Table Of ContentWOMEN IN THE MIDDLE EAST
WOlDen in the
Middle East
Perceptions, Realities and Struggles for
Liberation
Edited by
Haleh Afshar
Lecturer in Politics and Women's Studies
Department of Politics, University of York
Palgrave Macmillan
© Haleh Afshar 1993
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1993
All rights reserved. For infonnation, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1993
ISBN 978-1-349-22590-3 ISBN 978-1-349-22588-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-22588-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Women in the Middle East: perceptions, realities, and struggles for
liberation / edited by Haleh Afshar.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-312-07921-5
1. Women-Middle East-Social. conditions. 2. Women, Muslim
-Middle East. 3. Feminism-Middle East. I. Afshar, Haleh,
1944- .
HQI726.5.W67 1993 91-40070
305.42'0956-dc20 CIP
Contents
Notes on the Contributors vii
Acknowledgements x
Women in the Middle East - Perceptions, Realities and Struggles
for Liberation: Some Introductory Notes xi
PART I ISLAM IN WOMEN'S LIVES: THEORETICAL
PERSPECTIVES AND DAILY REALITIES
1 Development Studies and Women in the Middle East: The
Dilemmas of Research and Development 3
Haleh Afshar
2 A Western Invention of Arab Womanhood: The 'Oriental'
Female 18
Malika Mehdid
3 Women, Marriage and the Law in Post-Revolutionary Iran 59
Ziba Mir-Hosseini
4 Women's Everyday Religious Discourse in Iran 85
Zahra Kamalkhani
5 Attitudes to Female Employment in Four Middle Eastern
Countries 96
Ivy Papps
6 Women, Work and Power in the Rafsanjan Basin of Iran 117
Shahrashoub Razavi
PART II THE STRUGGLES FOR LIBERATION
7 Women's Resistance in the Arab World and in Egypt 139
Nawal El Saadawi
8 The Saddam Hussein Phenomenon and Male-Female
Relations in the Arab World 146
Ghada Karmi
v
VI Contents
9 Women in the Resistance Movement in Iran 158
Haideh Moghissi
10 The Emergence of a Joint Israeli-Palestinian Women's
Peace Movement During the Intifada 172
Juliet J. Pope
11 The Interrogation of Women 'Security' Detainees by the
Israeli General Security ServiCe 185
Teresa Thornhill
12 Women's Struggles and Strategies in the Rise of
Fundamentalism in the Muslim World: From Entryism to
Internationalism 206
Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas
Index 243
Notes on the Contributors
Haleh Afshar teaches politics and women's studies at the University of
York. She worked as a journalist and a civil servant in Iran before the
revolution and remains actively involved in Iranian politics. Her research
interests are centred on women, Islam and Iran. She has also been working
with Muslim women in west Yorkshire. She is a founder member of the
Development Studies Association's Women and Development Study Group
and is its joint convener. With Mary Maynard, she is the joint editor of
Macmillan's York Women Studies Series. She has edited Iran: A Revolu
tion in Turmoil (1985), Women, Work and Ideology (1985), Women, State
and Ideology (1987) and, with Bina Agarwal, Women, Poverty and Ideol
ogy in Asia (1990), Women, Development and Survival in the Third World
(1991), and, with Carolyne Dennis, Women and Adjustment Policies in the
Third World (1992).
Nawal EI Saadawi is an Egyptian doctor, novelist and militant writer on
Arab women's experiences and their struggles for liberation. Born in the
village of Kafr Tabla on the banks of the Nile, Nawal refused the limitations
imposed on her by both religion and colonial oppression which limited
women of rural origins to humble peasant lives of servitude. Nawal quali
fied as a doctor and rose to be Egypt's Director of Public Health, but her
activities as a campaigning and renowned author pursuing the cause of
women cost her first her job in the public sector and, for a time, her liberty.
She was sacked for publishing her book, Women and Sex, and for over ten
years her books were banned in Egypt. In 1981 she was imprisoned for
being a politically disruptive element. Undeterred, she continued and sub
sequently published her prison experiences in a new book written on scraps
of smuggled toilet paper Memoirs of the Women's Prison (1986). Nawal El
Saadawi has continued her untiring campaign and is a founder member of
the Arab Organisation for Human Rights. Her publications in English
include The Hidden Face of Eve (1980), Women at Point Zero (1983), God
Dies by the Nile (1985), Two Women In One (1985), Death of an Ex
Minister (1986), She has no Place in Paradise (1987), The Fall of the Imam
(1988), Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1988) and The Circling Song (1989).
Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas is an Algerian sociologist and social anthro
pologist who taught methodology and epistemology in the Social Sciences
vii
viii Notes on the Contributors
Department at the University of Algiers for twelve years. She is now a full
time activist and is the founder member and present coordinator of the
International Solidarity Network Women Living under Muslim Laws.
Zahra Kamalkhani is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology
at the University of Bergan. She has done field work with Iranian immi
grants and refugees and is currently working on a project on familial and
religious lives of women in Iran. She has published her MA thesis on
Iranian immigrants and refugees in Norway.
Ghada Karmi is a Research Associate in Near and Middle Eastern Studies
at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She has done extensive
research into medieval Islamic medicine, which formed the subject of her
doctoral thesis for the University of London. Currently, she lectures and
writes on Middle Eastern politics, particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Malika Mehdid was born and raised in Algeria where she obtained her first
degree in Conference Interpreting and Languages. She subsequently ob
tained her Master's degree in Translation Studies at the University of
Warwick where she is currently completing a PhD on the development of
Arab feminist literature. Her interests include the exploration of North
African literature and nineteenth-century French fiction.
Ziba Mir-Hosseini is a research fellow at Girton College, University of
Cambridge. She was born in Iran and obtained her first degree in sociology
from Tehran University, and her PhD in social Anthropology from the
University of Cambridge. She did fieldwork in four villages in northern
Iran, examining their changing economy and family structures. She is
completing a book on the Islamic family law based on her recent research
in the family courts of Iran and Morocco and has published several articles.
Haideh Moghissi teaches politics and women's studies at Queen's Univer
sity, Canada, where she completed her doctoral studies. She obtained her
first degree from Tehran University and was a founding member of the
National Union of Women and a member of the editorial board of Barabari
and Women in Struggle. She has written and published articles and chapters
about women in Iran and is currently writing a book on Populism and
feminism in Iran.
Ivy Papps is Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Durham.
Much of her research is concerned with applying economic analyses to
Notes on the Contributors ix
situations which are not generally considered the domain of economists.
She has published articles on the allocation of resources within households
and on determinants of bride price. She is currently working on a book about
the role of property rights in the determination of women's position.
Juliet J. Pope is currently writing a doctoral thesis on the political dis
course of Israeli and Palestinian women at St Antony's College, Oxford.
From 1987 to 1989 she conducted research in Israel as a Lady Davis Fellow
at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem. She has published articles on anti
Semitism and anti-Zionism in the women's movement and works as a tutor
in poetics at the Open University.
Shahrashoub Razavi is a research student at St Antony's College, Oxford.
She is currently working on her PhD thesis which is a comparative study of
gender relations in two regions of the Iranian province of Kerman.
Teresa Thornhill is a barrister and freelance writer who lives in London.
She specialises in family and criminal law and occasionally writes for the
Guardian. During 1990 she took a sabbatical to do research into the meth
ods of interrogation used by the Israeli secret police with Palestinian women
detainees. She was a contributor to The Boys in Blue: Women's Challenge
to the Police (1989).
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank all the participants in this project, including tl}ose
whose fme contributions could not be included in this volume. I hope that
we all learned much from one another. I am grateful for the patience,
kindness and hospitality shown by many of the authors. Some received me
in their homes and gave me not only revised chapters but also much food for
thought as well as for eating. I should also like to thank all those who
delivered their work punctually and then waited, with good humour, for the
stragglers.
It was a pleasure to host the meetings at York, where earlier drafts of the
chapters were discussed, and I should like to thank the British Society for
Middle Eastern Studies and the Development Studies Association for fund
ing these meetings. Thanks are similarly due to Miss Barbara Dodds for
helping to organise the meetings and for typing some of the chapters.
Last but not least, I should like to thank Maurice Dodson for holding the
fort and Molly and Ali for giving me the time, and occasionally even giving
up their beds, to help accommodate colleagues and contributors to this
volume.
HALEH AFSHAR
x
