Although much has been written about Egypt’s feminist movement during the twentieth century, few have explored the intersections between the state, the feminist movement and Islamist forces. The ‘woman question’ in Egypt has historically developed into a contested ideological battle between these multiple discourses, the dynamics of which have seldom been considered simultaneously in the literature. This study explores how state policies have both reproduced gender inequalities as well as appropriated the ‘woman question’ within its own rubric of national priorities. The study argues that an adequate understanding of the status of women in Egypt must be grounded in a thorough analysis of the state’s historical transformation and its political project. The state’s relationship with the feminist movement has been characterised by its attempt to control these forces through a careful oscillation between granting women particular rights whilst avoiding the risk of offending the patriarchal interests of Islamist forces. Ultimately, the state and the various Islamist forces sought to retain patriarchal control over women, as evidenced by modest legislative reforms pertaining to women’s rights. Specifically, the development of personal status laws in Egypt, which have mirrored the development of the Egyptian feminist movement and its relationship with the state, will be used as a key marker of the progress of women. Despite the literature on the historical development of the feminist movement, there has been no analysis of changes in personal status laws. This is particularly significant, given that the development of more equitable laws for women has been slow. The study will begin with the Constitution of 1923, marking the beginning of a recurrent process in which the state would solicit women’s political support, subsequently failing to grant them equal rights and reform personal status laws. A number of relevant works have helped guide this study. The important work by Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, links the emergence of feminist movements to nationalist struggles. Laura Lee Downs work explores the significance of conceptions of power in analysing the development of gender history. The works of both Mirvat Hatem as well as Elizabeth Thompson will be instrumental in understanding how women have been co-opted into reproducing nation-state collectivities. In understanding the Egyptian feminist movement, the works of Leila Ahmed, Margot Badran, Nikki Keddie, Nadje Al-Ali and Beth Baron will be instrumental.

Lebanese women made their first attempts at acquiring voting rights during the early 1920s, a time when Lebanese men enjoyed universal and unconditional suffrage, and were finally awarded voting rights in 1953. While some women fought relentlessly for this cause, others did not desire the right to vote. A significant number of Lebanese women felt that politics was a male domain and that women should focus on their homes and families instead. This is perhaps the reason why only 10% of female voters cast their ballots in the 1953 elections. There were even special polling places for women, emblematic of their citizenship status in a separate sphere from men. Only a very small number of women went on to hold public office. This paper explores the tensions and fissures in the Lebanese women’s movement during the post-independence era regarding voting rights, and the resulting dearth of female representation in politics after women finally obtained the franchise. Why wasn’t suffrage a common goal amongst Lebanese women, and why did the granting of female suffrage fail to translate into women’s political participation in the new state? I posit that the reasons for these phenomena are twofold. Firstly, the resilience of the patriarchy at the political, social, economic, and private level kept women outside of the official state-building process. Secondly, many women were ambivalent towards political participation and through their calls for the right to vote, they were actually playing to a script that proclaimed that political rights would lead to social and economic rights. Though they did not turn out in large numbers at the polls, this did not render Lebanese women passive citizens—they perceived their roles in the domestic sphere as a more relevant practice of citizenship. Lebanese women’s claims to citizenship were based on proper care of their households, scientific mothering, and raising upstanding citizens—this was equivalent to national service. Therefore, women actively contributed to the state-building process on their own terms from inside their homes. Sources include polling data, literature on postcolonial women’s movements, and Lebanese women’s own writings from the press and alumnae bulletins of universities.

Exploring Feminism in Contemporary Iraq: Legacies of the Past and Present Struggles Sabiha al-Shaikh Dawood’s landmark book, Awwal al-Tariq (1958), provides details about how women’s rights issues – such as access to education and the work sphere, veiling, and legal and political rights – structured the emerging nationalist consciousness and the idea of the “new nation” among the Iraqi elite. The first female lawyer in Iraq brings to light the emergence, among urban educated Iraqi women, of growing nationalist awareness that placed women and gender issues at the core of aspirations of modernization and national liberation. Nazihah al-Dulaymi, in her book al-Mar’ah al-Iraqiyah (1952), posed the second competing narrative on Iraqi women’s activism of this period. Al-Dulaymi puts forward a short study of the conditions of women’s lives in Iraq in the 1940s, which uses social class as an analytical framework. Al-Dulaymi was a gynecologist by trade, a prominent figure of the League for the Defense of Women’s Rights, the first Iraqi (Arab) female minister, and prominent communist activist. For her, qadhyat al-mar’ah [the woman question] is situated at the intersection of class struggles and national liberation. This presentation will explore the commonalities and differences between these two main trends that characterized Iraqi feminism in the middle of the 20th century. It will also show how these feminist legacies influenced contemporary women’s rights discourses and activisms in Iraq in the second half of the 20th century. Finally, I will analyse how the post-invasion Iraqi context marked by the very fragmentation of women’s legal rights on ethno-sectarian lines, has deeply affected, without totally undermining, these feminist legacies. My research is based on an ethnography of women’s political organizations in Baghdad primarily, Erbil and Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan secondarily (conducted between October 2010 and June 2012, and more recently in March-April 2016) and a social history of Iraqi women’s social, economic and political experiences since the formation of the Iraqi state in the 1920s.

With the inception of the war in Syria, women have participated in the shaping of competing state projects in the country. Parties to the conflict have recruited them as fighters (e.g., “lionesses of Asad”), comrades (e.g., women on governing committees in Rojava), and wives (e.g., IS’ “jihadi brides”). Through Syrian women, Western aid agencies and foreign governments have promoted ideas about proper statehood and gendered citizenship. NGOs propel the neoliberal discourses of female empowerment and victimization, while foreign backers of the regime present an eroticized vision of Syrian women as supporters of male soldiers. It is in this context, where I situate my analysis of government-sponsored print and visual media sources in Arabic, Russian, and English about women fighting on the side of the Syrian regime. By unpacking the discourses and aesthetics of these materials, the paper interrogates the intersection of gender, sexuality, and militarized violence, reflected in the regime’s state project, which female fighters seemingly endorse and contribute to. It shows how pro-regime female warriors articulate a version of feminism that encompasses calls for equality, invocations of paternalism, and gendered desires for security, survival, and recognition. This rhetoric is embedded in the history of state-sponsored feminism in Syria, hyper-militarization and masculinization of regional politics, and female vulnerability to violence. The paper argues that by interpellating women as fighters for Asad and Syria, the regime reiterates Syrian modernity and nationalism as normative and produces the other side as the oppressors of women. It also presents pro-regime women’s participation in combat as “normalizing” and “liberating” (i.e., “women are not only good for birthing”). The women-soldiers’ recognition of themselves as equal partners to state-building – a well-known ruse of state feminist projects – subjects and disciplines them into proper citizenship and womanhood, thus postponing the “uncomfortable” questions about a true feminist liberation. I draw from works on third world feminism, gender and violence in the Middle East, and state feminist projects in the region. Although research has been done on gender, normativity, and militarization in different contexts, this paper analyzes these interconnections in war-torn Syria, which lends itself to new theoretical insights. Moreover, media and scholarly attention has been given primarily to Kurdish and IS’ women fighters. Focusing on pro-regime female combatants, who also articulate a feminist project, will complicate the discussion about feminist possibilities and futurities in Syria.