Int. J. Middle East Stud. 41 (2009), 83–103.

Printed in the United States of America

doi:10.1017/S0020743808090132

Lila Abu-Lughod

D I A L E C T S O F W O M E N ’S E M P O W E R M E N T : T H E
I N T E R N AT I O N A L C I R C U I T R Y O F T H E A R A B
H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T R E P O R T 20051

The ethical and political dilemmas posed by the construction and international circulation
of discourses on women’s rights in the Middle East are formidable. The plight of
“Muslim women” has long occupied a special place in the Western political imagination,
whether in colonial officials’ dedication to saving them from barbaric practices or de-
velopment projects devoted to empowering them. In the past fifteen years or so, through
a series of international conferences and the efforts of feminist activists, women’s rights
have come to be framed successfully as universal human rights. Building on the U.N.
conferences on women that started in 1975 and led to other initiatives, the appropriate
arena of women’s rights work has been redefined from the national to the international.
It is ironic that this achievement may be shoring up arguments for foreign interven-
tions that have complex and sometimes dangerous consequences for women in various
societies in the Muslim world. Is there a way to make the case for the rights and
empowerment of women in the Middle East or the Muslim world in ways that do not
become grounds for arguments about the “clash of civilizations” and their associated
political, economic, and military agendas? What are the regional consequences of the
new internationalism of women’s rights?2 Finally, must this transnationalism dictate the
language in which rights are framed today?
These large questions that should interest any scholar of the Middle East lend a
particular cast to regional efforts to address women’s rights and status. The Arab Human
Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World represents
an extraordinary contemporary effort by Arab intellectuals and activists to assess the
problems women face in this region and to articulate a vision for a better future.3 This
essay will address three problems with this landmark report as a means of reflecting on
a broader set of questions about the international circulation of political discourses on
women’s rights and empowerment in the early 21st century. As an anthropologist who
has done ethnographic research over the past thirty years in a number of communities
in one Arab country (Egypt)4 and as a scholar interested in the way feminism works in
an international sphere, both historically and in the present, I responded to this report
with a mix of admiration and disappointment: admiration for its ambition, intentions,

Lila Abu-Lughod is William B. Ransford Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies in the Department
of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, N.Y.; e-mail: la310@columbia.edu

© 2009 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/09 $15.00

84 Lila Abu-Lughod

and serious commitment to the betterment of women’s lives and opportunities in the
region, and disappointment in the political limitations of the intellectual framework and
language it used and in the prejudices that shape its analyses of women’s everyday lives.5
In her multisited ethnographic study of the U.N.-based transnational movement in
the 1990s against gender violence, Sally Engle Merry argues persuasively that the
international language of women’s human rights is cultural—it is forged in the deterrito-
rialized social contexts of international meetings where documents are produced, and it
reflects the values of a secular global modernity, undergirded by concepts of autonomy,
individualism, and equality.6 Her study of the production and application of general
U.N. instruments such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimi-
nation against Women (CEDAW) and the platforms of the international conferences on
women (e.g., Beijing Platform, Beijing Plus Five) reveals that the social networks and
international bodies through which the dominant liberal definition of women’s rights is
promoted have given what I call a “dialect” of rights the status of what Asad calls a
“strong language,” one into which others must be translated.7
This dialect, I argue, is indeed that used in the AHDR 2005, even though the report
is directed at governments and civil society in only one region and was produced
by intellectuals, social scientists, and development experts from the region. It is thus
conceived of primarily as an internal document for the “imagined community” of Arab
nations, although its cosmopolitan authors, sponsorship by the U.N. Development Pro-
gramme (UNDP), and generic similarity to other human development reports give it an
inevitable international context.8 My reading of the AHDR 2005 on women examines
how a particular international or transnational dialect, with its attendant assumptions
and politics, has come to have currency among elites in the Arab region, leading to a
particular—and to an anthropologist like me, problematic—framing of Arab women’s
issues. Knowing nothing yet about the process involved in producing the document,
including the debates, negotiations, and pressures that led to the final text, I confine my
reading to the textual.9
In many ways, the report is commendable. It is rich with information and includes
a number of excellent chapters or subsections. As with any document of collective
authorship, the AHDR 2005 is written in multiple and sometimes contradictory voices,
so no summary can do it justice. My critiques of particular sections do not apply to
others. Among the report’s noteworthy overall strengths are that it strategically links the
advancement of women to that of men and of society as a whole; argues for important
legal and political reforms; paints an optimistic picture of a widely desired future;
condemns particularly egregious violations of women’s rights, such as the abuse of
international domestic workers; and draws attention to some of the hardest struggles
local women face. Their health needs are particularly pressing, but the report also
describes unflinchingly the inordinate burdens imposed on women by the absence of
security and the prevalence of violence and surveillance in the region, whether due to
the Israeli occupation in Palestine, the U.S. and British occupation of Iraq, the “war on
terror,” or the authoritarianism of local regimes that crush political opposition.
Recognizing much value in the report, I turn now to more troubling aspects of the
framing and findings, organizing the analysis around three basic questions. First, a report
like this enters a politically charged and historically particular international context of
global inequality and hostility. Does it lend itself, then, to being appropriated in negative
 Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 85

ways? Is this something that should concern the report writers and sponsors? Second,
as an anthropologist who has worked closely with women in rural communities, I was
uncomfortable with what seemed to be a cosmopolitan or urban middle-class perspective
on women’s lives, aspirations, and everyday conditions. How does this perspective affect
the report’s analyses and prescriptions? Third, how might the report’s reliance on a
particular international language of women’s rights and the dominant political paradigms
this dialect indexes—whether modernization, human development, or (neo)liberalism—
on the one hand color its representation of modern Arab societies and history? On the
other hand, how might it foreclose certain understandings of women’s problems in the
region, which in turn affect the solutions proposed?

E N T E R IN G A N IN T E R N AT IO N A L F IE L D

The AHDR 2005 enters a predetermined world context. Parts of the report are astute in
noting the external context in which pressures for reform and women’s empowerment
have become a focus in the Arab world and noting the influence of Western ideas
about women’s liberation and Orientalist representations of the region.10 Both in its
construction and its effects, however, the AHDR 2005 has been taken up as evidence
of the pathology of Arab gender culture, just as its predecessor reports were eagerly
seized upon by an international community as confirmation of the backwardness of the
Arab world.11 Even though the report gestures occasionally to the widespread nature
of gender discrimination and inequality, its exclusive focus on the Arab world and
the absence of a systematically comparative perspective create the distinct impression
that the situation for women in the Arab world, a homogenized group, is uniquely
bad.
Yet feminist scholars and activists in various parts of the world are concerned about
problems similar to those detailed in the report: domestic violence, epidemics of diabetes
and obesity, low representation of women in government, absence of leadership in the
corporate world, and discrimination in the workplace. Sixteen percent of representatives
in the U.S. Congress are women, a figure not so radically different from the percentages
in certain countries of the Arab world.12 The report aggregates the figures to conclude that
only ten percent of parliamentary representatives are women, but it neither distinguishes
among countries nor points out that the number is higher in countries such as Tunisia and
Iraq than it is in the United States.13 By continually pointing to gender inequalities in the
Arab world without offering a comparative perspective, the AHDR 2005 subliminally
reinforces the presumption that gender equity has been achieved elsewhere.
Is the situation in the Arab world particularly miserable? On some indices, like labor,
this might seem to be the case, even compared to other “developing” nations. However,
critics of statistical indices and development reports in general have shown that we
need in every case to examine closely the way figures were calculated and the skewing
generated by averaging together statistics from countries with vast disparities in wealth,
welfare, forms of government, and population.
To their credit, the report’s writers are aware of the density of foreign concern with
Arab women’s issues. The report also tries to anticipate local accusations about foreign
meddling and hostile attempts to discredit the project of women’s empowerment by
labeling it culturally inauthentic. It rightly states that “an enforced anatomic separation
86 Lila Abu-Lughod

