Samiha Ayverdi: Paradoxes of a Turkish-Muslim Woman Samiha Ayverdi (1905-1993), a nonconformist Turkish intellectual, was an important figure in Turkish conservative circles of the twentieth century. Born into the well-known Ayverdi family and being a high-ranking member of the R?fai order in Turkey, she spread her influence over a circle of like-minded intellectuals, authors and artists through the family-sponsored Kubbealt? Foundation. She was also the author of some 36 works, ranging from Islamic propagandist pamphlets and historical novels to highly autobiographical collections of essays on Ottoman-Turkish history. In a country where female activism was historically associated with the westernized and westernizing Kemalist elite, Samiha Ayverdi’s intellectual position is perplexing. Ayverdi’s works are at the intersection of tradition and renewal, conservatism and emancipation of women, Ottoman elitism and Turkish nationalism, mysticism and bourgeois life, fiction and autobiography. This paper aims to explore apparent contradictions in Samiha Ayverdi’s self-portraiture. How could a woman impose herself as an authority on a male-dominated, conservative, Muslim audience? How could a militantly Muslim woman play a leading role in a Muslim mystical brotherhood, while she was the living example of an emancipated, westernized and unveiled Turkish woman? Why are most of her works based on supposedly autobiographical experiences, exposing her daily life in her household, while Islam orders a strict separation of the private and the public spheres for women? How could Ayverdi claim to speak from inside Turkish conservatism, which has a populist and egalitarian dimension that challenges the alleged elitism of the Kemalist establishment, while she constructs a Balkan-Ottoman aristocratic elitism of her own? Although she celebrates the Ottoman imperial past and statecraft, why did Ayverdi choose to ignore the multicultural fabric of the Ottoman society and advocate anti-Semitic, anti-Armenian and, generally speaking, anti-Western views? In responding to these questions, we will attempt to uncover the multiplicity and complexity of Islamic identities in Turkey as well as work towards a reassessment of the concept of conservatism in a society which underwent tremendous change throughout the twentieth century. The fact that we are dealing with an outspoken female intellectual introduces an important twist to the discussion of both Islamism and conservatism.

Typically, when speaking of war, feminists consider the impact on women: how they become the transmitters of nation in political conflict, how they become symbols of loss of homeland, and how their bodies become sites of battle and conquest when they are assaulted and raped (Grewal, McKlintock, Shohat, Accad, Kandiyote). While it is understandable why feminism has privileged the “oppression of women,” it has sides-stepped the impact of war on men and has thus not attended to the injuries of men in war. My paper considers the psychic and emotional implications of masculinities in war: not to excuse or justify behaviour, but to reach deeper insights into the dynamics of war and the forces that compel men to violence. Specifically, this paper examines Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game and Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now for their capacity to give us insight into the meanings of racialized masculinities in the Middle East. Neither text represents a very consoling picture of men in war and conflict, but they have a great deal to teach us about the fragility that underpins masculinity in volatile political contexts. Indeed, they give us insight into the affective realities of racial and colonial traumas that inhabit constructions of identity, ideological positionalities and cultural representation. Inspired by Frantz Fanon’s plea for a new humanism and Paul Gilroy’s assertion that we attend to and politicize human suffering, I propose a psychoanalytic aesthetics of loss as a model for understanding violent masculinities and power. This approach demands that we recognize that aesthetic cultural texts have an emotional source and that “being touched” by affect might allow us to see masculine strategies in political conflicts as emotional strategies against loss, racial humiliation and racist aggression. Indeed, it permits us to see the humanity of men in war. In this way, this paper makes an intervention into political discourses of war and conflict in the Middle East by creating new conditions for conversation across gender and racial divides.

Alawiyya Subuh’s Maryam al-Hakaya (Maryam of Stories) (2002) considers the multifaceted interactions of Lebanese women belonging to three successive generations, shedding light on the social, cultural, and political changes that contemporary Lebanese society has undergone since the French colonial period. The text reveals that women’s growing involvement in cultural and literary production is an integral component of contemporary experience and urbanization and in this paper, I argue that the novel’s fundamental concern with women’s writing can be understood from two primary perspectives. On the one hand, women’s writing against the grain of the patriarchal structure and their reconceptualizations of categories like subjectivity, gender and sexuality destabilize the masculine center by offering new accounts of their own lives. From this perspective, this paper examines the various ways in which women’s urban experiences manipulate and invade the masculine sphere to create a meaningful positioning within urban society in which they can write their own stories. At the same time, this paper scrutinizes the impact of women’s engagements in city life on their decision-making powers and their control over their bodies and sexualities. From the second perspective, these tendencies and particularly women writing in an urban context formulate a new center that secludes other marginalized subjects, especially women of the rural south. Furthermore, by contrasting the city with the rural south, the novel exposes two competing subjectivities. The first is a traditional subjectivity, embodied by the rural south, that values family structure and the father figure and functions as a foundation for gender inequality and oppression and repression of female sexuality. It represents a past that is threatened by an emerging second subjectivity, which is cultivated by urban experiences that highlight individual freedom and self-recognition. Within this context, this paper finally explores the various modes in which women, especially in the village, internalize cultural and social beliefs and gender identity and how this process helps perpetuate the patriarchal structure.

