Public
and private in Middle Eastern women's history (Journal
of Women's History; 3/22/2003; Thompson Elizabeth)
It is remarkable
that the conceptual framework of public and private spheres has
never dominated Middle Eastern women's history. Given the media's
sensationalist fascination with Muslim women's veils, one might
have expected a vigorous scholarly critique of its simplistic dichotomies
of public and private. While much has certainly been written about
the current revival of veiling in Middle East, little has been written
on the historical contexts that have defined the meaning of those
veils. There has thus been virtually no debate about the usefulness
of the terms "private" and "public" in defining
those contexts. Why this surprising lacuna? It may simply reflect
the thin ranks of historians who specialize in the Middle East.
It also likely reflects postcolonial scholars' general distrust
of terms that carry the baggage of Western imperial hegemony. As
Europeanists have also acknowledged, Habermasian public and private
spheres are historically contingent categories that do not travel
well through European history, much less the histories of other
regions. So the lacuna may be a healthy sign that scholars of the
Middle East have avoided normative European categories that might
distort local experience. But avoidance may also incur steep costs
to historical understanding. First, by not interrogating the terms
public and private directly, scholars are unable to check their
misuse--for the terms are widely used by non-specialists in contemporary
debates about modernity, democracy, women's status, and Islamic
morality in the region. Second, rejection of universal categories
in favor of localist terminology may encourage the cultural exceptionalism
and essentialism that revisionist and feminist historians have sought
to combat. A purely local focus denies the reality of transnational
historical experience.
This essay therefore argues, in likely contrast to others in this
retrospective, for more extensive experimentation with public and
private as lenses of historical analysis. It is only through the
direct interrogation of the concepts in local historical contexts,
and through direct scholarly debate about their merits, that we
may succeed in redefining them in truly universal terms or in identifying
new conceptual frameworks that foster comparative and transnational
historical understanding. As a step toward that goal, this essay
examines the tentative and often unexamined uses of the terms "public"
and "private" in historical studies of gender boundaries
in the Middle East. It aims to tease out areas of consensus and
debate that are often only implicit in the most influential revisionist
and feminist scholarship found in English. In brief, dichotomous
models of public and private have not served medieval and early
modern women's history well. Preliminary efforts to reconceptualize
the topography of women's lived experience in graded terms of seclusion
and mobility seem more promising. Despite the seeming durability
of legal texts prescribing women's proper sphere of action, historians
have shown that the location and function of gender boundaries have
shifted over time, especially in response to state-building and
class formation. They generally agree that the colonial encounter
with Europe in the late nineteenth century caused a profound and
explosive shift in the discourses and practices that set gender
boundaries. The precise nature of the colonial and postcolonial
shifts in gender boundaries, however, remains unclear partly because
of our poor understanding of pre-colonial boundaries. Dichotomous
conceptions of public and private that emerged out of the colonial
encounter have combined with older repertoires to create a volatile
and complex reality for Middle Eastern women today.
The Elusiveness of Public and Private in Medieval Law and
Practice
Research on gender boundaries in the seventh through eighteenth
centuries has made important first steps in deconstructing historical
ideal models based solely on legal texts. Obstacles to a fuller
understanding include not only a rarity of sources, but also the
limits of polemical intent. The dominant inspiration for such research
has been reaction to the polarized and dichotomous discourses of
Westernization and Islamization that confront Middle Eastern women
today. This has resulted in a tendency toward under theorized usage
of the terms "public" and "private." Critics
of these approaches have substituted a variety of other terms that,
so far, have not brought conceptual clarity to the question of women's
status within emergent Islamic societies.
Contemporary debate about gender boundaries in Islamic societies
gravitates toward analysis of the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds.
Fatima Memissi, a Moroccan sociologist, and Barbara Stowasser, an
Arabist at Georgetown University, represent two important schools
of interpretation among feminist scholars. In The Veil and the Male
Elite, Mernissi argues that the Prophet intended to create the ideal
Muslim society, based on the principle that all believers are equal
before God, through what she calls a revolutionary conflation f
public and private spheres. That is why he situated his wives' apartments
adjacent to the first mosque in Medina, where they might participate
in communal debates, and why he took them along to battlefields.
"The Prophet's simple manner of living was a threat to those
around him, for he cared nothing for the virtues of the public/
private division of space, and male supremacy can only exist and
be consolidated if the public/private division is maintained as
an almost sacred matter," Mernissi argues. (1) But building
a state and defending the nascent community interfered with these
ideals. According to Mernissi, prominent converts protested Islam's
challenge to their patriarchal privilege in the home, and the Prophet
feared they would defect from the army. As Mernissi notes, it was
only after these confrontations that revelations appeared ordering
the Prophet's wives to veil. She insists that such revelations must
be read as historical contingencies that conflict with the enduring
principle of equality.
Like Mernissi, Stowasser applies the terms "public" and
"private" to seventh-century Arabian society in their
commonsense meaning of today. Her study of the Qur'an and its commentaries
also stresses their egalitarian and communitarian vision: "Beyond
ensuring public morality by way of personal example, however, God's
men and women must also do so through active involvement in communal
participation 'in obedience to God and His Prophet.' In pursuit
of these communal goals, men and women are equal 'guardians of each
other'(9:71)." (2) As evidence of women's public role, Stowasser
argues, women took oaths of allegiance and service to the community.
