“WE CAN DEFEND OUR RIGHTS BY OUR OWN EFFORTS”: TURKISH WOMEN AND THE GLOBAL MUSLIM WOMAN QUESTION, 1870-1935
Ansev Demirhan
A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department
of History.
Chapel Hill 2020
Approved by:
Cemil Aydin
Sarah Shields
Juliane Hammer
Michelle King
ii
iii
ABSTRACT
Ansev Demirhan: “We Can Defend Our Rights by Our Own Efforts”: Turkish Women and the Global Muslim Woman Question, 1870-1935
(Under the direction of Cemil Aydin and Sarah Shields)
This dissertation analyzes how Ottoman and Turkish women Muslim intellectuals established a set of arguments to advance women’s rights, through their engagement with the
“global Muslim woman question.” Fighting against Orientalized misconceptions of Muslim
women, these intellectuals engaged in both transregional and national debates about the rights, social positions, and “empowerment” of Muslim women. Of course, Western feminists and male
Muslim modernists also debated the conditions of Muslim women, the causes of their problems and the solutions for their “oppression.” But historians have allowed their words to obscure
Muslim women’s own intellectual visions, agency, and activism. As a corrective to this
oversight, my project explores three different historical moments of globally engaged Muslim
women intellectuals from the 1870s to the 1930s in the context of the late-Ottoman
Empire/Republic of Turkey. And it moves beyond the question of how Muslim modernists
reacted to European claims of Muslim women’s oppression, focusing instead on how Muslim intellectuals, especially Muslim women, initiated and developed their own conversations about
the place of women in society.
The debate this study examines appeared globally in the 1880s in an imperial context,
continued during the Constitutional Era, and reemerged with renewed intensity during the
cultural revolution and secularist reforms in Turkey during the interwar period. The dominant
iv
women intellectuals, and scholars have replicated their omission from historical narratives.
Exploring responses to this question in a global context reveals how ideas permeated imperial,
national and regional boundaries, challenging the notion that the advent of the nation-state gave
rise to national debates on the woman question that eclipsed transregional identifications and
global connections. In other words, national concerns on the proper role for women in society
and politics did not replace the global Muslim woman question for Muslim women intellectuals.
This study focuses on three moments in the emergence and evolution of the global
Muslim woman question. Throughout each of these periods, global engagement, facilitated
through the intellectual efforts of Muslim women, created a distinct conversation that
simultaneously focused on the need for reform within Muslim traditions, while also countering
Eurocentric liberal prejudices. The women in this study had to navigate a fine line between
critiquing Orientalism and demanding more rights at home. The latter could easily be used as
proof and justification by westerners that all Muslim women were, in fact, subjugated. I argue
that the Muslim women who participated in this debate continually provided a double-critique on
Eurocentric racial discourses on Muslim societies and gender inequality within their own
societies. I further contend, these women consciously used an Islamic framework to demand
their increased social and political rights because it enabled them to undercut the notion that
Islam was at the root of their oppression. And, their reinterpretation of Islamic traditions
undermined possible criticisms against their feminist agenda, by bolstering arguments for their
v
vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation was a collaborative effort and I could not have written a single page
without the unending support and love of the following people.
I want to begin by thanking my advisors Dr. Cemil Aydin and Dr. Sarah Shields. I can
never fully express my gratitude to you both for your unfailing commitment in supporting me
through this dissertation. I could not have wished for two more wonderful, helpful, and brilliant
scholars as advisors. Your brilliance as scholars is only rivaled by your empathy as people.
Thank you for believing in me and this project. I would like to also thank my other committee
members, Dr. Juliane Hammer, Dr. Michelle King, and Dr. Didem Havlioglu. Both as feminists
and scholars, each of you challenged me to be more thoughtful and intentional with my ideas.
Each of you inspired and helped me develop the necessary tools to produce a feminist history of
which I am proud. I would also like to thank my undergraduate mentors Dr. Carolyn Eichner and
Dr. Tamara Zwick. I would never have pursued this dissertation without your belief in me.
My years as a graduate student introduced me to some of the most amazing people and I
am lucky to end this chapter of my life with friendships that inspire me to be the best version of
myself. Thank you to Sarah Gaby, Jeanne Tilley, Eric Vreeland, Alexandria Faulkenbury, Evan
Faulkenbury, Alyssa Bowen, Heather Hillaker, Lorn Hillaker, Rory McGovern, Jillian
McGovern, Brian Drohan, Larissa Stiglich, Beth Hessler, and Mark Reeves. I especially want to
thank Jessica Auer, Erika Huckestein, and Kirsten Cooper not only for your friendship, but for
the edits, discussions, and emotional support. This project was made so much stronger because
vii
I want to thank my friends, Amy Lewis, Katie Scott, and Dayna Brayman. You three are
my chosen family and I cannot adequately express how much your love and friendship
throughout the years gave me the confidence I needed to embark on this adventure.
People say that moms need other moms. I completely agree. However, moms who are
finishing a dissertation need a Jenny in their lives. Jenny, you are truly the nicest, most generous
person. You gave your time and love to our family so that I could dive into the final stages of
this project with total focus. My ability to finish this dissertation with an infant is in large part
because of you. I could never repay your kindness.
I want to thank my parents for their sacrifices, love, and belief in me. Both my mom and
dad, for as long as I can remember, impressed the vital importance of an education and gave me
the support to accomplish my academic goals. I would never have dreamed of pursuing a
dissertation without this foundation.
I want to thank my daughter Kezban. You were my greatest motivation and source of joy
while I finished this dissertation. You reminded me every day that success is measured in more
substantial ways than words on a page and degrees earned. Being a good mother and someone
you admire will be my life’s greatest aspiration and success.
