HERMENEUTICS AND HONOR:

Negotiating Female Public Space in Islamic/ate Societies

Edited by
Asma Afsaruddin
Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs XXXII
Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
1999
INTRODUCTION
THE HERMENEUTICS OF GENDERED SPACE AND DISCOURSE
Asma Afsaruddin
The study of gender as an academic discipline is a fairly recent development in
the humanities and social sciences. Pioneering works that have focused on gender
have considerably affected academic discourse on how we interpret the paradigms
of social, economic, and ultimately power relations between men and women, in
both modern and pre-modern societies. The study of the roles of women and related
issues of gender in Islamic/ate societies is an even more recent phenomenon and one
that spans several disciplines. Its growing importance and relevance to our times is
attested by the current explosion of publications on this theme and the spirited
debate that often accompanies this topic.
The Committee for the Study of Women and Gender in the Middle East and
Islamic Societies at Harvard University has been particularly fortunate in
contributing to this scholarly discourse by providing a forum for distinguished
scholars for the dissemination and discussion of their works. This monograph is a
collection of some of the papers that were presented under the auspices of this
committee between 1993-96 (with the one exception of a specially invited paper)
which address the broad topic of women's participation in the public sphere and
their efforts to connect what has traditionally been connoted by the term "private"
(construed as the feminine realm) to the "public" (construed as the masculine realm).
The predominant academic discourse in the West about these binarily contrasted
spheres, especially in the Middle Eastern and Islamic/ate context, has been
somewhat skewed, rooted as it has been in Western self-referential understanding of
these terms and ahistorical scholarship (Nelson 1974; Rohrlich-Leavitt 1975).
Social and feminist historians have recently begun to emphasize that the notions of
private and public must be historicized by linking them to the hierarchies of power
and social relations in which they are embedded (Rosaldo 1980). They argue that
the public/private dichotomy is a meaningless one unless studied in reference to
"the specificities of gender, culture, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and historical
time" (Helly and Reverby 1992:6). In Middle Eastern history, Peirce (1992, 1993)
has shown that the inner sanctum of the imperial harem, in the Ottoman milieu of the
16th century, was in fact the real locus of both male and female political power.
Public inaccessibility was an indicator of both male and female high social status
and, therefore, "c
onventional notions of public and private are not congruent with gender" (Peirce
1993:45). Judith Tucker (1985:102-31) in her study of women in 19th century
Egypt points out that lower class urban and rural peasant women were involved to a
considerable extent in the social and economic institutions basic to their society in
that century. In Margot Badran's translation of the memoirs of the Egyptian
4
feminist Huda al-Sha
c
rawi (d. 1947), we find women of the elite class in the first
quarter of the 20th century, while the harem system still prevailed, occupied with
philanthropic activities, attending lectures in (segregated) public space, and
participating in the male-led nationalist movement (Shaarawi 1987). Mary Ann Fay
(1996, 1997) in her recent research into the lives of elite women in 18th century
Cairo found them actively engaged in administering their households and property
held independently of their husbands. Such studies subvert the private/public
binary and popular perceptions of the harem, especially as lodged in the Western
consciousness (Tapper 1979; Ahmed 1982; Alloula 1986; Kabbani 1986) and
fostered in certain quarters of academe by a peculiar anthropology of the Orient,
especially of the Muslim Orient (Carrier 1992; Asad 1986)
1
-- spawned by that
dialectal process termed Orientalism by Edward Said (1978). A majority of the
papers in this collection challenge the notion of rigidly demarcated and mutually
impenetrable territories of male vs. female inhabitancy. Rather, they serve to show
that the private and public bipolarity has often been anything but and that, indeed,
the two may be plotted along a continuum yielding far more points of contact with
the other in varying historical and social circumstances. Such an insight impels us
to re-examine the notion of one grand paradigm of gender relations and gender
exclusivity in cultures dominated by what are generally perceived to be Islamic/ate
5
values.
A word or two about the use of the various terms Muslim, Islamic, Islamicate,
and Islamist in this introduction seems appropriate here. Muslim and Islamic are
used interchangeably for societies that have a large Muslim population and whose
value systems are derived from a commonly shared Islamic tradition (whether Sunni
or Shi ci) before the period of European colonization or of the influence of Western
political ideologies (whether Western capitalism or Marxism). I am using
Islamicate, to resuscitate Marshall Hodgson's term (1974:1:58-59), for the
subsequent "modern" period (roughly from the 19th century on) to describe
societies which maintain and/or have consciously adopted at least the public
symbols of adherence to traditional Islamic beliefs and practices. Such societies or
considerable segments within such societies may regard Islam as a
civilizational-ideological construct on a par with and complementary to the
constructs of Western secular culture and feel themselves free to borrow
haphazardly from both systems. They do not, however, found the greater part of
their legal system on an Islamic basis nor attribute their state formation to the
realization of religious objectives (with very few notable exceptions). Islam in such
countries is more a shared "idiom," (Mardin 1989:3-7) and a cluster of "signals,"
such as collective celebrations and festivals, individual and communal rituals
6
(Arkoun 1994:62), assumed to be characteristic of Islamic/ate societies. Most
countries of the world today with a majority of Muslim inhabitants would be
considered examples of modern Islamicate societies. The imperative for
maintaining this distinction between "Islamic" and "Islamicate" arises from the fact
that there is no counterpart on the "Islamic" side to the epithet "Western" as used to
describe societies of modern Europe and North America today. "Western" in
reference to these regions evokes inter alia their shared Judeo-Christian heritage,
whose primacy, however, has become greatly attenuated and superseded by
politico-cultural values that are essentially areligious. A parallel use of "Eastern"
for countries traditionally regarded as Islamic is, of course, not possible since the
term "Eastern" encompasses broadly divergent social, cultural, and religious
systems, the Islamic one being only one of them. Although not a term that has
gained wide currency, Islamicate, for all the insightful reasons Hodgson enumerated,
seemed to be currently the appropriate available term to designate such countries,
where allegiance to Islam is cast in emotive and broadly cultural, experiential terms
rather than legal and theological.
