Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 11, Nos.

34, 379396, SeptemberDecember 2010

Does Political Islam Impede Gender-Based Mobilization? The Case of Egypt

RABAB EL-MAHDI*
The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
11 Totalitarian 1469-0764 Original Taylor 2010 relmahdi@aucegypt.edu RababEl-Mahdi 0000002010 3/4 & Article Francis (print)/1743-9647 Movements and Political (online)Religions 10.1080/14690764.2010.546114 FTMP_A_546114.sgm and Francis

ABSTRACT Does political Islam impede gender-based mobilization? An affirmative answer to this question is held by many scholars and feminist activists alike. From the Taliban in Afghanistan to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the various political Islamist organizations spreading throughout the South are often cited as anti-gender mobilization, if not anti-women altogether. The widespread and exponential support of political Islamism in the South, coupled with the decline of non-religious-based womens movements, warrants an examination of this assumed correlation. Using Egypt as a primary site of investigation, this paper argues that this correlation is spurious, if not ideologically biased and ahistorical. Looking at a recent initiative for building a non-religious-based womens movement in Egypt Women for Democracy as a microcosm, this article argues that the lack of such movements in the South should be understood through a historical structural analysis of post-colonial statesociety relations, in addition to agency-related factors of professed feminists in these countries.

KEY WORDS: women; gender; Egypt; feminism; movement; political Islam

Introduction During the past decade Egypt has been witnessing the budding of social movements and the burgeoning of collective mobilization initiatives for different causes. From the pro-Intifada movement in 2000 with its mass protests, boycott campaigns and support convoys to the anti-war movement in 2003; followed by the prodemocracy movement with the climax of Kifaya (The Egyptian Movement for Change) during 20042005; to finally, labour mobilization and socio-economic protests that started in December 2006.1 Many taboos were broken, including criticizing the President and his family, and many long-forgotten social groups such as workers came across as important players on the Egyptian political scene.
*Email: Relmahdi@aucegypt.edu. 1 For a more details on these movements see: Nicola Pratt, Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Arab World (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007); Rabab El-Mahdi, Enough! Egypts Quest for Democracy, Comparative Political Studies, 42:8 (2009), 10111039; and Joel Beinin, Workers struggles under socialism and neoliberalism, in Rabab El-Mahdi and Philip Marfleet (eds) Egypt: The Moment of Change (London: Zed Press, 2009), pp. 77101.
ISSN 1469-0764 Print/ISSN 1743-9647 Online/10/03-40379-18 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14690764.2010.546114

