© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/156920809X449544

Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 7 (2009) 57–87 brill.nl/hawwa

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence

Carolyn BarnettGeorgetown University

AbstractMany women have played an important role in Islamic renewal as advocates and activists within Islamist movements and parties. Women’s participation is of particular interest, given the reputation of these groups as insuffi ciently supportive of women’s rights. Th e specifi c infl uences and experiences that lead women to approach their own empowerment through Islam and to reform Islamist movements from within have been neglected. Th is article investigates some of the important infl uences on two prominent female Islamists: Heba Raouf Ezzat, Professor of Political Science at Cairo University, and Nadia Yassine, founder and head of the women’s branch of the Moroccan movement Justice and Spiritual-ity (JSA). First and foremost, it overviews the circumstances in which prominent women in Egypt and Morocco have asserted themselves in the past century, highlighting the consis-tent importance of paternal infl uence and the expansion of access to education, as well as the evolving role of religion and religious discourse in arguments for women’s rights. Th is article discusses the role of paternal infl uence and schooling as agents of political socializa-tion, pointing out that scholars have underestimated the important role that fathers play in strongly patriarchal societies and the ability of schools in former colonies to produce anti colonial and nationalist political sentiments. It then turns to Ezzat and Yassine themselves, presenting in detail the infl uence their fathers and foreign schools had on their political socialization. Both fathers held progressive views on women’s education, but they diff ered in their specifi c political views, such as their attitude towards Islamism,and the extent to which they sought to transfer their political views to their daughters. Th is article ends by discussing the role of foreign education in Ezzat’s and Yassine’s socialization and identity construction, emphasizing the importance of encounters with racist and condescending attitudes as a contributing factor to women’s search for Islamic alternatives.

Keywordspolitical socialization, Islamists, Islamic feminism, missionary schools, women in Egypt, women in Morocco

58 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

Many women have played an important role in Islamic renewal, as advo-cates and activists within Islamist movements and parties. Badran (1994), Abdel Latif and Ottaway (2007), Mahmood (2005), Karam (1998), Daoud (1994) and others have looked at women’s attraction to religious revival and intensifying public and political expressions of Islam, but also at their eff orts at reform and reinterpretation favorable to women.1 Fatema Mernissi notes that “even if at the beginning women recruits [to Islamist groups] were there to be manipulated, in many Muslim countries today . . . we see the emergence of a virulent feminist leadership within the funda-mentalist parties.”2 Given the reputation of these groups as insuffi ciently supportive of women’s rights, even among those who are unopposed to their political participation, women’s participation in Islamist movements and political parties is particularly interesting.3 Th is article addresses the specifi c infl uences and experiences that lead women to approach their own empowerment through Islam and to reform Islamist movements from within, which as a fi eld of study has been neglected.

Th is article investigates some of the important infl uences on two prom-inent female Islamists: Heba Raouf Ezzat, Professor of Political Science at

1 See Omayma Abdel Latif and Marina Ottaway, Towards a Model of Islamic Feminism (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007); Mahnaz Afkhani and Erika Friedl, eds. Muslim Women and the Politics of Participation (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1997); Karin Ask and Marit Tjomsland, Women and Islamization: Contemporary Dimensions of Discourse on Gender Relations (Oxford: Berg Press 1998); Mar-got Badran, “Gender Activism: Feminists and Islamists in Egypt,” in Identity Politics & Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective, edited by Valentine Moghadam. (Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994); Zakia Daoud, Féminisme et politique au magreb (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1994); Mervat Hatem, “In the Eye of the Storm: Islamic Societies and Muslim Women in Globalization Discourses” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26, no. 1 (2006): 22–35; Azza M. Karam, Women, Islamisms, and the State: Contemporary Feminisms in Egypt (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1998); Saba Mahmood, Th e Politics of Piety: Th e Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004; Barbara Sto-wasser, “Old Shakhs, Young Women, and the Internet: Th e Rewriting of Women’s Political Rights in Islam.” Th e Muslim World 91, no. 1/2 (2001): 99–119.

2 Fatima Mernissi, Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 2002): 161.

3 See, for example, Amr Hamzawy, Marina Ottaway, and Nathan J. Brown. “What Islamists Need to Be Clear About: Th e Case of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood,” Carn-egie Endowment Policy Outlook No. 35 (February 2007), http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=19032&prog=zgp&proj=zme (accessed February 28, 2008).

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 59

Cairo University,4 and Nadia Yassine, founder and head of the women’s branch of the Moroccan movement Justice and Spirituality (JSA).5 Both women are part of the trend often referred to as “Islamic feminism,” which Margot Badran has defi ned as “a feminist discourse and practice articu-lated within an Islamic paradigm.”6 Th e term is problematic because it encompasses activists with a range of social and political views, many of whom do not see themselves as feminists.7 Yet this trend—of which Ezzat and Yassine are a part—can be considered feminist in its emphasis on women’s equal humanity and the importance of their public presence, two tenets that require changes in gender relations in the social, political, and economic spheres. Th is article leaves aside discussion of the specifi c views and activities of these prominent women, which I detail elsewhere.8 Rather, I explore some of the key factors involved in the construction of their iden-tities, worldviews, and motivation to be active in the general public sphere and in politics.

Th is material is based on a series of in-depth interviews with Ezzat and Yassine that covered a range of topics concerning their upbringing, evolv-ing political consciousness, and academic and political work.9 Th e purpose

4 Ezzat is also a co-founder of IslamOnline, and currently columnist for the opposition newspaper Ad-Dustour. IslamOnline is a fast-growing web community for Muslims, avail-able in English and Arabic, which seeks to promote an “Islamic Renaissance” and brings together experts from various fi elds to provide Islamic guidance on a variety of daily issues. Ezzat co-founded the site under the guidance of internationally known religious scholar Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, and currently serves as a consultant for the project. She speaks widely on human rights, women’s rights, and interfaith dialogue from an Islamic perspective.

5 Th e JSA is one of two prominent Islamist organizations in Morocco, along with the Justice and Development Party (PJD). Unlike the PJD, the JSA chooses not to participate in Morocco’s electoral politics under the constitutional monarchy. Nadia Yassine is the daughter of the movement’s founder, Sheikh Abdessalem Yassine. She founded the women’s branch of the movement and is engaged in promoting human rights in an Islamic context.

6 Margot Badran, “Islamic Feminism: What’s in a Name?” Al-Ahram Weekly. 17 January 2002. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/569/cu1.htm (accessed February 28, 2008).

7 Ibid. See also Sherine Hafez, Th e Terms of Empowerment: Islamic Women Activists in Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2003); Martina Sabra, “Islamic Femi-nism, and a Th ird Way.” Middle East Times. 17 January 2008. http://www.metimes.com/Opinion/2008/01/17/op-ed_martina_sabra/3990/ (accessed February 9 2008).

8 Forthcoming.9 Interviews took place during June and July 2008 and were open-ended qualitative ses-

sions loosely organized around three main topics: background and infl uences, political and social perspectives, and engagement with other Islamists and non-Islamists, especially secu-lar women’s rights activists. Ezzat was interviewed in English, and Yassine in French; all translations are my own.

60 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

of the interviews was to gather general background information on each woman’s childhood and what they identifi ed as their formative experiences and infl uences: how they placed themselves in the contexts of their respec-tive national histories and in relation to family, friends, and colleagues who chose diff erent paths and political beliefs. In my conversations with both, they spoke to a greater degree than I had anticipated about the crucial roles their fathers played in their intellectual and social development, and about their education in schools run by foreigners.

Th is paper will provide a discussion of the development of the circum-stances within which prominent women in Egypt and Morocco have asserted themselves in the past century, highlighting the consistent importance of paternal infl uence and expanding access to education, as well as the evolv-ing role of religion and religious discourse in arguments for women’s rights. It then discusses the role of paternal infl uence and schooling as agents of political socialization, pointing out that scholars have underestimated the important role that fathers play in strongly patriarchal societies and the ability of schools in former colonies to produce anti colonial and national-ist political sentiments. It then turns to Ezzat and Yassine themselves, pre-senting in detail the infl uence their fathers and foreign schools had on their political socialization. I will demonstrate that both fathers held pro-gressive views on women’s education, but that they diff ered in their specifi c political views—in particular, their attitude towards Islamism—and in the extent to which they sought to impart their politics to their daughters. Th is article ends with a discussion of the role of foreign education in their socialization and identity construction.

I do not claim that paternal infl uence and Western-style education have solely determined the activism of Islamist women for religious reinterpre-tation as the route to women’s rights. I argue that in contexts where it was unlikely that girls perceived the possibility of an active, egalitarian sex role as possible, a nurturing father or the absence of a father became critically important for the emergence of political women of all stripes. Once this base of effi cacy was established, the specifi c educational and political infl u-ences a girl encountered helped shape her political attitude.

