rabab el-mahdi, "does political islam impede gender-based mobilization? the case of egypt"

Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions,Vol. 11, Nos. 3–4, 379–396, September–December 2010

ISSN 1469-0764 Print/ISSN 1743-9647 Online/10/03-40379-18 © 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14690764.2010.546114

Does Political Islam Impede Gender-Based Mobilization? The Case of Egypt

RABAB EL-MAHDI*

The American University in Cairo, Cairo, EgyptTaylor and FrancisFTMP_A_546114.sgm10.1080/14690764.2010.546114Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions1469-0764 (print)/1743-9647 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis113/[email protected]

ABSTRACT Does political Islam impede gender-based mobilization? An affirmativeanswer to this question is held by many scholars and feminist activists alike. From theTaliban in Afghanistan to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the various political Islamistorganizations spreading throughout the South are often cited as anti-gender mobilization,if not anti-women altogether. The widespread and exponential support of political Islam-ism in the South, coupled with the decline of non-religious-based women’s movements,warrants an examination of this assumed correlation. Using Egypt as a primary site ofinvestigation, this paper argues that this correlation is spurious, if not ideologically biasedand ahistorical. Looking at a recent initiative for building a non-religious-based women’smovement in Egypt – ‘Women for Democracy’ – as a microcosm, this article argues thatthe lack of such movements in the South should be understood through a historical–structural analysis of post-colonial state–society relations, in addition to agency-relatedfactors of professed ‘feminists’ in these countries.

KEY WORDS: women; gender; Egypt; feminism; movement; political Islam

Introduction

During the past decade Egypt has been witnessing the budding of social move-ments and the burgeoning of collective mobilization initiatives for different causes.From the pro-Intifada movement in 2000 with its mass protests, boycott campaignsand support convoys to the anti-war movement in 2003; followed by the pro-democracy movement with the climax of Kifaya (The Egyptian Movement forChange) during 2004–2005; to finally, labour mobilization and socio-economicprotests that started in December 2006.1 Many taboos were broken, includingcriticizing the President and his family, and many long-forgotten social groupssuch as workers came across as important players on the Egyptian political scene.

*Email: [email protected] a more details on these movements see: Nicola Pratt, Democracy and Authoritarianism in the ArabWorld (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007); Rabab El-Mahdi, ‘Enough! Egypt’s Quest for Democracy’,Comparative Political Studies, 42:8 (2009), 1011–1039; and Joel Beinin, ‘Workers’ struggles under “social-ism” and neoliberalism’, in Rabab El-Mahdi and Philip Marfleet (eds) Egypt: The Moment of Change(London: Zed Press, 2009), pp. 77–101.

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In all of these movements and initiatives women were key players and partici-pants, but never the focus of any of the rising initiatives, except for one short-livedinitiative named ‘Women for Democracy’- also known by its slogan (The Street isOurs) – which never transformed into a collective, broad movement.2 By examin-ing this initiative, this paper tries to answer the question/paradox of: why is thereno women’s movement in Egypt, even at times of heightened mobilization, that is,a movement that caters to and is derived from the specific and multiple positionsof groups of women in their broader context?

This question, however, warrants two interrelated caveats. The first is that thestarting point of this research is against gender universalism in all its differentversions – especially the liberal humanitarian project – as much as it is againstcultural relativism and essentialization, which characterizes a lot of studies onwomen of the global South. That is to say, it is against the false homogenization ofa prototype ‘Arab’ or a ‘Muslim’ woman, and that it equally underscores theplurality of feminism(s) and gender-mobilization. The second is a necessarydistinction, between women-based movements and women’s movements, adistinction which has been conflated frequently to overcome some of the harmfuleffects of pseudo-hegemonic white-liberal feminism, that is to say, the work ofmany post-colonial and post-structuralist scholars, who rightly questioned andcritiqued the universal humanist project as it relates to feminisms of the Southpointing to elements of Euro-white centrism, condescension and patronization.3

Such work was a necessary step to move beyond the hegemony of liberal-femi-nism as the feminism – the one way to women’s progress and betterment – and tolay bare the complexity and plurality of feminism(s) and feminist movements associo-historical constructs. However, later attempts to decolonize the feminism(s)of Third World women, and particularly women in the so-called Muslim world,have ended up promoting different shades of relativism, whereby any collectiveeffort in which women are key players would be characterized as a women’smovement. In contrast to this position, the starting point for this article and itsresearch question is based on an understanding that a women’s movement is notonly determined as such through the sex of its constituency and participants, butalso through its goals and declared consciousness. That is to not to say that everywomen’s movement has to be declared feminist – whatever the meaning given tothe word – but it also does not mean that any movement that is based on femalemembership is a women’s movement.

This distinction and these caveats are foundational because in Egypt, as inmany countries of the global South (e.g. Morocco, Pakistan and Iran), there existdifferent forms of women’s organizations and a plurality of feminism(s), that is,individual Islamist feminists who attempt to re-read and construct women rightswithin an Islamist narrative (e.g. Heba Raouf in Egypt, Asma Lamrabet in

2In this I use the broad definition of social movements, as coined by Tilly: ‘an organized, sustained, self-conscious challenge to existing authorities’; Charles Tilly, ‘Social Movements and National Politics’, inC. Bright and S. Harding (eds) State-making and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory (AnnArbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1984), pp. 297–317, at 304.3Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1992); Lila Abu Lughod (ed.) Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really needSaving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’, American Anthropologist,104:3 (2002), pp. 783–790; Chandra Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and ColonialDiscourses’, Feminist Review, 30: Autumn (1988), pp. 61–88; and Chandra Mohanty, Feminism WithoutBorders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

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Morrocco, and Zanan magazine writers in Iran).4 There also exist broad women-based movements such as the Muslim Sisterhood in Egypt (the women’s branchof the Muslim Brotherhood) and Al Adl wa’l Ihsan (Justice and Charity Movement)in Morocco, which includes women under the umbrella of a broader movementseeking social and political change at large. In all those countries these forms co-exist with individual non-religious-based women’s-rights NGOs and individualsecular feminists (e.g. Nawal Sadawi in Egypt, ShirinEbadi in Iran or FatimaSadiqi in Morocco, to name a few). Despite the importance and complexity ofthese different forms of gender-related narratives and organizations, and the vari-ation – and sometimes even overlap and linkages – of their constituencies, theyare not the focus of this research, although they definitely provide a contextualbackground for its focus. Rather, what this article examines and claims is missingis a collective non-religious-based movement by groups of women for what theyperceive as their rights or what they are against as injustices based specifically ontheir gender. Specifically, it asks the question whether the absence of such move-ment(s) is a result of the rise of political Islam – hence, the choice of Women forDemocracy as a failed attempt in such a direction.

