This proposed paper will discuss the scope, content and challenges of the Iraqi women's movement since 2003. It will map out the various trends, groups and individual actors and their position within the contemporary political landscape. My paper will address a question which has been pertinent to my research over the past years, namely: How do Iraqi women's rights activists position themselves 1) vis a vis a new government that mainly consists of Islamist political parties; 2) the occupation which despite the rhetoric of women's liberation has failed to engage in proper gender mainstreaming and finally 3) the resistance to the occupation. While the main focus of my paper will be on the current context, I will briefly contextualize my analysis by referring to the historical development of the Iraqi women's movement before and during the Ba'th regime (1968-2003). The proposed paper is based on empirical research carried our amongst Iraqi women's rights activists in Erbil, Sulamaniya and Amman as well as London and various locations within the U.S.

This paper attempts to map some of the ways in which Syrian women are negotiating a space for themselves within the gendered modalities of Syrian civic, religious, and political frameworks. Based on recorded interviews as well as published studies in both Arabic and English, this presentation aims to delineate some of the gains that women in Syria have accomplished as well as the obstacles they are currently working to overcome. In particular, the paper hopes to address the ways in which women's status in Syria is complicated by the experience of a brief period of European colonial rule, the establishment of a newly emerging, often highly contested, nation state, the rise of political Islam, and the emergence of new forms of international feminism. In the process, this paper will attempt to trace women's activism in Syria from its beginnings in the twentieth century to its latest concerns and manifestations today. In so doing, it will address: feminism and Syrian women's literary endeavors; Syrian women's social activism and charity organizations; public involvement in pre-independence nationalist efforts; women and the rise of political Islam; women and state legislation, including personal status laws and the concept of gendered citizenship; and the relationship between Syrian women's organizations, human rights organizations, and international feminist organizations.

Women's organizations in Lebanon have indirectly made a breakthrough in the strong triangular alliance between the state, religion and the family. Acting as political agents of social change, they followed nonconfrontational, although not passive, strategies to mobilize immanently within the traditional social structures. Using personal interviews with representatives from fourteen women advocacy groups, participant observations of meetings and campaigns, and content analysis of organizational reports and activists' publications, I examine in this paper the strategies that Lebanese activists apply in advocating for women's rights and recognitions. I first highlight the socio-historical context within which women's rights organizations set their goals, agendas and strategies. Then, I offer a historical overview of women's activism in Lebanon and the development of advocacy groups from charitable activities. Third, I present a typology of the various current organizations with a discussion of their issues and goals. I finally explore how women's rights organizations have bridged socio-cultural differences to build coalitions with other social actors in Lebanon and to construct their movement's identity as a democratic movement for gender justice internationally.

Despite the long and active history that goes back to the early 1940s, Jordanian women's movement today is witnessing a phase of real renaissance. Main features of this phase include some radical shifts in working agendas (from need- to right-based), changes in forms of activism (varying from autonomous to Islamists and other forms state created feminisms), and varying new discourses employed in mobilizing the woman's cause. The phase is also featured by a significant interaction between women's advocates and other social and political actors (mainly the Tribalists and Islamists) who often question the legitimacy of the movement, and the genuine nature of its discourses. To Islamists and Tribalists the women's movement is "elitist", and hence lacks the representation of "everyday" women. To them also issues raised by the women's activists and the discourses employed by resting on the International Women's Agenda are 'imported'; i.e. not relevant to Jordanian women and not sensitive enough to our culture and religion. This paper maps out the women's movement in Jordan ; it follows the different life cycles through which the movement has developed over time, highlights the main issues on the agenda of each cycle; goes over the changes and the shifts occurred along the journey, and the factors shaping such changes. The chapter will also draw emphasis on contemporary forms of women's activisms, their current discourses and their sociopolitical interactions with the state, the Islamists and the Tirbalists.

This research identifies structural, cultural, and dynamic elements operating in the campaign for women's rights in Kuwait. Using data from multiple sources, it focuses on the main characteristics and patterns of activism starting from the Gulf War of 1990 - 1991, paying particular attention to its growth and decline during the 1990s, an understudied period in the literature on women's movements in the Middle East. Our findings underscore the embeddedness of the struggle for women's rights in political development generally, and add to the understanding of social movements and their evolution in non-Western contexts.

Recent North American Muslim Women's movements articulate an urgent need to be part of the American and the universal, global discussion on Muslim human and political rights. Furthermore, they represent a timely and an engaged response to what some Muslim religious scholars have dubbed as the "crisis of epistemology," and the "crisis of religious leadership." This research will examine grassroots North American Muslim women's organizations and movements such as: KARAMAH (Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights), The Peaceful Families Project, and Muslim Women Freedom Tour. It will further advance the notion that the printed, visual and virtual output of US and Canadian Muslim women activists; such as: the Muslim woman's magazine Azizah, Zarqa Nawaz's documentary Me & the Mosque as well as the virtual online blog of Mohja Kahf "Sex and the Ummah" do indeed create a unique reclaimed feminine space for Muslim women whose activist liberating message cross ethnic and national boundaries in its efficacy and empowerment of Muslim women. Additionally, their call to reopen the doors of fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence), long deemed closed since the consolidation of the four major schools of jurisprudence in the ninth century, fosters a temporal and a geographical bond between these North American Women activists and their fellow Muslim women Middle Eastern predecessors both during the seventh century at the dawn of Islam, and in the early nineteenth century Arab women's liberation movements. These movements seek legitimacy by working with an Islamic jurisprudence framework so as to initiate change from within Muslim women's own spiritual and cultural contexts. The geographical spaces conquered due to the enactment of these religious and legal journeys claim more than personal and private spaces for these Arab Muslim women, rather they open up political and cultural spaces for their communities as well. Virtual and real networks are created in the process of reclaiming the religious feminine voice, as Asma Barlas puts it, from the patriarchal tradition of Muslim hermeneutics and jurisprudence.