Islamist is reserved for certain political activist groups within Islamicate
societies (for our purposes; such groups can of course exist in societies with
minority Muslim populations) whose primary wish is to govern and be governed
7
only by Islamic principles as they define them. On this account, these groups are
described as subscribing to "political Islam" (see, for example, Beinin and Stork
1997). Some of these activists advocate total adherence to the Shari`a (religious or
canon law) as formulated in the pre-modern period and see in Islam a monolithic
religio-political construct to countervail competing Western ideologies. As a
consequence, they have been labeled "Muslim" or "Islamic fundamentalists" by
some (see, for example, Esposito 1977), a nomenclature that is not without its
problems (Beinin and Stork 1997; Ghadbian 1997). Such activists may be of the
view that the Islamic East and the secular West are irreversibly set on a collision
course, evoking the specter of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations"
(Huntington 1993, 1996).
2
Others maintain that there is a distinction between
"Muslim fundamentalists" as described above and "Islamists," the latter term being
reserved for political activists who are also engaged in "modernist" interpretations
of Islamic scripture and the Shari
c
a (Zubaida 1997; Krmer 1997). "Modernist" in
our usage may be understood to refer to a "tendency to emphasize the flexibility of
Islam in the public sphere and to use this flexibility to interpret Islam in terms
congruent with, or at least in very positive dialogue with, one or more Western
ideologies" (Shepard 1987:311). The lines of distinction between "fundamentalist"
and "Islamist" remains somewhat blurred; certainly, in present usage, the two terms
8
are used quite interchangeably without reflection.
3
I should point out that the
contributors to this monograph do not necessarily use my terminology or may use
similar terminology but in a different sense, with which I have not tampered since
these terms are still evolving and being used with considerable imprecision.
4
The unifying theme of the papers contained in this volume is women's traversal
of public space and the process of negotiation of their gendered identities that this
entails. Many of the papers detail women's exploration of avenues that enable
self-empowerment. Empowerment here for our purpose connotes the carving out of
public space by the women for themselves, sometimes paradoxically by not even
leaving the home, through the medium of which they are able to derive benefits for
themselves and impose their presence on society at large. Identity empowerment
theory in feminist scholarship emphasizes "that all women can make some
constructive changes to enhance and improve their situations, however restricted
those situations" (Hall 1992:2), in particular, by consciously linking the private and
public aspects of their lives (Bernard 1981). Too often, the "power" in
empowerment has been equated with physical visibility and prowess which
automatically privileges the traditionally masculine realm of the outside world as
the real locus of meaningful acitivity (Smith 1990; Harding 1991). In the traditional
Islamic milieu, the general occultation of women from public view (more so for
9
upper- and middle-class rather than for working-class women) has not necessarily
nullified effective participation in public venues and the extraction of benefits from
public institutions. Rather, a lack of knowledge of the avenues that exist/ed for
exacting social redress and an inability to exploit these avenues on the part of
women have often led to their disenfranchisement. In her recent study of Yemeni
society, Sheila Carapico has observed that women's roles and rights were contingent
more on "specific features of status, class, and the politics and economics of
development" (1996:96) than on immutable religious and social values. Such
observations have been replicated in the study of women's lives in other parts of the
Middle East in both the pre-modern and modern periods; as, for example, in Iran
(Friedl 1991), in Turkey (Marcus 1992a, 1992b), and in Iraq (Rizk Khouri 1996,
1997). Empowerment theory suggests "that women's behavior and quality of life
can be changed by increasing their awareness of the strength of social influences
and of the interplay between intended and unintended consequences of women's
decisions and actions" (Hall 1992:2). Women everywhere, after all, possess some
degree of influence or informal power; how this power is exercised and to what
extent is as much a result of a woman's internal development as it is of the external
factors that impinge on her life (Leacock 1986; Rosen 1984). For women of means
and education in Islamic/ate societies, the exercise of power, formal or informal,
10
and negotiation of public space have frequently been less of an ordeal than for
women who do not enjoy the same advantages. The papers in our collection show
time and again that social class, economic status, and educational attainment are
variables that profoundly dilute the traditional dichotomy between the public and
private spheres.
The public/private discourse in the Islamic setting inevitably raises the issues of
veiling and feminine modesty and the consequences they create for the definition of
both individual and collective honor. Interestingly, both the phenomena of veiling
(and its attendant practice of seclusion) and unveiling in Islamic/ate societies have,
by social historians and Muslim modernists, been attributed to alien influence;
Byzantine and Persian for the former, modern Western European for the latter. This
attribution pits Muslim modernists against Islamist activists in a distinctive
"discourse of the veil," in which the former inveighs against the veil's foreign
provenance on the basis of the first attribution while the latter upholds its essentially
Islamic character on the basis of the second attribution. The Arabic word hijab is
generally understood to refer to the practice of veiling or to the veil itself (which in
itself can assume various forms). In a recent study of the word itself, Stowasser
(1997) has shown it to be a complex term that has implied different usages in
different stages of its evolution and application. The term taken exclusively to refer
11
to concealing attire today (divorced from the notion of seclusion) represents the last
stage of its semantic development. From the non-Muslim and especially modern
Western viewpoint, female coveredness has often impressionistically served as a
barometer for guaging female subjugation; a casual exposure to Western print and
broadcast media coverage of the Middle East tends to confirm this impression.
