https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.aud.edu/stable/pdf/3178451 ?ab_segments=0%252Fbasic_search_gsv2%252Fcontrol&refreqid=excelsior%3A182d63f4df0b88116f2bc54f1927353

Writ a short essay, no more than 1000 words count. ( average 2-4 pages length)

1. provide a summary of the major themes of the article.

       2-  Explain how the stereotypes of Middle Eastern women have been crucial to negative depictions of   the region and its culture.

Review: “Orientalism” and Middle East Feminist Studies

Reviewed Work(s): Colonial Fantasies: Toward a Feminist Reading of Orientalism by
Meyda Yegenoglu: Deconstructing Images of “The Turkish Woman.” by Zehra Arat:
Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo by Homa
Hoodfar: In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and
Palestine by Judith Tucker: Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of
Postmodern Analysis by Haideh Moghissi: Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in
Contemporary Iran by Ziba Mir-Hosseini: Engendering Middle East Studies by Deniz
Kandiyoti: Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Childhood by Fatima Mernissi and
Ruth V. Ward

Review by: Lila Abu-Lughod

Source: Feminist Studies , Spring, 2001, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 101-113

Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178451

ORIENTALISM AND MIDDLE EAST
FEMINIST STUDIES

LILA ABU-LUGHOD

The events marking the twentieth anniversary of the publication
of Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism provide an excellent occasion
to reflect on the book’s impact on Middle East gender and wom-
en’s studies. In some ways Orientalism and feminist studies have,
in Marilyn Strathem’s memorable phrase, an awkward relation-
ship.’ Despite the fact that the book is attuned, perhaps surprising
for its time, to issues of gender and sexuality, its main focus lies
elsewhere: the way in which the Orient has been represented in
Europe through an imaginative geography that divides East and
West, confirming Western superiority and enabling, if not actually
constituting, European domination of those negatively portrayed
regions known as “East.”2 Orientalism was not meant to be a work
of feminist scholarship or theory. Yet it has engendered feminist
scholarship and debate in Middle East studies as well as far
beyond the field.

In this essay I consider four ways in which Said’s work has had
an impact. First, Orientalism opened up the possibility for others
to go further than Said had in exploring the gender and sexuality
of Orientalist discourse itself. Second, the book provided a strong
rationale for the burgeoning historical and anthropological re-
search that claimed to be going beyond stereotypes of the Muslim
or Middle Eastern woman and gender relations in general. Third,
the historical recovery of feminism in the Middle East, emerging
from this new abundance of research has, in turn, stimulated a
reexamination of that central issue in Orientalism: East/West poli-
tics. Finally, Said’s stance, that one cannot divorce political
engagement from scholarship, has presented Middle East gender
studies and debates about feminism with some especially knotty
problems, highlighting the peculiar ways that feminist critique is
situated in a global context.
Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (spring 2001). @ 2001 by Feminist Studies, Inc.

101

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102 Lila Abu-Lughod

CORRECTIVES

The first studies inspired by Orientalism augmented Said’s work
with a closer focus on gender. One might point to works of the
mid-1980s like Rana Kabbani’s Europe’s Myths of Orient that exam-
ined literature and Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem that turned

back the gaze of French photographic postcards of Algerian
women. After the initial wave of corrective projects, with books
like Billie Melman’s 1992 historical study, Women’s Orients:

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE

Colonial Fantasies: Toward a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. By
Meyda Yegenoglu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Deconstructing Images of “The Turkish Woman.” Edited by Zehra
Arat. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and Survival in
Cairo. By Homa Hoodfar. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1997.

In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and
Palestine. By Judith Tucker. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1998.

Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern
Analysis. By Haideh Moghissi. London and New York: Zed
Books, 1999.

Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran. By
Ziba Mir-Hosseini. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Engendering Middle East Studies: Edited by Deniz Kandiyoti. Syra-
cuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Childhood. By Fatima Mernissi;
Photographs by Ruth V. Ward. Reading, Mass.: Adison-Wesley,
1994.

