Gendering Religion and Politics: Untangling Modernities

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Author: Hanna Herzog | Ann Braude

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Ge nder i ng R eligion and Pol itic s

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Ge nder i ng R eligion and Pol itic s U ntangl i ng M o der ni t i es

Edited by Hanna Herzog and Ann Braude Associate Editor Pnina Steinberg

T h e Va n L e e r J e r u s a l e m I n s t i t u t e and Wo m e n ’ s S t u d i e s i n R e l i g i o n P r o g r a m , Har vard Divinity School

Harvard Divinity School

GENDERING RELIGION AND POLITICS

Copyright © The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and the Women’s Studies in Religion Program, Harvard Divinity School, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-61308-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions First edition: August 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Untangling Modernities Hanna Herzog and Ann Braude

1

PART I GENDER, RELIGION,

AND

POLITICS: CONTINGENT RELATIONS

1 Nativism and the Politics of Gender in Catholicism and Islam Jose Casanova 2

3

21

Imagined Communities: State, Religion, and Gender in Jewish Settlements Hanna Herzog

51

Contemporary American Catholicism and the Challenge of Gender Equality Mary C. Segers

75

PART II WOMEN’S AGENCY

BETWEEN

RELIGION

AND

STATE

4 From the Moabite Ruth to Norly the Filipino: Intermarriage and Conversion in the Jewish Nation State Daphna Hacker

101

5 Seeking Recognition: Women’s Struggle for Full Citizenship in the Community of Religious Worship Pnina Lahav

125

6 “Subway Women” and the American Near East Relief in Anatolia, 1919–1924 Anat Lapidot-Firilla

153

7 Global Sisterhood: Transnational Perspectives on Gender and Religion Gertrud Hüwelmeier

173

vi

C o n t e n ts

PART III GENDER SPACES: CULTURE, RELIGION,

AND

POLITICS

8 Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War on Terror Saba Mahmood 9

193

Patriarchal Ecumenism, Feminism, and Women’s Religious Experiences in Costa Rica Elina Vuola

217

10 The Boundaries of Liberation, the Chains of Freedom: Urban Women in 1960s Egyptian Popular Cinema Shmulik Bachar

239

11 Language, Gender, and Power in Morocco Fatima Sadiqi

259

Notes on Contributors

277

Name Index

281

Subject Index

285

Li st of Figu res

6.1 NER orphans and American products on display 6.2 A sample of an NER campaign poster

160 166


Ack nowledgments

This book was first conceived at an academic encounter between the two editors while Hanna Herzog was a visiting scholar in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program (WSRP) headed by Ann Braude at Harvard Divinity School. Hanna suggested widening her theoretical concern with religion, gender, and politics into an interdisciplinary comparative project. Ann saw in Hanna’s proposal an opportunity to connect the work of the 150 scholars who have participated in Harvard’s WSRP since its founding in the 1970s with an international network. In 2006, 10 scholars from the United States, India, Germany, and Finland joined 10 Israeli and Palestinian scholars in Jerusalem for a public workshop jointly supported by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Harvard Divinity School, and the GoetheInstitute: “Religion Gender and Politics: An International Dialogue.” Jerusalem proved to be a particularly fruitful location because of its enormous significance for the three faiths under discussion, as well as the high visibility of intersections of religion, gender, and politics on its streets and in its newspapers, communities, and cafes. As quickly became clear from presentations and comments by Israeli and Palestinian participants, the State of Israel is itself an experiment in the application of social theory to the relation of religion and politics in the context of modernity, a fact that some papers in this book demonstrate as well. The conversation initiated at the conference has continued and evolved, and has grown to include additional scholars committed to deciphering the relationships between gender, religion, and politics. This collection of papers reflects and represents the work of this intellectual network. We offer our sincere thanks to the authors who trusted in the project and contributed their knowledge, enthusiasm, and commitment to it. The project also benefited immensely from the work of scholars and commentators whose work does not appear in this volume, including Nohad ‘Ali, Orit Avishai, Wallace Best, Ruth Ebenstein, Tamar El Or, Hunaida Ghanim, Tova Hartman, Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, Michael Karayanni, Ruth Barzilay Lumbrozo, Maina Chawla Singh, and Nayereh Tohidi. Theoretical conceptions underlying this project were initially developed in a three-year seminar, led by Hanna and sponsored by The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Hanna is thankful for the stimulating environment enabled by the open mindedness, support, and trust she enjoyed from both Shimshon Zelniker, the former director of The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and Gabriel Motzkin, the current director. Anat

x

Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts

Lapidot-Firilla took leadership of the seminar when Hanna was at Harvard. In parallel to the Van Leer Seminar, Hanna also led an advanced seminar on Gender and Politics at the Sociology and Anthropology Department of Tel-Aviv University, which resulted in several enriching student theses. Hanna wishes to thank all the seminar participants and extends special thanks to Yehouda Shenhav—who also read parts of the manuscript—for fruitful intellectual relationship. Kinneret Lahad with her rich sociological knowledge, wide intellectual horizons, and organizational cleverness has coordinated skillfully the Israeli seminar and the international conference. Shulamit Laron, the director of Public Events at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute was very helpful in the production of the conference. Sara Soreni, the director of Publications at Van Leer, and her assistant Yona Razon have been helpful in the accompanying book-production process. Anat HammermannSchuldiner assisted in the very first stages of the book-production process, and Esther Rosenfeld has been instrumental as production editor in the preparation of the manuscript. The technical staff of Van Leer has also always been very supportive. At Harvard Divinity School, the project benefited from the contributions of the many Women’s Studies in Religion Program Research Associates and Advisory Committee members who responded to countless queries, made suggestions, and contributed to the establishment of an international intellectual community. We are grateful for the support of Dean William Graham. Both Tracy Wall and Elizabeth Sutton, WSRP coordinators, assisted us in innumerable ways. In particular, we thank Mary C. Segers for lots of good advice. We owe special thanks to the professional and committed staff at Palgrave Macmillan: Anthony Wahl, the senior editor who accepted our manuscript, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, who continued working with us, Asa Johnson, the assistant editor of Production, Publicity, and Marketing, Kristi Lilas, our production editor, and the team at Macmillan Publishing Solutions. Ezra Freeman and his team at Twin Oaks Indexing Collective were very responsive and helpful at final stages of the book process. Our deep appreciation and thanks goes to Pnina Steinberg for her enriching sociological insights, her thorough reading of the papers, constructive comments, and skillful professional editorial help. Last but not least we wish to thank our families. Three generations of Ann’s family traveled to Jerusalem to facilitate this collaboration. Simon and Esther Adler contributed their faultless knowledge of Hebrew as well as their dedication to their daughter-in-law’s career and their grandchildren’s education. And Andy Adler made this project, and everything else, possible. Hanna’s family, and especially Ze’ev, shared in the intellectual journey of this book with her, as they share all their lives, with plentiful appreciation, support, and love.

Introduction

4

U ntangling M oder nities Hanna Herzog and Ann Braude

Our aim in this book is to suggest an interdisciplinary perspective

on the complex relations of gender, religion, and politics in light of paradigmatic shifts in theories of modernity and the growing body of studies on gender and religion. The book focuses particularly on Muslim, Christian, and Jewish women of diverse nationalities as they engage in politics while constructing and navigating modernity. In the last three decades modernity has become a most troubled category. A voluminous literature debates the meaning of modernity as a philosophical outlook, a set of evolving social structures, and a constellation of human experiences. The abundant academic and lay discourse on modernity, on its internal contradictions and paradoxes, provides evidence for the ongoing negotiation and construction of modernity—the phenomenon and the concept. This book is about untangling three categories that intertwine in the negotiation and construction of modernity: gender, religion, and politics. While it is the argument of this book that each mutually constructs the other two and that therefore they cannot be fully separated, we propose the project of “untangling” to advance the analytic task of exploring the constituent aspects of modernity and its multidimensional nature and inherently contingent qualities. Like modernity itself, all three categories are ridden with contradiction. Religion and gender in particular are often portrayed as timeless and unchanging, as existing outside social and historical processes, or as transcending cultural distinctions. Even scholars of religion who carefully locate their topics within detailed cultural contexts may fall back on an ahistorical notion

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H a n n a H e r z o g a n d A n n B r au d e

of “tradition” when discussing gender roles, while scholars of gender may leave religion inadequately analyzed in similar ways. Social scientists approaching politics are often unable to provide subtle discussions of either religion or gender, frequently viewing religious women as necessarily subjugated to patriarchal control, powerless and weak, and therefore universally in need of liberation. It is our task, in this book, to show the simultaneous construction and influence between gender, religion, and politics with an emphasis on women’s roles and perceptions.1 Just to complicate it a bit more: a main premise underlying this project is that while mutually shaping and being shaped, both religion and gender also exist and function in various realms of each culture, as if they were independent fixed entities. As marked categories they direct the way we think, act, and build our institutions and understanding of the world. In practice, however, these categories are hybrids, circulating in networks of translation and mediation that “moderns” busily attempt to purify of their hybrid qualities and locate on one or the other end of a socially constructed dichotomy (Latour 1993: 10–11; Shenhav 2007; Haraway 1991). Such social categories have very concrete results in society even though, as the following papers will show, they themselves are contested, constructed, and subject to shifts in power and meaning. From this perspective, gender, religion, and politics are both the cause and the symptom of the modern mind. Our theoretical claim is that each of the three categories—state, religion, and gender—is, in part, shaped by intersection with the others while simultaneously constituting the whole. Thus, historical analysis of social processes should seek and reveal the complex relations between the three categories, as they and the whole are constituted or reconstituted as changing, contingent and often unpredictable phenomena (see also Herzog 2006).

Modernity: A Contested Category This volume explores religion, gender, and politics in relation to the concept of modernity, because each emerges as an analytic category as part of the enlightenment project of defining a distinctively modern intellectual and social world. “Modernity” originates from the Latin modo, meaning “just now . . . of the present or the immediate past” (Webster’s Dictionary). Hence, modernity’s typical connotation is with the “new”—inherently discontinuous with former times by its ways of life, institutions, forms of thought, and experience. This understanding of modernity figures tradition as its opposite, signifying continuation with the past, persistence of old ways of being, values, and structures. Modern forms of thought are packaged in the concept

U n ta n g l i n g M o d e r n i t i e s

3

of “Enlightenment” (Hamilton 1996: 20), comprising a set of ideas including reason, empiricism, science, universalism, progress, freedom, and secularism (ibid.: 23–24). This cluster of ideas led Enlightenment philosophers and social scientists to perfect their systems of ordering things, with a growing tendency for classification and categorization of the world. In accordance with enlightened forms of thinking, the classical sociological notion of modernity unfolds roughly along four axes: structural differentiation (Emile Durkheim); rationalization, disenchantment of the world and the rise of capitalism (Max Weber); the history-making project, social transformation as a result of the class struggle between the capitalist bourgeois and the working class capitalism as a way station to the ultimate modern society (Karl Marx); and modern forms of social life in cities where space and time are compressed (George Simmel). All four share the perception of linear, structural progression from tradition to modernity (Oommen 2005: 151–58). The dominant narrative of modernity’s structural differentiation implies social transformation from simple to complex, from small communities of face-to-face interactions (Gemeinschaft) to larger, contractual, more impersonal social organizations (Gesellschaft), from rural to urban and—most importantly for this project—from sacred to secular. Differentiation, diversification, specialization, and fragmentation typify the modern social order. According to Weber, the differentiating of social categories and institutions is led by rationalization, in which “unthinking acceptance of ancient custom” is replaced by “deliberate adaptation to situations in terms of self-interest” or efficiency (Weber et al. [1922] 1978: 30). Weber saw science and technology replacing religion as organizing principles of society. In modern capitalism, for example, rationality governs both the economic system and people who enact it (Weber 1947). This reorganization of the social order results in a newly autonomous human being, guided by reason, who chooses contractual relationships that advance individual interests. In light of this view, it is not surprising that the relevance of religion to social structures came into question, and that religion was relegated to the margins of the social science research agenda. Women’s fate in the discourse of modernity resembles somewhat that of religion. Cultural associations between women, the private, the emotional, and sometimes even the irrational have marginalized women and excluded them from social and academic discourse. Even at the height of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, when women were welcomed into the salons as intellectual equals, their rationality was suspect (Hamilton 1996: 33–35). Thus, modern thinking continued women’s marginalization, excluding them from newly formed

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social spaces and sources of power. Our intention is to bring women to center stage, for a double purpose: to acknowledge reciprocal relations between women and religion and—no less importantly—to provide a fresh perspective on the apparent rationality of the differential liberation and marginalization of men and women in modern society. It is by exposing such cultural contradictions—and their working mechanisms—that we hope to untangle some of the most taken-for-granted ideas about women and religion. Recently, scholars have problematized the concept of modernity by interrogating its Eurocentric perspective. Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and their followers assumed (or at least implied) that European modernity will eventually spread to the rest of the world. While it is often described as “epistemological dualism” (Oommen 2005: 157), Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt (2005: 39–43) claims that modernity as a cultural program entails evaluation of the relative importance of basic antinomies such as reason/emotion and individualism/collectivism. Hence, narratives of modernity not only construct “universal” binaries, such as the West and the rest, modern-traditional, private-public, secularreligious and rational-emotional, they also constitute parallels and hierarchy between them. The modern West, perceived also as secular and rational, is constructed as more progressive, advanced (on some imaginary linear scheme of progress), definitely more masculine and more enlightened and, in any other significance, better and more desirable than its opposite: the dark, emotional, feminine religious cultures of the rest of the world. Reality after World War II refutes this vision, especially its assumption of the universality and superiority of modernity as it emerged in Europe and North America. Hence, Eisenstadt suggests that we acknowledge multiple, distinctive modernities emerging in different parts of the world (2002: 2): “The idea of multiple modernities presumes that the best way to understand the contemporary world . . . is to see it as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs.” Conceptualizing the modern in plural terms allows us to see that differences are not only between “civilizations” but rather between competing values and practices within and between societies. Charles Taylor (2002) suggests the term “social imaginary” to describe the complex of ways in which individuals imagine their “collective social life.” It includes the repertory of practices, symbols, and historical narratives that a given population uses to signify and legitimize moral orders. The notion of a social imaginary allows us to see clearly the interactions among multiple cultural perspectives without reducing them to some external frame. It opens new understandings of agency, new forms of sociability, and allows the conceptualization of modernity as open-ended horizons engendering spaces to interpret modernity in


5

multiple ways (Göle 2002; Kamali 2005; Kamrava 2006; Kaya 2004). These new understandings of modernity are exemplified by each of the case studies in this volume.

Religion and Modernity A central aim of this volume is to add the perspective of gender analysis to discussions of one of the most powerful concepts contributing to definitions of the category of modernity: secularization. Secularization theories and debates exemplify the desire of Western thinkers to adjust reality to fit their newly constructed set of principles defining modernity. Until recently, the modern binary perceptions of sacred/ profane and religious/secular were widely accepted by scholars as mutually exclusive antonyms. Social scientists described modernity as a process of secularization that involves the disappearance (Comte), decline (Weber), privatization (Berger), or transformation (Durkheim) of religion. Separation between state and religion and the assumption that people have become less religious have been perceived as part of a larger change led by rational, scientific knowledge, humanistic education, high-technology multinational capitalism, and bureaucratization. Empirical studies, however, prove otherwise. Linear theses suggesting strong connections between various dimensions of modernization and secularization are not supported by the facts on the ground. Religion has not disappeared. While the secularization thesis may provide an accurate description of the fate of religion in most European countries, it cannot explain the recent growth of Evangelical Protestantism in North and South America, the Christianization of Africa in the twentieth century, the compatibility of modernization with vibrant Islamic movements in Asia and the Middle East, the resurgence of religion in many former Soviet republics, or the intense religiosity of modern India (Davie 2001; Gorski 2003; Norris and Inglehart 2004). Moreover, the role of religion in political conflicts has increased in the last decades in all parts of the world (Casanova 1994; Fenn 2001). Religion continues to be significant in individual lives, collective identities, and political mobilization toward both peaceful and violent ends (Castelli and Rodman 2001; Davie 2007; Karam 2004). Furthermore, religion today is quintessential of identity politics and functions powerfully both as liberating and as repressive (Castells 2004). This volume was motivated in no small part by the fact that wherever religion is on the rise, issues relating to women and gender are central to its social and political expression. In questioning the presumed oppositions of religion and politics, secularism, and religiosity, we follow Bruno Latour’s view that cultural perceptions of absolute binary oppositions exist simultaneously with

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continuous change in social arrangements. In his book We Have Never Been Modern (1993), he proposes the terms “purification” and “hybridization” to describe these simultaneous but contradictory processes. The process of purification creates clean, neat, ordered categories by which we think, act, and build our institutions and understanding of the world. While purification makes it possible for ideas to control and discipline members of a society, it also enables the multiplication of hybrid phenomena, something Latour views as incompatible with a classic Western concept of modernity (ibid.: 41–43). From this point of view, modernity—like premodernity—is by itself a purified, reified social category. Through the simultaneous process of hybridization and purification, religion is relegated to the premodern non-European world, while the secular is relegated to the modern sphere and the West (Shenhav 2007). Following the processes by which each of the three categories—gender, religion, and politics—is replicated and purified in Latour’s terms, and at the same time is intertwined with the others, allows us to explore the variety of contingent ways religion, gender, and politics intertwine. We find Latour’s claim that purification and hybridization occur simultaneously in modernity particularly helpful in responding to poststructuralist or postmodern views that may lead to extreme relativism.2

Gender Perspective on Binary Oppositions Feminist theory makes a key contribution to discussions of modernity by critiquing the tendency of modern Western thought to divide the world into binary oppositions modeled on the opposition of male to female. Gender analysis exposes the power dynamics embedded in the differentiation of private and public spheres. This division reproduces gender inequalities by devaluing the unremunerated work of women in the home and, by extension, questioning the femininity or respectability of women (especially women of racial or ethnic minorities) who work outside the home (Fraser 1987; Pateman 1989; hooks 1990). The notion of a gendered division between a woman’s sphere of the home and a man’s world of the market place and politics became a cultural frame conferring meaning on the social order of Western societies. It became an aspect of common sense, a self-evident idea embedded in liberal and neoliberal discourses.3 At the center of the private sphere the family was viewed as being based on natural ties, ties of blood, and emotional bonds. The domestic framework was understood to be driven by affective relationships and moral considerations, founded on intimacy, decency, loyalty, self-sacrifice, subjectivity, particularity, and harmony. The public sphere, in contrast, revolved around organizations and was founded on universal values, competition, utilitarianism, rationality,


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and formal contract relations. Fixed rules define the modes of operation and the appropriate mutual relations in this sphere, where personal relations tend to be businesslike, formal, reserved, and objective. The distinction between the private and the public corresponds to the gendered division of roles and social definitions of femininity and masculinity. In the home, women preside over the transmission of cherished practices from generation to generation, tying religious piety to mundane domesticity. Thus, the private sphere represents the logic of tradition, while the public sphere represents progress, rationality, and modernity. According to this perception, the private sphere is marginal and secondary to the public arena in which the more important and more highly valued social activities occur. This marginality projects onto women, allegedly the “natural” inhabitants of the private sphere, rendering their activities secondary to those conducted by men in public (Herzog 1999). The same marginalization mechanism is concealed in the notion of the privatization of religion embedded in the discourse of secularization (Casanova 1994). Once religion is relegated to the private sphere, it loses its importance in constituting the social order. However, many studies point out that the separation between the private and the public has been limited to discrete sectors of Western society (Davidoff 2003; Helly and Reverby 1992) and has never appeared in many non-Western societies (Lauderdale Graham 2003; Thompson 2003). Moreover, the boundaries between the two spheres have been negotiated, permeable and elastic. Historians have noted that the home has never been devoid of economic relationships and that both the market and the state shape presumably private domestic matters (Boydston 1990; Ladd-Taylor 1995; Stansell 1987). Nevertheless, the binary conception, presupposing a world based on two purified spheres each driven by a different logic of interaction, continues to inform both scholarly and popular discourse about the sources of gender differentiation. Although women in most contemporary societies are increasingly entering the public sphere, and gender roles are being contested, cultural assumptions about the private and public realms continue to influence interpretations of both women’s and men’s experiences and social roles (Herzog 1998, 2004). This also holds true regarding the binary separation between religion and state. The ostensible opposition between traditional religious outlooks and those of modernity results in the multicoupling of religion: first, with irrationality and emotionality; second, with the old or traditional; third, with the private sphere. Moreover, it was also associated with another social category considered less rational and more emotional, connected to (and in charge of socialization to) tradition, and belonging to the private sphere—indeed—women. This is not to say, of course, that religion is in any way controlled by women, but that both religion

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and women were excluded from the modern vision of “the West.” Furthermore, both religion and women, in accordance with their new social location in the modern social order, were either marginalized or altogether excluded from the general understanding of modernity. When finally inserted into academic research, it is still within the paradigmatic binary modern/traditional. However, in the past twenty years, we see more and more research about women and religion (Ahmed 1992; Braude 1997; Castelli and Rodman 2001; King 1995; Meyers and Dinan 2001; Woodhead 2001), much as we see research on women and politics. Research on religion and politics also most often adheres to the binary form and excludes women from the analysis (Abu Zayyad and Cygielman 1994; Casanova 1994; Liebman and Don-Yehiya 1984; Norris and Inglehart 2004). Few studies focus on the interplay of all three (such as Ahmed 1992; Herzog 2006; Leslie and McGee 2000). As indicated by intense debates over abortion and the veil, women are often an indicator of the struggle between state and religion (Göle 1997) and the site where the struggle between religion and the state is waged, but until recently they were not considered to be active agents in the struggle. The essays collected here contribute to the effort to understand religious women as political agents (Epstein 1981; Mahmood 2005; Deeb 2006).

The Mutual Social Construction of Gender, Religion, and Politics This book builds on the theoretical premise that “gender,” “religion,” and “state”’ are not universal or essentialist entities, but rather contingent dimensions of social life that are embedded in time, place, and changing historical circumstances. Rather than employing dichotomies, we suggest a hybrid approach that collapses these dichotomies and examines these relationships in historical and comparative contexts. Hybridity, we argue, may exist not only between any given binary set of categories but also across sets. Hence, our focus is on intertwined and fused social realities of religion, gender, and politics. We examine how women and men are products of gendered regimes within religious and political configurations, and within the relationships prevailing between them—our project sets out to find out not whether, but how, women operate as social agents. The question is, therefore, not only how politics and religion shape women and how they help us understand gender relations but also how women’s endeavors and movements shape politics and religion, and how they in turn constitute gender relations. Moreover, seeking the female subject is driven by the perception


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that gender analysis does not simply involve revealing what is common to women but also what divides them. Each of the papers not only untangles religion, gender, and politics but also throws light on their interconnectedness. While unveiling the way they constitute each other, a wide array of dynamic relationships emerge—of power, substitution, dialogue, clash, or conciliation, each embedded in time, place, and historical contexts. We do not aim at a comprehensive mapping of all possible relationships between gender, religion, and politics, but rather at demonstrating the productiveness of analyzing such triple structures, and their abundant presence in everyday life. Contributors offer methodological solutions for triplestructured research, drawing on the resources of the academic disciplines of sociology, anthropology, political science, history, theology, literary and cultural studies, and the law. Looking at women in Latin America, Europe, the United States, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Morocco, and Anatolia, contributors explore patterns cutting across cultural variations of modernity, locating women in marginal but potent positions within and between politics and religion. It is women’s strategies and solutions—intended and unintended consequences of their actions—that differ in each cultural setting. Viewed through this lens, the state (though defined by its administrative logic) is continuously negotiated and changed (Connell 1990; Pierson 1996). Similarly, gender may be understood as knowledge that constitutes power relations based on meanings of assumed bodily differences (Fuchs-Epstein 1988; Lorber 1994, 2005; Scott 1999). This interpretation suggests that religion should be approached as a historical project that situates attitudes and practices in relation to various experiences, events, and social and cultural constructs (Asad 1993, 1999; Casanova, 1994, 2001; Gorski 2003; McCutcheon 1997). Such perception requires us to examine religions, in general, as relative dispositions and strategies for action, and as enmeshed in the lives and circumstances of those who practice them.

Road Map of the Book Of the book’s three sections, the first establishes the contingent relations of gender, religion, and politics. The volume opens with a chapter by the sociologist of religion Jose Casanova, one of the premier critics of secularization theory. Casanova here extends his critique to take gender into account. His essay historicizes the use of religion and gender to promote political agendas by comparing discursive elements of two power struggles: the nineteenth-century Anglo-Protestant attack on Catholicism and current Western critiques of Islam. He finds striking

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similarities, with both Catholicism and Islam condemned as undemocratic and sexist, and therefore incompatible with the progress of modern secular society. Hanna Herzog’s contribution tells the surprising story of how religious women have become central actors in discussions over the fate of the Occupied Territories—the heart of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Her essay examines two sorts of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Occupied Territories), one Ultra-Orthodox and one National Zionist. She finds that the alignment between the state’s interest in ruling the Territories and the interests of the two religious communities simultaneously advanced settlement activity in the Occupied Territories and enabled women to extend their roles and gain power relative to their male coreligionists. The ironies of the triangular relations between religion, gender, and state appear as we witness the state advancing religion in order to secure its political goals, while a religion alters its approach to gender because of its mutual interests with the state. The political scientist Mary Segers contributes a feminist critique of the Catholic Church in the contemporary United States. Segers focuses on tensions over the entrance of women into schools of theology, clerical sex-abuse and reproductive issues such as birth control and abortion. She finds that American politics and public opinion have forced the church to engage feminist ideas and movements, and in particular to consider the question of women’s moral agency in the context of Catholic theology. Here the national political context requires a religious reevaluation of gender. The second section of the book inquires into a potent and risky space for women’s agency—between religion and state. The legal scholar Daphna Hacker uncovers gendered dimensions of the decision to convert among interfaith couples in Israel. Her essay provides an especially useful case study for this volume, because it highlights the ironies of an ostensibly secular state relegating so-called personal law to religious authorities. The state’s reach into intimate family decisions becomes clear when interfaith couples find that they cannot marry in Israel because no religious body possesses authority over both partners. Hacker concludes that Israeli law—like that of many other immigrant societies—incorporates tensions between an attempt to preserve republican collective norms, on the one hand, and liberal, individualistic, postnational realities, influenced by global changes, on the other. Pnina Lahav analyzes the legal context in which devout Muslim and Jewish women in the United States use religious law to gain the ability to lead public prayers. Exploring the meaning of public prayer in each faith, as well as in American civil society, Lahav concludes that both the desire to lead public prayer and the legal strategies used to pursue it are


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closely tied to the political environment of the U.S. Both are rooted in the deep impact of the Civil Rights Movement on American law and culture. The historian Anat Lapidot-Firilla directs our attention to another space of opportunity between religion and the state that opened for American women between the two world wars. Lapidot-Firilla writes about “Subway Women”—active, thrifty, and compassionate—who rode the subway so they could save their carfare to aid needy women in Anatolia (modern Turkey). With both religious and state support, they reconfigured gender norms in a massive relief organization: Near East Relief. In this case, geographical mobility seems to symbolize the social mobility enabled by finding a junction of interests between state and religion. In the new geocultural location, women could more easily partake in shaping their own and their partners’ roles. Loosening gender prescriptions also emerge from the anthropologist Gertrude Huwelmeier’s account of transnational Catholic sisterhoods (nuns), starting in the mid-nineteenth century. Like the relief workers described by Lapidot-Firilla, the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ found new roles and sources of power by exploring new cultural and geographical positions. But unlike the “Subway Women,” nuns found new opportunities for women stemming from a conflict between the state and the Catholic Church during the German “Kulturkampf” in the nineteenth century. The thousands of nuns who migrated from Europe to the United States created ways in which to sustain their mutual contacts across national borders. More recently an increasing number of young women from Asia have entered the sisterhood, resulting in shifting power relations between the German Motherhouse and the dispersed houses around the globe. The third section of the book explores cultural spaces—such as literature, popular devotions, movies, and language—as sites of negotiation and expanding women’s power and freedom and also women’s influence on perceptions and roles of state and religion. The anthropologist Saba Mahmood uses popular literature to approach the issue Jose Casanova studied through historical discourse—the condemnation of Islam as a faith that is inherently harmful to women. Her interest in this essay is in the normative secularism shared by liberal discourses of Western feminism and democracy and its mobilization in a distinctly feminist anti-Islamism. Mahmood focuses on recently published nonfiction bestsellers written by Muslim women about their personal suffering at the hands of Islam’s supposedly misogynist practices. She shows how authors of this genre have been embraced both by feminists and by conservative political parties and think tanks that use them as evidence for a “clash of civilizations” between “Islam and the West.” Mahmood draws attention to the reductive conception of religiosity in this discourse, and

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to the ways the liberal discourse of freedom blinds us to the power that neoliberal forms of religiosity command in women’s lives. For the theologian Elina Vuola, the possibility of agency within patriarchal power structures is central to locating religious women in modernity. Pointing to a lacuna in theological studies, Vuola delves into the actual ways Costa Rican women view and talk about the Virgin Mary, and learns how women’s popular conceptions of Mary permeate their everyday lives. She documents women as active agents in the interpretation of religious symbols, practices, and identities. Vuola critically analyzes the dynamics of what she calls the “triangle of tension” between the official, patriarchal Catholic view of the Virgin Mary, feminist critiques of her, and women’s experience of her as life-sustaining, empowering, and transformative. In Shmulik Bachar’s chapter the modern Egyptian state promotes liberal changes in women’s roles, but popular response favors imperatives of religious tradition over change. Beginning in the 1960s, Egypt’s second president, Gamal ’Abd al-Nasser, promoted a new agenda of “Arab Socialism.” Convinced that women’s advancement was crucial to modernization, the Nasser regime promoted education and employment, enabling women’s entrance into the public sphere. Bachar introduces popular Egyptian cinema as a source for examining tensions between the state’s programs and the public response, finding that the acceptance of women’s rights was tempered by concerns for social stability and religious values. In the book’s final essay, the linguist Fatima Sadiqi inquires into the political and religious meaning of women’s strategic deployment of the four prevalent languages in Morocco: written Arabic, Berber, Moroccan Arabic, and French. The historical origins of Moroccan multilingualism explain the clear social and political meaning of each language. Linguistic knowledge as well as social awareness of the code and symbolism of language use enable the development of women’s strategies in their efforts to gain the most out of their social position, by choosing which language to speak. We believe these eleven case studies demonstrate both the feasibility and the usefulness of searching for modern entanglements of gender, religion, and politics. As this varied collection of papers suggests, these intersections are omnipresent. Some, such as the papers by Casanova, Hacker, and Mahmood, call for adding gender to the discussion of political issues currently conceived as related primarily to religion. Casanova, for example, points our attention to the all-too-common assumption that women are necessarily denigrated by Catholicism or Islam and elevated by Protestantism. Focusing on gender removes a cultural blind spot, reminding us that stereotypes may be arbitrarily mobilized for political purposes. Daphna Hacker brings to her analysis


13

of conversion the aligned interests of religious and political authorities, as does Mahmood in her study of the popularity of anti-Muslim literature by Muslim women. In other cases researchers shed light on women’s activities that have thus far been omitted from the historical account, such as the political, religious, and economic significance of the Subway Women’s medical work in Anat Lapidot-Firilla’s paper; the power struggles of Catholic Sisterhoods both with male religious authorities and with women from their home communities in Gertrud Huwelmeier’s paper; and Sadiqi’s inquiry into women’s use of languages as a means to pave their way into the public sphere of their own society. In most cases, women are chosen to be at the focus of research as active social agents, as in Herzog’s analysis of the changing women’s roles in religious settlement communities, Pnina Lahav’s inquiry into the desire of Muslim and Jewish women to lead public prayers, Elina Vuola’s analysis of women’s discourse on the Virgin Mary, and Shmulik Bachar’s interrogation of women’s representation in Egyptian movies. All these researchers genuinely tie their subject of inquiry with both religion and political power centers, to compile a strong argument for the contingency of the religion-gender-politics triangle and for the interconnectedness of the three categories. It is only when we analyze the three categories together that we can see both the contingency of its dynamic process of mutuality and the almost objectified presence of seemingly fixed conceptions of gender roles, political power, and religious stability. Once we do this—and give voice to so-far-silenced religious subjects, historical agents, and political actors—it is also our responsibility to take the next step. Rather than stopping at the point of showing empowering possibilities, several authors also analyze and critique the use women make, intentionally and unintentionally, of that newly exposed or acquired power. Herzog shows religious women participating vehemently in the most controversial Israeli settlement project, Anat Lapidot-Firilla reveals women relief workers promoting America’s political and economic agenda, and Mahmood criticizes the role both Muslim and secular feminist women play (or are manipulated into) in fanning hate and legitimizing war. We hope the studies assembled in this volume provide a theoretical foundation for including intersections of religion, gender, and politics in a multicultural and interdisciplinary approach to this revised perception of modernity.

Notes 1. We relate to gender as the binary structure system of social organization that creates inequality. While this binary system structures male and female roles alike, our focus is on women who are the weakened side in this social arrangement (Scott 1986, 1999).

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H a n n a H e r z o g a n d A n n B r au d e 2. In recent years many scholars relate to a deep ambivalence if not contradictions that lie at the core of modern society, as opposed to the classic perception of modernity (Delanty 1999: 5–12; Bauman 1991). 3. “Neoliberalism” as a philosophy embraces free markets, free trade and the free flow of capital as the most efficient way to produce the greatest social, political, and economic good in a global era. (Among the supporters of the neoliberalism policy were Reagan and Thatcher.) Criticizers of this worldview see it as an ideology, a power grab by economic elites and a race to the bottom for the rest (Harvey 2005).

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Delanty, Gerard. 1999. Social Theory in a Changing World: Conceptions of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Eisenstadt, S. N, ed. 2002. Multiple Modernities. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah. 2005. Modernity in Socio-Historical Perspective. In Comparing Modernities: Pluralism versus Homogeneity, Essays in Homage to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed. Eliezer Ben Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg, pp. 31–56. Leiden, Boston: Brill. Epstein, Barbara Leslie. 1981. The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown, CT; Irvington, NY: Wesleyan University Press; distributed by Columbia University Press. Fenn, Richard K. 2001. The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion. Oxford, UK, and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Fraser, Nancy. 1987. What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender. In Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, pp. 31–56. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Fuchs-Epstein, Cynthia. 1988. Deceptive Distinctions—Sex, Gender, and the Social Order. New Haven, London, New York: Yale University Press and Russell Sage Foundation. Göle, Nilufer. 1997. The Gendered Nature of the Public Sphere. Public Culture 10: 61–81. ———. 2002. Islam in Public: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries. Public Culture 14: 173–90. Gorski, Philip S. 2003. Historicizing the Secularization Debate: An Agenda for Research. In Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. Michele Dillon, pp. 110–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamilton, Peter. 1996. The Enlightenment and the Birth of Social Science. In Modernity, An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, Kenneth Thompson, pp. 19–54. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Book. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Helly, Dorothy O., and Susan M. Reverby. 1992. Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History: Essays from the Seventh Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Herzog, Hanna. 1998. Homefront and Battlefront and the Status of Jewish and Palestinian Women in Israel. Israeli Studies 3: 61–84. ––––––. 1999. Gendering Politics—Women in Israel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ––––––. 2004. Military-Family Relations in Israel as Genderizing Social Mechanism. Armed Forces and Society 31: 5–30. ––––––. 2006. Trisection of Forces: Gender, Religion and the State. The Case of State-Run Religious Schools in Israel. British Journal of Sociology 57: 241–62.

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hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning—Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End. Kamali, Masoud. 2005. Multiple Modernities, Civil Society and Islam: The Case of Iran and Turkey. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press—Studies in Social and Political Thought. Kamrava, Mehran. 2006. The New Voices of Islam: Reforming Politics and Modernity: A Reader. London, New York: I. B. Tauris. Karam, Azza M., ed. 2004. Transnational Political Islam: Religion, Ideology and Power. London, Sterling, VA: Pluto Press. Kaya, Ibrahim. 2004. Modernity, Openness, Interpretation: A Perspective on Multiple Modernities. Social Science Information 43: 35–57. King, Ursula, ed. 1995. Gender and Religion. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Ladd-Taylor, Molly. 1995. Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lauderdale Graham, Sandra. 2003. Making the Private Public: A Brazilian Perspective. Journal of Women’s History 15: 28–42. Leslie, Julia, and Mary McGee, eds. 2000. Invented Identities: The Interplay of Gender, Religion and Politics in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liebman, Charles S., and Eliezer Don-Yehiya. 1984. Religion and Politics in Israel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lorber, Judith. 1994. Paradoxes of Gender. New York, London: Yale University Press. ––––––. 2005. Breaking the Bowls—Degendering and Feminist Change. New York, London: W. W. Norton. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McCutcheon, T. Russell. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press. Meyers, Deborah, and Susan Dinan. 2001. Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds. New York: Routledge. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2009. http://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/modern. Accessed February 2, 2009. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. 2004. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Oommen, T. K. 2005. Challenges of Modernity in an Age of Globalization. In Comparing Modernities: Pluralism versus Homogeneity, Essays in Homage to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed. Eliezer Ben Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg, pp. 150–69. Boston: Brill. Pateman, Carole. 1989. Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy. In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory, ed. Carole Pateman, pp. 118–40. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pierson, Christopher. 1996. The Modern State. London and New York: Routledge.


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Scott, Joan W. 1986. Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. American Historical Analysis 91: 1053–75. ––––––. 1999. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Shenhav, Yehouda. 2007. Modernity and the Hybridization of Nationalism and Religion: Zionism and the Jews of the Middle East. Theory and Society 36: 1–30. Stansell, Christine. 1987. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Taylor, Charles. 2002. Modern Social Imaginaries. Public Culture 14: 91–124. Thompson, Elizabeth. 2003. Public and Private in Middle Eastern Women’s History. Journal of Women’s History 15: 52–69. Weber, Max. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organizations. Glencoe, Scotland: Free Press and the Falcon’s Wing Press. Weber, Max, Guenther Roth, and Claus Wittich. [1922] 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Woodhead, Linda. 2001. Feminism and the Sociology of Religion: From Gender-Blindness to Gendered Difference. In The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion, ed. Richard K. Fenn, pp. 67–84. Oxford, UK, and Malden, MA: Blackwell.


Part I

4 Gender, R eligion, and Politic s : Contingent R el ations


Chapter 1

4

Nati vi sm and the Politics of Ge nder i n C atholicism and Is l am Jose Casanova

The contemporary global discourse on Islam as a fundamentalist,

antimodern, undemocratic, and sexist religion shows striking similarities with the old discourse on Catholicism that predominated in AngloProtestant societies, particularly in the United States, from the midnineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Both discourses were based on four similar premises: (a) a theologico-political distinction between “civilized” and “barbaric” religions—that is, between religions compatible with Enlightenment principles and liberal democratic politics, on the one hand, and, on the other, religions grounded in traditions that resisted the progressive claims of the Enlightenment philosophy of history, liberalism, and secularism; (b) a nativist anti-immigrant posture that postulated the unassimilability of foreign immigrants due to their uncivilized social customs and habits; (c) transnational attachments and loyalties either to a foreign religious authority (i.e., the papacy) or to a transnational religious community (i.e., the ummah) that appeared incompatible with republican citizen principles and the exclusive claims of the modern nation-state; and (d) a set of moral claims about the denigration of women under religious patriarchies in contrast to their elevation by Protestantism. Any of these four principles may have been more or less salient at any particular time and place. It is their superimposition, however, that has given the anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim discourses their compelling effect. The juxtaposition of Catholicism and Islam shows that the problems lie not only in simplistic depictions of a uniform “fundamentalist”

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J o s e C a s a n ova

Islam that fail to acknowledge the extraordinary diversity one finds among Muslim societies in the past and in the present. Equally problematic and misleading is the essentialist construction of a modern secular West that fails to recognize Catholic Christianity as an integral part of the past and present of Western modernity. Every incrimination of Islam as a fundamentalist, antimodern, and anti-Western religion could have been directed justifiably against Catholicism not long ago. Moreover, most features of contemporary political Islam that Western observers find so reprehensible, including the terrorist methods and the justification of revolutionary violence as an appropriate instrument in the pursuit of political power, as well as legal structures subjecting women to a double standard of sexual morality, can be found in the not-too-distant past of many Western countries and of many modern, secular movements. Thus, before attributing these reprehensible phenomena all too hastily to Islamic civilization, one should perhaps consider the possibility that global modernity itself somehow generates such practices. This chapter is structured in three parts. The first part examines the modern discourse on Catholicism as a fundamentalist antimodern religion as it developed in nineteenth-century Protestant, liberal, and republican-democratic contexts, with special focus on American antiCatholic nativism. The second part examines the contemporary Western discourse on Islam and contemporary Muslim transformations from the comparative perspective of the analysis of Catholicism developed in the first part. The final section offers a tentative comparative sketch of what could be called the religious politics of gender within Catholicism and Islam.

The Catholic Discourse on Heretical Modernity and the Modern Discourse on Catholicism As religious regimes, both Catholicism and Islam preceded and are likely to outlast the modern world system of nation-states. The very attribute transnational only makes sense in relation to the Westphalian system of sovereign territorial states that emerged in early modernity and eventually replaced the system of medieval Christendom. That system had been centered on the conflictive interdependent relation between the Roman papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. Of all the world religions, none had seemed as threatened at its core by the emergence of the modern world system of sovereign territorial states as the Roman church. The Protestant Reformation and the ensuing dissolution of Western Christendom undermined the role of the papacy as the spiritual head of a universal Christian monarchy represented by the

N at i v i s m a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f G e n d e r

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Holy Roman Empire. Not only did the papacy lose spiritual supremacy over Protestant territories and peoples, but it also lost control of the emerging national Catholic churches to Caesaro-papist Catholic monarchs (Casanova 1997). One by one, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, most of the transnational dimensions of medieval Catholicism receded or disappeared altogether. It is not surprising, therefore, that for centuries the Catholic Church remained adamantly antimodern and developed a negative philosophy of history, which conceptualized modern processes as so many heretical deviations from the Catholic ideal of medieval Christendom. But the lifeworld of Catholicism did not remain frozen in the past of medieval Christendom, nor were the Catholic reactions to so many modern developments (Counter Reformation, Counter Enlightenment, Counter Revolution, etc.) simply reactionary regressions to an unchanging tradition, but rather reactive attempts, often awkward ones, to fashion Catholic versions of modernity. Only a teleological normative version of a single progressive and unilinear Western modernity can construct such historical responses as fundamentalist reactions. Ironically, it was the 1804 Concordat with Napoleon that served as the blueprint for the successive concordats with secular states, which allowed the papacy to regain control of the national hierarchies. In the course of the nineteenth century, as conflicts with the liberal state became endemic throughout Europe and Latin America, it became increasingly evident that it was easier to safeguard papal claims in Anglo-Saxon countries that had institutionalized freedom of religion than in Latin Catholic countries, even when Catholicism was officially established as the state religion. Indeed, Anglo-Saxon Protestant countries as well as countries such as Holland, Germany, and Switzerland, where Catholics constituted large minorities, became strongholds of modern Romanization and of a new liberal form of Catholic ultramontanism distinct from the integralist ultramontanism that was tied to the restoration of European monarchies. The year 1870 marks the turning point in the process of reconstitution of a modern global Catholic regime. At the very moment when the Papal States were incorporated into the new Kingdom of Italy and the papacy was forced to renounce its claims to territorial sovereignty, the First Vatican Council reaffirmed papal supremacy. Through the control of the nomination of bishops, the papacy—progressively and for the first time in history—gained control over the national churches. Significantly, non-Catholic liberal states were the first ones to accept the transnational papal claims, while Catholic monarchs tried to preserve the old caesaro-papist claims of state supremacy. Instead of leading to the further weakening or even

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extinction of the papacy, as was first feared, the loss of the Papal States led to the reconstitution of the Vatican as the highly centralized administrative core of a modern deterritorialized transnational religious regime, this time on a truly Catholic, that is, globalecumenical, basis. Protestant Anti-Catholic Nativism in the United States1 Notwithstanding fundamental differences and even mutual intolerance, there was something shared by practically all Protestant groups in colonial America—namely, virulent antipopery. Strict Calvinist and latitudinarian Armenian, High Church Anglican, and antinomian sectarian all viewed Rome and the Catholic Church as the “Anti-Christ” and the “Whore of Babylon.” Indeed, at times, the external enemy, Catholicism, was the only thing that could cement internal Protestant unity. The ebbs and flows of anti-Catholicism in the colonies usually moved in unison with developments in England. The “Intolerable” Quebec Act of 1774 at first exacerbated anti-Catholic feeling. But revolution and independence actually brought a rare interlude in antipopery. Catholic republican patriotism, the high profile of prominent Catholics like the Carrols, the alliance with Catholic powers (France and Spain), the campaigns for religious freedom, the general religious decline, and the spread of Enlightenment ideas were all contributing factors. President Kirkland of Harvard, in his 1813 Dudleian lecture, could express the startling view that “we may . . . abate much of that abhorrence of papists which our fathers felt themselves obliged to maintain and inculcate” (Hennesy 1981: 117). Given the disabilities under which Catholics had to function in most of the colonies, it is not surprising that they welcomed with enthusiasm the radically new dual constitutional arrangement of “no establishment” and “free exercise” inscribed in the First Amendment. In a letter to Rome in 1783, Catholic priests wrote that “in these United States, our Religious system has undergone a revolution, if possible, more extraordinary than our political one. In all of them free toleration is allowed to Christians of every denomination” (Hennesy 1981: 68). John Carroll, the first American bishop, reflected the consensus of the period when he drew a wall of separation between his role as a citizen and his role as the spiritual leader of American Catholics. Catholic laymen drew a similar line between their public secular and their private religious roles. This republican Catholicism represented the style of successful Catholic laymen, faithful to the church but fully at home in the world, who had learned, in the liberal tradition, to segregate their political, economic, and religious roles rigidly.


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In his portrayal of Catholics in America, de Tocqueville had already tried to refute the widespread thesis of incompatibility between “Republicanism” and “Romanism,” as well as the widely held perception on both sides of the French republican-laicist and monarchist-Catholic divide that Catholicism was incompatible with modern democracy and with individual freedoms. American Catholics, de Tocqueville observed, assented to the doctrines of revealed religion without discussion, while leaving political truths and civil matters open to free inquiry. “Thus, the Catholics of the United States are at the same time the most submissive believers and the most independent citizens” (de Tocqueville 1990, 1: 302). In his 1828 address to Congress, Bishop John England of Charleston offered the classic legitimation of liberal republicanism as well as his forward-looking vision of American Catholicism: You have no power to interfere with my religious rights; the tribunal of the church has no power to interfere with my civil rights. It is a duty which every good man ought to discharge for his own and for the public benefit, to resist any encroachment upon either. We do not believe that God gave the church any power to interfere with our civil rights, or our civil concerns . . . We desire to see the Catholics as a religious body upon the ground of equality with all other religious societies . . . We repeat our maxim: Let Catholics in religion stand isolated as a body, and upon as good ground as their brethren. Let Catholics, as citizens and politicians, not be distinguishable from their other brethren in the commonwealth. (Greeley 1969: 94; O’Brien 1989)

But John England’s optimistic vision would not be realized, at least not until the 1950s. The competing vision of a Christian America, zealously pursued by Evangelical Protestantism, and the system of Protestant denominationalism that ensued did not allow for the acceptance of Catholicism as just another American denomination. “Romantic nationalist evangelicalism,” that peculiar fusion of Evangelical Protestantism and American nationalism that grew out of the Second Great Awakening, was already well in place by 1830, at the time of de Tocqueville’s visit to the United States (Miller 1965). The Reverend Heman Humphrey, president of Amherst College, expressed the new national consensus when in 1831 he celebrated “the true American union, that sort of union which makes every patriot a Christian and every Christian a patriot” (McLoughlin 1978: 106). Catholics, however, were not included in the denomination “Christian,” and romantic evangelicalism soon turned into anti-Catholic nativism. The Reverend Lyman Beecher, father of the “New School” of New England Calvinism, became the leader of the anti-Catholic movement. In 1830, the year in which the first anti-Catholic newspaper, The Protestant,

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appeared in New York, Beecher inaugurated his series of anti-Catholic sermons, linking Catholicism and despotism as the enemies of American republican principles (Billington 1938: 70). In one of his sermons, while visiting Boston in 1834, he warned: The Catholic Church holds now in darkness and bondage nearly half of the civilized world . . . It is the most skillful, powerful, dreadful system of corruption to those who wield it, and of slavery and debasement to those who live under it. (Hennesy 1981: 119)

Soon thereafter, a Protestant mob, additionally incensed by a vogue of semipornographic publications revealing lascivious practices in popish nunneries and by lower-class resentment against a Catholic school that drew its pupils largely from upper-class families of Boston, burnt the Ursuline Convent school of Charlestown. Moreover, the massive immigration of impoverished Irish Catholics in the 1840s made American Catholics for the first time clearly distinguishable by class and ethnicity from their fellow citizens. Protestant anti-Catholic nativism soon began to acquire a sociopolitical shape in the American Republican Party of the 1840s and the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s. The Reverend Horace Bushnell, the father of American liberal theology, warned Protestant America: “Our first danger is barbarism, Romanism next” (ibid.). He could have added: “Both happen to be Irish.” Following an American Republican Party rally in Philadelphia on May 3, 1844, the Irish industrial district of Kensington went up in flames. On August 6, 1855, in Louisville, Kentucky, election day turned into “Bloody Monday” after the Louisville Journal had incited the Know-Nothings “to put down an organization of Jesuit Bishops, Priests and other Papists” and “to raise just as big a storm as you please” (ibid.). A few weeks later, Abraham Lincoln warned that if the KnowNothings came to power, the Declaration of Independence would read “All men are created equal except Negroes, foreigners and Catholics.” The Know-Nothings, however, soon disappeared as the moral energies of the Protestant crusade became absorbed in the antislavery movement and in the Civil War. From the 1880s to the 1920s, as foreign immigration of European Catholics and Jews grew to even larger numbers, the familiar combination of themes of the Protestant crusade reappeared: evangelical revivalism, which aimed to once again Christianize America and save the world for democracy; the “social gospel” and progressive reform movements, linking temperance, women’s suffrage, and child labor legislation; renewed anti-Catholic nativism, which found expression in the foundation of the American Protective Association in 1887, the expansion of the


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Ku Klux Klan; and campaigns for immigration-restriction laws. Catholics, not surprisingly, saw themselves as the targets of yet another evangelical Protestant crusade. Progressive Protestants, by contrast, tended to view Catholics as the main obstacle to reform. Billy Sunday and other revivalists never tired of warning their congregations of the menace that the “hordes of foreigners” were posing to Christian America and of blaming the “foreign vote” for blocking Prohibition. Only “a great AngloSaxon majority,” he warned, “could overcome this foreign influence” (McLoughlin 1978: 140–78). The ratification of Prohibition in 1920 turned out to be the final Pyrrhic victory of the Protestant crusade. The old evangelical coalition came together briefly just one more time at Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign in order to block the entrance of popery into the White House. For all practical purposes, however, anti-Catholic nativism died with this election. To be sure, old Protestant prejudices lingered on, and Protestant-Catholic conflicts flared again in the 1940s and 1950s. But those were no longer the typical churchsect, majority-minority conflicts of the past, but rather the first signs of normal interdenominational conflicts (Wuthnow 1988; Greeley 1990). By the 1950s, the religious others—Catholics and Jews—had been incorporated into the system of American religious pluralism. A process of dual accommodation had taken place. America became a “Judeo-Christian” nation, and Protestant, Catholic, and Jew became the three denominations of a revised American “civil religion” (Herberg 1960; Bellah 1967). The election of a Catholic to the Presidency in 1960 clearly confirmed the end of anti-Catholic nativism. Before entering the White House, however, John F. Kennedy had to prove his worthiness before an association of Protestant ministers in Houston.2 While not as lengthy or as virulent as the American anti-Catholic nativist campaigns, similar Kulturkämpfe erupted in Protestant England, Holland, and Germany throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. All manifested the same combination of Protestant confessional, modern liberal, and nationalist prejudices against Catholicism as a retrograde, fundamentalist, and alien ultramontanist religion. Similar anti-Catholic caricatures appeared frequently in popular newspapers in all four countries, often depicting Catholic religious practices alongside the magical superstitious practices of “oriental” and “primitive” peoples. Catholicism was clearly viewed as the inner Orient, a primitive atavistic residue within Western civilization. By the middle of the twentieth century, the old Protestant-Catholic cleavage that had run through all Western European societies and their colonies since the time of the Protestant Reformation had ceased to

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exist. Three interrelated developments contributed to the geopolitical and cultural realignment: 1. The Cold War and the NATO military alliance led to a new harmonious relationship between Washington and Rome, putting an end to the old conflict between Republicanism and Romanism and establishing the basis for the new ideological conflict between the Christian West (“the free world”) and the godless Communist East. 2. The project of European unification that led to the Treaty of Rome and the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957, and eventually to a continuously expanding European Union, was based on two historical reconciliations: the reconciliation between France and Germany, two countries that had been at war or preparing for war from 1870 to 1945, and the reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics within a newly reconstituted Christian Democracy. The negative experience of Fascism had led Catholic parties, many of whom had evinced corporatist-fascist inclinations in the 1930s, to abandon the model of political Catholicism as a “third way” between bourgeois liberal democracy and atheist totalitarian communism and to adopt an unequivocal democratic identity. Ruling or prominent Christian Democrats in all founding countries (Germany, France, Italy, and the members of Benelux) played a leading role in the initial process of European integration. 3. The Catholic aggiornamento to secular modernity that culminated in the Second Vatican Council and is expressed in the two most important documents of the council: the Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae) and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes). The official recognition of the inalienable right of every individual to religious freedom, based on the sacred dignity of the human person, meant that the church had abandoned its traditional compulsory character and accepted the modern principle of disestablishment and the separation of church and state. Gaudium et Spes represented, in turn, the definitive acceptance of the legitimacy of the modern age and the modern world, putting an end to the negative philosophy of history that had characterized the official Catholic position since the Counter Reformation. The aggiornamento led to a fundamental relocation of the Catholic Church from a state-oriented to a civil society–oriented institution. Moreover, the official adoption of the modern discourse of human rights allowed the Catholic Church to play a crucial role in opposition to authoritarian regimes and in processes of democratization through-


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out the Catholic world. As Samuel Huntington has already pointed out, the “third wave” of democratization from the 1970s to the 1990s was primarily a Catholic wave (Huntington 1991; Casanova 1996: 356–63). One may draw three interrelated inferences from the narrative so far: 1. There was always some justification, based on the official position of the Catholic Church, for the anti-Catholic discourse. The church after all had resisted or judged negatively most modern historical developments—the Protestant Reformation, the modern secular state, the modern scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the 1848 democratic revolutions—and had officially condemned as “modern errors” or heresies the discourse of human rights, liberalism, Americanism, and Modernism. 2. Yet, to a certain extent, Catholicism was also a construct and an effect of the anti-Catholic discourse, a discourse that can be traced back to the Protestant critique of Catholicism, through the Enlightenment critique of religion, through liberalism and secularism as critiques of the Ancient Regime and all the alliances of “throne and altar.” Catholicism always constructed itself discursively in dialectic relation with the anti-Catholic discourse of the time. But the varieties of practices and mentalities within the lifeworld of Catholicism always surpassed the homogeneous discursive construct. 3. Irrespective of how one judges the old anti-Catholic prejudices, the swift and radical transformation of the political culture of Catholic countries as the result of the official reformulation of the religious teachings of the Catholic Church in Vatican II puts into question the notion of the unchanging essence of even a world religion as dogmatically structured as Catholicism. The premise of an unchanging core essence should even be less valid for other “world religions” like Islam, which have a less dogmatically structured doctrinal core or a more pluralistic and contested system of authoritative interpretation of the religious tradition.

Muslim Aggiornamenti? As in the case of Catholicism before, the internal and external debates over the compatibility between Islam and democracy and modern individual freedoms is being internally and externally discussed in three separate yet interrelated debates:3 (1) in debates over “Islamism,” the transnational structure of the world of Islam and the alleged clash of civilizations between Islam and the West at the geopolitical level, with clear parallels with earlier debates on the clash between “Republicanism” and “Romanism”; (2) in debates over political Islam and over the democratic

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legitimacy of Muslim political parties in Turkey and elsewhere, which— like their initially equally suspect Catholic counterparts—may establish new forms of Muslim Democracy, akin to Christian Democracy; and (3) in debates over the proper articulation of a Muslim ummah in immigrant diasporic contexts outside Dar el Islam. 1. Dar el Islam As a transnational religious regime, Islam never had the highly centralized, hierarchic, and priestly-clerical structure of the Catholic Church. Against the often-repeated claim that Islam is “religion and state” and therefore knows no clear differentiation of religion and politics, even a superficial acquaintance with the complex history of premodern Muslim societies across three continents and over a millennium makes it abundantly clear that the patterns of relations and, indeed, differentiation between religious and political institutions and structures are as diverse as anything one finds in Latin Christendom or indeed in any other world religion (Lapidus 1996: 3–27). Characteristic at least of Sunni Islam since the Abbasid Caliphate has been the de facto separation between the religious community of believers (the ummah) and the rulers, a separation that was symbolically represented in the separation between the caliph and the actual ruler, the sultan. Such a separation tended to legitimize any ruler who ensured the existence of the Muslim community and the upholding of the sharia. But such rulers in turn were rarely viewed as promulgators or guardians of the basic norms of the Islamic community. In a certain sense, the realm of statecraft and political rulership was detached from the Muslim res publica—that is, from the ideal realm of the ummah—as the arena of implementation of the moral order of Islam. According to Shmuel Eisenstadt, “This decoupling of an autonomous and vibrant public sphere from the political arena—or to be more precise from the realm of rulership— . . . constituted one of the distinctive characteristics of Muslim civilization” (Eisenstadt 2006: 452). To a certain extent, all movements of Muslim revival in the history of Islam, particularly from the early modern period to the present, have been attempts to link up once again the religious community, the public sphere, and what we would call today the state, according to the pristine vision of the ummah during the prophetic age, when it entailed a fusion of the sociopolitical and religious communities. The fundamental challenge for all Muslim societies in the present is how to institutionalize this transcendent vision under modern democratic conditions and within a legal-constitutional state. The European colonial expansion into “the abode of Islam” and the posterior globalization of the European system of nation-states


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undermined the viability of all premodern forms of Muslim polities. The political world of Islam disintegrated throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like European Christendom before, Islam also became fragmented and territorialized into nation-states (Piscatori 1986). The dissolution of the caliphate following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire found little resistance throughout the Muslim world, particularly in predominantly Muslim countries. With the emergence of various forms of secular nationalism after World War II, it seemed as if the nation was becoming the primary imagined community also for Muslim peoples, replacing the old transnational imagined community of the ummah. It is increasingly evident, however, that in the last decades Islam is being reconstituted as a transnational religious regime and as a global imagined community. The proliferation of transnational Muslim networks of all kinds—the massive global proportions of the pilgrimage to Mecca, the establishment of global Islamic mass media, the expressions of global solidarity with the Palestinian people and other Muslim causes—can be viewed as manifestations of the contemporary globalization of Islam (Roy 2004). But unlike the modern reconstitution of the papacy as the core of a deterritorialized transnational Catholic religious regime, the dissolution of the caliphate has created a void and a still unresolved crisis in the political image of Islam as a transnational religious regime. Three alternative models of organization of Islam and of the global ummah compete on the world stage among Muslim actors: a. The predominant one and the one more in accordance with the world system of states is that of an international system of Muslim states in geopolitical competition with other state blocs and with Western hegemony. To a certain extent participation in this geopolitical competition has been the aim of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) since its founding in 1972. Virtually all states with majority Muslim populations now belong to the OIC. No other world religion has such an interstate organization. Yet the OIC has proved an extremely ineffective and noncohesive organization. Moreover, most Muslim states lack democratic legitimacy. b. The diverse nonstate transnational Muslim groups, the khilafist, are the second example of organization of Islam and of the global ummah who are striving to reconstitute the caliphate or a global Muslim polity incorporating all the historical territories of Dar el Islam. The radical jihadis, who are willing to use spectacular terror across state borders, are the most prominent or at least have attained the greatest global prominence. In terms of numbers, those may be relatively small and rather isolated and loosely organized cells, but through their willingness to openly challenge the hegemony of the

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Western powers, particularly the United States, and through the skillful use of Muslim rhetoric and symbols, they have captured the imagination and the sympathy of many disaffected Muslims throughout the world, particularly in the diasporas of radical Islam.4 c. Although usually overlooked by scholars, journalists, and political observers, the majoritarian currents of transnational Islam today and the ones likely to have the greatest impact on the future transformation of Islam are transnational networks and movements of Muslim renewal, equally disaffected from state Islamism and transnational jihadism. They constitute the networks of a loosely organized and pluralistic transnational ummah, or global Muslim civil society: from the “evangelical” Tablighi Jama’at, a faith movement highly active throughout the Muslim world and in Muslim diasporas, whose annual conferences in India represent the second largest world gathering of Muslims after the hajj, and other transnational dawa (missionary or evangelical) networks, to the neo-Sufist Fethullah Gülen’s educational network, active throughout Turkey, Turkish diasporas, and the Turkic republics of Central Asia, and other Sufi brotherhoods such as the Mourids of West Africa who have also expanded their transnational networks into the Muslim diasporas of Europe and North America. 2. Political Islam It is an undeniable fact that the majority of Muslim countries today have authoritarian political regimes and repressive states. Many of those regimes rely on the military and financial support of the United States and other Western powers. Many of them also claim to be “Muslim” states or seek the religious mantle of Islam as a source of political legitimation for the most diverse institutions and political practices. In fact, practically every political movement or project, in power or in opposition, throughout the Muslim world claims to be Islamic if not Islamist. It is this very fact of the apparently inevitable fusion of religion and politics in Muslim countries that has led so many external observers and experts to attribute a “fundamentalist” essence to Islam that allegedly makes it incompatible with the differentiated structures of modernity and with the privatization of religion supposedly required by liberal democracy (Lewis 1988; Tibi 1990). The relevant question is whether one should attribute the widespread impulse found in the contemporary politics of Muslim countries to establish Islamic states to some Islamic essence that Muslims cannot relinquish without also abandoning their religious tradition and their identity; or, alternatively, whether, as pointed out by Talal Asad, it may not be rather the product of modern politics and the modernizing


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state (Asad 1997: 190). I am not in a position to evaluate the competing claims concerning the history of Islam, but since one finds similar “fundamentalist” impulses to symbiotic fusions of religions and politics throughout the history of nation-state formation in the Christian West, and today one finds similar “fundamentalist” impulses within Judaism in Israel, within Hinduism in India, and within Buddhism in Sri Lanka, I would be inclined to attribute the common “fundamentalist” impulse to the common context of nation-state formation, rather than to some common symbiotic fusion of religion and politics at the genesis of all these religions that has left an indelible mark in their makeup (van der Veer and Lehmann 1999; Marty and Appleby 1991). I believe that a look at the ongoing contemporary reformulations of the Islamic tradition from the comparative perspective of the Catholic aggiornamento may be instructive. At the very least, it should serve to relativize constructions of a clash between “Islam” and “the West.” The problem, so often reiterated by the critics, is not just that Huntington’s thesis of the “clash of civilizations” rests on an essentialist conception of Islam, but that the construction of “the West” on which it is based is equally essentialist (Huntington 2004). Moreover, in comparison with the clerical, hierarchic, and hierocratic centralized administrative structure of the Catholic Church, the Muslim ummah, at least within the Sunni tradition, has a much more conciliar, egalitarian, laic, and decentralized structure. The pluralistic and decentralized character of religious authority, which had always been distinctive of traditional Islam, has become even more pronounced in the modern age, when the traditional autonomy and authority of the ulama, as the local guardians of the religious tradition, has been challenged and curtailed from above by state government and from below by the democratization of knowledge and media. Actually, if there is anything on which most observers and analysts of contemporary Islam agree, it is the fact that the Islamic tradition in the very recent past has undergone an unprecedented process of pluralization and fragmentation of religious authority, comparable to that initiated by the Protestant Reformation. In this respect, there is a crucial difference between the Catholic and Muslim transformations. The Catholic aggiornamento had the character of an official, relatively uniform, and swift reform from above that found little contestation from below and could easily be enforced across the Catholic world, generating as a result a remarkable global homogenization of Catholic culture at least among the elites. Islam, in contrast, lacks centralized institutions and administrative structures to define and enforce official doctrines, and, therefore, the ongoing Muslim aggiornamenti to modern global realities and predicaments are likely to be plural, with multiple, diverse, and often contradictory

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outcomes. One should be open to the possibility that the Islamic tradition, its distinctive public discourse, and Muslim practices will inform and shape the type of civil society and the democratic institutions that may emerge in Muslim countries. There are multiple Western modernities, and there will likely be multiple Muslim modernities. The contemporary transformation of Muslim politics in Turkey offers perhaps the best illustration of Muslim democratization and the most compelling refutation of Huntington’s thesis (Casanova 2006b: 234– 47). Ultimately, the Kemalist project of constructing a modern Western secular Turkish nation-state from above was bound to fail because it was too secular for the Islamists, too Sunni for the Alevis, and too Turkish for the Kurds. A Turkish state in which the collective identities and interests of those groups that constitute the overwhelming majority of the population cannot find public representation cannot possibly be a truly representative democracy, even if it is founded on modern secular republican principles. But Muslim Democracy is as possible and viable today in Turkey as Christian Democracy was half a century ago in Western Europe. Secular Europeans, apprehensive of Muslim political parties, or of any other religious political party for that matter, seem to have forgotten that the initial project of a European Union was basically a Christian-Democratic one, sanctioned by the Vatican, at a time of a general religious revival in post–World War II Europe, in the geopolitical context of the Cold War when “the free world” and “Christian civilization” had become synonymous. But this is a forgotten history that secular Europeans, proud of having outgrown a religious past from which they feel liberated, would prefer not to remember. Moreover, practically every continental European country has had religious parties at one time or another. Many of them, particularly the Catholic ones, had dubious democratic credentials until the negative learning experience of Fascism turned them into Christian-Democratic parties. Turkey has been patiently knocking on the door of the European club since 1959, only to be told politely to continue waiting, while watching latecomer after latecomer being invited first in successive waves of accession. Formally, it applied for membership in 1987. But until very recently there was no chance that Turkey could, or actually seemed eager to, meet the EU’s stringent economic and political conditions for membership. Only after the landslide victory of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in November 2002 have the structural conditions been created to introduce the kind of constitutional, legal, and democratic reforms that make EU membership possible. The paradox, therefore, is that it is only the rise of Muslim Democracy in Turkey that has created the conditions for real democratization and authentic Europeanization (Yavuz 2006: 224–55; 2003). A wide consensus has seemingly been reached among the


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Turkish population, showing that Turkey is no longer a torn country on the issue of joining Europe and thus “the West.” What is less clear is whether the Europeans, the political elites as well as ordinary citizens, are willing at least to admit a modern Muslim democratic Turkey into the EU, if not to embrace it. Officially, Europe’s refusal to accept Turkey so far is based mainly on Turkey’s deficient human rights record. But there are some not-so-subtle indications that an outwardly secular Europe is still too Christian regarding the possibility of imagining a Muslim country as part of the European community. One wonders whether Turkey represents a threat to Western civilization or rather an unwelcome reminder of the barely submerged yet inexpressible and anxiety-ridden “white” European Christian identity. The public debates in Europe over Turkey’s admission have shown that Europe is actually the torn entity, deeply divided over its cultural identity, unable to answer the question whether European identity, and therefore its external and internal boundaries, should be defined by the common heritage of Christianity and Western civilization or by its modern secular values of liberalism, universal human rights, political democracy, and tolerant and inclusive multiculturalism. Publicly, of course, European liberal secular elites cannot share the pope’s definition of European civilization as essentially Christian.5 But they also cannot verbalize the unspoken cultural requirements that make the integration of Turkey into Europe such a difficult issue. The paradox and the quandary for modern secular Europeans, who have shed their traditional historical Christian identities in a rapid and drastic process of secularization that has coincided with the very success of the process of European integration and who therefore identify European modernity with secularization, is that they observe with some apprehension the reverse process in Turkey (Casanova 2006c: 65–92). The more modern, or at least democratic, Turkish politics become, the more publicly Muslim and less secularist they also tend to become. In its determination to join the EU, Turkey is adamantly staking its claim to be, or its right to become, a fully European country economically and politically, while simultaneously fashioning its own model of Muslim cultural modernity.6 It is this very claim to be simultaneously a modern European and a culturally Muslim country that baffles European civilizational identities, secular and Christian alike. It contradicts both the definition of a Christian Europe and the definition of a secular Europe. 3. Muslim Immigrant Diasporas7 The specter of millions of Turkish citizens already in Europe but not of Europe, many of them second-generation immigrants, caught between an old country they have left behind and their European host societies

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unable or unwilling to fully assimilate them, only makes the problem more visible. Gastarbeiter can be successfully incorporated economically. They may even gain voting rights, at least on the municipal level, and prove to be model or at least ordinary citizens. But can they pass the unwritten rules of cultural European membership or are they to remain strangers, ultimately Fremdarbeiter?8 Can the European Union open new conditions for the kind of multiculturalism that its constituent national societies find so difficult to accept? The question of the integration of Turkey in the EU is inevitably intertwined, implicitly if not explicitly, with the question of the failed integration of Muslim immigrants. What makes “the immigrant question” particularly thorny in Europe, and inextricably entwined with “the Turkish question,” is the fact that in Europe immigration and Islam are, or at least have been until very recently, almost synonymous. The overwhelming majority of immigrants in most European countries, the United Kingdom being the main exception, have been Muslims and the overwhelming majority of Western European Muslims are immigrants. This identification appears even more pronounced in those cases where the majority of Muslim immigrants tend to come predominantly from a single region of origin—for example, Turkey in the case of Germany, the Ma’ghreb in the case of France. This entails a superimposition of different dimensions of otherness that exacerbates issues of boundaries, accommodation, and incorporation. The immigrant, the religious, the racial, and the socioeconomic disprivileged other all tend to coincide. Moreover, all those dimensions of otherness now become superimposed upon Islam, so that Islam becomes the utterly “other.” After September 11, all kinds of developments—the global war on terror, the ever more visible proliferation of global Muslim discourses and networks, as well as the proliferation of global discourses on Islam and controversies over veiling and Islamic fundamentalism—have conflated, particularly in Europe, into a panic that can only be characterized as Islamophobia. Anti-immigrant xenophobic nativism, the conservative defense of Christian culture and civilization, secularist antireligious prejudices, liberal-feminist critiques of Muslim patriarchal fundamentalism, and the fear of Islamist terrorist networks are being fused indiscriminately into a uniform anti-Muslim discourse that practically precludes the kind of mutual accommodation between immigrant groups and host societies that is necessary for successful immigrant incorporation. The parallels with Protestant-republican anti-Catholic nativism in mid-nineteenth-century America are indeed striking. Today’s totalizing discourse on Islam as an essentially antimodern, fundamentalist, illiberal and undemocratic religion and culture echoes the


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nineteenth-century discourse on Catholicism. What is new and different, however, is the strength of European secular identities. The drastic decline in religious beliefs and practices throughout Europe since the 1960s is accompanied by a secularist self-understanding that interprets the decline as normal and progressive, and therefore as a quasi-normative consequence of being a modern and enlightened European. It is this secular identity shared by European elites and ordinary people alike that paradoxically turns religion and the barely suppressed Christian European identity into a thorny and perplexing issue when it comes to delimiting the external geographic boundaries and to defining the internal cultural identity of a European Union in the process of being constituted.

