THE POLITICS OF FAMILY PLANNING IN EGYPT

Source: Anthropology Today, Oct96, Vol. 12 Issue 5, p14, 6p

By KAMRAN ASDAR ALl

I

In a work of fiction from late nineteenth century Egypt, the main character is an author who goes to the tombs outside Cairo for inspiration. Here, one day, he encounters an elderly noble who steps out from one of the graves. After a brief introduction the grave dweller asks the author to go to his house and fetch him his horse and some clothes. The author respectfully replies that he does not know where the nobleman lived, The infuriated elder curses and says:

Tell me which country you are from, for heavens sake'? It's clear that you are not an Egyptian. There is no one in the whole country who does not know where my house is. I'm Ahmad Pasha al-Manikali the Minister of War in Egypt.

The author replies:

Pasha, believe me, I'm from pure Egyptian stock. The only reason why 1 do not know where you live is that houses in Egypt are no longer known by the names of their owner. but by the names of their street, lane and number. If you would be so kind to tell me the street and lane number of your house, I will go there and bring you the things you ask for. l

This exchange from Muhammad al Muwaylihi's novel suggests how Egyptian society changed in the late nineteenth century, after a period of almost a century of continuous European colonial presence in Egypt. This ordering of Egyptian society through regulations and numbering irrespective of personal rank and status expressed modern notions of equality and justice, backed by the ideology of European liberalism. Timothy Mitchell (1988) shows how the colonial project in Egypt ordered and disciplined the bodies and minds of the Egyptian people through the introduction of modern education, policing, censuses, registration of births and deaths, and new ideas on health and hygiene culminating in medical inspection of bodies and the campaign for eradication of diseases. Mitchell maintains that issues of emancipation of women, the education of the populace and the rights and legality of citizenship were later ably argued by the emergent Egyptian educated classes in the expanding number of Arabic periodicals, newspapers and the new genre of literary novels. However, with increased population growth and rural-urban migration, Mitchell argues, by the end of the century the Egyptian elite itself was concerned about the crowds and the general disorderly and unhygienic conditions in the cities. This visual impact of urban crowds, the unemployed mob, aimlessly roaming youth, and people selling valueless objects, was further substantiated through the census and statistical data of the colonial, if formally independent, Egyptian State in the early decades of the twentieth century (Owen undated).

Modernizing policies and changes were hence continuous with a growing understanding of the population problem. The census data scientifically represented the 'reality' of the alarming population increase and its impact on future food distribution in Egypt. Numerical and statistical analyses were used to bring to life the relationship between overpopulation and the narrow strip of agricultural land along the Nile which is cultivable.2

Descriptions of the Egyptian population in cultural and spatial terms continue to connect present-day notions of 'Egypt' and 'Egyptian' from a development perspective to representations from the colonial past. Recent initiatives by international developmental agencies, in co-operation with the government of Egypt, play on historical themes such as subjugation of women, overwhelming population growth, lack of economic resources and diminishing agricultural land, to argue for an aggressive population planning programme.

The official family planning programme in Egypt, since its reorganization under international funding in the early eighties, has encountered a range of criticism from a variety of political formations. The major ideological and political threat that the Egyptian State and the international agencies face in implementing their programme is, however, from the Islamicist political groups.

The Egyptian State opposes these groups with all its ideological and military strength. This response by the modernizing Egyptian State with substantial moral and material help from the United States raises larger theoretical questions on the role of religious movements in politics. One dominant definition of modernity emphasizes the secularization of society, the setting of limits to religion in public life. The essentially unchanging nature of religion, the intolerance it breeds and the irrational and superstitious traditions of believers are posited as subversive to the rational goals of modern civil society. It is not that religion is denied a place in modern societies, but, as Talal Asad (1992a: 4) cogently argues, that a religion chastened, reformed and subscribing to the fundamentals of modern culture of science and statecraft is the kind supported in the modern era. This historically produced concept of religion, freed from its bigotry and worldly ambitions, comes to play its marginal role in the modern State. Politico-religious movements may constitute a challenge to this narrative of modern life (Asad 1992a).