English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918: Sexuality, Religion,
and Work; Judith Mabro’s 1991 edited collection, Veiled Half-Truths;
and a theoretically sophisticated analysis by a scholar not work-
ing specifically within Middle East studies, Lisa Lowe’s 1991
Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, scholars examined
the way that gender inflected Western discourses on the Orient.
These books asked specifically how European colonial women,

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Lila Abu-Lughod 103

mostly travelers, writers, and missionaries, represented “the
Orient.” A few essays in Zehra Arat’s 1998 published collection,
Deconstructing Images of “The Turkish Woman,” also take up this in-
triguing theme.
However, a 1998 book by Meyda Yegenoglu, a Turkish scholar
trained in the United States, entitled Colonial Fantasies: Toward a
Feminist Reading of Orientalism, takes to a new level the underex-
amined question of the gender and sexuality of Orientalism. Writ-
ten with sometimes numbing sophistication, the book explores the
neglected term in Said’s important distinction between “latent”
and “manifest” Orientalism. Yegenoglu suggests that “latent”
Orientalism, which refers to “the nature and extent of the sexual
implications of the unconscious site of Orientalism,” should be at
the core of our analysis. Drawing on psychoanalysis, especially in
its Lacanian and feminist versions, as well as a range of poststruc-
turalist theories on the constitution of the subject, she faults Said
for treating “images of woman and images of sexuality in orien-
talist discourse” simply as “a trope limited to the representation of
Oriental woman and of sexuality” (p. 25). In other words, she
challenges the way Said and others relegate gender and sexuality
to a subfield in their analysis of colonial discourse. Taking a more
radical position, she sets out to analyze instead “how representa-
tions of cultural and sexual difference are constitutive of each

other” (p. 1). This is exciting thinking, although much of the rest
of the book, which is an extended meditation on that powerful
and complex, but clich6d, symbol, the veil, as it figures in fan-
tasies of the Orient and the self, in Orientalist discourse, Middle
Eastern nationalisms, or Western feminism, does not quite make
the point.

THE “REAL” ORIENT

If works such as these are meant as correctives to Said’s relative

“neglect” of gender and sexuality, the bulk of work within Middle
East gender studies has seen Orientalism instead as providing a
strong rationale for careful and sympathetic research. Recogniz-
ing that stereotypes of the Middle Eastern woman have been cru-
cial to negative depictions of the region and its culture(s), many
scholars have sought through ethnographic or social historical re-
search to reveal the complex “realities” of gender and women in

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104 Lila Abu-Lughod

the Middle East or, through literary study, to explore how Middle
Eastern women represent themselves. In books like the 1965
Guests of the Sheik, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea pioneered the sym-
pathetic portrayal of women behind the veil. Further, Fernea’s
work to translate and publish Middle Eastern women’s writings,
in books beginning with Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak (with
Basima Berzigan), published around the same time as Orientalism,
has made available to new audiences the many voices of Middle
Eastern women.

Whereas in the 1960s and early 1970s, research and scholarly
writing on Middle Eastern women focused on questions of role
and status, the late 1970s marked an important shift, as Cynthia
Nelson pointed out in a review of the field. In recent decades, an
enormous body of scholarship (mostly in anthropology, sociology,
and history) has enhanced our knowledge of women and gender
relations in various parts of the Middle East. Two exemplary new
books allow us to reflect both on the achievements and limita-

tions of this sensitive, theoretically informed, post-Orientalist
empirical work.

As we have come to expect, the promotional copy justifying the
importance of Homa Hoodfar’s 1997 Between Marriage and the
Market: Politics and Survival in Cairo claims that “Hoodfar over-

turns stereotypes about women, Islam, and the Middle East and
North Africa in general.” And indeed, this extraordinarily rich
book shows the resourcefulness of lower-class women in Cairo.

Documenting with insight the strategies people use, whether in
work or marriage, to cope with the economic shifts entailed by
the structural adjustment policies the government has adopted,
the author offers perceptive analyses of the manipulations of gen-
der ideologies and religious beliefs. The anthropologist, of Iranian
origin, writes with wonderful honesty, clarity, and generosity
about the subjects she clearly came to like and respect.

