Abstract
This chapter is a reflection on the intersections between feminism, Islam, and revolution over time into the open-ended present. It argues that a revolution in Egypt capable of realizing a truly democratic state and society must include a full-fledged feminist revolution in order to dismantle patriarchal structures and practices inimical to the creation of an egalitarian state and society. The chapter argues that integral to this feminist revolution—and its success in leading to a democratic future for Egypt—is moving from a patriarchal to an egalitarian understanding and practice of Islam. It points to the longue durée of feminism and revolution—feminism as public activism was born and reborn in revolution—and of religious unity—defiantly asserted and reasserted—as part of revolutionary practice in Egypt.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter is based on historical research and is informed by continuing on-the-ground interactions, interviews, and conversations. It also draws upon my historical research, popular and scholarly literature, print and electronic press, and social media. Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995; Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2009; and “Women Marching for Revolution in Egypt: A Participatory Journal,” in Mounira Charrad and Rita Stevens, eds.
- 2.
Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism. London: Zed Books, 2012, pp. 30, 63–4, 238–41, and 245.
- 3.
See Dabashi, p. 238 and 241.
- 4.
I discuss this in “Egypt and the Art of Revolution: Brushes with Women,” in Judith F. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, eds. Women of the Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art, and Society. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Institute of Women and Art, 2012, pp. 14–33.
- 5.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution. London: Penguin, 1990.
- 6.
Creative disobedience is related to, but slightly different from, the term “rejection” that miriam cooke and I used in our analytical typology of Arab women’s feminist writings in Margot Badran and miriam cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, new expanded ed. 2004.
- 7.
On nashiza see Kecia Ali, “Religious Practices: Obedience and Disobedience in Religious Discourses” in Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Cultures, ed., Suad Joseph. Leiden: Brill, 2007. vol. 5, pp. 309–13.
- 8.
In the past, the disobedient woman who left the marital home without permission could be forcefully returned by a legal convention known as bait al-ta’ (literally, “house of obedience”). This law—backed by the received Islamic notion of wifely obedience, although formally modeled after a Napoleonic legal convention—was abolished in the 1960s. On obedience in the Egyptian Muslim Personal Law and feminist and human rights activism, see Marwa Sharafeldin, “Islamic Law Meets Human Rights: Reformulating qiwama and wilaya for Personal Status Law Reform in Egypt” in Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger, eds., Men in Charge?: Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition. London: Oneworld Publications, 2015, pp. 163–196, esp. pp. 171–74.
- 9.
On protection and feminism in Egypt, see Lucia Sorbera, “Challenges of thinking feminism and revolution between 2011 and 2014,” Postcolonial Studies, 2014 vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 63–75.
- 10.
Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, pp. 79–80.
- 11.
See Margot Badran, “Dual Liberation: Feminism and Nationalism in Egypt from the 1870s to 1925.” Feminist Issues. Spring 1988, pp. 15–24.
- 12.
On the creation of the Egyptian Feminist Union see Chap. 5 in “The House of the Woman,” Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, pp. 91–110.
- 13.
See Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation.
- 14.
See Margot Badran, “Introduction,” Feminism in Islam, pp. 1–14.
- 15.
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Palo Alto CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
- 16.
See Egyptian scholar and Islamic feminist Omaima Abou-Bakr’s discussion of Islamic modernist Shaikh Muhammad ‘Abduh, “The Interpretive Legacy of Qiwamah as an Exegetical Construct,” in Mir-Hosseini, eta al, Men in Charge?, pp. 44–64, esp. pp. 54–55.
- 17.
See Margot Badran, “Gendering the Secular and the Religious in Modern Egypt: Woman, Family, and Nation” in Linell Cady and Tracy Fessenden, eds. Gendering the Divide: Religion, the Secular and the Politics of Sexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, pp. 103–120, and Feminists, Islam, and Nation.
- 18.
In many interviews and conversations about the years Saiza Nabarawi repeated the story of how she and the union’s president Huda Sha’rawi took off their face veils at the Cairo Railway Station. She also told me many times over the story of how she was required to veil her face after returning to Egypt from Paris, where she had been raised until her early teens, of the trauma this caused her, and how Huda Sha’rawi urged her to put on the face veil, promising that they would remove it later. These are not narratives of colonialist pressures to unveil.
- 19.
See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
- 20.
When teacher and administrator Nabawiyya Musa was employed in the colonial state school system, she was required to wear the face veil. Only when she left for a school for girls created by the nationalists was she able to remove her face veil, which she did in 1909. Badran, Chap. 4, “Expressing Feminism and Nationalism in Autobiography: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Educator,” Feminism in Islam, pp. 90–115.
- 21.
Mona Anis, “Return of the Spirit,” al-Ahram Weekly, 10–16 Feb. 2011. Young director and script writer Laila Soliman’s play “Whims of Freedom,” performed by two women actors at the Makan cultural center in Cairo on June 21 and 22, 2014, weaves back and forth between the 1919 and 2011 revolutions.
- 22.
On disobedience and the family see: Mona Anis, “Return of the Spirit”; Elliot Colla, “Reading, Riting, Revolution,” book review of Mona Prince, Revolution Is My Name. n.p. 2012, Jadaliyya, posted July 3, 2013, downloaded July 4, 2013, in which he remarks that “revolution entails rebelling against your family as much as the state”; Lucia Sorbera, “Challenges of thinking feminism and revolution in Egypt between 2011 and 2014,” in Postcolonial Studies, 2014, vol. 17, no. 63–75, for a young woman’s personal testimony of family confrontation; and Margot Badran, “Theorizing Oral History as Autobiography: A Look at the Narrative of a Woman Revolutionary in Egypt,” Journal of Women’s History, Summer 2013, which contains personal testimony of resisting a mother’s admonition about taking part in demonstrations.