Recent critiques of development have failed to address the challenges posed by rising religious movements across the globe. Arturo Escobar's recent work (1992, 1995), a prime example of this trend in social analysis, argues that the crisis of modernity linked to the failure of the developmental project in the Third World gives rise to new social movements of the dispossessed and the marginalized. Social actors, according to Escobar, possess multiple subjectivities, which may incorporate the categories of gender, work, ethnicity and sexual preference, and are linked to new forms of politics that challenge and may destabilize the dominant unitary paradigms of the modernist project. This celebration of multiple subjectivity and hybridity may be important, yet, while attempting to theorize the break down of modernist discourse, Escobar is somewhat ambivalent on the rise of `new fundamentalism' which barbours `concepts and practices discarded long ago' (Escobar 1995: 217). Similarly, he stakes out a task for critical research to look for the conservative or progressive character of 'specific hybridizations' (1995: 221). These gestures towards the rising religious movements in different parts of the world place Escobar's work in a position of defending popular movements, yet creating a distance from them if they take on a religious and socially 'conservative' character. Secular and modern ideals of individual freedom and separation of church and state are never really tested as historically Western constructions. The question of conservatism is also crucial here. Conservative in relation to what? There is a teleological hint in such formulations that the European history of modernity still retains its unmarked value on the world stage. Moreover, the issue of multiple subjectivities in such formulations as Escobar's also obscure as much as they reveal. People definitely realign political possibilities and create multiple forms of relationships; however, it does not make them so fluid that they are not moral beings rooted in certain histories of place and distinctive communities (Asad 1994: 22; Trouillot 1995: xviii). Certainly the history of Islamicist politics in Egypt begs us to rethink these categories.[3]

Marxist critics of colonial rule and capital penetration have similarly yet to come to terms with the political implications of religious movements. Dipesh Chakrabarty (1994) argues that Indian social analysis, dominated by categories like sacred and the secular, recycled from European history, is incapable of comprehending the meaning different Hindu divine figures have in the experience and negation of modernity by the people. He forcefully argues that Indian secular scholarship does not have the tools to understand and appreciate the different time-worlds and non-secular calendars that people possess and travel in. Chakrabarty maintains that Marxist and progressive historians show immense antipathy towards the religious-spiritual practices of the people (1995: 752), and seek to anthropologize these sentiments of the people, by arguing 'what material benefits can the subaltern classes gain from the imaginations in which gods, spirits, humans and animals inhabit the same world?' (Chakrabarty 1994: 249-250).

I would argue that it is this anthropologizing of `religion' and the construction of religious movements primarily as backward, traditional, conservative and manipulative that needs to be rethought in light of the people's own experiences.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in rural and urban Egypt on the politics of family planning in Egypt, this article is a preliminary attempt to explore some of the ways in which the Egyptian State constructs notions of citizenship through its population planning programme. I will seek to analyse some political and social debates surrounding the issue of fertility control in Egypt. A response such as that of the Islamicist movement is usually interpreted rather constrictingly as the reaction of a traditional patriarchy.

II

I focus[4] on the politics of fertility regulation in Egypt. In the last decade, the structural adjustment programme in Egypt under the advice of the IMF and the World Bank has eroded long-term subsidies on items of daily use, increased energy rates by 50% in 1991, removed agricultural subsidies (subsidies for fertilizers and pesticides were removed in 1992-93), devalued the Egyptian pound, raised transportation costs and indirect taxes, and privatized State industries leading to widespread lay-offs with shrinking possibilities of employment. All this has disastrously affected the Egyptian poor, making their lives economically and socially unbearable (Korayam 1993). The international consultants of the family planning programme were one of the first to recommend the restriction of subsidies in Egypt (USAID 1982). It was hoped that reduction of state support would increase the economic costs of having many children and persuade families to adopt family planning as a `voluntary and non-coercive' choice. As the structural adjustment policy would supposedly cut the fat in the economy to make it flexible, the family planning programme would guarantee a correspondingly lean family. Playing on the imageries of surplus and waste, both programmes need to be understood in conjunction as methods to streamline the social and economic body of Egypt.

