Int. J. Middle East Stud. 41 (2009), 83103. Printed in the United States of America doi:10.

1017/S0020743808090132

Lila Abu-Lughod D I A L E C T S O F W O M E N S E M P O W E R M E N T : T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L C I R C U I T R Y O F T H E A R A B H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T R E P O R T 20051

The ethical and political dilemmas posed by the construction and international circulation of discourses on womens rights in the Middle East are formidable. The plight of Muslim women has long occupied a special place in the Western political imagination, whether in colonial officials dedication to saving them from barbaric practices or development projects devoted to empowering them. In the past fifteen years or so, through a series of international conferences and the efforts of feminist activists, womens rights have come to be framed successfully as universal human rights. Building on the U.N. conferences on women that started in 1975 and led to other initiatives, the appropriate arena of womens rights work has been redefined from the national to the international. It is ironic that this achievement may be shoring up arguments for foreign interventions that have complex and sometimes dangerous consequences for women in various societies in the Muslim world. Is there a way to make the case for the rights and empowerment of women in the Middle East or the Muslim world in ways that do not become grounds for arguments about the clash of civilizations and their associated political, economic, and military agendas? What are the regional consequences of the new internationalism of womens rights?2 Finally, must this transnationalism dictate the language in which rights are framed today? These large questions that should interest any scholar of the Middle East lend a particular cast to regional efforts to address womens rights and status. The Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World represents an extraordinary contemporary effort by Arab intellectuals and activists to assess the problems women face in this region and to articulate a vision for a better future.3 This essay will address three problems with this landmark report as a means of reflecting on a broader set of questions about the international circulation of political discourses on womens rights and empowerment in the early 21st century. As an anthropologist who has done ethnographic research over the past thirty years in a number of communities in one Arab country (Egypt)4 and as a scholar interested in the way feminism works in an international sphere, both historically and in the present, I responded to this report with a mix of admiration and disappointment: admiration for its ambition, intentions,

Lila Abu-Lughod is William B. Ransford Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies in the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, N.Y.; e-mail: la310@columbia.edu 2009 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/09 $15.00

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and serious commitment to the betterment of womens lives and opportunities in the region, and disappointment in the political limitations of the intellectual framework and language it used and in the prejudices that shape its analyses of womens everyday lives.5 In her multisited ethnographic study of the U.N.-based transnational movement in the 1990s against gender violence, Sally Engle Merry argues persuasively that the international language of womens human rights is culturalit is forged in the deterritorialized social contexts of international meetings where documents are produced, and it reflects the values of a secular global modernity, undergirded by concepts of autonomy, individualism, and equality.6 Her study of the production and application of general U.N. instruments such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the platforms of the international conferences on women (e.g., Beijing Platform, Beijing Plus Five) reveals that the social networks and international bodies through which the dominant liberal definition of womens rights is promoted have given what I call a dialect of rights the status of what Asad calls a strong language, one into which others must be translated.7 This dialect, I argue, is indeed that used in the AHDR 2005, even though the report is directed at governments and civil society in only one region and was produced by intellectuals, social scientists, and development experts from the region. It is thus conceived of primarily as an internal document for the imagined community of Arab nations, although its cosmopolitan authors, sponsorship by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), and generic similarity to other human development reports give it an inevitable international context.8 My reading of the AHDR 2005 on women examines how a particular international or transnational dialect, with its attendant assumptions and politics, has come to have currency among elites in the Arab region, leading to a particularand to an anthropologist like me, problematicframing of Arab womens issues. Knowing nothing yet about the process involved in producing the document, including the debates, negotiations, and pressures that led to the final text, I confine my reading to the textual.9 In many ways, the report is commendable. It is rich with information and includes a number of excellent chapters or subsections. As with any document of collective authorship, the AHDR 2005 is written in multiple and sometimes contradictory voices, so no summary can do it justice. My critiques of particular sections do not apply to others. Among the reports noteworthy overall strengths are that it strategically links the advancement of women to that of men and of society as a whole; argues for important legal and political reforms; paints an optimistic picture of a widely desired future; condemns particularly egregious violations of womens rights, such as the abuse of international domestic workers; and draws attention to some of the hardest struggles local women face. Their health needs are particularly pressing, but the report also describes unflinchingly the inordinate burdens imposed on women by the absence of security and the prevalence of violence and surveillance in the region, whether due to the Israeli occupation in Palestine, the U.S. and British occupation of Iraq, the war on terror, or the authoritarianism of local regimes that crush political opposition. Recognizing much value in the report, I turn now to more troubling aspects of the framing and findings, organizing the analysis around three basic questions. First, a report like this enters a politically charged and historically particular international context of global inequality and hostility. Does it lend itself, then, to being appropriated in negative

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ways? Is this something that should concern the report writers and sponsors? Second, as an anthropologist who has worked closely with women in rural communities, I was uncomfortable with what seemed to be a cosmopolitan or urban middle-class perspective on womens lives, aspirations, and everyday conditions. How does this perspective affect the reports analyses and prescriptions? Third, how might the reports reliance on a particular international language of womens rights and the dominant political paradigms this dialect indexeswhether modernization, human development, or (neo)liberalism on the one hand color its representation of modern Arab societies and history? On the other hand, how might it foreclose certain understandings of womens problems in the region, which in turn affect the solutions proposed?
E N T E R IN G A N IN T E R N AT IO N A L F IE L D

The AHDR 2005 enters a predetermined world context. Parts of the report are astute in noting the external context in which pressures for reform and womens empowerment have become a focus in the Arab world and noting the influence of Western ideas about womens liberation and Orientalist representations of the region.10 Both in its construction and its effects, however, the AHDR 2005 has been taken up as evidence of the pathology of Arab gender culture, just as its predecessor reports were eagerly seized upon by an international community as confirmation of the backwardness of the Arab world.11 Even though the report gestures occasionally to the widespread nature of gender discrimination and inequality, its exclusive focus on the Arab world and the absence of a systematically comparative perspective create the distinct impression that the situation for women in the Arab world, a homogenized group, is uniquely bad. Yet feminist scholars and activists in various parts of the world are concerned about problems similar to those detailed in the report: domestic violence, epidemics of diabetes and obesity, low representation of women in government, absence of leadership in the corporate world, and discrimination in the workplace. Sixteen percent of representatives in the U.S. Congress are women, a figure not so radically different from the percentages in certain countries of the Arab world.12 The report aggregates the figures to conclude that only ten percent of parliamentary representatives are women, but it neither distinguishes among countries nor points out that the number is higher in countries such as Tunisia and Iraq than it is in the United States.13 By continually pointing to gender inequalities in the Arab world without offering a comparative perspective, the AHDR 2005 subliminally reinforces the presumption that gender equity has been achieved elsewhere. Is the situation in the Arab world particularly miserable? On some indices, like labor, this might seem to be the case, even compared to other developing nations. However, critics of statistical indices and development reports in general have shown that we need in every case to examine closely the way figures were calculated and the skewing generated by averaging together statistics from countries with vast disparities in wealth, welfare, forms of government, and population. To their credit, the reports writers are aware of the density of foreign concern with Arab womens issues. The report also tries to anticipate local accusations about foreign meddling and hostile attempts to discredit the project of womens empowerment by labeling it culturally inauthentic. It rightly states that an enforced anatomic separation