between what is deemed local and what is deemed foreign is no longer possible in this
age.”14 It credits the global discourse about women with helping “Arab women’s efforts
to bring laws and national legislative initiatives into line with universal objectives” as
well as providing “support and backing through networking.”15 Yet such observations
do not absolve us of the responsibility of examining the implications of the long history
of “Western” interest in “Eastern” women. The perspective and politics embedded in the
report’s project of fostering a new “Arab renaissance”—based on the 19th-century Arab
renaissance, described as “positively influenced by the best human accomplishments of
the prevailing Western civilization”16 —alert us to the inescapable imbrication of cultural
or civilizational discourse and women’s rights in the Arab world.
The AHDR 2005 in fact contributes strongly to civilizational discourse by attributing
a significant role to Arab and Islamic culture in its diagnosis of gender inequality. In the
executive summary on “Levels of Well Being,” for instance, six paragraphs are devoted
to violence against women as part of “the impairment of personal liberty,” and yet only
a single, short paragraph considers the relationship between the spread of poverty and
the political, economic, and social disempowerment of women.17 The sensationalist
standbys of honor killings and female genital operations get mention in this section too,
reinforcing the impression that “traditional” or “cultural” pathologies are rife in this part
of the world. As feminist scholars have recently shown, there is a powerful transnational
feminist discourse about the antagonism between culture and rights that ossifies culture,
ignores history and politics, and contributes to the “othering” of distant or minority
groups.18 In focusing so heavily on culture while failing to be comparative and critical,
this report follows that pattern—and thus produces an Arab world that is the negative
foil for an enlightened and allegedly noncultural modern West.
The paradox here is that the very existence of the report contributes to a negative
representation of the position of Arab women even while it indexes the influence and
intellectual strength of professional Arab women and feminists. About what other region
of the world would a whole report, many years in the making and employing some of
its best minds, be devoted to women’s rights as one of the major problems facing
the region, alongside deficits of knowledge, freedom, and good governance? Yet how
does the empirical excess of a weighty report reinforce the idea that the Arab world
is a place peculiarly deficient in terms of women’s lives? Women in other parts of the
world surely face considerable problems as well, some of which are far less prevalent
in the Arab world: sex trafficking, sweatshop exploitation, HIV/AIDS, eating disorders,
substance abuse, famine, the feminization of poverty, and violence, both domestic and
genocidal.
Just one year earlier, another major survey of the (dire) status of women in the Middle
East was published—again, with no counterpart for other world regions: “Women’s
Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Citizenship and Justice,” a 2005 report
sponsored by Freedom House, the neoconservative U.S. organization.19 These reports
exist alongside recent reports by the World Bank (which, thanks to the dedicated work of
feminists, has made gender central to its efforts and thus has produced reports on gender
issues for many other regions as well). There seems to be an unfortunate convergence
between feminist concerns, regional and foreign, and a larger political and ideological
agenda for the region. The AHDR 2005 falls into that awkward nexus, whatever the
intentions and political loyalties of its authors.
 Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 87

Many parts of the report are detailed, thoughtful, politically courageous, and impor-
tant. However, the content is different from the overall effect, given that most people
will not read the report carefully and that there already exists a geopolitical and cultural
climate for any discussion of the Middle East. It is inevitable, given this context, that
whatever the motivations of the report’s contributors—and one presumes that these are
to encourage an Arab audience to undertake social and political reform—the AHDR
2005 will be appropriated internationally to affirm prevailing stereotypes of Arab and
Muslim women as oppressed and suffering from a uniquely patriarchal social order. We
need only look at Time magazine’s coverage of the launch of the report in its 7 December
2006 issue. The headline reads, “What’s Holding Back Arab Women?” It is telling that
this article on a report about empowering women in the Arab world is accompanied
by a photograph of black-clad Iranian women in school. The image of the oppressed
undifferentiated Muslim woman overdetermines the Western reception of the report.

D IS TA N C E F R O M T H E E V E R Y D AY

If the politics of representation in an international field place the AHDR 2005 in an

awkward position, the politics of class and the position of the cosmopolitan Arab in-
tellectuals who worked on the report account for some problems in its content. The
second part of my critique stems from my long-term involvement in particular subaltern
communities in the Arab world. What can an anthropologist’s ethnographic knowledge
of life on the ground in a number of particular communities tell us about the three keys
to women’s empowerment the report proposes: education, employment, and individual
rights?
Adely analyzes elsewhere the way the report misrepresents the status of women’s
access to education in the Arab world.20 From my own fieldwork over the past fifteen
years or so in an Upper Egyptian village, it is clear that it is not lack of access to
education but the poor quality of public education that is so problematic for girls, just as
it is for boys.21 This poor quality and the burdensome expenses associated with it are the
results of economic policies that devalue state provision of social welfare and services,
not of gender discrimination.
Infusing many parts of the report are prejudices common to a fragment of the Arab
intelligentsia who came of age in the eras of modernization and developmentalism. They
view education as the answer to overcoming backwardness and consider women’s edu-
cation a key to emancipation and individualism.22 They confuse literacy with creativity
and knowledge, like the high school educated bedouin girl I write about in Writing
Women’s Worlds23 who had come to denigrate the extraordinary skills and knowledge
that her unschooled mothers and aunts had in weaving, tent making, animal husbandry,
or poetry. Like the urban, professional Egyptian television writers and researchers I
discuss in Dramas of Nationhood,24 they are patronizing toward those who are “lacking
in awareness”; they see themselves—the educated intelligentsia—as enlightened leaders
whose duty it is to bring the masses out of darkness. According to the AHDR 2005, the
heroes and heroines who are to lead Arab societies to a positive future are novelists,
filmmakers, media producers, lawyers, and feminists.
The devaluation of those who are not educated is pervasive. In one particularly
disturbing passage, nonschooled bedouin and rural girls in marginal communities are
88 Lila Abu-Lughod