Finally, Neil- from start to finish this dissertation, and all the sacrifices that come with it,
was made possible because of you. Your selflessness, unlimited support, encouragement, and
total understanding gave me the conviction to keep writing on the days it felt impossible. There
are not enough words to express my depth of love and gratitude to you for taking this journey
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES……….x
INTRODUCTION………...1
CHAPTER 1: FATMA ALIYE AND THE GLOBAL MUSLIM WOMAN QUESTION………...24
The Ottoman Empire, Global Networks, and the Movement of Ideas………..31
Muslim Modernists’ Lives and Intellectual Productions………...39
Qasim Amin………...40
Şemseddin Sami……….41
Muhammad Barakatullah………...42
İsmail Gaspıralı………..43
Moulavi Cherágh Ali……….45
Mehmet Halil Halid………...46
Fatma Aliye………48
The Global Muslim Woman Question………...54
Polygyny………54
Arranged Marriages………...61
Property Rights………..64
Divorce………..66
Veiling………...71
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Conclusion……….79
CHAPTER2: “WE EXIST, WE HAVE AWOKEN, WE SHALL RISE”: GLOBAL FEATURES OF THE OTTOMAN WOMEN’S MOVEMENT AND KADINLAR DÜNYASI……….81
Ulviye Mevlan Civelek and Kadınlar Dünyası……….86
Ottoman Women’s Journals………...90
The 1908 Revolution and Gender Reforms………...95
Ottoman Women and the International Women’s Movement………...99
The Global Nature of Kadınlar Dünyası……….111
Reconciling Faith and Feminism and Activism Beyond the Pen………123
Conclusion………...133
CHAPTER 3: “NOW SHE IS HOLDING THE CROWN OF WORLD FEMINISM”: THE NEW TURKISH WOMAN ON THE GLOBAL STAGE, 1923-1935………..135
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’ Answer to the Global Muslim Woman Question………141
Keriman Halis and the “New Turkish Woman”………..147
International Women’s Congresses……….160
Halide Edip and the Global Muslim woman Question………171
Conclusion………...192
CONCLUSION………193
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1.1 – Fatma Aliye’s image on the fifty Turkish Lira…..………25
Figure 1.2 – Muslim networks in the nineteenth century from Seema Alavi’s Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire………..33
Figure 2.1 – Ulviye Mevlan Civelek (1893-1964)………86
Figure 2.2 – Ulviye Mevlan’s Civelek’s Commemorative plaque. Erected in 1971………..88
Figure 2.3 – Bedra Osman, Bedia Şekib, Nezihe Mustafa, Hamiyet Derviş, Mediha, Refi ka Mustafa, Seniha Hikmet-First image of Muslim women in a Periodical (Kadınlar Dünyası) in the Ottoman Empire, 1914………...93
Figure 2.4 – Selma Riza (1872-1931)………..107
Figure 2.5 – The Heading for the French supplement Kadınlar Dünyası………...113
Figure 2.6 – Belkıs Şevket………...129
Figure 2.7 – Yaşar Nezihe………...132
Figure 3.1 – Huda Sha’arawi on the far left with the Egyptian delegation At a press conference in Istanbul……….136
Figure 3.2 – Keriman Halis submission photo for Miss Turkey………..152
Figure 3.3 – Keriman Halis after winning the title Miss Universe………..153
Figure 3.4 – Opening session of the Alliance of International Women’s Congress in Istanbul, 1935………..164
Figure 3.5 – Ataturk and Halide Edip, 1923………175
Figure 3.6 – Halide Edip delivering speech, 1919………...176
1
INTRODUCTION
The Westernist [Kemalist] elites are distressed by educated Muslim women, who are in command of foreign languages as well. You can no longer identify Muslim people with either illiteracy or backwardness. We Muslim people do not fit everyday definitions of reactionary people anymore.1
Islam is open to interpretation. A woman may think that her motherhood tasks come before anything else. For this woman the best thing in life is taking care of her children and staying home. She can interpret Islam in this way. I look at Islam and say that since Islam is such a religion where women, too, can participate in the social and economic life, and it does not outlaw all these explicitly—what I am saying here is that it does not forbid these, this is not a suggestion—then I will study…. That is to say, the condition of where some women consider themselves only as mothers and where the rest find their existence outside the house…. springs from the flexible order of Islam, which fulfills every individual’s needs.2
Let me give an example of my own family. I sometimes talk about the verses and hadiths of our Prophet to my father. “Father, when it was necessary, our prophet undertook his own tasks and helped his wife; he swept the house.” …. “Where,” he asks, “where is it written?” That is, they don’t know such things, and they don’t accept them. Since they have not heard it from their own parents, they don’t believe in such things in Islam. They have been shown just that the women in the West struggle for equality…. For them women are respected so much in Islam, why should they ask for equality?3
—Turkish female university students, 19874
For many Westerners and Turkish secularists alike, no other Islamic symbol has connoted the “otherness” of Muslims more than the veil. Following the establishment of the Republic of
Turkey in 1923, authorities implemented extensive reforms aimed at secularization and
modernization. While these initial reforms did not officially ban the veil, donning it became
strongly discouraged. Republican elites depicted the veil as a relic of a backwards past. Official
regulation of the headscarf began in the 1970s when lawyers and civil servants were asked to no
1 Nilüfer Göle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996),
98.
2 Göle, 116–17.
3 Göle, 104.
4 These quotes come from field work conducted by Nilüfer Göle in 1987. Göle conducted in-depth interviews with
2
longer veil in government buildings. In 1982, the Council of Higher Education introduced a dress code targeting veiled female students which required “modern” dress at universities.5 Muslim
women university students like those quoted above launched an unprecedented mobilization in resistance to this “headscarf ban.”6
As their own words make clear, university women who opposed the veiling ban
understood it as a window into larger debates about what it meant to be a Muslim woman in the
modern world. They made it clear that their decision to veil was a personal one and criticized the
idea that veiling was a reactionary choice. Instead, they suggested that Kemalist efforts to abolish
veiling were an unwarranted reaction to Western pressures to fit a certain model of modernity.
These women argued that Islam was open to interpretation and therefore could mean different
things to different people. For them, there was no singular way of being a modern Muslim
woman. At the same time, some sought to use their own interpretations of religious texts to
challenge sexist behaviors and undermine patriarchal practices and policies within their own
community.
5 Esra Özcan, Mainstreaming the Headscarf: Islamist Politics and Women in the Turkish Media (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2019).
6 For more on this topic see Fatma Nevra Seggie, Religion and the State in Turkish Universities: The Headscarf Ban
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Seggie’s work focuses on the educational and cultural experiences of female students who decided to take off the veil to attend college. For information on the social and economic implications of the headscarf ban see Ayse Guveli, “Social and Economic Impact of the Headscarf Ban on Women in Turkey,” European Societies 13, no. 2 (2011): 171–89. Guveli argues that the ban intended to protect the elite’s privileged positions by slowing down social and regional mobility. Zeynep Akbulut, “Veiling as Self-Disciplining: Muslim Women, Islamic Discourses, and the Headscarf Ban in Turkey,” Contemporary Islam 9, no. 3 (2015): 433– 53. In this article Akbulut analyses how Muslim women’s personalized understandings of self-discipline and Islam were impacted by the headscarf ban. Kerime Akoglu, “Piecemeal Freedom: Why the Headscarf Ban Remains in Place in Turkey,” Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 38, no. 2 (2015): 277. Akoglu argue sin this article that the true purpose for the headscarf ban was not about safeguarding secularism, but had more to do with keeping women out of public spaces. Amélie Barras, “A Rights-Based Discourse to Contest the Boundaries of State Secularism? The Case of the Headscarf Bans in France and Turkey,” Democratization 16, no. 6 (2009): 1237– 60. Barras argues in this article that the use of a human-rights based discourse by Islamists, regarding the veil, bridges the disconnect between the religious and secular in Turkey.