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between what is deemed local and what is deemed foreign is no longer possible in this age.14 It credits the global discourse about women with helping Arab womens efforts to bring laws and national legislative initiatives into line with universal objectives as well as providing support and backing through networking.15 Yet such observations do not absolve us of the responsibility of examining the implications of the long history of Western interest in Eastern women. The perspective and politics embedded in the reports project of fostering a new Arab renaissancebased on the 19th-century Arab renaissance, described as positively influenced by the best human accomplishments of the prevailing Western civilization16 alert us to the inescapable imbrication of cultural or civilizational discourse and womens rights in the Arab world. The AHDR 2005 in fact contributes strongly to civilizational discourse by attributing a significant role to Arab and Islamic culture in its diagnosis of gender inequality. In the executive summary on Levels of Well Being, for instance, six paragraphs are devoted to violence against women as part of the impairment of personal liberty, and yet only a single, short paragraph considers the relationship between the spread of poverty and the political, economic, and social disempowerment of women.17 The sensationalist standbys of honor killings and female genital operations get mention in this section too, reinforcing the impression that traditional or cultural pathologies are rife in this part of the world. As feminist scholars have recently shown, there is a powerful transnational feminist discourse about the antagonism between culture and rights that ossifies culture, ignores history and politics, and contributes to the othering of distant or minority groups.18 In focusing so heavily on culture while failing to be comparative and critical, this report follows that patternand thus produces an Arab world that is the negative foil for an enlightened and allegedly noncultural modern West. The paradox here is that the very existence of the report contributes to a negative representation of the position of Arab women even while it indexes the influence and intellectual strength of professional Arab women and feminists. About what other region of the world would a whole report, many years in the making and employing some of its best minds, be devoted to womens rights as one of the major problems facing the region, alongside deficits of knowledge, freedom, and good governance? Yet how does the empirical excess of a weighty report reinforce the idea that the Arab world is a place peculiarly deficient in terms of womens lives? Women in other parts of the world surely face considerable problems as well, some of which are far less prevalent in the Arab world: sex trafficking, sweatshop exploitation, HIV/AIDS, eating disorders, substance abuse, famine, the feminization of poverty, and violence, both domestic and genocidal. Just one year earlier, another major survey of the (dire) status of women in the Middle East was publishedagain, with no counterpart for other world regions: Womens Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Citizenship and Justice, a 2005 report sponsored by Freedom House, the neoconservative U.S. organization.19 These reports exist alongside recent reports by the World Bank (which, thanks to the dedicated work of feminists, has made gender central to its efforts and thus has produced reports on gender issues for many other regions as well). There seems to be an unfortunate convergence between feminist concerns, regional and foreign, and a larger political and ideological agenda for the region. The AHDR 2005 falls into that awkward nexus, whatever the intentions and political loyalties of its authors.

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Many parts of the report are detailed, thoughtful, politically courageous, and important. However, the content is different from the overall effect, given that most people will not read the report carefully and that there already exists a geopolitical and cultural climate for any discussion of the Middle East. It is inevitable, given this context, that whatever the motivations of the reports contributorsand one presumes that these are to encourage an Arab audience to undertake social and political reformthe AHDR 2005 will be appropriated internationally to affirm prevailing stereotypes of Arab and Muslim women as oppressed and suffering from a uniquely patriarchal social order. We need only look at Time magazines coverage of the launch of the report in its 7 December 2006 issue. The headline reads, Whats Holding Back Arab Women? It is telling that this article on a report about empowering women in the Arab world is accompanied by a photograph of black-clad Iranian women in school. The image of the oppressed undifferentiated Muslim woman overdetermines the Western reception of the report.
D IS TA N C E F R O M T H E E V E R Y D AY

If the politics of representation in an international field place the AHDR 2005 in an awkward position, the politics of class and the position of the cosmopolitan Arab intellectuals who worked on the report account for some problems in its content. The second part of my critique stems from my long-term involvement in particular subaltern communities in the Arab world. What can an anthropologists ethnographic knowledge of life on the ground in a number of particular communities tell us about the three keys to womens empowerment the report proposes: education, employment, and individual rights? Adely analyzes elsewhere the way the report misrepresents the status of womens access to education in the Arab world.20 From my own fieldwork over the past fifteen years or so in an Upper Egyptian village, it is clear that it is not lack of access to education but the poor quality of public education that is so problematic for girls, just as it is for boys.21 This poor quality and the burdensome expenses associated with it are the results of economic policies that devalue state provision of social welfare and services, not of gender discrimination. Infusing many parts of the report are prejudices common to a fragment of the Arab intelligentsia who came of age in the eras of modernization and developmentalism. They view education as the answer to overcoming backwardness and consider womens education a key to emancipation and individualism.22 They confuse literacy with creativity and knowledge, like the high school educated bedouin girl I write about in Writing Womens Worlds23 who had come to denigrate the extraordinary skills and knowledge that her unschooled mothers and aunts had in weaving, tent making, animal husbandry, or poetry. Like the urban, professional Egyptian television writers and researchers I discuss in Dramas of Nationhood,24 they are patronizing toward those who are lacking in awareness; they see themselvesthe educated intelligentsiaas enlightened leaders whose duty it is to bring the masses out of darkness. According to the AHDR 2005, the heroes and heroines who are to lead Arab societies to a positive future are novelists, filmmakers, media producers, lawyers, and feminists. The devaluation of those who are not educated is pervasive. In one particularly disturbing passage, nonschooled bedouin and rural girls in marginal communities are