Arab Women’s Infl uences and Th e Evolving Feminist Discourse

Over the last century, opportunities for women’s activism in public life within the Arab world have changed dramatically. Writing on the emer-gence of prominent political women, by authors such as Badran, Howard-

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 61

Merriam, Hoff man, Daoud, and Baker, has focused on access to education and the importance of either absent or progressive fathers; mothers have not tended to be direct role models for educated and active young women.10 Badran, Karam, Daoud and Sidiqi have also described the shifts over time in the relationship of feminism and women’s activism to nationalism, reli-gion, and the West and the increasing prominence of religious discourse in arguments for women’s rights.11

Among the fi rst generation of women’s rights activists in Egypt, both Huda Sha‘rawi and Nabawiyah Musa grew up without fathers from an early age. Sha‘rawi’s father died when she was 5 years old, and Musa’s died before she was born.12 Th eir lack of directly infl uential father fi gures did not free them from constraints—Sha‘rawi was married to her cousin in her early teens, and Musa defi ed her mother’s orders to attend secondary school—but it is noteworthy that neither grew up in a household domi-nated by a controlling patriarch. Sha‘rawi is unique in that she was signifi -cantly infl uenced by a foreign woman: Eugénie Le Brun, a French convert to Islam married to an Egyptian.13 Similarly, Aisha Abd al-Rahman, one of the fi rst women to conduct Qur’anic exegesis in Egypt, was sent to second-ary school during her father’s prolonged absence.14 Th ese women had illit-erate mothers who did not serve as role models for their educated and outspoken daughters.

As the twentieth century progressed, educating girls became more and more common. Particularly amongst the middle and upper classes, the

10 Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Kathleen Howard-Merriam, “Egypt’s Other Political Elite,” Th e Western Political Quarterly 34, no. 1 (March 1981): 174–187; Valerie J. Hoff man, “An Islamist Activist: Zaynab al-Ghazali” tr. Valerie J. Joff man, in Women and the Family in the Middle East, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985): 233–254; Daoud, Féminisme et Politique au Maghreb; Alison Baker, Voices of Resistance: Oral Histories of Moroccan Women (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).

11 Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation; Karam, Women, Islamisms, and the State; Daoud, Féminisme et Politique au Maghreb; Fatima Sidiqi, Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco (Boston: Brill, 2003).

12 Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, 15.13 Margot Badran chronicles how Le Brun opened the fi rst Salon for women in Egypt,

encouraging them to read and write on a wide variety of topics. Le Brun was a strong advo-cate of dissociating patriarchal social practices from the Islam she encountered in her stud-ies as a convert. Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, 15.

14 Ruth Roded, “Bint al-Shati’s Wives of the Prophet: Feminist or Feminine?”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 33, no. 1 (May 2006): 56.

62 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

idea of educating women became acceptable and even a mark of social status. An expanding educational system under the monarchy facilitated the transition.15 Th e newly progressive attitude of some men toward wom-en’s roles and need for education—in spite of prevailing male sentiments to the contrary—brought their daughters new opportunities, but not unfet-tered freedom. Even as educational opportunities expanded, a modern “cult of domesticity” was taking shape that “idealized the roles of mother and (to a lesser extent) wife, and women’s place in the home.”16 Malak Hifni Nasif, a powerful advocate of women’s rights, was educated at the Abbas school and Saniyah School in Cairo thanks to her father, Hifni Nasif, a lawyer and man of letters infl uenced by Muhammad Abduh—but she was forced to give up her education when her husband objected.17

Some women embraced both the trend towards greater education for women and the emphasis placed on their primary role as wives and moth-ers. Fatma Rashid, wife of one of the loudest opponents of Qasim Amin’s argument for educating women,18 founded a “Society for the Advance-ment of Women” dedicated to promoting and reinforcing women’s domes-tically centered roles.19 Th e most prominent woman within this vein was Zaynab al-Ghazali, unparalleled among Islamist women. Her father was an independent religious teacher trained at Al-Azhar who encouraged her participation in da‘wa, the calling of fellow Muslims to piety and reli-gious observance.20 Th rough his exhortations Al-Ghazali found a passion for organizing Muslims in the cause of educating others about their reli-gious duties and helping the less fortunate through charitable works. She founded the Muslim Women’s Association after splitting from the Egyp-tian Feminists’ Union over disagreements with their goals: she felt that to speak of women’s liberation was unnecessary given the rights Islam granted to women.21 In one interview, she recalled the infl uence her father had on her:

15 Howard-Merriam, “Egypt’s Other Political Elite,” 178.16 Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, 63.17 Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Femi-

nist Writing: Second Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004): 134.18 Qasim Amin, Th e Liberation of Women and the New Woman: Two Documents in the

History of Egyptian Feminism (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000).19 Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, 52.20 Hoff man, “An Islamist Activist: Zaynab al-Ghazali.” 21 Al-Ghazali’s association was later folded into the Muslim Brotherhood, and she was

imprisoned along with Sayyid Qutb and other Brotherhood leaders by the Nasser regime during the fi fties.

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 63

He always used to say to me that, God willing, I would be an Islamic leader. Th at’s what he used to say to me . . . He would tell me how [Nusayba, the daughter of Ka’b al-Mazini, one of the Prophet’s companions] struggled in the path of Islam, and then he would ask me, ‘Whom do you choose? Do you choose Huda Sha’rawi, or will you become Nusayba?’ . . . So I decided to be a Muslim woman.22

Al-Ghazali makes no reference to her mother. It is diffi cult to evaluate what impact her mother’s level of education and public activity might have had, but her absence from al-Ghazali’s narrative—while Sheikh al-Ghazali features prominently—is noteworthy. Also important is the fact that Al-Ghazali operated outside of the expectations of women in her day, going so far as to divorce her fi rst husband for interfering with her religious work, while emphasizing the importance of highly gendered social and political roles.23 She did not propose restructuring of gender relations or revision of gender roles; for her, women’s primary duty was still to be devoted wives and mothers to bring up the next generation of good Mus-lims. Yet she herself recalled the decision “to banish marriage from my life, and to devote myself entirely to the call.”24 Al-Ghazali paradoxically cham-pioned strictly gendered roles while she defi ed them herself, as Hoff man and Karam have noted.25

At the other end of the spectrum was Nawal al-Sa‘dawy, a staunch feminist who rejected the cult of domesticity.26 She resisted the mixture of opportunity and restriction that came with the glorifi cation of women’s domestic roles. Sa‘dawy’s father, an employee of the Ministry of Educa-tion, sent all nine of his children, boys and girls, to school when at a time when schooling for girls was not expected.27 He clearly valued her develop-ment and education more than the average father of the time. Yet in recol-lections of her childhood, Sa‘dawy focuses not on his progressiveness but on the continued restraints she faced. While her father boasted to his

22 Quoted in Hoff man, “An Islamist Activist,” 237–8.23 Hoff man, “An Islamic Activist.”24 Ibid., 247.25 Ibid.; Karam, Women, Islamisms, and the State.26 One wonders, given Sa‘dawi’s other views, whether the refusal to blame Islam for

women’s ills is genuine, a protective tactic against off ending the sensibilities of religious conservatives and authorities too grossly, an eff ort to avoid aiding Orientalist perceptions of the Arab world, or some combination of the above.

27 Nawal al-Sa‘dawy, “Growing Up Female in Egypt,” tr. Fedwa Malti-Douglas, in Women and the Family in the Middle East, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, ed. (Austin: Univer-sity of Texas Press, 1985): 111–120.

64 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

friends about Nawal’s precocity in school, he also tried to marry her to a much older man when she was 16 years old.28

Th e youngest generation of feminists and political women, who came of age under Nasser, have faced new challenges to their ability to be active in the form of rising costs of living, rapidly changing urban environments, and religious resurgence.29 At the same time, access to education continued to expand, and Egyptians across the political spectrum saw education as women’s most important right.30

Th e changes in women’s status and opportunities in Morocco developed much the same as in Egypt, with a few important diff erences. Th e history of Morocco’s feminist movement starts later, in the middle of the twentieth century. Sidiqi argues that feminism in Morocco grew not out of national-ism but out of the encounter between indigenous and Western culture, and that it was a largely urban phenomenon.31 Still, it was through the nationalist movement and struggle for independence that women fi rst made modest gains in visibility. Women such as Malika El Fassi, Zhor Lazraq, Rqia Lamrania, Fatima Benslimane Hassar, Oum Kalthoum El Khatib, Amina Leuh, and others became simultaneously active in the nationalist movement and the protectors of a nascent feminist conscious-ness.32 Importantly, for this study, all of these women had fathers who either died when they were young (Lamrania, Hassar) or who went to unusual lengths to ensure their access to education. El Fassi’s father brought top-quality professors to their home so that her education would equal that of her brothers.33 Lazraq’s father secured entrance for her to Fez’s Qaraouine, the oldest continuously operating institute of higher education in the world and a center of Islamic knowledge, of which she became the fi rst female graduate.34 None of these women indicated that their mothers

28 Daoud, Féminisme et politique au magreb. 29 Howard-Merriam, “Egypt’s Other Political Elite.”30 Brian Katulis, Women’s Rights in Focus: Egypt (New York: Freedom House, 2004): 15.