Judith Tucker’s 1998 In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic
Law in Syria and Palestine is a detailed and lively study based on
jurists’ legal opinions and the Islamic court records of Damascus,
Nablus, and Jerusalem. Written by one of the pioneers of Middle
East women’s social history, the book subtly argues that although
Islamic legal doctrines were based on female/male differences,
judges opted in practice for broader and more flexible interpreta-
tions based on a desire for justice and for the stability of the com-

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Lila Abu-Lughod 105

munity. Arguing against an essential and rigid association of
Islamic law with patriarchy, Tucker concludes that it is only in
recent times, when law became codified and linked to the state,
that there developed “the enshrinement of gendered right and
privilege without the accompanying flexibility and judicial activ-
ism that had been the hallmark of Islamic justice” (p. 186).
It must be recalled, however, that Orientalism was not just about
representations or stereotypes of the Orient but about how these
were linked and integral to projects of domination that were on-
going. This raises an uncomfortable question about all our work
of the combating-stereotype sort-and I would include here not
just these books but many others that show how active, practical,
powerful, and resourceful (as opposed to passive, silent, and
oppressed) Middle Eastern women are or how complex gender
relations are, including my own ethnography of the Awlad ‘Ali,
Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. First, we have to ask
what Western liberal values we may be unreflectively validating
in proving that “Eastern” women have agency, too. Second, and
more importantly, we have to remind ourselves that although
negative images of women or gender relations in the region are
certainly to be deplored, offering positive images or “nondistort-
ed” images will not solve the basic problem posed by Said’s
analysis of Orientalism. The problem is about the production of
knowledge in and for the West. As Yegenoglu puts it, following
Said’s more Foucauldian point, the power of Orientalism comes
from its power to construct the very object it speaks about and
from its power to produce a regime of truth about the other and
thereby establish the identity and the power of the subject that
speaks about it” (pp. 90-91). As long as we are writing for the
West about “the other,” we are implicated in projects that establish
Western authority and cultural difference.

MIDDLE EASTERN FEMINISMS

This particular dilemma has underscored the often quite polar-
ized debates in the last decade among scholars who have turned
to the study of feminist organizations, journals, and more gener-
ally, the modernizing projects of remaking women and gender
relations. The richest historical work has been on Egypt, with
such studies as Leila Ahmed’s 1992 Women and Gender in Islam;

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106 Lila Abu-Lughod

Margot Badran’s 1995 Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the
Making of Modern Egypt; Beth Baron’s 1994 The Women’s Awakening
in Egypt; Marilyn Booth’s forthcoming May Her Likes Be Multiplied;
and Cynthia Nelson’s 1996 Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist. The
parallels for Turkey are described by contributors to Zehra Arat’s
Deconstructing Images of “The Turkish Woman” and by scholars
writing mostly in Turkish. For Iran, Parvin Paidar’s 1995 Women
and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran and Afsaneh
Najmabadi’s series of articles, soon to be part of a book, stand out.
One central question is whether local feminisms, especially those
of the early decades of this century, should be considered “indige-
nous” or imported, liberating or disciplinary. This debate has con-
sequences for current discussions about what kind of feminism is
appropriate for the Middle East.
In a collection of essays I recently brought together under the
title Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East
(1998), some scholars took up these questions, showing indeed
that colonial constructions of women as the locus of Eastern back-

wardness shaped anticolonial nationalisms and that feminist pro-
jects relied on Western discourses on women’s public roles, mar-
riage, domesticity, and scientific childrearing. But these essays
also explored the selectiveness with which Western ideas and
models were appropriated; the significant changes that were
introduced when European ideas were translated into local con-
texts; and the very ways that middle-class women themselves
were able to make positive use of what seemed like new systems
of discipline and regulation. Following one of the most produc-
tive lines of thought made possible by Orientalism, with the divi-
sion between East and West (and representation of each) to be
understood not as a natural geographic or cultural fact but as a
product of the political and historical encounter of imperialism,
we argued that condemning “feminism” as an inauthentic West-
ern import is just as inaccurate as celebrating it as a local or in-
digenous project. The first position assumes such a thing as cul-
tural purity; the second underestimates the formative power of
colonialism in the development of the region.

