The Non-governmental Political Participation of Arab Women
News
Review of: Women and the Arab NGOs. Dar Al-Mostaqbal Al-Arabi, 1999.
Women and the Arab NGOs is part of the series of the work of the Arab Network for NGOs in the field of promoting research on Arab non-governmental activism. The book contains six papers on women in NGOs in Jordan, Morocco, Yemen, Palestine, Egypt and Kuwait written by a group of distinguished scholars in the Arab world. The six papers analyze the role of women in Arab NGOs. Stress is laid also on the historical role played by these organizations in the different phases of national struggle. A reading of the historical part related to each of the six countries shows that women organizations and non-governmental work had been related to political activism and patriotic struggle in each of the six countries. In Jordan, women’s organizations took on a political role with the start of the Palestinian resistance movement against Zionist hegemony and the settlement policy. The 1948 Nakba played a role in the politicization of the women’s body: the problems of the camp, with its women and children, comprised an integral part of the work of the NGOs. Similarly, in Morocco, both colonization and women’s contributions in the nationalist movements had a great impute on the nongovernmental social work. The women’s branch that was founded by the Independence Party in the year
1944, in addition to its role in spreading patriotic awareness among women, was particularly interested in fighting illiteracy and helping poor, orphaned girls. Generally speaking, a large number of charity organizations in Morocco had been founded by political parties especially in the early forties of this century. In Palestine, the feminist movement, since its emergence until the present movement, has always been connected in some way or another to the political leadership in most of the charity societies which were founded as a result of the 1948 Nakba and of the dispersion of the Palestinian people. Relief work, training, raising the standard of women’s education, for the purpose of giving them an opportunity for finding better jobs and encouraging women to move from the private sphere to the public sphere and to participate in political work have been some of the most important objectives of the charity societies that were established in Palestine after 1948. As for Yemen, non-governmental women’s work †was associated with political developments. After independence Yemen established legal structures that helped in changing the role of women as well as involving them in the social, economic and political developmental processes. The state also paved the way for the emergence of a number of non-governmental women’s organizations that played an important role in the development of the country.
One of the most important countries where feminist work has been related to nationalist and political activism is Egypt. The 1919 Revolution, for instance, is one of the clear examples that illustrate the interrelation between the two movements: the feminist and the patriotic. Moreover, the feminist movement in Egypt generally tries to place itself within the framework of the more comprehensive social movements. Women’s struggle, thus managed to pave the way for the emergence of developmental liberation projects.
There were many prominent signposts along the road of the women’s movements and their development. Hoda Sha’rawy of the Women’s Union paved the way for a second generation of feminists to lead the movement. There was, for instance, Zeinab Al-
Ghazali whose activism started in the thirties. She is the founder of the Society of
Muslim Women, which was a women’s society with Islamic inclinations. There were also Ceza Nabarawy and Doria Shafik and it was Shafik who founded the Daughters of the Nile Union, which was concerned with women’s political rights. In the forties and fifties of the twentieth century, Ingy Efflatoun and Latifa Al-Zayat and others started a new trend in the women’s movement, which aimed at relating women’s rights to the liberation of the whole society from all forms of colonization as well as to the establishment of socialism. The year 1967 is said to be a “turning point”. The 1967 defeat was the beginning of the rise of the Islamic trend which continued to boom during the seventies and advocated the return of women to the house hence confining their role to the family. In spite of this regressive attitude, some singular but strong voices, such as Nawal Al-Sa’dawy and Amina Al-Said, presented women’s issues from a feminist perspective. The seventies and the eighties, however, witnessed the birth of a new feminist awareness; the eighties witnessed the beginning of the return of some Egyptian women to dealing with women’s issues as an independent entity. This stage, therefore, witnessed the beginning of the formation of some groups that saw women’s issues from a special perspective such as the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, which was founded in 1982 under the leadership of Nawal Al-Sa’dawy. Such organizations gained more ground in the nineties with the increase of the feminist awareness. A group of organizations were founded at the beginning of the nineties and they refused to be under the supervision of the Ministry of Social Affairs, but registered themselves as non-profit companies to get a larger share of freedom of movement, away form the hegemony of the government. The book includes a field study of ten of these women’s organizations. It aims at revealing the present conditions of these organizations restating their objectives and negotiating methods that can be adopted for the reactivation of civil society and the improvement of conditions of women.
The chapter on Kuwait further develops the theme of women’s political activism by highlighting the link between women’s activism and the political situation in Kuwait from the colonial period to the present day. Although the first women’s society in Kuwait was founded in 1962, i.e. after the independence, women’s social and voluntary work preceded the emergence of non-governmental organizations. Kuwaiti women have always volunteered in response patriotic callings on all occasions and under all circumstances, offering their effort and money. This shows clearly in their attitude towards the colonizer. The Iraqi aggression against Kuwait was another occasion when the relation between women’s non-governmental work and national resistance was established.
The six chapters emphasize the role played by women’s organizations in national resistance and struggle and the influence of these organizations on the policies and decisions in all the Arab countries included in the book. The historical survey presented by the six chapters is one of the most distinctive features of this work. An awareness of the history of non-governmental work is one way to better understand women’s movements and develop them.
 
Hoda El Saadi*
* Lecturer at Cairo University. Founding Member of the Women and Memory Forum.
 

Latest News