3
The outlawing of the veil remained a matter of intense public interest and debate in
Turkey throughout the 1980s. Islamists claimed veiling was a personal decision in accordance
with their religion, arguing that every woman had the right to veil. On the other hand,
progressive public opinion, particularly among Kemalist women, argued that efforts to end the
veil ban jeopardized the principle of secularism. The latter group organized into various
associations including: Çağdaş Yaşamı Destekleme Derneği (Association of Support for Modern
Life), Türk Hukukçu Kadınlar Derneği (Association of Turkish Female Jurists), and Kadın Çalışmaları Uygulama ve Araştırma Merkezi (University of Istanbul, the Center of Research and
Application on the Woman Question). These women’s organizations unequivocally supported
Kemalism and systematically opposed the post-1980s Islamist movements. For them, the
activism of Muslim women university students symbolized the broader threat posed by Islamist
political resurgence.
The global context of the 1980s infused this Islamist movement in Turkey with even
more significance. The public discourse on Muslim women and the veil was not just part of a
Turkish nationalist discussion, but was also connected to the transnational politicization of Islam.
Islamist activity in Turkey was filtered through the lens of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and played on Western secularists’ fears of a global reactionary revolution.7 The Iranian Revolution
reinforced the identification between veiling and radical Islam. The Islamic Revolution utilized
7 For more on the Iranian revolution see John L. Esposito, ed., The Iranian Revolution: Its Global Impact (Miami:
4
veiled bodies as symbols to distinguish its difference from the West.8 Thus, the political confrontation between Shari’a and secularism manifested as a conflict between veiled and
Kemalist women and vice versa.9
At times, these reductive dichotomies were replaced by attempts at a more nuanced
understanding of the veiling movement in Turkey. For instance, sociologist Nilüfer Göle argues that “veiled students, as new female actors of Islamism, acquire and aspire for ‘symbolic capital’
of two different sources: religious and secular.” But even scholars who sought to understand these women’s choices as modern, and not backwards, positioned them as an innovation of the
1980s. Göle herself suggested that this moment gave way to a new female Muslim
intellectualism that was peculiar to the time: “Their recently acquired visibility, both on
university campuses and within Islamist movements, indicates…. the emergence of a new figure,
the female Islamist intellectual [emphasis added].”10
However, this dissertation reveals a longer history of Muslim women intellectuals that
necessitates a reframing of the activism of these university women and other recent
conversations about Muslim womanhood. The 1980s Islamist movement in general, and Muslim
intellectual women in particular, actually represented a resurgence of what I call the global Muslim woman question— a broad and nuanced debate surrounding the appropriate social,
political, and religious role of Muslim women in society that was often led by Muslim women
themselves. Yet, none of the treatments of the historical moment recognized that these women
8 For more on veiling and the Iranian Revolution see Afsaneh Najmabadi, “(Un)Veiling Feminism,” Social Text 18,
no. 3 (2000): 29–45; Hamideh Sedghi, Women and Politics in Iran: Veiling, Unveiling, and Reveiling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Masoud Talachian, “The Veil and the State: Debating the Unveiling and Re-Veiling of Women in Twentieth-Century Iran,” (master’s thesis, Florida Atlantic University, 2004).
5
were a part of a long movement to define what it meant to be a modern Muslim woman.
Moreover, the issue around which the 1980s debate circled – the veil – had long symbolized the
tensions between Islam and Western concepts of modernity, civilization, and feminism. These
tensions infused the veil with significant political meaning, both within Turkey and
internationally. Being a veiled woman in the 1980s in Turkey created cognitive dissonance for those who aspired to safeguard Turkey’s secularist and Western modernity. However, if we look
to the history of Muslim women intellectuals, we see that many of them had long ago reconciled
these supposedly discordant concepts themselves, just as their counterparts did in the 1980s. In fact, the activism against the veiling ban in the 1980s grew out of the Turkish state’s failure to
fully wrestle with Muslim women intellectuals’ answers to an earlier incarnation of that question.
Late 20th century Turkish secularists did not recognize how Muslim women played a
significant part in the efforts to reconcile Islam and eastern modernism, progress, and women’s rights dating to the 1870s. Scholars have not centered Muslim women’s voices in these
conversations, and thus have not seriously considered how these women understood themselves,
their choices, and their place in the modern world. More than a century before the Turkish veil
ban, women intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire helped launch a global conversation on the ‘Muslim woman question.’ This study addresses this unexplored topic.
“‘We can defend our rights by our own efforts’: Turkish Women and the Global Muslim
Woman Question, 1870-1935,” analyzes how Ottoman and Turkish women Muslim intellectuals established a set of arguments to advance women’s rights, through their engagement with the
“global Muslim woman question.” Fighting against Orientalized misconceptions of Muslim
6
Muslim modernists also debated the conditions of Muslim women, the causes of their problems and the solutions for their “oppression.”11 But historians have allowed their words to obscure
Muslim women’s own intellectual visions, agency, and activism. As a corrective to this
oversight, my project explores three different historical moments of globally engaged Muslim
women intellectuals from the 1870s to the 1930s in the context of the late-Ottoman
Empire/Republic of Turkey. And it moves beyond the question of how Muslim modernists
reacted to European claims of Muslim women’s oppression, focusing instead on how Muslim intellectuals, especially Muslim women, initiated and developed their own conversations about
the place of women in society.
The debate this study examines appeared globally in the 1880s in an imperial context,
continued during the Constitutional Era, and reemerged with renewed intensity during the
cultural revolution and secularist reforms in Turkey during the interwar period. The dominant
political forces and policies during these historical moments overruled the efforts of Muslim
women intellectuals, and scholars have replicated their omission from historical narratives.
Exploring responses to this question in a global context reveals how ideas permeated imperial,
national and regional boundaries, challenging the notion that the advent of the nation-state gave
rise to national debates on the woman question that eclipsed transregional identifications and
global connections. In other words, national concerns on the proper role for women in society
and politics did not replace the global Muslim woman question for Muslim women intellectuals.
This study focuses on three moments in the emergence and evolution of the global
Muslim woman question. Throughout each of these periods, global engagement, facilitated
11 For an example of this literature see Gull-i-Hina, “Modernist Trends and Varied Responses: Reflections on
7
through the intellectual efforts of Muslim women, created a distinct conversation that
simultaneously focused on the need for reform within Muslim traditions, while also countering
Eurocentric liberal prejudices. The women in this study had to navigate a fine line between
critiquing Orientalism and demanding more rights at home. The latter could easily be used as
proof and justification by westerners that all Muslim women were, in fact, subjugated. I argue
that the Muslim women who participated in this debate continually provided a double-critique on
Eurocentric racial discourses on Muslim societies and gender inequality within their own
societies. I further contend, these women consciously used an Islamic framework to demand
their increased social and political rights because it enabled them to undercut the notion that
Islam was at the root of their oppression. And, their reinterpretation of Islamic traditions
undermined possible criticisms against their feminist agenda, by bolstering arguments for their
rights with claims of religious morality.
