Women in Islamic Societies Symposium

The symposium, "Women in Islamic Societies: New Questions in an Era of Globalization," was held on Friday, November 16th, 2001. The program was funded by the Al-Falah Research Program and sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Additional sponsors included the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Center for South Asian Studies, the Department of Women's Studies, and the Beatrice Bain Research Group. The conference organizer was Dr. Sherifa Zuhur, and the purpose of the meeting was to describe new topics and approaches to research on women and gender in Islamic societies.

Dr. Nezar Alsayyad, Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies introduced the program by underscoring the importance of defining new research questions at this particular historical moment. Dr. Sherifa Zuhur then described her efforts to assess the current interdisciplinary field of women's studies and gender in several scholarly gatherings including today's symposium in order to see precisely where and how these new research questions are being formulated. The opening speaker of the first panel, "Women, Transformation and Muslim Identity in the United States, Dr. Yvonne Haddad of Georgetown University in her lecture, "Re-Imagining Muslim Women for Cyberspace" described a project in which she and assistants had examined the content and orientation of thousands web-sites that reference Muslim women. A natural division arose between sites that describe Islamic practices favorably or negatively. She was most interested in sites that offer advice or "instant fatwas" to Muslim women seeking guidance. She emphasized the psychological impact of immediate access to such intervention, and how its normative tone and content was intended to redirect those who had strayed from the Straight Path. Some advisors' credentials were notably questionable, while the inquiring women's questions involved distinctly painful and personally crucial circumstances. "Mainstream verses Enclave: The Political Participation of Arab Muslim Immigrant Women," was then presented by Amaney Ahmad Jamal, who is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Jamal had investigated the development of civic and political consciousness among both female and male respondents. These resulted in a range of responses indicating how well the respondents understood their local political infrastructure, what they expected from it, and what sort of tactics they were willing to use to address their immediate problems. These problems might simply relate to infrastructure, or incidents of harassment or discrimination. The discussant, Dr. Lynne Wilcox, a Professor of Counselor Education at California State University, Sacramento, and a scholar/organizer of the Sufi community in the United States, brought up many of the troubling phenomena that Muslim women have experienced in the United States since the events of September 11, which have called into question the degree of tolerance available to Muslims in the United States.

Dr. Eleanor Doumato of the Watson Institute at Brown University presented focused on the role that public education, and specifically religious studies within that framework plays in the dissemination of a more conservative form of Wahhabism with global influence. This is characterized by a rejection of innovation, and the identification of nation with religion, and its consequent effects on women and gender. Further, an emphasis on community and conformity has been coupled with a sort of domino theory applied to all forbidden practices. In these, the situation in question, which may lead to such practices is disallowed as well as the practices themselves. Dr. Doumato noted that although 200 dissertations have been written on Saudi education, only a handful also study the role of the 'ulama. Engaging in these new research questions are vital in understanding the perceptions of Islam among Saudi radicals such as those involved in 9/11, but problems of access and interpretation would be involved.

Amira Sonbol presented "A History of Her Own: New Modes for Research on Muslim Women" and focused on the misconception that the Ottoman (Egyptian) legal system prior to its late nineteenth century modernization into new restructured shari`a courts and milla courts should have benefited women. Instead, it peripheralized women, claimed Dr. Sonbol, and diminished individuals' preexisting abilities to maneuver via the rules of the various madhahib. Dr. Sonbol suggested a number of areas in which further research is necessary, as in those issues in which gender and citizenship are defined.

Dr. Margot Badran of Cairo (and the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown) followed, alluding to the debate over the term "Islamic feminism," which she accepts, and sees personified in the discourse of various female (and male) actors in contemporary South Africa. South African Muslim women have not been included in studies of Muslim women to date. Dr. Badran discussed some differences in the various mosque or activist settings, and attributed the environment of activism to the legacy of the anti-apartheid movement. The discussant for this segment was Annalies Moors, who is the Director for the ISIM Center at the University of Amsterdam. She surveyed many of the most recent ways that scholars are approaching Islam, women, and gender, including such influential work as that of Leila Ahmed and Afsaneh Najmabadi, as well as critiquing and commenting on the papers.