Historically the Egyptian Family Planning Programme has concentrated on targeting women as recipients of its services. Specific surveys for women were conducted to gauge the total fertility rate, the contraceptive prevalence rate, the age at marriage, the social status of women, and knowledge, attitude and practice of fertility control. This information served policy planners in assisting women to make `independent choices' to accept/use one of the available contraceptive methods. The emphasis on women echoed larger trends in family planning policy around the globe (see Watkins 1993 for an excellent review). The relative invisibility of men in the debates around fertility control and contraceptive methods were probably due to the persistent structuring of population control debates around female/male, reproduction/production and domestic/public dichotomies.

Recently demographic research/surveys and media campaigns, the major tools of international family planning programmes, were, however, also used to gather information on the perceived threats to the programme consisting of issues like household construction, traditional male behaviour and Islam.[5]

Demographic research is embedded historically in modernization theory linking fertility decline to Western style socio-economic modernization, industrialization, modern education and political liberalization. Recent shifts in the discipline emphasize a focus on the micro-practices of individuals as prime determinants of fertility change. In one manifestation of this approach, a notion of culture is introduced which links an ideational change model to the acceptability of modern birth control (Greenhalgh 1995:7). This culturalist argument consists of a narrowly construed formulation of culture as communication within the household with minimal reference to the social, political and economic forces of the larger society. These readings of culture effectively place households/families and behaviour patterns on a continuum of traditional to modern. Modernization of behaviour may, therefore, lead to the constitution of modern families which are more open to the use of modern contraceptives (Greenhalgh 1995, 1996).

Furthermore, demographic research and surveys hypothesize that the level of education, autonomy of women and consensual companionate marriage is demonstrably linked to high acceptance of contraception (e.g. for Egypt see EDHS 1992, among others). In this process, notions of the free choosing individuals who as consenting adults create the bond of conjugal marriage are crucial. Chakrabarty (1994b) outlines similar processes in colonial India in which the construction of a modern domestic sphere relied on promoting the idea of `friendship' among spouses. Husbands and wives were supposed to be friends/companions reflecting the wellknown Victorian ideal of companionate marriage (Chakrabarty 1994b: 51). Chakrabarty further argues that the construction of this domestic/private sphere in India, embodying within itself the modern private/public dichotomy, sought to isolate the 'couple' from the local familial and community contexts and exposed it to the controlling gaze of the statal laws and regulations. The notion of social good and responsibility within the 'private' which casts the individual into the role of the citizen, enhances the ability of the modernizing state to regulate the reproductive sexual relations of the conjugal couple without hindrance or competition from other kin, affine and community members (ib. 1994: 52).6 I suggest that the population planning programme sponsored by the Egyptian State and the international developmental agenda attempts to socialize the domestic in precisely these ways, in their effort to create new/modern notions of subjectivity, individuality and bodies leading to the inclusive modern category of responsible citizenship.

This idea of free choice in the language of modernity is also linked with the language of rights and laws. Along with the emphasis on companionate marriage and the nuclear household, the notion of individual choice becomes the bedrock of most international family planning programmes.[7] The donor-assisted family planning programmes seek not only to enhance the range of individual choice available to women, but also to create conditions in which only certain modern choices may be made. They foreclose discussion of any other viewpoint or practice around the issue of fertility control. There is no space to manoeuvre except within the tightly constricted arena of choice given by the family planning programme. As modern individuals it becomes imperative for women to choose responsibly for the sake of the larger nation, the social body. The scope of their choice, however, is regulated by the concerns of the larger structures of political economy and not necessarily those of women. The liberatory and individualistic language of choice therefore does not allow women the luxury of non-choice of contraception.

The obvious solution to the crisis of numbers is the reduction of the population size to manageable levels, so the country can continue on its path of development. As women are supposedly released to make the responsible choice offered to them by the emancipatory state, men as heads of households, the traditional patriarchs, are expected to participate more fully in this social task by giving up their authority for the social good. The state, in the guise of the family planning programme, seeks to enter the domestic space of the Egyptian household aspiring for the authoritative voice in relation to fertility decisions.