The Religious Politics of Gender in Catholicism and Islam 1. General Theoretical-Analytical Reflections on Gender, Religion, and Modernity The thrust of this chapter so far has been to offer a schematic reconstruction of the complex relation between Catholicism, as a transnational religious regime, and Protestant, liberal, secular modernity and to portray the aggiornamento as Catholicism’s own attempt to fashion its own Catholic version of modernity.9 The juxtaposition of the anti-Catholic discourse and the Catholic aggiornamento serves to underline the paradox of a religion that had been depicted for centuries as unchanging, traditionalist, and authoritarian playing a crucial global historical role in the third wave of democratization. The purpose of such a reconstruction was to put into question contemporary Western secular discourses of Islam as an essentially fundamentalist, antimodern, and undemocratic religion, by drawing parallels with nineteenth-century anti-Catholic discourses. The aim was not to offer any systematic or substantive comparison between Catholicism and Islam as religious regimes, but to suggest that viewing contemporary Muslim transformations as forms of Muslim aggiornamenti—that is, as plural and often antithetical attempts by Muslim individual and collective actors to fashion their own Muslim versions of modernity—may be analytically and hermeneutically more fruitful to consider such transformations as the civilizational resistance of fundamentalist Islam against an essentialist construction of Western secular modernity. But is it not the case that when it comes to the religious politics of gender, both Catholicism and Islam turn out to be indeed basically similar radical versions of patriarchal fundamentalism or of fundamentalist patriarchy? Even assuming that one accepts as plausible the argument

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presented so far, that the Catholic aggiornamento signifies a successful adaptation to and coming to terms with secular modernity, is it not the case that when it comes to issues of family structure and gender roles, gender equality, authority and power within the church, sexuality and reproductive health, bioethics and genetics, the Catholic Church, or at least its official hierarchy, remains anchored in an unchanging traditionalist, naturalist, and fundamentalist patriarchal position? Is not equally the female “veil” the most patent and poignant symbol of modern Islamic fundamentalism, the unequivocal and undisputed sign of Muslim patriarchy, of the oppression of women, of the heteronomous control of female bodies, and of the literal effacement of female individual identity and subjectivity? I pose these questions in such a sharp and provocative manner in order to raise a flag precisely against any attempt to offer a simple and unambiguous affirmative or negative answer. Only from an unreflexive, Western-centric, liberal-feminist, teleological perspective on the liberation of “woman” (as a single universal historical subject), from religious patriarchy could one easily answer both questions in the affirmative. On the other hand, such warning by no means belittles the urgent historical need to subject both religious traditions to an internal radical feminist critique, reinterpretation, and reappropriation. In the remainder of this chapter I suggest in a very schematic fashion the kind of issues that could be elaborated in a more systematic comparison of the challenges that modern gender equality presents to both Catholicism and Islam. The religious politics of gender worldwide has become one of the most important issues facing global humanity and is likely to remain an issue of increasing relevance for the foreseeable future, if one assumes the validity of the following premises:10 1. That democratization, in the sense proposed by de Tocqueville, as the categorical principle of equality of ascribed conditions, is a modern, irresistible, universal, and “providential” force or drive; that the principle of gender equality is one of the last manifestations of this modern drive, so that the proposition that “all men and women are created equal” is becoming a global “self-evident truth”; that the task of somehow bridging the enormous gap between the norm of gender equality and the appalling reality of unequal worth, unequal status, and unequal access to resources and power is likely to remain one of the most important historical-political tasks and challenges for all societies; that while the drive to institutionalize the principle of gender equality may be general, its practices and effects—that is, the particular cultural, sociopolitical, and institutional arrangements—are likely to vary significantly across societies,


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cultures, civilizations, and religions. After all, one of the most critical lessons of feminism has been to question the false universalism of the category of “human being,” asserting instead women’s difference. Similarly, one must remain reflexively on guard to question any false universalism essentially inscribed onto the category of “woman,” “female emancipation,” or “gender equality.” 2. That sexuality is one of the most powerful, one could even say “sacred,” dimensions of individual and intersubjective human life; that sexual intercourse entails not only a unique source of erotic pleasure but also a physical act of intimacy between two persons that may serve as the foundation for a life-long mutual commitment to marriage, and in addition has the potential for the creation of new life and is therefore the foundation for kinship structures and social reproduction; that sexuality is therefore simultaneously the most intimate expression of the embodied self and therefore the most private of affairs and the primary source of sociobiological reproduction and therefore a public affair that no society can leave unregulated. In particular the female body, because of its indispensable function in the pregnancy and gestation of new life, is caught in the middle of this tension between the private and the public dimensions of sexuality. Moreover, the modern sexual revolution entails a dual separation of sexuality and biological reproduction. Reflexive birth control through reliable techniques of contraception has freed sexuality from reproduction, while advances in reproductive technologies and biogenetics may potentially free biological reproduction not only from sexuality but also from all traditional forms of social reproduction through family and kinship. 3. That insofar as religions are discursive systems of beliefs and practices that offer structures of moral order, cultural meaning, and motivational purpose to individuals and collectivities through symbolic means of transcendence and spiritual communication with some higher extrahuman, supernatural, or divine reality, religions have always been involved in the task of regulating sexuality, biological and social reproduction, family structure, and gender roles in accordance with some transcendent principle posited as natural, sacred, or of divine origin. In particular, monotheistic religions, which claim a radically absolute divine transcendence as the source of universally valid and unchanging principles, face the challenge of having to apply hermeneutically those universal principles to changing circumstances. The radical change in circumstances produced by the modern democratic and sexual revolutions and the fundamental transformations in gender relations and gender roles that both entail present a particularly difficult challenge to the sacred claims of those traditions. In the remaining section of this chapter, I offer

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a tentative sketch of some of those challenges from the comparative perspective of the different traditions of Catholicism and Islam. 2. Three Analytical Fields of Research on Gender and Religion within Catholicism and Islam As a fruitful heuristic way of organizing the wide field of research on gender and religion, I am going to follow Birgit Heller’s tripartite analytical differentiation between (a) the issue of “women’s status and roles in different religious traditions”—that is, the kinds of institutionalized gendered religious divisions of labor within Catholicism and Islam as religious regimes; (b) “the subject of cultural images, ideas, stereotypes and norms about women” within the discursive religious traditions of Catholicism and Islam; and (c) “the question what women as religious subjects do and think”—that is, the question of the historical agency of Catholic and Muslim women today in the contemporary reproduction and transformation of their religious traditions (Heller 2001: 357–59). a. The Gendered Religious Division of Labor and Power Relations within Catholicism and Islam as Religious Regimes and as Symbolic Modes of Production Sociologically one can view institutionalized religions as analogous both to polities, as systems of distribution of power, authority, and decision making within a community in relation to the sacred, and to economic modes of production, as symbolic modes of production, distribution, and consumption of the sacred and of religious goods. In both cases the obvious question is to what extent the system of power relations and the social relations of production are gendered and unequal—that is, whether men and women have unequal differential access to religious power and authority and unequal differential access to the means of production, distribution, and consumption of religious goods. The political analogy, at least, is by no means farfetched since after all the very word ecclesia in ancient Greek refers to the political assembly of citizens of the polis or city state, while the word ummah has analogous connotations of a sociopolitical community. In the first place, as universalist salvation religions, both Christianity and Islam offer equal access to salvation and to holiness to male and female. There is no gender discrimination in the eyes of God. God is the source and model of equitable justice and fairness to all. Moreover, as loving Father and as “the Merciful and Compassionate,” God may be said to express a feminine “preferential option” for the weak, the poor, the meek, the orphan, the widow. As high religions, however, the divine revelations have been linguistically and discursively embedded in patriarchal and androcentric cultures and societies.


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In the prophetic/charismatic foundational age of both religions, nevertheless, individual women had particularly close access to Jesus and Muhammad and played important active roles that seemed to break with the patriarchal relations of their respective sociohistorical contexts. But as the charismatic foundational movements became routinized and embedded in established worldly regimes, the patriarchal principles once again became clearly dominant as organizational principles of both religions, and a gendered division of labor of unequal religious roles became institutionalized: priesthood in the case of the Catholic Church, the ulama in the case of Islam, as hierarchically differentiated and high-status religious roles are exclusively male. While patriarchal, inasmuch as in its public dimensions it is primarily a male assembly, the ummah within Sunni Islam is more democratically organized, without a priestly/sacerdotal/clerical class and without the high differentiation of religious virtuosi/literati and ordinary people/ laity typical of all high religions. Only within Shi’ite Islam do the ulama attain a highly differentiated, at times also hierarchically organized, structure. The Catholic Church, by contrast, is characterized by a dual system of highly differentiated and canonically regulated religious roles, the sacramental one between ordained priesthood/clergy and laity, and that between, on the one hand, the religious orders of monks, friars, and nuns who follow the higher evangelical calling, withdraw from the world (saeculum), and profess the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience and, on the other hand, all the secular Christians (including the secular clergy) who live in the world. The dynamics of modern Western secularization, both the Protestant one of abolishing the differentiation between religious and secular roles and callings, and the Catholic/laicist one of giving primacy to civil over ecclesiastical (clerical) ranks, authority, and jurisdiction, were reactions against this dual Catholic system of differentiation. The existence of similar male and female religious orders and the high number of female saints, particularly in the early church, would seem to indicate that there is indeed ungendered, universal access to religious salvation (Ecclesia invisibilis) within Catholicism. However, within the Catholic Church as Ecclesia visibilis, both as public assembly and as a hierarchically and bureaucratically organized episcopal church, the crucial differentiation is that between priests and laity. Priesthood, as the domain of sacerdotal/sacramental, magisterial, and administrative/ canonical authority, is exclusively reserved for males. This is the fundamental issue of patriarchal gender discrimination within the Catholic Church. The discrimination is more blatant as traditionally the majority of the assembled faithful, and thus the majority of consumers of the religious goods distributed by the church, have been female, while the production, administration, and distribution of those goods have been almost exclusively in male hands.

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The official response of the Catholic male hierarchy to the modern demand for female ordination has been that ordination is of divine origin and therefore unchangeable, since Jesus selected only males as his disciples, who are the links to the apostolic succession of episcopal male priesthood. This is perhaps a persuasive sociocultural argument of historical precedent in accordance with the patriarchal premises of the apostolic age, but it is not a very well-grounded theological argument with scriptural support. Indeed, the male character of the priesthood was such a taken-for-granted cultural premise throughout the history of the church that it was unnecessary to provide a serious theological justification for it. Only after the modern democratic revolution questioned any form of gender discrimination was a theological justification required, and it then became obvious that the body of discursive theological argumentation for it within the Catholic tradition is very thin. One should add that at least since the establishment of the charisma of office after the Donatist heresy (Fourth century), it has been official Catholic doctrine that it is the sacramental charisma of the office—that is, the charisma of ordination that gives sacred dignity to the person of the priest, not the personal spiritual attributes, much less the bodily ones, of the individual. Although the demand for female access to the ulama, the learned guardians of the Muslim tradition, does not seem to appear so urgent in Muslim societies, one can assume that the demand is likely to grow in the future, particularly within Shi’ite Islam, where the ulama have real hierarchically organized power and prestige. Within the Sunni ummah at least, there is no rigid differentiation between the religious clerical elite and the ordinary Muslim. In any case, with the modern universalization of literacy and the democratization of religious knowledge, the differential status and role of the ulama become even less marked. What may become increasingly noticeable is that the real differentiation within the ummah is not a religious one between clerics and laity, but a gendered patriarchal one between male and female Muslims. Pnina Lahav’s chapter in this volume explores this issue in the context of the United States. b. Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Catholic and Muslim Traditions It would be impossible and presumptuous to even attempt to summarize the state of scholarship and the contemporary debates on this central issue. Solely listing the most relevant literature and sources on both traditions would take many pages. This is the area in which the interface between “religion” and culture—that is, “the customary sphere”—is the greatest. This is also the area in which religion most clearly shows its “Janus face.” Comparative historical research is


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particularly relevant in this sphere not only because of the tremendous range and diversity of religious norms and cultural customs concerning gender but more importantly because both traditions, like all religious traditions, are equivocal and ambivalent and can therefore be used to legitimate and reinforce, as well as to challenge prophetically patriarchal customs and norms. Indeed, in the name of reverting to some pristine religious tradition, movements of religious reform, revival, or purification often tend to introduce and legitimate radical changes in the customary sphere. Only through Abelard’s method of Sic et Non, simultaneously affirming and denying every proposition, could one do justice to the contradictions, ambiguities, and ambivalences in the religious traditions. The very strong misogynist strand in the Christian tradition is undeniable and has been amply documented most critically by contemporary feminist theologians and religious scholars (Daly 1985; Ruether 1974; Fiorenza 1993, 1994; Malone 2000, 2001). But no serious scholar could claim that this misogynist strand is derived from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth or deny that in its origins primitive Christianity represented an egalitarian countercultural trend against the patriarchal culture of the times (Greeley 2007). One could debate how to allocate fairly the blame for the later reversal to patriarchy, for the intensification of misogyny, or for the novel introduction of misogamy beyond the Jewish tradition, whether to attribute them to specific currents within Hellenism or Gnosticism, for example, or to particular patres, such as Paul, Tertullian, and Agustin. What is undeniable is that for two millennia the images of women and gender within the Catholic tradition have been produced and controlled by males and, what is most significant, mostly by celibate clerics. The persecution of witches in medieval Christianity and in early modernity offers the most damaging evidence of the way in which religious images could be used to sanctify the oppression of women. Only in the last decades have female scholars and religious activists begun to challenge in earnest the established patriarchal images and the male celibate control of those images (Fiorenza 1985; RankeHeinemann 1990). In most advanced capitalist Western countries the development of religious feminism was mostly a response to general secular trends in those societies, to the radical transformation in gender roles, to the advancement of women’s liberation, and to the spread of feminist ideas and sensibilities. But in many so-called Third World countries, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, religious feminism often presents a prophetic challenge vis-à-vis established patriarchal customs and gender roles (Ruether 1999: 214–47; Oduyoye 1995). Specifically within the Catholic tradition, the cult of Mary, the Virgin Mother of Jesus, Mother of God, and Mother intercessor of all believers, represents most paradigmatically the ambivalence in

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woman’s image, being simultaneously mother and virgin, and thus an unattainable ideal for all her sisters (Warner 1983; Greeley 1977). It is undeniable that the Virgin Mary in her myriad diverse vernacular representations has served as an iconic symbol of perpetual help to the most needy, the most marginal, and the most unprivileged, who in all cultures throughout the world happened to be oppressed women at the bottom of all hierarchies of power and privilege. What is debatable is whether such symbolic representation offers the anticipatory critical promise of transcendence and liberation in this world and in the next, or rather the otherworldly ideological compensatory opiate that serves to sanctify the status quo and quietist resignation. Similar heated debates concerning the image of women within Islam and the role of Islam in legitimating and reproducing patriarchy and gender inequality within Muslim societies have erupted with great force in the last few decades. As in the case of Christianity, female scholarship has made the most important critical contributions to those debates (Ahmed 1992; Stowasser 1994; Wadud 1999; Mernissi 1991; Moghissi 2005). There is some consensus that the Prophetic Revelation and the Sunnah of the Prophet constituted an improvement in the situation of women when compared with the reigning conditions in the immediate pre-Islamic period in the Arabian Peninsula. It is also widely accepted that Muhammad himself respected and trusted women and tried to facilitate equal participation of women in the religious life of the ummah. On the other hand, there is evidence of a rapid decline with the institutionalization of the early Muslim community, marked by what Jane Smith has termed a dual process of exclusion of women not only from leadership roles but from the communal aspects of religious life and their seclusion to a place apart from normal social intercourse with men (Smith 1985: 19–35). The most heated controversies, however, relate to the central role of women in modern processes of Islamization. Veiling, above all, has become the most salient, contested, and controversial emblem of contemporary global Islam. As Nilufer Gole has pointed out, no other symbol than the veil reconstructs with such a force the “otherness” of Islam to the West. Women’s bodies and sexuality reappear as a political site of difference and resistance to the homogenizing and egalitarian forces of Western modernity (Gole 1996: 1). Particularly in the West, the headscarf has become the symbol of fundamentalist Islam and of the oppression of Muslim women. Against such a simplistic liberal, feminist, and secularist reading of the meaning of the Muslim veil, anthropological phenomenological analyses of Muslim women both in Muslim societies and in immigrant diasporas have offered more nuanced, ambivalent, and contextual interpretations (Mahmood 2005; Meir-Housseini 1999). Saba Mahmood’s chapter in this volume explores the problems


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of such secularist readings of Muslim women’s situation. Suffice it to point out that while France outlawed the wearing of headscarves in public schools in 2004 in the name of secularism and gender equality, the government of Turkey tried to pass a controversial constitutional amendment in 2008 effectively lifting the ban on wearing the veil in universities and public schools in order to guarantee equal treatment from state institutions to those wearing scarves. Indeed, throughout the Muslim world, the veil has functioned as an emblem of the eruption of women in the public sphere after centuries of seclusion and as such as a symbol of their political, economic, and cultural emancipation, and above all as an expression of female agency and subjectivity. c. Women as Religious Subjects, Historical Agents, and Political Actors From a comparative perspective this may well be the most critical area of research insofar as it examines the historical agency of women in the contemporary reproduction, reinterpretation, and transformation of their religious traditions and their role in the contested politics of gender equality. The proliferation of feminist religious discourses within both Catholicism and Islam is undoubtedly the harbinger of radical transformations in both traditions. At the same time, the religious politics of gender are at the center of the internal contestations and debates within both traditions.11 Women reading the sacred texts of their traditions with female eyes and with female sensibilities without the mediation, interpretation, and control of male clerical authorities is the first hermeneutic step, simple yet radical, on the road to female religious subjectivity and agency. At the same time, so-called fundamentalist religious movements in all religious traditions are active and reactive interventions and responses to the radical global transformation of gender relations. The politics of gender are at the core of fundamentalist religious politics everywhere. But the binary categories of Western liberalism, secularism, and feminism cannot that easily be simply grafted upon gendered religious politics even in Western contexts, not to speak of non-Western Catholic and Muslim contexts (Badran 2007; Naghibi 2007; Sharma and Young 1994).

Conclusion This chapter has explored the claims underlying pervasive anti-Catholic strands in European and American social and intellectual history, and the claims of a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, in order to suggest parallels between developments in Catholic and Islamic cultures as aspects of modernity. From this vantage point claims that sexism is caused by or inherent in Islam can be seen to depend

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on a narrow time frame and ignorance of other religious systems. In concentrating on gender in a comparative discussion of Catholic and Muslim modernities, I have moved beyond consideration of xenophobic outlooks to reference internal debates within sectors of each religious group. The contemporary existence of these debates within both Muslim and Catholic contexts indicates the utility of incorporating both religion and gender into analyses of political negotiations of modernity.

Notes 1. Jose Casanova, “Roman and Catholic and American: The Transformation of Catholicism in the United States,” 1992, 75–111. 2. Kennedy’s speech was almost a replica of John England’s address to Congress in 1826, offering the classic liberal position of radical separation between the private religious and the public secular spheres. Had the Second Vatican Council and developments in global Catholicism not interfered, this liberal position would probably have become the official position of the American Catholic Church. Instead, a radically new form of modern “public Catholicism” emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) pp. 171—75. 3. Jose Casanova, “Catholic and Muslim Politics in Comparative Perspective,” 2006a. 4. There are some similarities between transnational jihadism today and Catholic ultramontanism in the nineteenth century. Both were parallel responses of transnational religious groups to the threats of the modern system of nation-states and the political opportunities of globalization. But Catholic ultramontanism only turned politically violent in conjunction with integralist tendencies aiming to restore Catholic authoritarian monarchism against the liberal state, particularly against Republicanism, as in the case of the Carlist wars in Spain or counterrevolutionary Catholic monarchism in France. The Cristero rebellion in laic postrevolutionary Mexico had a similar character. 5. In his first book published as Pope Benedict XVI, L’Europa di Benedetto nella crisi delle culture (Siena: Cantagalli, 2005), but written still as Cardinal Ratzinger, he questions, in a brief passage, Turkey’s EU membership given its Muslim culture and its lack of Christian roots. The book is dedicated to a critical reflection on the Enlightenment, secularism, and contemporary European culture. 6. On Turkish-Muslim modernities, cf., Nilüfer Göle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Snapshots of Islamic Modernities, in Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed., Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002); and M. Hakan Yavuz and John L. Esposito, eds., Turkish Islam and the Secular State. The Gülen Movement (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003).


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7. Jose Casanova, “Immigration and the New Religious Pluralism: A European Union/United States Comparison,” in Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism, ed. Thomas Banchoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 59–83. 8. A controversy erupted in Germany because Oscar Lafontaine, the left Socialist leader, dislikes the euphemism Gastarbeiter (guest worker) and prefers to call the immigrant laborer Fremdarbeiter (foreign worker), the term used during the Nazi period. 9. On the concept of Catholic modernity see James Heft, ed., A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 10. The relevant literature is already very vast. See, Darlene M. Juschka, ed., Feminism and the Study of Religion: A Reader (New York Continuum, 2001); Elizabeth A. Castelli, ed., Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Stephen Ellingson and M. Christian, eds., Religion and Sexuality in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2002); Denise Lardner Carmody, Women and World Religions (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1979); Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young, eds., Religion and Women (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994); Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Ellison Banks Findly, eds. Women, Religion and Social Change (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985). 11. For a good comparative survey, covering a good number of Catholic and Muslim countries, in response to the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, see Jane H. Bayes and Nayereh Tohidi, eds., Globalization, Gender and Religion: The Politics of Women’s Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

References Ahmed, Leila. 1992. Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven: Yale University Press. Asad, Talal. 1997. Europe against Islam: Islam in Europe. The Muslim World 87 (2): 183–96. Badran, Margot. 2007. Feminism beyond East and West. New Gender Talk and Practice in Global Islam. New Delhi: New Global Publications. Bayes, Jane H., and Nayereh Tohidi, eds. 2001. Globalization, Gender and Religion: The Politics of Women’s Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bellah, Robert. 1967. Civil Religion in America. Daedalus 96 (1): 1–21. Billington, Ray Allen. 1938. The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism. New York: Macmillan. Carmody, Denise Lardner. 1979. Women and World Religions. Nashville, TN: Abingdon. Casanova, Jose, 1992. Roman and Catholic and American: The Transformation of Catholicism in the United States. International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 6 (1): 75–111.

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––––––. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ––––––. 1996. Global Catholicism and the Politics of Civil Society. Sociological Inquiry 66 (3): 356–63. ––––––. 1997. Globalizing Catholicism and the Return to a “Universal” Church. In Transnational Religion and Fading States, ed. Susanne Rudolph and James Piscatori. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ––––––. 2006a. Catholic and Muslim Politics in Comparative Perspective. The Taiwan Journal of Democracy 1(1): 89–108. ––––––. 2006b. The Long, Difficult, and Tortuous Journey of Turkey into Europe and the Dilemmas of European Civilization. Constellations 13 (2): 234–47. ––––––. 2006c. Religion, European Secular Identities and European Integration. In Religion in an Expanding Europe, ed. Timothy Byrnes and Peter Katzenstein, pp. 65–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––––––. 2007. Immigration and the New Religious Pluralism: A European Union/United States Comparison. In Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism, ed. Thomas Banchoff, pp. 59–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castelli, Elizabeth A, ed. 2001. Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Daly, Mary. 1985. The Church and the Second Sex. Boston: Beacon. De Tocqueville. 1990. Democracy in America. New York: Vintage. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2006. The Public Sphere in Muslim Societies. In Islam in Public, ed. Nilüfer Göle and Ludwig Ammann, p. 452. Istanbul Bilgi University Press. Ellingson, Stephen, and M. Christian, eds. 2002. Religion and Sexuality in Cross-Cultural Perspective. New York: Routledge. Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. 1985. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad. ––––––. 1993, 1994. Searching the Scriptures: Vol. 1: A Feminist Introduction; Vol. II: A Feminist Commentary. New York: Crossroad. Gole, Nilufer. 1996. The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ––––––. 2002. Snapshots of Islamic Modernities. In Multiple Modernities, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Greeley, Andrew. 1969. The Catholic Experience. An Interpretation of the History of American Catholicism. Garden City NY: Doubleday. ––––––. 1977. The Mary Myth: On the Femininity of God. New York: Seabury Press. ––––––. 1990. The Catholic Myth: The Behavior and Beliefs of American Catholics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ––––––. 2007. Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and His Relationship with Women. New York: Forge. Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, and Ellison Banks Findly, eds. 1985. Women, Religion and Social Change. Albany: SUNY Press. Heft, James, ed. 1999. A Catholic Modernity? Charles Tylor’s Marianist Award Lecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


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Heller, Birgit. 2001. Gender and Religion. In Gender and Religion, ed. Kari Elisabeth Børresen, Sara Cabibbo, and Edith Specht, pp. 357–59. Rome: Carocci editore. Hennesy, S. J. 1981. American Catholics. A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Herberg, Will. 1960. Protestant-Catholic-Jew. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. ––––––. 2004. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Juschka, Darlene M., ed. 2001. Feminism and the Study of Religion: A Reader. New York: Continuum. Lapidus, Ira M. 1996. State and Religion in Islamic Societies. Past and Present 151:3–27. Lewis, Bernard. 1988. The Political Language of Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Malone, Mary. 2000, 2001. Women and Christianity: Vol. I: The First Thousand Years; Vol. II: From 1000 to the Reformation. Ottawa: Novalis. Marty, Martin, and R. Scott Appleby, eds. 1991. Fundamentalisms Observed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McLoughlin, William. 1978. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meir-Housseini, Ziba. 1999. Islam and Gender. The Religious Debate in Contemporary Islam. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mernissi, Fatima. 1991. Women and Islam. An Historical and Theological Enquiry. New York: Basil Blackwell. Miller, Perry. 1965. The Life of the Mind in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Moghissi, Haideh, ed. 2005. Women and Islam. Vol. I: Images and Realities. New York: Routledge. Naghibi, Nima. 2007. Rethinking Global Sisterhood. Western Feminism and Iran. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Brien, David. 1989. Public Catholicism. New York: Macmillan. Oduyoye, Mercy Ambo. 1995. Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy. New York: Orbis Books. Piscatori, James P. 1986. Islam in a World of Nation-States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ranke-Heinemann, Uta. 1990. Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church. New York: Doubleday. Ratzinger, Cardinal (Pope Benedict XVI). 2005. L’Europa di Benedetto nella crisi delle culture. Siena: Cantagalli. Roy, Olivier. 2004. Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. London: Hurst. Ruether, Rosemary Radford, ed. 1974. Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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––––––. 1999. Feminism in World Christianity. In Feminism and World Religions, ed. Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young, pp. 214–47. Sharma, Arbind, and Katherine K. Young, eds. 1994. Religion and Women. Albany: SUNY Press. Smith, Jane I. 1985. Women, Religion and Social Change in Early Islam. In Women, Religion, and Social Change, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Ellison Banks Findly, pp. 19–35. Albany: SUNY Press. Stowasser, Barbara Freyer. 1994. Women in the Qur’an, Traditions, and Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press. Tibi, Bassam. 1990. Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Van der Veer, Peter, and Hartmun Lehmann, eds. 1999. Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wadud, Amina. 1999. Qur’an and Woman: Re-Reading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press. Warner, Marina. 1983. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage. Wuthnow, Robert. 1988. The Restructuring of American Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yavuz, M. Hakan. 2003. Islamic Political Identity in Turkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ––––––. 2006. Islam and Europeanization in Turkish-Muslim Socio-Political Movements. In Religion in an Expanding Europe, ed. Timothy Byrnes and Peter Zatzenstein, pp. 225–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yavuz, M. Hakan, and John L. Esposito, eds. 2003. Turkish Islam and the Secular State. The Gülen Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Chapter 2

4

I magi ned Commu nities : State, R eligion, and Gen der i n Jewish Set tlements Hanna Herzog

This chapter offers a feminist perspective for understanding the triangular structure formed by religion, state, and gender, using a case study from contemporary Israel. It explores the centrality of women’s religiosity to a political issue with national and international consequences: the fate of the Territories that lies at the heart of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli settlements in the Territories display the inextricable connections of religion, gender, and the state suggesting that governments, as well as scholars, ignore them at their peril. Though Israel was founded as a democratic, secular state, it has identified itself as a state for the Jewish people. This has led it to award special status to religion, with a less than total separation between religion and state. However, very often in the public and academic discourse, Israeli society is described as rent by a religious-secular cleavage (Cohen and Susser 2000; Peres and Ben-Rafael 2006). In terms of social identity there is a dispute over alternative imagined communities, to use Anderson’s (1983) phrase. The struggle is frequently presented as between democracy and theocracy, or between two contradictory logics of association: a secular statist logic, modern and rational, versus traditional, conservative, transcendental, religious logic. Claims to Israel’s secularity notwithstanding, feminist studies since the 1980s indicate the centrality of religion’s role in the state in shaping

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the country’s gendered social order (Yuval-Davis 1980; Berkovitch 1997; Herzog 1998). The few studies addressing women’s efforts to change this refer to religion as an external, independent variable that explains the status of women (e.g. Sered 1997; Lahav 2000; Shakdiel 2002). This chapter, as part of the whole volume, applies a different theoretical perspective and proposes an examination of the complex dynamic relations between the religion-state-gender triangle by which each of the three constitute and reconstitute. I choose as a social site for my empirical study two types of Jewish religious groups—NationalReligious and Ultra-Orthodox—that have settled in the West Bank1 and created their own religious communities. The chapter asks how intersections between state, religion, and gender have shaped each of the categories—more specifically, if and how they have redefined the gendered division of roles within those communities. My major claim is that, at the intersection between state policy and the needs of religious groups, women’s role has been reformulated. The settlements as a political project of the state open new frontiers for Jewish religious life and offer new opportunities for women. The window of opportunity also impacts the organization of religious life while simultaneously opening up opportunities for women to participate in shaping state politics. The comparison between the two groups in a sociohistorical perspective underlines the similarities between them; it also pinpoints the cognitive components that influence the ways in which religion, state, and gender are intertwined and influence one another.

Orthodoxy and Ultra-Orthodoxy— Some Sociohistorical Background This chapter compares two communities practicing two different streams that emerged within Jewish Orthodoxy toward the end of the nineteenth century and, more particularly, between the two world wars: the Ultra-Orthodox stream, referred to in Hebrew as Haredi, and the National-Religious stream, which is also identified as Orthodox. Neither of these two streams is monolithic, and transformations have occurred within them over the years (Friedman 1991). While both emphasize observance of Jewish law, there are two major differences between them. One is their attitude to modern culture. Orthodox Judaism sought common ground between the world of religion and modernity, whereas ultra-Orthodoxy adhered to the claims of fulfilling the commandments of Jewish law (halacha) in the minutest details, which is why this stream is called Haredi in Hebrew, meaning fear and awe in keeping the commandments. The fear of exposure to the modern secular world and the determination to preserve the transcendental nature of biblical study

Imagined Communities

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(the Talmud and its commentators) engendered an emphasis on yeshiva studies (school for Talmudic studies) as a way of life. The second difference, related to the first, is the attitude to Zionism. Orthodoxy chose to throw in its lot with the Zionist movement; hence it is known in Israel as the National-Religious Movement (while in the United States it is known as modern orthodoxy). On the other hand, all the groups defining themselves as Haredi view Zionism as a secularnationalist ideology in direct opposition to the essence of Judaism. Although they accept the idea of the return to the Land of Israel, they oppose the Zionist enterprise, for it implies that human intervention, rather than divine sovereignty alone, can hasten Jewish redemption. In the process of building Israeli society, religious Zionism chose to play an active role, whereas the Haredim2 chose the path of social and physical segregation; however, they did choose to organize themselves politically and to participate in elections for the Knesset (Israeli parliament) (Schiff 1977). The experiences of each of these communities at the intersection between religion, state, and gender precipitated the creation of new social arrangements. These arrangements, as the brief analysis below will demonstrate, position both communities on the margins of Israeli society in its early stages. Both find themselves trapped by paradoxes created by their attempts to address their marginalization, paradoxes resulting from the triangular relation of religion, state, and gender. The following section explores their negotiation of incompatible goals that marginalize each community.

The Haredi World 3 The most distinctive characteristic of the Haredi community in Israel is its consolidation as a “society of scholars” (Friedman 1991) that segregates itself (Shilhav 1989) from Israeli society and defines itself as a religious elite. Haredi men are required to devote themselves full time to Talmudic study in yeshivas. This is intended both to rebuild the yeshiva world that had been destroyed in the Holocaust and to ensure its continuity. Friedman (1991) claims that the segregation was intended to serve as a defense against the secular world, as was the rigor of religious observance. Families hand over supervision of their youth to the yeshivas, where they are not only separated from the outside world but also form an “enclave culture” (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 23–89), inculcating a negative view of outsiders. A “wall of good deeds” divides the “moral superiority of the members of the enclave” from the allure of the surrounding secular, modern society (ibid.). In this culture, the value of learning exceeds that of any other commandment. An ascetic ethos contrasts the spirituality of the enclave of learning with the

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materialism of Western culture, and the glorification of working Israel, in particular (Stadler 2002). The society of scholars is made possible by three main factors. One is the modern, Western welfare state that ensures a minimal income for all its residents. The second is the economic prosperity of the private sector producing a relatively large echelon of wealthy Haredim in Israel, but even more so in Western countries, especially the United States. These benefactors continue the tradition of the rich men who fund the yeshiva world with their own money. The third factor, often overlooked and particularly paradoxical, is women’s entrance into the workforce. In Israel, state support of Haredi education constituted a catalyst for the development of the “society of scholars” that is based upon a gendered division of labor in which the men study Talmud and the women are the breadwinners (Friedman 1991). In 1953, Israel passed a law establishing free, compulsory education. This resulted in the abolition of separate ideological (sectorial) education systems (Shamai 2000). The National-Religious public accepted the yoke of the law together with the assurance of autonomy in religious studies. The Haredi public, separationist and objecting to state intervention in its education, refused to join the state education system and established an independent education network. In the early years of the state, 70 percent of the independent Haredi education was financed by the state, but over the years this funding was expanded until it came to be fully funded by the state (Friedman 1991: 56). Nevertheless, it should be noted that until 1995, the allocation for Haredi education was not based upon state legislation but was determined by the state budget in accordance with the level of pressure that Haredi politicians were able to exert. Following many debates, Haredi schools received full funding from the state while retaining complete autonomy, whereas National-Religious schools received full funding but only partial control of the curriculum. None of the issues raised in these public and political deliberations took into account the implications of the policy for gender structure (Herzog 2006). However, in practice, this policy made the state the financer of gendered education, and, therefore, of fashioning inequitable gender structures between men and women in the religious world. The Haredim build boundaries between themselves and the surrounding society both by segregating their schools and through a curriculum that sharpens the differences between their culture and the secular surroundings and even other religious environments. Haredi education differs sharply from secular Israeli schools by maintaining sex segregation and a different curriculum for boys and girls. The education system supports gender divisions in accordance with the Haredi worldview. Boys study religion from the age of three: heder (until the


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age of elementary school), Talmud Torah (the equivalent of elementary school), junior yeshiva (equivalent to high school), senior yeshiva (the equivalent of higher education in which they study from age 17 until they marry), and Kolel (institutions of study for married men). This educational track directs Haredi men to their main social mission: the Torah is their vocation. Because of this mission they are exempt from military service, which is compulsory in Israel. The obligation to serve in the military is one of the factors prompting men to remain in the Kolels; by remaining in school they express their commitment to the values of their community as well as their reservations about the Zionist state. Kolel enrollment also prevents them from participating in the labor force. Girls, on the other hand, study in Beit Yaakov schools (elementary school) with most continuing in Beit Yaakov seminaries. The education they receive prepares them for their roles as women, mothers, and spouses (El-Or 1994). As the society of scholars expanded, the role of the spouse grew to include work outside the home, as sole breadwinner. The establishment of the Haredi educational system, as well as high birth rates, created the need for many new male and female teachers. Every graduate of Beit Yaakov seminaries was able, with no difficulty, to find a position as a teacher with a salary paid by the state, albeit a low salary. This position is considered suitable for women because they are able to care for their own children during school vacations and because it is possible to work part-time. Haredi schools employ women of 18–19 in permanent jobs. The seminaries have defined an objective for their graduates: to marry a yeshiva student who devotes himself to Torah study in a Kolel after marriage (Friedman, 1991: 57). Women perceived this as a modern equitable ideal that befitted religious ideology as explicated in Midrash (halachic interpretation of the Bible). The partnership—between Issachar, representing the one who learns Torah, and Zebulun, who represents the one who supports Torah learning and facilitates it—means that the reward, in this world and the next, is shared equally by the student and the one who is responsible for economic support (ibid.: 58). Among the Haredim, the number of men who view “the Torah as their vocation” more than doubled during the 1990s, from 35,980 in 1990 to 72,836 in 1997 (Caplan 2007: 204). A considerable portion of the income in families in which the man is a student comes from National Insurance Institute allocations, scholarships awarded to the men studying in yeshivas and Kolels for many years; this is proportionately greater in Israel than in Haredi communities in the United States and European countries. In the latter countries, married men study for several years and then join the work force (ibid.: 205). In a society that confines itself geographically to a few residential areas,

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in which the fertility rate is among the highest in the world, with an average of seven children per family, whose chief breadwinner is a woman usually earning a low salary, the inevitable result is an increase in the poverty rate. The large concentrations of Haredim are considered the poorest areas in Israel. After more than forty years, a second and even a third generation have grown up in adversity (Sheleg 2000: 128–32). Economic hardship has become a cardinal issue for the Haredi community, which has undertaken a public campaign against wealth, luxuries, and consumerism (Stadler 2002). A large part of the burden falls on the women. They are expected to raise their families to limit their needs, and to be modest consumers despite the “avariciousness of women and young girls.” No matter what they do, they will always be the ones blamed. If the generation fails to deal with the attraction of luxuries, it will be due to the demanding nature of women; if it is successful in damping down the desire for luxury items, it will be because men were able to restrain the women’s demands (El-Or 1993). Until the 1970s, women were trained for jobs in education, and they taught mostly in Beit Yaakov schools. But as the number of graduates increased, and the number of vacant positions decreased, and as there was a greater need to increase the family income, the range of professions taught at the seminaries expanded. While men study almost exclusively Judaic subjects, women receive a broader education including English, information technology, graphics, marketing, and bookkeeping. While the teaching profession confined women to the Haredi world, entry into other fields has enabled women to integrate into the non-Haredi work force, occasioning much public debate in the 1970s and 1980s (Caplan 2007: 203–6, 217–31). Women find themselves caught in a series of traps. The quest for income propels them outside the physical boundaries of the community. Yet this movement is perceived as a spiritual threat and results in increased social supervision of women. Women are expected to succeed in their jobs so as to make a good living but are not supposed to develop an interest or satisfaction in their jobs, since work is an obligation and is secondary to their domestic roles. As opposed to the meaning assigned to women’s work in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was viewed as an equal gender division of labor that accorded equitable reward to men and women in this world and in the afterlife, it is the education, the variety of employment possibilities, and the option of developing a career that have caused the rabbis to redefine women’s work, and to revert to the ”traditional” model. According to this interpretation, going to work may be a necessity, but remains secondary to domestic tasks. The wife of one of the rabbis stated: “There is no doubt that in the court of heaven, our work outside the home will not be taken into account even if it is worthwhile.


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But I will be asked if I did my job as a woman in accordance with Jewish law, as a Jewish mother, and only in this sphere will I have to give an accounting” (cited in Caplan, 2007: 225). As a result, Haredi women turn down job offers in which there is any activity that contradicts their values (like working with men, or in nonkosher enterprises, or in factories manufacturing clothing that is not considered modest). This refusal of jobs has implications for the family income, as the law states that an unemployed person who refuses to accept a position offered to him and commensurate with his qualifications loses the right to receive unemployment compensation (ibid.: 231). Non-Haredi employers often hesitate to employ Haredi women because of their meticulous adherence to Jewish law in regard to women’s employment. In summary, the intersection with secular society holds multidimensional traps for Haredi women.

The National-Zionist World From the emergence of the Zionist movement until the late 1960s, the National-Religious movement in Israel was doubly marginalized. Zionism defined itself as a national liberation movement that also included freedom from the chains of religion. The Haredi community, in contrast, saw observance of religious laws as the authentic realization of Jewish existence, and thus opposed the establishment of the State of Israel. Religious Zionists sought an integration of religion and nationalism. However, being religious, they were on the margins of the dominant national-secular modern ideology. At the same time, they were not part of the active, independent, self-confident Haredi “society of male scholars” that presented itself as a religious elite. In many National-Religious schools, leading religious teachers were graduates of Haredi yeshivas (Zameret 1997). Their pupils had to deal with a disjuncture between their teachers’ Haredi interpretation of the halacha (Jewish law) and their parents’ behavior at home. The latter, though religiously observant, were committed to becoming part of modern society. They accepted the goals of Zionist society and were open to compromises with national ideas upheld by the secular parties (Friedman 1987; Liebman 1997). This posed a dilemma for pupils of both sexes: Who is following the correct Jewish path? Who is a better Jew? Is it the secular Zionist, their parents, who represent modern national Orthodoxy, or their teachers, Ultra-Orthodox Haredim? In the following section, I shall show how the political project of the settlement program opened up opportunities for the religious Zionists and for the Haredim to escape from the social traps in which they were ensnared. The formation of new communities opened up new areas of activity for women.

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Out of the Trap— The Settlement Project Since 1967, settlement in the Territories has become Israel’s central focus of economic and military investment as well as a central arena for political disputes between those, usually identified as leftist, who demand withdrawal from the Territories, and those on the right who see the Territories as a legitimate part of Israel. On the ground the state is the main investor in the building of the settlements, paving access roads, preparing the land for construction, subsidizing the construction, employment, educational and health services, and, perhaps most importantly, ensuring the security of residents (Shafir and Peled 2002). The range of settlements in the Territories is wide. In the public discourse, a distinction is commonly made between ideological settlements, which attract settlers who view the Territories as an integral part of the Land of Israel and/or as part of the messianic redemption, versus settlements for people who want to improve their quality of life in a suburb. The latter settlements are usually situated outside but close to the Green Line (the international boundary defined in 1948 with the establishment of the State of Israel). In practice the picture is more complex, not only because people are attracted to the settlements with a mixture of motives, but also because people who came as settlers for their own convenience often adopt ideological positions and vice versa. Likewise, there is a tendency to describe the ideological settlements as religious ones, whereas the others are considered secular. Despite this dichotomy, there are settlements with a variegated composition. In many settlements there is a mixture of religious and secular inhabitants, of National-Religious and Haredim, and of ideological and nonideological settlers. This chapter focuses on settlements that are primarily religious communities.4 The discussion has so far indicated that the common elements of the hardships to which both the religious Zionists and the Haredim are subject stem largely from the tension between their perception of Israel as a secular state and their own desire to have a Jewish state that would sustain a fully Jewish way of life. But each of these groups has a different understanding of a Jewish way of life in general and a Jewish state in particular. In view of these variant interpretations, the settlements provided a response to another kind of problem. New National-Religious Communities For the religious Zionists, the settlement project offered a solution for their simultaneous marginalization by secular Zionism and the Haredi religious community. The settlement movement enabled young religious people to realize pioneering Zionist ideas and the halachic command


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(mitzvah) to settle the Land of Israel (Eretz-Yisrael). Alignment between the interests of the state to rule the Territories and the existential needs of the youth advanced settlement activity in the Territories. The ideas and values that conflate nationality and religiosity encourage young religious people to join the settlement project. Religious young adults carried the settlement movement on their shoulders, and over time they also became more religious and more nationalistic (Feige 2002). A new social category has been constituted: the “Nationalistic Haredim.” As explained by the wife of a rabbi who lives in a settlement: “We decided to live here. We deliberated for many years if we should live in the center of the country. Our answer is that our settling at Mt. Brachah will save the State of Israel from destruction.” She continued: “The many families that have come to Yesha [settlers’ acronym for the geographical areas of the Occupied Territories—Judea, Samaria, and Gaza] were strengthened religiously. For example, a family that lives in Kedumim will be, usually, on a higher religious level and much more idealistic than brothers of the same family living in the center of the country. Their sons will volunteer for elite combat units. And, accordingly, if needed, the religious community will refuse orders [to vacate the settlements]” (Pinchasi 2004: 46). The settlement project paved the way for the creation of a new concept of a National-Religious community, based upon mutual accountability and high degrees of religiosity. Instead of living in neighborhoods within secular cities, subordinated to the dominant secular culture within the Green Line, these new communities allowed religious Jews to enter the public sphere without a secular semiotic, to retain the public preservation of the Sabbath, and to keep the synagogue at the center of public life. Rabbis assumed greater authority,5 and family and community values were at the very heart of private and public spheres (Feige 2002: 126–49). Haredi Settlements At the entrance to Modi’in Illit stands this sign “The Haredi city of the future.” The first Haredi settlements were founded at the beginning of the 1980s, when the momentum for establishing new settlements was at its peak. At that time, the declared policy of the Likud government was to establish as many settlements as possible in the hope of attracting Israelis of different backgrounds and social and religious strata. Haredim were the ideal candidates for settlements because they prefer to live in a segregated community and have a constant need for housing because of their high birthrate as well as a low income. Haredi settlements provided solutions to all these needs. Until the beginning of the 1980s, the Haredi public was not recognized as a separate sector, and the planning policy was one of integration, in

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the spirit of the “melting pot” ideology, and the housing offered by the Ministry of the Interior was in existing cities and towns. The Haredim, however, preferred to keep themselves separate from the secular population in their own neighborhoods and even practiced internal segregation between the various groups among them (Shilhav 1993; Sheleg 2000: 165–66). The preferences of the Haredi population prompted a change in government policy and accorded with the political resolution of the state “to build a lot and quickly” (Shilhav 1997: 13). This transformed the Haredi population from a spurned group that provoked much criticism into a rapid source of residents able to realize territorial policy. Because of its commitment to encourage Haredi settlement in the territories, the government was compelled to exceed normal expenditures for public construction (ibid.: 15). Haredi communities needed housing for large families, synagogues, and yeshivas to meet the requirements of the various streams among the Haredim, local sources for earning their livelihood, and security. For its part, the Haredi community had to adapt to locations unsuited to its preferences and aspirations. The fact that the settlements were over the Green Line aroused a considerable amount of dissent and opposition on the part of the rabbis and leaders of the Haredim. Many of them viewed the act of settlement as a “provocation to the Gentiles” and saw cooperation with the state as a Zionist project that contradicts the principle of waiting for the coming of the Messiah. Nonetheless, the needs of the population and the proximity to the Green Line swung the balance in favor of the settlements. As of October 2005, approximately one quarter of all settlers were Haredi (some 70,000), mostly concentrated in the towns of Beitar Illit and Modi’in Illit, which are close to the Green Line, though no small number of the Haredim are scattered throughout various settlements in the Territories.6 In the next section I want to emphasize the gender dimension that is usually ignored in discussion of the settlement project.

Women’s Roles in the New NationalReligious Communities The settlers’ primary goal is to create a religious community in which the family is at the center of community life. While, on the one hand, the emphasis on family reconstitutes women’s roles as mothers and wives, on the other, it has also led to the reinterpretation of these roles. The settlers, many of them graduates of yeshivas and ulpanot (women’s schools), carried a gendered National-Religious identity that has been molded by the religious education system supported by the state. In yeshivas, a new male nationalistic-religious identity has been created. Unlike the historic religious Jews of the Diaspora, who have long been


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portrayed as feminine, passive, and weak (Boyarin 1997), the Zionist model of the “new Jew” was—and to a large extent still is—based on the image of a strong, assertive man (Roniger and Feige 1992; Gluzman 1997). This man is stoic, controls his emotions and impulses, and is ready to fight and die in defense of his homeland, to which he is deeply committed. This hegemonic masculine model of “the Israeli man” is fostered by the national-Zionist yeshivas with a notable new addition: the “new Jewish man” is also deeply religious. Thus, the ideal “new religious Jew” is epitomized by “the new settler”: a scholar who holds both the Torah and a gun.7 Ulpanot, the women’s national religious schools, however, direct women to a different locus of Jewish knowledge and social location. Women’s religious education does not prepare them for knowledge positions; on the contrary, it teaches them to accept male religious authority as well as their roles as wives and mothers. These roles are understood as a religious duty. Modernity and secularism threatened to undermine the traditional way of life of the woman and endanger not only her role in preserving the home but also the continuity of the entire Jewish collective (Rapoport 1999; El-Or 2002; Gross 2002). Thus, for contemporary National-Religious women, graduates of the ulpanot, the model of the new female settler is a woman holding several children.8 Nevertheless, the accommodation of religious and nationalistic ideas as well as their location at the center of the rhythm of life of the settlers’ community opened up a new space for women. The halachic conception views the home and the family as the principal site for divine work by women, and her feminine virtue as the means of engaging in such work. In the language of the halacha “the honor of the King’s [God’s] daughter emanates from within.” Women, properly located in the domestic sphere, were not in need of the same education as men (Ross 2000). The halacha also declares that it is the woman’s role to join her husband in building the home they share. While significant stress is placed on the domestic role of the woman, there is no halachic restriction if her assistance is required in order to support the family financially. However, there is such a restriction on women’s participation in public life. Here Jewish law states unequivocally that only men have the option of engaging in “public work.” For “a man’s role is to conquer but that is not a woman’s role” (Zohar 1996). However, the distinction between the domestic sphere and the public sphere is blurred in the new settler communities (Herzog 2006). The entire settlement is perceived to be a “home.” Just as establishing a family is a religious command, the establishment of the extended settler family is seen as a national mission. As stated in an interview by the wife of the settler-rabbi quoted above, “it is important for me to strengthen the robustness of my family and my nation.” And in response to the question whether she has dreams

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of a personal nature, she replied: “Private? There is practically no such thing. Everything is interwoven together [the domestic-national]” (Pinchasi 2004: 49). Pronatalist attitudes and policies as well as women’s roles as mothers— in sociological terms “bearers of the community and the nation” (YuvalDavis 1980, 1993)—are well documented in nation-building processes and national struggles. So, too, is the religious pronationalism of the Haredim as a religious imperative (El-Or 1994). The emphasis on strengthening religiosity and nationality in the new communities in the settlements is translated into pronatalism, which has changed the structure of National-Religious families. National-religious families, in the past and those now within the Green Line, have tended to be similar to secular families in terms of number of children per family. This change is clearly seen in the high birthrates among settler families. While the average number of children per Jewish family is 2.8, settlers’ families tend to be bigger—with an average of 3.5 children per family.9 Fertility is a matter of personal and religious pride among highly educated religious women settlers, and caring and nurturing are important parts of their personal and social identities. The settlers’ discourse glorifies the family and motherhood (El-Or and Aran 1995). As mothers, women drive their children around the communities they live in, as well as outside the settlements, to after-school activities and to friends’ homes. Motherhood is, effectively, a political statement that proclaims that life in the embattled settlements is “normal,” that these are communities where people raise children, work, study, and take part in a rich cultural life (Feige 2002). Women not only support the community via fulfillment of their traditional roles but also expand and insert additional meaning into these roles as independent, self-confident women who work outside the home and who become politically involved. The expansion of traditional female roles is exemplified symbolically in the founding of the Rachelim settlement. The settlement was founded in memory of two women (both named Rachel) who were killed by Palestinians. In protest, college-educated, married, orthodox women established a settlement in the West Bank in 1991, framing its founding in terms of concern for their children’s safety, and thus supporting El-Or and Aran’s (El-Or and Aran 1995) claim that religious women prefer to describe political acts as acts of creation, giving birth. While no other settlements except Rachelim have been established solely by women, they have been active partners in the establishment of the settlements. In the violation of the halachic border between the private and the public world, such activity is also a declaration that women, as mothers, are equal participants with men in the settlement enterprise. While, in practice, the roles of women have expanded, these roles continue to be defined in the cultural domain as feminine roles,


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within the framework of their family responsibilities as key figures in the building of the family and the home. As one woman, a farmer’s wife and mother of ten who directs a study group on religious law, described her life: “Yesterday we worked until twelve thirty at night, it seems that it will be the same today. [. . .] It’s not easy to maintain a house with a big family, to hitchhike to work, to live in a place that is without [anything]. To be a farmer’s wife, you have to prepare the flowers for delivery, you have to go to a demonstration in Jerusalem, you have to take part in the Education Committee” (cited in Feige 2002: 155). The extension of the meaning of “home” opened new frontiers of social activities for National-Religious women in the settlements and, as a result, changed their status. Women are involved in three types of public activities within the community: membership in the elected council of the settlement, membership in statutory and nonstatutory committees of the settlement’s council, and membership in voluntary organizations. These organizations assist women following childbirth, advise mothers, and organize children’s clubs, as well as conduct Torah study sessions for women. In one settlement, women have established both a religious school (beit midrash) for women and a women’s theater. The latter is a cultural innovation also emerging in other religious communities, mainly in the settlements. It serves as both a venue for crossing boundaries—between the religious and secular worlds—and a sphere where women can freely and openly express their religious feelings. Thus it becomes a potentially subversive activity that transfers into a holy endeavor, avodat kodesh, a term ordinarily used for prayers and ritual activities (Rutlinger-Reiner 2005). National-Religious women from the settlements also take part in national politics, as active journalists presenting the positions of the settlers to the general public, as candidates for the National-Religious Party, and in political associations for the advancement of the settlements (Herzog 2006: 254–57). Settlements—as sociopolitical sites—give religiously observant women the opportunity to reinterpret their roles and status in society. The importance of women’s roles in the community is widely accepted, though in Nekuda, the settler newspaper, it has been debated whether or not women should remain in the public sphere or focus on their domestic duties as wives and mothers (Feige 2002: 154). The public and political presentation of the settlers suggests the dominant attitude characteristic of this debate. On the Internet homepage of Yesha, the Council for Jewish Settlements in the West Bank, before the disengagement from Gaza, women and children were salient figures.10 Of the nine figures pictured there, four are children and three are women. However, with a male scholar seated in its center, the photo suggests

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that the gendered structure is still relevant. On the new Web site, the images of children next to pictures from the disengagement and views of settlements in Gaza and the West Bank are prominent.11 Women are taking an active role, too, in the struggle against the evacuation of the settlements. Some of the participants are young women who are studying in ulpanot and who are receiving support for their activities from their teachers and the rabbis, using halachic justification such as “in a holy war the bride, too, must exit the bridal canopy and in this case this is an extended holy war.” Rabbi Mordecai Strassberg, the director of the ulpana in Revava in Samaria, explained: “The young women sense that their house is in danger and so they are involved in this matter. The girls in my ulpana have very high spiritual aspirations and see this as part of their responsibilities as religious girls.”12 Many women participating in protests against the evacuation of settlements are accompanied by their infants and children. The picture of a female settler carrying a baby in her arms has become the symbol of the struggle against any settlement evacuation. As active agents in the territorial struggle with the Palestinians, National-Religious women have assumed an active role in restructuring religious life and shaping Israeli politics. Thus, they are involved in one of the most important political problems in the Middle East. The involvement in this struggle enables women to extend their religious roles to include active political citizenship.

The Role of Women in the Haredi Settlements The Haredi settlements, especially the towns,13 were planned first and foremost to answer the housing needs of the Haredi population. The settlement authorities who initiated the creation of Haredi towns envisaged the town as “a town that is a home,” and one of the guiding principles of the construction was “a town especially suited to women and children” (Ginsberg 1989). The quality of life was measured by adherence to Jewish law. Beitar Illit is described on the Internet as the place where “the halachic Jewish state has come into existence on a small scale,”14 while Immanuel is the only place in Israel in which swimming pools were built “according to halachic rules of modesty and with the approval of the Guardians of Holiness,”15 the enforcers of Haredi rulings. As stated, the main reason for moving to Haredi settlements was the opportunity to improve housing standards.16 In the interviews Ginsberg (ibid.) conducted with the female settlers of Immanuel, they stated that their religious quality of life had improved because the day-to-day necessity of maintaining the social boundaries between Haredi society and their surroundings, which fell upon their shoulders,


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had decreased. Women explained that they were now free from all the dilemmas to which they were subjected in other places. They stated clearly that the territory belonged to the Haredim and that they could dictate an acceptable way of life where they lived. Even though the territorial separation did not totally segregate the settlement from secular society, it decreased the points of friction. On the Sabbath the town was closed to vehicular traffic. The women emphasized that the town was a “paradise for children” and that it was easier to raise them in the new town. Children had more freedom and safety on the roads; there were many playgrounds and public spaces in which they could play for hours. Despite the fact that these towns were planned for religious lifestyles, “entire towns were built with no employment opportunities,”17 nor was any concession made to the fact that women are the main breadwinners. The result was that, in a short time, there was female unemployment and increasing dependence on community members inside Israel and on the state agencies. A business owner from Modi’in Illit recalled, “I once heard a rabbi say that people come to him every day with problems of marital harmony. The rabbi explained that fifty percent of the complaints stemmed from problems of earnings, and the other fifty percent could also be resolved if there were an income.”18 As a result, the state created incentives for economic entrepreneurs to enter the Haredi settlements by means of subsidies and allocation of land. The basic desire of the Haredi society is to maintain a separate economic and labor system, such that there would be as little friction with the secular world as possible. And if there has to be friction, it is preferable for the secular to come to their areas, subject to their stipulations, rather than their going to the secular areas (Sheleg 2000: 116). At the beginning of the 2000s, this cultural position intersected with the interests of high-tech entrepreneurs who were seeking cheap labor and with state interests in strengthening the roots of the settlements by buttressing and expanding the settlements. Women were the subjects through whom the interests of both sides were advanced. High-tech companies that develop software and software services began to recruit Haredi women. “Their output is excellent. In seven hours, they produce what other workers do in nine hours,” explained Ephraim Reich, owner of ImageStore, which scans and integrates documents into digital files, and is himself Haredi (Sinai 2005). The trend of integrating women into high-tech enables entrepreneurs to employ high-quality workers at competitive costs.19 Owing to this trend, Haredi women find jobs close to home, in a homogeneous environment that takes their special needs into account: flexibility of working conditions and the opportunity to earn relatively more in comparison to other jobs that they could do near their homes.

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The center brings together the economic interests of the entrepreneurs, the economic hardship of the Haredim, the cultural preference of the Haredim to maintain an economic system within their own space, and the fact that the Haredi woman is finding her place in the workforce. Nevertheless, one CEO couched this exploitation in Zionist ideology by saying: “Matrix is thus offering the first Zionist Local Offshore Outsourcing” (ibid.). One cannot ignore the paradoxical use of the definition of a Zionist enterprise (Matrix) in a settlement that serves Zionist objectives by using a population group that does not define itself as Zionist.20 This convergence of interests places the women at the center. As in all global capitalistic economies, women manage to improve their economic situation just because of their exploitation in the workplace (Fernandez-Kelly and Wolf 2001). “As a mother of children and a Haredi woman, it would be hard for me to work in a secular place that did not support [my lifestyle],” says Kleiman, a religious woman in charge of one of the large projects in Israel in the field of document scanning and integration of texts into digital files. “Most of the girls in Kiryat Sefer [Modi’in Illit] don’t have drivers’ licenses and it is hard to use mixed public transportation,” she says explaining the preference women have for jobs in their places of residence. But she also enumerates their assets as employees: “Haredi women don’t surf the internet, don’t smoke, and hardly even go out for lunch. They come to do their jobs and to go home to their children. Haredi women are good, diligent employees, they do not look around, they suggest efficiency measures, and are concerned about their place of work . . . the employees become family. They spend Shabbat together, and two of the women even organized a summer camp for the rest of the children” (Shimoni 2005). “Even though they are the mothers of six children, they miss fewer days than a mother of two in Tel Aviv . . . Breaks are only for eating or pumping breast-milk in a room set aside for that purpose. Some women are even able to pop home, breastfeed and come back” (Sinai 2005). The integration of women into the workforce affects the division of labor in the family, especially in those families where the husband is a student. There is a notable increase in the number of Haredi men who are involved in housekeeping, shopping, and childcare when the mother is at work (Caplan 2007: 224). These changes are noticeable in day-to-day living although they have not been accorded legitimacy by the rabbis. On the other hand, the integration of women into the labor force within their community in jobs that are considered prestigious in the broader employment field, such as the high-tech industry, gives added status to women, for they chalk up success not only by being able to combine home and work but also by being able to combine work and a religious way of life: “The visitor to the work floor


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of the ImageStore company notices three remarkable phenomena: the silence that pervades the place, the fact that only women work there, and the fact that many of them are in advanced stages of pregnancy” (Sinai 2005). Paradoxically, the case of the Haredi towns is instructive regarding the conditions and means of creating work environments that are woman friendly, especially for Haredi women. For example, special rooms were set aside in the workplace to pump breast milk for nursing mothers; in order to solve the problem of frequent maternity leave, Matrix advises each client who places an order for a project to consider hiring an additional worker over and above the requirements so as to compensate for the high probability that, during the course of the project, at least one worker will be out on maternity leave; each project has its own room, and only women work in it. The women have their own dining room; the few men who are employed in the company, mostly project managers, can call the women in for a work discussion—but only with the door open (ibid.). Women’s work is the source of the family’s livelihood. Even though many women talk about their jobs in the manner expected of them in their society, as “a necessity and not a career,” one cannot ignore the other voices that are making themselves heard. In the survey undertaken by Ginsberg (1989), there were women who indicated that the entrepreneurs had to “persuade” their husbands to agree to move to a Haredi town in the West Bank because they had been offered jobs there. These women stated that they changed their places of work not only for economic reasons but because they “wanted a change” and “viewed this as an opportunity for job advancement.” Several women said that it was “good to feel worthwhile,” “good to get out of the house and meet other people.” Even women whose husbands worked and who therefore did not have to work outside the home did not see staying at home as an ideal situation, “that is not what I studied for” (ibid.). The employers also took this position: “We are adapting ourselves to the culture.” “In exchange we get highly motivated woman employees who are always eager to develop themselves and look for challenges” (Sinai 2005). Women’s employment outside the home, especially when the man is a yeshiva student, increased the egalitarian division of labor (Ginsberg 1989). But these achievements have not been transformed into official political power. Unlike the women in the National-Religious settlements, Haredi women do not play an active role in the formal political arena. Women have the right to vote in local elections, a right that they exercise just as men do. Nevertheless, in Immanuel for example, women were forbidden to vote in the first elections for the local authority. When the Haredi community is not running against the secular population, and the contest is within the community itself, women’s votes

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are not important, so the men can prevent the women of the community from going to vote (Shilhav 1997).21 But as one of the public employees in Immanuel put it, although it appears that “the status of a woman is zero, and she has no political power, in practice this is not the case.” It is true that a woman could not possibly serve as a member of the council, but in political struggles it is hinted that women are the “power behind the men” (ibid.). The power that women have built up results from the social networks that have sprung up in the Haredi town. Women have various extramural activities including study circles and mutual aid forums. The mutual aid is more intensive than it was in their previous residential area, and this is because most of the residents are young and do not have an extended family in the settlement.22 Haredi women in the settlements are at the vortex of the community, but on the topic of the most profound political debate in Israeli society—that of the settlements—they do not make their opinion known. They are not partners in the overt political support for the settlements because the Haredi rabbis have avoided making direct statements in connection with them and also because they are excluded from the political arena. Paradoxically they have become part of this political enterprise by virtue of their daily activities. The more involved they become in the economy of the settlement and the more they contribute to daily life in the community, the more they become partners in strengthening the settlement enterprise. To paraphrase El-Or (1994), who characterized the Haredi women as “educated and ignorant,” the women in the settlements are “productive and reproductive.”

Concluding Remarks The varying interpretations that religious communities give to their religious environment form different reciprocal relations between religion and state. The intersection between the state and religious communities has created a variety of hardships for community members. National-Religious Judaism, in choosing to amalgamate the state and religious communities, has been shunted to the margins of both secular and Haredi society, and Haredi society has chosen to segregate and marginalize itself while refusing to cooperate with the state and the national ideology. The settlement enterprise—as a project of the state—presented an opportunity for both groups to wrest themselves from the margins and to build themselves a new imagined community with the unintended consequence that women have a central role in the newly opening space. From a “sociological” category hardly addressed in the public discourse, women have become visible and prominent in the discussion on the fate of the Territories that lies at the heart of the conflict between


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Israelis and Palestinians. The main claim is that alignment between the interests of the state to rule the Territories and the existential needs of the religious Zionist and Haredi communities advanced settlement activity in the Territories. At the intersection between political and religious beliefs, settlers strive to create and sustain a new concept of an observant Jewish community, on the basis of mutual accountability and high levels of religiosity among the Haredim and religiosity and nationality among the religious Zionists. Home and family are at the center of the community life. The settlements have been interpreted as cities/residential areas that are home. This metaphor made it possible to blur the distinction between the private and the public and to expand the concept of home so as to include the women in the public sphere. While the emphasis on home and family reconstitutes women’s roles as mothers and wives, it has also led to the reinterpretation of these roles, and thus to the redefinition of women’s practices and status within the religious community and Israeli society at large. But each community has done this in a different manner. In the National-Religious settlements, most of the expansion has focused on participation in the political arena within the community, and active partnership alongside the men in the political struggle for the Greater Land of Israel, whereas in the Haredi settlements, women achieved this by massive participation in the workforce, particularly the workforce that developed within the community. This participation was not accompanied by a public challenge to the gendered division of labor, or a demand for equality in political participation, but the participation did result in changes that have had practical implications for daily life. The case study of the settlements project is only one site out of many where the three categories of gender, religion, and politics meet. As such, this study suggests theoretical and empirical guidelines for further studies in different social sites and various societies. The present chapter claims that women’s different roles and experiences in religion and politics should be included as part of our understanding not only of women’s lives but of society as a whole. In this sense, the analysis aims at removing women’s studies from the ghettos of the “women’s world” and making that world an integral part of the establishment of the foundations of the social order—in the case of Israel, gender, religion, and state relations.

Notes 1. The use of the term “West Bank” to denote this geopolitical space is related to the political polemic in Israel. Whereas supporters of settlement policy designate the areas as Judea and Samaria or as liberated

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2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

territories, opponents of the settlements and the occupation refer to the area as occupied territory, or in more neutral terms, the West Bank (of the Jordan). One of the ways of circumventing the need to take a political stance is to use the term “territories,” which then leaves the political interpretation to the reader or listener. Haredim: Hebrew plural of haredi. In this discussion, I shall be focusing mainly on the Ashkenazi Haredi world, within which there are various streams and diverse educational systems, Menachem Friedman, The Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) Society: Sources, Trends And Processes (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute For Israel Studies, 1991). The Sephardi Haredi world comprises similar patterns, but because its growth and connections with the surrounding society are different, I have chosen not to deal with them in this chapter. For further treatment of Sephardi Haredim, see David Lehmann and Batia B. Siebzehner, Remaking Israeli Judaism: The Challenge of Shas (London: Hurst, 2006). Jacob Lupo, Shas de Lita: The Lithuanian Take-Over of Moroccan Torah Scholars (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2004) (Hebrew). Of some one hundred and thirty settlements, fifty-one can be defined as national-religious communities, five as Haredi, and the rest as mixed. The most extreme example is the authorization given by certain rabbis, in the name of the halacha, to murder Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin. Also, a rabbinic decision has been announced that permits settlers and soldiers to refuse orders and denies recognition of the government’s authority in regard to decisions that require vacating the Occupied Territories. On current attitudes toward the state within the settlers’ communities, see, for example, Nadav Shragai, “Right wing Rabbis call for day of prayer and fasting against the disengagement,” Ha’aretz, March 11, 2005. Dror Etkes and Lara Friedman. http://www.peacenow.org.il/site/he/ peace.asp?pi=62&docid=1515 Accessed July 17, 2007. This is my paraphrase of the National-Religious movement’s slogan “Torah and Avoda” (work). Unlike the pioneering secular female settler who was portrayed in a manner similar to men (Bernstein 1992). http://194.90.153.197/mifkad/tables/pirsom7a/ Accessed July 20, 2007. This number will grow over time since many of the families are young people. The Web site http://www.moetzetyesha.co.il was removed from the Web after the disengagement in 2005. http://www.myesha.org.il Accessed July 25, 2007. http://www.bambili.com/bambili_news Accessed January 14, 2005. Immanuel, Beitar Illit, and Modi’in Illit. http://www.myesha.org.il/?CategoryID=171&ArticleID=49&Page=1 Accessed July 29, 2007. http://www.myesha.org.il/?CategoryID=174&ArticleID=66&Page=1 Accessed July 29, 2007. Despite the high level of satisfaction, women complained that the planning did not take sufficient account of the need for privacy, particularly


17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

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in the free-standing houses and terraced apartments that are more exposed to the eyes of strangers; but these planning issues exceed the scope of this study. For a discussion see Ginsberg 1989. Quote from Ephraim Reich, the owner and director of ImageStore, a company supplying electronic imaging services, which employs Haredi women in Modi’in Illit. http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3143773,00. html Accessed July 28, 2007. Ibid. The unique model of training and integrating women from the Haredi sector into technological development projects using the offshore outsourcing system facilitates the offering of development and software testing services at competitive prices compared with other countries of the world, besides overseas marketing. http://www.matrix.co.il/ NR/exeres/9AB1327F-44DC-4818-B7F7-D613FCA48BD9.htm Accessed July 25, 2007. For criticism of the connection between capitalism and colonialism, see Gadi Algazi, http://www.taayush.org/new/fence/matrix-bilin-10.html Accessed July 25, 2007. Compare with a similar situation among the Palestinian Arab women in Israel. See Hanna Herzog and Taghreed Yahia-Younis, “Men’s Bargaining with Patriarchy: The Case of Primaries within the Hamula in PalestinianArab Communities in Israel,” Gender & Society 21 (2007): 579–602. This closeness has its price in a lack of intimacy resulting from the fact that “everyone knows everything,” but this is beyond the scope of this study.

References Almond, Gabriel Abraham, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan. 2003. Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, Benedict R. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Berkovitch, Nitza. 1997. Motherhood as a National Mission: The Construction of Womanhood in the Legal Discourse in Israel. Women Studies International Forum 20: 605–19. Bernstein, Deborah S. 1992. Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Prestate Israeli Society. Albany: State University of New York. Boyarin, Daniel. 1997. Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caplan, Kimmy. 2007. Internal Popular Discourse in Israeli Haredi Society. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History (Hebrew). Cohen, Asher, and Bernard Susser. 2000. Israel and the Politics of Jewish Identity: The Secular-Religious Impasse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. El-Or, Tamar. 1993. The Length of the Slits and the Spread of Luxury: Reconstructing the Subordination of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women through the Patriarchy of Men Scholars. Sex Roles 29: 585–98. ––––––. 1994. Educated and Ignorant: Ultraorthodox Jewish Women and Their World. Boulder, CO, and London: Lynne Rienner.

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––––––. 2002. Next Year I Will Know More: Literacy and Identity among Young Orthodox Women in Israel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. El-Or, Tamar, and Gideon Aran. 1995. Giving Birth to Settlement: Maternal Thinking and Political Action of Jewish Women on the West Bank. Gender and Society 9: 60–78. Feige, Michael. 2002. One Space, Two Places: Gush Emunim, Peace Now and the Construction of Israeli Space. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Magnes (Hebrew). Fernandez-Kelly, Patricia, and Diane Wolf. 2001. A Dialogue on Globalization. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26: 1243–49. Friedman, Menachem. 1987. Life Tradition and Book Tradition in the Development of Ultraorthodox Judaism. In Judaism from Within and from Without, ed. Harvey E. Goldbert. Albany: State University of New York, pp. 235–55. ––––––. 1991. The Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) Society: Sources, Trends and Processes. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies (Hebrew). Ginsberg, Yona. 1989. Dwelling Needs of the Ultra-Orthodox Family: The Case of Immanuel. Environmental Planning 40–41: 21–29 (Hebrew). Gluzman, Michael. 1997. Longing for Heterosexuality: Zionism and Sexuality in Herzl’s Altneuland. Theory and Criticism: An Israeli Forum 11: 145–62 (Hebrew). Gross, Zehavit. 2002. National-Zionist Religious Identity of Graduated Women of the Religious Public School. In Jewish Culture in the Eye of the Storm, ed. Avi Sagi and Nachem Ilan, pp. 200–32. Ein Zurim: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and the Ya’akov Herzog Center for Jewish Studies (Hebrew). Herzog, Hanna. 1998. Homefront and Battlefront and the Status of Jewish and Palestinian Women in Israel. Israeli Studies 3: 61–84. ––––––. 2006. Trisection of Forces: Gender, Religion and the Case of StateRun Religious Schools in Israel. British Journal of Sociology 57: 241–62. Herzog, Hanna, and Taghreed Yahia-Younis. 2007. Men’s Bargaining with Patriarchy: The Case of Primaries within the Hamula in Palestinian-Arab Communities in Israel. Gender and Society 21: 579–602. Lahav, Penina. 2000. Up against the Wall: Women’s Legal Struggle to Pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Israel Studies Forum: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16: 19–22. Lehmann, David, and Batia B. Siebzehner. 2006. Remaking Israeli Judaism: The Challenge of Shas. London: Hurst. Liebman, Charles S. 1997. Religion, Democracy and Israeli Society. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publisher. Lupo, Jacob. 2004. Shas de Lita: The Lithuanian Take-Over of Moroccan Torah Scholars. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad (Hebrew). Peres, Yohanan, and Eliezer Ben-Rafael. 2006. Cleavages in Israeli Society. Tel Aviv: Am Oved and Sapir Library (Hebrew). Pinchasi, Hannah. 2004. The Disengagement Plan is against Torah, Morality, the Nation, and Very Basic Human-Rights. Eretz Acheret 24: 47–49. Rapoport, Tamar. 1999. The Pedagogical Construction of Traditional Woman in Modernity: An Ethnographic Study of Holiness Class. Megamot 39: 492–516 (Hebrew).


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Rutlinger-Reiner, Reina. 2005. “”My Aim Is To Get Higher And Higher”: Worship Onstage “ Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender 10: 10–28. Roniger, Luis, and Michael Feige. 1992. From Pioneer to Freier: The Changing Models of Generalized Exchange in Israel. European Journal of Sociology 33: 280–307. Ross, Tamar. 2000. Modern Orthodoxy and the Challenge of Feminism. In Jews and Gender, The Challenge to Hierarchy (Studies in Contemporary Jewry, An Annual Review of Sociology), ed. Jonathan Frankel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–38. Schiff, Gary S. 1977. Tradition and Politics. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Sered, Susan. 1997. Women and Religious Change in Israel: Rebellion or Revolution. Sociology of Religion 58: 1–24. Shafir, Gershon, and Yoav Peled. 2002. Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakdiel, Leah. 2002. Women of the Wall: Radical Feminism as an Opportunity for a New Discourse in Israel. Journal of Israeli History 21: 126–63. Shamai, Shmuel. 2000. “Cultural Shift”: The Case of Jewish Religious Education in Israel. British Journal of Sociology of Education 21: 401–17. Sheleg, Yair. 2000. The New Religious Jews: Recent Developments among Observant Jews in Israel. Jerusalem: Keter (Hebrew). Shilhav, Yoseph. 1989. The Haredi Ghetto: The Theology Behind the Geography. Contemporary Jewry 10: 51–65. ––––––. 1993. The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodox Neighborhoods in Israeli Urban Centers. In Local Communities and Israeli Polity, ed. E. Ben-Zadok. New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 157–87. ––––––. 1997. Governing and Managing a Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) City. Jerusalem: Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies. Shimoni, Eli. 2005. A Woman of Java (Haredi) Who Can Find. http://www. ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3143773,00.html Accessed July 28, 2007 (Hebrew). Sinai, Ruth. 2005. The Haredi Women in Modi’in Illit: The New Competitors of Indian Centers of Hi-Tec. Ha’aretz, September 19, 2005 (Hebrew). Stadler, Nurit. 2002. Is Profane Work an Obstacle to Salvation? The Case of Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews in Contemporary Israel. Sociology of Religion 63: 455–74. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1980. The Bearers of the Collective: Women and Religious Legislation in Israel. Feminist Review 4: 15–27. ––––––. 1993. Gender and Nation. Ethnic and Racial Studies 16: 621–32. Zameret, Zvi. 1997. Across a Narrow Bridge—Shaping the Education System during the Great Aliya. Sede Boker: Ben-Gurion Research Center, BenGurion University of the Negev Press (Hebrew). Zohar, Zvi. 1996. Traditional Flexibility and Modern Strictness: Two Halakhic Positions on Women’s Suffrage. In Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries, ed. Harvey E. Goldberg, pp. 119–33. Bloomington, IL, and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.


