Women in Middle

Eastern History
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Women in Middle

Eastern History

Shifting Boundaries

in Sex and Gender

EDITED BY

N I K K I R. K E D D I E

BETH BARON

Yale University Press

New Haven and London

Copyright © 1991 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced,
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Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Women in Middle Eastern history :

shifting boundaries in sex and gender/
edited by Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-300-05005-4 (cloth)
0-300-05697-4 (pbk.)
1. Women—Middle East—History.
I. Keddie, Nikki R. II. Baron, Beth.
HQ1726.5.W66 1992
305.42'0956—dc20 91-19665
CIP

The paper in this book meets the

guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on
Production Guidelines for Book
Longevity of the Council on
Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6
 Contents

Preface /vii
Organization of the Volume /ix
BETH BARON

1. Introduction: Deciphering Middle Eastern Women's History /1

NIKKI It KEDDIE

2. Islam and Patriarchy: A Comparative Perspective 723

DENIZ KANDIYOTI

I The First Islamic Centuries

3. Political Action and Public Example: 'A'isha and the Battle
of the Camel/45
DEMISE A. SPELLBERG

4. Early Islam and the Position of Women: The Problem

of Interpretation 758
LEILA AHMED

5. Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites

in Medieval Islamic Law 774
PAULA SANDERS

II The Mamluk Period

6. Manners and Customs of Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women: Female
Anarchy versus Male Shar'i Order in Muslim Prescriptive Treatises 799
HUDA LJUTFI

7. Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain: Women as Custodians of Property

in Later Medieval Egypt 7122
CARL F. PETRY

8. Women and Islamic Education in the Mamluk Period 7143

JONATHAN P. BERKEY
v
vi Contents

III Modern Turkey and Iran

9. Ottoman Women, Households, and Textile Manufacturing,

1800-1914/I6I

DONALD QUATAERT

10. The Impact of Legal and Educational Reforms on Turkish Women /177

NERMIN ABADAN-UNAT

11. The Dynamics of Women's Spheres of Action in Rural Iran /195

ERIKA FRIEDL

12. Political Roles of Aliabad Women: The Public-Private Dichotomy

Transcended 7215

MARY ELAINE HEGLAND

IV The Modern Arab World

13. Ties That Bound: Women and Family in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-

Century Nablus 7233

JUDITH E. TUCKER

14. The House of Zainab: Female Authority and Saintly Succession

in Colonial Algeria 7254

JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

15. The Making and Breaking of Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt 7275

BETH BARON

16. Artists and Entrepreneurs: Female Singers in Cairo during the 1920s 7292

VIRGINIA DANIELSON

17. Biography and Women's History: On Interpreting Doria Shafik 7310

CYNTHIA NELSON

List of Contributors 7335

Index 7337
Preface

The need for a book of interpretive research papers regard-

ing the history, and not just the current condition, of women
in the Middle East has been evident for some time, but the
possibility of producing a high quality and varied work de-
pended on the existence of a critical mass of good scholars
working on Middle Eastern women's history. Hence, even
scholars whose works are not included in this volume have
contributed to it. Scholars of Middle Eastern women's histo-
ry have published and presented papers in many places,
most notably in the annual meetings of the Middle East Stud-
ies Association and at the 1987 meeting of the Berkshire Con-
ference on the History of Women, where a series of panels
was organized by Margot Badran. Erika Friedl's, Mary
Hegland's, and Paula Sanders's papers in this volume were
rewritten from papers presented at that Berkshire con-
ference.
Contributing in various ways to this volume have been
Janet Afary, Marilyn Booth, Ken Cuno, Afaf Marsot, and
Ruth Roded. In Great Britain, Albert Hourani, Anna Enayat,
and Iradj Bagherzade gave us good advice about the manu-
script and encouragement. Jane Bitar and the staff of the
much-lamented Social Sciences Word Processing at UCLA
retyped the entire manuscript in their usual exemplary fash-
ion. Dean Paul Sherwin and the history department at City
College, CUNY, gave invaluable support.
Charles Grench, Eliza Childs, Cynthia Carter Ayres, Lin-
da Webster, and the others at Yale University Press did their
usuakexcellent editorial job.
Aside from the listed technical help from CUNY and
UCLA, this book, like most books edited or co-edited by
Nikki Keddie, had no subvention and no advances. Nor was
it based on a conference or invitational talks. This is men-
tioned only because many people think it is impossible to do
an edited book without such prior support. While financial
support is helpful, what is most needed is a vision, a cooper-
ative spirit, and an open-minded flexibility and willingness
to work by all involved, and this we had.

vii
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Organization of the Volume

BETH BARON

The chapters in this volume move from the distant to the

more recent past, with those on the modern period arranged
by region. Some periods and places receive more attention
than others. Occasional clustering, based on a relative abun-
dance of sources and of scholars in certain fields, provides
depth as well as breadth for these societies, such as Mamluk
and modern Egypt. The volume deals with major aspects of
Middle Eastern women's history, and the theme of male and
female boundaries runs throughout. The chapters, most
written by historians or using a historical approach, suggest
that gender boundaries in the Middle East have been neither
fixed nor immutable.
Nikki Keddie introduces the volume with a survey of ma-
jor questions in Middle Eastern women's history that em-
phasizes the Muslim majority. By sketching shifts in wom-
en's position from ancient to modern times, she helps to
identify ideological and other problems in the field and to
suggest useful directions for future research. Deniz Kan-
diyoti provides a comparative context for the Middle East,
contrasting systems of male dominance in two regions that
Islam crosses, the first in sub-Saharan Africa and the second
in the Middle East and southern and eastern Asia. She finds
that most women in the second region tacitly agreed to a
family pattern she calls "classical patriarchy" in which they
were subordinate as young brides in return for later benefits.
Kandiyoti suggests that Middle Eastern gender relations
have been influenced by a particular conjunction of classic
patriarchy and Islam.
The next set of chapters looks at women and gender in the
first centuries of Islam. Leila Ahmed documents the tension
between two tendencies: a legal one, sometimes called
orthodox, stressing gender inequalities and a spiritual, or
unorthodox one based on ethical egalitarianism. The latter,
expressed in Sufism and other unorthodox movements such
as Qarmatism, gave greater scope and freedom to women.
Yet the legal current prevailed, and with it a rigidification of

ix
x Beth Baron

gender boundaries. Denise Spellberg focuses on changing views of

'A'isha, Muhammad's favorite wife and a model for Muslim women. She
shows how ninth-century historians used 'A'isha's defeat in the Battle of
the Camel to point out the dangers of women's participation in govern-
ment, effectively circumscribing women's political roles. Paula Sanders
examines certain legal texts of Muslim jurists, mostly of the eleventh
century, to see how they constructed gender. She selects the seemingly
arcane but potentially dangerous problem of the ungendered, those who
had both male and female reproductive organs—hermaphrodites. The
ambiguity of hermaphrodites created a gray area in a world of bipolar
divisions of male and female. In setting hermaphrodites into the social
order by providing guidelines for ritualand behavior, medieval Muslim
jurists reaffirmed gender boundaries and hierarchies.
The following cluster of chapters is set in the Mamluk period (1250-
1517) in Egypt. Huda Lutfi shows how prescribed gender boundaries
were broken in practice by medieval Cairene women. Extracting informa-
tion on female behavior from a treatise by the fourteenth-century scholar
Ibn al-Hajj, she finds that women shaped their habits and rituals accord-
ing to their own needs and participated actively in public life, much to the
chagrin of her scholar. Carl Petry sees gender as an important factor in
shaping the strategies of the Mamluk elite for managing family property.
Because of the endemic violence of Mamluk politics and the consequent
high male mortality, women, whose chances of surviving were better,
often became caretakers of estates and supervisors of trusts. In this way,
they ensured family stability and class continuity, in turn augmenting
their own status in Mamluk society. Jonathan Berkey describes how
women pursued education through informal as opposed to institutional
channels. Many specialized in transmitting hadith (Traditions), an en-
deavor that may have been permitted, according to Berkey, in part be-
cause it combined the skill of memorization with the advantage of age.
The chapters on the modern Middle East are grouped by region, start-
ing with two on Ottoman and Turkish women. Donald Quataert argues
that women played a crucial role in nineteenth-century Ottoman man-
ufacturing, especially in handicraft, textile, and carpet production. By
focusing on household economies and small workshops, he challenges
the view that manufacturing and its labor force declined during this
period. Quataert also finds that, with regional variation, many house-
holds showed flexibility in the division of labor. Nermin Abadan-Unat ex-
amines the educational and legal reforms of the Turkish Republic, assess-
ing their impact on the position of women of various classes in Turkish
society. She shows how Ataturk's secularizing path, unique to the region,
has come under attack by Islamists, threatening to reverse earlier gains
for women.
 Organization of the Volume xi

Regarding Iran, Erika Friedl has personally witnessed major social

changes telescoped into decades in the tribal-rural Iranian community
that she has studied for the past twenty years. She argues that overlap-
ping and changing productive systems help to explain an increasing
circumscription of women's roles and behavior. The relative freedom of
many tribal-rural women has largely been based on socioeconomic neces-
sity and is not deeply embedded in ideology. It is fragile and easily lost
with changes in social circumstances, as the past two decades have
shown. Mary Hegland looks at the public-private dichotomy as myth and
ideology in a village. The myth obscures women's real political contribu-
tions, and the ideology functions to control women and their activities,
creating a reservoir that can be tapped for appropriate political purposes.
The final section of the volume focuses on the Arab world. Judith
Tucker attempts to recapture the female experience of the family in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Palestine. Women could draw sup-
port and protection from family members to temper a husband's pa-
triarchal control. Her evidence shows the importance of a number of
different affective family relationships. The next chapter, set in late-nine-
teenth-century Algeria, echoes Ahmed's suggestion that mysticism gave
women greater freedom. Julia Clancy-Smith examines the life of Lalla
Zainab, an Algerian saint, mystic, and learned woman, documenting her
struggle to succeed her father as head of a sufi lodge in the face of re-
sistance from her cousin, who promoted his own claims, and French
colonial officials, who backed the cousin. Zainab successfully defended
her inheritance, drawing on her spiritual authority to transcend indige-
nous and foreign gender boundaries.
In the first of three chapters on modern Egypt, I sketch changing
marital patterns among urban middle-class and upper-class Egyptians in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I argue that during this period
the notion of marriage based on love and free choice began to displace the
older ideal of arranged marriages. Virginia Danielson focuses on the lives
of a group of Egyptian performers (among them Umm Kulthum) who
dominated the music industry in the 1920s. These women demonstrated
a high degree of autonomy in managing their careers, taking advantage
of the opportunities that new technologies offered. In the final chapter of
the volume, Cynthia Nelson probes the relationship of biographer and
memoirist as she examines the life of Doria Shafik, an Egyptian feminist
active in the 1940s and 1950s. Shafik fought for political equality for
women before being placed under house arrest in 1957. Nelson argues
that her feminism was grounded in indigenous culture and was not in
opposition to Islam.
Each chapter provides insights into the past, opening new topics for
consideration or encouraging reconsiderations of old ones. Together they
xii Beth Baron

improve our understanding of women and gender in Middle Eastern

history. During the early centuries of Islam, once-fluid gender bound-
aries began to rigidify. Yet they were never impermeable, and in the
Mamluk period seemed quite elastic as women of different backgrounds
exercised relative autonomy. In modern times, shifting boundaries have
mostly moved toward increased equality for women, but not always.
Gender relations in the Middle East have proven dynamic, with women's
spheres of action contracting and expanding at different moments and
rates in response to a variety of factors, including women's acts and
attitudes. Although the chapters within are concerned with far more than
boundaries, gender boundaries and their changes over time provide one
approach to illuminating the past and present of the Middle East.
Women in Middle

Eastern History
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 Introduction: Deciphering Middle
I
Eastern Women's History

N I K K I R. K E D D I E

The position of women in the Middle East has aroused much

interest, but serious scholarly work on Middle Eastern wom-
en's history has been limited, in comparison both with the
study of women's history elsewhere and with the study of
contemporary problems. Existing volumes of articles about
women in the Middle East contain little that is historical. This
is the first scholarly collection to stress Middle Eastern wom-
en's history, and it also includes the work of several social
scientists whose theoretical perspectives are useful to the
study of the past.
The relative neglect of women's history has occurred
mainly because historians, unlike social scientists, cannot
construct their own research projects based on people who
can be directly observed, interviewed, or given question-
naires. Most historical work relies chiefly on written sources,
which are heavily male oriented, and a great mass of docu-
ments needs to be unearthed or restudied with women's
questions in mind.
Discussions of Middle Eastern women's history are also
often ideologically charged. Such discussions may be
wrenching ones for scholars who wish to overcome wide-
spread prejudices against Islam, but not ignore the problems
of Muslim women. One group denies that Muslim women,
who comprise the great majority of women in the Middle
East, are any more oppressed than non-Muslim women or
argues that in key respects they have been less oppressed. A

Some of the material in this introduction was used in Nikki R.

Keddie, "The Past and Present of Women in the Muslim World,"
Journal of World History 1, no. 1 (1990): 77-108. Where points differ,
this text has priority. In addition to written sources, the chapter is
based on wide travel, residence, and interviews in many Muslim
countries.

I
2 Nikki R. Keddie

second says that oppression is real but extrinsic to Islam; the Quran, they
say, intended gender equality, but this was undermined by Arabian pa-
triarchy and foreign importations. An opposing group blames Islam for
being irrevocably gender inegalitarian. There are also those who adopt
intermediate positions, as well as those who tend to avoid these contro-
versies by sticking to monographic or limited studies that do not confront
such issues. Some scholars favor shifting emphases away from Islam to
economic and social forces.
Given the paucity of studies and the abundance of controversy, sur-
veying major questions in the field might seem premature. It is per-
petually too early to survey any field, but such surveys are vital for
nonspecialists who wish to understand a field, and they help situate the
field's problems and useful directions for research.
This chapter stresses the Muslim majority in Middle Eastern history, as
do the chapters following, although research on minorities also exists.
Differences between Muslims and non-Muslims concerning gender sta-
tus are usually attributed mainly to the Quran, to early Muslim tradition
and holy law. There are also other, including pre-Islamic, roots of dif-
ference. Differences between the Middle East and other cultures regard-
ing gender relations were in most ways smaller in the past than in mod-
ern times. Muslim resistance to Western-sanctioned change is tied to a
centuries-old hostility between the Muslim Middle East and the West,
which has increased in modern times. The home has become a last line of
defense against a West that has won out in political and economic
spheres. So-called fundamentalists, or Islamists, see Western practices
toward and views on women as part of a Western Christian and Jewish
cultural offensive, accompanying political and economic offensives, and
turn to their own traditions as a cultural alternative.

The origin of gender inequalities in the ancient Near East is disputed

but it is known that hunter-gatherers and other pre-plow peoples are
more egalitarian between genders than are people who have experienced
the neolithic and agricultural revolutions. Technological developments
that made possible a surplus, states, and ruling classes were accom-
panied by a greater division of labor, including class hierarchies and
slavery, and encouraged the limiting of many urban women to domestic
occupations. Class differences developed among women as well as
among men, with some being slaves who filled menial or sexual roles,
others who performed both nondomestic and domestic labor, and upper-
class women who did not have to venture outside the home.l Veiling and
seclusion developed in the pre-Islamic Near East and adjacent areas as
markers for urban upper- and middle-class women, showing that they
did not have to work and keeping them from strangers.
 Introduction 3

As women in ancient societies became more subordinate, often treated

as property, many peoples developed myths about them as the source of
evil and sexual temptation—dangerous and needing control. Once in-
heritance in the male line became important, female virginity and fidelity
became central concerns. Males in most cultures were not required to be
faithful, and male polygamy was often legal. Muslims note that female
polygamy would raise doubts about fatherhood, which is unthinkable.
Women had to be controlled largely to minimize their chances of contacts
with outside men.
The guarding of women has been strong in Near Eastern and Mediter-
ranean societies from ancient times. As many "Islamic" customs go back
to the pre-Islamic Near East, something should be said about that before
discussing Islam. In the first known reference to veiling, an Assyrian
legal text of the thirteenth century B.C., it is restricted to respectable
women and prohibited for prostitutes. From the first, veiling was a sign
of status. Respectable Athenian women were often secluded, and veiling
was known in the Greco-Roman world. Veiling and seclusion existed in
pre-Islamic Iran and the Byzantine Empire, the two areas conquered by
the first Muslims, though we do not know how widespread they were.2
A husband who had the means to keep his wife veiled and secluded
showed that she was protected from advances and did not have to work
or shop outside. Full veiling has been both a class phenomenon and an
urban one. Early Muslims adopted veiling from conquered peoples, and
both non-Muslims in Muslim societies and Mediterranean women in
Christian societies were subject to many of the same forms of control and
isolation from men. Mediterranean societies, Muslim and Christian, also
had the same idea of the centrality of a man's honor, which lay chiefly in
the purity of the women of his natal family.
Similarities in Mediterranean attitudes toward male-female relations
are discussed by Germaine Tillion, who says that Mediterranean peoples
favor endogamy, which increases the tendency to control women in
tightly interrelated lineages. She notes that ancient Egyptians and Per-
sians favored "incestuous" unions, whereas most Mediterranean
peoples favor cousin marriage.3 Building on Tillion, one could say that
tribal groups, who are numerous among the Muslims of the Middle East,
have special reasons to want to control women and to favor cousin mar-
riage, and that the interaction of tribes with urban groups practicing
seclusion added segregation to control.
The term tribe has been so misused that many, especially Africanists,
avoid it. Whereas those who study Africa may justly react to a word
misused to characterize groups with millions of people, there is a role for
the word tribe in the Middle East. It translates terms in the main Middle
Eastern languages that refer to contiguous groups claiming descent from
4 Nikki R. Keddie

one ancestor. A tribe is a political-economic unit, and its leaders, gener-

ally chosen from one lineage, command more loyalty than the central
government, though they may now have little real power. In recent times
tribes tend to be strong when central governments are weak, and central
governments usually try to weaken tribes.
Tribes are not a primitive form of social organization. Pastoral nomadic
tribes, the most common in the Middle East, can evolve only after animals
are domesticated and there is a settled population with whom to trade
animal products for agricultural and urban ones. Cohesion requires
group decisions, which are facilitated in groups tied by kin. This favors
cousin marriage, as does the Islamic provision for female inheritance,
which encourages strategies to keep property in the lineage. Gertrude
Stern documents that Muslim Arabs increased cousin marriage after the
Quran required female inheritance.4 When women inherit according to
Muslim law, there are clear advantages in cousin marriage. Certain famil-
ial controls may be tied to the prevalence of tribal structures. In other
areas, however, many tribes have strong and quite liberated women, and
veiling and seclusion are more urban than tribal phenomena. The interac-
tion between tribal and urban controls on women was an important
influence on Middle Eastern gender relations.

The Quran was written in a context of different levels of sexual in-

equality among Arab tribes and in adjacent non-Arab empires. How it
affected the position of women is controversial.5 The classic Muslim view
is that pre-Islamic Arabs lived in ignorance and barbarism and that the
divinely revealed Quran provided a great step forward on all questions.
Some scholars, however, have documented (especially in Arab poetry)
conditions of matriliny, greater activity for women, even on the bat-
tlefield, and freer divorce.6 Such sources do indicate some matrilineal
and matrilocal customs, as well as freer divorce for women in certain
tribes, and a greater outspokenness and activity for many women than
became common after the rise of Islam, but we do not know how wide-
spread these patterns were.
The Quran did bring in some reforms, however, including the outlaw-
ing of infanticide and the payment of the male dower to the bride, not to
her guardian. The Quran also prescribed female inheritance—half that of
a male heir—and women's control over their property (which was known
earlier, however, as seen in Muhammad's first wife, the merchant Kha-
dija). Unfavorable features were free divorce for men but not for women
and polygamy for men (which already existed).
Although Islamic traditions say veiling and seclusion for all Muslim
women are in the Quran, this is a tendentious reading. One verse tells
women to veil their bosoms and hide their ornaments, later taken to
 Introduction 5

mean all except the hands, feet, and perhaps the face. This interpretation
makes no sense, because if everything was to be veiled, there would be
no point in ordering bosoms to be veiled separately. Another verse tells
women to draw their cloaks tightly around them so they may be recog-
nized and not annoyed. These are the only words generally taken to refer
to veiling.
Other verses suggest seclusion for Muhammad's wives, and these
stricter rules for an elite later spread, encouraged by the example of the
conquered Near East, to the urban middle and upper classes. Later veil-
ing was not, however, simply in emulation of the Prophet's wives. Nabia
Abbott notes that Muhammad's veiling of his wives reflected the growing
prosperity of the Muslim ruling group, enabling them to have servants
and to keep women from nondomestic work, and also the Muslims'
growing contact with surrounding societies where women were veiled.7
As Muslim society became state centered and class divided like those of
the surrounding and conquered peoples, many of their practices con-
cerning women, appropriate to stratified social structures, and their re-
liance on family regulation to maintain social control were naturally also
found appropriate by the Muslims.
The Quran gives men control of their wives, which extends to beatings
for disobedience, and adulterers of both sexes are to be punished by
lashing when there is either confession or four eyewitnesses to the act.
Islamic law and tradition changed this to the far more severe punishment
of stoning to death, but in practice women were often killed by their
brothers and many escaped punishment.
Islamic practices about women are often said to be resistant to change
because of their Quranic sanction, believed to be the word of God. This
has some truth, but there has been much breaking and bending of
Quranic admonitions throughout Muslim history. The Quran has been
interpreted, against the meaning of its text, as enjoining veiling, whereas
Quranic rules on adultery are rarely followed. Quranic inheritance rules
were hard to follow in rural and nomadic societies, as daughters married
out of the family, with only a minority marrying paternal first cousins.
Land or flocks inherited by an out-marrying woman reduced the prop-
erty of the patrilineal line. Hence means were found, in most rural and a
minority of urban areas, to evade women's inheritance rights. Also, the
general inheritance rules of the Quran were interpreted in a more pa-
triarchal way by Islamic law.
In all these cases, later practice was more patriarchal than the Quranic
text warrants. In general, the Quran was followed when it was not too
inconvenient to men or to the patriarchal family to do so, and not fol-
lowed when it was. This gives some basis to modern feminists and re-
formers who want to return to, and reinterpret, the Quran, although
6 Nikki R. Keddie

their interpretation sometimes moves as far in a new direction as the old

one did in the opposite one. Islamic law and Traditions tended to stress
and rigidity gender distinctions, seen as crucial to an ordered world, and
went to great lengths to avoid gender ambiguities (see Sanders chapter in
this volume).
Urban middle- and upper-class women, traditionally the most veiled
and secluded, were also much more likely to inherit Quranically. This is a
paradox only to a Westerner who reads back our concepts of women's
rights into the past and thinks that "disadvantaged" veiled women
should have fewer rights in other spheres. Urban residence in fact both
made women's inheritance easier, by not involving flocks and fields, and
encouraged veiling, because contact with unrelated strangers was more
likely; also there were more middle- and upper-class women with more
servants and slaves. Differences in class, place, and time meant that there
was never one set of Muslim women operating under one set of rules,
A variety of historical and anthropological works contribute to the
following overall picture of different female statuses: in general, rural
and tribal women do not inherit as the Quran and Muslim law says they
should, though "in return" they generally get permanent protection
from their natal family, and in some cases their sons may get all or part of
their share. Court records past and present suggest that urban women,
however, usually do inherit and are willing and able to go to Islamic
courts to protect their property rights, generally successfully. Sources
also suggest that urban women have had more rights than agricultural-
ists, although the great freedoms and powers of tribal nomadic women
are also noted. These differences are accentuated by a class-difference
pattern, with ruling class and upper-class women in both tribes and
towns often notable for their powers and independence whereas poorer
women were more dependent. Hence modern differences in styles of
living between town, tribe, and countryside and between classes in town
originate in earlier times and in continuing functional differences.8
This does not mean that the prescriptions of the Quran and Muslim
law counted for little. The rules on polygamy, divorce, and child custody
(to the father's family after a young age) were widely followed. If polyg-
amy and divorce were less general than Westerners might imagine, they
remained a threat to a wife. Divorce was generally common, but polyg-
amy seems to have been a rare, mainly upper-class, custom.
The condition of most women seems to have been broadly comparable
to that in the ancient Near East and the later Mediterranean and eastern
and southern Asia (for a comparison across Asia, see Kandiyoti in this
volume). Most women were valued mainly as producers of sons and
were brought up to marry, produce children, and safeguard the family
honor by not transgressing rules of sexual conduct and segregation. Most
 Introduction 7

were married young in arranged marriages in which the husband's family

had to pay a dower. This often included a delayed payment in case of
divorce or death, which provided some protection for the wife when it
was observed. Brides frequently lived in the husband's father's house-
hold, often with a menial position until the first son might be born. Young
brides were often dominated by mothers-in-law more than by husbands,
and they gained status mainly through their maturing sons. By the time
the sons became adults their mother might be very powerful in the house-
hold, ready to dominate her sons' wives in turn.
This brief outline cannot suggest the variety and satisfactions that
went along with the difficulties of women's lives. In the long prein-
dustrial period when nuclear and extended families were the main pro-
ductive units—whether in agriculture, herding, crafts, or trade—the or-
ganization of society around families and the superior power of dominant
males and of male and female elders probably seemed natural to most
people all over the world. It was only modern changes in economy,
politics, and society that made these structures less functional and called
them into question. Even before they were widely questioned, structures
of male domination caused much suffering, however.
Dramatic differences between Muslims and non-Muslims came with
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Muslim resistance to change, and
with contemporary Islamic revivalism. Regarding gender relations,
Islamism has no strict parallel in other civilizations, even though some
practices in India and elsewhere indicate that the Muslim world is not the
area of the worst atrocities toward women.

Whereas some scholars think the limitation of women's roles after the
rise of Islam was due to borrowing from non-Muslims, others stress that
this restriction began in Muhammad's time. The strongest women ap-
peared at the beginning of Islam. Khadija, the merchant, who employed
and married Muhammad, fifteen years her junior, was his first convert
and helped him in every way. Muhammad's young wife ' A'isha, whom
he married when she was a child and whose heedlessness of opinion
sometimes caused trouble, exercised much power. After Muhammad's
death she joined the coalition against Muhammad's son-in-law ' Ali and
participated in the crucial battle against him.
If these figures were unparalleled in later generations, neither internal
nor external forces were exclusively responsible. As Islamic society be-
came more like the societies around it in stratification and patriarchy, it
was natural to adopt their ways. Families wealthy enough to have slaves
or servants could afford seclusion. Women often acquiesced in veiling
and seclusion when to be less covered and to work outside were marks of
low status.
8 Nikki R. Keddie

Muslim women's lives have varied greatly by class, mode of produc-

tion, time, and place. What generalizations one can make in a brief essay
are partly based on Islamic laws and practices, even though their observa-
tion varied. Islamic law developed in the first few centuries of Islam, and
recent scholarship has shown how much it reflected regional Middle
Eastern customs—hence that much of it was in fact followed more in the
Middle East than elsewhere, though far from all, is not surprising. There
were four orthodox law schools, plus Shi'i schools, which differed on
some points important to women. Regarding marriage, schools differed
as to whether a virgin's consent was needed, or only that of her father or
guardian. In all schools marriage is a contract, not a sacrament, and the
man must provide materially for the wife and perform sexually. The wife
must have sex whenever the husband wishes, but she has no material
obligations. A man may divorce a wife by a thrice-pronounced declara-
tion, whereas women can divorce only for specified causes, agreed to by a
judge in court. Polygyny up to four wives was permitted, although the
Quran says only if all are treated equally, which came to mean a norm of
equal space and rotated sexual relations and overnight stays. Men were
permitted concubines and female slaves, and their children's status was
regulated. Another Shi'i practice goes back to pre-Islamic Arabia and
seems to have been condoned by the Prophet, though it was outlawed for
Sunnis by the caliph 'Umar. This is temporary marriage—a contract en-
tered into for a definite period. As in all marriages there is a payment to
the woman and children .are legitimate. It flourishes especially in pil-
grimage centers where men may come alone. It is wrong to consider it
prostitution, and it has uses besides satisfying men's sexual desires.9
Women are supposed to obey their husbands, and the Quran authorizes
beating if they do not. This is one of several verses that has been rein-
terpreted by modernists.
Women could hold and manage any amount of property, although
seclusion often made effective management difficult. Regarding the two-
thirds or more of inheritance that followed fixed rules, women were
supposed to receive half the share of men. In Shi'i law daughters without
brothers inherited everything, whereas in Sunni law they generally got
no more than half. In spite of the presumption of female inheritance by all
schools, it was common for women not to inherit, especially land. This
kept land from passing outside the paternal family. Partial compensation
in the form of gifts or sustenance in case of divorce or widowhood was
sometimes given to a woman who renounced inheritance. In addition,
the institution of waqf, inalienable endowment, was sometimes used to
endow descendants in the male line, thus avoiding both property division
and female inheritance. Some waqfs, however, benefited women partic-
ularly, both as recipients and as guardians (see Petry in this volume).
 Introduction 9

Regarding the most effective form of birth control then known, coitus
interruptus, most jurists and theologians allowed it, but some said it was
licit only if the wife agreed, as she might want children or object to
limiting her pleasure.10 Some say the authorization of birth control came
mainly because powerful men had slaves and concubines by whom they
might not want children (see Ahmed in this volume).
As in many societies, particularly Mediterranean ones, the code of
honor and shame has been central. A family's honor was seen as resting
mainly on the purity of its girls and women, and shame lay in any asper-
sions cast on this. Purity meant not only virginity for girls and fidelity for
wives, but also the impossibility that anyone should think or say these
were in doubt. Neither girl nor wife should talk to an outside man. The
ideal of segregation from gossip-provoking situations encouraged veiling
and seclusion. Some wealthy families kept women from going out of the
house except fully covered to see close relatives. In less wealthy families
women might have to have some business interaction with men, but they
were supposed to keep talk to a minimum and their eyes down. It seems
that outdoor dress for the upper classes usually included a facial veil and
loose covering for the body. Working, rural, and tribal women usually
had no facial veil. Most women passed the greater part of their lives in
homes, where they could wear and show off their more important
clothing and ornaments. Fashion was important, and current reporters
who are surprised that Arabian and Iranian women may wear jeans or
miniskirts below their veils are really reporting nothing new, as Muslim
women at home have long followed fashions, often ones from far away.
Honor and shame encouraged early marriage, as leaving a girl unmar-
ried after puberty was seen as creating a situation in which she might be
violated or impregnated. Mothers often played a greater role than fathers
in finding a groom, and matchmakers were sometimes used. Paternal
cousin marriage, which kept property in the patrilineal line, was favored.
Despite this, only a minority of marriages were to paternal first cousins;
even when this is claimed, investigation often shows a more distant
relationship. This may have limited bad genetic effects from such mar-
riages, although today many educated Muslims oppose cousin marriage
for genetic reasons.
As in much of traditional Mediterranean Europe, that a girl and a man
alone can be doing only one thing is widely assumed, and the girl is often
punished. Traditional ideology assumes that a woman who behaves im-
modestly arouses uncontrollable urges in men. She is a cause of fitna,
serious trouble, a word that also means revolt or civil war. Fathers, hus-
bands, and brothers are given formal control over women and the family,
as in many traditional societies, but observers often note the real power of
women in the home and family.
10 Nikki R. Keddie

In spite of formal and legal male dominance, Middle Eastern women

followed a number of strategies to increase their sphere of power and
freedom. Although men might control the quantity of sex, women had
much control over its quality and the amount of pleasure the man had.
Women controlled cooking, which many men found important, and they
could keep the home neat or messy, noisy or tranquil, attractive or unat-
tractive for the husband's visitors. Throughout Islamic history many
rulers were ruled by their wives or mothers, and the same thing hap-
pened in many private homes. More equal husband-wife relations were
also known. Women taught one another how to overcome formal in-
equalities, and the theoretical rules of Islamic law and the honor code
were often not enforced.
Too little research has been done to provide a true history of how
women fared over time in the Middle East. Here we can essay a few
generalizations. There seem to be four periods that saw the greatest free-
dom of action for a significant number of Middle Eastern women: the
earliest period of Islam; its first two centuries; the periods of nomadic and
steppe-based rule (those of the Seljuks, Mongols, Mamluks, early Safa-
vids); and the period of modern reform. In the first of these, the activities
of Khadija and 'A'isha have been mentioned, and there were also many
lesser powerful women, not to mention women who participated as
aides in battle, or even fought (as they had in pre-Islamic times). The next
period was more mixed (see Ahmed in this volume), but women con-
tinued to be important and powerful as queens, traditionists, and in
mystical and sectarian religious movements. At the same time, however,
slavery and class divisions were spreading. The invasions of Turkic and
other military groups and nomads from the eleventh century on, and
their rule over much of the Middle East, brought in, at least for the ruling
classes and the nomads, more egalitarian treatment of women. Powerful
women participated in rule in the Seljuk, Mongol, and Mamluk empires,
where restrictions on women appear to have been lessened (see Petry and
Berkey in this volume).
Through the centuries nonorthodox religious spheres have provided a
forum for female power. Shi'ism has women mullas, and Sufi (mystic)
orders include powerful and creative women leaders, and all had many
women followers (see Ahmed, Clancy-Smith, and Lutfi in this volume).
Since the nineteenth century there have been modern, mainly legal
and economic, reforms in the position of women, and the growth of
reformist and feminist ideas. Although, as elsewhere, changes have been
contradictory in their impact, the general trend thus far has been toward
greater legal equality between the sexes and greater real equality among
the urban Westernized middle and upper classes, although some in other
classes have suffered.
 Introduction 11

Women's position, past and present, tended to become limited in

times of economic contraction. At the very top, however, the role of
women was determined most by court conditions. Where royal heirs
were brought up within palace walls they might be subject to the influ-
ence of women or eunuchs. One example is the Ottoman Empire, where
from the late sixteenth century potential heirs to the throne were kept
from threatening the ruler by being immured in the harem. This greatly
increased women's and eunuchs' influence on them, even after they
came to rule. The negative phrase "harem rule" will probably have its
revisionist historians, though it is probably true that sultans with experi-
ence of the outside world ruled better than those without. The influence
of Ottoman queens and queen mothers, as with their lesser-known
counterparts in Mamluk, Mongol, and Seljuk times, not to mention Safa-
vid and Qajar Iran, shows how possible it was for women to exercise
great power, given the right circumstances.
The common Western view of the harem has little relation to reality.
The Arabic word harim does not have sexy connotations, but means the
part of the house forbidden to men who are not close relatives. For the
non-elite it mostly was not polygamous and had no slaves or concubines.
The harem was where the indoor work of the family was planned and
carried on, usually under the supervision of the wife of the eldest male. In
polygamous households and those with servants and slaves, the ac-
tivities of the harem were more complex, but it was not the den of idle-
ness and voluptuousness depicted from their imaginations by Western
painters. (Westerners who saw photographs of harems were disap-
pointed to find the clothing and furniture to be in keeping with Victorian
propriety, bearing no resemblance to the paintings of Delacroix.) The
main work of household production, including its textiles and other
crafts, and of reproduction, was done in the harem.11
Partly owing to difficulties of documentation, little study has been
done of pre-modern working women, rural or urban, or of slaves. Slavery
in Islam was rarely characterized by heavy gang labor, but was over-
whelmingly either household or male military slavery. Muslims could not
be enslaved, and so slaves were either war captives or purchased from
among non-Muslims. Slaves were often sexually subject to their masters.
Unlike those in the medieval West, their children were free. Some slaves
rose very high—slaves could be queens—and many were freed by their
masters. Although slavery was less onerous than, say, in the New World,
it still entailed a lack of freedom and a sexual subjugation that were more
severe than those experienced by free women. Slaves were often trained
to be singers and dancers—professions that were not quite respectable in
the Islamic world or in many other traditional areas.
Although it was suggested above that many tribes are highly con-
12 Nikki R. Keddie

cerned about the purity of lineage, in most other respects treatment of

women among tribal peoples tends to be more egalitarian than among
urbanites. It may be something about the long-term confluence of
nomadic and urban cultures that helps explain Middle Eastern patterns
of gender relations and controls. The greater gender egalitarianism of
tribal peoples shows up among pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arab
women, and among the Seljuks and Mongols in Iran, with their powerful
women in government. Early European accounts and indigenous paint-
ing suggest that tribal women did not veil. The Safavids in Iran (1501-
1722), who made Shi'ism Iran's state religion, came in supported by the
military backing of Turkic nomadic tribes, and early Safavid miniatures
are full of unveiled women. Italian travelers to Iran in those years wrote
that women were shockingly exposed! By late Safavid times, the influ-
ence of the religious classes had grown, and women were increasingly
veiled and secluded.
In recent decades, as veiling and seclusion were rejected by many
modernists and feminists, and as local nationalisms grew, those who
opposed veiling ascribed it to a different nationality from their own.
Many Arabs say veiling was imposed on them by the Ottoman Turks. In
fact, Turks began to veil only when they became assimilated in Islam, and
if many Ottomans in Arab lands veiled this was mainly because ruling
classes veiled, not because Turks in particular did. There is abundant
evidence that widespread Arab veiling preceded the Ottomans, although
it appears that pre-Ottoman Mamluk Egypt was freer in this respect than
Ottoman Egypt. Iranian modernists often blame veiling on Arabs, and
Turks on Arabs or Persians. As noted, veiling and seclusion are ancient
Near Eastern customs, long adopted by all major language groups in the
Middle East.
Some writers, reacting to Western hostility to veiling, deny its signifi-
cance. Although veiling and seclusion do not prevent women from living
varied and significant lives, they are parts of a system where males are
dominant and females are to be controlled. The system affects even non-
secluded women, who are expected to be modest and circumspect and
are subject to sanctions if they transgress the rules. It is true that the
overall system is more important than veiling as such.
The degree to which women follow the rules should not be exagge-
rated, however. Outside observers may see only heavily veiled shapes
and assume that these women's lives are completely controlled by their
menfolk. When seen from the inside, however, the same women may
give quite a different impression. Thus two eighteenth-century English-
women wrote admiringly of the lives and freedom enjoyed by Ottoman
ladies,12 whereas their Western male colleagues reported no such views.
 Introduction 13

Various peoples have reported transgressions of the rules by Egyptian

women (see Lutfi). Even in parts of the Middle East where Western influ-
ence is small, there have been recent reports of great independence on
the part of women. These center on the Arabian peninsula and Berber-
influenced North Africa, both areas of tribal strength. In the latter, among
several signs of a freer position for women is the institution of the free
woman, who may take lovers after divorce or widowhood without loss of
respect or of opportunities for remarriage. In Arabia, where women are
veiled and secluded, Leila Ahmed and Unni Wikan report deviant and
independent behavior and views by women in the United Arab Emirates
and Oman. Ahmed thinks that the relative success in organizing women
to assert their rights in Marxist South Yemen owes much to the Arabian
women's independence in views and action.13 From both Yemen and Iran
come reports of women's theater games in which male arrogance and
other male cultural qualities are mercilessly mocked, and such mockery
must have existed in the past. Egyptian women have also been noted for
their independence from pre-Islamic times to the present, indicating that
local traditions and conditions can be as important as tribal background in
variability. Differences not only by country but among city, tribe, and
countryside and between classes in degrees of women's independence
have already been noted, and further research will surely show more
variation. Women's independent attitudes are also expressed in folktales,
popular poetry, and women's religious ceremonies.14 Female religious
leaders and ceremonies express women's initiative. It would be wrong,
however, to ignore the widespread oppression and enforced subordina-
tion of women.

Changes in economy and society in the past two centuries, along with
the Western cultural impact, brought about forces within Middle Eastern
societies favoring changes in the conditions of women. At first this did
not involve legal changes, but rather such things as women's education.
Changes in Islamic law pertaining to women have met considerable re-
sistance. Only the Catholics, of major religions, vie with the Muslims for
tenacity regarding women's position and control of her body. Islamic
conservatism as it affects family law comes partly from the prominence of
laws on women in the Quran. Also, however, change concerning women
was felt by Muslim men to be a final invasion in the last sphere they could
control against aggressive infidels, once sovereignty and much of the
economy had been taken over by the West. The need to guard women
from the stares of the traditional Christian enemy has been documented
since the French came to Egypt with Napoleon, and veiling increased as a
reaction to their presence.15
14 Nikki R. Keddie

In the past two centuries those Muslims who became Westernized

tended to be those in the middle and upper classes who had profitable
contacts with Westerners. For larger if less visible groups, Westernization
was generally unpopular. The petty bourgeoisie and bazaar traders tend-
ed to support traditional Islamic ways. Modernizing liberals generally
belonged to the higher social classes, whereas those who defended tradi-
tional ways appealed to the traditional small bourgeoisie.16 The upper
classes were in alliance with Westerners, but the small bourgeois classes
competed with larger Western trade and tended to reject Western ways
partly from a desire to defend their own position. Women were and are
used in a game that is really more about politico-ideological questions,
including relations with the West, than about women per se. The petty
bourgeoisie in most Middle Eastern countries have stuck to essentially
traditional positions on women. Some traditional bourgeois and lower-
class women also prefer the old ways to being forced to obtain unpleasant
and low-paying jobs.
Until recently battles for women's rights in the Middle East resulted in
broadening those rights. The first names associated with those struggles
were male, but from the beginning women too were involved. Public and
independent activity for women's rights became widespread in the twen-
tieth century (see Nelson in this volume).17 These movements are only
one aspect of complex changes that include those in marriage (see Baron),
the family (Tucker), the economic role of women (Quataert), their social
role (Abadan-Unat), their ability to be public figures (Danielson), and the
like. Rural women have also undergone major transformations, often
becoming more stratified and more secluded, but sometimes also more
political (see Hegland and Friedl chapters). Modernization has had con-
tradictory results in the Middle East and elsewhere, and whereas some
women's positions have changed for the better, some poorer women
have suffered from modernization's economic effects, becoming more,
rather than less, restricted; having to work in unhealthful and poorly paid
positions; and often removed from the community security of rural life.
Veiling and seclusion spread in the countryside among the status con-
scious as they declined among Westernized city dwellers, and women's
roles were sometimes limited by the economic effects of Western con-
tacts. These contradictions have been reflected in conflicting women's
attitudes on modernization versus tradition.
Although the success of reform was tied to economic and social
changes, its immediate problems were often ideological; mainly, what
attitude to take toward the holy law. A few, notably the reforming Turkish
ruler Ataturk, took a secular position, legislating substantial legal equal-
ity for women on the basis of European law. Far more widespread have
 Introduction 15

been modernist interpretations of the Quran and Islamic law. Attachment

to these is strong not only because they are sacred texts, but also for
identity vis-a-vis the West. There is an impetus to ground arguments in
Islam, even for many who are privately secularists.
Varied modernist arguments have some widespread features. One is
that the Quran has several meanings, with its literal one for its own time,
and later interpretations to be made by modernists. Some stress the
"spirit of the Quran," which is said to be egalitarian (largely true), and
argue that several passages show that rights and egalitarianism were
intended for women. There has been much reinterpretation of key
verses. Modernists hold that the Quran opposes polygamy, because it
says the conditions for it cannot be met. Various passages are seen to
mean male-female equality, as the Quran sees them as equal believers
and often explicitly addresses both men and women.
Reformists usually refer to the earliest sources—the Quran and se-
lected Traditions about Muhammad—and reject most later interpreta-
tion. Subsequent Islamic law is rightly seen as more patriarchal than the
Quran. If the Quran is reinterpreted, law can be reshaped. Such new
interpretations could end polygamy and improve women's rights.
Reformist arguments arose partly because of a rapidly changing econ-
omy and society that was undergoing the influence of the capitalist and
imperialist West. As in the West, the rise of capitalism and of paid jobs
created new positions in the labor market for women, who had worked
chiefly in the household economy. In the Middle East early demand was
for nurses, midwives, doctors for women, and teachers. Demand soon
spread to low-paid factory and white-collar work (see Quataert). As else-
where, the development of capitalist relations had a contradictory impact
on different women. Putting women in the paid labor force could change
rules about sexual segregation, although not always. Some popular-class
women became more restricted than before (see Friedl). Wealthier fami-
lies, in contact with Westerners, saw advantages in women's education
and participation in the wider world. Women's education was favored by
reformists to improve child rearing and to prepare some women for jobs.
The first arguments said that women's education would improve the
rearing of sons, but women and men soon argued for women's rights.
Although steps toward women's education, jobs, and freedom met re-
sistance, until recently change was in the direction of greater equality.
Women's schools and women's or mixed universities were built in
almost every Muslim country; new jobs were opened; and laws were
reformed almost everywhere. The most radical reforms were those of
Ataturk in Turkey. He took the unique path of adopting Western codes
that outlawed polygamy and created substantial legal equality for
16 Nikki R. Keddie

women. Women got the vote in Turkey earlier than in France and Italy.
Turkey was able to move radically owing to long contact with the West; to
its experience of long, gradual reform; because Islamic leaders were dis-
credited after World War I; and also due to Ataturk's huge popularity, as a
leader who, uniquely in the Middle East, had taken territory back from
Western powers (see Abadan-Unat). The next most thorough reforms,
outside Eastern Europe, were in Tunisia and Marxist South Yemen. In
Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba's Personal Status Code of 1956 outlawed polyg-
amy on Muslim reformist grounds and created substantial legal equality
for women, while retaining a few Islamic features and male privileges. In
South Yemen polygamy is allowed in a very few circumstances, but
family law is otherwise egalitarian, and as important, women's organiza-
tions were encouraged to carry out education and propaganda.18 Else-
where legal reform is more limited, but significant. In spite of Islamist
agitation there has until now been little retreat in reform except in Iran
and, on a few matters, in Pakistan.
The main thrust of legal reform where it is not egalitarian is to place
restrictions on divorce, polygamy, and age of marriage, often by means of
Islamic precedents and often by making men justify divorce or polygamy
to the courts. This is in line with a modern trend to put personal and
family matters increasingly under state control and reduce the power of
Islamic courts. Reforms are, however, called Islamic, and Islamic courts
generally keep some power. Equally important, women's roles in educa-
tion, politics, and most parts of the work force have continued to grow.
Since World War II, a number of trends have undermined liberal re-
formism and encouraged Islamic revival. Among these are: (1) the grow-
ing cultural gap between the Westernized elite and the majority; (2) the
growth in the power of the West and of Israel; (3) socioeconomic disloca-
tions resulting from rapid urbanization, oil-backed modernization, and
growing income distribution gaps; and (4) disillusionment with the
failures of Westernized rulers and theories in the Middle East. The gap
between the elite and the masses has created two cultures in the Middle
East. Elite cultures tend to be Western-oriented, with young people get-
ting a Western-style education and having little contact with the tradi-
tional bourgeoisie or the masses. Sometimes the two speak different lan-
guages, as in North Africa. The popular classes identify much more with
Islam than the elite does. Among students and migrants from rural or
small-town Islamically oriented backgrounds who migrate to over-
crowded cities, alienation and Islamic revival are strong. It is also strong
among some urban groups who stress identity and anti-imperialism.
Western consumer goods and experts are more evident than ever.
Most important to Islamism, Western cultural influence is pervasive—in
 Introduction 17

consumption, the media, and all cultural forms. Although many of these
are items of choice, the backlash of rejection of Western cultural domi-
nance is not surprising. Also, Israel is widely seen as a Western bastion of
neocolonialism, bringing further reactions against pro-Western leaders
and ways.
Socioeconomic dislocations, reinforced by fluctuations in oil income,
include rapid urbanization, with the rich but rarely the poor getting
richer; the problems of migrants; and the breakdown of accustomed
family and rural ways. Islamism provides a social cement that appears
familiar in the face of new problems.
Disillusionment with postcolonial governments that had nationalist
and Westernizing, not Islamic, ideologies has focused on the Pahlavis in
Iran, Anwar Sadat in Egypt, the National Liberation Front in Algeria, and
Bourguiba in Tunisia. Nationalist and Western ideologies were dis-
credited among many attracted instead by new visions of Islam, with
major implications for women. Islam had the advantage of familiarity
and of not having ruled recently, which could have discredited it.
Modern Islamic revivalism has roots in the Egyptian Muslim Brethren
founded in 1928 and in the work of Abu al-A'la Maududi for Islamic
government in Muslim India. Islamism grew after World War II, and
especially after the 1967 Arab defeat by Israel and the 1973 oil price rise,
with its resultant economic and social dislocations. In advocating state
enforcement of Islamic law Islamism is innovating, as traditional Muslim
states since the development of Islamic law have not applied it as states or
in a centralized, codified way. What is demanded is novel, a modern
centralized theocracy, using many modern economic and technical
means, sometimes renamed.
Islamist movements are populist in appeal, stressing the rights of the
oppressed and the socially egalitarian nature of the Quran. They are far
from egalitarian about women, however, and take what they see as the
Islamization of women's role as a touchstone of Islam. This is partly
because matters affecting women make up much of the legislation in the
Quran, and also because a return to Quranic injunctions on dress, polyg-
amy, and so forth is a highly visible way to show one is a good Muslim.
Dress is a symbol of Islamist beliefs, and the dress adopted by Islamist
women is almost as important as a badge of ideology as it is a means to
modesty or seclusion. In fact, Islamist women are not secluded from the
world, but are found heavily among students, young working women,
and the like, and are also engaged in political activity. The dress of most
Islamist women also is not traditional, but newly fashioned.
There is separation of the sexes among Islamists. This is part of an
ideology that can be stated, in terms familiar to the American past, as one
18 Nikki R. Keddie

of "separate but equal." Islamists often say that men and women are
equal, but have different capacities according to their different roles. They
stress the importance of homemaking and child rearing, and are divided
on whether women can work provided it does not interfere with child
rearing.19 Practices in Islam that are unequal are justified as based on
men's and women's different natures and needs. Polygamy is seen as
better than the West's prostitution and mistresses, and early marriage as
better than Western-style promiscuity. (Many Western ways shock strict
Muslims just as many Muslim ways shock Westerners.) As in the former
U.S. Supreme Court separate but equal doctrine for blacks, however,
separation, in fact, means inferior rights—whether in education, work,
or the family. The real strains of recent decades encourage nostalgia for an
idealized past, including its sexual roles.
Though in most countries the leading Islamists tend to have partly
Westernized educations, this was not true of Khomeini's clerical group in
Iran, who took a hard line on reversing reforms concerning women.
Other governments with Islamic claims, like those of Sudan, Saudi Ara-
bia, Pakistan, and Libya, have been less absolute in their approach to
women. And in Algeria, Pakistan, and Egypt threats of Islamist legisla-
tion have been a catalyst to mobilize women against this. Iran today is
becoming less strict about women, but other countries are becoming
more restrictive.
Islamist movements have had an appeal for some women, especially
among students in some faculties and among the traditional classes. In
Iran more women demonstrated for Khomeini than against him. Else-
where Islamist women are also active and organized. Islamists encourage
women's participation in many spheres. Many women have chosen to
wear Islamic dress, and one of the reasons they give is that it keeps men
from bothering them in street or social contacts. Islamic dress is again a
badge—here saying that this is a serious respectable woman who should
not be touched or annoyed.
Other aspects of Islamism that appeal to many women include their
frequent women's circles and organizations, where women discuss
important matters in all-woman surroundings that are not intimidating.
They are also encouraged to undertake propaganda activities. Girls and
women whose parents or husbands do not normally let them out allow
them to go to mosque meetings, and some even reject proposed marriage
partners on the grounds that they are not good Muslims.20
Many Islamist women experience protection and respect. The legal
reforms in Muslim countries affected chiefly the elite, so that for many
women Islamism may not seem a step backward and may even restore
recently lost protections. Those who had experienced benefits, however,
often suffer under Islamist rule or pressures. Hence there are radically
 Introduction 19

different views about Islamism, often and understandably voiced and

acted on with vehemence.
Feminists disagree about whether they should continue trying to in-
terpret Islam in reformist ways or rather should stand foursquare for
secularization, saying that Islam should be a matter for private belief and
worship only. This is one of the key problems for Middle Eastern femi-
nists today, extending from Pakistan's influential Women's Action Forum
to the arguments among Middle Eastern women in many journals, in-
cluding the New Left Review.21 Those who stress the reinterpretation of
Islam hope to meet some of the cultural needs of ordinary women, in-
cluding Islamists, but their opponents say they are prolonging the re-
pressive life and practices of political Islam.
A few modernists in a sense combine the two positions, presenting an
Islam that does not require following Quranic practices regarding
women. One Egyptian scholar claimed that the legal parts of the Quran
were intended only for the lifetime of the Prophet. And a small group of
Sudanese say that only the Meccan suras of the Quran (which have re-
ligious rather than legal content) and not the legalistic Medinan ones are
valid after the Prophet.22 Such views are rejected by most Muslims today,
but they could fare better in the future.
Islamist trends will not necessarily continue strong far into the future.
Khomeini was able to appeal to various kinds of discontented people, but
once in power he aroused discontent. Even where Islamists do well in
elections, many elements of a protest vote are involved. The Islamist
phase of the 1970s and 1980s may continue, but it seems unlikely in
radical form to outlive widespread experience with so-called Islamic gov-
ernments. Only Iran in the Middle East to date has repealed major legisla-
tion favorable to women, although women's groups in Egypt and
Pakistan have had to struggle to forestall major changes, which could still
occur there or elsewhere.
Economic realities bring women in the Middle East more and more
into the labor force and the public sphere, and this continues, despite
Islamist trends. Yet women's legal struggles today are mostly defensive.
Both the feminists who are convinced that Islamic theory must be rein-
terpreted in their cause and those who say that this approach will only
play into the hands of anti-feminists are trying to find the most promising
way to bring back a situation in which women's rights may be actively
furthered. It may be that both the Islamic reformist and the secularist path
can contribute to this, especially if they concentrate more on the needs
and desires of popular-class women. And although the study of history is
not simply a pragmatic exercise, understanding the reasons for the posi-
tions of women in the near and distant past can also help to formulate
how those positions might be changed.
20 Nikki R. Keddie

Notes

1. The wide literature on these subjects includes Guity Nashat, "Women in the
Ancient Middle East/' in Restoring Women to History (Bloomington, Ind.: Organi-
zation of American Historians, 1988); Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Karen Sacks, "Engels Revisited:
Women, the Organization of Production, and Private Property," in Women, Culture,
and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1974).
2. Nashat, "Women in the Ancient Middle East," discusses ancient Near East-
ern practices and influences. See also Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie, eds., Women in
the Muslim World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 21, 32 n. 12.
3. Germaine Tillion, Le harem et les cousins (Paris: Seuil, 1966).
4. Gertrude Stern, Marriage in Early Islam (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1939).
5. On this issue, see especially Leila Ahmed, "Women and the Advent of
Islam," Signs 11 (1986): 665-91.
6. Works that stress women's power but have been criticized by more recent
scholarship are W. Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1885), and W. Montgomery Watt, Mohammad
at Medina (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956). More limited reports of women's indepen-
dence are largely based on pre-Islamic poetry found in the collection al-Aghani.
7. Nabia Abbott, Aishah, the Beloved of Mohammad (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1942).
8. See Shahla Haeri, Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi'i Iran (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1989).
9. Among many sources, see Judith E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century
Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); the articles of Martha
Mundy on Yemen; and Embassy to Constantinople: The Travels of Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, ed. and comp. Christopher Pick, with an introduction by Dervla
Murphy (London: Century, 1988). Elizabeth N. Macbean Ross, A Lady Doctor in
Bakhtiari Land (London: Leonard Parsons, 1921), shows leading tribal women
managing lands, flocks, and accounts during their husbands' long absences. Re-
cent literature shows how often urban women went to court and defended their
legal and property rights and stresses the independence of many tribal women,
but indicates less independence for the rural and urban popular classes. These
findings have not been coordinated, however, and some authors take a single
group as typical of women as a whole.
10. B. F. Musallam, Sex and Society in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983).
11. See Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, "The Revolutionary Gentlewoman," in
Women in the Muslim World, ed. Beck and Keddie; and Sarah Graham-Brown,
Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in the Photography of the Middle East, 1860-
1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
12. See the citation in R. C. Jennings, "Women in Early Seventeenth Century
Ottoman Judicial Records: The Sharia Court of Anatolian Kayseri," Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 28 (1975): 53-114 (56-57 n. 5).
13. Unni Wikan, Behind the Veil in Arabia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
 Introduction 21

Press, 1982); Leila Ahmed, "Feminism and Feminist Movements in the Middle
East, A Preliminary Exploration: Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, People's Democratic
Republic of Yemen," Women's Studies International Forum 5, no. 2 (1982): 153-68.
The women I met in North Yemen, externally a country of heavy veiling and
seclusion, included the following, all of whom were typical according to the
Yemeni specialist who accompanied me: a woman who said that the best thing
that could occur in a pregnancy was miscarriage, and that it was best to have no
children; three women who said that the longer their migrant husbands stayed
away the better; and a woman who had left her husband and returned to her
family and was then bargaining conditions for her return. In addition, many of
Yemen's divorced and married women are known to have had affairs. Such condi-
tions are not limited to tribally based societies, as indicated as early as Lady Mary
Montagu's reports on upper-class women's freedoms in Turkey in the early eigh-
teenth-century; but specialists who compare southern Arabia and certain other
tribal areas with other parts of the Middle East note "liberated" features that seem
to owe nothing to Westernization.
14. Claudie Feyein, A French Doctor in the Yemen, trans. Douglas McKee (Lon-
don: R. Hale, 1957), esp. p. 191; Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986); and the chapters by Vanessa Maher, Daisy
Hilse Dwyer, and Erika Friedl in Women in the Muslim World, ed. Beck and Keddie.
15. Nada Tomiche, "The Situation of Egyptian Women in the First Half of the
Nineteenth Century," in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East, ed. W. R.
Polk and R. L. Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
16. Juan R. Cole, "Feminism, Class, and Islam in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,"
International Journal of Middle East Studies 19 (1981): 387-407.
17. On twentieth-century feminist movements, see Ahmed, "Feminism"; Eliz
Sanasarian, The Women's Rights Movement in Iran (New York: Praeger, 1982); Azar
Tabari and Nahid Yeganeh, eds., In the Shadow of Islam: The Women's Movement in
Iran (London: Zed, 1982); and Margot Badran, "Dual Liberation: Feminism and
Nationalism in Egypt, 1870s-1925," Feminist Issues 8, no. 1 (1988): 15-34.
18. Maxine Molyneux, "Legal Reform and Socialist Revolution in Democratic
Yemen: Women and the Family," International Journal of the Sociology of Law 13
(1985): 147-72.
19. Many statements by Islamist leaders against women's working are cited in
Yvonne Y. Haddad, "Islam, Women, and Revolution in Twentieth Century Arab
Thought," Muslim World 74 (1984): 137-60. My interviews with Tunisian, Egyp-
tian, and other Islamist women, however, show that many of them work or expect
to work, even if they sometimes justify it as less than ideal. Haddad's article also
includes the results of interviews in several countries. There has been a consider-
able literature on Islamist women, including such authors as Fadwa al-Guindi,
Afaf Marsot, Nesta Ramazani, John Alden Williams, and others. See also Sherifa
Danielle Zuhur, "Self-image of Egyptian Women in Oppositionist Islam" (Ph.D.
diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1990).
20. See Nikki R. Keddie, "The Islamist Movement in Tunisia," Maghreb Review
11, no. 1 (1986): 26-39.
21. Mai Ghoussoub, "Feminism—or the Eternal Masculine—in the Arab
World," New Left Review 161 (1987): 3-18; Reza Hammami and Martina Rieker,
22 Nikki R. Keddie

"Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Marxism/' New Left Review 170 (1988): 93-
106; Mai Ghoussoub, "A Reply to Hammami and Rieker," New Left Review 170
(1988): 108-9.
22. See especially Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, The Second Message of Islam,
translated with an introduction by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1987), and Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Toward an
Islamic Reformation (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990).
 Islam and Patriarchy:
2
A Comparative Perspective

DENIZ KANDIYOTI

In contrast to the growing body of historical scholarship on

gender relations in the West, the question of women in Mus-
lim societies has remained closely tied to a predominantly
ahistorical consideration of the main tenets of Islamic re-
ligion and their implications for women. This has been at-
tributed by some to the more general shortcomings of Mid-
dle Eastern historiography, namely the lingering influence of
orientalism and an idealist bias that presents historical facts
as flowing directly from ideology.1 In the case of scholarship
on women, these tendencies have been compounded by a
high degree of confusion between polemical and analytical
goals. There is a continuing output of exegetical writing by
Muslim scholars, many of whom identify themselves as femi-
nists.2 This writing typically tries to establish Islam's compati-
bility with the emancipation of women. The favored sources
of such works continue to be the Quran, the hadith, and the
lives of prominent women in early Islam. There is a clear
attempt to resuscitate early Islamic history and the holy text
in order to formulate an indigenous feminist project, or at
the very least to encourage more progressive reading of the
texts that are regularly invoked by traditionalists to justify
the status quo. That feminists and traditionalists are equally
concerned with appropriating the "true" message of Islam
indicates that all parties believe it to be the only legitimate
ideological terrain on which issues pertaining to women can
be debated. I will not discuss the adequacy or merits of this
position, but merely point out that it has been one of the ten-
dencies giving a longer lease of life to ahistorical approaches
to the question of women in Muslim societies.3
There is, on the other hand, a vigorous body of scholarship
that locates women as historical and political actors firmly in
the context of temporal processes of socioeconomic transfor-
mation.4 Most work in this genre does not necessarily privi-
23
24 Deniz Kandiyoti

lege Islam as an analytic category, but inserts gender into broader dis-
courses about social transformation or the various theoretical paradigms
of different social science disciplines. Atone extreme of this spectrum, one
finds studies that are barely distinguishable from work on women and de-
velopment in any other part of the Third World. The specificity of Muslim
women's subordination, if any, and the possible role of Islamic ideology
and practice in reproducing it are thus lost from view. This leads to a para-
doxical situation whereby Islam sometimes appears to be all there is to
know, and at other times to be of little consequence in understanding the
condition of women, or more broadly, gender relations in Muslim societies.
I argue in this chapter that this is in part because we have not found
adequate ways of talking about the articulation between Islam and differ-
ent systems of male dominance,5 which are grounded in distinct material
arrangements between the genders but are rather imprecisely labeled
with the blanket term patriarchy. Indeed, the literature confirms that dif-
ferent systems of male dominance, and their internal variations accord-
ing to class and ethnicity, exercise an influence that inflects and modifies
the actual practice of Islam as well as the ideological constructions of
what may be regarded as properly Islamic. Religious practice is neces-
sarily influenced by the history of productive and reproductive relations
between the genders, as reflected in the workings of different indigenous
kinship systems. It may be, and has been argued, that the spread of Islam
has expedited the demise of varied local systems in favor of a more uni-
formly patriarchal mode, with an emphasis on patrilineality and patrilo-
cality, and with characteristic modes of control of female sexuality and
spatial mobility.6 This does not, however, justify the use of imprecise
expressions such as "Muslim patriarchy"7 to denote the sexual asymme-
tries encountered in contexts as varied as those of a Bedouin tribe, a
Hausa village, or an upper-class harem in Cairo or Istanbul. We therefore
need to examine critically the concept of patriarchy itself, before moving
on to a more detailed consideration of its usefulness for an understanding
of gender relations in Muslim societies.

PATRIARCHY: A PROBLEMATIC CONCEPT

Although a brief incursion into feminist theory cannot do justice to the

complex debates generated around the term patriarchy,8 I will attempt a
sketchy outline of some contemporary developments in its usage.
Radical feminists were the first to initiate a fairly liberal usage of the
term to apply to almost any form or instance of male dominance. Since
patriarchy defined in those terms was an all-pervasive, virtually timeless
phenomenon, its manifestations could be sought anywhere, although
the symbolic and psychic spheres were singled out as privileged areas of
 Islam and Patriarchy 25

investigation. In spite of numerous modifications and reworkings within

radical feminism, patriarchy was by and large allocated to the ideological
sphere, with a material basis in the division of labor between the sexes
(and in particular the facts of reproductive biology).9
In the case of Marxist or socialist feminism, the concept has a some-
what different history. It emerged as a residual category, because forms of
exploitation and oppression based on gender proved singularly re-
calcitrant to reduction to other forms (such as those based on race and
class). In those terms, what could not be explained through the workings
of capital could be put down to the logic of a related but distinct system
with its own laws of motion, namely that of patriarchy. However, the
degree of analytic independence assigned to the category of patriarchy,
as distinct from capitalism or the class system, could be quite variable, as
indeed was the degree of commitment to a systematic consideration of
the relations between the two.10 Nonetheless, this position had advan-
tages in that patriarchy was acknowledged to have a material basis in the
social relations between the sexes, which are in turn subject to historical
transformations. The emphasis on the reciprocal relations between types
and systems of production, the sexual division of labor, and age and
gender hierarchies meant that the psychodynamics and cultural con-
structions of gender could be historicized, and at least in principle, more
adequately theorized. In practice, however, most of the debate remained
centered on the effects of industrial and postindustrial capitalism on
gender relations, with relatively fewer attempts to establish linkages
within a broader comparative perspective.
The ways in which such linkages were theorized have in addition been
quite diverse. Some concentrated on establishing empirical associations
between types of production, kinship systems, and indicators of wom-
en's status. Ester Boserup, for instance, made a distinction between male
and female farming systems, relating them to population density, tech-
nology, and type of cultivation.11 Female farming systems, most preva-
lent in sub-Saharan Africa, are characterized by abundant land, low pop-
ulation density, shifting cultivation, and the use of the hoe as a farming
implement. Apart from tasks like clearing the land for cultivation, food
production is primarily the responsibility of women, who, according to
Boserup, have a high degree of mobility and the ability to market their
surplus to support themselves and their children. Male farming systems,
more characteristic of Asia, are prevalent under conditions of higher
population density, the necessity to increase productivity, and the use by
men of draught animals and the plow. Plow agriculture is prevalent in
areas of private ownership where a landless class whose labor may be
hired exists. Ideally, the women of landed households are released from
agricultural work in the fields and confined to domesticity, often actually
26 Deniz Kandiyoti

secluded as a symbol of prestige and family honor (as in Muslim veiling or

the purdah system). They increasingly come to depend on men for both
economic support and symbolic shelter.
Germaine Tillion, in her analysis of codes of honor and female mod-
esty in the Mediterranean, argues that these phenomena may in fact be of
more recent origin than suspected and may have evolved as a reaction to
the threat posed to endogamous tribal societies, which form the back-
bone of the post-neolithic ancient world, by outside forces, particularly
by an expanding urban civilization.12 She sees the customs and practices
related to the seclusion of women as results of the incomplete evolution
and degeneration of tribal society and of the structures of defense it
erected to maintain its integrity. Islamic rules are incidental to this pro-
cess, as evidenced by the very selectivity with which they are applied,
ignored, or circumvented. For instance, women are either altogether de-
prived of their inheritance rights when these threaten tribal property and
solidarity, or when they are accorded such rights, they are tightly
monitored through strict controls over marriage alliances and their spa-
tial mobility. Thus the apparent irony behind the fact that veiled urban
women have property rights whereas their unveiled rural sisters, whose
contribution to subsistence is typically higher, are deprived of them,
disappears. Although Tillion is quite clear about the material forces un-
derpinning tribal endogamy, the process of erosion of such structures
through contact with city values and exposure to other civilizational in-
fluences (operating through changes in mentality and outlook) remains
more nebulous.
Jack Goody followed up Boserup's typology by relating women's con-
tribution to production with kinship systems and modes of inheritance.13
He notes the empirical association between plow agriculture, male farm-
ing, diverging devolution (that is, bilateral inheritance), and monogamy,
all characteristic of Eurasia, which stand in contrast to Africa, where
female predominance in hoe cultivation is accompanied by homogenous
inheritance (matrilineal or patrilineal), polygyny, and bridewealth. This
approach has been criticized for trying to explain differences in kinship
patterns between very broadly defined regions through ahistorical refer-
ence to technological and ecological variations and for trying to under-
stand kinship and systems of production solely in terms of property
relations.14
At a more general level, approaches to women's subordination stress-
ing their modes of contribution to subsistence were criticized for their
"productivist" bias. It was argued that ultimately the position of women
could not be explained in terms of participation in production, which
could be extremely variable, but could be better understood with refer-
ence to their roles in reproduction.15 Some even turned the productivist
 Islam and Patriarchy 27

argument on its head by suggesting not only that women's status was not
predicated on their roles in production but also that productive roles may
in fact themselves be defined and limited by the kinds of reproductive
tasks assigned to women at different junctures of capital accumulation.16
Thus Lourdes Beneria and Gita Sen argued in their critique of Boserup
that the crucial distinguishing features of African and Asian farming do
not reside in the tools used—the hoe or the plow—but in the forms of
appropriation of land, surplus, and women's reproductive capacities.17
They proposed an analysis based on the dual concepts of accumulation
and reproduction, it being understood that there are systematic connec-
tions between different phases of accumulation, class formation, and
gender relations.18
Where did these developments leave the concept of patriarchy? To the
extent that efforts were made to relate it to processes of accumulation, it
became increasingly insubstantial and was often reduced to an epi-
phenomenon of the workings of capital. The allocation of productive and
reproductive tasks between the sexes is frequently presented as func-
tional to the maintenance of a cheap labor force, with gender ideologies
merely acting to justify the existing division of labor. In spite of strenuous
attempts at disentangling the workings of patriarchy from those of cap-
italism and the wish to grant the former some analytic autonomy,19 a
great deal was said about the laws of motion of capitalism whereas those
of patriarchy have at best remained nebulous and vague. This is partly
due to the often implicit assumption that there is such a thing as a unitary
and universal system that we may call patriarchy, and that the differences
in the character of women's subordination concretely encountered are
merely the outcome of different expressions or stages of the same sys-
tem.20 This has resulted in an overly abstract and monolithic conception
of male dominance, which obfuscates rather than reveals the intimate
inner workings of different gender arrangements.
I have proposed elsewhere that a useful point of entry for the identifi-
cation of different systems of male dominance may be found through
analyses of women's strategies in dealing with them.211 have argued that
women strategize within a set of concrete constraints that reveal and
define the blueprint of what I term the patriarchal bargain22 of any given
society, which may exhibit variations according to class, caste, and eth-
nicity. These patriarchal bargains exert a powerful influence on the shap-
ing of women's gendered subjectivity and determine the nature of gen-
der ideology in different contexts. They also influence both the potential
for and the actual forms of women's active or passive resistance. Most
important, patriarchal bargains are not timeless or immutable entities,
but are susceptible to historical transformations that open up new areas
of struggle or renegotiation of the relations between genders.
28 Deniz Kandiyoti

By way of illustration, I will contrast two systems of male dominance,

rendered ideal-typical for the purposes of discussing their implications
for women. I use these ideal types as heuristic devices that necessarily
simplify more complex reality, but can be fleshed out and expanded with
comparative, empirical content. These two types are based on examples
from sub-Saharan Africa and from the Middle East and southern and
eastern Asia. My aim is to highlight a continuum ranging from less corpo-
rate forms of householding, involving the relative autonomy of mother-
child units evidenced in sub-Saharan polygyny, to the more corporate
male-headed entities prevalent in the regions identified by James Cald-
well as the "patriarchal belt/'23 Against this background, I will explore
the extent to which Islam cut across different systems of male dominance
and the possibility that gender relations in the Middle East are influenced
by a particular conjunction between Islam and the system I identify as
"classic patriarchy." Finally, I will speculate on the impact of contempo-
rary social transformations on patriarchal bargains and gender ide-
ologies.

