West with Islamic injunctions regarding women. The Qur' an enjoins modest behavior for men as well as women. "Tell the believing men to lower their gaze and be modest" (Surah xxiv:30); "And tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest, and to display of their adornment only that which is apparent, and to draw their veils over their bosoms .... (Surah xxiv:31).

Veiling and head covering for women is a generalized Middle Eastern cultural trait that has been known in antiquity, as well as in contemporary times for not only Muslims, but Christian and Jewish women as well. The usual religious portrayal of the Christian Madonna is but one example. Veiling, and its attendant seclusion in Islamic culture, historically, has been associated with the rise of urban, middle class society (Tillion, 1964). Contemporarily, revived forms of "Shari'" dressing, or consciously modest, Muslim forms of dress are an overt and easily recognizable expression of Islamic revival that is visible in virtually every Muslim country today. Recent studies have shown that such veiling has multiple meanings; it can express genuine religious sentiment, or a revival of cultural-religious heritage that had been devalued during colonial times or under the influence of the dominance of Western culture; it can be a means of protection, especially for the urban, working class woman who enters the crowded, anonymous public sphere each day to work outside of the home for wages; or it can be a political symbol of an activist, Islamist woman who is participating in an organized movement to institute or restore Islamic government and society.

ARAB SOCIETY AND THE STATUS OF WOMEN

For the past fourteen centuries, Arab society has been so intertwined with the development of Islam, that they may appear to be indistinguishable. While the term "Arab" conveys a sense of both common language and cultural heritage, it is a problematic due to its multiple usages. The pre-existing society in Arabia before Islam, known by the special term the Jahiliya, was purported to be so harshly patriarchal that female infanticide was commonplace. While this practice is found among some patrilineal societies (it is also found among non-patrilineal, hunter-gatherer societies such as the Eskimo), it is more associated with privation than patriarchy, and it is unlikely that it was as widespread as is often claimed.

Certain recent historical studies of the status of Arab-Muslim women in pre-modern times indicate a significant autonomy demonstrated by women. Jennings' study (1978) of women's utilization of the Islamic courts in seventeenth century Ottoman Anatolia shows the active participation of women in community life, and not the slightest apparent hesitation to use the courts to protect their rights. Reflecting a pattern that is consistent with contemporary studies of women and the Shari' a courts (including my own observations in the Sudan and Egypt), women came to the court to settle disputes over marriage and divorce, to settle estates and to manage their property affairs. Unlike today's pattern, eighty percent of women, according to Jennings, handled their own cases, while only a minority twenty percent were represented by agents, typically male kin.

The classical Muslim jurists, the fuqaha, adopted a consistently protective attitude toward the legal rights of women. An interesting interpretation from the tenth century A.D. (third century, A.H.), involved the permissibility of the use of contraceptive methods (Bowen, 1981:323-28). The jurists at the time were in agreement that contraception ('azl, or coitus interruptus) interfered with two basic rights of women, the right to bear children and the right to sexual fulfillment. Consistent with the class-stratified nature of classical Arab society that included slavery, slave women lacked full entitlement to the same legal rights as free women, although, as wives or longstanding servants in households, they could inherit property through the mechanism of special bequest. To mollify inequity, like the rights afforded women, Islam has encouraged emancipation of a slave as a noble or expiative act.

In the context of the developed class nature of Arab society (at least from the time of the earliest waves of expansion of the religion and empire of Islam in the first centuries after the introduction of the religion), it is important to point out that then, and now, poorer women were deemed less in need of protection and were less subject to the strict practices of sexual segregation. Lower class women, who had to engage in activities outside of the home to eam a living, lacked a certain respectability that came with the confinement and veiling of middle class women. For the urban middle class, one clear display of accumulated wealth is the seclusion of women, who do not have to work outside of the home, and the veiling of these wealthier women, when going about in public, is an extension of this special economic status. Even today, the revival of Islamic dress is primarily an urban, educated, and middle-class phenomenon.

Sexual segregation, that is often mentioned in the West as oppressive to Arab women, is likewise a complex subject, but one that is better understood with the help of social contradiction and dialectics.

