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DIALECTS OF WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT: THE INTERNATIONAL CIRCUITRY OF THE ARAB HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 20051

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2009

Lila Abu-Lughod
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Extract

The ethical and political dilemmas posed by the construction and international circulation of 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 development projects devoted to empowering them. In the past fifteen years or so, through a series of international conferences and the efforts of feminist activists, women's rights have come to be framed successfully as universal human rights. Building on the U.N. conferences on women that started in 1975 and led to other initiatives, the appropriate arena of women's rights work has been redefined from the national to the international.

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Articles
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , February 2009 , pp. 83 - 103
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

1

United Nations Development Programme, Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World (New York: Regional Bureau of Arab States, cosponsored with the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development and the Arab Gulf Programme for United Nations Organizations, 2006). Please see the overview in this issue. Lila Abu-Lughod, Frances S. Hasso, and Fida J. Adely contributed to the following background note.

The AHDR 2005, published online in Arabic and English in December 2006, is the last volume in a four-part series focused on development in Arab-identified states and territories. A research and policy document as well as visionary political statement, this 230-page report (plus eighty pages of charts, statistics, and references) was produced over several years through the research, writing, and editing of over seventy-five individuals from the Arab world, including some of its most prominent social researchers and feminists.

In the 1980s, after a decades-long emphasis on economic growth as the primary engine for development, a number of prominent economists and development practitioners heralded a new era in the conceptualization of development as primarily a human endeavor with improved life chances and quality of life as the proper end. Thus was coined the term “human development,” followed by subsequent efforts to delineate the essential dimensions of human development and the appropriate measures of a development endeavor that no longer had “growth” (and, more narrowly, increased income) as its primary indicator but now sought to measure human ends, capabilities, and opportunities. The global human development report, launched by the UNDP in 1990, put forth new measures in the form of a human development index for capturing this vision. This initial report was followed annually by a new global human development report, each new release grappling with a new dimension of human development, with topics ranging from gender to democracy to technology and human rights. The UNDP's Human Development Report Office maintains a website (http://hdr.undp.org/) with information about the global reports as well as national human development reports that have been developed by select countries.

The AHDRs were produced under the auspices of and governed by the UNDP. The first, the ADHR 2002, presents and comparatively analyzes various indicators in Arab states and highlights three major “deficits” hindering human development that are addressed in depth in the volumes that follow: “Building a Knowledge Society” (2003), “Towards Freedom in the Arab World” (2004), and “Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World” (2005).

References

NOTES

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

2 The long history of internationalism in Arab women's movements has been studied by many. For Egypt see, for example, Badran, Margot, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar, and Nelson, Cynthia, “Satyagraha: Ghandi's Influence on an Egyptian Feminist,” in Pioneering Feminist Anthropology in Egypt, ed. Rieker, Martina, Cairo Papers in Social Science 28 (2005): 119–34Google Scholar. Also see the special issue on “Early Twentieth Century Middle Eastern Feminisms, Nationalisms, and Transnationalisms,” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 4, no. 1 (2008).

3 UNDP, AHDR 2005.

4 Abu-Lughod, Lila, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986/2000)Google Scholar; Writing Women's Worlds (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993/2008); Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

5 For more on these questions, see Abu-Lughod, Lila, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” American Anthropologist 104 (2002): 783–90; “The Debate about Gender, Religion, and Rights: Thoughts of a Middle East Anthropologist,” Publication of the Modern Language Association 121 (2006): 1621–30; and “The Scandal of Honor Crimes” (unpublished manuscript).

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

7 Asad, Talal, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” in Writing Culture, ed. Clifford, James and Marcus, George (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986): 141–64Google Scholar.

8 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Community (London: Verso, 1991)Google Scholar.

9 I intend to research the process of making the report for a future study. Moreover, I have consulted only the English version thus far.

10 AHDR 2005, 102.

11 For an excellent example of the way such negative portrayals picked up by the Western press need to be interrogated, see Eugene Rogan's “exercise in systematic doubt” about the way an earlier AHDR used the state of Arab publishing and translating to index a knowledge deficit. Rogan, Eugene, “Arab Books and Human Development,” Arab Studies Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2004): 67–79Google Scholar.