Chapter 3

4

Contemporary Amer ican C atholi ci sm and the Chall enge of Gender Equality Mar y C. Segers

Introduction The Roman Catholic Church in the United States is, for a variety of reasons, in major crisis. While Roman Catholics, at nearly 67 million, constitute the largest single religious denomination in the country, the American church is experiencing a long-term decline in the number of priests and nuns as well as a decline in rates of church attendance. Rates of intermarriage between Catholics and adherents of other faiths have increased during the last generation. There is considerable worry about educating young people and transmitting the faith to the next generation. But all this pales in comparison to the clerical sex-abuse scandal that erupted in 2002. Some regard this scandal as the defining event for the present generation of Catholics. The sheer magnitude of revelations of priestly abuse and episcopal cover-up is overwhelming. In the year 2002 alone, five bishops resigned, and some three hundred priests were suspended from priestly duties. Data released by researchers in 2004 showed that in the period between 1950 and 2002, 10,667 people lodged complaints with diocesan officials alleging that they were abused as minors. Church records indicated that 4,392 priests were accused of sexually abusing a minor during this same 52-year time period. (This number represents 4 percent of the 109,694 priests in active ministry

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during that time.) Financially, the church has expended more than $2 billion in legal settlements over sexual abuse (USCCB – United States Conference of Catholic Bishops 2004a, 2004b).1 Six years later, fallout from the scandal continues to reverberate through the American church. Six dioceses (Portland, Oregon; Spokane, Washington; Tucson, Arizona; San Diego, California; Fairbanks, Alaska; and Davenport, Iowa) have declared bankruptcy.2 Grand jury reports of major crimes followed by large legal settlements have resulted in straitened financial circumstances for four major archdioceses—Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. Overall, the scandal has undermined the credibility and legitimacy of church leaders, especially bishops, who, instead of reporting offending clerics to civil authorities, reassigned them to other churches where they continued to abuse children and teenagers. To date, ten bishops have resigned over their alleged involvement in sexual abuse or in concealing the abuse of others. Most observers agree that the sex-abuse scandal is about far more than sex. Among other things, it is about power and the abuse of power by church leaders, and it is about a Catholic laity finally waking up to its responsibilities. Moreover, scholars agree that “if the sex-abuse scandal had never occurred, the Catholic church in the United States would still face a crisis” (Steinfels 2003: 67). Factors such as theological gridlock and partisan fighting between liberal and conservative Catholics, a restive laity frustrated by unfulfilled promises that they would have a greater voice in the church, an aging clergy demoralized by the decline in priestly status and vocations, and a hierarchy increasingly dispirited over Vatican centralization and micromanagement have contributed to the present state of disarray in the American church. For our purposes, what is most interesting is the confluence of religion, sexuality, gender, and power that underlies the current crisis. Five years before the sex-abuse scandal made major headlines, Charles Morris warned that the American church was in serious trouble. Describing problems in the realm of vision, theology, and purpose, he cited three overlapping issues: “The first is about the limits of authority and the limits of dissent, which includes, but is certainly not restricted to, questions about sexual morality and reproductive ethics. The second is about the role of women in the church. And the third, which overlaps with both of the others, is about the future of the ministry” (Morris 1997: 294). Such issues of authority, of sexuality, of gender, and of priesthood can, perhaps, be reduced to the central question of religion and gender in Catholicism. An all-male, celibate clergy excludes women from the priesthood, an exclusion that reinforces sexism in civil society. A shortage of priests would be far less problematic if the priesthood were open to women. And official church teaching about sexual morality and reproductive ethics has certainly been influenced by patriarchal attitudes toward women. It seems clear, for example, that the American

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church’s political engagement over public policy on abortion is bound up with traditional views of women’s place in church and society. In short, religion, gender, and politics are profoundly interrelated. Indeed, scholarly analysis of contemporary American Catholicism compels us to “untangle modernities” and to show how gender affects religion and politics. In the United States, Catholic feminists apply a rich tradition of Catholic teaching about social justice to contemporary concerns for gender justice and equality in church and society. This work of Catholic feminists illustrates how a religious tradition can be both liberating and repressive. Feminists must combat the church’s traditional patriarchal conceptions of women at the same time that they use Catholic social thought to criticize sex discrimination in politics and society. These men and women struggle to remain Catholic while changing the institutional church; they reject an eitheror choice between sacred and secular, between religious tradition and the demands of contemporary life. Instead, they seek an intermediate path between modernity and tradition as part of the effort to reconcile Catholic Christian belief with contemporary convictions about gender equality and justice for women. Why analyze the case of the American Catholic Church? The American Catholic case is instructive for several reasons. First, while Catholics (at some 67 million or 25 percent of American society) constitute the largest single religious denomination in the United States, they are still a minority in a largely Protestant society that has traditionally viewed them critically and with suspicion. Mainly because of the Catholic Church’s positive experience in American society—historically it has flourished—the case of the American church illustrates how Catholics can retain authentic Christianity in a secular, pluralistic society constitutionally committed to church-state separation and religious freedom. The historical experience of the American church in living with religious diversity can be illuminating both to the worldwide Roman Catholic Church and to many secular societies challenged by religious pluralism. Second, the crisis of American Catholicism, symbolized most recently by the clerical sex-abuse scandal, is not just an internal affair of interest only to church members. The New York Times religion columnist Peter Steinfels contends that American Catholicism is in trouble and that the implications of church decline are ominous for all American citizens, not just Catholics. “Like virtually no other American institution,” he writes, “the Catholic church is a bridge. Unlike the nation’s second largest religious body, the Southern Baptist Convention, or many other geographically concentrated faith groups, the Catholic church links regions: Catholic New England with Catholic New Mexico, by way of the urban Midwest—Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Louis. What is more crucial, the church bridges races and classes, suburban neighborhoods and inner-city ghettos. It links power brokers on Wall

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Street or Capitol Hill, whose grandparents were immigrants from Europe, with newly arrived immigrants from Latin America, Haiti, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia.” Institutionally, there are more Catholic parishes in the United States than there are post offices in the country. The church spans the nation with its parishes, schools, colleges and universities, hospitals and clinics, and a social service system second only to the government’s. “Despite the impact of the sex scandals, Catholicism remains a powerful moral force in a society with fewer and fewer moral authorities of any sort” (Steinfels 2003: 2). Moreover, the American church mirrors many of the conflicts and issues facing the larger society: anxieties over rapid change, sexuality, gender roles, and the family; a heightening of individualism and distrust of institutions; the tension between inclusiveness and a need for boundaries; a groping for spiritual meaning and identity; and doubts about the quality of leadership. In other words, because of its size and the range of its activities, a crisis in this church is a kind of barometer of tensions occurring in American society as a whole; thus Americans cannot afford to pretend that the fate of this institution is irrelevant or does not concern them. Third, a case study of the contemporary American Catholic Church illustrates how religion, gender, and politics are deeply intertwined. It helps us understand the church’s recent political activity, especially the priority given to issues of sexual morality and reproductive ethics. Over the last 40 years, the American church has engaged in a prolonged struggle over abortion policy, a struggle that has been a major factor in American politics at the national and state levels. Arguably, no other political issue has received the emphasis, the funding, the attention, and the energy that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has given to public policy on abortion. At bottom, the saliency of the abortion issue is, of course, a function of gender. That is, the political controversy over abortion has forced American Catholics, clerical and lay, to consider the fundamental question of women’s moral agency. This is a difficult challenge for the American Catholic Church, which has been a major player in the movement to restrict abortion (just as it was a fierce opponent of legalizing birth control in the first half of the twentieth century). As we shall see, there are theological as well as historical and cultural reasons for the church’s patriarchal views, views that illustrate the complex interrelation between religion, gender, and politics. This chapter, accordingly, is divided into three parts. Part I on religion gives a brief overview of American Catholic history; it provides the context for understanding later sections of the chapter. Part II on gender addresses Catholic teaching on the role of women in church and society and examines changes in American Catholicism that reflect the increasing participation of Catholic women in the life of the church as well as public life. Finally, in Part III on politics, I consider the American church’s extensive efforts to influence abortion policy and some underlying


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theological concepts that help to explain the priority the church gives to this issue. This should help us understand both the analytical power of gender in explaining the intensity of the bishops’ campaign and the practical utility of gender in shaping abortion politics and policy. A few caveats are in order. First, it is not my purpose here to explain how and why the clergy sex-abuse scandal occurred. I am simply using it as an example of how religion, gender, and politics are interrelated. The same could be said of other major issues, such as same-sex marriage or the abortion controversy, a hardy perennial of Catholic political involvement. Second, I should clarify the sense in which the term “church” is used here. By “church” I do not mean the entire Catholic community or the “People of God” (to use the ecclesiastical term developed at the Second Vatican Council); instead, I am referring to leaders of the institutional American Catholic Church, the hierarchy of bishops, archbishops, and cardinals. Collectively, the bishops are members of the national conference known as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), whose headquarters are in a large corporate office building in Washington, D.C.

I. Religion: A Brief Overview of American Catholicism The American Catholic Church numbers between 66 and 67 million Catholics who constitute almost 25 percent of the population. In the United States, membership in the church has grown 21 percent since 1985, while the number of priests has fallen by 15 percent, to approximately 43,300. As a result of the decline in the number of priests, some 17 percent of U.S. parishes had no resident priest in 2005. Rates of church attendance have also declined; in 2004, some 32 percent of adult Catholics said they attended Mass once a week or more—compared with 67 percent in 1965. Finally, the number of religious sisters declined from 180,000 in 1965 to 68,634 in 2005. Over a forty-year period, the church lost a large force of cheap labor.3 Worldwide, the number of Catholics is increasing. The total number now is about 1.11 billion, reflecting a growth in membership of 25 percent since 1985 (nearly matching the world’s population growth of 27 percent in the period). But overall growth in the number of priests has been negligible. Large increases in the number of priests and in church membership have occurred in Africa and Asia since 1985, while Europe has seen virtually no growth in membership, and the number of priests there has declined by 11 percent (the sole exception to this trend being Poland, where the priesthood has grown by more than one-third).4 As for the American situation, the statistical indicators (church attendance rates, ratios of priests to people, declining numbers of religious sisters and brothers, financial contributions, parish closings) show a

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church at risk. Steinfels frames the crisis of the American church in stark terms, stating bluntly that the American church must transform itself or suffer irreversible decline. The challenges facing the church pertain to two fundamental transitions it must negotiate: the passage of leadership from clergy to laity (in view of declining numbers of priests and nuns), and a generational shift from a leadership formed in the American Catholic culture before the Second Vatican Council to a new leadership generation formed entirely after it. This raises questions about Catholic identity and how to transmit a rich Catholic tradition to the next generation. Issues of liturgical celebration, religious education, the identity of Catholic universities (some 232 in the United States), hospitals, and social service agencies—all these institutions of Catholic life and culture need to prepare for the transitions facing them. Steinfels thinks that American Catholicism is in trouble: “Absent an energetic response by Catholic leadership, a soft slide into a kind of nominal Catholicism is quite foreseeable” (Steinfels, 2003: 9). Historical Background Historically, the American church is largely an immigrant church. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, waves of migration from Ireland and Germany initially, later from southern and eastern Europe, and more recently from Latin America and Asia have challenged native Americans to accommodate newcomers and challenged immigrants to assimilate American values of religious freedom and church-state separation. The immigrant experience has been marked by periodic outbursts of nativism and anti-Catholic hysteria, prompted by Protestant suspicions of the loyalty and allegiance of Catholic citizens. Protestant fears were not without foundation—given nineteenthcentury papal condemnations of liberalism and liberal democracy. David O’Brien has aptly described these Protestant fears of Catholic power: Like the Americans of recent times who wondered whether the United States could tolerate the presence of subversives bent on the overthrow of free institutions, Protestants in the nineteenth century wondered whether the experiment in self-government could survive the presence of a massive Catholic population organized under hierarchical control, in separate churches and schools, upholding an intolerant view of religious liberty, making exclusive claims for their denomination, and recognizing the authority of a foreign, supposedly infallible pope, who taught that all the modern liberties, including freedom of conscience and church-state separation, were violations of the law of God. Anti-Catholics were hardly crazy and anti-Catholicism could easily appear as one of those reform movements seeking to insure the success of the American republic. (O’Brien 1983)


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Nevertheless, Catholics were gradually accepted in American society; indeed, the church flourished because its leaders skillfully developed a tripartite strategy of affirming American religious arrangements while ensuring the possibility of a Catholic presence in American life. First, they distinguished carefully between spiritual and temporal affairs and used this distinction as the basis for defending the pope’s spiritual supremacy while strongly denying any papal influence in secular politics. Second, they used the American tradition of disestablishment and church-state separation to vigorously defend the rights of Catholics. In the name of separation they insisted on their right and duty to defend their church against any effort to impose alien values or to exclude Catholics from public life. In the process, they built a Catholic parochial or separate school system that preserved Catholic culture. Third, church leaders demonstrated public-spiritedness in times of national crisis. They rallied to the nation’s cause in the First and Second World Wars and instructed American citizens in the responsibilities of citizenship. Overt anti-Catholicism ended after the Second World War, as Cold War anticommunism became a major rationale for American foreign policy. Postwar prosperity also affected Catholics who rose from the status of poor immigrants to middle-class suburbanites. The movement of American Catholics from marginal status into mainstream society was reflected in the election of John F. Kennedy as the first Catholic president in 1960. Simultaneously, during the 1960s, the global Catholic Church met in Rome for the Second Vatican Council, a major three-year effort to bring the church into the twentieth century and reconcile it to modernity. Major cultural changes in the Catholic world were generated by this ecumenical council of bishops who addressed issues of liturgical reform, religious freedom, the church’s relations with other religious traditions, the role of religious orders of men and women, CatholicJewish relations, and the role of the church in the modern world. Forty years later, Catholics still argue among themselves about the meaning of Vatican II and the major cultural changes it introduced. The evolution of American Catholics since the 1960s has certainly been influenced by cultural changes in the larger society: social protest movements against the Vietnamese War and for civil rights, which had the effect of partially discrediting the established elites; the sexual revolution, which began with the birth-control pill; countercultural challenges of the 1960s and 1970s; political scandals such as Watergate which further undermined established authority; the women’s movement (another product of the 1960s); and the birth of the gay and lesbian rights movement. As Luke Timothy Johnson has noted, these social and cultural changes occurred simultaneously with American Catholics becoming “fully American” as symbolized by Kennedy’s

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election, and against the backdrop of major internal changes within the Catholic Church generated and symbolized by Vatican II. Part of the reason the American church is in crisis today is the cumulative effect of these major secular and ecclesiastical changes in the space of barely two generations, in a relatively short period of time. The important point is the evolution and transformation of American Catholics from an immigrant church to a church of well-educated, affluent, suburban citizens who think for themselves, are more theologically sophisticated, and hold leadership positions in many of the professions and institutions of civil society. This is no longer a laity that “prays, pays, and obeys.” In the wake of the sexual-abuse crisis, lay people are concerned about church governance and episcopal accountability. Women are major participants in the lay movements for change in the American Catholic Church. Whether they will be in future leadership positions is a central question.

II. Gender Most observers agree that “the woman question” has become a crucial key to understanding the dilemma of the contemporary American church. Steinfels writes: “Until 1960, the most controversial topic confronting American Catholics was the church’s political power. Since 1960 the most controversial topics confronting American Catholics have been the church’s teachings on sex and on women” (Steinfels 2003: 253). He adds that the first question about the church’s political power was an external question, asked by outsiders. The second set of questions about sex and about women have come from inside the church; and they have deeply divided Catholics, many of whom deeply respect the church’s teaching authority yet find they cannot agree with the hierarchy’s views on the role of women in church and society. What are some of those views? The Catholic Christian tradition in the West denies priestly ordination to women and has a long history of justifying patriarchy and women’s subordination. Current church teaching has made only modest improvements in this situation. The result is that while secular feminists are likely to dismiss Catholic Christianity as hopelessly patriarchal and antifeminist, religious feminists struggle valiantly within the church to increase awareness of sexism and to prod the church into action on issues of gender justice. Their trenchant critique of Catholic views on women is especially noteworthy precisely because they do not dismiss Catholic tradition as irremediably flawed, but try instead to salvage positive elements from Catholic social teaching that feminists can use to promote gender justice. Feminists and scholars in women’s studies in religion have criticized Catholic Christianity for its traditional conception of women as primarily wives and mothers, for the denial of voice to women in church


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life, for its long history of fear and distrust of women (Segers 1994).5 As a cultural force in Western history, the church has, for the most part, either excluded women from education or selectively educated them primarily for social roles in domestic life. Institutionally, the Catholic Church in the United States actively opposed women’s suffrage and has been slow to support women’s greater political participation. Most gender scholars are not surprised by the church’s failure to champion women’s rights in the public (political) sphere. To them, this failure of the institutional church is merely the public reflection of an exclusion of women from priestly ordination and a refusal to include women in high administrative posts within the official church. There seems to be a parallelism between public and private, between the treatment of women in church polity and in the liberal state. The issues raised by Catholic feminists—new ecclesiological models, questions of authority, revisionist understandings of “women’s place”—have challenged the papal, curial, and episcopal authorities and created tensions both globally and within the church in the United States.6 These tensions have carried over to the church’s external relations with the larger society and government. Traditional views on women’s role as wife and mother are reflected, for example, in the primacy accorded by the church to the abortion issue in American politics. Indeed, because of their heightened concern with abortion, the American bishops have been single-issue-oriented in their approach to issues of women’s rights and public participation. Compared with the bishops’ extensive pro-life lobbying, the record of the American church on issues of women’s rights has been modest indeed. On issues such as equal credit opportunity, comparable worth, equal educational opportunity, childcare, child support, and social security for spouses, the bishops’ support has been lukewarm and qualified. Moreover, the Catholic hierarchy has used the abortion issue to justify its refusal to support other public policy initiatives—the Equal Rights Amendment, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, and the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988—designed to end discrimination against women and improve the quality of their lives (Segers 1994, 1995). Judging by the record, then, the Catholic hierarchy does not really support women’s full participation in the public life of the church or in the public sphere of civil society. Moreover, it is difficult to regard this as unrelated to the traditional conception of women in official church teaching. As Weaver notes, “Official Catholic teaching about women is a religious form of sex-role stereotyping which Catholic feminists oppose” (Weaver 1985: xiv). The Catholic Church does condemn the exploitation of women and defend their human dignity. But such positive elements in the Catholic view of women are offset by a conception of gender equality as complementarity. The writings of Pope John Paul II, for example, reiterated

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the traditional view that while men and women are equal before God, women are not identical with men but have complementary qualities that fit them to be companions and helpmates. The argument seems to be that gender differences do not mean diminishment, that although women are different from men, they are not inferior. But some feminists contend that if advocates of complementarity are to be taken seriously, then let them install women in positions of power within the institutional church, so that the link between difference and inferiority can be broken. Arguing that the ban on women’s ordination does not mean a ban on women in organizational leadership, they advocate that women be appointed to church leadership positions as chancellors, heads of tribunals, heads of curial congregations, members of the College of Cardinals, and Vatican diplomats. Such appointments would signify a commitment to genuine equality within the church. Church teaching bases its opposition to the ordination of women upon three main arguments: First, the Vatican maintains that since Christ did not call women to be apostles, the church hierarchy is prevented from ordaining women because it cannot act counter to the will and example of Jesus. Second, because Christ was male, priests as icons or representatives of Christ must maintain the natural physical resemblance to Christ, thus precluding women from symbolizing Christ as priest. Third, the Vatican defends its continued opposition to women priests on the grounds that an exclusively male priesthood is part of the church’s constant tradition. It is assumed that the institutional tradition of church teaching, called the “magisterium,” cannot change its mind. At the same time, the church hierarchy stresses women’s equality to men and insists that women’s exclusion from the priesthood should not be interpreted as evidence of their inferiority. Rather, official church teaching sees gender-role differentiation as reflecting complementary differences in the nature of women and men.7 Of course the refusal to ordain women denies the legitimate aspirations of those women who feel called to be priests. But it also carries heavy weight in the symbolic realm—that if women are intrinsically unfit for the sacramental priesthood in Catholicism, they must be unfit for leadership positions in civil society as well. And yet, women in the United States and other countries have been systematically challenging their exclusion from church leadership and public life. In the last 40 years, Catholic women theologians, ethicists, and scripture scholars—previously barred from schools of theology and seminaries— have secured positions in major American institutions (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) and in leading Catholic universities (Fordham, Boston College, Georgetown, Notre Dame). The first generation of feminist theologians and scripture scholars in the United States included pioneers such as Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza. Others have continued this rethinking of Christian


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theology and Catholic ethics: Elizabeth Johnson, Anne Carr, Bernadette Brooten, Margaret Farley, Mary Catherine Hilkert, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Christine Gudorf, and Sandra Schneiders, to name but a few. These scholars have emphasized the fact that much Catholic moral theology on the position of women in society was written by men, from the perspective of men. And they have argued for gender-neutral language in the church’s liturgy and rituals.8 Yet, American church leaders have not shown much appreciation of the women’s movement for justice and equality in church and society. Threatened by the emergence of the women’s movement, Vatican officials and some American bishops tried to respond to the challenges of feminism by co-opting the feminist label. Church leaders distinguished “Christian feminism” from “radical feminism,” using the latter phrase as a catchall term for all varieties of feminist theory outside “true Christian feminism.” Similarly, American churchmen undertook the task of writing a pastoral letter defining women’s role in church and society, seemingly oblivious to the fact that such a practice is contrary to the thrust of feminism that stresses decision-making and role definition by women themselves.9 At the same time, and despite the church’s largely negative reaction to the women’s movement, Catholic women (religious sisters and lay women) began to step into the vacuum left by the exodus of priests from parish ministries. Nuns have moved into diocesan management positions as chancellors, chief financial officers, school superintendents, and directors of education and personnel and of various other ministries—thereby allowing bishops to rotate priests back into parish work. In addition, there are now some 30,000 lay people working in parishes at jobs formerly performed by priests—liturgists, finance and administration directors, religious education directors, lectors, Eucharistic ministers, even “pastoral administrators” (a euphemism for a lay pastor in a parish without a resident priest). Some 80 percent of these lay professionals are women. This is an amazing transformation of the typical American Catholic parish, and it is reinforced by the aftereffects of the clerical sex-abuse scandal. If Vatican II laid the foundation for lay participation in the renewal of the church, the sex-abuse scandal clearly dramatized the need for greater lay participation in parish and diocesan ministry. Lay Catholics have begun to realize that priests and bishops have been ineffective, incompetent, and even corrupt, that the Catholic Church they love is in dire straits, and that they must step in and take much greater responsibility for church leadership and administration. If 80 percent of these lay professionals are women, it may be only a matter of time before women ascend into higher positions of church leadership. Proposals have been made to have women deacons and female cardinals, which leads to speculation that the ordination of women cannot be too far off. At the same time, church scholars warn of the problem

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of exploitation of women workers in parishes and dioceses. “Everyone knows that most Catholic parishes in this country would have to close up tomorrow if it weren’t for women. . . . Women carry out most of the work of ministry in many, if not most parishes in this country. But the same abuse of power, by which the male clergy exploited but never fully honored the ministerial labors of religious women in parishes, hospitals and schools, is now being perpetuated in the exploitation of single and married women in local parishes. And this exploitation takes place even while such women are denied ordination with the argument that only males can really represent Christ!” (Johnson 2004: 37–38). To summarize, despite increasing participation of American Catholic women in the life of their church at the parochial and diocesan levels, the exclusion of women from the clerical priesthood means that, at the national level, women are excluded from the USCCB, the policymaking body of the American church headquartered in Washington, D.C. In other words, despite women’s work in daily parish life, they have no real influence in the upper reaches of the institutional church. This exclusion of women from church leadership has political and policy consequences for American society. Since the USCCB presents the public face of American Catholicism in the nation’s capital, the policy positions it takes on major issues of American politics are of concern to Catholic and non-Catholic citizens alike. The next section examines the bishops’ extensive efforts to delegalize and recriminalize abortion. The American church’s 40-year campaign to restrict abortion illustrates the complex interconnection of religion, gender, and politics. I argue that the priority given to this issue by the bishops is deeply influenced by gender, by Catholic conceptions of women’s role, and by the same logic that excludes women from priesthood and episcopal leadership. This section explores underlying theological concepts that help to explain churchmen’s intense preoccupation with this issue. The discussion here shows how religion, gender, and politics converge in the struggle over abortion policy, a struggle that, for the last 40 years, has consumed the American Catholic Church and been a major factor in American politics at the national and state levels.

III. Politics In 1968, Congressman Robert Drinan (attorney, the former dean of Boston College Law School, and a Jesuit priest) observed the following: It is painfully clear that Catholics confront in the abortion issue an agonizing question of public policy which could divide Catholics, weaken ecumenical relations, and place Catholics and the Church in the years


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and decades ahead either in the position of having sinned by the use of its prestige and power against the sincerely held convictions of nonCatholics and non-believers or as a group which failed by silence to speak up when misguided men and women changed the law to permit the extermination of undesirable and unwanted human beings. It seems selfevident that this challenge is unique in American Catholic experience, that it is awesome, and that it is inescapable. Hopefully, it is a challenge which, unlike any previous challenge, will arouse the minds and consciences of American Catholics to original, creative thought on a legal, moral problem of incalculable significance. (Drinan 1968: 130)

Father Drinan’s prophetic remarks were made 40 years ago at the annual convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America. As he predicted, the abortion issue has been fateful for the Catholic Church in the United States. Over the years, many U.S. bishops and conservative Catholics have made it a litmus test of Catholic orthodoxy and a criterion of electability for public officials and candidates, Catholic and non-Catholic. The Catholic Church, of course, has addressed many public policy issues over the last 40 years. The bishops have issued major statements on war and peace, economic justice, child welfare, AIDS, and racism (to name a few). However, nothing has had quite the saliency of the abortion issue. Arguably, no other political issue has gotten the emphasis, the funding, the attention, and the energy that the USCCB has given to public policy on abortion. For the past two generations, the American church has been a major player in the movement to restrict abortion (just as it was a fierce opponent of legalizing birth control in the first half of the twentieth century). The bishops’ conference was the institutional home for the pro-life movement in the years before and immediately following Roe v. Wade (the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion). In 1966, Rev. James McHugh, head of the Family Life Bureau at the bishops’ conference, organized a “National Right to Life Committee” (legally incorporated and separated from the church after Roe and now the nation’s paramount antiabortion organization). The church also organized and funded the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment, its own church-affiliated and church-funded lobbying arm. The bishops’ conference (the institutional church) has marshaled all the political resources of the American system to press its case. Immediately after Roe, four cardinals testified in support of a constitutional amendment defending unborn human life before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee (the first time ever that high church officials had testified before Congress). Over the years, the USCCB has supported conscience clauses and “abortion neutral amendments” to legislation concerning medical insurance plans of employers to

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remove coverage of abortion-related medical services. Attorneys for the Catholic Conference have filed amicus curiae briefs in a host of Supreme Court cases on abortion in the last 40 years. In addition to Congressional testimony and legal representation, the bishops have resorted to grassroots mobilization campaigns to influence abortion policy. In 1975, the bishops’ conference issued a document entitled “Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities,” which was a detailed blueprint for organized pro-life political activity in the 1976 presidential election campaign—and beyond. In 1990, the bishops hired Hill and Knowlton, a prominent, pricey public relations firm, to better organize their media campaign to shape public opinion on abortion policy. The church has not hesitated to use its more than 19,000 parish units as mobilization centers for grassroots lobbying. In 1994, for example, the USCCB and the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment (NCHLA) printed and distributed in parishes 18.9 million postcards to mail to legislators urging Congress to exclude abortion coverage from the national health plan then under consideration. Such mobilization campaigns, conducted by the NCHLA, illustrate how the church uses a powerful political resource—its own parochial and diocesan network—to influence public policy. In addition, the national bishops’ conference has a branch network of some 34 state Catholic conferences to lobby at the state level.10 Church leaders also challenged Catholic lawmakers to support the effort to delegalize abortion. Indeed, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the bishops grew less tolerant and accepting of Catholic lawmakers who refused to translate the church’s moral proscription of abortion into public law—until, by the early 1990s, they were imposing sanctions against such Catholic politicians. These politicians were censured in sermons, barred from ministerial activities, refused sacraments, removed from parish councils, denied invitations to speak at church functions, expelled from the Knights of Columbus (a Catholic fraternal association), and threatened with excommunication. Individual Catholic citizens were told that it was immoral to vote for pro-choice candidates (Byrnes and Segers 1992; Evans and Shannon 1990: 30–36). Let me describe briefly three examples of controversial interventions by church leaders in electoral politics at national and state levels. The first shows how abortion became the chief criterion determining whether the American church would support policies for gender justice. Recall the nomination of Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, the first woman ever to be named by a major party for vice president. Instead of rejoicing at this historic event, prominent Catholic bishops treated her as a pariah because of her position on abortion policy—as if this were the only issue on the political spectrum—despite the fact that Catholic male


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politicians with precisely the same views had never been so criticized. I am not sure that Catholic feminists have ever gotten over the treatment of Ferraro in 1984 (Segers 1987). A second example of the use of church sanctions occurred in 1989. On November 15 three weeks before a special runoff election for the California State Senate, Bishop Leo Maher of San Diego prohibited the Catholic State Assemblywoman Lucy Killea, a contender for a Senate seat that would tip the balance to a pro-choice majority, from receiving Holy Communion because of her pro-choice position on abortion policy. In the December 5 election, Killea defeated her favored Republican opponent, Carol Bentley, thereby shifting the California Senate to a pro-choice majority. Bentley attributed her stunning defeat to Maher’s intervention in the political process. The bishop’s action brought national attention to Killea’s candidacy, elicited campaign contributions and support from pro-choice groups throughout the country, and triggered a sympathy vote for Killea as a way of protesting intervention by Catholic clergy in the electoral process. Bentley claimed that the bishop’s action made Killea “an international celebrity and martyr.”11 A third, noteworthy illustration of episcopal interventions in electoral politics was the treatment, by a small minority of Catholic bishops, of Senator John F. Kerry, a Catholic Democrat who opposed George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election. A handful of bishops (15 out of a total number of 300) threatened to deny Communion to Kerry because of his pro-choice position on abortion policy. The archbishops of Newark, New Orleans, and St. Louis also suggested that a faithful Catholic could not vote for Kerry. It is unclear whether the resulting controversy over Kerry’s Catholic identity damaged his electability or shifted a significant number of Catholic voters away from voting for the Democrat.12 At the same time, it is hard to think that this selective targeting of the Democratic presidential candidate—Republican pro-choice Catholics were not similarly sanctioned—was anything more than partisanship by these Catholic bishops. Needless to say, the imposition of Eucharistic sanctions did not elevate public discourse during the campaign. Indeed, the conservative bishops’ preoccupation with a narrow range of issues (abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research) at a time of war, when the nation’s conduct of that war was a fit subject for debate, distracted media and voters from serious discussion of important issues such as Iraq, the economy, the death penalty, nuclear proliferation, and other “life” issues.13 I have summarized here the American church’s 40-year antiabortion campaign because I think it indicates an intense preoccupation with this issue that far exceeds the church’s efforts to influence other major “life” issues such as the death penalty, the Iraq War, nuclear proliferation, peace in the Middle East, and the like. The question is: why?

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Why is there this Catholic fixation on abortion to the point that it trumps all other policy issues concerning respect for human life? The answer to this question about the political engagement of a major religious tradition has to do, in my view, with gender. It is women, after all, who have abortions. Extending the moral agency of women to include decision-making about life or death is, apparently, very threatening to a patriarchal institution such as the Catholic Church. This inevitably raises comparisons between the church’s nuanced just war theory and the absolutism of its position on abortion. As Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister noted in her commentary on the 1984 American Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter on war and nuclear deterrence, there is a glaring inconsistency between the bishops’ qualified acceptance of some aspects of nuclear war and deterrence and their moral absolutism in opposing abortion. This inconsistency is related directly to gender: The bishops claim that nuclear destruction and policy are repugnant to them but say it is impossible to be morally absolute in their repudiation of the manufacture or use of nuclear weapons because there is enough need for deterrence and enough doubt about their effects to command their toleration. It is troublesome to note that the bishops show no such hesitation or ambivalence about abortion. In that case, from a given principle they draw universal and absolute implications with ease. Catholic hospitals may not permit abortions; Catholic doctors may not perform them; Catholic nurses may not assist at them; Catholic monies may not be used to sponsor abortion clinics. Nevertheless, the arguments for abortion are the same: the promotion of a greater good and the deterrence of evil for the parents or a handicapped child itself, for instance. What is a woman to think? That when life is in the hands of a woman, then to destroy it is always morally wrong, never to be condoned, always a grave and universal evil? But when life is in the hands of men, millions of lives at one time, all life at one time, then destruction can be theologized and some people’s needs and lives can be made more important than other people’s needs and lives? It is a theological imperative that we confront this dichotomy. (Chittister 1982: 428)

Chittister’s comment that gender is somehow determinative of permissibility—of who can or cannot justifiably take human life—alerts us to be aware of how gender figures in Catholic moral theology. Another illustration of the role of gender in Catholic theology, which may help us understand why Catholics seem so preoccupied with the morality and legality of abortion, is Anne Patrick’s discussion of religious dimensions of the abortion debate. Patrick notes the importance


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of fundamental doctrines of creation, providence, and salvation in Catholic thought. For Catholics, the myth of special individual creation (“Who made you?” “God made me”) is joined with a strong doctrine of divine providence, whereby God’s care is thought to involve conscious divine intervention in history . . . Furthermore, beyond doctrines of creation and providence, there is the Christian doctrine of salvation, which has been etched on the believer’s consciousness through repeated hearings and visualizations of the story of Jesus. Particularly relevant to our concerns is the myth of divine incarnation in the baby Jesus, the power of which is evident annually at the Christmas season. It is perhaps to belabor the obvious to point out that Catholics have long understood that Mary’s “fiat”—her acceptance of a pregnancy she did not plan—was essential to “the divine plan of salvation.” In Mary, providence was understood to have intervened in human history through a miraculous conception and pregnancy that made possible the salvation of the world.14 (Patrick 1988: 177)

I think Patrick’s discussion helps to explain the religious sensibility underlying the Catholic Church’s concern about abortion. For Catholics, Mary’s acceptance of involuntary pregnancy and her desire that God’s will be done—fiat—is paradigmatic as a prescription for goodness and holiness. To refuse motherhood is to obstruct God’s salvific plan for oneself and for the world. Accepting God’s will is crucial for men and women on the path to holiness and salvation, but it is expressed in terms of gender, in the story of a woman and mother. Given the centrality of this narrative to Catholic Christianity, the intensity of Catholic opposition to abortion becomes more understandable. Which is not to say, however, that it is necessarily right, or convincing. My point here is to listen to thoughtful women articulate their experience of these issues of sexuality and sexual ethics. Paying attention to gender helps us understand the nexus between religion and politics on this issue. Paying attention to gender might also have some practical consequences. If church leaders adopted a gender perspective and factored in Catholic women’s views about the morality of abortion and what proper abortion policy might be, they might come to some different conclusions about abortion law and policy. Listening to feminist ethicists and theologians, I imagine, bishops might hear some common themes. First, the issue of women and abortion is complex. “The church’s failure to see any moral ambiguity whatsoever in a woman’s decision whether or not to continue a pregnancy is not only theologically but pastorally problematic.” Second, to be consistent the church should offer resources for women at crisis points in their lives. Third, “theologians who are pro-choice are not pro-abortion, but argue that women need to be seen as competent moral

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agents, and that these decisions are not simple ones” (Ross 2004: 45–47). Fourth, a proper policy goal—for both church and state—is how to reduce the incidence of abortion without coercing women. This means providing social assistance for involuntarily pregnant women: housing, childcare, health care, educational opportunities. It does not mean delegalizing and recriminalizing abortion. To summarize, this review of the American Catholic Church’s extensive efforts to influence abortion law helps us understand both the analytical power of gender in explaining the intensity of the bishops’ campaign and the practical utility of gender in shaping abortion policy. Armed with traditional views of woman’s role as wife and mother and with a theology of submission and acceptance of God’s plan, churchmen find it difficult to accept new views of women’s moral autonomy. The feminist perspective that women are ethical agents who must decide complex matters regarding the taking of human life runs counter to traditional patriarchal notions of women’s proper role and function in society. This clash of traditional and modern views of women’s moral agency underlies the intense concern of the American bishops with abortion law and policy in the United States.15 My account shows how religion, gender, and politics converge in the struggle over abortion policy, a struggle that has been a major factor in American politics at the national and state levels for the last two generations.

Conclusion The chapters in this volume focus on the influence of religion on the construction of gender and politics, the influence of gender on reinterpretations of religious traditions, and the influence of gender on redefinitions of the political. This chapter shows the influence of Roman Catholic theology on the construction of women’s social roles and on sexual and reproductive ethics. It also shows how greater attention to the factor of gender and to women’s views would redefine abortion politics and the church’s policy goals. Gender provides a perspective (standpoint) from which feminists criticize negative, patriarchal aspects of Catholic thinking about women’s place in society. The church as an institution is challenged by changing views of sexuality, reproduction, and the status of women. While it is true that abortion raises questions about the ethics of taking human life—serious questions that every society must confront—it is also undeniably true that the abortion issue has forced the institutional church to consider the fundamental question of women’s moral autonomy. The factor of gender has influenced the American church’s political participation during much of the twentieth century. Indeed, the


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institutional church has accorded highest priority to its opposition to contraception and its campaign to delegalize abortion. The intensity of church leaders’ concern with these issues of sexual morality and reproductive ethics can be explained, in large part, by the analytical factor of gender. At the same time, attention to gender also provides an opportunity for feminists and thoughtful Catholics to identify and utilize positive elements from Catholic social thought in the struggle against sex discrimination. The effort is to reject patriarchy while retaining positive features of Catholic tradition. As stated earlier, Catholicism as a religious tradition can be both repressive and liberating. This is especially relevant to the abortion controversy; here, church leaders should incorporate Catholic women’s views about the morality of abortion and especially about appropriate public policy on abortion. Women invariably see the complexity and ambiguity of abortion decision-making, and they call upon the church to provide resources in times of crisis. Church efforts should not be targeted at recriminalizing abortion; instead, the church should provide social assistance to involuntarily pregnant women— many of whom, because of poverty or loss of male partner support, feel they cannot afford to bring new life into the world. Rather than use criminal law to coerce women, church efforts should be directed at assisting women, thereby preventing resort to abortion. By acting positively to support pregnant women, the American bishops might recover some of the moral authority they have lost as a result of their incompetence in the clerical sex-abuse crisis and their imprudence in dictating how Catholic lawmakers and citizens should vote on abortion policy. By learning from women’s experience, churchmen can lead the church in a more progressive direction. By taking into account the factor of gender, both feminists and bishops can improve religion and politics.

Notes 1. As events have developed, the clerical sex-abuse scandal is not limited to the United States but is a worldwide problem, as recent reports from Ireland, Germany, Poland, Australia, and some African countries have indicated. 2. See www.BishopAccountability.org. See also Laurie Goodstein, “Settlement Seen in Abuse Cases in Los Angeles,” New York Times, July 15, 2007a, p. 24; also Joe Mozingo and John Spano, “$660-Million Settlement in Priest Abuses: L. A. Archdiocese’s Payout to 508 Claimants,” Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2007; available at http://www.latimes. com/news/local/la-me-priests15jul15,0,1528294 3. Sources for these data are the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Georgetown University, 2005; available at http://cara.

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4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

georgetown.edu/bulletin/index.htm. Also, Dean R. Hoge, “Facts and Figures: The State of the Priesthood,” Boston College Magazine (2005), available at http://www.bc.edu/publications/bcm/summer_ 2005/c21_hoge.html. More recently, a 2008 study of more than 35,000 adult Americans by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life confirms a picture of decline in the American Catholic Church. According to this major survey, Catholics have lost more members to other faiths, or to no faith at all, than any other U.S. religion. Moreover, Catholicism attracts fewer converts than the number of Catholics who are leaving the church. Roughly 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics, according to the Pew study. Still, despite the loss, the number of Catholics remains steady comprising one in four of all Americans (24 percent). Although Catholicism has experienced the biggest exodus of members, this has been offset by a huge influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly Latinos. See the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 2008 (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2008), released February 25, 2008. See also Neela Banerjee, “A Fluid Religious Life Is Seen Among Americans,” The New York Times, February 26, 2008, A12. Ibid. For a sampling of feminist theology and scholarship in women’s studies in religion, see the writings of Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Mary Daly, Anne Carr, Margaret Farley, Mary Hunt, Bernadette Brooten, Elizabeth Johnson, Sandra Schneiders, Anne E. Patrick, Mary Catherine Hilkert, and Mary Jo Weaver. See also the following volumes in the Harvard Women’s Studies in Religion Series: C. W. Atkinson, C. H. Buchanan, and M. R. Miles, Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality (Boston: Beacon, 1985), and C. W. Atkinson, C. H. Buchanan, and M. R. Miles, Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987). More recent scholarship includes Michele Dillon, Catholic Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Debra Campbell, Graceful Exits (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). For an account of international feminist challenges to Roman Catholic views of women’s role, see Susan M. Maloney, “United States Catholic Women: Feminist Theologies in Action,” in Globalization, Gender, and Religion: The Politics of Women’s Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts, ed. Jane H. Bayes and Nayereh Tohidi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 61–86. I am indebted to Michele Dillon for this summary; see Catholic Identity, pp. 60–64 and 166–67. In addition to these thinkers and scholars, feminist activists (religious sisters and lay women) have helped to improve the status of women in American society. These women include Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun and journalist; Theresa Kane, a Sister of Mercy who challenged Pope John Paul II on women’s ordination; Frances Kissling of Catholics For a Free Choice; Eleanor Smeal of NOW and the Feminist


9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

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Majority; and a whole host of nuns in political ministry—the founders of Network, a Catholic lobbying organization in Washington, Maureen Fiedler of the Quixote Center, the organizers of Woman Church, the leaders of the Women’s Ordination Conference, and a variety of other organizations. See Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest in the Church and Military (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); also Anne Lally Milhaven, Inside Stories (Twenty-third Publications, 1987); Madonna Kolbenschlag, ed., Between God and Caesar: Priests, Sisters and Political Office in the United States (New York: Paulist Press, 1985); and Jo Ann McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). Ultimately, the American bishops’ pastoral statement on women failed. While the USCCB began this effort with good intentions and actually conducted “listening sessions” with Catholic women in various dioceses, the Vatican forced the bishops, in three successive drafts, to revise the document so that it became ever more conservative. In the end, Catholic feminists lobbied the bishops’ conference to vote against adoption of this pastoral letter on women. See Mary C. Segers, “Sister Maureen Fiedler: A Nun for Gender Equality in Church and Society,” in Religious Leaders and Faith-Based Politics: Ten Profiles, ed. Jo Renee Formicola and Hubert Morken (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), pp. 175–96. See Mary C. Segers, “The Catholic Church as a Political Actor,” in Perspectives on the Politics of Abortion, ed. Ted Jelen (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), pp. 114–30. For a good account of state Catholic conferences, see David Yamane, The Catholic Church in State Politics: Negotiating Prophetic Demands and Political Realities (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Also, see Edward L. Cleary and Allen D. Hertzke, eds., Representing God at the Statehouse: Religion and Politics in the American States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). New York Times, December 6, 1989, p. A12. For Bishop Leo Maher’s letter to Lucy Killea, see “Letter to California Assemblywoman Lucy Killea,” Origins, December 18, 1989, p. 457. See also “Episodes in Abortion Politics,” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Catholic Vote, published by Catholics For a Free Choice (Washington, D.C.: Catholics For a Free Choice, 1996), p. 20. There are conflicting poll results over which candidate—Bush or Kerry—won a majority of the Catholic vote. According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), Gallup showed Kerry winning 52 percent and Bush getting 48 percent of the Catholic vote; National Election Studies (NES) had Kerry at 51 percent with Bush receiving 48 percent; and major media exit polls showed Bush winning 52 percent of the Catholic vote and Kerry receiving 47 percent. See http://cara.georgetown.edu There were indications, early in the 2008 presidential campaign, that some Catholic bishops would again threaten to publicly sanction

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Mary C. Segers pro-choice Catholic candidates such as former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was leading the Republican Party’s nomination contest at that time. In the 2008 general election contest between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, a few Catholic bishops criticized the abortion views of Senator Joseph Biden, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate and the only Catholic on a major party ticket. However, Douglas Kmiec, a well-known Catholic pro-life scholar and prominent constitutional lawyer to two Republican presidents (Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush) endorsed Barack Obama and wrote an influential book, Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question about Barack Obama (New York: Overlook Press, 2008). Like Kmiec, a significant number of Catholic Republicans voted for Obama. The final breakdown of the Catholic vote in the 2008 presidential election was 54 percent for Obama and 46 percent for McCain. See http://cara.georgetown.edu. See also Laurie Goodstein, “On Abortion, Giuliani Faces a Potential Fall from Catholic Grace,” etc. New York Times, June 25, 2007b, p. A14. 14. It is interesting that Pope John Paul II in his reflections on women uses this story of Mary’s fiat to underscore his understanding of the primary role of women. See his Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem (On the Dignity and the Vocation of Women), August 15, 1988. He published this apostolic letter in response to a request by the 1987 World Synod of Bishops on the Laity for a deeper consideration of church teaching on women. Available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_ paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_15081988_mulierisdignitatem_en.html 15. This clash occurs not only in American domestic politics but also took place at international conferences such as the Fourth United Nations Conference on the Status of Women in 1995 in Beijing and in later efforts to implement the Beijing Platform in 2000 and in 2005; see Bayes and Tohidi, eds., Globalization, Gender, and Religion, pp. 1–60.

References Atkinson, C. W., C. H. Buchanan, and M. R. Miles. 1985. Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality. Boston: Beacon Press. ––––––. 1987. Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Byrnes, T. A., and M. C. Segers, eds. 1992. The Catholic Church and Abortion Politics: A View from the States. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Campbell, Debra. 2003. Graceful Exits. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chittister, Sr. Joan, O. S. B. 1982. Stepping Tentatively between Prophetism and Nationalism. Commonweal 109 (August 13): 428. Cleary, Edward L., and Allen D. Hertzke, eds. 2005. Representing God at the Statehouse: Religion and Politics in the American States. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.


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Dillon, Michele. 1999. Catholic Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Drinan, Robert S.J. 1968. Catholic Moral Teaching and Abortion Laws in America. In Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America, Vol. 23, pp. 118–130. Evans, Nancy H., and Denise Shannon. 1990. BishopSpeak: A Chronology of the U.S. Catholic Clergy’s Involvement in Abortion Politics, November 1989–June 1990. In Guide for Prochoice Catholics, pp. 30–36. Washington, D.C.: Catholics For a Free Choice. Goodstein, Laurie. 2007a. Settlement Seen in Abuse Cases in Los Angeles. New York Times, July 15, p. 24. ––––––. 2007b. On Abortion, Giuliani Faces a Potential Fall from Catholic Grace. New York Times, June 25, p. A14. Hoge, Dean R. 2005. Facts and Figures: The State of the Priesthood. Boston College Magazine; available at http://www.bc.edu/publications/bcm/ summer_2005/c21_hoge.html Johnson, Luke Timothy. 2004. Abortion, Sexuality, and Catholicism’s Public Presence. In American Catholics, American Culture: Tradition and Resistance, Vol. 2 of American Catholics in the Public Square, ed. Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, pp. 7–38. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod. 1998. Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest in the Church and Military. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kmiec, Douglas. 2008. Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question about Barack Obama. New York: Overlook Press. Kolbenschlag, Madonna. 1985. Between God and Caesar: Priests, Sisters and Political Office in the United States. New York: Paulist Press. Maloney, Susan M. 2001. United States Catholic Women: Feminist Theologies in Action. In Globalization, Gender, and Religion: The Politics of Women’s Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts, ed. Jane H. Bayes and Nayereh Tohidi, pp. 61–86. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McNamara, Jo Ann. 1996. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Milhaven, Anne Lally. 1987. Inside Stories. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications. Morris, Charles. 1997. American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church. New York: Times and Random House. Mozingo, Joe, and John Spano. 2007. $660-Million Settlement in Priest Abuses: L.A. Archdiocese’s Payout to 508 Claimants. Los Angeles Times, July 15; available at http:://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-priests15 jul15,0,1528294 Neela Banerjee. A Fluid Religious Life is Seen Among Americans. New York Times. February 26, 2008, A12. O’Brien, David. 1983. American Catholics and American Society. In Catholics and Nuclear War, ed. Philip J. Murnion, pp. 17–18. New York: Crossroad. Patrick, Anne E. 1988. Virtue, Providence, and the Endangered Self: Some Religious Dimensions of the Abortion Debate. In Abortion and Catholicism: The American Debate, ed. P. B. Jung and T. A. Shannon, pp. 172–80. New York: Crossroad.

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Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. 2008. The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 2008. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center. Ross, Susan. 2004. The Complexities and Ambiguities of the “Prophetic Dimension”: A Response. In American Catholics, American Culture: Tradition and Resistance, Vol. 2 of American Catholics in the Public Square, ed. Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, pp 43–48. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Segers, Mary C. 1987. Ferraro, the Bishops, and the 1984 Election. In Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture, ed. C. W. Atkinson, C. H. Buchanan, and M. R. Miles, pp. 143–67. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. ––––––. 1994. Feminism, Liberalism, and Catholicism. In Catholicism and Liberalism, ed. David Hollenbach and R. Bruce Douglass, pp. 242–68. New York: Cambridge University Press. ––––––. 1995. The Catholic Church as a Political Actor. In Perspectives on the Politics of Abortion, ed. Ted G. Jelen, pp. 87–130. Westport, CT: Praeger. ––––––. 2001. Sister Maureen Fiedler: A Nun for Gender Equality in Church and Society. In Religious Leaders and Faith-Based Politics: Ten Profiles, ed. Jo Renee Formicola and Hubert Morken, pp. 175–96. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Steinfels, Peter. 2003. A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. New York: Simon and Schuster. USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops). 2004a. The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950–2002. Research study conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York; available at http:://www.catholicreviewboard.com/johnjaypdfindex.html ––––––. 2004b. A Report on the Crisis in the Catholic Church in the United States. Washington, D.C.: National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People; available at http:://www.catholicreviewboard. com/report0.1html Weaver, Mary Jo. 1985. New Catholic Women: A Contemporary Challenge to Traditional Religious Authority. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Yamane, David. 2005. The Catholic Church in State Politics: Negotiating Prophetic Demands and Political Realities. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Part II

4 Wo men’s Agency between R el igion and State


Chapter 4

4

From the M oabite Rut h to Norly the Filipino: Inter marr iage and Conversion i n the Jewish Nation State Daphna Hacker*

Introduction In Israel, unlike in other countries, the vast majority of Jews marry other Jews. Interreligious marriages are not common, comprising about 5 percent of all marriages (The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute 2006: 11). Most interreligious families in Israel are those in which both spouses are immigrants from the former Soviet Union.1 However, some of them are comprised of a native Jewish-Israeli and a non-Jewish immigrant, and thus are international, intercultural, and sometimes interracial, as well as interreligious families.2 This article focuses on the latter. Through these families’ experiences, and the sociolegal regime in which they are shaped, I shall discuss the relations between gender, religion, and citizenship in the country that defines itself as the Jewish nation state.3 Though we know very little about intermarriage in Israel, preliminary data I received from the Ministry of the Interior suggest that it is a gendered phenomenon. During 1998–2006, 21,379 requests for citizenship were submitted to the Ministry of the Interior by spouses of Israelis: 7,428 by men and 13,738 by women.4 Since, as will be elaborated below, Jewish immigrating spouses receive automatic citizenship and hence do not need to submit such a request, these figures are

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mostly of requests made by non-Jewish men and women who wish to join their Israeli spouse.5 These quantitative figures suggest that more women than men leave their cultural group and follow their Israeli spouse to his homeland. Moreover, the data I received from the Rabbinical Courts Management on conversion to Judaism in Israel suggest that the citizenship request figures do not tell the whole gendered immigration story of interreligious couples. In 2001–2006, 5,682 men and boys and 19,026 women and girls were converted to Judaism by the Orthodox state conversion tribunals—that is, 77 percent of those who convert are females.6 While about three-quarters of those converted are immigrants from Ethiopia7 and the former Soviet Union, the remaining converts immigrated from all over the globe, and it is reasonable to assume that many of them came to Israel to live with a Jewish-Israeli spouse. This shows that the conversion of immigrants, which in some cases is related to intermarriage, is also a gendered phenomenon. In this chapter I wish to expand on these crude quantitative data and inquire into a few of the stories behind them. These stories shed light on the gendered motivations for converting to Judaism and on the costs and benefits of conversion as shaped by the interrelation between gender, religion, and citizenship in Israel.

The Study This article is based on a sociolegal study aimed at exploring the realities of interreligious families living in Israel.8 The study included 28 interviews with 14 interreligious heterosexual couples who have at least one child under the age of 18 (each spouse was interviewed separately). In seven cases the female spouse immigrated to Israel and in seven cases the immigrating spouse was male.9 I was interested in two metaquestions: how do two adults from different places and religions create and maintain a family; and how does the fact that Israel defines itself as a Jewish state affect this ongoing process of family creation. I discussed a range of issues with the interviewees, including the circumstances under which they met and their decision to create a family, the names of their children, the holidays they celebrate, and the funeral they would like for themselves when the time comes. The interviews taught me about the variety of circumstances surrounding interreligious families that differentiate them from one another and make each family unique. Notwithstanding the particularity and uniqueness of each interreligious family, one repeated pattern did emerge from the interviews. Listening to the stories told by each spouse, I realized that negotiations over the issue of conversion to Judaism, and the decision whether to convert or not, were conducted along gendered lines. While four out of the six women who joined their Jewish-Israeli spouse converted to

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Judaism, only one out of the seven men in a similar position did the same.10 These findings motivated me to approach the state authorities and obtain the quantitative data presented above that placed the unrepresentative sample of interviewed couples in a broader context, and indeed proves that conversion in Israel is a gendered phenomenon. The interviewees’ stories also directed me to a legal investigation of the civil and religious laws, rulings, and guidelines governing conversion to Judaism in Israel. Though formal law was hardly mentioned by the interviewees, and they rarely approached a lawyer or went through an adverse legal procedure related to their interreligious family, it is clear that their lives are shaped before the law, with the law and against the law (as conceptualized by Ewick and Silbey 1998). Accordingly, their accounts of their motivations to convert, and the costs and benefits of conversion in the Jewish state, are presented here together with a discussion of the legal framework of religion and citizenship that hovers over the everyday lives of interreligious families in Israel.

Findings The Gendered Pressure to Convert Only in a small number of cases does a non-Jew who comes to Israel convert to Judaism from an inner motivation that is independent of social or familial pressures (Bass 2007: 30). This was the case with only one of the converts in my study: Julio came to Israel as a student, and was exposed to academic studies of Judaism during his time at university. Judaism and Jewish-Israeli society fascinated him, and he decided to join the Jewish people through conversion. Only after he had started the conversion procedure did he meet Lilach and decide to establish a family with a Jewish-Israeli spouse. And so Julio’s conversion was, in his words, driven by “true faith.” In other cases, the male immigrant non-Jews did not consider the option of conversion seriously, even when they married a Jewish spouse, and were not significantly pressured to do so. For example, Anthony, who was born in Greece but lived in Israel as a child owing to his father’s diplomatic career, never considered converting to Judaism, not even after meeting and marrying Dana. As he explains: Q: Was the option of conversion brought up? A: No, Dana never asked for such a thing. Q: And if she had asked? A: No. I mean it would have surprised me. If she had asked she would really have had to explain her argument, because I don’t think it fits with our everyday philosophy. It is hard to justify a change of religion if I do not believe in God.

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In the interview, Dana confirmed that she had never asked Anthony to convert, though as far as her parents are concerned, “marrying a non-Jew is not optimal,” and she believes that they would have been happier with her marriage to Anthony if he was Jewish. However, they never brought the subject up with her, and she thinks that given the option of her remaining a spinster or marrying a non-Jew, her parents would have chosen the latter. Two of the non-Jews’ female spouses also reported that they had never considered conversion and had never experienced pressure to do so. One of them, Johanna, even mentioned that Amnon, her Jewish-Israeli spouse, used to joke that “if you were to become Jewish I would kick you out.” Indeed, in his interview Amnon presented a very strong atheistic position, as well as what he called an antiethnocentric stand, arguing that he is “happy to be part of the assimilation figures of the Jewish people.” These cases demonstrate that interreligious marriages are no longer taboo in Jewish-Israeli society, and that a non-Jewish spouse can live in Israel without being exposed to social demands to convert. However, the interviews revealed that this is truer when the non-Jewish spouse is a man. When the non-Jewish spouse is female, on the other hand, she will most likely be pressurized to convert. Michelle’s story illustrates this gendered pressure. Michelle was born in France to a Catholic family. She met Yoel in Jerusalem in 1981 while studying for an MA degree. Yoel introduced Michelle to his parents, whom Michelle labels as “close to religion” but “not hysterically religious.” Yoel’s father reacted very strongly to their relationship and demanded that Michelle convert. The pressure on her increased when, after a lot of thinking, Yoel told her that it was also important to him that she convert. Michelle felt connected to her Christian heritage, while at the same time feeling a deep attachment to Israel and the Jewish people. However, she felt that she did not need formal approval for this attachment. She referred to the biblical story of Ruth the Moabite, saying: This is exactly what happens in the book of Ruth. I learned the book of Ruth properly and there was no conversion there, she just said, “Your people is my people and your God is my God” and that’s it, so why do I need the stamp of the Rabbinate? To me it seems absurd.

Even though this was her considered opinion, Michelle ultimately acceded to Yoel and his father’s request and converted to Judaism. The pressure on women to convert was also evident in the story told by Sonali, who came to Israel in 1996. Sonali had met Asael when she was 19 years old and he was traveling in India. She lived in a small village and was a member of a very traditional tribe. Sonali did not inform her parents about her relationship with Asael, knowing that


they would object and try to prevent any contact between them. Like every other girl in the tribe, she was expected to marry a man from the community and to have no romantic relationships until then. After a year of separations and hesitations, Asael and Sonali decided to marry and live in Israel. Sonali fled her village without saying goodbye to her parents, who disowned her after discovering that she had disobeyed the tribe’s traditions. Sonali arrived in Israel with very little knowledge about the country, its inhabitants, language, and customs. She also lacked basic practical skills such as managing a bank account and using modern kitchen facilities. When she arrived, and while still trying to adjust to her new environment, Asael, and more so his father, who had discovered religion at the age of 30, let her know that they wanted her to convert. Since Asael’s father was dying, he used his connections with the conversion authorities to speed up Sonali’s conversion, and after a relatively brief study of Judaism, her conversion was ratified. At the time, Sonali did not give much thought to the conversion and did as she was told. She claims to have been “ignorant,” “indifferent,” and “preoccupied with other things.” But after a while she realized that she had been pushed into something that she did not fully understand and to which she had not given her full consent: I think that I chose to come to this country, . . . and I chose Asael and what belongs to Asael but it does not have to chain me. It does not have to mean that I have to change my religion. Though it was not very difficult and I am not forced to keep Kosher at home. But it is my choice, and in my choice there is no room for state intervention and Asael’s relatives’. It harms your free choice.

A third example of this gendered pressure to convert can be found in the story of Christina. Christina was brought to Israel from Russia at the age of 13. Her Jewish father and Christian mother returned to their homeland, and Christina was raised by her grandmother who immigrated with her from Russia. Christina met Benny when she was 16 years old and he was 25. After seeing each other for a year they began to live together. Although she is not religious, Christina wanted to convert, because “if you chose to live here you need to live by the laws of this country.” However, she did not want to go through the long and demanding conversion course. Benny tried to find ways to get Christina converted more easily, but failed. Meanwhile, he refused to marry Christina, because marrying a non-Jew went against his religious beliefs. Benny’s opinion did not change even after Christina gave birth to their son and daughter. When I met her a year after the interview she was holding her recently born third child. She told me happily that she had managed to convert and that she and Benny had recently got

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married. In this case, Christina’s conversion was, among other things, a condition for marriage posited by her spouse. The stories of Michelle, Sonali, and Christina include male family members who pressured these non-Jewish women to convert. In two of the cases the father of the Israeli spouse felt a strong affinity to the Jewish religion, and in the third case it was the spouse himself who considered himself a traditional Jew who believed in God. In contrast, in the two cases in which the non-Jewish women were not pressured to convert, both their spouse and his family were only weakly connected to the Jewish religion. Nonetheless, some of the interviewees argued that the gendered pressure to convert is not limited to religious social circles. Anthony, who had never felt socially pressured to convert, said: Every woman I know who came to Israel and was not Jewish and had a relationship with an Israeli guy, eventually converted or they left the country because of the demand to convert. This is a critical point. I think no one arrives here with the notion that this will be the demand, but at a certain stage [because of] pressure from friends, or pressure from the family or broader social pressure, it is eventually demanded.

The gendered dimensions of the pressure to convert are clearer when the pressure put on women is compared to the pressure put, if it is put, on men. As mentioned above, not one of the seven non-Jewish male immigrants I interviewed reported significant pressure to convert. The only two who reported any pressure at all were Yorchan and Don. Yorchan came to Israel from Holland as part of a student exchange program. After a while he met Yael and was introduced to her family. Yael’s mother decided to conceal the fact that Yorchan was not Jewish from Yael’s religious grandmother. But, as Yorchan says, “The grandmother is old but not stupid.” She quickly figured out that her granddaughter’s blond, blue-eyed, non-Hebrew-speaking spouse was not Jewish, and applied pressure on Yael to make Yorchan convert. In order to placate Yael’s grandmother and other family members, Yorchan and Yael started to look into conversion. Yorchan approached a conversion institute and had a long talk with one of its representatives. During this talk he admitted that he was only interested in converting for practical reasons and that he did not believe that conversion would turn him into a Jew. To his surprise, the conversion institute’s representative, who Yorchan thought would pressure him to convert, responded by saying that in that case he should not convert—because he had no intention of being an observant Jew, his conversion would therefore be hypocrisy.11 This meeting ended the conversion chapter in Yorchan’s life: “On the spot I decided that I cannot do it. And that’s it, it was never brought up again. I never thought about it again.”


Don was the second man pressured to convert. His conversion was also jeopardized by the authorities, but in a different way. Don claims that he never wanted to convert to Judaism: “I wasn’t really into this religious thing.” He also believes that conversion should “come from your heart.” Though Don argues that he never felt pressured to convert by Tuva, his spouse, or her family, Tuva claims that she did want him to convert because of her traditional background. However, when they looked into the matter, they realized that it was a long and demanding procedure. At the same time, Don and Tuva were preoccupied with the difficult procedure required for Don’s citizenship: Don was an illegal migrant who had entered Israel as a member of a missionary delegation from Nigeria and stayed with no official permission. In order for him to be granted citizenship he had to go through a five-year procedure of state scrutiny in which he had to prove that his marriage to Tuva was lasting and genuine. Tuva told Don to leave the conversion issue aside, believing that after he got citizenship he would convert. However, when Don was finally given citizenship, they were so “mentally tired” that she relinquished the option of his conversion. In both Yorchan’s and Don’s cases, the family pressure to convert was weaker than the pressure put on Michelle, Sonali, and Christina and collapsed in the face of the obstacles placed by the authorities. The Reasons for the Gendered Pressure to Convert Why are non-Jewish women immigrants exposed to greater pressure to convert than non-Jewish men who immigrate to Israel? The answer starts with the Jewish Orthodox religious rule determining who is a Jew, and ends with the social and legal embracement of this religious rule. Yoel, who feels uncomfortable due to the pressure he put on Michelle to convert, excused his insistence by saying that his father was deeply offended by the possibility that he would marry a non-Jew. More than that, however, he admits that he himself had an independent wish that she would convert, because he wanted his children to be Jewish. Indeed, the Jewish Orthodox religious rule according to which a newborn is Jewish only if s/he was born to a Jewish mother paints the pressure to convert in its gendered colors. This rule was inspired by Ezra the Scribe, who came to the land of Israel in around 458 BC. Ezra was alarmed by the wide spread of interreligious marriages, and so he called a general assembly of the people that decreed that they were forbidden and that all foreign women and their children should be expelled. This decision was interpreted as ruling that a child’s Jewish identity is determined by his or her mother. This interpretation went against the widespread norm of patriarchal dynasty, and significantly

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deterred Jewish men from entering into interreligious marriages (Corinaldi 2001; Friedman 2002; Triger 2007).12 Yoel was not the only interviewee to have been influenced by a rule that was determined in ancient times. For example, Almog, who married James after he came to Israel from Ghana, is not concerned that he is and will remain Christian, because “the child is Jewish, nothing else matters to me.” Likewise, Rachel is happy she did not have to discuss the option of conversion with Naveen, who came from a British-based Indian family, because “the difficulty with a non-Jewish mother is the Jewishness of the children . . . in our case you can say the mother is Jewish so the children are Jewish.” Likewise, Yorchan, who decided not to convert, believes that if he had been a woman, things might have turned out differently. As he bluntly put it: “For a gentile woman in this country it is more problematic since this is a disease that is transferred to the children.” Indeed, Michelle summarized the connection between her conversion and the religious rules by saying that: If I was a man it would have been totally different, because then you do not have the whole issue that everything comes from the woman. It complicates things. Maybe if I was a man I would not have gone through this whole process.

These statements are expressions of the adoption of the ancient religious rule determining who is a Jew, as well as of the common disregard, apparently due to ignorance, of religious rules that might also influence children of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father.13 It seems that at least the secular Israeli population believes that the Jewishness of the mother solves all religious complications related to the children, and it becomes clear that the Jewishness of the children is at the heart of the gendered pressure put on non-Jewish women to convert. We are still left with the question as to why most of the interviewees feel that it is important that their children be considered Jewish. Indeed, we cannot understand the gendered pressure to convert without answering this question. The interviewees themselves offered three interrelated explanations. First, the children would feel more accepted within their social environment and would face fewer difficulties if they were Jewish. Norly, for example, wanted her children to be Jewish to save them the treatment she received as a Filipino teenager in an Israeli school in which she felt like “a stranger.” She wanted a “real family,” “so that my children will be treated well in school and the community, because here if you are not like everybody then you do not belong to the group.” Almog makes another argument stating that non-Jewish mothers should convert for the sake of their children. She says that her mother converted to Judaism so that her daughters would be able to marry


Jews in Israel, and that this is also the reason why it is important for her that her own daughter be recognized as Jewish, though she is married to a Christian. This argument relates to the fact that the Israeli legal system allows only religious marriages in Israel (Shifman 1995). As we saw above, ever since the time of Ezra the Scribe, Jewish law, and thus the Jewish Orthodox Rabbinate in Israel, has prohibited interreligious marriages. Since marriages in Israel are subordinated to Orthodox religious law, interreligious marriages conducted in Israel are not legally recognized (Triger 2007). This legal regime explains the motivation of Almog and her mother to secure their children’s Jewishness that will give them the option of fulfilling their most socially likely marriage option—namely, marrying a Jew in Israel. And so the monopoly over marriage granted by the state to Orthodox Judaism is yet another component of the pressure applied to non-Jewish women to convert.14 As can be seen, the welfare of their children, which motivates and pressures women to convert to Judaism, is not rooted in an intrinsic and essential quality of the Jewish Orthodox religion as perceived by the interviewees, but rather in the social and legal reality of the Jewish majority in Israel that is intolerant to non-Jews, as expressed by the Jewish children’s treatment of “foreigners” and by the prohibition of interreligious marriages. This intolerance is not only religious but also national, and is related to the third explanation mentioned by some of the interviewees for the pressure placed on women to convert. Anthony argued that: The ideology that there should be more Jews here, more Jewish children, maybe it is a secret to some people, but to me it is very clear . . . this policy combines several elements that are not new, but this is the idea, and if Judaism is determined by the mother then the crucial point is the mother, not the father. The father is just an instrument, in every sense of the word.

The policy Anthony refers to is the one aimed at securing Israel as the homeland of the Jews. This ambition is at the heart of the Zionist movement, the national expression of Judaism. Much has been written about the attempts of the Zionist movement to distinguish itself from the Jewish religion on the one hand, and its de facto reliance on the Orthodox religious components of Judaism for the legitimacy and uniformity of the Jewish national identity on the other (for examples focusing on the gendered implications of this ambivalence, see Triger 2005; Boaz 2002; Berkovitch 1999). The study reported here demonstrates one manifestation of the interrelation between Judaism as a religion and Judaism as a nationality. The desire among some of the male Israeli spouses, including some who are not religious, that their partner should convert is rooted in the motivation of the Jewish national collective

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to secure its existence, and to do so within the borders of Israel. In that sense, women’s conversion to Judaism is not only for the sake of their children themselves but also for the sake of the Jewish family and the broader Jewish collective, whose national future is believed to be dependent on the Jewishness of its children. Two out of the three explanations for the gendered pressure to convert provided by the interviewees also affect the kind of conversion women are channeled toward in Israel. All the female converted interviewees underwent an Orthodox conversion. Michelle states that at the time, she was the one to insist on an Orthodox conversion because, as she puts it: [I]n this screwed-up country, Conservative conversion does not count, so if you convert then do a real conversion. The whole idea is to give the children a true Jewish status here.

Michelle’s claim, as well as the fact that most converting women in Israel undergo Orthodox conversion,15 should be understood in light of the ongoing debate in Israel over “who is a Jew” and “who is a converted Jew” (Lifshitz and Sapir 2006). The question at the center of this debate is whether to recognize Reform and Conservative definitions of a Jew and Reform and Conservative conversions, or only the Orthodox definition and conversion (Maoz 1997; Shachar 2000; Corinaldi 2001). In fact, accepting the Reform definition of a Jew might have made the non-Jewish spouse’s conversion unnecessary, as some parts of this stream of Judaism recognize children born to Jewish fathers as Jews (Maoz 1971: 22–27).16 As we shall see, Israeli civil law adopts the Orthodox definition and does not recognize a child as Jewish unless s/he was born to a Jewish mother. As for conversion, at the time when Michelle underwent hers, Orthodox conversions were indeed the only kind recognized by Israeli law. However, in the last 25 years, the Israeli Supreme Court has recognized Reform and Conservative conversions conducted abroad and ordered the authorities to register the converts as Jews in the population registry.17 Moreover, in 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that the registration clerk must also register as Jews those who were converted by the Reform and Conservative communities in Israel. However, the Supreme Court emphasized that this registration is only statistical and not substantial—that is, it is not evidence for the validity of the conversion for any other purpose.18 The nonrecognition of the Jewishness of the mother and her future children when she converted through a non-Orthodox conversion has substantial ramifications on her and her children’s ability to marry a Jew in Israel. This is so because Israeli law recognizes religious marriages of Jews—that are, as mentioned above the only recognized marriages in Israel—only if they are recognized by


the Orthodox Rabbinate.19 Since the Orthodox Rabbinate does not recognize non-Orthodox conversions, those who were converted by the Reform or Conservative movements cannot marry in Israel. In 2005, the Supreme Court further broadened the recognition of non-Orthodox conversions when it acknowledged the right of Reform and Conservative converted Jews to come to Israel under the Law of Return that, as will be elaborated below, grants automatic citizenship to Jews.20 Still, the Supreme Court has not yet intervened in the state’s refusal to recognize those who were converted by the Reform and Conservative movements in Israel as Jews according to the Law of Return.21 The legal situation thus narrows the connection between the Jewish religion and Jewish nationality, which was mentioned by the interviewees as one explanation for the gendered pressure to convert, to a connection between the Jewish Orthodox religion and Jewish nationality. Though the Supreme Court has broadened the recognition of non-Orthodox conversions compared to the legal situation that existed when Michelle converted, in present-day Israel only Orthodox conversions grant the convert full legal recognition as Jewish. The fact that even after the rulings of the Supreme Court that allowed the registration of Reform and Conservative converts as Jews, the vast majority of converts choose an Orthodox conversion,22 proves that the recognition of Orthodox conversion as the only “true conversion” is not only legal but social as well. The legal and social preference of the Orthodox definition of a Jew and Orthodox conversion directs non-Jewish women who want their children to be Jewish to the most strict and patriarchal stream of Judaism and the conversion procedure that it insists upon.23 The Orthodox conversion in Israel includes about 500 hours of Jewish studies, in which the spouse of the conversion student is also expected to participate. In addition, the converted student must be “adopted” by a religious family that hosts her/him for the Sabbath and Jewish religious holidays. Further, the graduates of the conversion course must face a special Orthodox conversion tribunal that interviews the candidate and approves or denies the conversion (Britberd 2005). The conversion tribunal has to be convinced that the candidate genuinely wants to join the Jewish religion and follow its rules. The conversion includes circumcision for men24 and a “Tvila” (submersion in rain or spring water) for both women and men (Finkelstein 1993; Tor-Paz et al. 2004; Britberd 2005). Most of the interviewees related to the Orthodox conversion process as very demanding, claiming that it is hard to follow it and still be able to work for pay or care for children. As we saw, in some of the cases of the female non-Jews, efforts were made to get permission for shorter procedures. In the case of non-Jewish men, these difficulties were another deterrent that weakened their motivation, and that of their spouses, to undergo the conversion procedure.

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The story of Norly, to which we now turn, brings our attention to those women who wish to undergo Orthodox conversion not because of social and familial pressure exerted on them in the name of their future children’s interest, but in order to find refuge in Israel for themselves and for their children. This story deepens the discussion of the connection between conversion and gender, religion, and nationality in Israel and points to this connection’s economic, racial, and ethnic dimensions. Conversion and Citizenship Norly arrived in Israel from the Philippines at the age of 10, with her mother who worked in Israel as a private nurse. At the age of 17 she returned to the Philippines to give birth to a baby girl conceived during a relationship with another Filipino living in Israel. Six years later, she returned to Israel to work as a caretaker for a disabled child. Her daughter remained in the Philippines and was very miserable. It transpired that the thousands of dollars that Norly sent to her family over the years were not spent on her daughter, who was kept in a tiny room in her grandmother’s house with very little material and emotional attention. Norly started to look into the option of conversion, with the hope that as a Jew she would be granted citizenship and therefore be allowed to bring her daughter to Israel: A: All I wanted was to convert and settle in Israel, I did not mind if this would be with or without a man, to marry or to live alone. Q: Why did you want to convert? A: Because this was the only way I could bring my daughter Evelyn, because if I would convert I would receive citizenship. With citizenship I could bring my child.

Norly’s hope for citizenship through conversion was based on the Law of Return, which grants Jews who come to Israel, including converted Jews, automatic citizenship (Corinaldi 2001). In 2003, the state tried to exclude people who had converted after entering Israel from the rights granted by the Law of Return. The state’s argument was that Israel was becoming a desirable destination for non-Jewish immigrants, and that granting them citizenship because they had converted contradicted the public interest. The Supreme Court rejected the state’s arguments and interpreted the Law of Return as applying to anyone who converted, either before or after entering Israel.25 Notwithstanding, in 2005, the Supreme Court upheld the practice of the conversion tribunals to refuse conversion requests of illegal aliens.26 This practice recently became official when the Chief Rabbi responsible for the conversion tribunals issued directives stating that a person who is not


an Israeli citizen and does not hold a valid permanent staying permit would be allowed to convert in Israel only under “special circumstances” and with the approval of a special “exceptions committee.”27 Hence, the state is gradually narrowing the possibility of citizenship through conversion, which Norly wished to utilize. Norly’s attempt to attain citizenship through conversion, that took place before the rules narrowing this option were enacted, soon reached a dead end when her employers refused to allow her to take Fridays off so she could participate in the conversion course: “I was hurt by my employers because after I had worked with their child for 7 years they would not give me one day so I could get a life.” Eventually Norly turned for assistance to Erez, an Israeli man with a legal education. Norly had met Erez four years earlier when he helped a friend of hers to gain citizenship. After a while Erez asked Norly to marry him, and she agreed: We did not have great love between us . . . but it worked well, he needed someone socially, and I needed someone who would support me, and he supported me all the way since I left my job.

