Women's movements and feminist activism in the Middle East and North Africa are the focus of an extensive body of research. Academic analysis has documented the historical roots of the movements, their achievements and constraints, and their dynamics of change and adaptation to local/global power structures. However, there is a remarkable academic silence around issues of gender, generations and intergenerational relationships. There is little understanding of how feminisms and women's activism play out in the lives and consciousness of the "neo-liberal generation" of youth born during/after the 1980s. My presentation addresses the following two questions by focusing on the specific case of Morocco: 1. In what ways are youth's gendered identities, subjectivities and life choices informed by discourses of women's rights and gender equity 2. How do recent gains in women's rights in Morocco resonate with the younger generation? To answer these questions, my presentation draws on two sets of data: in-depth interviews I have conducted with young men and women from multiple sites in Morocco; and large-scale surveys on youth views on gender equality and gender issues in the country. My analysis of the ethnographies and surveys demonstrate that the younger generation negotiates the legacy/gains of women's movements and rights activism in complex ways. I identify three interesting processes through which youth interact with, interpret and negotiate feminist ideas and women's gains. These processes of interpretation and negotiation, I argue, are mediated by the gendered identities of youth as well as the specific conditions of their lives. I also argue that these processes point to the complicated ways in which youth relate to women's movements and women's rights in general. Finally I identify important areas in gender and generational analysis that need to be addressed by scholarship on Middle Eastern Studies.

The paper will present and critically analyze the work of Mohamed Talbi, a Tunisian intellectual who addresses the message of modern liberal feminism within the space of classical Islamic methods and text. Talbi is representative of his generation of North African intellectuals, writers who benefited from both a traditional Islamic education and European degrees. As such, Talbi work represents an attempt to reconcile the liberal, secular ideas of his European education with traditional Islamic scholarship. Within the scope of this paper, I will focus on Talbi's application on the asbsb al-nuznl, the circumstances surrounding the revelation, to a number of Qur'anic verses governing personal status. I will specifically examine his conclusions on gender equality, wife beating, polygamy, sexual relations between spouses, and divorce, along with their implications in resolving the tension between secularist and religious ideas in modern Tunisia. My primary source material is Talbi's written work in its original Arabic and French, most importantly, the books, Ummat Al-Wasat, Iyysl Allyh, and Plaidoyer pour un islam moderne, as well as Talbi's journal submissions to Jeune Afrique. I will supplement this material with a series of interviews with Talbi in which I sought clarification on his methodology and intellectual influences. Based on this body of material, I will briefly trace his intellectual formation, map out the method by which he articulates his conclusions on personal status, explore the images and ideals that he presents of Muslim women, both historic and modern, and offer some preliminary criticism of his conclusions. My research represents the first comprehensive English language work on Talbi's ideas on women. Within the context of his writing on this subject, I will explore the implications of Talbi's thought for a generation of North Africans seeking to reconcile, compare, and evaluate liberal arguments on gender equality and traditional Islamic conclusions. While this project remains, by Talbi's own admission, incomplete, his work remains highly influential among intellectuals both within Tunisia and throughout North Africa. As a new generation of Islamic thinkers in the Maghreb critiques and challenges his work, it is my hope that this paper will help the observer to understand Talbi's ideas, their significance, structure, and weaknesses, and their place in the process of articulating a modern Islamic feminism in North Africa.

When contemporary Moroccan leftist feminists narrate their life stories and talk about formative influences in their lives, many recall the influence of a "traditional" and pious father figure who was just and egalitarian, and who inspired their commitment to and struggle for gender equality. If this positive invocation of an enabling tradition is noteworthy for how consistently it recurs in the life stories of a cross-section of Moroccan leftist feminists; it is equally notable for how dramatically it disappears and is displaced by a notion of tradition as obstacle to women's emancipation and progress. In this paper, I juxtapose invocations of the "traditional, pious but egalitarian" father figure with that of "the failed and disappointing leftist husband who claims to be modern but is in fact traditional" in order to denaturalize the feminist repudiation and problematization of tradition; explore the relationship between salvaging modernity and disavowing tradition; and think about the demands of modern, progressive subjectivity. I argue that the tragedy of leftist feminist subjectivity lies in the fact that it is predicated on locating the possibility of women's progress and feminist politics in the repudiation of the very tradition that makes it possible in the first place; and that this constitutive disavowal comes in the way of a more generous ethos of intergenerational and intersubjective engagement. This paper is based on two years of field research among founding members of the feminist movement in Morocco whose activism emerged out of their immersion in and subsequent disenchantment with the Moroccan left in the 1980s. By taking feminist constructions of tradition as an object of inquiry, this paper seeks to contribute to a non-teleological study of feminist thought and politics, and to the anthropological study of secular and progressive subjectivity.