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

13 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 96.

14 Ibid., 6.

15 Ibid., 131.

16 Ibid., 6.

17 Ibid., 10.

18 Abu-Lughod, “The Debate About Gender” and Writing Women's Worlds; Brown, Wendy, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Multiculturalism and Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence; Volpp, Leti, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 12 (2000): 89–116Google Scholar; Volpp, Leti, “Feminism Versus Multiculturalism,” Columbia Law Review 101 (2001): 1181–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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

20 Adely, Fida J., “Educating Women for Development: The Arab Human Development Report 2005 and the Problem with Women's Choices,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 105–122 (this issue)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 For elaboration, see Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood, chap. 3.

22 For 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; Booth, Marilyn, May Her Likes Be Multiplied (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

23 Abu-Lughod, Writing Women's Worlds, 205–42.

24 Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood, 81–108.

25 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 119.

26 Ibid., 65.

27 Panda, Pradeep and Agarwal, Bina, “Marital Violence, Human Development and Women's Property Status in India,” World Development 33 (2005): 823–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 For example, see Williams, Joan, Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

29 Hoodfar, Homa, Between Marriage and the Market (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

30 Bahramitash, Roksana, “Myths and Realities of the Impact of Political Islam on Women,” Development in Practice 14 (2004): 508–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 167.

32 Ibid., 168.

33 Nussbaum, Martha, “Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings,” in Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities, ed. Nussbaum, Martha C. and Glover, Jonathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 61–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Ibid., 85.

35 Charrad, Mounira, States and Women's Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

36 See Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments and “The Scandal of Honor Crimes.”

37 Ali, Kamran Asdar, Planning the Family in Egypt (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

38 Joseph, Suad, ed., Intimate Selving in Arab Families: Gender, Self, Identity (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

39 Donzelot, Jacques, The Policing of Families (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Engels, Friedrich, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, rev. ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1972)Google Scholar; Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977)Google Scholar and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1978); Zaretsky, Eli, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1978)Google Scholar.

40 Kandiyoti, Deniz, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender and Society 2 (1988): 274–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Nussbaum and Glover, Women Culture and Development.

42 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 179.

43 Ibid., 230.

44 Ibid., 225.

45 Ibid., 92.

46 Ibid., 60.

47 Ibid. The report suggests that the Arab world needs to “support economic growth” (p. 225), but its main critique of the region is only that it is “dominated by rentier economies” (p. 20).

48 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 168.

49 Bayat, Asef, “Transforming the Arab World: The Arab Human Development Report and the Politics of Change,” Development and Change 36 (2005): 1225–237CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 229.

51 Ibid., 143–62.

52 Ibid., 149.

53 Ibid., 152.

54 Suad Joseph, “Elite Strategies for State Building,” and Molyneux, Maxine, “The Law, the State and Socialist Policies with Regard to Women: The Case of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen,” in Women, Islam, and the State, ed. Kandiyoti, Deniz (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Hatem, Mervat, “Economic and Political Liberalization in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (1992): 231–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Joseph, “Elite Strategies for State Building,” 179.

56 See also Al-Ali, Nadje, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (London: Zed Books, 2007)Google Scholar.

57 Molyneux, “The Law, the State, and Socialist Policies.”

58 Laura Bier, “From Mothers of the Nation to Daughters of the State: Gender, Citizenship and the Politics of Inclusion in Egypt, 1945–1967” (PhD diss., New York University, 2006). For a study of the 19th- and early 20th-century role of familial politics in the development of modern Egypt, see Pollard, Lisa, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt 1805–1923 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 124.

60 Ibid., 126.

61 The report calls for “extensive legal and institutional changes aimed at bringing national legislation in line with CEDAW.” UNDP, AHDR 2005, 22.