Here Norly is referring to the support in her struggle to attain Israeli citizenship for herself and her daughter. Indeed, Erez helped Norly with the formalities in bringing her daughter from the Philippines and later on adopted that child. After Norly realized she was pregnant with Erez’s child, they got married in Cyprus in 1999. But Norly’s marriage to Erez, Erez’s adoption of her Filipino child, as well as her giving birth to their Israeli child, did not grant her Israeli citizenship. To secure her status in Israel she had to convert to Judaism, which she, her Filipino daughter, and Israeli son, all did. Norly’s decision to go through with the conversion process even after she had married Erez can be fully understood only through the legal framework that governs it. The first case that dealt with interreligious marriages in Israel and reached the Supreme Court was that of Benjamin Shalit, an Israeli Jew who got married in Scotland to a woman whose Scottish father came from an “old Zionist family” and whose French mother came “from a family that is known for its lack of any religious identification.”28 Therefore, according to Jewish law, she was a non-Jew. The couple moved to Israel and had two children. In 1968, Shalit turned to the Supreme Court after the registration clerk, to whom every citizen has to report the birth of a child, refused to register his children as Jews under the nationality rubric (the children were registered as belonging to no religion under the religion rubric).29 In 1970, the court accepted the petition and stated that nationality is a subjective feeling and that the clerk ought to register a person’s nationality according to his or her statement, unless the clerk has a reasonable suspicion that the statement is false.

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This decision created a huge political commotion, and the law was immediately amended. The Population Registry Act was changed so that a person was not allowed to be registered as a Jew by nationality if s/he is not recognized as a Jew according to the Law of Return. At the same time, the Law of Return was altered to include a definition of a Jew as a person “who was born to a Jewish mother or converted, and is not a member of another religion.”30 These changes narrowed the definition of a Jew to the religious one and blocked an independent definition of Judaism as a secular national identity (Lahav 1998). And so, when Shalit petitioned the Supreme Court to order the registration clerk to register his third child’s nationality as Jewish, the petition was rejected.31 Like Shalit, Norly’s husband, Erez, would have failed to convince the state to recognize his adopted daughter and biological son as Jews, by nationality as well as religion, since they were born to a non-Jewish mother. The change to the Law of Return affected Norly and her family in another way. In addition to the narrowing of the definition of a Jew in the Law of Return, the law was amended to grant the right to enter and stay in Israel to a Jewish person’s spouse, as well as to the children and grandchildren of Jews and their spouses. For many years the Ministry of the Interior interpreted this change as implying that the benefits received by new Jewish immigrants,32 the most important of which is automatic citizenship, should also be granted to the non-Jewish spouses of Jewish-Israeli citizens (Shachar 2000). Hence, if Norly had married Erez between 1970–1995, she would have been granted automatic citizenship, as was the case, for example, with Yorchan, who married Yael in 1984, and Anthony, who married Dana in 1995. However, in 1996 the Ministry of the Interior changed its mind and began to interpret the Law of Return as nonapplicable to non-Jewish spouses of Jewish-Israeli citizens. According to the ministry’s new policy, a non-Jewish spouse of an Israeli (Jewish or not), would not receive automatic citizenship and would have to undergo a long and strict process in order to attain it. The Ministry of the Interior explained the new policy as the outcome of a new and widespread phenomenon of fictitious interreligious marriages between Israeli citizens and foreigners.33 This explanation, as well as the refusal of the state to allow conversion of non-citizens mentioned above, should be understood in light of the profound demographic changes caused by large numbers of migrant workers who came to Israel during the 1990s. In 2000, it was estimated that 240,000 documented and undocumented migrant workers were living in Israel, about 10 percent of the Israeli labor force (Kemp and Reichman 2003). Undocumented migrant workers are perceived as a severe social problem that should be handled first and foremost by deportation (Kemp 2007). Another measure, relevant to interreligious


couples in Israel, is to prevent illegal migrants from acquiring legal status through marrying an Israeli citizen and through conversion. The new restrictive interpretation of the Law of Return and its effects on the Law of Citizenship were ratified by the Supreme Court. However, it also ruled that the policy established by the Ministry of the Interior, according to which a non-Jewish spouse of a Jew has to wait six years for citizenship, is not reasonable.34 This decision caused the Ministry of the Interior to issue fresh regulations that established a new process by which non-Jewish spouses could request citizenship. A Jewish-Israeli spouse who marries a non-Israeli and non-Jewish spouse must submit a request for citizenship for his/her spouse. If the authorities are convinced that the marriage is not fictitious, the nonIsraeli spouse receives a permit to stay and work in Israel. Each year, for the next four years, the non-Israeli spouse has to report to the authorities and convince them that s/he lives in Israel with her/his spouse. Only then will s/he receive Israeli citizenship (Feller 2004; Minister of the Interior, Procedure. 4.4.0004).35 Norly’s decision to convert to Judaism thus becomes clearer. Before she met Erez, she realized that conversion was the only way she would be granted citizenship and be able to bring her daughter to Israel. Without an Israeli spouse, her only hope was the option opened up by the Law of Return and the Law of Citizenship that grants citizenship to Jews, including converts. Her employers’ refusal to allow her to participate in the conversion course left her with two equally unattractive options: either to stay with her employers and leave her daughter to suffer in the Philippines, or to leave her employers in order to participate in the conversion course, thus becoming an illegal migrant and risking deportation.36 In this context, marrying Erez became an appealing alternative. Marrying an Israeli allowed her both to leave her employers while gaining a new legal status and to bring her daughter to Israel from the Philippines. However, the new Ministry of the Interior policy meant that, for Norly, conversion remained an attractive path to secure Israeli citizenship, even after marrying Erez. Norly preferred the demanding yet relatively short conversion process that would grant her citizenship according to the Law of Return rather than wait four years and be exposed to the scrutiny of the Ministry of the Interior in the process of attaining citizenship through marriage. In addition, and in accordance with the gendered motivations mentioned above, Norly’s conversion, together with the conversion of her Israeli and Filipino children, also secured these children’s and Norly’s future children’s Jewish identity.37 Norly refers to the period of her conversion course in very positive terms: “I loved it . . . I was happy during that time.” She found the conversion course “very interesting” and enjoyed the hospitality of the

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religious “adopting family” and the time she spent in the synagogue, during which she could peacefully pray to God. It seems that the conversion course was a time in Norly’s life during which she felt accepted and embraced by her surroundings. The teacher at the conversion course, the Rabbi at the conversion institute, and the family she met accidentally at a bus station and who agreed to “adopt” her, all gave her recognition for her efforts to become a Jew. However, Norly soon learned that while her Jewishness may grant her citizenship, it does not guarantee social acceptance. She was still bullied by the immigration police in its searches for illegal immigrants in the streets (Kemp 2007), and once she was accused of shoplifting just because of her ethnic look, in particular the shape of her eyes. She relates sadly: All the conversion effort was for the children, not just for me, because it does not matter if I am Jewish or not—I receive the same treatment here in this country. They only see my eyes, and with my eyes you are no longer considered Jewish.

In contrast to Norly, Michelle and Christina who have a Western appearance, reported no social suspicion that they were not Jewish. Moreover, even Sonali, with her relatively dark skin, said that not everybody questions her Jewishness as they believe she belongs to the Jewish Hindu community that immigrated to Israel. Others ask her if she is Jewish, and she believes that her answer that she converted shields her from their “negative behavior.” And so, in addition to the dimensions of gender, religion, and nationality, Norly’s story adds considerations of citizenship, economic class, and race to the issue of conversion. The Law of Return is one of the most substantial symbolic and practical manifestations of the definition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people (Corinaldi 2001). The discrimination between Jews and non-Jews in Israeli law—granting automatic citizenship to Jews while subordinating non-Jews to a long procedure and the scrutiny of the Ministry of the Interior—is a powerful mechanism for securing a Jewish majority in Israel (Shachar 2000). This discrimination marks conversion to Judaism as a way of joining the Israeli national collective and constructs it as a ticket to Israeli citizenship. This ticket becomes crucial to the economically disempowered, who yearn for a permit to live in a developed country such as Israel in order to escape the hardships they face in their homeland. However, as more and more economically disempowered immigrants enter Israel in search of employment, the Israeli law reacts by narrowing the option of citizenship through conversion and allowing conversion in Israel only to those who already acquired citizenship or a permanent staying permit. Hence, the fear of migrating workers, who in most cases are


perceived as the ethnic and racial “other” even if converted, is so great that the state is willing for the first time to break the historical legal bond between Judaism and automatic Israeli citizenship.

Concluding Discussion My decision to interview interreligious spouses was at least partly motivated by my personal desire to hear the stories of couples who have managed to stay together despite the differences between them. Having previously studied divorcees (Hacker 2005), I wanted to be inspired by stories of spouses who have managed to create and sustain a family while bridging cultural, religious, and national differences. In this respect, my desire was fulfilled. I learned about the love, compassion, and care that people from different countries, religions, and cultural backgrounds can share, and about the fruitful negotiations that can help them shape their familial space.38 Nonetheless, the personal and familial stories of interreligious spouses were not disconnected from the conflict-ridden public sphere. This was most bluntly expressed in the accounts related to conversion. It is hard to imagine a more personal and private process than changing one’s religion. However, my findings support the conclusion drawn by others (Rambo 1993; Buckser and Glazier 2003) that conversion is hardly ever a process between the converting person and his or, especially in the Israeli and Jewish context, her God(s) alone. As can be learned from the interviewees, the decision whether or not to convert to Judaism in Israel is shaped by the social and legal reality surrounding interreligious couples. In that sense, conversion becomes a prism though which we can critically observe the contradictory trends and conflicting interests characteristic of contemporary Israeli society. On the one hand, non-Jewish spouses can enter Israel and live with their Jewish spouse without feeling any threatening pressure to convert. After about 4 or 5 years, the non-Jewish spouse can be granted citizenship if s/he so wishes. The phenomenon of interreligious couples and the social and legal tolerance toward it are expressions of the enhancement of liberal, individual, and postnational norms influenced by global changes that open national boarders and bring people from different nations, religions, and races together. However, these norms do not replace the local, ethnic, and national norms held by the Jewish majority in Israel (see also Kemp 2007; Ram 1999). As I have shown through the above discussion on conversion and the relationship between conversion and citizenship, these are excluding norms that separate Jews and non-Jews; men and women; Orthodox Jews and Conservative or Reform Jews; citizens and noncitizens; rich and

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poor; and “white” non-Jews and “colored” non-Jews. By placing the tales of inter-religious couples in the sociolegal regime in which they are shaped, they appear not only as stories about bridges that overcome differences, but also about walls that divide. With its ethnorepublican regime (Peled 1993; Kemp 2007) that explicitly combines religion and nationalism, and does not hide behind alleged neutral legal terms, the case of Israel might seem unique. However, the growing anxieties of receiving countries all over the globe regarding the religious, cultural, and ethnic implications of immigration prove that the tension between liberal notions of rights and freedoms on the one hand, and republican notions of nationality, religion, and ethnicity on the other, are a challenge Israel does not face alone. By observing conversion through the eyes of interreligious couples in Israel, I am contributing to the efforts being made to point out the gendered dimensions of these anxieties, as well as the antiessentialist feminist quest of exploring these gendered dimensions through their interplay with other constructed social identities (Van Walsum and Spijkerboer 2007). Let me end this paper by going back to one of the most famous interreligious marriages in Jewish tradition—namely, that of Ruth the Moabite to Boaz from the tribe of Judah. The ancient story of the widowed Ruth, who insisted on traveling with Naomi, her Jewish motherin-law, to her homeland, reverberates even to the present day: the Scroll of Ruth is read each year during Shavuot (a Jewish festival); her name is sometimes given to converted women39 and was given to an NGO that assisted interreligious couples; her story was referred to by one of the interviewees, as cited above; and recently mentioned in a newspaper article criticizing the Israeli Orthodox conversion authorities for the difficulties they cause those who wish to join the Jewish people (Golan 2007). Indeed, the story of Ruth is often given as an example of what used to be an easy way to join the Jewish people. Allegedly, all Ruth needed to say to Naomi in order to become Jewish was, “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”40 What a huge difference from the long, demanding, and suspicious procedures conversion candidates undergo in Israel today! However, we must go on reading the Scroll of Ruth to fully understand the conditions set for joining the Jewish people that existed then. Only by offering herself to a man—Boaz, a relatively wealthy man who was also a relative of Naomi’s—could Ruth guarantee her economic survival and female companionship with Naomi within the Jewish community. This sacrifice is evidence that the separating gendered, racist, and economic sociolegal walls described above are not a modern invention, and that the story of Ruth and some of the immigrating non-Jewish female spouses share a common ground.41


However, Ruth was not only the victim of a patriarchal and racist legal system that objects to interreligious marriages. She was also an interpreting subject who used the law in a creative manner to achieve her goals and to mobilize herself from being a poor, immigrant Moabite widow to being the founding mother of the dynasty that would lead to the birth of King David (for a detailed feminist and legal analysis of the Scroll of Ruth, see Bilsky 2004). Here again we find similarities between Ruth’s story and those told by non-Jewish women who immigrated to Israel not long ago, and who are maneuvering within the religious and civil laws to make a better life for themselves and for their children.

Notes * The research reported in this article was inspired by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute discussion group on gender, religion, and politics. I am grateful to Professor Hanna Herzog and the other members of the group. I would also like to thank the couples interviewed for the study for allowing me to learn about their lives and the Colton Foundation for its generous research grant. Special thanks to Oded Feller, Reut Michaeli, David Bass, Asher Maoz, Zvi Triger, Yaron Kapitulnik, Asaf Weitzen, and Tamar Barkay for their assistance and insightful comments on earlier drafts. The responsibility for the content of the paper is, of course, mine alone. Parts of the findings reported here were first published in Israel Studies 14(2). 1. During the 1990s about 850,000 immigrants came to Israel from the former Soviet Union; by 2000 they constituted 13 percent of the Israeli population. Of these immigrants, 23 percent are not considered Jewish (http://www.cbs.gov.il/statistical/immigrants.pdf). (Hebrew) (All internet sites were last viewed during January 2009.) 2. A third group of interreligious families, which will not be discussed here, is of an Israeli-Palestinian and an Israeli or an immigrating spouse that do not share the same religion. This group also faces substantial social and legal difficulties. See, for example, Algazi (2007). 3. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948. For an English translation, see http://www.knesset.gov.il/docs/ eng/megilat_eng.htm 4. Letter to the author from the Ministry of the Interior, March 22, 2007. 5. According to the letter from the Ministry of the Interior to the author dated March 22, 2007, about 17 percent of requests are from residents of the occupied territories and Arab countries who are most likely the spouses of Muslim or Christian Israelis. 6. Letter to the author from the Rabbinical Courts Manager, September 27, 2006. See also Rozen 2007. As will be elaborated below, the number of non-Orthodox conversions in Israel is very low and cannot change the statistical gendered pictures described above. See note 15. 7. Many of the Ethiopian immigrants are not recognized as Jews by the Israeli orthodox Rabbinate (Corinaldi 2001, chaps. 11 and 12).

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8. The term “interreligious families” is used here to include cases in which one of the spouses converted to his/her spouse’s religion. 9. The interviews were carried out during 2005–2006. All couples were recruited through the snowball technique, with the exception of one couple, whom I approached in a public playground. In all the couples but one, the Israeli spouse was Jewish and the migrating spouse was not Jewish or had converted to Judaism. One couple comprised of an Israeli-Palestinian Muslim man and a Jewish woman who had immigrated from Belgium. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. Three were conducted in English and the rest in Hebrew. All the names and some other identifying characteristics of the interviewees are concealed to protect their privacy. 10. Interestingly, the seventh immigrating woman I interviewed, who joined her Israeli-Palestinian Muslim spouse, was the only Jew in my study who mentioned the option of considering conversion to the nonJewish spouse’s religion. 11. Yorchan’s case corresponds with what is detailed in an information booklet on conversion published by the Israeli government (Tor-Paz et al. 2004). The booklet states that the conversion process includes an interview with a representative of the conversion tribunal. The following is stated during the interview: “Falling in love with a Jewish spouse is a legitimate cause for the preliminary motivation to get close to Judaism, but the representative will expect to hear other reasons and to make sure that after the beginning of the study of Judaism, you would have chosen it for itself, even if the connection with the Jewish friend had ended” (p. 11). The conversion tribunal expects the convert to adopt a traditional way of life, including the study of the Torah, praying, and the preservation of Kosher food (p. 20). See also Bass (2007). 12. The religious sources do not provide an explanation for the move from the patriarchal norm to the matriarchal rule. The speculations regarding this uncommon shift include the argument about the stronger bond between a child and his/her mother and hence the importance of the mother’s religious and cultural origin; the fact that there is never a doubt about who is the child’s mother (unlike the uncertainty of the father’s identity); and a possible motivation to use this rule to cope with births that were the outcome of rape of Jewish women by foreign men (Maoz 1989). 13. I was also ignorant of the fact that a daughter of a non-Jewish father and a Jewish mother is not allowed to marry a Cohen (Bass 2008). 14. The fact that today one can overcome the legal demand of religious marriage, among other ways by having a civil marriage abroad, see H.C. 143/62 Fonk Slezinger vs. Ministry of the Interior, P.D. 17, 225 (1963); CA 8256/99 Roe vs. Doe, P.D. 48(2), 213 (2003); and living in cohabitation (Lifshitz 2005), lead to the assumption that the motivation to secure the children’s ability to be married according to Jewish religious law is embedded in a deep social perception of the legitimate way of marrying and living as a couple. 15. For example, in 2003–2004, the Reform Movement in Israel conducted only 150 conversions and the Conservative Movement only


16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

130 conversions. See petition in H.C. 5336/03 The Religious Action Center vs. Ministry of Welfare. The Israeli Reform movement requires that a child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother be converted, though it might allow a shorter conversion procedure (http://www.reform.org.il/Heb/Services/Giur/ Court.asp) (Hebrew). H.C. 230/86 Miller vs. Ministry of the Interior, P.D. 40(4) 436 (1986); H.C. 264/87 The Religious Sepharadi Movement vs. Minister of the Interior, P.D. 43(2) 723 (1989); H.C. 1031/93 Pessaro (Goldstein) vs. Minister of the Interior, P.D. 49(4) 661 (1995); H.C. 2597/99 Rodriguez-Toshbaim vs. Minister of the Interior, P. D. 59(6) 721 (2005). H.C. 5070/95 Naamat vs. Minister of the Interior (Unpublished, 20.2.2002). Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law, 5713–1953. H.C. 2597/99 Rodriguez-Toshbaim vs. Minister of the Interior, supra note 17. These days, there are petitions pending in the Supreme Court arguing for the recognition of those who are converted by the Reform and Conservative movements in Israel as Jews according to the Law of Return. Moreover, the Ministry of the Interior does not accept the Supreme Court recognition of non-Orthodox conversion that was already achieved and is working on new guidelines related to conversion. Supra note 15. Since, unlike the Orthodox conversion tribunals, the Reform and Conservative movements are not state organs, their conversion certificates are recognized as valid for the change of one’s religion in the population registry only if approved first by a district court. Rabbi David Bass, who is a judge in a Conversion Tribunal, claims in a conversation we held that the Israeli Conversion Tribunals are less strict than some Orthodox communities abroad: in Argentina a Rabbinate order prohibited conversion all together and in France conversion takes up to six years. Interestingly, in Israel there is a special and less strict Orthodox conversion procedure available only to soldiers (Amikam 2005). The demand for circumcision might be another reason why men are less willing to consider conversion. If the man is already circumcised, as was the case with Julio, then he has to undergo the relatively easier procedure of drawing blood from the penis (Hatafat Dam Brith). For more details on circumcision and the conversion procedure in general in Israel, see http://www.itim.org.il/?CategoryID=208&ArticleID=54 7&Page=1 (Hebrew). H.C. 2597/99 Rodriguez-Toshbaim vs. Minister of the Interior, supra note 17. H.C. 552/04 Gozman vs. The State of Israel (Unpublished, 3.7.2005). In this case, a Ukrainian woman married an Israeli in Ukraine, came to Israel as a tourist, and started the procedure for citizenship. A year later the couple separated and the husband notified the Ministry of the Interior that he was about to divorce his wife and that the state should not issue her any staying permit. The woman then approached the conversion tribunal and was refused access because she did not hold a valid staying permit.

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27. Rules of Decisions in Conversion Request, Yalkut Hapirsumim 5500, February 27, 2006, article 4. 28. H.C. 58/68 Shalit vs. Minister of the Interior, P.D. 23(2), 477, 504 (1970). 29. The minister of the Interior does not include “Israeli” in his list of nationalities. Petitions arguing that an old Supreme Court decision that legitimized this practice should be overruled have not yet succeeded. (http://www.faz.co.il/story?id=3615&force_skin=print0). 30. Law of Return (Amendment no. 2), 5730–1970, article 4B. On the implications of the amendment to the law, see Maoz (2000). 31. H.C. 18/72 Shalit vs. Minister of the Interior, P.D. 26(1) 334 (1972). 32. On some of the current benefits received by new Jewish immigrants, see http://www.moia.gov.il/Moia_en/FinancialAssistance/Absorption Basket.htm?SearchText 33. H.C. 3648/97 Stemka vs. Minister of the Interior, P.D. 53(2) 728 (1999). 34. Stemka, supra note 33. The court also ruled that the demand posed by the Ministry of the Interior—that in cases in which the couple married while the non-Jewish spouse was resident in Israel without legal permission, s/he should leave Israel and be allowed to return only after the sincerity of the marriage can be examined—should be abolished. 35. Since 2003, Israeli law severely limits the ability of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories and several Arab countries to join their Israeli spouse. This new discriminatory law was harshly criticized by academics (Davidov et al. 2004), and was also attacked in court by human rights activists and organizations. Unfortunately, the scope of this paper does not allow elaboration of this point. 36. According to Israeli law, a migrant worker who leaves the employer who “invited” him/her to Israel loses his legal status (Dahan 2001). 37. On the conversion of children and the dependency of their conversion on the Jewish practices of their parents, see Finkelstein (1993), ch. 5. 38. It is important to note that I am not idealizing interreligious marriages. During my research I heard stories about interreligious couples who divorced or left Israel due to the hardship imposed by their surroundings and encountered cases in which the Israeli spouse took advantage of his relative power and exploited the non-Israeli spouse. 39. See http://mikranet.cet.ac.il/pages/item.asp?item=3246 (Hebrew). 40. Ruth, 1:16. 41. For a fascinating reading of the Scroll of Ruth as part of a symbolic politics of immigration, see Honig 1997.

References Algazi, Yosef. 2007. Converted to Islam? The Ministry of Religions Will Send You to a Psychiatrist. Ha’aretz. http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ ShArtPE.jhtml?itemNo=240424&contrassID=2&subContrassID=2&sbSu bContrassID=0 (Hebrew). Amikam, Bareket. 2005. IDF Allows “Friendly Conversion” and Hundreds of Soldiers are Converted Yearly. Ha’aretz. http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/

F r o m t h e M o a b i t e R u t h t o N o r l y t h e F i l i p i n o 123 pages/ShArtSR.jhtml?itemNo=648977&objNo=59165&returnParam=Y (Hebrew). Bass, David. 2007. Conversion and Undertaking of Precepts—Theory and Practice. Tzohar 30: 29–40 (Hebrew). ––––––. 2008. The Marriage of a Daughter of a non-Jew and a Cohen. Thomin 28 (4): 43–57 (Hebrew). Berkovitch, Nitza. 1999. Women and Valor: Women and Citizenship in Israel. Israeli Sociology 2 (1): 277–317 (Hebrew). Bilsky, Liora. 2004. Feminism and Family in Israel: A New Reading of the Scroll of Ruth. In The Love of Mothers and the Fear of Fathers, ed. A Klinberg, pp 194–246. Jerusalem: Keter (Hebrew). Boaz, Hagay. 2002. The Religious “Status Quo” and the Generation of Social Categories: The Struggle for Female Suffrage in the Pre-State Period. Theory and Criticism 21: 107–131 (Hebrew). Britberd, Ronia. 2005. Conversion, a paper submitted to the Knesset Committee for State Inspection. http://www.knesset.gov.il/mmm/data/docs/ m01083.doc (Hebrew). Buckser, Andrew, and Stephen D. Glazier, eds. 2003. The Anthropology of Conversion. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Corinaldi, Michael. 2001. The Enigma of Jewish Identity: The Law of Return, Theory and Practice. Srigim: Nevo (Hebrew). Dahan, Yossi. 2001. The Legal Chains of Foreign Workers. Mishpat Nosaf 1: 38–46 (Hebrew). Davidov, Guy, Jonathan Yovel, Ilan Saban, and Amnon Reichman. 2004. Country or Family? The Law of Citizenship and Entrance to Israel (Temporary Provision), 2003. He’arat Din 1 (2): 62–94 (Hebrew). Ewick, Patricia, and Susan S. Silbey. 1998. The Common Place of Law. Chicago: The University of Chicago. Feller, Oded. 2004. The Ministry. http://www.acri.org.il/hebrew-acri/engine/ story.asp?id=1000 (Hebrew). Finkelstein, Menahem. 1993. Proselytism: Halakhah and Practice. Jerusalem: Bar-Ilan University Press (Hebrew). Friedman, Daniel. 2002. To Kill and Take Possession: Law, Morality, and Society in Biblical Stories. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. Golan, Avirama. 2007. Ruth Would Have Still Been a Moabite. Ha’aretz. May 22 (Hebrew). Hacker, Daphna. 2005. Motherhood, Fatherhood and Law: Child Custody in Israel. Social and Legal Studies 14 (3): 409–31. Honig, Bonnie. 1997. “Ruth, the Model Emigree: Mourning and the Symbolic Politics of Immigration.” Political Theory 25 (1): 112–36. The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. 2006. Annual Assessment 2006. http://www.jpppi.org.il/JPPPI/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LN GID=&TMID=111&FID=337&PID=517&IID=525. Kemp, Adriana. 2007. Managing Migration, Reprioritizing National Citizenship: Undocumented Migrant Workers’ Children and Policy Reforms in Israel. Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8 (2): 663–91. Kemp, Adriana, and Rivka Reichman. 2003. “Foreign Workers” in Israel. Information on Equality 13 (Hebrew).

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Lahav, Pnina. 1998. Personal Identity and Collective Identity: Modernity and Jewishness in the Shalit Case. In Multiculturalism in a Democratic and Jewish State, ed. M. Mautner, A. Sagi and R. Shamir, pp. 409–39. Tel Aviv: Ramot (Hebrew). Lifshitz, Shahar. 2005. Cohabitation Law in Israel in Light of Civil Law Theory of the Family. Israel: Nevo (Hebrew). Lifshitz, Shahar, and Gideon Sapir. 2006. Who Shall Decide Who is a Jew? On the Proper Role of the Judiciary in a Democratic State. Bar-Ilan Law Studies 22: 269–326 (Hebrew). Maoz, Asher. 1971. Reform Conversion. M.A. thesis, submitted to the Hebrew University Faculty of Law (Hebrew). ––––––. 1989. Who is a Jew? Midstream 35 (5): 11–15. ––––––. 1997. Who is a Convert? Justice 15: 11–19. ––––––. 2000. Who is a Jew?—Much Ado About Nothing. In Law, Judicial Policy and Jewish Identity in the State of Israel, ed. D.B. Sinclair, pp. 75–119. Binghamton, N.Y.: Global Publications, State University of New York. Minister of the Interior. 2005. Procedure no. 4.4.0004. http://www.moin.gov.il/ Apps/PubWebSite/publications.nsf/6E600BAF684ACAD2422569 440020A73E/2440CD33F09DB509422570B5003829FF/$FILE/ Publications.4.0004.pdf (Hebrew). Peled, Yoav. 1993. Strangers in Utopia: The Civil Status of the Palestinians in Israel. Theory and Criticism 3: 21–35 (Hebrew). Ram, Uri. 1999. Between Nation and Corporations: Liberal Post-Zionism in the Global Age. Israeli Sociology 2 (1): 99–145 (Hebrew). Rambo, Lewis R. 1993. Understanding Religious Conversion. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rozen, Israel. 2007. The Feminine Aspect of Conversion (unpublished) (Hebrew). Shachar, Ayelet. 2000. Citizenship and Membership in the Israeli Polity. In From Migrants to Citizens Membership in a Changing World, ed. A. T. Aleinikoff and D. Klusmeeyer, pp. 386–433. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Shifman, Pinhas. 1995. Who Is Afraid from Civil Marriage? Jerusalem: The Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies (Hebrew). Tor-Paz, Shlomit, Farber Shaul, and Micha Roee. 2004. Conversion in Israel: Traditional, Practical and Legal Aspects. Jerusalem: Itim (Hebrew). Triger, Zvi. 2005. There Is a State to Love: Marriage and Divorce among Jews in Israel. In. Trials of Love, ed. O. Ben-Naftali and H. Naveh, pp. 173–225. Tel Aviv: Ramot (Hebrew). ––––––. 2007. Love and Prejudice: On the Paradox of the Inter-Marriage Phenomenon in Israel. In Studies in Law Gender and Feminism, ed. D. Barak-Erez, S. Yanisky, Y. Botten, and D. Pugach, pp. 733–76. SrigimLeon: Nevo (Hebrew). Van Walsum, Sarah, and Thomas Spijkerboer, eds. 2007. Women and Immigration Law. Oxon: Routledge-Cavendish.

Chapter 5

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S eek ing R ecognition: Women’s Stru ggle f or Ful l Ci ti zenship in the Community of R eligiou s Worshi p Pnina Lahav

Introduction This chapter addresses the struggle of religiously observant women in the United States to participate in public prayer. It focuses on two small but highly visible religions: Islam and Judaism.1 Within each group, a few earnestly follow religious law. Among these only a small fraction are feminists—religious devotees who adhere to their respective religious laws and yet aim to find ways to reconcile these laws with principles of inclusion and equal citizenship for men and women. The traditional regulation of public prayer, in both Islam and Judaism, has either excluded women or delegated them to a marginal role. Muslim law requires and encourages women to pray. It neither requires nor encourages prayer at the Muslim house of prayer—the mosque. A majority of Muslim scholars consider women ineligible to lead a congregation of men and women in prayer.2 When progressive Islam met feminism, a small movement—particularly in the United States—began to challenge this status quo. It comprised of women who felt deeply religious and were yet pained by their exclusion. Their movement has emphasized the right of women to attend prayer at the mosque and hence the need to make mosques more friendly toward women.

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Furthermore, women began to study Muslim law earnestly and seriously. Their scholarship yielded a vast body of knowledge that pointed in one direction: the Quran itself does not prohibit the full participation of women in the public ritual of prayer. Custom and culture do. In 2005 a historical event took place in New York City. Dr. Amina Wadud, a Muslim scholar, led a mixed-gender group of worshipers in the traditional Friday afternoon prayer (Wadud 1999).3 Like Islam, Judaism requires and encourages women to pray. Like women under traditional Islam, Orthodox Jewish women are not encouraged to go to the Jewish house of prayer—the synagogue. Furthermore, Judaism requires a worship or prayer quorum (minyan) for a public prayer to be valid. Women are not eligible to be counted in the minyan. The exclusion of women from the prayer quorum has led to their exclusion from many of the rituals involved in the public prayer, such as holding the Torah scroll, reading from it out loud, or wearing the prayer shawl. Like Islam, Judaism is not monolithic. The struggle for egalitarian Judaism began in the early-nineteenth century, when women in the Reform movement demanded equality and were met with the sympathy and support of the movement’s leaders (Meyer 1988: 55). However, while men and women prayed side by side in Reform synagogues, women still were not considered equal to men in the public ritual. Only in the 1970s did religious women begin an earnest study of Jewish law. They found that much that is prohibited was rooted not in the fundamental norms themselves (halakha), but rather in custom. The last two decades of the twentieth century saw considerable progress. In Conservative synagogues since the 1980s, women count as members of the worship minyan and enjoy full participation in the public prayer. Even Orthodox Judaism, the most resistant to change, has come to accept the phenomenon of “tefillah groups”—women’s prayer groups who obey the principle of gender segregation, but who, in the company of women, perform most of the segments of the public ritual (hold the Torah scroll, read from it before the congregation, wear prayer shawls). My project is threefold. I first aim to review briefly the significance of public prayer for women who wish to remain an integral part of their religious communities. Second, I review the challenges to Jewish and Muslim religious law with respect to prayer in the public religious space. In this part I tell the story of a few dedicated women who launched a campaign to amend religious law so that it accepted the public participation of women in prayer. Third, I shall argue that the focus on public prayer is largely an American phenomenon, and that U.S. women were intellectually stimulated, directly or indirectly nurtured, and encouraged by American law and the culture in which they were situated. I shall thus document an ongoing conversation between

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American law (broadly defined), Jewish law, and Muslim law in the United States. This conversation, I argue, has already had beneficial effects for religious women in the United States and, given the ease of the flow of information from one place to another, it has great potential to radiate to other communities globally with an immense promise to affect the lives of religious women everywhere.

Why Bother? The Performativity of Public Prayer A secular person may find it hard to empathize with the concept of prayer or with a project defending the right of religious women to full participation. For them, prayer is a relic of the past (Zaleski and Zaleski 2005). Why bother, then, to deploy secular intellectual efforts in an attempt to explore the right of religious women to be recognized as equal agents in the act of collective prayer? One may begin with the value of prayer. Prayer comprises many things. It can take the form of a petition; it can be confessional, an expression of adoration, ecstasy, thanksgiving, or a method of personal or communal healing. Prayer may be private or public, individual or communal. As a communal form, it is “cyclical, regular and routine, reiterated at set intervals throughout the day, week or year. It has a sacrificial character, offering the act of faith and the gift of loving attention to the divine beloved” (Zaleski and Zaleski 2005: 129). William James observed that in prayer “spiritual energy, which otherwise would slumber, does become active, and spiritual work of some kind is effected really” (James 1982). When the prayer is institutionalized and performed in community, the individual “spiritual energy” becomes a formidable, shared experience that transforms the community as it transacts with a higher power (ibid.). Public prayer unites all members of the community in a conversation with God. And yet, the performance of this devotional ritual in both Islam and Judaism brings out the most patriarchal aspects of the religious way of life.4 Religious laws have been interpreted to exclude women from public action and reduce them to passive observers, relying on men to represent them before God. Thus, women are implicitly designated to second-rate status in the community of worshippers. This interposition of the men between women and God in devotional prayer undermines their status as equal agents and undercuts their full moral worth as religious persons. A secular person seeking to understand the meaning of the ban on participation may find a clue in the constitutional rights to “peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” These two rights appearing alongside the right to freedom of speech and the religion clauses of the first amendment to the constitution of

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the United States are rooted in the premodern conception of the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. Petition is derived from the Latin word petitionem and means prayer. In any religious system, petition to a Supreme Being to redress grievances on a personal or public level is an important part of the heritage of that religion and its raison d’etre. The king, first as God’s anointed representative and then as a secular power holder, became the object of petitioning as the nation-state came into form. When the monarchy gave way to a republican form of government, the guarantee of petition was integrated into the secular constitution.5 For our purposes, it is important to observe the tie between peaceable assembly and petitioning. Of course, each right may be exercised separately. Thus, women may petition in the private sphere and then gather in the public sphere but refrain from any appearance of collectively petitioning. And yet, the combination of these rights yields special power and meaning. The power of petition is derived from numbers. The more individuals join in acting out their petitioning (peaceably assemble), the more powerful and persuasive the petition is. The power of petitioning peaks when it is performed in the public square. The history of petitioning in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States and in England confirms this dynamic. In her book Signatures of Citizenship (2003), Susan Zaeske shows how the right of petitioning “expanded significantly the ability of women to participate in politics absent the right of suffrage” and at the same time provided a means of asserting citizenship (Zuijdwijk 1982; Heerma van Voss 2001). Public prayer performs precisely the same function. It empowers the religionist to see herself as an entitled member who has an equal standing before God and whose voice has equal value. The petitioners’ act of prayer places their wrong(s) at the feet of their coreligionists, men and women, in a plea for recognition: “Look at me, I do what you do, I too have depth of pious intent and intensity of competence. I am as worthy. Accept me as God accepts me.” In insisting that they do not wish to exit but rather to remain inside their community, religious women seek recognition as equal members with full dignity. The right of women to participate as full agents in public prayer, thus, should appeal to the secular person because it is a variation on a right that secularism cherishes and which proves vital in the development of republican citizenship. This link between the right to petition and the right to prayer in the context of peaceable assembly highlights the further significance of the right to full participation in public prayer. The women who insist on this right are precisely the kind of citizens a democracy values and seeks to encourage. They are energetic, spirited, courageous, willing to

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fight for principle, and eager to stay in the community and correct its wrongs. These women may well serve as a sturdy bridge between secular and religious society. They testify to the fact that we need not interpret the rift between Western values and religious observance as necessarily a clash of civilizations. It is also worthwhile to view this matter from the perspective of democratic theory. The test of an egalitarian society lies in the actual protection guaranteed to small groups. It may well be that the right to free exercise of religion prevents the state from imposing an egalitarian principle on the discriminatory religious community, or that the prohibition on the establishment of religion prevents introducing equality into any particular house of prayer. But this is not an excuse to deny this minority the sympathy and expertise accumulated in secular law. Finally, the historical feminist struggle in the United States has been driven by the recognition that women are entitled to full and equal citizenship. The public act is performative in that it makes several statements: it reclaims the public space for women, it empowers through sheer numbers, and it fortifies the resolve through solidarity. It recreates the community (of women, of women and men) and asserts their connection with their government, which in the religious context is the government of the divine. The public prayer project should be seen as yet another step in this long chain of struggles to nurture recognition and equality, agency and meaning. Indeed, the significance of communal prayer has been recognized by both Islam and Judaism. Muslim doctrine asserts that “congregational prayer (salat al-jama’ah) is twenty-five times or twentyseven times better than the individual one.”6

Jewish Law confirms this sentiment in the Jewish tradition, as captured by Maimonides: The prayer of the community is always heard … Hence a person … should not pray by himself so long as he is able to pray with the community.7

Personal accounts of Muslim and Jewish women who participated as full citizens in such public prayers strengthen this principle with anecdotal evidence. The Muslim journalist Mona Eltahawy describes the mood at the Friday prayer led by Amina Wadud: “I could hear the two women next to me quietly sob as they listened to a woman issue the call to prayer. For one of them, a Somali, they were tears of return—in her country, women were not allowed into the local mosque. . . . I could see the light at the end of the 1,400-year-long tunnel.”8

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Arleen Stern, a Jewish social worker from New York, recounts her first chanting of the Torah during a Saturday service: “I faltered a few times, but the words came out and it all happened fairly quickly. . . . As I finished, I encircled my fellow students with one arm in exaltation. We were four women standing before everyone. . . . As should be with meaningful events in our lives. It was a moment in the process of coming to terms with a troubling part of my tradition, the part that tells me I have no place in leading others” (Stern 1983: 182, 184). Participation as an equal in public prayer makes women full partners in the religious experience, just as participating in town-hall deliberations, voting on matters of policy or being eligible to be elected to public office makes them full-fledged citizens of their republic. For these reasons, the participation of religious women in public prayer is no less important than addressing violence against women or equal pay. We must take it seriously.

Muslim Women’s Journey toward Recognition In New York City, on March 18, 2005, Dr. Amina Wadud, a woman professor of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and a devout Muslim, led a group of men and women in a Friday prayer (salat al-jama’ah). On that occasion she also delivered the customary weekly sermon (the khutbah). Dr. Wadud was thereby operating as an Imam, leader of her religious community. It was a historic moment and marked as such by the tiny yet jubilant community of attending men and women Muslims, by the global Muslim community, and by the mainstream media.9 The event intensified the debate among Muslims about whether Islam permits women to perform as Imams and lead the Friday public prayer before a mixed crowd of women and men. To illustrate its significance it is enough to point out that no mosque in New York City was willing to host the public prayer. The organizers initially planned to hold the prayer in a Soho art gallery, but a bomb-threat forced them to relocate to the Synod House affiliated with the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.10 The event generated a flurry of scholarly opinion, both supportive and opposing, as well as political commentary linking it to U.S. policy at home and abroad. A scholar by the name of Abid Ullah Jan branded the women “progressive opportunists,” and predicted their action would further stereotype American-Muslims as radical and dangerous, thus leading to pogroms and mass internments.11 Libya’s leader, Muaamar Kaddafi, warned that such activity might create a thousand Osama Bin Ladens.12 As this article is being written, more mixed-gender Friday prayers are being led by women.13 The practice is still held discreetly for fear of a backlash, and its practitioners still feel, to use a Western metaphor, like the early

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Christians in Rome. It is too early to predict how significant the transition is and where it may lead.14 The Qur’an, the holy book of Muslim believers, does not address the role of women in public prayers (e.g., Barlas 2002; Zahraa 2000). Even those denying the rights of Muslim women to lead a mixed congregation in prayer agree that “if we review the religious texts . . . we will not find a text that states point-blank that women are not permitted to lead people in prayer or deliver the Friday sermon.”15 Like Judaism, Islam has no authoritative hierarchy (an institution similar to the Papacy in Rome) to proclaim on these matters. Until very recently, however, most Muslim communities expected women to pray in the privacy of their home. In countries that allow women to attend prayer at the mosques (which is the case in most Muslim countries), women are expected to be passive participants. At home, women may lead a prayer, even to a mixed group of men and women. But many commentators insist that the woman leader be well versed in the Qur’an or that she be better qualified than any man in her household.16 In societies that discouraged the education of women, let alone their access to religious texts, it was unlikely to find a home where a woman was better qualified.17 Hence, the idea of a woman leading the prayer was not practical. Like orthodox synagogues, mosques typically seat women in separate sections, or relegate them to the rear, with a few Muslim countries excluding them completely. At the public prayer led by Dr. Wadud on March 18, 2005, worshipers departed from these traditions. Following the example of the prayer at the sacred space of the Qa’aba in Mecca, men and women stood in parallel columns.18 Dr. Wadud led the prayer, standing before the congregation, rather than in the front row, again departing from tradition. A further innovation was her decision to deliver the weekly sermon, the content of which was the status of women in the Qur’an (Wadud 2006: 249). Muslim feminists offer three basic arguments in favor of the inclusion of women in public. First, the Qur’an itself does not discriminate against women. Second, the Qur’an, as well as other early sources, speaks of women who held positions of public leadership. Third, a precedent during the life of the prophet Muhammad, the case of Umm Waraqa, shows that the prophet himself accepted gender equality in public prayer. Therefore, they argue, men and women did originally enjoy equal status in the public space of Muslim societies.19 The truest, highest, and most binding authority in Islam are the divine words of God (Allah) as they are inscribed in the Qur’an (Barazangi 2004). The Qur’an begins with the story of creation. Chapter 4:1 recounts God’s creation of man and woman: “O mankind! Be conscious of your Sustainer, who has created you out of one living entity

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(nafs), and out of it created its mate (zawj), and out of the two spread abroad a multitude of men and women.”20 The correct interpretation of this key verse, argue Muslim feminists, is that the male and the female were created as a pair of equal partners, at the same time, and of the same matter, and that each has a responsibility to actively participate in identifying with the message of the Qur’an and in interpreting it (Barazangi 2004: 43–47). Other verses of the Qur’an repeatedly refer to “men and women” rather than only to men (Wadud 1999: 15–28). The subsequent interpretation of these verses as creating the male first, and endowing him with the responsibility of developing Qur’anic jurisprudence, has resulted in the exile of half of the Muslim population—women—from rightful public participation. Thus, an initial error has been committed. The reason for the error and its subsequent entrenchment is that the traditional division of labor in Muslim societies has been projected onto the text of the Qur’an. Once one separates social conditions in the second half of the first millennium from God’s words, it becomes clear that the contemporary understanding of gender equality is compatible with the holy text and should prevail (Barazangi 2004: 44). Muslim feminists also invoke famous figures in the Islamic narrative as a second prong of their argument (Wadud 1999: 29–44). Some point to the role played by the Prophet Muhammad’s wives in developing Muslim law. Others point to figures explicitly mentioned in the Qur’an, for example, the Pharaoh’s wife who was said to have saved the life of the infant Moses, or Bilqis, the queen of Sheba.21 Particular emphasis is placed on the queen of Sheba, explicitly mentioned in the Qur’an as a model of wisdom and leadership (Wadud 1999). Thus, the argument goes, if Qur’anic narratives recognize women as equal and depict women as model leaders, and if all Muslim authorities agree that women are obligated to pray, it must follow that they can lead the public prayer. To buttress this argument is a third prong: the tale of Umm Waraqa, occurring in the immediate post-Qur’anic period and therefore radiating some of the original authority of the Qur’an.22 “The Prophet (peace be upon him) commanded Umm Waraqa, a woman who had collected the Qur’an, to lead the people of her area in prayer. She had her own mu’adhdhin [person who performs the call to prayers].”23 Opponents of women-led, mixed-gender public prayers rely on the silence of the original text on the matter of public prayer to support their position that tradition was also the message implicitly enshrined in the Qur’an. These scholars argue that Umm Waraqa must have had a mosque at home and it was there that she led members of her household. The method of this interpretation turns the tale of Umm Waraqa into a precedent narrowed to its facts and then universalized into a

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general rule. The private/public distinction is preserved, women’s prayers are legitimated, leadership is allowed, but only in the privacy of the home and only to members of the household. The public sphere remains the men’s domain (Barazangi 2004: 35). A companion challenge narrows the value of this precedent further. It argues that the Prophet allowed Umm Waraqa to lead a mixed group in prayer only because she happened to be more knowledgeable in the ways of the Qur’an than any men in her household. Recall that at that time Islam was struggling for recognition and was therefore limited to a small and self-selected group. When (as would often be the case in a society that does not value the education of women) a male member of the household is more knowledgeable about Islam, it is his duty to lead, and women must cede to his authority. To the three elements reviewed above, Muslim reformers add the concept of Ijtihad. A part of Muslim law, Ijtihad permits the adaptation of law to urgent and changing conditions of society (Hallaq 2001). One may see it as a tool, common to all legal systems, that allows for facing challenges from within, thereby responding to social needs without precipitating a legal breakdown. Critics respond that the doors of Ijtihad were closed around the tenth century and that since then significant changes of mainstream doctrine are not acceptable. The matter is controversial, but if one agrees that political and social consciousness in the twenty-first century requires the recognition of half of the Muslim population as equal partners in the Islamic project, then clearly Ijtihad is called for to enable appropriate interpretation (Arshad 2006; see discussion on how government of Morocco deployed Ijtihad in order to shape modern family law). Thus, Muslim scholars who seek reform face a high degree of opposition, consisting of patriarchal cultural traditions maintained by conservative scholars who consider themselves guardians of the sacred gates. The reformers rely on fresh readings of the canonical texts, on careful and critical expositions of precedents, and on creative interpretations of lacunae in the texts and traditions. Above all they are motivated by the wish to remain an integral part of their religious communities as full and equal citizens.

Jewish Women’s Journey toward Recognition The twentieth century witnessed Western Judaism’s division into three major denominations: Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. The Reform movement, born in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century, has recognized women’s need for equality since its inception (but has not always acted on this principle). The Conservative movement, born in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth

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century, allowed men and women to worship together, but enforced the legal barriers that excluded women from equal participation in the public ritual. Each movement, in its own way, was prepared to unmoor itself from legal rules that it considered anachronistic and counterproductive. Orthodox Judaism, itself complex and pluralistic, has by and large opposed change. Its leaders viewed Jewish law—Halakha—as disqualifying women from full and equal participation in the act of public worship. I should add that the Jews of the Middle East have not divided into denominations and that their approach is closer to the Muslim position. Until the 1970s, men enjoyed a monopoly over the public ritual in all Jewish denominations. No denomination allowed the ordination of women as rabbis, and only the Reform movement waived the rule that men alone are eligible for the worship quorum, the minyan. In general, women were segregated into “women’s quarters,” often cramped and shabbily kept, just like their Muslim sisters. Pious women channeled their religious energy into the social welfare of the congregation. Let me explain briefly the reasons for the view that Jewish law prohibits women’s active participation and leadership in the ritual of public prayer. Halakha requires a worship quorum, a minyan of ten persons, to hold a valid public prayer. The principle that a community is made up of ten persons (quorum) is rooted in the Bible and does not mention the gender of these ten persons. Later, the Talmud fashioned the rule that the ritual of communal prayer necessitates ten persons. Still, the Talmud did not specifically hold that these ten must be men, and over the generations the issue has been disputed. The scale of authoritative commentary tilted toward the exclusion of women, and yet this commentary was riddled with exceptions, and rested on a genderneutral Talmudic statement. Only in the sixteenth century did Rabbi Yosef Karo, in his canonic Shulchan Aruch (a codification of halakhic obligations) limit the quorum to men. Women were excluded because of a distinction between, on the one hand, halakhic obligations that are time bound and, on the other hand, obligations that are not time bound. Women were exempt from time-bound obligations because of their family role as wives and mothers. Public prayer must be conducted at certain times during the day and therefore it is a time-bound obligation. The argument is that because women were exempt from the obligation of time-bound prayer, it followed that they were also exempt from the obligation of quorum membership. According to Karo and subsequent commentary, women may not count as members of the quorum and may not perform any of the tasks associated with it (Hauptman 1993: 396; Sperber 2007). Massive change came in the 1970s when the Reform movement, which had already counted women as members of the quorum, invited

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women to take an equal part in positions of leadership. The movement began to ordain women as rabbis and train women cantors, and this breakthrough added to the already intensifying pressure on the Conservative movement to begin integration.24 In 1971, a group of 12 women calling itself “Ezrat Nashim” (the name is suggestive as it means both “women’s aid” and the separate section for women in the synagogue) submitted a manifesto to the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement. They demanded equal access to all areas of Jewish life, including membership in the minyan (Cantor 1995: 414). In February 1973, the First National Jewish Women’s Conference was held in New York City (Cantor 1995: 415). That same year, the Conservative movement made the inclusion of women in the minyan a matter of voluntary choice for its congregations. This decision was perceived to be news fit to print on the front page of the New York Times (Whitfield 2002: 1122; Prell 1989; Cantor 1995). Today, the full participation of women in Conservative and Reform synagogues is experienced as natural as the presence of African-Americans in the highest levels of government (Hauptman 1993). It is safe to say that many do not even know that until a few years ago gender-blind worship had been an exception to a widely accepted rule of exclusion. Orthodox jurisprudence tends to shun change and reform, and resists the idea that law is a reflection of its social environment. Orthodox rabbis regarded the feminist movement as an unwelcome “gentile” influence, a symptom of corruption of the genuine Jewish spirit. They saw feminism as “inauthentic” and condemned it as an alien intrusion.25 Two developments, however, combined to nurture a feminist movement within Orthodoxy. First, Orthodox rabbis had to concede that the prohibition on women’s access to Jewish learning was based on culture, not law (Frimer 1998: 54). Since the 1980s, yeshivot (institutes of higher learning) for women began to proliferate, particularly in Israel, educating both Israeli and foreign students. Orthodox Jewish women got the opportunity to undertake sophisticated and rigorous Jewish learning (El-Or 1998). Knowledge allowed them to evaluate for themselves why they were banned from public ritual. Meanwhile, American Jewish women studying in Conservative and Reform institutions of higher learning (e.g., the Jewish Theological Seminary), and emboldened by their access to the public prayer in their synagogues, began publishing scholarly work on the subject (Greenberg 1981; Plaskow 1990; Weiss 1990; and Adler 1998). American Orthodox Jewish women were thereby receiving feminist interpretations of Jewish law with regard to the public prayer from multiple sources. The “Women Tefillah Groups” (tefillah is the Hebrew word for prayer) were the fruit of these developments, gaining momentum from

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the mid-1980s onward. Some orthodox rabbis in the United States were sympathetic to the desire of women to worship as part of the community. They were willing to read the sources of Jewish law with a critical eye and exploit loopholes in order to allow more egalitarianism and more participation, all the while striving not to cross clear lines. The body of literature on the subject has grown exponentially (Ross 2004; Sperber 2007). Still, since the 1980s, while women enjoyed full participation in the Reform and Conservative synagogues, their Orthodox sisters experienced a much slower pace of integration. They had to abide by the Orthodox rule that women are not fit to serve in the quorum and were therefore unable to perform rituals that require a quorum such as calling for prayer or chanting from the Torah. In order to honor these prohibitions and still take an active part in public prayer, Orthodox scholars (men and women) engaged in a careful sorting out of public prayer into two types: prayers that necessitate a quorum and prayers that do not condition their validity on the minyan. They stated that they were entitled to engage in all prayers that fell into the second category. To emphasize that they were abiding by the prohibition on women’s participation in the minyan, they called themselves a “group,” not a minyan. They claimed the right to wear the prayer shawl (tallit), sing the songs leading to the sacred blessings, hold the Torah scroll, and read from it in the traditional chant. This compromise (the word compromise is my own choosing, and may not reflect the opinion of Orthodox women) led to the institution, now widespread in the United States, of Tefillah Groups. The similarity between contemporary traditional Islam and contemporary traditional Judaism is striking. Both insist on the monopoly of men in public prayer and do not allow for mixed-gender prayers. Both traditions tolerate the leadership of women in purely female gatherings. The next phase, currently spreading, is a joint effort by Orthodox men and women to form new congregations of “egalitarian minyanim.” These prayer quorums consist of men and women who are dedicated both to halakha and to egalitarianism. In these groups both the women and the men, almost all below 40 years old, are well educated and versed in halakha. This is significant because these women have the confidence and skill to lead the liturgical worship, while the men have the confidence and skill to face and transcend the ambiguity of the seemingly authoritative rules that exclude women. The piety and commitment to equal citizenship shared by members of these groups, men and women, is perhaps the key to their success. In egalitarian minyanim, the community splits into a section of men and a section of women, observing a symbolic (sometimes unseen) partition between them.

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Both sections use one prayer desk stationed in front (bimah), where a woman (on the women’s side) and a man (on the men’s side) stand and alternate in leading the prayer. They observe clear lines, where Jewish law is unambiguous in limiting the prayer to men. Where the language is vague or ambiguous, they choose the interpretation that agrees with egalitarianism rather than the one that rejects it.26

A Glance at Other Jurisdictions: The Cases of Tajikistan and Israel In order to better appreciate the contribution of general American culture or the progressive feminist movement in the United States to the religious women’s quest for recognition, it may be useful to look elsewhere for comparisons. Tajikistan, a republic with a Muslim majority, and Israel, the self-proclaimed Jewish state, are useful in this context. I am only attempting a glance at these jurisdictions, rather than a fullfledged inquiry. For our purposes, this would be enough as our eyes are cast mainly on developments in the United States, with a side glance at understanding the hurdles faced by religious women in other jurisdictions, particularly where civic society is not firmly rooted or where the government prefers the status quo. Tajikistan’s history in the twentieth century is intertwined with the history of religion. In 1920 it came under Soviet domination, and was declared a Soviet republic. The Soviet hostility to religion discouraged religious worship. In opposition to Soviet domination, an affinity developed between Tajik nationalism and Islam. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan gained independence and in 1994 ratified a constitution that provides that “no state ideology or religion may be established”27 and that “religious organizations are separate from the state and may not interfere in governmental affairs.”28 The constitution also guarantees gender equality and freedom of religious worship.29 Traditionally Tajiki women did not attend the mosque.30 In early 2004, women from the Vakhdat district, one of the strongholds of the United Tajik Opposition (UTO), began attending a mosque for purposes of prayer. In August of 2004, the Council of Ulemo—the supreme religious body of Muslims in Tajikistan—banned the presence of women in mosques. On November 6, 2004, President Emomali Rahmonov issued a decree affirming the ban. Very little is known about this ban.31 Some argued that it was a temporary measure, related to the fact that Tajiki mosques lacked adequate facilities for women; once mosques were fitted with separate facilities (which alone is proof that things are changing), women would be permitted to attend them.32 While the context and reasons for the ban are shrouded in contradictory explanations, it is clear that the government of Tajikistan did

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not hesitate to deploy the power of the state—rule making and police enforcement—to defend it.33 The principle of the free exercise of religion, as well as the guarantee of equal protection, was placed on the back burner. Clearly, constitutional principles cannot thrive without an empathetic culture. Israeli society is torn between a strong secular way of life and a traditional-religious, mostly Orthodox, ideology. Conservative and Reform Judaism as well as Orthodox women’s Tefillah groups do exist, but they are merely tolerated, not welcomed, by the majority of religious worshippers. In one glaring instance, the government was directly involved in denying recognition to women who wished to partake in the communal prayer as equals. In the late 1980s a diverse group of women, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, decided to hold a collective prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. They called themselves the Women of the Wall (WOW for short), formed the International Committee for Women of the Wall (ICWOW), and teamed up with Israeli women who were enthusiastic about this project. Following tremendous pressure from the Orthodox religious establishment and considerable violence against WOW members, the government banned the practice. Their argument was that this Tefillah group violated local custom and offended local feelings. A petition was brought before the High Court of Justice. WOW made a narrow argument: that as a state employee running a state-funded synagogue on state grounds, the rabbi of the wall was obliged to allow the prayers of groups of women in the area designed especially for women. In the course of almost 14 years, the court issued three decisions (Raday 2003). Finally, a 5:4 majority denied WOW’s petition.34 The court called upon the government to prepare another site, which is now available and is being used. Business is conducted as usual at the wall, and the worshippers know that “they” (WOW) have been relegated to another site, and that tradition and convention remain triumphant. Herein lies the similarity between Tajikistan and Israel. In both cases the culture was not hospitable to the women’s demand for recognition, and the government felt at liberty to allow political considerations and alliances to trump the women’s legal cause. Indeed, in Tajikistan the prohibition was general, and in Israel it was circumscribed; in Tajjikistan, Muslim religious women had little recourse, whereas in Israel, Jewish women and men were free to form their own synagogues. However, it is arguable that the defeat of the Jewish women in Israel is glaring. Israel is a state with a tradition of respecting the rule of law and freedom of religious worship. The fact that all three branches of the government stood behind the exclusion of the WOW is therefore even more emphatic.

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American Legal Culture: The Conditions Facilitating the Struggle of Religious Muslim and Jewish Women for Equality Why have Muslim and Jewish women in the United States been relatively successful in planting the seeds for their integration into the public aspects of their respective religions, whereas their coreligionists in other countries have been less fortunate? Below, I list several factors that I believe have been influential in encouraging American women to overcome their traditional exclusion. The Culture of Rights In his book The Horizontal Society, Lawrence M. Friedman elaborates on the concept of a culture of rights. He observes that in emerging modern society, persons of different races, genders, nationalities, and religions are convinced that they have a right to have rights (Friedman 1999: 94; Benhabib 2002: 2). Americans do not necessarily experience their rights in the actual world, and may not even be able to specify the particular rights that they are entitled to, but they do have an expectation to be rights bearers. Either growing up in America or experiencing the socialization into American culture as an immigrant makes one develop the expectation to enjoy equality, think for oneself, and partake in the civic culture. A religious person may begin to experience their exclusion within their own religion as “otherization.” The culture of rights operates to encourage challenges to the status quo and to legitimate the call for reform. Majority Religious Culture: The Christian Influence, the Protestant Impact Consider an Orthodox Jew, or a Muslim, watching their president attending church on television. A fact that might appear most natural to Christian Americans, but that stands out for the Orthodox Jew or practicing Muslim, is the way in which the president and the first lady worship together. Many will dismiss this spectacle as an irrelevant “way of others to worship,” but a few may feel a yearning to own the rights enjoyed by the first lady and may ask: Why can’t we do likewise? The inclusion of women in positions of power among many Protestant groups in the United States signals that equality in worship is possible. Furthermore, Protestantism supplies a methodology to legitimate inclusion. Under Protestantism one is entitled to go directly to scripture, the Hebrew Bible, and the Talmud in the Jewish case, the Qur’an and Hadith in the Muslim case, and see whether it is indeed

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true that women should be banned from full participation. The encouragement to take an independent, individual, assessment of what the Word means, is a part of American culture, and is available to Muslim and Jewish women who seek full integration. Indeed, as I have shown above, some of them have taken this opportunity, with encouraging results. The political scientist Alan Wolfe, in his book The Transformation of American Religion (2003), has analyzed the phenomenon of “convergence” of religions in America.35 He shows how Islam in the United States is finding a variety of ways to transform itself (Wolfe 2003: 226–36; Smith 1999) and predicts that the status of Muslim women will change in the American environment. However, minority religionists are fiercely dedicated to their own worldview and resent the thought that they might imitate another way of life. For change to be valid they must reason and feel that it is legitimate within their authentic traditions, springing from their own texts, and facilitated by their own distinct legal methodologies. Much respect needs to be paid to this perspective as we come to evaluate subtle influences. Constitutional Jurisprudence Since the 1980s, American constitutional jurisprudence has been torn between two important interpretive movements. “Originalism” seeks to restore to the constitution its original meaning. Popular Constitutionalism, or “Taking the constitution away from the courts,” seeks to (re)invest constitutional interpretation in the legitimate proprietor of the constitution, “we the people” (Kramer 2005; Calabresi and Scalia 2007; Tushnet 2000). These movements originated with very different goals in mind. Originalism was designed to create a valid legal theory for dismantling the legacy of the New Deal and the Warren Court. In contrast, constitutional populism aims at limiting the power of the federal judiciary (the judiciary that would dismantle the New Deal and Warren Court liberalism) to impose conservative ideological preferences on the body politic. Like American constitutionalists seeking reform (conservative as well as progressive reform), Muslim- and Jewish-feminist reformers seek to reread the body of precedents and treatises in light of the original sacred sources in order to recover the true meaning or spirit of the fundamental message. The fact that these theories of recovering true meanings are an important part of the political discourse in the United States creates a hospitable climate where Muslim and Jewish feminists feel comfortable developing their own interpretation within the four corners of their own intellectual-religious milieu (Quraishi 2006; comparing methodologies of interpreting the U.S. Constitution

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and the Qur’an). Of course, the purpose of deploying originalism may be radically different, yet the method is similar. The availability of the method, so ubiquitous in the American discourse, helps explain why the seeds of reform find a particularly hospitable milieu in this country. Jurisprudence The tension between legal formalism on the one hand and sociological jurisprudence on the other, a legal theory that holds law to be reflective of society, has been crucial in both Muslim and Jewish interpretations of their respective legal systems. Legal formalism, backed by traditionalists, insists that the Jewish and Muslim male monopoly in public prayer should prevail because this segregationist law is backed by a well-developed corpus of canonic jurisprudence and because it has been accepted for generations by the majority of believers. The response that times have changed is rooted in American culture. The 19th Amendment, recognizing women’s right to vote, the Civil Rights Acts prohibiting sex discrimination, the women’s movement, and the advances made by women in all walks of life, result in an ever widening gap between the formalistic conception of orthodox religious law and modern society. Women theorists and activists make use of sociological jurisprudence in their effort to challenge formalism. A subtle application of this challenge is found in Amina Wadud’s pioneering Qur’an and Woman (Wadud 1999). The Qur’an is the holy word of God (Allah). It is fortified with interpretations provided by the Prophet Muhammad and his inner circle (Hadith). What should be done when a tension is observed between the original message of the Qur’an and its subsequent, patriarchal interpretations? The antiformalist, historicist, and yet originalist approach is that only the Qur’an itself is eternally binding. Wadud observes: “While I accept the role of the prophet both with regard to revelation, as understood in Islam, and to the development of Islamic law on the basis of his sunnah or normative practices, I place greater significance on the Qur’an. . . . I would never concede that the equality between women and men demonstrated in the Qur’an could be removed by the prophet. If such a contradiction did exist, I would choose in favor of the Qur’an.” Wadud makes use of theories of sociological jurisprudence and of a historicist understanding of legal interpretation, but, in her first book, she avoided relying on any specific secular literature, perhaps sensing that using secular sources might weaken her arguments. Rachel Adler, in her attempt to develop an egalitarian theology of Judaism, relies explicitly on secular legal scholarship. This may be because the idea of women’s participation in public prayer, at least in the

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Reform and Conservative movements of Judaism, has already entered the canon, and the reliance on secular sources is less threatening. Another explanation may be that Reform and Conservative Judaism are themselves schools rooted in the Enlightenment and therefore have kinship to secular thought. Adler’s book Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics devotes an entire chapter to jurisprudence. The title of her book already discloses her intellectual debt to Martha Minow’s historic 1987 foreword in the Harvard Law Review. Minow’s “Justice Engendered” was the very first foreword authored by a woman law professor (1987). Adler’s arguments, that the exclusion of women is based on a formalistic legal theory, are also substantiated by references to Robert Cover’s canonic “Nomos and Narrative” (1983), Kenneth Karst’s “Woman’s Constitution” (1984), Robin West’s “Jurisprudence and Gender” (1988), as well as to philosophers John Rawls, Michael Sandel, and Seyla Benhabib (this is a partial list). Adler cites them liberally, as authoritative analyses of the way feminist readings of sacred texts should unfold. Thus, in both the American-based Muslim and Jewish cases, contemporary American legal scholarship is very much a part of the effort to develop a progressive and feminist religious jurisprudence.

Sociological and Philosophical Scholarship Muslim and Jewish feminists make extensive use of American scholarship by secular feminists in a variety of fields. Take, for example, Nimat Hafez Barazangi’s Woman’s Identity and the Qur’an. Barazangi opens her book with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She enters into a dialogue with Stanton, and examines “the significance of Stanton’s arguments with reference to the Qur’an as the primary living text of Islam” (Barazangi 2004: 4). Barazangi’s bibliographic list includes such American scholars as Seyla Benhabib, Susan Moller Okin, Nathan Glazer, David Hollinger, and Iris Marion Young. (ibid.: 153 [Benhabib], 160 [Susan Moller Okin], 154 [Nathan Glazer], 156 [David Hollinger], 164 [Iris Marion Young]). A similarly rich background of materials has evidently influenced theorist Tamar Ross in her effort to develop explanations and tools to enhance the equality of women in Judaism (Ross 2004). American scholarship works to legitimize the feminist project, and perhaps to make it more accessible to the general secular audience. Yet the very usage of these theories also shows that they have become a part of the religious discourse, and as such that they have been internalized by the tiny minority of believers who search for ways to overcome their “otherization” in their own communities.

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U.S. History in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century There is a wide consensus among American scholars that the most dramatic change in the law of the United States took place in the area of race relations. The Civil Rights Movement, the major catalyst of these changes, made an indelible impression on the American psyche. Feminists have been the direct descendants of this movement, and its memory feeds their imagination. The rise of Islam among African-Americans is partially rooted in the African-American search for an authentic identity on U.S. soil (Smith 1999: chap. 4). Dr. Amina Wadud, the scholar who led the historic prayer, is an African-American. Her struggle to open Islam to female participation is, in many ways, a repeat of Linda Brown’s effort to seek access to white public education in segregated America. Responding to a provocative question at a public lecture on Islam and Women, Wadud replied: “Usually I wear the hijab, and when I am wearing it, most Muslims do not consider me African-American; I pass off as a South Asian. . . . But when they see me without a scarf, they can see my African locks and they know I am Black and suddenly their attitude changes. The fact is I am a nigger and you will just have to put up with my blackness.”36 At the public prayer in New York City led by Wadud, a man, asked how he felt, responded: “This is to me like Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus.”37 Rosa Parks also made an appearance in an American fatwa: “a tiny Black lady in America, refused to go to the back of the bus 50 years ago because she was black. She destroyed apartheid in America by her courageous action. Amina Wadood [sic] is our Rosa Parks. God bless her courage.”38 The Muslim struggle for gender equality appears to echo, as well as to draw strength and inspiration from, the civil rights movement. The American collective consciousness was also the catalyst for the Jewish-feminist movement’s struggle for equality (Cantor 1995: 348; Kaufman 1988). The Jewish-feminist movement of the early 1970s in the United States was populated by women who were either veterans of the civil rights movement or who had been influenced by it. Note the dialogue between Phyllis Chesler (a prominent feminist theoretician in the 1970s), leader of the international (mostly American) WOW, and Anat Hoffman, the Israeli petitioner in the WOW litigation: “[Chesler:] The NAACP decided to back Rosa Parks who, on December 1, 1955, was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus.” “[Hoffman:] We are the same. Rosa Parks wasn’t only about a bus issue. . . . We want to move to the front of the bus, and people are telling us this is unacceptable” (Chesler and Haut 2003: 53).

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The Impetus to Show the Universalist, Benevolent Side of Minority Religions Following September 11, 2001, the Western media has been flooded with reports on Islam. Most of the descriptions focused on the militant (Jihadist) Islam. It is not surprising that the American Muslim community has been laboring to acquaint Americans with another Islam: benevolent, seeking peace and justice, open to progressive change (Armstrong 2000: 6). The struggle for women’s equality is a part of this campaign. Something similar, though not identical, marked the Jewish history of integration in America. By focusing on the universalistic messages of Judaism, Jews insisted that their culture shared some deep affinity with Christianity, and that therefore their integration should be welcome (Howe 1976: 618). The rapprochement between Jew and Gentile gave birth to the description of American culture as “Judeo-Christian” (Ackelsberg 1996: 89). It would be interesting to watch how Muslim integration, as it is bound to develop, weaves Muslim themes into this concept (Feldman 2005).39 The term “Abrahamic faith” seems already interwoven into the public discourse.

Conclusion In the United States, the campaign to include women in active roles in public prayer has been moderately successful. Within the Jewish community, the Reform and Conservative denominations today recognize women as full and equal partners in public prayer. Some even hold that without the integration and participation of women these congregations may starve. In Muslim-American communities, one sees heightened awareness of women as active participants, and the number of women-led prayers of mixed groups is growing. Still, in both Muslim and Jewish communities in the United States, hardcore believers reject the idea of egalitarianism, and insist on exclusion and segregation as divinely ordained. Hopefully, under optimal conditions, they will slowly, if grudgingly, accept women as full-fledged members of their community. We are at a crossroads. Muslim and Jewish law may either develop to fit more comfortably with contemporary constitutional principles or insist on its irreconcilable difference, thereby highlighting the chasm between predominant and subcultures. The influence of American culture should also be evaluated against the role America has played in world politics. The United States is a global power, and its political influence, indeed hegemony, is the subject of great resentment. In the major centers of Jewish and Muslim

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learning, the label “made in America” may by itself lead to rejection of the product. Thus, the question of which territory represents religion more “authentically” has been tied to the question of permissible reforms. In the case of Islam, the United States is generally considered the periphery, and Muslim Centers of Learning in the Arab world are considered the center. Arab-Muslim opposition to active participation of women in public prayer may deter American Muslim scholars who value reform. In the case of Judaism, the hierarchy is not as clear. Yet Israeli rabbis either consider themselves more authentic than their brethren in the diaspora, or are at least in competition with them. This dynamic further complicates the situation, chills the determination of some women to demand equality, and discourages progressive male religious authorities from taking a firm stand. Given the formidable obstacles, it is hard to predict how things will evolve. Perhaps the words of the Nobel Laureate poetess Wislawa Szymborska, neither Jewish nor Muslim, provide comfort for those who seek recognition, and for those of us who are interested in their struggle: “Certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.”40

Notes 1. There is no consensus on the number of Jews or Muslims in the United States. Various websites list the number of Muslims from three to nine million and the number of Jews between five to six millions. 2. See discussion below. 3. Wadud had previously delivered the Khutbah (sermon) during Friday prayer before a mixed congregation in the Claremont mosque in South Africa. She recounts that she did not plan the 2005 event, but that she was rather spontaneously integrated into it. Nor did she consider the event egalitarian. 4. The same is true of Catholicism, in which women are barred from the priesthood. A comparative study of the three religions will be most enlightening. 5. The Avalon Project at Yale University, “English Bill of Rights 1689,” http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/england.htm (accessed January 22, 2008). 6. The Treatise of Ibn Rushd, http://al-eman.com/feqh/viewchp. asp?BID=231&CID=5#s46 (Arabic) (accessed January 18, 2008) 7. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Tefilah 8.1. 8. See discussion on page 130. 9. The Progressive Muslim Union of North American (PMUNA) operates a website containing rich information on the prayer led by Wadud and on the controversy surrounding the position of Muslim law on this issue. This may not have been the very first such woman-led salat in

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10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

P n i n a L a h av the Islamic world. Indeed, it should be understood in the context of a wave of calls for Islamic reforms with regard to the status of women. Yet the controversy and excitement around it point to its significance. See PMUNA’s homepage at http://www.pmuna.org/. “Muslim Group is Urging Women to Lead Prayers,” New York Times, 18 March 2005; “With Women at the Forefront, A Muslim Service Challenges Tradition,” New York Times, 19 March 2005; “Woman Leads Mixed-Gender Islamic Service, Group Protests Outside,” Boston Globe, 19 March 2005; “A Prayer Towards Equality,” Washington Post, March 18, 2005. For Professor Wadud’s reflections on this and other public prayers, see Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad (2006). Abid Ullah Jan, “From Rebels to Leaders: The Fitna of Women Leading Men in Prayers,” Media Monitors Network. http://world.mediamonitors. net/content.view/full/13703 (accessed January 22, 2008). “Khadafy warns over co-ed prayer,” New York Daily News, 24 March 2005. Ahmed Nassef, “Amina Wadud Leads Mixed Gender Friday Prayer in Barcelona,” Muslim Wake Up (October 2005 edition), http://www. muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/2005/10/amina_wadud_lea.php (accessed January 22, 2008). There is evidence of incremental changes, more acceptance of women leading congregations of women in prayer (very rare hitherto) and more willingness to examine the legal basis for the eligibility to lead prayers under Islamic law. For an example, see Karia Bruning, “Are North American Muslims ready for female imams?” Columbia News Service, 28 November 2006. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, “Fatwa by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi,” www.islamonline.net(accessed January 22, 2008). Sheikh alQaradawi is an eminent Egyptian scholar, best known for his popular Al Jazeera program Sharia wal-Hayat (Sharia and Life). Sheikh al-Qaradawi also holds that a woman may lead a congregation of women in prayer. Imam Zaid Shakir, “An Examination of the Issue of Female Prayer Leadership,” Progressive Muslim Union of North America, http://www. pmuna.org/archives/Imam%20Zaid%20Shakir.pdf (accessed January 22, 2008). Imam Zaid Shakir posits various interpretations, including one holding that the woman must be well-versed in the Qur’an if she is to lead a prayer in her home, and another that she must be better versed than other men of the household. Sheikh al-Qaradawi suggests that the woman must be “well advanced in age” (see infra, note 17). Compare these approaches with Orthodox Judaism: those who concede that a woman may read from the Torah during the communal service still oppose it because her reading would send the message that the community has no men able to do the reading, and such a message may reflect negatively on the community. See Rabbi D. Sperber, “Congregational Dignity and Human Dignity: Women and Public Torah Reading” Edah, http://www.edah.org/backend/coldfusion/search/document. cfm?title=Congregational%20Dignity%20and%20Human%20Dignity%

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18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

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3A%20Women%20and%20Public%20Torah%20Reading&hyperlink=3 %5F2%5Fsperber%2Ehtm&type=JournalArticle&category=Jewish%20 Diversity%2FRelating%20to%20the%20Non%2DOrthodox&authortitl e=Professor&firstname=Daniel&lastname=Sperber&pubsource=not%2 0available&authorid=223&pdfattachment=3%5F2%5FSperber%2Epdf (accessed January 22, 2008). The historic prohibition on women’s religious learning is a feature common to Islam and Judaism. Both religions, however, have come to accept the fact that women are willing and eager to partake in the act of learning and opened their institutions of higher learning to them. Compare the custom being developed in egalitarian minyanim (see infra note 26). For discussion, see Nevin Reda, “What would the Prophet Do? The Islamic Basis for Female-Led Prayer,” PMU—The Women-led Prayer Initiative, Muslim Wakeup, http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/ archives/2005/03/women_imamat.php (accessed January 25, 2008). See also Havva Guney-Rubenacker, “Can Muslim Women Lead Prayers?” unpublished manuscript. Qur’an Verse 33:35. Sarah Shehabuddin, Female Leadership in Islam, http://www.irfi.org/ articles/articles_401_450/female_leadership_in_islam.htm (accessed August 8, 2008). Note that in the Hebrew Bible the one who saves Moses’s life is Pharaoh’s daughter, not his wife. McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316, 323 (1819). Reda, supra note 19. See also, “Women in Society: Political Participation,” Muslim Women’s League, http://mwlusa.orgpublications/essays/ polirights.html, p. 3 (accessed August 25, 2005); Meyer 1988. Barack Fishman, 1993: chap. 7; Nadell, 1999; Rabbi David J. Fine, “Women and the Minyan, OH 55:1 (2002),” The Rabbinical Assembly, http://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/teshuvot/docs/19912000/oh_ 55_1_2002.pdf. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. Iggerot Moshe OH 4:49 (1976), “Concerning the New Movement of Important and Confident Women.” Examples are worship quorums at Yale University (Urim, http:// www.minyanurim.com/ [accessed January 22, 2008]), at Harvard University (Tehilla, http://www.minyantehillah.org/ [accessed January 22, 2008]), and the Washington Square Minyan in Brookline, Massachusetts (http://www.wsminyan.org/ [accessed January 22, 2008]). In Israel, the pioneer in this area is the Shira Chadasha (“a new song”) Synagogue in Jerusalem (http://www.geocities.com/ shira_hadasha/ [accessed January 22, 2008]). See also Michal BarAsher Segal and Elizur Bar-Asher, “Guide for the Halakhic Minyan” http://minyanurim.com/uploads/Guide%20for%20Halachic%20Min yanim%20October%20-%20English%20-%20Bar-Asher%20Siegal.pdf. See also Hartman 2007. This book was published after this article had been completed and its content, regrettably, is not incorporated into the present discussion.