described as follows: “They are unable to read or write and thus express themselves—
and have never heard of their human rights. This erodes their very human status.”25 The
many articulate, creative, witty, and sharp uneducated women I have known in rural
Egypt (granted living in less dire circumstances than those deplored in the report for
the poorest and most marginal groups)—women who are creative poets and storytellers,
astute moral reasoners, energetic participants in their community’s social and political
affairs, and quick to bristle at infringements of their customary or religious rights—would
be surprised to hear that they or their daughters are less than human.
After education, employment is the second key to the rise of women in the Arab
world, according to the AHDR 2005. Both for liberal feminists and for those pushing
for the human capabilities approach (the framework adopted for much of the report),
employment is considered crucial for women’s advancement and capacity to live a good
life. Again, both from the work of critical feminist economists and my experience in
one Egyptian village, we have reason to ask if the report is out of touch with daily
realities for many in the Arab world. U.S. feminist scholarship has questioned work
for wages as a panacea. Feminist economists have argued that we need to measure
women’s economic contribution differently (and the AHDR 2005 concurs).26 Everyone
agrees that economic resources under women’s control are critical to their standing, but
employment, as Panda and Agarwal have shown, is not the same thing as property or
control of economic resources.27
The fantasy about the magical value of work for women is a middle-class one—it
presumes that jobs are well paid and fulfilling (as they may be, for the most part, for
professionals, despite the nearly universal double burden women carry, with housework
and child care remaining largely their responsibility). However, one must ask if work
that is badly paid, back breaking, exploitative, or boring liberates women. If employers
or families do not provide childcare, is it economically viable for women to work? If the
wages are low, are the cost of transport, the absence of women’s labor in maintaining
the household, and vulnerability to harassment worth it? These are basic questions that
can be asked about the Arab world, and everywhere, without even introducing more
radical feminist critiques of the way caring work is devalued in the segregated labor
market such that, for example, someone in the United States who parks cars in a garage
is paid more than a daycare worker.28 Which form of labor requires more skills? Whose
responsibilities are more serious?
In relation to women’s employment in the Arab world, one of the most interesting
studies is Homa Hoodfar’s ethnography of the urban poor in Cairo, based on fieldwork
in the late 1980s. In Between Marriage and the Market, she argues persuasively that
it makes economic sense for women in this community to want to be “housewives.”29
With the erosion of wages in the public sector associated with neoliberal reform, women
cannot cover the costs of transportation, childcare, and housekeeping with their wages.
They realize that they have more autonomy at home than in the workplace. It makes
economic sense because the household depends so much on “saving money,” not just
earning it. Women save money by standing in line to get cheaper goods, dealing with
the bureaucracy to get state benefits and subsidies, and working on social ties and trust,
both essential for participating in local credit associations, getting help and support with
various problems, and even for marriage arrangements. Moreover, staying at home allows
women to engage in petty trade, sewing, or raising chickens and rabbits to supplement
 Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 89

household income. It is an added bonus, Hoodfar argues, that staying at home contributes
to the appearance of conforming to conservative gender ideals, something that might
enhance family status. In other words, Hoodfar shows that the impediments to women’s
wage work, at least among the urban poor in this one Arab country, are not cultural
but economic. Others who have studied women’s labor participation in the Middle East
and noted its rapid increase in both the formal and informal economies under Islamic
regimes argue that for explanations one must turn to economic crisis and a precedent in
political mobilization, not to Islam or cultural factors.30
From my recent fieldwork, I agree that both the motives for working before marriage
and for giving up work after marriage are economic, the cultural obstacles gotten around
fairly easily through a variety of strategies of dress and movement. Girls in the Upper
Egyptian village in which I have been working have in the past decade and a half been
finishing high school and even regularly going on to institutes, colleges, or universities.
In the past ten years, some have even begun wanting and getting jobs. They might work
in an office or a small shop, or, in this area, for the Antiquities Organization, the largest
local employer; they might run literacy classes or, if very fortunate, get teaching positions
in local schools. Their monthly wage ranges from 80 to 200 Egyptian pounds, U.S. $14–
40 per month—not much, especially with prices skyrocketing, Egyptian currency losing
value, and government subsidies being removed. The girls are working to help pay for
their wedding trousseaus. It is difficult for these young women to work after marriage,
though, especially once they have children. Who would prepare family meals? Who
would care for the children? Who would raise livestock as insurance against illness or
big expenses, not to mention providing milk and cheese? Who would boost household
income through raising poultry?
Employment is not by its nature liberating. It must be of a certain quality to provide
economic independence, to allow women to contribute adequately to the household, or
to enhance women’s dignity and self-respect. The cultural norms against women moving
about in public may be one factor holding them back from employment, but these norms
are not decisive. More crucial, ethnographic examples suggest, are the nature of the
labor market and women’s opportunities within it.
The third key to “the rise of women” in the Arab world proposed by the AHDR 2005
is differentiation from family. This would indeed be a major social and cultural shift, one
whose roots in a common cosmopolitan language of development and rights, I argue,
are particularly clear. Although occasionally praising women’s special contributions as
mothers, the report represents the strength of familial ties as especially detrimental to
women. In the chapter on social structures, the “traditional” tribal kinship system is
condemned as “enshrining” male dominance.
The report’s assessment here of the family is both ideological and ahistorical. One
can see the workings of specific cultural values when the text deplores “the absence
of a clear dividing line between the personal and the familial”31 and states that the
weakest element of society, meaning women, do not enjoy rights as individuals per se.32
In this condemnation of tribe and family, the AHDR 2005 echoes the Western liberal
assumptions made explicit and universalized by philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has
attempted to define a good or flourishing life in terms of human capabilities that social
policy should foster.33 One key to a good life, she argues, is “being able to live one’s own
life and nobody else’s. This means having certain guarantees of noninterference with
90 Lila Abu-Lughod

certain choices that are especially personal and definitive of selfhood, such as choices
regarding marriage, childbearing, sexual expression, speech, and employment.”34
One can also see the ahistoricism in this chapter of the report, which strangely
attributes contemporary family dynamics and control over women to a timeless Arab
origin and then follows with the story of the introduction of Islam. Most sophisticated
social analysts who write about gender and family look instead to transformations over
the centuries, especially in the 20th century, to consider the rise and fall of empires,
the impact of colonialism or capitalist agriculture and industrialization, the gender-
ing of nationalism, the requirements of state-building projects, and the entailments of
globalization.
At the heart of any good analysis of “the Arab family” should be crucial differences of
class, as well as attention to the 20th-century histories of the different Arab states—their
economies and ideologies of development, the kinds of accommodations they made with
factions in the sphere of family law. Such dynamics are well studied by comparativists
like Mounira Charrad for the North African states of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.35
Furthermore, as an anthropologist who has worked with a contemporary “tribal” society,
the Awlad –Ali Bedouin in Egypt, I question whether strong family ties are more of a
problem for women than for men and whether, indeed, individualism should be enshrined
as the ultimate value.36 In that community in the 1980s, men did not more clearly draw
a line between the personal and the familial than women. Recent visits suggest this is
still the case, whether in terms of elections or social relations.
This section of the report fails to appreciate the strong positive sentiments people
in most communities in the Arab world (and perhaps elsewhere) have toward their
families, even when belonging to families places constraints on them. It also ignores the
economic necessity of joint family enterprises and the realities of household economies
where many contribute toward the sustenance of the family. Moreover, it is blind to
the possibility that families might be, for good and ill, the very structures within which
individuals conceive of themselves and realize themselves as individuals. Kamran Asdar
Ali’s study of state family planning in Egypt gives good evidence of how development
discourse seeks to individualize its women subjects, misrecognizing the more relational
bases of women’s selfhood and decision making, whether family based or religious.37
Suad Joseph has explored not just the weaknesses but also the strengths of what she calls
the “relational selves” fostered in Arab society.38 Many people, in the Arab world and
elsewhere, view as morally abhorrent the atomization of individuals and loss of family
support associated with advanced capitalism and the West—the very individualism that
is idealized by liberals and the AHDR 2005.
The patriarchal family has its problems, as a large and sophisticated feminist literature
has explored. Yet it is not clear that “individualization” automatically enables women
to realize equality or personal fulfillment. Theorizing about the dark side of the lib-
eral value of individualism under capitalism from Engels on to Zaretsky, or about the
rise of disciplinary society, as described by Foucault, Donzelot, or Balibar, suggests
that we be more cautious in our optimism.39 The persistence of gender inequality and
gender violence in the modern West, where individual women in some classes are
indeed detached from family and individualized, attests to a more complex process.
Any serious assessment of the role of family for women in the Arab world must ap-
preciate the positive significance of family even for all those who negotiate, contest,
 Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 91

“bargain,”40 and indeed sometimes suffer with particular restrictions because of family
ties.
The unambiguous devaluation of family and valorization of the individual in this report
are in line with urban, professional middle-class values and experiences, in confluence
with liberal feminist discourse. This stance reveals the dominance in the report, as
among this class, of the ideology of modernization. As several decades of critique have
shown, the modernization paradigm that equates progress with cultural change toward
secular, modern individualism is shot through with values. It is insufficiently attentive to
the dynamism of culture and religion, the complexities of hegemony, and the profound
impact of historical transformation. A language dominant in Euro-America and among
national elites around the Third World can thus be seen as dictating many of the ideals and
recommendations of the AHDR 2005, whether about education, employment, or family.
This language—or dialect, as I prefer to call it—has also structured the judgments such
educated elites make about what they caricature as the social relations and cultural forms
of rural and other “less enlightened” subjects.

