So many analyses of Arab political thought in the wake of World War II recount how progressive forces are captured by what Roel Meijer (2002), following James Scott (1999), has termed “the hegemony of authoritarian modernism.” We see this story told in some of the works that recount how early liberals “betray” the liberal cause by taking up Islamic themes in the work of Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot (1977) and Nadav Safran (1961). Another version from the left bemoans the abandonment of progressive communist movement by activists who subsumed the interests of workers and an internationalist outlook to nationalist and Arab nationalist causes and the emerging military regimes. Meijer’s own work on Egypt asks the question of “why so many prominent intellectuals joined the new regime in the second half of the 1950s, even though most of them had laid the ideological and institutional foundations for a pluralist civil society in the 1930s and 1940s” (2). The answer he gives focuses on the tension between two trends: one that sought to develop the democratic potential of civil society and another that sought to unify social forces in the name of national strength and development. The tension, Meijer tells us, is ultimately resolved in the favor of an authoritarian state-led modernization. A similar story is told in regard to Arab feminism during this time. As Badran succinctly puts it “what had been born out of independent feminist activism in the mid-1940s had come by the 1950s and 1960s to be harnessed by states to serve their purposes” (1995, 250). Arab feminism becomes state feminism. My aim is not to refute this general narrative—since it is certainly generally true. But it has never been the case that all feminism has been state feminism and we know that state feminism begins to decline in the 1980s. My contribution will examine early gendered critiques of authoritarian state-led modernization in the Egyptian context. These critiques are put forth from multiple ideological directions, from liberal feminists (such as Doria Shafiq), to socialist feminsits (such as Ingi Aflatun and Saiza Nabarawi), to what might be termed Islamic feminists (such as Zaynab Al-Ghazali).

I use the film Al Bab Al Maftouh (The Open Door) to reflect on women’s rights and their intersection with the anti-imperial cause in post-1952 Egypt; and on whether the woman’s question was solely the state’s business where women’s rights were given to women rather than taken by them, or a battle that women fought independently from the state. Or more than that. This film is both similar to -- and distinct from -- other films made in the 1950s and 60s about women’s issues and gender relations. It depicts women’s emancipation as part of Egypt’s liberation, and essentially as part of a liberation that was championed by the post-1952 state, a state that, as Laura Bier argues, sought to “mobiliz[e] women in the service of national development” and nation building, which required a “restructer[ing] of gender relations” (3-4). Watching The Open Door from today’s vantage point forces as to ask certain questions, as we witness post-2013 Egypt ruled by an oppressive state, whose policies and practices have had a devastating impact on women and the feminist cause, and whose excessive and unchecked power is often attributed to the systems of oppression that the 1952 military regime first established. It is hard to watch. The Open Door today and not wonder if this is pure propaganda given that the 1952 regime, despite its anti-imperial discourse and actions, was tyrannical, ts authoritarianism already consolidated and no secret by 1963 (the date of the film’s release). It crushed its opponents and left no space for a once vibrant feminist activism that used to be independent from the state before 1952. I argue that The Open Door’s message should not be simply dismissed as pure propaganda for the regime because the context we are living through today is still different from the context that the film’s contemporaries lived through.