However, in contrast to Mernissi, Stowasser argues that later revelations
on veiling are integral to the Qur'anic vision. They explicitly
defined a private family sphere for women and children that was
strictly off-limits to strangers, especially men. This definition
of a private family sphere was not intended to cut women off from
politics. Stowasser, like other scholars, uses the term "segregation"
rather than "seclusion" to emphasize the nature of the
male-female divide as a spatial separation, rather than a dichotomy
of public/private spheres. Both Stowasser and Mernissi are struggling
to fit the terms "public" and "private" to a
society undergoing a transition from tribal organization to more
urban, communitarian, and individual forms. Neither scholar, however,
defines the terms to fit consciousness or social structures of seventh-century
Arabia. Did the Prophet really conceive of, and therefore intend,
a conflation of two dichotomous spheres? To what degree was the
nascent community (umma) conceived in terms that we might call public?
What did privacy mean when the community's well-being and interest
focused on intimate sexual habits of its members? Might property,
and the Prophet's emphasis on women's rights to it, be an indicator
of a personal, if not private, realm?
Feminist scholars generally agree that the rise of a class of male
legal scholars, and the extension of the state far beyond Arabia,
contributed to extreme readings of scripture that became enshrined
in Islamic laws still used today. Leila Ahmed, author of Women and
Gender in Islam, chose to describe that process largely without
reference to public and private spheres, relying instead on the
concept of patriarchy. Ahmed argues that Persian and Byzantine cultures
of women's veiling and imperial harems were carried into Islamic
societies by converts from those regions. Legal scholars based in
the non-Arab provinces of the new empire extended Islamic definitions
of gender roles in the family to the wider community in a long continuum
of patriarchal dominance. As a result, Ahmed argues, hierarchical
legalism stifled the egalitarian, ethical voice of Islam. (3) In
an exceptionally nuanced study, historian Denise Spellberg approached
Iranian and Iraqi religious texts of the ninth and tenth centuries
as political debates and found that the figure of the Prophet's
favorite wife, 'A'isha, became the focus of ideological battles
between rivals for leadership of the medieval Islamic community,
the Sunnis and the Shi'is. This rivalry drove scholars of both camps
to cast 'A'isha's involvement in politics in progressively negative
terms, in part reflecting the prevailing norms of gender separation
rooted in pre-Islamic culture. Scholars' interpretations of scriptural
references to 'A'isha eventually asserted that all women were a
source of disorder and sexual temptation to men and that they should
therefore be excluded from politics. Spellberg also avoids use of
the private/public dichotomy in favor of a continuum of male authority
based on genealogy and marriage: "The development of 'Ai'sha's
historical persona definitively demonstrates the nexus between the
personal and political in Islamic historiography." (4) Her
argument contributes to a general consensus that the historical
context of the emergence of Islamic law privileged interpretations
favoring female exclusion rather than egalitarianism in community
affairs. In Islamic legal discourse, segregation became seclusion.
By the fourteenth century, social practice appeared to mirror Islamic
law in its emphasis on a rigid boundary between the harem and outer
world. That boundary was constructed as both sacred and sexual--emphasized
by the posting of eunuchs as guardians not only at the doors of
imperial harems in Cairo, but also at the Prophet's tomb in Medina
and the holy Ka'ba in Mecca. As historian Shaun Marmon has argued,
the eunuchs guarded against the dual forces of fitna (anarchy):
sexual temptation and political discord. (5) Prominent religious
scholars in Egypt sought to ward off social anarchy, according to
historian Huda Lutfi, by urging Muslims to maintain a "clear
division between the public domain of men and the private domain
of women" in the home. (6) The meaning of this boundary was
ambiguous: was it meant to conceal or to confine, or both? Women's
association with the harem appears to have been both a source of
power (because the Prophet had intended the family as the sacred
cornerstone of a just and godly community) and a virtual jail (because
it defined women primarily in terms of their sexual threat to male
authority and social order). Historian Leslie Peirce evokes this
ambiguity in her study of the sacred-sexual meanings of the Ottoman
imperial harem. (7) She argues that the Ottoman harem was not initially
defined as a female space; rather, it represented the innermost
sanctum of power inhabited by the sultan. No other adult males were
permitted in what Peirce calls the "vortex" of imperial
rule. This arrangement echoed key concepts in Islamic mysticism,
where Sufis viewed the zahir (public sphere) as a realm of corruption
and the batin (inner or private sphere) as the site of truth and
spirit. (8) Because women occupied the sacred center of family and
society, Peirce argues, their seclusion was not by definition exclusion
from the most important functions of maintaining a moral and just
society. Peirce's vortex model attempts to explain how royal women
continued to exert political influence through their sacred roles
in family networks, despite their physical (and sexual) confinement
in a guarded harem.
