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Gender Studies in the Arab World

Tunisian scholar Amel Grami argues that gender studies in Arab and Islamic contexts must build a local critical vocabulary, recover the historical plurality of Islamic culture, and reckon with the colonial legacy that reshaped attitudes toward non-normative identities.

"المجتمعات الإسلامية لم تكن معادية للهويات غير النمطية"

Qantara · By Amel Grami · 11 June 2026 · read the original in Arabic →

بدأت دراسات النوع الاجتماعي تجد مكانًا لها في العالم العربي، بل وأيضًا بمقاربات إسلامية. الباحثة التونسية آمال قرامي تتحدث عن تطور هذا المسار، وتبحث في كيفية إسهام الإرث الاستعماري بتشكيل التصورات السائدة حول هذه القضايا.

Gender studies have begun to find a place for themselves in the Arab world, and even through Islamic approaches. Tunisian scholar Amel Grami speaks about the development of this trajectory, and examines how the colonial legacy has contributed to shaping prevailing perceptions around these questions.

قنطرة: أنتِ من أوائل المتخصصات في دراسات النوع الاجتماعي في تونس والمنطقة العربية؛ لماذا يُنظر إليها في المنطقة بنوع من التشكيك في أهميتها؟

Qantara: You are among the first specialists in gender studies in Tunisia and the Arab region. Why is the field regarded in the region with a degree of skepticism about its importance?

Amel Grami: Historically, the teaching of gender issues remained confined to departments of foreign languages, such as French and English literature, within curricula that relied on foreign references and sources, without any real orientation toward producing local knowledge or developing approaches that speak to the realities of local societies. Gradually, however, the concept of gender, as a tool for analyzing relations of power and the distribution of social roles, began to expand within most social, humanistic, and even scientific disciplines. In parallel with this academic shift, and under international pressure, many states in the region incorporated gender into their public policies, within ministries and official institutions.

But this “top-down” adoption of gender-mainstreaming policies revealed the absence of a specialized academic framework. A number of nonspecialist researchers intruded into the field, contributing to the spread of misunderstanding and terminological confusion. Most often, we find gender being conflated with women’s studies and feminist studies, alongside a lack of familiarity with the circumstances in which this kind of scholarship emerged.

But you do not belong to the foreign-language departments that hosted this field in its beginnings. You studied Arab-Islamic civilization. How did the turning point toward gender studies come about?

I had a rich experience teaching comparative religion and Qur’anic studies in Beirut, Milan, and elsewhere. This enabled me to become acquainted with the conceptions, justifications, and representations of sexual difference contained in books of exegesis, jurisprudence, and other fields.

I felt that there was a gap in the study of gender from within Arab and Islamic culture, Gender in Islam. I asked myself: how did the various Arabic sources - historical, medical, religious, and so on - address the question of difference between the sexes? How did scholars understand masculinity/femininity, lay down the rules for an individual’s social upbringing, define roles, order relationships, and so forth?

And what did you find?

Islamic culture did not pose masculinity/femininity, man/woman, in isolation from non-normative identities such as the mukhannath, the khuntha mushkil, the eunuch, and the beardless youth. Moreover, Muslim societies were not, at every historical moment, hostile to people with non-typical identities; rather, they integrated them and considered their legal rulings and rights.

Books of jurisprudence contain explicit references to questions such as the inheritance of the khuntha mushkil, and the rulings on the imamate and marriage of the mukhannath. This reflects jurists’ awareness of the existence of cases that cannot be confined within the traditional binary of the sexes, male and female. The same is true of writers, poets, and other creative figures, who gave them space to express their experiences within texts. That flexibility, which existed in Arab culture, is what distinguishes us from other cultures that worked to marginalize them and sought to deprive them of the right to exist.

What, then, led to the social exclusion we witness today?

When Arab civilization collapsed, countries fragmented, and colonialism arrived to plunder their wealth, culture closed in on itself, withdrew into its shell, and was carried along into producing discourses of hatred, fanaticism, and fear of otherness. The alteration of the system of legislation in most colonized countries, the imposition of Western laws - French, British, and others - and the requirement that peoples follow them led to the codification of laws targeting these groups that did not identify with the model.

