Int. J. Middle East Stud. 41 (2009), 83–103. Printed in the United States of Americadoi: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 EI 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 BH U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T R E P O R T 2005 1

The ethical and political dilemmas posed by the construction and international circulationof discourses on women’s 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 de-velopment projects devoted to empowering them. In the past fifteen years or so, througha series of international conferences and the efforts of feminist activists, women’s rightshave 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 appropriatearena of women’s rights work has been redefined from the national to the international.

It is ironic that this achievement may be shoring up arguments for foreign interven-tions that have complex and sometimes dangerous consequences for women in varioussocieties in the Muslim world. Is there a way to make the case for the rights andempowerment of women in the Middle East or the Muslim world in ways that do notbecome grounds for arguments about the “clash of civilizations” and their associatedpolitical, economic, and military agendas? What are the regional consequences of thenew internationalism of women’s rights?2 Finally, must this transnationalism dictate thelanguage in which rights are framed today?

These large questions that should interest any scholar of the Middle East lend aparticular cast to regional efforts to address women’s rights and status. The Arab HumanDevelopment Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World representsan extraordinary contemporary effort by Arab intellectuals and activists to assess theproblems women face in this region and to articulate a vision for a better future.3 Thisessay will address three problems with this landmark report as a means of reflecting ona broader set of questions about the international circulation of political discourses onwomen’s rights and empowerment in the early 21st century. As an anthropologist whohas done ethnographic research over the past thirty years in a number of communitiesin one Arab country (Egypt)4 and as a scholar interested in the way feminism works inan international sphere, both historically and in the present, I responded to this reportwith 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 Departmentof 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 women’s lives and opportunities in theregion, and disappointment in the political limitations of the intellectual framework andlanguage it used and in the prejudices that shape its analyses of women’s everyday lives.5

In her multisited ethnographic study of the U.N.-based transnational movement inthe 1990s against gender violence, Sally Engle Merry argues persuasively that theinternational language of women’s human rights is cultural—it is forged in the deterrito-rialized social contexts of international meetings where documents are produced, and itreflects the values of a secular global modernity, undergirded by concepts of autonomy,individualism, and equality.6 Her study of the production and application of generalU.N. instruments such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimi-nation against Women (CEDAW) and the platforms of the international conferences onwomen (e.g., Beijing Platform, Beijing Plus Five) reveals that the social networks andinternational bodies through which the dominant liberal definition of women’s rights ispromoted 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 reportis directed at governments and civil society in only one region and was producedby intellectuals, social scientists, and development experts from the region. It is thusconceived of primarily as an internal document for the “imagined community” of Arabnations, although its cosmopolitan authors, sponsorship by the U.N. Development Pro-gramme (UNDP), and generic similarity to other human development reports give it aninevitable international context.8 My reading of the AHDR 2005 on women examineshow a particular international or transnational dialect, with its attendant assumptionsand politics, has come to have currency among elites in the Arab region, leading to aparticular—and to an anthropologist like me, problematic—framing of Arab women’sissues. 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 myreading to the textual.9

In many ways, the report is commendable. It is rich with information and includesa number of excellent chapters or subsections. As with any document of collectiveauthorship, 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 toothers. Among the report’s noteworthy overall strengths are that it strategically links theadvancement of women to that of men and of society as a whole; argues for importantlegal and political reforms; paints an optimistic picture of a widely desired future;condemns particularly egregious violations of women’s rights, such as the abuse ofinternational domestic workers; and draws attention to some of the hardest struggleslocal women face. Their health needs are particularly pressing, but the report alsodescribes unflinchingly the inordinate burdens imposed on women by the absence ofsecurity and the prevalence of violence and surveillance in the region, whether due tothe Israeli occupation in Palestine, the U.S. and British occupation of Iraq, the “war onterror,” or the authoritarianism of local regimes that crush political opposition.

Recognizing much value in the report, I turn now to more troubling aspects of theframing and findings, organizing the analysis around three basic questions. First, a reportlike this enters a politically charged and historically particular international context ofglobal 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 wasuncomfortable with what seemed to be a cosmopolitan or urban middle-class perspectiveon women’s lives, aspirations, and everyday conditions. How does this perspective affectthe report’s analyses and prescriptions? Third, how might the report’s reliance on aparticular international language of women’s rights and the dominant political paradigmsthis dialect indexes—whether modernization, human development, or (neo)liberalism—on the one hand color its representation of modern Arab societies and history? On theother hand, how might it foreclose certain understandings of women’s problems in theregion, 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 innoting the external context in which pressures for reform and women’s empowermenthave become a focus in the Arab world and noting the influence of Western ideasabout women’s liberation and Orientalist representations of the region.10 Both in itsconstruction and its effects, however, the AHDR 2005 has been taken up as evidenceof the pathology of Arab gender culture, just as its predecessor reports were eagerlyseized upon by an international community as confirmation of the backwardness of theArab world.11 Even though the report gestures occasionally to the widespread natureof gender discrimination and inequality, its exclusive focus on the Arab world andthe absence of a systematically comparative perspective create the distinct impressionthat the situation for women in the Arab world, a homogenized group, is uniquelybad.

Yet feminist scholars and activists in various parts of the world are concerned aboutproblems similar to those detailed in the report: domestic violence, epidemics of diabetesand obesity, low representation of women in government, absence of leadership in thecorporate world, and discrimination in the workplace. Sixteen percent of representativesin the U.S. Congress are women, a figure not so radically different from the percentagesin certain countries of the Arab world.12 The report aggregates the figures to conclude thatonly ten percent of parliamentary representatives are women, but it neither distinguishesamong countries nor points out that the number is higher in countries such as Tunisia andIraq than it is in the United States.13 By continually pointing to gender inequalities in theArab world without offering a comparative perspective, the AHDR 2005 subliminallyreinforces 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 weneed in every case to examine closely the way figures were calculated and the skewinggenerated by averaging together statistics from countries with vast disparities in wealth,welfare, forms of government, and population.

To their credit, the report’s writers are aware of the density of foreign concern withArab women’s issues. The report also tries to anticipate local accusations about foreignmeddling and hostile attempts to discredit the project of women’s empowerment bylabeling 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 thisage.”14 It credits the global discourse about women with helping “Arab women’s effortsto bring laws and national legislative initiatives into line with universal objectives” aswell as providing “support and backing through networking.”15 Yet such observationsdo not absolve us of the responsibility of examining the implications of the long historyof “Western” interest in “Eastern” women. The perspective and politics embedded in thereport’s project of fostering a new “Arab renaissance”—based on the 19th-century Arabrenaissance, described as “positively influenced by the best human accomplishments ofthe prevailing Western civilization”16—alert us to the inescapable imbrication of culturalor civilizational discourse and women’s rights in the Arab world.

