Sara Rahnama is an associate professor of history and director of the program for the study of the Middle East & North Africa at Morgan State University in Baltimore. Rahnama’s work explores the intersection of feminist discourse and colonialism in Muslim early 20th-century worlds. Her writing has appeared in a range of academic and popular publications, including Gender & History, French Historical Studies, The Washington Post, Middle East Eye, and The Conversation. On Thursday, Oct. 30, Rahnama visited Swarthmore to deliver a lecture on her award-winning book, “The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Colonial Algeria.” After the talk, she answered questions for The Phoenix via email.
Zephyr Weinreich: I’d like to begin our interview by inviting you to introduce yourself to our readers. Your official positions at Morgan State University are associate professor of history and director of the program for the study of the Middle East & North Africa. Beyond these titles, though, how do you understand your work? In other words, what are the aims of your scholarship? How did you arrive at these aims? How has your thinking about your role both within and beyond academia evolved over time?
Sara Rahnama: I came to my first book project with an interest in colonialism — how colonial histories continue to shape the world we live in today — and not really intending to focus on the Muslim worlds. Initially, that project was going to be a comparison of Algeria, Senegal, and Indochina or Vietnam. As I dug into the story in Algeria, I realized there was really a story to be told about Muslim feminism, and that’s funny for me because I never really wanted to work on those topics. As a Muslim woman myself, and as somebody who grew up in post-9/11 America, those conversations around the misconceptions about gender in Islam — which I argue have their roots in colonial history — just felt too personal to me, too close to home. Then the research topic kind of found me. I felt that I needed to explore it.
Since then, I’ve come to be very interested in questions of gender and Islam and empire, whether in the classical way that we think about it in the 19th and 20th centuries, or more modern forms of imperialism. I’m interested in moments where I see there being openings — where people feel a lot of hope and a lot of things becoming possible — and I’m interested in tracking how things close down, or narrow.
My first book [“The Future is Feminist”] looks at the interwar years [1918-1939], where there’s this really international gaze, and people are reading about what’s happening in other places, and getting really inspired, and pan-Islamist futures are possible, Muslim futures are possible, all these different futures are possible. Then by the ’40s and ’50s, it becomes clear that nationalism is the dominant path forward, and I would say that there’s a kind of narrowing of possibility. Similarly, my second book is a history of the Middle East from the ’50s to the ’80s, and I would argue the ’50s and ’60s were a similar moment of more open societies, inspiration about decolonization across the world. By the ’80s all of that had narrowed into authoritarianism across the region.
So broadly, I’m interested in how those openings and closings play out in the Middle East. I would just add that I’m in New York right now. I wanted to witness Zohran Mamdani become the first Muslim mayor [of New York City], and it just feels incredible to be part of the moments of openings, hope, and possibility that I think about intellectually as well.
ZW: You highlight 20th-century globalization as a key factor in the proliferation of feminist thought across the Middle East, arguing that unprecedented exposure to the more egalitarian sociocultural dynamics of far-flung countries inspired Algerian women to fight for an improvement in their status at home. In the age of the internet, cross-cultural communication occurs with ease and frequency that would have been utterly unimaginable to the activists whose work you’ve studied. How do you understand the impact of this acceleration on feminist discourse, both in the U.S. and the Middle East?
SR: My job is really focused on understanding the past, so it’s hard to opine in a professional sense on the present. That being said, I think that there are both sides to it. On one hand it’s possible for us to know about what’s happening across the world very rapidly, which is similar to the moment that I write about in my first book. At the same time, though, the Internet is not a benevolent force that just amplifies good.
Ten or fifteen years ago, Julian Assange had an editorial called “The Banality of Do No Evil,” because “do no evil” was one of Google’s mottos at the time, but he argued that all of these companies actually had a stake, and this information was not just getting disseminated in a completely democratized way. He talked about how tech companies encouraged what was happening in Egypt in Tahrir Square under the guise of promoting democracy. But it’s very complicated.
What I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past year is TikTok, and how in some ways, TikTok has created a platform for lots of people to learn about Palestine. This semester, when I was asking students about Palestine, they had the most informed perspectives I’d ever encountered in my eight years of teaching, and they had learned from TikTok. I was surprised. Of course, there was more to learn — there’s a lot of missing nuance — but it’s still an enormous tool. At the same time, we know now there was this pressure for it to be purchased, and there are questions about the kinds of material that the algorithm will promote or suppress, so I think we can be both encouraged and also wary of the limitations of these outlets.
ZW: Your work focuses on the Middle East and Muslim world, but you teach and publish in the United States. How do you navigate this disconnect between your subject matter and your audience? How do you manage neither to gloss over meaningful cultural differences, nor to provide your American readers with an exoticized or otherized image of the Middle East?
SR: The question of how to teach the Middle East in the United States is, for sure, a complicated one. A friend of mine, Marya Hannun, recently wrote a piece about writing “against,” She described how, since Sept. 11, scholars who work on gender in the Middle East have put extra effort into writing against the stereotypes that people have about the region in terms of gender, and showing other perspectives. What she rightfully points out, though, is how, when that’s our intent, we are still centering this racist portrayal. She asks what kind of other histories could we be telling and teaching if we were not so concerned with trying to undo this stereotype.