Segregation and confinement of women is one of the clearest statements of the removal of women from public life that can be found in human cultural expression. The powerful association between women and domestic life, and men and public life, is one of the accepted facts of contemporary gender studies, thus sexual segregation in Arab-Muslim society should be seen not as exceptional or unique, but one of the better-known examples of a more general cultural phenomenon. However, it may be singled out in many Western, feminist tracts as debilitating and degrading to women. One can only guess how many poor Arab-Muslim women over the centuries have longed for the protection and financial security of confinement.

During the twentieth century, when feminist movements emerged in virtually every Arab nation as part of nationalist struggles, among the many political and social demands that were raised, the end to sexual segregation typically was not among them. The end to education for males only and the promotion of education for women was a consistent demand, but co-education, specifically, was not mentioned as a significant feature of this more general elevation of women's status.

The sanctity and privacy of family life in the Middle East is a highly developed concept, as is the concept of the honor of the family. Segregation of women in the "forbidden" sectors, the harim, of the house is an important part of the public/private face of the household and is most in evidence when strangers or visitors enter the house. Otherwise, the "confinement" of women is more a matter of their closer association with the domestic chores and living arrangements of the household. Children, too, tend to be confined to the harim. With sexual segregation of females, in general, from males, in general, except for the closest of relatives, comes a strong measure of solidarity among women. The strong bonds that women share with female relatives, and with friends and neighbors (who frequently are also relatives) results in a number of positive benefits. Sharing and generosity, which are general features of Arab and Islamic cultures, are practiced in special feminine ways, from the more mundane sharing of personal possessions, to the more practical sharing of domestic tasks and child care. Information and advice are readily available and are given within an embracing cultural context of "sisterhood" where the kin term akht is frequently used among friends, neighbors and acquaintances.

One can only speculate about the value of such networks of women during times of social and political upheaval where mass mobilization of women has been witnessed. Certainly, veiling and the seclusion of women were turned into political weapons in the Algerian war of independence as women carrying political leaflets and even weapons under their veils escaped the indecent searches of the French military. Iranian women, in the 1979 Islamic revolution and in the subsequent years, have proven themselves effective political participants in mass public demonstrations and in propaganda efforts for the Islamic Republic. In my own research, I found that the female network of relatives and friends was critical in information, advice and support given to female litigants.

Thus, sexual segregation can be viewed as a complex duality, one that protects women as it keeps them from contributing to public life, but one that strengthens the bonds of cooperation among women that can be mobilized in a way that brings women into meaningful public participation. Apart from its Islamic rationale, it may be that sexual segregation has not been publicly challenged in a variety of Arab Muslim states precisely because their societies do not view it as harmful to women.

COLONIALISM AND WESTERN INFLUENCE ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN

European colonization of the Middle East was both a "scramble" involving military conquest, as was the case for the African continent, and it was a history of military intervention combined with the skillful manipulation of local hereditary elites. Condominium rule, Mandate or Protectorate status (as were the cases for British occupation of Egypt and the Sudan, Palestine and Aden) were political devices used to disguise the overt mission of colonization and give the appearance of some measure of autonomy. Unreconstructed European society of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was thoroughly patriarchal, in theory and practice. In the many decades of occupation, both European and Arab-Muslim society were to be transformed by the colonial experience.

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, European colonialism was neither a reformer of the iniquitous status of women in Arab-Muslim society, nor a special promoter of newly designated rights for women. However, the impact of colonialism was responsible, in part, for the transformation of the status of women in modern times.

The introduction of the worm capitalist system, involving a major shift from subsistence farming within the family to cash cropping, a market economy and the privatization, indeed the capitalization, of farming had profound effects on the dominant group of peasant women. As family land fell prey to monopolist landlords, women's traditional right to inheritance was eroded in the larger effort to maintain the integrity of the family's holdings (Tucker, 1986:194). In the urban areas, women became petty traders or supplemented their husband's income with the production of home-crafts, and in this unspectacular way, women entered the labor force. Even today, in a number of highly urbanized Arab and Muslim countries, women participate in the "informal sector", the arena of petty trade, and this remains a significant context within which women are apparent and are involved in public life. In colonial Egypt, economic transformation that was accompanied by a certain amount of privatization resulted in women forming economic associations with other family members, including their husbands, for the purpose of mutual economic support, joint purchase and lending (Ibid, p. 195).