This paper analyzes the relationship between state violence and feminist and/or women’s politics in Turkey in the late 1950s, amidst the authoritarian turn of the Democrat Party (DP) government. In December 1957, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes called for measures to ensure the “moral public order” in his opening speech of the assembly. Shortly after, Turkish Women’s Federation (TKB), a firm Kemalist organization, announced its strong commitment to fight against sex-work despite the lack of a visible government initiative around this issue. Why did the TKB claim responsibility for ensuring moral public order in this period? How did TKB’s politics and its relation to the state change after transition to multi-party democracy? What are the discourses and narratives of ideal womanhood and manhood in the DP period? And how do different actors such as women organized in TKB and sex workers themselves counter, contest or affirm the forging of particular gendered ideal national subjects? Drawing from a comparative reading on Middle Eastern state feminisms and Deniz Kandiyoti’s research on Kemalist nationalism and idealized gender roles in Turkey, I claim that the state apparatus is not the only actor to inform the ideals about the imageries of ideal family and ideal Turkish nation. Moreover, women from various classes were not the mere victims of state control, but actively shaped gender politics by either affirming or subverting “moral public order”. This research primarily relies on TKB’s archives, daily newspapers, and the parliamentary minutes in the last period of the DP (1957-1960). Feminist scholars in Turkey have been researching gender and sexuality politics and its intrinsic rather than incidental place in the political history of Turkey for at least four decades. Post-1935 period of women’s movement until the flourishment of autonomous feminist groups in mid 1980s is usually considered as the period of state feminism due to the lack of autonomous women’s groups. Yet, the particular gender regime of the DP, women’s agency in shaping this particular regime, and feminist dissidence and/or complicity with the state are surprisingly under-analyzed in scholarly accounts. I aim to extend and contribute to three main scholarly conversations: 1) history of women’s movements and state feminism in Turkey, 2) sociopolitical history of Turkey by analytically centering women’s complicity and/or dissidence with the state’s moralist politics, and 3) history of state feminisms in the Middle East.

In August 2017, the Tunisian president called for legal changes in order to give Tunisian women equal inheritance rights. His call sent shock waves through the region and several television networks devoted a lot of airtime to discuss the issue. In addition, large numbers of people—both men and women—took to social media to express their views on the matter. This study analyzes a sample of a thread of comments on a Youtube video of an episode of an Egyptian talk show in which an Islamic scholar and a secular journalist discussed the proposed change. Since the issue under study is a discussion about the cases in which Muslim men inherit twice as much as Muslim women, critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used to analyze the YouTube thread. CDA is a qualitative research method used to analyze how discourse is used to justify, maintain, and reproduce social inequalities in general, including gender inequality (Mullet, 2018). In addition, the study uses the theoretical definition of an ideology as developed by Van Dijk, T. A. (2006) to analyze these comments. He has defined ideology as a socially shared set of ideas that constitute a belief system to a particular group of people. Ideologies are very important because they “de?ne the social identity of a group.” In other words, ideologies define, control, and organize the group’s “shared beliefs about its fundamental conditions and ways of existence and reproduction,” or its cultural values (Van Dijk, 2006, p. 123). The study’s results indicate that Islam seems to function as an ideology that defines the social identity of many of the commenters and it even seems to have become common ground for some users. That is why dividing inheritance according to Sharia seems to be perceived by many users as the only way things can or should be done. Furthermore, some of the users comments suggest that Islamic ideology also serves the function of uniting people around a shared goal. However, the study’s results also indicate that some male users’ opposition to the proposed changes to women’s inheritance seem to have more to do with social and economic factors than religious ones. In addition, secular ideology seems to have provided a basis for some users to resist the dominance of Islamic ideology. But the number of users who seemed to alien themselves with secular ideology was clearly outnumbered. It is also noteworthy that most of them seemed to be Tunisian.

The mechanisms by which civil society organizations (CSOs) navigate restrictive environments or shrinking civic spaces remain under-explored. Limited space to engage in advocacy is one manifestation of a restrictive civic environment – reflected in many CSOs’ avoidance of confrontational tactics. In environments where CSOs are keen to maintain a low profile, non-confrontational advocacy mechanisms are often used instead. This paper explores how CSOs can engage in advocacy in a restrictive setting by considering issue characteristics, actor characteristics and advocacy tactics. This inquiry is approached through a case study on the adoption of a new law that criminalizes denial of inheritance to women which was put forth by a coalition of local civil society organizations in Egypt and led by an international NGO. I argue that the coalition’s ability to navigate the restrictive environment in Egypt can be explained by a confluence of factors, including that the issue did not conflict with beliefs of powerful decision-makers, that it was framed within a non-controversial guise, and that the actors used insider tactics in mobilizing support of influential government actors. Findings in this paper fill a gap in the literature on how non-adversarial partnerships with government are pursued by non-state actors, without being co-opted by the regime, for strategic purposes beyond survival.