MER Article The Islamist State and Sudanese Women The Islamist government in Sudan recently celebrated the third anniversary of the military coup that brought it to power by building a huge public park south of the Khartoum airport, featuring hundreds of hurriedly transplanted trees, bushes and flowers. The impressive determination and efficiency t Ellen Gruenbaum • 9 min read
MER Article Taking Up Space in Tlemcen: The Islamist Occuation of Urban Algeria Rabia Bekkar, an urban sociologist who has spent more than 12 years doing research in Tlemcen, Algeria, works at the Institut Parisien de Recherche: Architecture Urbanistique et Societe. She first came into contact with the Islamist movement in the form of neighborhood charitable associations. When the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) Hannah Davis • 13 min read
MER Article Qashqa'i Nomads and the Islamic Republic The Qashqa’i, an important tribal confederacy of approximately 400,000 people in the Zagros Mountains of southwestern Iran, are one of Iran’s national minorities. They speak Turkish and are Shi‘i Muslims. The nomads’ low-altitude winter pastures and high-altitude summer pastures are separated by hundreds of kilometers, and Lois Beck • 13 min read
MER Article Egyptian Women and the Politics of Protest In recent years to veiling of Muslim women has become a common image associated with radical Islamist politics. Yet in Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling and Change in Cairo (Columbia, 1990) Arlene Macleod demonstrates that lower middle-class women in Cairo who wear the hijab (new Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article Graham-Brown, Images of Women Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East, 1860-1950 (Quartet, 1988). The invention of photography in 1839 coincided, Sarah Graham-Brown observes, with a vigorous phase of European global expansion. Egypt and Palestine were among early testing gro Maya Jaggi • 3 min read
MER Article New Writing On Women, Politics and Social Change Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). Seteney Shami, Lucine Taminian et al, Women in Arab Society: Work Patterns and Gender Relations in Egypt, Jordan and Sudan (Oxford: Berg, 1990). Bouthaina Shaaban, Both Right and Left Handed: Arab Women Talk About The Sarah J Graham-Brown • 16 min read
MER Article Women and Work in Istanbul On the Asian side of the Istanbul lies a district which I will call Yenitepe. [1] At its center it is a teeming municipality of small shops and low-rise working-class apartments, but at its edge Yenitepe’s streets branch into a haphazard network of dirt roads threading together houses in Jenny White • 16 min read
MER Article The Egyptian Women's Health Book Collective The publication of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s famous and controversial book Our Bodies, Ourselves (1976) created wide repercussions and charted a way for women all over the world to gain personal control, through the possession of objective and necessary information, over their own Nadia Farah • 5 min read
MER Article Women and Public Participation in Yemen Although still old-fashioned when compared with their Levantine or North African sisters, constrained by patriarchal social structures, and limited in their earning capacities, Yemeni women play at least a token role in contemporary political and economic life. They may well be the most “liberated,” though not the most privileged, women Sheila Carapico • 3 min read
MER Article Women, Islam and the State Most commentary on gender and politics in the Middle East assigns a central place to Islam, but there is little agreement about the analytic weight it carries in accounting for the subordination of women or the role it plays in relation to women’s rights. [1] Using the Qur’an, Deniz Kandiyoti • 14 min read
MER Article Gender and Political Change ‘Aziza the Alexandrian is serving a life sentence in her women’s prison in Egypt for the murder of her mother’s husband. ‘Aziza, the main character in Salwa Bakr’s novel The Golden Chariot Won’t Ascend to the Heavens, assassinated this man who had seduced her as well as her mother, and then, followi Barbara Harlow, Julie Peteet • 10 min read
MER Article Feminism or Ventriloquism Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Indiana, 1990). Introduced by the editors as “the first collection of Arab women’s feminist writing,” Opening the Gates is both an important and problematic anthology. Following the basic format of two prev Zjaleh Hajibashi • 7 min read
