Gendering Political Agency in the Maghreb

Abstract

If North Africa is understudied by academics of the Middle East, the Maghreb is more so and Maghrebian women even more (Ennaji, Sadiqi, and Vintges 2016; Moghadam 1993; Sadiqi 2016). The four books under review direct attention to this region and link the multifaceted and gendered histories of the Maghreb to its present. Their local, regional, and transregional approaches make a valuable contribution to North African, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean studies. Employing novel approaches and methodologies, new theories, and new sources in the post–Arab Spring moment, the books highlight the role of gender in the making of the historical and contemporary political Maghreb.Unlike most works on women in Ottoman households that focus on the Middle East, especially Turkey, Amy Aisen Kallander’s Women, Gender, and the Palace Households in Ottoman Tunisia spans the period from the sixteenth-century Ottoman conquest of Tunisia to the early nineteenth century. Starting from the premise that palaces are complex domestic spaces where economic and political power is engineered, the author situates the family as the locus of such power and highlights the role and agency of women in the making, development, and transition of this power. Women’s economic and political power was facilitated by gender segregation and their will to maintain political power through their sons, their husbands, and other men. The power of palace women was so pervasive that royal families in Europe emulated it (e.g., the Ottoman-Hapsburg rivalry in the western Mediterranean). The centrality of the family was reflected in architecture. Government administrations were structured as households where diplomatic transactions, government economics, marriages, and circumcisions took place.Although the political role of the family vacillated according to the political context, it never disappeared. Relative political stability in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led to state consolidation and bureaucratic development that placed family at the center of government. During this period royal and elite women contributed to the prestige of the ruling dynasties. They served as counselors, teachers, and managers. Since political power has always gone hand in hand with religion in the Maghreb and larger North Africa, palace women also contributed to public piety via endowments (waqf), charity, the reception of grievances, the establishment of pious foundations, and the provision of soup kitchens. Through these pious actions, women were part and parcel of the government’s redistribution of wealth contract. Palace women’s political and religious commitments marked stability and grandeur.The political instability of much of the nineteenth century caused by European imperial projects weakened the Ottoman Empire, including the Tunisian province. Financial difficulties paved the way for reforms, for example, the 1861 constitution, which gave more power to the state. Patronage of education and religious endowments, formerly the responsibility of elite women, became state-provided services. The influence of palace families diminished, and as a result, the household model of government lost its relevance. This situation was complicated by modernization projects. These deep changes impacted the role of the household in politics, and the contributions of palace women to the reform were marginalized as women were transformed into a symbol of modernization.Kallander’s brilliant link between the decrease in palace women’s political power and the rise of a polity based on the slogan of fraternity resonates well with what happened in Algeria, Egypt, and other countries of the region: women disappeared from the political scene after the revolution. In Tunis the nineteenth-century reforms turned the family, more specifically the inheritance laws, into equality between men. Kallander also makes a powerful link between the status and role of the family in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the so-called Arab Spring. Prior to the Tunisian revolution, the Ben Ali family ruled like a royal family, although it owed its power to the ruling party and not to royal status. This family, including Ben Ali’s wife Laila and in-laws, monopolized Tunisian political and economic life for twenty-three years through corruption and clientalism. The author sees this as a perpetuation of the worst attributes of a royal family (palace building, flaunting of wealth, immunity from legal sanction, use of family connections, and preparation of a hereditary dynasty). Kallander’s dynamic approach to the role of the family and women’s political power in the Maghreb from the sixteenth century to the present analyzes colonial modernity not as rupture but as reorientation of a continuous global process.Amy Young Evrard’s Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement focuses on the Moroccan secular feminist movement. She shows how this movement weaves together the local and the transnational to produce something unique to Morocco and yet resonates with women’s concerns in the region and beyond—the promotion of women’s legal rights and the reform and implementation of the