Veiling as a consequence becomes equated with powerlessness and dependency
while its absence is associated with independent feminine agency (Ahmed
1992:142-68). Some Muslim modernists and feminists, especially of the late 19th
century and early 20th century, have accepted this equation as well. Muslim
reformists like Muhammad
c
Abduh (d. 1905) who had served as the rector of
al-Azhar University in Cairo and Qasim Amin (d. 1908), a prominent Egyptian
lawyer, blamed the practice of veiling for having contributed to the "backwardness"
of Muslim women and their general disenfranchisement (Ahmed 1992; Badran
1991:204-5). This rough and ready correlation between veiling and powerlessness
has been challenged by the attempts of social historians to restore women to the
historical mainstream. Recent and not-so-recent scholarly studies make it difficult
to reconcile the above equation with the life of, for example, A'isha bint Abi Bakr,
the wife of the Prophet, (a commonly evoked symbol of early Muslim feminism),
who we may assume was always veiled, but who displayed an aggressive public
12
persona in 7th century Madina (Abbot 1942a; Spellberg 1994). How, we may ask,
would this pat formula apply to women who, especially in the formative and early
medieval periods of Islamic history, have gone into battle, imparted religious
knowledge to men and women, endowed charitable institutions, offered political
advice to rulers and ruled themselves, presided over literary salons, among other
activities (for example, Abbott 1942b, 1942c, 1946; Ahmed 1992; Siddiqi
1993:117-23; Berkey 1992:161-81; Mernissi 1993; Walther 1993:103-53; Hambly
1998)? How would we then explain the power of certain dynastic women in 16th
century Ottoman Turkey who, despite their residence in the harem, exercised
considerable influence in the court politics of their time (Peirce 1993)? What are we
to make of 20th century educated Muslim women who charge into public
professions, clothed from head to toe (Makhlouf 1979; Macleod 1990; Zuhur 1992;
Hessini 1994)? Clearly, the variegated nature of Muslim societies over time and
place and the complexities of the lives of Muslim women do not allow for such a
meretricious equation.
In modern Islamist circles, the adoption of veiling by women acquires a
distinctive semiotic connotation whereby it is equated with moral-cultural-political
authenticity and superiority for both the woman and her family, especially her male
relatives, in the face of Western encroachment (El Guindi 1981; Rugh 1984, 1986;
13
Bennigsen 1985; Badran 1994b:203).
5
In the Islamicate milieu of the late 20th
century, the conscious adoption of the veil by Islamist women as a marker of their
professed ideology is sometimes coupled with greater political activism on their
part and ironically, therefore, with greater public visibility. Nilofer Gle, in her
recent study of Muslim women activists in Turkey, has recently underscored this
seeming paradox when she states, "The new social visibility of Islamist women,
who are outspoken, militant, and educated, brings about a shift in the semiotics of
veiling, which has long evoked the traditional, subservient domestic roles of
Muslim women" (1996:21). As Juan Cole has remarked, veiling by educated
women today in the urban centers of the Middle East and other parts of the
Islamicate world, may be "the farthest thing from `traditional'" (1994:27).
The writings of recent feminists thus rightly warn of the dangers of engaging in a
reductive, gender-based essentialism that portrays gender -- and its concomitants --
as a globally constant phenomenon. McNay (1992:64) has remarked that due to a "...
failure to carry through a differentiated analysis of different cultural and historical
contexts, areas of women's experience are either not understood in their full
complexity, are devalued or remain obscured altogether" (see also Showstack
Sassoon 1987:19). Responsible scholarship that offers us a dispassionate, nuanced
look at the various ways in which women (regardless of their attire) appropriate
14
public space and assert their presence through social and political channels, not
always formal, available to them in widely varying political and historical contexts,
opens up whole new vistas for understanding -- and valorizing -- women's ad hoc
attempts at self-empowerment.
6
Honor, which figures prominently in the title to this collection, is another
concept that is laden with culturally specific semantic connotations. To an
overwhelming extent, honor in Islamic societies, for both men and women, is rooted
in the sexual behavior of women in common with other traditional, especially
Mediterranean, societies. Sexual impropriety may imply not only illicit sexual
relations but violation of an elaborate code that prescribes circumspect and
decorous social relations between the sexes. The term honor is the most common
English word used in translation of the corresponding terms sharaf,
c
ird.,
c
izzat, and
namus (originally Arabic terms borrowed into other Islamic languages as well)
current in various Islamic/ate societies. Anthropologists have attempted to study
the multifaceted implications of honor (and, its concomitant, shame) in relation to
Mediterranean, including Arab, societies (for example, Peristiany 1966; Schneider
1971; Wikan 1984; Abu-Lughod 1986; Gilmore 1987; Peristiany and Pitt-Rivers
1991; Stewart 1994). The interpretations they offer of this slippery yet powerful
notion often overlap with the meanings, pregnant with the immediacy of women's
15
personal experiences, that become apparent in the essays presented here.
Abu-Lughod (1990:47) has commented in her study of Bedouin society in this
century that "most people's ordinary public responses are framed in terms of the
code of honor and modesty" and that "violations of the code must be understood as
ways of resisting the system and challenging the authority of those who represent
and benefit from it." These essays, more than any abstract theorization, convey
eloquently the diverse inflections of this ubiquitous code in its various cultural
contexts and women's attempts to accommodate, challenge, and negotiate with it in
their quest for self-empowerment.
The first essay in this collection by Anan Ameri discusses efforts by
contemporary Palestinian women to gain more effective political representation
under the recently formed Palestinian National Authority headed by Yasir Arafat.
She gives us a detailed look at the history of the grassroots movement that grew up
among Palestinian women in conjunction with more conventional women's groups
in the formative period of the Palestinian resistance movement against the Israeli
occupation. In the post-Oslo environment, the conventional women's groups have
been subsumed under the more powerful and better organized men's groups,
including both Fatah and Hamas who often had their own agendas for the women.
Ameri's article highlights in particular the difficulties faced by women who seek to
16
articulate their needs in the post-colonial phase of state formation in the Third
World where "the State is potentially a mechanism either for social change or social
control in women's lives" (Alvarez 1990:273; see also Chhachhi 1991; Rai 1996).
Although the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) is not a state in the usual sense
of the word, it has assumed a similar regulatory function in its capacity to define the
public role of women.