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27. http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/untc/ unpan003670.htm (accessed August 8, 2008). 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. IRINnews.org. “Ban on women attending mosques debated,” U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Tajikistan (on file with the author). It is estimated that 97 percent of Tajikistan’s Muslim majority are followers of the Imam Azam’s teaching, believing that women should pray at home, not in the mosque. 31. United States State Department, Report from March 6, 2007, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2006/78843.htm (accessed January 22, 2008). This report confirms the existence of the ban on women’s attendance of mosques, but reports that a “Friday Praying” mosque has been opened, where women are allowed to pray. 32. Nagris Zokirova, “Transitions Online: No Girls Allowed—8 October 2004,” http://www.singlearticles.com/transitions-online-no-girlsa3763.html (accessed January 22, 2008). But (ibid) for a U.S. State Department report of one mosque recently opened with adequate facilities. 33. See also U.S. Department of State 2006 Report on International Religious Freedom, discussing reasons for ban, http://www.state.gov/g/ drl/rls/irf/2006/71412.htm (accessed January 22, 2008). 34. Director General of the Government v. Anat Hoffman, HC Further Consideration, 4128/00 57(3) PD 289. 35. See Also Sanford Levinson 1988: 27–37; and Thomas C. Grey 1984. 36. Tarek Fatah, “‘I am a Nigger, and you will just have to put up with my blackness,’ Professor Amina Wadud Confronts Her Hecklers in Toronto,” Muslim Wakeup, http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/ archives/2005/02/i_am_a_nigger_a.php (accessed January 22, 2008). Note the sliding scale from her formal identification of herself as AfricanAmerican, to her description of how “they” see us—as black, to the pejorative nigger (implying that the deep racial prejudice is still strong). 37. Tasha Robertson, “Woman leads Mixed Islamic Service,” Boston Globe, 29 March 2005. Available at http://www.boston.com/news/nation/ articles/2005/03/19/woman_leads_mixed_gender_islamic_service/ (accessed January 22, 2008). 38. Islamic Center of Beverly Hills, www.icbh.org (accessed January 22, 2008). 39. In 2005, Justice Scalia made the following observation: “The three most popular religions in the United States, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—which combined account for 97.7% of all believers—are monotheistic.” McCreary County, Ky. v. American Civil Liberties Union of Ky., 545 U.S. 844, 894 (2005). This statement could well signal the arrival of Islam in U.S. legal culture by one of America’s leading legal intellectuals. 40. Wislawa Szymborska, “Love at First Sight,” Cinema 16, http:// cinema16.mty.itesm.mx/tres_colores/texto/kieslowsky/the_poem. html (accessed January 20, 2008).

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References Ackelsberg, Martha A. 1996. “Toward a Multicultural Politics: A Jewish Feminist Perspective.” In The Narrow Bridge: Jewish Views on Multiculturalism, ed. M. Brettschneider, pp. 89–104. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Adler, Rachel. 1998. Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America. Armstrong, Karen. 2000. Islam: A Short History. New York: Modern Library. Arshad, A. 2006. Ijtihad as a Tool for Islamic Legal Reform: Advancing Women’s Rights in Morocco. Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy 16: 129–56. Barazangi, Nimat Hafez. 2004. Woman’s Identity and the Qur’an: A New Reading. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Barlas, Asma. 2002. Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benhabib Selya. 2002. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Calabresi, Steven G., and Antonin, Scalia. 2007. Originalism: A Quarter Century of Debate. Washington, D.C.: Regnery. Cantor, Aviva. 1995. Jewish Women, Jewish Men: The Legacy of Patriarchy in Jewish Life. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Chesler, Phyllis, and Ruth Haut. 2003. Women of the Wall. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights. Cover, Robert. 1983. “The Supreme Court 1982 Term—Foreword: Nomos and Narrative.” Harvard Law Review 97: 4–67. El-Or, Tamar. 1998. Next Pessach: Literacy and Identity of Young Religious Zionist Women. Tel Aviv: Am Oved (Hebrew). Feldman, Noah. 2005. Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem—and What We Should Do About It. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Fishman, Sylvia Barack. 1993. A Breadth of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. Friedman, Lawrence Meir. 1999. The Horizontal Society. New Haven: Yale University Press. Frimer, Arye A. 1998. Women and Minyan. Tradition 23: 54–77 Greenberg, Blu. 1981. On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America. Grey, Thomas C. 1984. The Constitution as Scripture. Stanford Law Review 37: 1–25. Hallaq, Wael B. 2001. Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hartman Tova. 2007. Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism. Boston: Brandeis University Press. Hauptman Judith. 1993. Women and Prayer: An Attempt to Dispel Some Fallacies. Judaism 42: 94–103. Heerma van Voss, Lex. 2001. Petitions in Social History: International Review of Social History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Howe Irving. 1976. World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. James, William. 1982. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin. Karst, Kenneth. 1984. “Women’s Constitution.” Duke Law Journal: 447–504. Kaufman, Jonathan. 1988. Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America. New York City: Scribner. Kramer, Larry. 2005. The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, Sanford. 1988. Constitutional Faith. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Meyer, Michael A., 1988. Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Minow, Martha. 1987. The Supreme Court 1987 Term—Foreword: Justice Engendered. Harvard Law Review 101: 10–95. Nadell, Pamela. 1999. Women Who Would be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889–1985. Boston: Beacon Press. Plaskow, Judith. 1990. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. New York: Harper Collins. Prell, Riv-Ellen. 1989. Prayer and Community: The Havurah in American Judaism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Quraishi, Asifa. 2006. Interpreting the Qur’an and the Constitution: Similarities in the Use of Text, Tradition, and Reason in Islamic and American Jurisprudence. Cardozo Law Review 28: 67–121. Raday, Frances 2003. The Fight against Being Silenced. In Women of the Wall, ed. P. Chesler and R. Haut. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights. Ross, Tamar. 2004. Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. Smith, Jane I. 1999. Islam in America. New York: Columbia University Press. Sperber, Rabbi D. 2007. The Path of Halacha. Jerusalem: Reuben Mass. Stern, Arleen. 1983. Learning to Chant the Torah. In On Being a Jewish Feminist, ed. Susannah Heschel, pp.182–85. New York: Schocken Books. Tushnet, Mark V. 2000. Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wadud. Amina. 1999. Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ––––––. 2006. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam. Oxford: One World. West, Robin. 1988. Jurisprudence and Gender. University of Chicago Law Review 55: 1–72. Weiss, Avraham. 1990. Women at Prayer: A Halakhic Analysis of Women’s Prayer Groups. New York: Ktav. Whitfield, Stephen J. 2002. Declarations of Independence. In Cultures of the Jews, ed. D. Biale. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 1099–146. Wolfe, Alan. 2003. The Transformation of American Religion. New York: Free Press. Zaeske, Susan. 2003. Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery and Women’s Political Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Zahraa, Mahdi. 2000. Characteristic Features of Islamic Law: Perceptions and Misconceptions. Arab Law Quarterly 15: 168–96. Zaleski, Philip, and Zaleski Carol. 2005. Prayer: A History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Zuijdwijk, Ton J. M. 1982. Petitioning the United Nations: A Study in Human Rights. New York: St. Martin’s Press.


Chapter 6

4

“S u bway Women” and the Amer i can Near East R e lief i n Anatolia, 1919–192 4 Anat Lapidot-Firilla

Introduction The history of the twentieth century, noted Akira Iriye, was written mainly as the history of states, but at least in the American context should be viewed mainly as a history of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Iriye 1999: 425). While NGOs became part of the research mainstream in certain areas, mostly among social scientists, historians have been slow to make use of the literature and use it in their writings on the history of the twentieth century (ibid.: 424). What is true for American history is also very much the case for Middle East history. Indeed, with few exceptions most diplomatic historians who focus on the late-Ottoman and early–Turkish Republic period have ignored the importance of international NGOs and concentrated mainly on official diplomacy at a state-to-state level. One outcome of this neglect is the belated acknowledgment of the contribution of such organizations as Near East Relief (NER) to the spread of American values, culture, and products abroad. Another result of overlooking international NGOs was the sidelining of women, central activists in such organizations, to the margins of diplomatic history. This chapter seeks to demarginalize women’s activity as well as to decode the nature of the religion-genderpolitics triangle in which women operated and that they helped to shape.

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Researchers have pointed out that in the American Century, the mixture of the belief in doing well with the tendency to organize in private groups has shaped the activities of many social organizations in the United States. The twentieth century is known as the American Century because of the overwhelming dominance of the United States in technology and economy, but as Volker R. Berghahn explained, it was also so because of the mushrooming of American-based NGOs all over the world (Berghahn 1999). These organizations shaped a new image of the American hero. The way of this hero—that is, the American way—was to conquer the “others” by creating a common cultural language. Many articles that deal with transnational history and the beginning of globalization illuminated the creation of a new American cultural hero who set off to conquer the world with good deeds and peaceful means. Emily Rosenberg added a gender aspect to the established knowledge on international relations and the export of Americanism overseas. Her article reveals how for economic and cultural reasons the formula that connects modernity with mobility was created (Rosenberg 1999). Rosenberg also established the link between certain gender, aesthetic, and cultural values to the cultural norms of society and demonstrated how in the Western conception, gentle and slim women symbolized the civil and cultural. A thin and mobilized woman became, in the hands of economic consortia and Hollywood filmmakers, the symbol of American culture. No doubt, the mobilized thin women played and still do play an important part in exporting American culture and products overseas. Along with this image, of a glorified beauty in a limousine, emerged a counter-image of the subway woman. This was a woman, the product of an international social movement, who chose to save her money by riding the subway and contributed it to society, and in our case—to societies abroad that suffered major catastrophes during and after World War I.1 It is important to note that the contribution of women to missionary history is a subject well explored. Scholars such as Thorne, Singh, and Dana Robert, as well as many others, already recognized the role of women in the mission and recognized their unique interests, views of their own role, assumptions regarding the native population they worked in and societies they lived in (Thorne 2006; Singh 2000; Robert 1997). Their role and attitudes were coined by scholars as “missionary-Imperial Feminism” or “maternal imperialism.” However, in spite of their work in countries overseas, they were rarely viewed within the diplomatic history field. Moreover, historians of diplomatic history rarely make use of the documents available on the work of women activists overseas. Their accounts, if viewed, are often marginalized as not being objective, anecdotal, and peripheral to state archive documents.

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This chapter deals with one of the greatest diplomatic cultural and humanitarian operations organized by the American NER between 1919 and 1927, in which women took a major part, though one not always acknowledged. The chronological history of the NER was described by various historians, such as Robert L. Daniel, who concentrated on the philanthropic response to disaster in the Near East (Daniel 1970). Daniel stressed the importance of American philanthropy as a tool and an accepted instrument of foreign policy, and pointed to the strong connection between the state mechanisms and the private organizations. Indeed, the NER operation was initiated in response to the catastrophe in the Near East, however it was also a response to the fact that many in the United States have left the Protestant church as a result of the secularization process, and the emergence of an urgent need to revitalize the church. This translated into increased involvement on the part of the Protestant church in the economy and day-to-day social issues, and of activism well beyond the preaching about life in the next world. Philanthropic work in fields in which the government refrained from intervening or failed therein proved to be very efficient in generating excitement and drawing people into the community-church framework. The period between 1880 and 1920 was the golden age of missionary enterprise in the Middle East. As Fredrick Merk explained, “The mission was the truer expression of the national spirit. It made itself heard most authentically in time of ordeal or disaster” (Merk 1966: 261). But more importantly, philanthropy for public purposes was encouraged as part of the American image (ibid.: 265). Representatives of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Congregationalist in origin, began their work in various parts of the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s with the hope of preaching the teachings of Christianity to the Muslims (Earle 1929: 398–417; Lybyer 1924; Malakasian 1984: 349–50; Tibawi 1966; Grabill 1971). However, Ottoman authorities did not authorize the conversion of Muslims. In fact, the penalty for conversion and apostasy in the Sharia, the religious law, was death. It soon became evident that the hope for masses of converts was doomed to fail. Subsequently, instead of concentrating their efforts among the Muslim population, an illegal act in the Ottoman Empire, the missionaries began spreading their word to the local Christian population. In 1914, the American Board was in charge of 49 colleges and high schools throughout the Ottoman Empire (Nordmann 1929). However, when the war started the mission’s work in the field of education became secondary and most of its efforts were focused on providing help to the survivors-refugees, to orphans, and women. To reawaken the natives to new duties in Christ became almost inappropriate in the face of the Armenian genocide. Instead, compassion in various forms took its place.

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The complete history of the organization and its development is beyond the scope of this chapter. It is important, however, to note, that what has started as a missionary enterprise, has turned quickly into a state-backed international NGO relief endeavor. As early as 1915, the American Board formed the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR), that immediately after became known as the American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE), and than evolved into the NER (Moranian 2003: 194; Daniel 1970: 157). The U.S. Congress granted the organization a charter in 1919, thus endowing a political status and credibility to a church-based operation. The operation was carried out simultaneously in two geographic spheres: the previously Ottoman territories and the United States. In one sphere women activists were characterized by the “subway women,” thrifty, compassionate women, and on the other, compassion was packaged in medical terms and activities, “medicalized,” and translated into syringes, medical aid, and the spread of public health knowledge. In doing so, the NER activists helped create a future for the Armenian and Greek survivors in Anatolia, played key roles in assisting the church back at home to fill its halls and treasury, and contributed in further establishing American informal diplomacy and American consumerism in the areas they operated. No less important, in the process these women activists created for themselves a new identity and established the new American female heroine, armed with medical supplies and compassion. Among the organizations that lent a hand in this work, NER was particularly prominent. In fact, the majority of the American activity in the area, diplomatic or humanitarian, was conducted through the various pipelines of the organization. NER ran schools, orphanages, shelters for women (“rescue homes”), refugee camps, clinics and hospitals, work seminars, bazaars, and various other enterprises such as the occasional “relief theater.” The Turkish authorities noted their contribution and occasionally awarded NER officials, including women, with medals of the Imperial Order of Shefakat. The organization’s influence was immense. James Barton, the foreign secretary of the American Board, who chaired the organization, was involved in determining American policy in the Middle East, notwithstanding his hesitation to make such involvement publicly known. The representatives of the organization became the most reliable experts on the Middle East in general and on the Armenian and Greek populations in particular.2 They were also warmly welcomed in Anatolia. There, the appreciation for the American actions, on one hand, and the fierce opposition to the British actions, on the other, led to the establishment of the Wilsonian League, which supported the plan to establish an American mandate. One thing to remember is that the “vanishing”


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of the Armenian leadership in Anatolia during the war created a political vacuum and gave the NER the opportunity to represent the unrepresented.

The Politics of Compassion The documentation on the NER activists and operations is voluminous. They include official publications, reports, documents, and personal letters and a weekly newsletter published and distributed from Istanbul.3 The NER newsletter was mainly written and edited by women, who saw in it an opportunity to recreate their life and work story. In a way, the newsletter acted as a platform for the creation of a new American heroine. The new heroine was created as the antithesis to both the passive Anatolian woman and the American Hollywood woman described by Emily Rosenberg. In their attempt to navigate the public discourse and to carve out a place of their own, NER activists created the “subway woman.” As one activist articulated it in an article published by NER headquarters: The Lady of the house and I feel the need of a Rolls-Royce limousine and liveried chauffeur. But after paying our grocery bills and giving some thought to the orphans and refugees of the Near East, we do not have enough money left to buy even a flivver. Thereby we save the salary of the liveried chauffeur, and when we want to go for a joy ride we simply drop a nickel in the slot and take a rush-hour subway train for 151 Fifth Avenue.4

Most of the literature on NER rightly touches upon the connection between American foreign policy and philanthropic compassion and work. One aspect that was neglected is the way in which compassion was constructed in the hands of NER activists: through charity production. The charity or relief industry refers to both the productions of major relief operations and, mainly, the use of literary and cultural means aimed at generating compassion and in turn mobilizing funds and volunteers as well as achieving personal contentment. Compassion, while to a certain degree biologically engineered, is mainly socially and politically constructed, as noted by Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum 2001). Compassion, she explained, is a remedy for negative feelings. With the help of compassion we are capable of seeing other humans on similar terms and of empathizing with their vulnerability. Compassion allows us to get closer to others, to cross social, economic, and ethnic borders. Offering help and compassion to others grants us temporary happiness. However, we do not grant

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compassion to all humans; rather, we are guided in this respect by moral values that are acceptable to our society. The human tends to choose his subjects for compassion and considers some kinds of misery as unjustified while others are inevitably acceptable. This division assisted the NER activists not only to build public support for their cause but also to excuse their negative feelings toward certain segments of American society. In his article titled “The Institutionalized Child,” Barclay Acheson, an NER activist, compared the types of orphans of America and the Near East: It has been said that the product of American orphanages is below the standard of the normal child. If this is so, there are certain facts that may account for it. Many children in American orphanages are illegitimates; others are abandoned children; some are the offspring of subnormal parents who are unable to take care of them. Altogether the children in American institutions are apt to possess undesirable backgrounds. . . . The chief contrast between the children of American orphanages and the children under the care of Near East Relief lies in the fact that the latter are survivals of the fittest, the physically weak or mentally subnormal having died off. I should say that on the whole these children, rather than being subnormal, are above the average of their race, due to the selecting process of the vicissitudes through which they have passed. (Acheson 1924)

Like their male counterparts, American women’s compassion was rationalized and connected to social and pseudoscientific beliefs. The fact that compassion was not solely biological but rather guided by socially acceptable values did not escape the organization campaigners. As Suzanne Moranian noted, the management learned from previous experiences that connecting mission work to international catastrophe, especially those occurring in exotic places, attracted contributions for aid: the larger the catastrophe, the more donations were made (Moranian 2003). Over the 15 years of its operation, the organization distributed more than a hundred million dollars in relief and supplies (Daniel 1970: 169). In their hands, compassion became a tool that served American interests in the Middle East. They plotted the route for their home supporters through posters, magazines, pictures, and even tear-jerker films that encouraged the sentiments of empathy and compassion, and temporary euphoria through the act of “doing good.” Such feelings were predictable in view of the visual and audio material used to raise funds and awareness; however, it may also be argued that such emotions were built in, not only in the content of the stories told by the NER, but also in their literary structures. In 1921, less than two years after their first arrival in Anatolia, NER produced a movie called Alice in Hungerland, filmed with the help of


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an American director who had experience in “social” movies and who two years earlier had produced a film about an American orphan girl. The movie is an example of the methods used in arousing compassion: translating reality into well-known concepts and narratives from the Western literary world. Alice was a beautiful American girl who in her dream reached Anatolia, where nightmares come true. Alice, dressed in a well-ironed white dress, finds herself in an orphans’ camp with thousands of sick and hungry children. Innocent Alice asks questions and the information she receives in response looks to her like a logical quiz. Alice: Are you children? [Silence] Alice: Please, talk to me. You do not look like children in my neighborhood. A mature child: You do not look like a child. Have you received the beautiful clothes in an orphanage? Alice: Orphanage? Oh no. My mother made it. A young child: A mother?

Not only was the unnatural and unreasonable reality of the Near East brought to the American audience, but when Alice returned home her dress was stained and torn apart because parts were used as bandages and her hair is cut short. In other words, Alice, like the women of NER, became a new hero, one who sacrificed her convenience and mainstream looks for philanthropic compassion. In reality, American Alice was in fact a little Jewish girl named Esther Razon, who was fostered by Mrs. Florence Spencer Duryea, who was in charge on the operation in the Near East.5 Alice in Hungerland was not the only movie that was produced by NER. There were other famous ones such as Seeing is Believing, One of these Little Ones, Uncle America’s Golden Rule, and What the Flag Saw. Audiences coming to watch Coogan in comedies like Peck’s Bad Boy (1921) or Trouble (1922), also saw the reality in Armenia, Syria, and Greece. Naturally, when Alice in Hungerland was shown in different theaters all over the United States, in between Jackie Coogan’s commercial movies, commercial donors and their products were exposed through full-fledged advertising campaigns. Like in other grand American productions, advertising played an important role. It served not only to rally industrialists and producers of basic American foods such as barley, beans, oil, flour, and cocoa powder to further sponsor NER “shows,” but also as an opportunity to prove the high quality of American products and their wondrous effects. Well-fed children posed for NER cameras to prove what “a penny a day” could do as figure 6.1 suggests.

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Figure 6.1 NER orphans and American products on display Source: Image courtesy of The Near East Foundation and The Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advance Studies at Harvard University.

Most NER stories were tragic and dramatic. They left no room for interpretation and were translated to different age groups accordingly. Yet some stories were comic and had a happy end. Such was the story of Cosmos, written by K. H. Gillespie: Every orphanage has its pathetic scenes, but occasionally there is something which has humor in it. Little Cosmos gave us perhaps our best. He is a very small lad of about two and a half years. He was picked up on the streets and sent to the Greek hospital. While there he was claimed by the Armenians and taken to their hospital. Then the Armenians decided that he was a Greek and returned him to the Greek hospital, and from there he was sent to the Greek orphanage. Try as we might, we could not get him to attempt to talk. At last we decided that he was a mute. At Easter time when the children were given new clothing, Cosmos, along with the others, was being measured. During the process he was much amused with the writer’s glasses, and we asked if he would like a pair. Among the languages the interpreter tried out in putting the question was Russian—and Presto! Cosmos’ tongue was set wagging. Easter Sunday at church his uncle claimed him.6

All’s well that ends well. Naturally, this story reflects not only the literary capabilities of NER volunteers but also indicates the involvement of


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NER as well as other organizations in what might be called the “battle” over the identity of orphans—a struggle that had reached its zenith during the period under scrutiny. This dark chapter in the history of the imperialist involvement in Turkey was dealt with in the writings of some Turkish scholars, including such writers as Halide Edib in her Turkish Ordeal in the 1920s.7 In other stories published in the Istanbul weekly magazine, women are described as trained and successful peacemakers and diplomats as well as the messengers of new medical knowledge. In the typical NER narrative, the volunteers often suffered from cruel diseases such as typhus or dysentery but would not stop their efforts. One Miss Shauna of Texas was ordered, or so it was quoted in the newsletter, by the American consul to be evacuated, and she responded: “I’ll go this time,” she said, as she succumbed to the frantic appeals of her family, “but next time, you’ll see!” Now her “next time” has come, for having returned as a Near East Relief worker, after a year’s vacation at home, this determined young woman asked to be sent to the Caucasus because it was the most desperate and dangerous territory in all Armenia.”8

In spite of the attempts of NER activists to “medicalize” their compassion in the Anatolian fields—perhaps in an attempt to desensitize themselves to the overwhelming plight of the victims—serving among local Armenian and Greek women created a gentle cultural dialogue. The care of women in “rescue homes,” found throughout the country, was perhaps the most effective surroundings for such a dialogue. “Rescue homes” were established first under the British occupation authority in Istanbul and later by different international NGOs. NER was responsible for 11 such homes around the country but gave direct support to many others. According to NER accounts, around 63,800 women were helped in their institutions.9 The rescued women were pregnant Christian girls who were “saved” and “set free,” at times against their will, from their Muslim patrons. The average age was young, anywhere between 10 to 20 years old. The only unmarried or nonpregnant women who were allowed in such homes were those who were tattooed on their faces as a sign of ownership. Since the existence of Christian women in a Turkish harem was understood by the British and Americans to have always been the result of abduction, and their marriage was viewed as rape, their tattooed faces were seen as a symbol of their shame and doctors had to operate to remove the signs. Women’s accounts of rescue homes were sometimes conflicting. Some NER activists tell the story of young Christian women brought

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to harems in order to protect them. Some were married to their Muslim husbands out of love. In their letters they relate emotionally about the cross-cultural romances. NER women saw themselves at these homes as medical guides and public health consultants, detached from emotional involvement through their modern medical utensils—their syringes. Many of the young mothers, so they reported, were too young and emotionally unprepared to become mothers. Some were indifferent to their babies and other wished to send their children to their Muslim husbands, thus opening a new page in their life as free Christian women. Some volunteers expressed shock at the willingness of these young mothers to abandon their children and spoke in favor of motherhood as the main component of a woman’s identity. Others took pride in such a reaction and saw proof in it of the strength of Christianity: “Here you had poor Armenian girls willing to sacrifice their own babies for Christ,” was the interpretation. Abandoning the babies was a regrettable but important part of the process through which these women acquired their new identity of liberated Christian with no traces of her past captivity in Muslim harems. These many voices of the NER women reflected the internal, personal ongoing negotiation with their own identity. Examples of changes these church activists underwent in Anatolia can be found in the arguments between those who saw physical relief as their main goal and those who advocate the relief of the soul. Both kinds of relief were understood as a religious duty. Dr. Ruth Parmelee on 13 August, 1919, Harpoot, stated: Several of us have mentioned to members of the American or woman’s Board the problem that exists with regard to the return of Mrs. Atkinson. It seems hard, when we are in so great need of workers, that we can not think it is wise for her to return here. The hospital was born in her husband’s mind and she worked with him to bring it into existence. It is natural that she should take a very personal interest in that institution and in a way feel that it belongs to her. She is also anxious that the plans her husband made should be carried out. Moreover, like so many capable people in the world, some of her associates have found it hard to cooperate with her. She was so used to running things in the hospital, before any nurse came to help, that it was difficult for her to give up the reins. I need not go into details . . . Mrs. Atkinson is very interested in the Mohammedans, and is much less interested in the Armenians. To tour about among Turkish villages and work with the women would be most suitable work for her, and she would do it well. Such work is not now available here. . . . It does seem as though there might be a place, such as Aintab, where there has been more of a beginning made in the Mohammedan work, and where such a worker could more quickly and more happily fit into such evangelistic work.”10


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This description illuminates the changing attitude toward the oldfashioned female missionary, who came to aid her husband in his duty mission. New NER activists saw themselves in a new light. Evangelist missionary zeal had little place in their postwar reality. It is possible that the fact that NER was operating under the aegis of the state contributed to their changing self image. The church-related social ethos combined with the state diplomatic mission reinforced the image of these new subway women.

Compassion Campaigns and Campaigners Who were these American NER volunteers? Before the civil war, explained Suzanne Moranian, a typical American Board missionary was an Anglo-Saxon Protestant, who often came from New England and was usually a graduate of an elite private college or large state university (Moranian, 2003: 188). By the turn of the century, the recruits mostly came from middle class families from small towns in the Midwest and were married. Women missionaries at the period under scrutiny accounted for half of those in foreign service. Moraninan argued that the married women were teachers and nurses, assisting their husbands (ibid.: 188). The single female evangelists served as teachers. “Service in foreign fields for these women was tantamount to taking a vow of celibacy” (ibid.: 189). A careful study of their biographies is necessary. Nonetheless, it is generally accurate that most of them were adventurous women, at first mainly from New England but later from the Midwest and other parts of the country. For many, this was a legitimate way to break through the rather routine conservative life. It was legitimate because it fell both under the aegis of the state and of the church. It was also perceived as voluntary work not motivated by personal greed. Travel overseas to help the poor and the miserable was well imbued and rationalized in the values of their society. The Great War, with its horrors, provided challenges and opportunities. Doctors, nurses, secretaries, wives—women awarded no importance or recognition in their own home communities—found an opportunity to give meaning to their lives. One good example of an NER activist is Florence Billings (June 1879–September 1959).11 Florence Frances Billings was born in Hatfield, Massachusetts, and graduated from Redlands High School in 1899 and from Stanford University in 1903 with a BA in Latin. She taught school for several years during which time she traveled to Europe. She taught English at a private school in Germany for a period. In 1917, she signed up with the American Red Cross, and then went to France as a canteen and relief worker. In November 1919, she took

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a position at the American School for Girls in Bursa, Turkey. After six months she volunteered for service in Bursa with the NER. Billings worked under Annie Allen, the NER representative in Bursa. In 1921, she was transferred to Konya to relieve workers at a large center for Armenian refugees and orphans run by NER. In February 1922, after Annie Allen died of typhoid, Billings, now stationed at the American Hospital in Ankara, became the responsible NER representative. In 1922 and 1923, Billings was sent to Greece to visit Turkish prisoners interned there and to report on their conditions to the NER Commission. After leaving NER in 1923, she traveled throughout the Middle East, and in 1927 she received her MA from Columbia University. In the early 1930s, Billings became active in local affairs and in organizations such as the American Association of University Women and the Contemporary Club. Biographies of NER female activists suggest that what was almost exclusively the domain of men in the past, traveling abroad, opened up now for adventurous women. Indeed, NER newsletters are filled with notes on women traveling to the Far East, to different Middle East provinces and to Europe. Some of these women got married while in service; others found in the service shelter from such a prospect. While women played a key role in NER missions in the provinces and in the most deserted regions of Anatolia, as well as on the streets of U.S. towns, headquarters were run by men, both in Istanbul and in the United States. Some were church activists and most of them had impressive resumes. Worth mentioning is the recruitment of professional fundraisers. They left no detail for local interpretation. Church and local educators received training and guidelines that specified innovative ideas and methods on how to raise funds. They also left nothing to God’s will, including details in their instructions such as the colors of the envelopes that carried the pleading letters for compassionate donors. Those who had previously contributed money received a short note stating that their recent pledge was greatly appreciated and thanking them in the name of the children rescued by their assistance. Those who showed interest but failed to voluntarily contribute received a standard letter such as the following: The life of a child hangs in the balance as we write this letter to you. Recently the National Executive Committee of Near East Relief was compelled to make a 25 percent cut in all appropriations for relief work. Our previous funds were inadequate, and thousands have been turned away from our orphanages for lack of supplies. The deficiency in our treasury that has made this cut necessary adds to one of the world’s greatest tragedies. . . .


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We have not notified you before that your pledge has not been paid in full, but in the present emergency we feel compelled to ask if you can make a payment at this time. To do this, will save some lonely, starving child from degradation and death in the wilderness. Your pledge gave food, medical care, and human kindness to those who might have perished without it. We can take them in only when you help us. May we not still, with your aid, care for the child we rescued in your name? Perhaps you have forgotten this pledge was due? Our records show that $–– still remain to be paid. Send your payment today in the enclosed envelope. Make checks payable to Near East Relief. Sincerely,12

The compassion machinery was more efficient in some states than in others. When signs of fatigue or indifference were shown in states such as Kansas, Rotary, Lions, freemasons, women’s clubs, YMCA, and Boy Scouts were used as appropriate channels to further promote compassion. The ABC was taught as A for Anatolia, B for missing bread, and C for orphan camps. The compassion education campaign included history, geography, and theater. The historical version, among other explanations, recommended that Sunday-school pupils be taught that the current refugees are descendants of the ancient Greeks, with whose history and legends all young people are familiar: the stories of Argonauts and the Trojan war, of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, and of Alexander’s expeditions. The Gospels and the entire New Testament were written in Greek, they were reminded. Luke, Timothy the Evangelist’s father, Dionysius of Aeropagus, and Damaris, all among the first converts to Christianity in Athens, were Greeks. The message was that to the present day, Greeks have continued to bear witness to the truth of Christianity in the face of severest oppression and persecution. Pupils were asked to fill in imaginary letters such as: My name is . . . I am a little . . . girl and live in far off lands where . . . used to live. The mothers brought their little . . . to Him, but we have no . . . They died because they were . . . We have no fathers. They were . . . We are very lonely. Were you ever . . .? When it rains we cannot go in our . . . for we have none. We just walk in the . . . and when night comes we lie down wherever we are. Did you ever stay out doors all . . . and all . . .? This is the Christmas Season when we remember the birthday of . . . who loved little . . . Somebody told us that on His birthday American children would remember the . . . who are . . . and . . . in the land where He lived, and would send us . . . to eat and . . . to keep us . . . We are trying to wait for this gift. Please do not forget us. Goodbye,

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NER activities among the Armenians in the Middle East were understood, as is often the case with colonial perceptions, as a duty. It was the White Man’s Burden to teach the locals and to “infuse them with new blood—an inoculation of western ideas.”13 That meant the teaching of “something of the dignity of labor; it needs a conception of the equality of classes and sexes; it needs awakening to the value of co-operative effort, of democracy.” The perfect method was through NER education, schools and workshops, Boy Scouts training, and clinics. NER documents demonstrate how the White Man’s burden was feminized, as figure 6.2 demonstrates, and “medicalized” by NER female activists at the expense of religion—the traditional male core of power.

Figure 6.2 A sample of an NER campaign poster Source: Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress.


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In articles such as the “Near East still needs a Great Physician,” Mable Eliot explained the target of such a mission, coated in medical terms aimed at fighting disease: Our contention is that it is no exaggeration to say that these children, inoculated with Western ideals, will have an effect on the future of the Near East that will do much to offset the evil forces that have been working there in the past. Through these children we hope to administer the dose that will help make of the patient a new man, a wholesome, healthy New Near East.”14

Conclusions The story of NER encapsulates the story of mushrooming American influence in the Eastern Mediterranean at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is also an important link in the genealogical chain of the growing American presence overseas through methods of informal diplomacy. It was diplomacy of relief and refuge, of syringes and bandages, of compassion and knowledge. Researchers who examined the role of women in mission history downplayed the role of women in this important historical chapter. James Greenlee and Charles Johnston, for example, who examined the British missionaries’ work, dismiss the role of women missionaries. They argue that since women took no part in decision-making of missionary administration, their involvement and impact were minimal. However, as Rosemary Gagan already noted, they ignored the role of women in encouraging the growth of native churches and the fact that they “set the stage for the modernization of missions” (Gagan 2004: par 11). Furthermore, it is fair to argue that Greenlee and Johnson, as well as many other researchers, held a narrow view of the process of decision- and policy-making, thus ignoring the importance of what Lipsky described as “street-level bureaucracy,” meaning the people in the field and on the ground who in reality make policy (Lipsky 1980). NER women activists, as this chapter demonstrates, were more often than not decision-makers. They made an impact on the way the American NER operation was handled on the ground, sometimes in stations and in places no other foreigners, neither men nor women, entered. For millions in the Levant—Armenians, Greeks, Turks and Arabs—these women were their only connection with the Western world. They brought American medical and educational knowledge and therefore took part in the direct and indirect manifestations of American informal diplomacy. Despite the fact that women were secondary in the mission’s hierarchy—they were vital in the creation of the American impact.

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World War I brought an end to the campaign to Christianize the world and “tent-making,” commonly associated with the female role, was adopted as the missionaries’ vocation (Gagan 2004: par 11). This meant providing health, education, and welfare services to the populations in need. Dwight (1843–1917) noted that by 1901, even before the war, women already constituted the majority of the American Board force in Constantinople (Dwight 1901). This comes as no surprise: they were cheaper to recruit, well-educated, and motivated, as their biographies suggest. By the beginning of the twentieth century, they played a vital role in the American Board mission: they served as school principals, doctors, nurses, teachers, and in other, more administrative professions. Some even served in diplomatic missions, as observers for international organizations. This left a mark on the nature of missionary work and perhaps on the ways in which religion was later viewed by the locals. The fact that more and more women were recruited to the mission created what some researchers, for example, Barbara Welter and Anne Douglas, suggest viewing as the feminization of religion (Welter 1976; Douglas 1977). Indeed, the NER records clearly indicate that in Anatolia tent-making superseded male-led evangelizing missions. The war and their numbers allowed women to use their gender as a source of authority. Gender roles were an important factor in the mission overseas in various ways that deserve future attention. Christian male missionaries were occupied, so it seems, with the Muslim treatment of women and their segregation in the harem. Gender-based segregation, often associated with oriental male erotic fantasia or with cruel female slavery, was viewed as the epitome of Islamic cultural decay. The women of the mission thus served as mediators, examples and agents of change among potential “converts.” This is why special attention was given to “rescued women” who were “saved” from Turkish households, sometimes against their will. However, women missionaries often saw things in a more ambivalent way, exposing the complexity and the multifaceted local gender relation traditions. Male NER missionaries viewed their female counterparts within the religious context of relief activities. It was very appropriate for Joseph Greene to describe in his Leaving the Levant, published in 1916, that “in fact, to many of the people of Turkey, especially to the mothers, our lady teachers seem like angels” (Greene 1916: 183). Often women described themselves as “miracle performers” as well. Tent-making and relief to the poor was both a religious and an American duty. Whether or not they saw in NER women also new women is doubtful. Can NER women be portrayed as “new women”? The documents suggest that these women actually developed a negative image of new women in the form of “subway women.” While the “new women”


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emphasized their financial as well as sexual independence, NER subway women emphasized their collective responsibility to humanity. They were no longer women who saw their place within the private sphere only. They demanded a growing role in the public spheres and gave new meaning to their lives. This was, however, within the legitimate and traditional voluntary working arena. While the New American women immortalized themselves in Hollywood pictures, NER subway women developed a new female hagiography in which women were no longer confronted with home fronts and acted at the forefront. They “served the world” in war, famine, sickness, and other dangers. They created and marshaled an army against disease and helped transform the local population until their children settled down to “absorb American ideals of wholesome living and to grow into useful manhood and womanhood according to American standards and by American methods.”15 In their understanding they thus revived the spirit of pioneer days. However, they were also part of a hierarchical, patriarchal organization. On one hand they challenged gender norms and had the benefit of a greater autonomy to practice public roles. On the other, although often criticizing male attitudes, and thus challenging their perceived superiority, they also reemphasized traditional gender roles in their compliance with a patriarchal system, only now in the public sphere. When back at home in the United States, NER activists continuously tried to widen the borders of gender norms by lecturing, fundraising, and working in public arenas. While their male equals often did well, women were no more than dedicated to doing good. “Since the beginning of the world men have warred for property and power and women have patiently renewed what they have destroyed—human life,” wrote one activist in an article titled “Smyrna! Where Motherhood Transcends the Destruction of Men.”16 The author leaves very little doubt as to the way some NER female activists observed gender differences in relation to greed and mission, politics and religion. Building a new community over the sea may possibly also have meant building a new subway woman.

Notes 1. It is possible that the Hollywood image of American beauty has played an active role as an agency in the formation of the new subway woman. It certainly requires thorough research. 2. See, for example, the testimonies given by NER officials to the Committee on Immigration, US Doc. 550.5, Congressional Hearings 67th Congress 4th Session. Admission of Near East Refugees. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization House of Representatives on H.R. 13269, Dec. 15, 16, and 19, 1922. Serial 1-C Washington, Gov. Printing Office 1923.

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3. After 1927 when NER moved its activity to Greece, the office in Istanbul was transferred to the hands of locals, now operating under the name Sağlik ve Eğitim Vakfi (Health and Education Foundation). The institute holds documents and letters of the American Board. 4. “Economy Imperative,” Team Work, NER National Headquarters, vol. 1, no. 6, April 6, 1922. 5. New York Times, April 28, 1922. 6. Gillespie, Trebizond, NER Nov 13, 1920, vol. 2, no. 45, p. 3. 7. See also Yavuz Selim Karakişla, “Savaş Yetimleri ve Kimsesiz Çocuklar: Ermeni mi, Turk mü?” Toplumsal Tarih, Eylül 1999, no. 69, pp. 46–55. 8. The New Near East, October 1920, NY 6–8 1920–23, p. 14. 9. Most of them were in the eastern parts of the country. In Diarbakir and Mardin alone 25,000 women were registered, while only 6,000 women were registered in Istanbul. 10. Harpoot, Turkey, August 13, 1919, to Rev. Enoch Bell, 14 Beacon st. Boston Mass. confidential (unit 5 ABC 16.9.7) Reel 714. 11. For her biography, see Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Florence Billings Papers, 1915–1959 (bulk 1919–1928). 12. Team Work, Near East Relief, vol. 1, no. 6, April 6, 1922, p. 3. 13. They were also active in straightforward political activities such as campaigning for the establishment of an American mandate over Armenia and Anatolia before the San Remo Conference. 14. “The Near East Still Needs a Great Physician,” The New Near East, September 1927, p. 14 (Eliot, 1927). 15. “Making an Orphanage,” The New Near East, p. 8. 16. Ibid., p. 8.

References Acheson, B. 1924. The Institutional Child. The New Near East, January, p. 15. Berghahn, Volker R. 1999. Philanthropy and Diplomacy in the “American Century.” Diplomatic History 23 (3): 393–419. Daniel, Robert L. 1970. American Philanthropy in the Near East 1820–1960. Athens: Ohio University Press. Douglas, Ann. 1977. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf. Dwight, Henry Otis. 1901. Constantinople and Its Problems: Its People, Customs, Religions, and Progress. Illustrated. New York: Fleming H. Revell. Earle, E. M. 1929. American Missions in the Near East. Foreign Affairs 7 (3): 398–417. Eliot, Mable E. 1927. The Near East Still Needs a Great Physician. The New Near East, September, p. 14. Gagan, Rosemary. 2004. Gender, Work and Zeal: Women Missionaries in Canada and Abroad. Labour/Le Travail 53 (Spring): 44 pars. http://www. historycooperative.org/journals/llt/53/gagan.html (accessed August 7, 2008).


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Grabill, Joseph L. 1971. Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East: Missionary Influence on American Policy, 1810–1927. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Greene, Joseph K. 1916. Leaving the Levant. Boston: The Pilgrim Press. Iriye, Akira. 1999. A Century of NGOs. Diplomatic History 23 (3): 421–35. Karakişla, Yavuz Selim. 1999. Savaş Yetimleri ve Kimsesiz Çocuklar: Ermeni mi, Turk mü?. Toplumsal Tarih, Eylül, 69: 46–55. Lipsky, Michael. 1980. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Lybyer, A. H. 1924. America’s Missionary Record in Turkey. Current History 19 (5): 802–10. Malakasian, Mark. 1984. The Disintegration of the Armenian Cause in the United States, 1918–1927. IJMES 16 (3): 339–65. Merk, Frederick. 1966. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History. New York: Vintage Books. Moranian, Susan E. 2003. The Armenian Genocide and American Missionary Relief Efforts.” In America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915. ed. Jay Winter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nordmann, Bernhard F. 1929. American Missionary Work Among Armenians in Turkey (1830–1923). Abstract of Ph.D. thesis. University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois. Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Robert, Dana. 1997. American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Rosenberg, Emily S. 1999. Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the American Century. Diplomatic History 23 (3): 479–97. Singh, Maina Chawla. 2000. Gender, Religion and “Heathen Lands”: American Missionary Women in South Asia (1860s–1940s). New York/London: Garland Publishing. Thorne, Susan. 2006. Religion and Empire. In At Home With the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tibawi, Abdul Latif. 1966. American Interests in Syria, 1800–2900: A Study of Educational Literary and Religious Work. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Welter, Barbara. 1976. The Feminization of American Religion: 1800–1860. In Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. B. Welter. Athens: Ohio University Press.


Chapter 7

4

Global Sister hood: Transnational Perspectives on Gender and R eligion * Gertrud Hüwelmeier

On August 15, 1868, Mary Catherine Kasper, the founder of the

Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ (PHJC), wrote a letter from Le Havre, France, to her co-sisters in Dernbach, a little village in the Westerwald, one of the poorest regions in Germany. This letter gives an impression of her various feelings of sadness and pain after she had accompanied eight of her sisters to the harbor and had bidden them farewell before they set sail for America. Kasper wrote: They received priestly blessings, sang the song “Escort us on the Waves,” and then they left for the open sea, and the poor children [the sisters] could weep. But, my beloved sisters, what a touching sight, the huge ocean, the terrible waves, and the rapid retreat of the steamship out to sea. The poor sisters were no longer visible. Now I also could weep and I followed the ship with my eyes as long as we could see it. (Amend 2001: 73)

In the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of new Catholic women’s orders emerged across Europe (Ewens 1978; Hüwelmeier 2000d). Contrary to early modern nuns who spent their lives in strict enclosure (Strasser 2004), the members of the newly founded women’s congregations worked outside the convents as nurses or teachers.

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Until the Second Vatican Council these women were called “nuns,” and dressed in full habit. But starting in the 1960s they officially preferred the term “sister,” pointing out the differences compared to the encloistered “women religious” (who are still labeled nuns, at least in Germany)1 as well as emphasizing their involvement with social and feminist issues (Hüwelmeier 2000c, 2001, 2005, 2008; Braude 2004). From the beginning the members of the new congregations have been translocal and transnational in their activities. Catholic sisters have been active in the establishment of schools and hospitals, in educating children and taking care of the sick and poor both within and outside their countries of origin (Hüwelmeier 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2005, 2008, 2009). Due to political conflicts in Europe as well as mass migration to the United States, many of the European sisters left their home countries, settled in new places, and moved again in order to meet the needs of people. This chapter will focus on women religious as actors within the processes of migration and globalization. The transgression of local, regional, and national borders and the maintenance of social relations across continents raises the question whether women, and women religious in particular, gain more freedom through this movement, or whether old power relations are reinforced. While gender “has rarely been a principal focus of studies on transnational spaces and processes, including transnational migration” (Mahler and Pessar 2001: 441), I will ask how gender relations and the construction of gender are confirmed or negotiated within this context. Focusing on a historical and anthropological perspective, this chapter argues that processes of transnationalization and globalization caused changing power relations not just between male representatives of the Catholic church and Catholic sisters, but also among women religious themselves. Due to political conflicts in Germany during the late nineteenth century, Catholic sisters left their home country and settled in the United States. Far from home they were less controlled by their mother general, but were more dependent on American bishops, who tried to influence the sisters. Moreover, tensions emerged between women religious in the United States who were born in Europe and those younger sisters, now American born, who entered Catholic congregations in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In the second part of this chapter, I will concentrate on power conflicts among women religious after the Second Vatican Council, when many of the European women’s congregations opened their doors to women from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In contrast to their predecessors, Catholic sisters nowadays are confronted with questions of ethnic and cultural diversity. Due to the decline of novices in Europe, sisters from Asia and Africa are slowly taking over the political power within their global

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congregations. However, despite internal power struggles, I will argue, creating a transnational consciousness among Catholic sisters spanning national borders, enables women religious the negotiating of gender and power conflicts within a global setting.2 Experiences of migrant women, in particular with regard to their transnational connections are, to date, a still widely neglected topic within the social sciences. Early studies in migration concentrated mainly on male migrants (Piore 1979), while women played a quite marginal role within that kind of research, either as passive followers or as companions (Morokvasic 1984; Brettell and de Berjeois 1992). The study of migration has tended to ignore gender as a variable (Willis and Yeoh, 2000: xi), and to focus on the male migrant (Pessar 2003: 77). Only recently has the relationship between gender and migration become more apparent in sociology and anthropology (Gabaccia 1994; Anthias and Lazaridis 2000), with researchers focusing on experiences of migrant women. To analyze the complex relations of migrants between home and host country, anthropologists have introduced the term “transnationalism” (Glick Schiller et al. 1992, 1995; Glick Schiller 1999; Hannerz 1996, 1998, 2004). The nation-state is not absent within these theoretical debates, but it is only one “power-container” (Vertovec and Cohen 1999: xxi) alongside the multilayered networks of people transcending borders. Within these processes of traveling back and forth, people “forge and sustain multistranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (Basch et al. 1994: 7). They maintain familial, economic, and political relations between sending and receiving countries. Until the end of the 1990s, the influence of religion did not play a crucial role in studies on crossborder activities (Vertovec 2001; Foner 2003: 33), although religious groups and communities have largely emerged as a consequence of secular and global processes as well as of proselytizing activities (Hoeber Rudolph and Piscatori 1997).

Women’s Congregations in the Nineteenth Century In response to secularization,3 hundreds of Catholic women’s congregations were founded in the first decades of the nineteenth century in Europe. This wave was part of a process that Claude Langlois has called the “silent revolution” (Langlois 1984). Active nuns taught in schools, built hospitals, and worked as nurses. Sisters were engaged in educating children in the kindergarten as well as taking care of orphans and widows (Hüwelmeier 1999, 2000a, 2000b). The PHJC, founded in 1851, was one of these many congregations. The foundress, Catherine

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Kasper, was born in a little village in western Germany. She attended school for only two years and later worked as a day laborer in the fields of the wealthier peasants. On Sundays she gathered with other young girls from her home village to pray together, read the Bible, and to take care of poor and sick people. After Catherine Kasper had a vision, the local bishop confirmed this group of young women as a religious congregation. Although Poor Handmaids worked mainly with poor people, they were also asked to practice their nursing skills in the neighboring villages and small towns of the surrounding area. Women of the upper classes, in particular those of the Catholic nobility, also requested the nursing services of the sisters. Due to Catholic networks of baronesses, priests, and bishops of other dioceses, the Poor Handmaids were invited by the local gentry in different places to come live in their domains, where they then practiced social work with elderly people, children, the sick, and the poor. In exchange for their services the gentry provided them with clothes, accommodation, and food. Supported by women nobles in non-Prussian regions, the Poor Handmaids also founded houses in the Netherlands, Bohemia, Belgium, and Luxembourg (Hüwelmeier 2005). Those convents were quite important after the German Kulturkampf broke out, a political contest between the Protestant-dominated German nation-state formed in 1871 and the Catholic Church. In the 1870s the government passed several laws to curtail the influence of the Catholic Church. Priests were imprisoned, bishops left the country, and nuns were no longer permitted to teach in schools (Blackbourn 1997; Hüwelmeier 2004). Finally, sisters who had formerly worked in the schools left Germany and migrated to England, the Netherlands and the United States. Their experiences made it quite clear that the German nation-state was not interested in Catholic sisters teaching in schools. Sisters’ identification with the newly founded nation-state in 1871 was ambivalent, while loyalties toward the church and the congregation were much stronger. Migration to the United States Aside from the political conflicts between the state and the Catholic Church in Germany, nuns left their home country for a second reason: they took part in the Great Migration of millions of people from Europe to the United States. American bishops of German origin asked German superiors to send sisters to help in the processes of integration of immigrants in the American dioceses. Trained and qualified sisters were needed to build schools, kindergartens, and hospitals in remote areas as well as in big cities like Chicago. Churches and parishes had been important places of support for the millions of European immigrants in the United States (Gillis 2003). Very often such places

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were the only ones that existed for “gatherings in diaspora” (Warner and Wittner 1998). In particular, the central task of the Catholic immigrant church was the founding of parochial schools. “The Catholic perception that the public school system was an agent, first of Protestantification and, then, of secularization led to the creation of a system of Catholic education in the entire Catholic world” (Casanova 1994: 173). This was the way the church would play its own role in the “assimilation,” meaning the Americanization of the Catholic immigrant. Since 1789, when the first Catholic Diocese in Baltimore was founded, the American Catholic Church was transformed from a minority religion in a predominantly Protestant country into an immigrant church in the nineteenth century, as José Casanova has lucidly pointed out (1994: 167–207). Although “Catholicism in America has functioned as a multi-ethnic, territorially organized national church” (Casanova 1994: 167), it had “always had to live with the dynamic tension that has resulted from being Roman and American.” At the same time the American Catholic Church “has always been a member of the transnational, universal Roman Catholic Church” (ibid.). The broad sociological perspective, outlined by Casanova, gives many insights into the transformation of the Catholic Church in the United States. However, from an anthropological point of view, focusing on the parochial and local level and also on transnational connections, the lines of conflict were more complicated. There is much evidence for tensions: first, between Rome and the Catholic Church in America; second, among American bishops of different ethnic backgrounds; and third, between American bishops and female superiors of women’s congregations in Europe, who were more Rome-oriented than their American co-sisters. Finally, the lines of conflict were to be found among the sisters themselves. Gender Conflicts in a Transnational Setting To illustrate the multiple lines of gender conflicts, I will introduce the story of Sister Prudentia. She was called back to Europe in 1885— against her will. The transnational connections between German sisters in America and the motherhouse in Germany were strong, even if the nuns were separated by the ocean. What happened? Sister Prudentia migrated to America in 1872, after her predecessor, regional superior Sister Rose, the niece of a German bishop, traveled back to Germany. After Sister Prudentia, as representative of mother general, had visited all the houses of the PHJC in the United States, she was appointed as regional superior of the American Province. She was quite active in building schools and hospitals as well as in founding new convents all over the Midwest, a region where many of the German migrants

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had settled. Because of limited finances, she adapted the fundraising system of American denominations and was successful in collecting money from parish members. After 12 years she was called back to Germany, officially because new regulations from Rome prohibited a sister to stay in office for such a long time. Unofficially—and this is the version of the story told and written down by an American sister in 2001—Sister Prudentia “was totally ‘Americanized.’” Sister Stephen PHJC, the author of the story, wrote: In America, the relative isolation of people in groups far from each other developed a pioneering, independent spirit. Those who left European structures that they now saw as restrictive in the European culture, resisted any attempt to restrain the new freedom they so prized. This spirit alarmed the settled and more conservative world of Europe and continued to cause problems for Americans especially with church authorities until World War I. (Sr. Stephen Brueggeman 2001: 2)

It should be noted here that Catholic sisters, like Sr. Stephen, became authors themselves, inspired by the developing movement for women’s liberation in the United States in the late 1960s.4 As a member of the leading team of the PHJC in the United States at that time, Sr. Stephen experienced the “new spirit” in the American society as well as in Rome, and she became aware of the tensions that arose between the U.S. sisters and the German motherhouse, which mainly concerned debates about the habit and other “secular” issues. It was only in the 1990s that the American sisters of the PHJC began to rethink and reinterpret their own history, in particular with regard to their co-sisters in Germany. At the time of my fieldwork in 2003, Sr. Stephen was already in her early eighties and still very much interested in questions of transatlantic encounters past and present. After Sister Prudentia had traveled back to Germany in 1885, thereby fulfilling the vow of obedience, the local bishop in America—a bishop of German descent—intervened and wrote a letter to the mother general in Germany, stressing that he was the one to make such decisions. At the time when Sr. Prudentia left the United States, the bishop was staying in Rome. He was quite angry about the decision of the mother superior and wrote: “I was very surprised at this, because my advice and my agreement had not been asked. Your congregation is no exception. The law of the church states quite clearly, and your rule says it: the transfer is null and void.”5 He wanted Sister Prudentia to be sent back to the United States. The mother superior answered one week later and argued that she was just following the constitution of

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her congregation: no sister could stay in office more than nine years.6 But the bishop did not give up: It is more a question of personal insult and one I do not think I deserve. This is an offence, a violation against every church law and decisions of Rome. . . . Where a congregation has a Provincial House in another Diocese, the Bishop concerned must be informed and consulted beforehand regarding a change or the election of a new Provincial Superior. If the Bishop objects or refuses by this vote, then Rome has to decide. Only after the Bishop or Rome has decided can the change be made by the Motherhouse or the General Chapter.7

The gender and power conflicts between Bishop Dwenger in the United States and Catherine Kasper in Germany reached their peak when the bishop wrote, in the same letter that if Catherine Kasper did not give a satisfactory statement and did not express respect for his rights, “your authority is taken away forever, in the houses in the Province of Fort Wayne. Your congregation will suffer.”8 After Catherine Kasper had explained that according to the new church laws, the general superior is not obliged to ask the local bishop for permission in the case of the transfer of a sister, the bishop answered: “I will never allow anyone from Germany to change anything in my Diocese without my knowledge.”9 Some of the problems between these two powerful people, the U.S. bishop and the German mother superior, should be contextualized within the political tensions between the Catholic Church in the United States and Rome, as underlined by Casanova and others (Dolan 1985, 1998). But besides those conflicts we have to understand the language of power and dominance, expressed much more strongly in the letters of the bishop than in those of Catherine Kasper. She was very clear in what she said, and she formulated it in a rather polite way, apologizing for misunderstandings, promising she would do everything to maintain his goodwill. He, on the contrary, formulated his anger, his authority, and his power in a way women religious would never have done. The second line of conflict arose between the German sisters in America and the former regional superior. They argued that if Sister Prudentia were to return to the United States, they would leave America immediately with the next steamship for Europe. Sister Prudentia and a group of young sisters (i.e., sisters born and raised in the United States) would later separate from the PHJC and found a new congregation in America. Separations happened in several congregations whose motherhouses were located in Europe. It was difficult to maintain contact and it was not easy for some superiors in the United States to ask for permission for everything from their European motherhouses.

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Different levels of gender conflicts should be analyzed in light of the political and historical background. The transnational conflicts between the regional superior in the United States and the motherhouse in Europe as well as the problems among the first and second generations of Catholic sisters in the United States could best be understood in the context of the German Kulturkampf and the reorientation to Rome (Ultramontanismus) in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Power relations were of great importance. The community of the PHJC was declared a papal congregation in 1871. Until that time it had been a diocesan congregation with the local bishop as the “man in power.” Lots of tensions broke out in Germany between the representative of the local bishop, a priest striving for power, and the mother general in the 1850s and 1860s (Hüwelmeier 2004). After its declaration as a papal congregation, the mother general made her decisions together with her assistants—but not with the former representative of the bishop. Compared to the U.S., the American bishops as “church bosses” (Casanova 1994: 173) seemed to have more influence on decisions within their dioceses than European bishops had at that time. Transatlantic Connections French, Polish, German, and Irish women religious in the United States founded convents and established special spheres of work during the last decades of the nineteenth century. With hardly any knowledge of English, many of the sisters started a new life under completely different climatic, social, political, and cultural circumstances. In their dispersed houses they lived together in small groups and organized their daily lives and work on their own, without male dominance. Priests and bishops were often far away. These sisters realized a way of life quite different from middle-class ideals of womanhood and motherhood, a way of life characterized by adherence to a religious rule and by hierarchies of local, regional, and transnational power relations among women. Each convent had a local superior, who acted as female head of the household. The regional superior, one level up, lived in the province house, the place where administration took place and novices underwent training. She visited all convents regularly and made decisions on financial and political matters, such as the closing of convents, the moving of sisters to other places, or the founding of new houses. Additionally, the provincial superior was in constant contact with the German motherhouse, mainly by writing letters. In the case of the PHJC, General Superior Catherine Kasper responded to letters from her co-sisters in the United States, reminding her “daughters” to obey the rule, to pray, and to do their work. She never visited her

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sisters in the United States due to the costs of travel as well as to health problems. By writing letters she maintained contact and a sense of collectivity, community consciousness (Vertovec 1999) and shared imagination. The community was “re-created through the mind” (Cohen 1996: 516), recalling their common “origin,” pointing to the same religious “roots.” I quote from a letter, written by the mother superior to the sisters in America in 1886: If I would only be once in that America, if this is the holy will of the Lord. For me it seems there will not be anything any more. I am so often in America, day by day, even more often. In all my poor prayers I bring together the beloved sisters. . . .We live and work in one religious community. We all have the spirit of a Poor Handmaid of Jesus Christ, have one rule. The more we live and work in this one spirit, the closer we are to one another.10

In another letter she wrote: “In my mind I am traveling to America to my beloved sisters several times a day.”11 Catherine Kasper regretted not having face-to-face contact with her American “daughters” but, although I did not know our American sisters personally, they are very close to me. I feel a great desire to get to know them personally. But if this is not the holy will of the Lord, we will be satisfied. In my mind I am visiting you every day, and more often in prayer.12

Writing letters, sending prayers across the ocean, and participating in the lives of others across international borders can be best interpreted within the framework of “transnational social fields” (Glick Schiller 2003: 107). This concept focuses on personal social relationships by which immigrants continue to be part of the social life in their home countries, while they are simultaneously incorporated in the activities of their new surroundings. These relationships often encompass immigrants as well as persons born in the country of origin who never migrated. Transmigrants are persons, “who migrate and yet maintain or establish familial, economic, religious, political or social relations in the state from which they moved, even as they also forge such relationships in the new state or states in which they settle” (Glick Schiller and Fouron 1999: 344; Fouron and Glick Schiller 2001). Members of religious communities, similar to family members who live dispersed around the globe (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002), participate in the daily lives of their co-sisters in Europe and vice versa. They feel emotionally as well as religiously connected, while physically separated by the ocean.

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Since 1900, regular visits intensified the transatlantic connections among the PHJC. Sisters from the general leadership in Germany traveled to the U.S. province every six years to visit all houses in the various dioceses. Poor Handmaids from the United States, for their part, traveled to Germany to participate in the general chapter, electing their mother superior as well as her assistants. While many Americanborn sisters entered the community during the last decades of the nineteenth century, only superiors with a German ethnic background and orientation held office until 1932 (Specht 2001). Ties between the continents were strengthened and separation did not happen, although some severe conflicts emerged. Different mechanisms had been created to prevent tendencies toward separation or autonomy from Europe. The German motherhouse regularly sent German sisters to the United States; most of them settled in America for the rest of their lives. The “German” orientation of the PHJC in America was reinforced through membership of young women with German or German-American backgrounds, many of whom came into contact with the PHJC because they had attended their schools. Language, culture, rituals, and prayers were practiced in German; letters and chronicles were written in German until the First World War, some of them until the Second World War. During my fieldwork, American sisters told me that even after they entered the community in the 1950s, they learned to eat like poor German peasants in the nineteenth century, without knife or fork (that was considered bourgeois), just like their founder: she did not use a plate, but a clay bowl, typical of the region in which she was born. German dominance in the U.S. province was still perceived at that time. These accounts of women’s agency clearly show the ambivalent role of gender in a transnational Catholic women’s order throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The U.S. bishop who tried to exert his male power on the mother general in Germany in the 1880s was not successful. Other U.S. bishops, attempting to impose their ideas of how Catholic sisters should do their work within their dioceses, for example, as domestic servants in the bishops’ house, failed. The sisters left and went back to their province house. In this case, the vow of obedience in the sense of a disciplinary practice (Hüwelmeier 2004; Asad 1993; Mahmood 2004, 2005) was directed toward the female leadership of the U.S. province, not to the bishop. In addition, the return of Sister Prudentia to Germany against her will in 1885 also has to be understood in terms of the vow of obedience. Dominated by the politics of the German motherhouse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American branch of the PHJC tried to become more independent from their European co-sisters over the years, in particular after the Second Vatican Council.

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After the Second Vatican Council Although tensions existed between the U.S. province of the Poor Handmaids and the German motherhouse over the years, they never broke out into open conflict. After World War I, all German sisters in the United States became American citizens. During World War II they supported their co-sisters in Germany by sending money to repair houses that had been bombed. The sisters in Germany brought a co-sister, a former Jew who had converted to Catholicism and entered the PHJC, to the Netherlands to protect her life. She was later discovered by the Nazis and murdered in Auschwitz. Women religious were always aware of political conflicts within their own countries and across nation-states. They tried to manage those problems, at least within their congregation, regardless of whether they were Dutch, British, American, or German. In the late 1960s, after the Second Vatican Council, open conflicts emerged and the American sisters talked about separation from the German province. Disagreements arose about a number of issues: many American sisters, particularly the younger ones, strove for modernization—they wanted to wear ordinary clothes, not the habit; they preferred curls, not veils. They asked for democratization of convent life and transparency in decision-making processes and were no longer willing to submit to the instructions given by the German motherhouse. Eventually, they made their own decisions and wore ordinary clothes long before they received official permission. In this they followed their sisters from the Netherlands, some of whom were much more worldly oriented than their German co-sisters. Again, these tensions should be seen in the context of the transformation of the Catholic Church in America after the Second Vatican Council and the more “liberal” ideas of American culture and society. American Catholics were affected by “the educational and occupational revolution associated with the coming of postindustrial society, by the youth revolt and the counterculture of the 1960s, and by the anti–Vietnam War movement. There is no doubt that a new and activist intellectual stratum emerged within American Catholicism in the 1960s, whose members were to be found among bishops, priests, nuns, and laity alike and who became the carriers of the new Catholicism” (Casanova 1994: 186). Women from India While the 1960s and 1970s had been shaped by struggles about the degree of “worldliness” the PHJC could bear, many young sisters left the community in the United States as well as in Germany, a trend evidenced in all Catholic communities worldwide. At the same time young women from India came to the German motherhouse asking for admission.

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Encouraged by the Second Vatican Council, Indian bishops actively supported young Indian Catholic women, mainly from Kerala, in leaving India for Western Catholic orders and starting their postulancy in European countries. Due to personal networks, the mother general, whose German cousin, also a Catholic sister, was living and working in India at that time, traveled to India to make contact with the “global Catholic network.” Priests and bishops helped to find some young ladies willing to become Poor Handmaids. In addition to tensions between American and German sisters, the arrival of new members with a different ethnic background had various consequences not only with regard to power relations between Western and non-Western women religious, but also to the negotiation of conflicts among Poor Handmaids of different ethnic and class or caste background. When their novitiate was over, Indian sisters were trained as nurses, midwives and doctors, and eventually went back to India in the 1970s to found hospitals, boarding schools and leprosy treatment centers. The Indian sisters had also been engaged in the fields of girls and women’s education. Many years after they had entered the community, they requested “independence” from the German motherhouse in the late 1990s. They wanted their own novitiate in India: their own “government”—that is, their own provincialate and leadership team, their own candidates and elections in India. Meanwhile, the Generalate in Germany decided to give them full autonomy. Separation of the U.S. province from the German motherhouse in the 1970s did not happen because a special event took place in Rome, the beatification of the foundress of the PHJC (Hüwelmeier 2004). U.S. sisters told me that if the beatification had not taken place at that time, they would have split from Germany. In 1978 many sisters from America traveled to Europe for the first time in their lives to attend the beatification ritual in Rome. Before they participated in the ritual they visited the motherhouse in Germany, together with their co-sisters from the Netherlands, England, and India. They visited the little chapel where the foundress had her first visions and walked along the paths she walked more than a hundred years earlier. The Poor Handmaids were looking for “roots and routes” (Gilroy 1993). Seeing and touching the shrine of their spiritual mother, as well as forging personal relationships with German sisters, helped to overcome the old tensions. After the ceremony in Rome, the general leadership initiated annual meetings of all provincial teams in different countries. From that point on, 30 to 40 sisters started meeting regularly to discuss a new mission statement and the future of their community. They prayed together and established personal contacts. A new collectivity and community consciousness emerged, as well as an awareness of being an international community. The sisters realized their cultural differences more clearly

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and started talking about class, history, ethnicity, and caste. They negotiated new perspectives on their general leadership and decided to make it a more international group. In 1983, the first American sister was elected as general assistant. She moved to the German motherhouse, hardly speaking German. In 1995, 12 years later, the first American sister in the long history of the PHJC was elected as general superior. Her assistants came from the Netherlands, the United States, India, and Germany. In 2001, a sister from the Netherlands assumed office as general superior.

Conclusion Transnationalism refers to the multiple ties and interactions that link people or institutions across borders of nation-states (Vertovec 1999). When understood as long-distance networks, transnationalism preceded the nation. Since its very beginning, the Catholic Church spanned massive regions and even continents. Missionaries, priests, and nuns were loyal to their church, not to state representatives, in particular during the German Kulturkampf, a politico-religious conflict between Rome and the Protestant-dominated German nation-state in the late 1870s and 1880s. Although a massive transnational migration dates back to the nineteenth century, a transnational perspective on migration and traveling is new (Fouron and Glick Schiller 2001: 544). Cross-border travel, networking, letters, and financial activities have occurred at all times and in all cultures. Historical work (Foner 1997, 2000; Gabaccia 2000) has underscored the significant continuities of transnational activities past and present, but also pointed out important differences. Without new technologies, particularly telecommunications and easy and cheap air transportation, the emergence of “transnational social fields” (Glick Schiller and Fouron 1999) with their characteristic personal relationships and intensity, the opportunity of daily contact via phone calls and email, and constant participation in the lives of friends and relatives would have hardly been possible. Catholic sisters are part of these transnational social fields. In this chapter I focused on the transnational ties of women religious past and present as well as on their growing awareness of being a globally connected community. I outlined translocal and cross-border activities then and now and emphasized how these activities provoked and informed the transformation of power relations between Catholic sisters of different ethnic backgrounds. While ethnic and cultural diversity seem to be important issues for internal differences, women religious are actively engaged in overcoming class and caste conflicts by refounding and renewing their communities. Up to the late twentieth century, many of the transnational Catholic women’s congregations were

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dominated by female Western leadership teams, who tried to impose their worldview, their cultural values, and their religious practices onto their co-sisters in other parts of the world. The Eurocentric perspective of women religious has changed dramatically in the last two decades, not just due to the results of the Second Vatican Council but also due to the women’s movement, to rapid processes of globalization and transnationalization, as well as to a new understanding with regard to a rapidly changing world, in particular toward growing poverty, human rights, AIDS/HIV, and women’s issues. Power relations among Catholic sisters in transnational women’s congregations shifted from north to south as well as from west to east only in recent times. Due to the lack of new novices from Western countries, some of the orders do not exist any more, or will soon die out if they do not open their doors to women from other parts of the world. In those orders that already changed their politics, women from Africa, Asia, and Latin America may take over the leadership teams of the “Western” women’s congregations in the long run. The former headquarters, centers of power situated in Europe for more than 150 years, will become the periphery, while the peripheries may be transformed into new centers. This does not mean a mere inversion of power among women religious from different cultural backgrounds, but represents a constant negotiation of shifting power relations. Former ideas of hierarchy and dominance among Catholic sisters are being transformed into more egalitarian relationships and solidarity in their day-to-day activities as well as in their transborder connections. Nowadays, women religious are rarely seen in the streets and public places of villages and towns in Europe. But one might see them in international airports, traveling between continents, just like businessmen, diplomats, and foreign correspondents (Hannerz 2004). Catholic sisters are transmigrants on the move in religious affairs, visiting their dispersed houses all around the globe and looking for new fields of activity in a rapidly changing world. Today nobody weeps when leaving the co-sisters for some years to work in Africa or Mexico. Unlike the founder of the PHJC when she accompanied her first sisters to the steamship for America in 1868, women religious see each other at the next annual meeting, whether in Bangalore, Chicago, or in the little village in Germany, still the headquarters of a transnational women’s congregation.

Notes * This paper is based on a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). The project was affiliated with the Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Ethnologie, headed by Professor Ute Luig.

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1. The term women religious refers to the self-labelling of women in Catholic orders, such as “Leadership Conference of Women Religious” in the United States, as well as the label applied to these women in scholarly discourse (see, for example, Ann Braude 2004: 562; Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith 1999: 3; Heather L. Claussen 2001: 16). 2. Anthropological fieldwork was carried out in the Motherhouse of the PHJC in Germany as well as in their Province houses in the United States, near Chicago, and in Bangalore, India. 3. In this context the term refers to the French Revolution in Europe and its consequences with regard to the loss of power of the Catholic Church. Concerning Germany, in particular Prussia, a special law in 1803 (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss) led to monasteries and church trusts being dissolved. 4. Ann Braude (2004: 561) reported about Sister Joel Read, founding member of the National Organization for Women (NOW). 5. Letter from Bishop Dwenger to Mother Superior. August 17, 1885. Archives of the Motherhouse, PHJC. Dwenger-Kasper-Letters. Transfer of Sr. Prudentia—Ft. Wayne. Donaldson/Indiana. 6. Letter to Bishop Dwenger, August 22, 1885, in: Amend (2004: 351). 7. August 25, 1885, Archive, American Province House. 8. Ibid 9. Letter Dwenger-Kasper, October 12, 1885, Archive, American Province House. 10. Letter to America, December 18, 87. Archives of the Motherhouse, translated by Gertrud Hüwelmeier. 11. Letter, December 10, 1888. 12. Letter from 1890, translated by Gertrud Hüwelmeier.