Education, especially in the English model, was developed for the special needs of colonial administration which meant the opening of training schools and colleges for instruction in the English language and the learning of basic bureaucratic skills. Lower level colonial administrative posts were opened for men, and the goal of female education was left to local initiative. Indeed, the movement for girls' education in the Sudan was begun by the local reformer, Babiker Bedri, in the late nineteenth century only a few years after the advent of colonial occupation. The demand for female education, to be made available to the highest levels, was raised by the nascent feminist movement in Egypt in 1924 after the beginnings of the modern nationalist movement.

When education and training for women were provided, it was within the predictable limits of European society at the time, and so nursing, midwifery and teacher education were later appearances in the colonial model of development. But the provision of such education must be viewed as progressive for it certainly produced the first generation of professional women who were socially aware and politically conscious. Significantly, in most cases, it was these women who became the first to organize themselves into political groups, trade unions and, ultimately, the nationalist movements.

In most ways, women were marginalized by the colonial state apparatus. Their efforts to increase their participation are all the more notable given their general lack of articulation with the state. When the state did take notice, it was often to target women's status as part of a campaign to reform or "civilize" native practice. Various cultural campaigns directed at change in traditional practices involving women met with a notable lack of success, but are nevertheless interesting case studies in directed social change.

One of the better-known examples comes from Algeria under French colonial occupation. The veil, ever the Western symbol for the subordination of the Arab-Muslim woman, became the centerpiece of the colonial effort to modernize and uplift the status of Algerian women. Significatly, at the same time that the nationalist movement was gaining strength and revolutionary women were using traditional dress to political advantage, the French organized their ceremonies of public unveilings whereby women removed their veils while chanting slogans reflecting the positive benefits of becoming like the French. It is hardly surprising that after the war of national liberation and independence women returned to the veil and a more conservative form of dress. Unfortunately, returning to the religious and cultural roots of Algerian society also meant a departure from public politics and the more serious question of the changed status of women in a modern, independent Arab-Islamic state.

This simplified version of events, and of colonial action and local reaction, raises a number of complex issues that are only beginning to be addressed. Change directed from above, especially from a foreign, occupying power is neither ideal, effective nor enduring. The post-independence Algerian reaction to official sanctioning of unveiling women is a predictable nationalist response. However, since opposition to unveiling becomes associated with nationalism, approval of women in secular or western dress, or those adopting nontraditional roles appears to signal unpatriotic behavior. The resulting cultural conservatism acts as a depressant to further activism by women and by men on behalf of women. Cultural nationalism of this type tends to overwhelm progressive, secular nationalism, and the result can be stagnation, and traditionalizing of women's role.

More complicated, perhaps, in terms of ethical judgments and human rights, is the case of the British in the Sudan and the traditional practice of female circumcision. Infibulation and clitoridectomy are widespread practices in the Muslim regions of the Sudan, and the English resolved to eradicate the practice, whether motivated by public health considerations or the "civilizing" mission. It is clear that the British abhorred the practice as dangerous and harmful mutilation of women, and they exerted their influence over official Islamic opinion to oppose infibulation in favor of the less severe clitoridectomy (Fluehr-Lobban, 1987:96-97). It is also clear that today Sudanese health professionals and a growing body of public opinion agree with this view. But the British, however well-intentioned, attempted, without success, to suppress the practice, even to the point of making it illegal in 1946.

Predictably, cultural conservatism became a protection of cultural identity and national rights. While the British allowed autonomy in most other areas of personal, private family affairs, their intrusion into this realm may well have reinforced the practice, while opposition to its removal was justified on nationalist grounds. Indeed, my own studies of Sudanese family law indicate that, without much intervention on the part of the English, the laws regulating marriage, divorce, and child custody developed and changed adapting to modem realities, while the practice of infibulation continued unchallenged until almost a quarter-century after independence. Female circumcision, to my mind, is not justifiable on any grounds, including that of cultural relativism. However, without the critical local female point of view the proper context for comprehending the practice and, thus, the mechanism for its change cannot be understood.