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In all of these movements and initiatives women were key players and participants, but never the focus of any of the rising initiatives, except for one short-lived initiative named Women for Democracy- also known by its slogan (The Street is Ours) which never transformed into a collective, broad movement.2 By examining this initiative, this paper tries to answer the question/paradox of: why is there no womens movement in Egypt, even at times of heightened mobilization, that is, a movement that caters to and is derived from the specific and multiple positions of groups of women in their broader context? This question, however, warrants two interrelated caveats. The first is that the starting point of this research is against gender universalism in all its different versions especially the liberal humanitarian project as much as it is against cultural relativism and essentialization, which characterizes a lot of studies on women of the global South. That is to say, it is against the false homogenization of a prototype Arab or a Muslim woman, and that it equally underscores the plurality of feminism(s) and gender-mobilization. The second is a necessary distinction, between women-based movements and womens movements, a distinction which has been conflated frequently to overcome some of the harmful effects of pseudo-hegemonic white-liberal feminism, that is to say, the work of many post-colonial and post-structuralist scholars, who rightly questioned and critiqued the universal humanist project as it relates to feminisms of the South pointing to elements of Euro-white centrism, condescension and patronization.3 Such work was a necessary step to move beyond the hegemony of liberal-feminism as the feminism the one way to womens progress and betterment and to lay bare the complexity and plurality of feminism(s) and feminist movements as socio-historical constructs. However, later attempts to decolonize the feminism(s) of Third World women, and particularly women in the so-called Muslim world, have ended up promoting different shades of relativism, whereby any collective effort in which women are key players would be characterized as a womens movement. In contrast to this position, the starting point for this article and its research question is based on an understanding that a womens movement is not only determined as such through the sex of its constituency and participants, but also through its goals and declared consciousness. That is to not to say that every womens movement has to be declared feminist whatever the meaning given to the word but it also does not mean that any movement that is based on female membership is a womens movement. This distinction and these caveats are foundational because in Egypt, as in many countries of the global South (e.g. Morocco, Pakistan and Iran), there exist different forms of womens organizations and a plurality of feminism(s), that is, individual Islamist feminists who attempt to re-read and construct women rights within an Islamist narrative (e.g. Heba Raouf in Egypt, Asma Lamrabet in
In this I use the broad definition of social movements, as coined by Tilly: an organized, sustained, selfconscious challenge to existing authorities; Charles Tilly, Social Movements and National Politics, in C. Bright and S. Harding (eds) State-making and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1984), pp. 297317, at 304. 3 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Lila Abu Lughod (ed.) Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Really need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others, American Anthropologist, 104:3 (2002), pp. 783790; Chandra Mohanty, Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, Feminist Review, 30: Autumn (1988), pp. 6188; and Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
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Does Political Islam Impede Gender-Based Mobilization? The Case of Egypt 381 Morrocco, and Zanan magazine writers in Iran).4 There also exist broad womenbased movements such as the Muslim Sisterhood in Egypt (the womens branch of the Muslim Brotherhood) and Al Adl wal Ihsan (Justice and Charity Movement) in Morocco, which includes women under the umbrella of a broader movement seeking social and political change at large. In all those countries these forms coexist with individual non-religious-based womens-rights NGOs and individual secular feminists (e.g. Nawal Sadawi in Egypt, ShirinEbadi in Iran or Fatima Sadiqi in Morocco, to name a few). Despite the importance and complexity of these different forms of gender-related narratives and organizations, and the variation and sometimes even overlap and linkages of their constituencies, they are not the focus of this research, although they definitely provide a contextual background for its focus. Rather, what this article examines and claims is missing is a collective non-religious-based movement by groups of women for what they perceive as their rights or what they are against as injustices based specifically on their gender. Specifically, it asks the question whether the absence of such movement(s) is a result of the rise of political Islam hence, the choice of Women for Democracy as a failed attempt in such a direction. Despite being a short-lived experiment, the attempt of Women for Democracy reveals a lot about the meaning of a womens movement in Egypt, as much as it illuminates much of the dynamics of non-regime politics and the political society broadly understood, in their relationship to the issue of womens organization. The initiative is one of the few attempts in recent years seeking broader non-religious-based female mobilization (as opposed to NGOs projects); it is also one of the few attempts in which secular and Islamist women activists were trying to work together, highlighting the complex relationship between the two. The analysis is based on extensive fieldwork including participant-observation of meetings and events throughout 2005, interviews with founders and participants, and examining primary documents issued by the initiative. As Ella Shohat points out, we should always remember, (1) the importance of looking critically at activist practices, and of theorizing them as part of feminist agendas; [and] (2) that every practice is undergirded by some kind of theory, philosophy, worldview, or discursive grid even when the practitioners claim not to have a theory.5 Thus looking at The Street is Ours as part of a wider context of political mobilization and a longer history even if fragmented of womens initiatives and struggles reveals a lot about the discourse and dynamics that undergird womens movements at this particular moment, and the range of continuous and longer term challenges within the feminist praxis in Egypt. Much of this is shared with similar movements of the post-colonial South, from Morocco to Pakistan, where religious-based mobilization, including Islamist womens organizations, imbue the public sphere in the face of negligible non-religious-based women movements. Hence, the study of this attempt is of broader importance, especially that, as Mohanty affirms, histories of Third World womens engagement with feminism
For more details on Islamist feminism in theory and practice see Asma Barlas, Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Quran (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002); Amina Wadud, Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Womans Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); V. Moghadam, Islamic Feminism and Its Discontents: Toward a Resolution of the Debate, Signs, 27:4 (2002), pp. 11351171; and Margot Badran, Feminism Beyond East and West: New Gender Talk and Practice in Global Islam (New York: Global Media Publications, 2007). 5 Ella Shohat, Area Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cartographies of Knowledge, Social Text, 72, 20:3 (2002), pp. 6778 at 71.
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are in short supply.6 Thus, the study of this episode and its lack of success can contribute to the body of localized theory stemming from on-the-ground activism and hopefully it can inform the practice of future endeavours. The History and Competing Explanations Egypt saw the budding of an organized feminist movement as early as the 1920s with the formation of the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923.7 However, as Margot Badran summarizes it, the history of Egyptian feminism is about middle- and upper-class women assuming agency.8 Added to this, it is equally about the modernizing post-colonial state-making. Despite an early start of gender consciousness and an organization around it, the entrenchment of such movements has remained limited. Whether this is because of the class-background of its organizers (mainly upper- and middle-class women) or because of historical, cultural or socio-economic development reasons remains a debate among scholars. However, despite its limited appeal, the successive waves of female mobilization during the first half of the twentieth century, followed by the rise of a post-colonial state that delineated women as markers of both national authenticity and aspired modernity, have granted Egyptian women a number of rights much earlier than their peers in the region (e.g. mass education, political rights, paid jobs, etc.). What is interesting is that these rights and the early budding of female gender consciousness have not been equally matched by a continuation or a spread of womens movements. Hence, except for a few womens-rights professional NGOs and some religious-based womens movements, there is currently no significant non-religious womens movement in Egypt. Also, there seems to be an apparent contradiction between the large-scale participation of women in the workplace, education, mass-based Islamic movement and the aforementioned forms of mobilization, and the espousal of sexual segregation and discrimination against women (implicit and explicit) in the public sphere and within the public mainstream discourse.9 Why this is the case usually invites one of three answers with variation both by Egyptian women activists and literature alike. The first, and most prevalent, is that the womens movement in Egypt has been crippled by the rise of Islamism both as a political force and as a conservative social discourse, with a number of wide repercussions. Guenena and Wassef argue that recent political discourse in Egypt is dominated by the conservative polemics of the Islamists and that the state, in its attempt to contain the Islamists, has subordinated womens issues to its own concerns for security and legitimacy.10 Similarly, Shurkalla argues that:
6 7

Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, op. cit., p. 46. I emphasize this as the beginning of organization, to distinguish it from preceding stages of feminist struggle and consciousness marked by the writings and subsequent debates of individual women and men such as Qassim Amin, Malak Hefni Nassif and even Hoda Sharawi herself. 8 Margot Badran, Feminism, Islam, and the Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 3. 9 For example, as recently as February 2010, the general assembly of the State Council (one of the highest judicial and legal bodies in Egypt established in 1946) voted to ban the appointment of female judges. Moreover, a demonstration to protest this decision called by a number of women NGOs attracted less than 50 attendees. 10 Nemat Guenena and Nadia Wassef, Unfulfilled Promises: Womens Rights in Egypt (New York: Population Council, 1999), p. 1.

