Islam Is the Solution: Jordanian Islamists and the Dilemma of the 'Modern Woman'

Abstract

During the past decade, the issue of gender relations and women's conduct and dress has been occupying an increasingly prominent place in the discourse of Islamist movements. This article attempts to situate Arab Islamists' preoccupation with women within the legacy of colonialism and social transformations relating to gender and class. With regard to Jordan, the author links the urgency of the issue with social transformations at the level of gender and class during recent decades, and points out that the key to understanding the prominence of the 'woman question' in Islamist thinking is the fact that the social groups which comprise the traditional constituency of the Islamists are finally experiencing for themselves the socially disruptive implications of new patterns in women's work, education and visibility. In short, the issue of women's modesty and conduct, which was more abstract as recent as one generation ago (when only upper middle and upper class women were visible in the public domain), acquires concreteness and urgency in the rapidly changing social environment. The article also tries to show how the Islamists' framing of the issue in cultural terms has a primal appeal, especially to those social groups most alienated from the insular world of the westernized elite and in search of 'authentic' ways of living in the modern world.