The other history : the women and memory forum and the politics of remembering

الملخص EN

This paper investigates the revisionist, gender-sensitive engagement of the Women and Memory Forum (WMF) with Egypt ian-Arab cultural history.

Founded in 1995 in Egypt, the WMF is a group of women rescarchers-activists whose prime concern is equity for women.

This, they believe, cannot be achieved without proper understanding of the roots and sources of the long history of the suppression of Arab women's voices.

Therefore, they revisit Arab history, identify its biases, study its omissions, and point out that ’official' historiography has ignored the presence of women and their contribution.

In this article, The WMFs rereading of Arab history with the aim to produce "alternative knowledge" that writes women back is analyzed in terms of a writing of (an)oiher history.

It is other history in the sense of a history different from the official, mainstream version of history.

But it is also other history in the sense of the other's history: a history by and about women - men’s other.

I interpret the WMF’s revisionism of Arab history in terms of a return of the look.

Arab women's rereading of history is an act of "looking back," of gazing at men who have authored this (official) history.

Women, hence, are no longer passive recipients of the male gaze; they are owners and producers of a counter-gaze.

This revisionism as a counter-gaze unsettles the misogynist patriarchal (mis)rcpresentation of women as timid, passive, etc.

Here, women emerge as mobile, initiative-takers, and conquering of man's formidable institution, i.e.

history.