The writings of Arab women have been attracting greater interest in the last few decades; most of those women writers are considered to be feminists deploying literature as a political instrument. Through their writings, one can trace the substantial development of the literary feminist movement in the Mashriq; moving from the general calls for gender equality and the recognition of women’s rights of education and work to the sexual revolution and finally arriving at the most recent calls for women’s liberation in relation to national liberation. Moreover, some of these women writers moved beyond the usual representation of women as subverted and segregated by examining sexual and ethnic minorities in the Arab world through a feminist lens. Therefore, the representation of feminist issues through other subverted minorities, whether ethnic or sexual, forms a new literary dimension that is worthy of analysis and investigation. Huda Barakat (b. 1952), a contemporary Arab women novelist, utilises the figure of gay men to convey her feminist and humanist principles while shedding light on the struggle of other ethnic and sexual minorities. This is prevalent in her The Stone of Laughter (1994) and The Tiller of Waters (2001). Barakat’s unusual literary tendency, of exploring the construction of gay identity (as a sexual minority) in Lebanon during the civil war, is further reinforced with the skilful interweaving of her feminist calls “in disguise” and the life of ethnic minorities such as the Kurds and Druze in Lebanon. Barakat masterfully explores the repression of both women and sexual and ethnic groups in Lebanon through her gay men protagonists. This paper focuses on the literary representation of gay men in Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter and The Tiller of Waters, in order to test feminist critique and the manipulation of such figures to illustrate feminist calls in disguise. It will explore the literary techniques invested by the writer in her portrayal of the construction of sexual minorities against the backdrop of the civil war in Lebanon. It will also investigate the intertwining representation of both women and gay men as minorities against the unravelling Lebanese social and national structure. Accordingly, this presentation suggests that during times of war and national crisis, subverted minorities of women and gay men in Lebanon can be equally and simultaneously represented from a feminist and humanist standpoint.

This project looks at the ways in which older generations of Yemeni women in Sana’a negotiate religious change. Conventional field research techniques, including observation, participation, and interviewing, were used in order to gather material for this study, which is the result of research carried out in Sana’a, Yemen, for a period of six weeks during the summer of 2006, in which I attended women’s Qur’anic study circles held at Ahmed Nasser mosque, and interviewed approximately thirty-five women. Additionally, I attended events associated with Sufism and folk Islam that older women attend. While Yemen is a conservative Muslim country comprised chiefly of Shafi‘i Sunnis and Zaydi Shi‘is, the ways in which Islam manifests there is actually quite diverse. Practices associated with folk Islam are prevalent in Yemen, especially among older, illiterate women, who have had little to no access to textual, orthodox Islam. The past few decades in Sana’a, however, have witnessed a rise in socially-restrictive forms of Salafi Islam. The Salafis have begun to provide Qur’anic school education, including literacy training, for older, often illiterate, women for whom there are few other educational opportunities. On a previous trip to Yemen, I noticed that many older women both attend religious events associated with folk Islam, as well as Salafi-run Qur’anic schools. In 2007, during an interview with an illiterate older woman in a mosque, a sheikha, or female religious instructor, scolded my informant for her admission to me that she still attends non-orthodox types of religious activities, and vehemently advised her that they were religiously forbidden. This experience caused me to wonder how this older generation of women navigates conflicting religious discourses, while still seeking to fulfill their own self-interests. What types of benefits do older Yemeni women receive from their differing religious practices? Do their choices confer agency? How do the women accommodate doctrinal contradictions? This paper aims to answer those questions. Often scholars who write about development, education and women focus on the achievements and continuing needs of the younger generations, centralizing the young and leaving the aged on the periphery of their analyses. Centralizing the religious lives of older Yemeni women not only fills in the gap in the typical discourse on development and societal change, but it allows for a greater understanding of the role that religion plays in this picture.