ARAB-MUSLIM WOMEN AS ACTIVISTS IN NATIONALIST MOVEMENTS

I have written elsewhere describing the political mobilization and activism of Arab women in nationalist and national liberation movements (1977;1981). There is not a single Arab-Islamic country that was colonized, whether by Britain or France, where activism by women, in many cases leadership exerted by women, was not a feature of the snuggle for independence, whether as participants in national demonstrations or local level agitation. In the well-known case of Egypt, Hoda Shar' awi was both a founder of the Feminist Union of Egypt and a leading nationalist figure. As early as 1919, Madame Shar' awi joined thousands of Egyptian women in the March of the Veiled Women as part of the first wave of demonstrations demanding independence from England. Again in 1951, when the nationalist movement had gained tremendous momentum, 10,000 women of Cairo demonstrated at the memorial of those who had fallen in the snuggles against the British. The Egyptian Feminist Union, as an ally of the nationalist movement, saw no contradiction with the male leadership of the pro-independence political parties. There is no discernible history of an antagonism developing between men and women, which is remarkable given the overtly patriarchal nature of the society. Rather, the clear common agenda was the removal of the colonial presence. With independence, a new society could be constructed, and indeed it was, with universal suffrage established and new opportunities opened for women in all phases of public life.

A similar parallel and integrated history can be chronicled for the Sudanese nationalist and feminist movements. The Sudanese Women's Union was an outgrowth of the nationalist movement, and was founded about a decade before independence with the idea of mobilizing women and preparing them for greater participation in national life after independence. Its leadership came, not surprisingly, from the urban, educated sectors of society and from the women's trade union organizations, especially teachers and nurses. One of its founders, Fatma Ibrahim, became the first woman elected to Parliament during the first period of post-independence democracy, and she was frequently a visible leader of popular anti-government demonstrations.

A separate, but not always independent, Women's Union helped to keep the agenda for women's rights before the Sudanese political parties and governments in power. During the early years (1969-75) of the Numieri regime (overthrown in 1985), the women cabinet ministers he selected were, for the most part, chosen from among the ranks of the Women's Union. More women judges were appointed during these years, including women judges in the Islamic courts, than at any time in the history of the country. Despite the many hardships and disappointments that the Sudan has experienced in recent years, nevertheless one of the real achievements of these years was the increased visibility of women in responsible positions in public life.

With details varying based on the particulars of the histories of Arab countries, like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, or Muslim countries, like Turkey and Iran, we find that in each case women have had a significant role to play in the nationalist movements of their respective countries. Some, like Hoda Shar' awi of Egypt, or Djamila Boupacha of Algeria, are recognized as national heroines, and have established places in the historical record. Others, only recently coming to light with new, indigenous historical scholarship, like the feminist and nationalist writers of the independence struggle in Tunisia, Beshira Ben Mrad, Mabrouka.Gasmi, Khadija Rabh, and others whose role was often obscured by official versions of history by the single-party state in the post-independence period (Libidi, 1987). The thousands of mujahid women who perished in years of resistance against the Shah and against the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran may be remembered individually or collectively as part of a larger movement (Shoaee, 1987), while others, who will forever remain nameless, nevertheless should be remembered for taking the bold step outside of their private, protected domestic spheres to make a statement, for their nation and/or for the rights of women. In each case, the woman had to consider the harmful effects that her actions might have on her good reputation and the honor of her family.

A more contemporary aspect of the question of Arab-Muslim women and nationalism is the example of the Palestinian nationalist movement. Women have been active on a formal basis within the Palestinian independence movement since 1964 when the General Union of Palestinian Women was formed. Indeed, it is worth noting that the first Congress for Arab Women, which met in Cairo in 1938, was called for the purpose of discussing the worsening situation in Palestine (Fluehr-Lobban, 1980:237).

In the forty-five years since the establishment of the state of Israel, the Palestinian people have been dispersed to neighboring Arab lands; they have lived within the boundaries of the state, or in occupied territories since the 1967 war. As the nationalist and irredentist movement developed in response to the loss of Palestine, the response of women was, in many ways, predictable, and in other ways quite unique. The General Union of Palestinian Women involved women in political education, health and hygiene programs, and even trained women as armed militants allied to the nationalist cause. Since 1987 and the beginning of the popular upheaval known as the Intifada, women's spontaneous and organized resistance to Israeli rule has intensified.

