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In Search of an Arab-Islamic Feminism on the Web
Abstract
The new calls for change in Muslim family laws have energized debate about women’s issues across the Arab Muslim world. In my paper, I will discuss how Arab Muslim feminists have deployed Facebook and blogging in recent years as a tool for networking with other feminists, organizing conferences and forming different groups. This "new way" of networking is used among young as well as well-established feminists among sociologists, doctors, university professors and politicians. These women have agitated for women’s rights by setting up groups at the local as well as international level. Each group has its own focus and agenda. Facebook and blogging, which allow these women to speak freely to one another and encourage them to form groups, are platforms that are useful not only for coalescing around key social and political issues pertaining to women, but also for initiating social change. Using Morocco, Egypt and Saudi Arabia as my main case studies, I argue how Arab feminist bloggers and Facebook uses emphasize the centrality of religion to social change for women. Western feminists have always wondered why Muslim women who are outstandingly successful in a world dominated by men take such a position, and how their views relate to the religion in which they were reared, and to which they remain attached. Arab Muslim feminists do not want to be pigeonholed; they have overlapping memberships and specific identities, and may rightly prefer not to be fitted into compartments. These women also know a great deal about the history of Islam and do not wish to be the target of assumptions made by those not well informed about the extent of their knowledge and the inferences they draw from it. Furthermore, their Islam may not be the Islam of today's front pages in al-Jazeera, Le Monde, or in The New York Times. All these women live in Muslim communities where the state and religion are one. They have also experienced the slow modernizing and secularizing processes of their communities.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
None