Despite being a short-lived experiment, the attempt of Women for Democracyreveals a lot about the meaning of a women’s movement in Egypt, as much as itilluminates much of the dynamics of non-regime politics and the political societybroadly understood, in their relationship to the issue of women’s organization.The initiative is one of the few attempts in recent years seeking broader non-reli-gious-based female mobilization (as opposed to NGOs’ projects); it is also one ofthe few attempts in which secular and Islamist women activists were trying towork together, highlighting the complex relationship between the two. The analy-sis is based on extensive fieldwork including participant-observation of meetingsand events throughout 2005, interviews with founders and participants, andexamining primary documents issued by the initiative. As Ella Shohat points out,we should always remember, ‘(1) the importance of looking critically at activistpractices, and of theorizing them as part of feminist agendas; [and] (2) that everypractice is undergirded by some kind of theory, philosophy, worldview, ordiscursive grid – even when the practitioners claim not to have a theory’.5 Thuslooking at ‘The Street is Ours’ as part of a wider context of political mobilizationand a longer history – even if fragmented – of women’s initiatives and strugglesreveals a lot about the discourse and dynamics that undergird women’s move-ments at this particular moment, and the range of continuous and longer termchallenges within the feminist praxis in Egypt. Much of this is shared with similarmovements of the post-colonial South, from Morocco to Pakistan, where reli-gious-based mobilization, including Islamist women’s organizations, imbue thepublic sphere in the face of negligible non-religious-based women movements.Hence, the study of this attempt is of broader importance, especially that, asMohanty affirms, ‘histories of Third World women’s engagement with feminism

4For more details on Islamist feminism in theory and practice see Asma Barlas, Believing Women in Islam:Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002); AminaWadud, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1999); V. Moghadam, ‘Islamic Feminism and Its Discontents: Toward a Resolution ofthe Debate’, Signs, 27:4 (2002), pp. 1135–1171; and Margot Badran, Feminism Beyond East and West: NewGender Talk and Practice in Global Islam (New York: Global Media Publications, 2007).5Ella Shohat, ‘Area Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cartographies of Knowledge’, Social Text, 72, 20:3(2002), pp. 67–78 at 71.

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are in short supply’.6 Thus, the study of this episode and its lack of success cancontribute to the body of localized theory – stemming from on-the-groundactivism – and hopefully it can inform the practice of future endeavours.

The History and Competing Explanations

Egypt saw the budding of an organized feminist movement as early as the 1920swith the formation of the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923.7 However, as MargotBadran summarizes it, ‘the history of Egyptian feminism is about middle- andupper-class women assuming agency’.8 Added to this, it is equally about themodernizing post-colonial state-making. Despite an early start of genderconsciousness and an organization around it, the entrenchment of such move-ments has remained limited. Whether this is because of the class-background ofits organizers (mainly upper- and middle-class women) or because of historical,cultural or socio-economic development reasons remains a debate amongscholars. However, despite its limited appeal, the successive waves of femalemobilization during the first half of the twentieth century, followed by the rise ofa post-colonial state that delineated women as markers of both national authentic-ity and aspired modernity, have granted Egyptian women a number of rightsmuch earlier than their peers in the region (e.g. mass education, political rights,paid jobs, etc.). What is interesting is that these rights and the early budding offemale gender consciousness have not been equally matched by a continuation ora spread of women’s movements. Hence, except for a few women’s-rights profes-sional NGOs and some religious-based women’s movements, there is currentlyno significant non-religious women’s movement in Egypt. Also, there seems to bean apparent contradiction between the large-scale participation of women in theworkplace, education, mass-based Islamic movement and the aforementionedforms of mobilization, and the espousal of sexual segregation and discriminationagainst women (implicit and explicit) in the public sphere and within the publicmainstream discourse.9

Why this is the case usually invites one of three answers – with variation –both by Egyptian women activists and literature alike. The first, and most preva-lent, is that the women’s movement in Egypt has been crippled by the rise ofIslamism both as a political force and as a conservative social discourse, with anumber of wide repercussions. Guenena and Wassef argue ‘that recent politicaldiscourse in Egypt is dominated by the conservative polemics of the Islamistsand that the state, in its attempt to contain the Islamists, has subordinatedwomen’s issues to its own concerns for security and legitimacy’.10 Similarly,Shurkalla argues that:

6Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, op. cit., p. 46.7I emphasize this as the beginning of organization, to distinguish it from preceding stages of feministstruggle and consciousness marked by the writings – and subsequent debates – of individual womenand men such as Qassim Amin, Malak Hefni Nassif and even Hoda Sharawi herself. 8Margot Badran, Feminism, Islam, and the Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 3.9For example, as recently as February 2010, the general assembly of the State Council (one of the highestjudicial and legal bodies in Egypt established in 1946) voted to ban the appointment of female judges.Moreover, a demonstration to protest this decision called by a number of women NGOs attracted lessthan 50 attendees. 10Nemat Guenena and Nadia Wassef, Unfulfilled Promises: Women’s Rights in Egypt (New York:Population Council, 1999), p. 1.


Women’s expanding roles and integration into public life was in the pastclosely connected with the process of modernization, as well as withsecular nation-building. The weakening of the religious hierarchy and itscontrol on society and the creation of secular institutions allowed womento have space outside the direct control of the patriarchal community.With the growth of the Islamic movement, this space created by the statewas challenged.11

Equally, Hatem asserts that ‘the Islamists have been successful in rolling backsome of the gains made by women in precisely those states where the cause ofwomen was expected to proceed the furthest, that is, in Egypt, the Sudan, andAlgeria’.12 Yet this position seems to dismiss three important facts. First, even atthe height of the postcolonial ‘secular’ state in Egypt – the Nasserite era of the1950s and 1960s – when political Islamist organizations were severely repressedby the state, with negligible presence within the public sphere, there was equallyno presence of a strong women’s movement. Second, the gains and rights thatwomen acquired at the time were not predominately a result of their independentstruggle, but rather as part of the bigger corporatist project, in which the state inpursuit of ‘modernization’ co-opted different groups and in turn granted themsome rights.13 Third, the ‘secular’ nature of the post-colonial state is oftenmisleadingly over-emphasized. For example, in Egypt even under Nasser, thepersonal-rights laws governing marriage, inheritance and parenting issuesclaimed Islamic Shari’a as its main source of jurisdiction.

