A. Hassanpour, The (re)production of patriarchy in the
Kurdish language, in S. Mojab (ed.), Women of a non-
state nation. The Kurds, Costa Mesa 2001, 227–63.
R. A. Khumaynì(Ayatollah Khomeini), Dar justjù-yi ràh
az kalàm-i imàm, xi, Millì≠girà±ì, Tehran 1983.
P. Lafrance, La femme et le Pakhtunwali, in Centre
d’Etudes et de Recherches Documentaires sur l’Af-
ghanistan, La femme afghane à travers l’histoire de
l’Afghanistan. Actes du Colloque. UNESCO – Paris,
11 décembre 1998, Paris 2000, 73–9.
D. Nelson, National manhood. Capitalist citizenship and
the imagined fraternity of white men, Durham, N.C.
1998.
J. B. Saad, The image of Arabs in modern Persian litera-
ture, Lanham, Md. 1996.
Amir HassanpourIraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria“Mosaic societies”: problems of
terminology and perception
Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria are character-
ized by a rich ethnic, religious, and cultural diver-
sity that was formed and reconfigured historically
through processes of settlement, migration, dis-
placement, war, and state policy. It has long been a
cliché to describe the Middle East, and especially
the “fertile crescent” region, as constituting a
mosaic society (Coon 1958) traditionally charac-
terized by an “ethnic division of labor” (Sussnitski
1917). The easy and misleading premises of these
formulations today may be couched in more
nuanced language but still often form the basis of
scholarly as well as popular and media represen-
tations. Assumptions concerning pure identities,
impermeable boundaries, and age-old enmities al-
ternately exaggerate or underestimate societal ten-
sions and political mobilizations based on shifting
ethnic, linguistic, and confessional identities and do
not help in understanding how identities are con-
structed and reproduced, how they intersect and
cross-cut one another, how difference and percep-
tions of difference are articulated, or why political
demands may or may not be made on the basis of
ethnic difference or in terms of minority rights.
Adequately understanding how these processes
are gendered is even more difficult, given the pau-
city and the quality of the literature. While, as in
any type of collective identity, one can easily see
that women and their bodies symbolically operate
as markers of difference, that marriage strategies
are at the heart of group reproduction as well as
inter-group alliance, and that women’s participa-
tion in political processes are significant, these gen-
eralizations cannot easily be substantiated through
specific understandings of how they may operate in
the case of particular groups, localities, or even states.
iraq, jordan, lebanon, syria 573States, societies, and
nationalisms
Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria exhibit signifi-
cant variation in terms of nation building and state
building which creates disparate contexts for polit-
ical mobilization on the basis of ethnicity or
demands in terms of minority rights or national
self-determination. It is also important to recognize
that groups within these countries have historically
always been in interaction with each other and
across the borders formed in the twentieth century.
Thus the Kurds, but also Turkmens and Assyrians,
while constituting a “minority” within particular
states (Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey), form large
trans-border populations. Others are part of his-
torically constituted diasporas (Jews, Armenians)
while all groups are part of contemporary global
diasporas as a result of labor and refugee move-
ments. In this diverse landscape, the Kurdish move-
ments are the most salient, and best researched,
minority movements and can help illustrate the
ways in which religion and gender play into these
movements.
It is also important to consider how Syria, Iraq,
Jordan and Lebanon (in that order) participate in
discourses of Arab nationalism. Syria and Iraq
(until the 2003 invasion by the United States and
coalition forces) were the most comparable, in
terms of the multiple ethnic and minority groups
that inhabit their territories, their secular, national-
ist, “revolutionary” official rhetoric, and their au-
thoritarian regimes. The ruling groups in these
regimes were mostly recruited from communities to
which the long-serving presidents belonged (≠Alawìs
in the case of Syria and Tikrìtìs in the case of Iraq)
and are thus described by some authors as “minor-
ity regimes.” Both these states mobilized women
through a rhetoric of modernism, nationalism, and
state feminism, which privileged the state and
broader ideals of the Arab nation over ethnic, reli-
gious, or local identifications, as witnessed by the
attempts to socialize the “new Iraqi woman”
(Joseph 1991).
Jordan participates in the discourse of Arab
nationalism through emphasizing the role of the
Hashemites in overthrowing Ottoman rule in the
1920s. Equal weight is also given to the monarchy’s
religious credentials and descent from the lineage of
the Prophet Mu™ammad. Society and politics is
largely fractured on Palestinian/East Bank Jorda-
nian lines as well as through tribal allegiances cre-
ated by both bottom-up and top-down dynamics.
Loyalty to the regime and the monarch is the basis
for privileging groups. In this context the minority
groups, such as Circassians, Chechens, Christians