Despite the specific global and domestic circumstances of each temporal moment, the
historical actors who participated in the global Muslim woman question built on the intellectual
efforts of the Muslim women that came before them. The fact that the debate on the global
Muslim woman question spanned decades reveals the adaptability of and continued necessity for
Muslim Turkish women to reconcile their faith and feminist endeavors. The women in this
project all saw the debate on Muslim women as a conversation with global proportions.
Dominant discourses such as Orientalism, civilizational legitimacy, feminist Orientalism,
nationalism, modernization, and secularism, all sought to define and impose an idea of Muslim
womanhood, imbued with specific political purposes, that excluded actual Muslim women’s
8
themselves in the debate on the global Muslim woman question in order to regain control of the
narratives on modern Muslim womanhood.
Beginning in the 1870s the status of Muslim women, or more specifically their
oppression, became a key criterion in judging the civilizational backwardness of Muslim
majority societies. In 1878, British imperialist and Orientalist Stanley Lane Poole claimed that “the degradation of women in the East is a canker that begins its destructive work early in
childhood, and has eaten into the whole system of Islam.”12 In addition to Stanley Lane Poole,
colonial officers such as Lord Cromer (1821-1917), and Christian missionaries like Samuel
Zwemer (1867-1952), perpetuated discourses identifying the status of Muslim women as both
the cause and symptom of the decline of the Muslim world.13 This discourse compelled a
response from late-nineteenth century Ottoman, Egyptian, and South Asian Muslim intellectuals
concerned with the political implications of an unmitigated condemnation of their culture and
civilization. Propelled in part by these concerns, Muslim women intellectuals developed a
comprehensive discourse on the global Muslim woman question.
The Constitutional Era (1908-1919) represented a moment in Ottoman Imperial history
where different ideological currents competed for dominance. Yet at the center of Islamic,
Westernist, and Turkist discourses were issues of the equality of women in the Ottoman Empire
and citizenship.14 An individual’s view on Muslim womanhood remained a key measure of their
12 Reprinted from Samuel Marinus Zwemer, Amy E. Zwemer, and Peter G. Riddell, Moslem Women (Piscataway:
Gorgias Press, 2009), cited in Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
13 Samuel Marinus Zwemer, The Moslem World (New York: Young People’s Missionary Movement of the United
States and Canada, 1908).
14 For more on the second constitutional period and the Young Turks see M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in
9
understanding of modernity and their willingness to adopt a Western cultural model. Ottoman
Westernists viewed Islamic traditions as barriers against civilization and therefore sought to
liberate women according to Western understandings. Islamists accused Westernists of imitating
Europe and believed the moral values of Islam needed to be preserved. Turkists looked to past
Turkish life for the ideal society and argued that moral identity existed outside of Islam.15
However, the Muslim women engaged in the global Muslim woman question did not squarely
fall into any of these ideological camps, and instead continued to advance a more robust and
nuanced understanding of modern womanhood.
After the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey as
a secular nation, the global Muslim woman question became a key component in the
legitimization of Turkey as a nation-state. From 1924-1938, Western writings on the Turkish
Republic overwhelmingly praised the changes in the legal and social status of Turkish-Muslim
women. However, Muslim publics in the Middle East and India were divided over the terms and direction of Turkey’s secularizing reforms.16 Middle Eastern and Indian Muslim intellectuals
long understood the Ottoman Caliphate as an example of the harmony between Islam and
modernity, and together formed a triangle of intellectual transference with Ottoman
Intellectuals and Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Young Turks on the Challenges of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2015).
15 Göle, The Forbidden Modern, 37
16 Some of these Western sources include Hester Donaldson Jenkins, An Educational Ambassador to the Near East:
10
intellectuals.17 As a result of this trans-imperial link, Egyptian and Indian Muslim intellectuals continued to pay close attention to the radical secularizing reforms in Turkey regarding women’s
rights after 1924. The attention from Muslim intellectuals outside of Turkey helped continue an
intra-Muslim intellectual network on the global Muslim woman question.
This project engages with and advances three existing historiographies: the historiography on the “woman question,” the literature on Orientalism, and the history of
international feminist activism. The first exploration into the “woman question” by historians
situated the topic concretely in the Western world and among American and British feminists.
The woman question refers to the debate on the changing social, political, and economic roles of
women starting in the late-nineteenth century and continuing through the first few decades of the twentieth century. This debate was ignited by the fight for women’s suffrage. While this
literature did an immense service in unearthing women’s activism in Western feminist
movements, it failed to reveal the non-Western components of the woman question, as well as its
power as a discursive political and social tool.18
This dissertation builds on more recent scholarship on the woman question, which has
taken a transnational approach to understanding how it came to be answered. An example of one such work is Allison Sneider’s, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Women
17 The following works are primary sources that evidence an engagement by Muslim intellectuals on the topic of the
woman question vis-a-vis their claim to civilizational legitimacy, see Moulavi Cherágh Ali, The Proposed Political, Legal and Social Reforms in the Ottoman Empire and Other Mohammadan States (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1883); Halil Halid, The Crescent Versus the Cross (London: Luzac & Co., 1907); Şemseddin Sami, Kadinlar
[Women] (Istanbul: Gundogan Yayinlari, 1996).
18 For examples of these types of works see Nicola Diane Thompson, Victorian Women Writers and the Woman
11
Question, 1870-1929. While in some ways this work echoed both the geographical location (United States) and subjects (suffragists) of previous literature on the woman question, it has also
complicated our understanding of the woman question by revealing how suffragists positioned
their arguments for enfranchisement within a larger geopolitical framework. At the turn of the
twentieth century, U.S. expansion and empire raised the question of political rights for potential
new citizens to the level of congressional debate. The discussion of voting rights for potential
new citizens (Dominicans, Indians, Mormons, Hawaiians, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans) created a
political context for a national discussion of woman suffrage in an age of states' rights. Sneider
argues that had the United States not been such an expansive nation after the Civil War,
suffragists would have had a much harder time bringing their claims to Congress.19 U.S.
imperialism allowed women’s rights activists to both demand and acquire their rights for fear of
jeopardizing the nation’s geopolitical standing as a democratic nation.
The work of historians like Sneider helped raise the possibility for further investigation
into the woman question in a global context. By considering how Muslim women raised and
developed their own woman question, this dissertation finds a parallel phenomenon in the
Ottoman and Turkish contexts. The global Muslim woman question became crucial for the
geopolitical positions of both the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. In fact, the Turkish Republic understood the reform of women’s rights as a basic pillar of its legitimacy as a new
nation-state during the interwar period.