mudawwana (family law). The women’s movement in Morocco is political (Ennaji 2005), allowing it to compromise with Islamic feminist organizations. Secular Moroccan women play a positive role in the struggle for social change (Guessous 2011) and in safeguarding women’s rights. Secularity was crucial to the development of feminist thought in Morocco and North Africa. The post–Arab Spring Islamist government in Tunisia did not remove women from the political scene, and feminists brought back a secular government in the 2014 post-Islamist elections. Evrard convincingly argues that the Moroccan secular feminist movement owes its strength to the political dexterity it acquired through decades of strategizing with the monarchy, political parties, and other social movements. She emphasizes the “urban” nature of the movement and its inscription in the larger Moroccan political framework. Her analysis shows how diverse secular nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Morocco not only feminized the political space but democratized it and opened further decision-making spaces for women. She demonstrates the strength and elasticity of these NGOs as they improved women’s legal rights. Building on these findings, the author broaches issues such as the necessity to problematize the “secular” and go beyond the binary secular-religious as sources for women’s rights. She questions the meanings of secular and elite. Strikingly, Evrard’s book relocates the secular not only as part of women’s lives but also in the larger sociopolitical makeup of the region. In search of a “harmonious family,” the book speaks to Kallander’s by highlighting the flexibility of the women’s secular movement in Morocco, which offers family development programs. Evrard underlines the dual conception of the harmonious family, however defined by women related by blood or marriage. The idiom of family is growing salient in the discourse of associations (including slogans and brochures) as a way of legitimizing women’s rights and discussing issues like the veil.Taking the legal aspect of family law to a more concrete but complex level, that of judicial practices of 2008–9, Maaike Voorhoeve’s Gender and Divorce Law in North Africa highlights the emancipatory reading of judicial law by Tunisian female judges. This is a significant token of agency in a region where law and politics are imbricated (Charrad 2001). Intervening in law to improve it is generally referred to as ijtihad. Classical Muslim Sunni jurists, such as Abu Husayn al-Basri, Abu Hamid Muhammad Ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, and Sayf al-Din al-Amidi, transposed this meaning to the realm of Islamic jurisprudence and defined ijtihad as the exertion of the maximum “mental energy” to first comprehend and then apply fiqh (legal theory) with the aim of discovering the “law of God” (Ali-Karamali and Dunne 1994; Hallaq 1984; Sell 1907). This “law of God” is defined as the “all-encompassing law of Islam” that is based on the Quran, and ijtihad (Coulson 1964). The mutability of Islamic law has long been a point of contention, resulting in a rich tradition of legal theory in Islam. Classical Sunni jurisprudence reserves the right of ijtihad to a few male religious scholars. Focusing on divorce, Voorhoeve uses extensive fieldwork and reflection on norms, legislation, and judicial practices to locate nuances in some judicial practices where female judges adjudicate in a gender-neutral way by applying the constitution and international conventions. These findings are new and relevant to other countries of the Maghreb, also characterized by legal pluralism. Women judges’ mobilization of the emancipatory potential of the law is significant today. Innovating at the legal level, the strongest site of Arab-Muslim patriarchy, is remarkable, especially during the 2010–11 uprisings in Tunisia, where women’s rights and the relation between state, religion, and the judiciary were core political issues.Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh’s Ideal Refugees explores a different type of female political agency. The prominence of women as “ideal refugees” in the Polisario camps has been crucial for the political survival of the Polisario leaders since 1975. “Fabricated” images of “empowered” and “liberated” women have become part of the textual and visual representations of the refugees and camp life. By capitalizing on refugee women as “ideal,” “free,” “secular,” and “unique,” the Polisario male leaders secure the humanitarian and political support of Western academics, NGOs, civil society, and solidarity networks. Inadvertently, they highlight the central importance of women in any characterization of notions like “democratic,” “equal,” or even “politically credible.” Ironically, the Polisario’s representation of refugee women as “ideal” was not matched on the ground, as women were often marginalized in the allocation of development aid. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh calls this “repress-entations.”These four books break new ground. They use previously untapped sources, point to a number of new theoretical approaches, stress the importance of comparative analysis, and open several new lines of academic research on the Maghreb.