The AHDR 2005 in fact contributes strongly to civilizational discourse by attributinga significant role to Arab and Islamic culture in its diagnosis of gender inequality. In theexecutive summary on “Levels of Well Being,” for instance, six paragraphs are devotedto violence against women as part of “the impairment of personal liberty,” and yet onlya single, short paragraph considers the relationship between the spread of poverty andthe political, economic, and social disempowerment of women.17 The sensationaliststandbys 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 partof the world. As feminist scholars have recently shown, there is a powerful transnationalfeminist discourse about the antagonism between culture and rights that ossifies culture,ignores history and politics, and contributes to the “othering” of distant or minoritygroups.18 In focusing so heavily on culture while failing to be comparative and critical,this report follows that pattern—and thus produces an Arab world that is the negativefoil for an enlightened and allegedly noncultural modern West.

The paradox here is that the very existence of the report contributes to a negativerepresentation of the position of Arab women even while it indexes the influence andintellectual strength of professional Arab women and feminists. About what other regionof the world would a whole report, many years in the making and employing some ofits best minds, be devoted to women’s rights as one of the major problems facingthe region, alongside deficits of knowledge, freedom, and good governance? Yet howdoes the empirical excess of a weighty report reinforce the idea that the Arab worldis a place peculiarly deficient in terms of women’s lives? Women in other parts of theworld surely face considerable problems as well, some of which are far less prevalentin the Arab world: sex trafficking, sweatshop exploitation, HIV/AIDS, eating disorders,substance abuse, famine, the feminization of poverty, and violence, both domestic andgenocidal.

Just one year earlier, another major survey of the (dire) status of women in the MiddleEast was published—again, with no counterpart for other world regions: “Women’sRights in the Middle East and North Africa: Citizenship and Justice,” a 2005 reportsponsored by Freedom House, the neoconservative U.S. organization.19 These reportsexist alongside recent reports by the World Bank (which, thanks to the dedicated work offeminists, has made gender central to its efforts and thus has produced reports on genderissues for many other regions as well). There seems to be an unfortunate convergencebetween feminist concerns, regional and foreign, and a larger political and ideologicalagenda for the region. The AHDR 2005 falls into that awkward nexus, whatever theintentions and political loyalties of its authors.

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Many parts of the report are detailed, thoughtful, politically courageous, and impor-tant. However, the content is different from the overall effect, given that most peoplewill not read the report carefully and that there already exists a geopolitical and culturalclimate for any discussion of the Middle East. It is inevitable, given this context, thatwhatever the motivations of the report’s contributors—and one presumes that these areto encourage an Arab audience to undertake social and political reform—the AHDR2005 will be appropriated internationally to affirm prevailing stereotypes of Arab andMuslim women as oppressed and suffering from a uniquely patriarchal social order. Weneed only look at Time magazine’s coverage of the launch of the report in its 7 December2006 issue. The headline reads, “What’s Holding Back Arab Women?” It is telling thatthis article on a report about empowering women in the Arab world is accompaniedby a photograph of black-clad Iranian women in school. The image of the oppressedundifferentiated 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 RY D AY

If the politics of representation in an international field place the AHDR 2005 in anawkward position, the politics of class and the position of the cosmopolitan Arab in-tellectuals who worked on the report account for some problems in its content. Thesecond part of my critique stems from my long-term involvement in particular subalterncommunities in the Arab world. What can an anthropologist’s ethnographic knowledgeof life on the ground in a number of particular communities tell us about the three keysto women’s empowerment the report proposes: education, employment, and individualrights?

Adely analyzes elsewhere the way the report misrepresents the status of women’saccess to education in the Arab world.20 From my own fieldwork over the past fifteenyears or so in an Upper Egyptian village, it is clear that it is not lack of access toeducation but the poor quality of public education that is so problematic for girls, just asit is for boys.21 This poor quality and the burdensome expenses associated with it are theresults 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 Arabintelligentsia who came of age in the eras of modernization and developmentalism. Theyview education as the answer to overcoming backwardness and consider women’s edu-cation a key to emancipation and individualism.22 They confuse literacy with creativityand knowledge, like the high school educated bedouin girl I write about in WritingWomen’s Worlds23 who had come to denigrate the extraordinary skills and knowledgethat her unschooled mothers and aunts had in weaving, tent making, animal husbandry,or poetry. Like the urban, professional Egyptian television writers and researchers Idiscuss in Dramas of Nationhood,24 they are patronizing toward those who are “lackingin awareness”; they see themselves—the educated intelligentsia—as enlightened leaderswhose duty it is to bring the masses out of darkness. According to the AHDR 2005, theheroes 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 particularlydisturbing 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 Themany articulate, creative, witty, and sharp uneducated women I have known in ruralEgypt (granted living in less dire circumstances than those deplored in the report forthe poorest and most marginal groups)—women who are creative poets and storytellers,astute moral reasoners, energetic participants in their community’s social and politicalaffairs, and quick to bristle at infringements of their customary or religious rights—wouldbe 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 Arabworld, according to the AHDR 2005. Both for liberal feminists and for those pushingfor the human capabilities approach (the framework adopted for much of the report),employment is considered crucial for women’s advancement and capacity to live a goodlife. Again, both from the work of critical feminist economists and my experience inone Egyptian village, we have reason to ask if the report is out of touch with dailyrealities for many in the Arab world. U.S. feminist scholarship has questioned workfor wages as a panacea. Feminist economists have argued that we need to measurewomen’s economic contribution differently (and the AHDR 2005 concurs).26 Everyoneagrees that economic resources under women’s control are critical to their standing, butemployment, as Panda and Agarwal have shown, is not the same thing as property orcontrol of economic resources.27

The fantasy about the magical value of work for women is a middle-class one—itpresumes that jobs are well paid and fulfilling (as they may be, for the most part, forprofessionals, despite the nearly universal double burden women carry, with houseworkand child care remaining largely their responsibility). However, one must ask if workthat is badly paid, back breaking, exploitative, or boring liberates women. If employersor families do not provide childcare, is it economically viable for women to work? If thewages are low, are the cost of transport, the absence of women’s labor in maintainingthe household, and vulnerability to harassment worth it? These are basic questions thatcan be asked about the Arab world, and everywhere, without even introducing moreradical feminist critiques of the way caring work is devalued in the segregated labormarket such that, for example, someone in the United States who parks cars in a garageis paid more than a daycare worker.28 Which form of labor requires more skills? Whoseresponsibilities are more serious?