Reasons for supporting women’s education vary; for some, support for education is the result of the successful message that educated women are more marriageable and make bet-ter mothers, because they are better able to help educate their children. For others, educa-tion is viewed as most important because it is the basis for achieving all other women’s rights.

31 Sidiqi, Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco, 20.32 Baker, Voices of Resistance.33 Ibid., 71.34 Ibid., 84. In Baker’s oral histories, all of these women draw attention to the abnormal-

ity of their fathers’ attitudes toward women’s education and their awareness of and partici-pation in political aff airs.

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 65

were literate, let alone models for their own futures as publicly active edu-cators, commentators, and political mobilizers.

Most of these early politically active women were born into middle- or upper-class families and benefi ted from high levels of political engagement and discussion in their homes. One of the earliest, most prominent advo-cates of women’s rights was literally forced by her father into the position: Lalla [Princess] Aicha, daughter of King Mohamed V and sister of the future King Hassan II, was but 14 years old when she was made to give a political speech on women’s rights. As Howe amusedly notes, “she admit-ted that she didn’t know what [her father] was talking about at the time because she had been raised by French gouvernantes and wasn’t aware that Moroccan women needed help.”35 Lalla Aicha continued to stump for women’s rights and organize charitable organizations for a number of years. She later went on to become Morocco’s fi rst female ambassador.

Morocco, unlike Egypt, saw little in the way of an organized feminist movement until the late seventies and early eighties, when the feminist magazine 8 Mars provided a forum for feminist intellectuals to voice their concerns and arguments.36 Despite women’s participation in the politics and militancy of the nationalist movement, their activism was limited post independence. While men “endeavored to prove that Morocco could not progress without educating and training women,” this emphasis on education did not translate into greater political or economic freedom for most women.37 Women’s political participation was, when it existed, pri-marily through the stymied political parties vying for some amount of power in Morocco’s constitutional monarchy, and this participation was limited to urban, well-off , and French-speaking women.38 Indeed, it was out of political parties such as Istiqlal, the Parti du Progrès et du Socialisme (PPS), the Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires (USFP), and others that women’s committees and explicitly feminist organizations eventually devel-oped.39 Th e liberal, Western-oriented feminism of the elites has had trouble

35 Marvine Howe, Morocco: Th e Islamist Awakening and Other Challenges (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005): 147.

36 Daoud, Féminisme et politique au magreb.37 Sidiqi, Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco, 23.38 Ibid., 21. Language, and access to knowledge of languages, is a powerful force in

politics in Morocco. Whereas liberal feminists have used knowledge of French as a mark of social status and a method of access to “cultural powerful institutions,” religious feminists have increasingly relied on Qur’anic Arabic as the “language of God.” Sidiqi, 198–9.

39 Laurie Brand, Women, the State and Political Liberalization: Middle Eastern and North African Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

66 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

permeating the rest of Moroccan society, as “feminists from upper classes tend to adhere to a modern Western type of feminism, whereas feminists from lower strata tend to adhere to a more religious type of feminism.”40 However, there has been no standout individual in the history of Morocco’s religious feminism—no one like Zaynab al-Ghazali. Th is may be explained in part by the fact that Islamism itself is a relatively recent phenomenon in the kingdom; before Sheikh Abdessalem Yassine’s ascent in the seven-ties, the nationalist Istiqlal Party held a claim to representing the interests of religious conservatism in the context of political participation, and the combination of Sufi brotherhoods and the king’s supervision of religious life as “Commander of the Faithful” accounted for the social organization of individuals for the propagation of religious practice and solidarity.41 No large-scale socio-political religious movement on par with Egypt’s Mus-lim Brotherhood existed in Morocco until Yassine founded Al Adl wal Ihsan (JSA).

Bridging the two feminist approaches is Fatema Mernissi, the most prominent contemporary feminist in Morocco. Mernissi is well known for her sociological analysis of gender relations in the contemporary Muslim world and for her critical analysis of the Qur’an and hadith to argue that Islam does not support women’s inequality and the misogyny of religious practice.42 Mernissi was raised in a middle-class family in Fez and educated in a French secondary school before attending the Sorbonne and Brandeis University. In her memoirs of her harem childhood, Mernissi does not portray her father as a dominating patriarch, despite his apparent tradi-tionalism in supporting the harem.43 Instead, she explains his concern for protecting Moroccan culture from inevitable destruction, an argument to which she is sympathetic. She dwells on her consciousness of the multiple

40 Sidiqi, Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco, 187.41 Malika Zeghal, Les islamists marocains : le défi à la monarchie (Paris: Découverte,

2005).42 See Fatema Mernissi, Th e Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s

Rights in Islam (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Fatema Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics on Modern Muslim Society (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; Revised Edition, 1987). Today, Mernissi has distanced herself from women’s rights activism per se, focusing instead on a number of broader sociological issues in Morocco, including the impact of satellite technologies on youth education and culture, the expansion of civil society, entrepreneurship in rural areas, and the ambitions of young Moroccans. See her website, www.mernissi.net.

43 Fatema Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 67

barriers erected around her—not just of the household, but also by the French and Spanish and other Western powers. She recognized the double oppression of Muslim women by Muslim men as well as imperial Western powers.

Mernissi is a transitional fi gure in Moroccan feminism, particularly with respect to the discourse on women’s roles in relation to religion. She was one of the fi rst prominent women associated neither with the nationalist movement nor with the monarchy, distinguishing herself through her scholarly work. Mernissi was the fi rst to bridge the concurrent threads of liberal feminism and religious feminism in Morocco, paving the way for the current state of aff airs in which “each trend has started to use the oth-er’s jargon.”44 Moroccan feminists have increasingly determined that they must at least partially justify their position in terms of religious arguments to make headway against cultural prejudices, and Mernissi was one of the fi rst to make such arguments.45 Other women have followed and adopted similar stances. Leila Abouzeid, a leading feminist Moroccan writer who publishes in Arabic, writes from an Islamic feminist perspective and expresses shock at those—including her own father—who have “adopted the secular principles imported from the West.”46

Th e justifi cation of social change for women’s rights through religious discourse reached its zenith in Morocco with the passage in 2003 of the new Moudawana, or family law. Th e previous Moudawana, based on Maliki jurisprudence and codifi ed upon independence from France, had cemented women’s subordinate status. A 1999 proposal to amend the law, couched in the language of international human rights and development discourse, had provoked strong negative reactions. After several years of deliberation by a (mostly male) committee, the father fi gure of all Morocco put his progressive views behind the cause of women in a revised proposal

44 Sidiqi, Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco, 21. 45 As Kandiyoti points out, the eagerness of both feminists and “traditionalists” to return

to sources to demonstrate Islam’s egalitarianism has the unfortunate academic eff ect of “giving a longer lease of life to ahistorical approaches to the question of women in Muslim societies.” Deniz Kandiyoti, “Islam and Patriarchy: A Comparative Perspective,” in Women in Middle Eastern History, Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron, eds. (New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1991).

46 Quoted in Eva Hunter, “Feminism, Islam and the Modern Moroccan Woman in the Works of Leila Abouzeid,” African Studies 65, no. 2 (December 2006): 139. Abouzeid’s father was a member of the Union Nationale des Forces Populaires (USFP), and was impris-oned and tortured by both the French and later the new Moroccan regime during the transition from colonial rule.

68 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

in 2003. Th e new law enacted several radical changes—among them, establishing equality of responsibility and power within marriage and requiring men to come to court to divorce their wives—and was presented to parliament by the Commander of the Faithful himself in a speech note-worthy for its emphasis on the religious basis for the changes.47 On a national level, the dedicated eff orts of individual women and feminist groups came to fruition under the auspices of male endorsement. Although women’s activism has helped, “it was not political parties or civil society which foregrounded women on the political scene, but monarchs.”48

Political Socialization: Th e Infl uence of Fathers and Schools

Moving on from the historical context from which Ezzat and Yassine emerge, this section explores the ways that paternal infl uence and educa-tion impact the development and socialization of political women. Politi-cal socialization has been defi ned as “the process by which people learn what is expected of them in their particular political system.”49 It may also include studies of why certain people develop “deviant” political beliefs or modes of political behavior. Th is article considers (1) the socialization of political women, especially those who contravene social mores that dis-courage women’s political participation, and (2) the infl uence that fathers and schools have on political socialization, in particular with regard to women and individuals who become radicals opposed to the political sys-tem under which they operate.