- 23.
Ahdaf Soueif, My Country, Our Revolution. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012. See Mona Prince, Revolution Is My Name. Cairo: 2012 (privately published) for an account of her experience during the 18 days.
- 24.
Sherene Sieikaly, “The Meaning of Revolution: On Samira Ibrahim,” Jadaliyya, Jan. 28, 2013, downloaded July 10, 2015.
- 25.
See Sherine Hafez, “Bodies that Protest: The Girl in the Blue Bra, Sexuality and State Violence in Revolutionary Egypt.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Vol. 40:1, Autumn, 2014.
- 26.
I participated in both of these marches and wrote about them in my journal. For an extract from the journal see Margot Badran, “Women Marching for Revolution in Egypt: A Participatory Journal.”
- 27.
Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. New York: Perseus Books, 1994.
- 28.
I am picking this up in interviews with anti-tahharush activists. The number and range of groups is vast. See Angie Abdelmonem, “Reconceptualizing Sexual Harassment in Egypt: A Longitudinal Assessment of el-Taharrush el-Ginsy in Online Forums and Anti-sexual Harassment Activism,” Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, vol. 1. No. 1, summer 2015 pp. 24–47. These groups operate in similar and different ways. It is only among some that an incipient feminism can be detected; these engage in trying to ascertain the causes of molestation from boys and young men they detain and among whom they try to inculcate another way of thinking that resonates with certain feminist principles. For a recent overview and call for an intersectional movement see Mariam Kirollos, “Sexual Violence in Egypt: Myths and Realities,” Jadaliyya, July 16, 2013, downloaded July 20, 2015.
- 29.
See Mariz Tadros, “Mutilating bodies: the Muslim Brotherhood’s gift to Egyptian women,” Open Democracy, vol. 1, May 24, 2012; and Margot Badran, “Keeping FGM on the run? Between Resolution and Constitution.” Ahram Online Jan. 10, 2013. For a historian’s view on anti-FGM activism see Badran, Feminism in Islam, Chap. 7, Body Politic/s: Women, Power, and Sexuality in Egypt, pp. 168–91.
- 30.
See Margot Badran, “Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood: A project of patriarchal extremism.” Ahram Online. Mar. 28, 2013.
- 31.
See Sherine Hafez, An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women’s Islamic Movements . New York University Press, 2011.
- 32.
These observations are based on considerable interaction I have had with young revolutionaries, both women and men, since the early days of the uprisings. I was invited by a group of youth (around 30 were in attendance) to talk about Islamic feminism in the early spring of 2011. They were interested and open, but how Islamic feminism could be a force for change they found a conundrum.
- 33.
On the initial emergence of Islamic feminism in the 1990s see Badran, Chap. 9, “Towards Islamic Feminisms: A look at the Middle East,” in Badran, Feminism in Islam, pp. 215–241. Orig. pub. Asma Afsarrudin, ed., Hermeneutics and Honor in Islamicate Societies. Harvard Monograph Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
- 34.
For her most recent work see “The Interpretive Legacy of Qiwamah as an Exegetical Construct in Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki al-Sharmani and Jana Rumminger (eds.), Men in Charge? Rethinking Autorithy in Muslim Legal Tradition, London, Oneworld, 2015, p. 44–64.”
- 35.
The proceedings have been published; see Omaima Abou-Bakr, ed., Feminist and Islamic Perspectives: New Horizons of Knowledge and Reform. Cairo: Women and Memory Forum, 2013.
- 36.
For an exploration of the incipient movement of Islamic feminism in Egypt, see Sawsan Al-Sharif, Al-Haraka Al-Nasawiyya Al-Islamiyya fi Misr (The Islamic Feminist Movement in Egypt). Cairo: Rawafid Publishing, 2015. See also Mulki Al-Sharmani, “Islamic Feminism: Transnational and national reflections,” Approaching Religion, vol. 4, no. 2, Dec. 2014, pp. 83–94; Hoda Al-Saadi, “Islamic Feminism in Egypt between Acceptance and Refusal,” in Jean Said Maksisi, Rafif Reda Saydawy, and Noha Bayoumy, Arab Feminism: A Critical Perspective. Beirut: Center for Arab Unity Studies and the Lebanese Association of Women Researchers (al-Bahithat), 2012, pp. 417–28; and Margherita Picchi, “Egypt in transition: what future for Islamic feminism” in Anna Maria Di Tolla and Ersilia Francesca, eds., special issue on North Africa, Transition and Emerging Actors, Berber Movements, Gender Mobility and Social Activism Studi Maghrebini, 2016.
- 37.
For an excellent treatment of this campaign by a participant who is also a scholar specializing in Islamic-based law and women’s rights, see Marwa Sharafeldin, “Islamic Law Meets Human Rights: Reformulating Qiwamah and Wilayah for Personal Status Law Reform Advocacy,” pp. 163–196 in Mir-Hosseini et al, Men in Charge? On efforts of pioneering feminists in Egypt early last century, see Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, pp. 124–35.
- 38.
Hani Shukrallah, “Are Egyptians now less ‘Islamic’?” Ahram Online. May 14, 2015. On the new unveiling see Koert Debeuf, “Egypt’s Quiet Social Revolution.” Democracy Lab. Cairo, June 18, 2015.
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Badran, M. (2016). Creative Disobedience: Feminism, Islam, and Revolution in Egypt. In: Sadiqi, F. (eds) Women’s Movements in Post-“Arab Spring” North Africa. Comparative Feminist Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50675-7_4
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