Indeed, Peirce and other historians of the fourteenth to eighteenth
centuries have challenged the trend toward women's seclusion suggested
by medieval legal history with evidence that a more egalitarian
segregation persisted in social practice. (9) In their view, segregation
captures better the primary function of veiling, which is to obstruct
illicit sexual relations and to assure lines of paternity. Segregation
also captures the realities of social practice preserved in sources
unavailable for earlier centuries. According to this research, women's
physical restrictions to domestic space were only partial, and such
restrictions did not foreclose activity beyond the home, through
servants, intermediaries, and feminine social networks. Elite urban
women remained active in business transactions and charities, while
their poorer female neighbors routinely worked at home in cottage
industries or outside as peddlers, bathhouse attendants, servants,
and so on. And despite pressure from religious scholars, women continued
to play important roles in popular religion, as wailers at funerals,
in tomb-visiting rituals, and at religious holiday festivals. Class,
rather than gender or religious law, according to this view, was
a primary determinant of practice: both women and men of the elite
protected their status by not appearing on streets without being
guarded and veiled by large retinues.
Gender boundaries clearly varied over place and time, but research
has yet to explain fully how and why. Preliminary evidence suggests
links to class and state formation. At times, hardline religious
scholars enlisted states to enforce not just segregation, but women's
seclusion. The Mamluks, a slave-military elite that ruled Syria,
Egypt, and Arabia between 1260 and 1517, entered into an alliance
with the religious-scholar class to justify their rule. The Mamluk
state and scholars regularly blamed women's presence in public for
such calamities as drought and plague, and issued edicts forcing
them to stay home. In addition, the Mamluks financed the spread
of male-only law colleges that effaced women's longtime but informal
role in religious education, (10) In the Ottoman and Safavid empires,
an early laxness in sexual morality reflecting the dynasties' roots
in the Central Asian steppe appears to have disappeared by the seventeenth
century as state bureaucracies expanded and a religious lobby emerged.
In 1599, as Arabs and Egyptians had before them, the Ottomans decreed
women's political exclusion on the basis of a tradition that the
Prophet said, "A people who entrusts its affairs to a woman
will never know prosperity." (11) Evidence from the eighteenth
century, however, suggests that the trend toward rigid segregation
was not uniform. In the prosperous Tulip Era of the 1720s, for example,
Ottoman rulers loosened enforcement of gender segregation as the
court sponsored public festivities in the parks, gardens, and waterways
of Istanbul. (12) And practice in the Arab Ottoman provinces varied
widely, although ascendant scholarly families appear to have imposed
class-based definitions of male and female space at times to mark
their status. (13)
In sum, medieval and early modern Islamic law and social practice
appear far more flexible than today's polemics represent them to
have been. (14) Public/private dichotomies are difficult to discern
in the historical record. In an article unique in its self-conscious
interrogation of terms, historian Abraham Marcus confronted the
full complexity of privacy as practice and ideal in eighteenth-century
Aleppo, a principal trading center in Ottoman Syria. Local Arabic
speakers had no word for privacy, and it certainly was not defined
as the opposite of public. Rather, privacy was a function of enduring
sacred and communal values of modesty and honor built around the
gender segregation said to have been ordained by the Prophet. Great
emphasis was placed on physical modesty, through high walls and
indoor privies, segregated usage of bath houses, and veiling of
women outdoors. Even inquiries about female members of a man's household
were considered taboo. During urban riots in Syria in 1769, "Nothing
raised such universal horror as a few instances of the rebels breaking
forcibly in the Harems." However, honorable seclusion of women
was an elite ideal only; the poor huddled in very public spaces
like mosques. And private space did not necessarily mean private
life: crowded neighborhoods thrived on gossip about inhabitants,
male and female. Islamic law of the time contained few safeguards
against surveillance or intrusion by the state, business interests,
or social rivals. (15)
Marcus contextualizes the terms "public" and "private"
in historical time and in the usage of space, and so takes a step
toward their redefinition in transhistorical, truly universal terms.
Already clear is that if public and private realms might be discerned,
they were not defined in dichotomous terms. The complex relationships
between female and male spheres of action, and between the harem
and the wider community, have been described in a variety of ways:
Ahmed's patriarchy, Spellberg's genealogical nexus of personal and
political, and Peirce's Sufi model of inner-outer gradations. The
variety of terminology attests to the tentative nature of research
so far. The attempt at conceptual consistency through the use of
the term "segregation" is still problematic. "Segregation"
may capture women's continuing, wide range of political, economic
and social activity, but it does not capture what Marcus's walls
and Marmon's eunuchs highlight about veiling and seclusion--that
they conceal and confine something taboo, powerful, and sacred.
Might we translate these meanings of the harem as a form of privacy?
If so, might the world beyond the harem, the umma, be understood
as a form of public? Might modified versions of public and private
demonstrate more clearly how class and state formation intersect
with textual practices to define gender boundaries? Or is there
an alternative conceptual framework that might better capture the
changing locations and functions of gender boundaries in the medieval
and early modern eras? We are a long way from answering these questions,
and it is important to recall this uncertainty when we consider
how colonialism altered those boundaries.