Issues of women’s political socialization that have been debated include the sources of women’s lower levels of interest in politics, diff erences in political attitudes between men and women, and theories of personality and psychological orientations as they relate to political attitudes and behavior.50 While there is no general consensus on the degree to which

47 King Muhammad VI addressed parliament on October 10, 2003 to present the new law, which was then passed with minimal opposition.

48 Sidiqi, Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco, 95.49 M. Margaret Conway, Gertrude A. Steuernagel, and David W. Ahern, Women and

Political Participation: Cultural Change in the Political Arena (Washington, D.C.: Congres-sional Quarterly, Inc., 1997): 20.

50 Sue Rinehart, “Towards Women’s Political Resocialization: Patterns of Predisposition in the Learning of Feminist Attitudes,” in Gender and Socialization to Power and Politics, Rita Mae Kelly, ed. (New York: Th e Haworth Press, 1986); Virginia Sapiro, Th e Political Integration of Women: Roles, Socialization, and Politics (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983).

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 69

fathers infl uence girls’ interest in politics and sense of personal effi cacy, the role of mothers has been seen as more important.51 Kelly’s and Boutilier’s in-depth study of the socialization of political women explains paternal infl uence as limited because it “begins only if girls perceive that an active, egalitarian sex role is feasible.”52 Th at is, a woman must already believe in their own equality to a certain extent before the father’s attitude has a sig-nifi cant infl uence on her politicization. Presley, Weaver, and Weaver con-fi rm this assessment in relation to religiously-infl uenced political attitudes, pointing out that among Mormon and ex-Mormon women, the relation-ship between the political attitudes of mothers and daughters was signifi -cant, while the relationship with fathers was not.53 Howard-Merriam has noted that Kelly’s and Boutilier’s arguments about the socialization of political women place too much emphasis on the role of the mother. She argues that in studying Egyptian political women “the father emerges . . . as equally or more important” than the mother.54 However, she does not cri-tique Kelly’s and Boutilier’s assessment that “the importance of the father resides in his viewing his work as interesting and not simply as necessary to support a family.”55 Th eir argument is that men who view their careers as more than a means to livelihood and family maintenance are more likely to support, or at least accept, the extra-familial activism of their daughters. Furthermore, the daughters of these men are more likely to see education and public activity as legitimate and desirable for reasons other than the need to support a family.56 Th ese explanations neglect the direct infl uence of the father on the daughter as a political being.

51 “Effi cacy” is an important personal capacity that has been defi ned as “the belief that one has suffi cient control over political processes to satisfy the need for control in relevant life areas.” Kelly and Boutilier identify the development of effi cacy as a necessary step in the socialization of political women, as it allows them to see political action as a viable path to altering aspects of their lives. Rita Mae Kelly and Mary Boutilier, Th e Making of Political Women: A Study of Socialization and Role Confl ict (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978): 51.

52 Kelly and Boutilier, Th e Making of Political Women, 212.53 Sharon Presley, Joanne Weaver, and Bradford Weaver, “Traditional and Nontradi-

tional Mormon Women: Political Attitudes and Socialization,” in Gender and Socialization to Power and Politics, Rita Mae Kelly, ed. (New York: Th e Haworth Press, 1986): 65.

54 Kathleen Howard-Merriam, “Egypt’s Other Political Elite,” Th e Western Political Quarterly 34, no. 1 (March 1981): 178.

55 Ibid.56 Kelly and Boutilier downplay the role of the father so much that they do not identify

any direct paternal infl uence as signifi cant to the socialization of political women. For them, the key to a father’s infl uence is simply in his view of his occupation and his view of

70 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

Robert Lane argues that a father infl uences his child’s political socializa-tion in three ways: through direct indoctrination, by placing the child in a particular social context, and through his personal relations with the child.57 All three of these infl uences will fl ow more strongly from the father than from the mother in societies where fathers dominate the household. Suad Joseph explains that in the patriarchal systems found throughout the Middle East, children often “inherit the father’s political affi liation or political patron/client relationships,” drawing not just on his political atti-tudes but on his position within the broader political system.58 Th is direct infl uence is found in other patriarchal societies as well, with the result that the attitudes of men and their presence or absence have a large impact on women’s political socialization. Noting a direct infl uence of father-daughter relations on the socialization of political women in South Korea, Chunghee Soh demonstrates how political women (limited in her study to elected or appointed members of parliament) came almost entirely from families marked either by father absence or unusually nurturing fathers.59 Soh suggests that “nurturant fathers with an egalitarian worldview provide their daughters with ‘anticipatory socialization,’ which engenders in them the attitudinal and behavioral preparation for status shifts,” preparing them to take on non-traditional roles.60 Paternal infl uence on values and ideals is also integral to the socialization of radicals, those who reject established politics and favor systemic change, whether peaceful or violent. Keniston’s study of young radicals in the United States in the seventies concluded that the socialization of radicals did not involve a rejection of parents’ attitudes. In fact, he found that radicals strongly identify with “the side of their fathers that is idealistic, eff ective, and actively principled” and saw their radicalism as a return to their family’s core values.61 While the context for Islamic feminism is clearly diff erent from that of the sixties counter-culture

his wife’s autonomy—to what extent he views himself as the king of his household. Kelly and Boutilier, Th e Making of Political Women, 212.

57 Robert E. Lane, “Fathers and Sons: Foundations of Political Belief,” in Learning About Politics, Roberta S. Sigal, ed. (New York: Random House, 1970): 119.

58 Suad Joseph, “Patriarchy and Development in the Arab World,” Gender and Develop-ment 4, no. 2 (1996): 16.

59 Chunghee Sarah Soh, “Fathers and Daughters: Paternal Infl uence among Korean Women in Politics,” Ethos 21, no. 1 (March 1993): 53–78.

60 Ibid., 69.61 Kenneth Keniston, “Becoming a Radical” in Political Socialization, Edward S. Green-

berg, ed. (New York: Atherton Press, 1970): 122.

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 71

in America, it is evident in the examples to follow that their fathers’ values and beliefs help form the core of Ezzat’s and Yassine’s political worldviews.

When examining the Arab world it is important to underscore a more basic and important observation: in societies where patriarchal structures have continued to give so much formal and informal family control to fathers, the active and against-the-grain support by fathers of their daugh-ters’ education and activism has been critical to the emergence of political women. Alternately, the absence of fathers through death or desertion has provided space for women to advance themselves and promote women’s issues. Al-Lanski has noted, in her study of contemporary Omani women leaders, the dearth of research on women’s experiences in leadership roles in the Arab world and the marginal applicability of research conducted in the West to the experiences of Arab women.62 In Al-Lanski’s study, “all the women interviewed . . . acknowledged their parents or at least one of them, typically, the father to have facilitated an early sense of independence, self confi dence and assertiveness” (emphasis added).63 In addition, the broader political environment has as much of a direct impact on women’s leader-ship as do individual fathers. In Al-Lanski’s study, the majority of women were appointed to their posts by top male political leaders, “which does not necessarily refl ect the dominant male (or even female) ‘mood’ within the Omani socio-cultural environment.”64 Th us, ironically, the advance-ment of individual women may occur within the context of a perpetuated “neopatriarchal” political system that combines modernity with patron-age-based political ties.65

Apart from the family, school is the major socializing agent for children. Schools infl uence children both through “formal quasi-political instruc-tion,” for example in civics education, and through the general school atmosphere, which promotes adherence to authority.66 Discussions of school infl uence frequently focus on how education inculcates standard attitudes towards political systems that facilitate participation and obedience.67 Schools

62 Asya Al-Lanski, “Feminizing Leadership in Arab Societies: the perspectives of Omani female leaders,” Women in Management Review 22, no. 1 (2007): 53.

63 Ibid., 56.64 Ibid., 55.65 Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Th eory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1988).66 Roberta S. Sigel, “Th e School: Introduction,” in Learning About Politics, Roberta S.

Sigal, ed. (New York: Random House, 1970): 312.67 Ibid.

72 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

run by foreigners using foreign languages and curricula in the Arab world represent a unique case for the study of political socialization. Th ere, stu-dents encounter pedagogical systems that emphasize European methods, theories, and political systems—in addition to Western values and superi-ority—while operating on formerly colonized soil. In Egypt and Morocco, as elsewhere in the Arab world, missionary schools were pioneers in pro-viding modern education to both genders, but in particular to young women who lacked access to state-sponsored educational institutions.68 Th e early generations of prominent Arab women in the modern period were almost all educated in schools run by either foreigners or actually located in Europe or the United States.69 Ezzat and Yassine both attended private schools run by Catholics, German and French respectively, although after independence when state education had expanded to include almost all urban women.

