Field research in disciplines as diverse as development, gender, Islamology, and sociology continues to gather data that challenges the once dominant discourse that posited Islamic thought as rigidly conservative on gender issues, and idealizing women's role as being only that of mothers and housewives. The emergence of Islamic intellectuals, including both males and self-described Islamic feminists and both those trained in Islamic law/philosophy and those educated in post-enlightenment Western social science theories, has pushed forward discussion of human and women's rights from Morocco to Iran. On-going economic and social changes have pushed forward cultural changes that include valuing education attainment for both boys and girls even at the college level, where young women now comprise half or more of all entering college students in most Middle Eastern countries, and professional work for women. At the same time, the implementation of neo-liberal economic policies has helped to widen income and class differences in many of the large cities of the Middle East, and increasing more low-income women feel compelled to find income-generating work to help their families. The objective of this panel is to present field research documenting these changes and to stimulate discussion of their significance for women in the Middle East.
The five presentations on this panel begin with an overview paper that analyzes how two contemporary Islamic intellectuals, Muhammad 'Abid al-Jabiri (1936-2010) and Taha 'Abd al-Rahman (b. 1944) have been attempting to accommodate classic Islamic philosophical ideas to conceptions of democracy, human rights, and women's rights that are compatible with universal norms as expressed in various international conventions. The next paper examines how some highly educated Egyptian women with professional are, contrary to scholarly assumptions about women in this class, are deeply religious and strive to express their religiosity in both their professional and public lives in the name of realizing an ideal Muslim society. Religion is not necessarily a primary concern in the working lives of women in the next two presentations. In paper three, for example, educated, working women in the UAE and nearby countries express aspirations to have satisfying careers in the public or private sector, and some even becoming entrepreneurs. The last two papers deal with low-income working women: First a compartive study of women in four Arab countries, and second, women who work in Iran's non-formal economic sector. Both provide data showing that many low-income households in these countries actually are de facto female-headed.
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Mr. Rickard Lagervall
One of the main themes in modern Islamic discourse has been the relationship between universal and cultural particularistic norms regulating human affairs, the sphere which in classical Islamic tradition is designated as mu´amalat. One recurrent topic of contest has been the universal character of international conventions on human rights. This paper will discuss two attempts at accommodation by two Moroccan philosophers, who serve as exponents of two different positions in this debate.
Muhammad ´Abid al-Jabiri (1936-2010) justified a conception of democracy, human rights, and women’s rights substantially identical to that of contemporary international conventions by arguing for its foundation in the Islamic philosophical tradition. Indeed, he claimed that the European philosophical tradition had been borrowed from Islam. Taha ´Abd al-Rahman (b. 1944) argued for a specifically Islamic re-conceptualization of democracy and human rights, saying that the task of Islamic civilization was to inject a spiritual dimension into what he considered Western materialistic notions. The iconic figure in al-Jabiri’s philosophical discourse is the Andalusian Islamic scholar and philosopher Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), who attempted to reconcile revelation and reason. In contrast, ´Abd al-Rahman’s reference in Islamic tradition is Ibn Rushd’s contemporary, Ibn ´Arabi (d. 1240), who attempted to construct a coherent system of the Islamic mystical tradition.
Both of these Moroccan philosophers try to safeguard a particular collective identity, in the case of al-Jabiri, a national Moroccan one, and in the case of ´Abd al-Rahman, a general Muslim one. At the same time, they integrate this identity into a broader, modern global culture. In order to analyze how these two philosophical projects articulate the relationship between religion, law, and ethics in modern societies, I employ Kant’s ideas concerning universally binding moral norms. Kant made a distinction between moral and ethical norms, a distinction that has been elaborated by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and also Rainer Forst. I plan to depart from this distinction between universally binding moral norms and ethical norms which define the good of particular life-forms.
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Dr. Dalia Abdelhady
The objective of this paper is to investigate the ways that professional women in Egypt have embraced Islam to assert their interest in civic engagement and social change. My study focuses on highly-educated professional women, who are the least affected by desperate economic conditions, and examines the role religion plays in their public and professional lives. In some respect these women's narratives articulate a form of reactive identity in the face of global fragmentation and Western exclusion, particularly in the cultural sphere. However, respondents also emphasized that their religiosity informs their desire to shape their surroundings and to bring about the ideal Muslim society, thus participating in positive social change. To a large extent, these interests can be understood as specifically local and ethno-national, and possibly contradicting processes of globalization. However, my respondents also expressed strong interests in participating in global social changes and cosmopolitan forms of engagement that also were based on their religious values and identities. Women in my sample draw on their elite position and competence in Western culture to articulate their interest in global social changes and confidence in their leadership. Nonetheless, my respondents also expressed their awareness that the existing global culture is not open to their own culture, which provides many of them the basis for their global participation, such as providing alternative models for leadership, participation and identification that span the local and the global.