The Reformulation of Public and Private in Response to European
Imperialism
At first glance, historian Farzaneh Milani's discussion of privacy
in late-twentieth-century Iran resonates remarkably with Marcus's
discussion of eighteenth-century Syria. Like Marcus, Milani wants
to stretch the term "privacy" to embrace a variety of
forms. In Middle Eastern cities, the boundaries of the private realm
are not necessarily wider than elsewhere, she argues, just more
physical: "'There are no walls around the houses here,' I wrote
in my diary, in an entry dated 24 December 1967. This was a few
days after my arrival in America. It took me years to realize that
in America other kinds of walls, mainly invisible, existed.... privacy
can take different shapes and can be protected in more ways than
one." (16) In contrast to Marcus, however, Milani appears to
evoke a much more starkly polarized and durable system of gender
segregation. She notes that even thirty years after the modernizing
Shah banned veiling in 1936; Iranian men and women felt uncomfortable
socializing together. Moreover, while historians of earlier periods
stress evidence of women's activity beyond the harem, Milani emphasizes
that seclusion has severely limited women's access to courts, employment,
education, politics, and, most of all, writing. "The veil is
such a pervasive cultural issue that veiled/unveiled could be added
in the case of Iran (and Islamic Middle Eastern countries) to the
rather universal dichotomization of masculine and feminine in terms
of such polarities as culture / nature, reason / passion, self /
other, subject / object, law / chaos, day / night, rational / irrational."
(17) Mernissi echoes Milani's polarized perspective in describing
gender boundaries in contemporary Morocco: "Public means public.
It is not possible for an individual to claim a private zone in
public space.... A woman has no right to use male spaces. If she
enters them, she is upsetting the male's order and his peace of
mind. She is actually committing an act of aggression against him....
The Moroccan term for a woman who is not veiled is aryana (nude)."
(18)
Does the dichotomy that Mernissi, Milani, and others describe today
represent a dramatic change in social realities since the eighteenth
century or does it reflect a discursive shift, or both? Women's
history of the twentieth century appears at times like a hall of
mirrors where it is impossible to distinguish actual practice from
ideal images. There is little doubt, however, that the discursive
repertoire of gender boundaries was profoundly altered by the ascendancy
of European power and the influence of European dichotomies of public
and private. A second important shift has been the definition and
extension of an explicitly public realm defined dichotomously against
private. Amid evidence of change, however, continuities appear.
Just as in the ninth century Spellberg studied, in the twentieth
century, gender boundaries and women's association with the family
have been a central focus of political debates about the nature
of the Islamic community, state authority, and social rights.
Critiques of binary colonial discourses have been most influential
in framing twentieth-century Middle Eastern women's history. Ahmed
argues that European colonizers promoted a public/private dichotomy
that has stymied women's efforts to attain equality. Typical was
the view of the notoriously anti-suffragist British ruler of Egypt,
Lord Cromer, who pronounced Egypt doomed to backwardness as long
as its women veiled themselves. Egyptian elites replicated that
dichotomous discourse in such books as Qasim Amin's 1899 The Liberation
of Women, which argued that Egypt's path to modernity lay in the
unveiling and education of its women. (19) This binary opposition
between modernity and tradition also inspired a reactionary politics
of authenticity by nationalists and Islamists who urged women to
stay home and protect indigenous family values. Colonial binarism
ultimately worked against women, Ahmed argues, by forcing them to
choose between their liberation and their patriotism, a choice eventually
symbolized by their decision of whether or not to veil. "And
therefore, ironically, it is Western discourse that in the first
place determined the new meanings of the veil and gave rise to its
emergence as a symbol of resistance," Ahmed concludes. (20)
Even countries that escaped direct colonial rule absorbed European
dichotomies, as sociologist Nilufer Gole argues in her controversial
book on Turkey, The Forbidden Modern. Gole argues that Turkish women's
bodies have been a political site of difference and conflict since
the nineteenth century, and that their veiling habits can therefore
serve as an analytic thread "that interweaves the power relations
concealed by the 'civilizing process' between 'East and West.'"
(21) In the Ottoman era, Gole argues, nationalists drew upon Turkish
folklore about the equality of men and women in pre-Islamic culture
precisely to avoid the binarism that trapped their opponents, modernizers
who focused upon unveiling women as a universal totem of progress
and civilization. But in the 1920s, Mustafa Kemal and his fellow
founders of the Turkish Republic deviated from Turkism, tilting
toward elitist notions of a universal civilization, where the West
was the ideal model, and where the private was made public (Gole
follows Foucault's idea of the modernity of public confession).
Hence the unveiling of women and the abolition of Islamic laws on
their status were central to what became an authoritarian, Westernizing
Kemalist project. Kemalists' destruction of gender segregation was
a direct attack on the Islamic social order. Gole enraged contemporary
Kemalist feminists by suggesting that Islamist women who choose
to reveil are not reactionaries, but rather reformers who can help
Turkey supercede the binary trap of Westernization and assert its
own historical agency.
Political sociologist Parvin Paidar also privileges the power of
discourse in her study of women in modern Iranian history. Paidar
argues that Iran's two revolutions in 1905 and 1979 were complex
historical conjunctures that produced fundamental shifts in political
discourses about women. The constitutional revolution produced a
dominant discourse of modernization that emphasized women's education
and unveiling but, as in most Arab countries, left women firmly
under religious law and male authority at home. The Islamic republic
in the 1980s finally broke with the discourse of modernization and
its equivalence of modernity and unveiling. An Islamic revolutionary
discourse anchored the new regime in state-enforced veiling and
policing of gender segregation. Competing interests, however, would
eventually encourage women's public education, suffrage, employment,
and even military service in the war with Iraq. Despite women's
mobilization, however, the Islamic republic, like the modernizing
monarchy before it, remained the primary architect of their status.