Missionary schools in the Middle East and North Africa have a history of working to cultivate European thought and manners as part of a mission civilisatrice, in addition to using education as a way to promote Christian-ity or protect Christian minorities.70 Th ey also became part of the colonial campaign to liberate Arab women. Th e British and others used schools to “lift the veil” from women, fi guratively and literally, and open the way for them as public fi gures.71 Fleishmann has shown how American missionary women in Syria were preoccupied with the “timeless, unchanging oppres-sion of Syrian women,” ignoring broader socio-economic circumstances and political events as well as their own continued subordination within the Western, Christian tradition.72 While missionary women expressed horror at the institution of marriage in the East, the primary goal of most missionary schools was to socialize young women to be “civilized,” which

68 Nikki R. Keddi, “Women in the Middle East since the Rise of Islam,” in Women’s History in Global Perspective, Volume 1, Bonnie G. Smith, ed. (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004): 89.

69 Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, 8–10.70 Jennifer M. Dueck, “Educational Conquest: Schools as a Sphere of Politics in French

Mandate Syria, 1936–1946,” French History 20, no. 4 (2006): 442–459.71 Suad Joseph and Afsaneh Najmabadi, Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures (Bos-

ton: Brill, 2003): 70.72 Ellen L. Fleischmann, “‘Our Moslem Sisters’: women of Greater Syria in the eyes of

American Protestant missionary women,” Islam and Muslim-Christian Relations 9, no. 3 (October 1998): 318.

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 73

in practice meant becoming docile, effi cient, obedient wives.73 Many of the women educated in these schools took advantage of the ideals instilled in them to become educators or professionals themselves and contest the domination of their societies by Europeans, joining the ranks of other Western-educated colonial elites that led movements for independence in various colonies.74

Th e experiences of these elites demonstrated that “school eff ectiveness as a political socializer is dependent not only on what the schools say but on what the schools do.”75 Th at is, the way schools treat students and the way students see their schools in relation to society at large—as sup-portive, subversive, or somewhere in between—makes a diff erence. Rather than establishing desired political attitudes, schools can provoke defi ance. Missionary women who expected to be emulated for their example of the ideal modern women were met with scorn on many occasions, a result that led one woman to lament “the spirit of fanaticism or intolerance” among Muslim women.76 In fact, what they were encountering was a nationalist reaction to the apparent hypocrisy of foreign women, who protested the subjugation of Arab women without critiquing the colonial mission. Some early Arab feminists opened “national schools” for girls to compete with the missionary schools.77 In Egypt, one of the primary goals of the feminist movement from its inception was the creation of national schools and the replacement of foreign administrators with Egyptians.78 Ezzat and Yassine are part of post-independence generations in Egypt and Morocco whose encounters with colonialism were less direct, but the exposure to hypocrisy through their education remained.

In discussing young radicals, Westby and Braungart emphasize the impor-tance of generational changes that manifest themselves in alienation from

73 Eleanor Abdella Doumato, “Receiving the Promised Blessing: missionary refl ections on ‘Ishmael’s (mostly female) descendents’,” Islam and Muslim-Christian Relations 9, no. 3 (October 1998): 331. Missionary women themselves were part of a trend of the profes-sionalization of women within the missionary movement: it was believed that women could most eff ectively proselytize if they did so while providing concrete services like educa-tion and medical care.

74 Roberta S. Sigel, “Th e School: Introduction,” 316.75 Ibid.76 Doumato, “Receiving the Promised Blessing,” 333.77 Judith Tucker and Margaret Lee Meriwether, A Social History of Women and Gender in

the Middle East, (New York: Westview Press, 1999): 106.78 Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, 176.

74 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

basic institutions of socialization including “family, church, and school.”79 Th ey further suggest that “rapid social change may produce more protest than periods of relative tranquility”; broad social context is signifi cant in understanding how certain people become political activists or radicals.80 Ezzat and Yassine both undoubtedly grew up in times of rapid social, economic, and political change. However, rather than feeling strongly alienated from basic institutions in general, both seem to have embraced national and religious identity as a mark of independence from lingering colonialism while holding ambivalent attitudes towards the foreign schools in which they were educated. In both instances radicalization involves alienation, but the critical question is alienation from what. As I explore later, disillusionment with the promises of modernity and secularism are key themes in the development of both women. Th e rest of this paper looks more in depth at the paternal and educational infl uences on the lives and activism of two contemporary Islamist women’s rights activists Heba Raouf Ezzat and Nadia Yassine.

“I Claim Th at I Was Never Oppressed”: Heba Raouf Ezzat

As I argue elsewhere, Ezzat manages to defy most labels one tries to apply, from “Islamic feminist” to “Islamist” itself.81 She dislikes being called an Islamist when the term is applied by Westerners, but inhabits it when she feels Islam is being attacked. She is a staunch advocate of women’s full participation in public life, but disdains the term “feminist.” And she com-bines a liberal, nearly anarchist view of the role of the nation-state with a strong belief in social justice and national resistance to neoliberal globaliza-tion.82 Ezzat advocates a form of social democracy: a strong welfare state without the authoritarian characteristics of the current Egyptian regime. A political theorist by training, her work focuses the concepts of citizenship and secularity, as well as exploration of the role of urban social spaces, includ-

79 David L. Westby and Richard G. Braungart, “Th e Alienation of Generations and Status Politics: Alternative Explanation of Student Political Activism,” in Learning About Politics, Roberta S. Sigal, ed. (New York: Random House, 1970): 477.

80 Ibid.81 Forthcoming.82 Ezzat’s political views are less grounded in specifi c ideas of what kinds of policies an

Islamic state should produce than in the general idea that government that respects the dignity and liberty of human life can—and must, in the Egyptian context—be grounded in theoretical principles and methods of reasoning found in the Islamic tradition.

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 75

ing cyberspace, in politics.83 Ezzat’s unique perspective, a manifestation of the trend of Islamic renewal, has led her to critique both other Islamists and secular activists.

Ezzat grew up in downtown Cairo, within sight of buildings symboliz-ing the varying national, regional, and international infl uences acting on Egyptian society: the imposing Mugamma’ building housing state bureau-crats, the Arab League, the Nile Hilton, and the Egyptian Museum, a warehouse of room after room of ancient Egyptian artifacts. Her early years engendered a fi erce pride in her identity as an Egyptian and a Mus-lim, a trait that later both assisted and tempered her attraction to Islamism.84 Ezzat stated that a strong sense of faith and Muslim identity has been a constant throughout her life. She was raised by a liberal, educated and highly modern father she describes as much more “sportive” than politi-cally active, and a very religious mother who began veiling of her own conviction when it was much less common in Egypt.

Ezzat described her father’s side of the family as urbane, sophisticated, and heavily infl uenced by its Turkish origins. Her grandmother was not veiled, and her grandfather, who wore Western suits with a fez, worked for the Ministry of Education. She recalled seeing a photograph of her father at a young age, dressed in a suit with short pants, standing next to his mother in an elegant European dress. Her own father was also a civil servant; he graduated from a law school and went on to work at the Min-istry of the Interior. Ezzat’s mother had a high school education but had attended a school aimed primarily at preparing young women for their roles as wives and mothers, focusing on home-making skills. Ezzat did not dwell on her mother’s education or role in her own politicization, emphasizing instead the generational diff erences that divided her from her mother:

83 See Heba Raouf Ezzat, “Beyond Methodological Modernism: Towards a Multicul-tural Paradigm Shift in the Social Sciences.” In Global Civil Society 2004/5, Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius and Mary Kaldor, eds. (London: Sage, 2004): 40–58; Heba Raouf Ezzat, “Citizen, Nation, State, and Citizenship: Towards a Modern Islamic Political Th eory,” in Arabic (Cairo: Cairo University, 2007); Heba Raouf Ezzat, “It is Time to Launch a New Women’s Liberation Movement—an Islamic One.” Middle East Report (Nov/Dec 1994): 26–27; Heba Raouf Ezzat, “Secularism, the State, and the Social Bond: Th e Withering Away of the Family.” In Islam and Secularism in the Middle East, Azzam Tamimi and John L. Esposito, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 2000.): 124–137.

84 Heba Raouf Ezzat, interview with the author, 8 June 2008. Unless otherwise cited, all quotations and information on Ezzat’s personal life and background are from my inter-views of June 8, 13 and 19, 2008.

76 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

She was the generation that was brought up in Cairo and she was the fi rst generation to be educated . . . for them high school was enough. Because the second generation, like myself, became educated at the university but the fi rst generation wouldn’t expect it.