T H E P O L IT IC A L D IA L E C T O F (N E O )L IB E R A L IS M

This brings us to the final aspect of the AHDR 2005 that must be addressed: the political
dialect it deploys. In much of the report (although not all), one can detect the tell-tale
international vocabulary of the liberal human development or capabilities framework41
alongside the neoliberal economic framework to which the concept of human devel-
opment sought to be a moderate corrective. It is not the international character of the
“strong language” that is problematic: I am not arguing for use of an authentic “native”
language—there is no such thing. However, the particular hegemonic language used for
the report has serious consequences not only for the ways in which it frames problems,
but also the ways in which it proposes solutions.
Using this transnational dialect leads the AHDR 2005 to proffer largely cultural and
reformist political solutions, never radical political or economic solutions. The report
pushes for a strong civil society and for legal reform, treating law as “an instrument
and expression of culture.”42 It argues that “women’s capacities are held back by a
number of cultural and social factors”43 and thus calls for attitudinal change: through
more enlightened interpretations of Islam, better socialization and schooling, reform of
family law, and the development of “a culture of equal treatment and respect for human
rights” in the judiciary.44 The report advocates redistributing power in favor of civil
society; it says little about redistributing wealth. Its main silences, however, are about
collective action and the strongest sociopolitical trend in the region: the religious revival.
The liberal language of human development and the neoliberal discourses of structural
adjustment and global markets define priorities and possibilities in this report. One finds
calls for “social safety nets” rather than, say, projects of land reform. One finds passages
in which the report hedges on whether the erosion of the public sector has led to
gains in women’s participation in economic activity. Presumably as a consequence of
disagreements among those involved in putting the report together, it concludes lamely,
“Views differ. . . . ”45 Although structural adjustment is recognized not to have been
accompanied by growth in the private-sector’s capacity to generate jobs for women,
92 Lila Abu-Lughod

the language used to describe the growth of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as

a “safety net” fails to ask whether they can indeed provide the same support for the
marginal that a state welfare system can for citizens. The AHDR 2005 simply reports,
“NGOs expanded significantly and were encouraged to fill the gap, especially with
regard to the provision of social services and economic assistance.”46
Although social justice and income redistribution are mentioned from time to time,
there does not seem to be any corresponding rethinking of economic practices and pol-
icy regarding redistribution, wealth inequality, property, the market, production, poverty,
social welfare, and the labor market, all of which fundamentally affect women. In other
words, there is no hint of a marginalized but reemerging international language whose vo-
cabulary includes exploitation, underdevelopment, injustice, or revolution and no ques-
tioning of priorities such as military spending, Western investment, export economies,
profligate consumerism, or international debt.
What ideas are offered for combating “income poverty”? The report anemically
suggests “income-generating projects that target families with school-age children.”47
To advocate development and the human-capabilities approach is to leave the forces of
global capital largely unquestioned, even though the report does note some of their worst
entailments, such as the creation of new corrupt financial elites who have “harvested the
greater part of countries’ assets.”48
Furthermore, the liberal language of political reform dominates. The 2005 report, like
the previous three Arab human development reports, calls for “good governance.” This
is hardly a controversial ideal. It also calls for freedom—an important value but also an
impossibly loaded term that carries heavy ideological baggage, whether in antiterrorist
or anti-Communist rhetoric. As Bayat notes, its association with development comes
from Amartya Sen, who links it to “expanding choice”—part of a neoliberal dialect.49
In privileging development, the report aligns itself with gradual change and national
efforts. Yet the report is suffused with the characteristic neoliberal lack of faith in the
state and refusal to strengthen the public sector. For instance, the report suggests at one
point that a response to the poor level of education in the Arab world is to “possibly”
develop “an educational system that is strong, nongovernmental, and not for profit as
a rival to government education.”50 It is not clear why the report does not demand that
governments invest in public education, given that all the countries in the developed world
have governmental or state educational systems, albeit sometimes more decentralized
and censored in more subtle ways than in many Arab countries.
The liberal refusal to look to the state for gains in the empowerment of women is most
apparent in one sleight of hand in the report. In Chapter 6, “Culture,” the report skips over
one the most crucial periods in modern Arab history for women’s access to education,
the labor market, the political sphere, and legal rights—the keys, according to other parts
of the report, to women’s empowerment.51 In a potted history of the stages of awareness
about women’s issues in Arab society, this chapter begins with a period in which there was
a “realization of difference”; this is described as the early part of the 20th-century Arab
renaissance, in which “reform-minded political and intellectual elites recognized that
European societies had specific features that accounted for their strength and progress,”
among them ideas about women’s advancement.52 The narrative then inexplicably jumps
to the 1970s, leaving out the whole period of independence, national consolidation, and
state building in most Arab countries. The period from the 1970s on is characterized
 Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 93

positively as the period when “development” and “human development” became the
reigning paradigm for Arab governments and when international women’s conferences
and regional meetings leading up to them highlighted the need to do something about
gender inequality.53
This history ignores precisely what feminist analyses of state building in the region
have noted for Iraq, Yemen, or Egypt.54 Suad Joseph has shown how as part of its
state-building strategy, the Iraqi elite focused on women in the 1970s because of the
need for labor and the desire to win the allegiance of the population away from kinship
and ethnic ties. The ruling Ba–th Party thus set up programs to mobilize women into
state-controlled agencies and unions,55 to socialize them politically through enhancing
educational access and literacy, to reform personal status laws to be more favorable to
women, and to extend services to working women, including on-site child care, free
transportation, and free health care.56 In a similar vein, in socialist South Yemen in the
1970s and 1980s, fairly radical legal rights were extended to women by the state in line
with a Marxist ideology of promoting gender equality.57 In Egypt, it was under Nasser’s
“Arab socialism” in the 1950s and 1960s that mass education, health care, land reform,
tenancy protection, and access to the labor market were introduced, giving women major
new citizenship rights, even at the cost, as Bier and others suggest, of a loss of “political
autonomy” and with no real challenge to the family.58 State feminism has been rightly
criticized for undermining the autonomy of independent women’s groups, but its legal,
political, and economic contributions to changing the lives of women can hardly be
disputed.
I must interject that the chapter on the Arab women’s movement is much more accurate
and detailed. It gives due credit to the women pioneers at the turn of the 20th century and
acknowledges the projects of state feminism when, after national independence, women’s
unions were incorporated into the ruling political parties and where national development
and needs for both labor and literacy led to expanding women’s opportunities, despite
residual understandings of women as primarily reproductive.59 In this middle period
from the 1950s to the 1970s, there was a quantum leap in consciousness about and
sympathy for women’s issues and rights.60 Other parts of the report that promote the
human development approach ignore this period, however, and surely do so because of
the way it would challenge the reigning paradigm and the language of liberalism.
When mention is made of the gains for women through state efforts, the report
immediately invokes the flaws, mostly in the form of popular resistance to reforms. If
the report were truly interested in and aligned with the popular, however, it would be more
sympathetic to Islamism, as will be discussed. That these elites, however visionary, may
be out of touch with the women they seek to benefit is apparent in their findings regarding
CEDAW, which is foregrounded in the report as an international convention ratified by
all the Arab states that should serve as a template and ideal for national legislation.61 The
AHDR 2005 includes a chart based on the public-opinion poll conducted for the report
in which it seems only eight percent of the respondents surveyed in the four countries
covered (Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan) said they were aware of CEDAW. Of
those who knew about it, only half approved of its implementation in their country.
Which returns us to the most vexing issue—how a strong international language
with its base in the West, a language largely confined to an educated, professional,
cosmopolitan class that cannot imagine other ways of expressing humanity, getting
94 Lila Abu-Lughod