Does Political Islam Impede Gender-Based Mobilization? The Case of Egypt 383 Womens expanding roles and integration into public life was in the past closely connected with the process of modernization, as well as with secular nation-building. The weakening of the religious hierarchy and its control on society and the creation of secular institutions allowed women to have space outside the direct control of the patriarchal community. With the growth of the Islamic movement, this space created by the state was challenged.11 Equally, Hatem asserts that the Islamists have been successful in rolling back some of the gains made by women in precisely those states where the cause of women was expected to proceed the furthest, that is, in Egypt, the Sudan, and Algeria.12 Yet this position seems to dismiss three important facts. First, even at the height of the postcolonial secular state in Egypt the Nasserite era of the 1950s and 1960s when political Islamist organizations were severely repressed by the state, with negligible presence within the public sphere, there was equally no presence of a strong womens movement. Second, the gains and rights that women acquired at the time were not predominately a result of their independent struggle, but rather as part of the bigger corporatist project, in which the state in pursuit of modernization co-opted different groups and in turn granted them some rights.13 Third, the secular nature of the post-colonial state is often misleadingly over-emphasized. For example, in Egypt even under Nasser, the personal-rights laws governing marriage, inheritance and parenting issues claimed Islamic Sharia as its main source of jurisdiction. The second position in understanding womens movements (or the lack thereof), adopted by many post-structuralists and post-colonial theorists, is that there are womens movements in Egypt and elsewhere in the South that are creating and conquering new spaces and that might be re-inventing norms and practices along gendered lines; however, these movements remain undetected because of researchers biases and embeddedness within a Western/liberal/ humanist framework of feminism that may not be relevant to post-colonial societies.14 Subsequently, such scholars warn against pre-conceived notions and determining criteria for what a womens movement should be and how such limitations can prohibit our understanding of the reality in which women live and act in different parts of the world. In this vein for example, Saba Mahmood delineates a womens movement among female preachers in Egypt, a religious domain that is usually seen as contradictory to womens emancipation.15 While this body of literature represents a breakthrough against essentialist understandings of female mobilization in the Muslim-majority countries, it does not adequately explain why women are drawn to these movements as opposed to ones with more gendered demands and worldviews.
Hala Shukrallah, The Impact of the Islamic Movement in Egypt, Feminist Review, 47 (1994), pp. 1532 at 26. 12 Mervat Hatem, Toward the Development of Post-Islamist and Post-Nationalist Feminist Discourses in the Middle East, in Judith Tucker (ed.) Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 2948 at 3132. 13 See Pratt, op. cit.; and Nazih Ayubi, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (New York: I.B. Tauris, 1995). 14 See Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Really need Saving?, op. cit. 15 Mahmoud, op. cit.
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The final and third position is one that argues that the authoritarian and patriarchal socio-political setting is an impediment to the rise of womens movements. Moghadam for example suggests that womens organizations face obstacles and challenges that emanate from the state and religious institutions, which regard democratization, independent organization, and womens autonomy as threats to their power and interests.16 Similarly, Al-Ali contends that, [T]he lack of existing democratic models and experiences in democratic political structures poses an enormous challenge to womens rights activists.17 This same assumption about the effect of authoritarianism on the rise of a womens movement was put forward by Heba Raouf, Islamist feminist activist and one of the founders of Women for Democracy: a womens movement is a social movement with a feminist agenda there is no womens movement in Egypt as much as there is no strong social movements because we do not have a conducive political environment for the rise of such movements.18 However, while these statements are largely true in portraying the context in which womens endeavours for mobilization exist, it does not suffice to explain why female mobilization is impeded, whereas under the same conditions other forms of mobilization (e.g. labour and political Islamist organizations) can still flourish. Unlike the above views, this paper argues that, while authoritarianism and the rise of Islamism are important objective circumstances, they are not the main impediments to the rise of a non-religious-based womens movement. Rather, the main impediments lay in how the so-called feminist activists engage structural factors, whether it is a hegemonic patriarchal or even misogynous discourse or the obstacles of organization under authoritarian conditions. It shows that the lack of a feminist/womens movement in Egypt, including the demise of Women for Democracy, can only be understood through the dialectical relationship between participants forming this initiative and their organizational structure, the discourse or frames they use, and the broader political context in which they exist. The dynamic relationship between those three variables as exposed in The Street is Ours underscores the necessity of understanding the temporalities of gendermobilization in the post-colonial South beyond reductionist gender boundaries and calls for historicized readings of this kind of mobilization as part of a bigger socio-political narrative. The Street is Ours! On 25 May 2005, a number of female activists and journalists were sexually harassed and assaulted by police-recruited and supervised thugs during a peaceful demonstration against the regime-proposed amendments of the Egyptian constitution.19 This was not a new practice by the Egyptian security forces.
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Valentine Moghadam, Engendering Citizenship, Feminizing Civil Society: The Case of the Middle East and North Africa, Women & Politics, 25:1/2 (2003), pp. 6387 at 80. 17 Nadje Al-Ali, Gender and Civil Society in the Middle East, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 5:2 (2003), pp. 216232 at 228. See also Frances Hasso, Feminist Generations? The Long-Term Impact of Social Movement Involvement on Palestinian Womens Lives, The American Journal of Sociology, 107:3 (2001), pp. 586611. 18 Heba Raouf, personal interview by author, 5 November 2007. 19 The demonstration was called for by the Kifaya pro-democracy movement, in protest of the referendum scheduled on that day. The referendum and proposed constitutional amendment of article 76 allowing for multi-candidate Presidential elections were seen as cosmetic and irrelevant in the context of continued repressive laws and practices.

