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This chapter focuses on the work of Heba Raouf Ezzat. Ranked the thirty-ninth most influential Arab on Twitter, with over 100,000 followers, voted one of the hundred most powerful Arab women by ArabianBusiness.com, and elected a Youth Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, Raouf Ezzat has articulated and disseminated her Islamic politics in a global public sphere. Her writings and lectures develop an Islamic theory of women's political participation but simultaneously address other contested questions about women's leadership, women's work, and women's participation in the public sphere. Heba Raouf Ezzat is one of the most visible public figures in the Arab and Islamic world today, a visibility that began with her book on the question of women's political work in Islam, Woman and Political Work.

Arab Women's Association/Union (AWA) is the most active women's group in Palestine. The founding of the AWA in 1929 signified a transformation in women's organizing strategies, manifested by their self-consciousness in launching an actual women's movement in Palestine. The AWA established a national framework for the women's movement in organizing the First Arab Women's Congress in 1929, by creating local chapters and national committees. The agenda of the woman's movement was fluid, which permitted flexibility in navigating both within and around the dictates of nationalist categories. The way that women initiated the movement allowed them to seamlessly appropriate nationalism and “politicize” their experiences of working within the framework of charitable societies and other association structures.

The Arab region has witnessed a rising interest in women's issues at both the state and the regional level. Interest in women's issues in the Arab world accelerated considerably after the Beijing Conference, when it began to take on a new dimension. It indicates that significant positive change in the status of Arab women occurred in the 2000–2009 period, coinciding with the rising number of governmental and non-governmental women's empowerment projects. It aims to provide a descriptive analysis of the current status of Arab women in relation to men in the sectors of education, health, economic and political participation, and legislation, and also to examine the obstacles that still block the way to the advancement of Arab women and to indicate the way forward for their greater empowerment.

Arabs and Jews are inevitably construed as opposing forces engaged in conflict of biblical and global proportions. Renderings of Arabs and Jews often overlook the many close and complicated relationships that they have forged today and historically. In this introductory chapter, the stage is set for the chapters that follow-narratives that confront superficial notions of Arabs and Jews-noting that the chapters in which the stories are told an Arab and a Jewish woman are paired around common themes. This introductory chapter ends by speaking to the context in which the stories were gathered including the documentarian's perspective focused on marginalization.

Syrian Protestant women did not join in the published theological debates of the Christian presses in Beirut, but chapter 3 reveals that in the 1880s they began publishing sermons and articles on female education and child-rearing (tarbiya) for the mission periodical al-Nashra al-Usbu’iyya (The Weekly Bulletin). Along with the books and novels that women published at the American Mission Press, these largely neglected articles put Syrian Protestant women at the forefront of the Arab women’s awakening that gained momentum in the early twentieth century and united Christian, Muslim, and Jewish women activists. These proto-feminist authors occupied the traditionally masculine sphere of Arabic production and carved out a space for women’s intellectual and spiritual leadership in the Protestant community. Among these women were the acclaimed journalists Farida ’Atiya, Hanna Kurani, and Julia Tu’ma al-Dimashqiyya.

This book analyzes the reasons behind the meager representation of Palestinian women in Israeli politics. During the past sixty years, only one Arab woman has headed a local council (in the 1970s), two have become Knesset members (in 1999 and 2006), and seventeen women have become local council members. What does the political status of Palestinian women in Israel indicate about Israel's “democratic” nature? To what extent have Palestinian women progressed in the political arena since 1948? The book further examines how state political culture, patriarchal relations, and national conflict have shaped the possibility for women's participation; and how, for Palestinian women, Israeli democracy has failed even on its own terms. State policy has had complex and contradictory implications for the Arab national minority as a whole and for Arab women in particular. This book is based on qualitative, in-depth, extensive interviews with more than fifty-five Palestinian women activists.

Arab women writers draw on a rich, ancient heritage, which stretches back to civilizations that flourished in the region before the Islamic conquest. Al-Khansa' emerges positively in the culture; others were ostracized and held up as the epitome of wickedness and depravity. In later periods—the 'Abbasid, Umayyad, and Andalusian eras—biographical dictionaries and literary encyclopedias are filled with the names of hundreds of women, including female poets. Arab women's writing has dealt with a diversity of themes addressed in various styles, although historical concerns and an awareness of a double burden remains a basic theme in their writing. Writing women from various Arab countries are growing daily more aware of the exigencies of thoughtful, artistic writing, going beyond pure ideological criteria and fragile, direct moralizing or didacticism.

The introduction to the book identifies the female pioneers of documentary in the Arab area. It paints the historical context in which these women have been making documentaries, looking across borders within the Arab World and across transnational regions, within the form, in the seventies and eighties, nineties and two thousands. The theoretical approach is rooted in feminist film studies and Third Cinema theory. Using Ella Shohat’s writings on women making films in a post-Third Worldist and feminist reality, the chapter specifies those aspects of Third Cinema that have been neglected. Painting a socio-political and historical context for the films under discussion, it looks at the cultural history of documentary as well as thematic and stylistic tendencies in the Arab world. From an examination of Third Cinema and its focus on documentary the chapter moves on to New Arab Cinema (or ‘Cinema Chabab’) and its attitude towards melodrama and realism. This ‘new’ approach to the transnational documentary includes a clearer, perhaps more practical look at developing ideas of production, distribution and spectatorship.

This chapter focuses on the representation of women’s educational attainment as a development paradox in Jordan and the Middle East. The paradox is in keeping with a larger industry of defining Arab Muslim women in terms of development problems to be addressed through the expertise of development institutions. It is also clearly linked to a persistent and historical discourse about the Middle East, which characterizes its women as oppressed and powerless victims and its culture as retrograde. The global preoccupation with education in the region has figured strongly in such representations, with the state of education being linked to extremism, cultural backwardness, and even violence. Despite the important contributions of scholars studying women in the region over the past few decades, the popular image of Arab Muslim women continues to be that they are oppressed, weak, and passive victims.

This chapter evaluates Jean Sasson's Mayada. Critics rarely look at best-selling life narratives, although of course many readers do. The connections of life story and book markets to geopolitics are scarcely veiled at all. The fate of Norma Khouri's hoax life narrative Honor Lost, a generic sibling of Mayada and a contemporaneous publication, is a reminder of how important this assertion by a genuine native subject must be. The narrative structure of Mayada is a complex series of life narratives that circle around the oppression of women in Iraq. It presents some hope for a smooth transition to a Western style democracy in Iraq. Both Sasson and Mayada al-Askari respond to criticisms of Mayada and use the Amazon.com website to reinforce their intention that “this book makes readers admire and respect Arab women.” It is noted that the veiled best-seller is clearly a potent weapon in propaganda wars now.

The author reflects on her experience teaching Western literature and feminism to young (mostly) Arab women at Qatar University. This paper explores the limits of Western feminist ideology in the Middle East through Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938). The essay compares Woolf’s feminism to the liberal feminism of the International Women’s Alliance which, in the early 20th century, launched a world tour to recruit women around suffrage and equality. Because Woolf refuses to champion the ideology of liberal humanism, students are introduced to the kind of argumentation that allows them to challenge an all-too-common tenet of liberal humanist feminism that insists upon the oppression of women in the Middle East.