Moves by the Egyptian State, linked to the international development effort, to change the fertility behaviour of and bring the Egyptian poor (primarily) into modern regimes of social homogeneity, are periodically contested by the people themselves. Rural and urban women create their own preferences for contraceptive methods through formal and informal networks of knowledge and valuation. Indeed, we may argue that Egyptian women are equal partners along with their 'traditional household patriarchs' in rejecting modern contraceptives in their lives, and thus the authority of the State and development agencies as they position themselves as defenders of female rights. To be sure, it is not only the language and policy of the family planning programme that shape the responses of the people on contraceptive decisions. Competing discourses from religious groups, progressive political formations, feminist/women groups and popular media help shape people's attitudes towards fertility issues. Moreover, changing socio-economic conditions, increasing ruralurban migration due to shrinking possibilities of owning agricultural land coupled with increasing proletarianization, high levels of urban unemployment, housing shortages and modern education create experiences for people that influence their decisions about household size and relationships. In intellectual circles as well among poor people, questions are raised about the assumed 'natural' linkage of economic development and population control. The increasing disparity in income levels that is quite independent of family size also creates spaces to criticize the emphasis on family planning as opposed to issues of equity of distribution and social justice.

The major threat that the State encounters is in the language of Islam. Through a concerted effort of propagation and militancy, the Islamic political groups severely criticize the state for its fertility control policy. To counter this move, the State and the donor agencies have relied heavily on the State sponsored religious leaders (e.g. the Sheikhs of Al-Azhar University) to interpret Islam as favouring family planning. State pronouncements argue for the compatibility of family planning with Islamic principles. This paper cannot do justice to the range of arguments put forward by the State sponsored publications and campaigns about Islam's position on contraception. However, one of the key elements in these propositions is the issue of a strong nation. Based on one of the established rules of Islamic thought, that harm should be eliminated at all cost, the State argues that although procreation is important to preserve the entity of the nation, a large population dominated by ill health and weakness is useless (Ministry of Waqf and Ministry of Information 1994: 18-25). This is reiterated in the writings of Mohammad Sayed Tantawi, who was then the Grand Mufti of Egypt:

Once more we say: Welcome to a good, big strong productive population, but not for a weak poor and big population which goes astray from the right path and depends on others for its necessities. A small population is far better. (Tantawi 1988:5).

Islam remains a dominant idiom in social debates within Egypt and post-colonial Muslim societies. In the discussion on population control, as in other spheres, the Egyptian State constantly competes with the Islamic groups over the correct interpretation of Islam. The State of course has an ambiguous and long history of alliance and distance with some of the groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. However, in recent years it has decided to construct them and other groups together as extremists and terrorists, and thus sought to undermine their authority.

III

Another major critique of the State policy on fertility is from the secular women/feminist groups in Egypt? These groups to a large degree strive to change antiwomen laws stipulated by the Egyptian State to control the private and public life of Egyptian women. They operate mostly through organizing seminars, lectures and other intellectual and cultural activities on women issues. These consciousness raising forums are meant to be for the interchange of ideas among the educated group of feminist women and men. In demanding the emancipation of women, some groups link their politics to the larger political struggle being waged in Egypt on social and economic rights, the reform in labour laws and for the freedom of assembly and association. The agenda is to strive within the parameters of legality to increase the legal and political space of permissible democratic politics.

A number of women groups as NGOs or as consultants contribute in the developmental debate from a specific women-centred and nationalistic point of view. They argue that their efforts can help in focusing the international funds to appropriate `targets', on issues of women and development. This guarantees a diminution of waste and corruption in the development process and sets priorities designated according to `real need'.

The link between the women groups and the discourse of liberalization of the lending agencies is one of pragmatic co-operation and critical distance. There may, however, be a hint of a tactical alliance between the liberal political agenda of the development agencies, as the international agencies seek to introduce the International Human Rights debate in Egypt as a part of the `democratization' process, and the emancipatory politics based on the rhetoric of rights and legal reform of the women's groups. One of the debates in which this language is invoked periodically these days has to do with family planning. The right of women to choose a contraceptive or to 'plan' her family is often linked to her emancipation in this framework.

Most groups are critical of the family planning programme in Egypt. They oppose the use of poor urban and rural women as objects of experimentation for new contraceptive technology. They also argue for a more comprehensive notion of rights that includes provision for the health of the mother and the social well-being of women. A larger agenda of reproductive rights, according to them, needs to be more inclusive and give equal opportunities to all classes of women. Through this critique and engagement, they have been able to push the debate on reproductive rights beyond the mere providing of contraceptives, towards becoming more sensitive to the needs of women's health in general.

