From Southwest Ledger
In her book, “Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East,” Valentine M. Moghadam thoroughly examines the conditions of women in the Middle East—especially around the time of the Arab Spring of 2010—and reviews the plight of Middle Eastern women in history.
Moghadam wrote that she wants to show, “how women’s lives are shaped not primarily by Islam and culture but by economic development, the state, class location and the world system… that middle class, educated women are consciously and unconsciously major agents of social change in the region, at the vanguard of movements for modernity, democratization, and citizenship.” In an incredibly detailed analysis she does exactly that, however I came away with two ideas on which I want to focus: how women’s lives have declined in the Middle East and the role of Hamas towards women.
While the history of Middle Eastern women is too long and complicated to cover here, and every country is different, in short and as a generalization, as Middle Eastern nations fought to break away from colonial powers in the early part of the 20th century, women were vital. As new liberal governments formed with attempts at democracy and constitutional governments, the rights of women were included. As part of the movement to modernize women, they were pressured to remove their veils just as men were, sometime by law, told to wear Western style hats instead of turbans or fezzes. Moghadam wrote, “when revolutionary government set about reforming the position of women in the first period of social and economic transformation, they tend to focus on three goals: extending the base of the government’s political support, increasing the size or quality of the active labor force, and harnessing the family to the process of social reproduction. For socialist and communists movements, women’s participation was essential to the realization of those goals; women widened the movement’s or new government’s social base of support; women became part of the labor force and thus contributed to the productive process; women were central actors in the transformation of family life and its connection to wider societal processes. As we shall see, these elements have been present, albeit with variations, in state building and national identity construction across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as in the different courses and frames of Islamist movements.”
As time progressed, so did women’s roles in many Middle Eastern countries. They were able to vote, hold office, run companies and choose how they should dress. Yet, while for most women around the world these rights continued to grow, in the Middle East many of these rights began to reverse themselves starting in the 1980s.
Moghadam wrote, “Tension between the states’ modernizing and traditional impulses became more pronounced in the latter part of the century. The Islamic revival of the 1980s, partly inspired by the 1979 Iranian Revolution and partly the result of a complex set of endogenous and exogenous factors and forces, transformed the nationalist frame from modernist to religious. Conflicts and wars—the Iran-Iraq War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Lebanese civil war, the Algerian civil conflict of the 1990s—intensified hypermasculinity and controls over women. Both Islamist movements and regional conflicts transformed the cultural environment for women.”
At the same time as these conflicts there was a push that the Middle East had lost their way and had gone too far trying to copy Western culture and lifestyles. In realizing their situation – and to regain their identity – there was a call to return to Islam. Whereas once Middle Eastern universities, like American universities, were the center of liberal change, they began to be the center of Islamic fundamentalists. Once students encouraged women to attend college and pressured them to unveil, were now in the forefront of shaming women who attended class with their hair not covered.
While Moghadam covered the vast area of the Middle East and North Africa, and spoke sparingly on Palestine, I thought I would include her thoughts on the region as it has become such a volatile issue today. Especially as so many on the left seem to have sided with Hamas in this struggle, I felt it pertinent to look at their treatment of women. Palestine follows a similar course as described above. Moghadam wrote, “Palestinian women have been active participants in the movement for statehood, and they have founded many organizations that have contributed to a vibrant civil society. Nonetheless, social problems plague many women. The problems that Palestinian women face—early marriage and high fertility, the poverty of female-headed households [because so many men have died fighting], difficulties in daily life, domestic violence, sexual abuse, low political participation and representation, and absence of a legal framework for rights—originate in patriarchal gender relations, the Israeli military occupation and lack of resolution of the national problem, and the conservative nature of the main political forces. Patriarchal relations are particularly strict in the refugee camps, small towns, and the Gaza Strip. There, Palestinian women tend to marry young, at about age nineteen, often to close cousins. The hijab campaign of the late 1980s led to increasing observance of veiling by Palestinian women, including students at Birzeit University. The first intifada resulted in unprecedented opportunities for women’s social participation.” However, the second intifada which come in response to a peace talks with Israel helped usher in Hamas control and subsequently undid most of the gains women had made. Not only is the regimen oppressive, but the amount of domestic violence against women had grown exponentially.
Moghadam’s work can shed a great deal of light of the history of women in the region and the many struggles they face. It is immensely researched and contains dozens of charts and graphs. I also appreciate her neutrality on the subject—something my students struggled with as it is a sensitive subject. She very much gives the facts without blame. However, this is not a book for a casual reader. It is written academically with very little narrative or storyline to follow like the other books I have reviewed.
Published in 2013 by Lynn Rienner Publishers Inc., Boulder, Colorado, Valentine M. Moghadam’s “Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East” is available on Amazon.
James Finck, Ph.D. is a professor of history at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. He can be reached at HistoricallySpeaking1776@gmail.com.
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