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described as follows: They are unable to read or write and thus express themselves and have never heard of their human rights. This erodes their very human status.25 The many articulate, creative, witty, and sharp uneducated women I have known in rural Egypt (granted living in less dire circumstances than those deplored in the report for the poorest and most marginal groups)women who are creative poets and storytellers, astute moral reasoners, energetic participants in their communitys social and political affairs, and quick to bristle at infringements of their customary or religious rightswould be surprised to hear that they or their daughters are less than human. After education, employment is the second key to the rise of women in the Arab world, according to the AHDR 2005. Both for liberal feminists and for those pushing for the human capabilities approach (the framework adopted for much of the report), employment is considered crucial for womens advancement and capacity to live a good life. Again, both from the work of critical feminist economists and my experience in one Egyptian village, we have reason to ask if the report is out of touch with daily realities for many in the Arab world. U.S. feminist scholarship has questioned work for wages as a panacea. Feminist economists have argued that we need to measure womens economic contribution differently (and the AHDR 2005 concurs).26 Everyone agrees that economic resources under womens control are critical to their standing, but employment, as Panda and Agarwal have shown, is not the same thing as property or control of economic resources.27 The fantasy about the magical value of work for women is a middle-class oneit presumes that jobs are well paid and fulfilling (as they may be, for the most part, for professionals, despite the nearly universal double burden women carry, with housework and child care remaining largely their responsibility). However, one must ask if work that is badly paid, back breaking, exploitative, or boring liberates women. If employers or families do not provide childcare, is it economically viable for women to work? If the wages are low, are the cost of transport, the absence of womens labor in maintaining the household, and vulnerability to harassment worth it? These are basic questions that can be asked about the Arab world, and everywhere, without even introducing more radical feminist critiques of the way caring work is devalued in the segregated labor market such that, for example, someone in the United States who parks cars in a garage is paid more than a daycare worker.28 Which form of labor requires more skills? Whose responsibilities are more serious? In relation to womens employment in the Arab world, one of the most interesting studies is Homa Hoodfars ethnography of the urban poor in Cairo, based on fieldwork in the late 1980s. In Between Marriage and the Market, she argues persuasively that it makes economic sense for women in this community to want to be housewives.29 With the erosion of wages in the public sector associated with neoliberal reform, women cannot cover the costs of transportation, childcare, and housekeeping with their wages. They realize that they have more autonomy at home than in the workplace. It makes economic sense because the household depends so much on saving money, not just earning it. Women save money by standing in line to get cheaper goods, dealing with the bureaucracy to get state benefits and subsidies, and working on social ties and trust, both essential for participating in local credit associations, getting help and support with various problems, and even for marriage arrangements. Moreover, staying at home allows women to engage in petty trade, sewing, or raising chickens and rabbits to supplement

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household income. It is an added bonus, Hoodfar argues, that staying at home contributes to the appearance of conforming to conservative gender ideals, something that might enhance family status. In other words, Hoodfar shows that the impediments to womens wage work, at least among the urban poor in this one Arab country, are not cultural but economic. Others who have studied womens labor participation in the Middle East and noted its rapid increase in both the formal and informal economies under Islamic regimes argue that for explanations one must turn to economic crisis and a precedent in political mobilization, not to Islam or cultural factors.30 From my recent fieldwork, I agree that both the motives for working before marriage and for giving up work after marriage are economic, the cultural obstacles gotten around fairly easily through a variety of strategies of dress and movement. Girls in the Upper Egyptian village in which I have been working have in the past decade and a half been finishing high school and even regularly going on to institutes, colleges, or universities. In the past ten years, some have even begun wanting and getting jobs. They might work in an office or a small shop, or, in this area, for the Antiquities Organization, the largest local employer; they might run literacy classes or, if very fortunate, get teaching positions in local schools. Their monthly wage ranges from 80 to 200 Egyptian pounds, U.S. $14 40 per monthnot much, especially with prices skyrocketing, Egyptian currency losing value, and government subsidies being removed. The girls are working to help pay for their wedding trousseaus. It is difficult for these young women to work after marriage, though, especially once they have children. Who would prepare family meals? Who would care for the children? Who would raise livestock as insurance against illness or big expenses, not to mention providing milk and cheese? Who would boost household income through raising poultry? Employment is not by its nature liberating. It must be of a certain quality to provide economic independence, to allow women to contribute adequately to the household, or to enhance womens dignity and self-respect. The cultural norms against women moving about in public may be one factor holding them back from employment, but these norms are not decisive. More crucial, ethnographic examples suggest, are the nature of the labor market and womens opportunities within it. The third key to the rise of women in the Arab world proposed by the AHDR 2005 is differentiation from family. This would indeed be a major social and cultural shift, one whose roots in a common cosmopolitan language of development and rights, I argue, are particularly clear. Although occasionally praising womens special contributions as mothers, the report represents the strength of familial ties as especially detrimental to women. In the chapter on social structures, the traditional tribal kinship system is condemned as enshrining male dominance. The reports assessment here of the family is both ideological and ahistorical. One can see the workings of specific cultural values when the text deplores the absence of a clear dividing line between the personal and the familial31 and states that the weakest element of society, meaning women, do not enjoy rights as individuals per se.32 In this condemnation of tribe and family, the AHDR 2005 echoes the Western liberal assumptions made explicit and universalized by philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has attempted to define a good or flourishing life in terms of human capabilities that social policy should foster.33 One key to a good life, she argues, is being able to live ones own life and nobody elses. This means having certain guarantees of noninterference with

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certain choices that are especially personal and definitive of selfhood, such as choices regarding marriage, childbearing, sexual expression, speech, and employment.34 One can also see the ahistoricism in this chapter of the report, which strangely attributes contemporary family dynamics and control over women to a timeless Arab origin and then follows with the story of the introduction of Islam. Most sophisticated social analysts who write about gender and family look instead to transformations over the centuries, especially in the 20th century, to consider the rise and fall of empires, the impact of colonialism or capitalist agriculture and industrialization, the gendering of nationalism, the requirements of state-building projects, and the entailments of globalization. At the heart of any good analysis of the Arab family should be crucial differences of class, as well as attention to the 20th-century histories of the different Arab statestheir economies and ideologies of development, the kinds of accommodations they made with factions in the sphere of family law. Such dynamics are well studied by comparativists like Mounira Charrad for the North African states of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.35 Furthermore, as an anthropologist who has worked with a contemporary tribal society, the Awlad Ali Bedouin in Egypt, I question whether strong family ties are more of a problem for women than for men and whether, indeed, individualism should be enshrined as the ultimate value.36 In that community in the 1980s, men did not more clearly draw a line between the personal and the familial than women. Recent visits suggest this is still the case, whether in terms of elections or social relations. This section of the report fails to appreciate the strong positive sentiments people in most communities in the Arab world (and perhaps elsewhere) have toward their families, even when belonging to families places constraints on them. It also ignores the economic necessity of joint family enterprises and the realities of household economies where many contribute toward the sustenance of the family. Moreover, it is blind to the possibility that families might be, for good and ill, the very structures within which individuals conceive of themselves and realize themselves as individuals. Kamran Asdar Alis study of state family planning in Egypt gives good evidence of how development discourse seeks to individualize its women subjects, misrecognizing the more relational bases of womens selfhood and decision making, whether family based or religious.37 Suad Joseph has explored not just the weaknesses but also the strengths of what she calls the relational selves fostered in Arab society.38 Many people, in the Arab world and elsewhere, view as morally abhorrent the atomization of individuals and loss of family support associated with advanced capitalism and the Westthe very individualism that is idealized by liberals and the AHDR 2005. The patriarchal family has its problems, as a large and sophisticated feminist literature has explored. Yet it is not clear that individualization automatically enables women to realize equality or personal fulfillment. Theorizing about the dark side of the liberal value of individualism under capitalism from Engels on to Zaretsky, or about the rise of disciplinary society, as described by Foucault, Donzelot, or Balibar, suggests that we be more cautious in our optimism.39 The persistence of gender inequality and gender violence in the modern West, where individual women in some classes are indeed detached from family and individualized, attests to a more complex process. Any serious assessment of the role of family for women in the Arab world must appreciate the positive significance of family even for all those who negotiate, contest,