I also draw from insights gleaned from work by Joan Judge. Judge revealed the existence
of a multi-faceted, if national, conversation on the Chinese woman question in her monograph, A
19 Allison L Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929 (Oxford:
12
Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China. Her work has changed both our geographic orientation and understanding of the subject. This book pointed to
the turn of the twentieth century as a significant moment in the unfolding of Chinese modernity.
Judge argues that both the “woman question” and the question of history were central to
understanding national politics during this moment in China’s past. This work elucidated how
ideas of woman, history, and nation became imbricated with one another, while exploring how these ideas impacted women’s everyday lives. Her objective was to reveal the complexity of the
era by “tracing patterns and seeking meanings in the intricate weave of Chinese modernity.”20
While Judge certainly acknowledged the West as a global force in China’s need to grapple with
modernity, she shifted the focus away from the West as an historical actor, and focused primarily on the domestic responses to China’s woman question. I build on Judge’s model in centering the
intellectual outputs of Muslim women intellectuals on their own merits.
This dissertation builds off of the literature on the woman question by looking at the transregional/transnational articulations on the topic. Turkey’s response to the global Muslim
woman question has yet to be examined as a gendered and geopolitical discourse discussed in a
global context. As this study shows, the woman question was not the same in every context and
this historical investigation shows how moments of intense debate on the woman question helped
facilitate global conversations and were connected to other discourses such as modernization,
Islam, and Orientalism.
By considering Muslim women’s own construction of and engagement with the global
Muslim woman question, this dissertation helps push our understanding of Orientalist thought in
new directions. During the second half of the twentieth century, the independence movements in
20 Joan Judge, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford:
13
the Middle East and North Africa incited a debate within Cold War global academic circuits on
Orientalist knowledge production. One of the primary contributors to the debate, Edward W. Said, defined Orientalism as European intellectuals’ way of “coming to terms with the Orient
that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience… the Orient is… one
of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”21 He contends Orientalism was mainly a
British and French cultural enterprise, used to strengthen their own cultures by setting themselves against the Orient, which was deemed “a sort of surrogate.” Orientalism was an
academic discipline. But, more significantly for Said, Orientalism was an ideological discourse
that coalesced with European power. Said contends that all knowledge was a product of its
historical context, and could never remain unaffected by the auspices it is derived from. This
suggests that no knowledge can claim the privilege of truth. Moreover, Said further argued that Orientalism’s entanglement with imperialism resulted in a willfully racist discourse.
Said’s identification of Orientalist discourse, and its pejorative renderings within and
outside of academia, has prompted several scholars to analyze their understandings of
Orientalism and its effect on their own research.22 Edmund Burke is one such scholar, who as a
world historian is interested in both European Orientalism and modern Islamic history. Ultimately, while Burke acknowledges the validity of Said’s claims, he finds Said’s overall
understanding of Orientalism simplistic. To complicate Said’s interpretation of Orientalism,
Burke highlights how some Orientalists were against imperialism, or wrote favorably about Islamic culture and society. Further complicating Said’s stance, Burke points to Middle -Eastern
nationalists and the western inspirations they used to claim their autonomy. He also points out
21 Edward Said, “‘Introduction’ to Orientalism,” in Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and
Criticism, ed. Gaurav Gajanan Desai and Supriya Nair (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 71.
14
that nationalist and Pan-Islamic figures in the Middle East held their own biases and
assumptions. In fact, many nationalists internalized and reproduced stigmas attached by
European orientalism to their societies. According to Burke, Orientalism is a species of Enlightenment discourse that generated “un-falsifiable propositions about the superiority of
Europeans to non-Europeans.”23 However, Burke suggests Orientalism’s connection to
nationalism, modernity, and the Enlightenment made it a global process in need of constant
critique and reformulation.
This research finds support for Burke’s general framework, while asking new questions
about the relationships among nationalism, Orientalism, and gender. Rulers of the Turkish
Republic from 1924 to 1938, for example, argued that Islamic culture was a cause of the Ottoman Empire’s decline and thus that Turkey needed to westernize in order to achieve
progress and civilization. The nationalist Turkish government’s acceptance of stigmas attached
to the Turkish populations’ own religion and culture was especially visible in their claims to
liberate Turkish women from the shackles of traditions that bound them. Thus, in the Turkish
case, we see an alliance between nationalist Westernism and European Orientalism wrought through the prism of women’s status.
Furthermore, I draw from the work Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere, by Dietrich Jung, which offers both a critique and reformulation of Orientalism by considering the discourse’s global effects. In an attempt to deconstruct the hegemony of the essentialist
conceptualization of Islam found in public discourses, Dietrich Jung employed the use of the “global public sphere” as an analytical tool. Jung viewed the global public sphere as a social and
23 Edmund Burke, “Orientalism and World History: Representing Middle Eastern Nationalism and Islamism in the
15
political site by which Western and Islamic public spheres established a global platform.
According to Jung, this platform formed, extended, and disseminated knowledge through social
power relations.24 Echoing Burke, Jung pointed to the agency of late-nineteenth century Muslim
intellectuals in reproducing and contributing to European Orientalism.
Jung’s global sphere consisted mainly of Muslim reformist intellectuals’ exchanges with
European intellectuals, and depicted Muslim intellectuals’ as victims in their need to respond to
European Orientalism. A shift away from European intellectual networks towards intra-Muslim networks reemphasizes Muslim intellectuals’ agency against European Orientalist discourse, and
elucidates an organic discussion of the question of Muslim women’s rights within Muslim
societies. These conversations looked to develop Muslim women’s roles in society through their
own interpretations of Islamic traditions, and not as a result of Western pressure.25 As opposed to Ataturk’s wholesale westernization project that internalized Orientalist ideas, especially in
regards to women.
Both Burke and Jung have added to the complexity of Orientalism as a discourse and
topic of historical inquiry. They successfully highlighted the global component of Orientalism,
while linking it to other discourses such as positivism and nationalism.26 However, in their efforts to nuance Said’s rendering of Orientalism, both failed to address the gendered facet of
Orientalism.
24 Dietrich Jung, Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing Limited,
2011), 11–15.
25 Ansev Demirhan, “Female Muslim Intellectuals: Understanding the History of Turkey’s Woman Question
Through the Construction of Islamic Tradition” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014).
26 For more works on orientalism see Chandreyee Niyogi, ed., Reorienting Orientalism (New Delhi: SAGE
16
In considering the relationship between gender and Orientalism, this draws primarily
from the work of Reina Lewis, who has sought to critique and reformulate Orientalism through Ottoman women’s social and cultural agency. Lewis’ focus on Ottoman women’s agency
intervened in the discussion of the values and limits of Orientalism as a discourse and a
theoretical paradigm in significant ways. She focused on sources with a “female point of origin,”
bringing a new element to existing challenges to masculinist histories of Orientalism.27 In
addition to the use of sources from a female perspective, Lewis suggested the use of Ottoman
sources. These sources provided examples of indigenous cultural agency that demonstrated the
other side of the classic Orientalist paradigm. The importance of these sources rests in their ability to speak of “practices of resistance,” charged by differences of ethnicity and gender.