This paper will illustrate these positions and articulations of religious identities, and hypothesize ways Islam and cosmopolitan ideals are merged in the work lives and public engagements of Muslim women, grounding the analysis in sociological theories. The analyses are based on in-depth, multiple interviews with 25 women, all of who are college graduates, occupy managerial positions at their work, and self-identify as practicing Muslims (which in contemporary Egypt means wearing hejab). The respondents worked in various managerial and entrepreneurial positions, such as managers in businesses or non-governmental organizations, or owned their own businesses that provided a form of marketing or consulting to other companies and organizations. They all had at least a BA or BS degree, and many had graduate degrees. Their ages ranged from 30 to 45 years of age, and they were fluent in Arabic and English.
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Mrs. Jaleh Taheri
An interesting development in the past few years has been the number of articles and books focusing on women and work in Middle Eastern countries. This is a welcomed trend in view of the dearth of such studies as recently as 2000. Some of the recent literature not only provides fresh insights about the role of Middle Eastern women in the work force but also compels us to revise and even reject many long-accepted assumptions about women’s work outside the private sphere of the domestic family household. Unfortunately, this new research tends to concern working women in the most populous countries, particularly Egypt, Iran, and Turkey, and there is a need for more research about working in women in other MENA (Middle East and North Africa region) countries. One region of the Middle East where scholarship about working women has remained notably deficient is the oil-producing countries of the Arabian Peninsula. Yet, these countries have been experiencing similar gendered-related social changes as are occurring elsewhere within MENA: rapidly expanding educational opportunities for girls at the secondary and tertiary levels; delayed age of marriage for girls; and young women with high school and college degrees seeking employment opportunities in both the public and private sectors of their countries’ economies.
The aim of this paper is to analyze data on working women in the United Arab Emirates. The data includes statistics compiled by the Women for Sustainable Growth initiative, which is based at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University (Sweden) but has links with several university research centers and non-governmental organizations the in aforementioned countries, interviews with working women, and case studies carried out by scholars interested in women’s employment. It will seek to answers such questions, among others, as: What is the relationship between higher education and type of employment; what is the process by which women find jobs in the government and private sectors; what percentage of working women are self-employed entrepreneurs; what is the level of job satisfaction among working women, how do working women manage work and family responsibilities; and in what ways do women integrate their practice of Islam with their work environments? Answers to these queries can help us understand the degree to which the status of working women, particularly educated women, in Arabian Peninsula societies may be similar to or deviate from the status of working women in the rest of MENA.
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Dr. Jennifer Olmsted
Two major questions of interest to policy makers in the Arab world include:
1. why women’s labor force participation rates have risen more slowly than in other parts of the world;
2. what the link is between poverty and women’s employment.
Concerning the former, until recently Arab women’s employment rates were lower than would have been expected, given the high literacy rates in much of the region. In recent years though labor force participation rates among women have been rising. Some analysts have argued that rising female employment rates are a sign of increased women’s opportunity and empowerment, while others have argued that this may instead be a function of increased female impoverishment, which is in turn linked to high male unemployment and a rise in female headship rates. In this paper micro-level data from Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Egypt are analyzed to get at the questions: what can explain rising women’s employment, and is this phenomenon linked to shifting household patterns (more female headed households) and/or more likely to be occurring among poor women ; do how women’s employment and poverty patterns differ across different Arab countries and why. In my analysis I include a discussion of differences across countries, as well as across time (using data sets that are ten years apart in most cases) to look at how women’s employment patterns have shifted and are a function, or not, of poverty trends in the region.
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Dr. Roksana Bahramitash
Poverty, Gender and the Informal Sector in Iran
Since the 2009 Iranian presidential elections there has been considerable gender rights advocacy in Iran, primarily— if not exclusively— focusing on civil rights. While such rights are important, they tend to be more pertinent to urban middle and elite classes, and not necessarily to those from low-income households. In this research, based on a sample of 90 interviews with women from low-income households engaged in the informal sector, it was found that economic hardship is their most pressing concern. Close to one-third of the women in the sample were divorced or abandoned by their husbands or were heading single-headed households, one-fifth were married to men with drug addictions, the rest were either taking care of a sick or disabled husband or their husbands were in jail, and in some cases husbands simply were unemployed, illustrating the challenges some of our sample (selected through snowball sampling method) were facing. The followings hypotheses were put to test a) women of low-income households have entered into the job market to increase their economic status, b) economic empowerment has led to increases in inter-household negotiations over the allocation of the extra income and c) it has increased women’s sense of independence and empowerment vis-à-vis their husbands, fathers or brothers. The first hypothesis has been validated for the sample.
As for the second hypothesis, the results show that women have gained some control over household-spending decisions. However, the third hypothesis has generated mixed results: some have become empowered, while others responded that the extra burden of a double day has been a strain on their time and health. Interestingly, some women in the sample were part of rotating credit clubs. These clubs generated funds that were vital to the social safety nets of their members and, in some cases, self-help groups were formed that built economic and community solidarity. The findings suggest that on the one hand women of low-income households face major economic challenges often exacerbated by international economic sanctions and government mismanagement of the economy, and on the other hand some women manage to create opportunities for themselves in the informal sector and increase their access to economic resources through self-help groups and rotating credit clubs while energizing community solidarity.