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bargain,40 and indeed sometimes suffer with particular restrictions because of family ties. The unambiguous devaluation of family and valorization of the individual in this report are in line with urban, professional middle-class values and experiences, in confluence with liberal feminist discourse. This stance reveals the dominance in the report, as among this class, of the ideology of modernization. As several decades of critique have shown, the modernization paradigm that equates progress with cultural change toward secular, modern individualism is shot through with values. It is insufficiently attentive to the dynamism of culture and religion, the complexities of hegemony, and the profound impact of historical transformation. A language dominant in Euro-America and among national elites around the Third World can thus be seen as dictating many of the ideals and recommendations of the AHDR 2005, whether about education, employment, or family. This languageor dialect, as I prefer to call ithas also structured the judgments such educated elites make about what they caricature as the social relations and cultural forms of rural and other less enlightened subjects.

T H E P O L IT IC A L D IA L E C T O F (N E O )L IB E R A L IS M

This brings us to the final aspect of the AHDR 2005 that must be addressed: the political dialect it deploys. In much of the report (although not all), one can detect the tell-tale international vocabulary of the liberal human development or capabilities framework41 alongside the neoliberal economic framework to which the concept of human development sought to be a moderate corrective. It is not the international character of the strong language that is problematic: I am not arguing for use of an authentic native languagethere is no such thing. However, the particular hegemonic language used for the report has serious consequences not only for the ways in which it frames problems, but also the ways in which it proposes solutions. Using this transnational dialect leads the AHDR 2005 to proffer largely cultural and reformist political solutions, never radical political or economic solutions. The report pushes for a strong civil society and for legal reform, treating law as an instrument and expression of culture.42 It argues that womens capacities are held back by a number of cultural and social factors43 and thus calls for attitudinal change: through more enlightened interpretations of Islam, better socialization and schooling, reform of family law, and the development of a culture of equal treatment and respect for human rights in the judiciary.44 The report advocates redistributing power in favor of civil society; it says little about redistributing wealth. Its main silences, however, are about collective action and the strongest sociopolitical trend in the region: the religious revival. The liberal language of human development and the neoliberal discourses of structural adjustment and global markets define priorities and possibilities in this report. One finds calls for social safety nets rather than, say, projects of land reform. One finds passages in which the report hedges on whether the erosion of the public sector has led to gains in womens participation in economic activity. Presumably as a consequence of disagreements among those involved in putting the report together, it concludes lamely, Views differ. . . . 45 Although structural adjustment is recognized not to have been accompanied by growth in the private-sectors capacity to generate jobs for women,

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the language used to describe the growth of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as a safety net fails to ask whether they can indeed provide the same support for the marginal that a state welfare system can for citizens. The AHDR 2005 simply reports, NGOs expanded significantly and were encouraged to fill the gap, especially with regard to the provision of social services and economic assistance.46 Although social justice and income redistribution are mentioned from time to time, there does not seem to be any corresponding rethinking of economic practices and policy regarding redistribution, wealth inequality, property, the market, production, poverty, social welfare, and the labor market, all of which fundamentally affect women. In other words, there is no hint of a marginalized but reemerging international language whose vocabulary includes exploitation, underdevelopment, injustice, or revolution and no questioning of priorities such as military spending, Western investment, export economies, profligate consumerism, or international debt. What ideas are offered for combating income poverty? The report anemically suggests income-generating projects that target families with school-age children.47 To advocate development and the human-capabilities approach is to leave the forces of global capital largely unquestioned, even though the report does note some of their worst entailments, such as the creation of new corrupt financial elites who have harvested the greater part of countries assets.48 Furthermore, the liberal language of political reform dominates. The 2005 report, like the previous three Arab human development reports, calls for good governance. This is hardly a controversial ideal. It also calls for freedoman important value but also an impossibly loaded term that carries heavy ideological baggage, whether in antiterrorist or anti-Communist rhetoric. As Bayat notes, its association with development comes from Amartya Sen, who links it to expanding choicepart of a neoliberal dialect.49 In privileging development, the report aligns itself with gradual change and national efforts. Yet the report is suffused with the characteristic neoliberal lack of faith in the state and refusal to strengthen the public sector. For instance, the report suggests at one point that a response to the poor level of education in the Arab world is to possibly develop an educational system that is strong, nongovernmental, and not for profit as a rival to government education.50 It is not clear why the report does not demand that governments invest in public education, given that all the countries in the developed world have governmental or state educational systems, albeit sometimes more decentralized and censored in more subtle ways than in many Arab countries. The liberal refusal to look to the state for gains in the empowerment of women is most apparent in one sleight of hand in the report. In Chapter 6, Culture, the report skips over one the most crucial periods in modern Arab history for womens access to education, the labor market, the political sphere, and legal rightsthe keys, according to other parts of the report, to womens empowerment.51 In a potted history of the stages of awareness about womens issues in Arab society, this chapter begins with a period in which there was a realization of difference; this is described as the early part of the 20th-century Arab renaissance, in which reform-minded political and intellectual elites recognized that European societies had specific features that accounted for their strength and progress, among them ideas about womens advancement.52 The narrative then inexplicably jumps to the 1970s, leaving out the whole period of independence, national consolidation, and state building in most Arab countries. The period from the 1970s on is characterized

