Daughters of the Revolution: Negotiating Filial Piety in Post-2011 Egypt

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Nareman Amin

Abstract Based on interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 with young middle-class Muslim Egyptians, this article demonstrates how a political event such as the Egyptian revolution of 2011 can cause a shift in family relations and notions of filial piety, especially for young women. I argue that the revolution gave my female interlocutors the ability to question aspects of the social and religious structures in which they grew up, including parental authority. I analyze in-depth the cases of three women who were disappointed in their parents’ use of the religious moral mandate of obedience to and respect for parents (birr al-wālidayn) to discourage their daughters from participating in what the women believed was a just, moral cause. This moral dissonance did not push the young women to resist their familial obligations or subvert relational hierarchies, but they have negotiated the parameters of their subordination to their parents, including how to be dutiful daughters.

Author(s):  
Walter Armbrust

This chapter focuses on an influential post in June of 2011 by a blogger named Muhammad Abu al-Ghayt. Abu al-Ghayt's post frames class by reference to ʻashwa'iyyat, literally “haphazard” neighborhoods, meaning specifically the informal neighborhoods that were mentioned in the previous chapter as the social location of a substantial number of the fighters in street battles. In the imaginary of elites, many members of the middle class, and more than a few media professionals ʻashwa'iyyat are discursively marginal, or even liminal in the sense that they are often depicted as a morally compromised urban instantiation of precarious lives—morally compromised because of the alleged social pathologies that go with precarity, such as drug abuse, crime, and fanaticism. That sense of precarity, moreover, is an effect of the neoliberal ideology that formed the economic and social conditions of the revolution. Abu al-Ghayt never uses the term “neoliberal,” but the ʻashwa'iyyat were as much a product of it as the luxury housing developments that absorbed so much of the state's resources for the benefit of elites. Both the discursive sense of ʻashwa'iyyat as the urban expression of precarity and its associated pathologies, and the neoliberal order that structured poverty and wealth in the decades leading up to the revolution, are implicitly invoked by Abu al-Ghayt in his blog.


2020 ◽  
pp. 109-122
Author(s):  
Patricia D. Norland

This chapter centers on Oanh, who was born in the Mekong Delta, attended Lycée Marie Curie, and was considered the ninth Vietnamese woman of the Saigon sisters. It recounts the revolution of 1945, where Oanh's father was almost beheaded for being a landowner and collaborator but was spared at the last minute. It also emphasizes how Oanh took pride in being Vietnamese but did not have a strong political consciousness, only going along with student marches and other activities to “help make the crowd.” The chapter discusses her studies at Viterbo College in Wisconsin and life in the United States. It discloses her return to Saigon, where she applied her degree to help young women affected by the social upheaval of the Geneva Accords.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ismael Mohammadpour

<p>The Egyptian Revolution of 2011, in fact was the result of crises in the Egyptian society; such as increasing social inequality and corruption and Mubarak’s efforts to inherit the presidency. These crises by the help of the media –from the press to the social networks- provided the grounds for shaping anti-Mubarak social movements and eventually led to fall him. In this regard, one of the most considerable point, was the salient role of the press and the print media in the process of the revolution. Traditionally, there have been three types of journalism system in Egypt: the state-owned, independent and partisan (party-run) press. In this context, the researcher has tried to answer this question: how was the role and position of each type of these press systems in Egypt in the process of the revolution -especially since January 25th until February 11, the day that Mubarak resigned-, and how effective were these roles and positions on the Egyptian Revolution of 2011?<strong></strong></p><p>In this regard, in addition to detailed introduction of the newspapers of each press, the emphasis is to observe their views and positions accurately and portray the main discrepancies between the state-owned press with the independent and partisan papers.</p>As the findings of the research show, it seems in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the relative freedom of these traditional media in expressing their own views with the growth of the middle class, enabled Egypt to pass the Mubarak's thirty-year dictatorship by mobilizing their demands and forming powerful social movements.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
V. V. Gorshkova ◽  
A. A. Melnikova