62 Ibid., 61.

63 Ibid., 65, 213.

64 Ibid., 212.

65 Ibid., 61.

66 Ibid., 226.

67 Hanafi, Sari and Tabar, Linda, The Emergence of a Palestinian Globalized Elite: Donors, International Organizations and Local NGOs (Jerusalem: Institute of Palestine Studies and Muwatin, Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, 2005)Google Scholar.

68 Jad, Islah, “The NGO-isation of Arab Women's Movements,” International Development Studies Bulletin 35, no. 4 (2004): 34–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 222.

70 Abu-Lughod, “The Debate about Gender, Religion, and Rights”; Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence; Volpp, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior” and “Feminism Versus Multiculuralism.”

71 Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence.

72 Conners, Jane, “United Nations Approaches to ‘Crimes of Honour,’” in “Honour”: Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence against Women, ed. Welchmann, Lynn and Hossain, Sara (London: Zed Books, 2005), 22–41Google Scholar; Fraser, Arvonne, “Becoming Human: the Origins and Development of Women's Human Rights,” in Women, Gender and Human Rights, ed. Agosin, Marjorie (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 15–64Google Scholar.

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

74 Abu-Lughod, “The Scandal of Honor Crimes.”

75 Abu-Odeh, Lama, “Honor: Crimes of,” in Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005), 225Google Scholar. This is so especially in immigrant contexts, even when—as Volpp's unraveling of the strange case of Tina Isa in 1989 in New Jersey reveals and Katherine Ewing's book on Turkish immigrants to Germany describes—the actual motives for particular incidents may be other than cultural or honor based. See Volpp, Leti, “Disappearing Acts: On Gendered Violence, Pathological Cultures, and Civil Society,” Publication of the Modern Language Association 121 (2006): 1631–638Google Scholar; Ewing, Katherine, Stolen Honor (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

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

77 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 143–47.

78 Ibid., 208–12.

79 For a range of approaches, see Ahmed, Leila, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Al-Hibri, Azizah, “Muslim Women's Rights in the Global Village,” Journal of Law and Religion 37 (2000–2001): 37–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tucker, Judith, In the House of the Law (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

80 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 147.

81 Okin, Susan Moller, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

82 For an important discussion of human rights and shariʿa, see Modirzadeh, Naz, “Taking Islamic Law Seriously: INGOs and the Battle for Muslim Hearts and Minds,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 19 (2006): 191–233Google Scholar.

83 For examples of the approach, see Asma Barlas, “Globalizing Equality: Muslim Women, Theology, and Feminism,” and Anwar, Zainah, “Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Women's Rights,” in On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era, ed. Nouraie-Simone, F. (New York: Feminist Press, 2005): 91–110, 233–47Google Scholar; Al-Hibri, Azizah, “Deconstructing Patriarchal Jurisprudence in Islamic Law” in Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader, ed. Davis, Angela (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 221–30Google Scholar. For projects, consider the Malaysian NGO Sisters in Islam, which has support from the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Institute for Peace, while the ambitious new Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity has support from everything from the Global Fund for Women to major foundations including Ford, Luce, and Ms, http://www.asmasociety.org/wise/ (accessed 22 February 2008).

84 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, “(Un)Veiling Feminism,” Social Text 64 (2000): 29–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Najmabadi, , “Feminism in an Islamic Republic,” in Islam, Gender, and Social Change, ed. Haddad, Yvonne and Esposito, John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 59–79Google Scholar.

86 Deeb, Lara, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shiʿi Lebanon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

87 Ezzat, Heba Raouf, “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 Committee for Human Rights, 1999): 175–84, appendix IIGoogle Scholar; Mahmood, Saba, Politics of Piety (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

88 Karam, Azza, Women, Islamisms and the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 Mervat Hatem discusses the writings of Bakr, Omaima Abou and Elsadda, Hoda in “In the Eye of the Storm: Islamic Societies and Muslim Women in Globalization Discourses,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26 (2006): 22–35Google Scholar.

90 Islah Jad, “Between Religion and Secularism: Islamist Women of Hamas,” in On Shifting Ground, 172–98.

91 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 128.

92 Ibid., 123.

93 Ibid., 208.

94 Ibid., 211.

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