Revealing Reveiling: Islamist Gender Ideology in Contemporary Egypt.

• Author: Booth, Marilyn

With all the ink that has been spilled trying to gauge the nature and reach of what are variously called "Islamist," "fundamentalist," or "revivalist" movements in contemporary Arab societies, there has been little serious attention -- outside of a very few scholarly articles -- to the ways gender permeates the belief systems of these movements, or to situate women (other than the prominent Egyptian activist Zaynab al-Ghazali) as members within them. This is all the more striking as the "Veiled Woman" is probably the central (and undifferentiated) image that stereotypically represents these movements to outsiders, certainly to outsiders in the West. That stereotype has a history, and as in the past, it serves as a central icon in the construction of an "us-them" dichotomy with continuing political significance.

Sherifa Zuhur has combined historical and sociological methods in her attempt to understand the appeal of the "moderate oppositionist" Islamist message to women. Her approach relies on the concept of self-imaging, or what Jung termed "syzygy;" she examines how women invoke and measure themselves against historical archetypes that have come to represent competing images of "the ideal woman" -- Hawwa (Eve) to 'A'isha bint Abi Bakr to Huda Sha'rawi. Zuhur examines the construction of ideal female types in the "official" discourse of the Islamists (relying especially on the works of Zaynab al-Ghazali), and alternatively in the discourse of the State, as both have evolved historically. She shows how these ideal types, so rigid in their outlines, are assumed to be malleable by the contemporary women at whom they are aimed, for these women must handle several roles simultaneously. Zuhur finds that the image of the secular, elite woman propagated in recent history by the dominant ideology is losing ground to that advanced by the Islamists. But the life circumstances of most women in Egypt do not encourage their unqualified acceptance of the Islamist image of the ideal woman. A strength of this work is its emphasis on how women negotiate and shape the very images that are presented to them, and how this has been to the benefit of the Islamists. Zuhur argues convincingly that ". . . the oppositionist message to women has gained support through its flexibility in key areas that affect women. Furthermore, women have demonstrated an elasticity in interpreting and applying the Islamist message . . . . Certain positions on gender issues have become...