Ezzat described an evolving sense of what an appropriate level of education was for a young woman. Whereas for Ezzat attending university was a foregone conclusion, her mother’s lack of a university education was not strange, but merely a reasonable outcome given the social expectations of her own time and circumstances. Th e expectation of university education for Ezzat’s generation is testimony to the success of reformers in making education a priority for women embraced by people on both sides of the ideological struggle over women’s ultimate roles.

While crediting her mother with her religious upbringing, Ezzat was also critical of her mother’s apolitical attitude. She explained that she fre-quently fought with her mother about the latter’s charitable work through a local mosque as head of a zakat committee. Ezzat saw the work as prop-ping up the legitimacy of a corrupt regime—ameliorating the circum-stances of poverty and dependence that the state’s policies created in the fi rst place, easing popular pressure on the regime to reform and act on its promises and responsibilities. Her recollection draws attention to her critical political thinking as compared to her mother’s interest in good works as an acceptable public activity for women.85 Ezzat’s mother was not secluded at home, but neither was she an eff ective role model for the kind of public engagement Ezzat eventually pursued. In contrast, Ezzat attrib-uted to her father the open, engaging worldview that has proven so central to her prominence as a public speaker and commentator:

My mother rooted in me this sense of religiosity, mixed with social responsibility, and my father gave me this liberal, sort of [attitude]—to respect the freedom of others, to take responsibility of my own decisions, to be open to the world, not to have fears . . . so, I owe him a lot. I owe him a lot.

Ezzat went out of her way to credit her father with displaying an unusual dedication to ensuring her academic achievement and exposure to the out-side world—a nurturing instinct that Ezzat counts as a “blessing.” It was

85 Ezzat explicitly cited her mother’s charitable work as the result of public activism that began with hospital volunteer work during the 1973 war with Israel. After the war ended, she kept going: “She didn’t want to go back home doing nothing, you know. She felt like this was a blessing, to be active in society and to be helping those who need her.”

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 77

her father who pushed her to be at the top of her class, and who chose to send her to the German School, which he presumably believed would pro-vide her with more opportunities than an Egyptian state school.86 Ezzat has an older brother but felt that her father gave her special attention:

To say the truth, you know, he actually encouraged me to do things that he did not encourage my brother to do, maybe because he thought [my brother] can do it on his own . . . and he loved his mother, he loved his sister. He was not at all a dominant or a patriarchal parent at all.

When she was just thirteen, her father sent her to Austria to stay with the family of a man he had met while attending a conference. After establish-ing that the family was “a good Christian family,” he encouraged Ezzat to correspond with their two young daughters, and then sent her on her own for a visit. “I claim that I was never oppressed,” she said, citing this event as example of her father’s progressiveness. She further emphasized her father’s liberal infl uence on her attitude by describing an encounter she had with a friend of his, an Egyptian Jew who had moved to the United States rather than immigrate to Israel. Given Ezzat’s fervent anti-Israeli views, she was not keen to meet the man, but found that he turned out to be “very nice.” While Ezzat’s father did not try to indoctrinate her with a particular political attitude, perhaps contributing thereby to her receptiv-ity to Islamist thought, his close relationship with her and his eff orts to expose her to liberal and foreign infl uences clearly shaped her attitudes and sense of personal effi cacy. He consistently worked to give her opportunities and expose her to ideas beyond the realm of most Egyptian women’s expe-riences. She attributed to her father’s infl uence her openness to friendship and to debates with people from all across the political spectrum, within Egypt and internationally.

Ezzat’s father sent her to the Deutsche Schule der Borromäerinnen Kairo (German School), a Catholic missionary school just a few blocks from Cairo’s central Tahrir Square, from Kindergarten through the end of high school. Th ere she grew increasingly frustrated as she experienced the hypocrisy of foreign teachers who claimed to be teaching their students rationality and tolerance while suppressing expression of Islamic identity. An entire class of hers once boycotted a teacher with silence for a week

86 Sending children to private schools is standard for families that can aff ord to do so, given the substandard quality of education in Egyptian state schools at the primary and secondary level. Katulis, Women’s Rights in Focus: Egypt.

78 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

after he snapped that they should be grateful for “the privilege of being taught by Westerners.” As a teenager, Ezzat confronted the nuns and other teachers at the school over her right to wear the hijab, which they sought to prohibit. She recalled:

Why is it a condition if I go to your school that I don’t practice my Islam? You’re prac-ticing your Catholicism, you know? And it sounded very funny because [the headmis-tress] was wearing the same thing that I was wearing, a very Catholic, classic [wimple] . . . and we had the cross in every classroom, so why are you supposed to practice your religion and come and advocate it in my own Islamic country and you are in it—I mean if you are in Germany, I can understand the veil question in Germany, but you had no right to do that here [in Egypt], in the 70s . . . it didn’t sound rational, while they were teaching us rationality.

Th at this confrontation took place on Egyptian soil rankled her above all else. She explained her astonishment that “they were not practicing toler-ance vis-à-vis us in our own country, amazingly,” and her growing aware-ness of the Euro-centrism of the education she was receiving. Asked why she began to wear the veil—becoming one of the fi rst in her school to do so in seventy-fi ve years of its existence—Ezzat commented simply that it was due to her commitment to Islam: “I’m a responsible human being. It’s a requirement, so I did it. Th at’s it.”87 Her father was not a fan of the veil, but neither did he prevent her from wearing it, as the fathers of some of her friends did. Beyond her purely religious reasons, veiling became as much a political act as an expression of piety. “I had to make a point,” Ezzat explained. “I had to construct my identity . . . so every day I was mak-ing the choice [to veil] and feeling the oppression.” Ezzat did not speak of any female role models in particular having infl uenced her positively, though it is probable that the sisters’ attitudes and teachings infl uenced her signifi cantly given her many years at the German school.

Ezzat’s father did voice mild opposition to her nascent Islamist political leanings. At age sixteen, Ezzat fell into Islamist discussion circles through a friend of hers, whose boyfriend had recently joined the Muslim Brother-hood. She began reading the works of Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and other thinkers, and developing a dual consciousness of political reality as she concurrently read the works of German political theorists in school.

87 One of the commonalities among Islamist women activists is acceptance of the veil as an Islamic requirement. Th is is in contrast to more liberal Muslim feminists, many of whom contest the idea that the Qur’an requires veiling.

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 79

Ezzat’s father expressed disagreement with her sentiments but did not try to force her to abandon them:

He did not prevent me from my books or reading this stuff . . . ‘What is this?’ he said, ‘Hasan al-Banna? You’re reading Hasan al-Banna? You know I met him?’ He said, ‘I didn’t like him at all.’ Th at’s it, full stop, and then he left the room. So he used to send messages without enforcing an idea. But the house was not politicized.

Th us, while Ezzat’s father clearly infl uenced her through two of Lane’s three factors, social context and personal relationship, he did not attempt direct indoctrination to a particular political viewpoint. Ezzat took away from her father a liberal ethos and a sense of skepticism about her fellow Islamists that was further compounded by political events. Not long after she began reading Islamic literature, the assassination of President Sadat startled her into what would become a habit of critiquing of the Islamist movement to which she felt she belonged:

I thought [the Muslim Brothers] were too romantic. You know, everything is so romantic, so straightforward. It alerted me to the potential of this development into a more violent, radical Islam. It continued to be a concern of mine. Because I saw no reason to give up what I was believing in. But I saw a reason, a good reason, to refl ect on how it should not develop to become violent.

Th is caution continued when Ezzat began university studies in the presti-gious Faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University. In addition to having a personality ill disposed to joining groups and obeying orders, she was troubled by the discourse coming from the Muslim Broth-erhood’s student groups that diminished the dignity and importance of women. But she would not discard Islamism. “Secularism and separation between my religion and my social life, or my life generally, is unimagi-nable,” she states. “So, the only outcome is that you would fi ght—fi ght for your rights from within.”

“Th e Link of Love, Not a Link of Fear”: Nadia Yassine

At the other end of North Africa, Nadia Yassine has done her utmost to position herself as the voice of her father’s Justice and Spirituality Association (JSA) as well as the face of a peaceful, progressive Islamism.88

88 For the sake of simplicity, I use throughout this paper the acronym of the English

80 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

Charismatic and outspoken with a fl air for the dramatic, she has become a fi xture in Moroccan politics and among Western journalists perplexed and intrigued by the vivacious critic of Moroccan politics and patriarchy. Yas-sine is a former French teacher turned activist and spiritual guide to thou-sands of women; an artist who designs jewelry and may soon publish her fi rst novel; a self-appointed ambassador of peaceful Islam to an anxious West; and the daughter of the most notorious Islamist in Morocco. She has embraced the ideology and political vision of her father, Sheikh Abessalem Yassine, a unique blend of Sufi and Salafi st infl uences.89 Today she pro-claims that her support for democracy is based entirely on Islamic princi-ples, which she insists allows for pluralism and tolerance and would not involve the imposition of her views on others.90 At the same time, she believes that Moroccans must be suffi ciently politicized—their political culture developed—before democratization can occur, and she hopes to play a large role in shaping that culture through her father’s ideology. Sheikh Yassine’s position as a charismatic and idolized leader of the JSA requires that his daughter’s glowing portrayals of him be viewed in the context of his important role; but the way she describes him as a patient and tolerant fi gure, respectful of women, sheds light on her own emer-gence as a prominent political woman.

