Family, Gender, and Population in the Middle East

Abstract

Obermeyer has edited a volume of essays originally delivered at an international symposium, “Family, Gender, and Population Policy: International Debates and Middle Eastern Realities,” held in Cairo in early 1994. Organized by the Population Council, the symposium invited scholars to evaluate contemporary issues of population planning in light of current economic, political, cultural, and demographic forces influencing the region. Hoping to assist the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), the Population Council asked scholars from various disciplines to bring together empirical research and theoretical analysis in order to facilitate and inform the discussion that would follow at the ICPD. The results of this research and discussion proved to be of great value to the participants at the ICPD and subsequently the contributors framed their findings in the essays that form the chapters of this volume. Of the seventeen contributors, thirteen work in Middle Eastern countries; three reside in North America and one in Europe, but they have close ties to the Middle East by virtue of family background or extensive study. Their disciplines include economics, demography, and sociology, as well as epidemiology, biostatistics, obstetrics, and gynecology. An associate professor of anthropology and population in the Department of Population and International Health at Harvard University, Carla Makhlouf Obermeyer, as editor, brings these varied disciplines together within an integrated framework provided by her own interdisciplinary work. In the Foreword by Carolyn Makinson, program officer of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the significant contribution made by these researchers is underscored as she places these essays within the larger context of the ICPD The papers in this book go to press in a climate very different from the one prevailing when they were solicited and presented [i.e. before the ICPD]. Now, the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) is behind us. Its Programme of Action-which calls for population policies to address social development beyond family planning, and for family planning to be placed in a broader reproductive health framework-met with approval from widely differing constituencies in the population and development fields, and was adopted by the official delegations of 179 states. . . . Two years ago, such a consensus seemed improbable.. . (p. xi) As well as contributing substantive data to inform policy-making discussions, the writers offer current research that challenges the more superficial discussions of population planning issues which are based on stereotypic understandings of the diverse cultural and religious differences among the various countries and regions of the Middle East. Several major themes emerge: the need to understand family planning within the larger context of women’s health services, “the need to better define and measure widely used but little understood concepts such as women’s status and autonomy” (p. xii), and the need to examine “women’s rights” within the context of traditional Islam as it is practiced in specific cultural and geographic areas. Organized under three broad categories: “The Family, the State, and the Law: Politics and Population”; “Women in Families: Cultural Constraints and ...