There is, in most cases, an exclusion from their midst of Islamic-oriented women's groups. The dialogue and democratic politics remain within the realms of those who agree on liberal democratic ideals. The exclusionary politics towards the more Islamic minded women may alienate these formations from a sizeable portion of women in society. For example, the practices of poor women, under the guidance of Islamic oriented groups, in the Shabi (popular) neighbourhoods of Cairo, do not always figure in their possible political strategy. Very little attempt is made to reflect on the possible potential of a democratic alliance against an oppressive State.9 This is not to deny that the Islamic groups have themselves been extremely critical of and aggressive against the secular women organizations, and periodically resist any attempt to reform laws that discriminate against women.

Secular women groups speak in a universalized language of emancipation, thus invoking the authority to represent all Egyptian women and liberate them from their `misery'. This elitist rhetoric constructs the `Egyptian woman' as a victim who needs to be lifted from the drudgery of her life (the Islamic oriented women groups may be seen as misguided and `falsely conscious' of their own conditions). In such instances these formations remain within the parameters of the debate set by the larger neo-liberal agenda of international development. Speaking the language of liberal democracy, and invested in secularist politics, they may become the interlocutors for the international agencies and representative of what is modern, what is communicable and what is within the framework of international capital. As Chakrabarty reminds us, the politics based on the agenda of `rights' and `consciousness raising' are historically linked with the effort of creating citizens and strengthening of the State along with its capacity of coercion, `the continual forgetting of which fact constitutes the kernel of the citizen's "everyday life''' (Chakrabarty 1994c: 331).

Many women in these groups have suffered personally and collectively in their struggle for rights of women in Egypt. The politics based on the invocation of 'rights' may be important in the sphere of local struggles against undemocratic structures. However, this discourse of rights reworked into formulation of reproductive rights and maternal morbidity/mortality studies - the new emphasis in family planning discourse in Egypt - retains the linkage of reproduction and fertility to women. This is not dissimilar to the notion of self-control and discipline embedded in the rhetoric of 'choice' for women propagated by the State. It is women who should choose; reproduction remains a female act. In doing this, liberal notions of individual agency[10] and gendered victimhood are reproduced to argue for women's emancipation.

IV

In contrast to the above, I seek to briefly examine a different construction of choice and household formation from the one embedded in the fertility control programme in Egypt. For example, it was evident very early on in my research that people held different ideas about the formation of a household and family based on their own kin networks and larger familial relationships. Islam and the emerging politics linked to Islamic groups also created linkages and solidarities that went beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. During the fieldwork some of my male informants/friends invoked the notion of a large powerful family, the [c]Aila, in linking themselves to larger group solidarities. This view was especially important when these men spoke about the fertility control programme in Egypt. As world events evolved over the period of my stay, the news from Bosnia was the most ominous for my rural and urban informants. The perception of Muslims being persecuted because of their religion evoked anger and frustration. The situation in Palestine and the intifadah against the State of Israel also affected them immensely, more so because many of them were veterans of earlier wars against Israel. They interpreted these and other world events of discrimination against Muslims as personal humiliation. For many, the internationally assisted family planning programme was part of a larger Judaeo-Christian plot to weaken the Muslims of the world. Ishaq, a middle aged urban informant explained further:

Allah is the creator, and the world belongs to him, then accordingly, the national boundaries are meaningless and the whole universe was created to be populated by Muslims. People should be allowed to travel, work and spread the message of Islam wherever they please. Therefore, it becomes a religious duty to enlarge your immediate family so that the larger family may become stronger.

These articulations point towards some important issues. Given a chance, most of my friends sought to travel as migrant labourers, primarily to escape the lack of good employment opportunities in their lives. Keeping this background in mind, they seek to say that family planning is a contrived issue. For if they were allowed to travel, the world has enough resources to accommodate them. The imagery of a larger family and the critique of artificial geopolitical boundaries simultaneously challenges the modern discourse on the geographical boundedness of nation-states and the internationally sponsored family planning programme in Egypt, which bases its thesis on the limited assets within given borders of a nation-state and seldom raises the issue of international or local redistribution of resources. Finally, I would argue that Ishaq's argument also challenges and questions the colonial and contemporary construction of 'Egyptians' trapped in their geography.