State formation in the Third World, however, is markedly different from the
Western experience. These differences in the formation of the state and of civil
society are evoked in Gunnar Myrdal's (1968; 1970) classic formulation of the
"strong" state vs. the "weak" state. In general, strong states tend to be characterized
by a healthy infrastructural system that permits state policies to be effectively
implemented and allows for the central coordination of civil activities. The weak
state is bedeviled by an ineffectual, often corrupt, bureaucracy unable to implement
its policies effectively because of a disjunction of interests between the state and the
civil polity (Mann 1984; Myrdal 1970). According to this paradigm, most Third
World states are to be characterized as weak. Endowed with a weak infrastructural
power, as Rai (1996:33) points out, "the implementation of [state-sponsored]
directives can become hostage to random factors outside the control of the state"
which impedes its ability to effect social and economic transformation. The role of
17
the global economy is also an important consideration that affects women and
development (Moghadam 1996, 1998). Some (for example, Rosa 1987; Saadawi
1980; Marsot 1996) regard global capitalism and modernization as adversely
affecting state formation in the Third World, leading to the exacerbation of social
crises within weak states, including a further degradation of women's positions in
such societies. Many of these factors appear to be all too painfully applicable in the
current Palestinian situation. Sara Roy (1994, 1995a, 1995b) has documented the
serious social and economic malaise that has afflicted Gazan society in the
aftermath of the September, 1993 Oslo accord between the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) and Israel, a phenomenon she has termed "de-development."
Roy (1995b:13) particularly points to the weakening of critical support structures
such as schools, the extended family, and political institutions under limited
self-rule leading to a "... decline in collective and participatory behavior [as] are
seen in the lack of community consensus and withering away of community action."
In her survey, Ameri shows the impact of many of the above factors on the
current process of creating a Palestinian civil society and on the women's movement
in particular. She documents the changing nature of women's organizations,
particularly the General Union of Palestinian Women, which in their formative
period were more concerned with rallying political support for the PLO under
18
Israeli occupation than with explicitly feminist objectives. By 1978, the Women's
Work Committees had been formed with leftist support, which represented a
broader spectrum of women and had a more consciously feminist agenda. During
the Intifada of the late eighties, these women's groups gained heightened local
prestige and international visibility because of their active role in combating Israeli
repression, which gave them added confidence in themselves (see also Holt 1996).
In the post-Oslo context, the situation has changed dramatically; the
marginalization of the left, the indifference of the Palestinian National Authority
(PNA) towards women's issues, and the growth of Islamist movements that looked
askance at, particularly, secular feminism, have fractured and demoralized these
women's committees. The general trend has been away from grassroots activities
and towards institutionalization. As Ameri describes it, the women's movement as a
consequence "seems to have boiled down to a few internationally funded, city-based,
well-furnished, and well-equipped offices." Women at the grassroots level feel
betrayed by the leadership of the Palestinian National Authority and by the women's
groups coopted by the PNA who drafted the Women's Charter without consultation
with them. As a consequence, these women feel that the Charter does not
adequately address their concerns and interests. This has allowed religious
fundamentalists to gain ground at the grassroots level by providing basic social
19
services, which the institutionalized groups cannot or will not do, consequently
earning the loyalty of marginalized groups, including certain women. While secular
women have regarded this development with dismay (remembering Hamas's efforts
in the past to impose veiling on women), even they concede the appeal of Islamist
groups who do provide essential services -- in lieu of rhetoric -- to women.
The move towards institutionalization has been perceived by some as being
dictated by the interests of the international donor community which seeks to
depoliticize women and integrate Palestinian society within the global economy.
These foreign donors mandate "gender training," among other things, as part of the
agenda of non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), to the mystification of some
grassroots activists who view such activities as unrelated to the actual
empowerment of women. Caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, the
future of women's grassroots organizations remain at best tenuous since they lack
the paraphernalia and financial support of more conventional organizations. The
attempts of women to arrogate to themselves the right to articulate their own
concerns in a public forum unmediated by establishment (and, therefore, largely
masculine) sanction have evoked not sympathy but local and international
suspicion.
Shahla Haeri's article on the connection between the physical rape of individual
20
women in Pakistan and the political rape of a prominent female political personality,
Benazir Bhutto, who had also served as that country's prime minister, is both
provocative and illuminating. It is disturbing to note that a country which can elect
a woman to its highest office, when such a phenomenon is hardly a common
occurrence elsewhere in the world, can also witness incidents of rape that are acts of
political and/or tribal vendetta. Rape in this instance earmarks the violated woman
as a medium for getting back at politically active male relatives -- what Haeri
describes as "a modern improvisation on the theme of `feudal honor rape.'" Under
Benazir Bhutto, this scenario acquired an additional gruesome twist. Haeri suggests
that because the political leader in this case was a woman who was otherwise
unassailable, male politicians from rival political camps got "even" with her by
terrorizing less powerful female proxies who directly stood in for their more
powerful equivalent. A woman raped is a woman totally debased and shamed by her
male assailant. When the assaulted woman stands in for a woman more powerful
and that powerful woman herself may represent a whole nation, then it is the rape of
a whole nation, Haeri avers. This is so, because the honor of both men and women
hermeneutically inhere in the woman; she is regarded even as the very
personnification of honor. Her loss of honor leads to the accrual of collective shame
that cuts across gender lines. These gruesome events demonstrate that, unlike the
21
male politican, the female politician considered to have stepped out of line invites
reprisals constructed in gendered, sexual terms. In spite of having acquired the
trappings of public, therefore, masculine power, she is still perceived as being
trapped in her private, therefore, feminine persona; the politically wayward woman
is the equivalent of a morally wayward woman, to be punished in a sexually
atavistic manner.
Haeri further depicts how women who do choose (rarely) to step forward to point
an accusing finger at their rapists are usually ostracized by Pakistani society, by
their own families,
and tribes. To make matters worse, the Hudood Ordinances of Pakistan which deal
with rape and its penalty, places the onus of proof on the raped woman, making her
susceptible to charges of fornication/adultery (zina) should she categorically fail to
establish the guilt of the man.
7
Such a "fallen" woman may then be subject to
punitive measures, including honor killing, levied by the men in her family and tribe
in order to recover their lost collective honor. As a result, very few women who
have been raped choose to speak up and visit its drastic consequences on themselves
or their families. In recent times, women's and human rights groups have
increasingly begun to speak out against the plight of raped women and have offered
moral and emotional support to such women who have sought legal retribution in
22
limited cases. One may cautiously see in this a glimmer of hope for the foreseeable
future.