rights, and living a good life, affects the local construction of women’s needs, rights,
and empowerment. In the first section, I alluded to the troubling intersection between
imperial and feminist interests. The report, too, is properly suspicious of the political
objectives of dominant world powers and externally initiated reform initiatives.62 It
charges that regimes that gain legitimacy from foreign support have made women’s
empowerment a priority as a “democratic façade” and have appointed elite women to
public positions as “window dressing for the regime.”63 This the report links especially to
the post-9/11 period, “when a perceptible concentration of interest in women appeared”
in the West.64
Nevertheless, the report insists that women’s movements in the Arab world have
been forged in relation to and can only work in equal partnership with the transnational
women’s movement. “Specifically,” it notes, “there is collaboration, largely beneficial,
between the struggle for women’s emancipation in the Arab countries as a liberating
orientation in Arab society and women’s movements around the world, including in
the West. The efforts of international organizations are of special importance in this
respect especially with regard to the agreements, resolutions, mechanisms and inter-
national activities aimed at protecting women’s rights and equal treatment.”65 Indeed,
Arab feminists have participated in international meetings sponsored by the U.N., from
Mexico City to Beijing, just as they had attended international congresses in the first
half of the 20th century. They have sought to institutionalize the recommendations
hammered out in international forums. When the conclusion of the report calls for
empowerment and overcoming “the legacy of backwardness” by “eliminating all forms
of discrimination against women in Arab society,” it admits freely that the borrowing
here of exact language from CEDAW “is not accidental.” It is meant as “a reminder
that this national objective is, at the same time, an international objective that humanity
as a whole seeks to achieve. It is also an Arab commitment towards the international
community.”66
Partnership with an international women’s movement is very different from imperial
imposition. There are two problems with this alliance, however. First, insofar as the
international language is associated with development, the path local feminists have
taken on the ground is “NGO-ization.” This has produced, in post-Oslo Palestine, for
example, a “globalized elite” that Hanafi and Tabar characterize as urban, profession-
alized, politically moderate, and informed by global agendas.67 This elite favors a
strategic feminist agenda geared toward equity rather than a practical one dedicated to
the mundane needs of everyday women; such needs were met by the now marginalized
“traditional” charitable societies. Islah Jad, a co-author of the AHDR 2005, argues further
that the professionalization of those working on behalf of women has led to competition,
hierarchies, a privileging of those who can interface with donors, and short-term projects
that involve imported and apolitical tools like training workshops. Lost is the passionate
voluntarism of political mobilization or commitment to grassroots collective action.68
Second, the problem with this alliance is that it leads Arab women to partake in the
framing of women’s problems in one particular way, a way that echoes the classic liberal
feminist formulation opposing allegedly universal standards and local religio-cultural
norms: “how to deal with certain conflicts between international standards on the one
hand and religious and cultural beliefs on the other.”69 This reductive framing has been
criticized from many quarters, especially for its implicit construction of international
 Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 95

standards as somehow acultural or universal and for its reification and freezing of the
religions and cultures of minorities and non-Westerners.70 The educated and socially
concerned intellectuals who wrote the background papers and the final report are, in
the end, part of an international community that uses a moderate, liberal language that
opposes traditional culture to modern enlightenment, religious conservatism to secular
progressiveness, and patriarchal culture to women’s rights.
The final recommendations of the report rely on this dialect. Besides enhancing
employment opportunities and implementing legal reforms, one of three major recom-
mendations is ending violence against women. The genealogy of the campaign against
violence against women is an interesting one.71 Taking off in the 1990s, the campaign
quickly gained ground, new language being written into international documents and
special rapporteurs appointed.72 Critics have pointed out how this framing worked
especially well in overcoming North/South divisions that had plagued the international
women’s movement—but at a price. Kapur, for example, has charged that it constructed
Third World women as universal victim subjects.73 The antiviolence campaign also
focused attention on the personal or domestic sphere and on gender relations rather
than on international inequalities, conflicts, and global forces. In the context of this
regional report, which rarely alludes to comparable problems in the rest of the world,
the heavy focus on violence and issues of personal liberty suggest not just the “legacy
of backwardness,” but also the workings of a brutal masculinity to which Arab women
are particularly subject. It may be hard to guard against such a reading given the strong
contemporary association in the West of Arabs with violence and terror.
Highlighting such culturally marked forms of violence against women as honor crimes
and female-genital cutting, although important, distracts us from the major forms of vi-
olence that women in the Arab world suffer, whether in Palestine, Lebanon, or Iraq.
Moreover, the acceptance of such categories that are charged loci of transnational con-
cern leaves uninterrogated the ways such categories are applied to complex realities
in different settings and under different historical and political conditions, how they
have been publicized and put into commercial circulation, and how discussions of them
are structured by key binaries (tradition/modernity and civilized feminist enlighten-
ment/uncivilized backward patriarchy) that have organized a century of discussions of
Muslim societies, both for reformists within and critics outside.74
Honor crimes constitute an especially interesting locus for thinking about the transna-
tional circulation of discourses on women’s rights because, as Lama Abu-Odeh notes,
the struggles against such crimes have allied local activists and activists involved in
international human rights organizations; the language they use has “trafficked” back
and forth so that it is impossible to disentangle the “Muslim” and “Western.”75 This
language, like the adjacent languages of human development and neoliberal political
economy, has wide international currency, but it is not the only political currency with
value in the Arab world. If the language of safety nets and the private sector, of judicial
and legislative reform, and of civil society and democracy has silenced, in this report,
a Marxist language of class conflict and anti-imperialism, a nationalist language of
development and underdevelopment, and the languages of land reform, state-sponsored
enterprises, and welfare, or even popular resistance, as Hasso notes, the transnational
feminist language deliberately borrowed from CEDAW and other documents as part of
the “partnership” has crowded out both a more broadly political approach to violence
96 Lila Abu-Lughod

