In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15.2 (2004) 152-153


[Access article in PDF]

Narrating Feminism:

The Woman Question in the Thinking of an African Radical

Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf

Tracing a chronology involves creating a narrative history, but there is always more than one way to tell a story, and stories often tell us more about the present than they do about the past.
—Moore 153

To understand the Woman Question in the Sudan in the present day, we have to come to terms with the intricacies of the past as inscribed in the sociopolitical and historical problems of the country as a whole.1 For political theorist Mona Abul-Fadl, the Woman Question

has come to be defined over time in terms of problems arising from the indeterminate and changing status and role of women in society. It has generally been assumed to be a question of ascertaining/affirming women's rights and liberating women from the yoke of systemic oppression which keeps them subordinated to the "tyranny" of men, an oppression made possible by an order of society sanctioning male domination and qualified as patriarchal.
(29)

For Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim, a fervent Sudanese women's rights activist, the question is more complicated. For her, it is not important to transcend "patriarchy" as the only factor determining the position of women in society. Instead, she argues for a more complex and textured understanding of the constellation of forces that affects the status of women across [End Page 152]


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
"Welcome the Pioneer." The National Committee for the Welcoming of Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim, December 2003.
[End Page 153]

cultural and geographical frontiers. As I will attempt to show in this paper, Ibrahim saw that the problem was not merely the sexual oppression of women, but rather, the ways multiple societal configurations intersect to mold the experiences of women in the most dramatic ways by forming individual and collective consciousness, social relations, and access to positions of power and privilege.

Rights activist and union organizer, Ibrahim has been the President of the Sudanese Women's Union since 1956, and she is one of the most outspoken feminists in Africa and the Arab world. She initiated powerful protests against British colonialism as well as against national regimes that suppress women's political participation. She was the first woman from a developing country to occupy the post of President of the International Democratic Women's Federation and was a recipient of the United Nation's Award for Human Rights and Peace. Ibrahim's ideas can be found in her published lectures and in her two powerful books, Our Path to Emancipation and Our Harvest in Twenty Years. Her compelling journal essays, such as "Arrow at Rest" and "Sudanese Women's Union: Strategies for Emancipation and the Counter Movement," afford invaluable insights into her articulation of feminist history and praxis. In addition to these sources, I rely on an interview that I conducted with Ibrahim on December 21, 2003, at her home in Omdurman after her return from exile on December 19, 2003. I asked Ibrahim to discuss the circumstances in which The Path to Emancipation was written in 1962 and how the book was received in Sudanese political circles. According to Ibrahim:



The circumstances under which I wrote Our Path to Emancipation were very interesting as far as the concept of women's liberation was concerned. There was a marked confusion in the Sudan as well as in other developing countries about the nature and content of emancipation. For example, in Egypt when Huda Hanim Shaarawi founded the first women's organization in 1923, she led a huge demonstration in which women took off their veils as a symbol of their liberation from male authority. We ask ourselves, did this action result in women's equality in rights and entitlements in Egyptian society? The answer is no. I felt the urgency to provide a conceptual framework for our Union because I was convinced that burning the veil as happened in Egypt did not mark any affirmation of women's political, social, and economic rights. Women can be veiled but liberated. The equation of...

pdf

Share