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positively as the period when development and human development became the reigning paradigm for Arab governments and when international womens conferences and regional meetings leading up to them highlighted the need to do something about gender inequality.53 This history ignores precisely what feminist analyses of state building in the region have noted for Iraq, Yemen, or Egypt.54 Suad Joseph has shown how as part of its state-building strategy, the Iraqi elite focused on women in the 1970s because of the need for labor and the desire to win the allegiance of the population away from kinship and ethnic ties. The ruling Bath Party thus set up programs to mobilize women into state-controlled agencies and unions,55 to socialize them politically through enhancing educational access and literacy, to reform personal status laws to be more favorable to women, and to extend services to working women, including on-site child care, free transportation, and free health care.56 In a similar vein, in socialist South Yemen in the 1970s and 1980s, fairly radical legal rights were extended to women by the state in line with a Marxist ideology of promoting gender equality.57 In Egypt, it was under Nassers Arab socialism in the 1950s and 1960s that mass education, health care, land reform, tenancy protection, and access to the labor market were introduced, giving women major new citizenship rights, even at the cost, as Bier and others suggest, of a loss of political autonomy and with no real challenge to the family.58 State feminism has been rightly criticized for undermining the autonomy of independent womens groups, but its legal, political, and economic contributions to changing the lives of women can hardly be disputed. I must interject that the chapter on the Arab womens movement is much more accurate and detailed. It gives due credit to the women pioneers at the turn of the 20th century and acknowledges the projects of state feminism when, after national independence, womens unions were incorporated into the ruling political parties and where national development and needs for both labor and literacy led to expanding womens opportunities, despite residual understandings of women as primarily reproductive.59 In this middle period from the 1950s to the 1970s, there was a quantum leap in consciousness about and sympathy for womens issues and rights.60 Other parts of the report that promote the human development approach ignore this period, however, and surely do so because of the way it would challenge the reigning paradigm and the language of liberalism. When mention is made of the gains for women through state efforts, the report immediately invokes the flaws, mostly in the form of popular resistance to reforms. If the report were truly interested in and aligned with the popular, however, it would be more sympathetic to Islamism, as will be discussed. That these elites, however visionary, may be out of touch with the women they seek to benefit is apparent in their findings regarding CEDAW, which is foregrounded in the report as an international convention ratified by all the Arab states that should serve as a template and ideal for national legislation.61 The AHDR 2005 includes a chart based on the public-opinion poll conducted for the report in which it seems only eight percent of the respondents surveyed in the four countries covered (Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan) said they were aware of CEDAW. Of those who knew about it, only half approved of its implementation in their country. Which returns us to the most vexing issuehow a strong international language with its base in the West, a language largely confined to an educated, professional, cosmopolitan class that cannot imagine other ways of expressing humanity, getting

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rights, and living a good life, affects the local construction of womens needs, rights, and empowerment. In the first section, I alluded to the troubling intersection between imperial and feminist interests. The report, too, is properly suspicious of the political objectives of dominant world powers and externally initiated reform initiatives.62 It charges that regimes that gain legitimacy from foreign support have made womens empowerment a priority as a democratic fac ade and have appointed elite women to public positions as window dressing for the regime.63 This the report links especially to the post-9/11 period, when a perceptible concentration of interest in women appeared in the West.64 Nevertheless, the report insists that womens movements in the Arab world have been forged in relation to and can only work in equal partnership with the transnational womens movement. Specifically, it notes, there is collaboration, largely beneficial, between the struggle for womens emancipation in the Arab countries as a liberating orientation in Arab society and womens movements around the world, including in the West. The efforts of international organizations are of special importance in this respect especially with regard to the agreements, resolutions, mechanisms and international activities aimed at protecting womens rights and equal treatment.65 Indeed, Arab feminists have participated in international meetings sponsored by the U.N., from Mexico City to Beijing, just as they had attended international congresses in the first half of the 20th century. They have sought to institutionalize the recommendations hammered out in international forums. When the conclusion of the report calls for empowerment and overcoming the legacy of backwardness by eliminating all forms of discrimination against women in Arab society, it admits freely that the borrowing here of exact language from CEDAW is not accidental. It is meant as a reminder that this national objective is, at the same time, an international objective that humanity as a whole seeks to achieve. It is also an Arab commitment towards the international community.66 Partnership with an international womens movement is very different from imperial imposition. There are two problems with this alliance, however. First, insofar as the international language is associated with development, the path local feminists have taken on the ground is NGO-ization. This has produced, in post-Oslo Palestine, for example, a globalized elite that Hanafi and Tabar characterize as urban, professionalized, politically moderate, and informed by global agendas.67 This elite favors a strategic feminist agenda geared toward equity rather than a practical one dedicated to the mundane needs of everyday women; such needs were met by the now marginalized traditional charitable societies. Islah Jad, a co-author of the AHDR 2005, argues further that the professionalization of those working on behalf of women has led to competition, hierarchies, a privileging of those who can interface with donors, and short-term projects that involve imported and apolitical tools like training workshops. Lost is the passionate voluntarism of political mobilization or commitment to grassroots collective action.68 Second, the problem with this alliance is that it leads Arab women to partake in the framing of womens problems in one particular way, a way that echoes the classic liberal feminist formulation opposing allegedly universal standards and local religio-cultural norms: how to deal with certain conflicts between international standards on the one hand and religious and cultural beliefs on the other.69 This reductive framing has been criticized from many quarters, especially for its implicit construction of international

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standards as somehow acultural or universal and for its reification and freezing of the religions and cultures of minorities and non-Westerners.70 The educated and socially concerned intellectuals who wrote the background papers and the final report are, in the end, part of an international community that uses a moderate, liberal language that opposes traditional culture to modern enlightenment, religious conservatism to secular progressiveness, and patriarchal culture to womens rights. The final recommendations of the report rely on this dialect. Besides enhancing employment opportunities and implementing legal reforms, one of three major recommendations is ending violence against women. The genealogy of the campaign against violence against women is an interesting one.71 Taking off in the 1990s, the campaign quickly gained ground, new language being written into international documents and special rapporteurs appointed.72 Critics have pointed out how this framing worked especially well in overcoming North/South divisions that had plagued the international womens movementbut at a price. Kapur, for example, has charged that it constructed Third World women as universal victim subjects.73 The antiviolence campaign also focused attention on the personal or domestic sphere and on gender relations rather than on international inequalities, conflicts, and global forces. In the context of this regional report, which rarely alludes to comparable problems in the rest of the world, the heavy focus on violence and issues of personal liberty suggest not just the legacy of backwardness, but also the workings of a brutal masculinity to which Arab women are particularly subject. It may be hard to guard against such a reading given the strong contemporary association in the West of Arabs with violence and terror. Highlighting such culturally marked forms of violence against women as honor crimes and female-genital cutting, although important, distracts us from the major forms of violence that women in the Arab world suffer, whether in Palestine, Lebanon, or Iraq. Moreover, the acceptance of such categories that are charged loci of transnational concern leaves uninterrogated the ways such categories are applied to complex realities in different settings and under different historical and political conditions, how they have been publicized and put into commercial circulation, and how discussions of them are structured by key binaries (tradition/modernity and civilized feminist enlightenment/uncivilized backward patriarchy) that have organized a century of discussions of Muslim societies, both for reformists within and critics outside.74 Honor crimes constitute an especially interesting locus for thinking about the transnational circulation of discourses on womens rights because, as Lama Abu-Odeh notes, the struggles against such crimes have allied local activists and activists involved in international human rights organizations; the language they use has trafficked back and forth so that it is impossible to disentangle the Muslim and Western.75 This language, like the adjacent languages of human development and neoliberal political economy, has wide international currency, but it is not the only political currency with value in the Arab world. If the language of safety nets and the private sector, of judicial and legislative reform, and of civil society and democracy has silenced, in this report, a Marxist language of class conflict and anti-imperialism, a nationalist language of development and underdevelopment, and the languages of land reform, state-sponsored enterprises, and welfare, or even popular resistance, as Hasso notes, the transnational feminist language deliberately borrowed from CEDAW and other documents as part of the partnership has crowded out both a more broadly political approach to violence