and an alternative language of women’s rights that has been emerging across the Muslim
world, including the Arab countries.76 I turn to this now.
In keeping with the culture of the cosmopolitan Arab intelligentsia, the report writers
promote a largely secular vision. The AHDR 2005 devotes only ten substantive pages to
religion in the report. Yet the two sections—one on the Islamic religious heritage77 and
the other on Islamist positions on women—carry the most contradictory voices in the
whole report.78 The section on “the traditional religious heritage,” although defending
Islam as a rich source for basic human principles, follows a strong feminist tradition that
has emerged since the 1970s insisting that “the spirit” has been lost through patriarchal
interpretations of the Qur»an. Gender inequality has come with the codification of Islamic
jurisprudence.79 Concluding that the “customs and requirements” of the past will not
satisfy the contemporary age, the report presents the potentially controversial argument
that “turning to international laws that eliminate all forms of discrimination between
men and women in no way contradicts religious belief, since these laws are closer to
the spirit of the religious texts.”80 An explanation for this half-hearted accommodation
of Islam that recommends “independent interpretation” is found on page 223, where the
report admits that “forcing the public to choose between international standards and their
own religious beliefs and cultural traditions will create an insurmountable obstacle.”
As noted previously, the report generally posits a conflict between religion as now
practiced and international standards of women’s rights; in this, the report echoes liberal
feminist thinkers who have constructed religion as an impediment to gender equality.81
Three alternative ways of thinking about Islam and women’s lives are ignored. First, the
report nowhere reflects the lively debates in the scholarship on the Muslim world about
whether Islam and feminism are incompatible and whether, in fact, there is or could
be such a thing as Islamic feminism.82 This body of work includes explorations of the
textual sources and forms of authority that could be mobilized to argue for women’s
rights. (Related projects and NGOs devoted to women’s equity and rights within Islamic
frameworks are actually now enjoying foreign funding).83 Second, other scholars have
asked historical questions about the ways feminism has been linked to the projects
of modernity in the Middle East, thus excluding religious women and producing the
polarizations that exist today.84
Third, there are those who look closely at the historical contexts and political im-
pacts of Islamist women’s movements, whether conceived as compatible with Western
feminism, as represented in the Iranian journal Zanan,85 or fundamentally different,
as with the “gender jihad” advocated by Lebanese Hizbollah women86 or Egyptian
Islamists’ challenge to the simple value of equality or the ideal of freedom.87 Even
those working in one Arab country are stunned by the complexity of feminist positions:
Karam distinguishes among secular, Islamist, and Muslim feminists88 and shows the
vast variety of feminist positions in Egypt; Hatem discusses distinctive feminist voices
that do not polarize East and West, working either from within religious premises or
analyzing the historical importance of such premises to early feminist debates in Egypt.89
Jad has analyzed shifts in the gender ideology of Hamas in Palestine since the 1990s due
to the evolving power of Islamist women seeking to make space for themselves. This
is a process, she argues, that in turn cannot be understood without acknowledging the
irreversibility of previous achievements and the constant pressuring by secular feminists
in Palestine. The important point, though, is the dynamism of the process.90
 Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 97

These scholarly approaches suggest that we need to think not only about how reli-
giously based arguments for women’s rights might be structured differently from those
of secular feminism, but also about how imbricated they are in a world produced by a
century of debate and developments on the ground. None of the exciting scholarship on
these matters is reflected in the report, which instead presents a static and narrow vision
of the relationship between Islam and women’s rights.
The five-page section on Islamist women is the only part of the report that begins
from the premise that a religious life and politics might be important and desirable for
women and men. Instead of the general multicentury view of superseded Islamic heritage
offered in the other section on religion, or the characterization in the otherwise nuanced
chapter on the women’s movement that the influence of the Islamic revival “resonated
with traditionalists in Arab society”91 and contributed to a “retreat in legal regulations
formulated to serve women’s interests,”92 this section focuses squarely on Islamism in the
contemporary period as an important political trend with various strands, only some of
which are considered positive for “the rise of women.” Here a negative and rigid Salafism
(which confines women to the domestic sphere, reproduction, and motherhood, although
under pressure has recently engaged them in some militancy) is contrasted with a much
more positive Muslim Brotherhood, which, according to the report, “adopts a principled
position in support of women’s political rights” and fosters independent interpretation.93
Reliant on the distinctive position of the outspoken Egyptian intellectual Heba Raouf
Ezzat, the report offers a bold synthesis of the liberal political language of democracy
and civil society and an Islamist conception of a desirable Islamic society. The report
here advocates “escape from the constraints of the ‘Islamic-secular’ dichotomy” and
challenges Islamists “to develop an Islamic alternative that can coexist with differing
or opposing trends and advance women’s position forcefully in discourse and practice
not as a result of, but as one of the conditions for, building the Islamic society that they
desire.”94
Although groundbreaking in relation to earlier Arab human development reports,
this inclusion of discussion of the Islamic trend is limited—not only by its normative
and formalistic contrast between Salafis and Muslim Brothers and by the absence of the
complexities feminist scholars have been exploring but also finally by the absence of any
serious consideration of everyday religiosity among women in the region. In the opening,
the document’s tone is somewhat sympathetic and inviting to new interpretations, as if
recognizing the inevitable appeal and probable political success of Islamist politics;
in other places, though, it is more hostile, sometimes interpreting Islamism positively
and sometimes as a setback for women’s rights. One presumes this reflects strong and
irresolvable differences among the authors. In general, the alternative language of Islamic
piety that has a great deal of currency among ordinary women across the Arab world is
dismissed because the intelligentsia involved in the AHDR 2005 are so staunchly secular.
The fact that for a majority of nonelite Muslim women across the Arab world being a
good Muslim is a moral ideal or that their dignity as humans and women has a good
deal to do with their sense of themselves as good Muslims—whatever they think of
formal groups or political Islam—is given no weight at all. Based on my own research,
I suggest that the report’s ambivalence about religion (and its unqualified endorsement
of feminism) will find no more popular favor today than did the state socialist reforms
whose demise the report attributes to “popular resistance.”
98 Lila Abu-Lughod

C O N C L U S IO N

This analysis of the AHDR 2005 opens by noting that the international circulation
of discourses on Middle Eastern and Muslim women poses complex dilemmas for
those who are concerned about these women’s lives. The report, which promotes some
courageous and politically worthy goals that threaten the status quo in many Arab regimes
and challenge some foreign interventions, is nevertheless caught up in a specific set of
international institutions and networks and deploys a particular transnational language,
with problematic implications and uncertain effects.
In painting a negative picture of women’s rights and lives in the Middle East that
attributes shortcomings primarily to cultural and religious factors, the report does little
to combat the “pathologizing” of Middle Eastern cultures so rife in the international
arena. It thus lends itself to being appropriated—despite its best intentions—to affirm
the backwardness of the region. The reformist document, much like Qasim Amin’s
tract on women’s emancipation a century ago, may find itself fodder for antipathetic
projects.95 It is not clear how one can avoid such appropriations, but a more comparative
perspective on women’s rights issues as well as a more global analysis of the forces that
affect women locally might go some way toward subverting such appropriations.
Another aspect of the report that compromises its potential impact is the way it
reflects so strongly the values and experiences of the urban, professional middle class.
These intersect with liberal feminism. The representations of women’s lives and the
solutions offered are based on particular assumptions about what constitutes progress and
modernity, both considered good. In advocating education, employment, and separation
from family as keys to women’s advancement, the report reproduces the ideology of
modernization, in turn confirming the superiority of middle-class values. It mentions
quality in education and employment and the economics of both only in passing; it does
not dwell on the downsides of poor education and waged labor. The report does not even
consider the possibility that being formed by family systems might be economically
necessary and emotionally positive. In failing to recognize the circumstances of the
urban and rural poor and in denigrating alternative values they hold in their everyday
lives, the report weakens its claims to solidarity with women in the Arab world and
renders somewhat unrealistic its recommendations.
Finally, the report’s liberal framework and language, borrowed from the world of
international human rights, transnational feminism, and human development, may lead
to its marginalization within the Arab world. By completely sidelining the vibrant
contemporary alternative language of political economy and imperialism and by giving
little space to social movements or collective resistance and struggles over power, the
report eschews radical solutions. By slighting a religious language, the report forfeits the
wide popularity that attaches to an Islamic vision today. From a more serious standpoint,
this framework limits the kinds of solutions offered, with moderate and gradual reform
seen as the only option.
Will the international liberal political discourse of the AHDR 2005 undermine its
advocacy of women’s rights, or is this the only viable language for arguing for women’s
rights and advancement? These are the tough questions facing anyone concerned with
“the rise of women in the Arab world” and the relationship between transnational and
local feminisms.
 Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 99