More common than these concrete political acts have been the everyday acts of support and even rebellion exhibited by women. In families that are no longer intact due to the context of diaspora or due to male out-migration for wage labor, women, increasingly, have become heads of households (McConnan, 1987). Women's role in cultural and political education has taken on more significant dimensions. Symbolically and really, women have become the conservators of Palestinian culture, and through various cooperatives, traditional arts and crafts have been preserved, encouraged and even expanded with the double purpose of supplementing the income of women and furthering the nationalist cause. In'ash al-Usra, a woman's organization founded in 1965, has the specific function of keeping alive Palestinian culture under refugee conditions.

The high birthrate of Palestinian women within the state of Israel and the occupied territories is a form of resistance that has some demographers predicting an Arab majority in Israel by the turn of the century. This constitutes a unique expression of female nationalist sentiment and behavior.

Since the uprising began in December 1987, women have been active in the occupied territories as teachers in the alternative schools set up by the Palestinians after official schools were closed due to the uprising. Girls' schools as well as boys' have been closed during the years of the Intifada due to political activity. Other traditionally female occupations, such as nursing, have also mobilized women to perform their duties in new ways: Seventy percent of Palestinian Red Crescent workers are women.

Although Palestinian nationalism has been primarily a secular movement, increasingly, in recent years, that resistance has taken on an Islamic character. It is worth exploring the broader phenomenon of Islamic revival as it has affected women; its complex dynamics have both energized and immobilized women, and it is a major force to comprehend and analyze in the contemporary Arab-Islamic world.

ARAB-MUSLIM WOMEN AS ACTIVISTS IN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS

While secular nationalism may be said to have characterized the activism of women in the colonial and immediate post-independence period, activism within an Islamic framework is more characteristic of the current period. The phenomenon of Islamic revival is both proactive and reactive. It is reactive in the sense that it seeks to maintain the authenticity of Islamic institutions and traditions and rejects what is borrowed and external to it (Voll, 1983). "Fundamentalists", like their counterparts in the West, insist on a strictly literal interpretation of the scriptures, and thereby do not admit the wider spectrum of theological interpretation that has characterized the development of Islam (Stowasser, 1987:275). Islamic revival is proactive in the sense that many Islamic reformers seek to be "modernists", to borrow from the West selectively and thus enter the advanced technological age with its benefits, but with Islam intact. It is likewise proactive in the sense that it has spawned new tendencies in Muslim society regarding women, among these the creation of female-led study groups for women to examine the classical sources of the religion, Qur' an and Sunna, whereas Muslim theology has always been the provenance of men. Such powerful and even contradictory impulses invade the realm of ideology and practice regarding the current state of Arab-Muslim women.

The dilemma as posed by Stowasser, "Are women in Islam liberated and equal or protected and dependent?" (IBM, p. 260), is a misleading question, for both tendencies are powerful and real in the contemporary Arab and Islamic world. Women are both liberated and equal, and protected and dependent, depending on the context, and these, rather than being countervailing tendencies, are interactive forces that represent the historic development of Islamic society, internally, and in reaction to the West.

Women are protected and are afforded every right appropriate to their sex, according to some interpreters of Islam. "Islam, fourteen centuries ago, granted women what the western woman has not gained... in some western countries, woman is still struggling to get the same rights the Muslim woman had long, long ago" (Shalaby, 1970:308). This view is broadly representative of Muslim religious opinion, and can be sustained in certain arenas of objective reality. The financial security that the Islamic dower system affords women, and the independent holding of a woman's property (both the dower and her inherited property) are favorable to the status of married women when compared with the Western practice of a history of joint property in marriage without autonomy or long term financial security for the wife. Divorce, traditionally the unilateral right of the husband, has been broadly reformed such that it has become more dfficult for husbands and easier for wives to obtain, while a number of Christian and Jewish orthodox communities that co-exist with Muslims in the Middle East lack the alternative of divorce altogether.

Women are liberated and equal in the Arab and Islamic world, especially as a result of the gains made by and for women in the secular, nationalist movements, and in the development of constitutional rights for women in the post-independence period. In such cases, suffrage for women was extended while equality under the law was ensured. In many cases, secular feminist movements secured liberal maternity and parental leave rights for working women, as well as the basic right of equal compensation for equal work. These rights for working women in such Arab or Islamic nations as Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Sudan, or Turkey, in many ways, can be seen as exceeding the legal benefits currently available to women in the United States.