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and an alternative language of womens rights that has been emerging across the Muslim world, including the Arab countries.76 I turn to this now. In keeping with the culture of the cosmopolitan Arab intelligentsia, the report writers promote a largely secular vision. The AHDR 2005 devotes only ten substantive pages to religion in the report. Yet the two sectionsone on the Islamic religious heritage77 and the other on Islamist positions on womencarry the most contradictory voices in the whole report.78 The section on the traditional religious heritage, although defending Islam as a rich source for basic human principles, follows a strong feminist tradition that has emerged since the 1970s insisting that the spirit has been lost through patriarchal interpretations of the Quran. Gender inequality has come with the codification of Islamic jurisprudence.79 Concluding that the customs and requirements of the past will not satisfy the contemporary age, the report presents the potentially controversial argument that turning to international laws that eliminate all forms of discrimination between men and women in no way contradicts religious belief, since these laws are closer to the spirit of the religious texts.80 An explanation for this half-hearted accommodation of Islam that recommends independent interpretation is found on page 223, where the report admits that forcing the public to choose between international standards and their own religious beliefs and cultural traditions will create an insurmountable obstacle. As noted previously, the report generally posits a conflict between religion as now practiced and international standards of womens rights; in this, the report echoes liberal feminist thinkers who have constructed religion as an impediment to gender equality.81 Three alternative ways of thinking about Islam and womens lives are ignored. First, the report nowhere reflects the lively debates in the scholarship on the Muslim world about whether Islam and feminism are incompatible and whether, in fact, there is or could be such a thing as Islamic feminism.82 This body of work includes explorations of the textual sources and forms of authority that could be mobilized to argue for womens rights. (Related projects and NGOs devoted to womens equity and rights within Islamic frameworks are actually now enjoying foreign funding).83 Second, other scholars have asked historical questions about the ways feminism has been linked to the projects of modernity in the Middle East, thus excluding religious women and producing the polarizations that exist today.84 Third, there are those who look closely at the historical contexts and political impacts of Islamist womens movements, whether conceived as compatible with Western feminism, as represented in the Iranian journal Zanan,85 or fundamentally different, as with the gender jihad advocated by Lebanese Hizbollah women86 or Egyptian Islamists challenge to the simple value of equality or the ideal of freedom.87 Even those working in one Arab country are stunned by the complexity of feminist positions: Karam distinguishes among secular, Islamist, and Muslim feminists88 and shows the vast variety of feminist positions in Egypt; Hatem discusses distinctive feminist voices that do not polarize East and West, working either from within religious premises or analyzing the historical importance of such premises to early feminist debates in Egypt.89 Jad has analyzed shifts in the gender ideology of Hamas in Palestine since the 1990s due to the evolving power of Islamist women seeking to make space for themselves. This is a process, she argues, that in turn cannot be understood without acknowledging the irreversibility of previous achievements and the constant pressuring by secular feminists in Palestine. The important point, though, is the dynamism of the process.90

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These scholarly approaches suggest that we need to think not only about how religiously based arguments for womens rights might be structured differently from those of secular feminism, but also about how imbricated they are in a world produced by a century of debate and developments on the ground. None of the exciting scholarship on these matters is reflected in the report, which instead presents a static and narrow vision of the relationship between Islam and womens rights. The five-page section on Islamist women is the only part of the report that begins from the premise that a religious life and politics might be important and desirable for women and men. Instead of the general multicentury view of superseded Islamic heritage offered in the other section on religion, or the characterization in the otherwise nuanced chapter on the womens movement that the influence of the Islamic revival resonated with traditionalists in Arab society91 and contributed to a retreat in legal regulations formulated to serve womens interests,92 this section focuses squarely on Islamism in the contemporary period as an important political trend with various strands, only some of which are considered positive for the rise of women. Here a negative and rigid Salafism (which confines women to the domestic sphere, reproduction, and motherhood, although under pressure has recently engaged them in some militancy) is contrasted with a much more positive Muslim Brotherhood, which, according to the report, adopts a principled position in support of womens political rights and fosters independent interpretation.93 Reliant on the distinctive position of the outspoken Egyptian intellectual Heba Raouf Ezzat, the report offers a bold synthesis of the liberal political language of democracy and civil society and an Islamist conception of a desirable Islamic society. The report here advocates escape from the constraints of the Islamic-secular dichotomy and challenges Islamists to develop an Islamic alternative that can coexist with differing or opposing trends and advance womens position forcefully in discourse and practice not as a result of, but as one of the conditions for, building the Islamic society that they desire.94 Although groundbreaking in relation to earlier Arab human development reports, this inclusion of discussion of the Islamic trend is limitednot only by its normative and formalistic contrast between Salafis and Muslim Brothers and by the absence of the complexities feminist scholars have been exploring but also finally by the absence of any serious consideration of everyday religiosity among women in the region. In the opening, the documents tone is somewhat sympathetic and inviting to new interpretations, as if recognizing the inevitable appeal and probable political success of Islamist politics; in other places, though, it is more hostile, sometimes interpreting Islamism positively and sometimes as a setback for womens rights. One presumes this reflects strong and irresolvable differences among the authors. In general, the alternative language of Islamic piety that has a great deal of currency among ordinary women across the Arab world is dismissed because the intelligentsia involved in the AHDR 2005 are so staunchly secular. The fact that for a majority of nonelite Muslim women across the Arab world being a good Muslim is a moral ideal or that their dignity as humans and women has a good deal to do with their sense of themselves as good Muslimswhatever they think of formal groups or political Islamis given no weight at all. Based on my own research, I suggest that the reports ambivalence about religion (and its unqualified endorsement of feminism) will find no more popular favor today than did the state socialist reforms whose demise the report attributes to popular resistance.