AUTONOMY AND PROTEST: SOME EXAMPLES FROM SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

As I reviewed the literature on women in agricultural development pro-

jects in sub-Saharan Africa, my own background, as a woman born and
raised in Turkey, left me totally unprepared for what I found.24 This
literature was rife with instances of women's resistance to attempts to
lower the value of their labor, and more significant, women's refusal to
allow the total appropriation of their production by their husbands.
Whenever new agricultural schemes provided men with inputs and
credit, and the assumption was made that as heads of household they
would have access to their wives' unremunerated labor, problems
seemed to develop. In the Mwea irrigated rice settlement in Kenya, where
women were deprived of access to their own plots, their lack of alter-
natives and their total lack of control over men's earnings made life so
intolerable to them that wives commonly deserted their husbands.25 In
Gambia, in yet another rice-growing scheme, the irrigated land and the
credit were made available to men, even though it was the women who
traditionally grew rice in tidal swamps and there was a long-standing
practice of men and women cultivating their own crops and controlling
the produce. Women's customary duties with respect to labor allocation
to common and individual plots protected them from demands by their
husbands that they provide free labor on men's irrigated rice fields. Men
had to pay their wives wages or lend them an irrigated plot to have access
to their labor. In the rainy season, when women had the alternative of
growing their own swamp rice, they created a labor bottleneck for men,
 Islam and Patriarchy 29

who simply had to wait for the days on which women did not go to their
own fields.26 Pepe Roberts also illustrates the strategies used by women
to maximize their autonomy in the African context.27 Yoruba women in
Nigeria negotiate the terms of their farm-labor services to their husbands
while they aim to devote more time and energy to the trading activities
that will enable them to support themselves. Hausa women in Niger,
whose observance of Islamic seclusion reduces the demands husbands
can make on their services (an important point to which we shall return),
allocate their labor to trade, mainly the sale of ready-cooked foodstuffs.
In short, the insecurities of African polygyny for women are matched
by areas of relative autonomy that they clearly strive to maximize. Men's
responsibility for their wives' support, although normative in some in-
stances, is in actual fact relatively low. Typically, it is the woman who is
primarily responsible for her own and her children's upkeep, including
meeting the costs of their education, with varying degrees of assistance
from her husband. Women have little to gain and a lot to lose by becoming
totally dependent on husbands, and quite rightly resist projects that tilt
the delicate balance they strive to maintain.
Documentation of a genuine trade off between women's autonomy
and men's responsibility for their wives can be found in some historical
examples. Kristin Mann suggests that despite the wifely dependence
entailed by Christian marriage, Yoruba women in Lagos accepted it with
enthusiasm because of the greater protection they thought they would
receive.28 Conversely, men in contemporary Zambia resist the more
modern ordinance marriage, as opposed to customary marriage, because
it burdens them with greater obligations for their wives and children.29 A
form of conjugal union in which the partners may openly negotiate the
exchange of sexual and labor services seems to lay the groundwork for
more explicit forms of bargaining. Commenting on Ashanti marriage,
Katherine Abu singles out as its most striking feature "the separateness
of spouses' resources and activities and the overtness of the bargaining
element in the relationship."30 Polygyny, and in this case, the continuing
obligations of both men and women to their own kin, does not foster a
notion of the family or household as a corporate entity.
Clearly, there are important variations in African kinship systems with
respect to forms of marriage, residence, descent, and inheritance rules,
which are grounded in complex historical processes, including different
modes of incorporation of African societies into the world economy.31
Nonetheless, it is within a broadly defined Afro-Caribbean pattern that
we find some of the clearest instances of noncorporateness of the con-
jugal family both in ideology and in practice, which informs marital and
marketplace strategies for women.
It is therefore particularly interesting to see how Islam, which privi-
30 Deniz Kandiyoti

leges patrilineal bonds and clearly enjoins men to take full responsibility
for the support of their wives, acts on gender relations in different African
contexts. Enid Schildkrout's study of secluded Hausa women in Kano,
Nigeria, suggests that a typically West African pattern of high economic
activity and relative autonomy of women persists within a family struc-
ture defined by Islamic values concerning the sexual division of labor.32
She relates how women are able to subvert the idealized structure of the
domestic economy through the control they exercise over the labor of
their children, which makes it possible for them to trade in cooked foods
without having direct contact with the marketplace. Their seclusion ob-
viously restricts their mobility so that they are dependent on manipulat-
ing the limited resources their husbands provide for consumption and
diverting them to their own productive ends. However, this also puts
limits on the services husbands may expect from their wives, as they
cannot rely on them as a source of support and are thus at least in theory
expected to be the providers. Schildkrout suggests that the widespread
adoption of purdah in Kano is possible precisely because women have the
ability to play active economic roles while participating in the myth of
their total dependence on men. To the extent that this ability is predicated
on their control over children's labor, however, it will be increasingly
jeopardized as the latter are absorbed by the modern educational system
and become unavailable as domestic labor. Ultimately, the structure of all
but the wealthiest families in Islamic West Africa may be challenged by
such contemporary changes.
In Mette Bovin's work on the Manga women in Bornu, Niger, she
detects signs of actual female resistance to Muslim institutions in spite of
nine hundred years of "Islamization."33 Islam in Bornu grafted itself on
an older matrilineal system with different pre-Islamic marriage rules,
which were superseded but not totally eradicated by a Muslim patrilineal
system. Bovin suggests that it is women who maintain and transmit this
pre-Islamic cultural heritage, through their struggle to enforce the ma-
trilineal principle, the actual result being a kind of bilateral system. Pre-
Islamic influences are also apparent in traces of totemism in women's
rituals, the existence of independent statuses for women, and women's
vocabulary, which unlike men's does not include Arabic words. It is as
though Islamic rules were being negotiated by participants with diverg-
ing gender interests, the women stubbornly clinging to aspects of the
pre-Islamic system that may have been more empowering.
One does not have to accept this particular interpretation of pre-
Islamic survivals to concede a more general and rather obvious point.
There may or may not be a good fit between Islamic injunctions concern-
ing kinship and marriage and local pre-Islamic customs and practices. In
the latter case, not only local kinship patterns and ideologies are modified
 Islam and Patriarchy 31

but often the practice and interpretation of Islam itself. Presenting wom-
en as active participants in this process of reinterpretation and cultural
negotiation exercises a corrective influence on depictions of Muslim
women as passive victims of patriarchal domination. It is no accident,
moreover, that it is in sub-Saharan Africa that we encounter the clearest
instances of women's resistance, since they frequently involve the safe-
guarding of existing spheres of autonomy.

SUBSERVIENCE AND MANIPULATION: WOMEN UNDER CLASSIC PATRIARCHY

The foregoing examples of women's resistance stand in stark contrast to

women's accommodations to the system I call classic patriarchy. The
clearest instances of classic patriarchy are found in the geographical area
that includes North Africa, the Muslim Middle East (including Turkey,
Pakistan, and Iran), and southern and eastern Asia (specifically India and
China).3*
The key to the reproduction of classic patriarchy lies in the operations
of the patrilocally extended household, which is also commonly associ-
ated with the reproduction of the peasantry in agrarian societies.35 Even
though demographic and other constraints may have curtailed the actual
predominance of three-generational patrilocal households, there is little
doubt that they represented a powerful cultural ideal. It is plausible that
the emergence of the patriarchal extended family, which gives the senior
man authority over everyone else, including younger men, is bound up
in the incorporation and control of the family by the state,36 and in the
transition from kin-based to tributary modes of surplus control.37 The
implications of the patrilineal-patrilocal complex for women are not only
remarkably uniform but also entail forms of control and subordination
that cut across cultural and religious boundaries, such as those of Hin-
duism, Confucianism, and Islam.
Under classic patriarchy, girls are given away in marriage at a very
young age into households headed by their husband's father. There they
are subordinate not only to all the men but also to the more senior
women, especially their mothers-in-law. The extent to which this repre-
sents a total break with their own kin group, and consequent isolation
and hardship, varies in relation to the degree of endogamy in marriage
practices. Michael Meeker in his comparison between the rural Arabs of
the Levant and the Black Sea Turks draws our attention to the different
structuring of conceptions of honor among them and its possible relation
to the degree of endogamy they favor in marriage.38 Among the Turks, he
finds much lower rates of endogamy, and that the husband is directly and
principally responsible for a woman's honor. Among the rural Arabs of
the Levant, there is much greater mutuality among affines, and a worn-
32 Deniz Kandiyoti

an's natal family retains both an interest and an active involvement in

protecting a married daughter's honor. As a result, a Turkish woman's
traditional position may more closely resemble the status of the "strang-
er-bride" of pre-revolutionary China than that of an Arab woman, whose
position in the patriarchal household may be somewhat attenuated by
endogamy and recourse to her natal kin.
Lila Abu-Lughod, in her study of the Awlad 'Ali, Bedouins of the
Western Desert in Egypt, draws attention to the tension that marriage
creates in an ideological system in which agnation is given clear priority
as a basis for affiliation, and suggests that one resolution of this tension
may be sought in a preference for pa trilateral parallel-cousin marriages.39
She comments on the preferential treatment that wives from the same
patrikin as their husbands receive and on their greater sense of security.
Unni Wikan in her study of Oman indicates quite perceptively that al-
though in principle men subscribe to the ideal of cousin marriage and
agnatic loyalties, in practice they strive to stay clear of such unions.40
Marrying a stranger enhances the control of the husband by reducing
accountability to related in-laws and ensures the wife's exclusive depen-
dence on him.
Under classic patriarchy women frequently have no claim on their
father's patrimony, whether the prevalent marriage payment is bride-
price or dowry. Their dowries do not qualify as a form of premortem
inheritance since they are transferred directly to the bridegroom's kin and
do not take the form of productive property, such as land.41 In the case of
the mahr (brideprice), the proportion retained by the bride's father and
that returned to her in the form of valuables can be extremely variable,
despite explicit provision that part of the mahr belongs to her. Likewise,
women's access to and control over property can vary a great deal. There
is substantial historical evidence that women in the Middle East did own
and control property, especially if they were urban and middle or upper
class.42 There is equally widespread evidence that the patrilineage expro-
priates them if productive property takes the form of land or flocks and if
their inheritance rights threaten the economic integrity of the family or
tribal unit. Thus whether they are members of Muslim, Hindu, or Confu-
cian communities, young brides often enter their husband's household
as effectively dispossessed individuals, who can establish their place in
the patriliny only by producing male offspring.
A woman's life cycle in the patrilocally extended family is such that the
deprivation and hardship she may experience as a young bride are
eventually superseded by the control and authority she will have over her
own daughters-in-law. The powerful postmenopausal matriarch thus is
the other side of the coin of this form of patriarchy. The cyclical nature of
women's power and their anticipation of inheriting the authority of se-
 Islam and Patriarchy 33

nior women encourages a thorough internalization of this form of pa-

triarchy by the women themselves. Subordination to men is offset by the
control older women have over younger women. Women have access to
the only type of labor power they can control, and to old-age security,
however, through their married sons. Since sons are a woman's most
critical resource, ensuring their lifelong loyalty is an enduring preoccupa-
tion. Older women have a vested interest in the suppression of romantic
love between youngsters to keep the conjugal bond secondary and to
claim their sons' primary allegiance. Young women have an interest in
circumventing and possibly evading their mother-in-law's control. There
are culturally specific examples of how this struggle works to the detri-
ment of the heterosexual bond,43 but there are striking similarities in the
overall pattern. In the case of Muslim societies, Fatima Mernissi empha-
sizes the role of Islamic ideology, which posits the primacy of the male
believer's relationship with God, treating all other involvements, es-
pecially passionate and exclusive relationships with women, as diver-
sionary if not positively subversive. ** Although this ideology may indeed
constitute a local contributory factor, there is little doubt that what is
being played out in the mother-son-bride triangle forms a central struc-
tural component of a much broader patriarchal scenario.
The class or caste impact on classic patriarchy produces additional
complexities. Among the wealthier strata, the withdrawal of women
from nondomestic work is frequently a mark of status institutionalized in
such seclusion and exclusion practices as the purdah system and veiling.
The women who are thus restricted nonetheless share in the privileges of
their class through greater access to and control over property, more
leisure, and eventually better access to education. For the women of
poorer strata, who can ill afford to observe this cultural ideal, the ideology
of seclusion and dependence on men still exercises a powerful influence
that severely restricts the range of options available to them. Judith
Tucker's data on nineteenth-century Egypt suggest that the strongly in-
terventionist state policies of the Muhammad 'Ali period resulted in
women's recruitment into public works, state-run industries, and ex-
panding sectors of health and education.45 Yet at the same time she draws
our attention to how women's independent access to income could result
in losses on the family front, as when women in certain kinds of em-
ployment were legally deprived of the right of guardianship of their
children. Ultimately, women's access to resources is mediated through
the family. In situations where the observance of restrictive practices is a
crucial element in the reproduction of family status, women will resist
breaking the rules, even if observing them produces economic hardship.
I would therefore agree with Maria Mies's analysis of the lacemakers of
Narsapur, India, about whom she observes that the ideology of their
34 Deniz Kandiyoti

domesticity keeps them working at home, for extremely low wages, even
though they are producing for the world market.46 In this instance, ide-
ology acts as a material force that results in a lucrative export commodity
produced by conveniently cheap labor.
Women in areas of classic patriarchy thus are often unable to resist
unfavorable labor relations in both the household and the market, and
frequently adhere as far and as long as they possibly can to rules that
result in the devaluation of their labor. The cyclical fluctuations of their
power position, combined with status considerations, result in their ac-
tive collusion in the reproduction of their own subordination. They fre-
quently adopt interpersonal strategies that maximize their security
through manipulation of the affections of their sons and husband. As
Margery Wolf's insightful discussion of the Chinese uterine family sug-
gests, this strategy can even result in the aging male patriarch losing
power to his wife.47 Even though these individual power tactics do little
to alter the structurally unfavorable terms of the overall patriarchal script,
women become experts at maximizing their own life chances.
This creates the paradoxical situation noted by Kay Anne Johnson,
who comments on female conservatism in China: "Ironically, women
through their actions to resist passivity and total male control, became
participants with vested interests in the system that oppressed them."48
One also gains important insights into women's investment in existing
gender arrangements through ethnographic studies of the Middle East.
Some suggest that far from producing subjective feelings of oppression,
this willing participation enhances women's sense of control and self-
worth. Wikan, for instance, depicts Omani women in the following
terms: "Indeed many of the constraints and limitations imposed on wom-
en, such as the burqa [veil], restrictions of movement and sexual segrega-
tion, are seen by women as aspects of that very concern and respect on
the part of the men which provide the basis for their own feeling of
assurance and value. Rather than reflecting subjugation, these con-
straints and limitations are perceived by women as a source of pride and a
confirmation of esteem."49
The survival of the moral order of classic patriarchy, as well as the
positioning of male versus female and young versus old, however, is
grounded in specific material conditions. Changes in these conditions
can seriously undermine the normative order. As expressed succinctly by
Mead Cain, S. R. Khanan, and S. Nahar, it is both the key and the irony of
this system that "male authority has a material base, while male responsi-
bility is normatively controlled."50 Their study of a village in Bangladesh
offers a striking example of the strains placed by poverty on bonds of
obligation between kin and, more specifically, on men's fulfillment of
their normative obligations toward women. Martin Greeley also docu-
 Islam and Patriarchy 35

ments the growing dependence of landless households in Bangladesh on

women's wage labor, including that of married women, and discusses
the ways in which the stability of the patriarchal family is thereby under-
mined.51
In a purely analogical sense, patriarchal bargains, like scientific para-
digms,52 can be shown to have a normal and a crisis phase, which chal-
lenges our very interpretation of what is going on in the world. Thus
during what we might call the normal phase of classic patriarchy, there
were always large numbers of women who were in fact exposed to eco-
nomic hardship and insecurity. They were infertile and had to be di-
vorced, or orphaned and without recourse to their natal family, or un-
protected because they had no surviving sons or, even worse, had
ungrateful sons. They were merely considered "unlucky," however,
anomalies and accidental casualties of a system that otherwise made
sense. It is at the point of breakdown that every system reveals its internal
contradictions and often forces participants in the system to take up new
and seemingly contradictory ideological positions.

THE DEMISE OF PATRIARCHAL BARGAINS: RETREAT

INTO CONSERVATISM OR RADICAL PROTEST?

The material bases of classic patriarchy crumble under the impact of new
market forces, capital penetration in rural areas,53 and processes of eco-
nomic marginalization and immiseration. Although there is no single
path leading to the breakdown of this system, its consequences are fairly
uniform. The domination of younger men by older men and the shelter of
women in the domestic sphere were the hallmarks of a system in which
men controlled some form of viable joint patrimony in land, animals, or
commercial capital. Among the property less and the dispossessed, the
necessity of every household member's contribution to survival turns
men's economic protection of women—which is central to Muslim men's
claims to primacy in the conjugal union—into a myth.
The breakdown of classic patriarchy results in the earlier emancipation
from their fathers of younger men and their earlier separation from the
paternal household. Whereas this process implies that women escape the
control of mothers-in-law and head their own households at a much
younger age, it also means that they themselves can no longer look for-
ward to a future surrounded by subservient daughters-in-law. For the
generation of women caught in between, this transformation may repre-
sent genuine personal tragedy, since they have paid the heavy price of an
earlier patriarchal bargain, but are not able to cash in on its promised
benefits. Wolf's statistics on suicide among women in China suggest a
36 Deniz Kandiyoti

clear change in the trend since the 1930s, with a sharp increase in the
suicide rates of women over forty-five, whereas previously the rates were
highest among young women, especially new brides.54 She relates this
change explicitly to the emancipation of sons and their new chance to
escape familial control in their choice of spouse, which robs the older
woman of her power and respectability as mother-in-law.
In the case of Muslim societies, Mernissi comments on the psychologi-
cally distortive effects of the discordance between deeply ingrained im-
ages and expectations of male-female roles and the changing realities of
everyday life. "The wider the gap between reality and fantasy (or aspira-
tion), the greater the suffering and the more serious the conflict and
tension within us. The psychological cost is just barely tolerable. The fact
that we cling to images of virility (economic power) and femininity (con-
sumption of the husband's fortune) that have nothing whatever to do
with real life contributes to making male-female dynamics one of the
most painful sources of tension and conflict."55 This tension is docu-
mented through an analysis of "sexual anomie" in contemporary
Morocco, in which she stresses primarily men's frustration and humilia-
tion at being unable to fulfill their traditional role and the threat posed by
women's greater spatial mobility and access to paid employment.
The breakdown of classic patriarchy may be equally threatening to
women, however, who often resist the process of change because they
see the old normative order slipping away from them without any em-
powering alternatives. In a broader discussion of women's interests,
Maxine Molyneux suggests that this may not be put down merely to
"false consciousness" but to the possibility that changes realized in a
piecemeal fashion "could threaten the short-term practical interests of
some women, or entail a cost in the loss of forms of protection that are not
then compensated for in some way."56
Thus when classic patriarchy enters a crisis, many women may con-
tinue to pressure men to live up to their obligations and will not, except
under the most extreme circumstances, compromise the basis for their
claims by stepping out of line and losing their respectability. Their pas-
sive resistance takes the form of claiming their half of this particular
patriarchal bargain—protection in exchange for submissiveness and pro-
priety, and a confirmation that male honor is indeed dependent on their
responsible conduct.
The response of some women who have to work for wages in this
context may be an intensification of traditional modesty markers, such as
veiling. Often, through no choice of their own, they are working outside
the home and are thus "exposed"; they must now use every symbolic
means at their disposal to signify that they continue to be worthy of
protection. It is significant that Khomeini's exhortations to keep women
 Islam and Patriarchy 37

at home found enthusiastic support among many Iranian women, de-

spite the obvious elements of repression. The implicit promise of in-
creased male responsibility restores the integrity of their original pa-
triarchal bargain in an environment where the range of options available
to women is extremely restricted. Younger women adopt the veil, Farah
Azari suggests, because "the restriction imposed on them by an Islamic
order was therefore a small price that had to be paid in exchange for the
security, stability and presumed respect this order promised them."57
That this promise has proven to be illusory is strongly suggested by
Haleh Afshar's review of social policies under the Islamic Republic.58 She
nonetheless acknowledges a large support base among the poor and
working classes. Fadwa El Guindi's analysis of young women taking up
the veil in Egypt also speaks of women's concern with retaining respecta-
bility and a measure of "untouchability" now that they are present in
public spaces in growing numbers.59
It would be simpleminded to single out Islam as unique in fulfilling
this soothing and restorative function. There is evidence from non-
Muslim societies that retreat into social and religious conservatism is one
of the possible responses to changes that seem to threaten the moral
order, especially when they present challenges to existing gender ar-
rangements. At the ideological level, broken bargains seem to instigate a
search for culprits, a hankering for the certainties of a more traditional
order, or a more diffuse feeling that change might have gone either too far
or badly wrong. The familism of the New Right and the anti-feminist
movement in the West thus have been interpreted by some as an attempt
to reinstate an older patriarchal bargain, with feminists providing a con-
venient scapegoat on whom to blame the loss of family values, intimacy,
and community.60 What makes conservative Islamic discourse even more
compelling is that it often associates moral decay with contamination by
foreign, generally Western values, and assigns women a privileged role
in restoring the lost authenticity of the community of believers. This anti-
imperialist, populist discourse constructs women upholding Muslim val-
ues as radical militants rather than mere traditionalists, adding a signifi-
cant new dimension to female reaction in the Muslim world. What unites
female conservatism in the West with Muslim women's militancy in the
Middle East, however, is the common perception that the furtherance of
women's gender interests lie in the restoration of an original patriarchal
bargain that afforded them protection and dignity.

I have argued here that one of the major weaknesses in our theorizing
about women in the Middle East stems from a conflation of Islam, as
ideology and practice, with patriarchy. This conflation is encouraged by
monolithic and essentialist conceptions of both Islam and patriarchy. In
38 Deniz Kandiyoti

search of an alternative, I presented case materials illustrating women's

strategies and coping mechanisms as a means of capturing the nature of
patriarchal systems in their cultural, class specific, and temporal con-
creteness. I have tried to show how two ideal-typical systems of male
. dominance could provide different base lines from which women negoti-
ate and strategize, and how each affects the potentialities of their re-
sistance and struggles.
Islam cuts across these ideal types and extends well beyond them (as in
the case of Southeast Asian societies). Even though Islam brings its own
prescriptions to bear on gender relations in each context, it nonetheless
achieves different accommodations with the diverse cultural complexes it
encounters. That the core areas of Islamic civilization have historically
coincided with areas of classic patriarchy has tended to obscure these
variations, and encouraged a confusion between the assumed workings
of Islam and those of a specific type of patriarchy
The different political projects of modern nation-states, the specif-
icities of their nationalist histories, and the positioning of Islam vis-a-vis
diverse nationalisms also account for deep and significant variations in
policies and legislation affecting women.61 These variations find concrete
expression in the degree of access that women have to education, paid
employment, social benefits, and political participation.
There is, nonetheless, a sense in which Islam in the contemporary
world may be promoting a homogenization of ideology and practice con-
cerning women, the family, and gender relations. This political Islam
speaks to the gap created by the breakdown of patriarchal bargains and to
the turmoil and confusion created by rapid and often corrosive processes
of social transformation. The extensive "ideologization" of the sphere of
family and gender relations is itself, however, a historical phenomenon of
fairly recent origin that cannot be imputed to Islam itself.
It should be clear that these different levels at which I have invoked
Islam—kinship systems, the state, and political ideologies—cannot be
conflated and must be kept analytically distinct. We should now be mov-
ing toward finely grained historical analyses of how they intersect, in-
teract, and change.

Notes

1. Nikki R. Keddie, "Problems in the Study of Middle Eastern Women/' Inter-

national Journal of Middle East Studies 10 (1979): 225-40; Judith E. Tucker, "Problems
in the Historiography of Women in the Middle East: The Case of Nineteenth-
Century Egypt/' International Journal of Middle East Studies 15 (1983): 321-36.
2. Nawal al-Saadawi, "Women and Islam," in Women and Islam, ed. Azizah
 Islam and Patriarchy 39

al-Hibri (Oxford: Pergamon, 1982), 193-206; Azizah al-Hibri, "A Study of Islamic
Herstory," in Women and Islam, 207-20; Fatima Mernissi, Le harem politique (Paris:
Albin Michel, 1987).
3. For critical views on this question, see Azar Tabari, "The Women's Move-
ment in Iran: A Hopeful Prognosis," feminist Studies 12 (1986): 343-60; Mai
Ghoussoub, "Feminism—or the Eternal Masculine—in the Arab World," New Left
Review 161 (1987): 3-18.
4. Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie, eds. Women in the Muslim World (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1978); Judith E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century
Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Elizabeth W. Fernea, ed.,
Women and the Family in the Middle East (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985);
UNESCO, Social Science Research and Women in the Arab World (London: Frances
Pinter, 1984).
5. We have likewise not paid enough systematic attention to the articulation
between Islam, nationalism, and different state-building projects in the Middle
East. On this question, see Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1991).
6. Leila Ahmed, "Women and the Advent of Islam," Signs 11 (1986): 665-91.
7. Mervat Hatem, "Class and Patriarchy as Competing Paradigms for the
Study of Middle Eastern Women," Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no.
4 (1987): 811-18.
8. This discussion will not be representative of the broader debate on the
question of the origins and causes of women's subordination. On the question of
origins, see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986). A useful collection of essays may be found in Michelle Zimbalist
Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Women, Culture, and Society (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1974). This work introduces the public-private dichotomy,
which has been particularly influential, as well as contested, in analyses of women
in the Middle East. See chapters by Friedl and Hegland in this volume.
9. For two very different materialist accounts, see Shulamith Firestone, The
Dialectic of Sex (London: Women's Press, 1979), and Christine Delphy, The Main
Enemy (London: Women's Research and Resource Centre, 1977).
10. As in Zillah Eisenstein, "Developing a Theory of Capitalist Patriarchy," in
Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 5-40; Roisin McDonough and Rachel Har-
rison, "Patriarchy and Relations of Production," in Feminism and Materialism, ed.
Annette Kuhn and Ann Marie Wolpe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978),
11-41; Heidi Hartmann, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism:
Towards a More Progressive Union," in Women and Revolution, ed. Lydia Sargent
(London: Pluto, 1981), 1-41; Michele Barrett, Women's Oppression Today (London:
Verso, 1980).
11. Ester Boserup, Women's Role in Economic Development (London: George Al-
len and Unwin, 1970).
12. Germaine Tillion, The Republic of Cousins (London: Al Saqi, 1983).
13. Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976).
40 Deniz Kandiyoti

14. Ann Whitehead, "Review of Jack Goody's Production and Reproduction/'

Critique of Anthropology 3, nos. 9-10 (1977): 151-59; Karen Sacks, Sisters and Wives:
The Past and Future of Sexual Equality (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979).
15. Felicity Edholm, Olivia Harris, and Kate Young, "Conceptualizing
Women," Critique of Anthropology 3, nos. 9-10 (1977): 101-30.
16. Lourdes Beneria, "Reproduction, Production and the Sexual Division of
Labour," Cambridge Journal of Economics 3, no. 3 (1979): 203-25.
17. Lourdes Beneria and Gita Sen, "Accumulation, Reproduction and Women's
Role in Economic Development: Boserup Revisited," Signs 7 (1981): 279-98.
18. There have been many variations on this theme. See, for instance, Maria
Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (London: Zed, 1986).
19. As in Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution, and Barrett, Women's Oppression
Today.
20. Hence the host of such imprecise formulations as "state" patriarchy versus
"private" patriarchy, Muslim patriarchy, and so on.
21. Deniz Kandiyoti, "Bargaining with Patriarchy," Gender and Society 2, no. 3
(1988): 274-90.
22. This term is intended to indicate the existence of set rules and scripts
regulating gender relations, to which both genders accommodate and acquiesce,
yet which may nevertheless be contested, redefined, and renegotiated.
23. James C. Caldwell, "A Theory of Fertility: From High Plateau to De-
stabilization," Population and Development Review 4 (1978): 553-77.
24. Deniz Kandiyoti, Women in Rural Production Systems: Problems and Policies
(Paris: UNESCO, 1985).
25. John Hanger and Jon Moris, "Women and the Household Economy," in
Mwea: An Irrigated Rice Settlement in Kenya, ed. Robert Chambers and Jon Moris
(Munich: Weltforum, 1973), 209-44.
26. Janet Dey, "Gambian Women: Unequal Partners in Rice Development Pro-
jects," in African Women in the Development Process, ed. Nici Nelson (London: Frank
Cass, 1981), 109-22.
27. Pepe Roberts, "The Sexual Politics of Labour in Western Nigeria and Hausa
Niger," in Serving Two Masters, ed. Kate Young (New Delhi: Allied Publishers,
1989), 27-47.
28. Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change among the
Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
29. Monica Munachonga, "Income Allocation and Marriage Options in Urban
Zambia," in A Home Divided: Women and Income in the Third World, ed. Daisy Dwyer
and Judith Bruce (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 173-94.
30. Katherine Abu, "The Separateness of Spouses: Conjugal Resources in an
Ashanti Town," in Male and Female in West Africa, ed. Christine Oppong (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1983), 156-68.
31. Jane I. Guyer and Pauline E. Peters, eds., Conceptualizing the Household:
Issues of Theory and Policy in Africa, special issue of Development and Change 18 (1987).
32. Enid Schildkrout, "Dependence and Autonomy: The Economic Activities
of Secluded Hausa Women in Kano, Nigeria," in Women and Work in Africa, ed.
Edna G. Bay (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1982), 55-81.
 Islam and Patriarchy 41

33. Mette Bovin, "Muslim Women in the Periphery: The West African Sahel,"
in Women in Islamic Societies, ed. Bo Utas (London: Curzon, 1983), 66-103.
34. I am excluding not only Southeast Asia but also the northern Mediterra-
nean, despite important similarities in the latter concerning codes of honor and
the overall importance attached to the sexual purity of women, because I want to
restrict myself to areas where the patrilocal-patrilineal complex is dominant. Thus
societies with bilateral kinship systems such as Greece, in which women do in-
herit and control property and whose dowries constitute productive property, do
not qualify in spite of important similarities in other ideological respects. This is
not to suggest, however, that an unqualified homogeneity of ideology and prac-
tice exists within the geographical boundaries indicated. There are critical varia-
tions within the Indian subcontinent, for example, that have dramatically differ-
ent implications for women. For these, see Tim Dyson and Mick Moore, "On
Kinship Structures, Female Autonomy and Demographic Behavior," Population
and Development Review 9 (1983): 35-60. Conversely, even in areas of bilateral
kinship, there may be instances in which all the facets of classic patriarchy, namely
property, residence, and descent through the male line, may coalesce under spec-
ified circumstances. See Bette Denich, "Sex and Power in the Balkans/' in Women,
Culture, and Society, ed. Rosaido and Lamphere, 243-62. What I am suggesting is
that the most clear-cut and easily identifiable examples of classic patriarchy are
found within the boundaries indicated in the text.
35. Eric Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966).
36. Sherry Ortner, "The Virgin and the State," Feminist Studies 4 (1978): 19-36.
37. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982).
38. Michael Meeker, "Meaning and Society in the Near East: Examples from
the Black Sea Turks and Levantine Arabs/' International Journal of Middle East
Studies 7 (1976): 383-422.
39. Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986).
40. Unni Wikan, Behind the Veil in Arabia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1982).
41. Ursula Sharma, Women, Work and Property in North West India (London:
Tavistock, 1980).
42. Ronald C. Jennings, "Women in Early Seventeenth Century Ottoman Judi-
cial Records: The Sharia Court of Anatolian Kayseri/' Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient 28 (1975): 53-114; Haim Gerber, "Social and Economic
Position of Women in an Ottoman City, Bursa, 1600-1700," International Journal of
Middle East Studies 12 (1980): 231-44; Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt.
43. Abdelwahab Boudhiba, Sexuality in Islam (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1985); Kay Anne Johnson, Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Margery Wolf, Women and the Family
in Rural Taiwan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972).
44. Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil (London: Al Saqi, 1985).
45. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt.
46. Maria Mies, "The Dynamics of the Sexual Division of Labour and Integra-
42 Deniz Kandiyoti

tion of Women into the World Market/' in Women and Development: The Sexual
Division of Labour in Rural Societies, ed. Lourdes Beneria (New York: Praeger, 1982),
1-28.
47. Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan.
48. Johnson, Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China, 21.
49. Wikan, Behind the Veil in Arabia, 184.
50. Mead Cain, S. R. Khanan, and S. Nahar, "Class, Patriarchy and Women's
Work in Bangladesh," Population and Development Review 5 (1979): 408-16.
51. Martin Greeley, "Patriarchy and Poverty: A Bangladesh Case Study," South
Asia Research 3 (1983): 35-55.
52. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1970).
53. Deniz Kandiyoti, "Rural Transformation in Turkey and Its Implications for
Women's Status," in Women on the Move: Contemporary Changes in Family and Society
(Paris: UNESCO, 1984), 17-30.
54. Margery Wolf, "Women and Suicide in China," in Women in Chinese Society,
ed. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975),
111-41.
55. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 149.
56. Maxine Molyneux, "Mobilization without Emancipation? Women's In-
terests, the State and Revolution in Nicaragua," Feminist Studies 11 (1985): 227-54.
57. Farah Azari, "Islam's Appeal to Women in Iran: Illusion and Reality," in
Women of Iran: The Conflict with Fundamentalist Islam, ed. Farah Azari (London:
Ithaca Press, 1983), 1-71.
58. Haleh Afshar, "Behind the Veil: The Public and Private Faces of Khomeini's
Policies on Iranian Women," in Structures of Patriarchy, ed. Bina Agarwal (London:
Zed, 1988), 228-47.
59. Fadwa El Guindi, "Veiling Infitah with Muslim Ethic: Egypt's Contempo-
rary Islamic Movement," Social Problems 8 (1981): 465-85.
60. Janet S. Chafetz and Anthony G. Dworkin, "In the Face of Threat: Orga-
nized Antifeminism in Comparative Perspective," Gender and Society I (1987): 33-
60; Deborah Rosenfelt and Judith Stacey, "Second Thoughts on the Second Wave,"
Feminist Studies 13 (1987): 341-61; Judith Stacey, "Sexism by a Subtler Name?
Postindustrial Conditions and Postfeminist Consciousness in the Silicon Valley,"
Socialist Review (November 1987): 7-28.
61. Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State; see also Deniz Kandiyoti,
"Emancipated but Unliberated? Reflections on the Turkish Case," Feminist Studies
13 (1987): 317-38.
 The
I
First

Islamic

Centuries
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 Political Action and Public Example:
3
'A'isha and the Battle of the Camel

D E N I S E A. S P E L L B E R G

'A'isha bint Abi Bakr (d. A.D. 678) lived a long and controver-
sial existence within the nascent Islamic community. Ac-
knowledged in the earliest Arabic texts as the favorite wife of
the Prophet Muhammad, 'A'isha was accorded a special sta-
tus that derived primarily from the privileges of her marriage
to the founder of Islam. Her ascribed status, however, was
also affected by her actions after her husband's death. In-
deed, as she herself recounted, her married state lasted only
nine years. At eighteen, 'A'isha became a widow.1 Her in-
volvement in the first Islamic civil war culminated with her
participation in the Battle of the Camel (656). 'A'isha's politi-
cal action resulted in the creation of a problematic female
public example. After the Battle of the Camel, 'A'isha con-
tinued to be revered as the favorite wife of the Prophet, but
her actions as a widow provoked criticism.
This chapter examines 'A'isha bint Abi Bakr as a model for
other Muslim women. The depiction of 'A'isha was nega-
tively affected by her participation in the struggle for political
succession. The debate over 'A'isha's political activity is di-
rectly linked in the earliest Arabic texts with larger issues
concerning the place of women in early Islamic society and
their access to political power. To define 'A'isha's impact as a
public and political figure, therefore, is also to come to terms
with the nature of her influence on the Islamic community as
it sought to determine the place of all women in society.
There has been much scholarly debate concerning the
position of women in Arabia before and after the rise of Is-
lam. To ascertain how 'A'isha bint Abi Bakr fits the cultural
configuration engendered by Islam, it is necessary to outline
briefly the major Western scholarly arguments concerning
the position of women during this transitional period. Such a
survey, although suggestive, is to date more divisive than con-
clusive. The thesis of W. Robertson Smith that pre-Islamic, or
45
46 Denise A. Spellberg

jahiliyya, society was matriarchal has been challenged successfully in this

century by such scholars as W. Montgomery Watt and Gertrude Stern.2
Watt has distinguished both patrilineal and matrilineal tendencies in pre-
Islamic customs.3 However, more recent analyses of the same body of
ninth-century Arabic texts, the earliest sources available for the pre-
Islamic era, have resulted in three quite different interpretations of the
impact of Islam on women. Barbara Freyer Stowasser argues that "the
majority of pre-Islamic women appear to have lived in a male dominated
society in which their status was low and their rights were negligible/'4
Her overall assessment of the transition from the jahiliyya to the Islamic
period underscores her perception of the more positive standing women
found in the new Muslim community, where "both social status and the
legal rights of Muslim women were much improved."5 Nabia Abbott by
contrast, depicts the Prophet Muhammad as a reformer who "strove suc-
cessfully for the improvement of the economic and legal status of all
Moslem women," while at the same time leaving "woman forever in-
ferior to man, placing her one step below him."6 Abbott asserts that
certain new Islamic institutions, such as the seclusion decreed in the
Quran for the wives of the Prophet, resulted in an eventual negative re-
structuring of the role of Muslim women "into one of passivity and
submissiveness comparable to that already imposed" on neighboring
Jewish and Christian women.7 Suggesting that Abbott's thesis rests on
the implicit assumption of "misinterpretation by later generations," Leila
Ahmed states that the Islamic impact on pre-Islamic social and political
norms was inexorable and eradicated "those elements of activeness and
independence to be found in the women of the first Muslim society."8 Un-
like Abbott, Ahmed believes that Islam was not misinterpreted, but that
the more positive conditions for women's participation that had existed
in pre-Islamic society were "superseded and transformed" by Islam in
ways detrimental to women.9 As Use Lichtenstadter states, "pre-Islamic
Arab women played a part in the life of their tribe and exercised an influ-
ence which they lost only later in the development of Islamic society."10
Lichtenstadter and Ahmed both agree that a wider variety of participa-
tion was available to women in the pre-Islamic era. Ahmed argues that
"even if only fleetingly" women before Islam pursued many roles, which
included priestesses, warriors, leaders of rebellions, and nurses on the
battlefield.11 Through the examination of the earliest written Arabic
sources concerning 'A'isha's participation in battle and politics, this
chapter suggests that her actions reflected both pre-Islamic and Islamic
components. The depiction of 'A'isha as a public and political figure re-
flected the nuances of a society in transition.
The Prophet Muhammad changed the institution of marriage and
 Political Action and Public Example 47

with it the basic relationship between the sexes. His own wives, of whom
'A'isha was the most beloved, received an exalted status in Islamic soci-
ety, one that set them apart from ordinary women, conferring on them
the unique title "Mothers of the Believers." In the Quran 33:32, the wives
of the Prophet are described as "not like any other women." The need for
modesty was greater for the Mothers of the Believers than for other
women, since an attack on their honor was also an attack on the Prophet.
The directives in the Quran concerning both seclusion and the veil are
specifically addressed to the wives of the Prophet. The Mothers of the
Believers were regarded as models for all Muslim women in much the
same way Muslim men looked to the example of the Prophet.12
Muhammad married at least twelve women.13 Marriage conferred on
his many wives a prestige at once separate and singularly potent. The
number of wives taken by the Prophet has been the subject of much
speculation by non-Muslim scholars who have often judged these mar-
riages as a form of self-indulgence. The actions of the Prophet, generated
in a world where polygyny was common, were not merely personal,
however, but were part of a social and political program. Muhammad
changed the institution of marriage by replacing more flexible pre-Islamic
options with the Quranic injunction that no man take no more than four
wives. As Lichtenstadter's work demonstrates for the pre-Islamic period,
tribal alliances were cemented through matrimony.14 In binding signifi-
cant Muslim families together, Muhammad also employed the Islamic
institution of marriage to ensure the unity of the community.
All of Muhammad's wives were widows, except 'A'isha. Marriage to
the Prophet in many cases provided these widows with their sole means
of support after the death of their husbands. As demonstrated by M. E.
Combs-Schilling, however, Muhammad's marriages were not merely a
means of providing simple social welfare for the widows of his fledgling
religious community.15 The Prophet utilized marriage to forge major po-
litical alliances. The importance of this policy was demonstrated even
after his death. Marriage, the giving and taking of women, in both the
pre-Islamic and Islamic periods provides the true "tie that binds."16 Each
of the first five caliphs, the temporal political successors to the Prophet
after his death, was bound to him through marriage. These men either
gave their daughters to the Prophet in marriage or married Muhammad's
daughters. Combs-Schilling asserts that "the Muslim community used
Muhammad's decision making concerning political alliances solidified
through marriages as a guide to which men were worthy to rule."17 The
marriage of 'A'isha bint Abi Bakr serves as the first case in point, linking
her father, Abu Bakr, who would become the first caliph of Islam, to the
Prophet. 'A'isha's political interests and status within the Islamic com-
48 Denise A. Spellberg

munity were prestigious on two counts, for her father and her husband
were the most prominent men of their time. Indeed, the first civil war in
Islamic society exemplifies not just a dispute over the leadership of the
community, but also the attempt by Muslims to define their loyalty to
those who could demonstrate the closest relationship to the Prophet.
'A'isha took the field as the representative of a political marriage alliance,
one enhanced by the Prophet's preference for her during his lifetime.
'A'isha, Mother of the Believers, and daughter of the first caliph, Abu
Bakr, opposed the fourth caliph, 'Ali, the representative of a marital
union with the Prophet's daughter Fatima. After the death of the
Prophet, the Islamic community was directed for forty-eight years (632-*-
80) by men connected to him through marriage.
The Battle of the Camel was the major military conflict in the first fitna
(civil war) in Islamic society. The fitna was precipitated by the murder of
the third caliph, 'Uthman, who like his predecessors was linked to the
Prophet Muhammad through marriage.' A'isha's involvement in the pol-
itics leading to 'Uthman's assassination is extensively documented, par-
ticularly in the early chronicles, where her political motivation is the ob-
ject of debate.18 The dispute ended with a battle near Basra in which
'A'isha, together with Talha and al-Zubair, two of Muhammad's Com-
panions, were defeated by ' Ali ibn Abi Talib, first cousin and son-in-law
of the Prophet and the fourth caliph of Islam. The battle, referred to in
ninth-century Muslim sources with the pre-Islamic phrase Yaum al-]amal,
"the Day of the Camel," immortalized 'A'isha's presence in a closed litter
atop her camel.
The first civil war provided 'A'isha with an opportunity to participate
directly in the affairs of the Islamic state. Her closeness to the Prophet
during his lifetime, the result of her preferential status among his wives
as the habiba (favorite), had given her tremendous prestige within the
Muslim community, which even the Prophet's death could not obliterate.
Men followed her, a woman, into battle together with two male Com-
panions of the Prophet, an event that suggests not just her prestige,
but her power. How much of 'A'isha's motivation and conduct in poli-
tics reflects pre-Islamic norms? Most important, could her military and
political participation be reconciled with the emerging role of women in
Islam?
What did 'A'isha's role in the first civil war mean in seventh-century
terms? This question is significant because the first written sources deal-
ing with the Battle of the Camel date from the ninth century, not the
seventh. Thus nearly one hundred and fifty years of oral transmission
formed the basis of the first Arabic texts of the ninth century. The reliabil-
ity of these sources, which include politically inspired accounts, remains
the object of intense controversy in modern scholarship.19 Yet the most
 Political Action and Public Example 49

obvious political anachronisms may be as valuable as those attributed to

seventh-century originators because such anachronisms may reflect later
eighth- and ninth-century observations. Watt suggests that a major prob-
lem in ninth-century sources is reflected by the process of "tendential
shaping/'20 He proposes, in reviewing accounts of such "external acts" as
the Battle of the Camel, that the acts are not the most likely object of
distortion, but rather the qualities and motivations attributed to the ma-
jor actors in them. As Watt observes with reference to the Battle of the
Camel, "nobody denies that 'A'ishah left Medina shortly before the
murder of the caliph 'Uthman, but whether her motives were honour-
able, dishonourable, or neutral is vigorously debated."21 Here Watt advo-
cates that the "modern historian . . . largely discount allegation of
motives" in sources.22 Yet the very aspect of the sources that Watt be-
lieves should be ignored may be the most valuable for analyzing' A'isha's
depiction as a reflection of the emergence of Islamic social norms con-
cerning women. Even if they are the product of eighth- or ninth- rather
than contemporary seventh-century accounts, the depiction of 'A'isha's
motivations together with observations about her personal qualities best
represents the variety of Muslim attitudes concerning her participation in
the first civil war. Indeed, although the accounts attributed to 'A'isha
herself concerning the motivation for her actions may reflect "tendential
shaping," they should be understood as the product of an ongoing dis-
pute within the Muslim community that shaped the past and defined its
implicit significance for the future.
Did 'A'isha break pre-Islamic or Islamic precedent by participating
directly in battle? In pre-Islamic times, women participated in tribal war-
fare on the Arabian peninsula. With the advent of Islam women did not
relinquish their place on the battlefield. Many women fought alongside
the Prophet Muhammad, and the instances of "such participation can be
found literally by the dozens."23 Indeed, even after the Battle of the
Camel, women fought for both the fourth caliph 'Ali and his opponent
Mu'awiyya at Siffin.24 Nor is there any Quranic verdict on women's place
on the battlefield, whether in a military or a supportive role. 'A'isha did
not fight in the engagement, but served rather as a standard and a spur
for her troops, many of whom fell defending her. 'A'isha's participation
appears, initially, not to have prevented other Muslim women from gain-
ing combat access. In yet another pre-Islamic aspect of the Battle of the
Camel, the heaviest fighting took place around 'A'isha's camel, where
her supporters made a final effort to defend her. In the pre-Islamic era,
tribal Arabs often placed their women near the area of combat as an
incentive to achieve victory or defeat in death.25 It was the risk to
'A'isha's life that precipitated the bloody last stand of her partisans.
Indeed, one of the accusations lodged by 'Ali's supporters against
50 Denise A. Spellberg

'A'isha's male companions was that they had "exposed" the wife of the
Prophet to the threat of death in battle.26
The Quran likewise does not forbid women from exercising direct
political rule. In the one instance in the Quran where a woman rules she is
faulted not for her inability to govern, but for her ignorance of true faith.
The queen of Sheba on her throne is described in verse 27:23 as a com-
manding figure of truly regal bearing: "I found a woman ruling over
them, and she had been given [an abundance] of all things, and hers is a
mighty throne." Her kingdom was governed by consensus. Men were
consulted, although the queen retained the final right of decision. Abbott
has argued that this verse, revealed at Mecca, predates the strictures
Muhammad later imposed on his wives at Medina.27 She further stresses
that the part of the Quran in which Sheba figures was revealed "before
personal reasons led Muhammad to seclude his women."28 Moreover,
Abbott adds in a conjectural vein, he "had no definite intention of cate-
gorically disqualifying all women from state service and condemning any
or all their efforts in that direction."29 The injunctions that served, by
extension, to condemn women's action in politics is the famous verse
33:33, which commands the wives of the Prophet to stay in their homes.
Taken as a whole, ninth-century references to ;A'isha's role in the first
civil war may be divided thematically into negative appraisals of rule by
women, predictions of doom, censure, humor, and regret. These varied
categories reflect the Muslim community's range of response to 'A'isha's
persona as defined by her participation in the Battle of the Camel. In all
but the first two categories 'A'isha is the object of both praise and blame.
This oppositional coupling of reactions, often found in the same account,
reflects the difficulty the entire community had in coming to grips with
'A'isha's participation in the battle. In this process a significant dimen-
sion of 'A'isha's legacy became fixed.
A series of ninth-century traditions concerning the relation of women
to government are recorded in the hadith collections of al-Bukhari (d.
870) and Ibn Hanbal (d. 855). Ultimately, these traditions link 'A'isha with
generally negative appraisals of women and rule by predicting the evil
outcome of 'A'isha's involvement in the Battle of the Camel. The role
played by 'A'isha in these sources does not end with the ninth century,
but continues to evolve in the chronicles of the tenth century and various
later works of different genres. The elaboration of such themes over time
suggests the centrality of 'A'isha to the debate over the relation of women
to Islamic government.30 The problems of assessing 'A'isha's role in the
determination of women's participation in Islamic government expose
underlying assumptions about all women.
The discussion of women and rule in ninth-century sources is often
introduced by traditions that present the defects of women as the greatest
 Political Action and Public Example 51

fitna, "source of temptation or chaos/'31 Another meaning offitna is a trial

whereby an individual must choose between good and evil, which is
how the term is used in the Quran.32 In ninth-century traditions, the
Prophet stated that there would be "no fitna more harmful to men than
women."33 Women are here equated with a definition of dangerous fe-
male sexuality. Fitna, as noted above, is also the political term for civil
war. Although' A'isha is never directly linked with fitna as a definition for
women, by virtue of her gender she implicitly participates in the connota-
tions of the term as they applied to all women in ninth-century tradition.
When the definition of women as fitna is coupled with' A'isha's participa-
tion in the Battle of the Camel, the private and public definitions con-
verge. 'A'isha, at once personifies the worst inclinations of her gender
and, by extension, the ill effects resulting from female participation in
politics. In a similar vein, ninth-century hadith also note the predomi-
nance of women as inhabitants of hell.34 The same source also implies
that the cause of female overrepresentation in the fires of hell is lack of 'aql
(reason). This serious defect is presumably one from which no member of
the gender may escape. These misogynistic observations provide the
context for the critical ninth-century assessment of 'A'isha's foray into
politics in the Battle of the Camel.
'A'isha's participation in the battle is used to warn against all women's
involvement in affairs of state in a tradition that features her co-wife,
Umm Salama. According to al-Ya'qubi's (d. 897) version, as 'A'isha was
leaving for the Battle of the Camel, Umm Salama reminded her that "the
support of the religion does not depend upon the exertions of women."35
Umm Salama, a staunch supporter of 'Ali, was considered by later Shi'i
Muslims to be Muhammad's favorite wife. The antagonism between
'A'isha and Umm Salama reflects not just their differing personalities,
but also the political divisions rife within the Prophet's own household
after his death.
The predictions of doom that originated in the ninth century in rela-
tion to the Battle of the Camel concern the disastrous consequences re-
sulting from female rule. The two hadith that mention this concern are
part of a larger number of traditions that described how the Prophet, on
hearing that a woman ruled Sasanian Iran, said: "A people who place
women in charge of their affairs will never prosper."36 A woman named
Boranduxt did rule Iran circa 630-31, but we know little of her short reign
for good or ill, except that she ruled long enough to be immortalized on
coins.37 Only one variation of these traditions contained in Ibn Hanbal
directly mentions 'A'isha. In this account, the Prophet is said to have
uttered strong warnings about females, stating that "men perish if they
obey women."38 Enhancing the impact of his words was their utterance
"while his head rested on 'A'isha's breast."39 The outcome of the Battle of
52 Denise A. Spellberg

the Camel and the role of 'A'isha in it were at once seemingly predicted,
but, more pointedly, condemned. In the context of this hadith, 'A'isha
cannot even be defended, for at the time the observation was allegedly
made, she had as yet done nothing to bear out the Prophet's prognostica-
tions. Al-Bukhari recorded the Prophet's prediction about women gener-
ally and then concluded, with ninth-century hindsight, that Muham-
mad's words must have been spoken in reference to the Battle of the
Camel.40
References to the Battle of the Camel that censure 'A'isha in Ibn Sa'd
(d. 845) and al-Baladhuri (d. 892) are not narrated on her authority. The
majority of the accounts depict a similar incident: an unnamed man cen-
sures 'A'isha on the day of the battle by attacking her reputation and is
publicly rebuked by a Companion of the Prophet and supporter of ' Ali,
the eminent ' Ammar Ibn Yasir. That 'A'isha is defended by her enemy, a
supporter of 'Ali for the position of caliph as well as in battle, emphasizes
her prestige within the community as a whole. Ibn Sa'd's account offers
one perspective: "A man attacked 'A'isha's reputation on the Day of [the
Battle of] the Camel. The people agreed with him. Then 'Ammar said,
'What's this?' They replied, 'A man vilified 'A'isha/ Then 'Ammar said to
him, 'Silence your disgraceful clamor. Are you attacking the beloved of
the Prophet of God? She is his wife in heaven!' "41
This tradition reflects 'A'isha's prestige as the favorite wife of the
Prophet, which in this instance represented an implicit defense of her
actions. This defense was made even more forceful when uttered by a
supporter of 'Ali who, in emphasizing 'A'isha's previous status as the
favorite wife, reminded her accusers that her place in heaven was as-
sured. The incident also served as a warning to later audiences that
'A'isha's prestige, built on Muhammad's preference for her, could not be
obliterated by her actions after his death. The honor of the Prophet's wife
must be maintained, in spite of the independent actions of his widow.
The accusation is dismissed, but no defense against the specifics of the
assault of 'A'isha's reputation is recorded. By the nature of its subject, the
account also preserved a current of ridicule and derision regarding
'A'isha's involvement in the Battle of the Camel.
The broader implications of 'A'isha's direct involvement in the politi-
cal contests of the Islamic community are better captured in al-Bukhari's
hadith on 'A'isha's fada'il (superior qualities). Again, the element of
praise is apparent in the author's decision to include this account. Yet
although the theme offers 'A'isha her due in prestige as the wife of the
Prophet "in this world and the next," al-Bukhari's version provides a new
setting and motivation for 'Ammar's loyalty to 'Ali: "When 'Ali sent
'Ammar and al-Hasan to Kufa to call upon them [the inhabitants] to fight
[against 'A'isha], 'Ammar made a speech. He said, 'I know that she is his
 Political Action and Public Example 53

[the Prophet's] wife in this world and the next, but Allah puts you to test
[whether] to be His followers or hers/ "42 Here the Kufans were urged to
support 'Ali by the partisan 'Ammar, who in deference to the Prophet
gives 'A'isha her prestigious due. There appears to be little doubt in
'Ammar's plea, however, about whose cause is the righteous one. 'Ali's
followers are also supporters of the divine will. 'A'isha, although
praised, is thus faintly but distinctly damned in spite of her future access
to heaven, for to follow 'A'isha is to fail Allah's test.
A unique type of reference to 'A'isha's role in the battle employed
humor to underscore the criticism of the Prophet's wife. Al-Baladhuri
offers the following tradition:
'A'isha needed something so she sent [a message] to Ibn [Abi]'Atiq
saying, "Send your mule," so that she could ride it on an errand. He
said to her messenger, and he [Ibn Abi 'Atiq] was an idle joker, "Say
to the Mother of the Believers, 'By God, we have not yet gotten over
the shame of the Day of [the Battle of] the Camel, are you not too
exhausted to give us the Day [of the Battle] of the Mule?' "43
The point of the jest relies on the play of words and images. When the
mule is substituted for the camel, the idea of a battle so-named becomes
ludicrous. It is doubtful, however, that even an "idle joker" would ad-
dress 'A'isha with such scorn and sarcasm. The anecdote, despite its
humorous context, was a pointed accusation of 'A'isha's wrongdoing.
Two ninth-century sources depict 'A'isha expressing regret for her
actions in the Battle of the Camel. Ibn Qutaiba (d. 889) included an ac-
count in which 'A'isha apparently overheard unidentified men glorify-
ing the Battle of the Camel, although whose role or what side they were
supporting is not revealed. She urged them to desist, stating that there
had been enough siyah (outcry) regarding that fashal (fiasco).44 Regret
should not be confused with remorse, for 'A'isha's feelings as repre-
sented in these traditions nowhere signify repentance. The account may
be read as regret defined in terms of a desire to disassociate herself from
the defeat, rather than from participation in the battle. In short, the
passage is suggestive, but not conclusive, and represents a unique in-
stance within the ninth-century corpus of observations about 'A'isha.
The hadith in Ibn Sa'd's biographical dictionary that comes closest to
an outright confession is the one in which 'A'isha, on her deathbed,
reveals her own perspective about her actions after the Prophet's death
and their consequences: "'A'isha said about the time of her death, T
caused wrongdoing after the Prophet. So they should bury me with the
[other] wives of the Prophet/ "45 The implications of this admission of
regret about the Battle of the Camel are that her burial site should not be
special. Instead of being buried with the Prophet, beneath her own
54 Denise A. Spellberg

house, 'A'isha denies any privileged status and asserts that she is to be
buried like any other wife of Muhammad.
'A'isha's role in the Battle of the Camel, as depicted in ninth-century
sources, reveals a range of reactions, a variety of Muslim responses to a
controversial event in the history of the early Muslim community.' A'isha
and her participation in the Battle of the Camel were perceived as a flawed
ideal. The first fitna marked the beginning of Islamic political strife and,
with it, the legacy of varied responses to ' A'isha's historical personality.
It has been suggested by Abbott that' A'isha's loss at the Battle of the
Camel prompted the exclusion of women from public life.46 Although it
is true that 'A'isha never again joined directly in the Islamic struggle for
political succession after her defeat in the first civil war, that her example
alone stopped all other women from similar political forays is unlikely.
Abbott's appraisal of 'A'isha can be disputed on two separate counts.
First, 'A'isha was at best a participant, not the leader of the opposition to
'Ali. Immediately after her defeat other Muslim women fought in the
second civil war, as they had fought before and after the advent of Islam.
Second, her political actions represent at once a convergence and a clash
of pre-Islamic practice and Islamic strictures. 'A'isha derived her power
as a political figure from her relationship to two men: her father and her
husband.' A'isha's unique position was derived from a truly Islamic pres-
tige and for that very reason her new exemplar status provided the basis
for her censure. The role of the wives of the Prophet had been outlined by
the revelations of the Quran, but not tested in the lives of the women to
whom it applied. By taking the battlefield, by assuming a role as a politi-
cal figure after the death of her husband, 'A'isha challenged the Islamic
restrictions placed on the Mothers of the Believers, restrictions that did
not inhibit the actions of any other seventh-century Arab women. Her
defeat, coupled with her influential status, definitively circumscribed the
sphere of her role as a political figure. It could be argued that 'A'isha's
defeat assured that the Mothers of the Believers, the most prominent
group of women in the first Islamic community, remained outside the
political arena. Thus while the men closest to the Prophet vied for politi-
cal leadership, the potential for the women closest to him to follow the
same course was obstructed by divine revelation and the defeat of the
Prophet's favorite wife, 'A'isha.
As mentioned earlier, however, the political fate of the Mothers of the
Believers was not necessarily the destiny of all seventh-century Muslim
women. Neither 'A'isha nor the Quranic injunction directed at the wives
of the Prophet to stay secluded set a precedent for all women. More likely,
the definition of women in general as expressed in ninth-century hadith
extended and refined the idea that women were basically flawed and
dangerous to the maintenance of political order. The revealing applica-
 Political Action and Public Example 55

tion of the termfitna to women between the eighth and early ninth cen-
turies signaled an end to the options of all Muslim women in political
affairs.
In the tenth-century account of al-Mas'udi (d. 956), 'A'isha's example
as a political figure summoned a decidedly negative response. When
Zubaida, wife of the famed Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (d. 809),
heard the news of her son's death in a civil war, she was urged to follow
'A'isha's example. She declined, saying: "It is not for women to seek
vengeance and take the field against warriors/'47 She then went into
mourning and seclusion. Zubaida's response depicts 'A'isha as an un-
worthy political model for women.
The Battle of the Camel prompted a defense of'A'isha, who retired to
private life after her defeat in the first civil war. 'A'isha's retreat from
public life has been perceived as representative of the future limited role
of all women in the Islamic community.48 Yet 'A'isha's defeat also sig-
naled a new stage in her participation in the Islamic community, for she
retained a different source of prestige: her knowledge of the faith. Al-
though 'A'isha's image would be successfully manipulated to confirm
the danger of female participation in government, her powerful memory
and authority in matters crucial to the Islamic community, ranging from
methods of worship to medicine, ensured her praise among Sunni
Muslims.

Notes

1. Muhammad Ibn Sa'd, al-Tabaqat al-kubra (Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1958), 8:62.
2. W. Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Islam (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1885); Gertrude Stern, Marriage in Early Islam (London:
Royal Asiatic Society, 1939); W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1956).
3. Watt, Muhammad at Medina, 272-89.
4. Barbara Freyer Stowasser, "The Status of Women in Early Islam," in Muslim
Women, ed. Freda Hussain (New York: St. Martin's, 1984), 15.
5. Ibid.
6. Nabia Abbott, "Women and the State in Early Islam," Journal of Near Eastern
Studies 1, no. 1 (1942): 107. She cites Quran 2:228 and 4:34. See The Glorious Qur'an,
trans. M. M. Pickthall (New York: Muslim League, 1977). Pickthall's version is
used throughout this chapter.
7. Abbott, "Women and the State," 107.
8. Leila Ahmed, "Women and the Advent of Islam," Signs 11 (1986): 690, 691.
9. Ibid., 691.
10. Use Lichtenstadter, Women in Ayyam al-Arab (London: Royal Asiatic Society,
1935), 81.
11. Ahmed, "Women and the Advent of Islam," 691.
56 Denise A. Spellberg

12. Reuben Levy, The Social Structure of Islam, 2d ed. rev. (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1975), 126.
13. Watt, Muhammad at Medina, 395-99.
14. Lichtenstadter, Women in Ayyam al-Arab, 65.
15. M. E. Combs-Schilling, Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 69-72.
16. Ibid., 69.
17. Ibid., 72.
18. For the debate over 'A'isha's motivations in ninth-century sources, see
Ahmad Yahya al-Baladhuri, Ansabal-ashraf, ed. S. D. F. Goitein (Jerusalem: Jerusa-
lem University Press, 1936), 5:341-63; and Abu Ja'far Muhammad b. Jarir, Ta'rikh
al-rusul wa'l-muluk (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1898), 6:3000-3130.
19. On the subject of the authenticity of early hadith, see G. H. A. Juynboll,
Muslim Tradition: Studies in Chronology, Provenance and Authorship of Early Hadith
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim
Studies, ed. S. M. Stern and trans. C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern (London: George
Allen and Unwin, 1971).
20. W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1953), xiv.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Abbott, "Women and the State/' 118.
24. Abu 'Umar Ahmad Ibn 'Abd al-Rabbihi, al-'Iqd al-farid (Cairo: n.p., 1876),
4:158.
25. Lichtenstadter, Women in Ayyam al-Arab, 43.
26. Abu al-Hasan 'Ali b. Husain al-Mas'udi, Muruj al-dhahab wa ma'adin al-
jauhar (Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1965), 2:367.
27. Abbott, "Women and the State," 120.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. See Denise A. Spellberg, "Nizam al-Mulk's Manipulation of Tradition:
'A'isha and the Role of Women in Islamic Government," Muslim World 78, no. 2
(1988): 111-17.
31. E. W. Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon (reprint, Cambridge: Islamic Texts Soci-
ety, 1984), 2:2335-36.
32. For this usage, see Quran 37:61.
33. For example, see Abu Ahmad ' Abd Allah Isma'il al-Bukhari, Kitab al-jami'
al-Sahih, ed. M. Krehl (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1864), 2:419; and Ahmad Ibn Hanbal,
Musnad (Cairo: n.p., 1895), 3:22. The most recent discussion is by Fatima Mernissi,
Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society (Cambridge,
Mass.: Schenkman, 1975).
34. Al-Bukhari, al-Sahih, 3:419.
35. Ahmad b. Abi Ya'qub b. Ja'far b. Wahb b. Wadih al-Ya'qubi, Ta'rikh, ed. M.
Houtsma (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1883), 2:209.
36. Ibn Hanbal, Musnad 5:38.
37. See Robert Gobi, Sasanian Numismatics (Brunswick: Klinkhardt and Bier-
mann, 1971).
 Political Action and Public Example 57

38. Ibn Hanbal, Musnad 5:45.

39. Ibid., 48.
40. Al-Bukhari, al-Sahih 4, pt. 1, 376-77.
41. Ibn Sa'd, al-Tabaqat 8:65.
42. Al-Bukhari, al-Sahih 2:447.
43. Al-Baladhuri, Ansab 1:421.
44. Abu Muhammad 'Abd Allah Ibn Muslim Ibn Qutaiba, 'Uyun al-akhbar
(Cairo: n.p., 1930), 1:108.
45. Ibn Sa'd, al-Tabaqat 8:74.
46. Abbott, "Women and the State/' 120-21.
47. 'Ali ibn al-Husain al-Mas'udi, Les prairies d'or (Paris: Imprimerie Imperiale
and Imprimerie Nationale for the Soci£te Asiatique, 1970), 6:485-86.
48. Ahmed, "Women and the Advent of Islam," 690.
4
Early Islam and the Position of Women:

The Problem of Interpretation

LEILA AHMED

The message of Islam as instituted by Muhammad's teach-

ings and practice comprehended two tendencies that were in
tension with each other.1 Patriarchal marriage and male
dominance were basic components of the institution of mar-
riage as established by Muhammad in the first Islamic soci-
ety, and yet Islam preached an ethical egalitarianism as a
fundamental part of its broader spiritual message. Some
sects chose to give primacy to the ethical dimension of the
Islamic message. They regarded the regulations put into
practice by Muhammad as bearing primarily on that immedi-
ate social context and period, and thus not necessarily bind-
ing on Muslims at all times in all societies. This, however,
was not the position taken by orthodox Islam in the Um-
ayyad and Abbasid periods, crucial in Muslim history be-
cause the elaborations of scriptures and of laws during this
time have ever since been regarded as the founding defining
texts of Islam.
Orthodox Islam, in rendering the Islamic message into
scriptures and into an elaborate legal code, chose to view the
regulations and practices put into effect by Muhammad as
the fundamentals of the message and as binding on all Mus-
lims. The ethical injunctions enjoining fair treatment of
women were aspects of the Islamic message by and large not
heard, at least as reflected in the body of the law as it took
shape in this age. Had the ethical dimension of Islam been
heard, it would have tempered the articulation of the law and
we might today have a far more humane and egalitarian
Islamic law regarding women. But the period as a whole, and
in particular the Abbasid age, was an unpropitious one for

Portions of this chapter appear in somewhat different form in

Women,and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (Yale
University Press, 1992).

