Winter 1995

odernixing Women: Gender Change in the Middle East

and Social

Valentine M. Moghadam

Boulder and London, Lynne Reiner Publishers, 1993. 309 pages. $40 (ISBN 1555 873 464).

omen in the Middle East: Perceptions, Realities, and Struggles for Liberation

Haleh Afshar, editor

New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1993. 250 pages. $65 (ISBN 0312 065 019).

Review by Marilyn Booth, Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

he growing sophistication of gender studies has put increased T emphasis on the complexity and variability of sedgender systems in different times and places. Scholarship focusing on the Middle East is no exception. The hard-to-budge stereotypes of people in the region that prevail in Euro-American public dis- course-including some academic discourse-give political urgency to the scholarly quest. Introducing the collection of essays that comprise Women in the Middle East, Haleh Afshar calls for an activist research that will inevitably emphasize complexity in con- fronting its subjects, while Valentine Moghadam bluntly addresses her superb and wide-ranging study to an audience saturated by the

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image of the mute, secluded, and forever defined “Muslim woman.” Moghadam, and Afshar and her contributors, want to get away from the “women-in-Islam” paradigm that, however subtlyhandled, can end up suggesting not only a uniformity and historical rigidity in women’s situations, but also a rejection of any other explanatory framework.

From the beginning, Moghadam emphasizes “structural deter- minants other than religion” (p. xiii) as she explores women’s situations across the Arab world, Iran, and Afghanistan. Thus, she begins by investigating the interrelations of gender, economic development, and women’s employment. She finds an explanation for women’s relatively low rate of participation in the formal labor sector, not in “Islam,” but rather in some countries’ limited industri- alization and the dependence of some on capital-intensive, high- technology, oil-related industry. At the same time, she demon- strates in her straightforward, very clearly written narrative that there is great variability across the region concerning women’s participation in manufacturing and in other economic sectors. Her chapter on employment also serves as a useful introduction to the current state of the WID (women in development) literature and makes it all the more useful potentially as a teaching text.

Moghadam goes on to look at issues such as women’s access to education and shifting personal-status legislation, in the context of changing family and population profiles. Her chapter on “Islamist movements and women’s responses” provides a full discussion of this issue that has drawn much ink in Euro-American mass media. She stresses socioeconomic and state structural factors that shape suchmovements, and she places much emphasis on women’s agency within, around, and against Islamist groups. She refuses to provide easy answers to questions such as “can Islamist women be consid- ered feminist?” but she offers much material to fuel such a discus- sion. Now that Islamist movements offer women new terrain fnr movement in the public sphere and for vocality, they may under- mine their own will to put women back in the home. To what extent is this agoal in any case? Moghadaminsists on the complexity-and centrality-of gender relations and definitions as related to the new Islamism, as she examines both the activity of women in these movements and that of the feminist groups that contest them. “It may be,” she concludes,

that there are different cultural and political paths to gender equality and female empowerment. One possible outcome-certainly a surprising one-of Islamist move-

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ments, of the politicization of gender, and of women’s activism for and against these movements could very well be the subversion of the patriarchal order and its rapid demise .... the expanded activities of women’s orga- nizations will be the strongest challenge to patriarchy and the neopatriarchal state (pp. 169-70).

The next time I have to field one of those frequent questions about “women and fundamentalism,” I plan to refer my interrogator to this chapter.

Moghadam brings together her theses in two final chapters on Iran and Afghanistan and provides contrasting cases of how state action has-or has not-transformed women’s spheres of activity. Because of the relative paucity of gender-informed analyses of the recent history ofAfghanistan, this study of what Moghadam calls a society structured as a “classic patriarchy” is especially fascinating.

fshar’s Women in the Middle East gives us close-ups of chang- A ing gender relations and women’s activism from Iran to Alge- ria. Afshar’s short introduction covers basic information that any- one working in this area in a Euro-American context has to provide again and again: what the Qur’an says on gender relations, what the WID literature says and doesn’t say, what hijab does or does not mean. Like Moghadam, Afshar stresses that “Islam is only one ofthe many contributory factors that shapes (sic) the lives ofwomen in the Middle East” (p. 13). This is reiterated throughout the book, as is a focus on women’s agency as activists, as defendants, as economic actors. Some contributions suit the theme of the book better than others, and the quality of the essays in this volume are uneven. Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s study of how women manipulate personal-status laws in Iran, Shahrashoub Razavi’s essay on women, agricultural labor, and inheritance laws in Iran, and Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas’ article on women’s activism and Islamist activism, which ends with a useful sketch of the group Women Living Under Muslim Laws, offer fascinating, pertinent, and well-written expansions of the points that Afshar, and Moghadam, make. These two volumes are testimony to the distance gender studies that focus on Arab, and predominantly Muslim, societies have come.

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