Epilogue

In December 2019, in preparation for a TEDx talk (Naber 2019a), I reached out to my longtime comrade, Palestinian feminist Nada Elia, for advice on the content of my presentation. She asked me about my big idea. I hesitated before I said, “Arab feminism is not an oxymoron.” She screamed, “What? We have been saying that since the nineties!” Indeed, Jo Kadi (1994) used this phrase in the introduction to the first anthology on Arab American feminisms. In the early 2000s, Amira Jarmakani (2011) used the concept of “invisibility” to describe Arab American feminism, and Lara Deeb (2018) has been addressing how scholars of the Middle East have been repeating a litany to colleagues, the public, and other feminists for at least four decades that says, as she puts it, “Muslim women are not universally oppressed. Muslim women have agency. They are not...