(22)
As these scholars hint, and as other scholars have shown, state-building
and class politics are integral to understanding who wins the discursive
competition for women's bodies and the soul of the nation. Historian
Akram Khater's recent study of Mount Lebanon, for example, suggests
how class formation inflected the adoption of foreign models of
gendered space. In contrast to most studies, which have focused
on Muslim urban elites, Khater studied Christian peasants who rose
into the middle class by breaking gendered honor codes. In the mid-nineteenth
century, these mountain peasants risked shame by sending their daughters
to work in silk mills for a little extra income. When the silk industry
declined in the late nineteenth century, these daughters and their
brothers migrated temporarily to the Americas, where they again
worked outside of the home. Many of those who returned to Lebanon
with their foreign fortunes, however, asserted their new middle-class
identity by advocating the American model of at-home motherhood.
(23) Foreign models of maternalism appear to have coincided with
women's local strategies. Early twentieth-century maternalism in
the Middle East may be understood as a solution both to the class
anxiety of middle-class women activists concerned to preserve their
respectability, as well as to the political dilemma posed by East/West,
tradition/modernity discourses. Women reformers in Cairo, Beirut,
Tehran, and elsewhere framed their activism as necessary extensions
of their family role in education and health to the national sphere.
Many drew upon an old repertoire available within Islam that anchored
community welfare within the family. Even as teachers and charity
workers, however, women had to defend their presence outside of
the home as necessary service to their nations. (24) Maternalism,
even when it deployed foreign discourses, was no mere imitation
of foreign ideas; rather, it was a strategy adapted to new political
structures that emerged in the late nineteenth century.
Most consequential to women was the growth of state power, according
to sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti. While nationalist states may have
awarded women basic political rights, she has argued, they have
also made patriarchal bargains with their most recalcitrant opponents,
especially rural and tribal elites, who controlled resources the
states needed. When states intervened against the interests of local
powers and male household heads, they often sparked backlash movements
defined around patriarchal control of women. Women who fear for
their security in changing economies may opt for the security of
patriarchy. (25) Kandiyoti's model of patriarchal bargaining captures
the potential variety of public/private boundaries set in the region's
emergent nation-states. Her accomplishment is to carve a space outside
of liberal models of state-building and citizenship to consider
the specific practices of colonial and postcolonial politics in
the Middle East. It is a model, however, that explains better the
defense and expansion of the private sphere than the effect of the
new public sphere in which these contests take place.
The state's preeminent role in creating new public arenas is a subject
of my study of Lebanon in Syria just after World War I. While, in
Europe and the United States, it may have been the emergent bourgeoisie
that sparked development of print capitalism, a discursive public
sphere, public education, and new shopping districts, in the Middle
East it was the reforming state that utterly transformed and expanded
the public arena, in a non-Habermasian fashion, to mobilize resources,
finance expansion, and forge avenues of state intervention. To reflect
this difference, I call the new sphere a civic order rather than
public sphere or civil society. In the civic order, private associations
mushroomed around competition for control of the state and access
to its resources. The state played a primary role in setting the
rules of competition in the civic order. The French, who ruled in
Syria and Lebanon from 1920 to 1943, set those rules to favor their
patriarchal clients and to marginalize women, the labor movement,
and Islamic reformers. The nationalists who inherited the states
perpetuated French practice in what amounted to gender pacts that
underpin their regimes and continue to subordinate female citizens
to males through support of religious laws. Differences in the Syrian
and Lebanese pacts reflected the differing structures of their colonial
civic orders. (26) Political scientist Mervat Hatem has demonstrated
the greater latitude that Nasser's regime in Egypt had in redrawing
the gender boundaries of the public realm (civic order) once it
had dismantled the previous colonial regime's network of patriarchal
intermediaries. The 1956 constitution granted women rights to vote
and hold office, while the state promoted women's social rights,
such as education, health, and employment. "Not only did women's
right to work need protection but the state was aware of the fact
that their private/domestic roles as mothers and wives also needed
its social support. By themselves, the legal rights given to women
were not enough to secure their equality in the fraternal public
space. The state believed that its political commitment was needed."
(27) However, postcolonial Egyptian leaders, like their Syrian and
Lebanese neighbors, also refused to reform women's personal status
under Islamic law. Hatem argues that this left a critical opening
for Islamists supported by Nasser's liberalizing successor Anwar
Sadat in the 1970s.
