ABSTRACT
This chapter explores why this literature, which is concerned with the study of the modern nation-state, has privileged the "Muslim family" as its primary focus of analysis. It briefly outlines how Middle East political science has conceptualized the relationships among modernization, the state, and the family. These different perspectives on the family changed our views of Islamic society and its women. The chapter presents the narratives that studied the state in nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Middle East societies. It focuses on the state in the second half of the twentieth century. The chapter discusses the limits of the modernization discourse and the efforts to break with it. Nationalism was the basis of the oldest and most popular narrative used to analyze the new relationship among modernization, gender, and the state in the Middle East. The narrative on state feminism highlighted the modernist economic, political, and ideological strategies used by the postcolonial state to demonstrate its feminist credentials.