The second position in understanding women’s movements (or the lackthereof), adopted by many post-structuralists and post-colonial theorists, is thatthere are women’s movements in Egypt and elsewhere in the South that arecreating and conquering new spaces and that might be re-inventing norms andpractices along gendered lines; however, these movements remain undetectedbecause of researchers’ biases and embeddedness within a Western/liberal/humanist framework of ‘feminism’ that may not be relevant to post-colonial soci-eties.14 Subsequently, such scholars warn against pre-conceived notions anddetermining criteria for what a women’s movement should be and how such limi-tations can prohibit our understanding of the reality in which women live and actin different parts of the world. In this vein for example, Saba Mahmood delineatesa women’s movement among female preachers in Egypt, a religious domain thatis usually seen as contradictory to women’s emancipation.15 While this body ofliterature represents a breakthrough against essentialist understandings of femalemobilization in the Muslim-majority countries, it does not adequately explainwhy women are drawn to these movements as opposed to ones with moregendered demands and worldviews.

11Hala Shukrallah, ‘The Impact of the Islamic Movement in Egypt’, Feminist Review, 47 (1994), pp.15–32 at 26.12Mervat Hatem, ‘Toward the Development of Post-Islamist and Post-Nationalist Feminist Discoursesin the Middle East’, in Judith Tucker (ed.) Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers (Bloomington, IN:Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 29–48 at 31–32.13See Pratt, op. cit.; and Nazih Ayubi, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East(New York: I.B. Tauris, 1995).14See Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Prince-ton University Press, 2005); and Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really need Saving?’, op. cit.15Mahmoud, op. cit.

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The final and third position is one that argues that the authoritarian and patri-archal socio-political setting is an impediment to the rise of women’s movements.Moghadam for example suggests that women’s organizations ‘face obstacles andchallenges that emanate from the state and religious institutions, which regarddemocratization, independent organization, and women’s autonomy as threats totheir power and interests’.16 Similarly, Al-Ali contends that, ‘[T]he lack of existingdemocratic models and experiences in democratic political structures poses anenormous challenge to women’s rights activists’.17 This same assumption aboutthe effect of authoritarianism on the rise of a women’s movement was putforward by Heba Raouf, Islamist feminist activist and one of the founders ofWomen for Democracy: ‘a women’s movement is a social movement with a femi-nist agenda … there is no women’s movement in Egypt as much as there is nostrong social movements … because we do not have a conducive political envi-ronment for the rise of such movements’.18 However, while these statements arelargely true in portraying the context in which women’s endeavours for mobiliza-tion exist, it does not suffice to explain why female mobilization is impeded,whereas under the same conditions other forms of mobilization (e.g. labour andpolitical Islamist organizations) can still flourish.

Unlike the above views, this paper argues that, while authoritarianism and therise of Islamism are important objective circumstances, they are not the mainimpediments to the rise of a non-religious-based women’s movement. Rather, themain impediments lay in how the so-called feminist activists engage structuralfactors, whether it is a hegemonic patriarchal or even misogynous discourse orthe obstacles of organization under authoritarian conditions. It shows that thelack of a feminist/women’s movement in Egypt, including the demise of Womenfor Democracy, can only be understood through the dialectical relationshipbetween participants forming this initiative and their organizational structure, thediscourse or frames they use, and the broader political context in which they exist.The dynamic relationship between those three variables as exposed in ‘The Streetis Ours’ underscores the necessity of understanding the temporalities of gender-mobilization in the post-colonial South beyond reductionist gender boundariesand calls for historicized readings of this kind of mobilization as part of a biggersocio-political narrative.

The Street is Ours!

On 25 May 2005, a number of female activists and journalists were sexuallyharassed and assaulted by police-recruited and supervised thugs during a peace-ful demonstration against the regime-proposed amendments of the Egyptianconstitution.19 This was not a new practice by the Egyptian security forces.

16Valentine Moghadam, ‘Engendering Citizenship, Feminizing Civil Society: The Case of the MiddleEast and North Africa’, Women & Politics, 25:1/2 (2003), pp. 63–87 at 80.17Nadje Al-Ali, ‘Gender and Civil Society in the Middle East’, International Feminist Journal of Politics,5:2 (2003), pp. 216–232 at 228. See also Frances Hasso, ‘Feminist Generations? The Long-Term Impactof Social Movement Involvement on Palestinian Women’s Lives’, The American Journal of Sociology,107:3 (2001), pp. 586–611.18Heba Raouf, personal interview by author, 5 November 2007.19The demonstration was called for by the Kifaya pro-democracy movement, in protest of the referen-dum scheduled on that day. The referendum and proposed constitutional amendment of article 76 –allowing for multi-candidate Presidential elections – were seen as cosmetic and irrelevant in the contextof continued repressive laws and practices.


During the state’s confrontation with militant Islamist groups in the 1990s, secu-rity forces used similar tactics extensively in villages in Upper Egypt againstfemale family members of the militants. More generally, it is historically part of aglobal misogynous tradition of using female sexuality as a pressuring and evenhumiliating ‘tool’ against the enemy (read: other males). However, unlike similarepisodes, this incident happened in broad daylight in downtown Cairo, under theeyes of a hoard of local and international media following the referendum. Thenext day all the non-state-owned Egyptian newspapers, as well as the interna-tional press (including the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and HeraldTribune to name a few) covered the story. In less than a week a number of rallieswere organized by the political opposition movement and civil society organiza-tions to protest what happened.20

Moved by the experience, a number of activists – some of them assaulted in thisepisode – held a meeting to decide on an appropriate response to what happened.One of these activists – and a founder of Women for Democracy – reiterates:

Something was going on at the time. Kefaya was at its peak, women weretaking to the streets and after the 25th [May 2005] they felt targeted as agroup … as women, and were ready to stand against their harassment aswomen. There was also a critique of how their harassment was beingaddressed by the media and some political groups: as a violation of ‘our’honor. This determination to take again to the streets, as women, despitethe harassment seemed at the time to indicate an awareness of a genderrelated specificity. This sentiment of defiance, the claim of the street, andthe large number of young women that this incident mobilized, seemedpromising at the time.21

The initial meetings included a core group of men and women, some of themseasoned political activists, and others who were not engaged in previouspolitical activities but were moved by this episode. The majority, however, werepoliticized individuals, but covered the spectrum of ideologies: Islamists, nation-alists, liberals and Marxist-socialists. In less than two weeks these initial meet-ings which included around 10–15 activists, resulted in a call for a public rallyon 9 of June 2005 – at the Egyptian Press Syndicate under the slogan ‘The Streetis Ours’.