In relation to women’s employment in the Arab world, one of the most interestingstudies is Homa Hoodfar’s ethnography of the urban poor in Cairo, based on fieldworkin the late 1980s. In Between Marriage and the Market, she argues persuasively thatit 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, womencannot 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 makeseconomic sense because the household depends so much on “saving money,” not justearning it. Women save money by standing in line to get cheaper goods, dealing withthe 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 withvarious problems, and even for marriage arrangements. Moreover, staying at home allowswomen 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 contributesto the appearance of conforming to conservative gender ideals, something that mightenhance family status. In other words, Hoodfar shows that the impediments to women’swage work, at least among the urban poor in this one Arab country, are not culturalbut economic. Others who have studied women’s labor participation in the Middle Eastand noted its rapid increase in both the formal and informal economies under Islamicregimes argue that for explanations one must turn to economic crisis and a precedent inpolitical mobilization, not to Islam or cultural factors.30

From my recent fieldwork, I agree that both the motives for working before marriageand for giving up work after marriage are economic, the cultural obstacles gotten aroundfairly easily through a variety of strategies of dress and movement. Girls in the UpperEgyptian village in which I have been working have in the past decade and a half beenfinishing 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 workin an office or a small shop, or, in this area, for the Antiquities Organization, the largestlocal employer; they might run literacy classes or, if very fortunate, get teaching positionsin local schools. Their monthly wage ranges from 80 to 200 Egyptian pounds, U.S. $14–40 per month—not much, especially with prices skyrocketing, Egyptian currency losingvalue, and government subsidies being removed. The girls are working to help pay fortheir wedding trousseaus. It is difficult for these young women to work after marriage,though, especially once they have children. Who would prepare family meals? Whowould care for the children? Who would raise livestock as insurance against illness orbig expenses, not to mention providing milk and cheese? Who would boost householdincome through raising poultry?

Employment is not by its nature liberating. It must be of a certain quality to provideeconomic independence, to allow women to contribute adequately to the household, orto enhance women’s dignity and self-respect. The cultural norms against women movingabout in public may be one factor holding them back from employment, but these normsare not decisive. More crucial, ethnographic examples suggest, are the nature of thelabor market and women’s opportunities within it.

The third key to “the rise of women” in the Arab world proposed by the AHDR 2005is differentiation from family. This would indeed be a major social and cultural shift, onewhose roots in a common cosmopolitan language of development and rights, I argue,are particularly clear. Although occasionally praising women’s special contributions asmothers, the report represents the strength of familial ties as especially detrimental towomen. In the chapter on social structures, the “traditional” tribal kinship system iscondemned as “enshrining” male dominance.

The report’s assessment here of the family is both ideological and ahistorical. Onecan see the workings of specific cultural values when the text deplores “the absenceof a clear dividing line between the personal and the familial”31 and states that theweakest 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 liberalassumptions made explicit and universalized by philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who hasattempted to define a good or flourishing life in terms of human capabilities that socialpolicy should foster.33 One key to a good life, she argues, is “being able to live one’s ownlife and nobody else’s. This means having certain guarantees of noninterference with

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certain choices that are especially personal and definitive of selfhood, such as choicesregarding marriage, childbearing, sexual expression, speech, and employment.”34

One can also see the ahistoricism in this chapter of the report, which strangelyattributes contemporary family dynamics and control over women to a timeless Araborigin and then follows with the story of the introduction of Islam. Most sophisticatedsocial analysts who write about gender and family look instead to transformations overthe centuries, especially in the 20th century, to consider the rise and fall of empires,the impact of colonialism or capitalist agriculture and industrialization, the gender-ing of nationalism, the requirements of state-building projects, and the entailments ofglobalization.

At the heart of any good analysis of “the Arab family” should be crucial differences ofclass, as well as attention to the 20th-century histories of the different Arab states—theireconomies and ideologies of development, the kinds of accommodations they made withfactions in the sphere of family law. Such dynamics are well studied by comparativistslike 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 aproblem for women than for men and whether, indeed, individualism should be enshrinedas the ultimate value.36 In that community in the 1980s, men did not more clearly drawa line between the personal and the familial than women. Recent visits suggest this isstill the case, whether in terms of elections or social relations.

This section of the report fails to appreciate the strong positive sentiments peoplein most communities in the Arab world (and perhaps elsewhere) have toward theirfamilies, even when belonging to families places constraints on them. It also ignores theeconomic necessity of joint family enterprises and the realities of household economieswhere many contribute toward the sustenance of the family. Moreover, it is blind tothe possibility that families might be, for good and ill, the very structures within whichindividuals conceive of themselves and realize themselves as individuals. Kamran AsdarAli’s study of state family planning in Egypt gives good evidence of how developmentdiscourse seeks to individualize its women subjects, misrecognizing the more relationalbases of women’s 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 callsthe “relational selves” fostered in Arab society.38 Many people, in the Arab world andelsewhere, view as morally abhorrent the atomization of individuals and loss of familysupport associated with advanced capitalism and the West—the very individualism thatis idealized by liberals and the AHDR 2005.

The patriarchal family has its problems, as a large and sophisticated feminist literaturehas explored. Yet it is not clear that “individualization” automatically enables womento realize equality or personal fulfillment. Theorizing about the dark side of the lib-eral value of individualism under capitalism from Engels on to Zaretsky, or about therise of disciplinary society, as described by Foucault, Donzelot, or Balibar, suggeststhat we be more cautious in our optimism.39 The persistence of gender inequality andgender violence in the modern West, where individual women in some classes areindeed 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 ap-preciate 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 familyties.

