Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East The Egyptian Women's Movement by Najde al-Ali. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 282 pages.)

Abstract

Increasingly, since the Sadat era in Egypt and especially resulting from his
economic policies (infitah), there has been a significant rise of Egyptian
women who are putting on the "Islamic dress." Whereas women in the
early twentieth century were dramatically tearing off their veils and
throwing them into the Nile in order to desegregate society. Today,
Egyptian women are very noticeably doing the opposite as a form
of protest, while utilizing the same reasoning as before. The influx of
literature about this so-called "Islamism" has been discussed in nearly
every realm of the social sciences.
In contrast to this phenomenon, Najde al-Ali's study on women's
activity in Egypt is about a particular heterogeneous class of secular
women, that she feels has been marginalized on the state level by the overarching
concessions given to hegemonic "Islamist" policies. In effect, Ali
states, "I had noticed the tendency to overlook secular constituencies in
much of the recent scholarship dealing with Egypt, where the emphasis was
on Islamist tendencies and activism."
Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian
Women's Movement, is a highly informative introductory and analytical
study of secular women's activities through the voice of a plethora
of Egyptian women's organizations. In the introduction Ali categorizes
women's activism as being independent, associational and directed.
Whereas independent organizations have a power base from within and aim
to implement individual goals, associational and directed organizations
carry a more direct message outside the sphere of general women's issues.
In the first chapter, Ali engages in a discussion about the relationship of
Orientalism and Occidentalism in post-colonial literature. The reader is
introduced to the idea that these conceptual frameworks have indeed
limited the indigenous authenticity of women's activism in Egypt by
placing them in one of two extremes, whether it be religious or secular.
Immediately, Ali strives to make clear that certain values do not need to be
authenticated by any indigenous culture if they are "universal values".
However, it is here where a significant weakness emerges, by not
outwardly recognizing the importance of the competitive universal value
systems, including the "Islamist values", that are trying to find their space
in contemporary Egyptian political culture. Therefore, the message that is ...