The United Nations describes International Women's Day celebrated on 8 March of every year as a commemoration of "the story of ordinary women as makers of history". Al-Ahram Weekly takes the occasion to reflect on the progress made in the battle to emancipate woman kind A feminist pickle Dena Rashed attends an International Women's Day ceremony in Cairo One question posed by the principal speaker turned a potentially droll Women's Day event organised by the regional office of the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) into an occasion for heated, even belligerent sparring. How, asked Marnia Lazraq, professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, can the Egyptian Constitution uphold gender equality while at the same time referring to Shari'a (Islamic jurisprudence) as the principal source of legislation in matters personal and domestic? Based on her research paper, Political Liberalisation, Islamism and Feminism in Algeria, Egypt, and Jordan, the speech was the centrepiece of an event organised to highlight progress in implementing the Beijing platform in the Middle East; the theme, in accordance with the upcoming United Nations Research Institute for Social Development Review Report for Beijing plus 10, was "Gender and Development: 10 years after Beijing". Lazraq, who has published extensively on development, human rights, cultural movements, gender and Algerian colonial history, has also served as a consultant on gender issues for UNDP and World Bank gender coordinator for Europe and Central Asia. She is the founding director of the Association for Research and Algerian Women and Cultural Change (ARAWOC). Focussing on "the national and international political forces that have impinged on women's entry into public life as advocates for social change", the research she presented on this occasion aims to analyse three principal points: She charts the unintended consequences of political liberalisation policies of the 1980s for women's ability to promote social and political citizenship rights -- namely the lack of female involvement in the privatisation process considered in the wider context of alienation between privatisation and the people, which Lazraq equates with "a democracy without democrats" -- and, more specifically, the feminisation of unemployment and poverty in the region; she also explores the effects of the isolation of the Middle East on identity politics in the region, identifying the pitfalls present in the ascendancy of a religion-based feminist movement. The main argument of the paper is that in "all three countries women's movements are constrained by local power politics that nevertheless have opened a space for women to mobilise for their interests". Through her lecture Lazraq argued that in the three countries religion has emerged as a powerful source of identity and/or a platform for legal reform. "Analysing these issues entailed an overlapping framework of knowledge and global feminism, and a formal nature where meaning is attached to liberalism and democracy in the region, and thirdly a geo-political framework," she said. The consequences of 9/11, the war in Iraq, especially the sexual torture in Abu Ghraib prison, have all acted to consolidate a religious paradigm in the area. Lazraq showed samples of how American newspapers and magazines portray Muslim women in their stories: Images of the veil accompanied by disparaging quotes and headlines. "These images demonstrate a point," she told Al-Ahram Weekly : "to show how the religious paradigm impacts women when they try to constitute their own framework." Intentions notwithstanding, Lazraq's choice of imagery and the arguments she used served to antagonise a good portion of the largely female audience, many of whose members were veiled. For women as well as men, evidently, questions relating to Shari'a and the rights of women in Islam remain ticklish -- a "delicate" subject the pursuit of which will generate strong emotions. When she argued that gender-based legal identity -- a direct result of the use of Islamic jurisprudence as a source for family codes -- results in gender inequality, for example, Lazraq managed to offend many of her listeners. In her opinion, "while the Constitution grants equal rights to men and women, these rights are contradicted since the Constitution is based on Shari'a, where women are subject to men". It was at this point that the angered muttering started. "The problem is not Shari'a," my neighbour hissed, "but culture and society. Shari'a," she went on in the same breath, "does not undermine women's rights -- only its erroneous interpretation." This was a point Lazraq conceded -- interpretation is partly to blame -- but she went on to ask, even more contentiously, if there is a collective decision by men to interpret Shari'a in this way. That some women -- Islamist feminists calling for the correct interpretation and implementation of Shari'a -- have found space for their struggle within the religious paradigm, Lazraq found noteworthy. "In a way it is good that women are connecting, but it is important not to underestimate working at rock bottom. A cultural movement that re-socialises women into a religious society does not provide another alternative for them," she said. "It should be pointed out that the world is not only about religious discourse, that such discourse is only part of the larger system of ideas." Which perhaps brings us to the crux of the matter. According to one feminist present, the state of women remains as it is because "some people don't like to know about opinions different from their own."