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C O N C L U S IO N

This analysis of the AHDR 2005 opens by noting that the international circulation of discourses on Middle Eastern and Muslim women poses complex dilemmas for those who are concerned about these womens lives. The report, which promotes some courageous and politically worthy goals that threaten the status quo in many Arab regimes and challenge some foreign interventions, is nevertheless caught up in a specific set of international institutions and networks and deploys a particular transnational language, with problematic implications and uncertain effects. In painting a negative picture of womens rights and lives in the Middle East that attributes shortcomings primarily to cultural and religious factors, the report does little to combat the pathologizing of Middle Eastern cultures so rife in the international arena. It thus lends itself to being appropriateddespite its best intentionsto affirm the backwardness of the region. The reformist document, much like Qasim Amins tract on womens emancipation a century ago, may find itself fodder for antipathetic projects.95 It is not clear how one can avoid such appropriations, but a more comparative perspective on womens rights issues as well as a more global analysis of the forces that affect women locally might go some way toward subverting such appropriations. Another aspect of the report that compromises its potential impact is the way it reflects so strongly the values and experiences of the urban, professional middle class. These intersect with liberal feminism. The representations of womens lives and the solutions offered are based on particular assumptions about what constitutes progress and modernity, both considered good. In advocating education, employment, and separation from family as keys to womens advancement, the report reproduces the ideology of modernization, in turn confirming the superiority of middle-class values. It mentions quality in education and employment and the economics of both only in passing; it does not dwell on the downsides of poor education and waged labor. The report does not even consider the possibility that being formed by family systems might be economically necessary and emotionally positive. In failing to recognize the circumstances of the urban and rural poor and in denigrating alternative values they hold in their everyday lives, the report weakens its claims to solidarity with women in the Arab world and renders somewhat unrealistic its recommendations. Finally, the reports liberal framework and language, borrowed from the world of international human rights, transnational feminism, and human development, may lead to its marginalization within the Arab world. By completely sidelining the vibrant contemporary alternative language of political economy and imperialism and by giving little space to social movements or collective resistance and struggles over power, the report eschews radical solutions. By slighting a religious language, the report forfeits the wide popularity that attaches to an Islamic vision today. From a more serious standpoint, this framework limits the kinds of solutions offered, with moderate and gradual reform seen as the only option. Will the international liberal political discourse of the AHDR 2005 undermine its advocacy of womens rights, or is this the only viable language for arguing for womens rights and advancement? These are the tough questions facing anyone concerned with the rise of women in the Arab world and the relationship between transnational and local feminisms.

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Authors Note: I am grateful to Soraya Altorki, Lisa Anderson, Sheila Carapico, Christine Dennaoui, and four perceptive IJMES reviewers for extremely helpful comments; to my feminist reading group for their general encouragement and their dissatisfaction with an early version; to the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown for giving me the first occasion to present these ideas; to Toni Sethi for encouraging me to organize a forum on the AHDR 2005 at Columbia University; to Frances Hasso, Fida Adely, and Azza Karam for graciously participating in it; to Maryum Saifee, Page Jackson, and Vina Tran at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Middle East Institute for their help; and to Mona Soleiman for research assistance. A fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies gave me time to work on this article, which is part of a larger research project on Muslim womens rights in an international frame that I have been pursuing as a 2007 Carnegie Scholar. The statements made and views expressed here are solely the responsibility of the author. 1 United Nations Development Programme, Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World (New York: Regional Bureau of Arab States, cosponsored with the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development and the Arab Gulf Programme for United Nations Organizations, 2006). Please see the overview in this issue. Lila Abu-Lughod, Frances S. Hasso, and Fida J. Adely contributed to the following background note. The AHDR 2005, published online in Arabic and English in December 2006, is the last volume in a four-part series focused on development in Arab-identified states and territories. A research and policy document as well as visionary political statement, this 230-page report (plus eighty pages of charts, statistics, and references) was produced over several years through the research, writing, and editing of over seventy-five individuals from the Arab world, including some of its most prominent social researchers and feminists. In the 1980s, after a decades-long emphasis on economic growth as the primary engine for development, a number of prominent economists and development practitioners heralded a new era in the conceptualization of development as primarily a human endeavor with improved life chances and quality of life as the proper end. Thus was coined the term human development, followed by subsequent efforts to delineate the essential dimensions of human development and the appropriate measures of a development endeavor that no longer had growth (and, more narrowly, increased income) as its primary indicator but now sought to measure human ends, capabilities, and opportunities. The global human development report, launched by the UNDP in 1990, put forth new measures in the form of a human development index for capturing this vision. This initial report was followed annually by a new global human development report, each new release grappling with a new dimension of human development, with topics ranging from gender to democracy to technology and human rights. The UNDPs Human Development Report Office maintains a website (http://hdr.undp.org/) with information about the global reports as well as national human development reports that have been developed by select countries. The AHDRs were produced under the auspices of and governed by the UNDP. The first, the ADHR 2002, presents and comparatively analyzes various indicators in Arab states and highlights three major deficits hindering human development that are addressed in depth in the volumes that follow: Building a Knowledge Society (2003), Towards Freedom in the Arab World (2004), and Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World (2005). 2 The long history of internationalism in Arab womens movements has been studied by many. For Egypt see, for example, Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), and Cynthia Nelson, Satyagraha: Ghandis Influence on an Egyptian Feminist, in Pioneering Feminist Anthropology in Egypt, ed. Martina Rieker, Cairo Papers in Social Science 28 (2005): 11934. Also see the special issue on Early Twentieth Century Middle Eastern Feminisms, Nationalisms, and Transnationalisms, Journal of Middle East Womens Studies 4, no. 1 (2008). 3 UNDP, AHDR 2005. 4 Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986/2000); Writing Womens Worlds (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993/2008); Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 5 For more on these questions, see Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? American Anthropologist 104 (2002): 78390; The Debate about Gender, Religion, and Rights:

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Thoughts of a Middle East Anthropologist, Publication of the Modern Language Association 121 (2006): 162130; and The Scandal of Honor Crimes (unpublished manuscript). 6 Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 102, 177. 7 Talal Asad, The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology, in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986): 14164. 8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community (London: Verso, 1991). 9 I intend to research the process of making the report for a future study. Moreover, I have consulted only the English version thus far. 10 AHDR 2005, 102. 11 For an excellent example of the way such negative portrayals picked up by the Western press need to be interrogated, see Eugene Rogans exercise in systematic doubt about the way an earlier AHDR used the state of Arab publishing and translating to index a knowledge deficit. Eugene Rogan, Arab Books and Human Development, Arab Studies Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2004): 6779. 12 Center for American Women and Politics: Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu (accessed 17 August 2007). 13 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 96. 14 Ibid., 6. 15 Ibid., 131. 16 Ibid., 6. 17 Ibid., 10. 18 Abu-Lughod, The Debate About Gender and Writing Womens Worlds; Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Multiculturalism and Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence; Leti Volpp, Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 12 (2000): 89116; Leti Volpp, Feminism Versus Multiculturalism, Columbia Law Review 101 (2001): 1181218. 19 Freedom House, Womens Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Citizenship and Justice, 14 October 2005, http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=383&report=56 (accessed 9 October 2007). 20 Fida J. Adely, Educating Women for Development: The Arab Human Development Report 2005 and the Problem with Womens Choices, in International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 105122 (this issue). 21 For elaboration, see Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood, chap. 3. 22 For more on the link between womens education and ideals of modernity, see, among others, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Educating the Iranian Housewife, in Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women; Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001). 23 Abu-Lughod, Writing Womens Worlds, 20542. 24 Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood, 81108. 25 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 119. 26 Ibid., 65. 27 Pradeep Panda and Bina Agarwal, Marital Violence, Human Development and Womens Property Status in India, World Development 33 (2005): 82350. 28 For example, see Joan Williams, Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 29 Homa Hoodfar, Between Marriage and the Market (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997). 30 Roksana Bahramitash, Myths and Realities of the Impact of Political Islam on Women, Development in Practice 14 (2004): 50820. 31 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 167. 32 Ibid., 168. 33 Martha Nussbaum, Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings, in Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 61104. 34 Ibid., 85. 35 Mounira Charrad, States and Womens Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001). 36 See Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments and The Scandal of Honor Crimes.