The unambiguous devaluation of family and valorization of the individual in this reportare in line with urban, professional middle-class values and experiences, in confluencewith liberal feminist discourse. This stance reveals the dominance in the report, asamong this class, of the ideology of modernization. As several decades of critique haveshown, the modernization paradigm that equates progress with cultural change towardsecular, modern individualism is shot through with values. It is insufficiently attentive tothe dynamism of culture and religion, the complexities of hegemony, and the profoundimpact of historical transformation. A language dominant in Euro-America and amongnational elites around the Third World can thus be seen as dictating many of the ideals andrecommendations of the AHDR 2005, whether about education, employment, or family.This language—or dialect, as I prefer to call it—has also structured the judgments sucheducated elites make about what they caricature as the social relations and cultural formsof 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 politicaldialect it deploys. In much of the report (although not all), one can detect the tell-taleinternational vocabulary of the liberal human development or capabilities framework41

alongside the neoliberal economic framework to which the concept of human devel-opment 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”language—there is no such thing. However, the particular hegemonic language used forthe 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 andreformist political solutions, never radical political or economic solutions. The reportpushes for a strong civil society and for legal reform, treating law as “an instrumentand expression of culture.”42 It argues that “women’s capacities are held back by anumber of cultural and social factors”43 and thus calls for attitudinal change: throughmore enlightened interpretations of Islam, better socialization and schooling, reform offamily law, and the development of “a culture of equal treatment and respect for humanrights” in the judiciary.44 The report advocates redistributing power in favor of civilsociety; it says little about redistributing wealth. Its main silences, however, are aboutcollective action and the strongest sociopolitical trend in the region: the religious revival.

The liberal language of human development and the neoliberal discourses of structuraladjustment and global markets define priorities and possibilities in this report. One findscalls for “social safety nets” rather than, say, projects of land reform. One finds passagesin which the report hedges on whether the erosion of the public sector has led togains in women’s participation in economic activity. Presumably as a consequence ofdisagreements among those involved in putting the report together, it concludes lamely,“Views differ. . . . ”45 Although structural adjustment is recognized not to have beenaccompanied by growth in the private-sector’s capacity to generate jobs for women,

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the language used to describe the growth of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) asa “safety net” fails to ask whether they can indeed provide the same support for themarginal that a state welfare system can for citizens. The AHDR 2005 simply reports,“NGOs expanded significantly and were encouraged to fill the gap, especially withregard 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 pol-icy regarding redistribution, wealth inequality, property, the market, production, poverty,social welfare, and the labor market, all of which fundamentally affect women. In otherwords, there is no hint of a marginalized but reemerging international language whose vo-cabulary includes exploitation, underdevelopment, injustice, or revolution and no ques-tioning 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 anemicallysuggests “income-generating projects that target families with school-age children.”47

To advocate development and the human-capabilities approach is to leave the forces ofglobal capital largely unquestioned, even though the report does note some of their worstentailments, such as the creation of new corrupt financial elites who have “harvested thegreater part of countries’ assets.”48

Furthermore, the liberal language of political reform dominates. The 2005 report, likethe previous three Arab human development reports, calls for “good governance.” Thisis hardly a controversial ideal. It also calls for freedom—an important value but also animpossibly loaded term that carries heavy ideological baggage, whether in antiterroristor anti-Communist rhetoric. As Bayat notes, its association with development comesfrom Amartya Sen, who links it to “expanding choice”—part of a neoliberal dialect.49

In privileging development, the report aligns itself with gradual change and nationalefforts. Yet the report is suffused with the characteristic neoliberal lack of faith in thestate and refusal to strengthen the public sector. For instance, the report suggests at onepoint 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 asa rival to government education.”50 It is not clear why the report does not demand thatgovernments invest in public education, given that all the countries in the developed worldhave governmental or state educational systems, albeit sometimes more decentralizedand 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 mostapparent in one sleight of hand in the report. In Chapter 6, “Culture,” the report skips overone the most crucial periods in modern Arab history for women’s access to education,the labor market, the political sphere, and legal rights—the keys, according to other partsof the report, to women’s empowerment.51 In a potted history of the stages of awarenessabout women’s issues in Arab society, this chapter begins with a period in which there wasa “realization of difference”; this is described as the early part of the 20th-century Arabrenaissance, in which “reform-minded political and intellectual elites recognized thatEuropean societies had specific features that accounted for their strength and progress,”among them ideas about women’s advancement.52 The narrative then inexplicably jumpsto the 1970s, leaving out the whole period of independence, national consolidation, andstate 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 thereigning paradigm for Arab governments and when international women’s conferencesand regional meetings leading up to them highlighted the need to do something aboutgender inequality.53

This history ignores precisely what feminist analyses of state building in the regionhave noted for Iraq, Yemen, or Egypt.54 Suad Joseph has shown how as part of itsstate-building strategy, the Iraqi elite focused on women in the 1970s because of theneed for labor and the desire to win the allegiance of the population away from kinshipand ethnic ties. The ruling Ba–th Party thus set up programs to mobilize women intostate-controlled agencies and unions,55 to socialize them politically through enhancingeducational access and literacy, to reform personal status laws to be more favorable towomen, and to extend services to working women, including on-site child care, freetransportation, and free health care.56 In a similar vein, in socialist South Yemen in the1970s and 1980s, fairly radical legal rights were extended to women by the state in linewith a Marxist ideology of promoting gender equality.57 In Egypt, it was under Nasser’s“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 majornew citizenship rights, even at the cost, as Bier and others suggest, of a loss of “politicalautonomy” and with no real challenge to the family.58 State feminism has been rightlycriticized for undermining the autonomy of independent women’s groups, but its legal,political, and economic contributions to changing the lives of women can hardly bedisputed.

I must interject that the chapter on the Arab women’s movement is much more accurateand detailed. It gives due credit to the women pioneers at the turn of the 20th century andacknowledges the projects of state feminism when, after national independence, women’sunions were incorporated into the ruling political parties and where national developmentand needs for both labor and literacy led to expanding women’s opportunities, despiteresidual understandings of women as primarily reproductive.59 In this middle periodfrom the 1950s to the 1970s, there was a quantum leap in consciousness about andsympathy for women’s issues and rights.60 Other parts of the report that promote thehuman development approach ignore this period, however, and surely do so because ofthe 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 reportimmediately invokes the flaws, mostly in the form of popular resistance to reforms. Ifthe report were truly interested in and aligned with the popular, however, it would be moresympathetic to Islamism, as will be discussed. That these elites, however visionary, maybe out of touch with the women they seek to benefit is apparent in their findings regardingCEDAW, which is foregrounded in the report as an international convention ratified byall the Arab states that should serve as a template and ideal for national legislation.61 TheAHDR 2005 includes a chart based on the public-opinion poll conducted for the reportin which it seems only eight percent of the respondents surveyed in the four countriescovered (Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan) said they were aware of CEDAW. Ofthose who knew about it, only half approved of its implementation in their country.