In speaking to members of different Islamic groups[11] in my rural and urban field-sites, I found there was always a construction of the nation that was larger yet also contained within the boundaries of Egypt. Victoria Bernal (1994) has recently argued that the Islamicist forces propagate understandings that link local identities to larger and more universal set of beliefs and practices (p.41). Similarly to this argument, my informants had a sense of solidarity and connection with other Islamic states such as Sudan, and with the Islamic movements in different parts of the world. The connections were not only drawn in political terms, but rather in ways that the body itself was disciplined across borders. Therefore the regulation of correct practices of how one prayed, washed oneself, wore clothes, veiled, kept a beard, cut hair and behaved in public and private spaces was as important to link them to larger groups of Muslims in other parts of the world. At the same time, politics for these informants consisted of engaging and resisting the local and national power structures within the framework of the Egyptian State.

The newspaper Ash-Sha'b, a critic of the government with strong links to the Egyptian Islamicist movement, regularly publishes articles with arguments similar to those of some of my informants. For example, in one piece published before the ICPD conference held in Cairo in September of 1994, the columnist argued that because of the declining population in the United States and the West, there is a fear of future power deriving from the population potential of the Islamic world. Rather than invest in real and meaningful development to help the Muslim countries, the United States in particular defines this population growth as a security and defence problem, therefore allocating resources to fertility control measures (Ash-Shaab, 24 June 1994). Periodic editorials in the paper further attack the support given by the Egyptian State to the U.S. and its policies in the region, and connect it to the rhetoric of benevolence and altruism embedded in the foreign-sponsored development projects.

In a recent publication, the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the oldest and one of the more organized and popular of Islamicist groups, criticized the State-sponsored family planning programme on at least three broad levels. First, it views the family planning programme as a conspiracy of the West to contain the number of Muslims in this world. This is conceived as a genocidal tactic directed generally against the poorer countries and particularly against Muslims, who are considered the competitors to Western dominance. Second, by exposing the corruption of the State, the Brotherhood argues that the issue is not one of lack of resources but of inequitable distribution. It invokes human capabilities to labour and produce wealth, and the guarantee by God to provide sustenance. Hence, the restriction of fertility would not only leave fewer people to build a strong Muslim Ummah, but also exhibit doubt about God's promise of providing for the believers, Third, the introduction of contraceptives would destabilize the moral fabric of society, and women especially could secretly use it to indulge in extramarital or illicit sexual acts. The threat of unrestrained female sexuality (even consensual homosexuality) seeks to destabilize the moral fabric of this discourse.

The position is also clear on the boundaries of the nation-state. Again echoing Ishaq's position, the idea of a single Muslim Ummah which should be unified but has been kept forcefully divided is present throughout the publication, It is argued that the integration of these countries into a single system would eventually expose the false claims of the population problem (Muslim Brotherhood 1994).

The position of the Muslim Brotherhood on the issue of household relationship between men and women is based on its own specific hierarchy of ideas and practices based on a reading and interpretation of the Quran and the tradition of the Prophet. Islamic doctrine, according to the group, accepts the spiritual equality of both genders, but the role of headship and decisionmaking within the household has been given to men.

This is consistent with the prescribed private and public spheres that the gender roles are divided into. Women are the childbearers and have the onus of motherhood, while men have the responsibility to provide for the family. Men have been bestowed the Qowama (the right of decision) over women; however, this headship is bound in duties and obligations. For example, men cannot force their wives to pay for the upkeep of the house or for domestic expenditure. Husbands cannot direct their wives' financial dispensations, which they are entitled, by Islamic law, to manage on their own. Moreover, there is an emphasis on amity and consultation in spousal relationships to guarantee a stable partnership. The injunction of the headship role is from God, who has specified a higher degree of rights within the family to men as leaders of a Muslim family. This notion of the family, as primarily subservient to the will of God rather than to individual or social motivations, differs fundamentally from the notion of choice and individual freedom embedded in modernist liberal tradition. The decision on fertility regulation is, therefore, retained with the husband in this formulation. This is the crux of the issue. The essential decision of the reproduction and expansion of the Ummah cannot be left to women alone (Muslim Brotherhood 1994: 25-38).