The rally, which was very well attended, by the standards of Egyptian politicalrallies, with more than 300 people and a lot of media presence, announced thelaunch of a movement called Women for Democracy. Explaining the reasons forthis new initiative, its founding statement avowed that:

In light of the current events in Egypt which have seen a dangerous rise inrepressive practices, women became the primary bearers of this repressionin its different forms, whether on the street, at work, in means of transpor-tation, demonstrations, or police stations. We believe that these practicesare part and parcel of the ruling regime’s policies aiming at subjugatingand oppressing the Egyptian people. We have seen how women are

20Indicative of the reaction that this episode created, Kifaya’s candle-lit vigil to protest the assault wasthe biggest gathering of Kifaya throughout its peak 2004–2005 activities.21Aida Seif El-Dawla, personal interview by the author, 30 December 2007.

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tortured and sexually harassed in police stations and at demonstrations …For these reasons we invite all women to participate with us in the Womenfor Democracy Movement (The Street is Ours).

According to the founding statement Women for Democracy is ‘a politicalwomen’s movement linking the direct and urgent needs of women in work, educa-tion, health and family issues, with freedom from all forms of discrimination andoppression against women, and the public and urgent demands of the pro-democ-racy movement’.22 The founders seemed to be reiterating some positions in theliterature they are familiar with, the idea of strategic vs practical demands or thelink between the public and private spheres. However, it is not clear how such anabstract political message was expected to appeal to different groups of non-polit-icized Egyptian women (read: most Egyptian women). Stemming from this broadvision, ‘Women for Democracy defined five concrete aims for their movement:

1) Immediate trial of all officials responsible for abuse in police stations,prisons, or on the street, during the past years. 2) Establishing ademocratic system that guarantees accountability of the government. 3)Solidarity with all Egyptian women who suffered from the corruption ofthe regime and were subjected to its oppression. 4) Ending the use of theEmergency Law and all other freedom-limiting and anti-women laws. 5)Immediate release of all detainees, women and men.23

Again, the five aims reiterated the demands of the pro-democracy movementwhich was at its height during 2005, but which never managed to garner anymass-based support, and to which most of the founders belonged or were sympa-thetic to.

The rally and the resulting founding statement were followed by a few meet-ings during the summer months of 2005 discussing ideas for different campaignsand ways to reach a broader audience of women. These included the following: awebsite, street marches, publicity campaigns on university campuses and publictransportation, and field studies of women’s needs and demands. However, bythe end of that summer it was clear that this so-called movement was stillborn;the group organized one demonstration in solidarity with the wives of Islamistmilitant detainees – who were organizing a sit-in at the Lawyers Association inAugust 2005 – that was meagerly attended. None of the other ideas were everimplemented, not to mention that the membership of the group never exceededtens from those who attended the first and last rally in June 2005 and some activ-ists from women’s NGOs. Looking back at this initiative (its messages, structuresand actors) it seems that this outcome was somehow pre-determined, as thefollowing sections will show.

Who Is Speaking? To Whom? In which Language?

Cultural framing is an important process through which actors ‘assign meaning toand interpret, relevant events and conditions in ways that are intended to mobilizepotential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to

22Women For Democracy, Founding Statement, Cairo: 29 June 2005, unpublished.23Ibid.


demobilize antagonists’.24 In the case of women’s/feminist movements, where thedemands and challenges are counter-hegemonic in the Gramscian sense of theword, cultural framing processes become even more important. As ArleneMacleod explains, ‘for women, there is no clear-cut other to confront directly.Facing a layered and overlapping round of oppressors, women do not have therelative luxury of knowing their enemy. Relations with men, class relations, and …global inequalities’ confront women with a web of cross-cutting identities andpower dynamics.25 Thus, the conundrum becomes that, as much as an anti-hegemonic women’s movement depends on a successful cultural framing process,it is difficult to unfold one that carefully addresses this multiplicity and cross-cutting positions of women in relations of power and in targeting an ‘enemy’.

Ignoring this complexity, the founders of Women for Democracy, like theirpredecessors in the Egyptian women’s movement, have not managed to delineatethe nuances characterizing different groups of women and in turn differentmessages for their mobilization. Rather they imagined ‘women’ as a coherentgroup, masking a lot of specific dynamics of oppression/resistance that differentgroups of women confront based on variation in class and location. Looking backat the founding statement of ‘The Street is Ours’, this dilemma becomes veryclear. The statement seemed to reflect and respond to a number of classicaldebates within the feminist literature and academic discourse more than respond-ing to the life-issues of different groups of women. Other than using the word‘women’ a number of times, the five goals were a reiteration of the goals of thedifferent pro-democracy initiatives big at the time in Egypt (Kifaya and others).Two things were not clear – how could women relate to these goals? Or, whichgroups of women could these aims attract – other than the group of alreadyengaged political activists? The broad and overloaded message of the foundingstatement was clearly a reflection of a vague (and mostly academic) feministdiscourse in Egypt that is still ingrained in the global universal conceptions of‘sisterhood’. This discourse and a resulting framing process have not engagedsome key questions: how different are the needs, roles and agent/subject dilem-mas of the urban working-class woman vs her rural ‘sister’ in Egypt; the Copticwoman vs the Muslim; and the upper-class woman vs her maid; just to name afew dyads. Evading the analysis of complexities within the real material world ofwoman in favor of a constructed commonality of oppression has been a hurdletowards successful cultural framing and an enabling counter-hegemonicdiscourse, one that successive Egyptian feminist movements have not been ableto overcome for years; Women for Democracy was no exception.

