Contemporary Arab Women Revolutionaries Radical Traditions

Introduction: The Unfinished Revolution, Raad Khair Allah; PART I: The Fight for Liberation and Human Rights; Nawal El Saadawi: Rewriting the Female Body and Exposing Female Genital Mutilation's Role in Reinforcing Patriarchy, Khaoula Jaoudi; Huda Naamani: Feminism, Poetry, and Ecstatic, Collective Liberation, miriam cooke; A Woman's Revolution: Palestinian Female Filmmakers and the Cinema of Liberation, Rebecca Ruth Gould; Reading Baghdad's Female-Depicting Murals: A Critical Feminist and Intermedial Approach, Zeena Faulk and Ann Peeters; Endogamy, Exogamy, and Patrilineal Citizenship: Implications for Gendered Political Violence, Ibtihal Rida Mahmood; PART II: Disrupting Social and Gender Norms; Co-opting Meanings of Gendered Expectations: How Young Jordanian Women Disrupt the Country's Gendered Status Quo from Within, Ivana Cosmano; Troubling Gender in Contemporary Saudi Women's Fiction: Ambiguity, Embodiment, and Resistance, Ibrahim Alfraih; Waiting for the Full Moon: The Representation of Nudity and Sexuality as a Radical Tradition in Contemporary Syrian Female Art, Fassih Keiso; PART III: Counter-Memory as Resistance; Performing Identity in Isabella Hammad's Enter Ghost, Elena Violaris; Filmic Fabulation and the Rite of Return to the Archive, Mahasen Nasser-Eldin; Trauma as an Adversarial Strategy in Abulhawa's The Blue Between Sky and Water, Wael Salam; "We women are armed against calamity from childhood on": Re-remembering Moroccan Women's Resistance as a Model for Female Agency, Amirah Mohiddin; Radical Resistance in Badriah Albeshr's Novels Hend and the Soldiers and Thursday's Visitors, Rawan Althunyan; PART IV: Feminist Resistance in Conflict Zones; Women's Republic, How War Can Change Social Balance in the Desert: The Saharawi Case, Caterina Maggi; Beyond the Gun: The Gendered Paradox of Female Militancy in the Lebanese Civil War, Wassim Mroueh; Refuse, Resist, Remain: The Radical Continuum of Palestinian Women's Political Agency, Erin Brady; PART V: Feminist Translation and Digital Resistance; Arab Women Translators as Agents of Change, Ibtihal Rida Mahmood; Facing Off with the Liberators through the Blogosphere: Riverbend's Baghdad Burning and Faiza's A Family in Baghdad, Zeena Faulk; The Digital Unveiling: Radical Feminist Revolt and Activism in Egypt, Shereen H. Shaw and Ghada Nakhla

Biography

Raad Khair Allah is an IASH Postdoctoral Fellow in digital humanities, researching reimaginations of nationhood in Arab cultural and digital feminism, and a Tutor at the School of Social and Political Science (University of Edinburgh). She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies from the University of Warwick (2025). Khair Allah has been recognized with awards and fellowships from leading universities in the U.S. and U.K., including Harvard, Duke, Durham, and Edinburgh. Her digital project, Marginalization of Arab Women and Revolutionising Patriarchy, was awarded the DAHL Hero Medal 2024 (University of Warwick) and was also shortlisted for the USA’s Paula Svonkin Creative Art Award in 2022. Her work is published in Brill’s Journal of World Literature, Forum for Modern Language Studies (Oxford University Press), LIAS Working Paper Series, Exchanges, and Bridges. 

This visionary collection provides a crucial roadmap to Arab women’s feminist resistance across geographies and generations, highlighting both the revolutionary roots of Arab feminism and the ways in which these radical lineages inform contemporary feminist struggles across the region. The volume insists that we understand Arab feminisms as both individual and collective, interdisciplinary and intersectional, rooted in indigenous histories and ethics, while connected to global feminist discourse. It is an essential guidebook for all those engaged in “the unfinished revolution”.

Lisa Suhir Majaj

Writer and Scholar, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

 

Contemporary Arab Women Revolutionaries: Radical Traditions offers a powerful interdisciplinary rethinking of Arab feminist praxis. Bringing together studies of literature, art, film, digital activism, translation, and spirituality, the volume traces how Arab women transform cultural traditions into sites of radical resistance. Challenging both patriarchal and Eurocentric frameworks, it positions Arab women not as symbols, but as architects of decolonial, feminist revolution from the 1970s to the present.

Cristián H. Ricci

Professor of Iberian and North African Literatures

University of California, Merced, USA

 

This edited volume assembles a bath-breaking, powerful archive of Arab women’s radical traditions across time and space, tracing how women resist overlapping regimes of oppression through militancy, care, art, storytelling, digital activism, translation, and legal struggle.

Nicola Pratt

Professor of the International Relations of the Middle East and feminist international relations theory, University of Warwick, UK

 

Contemporary Arab Women Revolutionaries: Radical Traditions brings together an exciting and international group of scholars, writers, artists, translators, journalists, and filmmakers whose work expands our knowledge on gender, culture, politics and resistance across the Arab world and its diasporas. The collection’s interdisciplinary focus foregrounds women’s agency as it is shaped by war, displacement, patriarchy and various forms of authoritarianism. This is politically engaged scholarship that emphasizes radical feminist praxis across historical, geographical and political contexts. Organised around themes of liberation; disruption; counter-memory; resistance in conflict zones and translation and digital resistance, the book argues for the intersectional and ongoing nature of feminist resistance. 

Anastasia Valassopoulos

Professor of Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures, University of Manchester, UK

 

This exciting new volume by a distinguished ensemble of scholars, artists, and journalists provides original analyses of women’s powerful roles in revolutionizing Arab societies in the face of various forms of gender injustices. It is a substantial and timely addition to feminist theorical articulations from multidisciplinary perspectives. The volume documents a wealth of voices and case studies in societies and communities that are often underrepresented in academic publications.

Dalia Said Mostafa

Former Associate Professor in the Middle Eastern Studies Department – Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar

 

The edited volume Contemporary Arab Revolutionaries: Radical Traditions is an excellent, timely and uniquely comprehensive journey in analyzing and decolonizing contemporary feminism in the Arab World. This inspiring and important volume offers a much-needed interdisciplinary approach to the multifaceted nature of Arab women’s resistance across various temporal and spatial settings. It is a very welcome scholarly contribution to cultural, social and political feminism.

Farah Aboubakr

Lecturer in Arabic at the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland

 

This impressive book poses radical questions for the traditions it is inspired by as well as those it stands against. It will deepen and widen studies of feminism and of Arab countries by revealing the diversity of the acts of resistance of generations of too little-known Arab women. This work is a timely reminder to all of the everyday nature of resisting the diminishment of our humanity by confronting violence in our societies, opening our imaginations to the possibility of different realities, and performing simple acts of care.

Miranda Anderson

Honorary Fellow, Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, Associate Lecturer, Open University & Teaching Ensemble, the New School of the Anthropocene, Scotland and the UK

 

This daring and paradigm-turning volume combines studies across many disciplines, by recognized leaders in their respective fields, and covers diverse geographical segments of the Arab world and the diaspora. Arab societies cannot be free without the free and full participation of 50% of their members. By carrying their voices, this book does a priceless service to those of us wishing to understand and remake the Arab world’s future. 

Ramsey Hanhan

Author and public speaker, USA