Indeed, the emergence of dual legal systems--secular/state and religious/private--has
been important in defining the new public and private realms. Expanding
states whittled away at the historically autonomous (private) power
of religious scholars to interpret and enforce legal norms. They
did so by building competing, often secular (public) legal systems
and by usurping scholars' independent sources of wealth. This challenge
to the authority of religious scholars and to the autonomy of their
class contributed as much or more to the rise of Islamist movements
as Westernizing discourses did. In response, colonial regimes and
weak postcolonial states appeased Islamists by ceding authority
in areas now termed "personal status law" to religious
scholars. Because those laws subordinated women to male family members,
they compromised women's citizenship rights. Religious reaction
was not only Islamic, as anthropologist Suad Joseph's study of Lebanon
(with its powerful Christian minority) demonstrates. Joseph argues
that the line between public and private in Lebanon is not feminist
scholar Carole Pateman's line between the realm of state regulation
and natural law, but rather between state and religious law. (28)
As Joseph suggests, "By delegating kinship to religious law
and funneling citizenship through religious membership, however,
the state erased the line it drew between public and private. It
made religious laws, in effect, the laws of the state [and] assimilated
the rules of extended patri-lineal kinship codified by sectarian
family laws into the codes and practices of Lebanese citizenship."
(29)
Legal codification and state alliances with Islamic scholars have,
in turn, promoted a new rigidity in legal definitions of gender
boundaries. (30) Contemporary legal arguments reach back to the
repertoires of the past to define distinctly new--and newly gendered--public
and private realms. As legal scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl notes,
"The most pronounced feature of the legal determinations that
exclude women from public life is the obsessive reliance on the
idea of fitnah [anarchy] ... women are persistently seen as a walking,
breathing bundle of fitnah." (31) However, Abou El Fadl argues,
such legal positivism ignores basic moral principles of Islam, especially
the principle that no one should answer for the sins of another.
Women should not suffer seclusion because of men's unrestrained
sexual appetites. He argues against the maximalization of the private
sphere to mean women's confinement to the home; rather, he finds
a basis in the Qur'an for only a minimal requirement for concealment
of one's private parts ('awra). The old tensions between seclusion
and segregation, between harem as seat of power and as jail, thus
persist in the postcolonial era. Today, however, women trained in
Islamic law are building an alternative school of interpretation
that recoups women's equal participation in the umma, refusing the
postcolonial dichotomy of submission or betrayal. (32)
Points of Departure for Future Interrogations of Public
and Private
Broad continuities between the medieval and postcolonial eras are
evident in the research presented here: the sacred-sexual conception
of gender boundaries, the negotiated nature of those boundaries,
and the importance of the boundaries in the politics of state formation.
Also bridging the eras is the scriptural repertoire that scholars
and politicians have used in negotiating gender boundaries. Apparently
new in the twentieth century are realms called public and private,
the organized involvement of women, and the addition of dichotomous
notions of East/West and tradition/modernity. These studies of discourse
and citizenship have clearly demonstrated that current gender boundaries
in the Middle East are neither mere imitations of, nor deviations
from, European practice. They have refocused our attention on the
local historical contexts that have shaped the meanings of gender
boundaries.
A precise understanding of those contexts, and of how they have
changed in the postcolonial era, requires more research and conceptual
experimentation. One clue to the novelty of gender boundaries today
is the change in women's own speech as they have entered the new
publics. Milani's study of Iranian women poets reveals the new boundaries
in its description of how gender segregation had previously meant
women's silencing: "a woman's voice was considered part of
her 'Owrat (pudenda) and subject to strict concealment." (33)
She and others have shown how women adapted their voices to the
public realm of lectures, publishing, theater, and song. They have,
for example, employed various strategies to confront the shamefulness
of publicity, such as adopting rhetorical veils, desexualizing their
vocabulary, and addressing classical and religious themes. (34)
How might this new, public discourse reveal the meaning and boundary
of what has been newly defined as private? How might shifts in women's
public discourse reflect shifting distributions of power? As political
scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott has remarked, "the
frontier between the public and the hidden transcripts is a zone
of constant struggle between dominant and subordinate--not a solid
wall." (35) Along similar lines, we may question the degree
to which colonialism and responses to it altered public and private
conceptions of the self. Revisionist studies of autobiography as
a genre in Arabic literature, for example, challenge assumptions
that Arabs did not portray their private lives until after encountering
European writings and that European standards of privacy and publicity
define the genre. (36) These works contribute to an effort to find
a new language to articulate the relationship of the self to community,
of male to female, in indigenous terms.
Future research is also poised to address the larger postcolonial
project of provincializing Europe and rethinking the universal,
evident especially citizenship studies. (37) Gender critiques of
republicanism and Islamism in the Middle East have demonstrated,
for example, the need to conceptualize citizenship outside of liberal,
European frameworks. (38) Middle Eastern historians might take inspiration
here from subaltern studies approaches to South Asian history. Dipesh
Chakrabarty's discussion of Bengali republicanism, for example,
suggests how concepts like public might translate across regions
without the baggage of being labeled deviations from liberalism.
Chakrabarty argues that late nineteenth-century Bengali elites espoused
a non-Lockean fraternity that coexisted with, rather than supplanted,
patriarchy. They defined a public realm constituted not of contractual
individuals competing in a market, but rather of scions of ancestral/
sacred realms defending their authority against liberalism and the
British. They articulated that defense by creating a corresponding
private sphere, where housewives were admonished to observe discipline
and to cooperate with their husbands and brothers so as not to divide
families. (39) This model echoes, but is distinct from, contemporary
European and American models of domesticity, thereby fostering transnational
historical understanding without reimposing European hegemony.
