autochthonous political tradition that gives central
place to “the notion of the state as a family, organ-
ically united in love, and governed by a father-head
who best understands the needs of its members”
(Reid 1998, 25). Not only was Suharto – who pre-
sided over a corrupt and crony-ridden regime –
known as the “Father of Development” and his
wife universally referred to as Ibu Tien (Mother
Tien), but the state ideology enshrined a notion of
familial harmony as a quintessential “Indonesian”
characteristic in order to counter demands for the
political contestation associated with democracy.
For Indonesia’s women, this ideology was reflected
in discriminatory legal instruments as well as in a
systematic campaign to mobilize them in state-
sponsored organizations intended to nourish their
roles in the private sphere of the family as the
expression of “good citizenship” (Robinson 1999).Women, the family, and
boundaries
In the invocation of the nation as family, women
and their fecundity are seen as important “bound-
ary markers” of both ethnic group and nation. The
symbol of the family represents a homogenizing
version of the nation that suppresses plurality – and
indeed this has been a strong effect where this trope
has been deployed.
The former, long-standing president of Singa-
pore, Lee Kwang Kyu, proposed that the state
intervene in the marriages and reproductive choices
of educated Singaporean women for eugenicist pur-
poses, through a combination of incentives for
childbearing and experiments in state-brokered
marriages. He linked this appropriation by the
state to traditions where families arranged mar-
riages, often without their daughters’ knowledge or
consent, and also speculated on the possibility of
reintroducing polygamy (in fact, polygyny). The
proposal was directed at the majority Chinese resi-
dents, manifesting anxiety that their social prece-
dence may be challenged by Indian and (Muslim)
Malay minorities. A similar invocation to “breed”
was made by Prime Minister Mahathir, to Muslim
Malaycitizens of Malaysia, manifesting anxiety
that the Muslim Malay majority of Malaysia would
be overrun by Chinese citizens. Mahathir stressed
the unique qualities of the Malays, strongly rooted
in their Islamic religion: in this vision, the Malay
family, and women in their role as mothers, are fun-
damental to a (Malaysian) Islamic modernity.
Women act as identity markers by preserving
dress codes and other manifestations of public
behavior that define national boundaries, and
boundaries between nation/ethnic groups. In Egypt,156 families: metaphors of nation
the strong promotion of public veiling by Mu߆afà
Kàmil’s wife Íafiyya was linked to the fact that
Íafiyya’s honor (as mother of the nation) had
become the nation’s honor. “The vocabulary and
signs employed to disseminate nationalism thus
reinforced certain deeply embedded beliefs about
gender, reaffirming ideals of sexual purity, morality
and motherhood” (Baron 1993, 252).
Women are seen as the repositories of tradition
and are often enjoined to marry endogamously. In
situations of political conflict, within and between
nations, the connection between nation-women-
family-honor provides a language of violation.
Within the “microcosm” of the family, should a
woman be compromised or violated, there must be
redress lest the honor of the family be spoiled, and
so in conflict situations, rape becomes a direct
attack on the nation (which, like the family, is con-
ceptualized in terms of blood and relatedness). This
idea was developed in Egyptian nationalist strug-
gles against the British: “the notion of the collective
was expanded, and with this a new sense of collec-
tive honour developed” (Baron 1993, 246). Dis-
honor was increasingly associated with the inability
of Egyptian men to protect their women, an expres-
sion of the homology between the family and the
wider collective, the nation.Motherland/fatherland
A common invocation of the familial trope is the
conceptualization of the nation as mother or father.
Nasta suggests the idea of “motherland” is a com-
mon colonial trope, inherited by patriarchal post-
colonial male leaders: “In the iconographies of
nationalism, images of mothers have convention-
ally invited symbols suggestive of primal origins –
birth, hearth, home, roots, the umbilical cord of
being – as encapsulated by terms such as ‘mother-
tongue,’ ‘mothercountry’” (1991, xxi).
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many
modernist Islamic thinkers embraced French politi-
cal thought. This was especially the case in Egypt,
which was at the forefront in the reform of Islam
(Jayawardena 1987, ch. 3), and ideas flowing from
Egypt were influential in other Middle East coun-
tries. Donohue and Esposito argue that Rifà≠a Ràfi≠
al-¢a™†àwì(1801–73) was the first writer to intro-
duce these new concepts into Arabic (1982, 11),
expressing the French notion of fatherland (patrie)
by the Arabic wa†an(home area), and patriotism by
wa†aniyya. He wrote:there are some indications that God disposed men to
work together for the improvement of their fatherland
and willed that they relate to one another as members
of one family. God willed that the fatherland would...