The debate on fertility control and the control of women's reproduction becomes a major code of tension between the State and the Islamic parties. It is a competition over the control of the domestic; but the physical reproduction of the nation is also at stake here. Partha Chatterjee (1989) convincingly shows how, in colonial India, Bengali nationalists sought to close the domestic space to colonial penetration through constructing the categories of home/world and spiritual/material. He argues that the reason the issue of 'female emancipation' disappeared from the public agenda of nationalist discourse is that the nationalists refused to negotiate with the colonial power on the women's question. The middle class nationalists could not permit the colonial regime to enter an area where it considered itself sovereign.

Modernizing post-colonial States as secular powers also assume the task of remodelling the moral and the material conditions of the lives of its subjects. The control and reform of the most intimate relations among individuals is intrinsic to this process (Asad 1992a: 15). It may be argued that the Islamicists, along with other nationalist forces in Egypt, compete with the State as to the terms on which modern domestic spaces will be incorporated into a future nation. In this process, somewhat as the nationalists in colonial India did, they seek to guard the boundaries of the private/domestic against the entry of, what they consider are, alien notions of morality and meaning.

Hence the Islamicist groups create moral desires of correct and incorrect practices according to their own doctrine and interpretation of the Islamic tradition. Intrinsic to this discourse is the disciplining of bodily practices and the redefinition of ritual acts and spaces. However, it needs to be emphasized, the attempt to establish boundaries between people, to standardize beliefs and practices and to secure loyalties is essentially a secular project of the modern nation-state. The Islamic movement's aspirations to effect exclusions and inclusions may then be seen as influenced by these modern disciplining techniques of standardization, homogenization, organization and administration.

For the Egyptian State and international development agencies, the family planning programme is also a conduit into the debate on the `authentic' interpretation of Islam being waged in Egypt today. The State's desire to transform people to its own reading of Islam, as opposed to that of its Islamicist opponents, finds tests in the acceptance and use of contraceptives by primarily poor Egyptian families. Contraceptive use may also be, therefore, seen as a symbolic parameter to gauge support and identify opposition by the State.

It should be made clear that the rules and policies of the State or the Islamic groups do not guarantee a corresponding practice by people themselves. Women and men on the ground create meaning and participate in the production of moral desires influenced by, yet, perhaps, different from those articulated by the State, the Islamicists or the women's groups.

The undemocratic nature of the Egyptian State has left very little space to engage in non-violent political practice. The rise of the Islamic political movement with its reliance on violence may be a consequence of this policy. Yet it is important to note that this aspect of the Islamic movement has helped the State to define itself against the `terrorism' of the Islamic radicals. In this definition, the Egyptian State constructs itself as the `rational self' opposed to the `irrational other'. This construct ignores for most political and practical purposes the inherent tensions and differences among the Islamic groups themselves, and creates a monolithic argument against a perceived radical Islamic threat. The State creates this space for its own continuity as the guarantor of reason and civilized discourse. This, move, however, also guarantees the space for only two players in the political spectrum: the State and the `extremists'. The potential for any other voice, through discursive and violent means, is apparently excluded and eclipsed in the political space.

This article has argued that the Egyptian State, in collaboration with international donor agencies, uses the family planning programme as a tool to modernize its population. As a modern State it deploys categories of the `nation's economy' related to the concept of material wealth and social improvement ('progress') to argue for distinctive political and social practices connected to modern ideas of physical and mental health (Asad 1992b: 335-336). In this process the normalization of categories of conjugal marriage and nuclear family helps construct the modern categories of the `individual' and the `private'. These issues are distinctly linked to the construction of modern subjects and modern citizens. However, these constructions, in the case of Egypt, may be on very slippery terrain. On the one hand, there is an effort to produce socially responsible citizenry which would follow the State's advice on family planning and seek to restrict their family size. On the other, the high unemployment rate, general deprivation and undemocratic political environment exclude most people as equal players in the system, creating political conflict and deep resentment towards the process.

