Week 8 Blog Post

The readings for this week explore the concepts of gender, sexuality, and Islam within the broader context of the nation and the state. In Iran, nationalist groups positioned the nation as either the mother or the “beloved,” and, in doing so, fostered a specific kind of national identity that further defined the gender roles of men and women in Iranian society. Kandiyoti’s piece on women in Turkey examines the emergence of a discourse on the emancipation of women, beginning in the Tanzimat reforms of the late Ottoman Empire and continuing through the revolutionary policies of Kemalism. Joseph provides two case studies (Iraq and Lebanon) of how political elites sought to position women and families in the broader state system in order to reproduce or further support the power of the state. Molyneux explores the unique political situation in Yemen and examines how the legal system was utilized by governing elites to recharacterize familial relations and the position of women in Yemeni society. Finally, Amar’s piece turns our attention to Egypt as he examines gender, sexuality, and the feminist project in the context of police brutality and the security apparatus in the time period leading up to and contemporary to the Egyptian revolution.

I found Najmabadi’s piece on “vatan” particularly informative and especially enjoyed her discussion of how nationalism and patriotism contributed to the “binarization” of gender and the “heteronormalization” of sexuality in Iran (Najmabadi 97). One thing that I wish had been unpacked a bit more in this article, however, was the relationship between Islam and nationalism. Najmabadi demonstrates quite elegantly how the conception of Iran was slowly dissociated from the idea of Islam (Najmabadi 103), ultimately allowing the construction of an idea of “vatan” to “supercede,” or at least “incorporate,” a love for or loyalty to Islam (Najmabadi 113). However, I found this analysis to somewhat contradict what we encountered in our viewing and discussion of Persepolis, and in particular the scenes discussing the motivations for young men to become “martyrs” and go to war against Iraq. In such scenes, the young men appear to be driven more by a hope of a better afterlife, an afterlife that is promised to them through the teachings and doctrines of Islam, than by any particular attachment to the nation of Iran; in order of importance, then, love for (or at least a belief in) Islam appears to trump love for (or a belief in) the homeland. I would offer two potential qualifications for this apparent contradiction. First, the war between Iraq and Iran was not entirely contemporary to the time period which I believe Najmabadi is discussing; Najmabadi’s analysis, at times, significantly predates the Iran-Iraq war. Thus, changes in the relationship between "vatan" and Islam might have occurred during the period after the formation of this “vatan” identity but before the outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq. Second, and in my opinion more interestingly, the young men engaging in these actions in Persepolis tended to be from among the lower classes of Iranian society, whereas this discourse on nationalism would, I expect, be taking place more among the upper tiers of the Iranian political elites. Those seeking to define “vatan” and foster a specific type of patriotic sentiment that subordinates a “love for Islam” to a love for Iran,” then, may not be speaking for the entirety, or even perhaps the majority, of Iranians.

I also wanted to offer a few comments on “Elite Strategies: Iraq and Lebanon,” as this was, for me at least, simultaneously the most interesting yet also the most problematic of the texts we read for this week. Joseph notes that Iraq was ruled by a “homogenous ruling elite” (Joseph 177) and contrasts this homogeneity with the fact that Iraq itself is an incredibly diverse country (Joseph 178). Yet following this brief discussion of diversity, Joseph begins to create categories that overlook these differences that were just outlined. For example, consider the following claim: “Women have been important to the Ba’th agenda for state construction for two key reasons” (Joseph 179). Which “women?” I might consider buying into an argument for “Arab women” (as a category) being important to the Ba’th agenda for state construction, as Joseph does an excellent job of discussing the Ba’th party’s attempts at moving towards secularization and how such movement forced it to negotiate with both the Arab Sunni and Arab Shi’a religious establishments (Joseph 184). Even then, however, I would have difficulty in fully believing this categorization, since the Sunni-Shi’a divide in Iraq was certainly apparent under Saddam (though not as apparent as it would become under the Americans), and I would even consider hypothesizing that the Sunni and Shi’a women were treated slightly differently by the Sunni Ba’th party (though, again, that would only be a guess). However, my bigger problem is the complete absence of a discussion of non-Arab women. “Arab women” represent approximately 75% of the female population in Iraq, as “25% of the population is non-Arab” (Joseph 178). To give an easy example of this, there is an enormous Kurdish population in the north of Iraq that does not identify as Arab. Thus, when Joseph quotes a Director General of the Ba’th party as saying “Ethnicity and religion do not matter here, we are all part of the Arab nation” (Joseph 180, italics mine), I feel that this statement needs to be considered in the context of an Iraq that, while certainly majority Arab, is not homogeneously Arab. Were Kurdish women invited to take part in these state-sponsored projects that not-so-subtly promoted the Ba’th party and, consequently, the Ba’th platform of Arab nationalism? If invited, did these women choose to participate? Examining how Ba’th leaders approached non-Arab groups in the project of building an Arab state, I feel, would provide an interesting comparison to how they approached certain segments of the Arab population, allowing us to understand more completely both the broader Ba’th project of Arab nationalism and also how gender, sexuality, and Islam were incorporated into such a project.