... the debate on civil marriage reform and the implications for women’s rights in Lebanon. For advocates, the recognition of civil marriage legalizes interreligious marriages, strengthens secular citizenship, shifts the jurisdiction of marriage from religious to civil law, and ensures women’s rights. Opponents...

...Rebecca Gould Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran , Motlagh Amy . Stanford : Stanford University Press , 2011 . 200 pages. ISBN 978-0-8047-7589-2 . Copyright © 2013 Association for Middle East Women’s Studies 2013...

...Louise Halper Women’s Rights and Islamic Family Law: Perspectives on Reform , Welchman Lynn , ed. London & New York : Zed Books Ltd , 2004 . 300 pp. $26.95 Copyright © 2006 Association for Middle East Women’s Studies 2006 102  JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES...

...Roksana Bahramitash This paper reviews the experience of Iranian women during the reform era (1997–2004) from a postcolonial feminist theoretical perspective, and challenges the mainstream literature on women in the Muslim world in its tendency to portray them as passive victims. Iranian women...

...Neha Vora A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia Le Renard Amélie Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press , 2014 . 224 pages. isbn 9780804785440 Copyright © 2015 by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies 2015...

...Fatima Sadiqi; Moha Ennaji The Moroccan feminist movement has greatly feminized and democratized the public sphere in this country. An example of such a feminization is the recent 2004 Family Law reforms, which constitute the culmination of a long trajectory during which decisionmakers, political...

...Katja Žvan Elliott This article examines the rarely talked about subtleties of Moroccan reform in the realm of women’s rights and its inadequate fulfillment of obligations to international human rights standards. The Preamble to Morocco’s post-Arab Spring 2011 constitution follows the example...

... the printing press and political reforms during the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic silenced sexual discourses, television brought them back as part of the new gender regime and disseminated a gender “deviance” model of homosexuality. Against this background, the rest of the article analyzes...

...’ impact does not imply that they should be interpreted as resistance. In fact, transgressive acts are embedded in shifting power relations in the context of reform. In the third section, I show how transgressions have long-term implications for shaping groupings, identifications, and exclusions. Some...

... and in France that impact Muslim women, i.e., the Personal Status Code (moudawana) reform in Morocco, the ban on wearing “overt” religious insignia in public schools in France, and personal and professional goals and challenges. The data analysis shows that the greatest similarities occur among samples...

...Hoda Yousef Malak Hifni Nasif (1886–1918), one of Egypt’s early feminist writ­ers, stood at the crossroads of many political and social tensions of her day. Situated between the potential contradictions of Egyptian nationalism, Islamic reform, and Westernization, Nasif provides an important lens...

...Stephanie Willman Bordat; Susan Schaefer Davis; Saida Kouzzi Numerous recent initiatives in Morocco aim to promote women’s empowerment in the country’s current climate of legal reform, national and international development, and rising Islamism. The authors employ a holistic definition...

..., Fuʾad al-Takarli, and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, this article argues that the innovative aesthetic forms and themes adopted by men writers and their dedication to political and cultural renewal ( tajdid ) and social reform used the figure of the prostitute to articulate a vision of women’s liberation...

... activities led to a reform of the Moroccan personal status code (the Mudawwana ) in 2003. The discourse of the second generation of Tunisian women, which emerged, unlike that of women in other Arab Muslim countries, in a post-independence context wherein they benefited from an oft-amended PSC that awarded...

... Eastern male nationalists and Western feminists. Simultaneously drawing inspiration and seeking autonomy from Western models, theirs was an attempt to define feminism in their own terms—one that defied the presumption of male reformers who tried to arrogate to themselves the task of modernizing Eastern...

..., to advocate the entrance of women into the labor force, and to inveigh against the legal and social exclusion of women from many areas of commercial activity. The paper describes how, through her commentaries, Sertel sought to influence social and legal reforms taking place in the new Republic of Turkey...

...Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi This article sketches a history of Iran’s early girls’ school movement and examines its origins, goals, curricular content, and relationship to the state. It revises the tendency in the existing scholarship on modern education and reform to credit the Pahlavi state...

... of international models of transitional justice, it is geared toward earlier women’s rights and human rights activism, as well as to established state practices of at least selectively supporting women’s rights. Like political reform in general, the ERC and its gender approach are an outcome of internal, long-time...

... in Egypt were those female reformers who had been the first to endorse it and offer contraceptives in their clinics. At stake was control over an important form of aid that affected millions of women, management of a key program in the emerging social welfare state, and a victory in development circles...

... understanding Tof the “woman question” in modern Middle East history and dem- onstrate the complexity of the struggles women faced as they organized locally, regionally, and internationally for reforms to improve women’s status in society. Camron Amin, Kathryn Libal, and Orit Bashkin focus...