58
 Early Islam and the Position of Women 59

women. In the context of the age's mores with respect to women—the

decline in their position following Islam's expansion beyond the borders
of Arabia and the degradation of the very notion and definition of woman
at the level of the elite—the egalitarian dimension of Islam would have
been an exceedingly difficult one to hear.
Quranic precepts consist mainly of broad, general propositions chiefly
of an ethical nature, rather than specific legalistic formulations. As legal
scholars have pointed out, as a legislative document the Quran raised
many problems and by no means provided a simple and straightforward
code of law.2 On the contrary, the specific content of the laws derivable
from the Quran depended greatly on the interpretation that legists chose
to bring to it and the elements of its complex utterances they chose to give
weight to. As an example of this intrinsic complexity or ambiguity and of
the crucial role played by interpretation, legal historians cite the Quranic
references to polygyny. Polygyny, up to a maximum of four wives, is
expressly permitted by the Quran, but at the same time husbands are
enjoined to treat co-wives equally and if they fear they will be unable to
do so, to marry only one wife. The legal base of marriage and of polygyny
would differ profoundly depending on whether the ethical injunction to
treat wives impartially was judged to be a matter of legislation or left
purely to the individual man's conscience.3
The formation of Islamic law took place over several centuries and by a
variety of processes. During Muhammad's lifetime he was judge of the
community and interpreter of the general provisions of the divine revela-
tion. On his death the responsibility for interpreting Quranic precepts,
and translating that interpretation into practical decisions, devolved on
the caliphs who immediately succeeded him. The difficulties of interpret-
ing and rendering ethical ideas into law were compounded by the Arabs'
rapid acquisition of vast foreign territories. With the establishment of the
capital of the empire of the Umayyads (661-750) in Damascus the Arab
rulers adopted the administrative machinery of the Byzantine rulers they
had succeeded, which facilitated the assimilation of foreign concepts into
the still developing and essentially rudimentary apparatus of Islamic law.
Government-appointed judges, who initially combined the role of judge
with that of administrator, tended to apply local laws (which varied
throughout the territories) informed by their own understandings of
Quranic precepts. Disparities soon arose among regions. In Medina, for
example, a woman could not contract a marriage on her own account but
had to be given in marriage by a guardian, whereas in Kufa the law gave
her the right to contract her own marriage without the intervention of a
guardian.4 Differences of interpretation of Quranic injunctions also
arose. One judge ruled that the Quranic injunction to "make a fair provi-
60 Leila Ahmed

sion" for divorced wives should be interpreted as having a legalistic di-

mension and that therefore such a payment to the wife was obligatory.
Another judge, however, hearing a similar case ruled that the Quranic
injunction was directed only at the husband's conscience and was not
legally binding.5
Over the course of the Umayyad period local laws were modified and
elaborated by Quranic rules and "overlaid by a corpus of administrative
regulations and infiltrated by elements of foreign systems/'6 Growth was
haphazard and brought together heterogeneous materials, and the
Quranic elements were largely submerged.
Scholars of religion began to voice their views as to the standards of
conduct that would express the Islamic ethic. Grouping together in frater-
nities in the last decades of the Umayyad period and critical of the
Umayyad legal establishment, they formed the early schools of law.
When the anti-Umayyad Abbasids came to power (750-1250), these legal
schools were recognized and sponsored by the new state and as a result
developed rapidly.7 The legal doctrines they propounded became, with
state sponsorship and the appointment of representatives of the schools
of law to the judiciary and as government advisers, the practice of the
courts. The piecemeal review of local practice began in light of the prin-
ciples the scholars believed to be enshrined in the Quran. Originating in
the personal reasoning of individual scholars, a body of Islamic doctrine
gradually formed, which as time passed gained authority.8 The develop-
ment and elaboration of legal doctrine and of juridical procedures con-
tinued into the ninth century, with some variation between the decisions
of different regions. The Kufan school of law, for example, formed in an
environment influenced by the Sasanid sense of the importance of class,
developed the doctrine that required a husband to be the social equal of
his wife's family, a doctrine that formed no part of the law as it developed
in Medina.9 By the tenth century the body of Sunni Muslim legal thought
and practice achieved final formulation in four schools of law, represent-
ing in part the different regional origins of the schools and named after
major legal proponents—the Hanafi, the Shafi'i, the Hanbali, and the
Maliki. The body of law and of legal thought embodied in the writings of
those four schools was recognized as absolutely authoritative, partly
through the application of a juridical principle that had gained general
acceptance, that of ijma1 (consensus). According to this principle the
unanimous agreement of the qualified jurists on a given point had a
binding and absolute authority. Such agreement, once reached, was
deemed infallible and to contradict it became heresy.10 Although the-
oretically an earlier consensus could be repealed by a later generation
with a similar consensus, because of the authoritativeness with which the
existent body of law was now invested, such a possibility became highly
 Early Islam and the Position of Women 61

unlikely. Further discussion was precluded, not only of points that were
the subject of consensus, but also of matters on which the jurors had
agreed to differ.
In the early tenth century Muslim jurisprudence formally recognized
the body of already formulated legal opinion as final. The duty of the
jurist henceforth was to "imitate" his predecessors, not to "originate"
doctrine. Thus the whole body of the law as it had evolved during the first
three centuries in effect was consecrated as the complete and infallible
expression of divine law. Even though, as Noel Coulson points out, "the
great bulk of the law had originated in customary practice and in scholars'
reasoning . . . and [the development] of classical theory . . . was the
culmination of a process of growth extending over two centuries," tradi-
tional Islamic belief came to hold that the law as articulated in this liter-
ature was operative from the beginning. "The elaboration of the law,"
Coulson writes, "is seen by Islamic orthodoxy as a process of scholastic
endeavour completely independent of historical or sociological influ-
ences."11 Consequently, the vision of society developed by the men of
this period, and their understanding of the relations that should pertain
between men and women, was established as the ultimate and infallible
articulation of the Islamic notion of justice, which has, ever since, been
imposed as finally binding on Muslims.
The claim is (and must be, if the body of legal thought as a whole is
affirmed as representing the correct and infallible articulation in legal
form of the ethical formulations of the Quran) that the different schools of
law are essentially in agreement and that variations among them are only
on matters of insignificant detail. Some of these "insignificant" dif-
ferences in interpretation, however, result in laws profoundly different in
their consequences for women. Whereas all schools agree that marriage
may be unilaterally terminated extrajudicially by the male, Maliki law
differs from the other three schools as to women's right to obtain judicial
divorce. Hanafi law, for example, permits it only on the grounds of sexual
impotence, but Maliki law allows a woman to petition on grounds of
desertion, failure to maintain her, cruelty, sexual impotence (even after
the consummation of the marriage), and if the husband is afflicted with a
chronic or incurable disease detrimental to her.12 The differences for
women obviously are fundamental. Similarly, Hanafi law differs radically
from the other three in its view of marriage contracts, and of women's
right to stipulate such terms as that the husband may not take a second
wife. The other three schools consider men's right to unilateral divorce
and their right to marry as many as four wives to be of the essence of
marriage, and therefore elements that may not be altered by the specific
contractual agreements entered upon by man and wife. The Hanafi
school, however, considered that the Quranic utterances on polygyny,
62 Leila Ahmed

for instance, were permissive, not mandatory, and that for a man to have
only one wife is therefore not contrary to the essence of marriage; the
spouse's agreement to this (or other matters) in the contract is conse-
quently valid and enforceable.13
Such differences make plain that the ethical injunctions on marriage in
the Quran are open to radically different interpretations, even by indi-
viduals who share the assumptions, worldview, and perspective on the
nature and meaning of gender typical of Muslim society in the Abbasid
period. That groups of male jurists were able, in spite of the unquestion-
ing androcentrism and misogyny of the age, to interpret the Quran as
enabling women to bind men to monogamy and to obtain divorce in a
broad range of oppressive situations is itself important. It suggests that a
reading by a less androcentric and less misogynist society, one that gave
greater ear to the ethical injunctions of the Quran, could have elaborated
(and could still reelaborate) a law that radically altered women's position
for the better. If, for example, the two dissenting doctrines just men-
tioned had been the view of the majority (and thus formed the basis of
general legal practice in Islamic countries rather than that of a minority),
they (particularly in combination) could have fundamentally altered
women's status in marriage.
Nor were those two the only (though quite fundamental) points on
which jurists of the day revealed the androcentric assumptions of their
society in their interpretation of the Quran, while at the same time failing
to give legal form to its ethical injunctions. The reflections of two modern
legal scholars on this matter are worth quoting in full:

[A] considerable step—a process of juristic development extending

over more than two centuries—separates the Quran from the clas-
sical formulation of Islamic law. . . . The modicum of explicit
Quranic legal rulings on the status of women were naturally ob-
served, but outside this the tendency was to interpret the Quranic
provisions in the light of the prevailing standards. . . . In particu-
lar, the general ethical injunctions of the Quran were rarely trans-
formed into legally enforceable rules, but were recognized as bind-
ing only on the individual conscience.
Thus, for example, a husband was never required to show that
he had any reasonable or proper motive before exercising his power
to repudiate his wife. And while the Quran might insist upon im-
partial treatment of co-wives in polygamous unions, classical Islam-
ic law did not elevate this requirement into any kind of legal re-
striction upon the husband's entrenched right to have four wives.
The result was that the Quranic provisions concerning women's
status and position in the family were dissipated and largely lost.14
 Early Islam and the Position of Women 63

The rulings the jurists developed on women's rights in matters of

sexuality, contraception, and abortion, outlined by Basim Musallam in
his important book Sex and Society in Medieval Islam, are interesting. In
contrast to the laws regulating marriage, those governing contraception
and abortion appear remarkably liberal in the measure of control they
allowed women in preventing and terminating pregnancy, and thus
might be taken superficially as remarkably free of androcentric bias. In
fact (as I have argued in detail elsewhere), though such laws did permit
women to exercise some control in preventing and terminating preg-
nancy, when the broad legal environment of which they were a part is
taken into account, these laws also may be seen as entirely in harmony
with an androcentric perspective.15 As such, they were part of a legal
system that permitted polygyny and concubinage and that also stipu-
lated, on the basis of clear Quranic rulings, that males were economically
responsible for their offspring. If a man's concubine bore him a child, the
concubine could not thereafter be sold and she became legally free at his
death; her child became the man's legal heir along with children born to
his wives. Given this system, it was economically to men's advantage
that women not bear many children, and that concubines not bear any
children, since if they did they ceased to be a profitable investment. And
in a system that permitted polygyny and unrestricted divorce and con-
cubinage, a woman who did not give birth would present no hardship for
the man since he had the options of divorcing her, of taking another wife
without divorcing her, or of taking a concubine. Although sexual and
other services were wifely duties according to the law, child bearing was
not. Oral culture, both in contemporary and earlier Muslim societies, in
contrast, placed heavy stress on women's generative capacity. To re-
produce was economically to women's advantage: for slaves it was a
passport to freedom and for wives it bound up the husband's emotional,
sexual, and monetary resources and thus lessened his ability to take on
more women. Arguably, then, oral culture expressed women's interests
just as the law expressed men's.
The problem of interpretation and of the biases and assumptions that a
particular age brought to its readings and renderings of a text is relevant
beyond the founding texts of Islamic legal thought. With respect to the
central texts at the core of the edifice of orthodox Islam, interpretation
again played a vital but more hidden role.
Interpretation is of necessity part of every act of reading or of inscrib-
ing a text. According to orthodox Islam the text of the Quran represents
the exact words recited by Muhammad. This view holds that the Quran
was perfectly preserved in oral form from the beginning and was written
down during Muhammad's lifetime or shortly thereafter, when it was
"collected" and arranged for the first time by his Companions. The
64 Leila Ahmed

orthodox account of the process is that a complete written text was made
after Muhammad's death in the reign of the first caliph, Abu Bakr (632-
34), and that the authoritative version was established during the reign of
the third caliph, 'Uthman (644-56). A dispute between Syrian and Iraqi
troops as to the correct recitation of the Quran prompted 'Uthman to
compile a single authorized version. Obtaining Hafsa's collection, he
commissioned four prominent Meccans to make a copy following the
dialect of the Quraish. When the process was complete, 'Uthman sent
copies to the major centers and ordered other versions destroyed. This
was done everywhere except in Kufa, where for a time the Kufans re-
fused to destroy their version. Eventually, however, 'Uthman's text be-
came the canonical version and the final consonantal text. The fully vo-
calized version was established in the tenth century.16
Some Quranic scholars have asserted that the Quran is not in the
Quraish dialect. In addition, a number of other elements suggest that the
process by which Muhammad's recitations were transformed from oral
materials to written text was not as seamless as orthodox accounts de-
clare.17 For one thing, as these accounts themselves indicate, a number of
different versions were evidently in circulation at the time of the compil-
ing of the canonical version, including one sufficiently different for the
Kufans to reject that version. There is also the element of uncertainty
arising sheerly from the material conditions attending the inscription of a
text in this place and period. In addition to the rough nature of the
materials (such as animal bones) used to note down Quranic verses dur-
ing Muhammad's lifetime, the Arabic letters used at this point were in-
complete. The dots necessary to distinguish between the consonants
were lacking, for example, so that in a group of consonants two or more
readings were possible. Deciding which reading was correct based on
these notations and on oral memories that orthodox belief also admits
were divergent, a process not finalized according to orthodox statements
until at least fifteen years and many foreign conquests after Muhammad's
death, was itself an act of interpretation. Similarly, deciding which vo-
calization was to be the canonical one with respect to a text in which only
consonants were written (a process not finalized until the tenth century)
could itself importantly alter meaning, and thus such decisions also were
interpretative.18 As one important study of Muslim inheritance law has
recently shown, in deciding between variant readings and finalizing one
of two mutually exclusive readings as authoritative, the theologians and
legists of the day were already choosing meanings from the perspective
of their own environment, meanings fundamentally different from those
connoted by the same phrases in the early Muslim environment.19
The role of interpretation in the preservation and inscription of the
Quran is, however, suppressed in orthodox doctrine, and the belief that
 Early Islam and the Position of Women 65

the text is precisely as Muhammad recited it is itself a tenet of orthodox

faith. To question whether the body of consecrated Islamic law represents
the only possible legal interpretation of the Islamic vision is surrounded
with awesome interdictions. That its central texts do embody acts of
interpretation is precisely what orthodoxy is most concerned to conceal
and erase from the consciousness of Muslims. This is understandable,
because the authority and power of orthodox religion, whose interests
were closely bound up in the Abbasid period with those of the ruling elite
and the state, depended on its claim to a monopoly of "truth," by declar-
ing its version of Islam absolute and all other interpretations heresies.
Various other interpretations of the Islamic vision, however, from the
start developed and counterposed their readings to that of orthodoxy,
even as it gained firm control and denounced alternative visions as hereti-
cal. Among those that posed radically different interpretations were the
Qarmati and Sufi movements, which both drew many adherents from
the underclass. The Qarmati movement, a radical variety of Isma'ili
Shi'ism, and the Sufi movement in some of its more radical aspects were
declared heretical and persecuted until the former was entirely eradi-
cated and the latter shorn of its more radical dimensions. Movements of
political and religious dissent often also entailed different understand-
ings of the social dimension of Islam, including matters directly affecting
women, as was true of the early Kharijite movement. Divergent and, as
will be suggested, oppositional views to those of the orthodox on a com-
prehensive range of matters, religious, political, and social, were rooted
in a reading of Islam that differed fundamentally from that of the
orthodox. Both Sufism (in its more radical form) and the Qarmati move-
ment emphasized Islam's ethical, spiritual, and social teachings as its
essential message. They believed that the regulations Muhammad put
into effect in his society, and even his own practices, were above all
ephemeral aspects of Islam, relevant primarily to a particular society at a
certain stage in its history. Again, therefore, the issue is difference of
interpretation, not in the sense of understanding particular words or
passages in the text, but more radically, pre-textually or supra-textually,
in the sense of how to "read" Muhammad's acts and words and how to
construe their relation and import to history. Was the import of the Islam-
ic moment a specific set of ordinances, or the initiation of an impulse
toward a juster and more charitable society? The Sufi and Qarmati move-
ments are of specific interest in the present context because both broadly
opposed the politics and religion of the dominant culture, including, the
evidence suggests, its view of women.
Sufism was a movement in which pietism, asceticism, and mysticism
were dominant elements. Possibly originating in the days of Muham-
mad, it gained ground and developed importantly in particular during
66 Leila Ahmed

the first three or four centuries of Islam, that is, coterminous with state-
supported orthodox Islam. Sufism had political dimensions, being a form
of dissent and of passive opposition and resistance both to the govern-
ment and to established religion. Its oppositional relation to the society
and ethos of the dominant is evident in the values enunciated as funda-
mental to its vision. Ascetism, the renunciation of material goods and of
money not earned by the labor of one's own hands and in excess of one's
daily needs, and the emphasis on celibacy (though not an invariable
requirement), precisely reverse the materialism, exploitation of the labor
of others, and unbridled sexuality that were enshrined in the mores and
way of life of orthodox society. Sufi emphasis on the inner and spiritual
meaning of the Quran, and the underlying ethic and vision it affirmed as
opposed to the letter of the text and law, similarly countered the letter-
bound approach of orthodoxy.
A number of elements in Sufism strongly suggest that the Sufi ethos
countered that of the dominant society with respect also to their gender
arrangements and their view of women. From early on the Sufis counted
women among those importantly contributing to their tradition and in-
cluded such women as Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya (d. 801) among the ranks of
the most elect of spiritual leaders. Moreover, Sufi tales and legends incor-
porate elements that suggest a rejection of the values of the dominant
society with regard to women.
The narratives about Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya, for instance, most of which
are clearly legendary, exemplify distinctly countercultural elements with
respect to ideas about gender. The notion underlying all male-female
interaction in the dominant society, that biology and sexuality govern
relations between the sexes, for example, is clearly repudiated by one
short Sufi narrative. In it, the highly esteemed Sufi leader Hasan al-Basri
(d. 728) declares, "I passed one whole night and day with Rabi'a speaking
of the Way and the Truth, and it never passed through my mind that I was
a man nor did it occur to her that she was a woman, and at the end when I
looked at her I saw myself as bankrupt [i.e. as spiritually worth nothing]
and Rabi'a as truly sincere [that is, rich in spiritual virtue]."20 The tale also
reverses the dominant society's valuation of male over female, by repre-
senting not merely any man but one of the most revered male Sufi leaders
describing himself as "bankrupt" compared with a woman of truly supe-
rior merits. This theme is amplified in many such short narratives that
depict Rabi'a surpassing her male colleagues in intellectual forth-
rightness and percipience as well as in spiritual powers. In another tale,
again featuring Hasan al-Basri, he approaches Rabi'a, who is sitting on a
bank with a number of contemplators. Throwing his carpet on the water,
Hasan sits on it and calls to Rabi'a to come and converse with him. Rabi'a,
understanding that he wants to impress people with his spiritual powers,
 Early Islam and the Position of Women 67

throws her prayer carpet into the air, flies up to it, and sitting there says,
"Oh Hasan, come up here where people will see us better." Hasan is
silent, because it is beyond his power to fly. "Oh Hasan," Rabi'a then
says, "that which you did a fish can do ... and that which I did a fly can
do. The real work [for the saints of God] lies beyond both of these."21
Other tales show her similarly surpassing prominent male Sufi figures.
One relates how, when Rabi'a is making her pilgrimage to Mecca, the
Ka'ba rises up and comes forward to meet her. Observing this, Rabi'a
comments, "What have I to do with the house, it is the Lord of the house I
need." Meanwhile an eminent fellow Sufi, Ibrahim ibn Adham, also mak-
ing the pilgrimage to Mecca, takes many years to reach his destination
because he repeatedly stops piously to perform ritual prayers. Arriving at
Mecca and seeing no Ka'ba, he thinks his eyes are at fault, when a voice
informs him that the Ka'ba has gone forth to meet a woman. When Rabi'a
and the Ka'ba then both appear, Rabi'a informs Ibrahim (who is con-
sumed with jealousy that the Ka'ba has so honored her) that whereas he
crossed the desert with formal ritual prayers, she came in inward prayer.
In addition to showing her outdoing men, the tale shows her gently
undercutting the formalism and literalness of orthodox religion and the
trappings of piety, just as does a remark attributed to Rabi'a about an-
other Sufi, Sufyan al-Thauri. "Sufyan would be a [good] man," she says,
"if only he did not love the Traditions."22
Although such narratives perhaps capture some qualities exemplified
by the historical Rabi'a, doubtless they are mainly of a legendary nature.
Given their dates, for instance, it is highly unlikely that Hasan and Rabi'a
ever met, let along enjoyed the above exchanges. The legendary nature of
such stories gives them greater weight as exemplars of Sufi thought, in
that they are not merely records of happenings but rather narrative struc-
tures deliberately devised to express thoughts. And among those
thoughts is that women may excel over even the ablest of men and may be
men's teachers in the domain of the spiritual, and that interactions be-
tween men and women on the intellectual and spiritual plane far exceed
in importance their sexual interactions. This is not to suggest that all Sufi
men were non-sexist, or even that Sufi literature did not incorporate
some of the misogynist elements present in its broad environment.23 The
argument here is simply that it did include elements rejecting misogyny
and transcending definitions of human beings based on biology.
Other details in the legends about Rabi'a suggest reasons besides the
spiritual that women might be drawn to Sufism. According to biograph-
ical legend, for example, Rabi'a was either a slave or a servant of very
poor origin until her master released her from service after he woke one
night to see a light, the light of saintliness, shining over her head and il-
luminating the entire house. Rabi'a then retired into the desert; she later
68 Leila Ahmed

returned to practice, for a time, the profession of flute player. Thereafter,

in the words of Margaret Smith, Rabi'a's twentieth-century biographer,
the extant material "gives a clear idea of a woman renouncing this world
and its attractions and giving up her life to the service of God."24 Al-
though Smith focuses on Rabi'a's spiritual concerns, Rabi'a's class back-
ground is worth taking note of, as is the fact that a female slave or servant
scarcely had the option of renouncing many worldly attractions. Sufism,
it is clear, offered the possibility of a life of independence and autonomy
otherwise certainly impossible for women, particularly women of
Rabi'a's class. Tales in which Rabi'a rejects offers of marriage from numer-
ous admiring Sufi companions similarly emphasize her autonomy and
capacity to remain free of any male authority. Although it was impossible
for women according to orthodox mores, Sufism enabled a few women to
enjoy such autonomy. To say this is not to cast doubt on or belittle Rabi'a's
mysticism, but only to recognize it as a complex and comprehensive
response to her society and its mores. As mystic, Rabi'a's major contribu-
tion is regarded as having been the emphasis on the centrality of the love
of God to mystical experience.25 She declared, according to legend, that
her love of God was such that it allowed no room even for love of Muham-
mad. Among the most famous tales is that of her carrying a torch and a
ewer through the streets of Basra, intent on setting fire to paradise and
pouring water on the flames of hell in order, Rabi'a explained, that those
two veils would disappear from the eyes of believers and they come to
love God for His beauty and not out of fear of hell or desire for paradise.26
Much less is known regarding Qarmati views about women, but they,
too, appear to have departed fundamentally from the prescriptions in
orthodox Islamic society pertaining to the proper relations between men
and women. Qarmati writings have not survived, and so one cannot base
investigations of their beliefs and practices on their own accounts. The
movement, which was distinctly one with roots and followers among the
underclass, challenged the Abbasid regime militarily and for a time even
succeeded in establishing an independent republic. It was eventually
eradicated and its writings destroyed or lost. Nearly all the available
information about its activities and society comes from the pens of un-
sympathetic observers who were supporters of the Abbasid regime.
The Qarmati movement saw itself, like other movements of dissent, as
representing the true realization of the Islamic message, opposed to the
misinterpretations of Islam and the corruptions practiced by the domi-
nant society. Accounts of their society depict them as advocates of com-
munal property. Qarmati missionaries are described, for example, as
organizing villagers and inviting them to bring to a central place all they
owned by way of "cattle, sheep, jewelry, provisions"; thereafter no one
owned anything and the goods were redistributed according to people's
 Early Islam and the Position of Women 69

needs. "Every man worked with diligence and emulation at his task in
order to deserve high rank by the benefit he brought. The woman
brought what she earned by weaving, the child brought his wages for
scaring away birds/'27 In the republic they established, property was
communal and was administered by a central committee, which ensured
that all had their housing, clothing, and food needs taken care of. Some
writers asserted that the Qarmatis also treated women as communal
property. Contemporary scholars, however, suggest that this view repre-
sents the writers' misperception of what they witnessed—which was so
different from the practices regarding women of their own society. The
evidence adduced in support of their accusation was that Qarmati
women were not veiled, that both sexes practiced monogamy, and that
women and men socialized together. These and similar practices appar-
ently led the writers to believe that the Qarmatis were "debauched" and
"obscene"; they themselves of course came from societies in which the
"unobscene" norm among the elite was for men to keep, and relate sexu-
ally to, women by the dozen.28
Thus Islam in this period was interpreted in ways, often representing
the interest and vision of different classes, that implied profoundly differ-
ent societies, including the arrangements and attitudes governing the
relationship between the sexes. The dissent and the "heresies" dividing
the society were concerned not so much with obscure theological points
(as orthodox history generally suggests) as with the social order and the
values inscribed in the dominant culture. The uniformity of interpreta-
tion and the generally minimal differences characterizing the versions of
Islam that were to survive thus do not reflect unanimity of understand-
ing. Rather, they represent the triumph over its rivals of the Abbasid state
and of the religious and social vision it sponsored at this crucial formative
moment in history.
One figure in particular deserves mention in the context of the concept
of woman and of the feminine in the formative Islamic ages, both for this
countercultural understanding of Islam with respect to women and be-
cause he is probably unique among major Muslim scholars and philoso-
phers in regarding women sympathetically. Ibn al-'Arabi (1165-1240),
whose intellectual stature and range arguably surpass al-Ghazali's, was
born in Murcia, Spain. In his youth he studied under Sufi masters in his
native land, including two women, Shams, Mother of the Poor, and
Nunah Fatima bint al-Muthanna. He said of Shams that "in her spiritual
activities and communications she was among the greatest" and de-
scribed miracles performed by Nunah Fatima, with whom he studied
when she was in her nineties. He helped build her a hut of reeds.29 Ibn
al-'Arabi instructed his daughter in theology, and she apparently was
able to answer theological questions when scarcely a year old; he wrote
70 Leila Ahmed

movingly of her joy on seeing him after an absence. (The extent to which
the different mores of Arab Spain, where Ibn al-'Arabi came to maturity,
shaped his attitude to women is certainly an important question and one
that has yet to be explored.)
Ibn al-'Arabi was persecuted as a heretic a number of times. On at least
one occasion the "heresy" he committed that outraged the orthodox was
in connection with his statements about women. His poem Turjuman al-
ashwacj (The interpreter of longing), for example, centers on the figure of
a young woman he met in Mecca. He wrote that she was "learned and
pious, with an experience of spiritual and mystic life," and that but for
"paltry souls . . . predisposed to malice, I should comment here on the
beauty of her body as well as her soul." The memory of "the grace of her
mind and the modesty of her bearing" and the "unwavering friendship"
she offered him become the sources of inspiration in his poem, the central
metaphor of which (as in Dante's work two centuries later) is that the
young woman (Nizam) is the earthly manifestation of Sophia, the divine
wisdom that his soul craves.30 The notion of divinity in the female face
was profoundly offensive to the orthodox, and the antagonism the poem
earned Ibn al-'Arabi led him later to write a commentary to the work
asserting that its meaning was entirely spiritual and allegorical. Ibn
al-'Arabi continued to develop in his thought the notions of the feminine
dimension of the divine and the complementarity of the sexes. Among
such notions were the idea that Adam was the first female, because Eve
was born from his inside, and that Mary, by generating Jesus, became the
second Adam.31 Again using Adam and Eve as metaphor, Ibn al-'Arabi
wrote of God drawing forth from Adam "a being in his own image, called
woman, and because she appears to him in his own image, the man feels
a deep longing for her, as something which years for itself."32 Moreover,
Ibn al-'Arabi construed the creative Breath of Mercy, a component of the
Godhead itself, as feminine.33 Although he was subjected to hostility
during periods of his life, the intellectual power evidenced in his pro-
digious literature was such that he is widely acknowledged as a major
Muslim thinker.

The moment in which Islamic law and scriptural interpretation were

elaborated and cast into the forms that were to be considered au-
thoritative to our own day was a singularly unpropitious one for women.
The mores and heritage of Ummayad and, in particular, of Abbasid soci-
ety were, with respect to women, deeply negative. They played a signifi-
cant part in the extent to which the elaboration of the law would be
weighted against women, first by determining that Islam's broad propo-
sitions instituting male dominance in marriage would be emphasized
 Early Islam and the Position of Women 71

and given legal articulation, rather than its broad ethical injunctions em-
phasizing justice and fairness. Second, they led to interpretations of
those propositions that in their specificities were the least favorable sys-
tematically to women. The minority legal opinions on women's right to
divorce and to stipulate conditions in their contracts indicate that even in
this androcentric age a reading of Islam that was fairer to women was
possible; unsurprisingly, in a society in which women were deeply de-
valued this fairer reading was not favored by the majority of the legists of
the day. Similarly, the example of the Sufis and the Qarmatis indicates
that there were different ways of reading the Islamic moment and text
from those of the dominant culture, and that such readings had impor-
tant implications for the conceptualization of and the social arrangements
around issues of gender.
These findings obviously are relevant to the issues being debated to-
day in Muslim societies, given in particular the trend to interpret and
apply classical Muslim law yet more rigidly to women and in all ways,
societally and governmentally, to endorse the orthodox Islamic vision of
woman. Now that women in unprecedented and ever-growing numbers
are forming part of the intellectual community in Muslim countries, per-
haps—as they are already reclaiming the right, not enjoyed for centuries,
of attending the mosques—these veins of thought will be reopened and
the process of the creation of Islamic law will be brought into question.

Notes

1. See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern
Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), chap. 6.
2. N. J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1964), 10-11, 17.
3. Ibid., 18-19.
4. Ibid., 30.
5. Ibid., 30-31.
6. Ibid., 34. The summary of the history of Islamic law in the following pages is
based on Coulson's account in his History, chaps. 1-3, and on Joseph Schacht's An
Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), chaps. 4-10.
7. Coulson, History, 36-37.
8. Ibid., 39.
9. Ibid., 49.
10. See Coulson, History, 77-78; Schacht, Introduction, 28-30.
11. Coulson, History, 85.
12. Ibid., 97.
13. Noel J. Coulson, Conflicts and Tensions in Islamic Jurisprudence (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1969), 25-30.
72 Leila Ahmed

14. Noel J. Coulson and Doreen Hinchcliffe, "Women and Law Reform in
Contemporary Islam/' in Women in the Muslim World, ed., Lois Beck and Nikki
Keddie (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 38.
15. See B. F. Musallam, Sex and Society in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1983); and Leila Ahmed, "Arab Culture and Writing Women's Bodies,"
in Feminist Issues 9, no. 1 (1989): 41-55.
16. See Encyclopaedia of Islam, s.v. "al-Kur'an" (5:400-432, 464).
17. Theodor Noldeke, Geschichte des Qorans, ed. F. Schwally, 3 vols. in 1
(Leipzig, 1909; reprint, Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1961), ii, 57-62.
18. See Encyclopaedia of Islam, s.w. "al-Kur'an" and "Kira'a" (5:127-28).
19. See David S. Powers, Studies in Qur'an and Hadith: The Formation of the Islamic
Law of Inheritance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
20. Cited in Margaret Smith, Rabi'a the Mystic and Her Fellow Saints in Islam
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 14.
21. Ibid., 36.
22. Ibid., 9,16.
23. Annemarie Schimmel observes that Sufism was ambivalent toward wom-
en, noting, for example, that even the title of the Persian mystical poet Sana'i's
poem Banat al-na'sh (Daughters of the bier) "points by its very name to the fact that
daughters are better on a bier than alive." She notes further that some male Sufis
"were absolutely antagonistic to or disinterested in women, even to the point that
they would not touch food cooked by a woman," and that "early Islamic as-
ceticism and the mystical writings based on these ascetic ideals were as inimical to
women as is any ascetic movement in the world of religion, be it medieval Chris-
tianity or early Buddhism. It was easy for the Muslim ascetics of the eighth and
ninth centuries to equate woman and nafs, the 'lower self that incites to
evil' . . . since the word nafs is feminine in Arabic. Furthermore, as they saw in
woman, as it were, the nafs principle personified they also represented (like their
Christian colleagues) the word as a hideous ghastly old hag." Mystical Dimensions
of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 426, 428; Schim-
mel, "Women in Mystical Islam," in Women and Islam, ed. Azizah al-Hibri (New
York: Pergamon, 1982), 146. Schimmel does grant, however, that Sufism was more
favorable to women than other branches of Islam were.
24. Smith, Rabi'a, 9.
25. A. J. Arberry, Muslim Saints and Mystics (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1979), 51.
26. This story made its way to medieval Europe, where in one text the account
as Schimmel reports it is accompanied by an illustration of an oriental woman with
a torch and a ewer. See Schimmel, "Women in Mystical Islam," 147.
27. Cited in Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History (London: Arrow, 1958), 109.
See also Ibn al-Jauzi, "Kitab al-muntathim fi ta'rikh al-muluk wa'1-ummam," in
Akhbar al-qarammita fi al-Ahsa1, al-Sham, al-'Iraq, al-Yaman, 2d ed. (Damascus: Dar
Hassan, 1982), 255-72.
28. For a discussion of this, see M. J. De Goeje, "Carmatians," Encyclopedia of
Religion and Ethics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961); and Memoire sur les
Carmathes du Bahrain et les Fatimides (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1886).
29. Sufis of Andalusia: The Ruh al-quds and al-Durrat al-fakhirah of Ibn 'Arabi,
 Early Islam and the Position of Women 73

translated with introduction and notes by R. W. J. Austin (London: George Allen

and Unwin, 1971), 142-43.
30. Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism oflbn ''Arabi, trans. Ralph
Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 137-39.
31. Ibn al-'Arabi, The Bezels of Wisdom, translated with an introduction by R. W.
J. Austin (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 35; see also Fazlur Rahman, Islam, 2d ed.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 146.
32. Ibn al-'Arabi, Bezels, 274.
33. R. W. J. Austin, 'The Feminine Dimensions in Ibn 'Arabi's Thought,"
Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society 2 (1984): 5-14.
 Gendering the Ungendered Body:
5
Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law

PAULA SANDERS

No aspect of life in medieval Islamic societies was free from

considerations of sex.1 The boundary between male and
female was drawn firmly and was deeply embedded both in
views of the cosmos and in social structures. The most visi-
ble expression of this boundary, the social segregation of
men and women, was only a particularly concrete demon-
stration of the notion that male and female were opposites,
and that an ordered human society depended on maintain-
ing boundaries that had been ordained by God.
Men and women not related by blood or marriage lived in
separate, but intersecting, spheres. Interaction between
them was understood to be both necessary and inevitable,
but it was permissible and desirable only under carefully
controlled and rigidly prescribed circumstances. The most
desirable of these circumstances is expressed by the institu-
tion of nikah, often narrowly translated as "marriage." Nikah
and zina (unlawful intercourse) constitute the two funda-
mental categories of possible interaction between unrelated
men and women in the social world. These categories rest
upon the existence of the male-female boundary, and there-
fore even zina, in some sense, affirms that boundary while
threatening others.2
Violation of those permitted relationships promised not

I am grateful to the friends and colleagues whose comments on

various versions of this chapter and whose discussions with me on
the topic have been invaluable: Natalie Zemon Davis, Fatma Muge
Gocek, Monica Green, Susan Lurie, Shaun Marmon, Leslie Peirce,
Kevin Reinhart, and Everett Rowson. I also thank Marilyn Sanders,
M.D., for assistance with modern medical literature on human her-
maphroditism. Kevin Reinhart of Dartmouth College is preparing
an edition of al-Asnawi's Idah al-mushkil from a manuscript in the
Zahiriyya Library in Damascus (private communication, 3 Sept. 1990).

74
 Gendering the Ungendered Body 75

only social disruption, but disorder on a much larger (and perhaps un-
seen) scale. Those disruptions could be caused not only by actual vio-
lations of taboos, but even by the suggestion that such violations had
occurred. The false accusation of adultery (qadhf, often translated simply
as "slander"), for example, is one of only five crimes for which the Quran
prescribes punishment.3 The broad Quranic concepts concerning licit
and illicit relationships, as well as modesty, pertain equally to men and to
women, but they were interpreted primarily in terms of the dangers that
women's disruptive sexuality present to an ordered society.
Men and women were socialized into this world of relations, which
assumed that men and women must interact, that they must interact in
prescribed ways, and that interaction in other ways threatened the social
order and had to be guarded against at all costs. The question of one's
maleness or femaleness was a crucial factor in determining what kinds of
protection against social disorder needed to be employed. Although men
and women presumably bore equal responsibility for such illicit rela-
tions, that responsibility was construed in terms of certain assumptions
about the natures of men and women. Men were considered susceptible
to seduction and the actors, whereas women were considered to be both
seductresses (that is, tempting men to act in certain destructive ways)
and the recipients of the men's acts.4
Furthermore, the relations and dangerous possibilities rested on as-
sumptions about the responsibilities of men to prescribe behaviors and
set limits for women, who were considered to be their inferiors. If the
spheres of men and women intersected, they were also established in a
clear hierarchy that placed men above women. Although women were
considered to be the equals of men before God, this spiritual egalitari-
anism did not imply a similar egalitarianism in the social world. This was
the social context in which the Quranic verses stating that "men are a
degree above women" and that "men are the managers of the affairs of
women" were to be understood.5
Women were presumed to be the major site of social disorder (fitna) by
medieval jurists and commentators as well as in popular literature. But
even the notion of the potentially dangerous sexuality of women, of the
ever-present threat of fitna, was relational. Although the danger was
located among women, it was not their being that represented disorder,
but the possibilities of their illicit relationships with men.6
Under these circumstances, a person who fit neither of the available
categories presented a serious dilemma in a society where the boundary
between male and female was drawn so clearly and was so impenetrable.
In this respect, medieval Islam differed from medieval and early modern
European societies, where the boundary between male and female was
76 Paula Sanders

more permeable and where the troubling possibility of the mixing of

sexes did exist.7
Not all boundaries in medieval Islamic societies were as impermeable
as that between male and female. There were other, equally fundamental
boundaries in Islamic societies that also involved hierarchies: Muslim and
non-Muslim, free and slave. But these boundaries could be crossed.
One's fundamental category could be changed by conversion or man-
umission. The sexual boundary was different, since it could not be
crossed legitimately simply by an act of will.8
What did medieval Muslims do when confronted with a person whose
sex was unknown? In societies that took for granted that everyone was
either male or female, what place if any was there for the hermaphrodite,
who seemed to fit neither category? For occasionally children were born
or individuals encountered who did not fall into these two categories,
whose anomalies in sexual physiology made it impossible to determine
whether the person was male or female.9
The biological process of sex determination, according to medieval
Muslim natural philosophers and physicians, required the domination or
precedence of the semen of one parent over the other. Whereas it was
assumed that women were created from man (that is, from Adam's rib)
and inferior in most respects, they were considered biologically equal in
human reproduction. Both male and female shared equally the power of
generation, because both were believed to contribute semen to the re-
production of the child. Semen was regarded as a complex substance that
came from all parts of the body, which explained why children resembled
their parents.10 The child would have the sex of the parent whose semen
dominated. Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jauziyya attributed this domination to con-
ditions of heat or cold in the womb, as well as to the relative strength or
weakness of the semen contributed by each parent.11
This theory of generation as advanced in medical texts intersected
with Quranic doctrines of creation. There was a deep coherence between
Quran, commentary, and scientific literature on this subject. In particu-
lar, the preference for the Hippocratic-Galenic over the Aristotelian tradi-
tion seems to have been due largely to its consistency with the classical
Islamic understanding of the Quranic doctrine of creation. Similarly, the
medical assumption that there were two sexes was consistent with the
interpretation of the Quranic verse "we have created of everything a
pair" (51:49), which was clearly understood by the commentators to refer
to male and female.12
The insistence on the two sexes of male and female and the articulation
of this assumption in the theory of generation found its way even into
lexicography. The medieval lexicon Lisan aljArab's discussion of the term
dhakar (meaning, among other things, "male" and "penis") states: "If the
 Gendering the Ungendered Body 77

[seminal] fluid of the man dominates the [seminal] fluid of the woman,
they will produce a male child. If the [seminal] fluid of the male precedes
the [seminal] fluid of the female, she will bear a male child, if God wills."
If the semen of neither parent dominated, the child would be a her-
maphrodite. 13 Although the jurists were confident that every person had
a true sex—known at least, or perhaps only, to God—discovering what
that sex was remained a human dilemma subject to the limitations of
human knowledge. The first concern of the jurists was to assign sex to
such a person, usually an infant born with ambiguous genitalia.14
One jurist stated simply, "If the child has a vulva (farj) and a penis
(dhakar) then it is a hermaphrodite (khuntha)." Other lawyers and medi-
eval lexicographers defined the khuntha as one who has "what is proper
to both men and to women," "what is proper to both the male and the
female," or "neither what is proper to the male or to the female."15 This
last condition, according to al-Sarakhsi, was the gravest form of du-
biousness (ishtibah); he was describing a child who was neither male nor
female, excreting from its navel (surratuhu).
Al-Sarakhsi told his readers further that "the two characteristics
[having what is male and female] are not combined in one person, be-
cause they are dissimilar by way of being contradictory." Nowhere in
these texts is there even the slightest suggestion that a khuntha is both a
man and a woman. Human beings had to be either male or female; some-
times they seemed to be neither, but they could not be both. The difficulty
lay in establishing a place for the hermaphrodite until its primary set of
organs could be determined, that is, the set of organs that had legal value
and to which sex would be attributed.
The basic rule in establishing the sex of the child was al-hukm li'l-mabal
(the judgment is attributed to the urinary orifice). This principle can be
traced to pre-Islamic Arabian custom. It was also established in hadith
that "the inheritance is awarded to the urinary orifice" (al-mirath li'l-
mabal), that is, the sex of the child was determined by the mabal. Al-
Sarakhsi explained further:

The division between male and female at birth is manifest in the

[urinary] organ [fala] . . . at the time of separation of the child from
the mother, the use [manfa'a] of that organ is urination; other uses of
the organ occur after that . . . but the primary use [al-manfa'a al-
asliyya] of the organ is that it is the urinary orifice [mabal, lit. "place
of urination"]. So if it urinates from the mabal of men, the organ of
division is in its [the male urinary orifice] jurisdiction [that is, the
child is male], this being so even if the other has a larger aperture in
the body. And if it urinates from the mabal of women, then that is
the [primary] organ [the one to which sex is attributed].16
78 Paula Sanders

If the distinction could be made on this basis at birth, the sex of the
child was determined and the additional organs accorded the status of
"defect" ('aib). In other words, the presence of the extra organs was
recognized as an objective reality, but these extra organs were assigned
no legal value. Once relegated to the status of 'aib, or defect, they could
be removed surgically.17
If, however, the child urinated from both of the orifices, then the one
from which the urine proceeded first was primary.18 If it urinated from
both simultaneously, some said that primacy would be awarded to the
organ from which the greater quantity of urine proceeded.19 Abu Ja'far
al-Tusi, the Shi'i jurist, added another criterion: "If the onset of urination
from [the mabals] is simultaneous, then [the sex of the child] is consid-
ered on the basis of the one that urinates last."
Other alternatives were offered: "Some say to count the ribs, and if
they are equal in number then it is a woman; if they are unequal, it is a
man. And some say to consider it on the basis of the inclination of its
nature." This is the only instance where anything other than strictly
biological measures were suggested to determine the sex of a khuntha; it
does not reflect the conventional juridical wisdom on such matters.
If the sex of the child could not be determined by these conventional
methods, it remained in a stat£ of dubiousness (ishtibah) or ambiguity
(ishkal) until the onset of puberty. Puberty (bulugh, idrak) in Islam is deter-
mined by the appearance of signs (alamat) that indicate sexual maturity.
For a man, these are intercourse using the penis, the appearance of facial
hair, and nocturnal emissions; for a woman, they are the growth of the
breasts, the onset of menstruation, vaginal intercourse, conception, and
lactation.2^
For a khuntha, the appearance of any one of these signs would nullify
the dubiousness or ambiguity. Such a sign determined both sex and the
attainment of sexual majority. Furthermore, the hermaphrodite was not
disabled by the ambiguity surrounding its sex in reporting the ap-
pearance of these signs. Its claims of puberty were accepted just like those
of a normal child, because no one else could know about it. In this sense,
the hermaphrodite benefited from the general ambiguity surrounding
childhood. Since children are not considered to be sexual beings in Islam,
the rules of modesty or other precautions aimed at preventing illicit sex
between adults do not apply to them. Their sex is known, but they are not
part of the social-sexual world of adults. They are, in a word, unso-
cialized.
But Islamic jurists recognized that the period immediately preceding
puberty was different. The prepubescent adolescent (murahiq) was nei-
ther child nor adult; it hovered around the frontier of sexuality in a way
that was troubling because of this ambiguity. Jurists were often unsure
 Gendering the Ungendered Body 79

whether particular precautions regarding modesty, for example, ought to

be imposed on the adolescent. Reaching puberty lifted the cloud of ambi-
guity that covered all children and adolescents. It was a small step to
exploit and extend this ambiguity to the khuntha.
The condition of ambiguity was presumed to be temporary. Manifesta-
tion of any one of the signs of puberty removed the ambiguity perma-
nently. Once the sex of a person had been established, that judgment was
irreversible, regardless of any evidence that might be produced to the
contrary.21 The system aimed at providing every possible opportunity for
establishing the true sex of the child. Nonetheless, it was possible that
none of the signs of puberty ('alamat) would appear. In this case, said
al-Quduri, the khuntha was ambiguous (mushkil).22
Khuntha mushkil was the technical legal term for a hermaphrodite who
had passed the age at which puberty normally occurs without manifest-
ing any of its signs.23 Its sex could not be determined. The mushkil label
was a difficult one to contest, once applied, because of the same legal
principle of precedence that allowed the jurists to insist on the perma-
nence of sex once it had been assigned. In that case, after the determina-
tion of male sex based on a nocturnal emission, the appearance of such
contradictory evidence as the growth of breasts had no legal conse-
quence. By the same reasoning, the admission that one was unable to
determine sex prevented the hermaphrodite from asserting later that it
had reached puberty. Now jurists had to contend with the tension be-
tween their desire to determine the sex of every human being with cer-
tainty, and the caution that was demanded in attributing sex.
Although Islamic jurists could not establish the true sex of the khuntha
mushkil, they nonetheless had to incorporate it into the adult social
world in which everyone was either male or female. They had to assign
the khuntha mushkil to one of these categories in order to either prescribe
or proscribe, because the rules for men and women were different.
This process, as opposed to establishing true sex, I would call gender-
ing. I have invoked this most modern of terms with the full awareness
that it is anachronistic. But feminist scholarship has created new mean-
ings for what was once simply a grammatical term. Gender goes beyond
biological definitions of sex (although these are also cultural construc-
tions). It is embedded in the social understanding of what constitutes
maleness or femaleness, as well as the social implications and conse-
quences of being male or female.241 use the word gendering to describe
the strategies by which medieval Muslim jurists constructed the khuntha
mushkil—an unsexed, ungendered, and therefore unsocialized being—
as a social person in terms of traditional categories of sex.
In doing this, they changed their focus from the true sex of the indi-
vidual to the prescriptions for whole categories (male and female). This
80 Paula Sanders

process, in turn, reaffirmed those categories and maintained the bound-

ary between male and female while retaining the emphasis on male and
female in relation to one another. This strategy was possible not because
new categories were invented, but by virtue of the structure of Islamic
law itself. If sex was not arranged on a continuum for medieval Muslims,
the moral universe encoded in Islamic law was. There were only two
poles for sex: male and female. But all behavior fell somewhere on a scale
of religious qualifications that included five categories: obligatory, recom-
mended, neutral, reprehensible, and forbidden. Under certain circum-
stances, reprehensible behavior might be preferred when the alternative
was committing a forbidden act. In determining which course of action to
take, jurists employed another fundamental principle of law: precaution
(ihtiyat), denoting the choice of a course of action that is founded on
certainty rather than uncertainty.
The possibilities of the khuntha being a man or a woman had to be
considered with respect to every variation that is tied to sex. Decisions
were often based on procedural rules not directly related to sex. Depend-
ing on the situation, jurists might be informed by a different hierarchy of
concerns in negotiating the gender of the hermaphrodite. The negotia-
tion of gender was not invariably difficult or complicated. Gendering
seems to have been least problematic when it involved segregation and
where spatial relations clearly reflected sexual hierarchy. In these circum-
stances, the simple arrangement of male above female could be exploited
to grant the hermaphrodite an intermediary position.
These concerns informed the discussions of where the hermaphrodite
should stand in prayer (salat). Prayer is a daily obligation. Numerous
occurrences can invalidate a person's prayer, in which case the prayer
must be repeated, just as missed prayer must be made up at another time.
Men and women may pray in the same room, but the rows of men must
always precede the rows of women. This is a clear case of segregation and
the spatial expression of male supremacy. Where should the khuntha
mushkil stand in prayer? In Friday prayer, between the rows of men and
the rows of women:
It should stand behind the men and in front of the women as a
precaution, because if it is a man standing among the rows of wom-
en, his own prayer is invalid; and if it is a woman standing among
the rows of men, then the prayers of those men on her right, her
left, and behind her will be invalid. An adolescent is, in this, like a
mature adult. But if the khuntha is in the rows of men, in front of
the women, we are certain of the validity of its [own] prayer. If it
stands among the women, however, we prefer that it repeat the
 Gendering the Ungendered Body 81

prayers, because the obligatory nature of prayer for [a man] is well-

established, while the non-fulfillment of this duty is doubtful.
This is a perfect example of the way the boundary and the hierarchy
were preserved: the validity of the hermaphrodite's own prayer and of
those of the other congregants was assured by its segregation, and by
standing between the rows of men and women, it neither threatened the
superior status of men nor was it threatened with an inferior position.
Should it turn out to be a man, he would simply constitute the last row of
men; should it turn out to be a woman, she would be the first row of
women. The hierarchy expressed in the spatial relation of men and wom-
en in prayer also applied to the dead:
When a khuntha mushkil dies and is prayed over with a man and a
woman, the man is placed right next to the imam [prayer leader], the
khuntha next, and the woman following the khuntha, in considera-
tion of their position in life . . . and if they are buried in a common
grave due to some extenuating circumstance, there is no objection
[provided that] a partition of dirt is made between the bodies. The
man faces the qibla [direction of Mecca], followed by the khuntha,
and then the woman, because facing the qibla is an honor, so the
man should be closest to it.
In these two cases, the concern with maintaining both the boundary
and the sexual hierarchy intersected with another concern that informed
the negotiation of the jurists: protecting the male domain from intrusion.
Every precaution was taken to ensure against violating any existing
boundaries: the supremacy of male over female was always asserted, and
the superior position of the khuntha to women in prayer and burial
customs was a way of maintaining the hierarchy in which men were, in
relation to women, the superior party. When in doubt, the rule seemed to
be to accord the inferior status to hermaphrodites. What was important
was that access to the higher status of men be successfully protected. The
rules assured that no hermaphrodite would attain the status accorded to
men unless it could be demonstrated that he was, indeed, a man.
These same concerns also informed the distribution of inheritance
shares. Inheritance in Islam is governed by the rules laid down in the
Quran and elaborated by the later jurists. It is basically a modification of
agnatic succession, amended to include women and spouses.25 The Is-
lamic law of inheritance developed and elaborated the principle that a
hermaphrodite inherits in the same proportions as the female, because it
must accept the lesser status of the two. If a father died leaving a son and
also a hermaphrodite, the wealth was divided among them in three
82 Paula Sanders

shares: two for the son and one for the khuntha, for the khuntha was
treated as a female.
But the jurists worried that others might try to exploit the ambiguity of
the hermaphrodite's sex for their own advantage. Because of the interde-
pendence of men and women in matters relating to family life (such as
marriage and inheritance), the social fact of the khuntha's sex had impor-
tant implications for other people, particularly relatives. The sex of the
khuntha would affect the shares of its own blood relations, as in the case
of a man who died leaving a wife and two children, one of whom was a
khuntha. "Then the khuntha died after its father, and so the mother
claimed this to be a son, urinating from where boys urinate. The accepted
opinion is the word of the son, because the mother claims an excess in her
inheritance by claiming him [the khuntha] to be a son, whereas the
[other] son has no excess to gain, so his word is accepted with an oath."26
Presumption operated in favor of the son's claim, because he had nothing
to gain from determining the sex of the child. The mother, however,
stood to gain by establishing the khuntha as a male child, from whom she
could inherit. Determining sex was important because the relationships
of the living to the khuntha were not altered by the fact of death.
There were other fundamental concerns. Numerous problems in gen-
dering hermaphrodites revolved around the issue of modesty.27 Many
prescriptions for dress, demeanor, and segregation are based on this
concept of modesty, called in Arabic sitr al-'aura, literally, "covering
[one's] nakedness." The exhortation to preserve modesty applies equally
to men and women in Islam, but the various law schools have diverging
definitions of what constitutes the 'aura for men and women, and they
usually emphasize women's responsibility. When the concerns of jurists
were centered on sitr al-'aura, the hermaphrodite was almost always
gendered as female.
In the absence of any clear hierarchical concerns, and given the com-
plicated matrix of concerns around modesty, the difficulties of negotiat-
ing gender often required invoking other frontiers. Jurists might, for
example, exploit the recognized category of the adolescent, who is not
always required to adhere to prescriptions for adults, to resolve a ques-
tion about the necessity of veiling in prayer. Al-Sarakhsi concluded that a
khuntha should be veiled while praying: "If it is a man, his being veiled is
not forbidden in prayer, and if it is a woman, she is obliged to be veiled in
her prayer." If it prayed without a veil, the adult khuntha was required to
repeat the prayer, because of the possibility that it was a woman. But if it
prayed without a veil before reaching puberty, it need not repeat the
prayer, because an adolescent female (murahiqa) is not obliged to wear the
veil when praying.
Jurists were not able to exploit another frontier—death—in negotiat-
 Gendering the Ungendered Body 83

ing gender around the question of sitr al-'aura. When discussing the
ritual ablutions and burial shrouds of the khuntha, they unanimously
advocated precautionary veiling in the interests of modesty. Al-Sarakhsi
reminds us also that what applied to the khuntha in lifetime with respect
to sitr al-'aura applied equally in death. It is clear from this text that the
restraints on relationships between men and women that exist in life are
neither abolished nor neutralized by death. The boundary remains as
firm for the dead as for the living, and the taboos that govern the rela-
tionships between men and women while they are alive govern also that
between the living and the dead:
If it dies before reaching puberty, but while approaching it, neither a
man nor a woman should perform the ghusl [the major ritual ablu-
tion, involving a full bath] on it, but rather should perform the
tayammum [ritual ablution using clean sand or dust instead of water,
to be substituted for the ghusl only under special conditions]. This
is because of the principle that gazing upon the 'aura is forbidden
and this prohibition is not lifted in death. . . . If it is mushkil—that
is, having no sex or its not being known whether it is a male or
female—perform the tayammum. This is an extenuating circum-
stance because there is no one who can perform the ghusl on it. . . .
This is parallel to the case of a woman who dies among men when
there is no other woman; in such a case, the tayammum is per-
formed. The case of the khuntha is like this. If the person per-
forming the tayammum is a woman, there is no need for a rag
[covering her hand]; likewise if it is a man who is related on the
mother's side in the forbidden degree. But if he is unrelated to her,
the tayammum must be performed with a rag [wrapped around the
hand]. It is permitted to look at the face, and to expose it to the arms
only, because it might be a woman and in this case, precautions
must be taken with respect to those things that are [ordinarily]
founded upon precaution, namely [to prevent] looking at the 'aura.
Al-Sarakhsi also recommended that the khuntha be buried like a girl,
because this is closest to the sitr. Women are shrouded in more layers than
men, but these excess layers are permitted for men when buried under
special circumstances. Dubiousness of sex is one of those.
Even insisting that modesty be a priority did not preclude complica-
tions in negotiating gender in every situation. The requirements for dress
for men and women making the pilgrimage (hajj) are, according to some
schools of law, contradictory and raise the specter of committing two
equally forbidden acts.28 In the case of a khuntha past adolescence, some
Hanafi jurists were confounded, because "a man in ihram [a state of ritual
purity marked by putting on special clothes at the beginning of the pil-
84 Paula Sanders

grimage] may not wear seamed clothing, while a woman in ihram is

obliged to wear seamed clothing and is prohibited from going without a
waistband and cloak." Had the risk involved a choice between commit-
ting a reprehensible act or a forbidden one, the judgment might well have
been different. Al-Sarakhsi admitted that he did not know the answer
because each possibility is equally forbidden. The hierarchy of human
activities manifest in the scale of religious qualifications helps negotiate
gender only when the two possibilities are not equally forbidden.
But some jurists resolved the problem by returning to the issue of
modesty. They suggested that the khuntha dress as a woman because this
is closer to the sitr, and her status in a state of ihram is founded on sitr,
just as it is at other times. Moreover, al-Shaibani maintained, a man can
wear seamed clothing during his ihram when there are extenuating cir-
cumstances (udhr, lit. "excuse"), and "dubiousness of the matter of its
sex is one of the gravest [extenuating] circumstances."
Protecting against violations of the prescriptions for modesty could
create difficulties even in trying to determine the true sex of the khuntha
mushkil. Jurists could invoke another boundary to mitigate the compli-
cated circumstances, of slavery. The legal position of the female slave as
the sexual property of her master permitted the negotiation of gender
without the risk of violating the rules of modesty.29
It is reprehensible [makruh] for a man or a woman to inspect [the
khuntha] until he reaches puberty and the matter of his sex is
cleared up, because the adolescent is in the position of the pubes-
cent with respect to the obligation of sitr al-'aura. A person of one
sex looking at a person of the opposite sex is not permitted. . . .
Whether a man or a woman examines him, there is [still] the suspi-
cion of looking at [the nakedness] of a person of the opposite sex
(nazr khilaf al-jins). Instead, a slave girl who is knowledgeable in
these matters is bought for him from his own money to examine
him, so that he owns her by means of actual purchase. If the
khuntha is a woman, then the person looking is a member of the
same sex (nazr al-jins ila al-jins) and if it is a man, then it is a slave
[mamluka] looking at her master.
That the determination of sex should have been in the hands of someone
who, in every other respect, was a disprivileged person is remarkable.
Slaves, for example, could not give testimony in an Islamic court. In spite
of its legal implications and importance, the determination of true sex
apparently took place outside the formal structures both of law and of
medicine. Physicians do not seem to have been participants in this pro-
cess.30 Because it was permissible for a slave to look at her master, a
 Gendering the Ungendered Body 85

khuntha was circumcised by a slave girl purchased for him either from his
own funds or, if he was indigent, from the funds of the public treasury.31
The notion that the sex of the khuntha was a social concern was rein-
forced by the commitment of funds from the bait al-mal (public treasury)
to buy the slave girl. The funds of the treasury were to be used for the
public good, and what could be more in the interests of the public good
than the knowledge of whether someone was male or female? The estab-
lishment of sex was not only important to determine the legal status of
the khuntha, but also had implications for the position of others within
the community. Even a single individual whose sex was not known
threatened the social order. The sex of one person was inevitably tied to
the status of others.
Whereas conditional gendering worked to preserve social order in
many instances, establishing the true sex of the khuntha mushkil was the
only remedy under other circumstances. This, as we have seen, was often
impossible. If the sex of the khuntha could not be determined, some
matters, including the status of other people, simply had to be held in
abeyance.
If it is said: if the first child you bear is a boy, you are divorced; or, to
a slave, if the first child you bear is a girl, you are free, and then they
each bear a khuntha mushkil, neither the divorce nor the manu-
mission takes place until the child's sex has been determined, be-
cause whatever is contingent upon a condition cannot be carried
out as long as the condition does not actually exist. With ishkal, the
existence of the condition is not a certainty. This is parallel to the
case where someone says: If I don't enter so-and-so's house, then
his slave is free, and then he dies without it being known whether
or not he entered. [In this case,] the manumission does not take
place.32
Here, fulfilling the condition depended on establishing the sex of the
child. Sometimes, however, the problem could be solved by employing a
formula that allowed for both possibilities:
If a man says, ''All of my male slaves are free" or "All of my female
slaves are free" and he has a slave who is a khuntha, the khuntha is
not free until the matter of his sex has been determined. But if the
master says the two statements together, then the khuntha is freed,
because if they are combined then one of the two must apply to him;
if they are pronounced separately, then it is not certain [whether or
not it applies to the khuntha], whereas servitude is a certainty.
Likewise, if a man says [to his wife], "If I buy a male slave, then you
86 Paula Sanders

are divorced," and he buys a khuntha, she is not divorced. But if he

makes the two statements together ["If I buy a male slave or female
slave, then you are divorced"] then she is divorced by the purchase
of the khuntha because of the certainty of the condition.
The punishment of crimes like slander (qadhf) and theft was relatively
simple, because the penalties did not differ for men and women, so the
ambiguity of the khuntha's condition was irrelevant. But when the
khuntha was the object of slander, the situation was quite different. The
form of the accusation then depended on the sex of the accused.
A man slandering a khuntha is not subject to the hadd (Quranically
prescribed punishment) because he is in the position of someone
who slanders a lunatic or a ratqa1 (a woman who is physically inca-
pable of having intercourse). The slanderer deserves the punish-
ment by virtue of relating a man to an act that he perpetrates, and
by relating a woman to having made possible the perpetration of an
act committed by someone other than her. Because of the ambiguity
of the sex of the khuntha, the reason [for the punishment] cannot be
determined: it is known which of the two acts the slanderer is
attributing to the khuntha. If it is attribution of the perpetration of
the act, and the khuntha is really a woman, then he has attributed
an impossibility to her and thus stands in the position of a person
who slanders a lunatic or a ratqa'. If he attributed it to making
possible the commission of the act, and the khuntha is a man, it is
something in whose domain he is powerless, and this does not call
for the hadd. So it is not possible to undertake inflicting the hadd
punishment while the matter of the khuntha's sex is ambiguous.
The analogy between the khuntha and the lunatic or idiot was not
intended to reflect on the supposed intellectual capacity of the khuntha,
but rather to demonstrate the impossibility of establishing precisely on
what grounds the accusation was being made. In Islamic law, the exact
terms of an accusation are essential to determining guilt or innocence.
The nature of the accusation of zina is determined by the sex of the
accused adulterer. Men are accused of perpetrating the act, women of
being the parties who allow the action. The structure of these accusations
reveals, in fact, that medieval Muslim jurists constructed sexuality differ-
ently for men and women. The concern of the jurists was to preserve not
only the categories of male and female, but also a particular understand-
ing of what those categories meant and implied. They wanted to preserve
biological difference, but they understood that difference to have social
meanings.33
This concern about the social implications of sex is nowhere clearer
 Gendering the Ungendered Body 87

than in the reasoning displayed in a discussion of the legal validity of the

marriage of a khuntha.34 The validity of the marriage of a khuntha whose
father had married it to a man or a woman could not be determined until
its true sex was discovered. This was not, as we might think, because of
concerns about inheritance, incest taboos, or modesty. It was because, as
al-Sarakhsi states, the male entered marriage as a malik (owner), whereas
the female became mamluka (owned) by virtue of marriage/This short
statement communicates powerfully not only the necessity of knowing
who is male or female, but what it means socially to be male or female. "If
it manifests [at puberty] the signs ['alamat] of men and its father had
previously married it to a woman, then [that] nikah is regarded as being
valid from the time the father contracted it, because it has become clear
that his action coincided with the actual status of the khuntha . . . but if
the father had married it to a man and it then manifested the signs of male
puberty, then it has become clear that the action did not coincide with the
khuntha's actual status, and the nikah is null."35
What does al-Sarakhsi mean when he talks about the action coinciding
with the actual status of the khuntha? That "actual status" is not merely
the biological fact of one individual's sex, but the more important cate-
gorical fact that all men enter marriage as possessors and all women as
possessions. The difficulty thus rests not only in the apparent sexual
contradiction and impossibility of two men marrying each another, but
also in the related social fact that two people cannot both enter a marriage
as owners. One must enter as the malik (owner), one as the mamluka
(owned). And this means that one must be male and one female.
With marriage, an institution founded on the fundamentally sexual
relationship between men and women, the separate concerns that the
jurists dealt with came together. Questions of sexual hierarchy, as we
have just seen, of the protection of the male domain, modesty, and incest
taboos, all converged. Sometimes, as with a question of modesty, the
relationship established by marriage between husband and wife permit-
ted the jurists to negotiate gender without risking violation of any taboo.
Although the marriage of a khuntha to a woman, for example, could not
be regarded as valid as long as the sex of the khuntha was unknown, it
was still considered to be mustaqim, meaning that it did not involve any-
thing forbidden. The jurists reasoned that if the khuntha turned out to be
a woman, this meant only that two members of the same sex had seen one
another and that the marriage itself was merely a blunder. If it turned out
to be a man, this constituted the gaze of a woman upon her husband, and
there was no prohibition against that.
The jurists were more concerned, however, that a marriage might
violate the incest taboos. The prohibition of affinity could be established
by a man kissing an adolescent girl, for example, in which case her
88 Paula Sanders

mother and sisters would be forbidden to him in marriage. The rule

extended to hermaphrodites, and the jurists were careful not to allow the
possibility of contracting a marriage that might violate these taboos. "If a
man kisses [the hermaphrodite] with lust, then he may not marry the
khuntha's mother until the status of its sex has been determined. Because
if it is female, his kissing her after [she] reaches adolescence establishes
the prohibition of their becoming related by marriage, and the mother
would be forbidden to him. This is the prevailing opinion, because it is
preferable to forgo nikah with a woman who is permitted to him than to
engage in nikah with a woman who is forbidden to him."
Yet the continual attempts to normalize the khuntha also intersected
with a conservative thrust within Islamic law that attempts to preserve
marriages. If a khuntha married a woman and failed to have intercourse
with her, the same rules applied as would to an impotent man—that is,
no action could be taken to dissolve the marriage until a period of one
year had passed. This delay was intended as a waiting period to see
whether the impediment to intercourse was temporary or permanent.36
What is striking about the laws concerning marriage of the her-
maphrodite is the complete absence of the anxiety about homosexuality
that pervades the European texts on hermaphroditism. Where early
modern Europeans agonized over the dangers of homosexual activity in a
union involving a hermaphrodite, medieval Muslims had other con-
cerns: incest taboos and modesty. Although homosexuality is disap-
proved in Islam, it does not seem to have been a part of the hierarchy of
concerns informing the negotiation of gender in law.37
If medieval Muslim jurists had an overriding anxiety, it was not any of
the particular concerns—incest taboos, modesty, segregation, or even
hierarchy—that organized their negotiation of gender, but maintaining
the gendered integrity of their world as a whole. Their received view of
the world was as a place with only two sexes, male and female. In this,
medieval Muslims were closer to modern Americans than, say, to the
ancient Greeks.38 Their interpretation of the khuntha mushkil was em-
bedded in this bipolar view of the world. A person with ambiguous
genitalia or with no apparent sex might have been a biological reality, but
it had no gender and, therefore, no point of entry into the social world: it
was unsocialized.
In this world where everyone had to be gendered, a person without
gender could not be socialized. Such a person could not participate in
ritual, in itself a profoundly communal and social activity, until it had
been artificially gendered. Hermaphrodites were usually gendered in the
world of ritual as female.
An ungendered person could not enter into the gendered world of
marriage and kinship: one was a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister, a
 Gendering the Ungendered Body 89

husband or a wife. This is not to say that medieval Muslims denied the
biological tie between a hermaphrodite and a blood relation any more
than the biological fact of ambiguous sex. Rather, it means that this bond
could not be interpreted and could not be invested with social meaning
unless it was gendered. The social implications of ties of blood or milk
depended on whether one was male or female, just as the very existence
of a familial tie could depend on gender. This is why, for example, the
jurists insisted that a man not marry the mother or sisters of a khuntha he
had kissed. If the khuntha was female, that act created a relationship of
affinity that prohibited marriage; if it turned out to be male, no such
relationship existed. In either case, the man had kissed the khuntha, but
the interpretation of that act as having social consequences or not, as
constructing a relationship or not, was entirely dependent on gender.
Sex and gender were social matters with implications for whole
groups—especially because of the complex familial and household net-
works that characterized medieval Islamic societies. The presence of one
ungendered person, as we have seen, could compel an entire network to
hold in abeyance questions of marriage, inheritance, and relation to one
another. Even the efforts by the jurists to normalize the hermaphrodite in
order to permit the continued formation of marital ties, for example,
could not be entirely successful. Ultimately, the interpretation of those
relationships was suspended until the sex of the hermaphrodite was
known. In this world, the ungendered person was not only unsocialized,
but could desocialize everyone else by compelling them to suspend the
normal formation of social and familial ties.
I have tried to demonstrate how the ungendered body was un-
socialized and the strategies that jurists used to gender and therefore
socialize the body in the case of hermaphrodites. By doing this, they
permitted them to carry out the daily business of life and death: prayer,
pilgrimage, burial, marriage, inheritance, manumission. Even when de-
cisions had to be held in abeyance, the fundamental categories of male
and female and the social embodiment of those categories were pre-
served. What was at stake for medieval Muslims in gendering one ungen-
dered body was, by implication, gendering the most important body: the
social body.

Notes

1. There is a growing literature on sex and sexuality in Islamic societies. See

Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1985), and the collection Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, ed. Afaf Lutfi al-
Sayyid-Marsot (Malibu, Calif.: Undena, 1979).
2. On the laws concerning unlawful intercourse, see Joseph Schacht, Introduc-
90 Paula Sanders

tion to Islamic Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 178ff. See also, for an
analysis in terms of sexuality, Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam, 14-18, 32.
3. On hadd (Quranically prescribed punishments), see Schacht, Islamic Law,
178-87.
4. The best-known example of these two qualities is the story of Joseph and
Zulaika (the Quranic version of the biblical story of Potiphar's wife, but different in
a number of important ways). The Quranic version is in Sura 12 (Joseph); the
biblical version in Genesis 39. Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam, 20-29, has an interest-
ing analysis of the story and of a sequel to the story in Islamic tradition.
5. Quran 2:228, 4:38.
6. On women as fitna, see the numerous references compiled by Bouhdiba,
Sexuality in Islam, 118ff. See also the provocative argument about the structure of
male desire in Islamic societies by Fatna Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious
(Oxford: Pergamon, 1984). This attitude is expressed in the well-known Pro-
phetic tradition, "I have not left any disorder (fitna) more damaging to men than
women," cited widely in the hadith (Traditions) collections and lexicographies;
see Lisan al-'Arab, s.v. "f-t-n."
The term fitna has a wide range of meanings in medieval Arabic and Islamic
societies, where it refers to the civil wars of the early Islamic state and can mean
either a political or a social threat to the internal order of the Islamic community.
But it can also mean any sort of disruption or distraction from one's love of God:
children, because of the numerous demands they make, are sometimes seen as a
source of fitna. See, for example, the references collected by Aliah Schliefer,
Motherhood in Islam (Cambridge: Islamic Academy, 1986), an interesting example
of a modern Islamist study based on Quran and hadith.
7. On hermaphrodites in early modern Europe, see Lorraine Daston and Ka-
tharine Park, "Hermaphrodites in Renaissance France," Critical Matrix 1, no. 5
(1985): 1-19, and the numerous references cited there. On sexuality in general, see
Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages
(Oxford: Polity Press, 1988), and Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
8. There were, however, numerous ways to violate the boundary, including
homosexual acts, adultery, transvestism, sodomy, and bestiality. These are la-
beled as abominations in the Quran and are punishable in different degrees of
severity. Ritual impurity, incurred by such emission of fluids and discharges from
the body as menstrual blood, semen, urine, and feces, constitutes another vio-
lation. But this impurity can be removed by performing ritual ablutions. Ritual
impurity, as distinct from abominations, can be incurred even while engaged in
licit sexual activities. For example, the act of sexual intercourse itself does not
render one ritually impure, but rather the discharge of semen.
There were also men of altered sex in Islam. Eunuchs were particularly impor-
tant in political and military affairs and are best known popularly as the ubiquitous
guards of the harems. Eunuchs were created by castration outside the lands of
Islam, and their legal status was clearly defined; they were slaves. Caliphs and
sultans assembled large corps of personal guards composed entirely of eunuchs.
Eunuchs have been studied primarily in the context of their military functions in
the Mamluk corps by David Ayalon; see "The Eunuchs in the Mamluk Sultanate,"
 Gendering the Ungendered Body 91

in The Mamluk Military Society (London: Variorium Reprints, 1979), no. 3, and "The
Eunuchs of Islam/' in Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam (Jerusalem: Magnes
Press, 1979), 67-124. See also Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., s.v. "khasi."
For an entirely new approach to eunuchs as a distinct social group, see Shaun
Elizabeth Marmon, "Eunuchs of the Prophet: Space, Time and Gender in Islamic
Society" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1990).
9. Hermaphroditism is defined medically as a physical condition in which
reproductive organ tissues from both sexes are present in a single individual. The
true hermaphrodite has both ovarian and testicular tissue; the external genitalia
usually have an essentially male or ambiguous appearance. Daston and Park,
"Hermaphrodites in Renaissance France," 19 n. 56, cite an estimate of the current
incidence of human hermaphroditism as 1:25,000 births.
There is a large medical literature on sexual differentiation and human herma-
phroditism and the criteria to be used in sexing hermaphrodites. For two exam-
ples of this literature, separated by nearly two decades, see John Money, Joan G.
Hampson, and John L. Hampson, "An Examination of Some Basic Sexual Con-
cepts: The Evidence of Human Hermaphroditism," Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins
Hospital 97 (1955): 301-19, and John Money and Anke A. Ehrhardt, Man and
Woman, Boy and Girl (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). The sec-
ond work is widely regarded in the medical community as the definitive statement
on the heredity versus environment question on the development of sexual differ-
entiation and identification. The book, which approaches this problem using
studies of hermaphrodites and pseudohermaphrodites, is notable for its absolute
insistence on gendering children as either male or female. It is a fascinating docu-
ment of American bipolar attitudes toward sexual differentiation. Although
Money and Ehrhardt chronicle the powerful influence of environment on sexual
differentiation, they do not question the categories of male and female, nor do
they analyze the ways in which American culture has constructed these catego-
ries. For a different approach that deals with the cultural construction of gender,
see n. 24, below.
10. See B. F. Musallam, Sex and Society in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1983), chap. 3.
11. Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jauziyya, Tuhfat al-maudud bi-ahkam al-maulud (fourteenth
century; Damascus: Dar al-Kutub al-'Ilmiyya, 1971); also available in numerous
inexpensive Cairo editions. See also 'Arib b. Sa'id al-Katib al-Qurtubi (eleventh
century), Kitab khalq al-janin wa-tadbir al-habala wa'l-mauludin (Arabic with French
translation, Le livre de la generation du foetus et le traitement des femmes en-
ceintes et des nouveau-nes), chap. 4, p. 24 (Arabic); p. 32 (French).
12. The coherence between these various genres within the Islamic tradition
has been meticulously reconstructed by Musallam, Sex and Society. For this in-
terpretation of Quran 51:49, see al-Tabarsi, Jawami' al-Jami' (Beirut: Dar al-Adwa',
1985), 2:606-8, and the Tafsir al-Jalalain (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-'Ilmiyya, n.d.),
684.
13. Ibn Manzur, Lisan al-'Arab, s.v. "dh-k-r."
14. The legal material for this study is drawn largely from eleventh-century
sources. One of the longest discussions of hermaphrodites is found in al-Mabsut of
al-Sarakhsi (d. 1090), a lengthy encyclopaedic compendium of Hanafi law, one of
92 Paula Sanders

the four orthodox schools. Two other Hanafi texts, al-Mukhtasar of al-Quduri
(d. 1036) and al-Hidaya of al-Marghinani (d. 1196), although much shorter, cor-
roborate al-Sarakhsi. A fourth text, al-Mabsut ft fiqh al-imamiyya of Abu Ja'far al-
Tusi (d. 1067), is a Shi'i work. The minor variations in al-Tusi's text result from
slight differences in methodological principles between Sunni and Shi'i law; they
do not reflect a different conception of the hermaphrodite. See Peter Freimark,
"Zur Stellung des Zwitters in rabbinischen und islamischen Recht," Zeitschrift der
Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft 120 (1970): 84-102. A more extensive study
of the development of the law on hermaphrodites is Agostino Cilardo, "Historical
Development of the Legal Doctrine Relative to the Position of the Hermaphrodite
in the Islamic Law," The Search 7 (1986): 128-70. See also the few paragraphs de-
voted to hermaphrodites in Jean-Paul Charnay, L'ambivalence dans la culture arabe
(Paris, 1967), 184-85. Thanks to Fedwa Malti-Douglas for this reference.
15. Edward Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, s.v. "khanatha"; Lisan al-'Arab and
Muhit al-Muhit, s.v. "khanatha"; al-Quduri, al-Mukhtasar; al-Sarakhsi, al-Mabsut.
In Muhit al-Muhit, we find a fascinating use of the term khuntha applied to a
particular grammatical case: "Some grammarians call [the word] to which the ya'
al-mutakallim [a grammatical marker of the first person] is added 'khuntha/ claim-
ing that it is not mu'rab [desinentially inflected] because it follows the kasra [one of
the short vowels of Arabic] before the ya' and is not mabni [ending indeclinably]
because of the absence of one of the reasons of indeclinability. This is like a person
who is neither male nor female." In Arabic grammar a basic distinction is made
between words that can be inflected and those that are indeclinable. Thus the
comparison between a word that is neither declinable nor indeclinable and a
person who is neither male nor female is an apt one.
16. The hadith is transmitted by Najm al-din b. Hafs al-Nafasi, Talibat al-Talaba
fi al-istilahat al-fiqhiyya (Baghdad, A.H. 1211), 171, a twelfth-century dictionary of
legal terms. See also al-Tusi, al-Mabsut, 114. All block quotations, unless otherwise
noted, are from al-Sarakhsi, al-Mabsut (Beirut, 1986), vol. 30, chapters "K. fara'id
al-khuntha" and "Kitab al-khuntha," 91-114.
17. This was the suggestion of Avicenna in his Canon (al-Qanun), vol. 2, bk. 3,
p. 603. I am grateful to Basim Musallam for the reference.
18. Al-Sarakhsi based this on the legal principle of "the preponderance of
precedence in the event of opposition or equivalence." In defining sex, as in
determining the proper course of action in any given circumstance, previously
established legal principles were applied. No new principles of law were intro-
duced to accommodate the khuntha.
19. The Hanafi jurists Abu Yusuf and Muhammad al-Shaibani accepted this,
but Abu Hanifa rejected the argument on two counts: first, because the quantity of
urine indicated the width of the makhraj (the mabal, the urinary orifice) and no
consideration was given to that; second, because large or small quantity would be
manifest in the urine itself, not the mabal, which was the distinguishing organ.
These opinions were reported also by al-Quduri and al-Marghinani.
20. See Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., s.v. "baligh."
21. As al-Sarakhsi said, if sex was attributed to the khuntha on the basis of
urination from one of the mabals and it then urinr.ted from the other one, the
 Gendering the Ungendered Body 93

judgment "is not changed by urination from the other organ." He likened this
person to a man who presented evidence for his marriage to a woman and was
awarded the judgment, or to a judgment made about the lineage of a child on the
basis of certain evidence. The presentation of different evidence after the judg-
ment would not reverse it, following from the legal principle of "the prepon-
derance of precedence in the event of opposition or equivalence."
22. On one occasion, however, al-Sarakhsi mentioned that if none of the signs
appeared, the absence of breasts would indicate (legally) that it was a man. This
attribution of male sex on the basis of the absence of breasts is unique among these
texts.
23. The terms mushkil and ishkal are both derived from the triliteral root sh-k-l.
As used in the texts, ishkal seems to be a general term for ambiguity and is
interchangeable with ishtibah (dubiousness), whereas mushkil seems to be a tech-
nical legal term as well as a general term.
24. There is a large literature on the cultural construction of gender. Readers
will find a good introduction to the topic in Sherry Ortner and Harriet Whitehead,
Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981). See also Caroline Walker Bynum, Steven Har-
rell, and Paula Richman, eds., Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols
(Boston: Beacon, 1986). The introduction by Bynum is particularly useful. On
gender in historical analysis, see Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of
Historical Analysis," American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053-75. These works all
provide excellent introductions and voluminous references in the notes.
25. See Schacht, Islamic Law, 169-75, for a brief introduction to the topic.
26. When no clear evidence could be presented in a case, judges were permit-
ted to extract oaths from the parties involved. For a clear explanation of legal
procedure, including the presentation of testimony by witnesses and the use of
oaths, see Schacht, Islamic Law, 188-98, and Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., s.v.
"da'wa" (action at law), "kadi." Determining who is the plaintiff and who the
defendant in a case is particularly important in Islamic law because the rules of
evidence and presumption are different for the two parties. This determination
was often the crux of a particular case.
27. Modesty, and the related issues of segregation and veiling, have received
much attention recently from feminist scholars. See Valerie J. Hoffman-Ladd,
"Polemics on the Modesty and Segregation of Women in Contemporary Egypt,"
International Journal of Middle East Studies 19 (1987): 23-50; and Fatima Mernissi,
Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society (Cambridge,
Mass.: Schenkman, 1975).
28. When a Muslim pilgrim reaches the point at which he or she crosses over
into the territory approaching Mecca, the site of the Ka'ba, he or she enters a state
of ritual purity. No sexual relations are allowed at any time and special attire must
be donned by both men and women. See Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., s.v.
"ihram," for details.
29. For an excellent introduction to the topic of female slavery in Islam, see
Shaun Marmon, "Concubinage, Islamic," in Dictionary of the Middle Ages. The
master's sexual rights over his female slave, although broad, were not unlimited.
94 Paula Sanders

The same prohibitions regarding incest applied to the master and female slave as
to husband and wife.
Gender difference is fundamental to the different conception in Islamic law of
male and female slavery. Unlike the male slave, the female slave's primary role
was sexual. The formula "Your sexual organ is free" thus functioned legally to
manumit a female slave, but not a male slave.
30. In medieval and early modern Europe, physicians were integral to the
process of determining sex. See Datson and Park, "Hermaphrodites in Renais-
sance France."
31. See Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jauziyya, Tuhfat al-maudud bi-ahkam al-maulud, which
includes a long chapter on circumcision.
32. Divorce upon the fulfillment of a specific condition is permitted, though
discouraged, in Islam. See Schacht, Islamic Law, 163-66.
33. This is not to say that they thought, as modern feminism does, that the
science of biology itself was socially or culturally constructed, but that they con-
sidered the boundary between male and female to be important because it implied
a difference in social anatomy.
34. Concluding a marriage contract in the presence of witnesses is the only
legal act required in constituting a marriage in Islam. There are impediments to
marriage that result from close blood or milk ties, and so marriage is forbidden
with any of the incest-forbidden relatives (maharim), with the maharim of one's
wet nurse, or with women who are related to each other in forbidden degrees by
consanguinity, affinity, or fosterage.
Marriage contracts may be concluded on behalf of minors by their guardians or
fathers, and these marriages are consummated when the children reach puberty.
Even without consummation, however, these are valid marriages and establish
the rights of inheritance between husband and wife. All of these rules apply
equally to the khuntha.
35. Determining whether the marriage was defective or null affected the pos-
sible inheritance by either spouse.
36. This conservative tendency with respect to marriage must be taken into
consideration when trying to understand the divorce laws. The popular concep-
tion that divorce by repudiation is accomplished in Islam easily or without conse-
quences is misleading. Although technically possible, it is disapproved of, and
numerous Prophetic Traditions (hadiths) denounce the practice.
37. The available material on homosexuality in Islam is limited at present. The
basic legal position is outlined in the article "liwat" in Encyclopaedia of Islam, new
ed. References are ordinarily scattered; see James A. Bellamy, "Sex and Society in
Islamic Popular Literature," in al-Sayyid-Marsot, Society and the Sexes, 36-40; S. D.
Goitein, "The Sexual Mores of the Common People," ibid., 59-60, who mentions
the cult of the ephebes among the Jewish intelligentsia of Muslim Spain; and the
more expanded discussion in Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Commu-
nities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), vol. 5, chap. X.B.5, "Sex." John
Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), 194ff., compares medieval Islamic and Christian attitudes.
38. For a fascinating discussion of the common-sense view of different cultures
 Gendering the Ungendered Body 95

toward intersexuality, see Clifford Geertz, "Common Sense as a Cultural Sys-

tem," in his Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York:
Basic Books, 1983), 80-84, and Robert Edgerton, "Pokot Intersexuality: An East
African Example of the Resolution of Sexual Incongruity," American Anthropologist
66, no. 6, pt. 1 (1964): 1288-99.
This page intentionally left blank
II
The

Mamluk

Period
This page intentionally left blank
 Manners and Customs of Fourteenth-Century
6
Cairene Women: Female Anarchy versus Male

Shar'i Order in Muslim Prescriptive Treatises

HUDA LUTFI

Some of our worthy ancestors [al-salaf\ may God be pleased

with them said: "A woman is permitted three exits: one to the
house of the husband when she is married to him; one when
her parents die; and one when she is carried to her grave." By
God, listen to this salafi advice, and observe the kind of chaos
and corruption caused by women's frequent exits nowadays.
—Ibn al-Hajj
Egyptian Mamluk society in the mid-fourteenth century en-
joyed relative economic prosperity and political stability.1
Like other medieval societies, however, it experienced a
large share of poverty and physical pain. Both rich and poor
suffered from sickness, premature death, and low life expec-
tancies. In response to the hazards of recurrent diseases and
plagues, contemporary medical practices were largely sup-
plemented by popular superstitious belief in the power of
amulets, holy relics, and preservatives to bring about effec-
tive escape or relief from such common disasters. Here, the
all-important role of the dead or living sufi (mystic) saint was
sustained by popular belief that saint and shrine pilgrimage
could cure poverty and sickness and relieve the stressful
conditions of daily life. Hence saint shrines in urban commu-
nities to which pilgrims, especially women, brought their
supplications became ubiquitous. Daily routines and human
difficulties also were transcended through the celebration of
numerous religious festivities and tomb-visiting rituals,
which became characteristic features of everyday female life
in Egyptian cities.
I should like to thank Lila Abu-Lughod for the valuable remarks
she made on this chapter.