Echoing other post-colonial feminist theorists such as Chandra Mohanty, Lewis argues that using
these sources undercut the pejorative and monolithic rendering of Muslim women.28 This study
is in part an answer to the call for more dynamic and robust histories on gender and orientalism. By examining Muslim women’s responses to the orientalist discourse about themselves, and
considering those responses as part of a transregional discussion, this dissertation re-centers both the global nature of the Muslim woman question and women’s own agency in answering it.
Finally, this dissertation puts discourses on the global Muslim question and Orientalism
in conversation with our understanding of early twentieth century international feminism. One of the landmark works on international feminist activism is Leila Rupp’s work. Rupp’s book
27 Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2004), 3.
28 In “Under Western Eyes” Chandra Mohanty argues that Western feminist scholarship reduces all women of the
17
Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement, traced the development of three international women’s organizations—the International Council of Women, the
International Alliance of Women, and the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom.
This work laid a foundation for historians to examine women’s internationalism. Examining the
first few decades of the twentieth century, when the United States and Europe saw the expansion of a feminist consciousness, Rupp’s work analyzed how the women in these organizations used
the rhetoric of “sisterhood” to help create a purportedly “common” feminist cause. However,
Rupp revealed, this “sisterhood” was forged time and again with assumptions of Western cultural
and political superiority.29
Other historians have helpfully broadened Rupp’s scope in recent years. Historian Nicole
Van Os pivoted away from Western feminists’ engagement within the international movement and examined Ottoman Muslim women’s internationalism. In, “They can breathe freely now”:
The International Council of Women and Ottoman Muslim Women (1893–1920s)”, Van Os
explored interactions between Ottoman women and the International Council of Women. She
argues that the first contact between the international women’s movement and women in the
Middle East occurred prior to the 1920s, which had been the commonly accepted historical narrative previously. This study builds off Van Os’ work by exploring the global connections
and networks of Ottoman Muslim women prior to the 1920s, allowing us to see more clearly the
long history of global engagement by Muslim women intellectuals.
Charlotte Weber has also shifted the focus away from the western women’s international
movement toward “Eastern” women’s feminist activities. Weber’s article, “Between
29 Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton
18
Nationalism and Feminism: The Eastern Women's Congresses of 1930 and 1932,” examines the
Eastern Women’s Congresses in Damascus (1930) and Tehran (1932) to show how Middle
Eastern women put forward their own claims to modernity. These women used the terms of international feminist and nationalist discourses to demand Eastern women’s advancement.
Weber argues “that in organizing across national boundaries, in seeking recognition from the
international women’s movement, and above all in articulating a uniquely ‘Eastern’ framework
in which to ground women’s rights, the delegates tried to create an autonomous women’s
movement.”30 Weber further showed how these congresses were an attempt to create a feminist
model that made sense for these women; one that would be constructed by them and on their
own terms.31
Building off these scholars’ works, this dissertation explores how Muslim women
engaged with the global Muslim woman question vis-à-vis the feminist Orientalism that framed the international women’s movement. Van Os challenged the standard periodization of Ottoman
women’s internationalism and this study contributes to the growing literature on Ottoman and
Turkish women’s global experiences. Like Weber’s research, this study also looks to focus on
Ottoman and Turkish women’s construction of an authentic Muslim womanhood. However, my
research also challenges in some important ways Weber’s assessment of the early nationalist
period. In her article, Weber declared, “In Turkey…which remained free of direct European rule, the modernizing [regime] of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk…took it upon themselves to transform
30 Charlotte Weber, “Between Nationalism and Feminism: The Eastern Women’s Congresses of 1930 and 1932,”
Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 83.
31 For more work on women’s internationalism see Marie Sandell, The Rise of Women’s Transnational Activism:
19
‘backward women’…their coercive ‘state feminism’ left no room for independent feminist
activity.”32 This project aims to show that despite the state-sponsored feminism inacted by the
Turkish Republic, there was in fact “independent feminist activity.” Moreover, that activity
derived from a long, dynamic, and nuanced discussion among a globally-focused cohort of
Muslim women feminist intellectuals.
This dissertation is comprised of three chapters. Chapter one reveals the emergence of the
global Muslim woman question as it was debated among an intra-Muslim network of
intellectuals during the context of nineteenth-century Orientalism. This chapter highlights Fatma Aliye’s participation in the debate as an inception point of women trying to take back control of
the narrative on modern Muslim womanhood. In chapter two, women build on Aliye’s ideas on the pages of the Ottoman women’s journal Kadınlar Dünyası. These women’s responses show
the use of an Islamic feminist framework in the context of a greater global discourse on Muslim women’s rights and international feminism. Chapter three presents an inflection point in the
global debate wherein the rise of Kemalist reforms seems to some people to achieve Muslim women’s “liberation” but actually is, for women who had been working in the intellectual
tradition of women like Aliye and Kadınlar Dünyası’s writers, an imperfect solution.
In order to establish the transregional existence and nature of the global debate on the
Muslim woman question, chapter one probes the assumption that late-nineteenth century Muslim intellectuals’ engagement with issues concerning Muslim women was an apologetic discourse.
This chapter assesses the discourse among Muslim intellectuals both within and outside of the
Ottoman Empire. However, the emphasis of this chapter is on the Muslim modernist Fatma Aliye
and her work Nisvân-ı İslâm. This chapter centers Aliye in the global Muslim woman question
20
debate. For Aliye, women’s religious and political importance stood at the center of her Islamic understanding. This chapter argues Aliye’s use of an Islamic framework positioned her in a
transregional discourse responsible for constructing the modern identity, “Muslim woman.”
Chapter two examines the Ottoman women’s journal Kadınlar Dünyası. The journal’s
editors and contributors self-consciously addressed the global Muslim woman question from 1913 to 1921. The editors aligned the journal with the contemporary international women’s
movement. The educated Ottoman women who wrote for Kadınlar Dünyası were tired of being blamed for the Empire’s shortcomings and saw the journal as a vehicle to change this narrative,
as well as the narrative on Muslim women espoused by feminist Orientalism. I argue in this
chapter that Kadınlar Dünyası and its contributors published articles with the twin objectives of presenting a more accurate understanding of Muslim womanhood to Western feminists and
simultaneously constructing an Ottoman Muslim womanhood that legitimized their demands for
more social and political rights within the Empire. Kadınlar Dünyası carved out a space for women to interpret Islamic traditions and cultural practices in relation to their fight for women’s
rights. By doing this, the authors made clear that there would not be an adoption of Western
feminist principles at the expense of their religious identities. Through this journal, these women
constructed Muslim womanhood in a manner that reconciled their faith with their feminist goals
for audiences both within the empire and western audiences.