The article considers the contradictions and conflicts that are characteristic of modern Russian society. The processes of social disintegration are analyzed and interpreted as a result of fundamental social and economic transformations. The problems of economic inequality are presented in the historical perspective in close connection with the previous stages of Russia's socioeconomic development. Significant polarization of the population is one of the most significant conflict factors in modern society, which leads to an increase in protest moods and may in the long term threaten social upheavals. Nevertheless, dissatisfaction with the socio-economic situation does not lead to ideas of the unification and consolidation of society, but find expression in social conflicts. The emergence and development of social conflicts is influenced by a number of factors: economic, ethnic, religious. One of the most important characteristics of society is its social structure. After the collapse of the USSR, the previous social structure was abolished, and a new social reality was formed in Russia. When considering the stratification structure of society, most attention is paid to the middle class, which is considered the backbone of a stable society. The middle class in Russia is in the stage of formation, it is hardly possible to speak of a complete analogy with the middle class of Western society. The share of middle class in society can be estimated in different ways depending on the methodological approaches used by researchers. An important consequence of the transformation of the social structure was the problem of marginalization, since the dismantling of the old social structure and the slow formation of the new one put the social status and place in the division of labor system of many individuals into question. The sharp impoverishment of representatives of prestigious professions led to a reassessment of their situation, especially for the younger generation. When analyzing the origins of social conflicts in modern Russian society, it is necessary to consider the issue of the attitude of the broad masses of the population to power and national elites. It should be noted that power in Russia historically takes shape around specific leaders and does not have an institutional character. The most significant factor shaping the attitude towards the authorities and the elite in general in Russian society are the economic results of the market reforms that have taken place. Only a small part of the population believes that they won as a result of the changes that have taken place, the natural consequence of which is the population's distrust of the authorities and, in general, political institutions.


Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi

By the 1840s, convent narratives gained more middle-class, respectable readers, moving away from descriptions of sex and sadism and focusing instead on convent schools and the education of young women. Popular works such as Protestant Girl in a French Nunnery described "tricks" used by nuns to convert female pupils and lure them into convents. Such literature warned that as neither wives nor mothers, nuns could not train the right kind of women for America. The focus on convent schools converged with the common or public school movement. At the same time, teaching became an acceptable occupation for women, prompting more women to seek opportunities for higher education. This chapter compares the approach to education among nuns and other female teachers alongside the caricatures of convent schools in anti-Catholic print culture. I seek to answer why convent schools faced such heightened animosity even as teaching became feminized.


Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel

Beginning around 1860, authors in the Egyptian capital portrayed Cairo’s changing cityscape and the recent emergence of local newspapers in terms of their impact on rationality (‘aql). In their descriptions, these contemporaries depicted rationality as an education of the heart that especially enabled men from the middle class to control their bodies and passions. The chapter shows that Cairo’s transformation was, however, not always associated with rising rationality by drawing on a different set of sources. Police and court records from the 1860s and 1870s demonstrate that contemporaries also described processes of urban change as a danger to the “honor” of lower-class women. Like the debates in Berlin, emotional practices in Cairo thus served as a way to address the social formation of the Egyptian capital during a time of dynamic transformation.


Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.


Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.


Author(s):  
Patrick Chura

This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class identity in two groups of American realist novels. First, it analyzes a pair of literary responses by William Dean Howells to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing as the lead-in to a discussion of realist works about voluntary downward class mobility or “vital contact.” With Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes as a reference point and paradigm, the chapter also explores the ideologies implicit in several novels about upward social mobility, noting how both groups of texts are ultimately guided by a genteel perspective positioned between dominant and subordinate classes. In similar ways, the novels treated in the chapter balance middle-class loyalties against identities from higher and lower on the social scale while sending messages of both complicity and subversion on the subject of capitalist class relations.


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