99
100 HudaLutfi

In their prescriptive literature and sermons, Muslim salafi scholars

made heavy and repeated attacks on these popular religious customs.2
Indeed, the scattered knowledge-we have of such popular practices is
primarily due to these Muslim scholars, who denounced them as harmful
innovations (bid'a). This is not to say that all religious scholars struggled
against these popular practices. In his prescriptive treatise al-Madkhal,
Ibn al-Hajj repeatedly blamed religious scholars (ulama) for the religious
ignorance of the masses.3 Appalled by the corrupt practices of the com-
moners (al-'awamm) and the vile habits of women, as well as by the
indifference and decadence of the Egyptian religious scholars, in his four-
volume treatise Ibn al-Hajj painstakingly demonstrated to his religious
colleagues the preponderance of innovations and abominations in Egyp-
tian Mamluk society, reminding them repeatedly of their sacred religious
duty to order the good and forbid the evil. Like a good Muslim scholar,
Ibn al-Hajj took on himself the task of writing a treatise that would expose
and denounce these popular practices, prescribing proper shar'i (legal)
rules in their place. Our scholar typically viewed any form of behavior not
enjoined by the Quran and without precedence in the sunna of the Proph-
et and his companions to be a vile bid'a that should be stamped out.
He especially deplored the immodest mingling of men and women on
any religious or social occasion. Ibn al-Hajj, like other salafi scholars, saw
a clear division between the public domain of men and the private do-
main of women. Neither should intrude into the other, and women's
proper place should be restricted to the private space of the household.
Ibn al-Hajj's firm belief in the exclusion of women from the outside world
of men was informed by a sexual ideology that viewed the presence of the
female body as threatening to the order of the male world. Accordingly,
any infringement of these spatial restrictions was considered by Ibn al-
Hajj to be an act promoting anarchy or chaos.
Nowhere can we better document the fear of the female so typical of
most formal Islamic discourse than in Ibn al-Hajj's treatise. In a revealing
statement, he tells us how the feminine should be viewed as the symbol
of corruption, defying shar'i order: "The origin of all chaos and corrup-
tion in society is one of three things: neglecting the advice of religious
scholars on matters regarding proper Muslim behavior; the infiltration of
base customs and traditions to the extent that they become the accepted
religious practices; and acceptance of the opinion of those whom the
Lawgiver, may God be pleased with him, has regarded as lacking in
religion and reason [that is, women]."4 Ibn al-Hajj thus attributed the
chaos in society to the prevalence of female ways. If we examine his
cultural biases, we see that he considered women to combine all three
causes of social anarchy: they are ignorant because they do not seek
religious knowledge; they are carriers of vile traditions; and this is due to
 Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women 101

their mental and physical deficiencies. In reiterating this view through-

out his treatise, Ibn al-Hajj quotes the notorious tradition attributed to the
Prophet: "You are lacking in mind and religion."5 He tells us that men are
less vulnerable to religious ignorance, not only because they are inher-
ently superior in mind and body, but because "men have more frequent
contact with religious scholars than women. This is so because women
are secluded and have been reared in ignorance, hence they are more
prone to adopt innumerable vile habits contrary to the shari'a."6 To rid
women of their ignorance, Muslim religious scholars must dedicate more
time to the task of educating them. Ironically, Ibn al-Hajj, who was partic-
ularly rigid about the rules of female exit, made an exception here: "It is
the duty of the husband to inform his wife of the relevant religious rules
when she is ignorant of them, but if he was ignorant of them himself, he
should seek someone to teach him, or he should permit her to go out to
seek her religious education."7
Like other Muslim religious and historical literature, Ibn al-Hajj's writ-
ings were inspired by a pious mentality that correlated the prevalence of
unislamic practices to the inevitable occurrence of disasters, as a sign of
divine wrath.8 Hence he warns Egyptian Muslims, especially women,
that if they continue to indulge in their unislamic practices and extrava-
gances they are bound to bring down Allah's punishment. This mentality
seems to have been exaggerated when women were involved, for they
were often chosen as easy scapegoats by religious scholars and rulers in
order to control female public behavior and explain away the real causes
behind political crises and catastrophes. We are told, for example, that
during the famine and plague of A.D. 1438 the Mamluk sultan Barsbay
conferred with the religious scholars about the causes behind these catas-
trophes, and they agreed that the primary cause was the appearance of
women in the streets. A decree was immediately issued ordering women
to stay home!9
But it was the earlier government of the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim that
was known for its notorious hostility to women's independence and
mobility outside their private spatial boundaries. The Mamluk historian
al-Maqrizi makes repeated references to al-Hakim's decrees forbidding
women to go out, and it is no coincidence that these anti-women state
injunctions were issued at times of crisis: droughts, famines, plagues,
and inflation. Women were ordered to stay home and were forbidden to
walk in the markets, to visit tombs of relatives or saints, and to go to
public baths; shoemakers were forbidden to make shoes for women.10
After much search for any sign of female protest against these measures
of state control, I found only a short anecdotal reference to an incident
that supposedly took place in response to al-Hakim's hostility toward
women. We are told that "one day the inhabitants of the Egyptian capital
102 HudaLutfi

came across an effigy made in the image of a veiled woman holding a

piece of paper insulting and cursing al-Hakim because he forbade women
from walking in the streets."11 For Ibn al-Hajj, it was not simply women's
manners and vile habits that needed to be strictly controlled to save the
moral integrity of the Muslim community; he considered commoners and
religious minorities, whose corrupting habits should be fought by good
Muslims, also to be social elements of chaos.12
To the feminist social historian, Ibn al-Hajj's treatise is important in
two respects. First, it allows us to explore the discrepancy between the-
oretical and actual restrictions on women. Throughout his treatise Ibn al-
Hajj systematically demonstrates the existing discrepancies between the
ideal and the real in medieval Egyptian society, showing that prescriptive
religious literature should not necessarily be taken as a reflection of real-
ity. Lower- and middle-class Egyptian Muslim women seem to have paid
little attention to the religious restrictions prescribed in this literature.
Egyptian women participated actively in public life and devised strat-
egies that enabled them to do so. Two classic female strategies that appear
to have been commonly used were the denial of sexual pleasure to and
the threat of separation from a husband who tried to exercise control over
a strong-willed wife. Cultural and religious restrictions, however, did
influence female behavior, most evident in modest dress and in the
efforts to separate women from men physically. Second, in denouncing
the existing manners and customs of Egyptian Muslims, Ibn al-Hajj inad-
vertently provides the historian with impressive data on the everyday life
of Egyptian men and women in the cities of Cairo and Misr. Most interest-
ing is his focus on the details concerning the lives of ordinary and obscure
people in Egyptian Mamluk society, which are systematically ignored in
the historical literature. But to what extent can we rely on Ibn al-Hajj's
historical data? This is a difficult question, since most of the information
he gives cannot be found elsewhere in the historical literature. Recogniz-
ing that Ibn al-Hajj's description reflects the viewpoint of a Muslim re-
ligious scholar who looked upon women's behavior as dangerous, we can
nevertheless read his account against the grain to make it reveal a descrip-
tion of Cairo life of the period, a picture corroborated by other accounts,
like that of al-Maqrizi.
The researcher faces a challenge in trying to make sense of the scat-
tered and irregular data found in al-Madkhal. Working to discover and
reconstruct the female experience in medieval Muslim culture, I use gen-
der as the central category of analysis, according to which historical data
are reconstructed and refocused. What did Cairene women do in their
daily life? What was the nature of male-female interaction? Besides these
important questions, the conception of the opposition between the pub-
lic and private domains is used to clarify our understanding of the female
 Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women 103

experience, and to show how far women abided by the restrictive rules of
space. Working with al-Madkhal as a prescriptive treatise may also aid us
in examining the use of gender to impose order and stability in a Muslim
society. Here, women were typically viewed as perpetuators of anarchy,
whose power needed to be broken by the shari'a.
Like other medieval urban cultures, Egyptian Muslim culture viewed
the basic role of women to be within the boundaries of the household,
caring for the family and managing household matters. Among the mid-
dle and upper-middle classes, this view was reinforced by an ideology of
strict segregation, where the female was asked not to overstep her spatial
boundaries. Ibn al-Hajj was a strong protagonist of this view, as is evident
in his bitter criticism of urban Egyptian women, who did not adhere
strictly to these rules: women belonging to the lower, middle, and upper-
middle orders were often seen crossing the private boundaries of the
home into the public world of men. In this regard, our scholar repeatedly
admonishes the Egyptian man, be it husband, father, brother, or re-
ligious scholar, to prevent anarchic behavior by women on the street: he
explains to them the rules of going out (adab al-khuruj) according to the
sunna. A woman should go out only for a necessity, and if she does, she
should go in long and unattractive garments. If women walk in the
streets, they should walk close to the walls of houses, in order to make
way for men. In accordance with the Prophet's saying, Ibn al-Hajj ad-
monishes men to make the road difficult and narrow for women, and he
exclaims: "Look how these norms have been neglected in our days. . . .
She goes out in the streets as if she were a shining bride, walking in the
middle of the road and jostling men. They have a manner of walking that
causes the pious man to withdraw closer to the walls, in order to make
way for them. Other men, however, would jostle and humor them delib-
erately."13 Heedless of such warnings, women went to the markets to
purchase their needs, and they seem to have done that regularly on two
important market days: the suq (market) of Cairo on Mondays, and the
suq of Misr on Sundays.14 The favorite spots of women were the jeweler's
shop, that of the cloth merchant, and that of the shoemaker. According to
Ibn al-Hajj's description, women would sit in shops for several hours,
conversing and humoring the shop owners, hoping for a good bargain.15
In this regard, a long piece of advice is delivered to the shopkeeper,
warning him of female corrupting behavior:

And he must be careful when a woman comes to buy something, to

look at her behavior, for if she was one of those women dressed up
in delicate clothes, exposing her wrists, or some of her adornments,
and speaking in a tender and soft voice, he should leave the selling
transaction and give her his back until she leaves the shop peace-
104 HudaLutfi

fully. . . .This is a great affliction nowadays, for one rarely sees the
shop of the cloth merchant without the presence of women dressed
in delicate clothes which expose their adornment, and behaving as
if they were with their husbands, or members of their family.16

To secure their household needs, women of the city also dealt with
male peddlers who facilitated selling and buying transactions in residen-
tial areas distant from the market. Even though Ibn al-Hajj praises the
peddler for transporting necessities to the women in their houses, thus
protecting the harim (wives) of Muslims, he criticizes women's casual
behavior in dealing with these peddlers.17 The transport of such impor-
tant items as water, milk, oil, flour, and flax entailed regular visits to
homes, which in turn must have led to the development of some degree
of familiarity between the peddler and his female client.18 Ibn al-Hajj
insists that rules should be followed: women should not be alone with a
peddler; should not come to the door unveiled, as was their custom; and
should not get involved in long arguments over selling and buying.19
"And it is a great wonder that many of their men, who are supposed to be
superior in mind and piety, arrive to their houses to find the peddler of
flax, or whatever, discussing with their women matters regarding buying
and selling. And the men do not forbid what is going on ... and their
answer to this is to say: 'I do not accuse my wife of anything, because I
trust her and do not believe that infidelity crosses her mind/"20 In de-
fense of their casual behavior, middle- and upper-middle-class women
produced a typical class argument: to these women, such men were of an
inferior status and therefore ineligible as sexual partners.21 To this argu-
ment Ibn al-Hajj retorts: "They invent their own rules, arguing that men
such as the flax seller and the water-carrier are not men to be ashamed
of ... they are not ashamed of slaves or commoners either, because they
view them as being too inferior in status. This attitude has become wide-
spread among many women nowadays/'22
Within their private households, women came into constant contact
with neighbors and relatives of both sexes. Ibn al-Hajj admonishes men
to forbid women from socializing together, as they customarily do, for
fear that they will corrupt one another. Moreover, he criticizes women's
free mingling with male relatives and neighbors, thus breaking the rules
of sexual segregation within the household: "They constantly mingled
with male cousins and neighbors, they would joke and converse with one
another in isolation; as for the male and female neighbors, and those
raised together since childhood, you cannot find much difference in
female treatment between the husband and these men, except in sexual
matters."23
In the daily household scene, women seem to have been holders of
 Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women 105

power in domestic affairs. To denounce their un-shar'i ways, Ibn al-Hajj

relates some of their daily habits in the house. He expresses great suspi-
cions regarding the common practice of Cairene women whereby, the
wife reserves for the husband his special food and eating utensils, which
are not to be used by other members of the family. Our scholar considered
this contrary to the sunna, which requires that eating meals should be an
occasion shared by the whole family, but he also feared that the practice
was a subterfuge by which women could perform magical artifices
against their unpliable husbands.24 Female superstitious beliefs also
added special significance and order to women's daily chores and prac-
tices. "On each day they performed specific chores that could not be
undertaken on other days, and they believed that any infringements of
these arrangements might bring about bad luck." On Saturdays, for exam-
ple, women would not purchase or cook fish, buy soap or wash clothes, or
go to the public bath. Sunday was a day of rest; women performed no
domestic chores on that day. These customs, Ibn al-Hajj remarks, were
copied from Jews and Christians and were hence unislamic. On Wednes-
days, milk was not allowed to be purchased; on Mondays, Tuesdays, and
Thursdays, women performed the necessary domestic chores and pur-
chased necessities for the household. On Fridays, they rested from spin-
ning and combing flax, probably to spend more time with their families
when the men were off from work as well.25
Believing that the performance of specific domestic practices on spe-
cial religious occasions would bring about prosperity and health for their
families, Cairene women followed these practices closely. The purchas-
ing and burning of incense, for example, was a must on the feast of
'Ashura; they believed this to bring blessing for the whole year, cure
sickness, and ward off the evil eye.26 Similarly, women bought milk on
the eve of the Islamic new year to ensure household prosperity. On
equinoctial occasions, both men and women, relatives and neighbors,
picked camomile flowers, reciting magical formulas while cutting the
plants. Wrapped in paper dyed with saffron, the camomile was then kept
in a box in the house to bring affluence to all family members.27 Another
domestic tradition, practiced by some women, was the refusal to do any
housecleaning during the absence of a male member of the family, in the
belief that if they did, the traveler might never return.28 These and other
female daily habits most probably were carried over from Egyptian or
Coptic traditions, which Ibn al-Hajj considered harmful innovations, but
which may have served the important function of giving women a feeling
of more security and control over their daily lives.
In addition to their regular domestic chores as mothers and wives,
lower-class Cairene women, especially the older ones, contributed a sig-
nificant service to the households of the middle and upper-middle
106 HudaLutfi

classes: they safeguarded the rules of sexual segregation and the bound-
aries of female territory, so valued by Muslim cultural norms. Ironically,
Ibn al-Hajj, who repeatedly criticizes Egyptian women for being out too
often in the streets, commends the services that female peddlers contrib-
uted in protecting the chastity of the harim: "And there must be female
peddlers to pass by houses in order to carry the dough to the baker, so as
to protect the harim of the Muslims."29 Lower-class women performed
other valuable services to the harims of urban households: they were the
official mourner (al-na'iha), the undertaker (al-ghasila), the midwife (al-
qabila), the barber (al-sani'a), the bath attendant (al-ballana), and the expe-
rienced female doctor.30 Uninhibited by the strict rules of female segrega-
tion, these women moved around in the public space of men. We are told
that they even used the precincts of mosques to sell their yarn, shouting
and bargaining with their male dealers for a better price. Ibn al-Hajj
complains that the women abused the sanctity of the mosque, "for the
house of Allah is not a place for selling goods, or a place to bring children
who will defile its purity."31
Throughout al-Madkhal, Ibn al-Hajj stresses repeatedly that the Mus-
lim man should be responsible for the proper shar'i behavior of his
females, and he complains that in actuality women were left unguided
and unrestricted, inventing and following their own ways.32 He says that
these unislamic manners can be observed in the female customs associ-
ated with wedding celebrations, divorces, eating, sexual habits, rituals of
purity, modes of dress and adornment, birth and death rituals, as well as
in social and religious festivities. "As for what they did in wedding cere-
monies, do not ask about the innumerable violations that they invented,
for what they invented in childbirth is a drop in a bucket, compared to
what they do in marriage ceremonies."33 Unfortunately, Ibn al-Hajj gives
us only a few details of what women did in marriage celebrations. Women
indulged in excessive gaiety, producing their trilling cries of joy, clapping,
dancing, and singing to the beats of the tambourine.34 Moreover, wed-
ding celebrations involved drinking wine, listening to unveiled female
singers, and the presence of unveiled women during the festivities.35
Of divorce practices prevalent in urban Egyptian society, Ibn al-Hajj
mentions only those that violated the shari'a. He severely criticizes the
widespread practice of repeated divorces, exceeding the Islamic legal
limit of three consecutive divorces permitted to the husband. He says
that certain men performed the function of a muhallil (husband of conve-
nience) for a fixed period and fee, after which the wife could go back to
her former but real husband.36 According to Ibn al-Hajj, mother,
daughter, and granddaughter solicited the services of the same muhallil
in order to go back to their respective husbands, who had divorced them
three consecutive times. "Here is yet another example of female chaotic
 Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women 107

behavior, which defies all the rules of the shari'a, for how can it be that
mother, daughter and granddaughter are permitted to marry the same
man/'37 When disputes between husband and wife got too complicated,
women resorted to the help of the judge, who held his court in the
precincts of the quarter's mosque. Prior to the court hearing, women
waited inside the mosque, discussing their cases with their agents and
husbands. Here again, Ibn al-Hajj states that women overstepped their
boundaries, "for the mosque is surely not a place for marital squab-
bles/'38 Divorced or widowed women were more vulnerable, because of
their repeated exploitation by the male witnesses testifying to their mar-
riage contracts. Ibn al-Hajj tells us that a widow was often forced to pay
the witness any sum he demanded so that he might agree to testify as to
the correct sum of her deferred dowry.39
When it came to sexual matters, Ibn al-Hajj placed the onus on the
man, not the woman, for the female was viewed as a passive body that
needed to be sexually satisfied by the man. Contrary to the common habit
of sleeping in ordinary clothes, he advises both man and wife to sleep in
the nude, as indicated in the sunna.40 This, he argues, gives pleasure to
the woman and allows for greater sexual gratification. Ibn al-Hajj crit-
icizes the sexual attitude of the Egyptian man, who commonly ap-
proaches his wife without warning and achieves his sexual satisfaction
without paying attention to her sexual desires. Sunni precedent requires
sensitivity in sexual matters from the husband. Ibn al-Hajj states that
although female sexuality is stronger than that of the male, it is difficult
for the man to sense her sexual desire because of her haya' (modesty). But
the wife's desire, he argues, can be sensed from her special adornments:
her makeup, perfume, and finery. Ibn al-Hajj also severely condemned
the common practice of anal sex. According to the sunna, this is almost
equivalent to the sin of homosexuality.41 Moreover, anal sex gives no
satisfaction to the wife, thus leaving her sexually ungratified, which in
turn makes her a potential sexual threat. The main concern of Ibn al-Hajj
here was that female sexuality left unsatisfied within the boundaries of
marriage would result in sexual chaos in Muslim society; therefore, the
woman's sexual desires must be satisfied within marriage.
Both husbands and wives apparently practiced the habit of conjuring
the mental image of a beloved during the sexual act and imagining the
beloved, and not the spouse, to be their sexual partner. Ibn al-Hajj be-
lieved this practice to be tantamount to adultery, which would inevitably
lead to much sexual chaos. He blamed the practice on the mingling be-
tween men and women in Egyptian urban society and on the habit of
indulging in sexual talk in male and female gatherings.42 He describes
another sexual behavior that seems to have been commonly practiced by
some Egyptian wives: "This is an ugly and base habit; when the wife
108 Huda Lutfi

comes to bed, she takes something from the husband, most probably in
addition to her nafaqa (legal allowance), which varies according to his
financial situation, and is paid as a bed fee (haqq al-firash)."& If we accept
what Ibn al-Hajj tells us about the sexual insensitivity of husbands, how-
ever, we can perhaps understand why some wives demanded a "bed fee"
before going to bed with their husbands.
Female rituals of purity were a subject of great concern to our scholar,
and in Islamic culture these are given much importance because they
are closely related to female sexuality and religiosity. The sunna of the
Prophet prohibited sexual intercourse and demanded abstention from re-
ligious obligations during the period of menstruation. Resumption of sex-
ual intercourse and religious duties after termination of the menstrual pe-
riod then entailed an elaborate and formal ritual of purification. Ibn al-Hajj
viewed the ritual of female purity with utmost seriousness, and to correct
the faulty and confused rituals of purity practiced by Cairene women, he
wrote two long sections on the proper rituals of purity to be followed by
men and women.44 Our scholar observes that Egyptians in general did
not really care about religious formalities, but more about worldly mat-
ters. Both men and women were to blame: "It is a wonder to see that most
of them pay a thousand to buy a house or to build one themselves, but
they do not bother to build a space for ablution, let alone washing. . . .
The women encourage the men to neglect this duty, as though it was a
conspiracy between them."45 As a result, says Ibn al-Hajj, a woman does
not have the place or utensils to perform her proper ablutions after the
sexual act or menstruation. Furthermore, women who were too shy to go
to the public bath to perform their ablutions ended up neglecting their
religious duties of fasting and praying.46 Ibn al-Hajj argues, however,
that even women who performed their rituals of ablution did so in a
faulty manner. Some women, for example, believed that the menstrual
period lasted for one week, and whether the blood disappeared or not,
they proceeded to perform their ablution ritual and resumed their re-
ligious duties and normal sexual relations. Ibn al-Hajj considered this a
heretical practice, for it contradicted the rules of Allah and his Prophet,
and a Muslim was in danger of losing his religion if he had sexual inter-
course with a menstruating woman. Equally condemned was the com-
mon female practice of purification in which the woman waited until her
menstrual blood disappeared, on the following day bought her soap, the
day after washed her clothes, and on the third day performed her ab-
lution and prayers. According to Ibn al-Hajj, such a practice allowed
women to waste two days of prayers.47 He further criticized the ignorance
of women who went to the public baths to perform their major ritual of
ablution without performing the ritual of pronouncing al-niyya al-
shar'iyya (the shar'i intention), which should accompany the act of ablu-
 Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women 109

tion. Ibn al-Hajj also severely criticized the common female belief that a
woman could not attain purity after menstruation unless she washed the
interior of her vulva. This was not only contradictory to the sunna, he
states, but was also sexually corrupting because it encouraged the
woman to touch a highly excitable area of her body.48
Women, we are told, were also inconsistent when it came to rituals of
purity during the obligatory fast. Some went on fasting in spite of their
menstruation, arguing that it was more difficult to make up their lost
period of fasting at a time when everybody else was eating normally.
Others broke their fast for the first three days of their menstrual period
only, claiming that after the third day fasting becomes obligatory, despite
the presence of menstrual blood. Furthermore, women who fasted dur-
ing menstruation did not always perform their regular prayers. "And
when I ordered one of the women to perform her prayers, she exclaimed,
'do you find me an old woman?' As if prayers were not an obligation on
the young." Ibn al-Hajj even criticized women who adopted stricter but
not necessarily Islamic measures of purity, as they went so far as to
restrain themselves from touching food or coming near the pantry.49
Female nudity in the public baths also upset Ibn al-Hajj: "When
women performed their ablution, Muslim, Jewish and Christian women
pranced about the place naked, and women there are so bold as to scold
the more timid females who wished to cover from the navel to the
knees."50 To prevent such chaotic female behavior, women were told not
to perform their major ritual of purity in the public bath, but to perform it
instead in their homes. Typically, Ibn al-Hajj considered all these female
chaotic practices a result of the ignorance of women, who seem to have
been continually inventing their own religious rituals to suit their daily
patterns of work and socializing.
Muslim prescriptive literature viewed the female body primarily as the
repository of male sexual pleasure, and hence a source otfitna (tempta-
tion) that should be concealed; Ibn al-Hajj's treatise is no exception.
Hence, female clothes were seen to serve the crucial function of conceal-
ment. Properly concealed, women might cease to be a threat to the social
order. Yet female clothes were also viewed as serving the function of
adornment for the husband's sexual pleasure. Thus, in contrast to men,
women were legally permitted to use such luxurious items of adornment
as gold, silver, and silk: "For it is as the hadith stated, they are deficient in
mind and religion, and therefore, they are permitted to use silk, gold,
silver and other such items because of their nuqsan [deficiency]. As for the
man, he is the repository of perfection, God has perfected and adorned
him, so he is not allowed to indulge in the adornment permitted to those
who are deficient." Men were also warned not to emulate women in their
mode of dress lest they become effeminate: dress style should enhance
NO HudaLutfi

the segregation between the sexes.51 Ibn al-Hajj's descriptions of female

modes of dress in Cairo give us an insight into how women actually
dressed there, and to what extent Cairene women abided by the Islamic
rules of female dress. The basic female dress in Cairo was the long and
loose thaub or qamis (chemise), under which long and baggy sirwals
(baggy trousers) were worn; the head and neck were normally covered
by long and ample headcloths. But Ibn al-Hajj tells us that instead of the
wide and ample clothes that were designed to conceal the contours of
the female body, Cairene women wore a tight and short chemise, which
defined the body and was contrary to the prescribed shar'i dress.
"Women wore the short and tight chemise which only reached the knees;
as for the trousers, worn under the chemise, these were worn far below
the navel, exposing that part to the eye, unless the upper garment was
made of thick and ample material."52 But it seems that women wore their
trousers only outside the house; at home they wore just the chemise. Ibn
al-Hajj considered this to be defying the shari'a, which prohibits the
woman from exposing the forbidden parts of her body to anyone but her
husband. The wide short sleeves were another bid'a invented by Cairene
woman. Ibn al-Hajj exclaims, "if a woman is dressed in this manner, and
she raises her arms, her underpits and her breasts are exposed, which is
the behavior of wicked women who wish to expose their bodies in public
(al-mutabarrijat)."53 Equally criticized were women who stood on the roof-
tops, dressed in the short chemise without trousers. Ibn al-Hajj also
condemned the fashionable 'imama (turban), for it was not only ugly but
contrary to the shari'a as well, because it concealed the woman's beauty
from her husband and prevented her from performing her proper ablu-
tions.
Ibn al-Hajj tells us that the female body most desired by men was
the voluptuous and fleshy body, and to secure male attention Cairene
women seemed to work hard at nurturing a plump body. To do so, some
women abstained from Ramadan fasting; some families went so far as to
discourage their young unmarried daughters from fasting in order to
attract more male suitors. Ibn al-Hajj states that female obsession with
corpulence led some women to indulge in incessant eating, even if they
were not hungry. In addition to wasting food, our scholar complains,
some of these women became so obese that they could no longer perform
their prayers or ablutions properly.54 Ibn al-Hajj criticized such practices
of female adornment as painting the eyebrows and tattooing the skin
because they too interfered with the proper performance of rituals of
ablution. As for the removal of facial hair and splitting and filing teeth to
render them white, we are told that these should not be performed by a
male barber, as was normally done: "A strange man should not be permit-
ted to touch the lips and face of a woman because it leads to corrupting
 Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women 111

behavior."55 Ibn al-Hajj did not criticize such practices because he op-
posed female adornment, for he stressed the importance of the wife's
duty to adorn herself for her husband. Alas, this was not the case among
most Cairene women: "At home she usually dresses in her worst clothes,
pays no attention to her looks, and leaves her hair uncombed. She allows
herself to be in such a state of dirt and sweat that her husband shuns
her. . . . But when she goes out she dresses in her best clothes. Adorned
and perfumed, she puts on her jewelry, wearing her ankle-bracelet over
her sirwal."56 Competition in female adornment was most intense when
women went to the public bath. There women would take their expen-
sive clothes and jewelry to show off after they were finished with their
bath. Ibn al-Hajj complains bitterly because of the numerous problems
that ensued between husband and wife—she demanding that he should
buy her expensive clothes to match those of her female friends. We are
told that the situation could become complicated, particularly if the hus-
band could not afford the expensive tastes of his wife.
The common but significant event of childbirth was and still is a cause
of much celebration among Egyptian families and particularly among
women. In medieval Egyptian society, where female fertility was highly
prized and child mortality was often acute, a successful delivery was
naturally celebrated with the utmost joy and publicity. The event inspired
a host of rituals, all aimed to bring good health and fortune to the baby
and the mother, as well as joy to the whole family. Typically, Ibn al-Hajj
launched severe attacks on these female innovations, which he found
to be meaningless, extravagant, and without precedent in the Muslim
sunna. He was, therefore, unhappy to see men contributing to and par-
ticipating in these wicked rituals: "And men do not scold them, on the
contrary, they seem to be pleased with all this, and encourage it. This is
also true of the religious scholars and mystics, they also celebrate this in
their homes, and invite people for the celebrations/'57
During the process of delivery and the festivities consequent on the
birth of the child, the midwife played the leading role. Ibn al-Hajj, ob-
sessed as he was with female impurities, warned husbands of the un-
shar'i practices of the midwife, who touches the baby and its clothes with
hands soiled by the impure blood of delivery. "And they do worse than
this, they smear the baby with the impure blood on their fingers, explain-
ing that it is good for this and that/' If the midwife was dealing with a
difficult delivery, she would mix soft bread with mouse stools and stuff it
into the mouth of the mother, claiming that this would help ease the
pain.58
When the baby was born, loud and long-drawn-out shrills were heard
everywhere in the house, as a manifestation of female joy. Music, danc-
ing, and an atmosphere of gaiety followed, and a variety of special dishes
112 Huda Lutfi

was served to the family and neighbors of the community. This, Ibn al-
Hajj tells us, went on for seven days; every time a woman came to express
her congratulations, the song and dance would start all over again. To
publicize the happy event, trumpets and pipes were blown in front of the
house door, inviting neighbors and friends to participate in the joyful
atmosphere. Our scholar remarks that these practices were so ingrained
in people's daily lives that they considered them as important as religious
rituals.
Ritual celebrations on the seventh day after delivery (al-subu') were
especially important, as they signified the safe passage of the newly born
into the world.59 An atmosphere of feasting was created by the women of
the house; various kinds of rich sweet dishes were served to visitors and
friends, and whole dishes of nuts and candies were readily available
around the house.60 On the eve of the subu', women of the family partici-
pated in various rituals reserved for the occasion. Items of special mean-
ing were collected and placed near the baby's head. In the morning, some
of these items were offered to relatives, neighbors, and the poor, in order
to bring baraka (blessing) for the baby. Another important ritual, per-
formed before removal of the umbilical cord and aimed to bring benedic-
tion for the baby, was to wrap its head with a cloth on which the Quranic
verse of Yasin was written with saffron. For protection against illness, the
important ritual of the umbilical cord was attended by all the newborn
babies of the neighborhood. Some mothers kept the knife used on the
occasion close to the baby's head, and carried it while they worked
around the house. This went on for forty days and was believed to protect
the mother against the evil spirits. The subu' festivities culminated in a
joyous ceremony in which mother, baby, midwife, female relatives, and
friends participated. Candles were lit, and the mother, elegantly dressed
in new clothes, marched close to the midwife, who carried the baby in a
tour all over the house. Meanwhile, a woman relative walked in front of
the midwife with a plate of salt mixed with cumin and saffron, which she
sprinkled right and left over the participants. Incense, prepared specially
for the ritual, was burned to ward off the evil spirits and to protect mother
and child against disease. For this happy occasion, the father bought new
clothes for all members of the family and new furnishings for the house,
adding to the spirit of joy and renewal.61
Like those of childbirth, death and funerary rituals were given great
importance by women in Cairo. Historically, ancient Egyptian death ritu-
als were known to have been quite elaborate and complicated, under-
taken primarily for the spiritual welfare of the deceased soul and to ease
the adjustment necessary to accommodate the event of death.62 Some of
these rituals may have been carried over to later historical periods, since
both the Coptic and Islamic religions, like ancient Egyptian religions,
 Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women I 13

emphasize the importance of life after death. Women followed these

ancient traditions more closely than men. Ibn al-Hajj denounced the
numerous "innovations" in this area, and by way of guidance he devoted
a long section to proper shar'i rituals of death.
When death befell a family member, the women of the household,
especially those closest to the dead person, confronted the event with
rituals of rejection. Social and religious inhibitions were little regarded,
and the women gave vent to their sorrow and pain in a most vehement
way: "Women expose their faces and spread their hair, they blacken both
face and body, and lament and wail in loud, shrieking voices. They heap
earth on their heads, and place chains around their necks, and stain their
houses in black."63 The most important funerary ritual was the process of
body purification. In the case of female corpses, this task was undertaken
by a woman specialist (al-ghasila). Ibn al-Hajj describes the dramatic
scenario that occurred when the women of the house saw the ghasila
approaching the house: "When the ghasila enters the house, the women
give vent to a loud scream (al-saiha al-'uzma); they pour insults and beat-
ings on her. The ghasila, aware of this female tradition, is on her guard,
and tries to hide from them. They shout at her, 'you are the face of
calamity/ and in response, she says, T have seen the calamity in your
house/ Eventually, they allow her to perform the washing ritual, and in
turn, she admonishes them, and reminds them that death is God's
will."64 Following the meticulous cleansing of the body, the ghasila re-
cites formulas of praise for the dead soul, which are followed by the ritual
of shrouding the corpse. Contrary to the Islamic tradition, which leaves
the face uncovered, Egyptians shrouded the whole body from head to
toe, just as their ancient ancestors did.65
After the body was properly shrouded, it was moved from the house
to the bier, and here another farewell female shriek was heard as mem-
bers of the family stood by to see the corpse leave the house. The imam
(prayer leader) of the closest mosque then usually led a collective prayer,
in which men and women prayed for the comfort and peace of the dead
soul. This was followed by a lengthy funeral procession, in which re-
ligious and Quranic chanting was performed. "Walking behind their
men, women performed their usual ritual of collective wailing and
shrieking. They walk about oblivious of proper female modesty, striking
their faces in lamentation."66
On the morning following the death, men and women of the family
usually went for lengthy visits to the tomb of their dead relative, using the
house inside the graveyard for lodging. Food offerings formed an impor-
tant part of Egyptian funerary rituals, and women of the family cooked
food for three consecutive nights after the death. On the third evening
special rituals of commemoration took place around the tomb. Baffled by
114 Huda Lutfi

these feastlike practices, Ibn al-Hajj remarks that they seemed more like
wedding celebrations than death rituals. Male and female relatives and
friends congregated to feast on a large variety of food and to listen to
Quranic reciters and mystical chantings. In addition, male and female
preachers were hired to relate admonishing stories to this audience.67
A period of intensive mourning followed, and it was the women of the
family who mourned most passionately. During the mourning period
immediately after the death, close female relatives of the deceased stayed
home to receive condolences from female relatives and friends. A na'iha
(professional wailer) was hired to intensify the atmosphere of mourning
in the house: leading female relatives and friends to the beats of the
tambourine, the wailer orchestrated a powerful scene of lamentation. Ibn
al-Hajj informs us that women indulged in these scenes, in defiance of
the shari'a, for several days and nights after the death.68 Mourning con-
tinued for at least one year, during which the women of the family wore
black, the color of sorrow, and abstained from all forms of adornment.
After the year of mourning was over, women prepared for the period of
dissolving sorrow (fakk al-huzn). This meant that they could go to the
public bath, apply henna stain, and use other female embellishments.69
This did not mean that women forgot their dead. In the hope of finding
comfort and relief from their daily problems, women spent a great deal of
time visiting the tombs of their dead relatives and favorite saints. Tomb
visiting was also an important aspect of religious festivities; on those
occasions men and women spent all morning and most of the afternoon
in the company of their dead relatives or favorite saints.70 Ibn al-Hajj
denounced women's tomb visiting, and he quotes a Prophetic tradition
supporting his view: "God curses women who visit tombs."71 Being op-
posed to women's crossing forbidden boundaries outside their homes,
he viewed their frequent visiting of tombs as a cause of great evil and
corruption: "Observe, may God forgive us and forgive you, what the
women have invented in connection with these visits. They have allo-
cated for each shrine a specific day of the week, so that most of their
weekdays are used to obtain their wicked desires. . . . On Mondays,
they visit the shrine of al-Husain; on Tuesdays and Saturdays, they visit
al-Sayyida Nafisa; Thursdays and Fridays were dedicated to visiting the
tombs of other holy saints and the tombs of their dead."72 Ibn al-Hajj was
very critical of Cairene women's conduct on the way to and from the
cemeteries, because they violated all the shar'i rules of sexual segrega-
tion. We are told that to reach the cemeteries, women hired the services of
a donkey owner who was willing to make the round trip. As the woman
rode behind the man on the donkey, much touching occurred between
the two people: "Her hands would be on his shoulder, and his hand
would be on her thighs, talking to one another as though they were
 Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women 115

husband and wife."73 Here Ibn al-Hajj remarks that whereas the feminine
nature inclines toward chaotic and corrupt behavior, men are expected to
take corrective measures to control the behavior of their women. But
Cairene men disappointed him repeatedly: "The strange thing is that the
husband and other men see all this and know of it, but do little about it.
Even though this female behavior entails the forbidden, all those people
who watch are silent; they make no comments, and do not even display
any signs of Islamic jealousy (ghaira islamiyya)." In spite of the threats of a
pious husband, however, the wife insisted on having her own way. We
are told that if the husband tried to stop his wife from visiting the tombs,
she would refuse, threatening him with separation or denial of sexual
pleasures. The dispute could lead to enmity and beating and ultimately
reach the judge's court.74
Tomb visiting was most popular on the eve of Friday, especially during
the full moon. Men and women often went to the cemeteries on Thursday
evenings, spent all of Friday there, and returned on Saturday. Spending
the night in the cemeteries was usually facilitated by the presence of
houses within the precincts of graveyards; a tradition that Ibn al-Hajj
found ugly and corrupting. Tomb visiting was also favored on special
religious feasts.75 During these visits, lights and fire were kindled and the
Quran was chanted. Women sang and played the tambourine, and both
men and women joined to dispel the darkness of death, receiving comfort
from the presence of the dead soul.76 At the end of their visits men and
women would open an individual dialogue with the dead saint or rela-
tive, telling him or her their problems and asking for assistance in fulfill-
ing their needs.77
Cairene women also enjoyed participating in popular religious fes-
tivals. These became so popular that the ruling elite found it important to
participate in their celebration.78 Ibn al-Hajj mentions many of these
festivals, both Coptic and Muslim, and in doing so denounced the cor-
rupt manners of Cairenes.79 During these festivals, women mingled with
men in the mosques, the streets, and the precincts of the cemetery. Ibn al-
Hajj found women's presence in the mosques most offensive. "Women
should be isolated in a place distant from men, contrary to what happens
today. They mingle with men, and on feast days you find the mosque
crowded with women."80 On these religious occasions, sufi orders held
intense public celebrations, in which women and men participated.
However, private celebrations were also held separately for both men
and women. The female sessions, privately held in a home, were nor-
mally orchestrated by a female sufi (shaikha) who led the women in their
collective experience of chanting, clapping, dancing, and playing music.
In addition, the shaikha preached and told stories to her female audience:
"The shaikha was also an interpreter of God's book, she interprets and
116 HudaLutfi

relates stories of prophets, adds and deletes, often committing blatant

blasphemies with nobody to correct or guide her. I have been told that she
did so in the house of one of the respectable religious scholars, and no
one corrected her; on the contrary, they were generous with her."81
Women also apparently could be initiated into sufi orders headed by
women shaikhas. Some of these shaikhas required their female initiates
to wear the sufi woolen garb and to free themselves from matrimonial
bonds. Viewing these female practices as contrary to the shari'a, Ibn al-
Hajj demanded that the shaikha be reprimanded and her ways reformed:
"But alas, many respected scholars speak of her virtues, praise her, and
invite her to perform the dhikr [mystical practice] in their congregations,
and even visit her in her house. As for the other shaikhas who do not
wear the woolen garments, they commit more vile imperfections that are
too many to enumerate and too ugly to mention/'82 In other maulids
(religious birthday feasts), the female sufis headed by their shaikha
would recite the Quran and perform the dhikr collectively before male
sufi groups. Moreover, men and women belonging to some popular sufi
orders seem to have established bonds of fraternity. "These orders estab-
lish covenants of fraternity between men and women without disapprov-
ing or hiding i t . . . they went so far as to tolerate women sitting close to
men, claiming that they are the spiritual children of their shaikh, and
once women became the spiritual sisters of men they did not need to veil
themselves from them."83 Dhikr sessions held by the more popular sufi
orders during the various maulids were less restricted by rules of sexual
segregation; women behaved more freely among the sufis, throwing off
their veils of modesty when they were around their holy men. The visit of
sufi orders during maulids initiated a communal spiritual atmosphere
among the inhabitants of the quarter. Uttering shrills of joy, women
would go out unveiled to welcome the men of Allah and to offer them free
food and accommodations. In the evenings, men and women from the
quarter engaged in a collective spiritual dance inspired by sufi singing
and chanting. Predictably, Ibn al-Hajj disapproved strongly of these sufi
aberrations.
In addition to the numerous Muslim and Coptic festivals in which
Cairene women participated, the city of Cairo offered many other oppor-
tunities for social entertainment: lush parks, scenic sites by the banks of
the river, and pleasant boat rides.84 According to Ibn al-Hajj's and al-
Maqrizi's descriptions, the favorite spots of recreation were the scenic
sites built by the shores of the Nile and the ponds of the city. Men,
women, and families spent their recreation days enjoying the open air
and the water. We are told that women went on donkeys to these spots,
where they would promenade or swim.85 Nile boat rides seem to have
been the most popular form of recreation among Cahenes, notorious for
 Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women 117

indulgence in fun and pleasure. Ibn al-Hajj expressed his anger concern-
ing women's presence in the midst of what he considered to be a corrupt
atmosphere: "As witnessed by all, riding in boats involved more corrup-
tion than riding on donkeys, and hence does not need to be described in
detail. As for the outings of men and women to the barrages, and what
takes place there, it is too much for the ear to hear and for the eye to
see."86 Ibn al-Hajj resented female presence in the parks of Cairo, because
he considered public parks as places for male outings and recreation
where women should not be seen. Nonetheless, women went to the
parks in their best adornments, and together with male members of the
family they spent their day "listening to music and recitals of love poetry
which softens the hearts of men and women."87
The most common form of female entertainment among upper-
middle- and upper-class women was viewing public events, such as re-
ligious festivities and everyday street events, from behind their laced
window screens or from house rooftops. There are numerous descrip-
tions in al-Madkhal of the female custom of watching the panorama of the
outside male world from behind their screens. Even this form of female
modesty aroused Ibn al-Hajj's anger, for he complained that women sat
by the windows dressed in their best clothes and that their sight was a
source of temptation for the men who gazed at them. Also, women
hiding behind their screens, eagerly watching the weekly sufi gatherings
and listening attentively to the young and handsome male singers, were
tempted by male beauty, which could jeopardize marital relations.
Our scholar was not content to bar women from going out shopping,
socializing, visiting tombs, and sharing in public festivities; he de-
manded that women should be completely concealed from the eyes of
men: "All doors, windows and roofs should be shut. And they should be
forbidden to look outside when men were out"; only thus could women's
corrupting and chaotic behavior be checked.88 Ibn al-Hajj reminds us
finally that only if a strict demarcation between male and female territory
is guarded can shar'i order prevail in the Muslim community.
The historical evidence on Cairene women gleaned from Ibn al-Hajj's
treatise demonstrates the gap between prescriptive literature and the
existing reality of women's everyday life. This literary genre should be
viewed primarily as an "ideal" that Muslim male scholars tried to pre-
scribe for their societies to bring about an ideal Islamic order, which they
saw as lacking in reality. In trying to impose this shar'i order, Ibn al-Hajj
showed how Cairenes in general, and women in particular, deviated
from it. Women wielded power in their immediate surroundings; they
shaped their daily habits and religious rituals according to their own
needs in the Cairene urban context. This is most evident in the way they
scheduled and organized their wide-ranging domestic chores, as well as
118 HudaLutfi

their daily outings into the public domain of the market, the shrine, the
cemetery, the mosque, and the park. Even in religious rituals, which
were more rigidly defined by the religious scholars, Cairene women
adapted rituals of purification, fasting, and prayer to suit their daily
patterns of domestic life.
Even though female life revolved around important domestic affairs,
like marriage, childbirth, death, and social and religious festivities, this
does not mean that women were housebound. Working-class women, in
addition to their regular domestic work, performed all the necessary
female-related services for upper- and middle-class women, thus obtain-
ing some economic leverage and a greater mobility in the public domain.
Exclusive female gatherings occupied much time, and must have given
women the opportunity for intense and meaningful socializing outside
their homes. This can be seen in frequent female visiting, childbirth fes-
tivities, mourning periods, and sufi sessions, which were held separately
from those of men. Women not only were able to hold their dhikr sessions
separately, but they could also be initiated into women's sufi orders
headed by a female sufi. This is not to say that Cairene women were
completely segregated from the male world, for women interacted with
men on a daily basis: on their trips to the cemetery and to the market, in
shops, in the precincts of shrines and mosques, as well as in sufi gather-
ings. As Ibn al-Hajj tells us, Cairene women were too easygoing in their
behavior with "foreign" men.
Unlike the stereotypical submissive and obedient wife, the Cairene
women depicted by Ibn al-Hajj were strong willed and defiant of male
and shar'i authority. They often used classical female strategies to obtain
what they desired from recalcitrant husbands. Ibn al-Hajj repeatedly
mentions threats of separation or withdrawal of sexual services as the
primary weapons wives used to break down their husbands' resistance.
These strategies were complemented by two institutionalized practices,
which may have given the woman greater leverage in her relationship
with her man: her frequent use of the judge's court to ensure her legal
rights and her demand of a "bed fee" for her sexual services.

Notes

1. See Ira M. Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1967). A close reading of al-Maqrizi's al-Khitat al-maqriziyya,
written in the fifteenth century, reflects the author's nostalgia for the prosperity of
the previous century; the Halabi edition, 2 vols. (Cairo, n.d.), hereafter Khitat.
2. Medieval male-authored legal, ethical, philosophical, mystical, and medical
treatises form a rich literary body that needs to be explored from a new perspec-
tive. This cultural heritage defines for us the social and religious values and norms
 Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women 119

in Muslim societies, and it continues to inspire modern religious scholars who

wish to perpetuate an Islamic ideal order as prescribed by Islamic patriarchal
values.
3. Ibn al-Hajj's full name was Abu 'Abd Allah ibn Muhammad al-'Abdari al-
Fasi. He was born in Fez, Morocco, and died in Cairo in A.H. 737/A.D. 1336-37. He
composed several religious treatises, the most important of which is the one
under study: al-Madkhal ila tanmiyat al-a'mal bi tahsin al-niyyat (An introduction to
the development of deeds through the improvement of intentions), 4 vols. (Cairo:
Al-Matba'a al-Misriyya, 1929), hereafter al-Madkhal
4. Al-Madkhal 4:104.
5. Ibid., 1:146, 241.
6. Ibid., 3:282.
7. Ibid., 1:274, 276.
8. See Khitat 2:5, 367-68.
9. A. S. Sa'd, Social and Economic History of Egypt (in Arabic) (Beirut, 1979), 489.
10. Khitat 2:287. In a study of the popular Islamic writings on women, recently
published in Egypt, I analyzed Muslim male attitudes to women. The paper was
delivered at a conference organized by the Arab Women Solidarity Association,
Cairo, 1986.
11. Khitat 2:102.
12. Al-Madkhal 3:127.
13. Ibid., 1:244-45.
14. Ibid., 2:17-18.
15. Ibid., 4:32-34.
16. Ibid., 4:32.
17. Ibid., 4:101.
18. Cairene peddlers still come to the houses to sell their merchandise to
housewives.
19. Al-Madkhal 4:101-2.
20. Ibid., 4:103.
21. Ibid., 4:102, 180.
22. Ibid., 4:103.
23. Ibid., 4:103-4.
24. Ibid., 1:216.
25. Ibid., 1:278, 279.
26. The feast of' Ashura became a popular religious feast of mourning during
the Fatimid period. It commemorates the day Husain, the grandson of the Proph-
et Muhammad, was martyred. After the Fatimids, the Sunni Ayyubids celebrated
'Ashura as a feast of joy; see Khitat 1:431, and Edward William Lane, Manners and
Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London: Aldine, 1954), 434-39.
27. Al-Madkhal 1:277, 279.
28. Ibid., 2:67.
29. Ibid., 4:199.
30. Ibid., 3: 232, 246, 290, 4:105,114.
31. Ibid., 2:226-27.
32. Ibid., 2:168.
33. Ibid., 3:288.
120 HudaLutfi

34. Ibn al-Hajj often refrains from describing details that are too well known,
or too vile to describe. More-detailed descriptions of wedding celebrations can be
culled from Mamluk literary sources; see F. Amin, Egyptian Society as Portrayed by
Mamluk Literature (in Arabic) (Cairo: Dar al-Ma'arif, 1982), 254, 297.
35. Al-Madkhal 1:162-63.
36. Most schools of Islamic law will allow a thrice-divorced woman to remarry
her ex-husband, but only after she temporarily takes a new husband (al-muhallil).
37. Al-Madkhal 2:61.
38. Ibid., 2:227.
39. Ibid., 2:161.
40. Ibid., 2:169, 1:183.
41. Ibid., 2:191, 192-94.
42. Ibid., 2:195-96.
43. Ibid., 2:169.
44. Ibid., 2:175-77, 1:211, 276.
45. Ibid., 1:169-70.
46. Ibid., 2:170.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 1:213-14.
49. Ibid., 2:62, 68.
50. Ibid., 2:172.
51. Ibid., 1:140-46 (quotation on p. 146).
52. Ibid., 1:241-45. See also Khitat 2:323; the hisba manuals, which provide the
market supervisor (al-muhtasib) with the shar'i rules of commercial transactions
and moral behavior, are replete with references to female dress and conduct in the
markets.
53. Al-Madkhal 1:243-44.
54. Ibid., 2:60, 63.
55. Ibid., 4:105.
56. Ibid., 1:168.
57. Ibid., 2:287, 185.
58. Ibid., 3:283.
59. Ibid., 3:287. The subu' rituals are still widely practiced all over Egypt,
especially among the lower-middle classes and in rural areas.
60. Ibid., 3:292.
61. Ibid., 3:290-91.
62. On ancient Egyptian funerary rituals, see C. J. Bleeker, Egyptian Festival
Enactments of Religious Renewal (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967), 124-38.
63. Al-Madkhal 3:233.
64. Ibid., 3:246.
65. Ibid., 3:242.
66. Ibid., 3:250, 277.
67. Ibid., 3:278-79.
68. Ibid., 3:235.
69. Ibid., 3:281.
70. See Bleeker, Egyptian Festival Enactments, 124-38.
71. Al-Madkhal 1:25.
 Fourteenth-Century Cairene Women 121

72. Ibid., 1:269.

73. Ibid., 1:267.
74. Ibid., 1:266, 269.
75. Ibid., 1:268. It is a common practice among present-day Egyptian families
to visit the tombs of their dead on feast days.
76. Ibid., 1:268, 2:17, 309, 310, 311.
77. Ibid., 2:312.
78. This is especially true of the Fatimid period, during which the caliphs
participated in many religious festivals; see Khitat 1:387-88, and 490-96. For a
more detailed description of festivals during the Mamluk period, see ibid.
79. On Islamic festivals, see al-Madkhal 1:283-85, 290-312; on Coptic festivals,
see ibid., 2:49-60. It is interesting to note here that, much to the annoyance of Ibn
al-Hajj, Egyptian Muslims also participated in Coptic festivals. On Coptic festivals
during the Fatimid and Mamluk periods, see Khitat 1:264-69.
80. Al-Madkhal 1:287, 289.
81. Ibid., 2:12.
82. Ibid., 2:141.
83. Ibid., 3:200.
84. For more details on recreation sites in Mamluk Cairo, see Khitat 2:125,130-
32, 144, 152, 162.
85. Al-Madkhal 1:270.
86. Ibid., 1:272.
87. Ibid., 1:271.
88. Ibid.
 Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain: Women as
7
Custodians of Property in Later Medieval Egypt

C A R L F. P E T R Y

On A.M. 22 Jumada 1884/A.D. 11 August 1479, the foremost

chronicler of the later Mamluk period in Egypt and Syria, Ibn
lyas, provided the following obituary notice for Khawand
(princess) Zainab, wife of Sultan Inal (857-65/1453-61):

She was among the most noble of princesses in rank.

She enjoyed such prestige during the reign of her hus-
band that she administered state affairs, influencing
both appointments and dismissals. She commanded
wide respect, and possessed a substantial fortune. She
married only al-Ashraf Inal, who himself took no other
wife. Upon his final's] death, al-Zahir Khushqadam
[865-72/1461-67] subjected her to several confisca-
tions, extorting vast sums of money. Yet despite these
adversities, the princess retained her honor and main-
tained her status until her death, at more than eighty
years of age. Truly, she was among the notables of her
time.1
To observers superficially acquainted with medieval Islamic
societies, such an entry might seem unusual. Given tradi-
tional concepts about the status of women under Islamic law,
overt references to a seasoned ruler consulting his wife on
state policy would imply a level of mutual respect inconsis-
tent with either Quranic injunction or long-standing social
practice.2 But although few royal spouses may have wielded
the political influence exercised by Khawand Zainab, many
certainly enjoyed her status. Indeed, as historians probe the
sources that describe the urban society of Egypt and Syria
during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods (566-922/1171-
1517), they soon discover a remarkable degree of parity be-
tween men and women who belonged to the ruling elite.
Although sharp divisions in public roles and postures dis-

122
 Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain 123

tinguished the two sexes, these do not appear to have created any ap-
preciable differences in status. No dimension of this elite's activity more
vividly illustrates this situation than the assignment of custodianship
over property and the endowment of charitable trusts. Class identity
combined with pragmatic necessity to promote the mutual supervision of
estates by men and women, certified by elaborate legal procedure. Quite
often, women were chosen to assume exclusive responsibility for prop-
erty management.
The imposition of militarist authority in Egypt by the famous Kurdish
commander Salah al-Din (the Crusaders' Saladin) in 1171, and the subse-
quent replacement of his Ayyubid dynasty by Mamluk slave-soldiers less
than a century later, is widely known.3 The Mamluk regime based in
Cairo was more centralized than its predecessor and recruited its ruling
class almost exclusively among adolescents imported from foreign re-
gions as slaves, who were manumitted on completion of their training.
During the first century of the regime's existence, most Mamluk novices
(Julban) were purchased, at steep prices, from the Qipjak Steppes of
Central Asia. The Turkish dialect of this region became the barracks lan-
guage of the regime. From the late fourteenth century, Mamluks were
collected from Circassia in the Caucasus, and its language was added to
Qipjak as a lingua franca of the ruling elite.4 Committed to preserving the
alien distinctiveness of their class, the Mamluks also arranged for the
transfer of women from their homelands, preferring them as concubinal
and marriage partners. Yet the Mamluks did not construct a closed caste
system that denied access to individuals from the Arab-speaking masses
over whom they ruled. The contemporary biographical literature makes
repeated reference to marriage ties that cut across ethnic lines, especially
for subsequent generations. But the desire to retain ethnic separation
remained a significant aspect of Mamluk identity throughout their do-
minion over Egypt and Syria. Certainly the majority of first-generation
recruits, from whom virtually all future officers and autocrats emerged,
consorted with women who had been born in their regions or were de-
scended from Turkish or Circassian lineages.
Given this keen ethnic consciousness, women of Qipjak or Circassian
origin were regarded as members of the ruling class by virtue of their
"racial" background. Ann Lambton has noted the prominence of women
who belonged to Central Asian military elites (Seljuks and Mongols) that
dominated Iran throughout the Middle Ages. Although the Persian re-
gimes were dynastic and based on heritable succession rather than slav-
ery, the influence wielded by these women over politics and guard-
ianship of property closely paralleled their contemporaries' leverage in
Mamluk Egypt. Such mutual status may suggest that women in Muslim
124 Carl F. Retry

Central Asia enjoyed a higher level of social equality and integration than
those in the central Islamic lands.5 In both Egypt and Iran, ethnic identity
and membership in the ruling class contributed to the augmented posi-
tion of these women compared with their civilian counterparts. The
nature of marital preference itself certainly contributed to the promi-
nence of Qipjak and Circassian women in Cairo, who shared with their
male peers the distinction of foreign origin. The relative scarcity of such
women and the financial requirements for their proper maintenance in
the capital enhanced their position in a tradition that required men or
their families to pay a dower to the bride.
Complementing this sense of ethnic parity between sexes, the political
environment created by the Mamluk regime contributed decisively to the
prestige of its female members. In the absence of any binding principle of
hereditary succession or dynastic loyalty,6 the Mamluks developed, on
an ad hoc basis, a system of advancement and promotion that was highly
egalitarian and rigorously merit-oriented, but exceptionally violent. Ob-
servers of Mamluk interfactional rivalries were uniformly dismayed at
the endemic infighting that seemed ubiquitous in the Mamluk system.7
Recent analysts of military slavery in the medieval Muslim world have
become convinced that, for good or ill, such feuding was not at all an
aberration but in fact had evolved as a basic, indeed fundamental, dimen-
sion of militarist politics. Mobility within ranks of slave-soldiers was in-
variably marked by intense rivalry and acrimonious competition. Al-
though a special kind of camaraderie (khushdashiya) founded on barracks
ties and cemented during arduous training sessions bound various fac-
tions together in fierce loyalty, no ambitious recruit bent on achievement
allowed personal bonds to interfere with the ruthless attainment of his
objectives. Accordingly, no tie of loyalty was absolute in this system. No
personal bond overrode the seizing of opportunities when they arose or
the forming of ad hoc and often precarious coalitions, even if they em-
braced members of hostile factions. Although this concept of mobility has
convinced many historians of the inherent divisiveness of the Mamluk
apparatus, it certainly weeded out incompetents. Few dull plodders ever
made it to the sultanate in Cairo throughout this era.
But the system had its cost: a high rate of mortality among Mamluk
men at every level, from raw trainee to senior officer who possessed his
own troopers. The extreme risk to life and limb involved with advance-
ment through the chaotic Mamluk hierarchy, aggravated by arrests, ex-
iles, imprisonments, and executions, as well as casualty rates that were
normative for a professional military class engaged in continuous warfare
with foreign powers, compromised the actuarial chances of these men. In
comparison, the life expectancy of their female counterparts was higher,
even admitting the risk of death in childbirth.8 Women enjoyed the status
 Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain 125

of membership in the ruling elite, but they shared few of its factional
liabilities and none of the risks involved with military campaigns. Al-
though women did participate in the rivalries that preoccupied their male
relatives, they rarely faced the same level of retribution. We shall see that
women were subjected to confiscation of assets, a phenomenon that
became endemic during the later Mamluk period. But they seem largely
to have been spared the recriminations that were meted out so savagely to
men for losing in disputes between parties or competing coalitions. And
since women did not take the field in battle, they were spared the ulti-
mate consequence of a warrior's calling. Considering their lower mor-
tality rate, women's role as stabilizers of familial and lineage groups
seems less surprising.
In light of the insecurity and tension that so infused the political mi-
lieu, women served as guarantors of continuity in family structures that
suffered repeated losses of male members. The prominence of women as
custodians of estates stands as testimony to their security advantage over
men, as will be seen below. But as living symbols of stability who might
survive several generations of men cut down in their prime, women often
presided over their houses as dowagers. They would command enor-
mous respect even from rival groups who accorded no one else equiv-
alent reverence. Such women often emerged as authority figures, es-
pecially during sudden crises or prolonged episodes of sedition. Indeed,
at the inception of the Mamluk state, an ambitious woman attempted to
establish herself as a co-ruler. Shajar al-Durr, a concubine of al-Malik al-
Salih Ayyub (638-47/1240-49), upon her lord's death involved herself
intimately with one of his grand amirs, Aibak. The two connived to found
a new regime in Cairo, and the former concubine dared to proclaim
herself "Sultana."9 Most references in the narrative sources depict royal
wives closely associated with husbands, or widows presiding over a
harmonious succession.10 But the widespread appointment of women as
caretakers of estates and supervisors of trusts implies that this phe-
nomenon extended far beyond the highest level of the Mamluk hier-
archy.
Women attained esteem as symbols of longevity who provided the
continuity necessary for the preservation of lineages over time as well as
the integrity of estates. In civilian society, such a role was much less
important since men did not participate directly in either factional dis-
putes or battlefield activities. The actuarial ratios between men and
women were more balanced, and women were therefore less vital as
guarantors of familial cohesion. We should not assume that this lack of
visibility automatically resulted in greater subordination of civilian wom-
en, for they do appear in the archival sources as trust supervisors. But the
narrative sources contain fewer references to their political eminence.
126 Carl F. Retry

Female members of the Mamluk elite, however, received a very special

kind of respect, which accrued to them as a consequence of their actuarial
gain and immunity to the violence that infused every facet of the male's
universe. This respect was profound and apparently unique to the mili-
tarist governments that held sway over the central Islamic lands during
the high and later Middle Ages. Although women of court circles often
enjoyed great prestige in the Ottoman Empire, they belonged to a tradi-
tion of dynastic succession that posed no threat of extinction to the ruling
house itself. The militarist regimes that the Ottomans absorbed usually
eschewed dynastic principles, and therefore they faced special problems
of continuity that women, through their own survival, could mitigate.

FISCAL DILEMMAS OF THE MAMLUK STATE

Women did not figure prominently in the custodianship of property and

charitable trusts solely for the reasons discussed above. Their relative
immunity from liabilities of male status also defrayed, at least in part,
infringements by the regime on the integrity of estates. These depreda-
tions became acute during the last century of Mamluk rule in Egypt and
Syria and contributed to a broad tendency toward hoarding assets in safe
but conservative forms of investment. From the so-called Time of Trou-
bles, which brought to an end the formative era of Sultan Baibars (658-
76/1260-77) and Sultan Qala'un (678-89/1279-90)," the Mamluk regime
was compelled to cope with either static or declining official revenues:
land taxes, commercial tariffs, transit tolls, imposts charged to both do-
mestic and foreign merchants, and so forth. The declines in part reflected
the pilfering of revenues by the very cadres the system of land allotments
(iqta') had been designed to support. But the productive capacity of
Egypt's proverbial agriculture saw no increase after the Time of Troubles,
and may actually have diminished.12 Cairo's lucrative monopoly over the
international trade between southern Asia and the Mediterranean in
such exotic commodities as spices remained a vital aspect of the economy,
but its level of profitability was tied to market forces increasingly beyond
Cairo's control.13
Arrayed against these static sources of revenue were demands by an
increasingly aggressive and unyielding military establishment, over
which the autocrat himself often exercised only marginal disciplinary
powers. All first-generation members of the Mamluk order, regardless of
rank, were trained to view themselves as more than privileged. They
considered their service of defense and protection of the Dar al-Islam as
indispensable in a turbulent international environment. Both Mamluk
officers and recruits, exploiting the tradition of competing factions, be-
came adept at inflating their demands for salaries and for bonuses cus-
 Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain 127

tomarily paid as inducements to participate in a campaign. This was a

highly sophisticated class of professional warriors, whose loyalty to pa-
trons and regime was real but never isolated from scales of pay. Soldier-
ing was, in the final analysis, a job—and one fraught with dangers.
Loyalty was therefore always bought and commensurate to fiscal re-
muneration. In a flourishing polity, such attitudes could be profligately
indulged, but the Mamluk Empire committed itself early on to preserving
the status quo rather than to enlarging its frontiers or encouraging eco-
nomic growth.14
Because the sultan had himself grown to maturity and developed his
sense of competition within this system, he was rarely disposed to alter it.
Indeed, even the most capable Mamluk autocrats found themselves con-
strained by the ironclad monopoly their troops held over the govern-
ment. Keenly aware that the forces of insurrection and sedition that had
placed so many of them on the throne could dislodge them from it, few
autocrats sought to reform the political traditions of the military elite, or
even to curb the grossest forms of exploitation inflicted by their subordi-
nates on the population. No ruler between Qala'un and Qansuh al-
Ghauri (906-22/1501-16) considered alternative sources of recruitment
or training procedures that might create a less unruly military class.
In the second half of the ninth hijri/fifteenth century A. D. , the effective
"Pax Mamlukia," which had sheltered the eastern Mediterranean and
southwest Asia for two hundred years, began to wane. Following the
successful repulsion of the Mongols by Baibars at 'Am Jalut in 659/1260
and the expulsion of the European Crusaders from the Levant by
Qala'un, the Mamluk Empire cast a security blanket over the central
Islamic lands. Preservation of the resulting equilibrium became a funda-
mental principle of Mamluk foreign policy, and the prime reason for the
regime's prestige. But after 1450 this peace began to unravel/due to
revolts by restive marcher vassals, threats from the Ottoman government
to the north, now fully recovered from the disaster of Timur's invasion,
sectarian imperialism by the newly established Safavid shahs in Iran, and
aggression by Europeans seeking to break the Mamluk monopoly over
the East-West trade. These developments, widely studied but still de-
bated as to their relative significance, lie outside the scope of this chapter.
Here we must note the problems these momentous changes posed for the
Mamluk autocrat and his staff, already coping with static revenues and
inflated demands on them.
Given the growing foreign menace to Cairo's vision of security, no
Mamluk ruler dared to allow the combat readiness of his army to lapse,
regardless of cost. The professional military class, fully aware of their
sovereign's dependence, saw fit to pressure him for ever steeper incre-
ments to their pay scales. Almost without exception, every sultan who
128 Car! F. Retry

mobilized his troops for combat duty abroad found himself obliged to
appease their demands. The narrative sources dwell at great length on
the tensions between supreme commander and common soldier over
money.15 Several sultans threatened to abdicate rather than yield to the
extravagant pressures of their army units, but none carried through.
Ultimately, the autocrat would submit and promise to meet the requests
of his troops rather than face insurrection at home or defeat abroad. But
how was the regime to meet these demands?
The sultanate relied increasingly on ad hoc sources of revenue: troves
of money amassed by military officers, regime bureaucrats, and wealthy
merchants who had proven themselves adept at hoarding assets during
periods of financial crisis. The autocrat, assisted by subordinates from
both the military and civilian branches of government, proceeded to
extract funds by force to meet its expenses. Confiscation of assets was
hardly unique to the later Mamluk period, but what had occurred spo-
radically in earlier reigns now became routinized. Mulcting of fractious or
overly ambitious amirs, crafty bureaucrats who had grown too rich, and
merchants whose profits rendered them enticing targets provided the
regime with the funds needed to stave off revolt by its troops. The figures
reported in the biographical and narrative sources reveal enormous
sums, acquired either from secreting iqta; rents or from acceptance of
bribes, which the regime now expropriated on a systematic basis.16 In-
deed, a tacit partnership between the autocrat and sagacious officials, in
which the former planted trusted clients in lucrative fiscal offices, may
have matured during this period. The sultan allowed his staff to accumu-
late vast treasures through corrupt devices, ritually arrested them, seized
their ill-gotten gains, and subsequently returned them to office.17
The sultan also stepped up his confiscation of private estates, in partic-
ular those acquired by dangerous military colleagues. Former rivals for
the throne were particularly susceptible to this treatment, and the regime
usually turned a deaf ear to the complaints of heirs who swore that they
shared none of their parents' disloyalty and were being denied their
rights under Islamic law.18 The autocrat replied that such assets had been
garnered by treasonous subordinates and thus appropriately reverted to
the state. The sultanate also imposed extraordinary taxes on both luxury
items and commodities traded in bulk. Quite often, such taxes were
charged on a "futures" basis, with revenues collected in advance of the
exchange or sale of the goods in question, before any profits had actually
been made.19 Stewards of landholders (mubashirun al-mucjta'in) in-
creasingly faced similar tactics and were compelled to pay taxes on crops
that had not yet been harvested.20 Finally, the sultanate impounded the
yields of trust properties (waqfs) endowed to support charitable and scho-
 Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain 129

lastic activities. This type of action represented a truly desperate expedi-

ent and was rarely contemplated without at least pro forma consultation
with eminent representatives of the ulama. Because members of the mili-
tary elite invested heavily in waqfs, autocrats hesitated before tampering
with this most sacrosanct of investments.21 Nonetheless, the vast re-
sources of land and property tied up in charitable trusts beckoned irre-
sistibly to rulers plagued by unremitting demands from their troops.
The implications of these tactics for the long-term growth of the Egyp-
tian economy have not been studied in any systematic way.22 Historians
have tended to castigate later Mamluk autocrats and their staffs for short-
sighted obsession with expedients enabling them to survive immediate
crises rather than engaging in prolonged speculation over their nation's
future. Whether any government contemplating fiscal ruin could have
afforded the luxury of reflection is open to question. But from the per-
spective of estate cohesion, these tactics posed a serious threat. All hold-
ers of substantial properties, both civilian and military, were extremely
sensitive to such strategies.