Does Political Islam Impede Gender-Based Mobilization? The Case of Egypt 385 During the states confrontation with militant Islamist groups in the 1990s, security forces used similar tactics extensively in villages in Upper Egypt against female family members of the militants. More generally, it is historically part of a global misogynous tradition of using female sexuality as a pressuring and even humiliating tool against the enemy (read: other males). However, unlike similar episodes, this incident happened in broad daylight in downtown Cairo, under the eyes of a hoard of local and international media following the referendum. The next day all the non-state-owned Egyptian newspapers, as well as the international press (including the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and Herald Tribune to name a few) covered the story. In less than a week a number of rallies were organized by the political opposition movement and civil society organizations to protest what happened.20 Moved by the experience, a number of activists some of them assaulted in this episode held a meeting to decide on an appropriate response to what happened. One of these activists and a founder of Women for Democracy reiterates: Something was going on at the time. Kefaya was at its peak, women were taking to the streets and after the 25th [May 2005] they felt targeted as a group as women, and were ready to stand against their harassment as women. There was also a critique of how their harassment was being addressed by the media and some political groups: as a violation of our honor. This determination to take again to the streets, as women, despite the harassment seemed at the time to indicate an awareness of a gender related specificity. This sentiment of defiance, the claim of the street, and the large number of young women that this incident mobilized, seemed promising at the time.21 The initial meetings included a core group of men and women, some of them seasoned political activists, and others who were not engaged in previous political activities but were moved by this episode. The majority, however, were politicized individuals, but covered the spectrum of ideologies: Islamists, nationalists, liberals and Marxist-socialists. In less than two weeks these initial meetings which included around 1015 activists, resulted in a call for a public rally on 9 of June 2005 at the Egyptian Press Syndicate under the slogan The Street is Ours. The rally, which was very well attended, by the standards of Egyptian political rallies, with more than 300 people and a lot of media presence, announced the launch of a movement called Women for Democracy. Explaining the reasons for this new initiative, its founding statement avowed that: In light of the current events in Egypt which have seen a dangerous rise in repressive practices, women became the primary bearers of this repression in its different forms, whether on the street, at work, in means of transportation, demonstrations, or police stations. We believe that these practices are part and parcel of the ruling regimes policies aiming at subjugating and oppressing the Egyptian people. We have seen how women are
20

Indicative of the reaction that this episode created, Kifayas candle-lit vigil to protest the assault was the biggest gathering of Kifaya throughout its peak 20042005 activities. 21 Aida Seif El-Dawla, personal interview by the author, 30 December 2007.

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R. El-Mahdi tortured and sexually harassed in police stations and at demonstrations For these reasons we invite all women to participate with us in the Women for Democracy Movement (The Street is Ours).

According to the founding statement Women for Democracy is a political womens movement linking the direct and urgent needs of women in work, education, health and family issues, with freedom from all forms of discrimination and oppression against women, and the public and urgent demands of the pro-democracy movement.22 The founders seemed to be reiterating some positions in the literature they are familiar with, the idea of strategic vs practical demands or the link between the public and private spheres. However, it is not clear how such an abstract political message was expected to appeal to different groups of non-politicized Egyptian women (read: most Egyptian women). Stemming from this broad vision, Women for Democracy defined five concrete aims for their movement: 1) Immediate trial of all officials responsible for abuse in police stations, prisons, or on the street, during the past years. 2) Establishing a democratic system that guarantees accountability of the government. 3) Solidarity with all Egyptian women who suffered from the corruption of the regime and were subjected to its oppression. 4) Ending the use of the Emergency Law and all other freedom-limiting and anti-women laws. 5) Immediate release of all detainees, women and men.23 Again, the five aims reiterated the demands of the pro-democracy movement which was at its height during 2005, but which never managed to garner any mass-based support, and to which most of the founders belonged or were sympathetic to. The rally and the resulting founding statement were followed by a few meetings during the summer months of 2005 discussing ideas for different campaigns and ways to reach a broader audience of women. These included the following: a website, street marches, publicity campaigns on university campuses and public transportation, and field studies of womens needs and demands. However, by the end of that summer it was clear that this so-called movement was stillborn; the group organized one demonstration in solidarity with the wives of Islamist militant detainees who were organizing a sit-in at the Lawyers Association in August 2005 that was meagerly attended. None of the other ideas were ever implemented, not to mention that the membership of the group never exceeded tens from those who attended the first and last rally in June 2005 and some activists from womens NGOs. Looking back at this initiative (its messages, structures and actors) it seems that this outcome was somehow pre-determined, as the following sections will show. Who Is Speaking? To Whom? In which Language? Cultural framing is an important process through which actors assign meaning to and interpret, relevant events and conditions in ways that are intended to mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to
22 23

Women For Democracy, Founding Statement, Cairo: 29 June 2005, unpublished. Ibid.

Does Political Islam Impede Gender-Based Mobilization? The Case of Egypt 387 demobilize antagonists.24 In the case of womens/feminist movements, where the demands and challenges are counter-hegemonic in the Gramscian sense of the word, cultural framing processes become even more important. As Arlene Macleod explains, for women, there is no clear-cut other to confront directly. Facing a layered and overlapping round of oppressors, women do not have the relative luxury of knowing their enemy. Relations with men, class relations, and global inequalities confront women with a web of cross-cutting identities and power dynamics.25 Thus, the conundrum becomes that, as much as an antihegemonic womens movement depends on a successful cultural framing process, it is difficult to unfold one that carefully addresses this multiplicity and crosscutting positions of women in relations of power and in targeting an enemy. Ignoring this complexity, the founders of Women for Democracy, like their predecessors in the Egyptian womens movement, have not managed to delineate the nuances characterizing different groups of women and in turn different messages for their mobilization. Rather they imagined women as a coherent group, masking a lot of specific dynamics of oppression/resistance that different groups of women confront based on variation in class and location. Looking back at the founding statement of The Street is Ours, this dilemma becomes very clear. The statement seemed to reflect and respond to a number of classical debates within the feminist literature and academic discourse more than responding to the life-issues of different groups of women. Other than using the word women a number of times, the five goals were a reiteration of the goals of the different pro-democracy initiatives big at the time in Egypt (Kifaya and others). Two things were not clear how could women relate to these goals? Or, which groups of women could these aims attract other than the group of already engaged political activists? The broad and overloaded message of the founding statement was clearly a reflection of a vague (and mostly academic) feminist discourse in Egypt that is still ingrained in the global universal conceptions of sisterhood. This discourse and a resulting framing process have not engaged some key questions: how different are the needs, roles and agent/subject dilemmas of the urban working-class woman vs her rural sister in Egypt; the Coptic woman vs the Muslim; and the upper-class woman vs her maid; just to name a few dyads. Evading the analysis of complexities within the real material world of woman in favor of a constructed commonality of oppression has been a hurdle towards successful cultural framing and an enabling counter-hegemonic discourse, one that successive Egyptian feminist movements have not been able to overcome for years; Women for Democracy was no exception. Underlying this problem in discourse and framing of the womens question which contributed to the quick demise of Women for Democracy are a number of unresolved contradictions contradictions that are present in the literature framing womens movements in the South as much as they are alive within real attempts at mobilization, including Women for Democracy. The first of these contradictions relates to the definition of a womens movement in the Egyptian context and its oscillation between universalist and relativist positions. More than being solely a theoretical debate, this binary was very clear among the founders of
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David Snow and Robert Benford, Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization, in Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi and Sidney Tarrow (eds) From Structure to Action: Social Movement Participation Across Cultures (Greenwich, NY: JAI Press, 1988), pp. 197217 at 198. 25 Arlene MacLeod, Hegemonic Relations and Gender Resistance: The New Veiling as Accommodating Protest in Cairo, Signs, 17:3 (1992), pp. 533557 at 553.