This takes me to the fourth way in which Said’s work has been-
or perhaps could be-crucial to Middle East gender studies: sort-
ing out the politics of contemporary Middle East feminisms. The
issues raised here are relevant for many other Third World femi-

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Lila Abu-Lughod 107

nisms. Said’s greatest intellectual contribution has been to reveal
the “worldliness” of all cultural production, even academic. I have
always understood the tensions in Orientalism between a human-
ism that looks beyond cultural difference and the Foucauldian
project of tracking the relationship between power and knowl-
edge as arising from Said’s need to grasp and expose what many
of us have experienced: the pain of identifying with a community
(the Palestinians) regarded with antipathy in the West and treated
brutally on the ground.
Feminist scholarship too is, by definition, an engaged scholar-
ship because it is premised on a concern about the condition of
women and usually involves a critique of the structures that
oppress them. It too is linked to personal experience. A good deal
of the most interesting feminist theorizing inside and outside of
Middle East studies has been about the importance of positionali-
ty (the social location from which one analyzes the world), related
to the insights of Orientalism. However, as the work of a number
of outspoken feminists from the Middle East reveals, and I will
just take some examples from the Arab world here, to launch
feminist critiques in a context of continuing Western hegemony is
to risk playing into the hands of Orientalist discourse. There are
analogies to be made with what happens when Edward Said goes
beyond criticizing Israel or the United States and instead de-
nounces authoritarian Arab regimes or deplores the lack of
democracy in Arafat’s Palestine National Authority.
Feminists from the Middle East, especially those who write in
English or French, are inevitably caught between the sometimes
incompatible projects of representing Middle East women as
complex agents (that is, not as passive victims of Islamic or “tradi-
tional” culture), mostly to the West, and advocating their rights at
home, which usually involves a critique of local patriarchal struc-
tures. The problem with the latter is that it can easily be appropri-
ated as native confirmation of already negative and simplistic
images, as when American missionary women at the turn of the
century cited Qasim Amin for evidence of the lovelessness, and
therefore inferiority, of marriage under Islam.4 Qasim Amin,
author of the controversial The Liberation of Women in 1899, is
often credited in the Middle East with being a champion of wom-
en’s emancipation.
Let me try to give some examples of the tricky situations in

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108 Lila Abu-Lughod

which Arab feminists find themselves. Moroccan sociologist
Fatima Mernissi is a good example because her sophistication, cre-
ativity, and political courage are stunning; and yet her work, when
it moves between her home in the Arab world and the Western

context in which it is so well received, can be troubling. Her 1994
memoir of coming of age is called Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a
Harem Girlhood. Instead of refusing to reproduce the old Orientalist
stereotype of women in harems, she brings to life the world of
women and patriarchal authority in the enclosed household of her
wealthy Fez family. Conjuring up a rich emotional world and cap-
turing exquisitely family dynamics and women’s experiences, she
nevertheless anchors the memoir in her “innocent” interrogation of
the meaning of boundaries, the invisible rules of space, and sexual
difference. In the end, despite her celebration of women’s tradi-
tional powers of beauty, she unambivalently pits her mother’s
strong wish for modernity-for a little girl dressed in Western
clothes who will attend school, learn French, and become liberat-
ed-against all the restricting forces of tradition and the harem.
Tradition and Modernity. Harems and Freedom. Veiling and
Unveiling. These are the familiar terms by which the East has long
been apprehended (and devalued) and the West has constructed
itself as superior. These are some of what Said calls the dogmas of
Orientalism, and they are the very terms that feminist scholars like
Lata Mani, in her belatedly published book on colonial India,
Contentious Traditions, have brilliantly called into question.

For many feminists from the region, not just “tradition” but
Islamism is also seen as a threat to women. Again, one has to ask
what the class politics and ideological assumptions of a local op-
position to this might be and what views of the incompatibility of
Islam with women’s rights such opposition unwittingly affirms.
Can one both recognize that organizations such as Women against
Fundamentalism and Women Living under Islamic Laws are
working against some serious abuses of women and yet be open
to the many women activists working from within the Islamic tra-
dition to bring out new interpretations of religious texts or the
many nonelite women searching for an alternative modernity
that is not secular? Feminists in the context of the Islamic Repub-
lic of Iran, in many ways like Islamic modernists earlier in the
century and feminist Islamist contemporaries in Egypt, Jordan,
and Turkey, are themselves arguing for a more dynamic and his-

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Lila Abu-Lughod 109

torically sensitive vision of what Islam is or could be for women.
They are publishing journals and magazines in Persian, Arabic,
and Turkish-work that is not directed to the West and is largely
unknown here except through scattered studies published in En-
glish, including the work of Afsaneh Najmabadi (“Feminisms in
an Islamic Republic,” in Yvonne Haddad and John Esposito’s 1998
Islam, Gender, and Social Change), Nilufer Gole (The Forbidden
Modern: Civilization and Veiling, 1996), and Aynur Ilyasoglu
(“Islamist Women in Turkey: Their Identity and Self-Image,” in
Arat’s Deconstructing Images of “The Turkish Woman”). Some of
their voices are recorded by Elizabeth Femea in her wide-ranging
exploration, In Search of Islamic Feminism: One Woman’s Global
Journey, a 1998 book that never quite clarifies what “Islamic femi-
nism” might mean.