WOMEN AND THE MANAGEMENT OF PROPERTY

The actuarial advantage of women who belonged to the Mamluk elite

contributed more than any other factor to their prominence as custodians
of estates built up by male relatives. Their greater life expectancy after
marriage, due in part to their youth upon entering into betrothal, ren-
dered women ideal choices as supervisors. Their relative security from
the violence endemic to politics within the Mamluk system also en-
hanced their desirability, although we should not assume total immunity.
Vast estates presided over by women who had inherited from fathers or
husbands could be subject to confiscation. In Dhu al-Hijja of 874 (June
1470), Sultan Qaitbay demanded an "obligatory gift" of 150,000 dinars
from the Lady Sada, daughter of the former Nazir al-Khass (supervisor of
the special fund), Yusuf b. Katib Jakam, to help defray the expenses of an
expedition against the Dhu al-Qadirid rebel, Shah Suwar, in southeastern
Anatolia.23 The lady demurred, "claiming that she had nothing to pay."
But the sultan insisted that her father's legacy would enable her to meet
this figure, and he placed all her assets under sequestration with no
private transactions permitted. He subsequently arranged for the auc-
tioning of enough property to yield up the required sum. "The Lady was
then honored in a court ceremony, and allowed to resume her life as
before." Qaitbay's respect for Sada should be compared with the rather
more callous treatment men received when compelled to part with their
wealth. Many were intimidated with the threat of torture, and several
130 Carl F. Retry

died before revealing where they had stashed secret troves. I have en-
countered no case of a woman undergoing physical duress to force her to
reveal assets.24
The role of women as guarantors of familial continuity in Mamluk
society counted for far more than maintenance of lineage. Women often
contested in court challenges to their legal rights as caretakers of inher-
ited assets, especially when the future of minor children was at stake. In
Muharram of 875 (July 1470), the widow of the chief justice Sharaf al-Din
al-Munawi brought suit against her husband's former agent, Zain al-Din
al-Abutiji, who had expropriated lands in Anbaba, across the Nile from
Cairo, designated for al-Munawi's children by a former wife.25 Al-Abutiji
contended that he, rather than their stepmother, had been appointed
legal guardian of the children. The grand amir Inal al-Ashqar, who pre-
sided over the appeals case, acknowledged al-Abutiji's status as guard-
ian, but ruled that he had acted negligently and had falsely claimed
reconciliation with the second wife. He ordered al-Abutiji flogged on the
buttocks and compelled him to make restitution.
Several months later (Dhu al-Qa' da/April-May 1471), the wife of an
official in the service of Sharaf al-Din Ibn Gharib, Muqaddam al-Daula
(custodian of the privy fund), appealed via the royal harem to the sultan
on her husband's behalf.26 She claimed that Ibn Gharib had falsely ac-
cused her husband of corruption for which he himself was responsible
and had then exiled him to Upper Egypt (al-Sa'id). The wife used her in-
fluence in the harem because she belonged to "their faction" (jihati-
hinna). Presumably heeding his own wife's pleas, the sultan recalled the
official from exile and summoned him to the court for a confrontation
with his employer's agent. Yet the sultan did not find Ibn Gharib at fault
and honored the agent with a ceremonial robe. But the official was al-
lowed to retire to private life in Cairo with no fine.
One of the most intricate cases reported in the chronicles involved a
dispute between the daughter of Sultan al-Nasir Faraj (801-15/1399-
1412), Khawand Shaqara, and the grand amir Khairbak Hadid al-Ashrafi
over agrarian land in the Faiyum that the princess had inherited as a waqf
supervisor. River flowage had eaten away this land, replacing it with
several islands.27 During the reign of al-Zahir Khushqadam, the wazir
(prime minister) claimed that Shaqara had lost title to these islands be-
cause the original plot no longer existed. The princess appealed to Sultan
Khushqadam, who recognized her transferred claim to the islands and
confirmed the original waqf with a royal deed. Shaqara subsequently
leased the islands to Amir Khairbak for a set term. Khairbak expended
substantial sums on converting the islands to a profitable plantation,
with a sugar press to harvest the cane. When Khawand Shaqara decided
to rent out the property on her own, Khairbak claimed that it was now
 Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain 131

entirely occupied with his operation. He offered to pay her "appropriate

rent" while insisting that he had greatly enhanced the value of the origi-
nal island. Shaqara once again lodged an appeal before the sultan, this
time al-Ashraf Qaitbay. She argued that Khairbak had usurped his profits
from a trust property that he exploited solely for personal gain. Qaitbay
found the matter too complicated for resolution at one hearing and con-
vened all four chief justices to weigh the arguments. Even these august
legal authorities could not handily resolve the case and they divided over
whether Amir Khairbak had actually violated the proviso of the original
waqf. The council ultimately ruled in favor of Khairbak's retaining his
lease rights, since he had invested his personal funds alone rather than
any return from the trust. The princess, now at an advanced age, was
entitled only to the waqf yield itself based on the reconf irmation issued to
her by Khushqadam. The amir had made no move to challenge her posi-
tion as Nazira al-Waqf al-Sharif.
The limits to which a free-spirited woman with substantial assets
might go to seek independence are revealed in the fascinating obituary of
Sultan Tatar's (824/1421) daughter, penned by al-Sairafi.28 This historian,
who attended appeals sessions (majalis al-mazalim) at the royal court dur-
ing Qaitbay's reign as a Hanafi na'ib (deputy judge), was something of a
prude. His assessment of Khawand Fatima bt. al-Zahir Tatar, who died on
21 Safar 874/30 August 1469, is as entertaining as it is instructive. Having
matured in the custody of Sultan Barsbay (825-41/1422-37), Fatima
elected not to marry his ultimate successor, al-Zahir Jaqmaq (842-
57/1438-52). Instead, she departed from the citadel with a trousseau of
100,000 dinars and took up private residence next to the house of the
overseer of the Mansuri Hospital as a guest of his sister. Al-Sairafi claims
that eunuchs (tawashiya) were soon attracted to her circle, as were "el-
derly people" ('aja'iz). Among her retinue was a certain Hana, a scribe
who had grown up at the Azhar (Cairo's cathedral mosque) and "fre-
quented eunuchs." Serving as Fatima's private secretary, he took on the
airs of a nobleman, "this upstart who began as a peasant at the Azhar!"
Fatima apparently fell into profligate ways under the influence of such
persons. Having squandered her inheritance, she began to pawn her
expensive apparel and jewelry, at "abysmally cheap prices." When all she
originally possessed had been dissipated, Fatima took out loans and beg-
ged for charitable donations. A fortuitous marriage to the Qadi Sharaf al-
Din al-Tata'i al-Ansari provided a respite from her troubles, but
eventually her husband discarded her to avoid impoverishment and also
to marry a divorced princess whose fortune was presumably intact. Wild
with jealousy, Fatima appealed to Sultan Inal for justice, but al-Tata'i was
found to be within his rights. Sultan Jaqmaq had granted Fatima an emer-
gency loan of 5,000 dinars several years earlier, and he had placed the
132 Carl F. Retry

proceeds from the estate of a former Nazir al-Khass at her disposal to pay
off her debts. "But in less than a year's time, her situation sank to its
former sorry state." Her current grievance therefore went unheeded.
Collectors pounded at her door and auctioneers demanded the right to
inventory her possessions.
Yet Fatima seems to have pursued her social interests with remarkable
alacrity, in spite of her desperate financial condition. Al-Sairafi claims that
she gained influence with women of foal's harem and proceeded to
"serve them in important matters." She became notorious for her "exces-
sive elegance (labaqa) in food and drink" and entered into subsequent
liaisons, one of which resulted in another abortive marriage. According
to al-Sairafi, Fatima set a bad example to the public for acts of vileness "no
one else dared to commit. . . . Neither the merchants nor the commons
could put an end to her depravity." Upon her death, Sultan Qaitbay
provided a shroud for her burial and 40 dinars to defray funeral expenses.
Although he refused to attend her prayer services, women "of the igno-
rant masses" did so, slapping their cheeks, rending their breasts, and
keening the ritual wail for the deceased. Following her interment,
Fatima's creditors petitioned the sultan for redress. Due to the gravity of
their claims, Qaitbay reluctantly agreed to grant them justice by expropri-
ating her father's waqfs.
This extraordinary person was remarkable not only for her arrogance,
but also for her indifference to societal stricture. Throughout his reign,
Qaitbay made a great public show of encouraging moral probity. He
rarely plundered trust properties, but he believed that the heinousness of
Fatima's offense had negated the sanctity of her father's endowment. He
therefore allowed her creditors to recover some of their losses from its
proceeds. Fatima's behavior was hardly typical, and I have encountered
no biography of a woman from any rank that remotely compares with
hers. Nonetheless, her example suggests what elite women could get
away with in Mamluk society, regardless of sanctions applied to reform
them. The negative tone of al-Sairafi's remarks also suggests that the
establishment regarded her profligacy as undignified. In the final analy-
sis, Fatima was judged unworthy as a representative of her class because
of her flagrant disregard for the integrity of assets she inherited.
The notorious in society always attract attention, but few of her con-
temporaries imitated the antics of Fatima bt. Tatar. Indeed, al-Sairafi pro-
vided obituaries of several women who were models of decorum, shrewd
managers of estates, and munificent patrons of charity. Notable among
these was the Lady Amina bt. Isma'il, known as Bint al-Khazin (daughter
of the treasurer).29 After her father's death, the Shafi'i chief justice had
demanded rights of custody over his trusts, but the sultan decided in the
daughter's favor, claiming: "I shall act for them according to legal princi-
 Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain 133

pie, and shield them against usurpers." Amina manipulated the proper-
ties and trusts she received from her father so prudently that she left
"vast assets" (amwalan jammatari) at her death.
Equally respected was the princess Mughul, daughter of the famous
judge and confidential secretary Nasir al-Din Ibn al-Barizi and wife of
Sultan Jaqmaq.30 Previously married to another eminent qadi (judge),
Mughul was a sterling example of a civilian who crossed caste lines to
reach the pinnacle of Mamluk society. Upon Jaqmaq's demise, Mughul
resided in the home of her daughter's husband, the famous Atabak (su-
preme field commander) Azbak. Azbak so venerated his mother-in-law
(who presumably received a legacy from Jaqmaq), that when his wife died
he declared Mughul guardian of his son, mistress of his house, and
manager of his affairs—"even the slave girls who were his concubines."
He appointed her nazira over the waqfs of her father, brother, and former
husband and personally witnessed the legal confirmation. Al-Sairafi ex-
tolled Mughul's beneficence, describing the madrasa (legal academy) that
she founded and her support of the poor and indigent in Jerusalem.
Unlike Fatima bt. Tatar's final riles, Khawand Mughul's funeral was at-
tended by the sultan and most of the royal court. Qaitbay personally led
her prayer service. She was buried in the courtyard of the Shrine of Imam
al-Shafi'i, fitting testimony to the respect accorded her.
The endowment deeds surviving from the Mamluk period include
many examples of less-eminent women who endowed charitable trusts
on their own or managed the estates left them by their fathers or hus-
bands. Of roughly 1,000 deeds examined by M. M. Amin,31283 are listed
under a woman's name and the great majority belong to the second
category. They reveal specific details about estate preservations and lin-
eage continuity lacking in the narrative sources. One of the most il-
lustrative examples is the deed of al-Masuna (virtuous) Tatarkhan,
daughter of the Silahdar (royal arms bearer) Tashtamur al-Husami, dated
Rajab of 7977April-May 1395.32 This deed spells out in precise language
the discretionary powers granted to the amir's daughter over his estate,
which is then itemized. Her patrimony was large: several hundred fad-
dans (1 F. = 4,200.8m2) of land in Sharqiyya Province of the Delta, six
town houses, numerous shops (hawanit), and other rental properties in
Cairo. The writ identifies Tatarkhan as sole supervisor of the estate and
guardian of the family's interests to her own death. Tatarkhan's legal
powers were representative of the status enjoyed by women of her class,
virtually all of whom exercised genuine authority over property accumu-
lated by male relatives. Rather than expecting to find the kind of indepen-
dent disposition of assets as defined by the norms of modern Western
societies, we should seek the autonomy of these women in the context of
their partnership with spouses, immediate families, and extended lin-
134 Carl F. Retry

eages. Nowhere is this sort of relationship more clearly personified than

the career of Khawand Fatima, wife of Sultan Qaitbay.
Fatima bt. 'Ala' al-Din'Ali b. Khalil b. Khassbak belonged to an august
walid nas (scion of Mamluk) house of Cairo. She descended from Saif al-
Din Khassbak al-Nasiri (d. 734/1334),33 a prominent amir in Egypt and
Syria during the reign of al-Nasir Muhammad. Her father was described
by 'Abd al-Basit as an iqta' holder who was honorable, just, and
learned.34 Fatima's personal life remains elusive since biographical de-
tails about her are sparse. Ibn lyas noted that she was more than sixty
years of age at her death on 22 Dhu al-Hijja 909 (6 June 1504).3$ Since her
husband, Qaitbay, was in his eighty-third year when he died in 901, we
may assume that Fatima was some three decades his junior. None of
Qaitbay's lengthy biographies, which praise his piety and extol his gener-
osity but provide only offices prior to his enthronement, reveals the date
of his marriage to Fatima.36 Nonetheless, adhering to his predecessors'
preference, Qaitbay took no other legal wife throughout his lifetime.37
We can surmise what Fatima's background was like from the pattern of
her own endowments, the careers of her contemporaries, and the great
esteem she received from husband, peers, and the public at large. From
the network of agents and judges through whom Fatima established her
personal estate, we may assume that the princess was familiar with prop-
erty management long before her betrothal. Fatima appears in several
deeds as supervisor for her two siblings, al-Nasir Muhammad and al-
Masuna 'A'isha.38 She apparently served as her father's executor, even
though there was a surviving son. Fatima thus brought a substantial
fortune to her marriage. For his part, Qaitbay had assiduously managed
his own sizable assets during his distinguished career as an amir.39 Ac-
cordingly, upon his enthronement in 872/1468, the two already were rich
and well versed in the techniques of estate preservation. But fate was not
kind to this couple who demonstrated such farsighted conduct of their
affairs. Their marriage produced only two children, both of whom suc-
cumbed to the plague in childhood.4^ Qaitbay's heir; ah-Nasir Muham-
mad, was the issue of a concubine, Aslbay, and born late in his reign.4*
Yet these personal tragedies never blighted his relationship with Fatima,
which remained a close personal bond.
Fatima appears in the chronicles on only three occasions: when she
ascended the citadel once her husband felt secure enough to transfer his
household from his former residence to the palace;42 when she partici-
pated in the pilgrimage of 879/1475, without her husband (who went four
years later);43 and when she died (see note 35). Fatima received a lavish
reception upon her return from the Hijaz. She was accompanied to the
citadel by the four chief justices, who walked beside her palanquin. Can-
tors bearing tambourines heralded her progression. As she ascended to
 Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain 135

the citadel from Rumaila Square, the parasol and the bird, emblems of
royalty reserved for the supreme autocrat, were held over her head. Gold
and silver pieces were strewn about her, and when she entered the pal-
ace, gifts commemorating her safe return were presented by rejoicing
courtiers.
Fatima's obituary notice emphasizes her great fortune and immense
estate (taraka hafila). Ibn lyas states that she presided as mistress over the
court for thirty years and possessed her own quarters. But he also notes
that, following her husband's decease, she was subjected to various in-
dignities because of her wealth. The Julban recruits dared to invade her
dwelling by the Aq Sunqur Bridge to demand a bonus. They heaped
insults on her and threatened assault if she did not accede. When Qait-
bay's heir, al-Nasir Muhammad, learned of their brazenness, he forbade
any Mamluk to approach her residence on pain of death. The Julban
believed that Fatima had participated in a conspiracy to murder the grand
amir Qansuh Khamsmi'a, whom she married, following his enthrone-
ment, to defend her estate. Fatima's involvement was never proved, but
she remained vulnerable. She therefore sought security through yet an-
other marriage—to al-' Adil Tumanbay—which lasted only two months.
Fatima's health declined rapidly thereafter, and she died in Bulaq of an
ulcer.
Some thirty-nine deeds granted by Fatima alone have been preserved.
We should recall that this collection of documents may represent only a
remnant of Fatima's total endowment program. Nonetheless, the sample
still extant does suggest an investment strategy. The longest writ,
Fatima's own primary waqf, drawn up well into her career, repeats many
properties listed in individual bills of sale (buyu'\ which provide both
shares and prices.44 Indeed, most of the remaining documents identify
Fatima's purchases.45 The earliest dates from 21 Rabi' I 878/16 August
1473, the last from 27 Rajab 909/15 January 1504, just months before her
death. She spent a total of 16,500 dinars and 10,000 dirhams (silver coins)
during this thirty-year period. According to the surviving deeds, she was
most actively engaged in acquisition of real estate between 894 and 896
(1488-91), which period also witnessed the first signs of her husband's
declining vigor. Fatima may well have been concerned about her security
after Qaitbay broke his leg during a polo match three years earlier, and
began to plan for future exigencies. Two-thirds of the properties she
bought were commercial or rental structures in Cairo or its environs, with
notable clusterings in the Aq Sunqur (where she made her private home
outside the citadel), Bab Sha'riyya, and Bulaq districts (total purchase
value 9,900 dinars); one-third were agricultural lands in Gharbiyya
(Delta), Ashmunain (Upper Egypt), and al-Matariyya (north of Cairo)
(total purchase value 6,400 dinars). All of this property was clearly differ-
136 Carl F. Retry

entiated from that of her husband. Fatima, however, did buy shares in
real estate partially owned by powerful amirs of her husband's faction
who were his trusted colleagues, perhaps in an effort to hedge against the
threat of confiscation were he to die suddenly. Upon her own demise, of
course, Sultan al-Ghauri assumed title to all her property. The transfer
was completed in one day: 24 Safar 910/6 August 1504, terminating one of
the largest Mamluk fortunes of the ninth/fifteenth century.46
Yet Fatima managed to maintain her control over this estate through-
out her lifetime—no mean feat. Al-Ghauri acquired a notoriety un-
paralleled even by members of his caste as a confiscator of charitable
trusts, but even he waited until Fatima's death before seizing her assets.
And he could claim with justice that no legal heirs survived her. Whether
Fatima secretly agreed to will all her property to al-Ghauri if he respected
her position until her death is not clear, but stands as a reasonable hy-
pothesis. Al-Ghauri displayed elaborate disinterest throughout his tur-
bulent reign for the feelings of those he abused. His respect for Fatima's
rights during her life suggests that he had been assured some profit. In
any case, from the profile of Fatima's investments, we detect a skilled
partner who contributed to her husband's tactics for enlarging a fiscal
preserve and an adept politician who controlled a vast estate after his
demise. Fatima is a particularly salient example of a woman familiar with
the total spectrum of her male relatives' finances.

What does this kind of familiarity suggest about women's function

and influence over policy formation in the Mamluk state? We must dis-
tinguish between evidence clearly provided by the narrative and archival
sources, and speculation over its possible implications. We know the
following. First, the literature repeatedly refers to women autonomously
managing property acquired from male relatives. They possessed the
power to initiate litigation in defense of their rights, thereby sheltering
their assets. Second, women were regarded as desirable custodians of
estates because of their actuarial gain over men, their junior age at mar-
riage, and their lesser susceptibility to the violence and feuding that
sapped men's energies. As a consequence of these advantages, women
were esteemed as guarantors of familial stability and lineage continuity.
A woman who outlived one or more generations of her male kin often
became a dowager, a revered symbol of her house and the head of her
family. These readily verifiable facts go far to explain the augmented
status of elite women in Mamluk society.
We may surmise from this evidence that some of these women served
as effective colleague-consorts in the administration and preservation of
their male relatives' estates. This sort of collusion in activities considered
vital to ensuring the social rank and economic dominance of their class
 Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain 137

would elucidate their visibility in both the narrative literature and the
documentary sources. Moreover, it is quite likely that these women were
intimately involved in the unofficial or clandestine economy that pro-
vided the ruling elite with much of its funding. Qaitbay was a pioneer in
attempts to circumvent his regime's dependency on traditional taxes by
creating a private fiscal preserve through artful manipulation of trust
properties. Can we assume that his wife's activities as a waqf purchaser,
unparalleled in scale during the later medieval period, had some bearing
on this strategy? Given the dearth of concrete information, we cannot be
sure of Fatima's hidden motives. But we can place our current knowledge
in a more intriguing setting by raising such hypotheses. When Ibn lyas
observed that Khawand Zainab administered state affairs on behalf of her
husband, he may have inferred more than he would openly describe. Did
he assume that his readers would know enough to appreciate the signifi-
cance of his remarks? Recapturing the gist of such assumptions poses a
challenge to our generation of historians, who seek to comprehend the
behavior and aspirations of vibrant actors of both sexes in premodern
Muslim societies.

Notes

1. Ibn lyas, Bada'i' al-zuhurfi waqa'i' al-duhur, ed. Muhammad Mustafa (Cairo:
Bibliotheca Islamica, 1963), 3:156,1. 19.
2. An entire Sura (chapter) of the Quran, no. 4, deals with women's rights and
obligations as believers, wives, wage earners, heirs, and parents. Several of its
verses, in particular no. 38 (as counted by A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted [New
York: Macmillan, 1955]), have aroused such controversy that they cannot be evalu-
ated in isolation from the social context of the Prophet's own age. See Nabia
Abbott, "Women and the State on the Eve of Islam/' American Journal of Semitic
Languages and Literatures 58 (1941): 259-84; Abbott, "Women and the State in Early
Islam," Journal of Near Eastern Studies I (1942): 106-26; and Jane I. Smith and
Yvonne Y. Haddad, "Women in the Afterlife: The Islamic View as Seen from
Qur'an and Tradition," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43 (1975): 39-50.
For views of prominent political theorists of the Middle Ages on the status of
women, see Nasir al-Din Tusi, Ethics, trans. G. M. Wickens (London: George
Allen and Unwin, 1964), 161-77; and Nizam al-Mulk, The Book of Government,
trans. Hubert Darke (London: Routledge, 1978), 179-86.
3. On general background to this period, see David Ayalon, "Aspects of the
Mamluk Phenomenon," Der Islam 53 (1976): 196-225; Ayalon, "Ayyubids, Kurds
and Turks," Der Islam 54 (1977): 1-32; Andrew Ehrenkreutz, Saladin (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1972); P. M. Holt, The Age of the Crusades: The Near
East from the Eleventh Century to 1517 (London: Longman, 1986); R. Stephen
Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus, 1193-1260
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977); Robert Irwin, The Middle East
138 Carl R Retry

in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluk Sultanate, 1250-1382 (Carbondale: University
of Southern Illinois Press, 1986); Malcolm Cameron Lyons and D. E. P. Jackson,
Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
and Gaston Wiet, L'Egypte arabe, vol. 4 of Gabriel Hanotaux, ed., Histoire de la
nation tgyptienne (Paris: Societe de 1'Histoire Nationale, 1937).
4. See the following by David Ayalon: "The Circassians in the Mamluk King-
dom," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 69 (1949): 135-47; "Names, Titles and
Nisbas of the Mamluks," Israel Oriental Studies 5 (1975): 189-232; "Le regiment
bahriya dans 1'armee mamelouke/' Revue des etudes islamiques (1951): 133-41; and
"The European-Asiatic Steppe: A Major Reservoir of Power for the Islamic
World," Acts of the Twenty-fifth Congress of Orientalists (Moscow, I960), 2:47-52.
5. Ann K. S. Lambton, "The Constitution of Society," pt. 2, "Women of the
Ruling House," chap. 8 in Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia, Bibliotheca
Persica (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 258-96, See also Shirin
Bayani, Zan-i Irani dar 'asr-i Mughul (Iranian women during the Mongol period)
(Tehran: Tehran University Press, 1352/1973); and Karl Jahn, "Timur und die
Frauen," Anzeiger der Osterreichischen Akademieder Wissenschaften, Philosophisch His-
torische Klasse 3, no. 24 (1974): 515-29.
6. In general, the Mamluk elite rejected the principle of a ruling dynasty. The
requirement that senior officers and the sultan himself had to advance from the
ranks of first-generation imported slaves dated from the origins of the regime,
during the turbulent decades following the death of al-Malik al-Salih in 1249. See
Irwin, Middle East, 1-36; Ira M. Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1-8; and Carl Petty, The Civilian Elite
of Cairo in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 19-
25. The descendants of Sultan Qala'un did constitute a dynasty of sorts, since
they occupied the throne for much of the eighth/fourteenth century. But their
right of inheritance was never absolute, nor did it go unchallenged.
7. Every generation of chroniclers produced critics of Mamluk rivalry and
violence. During the later period,' Abd al-Basit b. Khalil, Ibn lyas, and al-Sairafi al-
Jauhari were representative of the concern voiced by literate civilians over the
endemic violence of Mamluk politics. See 'Abd al-Basit, al-Raudal-basimfihawadith
al-'umr wa'l-tarajim, MS, Arabo 728-29, fol. 251,1. 23, Vatican Library; Ibn lyas,
Bada'i' 3:45,1. 9, on the tyranny of Amir Inal al-Ashqar, mentioned below, 3:72,1.
15, on violent dispute between the Atabak and an officer over results of polo
match; al-Sairafi, Inba' al-hasr bi-abna' al-'asr, ed. Hasan Habashi (Cairo: Dar al-Fikr
al-'Arabi, 1970), 193,1. 1, on a Mamluk soldier shooting a soldier from rival unit
while drunk, 232,1.17, on amirs quarreling over flaying of a bedouin. Robert Irwin
offers a brief but perceptive analysis of Mamluk violence in Middle East, 86-102.
8. The contemporary sources do not provide any references to mortality re-
lated to childbirth, so no statistics can be drawn. Since chronicles do emphasize
the choice of females as custodians of property because of their longevity, we may
assume that the actuarial gain of women outweighed this risk, at least to some
degree.
9. Al-Maqrizi, Kitab al-suluk li-ma'rifa duwal al-muluk, ed. Mustafa Ziyada
(Cairo: Committee on Authorship, Translation, and Publication, 1936), 1:324-44,
 Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain 139

361-68; Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols, 303-4; G. Schregle, Die Sultanin
von Agypten (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1961).
10. For examples of women active in Mamluk politics, see Carl Petry, "A Para-
dox of Patronage during the Later Mamluk Period," Muslim World 73, nos. 3-4
(1983), esp. nn. 39,43. An interesting case involved Aslbay, a concubine of Sultan
Qaitbay and the mother of his heir. Sultan al-Ghauri refused to allow her to return
from the pilgrimage to Mecca due to her alleged conspiracy with Qaitbay's loyal
retainers. See Ibn lyas, Bada'i' 4:131,1. 11,159,1. 15.
11. Irwin, Middle East, 85-102, 125-49; Lapidus, Muslim Cities, 25-38.
12. On reversion of arable land to pasturage or waste, see Jean-Claude Garcin,
Un centre de la haute Egypte medievale: Qus (Cairo: Institut Francois d'Arch£ologie
Orientale, 1976), 499-506, and Garcin, "La mediterraneisation de 1'empire
mamlouk sous les sultans bahrides," Rivista degli studi orientali 48 (1974): 109-16.
13. Eliyahu Ashtor, Levant Trade in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1983), 200-216,433-50; Jean-Claude Garcin, "The Mamluk Mili-
tary System and the Blocking of Medieval Muslim Society," in Europe and the Rise of
Capitalism, ed. Jean Baechler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 113-35;
Subhi Labib, Handelsgeschichte Agyptens im Spatmittelalter (1171-1572) (Wiesbaden:
F. Steiner, 1965), 402-8.
14. Little has been written on the ideological orientation of the Mamluk re-
gime. But its policies, first articulated during the reign of al-Zahir Baibars, clearly
indicated a commitment to preservation of the status quo rather than expansion-
ism. See David Ayalon, "Preliminary Remarks on the Mamluk Military Institution
in Islam," in War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, ed. V. J. Parry (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1975), 44-58; P. M. Holt, "Some Observations on Shafi'
b. 'Ali's Biography of Baybars," Journal of Semitic Studies 29 (1984): 123-30; Irwin,
Middle East, 37-58; Abd al-Aziz Khowaiter, Baibars the First: His Endeavors and
Achievements (London: Green Mountain Press, 1978); and Peter Thorau, Sultan
Baibars I. von Agypten (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert, 1987), 143-60, 169-86.
15. Ibn lyas, Bada'i' 3:5, 1. 12 (sultan refuses to pay accession gift), 27, 1. 3
(sultan compelled to grant 400,000-dinar bonus for expedition), 3:236,1.10 (sultan
forced to pay special bonus to quell revolt), 3:251,1.13 (sultan distributes 1 million
dinars in bonuses alone for Ottoman expedition), 3:261,1.16 (sultan threatens to
abdicate due to impending bankruptcy); 'Abd al-Basit, Raud, fol. 203-b, 1. 22; al-
Sairafi, Inba', 16,1.16,24,1. 5 (sultan omits stipend to aulad al-nass (descendants of
Mamluk) due to depletion of treasury), 35,1.13,40,1.11 (sultan reduces stipends
to Sultani Mamluks).
16. Petry, Civilian Elite, 202-21.
17. Ibid., 312-25; Ibn lyas claimed that Sultan al-Ghauri so abused his civil
officials that he upset this tacit partnership. Bada'i' 5:91,1. 15.
18. See, for example, 'Abd al-Basit, Raud, fol. 174-b, 1.17 (Qaitbay's confisca-
tion of the former grand dawadar's estate at the outset of his reign); al-Sairafi,
Inba', 56,1.12; Ibn lyas, Bada'i' 3:39,1.13 (Qaitbay arrests Zain al-Din the Ustadar
and demands 100,000 dinars; latter claims to own only house and waqf), 4:12,1. 6
(upon his accession al-Ghauri imprisons the treasurer Timurbay), 4:405,1.3 (upon
the Amir Khairbak al-Khazindar/s death, huge hidden estate discovered), 4:428,1.
140 Carl F. Retry

24,476,1.1 (al-Ghauri tortures Ustadar to compel revelation of assets); 5:32,1.8 (al-

Ghauri seizes property of daughter of inspector (kashif) of Gharbiyya Province),
5:90,1. 1 (author castigates al-Ghauri for confiscating inheritances).
19. Al-Sairafi, Inba'', 38,1.1 (on unfair taxes charged by wazirs, in contrast with
past); Ibn lyas, Bada'i' 3:260,1.16 (futures tax on merchants to raise bonus money);
3:262,1.19, (masses revolt against qadi who recommended futures tax), 3:278,1. 5
(sultan imposes huge ad hoc tax to defray cost of Ottoman expedition), 3:315,1.12
(futures tax on grain), 3:302,1.10 (author criticizes sultan for charging five-months
futures tax), 4:20,1. 7 (sultan's agents demand seven-months futures tax).
20. Ibn lyas, Bada'i' 3:253, 1. 13 (sultan places tax of one-fifth yield on iqta'
holders), 3:269, 1. 8 (fifth tax on iqta' holders in Sharqiyya to fund Ottoman
expedition), 4:24, 1. 10 (iqta' holders forced to pay double kharaj), 4:262, 1. 12
(prefects of Gharbiyya and Sharqiyya charge futures yield tax), 4:291,1. 9 (sultan
forces iqta' holders to pay for dyke and canal repairs).
21. 'Abd al-Basit, Raud, fol. 183,1. 2; al-Sairafi, Inba', 34,1. 14 (sultan contem-
plates collecting portion of waqf yields to pay bonuses); Ibn lyas, Bada'i' 3:13,1.21
(sultan convenes council of qadis to debate tapping waqf yields to raise expedition
money), 3:192, 1. 9 (sultan appoints extortionist supervisor of trusts (nazir al-
auqaf), 3:331,1. 1 (author denounces Qaitbay for allowing his dawadar, Yashbak,
to alienate waqfs), 4:14,1.13 (sultan convenes qadis to discuss waqf confiscation),
4:260,1. 5 (sultan confiscates Shafi'i waqfs), 5:91,1.1 (author implies that God has
allowed Ottoman conquest as revenge for al-Ghauri's tampering with trusts).
22. Muhammad Amin has explored the consequences of waqf manipulation.
See his al-Auqafwa'l-hayat al-ijtima'iyya ft Misr (Cairo: Dar al-Nahda al-'Arabiyya,
1980), 361-72. Lapidus discusses urban decline brought on by insecurity of assets
(Muslim Cities, 27-38). I have touched on the subject in a general way. Civilian Elite,
19-33, 246-54.
23. Al-Sairafi, Inba', 429, 1. 1 (who refers to Sada as his mother); Ibn lyas,
Bada'i' 3:46, 1. 17.
24. Indeed, the only case of a Mamluk woman suffering torture that I have
discovered was Khawand Jankaldi, wife of Sultan al-Zahir Qansuh (a predecessor
of al-Ghauri), who was interrogated about the hiding place of her husband. Ibn
lyas, Bada'i' 4:205,1.19.
25. Al-Sairafi, Inba', 19,1. 1.
26. Ibid., 286, . 9.
27. Ibid., 471, . 9 (18 Muharram 877/26 June 1472).
28. Ibid., 131, . 14.
29. Ibid., 225, . 14 (d. 16 Jumada I 875/25 Dec. 1466).
30. Ibid., 426, . 6; Ibn lyas, Bada'i' 3:70,1.13 (d. 28 Shawwal 876/8 Apr. 1472).
31. Muhammad M. Amin, Catalogue des documents d'archives du Caire de 239/853
a 922/1516 (Cairo: Institut Frangais d'ArchSologie Orientale, 1981).
32. Daftarkhana, hujjat 913 jadid (Amin #339), Ministry of Waqfs, Cairo.
33. Ibn Taghri-Birdi, al-Manhal al-safi wa'l-mustaufi ba'd al-wafi, Ms (Cairo: Dar
al-Kutub, Ta'rikh 1113); Gaston Wiet, "Les biographies du Manhal Sari," Memoires
de I'institut d'Egypte 19, no. 944 (1932): 139.
34. 'Abd al-Basit, Raud, fol. 181, 1. 29. See also Ibn lyas, Bada'i' 3:302,1. 14.
35. Ibn lyas, Bada'i' 4:64,1. 6.
 Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain 141

36. See al-Sakhawi, al-Dau' al-lami' ft a'yan al-qarn al-tasi' (Beirut: Dar al-Mak-
taba al-Haya, 1934), 4, p. 201, no. 697, for the lengthiest and most adulatory
biography.
37. Few Mamluk sultans elevated more than one connubial partner to the
status of legal wife, even though Islamic law entitled them to four. Most took
concubines simultaneously, however, and progeny from the latter enjoyed equal
inheritance rights.
38. Fatima's two siblings are referred to in the context of her "donation" (hiba)
to Sultan al-Ghauri. Fatima made this donation of property in the role of caretaker
of her inheritance and that of "her siblings (ikhwaha) by her; father: The Honorable
(Janab) al-Nasir Muhammad and the Lady the Virtuous (Masuna) 'A'isha." See
Daftarkhana, hujjat 104 jadid (Amin #450), Ministry of Waqfs.
39. The earliest surviving deed drawn up for Qaitbay is dated 29 Dhu al-Qa'da
855/23 Dec. 1451, seventeen years before his enthronement (Mahkama Shar'iyya:
Mahfaza 18, hujjat 111, National Archives, Cairo [Amin #116]). He is referred to
as al-Saifi Qaitbay b. 'Abd Allah al-Mahmudi. As amir he purchased 26.7 percent
of a plot of land in Nahiyat Salmun, Gharbiyya Province, for 1,100 dinars. Since
this property does not appear in later waqf documents designating its yield for
support of a foundation, the purchase presumably was reserved for Qaitbay's
own estate.
40. Al-Sairafi, Inba', 60,1. 1; Ibn lyas, Bada'i1 3:30,1. 12.
41. The son was born in Shawwal 887/November 1483, to "the Sultan's favor-
ite, Aslbay al-Jarkasiyya" (Ibn lyas, Bada'i' 3:197,1. 4). Sultan al-Ghauri later con-
fiscated all of Aslbay's estate: ibid., 4:20,1. 12.
42. 'Abd al-Basit, Raud, fol. 181,1. 29; Ibn lyas, Bada'i' 3:12,1. 4 (on 4 Dhu al-
Qa'da 872/26 May 1468).
43. Ibn lyas, Bada'i' 3:106,1. 18.
44. Daftarkhana, hujjat 775 jadid (Amin #506), Ministry of Waqfs.
45. When Sultan al-Ghauri assumed ownership of Fatima's estate, he took over
most of the surviving deeds. They are all in Daftarkhana, the "new" (jadid)
collection, Ministry of Waqfs.

712 (Amin #376), purchase, 12 Rabi' II 894/15 Mar. 1489

205 (Amin #421), transfer, 24 Shawwal 904/3 June 1499
765 (Amin #427), purchase, 2 Jumada II 903/26 Jan. 1498
443 (Amin #430), purchase, 22 Dhu al-Hijja 895/6 Nov. 1490
425 (Amin #435), purchase, 23 Sha'ban 894/22 July 1489
209 (Amin #438), transfer, 22 Dhu al-Hijja 905/19 July 1500
490 (Amin #439), purchase, 22 Dhu al-Hijja 895/6 Nov. 1490
420 (Amin #442), purchase, 17 Rabi' 1896/28 Jan. 1491
204 (Amin #450), transfer, 19 Dhu al-Hijja 890/27 Dec. 1485
707 (Amin #469), waqf, 21 Rabi' 1878/16 Aug. 1473. This deed was not
taken over by al-Ghauri.
294 (Amin #481), purchase, 11 Muharram 890/28 Jan. 1485
579 (Amin #502), rent, 2 Jumada I 900/29 Jan. 1495
472 (Amin #504), repossession, 3 Dhu al-Hijja 888/2 Jan. 1484
77-0 (Amin #510), purchase, 26 Jumada II 903/19 Feb. 1498
142 Carl F. Retry

447 (Amin #518), purchase, 19 Dhu al-Hijja 890/27 Dec. 1485

427 (Amin #519), purchase, 6 Dhu al-Qa'da 894/1 Oct. 1489
433 (Amin #528), purchase, 11 Dhu al-Qa'da 891/8 Nov. 1486
448 (Amin #543), purchase, 5 Rabi' I 894/6 Feb. 1489
492 (Amin #544), purchase, 12 Rabi' II894/15 Mar. 1489
474 (Amin #545), purchase, 12 Rabi' II894/15 Mar. 1489
472 (Amin #546), purchase, 23 Dhu al-Hijja 894/18 Nov. 1489
455 (Amin #548), purchase, 23 Dhu al-Hijja 894/18 Nov. 1489
438 (Amin #553), purchase, 17 Rabi' I 896/28 Jan. 1491
50 (Amin #555), transfer, 6 Dhu al-Qa'da 904/15 June 1499
178 (Amin #556), purchase, 15 Shawwal 896/24 Aug. 1491
59 (Amin #565), purchase, 6 Shawwal 899/10 July 1494
469 (Amin #566), purchase, 6 Jumada 1900/2 Feb. 1495
109 (Amin #567), transfer, 27 Rajab 909/15 Jan. 1504
435 (Amin #576), purchase, 15 Dhu al-Qa'da 901/26 July 1496
409 (Amin #577), purchase, 15 Dhu al-Qa'da 901/26 July 1496
222 (Amin #583), transfer, 16 Safar 903/14 Oct. 1497
77-i? (Amin #592), purchase, 6 Dhu al-Qa'da 904/15 June 1498
453 (Amin #594), purchase, 13 Rabi' II905/17 Nov. 1499
123 (Amin #595), purchase, 14 Rabi' II905/18 Nov. 1499
465 (Amin #608), purchase, 20 Jumada II906/11 Jan. 1501
466 (Amin #622), purchase, 10 Ramadan 907/19 Mar. 1502
677 (Amin #660), purchase, 27 Rajab 909/15 Jan. 1504

46. The assumptions are designated as intiqal (transfer) or hiba (gift). They
name al-Ghauri as executor of Fatima's estate and place all properties within the
sultan's waqf supporting his khanqah (mystic hospice) and madrasa (known as the
Ghuriya today). The presiding judge was Sari al-Din 'Abd al-Barr b. al-Shihna al-
Hanafi, who was deeply involved in the sultan's expropriations until his fall from
grace in 919/1513. The scribes (muwaqqi'uri) were 'Abd al-Karim b. 'Ali al-Majuli
and Musa b. 'Abd al-Ghani al-Maliki.
 Women and Islamic Education
8
in the Mamluk Period

J O N A T H A N P. B E R K E Y

How splendid were the women of the ansar [the Medinese

"helpers" of the Prophet]—shame did not prevent them from
becoming learned in the faith.—'A'isha, wife of the Prophet.
Islamic legal and religious education was in origin and re-
mained throughout the Middle Ages a fundamentally infor-
mal system. From the primary level to the final stages of
instruction and the transmission of knowledge, one's educa-
tion depended more on a personal relationship with a teach-
er or teachers than it did on an attachment to any institution.
The community of scholars whose standards and principles
arbitrated all questions of intellectual accomplishment
looked not to an attestation that one had studied in any
particular school, but rather to the ijaza, the certification by a
teacher that a particular student was qualified to teach a par-
ticular subject, or to transmit a specific book or collection of
traditions. The bonds between teacher and student may
have been informal, but they could also prove extremely
close, and not infrequently grew out of actual ties of kinship.
In such a system, as we shall see, women could play a signifi-
cant role.
To be sure, the rise of the institution known as the madrasa
resulted, to a certain degree, in the "formalization" of the
educational process. Before the eleventh century, mosques
provided the principal venue for the teaching circles (halqa,
majlis) in which all Islamic higher education took place. Pro-
spective students made private arrangements with the
shaikhs (masters, teachers) who taught at such sessions, the
teachers drawing an income from fees paid to them by their
students, or from the occasional largesse of the caliph or

Portions of this chapter appear in somewhat different form in The

Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic
Education (Princeton University Press, 1992).
143
144 Jonathan P. Berkey

some other wealthy individual. The establishment of the Nizamiyya

madrasa in Baghdad in A.H. 459/A.D. 1067, however, significantly altered
the equation. Closely associated with the Sunni revival of the twelfth
century, the madrasa spread rapidly through Syria and later, Egypt, un-
der the patronage of Zangid and Ayyubid sultans. For the first time, the
Islamic world produced an institution, distinct from mosques and other
religious establishments, devoted specifically to the inculcation of the
Islamic religious sciences and, in particular, offiqh, the science of Islamic
jurisprudence.1
The task of identifying with precision the distinctions between the
madrasa and other institutions of Islamic learning raises difficulties of its
own, problems that cannot be dealt with here. For our present purposes it
suffices to note that madrasas systematically provided, first, endowed
teaching posts with guaranteed stipends for those professors who held
them, and second, stipends and often living accommodations for stu-
dents. Even after the collapse of the Shi'i governments and the with-
drawal from Palestine of the Latin Crusaders—the twin threats that had
motivated the Zangid and Ayyubid princes to construct and endow in-
stitutions to train a class of legal and religious officials—madrasas con-
tinued to be built. In the city of Cairo, capital of the Mamluk regime from
its inception in the year 648/1250 to its demise at the hands of the Ot-
toman sultan Selim in 922/1517, madrasas emerged as the leading institu-
tions of Islamic education, their endowed professorships and student
scholarships supporting a corps of trained legal scholars and officials.
Many women of the Mamluk period were associated with madrasas as
benefactors, supplying the endowments necessary to establish and
maintain the schools. A minimum of five such schools, founded by
women, existed at some time in Mamluk Cairo: one established by the
wife of a powerful Ayyubid amir at least half a century before the fall of
that dynasty; one established in the seventh/thirteenth century by the
daughter of an Ayyubid prince, who herself was learned in hadith (the
Prophetic traditions); one endowed by a daughter of the Mamluk sultan
al-Nasir Muhammad, which included a tomb for her own burial; another,
and perhaps the most famous, established by Barakat, the mother of
Sultan al-Ashraf Sha'ban, in 771/1469-70; and one built by Fatima, the
daughter of Qanibay al-'Umari al-Nasiri and wife of Taghri Birdi al-
Mu'adhdhi, in the late ninth/fifteenth century.2 At least one more was
established within a decade of the Ottoman conquest.3 According to a
sixteenth-century history of Damascene madrasas, the Syrian capital
boasted even more.4 Other women shared in the abiding interest felt by
their families for schools established by an ancestor, for example, by
bestowing endowments on them at a future date. Quite a few—
 Women and Islamic Education 145

daughters and wives of Mamluk as well as scholarly families—were bur-

ied in tombs attached to madrasas founded by a husband, father, or
grandfather.
A woman could also be vested with a supervisory role in the admin-
istration of a madrasa. Deeds of endowment (waqfiyyas) establishing
madrasas normally left ultimate financial and administrative control
(nazar) of the institutions and their endowments in the hands of the
founders and. after them, their children and descendants—usually spec-
ified as "the most rightly guided" (al-arshad) of the descendants—their
trusted retainers, powerful amirs, judges, or some combination thereof.
How often such stipulations resulted in a woman's assuming the control-
lership of Cairene madrasas is not clear, although one researcher who
knows the documentary sources well has concluded that the practice was
common.5 Several waqfiyyas stipulated specifically that the female as
well as the male descendants of the founder were to be eligible to serve as
controller of endowments supporting madrasas.6 Nonetheless, it lay
within the founders' discretionary powers to exclude their daughters and
female descendants from the nazar, and sultans al-Zahir Barquq and al-
Mu'ayyad Shaikh, among others, chose to make such a stipulation in
establishing their madrasas.7
Thus the wives and daughters of the Mamluks and of the academic
elite were hardly strangers to the world of institutionalized education,
and they participated actively in the creation and administration of the
endowments on which that world relied. As benefactors, several women
invested substantial sums in the establishment of institutions of learning,
like their male counterparts appropriating to themselves the baraka (bless-
ing) thought to be gained from supporting the pious activities of the
schools. As administrators, they found themselves, at least in theory (for
substitutes could be appointed), actively managing a school's assets and
appointing its professors and other functionaries.
Women, however, played virtually no role, as either professor or stu-
dent, in the systematic legal education offered in the madrasas. To the
best of my knowledge, the chronicles and biographical dictionaries of the
Mamluk period yield not a single instance of the appointment of a woman
to a post in a madrasa, or to an endowed post in any educational institu-
tion.8 This is hardly surprising, and the explanation is not difficult to
discover. Quite simply, women were excluded from active participation
in those occupations—litigation, judging, administration—for which the
systematic legal curriculum of the madrasa was designed to produce
qualified candidates.
Yet immediately an anomaly confronts us. As the sources attest, many
medieval women were, in some sense, educated. Of the 1,075 women
146 Jonathan P. Berkey

listed in al-Sakhawi's al-Dau' al-lami' li-ahl al-qarn al-tasi', a biographical

dictionary of the leading figures 6f the ninth/fifteenth century, 411 can
definitely be said to have received some degree of education: to have
memorized the Quran, or studied with a particular scholar, or received an
ijaza. The biographies of the other women are not detailed enough to
allow definitive judgments as to the extent of their intellectual training,
but given al-Sakhawi's interests, it seems probable that they, too, were
educated: the eleven volumes devoted to men consist largely of details of
the lives and careers of the educated elite. But if women were excluded
from the madrasa, what did they study, where, with whom, and why?
The answer lies in the persistent informality of Islamic education. The
remarkable growth in the number of madrasas notwithstanding, the in-
stitution never established a monopoly on the inculcation of the Islamic
sciences. Endowment deeds for madrasas often made precise stipula-
tions as to which classes were to be held when and in which parts of the
building, and who was to attend, but we should not be led to believe that
lessons occurred only at those times and places. On the contrary, many
scholars continued to teach in less formal settings: in public teaching
circles in mosques and in private homes. In such venues, women might
be found alongside men, receiving instruction or attending the recitation
of hadith. Hence, as we shall see, the moral outrage of the fourteenth-
century puritan Ibn al-Hajj at the popular practice of women coming
together with men in mosques to hear a recitation of books (sama' al-
kutub) by a shaikh or an imam (literally, a prayer leader).
The transmission of knowledge in the later Middle Ages continued to
depend far more on the personal relationship between teacher and stu-
dent than it did on any institutional framework. Most educations began
with the closest relationship of all, that of kinship. When listing those
with whom a particular individual studied, al-Sakhawi and other biog-
raphers often began with the subject's father, grandfather, or uncle, and
only then moved on to others. For women, this was particularly true.
Zainab al-Tukhiyya (d. 894/1388), for example, the daughter of 'Ali ibn
Muhammad al-Diruti al-Mahalli, received from family members a basic
but substantial education typical of that given many girls. When she was
a child in Mahalla, her father made her memorize the Quran and taught
her to write, but he also instructed her in a number of books that formed
core elements in the advanced education of any late medieval Muslim of
the Shafi'i madhhab (school of law). Zainab studied several fundamental
works of Shafi'i jurisprudence, including Najm al-Din'Abd al-Gha£far al-
Qazwini's workal-Hawial-saghirfial-furu' and the mukhtasar (abridgment)
of Abu Shajja' Ahmad al-Isfahani, as well as a treatise in verse on Arabic
grammar entitled al-Mulha, written by Abu Muhammad Qasim al-
Hariri.9
 Women and Islamic Education 147

But husbands, no less than fathers, grandfathers, and uncles, as-

sumed a responsibility for the education of their wives. Thus, after her
marriage, Zainab al-Tukhiyya's husband undertook to continue her edu-
cation, guiding her through the two principal collections of hadith, the
Sahih of al-Bukhari and that of Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj.10 The jurist Qadi
Khan recognized few situations in which women were permitted to leave
their homes without their husbands' permission, but among them was
that of a woman who wanted to attend a lesson (majlis al-'ilm) and whose
husband was not a faqih—that is, was not himself qualified to instruct
her. Clearly, the jurist understood that the primary responsibility for a
woman's education lay with her husband.11
Families of the scholarly elite took special care to educate their female
offspring. The biographical dictionaries frequently comment that boys
who were to become famous scholars began their education, or received
ijazas permitting them to transmit a certain book or collection of tradi-
tions, at extraordinarily young ages; girls, too, shared in this distinction.
Another Zainab (d. 865/1461), daughter of 'Abd al-Rahim ibn al-Hasan
al-;Iraqi al-Qahiri, began her education by accompanying her brother to
classes at the start of her fifth year. Her older contemporary Zainab bint
'Abd Allah ibn Ahmad, known as Bint al-'Aryani (d. 856/1452), was
similarly brought before a scholar for the first time at the age of two.12
The long-term intellectual benefits of these early contacts between
scholars and pupils aside, such exposure held value chiefly as a first step
in a process of including young students in the academic world. The full
significance of their attendance will become apparent soon. For the mo-
ment, however, it is important to recognize that girls as well as boys were
consciously drawn into the process and that, at such ages, the initiative
for educating them lay with their families, that is to say, with fathers or
possibly older brothers. In the al-Majma' al-mu'assas bi'l-mu'jam al-
mufahras, an account of his education and a list of his teachers covering
more than four hundred manuscript pages, Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani care-
fully indicated those shaikhs from whom he had secured ijazas for his
daughters.13 That the scholarly Bulqini family produced many learned
women whose biographies are found in al-Sakhawi's collection should
therefore come as no surprise. Indeed, so accepted was the education of
women among families of learning that al-Sakhawi commented of one
woman, although he had no direct knowledge of her education, "I do not
doubt that she had obtained ijazas, as her family was well-known [for its
learning]."14
At one level, the care with which scholarly families (the ulama) edu-
cated their daughters reflected a concern for their spiritual well-being.
Islamic education, after all, aims not only at producing a cadre of judges
and scribes to regulate social intercourse, but also at inculcating the prin-
148 Jonathan P. Berkey

ciples and practices that shape the character and behavior of a good
Muslim—in other words, at the individual soul, which concerned men
and women equally. Obviously, not everyone possessed the means to
become an 'alim, a fully trained scholar, but all Muslims were expected to
obtain the degree of knowledge requisite for their station in life, accord-
ing to an important treatise on knowledge and learning that circulated
widely during the Mamluk period. Everyone, for example, was required
to know enough of the law to fulfill his or her duties to pray, fast, pay zakat
(the obligatory alms tax), and perform the pilgrimage, duties incumbent
on women as well as men. But 'Urn (religious and legal learning) involved
more than the minimum knowledge needed to fulfill one's religious obli-
gations. The same text noted that "[knowledge has an important bearing]
on all other qualities [of human character] such as generosity and avarice,
cowardice and courage, arrogance and humility, chastity [and debauch-
ery], prodigality and parsimony, and so on. For arrogance, avarice, cow-
ardice, and prodigality are illicit. Only through knowledge of them and
their opposites is protection against them possible. Thus learning is pre-
scribed for all of us."15
For all of us—including women. Although women did not function in
society as lawyers and judges, scribes and administrators, they had no
less need of 'ilm at the personal level than men did, a point that appar-
ently did not escape the ulama. Islamic lawyers busied themselves with
prescribing rules for the regulation of women's personal and social affairs
and for their ritual and hygenic behavior—one need consider only the
extensive chapters in the law books on menstruation and other matters of
ritual purity of special interest to women. Those precepts and regulations
then had to be transmitted to those they most concerned.
The only question was how this knowledge was to be transmitted to
women and young girls. The matter was a delicate one, for somehow it
had to be accomplished without threatening the gender boundaries that
cut across the medieval Islamic world, which the ulama, with their
greater familiarity with the precepts of the law, perhaps took more se-
riously than others did. Though many women participated actively in
other religious, economic, and literary pursuits, including the transmis-
sion of knowledge, there was a certain reluctance to encourage the educa-
tion of women, which although often overcome nonetheless doggedly
shadowed their intellectual pursuits.16 One reason women were ex-
cluded from education in madrasas was the intrinsic threat to sexual
boundaries and taboos their presence was believed to represent in an
institution housing any number of young male Muslims. Madrasas were
not monasteries—many people lived inside them, including married
scholars with their families (as witnessed by the not infrequent reports in
 Women and Islamic Education 149

the chronicles that a particular individual had been born in one madrasa
or another). Many felt, however, that a stricter separation of men and
women would prove more conducive to education. Women, wrote the
fourteenth-century scholar Badr al-Din Ibn Jama'a in a treatise on the
manners and methods of education, should not live in the madrasa, or
nearby where men and boys from the madrasa would pass by their doors,
or even in buildings with windows overlooking the courtyards of the
schools.17
As we have already noted, however, Islamic education was by no
means confined to the madrasa, and in the less formal venues in which it
thrived—private teaching circles in mosques and homes—women could
be found studying alongside men. There is no question that this oc-
curred; how frequently and how well it was accepted are more prob-
lematic. Consider the complaint of Ibn al-Hajj, who wrote a lengthy
treatise describing practices of which he did not approve:
[Consider] what some w omen do when people [that is, men] gather
with a shaikh to hear [the recitation of] books. At that point women
come, too, to hear the readings; the men sit in one place, the
women facing them. It even happens at such times that some of the
women are carried away by the situation; one will stand up, and sit
down, and shout in a loud voice. [Moreover,] private parts of her
body will appear; in her house, their exposure would be forbid-
den—how can it be allowed in a mosque, in the presence of men?18
"Private parts of her body"—the term Ibn al-Hajj used was 'aurat, liter-
ally, "that which it is indecent to reveal." In the case of women, that might
include everything except the face and hands. Clearly what concerned
Ibn al-Hajj was not explicit exhibitionism, but the threat to established
sexual boundaries represented by the mixing of men and women in these
informal lessons.
Under these circumstances, alternative arrangements were generally
made for the education of women. Women could be educated and sexual
boundaries preserved by providing for instruction from family members:
fathers, brothers, or husbands. Even so, many women studied with and
received ijazas from scholars outside the immediate family circle, and
often the scholars with whom they studied were themselves women. I do
not mean to suggest that education took place exclusively in groups seg-
regated by sex. On the contrary, many whose biographies were recorded
in such compilations as al-Sakhawi's dictionary of fifteenth-century lumi-
naries, males as well as females, were instructed by and received ijazas
from learned women, a point to which we shall return. But a thorough
perusal of the Kitab al-nisa', the volume of al-Sakhawi's work that is de-
150 Jonathan P. Berkey

voted to women, leaves the impression that girls, more than boys, re-
ceived their instruction from other women. Some educated women
shouldered the specific responsibility for "teaching women the Quran
and instructing them in 'ilm and righteous deeds."19 Al-Sakhawi offers
an insight into a world in which learned women transmitted to other
women the precepts of the law—that is to say, 'ilm—of special concern to
them. A certain Khadija, daughter of' Ali ibn 'Umar al-Ansari who died
in 873/1469, "informed [other] women concerning the chapters [from the
law books] on menstruation and like matters."20 Women may not have
explicitly formulated the law, even concerning specifically feminine mat-
ters, but they did play an active role in transmitting its principles and
regulations to one another.
It was not necessary to establish a completely separate structure for
this purpose. As we have seen, even in Mamluk Cairo structure was a
secondary element in the organization of education and the transmission
of knowledge. Historians of the period occasionally refer to girls whose
fathers or brothers brought them to classes or lectures at a madrasa.21
Nonetheless, the need to preserve sexual boundaries did encourage a
focus on particular institutions and locations for the education of women.
The forum might well be—a point worthy of special note—a private
home, such as that of one learned woman of the fifteenth century whose
family seems to have committed itself especially to the religious edifica-
tion of women, for "her house was a gathering place for divorced and
widowed women, devoted to the instruction of young girls."22
By extension, a secondary objective of the education of women in-
volved the regulation of what might be called "female space." Consider,
for example, the institution known as the ribat al-Baghdadiyya, estab-
lished in 684/1286 by a daughter of the Mamluk sultan Baibars. Little is
known of this hospice and others like it, although apparently at least five
were established in Cairo over the course of the Mamluk period, in addi-
tion to a large number in the necropolis outside the city.23 They seem to
have served principally as places of residence for elderly, divorced, and
widowed women who had no place of abode, until their death or remar-
riage.
In addition to providing women with shelter, however, at least some
of these institutions were expected to satisfy the intellectual and spiritual
needs of those without family members capable of providing them with a
suitable education. This was particularly true of the ribat al-Baghdadiyya,
where the shaikha who administered the institution routinely preached
to the female residents and instructed them in fiqh, the science of Islamic
jurisprudence, "until such time as they should remarry or return to their
husbands."24 Here, then, the instruction of women actually played a role
 Women and Islamic Education 151

in protecting and reaffirming sexual boundaries that the independent

status of a divorced or widowed woman might threaten.

At first glance, education seems to have represented a world in which

gender barriers, if not actually dissolved, were at least permeable. Al-
Sakhawi himself, in his biographical dictionary, specifically refers to hav-
ing studied with or received ijazas from sixty-eight women; this figure
does not include those of an earlier generation whom his own teacher,
Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani, numbered among his instructors. Even in these
settings, however, actual contact between men and women might be
limited, since the standards of the time made it possible to receive an ijaza
from a scholar without actually studying or reciting a work in his or her
presence.25 Here again, the family connection was crucial. Two sisters,
for example, received ijazas by virtue of their association with their schol-
arly brothers.26 In an ijaza issued by al-Sakhawi himself, the scholar
authorized Abu Bakr ibn al-Hishi and his three sons, who had "heard"
him recite his collection of traditions known as the Kitab al-buldaniyyat, to
transmit the work; the same ijaza was issued to Ibn al-Hishi's younger
daughter 'A'isha, although there is no evidence that she was actually
present at the recitations.27 Yet in other contexts men and women, boys
and girls, did study and hear lessons together—a certain Asiyya al-
Dimashqiyya (d. early tenth/sixteenth century), for example, heard
lessons given by her grandmother in the presence of her brothers and al-
Sakhawi.28 Ibn al-Hajj's complaint that men and women were congregat-
ing in mosques to hear the recitation of a book, while suggesting that a
certain section of the population frowned on the practice, nonetheless
confirms that it was not uncommon.
In no field was this more true than in the transmission of hadith, the
Prophetic traditions that form an important basis of Islamic law.29 Well-
known muhaddithun (those who had memorized and taught traditions)
routinely compiled lists of those on whose authority they recited hadith;
in them, most important male scholars included significant numbers of
women. In his list of 172 names, Taj al-Din 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Subki (d.
771/1370) included 19 women.30 Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani provided the
names of 53 women with whom, in one way or another, he studied
traditions.31 No less a scholar than Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (d. 911/1505)
relied heavily on women as his sources for hadith: of the 130 shaikhs of
exceptional reliability on whose authority he recited traditions, 33—more
than a quarter of the total—were women.32
'A'isha, the daughter of Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Hadi, achieved a
position in the transmission of hadith unequaled by many men, and her
life provides a model for female transmitters. Born in Damascus in the
152 Jonathan P. Berkey

early eighth/fourteenth century,33 in her fourth year she was brought

before Abu al-'Abbas Ahmad al-Hajjar, a prominent muhaddith who
died in 730/1329, from whom she heard two small but popular collections
of hadith.34 She later studied Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj's important compen-
dium of traditions, the Sahih, with Sharaf al-Din 'Abd Allah ibn al-
Hasan35 and others, and Ibn Hisham's sira (biography) of the Prophet.
During her lifetime she collected ijazas from scholars in Aleppo, Hama,
Nablus, and Hebron, and she herself became one whom the rahhala—
those scholars and others who traveled the Islamic world in search of
hadith—eagerly sought out. Her fame spread; as important a scholar as
Ibn Hajar was proud to list her among his principal teachers.36 The seven-
teenth-century historian Ibn al-'Imad gave her the epithet "muhadditha of
Damascus" and remarked that she was "the most supported [that is, in
the reliability of her transmission] of the people of her time."
The very nature of the culture of hadith transmission ensured that
women, no less than men, could become prized teachers. Clearly it was
imperative that one study hadith with a shaikh of wide knowledge and
blameless reputation, not only to increase the number of traditions one
knew and could transmit, but also to draw on a shaikh's authority and so
enhance one's own reputation as a muhaddith. But the selection of a
teacher of hadith involved another criterion as well: reducing the number
of transmitters in a given chain of authority (isnad). In other words, a man
or woman might become a prized teacher of hadith because he or she
could claim to have studied directly with an especially revered transmit-
ter of traditions. An inevitable consequence was that young pupils pre-
ferred older teachers, for these privileged students, as they aged, might
become the sole surviving muhaddith in a particular city or region to
recite traditions on the direct authority of a prominent shaikh.
At this level women could compete directly with men, and in fact a
number of women distinguished themselves as the sole surviving trans-
mitter of traditions from prominent teachers. The muhadditha 'A'isha
bint 'Abd al-Hadi, for example, well deserved the great respect in which
she was held, for she "aged until she stood alone [as a transmitter] from
the majority of her shaikhs."37 It is here that the early education of girls
(and boys) played a critical role, by allowing women to establish indepen-
dent reputations as valuable links in the chains of authority on which
Muslim learning rested.;A'isha was four when she heard the Sahih of al-
Bukhari from the famous traditionist al-Hajjar, then more than a hundred
years old. In 'A'isha's old age, as her student Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani
announced proudly in his account of his education, "no one other than
['A'isha] remained on the earth who transmitted from al-Hajjar."38
'A'isha bint 'Abd al-Hadi was by no means unique in this respect.
Other women achieved distinction as prominent transmitters of hadith,
 Women and Islamic Education 153

among them Khadija bint Ibrahim b. Ishaq al-Dimashqiyya, who when

she died at the age of almost ninety in 803/1400-1401, was the last to
transmit hadith on the authority of al-Qasim Ibn 'Asakir, a prominent
Syrian traditionist who died in 723/1323, "bi'1-sama"' (that is, having
heard Ibn 'Asakir himself read traditions).39 Both Maryam bint Ahmad
ibn Ibrahim (d. 805/1402-3) and Fatima bint Khalil ibn Ahmad (d.
838/1434) ended their lives as the sole authorities for the direct transmis-
sion of traditions from a number of their shaikhs. Both, moreover,
achieved the further distinction of having mashyakhas (lists of those on
whose authority they transmitted hadith) composed for them—in the
case of Fatima, by Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani himself—a further indication
that women studied traditions not only as pious adherents, but also as
active participants in the transmission of this important field of Muslim
intellectual endeavor.40
That women frequently excelled in the transmission of hadith, how-
ever, should not disguise from us the fundamental difference between
the character of the education they received and that accorded men. The
most practical consequence of this difference—namely, the absence of
women in endowed positions in madrasas—we have already noted. The
gender barrier affected the core of the relationship between teacher and
student as it was known in medieval Islam. Instruction, it may be argued,
necessarily implies a power relationship between instructor and student.
Certainly Islamic pedagogical literature abounds with metaphors and
normative guidelines that reinforced the subservient role of the in-
structed. A student should respect and obey his shaikh in all matters,
commented an important fourteenth-century writer, "as the patient
[obeys] the skillful doctor/'41 Another jurist preferred the metaphor of
father and child: "Every student and teacher should show respect for the
other, especially the former [that is, the student especially should be
respectful], because his teacher is like the father or even greater, since his
father brought him into the world of perdition, while his teacher leads
him to the world of eternal life."42 Inside the madrasa, or in situations of
special intimacy between instructor and instructed, a teacher's control
over his pupils extended to a close supervision of their behavior and
morals, as well as their educational progress.43 Consequently, a careful
reader of the biographies of women in al-Sakhawi's al-Dau' al-lami' and in
other biographical dictionaries will note the dearth of such terms as suhba
and mulazama, terms that describe the intimate personal and intellectual
relationships between gifted students and particular prominent teachers,
and terms that occur with such frequency in the biographies of men.44
Moreover, the biographical dictionaries reveal a paucity of women
said to have excelled in jurisprudence, or in usul (the bases of jurispru-
dence), or in kalam (theology), or in any subjects in which male scholars
154 Jonathan P. Berkey

were often said to have been proficient. This is not to say that such areas
of study were entirely off limits to women. Girls could receive instruction
in the fundamentals of fiqh, as did Zainab al-Tukhiyya. Many popular
introductory texts formed part of the curriculum of the education of
females, such as Ibn Malik's versified introduction to Arabic grammar,
Ulfiyya; al-Qasim al-Shatibi's popular poem on the Quran; and Sharaf al-
Din al-Busiri's qasida (poem) in praise of the Prophet. But beyond the
elementary stages, a woman's education focused almost exclusively on
hadith, and in that field lay her surest path to prominence.
The study of hadith, of course, formed a core element in the education
of any medieval Muslim, including those such as merchant-scholars,
who though not full-time academics, nonetheless devoted great time and
energy to the pursuit of 'ilm. Moreover, the hadith themselves played a
formative role in the shaping of Islamic thought and society. The Pro-
phetic traditions not only constituted one of the bases—in many ways
the most important basis—of Islamic law, but their public recital on feast
days, during the months of Rajab, Sha'ban, and Ramadan, and on other
special occasions was also a central feature of popular Muslim religious
celebration.
But the culture of hadith transmission differed sharply from the nature
of the inculcation of fiqh, that is, it differed from the systematic legal
education offered in the madrasas. In the first place, most women (and
men, for that matter) became prominent transmitters of hadith only at a
relatively advanced age, when their chains of authority were com-
paratively shorter; to a system protective of its gender boundaries, an
elderly woman transmitting a text or a body of traditions posed a less
serious threat than one younger.45 Moreover, the most important quality
of the muhaddithun was memory, the ability to remember and transmit
accurately traditions that they themselves had studied, as well as the
chains of authorities on which their transmission rested. Such stress was
laid on memory that medieval writers sometimes complained of tradi-
tionists who merely memorized and recited hadith, without understand-
ing them.46 Memorization, of course, played a critical instructional role in
other fields as well, but the study of fiqh and related subjects revolved
around munazara, the disciplined disputation of fine points of the law and
the resolution of controversial questions.47 That women played a critical
role in the transmission of hadith, and virtually none in higher legal
training, may reflect this pedagogical difference. Women were systemat-
ically excluded from holding judicial positions that would require them to
resolve disputes among men or formal instructional positions that carried
a personal, institutional, or metaphorical authority over young men. A
similar subconscious concern may have lurked behind their apparent
exclusion from the study of such subjects as fiqh, where a woman's
 Women and Islamic Education 155

assertion of analytical and forensic skills could place her—intellectually,

at least—in a position of authority over men. In the transmission of
hadith, of course, disputes might also arise, over the accuracy of a trans-
mitter's memory, for example, but such disputes could be resolved by
reference to a text.
Such limitations, however, should not disguise the prominent role
that women did play in the transmission of a critical field of traditional
Muslim learning. The extent of their contribution is difficult to measure,
obscured as it is by the indifference or embarrassment of sources written
exclusively by men, and by the private venue in which most of their
teaching took place. But the fact remains that prominent hadith scholars
of the stature of Ibn Hajar and al-Suyuti openly relied on many women
for secure and persuasive chains of authority. Their reliance suggests that
active participation in the transmission of Muslim knowledge in the Mid-
dle Ages was by no means an exclusively male preserve.

Notes

1. See George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the
West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).
2. For information on these madrasas—known as al-'Ashuriyya, al-
Zutubiyya, al-Hijaziyya, the madrasa of Umm al-Sultan, and the madrasa of
Umm Khawand—see Taqi al-Din Ahmad al-Maqrizi, al-Mawa'iz wa'l-i'tibar bi-
dhikr al-khitat zva'l-athar, 2 vols. (Bulaq: Dar al-Taba'a al-Misriyya, 1853; reprint,
Beirut: Dar al-Sadir, [1970?]), 2:368, 382, 399-400; and Shams al-Din Muham-
mad al-Sakhawi, al-Dau' al-lami' li-ahl al-qarn al-tasi', 12 vols. (Cairo: Maktabat al-
Qudsi, A.H. 1353; reprint, Beirut: Dar Maktabat al-Hayat, 1982), 12:98.
3. By Khadija bint al-Dhirham wa Nisf; see Muhammad ibn Ahmad Ibn lyas,
Bada'i' al-zuhurfi waqa'i' al-duhur, ed. Paul Kahle and Muhammad Mustafa, 5 vols.
(reprint, Cairo: Al-Hai'a al-Misriyya al-'Amma li'1-Kitab, 1982-84), 5:336.
4. 'Abd al-Qadiral-Nu'aimi, al-Darisfi ta'rikhal-madaris (Damascus: Al-Majma'
al-'Ilmi al-'Arabi, 1948-51).
5. Carl Petty, "A Paradox of Patronage," Muslim World 73 (1983): 199; on 200-
201 Petry lists a number of women who served various endowments as nazirat
(controllers).
6. See, for example, the following waqfiyyas (all deeds cited are found in one
of two Cairene archives: Dar al-Watha'iq al-Qaumiyya and Wizarat al-Auqaf):
Mughultay al-Jamali, Wizarat al-Auqaf o.s. no. 1666; Zain al-din Sidqa, Dar al-
Watha'iq no. 59; Sudun min Zada, Dar al-Watha'iq no. 58; and Jamal al-Din al-
Ustadar, Dar al-Watha'iq no. 106.
7. Waqfiyyat Sultan Barquq, Dar al-Watha'iq no. 51; Waqfiyyat Sultan
al-Mu'ayyad Shaikh, Wizarat al-Auqaf o.s. no. 938.
8. There is one possible exception. In A.H. 891 a certain Qilij al-Rumi al-Ad-
hami died, and his wife was appointed—the world used is cjurrirat—to his posi-
tion as "shaikh" of the Sultan Qaitbay's zawiya. The significance of this event is not
156 Jonathan P. Berkey

at all clear, although the chronicler does record his surprise at the occasion. Ibn
lyas, Bada'i' 3:233.
9. Al-Sakhawi, of course, refers to these works only in a shorthand form—for
example, as al-Hawi or al-Mulha. Their identification is based on other references
in al-Sakhawi's biographical dictionary and those in Hajji Khalifa's seventeenth-
century encyclopedia of Muslim learning, Kashf al-zunun 'an asami al-kutub wa'l-
funun (Istanbul: Maarif Matbaasi, 1941).
10. Al-Sakhawi, al-Dau' 12:45.
11. Fakhr al-Din Qadi Khan, Fatawa (Cairo: Matba'at al-Shaikh Muhammad
Shahin, 1865), 1:374.
12. Al-Sakhawi, al-Dau' 12:41-42.
13. Ibn Hajaral-'Asqalani, al-Majma' al-tnu'assas bi'l-mu'jamal-mufahras, Daral-
Kutub al-Misriyya, "Mustalah al-Hadith" MS. 75 [= Ma'had Ihya' al-Makhtutat
al-'Arabiyya, "Tarikh" MS. 780].
14. Al-Sakhawi, al-Dau' 12:6.
15. Burhan al-Din al-Zarnuji, Ta'lim al-muta'allim, tariq al-ta'allum (Cairo: Dar
al-Nahda al-'Arabiyya, 1977), 9,11; see the translation by G. E. von Grunebaum
and Theodora M. Abel, The Instruction of the Student: The Method of Learning (New
York: King's Crown Press, 1947), 21, 22.
16. A detailed summary of some of the occupations in which women were
active can be found in Ahmad 'Abd ar-Raziq, La femme au temps des mamlouks en
Egypte (Cairo: Institut Frangais d'Archeologie Orientale, 1973).
17. Badr al-Din Ibn Jama'a, Tadhkirat al-sami' wa'l-mutakallimfiadabal-'alim wa'l-
muta'allim (Hyderabad: Da'irat al-Ma'arif al-'Uthmaniyya, A.H. 1353), 87.
18. Ibn al-Hajj, Madkhal al-shar' al-sharif (Cairo: Al-Matba'a al-Misriyya, 1929;
reprint, Beirut: Dar al-Hadith, 1981), 2:219.
19. Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani, al-Durar al-kaminafi a'yan al-ma'ia al-thamina (Cairo:
Dar al-Kutub al-Haditha, 1966), 1:383.
20. Al-Sakhawi, al-Dau' 12:29.
21. See, for example, al-Sakhawi, al-Dau' 12:29.
22. Ibid., 12:148. More than one male scholar, too, made his home a "gathering
spot" for "widows and the like." Ibid., 1:207, 2:111-13.
23. 'Abd ar-Raziq, La femme au temps des mamlouks, 72-74, discusses the scat-
tered references in the sources. Fragmentary evidence points to at least five such
institutions in Cairo; see al-Sakhawi, al-Dau' 12:26, 45; Ibn lyas, Bada'i' 2:59; and
al-Maqrizi, Khitat 2:397. On those in the Qarafa, see ibid., 2:454.
24. Al-Maqrizi, Khitat 2:427-28.
25. Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies, trans. C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern (Lon-
don: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), 2:176-78.
26. Al-Sakhawi, al-Dau' 12:120.
27. A. J. Arberry, Sakhawiana (London: Emery Walker, 1951), 4-5. Arberry sug-
gests that 'A'isha may have "sometimes" attended the lessons with her father, but
that hardly follows from the evidence of the ijaza itself. That the license was issued
in her name does not guarantee that she was present.
28. Al-Sakhawi, al-Dau' 12:3.
29. One of the first Western historians to recognize the opportunities pre-
 Women and Islamic Education 157

sented to women by the transmission of hadith was Ignaz Goldziher; see his
Muslim Studies 2:366-68.
30. Taj al-Din'Abd al-Wahhab al-Subki, Mu'jam shuyukh al-Subki, Dar al-Kutub
al-Misriyya, Ahmad Timur Pasha Collection, "Tarikh" MS. no. 1446 [= Ma'had
Ihya' al-Makhtutat al-'Arabiyya, 'Tarikh'' MS. 490].
31. Ibn Hajar, al-Majma' al-mu'assas.
32. Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, al-Tahadduth bi-ni'mat Allah, ed. Elizabeth M. Sartain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 43-70.
33. The information for her life is drawn from the accounts of these three
biographers: Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani, Inba' al-ghumr bi-abna' al-'umr (Hyderabad:
Jam'iyyat Da'irat al-Ma'arif al-'Uthmaniyya, 1967; reprint, Beirut: Dar al-Kutub
al-'Ilmiyya, 1986), 7:132-33; al-Sakhawi, al-Dau' 12:81; 'Abd al-Hayy Ibn al-'Imad,
Shadharat al-dhahab ft akhbar man dhahab (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qudsi, 1931; reprint,
Beirut: Dar al-Masira, 1979), 7:120-21.
34. For al-Hajjar's biography, see Ibn Hajar, al-Durar 1:152-53.
35. Probably Sharaf al-Din 'Abd Allah ibn al-Hasan (not al-Husain) ibn 'Abd
Allah al-Maqdisi al-Hanbali (d. 732/1332), who, significantly, seems to have been a
colleague of 'A'isha's father, Muhammad. Ibid., 2:361-62.
36. Ibn Hajar, al-Majma' al-mu'assasf 240-43.
37. Al-Sakhawi, al-Dau' 12:81.
38. Ibn Hajar, al-Majma' al-mu'assasf 240.
39. Ibid., 104ff.; al-Sakhawi, al-Dau' 12:24.
40. On Maryam, see Ibn Hajar, al-Majma' al-mu'assas, 322-27, and al-Sakhawi,
al-Dau' 12:124; on Fatima, see ibid., 12:91, and on Fatima's mashyakha, see Jac-
queline Sublet, "Les maitres et les etudes de deux traditionnistes de 1'epoque
mamelouke," Bulletin d'etudes orientales 20 (1967): 9-99.
41. Ibn Jama'a, Tadhkirat al-sami', 87.
42. Zakariyya Abu Yahya al-Ansari, al-Lu'lu' al-nazim ft raum al-ta'allum wa'l-
ta'lim (Cairo: Idarat al-Taba'a al-Muniriyya, A.H. 1319), 6-7; Abu Zakariyya Muhiy
al-Din al-Nawawi, al-Majmu' (Cairo: Idarat al-Taba'a al-Muniriyya, n.d.), 1:31.
43. Ibn Jama'a, Tadhkirat al-sami', 60-61; cf. the opinion of Taqi al-Din 'Ali al-
Subki, Fatawa al-Subki (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qudsi, 1936-37; reprint, Beirut: Dar al-
Ma'rifa, n.d.), 2:126-27.
44. On the significance for Muslim education of the concept otsuhba (compan-
ionship) and its related verbs, see George Makdisi, "Suhba et riyasa dans 1'enseig-
nement medieval," in Recherches d'Islamologie: Recueil d'articles offerts a Georges C.
Anawati et Louis Gardet par leurs collegues et leurs amis (Louvain: Peeters, 1977), 207-
11; and Makdisi, Rise of Colleges, 128-29.
45. Elizabeth Sartain makes this point in her outstanding study Jalal al-Din al-
Suyuti, vol. 1, Biography and Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975), 127.
46. On this point and on instruction in hadith generally, see Makdisi, Rise of
Colleges, 210-13.
47. Ibid., 109-11.
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1111
Modern

Turkey

and

Iran
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 Ottoman Women, Households, and
9
Textile Manufacturing, 1800-1914

DONALD QUATAERT

In spite of their central place in Ottoman social and economic

life, we know little about nineteenth-century Ottoman man-
ufacturing women, the households in which they lived and
worked, their economic activities, and changes in these pur-
suits over time. Women and their households mediated the
process of growing Ottoman participation in the world econ-
omy, and changes in household processes of production and
the household division of labor should be understood as
adaptations to changing market opportunities, both domes-
tic and international. Thus, I believe, there are relations be-
tween changes in Ottoman household economies and the
regional and world economies of the nineteenth century. But
to view the evolution of nineteenth-century Ottoman house-
hold economies as merely a story of transformation from
subsistence to market production would be too simplistic.
Many Ottoman households already were committed to man-
ufacturing for the market, at varying levels, well before 1800.
As a famous example, in the town of Ambelakia in Ottoman
Thessaly, the manufacture of red yarn was a family business
in the eighteenth century. "Every arm, even those of the
children, is employed in the factories; whilst the men dye the
cotton, the women prepare and spin it/'1
Vigorous and vibrant putting-out systems interlaced the
Ottoman Empire, exchanging raw materials and semi-
processed goods among its European, Anatolian, and Arab
provinces. Women and men in north Anatolian towns such
as Zile and Merzifon, for example, received raw cotton from
the Mediterranean south and spun it into thread. Some of
the newly made thread was exported to the Ottoman
Crimea, and local weavers used some to make a coarse calico
for regional use and for export.2 Other Ottoman households
were subsistence producers as of 1800 and, in declining
numbers, remained so throughout the period. Also, as I will
161
162 Donald Quataert

show, the nature of Ottoman household economies varied by region, as

did changes in those economies.
A focus on households and women's work is a key to properly under-
standing the history of Ottoman manufacturing in the nineteenth cen-
tury. It is widely held that Ottoman manufacture "declined" in the age of
the European Industrial Revolution. But what is meant by decline? Per-
haps there was no decrease in gross Ottoman industrial output between
1800 and 1900. After all, the domestic Ottoman market as well as the
export market for select Ottoman manufactures was much larger at the
beginning of the twentieth century than before (see below).3 The oft-cited
Ottoman industrial decline may in fact reflect a decrease in the output
generated by organized guild male labor. It thus is critical to examine the
household division of labor by gender. Manufacturing output by urban
guilds, which were male dominated, did fall off sharply in many areas.
But, as I will demonstrate, manufacturing production by females work-
ing at home did not merely continue but sharply expanded in some
regions and textile handicraft sectors. In addition, factory labor in-
creased, particularly after 1880, and the majority of the textile workers
were girls and women.
Rural households accounted for at least 80 percent of the Ottoman
population and usually consisted of the nuclear family, that is, a husband
and wife (usually one) and their children. Rural households in the Black
Sea coastal areas of Anatolia averaged 6.5 persons and as few as 5.3
persons elsewhere, figures that place Anatolia just above the average for
preindustrial Europe. Multiple-family households in rural Anatolia did
not account for more than 30 percent of the total, whereas simple, or
nuclear, households made up 50 to 60 percent.4 In the capital city of
Istanbul, similarly, very good data reveal that the extended family made
up only 16 percent of all households counted. Upper-class Istanbul
households averaged 5.7 persons, and those further down the social
ladder averaged 4.5 persons. Polygyny was rare in the capital, involving
only 2 percent of all married Muslim men. In the Arab town of Nablus,
the polygyny rate was higher, 16 percent of the men enumerated.5 It
must be stressed that in both urban and rural households, the males often
were absent, engaged in wage-earning labor at sites some distance from
their homes. Migratory labor, involving work in other rural areas as well
as in both remote and nearby urban centers, was a normal condition of
existence for Ottoman families. Finally, a considerable amount of time in
the average Ottoman rural household was devoted to manufacturing
activities, sometimes for family use and at other times for sale. That
manufacturing was an everyday part of Ottoman rural (and urban) life
has been overlooked almost completely in the literature on both Ottoman
manufacturing and Ottoman agriculture. Scholars of manufacturing
 Ottoman Women and Manufacturing 163

have focused on urban male guilds, whereas researchers of the coun-

tryside usually have considered only crop growing and animal husban-
dry. Rural households were not simply agricultural producers. Instead,
they were engaged in a mix of economic activities, for example, crop
growing, mining, manufacturing, and fishing, the composition of which
changed according to region, season, and opportunity. If crop prospects
were poor, then the family would devote increased attention to manufac-
turing for sale to earn cash for purchasing foodstuffs.