NOTES

Author’s Note: I am grateful to Soraya Altorki, Lisa Anderson, Sheila Carapico, Christine Dennaoui, and
four perceptive IJMES reviewers for extremely helpful comments; to my feminist reading group for their
general encouragement and their dissatisfaction with an early version; to the Center for Contemporary Arab
Studies at Georgetown for giving me the first occasion to present these ideas; to Toni Sethi for encouraging
me to organize a forum on the AHDR 2005 at Columbia University; to Frances Hasso, Fida Adely, and Azza
Karam for graciously participating in it; to Maryum Saifee, Page Jackson, and Vina Tran at the Institute for
Research on Women and Gender and the Middle East Institute for their help; and to Mona Soleiman for
research assistance. A fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies gave me time to work on
this article, which is part of a larger research project on Muslim women’s rights in an international frame that
I have been pursuing as a 2007 Carnegie Scholar. The statements made and views expressed here are solely
the responsibility of the author.
1 United Nations Development Programme, Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of

Women in the Arab World (New York: Regional Bureau of Arab States, cosponsored with the Arab Fund for
Economic and Social Development and the Arab Gulf Programme for United Nations Organizations, 2006).
Please see the overview in this issue. Lila Abu-Lughod, Frances S. Hasso, and Fida J. Adely contributed to
the following background note.
The AHDR 2005, published online in Arabic and English in December 2006, is the last volume in a four-part
series focused on development in Arab-identified states and territories. A research and policy document as well
as visionary political statement, this 230-page report (plus eighty pages of charts, statistics, and references)
was produced over several years through the research, writing, and editing of over seventy-five individuals
from the Arab world, including some of its most prominent social researchers and feminists.
In the 1980s, after a decades-long emphasis on economic growth as the primary engine for development, a
number of prominent economists and development practitioners heralded a new era in the conceptualization
of development as primarily a human endeavor with improved life chances and quality of life as the proper
end. Thus was coined the term “human development,” followed by subsequent efforts to delineate the essential
dimensions of human development and the appropriate measures of a development endeavor that no longer
had “growth” (and, more narrowly, increased income) as its primary indicator but now sought to measure
human ends, capabilities, and opportunities. The global human development report, launched by the UNDP in
1990, put forth new measures in the form of a human development index for capturing this vision. This initial
report was followed annually by a new global human development report, each new release grappling with
a new dimension of human development, with topics ranging from gender to democracy to technology and
human rights. The UNDP’s Human Development Report Office maintains a website (http://hdr.undp.org/) with
information about the global reports as well as national human development reports that have been developed
by select countries.
The AHDRs were produced under the auspices of and governed by the UNDP. The first, the ADHR 2002,
presents and comparatively analyzes various indicators in Arab states and highlights three major “deficits”
hindering human development that are addressed in depth in the volumes that follow: “Building a Knowledge
Society” (2003), “Towards Freedom in the Arab World” (2004), and “Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab
World” (2005).
2 The long history of internationalism in Arab women’s movements has been studied by many. For Egypt

see, for example, Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), and Cynthia Nelson, “Satyagraha: Ghandi’s Influence on
an Egyptian Feminist,” in Pioneering Feminist Anthropology in Egypt, ed. Martina Rieker, Cairo Papers in
Social Science 28 (2005): 119–34. Also see the special issue on “Early Twentieth Century Middle Eastern
Feminisms, Nationalisms, and Transnationalisms,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (2008).
3 UNDP, AHDR 2005.
4 Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, Calif.: University

of California Press, 1986/2000); Writing Women’s Worlds (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,
1993/2008); Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005).
5 For more on these questions, see Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity

in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); “Do Muslim Women Really Need
Saving?” American Anthropologist 104 (2002): 783–90; “The Debate about Gender, Religion, and Rights:
100 Lila Abu-Lughod

Thoughts of a Middle East Anthropologist,” Publication of the Modern Language Association 121 (2006):
1621–30; and “The Scandal of Honor Crimes” (unpublished manuscript).
6 Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 102, 177.

7 Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” in Writing Culture,

ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986): 141–64.
8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community (London: Verso, 1991).
9 I intend to research the process of making the report for a future study. Moreover, I have consulted only

the English version thus far.

10 AHDR 2005, 102.
11 For an excellent example of the way such negative portrayals picked up by the Western press need to be

interrogated, see Eugene Rogan’s “exercise in systematic doubt” about the way an earlier AHDR used the
state of Arab publishing and translating to index a knowledge deficit. Eugene Rogan, “Arab Books and Human
Development,” Arab Studies Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2004): 67–79.
12 Center for American Women and Politics: Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers, the State University of

New Jersey, http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu (accessed 17 August 2007).

13 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 96.
14 Ibid., 6.
15 Ibid., 131.
16 Ibid., 6.
17 Ibid., 10.
18 Abu-Lughod, “The Debate About Gender” and Writing Women’s Worlds; Wendy Brown, Regulating

Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Multiculturalism and Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2006); Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence; Leti Volpp, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior,” Yale
Journal of Law & the Humanities 12 (2000): 89–116; Leti Volpp, “Feminism Versus Multiculturalism,”
Columbia Law Review 101 (2001): 1181–218.
19 Freedom House, “Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Citizenship and Justice,” 14 Oc-

tober 2005, http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=383&report=56 (accessed 9 October 2007).

20 Fida J. Adely, “Educating Women for Development: The Arab Human Development Report 2005 and the

Problem with Women’s Choices,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 105–122 (this
issue).
21 For elaboration, see Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood, chap. 3.
22 For more on the link between women’s education and ideals of modernity, see, among others, Afsaneh

Najmabadi, “Educating the Iranian Housewife,” in Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women; Marilyn Booth, May Her
Likes Be Multiplied (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001).
23 Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds, 205–42.
24 Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood, 81–108.
25 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 119.
26 Ibid., 65.
27 Pradeep Panda and Bina Agarwal, “Marital Violence, Human Development and Women’s Property Status

in India,” World Development 33 (2005): 823–50.

28 For example, see Joan Williams, Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do

About It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

29 Homa Hoodfar, Between Marriage and the Market (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997).
30 Roksana Bahramitash, “Myths and Realities of the Impact of Political Islam on Women,” Development

in Practice 14 (2004): 508–20.

31 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 167.
32 Ibid., 168.
33 Martha Nussbaum, “Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings,” in Women, Culture, and Development:

A Study of Human Capabilities, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995), 61–104.
34 Ibid., 85.
35 Mounira Charrad, States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco

(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001).