In her 1997 address to the Middle East Women’s Studies Asso-

ciation at the Middle East Studies Association annual meetings,
the Cairo-based anthropologist Soraya Altorki spoke with great
eloquence about the problems confronted by women who work
in three Arab women’s groups in Egypt-the Women and Memory
Forum, the New Woman, and Nour-devoted to “feminist” re-
search and advocacy.” Her remarks on these groups could be par-
alleled by discussion of other groups, such as the Women’s
Studies Program at Birzeit University in Palestine, where femi-
nists are working within national contexts for the study and ad-
vocacy of women, not only teaching, running for office, and orga-
nizing women’s centers but also publishing studies that might
shape policymaking by the national governing authorities.6 They
are all put on the defensive by some activities of feminists abroad
and by the Western media’s sensationalism when presenting
Islam and women. They must also reckon with international
funding agencies with their own priorities regarding women’s
issues, priorities that often differ from those working in what
Altorki calls a “nationalist context.” As a number of the partici-
pants in the first Arab regional women’s/gender studies work-
shop noted (proceedings of which were published in a volume
edited by Cynthia Nelson and Soraya Altorki for Cairo Papers in
Social Science), their projects and stances are inevitably read, and
undertaken, in relation to these outside constructions and inter-
ventions that they admit are linked, in Altorki’s words, to “the
legacy of colonial rule and present hegemony.”

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110 Lila Abu-Lughod

The dilemmas are sharp because of this global context. As the
Women and Memory Forum, a group in Egypt, puts it, “identify-
ing exclusively with the west means rejecting the Arab heritage,
while rejecting the west and cleaving to ‘tradition’ means accept-
ing patriarchal structures of subordination and inferiorization.”8
The solution is to refuse the tradition/Western modernity divide,
but how sophisticated do you have to be to manage this?
One strategy seems to be to publish in regional languages as
well as English or French, and to initiate local projects, both acad-
emic and activist. The recently established Women and Memory
Forum in Egypt holds conferences, publishes a newsletter called
Letters from Memory (as of the January 1999 issue, in both English
and Arabic), and has published a few books in Arabic. The edi-
tors creatively rewrite Arab folktales from “a gender-sensitive
perspective,” recover the writings and activities of forgotten
women from the past (whether feminists like Malak Hifni Nassef
or an eighteenth-century aristocrat who forced the invading
French to respect her while standing up for the rights of others),
and rewrite Arab history from a gendered perspective.’
Nour, a research and publishing house for work on and by
Arab women, has commissioned and published books, including
some translations; organized the first Arab women’s book fair;
and regularly publishes a book review journal by the name Nour.
The journal, now in its fourteenth issue (with recent special issues
devoted to Palestinian and Lebanese women), cover a wide range
of books, some in English but most in Arabic, in the social sci-
ences and literature. These organizations are run by academic or
professional women and, like the Women’s Studies Programs at
universities in Palestine and Yemen, have been partially support-
ed by European (especially Dutch) funds, opening them up to
occasional suspicion.
The work of the New Woman Research Center in Egypt is per-
haps more controversial, however, because it concentrates on the
problem of violence against women.10 The center’s field research
has shown how widespread the problems are; but one can also
imagine what uses publicity about this issue might be put to in
the wider world, a world already primed to think of the Middle
East as a place of violence against women, especially because of
the highly publicized issue of female circumcision. And what
accusations will be leveled against these feminists by government
authorities and other defenders of Egypt’s image?