Finally, another promising point of departure toward defining Middle
Eastern gender boundaries is to consider households and families
outside of the usual urban and elite context. Villages where physical
walls are rare have prompted reflections on economic logics, mythical
deployments, and poetical transgressions of public/private dichotomies
among rural and tribal societies that are now challenged by state
expansion and global capital. (40) In provocative apposition to
Khater's work on Lebanese migrants, anthropologist Jenny White has
studied rural migrants to Istanbul working in post-Fordist export
clothing manufacture. Here, employment and kinship intertwine in
a realm that straddles any clear boundary between public or private.
(41) These studies capture the mobility of gender boundaries in
recent history, and may help us to reconceptualize those of the
more distant past. They also enable us to resist and critique media
images of Afghan women in burqas as essentially Middle Eastern and
as throwbacks to an essentialized past tradition. What the pioneering,
if rudimentary, scholarship reviewed here has clearly demonstrated
is that public and private gender boundaries in today's Middle East
are as much products of transnational discourses, politics, and
economies as they are of internal crises in state formation and
class identity.
NOTES
I wish to thank Farzaneh Milani for her perceptive comments on this
article's first draft.
(1) Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite:
A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam, trans. Mary
Jo Lakeland (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1991) 111. Original
edition was Le harem politique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1987).
(2) Barbara Freyer Stowasser, "Women and Citizenship
in the Qur'an," Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic
History ed. Amira El Azhary Sonbol (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University
Press, 1996), 28. See also Barbara Freyer Stowasser Women in the
Qur'an: Traditions and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994).
(3) Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical
Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1992).
(4) Denise Spellberg, Politics, Gender, and the
Islamic Past: The Legacy of 'A'isha Bint Abi Bakr (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 6. See also Denise Spellberg, "Political
Action and Public Example: 'A'isha and the Battle of the Camel,"
in Women in Middle Eastern History ed. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth
Baron (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991) 45-57.
(5) Shaun Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries
in Islamic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
(6) Huda Lutfi, "Manners and Customs of Fourteenth-Century
Cairene Women: Female Anarchy versus Male Shar'i Order in Muslim
Prescriptive Treatises," in Women in Middle Eastern History,
99-121, esp. 100.
(7) Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and
Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993); see especially the introduction on methodological issues.
(8) For contemporary views of these concepts, see
Mehdi Abedi and Michael M.J. Fischer, 'Thinking a Public Sphere
in Arabic and Persian," Public Culture 6, (fall 1993) 220-30.
(9) See Peirce, Imperial Harem, 7; Lutfi, "Manners
and Customs of Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women," 103; Fariba
Zarinebaf-Shahr, "Women and the Public Eye in Eighteenth-Century
Istanbul," in Women in the Medieval Islamic World, ed. Gavin
Hambly, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 301-23; Dror Ze'evi,
"Women in Seventeenth-Century Jerusalem: Western and Indigenous
Perspectives," International Journal of Middle East Studies
27 (1995) 157-73; Rudi Matthee, "Prostitutes, Courtesans, and
Dancing Girls: Women Entertainers in Safavid Iran," in Iran
and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R.
Keddie ed. Rudi Matthee and Beth Baron (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda
Publishers, 2000) 121-50.
(10) Lutfi, "Manners and Customs of Fourteenth-Century
Cairene Women." See also articles in Women in Middle Eastern
History by Carl Petry and Jonathan Berkey on women's property ownership
and education.
(11) Peirce, The Imperial Harem, 267. See also
Matthee, "Prostitutes, Courtesans, and Dancing Girls,"
esp. 146-50; Yvonne J. Seng, "Invisible Women: Residents of
Early Sixteenth-Century Istanbul," in Women in the Medieval
Islamic World, 241-68; and Maria Szuppe, "'The Jewels of Wonder':
Learned Ladies and Princess Politicians in the Provinces of Early
Safavid Iran," in Women in the Medieval Islamic World, 325-47.
(12) Madeline C. Zilfi, "Women and Society
in the Tulip Era, 1718-1730," in Women, the Family, and Divorce
Laws in Islamic History, 290-303.
(13) Dina Rizk Khouri, "Drawing Boundaries
and Defining Spaces: Women and Space in Ottoman Iraq," in Women,
the Family, and Divorce Laws, 173-87. See also Judith Tucker, In
the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and
Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
(14) See Khouri, "Drawing Boundaries and Defining
Spaces," 174; and Tucker, In the House of the Law, 3.
(15) Abraham Marcus, "Privacy in Eighteenth-Century
Aleppo: The Limits of Cultural Ideals," International Journal
of Middle East Studies 18 (1986) 165-83. Nazih N. Ayubi explores
the continued absence of a word for privacy today, and the continued
emphasis on communal identity in his "Rethinking the Public/Private
Dichotomy," Contentions 4 (spring 1995) 79-105, esp. 96.
(16) Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words: The Emerging
Voices of Iranian Women Writers (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University
Press, 1992) xi.
(17) Ibid., 4-5.
(18) Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern
Muslim Society. rev. ed.. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987) 143-44.
