Arab Feminism

Leila Ahmed traces how gender, law, and religious authority changed across Islamic history, then shows how colonial rule turned the veil and the ‘woman question’ into political symbols.

Mona Eltahawy connects control over women’s bodies at home, in public, and through the state, then asks what a sexual revolution can mean without flattening the Middle East into one story.

Lila Abu-Lughod dismantles the rescue narrative that turns Muslim women into a uniform victim class and uses their suffering to authorize war, humanitarian intervention, and moral superiority.

Saba Mahmood’s ethnography of Cairo’s women’s mosque movement challenges feminist theories that recognize agency only as resistance to norms and asks how ethical subjects are formed through embodied religious practice.

miriam cooke reads Muslim women’s literary and public interventions as the making of Islamic feminism, a contested space in which religious belonging and demands for gender justice are claimed together.

Nawal El Saadawi’s novel follows Firdaus, an Egyptian woman on death row, as she recounts a life shaped by poverty, sexual violence and economic dependence. This reading examines the narrative frame and avoids treating one character’s experience as representative of all Arab women.

Kaouther Ben Hania combines testimony, reenactment, and visible performance to examine how violence, maternal authority, political upheaval, and extremist recruitment move through one Tunisian family.

Touzani connects craft, silence and care to queer desire within marriage, asking how love beyond possession can retain a place and choices for everyone.

During Algeria’s Black Decade, a student turns fashion into collective defiance as armed fundamentalism closes public space around women’s bodies, education, and friendship.

Following a rape survivor through one night of hospitals and police stations, Kaouther Ben Hania exposes how institutions convert the demand for care into an ordeal of proof, shame, and intimidation.

Mai Masri’s prison drama follows a Palestinian teacher who gives birth in Israeli custody, locating motherhood, collective resistance, and political imprisonment within the same carceral space.

10-year-old Saudi girl Wadjda dreams of owning a green bicycle to race with her male friend Abdullah. This groundbreaking work is the first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia and the first directed by a Saudi woman, exploring complex themes of female freedom, social constraints, and cultural transformation through a girl's desire for a bicycle.

Manal al-Sharif recounts how filming herself driving turned an ordinary act into a campaign against Saudi Arabia’s system of gendered mobility and guardianship.

Using regional survey data, Dalia Mogahed challenges media stereotypes about the Arab uprisings and examines how demands for dignity, accountable government, religion, and women’s rights coexist.

Zainab Salbi redirects attention from war’s front line to the women who maintain daily life, survive gendered violence, and are then excluded from formal peace negotiations.