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Lila Abu-Lughod 111

The problems faced by feminists in various countries of the
Middle East vary because such groups work in such different
political contexts, both internally and vis-a-vis the West. For
example, feminists in Turkey have similarly taken up the question
of violence against women, opening the Purple Roof Women’s
Shelter in Istanbul, and a similar one in Ankara, along with taking
on less controversial projects such as founding the Women’s
Library and Information Center. Each national context is config-
ured differently. Turkish feminists are subject to less criticism in
the name of Turkey’s image abroad. Instead they must confront
not just the growing presence of Islamists (whom they, as secular-
ists, find threatening) but also the challenge they represent to the
state which, based on Kemalist ideology and reforms, sees itself
as having solved “the woman question” long ago. In Iran under
the Islamic Republic, feminism in its various guises and ex-
pressed through various media, including a number of women’s
journals, faces yet other alignments and minefields.

Some feminist scholars in the field have worried that the influ-

ence of Said’s Orientalism, and the broader approaches known var-
iously as postcolonial and postmodern, have led us away from
criticism of local institutions and political forces. Haideh Moghissi,
a Canadian-based Iranian feminist scholar, goes so far as to ac-
cuse Middle East intellectuals of undertaking “a costly intellectual
experiment” when they are so anxious to be anti-Orientalist that
they develop an “uncritical fascination with Western postmod-
ernism.” In her 1999 Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The

Limits of Postmodern Analysis, she asserts that this inclines them to
celebrate difference and local voices. She fears that in recognizing
and respecting what they call Islamic feminisms in Iran, they “in-
advertently lend support to the most effectively cloaked repres-
sive movement in the region: Islamic fundamentalism” (p. 63).
Her targets are other European-based Iranian feminist scholars
such as Haleh Afshar (Islam and Feminisms: An Iranian Case Study,
1998) and Afsaneh Najmabadi, who no longer see Islamic femi-
nism as an oxymoron, and even Ziba Mir-Hosseini, whose de-
tailed 1999 study of the internal religio-legal debates about gen-
der and women in the Islamic Republic in the 1990s (Islam and
Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran) makes a case for
a lively range of opinion among clerics and laypeople and whose
argument is that the processes of social change set in motion by

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112 Lila Abu-Lughod

the Islamic Revolution in 1979 have “nurtured not only a new
school of jurisprudence, which is slowly trying to respond to so-
cial realities, but also a new gender consciousness” (p. 179).
Deniz Kandiyoti, whose earlier groundbreaking Women, Islam,
and the State had brought to the fore issues of nationalism and
state policy, moving discussion away from essentialist cultural
arguments about “women and Islam,” also worries about the im-
pact of Said’s Orientalism. In a sweeping review in the introduc-
tion to her recent edited volume, Engendering Middle East Studies,
she argues that the field of Middle East gender studies has been
negatively affected by the arguments of Orientalism in three ways:
social analysis has been devalued in favor of analysis of represen-
tations; binary thinking about East and West has trained us to
focus too much on the West and not enough on the internal het-
erogeneity of Middle Eastern societies; and, finally, it has also
deflected attention away from “local institutions and cultural
processes that are implicated in the production of gender hierar-
chies and in forms of subordination based on gender” (p. 18).
Kandiyoti argues for the necessity of internal critique of gendered
power in Middle Eastern societies.
Said, I believe, would not disagree. I even think he offers
Middle East feminists and feminist scholars a model for the kinds

of entangled political engagements they inevitably face. He has
braved accusations and condemnations coming from many sides
as he both criticizes the various forms and instruments of Western

domination and the failures of Middle Eastern societies and politi-
cal systems. What enables him to steer a clear course is the in-
tegrity of his position. He is a critic who is consistent in his advo-
cacy of justice on a global scale, and of democratic principles,
wherever. As feminists we would do well to be similarly consis-
tent, aware of the complex ground we tread and criticizing the
multiple forms of injustice we find.

NOTES

An essay like this is perhaps more of a collective project than most. I am grateful to all
those discussed in the essay, as well as all those working in Middle East gender studies,
for giving me so much to think about. Edward Said provided the inspiration, of course,
because an early version of the essay was presented in the president’s plenary session
on “Edward Said’s Orientalism: Twenty Years Later” at the 1998 Middle East Studies

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Lila Abu-Lughod 113

Association Meetings in Chicago. I am grateful to Philip Khouri for inviting me to par-
ticipate. Colleagues and friends in Cairo, such as Cynthia Nelson, Soraya Altorki, Huda
Lutfi, and Hoda Elsadda, were generous with work and invitations to participate in dis-
cussions of gender studies. To Rema Hammami I am grateful for material from Birzeit
University, Palestine. I owe debts to Deniz Kandiyoti, Ayse Parla, and Berna Yazici for
teaching me about feminism in Turkey, to Afsaneh Najmabadi for helping me think
about Iran, and to Chris Walley for discussions that sharpened my awareness of the
tricky stances feminists must take. Finally, Tim Mitchell and the Feminist Studies editors
gave this essay fine critical readings and made enormously helpful suggestions for revi-
sions.

