Arab StatesArab states, like other modern nation-states, pro-
duce visual representations of the nation that are
often highly gendered; the imagining of nationhood
seems to have a great deal to do with the imagining
of femininity and masculinity. But representations
of gender and nation in Arab countries do not fol-
low a single formula, nor do they remain static over
time. In Egypt, where the peasant population was
always larger than the urban or nomadic popula-
tions, peasants were the chosen symbols of cultural
authenticity from the earliest days of nationalist
iconography, and the nation was often represented
as a peasant woman. In Jordan, where the mer-
chant class was economically dominant from the
founding of the state in 1921, tribal men and all
women represented tradition in national imagina-
tion, while urban males represented the future. The
familiar male/female, modern/traditional duality is
completely reversed in some Kuwaiti iconography,
where “Family Day” commemorative stamps de-
pict the man in full Arab dress as the woman and
children, all dressed in Western clothes, sit or play
in a circle around him. In addition, when social
issues deemed critical to national development
are represented (such as education and literacy),
women have been used as markers of progress in
almost all Arab countries, with the apparent ex-
ception of Saudi Arabia, regardless of competing
depictions of women as the custodians of tradition
(whether peasant or tribal) in most of these same
countries.
As the site of one of the earliest nationalist move-
ments in the Arab Middle East, Egypt has a partic-
ularly long history of imagining nationhood. After
the nationalist leader Mu߆afàKàmil died in 1908,
a memorial committee created a statue that depicts
Kàmil standing erect, delivering a speech. He places
his left hand on a bust of the Sphinx, and points
down with his right hand. The extended forefinger
of his right hand draws us to the pedestal of the
statue: a bronze relief shows a seated young peas-
ant woman, with head covered but face unveiled, of
slightly smaller dimensions than Kàmil. Entrapped
in the square space, she represents Egypt under
British occupation. By this time, a consensus had
formed in Egyptian nationalist imagination: the
nation should be represented as a woman. It had a
National Insignia, Signs, and Monuments
certain linguistic logic (Mißr, or Egypt, is gendered
female in Arabic), and the choice also gave nation-
alists a rich field for political commentary through
sexual innuendo and gendered metaphors. Inspired
by the Revolution of 1919, Ma™mùd Mukhtàr
sculpted a work called Nah∂at Mißr(The awaken-
ing of Egypt), which shows a peasant woman lift-
ing her veil from her face with her left arm and
placing her right arm on the back of a Sphinx as it
rises up on its forelegs. The Sphinx rising suggests a
rebirth of Egypt’s ancient grandeur; the peasant
woman lifting her veil symbolizes the liberation of
the modern nation. The statue became the pre-emi-
nent symbol of the national struggle, and the
unveiling of women remained a popular metaphor
for Egyptian independence.
After 1948, Palestine was often represented by
Arab states as a woman in need of rescue. This idea
can even be indicated by the absence of women
from images. Postage stamps produced by Egypt,
Syria, and Jordan since the 1960s portray Pales-
tinian refugees in the form of a man dressed in rags
and struggling to carry his children, or as a man and
child peering through barbed wire, their landless-
ness symbolized by the mother’s absence. At the
same time that Palestine was being imagined as a
woman in need of male Arab defenders, however,
the very real Palestinian female warrior-martyr was
making her way into official national iconography
in several Arab states. A 1970 stamp produced by
the People’s Republic of Southern Yemen depicts
silhouetted figures of mixed gender holding guns
above their heads as they plant the Palestinian flag
in the ground. The same year, Kuwait published a
stamp in honor of female “Palestinian comman-
dos”; the image on the stamp depicts a young,
unveiled woman brandishing a machine-gun.
While images of Palestine indicate a potential
tension between representations of the nation as a
woman and representations of women defending
the nation, on some levels there may be a conti-
nuum from one of these symbols to the other. A
1952 Egyptian postage stamp celebrating the
nationalist revolution of that year portrays a female
figure in culturally indeterminate dress, broken
chains dangling from her raised arms, which are
holding a large golden sword in the air, against a
crescent background. Such images clearly evoke
the use of female figures to symbolize liberty in