Over the past three decades, the study of nationalisms and state-building in the Middle East and North Africa has benefited greatly from critical attention to women, gendered notions of modernity, and transformations of the nuclear family and domesticity. Scholars examining emergent forms of citizenship have increasingly centered women and their bodies, first as sites, and more recently as agents of reform. However, despite these advances, the study of nationalisms remains largely stuck within the bounded nation. While this may seem logical enough, as David Ludden noted in his 2003 presidential address to the Association for Asian Studies, historians, particularly those of Asia, must be careful not to “read our present-day national sentiments into the histories of previous ages.” National sentiments emerged and solidified in an increasingly mobile and connected world. It is this transregional dimension of gendered modernity that this paper explores. Specifically, by exploring the interaction between Afghan and Arab women’s reform movements, I decenter both the nation and the “Arab world”. I focus on the travels of Hanifa Khouri, an Arab writer and activist who published in the Egyptian press of the 1920s. She was invited to Kabul on behalf of the famous Afghan Queen Soraya, after the Queen’s visit to Cairo in early 1928. Queen Soraya was herself born to a Syrian mother and spent her early childhood in Damascus. I analyze these two figures’ narratives and the popular narratives surrounding them in the context of regional reform and transformations in women’s education, the press, and activism in both Egypt and Afghanistan in order to illustrate how new ideas about women’s education, domesticity, and activism circulated between national boundaries not just through Empire or the Pan Islamic press, but through the south-south movement of elite women themselves as both symbols and agents of modernity.

This paper revises understandings of early Arab women’s movements in two ways. First, it highlights the transnational nature of these movements by tracing flows of both women themselves and their ideas as they traveled beyond national and regional borders. Secondly, it connects the academic literature on modern domesticity in the Arab world with academic work on early women’s movements, detailing precisely how ideas about domesticity and domestic education travelled between metropole and colony and across south-south axes. Using examples from Egypt and Morocco, the paper draws on memoirs, oral histories, letters, periodicals, and archival documents to re-evaluate these movements through the lens of social class. Egyptian activist Huda Sha’rawi is often referenced in terms of her advocacy for Egyptian independence and women’s political rights, as well as her charitable work. This paper, however, specifically explores Sha’rawi and her organization, the Egyptian Feminist Union, in terms of their attitude towards domestic science education and its role in the modern Egyptian educational system. Experiences informed by her travels in Europe and her circulation within transnational women’s organizing circles in the 1910s and 20s led Sha’rawi to prioritize domestic science as an essential component of women’s education. These experiences led her to create opportunities for multiple other Egyptian women to travel to England to study domestic science in depth and subsequently return to write new curricula for Egyptian schoolgirls. In turn, the work of Egyptian activists like Sha’rawi was referenced by Moroccan women activists in the 1930s and 40s, who like Sha’rawi were urban elites connected to prominent nationalists. Just as Egyptian activism was deeply informed by European and other Eastern reform movements, the work of early Moroccan women’s movements led by women like Malika al-Fassi––including their embrace of modern domesticity ideology––cannot be fully understood without attention to the Egyptian precedent. Scholars of gender have described these kinds of actors and movements in terms of “relational feminism”: a gender politics advocating for women’s access to education and other rights, but in the context of a system of complementary gender roles in which women are cast as mothers and caregivers. By tracing one strand of this political field, domestic education, this paper highlights the shared class position of the elite women who promoted it while broadening the context of early Arab women’s movements as extending beyond national borders.

This study uses social theory, historical perspectives, family albums, and more than 30 ethnographic narratives from first- and second-generation Palestinian Americans to explain how women’s conceptions of womanhood and marriage changed in two historical periods, 1950s -1980s and 1990s-2000s. I explore the manner in which Palestinian women utilized their cultural, national, and religious contexts to build strategies to increase their agency in their family and community, take control of their martial choices, and change the standards that constitute what makes a compatible partner from beyond national and regional boundaries. During the first period, immigrant-generation marriages were mainly arranged, endogamous and enforced by hometown ties and institutions (i.e., al-Bireh American Society), as well as national politics. Although cross-border marriage was still practiced by those during the later time period, an increase of exogamous marriages grew as a result of the contemporary global Muslim revival movement that has been materializing through popular, cultural, intellectual, and political discourses operating within theological context in the last three decades. The intersection of these discourses triggered an inclination toward intermarriage between American Palestinians and other Muslim groups. For women, this period of Islamic revival profoundly affected their perception of their own identities, their identificatory agency, and their engagement with gendered social and religious institutions. Utilizing more than one type of cultural capital (as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu) shaped immigrants’ identities and sense of belonging, especially among second-generation Palestinian Americans. They usually identified themselves in a cross-cultural manner, embodying dual membership in mainstream and subcultures. Historical and cultural factors, including the increase in numbers of religious institutions established since the late 1980s and the arrival of new immigrants, primarily from South Asia, prompted changes in the size and diversity of Arab and Muslim communities. In addition, the increase in education levels, the diversity of career pursuits, transnational mobility, and advances in communication (i.e. digital media) facilitated the destabilization of national and cultural boundaries and increased women’s negotiation of marriage outside these canons. Despite this, the diaspora politics of displacement among Palestinians strengthened their connectedness to their homeland and reinforced in-group and cross-border marriages, which ultimately complicated women’s choices of potential spouses.