Underlying this problem in discourse and framing of the women’s questionwhich contributed to the quick demise of Women for Democracy are a number ofunresolved contradictions – contradictions that are present in the literatureframing women’s movements in the South as much as they are alive within realattempts at mobilization, including Women for Democracy. The first of thesecontradictions relates to the definition of a women’s movement in the Egyptiancontext and its oscillation between universalist and relativist positions. More thanbeing solely a theoretical debate, this binary was very clear among the founders of

24David Snow and Robert Benford, ‘Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization’, in BertKlandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi and Sidney Tarrow (eds) From Structure to Action: Social MovementParticipation Across Cultures (Greenwich, NY: JAI Press, 1988), pp. 197–217 at 198.25Arlene MacLeod, ‘Hegemonic Relations and Gender Resistance: The New Veiling as AccommodatingProtest in Cairo’, Signs, 17:3 (1992), pp. 533–557 at 553.

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Women for Democracy and their different visions of what a women’s movementin Egypt should look like and what its programme should entail. In an interviewwith Hala Shukrallah, a well-known feminist, founder of the ‘New WomanCenter’ NGO, and a later participant in Women for Democracy, she stressed that‘feminism is a world-view for social change […] which becomes compromised byrelativist positions. Such positions and the movements they celebrate are accom-modating, they do not aspire ultimately for this world-view’. She added, ‘somepeople see this as a particularly Western world-view, but you can not developyour own feminism away from this discourse’.26 On the other hand, Heba Raouf,who was one of the key founders of Women for Democracy and a well-knownIslamist thinker, declared that one of the key impediments to the rise of awomen’s movement in Egypt is an excessive reliance on the Western-feministdiscourse (read: white liberal universalism) ‘that tend[s] to import an agenda thatis not ours’.27 Even though both women are seasoned activists and scholars whodid not voice the crude versions of universalism nor relativism (they are verymuch aware of the critique of both views), it was very clear in the interviews that,while Shukrallah stressed the importance of some feminist universal values,Raouf emphasized localization and cultural heritage (read: cultural specificity).Somewhere between those two views laid another vision expressed by Seif El-Dawla (another of the founders); for her:

[A]ny movement is colored by the context, be it cultural, social, political,or otherwise. There cannot be a movement out of context. A feministmovement in Egypt would have to take the context into considerationbecause its body of women carries that context. Not dealing withcomplexities of that context can only result in more alienation and elitism.However, doing that does not mean giving up on what I think is the coreconviction of feminism, which is the acknowledgement of the existingbalance of power between men and women in a society [and] theacknowledgement of the patriarchal nature of that society.28

The different concepts of a women’s movement by these activists, and conse-quently their different framing, are not particular to feminist activists in Egypt,and are not necessarily unhealthy. In any movement ‘frames are contested –within the movement by leader and cadre debating alternative goals and visionsfor the movement, and externally by countermovement actors’.29 It is this multi-plicity that enriches a movement both tactically and strategically. However, theproblem within Women for Democracy and the Egyptian feminist circles ingeneral is not the contending visions, but their respective use of ‘feminism’ as amonolith and their diametrically opposed views on this monolith with no attemptat dialogue between them.

Stemming from this binary is another challenge that was very clear in the ‘TheStreet is Ours’ attempt and which has marked the Egyptian feminist discourseand resulting cultural framing process for decades, that of cultural authenticity vs

26Hala Shukrallah, personal interview by author, Cairo, 18 November 2007.27Heba Raouf, personal interview by author, Cairo, 3 November 2007.28Aida Seif El-Dawla, op. cit.29M. Zald, ‘Culture, Ideology, and Strategic Framing’, in D. McAdam, J. D. McCarthy and M. Zald (eds)Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 261–274 at 261.


westernization. Deniz Kandiyoti, Partha Chaterjee and others have eloquentlyshown how women in the post-colonial settings of the South have been made partof a contested terrain between notions of cultural authenticity, i.e. bearers of thenational identity and integrity vs colonial ‘Western’ encroachment.30 Interest-ingly, this demarcation is not only a legacy of the nationalist moment during thestruggle for independence and consolidation of the post-colonial nation states.Rather it is still a current dividing line very much alive in the context of imperial-ist expansion (both through wars and military threats – Iraq, Afghanistan andIran – as well as the entrenchment of the global neoliberal project). At a time ofmilitarized war and US empire building, as Mohanty31 and others have character-ized the contemporary moment, ‘it is difficult for anyone thinking about “thewoman question” today, as at the turn of the century, to escape the language ofaccusations and counter-accusations about cultural authenticity’.32

In the case of Egypt, as in many countries of the South with a colonial heritageand subsequent national struggles, it is relatively easy for anti-imperialist move-ments to frame images against foreign intervention using the cumulative culturalstock, e.g. songs, movies, idioms, proverbs. That is the collective memory withvivid images of colonization, of anti-colonial struggle and inherent suspicion ofor at least mixed feelings about the ‘West’. However, in the case of a women’smovement with the legacy of the aforementioned authentic/Western binary,feminist activists do not have such privilege. Moreover, both because of theimage of Third World women – especially Arab and Muslim – created in and bythe ‘West’, and because it is the same location of imperial forces, Egyptian femi-nist activists are more easily seen as suspects of imperialism. Especially when‘global feminism, using a universal human rights paradigm, constructs for itselfthe role of the heroic savior, reminiscent of colonialist civilizing mission and inline with current U.S. imperialist interventions’.33 The support of many feministactivists in Europe and the United States for the war in Afghanistan is a case inpoint.34 Thus, unlike what a lot of the literature proclaims, it seems that in thecase of Egypt and other Arab countries, association with international feministcircles – which are still pre-dominated by white-liberal feminist conceptions –whether on discourse or practical level (through NGOs and transnationalnetworks), is more of a hindrance than an advantage to women’s movements inthe South.35

This dividing line and the resulting impediment it creates were clear bothwithin the group of Women for Democracy and between them and their potentialaudience. According to Heba Raouf, one for the reasons for the disintegration ofWomen for Democracy is the fact that the secular activists ‘are adhering to aglobal feminist agenda, while the new generations of women activists are more

30Denis Kandiyoti, Women, Islam and the State (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992); ParthaChaterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1993).31Chandra Mohanty, ‘US Empire and the Project of Women’s Studies: Stories of Citizenship, Complicityand Dissent’, Gender, Place and Culture, 13:1 (2006), pp. 7–20.32Abu Lughod, Remaking Women, op. cit., p. 14.33Elora Halim Chowdhury, ‘Global Feminism: Feminist Theory’s Cul-de-sac’, Human Architecture:Journal of the Sociology of Self Knowledge, IV Special Issue (Summer 2006), pp. 291–302 at 291.34For an excellent critique see Abu Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really need Saving?’, op. cit.35For an example of this literature see Moghadam, ‘Engendering Citizenship, Feminizing Civil Society’,op. cit.; and Lisa Baldez, ‘Women’s Movements and Democratic Transition in Brazil, Chile, EastGermany and Poland’, Comparative Politics, 35:3 (2003), pp. 253–272.