References Amend, Gottfriedis. 2001. Katharina Kasper. Gründerin der Kongregation der Armen Dienstmägde Jesu Christi. Schriften. Band I. Erste Regeln und eigenhändige Briefe. Im Auftrag der Generalleitung der Armen Dienstmägde Jesu Christi kritisch ediert und kommentiert. Kevelaer : Verlag Butzon and Bercker. ––––––. 2004. Katharina Kasper. Gründerin der Kongregation der Armen Dienstmägde Jesu Christi. Schriften. Band II. In ihrem Auftrag verfaßte Schriften. Kevelaer: Verlag Butzon and Bercker. Anthias, Floya, and Gabriella Lazaridis, eds. 2000. Gender and Migration in Southern Europe. Women on the Move. Oxford: Berg. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. 1994. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation States. Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach. Blackbourn, David. 1997. Wenn ihr sie wieder seht, fragt wer sie sei. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993: Marpingen. (Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany. Oxford: Clarendon).

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Braude, Ann. 2004: A Religious Feminist Who Can Find Her? Historiographical Challenges from the National Organization for Women. The Journal of Religion 84 (4) (October): 555–73. Bryceson, Deborah, and Ulla Vuorela, eds. 2002. The Transnational Family. New European Frontiers and Global Networks. Oxford: Berg. Brettell, Caroline B., and Patricia A. deBerjeois. 1992. Anthropology and the Study of Immigrant Women. In Seeking Common Ground, ed. Donna Gabaccia, pp. 41–63. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Brueggeman, Stephen. 2001. Building Little Houses. Poor Handmaid Stories. Sr. Prudentia. American Experience. 1872–1885. Province House of the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ. Indiana: Donaldson. Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Claussen, Heather L. 2001. Unconventional Sisterhood. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Coburn, Carol K., and Martha Smith. 1999. Spirited Lives. Chapel Hill and London: The University of California Press. Cohen, Robin. 1996. Diasporas and the Nation State: From Victims to Challengers. International Affairs 72: 507–20. Dolan, Jay P. 1985. American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press. ––––––. 1998. The Immigrants and Their Gods: A New Perspective in American Religious History. In Religion in American History: A Reader, ed. Jon Butler and H. S. Stout, pp. 146–56. New York: Oxford University Press. Ewens, Mary. 1978. The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Arno Press. Foner, Nancy. 1997. What’s New About Transnationalism? New York Immigrants Today and at the Turn of the Century. Diaspora 6 (3): 355–75. ––––––. 2000. From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration. New Haven: Yale University Press. ––––––. 2003. Introduction: Anthropology and Contemporary Immigration to the United States—Where We Have Been and Where We Are Going. In American Arrivals. Anthropology Engages the New Immigration, ed. Nancy Foner, pp. 3–44. Oxford: James Currey. Fouron, Georges, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2001. All in the Family: Gender, Transnational Migration, and the Nation-State. Identities 7 (4): 539–82. Gabaccia, Donna R. 1994. From the Other Side. Women, Gender and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 1820–1990. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ––––––. 2000. Italy’s Many Diasporas. London: UCL Press. Gillis, Chester. 2003. “American Catholics: Neither Out Far nor In Deep.” In Religion and Immigration. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Experiences in the United States, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane I. Smith, and John L. Esposito, pp. 33–60. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. Gilroy Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Glick Schiller, Nina. 1999. Transmigrants and Nation-States: Something Old and Something New in the U.S. Immigrant Experience. In The Handbook of

Global Sisterhood

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International Migration: The American Experience, ed. Charles Hirschmann, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh deWind, pp. 94–119. New York: Russel Sage Foundation. ––––––. 2003. The Centrality of Ethnography in the Study of Transnational Migration. Seeing the Wetland Instead of the Swamp. In American Arrivals. Anthropology Engages the New Immigration, ed. Nancy Foner, pp. 99–128. Oxford: James Currey. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, eds. 1992. Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered. New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. ––––––. 1995. From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration. Anthropological Quarterly 68: 48–63. Glick Schiller, Nina and Georges E. Fouron. 1999. Terrains of Blood and Nation: Haitian Transnational Social Fields. Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (2): 340–66. Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational connections. Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. ––––––. 1998. Transnational Research. In Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, ed. H. Russel Bernard, pp. 235–56. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. –––––––. 2004. Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoeber Rudolph, Suzanne, and James Piscatori, eds. 1997. Transnational Religion and Fading States. Oxford: Westview Press. Hüwelmeier, Gertrud. 1999. Ordensschwestern und Jungfrauen. In Religion und weibliche Identität, ed. Ulrike Krasberg, pp. 35–51. Marburg: Curupira. ––––––. 2000a. Vom Dienstmädchen zur Dienstmagd Christi. In Religion und Geschlechterverhältnis, ed. Ingrid Lukatis, Regina Sommer, and Christof Wolf, pp. 215–23. Opladen: Leske und Budrich. ––––––. 2000b. Gendered Houses. Kinship, Class and Identity in a German Village. In Gender, Agency and Change. Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Victoria Ana Goddard, pp. 122–41. London: Routledge. ––––––. 2000c. Die Macht der Ordenstracht. Transformationen von Körpergrenzen. In Körper und Status. Zur Soziologie der Attraktivität, ed. Cornelia Koppetsch, pp. 189–209. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag. ––––––. 2000d. Women’s Congregations as Transnational Communities. ESRC Transnational Communities Programme Working Papers WPTC-2K-13, www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk ––––––. 2001. “Närrin Gottes”—Ordensfrauen auf der Bühne. In Geist, Bild und Narr. Zu einer Ethnologie kultureller Konversionen. Festschrift für Fritz Kramer, ed. Heike Behrend, pp. 138–54. Berlin and Wien: Philo-Verlag. ––––––. 2004. Närrinnen Gottes. Lebenswelten von Ordensfrauen. Münster: Waxmann. ––––––. 2005. Ordensfrauen unterwegs: Gender, Transnationalismus und Religion, ed. Susanna Burghartz and Rebekka Habermas, Historische Anthropologie 13 (1): 91–110.

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––––––. 2008. Formations of the Religious Self—Becoming “Women in Christ” in a Globalizing World. In Religion and Its Other: Secular and Sacral Concepts and Practices in Interaction, ed. Heike Bock, Jörg Feuchter, and Michi Knecht, pp. 199–211. Campus Verlag: Frankfurt am Main. ––––––. 2009 (in print). Women’s Congregations as Transnational Networks of Social Security. In Social Security in Religious Networks: Changes in Meanings, Contents and Functions, ed. Anja Peleikis, Tatjana Thelen, and Carolin Leuthoff-Grandits. Berghan. Langlois, Claude. 1984. Le catholicisme au féminin. Les congregations francaises a` supérieure générale au XIXe siècle. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf. Mahmood, Saba. 2004. Women’s Agency within Feminist Historiography. The Journal of Religion 43 (4): 573–79. ––––––. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Morokvasic, Mirjana. 1984. Birds of Passage Are also Women. International Migration Review 18 (4): 886–907. Mahler, Sarah J., and Patricia Pessar. 2001. Gendered Geographies of Power. Identities. Global Studies in Culture and Power 7: 441–59. Pessar, Patricia R. 2003. Anthropology and the Engendering of Migration Studies. In American Arrivals. Anthropology Engages the New Immigration, ed. Nancy Foner, pp. 75–98. Oxford: James Currey. Piore, Michael J. 1979. Birds of Passage: Migrant Labour in Industrial Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Specht, Anita. 2001. The Power of Ethnicity in a Community of Women Religious: The Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ in the United States, 1868–1930. U.S. Catholic Historian 19 (1): 53–64. Strasser, Ulrike. 2004. Early Modern Nuns and the Feminist Politics of Religion. The Journal of Religion 84 (4): 529–55. Vertovec, Steven. 1999. Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism. Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (2): 447–62. ———. 2001. Religion and Diaspora. ESRC Transnational Communities Programme Working Papers WPTC-01-01. www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk. Forthcoming in New Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz and Randi Warne. Berlin and New York: Verlag de Gruyter. ———, and Robin Cohen, eds. 1999. Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Warner, R. Stephen, and Judith Wittner, eds. 1998. Gatherings in Diaspora. Religious Communities and the New Immigration. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Willis, Katie, and Brenda Yeoh, eds. 2000. Gender and Migration. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Part III

4 Gender Spaces: Cu lture, R eli gion, and Politics


Chapter 8

4

Fe mi ni sm, Democracy, and Em pire: I sl am and the War on Te rror Saba Mahmood*

The complicated role European feminism played in legitimating and

extending colonial rule in vast regions of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East has been extensively documented and well-argued for some time now.1 For many of us raised in this critical tradition, it is therefore surprising to witness the older colonialist discourse on women being reenacted in new genres of feminist literature today, with the explicit aim of justifying the U.S. war on terror in the Muslim world. It seems at times a thankless task to unravel yet again the spurious logic through which Western imperial power seeks to justify its geopolitical domination by posing as the “liberator” of indigenous women from native patriarchal cultures. It would seem that this ideologically necessary but intellectually tedious task requires little imagination beyond repositioning the truths of the earlier scholarship on Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, and India that has copiously and rigorously laid bare the implicated histories of feminism and empire. Yet it is important for feminists to address the relationship between contemporary feminist discourse and Euro-American imperial domination of the Middle East. While ordinary Americans and Europeans seem to have lost their enthusiasm for the Bush-Blair strategy of unilateralist militarism (whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iran), they continue to trust the judgment offered by their politicians and media pundits, that Muslim societies are besotted with an ideology of fundamentalism whose worst victims are its female inhabitants. This judgment further entails the prescriptive vision that the solution lies in promoting

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“democracy” in the Muslim world and Western values of “freedom and liberty” through religious and cultural reform, so that Muslims might be taught to discard their fundamentalist propensities and adopt more enlightened versions of Islam. I do not expect the change in the White House regime (with the election of President Obama) to dim the appeal of this narrative given its longstanding hold on the EuroAmerican imaginary. What concerns me most in this chapter is the role the tropes of freedom, democracy, and gender inequality have come to play in this story, and the ease with which Islam’s mistreatment of women is used as a diagnosis as well as a strategic point of intervention for restructuring large swaths of the Muslim population, if not the religion itself. How have the tropes of freedom, democracy, and gender equality—constitutive of a variety of traditions of feminist thought— facilitated the current Euro-American ambition to remake Muslims and Islam? What does such an imbrication obfuscate and what forms of violence does it condone? How has the normative secularism internal to liberal feminist discourse made the Euro-American war on Muslims made palatable to feminists from across the political spectrum.2

Native Testimonials The empirical terrain from which I want to think through these issues is the plethora of recently published nonfiction bestsellers written by Muslim women about their personal suffering at the hands of Islam’s supposedly incomparable misogynist practices. Since the events of 9/11, this vastly popular autobiographical genre has played a pivotal role in securing the judgment that Islam’s mistreatment of women is a symptom of a much larger pathology that haunts Islam—namely, its propensity to violence. Calls for the reformation of Islam, now issued from progressive, liberal, and conservative podiums alike, are ineluctably tied to its oppression of women. The argument is simple: women are the most abject victims of the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism. The solution lies in bringing “democracy” to the Muslim world, a project that will not only benefit women but that will also make them its main protagonists. In our age of imperial certitude, it seems that the fate of Muslim women and the fate of democracy have become indelibly intertwined. Many of the authors of these accounts have been handsomely rewarded by conservative political parties and think tanks internationally, and some have been catapulted into positions of political power, having few qualifications other than their shrill polemic against Islam. Given their public prominence, the authors of this genre perform a quasiofficial function in various American and European cabinets today: lending a voice of legitimacy to, and at times leading, the civilizational confrontation between “Islam and the West.”

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As will become clear, however, the popularity of these authors extends beyond their conservative supporters to liberal and progressive publics who dismiss the poor writing and gross exaggerations characteristic of this genre as incidental to its real merits: the truth of Islamic misogyny. The ideological force of this literature lies to a great extent in the ability of the Muslim woman author to embody the double figure of insider and victim, a key subject within Orientalist understandings of women in Muslim societies. These autobiographical works are, however, also distinct from earlier colonial accounts in which it fell to Europeans to reveal the suffering of indigenous women. The fact that this genre of Muslim women’s biographies speaks to a range of feminists, many of whom oppose imperialist politics, is particularly disturbing. A number of well-known feminist critics have endorsed these books, and several of the bestsellers are either taught or widely read within women’s study circles.3 While the authentic “Muslim woman’s voice” partially explains the popularity these books command, it is the emancipatory model of politics underwriting these accounts that provokes such pathos and admiration among its feminist readership. It is this emancipatory model, with its attendant topography of secular politics and desire for liberal freedoms, that I wish to examine in this chapter. In what follows, I will make three related but distinct arguments. In the first section of the chapter, I will examine the symbiotic relationship between the authors of this genre of women’s literature and conservative political parties and think tanks in America and Europe, a relationship that should serve to mute the enthusiastic reception these books have received in many feminist circles. The second section of this chapter analyzes the particular kinds of elisions and inaccuracies, so characteristic of these autobiographical accounts, that have helped construct an essential opposition between Western civilization and Muslim barbarism (or fundamentalism). Finally, the third section examines current arguments for bringing democracy to the Muslim world and the role the figure of the oppressed Muslim woman plays in these calls. I draw attention to the singular and reductive conception of religiosity underwriting these calls, one that enjoys wide currency among a range of feminists (Pollit 2002) but that needs to be criticized for the forms of violence it entails and the narrow vision of gender enfranchisement it prescribes. In this section I also discuss how the liberal discourse on freedom, endemic to various traditions of feminist thought, blinds us to the power that nonliberal forms of religiosity command in many women’s lives. If indeed feminists are interested in distancing themselves from the imperial politics of our times, it is crucial that these forms of religiosity be understood, engaged and respected, instead of scorned as expressions of a false consciousness.

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One of the most successful examples within this genre of Muslim women’s literature is Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. Since its publication in 2003, this book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over 117 weeks, translated into more than 32 languages, and has won a number of prominent literary awards. Although Nafisi’s writing exhibits aesthetic and literary qualities that make it unique among the works I discuss here, it shares with these other writings a systematic exclusion of information that might complicate the story of women’s oppression in Iran. A second book published to wide acclaim—though it does not have the literary pretensions of the former—is Canadian journalist Irshad Manji’s The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. This book has been translated into more than 20 languages, republished in over 23 countries, and was on the Canadian bestseller list for 20 weeks during the first year of its publication. Manji’s shrill diatribe against Muslims has won her a prominent public profile: she regularly appears on a variety of television networks (including BBC, CNN, FoxNews), her op-eds are published in prominent international dailies (such as the New York Times, the Times of London, the International Herald Tribune, the Sydney Morning Herald), and she is invited to give lectures at elite academic institutions despite the fact that her writings and speeches are full of historical errors and willful inaccuracies about Islam. A third sample of this genre, Carmen bin Laden’s Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia, is an account of Carmen’s marriage to one of Osama bin Laden’s 25 brothers and the years of claustrophobic (albeit plush) boredom she spent in Saudi Arabia. Translated into at least 16 languages, with translation rights sold in more than 27 countries, the book was on the bestseller list in France for months after its initial publication as well as on the New York Times bestseller list during the first year of its publication. In France a number of such books reached high acclaim at the time of the passage of the controversial law banning the display of the veil (and other “conspicuous” religious symbols) in public schools. Leading these publications was Fadela Amara’s Ni putes ni soumises, which received two prominent literary awards (Le Prix du livre politique and Le Prix des Députés in 2004), sold over 50,000 copies, and has been translated into multiple languages. A sequel to the book, Ni putes ni soumises, le combat continue, sold out prior to its publication. An equally popular first-person account attesting to Islam’s barbaric customs is Bas les voiles! written by Iranian dissident Chahdortt Djavann (2003), whose quote on the dust jacket exemplifies the enunciative position that constitutes this autobiographical genre: “I wore the veil for ten years. It was the veil or death. I know what I am talking about.”


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Both Amara and Djavann provided personal testimonies against the veil to the Stasi Commission (a government-appointed investigative body that recommended the ban), which reportedly moved the presiding officials to tears. These women’s highly dramatized statements, marshaled as “evidence” of the oppressive character of the veil in the Stasi Commission’s report, played a key role in securing French public opinion against the veil and creating a communitas of shared aversion to Islam’s religious symbols and the misogyny to which they give expression. Other European countries, including Holland, Spain, Sweden, and Germany, also lay claim to their own ambassadors of Islam’s patriarchally oppressed. These authors authenticate and legitimize the Islamophobia sweeping Europe today, lending a voice of credibility to some of the worst kinds of prejudices and stereotypes Europe has seen since the rise of anti-Semitism in the 1930s. These authentic Muslim voices have played a crucial role in shoring up support for the passage of a number of anti-immigration laws in Europe targeting the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the population. It is no small task that these female “critics of Islam” perform, and indeed, their service is recognized by the conservative political forces of contemporary Europe and America who have bestowed considerable honors on this group.

Neoconservatism and Women’s Suffering Consider, for example, the mercurial rise of Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Dutch politics. A woman of Somali descent, Hirsi Ali had no public profile until she decided to capitalize on the anti-Muslim sentiment that swept Europe following the events of 9/11. Excoriating Muslims for their unparalleled barbarity and misogyny, she scored points with the right wing when she attacked the Dutch government’s welfare and multicultural policies for fostering and supporting the culture of domestic violence supposedly endemic to Islam and Muslims. In highly staged public statements, Hirsi Ali has characterized the prophet Muhammad as a pervert and a tyrant, claiming that Muslims lag “in enlightened thinking, tolerance and knowledge of other cultures” and that their history cannot cite a single person who “made a discovery in science or technology, or changed the world through artistic achievement” (Hirsi Ali 2006: 152–53, Kuper 2004). Soon thereafter the right-wing People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy offered her a ticket to run for member of parliament, a seat she won by popular vote in January 2003 despite the fact that she had little qualification for such a position. Dutch immigration services subsequently discovered that Hirsi Ali had lied to gain entry into the Netherlands, fabricating the story of her flight from a forced marriage and a vengeful natal family. Threatened with the repeal of her Dutch citizenship, Hirsi Ali resigned from the

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Dutch parliament and was immediately granted a position at the prestigious right-wing think tank in Washington, DC, the American Enterprise Institute. Predictably, Hirsi Ali also published a memoir titled The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam, a title highly reminiscent of the nineteenth-century literary genre centered on Orientalist fantasies of the harem (cf. Alam 2006). Despite the facts that Hirsi Ali’s personal story of suffering under Islamic customs has been discredited and the book is full of absurd statements (such as “[Muslim] children learn from their mothers that it pays to lie. Mistrust is everywhere and lies rule,” Hirsi Ali, 2007: 25–26), it has done quite well. At the time of the writing of this chapter, The Caged Virgin (Hirsi Ali 2006) had sold translation rights in 15 countries, and Ali is widely regarded as the contemporary doyen of “conservative left criticism.” Importantly, she is also hailed by left critics (such as Christopher Hitchens 2006) and in February 2008, she was awarded the Simone de Beauvoir Freedom Prize. The arguments of these authors read like a blueprint for the neoconservative agenda for regime change in the Middle East. Irshad Manji is a case in point. Her book Trouble with Islam (2004) is breathtaking in its amplification of neoconservative policies and arguments—all told in the voice of a purportedly self-critical and reformist Muslim woman who wants to bring her lost brethren to the correct path. While inflammatory hyperbole is characteristic of this genre, Manji uses language aimed at injuring and offending Muslim sensibilities. Her text is littered with sentences that describe Muslims as “brain-dead,” “narrow-minded,” “incapable of thinking,” “hypocritical,” “desperately tribal,” and “prone to victimology” (ibid.: 22, 30, 31). She brands Islam as more literalist, rigid, intolerant, totalitarian, anti-Semitic, and hateful of women and homosexuals than any other religion, and its rituals more prone to inculcating “mindless and habitual submission” to authority. Manji’s denunciations of Islam and Muslims are matched by the unstinting praise she reserves for the “West,” “Christianity,” “Judaism,” and “Israel.” She finds the Western record unparalleled in human history for its tolerance, its “love of discovery,” “openness to new ideas,” and so on (ibid.: 18, 20, 204–18; Manji 2006b). Like Hirsi Ali, Manji supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and subsequently the Israeli destruction of Lebanon in the summer of 2006—all in the name of cleansing the Muslim world of “Islamic fanatics and terrorists” (Manji 2006a). In her book, Manji, in Manichaean fashion, upholds Israelis as paragons of virtue, capable of self-criticism and tolerance, while Palestinians are condemned for inhabiting a culture of blame and victimhood. She goes so far as to say that Israel’s discrimination against its Arab citizens is a form of “affirmative action” ( Mani 2004: 112). Manji has been promoted


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by the pro-Israel information lobby, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), and the infamous Daniel Pipes, who reviewed her book in glowing terms and with whom she has appeared at Israeli fundraising events. Despite the cozy relations Manji enjoys with neoconservative luminaries, it would be a mistake to underestimate the broad public presence she commands. Not only do her polemical op-eds appear in prominent international dailies, she is routinely invited to lecture at a wide range of liberal arts colleges and universities and asked to comment on political events of international import on major television and radio talk shows. Her reviewers often benignly overlook the factual errors and polemical oversimplifications that characterize Manji’s work. In an early review published in The New York Times, Andrew Sullivan (2004) writes: The Trouble with Islam is a memorable entrance. It isn’t the most learned or scholarly treatise on the history or theology of Islam; its dabbling in geopolitics is haphazard and a little naïve; its rhetorical hyperbole can sometimes seem a mite attention-seeking. . . . But its spirit is undeniable, and long, long overdue. Reading it feels like a revelation. Manji, a Canadian journalist and television personality, does what so many of us have longed to see done: assail fundamentalist Islam itself for tolerating such evil in its midst. And from within. (emphasis added) (10).

The last caveat is telling: Manji’s identity as a Muslim lends particular force to her Orientalist and racist views, reaching audiences that ideologues such as Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes cannot. Apart from her vitriolic attacks on Islam, what makes Manji so valuable for someone like Sullivan is her “distinct tone of liberalism”—“a liberalism that,” he writes, “seeks not to abolish faith but to establish a new relationship with it. If we survive this current war without unthinkable casualties, it will be because this kind of liberalism didn’t lose its nerve. Think of Manji as a nerve ending for the West—shocking, raw, but mercifully, joyously, still alive.” Note the providential role this imaginary is expected to play in the Muslim world. Not only is it a harbinger of joy and mercy for Iraqis whose country has been destroyed by the U.S. military occupation, but it promises to reorchestrate every Muslim’s relationship to his/her faith.

Selective Omissions Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, with its literary pretensions and invocations of great “Western Classics,” stands in contrast to Manji and Hirsi Ali’s books. Indeed, much of its appeal stems from the fact

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that it plays on Nabokov’s subtle masterpiece Lolita in a manner that makes Nafisi’s narrative palatable to sensibilities critical of the strident opportunism of the other texts. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a firstperson account told from the point of view of an Iranian professor of English (Nafisi herself) who, after resigning from her post at an Iranian university out of frustration over clerical control of the curriculum, gathers several of her female students to teach them classics from Western literature in the privacy of her home. Nafisi uses these sessions as a means not only to denounce clerical political rule but also to express her visceral distaste for Iranian cultural life—both contemporary and historical. She paints a stultifying picture of life in post-Revolutionary Iran, devoid of any beauty, color, inspiration, poetry, debate, discussion, and public argumentation. In this suffocating environment, it is only the Western literary canon that offers any hope of redemption in its irrepressible power to foment rebellion and critique and its intrinsic capacity to incite critical self-reflection. Despite the difference in tone between Nafisi and authors like Hirsi Ali and Manji, the fundamental message her memoir communicates is not that different: Islamic societies are incapable of thought, reflection, and creativity, and their propensity to violence is most evident in their treatment of women. At one point in the memoir, Nafisi sweepingly declares that Iranian university students are only capable of obsequious sycophantic behavior toward their instructors because “from the first day they had set foot in the elementary school, they had been told to memorize. They had been told that their opinions counted for nothing” (ibid.: 220). Such declarations are coupled with gratuitous statements such as: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife” (ibid.: 257). The contempt that Nafisi reserves for Iranians and Muslims stands in sharp contrast to the utter adulation she reserves for the West: from its cultural accomplishments to its food, its language, its literature, its chocolates, and its films. As must be clear by now, this dual theme of abhorrence of everything Muslim and sheer exaltation of all things Western is a structural feature of this genre of writing. This image of Iranian life is ruthless in its omissions. During the period Nafisi writes about, not only has Iranian clerical rule faced some of the toughest challenges from a broad-based reform movement in which women played a crucial role, but Iranian universities have been at the center of this political transformation. This is in keeping with Iran’s long history of student involvement in almost all protest movements of any significance in the modern period, including the overthrow of the Shah. One of the most interesting accomplishments of the last three decades is the establishment of a feminist press and


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a critical scriptural hermeneutics that is quite unique in the Muslim world (Najmabadi 1998). During the same period about which Nafisi writes so disparagingly, Iran has produced an internationally acclaimed cinema, which is just as fiercely critical of various aspects of contemporary Iranian society as it is reflectively ponderous about the existential meaning of modern life itself. None of this has been easy or without cost for those who have struggled against the absolutist impetus internal to the clerical establishment in charge of the Iranian state apparatus. But it is important to note that dissent has come not only from secular leftists and liberals but from the clerics themselves, many of whom had supported the Islamic Revolution at its inception but who became the most trenchant critics of the establishment’s corruption and totalitarian control.4 Social and political critique, in other words, has become a deeply integral aspect of post-revolutionary Iranian life. Reading Lolita in Tehran fits the Orientalist paradigm: it reproduces and confirms the impressions of its Western audience, offering no surprises or challenges to what they think they already know about Iran and its rich cultural and political history.5 Like Delacroix’s famous painting Women of Algiers, Nafisi’s memoir only embellishes the tapestry of anecdotal prejudicial impressions that the audience bring to their reading of the object at hand. One cannot help but wonder how Nafisi’s book would have fared had it surprised its readers with social facts that do not neatly fit her readers’ structure of expectations, such as the fact that the literacy rate for women shot up dramatically under Islamic rule from 35.5 percent in 1976 to 74.2 percent in 1996. or that over 60 percent of Iranian students in higher education are women, or that post-revolutionary Iran has had more women representatives elected to the parliament than the U.S. Congress (Bahramitash 2006: 235). In addition, the population growth rate in Iran declined from 3.2 percent in 1980 to 1.2 in 2001 as a result of one of the most effective family planning and public health initiatives launched in recent history. If indeed Iranian women have been able to achieve this kind of political and material enfranchisement under conditions of Islamic clerical rule, then how does this complicate the rather simple diagnosis that Islamic rule is and always will be oppressive of women? Nafisi’s book neatly fits into the geopolitics initiated by the Bush White House which declared Iran to be part of the “axis of evil,” and neoconservative plans to attack Iran were made public (Hersch 2006). It is hard not to read Nafisi as providing the cultural rationale for such plans, particularly those extended to her by the neoconservative establishment. Bernard Lewis, the Orientalist ideologue of the current U.S. imperial adventure in the Middle East, calls the memoir “a masterpiece,” and Nafisi was given a prestigious position at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where her

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friend Fouad Ajami, another prominent conservative ideologue, directs the Middle East program. The fact that Nafisi was awarded such a position, even though she had no substantial publishing record or a comparable position at a similar institution, attests to the considerable service she has performed for the scions of the U.S. empire. Political patronage aside, Nafisi has also been promoted as a cultural icon by corporations eager to showcase their socially responsible side. The manufacturer of the luxury car Audi, for example, promoted Azar Nafisi (along with media figures like David Bowie and the actor William H. Macy) as part of “Audi of America’s ‘Never Follow’ Campaign” to sell the brand to affluent and educated potential buyers. Nafisi has appeared in Audi advertisements for magazines as diverse as Vanity Fair, Wired, Golf Digest, The New Yorker, and Vogue (see Salamon 2004). Inasmuch as automobile advertisements do not simply sell cars but also forms of social identity, Audi’s promotion of Nafisi shows the extent to which a genuine concern for Muslim women’s welfare has been evacuated of critical content and whittled down to a commodified token of elite chic. The project of “Saving Muslim Women” is reminiscent these days of the “Save the Whale” campaign: while the latter might have contributed to the well-being of the species the campaign sought to protect, the former, I fear, might well obliterate the very object it champions. Indeed, this is a conclusion that echoes Hamid Dabashi’s assessment in his devastating review of Reading Lolita in Tehran (Dabashi 2006). Apart from the political service the text renders, Dabashi criticizes the book cover for the “iconic burglary” it performs. The cover of the book shows two young veiled women eagerly poring over a text that the reader infers to be Lolita “in Tehran.” Dabashi shows that this is a cropped version of an original photograph that portrayed two young students reading a leading oppositional newspaper reporting on the election of the reformist candidate Khatami, whose success was widely attributed to votes cast by Iranian women and youth. In censoring the photograph and denuding it of its historical context, Dabashi argues that the book strips these young women “of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, reducing them into a colonial harem.” For Dabashi, insomuch as the book cover places the veiled teenage women within the context of Nabokov’s celebrated novel about pedophilia, it reenacts an old Orientalist fantasy about the incestuous character of the East, simultaneously repulsive and tantalizing in its essence. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the women whose suffering Nafisi sets out to capture must be obliterated in their particularity, both narratively and iconically, so that they can be re-enshrined as the “caged virgins” of Islam’s violence.


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The fact that Nafisi’s book has drawn accolades from feminist writers such as Susan Sontag and Margaret Atwood is disquieting in that even vocal critics of the conservatism characteristic of the Bush-Blair era remain blind to the dangerous omissions that texts such as Nafisi’s embody and to the larger political projects they facilitate.6 It is crucial that feminist writers and cultural critics learn to read such texts more critically, a reading that must ground itself in a familiarity with the complexities and ambiguities that attend even the much spurned Iranian clerical regime and the politics of dissent it has spawned.

But What about Islam’s Abuse of Women? The reader might object at this point that even though accounts of Muslim women’s suffering have been opportunistically used to serve a political agenda, is it not the case that Islamic societies exhibit a forbidding record of misogynist practices? How can anyone concerned about women’s well-being not criticize and condemn such unspeakable atrocities? By way of an answer, let me begin by stating categorically that I fully acknowledge that women in Muslim societies suffer from inequitable treatment and are disproportionately subjected to discriminatory acts of violence. Any feminist concerned with improving Muslim women’s lot, however, must begin not simply with the scorecard of Islam’s abuses but with the terms through which an act of violence is registered as worthy of protest, for whom, under what conditions and toward what end. Let me flesh out these points by considering the much publicized issue of “honor killing,” a widely condemned practice that received international media attention even prior to the events of 9/11 but has since surfaced more dramatically in the genre of literature I discuss here. “Honor killing” is generally understood to be an “Islamic practice” in which women suspected of engaging in illicit sexual behavior are murdered by male family members. This practice might be compared to acts of man-on-woman homicide common to many Western societies. Consider, for example, the following comparable statistics: various reports show that in a country of 140 million people, almost 1,000 women are killed per year in Pakistan (that, along with Jordan, has one of the highest recorded instances of “honor killings”).7 The U.S. Family Violence Prevention Project, on the other hand, reports that approximately 1,500 women are killed every year by their spouses or boyfriends in what are called “crimes of passion” in the United States, which has a population of roughly 300 million (slightly more than three women are murdered by their boyfriends or husbands every day in the United States).8 Despite these parallel statistics, discussions of “honor killings” are seldom analyzed within a comparative context.

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Instead, most discussions construct “honor killing” as symptomatic of “Islamic culture” (note the elision between religion and culture in this formulation), while acts of man-on-woman homicide in the United States are presented either as acts of individualized pathology or excessive passion. In this logic, American men are represented as acting out of jealousy (a “natural” emotion) against their sexual rivals (albeit swept away by its force), while Muslim men are understood to be compelled by “their culture,” irrationally and blindly acting out its misogynist customs and traditions. An individualized account of domestic violence in the West is secured, in other words, against a tautological account of “Islamic culture.” Once this premise is conceded, it follows that an appropriate strategy for combating this form of violence in the West is to transform individual behavior, whereas in Muslim societies one would need to reform, if not eradicate, “Islamic culture.”9 Such a polemical account, in its drive to quantify sexism (West equals less; Islam equals more), fails to realize that both forms of violence are equally cultural as they are gendered, each depending upon distinct valuations of women’s subordination, sexuality, kinship relations, and various forms of male violence. Any opposition to these different (if comparable) acts of male violence requires a precise and grounded understanding of the social relations and cultural grammar that give meaning and substance to such acts. The point I am making here is rather simple and straightforward: no discursive object occupies a simple relation to the reality it purportedly denotes. Rather, representations of facts, objects, and events are profoundly mediated by the fields of power in which they circulate and through which they acquire their precise shape and form. Consequently, contemporary concern for Muslim women is paradoxically linked with and deeply informed by the civilizational discourse through which the encounter between Euro-America and Islam is being framed right now. Feminist contributions to the vilification of Islam do no service either to Muslim women or to the cause of gender justice. Instead they reinscribe the cultural and civilizational divide that has become the bedrock not only of neoconservative politics but also of liberal politics in this tragic moment of our history.

Women, Democracy, and Freedom In these last two sections, I want to examine the work that the rhetoric of democracy and freedom has come to perform in the “war on terror,” paying particular attention to the secularity of this rhetoric and its constitutive assumptions. As is evident from even the most cursory reading of the media, progressive and conservative strategists agree these days that one of the most compelling strategies for eliminating


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Islamic fundamentalism consists of empowering Muslim women by educating them and giving them access to economic resources and political representation. The logic underlying this project is rather simple. In the words of New York Times reporter Barbara Crossette (2001): “When women’s influence increases . . . it strengthens the moderate center, bolstering economic stability and democratic order.” The conventional wisdom seems to be that insomuch as feminism is “the opposite of fundamentalism” (Pollit 2002: xiv), and fundamentalists are supposed to hate democracy, it follows that empowering women will further the cause of feminism, which in turn will help eliminate Islamic fundamentalism. Apart from the more complicated fact that a number of Islamist movements—those pejoratively referred to as fundamentalist in the literature I cite here—seek to broaden the scope of political debate in the Muslim world rather than narrow it, I want to question the facile equation made between democracy and women’s socioeconomic status: the idea that promoting the latter will automatically lead to the former. This equation is easily put to the test if we look at the conditions under which women lived in Iraq prior to the first U.S. war on Iraq in 1990. Despite the fact that Iraq was not a democracy under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi women enjoyed one of the highest rates of literacy in the third world and were widely represented in various professions including the army and public office. At the height of Iraq’s economic boom, Saddam Hussein implemented a series of policies to attract women to the workforce by providing them incentives such as generous maternity leaves, equal pay and benefits, and free higher education (Chew 2005; Bahdi 2002). In this important sense, Iraq was no different than a number of socialist countries (such as Cuba, the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe), where the lack of liberal democracy did not translate into complete marginalization of women from the socioeconomic and political life of these countries. Iraqi women’s condition declined after the Iran-Iraq war (1980– 1988), but suffered the most serious setback after the first Gulf War (1990–1991) and the subsequent economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. in cooperation with the United Nations and its European allies. Female literacy dropped sharply after the Gulf War, and Iraqi women’s access to education, transportation and employment became increasingly difficult. The current U.S. occupation of Iraq is the most recent chapter in 12 years of debilitating sanctions that directly contributed to the most dramatic decline in Iraqi women’s living conditions. Needless to say, in the current situation of violence, chaos, and economic stasis, women (along with children, the elderly and the disabled) are the most vulnerable victims of this disorder, and they are not likely to experience even a modicum of social order in the foreseeable future. Not only

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has Iraqi women’s dramatic loss of “life and liberty” failed to arouse the same furor among most Euro-Americans as have individualized accounts of women’s suffering under Islam’s tutelage, but a number of political pundits now suggest that perhaps the promotion of electoral democracy in the Middle East is not a good idea after all, since it might bring Islamist political parties to power (as indeed was the case in the 2005 elections held in Palestine and Egypt) (Feldman 2006; Friedman 2006). Apart from the fact that these commentators find Islamist ascendance to political power inimical to American strategic interests, the fate of women under Islamic regimes is often marshaled as the ultimate reason for thwarting Islamist success at the polls. Note here once again the neat equivalence drawn between Euro-American strategic interests and women’s well-being, between democracy (narrowly defined in electoral terms) and women’s status. One heart-rending appeal for instituting democracy by legislating women’s freedom was made by Barbara Ehrenreich in an op-ed piece written for the New York Times in the lead-up to the 2004 American elections. In this piece, Ehrenreich upheld Carmen bin Laden’s memoir Inside the Kingdom as the manifesto that all Democrats should embrace in their policy toward the Muslim world. As I mentioned earlier, Inside the Kingdom is Carmen’s account of her luxurious life both in Switzerland, where she was raised and currently resides, and in Saudi Arabia, where she lived as the sole wife of one of the rich scions of the bin Laden family for several years. Much of the book lists the claustrophobic character of her life in Saudi Arabia, one punctuated by extended luxurious vacations in Europe, palatial houses with an army of servants, and lavish parties. Carmen, much like the authors I mentioned earlier, brims with her adulation for the West, its lifestyle, and its “opportunities.” Carmen’s zeal for a Western lifestyle is only matched by her sneering and derogatory portrayal of Saudi women. For Carmen, they are doomed to a herd mentality by the straitjacket of their cultural traditions: “You never develop as an individual in the Middle East. People may manage to escape their tradition for a short while, but those rules catch up to them” (Bin Laden 2004: 16). It is this account that inspired Barbara Ehrenreich’s plea to the Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry to make gender parity a cornerstone of his foreign policy in the Middle East, because the real enemy, she opined, is not terrorism, but an “extremist Islamic insurgency whose appeal lies in its claim to represent the Muslim masses against a bullying superpower.” Ehrenreich erroneously but predictably reduces the heterogeneity of Islamic movements to the likes of Osama bin Laden, and in due course, treats the practice of veiling (now so common in large parts of the Muslim world) as nothing but the entrapment of Muslim women in this patriarchal ideology. As a number of


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scholars have shown in the last 15 years, pace Ehrenreich, the Islamic movement is not only quite diverse, but a number of its constitutive strands have strong support among women, who are the backbone of the welfare work undertaken by this movement (Abdo 2004; Deeb 2006; Mahmood 2005). Far from curtailing women’s freedoms, Islamic movements have often been the vehicles for women’s participation in the sociopolitical life of their societies. One of the grave costs of Ehrenreich’s argument is that it fails to account for the complicated social shifts, challenges, and political transformations Islamic movements have produced that do not fit the simplistic logic of patriarchal subordination and authoritarian politics. The fact that Carmen bin Laden’s model of white elite bourgeois femininity is the symbol of this vision of “democracy” should alert us to its imperialist underpinnings. Callous and unrelenting in the modes of sociability and subjectivities it seeks to remake, this vision ridicules and scorns women whose desires and goals do not fit the telos of a liberal lifestyle. It is precisely because Ehrenreich is so sure that this insurgency is not in the best interests of women that she is led to conclude that it is up to the United States (better led by the Democrats than Republicans) to free these enslaved souls. This missionary zeal to remake “cultures and civilizations” has strong resonances with colonial projects of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, when European powers, also outraged by what they took to be Islam’s degradation of women, undertook cultural and educational reform to civilize the local population. British regulation and policing of practices of widow sacrifice (sati) in India and feminine genital cutting in Sudan, symbolic of the colonized cultures’ barbaric treatment of its women, seldom benefited those whom they were supposed to save. As Mani has noted, indigenous women were neither the objects nor the subjects of these reforms; rather, they were the ground on which European and national battles were fought for competing visions of empire and modernity (Mani 1998; Boddy 2007; Mahmood 2005, esp. chap.1 and epilogue).

Secularism and Empire Calls for secularizing and liberalizing Islam so that Muslims may be taught to live a more enlightened existence are issued from a variety of quarters these days, left and right alike. These calls strike a chord with secular feminists (from a variety of political perspectives) who have long been convinced that religion is a source of women’s oppression. While critical of neoconservative militaristic belligerence, many liberal feminists support a broad-based strategy of slow progressive transformation, one in which, as Katha Pollit (2002) puts it, “organized religion [is made to] wither away or at any rate modulate away from dogma

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and authority and reaction toward a kind of vague, kindly, nondenominational spiritual uplift whose politics if it had any, would be liberal” (ix). This seemingly benign vision encodes a secular conception of religiosity in which religion is treated as a private system of beliefs in a set of propositional statements to which an individual gives assent. Secularism, often reduced to its doctrinal principal (the separation of religion and state), operates here as a sociocultural project, authorizing a privatized form of religious subjectivity that owes its allegiance to the sovereign state (rather than to traditional religious authority). Importantly, the autonomous individual is the protagonist animating this secular liberal model of religiosity, a self-choosing subject who might appreciate the spiritual truths religious traditions symbolize, but is enlightened enough to understand that these truths command no epistemological or political force in this world. These aspects of secular culture, now often noted under the rubric of secularity, are propagated not only through the agency of the state but also through a variety of social actors and organizations that might well be critical of various policies and prerogatives of the state.10 Embedded in this secular conception of religiosity (echoed in Katha Pollit’s quote above) are a number of presuppositions about autonomy and freedom that resonate with liberal feminist thought. The most obvious is the powerful trope of the autonomous individual—capable of enacting her own desires free from the force of transcendental will, tradition, or custom—that continues to animate many strains of feminism despite trenchant philosophical and anthropological critiques of such a limited conception of the subject (see Butler 1993; Mahmood 2005: chap. 1). A second assumption central to this secularized conception of religiosity is the understanding that a religion’s phenomenal forms—its liturgies, rituals, and scriptures—are inessential to the universal truth it symbolizes. The precise form that scripture and ritualized practices take, in other words, is regarded as inconsequential to the spirituality (immaterial and transcendental) that they represent but are not reducible to. This secularized conception of ritual behavior makes it difficult, for example, for many secular feminists to entertain the claim made by a large number of Muslim women that the veil is a doctrinal command. Women who contend that the veil is part of a religious duty, a divine edict, or a form of ethical practice are usually judged to be victims of false consciousness, mired in a traditionalism that leads them to mistakenly internalize the opinions of misogynist jurists whose pronouncements they should resist.11 The veil—reduced either to its symbolic significance (a symbol of Muslim identity or women’s oppression) or its functional utility (the veil protects women from sexual harassment)—is seldom entertained as an expression of and a means to a Muslim


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woman’s submission to God’s will, despite repeated evidence that for many veiled women this understanding is central (Mahmood 2005; Fernando 2006; Scott 2007). To take such a claim seriously would require stepping out of the simple opposition liberalism constructs between freedom and submission, instead exploring the forms of submission internal to a particular construction of freedom and the system of gender inequality in which such a construction resides. Sadly, this is not the direction in which the Euro-American public debate is headed (evident in the French ban on the veil and the attempts in other countries to follow suit). Instead, contemporary calls for reforming Islam are built upon a narrow vision of a secularized conception of religiosity that mobilizes many of the liberal assumptions about what it means to be human in this world. The problem of this prescriptive vision of secularized religiosity lies in its singularity and certitude that brooks no argument and makes no adjustments for different ways of living, both religiously and politically. It is the telos of a liberal-democratic Protestant society—whose ethos is condensed in the cosmopolitan sensibilities and pleasures of its enlightened citizenry—that is posited as the Mecca toward which all Muslims should conscientiously head. Apart from the infeasibility and singularity of this vision, what strikes me as imperialistic is the chain of equivalences upon which such a vision rests. It is not simply Islamic militants who are the object of this unrelenting prescription, but all those Muslims who follow what are considered to be nonliberal, orthodox, and conservative interpretations of Islam, key among them the wearing of the veil, the strict adherence to rituals of Islamic observance, the avoidance of the free mixing of the sexes and the adjudication of public and political issues through religious argumentation. Insomuch as the appellation of fundamentalism has now come to enfold within itself not simply Islamic militants but also those who embrace this range of practices, calls for the liberalization of Islam are aimed at the transformation of these Muslims, making their lifestyles provisional if not extinct through a process of gradual but incessant reform. As I have shown elsewhere, the prescriptive force of this liberal project is not simply rhetorical. It enjoys the support of the U.S. State Department that recently allocated over $1.3 billion under an initiative titled “Muslim World Outreach” to transform the hearts and minds of Muslims through a range of theological, cultural, and pedagogical programs. Part of a broader strategy of the White House National Security Council, this initiative is engaged in training Islamic preachers, establishing Islamic schools that propagate liberal interpretations of Islam, reforming public school curricula, and media production (which includes establishing radio and satellite television stations, producing and distributing Islamic talk shows, and generally shaping the content of

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public religious debate within the existing media in Muslim countries). What is notable about this broad-based multipronged strategy is that it is not the militants but the ordinary “traditional” Muslims who are the targets of this reform, in that they are seen as woefully lacking in the kind of secular sensibility required of modern subjects.12 This project bears obvious similarities to the State Department’s Cold War strategy with one exception: the current campaign has an overt theological agenda that abrogates the same secular liberal principal—the right to religion and freedom of conscience—that the United States is supposed to be fostering among Muslims through this campaign. There are many ironies in this attempt of the U.S. government to orchestrate Islamic reform in the Muslim world, but one that merits some reflection is how this policy of promoting liberal religiosity in the Middle East sits in tension with the Bush White House’s active promotion of a particular form of Evangelical Christianity at home. As I have argued elsewhere, these seemingly opposite tendencies need to be analyzed as part of what constitutes secularism today—particularly the understanding that secularism is not simply an evacuation of religion from politics but its reorchestration. Furthermore, it is not clear to me that inculcating a liberal religious sensibility among Muslims is necessarily going to decrease militant attacks on the U.S. or other Western European powers. This is not because all Muslims are violent, but because the grievances they hold against the West have more to do with geopolitical inequalities of power and privilege. Even Osama bin Laden was clear in his message at the time of the World Trade Center attacks: he wanted American troops out of Saudi Arabia, a just solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and an end to Euro-American domination of Muslim resources and lands. His ends, if not his means, speak to a wide range of Arabs and Muslims who are currently witnessing one of the most unabashedly imperial projects undertaken in modern history, a project that, as a number of observers have pointed out, has done more to fuel the militant cause rather than eliminate it. The Muslim World Outreach program seeks to build alliances and networks with what it calls “moderate” Muslim scholars who promote a liberal interpretation of Islam and who largely echo the programmatic vision championed by the U.S. State Department through this initiative. The fact that calls for liberalizing Islam are now increasingly made by a range of prominent Muslim intellectuals—such as Khaled Abul Fadl, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Abdolkarim Soroush, Hasan Hanafi—is testimony to the hegemony that liberalism commands as a political ideal for many contemporary Muslims, a hegemony that reflects, I would submit, the enormous disparity in power between Euro-American and Muslim countries today. In their reflections, it is Islam that


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bears the burden of proving its compatibility with liberal ideals, and the line of question is almost never reversed. They do not ask, for example, what it would mean to take the orthodox practices of Islam, embraced by many in the Muslim world right now, and rethink some of the secular liberal values that are so readily upheld today, such as freedom of choice, autonomy, and indifference to religious forms of belonging. What would such a dialogue look like? How would such a conversation change our world-making projects? As a number of critics of liberalism have pointed out, it is a characteristic of liberal thought—which, we must remind ourselves, cuts across conservative and radical projects—to assimilate unfamiliar forms of life within its own projection into the future, a future that is defined by the unfolding of the liberal vision itself. All life forms that do not accord with this futurity are to be subsumed within a teleological process of improvement and are destined to become either extinct or provisional. This attitude toward difference seems not only to animate calls for Islamic reformation but is also operative in contemporary strands of feminism—particularly in its certainty that women’s sensibilities and attachments, those that seem so paradoxically inimical to what are taken to be women’s own interests, must be refashioned for their own well-being. It is this arrogant certitude that I want to question here. Does the confidence of our political vision as feminists ever run up against the responsibility that we incur for the destruction of life forms so that “unenlightened” women may be taught to live more freely? Do we fully comprehend the forms of life that we want so passionately to remake so that Muslim women and men may live a more enlightened existence? Can we entertain the possibility that practices like the veil might perform something in the world other than the oppression and/or freedom of women? Have we lost the capacity to be able to hear the voices of Muslim women that do not come packaged in the form of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Azar Nafisi, and Irshad Manji? Would an intimate knowledge of lifeworlds that are distinct, and perhaps even opposed to our cosmopolitan lifestyles, ever lead us to question the certainty with which we prescribe what is good for all of humanity? At a time when feminist and democratic politics run the danger of being reduced to a rhetorical display of the placard of Islam’s abuses, these questions offer the slim hope that perhaps a dialogue across political and religious differences—even incommensurable ones—can yield a vision of coexistence that does not require making certain lifeworlds extinct or provisional. It requires us to entertain the possibility, perhaps too much to ask in the current imperial climate, that one does not always know what one opposes and that a political vision at times has to admit its own finitude in order to even comprehend what it has sought to oppose.

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Notes * This chapter would have been impossible to write without the assiduous research assistance of Noah Salomon, Michael Allan, Stacey May, and Mark McGrath. I am thankful not only for their help in locating the materials but also for keeping me abreast of the enormous popularity this genre of literature enjoys in various public forums. My thanks to Jane Collier, Charles Hirschkind, and Joan Scott for their critical comments, and to Mayanthi Fernando for introducing me to the French examples in this genre. A longer version of this paper appears in Joan Scott (ed.), Women Studies on the Edge, Duke University Press, 2007. I would like to thank Duke University Press for permitting the republication of this piece in its current version. My sincere thanks to Ann Braude for her expert editing for this volume. 1. A small sample of this vast scholarship includes Alloula 1986; Ahmed 1992; Lazreg 1994; Mani, 1998; and Spivak 1988. 2. This is not to deny that there are traditions of feminist thought that have been critical of the imperial impulse internal to liberalism. My own engagement here is in fact enabled by and deeply indebted to this tradition. I use the term “liberal feminism” in this essay to designate those currents within feminism where the connections between a certain analysis of gender inequality and the politics of empire are most dense and pervasive. For a further exposition of this critique of liberal feminism, see my Politics of Piety 2005, esp. chap. 1. 3. On Azar Nafisi, see, for example, Atwood (2003); on Carmen bin Laden, see Ehrenreich 2004. Both Ayan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji are regularly invited to women’s and gender studies programs across US campuses. 4. Some of these people include clerical luminaries such as Shariat-Madari, Mahmoud, Taleqani, Abdollah Nouri, and Hossein Ali Montazeri. For an account of the dissent from within, see Abdo and Lyons 2004. 5. For a comprehensive analysis of the Orientalist character of Nafisi’s book, see Keshavarz 2007. 6. Susan Sontag, for example, offers the following praise for Nafisi: “I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi’s account of how she defied, and helped others to defy, radical Islam’s war against women. Her memoir contains important and properly complex reflections about the ravages of theocracy, about thoughtfulness, and about the ordeals of freedom—as well as a stirring account of the pleasures and deepening of consciousness that result from an encounter with great literature and with an inspired teacher.” See the Random House web site: http://www. randomhouse.com/acmart/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780812971064 (accessed September 4, 2006). 7. http://www/hrcp-web.org/women.cfm# (accessed March 9, 2007); and the Amnesty International Report issued in September 1999 at http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engASA330181999 (accessed March 9, 2007). 8. See the Family Violence Prevention Project website at http:// endabuse.org/resources/facts.


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9. The reigning presumption seems to be that the West has individualized and privatized culture so that when and if it is practiced, it is an expression of free choice. Muslims, in contrast, are subjects of their culture as a collectivity, lacking the values of autonomy and freedom that would enable them to choose rationally from their cultural practices. As Wendy Brown points out, culture and religion in this form of reasoning are understood to “perpetuate inequality by formally limiting women’s autonomy, while the constraints on choice in a liberal capitalist order . . . are either not cultural or not significant” (Brown 2006: 195). 10. For recent scholarly work on the understanding of secularism not so much as an abandonment of religion but as its reformulation along certain lines, see Asad 2003; Mahmood 2006. 11. Nawal al-Saadawi (2004), a prominent secular Egyptian feminist, expressed this view on observing a sign displayed by French Muslim women protesting the recent ban on the veil that said: “The veil is a doctrine, not a symbol.” Saadawi found this slogan to be an expression of the false consciousness of the protesting Muslim women, a sign of their naïve complicity with the capitalist plot to keep the Muslim world from coming to a “true political consciousness.” Once again, any concern with religious doctrine cannot but be a ruse for material power in this kind of an argument. 12. For an extensive elaboration of the threats traditional Muslims pose to U.S. strategic interests and the “Western lifestyle,” see Benard 2003.

References Abdo, Genieve. 2004. No God but God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam. New York: Oxford University Press. Abdo, Genieve, and Jonathan Lyons. 2004. Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First Century Iran. New York: Henry Holt. Ahmed, Leila. 1992. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press. al-Saadawi, Nawal. 2004. An Unholy Alliance. Al-Ahram Weekly, January 22–24, 2004, February 15, 2007. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/674/ op2.htm (accessed March 9, 2007). Alam, Fareena. 2006. Enemy of Faith. New Statesman, 24 July 2006, pp. 54–55. Alloula, Malek. 1986. The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Amara, Fadela. 2004. Ni putes ni soumises. Paris: La Découverte. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Atwood, Margaret. 2003. A Book Lover’s Tale: A Literary Life Raft on Iran’s Fundamentalist Sea. Amnesty International Magazine (Fall 2003). http://www.amnestyusa.org/magazine/fall_2003/book_lover/ (accessed 7 Mar. 2007). Bahdi, Reem. 2002. Iraq, Sanctions, and Security: A Critique. Duke Journal of Gender, Law, and Policy 9 (1): 237–52.

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Bahramitash, Roksana. 2006. The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism, and Oriental Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American Bestsellers. Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 14 (2): 223–37. Benard, Cheryl. 2003. Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, Strategies. Pittsburgh: Rand Corporation. Bin Laden, Carmen. 2004. Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia. New York: Warner. Boddy, Janice. 2007. Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brown, Wendy. 2006. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton: Princeton UP. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. Chew, Huibin Amee. 2005. Occupation Is Not (Women’s) Liberation. Znet, March 24, August 26, 2006. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle. cfm?ItemID=7518. Crossette, Barbara. 2001. Living in a World without Women. New York Times, November 4, 2001, pp. 4.1. Dabashi, Hamid. 2006. Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire. Al-Ahram Weekly, June 1–7. http://www.mltoday.com/Pages/ Commentary/Dabashi-NativeInformers.html (accessed August 24, 2006). Deeb, Lara. 2006. The Pious Modern. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Djavann, Chahdortt. 2003. Bas les voiles! Paris: Nouvelle Revue française. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2004. The New Macho Feminism. New York Times, July 29, 2004, p. 19. Feldman, Noah. 2006. The Way We Live Now: The Only Exit Strategy Left. New York Times July 30, 2006, p. 9. Fernando, Mayanthi. 2006. “French Citizens of Muslim Faith”: Islam, Secularism, and the Politics of Difference in Contemporary France. Dissertation, University of Chicago. Friedman, Thomas. 2006. The Kidnapping of Democracy. New York Times, July 14, 2006, p. 19. Hersch, Seymour. 2006. Annals of National Security: The Iran Plans. The New Yorker, April 17, 2006, pp. 30–37. Hirsi Ali, Ayaan. 2006. The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam. New York: Free Press. ––––––. 2007. Infidel. New York: Free Press. Hitchens, Christopher. 2006. Dutch Courage: Holland’s Latest Insult to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Slate May 22, 2006. http://www.slate.com/id/2142147 (accessed August 28, 2006). Keshavarz, Fatemeh. 2007. Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kuper, Simon. 2004. Of All Things European: Guru of the Week—Big Thoughts in Brief—Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Financial Times Weekend Magazine, March 27, 2004. http://search.ft.com/ftArticle?queryText=kuper+hirsi+ali &aje=true&id=040327001305 (accessed March 8, 2007). Lazreg, Marnia. 1994. The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York: Routledge.


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Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ––––––. 2006. Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation. Public Culture 18 (2): 323–47. Mani, Lata. 1998. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Manji, Irshad. 2004. The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ––––––. 2006a. Don’t Be Fooled by the Fanatics. Times Online, August 5, 2006. http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/news/the-times-2006-08-05.html (accessed August 30, 2006). ––––––. 2006b. How I Learned to Love the Wall. New York Times, March 18, 2006, p. A15. Nafisi, Azar. 2003. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York: Random House. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 1998. Feminism in an Islamic Republic. In Islam, Gender, and Social Change, ed. John Esposito and Yvonne Haddad, pp. 59–84. New York: Oxford University Press. Pollit, Katha. 2002. Introduction. In Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Fundamentalism and Terror, ed. Betsy Reed, pp. ix–xviii. New York: Nation Books. Salamon, Julie. 2004. Author Finds That with Fame Comes Image Management. New York Times, June 8, 2004, p. E1. Scott, Joan Wallach. 2007. Politics of the Veil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge. Sullivan, Andrew. 2004. “Decent Exposure.” New York Times Book Review, January 25, 2004, p. 10.


Chapter 9

4

Patr i archal Ecu menism , Fe mi ni sm, and Women’s R eligious Ex per i ences in Costa R ic a E l i n a Vu o l a

Para mí (La Virgen) como madre, como mujer que es, entiende bien a las mujeres. Nos entiende bien a nosotras porque es igual a nosotras. Sólo que es elegida entre todas las mujeres para ser una mujer pura, limpia, para ser ese primer sagrario, donde Jesús de formó. (Laura) For me, (the Virgin) as mother, as the woman that she is, understands women well. She understands us well because she is like us. Only that she is chosen among all the women to be a pure woman, a clean woman, to be the first sanctuary, in which Jesus was formed.

This is an excerpt from one of the interviews that I conducted with

Costa Rican Catholic women in 2006 and 2007 on the meaning of the Virgin Mary. It expresses something that I heard in one way or another in most—if not all—interviews: that the Virgin Mary is both like me (another woman) and unlike me (different). I have earlier called this interplay of identification with and differentiation from Mary in women’s devotion to her the “both-and character” of women’s popular Marian piety.1 In this chapter, I bring forth this double meaning of the Virgin Mary for many Catholic women as a critique of a tendency in feminist scholarship on Latin American women to see religion, and more specifically, the Virgin Mary, solely as a source of women’s sufferings and alienation. The quotation summarizes one central tenet in women’s devotion of Mary that is lacking in secular feminist analyses of

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the influence of Catholicism on women: Mary understands and sustains women, both as a human female, like themselves, and as a powerful divine source of compassion. By taking a close look at the ways gender is constructed and deconstructed locally inside one major global religious current, Latin American (more specifically, Costa Rican) Roman Catholicism, my intention is to demonstrate from the specific perspective of the devotion of the Virgin Mary, on the one hand, how gender constructions are central in the revival of what I call patriarchal ecumenism—that is, traditionalism in issues concerning women, family, and sexuality considered central and unyielding in otherwise different religious traditions—and to see women as active agents in the formation of their religious identity, on the other hand. Issues related to gender and women’s (proper) roles in different religious traditions are at the heart of today’s major global schisms that are presented as conflicts especially between the (Christian) West and the (Muslim) East. I join such feminist scholars of religion who both wish to critically analyze women’s submission and constructions of gender in different religions but who also respect and interpret women’s agency within them. The questions are can there be agency and empowerment within structures of power, and how can scholars assess this agency without downplaying either the weight of religious sexism or women’s possibilities for change? By means of my specific research, I intend to shed light on the role of religion in sociocultural and political developments, as well as ask critical questions about the potential of one political movement, feminism, to function as a social force if its relationship to religion and religious women is either blind (viewing secularization as inevitable and natural) or openly negative (seeing women as victims). Through my material, I will give a new perspective to the (feminist) concept of empowerment, which I think, until now, has neglected some crucial aspects of life that are perceived as empowering by women. In order to do this, I rely on interviews with Catholic Costa Rican women about their views of a specific religious (gendered) symbol, the Virgin Mary.2 For these self-identified devotees of the Virgin Mary, she is experienced as deeply empowering in ways that are often in tension with both the official teaching and the sort of feminist critique that sees religion and religious symbols and sentiments in homogenizing and negative terms. I want to critically analyze and interpret the dynamics at work in this “triangle of tension” between, first, the official, obviously patriarchal, Catholic view of Mary (especially as a model of maternal purity and submission for women to follow); second, the feminist critique of her and its consequences (in the Latin American setting especially in the form of the concept marianismo); and third,

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women’s experience of her as life-sustaining, empowering, and transformative. The question of possibilities of agency within structures of power is central. Can women be empowered in the context of patriarchal and often openly sexist religions? Who defines what that empowerment is? How are we to combine a feminist critique of religion, carried out using adequate tools of analysis, with a new and more diverse understanding of women’s rights, their agency and empowerment, as ethical, social, political, and religious subjects who also reinterpret their religious heritage? Answers to these questions have consequences for political issues such as legislation concerning reproductive rights, the family, and women’s social and legal status.

Theology and Ethnographic Study of Religion There is a growing number of scholars from different fields who try to take up both the theoretical and practical (political) challenge of understanding why different religious traditions continue to hold such importance for so many people. Many of them are women from different parts of the world and from different religious traditions. As a theologian, I would like to see feminist theological scholarship included in this kind of multidisciplinary task. Theologians and philosophers of religion could enrich their work with scholarship using ethnographic methods. But their work may also give some understanding of both the deeply embedded sexism in different religious traditions and women’s ways of interpreting and negotiating with it. Feminist theology could work in much closer contact with scholars who study religion as “lived religion”—meaning “religious practice and imagination in ongoing, dynamic relation with the realities and structures of everyday life in particular times and places” (Orsi 2002: xiii–xiv). It does not have to mean excluding the level of the symbolic, but, more than it did earlier, basing some of the central claims about the sexism of patriarchal religions on women’s own experiences, interpretations, and agency within those traditions. What could it be, then, that theology can add to the theorizing about religion and gender? As becomes clear later on in the chapter, an obvious asset of theology for understanding the complex meanings of the Virgin Mary, for example, is the understanding and untangling of the development of Mariology and Marian dogmas in the history of theology. Marian devotion arrived on the Latin American continent as an intimate part of conquest and evangelization, in many instances replacing the pre-Columbian female deities. This was a repeat of what had happened earlier in the Mediterranean region where the cult of

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Mary replaced pre-Christian goddesses. In both cases, this history has both dogmatic and devotional implications. Even today, Marian piety and Mariological teachings of the Church are intimately tied to some of the most central theological claims of Christianity, such as incarnation—God becoming human—and salvation. However, theology has always been attentive to religion not just as dogma, but also as spirituality, the quest for the meaning of life, ethics, and the human need to relate to transcendence. Feminist theology has questioned the traditional exclusion of women from the sacred by claiming women’s full humanity as imago dei (image of God). Theology pays special attention to this symbolic dimension of religion and, in the case of feminist critique, its deep sexism. One way of understanding the role of theology is to consider theological notions such as God, creation, Christ, and church as “symbols,” as key areas or loci around which Christian communities construct their beliefs, spiritualities, practices, and relation to the world and other religions. These symbols can be understood as “doctrines,” especially when they are further developed conceptually and related one to another to form a kind of basic grammar for Christian communities. Doctrines can be understood as elaborated forms of symbolic knowledge. Theology, through symbol and doctrine, becomes the creation of spaces for Christian practice, which brings together analysis of social situations, biblical interpretations, fashioning of new meanings and practices, and forms of spirituality (Chopp and Taylor 1994: 14–15). In the case of Mary and Mariology, it is often in the image of Mary that women see their own humanity reflected in the divine. In feminist theology, there has always been a keen interest in everyday, “ordinary” experiences. However, there is still a striking gap between what is said about women’s religious experiences, on the one hand, and the methods used to sustain those claims (the absence of ethnographic methods), on the other. I am therefore asking on what grounds and with which methods can something be said about women’s relationship to their religion? What are the results of using an ethnographic method for the development of both a feminist theology, which would be more attentive to “lived religion” and not just dogma, and a feminist theory more open to (and less categorical about) the multiple meanings of religion in women’s lives. The step toward a more ethnographic direction in my own research stems from a growing interest in the often tense relationship between “lived religion” and the scholarly study of religion, especially in the field of theology. Interviewing turned out to be one method for testing my hypothesis about the binary way of approaching religion and religious women in social-scientific feminist theorizing in Latin America.


Marianismo and Latin American Women Much of contemporary feminist scholarship on women in Latin America is guided by a two-fold relationship to religion. On the one hand, religion is not seen or, even less, analyzed at all as a factor in women’s lives. This I have called a feminist blindness to the importance of religion, especially to those of its aspects that women might experience as positive and life-sustaining. On the other hand, when religion is taken into account at all by feminist scholars, it is often done through something that I have called a religious paradigm or religion-as-a-lens type of theorizing, in which religion is seen as the chief explanatory factor of women’s lives in a given culture, but mainly as a monolithically negative, misogynist, and immutable force over people’s lives. Women’s own interpretations are not necessarily taken into account, nor is “religion” interpreted as lived religion, shaped by people, but rather as an institution. I started to pay attention to how, in the Latin American context, this tension has crystallized in the image of the Virgin Mary (Vuola 2002, 2006, and 2009 (forthcoming)). There is a strong tendency in feminist Latin American studies to regard all established religion, including popular Catholicism, as harmful and alienating for women. The favorite woman of the Catholic Church, Virgin Mary, is a case in point. Women’s love for her and devotion to her is seen as the worst sort of alienation. In much feminist research, hardly any differentiation is made between institutional, official religion, on the one hand, and lived religious practices, on the other.3 The term marianismo, widely used in contemporary feminist research on Latin American women, originally comes from an early article by Evelyn P. Stevens (Stevens 1973a).4 According to Stevens, marianismo is a “secular cult of femininity drawn from the adoration of the Virgin Mary,” which “pictures its subjects as semi-divine, morally superior and spiritually stronger than men. This constellation of attributes enables women to bear the indignities inflicted on them by men, and to forgive those who bring them pain. . . . Men’s wickedness is therefore the necessary precondition for women’s superior status” (Stevens 1973a: 62). Machismo is the “other face of marianismo,” and together they create two opposite moralities for Latin American men and women, “a stable symbiosis in Latin American culture” (ibid.: 63). Women are deliberate perpetrators of the marianismo myth (ibid.), which is characterized by the female ideals of semidivinity, moral superiority, spiritual strength, abnegation, an infinite capacity for humility and sacrifice, self-denial and patience (Stevens 1973b: 94). All this “a considerable number” of Latin American women freely choose and support. Both machismo and marianismo are syndromes, fully developed only in Latin America (ibid.: 91, 94).

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Even when Stevens’s term has been criticized, it is still widely used, repeated and reproduced. It has been criticized for oversimplifying the realities of women in the region (Browner and Lewin 1982: 63), for not taking the force of patriarchal social relations seriously enough, for reflecting only a middle-class reality (Bachrach Ehlers 1991: 1–5, 14), and for being essentialist, anachronistic, sexist, and ahistorical (Navarro 2002: 257, 270). Looking closely at how this idiom is used, I suggest three additional critical points. First, the use of the term is confusing, referring not only to the cult of the Virgin Mary, but also to the teaching concerning her in the Catholic tradition, and theological research related to her person (Mariology). To use the term marianismo interchangeably with all these phenomena is of course inaccurate, since they are not identical. In fact, the term is used without critical elaboration or knowledge of the history of Catholicism and Catholic theology, including Mariology.5 Second, the relationship between the figure of Mary—both as a cultural and religious symbol—and women’s social status is often presented in terms of cause and effect in the marianismo model. But how exactly does women’s submission follow from either the general cultural importance of the Virgin Mary figure or its use as a tool for women’s submission? I think we should be cautious in claiming a direct causality between religious teachings and symbols, women’s devotional practices and their social and religious status. They are not unrelated, but it seems that in almost any other area of culture such unfounded assumptions cannot be presented by scholars as referring to the relationship between women and their religious traditions and about religion(s) in general as oppressive for women. Such generalizations omit both feminist theological critique of different religious traditions and women’s own religious experiences and interpretations. This is where I think a theological analysis is most needed, since religion is also about spirituality and faith, not just practices. In this sense, is the “Virgin Mary” in Christianity an analogical metaphor for “the veil” in Islam? Both are easily presented as the signs of or metaphors for women’s secondary and oppressed status, in spite of evidence to the contrary or calls for much more nuanced research on the symbol in question. Third, one obvious tension, specific to Latin America, remains unexplained and unresolved. On the one hand, the oppressiveness of the Catholic tradition for women, especially in the figure of the Virgin Mary, is taken for granted. On the other, the crucial role (even if often contested and contradictory) played by the Catholic church in organizing women in Latin America, including early feminism (Baldez 2002: 11, 34–35, 126 on Chile; Alvarez 1990 and 1994 on Brazil), is acknowledged. In many countries, this role of the church was related to its wider role in the defense of human rights through the space it


offered to the threatened civil society during the military dictatorships. Women were already organized in the Catholic Church, for example, in the so-called mothers’ clubs. Thus, there was an existing network to examine new issues during the 1960s and 1970s. Those scholars who use the marianismo explanation for women’s social and political roles never relate it explicitly to this larger social, political, and cultural role of the Catholic Church, on the one hand, and women’s own organizing, on the other. In other words, it does not provide an answer to the questions “how” and “why” a given religious tradition can serve as a catalyst for different or even contradictory ends, sometimes simultaneously. The church as an institution was a concrete home for Latin American women’s movements in their early stages, but it was and is also the institution which maintains rigid teachings on issues of sexuality, family, and reproduction. The institutional teaching on the Virgin Mary is often sexist and misogynist. But women themselves do not live according to the teachings of the church, neither in their sexual and reproductive lives nor in the veneration of Mary. In order to understand the multifaceted relationship between women and Catholicism, all these realities should be taken into account by scholars, and not merely be reduced to one abstract concept of marianismo. This is especially important regarding the growth of conservative tendencies not only in the Roman Catholic Church but in other religions as well. Sonia Alvarez does not frame her analysis with the machismomarianismo binary; instead she looks at the concrete genealogy of the Brazilian women’s movement, which is probably why she succeeds in giving a less stereotypical image of both the Catholic Church and women’s multilayered relationship with it, as well as of the ways in which the church both fostered and hindered the birth of an autonomous feminist movement in Brazil (Alvarez 1990 and 1994). Her work—as does my own—suggests that the framing of gender issues with the marianismo term and its connotations may conceal rather than clarify women’s realities. Let me take a few examples of some of the difficulties that may surface with the use of the marianismo model. Lisa Baldez criticizes another widely used binary model in feminist Latin American studies—that of understanding women’s political organizing in terms of feminine vs. feminist movements (movimientos de mujeres vs. movimientos feministas). According to her, in reducing women’s interests to two categories, the approach obscures more than it explains. Many movements do not fit easily into either category (Baldez 2002: 14). If we examine her critique, it is surprising to see how she then takes the other widespread binary of marianismo vs. machismo so for granted: “framing mobilization in terms of conventional gender roles may seem to be an obvious or inevitable move, especially for women in Latin America,

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where machismo and marianismo (the cult of Virgin Mary) run deep and appear to constitute an essential component of the culture” (ibid.: 15). It could be said, reframing her own words, that most people—men or women—do not fit easily into either category. From a slightly different perspective, Lynn Stephen, an anthropologist, points out how scholars who have analyzed “motherist” movements in the continent, have all pointed out the links between Catholic images of femininity and their use by repressive states to control women (Stephen 2000: 35).6 “Images of the various incarnations of the Virgin Mary portray an idealized woman who is an obedient, self-sacrificing mother, subordinating her needs to those of her children. The Virgin Mary obeyed the wishes of her son, Christ, and of other men including the disciples and God himself” (ibid.). Stephen does not use the machismo-marianismo binary as a theoretical tool, but instead presents another binary related to the Virgin Mary figure, that of the Virgin versus the Whore (ibid.). According to her, repressive states use this extension of the Catholic imagery to constrain women’s deviation from the proper roles assigned to them (ibid.). Thus, women in human rights movements such as Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Argentina) and Co-Madres (El Salvador) would not merely repeat or reinforce the Catholic female imagery but also use it for their own ends and even subvert it, turning their motherhood into “political motherhood” or “subversive motherhood.” For Stephen, as for many other scholars, notions of proper female behavior, particularly in relation to motherhood, are “tied to the Catholic Church” (Stephen 2000: 283). More concretely, the image of the Virgin Mary is put forward: “If women were not living up to the traditional Catholic image of the Virgin Mary as an obedient, pure, and self-sacrificing mother, then they could be interpreted as the opposite—as a whore, an aggressive, impure, sexual object” (ibid.), referring explicitly to the “mothers of the disappeared.” The formal teaching and theology on Mary contains much of what are recognized as the cultural female ideals. Nevertheless, not to analyze these ideals’ relationship to women’s concrete everyday lives, their own self-understanding as Catholic women, and their often deviant interpretations of the Virgin Mary, stemming from the richness of Latin American popular Catholicism, leaves both the imagery of the Virgin and women’s understanding of it largely unexplained. Stephen is critical of traditional notions of womanhood and wants to present alternative cultural discourses on motherhood. Certainly the changed roles of women, as mothers who are also active in human rights organizations, are such alternative discourses, and by pointing them out, her analysis is not as abstract and vague as those who merely use the marianismo term. Nevertheless, even in her essay, a causal link


between women’s roles, the Virgin Mary (or different virgin cults) and the Catholic Church (Stephen 2000: 274) begs the question of how exactly they are tied together. How do Catholic women themselves see, live, comprehend, and conceptualize the relationship between their roles as women, the importance of the Virgin Mary and the Catholic tradition for them? The sociologist Susan Eckstein, when writing on gender-based resistance in Latin America, noted how “in Latin America where motherhood is glorified and women are exalted as domestic beings—as reflected in marianismo, the counterpart to machismo—women feel a particularly strong sense of loss when their children ‘disappear’.” (Eckstein 2001: 26). She relates Stevens’s thesis directly to women’s political activism as mothers of the disappeared. But how exactly does “a glorified motherhood” and women’s specific domestic roles make the loss of a child somehow more horrifying for Latin American women than for any mother anywhere? As I mentioned earlier, Marysa Navarro says something quite different. Women’s radicalization as mothers against Latin American dictatorships was a logical result and continuation of their socialization, including their socialization in domestic roles, and not the result of an abstract model of motherhood such as marianismo (Navarro 2001). At the beginning of the book Gender in Latin America by Sylvia Chant and Nikki Craske, there is a “Glossary of Latin American terms,” in which marianismo is explained as the “cult of the ‘Virgin Mary,’ idealising motherhood, and chaste and decorous behaviour in women” (Chant and Craske 2003: xi).7 When marianismo is understood in this way, which is not the way Stevens originally used it, two different phenomena are conceptually confused: the religious devotion of the Virgin Mary, widely spread and with different forms in Latin America and elsewhere, and women’s supposed idealization in their role as mothers and the (supposedly related) cultural expectations toward their behaviour, especially in the area of sexuality. In an earlier book, Craske makes wide use of Stevens’s machismomarianismo thesis, tying it into the very core of her theorizing (Craske 1999: 11–18). According to her, Stevens’s essay may be exaggerated in its examples, but nevertheless “the basic underpinnings of the construction of womanhood, and thus gender relations, hold true” (ibid.: 12). Craske gives no argument for this claim. She assumes a line of thought, which combines marianismo (à la Stevens) with an understanding of women’s identification with (and their love of) the Virgin Mary as something harmful, and then combines these two with motherhood as framed by the traditional gender constructions of the Catholic Church (ibid.: 6, 12–13, 127). This combination, I believe, must be disentangled.

