Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons form the Arab World
Edited by Maha El Said,
Lena Meari and Nicola Pratt
(Zed Books, £19.99)

THE RISE of Islamic power in north African states has created a resistance by religious leaders to what is regarded as UN and Western interference into the traditional cultural values concerning women.

Women have taken an equal part in the intifada of Palestinians against zionism and in the dramatic revolutions and counter-revolutions in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia in recent years.

However, their empowerment in these struggles has led to a backlash from Islamic patriarchal organisations and governments who have treated women to appalling sexual harassment and brutality to drive them out of politics and back into the home.

This book is based on a series of contributions to a workshop on this subject which took place at the University of Warwick in July 2013, funded by the British Academy.

The editors point out that the female body is a most sensitive issue in Islam. Thus the zionist torturers of female Palestinian freedom fighters concentrated on stripping them and subjecting them to violent sexual abuse in order to try to shame them into confessions.

Similarly, women’s equal involvement in the Egyptian uprising early in 2011 against Hosni Mubarak resulted in the new regime naming them as “loose women,” to be humiliated by stripping them in public and subjecting them to virginity tests to prove that they had violated Islamic patriarchal norms.

Some brave women responded to this by sending out online pictures of themselves naked or belly dancing with slogans on their body or by painting street cartoons showing iconic Egyptian women towering over puny male figures.

This offended both men and women who adhered to traditional views of the role of women in Islamic society.

The overthrow of Muammar Gadaffi in Libya also involved women who were opposed to his “state-feminism,” a term used to describe the outward equality of men and women at every level.

They were paid back by the new regime, which professed Western values but treated women as whores when they tried to take their part in civil life.

The role of women in Tunisia, a modern state under Habib Bourguiba and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, had great support among the middle class who backed UN resolutions on women’s rights.

But women within the poorer section of the population, who thought that equal rights “make men lazy and anxious to find rich wives to keep them,” have helped to create a fundamentalist Islamic opposition within Tunisia which opposes UN and Western values.

Most of the contributions come to one conclusion — that UN resolutions cannot effectively be applied in countries where there is a strong Islamic cultural tradition of women staying in the home, subject to male control and suffering abuse in silence, without engaging with Muslim women’s organisations who are fighting these conditions on the ground in non-pejorative ways in order to slowly produce change.

This is a thought-provoking book whose conclusions could also be applied to feminist struggles in other countries and religions.