The Iranian Case

Women as activists in Islamic movements is a concept not easily admitted to Western discourse. The revolution in Iran demonstrated that massive mobilization of women could occur within an Islamic framework, but the political agenda that women were demonstrating for was one that, for the most part, was viewed as disturbing to the West. The anti-American and anti-Western aspect of the Iranian revolution reduced the potential impact that such large-scale participation of women in a revolutionary process might have had on Western public opinion. As a result, it has been difficult, at the level of ideology as well as factual information, to make a fair assessment of what progress or retrogression has occurred with respect to the status of women in Iran since the revolution.

Sanasarian's study (1982) documents the women's rights movement in Iran until Khomeini, discussing the cooptation of the movement under Mohamed Reza Shah, and that women in the anti-Shah movement did not make feminism an issue, and therefore, did not achieve much by the overthrow of the Shah. The official repression of women's rights under Khomeini, i.e. demanding fights not already found in Islam, is understood by the author as a hopeless step backward for Iranian women.

However, a more recent study (Moghadarn, 1988) indicates that there is a discrepancy between ideology and practice regarding women in the Iranian Islamic Republic. Her data reveal that the massive expulsion of women from modern-sector employment that had been envisioned by the new ruling Islamic authorities has not occurred. Women's labor force participation in the urban areas has not changed and female government employment has actually increased since the Islamic revolution (1988:223). Indeed, overall female employment has increased from 13% of the work force in 1976 to 18% in 1982. Presumably these figures increased after 1982 with the effects of the war with Iraq being felt in the loss of males in the labor force. Economic imperatives have proven to be more powerful than ideological considerations.

Moreover, some women resisted the Islamization of personal status laws, noting the inconsistency of the new constitution that proclaimed equality between men and women, and Islamic Shari'a which may not treat men and women equally in such areas as divorce, inheritance and other family matters. Such public discussion has sharpened ideological differences, and a number of women parliamentarians who have come to be known as "Islamic feminists", have decried the suppression of women's rights as "un-Islamic" and "prejuclicial" to the basic rights of women. The effectiveness of this public dialogue was demonstrated when the government was obliged to criticize unofficial gangs of youthful Hizbollahi (self-styled "Partisans of God") who were roaming the streets enforcing the Islamic dress code for women. The President, Prime Minister and Speaker Rafsanjani are all on record as having denounced these vigilantes (IBM, p. 227).

Clear supporters of the state and representative, perhaps, of a new definition of women in Iran are the "Baseej Women", who number about 4000 and were organized in 1984 as an arm of the Islamic state. They are a volunteer force who undergo military training before being assigned to guard government ministries and banks (IBM, p. 237). Entrusting women with such public responsibility is contradictory to the earlier decisions of the Islamic Republic to remove women from the ranks of public officialdom, when in the early 1980s women judges and women holding top government posts were asked to resign. Such contradictions are not irrational, but are reflective of the unevenness or nonlinearity of social change. In an historical case like that of Iran, it becomes very difficult to state decisively whether things are getting better or worse for Iranian women under the rule of Islam.

To return to a basic question that has been posed, "Are women in Islam liberated and equal, or protected and dependent", in Iran? The answer is that both forces and tendencies are represented, and they are not necessarily diametrically opposed. In the Iranian constitution, "every citizen, whether female or male, has equal protection of the law," (this is more explicitly stated than at present time in the U.S. constitution), yet the Islamization of the law represents a denial of that equality in certain legal spheres. Likewise, while official ideology wants to "protect" women by keeping them confined to the domestic realm, real economic and political conditions have compelled women's representation in the work force to increase since the Islamic revolution. Such powerful contradictions act as a catalyst to the forward motion of the particular history of the status of women in Iran, whether punctuated developments occur under a Western-looking monarchy or an Islamic regime. This represents a more complex view of history than simple judgments of "progress" or "backward steps", and can embrace the view that the status of women has undergone a distinctive evolution in twentieth century Iran, one that can be best comprehended by examining its overall complexity.

The Egyptian Case

In Egypt, similarly contradictory voices can be heard, and, likewise, both are representative of thoroughly modem tendencies and developments. The secular, feminist movement has produced some modem authors, such as Nawal el-Saadawi, who has received a great deal of attention in the West for her radical views of the need for a socialist transformation of society to ensure women's rights.