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The above examples reflect some of the most problematic uses of the marianismo term, since they never explain how women’s idealization (as mothers), their subordination and supposed desexualization follow from the religious veneration of the Virgin Mary. In Latin America, Marian piety includes a variety of local practices and devotions, many of them syncretistic, not studied or possibly not even known by scholars who claim the “cult” of the Virgin Mary to be the ultimate source of women’s sufferings. I am not denying entirely the link between a cultural symbol such as the Virgin Mary, a given culture’s moral codes, and people’s everyday lives, but I am questioning the (simple) causality between them, presented principally in negative terms. There probably is some relationship between women’s political activism, their motherhood, and the cultural imagery of the Virgin Mary. For example, an image of Mary inspired by liberation theology pictures her as the poor campesina woman, losing her son to death while fighting alongside her people, but nevertheless chosen to be the Mother of God and thus symbolizing the church of the poor. This image ties motherhood and political struggle to the figure of the Virgin Mary with quite different qualities than the marianismo type of imagery. Mary as a religious symbol—not marianismo as an abstraction or ideology—can be empowering for women in their political and everyday struggle. This understanding of her is based on the Biblical Mary, especially the text called Magnificat, in which it is Mary who announces the Kingdom of God as a kingdom of justice. It is also too easily assumed that the influence flows only in one direction, from the top down, from the religious dogma or symbol to people’s everyday lives, identities and beliefs. It is assumed that people’s (women’s) own interpretations do not affect the cult as well, something that anthropological studies on Latin American religiosity demonstrates not to be true. Even the history of official Catholic Mariology includes many, sometimes central elements that are derived from popular beliefs, becoming dogmas or accepted theological teaching only afterwards, such as the Assumption of Mary into heaven, a popular belief for centuries but accepted as a dogma as late as 1950.8 (Women’s) popular beliefs about the Virgin Mary may be, and in fact often are, in tension with the creed and dogma of the church, but not necessarily so, because over the centuries, many so-called popular beliefs have in fact been integrated into the dogma. Even if the supposed one-way causality (from the cult of Mary to the idealization/ demonization of women) were true, why assume that the effect is only or primarily detrimental for women? How and with which methods can scholars show it really to be so? My argument is that ethnographic methods in the study of (women’s) religiosity and not just of religions as systems or institutions can in fact demonstrate that this kind of


assumption is far too vague, superficial, and one-sided. Mary’s “effect” in ordinary Catholic women’s lives is often empowering, consoling, and strengthening. Many women do not perceive Mary as the source of their sufferings and submissiveness. Women such as the Argentinian Madres de Plaza de Mayo are not necessarily “subverting marianist notions of motherhood” (Craske 1999: 12) but, instead, identifying with Mary and her earthly lot, “following” her (what I call imitatio Mariae, imitation of Mary). They may also be asking for her help and protection, because she is not an ordinary woman like themselves but a transcendent being with supernatural powers. This, I believe, is the very core of the radical sense of empowerment so many Latin American Catholic women claim to gain from their devotion to Mary. It is quite different from the marianismo type of understanding of motherhood, of Mary and of the women who love and follow her, which too easily assumes that religion is always and everywhere, without any further qualifications, only detrimental and restrictive for women.

Patriarchal Ecumenism The implications of what I have been claiming in this chapter are of central importance for the growing tendencies in different religious traditions, which place women, sexuality, reproduction, and family at the core of a “correct” and “truthful” interpretation of a given religion. These tendencies that some call fundamentalist may in fact have more in common with each other than differences between them, especially in the case of the sister religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This would question the “clash of civilizations” type of explanations about the growth of religiously informed political movements (Huntington 1996). Growing cooperation between the “traditionalists” of different religions as well as between the “reformists” (including feminists) is drawing the lines inside rather than between given religious traditions. A careful analysis of women’s rights, sexuality, family, and gender roles makes it easier to understand differences and similarities both inside and between religions. The rise of the often state-legitimized “social fundamentalism” 9 is creating new political alliances between, for example, the Vatican, conservative evangelicals from the United States, and some Muslim governments, especially on issues concerning women’s rights (Vuola 2002). This is what I call patriarchal ecumenism. In Latin America, there is very little public space for discussion on sexual and reproductive policies, including the voices of women who do not live according to the teachings of the church, committing acts considered major sins by the church, such as abortion, but understanding themselves

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to be Catholics or Christians nevertheless. The spheres of private and popular religiosity, which may include the image of a forgiving and understanding God—in the Catholic tradition, often also in the figure of the Virgin Mary—and the public role of the Catholic hierarchy, do not meet each other in any meaningful way in a society and in a church where women’s ways of perceiving religion, God, sin, and justice have no legitimacy or importance (Vuola 2006: 144). How then should one take seriously women’s experiences of themselves not only as sexual, gendered, and reproductive but often also as religious beings in that kind of political and cultural climate? In order for us to understand and analyze the complex and often contradictory relationship between women and their religious traditions, identities, and beliefs, it is important to recognize that women have different ways of opposing cultural stereotypes concerning themselves, including some of those represented by feminists. The image of women as passive victims of religious indoctrination is one of the most common ones, as in the case of the marianismo thesis. To be able to tackle what I call patriarchal ecumenism, it is of the utmost importance that feminist scholars do not present a simplistic or flawed view of religious women. In this sense, understanding women’s many-sided, rich, and controversial relationship to their religious traditions is of direct political importance. If feminist theories and practices create too narrow, superficial or homogenizing constructions of religion, omitting women’s religious agency within them, we might need to ask critical questions about what is meant by the feminist concept of empowerment.10 The women I interviewed in Costa Rica, almost by exception, when asked what the Virgin Mary means to them, used words and expressions that come close to the feminist understanding of empowerment.11 The source of these experiences of empowerment is in the realm of the supernatural, the spiritual and the transcendent, in folk religiosity (religiosidad popular), and often in quite concrete faith in miracles. Some personifications of the Virgin Mary, such as La Virgen de los Angeles or La Negrita of Costa Rica, particularly important to many of my informants, are experienced as powerful and empowering because of their miraculous capacities for healing and protection from harm. She is experienced as a source of empowerment in everyday-life situations, especially when life is threatened by sickness, death, loss, abuse, and economic uncertainty or outright poverty. I will end my chapter with direct references to my informants’ interpretations of the Virgin Mary and her meaning for them, hoping to offer them as a correction of a too-narrow understanding of the meaning of religion for women, one that is too often framed in terms of control and passivity. This is especially critical of feminism as a political


movement in regions such as contemporary Latin America, in which one religious tradition’s patriarchal elites are actively blocking legal, moral, and social changes in the area of sexuality, family, and reproduction. The possibilities of feminism to function as a sociopolitical force, with a broad base in society, are weakened if its relationship to religion—both as an institution and as lived religion or spirituality—is too stereotypical, hostile, or ignorant.

Imitatio Mariae ? Mary and Her Female Followers in Costa Rica The Costa Rican Catholic women I interviewed described their relationship with the Virgin in terms of what I call imitation, imitatio Mariae, rather than passive submission (Vuola 2006: 150). In the classical spiritual path of imitatio Christi—following of Christ—Christ’s sufferings serve as an ethical ideal for Christians to follow rather than as a literal model for human behavior. The women I interviewed both internalize the teachings of the church, including Mariology, and negotiate with them. For example, Mary is largely understood in terms of patriarchal family structures, in which Mary plays the role of the mother of the heterosexual nuclear family. Mary is a channel and mediator between humanity and divinity in both official Catholic Mariology (Mediatrix) and popular piety (intercesora). Thus, her “place” is clear in the patriarchal nuclear family of God the Father, Jesus the Son, and Herself. This, to a feminist eye, may seem like a deep internalization of sexist church doctrines—which it to some extent also is—and thus to prove that the marianismo thesis of Stevens and others is correct. However, I suggest that because of my informants’ deep and personal identification with Mary, they see her and “her family” rather as a reflection of their own lives—not always something to be dramatically changed, because it is also their roles as mothers, wives, and heads of family that are respected both by themselves and by the larger community and culture. Mary is like them as a woman and as a mother, even as the woman of the divine nuclear family, regulated to a secondary status in relation to her “husband” (God) and her son. But she is powerful. The understanding per Mariam ad Iesum, through Mary to Jesus, is official teaching in the Catholic Church. My informants stressed this most often in familial terms. For example: He [Jesus] does what you ask of his mother. Because she is the intercessor in front of her son. . . . She intercedes in front of her beloved son for the miracles, for what is asked of her, right?12

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According to 80-year-old Doña Elisabeth: She [the Virgin] hears all the prayers one says. She concedes everything when she can. But she cannot do it without the permission of God.13

Mary’s “place” in the hierarchy of the celestial nuclear family becomes clear when Anita comments: You go to the lawyer, to ask that lawyer, that he could help in that issue, and we know that he can help me, because he has all the knowledge to be able to do it. But, if that lawyer there . . . and his mother is there and she is my friend or I know her, I will resort to her, too. It is not that I wouldn’t have asked that lawyer, but that I also resort to the mother, so that she would help me, and so that God, let’s say, or in this case the lawyer would have, like, would have more strength . . . It is like having a stronger commitment.14

The comparison of Jesus to a lawyer reflects something quite common in Costa Rican culture in which things are often resolved through personal and family relationships rather than formalities. In Anita’s comparison, the lawyer is always male (abogado, not abogada) and with the power, but because of the central role of the mother in the family, the informal way to power often goes through her. Anita’s friend Fiona commented: What happened at the wedding in Cana, you know, she [the Virgin] interceded, right? We can make this comparison with our mothers, especially when the fathers are a little bit difficult to, eh, to persuade, right? So, “Mom, talk to Dad, make a deal, but help me.” . . . The mother always intercedes in many things. So I think, I suppose that when we ask Mary, just like Anita said, we ask her knowing that she alone has no power. But she does have the great power of intercession, right?15

The triangle father-mother-son, in which the absence of the father and the power of the mother in everyday life are accentuated, is reproduced even to the extent that it becomes a sort of alternative Trinity in which the Holy Spirit is replaced by Mary. It is obvious that both the Father and the Son have more power than the Mother, but it is just as obvious that to be able to negotiate with them, one would do wisely to approach the Mother first. Mary’s womanhood is of central importance for most of the women I interviewed: because she [the Virgin] has been a mother, knowing the worries of a mother, . . . it is easier for someone who has lived through something to

Patr iarchal Ecumenism and Virgin Mary in Costa Rica 231 understand another person who is going through the same. The Virgin already lived through all these things and she can understand me better, understand what I am feeling.16

In their identification with Mary, women see her both as themselves and as radically different from them. The Virgin Mary is understood in both human and divine terms. The line between the human and the divine is blurred. The women struggled with not presenting Mary as a divinity, knowing it is not the official Catholic view. Mary is first of all deeply human. Her humanity is female. But she is still not like any other human being, any other woman. She understands women because she is a woman herself, but she can also help them, sometimes through miracles, because she is more than a human female, she is a transcendent, divine figure. She is both like her devotees (her immanence and humanity) and radically different (her transcendence and even her divinity). This is why she can be prayed to for help. She has the power to intervene. At the same time she understands the complexities of human life, especially those of women, better than God and Jesus, both understood in masculine terms. For Ana Isabel, “I feel that it is easier—right?—[I]t is often much easier for a woman to trust another woman than a man.”17 According to María, 32, women’s relationship to the Virgin is different from that of men. It is not only because of motherhood—María herself was not a mother—but as a person: I would say that men see her in one way, we women in another way. Men see her as mother, as the woman she was, but we women see her as equal to us. As a human being, a person just like us. Who has the same organs as one does, well, it makes a difference. . . . She is less like men. I see her as a similar person to myself, an equal. . . . I identify myself completely with her because she is a woman.18

Because of Mary’s humanity, her being a woman who has gone through everything that any woman would, my informants’ relationship with her is one of deep identification: she understands women. The women I interviewed did not usually directly question the patriarchal structures of mainstream theology (masculinity of God, hierarchy between god and humanity, Mary’s “purity”); rather they reproduced it. In their identification with Mary, they both saw and reproduced their own fate but also questioned it, since Mary has so much more power in “her” family than they probably do in their own. It is in the role of Mary as the Mediatrix that her both-and character becomes crystallized. The women emphasized her mediating role, not only as a channel between divinity and humanity, but as an active role: she is the intercessor who has the power to act. Since she is experienced

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as being closer to human beings, especially women and mothers, than God and Jesus, the women feel that they can talk of anything to her without having to “control” themselves or think whether some mundane everyday worry is too small or insignificant to express. In this, they expressed Mary’s womanhood, not just her maternity, in the very same terms they defined themselves, in relation to men and children. My interest here is to stress the gendered, feminine continuum between these women and Mary as they experience it, not to judge their understanding of gender roles. Women turned to Mary for help with everyday problems: If I lose something—something very common for us women, right? That we put a thing somewhere and then we forget about it—and me, more than once, I have told my female friends that at times when they say, “Look, I lost such and such thing and cannot find it anymore,” I tell them, “Say to the Virgin [of Light, Virgen de la Luz] that she would search for it or give a little bit of light. And wow, it works for us. She gives it to us, if we ask with a lot of faith.19

Or: The Virgin is like a telefax [laughs] which reaches us just like that [snaps her fingers]. It is she who intercedes in front of her son for us. As the woman that she is. As mother. As helper. She with her merciful heart, full of love, affection and tenderness. As we women are. Tell me, don’t we women always have more sensitive feelings than the men? We have a sixth sense that helps us see things that men do not see.20

From finding a parking spot to having a difficult labor, nothing is too “lowly” to express to Mary. She is not judging, she wants to help and comfort. Above all, she understands. It is really strange that, well, I always drive the car and my mother talks like crazy to her [Virgin Mary], really, “Ay, Little Virgin, I need a parking spot, but a big one,” you know I am not that good a driver, well, “find me a space,” or if I am running late, my mother says, “I need a favor, why don’t you ask the Virgin to do it?21

Women strongly felt Mary’s presence particularly when giving birth. This is of particular interest, since it is Mary’s giving birth that, according to classical Mariology, separates her from all other women: she remained a virgin, did not feel any pain, the hymen did not break. But it seems that in women’s Marian piety, this traditional understanding is simply bypassed or not given importance, and Mary’s labor is experienced in very human terms. Her exceptionality is elsewhere. She gave


birth just like any woman does, but because of her divine power, she can help, sustain, and protect other women in labor.22 For Eugenia: Because she [the Virgin] always has been on my side in the most difficult moments. I had a really, really difficult labor . . . and I remember that I just surrendered myself, or, in fact, I thought: “If you did it, I can do it.” . . . It has been very, very special, in the most difficult moments of my life, I have felt her tremendously by my side. . . . And I felt her hugging me, or, I felt her consolation, really, it wasn’t like that all things would be resolved, but it really was like a consolation, her protection, that everything will be alright.23

The theme of giving birth and labor came up also in a discussion with three middle-aged women from the popular education group of the Claretian Brothers in San José. One of them, Gisela, started to talk about her experience of such an intense prayer to the Virgin that she did not feel any pain. She interpreted this “not as a miracle” but rather Mary “accompanying” (acompañamiento) her. Another woman, Laura, said: “She helps in labor when you ask her.” Gisela explained: I feel that she helped me. Well, I cannot say it was a miracle or what is a miracle, but I, for example, I have felt—well, her accompaniment, or, let’s say, I am used to asking “Little Virgin, help, so that dad’s operation will go fine, or that my baby would be fine, and so on, that her intercession always has worked. Well, is it faith or what is it, right?24

This closeness to Mary is also expressed in a variety of tender ways of referring to Mary: Mamita María, Madrecita, Virgencita (Little Virgin), mi mamá, mamá divina. The emphasis on Mary’s motherhood, her being a divine mother, led Anita to pitifully tell me that as a Protestant, I am an orphan: “If you [the Protestants] do not have her, you are orphans. We Catholics always have a mother, even if our own mother dies.”25 The Virgin Mary is a mother to her devotees, but for human mothers she is also a friend (amiga), another mother who understands.26 Her power is, however, beyond her human-like maternity: she is La Madre Santíssima, Virgen Poderosa (Powerful Virgin), Reina del Cielo (Queen of Heaven), La Milagrosa (The Miraculous). These Costa Rican women experience Mary mostly in terms of protection, love, empowerment, consolation, and understanding, and in deeply personal ways. Their relationship with Mary is reciprocal and real, not the one-way indoctrination by the church hierarchy or patriarchal culture implied by marianismo. The Virgin Mary of the popular religion or “lived religion” (Orsi 2002: xix–xxiii) is often quite different from the formal teaching, imagery, and cult. Robert Orsi also traces the ordinary as the site of the

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divine in Mary and women’s faith in her as incarnational faith: “The women in the community believed that Mary had suffered the pains of childbirth, that she had menstruated, and that she worried constantly about her child. They felt that she could understand and help them because she had shared their most private experiences and because she was as powerful—and as powerless—as they were” (ibid.: 227). This is why so many women, including the Costa Rican women I interviewed, love and trust the Virgin Mary and see her as the divine mirror of their lives, reflecting both the reality as it is as well as the fears and hopes for something beyond that mere reflection. Traditional theology has often obscured this in its Mariology, but at the same time it has maintained and assumed, throughout the centuries and different cultural contexts, elements of it. It is this (continuing) interplay between dogma, theology, popular or lived religion and women’s everyday experiences that I wish to put into dialogue with feminist Latin American studies and its claims about women and religion.

Notes 1. Vuola 2006 and 2009(forthcoming). 2. I conducted semistructured interviews with 13 women in San José and the surrounding cities of Alajuela and Heredia in January–February 2006. I also participated in one group conversation with a mixed group of men and women at the Biblical Center of the Claretian brothers in San José, which was part of their “popular education” program. I conducted another round of eight interviews in March 2007 in both urban and rural settings in Costa Rica. I observed and documented the celebrations of the Virgin of Los Angeles (La Negrita) in Costa Rica in the first week of August 2007, including a pilgrimage of about two million people to the basilica of the Virgin in the city of Cartago. Most of the women I interviewed were of the lower middle class, some with very little formal schooling; however, some of the younger ones even had a university degree. One of the older women was exceptional in that she had studied theology and was actively promoting a liberation-theology type of community in which she and other women could play a more active role than in a normal parish. The ages of my informants vary between 28 and 81. Most of the women I interviewed I found through my contacts with Catholic parishes in Costa Rica. I wanted to interview Catholic women who saw themselves as marianas, conscious and explicit regarding the importance of the Virgin Mary in their lives. They were active participants in their local parishes. My results would probably be quite different if I had interviewed less active Catholic women, or those who have alienated themselves from their Catholic upbringing altogether. Researcher Sarri Vuorisalo-Tiitinen has transcribed the interviews. All the translations from Spanish to English are mine. I wish


3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

to thank especially Anamaría Hernández and Normán Solórzano for helping me to find informants. In the history of feminist theorizing, this is analogical of how women have been considered in other areas of feminist research as victims or alienated in need of liberation, a view that has been strongly criticized and that today has given way to much more varied views both of women and of their relationship to different structures of power. In feminist scholarship, it seems to be in the area of religion where the tendency to see women primarily as passive victims without agency and active meaning-making can still be maintained without much protest. A slightly different version of the article appeared the same year (Stevens 1973b). I have analyzed Stevens’s essays more extensively elsewhere (Vuola 2006 and 2009 [forthcoming]) and do not repeat that here. I will only outline her basic theses. For example, concerning the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, Chant and Craske write: “Yet it is also important to recognise that contradictory ideals are established by Catholicism´s iconography of the Virgin Mary, and its insistence on the Immaculate Conception” (Chant and Craske 2003: 135). They continue quoting a (nonscholarly) book on Nicaragua that discusses “the twin ideal of mother and virgin, impossible for a woman to achieve.” However, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (1854) does not refer to the virgin birth of Jesus Christ from Mary, which is a much earlier dogma, but to the conception of the Mother of God herself, according to which she, like her son, was immaculately conceived, having been born without original sin. However, of the three scholars she mentions, at least Navarro merely refers to the mothers’ (of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina) use of Catholic symbols and their identification with Mary’s sorrow in their search for their lost children. She explains their extraordinary militancy and courage in confronting a repressive state by the radicalization of their motherly role: “Their refusal to acquiesce in the loss of their children was not an act out of character, but a coherent expression of their socialization” (Navarro 2001: 256). The mothers were first ignored by the military junta, because mothers were not perceived as political subjects (ibid.: 257). Thus, for Navarro, it is not a specifically Catholic femininity but motherhood in itself that made the repressive state first ignore and then use it against these women. It is not clear why the authors have written Virgin Mary in quotation marks. I could think of two possibilities: first, that they wish to point to a cult far wider and more complex than that of a simple figure, or second, that somehow they want to question the “personality” of the figure, meaning that the term only refers to a (theological, cultural) concept, not to a person in any meaningful sense. According to Jaroslav Pelikan, the Marian doctrines are good examples of how doctrinal development has followed popular beliefs and lived spirituality, and not the other way round. Classical Mariology is not as much “from-top-down” as one might first think (Pelikan 1996: 210).

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9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

He makes the point that we should not automatically assume that what the councils of the church legislated as dogma was what the common people actually believed, or conversely, that what the common people actually believe is always different from dogma and creed. The veneration of the Virgin Mary is one of the clearest examples of how ideas and practices have moved from the faith of the common people into liturgy, creed, and dogma rather than the other way around (ibid.: 216). According to John S. Hawley, “until recently, it has been insufficiently appreciated . . . that issues of gender play a crucial role in the language of fundamentalism. While some thinkers continue to emphasize the appeal to inerrant scripture as a principal defining feature of fundamentalist groups, others—myself included—have focused on the centrality of an appeal not to scriptural fundamentalism but to a certain “social fundamentalism.” We have noted that shared fears about enlarged domains of relative autonomy for women are a major focus of attention . . .. What is being championed is a divinely sanctioned vision of natural differences between the sexes.” (Hawley 1999: 4). In Latin American feminist parlance, empowerment is most often translated into Spanish directly as empoderamiento (poder = power). According to Giblin, empowerment means “the process by which individuals, families, groups, and communities increase their personal, interpersonal, socioeconomic, and political strength and influence in order to improve their well-being. Empowerment is not granted from an external source but emerges from within. . . . Empowerment is a transforming process that enhances the moral agency of women and other oppressed groups and enables them to act toward justice and right relations” (Giblin 1996: 83–84). Interestingly, I found a definition of the term empowerment only in the Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, whereas two “secular” feminist dictionaries I consulted (Code 2000 and Humm 1990) did not include the term at all. Anita, February 3, 2006, Alajuela. Doña Elisabeth, January 30, 2006, San José. Anita, February 3, 2006, Alajuela. Fiona, February 3, 2006, Alajuela. Eugenia, February 8, 2006, Heredia. Ana Isabel, March 23, 2007, San Carlos. María, March 20, 2007, Santa Barbara de Heredia. Olivia, February 9, 2006, San José. Ibid. Eugenia, February 8, 2006, Heredia. In fact, there is cross-cultural evidence that this role of Mary as the first mother is of special importance for women at the moment of labor. See Vuola 2009(forthcoming). Eugenia, February 8, 2006, Heredia. Gisela, February 8, 2006, San José. Anita, February 3, 2006, Alajuela. Ibid.


Referenc es Alvarez, S. E. 1990. Engendering Democracy in Brazil. Women’s Movements in Transition Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ––––––. 1994. The (Trans)formation of Feminism(s) and Gender Politics in Democratizing Brazil. In The Women’s Movement in Latin America. Participation and Democracy, ed. J. S. Jaquette, pp. 13–63. Boulder: Westview Press. Bachrach, Ehlers, T. 1991. Debunking Marianismo: Economic Vulnerability and Survival Strategies among Guatemalan Wives. Ethnology 30 (1): 1–16. Baldez, L. 2002. Why Women Protest. Women’s Movements in Chile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Browner, C., and E. Lewin. 1982. Female Altruism Reconsidered: The Virgin Mary as Economic Woman. American Ethnologist 9 (1): 61–75. Chant, S., and N. Craske. 2003. Gender in Latin America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Chopp, R. S., and M. L. Taylor. 1994. Introduction: Crisis, Hope, and Contemporary Theology. In Reconstructing Christian Theology, ed. R. S. Chopp and M. L. Taylor, pp. 1–24. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Code, L., ed. 2000. Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories. London and New York: Routledge. Craske, N. 1999. Women and Politics in Latin America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Eckstein, S. 2001. Power and Popular Protest in Latin America. In Power and Popular Protest. Latin American Social Movements, ed. S. Eckstein, pp. 1–60. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giblin, M. J. 1996. Empowerment. In Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, ed. L. M. Russell and J. S. Clarkson, pp. 83–84. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Hawley, J. S. 1999. Fundamentalism. In Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women, ed. C. W. Howland, pp. 3–8. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Humm, M. 1990. The Dictionary of Feminist Theory. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Huntington, S. P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Navarro, M. 2001. The Personal is Political: Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo. In Power and Popular Protest. Latin American Social Movements, ed. S. Eckstein, pp. 241–58. Berkeley: University of California Press. ––––––. 2002. “Against Marianismo.” In Gender´s Place. Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America, ed. R. Montoya, L. J. Frazier and J. Hurtig, pp. 257–72. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Orsi, R. A. 2002. The Madonna of the 115th Street. Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pelikan, J. 1996. Mary Through the Centuries. Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Stephen, L. 2000. Women and Social Movements in Latin America. Power from Below. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Stevens, E. 1973a. Machismo and Marianismo. Society 10 (6): 57–63. ––––––. 1973b. Marianismo: The Other Face of Machismo in Latin America. In Female and Male in Latin America. Essays, ed. A. Pescatello, pp. 89–101. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Vuola, E. 2002. Remaking Universals? Transnational Feminism(s) Challenging Fundamentalist Ecumenism. Theory, Culture and Society 19 (1–2): 175–95. ––––––. 2006. Seriously Harmful for Your Health? Religion, Feminism, and Sexuality in Latin America. In Liberation Theology and Sexuality: New Radicalism from Latin America, ed. M. Althaus-Reid, pp. 137–62. London: Ashgate. ––––––. 2009, forthcoming. La Morenita on Skis. Women’s Popular Marian Piety and Feminist Research of Religion. In Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology, ed. S. Briggs and M. McClintock Fulkerson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 10

4

The Bou ndar ies of Liberation, the Chai ns of Freedom: Urban Women i n 1960 s Egyptian Popu l ar Cinema Shmulik Bachar

Introduction: Historiography and Popular Culture At the end of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the image of the “New Woman”1 penetrated Egyptian popular culture and expressed itself most vividly on the silver screen. It was the image of an elegant, educated, and professional woman that represented Egyptian society’s desire to approach the “enlightened” West (which was undergoing a gender revolution and witnessing the activities of women’s liberation movements) and thus created a new society that was able to allow its women access to culture, education, and freedom and removed existing obstacles (Gordon 2002: 136; Golombok and Fivush 1994: 2). Still, as Sherifa Zuhur claims, there was no radical breaking of sacred social conventions on the screen, and popular culture dealt with patterns of change vs. continuity. Thus, filmmakers (directors, producers, scriptwriters), mostly men, were able to express social conflicts that Egypt was undergoing at certain periods (Zuhur 1998: 211–13). It is worth mentioning that until the end of the 1990s, the dominant attitude toward Egyptian popular cinema was one of denigration and underrating. Both Western and Egyptian critics and researchers claimed that it was a cheap imitation of Hollywood, lacking in any kind of sophistication (Baker 1974; Malkmus and Armes 1991; Farid

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1996). But since the end of the 1990s, Western researchers like Walter Armbrust (1996, 2000), Joel Gordon (2001, 2002), Viola Shafik (1998), Jane Gaffney (1987), and Sherifa Zuhur have been leading a new approach that focuses upon popular cinema, believing it contains essential information about a society going through changes, and about the visual texts that particular society was attracted to, and takes into consideration the constant dialogue between the filmmakers and the audiences. This new approach can be regarded as a continuation of a perception developed by Marc Ferro, who was the first Western researcher to treat visual images in feature films as historical evidence per se, believing a film is not only art but also a cultural product that testifies to its creators’ worldviews and patterns of life. He claimed that a cinematic product contains political and ideological products, the exposure of which can contribute to a better understanding of historical reality under research (Sand 2002: 13–17; Ferro 1991). According to Shlomo Sand, a film is first and foremost a document that expresses the viewpoints of the cultural agents who make it. Therefore, its mass consumption enables it to shape hegemonic ideologies (Sand 2002: 18–22). Robert Rosenstone maintains that while conventional historiography divides the world into simplified categories such as politics, economics, gender, or religion, a film presents an integrative image of these complex processes (Rosenstone 1995). Furthermore, we need to recall that directors and scriptwriters hold certain conventions concerning their audiences’ gender attitudes. Therefore, it is almost inconceivable to make films that are contrary to acceptable social norms, since it might render these films unauthentic. But we also need to recall that filmmakers also want to shape social attitudes, so it is quite difficult to quantify the extent of the mutual influences between those who make the films and those who watch them (Hughes 1976; Zuhur 1998: 213). Still, as Armbrust claims, Egyptian cinema was a vital ingredient in the construction of modernity and national identity in Egypt, in addition to being a powerful tool of indoctrinating the masses, popularizing education, and promoting the bourgeois lifestyle, which was its central theme from its start till the 1970s (Armbrust 2002: 217, 221). Based upon the new approach mentioned above, we shall assume that the Egyptian cinema industry2 represents quite authentically the social and cultural realities in Egypt. The Egyptian feature film is a central medium of popular culture, a coherent tool for social expression, that enables us to understand how society deals with changes from within, and to what extent it is willing to accept and internalize them. It seems that no theme was dealt with in Egyptian cinema more than the issue of women, their status, and the dilemmas surrounding them in the

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framework of social conventions and boundaries. All cinematic genres, from melodramas to comedies, were obsessed with women—questions of morality, values, traditions, the place of the family, relations between the sexes—and other pressing issues stemming from women leaving their homes and entering the public sphere under the new options provided by the nation-state. Furthermore, women mark the boundaries of a collective, so that the discourse regarding these boundaries revolves around women’s bodies and identities. This continuous treatment of women’s issues in feature films may be the primary reason justifying the use of this medium as a tool for understanding social changes and tensions. But before we start analyzing the films themselves, it is worth examining the historic period under research in order to understand the scope and character of the social changes related to women’s education and work in the 1960s, under the Nasserist regime.

The Revolutionary Regime and Women’s Education and Employment During the first decade following the July 1952 Free Officers Revolution, Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser’s regime was unable to create a coherent political and social doctrine, since it was preoccupied with consolidating its rule, creating authoritarian characteristics, and penetrating civil society organizations and unions (feminist organizations included), thus subjecting them to its authority. In the second half of the 1950s, the regime tried to handle the state’s economic problems, declaring a fight for social justice through the initiation of legal reforms (free social services, minimum wage, nationalization, agrarian reform, etc.) (Abdel Kader 1987: 104–5; Hopwood 1991: 85, 87). In the course of the 1960s (at least until the 1967 war), the Arab Socialism experiment reached its peak, ideologically and practically. After the collapse of the United Arab Republic (i.e., the union with Syria) in 1961, Nasser was determined to redraft Egypt’s social ideals, and in May 1962 the National Charter (Al-Mithaq al-Watani) was promulgated, declaring that freedom, socialism, and unity were Egypt’s main objectives in its ambition to become a modern nation that wished to remain loyal to its values and traditions. The government enacted a set of laws that included the first Five Year Plan, the expansion of the public sector, limitations on land ownership, and a commitment to employ every male and female university graduate in public-sector companies and the civil service (Abdel Kader 1987: 105; Hopwood 1991: 90–91; Sullivan 1986: 35; Macleod 1991: 51). As for women’s status, it was the Nasserist regime that attached the issue to its national strategy of rapid socioeconomic development through industrialization, thus incorporating the pre-revolutionary

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feminist organizations’ demands into an official part of state ideology. Back in 1956, women’s suffrage was introduced into the constitution.3 The Labor Law of 1959 prohibited sexual discrimination at work and entitled women to social services, such as maternity leave and so on. In the beginning of the 1960s all women’s organizations were officially banned, and their activities were incorporated into Nasser’s newly established political platform, the Arab Socialist Union (Al-Ittihad al-‘Arabi al-Ishtiraki), under a one-party system. The 1962 Charter formally recognized the need to liberate women, maintaining women’s equality to men, and stressing the need to remove the chains that hindered their movement, so that they would be able to play an important part in shaping Egyptian society (Hatem 1994: 664, 667; Abdel Kader 1987: 108–9, 115–16; Sullivan 1986: 23, 33). But, according to Mervat Hatem, even under the secular regime there was no change in the patriarchal ideal that preferred to see women at home. She claims that the basic domestic identity of the Egyptian woman was supplemented with a professional one, since women’s labor was perceived to be default due to the need to consolidate the middle class and strengthen its economic foundation (Hatem 1994: 670). Whether or not the regime preferred to keep women at home, it still realized the importance of promoting their status as a standard for examining Egypt’s success in becoming a free modern nation. Therefore, the regime tried to distinguish Egypt from other Asian and African societies and made many efforts to shake off patterns perceived as backward, such as early marriage, uncontrolled birth rate, women’s veiling (the “new women” of the 1960s’ films do not wear the veil), and women’s segregation. We need to recall Egypt’s desire to lead the Arab world with the introduction of the pan-Arab vision; these attempts are tightly linked to the regime’s desire to create an authentically socialist modern society (Bier 2004: 100). Based upon the regime’s declarations, the state did apply mandatory free education in elementary school, for both boys and girls, and encouraged a growing number of girls to finish high school, though female access to these institutions remained relatively low (about 600,000 girls, comprising only one-third of all high-school students in the mid-1970s). The regime invested great efforts in the enrollment of women in higher education. Nasserist ideology considered education and employment as acceptable ways of social mobility, thus making women’s education a social necessity and a status symbol. The demand for female education started to grow in the 1960s, and middle- and upper-middle-class women were the greatest beneficiaries of the application of the new education laws. By the end of the Nasser era, almost 15 percent of all female employees held academic degrees. Still, women’s university enrollment was highly selective: while mostly upper-middle-class women were accepted to the more prestigious


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faculties (medicine, engineering, law), the lower-middle class were fitted into the humanities, social sciences, nursing schools, or trained as teachers. But, despite all these ambitious plans and the marked progress in women’s scientific and professional education, there has been continuous gender inequality in this system, mainly due to systematic lower budgeting for female education (Abdel Kader 1987: 109–11; Sullivan 1986: 22, 34; Al-Sanabary 1985: 93–94, 97–100, 104–9). According to the socialist ideology of the regime, which demanded that both men and women take part side by side in the creation of the new society, the government endeavored to increase the share of women in the workforce, especially through legal means that forced employers to give all necessary social services to women. Still, the growth in women’s share of the total workforce remained very modest (from 2.3 percent in 1947 to 6.4 by the end of the 1960s). Most female employees worked as civil servants in the bureaucratic and governmental system (by 1976 they comprised almost one-third of all clerks in Egypt), as doctors and nurses, and as teachers. Although the number of women working outside their home was growing, it still was not a common scene (as we shall see in cinematic representation later on). Many women found it difficult to adjust to the requirements of both family and a professional career. One of the results of women’s leaving for university or to work was their decision to postpone their marital age. Although by law they were allowed to get married at the age of 16, during the 1960s, many urban middle-class and upper-middle-class educated women got married only in their early twenties and even later (Abdel Kader 1987: 112–15; Sullivan 1986: 32–35; Macleod 1991: 8; Moghadam 1993: 124–29). It is important to note that in the cinematic medium we can see young women aged 18 and even older who are all single.4 Despite the enactment of social laws for the betterment of women, the state left a complex system of personal status laws (i.e., marriage, divorce, inheritance, etc.) untouched, thus serving the patriarchal male needs. On the one hand, the regime tried to marginalize the role of religion in state affairs and made secularism one of its new national ideals. The state abolished the Shar’i (religious) courts in 1955 and established civil courts instead. On the other, the regime did recognize Islam as state religion. In the same manner, in 1961 the regime nationalized al-Azhar, the most prestigious religious establishment in the Sunni world, and reformed it, thus turning it into a tool for legitimizing the regime’s controversial policies. But, the regime had to give al-Azhar some privileges in the social sphere in order to pacify its scholars (the ‘ulama) and maintain its preeminence in the public’s eyes, and therefore the religious establishment furthered its grip on social matters. All personal status laws remained under the

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jurisdiction of Islamic law (Shari’a) and were not thoroughly codified (Hatem 1994: 664).5 In light of the above, we need to stress that Islamic religious and cultural discourse—being so well entrenched in society—was utterly unchallenged in social affairs, especially regarding the status of women. Therefore, one can say that religion’s place was almost taken for granted. Patriarchy and religion went hand in hand, and as we shall see, while certain superficial notions were indeed challenged and underwent changes, the most basic foundations upon which that society stood were unbroken. The concept of women’s liberation thus contained the chains that activated a vicious circle: women could demand more rights and freedom, and challenge old gender perceptions in the name of progress and modernity, but all these were subordinated to the national project, in the name of preserving what was perceived as cultural authenticity and clear gender boundaries (Bier 2004: 107–8).

Analyzing the Films: The Boundaries of Liberation The films that we shall deal with below were made in a period perceived as the beginning of an era of freedom and liberation for women in the wake of the expected (but unfulfilled) demise of traditional forces in Egypt and throughout the Arab and Muslim world. At the end of the 1950s, Daniel Lerner (1958) described in his classic book The Passing of Traditional Society the dynamics of change in a developing world as a gradual detachment from the traditional past, with a bright future waiting ahead, destroying all human illnesses, among them the subordinate status of women. But by the mid-1960s Middle East researchers and sociologists (Halpern 1963; Van Nieuwenhuijze 1965) rejected Lerner’s evolutionary-psychological perception, and in the 1980s and 1990s, Arab researchers (e.g., Sharabi 1988; Barakat 1993; Badran 1994; Moghadam 1993) stressed the failures of modernization in bringing about radical social changes in the Middle East. They have claimed that modernization is not a liberating force, but rather destabilizes powerful traditional elements, exchanging them with different privileges enjoyed by men and patriarchal institutions (Macleod 1991: 12). Since the second half of the twentieth century, urban middle class (and upper-middle class) women in Egypt in particular have been struggling with the rapid social changes brought about by modernization. They have been trying to create their own coherent authentic identity, based on the combination of local cultures and traditions, on the one hand, with the desire to expand their possibilities and spheres of action, on the other. According to Arlene Macleod, who conducted


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research on Egyptian middle-class women’s return to the veil in 1980s Egypt, it is inaccurate to conceptualize Muslim Middle Eastern women as living under an oppressive, humiliating culture. She maintains that it is inaccurate to perceive women as passive victims of a patriarchal society, since many of them demonstrate assertiveness and confidence, and—though it sounds contradictory—in certain situations women can also perpetuate their fellow women’s subordination and gender inequality. Macleod develops Gramsci’s idea of hegemony to show how relations of interdependency between a coercive dominant male society and a coerced dominated female group work through negotiations and constant challenges to the weaker side. The subordinated female group accepts its inequality but at the same time tries to expand its boundaries (Macleod 1991: 16–19; Gramsci 2004). Egyptian popular culture of the 1960s also deals with these tensions between social change and society’s need to preserve its centuries-old values and local traditions. On the surface, the movies under analysis seem to be a celebration of Lerner’s optimistic vision of young, Westernstyle dressed urban women, who attend higher education institutes and work for governmental bureaucracy or private-sector companies, thus removing the chains of tradition and fulfilling their dreams. Sooner or later this vision turns out to be a bit more complex. With the assumption that it was the Nasserist regime’s desire to promote women’s integration in education and employment, it is possible to maintain that these movies convey to women and to society as a whole the message that women’s new social needs are acceptable and welcomed. But, at the same time, they receive a clear signal telling them what might happen if they go against social conventions and break the rules. It will not be correct to assert, therefore, that the female characters represent women who suffer ill-treatment and total coercion by male society. Rather, one can discern heroines who stand on their own, fighting and trying to challenge social conventions, though without breaking sacred social codes and taboos. Finally, it is worth mentioning that although this article analyzes only five films, many feature films dealing with these issues were produced during the period under discussion; however, it will be impossible to discuss all of them in this limited framework.6 The first film,7 Girls’ Rebellion (Thawrat al-Banat), is a social farce that tries unconvincingly to challenge traditional perceptions that maintain it is a man’s duty (and right) to court a woman and propose marriage. The film’s young heroine, Nadia (played by Nadia Lutfi, a star from the 1960s), develops a new “theory” that calls upon women to take the initiative and prove their equality to men and even that they surpass them. This phenomenal idea utterly fails and supposedly proves the superiority of the “old” ways in which “men are men and women are women,” as one of the characters maintains. This is the

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story of a young, enthusiastic and active feminist woman, who works for a women’s rights organization; after reading a newspaper article about Valentina Tereshkova, the first Soviet female cosmonaut who was launched into space, she claims that it is proof that women are just as smart and qualified as men. As Laura Bier maintains, the description of other women’s situations is an instrument by which Egyptian women negotiate with society and challenge the boundaries of the nation and their place in the national project.8 Throughout the film, women adhere to Nadia’s project, court men, and propose marriage to those they find attractive. But all the scenes demonstrate the absurdity of the entire project by ridiculing situations that are merely a mirror image of gender roles rather than a redefinition of the social roles of men and women in society: while men adopt a “feminine” tone, go to the hairdresser before their wedding, and ask their wives to buy them expensive items of jewelry, women wrestle with each other, try to prove that they can cope with large amounts of alcohol, and chase men on the street. It is obvious that male characters in the film take the entire idea ambivalently. Some of them enjoy the women’s proposals of marriage, but after a while they start mocking Nadia and her female followers, feeling threatened by the new concept. Though the theory initially gains momentum and popularity, very soon its deficiencies are crystallized. Although this is a comic film, at a certain moment one of the newly married couples gets into a fight, during which the husband asks for a divorce and the wife slaps him. He angrily beats her, takes back control, authority, and his honor and shouts at her: “You thought you were men, proposing and marrying and controlling us . . . Well, control is in my hands and I’ll never divorce you. I’ll rip you off first and then make you crawl!” In this episode the husband clarifies “who’s the boss”; although she is rich and he is poor, financial wealth does not enable her to control him, since it is her duty to obey him. And indeed the theory fails and is buried when Nadia herself falls in love with her long-time suitor, Galal (played by Hasan Yusuf, a young star of the 1960s), and just waits for him to propose. The boy’s father interferes, saying: “There is not a single girl who doesn’t want to get married.” Since this is a comedy, all social tensions are resolved satisfactorily. Due to the young lovers’ stubbornness and inability to admit their love for each other, the families of both bring in the Ma’dhun (the marriage registrar), calling him “Tabib Shar’i” (forensic or legal doctor), and saying that he is the only one who can “cure” this couple of their “illness.” Everyone celebrates the world’s return to its “sane” track, with Nadia’s acceptance of the rules of the Shari’a (Islamic Law) without hesitation. Throughout the film, our heroine encourages her girlfriends to pursue men, but she does not know how to bring her own


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idea into effect. Enchanted by her young suitor’s charms, she just waits till the end for him to propose. This film presents the ambivalent rhetoric of the Nasserist “New Woman” Project: on the one hand, an ambition to attain progress and development, but on the other, the demand to preserve cultural authenticity. The film expresses the perceived threat that modern life and women’s liberation might lead to the desexualization of women, which might cause the destruction of gender differences and roles. Although there is an acknowledgment of social changes related to women (the film does present women as college students and journalists taking their stand in the public sphere), the rules of the game are crystal clear: the proposed revolution is not realistic and therefore can exist only as a comic farce that will express what is right and what is wrong and will be able to bridge the social and intersexual tensions of the period. The second film, Three Suitors (Al-Thalatha Yuhibbunaha), presents us with a beautiful young woman, Iman (played by Su’ad Husni, the “Cinderella” of the Egyptian silver screen), who works in a governmental company as a secretary while she is finishing her academic studies and preparing for her final exams. Iman is being pursued by several men, but other than flirting with them and teasing them she keeps a certain distance and does not allow herself to get attached to any of them. Although she loves to laugh and to go dancing in clubs with her “gang” (shilla), she considers herself a woman of honor and purity. Furthermore, as a decent girl she abstains from alcohol altogether, knowing how negatively a woman who drinks is perceived. She does not even want to get married before she guarantees her future through academic studies. Still, people around her view her as a promiscuous woman with a bad reputation (people even describe one of her boyfriends as a “new client”). Throughout the film, three handsome young men pursue Iman: one of them is her boss, ‘Isam (played by Yusuf Sha’ban), with whom she maintains a deeper relationship than that shared between a boss and secretary, since he tutors her for her final exams and wishes to marry her. The second is her coworker, Kamal (played by Hasan Yusuf), who is a reckless, light-minded man with whom she goes dancing in cabarets. And the third is a gentle, kind-hearted intellectual, ‘Adil (played by Yusuf Fakhr al-Din), who is deeply in love with her, but holds more conservative thoughts regarding her behavior and wishes to keep her away from her “bad” habits, saying that young girls these days have utterly forgotten what honor is. When, after long procrastination, Iman falls in love with the goodhearted ‘Adil, and the two of them plan to get married as soon as possible, the melodramatic events reach their peak: ‘Isam, her boss, utterly jealous and angry at Iman for not marrying him, decides to take his

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revenge. He invites her to study at his apartment and puts drugs in her Coca-Cola bottle (one wonders if the use of Coca-Cola is accidental, or a symbolic expression of “Westoxication,” since the film is abundantly filled with Western images, for example, the actors’ and actresses’ outfits and the dances at the clubs). After she falls asleep he rapes her, but then leaves the room full of remorse. When she wakes up yelling that her life has been ruined, he justifies his behavior, saying he was forced to do so after he started to believe what people had been saying about her (kalam al-nas, “people’s talk”). He proposes marriage in order to remove the social stain, but she refuses to marry him and says it is a burden she will carry for the rest of her life. Afterward, she wishes to make her fiancé ‘Adil leave her and starts drinking and misbehaving until he finally decides to leave and marry her best friend, Layla (Nahid Sharif). Iman watches the wedding from afar together with the immoral Kamal, who was socially denounced by his fellow workers after trying to impose himself upon Iman during a company excursion. She forgives him and remains with him in the end in a sort of alliance of the accursed. This film sends a very harsh message, according to which the improper behavior of women, even without having sex before marriage, necessarily leads to dishonor and shame. People in a patriarchal society judge young women who go out into the public sphere by what they see and what they perceive as normative behavior. As kind, goodhearted, and educated as she may be, a woman is exposed to external temptations, and therefore the very fact that she leaves the family and home boundaries carries the potential for destruction, prostitution, and immorality (Moghadam 1993: 105, 108; Mohsen 1985: 68). After Kamal tried to impose himself on Iman, her best friend, Layla, who is just the opposite of Iman (a conservative gentle woman, who does not fool around) told the latter that it was not Kamal’s fault, since it is a girl’s duty to maintain her honor and good reputation, rather than seducing men with her permissive behavior. In fact, Layla expresses a view held by many women who agree that social sanctions and family restrictions should be imposed in order to contain women’s sexual desires (Macleod 1991: 84). The third film, The Woman’s Enemy (‘Adu al-Mar’a), is a romantic comedy made by the public-sector cinema productions. The heroine is Nadia (again Nadia Lutfi), a 23-year-old lawyer, who dedicates her life to promoting women’s rights and social status through a feminist organization. The male hero is Dr. ‘Isa al-Ayyubi (Rushdi Abaza, one of the greatest film stars of the 1960s and 1970s), a famous author and an intellectual, who is also known for his harsh objection to women’s rights, and has therefore been nicknamed “the women’s enemy.” In a TV interview, he maintains that a woman is a flawed, defective creature.


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He also says that the situation in which women go to work and get equal rights is unnatural, since men were created to work and provide the family’s livelihood, while women were created differently in order to stay at home, raise children, cook, and mend clothes, which is what they do best. Furthermore, he claims that women should acquire an education not for their own benefit, but for the sake of raising their children better. He infuriates the female audience when he compares women to insects, saying that their intellectual and mental level is inferior to that of men, while stressing that he was merely quoting Freud. Hearing Dr. ‘Isa’s words, Nadia decides to get to know him in order to change his perceptions about women, and she is even willing to bet on this issue with her friends. Deceitfully, the charming and attractive Nadia encounters ‘Isa, and the bet is turned into a love story. He confides in Nadia the blame he holds against his mother, claiming she neglected him after the death of his father for the sake of her second husband thus ruining his sacred perception of her as a mother figure.9 Since this is a feature film, Nadia convinces ‘Isa very quickly that his mother was not to blame and says that, if she were in the same situation, she would remarry because a single mother needs a man by her side to protect her. After he hears about the bet, he feels betrayed and bitterly forces her out of his house, saying she is proof that women are just like insects. But all’s well that ends well, and he soon realizes he was mistaken about Nadia’s true love for him. On another TV show, he declares that women comprise half of society and their presence by men’s side is a necessity with the entire audience applauding him. In the film’s finale, Nadia and ‘Isa reunite. This film ridicules perceptions such as those voiced by ‘Isa at the beginning, showing they are unacceptable, especially among the Egyptian elite, which tries to dictate social norms. On the other hand, what ‘Isa says at the end about a woman’s place next to the man reflects a public discourse that is not revolutionary, but rather quite common in Egypt. In fact, liberal intellectuals such as Qasim Amin held some of these perceptions back at the turn of the nineteenth century (Amin 1995; Bashkin et al. 1999). It might be difficult to infer a call for whole-hearted equality between the sexes, since Nadia herself admits that she needs a man to provide for her and protect her. As for ‘Isa’s claim that men and women were conceived to fulfill different tasks, it is important to note that this was a common perception among Egyptian urban women long after the 1960s (Macleod 1991: 41, 81). The social critique The Shame (Al-‘Ayb) is another public-sector production. It is an adaptation of a story written by Yusuf Idris, one of Egypt’s most prominent authors, and comprises the beginning of post–1967 war films criticizing the Nasserist regime. This is one of the few films in which a portrait of Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser is shown with

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a clear message against the regime’s conduct.10 The film opens with a quotation from the National Charter, which maintains that “criticism, and particularly self-criticism, is one of the most important guarantees for freedom.” The film focuses on governmental and bureaucratic corruption, questions of morality, ethics, and social justice. But it also deals with the entrance of women into the public sphere, stereotypes about women, and intersexual tensions. This is the story of Sana’ (starring Lubna ‘Abd al-‘Aziz), a young trade-school graduate11 who starts work in a junior governmental position, thus carrying out the regime’s commitment to employ every male and female university graduate (Sullivan 1986: 35; Macleod 1991: 3, 51). The opening scene is quite telling on the scarcity of women in government positions. Sana’, together with two of her female co-workers in the Ministry, enters the building while dozens of men gaze at them bewildered, as if they have never seen a woman before. In the office, the women’s first day arouses both excitement and sexual tension. At first, the manager ogles them lustfully. Later on, four men in Sana’s office make fun of her and “scan” her legs, making some chauvinistic remarks. But at the end of the day the three women agree that there is nothing better than work, thus expressing the middle-class urban woman’s desire for social mobility (Macleod 1991: 3, 56). Optimistic as she sounds, Sana’ soon realizes the harsh realities of being a civil servant in a governmental position, earning low wages and being unable to support her widowed mother and young brother. We also realize that the four men working with Sana’ are corrupt and involved in shady activities, signing construction approvals without the necessary bureaucratic procedures for a rich contractor in exchange for (relatively) large sums of money. They decide to make Sana’ their stooge by showing her how to sign the papers, so that if the scheme is discovered, she will be framed instead of them. When she starts asking questions, the male group decides that one of them should make her fall in love with him in order to keep her busy, since “all a pretty girl like her wants is to get married.” And indeed, the charming Muhammad alGuindi (the aforementioned Rushdi Abaza) manipulates her into falling for him and convinces her to give up her plan to support her mother and brother by herself and marry him instead. But soon afterward Sana’ discovers the corruption scheme and angrily breaks up with Muhammad, saying she does not want anything to do with this “shameful” behavior. Unlike the original story, where the heroine succumbs and eventually takes the bribery money, the film presents a more optimistic finale, according to which Sana’ does not give in to the rich contractor’s attempts to tempt her (Qasim 1998: 127). Her brave resistance makes Muhammad repent and he hands himself over proudly to the Supreme Court while Sana’ weeps and calls to him repeatedly.


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Though the film does not deal with women’s status directly, one can still see young educated women who get the opportunity to work as equals (at least in theory) in the bureaucratic system. They are a rare sight in the office and under constant pressure from the maledominated environment surrounding them. Within the context of this movie, the female character has to maintain her moral standards, but it is also possible that she symbolizes the Egyptian nation, calling upon a society that is corrupt and evil to repent and purify. As Beth Baron shows, even in the 1870s the Egyptian nation was visually represented as a woman, thus allowing for a large scope of political criticism through sexual and gender metaphors. Representing the nation as a young, innocent, and pure woman was meant to create a romantic feeling among Egyptian men, making them defend their nation, honor, and pride (Baron 1997: 119–23). Based upon this argument, it may be appropriate to interpret the film as a call to the younger generation post the 1967 war, who were asking themselves what went wrong and how they were humiliated by Israel, to wake up and get rid of their predicaments, and defend their beloved nation. The fact that Muhammad (who symbolizes the people) goes after Sana’ proves that there is a cure to Egypt’s ailment. The fifth and last film under analysis is The Students’ Dorms (Bayt alTalibat), which tells the story of three young women students in Cairo, their dreams, ambitions, and loves. They live in an exclusive residence for female students, run by a strict and hard-minded woman who tries to enforce discipline with an iron fist and not always very successfully. Amal, the leading heroine (Nahid Sharif) is a humanities student, who has always dreamed of going to college, thus taking responsibility for her life and future. Her two friends hold two radically different perceptions from each other about academic opportunities: Hiam (Nelli) dreams of marrying her boyfriend and therefore takes her studies less seriously (even though she understands their importance in the end), while Iman (Magda al-Khatib) is a medicine student, who is willing to give up love and marriage for the sake of pursuing her dream (but she too falls in love eventually). In the course of the film, Amal gets acquainted with Ahmad (Kamal al-Shinnawi, a big star in the 1950s and 1960s), a journalist and an author who is willing to help her become an author as well. After spending a lot of time with each other, the two of them discuss their future together, and Amal realizes that he is not the enlightened person she thought he was. He maintains that every woman is ready to give up all her dreams in order to serve the man with whom she chooses to live and adds that he needs a woman like Amal, who understands his character and the demands of his work so that she will be his helpmate, sitting at home and raising the children after marriage. Amal fiercely

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objects, saying that a woman should not yield her personality, not even for love, and refuses his marriage proposal, while apologetically asking him to understand that she wants a path of her own in life. She also maintains that she is proud of going to work and that there is no shame in working and studying, thus taking care of her own future. Finally, Ahmad realizes he was mistaken and accepts Amal the way she is for the sake of a happy ending. The three female characters in this movie express a multifaceted discourse of the complex lives of urban, educated, working women in the 1960s who wished for self-fulfillment and professional success, but also strove to find love, get married, and bear children. Of the three female models, Amal seems the most well-balanced, wishing to find love, but remaining ambitious and yearning for a professional career in the framework of the opportunities opened up for women thanks to the revolutionary regime. Ahmad’s coming to terms with Amal’s desires expresses Egyptian mainstream society’s acknowledgment of women’s right to study and work without neglecting their commitment to accepted social codes (i.e., marriage and family). One cannot help but wonder whether or not this film validates Mervat Hatem’s argument, according to which it was not the desire to promote women’s rights per se that was on the Nasserist regime’s mind, but the understanding that it was a social necessity of a developing country (Hatem 1994: 670). It is possible that without this necessity, the patriarchal Egyptian society would have preferred Ahmad’s solution, that is, the wife should stay at home. Still, despite the ambivalent attitude expressed in this movie, as well as in the other movies under discussion, women did manage to seize the opportunities opened up for them in education and employment.

Conclusions The five films discussed in this narrow framework point to the feeling of ambivalence and confusion that Egyptian society was undergoing during the 1960s, at the height of a complex modernization process that was in constant struggle with long-held traditional worldviews that wished to maintain social order. There are several common denominators to all the films. First, all leading (and secondary) heroines are single and most of them (except for Amal in The Students’ Dorms) represent broken family patterns—that is, they do not have families in the traditional sense, since they lack a father or an elder-brother figure to watch over them when they leave home. All the changes and the relative freedom achieved through education and employment notwithstanding, these female figures show that they need a strong, protective male figure. Thus, although Nadia in Girls’ Rebellion tries to promote a


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revolutionary project for the liberation of women, she gives up the fight and surrenders to social conventions and to her lover’s advances in the end. In The Woman’s Enemy, the heroine, Nadia, makes a chauvinist man change his views about women, but not at the expense of her love for him and their happy union. In The Shame, independent Sana’ does not succumb to bribery offers but nevertheless proves incapable of living without a man, and in the end yearns for him to return. In The Students’ Dorms, Amal may have changed her suitor’s views regarding women’s careers, but finally finds herself in his arms and in need of his assistance. As for Iman, the tragic heroine in Three Suitors, her bitter end is a reminder that she could have been saved if she had clung to the man who loved her, instead of acting recklessly and immorally as was perceived by her peers. Second, based upon Macleod’s claim, according to which women negotiate with patriarchal society and fit into social constructions and power struggles (Macleod 1991: 41, 43), our female characters fight for their cause and try to expand their opportunities, even though they need to manipulate and maneuver due to the constraints. In Girls’ Rebellion, a challenge is set to many gender perceptions, despite the fact that the patriarchal dictate overcomes the challenges. In The Woman’s Enemy, the heroine succeeds in changing prejudices, though she does not challenge the accepted social ethos and wishes to be her lover’s helpmate. In The Shame, the heroine fights two battles at the same time: she struggles to succeed in her new position, while fighting against social corruption. In The Students’ Dorms, Amal insists on fulfilling her professional dream and even makes her lover accept these demands. It seems that Iman in Three Suitors is the only one whose struggle was meant to fail even before it had started, since she “misbehaved” and therefore had to be punished. It is clear, then, that despite changes in women’s perceptions of themselves and in the way society perceives them (and it is very well represented in popular culture), one can still not ignore the effects of traditional viewpoints. Women are expected to fulfill economic and social ends, but they also have to adopt a normative feminine identity and combine work with the demands of home and family (Macleod 1991: 95). Third, most of the women figures in these films belong to the middle class (and even the lower-middle class), except for Nadia from The Woman’s Enemy who is from the upper-middle class. These young women’s economic condition forces them to support their families. Still, the question whether these women work for self-accomplishment and happiness or because of tough socioeconomic conditions remains ambivalent, since in reality economic constraints may dictate a course of action (Macleod 1991: 72), but cinematic imagery nevertheless tries to

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stress ideas of liberation and self-fulfillment in the name of that period’s national ethos (Amal and her girlfriends in The Students’ Dorms are a good example of this). In this context, Ella Shohat maintains that third world postrevolutionary films did not adopt first world (or Western) feminist ideas, even when the films were made by women directors, since these films were made in a nation-state hegemonic-language context that stressed the importance of the revolution in empowering women and saw their ambitions as an integral part of that revolution (Shohat 1997). This perception is supported in the framework of this discussion. To conclude, although we have reviewed only five films made in a narrow time period (1963–1968), it is possible to view them as a sample that represents the way society and the state perceived women going out into the public space for education and employment. On the one hand, there is a clear acknowledgment of the necessity to promote women in order to turn Egypt into a more enlightened, culturally developed country. On the other, there is constant tension and an attempt to limit and restrict these measures, so that social stability and order will not be disrupted. In all these films, it seems that women’s liberation is only half-hearted and partial; thus, despite important changes taking place in society at the time—and they are certainly reflected in popular culture representation—these are still superficial steps, the meaning of which is to keep patriarchal institutions intact. This fascinating tension between the need to promote changes and the demand to dictate their pace intensified in the following decades, and it has been clearly represented in the Egyptian popular culture, especially in silver-screen manifestations.

Notes 1. For a thorough discussion of the “New Woman” concept in America and the way it spread around the world since the 1920s, see Rosenberg 1999. 2. It is important to note here that, in the period under review, the Egyptian cinema industry was split into two: a part of it remained in private hands and continued making commercial films, while the state started to nationalize private companies in all sectors of the economy. In 1963, a part of the cinema industry was nationalized when the government purchased studios, filming equipment, and screening halls. The public sector collapsed in the beginning of the 1970s, after making 145 films, about one-third of the entire 426 films made between 1963–1972. The reasons for its failure were mainly its lack of efficient management and the productions’ lack of popularity among the general public (Fayed 1999; Abu Shadi 2002). 3. It is worth mentioning, though, that by 1967 only about one million women voted for parliament, less than a quarter of the national constituency.


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4. For example, in the movie The Woman’s Enemy, which will be discussed at length later on, the heroine is a 23-year-old single woman who works as a lawyer and an activist for women’s causes. 5. For further reading, see Bechor 2002; Zeghal 1999; Moustafa 2000; and Hatina 2001. 6. Other films dealing with women’s entrance into the public sphere for employment and education include Boys and Girls (Subyan wa-Banat); Dark Glasses (Al-Naddara al-Sawda’); For Men Only (Li-al-Riggal Faqat); A Girl Like Any Other (Bint min al-Banat); Girls’ Secrets (Asrar al-Banat); Good Morning My Dear Wife (Sabah al-Khayr Ya Zawgati al-‘Aziza); My Wife the General Manager (Mrati Mudir ‘Am); The Student and Her Professor (Al-Tilmidha wa-al-Ustadh); The Students’ Apartment (Shaqqat al-Talaba); and A Widow with Three Daughters (Armala wa-Thalath Banat). 7. The technical data (year of release to the theatres, actors, directors, etc.) on all the films under discussion is based upon Qasim 2002, Qasim 2004.” 8. Bier 2004, p. 101. 9. Gender constructions describe women as mothers and wives, who win the honor and admiration of the children, especially boys, since the latter are supposed to be more precious to mothers (Macleod 1991: 82). 10. After the 1967 defeat, the regime provided wider scope for criticism, since there was a feeling then that public debate would help reorganize Egyptian society and prevent another military defeat. But one should not interpret the display of Nasser’s portrait as a blunt criticism against the ruler himself. After all, any criticism against Nasser after 1967 was made through allegorical means. The film Land of Hypocrisy (Ard al-Nifaq), is a good example for this kind of allegory. Another film, Certain Fear (Shay’ min al-Khawf), exemplifies the borderlines of criticism. The film, which presents the story of a village gang leader, was prohibited by the censors since it allegedly equated Nasser to the gang leader. Nasser thought differently and approved the film’s screening, maintaining that his government was not a gang and that he was not a gang leader. In The Shame the presentation of Nasser’s portrait might symbolize the father of the nation looking at his recalcitrant children, rebuking them for their deviant behavior. 11. It is an occupation that draws a large number of women since they were taught “feminine” tasks, such as account management and other secretarial jobs (Al-Sanabary 1985: 103).

References Abdel Kader, Soha. 1987. Egyptian Women in a Changing Society, 1899–1987. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Abu Shadi, Ali. 2002. Cinema and Politics (Sinama wa-Siyasa). Damascus: AlMada (3rd Edition). Amin, Qasim. 1995. The New Woman. Trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.

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Armbrust, Walter. 1996. Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––––––. 2000. The Golden Age before the Golden Age: Commercial Egyptian Cinema before the 1960s. In Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond, ed. Walter Armbrust, pp. 292–327. California: University of California Press. ––––––. 2002. The Rise and Fall of Nationalism in the Egyptian Cinema. In Social Constructions of Nationalism in the Middle East, ed. Fatma Müge Göçek, pp. 217–50. New York: State University of New York Press. Badran, Margot. 1994. Gender Activism: Feminists and Islamists in Egypt. In Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective, ed. Valentine M. Moghadam, pp. 202–27. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Baker, Raymond William. 1974. Egypt in Shadows: Film and the Political Order. American Behavioral Scientist 17 (3) (January-February): 393–423. Barakat, Halim. 1993. The Arab World: Society, Culture and State. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Baron, Beth. 1997. Nationalist Iconography: Egypt as a Woman. In Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, ed. James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni, pp. 105–24. New York: Columbia University Press. Bashkin, Orit, Liat Kozma, and Israel Gershoni, eds. 1999. Sculpturing Culture in Egypt: Cultural Planning, National Identity and Social Change in Egypt, 1890–1939. Tel Aviv: Ramot, Tel Aviv University (Hebrew). Bechor, Guy. 2002. Between Vision and Reality: Law in the Arab World. Herzliya: IDC Publications (Hebrew). Bier, Laura. 2004. Modernity and the Other Woman: Gender and National Identity in the Egyptian Women’s Press, 1952–1970. Gender and History 16 (1) (April): 99–112. Farid, Samir. 1996. Periodization of Egyptian Cinema. In Screens of Life: Critical Film Writing from the Arab World, ed. Alia Arasoughly, vol. 1, pp. 1–18. Quebec: World Heritage Press. Fayed, Ziyad. 1999. The Revolution in the Egyptian Cinema July 1952–October 1973 (Al-Thawra fi al-Sinama al-Misriyya Yulyu 1952–October 1973). Cairo: Al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab. Ferro, Marc. 1991. Film: A Counteranalysis of Society?. Zmanim 39–40 (Winter): 100–11 (translated to and published in Hebrew). Gaffney, Jane. 1987. The Egyptian Cinema: Industry and Art in a Changing Society. Arab Studies Quarterly 9: 53–75. Golombok, Susan, and Robyn Fivush. 1994. Gender Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, Joel. 2001. Class-Crossed Lovers: Popular Film and Social Change in Nasser’s New Egypt. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18 (4): 385–96. ––––––. 2002. Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt. Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center. Gramsci, Antonio. 2004. Sull’Egemonia: una selezione dai “Quaderni del carcere.” Trans. to Hebrew by Alon Altaras. Tel Aviv: Resling.


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Halpern, Manfred. 1963. The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hatem, Mervat F. 1994. Egyptian Discourses on Gender and Political Liberalization: Do Secularist and Islamist Views Really Differ?. Middle East Journal 48 (4) (Autumn): 661–76. Hatina, Meir. 2001. Egypt’s al-Azhar: Fortress of Orthodoxy and the Challenge of Modernity. Zmanim (Israel) 74: 43–55 (Hebrew). Hopwood, Derek. 1991. Egypt: Politics and Society 1945–1990. London: Harper-Collins Academic. Hughes, William. 1976. The Evaluation of Film as Evidence. In The Historian and Film, ed. Paul Smith, pp. 49–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lerner, Daniel. 1958. The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Macleod, Arlene E. 1991. Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling and Change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press. Malkmus, Lizbeth, and Roy Armes. 1991. Arab and African Film Making. London and New Jersey: Zed Books. Moghadam, Valentine M. 1993. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publications. Mohsen, Safia. 1985. New Images, Old Reflections: Working Middle-Class Women in Egypt. In Women and the Family in the Middle East: New Voices of Change, ed. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, pp. 56–71. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Moustafa, Tamir. 2000. Conflict and Cooperation between the State and Religious Institutions in Contemporary Egypt. International Journal of Middle East Studies 32: 3–22. Qasim, Mahmud. 1998. The Woman in the Egyptian Cinema (Al-Mar’ah fi alSinama al-Misriyya). Al-Giza: Dar al-Amin. ––––––. 2002. Twentieth Century Films’ Guide of Egypt and the Arab World (Dalil al-Aflam fi al-Qarn al-‘Ishrin fi Misr wa-al-‘Alam al-‘Arabi). Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli. ––––––. 2004. The Actors’ Encyclopedia of the Arab Cinema (Mawsu’at alMumaththil fi al-Sinama al-‘Arabiyya). Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli. Rosenberg, Emily S. 1999. Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the “American Century.” Diplomatic History 23 (3) (Summer): 479–97. Rosenstone, Robert A. 1995. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to our Idea of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sanabary, Nagat al-. 1985. Continuity and Change in Women’s Education in the Arab States. In Women and the Family in the Middle East: New Voices of Change, ed. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, pp. 93–110. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Sand, Shlomo. 2002. Film as History: Imagining and Screening the Twentieth Century. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, The Open University of Israel (Hebrew). Shafik, Viola. 1998. Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Sharabi, Hisham. 1988. Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Shohat, Ella. 1997. “Framing Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender and Nation in Middle Eastern/North African Film and Video,” CUNY-Graduate Center, http://152.1.96.5/jouvert/v1i1/shohat.htm. Accessed March 2, 2004. Sullivan, Earl L. 1986. Women in Egyptian Public Life. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Van Nieuwenhuijze, C.A.O. 1965. Social Stratification and the Middle East: An Interpretation. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Zeghal, Malika. 1999. Religion and Politics in Egypt: The Ulema of al-Azhar, Radical Islam and the State (1952–94). International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (3) (August): 371–99. Zuhur, Sherifa. 1998. Victims or Actors? Centering Women in Egyptian Commercial Film. In Images of Enchantment: Visual and Performing Arts of the Middle East, ed. Sherifa Zuhur, pp. 211–28. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.

Filmography Boys and Girls (Subyan wa-Banat), Director: Husayn Hilmi al-Muhandis, 1965. Certain Fear (Shay’ min al-Khawf), Director: Husayn Kamal, 1968. Dark Glasses (Al-Naddara al-Sawda’), Director: Husam al-Din Mustafa, 1963. For Men Only (Li-al-Riggal Faqat), Director: Mahmud Dhu al-Fiqar, 1964. A Girl Like Any Other (Bint min al-Banat), Director: Hasan al-Imam, 1968. Girls’ Rebellion (Thawrat al-Banat), Director: Kamal ‘Atiyya, 1964. Girls’ Secrets (Asrar al-Banat), Director: Mahmud Dhu al-Fiqar, 1969. Good Morning My Dear Wife (Sabah al-Khayr Ya Zawgati al-‘Aziza), Director: ‘Abd al-Mun’im Shukri, 1969. Land of Hypocrisy (Ard al-Nifaq), Director: Fatin ‘Abd al-Wahhab, 1968. My Wife the General Manager (Mrati Mudir ‘Am), Director: Fatin ‘Abd alWahhab, 1966. The Shame (Al-‘Ayb), Director: Galal al-Sharqawi, 1967. The Student and Her Professor (Al-Tilmidha wa-al-Ustadh), Director: Ahmad Diaa’ al-Din, 1968. The Students’ Apartment (Shaqqat al-Talaba), Directors: Talaba Radwan and Fatin ‘Abd al-Wahhab, 1967. The Students’ Dorms (Bayt al-Talibat), Director: Ahmad Diaa’ al-Din, 1968. Three Suitors (Al-Thalatha Yuhibbunaha), Director: Mahmud Dhu al-Fiqar, 1965. A Widow with Three Daughters (Armala wa-Thalath Banat), Director: Galal al-Sharqawi, 1965. The Woman’s Enemy (‘Adu al-Mar’a), Director: Mahmud Dhu al-Fiqar, 1966.

Chapter 11

4

Language, Gender, an d Power in M orocco Fatima Sadiqi

Introduction This chapter considers the complex interaction between language, gender, and power centers, especially religion and politics, in Morocco. The argument I make is that languages in Morocco are tied to the social positions of women in relation to power centers, that women are learning the power of language, and that they, according to their differentiated resources, manipulate it to their advantage. My main emphasis is on (i) the origins of multilingualism in Morocco, which stems from its religio-political history; and, as a result, (ii) women’s strategies and possible gains. On the basis of this argument and emphasis, I seek to highlight the fact that in Morocco language dynamics impact the triangle of women-religion-politics in significant ways. Moroccan women’s linguistic agency is ethnically, socioeconomically, and educationally differentiated. The four main languages used in Morocco (written Arabic, Berber, Moroccan Arabic, and French) have clear social and political meanings that interact with gender. Written Arabic is not a mother tongue, but its strong association with Islam and literacy both distances it and makes it “attractive” to women, the majority of whom are illiterate. On the other hand, the use of Arabic by educated feminists (some of whom also use French and English) gives them authority in the powerful domains of politics and religion and dilutes the political instrumentalization of the veil by male politicians. Berber, a rather secular and oral language, is closely associated with

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women and “popular” religion. Women are by far the preservers of the Berber language and culture. As for French, being associated with “modernity,” this language is a typically urban and elitist language that generally appeals to women as a medium through which taboo topics may be tackled and social prestige acquired. Women’s use of languages in Morocco has attracted the attention of sociolinguists since the late 1970s. Up to the mid-1990s, a number of sociolinguistic studies on Morocco underlined the importance of the variable of “sex” in the use of languages (Abbassi 1977; Elbiad 1985; Ennaji 1991; Lahlou 1991). From the mid-1990s onward, more and more studies started to shift from the concept of “sex” as a social variable to the concept of “gender” as an analytical tool (Badran et al. 2002; Sadiqi 2000, 2003a; Ennaji 2005; Sadiqi 2006; Sadiqi and Ennaji 2006). In the latter studies, the concept of “gender,” unlike that of “sex,” is shown to go beyond the statement of facts to that of highlighting the “power tension” between language users. This upsurge of interest in language and gender is part of the human, cultural, and linguistic rights movements that started in the mid-1980s and continued into the present day. Although a relative newcomer on the Moroccan academic scene, the language and gender discipline is becoming more and more popular. It is a discipline that not only explains everyday language use by men and women, but also explores the intricate and hidden relationship between language and the ideology of power, a topic that was taboo in the decades immediately following independence. Both language and gender are power-laden categories that have been interacting in interesting ways in Morocco, a developing Muslim and multilingual country. This interaction not only affects the religious, political, economic, and social aspects of Moroccan identity, but also its language use and symbolic self-representations. This chapter includes seven sections: Section 1 provides preliminaries; Section 2 deals with written Arabic and gender; Section 3 with Berber and gender; Section 4 with Moroccan Arabic and gender; Section 5 with French and gender; Section 6 with Moroccan women’s linguistic strategies; and Section 7 with the impact of language dynamics on women’s religio-political power.

