Middle Eastern Women and the Struggle for a Public Voice

VALENTINE M. MOGHADAM

Valentine M. Moghadam is a chief of section in the social and human sciences sector of Unesco, and the author of Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2nd ed., 2003).

Women and Media in the Middle East: Power through Self-Expression
edited by naomi sakr
London, I. B. Tauris, 2004. 256 pages
Hardback: £45

The structure–agency dialectic is best captured in Marx’s famous observation that workers make history, but not under conditions of their own choosing. Similarly, contemporary Middle Eastern women’s movements show that collectively, women are agents of social change in the region, though the constraints under which they operate remain formidable. The modernising women of the Middle East not only have been affected by various socio-economic, political, and cultural processes, but are themselves at the centre and even forefront of change. Often, their explicit objectives are equality for women and the democratisation of society. Among their strategies are “Islamic feminism”, or reinterpretation of Islamic history and law to recuperate their emancipatory kernel, engagement with public policies and recommendations for reform, and increasing use of the media for self-expression and to influence public opinion. Indeed, power through self-expression, as in the subtitle of the book under review, is an apt description of the strategy of women’s groups (e.g., those in Morocco and Iran), feminist scholar–activists (as in Egypt’s New Woman Research Centre), and women writers and filmmakers in many Middle Eastern countries (such as Egypt’s Nawal Saadawi, Algeria’s Assia Djebar, and Iran’s Rakhshan Bani-Etemad).

Naomi Sakr, editor of Women and Media in the Middle East, contributes a fine introductory chapter that sets the tone for the book while also providing a framework within which to understand and explain women’s involvement in, and engagement with, the media. Noting that the “Middle East media have changed dramatically since the early 1990s” (p. 4), Sakr goes on to argue that by constituting a “critical mass”, women have been “making a difference” through their access to the public sphere. Issues pertaining to gender relations and the status of women are pervasive in the Middle East, not least because of public debates often initiated by women activists and leaders. Sakr points to US research showing that the presence of women in the media is correlated with increased coverage of issues such as rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and health. But, she is keen to emphasise, a critical mass of women in the media does not necessarily lead to change in the nature and content of the news when the media operate within an authoritarian context with censorship laws. Egyptian radio and television, for example, have a large proportion of women, but since the media are under the supervision of the ministry of information, little has changed in media coverage and women have had minimal impact on the public sphere. Again, limited access to the Internet means limited involvement in the transnational public sphere. This marginalisation and exclusion of female perspectives, concerns, and input is true also of Saudi Arabia and even of Jordan, with its Arab Women’s Media Centre—though there is evidence that internal and external pressures may eventually have an effect.

The Iranian context provides an interesting contrast. For there, journalists have defied the authoritarian state and stringent censorship laws to set up independent media, including a lively and dynamic women’s press—though writers have paid dearly in terms of newspaper closures, fines, and jail sentences. This is the subject of chapter two, “The Women’s Press in Contemporary Iran: Engendering the Public Sphere”, by Gholam Khiabany and Annabelle Sreberny. They provide a historical overview of the emergence and growth of women’s media in Iran, the constraints such media have faced, and their success in ensuring that women’s rights remain part of public debates.

Three chapters focus on Egypt: Sonia Dabbous examines women’s rights and women’s journalism before the Free Officers’ revolt of 1952; Lina Khatib discusses women as tools of nationalism in Egyptian political cinema; and Sahar Khamis considers Egyptian rural women’s readings of televised literacy campaigns.

Dabbous highlights the very long struggle of Egyptian women to change laws and customs that keep women in a subordinate position in the family, and commemorates the valiant women leaders whose hunger strikes and demonstrations gained women political rights. To this reader, the contrast with today’s more discreet forms of contestation and strategies of reform in Egypt is striking.

Khamis’s ethnographic survey of thirty rural women found varied responses to the messages conveyed in the Egyptian government’s televised rural literacy campaigns. Some agreed with the campaigns’ presentation of rural illiteracy as a problem that needed to be corrected, while others defended their decision to remain focused on motherhood and domestic duties rather than leave home for literacy classes.

Khatib discusses the distortions and misrepresentations that occur when cinema is used to propagate a particular state ideology or interpretation of nationalism. Xenophobic filmmaking casts women as temptresses and traitors who enable Israel or Western enemies to make inroads into the body politic.

This is perhaps why women need to make their own films, as Zahia Smail Salhi shows in her chapter on Algeria. Feminist writers and filmmakers such as Assia Djebar are in revolt against the silences and distortions of the colonial and post-colonial periods, and loudly proclaim and depict women’s voices, self-representations, and aspirations. (I might add that feminist filmmaking in Iran, by for example Tahmineh Milani and Marzieh Meshkini as well as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, has similarly sought to contest male power and state policies, and in the process has helped to change cultural attitudes and international misperceptions.)

Victoria Firmo-Fontan’s chapter on the broadcasting service of the Lebanese Hezbollah, al-Manar (“the lighthouse”) television, and the Hezbollah Women’s Association is an interesting case-study of the effective exploitation of the media by Islamists. In contrast to other Lebanese families’ use (and misuse) of foreign maids, Islamist families apparently do not employ imported maids, and Islamist women insist that their hijab does not constrain their activism. (Female presenters on al-Manar TV wear the hijab, and no parts of the female body than the hands are exposed on any programme.) Al-Manar TV apparently prides itself on being different from “other Lebanese television channels, where women are objectified and represented as ‘belly-dancers and prostitutes’ ” (p. 177).

For those who have noted the presence of women journalists of Arab origin on CNN International, the BBC, and other international media, Magda Abu Fadil provides profiles of and interviews with Arab women journalists at home and abroad. Have they helped to effect change in their countries and turn the post–11 September tide of international stereotyping and misrepresentation? The answer is yes and no. As one woman journalist notes: “On the one hand, we benefit from deep respect accorded women in a region where they represent the family’s top values, as mothers or sisters. But we also suffer because there is little understanding of a woman’s need to have a career, or to advance financially outside of traditional social criteria” (p. 197).

Women and Media in the Middle East includes other chapters on Palestine (Benaz Somiry-Batrawi), Kuwait (Haya al-Mughni and Mary Ann Tétreault), and the Internet (Deborah Wheeler). What comes across in this fine collection is that access to and use of the media is a key mechanism for women’s empowerment and social reform, but women continue to face political, cultural, and economic challenges in effecting lasting change.