The Islamic right responded to the growth of a feminist and mainly secular consciousness in Egypt with the creation of the Muslim Sisters, a clear extension of the Muslim Brotherhood. Certain well-known spokeswomen, such as Ni'mat Sidqi, articulate the now familiar position that women's rights are fully ordained in Islam. Scholarly and intellectual voices have been added to the Islamic right (countering the contention that fundamentalists are "blind followers" who are not educated or are antiintellectual), such as Aisha Abd alRahman, a noted Qur' anic scholar and university professor, who affirms the principle of male authority over women and criticizes the degrading and dehumanizing aspects of modernity (Hoffman-Ladd, 1987:36). Adding to the complexity of the international dialogue that is taking place on the subject, at least one Western expert on Islam (Esposito, 1982:108) has argued that Islam, overall, values equality over the principle of male authority over women.

The new Islamic movement in Egypt combines features of more traditional feminism tied to the secular nationalist movement with core values extracted from Islam. As such, Aisha Abd al-Rahman argues against the "men from our nation who want to eliminate our humanity in the name of Islam", as she decries "the other men from our nation who, in the name of civilization, want to tear off every covering, material and spiritual". The "truly Islamic" and the "truly feminist" option, she says, is neither immodest dress and identical roles for the sexes in the name of modernity, nor sexual segregation and the seclusion of women in the name of Islam. The right path is the one that combines modesty, responsibility and integration into public life with the Qur' anic and naturally enjoined distinctions between the sexes (Hoffman-Ladd, 1987: 37).

Having not experienced a social, political and religious revolution like Iran, the debate in Egypt has revolved around the role of Shari' a in state governance. That debate has advanced to the point where the Shari' a has been acknowledged by the Egyptian Parliament as the source of future legislation, a major concession to the growing political strength of the Islamic revivalist forces. While largely a "paper" concession with little of the kind of legislation that has characterized other Islamization moves, such as the banning of alcohol or the imposition of zakat, an Islamic method of taxation, nevertheless the turn away from secular modernism is pronounced in Egypt today.

The most visible expression of this, though by no means entirely diagnostic of the trend, is the widespread use of some form of Islamic dress by women, a marked difference from the Egypt of Nasser's days. The contemporary debate over the proper role for women in Egypt has focused on Islamic dress or Western-style clothing as the most obvious symbol of identifying oneself as either Islamic and modest or secular-Western and, presumably, immodest. This, too, is a false contradiction, for the revival of Islamic forms of dress has provided a way for the educated, professional woman to participate in public life and be both modem and Islamic. True to fact, Islamic dress has been adopted most enthusiastically by the urban female student or working woman-- the 80% majority of Egyptian peasant women have been generally indifferent to the movement, even after they migrate to the cities.

What is notable is the large-scale defection to the Islamic movements of middle class women, traditionally the most Western-oriented and secular segment of Egyptian society. This reflects not only the failures of the political and economic policies of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak which have alienated the middle class, but the powerful attraction of the Islamic alternative as a form of self-identification and cultural nationalism (Harem, 1988). The Egyptian constitution of 1971 states that women are equal to men in every respect that does not contradict Islamic Shari' a, and in wording that is similar to the Iranian constitution, the nature of that equality is subject to current interpretations of women's proper role in society. For the middle class woman, who is not compelled financially to work outside of the home for wages, the Islamic ideal of confinement provides the perfect rationale for her remaining out of the work force. The state has done its part as well by providing extended parental leave for women (increased to two years without pay) and supporting the use of women in part-time work at reduced hourly wages (Ibid, p. 214).

Despite these incentives, frequently couched in Islamic terms of "family", to keep women from joining the labor force, the percentage of women formally counted in the work force doubled from 1971 to 1981, increasing from 7% to 14%. These official statistics do not reflect the large number of women working outside of the home in the informal sector or in domestic production. The Egyptian case is complicated by the large number of predominantly male labor migrants, whose return in the late 1980s as the oil economy in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf became depressed, engendered a certain resentment against women who had filled the jobs left by the migrating men. A call for the return of working women to the home, couched in the name of Islamic family values, is an obvious temptation, but is one that has not had much positive response in Egypt.