In 1947, Pakistan was created on the demand of some Indian Muslims for a homeland where Muslims could live in accordance with their own Islamic cultural values. Ever since then, various governments, political parties, and religious groups have vied over defining the role of Islam in the lives of Pakistanis. The greatest attempt was made under Zia-ul-Haq (1977-88), who brought about the Islamization of the country's laws, educational institutions, and society. One outcome of it was the mushrooming of madrasas that produced militants for the Cold War and other jihad exploits. The 1990s democratic governments failed to regulate them. Post-9/11, these madrasas came into limelight for their association with Islamic extremism. Much literature has been produced about the connection of radical madrasas and the 1980s Islamization. Sophisticated analyses have highlighted that children from poor families looking for free food, shelter and lodging fuel these madrasas. However, there are two aspects of the 1980s onward Islamization process that are yet to be studied: the non-militant experiments in Islamization in education, in particular, by women; and, how middle and upper class citizens growing up in the 1980s have incorporated the Islamization process in their everyday lives. In this paper, I attempt to fill these gaps by examining women's patronization of the Al-Huda madrasas. In the 1990s, the founder, Dr. Farhat Hashmi, began giving sermons at Western five star hotel chains in Karachi that were attended by elite women. Soon, middle class women joined their league and today, Al-Huda has branches in all urban centers of Pakistan. I will undertake a historical and anthropological analysis to explain the kinds of social needs not addressed by the Islamization process so far that are addressed by Al-Huda, and how the madrasa represents women's unique configuration of a non-militant, prestigious mode of Islamic education in a modern, urban Pakistani culture. The paper will further answer the following questions: What are the defining features of this piety movement and in what ways are the backgrounds of its patrons different from those of women at other female madrasas? Are these women trying to find a balance between Islamization and the social and educational patterns before Islamization? How does the Al-Huda example point toward future configurations of Islamic ideology in Pakistani culture?

In October 2009, the hitherto most heated row over the face veil (niqab) broke out in Egypt after the Shaykh al-Azhar had ordered a school girl to remove her veil and humiliated her in public. On Oct. 20, 2009, the pan-Arab satellite TV station al-Jazeera's famous (and notorious) talk show "al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis" hosted a debate on what the face veil had to do with Islam. Participants were the Syrian Islamist preacher Abd al-Rahman Kuki and the Egyptian director of the Jordanian-based Arab Institute for Research and Strategic Studies, Abd al-Rahim Ali. Both used very strong language to mark their points, and Kuki was arrested upon his return to Syria and sentenced to one year imprisonment in February 2010 for having exposed Syria and the Syrian president to derogation and stirred up sectarian chauvinism; he was set free on presidential pardon a week later. Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis is known for its high pitch, and sometimes blamed for having contributed to lowering the standards of debate on Arabic media by allowing participants to abandon measured discussion and engage in populist mud-slinging. To bemoan the decline of the culture of debate in the Arab world appears to be a fashionable topos recently; it was a theme in the niqob debate itself, and in January 2010 the BBC Arabic service made it a focus in its socio-cultural program BBC Xtra. In my presentation, I give examples from a micro-analysis of the rhetorical and linguistic strategies employed by the participants. This includes not only the formal arguments made pro and contra the niqlb. Much of the debate was highly emotionally loaded, and I attempt to point out core areas of emotional concern for the two opponents. I have tagged and analyzed the debate regarding: o arguments made / debated / raised but not completed o which arguments do not get a response, are ignored / by-passed o what means are used to bypass an argument o MSA / colloquial o sarcasm / smiles / laughter o interruption o use of expressions of disbelief o how much each participant actually gets to speak o word frequency count o pronoun use: construction of WE vs. YOU The aim of this exercise is to make conscious not only the fundamental principles or ideas dividing the opponents, but also basic emotions nourishing and upholding their different world views - emotions that appear ever more important as market shouting becomes a prominent feature of the Arabic mediascape.