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Women for Democracy and their different visions of what a womens movement in Egypt should look like and what its programme should entail. In an interview with Hala Shukrallah, a well-known feminist, founder of the New Woman Center NGO, and a later participant in Women for Democracy, she stressed that feminism is a world-view for social change [] which becomes compromised by relativist positions. Such positions and the movements they celebrate are accommodating, they do not aspire ultimately for this world-view. She added, some people see this as a particularly Western world-view, but you can not develop your own feminism away from this discourse.26 On the other hand, Heba Raouf, who was one of the key founders of Women for Democracy and a well-known Islamist thinker, declared that one of the key impediments to the rise of a womens movement in Egypt is an excessive reliance on the Western-feminist discourse (read: white liberal universalism) that tend[s] to import an agenda that is not ours.27 Even though both women are seasoned activists and scholars who did not voice the crude versions of universalism nor relativism (they are very much aware of the critique of both views), it was very clear in the interviews that, while Shukrallah stressed the importance of some feminist universal values, Raouf emphasized localization and cultural heritage (read: cultural specificity). Somewhere between those two views laid another vision expressed by Seif ElDawla (another of the founders); for her: [A]ny movement is colored by the context, be it cultural, social, political, or otherwise. There cannot be a movement out of context. A feminist movement in Egypt would have to take the context into consideration because its body of women carries that context. Not dealing with complexities of that context can only result in more alienation and elitism. However, doing that does not mean giving up on what I think is the core conviction of feminism, which is the acknowledgement of the existing balance of power between men and women in a society [and] the acknowledgement of the patriarchal nature of that society.28 The different concepts of a womens movement by these activists, and consequently their different framing, are not particular to feminist activists in Egypt, and are not necessarily unhealthy. In any movement frames are contested within the movement by leader and cadre debating alternative goals and visions for the movement, and externally by countermovement actors.29 It is this multiplicity that enriches a movement both tactically and strategically. However, the problem within Women for Democracy and the Egyptian feminist circles in general is not the contending visions, but their respective use of feminism as a monolith and their diametrically opposed views on this monolith with no attempt at dialogue between them. Stemming from this binary is another challenge that was very clear in the The Street is Ours attempt and which has marked the Egyptian feminist discourse and resulting cultural framing process for decades, that of cultural authenticity vs
26 27

Hala Shukrallah, personal interview by author, Cairo, 18 November 2007. Heba Raouf, personal interview by author, Cairo, 3 November 2007. 28 Aida Seif El-Dawla, op. cit. 29 M. Zald, Culture, Ideology, and Strategic Framing, in D. McAdam, J. D. McCarthy and M. Zald (eds) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 261 274 at 261.

Does Political Islam Impede Gender-Based Mobilization? The Case of Egypt 389 westernization. Deniz Kandiyoti, Partha Chaterjee and others have eloquently shown how women in the post-colonial settings of the South have been made part of a contested terrain between notions of cultural authenticity, i.e. bearers of the national identity and integrity vs colonial Western encroachment.30 Interestingly, this demarcation is not only a legacy of the nationalist moment during the struggle for independence and consolidation of the post-colonial nation states. Rather it is still a current dividing line very much alive in the context of imperialist expansion (both through wars and military threats Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran as well as the entrenchment of the global neoliberal project). At a time of militarized war and US empire building, as Mohanty31 and others have characterized the contemporary moment, it is difficult for anyone thinking about the woman question today, as at the turn of the century, to escape the language of accusations and counter-accusations about cultural authenticity.32 In the case of Egypt, as in many countries of the South with a colonial heritage and subsequent national struggles, it is relatively easy for anti-imperialist movements to frame images against foreign intervention using the cumulative cultural stock, e.g. songs, movies, idioms, proverbs. That is the collective memory with vivid images of colonization, of anti-colonial struggle and inherent suspicion of or at least mixed feelings about the West. However, in the case of a womens movement with the legacy of the aforementioned authentic/Western binary, feminist activists do not have such privilege. Moreover, both because of the image of Third World women especially Arab and Muslim created in and by the West, and because it is the same location of imperial forces, Egyptian feminist activists are more easily seen as suspects of imperialism. Especially when global feminism, using a universal human rights paradigm, constructs for itself the role of the heroic savior, reminiscent of colonialist civilizing mission and in line with current U.S. imperialist interventions.33 The support of many feminist activists in Europe and the United States for the war in Afghanistan is a case in point.34 Thus, unlike what a lot of the literature proclaims, it seems that in the case of Egypt and other Arab countries, association with international feminist circles which are still pre-dominated by white-liberal feminist conceptions whether on discourse or practical level (through NGOs and transnational networks), is more of a hindrance than an advantage to womens movements in the South.35 This dividing line and the resulting impediment it creates were clear both within the group of Women for Democracy and between them and their potential audience. According to Heba Raouf, one for the reasons for the disintegration of Women for Democracy is the fact that the secular activists are adhering to a global feminist agenda, while the new generations of women activists are more
30

Denis Kandiyoti, Women, Islam and the State (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992); Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 31 Chandra Mohanty, US Empire and the Project of Womens Studies: Stories of Citizenship, Complicity and Dissent, Gender, Place and Culture, 13:1 (2006), pp. 720. 32 Abu Lughod, Remaking Women, op. cit., p. 14. 33 Elora Halim Chowdhury, Global Feminism: Feminist Theorys Cul-de-sac, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self Knowledge, IV Special Issue (Summer 2006), pp. 291302 at 291. 34 For an excellent critique see Abu Lughod, Do Muslim Women Really need Saving?, op. cit. 35 For an example of this literature see Moghadam, Engendering Citizenship, Feminizing Civil Society, op. cit.; and Lisa Baldez, Womens Movements and Democratic Transition in Brazil, Chile, East Germany and Poland, Comparative Politics, 35:3 (2003), pp. 253272.

