MODERNITY IN LAW: MULTIPLE AGENCIES IN TUNISIA The discourses of tradition and modernity in the Muslim world have overwhelmingly focused on issues of gender and Islamic law, which have been perceived among the highest stakes in policy choices and cultural representations. Modernity has been understood in this context in terms of greater legal rights for women. Starting in the 1950s and ever since, Tunisia has implemented gender legislation expanding women’s rights in family law. The ground breaking phase occurred with the promulgation of the Code of Personal Status in the mid-1950s during the formation of a national state in the aftermath of independence from French colonial rule. Another major phase occurred in the 1990s with citizenship law reforms as embodied in the Tunisian Code of Nationality. As a result of these two major phases, Tunisia has been at the forefront of "woman friendly" legislative changes in the Arab-Islamic world and is widely recognized as such. Following the Jasmine Revolution of January 2011 and the political transformations being implemented in its aftermath, further changes in family and personal status law are now being discussed. This paper first examines the meaning ascribed to the concept of modernity in the social science discourse on the Middle East as well as in the political rhetoric. It then documents major phases of reforms in favor of women’s rights in Tunisia and outlines the conditions that permitted or encouraged the continuity over the last half century. The first wave of reforms in the 1950s transformed the legal construction of gender roles within the family. The second wave in the 1990s redefined the conditions for the transmission of Tunisian citizenship. Current debates concern primarily inheritance. In painting social change in broad strokes, I analyze the initial and pioneering phase of the 1950s as a reform resulting from the actions of a newly formed national state interested in building a new society at the end of colonial rule. By contrast, the role of women’s agency came into play in Tunisia starting in the 1980s and became more robust in the 1990s. The consequences of the recent 2011 Jasmine Revolution still have to be explored. The evidence suggests that different political configurations can be conducive to reform and that the pursuit of modernity can be initiated by different social actors.

Lebanese women’s rights activists enacted strategies for advancing women’s rights that benefited from the shifting international trends for gender equality. Lebanese feminists took advantage of the augmented global attention to, and funding for, gender related-issues in order to advance their movement. By deconstructing the complexity of conceptualizing gender in a Lebanese context, this paper examines how women’s rights activists unpacked the meaning of gender to maneuver within the structural limitations surrounding them. I argue that activists used opportunities made possible through a global modern discourse on gender to advance their movement. They did so by framing feminist principles within a discourse that was sanctioned by their cultural norms and values. This paper first examines the local and global, conceptual and practical opportunities that became available for women’s rights activists in Lebanon with the introduction of the concept gender in the 1990 United Nations’ Conference in Beijing. Second, I analyze the burgeoning scholarship that emerged to translate the term gender, and to interpret its meaning, disseminate this new knowledge, teach it and apply it. Third, I investigate the formation of global networks that brought International organizations in partnership with Lebanese activists who did “gender work.” The neo-liberal international order, that devolved power to private nongovernmental and international organization, rewarded Lebanese gender activists financially and symbolically. In addition to receiving monetary assistance, “gender” activists became representatives of the Third World and the Muslim world in the international dialogues over gender mainstreaming, gender equality and gender work. Moreover, the international organizations’ efforts urged the Lebanese government to form a partnership with women’s organizations in order to provide social welfare services and design the future of gender relations in the country. Finally, this paper reveals that by embracing the concept of gender, women’s rights organizations sought to escape the linguistic curse of feminism, and to reintegrate their struggle for rights to achieve equality for all, the cause for which they have been fighting all along. In sum, activists in the various advocacy groups used modern political opportunities to advance women’s attainments of education, work and political rights.

The proposed paper aims to critically engage with the dichotomy of modernity and tradition in relation to gender and in the context of the shifting social, political and economic realities of Iraq. I will explore the multiple understandings of modernity against the backdrop of rapidly changing social, economic and political universes. By exploring several significant moments in the modern history of Iraq, i.e. the (pre)revolutionary period during the 1950, the early Ba’th regime, the impact of war and sanctions and the period following the invasion in 2003, I will attempt to unpack the meaning of modernity for different social actors. I am particularly interested in showing the complexity of both state discourses and social actors, such as women’s rights and political activists. The paper is based on a larger project in which I have explored the modern histories of Iraqi women through oral histories and life stories of different generations, ethnic & religious groups as well as secular and religious Iraqi women. The qualitative research was conducted in the diaspora (Jordan, the US, and the UK) as well as women who still live inside Iraq, but I only travelled to northern Iraq.

Arab women face entrenched discrimination, which is clearest in personal status laws that give men more rights than women in marriage and divorce, and in practices endangering women’s safety, from “honor killings” in Jordan to female genital mutilation (FGM) in Egypt. Our paper seeks to explain the reasons for the widely varying outcomes of attempts to pass women’s rights legislation in Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and Morocco. Our most successful cases are Morocco, where the 2003 moudawana abolished women’s duty to obey husbands and restricted polygamy, and Egypt, where the 2008 Child Law criminalized FGM. Jordan is an intermediate case; in 2003 King Abdallah’s campaign to increase honor killings punishments failed, and while a new honor crimes tribunal has handed down longer sentences, lenient punishment laws remain unchanged. In our least successful case, Yemen, a 2009 bill to raise girls’ marriage age has not been passed. Indicators that usually affect levels of women’s rights do not predict these outcomes. Strong tribal organization and low female literacy are argued to decrease women’s empowerment, but Morocco has both, while Jordan has the highest female literacy rate in our sample. Levels of wealth also seem irrelevant, as Egypt, the richest of our countries, has passed important legislation, but so has much poorer Morocco. Our paper focuses on three questions to develop a model outlining conditions favoring female-friendly legislation. What strategies did women’s rights groups use to support reform, and did they matter? Jordanian and Moroccan women organized massive signature campaigns, which helped in Morocco and don’t seem to have worked in Jordan, while Egyptian women did not mount major public efforts in favor of the Child Law. Which reforms prompted the deepest opposition from Islamists? In the Child Law Muslim Brotherhood parliamentarians did not strongly protest criminalizing FGM, but vehemently opposed letting mothers obtain birth certificates for children of unknown paternity. Do the number of Islamists relative to other parties in the parliament matter? Information for Egypt will come from interviews with government officials and leaders of women’s rights organizations in the summer of 2010 and from transcripts of the parliamentary debates.. Information on the other cases will be obtained from parliamentary transcripts where available, Arabic-language press coverage of the bills, including for Jordan coverage by as-Sabeel, which represents the Islamic Action Front, and analyses from women’s activists, including the book by Rana Husseini analyzing the honor crimes campaign she helped to organize.