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human rights oriented. And both are not rooted in a local discourse’.36

Conversely, for Shukrallah, challenging the legitimacy of the women’s move-ments by accusing it of being a Western import is the ‘defense mechanism of apatriarchal society’.37 Within the meetings of the group, which included secularand Islamist activists, there was always this haunting legacy and this fear of beingperceived as ‘Western’. Falling into this very real trap, activists became concernedwith categorizing and critiquing ideas among the group, based on being congru-ent with a so-called authentic national cultural parameter as opposed to beingoutside it and hence rejected. As such, the main criteria and pivotal axis for move-ment became a misleadingly homogenized cultural referent rather than being thevoicing of existing demands and concerns of real groups of women. Like theirpredecessors, these activists failed to make the necessary fusion between thehuman and universal on the one hand and the local and historicized on the other.

And since as Mohanty asserts, ‘feminist discourse is productive of analyticalcategories and strategic decisions that have material effects’, the problems andbinaries that inflict the feminist discourse in Egypt have had their impact on thepotential of women’s movements.38 Not being able to translate transnationalgendered principles into cultural repertories related to the daily lives and histo-ries of groups of women have made the calls and demands of women’s move-ment ‘foreign’ to the majority of Egyptian women in every sense of the word.Women for Democracy was no exception. Trapped in those binaries, the foundingmembers of Women for Democracy were not interested in questioning theiropposite positions, let alone initiating a localized discourse. Rather, they weretrying to jump over a necessary step of dialogue between them as women activ-ists of different backgrounds to a more advanced position of addressing theimaginary masses of women, which each of them had a different image for andsomehow claimed to represent.

Divided They Continue

It is impossible to separate a discourse and meaning system from those who useand produce it and the context in which it is used. As mentioned earlier, Womenfor Democracy meetings included different shades of both ‘gender experts’ whowork on women’s rights within development projects and ‘feminist activists’ ofdifferent political shades. Similar to what Lazreg called ‘containment throughinclusion’,39 the so-called ‘gender experts’ and ‘feminist activists’ seemed to inter-pret different aspects of women’s lives in ways that fit and serve their global-feminist paradigm. These activists worked on ‘gender issues’ through academicand NGO projects and thus, even though they lacked practical experience incollective organization with women, they used their professional jargon and para-digms in debates and counter-debates about what ‘Egyptian women’ want.Hence, the resulting founding statement, and consequently the lack of furthermobilization, was a reflection of the perceptions of this small group of womenwho are feminists by profession or conviction and who are subject to their specific

36Heba Raouf, personal interview by author, 4 November 2007.37Shukrallah, op. cit.38Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, op. cit., p. 110.39Marnia Lazreg, ‘Development: Feminist Theory’s Cul-de-sac’, in Kriemild Saunders (ed.) FeministPost-Development Thought: Rethinking Modernity, Post-colonialism, and Representation (London: Zed Press,2002).


paradigms, rather than a broader platform of different groups of women. As oneof the initiative participants put it; ‘there was a lack of clarity … what was ourobjective? This is the problem of the political elite that is not linked and pushedby a constituency’.40

In addition to this problem of exclusivity and exclusion, the voids and binariescharacterizing the discourse of the Women for Democracy and the broaderdiscourse of female mobilization in Egypt were emphasized by dividing linesamong the participants of the group. These dividing lines between Islamists vsseculars, and NGO professionals vs political activists, were one of the mainreasons behind the premature ending of the initiative. Even though ‘feminist’movements have been characterized by differences in theoretical positions and inturn praxis elsewhere, these differences have enriched the movement in somesites like the United States or at least did not fatally impede the movement, as inIran. However, in Egypt these differences are a major hurdle for the rise of asignificant movement, not only because of the exaggerated divide betweenIslamists vs secularists, but even among the so-called secularists themselves. Asone of the participants put it:

I was very enthusiastic about ‘The Street is Ours’. I thought it was anexcellent opportunity for women of different affiliations to worktogether. But when I went [to the meetings] I felt there was a lot oftension. I felt we are not yet mature enough to set common goals andachieve them.41

This ‘tension’ was very clear in the few meetings of Women for Democracywhere, even though the participants were cordial to each other, at the first sign ofdisagreement the discussion turned sour, with insinuations of being ‘reactionary’and ‘conservative’ (on the part of the secularists against the Islamists); being‘Westernized’ (the Islamists’ accusation against the seculars); ‘working with thestate’ and being ‘donor-driven’ (an accusation of the activists against the NGOprofessionals); or ‘being too radical with no sense of reality’ (the NGO profession-als against the activists). The fact that these activists knew each other through‘pre-existing networks’ – again unlike what a lot of the literature assumes – was adisadvantage rather than an addition to the initiative, since they brought withthem their earlier disagreements and pre-conceived notions about one another.42

Similarly, many of the participants in Women for Democracy after its initialrally were professionals from women’s rights NGOs, and, according to Seif El-Dawla ‘the maximum that they can do together is to organize the 8th of March(International Women Day) event’.43 However, they brought with them a lot oftheir ‘professional’ rivalries. As in many other countries, rivalry over foreignfunding, careerism and short-lived projects in response to available funding havebeen some of the negative elements within the community of secular women’srights NGOs in Egypt.44 These rivalries resonated in Women for Democracy

40Shukrallah, op. cit.41Ibid.42See Moghadam, ‘Engendering Citizenship, Feminizing Civil Society’, op. cit.; and Baldez, op. cit.43Seif El-Dawla, op. cit.44Nadje Al-Ali, Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: the Egyptian Women’s Movement(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Al-Ali, ‘Gender and Civil Society in the MiddleEast’, op. cit.

