The question of what the veil represents has produced countless academic inquires and stirred much political debate. With existing research focusing mostly on the perception and framing of the veil among non-Muslims or on small-n investigations of possible motivations to veil among Muslim women, this paper aims to offer broad conclusions about the drivers of Muslim public support for the veil. Utilizing Arab Barometer data, it tests the empirical validity of claims that liberal Western representations of the veil misrepresent it as a symbol of inequality by ignoring its role as a symbol of female empowerment. In doing so, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature which examines the factors that help determine public opinion on women’s rights and gender equality across the Arab and Muslim world as well as in comparison to other parts of the world. The analysis does not aim to contribute to ongoing debates over the attempts of governments around the world to regulate the various manifestations of the veil. Instead, this paper lets Muslim Arab women and men speak for themselves. By shedding light on why some Arab Muslim women and men think that women should veil, this analysis highlights the wider social context in which Arab women decide whether or not to veil, particularly the role which religiosity and Islamist ideology as well as individual opinion on and structural measures of gender equality might play.

As concerns about Islamic extremism rise in Europe and the United States, the gendered body has become the space in which both international organizations and the state negotiate the terms of security. This body becomes both the subject and the object of security as it is simultaneously constructed as vulnerable and a threat. This can be seen in global discourses about refugees, bans on Islamic garments, and international campaigns about women’s rights issues. The gendering of rights and bodies as women’s is appropriated into hegemonic discourses as a tool of power. This does not just happen at the global level, the nation state is also deeply invested in the construction of the gendered object on which the desires of the nation can be inscribed. The Moroccan case shows the interference of the West, Saudi influence, and endogenous struggles as all using the gendered body as a vehicle for their own interests and a battleground on which to struggle for hegemony. The ban on the manufacture and sale of the burqa in Morocco is only the most recently example in a long line of events and actions where women’s bodies become the gendered object of state security. The gendered body becomes a vehicle which the state uses to negotiate its position in the international arena. It is in a perpetual limbo between the world and the state, used as a battle ground for power structures. The same voices that claim to either protect or liberate this body, erase its agency and individuality in order to use it in the service of the needs of those in power. The gendered body is therefore simultaneously hyper visible and invisible. The state has long used the gendered body as a tool to position its interests at the local and global level. However, it has come to occupy a prominent place on the global stage in the years since the Arab revolutions and the rise of right wing populism in the West. The practices surrounding the regulation of these bodies is rooted in the colonial legacy and the Cold War. Mapping and analyzing the history and different powers involved in the case of women’s rights in Morocco, will show the practices and discourses by which women’s bodies and their rights become the embodiment of a battle ground of hegemonic contestation.

Violent conflicts provide important transformative moments for identities as episodes of collective trauma can shake our understandings of ourselves in profound and dramatic ways. Even the identities that we understand as stable experience shifts and changes in the wake of violent conflicts. Understandings of what it means to be female and, as a result, what roles women may “appropriately” adopt often change as a result of violent conflict. However, there has been little attention paid to the mechanisms through which conflict alters social definitions of womanhood. Those works that do exist tend to focus on the general strategies available to women in conflict zones or specifically on the role of gendered violence, such as instances of rape against women in civil war. This paper will consider variations in the depiction of women’s roles and the characterization of what constitutes appropriate political behavior for women in the Syrian uprising across time and space. In particular, it will highlight the tensions that have emerged as some women try to assert themselves politically in a context which has been increasingly characterized by conservative religious armed groups. This paper will attempt to explain variations in the levels and forms of women’s political participation in rebel-held areas of Syria by considering the activities of non-governmental organizations in some parts of the country as well as the varying ability of armed groups to impose conservative understandings of women’s identities. In summary, this expands existing literature by understanding the ways roles morph and change across time and space through violent conflict.

The objective of my paper is to examine how women’s political and economic participation has been publicized under the Rouhani administration. An analysis is made how women related bills have been debated both in the parliament and in the civil society since the establishment of the Rouhani government in 2013 to present. It is generally conceived that not much progress has been made in women’s rights in the family and women’s political and economic participation since the end of the Khatami’s administration. This has been mainly attributed to the growing power of neo-conservative factions in Iran’s politics during the period of President Ahmadinejad. The emergence of the Rouhani administration is considered a victory for the moderate faction. Yet, Rouhani government has also now witnessed some degree of the revival of the conservative’s powers because the economic sanctions had not been lifted by the US as was agreed in the final nuclear agreement (the JCPOA). Despite this trend of the growing conservativism in Iran’s politics, women’s political and economic participation has been set as one of the important national strategies for economic recovery of the state, and thus has been promoted. Within this context, a new discourse has emerged. Women parliamentarians and Shahindokht Molaverdi, advisor to President for women and family affairs have voiced the concept of “gender equality” to be achieved in Iran that they justified by emphasizing the need of Iran’s complying with Goal Five of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Addressing the concept of “gender equality” was a taboo in the past but is now publicly permitted. The expansion of the maternity leave and the introduction of paternity leave, the reduction of women’s working hours in public sectors for women with children of 6 years or under 6 years of age, and the question of “Work and Life Balance” were among representative issues that are debated in the parliament and in Zanan-e Emruz (Today’s Women, that was once banned but revived in 2014). The present study will shed light on an emerging women’s discourse on “Work and Life Balance” in the contemporary Iran. The research is based on the text analysis of newspaper articles, the parliament women-related bills, and various articles published in Zanan-e Emruz. This paper will argue that the politicization of women’s issues is distinctively different from the past, neither Islamist nor Islamic feminist orientation but “culturally local but with globally shared value.”