36 See Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments and “The Scandal of Honor Crimes.”
 Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 101
37 Kamran Asdar Ali, Planning the Family in Egypt (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2002).
38 Suad Joseph, ed., Intimate Selving in Arab Families: Gender, Self, Identity (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse
University Press, 1999).
39 Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997); Friedrich

Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, rev. ed. (New York: International Publishers,
1972); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977) and The History of Sexuality: An
Introduction (New York: Random House, 1978); Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (New
York: Harper and Row, 1978).
40 Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender and Society 2 (1988): 274–90.
41 Nussbaum and Glover, Women Culture and Development.
42 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 179.
43 Ibid., 230.
44 Ibid., 225.
45 Ibid., 92.
46 Ibid., 60.
47 Ibid. The report suggests that the Arab world needs to “support economic growth” (p. 225), but its main

critique of the region is only that it is “dominated by rentier economies” (p. 20).
48 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 168.
49 Asef Bayat, “Transforming the Arab World: The Arab Human Development Report and the Politics of

Change,” Development and Change 36 (2005): 1225–237.

50 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 229.
51 Ibid., 143–62.
52 Ibid., 149.
53 Ibid., 152.
54 Suad Joseph, “Elite Strategies for State Building,” and Maxine Molyneux, “The Law, the State and

Socialist Policies with Regard to Women: The Case of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen,” in
Women, Islam, and the State, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1991); Mervat
Hatem, “Economic and Political Liberalization in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism,” International
Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (1992): 231–51.
55 Joseph, “Elite Strategies for State Building,” 179.
56 See also Nadje Al-Ali, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (London: Zed Books, 2007).
57 Molyneux, “The Law, the State, and Socialist Policies.”
58 Laura Bier, “From Mothers of the Nation to Daughters of the State: Gender, Citizenship and the Politics

of Inclusion in Egypt, 1945–1967” (PhD diss., New York University, 2006). For a study of the 19th- and early
20th-century role of familial politics in the development of modern Egypt, see Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the
Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt 1805–1923 (Berkeley, Calif.:
University of California Press, 2005).
59 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 124.
60 Ibid., 126.
61 The report calls for “extensive legal and institutional changes aimed at bringing national legislation in

line with CEDAW.” UNDP, AHDR 2005, 22.

62 Ibid., 61.
63 Ibid., 65, 213.
64 Ibid., 212.
65 Ibid., 61.
66 Ibid., 226.
67 Sari Hanafi and Linda Tabar, The Emergence of a Palestinian Globalized Elite: Donors, International

Organizations and Local NGOs (Jerusalem: Institute of Palestine Studies and Muwatin, Palestinian Institute
for the Study of Democracy, 2005).
68 Islah Jad, “The NGO-isation of Arab Women’s Movements,” International Development Studies Bulletin

35, no. 4 (2004): 34–42.

69 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 222.
70 Abu-Lughod, “The Debate about Gender, Religion, and Rights”; Merry, Human Rights and Gender

Violence; Volpp, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior” and “Feminism Versus Multiculuralism.”
71 Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence.
102 Lila Abu-Lughod
72 Jane Conners, “United Nations Approaches to ‘Crimes of Honour,’ ” in “Honour”: Crimes, Paradigms,
and Violence against Women, ed. Lynn Welchmann and Sara Hossain (London: Zed Books, 2005), 22–41;
Arvonne Fraser, “Becoming Human: the Origins and Development of Women’s Human Rights,” in Women,
Gender and Human Rights, ed. Marjorie Agosin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001),
15–64.
73 Ratna Kapur, “The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the ‘Native’ Subject in

International/Post-colonial Feminist Legal Politics,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 15 (2002): 1–37.
74 Abu-Lughod, “The Scandal of Honor Crimes.”
75 Lama Abu-Odeh, “Honor: Crimes of,” in Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Leiden: E. J.

Brill, 2005), 225. This is so especially in immigrant contexts, even when—as Volpp’s unraveling of the strange
case of Tina Isa in 1989 in New Jersey reveals and Katherine Ewing’s book on Turkish immigrants to Germany
describes—the actual motives for particular incidents may be other than cultural or honor based. See Leti
Volpp, “Disappearing Acts: On Gendered Violence, Pathological Cultures, and Civil Society,” Publication of
the Modern Language Association 121 (2006): 1631–638; Katherine Ewing, Stolen Honor (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2008).
76 Frances S. Hasso, “Empowering Governmentalities rather than Women: The Arab Human Development

Report 2005 and Western Development Logics,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009):
63–82 (this issue).
77 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 143–47.
78 Ibid., 208–12.
79 For a range of approaches, see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, Conn.: Yale

University Press, 1992); Azizah Al-Hibri, “Muslim Women’s Rights in the Global Village,” Journal of Law
and Religion 37 (2000–2001): 37–66; Judith Tucker, In the House of the Law (Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 2000).
80 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 147.
81 Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,

1999).
82 For an important discussion of human rights and shari–a, see Naz Modirzadeh, “Taking Islamic Law

Seriously: INGOs and the Battle for Muslim Hearts and Minds,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 19 (2006):
191–233.
83 For examples of the approach, see Asma Barlas, “Globalizing Equality: Muslim Women, Theology,

and Feminism,” and Zainah Anwar, “Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Women’s Rights,” in On Shifting
Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era, ed. F. Nouraie-Simone (New York: Feminist Press, 2005):
91–110, 233–47; Azizah Al-Hibri, “Deconstructing Patriarchal Jurisprudence in Islamic Law” in Global
Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader, ed. Angela Davis (New York: New York University Press,
2000), 221–30. For projects, consider the Malaysian NGO Sisters in Islam, which has support from the
National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Institute for Peace, while the ambitious new Women’s
Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity has support from everything from the Global Fund for Women
to major foundations including Ford, Luce, and Ms, http://www.asmasociety.org/wise/ (accessed 22 February
2008).
84 Afsaneh Najmabadi, “(Un)Veiling Feminism,” Social Text 64 (2000): 29–45.
85 Najmabadi, “Feminism in an Islamic Republic,” in Islam, Gender, and Social Change, ed. Yvonne Haddad

and John Esposito (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 59–79.

86 Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi–i Lebanon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton

University Press, 2006).

87 Heba Raouf Ezzat, “Political Reflections on the Question of Equality,” in Islam and Equality: Debating the

Future of Women’s and Minority Rights in the Middle East and North Africa (New York: Lawyers Committee
for Human Rights, 1999): 175–84, appendix II; Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2005).
88 Azza Karam, Women, Islamisms and the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
89 Mervat Hatem discusses the writings of Omaima Abou Bakr and Hoda Elsadda in “In the Eye of the

Storm: Islamic Societies and Muslim Women in Globalization Discourses,” Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26 (2006): 22–35.
90 Islah Jad, “Between Religion and Secularism: Islamist Women of Hamas,” in On Shifting Ground, 172–98.
91 UNDP, AHDR 2005, 128.
 Dialects of Women’s Empowerment 103
92 Ibid., 123.
93 Ibid., 208.
94 Ibid., 211.
95 Amin’s condemnation of loveless marriage was cited at the turn of the last century by Protestant mis-

sionaries as corroboration of their stance on the evils of Islam for women. Annie Van Sommer and Samuel
M. Zwemer, eds., Our Moslem Sisters (New York: F. H. Revell Company, 1907); Abu-Lughod, Remaking
Women.