Week 5 readings

This weeks readings surrounded the transformation of Islamic feminists and what they have endured on their way to this modern period of time. The first reading did discuss the Hijab and how controversial it was at first. The women who wore it symbolized a whole new era of women and work. At first, Abu-Lughod chapter, The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt, argues that Islamists denounce the topics that Western women focused on such as sexual independence and public freedoms. Authors such as Fa thiyya al-Assal knew that Islamic feminists are more concerned with marital abuse, literacy and education, and the importance of reading.

The hijab which was introduced in the 1980s as a way for women to push themselves away from the western way of women, but ti was a new modest Islamic dress and as Lughod says, it was a part of a religious awakening. Women who had made the decision to wear a veil were a part of or assumed to be a part of the workforce, which the media of course scrutinized heavily. There was a heavy backlash against women becoming their own person and creating their own careers, a couple of these backlashes were seen in the United States soon after world war two. A relation was how the media would  shame working women and assume there was no one watching the children. It was a way to "push" women back into the house and let the men take control of a career. In Egypt they had become used to women in all professions.

Lots of changes went on when entering the eighties after the revolution had taken place as Juliet A. Williams points out in  Unholy Matrimony? Feminism, Orientalism, and the Possibility of Double Critique. Family law in Iran had went through changes, which marked a new time in Islam. The topic of temporary marriage had sparked some attention around the world and of course the American media turned it and twisted it to become something that it wasn't. 

 

Although both of these readings cover serious topics such as women at work, what Egyptians take was with women at work and the after the revolution in 1979, they do visit familiar topics that we have discussed in class.Those topics would include the differences between "third world" feminists and western feminists, the two authors visit the different concerns and issues that they cover.