Julie Peteet's paper offers us another look at Palestinian women, whose identity
as political actors is still inextricably bound to their biological functions and sexual
roles, creating what she calls a "discourse of somatization." This discourse is
concerned with gender and sexuality at one end; class and nationalism on the other.
The uneasy alliance between nationalism and feminism, already brought into relief
by Ameri, is similarly underscored by Peteet. Nationalism, at best, has an
ambivalent relationship to feminism; as an oppositional movement, nationalism
tends to be supportive of feminist objectives. Should nationalist movements come
to power, more frequently than not, they prove to be the bete noire of feminism,
adopting an adversarial stance vis-! -vis feminist movements and viewing the latter
as subversive of their overall aims. The latter situation, as shown by both Ameri and
Peteet, now prevail in the PNA-controlled areas. With men effectively in control of
the discourse of somatization, women's identities as citizens and political actors,
both in the pre- and post-Oslo phase, have been subsumed by their familial and
social roles, emanating from their biological functions and their relationships to
men. This is clearly illustrated by the fact that Palestinian citizenship is strictly
defined in patrilineal terms; a Palestinian woman cannot transmit Palestinian
23
nationality to her children in the event of her marriage to a non-Palestinian man.
The situation is further complicated by the Islamist coloring that Palestinian
nationalism has acquired. This development has had a strong impact on the lives of
women, particularly over the issue of veiling. The semiotics of veiling prevalent in
Islamist circles is a development that has occured in the aftermath of European
colonialism and with the construction of modern Western society as the "other" in
the Islamist consciousness (Tavakoli-Targhi 1994). The adoption (or non-adoption)
of veiling has acquired such political (and moral) valency that the entire ideological
confrontation between the Muslim East and the (post-)Christian West, appears, at
least impressionistically, to become reduced to this one practice.
8
Foucault has
commented on the body serving as the site of "micro-physics of power" (1979:28)
through which the larger social struggles over power are refracted. Islamist
ideologues have been fully prepared to exploit this strategy.
9
As Peteet points out,
Hamas in its Islamization of Palestinian nationalism called upon women to veil
themselves for then they would be contributing to the Palestinian resistance in the
most morally effective manner. The private comportment of women was thus
reformulated as an act of public resistance, symbolizing the seizure of the higher
moral ground against the Israelis. Here we find the private merging with the public
in a spectacular fashion where veiling forefronts not feminine modesty but defiance
24
(traditionally prized in men only) of a repressive authority. Women who resisted the
efforts of Islamist men to appropriate their bodies as the loci of nationalist resistance
could then legitimately be seen as betraying the national cause. Framing
nationalism within an Islamist discourse of morality allowed Hamas activists to gain
unprecedented leverage over women's private and public conduct and to rescript
their own suppression of women's civil rights as a justified part of a program of
moral resistance to a greater political repression by an occupying force.
10
The failure of the nationalists to intervene in this situation on behalf of the
women has led to disillusionment with nationalism. Peteet ends by pointing out that
in the post-Oslo phase of nation-building, Palestinian women are increasingly
appealing to democratic and human rights, rather than specifically feminist rights,
to challenge Islamist and nationalist definitions of gender-based, patriarchal notions
of women's private conduct and public agency. By reappropriating the discourse of
somatization and reformulating it within the framework of secular and democratic
values, they are seeking to break down the bifurcation of private and public spheres.
The private is public after all, they insist; in a democratic, pluralistic society, the
woman in her role as an independent public citizen should gain control of her
private life as well -- through state intervention if necessary.
The similarity of women's experiences in Islamic/ate societies seeking to assert
25
their identities during the process of formation of civil society and modernization
becomes apparent in the article by Nayereh Tohidi who treats of many of the same
social phenomena described by Peteet and Ameri, for example, but in relation to the
former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Tohidi makes the telling point that no one
paradigm, whether it be of "Islamic determinism" current among Western
Orientalists or of "economic reductionism" popular among Marxist-Leninist
ideologues, captures or adequately explains the diversity of women's experiences
and gender issues in post-independence Azeri society. Women's organizations
under Soviet sponsorship suffered from the same disjunction described elsewhere
between state-imposed policies and the actual needs of women in the real world.
Although these state-sponsored organizations were high on rhetoric and short on
deliverance, Tohidi points out that a small number of educated, politically active
women were able to wrest some benefits for themselves and for the women's
movement in general from these organizations. Tohidi's analysis shows that
women's ad hoc clubs established by Azeri women themselves, outside of
state-sponsored circles, were the most successful in representing women, for they
were "consonant with their own demands and aspirations, an extension of the Jadid
goals, rather than a set of alien or imported colonial ideas." These ad hoc clubs were
often just the local sewing circles and even women's bath houses, proving once
26
again the fluidity with which the private can become transmuted into the public.
The issue of veiling vs. unveiling remained a minor one at this stage, although
potentially charged with political implications.
The resurgence of traditional Islamic and nationalist values in pre- and
post-Soviet Azerbaijan has complicated the issues of gender relations and women's
presence in the public sphere. On the one hand, Tohidi points out, conservative
Muslim clerics opposed secular modernization, including the women's movement,
while on the other, Azeri Muslim modernists, who launched the Jadid movement in
the 19th century, adopted women's issues as part of their reformist and modernizing
movement. The Jadidists promoted female education among other measures to
improve the position of women. Like-minded intellectuals founded journals like
Ishiq that advocated women's rights and quoted Qur'anic verses and hadiths
(statements attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) in support of their position. Here
we find a typical hermeneutic tension between religious conservatives and
modernists; the former claims to find in Islam a mandate for women's subjugation to
men while the latter postulates that Islam has provided a blueprint for women's
liberation. Tohidi points out that ambivalence towards women's rights lingers on
today because the issue of women's emancipation is further complicated by its
association in some quarters with Soviet cultural imperialism.
