Suchergebnisse

In spite of rhetoric about an incipient citizen's democracy in Egypt, civil conditions are such that they militate against organized change. There is a sustained (23-year) state of emergency which limits public protest, political parties and civil organizations. Depressed economic conditions tend to draw people away from social and political concerns in favor of basic survival. In spite of this, a growing minority of citizens do engage in numerous diverse forms of activism. Women form a large part of this cadre. Contrary to the stereotypical depiction of them as passivevictims of patriarchal oppression, women have organized themselves for over a century around various feminist, nationalist and religious causes. They have challenged both state authority, and prevailing gender ideologies and practices that shape their everyday lives (Al-Ali 2003).

Activism is a term widely used to describe a broad range of activities carried out by individuals, groups and organizations. No single definition of the concept is fully comprehensive or universally accepted. While certain activities may be termed activism by some, they may not be considered as such by others. What constitutes activism is a controversial issue and is likely to remain a culture- and time-bound concept.

By Nadje Al-Ali, Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women's Movement (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Women's Activism and Participation in Lebanon was the subject of a round table discussion held at the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World last October. The participants were Lina Abou Habib, Iqbal Doughan, Linda Matar, Mona Khalaf, Zoya Rouhana, and Dima Dabbous-Sensenig. The moderator was Marguerite Helou.

It is only fair to begin with an admission that a few years ago I would have regarded the title of this paper as an impossible self-contradiction. Scholarship was one concept; activism another. In those days, the two concepts appeared to me to be incompatible. One could, of course, expect to encounter activists who had been scholars, or who had at least received scholarly training; but one would not expect to find a scholar who was an activist at the same time. In the simplest and most general terms, scholarship implied withdrawal, and activism meant involvement. This, at least, was the tradition with which I was familiar. True, there was such a thing as it applied scholarship, but this applied to subjects with which I was not very familiar, nor was I very comfortable with the concept. It seemed to me that the scholar who was overly concerned with the application of his scholarship was not a true scholar and that he stood in danger of compromising his scholarly objectivity and integrity. Obviously, this was the point of view of a rather standard traditionalist, trained in a study of government which had deep roots in the orthodoxy of the humanities and – in my case — lesser roots in the social sciences, which in my student days still seemed more social than scientific.

This special issue of al-Raida is devoted to women, activism, and the arts in the Arab world – a subject that was not chosen at random. Women and creativity has always been a topic of interest in the discipline of Women's Studies, and this issue in particular has as its focus the ways in which women of the Arab diaspora channel their creativity in a positive way in order to develop tools of consciousness-raising and a means of actively participating in the history – past, present, and future – of their own communities and countries as well as of the world in general.

How do you define activism? Tell me about the pioneering work done by the Jordanian National Commission for Women and what it has achieved in the area of women's political rights?

Democracy, simply defined as the rule of the people, by the people, for the people, is a term that has dominated political and sociological discourse and literature from ancient times up till now. However, determining who constitutes "The people" was, and continues to be, a culture- and time-bound issue. Throughout most of human history, women constituted one of the social groups excluded from the category of "The People." They had to wait till the twentieth century, and in some regions the third millennium to acquire equality with the male population in social, political and economic rights. This was brought about by the efforts of many women activists and their male supporters aided by various developments at the social, economic and political levels.

Palestinian women occupy a special place in Arab women's political history because of their dynamic involvement in the long Palestinian struggle. Similar to the case of women in the Algerian Revolution, Palestinian women's participation in the nationalist struggle provided an historical opportunity for their social and economic liberation (Hiltermann 1991; Kawar 1996; Peteet 1991; Sabbagh 1998). On the other hand, the Palestinian women's case is a good example of how the political context mandates parameters of women political participation and their struggle for equality.