1. Marilyn Strathern, “An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and
Anthropology,” Signs 12 (winter 1987): 276-93.
2. Some have charged that Said had relatively little to say about women and gender in
his book, although he was to correct for this slightly in his 1985 article, “Orientalism
Reconsidered,” Race and Class 27, no. 2 (1985): 1-15, and in his Culture and Imperialism
(New York: Knopf, 1993). It must be recalled that Orientalism was published as feminist
scholarship was beginning to take off in the United States and at just the same moment
that the first major readers on women in the Middle East came out: Lois Beck and Nikki
Keddie, eds., Women in the Muslim World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978),
and Elizabeth Fernea and Basima Bezirgan’s Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977).
3. Cynthia Nelson, “Old Wine in New Bottles: Reflections and Projections Concerning
Research on ‘Women in Middle Eastern Studies,’ ” in The Contemporary Study of the Arab
World, ed. Earl Sullivan and Jacqueline Ismael (Edmonton, Alberta: Alberta University
Press, 1991), 127-52.
4. I discuss this in “The Marriage of Islamism and Feminism in Egypt: Selective
Repudiation as a Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics,” in my Remaking Women:
Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998),
243-69.

5. Soraya Altorki, “Feminist Groups in Contemporary Egypt,” The Review of the
Association for Middle East Women’s Studies 7, no. 4 (1998): 16.
6. Lisa Taraki, Rita Giacaman, Penny Johnson, and Rema Hammami, Palestinian Women:
A Status Report (Birzeit, Palestine: Women’s Studies Program, Birzeit University, 1997).
7. Altorki, 16.
8. Quoted in Altorki, 16.
9. See Hoda Elsadda, Somaya Ramadan, and Amina Abu-Bakr, eds., Women’s Time and
Alternative Memory (Zaman al-nisa’ w al-dhakira al-badila) (Cairo: Women and Memory
Forum, 1998).
10. The New Woman Research and Study Center has many projects besides this one on
violence against women. For example, they commissioned and published, in Arabic and
English, a comparative study, The Feminist Movement in the Arab World: Intervention and
Studies from Four Countries (Cairo: Dar El-Mostaqbal Al Arabi, 1996).

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• Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

Feminist Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 1-250
Front Matter [pp. 1-2]
Preface [pp. 3-8]
Rethinking Radicalism
Call Me Qingnian but Not Funü: A Maoist Youth in Retrospect [pp. 9-34]
Poetry
A Praise for Dorothy Parker [p. 35]
The Crisis [p. 36]
Middle Eastern Women
Discourses on Women’s Biographies and Cultural Identity: Twentieth-Century Representations of the Life of ‘A’isha Bint Abi Bakr [pp. 37-64]
“Feminist Studies” Award Winner
The “Honor” of the State: Virginity Examinations in Turkey [pp. 65-88]
Middle Eastern Women
Women in Iran: Notes on Film and from the Field [pp. 89-100]
Orientalism and Feminism
Review: “Orientalism” and Middle East Feminist Studies [pp. 101-113]
Middle Eastern Women
Art Essay [pp. 114-124]
Orientalism and Feminism
Unveiling Scheherazade: Feminist Orientalism in the International Alliance of Women, 1911-1950 [pp. 125-157]
Poetry
Rose [p. 158]
Rethinking Radicalism
Review Essay
Review: Memoirs of the Feminist Film Movement [pp. 159-166]
Shooting Solanas: Radical Feminist History and the Technology of Failure [pp. 167-189]
Radical Feminism, Lesbian Separatism, and Queer Theory [pp. 190-222]
Poetry
Sugar River [p. 223]
In the Garden with My Daughter [p. 224]
Rethinking Radicalism
Re-Visioning the Women’s Liberation Movement’s Narrative: Early Second Wave African American Feminists [pp. 225-245]
Notes and Letters [pp. 249-250]
Back Matter [pp. 246-248]