And since colonialism targets not only land but minds as well, influencing peoples’ patterns of thought and the colonized person’s view of the self, this led to a change in Arab societies’ view of people with these non-typical identities.

Awareness of what the colonial experience left behind compels us today to analyze this legacy and to reconsider our relationship with European and Western centrism, as well as our epistemic choices. For this reason, reliance in teaching curricula is no longer limited to works produced in the Francophone sphere; attention has also turned to the knowledge produced by gender studies in Arab societies, in addition to the work of women researchers living in exile.

On the basis of these transformations, I began to pay great attention to African studies, and it became clear to me that advanced gender studies exist in a number of African countries and in the Global South. These studies call for moving beyond a narrow definition of the concept of “thought,” whether in terms of disciplines or the kinds of texts adopted for analysis, while at the same time highlighting the diversity of the sites and fields from which African women and women of the South produce knowledge.

The translation of terms specific to gender has long posed a dilemma for researchers. How have you addressed it?

There is terminological confusion concerning the lexicon of feminist studies and gender studies. We find Gender Arabized as junusa in Lebanon and Sudan, al-naw‘ al-ijtima‘i in Tunisia, Morocco, and Libya, or al-naw‘ in Egypt, and naw‘ al-jins in other countries. This does not make it easier for digital libraries to classify production. The change taking place today, however, has led to a stabilization in the use of al-naw‘ al-ijtima‘i or gender.

In addition, we find the widespread occurrence of errors in Arabization, even in United Nations documents: for example, the use of jinsaniyya, which means Sexuality, and sometimes jins, sex, to signify gender.

I faced this problem while preparing my dissertation, so I worked to simplify the concepts and bring them closer to the Arab reader by using the term “gendering knowledge,” meaning the classification of the sciences according to the social roles ascribed to women and men. In my book Women and Terrorism, I likewise drew on the concept of the “gendering of terrorism.” In my lectures, I also sought to find Arabic alternatives for the phrase LGBTQ+, such as “people with non-typical identities” or “people with non-normative identities.” In doing so, I proceeded from the Islamic cultural frame of reference, showing the existence of other meaningful terms, such as the mukhannath, the khuntha mushkil, the eunuch, and the beardless youth, while clarifying the differences among them.

We, too, no longer use the concept of “sexuality” in the singular, but “sexualities,” in recognition of the multiplicity of identities, orientations, practices, and expressions.

On Love, Sex, and the Roles of Women and Menعن الحب والجنس ودور المرأة والرجل

Khatira is the name of a women’s media organization in Beirut. Through satirical and ironic videos, it addresses subjects such as sex, love, and gender roles, reaching large numbers of young women in the Middle East and North Africa. A report by Diana Hodali.

Do you also use inclusive language?

I adopt comprehensive or inclusive language in teaching, both orally and in writing. Instead of letting the masculine prevail over the feminine, I deliberately use “women/men activists” rather than “men/women activists.” In footnotes I write “refer [feminine/masculine] to...”; and in writing I use “the female reader,” because we always assume the existence of a male reader, a male translator, and a male critic.

I was among those who defended writing the Tunisian constitution in 2014 in an inclusive manner, through the use of the feminine marker, as in “Tunisian women and Tunisian men.” My defense before those who objected proceeded from the Qur’anic text in Surat al-Ahzab, 33:35: “Indeed, the Muslim men and Muslim women, the believing men and believing women, the obedient men and obedient women (...).”

These issues reveal the extent to which the gender specialist contributes to approaching the problems of Arabization from a critical feminist perspective, and to reconsidering translation practices from the standpoint of a feminist consciousness that grasps the backgrounds of the oppression imposed on women and understands the relationship of gender to language and power, and the intersections of translation with local culture.

This awareness of these problems contributes to building local and alternative knowledge that responds to the needs of our societies.

To what extent has the view of Arab societies today changed toward research that employs gender?

It must be acknowledged that the states that have incorporated gender into their policies have contributed to making it known, and to changing people’s view of several issues, such as the relationship between climate change and women, for example, and the digital gender gap. Added to this is the role of writings that analyze reality from a gender perspective - whether academic or journalistic, or dramatic and cinematic works - in changing mentalities, demonstrating the injustice imposed on women, explaining its causes, and proposing alternatives. This is an effort to be valued, but it still does not express the ambitions of women and men scholars.