The afternoon session focused on Islamization and women. Dr. Yesim Arat of Bogazici University discussed her research on Islamist women, specifically women active in the Refah (Welfare) Party. No other political party in Turkey could equal their numbers or dynamism; the women of the Party registered nearly a million members in about six years, although the gender orientation of their party prevents them from standing for political representation. They have been politicized by learning the arts of mobilization in which they tap into traditional values and modes of socialization in order to politicize other women (and men as well).

Dr. Larry Goodson, of Bentley College, a scholar of Afghani politics, discussed the Taliban policy toward women of the last five years, and the prospects for the future, as he expected the regime to be replaced by a coalition of other Afghan leaders. Goodson had seen the strict and even cruel treatment of women to be a cornerstone of the Taliban's platform, one that was particularly popular with the rank and file membership. They believed that such strict controls were an improvement on the anarchic situation during the years of fighting in which some women were raped and victimized, despite the incongruence between the Taliban codes and the traditional Afghani Islamic mores.

Goodson commented on the role of Afghani women in the Western trope of liberation and that he did not expect women to realize complete freedom, or the re-instatement of the strictest rules of sex-segregation post-Taliban, but some middle ground, and hopefully an element of representation. Discussant, Wali Ahmadi (Department of Near Eastern Languages and Culture, UC Berkeley) commented on the change in our perceptions since September, although the conference had been planned much earlier. He also pointed the contrasting perceptions of gender issues at the local and the international levels and problematized the discussion of agency that occurred in both papers.

Sherifa Zuhur, who is currently visiting the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy briefly surveyed the literature on Islamist movements from the late 1970s to the present, in "'Voices' and Silences: Problems in the Study of Women under Islamization"

A decade and a half of studies on Islamism rarely incorporated more than cursory mention of women and gender issues. She then described the problems that beset research involving Muslim women, or Islam and human rights in mainstream scholarship as have been expressed in the debating essays in Susan Okin's collection, Is Multiculturalism Good for Women? Such work conflates Islamism, Islamization, and Islam itself. Zuhur continued with a narrower focus on work that directly explores the women and Islamism or Islamization, including the debate on whether the terms Islamist and feminist are oxymoronic, inter-scholarly disputes over the sanctity of secularism, preliminary and therefore overly essentializing work on previously untreated groups, and the lack of sufficient data and research access in various countries. Another type of publication has included various approaches to women in global fundamentalisms, but the implied macro-level comparisons between fringe movements, or aspects of majority or oppositionist discourse can be misleading. She also pointed to new areas of research including recent works that directly explore the degree and nature of women's agency in or ambivalence to on Islamist structures and ideas, Islamist movements understandings of patriarchal reproduction, and Islamic influences via educational structures.

Dr. Nancy Gallagher compared two high profile apostasy cases launched by Islamists against feminist activists in recent years in "Apostasy and Women's Rights." Both featured attempts to divorce these women from their Muslim spouses by third-party action. The first case involved Toujan Faisal, a Jordanian television journalist known for her outspoken attacks against Islamists. This case occurred shortly after the furor over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, and local support was more important to the case's resolution than the relatively limited international response. In intervening years before the second case was brought against Egyptian feminist writer, Dr. Nawal al-Saadawi, other sentences of apostasy-as-censorship were publicized against Moroccan and Bangladeshi women authors, and a forced divorce-by-third party (hisba) was brought against Nasr Abu Zeyd of Egypt. Perhaps in response to this last highly controversial action, a campaign to defend Dr. Al-Saadawi gained strength and due to women activists' networking, a good deal of international support. Gallagher noted that both cases resulted at least partially from a struggle between the Islamists and secularists that is aggravated by governmental attempts to play the two constituencies against each other. Both cases also embarrassed their respective governments, and illustrated the mediatory function that international or local solidarity groups can assume.

Discussant, As`ad AbuKhalil critiqued some of the day's proceedings as having been influenced by the retrospective criticism of Islamism that has typified the atmosphere in the wake of the September 11th events. With regard to one of the latter two papers, he cautioned us to beware of the Western fascination with the bizarre, or the exceptional that may capture the interest of researchers of the Middle East. A reception concluded the day's proceedings.