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meetings. According to Shukrallah; ‘people felt threatened about leadership, Ibelieve one of the things that led to the failure was competition for leadership andcredit’.45 However, in addition to competition and rivalries, these professional-ized activists came from a different tradition – of NGOs and its dynamics – thanthat of political activists, and one that is not necessarily congruent with thedynamics of building a social movement. In the few meetings that were held thisdivide manifested itself in explicit and implicit criticism from the political activ-ists to representatives of the NGOs, accusing them of being a mouthpiece for theirdonor institutions, or not being politicized enough because of their collaborationwith the state through the National Council for Women.46 According to Seif El-Dawla, women’s NGOs in Egypt ‘are either service organizations adopting anapproach that is even more charity-oriented than developmental. Or advocacyand human rights organizations, mostly legally oriented, working on behalf ofwomen and not with them’.47 One of the clear resonances of this in Women forDemocracy was an obsession by many of the founders on the wording of thefounding statement at the expense of trying to figure out ways for mobilization.

For the few participants who joined Women for Democracy and were not partof any group (the Islamist activists, secularist activists or NGOs professionals),but rather friends and acquaintances of these activists or members of the risingbroader political opposition community, the aforementioned divisions andtensions were expelling. As one of them said:

I didn’t understand a lot of disagreements that seemed to be blown out ofproportion … These women seemed to have known each other frombefore and to have come with some sort of baggage or personal disagree-ments. I felt it was not my place; they were more concerned with provingeach other wrong than in thinking of what we should do next.48

Thus, not only was the mobilizing structure of ‘The Street is Ours’ riddled byheightened divisions within its organizing body, but also the management ofthese divisions was eliminating potential resources to this structure. Byalienating the easier pools of its mobilizing structure, such as friends, outsideactivists and sympathizers, the group was further curtailing any potential forexpansion.

Similarly, in terms of tactics for outreach, the group was not doing a better job.The only tactic used by the group in its short life was street demonstrations, whichhad been the most predominant form of protest used by dissent groups and move-ments since the rise of a political mobilization cycle in 2000. While this is expected,since ‘[c]ollective actors, probably most often, adopt mobilizing structural formsthat are known to them from direct experience’,49 the problem was that, for aninitiative with no constituency and that had not built any ties with its surround-ings, street protests were self-defeating if not outright foolish. However, the core

45Shukrallah, op. cit.46The council is affiliated directly to the President’s Office and is headed by his wife. It subcontracts andfunds a lot of women NGOs as well as using NGO professionals as consultants.47Seif El-Dawla, op. cit.48Anonymous, personal interview by author, Cairo, 12 January 2008.49J. McCarthy, ‘Constraints and Opportunities in Adopting, Adapting, and Inventing’, in D. McAdam,J. D. McCarthy and M. Zald (eds) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996), pp. 141–151 at 148.


activists of Women for Democracy were more focused on their differences thanthey were at attempts for innovation or coming up with new tactics, while the non-conducive organizational environment, riddled with tension, did not allow newrecruits enough time and space to develop such tools.

A Non-conducive Political Society

One of the common views that is shared between the literature on women’smovements in the Middle East and the activists interviewed in this research is thenegative impact of the authoritarian political context on the potential gendermobilization. Al-Ali, for example, points out that ‘repressive measures have notonly been directed towards Islamic militant groups and Communists, but alsotowards women activists’, hence dissuading them from mobilization or at leastmaking it difficult for them.50 However, despite the accuracy of such descriptions,the causality established between repression and authoritarianism more generallyand the hindrance of women’s mobilization is actually flawed. Looking at theexample of Women for Democracy, it is interesting to note that state repression –portrayed in the assault on female activists on the referendum day – was in fact astimulant for this attempt at mobilization. Moreover, there was no element ofdirect or indirect state coercion involved in its quick demise. Of course that is notto say that repression or more broadly authoritarianism is desirable (whethernormatively or functionally) to women’s mobilization, but rather that it is not adeterministic factor for its absence. A quick look at past women’s movements inLatin America, Iran and Eastern Europe further confirms this conclusion. Morespecifically, in Egypt, as pointed out earlier, the same authoritarian context didnot prohibit other forms of mobilization, including political Islam.

That is not to say that the authoritarian context of Egyptian politics and state–society relations have no bearing on women’s mobilization, but rather that thiselement plays out very differently in shaping women’s mobilization: not throughcoercion but rather through compartmentalizing potential participants within thewomen’s movement. Authoritarianism not only shapes the arena in which activ-ists function (political and civil societies), but more deeply affects their relationalpolitics. The continuity of the state’s ‘stick and carrot’ policy in dealing withdissent (including women’s/feminist demands) not only dissuades potentialactors from organizing because of the threat of coercion, but more importantlypersuades some of those actors to join ranks with the state and suffice with partialpractical gains with the hope of more strategic gains in the future. This was veryclear from the wedge between NGO and opposition activists in the Women forDemocracy – those who had links with the National Council for Women asopposed to the others – as discussed above.

Moreover, such authoritarian context and the contaminant lack of wide-platform movements or parties deprive nascent women’s movements from –potential strong allies, and the opportunity to benefit from overlapping mobiliza-tion structures, repertoires of contention and political learning at large. The ‘spill-over effects’ and intra-movement collaboration that nurtured feminist movementsin other parts of the world were kept in check in Egypt through the flexible author-itarianism of its regimes. Unlike the state of flux created by the rise of peasants,pro-democracy and natives’ social movements in Latin America for example,

50Al-Ali, ‘Gender and Civil Society in the Middle East’, op. cit., p. 222.

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which was conducive to the rise of a Latin American feminist movement, or thespillover effects that the civil rights movement had on the feminist movement inthe United States, this has not been the case in Egypt during the past decades. InEgypt itself, historically the strongest episodes of women’s mobilization corre-lated with the rise of other movements, specifically the anti-colonial mobiliza-tion.51 In contrast, current female voices and demands, even when not necessarilyfeminist, do not find a platform within strong oppositional political allies.