Which returns us to the most vexing issue—how a strong international languagewith its base in the West, a language largely confined to an educated, professional,cosmopolitan class that cannot imagine other ways of expressing humanity, getting

94 Lila Abu-Lughod

rights, and living a good life, affects the local construction of women’s needs, rights,and empowerment. In the first section, I alluded to the troubling intersection betweenimperial and feminist interests. The report, too, is properly suspicious of the politicalobjectives of dominant world powers and externally initiated reform initiatives.62 Itcharges that regimes that gain legitimacy from foreign support have made women’sempowerment a priority as a “democratic facade” and have appointed elite women topublic positions as “window dressing for the regime.”63 This the report links especially tothe post-9/11 period, “when a perceptible concentration of interest in women appeared”in the West.64

Nevertheless, the report insists that women’s movements in the Arab world havebeen forged in relation to and can only work in equal partnership with the transnationalwomen’s movement. “Specifically,” it notes, “there is collaboration, largely beneficial,between the struggle for women’s emancipation in the Arab countries as a liberatingorientation in Arab society and women’s movements around the world, including inthe West. The efforts of international organizations are of special importance in thisrespect especially with regard to the agreements, resolutions, mechanisms and inter-national activities aimed at protecting women’s rights and equal treatment.”65 Indeed,Arab feminists have participated in international meetings sponsored by the U.N., fromMexico City to Beijing, just as they had attended international congresses in the firsthalf of the 20th century. They have sought to institutionalize the recommendationshammered out in international forums. When the conclusion of the report calls forempowerment and overcoming “the legacy of backwardness” by “eliminating all formsof discrimination against women in Arab society,” it admits freely that the borrowinghere of exact language from CEDAW “is not accidental.” It is meant as “a reminderthat this national objective is, at the same time, an international objective that humanityas a whole seeks to achieve. It is also an Arab commitment towards the internationalcommunity.”66

Partnership with an international women’s movement is very different from imperialimposition. There are two problems with this alliance, however. First, insofar as theinternational language is associated with development, the path local feminists havetaken on the ground is “NGO-ization.” This has produced, in post-Oslo Palestine, forexample, a “globalized elite” that Hanafi and Tabar characterize as urban, profession-alized, politically moderate, and informed by global agendas.67 This elite favors astrategic feminist agenda geared toward equity rather than a practical one dedicated tothe 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 furtherthat 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 projectsthat involve imported and apolitical tools like training workshops. Lost is the passionatevoluntarism 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 theframing of women’s problems in one particular way, a way that echoes the classic liberalfeminist formulation opposing allegedly universal standards and local religio-culturalnorms: “how to deal with certain conflicts between international standards on the onehand and religious and cultural beliefs on the other.”69 This reductive framing has beencriticized from many quarters, especially for its implicit construction of international

Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 95

standards as somehow acultural or universal and for its reification and freezing of thereligions and cultures of minorities and non-Westerners.70 The educated and sociallyconcerned intellectuals who wrote the background papers and the final report are, inthe end, part of an international community that uses a moderate, liberal language thatopposes traditional culture to modern enlightenment, religious conservatism to secularprogressiveness, and patriarchal culture to women’s rights.

The final recommendations of the report rely on this dialect. Besides enhancingemployment opportunities and implementing legal reforms, one of three major recom-mendations is ending violence against women. The genealogy of the campaign againstviolence against women is an interesting one.71 Taking off in the 1990s, the campaignquickly gained ground, new language being written into international documents andspecial rapporteurs appointed.72 Critics have pointed out how this framing workedespecially well in overcoming North/South divisions that had plagued the internationalwomen’s movement—but at a price. Kapur, for example, has charged that it constructedThird World women as universal victim subjects.73 The antiviolence campaign alsofocused attention on the personal or domestic sphere and on gender relations ratherthan on international inequalities, conflicts, and global forces. In the context of thisregional 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 “legacyof backwardness,” but also the workings of a brutal masculinity to which Arab womenare particularly subject. It may be hard to guard against such a reading given the strongcontemporary association in the West of Arabs with violence and terror.

Highlighting such culturally marked forms of violence against women as honor crimesand female-genital cutting, although important, distracts us from the major forms of vi-olence 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 con-cern leaves uninterrogated the ways such categories are applied to complex realitiesin different settings and under different historical and political conditions, how theyhave been publicized and put into commercial circulation, and how discussions of themare structured by key binaries (tradition/modernity and civilized feminist enlighten-ment/uncivilized backward patriarchy) that have organized a century of discussions ofMuslim societies, both for reformists within and critics outside.74

Honor crimes constitute an especially interesting locus for thinking about the transna-tional circulation of discourses on women’s rights because, as Lama Abu-Odeh notes,the struggles against such crimes have allied local activists and activists involved ininternational human rights organizations; the language they use has “trafficked” backand forth so that it is impossible to disentangle the “Muslim” and “Western.”75 Thislanguage, like the adjacent languages of human development and neoliberal politicaleconomy, has wide international currency, but it is not the only political currency withvalue in the Arab world. If the language of safety nets and the private sector, of judicialand 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 ofdevelopment and underdevelopment, and the languages of land reform, state-sponsoredenterprises, and welfare, or even popular resistance, as Hasso notes, the transnationalfeminist language deliberately borrowed from CEDAW and other documents as part ofthe “partnership” has crowded out both a more broadly political approach to violence

96 Lila Abu-Lughod

and an alternative language of women’s rights that has been emerging across the Muslimworld, including the Arab countries.76 I turn to this now.

In keeping with the culture of the cosmopolitan Arab intelligentsia, the report writerspromote a largely secular vision. The AHDR 2005 devotes only ten substantive pages toreligion in the report. Yet the two sections—one on the Islamic religious heritage77 andthe other on Islamist positions on women—carry the most contradictory voices in thewhole report.78 The section on “the traditional religious heritage,” although defendingIslam as a rich source for basic human principles, follows a strong feminist tradition thathas emerged since the 1970s insisting that “the spirit” has been lost through patriarchalinterpretations of the Qur»an. Gender inequality has come with the codification of Islamicjurisprudence.79 Concluding that the “customs and requirements” of the past will notsatisfy the contemporary age, the report presents the potentially controversial argumentthat “turning to international laws that eliminate all forms of discrimination betweenmen and women in no way contradicts religious belief, since these laws are closer tothe spirit of the religious texts.”80 An explanation for this half-hearted accommodationof Islam that recommends “independent interpretation” is found on page 223, where thereport admits that “forcing the public to choose between international standards and theirown religious beliefs and cultural traditions will create an insurmountable obstacle.”