27
Post-independence Azerbaijan is today characterized by political fragility and
economic uncertainty. As has occurred repeatedly throughout history in different
times and places, a nation that is seeking to find its way and is unsure of its identity
generally holds women's desires for professional and public fulfilment hostage to its
own quest for security.
11
That this mind-set is replicated in today's Azerbaijan is,
therefore, not surprising. The stress on family cohesiveness bolsters its sagging
morale; the pervasive code of honor (namus) maintains social order. Women, as the
culture-bearers and moral exemplars of the nation, represent the last defense against
internal corrosion of its family and ethno-cultural values and encroachment upon
them from without. Tohidi, however, finds in the versatility of Azeri society, with
its fluid interpretation of Islamic norms and of national, cultural, and gender issues,
the potential for future amelioration in the status of women. Virginia Danielson's
article takes us away to the somewhat different realm of music and cultural activity.
One important point to emerge from her presentation is that this realm was sort of a
gender-neutral zone where the private and the public could interface with almost
casual ease. Part of the reason for this appears to be, as Danielson points out, is that
this realm, in the early stages of its evolution, was often peopled by the female
performer's family, friends, and neighbors, who as extensions of her private world,
mediated and facilitated her public role. This transitional "cultural zone," if I may
28
call it that, facilitated the acceptance of such performance on the part of women and
the extension of such activity beyond its original sphere.
Danielson charts the development of commercial entertainment establishments
in Egypt in the 19th century under the patronage of the Khedives, reflecting
European influence. The commercialization of "the cultural zone" had significant
repercussions on public perceptions of the female entertainer. The entertainment
industry was now seen as alien, inherently iniquitous, and, therefore, threatening to
the moral fabric of society. Women performers were not required to retreat
altogether from public entertainment but rather had to prove that in spite of their
heightened public presence, they still subscribed to traditional norms of moral
behavior and respectability. Danielson indicates the creative ways in which the
performers responded to the situation without sacrificing professionalism. One
principal and very public manner of indicating conformity with society's
expectations was to adopt modest attire. In Islamic/ate societies, modest garb on
professional women helps blur the lines of demarcation between the private and
public, allowing them to inhabit both spaces simultaneously (for example, Hessini
1994). In lieu of supportive family members who "buffered" the female performer
from the intrusiveness of the public zone, modest clothing allows the woman to
retain the privateness of her identity in the realm of public performance, investing
29
her activity with a legitimacy that it would otherwise lack in the collective
perception. The photographs that accompany this article graphically convey the
artful, imaginative ways in which these professional women engaged with public
expectations of honorable behavior and respectable attire while negotiating their
inroads into public space.
Leslie Peirce's article transports us back in time to the 16th century courts of
Ottoman Turkey to engage us in legal discourse concerning the status of women. In
this period, two broad categories of women were identified in Ottoman society, the
muheddere ("respectable") and by default non-muheddere women. As Peirce
emphasizes, these were also terms that connoted class affiliation, the former term
referring to "elite" women, the latter to "common" women; as primarily
socio-economic terms, they were thus also applied to non-Muslim women. In the
original Arabic from which the term is borrowed, muhaddar refers to what is
sedentary and, therefore, civilized, reflecting an early cultural bias that was to
develop in the Islamic world in favor of the urban, organized mode of existence over
the itinerant life-style of the Bedouin, often regarded as beyond the "reach" of
civilization. This world-view, in the urban context, would also come to recognize
differences in social status based primarily on lineage and occupation. That such a
world-view found eventual codification in law is not suprising; law is, after all, not
30
merely "abstracted discourse" about social realities but is in itself shaped by those
very realities (Hallaq 1997:162). Ottoman court records thus tend to reveal elitist
interpretations of the law by the imperial muftis, even in the shari ca courts,
reflecting an amalgam of curfi (customary) and normative law. In one instance, Ibn
Kemal, the famed jurist, is recorded as saying that he would exempt a seyyid (a
descendant of the Prophet) from incurring punishment if he were to curse an
ordinary person; if the latter, however, were to respond in kind, he would have to
suffer the consequences of his deed. This kind of legal reasoning is based on the
recognition of a system of "vertical" honor or "positive" honor, as termed by
anthropologists, which has been defined by Stewart (1994:59) as "the right to
special respect enjoyed by those who are superior, whether by virtue of their
abilities, their rank, their services to the community, their sex, their kin relationship,
their office, or anything." Curiously, this notion of vertical or positive honor breaks
down in sexual matters. Peirce points out how the elite class, and, especially elite
women, could incur a higher penalty than the lower classes in matters of sexual
indiscretion, for the ensuing social fallout would be greater in a case involving a
muheddere woman, both for the woman herself and her closest male relatives.
In his study of an Islamic law court in modern-day Morocco, Lawrence Rosen
(1989:44) remarked "how cultural assumption, legal approach, and substantive law
31
are all deeply entwined." His observations led him to conclude that he was dealing
with a legal system "whose constant emphasis is not on a series of antecedent
concepts but on evaluating the consequences of people's actions," (1989:45) a
remark that seems equally apposite in relation to the 16th century Ottoman court.
Classical Islamic legal theory evidences a strong concern for promoting the public
good or interest (in Arabic maslaha) that manifests itself on the ground as showing
more of a regard for the spirit of the law rather than its text (Hallaq 1997:89). The
punishment should fit the crime as perceived in terms of public utility; the sexual
impropriety of a high-born woman is far more disruptive of social harmony than that
of a woman from the lower echelons of a society and thus must be punished
accordingly. The rationale behind the Ottoman mufti's pronouncements in our
specific case is, therefore, best discerned through a cultural analysis of the intricate
nexus of class and gender relationships that defined Ottoman society and
maintained social equilibrium. The calculus of consequence evoked by the mufti is
found to be eminently sensible when viewed against the backdrop of cultural
assumptions of honor and the complex, myriad ways in which these assumptions,
referenced by class and gender, impacted upon people. As Peirce herself had
remarked earlier (1993:8), Ottoman society of the 16th and 17th centuries tended to
resolve itself more along the lines of privileged vs. the common, the sacred vs. the
32
profane rather than public vs. private with all their attendant connotations. When
law is understood as largely embedded in culture, even to be culture itself, it comes
as no surprise that these cultural delineations of social reality find ample legal
articulation.
