group headed the opposition to the 1974 Family
Code. Yewwu Yewwi leaders did not hesitate to
conduct public forums, to write articles for Senega-
lese newspapers and to publish their own newslet-
ters. They also networked, using family and friends
and political connections. The code was finally re-
vised in 1989, and most of the changes were favor-
able for women (Creevey 1996, 299–301, Callaway
and Creevey 1994, 176–81). Yewwu Yewwi and its
successor, Réseau Siggil Jiggeen (Network of
women rising), continued to agitate for further
improvements in the code throughout the 1990s. In
2000, they were rewarded when a new constitution
that made further reforms was introduced.
Conditions are always changing throughout
Muslim West Africa. Women’s definitions of what
is important to them will also change. In Senegal,
the replacement of Yewwu Yewwi by Siggil Jiggeen
in the late 1990s signaled a tactical move by
Senegalese feminists away from identification with
the Western feminist confrontational emphasis on
equality and toward the more widely accepted goal
of achieving economic power and independence for
women. Nonetheless, they continued to struggle
for governmental reform and broadened their
activities in many ways. Fatou Sow, a feminist
leader and distinguished scholar, has even started
her own radio station, Sokna FM (soknais a hon-
orific title for a woman), which deals solely with
issues and concerns of women. In Nigeria, Ayesha
Imam, also a noted scholar and feminist leader, and
other Muslim feminists have established “action
research” teams composed of women’s rights
activists, ≠ulamà±(scholars of Islam), lawyers, histo-
rians, and Arabic linguists to research Muslim
jurisprudence, the history of Islamic law in Nigeria,
and Sharì≠a court decisions in order to challenge the
interpretations of Islamic law by fundamentalist
judges in the Sharì≠a courts.
Many West African women, of course, belong to
a wide variety of groups that are not included in
this discussion because of our definition of “femi-
nist.” Many more Senegalese women in rural areas
belong to women’s associations, which have lim-
ited social and/or economic objectives, than to
Siggil Jiggeen. These groups empower women in
their businesses and lives and may ultimately result
in increased demand for specifically feminist objec-
tives among a wider population (Creevey 2004).
However, women’s perceived goals can also be-
come limited rather than expanded. A good exam-
ple is the transition in Sudan in the late 1980s and
early 1990s when educated women brought into
the National Islamic Front (NIF) moved from sup-
porting social reform to aspiring to “ideal” Muslim
turkey 595womanhood (Hale 1995, 185–218). In northern
Nigeria, women working to reinterpret Muslim
law are working within a specific Islamic frame-
work and do not challenge its underlying gender
conservatism. Sudanese and Nigerian women are
responding to the growing wave of fundamentalist
power and trying to see it in a positive way, as did
Nana Asma±u many years ago. Perhaps there is a
danger that acknowledging such limited move-
ments and labeling them as “Islamic feminism” will
undercut support for those Muslim women who
are both unwilling to compromise with conserva-
tive religious teachings and trying to change the
social and political structure of their society to fully
empower women (Moghissi 1999). In the real
world of Islamic West Africa, however, the con-
text defines what is possible. Feminists here are
responding realistically to their specific conditions
and will continue to do so.Bibliography
B. Callaway and L. Creevey, The heritage of Islam.
Women, religion and politics in West Africa, Boulder,
Colo. 1994.
L. Creevey, Islam, women and the role of the state in
Senegal, in Journal of Religion in Africa26:3 (1996),
268–307.
——, Impacts of changing patterns of women’s associa-
tion membership in Senegal, in B. Purkayastha and
M. Subramaniam (eds.), The power of informal net-
works. Lessons from South Asia and West Africa,
Lanham, Md. 2004, 61–74.
S. Hale, Gender politics in Sudan. Islamism, socialism,
and the state, Boulder, Colo. 1996.
B. B. Mack and J. Boyd, One woman’s jihad. Nana
Asma±u, scholar and scribe, Bloomington, Ind. 2000.
V. Moghadam, Islamic feminism and its discontents.
Towards a resolution of the debate, in T. Saliba,
C. Allen, and J. A Howard (eds.), Gender, politics, and
Islam, Chicago 2002, 15–51.
H. Moghissi, Feminism and Islamic fundamentalism,
London 1999.
F. Sow, Dépendance et développement. Le statut de la
femme en Afrique moderne, in Notes africaines 130
(July 1973), 256–65.
——, Muslim families in contemporary Black Africa, in
Current Anthropology 26:5 (December 1985), 566.
——, The social sciences in Africa and gender analysis, in
A. M. Imam, A. Mama, and F. Sow (eds.), Engendering
African social sciences, London 1997a, 31–60.
——, Gender relations in the African environment, in A.
M. Imam, A. Mama, and F. Sow (eds.), Engendering
African social sciences, London 1997b, 251–70.Barbara Callaway and Lucy CreeveyTurkeyThe history of the Woman Question in Turkey
goes back to the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, a period marked by far-reaching Westernizing