Women, Structure, and Agency in the Middle East: Introduction and Overview to Feminist Formations' Special Issue on Women in the Middle East

In many ways, the recent past has not been kind to women of the Middle East. Economic stagnation, the spread of patriarchal Islamist movements, the persistence of the authoritarian state, the nonresolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq all have left their mark on the legal status, economic well-being, and security of Middle Eastern women. And yet, despite these travails, and to a certain extent because of them, women in the Middle East and North Africa have developed strategies for survival and empowerment and have evolved in ways that shatter every stereotype that has represented them as victimized, passive, and traditional. They are building strong women's organizations, conducting research, demanding equal citizenship, and networking internationally. In the process, they are changing the nature of the public sphere and helping to build civil society in their countries; and they are helping to shift the balance of feminist power—in terms of conceptual and strategic innovations—from North to South.

Three important events related to women's rights in the region have marked the first decade of this century. The first was the reform in 2003-2004 of Morocco's personal status code (the Mudawanna) granting Moroccan women new rights; this followed a long struggle to which Moroccan women's groups and a regional feminist network, the Collectif 95 Maghreb Egalité, had made indispensable contributions. The new Moroccan family law has been called epochal in nature. The second event concerns the 2004 Arab League Summit held in Tunis where the host nation surprised the other member states by calling upon them to "consider the promotion of the rights of Arab women as a fundamental axis of the process of development and modernization of Arab societies" (Labidi 2007, 7). While this statement implies something unique about Tunisia's approach to women's rights, it is also suggestive of the recognition slowly being accorded to women's participation and rights, as the Arab Human Development Report series also confirms. The third event was the emergence of a vocal and visible feminist movement in Iran in 2005 through such campaigns as Stop Stoning Forever and especially the One Million Signatures Campaign for equality and legal reform, along with the massive participation of women in the Green Protests of the summer of 2009. Clearly, this is not a region that is unchanging, nor is it one in which women are simply victims of oppression or bystanders to events.

Women in the Middle East constitute a diverse and heterogeneous population and their social positions within and across countries vary by social class, ethnicity, and urban/rural location. Macro-level factors that shape women's legal status and social positions are the country's social structure and stage of development, as well as the nature of the state and its economic, social, and cultural policies. There is no archetypal Middle Eastern Woman but rather women in quite diverse socioeconomic and cultural arrangements.

Women are likewise divided ideologically and politically. Some women activists have aligned themselves with liberal or left-wing organizations; others have lent their support to Islamist/fundamentalist groups. Some women reject religion as patriarchal; others wish to reclaim religion for themselves or to identify feminine aspects of it. Some women reject traditions and time-honored customs; others find identity, solace, and strength in them. More research is needed to determine whether social background shapes and can predict political and ideological affiliation but, in general, women's social positions have implications for their consciousness and activism.

Despite this diversity, there are at least two common characteristics that are particularly noticeable when comparisons are made with women and gender relations in other regions of the global South, such as Latin America and East Asia. One is relatively limited access to paid employment and under-representation in the political system; the other is that women in nearly all the countries of the region experience second-class citizenship that is inscribed in Muslim family law and reflected in patriarchal cultural practices...