Introduction

Over the last three decades, the role played by phenomena linked to the (re-)making of collective memory, or, more precisely, of collective memories in situations of societal and political change, has gained attention in the humanities and social sciences in general. Only in recent years has this subject been researched with respect to colonial and postcolonial settings (Sengupta 2009) and here also with respect to the Middle East.¹ Approaches are highly diverse, ranging from cultural studies to psychosocial perspectives. Rare but highly interesting exceptions studying the violent history of the Middle East from a gender perspective and focusing on contesting memories of women include works by Efrat Ben Ze'ev (2010), Ruth Rubio-Marín (2006), and Alison Baker (1998)—in addition to films like The Forgotten by Driss Deiback (2006). These studies link the general trend toward marginalizing or denying female experiences in the field of officially recognized memory production to the continuing hegemony of gender stereotypes that identify women with passive and "helping hand" roles, thus neglecting their distinct collective as well as individual contributions to society and history. Generally speaking, memory studies seem to suggest that representations of women as "self-abandoning" and "self-forgetful" are one common characteristic element of the making of collective memory. This may be explained by the fact that the making of collective memory is often linked to highly gendered and sexualized models of national, religious, or ethnic identity. Though fully aware that most of the terms describing phenomena of collective memory or collective forms of trauma are highly controversial, we decided not to engage in a more general theoretical debate here but rather to test such concepts with respect to the material presented in the case studies.² The following contributions address different ways in which personal and public memory are linked to or interact with each other.

Anja Peleikis developed a similar approach in her study on the multiple personal and public memories in a confessionally mixed village in southern Lebanon. In a book published in 2006, she scrutinizes how recollections of the past are transmitted from one generation to the next and how, through this process, religious affiliations have been transcended by more powerful group identities (like age, gender, neighborhood, and profession). At the same time, confessional hierarchies have been redefined since the expulsion of confessional groups from the village. Thus, efforts toward reconciliation failed on the local level and—one could reason—prevented the emergence of a renewed social order (Peleikis 2006).

Memory studies deal with a highly ideological field. The politicization of memory sets limits to reconfiguring collective as well as personal forms of memory. A clear case is the completely different cultures of memory dealing with National Socialism and the Holocaust in the former West and East Germany, to cite a non-Middle Eastern example. As late as in 1994, an exhibition in West Berlin to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Claus von Stauffenberg's attempted assassination of Hitler caused fierce strife over the inclusion of communist resistance fighters in the exhibition and the national memorial. Similar conflicts existed in East Germany: Historians still debate whether memory in the German Democratic Republic prioritized the suffering of Communists over that of Jews.

The following contributions are linked to a project on memory politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region that we were directing in the framework of the Berlin Collaborative Research Centre at Humboldt-University, called "Representations of changing social orders." Most of the papers were presented at a workshop on gendered memories in the MENA convened at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin in June 2009. The papers brought together in this special issue on "Gendered Memory in the Middle East and North Africa: Cultural Norms, Social Practices, and Transnational Regimes" tie in with two different fields of research—memory studies and gender studies—linking theoretical insights from both fields to gain a deeper understanding of the ongoing processes of societal and political change in the MENA region in the light of highly complex and necessitative societal reconciliation. More particularly, the papers explore the tensions and interactions [End Page 2...