Syracuse University Press

Militant Women of a Fragile Nation

mandy — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

This account of women’s central role in the industrial history of Lebanon adds another valuable title to Syracuse’s outstanding series of books on Middle Eastern history and culture, “Beyond Dominant Paradigms.” In stark contrast to images of women as helpless victims that pervade much of the depiction of the region consumed by the Western press, Malek Abisaab’s Militant Women of a Fragile Nation shows women’s transforming role in colonial and postcolonial industrialization, in the labor struggles and resistance to colonial rule, in the work of trade unions and the Arab Feminist Union, and in the modern Lebanese economy.

From the “silk economy” at the center of industrialization in the nineteenth century through the rise and dominance of the tobacco industry, women have largely negotiated and renegotiated their own position in industry. The author rejects the subaltern view of these women and their identity within the social and economic history of Lebanon: through active participation and protest, women have resisted exclusion from power and have contributed to a culture of changing alliances and class and gendered identities that are constantly in play. Through various power structures and economic models, women demonstrated, in Abisaab’s view, that “patriarchy cannot endure for long or unchangingly,” and that the women he studies are not “passive victims of capitalism” but strategically engaged in a resistance that has played a major role in shaping the modern economy.

Militant Women of a Fragile Nation begins with an account of the region known as Mount Lebanon in the later nineteenth century, and women’s involvement in silk production. As women moved into the workplace, they struggled against patriarchal control of their sexuality and an exploitative wage system that paid them half as much as men—whose work was gendered as “skilled” labor. As the silk economy declined, women dominated the “unskilled” part of the workforce in tobacco—and again earned subsistence wages while exposed to toxic chemicals in the factories.

During the period of French colonial rule of Syria-Lebanon, the French imposed the Régie, a monopolistic cartel governing tobacco production. It was during this time that women had a definable target for social action and struggled for improved conditions and resistance to colonial control. In the early years of the twentieth century, the Syrian-Lebanese “New Woman” emerged as a cultural phenomenon, and by the 1930s the Arab Feminist Union was organized to campaign against the Régie.

While there are differences in attitudes among women of different classes, the data the author accumulates shows a consistently remarkable level of women’s participation in the work force over the past 130 years. While women of the elite classes actively resisted colonial dominance, they tended to denigrate women’s participation in paid labor. “Factory women,” on the other hand, identified profoundly with their gender roles in the work place, and the factory became a site for active participation and reconsideration of their roles and identities. For both groups, women’s radicalism has had a shaping role in the economic history of the region.

Written by: Rick Taylor, September 8th 2010

Masculine Identity in the Fiction of the Arab East Since 1967

admin — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Samira Aghacy

Syracuse University Press

It is widely acknowledged that limited gender constructs and highly patriarchal social structures, the kind that are prevalent in the Middle East, are often harmful to women. Across the spectrum of thought and knowledge—from columnists like New York Times' Nicholas Kristoff to 2010 Time 100’s Reem Al Numery—we have all become familiar with how harmful the effects of male-centric, male-dominant societies can be to women.

The questions then become: How do these constructs effect men? How does the amplification of the importance of men as a group effect men as individuals? Are the gender constructs and societal norms that are so often harmful to women exclusively beneficial to men, or does some harm come to men as well?

In Masculine Identity in the Fiction of the Arab East Since 1967, Samira Aghacy attempts to answer these questions. While her analysis focuses on fiction, there is no denying that the truth is often found in what has been imagined. The stories constructed simplify the present being experienced, often making it less personal and more manageable. By surveying the fiction written in what she calls the "Arab East" (Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq) after the various wars of 1967 (the Six-Day War with Israel, the state breakdown in Lebanon, etc.) caused a nadir in the region, Aghacy brings to the fore men’s vision of their constructs.

Aghacy emphasizes her identification with a view of the world that sees masculinity as operating independently of men, at times. Thus, men can be victims of masculine societal norms. In this light, the archetypes Aghacy finds in the literature are both abusers and abused, those who inflict and enforce societal norms of masculinity unto others and those who are the Others. The writings she examined also use male stereotypes to make judgments about their societies. According to Aghacy, in a story a dysfunctional male may represent a dysfunctional state, an oppressive male can represent an oppressive state, etc.

Viewing the world through a feminist lens, it is easy to forget the effect of repressive structures on men. Masculinity, which so often limits women, can also limit men, and often profoundly so. While the experience is in no way comparable, patriarchal structures are torturous in a distinct way for all members of the patriarchy.