The fieldwork in Egypt was supported by a Doctoral Research Fellowship granted by the Population Council and the support of the anthropology department at the Johns Hopkins University. Different and earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the annual meetings of the American Anthropology Association (Atlanta 1994) and the MESA meetings (Phoenix 1994). I thank Talal Asad, Caroline Bledsoe, Kaveh Ehsani, Robert Foster, Thomas Gibson, Niloofar Haeri, Saba Mahmood, Syema Muzaffar, Martina Rieker and Michel-Rolph Trouillot for their support and thoughtful comments. I am indebted to the Editor of this journal and an anonymous reader for their suggestions and close reading. However, I remain responsible for the final shape of this article and any shortcomings therein. My utmost gratitude is to my informants who welcomed me into their lives with open hearts.

Newspapers and Periodicals Ash-Sha'b 24 June 1994 (Arabic).

1. All translations are from Roger Allen, A study of hadith Isa ibn Hisham: Muhammad al Muwaylihi's view of Egyptian Society during the British Occupation.

2. The first modern census in Egypt was held in 1882. The next was held in 1897. Also see Cleland (1936) and Craig (1926) for some of the early twentieth century analysis of the population issue in Egypt.

3. Escobar's rich and complex work needs a more detailed analysis. I raise his formulations as an example of recent post-modern scholarship on the subject of development.

4. I discuss the following in more detail in another paper, Asdar Ali (1996).

5. This analysis is based on interviews with family planning officials in the government, the international donor agencies, the non-governmental organizations and reading family planning reports and surveys.

6. Historically, by the early part of the twentieth century marriage patterns by choice and 'love' reflecting changing social and economic structures were becoming common among the elite of Egypt (see Baron 1991). A nineteenth century version of a liberal European family being imposed on Egyptian households may be in order to normalize the vast majority of the Egyptian poor, who, although statistically they live in nuclearized households, are not behaving as modern families would in their acceptance of modern contraception.

7. The Egyptian Family Planning policy emphasizes the rights of the;family as a unit to decide one the appropriate number of children it desires within the framework of religion and the cultural norms of society (Sayed 1989, as quoted in Naguib and Lloyd 1994). However, in practice services are primarily provided to women, and spousal consent is not required for the use of most family planning methods (Naguib and Lloyd 1994). International donor agencies favour this approach by championing the right of the individual, in this case 'the Egyptian woman', to decide the method of contraception. As the choice of contraception by women is rhetorically linked to their emancipation, the family planning programme and the donor agencies present themselves as the defenders of the rights of women. The international donors view the policy emphasis on couples' rights as a direct infringement of the individual rights of women to decide in reproductive matters. They invoke the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women to struggle for the individual rights of women. This is a site of some tension between the Egyptian State bureaucracy and international donor agencies. A detailed discussion of these complex relationships is, however, beyond the scope of this article.

8. I interviewed members of different women groups. I occasionally attended seminars and presentations organized by them and also came across some of them individually in my research on Egyptian NGOs and while visiting offices of international development agencies. My focus in this paper is to represent the broader issues that unite their agenda rather than to do an ethnography of each group separately. However, it should be mentioned that the political leanings of these groups range from marxist nationalist to the mere liberal. The self-expression of these groups as feminists is also a complicated issue and beyond the range of arguments presented here. For a more complex presentation of their views see Nadje Sadiq Al-Ali's paper (1996).

9. Saba Mahmood (1996), in a yet unpublished theoretical essay, discusses the problems western feminist thought encounters in accommodating the views of religious Islamic women.

10. Talal Asad (1993, 1995), argues that the concept of agency linked to a consciousness is problematic as it obscures the fact that actions are most of the times not products of individual will, but structured by the range of possibilities available in a certain given situation.

11. All Islamic groups/parties/formations oppose, completely or partially, the State-sponsored family planning programme according to their own interpretations of Islamic doctrine. The Islamic movement in Egypt needs to be understood in all its diversity and complexity (e.g. Muslim Brotherhood and groups such as Islamic Jihad and the Jamaat). For the sake of this article, however, I do not present a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the responses of different Islamic political groups to the fertility control programme in Egypt. The section will seek to present arguments put forward by my Islamicist politics-oriented informants, by the publications of primarily the Muslim Brotherhood and the politically sympathetic press, like the newspaper Ash-Sha'b, as they offer a critique of the State-sponsored project.

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