Our final paper is by Margot Badran which discusses "Islamic feminism(s)" and
the multiplicity of identities and discourses such a term currently implies. Badran
provides an extensive review of what feminism has meant in the 19th and 20th
centuries in Islamic/ate countries in their encounter with modernity, with women,
primarily from the upper and middle classes, seeking to challenge masculinist
constructions of modernity. Whereas masculine attempts to engage with modernity
were regularly (but not always) seen as politically legitimate, women's attempts to
gender the discourse of modernity were more commonly viewed as subversively
linked to an imperialist West that sought to undermine essential Islamic values,
especially concerning the family and the private sphere. Egypt, as Badran points out,
was in the vanguard of such feminist movements at the turn of the century in which
women insisted on claiming agency for themselves in defining their rights and did
so within the larger Islamic framework (also Tucker 1985; Badran 1989a, 1993).
Badran stresses that Islam has provided the subtext for much of the feminist
discourse generated in the last and present centuries in the Middle East, much more
33
than is currently acknowledged; the notable exception would be "state-sponsored"
femininism in Kemalist Turkey which consciously strove to divest it of Islamic
content. Lack of sufficient historicization and of critical deconstruction of concepts
having to do with gender, she says, have led to mislabeling and erroneous depictions
of feminist movements in the Islamic/ate context, both by indigenous and Western
commentators. Badran heavily underscores the role that women's "revisioning
of Islam", as she terms it, through the hermeneutic of ijtihad, that is, through critical
rereading of Scripture and canon law, has played and continues to play in the
shaping of a distinctive Islamic feminism. There is at present a growing body of
literature that illustrates how Muslim feminists have sought and continue to seek
support for self-empowerment in Islamic prescriptions, deliberately challenging
those who maintain that Islam and human rights for women are conceptually at odds
with one another. These feminists have tended to affirm that androcentric
interpretations of various Qur'anic verses by male exegetes and the propagation of
certain spurious hadiths with misogynist content have mandated the formation of
patriarchal societies and an inferior role for women in such societies (Ahmed 1992;
Mernissi 1991a, 1991b). They tend to emphasize interpretive readings of the Qur'an
premissed upon the notions of equality and justice which they insist it upholds for
both men and women; thus, allowing for an understanding of male and female social
34
roles as complementary and egalitarian rather than hierarchical and unequal
(Muslim Women's League n.d.; Sisters in Islam 1991; Badawi 1995; Muslim
Women's Georgetown Project 1995; al-Hibri 1997, 1998; Najmabadi 1998:65-72).
They point out that the Qur'an uses gender-inclusive language addressing believing
men and women equally (Wadud-Muhsin 1992; Ahmed 1992) and it relates
accounts of virtuous women as exempla for all humankind (Wadud-Muhsin
1992:29-42; Stowasser 1994:67-81). Muslim feminists and modernists tend to
stress that the position of Muslim women was much more egalitarian in the early
years of Islam before the final codification of the Shari
c
a by the 10th century by
male legists who sought to circumscribe women's public activities in the interests of
maintaining patriarchal social order (Esposito 1982; Ahmed 1992; Afshar 1996;
al-Hibri 1997). A new term "womanist Islamic thought" has recently been used to
refer to this school of thinking engendered by this type of hermeneutic initiative on
the part of Muslim feminists and modernists (al-Hibri 1998:542).
Badran astutely shows us how Muslim women activists, both in the world of
Islam and in diaspora, are progressively and successfully gendering Islamist
discourse by appealing, therefore, to the scriptural basis for gender egalitarianism.
12

In many ways, the feminist movement in the Middle East has come full circle.
Whereas the earliest feminist movement in Egypt formulated its discourse in Islamic
35
terms, subsequent feminist movements sometimes consciously strove to remain
secular in tandem with men's secular nationalist movements with which they were
allied. Secular, however, did not necessarily imply the wholesale rejection of
religious values but rather the recognition of religious difference while upholding
equal political citizenship for all. Thus the feminist movement sought to broaden its
platform and its constituency to include non-Muslim women as well, such as the
Coptic Christians in Egypt. Such a development paralleled the men's secular
nationalist movement which, in quest of similar objectives, sought to divest the
public, political realm of overt religious content and relegate religion to the private,
domestic sphere. But whereas men could compartmentalize their lives easily into
distinctive private and public zones, women could not. Their lives were still heavily
circumscribed by patriarchically interpreted religious laws operative in the private
sphere that restricted their access to the public sphere. This awareness has created a
wide-spread recognition among both secular and Muslim feminists that religious
reform must be part of their agendas.
In the late 20th century, Badran continues, the predominant feminist discourse is
once again inevitably being constructed within an Islamic paradigm, with women
insisting on the right to reinterpret and recast this paradigm. Although such an
enterprise is associated primarily with Islamist women, secular feminists are also
36
engaging with religion in their political activities. A dramatic indicator of this
newly coalescing alliance is the new support of secular feminists in Turkey for the
right of Islamist women to openly sport head-scarves as crucial signifiers of their
Islamist identity. According to Badran, Islamic feminism, in Turkey as in Iran,
Egypt, and elsewhere, is steadily blurring "the borders between [secular] feminisms
and gender-progressive Islamisms." This has enabled Muslim feminists to win a
new legitimacy for themselves, and consequently greater political and ideological
credibility for Islamic feminism. A gendered Islamist discourse of this nature is
helping to bridge the gap between secular and religious feminists on the one hand
and male and female Islamists on the other, creating a "middle space," an
"independent site between secular feminism and masculinist Islamism" where these
groups can meaningfully come together. Such an undertaking is full of danger,
Badran remarks, but also full of enormous opportunity; the new alliance that such
groups are capable of forging in this middle space could rewrite history, as she
predicts, in the 21st century.