Written by: Elisheva Zakheim, May 19th 2010

Family, Gender, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia

admin — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Kenneth M. Cuno, Manisha Desai

Syracuse University Press

Family, Gender, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia makes available twelve essays that were presented, in earlier forms, at the 2004 symposium of the same title, which took place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The essays, edited by Kenneth M. Cuno and Manisha Desai, include analysis of eleven nation-states from Morocco to Bangladesh. With thirty-one pages of works cited, this is a valuable reference on an increasingly critical topic. Major themes include the impact of colonialism and postcolonial struggles with national identity; religious politics, and in particular religion’s impact on family law; and international standards, as outlined in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and related conventions, versus nationalist efforts for self-determination without perceived pressures from outside.

The issues dealt with in these essays are complex, and I am wary of oversimplifying any of them. In the discussion of the role of colonialism, one idea that emerges is that colonial patriarchies interact with local patriarchies, creating hybrid forms that become sites of negotiation and contestation. Another idea that recurs is the interplay of religion, local custom, and the state, three venues for regulating behavior and establishing social mores. In practice, as contributor Shelley Feldman points out in her discussion of Bangladesh, this means that constitutional reform alone is insufficient to create change, because it will not (necessarily, or sufficiently) impact local customs and religious laws.

Taken together, the analyses shed light on one another. The reader can see commonalities among the nations in these interrelated regions, as well as critical differences that make each locality’s challenges unique. It becomes apparent that, as the editors point out in the introduction, “neither nationalism nor elite women’s feminism guarantees the ‘liberation’ of women.” Thankfully, these discussions also highlight many ways in which women are actors, participating in many ways, from liberatory habits of daily life to transnational feminist organizations.

Written by: Lisa Rand, May 11th 2010

Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style

admin — Mon, 10 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Fawzia Afzal-Khan

Syracuse University Press

A poet’s power lies not only in her well-crafted images but in the rhythm of her recitation. As I read Lahore With Love, the memoir of Fawzia Afzal-Khan, I longed to hear her read the volume aloud. Many parts of her story poured out in a stream of consciousness, and her anecdotes deftly wove between youth and adulthood, lighthearted desires and the pain of loss, politics and the laughter of girlfriends.

Afzal-Khan interweaves her personal story with key elements in the history of the establishment of Pakistan, her homeland, which was formed just ten years before her birth. The painful string of military dictatorships running her country creates a mirror for the tragic experiences endured by her girlfriends. As she writes, with foreboding, “I have sensed disaster coming their way, my way, my country’s way.” In some ways, Afzal-Khan escaped disaster: she is a professor in the English Department at Montclair State University (New Jersey), a scholar of postcolonial studies, a poet, and an actress. Yet while she lives a successful life in the United States, she carries with her a complicated sorrow and relief, a pain of loss that is aggravated each time she visits Pakistan and sees some new wounds inflicted upon her home and her loved ones.

Lahore With Love gives us vignettes of upper middle class life in a culture where propriety called for gender-segregated social gatherings, but someone was always ready to break rules. The line between acceptable “colonial” habits (Catholic school) and the dangerous “Western decadence” (art school) was at times thin and slippery. As the author forges her own self-identity, the nation also seeks a shape; she heads to the U.S. to obtain her PhD, and Pakistan begins to undergo Islamization, with new layers of reactionary rules added to the old. There is nothing dry about the presentation of material; in one bloody chapter, the story of Shia martyrs is juxtaposed with bullfighting in Spain.

At times I would have enjoyed seeing the vignettes fleshed out more fully, and I suspect some readers will want a volume of Pakistani history by their side to read further about incidents to which the author refers. However, any changes to the unique narrative structure would detract from the author’s intense style. Her voice is the one we use when we long for a reunion with dear friends who are now gone, or hunger to return to the past to stop tragedy from striking, or barely restrain our anger at the callousness of our fellow humans.

Afzal-Khan asks, “Are we doomed to inhabit this binary universe or can we challenge the system that turns us into the roles we wear like selves?” She sets for the reader a powerful mold-breaking example when she self-identifies as “actorsingerpoetactivistmemoirist.”