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human rights oriented. And both are not rooted in a local discourse.36 Conversely, for Shukrallah, challenging the legitimacy of the womens movements by accusing it of being a Western import is the defense mechanism of a patriarchal society.37 Within the meetings of the group, which included secular and Islamist activists, there was always this haunting legacy and this fear of being perceived as Western. Falling into this very real trap, activists became concerned with categorizing and critiquing ideas among the group, based on being congruent with a so-called authentic national cultural parameter as opposed to being outside it and hence rejected. As such, the main criteria and pivotal axis for movement became a misleadingly homogenized cultural referent rather than being the voicing of existing demands and concerns of real groups of women. Like their predecessors, these activists failed to make the necessary fusion between the human and universal on the one hand and the local and historicized on the other. And since as Mohanty asserts, feminist discourse is productive of analytical categories and strategic decisions that have material effects, the problems and binaries that inflict the feminist discourse in Egypt have had their impact on the potential of womens movements.38 Not being able to translate transnational gendered principles into cultural repertories related to the daily lives and histories of groups of women have made the calls and demands of womens movement foreign to the majority of Egyptian women in every sense of the word. Women for Democracy was no exception. Trapped in those binaries, the founding members of Women for Democracy were not interested in questioning their opposite positions, let alone initiating a localized discourse. Rather, they were trying to jump over a necessary step of dialogue between them as women activists of different backgrounds to a more advanced position of addressing the imaginary masses of women, which each of them had a different image for and somehow claimed to represent. Divided They Continue It is impossible to separate a discourse and meaning system from those who use and produce it and the context in which it is used. As mentioned earlier, Women for Democracy meetings included different shades of both gender experts who work on womens rights within development projects and feminist activists of different political shades. Similar to what Lazreg called containment through inclusion,39 the so-called gender experts and feminist activists seemed to interpret different aspects of womens lives in ways that fit and serve their globalfeminist paradigm. These activists worked on gender issues through academic and NGO projects and thus, even though they lacked practical experience in collective organization with women, they used their professional jargon and paradigms in debates and counter-debates about what Egyptian women want. Hence, the resulting founding statement, and consequently the lack of further mobilization, was a reflection of the perceptions of this small group of women who are feminists by profession or conviction and who are subject to their specific
Heba Raouf, personal interview by author, 4 November 2007. Shukrallah, op. cit. 38 Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, op. cit., p. 110. 39 Marnia Lazreg, Development: Feminist Theorys Cul-de-sac, in Kriemild Saunders (ed.) Feminist Post-Development Thought: Rethinking Modernity, Post-colonialism, and Representation (London: Zed Press, 2002).
37 36

Does Political Islam Impede Gender-Based Mobilization? The Case of Egypt 391 paradigms, rather than a broader platform of different groups of women. As one of the initiative participants put it; there was a lack of clarity what was our objective? This is the problem of the political elite that is not linked and pushed by a constituency.40 In addition to this problem of exclusivity and exclusion, the voids and binaries characterizing the discourse of the Women for Democracy and the broader discourse of female mobilization in Egypt were emphasized by dividing lines among the participants of the group. These dividing lines between Islamists vs seculars, and NGO professionals vs political activists, were one of the main reasons behind the premature ending of the initiative. Even though feminist movements have been characterized by differences in theoretical positions and in turn praxis elsewhere, these differences have enriched the movement in some sites like the United States or at least did not fatally impede the movement, as in Iran. However, in Egypt these differences are a major hurdle for the rise of a significant movement, not only because of the exaggerated divide between Islamists vs secularists, but even among the so-called secularists themselves. As one of the participants put it: I was very enthusiastic about The Street is Ours. I thought it was an excellent opportunity for women of different affiliations to work together. But when I went [to the meetings] I felt there was a lot of tension. I felt we are not yet mature enough to set common goals and achieve them.41 This tension was very clear in the few meetings of Women for Democracy where, even though the participants were cordial to each other, at the first sign of disagreement the discussion turned sour, with insinuations of being reactionary and conservative (on the part of the secularists against the Islamists); being Westernized (the Islamists accusation against the seculars); working with the state and being donor-driven (an accusation of the activists against the NGO professionals); or being too radical with no sense of reality (the NGO professionals against the activists). The fact that these activists knew each other through pre-existing networks again unlike what a lot of the literature assumes was a disadvantage rather than an addition to the initiative, since they brought with them their earlier disagreements and pre-conceived notions about one another.42 Similarly, many of the participants in Women for Democracy after its initial rally were professionals from womens rights NGOs, and, according to Seif ElDawla the maximum that they can do together is to organize the 8th of March (International Women Day) event.43 However, they brought with them a lot of their professional rivalries. As in many other countries, rivalry over foreign funding, careerism and short-lived projects in response to available funding have been some of the negative elements within the community of secular womens rights NGOs in Egypt.44 These rivalries resonated in Women for Democracy
40 41

Shukrallah, op. cit. Ibid. 42 See Moghadam, Engendering Citizenship, Feminizing Civil Society, op. cit.; and Baldez, op. cit. 43 Seif El-Dawla, op. cit. 44 Nadje Al-Ali, Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: the Egyptian Womens Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Al-Ali, Gender and Civil Society in the Middle East, op. cit.