Chapter three illustrates the significance of a renewed debate among Muslim intellectuals
and feminists about the merits and shortcomings of radical Kemalist reforms enacted in the name
of civilizing, westernizing, and liberating Muslim women from their religious traditions.This
chapter analyzes the Kemalist reforms concerning women in order to link the global Muslim
21
these reforms, this chapter analyzes how other Muslim majority countries (some of which were once a part of the empire) reacted to the Republic’s reforms. This chapter analyzes three
important elements in that response: Keriman Halis’ time as Miss Universe, international
Congresses, and Halide Edip’s intellectual works produced abroad. I argue that the response to
Kemalist reforms indicated a divergence in Muslim women’s responses to Ataturk’s top-down
answer to the global Muslim woman question. Some women celebrated and looked to Turkey as
a model, while others criticized the Kemalist response because Turkey granted women’s rights
under the terms that Islam no longer be used as a feminist framework, rupturing modern Turkey
from the intellectual legacy of Muslim women intellectual feminists before them.
By using the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey as a lens into this larger
transregional global Muslim woman question, this dissertation project advances our
understanding of global women’s history in a number of ways. First, I challenge traditional
periodization on woman’s issues within Turkish history, illustrating how the Republican-era
Turkish woman question, identified with the successes of authoritarian secularizing reforms,
emerged in complex ways from a global Muslim woman question discussed in the late-Ottoman
empire. Moreover, my research shows that the debate on Turkey’s woman question continued
well after Kemalist reforms were enacted, contesting the idea that Kemalism resolved the debate.
Similarly, this dissertation demonstrates the wide variations in intellectuals’ responses to the challenge of the “woman question,” recognizing the non-monolithic nature of the vibrant
intellectual life of the Ottoman Empire/Turkey. Finally, my research emphasizes the crucial
transregional/transnational dimension to the global Muslim woman question, revealing how
discursive influences on the Muslim woman question transcended national and regional
22
Scholars like Saba Mahmood, Juliane Hammer, and Lila Abu-Lughod, warn us that
arguing against established stereotypes can lead to parochialism and discourage theoretical
reflection if it becomes the sole purpose of the work. 33 The intention of this project is not to contribute to one of the two dominant narratives on Muslim women: “Muslim women are and
have historically been oppressed and here is why,” or “Muslim women are not and have not been oppressed and here is why.” Writing to or against one of these narratives reduces both research
and analytical possibilities. My focus on intra-Muslim and Muslim feminist networks of
intellectual exchange allows this dissertation to reach beyond unhelpful dichotomies. Accessing
and understanding figures like Fatma Aliye, Halide Edip, and other related networks of women, I
avoid getting trapped within closed narratives on Muslim women’s “oppression” and/or “liberation.” Instead, this project offers a critical engagement of what it meant to be a Muslim
woman, according to Muslim women in varying temporal and political contexts. This enables me to imbue the category “Muslim woman” with a theoretical and historical nuance that might not
otherwise be possible.
This project reveals that, notwithstanding the ideological bifurcation between secular
modernists and Islamists in the late twentieth century, both camps have been complicit in their
disregard for the nuanced narratives offered by Muslim women intellectuals themselves,
especially regarding their ideas on Islam as a discursive tradition. By examining Muslim
33 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005). Mahmood’s work challenges normative liberal notions on Muslim women and reframes how we understand Muslim women’s agency, freedom, and authority. Juliane Hammer, American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than a Prayer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012). In this book Hammer shows how Muslim American women challenged post-911 Islamophobic stereotypes through intellectual
23
women’s intellectual production, which does not fall into either ideological camp, this project
presents a means of historicizing and overcoming our understanding of harsh dichotomies like
tradition/modernity, modernists/Islamists, and oppression/liberation. These politicized binaries
have disempowered and silenced, and continue to silence, Muslim women struggling for their
rights on their own terms. In fact, Muslim women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
empowered themselves by challenging these very same dichotomous narratives. Were this
history better understood, perhaps scholars and the Turkish public alike might have looked
24
Chapter 1: Fatma Aliya and the Global Muslim Woman Question
In 2005, Turkey’s Central Bank appointed a committee to select several historical figures
to appear on newly issued Turkish currency. Fatma Aliye, noted as Turkey’s first woman novelist, has graced the fifty Turkish Lira minted since 2009. The committee’s decision to put
Aliye on Turkish currency incited national criticism by secularists who thought her selection
represented a surrender to religious conservative forces and a snub to the historical activists who fought for women’s rights. Mustafa Özyürek, an MP for the secularist Republican People’s
Party, described Aliye as a “dubious personality” of whom most Turks had never heard. He
noted that, “working within the tight criteria of finding types [of women] the AKP [Justice and
Development Party] would approve of is a tough challenge; 90% of people in the street do not know the figures they have chosen.”34 Bedri Baykam, an artist and member of the pro-Atatürk
Kemalist Thought Association, said it was part of an AKP-driven hidden agenda. Baykam declared, “I have no problem using historical figures on bank notes but I don’t trust the
motives…They will infiltrate through the currency names or images that at first look
harmless…until you get people who negate the values of the republic.”35
The suggestion that most people do not know of Fatma Aliye and her work as a women’s
rights activist is accurate. However, the idea that Aliye was not among the first Ottoman
feminists to fight for women’s rights, or that as a figure her life and memory negate the values of
34 Robert Tait, “First Woman on Banknote ‘Snub’ to Secular Turkey,” Guardian, October 12, 2008,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/oct/13/turkey-gender.
25
the Turkish Republic, both in the past and contemporaneously, is inaccurate. These recent, as
well as historical, debates on women’s societal roles present a unique lens through which to see
the tension between secularism and Islamic traditions, because often intellectuals and politicians
point to Muslim women as a marker of the incompatibility between the two.
What most people do not know about is the committee’s internal debate.36 The committee
discussed at length whether or not to use an image of Fatma Aliye donning the veil. This debate
held some merit considering the backlash from secularists over her selection. It is worth
questioning how the national bank chose to construct her popular memory. Ultimately, they
decided to put her on the lira sans veil, perhaps because of an understanding that she could pass
36 Dr. İbrahim Turhan, member of the Turkish Central Bank Governing Board (2004-2012), email interview by
author, February 22, 2020.
26
as a modern Turkish figure only if she did not wear the veil, thus reiterating the national
discordance between veiling, modernity, and Turkish identity. This debate suggested how little concern there was to depict Aliye’s historical memory accurately. Aliye understood a form of
veiling as a directive of Islam and did not see Islam as a challenge to her identity as a modern
Ottoman- Turkish woman. Instead, the construction of her historical memory needed to suit Turkey’s contemporary cultural identity politics. What is more interesting is that she was debated
as a national figure, but her appropriation as a national symbol clouded the fact that she herself
was a Muslim intellectual with transregional readership in Arabic, Urdu, and French. An examination of Aliye’s own work would have helped the committee to answer the question of
whether or not Aliye should be pictured wearing the veil.
