Women, the State, and Political Liberalization: Middle Eastern and North African Experiences

Laurie A. Brand

Columbia University Press

1998

Preface

 

By late 1987, a wave of potentially deep-reaching political changes appeared to be underway in the Middle East and North Africa. First, Tunisia’s president-for-life, Habib Bourguiba, was ousted after more than thirty years in power. Then even more dramatically, in December 1987 the long-standing episodic civil resistance to Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza crystallized into sustained, and escalating, opposition. Shortly thereafter a number of Arab regimes, manifestly incapable of coping with growing problems of debt, unemployment, and corruption, appeared to begin to give way to successors that promised more political freedoms. Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, and Morocco all witnessed political openings of various types, some more apparently significant than others, but all promising changes that would lessen repression and open the way for greater political participation.

As I watched the unfolding of the political liberalizations in the Arab world, I also began to follow with great interest the “liberalizing” impact of the much more profound economic/cum political transformations that began to sweep Eastern Europe. While each country has had its own experience, several trends emerged. Conservative forces, whether those aligned with the Church or those that were simply reactionary nationalist, began to espouse programs for women that involved a renewed emphasis on motherhood (with restricted if any access to abortion as a corollary) and a woman’s “primary duties” in the home. At the same time, the safety nets that the socialist regimes had provided were dismantled or simply disintegrated under the weight of the massive budgetary problems the new market economies were experiencing. Redundant employment in the state sector was being eliminated as well, and women seemed to be bearing the brunt of these cutbacks. Quotas for female representation in people’s assemblies, however purely symbolic they may have been, were ended; and women’s presence in other political institutions declined markedly. At least in the short to medium term, women appeared to be among the big losers in the much heralded economic and political transformations from communism.

In the Middle East and North Africa, although the processes underway were by no means as “revolutionary” (in the pure sense of the term), nonetheless similar trends appeared. The opening up of the political systems offered, at least initially, the opportunity for a variety of opposition groups to enter the political realm as legal participants. In the Middle East, however, it was not the traditionalists of the Catholic or Orthodox church, but rather those of a particular strain of Islam, often called (inappropriately) for lack of better term “fundamentalists.” Such groups entered the political fray with a part of their program aimed at instituting more conservative social policies, among them some which threatened to constrain women’s activities and rights. It was as these trends were beginning to become clear in 1991 that this project was initially conceived.

While the political and economic transformations that swept Eastern Europe in 1989–90 continue to unfold, the openings that appeared in the Middle East and North Africa have in virtually all cases been closed. Tunisia’s was perhaps the shortest lived, as renewed repression was clear certainly by 1990. Algeria, which in some ways had been the most promising, had, at the time of this writing, fallen into a cycle of low-level civil war between the security forces or civilian villagers and certain Islamist groups. Morocco’s 1993 and 1997 elections were disappointments to the opposition, although the associational life that has blossomed since the Gulf war continues to offer hopeful signs. Yemen’s amazingly vibrant “cohabitation” degenerated into civil war in the early summer of 1994. And by mid-summer of 1994 fears of popular expressions of opposition to a peace accord with Israel had led the Jordanian government to narrow the margins of freedom of expression in the kingdom.

The question may then arise, why pursue a project on women and political liberalization if the political openings, part of the central problematic of this project, were closed or closing after such short periods? Several responses suggest themselves. The first is that the apparent similarities with the Eastern European cases (as chapter 1 will argue) are too significant to be ignored simply because the transformations were not as thoroughgoing. Exploring possible shared characteristics offers the potential to say something about the significance of culture—Islam as the omnipresent independent variable in Middle East politics—as opposed to structure. Second, it has been suggested by some of the civil society literature that vibrant women’s organizations may be the most important precursors to more democratic development. This proposition is worth exploring to determine what such organizations do and how they relate to the state, other political actors, and each other during such periods. Third, trends visible during such periods of limited openings may offer insights into what to expect when the more thoroughgoing changes do come in the Middle East and North Africa.

I am a political scientist, not an anthropologist, but I do believe it is useful for a researcher to situation herself vis-à-vis her study. I am an Arabist, a female, and an American. (I struggled in writing this sentence to determine the priority order of the adjectives, and I am not sure I have it right or that it does not change situationally.) I have never before attempted to write on women, in part because that was not where my intellectual interests lay and, in part because, when it came to the Middle East, the topic seemed like a minefield. When I traveled to Jordan in the summer of 1992, it was on a grant to examine the impact of economic and political liberalization on organized labor. Yet, between writing the proposal and arriving in Jordan, I had found myself drawn to the question of women and political liberalization, in large part because of the developments in Eastern Europe, but also because of what seemed to me similar developments in Jordan during the period of Islamist participation in the cabinet, January–June 1991. I should also say, however, that had it not been for the misogynist policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations aimed at, among other things, legislating away a women’s right to choose, I might never have come to view these questions in the same way. Had I not felt my own rights threatened by a gang of sociopolitical reactionaries, I might never have come to the point where such a study was so important to me.

This of course does not make entering this field any less problematic. I am aware that there will be charges that as an outsider (a non-Muslim and non-Arab) I somehow have no right to explore these issues, or am incapable of exploring them objectively. I accept the second charge, but with the understanding that none of us is an objective observer or student of any event or phenomenon. As for the first, I reject it categorically as insidious and as an indirect attack on academic freedom. If we are qualified to explore only those topics of which we are a part, then our potential contributions as social scientists will be marginal indeed. I would be qualified to write only about middle-class women from the suburbs of Cincinnati who go to Georgetown University, major in French, become interested in Arabic, study Arabic in Cairo...

This study has been one of both societal and self-exploration. Never have I had to struggle with questions of cultural relativism, and of what I believe and what I can accept, as I have in conducting this research. I can say that I have not been able to overcome my bias against organized religion (any religion) or my implicit distrust of that set of relations called “the state.” This does not mean that I refuse to accept the importance of religion and religious values in the countries I have studied or reviewed. I believe one can study and understand societies, and indeed, as I believe I have with the Arab world, come to feel very comfortable and at home in another society, without accepting or adopting all its values. Nor does it mean that I see the state as simply a set of coercive relations that above all else repress. I hope this study shows how complicated and at times contradictory those relations can be.