Militant Women Of A Fragile Nation

In Militant Women of a Fragile Nation, Malek Abisaab takes a gendered approach to labor conflicts, anticolonial struggles, and citizenship in modern Lebanon. The author traces the conditions and experiences of women workers at the French Tobacco Monopoly.

A first person account of a young woman activist imprisoned for four years in the notorious Khiam Women's Prison Shattering the notion that Muslim women did not play an active role in armed resistance and national liberation struggles A unique and rare insight into the life of a woman living in extreme and uncertain conditions Recounting the Israeli invasion and occupation of South Lebanon Brilliantly translated by Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah from McGill University in Montreal An important message about the need to liberate prisoners and the call for solidarity in the face of injustice Shattering the notion that Muslim women did not play an active role in armed resistance national liberation struggles “In order to carry on with life in prison, you must believe you will be there forever.” In the haunting and inspiring Memoirs of a Militant: My Years in the Khiam Women’s Prison Nawal Baidoun offers us her first-person account of the life of a young woman activist imprisoned for four years, as well as the events leading up to her arrest and detention. Born into a nationalist family in Bint Jbeil, Lebanon, not far from the location of the prison itself, Baidoun, like so many others, found herself compelled to take up arms to resist the Israeli occupation. Her memoir skillfully weaves together two stories: that of the oppressive conditions facing ordinary people and families in South Lebanon, and that of the horrors of daily life and the struggle for survival inside the prison itself. Arrested for her role in planning the assassination of the well-known Israeli agent and collaborator, Husayn Abdel Nabi, Baidoun was at one point detained with Soha Bechara, a fellow militant whose similar operation is better known. Her activism rooted in her Islamic faith, Baidoun shatters the notion that Muslim women did not play an active role in the armed resistance. Much like her sisters in Algeria and Palestine, Nawal Baidoun belongs to a generation of Muslim women in the Arab world who played a significant role in their national liberation struggles. She describes the intense mental and physical torture she endured, and her refusal to confess despite this. Memoirs of a Militant offers us rare and unique insight into the strength and courage of Baidoun in extreme circumstances and conditions. Nawal Baidoun herself has said that she wrote this book as a sort of history lesson for the generations who come after her, to show the ways in which women actively took part in the resistance and struggle against the occupation. Her strongly abolitionist message about prisons and the need to liberate all prisoners and detainees resonates strongly today, as does her call for solidarity in the face of injustice.

A cultural and political history of youth culture and youth-centric organizations in Lebanon from 1920-1958.

This book analyses the reasons for women’s participation in the various Lebanese and Palestinian militias involved in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). Whilst most existing accounts of the Civil War in Lebanon either overlook the roles and experiences of women entirely or focus on women as victims or peacemakers only, ‘Women and the Lebanese Civil War’ highlights that women were involved as militants (and often also as fighters) in all of the militias partaking in the war. Analysing individual motivations, organisational characteristics, security-related aspects and societal factors, the book explains why women were included as fighters in some of the militias but not in others. Based on extensive fieldwork in Lebanon, the book is the first comprehensive study of female perpetrators and supporters of political violence during the Lebanese Civil War. Beyond the case of Lebanon, it questions widespread assumptions about the roles of women at times of violent conflict and war.

The thirteen critical and well-documented chapters of Women, Work and Activism examine women’s labor struggle from late nineteenth-century Portuguese mutual societies to Yugoslav peasant women’s work in the 1930s, and from the Catalan labor movement under the Franco dictatorship to workplace democracy in the United States. The authors portray women's labor activism in a wide variety of contexts. This includes spontaneous resistance to masculinist trade unionism, the feminist engagement of women workers, the activism of communist wives of workers, and female long-distance migration, among others. The chapters address the gendered involvement of working people in multiple and often precarious and unstable labor relations and in unpaid labor, as well as the role of the state and other institutions in shaping the history of women’s labor. The book is an innovative contribution to both the new labor history and feminist history. It fully integrates the conceptual advances made by gender historians in the study of labor activism, driving home critiques of Eurocentric historiographies of labor to Europe while simultaneously contributing to an inclusive history of women’s labor-related activism wherever to be found. Examining women’s activism in male-dominated movements and institutions, and in women’s networks and organizations, the authors make a case for a new direction in gender history.

Women have consistently been left out of the official writing of Lebanese history, and nowhere is this more obvious than in writing on the Lebanese Civil War. As more and more histories of the war begin to circulate, few include any in-depth discussion of the multiple roles women played in wartime Lebanon. Fewer still address the essential issues of women’s work and their creative production, such as literature, performance art, and filmmaking. Developed out of a larger oral history project collecting and archiving the ways in which women narrated their experiences of the Lebanese Civil War, this book focuses on a wide range of subjects, all framed as women telling their "war stories." Each of the six chapters centers on women who worked or created art during the war, revealing, in their own words, the challenges, struggles, and resistance they faced during this tumultuous period of Lebanese history.

The first major scholarly biography of Fatima Jinnah, both nuancing and gendering the socio-political history of modern South Asia.

The complex history of Lebanese Shi‘ites has traditionally been portrayed as rooted in religious and sectarian forces. The Abisaabs uncover a more nuanced account in which colonialism, the modern state, social class, and provincial politics profoundly shaped Shi‘i society. The authors trace the sociopolitical, economic, and intellectual transformation of the Shi‘ites of Lebanon from 1920 during the French colonial period until the late twentieth century. They shed light on the relationship of contemporary Islamic militancy with traditions of religious modernism and leftism in both Lebanon and Iraq. Analyzing the interaction between sacred and secular features of modern Shi‘ite society, the authors clearly follow the group’s turn toward religious revolution and away from secular activism. This book transforms our understanding of twentieth-century Lebanese history and demonstrates how the rise of Hizbullah was conditioned by Shi‘ites’ consistent marginalization and neglect by the Lebanese state.