(19) Qasim Amin, The Liberation of Women and the
New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism, trans.
Samiha Sidhour Peterson (Cairo: American University in Cairo, 2000).
(20) Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 164.
(21) Nilufer Gole, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization
and Veiling (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996)
1.
(22) Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process
in Twentieth-Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995).
(23) Akram Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration,
Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2001).
(24) On early women's activism in Egypt, see Beth
Baron, The Women's Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the
Press (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994); and Margot
Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern
Egypt (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). On early
twentieth-century Iran, see Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional
Revolution, 19061911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and
the Origins of Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
On Ottoman Turkey, see Elizabeth Frierson, "Unimagined Communities:
State, Press, and Gender in the Hamidian Era" (Ph.D. diss.,
Princeton University, 1996); Palmira Brummett, "Dressing for
the Revolution: Mother, Nation, Citizen, and Subversive in the Ottoman
Satirical Press, 1908-1911," in Deconstructing Images of "The
Turkish Woman" (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998) 37-63;
and Aynur Demirdirek, "In Pursuit of the Ottoman Women's Movement,"
in Deconstructing Images of "The Turkish Woman," 65-82.
(25) Deniz Kandiyoti, "Women, Islam, and the
State: A Comparative Approach," in Comparing Muslim Societies:
Knowledge and the State in a World Civilization ed. Juan R. I. Cole
(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992) 237-60. See
also her edited volume, Women, Islam, and the State (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1991).
(26) Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican
Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). For postcolonial Lebanon
and other comparative cases, see Suad Joseph, ed., Gender and Citizenship
in the Middle East (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
(27) Mervat Hatem, "The Pitfalls of the Nationalist
Discourses on Citizenship in Egypt," Gender and Citizenship
in the Middle East ed. Suad Joseph (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University
Press, 2000), 49.
(28) Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988).
(29) Suad Joseph, "Civic Myths, Citizenship,
and Gender in Lebanon," in Gender and Citizenship in the Middle
East, 107-36, esp. 132. See also Mounira Charrad's article in the
same volume and her book, States and Women's Rights: The Making
of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2001).
(30) Judith Tucker, "Revisiting Reform: Women
and the Ottoman Law of Family Rights, 1917," Arab Studies Journal
4 (fall 1996) 4-17. For contemporary Iran, see Ziba Mir-Hosseini,
Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999) esp. 65-79 and 90-97. For
a provocative case study that unfortunately neglects gender implications
of codification, see Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual
Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993).
(31) Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, Speaking In God's
Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000)
235. The comments here summarize chapters six and seven generally.
(32) See, for example, Mahnaz Afkhami, ed., Faith
& Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World (Syracuse,
N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995); and Gisela Webb, ed., Windows
of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America (Syracuse,
N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
(33) Milani, Veils and Words, 48.
(34) See also Afsaneh Najmabadi, "Veiled Discourse--Unveiled
Bodies," Feminist Studies 19 (fall 1993) 487-518, esp. 489;
Beth Baron, The Women's Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and
the Press (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994); Virginia
Danielson, "Artists and Entrepreneurs: Female Singers in Cairo
during the 1920s," in Women in Middle Eastern History, 292-309;
Assia Djebar, The Women of Algiers in their Apartment (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1992); and Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence
of Silence: Algerian Women in Question (New York: Routledge, 1994).
(35) James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of
Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1990) 14.
(36) Dwight F. Reynolds, ed., Interpreting the
Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001) esp. 72-103. On autobiography
and biography of Egyptian women activists, see Huda Shaarawi, Harem
Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, trans, and ed. Margot
Badran (New York: The Feminist Press, 1986) and Cynthia Nelson,
Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart (Cairo: The American
University in Cairo Press, 1996).
(37) See, for example, Seyla Benhabib, "Models
of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jurgen
Habermas," in Feminism, the Public, and the Private ed. Joan
B. Landes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) 65-99; Nira
Yuval-Davis, "Women, Citizenship, and Difference," Feminist
Review 57 (autumn 1997) 4-27; Margaret R. Somers, "The Privatization
of Citizenship: How to Unthink a Knowledge Culture," in Beyond
the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture
ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999) 121-64.
(38) See Joseph, Gender and Citizenship in the
Middle East. Another valuable volume is Asma Asfaruddin, ed., Hermeneutics
and Honor: Negotiating Female "Public" Space in Islamic/ate
Societies (Cambridge, Mass: Center for Eastern Studies of Harvard
University, 1999).
(39) Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2000) 214-36.
(40) Erika Friedl, "The Dynamics of Women's
Spheres of Action in Rural Iran," in Women in Middle Eastern
History, 195-214; Mary Elaine Hegland, "Political Roles of
Aliabad Women: The Public-Private Dichotomy Transcended," in
Women in Middle Eastern History, 215-30; Michael Gilsenan, Recognizing
Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Arab World (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1982) 164-91; and Lila Abu Lughod, Veiled Sentiments:
Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986).
(41) Jenny White, Money Makes Us Relatives: Women's
Labor in Urban Turkey (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).
ELIZABETH THOMPSON is associate professor of history at the University
of Virginia and author of Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights,
Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (2000).
She is currently working on a comparative study of gender in the
late French empire.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University Press
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