Information on the nineteenth-century Bursa silk industry offers

powerful hints but frustratingly little concrete data concerning the impact
of female labor on changes in the gender division of household labor. For
centuries, the town of Bursa and its environs had been renowned for rich
brocades and fabrics. The gender division of labor in the industry varied
according to its rural or urban location. Village families, both male and
female members, provided the raw silk, unraveled in a single length from
the cocoon. In the town itself, however, silk spinning may have been an
exclusively female occupation as the century opened, as it was in the city
of Damascus, located in a Syrian province of the Ottoman Empire. At
Bursa, as in Damascus, male weavers, organized into guilds, wove al-
most all the silk cloth produced, although a few female workers were
engaged as well. The involvement of the guildsmen weavers in the Bursa
silk industry fell as silk cloth production plummeted after 1830. For sever-
al decades, redundant male weavers may have found work in the ex-
panding industry of raw silk, which at that time was spun largely by
hand. In 1812, total production of raw silk at Bursa, all of it manually
reeled by both men and women, averaged 150,000 pounds.6 Subse-
quently, thanks to rising foreign demand and new technology, output
soared. The new technology came in the form of steam-powered ma-
chinery, housed in factories, that spun the raw silk from cocoons. In 1850
such spinning mills produced 10 percent of total raw silk. By 1860, when
Bursa raw silk output equaled 1.5 million pounds, 98 percent of it was
reeled in a factory setting—in nearly fifty mills that employed at least
4,200 persons.
In the Bursa factories, the labor force was entirely female, both girls
and women, except for male superintendents and mechanics tending the
engines. The same gender distribution simultaneously came to prevail in
the silk-spinning mills being established in the Lebanon region, similarly
founded to meet mounting European demand. In the first days of these
mills, entrepreneurs at Bursa and in the Lebanon struggled with a labor
source reluctant to enter a factory, and in both regions they employed a
variety of methods, sometimes remarkably similar, to overcome impedi-
ments to labor recruitment. Both sets of entrepreneurs brought in women
164 Donald Quataert

from France and Switzerland, experienced in silk reeling, to instruct in

the new technology and to demonstrate by example that women could
work safely in such factories.7 These entrepreneurs also found allies in
religion, both Christianity and Islam. Around the 1860s, the Roman Cath-
olic pope issued a decree permitting Bursa-area girls of Armenian back-
ground to work in the mills, and in Lebanon local ulama as well as the
Christian clergy played key roles in persuading local girls to work under
foreign women supervisors in foreign-owned silk-reeling mills.8 Appeal-
ing to the workers' more worldly needs, Bursa factory owners also of-
fered high wages; a reeler in the mid-1850s earned five times as much as
she needed for her daily bread. But wages quickly dropped. Labor sup-
plies were augmented as urban Turks from Bursa and village girls from
surrounding areas became available; silk reelers soon were among the
most poorly paid factory workers in Ottoman manufacturing. The
"lowest daily wages were paid in the silk (and tobacco) factories in which
mainly women worked."9 Married Turkish women in the city provided at
least some of the labor. According to one European observer in the late
1860s, this wage labor enhanced the women's status in the eyes of their
husbands since it increased family income. And, he approvingly noted,
since the women dutifully returned to the women's quarters on coming
home from work, wage labor had brought only advantages to the Ot-
toman Turkish family at Bursa.10 Bursa entrepreneurs also turned to labor
supplies outside the city. They recruited "very" young girls from sur-
rounding rural areas and housed them in dormitories built adjacent to the
mills. These village girls, who began as apprentices as early as ten years of
age, arrived in caravans for the labor-intensive reeling season. When the
season ended, the girls and young women, who won a certain local fame
for their purchases of fashionable clothing, as did the Lebanon reelers,
returned home with "practically all" of their wages. Once married, they
generally quit the factory and usually did not return unless widowed.11
But beyond their clothing purchases, we know little about how the wages
were used—whether the girls retained the money and brought it into
their marriages or turned it over to their parents. A tidbit of information
from the 1850s implies that the young women helped to support their
families, but we cannot generalize from that. There are other uncertain-
ties. It is not totally clear if there was a net increase in the use of female
labor in the silk industry or simply a continuation, in mechanized form, of
established patterns and levels. Nor is it known if this work represented
the entry for most families into wage labor or their shift from one wage-
earning activity to another. The rise of mechanized silk reeling does coin-
cide exactly with the sharp decline in cotton spinning in the Bursa area
during the pre-1850 period; the availability of (temporarily) high-paying
 Ottoman Women and Manufacturing 165

jobs in silk reeling might well have accelerated the decline of local cotton
spinning.
The overwhelming predominance of female labor in the Ottoman silk-
spinning industry can be explained by several factors. The Ottoman
economy generally was labor scarce, and employing women solved the
serious problem for factory owners of finding cheap labor. Also, the mills
did not provide a reliable source of full-time income for their workers.
After the great burst of factory building, the industry suffered from over-
capacity and spinning factories were consistently underutilized. In the
1850s, the 1870s, the 1890s, and the early twentieth century, we are told,
they typically operated not more than two hundred days per year. The
mills thus offered a kind of part-time labor that corresponded well with
Ottoman society's view of female labor as supplemental. Such an activity
also fit nicely with the time demands that raising silkworms placed on Ot-
toman families. Given the prevailing labor scarcities around Bursa, for
example, it is hardly coincidental that cocoon raisers devised a method
for feeding the silkworms that reduced the labor input by 70 percent,
compared with methods in France and Italy. Part-time factory work also
was compatible with the demands of agricultural and domestic tasks on
the workers. Mechanized silk reeling, as it evolved in the Ottoman lands,
interfered minimally with the preexisting division of labor within the
household, whether rural or urban. For the factory owner, the arrange-
ment had only one long-term disadvantage. Throughout the entire pe-
riod, most factories operated well below capacity, although they often
could have spun profitably the year round.12
Girls and women played an essential role in three arenas of textile
production. They made yarn and cloth at home for immediate use by
household members, they produced at home for the market, and they
labored in workshops, away from the home setting.13 Until the second
quarter of the nineteenth century, a large proportion of female labor in
textile production had been involved with spinning, with either the
wheel or the distaff. But the import of European-manufactured factory-
spun cotton yarn then rose incredibly, dramatically affecting the eco-
nomic and social status of Ottoman women. Annual Ottoman imports of
cotton yarn, a mere 150 tons in the early 1820s, rose to some 7,750 tons in
the 1870s. The impact of this increase must have varied considerably,
depending on whether the women had been spinning primarily for the
marketplace or for domestic use. For most commercially oriented female
spinners, the foreign yarn meant, in the long run, the loss of their spin-
ning jobs and, in the short term, sharply declining wages as they ac-
cepted lower wages to compete with the cheap and strong imported
product. To the extent that commercial cotton spinning was a preserve of
166 Donald Quataert

women, the use of imported thread contributed to the displacement of

these females from the work place. And if the unemployed women did
not find wage employ in the weaving of cloth from the imported yarn, the
work force might have become more gender homogeneous over time,
that is, more exclusively male. This last assumption, however, is ques-
tionable. One of the major trends in nineteenth-century Ottoman man-
ufacturing was the shift from guild to nonguild labor, quite probably
accompanied by a rise in the importance of female labor in the overall
production of cotton cloth and other textiles. If the rising imports of yarn
had a negative or mixed impact on commercial yarn spinners, the effect
on women spinning for home use was much more certain and definitely
more positive. The hand spinning of yarn required to provide the average
Ottoman family's clothing needs consumed a vast amount of time, an
estimated one-twelfth of the woman's total labor output.14 This house-
hold division of labor began to change in the second quarter of the nine-
teenth century when imports of machine-made European yarn began
flooding into the Ottoman Empire. Purchase of imported yarn must have
been attractive to hand spinners, who thus were relieved of a time-con-
suming and quite unremunerative task. Between 1820 and 1870 yarn
imports freed an estimated 160,000 Ottoman women (calculated on the
basis of full-time job equivalents) from the onerous and unprofitable task
of spinning cotton.15 The release of these women dramatically affected
their households' distribution of labor through a combination of in-
creased leisure time, increased cloth production for family consumption,
and increased market production of agricultural commodities and cloth
to pay for the purchased yarn.
In spite of the advantages, however, poverty kept many Ottoman
women spinning cotton yarn at home both for domestic consumption
and for sale. Since many families did not assign monetary value to the
time spent spinning, the homespun yarn could undersell the European
product. Though not necessarily yarn of comparable quality, it was us-
able for making lower-grade clothes. As the price of imported yarn and
textiles fell steadily over the course of the century, so did the remunera-
tion of spinners producing for the market. In the winter of 1857, "all" the
Kurdish women in the districts surrounding Diyarbakir occupied them-
selves by spinning for men in the town who wove bez cloth. These women
were too poor to buy the raw cotton for spinning, much less imported
yarn. Instead the women gathered and picked cotton and in return re-
tained a small percentage of it. A woman would spin six pounds of cotton
into yarn and then exchange it in town for nine pounds of raw cotton. She
kept at this cycle until she had enough twist, "which the husband con-
verts into cloth, using for his family what is necessary and selling the
rest."16 Hand spinning persisted through at least the 1860s around
 Ottoman Women and Manufacturing 167

Erzurum, and in the Sivas region it was commonplace during the late
1880s. "What goods are manufactured such as carpets, rough woollen
cloth, yarn, leather, is done by the people (mostly the women) at their
homes. . . . Great quantities of yarn are used. It is now all made by the
people (mostly the women) at home on the rudest kind of spinning
wheels."1?
In the early twentieth century, at the great cloth-manufacturing center
of Aleppo, women working at home annually spun an estimated 100,000
kilograms of cotton yarn used for making the coarser cloths.18 At nearby
Maras, spinning yarn did "not constitute a profession properly speak-
ing/' Nonetheless, women "in all the poor homes—that is, among nearly
all families . . . during their spare moments" annually spun 90-100,000
kilograms of cotton yarn.19
Ottoman girls and women dominated the cotton and wool yarn spin-
ning work force in the steam-powered mills that emerged late in the
nineteenth century. These were concentrated in Salonika and inland
Macedonia as well as in Izmir, Adana, and Istanbul. Young girls formed
the bulk of the labor force and, in common with their European and
American (and Bursa) sisters, did not remain long enough to acquire
skills, much to the irritation of the owners.20 Jewish girls in the Salonika
mills, for example, worked until they married, as early as age fifteen, or
until they had accumulated the necessary dowry.21 One mill, in the
Yedikule district of Istanbul, employed some 300 women and children to
make 500,000 packets of yarn per year. In the Adana region of southeast
Anatolia, one mill with 2,700 spindles employed 300 women and chil-
dren, who annually produced 1 million kilograms of yarn. A nearby mill
employed 550 persons, usually children and women, who worked twelve
hours a day.22 Around 1880 one of the mills in the European provinces of
Salonika employed altogether 250 young women and 50 males. In the city
of Salonika in the 1890s, mills employed 480 girls, twelve to eighteen
years of age, and 160 men and boys. The men received two or three times
the boys' wages, whereas girls' starting pay was half that of the boys.
Approximately 75 percent of the 1,500 workers in the Macedonian spin-
ning mills were females, usually girls, some as young as six years of age.
In the 1890s they worked fifteen hours a day in summer and ten in winter,
with a thirty-five-minute break for dinner but none at all for breakfast.
Women working in inland mills, for example at Karaferia and Niausta,
were in a worse position than their Salonika counterparts. In early-
twentieth-century Salonika, the combination of a booming tobacco-pro-
cessing industry that competed for relatively scarce labor and an active
workers' movement escalated wages in the cotton mills. (Women also
dominated the work force of the tobacco-processing factories.) But the
inland mill workers had few wage-earning options.23
168 Donald Quataert

The weaving of cloth by women also remained commonplace through-

out the period, long after indigenous cloth manufacture supposedly had
disappeared from the Ottoman lands. Around Bursa in the 1860s, "the
peasantry find an economy in the women weaving at home stout articles
for common wear/'24 At Trabzon, similarly, the "countrywomen" both
worked in agriculture and spun woolen cloth for family members' outer
garments.25 At about this time, nearly 12,000 hand looms in the east
Anatolian provinces of Diyarbakir and Erzurum employed that many
men in addition to 6,000 youths under sixteen years of age. Two-thirds of
these looms were used to weave cotton cloth and were located in the
countryside, not in the towns. These rural weavers obtained the twist
from women villagers, who in exchange received an equal weight in
cloth.26 We do not presently know the rural weaver's contribution to total
family income, but only that other members of the family engaged in
agriculture. In the towns of the region—Bitlis, Diyarbakir, Mardin, and
Harput—the male weavers provided most of the family's cash and the
wife earned about one-seventh of the total.27
At the end of the century, "almost every family" in Asia Minor still
owned a hand loom. "They can make their own cloths while vast num-
bers would be unable to earn the money with which to purchase foreign
cloth."28 This tenacious retention of looms well into the era of massive
Ottoman imports of European cloth hints at the Ottoman household's
flexible responses to changing market opportunities. In years of strong
demand for agricultural products, the looms might be neglected, but in
times of famine or weak demand for agricultural goods, cloth again might
be made for the family or the market. Women in the province of Sivas in
the 1890s used both locally spun and British yarn to weave a coarse cloth
for men's trousers and other garments. These female weavers worked on
as many as 10,000 looms in the province. In the district (kaza) of Davas in
Ay din Province, about 185 looms were employed in weaving various
cotton and linen textiles for sale, and girls and women operated a full
three-quarters of them.29 In the province as a whole, some 10,000 hand
looms wove striped cloth (alaca) for home consumption and for sale.30
These households simultaneously engaged in agriculture and manufac-
turing oriented toward the marketplace. Weaving output fluctuated with
the harvest, another example of household labor ebbing and flowing with
income opportunities and requirements, from agriculture to manufactur-
ing and back again. During the 1870s rural artisans who manufactured
goods for sale to their neighbors earned two-thirds of their income from
agricultural sources and one-third from handicraft activities.31
As these examples demonstrate, female participation in the wage-
earning manufacturing labor force was predicated on very low wages.
 Ottoman Women and Manufacturing 169

Late in the nineteenth century, imported yarn created thousands of new

jobs for women in the Istanbul area. Working at home in their newly
found employment, these women used foreign yarn to crochet lace for
export, earning piecework wages that were extremely low by Ottoman
standards of the time, approximately 1.5 piasters per day. Similarly cheap
female labor, earning no more than 1.5 piasters per day, permitted Ot-
toman hand-printed textiles to remain competitive with the mechanical
imprints of European factories.32 The significance of such wages can be
illustrated if we assume that a family of six persons purchased all its bread
needs. Around 1900 such a family would have required 35 to 40 piasters
per week merely for its minimum bread requirements, exclusive of the
monies needed for other foodstuffs, for housing, and for clothing. A
lacemaker or a hand printer earned on the average 20 percent of the sum
needed to keep the family just in bread. Put another way, each woman's
wages provided the bread she needed to survive plus a fraction of the
bread needed by one other member of her family.
As an example outside of textiles, shoemaking in Istanbul demon-
strates, together with Bursa silk reeling, that low wages were not con-
fined to home industries and provides another indirect glimpse into the
household division of labor. At the end of the century as many as fifty
men and women labored together in shoemaking workshops. Male oper-
ators of sewing machines made half-shoes and earned up to 1.25 piasters
per day. With an average urban family of five, if he worked seven days a
week he could earn 25 percent of his family's weekly bread. The sewing
machine operator's wife, if employed in the shop, would finish but-
tonholes or sew on buttons. But she earned, again assuming a seven-day
work week, only 10 to 15 percent of the sum needed to buy the family's
total bread. Labor from the children, which was quite common in nine-
teenth-century Ottoman manufacturing, clearly was necessary to meet
the minimum subsistence requirements of the family.33
Women also were actively involved in the famed mohair industry of
Ankara, a participation that dated back to the mid-eighteenth century,
when they spun the lower-quality grades, and probably earlier. In the
1830s and 1840s, the mohair-weaving guild, struggling to meet European
competition, implemented what was hailed as an innovation in the in-
dustry. Previously the guild sheikh had bought raw mohair at fixed prices
and given it to the spinners (both female and male). But now the guild
made contracts with "poor women" who bought mohair in the local
markets, spun it, and then sold it to the guild for whatever price they
could command. As the guild sought to compete with the "cheap price"
of the European producers, the women supplemented rather than re-
placed the earlier method of obtaining yarn.34 A free female labor force
!70 Donald Quataert

thus coexisted with the male spinning guild, a pattern also encountered
in the Bursa silk industry, as well as in furniture and shoemaking in
Istanbul and textile production at Aleppo. Similarly, in the area of the
southern Balkan mountains, male braidmakers belonged to the guild
(gaitanci esnafi), but the women who spun the wool yarn for them did
not.35
The carpetmaking industry offers a good example of how the gender
distribution of labor in a particular industry varied regionally. This varia-
tion indicates the absence of a uniform Middle Eastern or Islamic value
system regarding the participation of women in the work force. In the
Middle East generally the carpet industry boomed in the late nineteenth
century. In western and central Anatolia, for example, soaring output
after 1850 employed perhaps 60,000 persons by World War I, most of
them girls and women. In certain areas of Anatolia, women historically
had been engaged in all phases of carpetmaking—that is, in the spinning
and dyeing of the wool and the knotting of the rugs. From Sivas in 1888
we have this description. "The dy[e]ing, spinning, weaving etc are all
conducted unitedly, the women of each family engaged in the business
doing all the work from the spinning of the yarn by hand, dyeing it with
vegetable dyes, to the weaving and completion of the carpet/'36 In this
case a single (female) individual carried out all the steps involved in
making a rug. But elsewhere divisions of labor were common and appar-
ently were proportionate to an area's involvement in commercial carpet
production. In the late nineteenth century, for example, men at the great
production center of Usak washed and bleached the wool and women
spun it into yarn. This division of labor changed in the final three decades
of the nineteenth century as the production of rugs tripled but the
number of carpet looms only doubled. To accomplish this feat, Usak
rugmaking families rearranged their lives so that the women could spend
more time at the looms: for a brief period in the late 1890s, Usak men took
over the task of spinning the wool yarn. Steam-powered spinning facto-
ries then were built in the town. Similarly, in one area of modern Iran, as
women's commercial rug knotting became more valuable, men assumed
such traditionally female tasks as carrying water. (In this case, there was
no accompanying ideological shift in gender roles.)37 At Usak, the divi-
sion of labor changed in other ways as well: the early-nineteenth-century
practice of women dyeing the yarn had given way to male dyeing by the
1880s. But at the important export center of nearby Kula, different divi-
sions of labor prevailed. There women continued to dye the yarn until the
century's end. Again, by way of contrast, men as well as women knotted
commercial carpets at Gordes and Kula. In Qajar Iran during the same era
tribal males usually did not work in carpet knotting but the women did.
 Ottoman Women and Manufacturing 171

In some areas of Iran at this time, however, men played an active role in
the industry. At Meshed and other major urban centers, males regularly
worked as rug knotters; in cities such as Tabriz they worked together with
women on the same looms. But in other Iranian cities, such as Kerman,
only women knotted.38
These examples demonstrate the absence of clear-cut patterns of gen-
der division of labor in nineteenth-century Middle Eastern manufactur-
ing, at least in rugmaking. Ottoman (and Qajar) men and women readily
interchanged productive roles to maintain family livelihoods. The pres-
ence of male and female rug knotters at Kula and Gordes and in several
cities of Qajar Iran reflects a gender sharing of Middle Eastern jobs that
popular stereotypes hold to be the monopoly of women. These Anatolian
and Iranian examples also show that the division was not characterized
by male domination of those activities that were heavily committed to
market production; in all the highly commercialized production centers,
both males and females knotted rugs. The presence of male and female
workers in the shoemaking shops of Istanbul, for its part, seems to sug-
gest an easier set of gender relations than stereotypes would permit. In
these situations the rigid barriers that are presumed to have existed be-
tween the sexes and in the gender division of labor simply were not
present. That is, our assumptions about such divisions are incorrect, at
least some of the time.
But the patterns of gender sharing in carpetmaking tasks at Usak and
other long-established commercially oriented production centers were
not universal in the industry. As Western demand for carpets mounted,
Izmir and Istanbul merchants established new workshops in many re-
gions. Similarly, a European merchant founded a new knotting center in
1912 in the Iranian town of Hamadan. Only girls and women knotted at
these workshops, where unlike in the traditional centers they worked
away from the home.39 Thus in the late nineteenth century tens of thou-
sands of girls and women were employed outside the home for the first
time. Again, we have no data on consequent changes in the status of the
female workers within the family or on the distribution of domestic and
agricultural tasks within the household.
We do not know the causes of this exclusion of male knotters from the
workshops founded in late-nineteenth-century Anatolia (and at
Hamadan). Whether it resulted from the decisions of the families or of the
West European merchants who organized the workshops is uncertain.
The contemporary rugmaking industry of the late twentieth century is
significant in this context. One of the largest firms presently organizing
the hand knotting of rugs in the Middle and Far East employs female
knotters at one location, males at another, and females at yet a third. To
172 Donald Quataert

this company, gender is irrelevant; clearly, the firm has adjusted to

prevailing local practices that make both groups available for knotting
rugs.

The nineteenth-century growth in the three most important export

industries—silk reeling, lacemaking, and carpetmaking—was fueled by
European demand and, it seems important to repeat, sustained by a work
force that was overwhelmingly female and poorly paid.
In the textile industries generally, men previously had formed the vast
majority of the urban guild weavers. As European competition mounted,
these men continued to weave, but for declining wages, contributing
relatively less to overall family income through their manufacturing
tasks. In many of the industries that were either newly born, or expand-
ing, or successfully adapting to changing conditions, female labor was
dominant. This was true of the hand-spun yarn produced in the home
and the machine-made yarn produced in factories, of carpet, lace, and
raw silk production, and of linen and silk weaving in some areas. The
importation of foreign yarn, for its part, relieved many women of spin-
ning tasks and freed them to use this newly available time in more lu-
crative forms of manufacturing activity. But men as well as women wove,
both for the market and for subsistence needs.
The situations examined here seem to support several conclusions
concerning Ottoman women, households, and manufacturing. First, as
should be obvious by now, women played an integral role in the textile-
manufacturing life of the Ottoman Empire, both in the home and in the
workshop. Many worked outside the home—Muslim, Christian, and
Jewish Ottoman women and girls alike. Certainly this changes our view
of day-to-day life in the Ottoman Empire. But does it not also speak to the
issue of industrialization itself? Most of the activities recorded here took
place not in mechanized factories but rather in small workshops and in
households. By tracing women's work back into their homes, we have
discovered a universe of manufacturing activity that simply is lost when
the focus is on the factory. At the same time, by seeing the (apparently)
rising incidence of women's work outside the home, we begin to under-
stand more clearly the magnitude of the nineteenth-century changes.
That female labor occupied the very bottom of the wage scale, receiving
fractions of their male counterparts' pay, hardly was coincidental. From
the poor wages they received we must conclude that women's work was
considered supplementary and nonprofessional. But this work was abso-
lutely essential to the survival of the Ottoman textile industries in the
nineteenth century, when costs and prices fell steadily. Western market
demands may have enhanced the economic importance of the female
members of Ottoman households engaged in manufacturing. Finally,
 Ottoman Women and Manufacturing 173

many nineteenth-century Ottoman households demonstrated consider-

able flexibility in the gender division of labor.
In several respects, the conclusions of this chapter have been corrobo-
rated by ethnographic research in the modern-day Middle East. A
number of recent studies unambiguously demonstrate the vital impor-
tance of female labor in the economic survival of the contemporary Turk-
ish village household and so make important links with the Ottoman
past. Several of these studies, however, did not find the gender sharing
of jobs that seems to have been common in the nineteenth century. Re-
search focusing on villages in the Konya region of central Anatolia, for
example, reveals no such sharing today. In general, this group of scholars
argues that tasks are rigidly defined as male or female. Further, they
observe that when women assume new manufacturing responsibilities,
men not only allow them to work harder and longer than before but also
refuse to assume any additional tasks at home. Nor do these researchers
find any enhanced power or status within the household resulting from
the increased wage work of modern Turkish women.40 These conclu-
sions, however, are flatly contradicted by another researcher working on
carpetmakers near Ayvalik, in western Anatolia. These workers became
involved in carpet production quite recently, as part of a Turkish univer-
sity's effort to restore the use of natural dyestuffs in the industry. The
women and men freely interchange carpetmaking and household-main-
tenance tasks.41 Thus places that are physically near to one another differ
fundamentally in the gender division of labor. The difference simply may
be a matter of variation by location, a phenomenon encountered often
enough in the research presented here. Or perhaps ideology is shaping
what researchers observe in the contemporary work sites and house-
holds. That is, the respective researchers find the gender sharing or gen-
der division of work tasks that they are looking for.
The role of the historical past in transforming the status of contempo-
rary manufacturing women remains uncertain. Is there more or less gen-
der sharing of manufacturing tasks in the Middle East of the 1980s than
during the preceding century? The question posed is difficult to address
using the historical sources. What was the impact of rising nineteenth-
century manufacturing for the marketplace on the status of wage-earning
Middle Eastern women and on their family relationships? Did it spark a
social reaction whereby men perversely imposed tighter social controls
over women whose economic importance was being enhanced? We
should expect to see considerable change in the role and status of these
manufacturing women over time. After all, during the 1980s the popular
classes veiled and secluded women much more than formerly. But
whether such trends produced a stricter gender division of labor has not
been determined.
174 Donald Quataert

Notes

1. David Urquhart, Turkey and Its Resources (London: Saunders and Otley,
1833), 47-51, 24.
2. Halil Inalcik, "Osmanli pamuklu pazari, Hindistan ve Ingiltere: Pazar re-
kabetinde emek maliyetinin rolu," Middle East Technical University, Studies in Devel-
opment 1979-80, special issue, 1-65; Public Record Office (London), Foreign Office
(hereafter FO) 78, various reports by Brant at Trabzon in the 1830s.
3. Over the period, the population increased at an annual rate of 0.8 percent;
the territorial base of the state, however, steadily shrank. Charles Issawi, ed., The
Economic History of Turkey, 1800-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980),
11.
4. Justin McCarthy, "Age, Family and Migration in the Black Sea Provinces of
the Ottoman Empire," International Journal of Middle East Studies 10 (1979): 309-23;
McCarthy, Muslim and Minorities: The Population of Anatolia and the End of the Empire
(New York: New York University Press, 1983), 110-11; FO, Further Reports from Her
Majesty's Diplomatic and Consular Agents Abroad Respecting the Condition of the Indus-
trial Classes and Purchasing Power of Money in Foreign Countries (London: Harrison
and Sons, 1871).
5. Alan Duben, 'Turkish Families and Households in Historical Perspective/'
Journal of Family History 10 (Spring 1985): 75-97; Duben, "Muslim Households in
Late Ottoman Istanbul" (unpublished paper, 1986); Judith E. Tucker, "Marriage
and Family in Nablus, 1720-1856: Toward a History of Arab Marriage," Journal of
Family History 13, no. 2 (1988): 165-79; Tucker in this volume.
6. Halil Inalcik, "Bursa," Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960),
1:1333-36; Hatt-i humayun #16757,1225/1810, Ba§bakanlik Ar§ivi (hereafter BBA).
7. Consular Reports of the United States, Department of State, National Ar-
chives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter CRUS), reel T194 R. #2, Schwaabe at Brousse 1
Oct. 1847; R£gis Delbeuf, Une excursion a Brousse et a Nicee (Istanbul, 1906), 140 n. 1,
142, 166-69; author's interview with Rana Akdis, Akay at Bursa, June 1986; cf.
wages and prices cited in Issawi, ed., Economic History, 44-45, and FO 78/905,
Sandison at Bursa, 6 Aug. 1852. For a fuller account, see Donald Quataert, "The
Silk Industry of Bursa, 1880-1914," Collection Turcica III: Contribution a I'histoire
. economique et sociale de I'Empire Ottoman (Paris: Peeters, 1983), 481-503.
8. Akay 1986 interview; Edward C. Clark, "The Emergence of Textile Manufac-
turing Entrepreneurs in Turkey, 1804-1968" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University,
1969), 34; Roger Owen, "The Silk-Reeling Industry of Mount Lebanon, 1840-
1914," in The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, ed. Huri Islamoglu-Iran (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 276-77.
9. Quotation is from A. Gunduz 6kc.un, trans., Osmanli sanayii. 1913, 1915
yillari sanayi istatistiki (Ankara: Ankara Universitesi Sosyal Bilimlez Fakulultesi
Yayinlari, 1970), 22; also see CRUS, reel T194 R. #2, Schwaabe at Bursa, 1 Oct. 1847.
10. Alexander Treshorn von Warsberg, Ein Sommer im Orient (Wien: C.
Gerold's Sohn, 1869), 146.
11. See sources cited in n. 5, above.
12. See sources in n. 5, above. Also see Hudavendig^r Vilayeti Salnamesi
 Ottoman Women and Manufacturing 175

(hereafter vs) 1324/1906, 278; CRUS, reel T194; FO 195/299, Sandison at Bursa, 24
May 1851,195/393, Sandison at Bursa, 13 Aug. 1855. To reduce labor costs, much
of the industry moved out of the city altogether; at the turn of the century, 75
percent of the mills' productive capacity was situated in towns and villages out-
side of Bursa. La revue commerciale du Levant: Bulletin de la chambre de commerce
frangaise de Constantinople, 30 Nov. 1909.
13. The documents consulted for this study often were unhelpful or mislead-
ing on the gender identity of the work force, English- and Turkish-language
sources usually refer to worker or isci without elaboration, only occasionally noting
the person's gender. French- and German-language sources designate workers
generally as ouvrier or arbeiter and sometimes use these masculine forms to refer to
workers who, I knew from other sources, were female.
14. Urquhart, Turkey, 149-50.
15. Sevket Pamuk, "The Decline and Resistance of Ottoman Cotton Textiles,
1820-1913/' Explorations in Economic History 23 (1986): 205-25.
16. FO 195/459, Holmes at Diyarbakir, 14 Apr. 1857.
17. CRUS, 26 May 1887.
18. Germany, Reichsamt des Innern, Berichte uber Handel und Industrie (Berlin:
Carl Hermanns), I, Heft 9, 10 Aug. 1907.
19. La revue, 31 mar. 1904, Lettre de marache, 30 Mar. 1904.
20. Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Accounts and Papers (hereafter A&P),
1899,103, 6241, Sarell on Constantinople, 1893-97.
21. A&P, 1893-94, 5581, Salonica for 1891-92 (Blunt, 30 Sept. 1893).
22. Austria-Hungary, Berichte der K. u. K. Osterr.-Ung. Konsularamter uber das
Jahr 1901 (Vienna: Handelsmuseum) (hereafter KK), 1901, vol. 19, p. 1, and for 1902
and 1903; Ministere du Commerce, Rapports commerciaux des agents diplomatiques et
consulaires de France (Paris, 1883-1914) (hereafter RCC), no. 109 (Mersin for 1892);
Berichte, I, Heft 9, 20 Aug. 1907.
23. RCC, no. 76, reel 33, Salonique for 1900, reel 35, Salonique for 1902; Bulletin
du Comite de VAsiefranqaise, Salonique, 25 juillet 1883. See also A&P, 1893-94, 97,
5581, Salonica for 1891-92 (Blunt, 30 Sept. 1893), 1908,7253,17, Salonica for 1907,
7472,103, Salonica for 1910; Berichte, XIX, Heft 6,18 Apr. 1913; and KK, 1905, vol. 2,
p. 6, Salonich.
24. FO 195/774, Sandison at Bursa, 28 May 1864.
25. A&P, 1878-79, Biliotti at Trabzon for 1877-78.
26. FO, Further Reports, 797.
27. Ibid., 795.
28. CRUS, reel T681, Jewett at Sivas, 30 June 1893.
29. vs (Aydin) 1307/1891.
30. Berichte, Bd. VII, Heft 4,19 Juli 1904,300; CRUS, reel T681, Jewett at Sivas, 26
May 1893.
31. FO Further Reports, 743.
32. Berichte, Bd. VII, Heft 4,19 Juli 1904, 274, 301, 306-8. See also A&P, 1878-
79, Biliotti at Trabzon for 1877-78.
33. This assumes a per capita consumption of 1.8 lbs./0.83 kgs per day at an
average price of 1.0 kurus/okke of bread. Donald Quataert, "Limited Revolution:
176 Donald Quataert

The Impact of the Anatolian Railway on Turkish Transport and the Provisioning of
Istanbul, 1890-1908," Business History Review 51, no. 2 (1977): 139-60. Berichte, Bd.
VII, Heft 4, 19 Juli 1904, 306-8. See, for example, vs (Adana) 1318/1902, s. 188.
34. Cevdet Iktisat #52,6 Za 1241/July 1826, #31,3 B 1244/January 1829, #694,6
Za 1244/June 1829, BBA; Mesail-i muhimme Ankara eyaletine dair #2073,
1261/1845, BBA.
35. Nikolai Todorov, The Balkan City, 1500-1900 (Seattle: University of Wash-
ington Press, 1983), 228; Salaheddin Bey, La Turquie a I'exposition universelle 1867
(Paris: Hachette et Cie, 1867), 129; Michael R. Palairet, 'The Decline of the Old
Balkan Woolen Industries, c. 1870-1914," Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial und
Wirtschaftsgeschichte 70 (1983): 331-62.
36. CRUS, reel T681, Jewett at Sivas, 22 July 1888.
37. Nikki Keddie to author, 4 Oct. 1988.
38. U§ak il yilligi (Istanbul, 1968), 269; A. Cecil Edwards, The Persian Carpet: A
Survey of the Carpet-Making Industry of Persia (London: G. Duckworth, 1953), 28,59-
60, 201. Further east, in the mid-twentieth century, Indian men also were com-
monly employed as knotters of commercially made rugs.
39. For a fuller account of the carpet industry, see Donald Quataert, "Machine
Breaking and the Changing Carpet Industry of Western Anatolia, 1860-1908,"
Journal of Social History 11 (Spring 1986): 473-89, and sources therein; and Ed-
wards, Persian Carpet, 90-91.
40. Giinseli Berik, "From 'Enemy of the Spoon' to Factory: Women's Labor in
the Carpet Weaving Industry in Rural Turkey" (paper presented at the annual
meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, New Orleans, La., 22-26 Nov.
1985); Berik, "Invisible Carpet Weavers: Women's Income Contribution in Rural
Turkey," Nilufer Isvan-Hayat, "Rural Household Production and the Sexual Divi-
sion of Labor: A Research Framework," and E. Mine £inar, "Disguised Em-
ployment—The Case of Female Family Labor in Agriculture and Small Scale Man-
ufacturing in Developing Countries; the Case of Turkey" (papers presented at the
annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, Boston, 20-23 Nov. 1986).
41. Josephine Powell, "The Role of Women" (paper presented at a symposium
on village life and village rugs in modern Turkey, Georgetown University, Wash-
ington, D.C., 1987. Similarly, there is considerably disagreement among Euro-
pean historians concerning gender roles in rural manufacturing. See the works by
Gay Gullikson, Hans Medick, and Jean Quataert.
 The Impact of Legal and
10
Educational Reforms on Turkish Women

NERMIN ABADAN-UNAT

Turkish society has undergone drastic changes in the past

sixty years, but how this has affected the status of women is
much debated. Staunch supporters of Ataturk's reforms,
while deploring the fundamentalist movements of recent
years, point to the education and training of large numbers
of professional women as a unique accomplishment. Those
who oppose the trend toward Westernization in general, and
its endorsement of secularism and the emancipation of wom-
en '<n particular, are more sharply critical. They welcome the
recent emergence of astonishingly large numbers of young
zealous Islamic women. For the fundamentalists, Ataturk's
reforms served only to produce a decadent Western way of
life and to destroy the moral basis cherished during centuries
of Ottoman rule. The truth lies somewhere in between and is
far too complex to be encapsulated in a single argument.
It is true that Ataturk and his supporters based their sys-
tem of women's reforms on the twin pillars of law and educa-
tion, thus serving a predominantly urban female elite. Socio-
economic indicators have proved that the majority of Turkish
women still endorse traditional values and mores, reflecting
the attitudes of a conservative rural community. One is
forced to agree with Binnaz Toprak that Turkish women have
been emancipated but not yet liberated.1 An evaluation of
this unique process requires a brief examination of the status
of women in Ottoman society and of Ataturk's reforms.
Until the end of the nineteenth century the social division
of labor according to sex was based on a rigid interpretation
of the Muslim ethic. The first slow steps toward the educa-
tion of women began in 1863 with the foundation of a college
for the training of women teachers in Istanbul, followed by
the opening of primary schools for girls.2 The return to con-
stitutional monarchy in 1908 brought into positions of power
men whose political and social creed laid strong emphasis on

177
178 Nermin Abadan-Unat

women's education. During this period women <. tarted to organize them-
selves. An impetus for genuine reform came with World War I, which
created jobs for women in ammunition and food factories.
In a parallel movement, banks, postal services, central and municipal
administration, and hospitals began to open their doors to women. But
though the changes were accelerated by the demands of the war ma-
chine, they did not meet with universal approval. Official policies pre-
scribed permitted skirt lengths and a special imperial decree was needed
before the veil could be discarded during office hours.

In 1919 the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the occupation of Istanbul

by British soldiers, and the landing of Greek soldiers in Izmir aroused a
storm of outrage and protest throughout all strata of the population.
Turkish women also were provoked into political activism. They partici-
pated in open-air meetings and were addressed for the first time by such
well-known women writers and educators as Halide Edib and Nakiye
Elgun.
Even during the War of Independence, on his various visits to the
countryside Ataturk continued to voice his support for egalitarian mea-
sures with regard to women. Addressing the Turkish Grand National
Assembly, Ataturk publicly acknowledged the heroic deeds of Anatolian
women in his speech of 3 February 1923. He formally promised that
"Turkish women shall be free, enjoy education and occupy a position
equal to that of men, as they are entitled to it."3 In this way he prepared
public opinion for radical changes.

ATATURK'S REFORMS CONCERNING WOMEN

Following the foundation of the Turkish Republic in October 1923,

Ataturk was disappointed by the slow and conservative approach of the
Turkish Parliament when considering issues pertaining to the legal status
of women. Asked to amend and codify a family law proposal first drafted
in 1917, the commission in charge approved of marriage at age nine for
girls and age ten for boys and opted to retain polygyny. Furthermore, the
commission gave women the right to divorce only exceptionally but up-
held a man's right to repudiate his wife. Ataturk and his supporters, who
were determined to adopt Western standards, vehemently disapproved
of this bill.
Ataturk increasingly became convinced that the only way to modern-
ize Turkish society was to eliminate the power of religious rules and laws,
customs and arrangements. His ambition was to achieve no less than a
national revolution based on secular and positivist thought. In eman-
cipating Turkish women he wanted to lay the foundation for a more
 Legal and Educational Reforms 179

egalitarian and harmonious family life. In March 1923 he announced his

ultimate goal: "Our enemies claim that Turkey cannot be considered a
civilized nation because she consists of two separate parts: men and
women. Can we shut our eyes to one portion of a group, while advancing
the other and still bring progress to the whole group? The road of prog-
ress must be trodden by both sexes together marching arm in arm."4
Anxious to present a modern face to the world, Ataturk began to encour-
age significant initiatives to eliminate the obvious inequalities in public
life. In his determination to fight the conservative forces gathered around
the Ministry of Shari'a, Ataturk managed to impose legislation that had a
definitive effect on the orientation of public policies. On 3 March 1924 two
new laws were passed. The first abolished the caliphate, and the second
unified instruction by eliminating all religious educational institutions.
The law for unification of instruction in effect assured both sexes of their
right to education, thus opening the door to coeducation.
Ataturk had no intention of waiting for long-term evolutionary pro-
cesses to take their course, and he turned to codification as an accelerator
of social change. On 17 February 1926 a slightly modified version of the
Swiss civil code was adopted. For Ataturk and his supporters, granting
equality to men and women was the fulfillment of an earlier promise. It
symbolized Turkish determination ''to reach a level of contemporary civi-
lization." Arguments put forward in favor of the new law reflected,
among others, the belief that "monogamy and the right to divorce are
principles required for a civilized world." One might conclude that the
major rights conferred on Turkish women were a product of the unrelent-
ing efforts of a small revolutionary elite rather than of large-scale de-
mands by Turkey's female population.
This observation might also apply to the granting of political rights.
Although the Turkish Women's League presented publicly articulated
demands in 1928, again it was the personal intervention of Ataturk and
his close supporters that led to the 1931 constitutional amendment grant-
ing Turkish women the right to participate in municipal elections. Three
years later, on 5 December 1934, Turkish women were given the right to
vote and to be elected at general elections—some fourteen years earlier
than those rights were granted to women in France, Italy, and Belgium. In
1935 eighteen women deputies entered the Turkish Grand National As-
sembly.

EXPLAINING THE REFORMS

How can the lasting success of these reforms be explained? The following
factors may provide a partial explanation.
Absence of colonial rule. Neither the part of the Ottoman Empire that
180 Nermin Abadan-Unat

became Turkey nor the Turkish Republic had ever experienced foreign
rule. The dilemma of emancipating women in an Islamic society therefore
did not present itself in quite the same way that it would have in a former
colony.
The long past of modernization in the Ottoman Empire. Westernization or
Europeanization began as early as 1793, initiated from within the society.
It was conceived and engineered by a group of indigenous Ottoman elite
consisting of sultans and high-ranking bureaucrats. It manifested itself
in a concrete way with changes in the military sector, leading to the con-
cept of "defensive modernization/'5 Islamic and Western institutions
existed side by side, especially in the fields of education and law.6
The issue of women in public discourse. The three major ideologies that
preoccupied the minds of Ottoman intellectuals in the second half of the
nineteenth century all gave considerable place to the status of women.
Those in favor of a radical Westernization of Ottoman society advocated
the adoption of a European civil code, the abolition of polygyny, and the
outlawing of repudiation. Supporters of Turkish nationalism, although
critical of European education, deplored polygyny, repudiation, and the
veil. Even Islamic traditionalists, who advocated segregation, were ready
to concede women the right to dispose of their own property and to
attend primary and secondary schools. This long period of gestation later
enabled relatively large-scale implementation of reforms.7
The strongest public advocates of the importance of educating women
and raising their status were men—men with political ambitions. During
the 1890s and early 1900s the problem of women in Turkey became an
ideological controversy incorporating questions of Ottoman, and later
Turkish national identity. The single most important factor in the trans-
formation of the issue was to be found in nationalist state ideology.
Women's contribution. After constitutional monarchy was restored in
1908, a significant number of Ottoman women writers established a rich
array of women's magazines, further developing the discussion in favor
of equal rights.8 They contributed to a growing dynamism in urban pub-
lic opinion, presenting a significant body of argument in favor of radical
change in the status of women and enhancement of their educational
opportunities.
The collapse of the empire and the discrediting of the sultan-caliph. Islamic
values and the traditional social order, which until the end of World War I
were defended by an omnipotent ruler were irreparably shaken when
the sultan was discredited. Following the defeat of the empire, Mustafa
Kemal, the victorious general of the Ottoman army, later given the sur-
name Ataturk—Father of Turks—started a war of independence in Ana-
tolia against all invaders and occupying forces. The struggle for indepen-
dence was rejected by the sultan, who condemned Mustafa Kemal to
 Legal and Educational Reforms 181

death in absentia. The rift between the sultan, who collaborated with the
Allies, and the nationalist forces came to an end when the former fled
from the country on a British warship. The disintegration of a six-century-
old dynasty, followed by the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, greatly
facilitated the adoption of secularism as one of the fundamentals of the
new republic. At the same time it deprived the traditionalists of a power-
ful protector.9
Ataturk's personality. There can be no doubt that the charismatic per-
sonality of Ataturk was a major contributor to the uncontested accep-
tance of all major reforms in favor of women. In spite of his military
background, once Ataturk gained legitimacy he based his power on legal
norms. With regard to such delicate issues as the discouragement of the
wearing of the veil he eschewed special laws in favors of persuasion
through public addresses. (He did not, as is widely believed in the West,
outlaw veiling.) His sincere belief in secular and scientific thought, and
his commitment to the supremacy of Western civilization, enabled him to
infuse new hope into a defeated and impoverished nation.

RECENT DISCUSSION

Since the end of World War II, there have been many discussions as to
what the strategic goals of these reforms were. First-generation re-
publican women looked on these reforms as a major component in the
making of a democratic civic society. More recently Sirin Tekeli has ar-
gued that the singling out of women as the group most visibly oppressed
by religion was absolutely central to Ataturk's attacks on the theological
state, culminating in the abolition of the caliphate. Furthermore, Tekeli
argues, Ataturk was equally desirous to dissociate his single-party re-
gime from the European dictatorships of the time (Hitler's Germany and
Mussolini's Italy).10 In contrast to the Kinder-Kiiche-Kirche ideology of
these fascist states, Turkey presented itself as a country that granted
political rights to its women, thereby symbolically claiming a rightful
place among Western democratic nations.
As Deniz Kandiyoti rightly points out, the Turkish case proves that the
state can be a powerful instigator of change through its policies. These
may meet various forms of resistance or, on the contrary, be facilitated by
new political alliances in the socioeconomic sphere. Turkey illustrates
both the potential, and the limitations, of reforms instigated by a political
vanguard in the absence of a significant women's movement.11 The pro-
cess of secularization, which diminished the impact of Islamic values,
undoubtedly left its mark right up to the 1950s, particularly on the rapidly
increasing urban population.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that state authority and elitist
182 Nermin Abadan-Unat

legislation have been able to transform all strata of society. On the con-
trary, progressive legislation has led to sharp polarizations between tradi-
tionally oriented predominantly rural values, and the progressive values
adopted in urban areas. Yet even here a rigid dichotomy is not applicable;
levels of development are the decisive factor.12
The wish to hold on to, or return to, the past manifests itself in the
rejection of civil marriage (the only legally recognized form) in favor of a
religious ceremony with its potential for polygyny, repudiation, and il-
legitimacy; the demand for a brideprice in the marriage agreement; a
decline in the number of females attending school beyond compulsory
primary education; and an emphasis on women's fertility and reproduc-
tive role. By and large, the Kemalist reforms concerning the emancipation
of women have penetrated the countryside only unevenly.

REFORMS AND REALITY

The balance sheet of the past sixty years clearly indicates that revolution-
ary efforts through law have resulted in only partial changes. Republican
reforms have been unable to remove vast national disparities. The clear
discrepancies between town and country, class and region, persist.
Bound by the traditional patterns of society, women have been slow to
change their attitudes toward the selection of spouses, marriage, and
inheritance. A policy of openness in the field of education has created a
sizable women's elite, particularly visible in academia, the liberal profes-
sions, art, and literature. Yet Turkish women, particularly those living in
undeveloped rural areas, are still afflicted by a multitude of problems.
And it is these problems that force us to reconsider the merits and efficacy
of past policies. They also lead us to ask a series of important questions:
To what extent can revolutions of legal systems change the traditional
way of life of the majority of women in a given country? Which major
economic, social, and political factors are directly or indirectly responsi-
ble for accelerating or retarding this process? Does a significant participa-
tion of women in the organized labor force during such crisis periods as
war encourage a social movement in favor of equality for women? And if
so, once the extraordinary conditions pass, will the old patterns return?
Does religion, ideologically or in terms of values, maintain its decisive
hold on the amount and degree of women's social and political participa-
tion? Is a high degree of electoral mobilization and participation sufficient
to eliminate women's marginal position in politics?
Sociological, anthropological, and sociopsychological theories, such
as those of William J. Goode and E. Bott, all seem to indicate that shifts in
the role of sexes, or changes in the economic status of women, depend
directly on changes in the economic system. A different interpretation,
 Legal and Educational Reforms 183

centered on social crisis, furnishes an additional dimension. According to

this approach, defended by Elise Boulding, rapid modernization and
such crises as wars often seem to elevate women into "male" positions, at
least temporarily.13 In Turkey structural factors predominated, such as
the systematic efforts to reform education as part of a comprehensive
Western-oriented modernization program and the introduction of tech-
nologies leading to growth in the industrial and service sectors, and were
abetted by such crises as the War of Independence in 1919-23.

EDUCATION: SUCCESS OR FAILURE?

The founders of modern Turkey viewed education as the most powerful

peaceful means to transform individuals from passive subjects to active
citizens. A brief assessment of the results of public education reveals that
in spite of free and compulsory education, girls have been neglected in
terms of schooling, especially in rural areas. In 1984 the literacy rate stood
at 62.5 percent for women, as opposed to 86.5 percent for men. There is
an important relation between labor-force participation and education. A
nationwide survey carried out by Hacettepe University in 1975 showed
that 9 percent of uneducated women in urban centers were employed,
compared with 28 percent of those who graduated from secondary or
higher level schools, whereas in rural areas employment levels decreased
as educational attainment increased. The survey emphasized cash earn-
ings, so in rural areas the majority of women were classified as unpaid
family members. Thus only wage-earning agricultural laborers and such
government workers as primary school teachers, nurses, and midwives
fit the employed category. There is also an inverse relation between the
degree of education and agricultural production: 92 percent of the un-
educated female labor force participate in agricultural production, 84
percent of the primary school graduates, and 5 percent of the secondary
school or higher-level graduates.14 School attendance is undercut by a
high rate of absenteeism among those who drop out to participate in
agricultural tasks.
In terms of primary school attendance Turkish figures for both sexes
are low compared with other EEC countries: 82 percent compared with 92
percent. But the real discrepancy becomes visible at higher levels. Where-
as the percentage of girls in secondary education in industrial countries
varies between 49 and 51, in Turkey it reaches only 35. Similarly, whereas
the percentage of girls in vocational schools in industrial countries ranges
between 45 and 62, in Turkey it attains a mere 28.15 Turkey's higher
education, however, shows a steady growth and an average of 32.4 per-
cent, compared with industrialized countries, which range between 33
and 51 percent. Given that the percentage of Turkish female students in
184 Nermin Abadan-Unat

Table 10.1: Male and Female University Students in Absolute Numbers,

1927-83

Students
Percentage of
Years Men Women Total Women Students

1927-28 3,477 441 3,918 11.2

1937-38 7,820 1,564 9,384 16.6
1947-48 20,153 4,541 24,694 18.4
1957-58 35,415 6,545 42,060 15.8
1967-68 100,180 23,503 123,683 19.0
1977-78 247,145 79,538 345,476 23.0
1982-83 197,962 83,577 281,539 29.7

Source: Eser Danyal Koker, "Education, Politics and Women in Turkey" (Ph.D.
diss., Ankara University, 1988; in Turkish), tables 13, 19, 32.

Turkey's twenty-seven universities reached an average of 32.4 in 1985-86,

their number has grown thirteenfold in the space of thirty years (see table
10.1).
It is a puzzling picture: an unrealized mass education program and at
the same time a constantly growing number of female university stu-
dents.16 There is no doubt that in this respect Turkey holds the lead
among Middle Eastern countries. The relatively high percentage of
women in the civil service is further evidence of the growing presence of
qualified female personnel in public life (see table 10.2).
When measuring the educational attainment of these women officials,
the first fact to be noted is that the levels they reach are, on average,
higher than those of their male counterparts. In addition, the most
qualified female labor seems to be concentrated in the service sector—be
it private enterprise or government service.
With regard to professional women, a trend familiar to studies of
Third World countries also seems to be the rule in Turkey. It can be
characterized as follows: (1) the percentage of women professionals is
higher than in capitalist countries; (2) professional women are mainly
concentrated in metropolitan and urban centers; (3) since they seek se-
curity and facilities related to their work rather than quick promotional
opportunities, they prefer government employment.17
Turkish women who do not go into public administration are in-
creasingly pursuing academic careers. This is the case not only in such
traditionally women-oriented disciplines as humanities, social sciences,
and social services, but also in the male-dominated preserves of medi-
 Legal and Educational Reforms 185

Table 10.2: Distribution of Female Civil Servants, 1938-82

Female Civil Servants

Total
Year Civil Servants N %

1938 134,779 12,716 9.5

1946 159,166 30,046 13.5
1963 443,869 72,702 16.0
1970 655,737 123,812 19.0
1978 1,038,777 277,622 27.0
1982 1,294,418 318,470 25.0

Sources: For 1938, 1946, 1963, and 1970, Mesut Giilmez, "Numerical Evolution of
Turkish Civil Servants/' Public Administration Review 6, no. 3 (in Turkish): 27-47;
for 1978 and 1982, State Personnel Organization Survey, 1978 (Office of the Prime
Minister, 1979); and State Personnel Organization Survey, 1982 (Office of the Prime
Minister, 1983).

cine, law, engineering, and science. A retrospective on Turkish academic

women reveals a rather astonishing steady rise in numbers, running
parallel to that of female university students (see table 10.3).
At the time of the basic reorganization of Turkish universities in 1932,
there was only one female faculty member. Fifty years later Turkey's
twenty-seven universities were employing roughly six thousand women
academics. The distribution according to disciplines shows some equally
interesting features. In medicine, women have occupied important posi-
tions since the late 1940s; in 1946-47 the existing medical faculties con-
tained 199 men and 53 women, 21 percent of the total. This proportion
has stayed fairly constant, being 27 percent in 1980-81.18 Women aca-
demics increasingly have been elected or appointed to important deci-
sion-making positions.19
The question of why so many of Turkey's professional elite are female
has been treated most extensively by a well-known Turkish sociologist,
Ay§e Oncu.20 Having established that one in every five practicing lawyers
and one in every six practicing doctors in Turkey is female, Oncu attempts
to determine whether this trend is relatively new, growing, and particular
to Turkey. Oncu argues that although women enjoy wider work oppor-
tunities in the professional labor market in Turkey than women do in most
industrialized societies in the West, Turkey is not unique in this respect. A
number of developing countries that have become rapidly integrated into
the world market in recent years—Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, and
India, for example—provide women with more options in the profession-
al labor market than do most of their Western industrialized counter-
186 Nerrrtin Abadan-Unat

Table 10.3: Distribution of Turkish Female Faculty Staff, 1932-82

Number of
Academicians
Percentage of Female
Years Men Women Total Academicians

1932-33 501 1 502 0.1

1942-43 927 196 1,123 17.4
1952-53 1,692 308 2,000 15.4
1962-63 3,432 1,029 4,461 23.1
1972-73 8,399 2,699 11,098 24.3
1982-83 15,975 5,839 21,814 26.8

Source: Koker, "Education, Politics and Women in Turkey," tables 15, 27, 41.

parts.21 The main reasons seem to be the new growth in the economic
realm, demographic losses due to emigration of the high-skilled labor
force, and the like, which make openings for a woman easier to find than in
the West, where the supply outruns the demand. In many developing
countries law, medicine, and dentistry constitute a cluster of occupations
that appear to women as alternatives.22
The classical argument to explain this trend is based on class in-
equalities. Rapid rural migration to the cities and a scarcity of factory
employment result in a large pool of unskilled female labor in large urban
areas, which upper-class women are able to exploit. For these women are
then able to fulfill both a professional and a marital role because domestic
labor is available and although most families are nuclear, the extended
family network can be relied on for child rearing. Although Oncii accepts
the irrefutable validity of these arguments, she posits another relevant
factor. Whereas Western industrial societies subject the most skilled,
prestigious, and highest-income professions to a tight self-regulating
system, Third World countries are unable to maintain such self-per-
petuating and elite recruitment patterns. When they open their doors the
first to enter are women from professional and white-collar backgrounds,
because they have or can easily obtain the requisite education. As Oncii
emphasizes, "the admission of women serves to maintain closure by
keeping it a family affair/'23 The elite background of professional women
thus is significant from two points of view: (1) the ready availability of
lower-class women as domestics in private homes "emancipates" the
upper-class women to pursue professional careers; and (2) state policies
that deliberately aim at the rapid expansion of the professional cadres
actively encourage women to enter prestigious professions.
 +Legal and Educational Reforms 18

SECULARISM VERSUS FUNDAMENTALISM

Has there been a noticeable change in this interpretation? One might say
yes. With the increase in female university students from rural and low-
income urban families the clash between liberal and conservative values
has become increasingly evident. This trend has been reinforced by the
return to compulsory religious education in primary and secondary
schools. Some women students seem to be facing serious dilemmas con-
cerning Muslim identity and secularism.24 One indication of this clash is
the continuing struggle by women students determined to wear head
scarves in classes, exams, and graduation ceremonies against the official
university policy, which was recently reaffirmed by a constitutional court
decision. The university administrators and the Higher Education Coun-
cil based their arguments on the assumption that certain types of
clothing—head scarves and ankle-length, shapeless, drab-colored
coats—constitute a response to demands formulated by fundamentalist
religious or political leaders and as such are political symbols. In recent
years political parties have been openly championing the cause of a re-
turn to the shari'a and the adoption of "Islamic dress." These political
views are in opposition to the Dress Regulation, introduced after the
military intervention of 1980, which prohibits all male government em-
ployees from wearing beards, moustaches, and baggy trousers, and
females from wearing head scarves and veils.25
Meanwhile, the issue has become a steady source of conflict between
fundamentalist students and university administrators. During the legis-
lative session of 1988 the government party passed a law granting to
female students the right to cover their heads. This law was first vetoed
by the president, and after it was readopted by Parliament, the president
sent the law to the constitutional court. The decision of the constitutional
court reaffirmed the contention that special privileges with regard to
dress violate the principle of equality before the law. Right-wing political
parties openly sustain the claims of these students, whereas left-wing
parties also support the claims, but on the basis of freedom of conscience
and democratic liberties.
Social scientists such as §erif Mardin and Qgdem Kagitgiba§i have
interpreted the religious revival in Turkey and its impact on the student
body as the result of attempts to deal with the increasing stress of living in
a society in the throes of rapid social change. In addition to such so-
ciological interpretations, one must also attach importance to the ideolog-
ical polarization into which Turkish post-1980 democracy has been
forced. The military and civilian governments have supported a growth
in religion in order to combat extreme leftist movements. During the past
188 Nermin Abadan-Unat

five years the General Directorate of Religious Affairs has been opening
1,500 mosques and prayer rooms a year, with more than 633,000 students
attending official Quran courses.26 These activities are complementary to
article 24 of the new constitution of 1982, which introduced compulsory
instruction in religious culture and moral education in primary and sec-
ondary schools.
The increasing importance that such Islamic sects and Sufi orders as
the Nak§ibendis, the Siileymanlis, and the Nurcus have been gaining
both inside Turkey and among Turkish workers in various European
industrial countries can be detected in the economic and social life of
Turkish society. Banks with capital from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates
are distributing "profit dividends" instead of interest. Foundations of a
religious character are establishing secondary schools and even attempt-
ing to found private universities. These efforts to create a favorable cli-
mate for an Islamic republic are also supported by associations of Turkish
workers living abroad. Within this conflict the issue of women is playing
a decisive role.

LEGAL REFORMS

As stated earlier, Ataturk used legal reforms as a revolutionary tool to

eliminate the traditional Islamic norms and jurisprudence. In this sense
one could label his actions as the implementation of a kind of state femi-
nism. More than sixty years have passed since the adoption of the Swiss
civil code in 1926. Of course, legal reforms cannot change attitudes,
customs, and institutions overnight. Their real importance emerges only
when socioeconomic structural changes have exercised a lasting effect on
both sexes. In regions with a predominantly agrarian character, where
large landownership remains the privilege of a highly influential group of
local notables, marriages, divorces, and matters of inheritance are carried
out in the traditional way. Thus one may speak of legal dualism. Proof of
this is most evident in the situation of children born from de facto unions
(Islamic marriages), who were deprived of their civic identity. This crucial
problem was solved in two ways: (1) by a series of amnesty laws recogniz-
ing the paternity of such children, a total of 7,724,419 up until 1950; and
(2) after 1960 by introducing a simplified procedure for recognizing pater-
nity. 27
How egalitarian is the Turkish civil code? Like the Swiss civil code it
reflects traditional European values. There is no absolute equality be-
tween husbands and wives. The husband is the head of the family (art.
154), and the right to choose a domicile belongs to him (art. 152II). Should
the wife wish to assume a profession or work outside the household, she
must obtain the consent of her husband, which might be tacit approval
 Legal and Educational Reforms 1 89

(art. 159). This clause, which in recent years was constantly criticized by
the press and feminist groups, has been revoked by the decision of the
constitutional court in March 1990. The wife, however, may freely dis-
pose of her material goods. The rule in marriage, unlike, for instance, that
of the Napoleonic Code, is separation of property and goods.28
Among the demands proclaimed by twenty-seven Turkish women's
associations in 1975, on the occasion of the International Women's Year,
were the following legal requirements:
1. Husband and wife should be entitled to represent the marital
union.
2. The wife should not be obliged to adopt the husband's family
name.
3. The prerogative of a husband to forbid his wife the practice of
a profession or employment should be abolished.
4. Legal, educational and administrative measures to abolish the
"bride price" [ba§lik] should be implemented.
5. The prohibition of a religious ceremony before a civil marriage
has been registered should be reinforced.
6. In order to equalize tax obligations, individual tax declara-
tions for husband and wife should be required.
7. Women civil servants and workers should be able to take one
paid year's leave of absence after childbirth.
8. Rural women should be able to benefit from social security
rights.
9. The exploitation of apparently "adopted" female children,
employed in domestic service should be prevented by legal provi-
sion.29

In May 1989 the first women's convention in Turkey assembled in

Istanbul, attracting women of various feminist and feminist-socialist or-
ganizations. The women's platform contained the following new de-
mands: the elimination of sexism in all school books; a close follow-up of
discriminatory programs in the media; the lifting of legal prohibition on
the establishment of women's branches within the existing political par-
ties; the adoption of a quota system to increase women's representation
in politics; the abolition of legalized prostitution; and the revision of the
penal code in order to prevent violence within the family.30
The right of abortion up until the tenth week of pregnancy has been
granted (27 May 1983; law no. 2827); in the case of married couples the
consent of the husband is required. Abortions and family-planning ser-
vices are provided in most government hospitals; though underutilized
in less-developed rural areas, they are in strong demand in large cities.
The right to abortion, as with previous legal innovations, was granted not
190 Nermin Abadan-Unat

as a result of the struggles of mobilized women voters or nongovernmen-

tal agencies, but because the government is eager to promote large-scale
voluntary population control.
In theareaof political rights, representation in Parliament since 1934 has
shown a downward trend. During the legislative period of 1935-39 eigh-
teen women were elected to Parliament (4.5 percent), but after the tran-
sition to a multiparty system in 1946 the figure declined; only nine (1.2 per-
cent) were elected in 1977-80. At the last general election, in 1987, just six
women (1.3 percent) entered the national assembly. More women than
previously, however, have assumed leading decision-making positions.
Yet it cannot be denied that public involvement is restricted for women
by the patriarchal nature of society. As has been shown by the young
political scientist Yesim Arat, until the 1980s women parliamentarians in
Turkey were drawn into politics by men. The very legitimacy of male
power, which usually ties down the household, ironically promotes the
initiation of women into politics. The asymmetry of power between men
and women apparently was used in an instrumental sense to promote
women. The sixty-nine women deputies who served from 1935 to 1980
were predominantly back-benchers. The constitution of 1982 prohibits
the setting up of youth and women's sections within political parries,
further reducing the chances to develop a healthy democratic system.
The climate of opinion concerning women's issues nevertheless has
changed drastically since 1983 and the return to a multiparty system. The
major opposition party, the Social Democratic Populist party, endorsed
the principle of realizing within ten years an intra-party female represen-
tation of 25 percent. Various feminist organizations have mounted pro-
tests against juridical discrimination in court decisions, wife battering,
violations of the freedom of expression and of conscience, and the like.
But the most militant women's movement of the day is Islamic.
Though it has no declared leader, its mouthpiece, a monthly magazine
called Kadin ve Aile (Women and family), reflects the outlook of the Naksi-
bendi order in Turkey on women's issues. The movement is ideologically
supported by the fundamentalist wing of the government party, ANAP.
The female students who have staged sit-ins, hunger strikes, and boy-
cotts of examinations are closely linked to the conservative political
parties.

The legal and educational reforms undertaken sixty years ago opened
the doors of coeducation to Turkish women, by offering them free school-
ing from primary level to university graduation. The value judgments
that had upheld a sex-segregated social order were discredited by a
strong emphasis on secularism. Until the transition to a multiparty sys-
tem, public policies fostered the development of active, career-minded,
 Legal and Educational Reforms 191

creative women, presenting these pioneers as role models for the new
generation. Today, a fast-growing competitive economy and the impact
of the mass media, particularly television, have led to the projection of
different role models. The ideal woman is presented as a loving partner
and a devoted mother.
The equality of the sexes in the eyes of the law has permitted the
overall application of the principle "equal pay for equal work." The major
beneficiaries of this process have been the qualified urban female genera-
tions of medium-sized and large cities. The restrictions of the constitu-
tion of 1982 concerning trade union affiliation have been a major hand-
icap for the application of this principle to the growing number of
industrial workers.
Because transforming the status of Turkish women was regarded as an
inherent element of the Kemalist state ideology, women in relevant exec-
utive positions did not assume any responsibility for tackling specific
women's issues. The rapid changes in Turkish society have led to grow-
ing uncertainty about sexual mores. By adhering to conventional stan-
dards in their private lives, career women try to protect their authority in
public.
The large numbers of professional and academic women in Turkey are
no doubt the result of close economic and ideological ties between upper-
class and upper-middle-class groups and the West.31 As Nikki Keddie
rightly pointed out in 1979, working urban, rural, and tribal groups in
modernizing Middle Eastern countries are losing their productive role
and status, whereas the top urban groups, which include women, are
gaining.32 The close cooperation between the Turkish male elite and
Western businessmen and politicians has had a spill-over effect on the
status of women. Such men, moving largely in Westernized circles, are
encouraging women's demands for modern education, unveiling, and
the chance to lead professional lives. The extremely skewed income dis-
tribution of nearly all Middle Eastern countries heightens the sense of
two distinct cultures.
The crucial problem Turkey faces today is both structural and cultural.
The major reforms undertaken by Ataturk rested on the assumption that
Islam and feminism are basically incompatible, which has resulted in
massive public debates about the meaning and basis of secularism. All
the historical data clearly indicate that the entrance of Turkish women
into the political struggle at the birth of the republic served as an ideologi-
cal lever. With the transition to multiparty democracy, the debates on
women's societal function began to express a tension between Western-
ization, Islam, and socialism. That Kemalist republicanism (with its cul-
tural Westernism) is no longer the sole ideology has to be reckoned with.
The 1970s, even more than the 1980s, witnessed a resurgence of polemi-
192 Nermin Abadan-Unat

cal writings on women, involving Marxist and Islamist currents. New

protagonists of women's issues are becoming more self-consciously pol-
iticized and better organized.
Conservative political parties, such as the National Salvation party (at
present dissolved) and its successor, the Welfare party, have succeeded in
creating a new female elite, which is attempting to legitimize traditional
sex roles. The Islamic framework concerning sexual differences is oper-
ative both at elite and at mass levels. At the mass level, the modernists,
while strongly defending equality in public life, do not reject the Islamic
moral code concerning the predominance of male authority in private
life.
The educational and legal reforms of the Turkish Republic have, over
the decades, produced three generations of articulate, highly qualified
professional women. Whether the achievements of this elite can inspire
the young generations of today; whether today's young women have a
commitment to democratic values that will lead them to ignore the built-
in constraints of the Islamic ethic; and whether women's movements and
feminist currents will be able to produce independent voices for greater
individual freedom and democratization are open questions.
Whether a serious backlash could occur in Turkish society depends on
a great many factors, all centered on the discussion of secularization and
democracy. Until an increased awareness and consciousness lead Turkish
women to defend an enlarged catalog of social and political rights, wom-
en's issues will remain a sensitive item in the arena of political confronta-
tion, and thus an acid test by which to assess the characteristics of the
state.

