From a Smear Campaign to the Kuwaiti Parliament

This chapter is a translated interview with Aseel Alawadhi, a former parliamentary member and a philosophy professor at Kuwait University, who was accused of opposing Islam and the veil during her 2009 race for the Kuwaiti Parliament. In this interview, Alawadhi defends her philosophical beliefs and asserts the focus of her political campaign on women’s representation in Kuwaiti politics.

Two Nonviolence Campaigns Initiated by Women in Syria

“Stop the Killing” and “Brides of Peace” are two campaigns initiated by Syrian women to revitalize nonviolent resistance in Syria, in response to the militarization within the Syrian revolution and the rise of Islamist extremist militias. In this chapter, Mohja Kahf, professor at the University of Arkansas, seeks to understand how these campaigns put women back at the forefront of civil disobedience, stumped the regime, and rallied the values of the original protest movement of Syria.

“Women Are Complete, Not Complements”

In this chapter, Mounira M. Charrad and Amina Zarrugh discuss women’s reactions to a draft of a controversial article in the new Tunisian Constitution following the “Jasmine Revolution” and the fall of the oppressive regime in 2011. Specifically, they consider the debates between Islamists and secularists about the inclusion of the term “complementary” to refer to women in the new constitution. Highlighting the significance of terminology, they show how the draft ignited public protests under the leadership of advocates for women’s rights, which in turn led to the promulgation of one of the most liberal constitutions in the Arab word in regard to gender.

Mapping the Egyptian Women’s Anti–Sexual Harassment Campaigns

In this chapter, Theresa Hunt explores the trajectory of the anti–sexual harassment campaigns in Egypt as one example of women’s prerevolution and antiregime protest. She examines the extensive campaigns of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, El Nadim Center for the Management and Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, and the new, technology-fueled project HarassMap. By strategically gaining national and even international attention, these campaigns engaged in critique of the state’s failure to address the alarming level of sexual harassment on Cairo’s streets and pressured the state to develop appropriate policy. As these organizations combined consciousness raising with subversion of state obstacles and mobilization of the public, their work reflects aspects of the 2011 revolution that mainstream media narratives find compelling but rarely attribute to women’s activism.

Sensing Queer Activism in Beirut

From 2007 to 2014, Meem was an organized group of more than four hundred lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans* women and trans* people in Lebanon. Based on an ethnography of/with the Meem community, this article explores Meem’s activism as an embodiment of a MENA-situated and nonfixed queerness that disrupts the model of an LGBT rights activism framed through the binary of Western “Gay International” polarized against an authentic Arab identity. In this chapter, Nisrine Chaer examines protest soundscapes, or the auditory sensations in embodied encounters within the spaces of the protests, that have emerged in the wake of the garbage crisis in Lebanon and in a feminist march, “Take Back the Night.” She argues that by looking at the sensual dimensions of activism in space, the embodied practices of protesting, we expand our understanding of politics beyond the discursive realm, and hence capture the complex and intersectional nature of Meem’s political practice that resists both imperialist and local oppressions.

Writing Lebanese Feminist History

In this chapter, Nicole Khoury analyzes the editorials in one of Lebanon’s most successful feminist journals, Al-Raida. Through examining the first decade of Rose Ghurayyib’s editorials, she recovers a part of Lebanese feminist history that has been largely ignored. The editorials illustrate that arguments for gender equality in the midseventies were grounded in liberal feminist theory. Written during the violent civil war, and the period of foreign influences, the editorials mark a shift in the focus of the Lebanese feminist movement to postcolonial feminist theory, a shift that changed the way the movement articulated its goals. While the editorials first addressed an English-speaking elite Lebanese audience, they later began to focus on a collective activism that defined women’s needs and goals within the larger national and international context, marking an important shift in Lebanese feminist history.

“The Factory Of The Revolution”

Giving a personal voice to the role of women in the Syrian revolution, Layla Saleh places the account of one Syrian woman, Um Ibrahim, exiled in the second year of the uprising, in the larger context of women’s participation in the revolutionary popular mobilization, after the Assad regime’s “women’s rights” proved unsatisfactory and insufficient. The narrative culminates in Um Ibrahim’s own participation in the protests in Damascus before the full-fledged war took hold. Um Ibrahim recounts how women took on a central role in the Syrian revolution, hiding protesters, cooking, delivering food and weapons, and serving in the political and armed opposition. However, they have been victimized by the war, their activist role has been diminished, and their security and physical well-being have become precarious as the country is bloodily entrenched in civil and proxy warfare.

Long before the Arab Spring

The Arab Women Solidarity Association United (AWSA United) emerged as an outlet for Arab women in the diaspora to express solidarity and support for women in the Arab world. It pioneered transnational Arab women’s groups that connected Arab women in all six continents. In this chapter, Rita Stephan explores the impact of AWSA United on Arab women activists who, between 1999 and 2011, used cyberfeminism to share their ideological and political marginalization, and how AWSA United helped them foster their collective identity, strengthen their connectivity, and increase their activism.

A Patriotic Christian Woman in the Syrian Parliament

During the 128th Inter-Parliamentary Union Assembly (March 22–27, 2013) in Ecuador, parliamentarians from around the world stressed the need to include women in politics. Christian Syrian parliamentarian Maria Saadeh contributed to the discussion by explaining her motives to enter politics and her commitment to political reforms. In her remarks, she explains her decision to run for Parliament as stemming from belief in defending her rights and the right of Syria’s people to have freedom of expression and determine their destiny through the Syrian Parliament, which she considers the only legitimate platform to advocate for reform. She claims that legitimacy cannot be won through war, killing innocent people, or destroying the state’s infrastructure under the pretext of changing the regime or protecting civilians.

Barefoot Feminist Classes

This chapter is told through the narrative voice of the late Rula Quawas, a professor of literature and feminist theory at the University of Jordan. She discusses how her teaching experience led her to see education as a weapon within discourses of social justice and cultural transformation. The chapter includes poems written by her students expressing their feminism as Muslim women resisting the patriarchal structures of Jordanian society.