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meetings. According to Shukrallah; people felt threatened about leadership, I believe one of the things that led to the failure was competition for leadership and credit.45 However, in addition to competition and rivalries, these professionalized activists came from a different tradition of NGOs and its dynamics than that of political activists, and one that is not necessarily congruent with the dynamics of building a social movement. In the few meetings that were held this divide manifested itself in explicit and implicit criticism from the political activists to representatives of the NGOs, accusing them of being a mouthpiece for their donor institutions, or not being politicized enough because of their collaboration with the state through the National Council for Women.46 According to Seif ElDawla, womens NGOs in Egypt are either service organizations adopting an approach that is even more charity-oriented than developmental. Or advocacy and human rights organizations, mostly legally oriented, working on behalf of women and not with them.47 One of the clear resonances of this in Women for Democracy was an obsession by many of the founders on the wording of the founding statement at the expense of trying to figure out ways for mobilization. For the few participants who joined Women for Democracy and were not part of any group (the Islamist activists, secularist activists or NGOs professionals), but rather friends and acquaintances of these activists or members of the rising broader political opposition community, the aforementioned divisions and tensions were expelling. As one of them said: I didnt understand a lot of disagreements that seemed to be blown out of proportion These women seemed to have known each other from before and to have come with some sort of baggage or personal disagreements. I felt it was not my place; they were more concerned with proving each other wrong than in thinking of what we should do next.48 Thus, not only was the mobilizing structure of The Street is Ours riddled by heightened divisions within its organizing body, but also the management of these divisions was eliminating potential resources to this structure. By alienating the easier pools of its mobilizing structure, such as friends, outside activists and sympathizers, the group was further curtailing any potential for expansion. Similarly, in terms of tactics for outreach, the group was not doing a better job. The only tactic used by the group in its short life was street demonstrations, which had been the most predominant form of protest used by dissent groups and movements since the rise of a political mobilization cycle in 2000. While this is expected, since [c]ollective actors, probably most often, adopt mobilizing structural forms that are known to them from direct experience,49 the problem was that, for an initiative with no constituency and that had not built any ties with its surroundings, street protests were self-defeating if not outright foolish. However, the core
Shukrallah, op. cit. The council is affiliated directly to the Presidents Office and is headed by his wife. It subcontracts and funds a lot of women NGOs as well as using NGO professionals as consultants. 47 Seif El-Dawla, op. cit. 48 Anonymous, personal interview by author, Cairo, 12 January 2008. 49 J. McCarthy, Constraints and Opportunities in Adopting, Adapting, and Inventing, in D. McAdam, J. D. McCarthy and M. Zald (eds) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 141151 at 148.
46 45

Does Political Islam Impede Gender-Based Mobilization? The Case of Egypt 393 activists of Women for Democracy were more focused on their differences than they were at attempts for innovation or coming up with new tactics, while the nonconducive organizational environment, riddled with tension, did not allow new recruits enough time and space to develop such tools. A Non-conducive Political Society One of the common views that is shared between the literature on womens movements in the Middle East and the activists interviewed in this research is the negative impact of the authoritarian political context on the potential gender mobilization. Al-Ali, for example, points out that repressive measures have not only been directed towards Islamic militant groups and Communists, but also towards women activists, hence dissuading them from mobilization or at least making it difficult for them.50 However, despite the accuracy of such descriptions, the causality established between repression and authoritarianism more generally and the hindrance of womens mobilization is actually flawed. Looking at the example of Women for Democracy, it is interesting to note that state repression portrayed in the assault on female activists on the referendum day was in fact a stimulant for this attempt at mobilization. Moreover, there was no element of direct or indirect state coercion involved in its quick demise. Of course that is not to say that repression or more broadly authoritarianism is desirable (whether normatively or functionally) to womens mobilization, but rather that it is not a deterministic factor for its absence. A quick look at past womens movements in Latin America, Iran and Eastern Europe further confirms this conclusion. More specifically, in Egypt, as pointed out earlier, the same authoritarian context did not prohibit other forms of mobilization, including political Islam. That is not to say that the authoritarian context of Egyptian politics and state society relations have no bearing on womens mobilization, but rather that this element plays out very differently in shaping womens mobilization: not through coercion but rather through compartmentalizing potential participants within the womens movement. Authoritarianism not only shapes the arena in which activists function (political and civil societies), but more deeply affects their relational politics. The continuity of the states stick and carrot policy in dealing with dissent (including womens/feminist demands) not only dissuades potential actors from organizing because of the threat of coercion, but more importantly persuades some of those actors to join ranks with the state and suffice with partial practical gains with the hope of more strategic gains in the future. This was very clear from the wedge between NGO and opposition activists in the Women for Democracy those who had links with the National Council for Women as opposed to the others as discussed above. Moreover, such authoritarian context and the contaminant lack of wideplatform movements or parties deprive nascent womens movements from potential strong allies, and the opportunity to benefit from overlapping mobilization structures, repertoires of contention and political learning at large. The spillover effects and intra-movement collaboration that nurtured feminist movements in other parts of the world were kept in check in Egypt through the flexible authoritarianism of its regimes. Unlike the state of flux created by the rise of peasants, pro-democracy and natives social movements in Latin America for example,
50

Al-Ali, Gender and Civil Society in the Middle East, op. cit., p. 222.

