[Feminism & Islam: Legal & Literary Perspectives]

The religious revivalism the Middle East and the outright suppression of women's legal rights and personal freedoms by Islamic states Iran, Afghanistan and Sudan has another side to it which is often overlooked or at least not sufficiently appreciated. That is the remarkable resistance of women, their skilful manoeuvring within gendered borderlines and their unbroken and unbreakable struggle for change. The scholarship on Islam and gender issues which give prominence to the voices of women, rather than to the undeniably discriminatory gender practices the Islamic societies, counter this important absence the literature.Dawn Chatty and Annika Rabo's Organizing Women: Formal and Informal Women's Groups the Middle East grew out of a workshop held at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women at Oxford University June 1995. The editors bring together a group of academics and researchers who survey women's activism different countries of the Middle East including Lebanon, Morocco, Bahrain, Egypt and Kuwait. They explore one of the most neglected and least documented areas of scholarship on Islam and gender issues, women's organizations. The book is a much needed addition to the field of women's studies, comparative studies of gender issues and cultural studies.As the editors note their insightful introduction, women's organizations are not looked upon favourably the Middle East. In fact, except for charity-oriented and social service agencies, and women's associations sponsored and by the state, independent women's organizations are not tolerated. Various contributors to the book explore specific issues and constraints which women face different countries the region when they try to organize themselves as active agents and not as appendages of the state or of various political parties. The volume consists of nine chapters, each confirming the general theme of the book. In various countries of the Middle East, the creation of women's organization(s) has been linked with modernization projects which require the production of educated, career-oriented women who will dutifully participate state-building, while simultaneously maintaining their nurturing role as mothers and wives. As soon as a radical shift women's discourse emerges, as Hya Al-Mughni's illuminating chapter on women's organizations Kuwait demonstrates, government officials change the leadership of the organization, or dissolve it altogether. Seen this context, the reader will better appreciate why, for example, Senegalese women's associations, discussed the chapter by Eva Evers Rosander, continue to maintain hierarchical caste and gender structures, or why Lebanon, discussed by Suad Joseph, women's organizations acting on behalf of women are by a small clique of women who reproduce 'the political processes of men's hierarchical, patron-client socio-political organizations'(p. 62).After reading the chapters, the reader more fully appreciates the point raised the introduction, that in societies where civil consensus is unimportant, where individual voice is insignificant, where associations that cut across kin groups and tribes are feared, women who organize groups are considered a threat to existing institutions (p. 18). And we might empathize with the editors' position that this context, greater efforts at organizing women will increase their dependence on the centres of power, whether these are national or international, civil or state run (p. 19).The Nawal El Saadawi Reader is a collection of El Saadawi's non-fiction writings on a host of topics, written over several years for international conferences and events. The volume speaks to the pressing intellectual conceres that El Saadawi faces since the publication of her path-breaking nonfiction work. The Hidden Face of Eye (Zed Books, 1980), both as a political activist and now as an Arab feminist widely acknowledged and celebrated inside and outside of the Middle East and North Africa. …