Yassine grew up in an overtly political household. Sheikh Yassine was a civil servant in the Ministry of Education, a teacher of Arabic and an advo-cate of education reform through the mid-sixties, when he left the minis-try. Nadia Yassine’s religious and political perceptions came primarily from the ideology and pedagogy developed by her father following his break from the Butshishiya Sufi order in the early seventies. Dissatisfi ed with the order’s unwillingness to follow his lead and pursue social and political activism, Sheikh Yassine left the order and began teaching and writing on his own. His 1974 letter to King Hassan II, “Islam or the deluge,” criti-

translation “Justice and Sprituality” to refer to Al Adl wal Ihsan, Yassine’s movement. Th e name is also occasionally translated as Justice and Charity; in French, it is Justice et Bienfaisance.

89 For a detailed account of the development of Yassine’s thought and analysis of its relationship to other strains of Islamist thought, see Henri Lauzière, “Post-Islamism and the Religious Discourse of ‘Abd Al-Salam Yassine.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37 (2005): 241–261.

90 For examples of Nadia Yassine’s political discourse, including essays and interviews, see her website, www.nadiayassine.net (available in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic). See also her book, Toutes Voiles Dehors (Casablanca: Le Fennec, 2003).

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 81

cized the monarch’s rule and in particular his negligence of the Islamic well being of the Moroccan people. Th e missive earned Yassine three years in a mental institution followed by house arrest and continual harassment. Yassine’s mother left when she was 9 years old, for reasons that she did not wish to detail; she was not mentioned in the interviews beyond this fact, and seems to have had minimal impact on Yassine’s development as a polit-ical woman.

Nadia Yassine’s emergence as a female political leader is strongly related to her father’s notoriety, in the obvious sense of her exposure to politics and repression by the Moroccan regime, but also in terms of how her father’s emphasis on teaching, persuasion, and peaceful Islamization led to her embrace of his views. Yassine dates her political consciousness to the writing of “Islam or the deluge”—she was 14 years old at the time—and to her father’s arrest by secret police forces in the middle of the night. But in speaking of her father’s career, Yassine drew particular attention to his role as an educator:

My father was part of the teaching corps after independence and he was among the most brilliant minds, if you will . . . Among the propositions that he presented to the regime [in 1963] was the Montessori Method, which is now very stylish; he was already interested in this method, he did research and read widely and for him this was the ideal pedagogy.

Yassine described her father as an eff ective innovator stymied by the short-sightedness of a corrupt regime uninterested in truly improving educa-tional opportunities for Moroccans. Her narrative consistently contrasts her father’s views and methods with those of the Moroccan regime. He is progressive while the regime is intractable; he is tolerant while it is repres-sive. However, she also works a fi ne line of identifying herself fully with his philosophy and teachings while building herself up as noteworthy for her own eff orts. Yassine’s writings, interviews and speeches refer to her father much less than one might expect. While she might acknowledge that her father is her “spiritual master,” she wants to be taken seriously as a thinker in her own right.91 Her Western education has provided an outlet for just that: Yassine’s book rehashes many of her father’s arguments, ren-dered with reference to almost exclusively Western thinkers rather than

91 Taieb Chadi, “Round the table with Nadia Yassine.” Le Journal Hebdomadaire 238, 7–20 January 2006. nadiayassine.net. http://nadiayassine.net/en/page/10375.htm (accessed February 8, 2008).

82 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

Islamic sources.92 Yassine appears to have taken upon herself the role of cultural interpreter between her father and Western audiences.

In portraying her youth, Yassine painted a picture of her father as a patient guide who respected his daughter’s spirit and intellect. She highlighted her father’s disproportionate infl uence on her spiritual development:

Th e only person who could have infl uenced me was my father . . . Even now, there is no question but that he orients me in one sense or another, and beyond that, he does everything to provoke in you a certain curiosity—for him, it is important that you forge your own opinion. Of course, he inculcated Islamic values in me, but not through fear.

Th e theme of forging one’s own opinion dominates Yassine’s discourse, as she seeks to distance JSA, her father, and herself from any implication of imposing Islam on others, particularly in light of prejudices and fears of Islamists as keen on restricting the rights of less observant individuals. She spoke of her relationship to him as “the link of love, not a link of fear.” Yassine emphasized that her father never pushed her to follow in his foot-steps, though he did—unlike Ezzat’s father—obviously desire that she would see the wisdom of his particular teachings. She was careful to distin-guish her father’s teachings from those of other Islamists, particularly in terms of her personal relations with him:

[Islamism] is not a school of thought, it’s a troublesome reaction. My father has a thought. He has a pedagogy. He had positive attitudes towards me as a woman . . . I lived an Islam that respects women. And which places respect among Islamic values. He accompanied me in my spirituality . . . he had the great wisdom not to impose anything on me.

Yassine did not begin to wear the veil until she was twenty, shortly before she married. At the time, veiling was not common in Morocco, least of all among the educated middle class of which she was a part. She said that her father did not pressure her to wear it. “We talked about it maybe twice,” she recalled, and the message he gave was that she must follow her own curiosity and desire to be a good Muslim to determine the proper course of action.

92 Yassine, Toutes Voiles Dehors. Th e bibliography of the book reads like a syllabus for a course on Western approaches to modernity, secularity, and spirituality. Among the few Muslim thinkers Yassine does reference are her father, Tariq Ramadan, Ibn Khaldun, and Zakia Daoud.

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 83

Indeed, Yassine credited her spirituality and commitment to Islam to her father’s tolerance and emphasis on persuasion rather than command—to the point that without his guidance, she might have recoiled from the extremes of other Islamists and abandoned the faith altogether. “I loved Islam because I loved my father,” she said. “My father is a very honest per-son, my father is a very credible person, he has never lied to me, he has never beaten me.” She insisted her father’s emphasis was always on loving God, rather than on worrying about following the minutiae of orthodox Islamic practice to the letter. Once in Marrakech, when Yassine was a teen-ager, she saw her father coming home from the mosque with a few Salafi s who had “a certain image of women.” Yassine, riding her motorbike in jean shorts with her head uncovered, did not want to create problems for her father with the bearded men, so she pretended not to know him. In our interviews, Yassine was keen to portray her father as a saintly fi gure, always benevolent, moderate, and holy in his actions. She recalled that he later scolded her for fearing to be herself in front of those with whom she dis-agreed:

Every evening, I had very important discussions with my father. I went into his offi ce [to discuss] my daily life, and he asked me why I had pretended not to know him. I told him I did not want to embarrass him. He told me to never think like that, fi rst of all because people need to know that you can be from the same family without having the same ideas and, spiritually speaking, you are making human calculations, you are positioning yourself in relation to human beings, when you should be positioning yourself in relation to God.

Th is same attitude marks Yassine’s responses to frequent queries about what sort of social and political goals the JSA would have if ever in power. Asked by a reporter if they would shut down nightclubs, she did not explic-itly outline what the group’s position would be, but commented that “the most important things for us are free choice and education; these are two basic concepts of Islam that we want to revive. Th e great challenge then is to leave bars, night clubs and casinos open, but that nobody will go to them.”93 Yassine’s father thus infl uenced her with regard to all three of Lane’s methods of socialization: direct indoctrination, social context, and personal relations. Th e latter was probably most important, as she herself emphasized.

93 Ibid.

84 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

In recalling her schooling, Yassine described both her defi ance of West-ern racism and her willingness to debate and discuss opposing views. She attended French mission schools in Casablanca and Rabat, including the Lycée Descartes in Rabat, studied ballet and piano, and attending her father’s Sufi circles. She studied Arabic and Islamic subjects with her father, who was conscious of the challenges of maintaining his children’s spiritual-ity while they attended secular schools. She, like Ezzat, entered into con-frontations with teachers she recalled as being “a little bit racist.” Yassine recalled one instructor in particular: “He was extremely racist . . . he disliked all that was Moroccan, so I really decided to challenge him. I bought a white djellaba with very fl ashy red decorations and a Berber scarf that I put on, not to veil [religiously] but for the provocation.” When she came into school in her proud national costume, the teacher told her the outfi t was ridiculous, to which she responded that the tie he wore was ridiculous. Another profes-sor amused himself in class by mocking the Qur’an. Yassine and a friend responded by walking out of class. “I had a very clear identity, even though I wore jeans. But it was not yet a spiritual claim,” Yassine explained. Islam was a mark of diff erence from the Christians in her class, but Yassine’s defense of it was not yet related to a deep sense of spiritual devotion.

