When is revolution? Triggered by the reception of the French Revolution, the many smaller revolutions in southern European Mediterranean countries and later political events of the anti-imperialist ‘Ur?b? revolution (thawrat ‘Ur?b? in 1879-1882) in Egypt and finally the Young Turk Revolution (1905-1908) in Turkey, the very concept of thawra and inqil?b was under scrutiny. Applied as analytical concept or described as political instrument for modern Arab, or late Ottoman-Arab, thought the demarcation line of revolution was deeply embedded in related questions of development (tatawwur) and progress (taraqq?), reform (isl?h) and renaissance (tajd?d, nahda), as well as of decline and fitna. In this paper I seek to bring to the forefront to what extent political, cultural and religious discourses on revolution were inscribed as well in questions of gender and women. These questions were not reduced to the ‘women question’ alone but define the very vocabulary and structure of arguments.

Gendering nationalism. The Moroccan “Revolution of the king and the people” Up to now, analyses of Moroccan politics of gender have most of the time focused on how authoritarian reform and / or the specificities of the monarchy’s religious legitimacy have determined the country’s efforts at promoting women’s rights over the last decades. This paper intends to shed new light on the complexities of the issue by stressing the nationalist dimension of royal authority as it appears from the discursive production on the occasion of the annual celebration of the “Revolution of the king and the people”. In contrast to the processes of state and nation building in the republican regimes of the neighbouring countries, the political construction of independent Moroccan has been predominantly centred upon the figure of the king who was able to impose himself not only as the highest political and religious authority of the country. As a result of complex political struggles between the nationalist movement and the colonial powers as well as between different factions within the nationalist movement, the monarch also emerged as the sole legitimate representative of the “revolutionary” - i.e. the independentist - will of the nation. Until today, in remembrance of the broad opposition to the exile forced upon Muhammad V on August 20, 1953, by the French colonial administration, the “Revolution of the king and the people” is celebrated in the country. Based on an analysis of royal addresses delivered on this occasion since the 1990ies, the paper looks at the shifting semantics of the term revolution deployed by the monarchy as a major gendered and gendering nationalistic trope. It will be argued that while the discursive repertoires of human rights on the one hand, Islamic reform on the other hand figure prominently in official discourses on issues of women’s rights, the nationalist underpinning of monarchical legitimacy continues to shape Moroccan politics of gender on the structural as well as the ideological level.

The demonstrations of June 30, 2013 in Egypt and the following seizing of power by the military appeared to many observers as the end of the revolutionary period which started in 2011. However, for others who supported the overthrow of the Muslim Brothers, June 30, 2013 was a victorious revolution correcting the path of the 2011 uprising and reuniting the Egyptian people around the army, in line with the rhetoric of the official media at that time. These same media insisted particularly on the participation of women to the demonstrations, shown as a marker of the people’s unified will to overthrow the Muslim Brothers. Both critics and supporters of the military tended to put emphasis on the emotional dimension of the involvement of these women, even often presenting them as mostly driven by romantic attraction toward the then general officer 'Abd al-Fattah al-Sissi. In contrast, this contribution proposes to take at its word the claim of women supporting the military that June 30, 2013 was a revolution. Based on collected narratives of women demonstrators, the presentation describes the steps of their engagement against the Muslim Brothers as the polarization between their supporters and opponents was growing. Further, the paper discusses the impact of mass mobilizations for creating a sense of shared history leading eventually to an unrestricted support to the army’s command. “I <3 the state of emergency,” a statement published online by a woman engaged in the “June 30 revolution” in August 2014 despite her previous support of the 2011 movement, reflects such a subjective involvement into the events. On the analytical level, the paper discusses the relevance of studying political engagements in favor of authoritarian regimes as experiences of revolutionary subjectivation. Gilles Deleuze forged the concept of “becoming revolutionary” (devenir-révolutionnaire) to understand the legacy of the May 1968 uprising in France despite its apparent political failure. According to him and to Félix Guattari, it is important to pay a close attention to the open virtualities which shape subjects in moments of uprising to properly assess their impact. Considering 2013 in Egypt, the presentation reflects upon the possibility of apprehending mobilizations leading to a reinforced control on society by state institutions as instants of empowerment carrying along a sense of emancipation for those involved, and the possible legacy of such apparently paradoxical stances.

The power of words and their impact on the social construction of reality (S. Resta, 1998, Words and Social Change) provide the conceptual framework for this presentation. Within this perspective, the presentation adopts a long-term view concerning the evolution and connotation of vocabulary which is emblematic of socio-politio-cultural transformation within a given geographical region. In this regard, the focus here is on gender-specific words which intersect nineteenth-century nahda expression in the Ottoman Arab provinces and that of the Syrian revolution (2011-). In the latter case, examples are taken from The Creative Memory of The Syrian Revolution website which, from 2011, at the beginning of the conflict in Syria, to the present day, receives and archives poems, short stories, blogs, video clips, movies, filmed interviews, memoirs, street art, pictures of posters and banners used in political demonstrations, etc., as well as oral narratives whose recordings are sent to the website managers. Even though the twentieth century and along with it, different types of political structures separate these two points in time, i.e., the nineteenth-century nahda and the Syrian revolution which burst into public consciousness in 2011 (in reality, both phenomena have earlier antecedents which will be briefly touched upon in this presentation), gender and the politics of words are central to both movements. That is not to imply, of course, that there was an unbroken linear transfer of words and a homogeneity of ideas conveyed by those words from the period of the nahda up to current-day Syrian vocabulary as related to gender and the on-going revolution. Nonetheless, within these two contexts, some words which are instrumental to nahda concepts regarding gender and those expressed by individuals (sometimes anonymously) who published on the above Syrian Revolution website reveal vocabulary which is crucial to both phenomena. Although perhaps not specifically conveying the same connotation in either situation, due to the specificity of the circumstances of both movements, use is nevertheless made of the following words in both nineteenth-century nahda and current expressions of the Syrian revolution: regeneration, renewal, reform, progress, rights, obligations, innovation, all of which are associated with the role of gender. It is the objective of this presentation to identify the context in which this vocabulary is used within the situation of the Syrian revolution, as available on the above website, taking into account the fact that these same words conveyed key concepts during the nahda.

Who decides that a country has experienced a rebellion, or an insurgency, not a “revolution?” Who owns the concept of revolution? What are the political and epistemic consequences of conceptual ownership? Why and how does a colonial situation inflect the language of social change? To answer such questions, this paper examines the sources, evolution, as well as effects of the struggle over naming radical movements of decolonization in the second half of the XXth century. Focusing on the case study of Algeria, the paper examines the political and cultural frameworks as well as traditions within which the Algerian War (1954-1962) was named and conceptualized by its protagonists. Using historical monographs as well as interviews with contemporary Algerian historians, it further analyzes the persistence of the struggle over naming in current postcolonial historiography, as it explores revisionist accounts of the War among Algerian opposition groups, and describes their erasure of women’s participation in the War. Theoretical lessons will be drawn about the role played today by former colonial empires in the symbolic appropriation and redefinition of their fall through the political production of historical knowledge.