As noted previously, the report generally posits a conflict between religion as nowpracticed and international standards of women’s rights; in this, the report echoes liberalfeminist thinkers who have constructed religion as an impediment to gender equality.81

Three alternative ways of thinking about Islam and women’s lives are ignored. First, thereport nowhere reflects the lively debates in the scholarship on the Muslim world aboutwhether Islam and feminism are incompatible and whether, in fact, there is or couldbe such a thing as Islamic feminism.82 This body of work includes explorations of thetextual sources and forms of authority that could be mobilized to argue for women’srights. (Related projects and NGOs devoted to women’s equity and rights within Islamicframeworks are actually now enjoying foreign funding).83 Second, other scholars haveasked historical questions about the ways feminism has been linked to the projectsof modernity in the Middle East, thus excluding religious women and producing thepolarizations that exist today.84

Third, there are those who look closely at the historical contexts and political im-pacts of Islamist women’s movements, whether conceived as compatible with Westernfeminism, as represented in the Iranian journal Zanan,85 or fundamentally different,as with the “gender jihad” advocated by Lebanese Hizbollah women86 or EgyptianIslamists’ challenge to the simple value of equality or the ideal of freedom.87 Eventhose working in one Arab country are stunned by the complexity of feminist positions:Karam distinguishes among secular, Islamist, and Muslim feminists88 and shows thevast variety of feminist positions in Egypt; Hatem discusses distinctive feminist voicesthat do not polarize East and West, working either from within religious premises oranalyzing 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 dueto the evolving power of Islamist women seeking to make space for themselves. Thisis a process, she argues, that in turn cannot be understood without acknowledging theirreversibility of previous achievements and the constant pressuring by secular feministsin Palestine. The important point, though, is the dynamism of the process.90

Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 97

These scholarly approaches suggest that we need to think not only about how reli-giously based arguments for women’s rights might be structured differently from thoseof secular feminism, but also about how imbricated they are in a world produced by acentury of debate and developments on the ground. None of the exciting scholarship onthese matters is reflected in the report, which instead presents a static and narrow visionof the relationship between Islam and women’s rights.

The five-page section on Islamist women is the only part of the report that beginsfrom the premise that a religious life and politics might be important and desirable forwomen and men. Instead of the general multicentury view of superseded Islamic heritageoffered in the other section on religion, or the characterization in the otherwise nuancedchapter on the women’s movement that the influence of the Islamic revival “resonatedwith traditionalists in Arab society”91 and contributed to a “retreat in legal regulationsformulated to serve women’s interests,”92 this section focuses squarely on Islamism in thecontemporary period as an important political trend with various strands, only some ofwhich are considered positive for “the rise of women.” Here a negative and rigid Salafism(which confines women to the domestic sphere, reproduction, and motherhood, althoughunder pressure has recently engaged them in some militancy) is contrasted with a muchmore positive Muslim Brotherhood, which, according to the report, “adopts a principledposition in support of women’s political rights” and fosters independent interpretation.93

Reliant on the distinctive position of the outspoken Egyptian intellectual Heba RaoufEzzat, the report offers a bold synthesis of the liberal political language of democracyand civil society and an Islamist conception of a desirable Islamic society. The reporthere advocates “escape from the constraints of the ‘Islamic-secular’ dichotomy” andchallenges Islamists “to develop an Islamic alternative that can coexist with differingor opposing trends and advance women’s position forcefully in discourse and practicenot as a result of, but as one of the conditions for, building the Islamic society that theydesire.”94

Although groundbreaking in relation to earlier Arab human development reports,this inclusion of discussion of the Islamic trend is limited—not only by its normativeand formalistic contrast between Salafis and Muslim Brothers and by the absence of thecomplexities feminist scholars have been exploring but also finally by the absence of anyserious consideration of everyday religiosity among women in the region. In the opening,the document’s tone is somewhat sympathetic and inviting to new interpretations, as ifrecognizing the inevitable appeal and probable political success of Islamist politics;in other places, though, it is more hostile, sometimes interpreting Islamism positivelyand sometimes as a setback for women’s rights. One presumes this reflects strong andirresolvable differences among the authors. In general, the alternative language of Islamicpiety that has a great deal of currency among ordinary women across the Arab world isdismissed 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 agood Muslim is a moral ideal or that their dignity as humans and women has a gooddeal to do with their sense of themselves as good Muslims—whatever they think offormal groups or political Islam—is given no weight at all. Based on my own research,I suggest that the report’s ambivalence about religion (and its unqualified endorsementof feminism) will find no more popular favor today than did the state socialist reformswhose demise the report attributes to “popular resistance.”

98 Lila Abu-Lughod

C O N C L U S IO N

This analysis of the AHDR 2005 opens by noting that the international circulationof discourses on Middle Eastern and Muslim women poses complex dilemmas forthose who are concerned about these women’s lives. The report, which promotes somecourageous and politically worthy goals that threaten the status quo in many Arab regimesand challenge some foreign interventions, is nevertheless caught up in a specific set ofinternational institutions and networks and deploys a particular transnational language,with problematic implications and uncertain effects.

In painting a negative picture of women’s rights and lives in the Middle East thatattributes shortcomings primarily to cultural and religious factors, the report does littleto combat the “pathologizing” of Middle Eastern cultures so rife in the internationalarena. It thus lends itself to being appropriated—despite its best intentions—to affirmthe backwardness of the region. The reformist document, much like Qasim Amin’stract on women’s emancipation a century ago, may find itself fodder for antipatheticprojects.95 It is not clear how one can avoid such appropriations, but a more comparativeperspective on women’s rights issues as well as a more global analysis of the forces thataffect women locally might go some way toward subverting such appropriations.

Another aspect of the report that compromises its potential impact is the way itreflects so strongly the values and experiences of the urban, professional middle class.These intersect with liberal feminism. The representations of women’s lives and thesolutions offered are based on particular assumptions about what constitutes progress andmodernity, both considered good. In advocating education, employment, and separationfrom family as keys to women’s advancement, the report reproduces the ideology ofmodernization, in turn confirming the superiority of middle-class values. It mentionsquality in education and employment and the economics of both only in passing; it doesnot dwell on the downsides of poor education and waged labor. The report does not evenconsider the possibility that being formed by family systems might be economicallynecessary and emotionally positive. In failing to recognize the circumstances of theurban and rural poor and in denigrating alternative values they hold in their everydaylives, the report weakens its claims to solidarity with women in the Arab world andrenders somewhat unrealistic its recommendations.