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which was conducive to the rise of a Latin American feminist movement, or the spillover effects that the civil rights movement had on the feminist movement in the United States, this has not been the case in Egypt during the past decades. In Egypt itself, historically the strongest episodes of womens mobilization correlated with the rise of other movements, specifically the anti-colonial mobilization.51 In contrast, current female voices and demands, even when not necessarily feminist, do not find a platform within strong oppositional political allies. The constriction of this pool of contentious actors under authoritarianism was very much an issue for Women for Democracy, despite a state of political influx at the time. According to Heba Raouf, one of the reasons our initiative was very short-lived is that the key people who founded it were busy with other political activities. We could not give it enough incubatory time and attention to overcome our differences and disagreements.52 However, what is more interesting here is that, even though the Muslim Brotherhood, the biggest mass movement in Egypt, did not lend organic support to the rising initiative, it sent one of its iconic female figures, Jihan El-Halafawy, to the inauguration rally of Women for Democracy. At the same time, neither the liberal Wafd Party nor the leftist Tagamu party did so, nor did they later participate or lend any kind of support to the initiative. Conclusion The study of Women for Democracy, as short experience as it was, raises as many questions as the answers it provides, both for feminist literature and praxis. It shows the continuity of many challenges facing gendered mobilization in Egypt, as in many parts of the South, none of which is deterministically correlated to the rise of political Islam. In terms of discourse, framing womens rights along the binaries of Western vs authentic, and the universal vs the culturally specific, seem as relevant and alive today as they were several decades ago, with the first impulse of an organized womens movement and at the height of national struggles and the early days of the post-colonial state. These binaries, and the resulting divisions they lead to among activists, are compounded by narrow definitions of feminism(s) and unsuccessful attempts (if any) at localization of the concept. Similarly, it advocates the need to acknowledge the ambivalence in terms of construction of women as subjects and subsequently their representation along the intersecting axes of class, religion, nation and gender, rather than homogenizing women as one group. What this means in relation to political Islam is that, if we are to understand womens movements for what they are, resistance movements, and to understand that at the current historical juncture in Egypt and more broadly the Arab region, resistance is defined within Islamist parameters and carries its banner, then it should be no surprise that womens mobilization would follow the same trend. However, this should not blind us from the fact that there are other conceptions and contaminant actors who perceive women rights differently and aspire to different forms of women mobilization. Hence, a clear and locally constructed definition of what gendered mobilization means in the Egyptian context which
51

It is not a coincidence that the founding of the first women organization (EFU) took place in the aftermath of the 1919 revolution and by women of the Wafd Party which was leading the anti-colonial struggle at the time. 52 Raouf, 5 November 2008, op. cit.

Does Political Islam Impede Gender-Based Mobilization? The Case of Egypt 395 is necessary for successful mobilization can only arise through joint struggles, dialogue, and negotiated coalition-building between religiously based and secular activists. One of the major causes of the demise of Women for Democracy is that the secular activists, not understanding the volatility of their setting as postcolonial subjects, viewed their Islamist peers as foes rather than partners. In interviews with non-Islamist activists of Women for Democracy, most of them could consider the Islamist movement as a potential audience, let alone a potential ally that they could not work with even on specific demands or activities. Their understanding similar to much of the literature was that, [t]he movement for womens citizenship [has] to contend with patriarchal Islamist movements.53 While many positions on women within political Islamist organizations need to be contended with, this does not apply to all the different organizations, or even the whole range of positions within one organization.54 In a post-colonial setting where authenticity and tradition does not simply equate to conservatism and revisionism, but also to resistance and autonomy, it is a fatal mistake not to discern the differences. Distinguishing those differences and subsequently engaging different co-existing conceptions of women rights and desired mobilization requires that we do not see them as some of the literature and activists do as intrinsically opposed. For example, Lila Abu Lughod asks, [I]s liberation even a goal for which all women or people strive? Are emancipation, equality, and rights part of a universal language we must use? In other words, might other desires be more meaningful for different groups of people? Living in close families? Living in a godly way?.55 Even though those are important questions to ask, especially in response to an unrightfully homogenizing and universalizing discourse on women in the south, the question becomes, why are those two different sets of desires seen as mutually exclusive? In other words, why are women or a woman of the South perceived as having to choose between equality, freedom and emancipation on the one hand, and living in a close family or in a godly way on the other? Moreover, why are those two sets of principles or desires seen as inherently belonging to one context, historic location or culture and not the other? Why cannot a woman from the South be entitled to both, i.e. equality in a close family? Finally, there is a need to perceive these conceptions of close family, godly ways and the like in a historicized fashion rather than an essentialist way that refrains from questioning their meaning under the rhetoric of respecting difference. However, Women for Democracy activists, like much of the literature, seemed to ignore the complexity of multiple and contradictory consciousness when trying to map the engagement (historical or potential) of Egyptian women with feminisms. Rather than engaging with their Islamist peers, so far, non-religious-based activists continue to share with the literature a mistaken understanding that, [p]articipation in transnational feminist networks and similar global advocacy networks could assist Middle East and North Africa womens struggles at the local and national levels by providing them with needed solidarity and
53 54

Moghadam, Engendering Citizenship, Feminizing Civil Society, op. cit., p. 71. A clear example of this range of opinions within Islamist organizations is the Muslim Brotherhood. For example, while their tentative party platform announced in 2006 declared that women should not run for Presidential candidacy, influential figures within the organization such as Essan Al-Erian and Aboul Monem Abou Al-Fotouh openly opposed this position. 55 Abu Lughod, Do Muslim Women Really need Saving?, op. cit p. 788.

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support.56 However, any historical understanding of womens mobilization in Egypt and the Arab world suggests, on the contrary, that these activists need to start focusing on inside more than outside. It pushes activists and scholars to ask the same question that Homi Bhabha asked more than a decade ago: Are the interests of Western theory [and subsequent praxis] necessarily collusive with the hegemonic role of the West as a power bloc?57 The tentative answer is: as long as feminism and womens struggles continue to be colonized and represented in terms of a global feminism that is pre-dominantly white-liberal, they will be collusive. Finally, at the heart of all these concluding insights lies the question: is mobilization along gender axis relevant to all societies at different times? This is an integral question to ask, because at the same moment of history when Women for Democracy failed, hoards of Egyptian women were taking the lead in labour mobilization (strikes, sit-ins and factory occupations), socio-economic protests and the pro-democracy movement, let alone the political Islamist movement. Women were not confined to the home or the family; they were (and still are) active agents, but along axes other than their gender.

56 57

Moghadam, Engendering Citizenship, Feminizing Civil Society, op. cit., p. 80. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 20.

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