Notes
1. Binnaz S. Toprak, "Religion and Turkish Women," in Women in Turkish Soci-
ety, ed. Nermin Abadan-Unat (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), 281-92.
2. Tezer Ta§kiran, Cumhuriyetin 50 ci yilinda Turk kadin haklari (Turkish women's
rights at the 50th anniversary of the republic) (Ankara: Basbakanlik Kiiltur Mus-
tesarligi, 1973), 27-28.
3. Afet Inan, Tarih boyunca Turk kadinin hak ve gorevleri (Rights and obligations
of Turkish women in history), 3d ed. rev. (Istanbul: Milli Egitim Basimevi, 1975),
97.
4. Ataturk'iin soylev ve demegleri (Speeches and statements of Ataturk), 2d ed.
(Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu, 1961), 2:150.
5. Dankwart A. Rustow, "The Military: Turkey," in Political Modernization in
Japan and Turkey, ed. Robert E. Ward and Dankwart A. Rustow (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1964), 353.
6. Roderic H. Davison, Turkey: A Short History (Walkington: Eothen Press,
1968), 82-83.
 Legal and Educational Reforms 193

7. Pervin Esenkova, "La femme turque contemporaine: Education et role so-

cial," Bulletin International d'Etudes Arabes (Tunis) (Spring 1951): 280-96.
8. Tezer Taskiran, Women in Turkey (Istanbul: Redhouse, 1976), 45.
9. Lord Kinross, Ataturk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal (New York: William
Morrow, 1965), 439.
10. Sinn Tekeli, "Women in Turkish Politics," in Women in Turkish Society, ed.
Abadan-Unat, 293-310.
11. Deniz A. Kandiyoti, "Emancipated but Unliberated? Reflections on the
Turkish Case," Feminist Studies 13 (1987): 317-38.
12. Nermin Abadan-Unat, Women in the Developing World: Evidence from Turkey
(Denver: University of Denver Graduate School of International Studies, 1986),
46.
13. William J. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York: Free
Press, 1963); E. Bott, Family and Social Network (New York: Free Press, 1954); Elise
Boulding, The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview, 1976), 733.
14. Ferhunde Ozbay, "Women's Education in Rural Turkey," in Sex Roles, Fami-
ly and Community in Turkey, ed. (Jigdem Kagitc,ibasj (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1982), 135.
15. TUSIAD, Indicators of Turkey's Modernization: Industrialization (Istanbul: Asso-
ciation of Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen, 1988), 27, table 3.6.
16. Eser Danyal Koker, "Turkiye'de kadin, egitim ve siyaset" (Education, pol-
itics and women in Turkey) (Ph.D. diss., Ankara University, 1988), 205; Koker
notes that the twenty governments that took office between 1960 and 1980 allo-
cated little to women's issues. None of the programs made any reference to an
equalization between the sexes in terms of educational performance.
17. Nermin Abadan-Unat, "Women in Government as Policy-Makers and Bu-
reaucrats: The Turkish Case," in Women, Power and Political Systems, ed. Margherita
Rendel (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 101.
18. Koker, 'Turkiye'de kadin, egitim ve siyaset," 188.
19. During the academic year 1988-89, at Ankara University the deans of the
schools of law, humanities, science, theology, and journalism as well as of the
graduate school were women.
20. Ay§e Oncii, "Turkish Women in the Professions: Why So Many?" in Women
in Turkish Society, ed. Abadan-Unat, 185.
21. C. Safilios-Rothschild, "A Cross-Cultural Examination of Women's Mar-
ital, Educational and Occupational Options," in Women and Achievement, ed. M. T.
S. Mednick et al. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1971), 322; in 1980-81 Turkish
universities had sixteen medical, six dentistry, and four pharmacy schools. The
distribution of female students was as follows: 25 percent in medical, 33.3 percent
in dentistry, and 55.7 percent in pharmacy schools. Koker, "Turkiye'de kadin,
egitim ve siyaset," 269, table 34.
22. Rudolp C. Blitz, "An International Comparison of Women's Participation
in the Professions," Journal of Developing Areas 9 (July 1975): 505.
23. Oncii, "Why So Many?" 189, 193.
24. It should be pointed out that in Turkish secularism is not equivalent to the
194 Nermin Abadan-Unat

American term, which generally refers to the separation of church and state.
Rather it is a concept based on the European notion of laicism, according to which
religious practice and institutions are regulated and administered by the state.
25. Emilie A. Olson, "Muslim Identity, Secularism in Contemporary Turkey:
The Headscarf Dispute," Anthropological Quarterly 58, no. 4 (1985): 161-78. Assis-
tant Professor Koru of Ege University (in Izmir), a chemical engineer, refused to
remove her head scarf, consequently resigned, and went to court, claiming that
her constitutional rights had been abridged; see Milliyet, 27 July 1985.
26. The number of personnel employed in the General Directorate of Religious
Affairs has increased by 58 percent during the past five years: in 1983 the number
of civil servants in the directorate was 53,582; in 1988 it was 84,712. Parallel to this
increase, the number of persons participating in the pilgrimage to Mecca has also
significantly increased; from 30,450 in 1984, this figure climbed to 285,724 in 1988.
Pilgrimage to Mecca also is organized by the General Directorate of Religious
Affairs. Cumhuriyet, 23 Jan. 1989, 8.
27. Nermin Abadan, Social Change and Turkish Women (Ankara: Faculty of Politi-
cal Science Publication SBF 171-153, 1963), 23.
28. The French and German civil codes were rejected by the Turks because they
imposed too subjugated a role on the woman within marriage. Since then both
these codes have been substantially revised. The major reason for preferring the
Swiss civil code, however, was that the code had satisfied various linguistic com-
munities with different cultural backgrounds and therefore might be compatible
even in a totally different society, See Mary Zwahlen, Le divorce en Turquie: Contri-
bution a I'etude de la reception du Code civil Suisse (Lausanne: Universite de Lausanne,
Faculte de Droit, 1981), 68-69; and Sabine Dirks, La famille musulmane (Paris:
Mouton, 1969), 34-40.
29. Nermin Abadan-Unat, "Turkish Women and Social Change," in Women in
Turkish Society, ed. Abadan-Unat, 14-15.
30. Sidika Rezzan Alp, "I. kadin kurultayi" (First women's convention),
Mulkiyeliler Birligi Dergisi, no. 108 (June 1989): 28-30.
31. For the impact and trends of Turkish feminism, see the comprehensive
article by Niikhet Sirman, "Feminism in Turkey: A Short History," New Perspectives
on Turkey 3 (1989): 1-34. For the scope and targets of governmental policies, see
Gunseli Berik, "State Policy in the 1980s and the Future of Women's Rights in
Turkey," New Perspectives on Turkey 4 (1990): 59-81.
32. Nikki R. Keddie, "Problems in the Study of Middle Eastern Women," Inter-
national Journal of Middle East Studies 10 (1979): 225-40.
 The Dynamics of Women's
II
Spheres of Action in Rural Iran

ERIKA FRIEDL

Shifts in gender roles in Iran over the past few decades have
been attributed to the Pahlavi regime, to Western influences
tied to modernization and economic development, and later,
to the functionaries of the Islamic Republic. These shifts in-
clude such contradictory phenomena as the unveiling of
women and the Islamic dress code; birth control and
glorified motherhood; women dependent on male wage
earners and female guerrilla fighters; monogamy and polyg-
yny; limited access to resources for women in an officially
egalitarian society; and so on. The logic behind these devel-
opments has been sought in the dialectic of the public-pri-
vate dichotomy, the rules of patriarchal politics, the pro-
cesses of disenfranchisement in capitalist economies, and in
the ideologies of liberation put into action. No matter what
the frame chosen, actual gender roles are hard to delineate
and the theoretical concept of gender role remains elusive: it
is an imprecise tool for analyzing social processes that seem
to proceed in different directions simultaneously.
This difficulty in applying the role concept to socio-
historical processes holds true even for rural communities,
which presumably offer relatively few roles and retain gen-
der-role patterns longer than complex, fast-changing urban
centers. Working up data on gender issues gathered over the
past twenty years in a tribal rural area of southwestern Iran, I
thus found the term gender role not equal to the data's com-
plexities, even for this one village.
In this village as elsewhere, for example, a woman's eco-
nomic role is said to be essentially domestic, whereas men
work in the fields. Yet while women indeed do not work in

An earlier version of this chapter was read at the Seventh

Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Wellesley College,
Wellesley, Mass., 19-21 June 1987.

J95
196 Erika Friedl

wheat fields (except at the tail end of harvesting), they are seen working
in other fields and in vineyards. A woman's role allows her to bring home
firewood on her back, but not on a donkey. As a mother, a woman is
responsible for the welfare of her children, yet her sons from about the
age of nine have the authority to order and control her.
Under close scrutiny, actual gender performances are so highly con-
textualized, variable, and overlapping, even in this small, relatively ho-
mogenous community, that normative rules can be isolated only with so
many exceptions that the "norm" is rendered heuristically dubious. Like-
wise, and for the same reasons, the popular concept of public versus
private proved to be of limited use in the context of tracing shifts in male-
female performances historically, or in making sense of the great diver-
sity operative in gender definitions today. On first sight, for example,
what women do and where they do it in the village seems confusing;
locally, women are said to "belong in the house," yet one sees many
women out on apparently legitimate errands, often all day and far from
home. A respectable woman will argue that she cannot walk even a few
steps down the lane to visit a relative without being wrapped in a long
veil, yet the same woman can be seen working at the public water chan-
nel, not only sans cumbersome veil but with her shirt sleeves rolled up to
her elbows; a girl is taken out of school after the third grade because it is
not right for her to be among strangers, but the next day she is working in
an outpost camp in the mountains, in full view of women, men, relatives,
and strangers alike.
Such seeming inconsistencies have given rise to contradictory gener-
alizations about rural tribal women in Iran, depending on which side one
wishes to emphasize: women appear either as downtrodden beings with-
out much of a face or a voice,1 or (and just as legitimately) as powerful
personages to be reckoned with in the domestic and political sphere.2
The terms public and private are used to argue both positions.3 One can
say, for example, that the woman washing clothes at the water channel is
out in the open, but that the public space is transformed symbolically into
a private one by virtue of her domestic activity—an elegant sleight of
hand. If indeed this were the case, the woman also would have to behave
as she would in a private setting, however temporarily. In fact, however,
her face and her body attitude send distinct off-limits signals to any man
or stranger, that is, she shows that she very much feels herself to be in
public, and that furthermore her appearance, her activity, and her con-
tacts during this time are open to public scrutiny—in this sense she
becomes an entirely public being and is seen as such by others. A simple
public-private dichotomy thus does not help much to sort out what is
going on in the dynamic, action-created reality of village life.
To escape this semantic impasse, I decided to return to the basic van-
 Women's Spheres of Action in Rural Iran 197

tage point of observation of gender performance. The sexual division of

labor, that is, the relation between gender and economic activities, in-
cluding their social ramifications and the manipulation of ideological
superstructures, can be observed, questioned, challenged, and elicited
for the living-memory past through interviews, life histories, and various
data on demographic and economic processes. While keeping my atten-
tion firmly focused on gender behavior in an economic context, I thus
analyzed gender-related developments in the village over the previous
three generations, eventually arriving at a model useful for understand-
ing present muddled conditions in terms of an interplay of economic
systems that evolved at different developmental stages. Each of these
stages I see as a productive system, a "sphere of action," that is, the
physical, social, and psychological space in which men and women
move. These spaces form closed spheres in which action and meaning are
coherently connected in a logic, a world view of their own.
Four such productive systems operate in the village: (1) the hunting-
gathering system; (2) the pastoral system; (3) the agricultural system; and
(4) a system created by pre-revolutionary economic development and
post-revolutionary conditions. These last two developments produced
similar parameters for actions and therefore are dealt with as one system.
Each of the systems has its own dynamic in the gender discourse, its own
logic and historical connectors. The first three were fully operative simul-
taneously in the village until about 1970, when the intensive pro-
letarianization of the Iranian countryside promoted the fourth sphere to
dominance. To a much lesser degree than before, however, the other
three systems are still operative.
For individual villagers in the action grid of daily life, these systems
overlap or alternate, depending on the task at hand, creating inconsisten-
cies and fuzzy borders that confuse actors and observers alike. Most
important, however, they provide points of leverage for political manip-
ulations, especially those informed by androcentric goals. This point de-
serves emphasis, as it is of key importance to the success of the ongoing
patriarchalization of Iran.4 Contrary to some popular romantic notions,
the seeming relative freedom of rural women (signified by casual veiling,
outdoor work, and spatial mobility) is not securely grounded anywhere
in ideology or in practice, but is a function of circumstantial, largely
economic, necessity. It is a brittle freedom.
The fragility of women's position in their society—rural, pre-
proletarian, so-called traditional as it is (or was a few years ago)—of their
sources of power and sense of self (vis-a-vis men), is directly correlated to
certain factors of what I call the patriarchal feature set. These include an
androcentric world view with ideological and philosophical tenets that
provide little stimulus for women's identity formation; the authoritarian
198 Erika Friedl

structure of social life; a hierarchy of gender-indexed space, things, and

activities; and a paucity of rituals for women. In situations where shifting
boundaries of the various action spheres creates liminal areas, marked by
Contradiction and conflict of rules, little effort is needed by anyone in a
position of authority to unhinge the delicate systems and open up the
whole complex for disenfranchisement, restriction, suppression, or
other processes of patriarchalization. This process does not even depend
much on law enforcement or political decisions aimed explicitly at the
subordination of women, but works on a much deeper, more subtle level
of cultural articulation. Indeed, it can be argued that the Islamic Republic
is given entirely too much credit (or blame) for the recent shifts in gender
performance and spheres of actions for men and women in Iran. Rural
Iran was well prepared for this shift before 1979, after two decades of so-
called modernization, economic development, and Western-type educa-
tion had shifted the boundaries of the traditional spheres in the village to
such an extent that women could be pushed to the fringes of their world
without much resistance.5
A few ethnographic facts provide the background for my analysis. My
data come from a large tribal village in southwest Iran. The three thou-
sand villagers speak Luri, a dialect quite different from standard Persian,
are Shi'i Muslims, and settled from a pastoralist-transhumant way of life
about a hundred years ago. Since then, the village has had a mixed
agricultural economy that includes subsistence and cash crop farming,
transhumant sheep and goat herding, and dairy cows. The village is
becoming increasingly dependent on income from non-farming ac-
tivities, mostly wage labor, salaried jobs, and trade. The bases of the local
sociopolitical life are kin groups. These were part of a tribal political
organization in which subtribal chiefs and khans, wielding often ruthless
power, were backed! by outsiders like the shah or allied khans from other
tribes, so that common people had little political autonomy and limited
decision-making authority in economic and political matters. Time and
again, chiefs interfered in domestic matters, commandeered services,
syphoned off domestically created surplus, and even, on some infamous
occasions, demanded sexual favors.
It is important to emphasize this situation: the general population,
men and women, lacked political autonomy and thus a public voice in the
political sense. The view from below is one in which the rifles of the khans
and their retinue, and later those of government agents, directed life for
most villagers. Furthermore, crowded domestic space and weak bound-
aries in the village (and even more so in the outposts and camps, where
life is conducted in branch huts and tents), make everyday life largely
public. Thus a woman churning butter at night (in a skin bag suspended
on a tripod, producing characteristic slosh-bang sounds) tells everybody
 Women's Spheres of Action in Rural Iran 199

else in camp not only that she is working, but also how much yogurt she
is processing and how much butter she is likely to yield. A woman's
crying in a corner of her house, certainly a private affair, is heard, com-
mented on, and potentially acted upon by her neighbors. Her private
discomfort becomes a public event with sociopolitical consequences insti-
gated and often negotiated later by the public. A young bride from an-
other village, for example, who was unhappy in her in-laws' house but
never had complained to others about her treatment in accordance with
proper face-saving behavior, one day aired her discontent by wailing
loudly, if briefly. Although the incident seemingly was ignored, within
two days her father appeared with a large group of other relatives and
demonstratively took her home. A long politically and economically costly
negotiation began, involving a wide circle of people, until the conditions
were hammered out under which the husband could take her back.
To express the scarcity of bounded space in numbers: a tent or branch
hut affords about two square meters of space per person; a house in a
village between two and a half and four square meters (roughly one-tenth
of what we deem adequate in the United States), and in most cases
between two and eight square meters per person of open porch and
verandah in front of the living rooms. Although such boundaries as a
reed wall, a fireplace, a pile of household goods, and a rug on the floor
delineate and define space, they do nothing much to privatize that space
practically. Indeed, under these circumstances open public space often is
more private than domestic space. If truly secret matters must be dis-
cussed, for example, a walk is advisable—in itself, however, telling
everybody else that the two walkers are up to something. In this regard
the unparalleled spying abilities of children, who have the run of the
neighborhood and few rules to restrain them, must be noted. Adults rely
heavily on the intelligence services of their young children. One can even
make the point that women, more in touch with children than men are,
usually are better informed about the goings-on in the village and can
extract considerable power from their knowledge if they so choose.
Finally, the machismo subculture of men, which until recently cen-
tered on hunting, war, and raiding, is an important component of the
larger culture. Hunting was a men-only enterprise; except as provi-
sioners of food, women had no part in it. (They did have a parallel ac-
tivity, discussed below.) Hunting played on male prowess. It took place
far from home, was dramatic, and required mastering danger, difficult
terrain, and skills and sacrificing domestic (that is, female) creature com-
fort. Likewise, fighting and raiding were organized and carried out by
men only. After kinship ties, allegiance to a successful military leader was
by far the most influential social tie in a family's existence. These ties were
maintained exclusively by men and were sustained by the ever-present
200 ErikaFriedl

potential for outbreaks of aggression. Yet until 1963, when the war-
raiding complex came to an end with the assassination of the last para-
mount khan, war and aggression cognitively and practically were condi-
tions of life women, too, had to come to terms with. In attacks and raids
on their village women took up defense, hurling rocks, screaming, wield-
ing clubs, and occasionally shooting rifles. Some stories even tell of wom-
en stealing sheep. The old village and the individual houses in it were
built like forts, some with guarding towers, whose windowless walls
faced the roads with slits for shooting. A walk overland was a dangerous
adventure; women alone in a herding outpost in the mountains had to
reckon with nighttime raids on the sheep corrals by hostile neighboring
villagers.
The pacification of the tribal area by the Pahlavis ended the large-scale
war-raiding activities; modern guns and high demand for game among
the fast-rising population almost eliminated game animals and ended the
hunting. Yet tales of bravery linger, as do a romantic propensity for the
great outdoors and pride in endurance. Men were the actors here, with
women in the supporting roles of admirers on whom the glory of their
men "shines like sunlight," as one woman put it.
In the ethnographic setting sketched here, different historic-economic
strata produced the four overlapping productive systems in which men
and women move, I describe them in such a way as to highlight the
vulnerability of the women's position in confrontation with the pa-
triarchal trends mentioned above.

THE HUNTING-GATHERING PRODUCTIVE SYSTEM

In spite of agriculture and herding, until about 1960 (most likely for
centuries before) at times as much as 90 percent of all food consumed was
procured through gathering and hunting. Most available meat was game,
highly prestigious, "healthy," and provided by men, but food collecting,
done almost exclusively by women, yielded the lion's share of all avail-
able foodstuff: acorns, harvested in the outlying woods in the autumn,
were labor intensively turned into flour and different kinds of breadlike
starch staples; wild vegetables were dried for consumption in winter;
mushrooms, edible roots, wild fruits, and berries, occasionally locusts,
were harvested to augment the diet. By and large, the local cuisine re-
volved—and still does to some degree—around foodstuff collected in the
wild. Rice and wheat were luxury staples only the rich could afford.
Women's foraging parties often last from sunup to sundown and take
the women far from home into areas otherwise frequented only by hunt-
ers and men on errands in the mountains. During outings men and
women perform all necessary tasks themselves: hunters do not take
 Women's Spheres of Action in Rural Iran 201

along women to cook for them, nor do women take along men as guides
or for protection.
In the past, the women's groups on these occasions were large (up to
thirty participants), made up of whoever in a general neighborhood had
the time, strength, and inclination to join. Today the parties are fewer and
smaller. No woman was veiled on a gathering trip in the past—dress was
workaday—but now most women wear their work-hindering veil wraps
and discard them later, when "nobody is looking." The atmosphere on
these outings is relaxed, the hard work is performed in a spirit of fun,
joke-buffered competition, even rowdyness. Interaction can best be sum-
marized as "networking" in a socially relaxed and economically produc-
tive atmosphere. Public matters are discussed at length, ranging from
critique of prominent figures like the chief to matchmaking, from repri-
mands for the conduct of individual men or women to venting of feel-
ings, from giving and receiving of commiseration and advice to simple
bantering. Stray men encountered by chance are dealt with from a posi-
tion of strength in numbers in a largely unstructured setting and a gener-
al spirit of lightheartedness: such men are put on the defensive through
jokes and teasing, or given tea, or driven away with strong language,
depending on the man in question and the circumstances. Neither
shyness, coyness, nor avoidance—appropriate for such occasions in the
village—is necessary in the etiquette of such encounters in the moun-
tains. This is not to say that a woman on an outing enjoys the freedom of
an autonomous agent; she must observe a minimum of the decorum
required in interactions with other women to whom she is either related
or at least well-known. But as the composition of these groups is not kin-
based by design but essentially individual and economic and organized
around a specific, limited project that does not involve the observation of
a full set of responsibilities (such as guarding children, feeding a hus-
band, practicing deference rituals toward in-laws), behavior rules in ef-
fect in the village are greatly relaxed here: an elder sister-in-law, for exam-
ple, who is to be treated with circumspection at home, here can be
ignored or dealt with on the level of a cohort member one has known all
one's life. In such informal task-centered groups, women establish their
own hierarchies based on skill, personality, success, wit, wisdom, and
other public virtues, and they can, if so inclined, practice social skills
unfettered by the familiar confinements of male authority, domestic rela-
tionships, and the demands of young children that rule life at home.
In the women's own reports, they associate the outings predomi-
nantly with feelings of pleasure, competence, and satisfaction derived
from climbing around in the mountains and bringing home heavy packs
of valuable food—exertion and fatigue usually are not even mentioned.
The supportive, lighthearted, and word-centered atmosphere is (in our
202 Erika Fried!

terms) therapeutic:, and the skills of leadership, task-related problem

solving, decision making, arguing in large groups, exerting influence,
manipulating opinions, and eliciting and offering support are practiced in
a nonthreatening environment. Status obtained in these interactions and
through economic success is transferred by the women into the domestic
setting, at least in the form of increased assertiveness. In other words,
their public (but aU-women) performance carries over to the domestic
(both sexes) domain.
At home, women retain full control over all gathered resources.
Gathered food is considered low-status food and as such is not claimed as
tribute or taxes by the chiefs; public distribution thus is not compulsory
(unlike game and birds, for example, which hunters were required to
share with chiefs on the threat of retribution). Women alone decide what,
if any, goes to whom: they are free to keep it all in their larder, to serve it to
guests, or to give it as gifts. They can (and do) use their harvest prudently
to enhance their status as a good food provider to children, husband,
relatives, and guests, which in turn percolates into the pool of power
resources vis-a-vis other women in the domestic unit. These assets are
the more important politically since women are dependent on men for all
other foodstuffs, except chickens and eggs, which are always in short
supply for reasons beyond the women's control. A woman who takes
along on visits little bundles of wild leeks (seen drying all summer long on
her flat roof) or who never runs out of wild almonds or dried blackberries
enjoys the reputation of a "good" woman, one who is industrious and a
talented housekeeper. To the extent that a woman's distribution of her
surplus transcends the domestic circles, it creates recognition and wider
reciprocal relationships—both providing additional sources of self-
esteem and the social benefits that go with a good public reputation.
Compared with the social skills and political moves practiced in this
setting, the dynamics of a woman's actions within the kin group proper,
large as this may be and rich in women, are very different: status in a kin
group is assigned to positions within a hierarchy topped and bounded by
men, and each carries well-defined expected behaviors; any deviation
from this order has the potential to produce conflict or else is the product
of a previous conflict. Among structural near equals like sisters-in-law,
the interaction is seen as competitive rather than cooperative; abusive
rather than supportive; and stressful rather than relaxing. Men function
as ultimate authorities in crises resulting from these interactions. Al-
though the transfer of a woman's self-confidence and skills from the all-
women's extradomestic group into the domestic one often is rich in con-
flicts also, our observations suggest that a woman of good repute and
demonstrable success in the all-women's gathering group is more likely
to succeed in her domestic group than one who has no such source of
 Women's Spheres of Action in Rural Iran 203

status (all other factors being about equal), if by no other mechanism than
her superior bargaining position. In an argument between two sisters-in-
law, for example, the point was driven home by one of them this way:
"And whose wild almonds have you just been feeding to your visitors?
And who carried them down from the mountains on her own back, tell
me? And next time you run out of goodies for your guests don't dare
come to me."
Public loci of actions for women, economic independence for women,
and women's solidarity, all of which characterize gathering activities, are
anathema to the principles of patriarchal orders such as are (and were)
operative in Iran. As long as there was an overriding economic need for
women's activities that challenged the ideal order, mechanisms were
activated that made it possible to tolerate women's gathering parties:
they were labeled "unimportant" (hence not taxed by chiefs); men ig-
nored them (women did not need to ask their permission to join, or for
their protection); the gathered food had neither prestige nor cash value of
interest to men. But once reliable food supplies became available in the
wake of such state and local developments as food imports and men's
access to money (trade, wages, salaries) with which to buy food, and once
the exploitation by chiefs and landlords had ended, the women's gather-
ing activities lost their economic urgency: they became optional, if not
superfluous. Acorn-flour bread, for example, is now in the village a sym-
bol of bad, hungry days gone by—there is no need to gather acorns if one
can eat wheat bread. Joining a gathering party now has the flavor of
leisure-time luxury, and a risque one at that, as it blatantly runs counter to
an easily asserted ideal of domestic confinement for women. Women
who ten years ago went on gathering outings as a matter of course now
would not dream of joining one, nor would they allow their daughters or
daughters-in-law to join one of the few small parties resisting the pres-
sure to stay home. The danger of the wilderness, exhaustion, and health
risks, the possibility of molestation by never-to-be-trusted strange men,
honor easily tainted in public—notions that previously had been ig-
nored, suppressed, or downplayed now provide powerful arguments for
men and women opposed to women going out in the mountains. With
the sharp decline in the incidence of women's gathering parties, a well-
integrated and elaborate sphere of action for women has shrunk and a
source of female autonomy has dried up.
True enough, the men's hunting sphere has shrunk even more, largely
because of the near extinction of game. (For a while, the disarmament
policy under Shah Muhammad Reza also severely limited local gun
ownership; at the same time, however, sport hunting by outsiders
finished whatever game population was left after the burgeoning local
population began a massive hunting for food about 1940.) But for men,
204 Erika Friedl

alternative ways for getting out and returning with valuables have
opened up, whereas for women no alternatives to gathering have
emerged.
The link between subsistence necessity and tolerance of a thriving all-
women economic group activity thus made it possible to bring the whole
sphere of action to an end, affirming and intensifying features of a pa-
triarchal set, including greater economic dependence of women on men,
spatial restriction, and greater isolation of women from one another.6

THE PASTORAL PRODUCTIVE SYSTEM

Migrating and camping units are small (up to ten tents or branch huts),
organized bilaterally, and unstable. The spatial mobility of the migration,
the lack of visible boundaries in and around camps, and the relative
freedom of movement for women within camps—features women them-
selves see as desirable—are counterbalanced by the social isolation that is
a function of the solitary, rhythmic chores of milk and wool processing
and of the smallness of the camp group. Women say they are both free
(azad) and lonesome (tanha), but less free and more lonesome than men,
whose spatial and temporal parameters, compared with women's, are
almost unbounded: men can leave camp any time, for days on end, and
for whatever reason, whereas women can not.
In the pastoral setting the only large all-women's groups are the kin-
based ones that are activated in a formal atmosphere at special occasions
like weddings. Camp groups are much less stable and much smaller than
courtyard-neighborhood groups (organized predominantly patrilineally)
in the village. This affords camp-based women more intensive interaction
with fewer women over shorter periods of time than village women
enjoy, but at the expense of constant access to a wide network of interac-
tion and information.
The obvious lack of privacy during the migration and in the camps has
one major benefit for women: it gives them access to all the intelligence
that can be had locally, including that gained through involuntary (and
voluntary) listening to conversations among men, their own as well as
occasional visitors, behind solidly symbolic but only marginally effective
tent planes or branch walls. Not all women benefit equally from this
opportunity, however. The information thus obtainable depends on the
political standing of l:he men of the house: the more sociopolitically active
a man is, the more opportunity his women will have to listen to discus-
sions and to participate in decisions around his fire. No matter how
bright, interested, and talented a woman might be, if her husband or
father is a recluse, uninterested in the affairs of his fellow beings and the
world at large, she will have little opportunity to gain knowledge or to air
 Women's Spheres of Action in Rural Iran 205

her own opinions and manipulate those of others. But everyday affairs
concerning the camp and its members, indeed, all matters under the
authority of the people themselves (rather than dictated by outsiders like
chiefs, urban money lenders, and government agents) are handled with
the knowledge and potential input of women. Taking charge sometimes
proceeds even without men, if they happen to be absent when a decision
has to be made. In a small camp of four tents in the tribe's winter quarters,
for example, one midmorning the women suddenly reached the deci-
sion—on what basis remained a mystery to me—to move. The only two
men in camp at the time together with all the women took down the tents
and corrals and moved about an hour's distance away. In the evening the
absent men, thinking they were returning home, found an empty camp
site and wandered around for two hours before catching up with their
people. This led to some jokes but no reprimands to the wives who had
made the decision to "move the fire" without waiting for their husbands.
The fireplace (task) in the tent or hut is the center for both a man's and a
woman's overlapping spheres of action. The word task characteristically
denotes the essence of domestic security (such as when a man says "my
fire is dead" as a euphemism for his wife's absence) as well as a core
patrilineal unit in a political sense. As the tash is the locus of a wife's
power and a husband's authority, both the woman and the man are in
charge, even if this locus has different significance for each.
What any particular woman does with the knowledge she gains
around her fire depends on her own personality, her aspirations, and her
abilities. There are chiefs' wives at centers of intelligence and power who
are, as it is said, "quiet," and others have carved an enduring place of
fame for themselves in the lore of local history as intriguers, shakers, and
movers of all men within their considerable sphere of power. Even
women in ordinary positions have the choice either to limit their knowl-
edge and influence to purely domestic issues or to include matters of
wider economic and political portent. All information is a potential
source of power—how it is used is a matter of choice. But this source of
power is not granted to women legally, nor is it anchored anywhere
ideologically.
Lack of privacy, of course, also subjects a woman's own actions to
public comment. A woman's public and private personas are identical in
the camp. To be politically useful, knowledge gained about the affairs of
others has to be balanced carefully against one's own conduct.
The pastoral sphere is characterized by a division of labor in which
women, as milkers and milk and wool processors, are the ones who turn
most of the available surplus into valuable commodities (butterfat,
cheese, rugs) through hard labor, whereas men control the distribution of
these goods and their profit. Economically, women are exploited. Denied
206 ErikaFriedl

control and autonomy of decision over their products, they cannot turn
their activities into sources of power, public or domestic. (There is one
exception: refusing to work, as a measure of last resort. Embarrassing a
husband by leaving; him at the height of an argument to cope with chores
that he, as a man, is not accustomed to doing does put a woman tem-
porarily into a good bargaining position, but such extreme and upsetting
gestures cannot be made often.) At best, women derive a kind of under-
dog satisfaction from their indispensable skills. Not surprisingly, they see
their own pastoral labor as hard, endless, cheerless toil and complain
about exhaustion, ill health, loneliness, and lack of comfort. Rarely does a
woman protest her husband's decision to reduce the herds or to settle
down. Many former herders have settled and others are settling in vil-
lages and towns where they have rights in agricultural land or access to
jobs.7 There they move in a productive sphere marked by a sedentary,
agricultural, or wage-labor way of life. For those who stay with the pas-
toral life, the standard of living is increasing due to the higher prices their
products now fetch. In the case of the relatively affluent herder, the
women's lot is eased by better food and small luxuries and by labor-
saving gadgets like propane-gas burners, which make obsolete the ar-
duous task of collecting firewood, and by the use of trucks for the move-
ment of camps and animals, which mitigates the exhausting trek of
people and animals on the migrations.
In either case, however, sedentarization or pastoral affluency, women
automatically become more firmly embedded in webs of male control and
dependency than before. Bottled gas for cooking has to be bought (with
money men control), in town (far from a woman's sphere of action), and
has to be transported to camp by men, whereas firewood was collected by
women at their discretion and within their radius of action space. Among
nomadic pastoralists, any woman could load and unload donkeys and
drive them, but only men can drive trucks.
Needless to say, male control of women's actions and the dependency
of women on male services and on resources controlled by men are prom-
inent features in the patriarchal set, as are curtailment of spatial mobility
and control of access to information. Seen in historical perspective, the
adaptive dynamic of the pastoral life furnishes a good example of the mu-
tual reinforcement of androcentric structures quietly operative in the
culture and of changes in socioeconomic parameters.
In such a reality, our concepts of private and public, of roles, even of
higher and lower status of women, are largely irrelevant. From a general
tribal Islamic and local legal point of view, women have no rights vis-a-vis
men other than to expect regular sexual services and adequate livelihood
and protection from their husbands.8 Women do not inherit according to
tribal custom; they do not hold offices, do not carry weapons, and are
 Women's Spheres of Action in Rural Iran 207

expected to perform services for the men responsible for them. Legally, a
woman has no rights to any of her products, economic or reproductive.
Yet, as we have seen, she does have relevant input into the system in a
practical sense. This input proceeds according to such general rules of
power as the interplay among personality, ambition, manipulative skills,
knowledge and information about important issues; the backing by a
woman's own family or by her children or others in the camp group; and
her standing in the hierarchy of the women around her. In daily action
within the spheres open to both men and women, these criteria are the
most important ones; indeed a woman may appear to be her husband's or
her sons' equal or even to be informal master of the household, without,
however, any structural, legal, or ideological backing.

THE AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVE SYSTEM

In the tightly clustered traditional village, living rooms are arranged atop
barns around courtyards populated by patrilineally related men and their
families. A house is referred to by the name of the man who lives there
("the house of AH, son of Hasan"). Save for the house or the room of the
rare widow living by herself, houses are male property providing female
space.
The solid appearance of substantially built mud-brick houses with
well-defined areas and visible boundaries notwithstanding, the densely
packed rooms offer little privacy. Comings and goings in the courtyard
are noticed by all; voices carry through open doors and windows; chil-
dren have unrestricted movement everywhere. In addition, flat house
tops, open verandahs in front of the living rooms, doorways with views
into neighbors' courtyards or the streets, and the human voice can be—
and are—used effectively to appropriate extradomestic settings.
Neighbors, kin, and in-laws, the large, relatively stable network of
bilateral kin groups functioning in the village create and relate news that
women can plug into depending on their status in the network and on
their own ambitions within the domestic sphere to which they are rele-
gated by work, child care, and custom. A fight over the operation of a
flour mill that was co-owned by a set of male cousins was strongly influ-
enced, for example, probably even settled, by three of the cousins' wives,
who thrashed the issue out among themselves. The men, I was told, had
little choice in this. It can be argued justifiably that by local standards of
proper conduct the women overstepped their places, probably even com-
mitted sins left and right in the process. Nonetheless, they apparently
found it possible, advisable, and defensible to take these matters into
their own hands; again on the practical level, they acted as role models for
their daughters and other women and they got away with it.
208 Erika Friedl

Inasmuch as kin groups function as political bodies in which domestic

politics and public politics are interconnected, women can, and usually
do, have effective input in decisions and access to carriers of authority.
After all, no matter how excluded she may be from public loci of political
authority as defined earlier, a woman does have access to her relatives
and her husband's relatives (if these are different), and these include men
and women, powerful ones and weak ones. For any woman all other
people in her kin network are potential sources of power and potential
means to create safe spaces in which to move. A young female teacher in
one of the elementary schools in the village, for example, successfully
defended her refusal to comply with the new order that all female teach-
ers had to relocate to the girls' school (which for her would have meant
walking four miles every day). She pointed out that of the dozen male
teachers in her school every single one was related to her and that there-
fore she was not among strange men. The whole village found the matter
a joke, but she won her case.
In the courtyards, women usually spend the day with other women
save for mealtime visits from their men (husbands, fathers, brothers,
sons). Most of the quintessentially female tasks of preparing food, pro-
cessing wool and milk, and caring for infants are carried out there in close
proximity to other women. The spaces the women occupy, however, are
feminine spaces only as long as they are not challenged by men. The
appearance of men will break up a women's gathering anywhere in the
house if the men want to be there. Domestic space, well-defined by walls,
is more of a feminine space than any other in the village (except the
bathhouse at women-only times), but it is so by virtue of occupancy by
women who are taking care of male property. Dissatisfied with his wife's
services, a husband can send her away at any time.
Village lanes, shops, and the surrounds of the village, especially the
fields, are largely male domains. Women are by no means prohibited
from being outside the house, but it is understood that they must have a
legitimate reason to be out: carrying water, walking from one house to
another, and performing an urgent errand are acceptable reasons; going
for a walk, lingering outside one's door, and hanging around a shop are
not legitimate activities and would lead to gossip and censure. Although
there are stories of desperate young widows with children plowing a
field, harvesting a wheat crop, or cutting grass for a cow at home, such
rare occurrences were remarkable enough to be remembered for decades.
Women did, however, participate more actively in the cultivation of cash
crops like tobacco, opium, and sugar beets. (In other words, women can
work in public-oriented crops but not in the traditional domestic-oriented
ones, like wheat and barley. This is another instance where the public-
private categorization creates confusion.) Men are fully in control of all
 Women's Spheres of Action in Rural Iran 209

agricultural crops, and tax tributes to the landlord or chief had to be paid
on all agricultural products grown by men.
There were no vegetable gardens in the village until the mid-1960s,
when people (men and women) started to grow potatoes, tomatoes, and
some green vegetables out in the fields. Kitchen gardens near the house
(a woman's agricultural domain in most parts of the world), with popular
greens like onions, parsley, spinach, and dill, here are tended by men and
women, and even now are found only around the most modern houses,
where walls, low population density, and absence of chickens make such
plantings possible—or so the people say. Women do not seem to derive
any benefits from these small gardens other than the availability of
greens.
The agricultural division of labor thus promotes women's economic
dependence on men for staple food, reversing the order of the hunting-
gathering mode of earlier and poorer times. The agricultural staple
(wheat), however, unlike the acorns of old, is a prestige crop. In conjunc-
tion with the legal disenfranchisement of women mentioned above, this
economic dependency, the inaccessibility of staple and prestige re-
sources, and the denial of inheritance shares and rights of management
in the agricultural setting are felt by women to strongly inhibit the gener-
ation of power.
The marked separation of domestic from extradomestic life is miti-
gated by the absence of all-male meeting places in the village, if one
disregards the chief's house in former times: there are no coffee houses
and no tradition of using the mosque or the bazaar, for example, as social
centers for men's daily interactions. Intravillage public matters are dis-
cussed in the street or in one another's houses. There women can listen
and, if so inclined, make themselves heard from the sidelines: the back of
the room, outside the door, serving tea or a meal. Men arrive at decisions
through informal discussions in consensus-among-equals fashion or
through mediation, and therefore women's opinions count potentially
much more than in a setting where decisions are made by men's votes or
by representation. Here again, the door is wide open for women to man-
ifest individual differences in degree of political ambition and exertion of
power.
A woman's political acuity and power are partly a function of her
husband's (father's, sons') political standing, inasmuch as through him
she has access to larger or smaller authority networks. In turn, however, a
politically astute or ambitious woman will use her network of relatives,
men and women, and her information, however come by, to empower
her husband or sons, thereby broadening her own power base. To under-
stand how women actually work through and around a public system
that assigns them, legally speaking, second-class status with virtually no
210 ErikaFriedl

authority at all, not even over their offspring, to create a measure of

independence, impact, or self-realization, one has to focus on these dy-
namics. Role analyses or confrontational dichotomies like public and pri-
vate alone do not afford us much insight into these processes.
An example of political maneuvering among women in the context of
the brideprice illustrates this point: negotiations over the brideprice and
what a bride's father does with it are not only about goods and money but
also about status. Relative to the actual volume and value of the bride-
price, the dowry a bride brings with her in the form of household goods
and luxuries is an indication of her father's willingness and ability to back
her up and to watch over her interests, and thus of his status vis-a-vis his
daughter's in-laws. A stingy or poor father who keeps much of the bride-
price for himself can be ignored politically by his daughter's in-laws,
whereas one who gives more in the dowry than he received in the bride-
price is to be reckoned with in matters to come between the two families.
For years after a wedding, more or less subtly, both families attempt to
gain political advantage by asserting their own generosity over the
other's alleged stinginess. Both men and women engage in these games
of one-upmanship, and a bride supported by her father's generosity can
use his backing as a power source in her new group, which in turn
benefits her father. In the king-making efforts within one of the larger and
upwardly mobile families in the village, for example, one man was built
up by his daughter: discussing a discord between her female cousin (her
father's brother's daughter) and this cousin's in-laws, she said that her
own father had out of his pocket bought a rug for his niece because her
father (his own brother) was a poor man and the brideprice he had gotten
had been dismally meager, too. In a one-sentence stroke, the speaker
thereby expressed her father's superiority over his poorer brother (imply-
ing that he was wealthier and worthier than the brother), insinuated the
low status of the niece's in-laws (they were poor or stingy), and affirmed
the backing of the niece by her relatives (even her uncle is supporting
her). With this pronouncement the woman herself furthermore showed
that she was willing and able to assert herself and to support her father,
and was counting on his powerful support. Strategies like this form a
woman's position as negotiated on the ground level of day-to-day living.
In the traditional agricultural setting the women's sphere of action is
severely limited spatially and economically by the division of labor and by
the confinement of stable, easily gender-indexed spaces. The resulting
economic dependency of women on men, however, is somewhat bal-
anced by the women's access to a large group of people, which affords
them not only more occasions for input into the discussion of the large
volume of issues that emerge in the life of a populous village, but also
more occasions to create mutually interdependent power relationships
 Women's Spheres of Action in Rural Iran 211

with a wide net of relatives. To the extent that village affairs are dealt with
locally (and not, for example, in the city) and that men conduct political
affairs in one another's houses (and not, for example, at the mayor's
office), women at least can keep abreast of happenings and decisions that
affect domestic and public conditions.

THE POST-DEVELOPMENT, POST-REVOLUTION SETTING

Over the past twenty years the effective integration of the area into the
rapidly developing nation, the revolution, and the post-revolutionary
policies of the Islamic Republic all have worked toward shrinking the
options women have for action. Economically, increased opportunities
and greater availability of food have made such activities as gathering
acorns superfluous and sheep and goat herding on a small scale unprofit-
able. There are few gathering parties now, and few women leave the
village to spend part of the year in outposts with the herds. Women have
lost their productive niche as gatherers and as processors of milk and
wool, and the fields and newly created orchards are a solidly male do-
main. Since 1979, the effective implementation of the fundamentalist
doctrine of domestic confinement of women has curtailed food gathering
even further. Indeed, a woman's participation in such expeditions is now
used in power plays between mothers-in-law and their sons' wives and
between husbands and brothers and their wives and sisters, with young
women usually the losers. In other words, female groups now are con-
fined to domestic kin groups. As the locus of decision making in public
affairs has shifted from the political economic arena of domestic centers to
offices, from the village to towns, and from villagers to urban bureau-
crats, both men and women have lost autonomy, but unequally so. Ex-
cept for teachers and the occasional female member of the Islamic village
council, women generally now have much less access to public places
than men do. Women's sphere of action includes fewer points of access to
sources of information, decision, and power, because these centers have
shifted out of reach in a spatial sense and into a kind of public arena that is
dominated by male strangers speaking a different language, deriving
their authority from amorphous outside agents, and depending on writ-
ten communications that women cannot read. This alienation of eco-
nomic and sociopolitical power makes it easy for the republic's funda-
mentalist ideology to realize an order in which men act as culture brokers,
news agents, and sole political agents for women; in which men with
the full backing of the law can assert total domestic authority over their
women; in which men can usurp all nondomestic space, thus making it
public in the sense that women are restricted from it; and in which men
can demand a degree of compliance and subordination from their women
212 ErikaFriedl

that would have been hard to obtain without severe protest a generation
ago. The paradoxical situation thus is created in which women officially
have a public political vote and have access to information on the national
level via television and other propaganda instruments, yet lack access to
input into decisions at the local level as well as information about domes-
tic, private affairs that affect them daily.
As mentioned above, in the wake of these effects of modernization the
all-women's groups no longer are important. Pre-wedding parties have
stopped completely, and the bathhouse crowd is shrinking as new
houses are built with shower stalls. The only new occasion for congrega-
tion of women locally is graveyard visitation on Thursday afternoons, but
this is kin-based, with a decidedly downbeat mood and a narrow field of
action and purpose, and thus neither an equivalent to nor a substitute for
the old gathering groups.9
Indeed, women in the post-modernization sphere are more isolated
than they were in any other sphere, as the large courtyards break up,
nuclear families move into walled-in single-family houses, and legitimate
economic reasons for outings by women disappear. Because this devel-
opment conforms to the Islamic patriarchal virtue of domestic confine-
ment of women, it will be difficult to circumvent, unless the new houses
in turn become centers for new courtyard-type developments in the
rapidly expanding village. (There are signs to this effect.) In this case,
economic necessity again will override ideological postulates without
changing the androcentric superstructure.

As women move in and out of the overlapping productive systems in

the course of their daily routines, they appear more or less dependent,
influential, visible, strong, or whatever adjectives we might wish to try
on them, according to the logic of these systems. The same woman who is
moving freely far from home collecting edible thistles with other women
(in the first system) can be seen the next day covered from head to toe
walking self-effacingly through the main street of the village (in the
fourth system) on her way to a field where, without her veil, she will pull
weeds with her husband in his patch of lentils, perfectly in accordance
with the requirements of the third system. Neither her gender role nor
definition of public and private has shifted—the seeming inconsistency
in her behavior is due to her shifting among different action spheres with
their different behavior codes.
Similarly, a woman who is used to receiving and hosting passing
strangers at her fire from many seasons spent in a branch hut or a tent
easily may transfer this familiar practice to the village should the need
arise (choosing to move in the second system), whereas a woman who
never was exposed to life in a camp will not even admit a stranger to the
 Women's Spheres of Action in Rural Iran 213

house if she is alone, thus staying firmly in the action grid of the fourth
system. The difference between the behavior of those two women is due
neither to a difference in their respective roles, nor necessarily to a dif-
ference in personality or degree of piety, but rather to the difference in the
respective action systems in which they move. By the same logic, how-
ever, a woman accustomed to conversing freely with strangers in a camp
may choose to adopt a fourth-system mode of interaction when she is in
the village and ignore the stranger completely.
Overlapping action-sphere boundaries create options for women.
These options can be—and are—influenced by the all-encompassing an-
drocentric rules asserting themselves in Iran presently. In the village, lost
economic niches and heavy pressure by propaganda agents, from
mullahs to revolutionary guards to schoolchildren, motivate more and
more women to accept the narrowly uniform parameters of the fourth
system.
In this system, a woman's role is defined in authoritative religious
scriptures, and the concepts of public and private divide the world into
"separate but equally important" parallel spheres in which women and
men work for one another's benefit. This program has rhetorical merits,
but practically it amounts to a myth, one that mystifies the fact that
economically, culturally, politically, and cognitively most women have
lost access to sources of power both in the domestic and in the extra-
domestic sphere. They have lost this access rapidly and easily because the
appearances of freedom and assertion in the past were only a function of
socioeconomic circumstances and not embedded in a gender-egalitarian
(not to speak of gynocentric) ideology.

Notes

1. Adele K. Ferdows and Amir Ferdows, "Women in Shi'i Fiqh: Image through
the Hadith," in Women and Revolution in Iran, ed. Guity Nashat (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview, 1983), 54-68.
2. Lois Beck, "Women among the Qashqa'i Nomadic Pastoralists in Iran," in
Women in the Muslim World, ed. Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1978), 351-73.
3. The Seventh Berkshire Conference on the History of Women was dedicated
to the exploration of the usefulness of this dichotomy.
4. No matter how controversial, the term patriarchy seems to be here to stay.
See Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986).
5. Erika Friedl, "The Division of Labor in an Iranian Village," MERIP Reports,
no. 95 (March-April 1981): 12-18.
6. There were other traditional all-women's groups in the past, not connected
with gathering but sharing similar social and psychological benefits, such as par-
214 ErikaFriedl

ties before weddings, where in a bawdy, cathartic atmosphere women made fun
of their behavior during childbirth and of sex. In another informal atmosphere,
the bathhouse, ad hoc bathing groups exchanged news, discussed problems, and
politicked. This was also where the most private of all entities, the body, was
revealed to public scrutiny: pregnancies invariably were first noted here, and if a
woman could conceal elsewhere that she had been beaten, in the bath her bruises
told the tale and her condition became public. Smaller all-women's groups tradi-
tionally formed around such economic tasks as hulling rice, carding wool, and
spinning, but these were conducted within the domestic sphere, were composed
of neighbors who usually also were kin, and therefore operated largely according
to the dynamics of the kin network.
7. Reinhold Loeffler, "Recent Economic Changes in Boir Ahmad: Regional
Growth without Development," Iranian Studies 9, no. 4 (1976): 266-87; Loeffler,
"Economic Changes in a Rural Area since 1979," in The Iranian Revolution and the
Islamic Republic, ed. Nikki Keddie and Eric Hooglund, new ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1986), 91-109.
8. Guity Nashat, "Women in the Islamic Republic of Iran," Iranian Studies 13,
nos. 1-4 (1980): 165-94; Behnaz Pakizadeh, "Legal and Social Positions of Iranian
Women," in Women in the Muslim World, ed. Beck and Keddie, 216-26; Fazlur
Rahman, "Status of Women in the Qur'an," in Women and Revolution in Iran, ed.
Nashat, 37-54.
9. For possibilities for women's gatherings not realized in this village, see
Anne H. Betteridge, "The Controversial Vows of Urban Women in Iran," in Un-
spoken Worlds: Women's Religious Lives in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Nancy Auer Falk
and Rita M. Gross (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), 141-58; and Mary E.
Hegland (Hooglund), "Religious Ritual and Political Struggle in an Iranian Vil-
lage," MERIP Reports, no. 102 (1982): 10-17.
 Political Roles of Aliabad Women:
12
The Public-Private Dichotomy Transcended

MARY ELAINE HEGLAND

Until the mid-1960s, public and political relations in the Ira-

nian village of Aliabad were conducted through personal
relationships. The government's hand had not spread into
rural areas: no outside political authority or police force con-
trolled village politics. The people themselves competed for
political power and were in charge of maintaining stability.
Competition between groups resulted in violence and inse-
curity. One had to tie personal relations together—kin,
friends, and partners—to gather political support. Personal
and domestic relations were also public and political rela-
tions, for politics was conducted through kinship and family
relations. Although there appears to be no actual delineation
between public and private realms in this setting, there is a
strong indigenous ideology of the separation between the
domestic and private and the public and political, which
assumes women to predominate in the first and men in the
second. Why this contradiction? To what uses is the public-
private dichotomy put in this situation?1 What are the results
of encouraging such a dichotomy? An examination of the
lives of Iranian village women of two main groups, peas-
This chapter is based on research carried out in Iran from June
1978 until December 1979.1 am grateful to the following for funding
my research and writing: the Social Science Research Council and
the American Council of Learned Societies; the Anthropology de-
partment and the Southwest Asian and North African program of
SUNY, Binghamton; the Educational Foundation of the American
Association of University Women; the Center for Near Eastern and
North African Studies of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor;
and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Research would
not have been possible without the assistance of the many Iranians I
have known since 1966 and especially the residents of Aliabad, who
befriended and taught the foreigner in their midst. The name of the
village and those of individuals have been changed to protect pri-
vacy.
215
216 Mary Elaine Hegland

ants and traders, during several recent periods—landlord-dominated,

post-land reform, pre-revolution and revolution, and post-revolution—
suggests that the public-private dichotomy as ideology and as myth has
been used to contain and utilize women and their activities in political
competition.

THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE DICHOTOMY AS IDEOLOGY

The public-private Ideology was discernible in the village of Aliabad dur-

ing my fieldwork in 1978 and 1979, more so among the womenfolk of the
traders than those of the peasants.2 Whereas peasant women did not give
much attention to regulations of covering and segregation, trading wom-
enfolk were highly conscious of adhering to modesty guidelines and
prided themselves on being mo'men (proper and sure in their adherence
to their faith). They made fun of the peasant women, whose dresses, they
said, were slit down the front for nursing babies; they were not modest.
The traders and their wives were usually sayyids, or descendants of the
Prophet. Sayyids were expected to adhere more faithfully to religious
ritual standards than other Muslims. In addition, traders were often haj-
jis; they had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. A few of the trading women-
folk themselves had been to Mecca, which also brought greater obliga-
tions of demonstrated religiosity, including more attention to covering
and black chadors, or veils.
Among the trading womenfolk, the public-private ideology was ap-
parent in words, discussion, and behavior. Women belong inside the
house; inside is women's area and outside is for men. The men can be in
the alleyways, or in the streets outside the village. Women are supposed
to be at home. Such words as hijab (covering) and daruni (inside) versus
biruni (outside), khaneh (house) and hayyat (courtyard) versus kucheh (al-
leyway) and khiaban (street), and deh (village) versus biaban (countryside)
indicated the proper places for women and men.
In talking with one another women often alluded to the modesty code.
One woman was especially admired by the others. They said, "She
hardly ever leaves her courtyard. She's such a good Muslim, she's such a
good woman." Other women halfheartedly wished they could live up to
her example. Women were sometimes afraid to be seen walking, even
just outside their own courtyards. One young woman was uncomfort-
able standing on a neighbor's roof talking, for fear that people would call
her a stray—the same word used for a stray dog.
In their behavior as well as their comments, sayyid women showed
a consciousness of the public-private dichotomy. One young sayyid
woman was known to avoid attending weddings of anyone except her
 Political Roles of Aliabad Women 217

closest relatives. Sayyid women rarely watched the dancing at weddings

in the open areas of the village, whereas other village residents could.
(Everyone was expected to watch the dancing, whether or not they were
related to members of the wedding party.) Sayyid women did not go to
the mosque, where they felt they would be exposed to unknown men,
but other women could attend the mosque and sit in the curtained-off
area for women. Sayyid women did not come outside to watch the male
mourning processions during the yearly commemorations for Imam Hu-
sain, a highly significant figure in Shi'i Islam martyred in A.D. 680. When
going outside their own close neighborhood, sayyid women wore the
more conservative black chador rather than a lighter printed chador that
they wore nearer home and that other women wore outside the village as
well. When attending weddings and mourning gatherings or going to
shrines and to the cemetery, sayyid women walked with a large number
of their relatives and associates to be enclosed and encapsulated in a
group of women.
The trading womenfolk had internalized the directives of the public-
private dichotomy, as I learned when I moved from the Lower Neigh-
borhood, where the sayyid trading women lived, to the Upper Neigh-
borhood in Aliabad, which was more heavily peasant. My old neighbors
were extremely reluctant to come and visit me in my new home. A close
friend explained, "I can't come to the Upper Neighborhood. I'd feel as if I
were stealing if I went there. It would be zesht (socially inappropriate,
ugly). I couldn't come to your courtyard because I don't have any relatives
there."
Finally, realizing that their failure to visit hurt me, almost the entire
social group of sayyid women came to see me, apparently finding the
courage to do so only in large numbers. They knocked timidly on my
door, choosing the one through the village wall rather than the door into
the courtyard from an internal village alleyway. By going out the main
village gateway and then coming to my outside door, they could avoid
walking through the part of the village alien to them. As soon as I opened
the door, the women scurried into my courtyard. They sat stiffly for half
an hour, keeping their formal black chadors wrapped carefully around
themselves. Each time the courtyard door opened they looked up, ready
to flee into a corner should a man appear.
The sayyid women had internalized the public-private ideology; they
felt shame if they went outside the parameters set by that ideology. Yet in
spite of their attention, talk, and demonstrated obedience to modesty
standards, it was more often the trading women rather than the peasants
who left their homes and domestic work to engage in economic and
political activity. In addition, all of their activity, including their domestic
218 Mary Elaine Hegland

involvement, was relevant to politics. Their domestic and personal lives

were political and part of the public world.

THE MYTH OF THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE DICHOTOMY

In spite of the attention Aliabad women, especially the sayyids and trad-
ing womenfolk, gave to the public-private ideology, this dichotomy did
not accurately depict reality. The accuracy of the dichotomy can be evalu-
ated in two ways: first, the locus of activity, and second, the realm for
which a particular activity is important.
In terms of the gradation between private and public locus of ac-
tivity—moving from the living room, where the family carried on all
activities, to the good room, where guests were received, and on to
courtyard, alleyway, close neighborhood, section, village, village land,
and beyond—women certainly stayed closer to home than men did.
Even here, however, a strict division between public and political versus
private and domes tic, with men in the former and women relegated to
the latter, is not accurate. Women commonly carried on domestic chores
outside of their own homes and courtyards. Without a water spigot in
their own courtyard—a relatively new convenience for those fortunate
enough to have one—women had to wash clothes in a stream outside the
village, often draping them on graveyard stones to dry. One young wom-
an routinely took her laundry to her mother's courtyard and stayed the
day, returning in time to cook her husband's dinner. Women often took
their own work to other courtyards or assisted friends and relatives.
Domestic work in other courtyards was especially noticeable on the occa-
sion of weddings, death commemorations, and other gatherings.
Women rarely went outside the village on food-gathering expeditions
but often visited in other homes, shopped, went to the mosque and
women's religious gatherings in homes, walked to the graveyards or
village shrines, and went to Shiraz and even farther to visit relatives and
shrines or to conduct other business. A number of young unmarried
women stayed with relatives in Shiraz to attend high school, and others
worked long hours in the carpet workshop located in the village and
owned by the then village boss, Sayyid Ya'qub, and his brother. Some
eleven widowed, divorced, or married women worked for pay: three
kindergarten teachers (among them a young woman who stayed in
Shiraz to teach during the week and returned to her parents' home on
the weekends to be with her two children), a kindergarten cook, two
midwives, a cloth saleswoman, a seamstress, a public bath attendant, a
keeper of dairy cows and other animals, and an opium smuggler.
Animals owned or tended by a family were kept in courtyards at night,
and women were active in milking and otherwise caring for cows, sheep,
 Political Roles of Aliabad Women 219

goats, and chickens. Although agricultural fields were off limits to

women in Aliabad, women could become involved in trade. In earlier
years some widows became traders to support themselves and their chil-
dren, and they visited the camps of migrating Qashqa 'i on business in the
company of a child. Women married to traders often helped with the
business. Several auxiliary shops and all the wholesale grain traders'
businesses were located in homes. Women waited on customers and
dealt with trading partners there or in shops outside the home in the ab-
sence of their husbands. Even the wives of opium dealers were knowl-
edgable about prices and quality, and they interacted without reticence or
embarrassment with men from outside the village, usually known to
them through previous association. Several women were known as good
managers and astute businesswomen.
Political and economic business was often conducted in domestic set-
tings. In addition to being a base for trading, homes were often where
men held political meetings. No buildings were designated for political
activity and closed to women. There were no men's houses nor was there
a bazaar area. Grocery shops were too tiny to host large gatherings. The
mosque was open to women (with a curtained-off side for their use) as
well as to men and was not thought appropriate in any case as a location
for political activity (unless it could be defended as religious activity).
Political discussion then was possible only outdoors or in homes. Recep-
tion of political dependents and partners, strategy planning and decision
making among allies, gatherings of taifeh (kinship-based factions) mem-
bers, and emergency meetings and "entrenchments" (sangar), or gather-
ings, of taifeh members following violence for mutual protection and
demonstration of support all took place in homes, where women often
had the opportunity to watch, listen, and even participate. If nothing
else, they were present to serve tea and thus could keep up-to-date on
political debates and planning.
Women carried on domestic work outside their homes and entered
into economic and political affairs. Men carried on business and political
activity inside their homes and, of course, entered into and influenced
domestic and private affairs and were the final authorities over their
wives, daughters, sisters, and even, at times, their mothers. Lines dis-
tinguishing public and political from domestic and private concerning
space and activity were thus not immutable. If the spatial boundaries
between public and private were erratic, the dividing line becomes all the
more indistinct when we consider the realm of significance for particular
activities. Because of the political system in Iran and specifically in the
village of Aliabad, separating the personal and private from the political
is not possible.
Political relations in Iran were based more on personal contact and
220 Mary Elaine Hegland

connections than on universalistic criteria. Political and economic ac-

tivities depended on personal acquaintance, family connections, trust
developed through intensive social interaction, friendship, kinship, and
face-to-face contact more than on reliable institutions, legal guarantees,
and impersonal contracts. In an environment of insecurity, fluctuation,
and mistrust—both political and economic—friendship, family,
kinship, and social interaction were paramount. To elicit political sup-
port, favors, and assistance, people used the obligations, emotional
attachments, history, concern, empathy, and dependency of friendship,
kinship, association, and partnership (sharik), as well as visiting and
eating at one another's homes. In the absence of regular political and
economic institutions, family, kinship, and friendship could not be sep-
arated from politics. Political activity was conducted largely through
personal contacts and connections.
Such was the rule in Aliabad. At the time of my field work between
June 1978 and December 1979, this large village located in southwestern
Iran contained some three thousand people. Owned throughout the
first half of this century by the powerful merchant and landowning
family of Qavams, who were based in the nearby city of Shiraz, Aliabad
was administered by local representatives of the Qavams. Such repre-
sentatives were so powerful that they were called little shahs; they
enjoyed almost complete control over other villagers and even over
many surrounding regions. Both peasants and traders—adult males
were divided almost evenly between these two occupations—needed
the protection and resources available only from these representatives
of the landlord. Traders needed the assurance of protection during their
dangerous trips to Shiraz or other villages; only the landlord's represen-
tatives could send armed horsemen to accompany or rescue traders and
their goods. Peasants likewise were dependent on the representatives
for access to agricultural land under their control, protection of that land
and its produce, and security for themselves, their families, and their
property from other villagers and any attacking outsiders. With no
other alternatives to deal with danger inside and outside the village,
residents submitted to the rule of the landlord's representatives. Force,
violence, and insecurity were rampant. One's only hope was to connect
oneself to a powerful political figure.
Even the landlord's representatives were not secure in their posi-
tions. In the words of a commonly quoted proverb, "One day the sad-
dle is on the horse; the next day the horse is on the saddle." Landlord's
representatives rose to their positions through success in trade and then
used the profits from trade to build up a following of dependents and
allies—a taifeh, or kinship-based political grouping. A political con-
tender could provoke a series of violent confrontations with the taifeh of
 Political Roles of Aliabad Women 221

an incumbent. Upon winning several such struggles, the contender,

recognized to be more effective as a local strong man, would be named
as the new representative by the landlord. Political and economic posi-
tion rested entirely on connection with a powerful political figure and
membership in or support from a large and physically powerful taifeh.
Such alliance rested on intense and regular social interaction and dem-
onstrations of closeness. For Aliabadis as well as for other Iranians,
then, social interaction and personal connections were of primary sig-
nificance in the political process.
In a political world where the obligations and responsibilities of inti-
macy were the stuff of politics, women and their activities were central
to the political process.3 Although the weight of modest behavior rested
more on traders and their wives, trading womenfolk were called on to
be the most active in the political process, for the traders rather than the
peasants were leaders in political competition. It was a myth, then, that
sayyid trading women and their activities were irrelevant to the public
political arena. At the same time, the public-private ideology was in-
strumental in curtailing women and their activities in order to channel
them into public political use.

THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE DICHOTOMY: CONTROL AND CONTAINMENT OF WOMEN

Many of the roles of women were significant for the public political
realm.
Social. In a system where political alliance was demonstrated and
maintained through social interaction—visiting and hosting (raft o
amad)—the activity of women was crucial. The wives of politically
important figures were extremely active in women's groups and net-
works. The more intense the social interaction and the closer the rela-
tionship, the greater was the obligation to show support in political
struggles. Men therefore encouraged their wives to lead active social
lives with the womenfolk of their political allies. Women were responsi-
ble for the seemingly endless round of events connected with the life
cycle, in which they were autonomous social actors and which were
sometimes only vaguely recognized by men. At weddings women were
especially in evidence, often coming to the bride's and groom's homes
weeks in advance to help with preparations and to join in the festivity;
they also attended mourning gatherings in larger numbers and for
much longer after a death than men did. Some women's gatherings had
no analogue among men. Men did not attend most life-cycle events
connected with preparation for marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth.
Men did not frequent the cemetery on Thursday afternoons, and few
men were present on the various commemorative days after a death.
222 Mary Elaine Hegland

Men did not go to the local shrines in groups, nor did they usually
attend rauzehs (recitations of the stories about saints, especially related
to the martyrdom of Imam Husain and his followers).4 Men had no
equivalent to the gathering for religious teaching by visitors from Mak-
tab-i Zahra, the women's religious school in Shiraz, or to the Quran
reading and explanation for females in the mosque by the visiting mulla
from Qum, a program started before the revolution.
Women's socializing was more regular and interrupted less often than
that of men. During periods of conflicts, the public bath was closed dur-
ing men's hours to prevent possible outbreaks of violence. Male members
of competing taifehs fled the village or stayed at home to avoid meeting
enemies. Mourning ceremonies for men were cancelled during hostili-
ties, but women's mourning gatherings continued as usual and women
maintained interaction with the womenfolk of opposing taifeh to a cer-
tain extent. By maintaining social interaction with enemy factions,
women could facilitate rapprochement later. Because women could be
seen as somewhat removed from a conflict and because they had lower
status, they were used as messengers or intermediaries in delicate so-
ciopolitical negotiations. Women often pressured for a cessation of con-
flict; avowed acquiescence to the demands of their womenfolk for peace
provided men with a graceful means of ending a struggle.
Men often were absent from the village, maintaining shops in other
villages, on itinerant trading trips, or engaged in agricultural pursuits.
Women were available in the village for the frequent, intense social in-
teraction required to demonstrate and maintain political alliance, to
which the "feminine" mode of interaction and "feminine" personality
lent themselves. Women's exchanges were less formal and less dignified,
covered a wider spectrum of topics—often including the personal revela-
tions that feelings of closeness encouraged—and were more free flow-
ing. A woman could drop in at a neighbor's without notice and chat at the
doorway or squat informally with the woman of the house wherever she
was without interrupting work and be on her way again in a matter of
minutes if necessary. A man's visit required a more formal reception,
complete with admittance to the sitting room, offering of more hospi-
tality, and a lengthier stay. Because women did not have as much status
and dignity to live up to, they were less reluctant to display their emo-
tions and true selves.
Women maintained close contact with their own families and relatives
as well as with those of their husbands. Perhaps the closest kinship tie
was between mother and daughter, who usually attempted to visit each
other as often as possible. The bilateral kinship system provided men
with a choice of political alliance and a means of changing sides when
advisable.
 Political Roles of Aliabad Women 223

In a world where politics was conducted largely through kinship, the

responsibility of women for the "work of kinship" put them at the center
of the political process.5 Where social relations and political alliances are
one and the same, women's social activities are also political activities,
whether overtly recognized as such or not and whether they take place in
the "domestic" sphere or in public.6
Women were available for the intensive, repetitive socializing with
family, kin, and neighbors necessary to maintain political connections
because they were prevented from having other social contacts. Women
were allowed to associate only with close kin and neighbors. Even when
traveling to Shiraz, women were shrouded in veils and surrounded by a
group of their regular female associates and did not make new acquain-
tances.
Sexual. Women's sexuality (and men's) was utilized in the political
process. Girls were married to men with whom their fathers or other male
taifeh members wished to make or solidify political-economic alliances.
Marriages were arranged with children of the landlord's representative in
a neighboring village, with trading partners, within the taifeh, between
taifeh in a confederation, with tribal allies, and with religious and trading
figures in Shiraz. To conserve sexuality for such purposes, the modesty
code was invoked to prevent girls from meeting young men on their own
and to prevent married women from coming into contact with men other
than their husbands. Girls could be promised at a very early age and
married by age nine, again to circumvent independent expression of
sexuality. Many factors colluded to reserve women's sexuality for appro-
priate political alliances, including the age difference between husband
and wife; the power of a mother-in-law and other female in-laws over a
bride; the seclusion of women in chadors and buildings; the restriction of
a bride to her house in the period before and after marriage; the failure to
consider female satisfaction in intercourse; early impregnation; a hover-
ing group of female associates; internalized socialization concerning
modesty and sexual loyalty to the husband; awareness of the dire results
of sexual impropriety; and lack of education, of opportunities for em-
ployment, and of independent economic means, resulting in economic
dependence.7
Reproductive. Kin were the best raw material for creating political allies.
Although even family and kin were not automatically political support-
ers—one had to associate with them on good, intimate terms—kin could
be trusted more than non-kin. The great majority of supporters of a taifeh
head were his kin. A woman's reproductive activities, then, were also
political.8 Taifeh heads often were men with a good number of sons, and
daughters likewise provided a means to solidify political alliances within
or outside the taifeh through marriage. Women's energies were available
224 Mary Elaine Hegland

for reproduction because early marriage and the lack of opportunity for
education and for work left them no alternatives. In addition, marriage
and then children—especially sons—were the route to obtaining what-
ever status and prestige were available to women.
Family relations. The love, concern, care, and affection expended by
women on their offspring were political investments, for the resulting
affective attachments and loyalty of sons and daughters to their mothers
united the taifeh and often brought sons-in-law and their relatives as
allies to the taifeh. The frequent visits between mother and married
daughter carried political implications, as did social relations between a
woman and other members of her natal and conjugal families. Again, as a
woman had no other means of achieving satisfaction, the role of mother
and the loyalty and affection of her children were among the few rewards
available to her.
"Domestic" labor. All domestic tasks could be political public work.9
Providing physical care and affection for children; processing, preparing,
and serving food; washing; cleaning; tending to the needs of the husband
and other older males; offering hospitality; dressing attractively, es-
pecially for weddings; receiving relatives and neighbors; maintaining a
harmonious household and good relations with kin and neighbors; ad-
ministering weddings, mourning gatherings, religious commemora-
tions, and ritual feasts; distributing charity; and caring for incapacitated
relatives served to demonstrate and to maintain or improve the political
standing of husband, family, and taifeh. A woman was not allowed to
work independently to earn money, thus making her labor available for
the political benefit of her family and her taifeh.10
Religious. Going on hajj; praying; following fasting requirements and
scheduling food preparation and meals to enable other family members
to do so; providing charity; achieving a reputation for piety, modesty, and
goodness; hosting rauzehs; attending mourning commemorations; mak-
ing vows and donating food; distributing the meat from the sacrifice of a
sheep required yearly for hajjis; hosting ritual feasts and religious actors
and reciters from Shiraz; attending meetings for religious education; vis-
iting shrines; and—in the pre-revolution and revolution periods—pro-
fessing revolutionary fervor and loyalty to Ayatollah Khomeini and join-
ing revolutionary demonstrations all brought prestige to one's husband,
family, and taifeh and allowed appropriate opportunities for socio-
political interaction. Women had to be content with these religious prac-
tices since they were excluded from the men's side of the mosque, from
serious study of the Quran in groups in Shiraz, and from the village male
ritual commemorations for the death of Imam Husain and his family.
Verbal and intellectual. Women were more verbally gifted and active
 Political Roles of Aliabad Women 225

than men. Spending more time than men in the company of family,
relatives, and neighbors with whom they felt comfortable and natural,
less compelled by dignity to restrict themselves to "important" topics of
conversation, less restrained from undignified probing and pressuring,
and known to be more curious and gossipy, many women developed
amazing communication and information collecting skills. Confined to
their homes, women often missed the most dramatic and newsworthy
events. Many women became adept at questioning and probing each
available informant—their own or other children, other women, and all
male visitors—to piece together what had gone on and why. Women
used their verbal and intellectual skills for gathering information, spying,
persuading, taunting, berating, threatening, shaming, discussing, in-
terpreting, encouraging, and building up close sociopolitical relations.
Barred from much education, from primary involvement in economic
pursuits, and from political policy making, women brought their verbal
and intellectual abilities to these political tasks.11
Emotional and moral. Women were thought to be more emotional than
men, and indeed they displayed more emotion. They were expected to
scream and wail, scratch their cheeks, beat their chests, and go without
food and drink when in grief. In cases of injury or death due to violence,
supportive women streamed to the courtyard of the afflicted person with
outpourings of emotion, showing sorrow and rage. The reaction of
women to what they considered wrongful deeds and their expressions of
emotion were often effective in persuading men to take action and in
swaying village opinion. Their attachment to fathers, brothers, and cous-
ins could mobilize women to rally men into support or to encourage them
to negotiate.
Leadership. Through their active, competent, and valuable participation
in both the world of women and the world of men many trading women
developed amazing presence, self-confidence, interpersonal skills, and
administrative abilities. They could be assertive and outgoing, even in-
timidating. Their leadership qualities, strength, persuasive abilities, per-
ceptiveness, and verbal, analytical, and managerial skills could be truly
outstanding. Yet such skills and abilities in the end were used to build the
position of the husband and other male relatives. Without connection to a
male a woman could never maintain such an elevated position.
Symbolic. The modesty and apparent seclusion and obedience of wife
and daughters brought respect to a man and to his family and taifeh.
Submission of dependents and allies—whether male or female—indi-
cated political and economic strength. Inferiors showed public deference
and subservience to a powerful person no matter what their private feel-
ings. Control over womenfolk and the ability to protect them and their
226 Mary Elaine Hegland

modesty were signs of power, as were control over and protection of male
subordinates.
Although women were to stay home, covered and modest, to bring
status to a man and his political grouping, they were occasionally ex-
pected to be on public display. The formidable sight of many black
chadors gliding together to a wedding, to a gathering for mourning, or to
the cemetery left no doubt in the eyes of beholders of the unity, size,
strength, and control of the represented taifeh. Every detail of wed-
dings—managed by women—was discussed for weeks following to
evaluate the quality, expense, and number of guests and how far they had
come to attend, as well as the current status of the involved families. The
bridewealth demanded of the groom and his family, the household goods
bought for the bride by her father, the gifts given the bride by the groom
and his family, the wedding gifts of money from guests, and the bride's
clothing and makeup, in addition to the food and service, were means of
creating or maintaining status.
Dancing was performed in alleyways rather than in courtyards, but
even if held in a large courtyard the uninvited—male and female—
watched from the rooftops. Women and girls did not wear veils during
the dancing. The number of women, their wedding apparel, and the
effort and enthusiasm with which they celebrated were important com-
ponents of the success of the wedding and the status brought to the
families. A large group of women lined up together dancing was a color-
ful visual indication of the size and strength of the taifeh. Especially when
going to the bride's father's home to bring the bride back to the groom's
home, women were expected to be noisy and enthusiastic in their ululat-
ing and singing of ditties and risque wedding songs. Even sayyid women
could become loud and raucous at such times in their determination to
put on a show of unity and strength. Barred from being individuals in
their own right, women were available to symbolize the status and politi-
cal power of their fathers, their husbands and brothers, their families,
and their taifehs.
Coping mechanisms. Given the pressures of socialization, the accep-
tance of the existing system as natural, their dependence and lack of
alternatives, the unlikelihood of successful resistance, and the necessity
of family and community approval, women in general maneuvered
within accepted limits to cope with their situations. Because a woman
was identified primarily with her family, to improve her own position she
had basically two choices: improving her own standing within the family
or improving the standing of her family.12 One important means of escap-
ing from the confinement of family was through developing women's
networks and groups, which were themselves effective social controls
over women and useful for male political maneuvering. Likewise, the
 Political Roles of Aliabad Women 227

satisfaction and political clout developed through motherhood and close

relationships with sons and daughters, and extended to fathers and
brothers, perpetuated the system rather than bringing about change. A
desire to improve her situation or to seek comfort could only lead a
woman to strengthen ties and work harder for her family, making her all
the more valuable a commodity in politics and providing all the more
reason to keep her and her work in confinement.

