Gender in the Middle East

Feminist and women's studies in the 1960s and 1970s paved the foundation for the emergence of gender analysis in the 1980s. Women's studies and gender studies arose to combat the absence of documentation about women in all Western disciplines. Yet the focus on gender emphasizes the inextricable interaction between both sexes, while women's studies' singular focus does not. Documenting the experience of women led to the realization that it was necessary to deepen the exploration of the multiple meanings of male and female on symbolic and practical levels. Female scholars dominate this methodology, but men now contribute to the field. Gender studies draws theoretical inspiration from Western interdisciplinary sources but continues to refine such precedents, proving at once the importance of universal conceptual frameworks and the centrality of Middle Eastern context in their refinement. Proponents of gender studies support both academic intent and often an activist agenda for social change. Therefore, many intellectuals and religious leaders in Middle Eastern societies reject gender as an intrusive European and American construct.

Evidence of Islamic feminism in the Middle East does exist as the historical foundation for gender studies, but few scholars there connect this movement to the precedent of earlier challenges to male authority. In 1923, Huda Sha'rawi (d. 1947) founded the Egyptian Women's Union and called for equal rights for both women and men. She also publicly removed her veil as a denial of traditional strictures that she perceived as part of a corrupt, oppressive social hierarchy. Support for her reformist platform received public approbation from select secularist men and many upper-class Christian and Muslim women. Sha'rawi's example did not incite a mass movement in support of either feminism or, by extension, new definitions of male and female identity in the Middle East. Stiff opposition to such movements remains the norm.

In the late 1970s, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea and Basima Bezirgan edited a groundbreaking collection of documents designed to more accurately represent the complex history and multiple roles of Muslim women. These translated selections filled the need for English-speaking audiences to understand the women in this area in their own terms. The precedent-setting lives of early female historical figures were set alongside contemporary women's stories, poems, and recollections of resistance to colonial occupation. These selections drew in part upon previous works in the 1930s and 1940s by scholars such as Margaret Smith, who illuminated the importance of the early ascetic mystic, Rabi'a of Basra (c. 714–801 C.E.).

In the 1980s, women scholars in the Middle East took up the challenge raised by female coreligionists in the early twentieth century to oppose the assumed right of male authorities to define and control every aspect of their lives. They explicitly identified with Western feminist agendas and, as a result, their publications were condemned in their native lands. Fatima Mernissi's classic work, The Veil and the Male Elite (1987), argued that accepted male readings of the medieval Islamic past were deeply flawed and sexist when applied to the present. Although this work predated the emergence of gender studies, it, together with similar works, helped spur its birth. Ironically, Mernissi found the most receptive audience for her work outside the Middle East where feminists identified shared concerns. Support for her critique of male dominance from scholars abroad fueled accusations in the Middle East that Mernissi had been co-opted by the enemies of Islam.

Since the 1990s, the struggle to apply gender inquiry to Middle Eastern societies has also been forcefully challenged by Muslim women in the United States. Many questioned the right of non-Muslims to speak on behalf of Middle Eastern men and women. In the wake of these protests, Western scholars of the Middle East display greater self-awareness as well as greater sensitivity to cultural differences. Muslim women seeking to better understand their place in Islamic society now increasingly invigorate public discussions of the gendered definitions of both sexes. In this process, Muslim women challenge long-standing precedents about cultural hierarchies and praxis. They claim the right to an active intellectual presence, which disrupts the assumption that Middle Eastern women are either silent or passive in their own societies.