Even in this relatively small collection of essays, we discover the multiplicity of
voices that lend tenor and timbre to the discourse about gender and space in
Islamic/ate societies. These voices harbinger genuine transformation of gendered
social and national identities in such societies. One of the most prominent Muslim
37
feminist voices (some would argue the most prominent voice) of this century
belongs to Huda Shaarawi, founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union in the 1920's.
In her memoirs (Shaarawi 1987), there is one telling episode that nicely
encapsulates the process of challenging and redefining gendered discourses and
boundaries and its potential for social transformation. In the early stages of her
feminist activity, Huda at one point agonized over what to name the women's
organization she had helped found; she, like others, recoiled from the use of the
word nadi ("club") with its dangerous associations with men's very public activities
in a realm physically off-limits to the harem-dweller. In 1925, Huda not only named
her association the Club of the Women's Union but by the early 1930s, she had also
moved the headquarters of the Egyptian Feminist Union right into the heart of Cairo
(Sha arawi 1987:132-33). It was a dramatic gesture of proud self-assurance,
signalling the coming of age of the women's movement in Egypt, its arrival at the
very center from the margins. The trajectory of this movement demonstrates
tellingly that the private cannot be neatly delimited from the public in the dialectics
of gender role configuration and transformation. Although their means may differ,
women everywhere are increasingly intent on conjoining the two spheres.

1NOTES
. Asad is particularly critical of the approaches of Western anthropologists like Ernest Gellner and
Clifford Geertz who, in their respective works Muslim Society (1981) and Islam Observed (1968),
38

resort to a "certain schematization of Islam" which "as a drama or religiosity expressing power is
obtained by omitting indigenous discourses, and by turning all Islamic behavior into readable
gesture" (emphasis in text; Asad 1986:9). He suggests that we may arrive at a more authentic
anthropology of Islam by seeking "to understand the historical conditions that enable the
production and maintenance of specific discursive traditions, or their transformation -- and the
efforts of practitioners to achieve coherence" (Ibid. 17).
2 For a trenchant critique of this thesis by a modern historian of the Middle East, see Mottahedeh
1995.
3 Ghadbian 1997:7 suggests that "`Islamist' (`Islamiyyun') is what people belonging to Islamic
movements call themselves, while `fundamentalist' is what their opponents derisively call them in
a foreign tongue."
4 See Shepard 1987 for an excellent discussion of this problem of nomenclature, particularly p.
327, n. 2, which also provides a useful review of the literature on this issue upto 1987.
5 The flip side of this argument is that Muslim feminism is then attributed to Western and,
therefore, imperialist provenance; see, for example, Ahmed 1984; Badran 1991.
6 For a study of ad hoc women's groups, see March and Taqqu 1986. See also Tucker 1983 in
which she shows that women's informal political and economic activities have tended to be
undervalued by mainstream society, and Rizk Khouri (1996) for her discussion of women's
attempts to circumvent and recreate gendered boundaries and spaces.
7 For a detailed look at rape laws in Pakistan, see Quraishi 1997. I am grateful to Prof. Azizah
al-Hibri of the University of Richmond School of Law for bringing this reference to my attention.
8 This is a view that is endemic in both Islamist and Western polemical discourse. For a discussion
of how this ideological war has been waged centered around Muslim family mores and especially
the status of the Muslim woman, see, for example, Mernissi 1984; Boudhiba 1985; Ahmed
1992:144-68; Gle 1996. Yvonne Haddad has referred to the veil as "the Silk Curtain" that
demarcates the Muslim East from the West in a talk sponsored by the Committee for the Study of
Women and Gender in the Middle East and Islamic Societies, Center for Middle East Studies,
Harvard University in March, 1996.
9 A recent New York Times article by Elaine Sciolino (1998) highlights this battle of civilizations
as encoded in female attire. According to this article, a Christian female missionary during a visit
to Iran resolutely refused to trade in her hat which, to her, symbolized her Christianness and her
Western heritage, for an Islamic head-scarf. In turn, the Iranian authorities insisted that she discard
her otherwise modest hat for a head-scarf, the only appropriate non-Western and authentically
Muslim head-covering acceptable to them.
10 In other parts of the Islamicate world, Islamist activism has been associated with mandatory
veiling for women and curbing of their public activities, as for example, has occurred in Iran after
39

the Islamic Revolution of 1978, and more recently, in Algeria and Afghanistan. However, this
situation cannot be generalized to all parts of the Islamicate world; the relationship between
subscription to political Islam and suppression of women's civil rights is not an absolute, linear one.
Tessler and Jesse (1996) in their recent study of Islamist activities in Egypt, Kuwait, and Palestine,
found that in Kuwait and Egypt in particular, men who supported Islamist movements did not
display more conservative attitudes regarding women's status than men who did not support
Islamist movements. Thus, they conclude, "there is no inevitability about the connection between
attitudes toward political Islam and attitudes toward women, meaning that support for Islamist
organizations does not necessarily come from those who hold conservative views about the status
of women" (Ibid.:215).
11 For this phenomenon, see Jayawardena, 1988; Hlie-Lucas 1994.
12 A stunning example of recent feminist hermeneutic initiative is offered by Najmabadi 1998:66.
The Iranian journal Zanan in an article has challenged the conventional interpretation of a specific
Qur'anic verse in the chapter on Women (Surat al-Nisa' 4:34), the first part of which is commonly
translated as "Men are in charge of (qawwamun
c
ala) women because God has preferred the one
over the other (or some of them over others) and on account of what they spend of their wealth."
Instead of understanding the Arabic verb qawwama as being derived from the root qym which
would yield the meaning of guardianship, the authors of the article argue that the verb is instead
derived from the root qwm which would imply standing up in support of someone, a radically
different exegesis that undermines the very basis of a patriarchally constituted family. For other
traditional and modernist interpretations of this verse, see Stowasser 1998; al-Hibri 1997. For
Zanan's activities, see also Mir-Hosseini 1996a, 1996b. For discussions of how modern feminist
discourse relies upon scripturalist interpretation to legitimize women's access to higher education,
see, for example, Omid 1994; Barazangi 1997.
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