in exchange for preservation of patriarchal prac-
tices that limited women’s authority and independ-
ence both in and out of the home. In Pakistan,
Haeri (1999) argues that civil society emerged not
alongside or outside older kin structures, but rather
intertwined with them. This historical reality, she
maintains, explains the new phenomenon of politi-
cal rape, where groups dishonor their political foes
through the violation of female relatives – a prac-
tice apparently rooted in Pakistani soldiers’ rapes
of Bengali women during the civil war in 1971. The
effect of these rapes has been to intensify protec-
tiveness and seclusion of women, and so their ex-
clusion from civil affairs.
These and other scholars of the contemporary
Islamic world have thus sought to explain the error
of Frantz Fanon’s prediction in A Dying Colonial-
ism(1967) that decolonization struggles would
equalize male and female citizens. Revolutionary
regimes did improve women’s access to public
resources and office during the 1960s and 1970s
(Hatem 2000, Joseph 1991, Molyneux 1991,
Kandiyoti 1991). However, as under the authori-
tarian, interwar regimes in Turkey and Iran,
women’s benefits were often only partial and won
at the price of lost autonomy from the state.
Revolutions, moreover, did not generally void the
colonial era’s patriarchal pacts and dichotomous
discourses. In Egypt and South Yemen, for exam-
ple, socialist revolution produced a backlash cen-
tered upon the restoration of Islamic norms
regarding women’s status. Likewise, weak revolu-
tionary regimes in the Palestinian entity and in
Azerbaijan rolled back reforms in the 1990s as they
caved to pressure from Islamic interests (Asfa-
ruddin 1999). Meanwhile, liberal theorists had
hoped that non-socialist polities might prove more
egalitarian as a wave of liberalization and the rein-
vigoration of civil society were heralded in the late
1980s (Butenschon 2000, Norton 1995, Schwedler
1995). Brand’s comparative study (1998), however,
pessimistically concluded that emergent civil soci-
eties in the Arab world, as in Eastern Europe, have
often become the domains of religious movements
that explicitly exclude women’s participation.
Three groups of scholars offer more optimistic
visions, through non-liberal frameworks of in-
quiry. Some demonstrate that women have adopted
ingenious strategies to overcome colonial binarism.
Göle (1996) argues that women’s reveiling in con-
temporary Turkey is an effort by Turks to take back
their historical agency after its enslavement to
European models of modernization. Ahmed (1992)
similarly argues that Egyptian women’s reveiling is38 civil society
not a withdrawal from the public sphere but rather
an attempt to supersede colonial binarism. Despite
Islamist pressure and state dictatorship, Egyptian
women continue to mobilize in a diverse array of
groups where religious and secular agendas often
converge (Al-Ali 2000). Most striking, the vibrancy
of debate and resilience of civil society in post-rev-
olutionary Iran have defied earlier predictions of
women’s exclusion from public life, and instead fos-
tered new forms of Islamic modernity that permit
women’s participation (Paidar 1995, Mir-Hosseini
1999). And in both Bangladesh and Pakistan,
where Islamic politics have polarized civil society,
women’s groups have flourished, especially to pro-
tect women’s legal rights and to provide them with
jobs (Shaheed 1998). According to Shehabuddin
(1999), rural Muslim women in Bangladesh do not
feel compelled to follow Islamist parties whose
agendas conflict with women’s practical needs.
A second group of scholars has confronted the
inadequacy of liberal frameworks by experiment-
ing with feminist and communitarian models of cit-
izenship (Joseph 1993 and 2000, Yuval-Davis and
Werbner 1999, Benhabib 1998). They identify
processes that sustain gender inequality in civil
society, as well as strengths women have as citizens
embedded in subnational communities. A third
group has turned its focus away from the formal
women’s organizations that have emerged over the
past century to study the endurance of women’s
informal networks. Hale, for example, argues that
Sudanese women’s organizations established as
wings of male parties (Islamic and socialist) were
not only accessories to men’s domination but also
obstacles to the more promising power of women’s
informal networks. Women’s networks defy public-
private dichotomies by mobilizing connections
within families, workplaces, and neighborhoods
not only to amass significant economic and cultural
resources, but also to assert political influence at a
grassroots level (White 2002, Singerman 1995,
Hale 1996). However, the populism of “vernacular
politics” in Turkey, White argues, masks the eco-
nomic foundations of women’s political weakness.
Her concerns echo those of MacLeod (1992) and
Ahmed (1992), who worry that women’s use of
Islamic symbols may ultimately play into the hands
of the authoritarian Islamic elite. The debates about
the relationship of Islam to women’s status as citi-
zens in civil society have only begun in this fruitful,
emergent field of inquiry.Bibliography
L. Abu-Lughod, Remaking women. Feminism and mod-
ernity in the Middle East, Princeton, N.J. 1998.