relations and politics, and while some have hugely
developed oil-rich economies, others have little or
no natural resources. Some of these states boast rel-
atively modernized polities, while others verge on
the politically semi-feudal. Religion has enormous
social, political, and cultural impact, particularly as
the region is the historical meeting place of the
three monotheistic world religions, but the region
as a whole is predominantly Islamic.
It is too common a refrain, indeed a cliché, to
assume that Islam determines the debate around
women and women’s rights. The complex reality is
that religion (whether Islam, Christianity, or any
other faith tradition in this fertile religious land-
scape) plays an important role as an identity marker,
a phenomenon which increased significantly toward
the latter part of the twentieth century. This height-
ened role and awareness of religion has entailed a
redefinition of the role of the state, civil society, and
economy, and within that framework, of women’s
specificities. Whether Muslim or Christian, Arab
women have become increasingly conscious of the
fact that no matter how qualified and capable they
are, there is a glass ceiling that – barring one or two
cases – prevents women from occupying important
decision-making positions in the political (for
example, as presidents or prime ministers), judicial
(as judges), or religious realms (for example, as a
mufti). This is blamed not on any one religion per
se (because this would not explain the fact that
other non-Arab Muslim countries often have very
different sets of conditions (for example, women
occupy important decision-making positions).
Women form nearly 60 percent of the population
of these states and, in some countries, they form
also approximately 60 percent of the student body
at various levels. The first feminist movement was
fashioned in the shadow of the colonial era and
manifested itself in Egypt in the late 1800s, later
traveling to all corners of the Arab world, such that
by the 1960s many of the seeds of contemporary
feminist organizations had taken root. Anti-colo-
nial struggles moulded much of the discourse sup-
portive of feminist rhetoric, as well as that opposed
to it. To this day, feminist movements are regarded
with suspicion, and are seen as either a harbinger or
a manifestation of Western imperialist encroach-
ment. After the events of 11 September 2001 and
subsequent United States military action in
Afghanistan, followed closely by the invasion of
Iraq and its unfolding dynamics, women activists
find themselves facing the same challenges today
that they faced earler: to speak of women’s rights
when the Muslim world is facing its toughest chal-
arab states 583lenge since colonial times is to support “the ene-
mies of Islam.”Definition and terminology
But what do feminism or gender mean in the
Arab context? To many, feminism, in so far as it is
an attempt to struggle for more rights for women
(whether the right to vote, to equal pay, or to
divorce and custody of children without the legal
harassment currently in store for many women),
has been a permanent feature of the social, cultural,
and political landscape. Although the first modern
feminist movements (as opposed to feminist dis-
course, which was attributed to men in Egypt and
Tunisia) are often spoken of as appearing in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, students
of religious history (whether that of Islam or
Christianity) are quick to unearth examples of much
earlier champions of women’s rights. Claiming
back this history (or “herstory”) is in fact slowly
gaining credibility as a legitimate scientific enter-
prise in Arab academia, and is supported by several
activists in the non-governmental sphere as well.
Feminism as a term, however, is far from wide-
spread. With no equivalent in the Arabic language,
the word contributes to the misperception of the
entire movement as foreign. Few women activists
feel comfortable with the term, and those who do
are not necessarily consistently vocal about it as a
self-definition. It is not uncommon to find re-
searchers referring to feminism – or to certain
activists as feminists – while the activists themselves
baulk at the reference. At the same time, however,
an alternative mode of reference to these women
and men has yet to appear. Some have toyed with
the Arabic terms niswiyyaor nisà±iyya(which act as
a translation of the word feminism) but such termi-
nology has simply not become popular.
The term gender also has no Arabic translation,
but is more often used by feminist groups and
sometimes social scientists as a descriptive or ana-
lytical category. Gender is still seen as synonymous
with “women” and a widespread or popular
appreciation of the nuances of the term – whether
semantic or actual or both – remains lacking in the
Arab world. At the same time, the social construc-
tion of masculine and feminine roles and identities
is central to an understanding of the social oppres-
sion and the cultural constructions of violence that
affect women in the Arab world.The continuum of feminism
For the sake of clarity in this entry, a broad defi-
nition of the term feminism is used with two key