Written by: Lisa Rand, May 10th 2010

Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism Among Urban Pakistani Women

admin — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Sadaf Ahmad

Syracuse University Press

In Transforming Faith, Sadaf Ahmad explores the role of Al-Huda, a women’s Islamic religious school, in promoting the spread of a particular kind of Islam, especially among educated middle- and upper-class women in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Ahmad sets the scene by situating her topic in an historical and global context. She provides a broad overview of the various branches of Islam, and she tells the history of Pakistan’s self-conception as an Islamic state. She describes how Pakistani leaders have drawn discursively on certain flavors of Islam in order to consolidate political power, and how those choices laid the foundation for today’s increasingly conservative politico-religious milieu in Pakistan. Ahmad also links these developments to contemporary global pressures, including the hegemonic and military threats to Pakistan that accompany the skyrocketing Islamophobia in the West.

Against this backdrop, Ahmad explores the growing movement of Islamic women’s religious education, which takes place through small dars, classes for neighborhood women about technical and practical dimensions of Islam that are usually run out of one woman’s home, and through the larger, more institutional Al-Huda network. Its official branches and smaller, less formal dars are run by Al-Huda graduates.

Drawing on a body of carefully selected theory, Ahmad sensitively situates her description of the Al-Huda movement (which in many ways promotes a rigid, patriarchal form of Islam) in its political and cultural context. She notes that women are often positioned by the modern state as the “keepers of tradition,” and that women (especially Muslim women under the Western gaze) are perceived to be helpless victims of patriarchal and state pressure. While she does not hesitate to identify Al-Huda’s flavor of Islam as reactionary, she is also careful to tease out the complex reasons that women seek out Al-Huda and find its teachings transformative and personally meaningful.

On the whole, I found the book extremely nuanced and insightful; however, I did feel that one key element was missing. I found it strange that Ahmad does not discuss the communal feminist aspects of Al-Huda and the dars. Large numbers of women are organizing themselves and each other to obtain highly technical religious knowledge without the mediation of male teachers. In fact, Al-Huda promotes Arabic literacy to enable women to develop a direct relationship with the sacred text of the Qu’ran. It seems that this growing expertise might enable women to take more of a role in defining what it means to be a devout Muslim (and a devout Muslim woman in particular), which could have far-reaching implications. The lack of discussion of this question is puzzling.

Ultimately Transforming Faith is an exploration of the role of pedagogy in producing social and cultural change. How do teachers (in whatever sense of the word) identify and recruit a body of students? In a given sociopolitical context, how do teachers discursively situate their chosen body of knowledge (or, as Foucault would say, technologies of the self) against the backdrop of their students’ lives? What makes it possible to convince students to use those technologies of the self to discipline themselves into “ethical/pious subjects” (as Ahmad writes, drawing on Foucault and Mahmood)? In what way does the state co-opt those particular “ethical/pious subjects” for its own ends? In what ways do “ethical/pious subjects” develop a particular vantage point for resistance?

With its complementary combination of critical history, theory, and ethnography, Transforming Faith is an excellent—and thoroughly readable—case study for examining these questions.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, April 6th 2010

The Pistachio Seller

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Reem Bassiouney, translated by Osman Nusairi

Syracuse University Press

“How does a woman fall in love?” The opening line of Reem Bassiouney’s The Pistachio Seller is dangerously full of clichéd melodrama and trite gender assumptions; however, Bassiouney avoids these pitfalls by presenting complicated characters who exhibit the complexity of religion, love, and belief.

Bassiouney explains the significance of the pistachio in an Author’s Note, which reveals the historical significance of the pistachio and ties the nut to a very real cultural context. Pistachios are the most expensive nuts in Egypt. Because they are usually exported from abroad, until the capitalist movement of the 1990s, the pistachio was banned. Setting the novel in contemporary Egypt, the pistachio represents indulgence, luxury, and the perceived weakness of the East for pleasures from the West. The Pistachio Seller opens with young Wafaa falling in love with her cousin, Ashraf. Educated in England, Ashraf feels a disdain for the poverty, tradition, and "backwardness" of Egypt, and offers pistachios to all as though he could offer a taste of a better life. Wafaa expresses her confusion of desire and pride: “Was is really vital for East Germany to taste bananas? Were bananas worth all this humiliation? So what if man has to live without bananas? We could live without pistachios and without bananas.”

A devout Muslim, Wafaa desires Ashraf, but hates herself for lusting. Her desire is driven by imagination, prejudice, and the unachievable. This is where the beauty of Bassiouney’s complex characters shines. No character is singularly blameless or nefarious. Do I love Wafaa for being honest and passionate, or hate her for being judgmental and dogmatic?

I’m conflicted about the novel’s conclusion and Wafaa’s character development. The Pistachio Seller takes an epistolary turn when Ashraf moves to the U.S. While Ashraf writes honest, often self-pitying letters, Wafaa’s love letters are erratic, revealing little of her life. While Wafaa’s rhetoric changes, it seems her impulses do not.