Transnational crossings in Rajia Hassib’s work suggests both tension and sympathy between three generations of the Al-Menshawy family. The hybrid affiliations between Egyptian and American identifications destabilize any clear cut national boundaries of difference. Yet the central tension between the characters is in the realm of spiritual affinity, as the grandmother’s ritual practices, the mother’s spiritual wrestling and doubt after her son’s death, and the daughter Fatima’s discover of an Arab-American piety surface within the richly-textured pages of this novel. Paradoxically, these contrasting practices, the source of difference, are also the source of strength for these three generations of women, as the author destabilizes ideologies of nation and religion to reconceive feminine voicing and power. But despite the author Rajia Hassib’s inclusion of female spirituality in the novel, critics have offered surprisingly little analysis of these gendered forms of postcolonial belief. This gap in criticism ignores the range of Muslim perspectives, a postmodern plethora, where female protagonists shift their vantage points on religion due to trans-national pressures even as they find their voice within these altered trans-national sites. Pervading the novel, an alternative paradigm over women’s spiritual practices and agency flows, suggesting that beliefs can entrap and empower, often in ways that are unexpected, healing, or paradoxical. While religion is often mistakenly assumed to be a meager tool of nationalism, Rajia Hassib depicts how multifunctional beliefs are often contested, and sometimes resistance to dominant norms, since they can relate not only to national allegiance, but also resistant religious revivals. But what is most surprising is how these spiritual tensions work as a literary strategy to decolonize a historical legacy of European and dictatorial control over gendered bodies. Indeed, the spiritual action and ambivalence in this novel suggest a trans-national network of subversion. This delightful, literary well-spring reconceives feminist agency in Islamic terms, situated within variegated traditions and communities —for three women, powerful streams, outpouring from generational inheritance.

In Anxiety of Erasure, Hanadi al-Samman writes about the way in which women authors of the early and mid-twentieth century attempted to challenge the erasure of the female character in Arab fiction by calling attention to the myth of pre-Islamic female infanticide underlying these androcentric narratives. These writers used the Shahrazad figure to place the woman narrator at the center of the construction of myth. This, however, resulted in literary productions by women writers that either reinforced patriarchal fear of feminine sexuality or perpetuated the symbolic representation of womanhood as the mother and the nation, resulting in a womanhood lost in what Irigraray calls its “representative function.” Disillusioned with this counterproductive reinforcement of patriarchal notions of femininity and the perpetuation of the whore/mother dichotomy, more texts by Arab women, I argue, began to construct narratives that contested the spatial confinement within domestic national and familial spaces, and the Manichean rejection of corporeal “felt histories.” In Miral al-Tahawy’s narrative about the identity of the Bedouin woman, I see a productive turn to the self-reflexive deconstruction of temporal and spatial unity that is the justification for boundaries surrounding the nation, the domestic sphere, and embodied experience. The recursive narrative structure challenges the teleology of historical linearity and the near-merging of the worlds of animals, humans, and the desert landscape challenges anthropocentric understandings of humanness and broadens the definitions of ‘self.’ Al-Tahawy uncovers the influence of myth on modern society by examining social norms and standards in relation to Egyptian folklore and the traditional fairytale of Sitt al-Hosn (Rapunzel), but she does so critically, destabilizing the problematic discourses that they perpetuate and complicating the Shahrazad ideal. In my paper, I seek to examine the ways in which al-Tahawy merges ithe magical and real to uncover the contradictions inherent in patriarchal definitions of Arab womanhood. I argue that temporal asynchrony, manifested in the traverse of place and time, enables a constant reevaluation of gendered social systems both within and without the text and challenges the erasure inherent in the wa’d trauma.