Finally, the report’s liberal framework and language, borrowed from the world ofinternational human rights, transnational feminism, and human development, may leadto its marginalization within the Arab world. By completely sidelining the vibrantcontemporary alternative language of political economy and imperialism and by givinglittle space to social movements or collective resistance and struggles over power, thereport eschews radical solutions. By slighting a religious language, the report forfeits thewide 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 reformseen as the only option.

Will the international liberal political discourse of the AHDR 2005 undermine itsadvocacy of women’s rights, or is this the only viable language for arguing for women’srights and advancement? These are the tough questions facing anyone concerned with“the rise of women in the Arab world” and the relationship between transnational andlocal feminisms.

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N O T E S

Author’s Note: I am grateful to Soraya Altorki, Lisa Anderson, Sheila Carapico, Christine Dennaoui, andfour perceptive IJMES reviewers for extremely helpful comments; to my feminist reading group for theirgeneral encouragement and their dissatisfaction with an early version; to the Center for Contemporary ArabStudies at Georgetown for giving me the first occasion to present these ideas; to Toni Sethi for encouragingme to organize a forum on the AHDR 2005 at Columbia University; to Frances Hasso, Fida Adely, and AzzaKaram for graciously participating in it; to Maryum Saifee, Page Jackson, and Vina Tran at the Institute forResearch on Women and Gender and the Middle East Institute for their help; and to Mona Soleiman forresearch assistance. A fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies gave me time to work onthis article, which is part of a larger research project on Muslim women’s rights in an international frame thatI have been pursuing as a 2007 Carnegie Scholar. The statements made and views expressed here are solelythe responsibility of the author.

1United Nations Development Programme, Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise ofWomen in the Arab World (New York: Regional Bureau of Arab States, cosponsored with the Arab Fund forEconomic 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 tothe following background note.

The AHDR 2005, published online in Arabic and English in December 2006, is the last volume in a four-partseries focused on development in Arab-identified states and territories. A research and policy document as wellas 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 individualsfrom 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, anumber of prominent economists and development practitioners heralded a new era in the conceptualizationof development as primarily a human endeavor with improved life chances and quality of life as the properend. Thus was coined the term “human development,” followed by subsequent efforts to delineate the essentialdimensions of human development and the appropriate measures of a development endeavor that no longerhad “growth” (and, more narrowly, increased income) as its primary indicator but now sought to measurehuman ends, capabilities, and opportunities. The global human development report, launched by the UNDP in1990, put forth new measures in the form of a human development index for capturing this vision. This initialreport was followed annually by a new global human development report, each new release grappling witha new dimension of human development, with topics ranging from gender to democracy to technology andhuman rights. The UNDP’s Human Development Report Office maintains a website (http://hdr.undp.org/) withinformation about the global reports as well as national human development reports that have been developedby 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 KnowledgeSociety” (2003), “Towards Freedom in the Arab World” (2004), and “Towards the Rise of Women in the ArabWorld” (2005).

2The long history of internationalism in Arab women’s movements has been studied by many. For Egyptsee, 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: Ghandi’s Influence onan Egyptian Feminist,” in Pioneering Feminist Anthropology in Egypt, ed. Martina Rieker, Cairo Papers inSocial Science 28 (2005): 119–34. Also see the special issue on “Early Twentieth Century Middle EasternFeminisms, Nationalisms, and Transnationalisms,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (2008).

3UNDP, AHDR 2005.4Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, Calif.: University

of California Press, 1986/2000); Writing Women’s Worlds (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,1993/2008); Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2005).

5For more on these questions, see Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernityin the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); “Do Muslim Women Really NeedSaving?” American Anthropologist 104 (2002): 783–90; “The Debate about Gender, Religion, and Rights:

100 Lila Abu-Lughod

Thoughts of a Middle East Anthropologist,” Publication of the Modern Language Association 121 (2006):1621–30; and “The Scandal of Honor Crimes” (unpublished manuscript).

6Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 102, 177.

7Talal 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): 141–64.

8Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community (London: Verso, 1991).9I intend to research the process of making the report for a future study. Moreover, I have consulted only

the English version thus far.10AHDR 2005, 102.11For an excellent example of the way such negative portrayals picked up by the Western press need to be

interrogated, see Eugene Rogan’s “exercise in systematic doubt” about the way an earlier AHDR used thestate of Arab publishing and translating to index a knowledge deficit. Eugene Rogan, “Arab Books and HumanDevelopment,” Arab Studies Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2004): 67–79.

12Center for American Women and Politics: Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers, the State University ofNew Jersey, http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu (accessed 17 August 2007).

13UNDP, AHDR 2005, 96.14Ibid., 6.15Ibid., 131.16Ibid., 6.17Ibid., 10.18Abu-Lughod, “The Debate About Gender” and Writing Women’s 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,” YaleJournal of Law & the Humanities 12 (2000): 89–116; Leti Volpp, “Feminism Versus Multiculturalism,”Columbia Law Review 101 (2001): 1181–218.

19Freedom House, “Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Citizenship and Justice,” 14 Oc-tober 2005, http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=383&report=56 (accessed 9 October 2007).

20Fida J. Adely, “Educating Women for Development: The Arab Human Development Report 2005 and theProblem with Women’s Choices,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 105–122 (thisissue).

21For elaboration, see Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood, chap. 3.22For more on the link between women’s education and ideals of modernity, see, among others, Afsaneh

Najmabadi, “Educating the Iranian Housewife,” in Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women; Marilyn Booth, May HerLikes Be Multiplied (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001).

23Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds, 205–42.24Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood, 81–108.25UNDP, AHDR 2005, 119.26Ibid., 65.27Pradeep Panda and Bina Agarwal, “Marital Violence, Human Development and Women’s Property Status

in India,” World Development 33 (2005): 823–50.28For example, see Joan Williams, Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do

About It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).29Homa Hoodfar, Between Marriage and the Market (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997).30Roksana Bahramitash, “Myths and Realities of the Impact of Political Islam on Women,” Development

in Practice 14 (2004): 508–20.31UNDP, AHDR 2005, 167.32Ibid., 168.33Martha 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), 61–104.

34Ibid., 85.35Mounira Charrad, States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco

(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001).36See Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments and “The Scandal of Honor Crimes.”

Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 101

37Kamran Asdar Ali, Planning the Family in Egypt (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2002).38Suad Joseph, ed., Intimate Selving in Arab Families: Gender, Self, Identity (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse

University Press, 1999).39Jacques 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: AnIntroduction (New York: Random House, 1978); Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1978).

40Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender and Society 2 (1988): 274–90.41Nussbaum and Glover, Women Culture and Development.42UNDP, AHDR 2005, 179.43Ibid., 230.44Ibid., 225.45Ibid., 92.46Ibid., 60.47Ibid. 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).48UNDP, AHDR 2005, 168.49Asef Bayat, “Transforming the Arab World: The Arab Human Development Report and the Politics of

Change,” Development and Change 36 (2005): 1225–237.50UNDP, AHDR 2005, 229.51Ibid., 143–62.52Ibid., 149.53Ibid., 152.54Suad Joseph, “Elite Strategies for State Building,” and Maxine Molyneux, “The Law, the State and

Socialist Policies with Regard to Women: The Case of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen,” inWomen, Islam, and the State, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1991); MervatHatem, “Economic and Political Liberalization in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism,” InternationalJournal of Middle East Studies 24 (1992): 231–51.

55Joseph, “Elite Strategies for State Building,” 179.56See also Nadje Al-Ali, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (London: Zed Books, 2007).57Molyneux, “The Law, the State, and Socialist Policies.”58Laura Bier, “From Mothers of the Nation to Daughters of the State: Gender, Citizenship and the Politics

of Inclusion in Egypt, 1945–1967” (PhD diss., New York University, 2006). For a study of the 19th- and early20th-century role of familial politics in the development of modern Egypt, see Lisa Pollard, Nurturing theNation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt 1805–1923 (Berkeley, Calif.:University of California Press, 2005).

59UNDP, AHDR 2005, 124.60Ibid., 126.61The report calls for “extensive legal and institutional changes aimed at bringing national legislation in

line with CEDAW.” UNDP, AHDR 2005, 22.62Ibid., 61.63Ibid., 65, 213.64Ibid., 212.65Ibid., 61.66Ibid., 226.67Sari 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 Institutefor the Study of Democracy, 2005).

68Islah Jad, “The NGO-isation of Arab Women’s Movements,” International Development Studies Bulletin35, no. 4 (2004): 34–42.

69UNDP, AHDR 2005, 222.70Abu-Lughod, “The Debate about Gender, Religion, and Rights”; Merry, Human Rights and Gender

Violence; Volpp, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior” and “Feminism Versus Multiculuralism.”71Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence.

102 Lila Abu-Lughod

72Jane 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), 22–41;Arvonne Fraser, “Becoming Human: the Origins and Development of Women’s Human Rights,” in Women,Gender and Human Rights, ed. Marjorie Agosin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001),15–64.

73Ratna Kapur, “The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the ‘Native’ Subject inInternational/Post-colonial Feminist Legal Politics,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 15 (2002): 1–37.

74Abu-Lughod, “The Scandal of Honor Crimes.”75Lama 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 when—as Volpp’s unraveling of the strangecase of Tina Isa in 1989 in New Jersey reveals and Katherine Ewing’s book on Turkish immigrants to Germanydescribes—the actual motives for particular incidents may be other than cultural or honor based. See LetiVolpp, “Disappearing Acts: On Gendered Violence, Pathological Cultures, and Civil Society,” Publication ofthe Modern Language Association 121 (2006): 1631–638; Katherine Ewing, Stolen Honor (Stanford, Calif.:Stanford University Press, 2008).

76Frances S. Hasso, “Empowering Governmentalities rather than Women: The Arab Human DevelopmentReport 2005 and Western Development Logics,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009):63–82 (this issue).

77UNDP, AHDR 2005, 143–47.78Ibid., 208–12.79For a range of approaches, see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, Conn.: Yale

University Press, 1992); Azizah Al-Hibri, “Muslim Women’s Rights in the Global Village,” Journal of Lawand Religion 37 (2000–2001): 37–66; Judith Tucker, In the House of the Law (Berkeley, Calif.: University ofCalifornia Press, 2000).

80UNDP, AHDR 2005, 147.81Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,

1999).82For an important discussion of human rights and shari–a, see Naz Modirzadeh, “Taking Islamic Law

Seriously: INGOs and the Battle for Muslim Hearts and Minds,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 19 (2006):191–233.

83For examples of the approach, see Asma Barlas, “Globalizing Equality: Muslim Women, Theology,and Feminism,” and Zainah Anwar, “Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Women’s Rights,” in On ShiftingGround: Muslim Women in the Global Era, ed. F. Nouraie-Simone (New York: Feminist Press, 2005):91–110, 233–47; Azizah Al-Hibri, “Deconstructing Patriarchal Jurisprudence in Islamic Law” in GlobalCritical Race Feminism: An International Reader, ed. Angela Davis (New York: New York University Press,2000), 221–30. For projects, consider the Malaysian NGO Sisters in Islam, which has support from theNational Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Institute for Peace, while the ambitious new Women’sIslamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity has support from everything from the Global Fund for Womento major foundations including Ford, Luce, and Ms, http://www.asmasociety.org/wise/ (accessed 22 February2008).

84Afsaneh Najmabadi, “(Un)Veiling Feminism,” Social Text 64 (2000): 29–45.85Najmabadi, “Feminism in an Islamic Republic,” in Islam, Gender, and Social Change, ed. Yvonne Haddad

and John Esposito (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 59–79.86Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi–i Lebanon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton

University Press, 2006).87Heba Raouf Ezzat, “Political Reflections on the Question of Equality,” in Islam and Equality: Debating the

Future of Women’s and Minority Rights in the Middle East and North Africa (New York: Lawyers Committeefor Human Rights, 1999): 175–84, appendix II; Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2005).

88Azza Karam, Women, Islamisms and the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).89Mervat 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 SouthAsia, Africa and the Middle East 26 (2006): 22–35.

90Islah Jad, “Between Religion and Secularism: Islamist Women of Hamas,” in On Shifting Ground, 172–98.91UNDP, AHDR 2005, 128.

Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 103

92Ibid., 123.93Ibid., 208.94Ibid., 211.95Amin’s condemnation of loveless marriage was cited at the turn of the last century by Protestant mis-

sionaries as corroboration of their stance on the evils of Islam for women. Annie Van Sommer and SamuelM. Zwemer, eds., Our Moslem Sisters (New York: F. H. Revell Company, 1907); Abu-Lughod, RemakingWomen.