Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East

Abstract

Increasingly, since the Sadat era in Egypt and especially resulting from his economic policies (infitah), there has been a significant rise of Egyptian women who are putting on the "Islamic dress." Whereas women in the early twentieth century were dramatically tearing off their veils and throwing them into the Nile in order to desegregate society. Today, Egyptian women are very noticeably doing the opposite as a form of protest, while utilizing the same reasoning as before. The influx of literature about this so-called "Islamism" has been discussed in nearly every realm of the social sciences. In contrast to this phenomenon, Najde al-Ali's study on women's activity in Egypt is about a particular heterogeneous class of secular women, that she feels has been marginalized on the state level by the overarching concessions given to hegemonic "Islamist" policies. In effect, Ali states, "I had noticed the tendency to overlook secular constituencies in much of the recent scholarship dealing with Egypt, where the emphasis was on Islamist tendencies and activism." Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women's Movement, is a highly informative introductory and analytical study of secular women's activities through the voice of a plethora of Egyptian women's organizations. In the introduction Ali categorizes women's activism as being independent, associational and directed. Whereas independent organizations have a power base from within and aim to implement individual goals, associational and directed organizations carry a more direct message outside the sphere of general women's issues. In the first chapter, Ali engages in a discussion about the relationship of Orientalism and Occidentalism in post-colonial literature. The reader is introduced to the idea that these conceptual frameworks have indeed limited the indigenous authenticity of women's activism in Egypt by placing them in one of two extremes, whether it be religious or secular. Immediately, Ali strives to make clear that certain values do not need to be authenticated by any indigenous culture if they are "universal values". However, it is here where a significant weakness emerges, by not outwardly recognizing the importance of the competitive universal value systems, including the "Islamist values", that are trying to find their space in contemporary Egyptian political culture. Therefore, the message that is ...