Fatma Aliye’s selection by the Turkish Central Bank highlighted the recent tension
between interpretations of secularism and narrow understandings of Muslim womanhood. This
tension has a long history; one which some scholars suggest was long since resolved by the
formation of the Turkish Republic and with it the institution of legal reforms. Ottoman
intellectuals debated the limits of Westernization at the end of the nineteenth century. This
historical debate revealed tensions between modernization and cultural identity and, in turn,
gender. Ottoman Westernists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries argued that only
freeing women from the religious constraints and traditional ties of Islam could emancipate
women. Alternatively, Ottoman conservatives conjectured that granting women freedom from
religious traditions would break down the moral fabric of society. Consequently, veiling symbolized “backwardness” for proponents of Westernization, because it signified women’s
27
The scholar Nilufer Göle contends that Westernists eventually triumphed over
conservatives with the success of the Turkish Kemalist Revolution of 1923.37 Both scholars and contemporaries of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his reforms credited Turkey’s first president with
posing and answering Turkey’s woman question.38 In his biography of Atatürk, Andrew Mango wrote, “Atatürk who encouraged the process from the start, deserves his fame as the hero of
women’s emancipation in Turkey, even though social change was, inevitably, gradual and
limited.”39 Şükrü Hanioğlu, while not echoing Mango’s enthusiasm, suggested in his intellectual
biography of Atatürk that, “the status and appearance of women was yet another major concern
for Mustafa Kemal. As early as 1916…he had expressed support for the emancipation of women
and the abolition of the veil.”40 Undeniably, the Turkish Republic ushered in important reforms
for women including the unification of national education, which made primary schooling
compulsory for all children. The state legally enacted equal pay for equal work, and with the
adoption of the 1926 Swiss Civil Code as a model for Turkish legal reform, unilateral divorce
and polygyny were abolished. Atatürk, both in historical memory and historiography, is credited
for enacting these reforms, their genesis, and the effect they had on the status of (elite) women.
37 Nilufer Göle is the most significant contributor to the literature on gender and male Muslim reformist thought.
Göle’s project focuses on the Ottoman/Turkish intellectual network that placed women at the center of the discourse on Westernization, placing Muslim intellectuals Şemseddin Sami and Amhet Midhat Afendi within this grid. Göle,
The Forbidden Modern. While more recent works, like Göle’s, use gender as an analytical tool, Muslim intellectual history has failed to highlight Muslim women intellectuals and their discursive contribution to the Muslim woman question.
38 Some of these sources include Hester Donaldson Jenkins, An Educational Ambassador to the Near East: The
Story of Mary Mills Patrick and an American College in the Orient (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1925); Barbara Ward, Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1942); Mary Mills Patrick, A Bosporus Adventure: Istanbul (Constantinople) Woman’s College 1871-1924 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1934); Ada Goodrich-Freer, Things Seen in Constantinople:A Description of This Picturesque Outpost of the Orient, Its History, Mosques and the Life and Ways of Its People (London: Seeley, Service & Co., 1926); Anna Fink, Colorful Adventures in the Orient (Austin: von Boeckmann-Jones, 1930).
39 Andrew Mango, Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (New York: The Overlook Press,
1999), 435.
28
The popular, and scholarly, narratives on Kemalist reforms espoused a state-sponsored feminism. By crediting Atatürk for women’s political and social progress, the history of
late-Ottoman intellectuals and how they discussed the woman question globally, on multiple
intellectual fronts, in gendered terms, and in connection with other Muslim intellectuals is muted. With the exception of a few secondary sources, male Muslim reformists’ comments on the topic
of women are only briefly mentioned, if not entirely overlooked in modern scholarship. In fact, male reformists’ works are seldom understood as contributing to the historical discussion of
gender in Muslim societies. For example, Charles Kurzman edited a volume of primary sources
that represents a collection of the intellectual output of Muslim modernists from the
late-nineteenth century until World War II. This work was organized thematically and under the topic
of “Women’s Rights,” only two of the six modernists analyzed in this chapter were listed.41
Often times the secondary literature emphasizes male reformists like Qasim Amin, Şemseddin
Sami, Muhammad Barakatullah, İsmail Gaspıralı, Moulavi, Cherágh Ali, and Mehmet Halil
Halid’s contribution to anti-imperial political ideology, or nationalist efforts, instead of their
discussions on gendered issues.42
The Muslim reformists and their works examined in this chapter are often positioned in a
binary where intellectuals were either pro-Westernization or conservative traditionalists. This
binary is in part responsible for an understanding of their works as merely apologetic (i.e. the
defense of religious doctrine through discursive debate), particularly in regards to the topic of
Muslim women. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, however, Muslim modernists debated
41 Charles Kurzman, ed., Modernist Islam, 1840-1940: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 42 S. Tanvir Wasti, “Halil Halid: Anti-Imperialist Muslim Intellectual,” Middle Eastern Studies 29, no. 3 (1993):
29
the Muslim woman question by delving into the following topics: polygyny, arranged marriages,
property rights, divorce, veiling, and education. Each of these topics comprised a discourse on
Muslim women and Islamic traditions that extended beyond apologetics and beyond the binary
of Westernism versus Islam. A close reading of their works present insights on how Muslim
modernists understood and constructed womanhood for themselves.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, the oppression of Muslim women served as a key criterion in judging the civilizational “backwardness” of Muslim majority societies.43 With the
Ottoman Empire a primary target of this civilizing discourse, Ottoman intellectuals presented refutations of these claims and started a transregional conversation on Muslim women’s rights
and societal roles. Yet, while the debate over what I term the ‘Muslim woman question’ has
raged for over a century, historians have failed to recognize its global character. What has been
especially overlooked in academic and political discussions is the historically rich discourse by
Muslim intellectuals, especially Muslim women, who articulated various ideas on modern
Muslim womanhood, while also shaping new Islamic intellectual traditions, and critiquing
European Orientalist discourses.
In order to establish the transregional nature of the debate on the Muslim woman
question, this chapter assesses the discourse among Muslim intellectuals both within and outside
of the Ottoman Empire. The Muslim modernists highlighted in this chapter in addition to Fatma
Aliye represent a carefully selected group of prominent and influential male figures who come
from different geographical regions. While the individual societies they lived in had unique
political contours, these men were united by their intellectual fight against a racist European
Orientalism. Each of these thinkers felt compelled to confront derogatory discourses on Muslim
43 There were similar arguments with regard to the Hindu religion’s oppression of Hindu women (Sati) and Chinese
