A most masculine state: gender, politics, and religion in Saudi Arabia

A MOST MASCULINE STATE: GENDER, POLITICS, AND RELIGION IN SAUDI ARABIA Madawi Al-Rasheed Cambridge: Ca mbridge University Press, 2013 (xii + 333 pages, works cited, index) 78. 79 (cloth), 26. 99 (paper) A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion Saudi will become an essential reference for discussions of what author Madawi Al-Rasheed calls the globalized question of Saudi (26). Saudi are subject to economic marginalization and strict rules that regulate their everyday lives. While Western media focus on ban on driving, this book explores deep-rooted of Saudi kingdom (1). Male guardians determine and control women's mobility, education, employment, and health just as state makes their subordination possible at legal, social, political, and economic levels. Al-Rasheed identifies her book as a project exploring the intercon- nection between gender, politics, and religion an attempt to explain continued exclusion of Saudi from public (3). The ban on independent associations and organizations has also played a major role denying Saudi a chance to press collectively for social transforma- tion (2). The status quo is, however, changing with expansion of com- munication technology that allows Saudi to be present and active public sphere. Their voices are no longer unheard as they challenge ociety daring voices, critical texts, and real mobilization (2). Acknowledging pioneering texts study of gender Saudi Arabia, including work by Soraya Altorki, Saddeka Arebi, Eleanor Doumato, and Amelie Le Renard, and drawing upon work of feminist scholars Deniz Kandiyoti, Suad Joseph, Mounira Charrad, and Sylvia Walby, Al-Rasheed looks to fill a gap growing literature by placing gender Saudi relation to state and nationalism. She formulates concept of religious conversation with and against Joseph Massad's and Partha Chatterjee's theories of nationalism, which, she argues, fail to account for imaging of Saudi Arabia (9). Unlike Jordan, for example, which was invented by forging a nationalism based on Bedouin culture, the Saudi nation articulated an identity by claiming to apply Sharia all aspects of life and submitting to a universal Islamic (14). Citing work of Beth Baron and Mervat Hatem, she also contrasts case of Saudi kingdom with that of Egypt, where anticolonial nationalism allowed to benefit certain legal aspects while projecting gender relations as a function of greater political projects (17). In Saudi kingdom, nationalism involved breaking military and political autonomy of tribes, even as it drew upon tribal ethos to keep women a patriar- chal relationship under authority of male relatives (5). By looking at both secular and nationalisms region and their relation to modernity, mostly through prism of their discourses of women's rights, Al-Rasheed shows how in both cases, are turned into symbols, representing anything but themselves (17). In Saudi kingdom, a limited women's presence indicates nation's obedience to Islamic law. Al-Rasheed surveys a number of Saudi fatwas on 1980s whose restrictive interpretations of Islam, she shows, were used by state to further limit women's visibility public space. The 'ulama' have also emphasized women's emotionality to deem them incapable of serving state positions and public offices. This narra- tive was further used to make subordination of Saudi possible legal, social, and terms. In order to control their appearance and mobility, women's bodies were referred to as sources of fitna (which author translates as chaos rather than temptation). According to Al-Rasheed, Saudi face a double exclusion- general economy and one domestic sphere (23). …