Preliminaries During the Protectorate (1912–1956), the French used education to root their language in the Moroccan social fabric—and they succeeded. French is now considered a Moroccan language. After independence the Moroccan rulers used written Arabic to build a strong state, and they succeeded. Morocco became part of the Arab Umma (nation). An

L a n g uag e , G e n d e r , a n d Pow e r i n M o r o c c o

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important result of this is that during the Protectorate and state-building phases, oral languages and women were completely marginalized. In the decades that followed independence, often referred to as the “postcolonial era,” the linguistic situation in Morocco became more complex. The emergence of social sciences, especially sociology and linguistics, coupled with greater awareness of human rights, women’s rights, and democratization, propelled oral languages and women to the forefront of the political scene. Multilingualism became an important component of Moroccan culture. Today, multilingualism interacts significantly with the major categories of religion, ethnicity, gender, class, and educational opportunities. Unlike the situation in some Middle Eastern countries where multilingualism is often considered a “threat” to Arab identity and unity, in Moroccan society, multilingualism is perceived as a positive socialpromoter—it increases the individual’s potential for communication and opens up horizons for jobs and social ascension. Multilingualism is furthermore a positive identity-builder, for it boosts self-respect and creates a composite identity, resulting in individuals being more socially confident and “tolerant” toward others. Most Moroccan intellectuals perceive multilingualism as an empowering factor that creates intellectual authority and fosters intellectual exchange in an increasingly globalized world. Four major languages are used in Morocco: Standard Arabic, French, Berber, and Moroccan Arabic. Whereas the first two languages have written forms, are taught at school, and are perceived as “literate,” the latter two do not have a written form, are not taught at school, and are perceived as “oral” and “illiterate” in spite of current changes in the status of Berber. Each of these languages interacts with religion, politics, and gender in specific ways. Let us consider these interactions in some detail.

Standard Arabic and Gender The study of Arabic from a gender perspective is still in its initial stages, although Arabic sociolinguistics has attracted the attention of scholars worldwide. Some of these works use the variable of “sex” in deconstructing Arabic usage, but no significant attention is being paid to the use of gender as an analytical tool in deconstructing the men/women power relationship between Arabic users. The interaction of Arabic and gender may be attested at two levels: the formal (grammatical) level and the sociolinguistic (relational) level. At the formal level, Arabic exhibits grammatical and semantic gender usages that may be qualified as “androcentric” (male-biased); and at

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the sociolinguistic level, Arabic is used more in male-associated than female-associated contexts. Given the focus of this chapter, I shall not deal with the formal level. Arabic has two gender-linked characteristics: (i) it is not a mother tongue (meaning that it is not used by mothers to their children); and (ii) it entertains a diglossic relationship (of power) with Moroccan Arabic. Both characteristics render Standard Arabic a typically “public” language in an overall patriarchal context in which “public” denotes “male power” and rationality, as opposed to “private” which denotes the “women’s realm” (Arab-Islamic patriarchy being based on space segregation—hudud). These hudud (frontiers) are not only spatial but also linguistic and symbolic. Being a public language, Standard Arabic is used in public spaces that happen to be the arenas of authority: the mosque (religion), the government (political authority), education (literacy), the media (communication), law, as well as culturally formal public settings such as funerals. These domains of use make Standard Arabic a “high” language. It is a known fact that dominant groups in a society achieve power mainly through control of “high” languages, and it is through this control that they ensure the “obedience” and “allegiance” of “subordinated” portions of the population, including women. Here I quote Mary Kaplan (1978): Refusal of access to public language is one of the major forms of the oppression of women within a social class as well as in trans-class situations.

Thus, women are excluded from public rituals that are culturally symbolic such as the call for prayers, Friday prayers, etc. Arabic is widely perceived as the language of the Qur’an and this is its strongest attribute. Although women strongly feel that they “belong” to the official religion, and hence to Arabic as the medium through which this religion is expressed, they do not really participate in public religious practices—not because the scriptures have so prescribed, but because their culture does not encourage them to do so. Consequently, women’s “religious” space in Arabic is reduced and publicly constrained. As a reaction, many women blame this on the male-biased interpretations of the Qur’an and the Hadiths (the Prophet’s sayings) and not on the teachings of Islam. Their bitterness is augmented by the fact that they are the ones who usually teach the Qur’an (orally) to their children. This reaction has led many women to set up specific spaces, usually at home, where they gather and discuss religion. These gatherings are often led by a woman who acts as a “leader,” and she is the one who answer questions.


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Standard Arabic is also the language of politics. This is another domain where men, rather than women, dominate. Because of their relative exclusion from politics, a general tendency to disqualify women as competent public speakers in Arab-Muslim societies has developed. This state of affairs has created an apparent paradox in these societies: women are perceived as “conservative,” in the sense that they preserve oral culture by speaking indigenous, often oral, languages and by transmitting cultural values, and as “non-conservative,” because they do not use the conservative means of public linguistic expression—Arabic. The paradox, however, makes sense politically in that it highlights the political status of women’s idioms. Women have reacted to the political status of their idioms. For example, the pioneer writers, activists, and journalists who began their careers expressing their views in French during the 1960s and 1970s, skillfully switched to Arabic from the mid-1980s onward, especially when giving statements to the media, as an attempt to stop radical Islamists from using the language argument against them. By using Arabic in the public sphere, these women were also seeking a place in the powerful political, but also religious, space. They have largely succeeded in this respect, as I have argued in a different paper. They exhibited dexterity in the use of the Qur’an and the Prophet’s sayings on TV to show that Islam as a religion and Arabic as a language are not the prerogatives of men alone. In so doing, they highlighted the fact that Islam preaches universal ideas about equality and tolerance between the sexes. Standard Arabic is also the language of the law and lawimplementation. As the exercise of the law takes place in the public sphere, women, especially the illiterate ones, do not generally understand the language of the law, and hence often fail to know their rights. As a reaction, feminine and feminist NGOs translate the laws into Moroccan Arabic and sometimes Berber. Finally, Standard Arabic is closely associated with literacy. Illiteracy is more a female problem than a male problem in Morocco. In reaction, many NGOs are fighting illiteracy.

Berber and Gender Berber is the oldest language in Morocco and North Africa. Although this language has never been associated with a “divine” written text, it has survived for over 5,000 years. Arabs and Islam came to Morocco hand in hand in the eighth century. By the eleventh century, Morocco was completely Islamized, but even today it is not completely Arabized. There are three major dialects of Berber in Morocco. Many factors have contributed to the retention of Berber in Morocco: the mother tongue

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status of the language, female illiteracy, male migration from rural to urban areas or European countries, and French. As a native language, Berber possesses the historicity, dynamism, and vitality of mother tongues. As a rural and largely oral language, Berber has not been in competition with the “literate” Standard Arabic. It has mainly been maintained in rural and semiurban areas, and is still used primarily in homes and at intimate gatherings. Berber is also the language of communication between the (male) migrants to the European cities and their families left behind (through the use of cassettes). Paradoxically, the presence of French in Morocco helped to maintain Berber. Through the dissemination of education in French, language itself has gradually become less associated with its religious base in the minds of Moroccans, a fact that has tacitly “legitimized” the use of Berber in everyday life and improved the attitude toward it. The factors that have ensured the maintenance of Berber are linked to women: women are the ones who have perpetuated the language; they are the illiterate ones; and they are the ones who have stayed home to take care of the children when the men migrated. To the extent that Berber is the language of cultural identity, home, the family, the village affiliation, intimacy, traditions, orality, and nostalgia to a remote past, it perpetuates attributes that are considered female in Moroccan culture. Indeed, the fate of Berber has always paralleled the fate of women in Morocco.

Moroccan Arabic and Gender Moroccan Arabic is the lingua franca in Morocco. The need for a lingua franca is motivated by the presence of three major Berber dialects and many subdialects. The speakers of the three Berber dialects have often had to recourse to Moroccan Arabic when communicating between each other. Although both women and men use Moroccan Arabic, preferences for this language sometimes vary on the basis of gender. For example, in rural areas, Berber women use Moroccan Arabic less than Berber men because they are more confined to their homes. However, outside the home, Moroccan Arabic is used by Berbers and Arabs of both sexes except in remote areas where Berber is used by both sexes. In urban centers, educated women shift from Berber to Moroccan Arabic and from the latter to French more than men. The classical explanation for this phenomenon is that women aspire more to social prestige as they need it more than men do. As Moroccan Arabic is not restricted to strictly private contexts, it is less of a “female” language than Berber is. Being historically related to Standard Arabic, this language is generally perceived as a “more civilized” language than Berber, but since it lacks a written


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form, Moroccan Arabic is perceived as a “debased” form of Standard Arabic.

French and Gender French is an urban superordinate second language that is closely linked to education. It has, over the years, become very useful in the private sector. French is also necessary for obtaining employment and is thus positively perceived as a symbol of “modernity,” “enlightenment,” and “openness to the Western world.” The general attitude to French is positive. Like Moroccan Arabic, French is used by both men and women, but it interacts significantly with gender: whereas men use French in the higher administrative and military positions, thus exploiting the “emasculating” aspect that usually accompanies colonial languages, women benefit from the social-prestige aspect of this language. They derive social power from being considered “civilized” and “modern.” Even in conservative families, a woman speaking French to her children is viewed in a positive light. In spite of the fact that the majority of Moroccan women do not have easy access to French, this language is more favored by women than by men. In fact, women tend to display proficiency in French more frequently than in Standard Arabic. This behavior is linked to the fact that men are generally more favorable to women’s proficiency in French than to their proficiency in Standard Arabic. The reason for this is that French is less related to cultural identity than Standard Arabic, and is thus less threatening to the male status quo. Men are more favorably disposed to women “speaking” French than they are to women “behaving” in a “French” (Westernized) way, because women’s use of French is a guarantee that they will speak it (and teach it) to their children. “Behaving” in a French way is generally perceived as “stripping” women of their “authenticity” as members of their own community. It is also regarded as a sign of “too much emancipation,” which clashes with Moroccan cultural values. This makes sense in the Moroccan patriarchal and sexist culture. Women are aware of this and use French to gain, use, and maintain social power. Overall, French is more of a female language than is Moroccan Arabic. When compared to Standard Arabic, French displays a different aspect: both languages have social power, but each power carries a specific symbolic meaning in the Moroccan context: French is crucial in Moroccan postcolonial administration and politics and Standard Arabic is a symbol of a glorious past and cultural identity. The two symbolic powers serve men more than women; men appropriate the symbolic powers of French and Standard Arabic (they hold the highest positions in politics, administration, and business) and women are

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more associated with the “modern” (but “alien”) aspect of the two languages. Their use of French is perceived positively in social contexts, but only in relation to fostering “good” citizens. The above overview reveals that languages interact with gender in Morocco. Women are closer to Berber and Moroccan Arabic than men because Moroccan society clings to its indigenous traditions but assigns the responsibility of guarding those traditions to women. On the other hand, the majority of women are distanced from literate languages because they are less subject to schooling. Of the two literate languages, educated women are closer to French.

Moroccan Women’s Use of Communicative Strategies These strategies are primarily dictated by their geographical origin and level of education. Rural women are predominantly illiterate, and thus use female oral literature to empower themselves, and educated urban women use their language skills (code-switching) for the same purpose. Women’s communicative strategies are highly structured; they show that Moroccan women assert themselves in a rigidly patriarchal society although they are not generally associated with the country’s more powerful languages. I will now provide a brief overview of these strategies.

Illiterate Women’s Strategies of Communication Oral female genres are “unofficial” voices that “circulate” as “anonymous” literature in the community without being officially recognized. The anonymous aspect of oral female literature has freed women’s self-expression from social constraints and has given it space. The oral medium escapes the constraints (hududs) of the written medium. Illiterate women in Morocco use two mediums of orality: traditional skills and oral literature genres. The major traditional skills are midwifery, child-rearing, preparation of herbal remedies, carpet weaving, and hand and feet decorating (henna). These skills constitute precious knowledge in the community and they are acquired on the basis of direct empirical sources, experience, practice, and inherited beliefs. The mastery of these skills is not so much based upon “knowing what” as on “knowing how.” Socially speaking, these female skills are considered necessary though not “prestigious” or “glorious.” Their necessity is often manifested in a set of linguistic rituals that accompany them. In addition to traditional skills, Moroccan women use oral literature as a medium of self-expression. Various female oral genres are


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recognized in Moroccan culture, the most important of which are folktales, folk songs, and halqa (marketplace oratory). Storytelling is a strong means of maintaining and perpetuating power inside the family, especially in larger rural households. Grandmothers reinforce their status in the household by establishing strong links with their (usually young) audiences through unfinished stories and suspense. This is understandable in settings where older women feel that younger daughters-in-law are gaining power through having children. Through telling them stories, women seek to “recuperate” the children and make themselves “indispensable” at home. On a more abstract level, Moroccan women often manage to empower themselves by expressing women’s intelligence and victory over men in stories. In this way, storytelling may be perceived as a reaction to marginalization. Older women who tell long stories, are from simple-minded entertainers. They are perceived in the family as almost “mystical” female figures. They exhibit powerful thinking and memory, and a skillful use of their psychological knowledge of human nature. They make the possibility of transforming the world easier to grasp. These attributes are strongly associated with the image of the grandmother in Moroccan culture. Another female oral genre in Morocco is folk songs. Moroccan folk songs are sung in Berber or Moroccan Arabic. These songs contrast sharply with “high” songs sung in Standard Arabic. Typical folk songs are usually delivered by illiterate people. Finally, the typically Moroccan oral genre of halqa (public oratory) has started to be appropriated by women. The setting of halqa or public oratory is usually the public marketplace. The discourse of halqa is hybrid; it is both religious and obscene. This discourse is also characterized by curses, oaths, monologues, and blessings, and usually aims at involving the audience by making it participate in the halqa rituals. Marketplace female orators may sometimes include genuine poets. Mririda is one such poet; she is Berber and became famous after her death. Her poems were gathered, translated into French, and published in a book. However, female public orators, like female singers, are perceived as “debased” and “low”; they are doubly marginalized as women and as a lower class. Literate Women’s Strategies of Communication Code-switching is defined in sociolinguistics as the use of more than one language simultaneously in conversation. Code-switching is a characteristic feature of multilingual settings like Morocco. Linguists have proved that code-switching is a linguistically self-sufficient style of speech and that code-switchers master the languages they mix and

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are perfectly competent in them. In implying choice on the part of the code-switcher, code-switching is a linguistically “healthy” practice. It is a rule-governed phenomenon where the grammar of the mother tongue prevails in the structure of sentences and is “completed” by the lexicon and some minor functional words from the second language. Code-switching presupposes bi- or multilingualism, and thus indicates positive social attributes in Moroccan society. It also indicates composite identities that are aware of the social value of each of the languages used. Code-switching presupposes competence not only in two linguistic codes, but also in appropriately manipulating the two codes in real life contexts. Code-switching between Moroccan Arabic and French is by far the most widespread and the most revealing. It is common only in urban areas and involves educated bilingual women. Studies have shown that this type of code-switching is more prevalent in the speech of women than in that of men. Frequently, women insert whole French sentences into their Moroccan Arabic or Berber conversations. In urban settings, code-switching is a female type of communicative style. This skill is encouraged from childhood, as little girls are more strongly encouraged to use French in their Arabic than are little boys. This is more often the case in upper- and middle-class families, who are very much in favor of modernity and openness to Western values. This practice is continued into adolescence when female teenagers include French more frequently than male teenagers into their conversations. This code-switching is often perceived by young females as a means of group solidarity and of showing their difference from boys.

Results of These Strategies: The Dynamics of Language and the Women-Religion-Politics Triangle Moroccan women’s voices began to be heard in the powerful public domains of politics and religion when they started to deal with the concept of Islamization—that is, when they started to manipulate Islam politically. The story of Moroccan women and Islamization is unique in at least two ways: not only is it linked to the success of multilingualism and multiculturalism in a country where only one religion dominates—Islam—but it also explains the paradoxical situation in which a very high level of female (and male) illiteracy coexists with a spectacular achievement of the Moroccan feminist movement—a very progressive Family law. Moroccan women engaged with Islamization at various stages of modern history. This engagement has resulted in the interesting changes of Moroccan women’s (political) consciousness and power


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negotiation. Women’s changes of consciousness have been triggered by three factors that interact in complex ways and that chronology alone cannot explain: (i) feminist political consciousness that accompanies urbanity and education; (ii) global synergy consciousness that is usually an extension of local feminist consciousness; and (iii) democratization consciousness and awareness of the intriguing role of religion in the (political) power game. These three types of consciousness kept a strong, albeit “invisible,” link not only between the legal demands of (literate) feminists and illiterate women but also between feminists and the state rulers. Women’s issues and their marginalized mother tongues (Berber and Moroccan Arabic) became state issues (a means to fight Islamists) while retaining their “feminist” edge, thus allowing women to problematize the centuriesold Islamic practices on which the state itself is based. The clever use of “cultural” and “symbolic” Islam by Moroccan feminists places a roadblock to radical Islamists, rallies illiterate women to women’s issues, and forces the state to satisfy women’s legal demands (which also serve current state purposes). Women’s multifaceted and fluid involvement with Islamization has become a central element in Morocco’s overall postcolonial policy in which ideologies of modernity, Islamism, democratization, feminism, and global synergy constitute an interesting blend. Islamization and Feminist Political Consciousness Islam was introduced in Morocco during the Arab conquest of North Africa in the seventh century. It became the state religion of the country after independence from French colonizers in 1956. Feminist consciousness has never been the sole prerogative of literate feminists in Morocco. Alongside the rich literature in French (Mernissi 1987) and Arabic (Abouzeid 1989; Bennouna 1967) that characterized the 1960s and 1970s, an older, often anonymous, oral literature coexisted (Sadiqi 2003a; and Sadiqi et al. 2009). It is, however, important to note that this literature focused on family law, and thus women authors, as proponents of a social movement, had a bigger impact on the decision-makers. These pioneer feminists may be termed “liberal” insofar as they chose to articulate their legal demands in terms of “liberalizing” society and did not concentrate on religious texts. They used literate languages and addressed issues of legal rights and modernity. These women often belonged to the upper urban classes (Sadiqi 2003b; Ennaji 2005). It is interesting to note that liberal feminists never targeted Islam as a religion; on the contrary, attacks on patriarchy have been supported by Islam’s ethical ideals in which men and women enjoy the same rights. Faced with modernity issues, liberal feminists sought to downplay the

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narrow religious aspect; vis-à-vis international feminism, they sought a characterizing identity and a strategy of liberation in Islam that standard Western explanatory frameworks—often based on egalitarian and individualistic assumptions—did not include. In their approach, liberal feminists were conscious of the patriarchal use of Islam. They challenged the separation and opposition between the private and public spheres, which constitutes the pillar of patriarchal Islam, and sought to politicize the private sphere. As Mernissi (1987) states: One of the functions of theological discourse on women is to slide the debate on real economic, political, and social problems into religious debates. Thus, instead of debating the obstacles to rural girls’ schooling and the causes of women’s absence in the food industry, the theological discourse moves the debate into “Is such a law or measure authentic?” “Does such a law or measure conform to tradition in Mali or is it an innovation?” This movement of real problems towards problems relating to Fiqh or religious debate, during the rare meetings about women which have occurred in Arab countries, may be considered one of the hemorrhages which have aborted the skilled potential of public administrators, political parties, associations and intellectuals who have tried to reflect on women’s condition in these societies. (Translated by Fatima Sadiqi)

Liberal feminist scholars also understood the central role of women in the discourse, rather than in the term, of Islamization and endeavored to “use” their share of this discourse. This is enhanced by Islam’s capacity to provide Muslims with powerful tools of social analysis (Eickleman and Piscatori 1996). As such, Islamization for liberal feminists is a continuous rethinking process in which their voices needed to be “well positioned” in order to be heard. These feminists knew that they had to continuously negotiate their position in the Moroccan Islamic discourse and “package” their demands with the right dose of “Islamic intensity.” The voice of the pioneer liberal feminists resonated very well with the then very popular leftist ideology of the political opposition. The pioneering political women, such as Nouzha Skalli and Rabea Naciri, espoused easily the ideas of the liberal feminist scholars. The state (very authoritarian in the 1960s and 1970s), for them, constituted the antithesis of their demands. For many liberal feminist activists, cultural ideas were harnessed and often exaggerated in the service of political ideologies and practices. For example, women and their sexual purity were often linked with the honor of men and families, and this discourse was “legitimated” through its connection with Islam. For these activists, linking sexual purity with the honor of men and families is a way of controlling women and keeping them under the authority of men.


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Women and the Global Context: A “Re-Islamization”Process? From the mid-1980s onward, globalization created a context in which religious and gender identities arose and developed in relation to one another. One of the tokens used in this respect is the wearing of the veil, which facilitates the investment of the public sphere and the appropriation of the religious discourse. The veil facilitates access to the increasingly hostile public space at a time when unemployment and social and political crises are soaring, thus creating a form of, at least superficial, “re-Islamization.” With the advancing levels of education, the greater permeability of political borders, and the rise of new communications media, more and more women participate in public debates over issues of family law and their role in society. Ideas and practices that have long been taken for granted and understood as Islamic are being confronted and challenged by these women. Such participation by women is part of “public Islam” (Eickleman and Piscatori 1996), whereby thinking about Islam is not limited to self-ascribed religious authorities. The new generation of women is conscious of the burden of patriarchy. Most of them are affiliated to Islamic associations and/or Islamic political parties and do not voice themselves as “anti-liberal.” Their relationship to liberal feminists has never been confrontational, as the latter have attacked Islam and have not been consistently fighting Islamic patriarchy. Moroccan women’s re-Islamization—at least at the “appearance” level—may be explained within a broader theoretical framework in which tradition and religion are not seen as fixed and “regressive” concepts that are fundamentally incompatible with economic development. From the mid-1980s onward, researchers in the field have highlighted two things: (i) the increasing role of tradition and religion as dynamic concepts in the overall global context; and (ii) the questioning of the modernity-vs.-tradition dichotomy. Globally speaking, and contrary to the prevailing theories of modernity and modernization of the mid-twentieth century, religion plays an increasingly important role in politics and public life (Casanova 1994, Eickleman and Piscatori 1996). This is very different from the decades between the 1950s and 1970s when academic and social modernization approaches to the third world attributed the Muslim world’s lack of modernization to the pervasive influence of tradition and religion (Halpern 1963; Almond and Powell 1966). The latter theories were reinforced by the Marxist-Leninist views that religion would disappear with the socioeconomic structures that fostered it in the first place. The unfolding of facts from the mid-1980s onward has shown that tradition and religion interact with economic progress and modernity

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in deep but complex ways (Hudson 1980; Bill and Leiden 1974; Binder 1986; Weiner and Huntington 1987; Higgot 1983; Wong 1988; So 1990; Eickleman and Pasha 1991; Findley 1992). Consequently, women are increasingly aware that religious beliefs and values play an increasing role in thinking about self, society, and politics at the local and world levels. Coupled with Islamization, globalization started to make sense for the younger generations of Moroccan women. Globalization has had yet another impact on Moroccan society: the beginning of democratization. Islamization and Democratization From the mid-1990s onward, Morocco witnessed more political openness and more democratization: the first ever socialist government in 1998, a new and more open king in 1999, a quota system in the elections in 2001, 35 women in the Parliament in 2002, a new Family Law in 2003, more women in the highest religious offices in 2004. The twin facts of the veil gradually losing its political edge (the veil became multifunctional and fashion based) and of the liberal feminists not jeopardizing Islam as a religion reconciled the views of liberal feminists and “veiled” women in Islamic associations and political parties. Many liberal feminists are veiled and many younger “religious” feminists espouse liberal views. Morocco is unique in the sense that one cannot really speak of “Islamic” and “secular” feminisms as categories in complementary distribution. All Moroccan feminists, whether liberal or religious, confront patriarchy and do not put Islam as a religion into question. Today’s feminists, liberal or conservative, veiled or nonveiled, are genuinely interested in revisiting the sacred texts with the aim of gaining more public power and voice. Feminist reinterpretation of the classic texts is a new development that constitutes a sweeping challenge to the central assumptions and presuppositions of academic political theory. Women are more and more conscious that they have been deliberately excluded from the sacred not because Islam prescribed so but because Islam was revealed in a heavily patriarchal society that managed to engrave a specific picture of women in the Muslim Unconscious. According to Ait Sabbah (1984: 44): The essence of maleness and the essence of femaleness unfold in relation to each other in a three-dimensional space, each having a position, its own dynamics (or lack of it), and a precise mode of conduct that defines it and opposes it to the other in an immutable and determining hierarchical relationship.


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Ait Sabbah goes on to describe the hierarchical relationship of male and female essences as follows: with regard to position, male is vertical and female horizontal; with regard to dynamics, male is mobile and dynamic and female immobile and inanimate; and regarding the mode of conduct, male is endowed with will whereas female is not. Reexamining sacred texts and reinterpreting them from a feminist point of view is certainly opening up new avenues for Moroccan feminist scholars as a means of addressing patriarchy. The way Islam has been implemented from the seventh century until now has consistently been geared to serving and consolidating patriarchy through imposing a strict space dichotomy in which men relate to the public space and women to the private space (Ait Sabbah 1984; Ahmed 1992; Sadiqi 2003a). For 15 centuries, Muslim political rulers have always sought the support of religious leaders to maintain the status quo. It is true that the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, the reforms of Christianity and Judaism, as well as the Industrial Revolution brought about a fresh rethinking of Islam in the nineteenth century. The great reformers of this period, Jamal Eddine Al-Afghani, Rachid Redha, and Mohamed Abdu made genuine attempts to reform Islam and give more space to women in the Arab-Muslim world. However, the painful experience of colonization put a halt to these attempts by pushing Muslims back into a search for identity by going back to orthodox Islam. In spite of the continuity that the story of Moroccan women and Islamization offers, the story remains incomplete: it does not provide the linguistic and cultural roots of Moroccan feminism. I believe that it is high time that the Moroccan feminist movement included the language dimension and reconciled itself with its pre-Islamic roots. It is the language dimension that distinguishes Moroccan feminism from its Western and Middle Eastern counterparts. Reappropriating the Berber pre-Islamic period (where women were goddesses, saints, and queens) within the framework of an Islam that did not erase these strong symbols but absorbed them and transformed them, provides a larger framework for feminist reflection than the narrow harem-based framework that prevailed in Moroccan feminist thought up to now. This view also makes the impact of language on the women-religion-politics triangle more meaningful.

Conclusion The story of language, gender, and power in Morocco is a story of a constant rethinking process. Revisiting the sacred and the collective Unconscious is certainly not the end of the story. Geo-spatial, economic, and political contexts will always be accompanied by feminist

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rethinking of the sacred and the Unconscious. The combination of Berber revival, Islamization, modernization, democratization, and feminism in Morocco is part of the larger power negotiation in which patriarchy is still very strong.

Referenc es Abbassi, Aziz. 1977. A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Multilingualism in Morocco. Doctoral Dissertation. Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin. Abouzeid, Leila. 1989. ςam al-fiil “Year of the Elephant.” Trans. Barbara Parmenter. Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin. Ahmed, Leila. 1992. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Ait Sabbah, Fatna. 1984. Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. Paris: The Athene Series. Pergamon Press. Almond, Gabriel .A., and G. Bingham Powell, Jr. 1966. Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach. Boston: Little, Brown. Badran, Margot, Fatima Sadiqi, and Linda Rashidi, eds. 2002. Language and Gender in the Arab World. Language and Linguistics 9. Bennouna, Khnata. 1967. Liyasqet Assamt! (Down with Silence!). Casablanca: Imprimerie Al-Jadida. Bill, James A., and Carl Leiden. 1974. The Middle East: Politics and Power. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Binder, Leonard. 1986. The Natural History of Development Theory. Comparative Studies In Society and History 28 (1) (January): 3–33. Casanove, José. 1994. Public Religion in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eickleman, Dale F., and Kamran Pasha. 1991. Muslim Societies and Politics: Soviet and US Approaches—A Conference Report. Middle East Journal 45 (45) (Autumn): 630–47. Eickleman, Dale F., and James Piscatori. 1996. Muslim Politics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Elbiad, M. 1985. A Sociolinguistic Study of the Arabization Process and Its Conditioning Factors in Morocco. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Buffalo, NY: University of New York at Buffalo. Ennaji, Moha. 1991. Aspects of Multilingualism in the Maghreb. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 87: 7–25. ––––––. 2005. Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco. Boston: Springer. Findley, Carter Vaughn. 1992. Knowledge and Education. In Modernization in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire and Its Afro-Asian Successors, ed. Cyril Edwin Black and L. Carl Brown, pp. 121–49. Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press. Halpern, Manfred. 1963. The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


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Higgot, Richard. A. 1983. Political Development Theory: The Contemporary Debate. London: Croom Helm. Hudson, Michael C. 1980. Islam and Political Development. In Islam and Development: Religion and Socio-Political Change, ed. John L. Esposito, pp. 1–24. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Kaplan, Mary. 1978. The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Juedischer Frauenbund, 1904–1938. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. Lahlou, Moncef. 1991. A Morpho-Syntactic Study of Code-Switching Between Moroccan Arabic and French. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Austin, TX: Austin University at Texas. Mernissi, Fatima. 1987. The Discourse on Arab-Muslim Women. In Approches. Portraits de Femmes. Casablanca: Editions Le Fennec. Sadiqi, Fatima. 2000. Aspects of Moroccan Feminism. In Feminist Movements: Origins and Orientations, ed. Fatima Sadiqi, Farida El Kettani, Leila Baghdadi, Fatima Mouaid, and Souad Slaoui, pp. 195–214. Fès: Publications of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University. ––––––. 2003a. Women, Gender and Language in Morocco. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers. ––––––. 2003b. Women and Linguistic Space in Morocco. Women and Language 26 (1) (Spring): 35–43. ––––––. 2006. The Impact of Islamization on Moroccan Feminisms. Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32 (1): 32–40. Sadiqi, Fatima, and Moha Ennaji. 2006. Feminization of Public Space: Women’s Activism, the Family Law, and Social Change in Morocco. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS) (special issue ed. Valentine Moghadam and Fatima Sadiqi) 2 (2): 86–114. Sadiqi, Fatima, Amira Nowaira, Azza El Khouly and Moha Ennaji (eds.) (2009). Women Writing Africa. The Northern Region. Anthology. New York: Feminist Press. So, Alvin Y. 1990. Social Change and Development. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Weiner, Myron, and Samuel P. Huntington. 1987. Understanding Political Development: An Analytic Study. New York: Harper Collins. Wong, Siu-Lun. 1988. Emigrant Entrepreneurs: Shanghai Industrialists in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.


Notes on Contr ibu to rs

Shmuel Bachar is a research fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Lauder School of Government Diplomacy and Strategy, the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya. He holds a BA in Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations (the Hebrew University, summa cum laude), and an MA in Contemporary Middle Eastern Studies (the Hebrew University, summa cum laude). He is currently completing his doctoral dissertation on “Representations of urban women in the Egyptian popular cinema between the 1940s and 1960s” at the Hebrew University. Ann Braude serves as director of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program and Senior Lecturer on American Religious History at Harvard Divinity School. Her publications include Saints and Sisters: Women and Religion in America (2008), Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion (2004), and Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in 19th-Century America (1989, 2000), as well as articles on women in Judaism, Christian Science, and American religious life. José Casanova is professor of Sociology and senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, where he heads the Program on Religion Globalization and the Secular. He has published widely in the areas of sociological theory, religion and politics, transnational migration, and globalization. His best-know work, Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) has become a modern classic in the field. He is presently working on two main projects, “Rethinking secularization: A global comparative perspective” and “Transnational migration, transnational religion and diversity.” He is a member of the Social Science Research Council Advisory Committee for Religion and International Affairs. Daphna Hacker is assistant professor at the Buchman Faculty of Law and the NCJW Women and Gender Studies Program at Tel Aviv University. She received her LLB from Hebrew University, her LLM (magna cum laude) from American University Washington Collage of Law, and her PhD (magna cum laude) from the Sociology and

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Anthropology Department at Tel Aviv University. Her studies focus on the intersection between family, law, and gender. Hanna Herzog is professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, of which she served as Head (1998–2001). She is one of the founders of the NCJW Women and Gender Studies Program, and since 2009, Head of the program. She is former president of the Association for Israel Studies. Her numerous articles deal with issues in political sociology, gender and politics, ethnic and racial relations, sociology of generation, and gender knowledge. She is the author of Gendering Politics: Women in Israel, coauthor of Sex Gender Politics—Women in Israel (1999), and editor of several books on modern Israeli society. She serves as academic director of the Program on Civil Society at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Gertrud Hüwelmeier is senior lecturer and research fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Department of European Ethnology. Her work focuses on the intersections of religion, gender, and transnationalism. She is the director of a research project on “Transnational networks, religion and new migration,” exploring religious diversity among Vietnamese and Ghanaian migrants. Recent publications include the coedited volume Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets and Mobilities (2009). Pnina Lahav is professor of Law and Law Alumni Scholar at Boston University where she teaches constitutional law, political and civil liberties, and foreign affairs. Her scholarship includes freedom of expression, biography, women’s rights and constitutional law. Professor Lahav authored the acclaimed biography Judgment in Jerusalem, Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century (1997) and (with others) The History of Law in a Multi-Cultural Society (2002). Anat Lapidot-Firilla is a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and the academic director of its Mediterranean program. She teaches at the Department of International Relations, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her BA in History of the Middle East from Tel Aviv University, and holds a PhD from the Department of Politics, the University of Durham, UK. She has been granted numerous scholarships and awards, including the Wingate Scholarship, the HIRIJW Research Grant, awarded by Brandeis University and the YTS at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace (2003–06). Her research focuses on various aspects of religion, politics, gender and identity conflicts, and on informal diplomacy, with an emphasis on Turkey.

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Saba Mahmood is associate professor of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2004), which received the Victoria Schuck Award from the American Association of Political Science. Her work appears in a variety of journals including Cultural Anthropology, Boston Review, Social Research, American Ethnologist, Public Culture, and Cultural Studies. Mahmood is the recipient of the Carnegie Corporation Scholar Award (2007), and the Frederick Burkhardt fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2009–10). Her current project focuses on politics of religious freedom in the Middle East. Fatima Sadiqi is president of the Centre for Studies and Research on Women and the newly created nongovernmental organization ISIS for Women and Development (Fez); professor of Linguistics and Gender Studies (University of Fez); editor-in-chief of the journal Languages and Linguistics; member, editorial board of Gender and Language; and National Coordinator of SafetyNET. She has published books and articles on women, gender, Islam, and language. Her latest publication is Women Writing Africa (2009). Mary C. Segers is professor of Political Science at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, where she teaches courses in religion and politics and in political theory. She is the author of 50 scholarly essays and 7 books, including The Catholic Church and Abortion Politics: A View From the States (1992). She was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Princeton University, and a Ford Foundation Lecturer in Women’s Studies in Religion at Harvard Divinity School. She held a Henry Luce Fellowship in Theology at Harvard from 1987 to 1989. In 1999, she served as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Warsaw. Pnina Steinberg is an independent research professional. She holds a PhD from the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Tel Aviv University, for a dissertation on “Jewish cultural contact-zones.” She was a Lady-Davis Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Currently she serves as an academic editor and coach to academic professionals. Elina Vuola, professor of Latin American studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland holds a PhD in theology. Her research interests include Latin American liberation theology, feminist studies, issues of sexual ethics, and the Virgin Mary. Her dissertation, Limits of Liberation. Feminist Theology and the Ethics of Poverty and Reproduction (2002) has been published in Spanish as La ética sexual y los límites de la praxis. Conversaciones críticas entre la teología feminista y la teología de la liberación.


Name Index

Abaza, Rushdi, 248, 250 Abdu, Mohamed, 273 Abelard, Peter, 43 Acheson, Barclay, 158 Adler, Rachel, 141–42 Ajami, Fouad, 202 Al-Afghani, Jamal Eddine, 273 al-‘Aziz, Lubna ‘Abd, 250 al-Khatib, Magda, 251 al-Nasser, Gamal ’Abd, 12, 241, 249–50, 255n9 al-Qaradawi, Sheikh Yusuf, 146n16 al-Saadawi, Nawal, 213n11 al-Shinnawi, Kamal, 251 Alvarez, Sonia, 223 Allen, Annie, 164 Amara, Fadela, 196–97 Amin, Qasim, 249 Anderson, Benedict, 51 Aran, Gideon, 62 Armbrust, Walter, 240 Asad, Talal, 32 Atwood, Margaret, 203 Bachar, Shmulik, 12, 13 Baldez, Lisa, 223–24 Barazangi, Nimat Hafez, 142 Baron, Beth, 251 Barton, James, 156 Beecher, Lyman, 25–26 Benhabib, Seyla, 142 Bentley, Carol, 89 Berghahn, Volker R., 154 Biden, Joseph, 96n13 Bier, Laura, 246 Billings, Florence Frances, 163–64

Bilqis, queen of Sheba, 132 bin Laden, Carmen, 196, 206, 207 bin Laden, Osama, 206–7, 210 Brown, Linda, 143 Brown, Wendy, 213n9 Brueggeman, Sister Stephen, 178 Bush, George W., 89, 95, 201, 210 Bushnell, Horace, 26 Carroll, John, 24 Casanova, Jose, 9–10, 11–12, 177, 179 Chant, Sylvia, 225 Chesler, Phyllis, 143 Chittister, Joan, 90 Claretian Brothers, 233 Coogan, Jackie, 159 Cover, Robert, 142 Craske, Nikki, 225 Crossette, Barbara, 205 Dabashi, Hamid, 202 Daniel, Robert L., 155 Djavann, Chahdortt, 197 Douglas, Anne, 168 Drinan, Robert, 86–87 Durkheim, Emile, 4 Duryea, Florence Spencer, 159 Dwenger, Bishop, 179 Dwight, Henry Otis, 168 Eckstein, Susan, 225 Edib, Halide, 161 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 206–7 Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah, 4, 30 Eliot, Mable, 167

282

Name Index

El-Or, Tamar, 62, 68 Eltahawy, Mona, 129 England, Bishop John, 25, 46n2 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 34 Ezra the Scribe, 107, 109 Fakhr al-Din, Yusuf, 247 Ferraro, Geraldine, 88–89 Ferro, Marc, 240 Friedman, Lawrence M., 139 Friedman, Menachem, 53 Gaffney, Jane, 240 Gagan, Rosemary, 167 Giblin, M. J., 236n11 Gillespie, K. H., 160 Ginsberg, Yona, 64, 67 Glazer, Nathan, 142 Gole, Nilufer, 44 Gordon, Joel, 240 Gramsci, Antonio, 245 Greene, Joseph, 168 Greenlee, James, 167 Gülen, Fethullah, 32 Hacker, Daphna, 10, 12–13 Hatem, Mervat, 242, 252 Heller, Birgit, 40 Herzog, Hanna, 10, 13 Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 197–98 Hoffman, Anat, 143 Hollinger, David, 142 Humphrey, Herman, 25 Huntington, Samuel, 29, 33, 34 Husni, Su’ad, 247 Hussein, Saddam, 205 Hüwelmeier, Gertrude, 11, 13 Idris, Yusuf, 249 Iriye, Akira, 153 Jan, Abid Ullah, 130 Johnson, Luke Timothy, 81 Johnston, Charles, 167 Kaddafi, Muaamar, 130 Kaplan, Mary, 262

Karo, Yosef, 134 Karst, Kenneth, 142 Kasper, Mary Catherine, 173, 175–76, 179, 180–81, 184 Kennedy, John F., 27, 46n2, 81–82 Kerry, John F., 89, 95, 206 Killea, Lucy, 89 Kirkland, John Thornton, 24 Kleiman (Haredi woman), 66 Kmiec, Douglas, 96n13 Lahav, Pnina, 10–11, 13, 42 Langlois, Claude, 175 Lapidot-Firilla, Anat, 11, 13 Latour, Bruno, 5–6 Lerner, Daniel, 244, 245 Lewis, Bernard, 199, 202 Lincoln, Abraham, 26 Lipsky, Michael, 167 Lutfi, Nadia, 245, 248 McCain, John, 96n13 McHugh, Rev. James, 87 Macleod, Arlene, 244–45, 253 Maher, Leo, 89 Mahmood, Saba, 11–12, 13, 44–45 Mani, Lata, 207 Manji, Irshad, 196, 198–99 Marx, Karl, 4 Merk, Fredrick, 155 Mernissi, Fatima, 270 Minow, Martha, 142 Moranian, Suzanne, 158, 163 Morris, Charles, 76 Mririda (poet), 267 Nabokov, Vladimir, 200 Naciri, Rabea, 270 Nafisi, Azar, 196, 200–3 Navarro, Marysa, 235n6 Nussbaum, Martha, 157 Obama, Barack, 96n13, 194 O’Brien, David, 80 Okin, Susan Moller, 142 Orsi, Robert, 233–34

Name Index Parks, Rosa, 143 Parmelee, Ruth, 162 Patrick, Anne, 90–91 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 235n8 Pipes, Daniel, 199 Pollit, Katha, 208 Pope John Paul II, 83–84, 96n14 Rahmonov, Emomali, 137 Rawls, John, 142 Razon, Esther, 159 Read, Sister Mary Joel, 187n4 Redha, Rachid, 273 Reich, Ephraim, 65 Robert, Dana, 154 Rosenberg, Emily, 154, 157 Rosenstone, Robert, 240 Ross, Tamar, 142 Ruth the Moabite, 104, 118–19 Sabbah, Ait, 272–73 Sadiqi, Fatima, 12, 13 Sand, Shlomo, 240 Sandel, Michael, 142 Segers, Mary C., 10 Sha’ban, Yusuf, 247 Shafik, Viola, 240 Shakir, Imam Zaid, 146n16 Sharif, Nahid, 248, 251 Shohat, Ella, 254 Singh, Maina Chawla, 154 Skalli, Nouzha, 270 Smith, Al, 27

283

Smith, Jane, 44 Sontag, Susan, 203 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 142 Steinfels, Peter, 77, 80, 82 Stephen, Lynn, 224–25 Stern, Arleen, 130 Stevens, Evelyn P., 221–22, 225, 229 Strassberg, Rabbi Mordecai, 64 Sullivan, Andrew, 199 Szymborska, Wislawa, 145 Taylor, Charles, 4 Thorne, Susan, 154 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 25, 38 Umm Waraqa, 131, 132–33 Vuola, Elina, 12, 13 Wadud, Amina, 126, 129, 130, 131, 141, 143 Weaver, Mary Jo, 83 Weber, Max, 3, 4 Welter, Barbara, 168 West, Robin, 142 Wolfe, Alan, 140 Young, Iris Marion, 142 Yusuf, Hasan, 246, 247 Zaeske, Susan, 128 Zuhur, Sherifa, 239, 240


S u bject Index

Abbasid Caliphate, 30 abortion,77, 78, 83, 86–93, 227 “Abrahamic faith,” 144 advertising,159 Afghanistan, U.S. invasion of, 198–99 Africa, Catholic sisters from,174, 186 African-Americans, Islam and,143 Alice in Hungerland (Near East Relief), 158–59 American Association of University Women (AAUW), 164 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,155, 156, 163, 168 American Catholic Church,75–93, 176–77; decline in,77, 80, 82, 94n3; gender and,82–86; history of,79–82; politics and,86–92; rights of,81; de Tocqueville on,25. See also Catholic Church American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR), 156 American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE), 156 American culture: effect on Catholic Church of,183; export of,153–54, 157, 167, 169 American Enterprise Institute,198 American Protective Association, 26–27 American Red Cross,163 American School For Girls,164 Anatolia,162; depictions of,

158–59; fundraising for,165; image of women in,157; NGOs in,156, 161, 164 Anglo-Saxon countries,23 Arabic language: Moroccan,261, 264–65, 266, 267, 268; Standard,261–63, 265, 267; written,259, 260 Arab Socialism,12, 242 Argentina, women’s resistance in,224, 227, 235n6 Armenia,161, 166 Armenian refugees of WWI, 156 Asia, Catholic sisters from,174, 186 Auschwitz, Germany,183 autonomy,208 al-Azhar (Islamic university), 243 Beitar Illit (Jewish settlement), 64 Beit Yaakov schools,55, 56 Berber language,259–60, 261, 263–64, 266, 267, 273–74; code-switching and,268 Bible, women’s access to,139–40 bishops,76, 178–79, 180, 182. See also United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) “Bloody Monday,” 26 Boy Scouts,165, 166 Brazil, women’s resistance in,223 breastfeeding,66, 67 Bush-Blair strategy,193, 203 Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam, The (Hirsi Ali), 198

286

Subject Index

caliphate,31 cantors, women as,135 Catholic Church,9–10; aggiornamento of,33, 37; anti-Catholicism discourses and,21; anti-Catholic nativism and,22, 24–29, 27, 36, 80–81; antimodernity of,23; conflict within,176, 177, 179, 180, 183; feminism and,77, 82–83, 89, 222–23; homogenized culture within,33; immigration and,80, 94n3, 176–77; Irish Catholics and,26; Islam and,21–22; lawmakers in,88; laypeople in,24, 85; leadership in,80, 182; parishes of,78; religious politics of gender in,37–45; transnationalism and,174, 185, 186; women’s status and roles in,40–45, 76. See also American Catholic Church; Mariology; mission work; priests Catholicism, popular: vs. institutional,221, 224, 226, 227–28, 229–34; marianismo and,222; women and,220, 223, 236n11; women’s status and roles in,217–18, 221, 224, 227, 228. See also popular religion; Virgin Mary Catholic sisters,85, 187n1; activities of,173–74, 175–76; American,174–75, 177–78, 179, 181–82, 184, 185–86; Eurocentrism of,186; gender conflict and,179; German,176, 178, 179, 182, 183; hierarchy of,180; Indian,183–85; nonWestern,174, 183–85, 186; political involvement of,183; power of,182; transnational conflicts among,174–75, 178, 179–80; transnational connections of,181–82, 184, 185–86. See also under names

of individual sisters; Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ (PHJC) Catholic women’s orders. See Catholic sisters charity. See fundraising Chicago, Catholic sisters in,176 childbirth, Virgin Mary and, 232–33, 234 Christian Democracy,28, 30 Christianity: Evangelical,210; fundamentalism in,227; impact on other U.S. religions of, 139–40; vs. Islam,198, 218; in Israel,104, 119n5. See also Catholic Church; mission work; Protestantism church attendance,79 church-state separation,5, 51, 80, 81 cinema, Iranian,201. See also Egyptian cinema circumcision, female,207 circumcision, male,121n24 citizenship, Israeli,101–2; conversion to Judaism and,112–17; legal obstacles to,107, 112–13, 114–15 “civil religion,” 27 Civil Rights Act of 1964 (U.S.), 141 Civil Rights Movement (U.S.), 143 class,26, 253 clerical sex-abuse scandal,75–76, 77, 79, 85, 93 code-switching,266, 267–68 Cold War, the,28, 34 Co-Madres (El Salvador), 224 communication, Morrocan women’s strategies of,266 compassion,155, 156, 157–58, 159, 165 Concordat with Napoleon (1804), 23 congregational prayer. See public prayer Congress, U.S., 156, 163 Conservative Judaism: in Israel,110–11, 120n15, 121n21, 138; origins of,

Subject Index 133–34; Rabbinical Assembly of,135; women’s access to public prayer in,126, 136, 141–42, 144; women’s religious education in,135 conservative political parties vs. Islam,194–95 Constitution, U.S., 24, 127–28, 140–41 consumerism, Haredi and,56 conversion to Judaism: children and,122n37; gender and, 102–3, 103–11; legal aspects in Israel of,107, 109, 110–11, 113–16, 117–18; process of,120n11; as route to Israeli citizenship,112–17; social pressure in Israel and,102–3, 104, 105–11. See also Israel Costa Rica,218–19, 228, 229–34, 234n2 Council of Ulemo,137 Cuba, women in,205 Declaration on Religious Freedom (1965), 28 democracy,194, 205–7, 206, 207; democratization and,38, 272–73, 274 Democratic Party (U.S.), 206, 207 denominationalism,25 Dictionary of Feminist Theologies (Giblin), 236n11 diplomacy: by NER, 167; women’s roles in,154, 156, 161, 163, 168 directors,240 doctrines,220 dogma: Marian,219–20, 231; vs. popular religion,220, 226–27, 229, 233–34, 235n5, 235n8 domestic tasks,56 education: American Catholic church and,81, 83; in Egypt,242–43; in Egyptian cinema,247, 249, 251; family law issues and,271; French language and,260, 264,

287

265, 266; Haredi and,53–55, 56; Moroccan women and,259, 266; National-Religious stream and,53–54, 57, 61; parochial schools and,177; women’s access to,126, 135, 205 Egypt, democracy in,206 Egyptian cinema,12, 239–41, 244–54; Girls’ Rebellion and,245–47, 252, 253; The Shame and,249–51, 253; The Students’ Dorms and, 251–52, 253; Three Suitors and,247–48, 253; The Woman’s Enemy and,248–49, 253 El Salvador, women’s resistance in,224 employment: of Egyptian women,243; French language and,265; of Haredi women,56–57, 65–68; portrayed in Egyptian cinema,250–52 empowerment,236n10, 236n11; Virgin Mary and,218–19, 227, 228, 233; of women,205, 217–19, 227, 228 Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (Adler), 142 Enlightenment thought,3, 21, 273 equal rights, Egyptian women and,249 Ethiopia, immigrants to Israel from,102 ethnicity, American Catholics and,26 ethnographic methods, theology and,219, 220, 226–27 Eurocentrism in Catholic church,186 European Christian identity,35 Europeanization,34 European unification,28 European Union (EU), 34, 35–36 Ezra the Scribe,107, 109 Ezrat Nashim (Jewish women’s group), 135

288

Subject Index

family: division of labor in,66, 67; Jewish settlements and,60, 69 family law,120n13, 269, 271; Moroccan women and,268 Family Law (2003), 272 fascism,28 female ordination,42, 76, 82, 83, 84–85 feminine genital cutting,207 feminism,39, 194, 271; Catholic church and,77, 82–83, 89, 222–23; Catholic sisters and,178; Civil Rights Movement and,143; coopting of label of,85; criticism of religion by,217–18, 221, 228; democracy and, 205–7; in Egypt,242; feminists,84; feminists and,82, 93, 94n8; imperialism and,193, 212n2; Islam and,142, 195, 204, 205, 208; in Latin America,228–29; Moroccan language and,259; Moroccan women and,268–69; political consciousness and,268–69, 269–70; religious,43; religious women and,129; theology of,219, 220; veiling and,272 fertility rate,62; of Haredi,56 First Amendment (U.S. Constitution), 24 First National Jewish Women’s Conference,135 First Vatican Council,23–24 folk songs,267 foreign policy, U.S., 155, 157, 206–7, 209–10 formalism, legal,141, 142 France, anti-Muslim sentiment in,196–97, 209. See also French language freedom,194; of religion,23, 80; vs. religiosity,195–96 freemasons,165 French language,260, 263, 265–66; Berber and,264; code-switching and,268

fundamentalism,45, 193–94; gender and,236n9; in Islam,21–22, 32–33, 205, 227; patriarchy and,37; reform and,209 fundraising,157, 158, 159, 164–65, 178 Gender in Latin America (Chant and Craske), 225 Germany: Catholic sisters in,176, 178, 179, 182, 183; Islam in,197; Kulturkampf,176, 180, 185 Girls’ Rebellion (Thawrat al-Banat), 245–47, 252–53 globalization,46n4; re-Islamization and,271–72. See also transnationalism God,40 goddesses,219–20 Great Migration,176 Greece,164, 165 Greek refugees of WWI, 156 Green Line,59, 60 Gulf War (1991), 205 Hadith,139–140, 141 Haredi movement,52, 53–57, 70n3; settlements and,58, 59–60, 64–68; women’s roles in, 64–68. See also Ultra Orthodox Judaism harems,161–62, 168 Harvard Law Review,142 Hawley, John S., 236n9 headscarves. See veil wearing High Court of Justice (Israel), 138 Hill and Knowlton law firm,88 Holland,106, 197 Holy Roman Empire,22–23 home, prayer in,131 honor killing,203–4 Horizontal Society, The (Friedman), 139 housing, Haredi,64 human rights,35

Subject Index Ijtihad,133 ImageStore,65, 67 Imam, role of,130 imitatio Christi,229 imitatio Mariaea,229 Immanuel (Jewish settlement), 64–65 immigrants,21, 26, 47n8; Catholic Church and,80, 94n3, 176–77; to Israel,104–5, 106, 107, 112; Muslim,35–37; restriction laws and,27 immigration,101; European laws against,197; in Israel,102, 114–15, 116, 118. See also migration imperialism,161–62, 193–94, 202, 209–11, 212n2 Imperial Order of Shefakat,156 incarnation of Virgin Mary,220 India,104–5, 116, 183–85; widow sacrifice in,207 Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia (bin Laden), 196, 206 International Committee for Women of the Wall (ICWOW), 138 interreligious marriages in Israel,10, 101–19, 122n35; citizenship and,112–17; matrilineage and,107–12; pressure to convert in,103–7, 107–12, 117–19; prohibition of,109, 110–11; statistics of,101–2; study of,102–3, 117 “Intolerable” Quebec Act of 1774, 24 Iran,200–1, 202–3 Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988), 205 Iraq,198–99, 205–6 Irish Catholics,26. See also American Catholic Church; Catholic Church Islam,9–10, 263; African-Americans and,143; anti-Muslim discourses and,13, 21; in Arab world,145; vs. Christianity,198, 218; criticism of,196–97, 197–99, 200–203; Dar el Islam and,30–32;

289

diversity within,207; as Egyptian state religion,243–44; feminism in,142, 195, 204, 205, 208; feminist analysis of, 204, 272–73; in France, 196–97; fundamentalism in,21–22, 32–33, 205, 227; immigration and,35–37; Islamophobia and,36, 37; in Israel,119n5, 198–99; jurisprudence and,140–42; law of (Shari’a), 244; Muslim revival and,30, 33; organization of,31–32, 33, 41; in Ottoman Empire,155; political,30, 31, 32–35, 206; public prayer in,129; reform of,194, 199, 209–11; reIslamization and,271–72; religious politics of gender in, 37–45; secularism and,207–10; sexism and,44–45, 45–46; Shi’ite,41, 42; Sunni,30, 41, 42; in U.S., 139–40; Western perceptions of,144, 168, 195, 201; written Arabic and,259. See also Muhammad; Qur’an, the; women, Muslim Islamic Revolution (Iran), 201 Islamism,29 Islamization,268, 269–74, 272–73 Israel: Christians in,104, 119n5; citizenship in,101–2, 107, 112–17; Conservative Judaism in,110–11, 120n15, 121n21, 138; definition of Jews in,114; immigrants to,104–5, 106, 107, 112, 119n1; immigration in,102, 114–15, 116, 118; intolerance in,109, 116–17; invasion of Lebanon by,198– 99; vs. Islam,198–99; as Jewish state,116, 145; Law of Return in,111, 112, 114–15, 121n21; marriage laws in,120n13; Muslims in,119n5; Orthodox Judaism in,107–8, 110, 111, 112, 121n21, 138; Reform

290

Subject Index

Israel: Christians in (Continued) Judaism in,110–11, 120n15, 121n21, 138; women’s public worship in,138; women’s religious education in,126, 135. See also conversion to Judaism; interreligious marriages in Israel; Jewish settlements Israeli-Palestinian conflict,210 Istanbul, Turkey,161–62 Italy,23 Jan, Abid Ullah,130 Jesus,43; patriarchy and,42; virgin birth of,235n5; women and,41, 229, 230 Jewish identity: Israeli definition of,114; matrilineal descent of,107–8, 120n12 Jewish law (halacha), 52, 57, 126 Jewish settlements,10, 58–69; Haredi,58, 59–60, 64–68; National-Zionist,58–59, 60–64; women’s roles in,60–68 Jewish Theological Seminary,135 jihadis,31–32, 46n4 Jihadist Islam,144 Jordan, honor killing in,203–4 Judaism,27, 145; effect of jurisprudence on,140–42; feminism in,143; fundamentalism in,227; vs. Islam,198; jurisprudence and,141–42; matrilineal descent of,107–8, 120n12; as nationality vs. religion,109–10, 111, 113, 118; public prayer in,129–30; in U.S., 133–34, 139; women’s access to public prayer in,126, 133–37, 138, 141–42, 144; women’s exclusion from public prayer in,125, 126, 127, 134, 136, 137–38, 146n16; women’s religious education in,126, 135. See also Conservative Judaism; conversion to Judaism; Orthodox Judaism; Reform Judaism

jurisprudence,140–42 Justice and Development Party (AKP), 34 Kerala, India, Catholic sisters from,184 Khatami, Mohammad,202 khilafist (transnational Muslim groups), 31 Knights of Columbus,88 Know-Nothing movement,26 Kolel (Orthodox education), 55 Kulturkampf, German,176, 180, 185 labor: gendered divisions of,54, 66, 67; gendered religious divisions of,40–42; Haredi and,54 Labor Law (Egypt,1959), 242 language,12, 85, 259–60, 261, 263, 273. See also Arabic language; Berber language; French language; multilinguilism in Morocco Latin America,23; Catholicism in,217–18, 222–223; Catholic sisters from,174, 186; feminism and,228–29; male vs. female roles in,221; Marian devotion in,219–20, 231; marianismo in,218, 221–26, 229; popular religion in,220, 221, 224, 229–34; reproductive rights in,227; women’s empowerment in,217–19, 227, 228; women’s resistance in,223–24, 225–26. See also Catholicism, popular; women, Latin American law,10–11, 33, 263; family law and,120n13, 268, 269, 271, 272; immigration and,27, 197; Islamic (Shari’a), 244; Israeli,10; Jewish (halacha), 52, 57, 126; Labor Law (Egypt,1959), 242; personal status,243–44

Subject Index Law of Citizenship (Israel), 115 Law of Return (Israel), 111, 112, 114–15, 121n21 leadership, women in,84, 86; NER and,164, 166–67, 168, 169 Leaving the Levant (Greene), 168 Lebanon, Israeli invasion of,198–99 liberal feminism. See feminism liberalism,211 Likud government (Israel), 59 Lions clubs,165 literacy: Berber and,264; Moroccan women and,259, 266, 269; standard Arabic and,263 literature, Moroccan,269 lived religion. See popular religion Lolita (Nabokov), 200 machismo,221, 223–24 Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Argentina), 224, 227, 235n6 Maimonides,129 marginalization,3–4, 7–8, 261 Marian devotion,226, 231; history of,219–20. See also Virgin Mary marianismo,218, 221–26, 229. See also Virgin Mary Mariology,222, 234, 235n8; history of,219–20, 226. See also Virgin Mary marriage: of Egyptian women,243; Haredi,55; portrayed in Egyptian cinema,250–52. See also interreligious marriages in Israel Mary. See Virgin Mary maternity leave,67 matrilineage, Jewish,120n12; pressure on non-Jewish wives to convert and,107–12 Matrix (software company), 66, 67 Mecca,131 medical insurance,87–88 men,61, 66, 67 middle class,253 Middle East: American women’s travel in,164; democracy

291

in,205, 206; imperialism in,193–94, 202, 209–11; mission work in,155; NGOs in,153, 156, 166; U.S. and,158, 207 Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), 199 migration: gender and,175; of PHJC, 176; transnationalism and,185; to U.S., 174, 176–77. See also immigration military, Israeli,55 Ministry of the Interior of Israel,101–2, 114, 116 minyan. See quorum misogyny,43 mission work: effects on donations to,158; as expression of American culture,155; focus of during WWI, 155–56; missionaries and,163–64, 167, 185; post-WWI changes in,163, 168; U.S. governmental recognition of,156, 163; women’s role in,154, 156, 167, 169. See also Catholic sisters; Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ (PHJC) Modi’in Illit (Haredi settlement), 59 monarchy, right to petition under,128 moral agency of women,90–92 Morocco: government of,272–73; political consciousness of women in,268–69. See also multilinguilism in Morocco mosques: women’s access to,125, 131, 137–38; women’s exclusion from,130 motherhood,62; Virgin Mary and,224, 230–31, 233; women’s resistance and,224, 225, 226, 227, 235n6. See also Virgin Mary mothers, Jewish: Jewish identity and,107–10 mother tongues,262, 263–64

292

Subject Index

Muhammad,131, 141, 197; views on Muslim women’s role of,132, 133; women and,41, 44 multilinguilism in Morocco,12, 259–74; public/private language and,262; women’s strategies of communication and,266–68. See also Arabic language; Berber language; French language murder of women,203–4 Muslim Centers of Learning,145 Muslim Democracy,30, 34 Muslim World Outreach program (U.S.), 209–10, 210–11 Nasserist regime,241–42, 252 National Committee for a Human Life Amendment,87–88 National Insurance Institute,55 National-Religious communities, 58–59; women’s roles in,60, see also Orthodox Judaism National-Religious stream,52–53, 54, 57 “National Right to Life Committee,” 87 National Security Council (U.S.), 209–10 nation-state formation, fundamentalism and,33 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 28 Nazis,183 Near East,155, 158–59 Near East Relief (NER), 11; export of American culture and,153, 167, 169; fundraising by,164–65; goals of,162–63, 166–67; history of,155–56, 163–64; influence of,156–57; literature of,158, 160–61, 166–67; movies by,158–59; rescue homes of,161–62; U.S. governmental recognition of,156, 163; women’s leadership in,164, 166–67, 168, 169 Negrita, La,228

Nekuda (Jewish settlement newspaper), 63 neoconservativism,198, 201–2 neoliberalism,14n3 NER. See Near East Relief (NER) the Netherlands,197–98 “New Woman” image,239, 247 New York City, public prayer in,126, 130 New York Times,135, 196, 199, 206 NGOs. See nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) 19th Amendment (U.S.), 141 Ni putes ni soumises (Amara), 196 Ni putes ni soumises, le combat continue (Amara), 196–97 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 153–54, 156, 157, 161, 163, 164, 166 nuclear war,90 nuns. See Catholic sisters oral female genres,266–67 ordination,42, 76, 82, 83, 84–85 Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), 31 Orientalist literature,198, 201 originalism,140 orphans,158, 160–161 Orthodox Judaism: in Israel, 107–8, 110, 111, 112, 121n21, 138; legal recognition in Israel,107–8, 110, 111, 112, 121n21; NationalReligious,52–53, 54, 57, 58–59, 60; women’s relationship to public prayer in,126, 134, 136–37, 146n16; women’s religious education in,135. See also national religious communities Ottoman Empire,153, 155–56. See also Turkey Pakistan, honor killing in,203–4 Palestine,199, 206; interreligious marriages in Israel and, 122n35

Subject Index Palestinian-Israeli conflict,210 papacy: Roman,22–23; spiritual affairs and,81 parochial schools,177 Passing of Traditional Society, The (Lerner), 244 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), 28 patriarchal ecumenism,218, 227–29 patriarchy: early Christianity and,43; feminism and,271, 272; fundamentalism and,37; Islamization and,269–70; Moroccan,274 patriotism, U.S., 25, 81 People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (the Netherlands), 198 personal status laws,243–44 petitioning, public prayer and, 127–29 philanthropy,155, 157 the Philippines,112 PHJC. See Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ (PHJC) pluralism, American religious,27 Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ (PHJC), 11, 173; gender conflict and,177–78; growth of in India,183–84; origin of,175–76; as papal congregation,180; transnational conflicts in,177–80, 182–83, 184; transnational connections in,180–82, 184–85, 186. See also Catholic sisters popular religion: vs. dogma,220, 226–27, 229, 233–34, 235n5, 235n8; in Latin America,220, 221, 224, 229–34; vs. theology,219, 234; women’s empowerment in,217–19, 227, 228; women’s roles and,220, 224. See also Catholicism, popular Population Registry Act (Israel), 114 populism, constitutional,140

293

poverty,56 power: in Catholic church,76; French language and,265; gendered religious divisions of,40–42; Haredi women and,67; language and,259–60; of public prayer,128–30; women in positions of,84 prayer,127, 131. See also public prayer prayer groups,135–36, 138 pregnant women: social assistance for,92, 93 priests,41–42; female ordination and,42, 76, 82, 83, 84–85; lay people doing work of,85; shortage of,79. See also Catholic Church private sphere,6–7; Catholics and,24; French language and,265. See also public/private spheres Progressive Muslim Union of North America (PMUNA), 145n9 Prohibition,27 pronatalism,62 Prophetic Revelation,44 Protestant, The (anti-Catholic newspaper), 26 Protestantism,21, 24, 80, 155; crusades for,26–27; Evangelical,25; impact on other U.S. religions of,139–40; U.S. foreign policy and,209. See also Christianity Protestant Reformation,22, 33 Protestants, Catholics’ view of,233 Prudentia, Sister,177–78, 178–79, 182 public policy, American Catholic church and,83, 87, 90 public prayer,10–11; compared with secular petitioning,127–29; Jewish women’s access to,126, 133–37, 138, 141–42, 144; Jewish women’s exclusion from,125, 126, 127, 134, 136, 137–38, 146n16; in

294

Subject Index

public prayer (Continued) Judaism,129–30; Muslim women’s exclusion from, 125–26, 127, 132–33, 137–38; Muslim women’s movement for access to,131–33; power of,128–30 public/private spheres: American Catholic church and,83; male/female power and,262; National-Religious communities and,59; sexuality and,39 public sphere,6–7; Catholics and,24; Muslim revival and,30; National-Religious women in,63; women’s participation in,61

religious education. See education religious law. See law Religious Zionists,57. See also National-Religious stream reproductive issues,10; abortion and,77, 78, 83, 86–93, 227 Republicanism,25, 29 Republican Party (U.S.), 26, 207 rescue homes,161–62 Roe v. Wade (1973), 87 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholic Church Romanism,25, 29 Rotary clubs,165 Russia, immigrants to Israel from,105 Ruth the Moabite,104, 118–19

Qa’aba,131 quorum,126; women’s exclusion from,134, 136; women’s inclusion in,134–35, 136–37 Qur’an, the,126, 262, 263; effects on interpretation of,140–41; primacy of,141, 142; role of women in,131–33; women’s access to,139–40 Qur’an and Woman (Wadud), 141

Saudi Arabia,196, 206, 210 scripture, women’s access to,139–40 scriptwriters,240 Second Vatican Council,29, 81–82; Catholic sisters and,174, 184; church leadership and,80, 85; religious freedom and,28, 46n2; transnational conflicts and,183, 186 secularism,207–10 secularization,5, 155; Catholicism and,41, 177; in Egypt,243; in Europe,34; Islamophobia and,37; marginalization and,7; papal influence on,81 separation between state and religion,5, 80, 81; in Israel,51 sexism,242; Catholicism and, 42–44, 76; Islam and,44–45, 45–46 sexuality,247; American Catholic church and,82–86; morality and,78, 93; purity and,270; regulation of,39 Shame, The (Al-‘Ayb), 249–51, 253, 255n9 Shar’i (religious) courts,243 Shavuot (Jewish festival), 118 Shi’ite Islam. See Islam Shulchan Aruch (Karo), 134

Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative Movement,135 rabbis, women as,135 race,116–17 Rachelim settlement,62 Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi), 196, 200–3 Reform Judaism: in Israel,110–11, 120n15, 121n21, 138; origins of,133; women’s access to public prayer in,126, 134–35, 136, 141–42, 144; women’s religious education in,135 religion,168, 218, 227; freedom of,23, 28, 46n2, 80. See also popular religion; specific religion religiosity,195–96 religious communities. See Jewish settlements

Subject Index Signatures of Citizenship (Zaeske), 128 sisters. See Catholic sisters snowball technique,120n9 software companies,65 Soviet Union,105; effect on religion in Tajikistan of,137; immigrants to Israel from,101, 102, 119n1; women in,205 Spain, Islam in,197 Stasi Commission,197 State Department, U.S., 209–10 storytelling,267 Students’ Dorms, The (Bayt alTalibat), 251–52, 253 subway women,11, 13, 154, 156, 157, 168–69 Sudan, female genital cutting in,207 Sufism,32 Sunni Islam. See Islam Supreme Court of Israel,110, 111, 112, 115 Sweden, Islam in,197 symbols in religious practice,220 synagogues, women’s access to,126, 131, 136 Tablighi Jama’at (Muslim revival movement), 32 Tajikistan,137–38 Talmud: quorum in,134; women’s access to,139–40 Tefillah groups,135–36, 138. See also Jewish law (halacha) telecommunications, transnationalism and,185 Territories (Israeli), 51, 68–69, 70n1. See also Jewish settlements terrorism,36 theater,63 theology,219, 220, 226–27, 234 Three Suitors (Al-Thalatha Yuhibbunaha), 247–48, 253 Torah,55, 130 tradition,2–3, 271–72 traditional skills,266–67 traditional views of women,82–83, 92, 253

295

Transformation of American Religion, The (Wolfe), 140 transnationalism,22; Catholic church and,174, 185, 186; Catholic sisters and,174–75, 177–78, 181–82, 184, 185–86; PHJC and,177–80, 180–82, 184–85, 186 Trouble with Islam: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith, The (Manji), 196, 198–99 Turkey,168; EU and,35–36; imperialism in,161–62; Muslim politics in,34–35; NGOs in,153. See also Ottoman Empire Turkish Ordeal (Edib), 161 ulama, as exclusively male,41, 42 ulpana (Jewish women’s National-Religious school), 64 ulpanot (Jewish women’s National-Religious schools), 61 Ultra Orthodox Judaism, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 70n3. See also Haredi movement ummah,32, 44 Umm Waraqa, 131, 132–33 United Arab Republic,241 United States: Catholic Church in,176–77; Catholic sisters in,174–75, 177–78, 179, 181–82, 183–84, 185–86; Civil Rights movement in,141, 143; Constitution of,24, 127–28, 140–41; crimes against women in,203–4; culture of,153–54, 157, 167, 169, 183; foreign policy of,155, 157, 206–7, 209–10; global resentment of,144–45; Haredim in,54; imperialism of,202; invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by, 198–99; vs. Iraq,205–6; Islam in,139–40; Judaism in,133–34, 139; Middle East and,158, 207; migration to,174, 176–77; NGOs of,154, 164;

296

Subject Index

United States: Catholic Church in (Continued) PHJC in,177–78; secularization of,155; support to Muslim countries by,32; War on Terror of,193, 204; women activists from,156; women’s access to public prayer in,125–27, 129–30, 137, 139–43, 144–45. See also American Catholic Church United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), 78, 79, 86, 87–88, 95 United Tajik Opposition (UTO), 137 universalism,39 Ursuline Convent school,26 U.S. Family Violence Prevention Project,203 Vatican Councils. See First Vatican Council; Second Vatican Council veil wearing,38, 208–9, 211, 242, 271, 272; ban on in France,196–97, 209; criticism of,207; as metaphor for women’s oppression,222; as symbol of Islam,44–45; as symbol of women’s oppression,197 Virgen de los Angeles, La,228 Virgin Mary,12, 96n14, 234n2; abortion policy and,91; assumption into heaven of,226; childbirth and,232–33, 234; cultural importance of,222; empowering nature of,228, 233; empowering vs. submissive nature of,218–19, 227; feminism and,221; human-divine tension of,217, 231; images of,226; imitation of,227; immaculate conception of,235n5; as intercessor,229–30, 231–32; Marian devotion and,219–20, 226; marianismo and,218, 221–26, 229; Mariology

and,219–20, 222, 226, 234, 235n8; as metaphor for women’s oppression,222; as mother,224, 230–31, 233; popular vs. institutional views of,223, 233–34; roles of,229; women and,225, 229–34; women’s images and,43–44 Virgin of Los Angeles,234n2 virgin-whore binary,224 voting,67–68, 83, 242, 254n3 war on terror (U.S.), 193, 204 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour), 6 West, the,4, 8 West Bank,69n1 Western images,248 Western Wall (Jerusalem), 138 White Man’s Burden,166 widow sacrifice,207 Wilsonian League,156 witches, persecution of,43 Woman’s Enemy, The (‘Adu al-Mar’a), 248–49, 253, 255n4 Woman’s Identity and the Qur’an (Barazangi), 142 women,249; American Catholic church and,82–86; crimes against,203–4; desexualization of,247; as directors,254; educational access for,126, 135, 205; employment of, 56–57, 65–68, 243; in Haredi communities,64–68; images of,42–45; linguistic agency of,259; marginalization of,3–4, 8, 261; moral agency of, 90–92; in National-Religious communities,60–64; ordination of,42, 76, 82, 83, 84–85; popular religion and,220, 223, 224, 236n11; religious empowerment of,217–19, 227, 228, 233; religious identities of,228; as religious subjects,45; sexual desires of,248; voting and,83, 242,

Subject Index 254n3; women’s movement and,85. See also Virgin Mary women, American: diplomatic role of,154, 156, 161, 163, 168; as exporters of American culture,157; foreign depictions of,161, 168–169; mission work of,154, 156, 167, 169; in NGOs,153, 164, 167, 168 women, Latin American: motherhood and,224, 225; religious empowerment of,217–19, 227, 228, 233; reproductive rights of,227; resistance of,223–24, 225–26; Virgin Mary and, 229–34, 234n2 women, Muslim,13, 40–45, 206; autobiographies of,194–97, 197–99, 200–3; empowerment of,205; exclusion from public prayer of,125–26, 127, 132–33, 137–38; oppression of,194–95, 203–4 Women of the Wall (WOW), 138, 143

297

women religious,187n1. See also Catholic sisters women’s status and roles,240; in Catholic church,76; in Catholicism/Islam,40–45; in diplomacy,154, 156, 161, 163, 168; Islamic law and,244; male interpretation of,85; traditional views of,82–83, 92, 253. See also Egyptian cinema work. See employment World War I: American women’s aid during,154; mission work during,155–56, 163, 168 worship. See public prayer Yesha (Council for Jewish Settlements on the West Bank), 63–64 yeshiva studies,53–54, 55 yeshivot (Jewish men’s religious schools) 57, 60, 61YMCA, 165 Zionism,57, 109

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