Again, to restate the question for Egypt, "Are women in Islamic societies liberated and equal or protected and dependent?", the answer is neither, or both. Like Iran, the lack of a definitive response indicates that the question may be improperly phrased. Perhaps the question should be, "What factors internal to Arab and Islamic society, and what factors external to it have shaped the contemporary status of women?" In this restructuring of the basic question, the fundamentals of Islamic belief and practice can be considered; the essential characteristics and values of Arab society can be incorporated; and the interaction of these with Western culture, and its associated colonial history and current economic dominance, can treat the question of women with all of the complexity that it deserves.

TOWARD A THEORY OF ARAB-MUSLIM WOMEN AS ACTIVISTS

In order to comprehend the unique development of the status of women in Arab and Islamic culture, we must seek to explain this distinctive history on its own terms. We must look to the nature of Arab society itself and to the enmeshed character of Islamic religious culture; we must analyze the interaction of Western and Arab-Islamic cultures in the context of colonialism and the subordination of the latter to the former; and we must accept Islamic revival, even as it rejects us, for the powerful nationalist and cultural sentiments it expresses. With specific reference to an enhanced understanding of the status of Arab-Muslim women, I suggest the following set of propositions as a basis for a theoretical model which reshapes and reconstructs our analysis of modern women in the Arab and Islamic world.

1) Arab society was more patriarchal than the religion of Islam, which introduced a number of reforms improving women's status. Thus, Arab-Islamic society needs to be regarded as a modified form of patriarchy.

2) Sexual segregation, a social norm that idealizes confinement of women to the domestic arena, is part of a more general phenomenon recognized in gender studies as the male/public, female/private dichotomy.

3) The separation of women is not necessarily a harmful thing, and the high degree of female solidarity described in the literature, and the potential for mobilization of women through these dense networks is a largely unappreciated by-product of sexual segregation.

4) Historically, the beginning of the political mobilization of women in Arab-Islamic society is tied to the colonial experience and to the growth of nationalist movements.

5) Women as activists in secular, nationalist movements frequently develop a feminist agenda that associates emancipation with independence, thus contradictions and antagonisms between women and men tend not to develop.

6) Women's contribution to the nationalist struggle can be "progressive" and "modernist", especially as regards the demands of urban, educated women, and/or it can be conservative and preserving of traditional culture, when that integrity is threatened.

7) The participation of women in the more recent religious revivalist movements in Arab-Islamic societies can be seen as an extension of the earlier involvement of women in nationalist activities; each are forms of political mobilization.

8) "Islamic feminism" is a new presence in Arab-Islamic culture that can be analyzed as a unique combination of the foregoing cultural and historical variables. As a social-ideological construct, it has given the "new" woman a means by which she can be both modern and Islamic, without any irreconcilable contradiction between the two.

9) Contemporary Islamic revival and historical secular nationalism may confront each other more directly in the immediate future, and women's organizations will, as a result, experience greater polarization and sharper individual choices between the separate ideologies.

10) The activist woman in Arab-Islamic society, whether secularly or religiously motivated, is a courageous woman, like her counterparts elsewhere, in that she has taken the bold step outside of the domestic arena into the public world of men, and of ideas, and has entered that realm of effecting social change.

The foregoing proposals toward a theory of feminine mobilization, in secular and religious contexts, in the Arab-Muslim Middle East are offered as a means of going beyond particularized scholarship regarding the status of women in the region. They are intended to achieve an initial level of summary and generalization that can lead to more refined theoretical formulations which seek to explain the complex dynamic of female activism in the Middle East.

Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban is Professor of Anthropology at Rhode Island College.

This paper was originally presented at the New Hampshire International Seminar, at the University of New Hampshire in March 1989. The paper was later read at the College of the Holy Cross in November 1989, and at the Centre d'Etudes Maghrebines a Tunis in October 1990. I am grateful to the many colleagues, from various disciplinary backgrounds who attended these presentations, for their helpful comments and constructive criticism.

Beyond these public lectures, I gratefully acknowledge the insightful comments of Miriam Cooke, who read the paper while we were both fellows at Dartmouth College in 1990, and also Carol Bardenstein, of Dartmouth, and Eleanor Doumato of the University of Rhode Island. Tunisian feminist writer, Lilia Libidi, generously shared her own work and comments on the paper while I was residing in Tunis during the fall of 1990.

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