The constriction of this pool of contentious actors under authoritarianism wasvery much an issue for Women for Democracy, despite a state of political influx atthe time. According to Heba Raouf, ‘one of the reasons our initiative was veryshort-lived is that the key people who founded it were busy with other politicalactivities. We could not give it enough incubatory time and attention to overcomeour differences and disagreements’.52 However, what is more interesting here isthat, even though the Muslim Brotherhood, the biggest mass movement in Egypt,did not lend organic support to the rising initiative, it sent one of its iconic femalefigures, Jihan El-Halafawy, to the inauguration rally of Women for Democracy. Atthe same time, neither the liberal Wafd Party nor the leftist Tagamu party did so,nor did they later participate or lend any kind of support to the initiative.

Conclusion

The study of Women for Democracy, as short experience as it was, raises as manyquestions as the answers it provides, both for feminist literature and praxis. Itshows the continuity of many challenges facing gendered mobilization in Egypt,as in many parts of the South, none of which is deterministically correlated to therise of political Islam. In terms of discourse, framing women’s rights along thebinaries of Western vs authentic, and the universal vs the culturally specific, seemas relevant and alive today as they were several decades ago, with the firstimpulse of an organized women’s movement and at the height of national strug-gles and the early days of the post-colonial state. These binaries, and the resultingdivisions they lead to among activists, are compounded by narrow definitions offeminism(s) and unsuccessful attempts (if any) at localization of the concept.Similarly, it advocates the need to acknowledge the ambivalence in terms ofconstruction of women as subjects and subsequently their representation alongthe intersecting axes of class, religion, nation and gender, rather than homogeniz-ing women as one group.

What this means in relation to political Islam is that, if we are to understandwomen’s movements for what they are, resistance movements, and to understandthat at the current historical juncture in Egypt and more broadly the Arab region,resistance is defined within Islamist parameters and carries its banner, then itshould be no surprise that women’s mobilization would follow the same trend.However, this should not blind us from the fact that there are other conceptionsand contaminant actors who perceive women rights differently and aspire todifferent forms of women mobilization. Hence, a clear and locally constructeddefinition of what gendered mobilization means in the Egyptian context – which

51It is not a coincidence that the founding of the first women organization (EFU) took place in theaftermath of the 1919 revolution and by women of the Wafd Party which was leading the anti-colonialstruggle at the time.52Raouf, 5 November 2008, op. cit.


is necessary for successful mobilization – can only arise through joint struggles,dialogue, and negotiated coalition-building between religiously based and secu-lar activists. One of the major causes of the demise of Women for Democracy isthat the secular activists, not understanding the volatility of their setting as post-colonial subjects, viewed their Islamist peers as foes rather than partners. In inter-views with non-Islamist activists of Women for Democracy, most of them couldconsider the Islamist movement as a potential audience, let alone a potential allythat they could not work with even on specific demands or activities. Theirunderstanding – similar to much of the literature – was that, ‘[t]he movement forwomen’s citizenship [has] to contend with patriarchal Islamist movements’.53

While many positions on women within political Islamist organizations need tobe contended with, this does not apply to all the different organizations, or eventhe whole range of positions within one organization.54 In a post-colonial settingwhere authenticity and tradition does not simply equate to conservatism andrevisionism, but also to resistance and autonomy, it is a fatal mistake not todiscern the differences.

Distinguishing those differences and subsequently engaging different co-exist-ing conceptions of women rights and desired mobilization requires that we donot see them – as some of the literature and activists do – as intrinsicallyopposed. For example, Lila Abu Lughod asks, ‘[I]s liberation even a goal forwhich all women or people strive? Are emancipation, equality, and rights part ofa universal language we must use? … In other words, might other desires bemore meaningful for different groups of people? Living in close families? Livingin a godly way?’.55 Even though those are important questions to ask, especiallyin response to an unrightfully homogenizing and universalizing discourse onwomen in the south, the question becomes, why are those two different sets ofdesires seen as mutually exclusive? In other words, why are women or a womanof the South perceived as having to choose between equality, freedom and eman-cipation on the one hand, and living in a close family or in a godly way on theother? Moreover, why are those two sets of principles or desires seen as inher-ently belonging to one context, historic location or culture and not the other?Why cannot a woman from the South be entitled to both, i.e. equality in a closefamily? Finally, there is a need to perceive these conceptions of ‘close family’,‘godly ways’ and the like in a historicized fashion rather than an essentialist waythat refrains from questioning their meaning under the rhetoric of ‘respectingdifference’. However, Women for Democracy activists, like much of the litera-ture, seemed to ignore the complexity of multiple and contradictory conscious-ness when trying to map the engagement (historical or potential) of Egyptianwomen with feminisms.

Rather than engaging with their Islamist peers, so far, non-religious-basedactivists continue to share with the literature a mistaken understanding that,‘[p]articipation in transnational feminist networks and similar global advocacynetworks could assist Middle East and North Africa women’s struggles at thelocal and national levels by providing them with needed solidarity and

53Moghadam, ‘Engendering Citizenship, Feminizing Civil Society’, op. cit., p. 71.54A clear example of this range of opinions within Islamist organizations is the Muslim Brotherhood.For example, while their tentative party platform announced in 2006 declared that women should notrun for Presidential candidacy, influential figures within the organization such as Essan Al-Erian andAboul Monem Abou Al-Fotouh openly opposed this position.55Abu Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really need Saving?’, op. cit p. 788.

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support’.56 However, any historical understanding of women’s mobilization inEgypt and the Arab world suggests, on the contrary, that these activists need tostart focusing on ‘inside’ more than ‘outside’. It pushes activists and scholars toask the same question that Homi Bhabha asked more than a decade ago: ‘Are theinterests of ‘Western’ theory [and subsequent praxis] necessarily collusive withthe hegemonic role of the West as a power bloc?’57 The tentative answer is: as longas feminism and women’s struggles continue to be colonized and representedin terms of a global feminism that is pre-dominantly white-liberal, they will becollusive.

Finally, at the heart of all these concluding insights lies the question: is mobili-zation along gender axis relevant to all societies at different times? This is anintegral question to ask, because at the same moment of history when Women forDemocracy failed, hoards of Egyptian women were taking the lead in labourmobilization (strikes, sit-ins and factory occupations), socio-economic protestsand the pro-democracy movement, let alone the political Islamist movement.Women were not confined to the home or the family; they were (and still are)active agents, but along axes other than their gender.

56Moghadam, ‘Engendering Citizenship, Feminizing Civil Society’, op. cit., p. 80.57Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 20.

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