Bassiouney does not compromise the novel’s tone by romanticizing the U.S., or portraying it as a home for Ashraf in exile. As is true with many elements in The Pistachio Seller, the U.S. proves to be a conflicted indulgence, like pistachios, enticing one away from one's homeland and offering little in return but ephemeral pleasure. Wafaa says, “Luxury living was like a drug you could get addicted to: it would control the cells of your brain, and you could not will it away.”

The Pistachio Seller is Bassiouney’s fourth novel; however, the first three are not yet translated into English. I hope The Pistachio Seller holds the promise of more translated novels from Bassiouney in the future.

Written by: Claire Burrows, March 11th 2010

The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture

admin — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:52:00 +0000

By Warren Hoffman

Syracuse University Press

Once homosexuality has been fully incorporated and accepted into “mainstream” society, I wonder what group will be placed at the bottom of the totem pole. I use the word incorporated because it symbolizes a capitalistic tolerance without a desire or need to understand a person's totality. What makes this subject matter doubly difficult is when being part of one group becomes the default for another.

In The Passing Game, Warren Hoffman explains how the term homosexuality was coined at the very same moment in history as anti-semitism, how the stereotypes of Jews from 1880 to 1920 included homosexuality, and how synonymous Jew and queer were at that time. Hoffman’s first example is the Yiddish play Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance) by Sholem Asch, which first appeared in 1907 and depicted prostitution and homoerotic female love. When the English version of the play was performed on Broadway in 1923, it caused a scandal, in which the entire cast was arrested and found guilty for performing an immoral drama. The issue of homosexuality was virtually non-existent and non-recognized by wider audiences in 1907, but Hoffman shows that the uproar in 1923 indicated a shift in thought on sexuality between 1907 and 1923.

Further along the book, Hoffman focuses on the term queer and its association outside of a sexual context. In the 1946 publication of Wasteland by lesbian writer Jo Sinclair (Ruth Seid), Hoffman explores the way in which this term is used in a non-sexual context, but still somehow tied to sexuality. The main character, Jake Braunowitz, is a second-generation heterosexual Jewish American, who is ashamed and embarrassed to be Jewish. Debbie is Jake’s sister, who learns through her psychiatrist to accept her lesbian identity. Jake seeks the help of this same psychiatrist, and learns that by accepting his sister as queer, he can also accept his Jewish identity.

In Hoffman’s examination of Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance) and Sinclair’s Wasteland, as well as his study of cross-dressing and gender ambiguity in short stories, shows how queerness can be related to subject matter outside the context of sexuality. For example, Hoffman analyzes how the feminization of the Jewish male has shaped many Jewish men and women as they have been forced to deal with their own sexuality.

Readers of Hoffman's work may realize how anything that deviates from the mainstream culture and society, be it, culturally, “racially”, or religiously, can be considered abnormal. The Passing Game reminds us why these predominant cultural and societal mores should be changed by any means necessary.

Written by: Olupero R. Aiyenimelo, September 17th 2009

Gender and Class in the Egyptian Women’s Movement, 1925-1939: Changing Perspectives

admin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:54:00 +0000

By Cathlyn Mariscotti

Syracuse University Press

Gender and Class reads like the last reference book in a lengthy series about the Egyptian women’s movement. I came to this review ready to learn something about a time in history that most people probably know very little about. I came away learning only a few ‘vocab’ words from the glossary.

Cathlyn Mariscotti’s book reads more like a thesis essay reflecting on a scholarly course the audience has taken rather than a text written for the general reader. Every fact Mariscotti references relies heavily on other texts to get her point across. The main comparison and crux of the book is that Western feminism is extremely bourgeois and did not entirely help lower class women in Egyptian, such as the peasant fellahin.

This seemed to be an interesting idea at first mention, but after reading on, the reader realizes Mariscotti has laid all of her cards down on the table too early in revealing her argument, and all within the first twenty pages. This made for rather tedious reading of the rest of the book.

The text is a general criticism of the feminist movement as a whole, including Global North countries, such as the United States, Mariscotti does not make learning about the Egyptian women’s plight with this issue easy or entertaining to read. I was so overwhelmed by snippets of facts and parentheses telling me which books I could find and read about these facts; sadly I absorbed next to nothing about this largely overlooked period of history. In the end, all I learned about the Egyptian women’s movement was that I need to seek out other books to do so.

Written by: Jen Klee, March 4th 2009