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37 Kamran 38 Suad

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Asdar Ali, Planning the Family in Egypt (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2002). Joseph, ed., Intimate Selving in Arab Families: Gender, Self, Identity (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999). 39 Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997); Friedrich Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, rev. ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1972); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977) and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1978); Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). 40 Deniz Kandiyoti, Bargaining with Patriarchy, Gender and Society 2 (1988): 27490. 41 Nussbaum and Glover, Women Culture and Development. 42 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 179. 43 Ibid., 230. 44 Ibid., 225. 45 Ibid., 92. 46 Ibid., 60. 47 Ibid. The report suggests that the Arab world needs to support economic growth (p. 225), but its main critique of the region is only that it is dominated by rentier economies (p. 20). 48 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 168. 49 Asef Bayat, Transforming the Arab World: The Arab Human Development Report and the Politics of Change, Development and Change 36 (2005): 1225237. 50 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 229. 51 Ibid., 14362. 52 Ibid., 149. 53 Ibid., 152. 54 Suad Joseph, Elite Strategies for State Building, and Maxine Molyneux, The Law, the State and Socialist Policies with Regard to Women: The Case of the Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen, in Women, Islam, and the State, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1991); Mervat Hatem, Economic and Political Liberalization in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism, International Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (1992): 23151. 55 Joseph, Elite Strategies for State Building, 179. 56 See also Nadje Al-Ali, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (London: Zed Books, 2007). 57 Molyneux, The Law, the State, and Socialist Policies. 58 Laura Bier, From Mothers of the Nation to Daughters of the State: Gender, Citizenship and the Politics of Inclusion in Egypt, 19451967 (PhD diss., New York University, 2006). For a study of the 19th- and early 20th-century role of familial politics in the development of modern Egypt, see Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt 18051923 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005). 59 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 124. 60 Ibid., 126. 61 The report calls for extensive legal and institutional changes aimed at bringing national legislation in line with CEDAW. UNDP, AHDR 2005, 22. 62 Ibid., 61. 63 Ibid., 65, 213. 64 Ibid., 212. 65 Ibid., 61. 66 Ibid., 226. 67 Sari Hanafi and Linda Tabar, The Emergence of a Palestinian Globalized Elite: Donors, International Organizations and Local NGOs (Jerusalem: Institute of Palestine Studies and Muwatin, Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, 2005). 68 Islah Jad, The NGO-isation of Arab Womens Movements, International Development Studies Bulletin 35, no. 4 (2004): 3442. 69 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 222. 70 Abu-Lughod, The Debate about Gender, Religion, and Rights; Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence; Volpp, Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior and Feminism Versus Multiculuralism. 71 Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence.

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Conners, United Nations Approaches to Crimes of Honour, in Honour: Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence against Women, ed. Lynn Welchmann and Sara Hossain (London: Zed Books, 2005), 2241; Arvonne Fraser, Becoming Human: the Origins and Development of Womens Human Rights, in Women, Gender and Human Rights, ed. Marjorie Agosin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 1564. 73 Ratna Kapur, The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the Native Subject in International/Post-colonial Feminist Legal Politics, Harvard Human Rights Journal 15 (2002): 137. 74 Abu-Lughod, The Scandal of Honor Crimes. 75 Lama Abu-Odeh, Honor: Crimes of, in Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005), 225. This is so especially in immigrant contexts, even whenas Volpps unraveling of the strange case of Tina Isa in 1989 in New Jersey reveals and Katherine Ewings book on Turkish immigrants to Germany describesthe actual motives for particular incidents may be other than cultural or honor based. See Leti Volpp, Disappearing Acts: On Gendered Violence, Pathological Cultures, and Civil Society, Publication of the Modern Language Association 121 (2006): 1631638; Katherine Ewing, Stolen Honor (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008). 76 Frances S. Hasso, Empowering Governmentalities rather than Women: The Arab Human Development Report 2005 and Western Development Logics, International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 6382 (this issue). 77 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 14347. 78 Ibid., 20812. 79 For a range of approaches, see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Azizah Al-Hibri, Muslim Womens Rights in the Global Village, Journal of Law and Religion 37 (20002001): 3766; Judith Tucker, In the House of the Law (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000). 80 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 147. 81 Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). 82 For an important discussion of human rights and sharia, see Naz Modirzadeh, Taking Islamic Law Seriously: INGOs and the Battle for Muslim Hearts and Minds, Harvard Human Rights Journal 19 (2006): 191233. 83 For examples of the approach, see Asma Barlas, Globalizing Equality: Muslim Women, Theology, and Feminism, and Zainah Anwar, Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Womens Rights, in On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era, ed. F. Nouraie-Simone (New York: Feminist Press, 2005): 91110, 23347; Azizah Al-Hibri, Deconstructing Patriarchal Jurisprudence in Islamic Law in Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader, ed. Angela Davis (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 22130. For projects, consider the Malaysian NGO Sisters in Islam, which has support from the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Institute for Peace, while the ambitious new Womens Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity has support from everything from the Global Fund for Women to major foundations including Ford, Luce, and Ms, http://www.asmasociety.org/wise/ (accessed 22 February 2008). 84 Afsaneh Najmabadi, (Un)Veiling Feminism, Social Text 64 (2000): 2945. 85 Najmabadi, Feminism in an Islamic Republic, in Islam, Gender, and Social Change, ed. Yvonne Haddad and John Esposito (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5979. 86 Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shii Lebanon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). 87 Heba Raouf Ezzat, Political Reflections on the Question of Equality, in Islam and Equality: Debating the Future of Womens and Minority Rights in the Middle East and North Africa (New York: Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 1999): 17584, appendix II; Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). 88 Azza Karam, Women, Islamisms and the State (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998). 89 Mervat Hatem discusses the writings of Omaima Abou Bakr and Hoda Elsadda in In the Eye of the Storm: Islamic Societies and Muslim Women in Globalization Discourses, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26 (2006): 2235. 90 Islah Jad, Between Religion and Secularism: Islamist Women of Hamas, in On Shifting Ground, 17298. 91 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 128.

72 Jane

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92 Ibid., 93 Ibid.,

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123. 208. 94 Ibid., 211. 95 Amins condemnation of loveless marriage was cited at the turn of the last century by Protestant missionaries as corroboration of their stance on the evils of Islam for women. Annie Van Sommer and Samuel M. Zwemer, eds., Our Moslem Sisters (New York: F. H. Revell Company, 1907); Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women.