At the same time she confronted the racism of some of her French teach-ers, Yassine generally recalled her school years with fondness and an appre-ciation for the openness engendered by her interaction with the Catholic fathers and sisters and her frequently non-Muslim, non-Moroccan col-leagues. Her acts of defi ance were “a political revolt” rather than “rejection of the other”; in our conversations she brought up her numerous Jewish friends and emphasized that she loved most of her classmates and teachers. Yassine used to sit for hours with one Father Luc, whose Catholic cate-chism class she attended a few times. He fascinated her because he was so passionate about his work and his faith, such that despite a fi fty-year age diff erence and strong diff erences of opinion, they got on splendidly, although she suspected he was trying to convert her. Yassine contrasted her exposure to individuals of diff erent backgrounds at a young age to the experiences of the many young women she met at university in Fez, who she described as “uncultured” and largely ignorant. Like Ezzat, Yassine took pride in her broad knowledge, much of which was gained through her education at the French schools, and saw her deeper understanding of Western history and culture as a benefi t in her eff orts to argue against uncritical Westernization. Apart from Father Luc, she did not mention any instructors as having been memorably infl uential on her growth, although

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 85

she did admit that the environment likely fostered her strong personality and conviction about women’s rights.

Yassine explicitly linked her impulse from a young age to “present Islam and [Moroccan] culture in another way” in school to her current focus on presentation of Islam and the ideology and work of JSA to outsiders, espe-cially Westerners. Her openness to interviews is well known and her web-site, nadiayassine.net, is available in Arabic, English, French and Spanish. It is impossible to determine how much of Yassine’s remembrances have in fact adjusted to fi t this desired narrative. Nevertheless, this particular mode of education infl uenced Yassine’s politicization. Yassine emphasized her French mission school education as the starting point of both her revolt against Western snobbery and her practice of dialogue and engagement with others. Engagement with that curriculum in that environment, her engagement with Father Luc as a role model, and the infl uences on her spirituality and sense of Moroccan and Muslim identity at home helped forge her particular political consciousness.

Fathers, Schools, and the Turn to Political Islam

What emerges from these in-depth discussions with Ezzat and Yassine is the crucial infl uence of their fathers as supportive of their education and political awareness, and how this combined with the cross-cultural encoun-ters in foreign schools to shape their self-perception and worldview. To be sure, these were not the only infl uences playing on their lives and the development of their unique personalities. Ezzat was also greatly infl u-enced by her mother’s religiosity and by the accident of being drawn into Islamist circles at a young age. In similar fashion, Yassine cannot be under-stood outside the context of her father’s spiritual and political develop-ment and prominence. His arrest occurred when she was still quite young. Her mother’s absence and her status as the family’s oldest child also cer-tainly impacted her development. Neither woman can be viewed indepen-dently of the broader social and political changes taking place in their respective countries as they were growing up. Yet even if these women would have become who they are today without the same schooling and paternal infl uences, these are the factors to which each woman pointed as particularly important in their own memories.

Th e centrality of paternal infl uence and schooling points to some larger issues in studies of Islamic feminism and women’s rights in the Middle

86 C. Barnett / HAWWA 7 (2009) 57–87

East and North Africa that deserve further attention. First is the vitally important role of male attitudes towards women’s education and participa-tion. In a context where male authority is assumed, the presence of a nur-turing father or lack thereof can make or break the development of female political and social consciousness and a sense of personal effi cacy. Western-oriented studies that relegate paternal infl uence on political women to sec-ondary status ignore the fact that the women considered in those studies exist within social systems that already assumed a certain level of female competence and independence and do not assign absolute household authority to the father. It is possible for strongly patriarchal systems to stunt women’s personal effi cacy entirely. In these contexts, nurturing or absent fathers may be required for female leaders and women’s rights activ-ists to emerge.

While this observation speaks to the necessity of changing male atti-tudes to support women’s rights, the examples of Ezzat and Yassine also demonstrate that a nurturing and encouraging father will not necessarily produce a daughter with a liberal, pro-Western worldview. Women may be educated activists for religious, socially conservative causes. Ezzat and Yassine could also represent two diff erent models for the development of the Islamist political woman: one whose father was a liberal intellectual opposed to such trends, and another at the forefront of Islamism who was deeply concerned with his daughter’s spiritual and political development. Th e issue of education further complicates the picture, because both women had extensive exposure to Western liberal history and thought, a cultural tradition that in the modern period has more unequivocally supported women’s full equality, although this was perhaps tempered by the Catholic nature of their schools.94 More light on this issue could be shed through investigation into the political perspectives of more young women who attended such schools, or of the comparative educational backgrounds of Islamist women.

Neither woman can be viewed as rejecting wholesale the lessons of the Western experience. Rather, their identity is constructed as a reaction to the Western hegemonic culture they encountered, accepting certain aspects of this culture and rejecting others. Whereas one reaction in the Arab world to the mission civilisatrice of the colonizing powers was “a return to

94 Elsewhere in my interviews with Ezzat and Yassine, both women stated frankly that they acknowledge the situation of women in their respective countries to be very desperate—which is why both see the need for reform of attitudes towards women and reinterpretation of religious sources to support women’s public participation.

Th e Socialization of Female Islamists: Paternal and Educational Infl uence 87

land and to religion” that strengthened the patriarchal family, Ezzat and Yassine simultaneously reject the racism of colonialism and other Islamists’ reactionary embrace of traditionalism.95 Th e ideas and skills to which each woman was exposed remain points of pride, and both built on their experi-ences in their work and activism. At the same time, both women stressed that they encountered patronizing and racist attitudes in their Western schools that they found oppressive of their national and religious identity. Th ese experiences highlighted for them the hypocrisy of a Western tradi-tion that did not practice its own glorifi ed teachings on liberalism and tolerance, and contributed to each woman’s openness to Islamist attitudes and politics. Still, Ezzat and Yassine did not reject their educational back-grounds. Th ey chose to use the language and theories of the West against itself in support of their alternative interpretations, just as they have used the language of Islamic renewal and reinterpretation to root their pro-woman perspectives in a discourse not easily dismissed as being of Western origin.

Th is is not to claim that Ezzat and Yassine have drawn on Islamic sources only out of a desire to protect their public legitimacy and cultural authen-ticity; genuine belief in the primacy of Islamic sources for women’s libera-tion seems to motivate both. But given that their extensive and mixed experiences with Western education make it nearly impossible to untangle the infl uences underpinning each woman’s perspective, it is important to acknowledge the role their fathers’ attitudes and Western schooling played. Th eir fathers were unusually encouraging in regard to their daughters’ edu-cation, critical refl ection, and activism, building on changes brought about by the eff orts of earlier reformers who pioneered educational opportunities for women and spoke up for women’s role in the public sphere. Ezzat, Yas-sine, and other women’s rights activists—Islamist, secular, or somewhere in between—represent the culmination of early feminist changes in the Arab world. At the same time, the Western intellectual tradition to which each woman was heavily exposed was conveyed in a context that under-mined its attractiveness. Disenchanted with a supposedly rational, tolerant mode of thought that seemed marred by hypocrisy and irrationalism, each woman looked elsewhere for a fulfi lling political and social ideology. Th e result—attraction to and propagation of Islamist viewpoints—belies assumptions about the eff ects of Western education and motivations of women’s rights activism.

95 Moghadam, Modernizing Women, 83.

To order and for more information e-mail brill@turpin-distribution.com

or cs@brillusa.com (for customers in the Americas).

ON

LI

NE

JO

UR

NA

LS Electronic Access to your Journal

at no extra chargeBrill is pleased to announce that you - as an institutional subscriber to the printed version of this journal - can access the electronic version - including all back fi les - at no extra cost.

How to gain access to Brill’s online journals

InstitutionsYou can go to the URL as given in this issue or to brill.nl and search/browse for the title of your journal in the search bar.

Before you can access online journals you need to register with Ingenta fi rst (at www.ingentaconnect.com/register/institutional).

Please click ‘register’ and fi ll out the registration form. You will need to fi ll out your IP-address range(s) or your User-ID and Password. After completion of this form you will get an IngentaConnect registration ID and you will see your IP address range(s). Now you can activate your subscription(s) by logging in to activate institutional and fi ll out the institutional activation form, including your CU-prefi xed Customer Number. This number can be found on the address label, which is sent with your issue(s), on the (renewal) invoice (listed as “ship-to”), or you may ask your subscription agent to supply you with your Brill customer number. Please click ‘enable access’ to complete the process. On your screen you will see a list of the journals you have electronic access to.

Our Journals are hosted by Ingenta and are available via a number of journal agents