The question also makes me think of the recent book, “Perfect Victims,” by Mohammad el-Kurd. He’s also writing about this mentality in which you’re always working to humanize yourself for this imagined audience, and what’s lost, and how dehumanizing it is to intellectually feel that you’re always trapped in that position.
When I teach — obviously, given my own intellectual formation in that period — that impulse to write against or teach against those stereotypes is very present, and yet I’ve stopped trying to tell an easy story for my students as well. I want them to understand the complicated layers of nuance.
One example of that is the history of women’s rights in Iran, including up to the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement of recent years. On one hand, the status of women in Iran today is very troubling and merits our attention. On the other hand, we should not let ourselves be swayed into thinking that war is the answer, which has happened in other moments in history, like the war in Afghanistan, in which military operation is framed as something that’s happening for the sake of women’s rights. We know that that doesn’t work. Anybody could see that the status of women in Afghanistan now is much worse than it was in 2001.
So I embrace that it’s not a one dimensional story, that there are many perspectives, and that we can get our students to understand complicated things that don’t necessarily have an easy answer.
ZW: You mentioned during your lecture that people are often surprised to find out that Muslim feminist work exists whatsoever, let alone to an extent sufficient for scholarly study. As you found your way to this field, did you have a similar experience? What have you learned through your research that has surprised you? What misconceptions about your areas of study do you think our readers might have?
SR: Constantly throughout the process of researching the first book, I encountered people’s inability to even comprehend a feminist ideology that could be rooted in Islam. They were thought of as antithetical: Islam obviously was associated with misogyny in their minds. That was from academics, that was from archivists, and that was from popular perceptions of the work. I would say that for myself as a Muslim woman, obviously that didn’t resonate for me. My own upbringing was one that stressed Islam’s actual reverence for women, and the equality of all human beings, regardless of gender, wealth, and anything else that determines status.
In terms of what has surprised me in my material, the story of women’s activism in the Middle East in the 20th century is so often one that centers elite women, so I didn’t know what I was going to find in Algeria. I expected that it was going to be the same thing: elite Algerian women who are calling for better status for women. In fact, I found that a lot of these discussions were precipitated by concerns about working-class women, and it was working-class women who were having this really active public presence. That really surprised me, and I would say kind of delighted me, too.
I’ll just add that one thing that came up for me a lot was this feeling that I wished the story was “juicy” in this cinematic way: working women who were wearing lipstick and having fun and shopping in department stores, etc. I shouldn’t say cinematic; it’s more that it feels like a story that’s told in other places at a similar time. But, in Algeria, I had to always remind myself that these women are earning meager wages. Their status as working women did not catapult them into some other lifestyle. That might be a more fun story to read, but it’s not an accurate one to tell, so trying to point out the nuance and complexity of these women’s social positions was something that surprised me and that I work to do.
ZW: Many people of my generation feel that the struggle for positive social change is increasingly hopeless with each passing day. As a scholar of sociocultural reform and revolution, do you feel that these anxieties are justified? In what ways are today’s activists engaged in the same fights as their predecessors, and in what ways is the contemporary activist paradigm unique? What might today’s aspiring activists have to learn from the figures you’ve studied?
SR: Your question is a really valid one and definitely one that I am struggling with as well. In the face of all of the violence that we saw over the course of the last two years, feeling that no amount of protest or action was really leading to any change is completely understandable. I really enjoyed Ta-Nehisi Coates’s perspective in his recent conversation with Ezra Klein, in which he explains that if you root yourself in a tradition of struggle, you understand it is many many generations long.
The fight for social justice in this country is one that begins with the beginning of the country. It’s a very old struggle, and every generation has brought new tools and new skills to the fight, but it is a long one, which Coates points out. We believe that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, and our responsibility is to do the work. We may not see the fruits of that work in our generation or anytime soon in our lives, but that doesn’t mean that it’s senseless. That’s an explanation that deeply resonates with me.
As a person of faith, I’m deeply inspired by the sense of social justice and the revolutionary spirit in Islam and other faiths. For me, there’s a sense that we all have a responsibility to bring our privilege and our particular gifts in service of a struggle that is larger than ourselves, that is longer than ourselves. That work might take time, and might be disheartening and disappointing, and that’s where we turned towards each other. We turn to community, we support and uplift each other, and make art. We promote creativity, and love one another, and focus on the day-to-day things alongside the work, so that we’re able to stay in the struggle.
ZW: Scholars around the world seem to agree that academia is now changing more rapidly than it ever has before, but the specifics of this narrative of revolution are highly variable. Based both on your own experiences as an academic and on the understanding of social change that you’ve gained through your research, how do you think about academia’s present and future? What challenges do you anticipate? What opportunities do you hope to utilize?
SR: One of the biggest challenges right now is just protecting the freedom of speech of college professors. We have had so many professors in the past year to be fired, reprimanded, and subjected to disciplinary action over freedom of speech issues. That is deeply, deeply troubling to me. It should be a foundational aspect of our society that we don’t touch, so I would say that universities need to hold fast to those values. It’s time for the public to pressure universities as well to hold onto those values.