POLITICAL ROLES OF ALIABAD WOMEN HISTORICALLY

The roles and usefulness of women in politics varied depending on the

degree of control by the central government over the villages as well as on
the political use of women by each regime.
Under the Qavams. In the latter part of the last century under the Qajar
dynasty, the political process in Aliabad was probably somewhat similar
to that which followed under the Qavams, characterized by violence,
insecurity, and competition for political leadership among successful
traders and their taifehs. Women and their activities most likely were
crucial in the political process then, too. After the takeover by the Qavam
family, their policy of allowing the victors of political competition to be
their representatives and to provide political leadership encouraged fac-
tional struggle, in which the participation of women was highly signifi-
cant. Social interaction was central in maintaining political ties, and
women were largely responsible for social relations.
Women's political activities were at their height during the factional
competition encouraged by the Qavams before land reform in 1962.
Womenfolk of the political and trading elites managed large extended
households with many guests and gatherings, and they directed the
activities of servants and subordinates. Seven-day wedding celebrations,
a month or two of hosting religious mourning troupes and other guests,
and preparing sweet bread for the entire village at the new year chal-
lenged their administrative and social skills. Intrigue, changing alliances,
and conflict demanded their expertise in communication.
After land reform. The demise of local and regional centers of political
power after land reform in 1962 did away with meaningful local political
competition. Villagers could no longer turn against a local leader who
had become too corrupt and tyrannical or who failed to serve the interests
of most villagers. Local politicians acted as the arm of the central govern-
ment and were not susceptible to local opinion. Factional mobilization
was senseless; the village boss, Sayyid Ya'qub, would immediately call
on the gendarmerie to settle any "trouble."
Factional politics declined drastically. Not one case of taifeh violence
and entrenchment seems to have occurred between the mid-1960s and
228 Mary Elaine Hegland

the revolutionary period of 1978-79. Social and religious gatherings were

infrequent and less elaborate. Political relations with other regional lead-
ers declined. Now the guests most often entertained in Sayyid Ya'qub's
home were the captain and others from the nearby gendarme station.
Under these conditions, neither women nor men had much opportunity
for overt political activity, and women's activities declined in political
significance. Status and political standing within the village were of some
relevance and practical importance, and the sayyid women, especially
members of the taifeh of Sayyid Ya'qub, engaged in "status-producing"
and "status-maintaining" activities.13
Pre-revolution and revolution. With the decline during the revolutionary
period in the effectiveness of the Sayyid Ya'qub administration and its
backers, the gendarmerie, factional confrontation and competition were
again possible. Women joined in with their traditional activities, but they
also took it upon themselves to organize the first revolutionary protest in
the village and participated in demonstrations in Shiraz. Men approved
of such female activism; it was considered to be religious activity, which
traditionally was thought to be appropriate for women. The dramatically
innovative aspect of the participation of masses of Iranian women in
national politics was thereby obscured; thus it was difficult to rationalize
women's continued participation in public political life in Iran after the
revolution.
Post-revolution. Since I did not remain in Aliabad after December of
1979,1 was not able to see the effects on village life of the consolidation of
power under the Islamic Republic, beyond some indications of further
restrictions on the mobility of women. Centralization of power has most
likely again removed the possibility of meaningful local political process
and with it much of the political impact of women's activities. Such in-
fringements of public and political life on domestic life as those described
by Erika Friedl for a village some sixty miles away probably are also taking
place in Aliabad (see her chapter in this volume). Now villagers with
political aspirations no doubt put their efforts into currying favor with
representatives of the Islamic Republic. One way to do so would be to
severely enforce the segregation, invisibility, and modesty of wives
daughters, sisters, and mothers.

Throughout recent history in Aliabad, the public versus private myth

has obscured women's very real contribution to politics. By expanding
the walls of the private domestic arena, men have utilized women's ac-
tivities in a variety of political ways, such as public urban demonstrations
during the Iranian revolution. Once women's political work is no longer
needed, the walls can be allowed to contract again.
If one ignores the myth and looks instead at the reality of women's
 Political Roles of Aliabad Women 229

involvement, the centrality and political utility of women's roles become

apparent. It becomes clear that domestic is political, that private is public,
that all activities performed in the domestic, private realm are significant
for the public and political realm.14
At the same time that the myth of public versus private obscures
women's impact in the public political arena, the public-private dichot-
omy as ideology is used to restrict women and their activities. The con-
cern for modesty, with its division of life into two spheres, is politically
useful in two ways. First, hijab (covering) and segregation actually do
control sexuality—which can then be put to political use. Second, the
avowed concern about modesty is a reason to keep women and girls
confined and thus under control. The public-private dichotomy as myth
and as ideology is instrumental in structuring the walls of veils, build-
ings, social groups, and restrictions to dam up women and their activities
as a reservoir of human labor—which can then be used in the public
political realm.

Notes

1. See Rayna Rapp, "Review Essay: Anthropology," Signs 4 (1979): 508;

Michelle Rosaldo, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism
and Cross-Cultural Understanding," Signs 5 (1980): 402 n. 20; Jane Atkinson,
"Review Essay: Anthropology," Signs 8 (1982): 238; and Sylvia Yanagisako, "Fami-
ly and Household: The Analysis of Domestic Groups," Annual Review of An-
thropology 8 (1979): 191.
2. The traders, of course, were influenced by their contacts in the Shiraz ba-
zaar.
3. See also Suad Joseph, "Working-Class Women's Networks in a Sectarian
State: A Political Paradox," American Ethnologist 10, no. 1 (1986): 4.
4. For further information on rauzehs and women's religious practices, see
Anne Betteridge, "Ziarat: Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Shiraz" (Ph.D. diss., Uni-
versity of Chicago, 1985).
5. See Micaela di Leonardo, "The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Wom-
en, Families, and the Work of Kinship," Signs 12 (1987): 440-53.
6. See Barbara Aswad, "Women, Class, and Power," in Women in the Muslim
World, ed. Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1978), 473-81.
7. See Hanna Papanek, "Purdah: Separate Worlds and Symbolic Shelter," Com-
parative Studies in Society and History 15, no. 3 (1973): 319.
8. See Julie Peteet, "No Going Back: Women and the Palestinian Movement,"
MERIP Middle East Report 16, no. 1 (1986): 20-24,40. Honoring mothers for raising
their children to become martyrs and for sacrificing their children was an impor-
tant aspect of the ideology surrounding "martyrdom" during the Iranian revolu-
tion and then during the Iran-Iraq war. I remember watching television interviews
even some years after the Vietnam War in which mothers proclaimed how proud
230 Mary Elaine Hegland

they were that their sons had died for freedom and for America and how happy
they themselves were to have made such sacrifices for their country. This kind of
attitude is probably widely taught in Iran and elsewhere partly to encourage
mothers to give up their children.
9. See Peteet, "No Going Back."
10. Women who worked would bring great shame to the men in charge of their
care; the men would be thought unable to support them, which could not be
tolerated. With one exception (the opium smuggler) all the women in Aliabad
who worked for money had no alternative—they did not have a male provider.
Even in these cases, the sort of work available to them involved other women and
was low paying and unreliable—midwifing, keeping a shrine, helping with bread
baking. Few women had any real alternatives to economic dependence on a male.
It is noteworthy, however, that four young women from Aliabad (and perhaps
others) were teachers and thus did have a means of economic independence. See
Erika Friedl, "The Division of Labor in an Iranian Village," MER1P Reports, no. 95
(March-April 1981): 12-18, 31.
11. With their skill at ferreting out information from a variety of sources and
piecing it together to form a rich, detailed picture of events, including discussion
of the differing interpretations of the various participants, and their verbal ability
in conveying an almost visual account to others, women were usually better
informants than men.
12. See Andrea Rugh, Family in Contemporary Egypt (Syracuse: Syracuse Uni-
versity Press, 1984), 275-89.
13. See Hanna Papanek, "Family Status Production: The 'Work' and 'Non-
Work' of Women," Signs 4 (1979): 775-81.
14. For relevant discussion, seeAzarTabari, "The Women's Movement in Iran:
A Hopeful Prognosis," Feminist Studies 12 (1986): 343-60; Rayna Rapp, "Family
and Class in Contemporary America: Notes toward an Understanding of Ide-
ology," Science and Society 42, no. 3 (1978): 278-300; Carol Delaney, "Seeds of
Honor, Fields of Shame," in Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean, ed.
David G. Gilmore, American Anthropological Association Special Publication 22
(Washington, D.C.: AAA, 1987), 35-48; Suad Joseph, "Family as Security and
Bondage: A Political Strategy of the Lebanese Urban Working Class," in Toward a
Political Economy of Urbanization in Third World Countries, ed. Helen Safa (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1982), 151-71; Maxine Molyneux, "Mobilization without
Emancipation? Women's Interests, the State, and Revolution in Nicaragua," Femi-
nist Studies 11 (1985): 227-54; Judith Tucker, "Insurrectionary Women: Women and
the State in Nineteenth Century Egypt," MERIPMiddle East Report 16, no. 1 (1986):
9-13,34; and Sylvia Yanagisako, "Women-Centered Kin Networks in Urban Bilat-
eral Kinship," American Ethnologist 4, no. 2 (1977): 207-26.
IV
The

Modern

Arab

World
This page intentionally left blank
 Ties That Bound: Women and Family in
13
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Nablus

J U D I T H E. T U C K E R

To study Arab women and the family in historical context,

we must address three discrete problems. First, there is a
dearth of studies of the family in the region from a historical
perspective. With the exception of the recent work of Mar-
garet Meriweather and Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, who
have done valuable reconstructions of family patterns
among the elite of Ottoman Aleppo and Damascus, there has
been little significant work on family history and even less on
the specifically female experience of the family.1 Until re-
cently, historians of Arab women have had other agendas.
Women's relation to systems of production and exchange
has been studied: we now have considerable information on
women's active role in the endowing and managing of waqf
property and on women as independent economic actors in
trade and real estate.2 Some historians have focused on
women and politics, including women's behind-the-scenes
impact through harim intrigues and their more visible clout in
feminist movements.3 Most recently, historians and an-
thropologists have tried to capture the elusive woman's
voice through oral histories.4 These approaches share a de-
sire to redress the almost total neglect of women in writing
the history of the region and to demonstrate women's eco-
nomic, political, and cultural contributions.
The family, however, has received little systematic atten-
tion. This lacuna may reflect a view of the family as an un-
changing instrument of oppression, as a mediator of pa-
triarchal values, in brief, as the antithesis of women's
aspirations. Although the family is an important locus of
women's historical experience, study of the family was not at
the top of the agenda in the "compensatory" period of Arab
feminist scholarship. I think we are now entering a new pe-
riod, however, when women's contributions are no longer so
totally obscured, and we can turn our attention to the ques-
233
234 Judith E. Tucker

tions of what such a fundamental institution looked like, how it changed

over time, and what part it played in mediating gender roles and relations
in society.
Once we do recognize the importance of the family, how do we con-
struct our approach to its study? There is, of course, a well-established
school of family history pioneered in the European context. Largely dem-
ographic in approach, such family history asks certain basic questions of
primarily quantitative data, seeking to establish the size of the house-
hold, fertility rates, marriage patterns, and so forth.5 We certainly want to
have this basic demographic data, but as women's historians we also
want to ask other questions. What was the family from a woman's point
of view? How did the Arab family structure gender relations? How does
study of this basic social institution help us to understand changes in
gender definition and the relation between gender and power over time?
How, then, do we explore this family? We do not always have the kind
of source materials that have been employed in European history, and we
lack detailed census data until the rather recent past. We can, however,
draw on legal records, both the law as prescribed in theory and the actual
practice in the Islamic courts. The plethora of marriage contracts, divorce
agreements, child custody cases, and family support claims that we have
for most urban areas of the Arab world in the later Ottoman period
constitutes a record of how women lived their family lives. I use these in
the following discussion of the family in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, with the knowledge that the study of other kinds of sources,
including literature, popular discourse, and material culture, can add a
great deal in the future to our understanding of the family.
In an attempt to understand what the family appeared to be in Nablus,
we must explore a number of family relationships. What were family
relationships from the woman's point of view and how did they define,
control, and support her? Sociologists have seen the male patriarch as the
linchpin of the family. Halim Barakat characterizes the "traditional Arab
family" as "stratified on the basis of sex and age." The father of the family
exercised authority and expected compliance from his wife and children,
so that "according to the traditional norms, a woman commits a grave
mistake by challenging her husband's authority."6 We can examine the
reality of this patriarchal family through study of the three major catego-
ries of relationship that emerge from the Islamic court records: marital
relationships, parent-child relationships, and extended kin relation-
ships. First, was the husband the primary pillar of patriarchy? To what
extent did he control his wife's behavior and enforce obedience to himself
and to traditional norms? Second, how did a woman's relationship with
her parents and children define her reproductive roles? Did such rela-
tionships modify or circumscribe her husband's power? Third, did rela-
 Ties That Bound 235

tions with extended kin reinforce the control of women or did they also,
at times, diffuse and thus weaken this control?
Such relationships did not develop in a vacuum. The family was inti-
mately linked to the material base and to the relations of production in
Nablus society, a society based primarily on economic surplus from the
land collected from a free peasantry by a small number of powerful fami-
lies. The surplus was supplemented by income from long-distance trade
and craft production. The center of these activities, the town of Nablus, is
particularly well suited to a study of family, as family solidarity and
family-based alliance played critical roles in this economic system and the
political arrangements undergirding it between 1720 and 1856. As the
most important market and production center in the Palestinian high-
lands during much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Nablus
had a thriving economy and a population of 12,000 to 15,000 in 1800,
diverse enough to allow us to study the family in a varied environ-
ment.7
Although the Jabal Nablus region, for which the town of Nablus
served as both administrative and business center, remained putatively
under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman control had grown weak
and indirect by the eighteenth century. The Ottoman presence in the
Palestinian highlands region was limited, by and large, to an annual tax-
collecting tour made by the Ottoman wall (governor) of Damascus. Au-
thority on the ground had devolved into the hands of a small number of
important families, members of which monopolized official posts. From
their bases in the town of Nablus or in outlying village redoubts, the al-
Nimrs, Tuqans, 'Abd al-Hadis, Jarrars, Jayyusis, and others acquired
power at various times through their ability to employ family solidarity
and patronage for influence or armed struggle when necessary. Indeed,
the political narratives of the period read as Byzantine accounts of con-
flicts and alliances among family groups that competed to acquire, pre-
serve, and increase their power, whether it be economic, in the form of
landholdings, through control of timars (land grants) and iltizams (tax
farms) or administrative, in the form of major offices, including gover-
norships.8 After 1856 the Ottomans attempted, with varying rates of
success, to reassert more direct control in the region in keeping with the
goals of the tanzimat period of reform and centralization.
The majority of the Nablus population did not belong to the families of
wealth and power that ruled the region. In the Islamic court records from
the town of Nablus, three distinct social groups emerge. First, a few
ruling families, notably the al-Nimrs and Tuqans, who maintained their
primary residences in the town, brought their business to the Nablus
court; other ruling-group families with power bases in the countryside
apparently were less apt to use the Nablus court, and the records are
236 Judith E. Tucker

almost silent concerning their activities. Second, residing in the town

were a larger number of merchants and artisans, whose presence re-
flected the importance of Nablus as a market and production center for
the Palestinian highlands. In addition to trade in grain and handicrafts,
Nablus was famous for its soap, which was exported as far as Egypt,
Anatolia, and the Arabian Gulf. A group of merchant families that traded
primarily in soap and grains prospered in the town, and the ranks of this
middle social group were further swelled by tradesmen and artisans
whose markets were more regional. Third, a still larger number of rela-
tively poor families—the less affluent artisans, petty traders, service and
day workers—formed the bulk of the town's working population. Family
life was not necessarily constant across social groups, and we face the
potential problem of dealing with a variety of family forms, from that of
the ruling governor to that of the poor peddler. As we explore family
relations, we can expect to encounter differences among these social
groups, differences in the political and economic significance of the fam-
ily, and as a result differences in gender definitions.
The primary source material for the study of the family is found in the
records of the Islamic court (mahkama shar'iyya) in Nablus. The records are
not complete for the period under discussion: only two registers (sijills)
survive from the early eighteenth century, covering 1722 to 1729, but
there is a fairly complete set of records from 1798 onward. Much of the
material in the extant court records has a direct bearing on family life. The
most relevant and useful documents are marriage contracts, registrations
of divorce, support payments to family members (nafaqa), and records of
partition of estates. These documents do not appear as frequently as
property sales or waqf endowments: indeed, the nine sijills of the 1722 to
1729 and 1798 to 1856 period, each of which contains the minutes from
600 to 1,200 cases, recorded a total of only 107 marriage contracts, 95
registrations of divorce, and 23 cases of nafaqa. Several hundred estates
were also registered: of these, I selected a random sample of 100. The
modest number of documents dealing directly with family relations sug-
gests that many marriages, divorces, and support arrangements were not
registered in the court: these may well be cases that were considered
particularly important or problematic.
The court did not cater only to the wealthy, however. Although the
ruling group and the prosperous merchant class are overrepresented in
the records, many of the poorer residents of the town also availed them-
selves of court services: for example, about one-third of all marriage
contracts listed brides and grooms of lower-class background, and 37 of
the 100 estates sampled involved modest amounts of property. Thus
although court cases undoubtedly feature the more complicated or
intractable situations, they do cut across class lines and enable us to form
 Ties That Bound 237

an idea of family life, particularly at its critical and tense moments, among
all social groups. The case material also allows us to focus on rela-
tionships central to the family.

THE MARITAL RELATIONSHIP

The marital relationship was an important tie for women and men alike.
This acquired form of relatedness structured basic gender relations in the
family and largely determined the distribution of power at the center of
family life. What features shaped this experience for women? Age at
marriage, the form of marriage arrangements, the permanence or imper-
manence of the relationship, the number of marriages an individual
might make in a lifetime, the practice of polygyny, the life expectancies of
women and men, and the kinds of material ties binding the couple influ-
enced the expectations a bride and groom brought to a marriage and
described the contours of the relationship for both.
Marriage was very much a normal expectation. Indeed, out of a sam-
ple of thirty-five women who left estates to be divided by the court, only
one appears not to have been married, and she probably had barely
reached her majority. Saluh, who died in 1260/1854 with a modest estate
composed entirely of cash, left only her mother and four young sisters.9
Both the contents of her estate, notably the absence of the clothing and
kitchen equipment possessed by married women, and the youth of her
siblings (they had yet to attain puberty, the age of majority in Islamic law)
suggest that Saluh died very young, before her marriage could be ar-
ranged. All the other female estates belonged to women who left hus-
bands as heirs, or who clearly had been married and borne children at
some point. In the absence of celibate communities or any possibility for
independent existence, the marital state was invariably imposed on
women.
Male prospects did not differ radically, although certain male careers,
while not precluding marriage, at least rendered marriage less of a neces-
sity. Out of a sample of sixty-two male estates, six belonged to men who
apparently had never married. In two instances, occupations seem to
have played a role in their bachelorhood. One shaikh, or member of the
ulama, never married and left his modest estate, that of an 'alim without
important business or official connections, to his nephews.10 Another of
the bachelors was an Ottoman soldier, whose possessions, composed of
weapons, clothing, and cash, testified to a life of rootless mobility.11 In
the remaining cases, youth may have been a factor but the evidence is not
conclusive. In any event, men were almost as likely as women to marry at
least once: Nablus was definitely a marrying society.
Precise age at marriage is impossible to determine. Marriage contracts
238 Judith E. Tucker

do not specify the ages of the bride and groom, although the bride is
identified as either a minor (saghira) or a major (baligha), with puberty the
dividing line between legal minority and majority. Some girls were in-
deed married off in their minority: of 107 marriage contracts in the Nablus
records, 19 recorded the marriage of prepubescent girls. Such marriages
gave enormous power, at least in a legal sense, to the girl's family: the
father of a minor or another close male relative, acting as her marriage
guardian (wall), could marry her off to a "suitable" groom with a proper
mahr (bridewealth) without consulting her. The upper and more affluent
middle classes of the city were the most likely to arrange these early
marriages: all but 4 of the 19 minor brides came from prosperous families.
Although the child bride was clearly not the rule, a significant number of
families did favor such marriages and society as a whole apparently val-
ued young brides—the minor's mahr was invariably among the highest
in her social group—which suggests that women often were married
young, if not before, then shortly after, puberty.12 The dearth of unmar-
ried women's estates reinforces such a conclusion: a woman did not
advance far into her legal majority before a marriage was arranged for
her.
We have far less evidence for male age at marriage because marriage
contracts do not provide information on the legal status of the groom.
The minor bride, however, could be married to a man who was well
established in his profession and thus certainly her senior. In 1725, one
prepubescent girl, Badawiyya, was married to the court scribe, Muham-
mad Effendi, and the girl Amnah was married to the shaikh Sulaiman, an
acknowledged religious scholar, in 1726.13 Nablus society clearly counte-
nanced a certain discrepancy between the ages of the bride and the groom
but we cannot be sure whether such a discrepancy was the rule or was an
occasional, although accepted, practice.
That minor marriage occurred at all underscores the extent to which
marriage was viewed as an arrangement to be made by the families of the
bride and the groom. The overlapping practices of child marriage and
cousin marriage (17 out of 107 contracts) signaled the centrality of family
wishes to marriage arrangements: whereas child marriage allowed for
ultimate familial control, cousin marriage was arranged to preserve the
integrity of property or to strengthen the solidarity of the extended family
for political ends. As with child marriage, cousin marriage was more
prevalent among the middle and upper classes, which had more to pro-
tect in terms of property and influence. Many upper-class brides were
married off at a young age to cousins, or to men from other families with
which their own families sought alliance. The political history of Nablus
is paralleled by a history of strategic marriage arrangements. Of the six
 Ties That Bound 239

marriages recorded for the influential Tuqan family, members of which

held important official posts in the eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies, two were made within the family circle and three united Tuqans
with other families at the apex of the power structure.14 The fine hand of
family management is also evident in the utter absence of mesalliance:
marriage contracts were invariably drawn up between social equals.
Once in a marriage, could a woman expect to remain with her husband
permanently? Social background again played a large part. Of the 107
women whose marriage contracts were registered in the Nablus courts,
23 were clearly identified as having been married before. Among these
women, 15 were of lower-class origin, testifying to the relative imperma-
nence of marriage among the poorer sectors of the population; by con-
trast, only 2 upper-class brides were entering a second (or third, and so
on) marriage. Depending on their social origins, then, women entered
marriage with rather different expectations. The upper-class woman,
whose marriage was so closely tied to family needs and politics, barring
the premature death of her husband, usually could expect to spend her
life in one marital relationship. The lower-class woman, however, was
more apt to divorce and to embark on a second marriage.
The practice of polygyny further helps to explain this difference. Al-
though Islamic law allows a man to take up to four wives at a time,
concurrent multiple wives were not the rule: of the sixty-two men whose
estates listed all surviving heirs, only ten were survived by two wives and
only one by more than two. Of these polygynous men, only one or
possibly two left estates reflecting lower-class economic standing: poly-
gyny was usually reserved for the prosperous. An upper-class man in
search of sexual variety or more progeny could absorb the expense of
adding a wife to his household, but a poor man would be more likely to
divorce his current wife and marry anew. An upper-class woman, though
far more likely than her lower-class sister to remain in the same marital
household, might also have to tolerate the presence of an additional wife.
Whether widowed or divorced, neither women nor men remained
single for long. The inheritance records reveal striking evidence of the
drive to remarry, to establish a new marital relationship to replace one
that had been terminated. The vast majority of both women and men
died in the marital state: 72 percent of the women with estates and 76
percent of the men left spouses behind. Only frequent remarriage could
account for such figures because of relatively high rates of divorce and
premature death, particularly among women. The same registers that
recorded 107 marriages also recorded ninety-five divorces, which far un-
derstates the actual number. The male-initiated divorce (talacj), which
could be pronounced at the will of the husband without recourse to legal
240 Judith E. Tucker

grounds or judicial proceedings, was not ordinarily registered in the

court. Because of the ease of this type of divorce, we may assume that it
was the most commonly practiced form.
Four types of divorce were brought to court. A woman who wanted a
judicial decree of separation (faskh) was obliged to state her case before
the judge, either in person or using the offices of an agent, in the follow-
ing manner:
The hurma [woman] Amnah bint 'Ali bin Jabril al-Nabulsi, the
wife of Yusif al-Zubaidi, came to the court and claimed that the
aforementioned Yusif, her husband, had been absent for four years
prior to this day and had left her neither nafaqa nor kiswah [clothes],
nor a legal supporter, and there had been no news of him, she did
not know his whereabouts which caused her great hardship, and
she no longer had the patience to endure it. He had taken her
means of support with him. So she requested from our lord the
shari'a judge a faskh of the marriage so that she could marry
whomever she wants once the 'idda [waiting period] is over. He [the
judge] did not just take her word for it but asked her to prove her
claims with legal evidence. So she brought witnesses, the Hajj 'Ali
bin Husain al-Saraji, Sulaiman bin Isma'il al-;Alul, and Mansur al-
Qawwas, who testified that Yusif al-Zubaidi, the husband of the
above-mentioned Amnah, had been absent for four years and had
left his wife without nafaqa and a legal supporter, and there had
been no news of him and no one knows his whereabouts, and no
estate or money had been found which Amnah could use to sup-
port herself. Theirs was a valid, legal testimony in both form and
content. Our lord the shari'a judge then asked her to take an oath
by God, the mighty and merciful, that her husband did not leave
her nafaqa for the period and that she deserves nafaqa, and she did
so. So he then told her to be patient and wait for her husband, but
she refused and insisted on an annulment. He gave her a three day
period in which to reconsider, and then annulled his marriage to
her on the morning of the date below after asking God's forgiveness
for doing so. At that point, she requested from the judge a written
document of the annulment in accordance with the madhhab [legal
school], and he did so knowing the difference among the imams on
this matter, and implementing the Hanafi madhhab. 25 Jumada I,
1136.
Only eleven such divorces were registered in the court: in all the cases,
women obtained divorces on the grounds of desertion and their subse-
quent failure to receive material support from their husbands.
A woman also might promise to compensate her husband financially if
 Ties That Bound 241

he would grant her a divorce, known as khul'. Khul' divorce, although

female initiated, required the express consent of the husband, who had to
agree to the terms and actually pronounce the divorce. This type of di-
vorce was thus available only to women whose husbands were willing to
divorce them in return for some kind of compensation.15 More than half
of the divorces recorded in the court, forty-nine out of ninety-five, were of
the khul' variety, according to which a woman agreed to forgo what her
husband owed her: the remainder of her mahr, legally prescribed support
payments (nafaqat al-'idda) in the post-divorce period, or even debts. Sev-
eral women even made a further payment, a sort of ransom to their
husbands.
Divorces that took place before consummation of the marriage were
recorded in the court as well: ten such divorces, which required the
groom to pay half of the stated mahr if the divorce were his desire, and
none of it if he pronounced the divorce at the request of the bride, were
registered in the courts.
The remaining twenty-five divorce cases were instances of male-
initiated talaq, the unilateral repudiation of the wife by her husband.
Such a divorce could be pronounced at any time and place by the hus-
band, who did not need to bring it to court. Indeed, almost all the cases of
talaq recorded in the court are a special variety: these conditional divorces
came about after the husband had sworn that his wife would be divorced
if she disobeyed his express orders; the court recorded the disobedience
and the subsequent automatic divorce. Cases of talaq in which the hus-
band simply divorced his wife without the complications of special settle-
ments or swearing of oaths were rarely recorded. We may assume, how-
ever, that the simple form of talaq was the most common, being the
easiest and most free of legal complications. The inclusion of such di-
vorces in the records would have raised the overall number of divorces
significantly. Whatever the type of divorce, the overwhelming majority
of registered cases involved, not surprisingly, people of lower-class back-
ground, for whom marriage did not carry the same economic and political
weight.
If divorce often terminated the marital relationship, especially in
poorer circles, so did the premature death of a young wife. Early marriage
and the risks of childbearing took their toll on women: the resulting
difference between female and male life expectancies is striking. Al-
though the inheritance records never give age at death, we do have evi-
dence provided by surviving relatives. More than half (53 percent) of the
women who left estates were survived by at least one parent, a derailing
of the normal life cycle that suggests high mortality in the childbearing
years. By comparison, only 18 percent of male estate holders were sur-
vived by one or both parents. Similarly, more than half of all deceased
242 Judith E. Tucker

mothers left children who were all minors. The estate of Safiyya,
daughter of al-Sayyid Khadr, was typical.16 She left her meager posses-
sions, some jewelry, clothes and household goods worth 249 ghurush,
and the remainder of her mahr and other debts owed by her husband
totaling 452 ghurush, to be divided according to Islamic law among her
husband, her mother and father, and her minor son. Nor did status
provide a bulwark against early death. Salha, daughter of the Hajj Mus-
tafa al-Sadr, left her property—the jewelry, clothes, and household
goods of an affluent middle-class woman—to her husband, al-Sayyid
Ahmad, her minor daughter, and her father, the Hajj Mustafa.17 Men did
not necessarily live to a ripe old age, but they were far more likely than
women were to outlive their parents.
The marital relationship, vulnerable as it was to premature death and
frequent divorce, was bolstered in some cases by the development of
material ties in the guise of formal loans. Of the sample one hundred
estates of men and women, fifteen recorded outstanding loans of money,
in all cases owed by the husband to his wife.18 Such debts could be
substantial: one poor man died owing his wife 500 ghurush, impossible to
repay from his paltry estate of 364 ghurush.19 Among the prosperous
middle class as well, wives might lend substantial sums to their hus-
bands, perhaps for business ventures: one merchant owed his wife more
than 11,000 ghurush at the time of his death.20 Such indebtedness rein-
forced marital ties by binding the husband to his wife in an immediate
material sense. Debts could also inhibit divorce: all such obligations,
formal loans as well as the balance of the mahr, could be called in if the
husband initiated a divorce.
The complexity of the marital relationship derived, therefore, from a
number of factors. Tight family control over marriage arrangements,
often manifested in early age at marriage and marriage to relatives, re-
moved all choice of partner from the bride and groom and tended to
encourage the marriages of young and inexperienced girls in particular.
Such control was especially important to families of standing and means,
who strove to preserve their position and property through strategic
marriage. In these circles the marital relationship, although possibly
polygynous, was viewed as fairly permanent: some guarantee of the
stability of the relationship was essential to its value as a way of forging
alliances. Among the lower classes the marital relationship was more
temporary: many marriages ended in divorce. Death, and in particular
the premature death of a young woman of childbearing years, crossed
class lines to terminate marriages among all social groups. Married young
without any claim to her husband's affections, a woman might depend on
her family's, and her groom's, interest in the marriage to bolster her
position. In addition, loaning money to her husband could provide her
 Ties That Bound 243

with a certain material leverage. Other relationships were crucial, how-

ever, in the overall definition of a woman's place in the family.

PARENTS AND CHILDREN

The relationship between parents and children was defined by legal rules
and social customs as a permanent and central one, composed of material
and emotional obligations and attachments. Socially constructed defini-
tions of the relationship were refined, of course, by the physical realities
of the time. Maternal and infant mortality in particular set harsh limits on
the ability of parents and children to fulfill mutual obligations, and in
some cases even jeopardized the possibility of having such a relationship
at all.
How many children survived the perilous first years of life? Men mar-
ried later, sometimes practiced polygyny, and lived longer than women,
and thus tended to leave larger numbers of children behind: the fifty-six
men who married left a total of 187 children, or an average of 3.3 children
apiece. Many women, thrust early into marriage and childbearing, un-
doubtedly died in childbirth or of its complications: indeed, the thirty-
seven married women studied here left 68 children, only 1.5 apiece. Most
men fathered four or fewer surviving children (see table 13.1), Larger
families were rare: four of the fifty-six men left seven or more children,
and only one man produced ten survivors. Women left far smaller fami-
lies behind: nineteen, more than half of the thirty-seven married women,
died leaving only one or no living children, and no woman's estate
named more than five children. We have every reason to suspect that
these families would be even smaller if we could count the children who
survived to adulthood. For men and women alike, more than half of their
surviving children were legal minors, still in the hazardous zone of child-
hood with its special vulnerability to death from disease.
The relatively small number of surviving children inevitably modified
the prescribed legal and social obligations of the relationship. Parents and
children were bound, under law, by a set of mutual material respon-
sibilities. Islamic law insists on the partition of an estate among specified
legal heirs in precise proportions; the ability to make bequests is very
limited. Children were the most important of the parents' legal heirs:
depending on the number and relationship of other surviving heirs, chil-
dren would typically receive anywhere from half to the entire estate of
their parents. When a child predeceased his or her parents, the parents'
share of the child's estate was less but still substantial, usually anywhere
from one-sixth to one-half, again depending on other eligible heirs. The
hurma Hajjiyya, for example, left an estate of 1,196 ghurush. Once fu-
neral expenses and court costs of 207 ghurush were deducted, the re-
244 Judith E. Tucker

Table 13.1: Number of Living Children at Time of Parent's Death

(data from estates of single men and women excluded)

Male Estates Female Estates

Number of Children (N = 56) (N = 37)

0 4 4
1 9 15
2 7 9
3 11 3
4 11 4
5 5 2
6 5 0
7 2 0
8 1 0
9 0 0
10 1 0
Total number of children from male estates: 187
Total number of children from female estates: 68

maming 989 ghurush was to be divided among her husband (one-fourth),

her mother (one-sixth), and her minor son (the remainder, or seven-
twelfths).21 If neither of the deceased's parents was living, the children of
the deceased inherited a larger portion. Amun left an estate of 4,530
ghurush, which included her inheritance from her father, a sum of 1,206
ghurush. Once funeral and court costs of 805 ghurush were paid, a
quarter of the remaining 3,725 ghurush went to her husband and the rest
was divided equally among her four children.22 Whereas mothers and
fathers were entitled to equal shares in their children's estates, sons in-
herited twice as much as daughters: Sara's net estate of 1,335 ghurush
was divided in the following manner: 334 to her husband, 250 each to her
daughters Safiyya and Saluh, and 501 to her son, Musa.23 Inheritance law
thus spun a web of material ties between parents and children, giving
each a substantial claim to the other's property. Although we cannot be
sure that the letter of the law was always observed, especially in the case
of female heirs, the Nablus records are free of any female protests about
disinheritance.
Not only were parents and children reciprocal heirs, but they also,
according to the law, owed each other material support when necessary
during their lifetimes. Islamic law imposes the duty of providing support
(nafaqa) for the poor on certain of their relatives: parents and children,
when they attain their majority, are legally bound to support each other
should the need arise. Although much of this support undoubtedly was
 Ties That Bound 245

delivered without any recourse to the courts, certain problematic cases

were brought to the qadi for discussion and registration. A husband and
father had to support his children: should he fail to do so, his wife could
come to court to request the judge's intercession. One Muhammad told
the judge he would pay his wife and children the money for a proper level
of daily support and buy his children clothing when necessary.24 As the
case gives no context for the unusual extraction of this commitment, we
can only assume that Muhammad's wife failed to persuade her husband
to fulfill standard familial duties and had finally resorted to the court to
secure an unequivocal statement of his obligations. A woman might also
go to the court on her behalf and that of her children when a husband's
long absence left them without support. In these instances, the intent
was to record her husband's ultimate responsibility for a set amount of
support. The court might then authorize the wife to borrow the necessary
money, on the understanding that her husband would be responsible for
its repayment, as in the following case:
The shari'a judge imposed nafaqa, clothing, house rent, toilet-
ries, soap, bread, oil, and other things, and the rest of her legally
prescribed needs, for the hurma Amnah bint Darwish al-Ghazawi
on the date below, and two qita' misriyya. He permitted her father
Darwish to borrow the money, and the debt incurred will be owed
by her husband, Ahmad bin Subah, who was away from the city
and had left her with neither nafaqa nor anything else, nor had he
delegated a legal provider for her in the prescribed legal fashion.
Recorded at the beginning of Rabi' I, 1138.
A woman named Khadija and her daughter also were left without any
support from a missing husband, so Khadija asked the judge for a nafaqa
award that would cover the costs of their rent, clothing, food, drink,
soap, and toiletries.25 Khadija was responsible for borrowing the
awarded amount, but her husband could be charged for it when, and if,
he returned.
Mothers were not liable for nafaqa payments. Although a woman
might keep children, particularly young children, in her care (hidana)
during the absence or after the death of her husband, she was not respon-
sible for material support. Indeed, her role consisted of overseeing the
expenditure of nafaqa payments to the children made by others. She
might pay the costs of support herself with the expectation of being
reimbursed by her children when they reached their majority, or she
might collect the money from relatives of her husband.26 Such a burden
could, however, prove formidable. Lutfiyya, a poor woman, cared for
two young sons, Bakr and ' Asad, after their father died. On the basis of
the court-awarded nafaqa of 30fidda misriyya daily, during the course of
246 Judith E. Tucker

about two and a half years she spent 675 ghurush for their upkeep.
Whereas she was able to collect 275 ghurush from her late husband's
estate for nafaqa, the remaining 400 ghurush had come out of her own
pocket. With no responsible relatives in a position to help, she finally had
to surrender the children to her late husband's sister, who agreed to take
them without nafaqa.27 According to the law, such was the solution: if the
deceased father's family was too poor to make nafaqa payments, it had
the option of taking custody of his children instead.
Once children reached majority, they in turn assumed legal responsi-
bility for the support of destitute parents. The fairly short life expectancy
and the no doubt strong social pressures to assist parents help explain the
near absence of litigation concerning this issue: the Nablus records of
1720 to 1858 reveal only one instance where parents resorted to the court
to force their grown children to support them. The Hajj' Abd al-Ghani [?]
al-Fatayir and his wife Mas'uda asked the judge to impose nafaqa pay-
ments on their two grown sons of 5 ghurush daily, or 150 ghurush a
month. In agreeing to their request, the judge noted that children were
obliged to support poor parents, even those capable of working, and that
any child who could afford to pay the alms tax (zakat) should pay the
awarded nafaqa.28 For both parents and children, gender played a large
role in defining responsibilities. Material support was legally required
and expected only from men: neither mothers nor daughters bore finan-
cial responsibility for their children or parents. Such a definition of mate-
rial responsibilities buttressed a patriarchal system in which continuation
of the family name, loyalties, and property devolved largely on male
descendants.
What effect might this critical difference have had on the valuation of
male and female children? We have only indirect evidence here, but men
who wanted a son or sons seem to have been more predisposed to take a
second wife. Of the ten deceased men with two wives, four had
daughters only, one had seven daughters and one son, and one had two
daughters by his first wife and a daughter and three sons by his second.
These six polygynous men may have been concerned, first and foremost,
with the number of surviving male children. Any preference for male
children was not translated into obvious differential treatment of infants,
however. If girl children were less welcome and useful than boys, they
did not receive less food or less care, judging from mortality rates. The
100 combined male and female estates record 255 surviving children, of
whom at least 136 were girls. In spite of the greater strength and du-
rability of the legal relationship between parents and male children, boys
were not favored to such a degree that they survived infancy in greater
numbers than girls did.
In general, class differences seem to have had little impact on most
 Ties That Bound 247

Table 13.2: Number of Living Children by Size of Estate (in ghurush)

(male and female estates combined)

Size of Estates
Number of Children 1-1,000 1,000-10,000 10,000+

0 3 5 0
1 13 10 0
2 5 10 1
3 5 6 2
4 6 7 1
5 3 2 1
6 2 3 0
7 0 2 0
8 0 2 0
9 0 0 0
10 0 1 0

features of the parent-child relationship. Men and women of different

classes had roughly similar numbers of children, although wealthier fam-
ilies did tend to be a bit larger (see table 13.2). Affluence proved no barrier
to maternal mortality: the women of the prosperous middle class were
just as likely to die in their childbearing years as were lower-class women;
the estates of those who died leaving children in their minority ranged in
size. The one striking class difference appears in the cases of nafaqa
awarded to children or parents. Of nine such cases, eight named poor
and untitled people; only one case, that of a woman awarded nafaqa for
the care of four minor children by her deceased husband, involved a
middle-class ulama family. The entire problem of nafaqa did not, in gen-
eral, touch the more prosperous, whose resources allowed for the care of
all family members without resort to litigation.

OTHER RELATIONS OF KIN

Although most inheritance and nafaqa arrangements gave the marital or

the parent-child relationship the greatest weight, other forms of related-
ness also entailed real rights and responsibilities. A woman's relationship
with her brother, for example, could be very close and dependent, es-
pecially if their father was dead. Brothers, in the absence of a father, acted
as guardians or as agents for their sisters' marriages: in the 107 marriage
contracts, brothers acted as guardians of minors four times and as agents
for women in their majority seven times. Since many of these women
were marrying for a second or third time, their relationship with their
248 Judith E. Tucker

brother was an enduring one that they could return to between mar-
riages. A brother might also be assigned responsibility for the care of his
orphaned minor siblings. He was not expected, however, to spend his
own money for their care: whatever he had to disburse was to be repaid to
him by his siblings when they came of age.29 Infrequently, if a man died
without surviving children, his siblings, including sisters, might inherit
part of his estate. Such was the case when a man died leaving a wife,
mother, sister, and two brothers, all of whom were legitimate heirs.30
These lifelong bonds of protection, support, and material claims lay at
the heart of the social value attached to the brother. Mary Eliza Rogers
relates a story she heard of a woman who sought out Ibrahim Pasha,
governor of the region during the Egyptian occupation of Palestine. Hav-
ing told Ibrahim that three men of her family—her husband, her brother,
and her eldest son—had been taken for the army, the woman pleaded for
the release of one. Which do you want? asked Ibrahim. My brother, she
said, for I might find another husband, I have younger sons, but if my
brother dies he cannot be replaced.31 If a brother provided protection, the
policing of sexual behavior was also his responsibility. Although the
Nablus sources remain silent on a brother's role in enforcing women's
obedience to norms and in punishing transgressions, later work on Pales-
tinian society stresses the extent to which fathers and brothers were
expected to intervene should a woman commit any offense. Sexual trans-
gressions, including the crime of elopement, were punishable by death at
the hands of the brother.32 Such an execution was not ordinarily re-
corded, either as crime or punishment, presumably because of its extra-
legal but nonetheless widely accepted status.
Another legally recognized, although somewhat less important, rela-
tionship was that between grandparents and grandchildren. Limited life
expectancy meant that not many grandparents survived to take on re-
sponsibility for their grandchildren. Nonetheless, there are a few cases of
grandparents involved in nafaqa arrangements. Salaha, for example,
raised her son Rajab's daughter. Even though the court had awarded her
two qita' misriyya daily from Rajab, she agreed to waive payments and
raise her granddaughter at her own expense.33 In another instance, a
man took responsibility for his minor granddaughter; in his case, his
expenses would be met from the money she had inherited.34 Equally rare
was the reverse situation, in which a man assumed responsibility for a
grandparent. In one lone case, an elderly destitute woman was awarded
nafaqa payments from her grandson.35 Although law and society thus
recognized special ties of mutual responsibility between grandparents
and grandchildren, these were rarely activated.
A stronger relationship that was more frequently activated was that
between children and their aunts and uncles, particularly on the father's
 Ties That Bound 249

side. As in most patrilineal societies, children belonged to their father and

his family, the members of which bore material responsibility for them.
Although, as we have seen, young children might remain temporarily in
their mother's care after the death of their father, the father's family was
responsible for providing material support and paternal uncles acted as
the child's legal guardians. If the father's family could not afford the
nafaqa payments, they could, instead, take custody of the children them-
selves. Salha's seven children were taken from her care and placed in the
keeping of their father's sisters, whose brother was poor and could not
afford to pay Salha the awarded nafaqa.36 Even if the nafaqa could be
paid, the mother might lose custody to the father's family for a number of
reasons. First, under the Hanafi law applied in Palestine, boys at age
seven and girls at age nine could be removed from their mother's custody
and given to the father's family. Second, a mother's remarriage to any
"stranger" who was not a close relative of the children meant that the
children must leave her house. Finally, a woman could be declared an
unfit mother if she did not give the children proper care. It is not surpris-
ing, therefore, to find minor children in the care of their paternal aunts
and uncles.37 In these cases, nafaqa was awarded for a different reason:
money spent on their care by paternal relatives was a debt incurred by the
children, which they were obligated to repay when they reached
adulthood. Although legal guardianship and eventual custody of chil-
dren devolved on paternal relatives, in their absence a maternal uncle
might become the guardian and supporter of his sister's child.38
Thus whereas many prevailing social and economic arrangements
stressed the marital tie and the bonds between parents and children, a
number of legal and social obligations widened the family circle to in-
clude other kin—siblings, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Although
these types of relations appeared to be of lesser intensity than those
women formed with husbands and children, they constituted an impor-
tant second tier of affective family ties to which women could turn, es-
pecially in times of trouble. That the court was sometimes used, particu-
larly by the poor, to activate these relationships, however, points more to
their weakness than to their strength: legal obligations had to be activated
when social custom and pressure proved insufficient, as apparently they
sometimes did among the poor. The wealthier and more powerful mem-
bers of Nablus society, however, enjoyed resources that rendered re-
course to the court unnecessary, either because individuals did not re-
quire material support or because, when needed, it was automatically
provided by kin.

In our exploration of the kinds of social relations within the family that
defined and elaborated gender, the production of female gender proved
250 Judith E. Tucker

to be a complex and variegated process. The court material does not

suggest a crude patriarchy in which an all-powerful male head of family
imposed absolute submission on women, be they wives or daughters;
rather it suggests that women's lives encompassed a number of affective
family relationships. Certainly the marital relationship appears to have
been the most significant: most women were married young and were
bound to their husbands by a number of economic and social ties. The
husband did enjoy the right to demand obedience and submission from
his wife as part of the legal definition of marriage rights and obligations.39
Such legal enshrinement of a husband's patriarchal control was modified
in practice, however, by the kinds of leverage a woman might exercise
through control of her mahr and other capital, and more important for
our purposes, through the relationships she maintained with other fam-
ily members. Other affective relations—with her parents and children,
her brothers and sisters, her grandparents, her aunts and uncles—pro-
vided her with both material and moral support from a wider family
circle. The ongoing involvement and interest of a number of family mem-
bers diffused her husband's control and protected her against an overly
imperious, neglectful, or abusive husband.
Still, the family setting did emphasize, at least initially, the role of a
female in biological reproduction: married young, women often perished
in their early childbearing years as a result of the perils of frequent preg-
nancies at a young age. To the extent that many women did not survive
the years of early matrimony, their lives were almost completely colored
by the view of female gender as tied to motherhood and service to a
husband. For the woman who escaped maternal mortality, however, the
possibility of divorce and second marriages, the ability to amass some
capital through mahr payments and inheritance, and the activation of a
support network of parents, children, brothers, and aunts and uncles all
lessened her subjugation to her husband. The normative female was
certainly an obedient wife and a mother first and foremost, but she was
also a member of a larger family with very real claims to support and
protection from its members, claims that could grow in importance and
complexity if she survived her childbearing years.
Subtle differences in definitions of female gender can also be detected
between different classes in Nablus society. In upper-class circles, where
marriage tended to be viewed as a more permanent arrangement, a wom-
an's relationship with her husband loomed large as a lifetime affair, thus
highlighting her role as a wife. Indeed, the absence of any evidence in the
courts that upper-class women turned to other family members in times
of need suggests either that they were more enclosed in the world of their
marriage and less likely to activate other relationships, or that upper-class
families provided support as a matter of course without recourse to litiga-
 Ties That Bound 251

tion. Because of the importance of marriage alliances to the social and

political life of the times, we suspect that parents, brothers, sisters, un-
cles, and aunts did indeed maintain an active interest in a woman's mar-
ital situation. In lower-class circles, however, the issue is clearer: women
used the courts to activate networks of kin support, particularly critical in
a milieu where marriage was viewed as less permanent and many wom-
en's ties to their husbands were loosened by the probability of serial
marriage. In both cases, the image of husband as unbridled patriarch
exercising absolute power over his wife does not jibe with the evidence
for complexity of family relations. Various studies tell of the normal pro-
gression of wives from young brides dominated by mothers-in-law to
increasingly respected mothers of growing sons.
Clearly we need to explore the contours of the family further as it
developed in the Middle East, taking into account the ways in which the
institution evolved in articulation with the level and organization of pro-
duction in the society. The substantial issues of such context and change
in the development of the family lie outside the scope of this chapter, but
our understanding of the position and power of women in Middle East-
ern societies needs a systematic exploration of how changes in family
arrangements structured gender relations in society as a whole.

Notes

1. See Margaret Meriweather's forthcoming book on family and society in

Ottoman Aleppo, and Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, "The Lore and Reality of
Middle Eastern Patriarchy," Die Welt des Mams 28 (1988): 496-512.
2. See Gabriel Baer, "Women and Waqf: An Analysis of the Istanbul Tahrir of
1546," Asian and African Studies (Jerusalem) 17, nos. 1-3 (1983): 9-28; Ronald C.
Jennings, "Women in the Early Seventeenth Century Ottoman Judicial Records:
The Sharia Court of Anatolian Kayseri," Journal of the Economic and Social History of
the Orient 28 (1975): 53-114; Abraham Marcus, "Men, Women and Property: Deal-
ers in Real Estate in Eighteenth-Century Aleppo," Journal of the Economic and Social
History of the Orient 26 (1983): 137-63; and Judith E. Tucker, Women in
Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
3. Margot Badran, "Dual Liberation: Feminism and Nationalism in Egypt,
1870s-1925," Feminist Issues 8 (1988): 15-34; Fanny Davis, The Ottoman Lady: A
Social History from 1718 to 1918 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1986).
4. See, for example, Nayra Atiya, Khul-Khaal: Five Egyptian Women Tell Their
Stories (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982); Elizabeth W. Femea, ed., Wom-
en and the Family in the Middle East (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); Fatima
Mernissi, Doing Daily Battle: Interviews with Moroccan Women (London: Women's
Press, 1988); and Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries
(London: Zed, 1979).
5. See, for example, Richard Wall, Jean Robin, and Peter Laslett, eds., Family
Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). For a
252 Judith E. Tucker

discussion of feminist concerns in Western family history, see Joan Kelly, "Family
and Society/' in her Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), 110-53.
6. Halim Barakat, "The Arab Family and the Challenge of Social Transforma-
tion," in Women and the Family in the Middle East, ed. Fernea, 31-32.
7. For a discussion of the demographics of Nablus in this period, see Beshara
Doumani, "Merchant Life in Ottoman Palestine: Jabal Nablus and Its Hinterland,
1800-1860" (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1990).
8. For accounts of the political history and administration of Jabal Nablus, see
Ihsan Nimr, Ta'rikh Jabal Nablus wa'l-Balqa' (Nablus: al-Matba'a al-Ta'awuniyya,
1975), vol. 1; Amnon Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century: Patterns of Govern-
ment and Administration (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1973), 164-69, 301-6; Miriam Hoex-
ter, "The Role of the Qays and Yemen Factions in Local Political Divisions," Asian
and African Studies (Jerusalem) 9 (1973): 249-311; Mordechai Abir, "Local Lead-
ership and Early Reforms in Palestine, 1800-1834," in Studies on Palestine during the
Ottoman Period, ed. Moshe Ma'oz (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975), 284-310; and Alex-
ander Scholch, "The Decline of Local Power in Palestine after 1856: The Case of
'Aqil Aga," Die Welt des Islams 23-24 (1984): 458-75.
9. Mahkama Nablus (M.N.), sijill (s.) 12, p. 113. Estates with minor heirs had to
be registered in the court. The estates of women without minor children, there-
fore, may well be underrepresented in the records. Since the legal heirs of unmar-
ried women could include minor siblings, nephews, or nieces, these estates also
would be registered on a mandatory basis.
10. M.N., s. 9, p. 250.
11. M.N., s. 12, p. 29.
12. For an expanded discussion of age at marriage, see Judith Tucker, "Mar-
riage and Family in Nablus, 1720-1856: Towards a History of Arab Muslim Mar-
riage," Journal of Family History 13 (1988): 165-79.
13. M.N., s. 4, pp. 201, 331.
14. M.N., s. 4, p. 11; s. 4, p. 11 (second case), s. 4, pp. 127, 254, s. 7, p. 349.
15. We have little information on the frequency of khul' divorce, which did
give women some control within a marriage. We suspect, however, that khul'
divorce was not uncommon: in nineteenth-century Egyptian court records, khul'
divorces occur with some frequency. See Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century
Egypt, 54.
16. M.N., s. 9, p. 4
17. M.N., s. 9, p. 3.
18. M.N., s. 9, pp. 4,16, 26, 41, 70, 73, 78, 82,125,149,169, 324, s. 12, pp. 75,
53, 97.
19. M.N., s. 9, p. 149.
20. M.N., s. 9, p. 41.
21. M.N., s. 9, p. 50.
22. M.N., s. 9, p. 154.
23. M.N., s. 9, p. 3.
24. M.N., s. 11, p. 112.
25. M.N., s. 4, p. 254. Other similar cases include M.N., s. 4, p. 237, and s. 10,
p. 173.
 Ties That Bound 253

26. M.N., s. 5, pp. 29, 93.

27. M.N., s. 11, p. 156.
28. M.N., s. 12, p. 354.
29. M.N., s. 9, p. 69.
30. M.N., s. 9, p. 118.
31. Mary Eliza Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862),
272-73. The same story, in the context of a different war and a different army, was
still popular in the late 1920s, as recorded in Hilda Granqvist, Marriage Conditions
in a Palestinian Village (New York: AMS Press, 1975), 2:253.
32. See Granqvist, Marriage Conditions 2:219, 255.
33. M.N., s. 4, p. 82.
34. M.N., s. 5, p. 171.
35. M.N., s. 5, p. 150.
36. M.N., s. 5, pp. 62-63. A similar case, in which the children were awarded
to their father's sister, was recorded in s. 11, p. 156.
37. M.N., s. 4, p. 99, s. 11, p. 119, s. 12, p. 7.
38. M.N., s. 4, p. 291.
39. See John Esposito, Women in Muslim Family Law (Syracuse: Syracuse Univer-
sity Press, 1982), 23.
 The House of Zainab: Female Authority
14
and Saintly Succession in Colonial Algeria

JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

Nineteenth-century visitors to the Rahmaniyya zawiya (sufi

lodge) in al-Hamil, Algeria, were inevitably surprised by its
appearance. Located in the arid reddish foothills of the Sa-
haran Atlas, the town clings to the side of a mountain, its
highest point formed by the square white minaret of the
mosque adjoining the Rahmaniyya establishment. The sufi
center was of relatively recent construction, having been
founded only in 1863. By the last decade of the nineteenth
century, it claimed thousands of followers in Algeria and the
Maghreb who were spiritual clients of al-Hamil's head
shaikh, Sidi Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim, and later of his
daughter, Lalla Zainab.1
The town's prominence as a pilgrimage site and educa-
tional center was the work of Sidi Muhammad (1823-97), a
powerful saint, mystic, and scholar.2 By the eve of the
shaikh's death, a group of buildings surrounded his family
residence and the mosque: a library boasting an unusually
rich collection of manuscripts, guest houses for pilgrims and
travelers, a children's school (kuttab), a meeting room for sufi
devotions, and lodgings for older students attending the
madrasa (theological seminary).3 At any given moment, sev-
eral hundred students, instructed by full-time professors,
studied at the Rahmaniyya establishment. This contrasts
with the situation in other parts of Algeria under the Third
Republic, which neglected or limited Muslim education for
political as well as economic reasons.4
The zawiya's activities were not restricted to education,
however. Those in need, the poor, the disinherited, and
even fugitives from French justice found shelter in al-Hamil,
which was able to provide a multitude of social services be-
cause of its remarkable prosperity. The monetary worth of
the center's holdings in 1897—gardens, land, flocks, mills,
cash, and so on—has been evaluated at 2.5 million francs, a
254
 The House of Zainab 255

huge sum for the period in view of the general impoverishment of the
Muslim Algerians.5 In addition, the sufi center employed a small army of
people to carry out its charitable works and to supervise its numerous
hubus (waqf, or pious endowments) properties, mainly devoted to agri-
culture or pastoral production. The day-to-day administration of the
zawiya thus required substantial managerial skills as well as bookkeeping
to monitor incoming revenues, mainly in the form of pious offerings by
the shaikh's religious clients.
On 2 June 1897, Sidi Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim died, to the eventual
consternation of local French authorities in the nearby Bureau Arabe in
Bou Saada, some twelve kilometers to the north of al-Hamil. Throughout
his tenure as head shaikh, Sidi Muhammad had carefully eschewed polit-
ical activities, refusing to be drawn into anticolonial rebellions led by
Rahmaniyya notables in other areas of Algeria.6 Because of this, the al-
Hamil center was regarded favorably by the colonial regime, which ex-
plains the zawiya's affluence and its ability to flourish in an era when
many other sufi establishments and their elites were under attack.7 Local
military officials had assumed that the headship of al-Hamil would pass
uncontested to the deceased shaikh's nephew, Muhammad b. al-Hajj
Muhammad, who was Sidi Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim's closest male
associate and, more important, well disposed toward France. Calm as-
surance soon gave way to dismay in French circles. The matter of spiritual
succession unleashed a bitter struggle that divided not only the shaikh's
family but also his far-flung religious clientele, threatening the political
calm of a sensitive region in the Sahara. Colonial officials had failed to
take Lalla Zainab (c. 1850-1904), the daughter of Shaikh Muhammad,
into account.
From 1897 until her death in 1904, Lalla Zainab directed the Rahman-
iyya zawiya herself, assuming the heavy responsibilities for education
and social welfare in al-Hamil. She did this in spite of intense opposition
from the Bureau Arabe officers in Bou Saada, who were backing her male
cousin's claims to the post of head shaikh. Zainab's tenure in office raises
a multitude of questions. Who was she, what was her story, and what
does Zainab tell us about relations between colonizer and colonized,
between men and women in late-nineteenth-century Algeria? More gen-
erally, what can we learn from Lalla Zainab about the involvement of
North African Muslim women in sufi orders or in other manifestations of
"popular religion" within the context of European systems of domina-
tion? How typical or atypical was she of other women and of other saints
and sufis? Before examining Zainab's story, a brief overview of women's
participation in the North African tariqas (sufi orders) will place her story
in a larger cultural and historical context.
256 Julia Clancy-Smith

WOMEN, SUFIS, AND SAINTS

Most studies of Muslim women begin by evoking their status as defined

in Quran and the holy law. Patriarchy, which shaped male and female
roles and often legitimized them through appeals to the law and to sacred
texts, is also cited. Yet recent research has effectively demonstrated that
women's social place in Muslim societies varied considerably over time
and space. Adjustments must be made for such important structural
determinants as class, ethnicity, and modes of production as well as
historical circumstances. Prior to the modern Salafiyya movement of re-
formed Islam, the most visible manifestation of female religiosity was
women's active involvement in saint veneration or mysticism or both.
Although there are some recent studies of present-day female involve-
ment in saint cults, pilgrimage centers, and sufi orders, women's associa-
tion with these important communal religious and sociocultural activities
in the past has received relatively little scholarly attention.8 Indeed the
path to mysticism for Muslim women seems to begin and end with Rabi'a
al-'Adawiyya, who died in Basra in A.D. 801.
Aside from the empirical matter of women's relation to popular Islam,
the existence of revered female mystics and saints raises an additional
theoretical issue tied to the public-private dichotomy, now under intense
scrutiny and refinement.9 Did the borders, at times fluid, defining sacred
and profane spaces and activities influence the contours of gender-based
boundaries informed by various systems of patriarchy? Conversely, how
did gender influence the domain of the sacred? Some of these issues can
be addressed by using the experience of North African women in the past
century as case studies.
In the Maghreb, some of the North African tariqas permitted women
members a measure of institutionalized collective participation in Islam
as locally lived and received, notably the Tijaniyya and the Rahmaniyya
orders. In the nineteenth century, there appear to have been relatively
large numbers of female Rahmaniyya members. This was in part because
the Rahmaniyya claimed the single largest following among the Algerian
orders and also because of certain doctrinal tenets of the order and its
founder, Sidi Muhammad b. ;Abd al-Rahman al-Azhari (died c. 1793—
94).10 Statistics for female membership are somewhat difficult to obtain,
and mainly come from colonial sources. Louis Rinn estimated that in the
commune of Akbou (in the Kabylia) there were some four thousand
women Rahmaniyya members during the 1880s; wherever their numbers
were sufficient, women had their own female muqaddamat (circle lead-
ers).11 A1913 study from the Awras (Aur&s) Mountains revealed that one
small oasis in the region of Tkout counted three times as many female
Rahmaniyya members as male initiates.12
 The House of Zainab 257

The voices of ordinary women in the past were muted or silent about
the meaning that sufism held for them in their daily lives. An anecdote
from nineteenth-century Algeria, however, indicates that tariqa mem-
bership was a source of immense pride for women, particularly in con-
frontations with more powerful forces. A Bureau Arabe official in Batna
reported in 1849 that an Algerian woman had come to him to lay forth a
grievance and demand that justice be done. Encountering a dilatory re-
sponse, the woman then threatened the colonial officers in the following
manner: "If you do not listen to me, I will go and complain to Sidi' Abd al-
Hafiz [shaikh of the Rahmaniyya zawiya of Khanga Sidi Naji]. . . . I am a
sister of the Rahmaniyya/'13
Several of the nineteenth-century Rahmaniyya ijazas (diplomas) spe-
cifically mention initiation rites (talqiri) for female murids (aspiring sufi
adepts) performed by male shaikhs; in other cases, women sufis were
allowed to initiate other women into the tariqa.14 Many of the initiation
ceremonials—the recitation of certain prayers, the state of ritual purity,
and the engagement or pact (ahd)—were the same for men and women.
When the 'ahd ceremony was performed by a male shaikh, however, it
was subject to the principles governing sexual segregation. Thus the
male muqaddam arranged the women in front of him, and instead of
placing his palm upon that of the female murid so as to engage the
thumbs (as was done for men), she held one end of a long cloth in her
right hand and the muqaddam held the other end. Another method to
avoid physical contact between the sexes during the engagement ritual
was to place a bowl of water between the muqaddam and the neophyte.
Each then immersed the index finger of the right hand into the bowl and,
with closed eyes, recited certain prayers together. Finally, as was true for
men, the initiation ceremony was concluded by the whispering of secret
instructions to the female novice, although these instructions were sim-
plified for women.15
The experience of ordinary women in the tariqas raises in turn the
issue of females who were themselves saints or sufis or who enjoyed an
elevated socioreligious status by virtue of kinship in sufi or saintly fami-
lies.
Among the Ait Isma'il of the Jurjura Mountains in the Kabylia, the
Rahmaniyya order's original geographical matrix, we find several in-
stances of women assuming leadership roles, at least temporarily. In
1836-37, bitter disagreements erupted over the matter of succession to
the headship of the central zawiya. The widow of the deceased shaikh,
Lalla Khadija, herself a powerful saint, not only directed the sufi center
for several years but also on her own initiative resolved the dispute to the
satisfaction of all by 1842. Although the Kabyles appear to have been
quite amenable to her de facto administration of the zawiya, Lalla Khadi-
258 Julia Clancy-Smith

ja's activities were subject to one gender-based restriction—she did not

actively engage in Rahmaniyya missionary work outside the region.16
Rinn suggests that there was also gender-based opposition to her spir-
itual authority by some Rahmaniyya muqaddams who directed second-
ary zawiya. During Khadija's five-year administration, various sufi sub-
alterns were negligent in remitting revenues back to the central zawiya
from places outside of the Jurjura. This is somewhat ambiguous, how-
ever, since provincial sufi deputies often behaved this way toward male
shaikhs whose authority was either contested or waning.17
In the next decade, Lalla Khadija's eldest daughter, who was the
spouse of the current head Rahmaniyya shaikh, emerged in a leadership
role during the French assault on the Jurjura Mountains between 1856
and 1857. Lalla Fatima not only organized armed resistance to the colonial
army but also fought alongside her male counterparts in defense of Ka-
byle independence. In addition, Lalla Fatima appears to have been the
first to initiate women into the tariqa as "sisters" and to authorize female
sufi circle leaders, or muqaddamat.18
In the Algerian Sahara at the end of the nineteenth century, two
women from sufi lineages assumed the direction of a desert sufi center.
After the death of Sidi Mabruk b. 'Azzuz sometime before 1895, his co-
wives, Mabruka and Khadija, took over the daily administration of the
Rahmaniyya zawiya in al-Aghwat (Laghouat). They received pious offer-
ings from religious clients performing the ziyara (local pilgrimage to a sufi
or saint's shrine, often accompanied by donations) and provided the
requisite hospitality—food and shelter—to those visiting the center from
outside the immediate area. It should be noted, however, that the spir-
itual affairs of the al-Aghwat center were handled by a male Rahmaniyya
notable residing in the oasis of Tulqa in the Ziban.19
Other Muslim women—and even European women—did tem-
porarily assume leadership roles in some North African orders.20 This
was frequently the result of unusual circumstances, however, such as
internecine quarrels among the tariqa's male elite, the disorders of colo-
nial conquest, or the absence of male family members to carry on the
work of a particular sufi center or saint shrine.21
The case of Lalla Zainab differs somewhat from these examples. Her
tenure came after the political upheavals of the early colonial period had
ended for the most part. The native Muslim population of fin de siecle
Algeria was more or less resigned to the unpleasant realities of French
rule. Although rebellious activity had not entirely been suppressed, re-
volt had given way to passive or more subtle forms of resistance by the
1890s. Moreover, Zainab's assumption of responsibility for both the spir-
itual and the social welfare functions of the al-Hamil zawiya did not
follow a period of contention over leadership, but rather triggered a
 The House of Zainab 259

struggle for spiritual power from which she eventually emerged vic-
torious. And a suitable male successor to Zainab's father had been wait-
ing patiently in the wings for some time prior to the shaikh's death—his
nephew, Muhammad b. al-Hajj Muhammad.

ZAINAB BINT SHAIKH MUHAMMAD B. ABI AL-QASIM, C 1850-1904

During her lifetime and after, Zainab was venerated as a pious, learned
woman and a saint by a large number of followers, both male and female.
Although part of her socio-spiritual capital was clearly inherited from her
father by virtue of kinship, Zainab expanded that fund of popular venera-
tion through her own actions and activities. And she did so in spite of—
or perhaps because of—opposition from colonial officials and from some
of her male counterparts within the Rahmaniyya hierarchy.
Knowledge about Zainab's early years is extremely scanty. There is
some biographical material, published and unpublished, devoted to her
father, but Zainab is conspicuous for her absence in the Arabic texts. In
one case she is referred to simply as the shaikh's "bint saliha" (virtuous
daughter) with no further elaboration on her life.22 Most of our documen-
tation comes from unpublished French archival sources dating from the
1897-99 period, when Zainab's headship of the zawiya was opposed by
local colonial officials. Thus, aside from a few quite sympathetic travelers'
accounts by Europeans who had met personally with Zainab—among
them, the notorious Isabelle Eberhardt (see below)—much of our infor-
mation about her comes from her opponents.23
Zainab was born in al-Hamil around 1850, soon after her father had
arrived in the oasis to establish the madrasa, but before he became a
Rahmaniyya shaikh, which occurred in the following decade. Zainab's
family enjoyed two significant sources of socio-spiritual authority. First in
importance was that her father claimed to be from the Prophet's lineage,
which bestowed an eastern Arab ancestry on the clan. Second, however,
Shaikh Muhammad was the descendant of al-Hamil's saintly founders,
who had emigrated several centuries earlier to the Bou Saada region from
elsewhere in North Africa and created the village by performing a mira-
cle.24 Yet sharifian descent and maraboutic origins were not necessarily
sufficient to establish a reputation for holiness and a popular following.
Piety, learning, good deeds, and miracles were also required. In the
course of her lifetime, Zainab constructed her own saintly persona,
which not only outlived her but also completely overshadowed her suc-
cessor—and rival—at the Rahmaniyya zawiya, Muhammad b. al-Hajj
Muhammad.
Zainab appears to have spent most, if not all, of her early life in the
oasis of al-Hamil. This changed after her father's death in 1897, when the
260 Julia Clancy-Smith

demands of running a complex sufi center as well as of combating her

enemies in French officialdom required Zainab to travel extensively. In
accordance with the custom of endogamy among North African saintly
sufi clans, Shaikh Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim had taken several wives
from religious families in the area. In addition, he concluded strategic
marriage alliances with the "aristocratic" Muqrani clan from northeastern
Algeria and with other distinguished families. These liaisons brought a
large measure of social mobility and prestige, but apparently did not
produce any surviving male heirs.25
From a young age, Zainab was taught by her father, himself a scholar
of distinction. The shaikh took the matter of Zainab's education very
seriously since she had attained an advanced level of instruction and was
well versed in the books and manuscripts housed in the zawiya's library.
She was quite learned in the Quran and hadith; her erudition was appre-
ciated by her father's disciples and enhanced the "already great prestige
she enjoyed" in the community as the shaikh's daughter. One source
claims that Sidi Muhammad "had trained her from childhood to fill the
role that awaited her/'26
Zainab was raised in the harim of the shaikh's residence, which housed
some forty women, including the shaikh's mother and his sister. Because
the divorced wives of saintly and sufi figures were normally not permit-
ted to remarry, at the time of the shaikh's death several women who had
been repudiated remained under his care, in addition to his legal wives.
Other women, deprived of male or family protection, resided in the
zawiya and were generously provided for by Muhammad b. Abi al-
Qasim. After his death, Zainab assumed the role of protector for the
harim's women, shielding them in at least one instance from harassment
by local French officials.27
The sufi residence provided shelter to a number of people besides the
women of the harim. Political refugees from the 1864 revolt of the Sidi
Aulad Shaikh (in western Algeria) and from the 1871 Muqrani uprising
(in northeastern Algeria) were accorded asylum in al-Hamil together with
their families.28 These refugees may have provided Zainab with informa-
tion about the workings of the colonial regime elsewhere in Algeria.
When she took over the zawiya in 1897, Zainab was surprisingly conver-
sant with the ways of the infidels—a knowledge she could not have
acquired otherwise since there were no Europeans residing in the oasis.
Thanks to geographical isolation and to the absence of European set-
tler communities in the Sahara, the oasis of al-Hamil was spared undue
interference by the colonial order. Thus Zainab had few prolonged con-
tacts with the French prior to 1897. Moreover, the prosperity of the
zawiya served as a buffer against the harsh social conditions and political
repression experienced by Muslims in northern Algeria. Although Sidi
 The House of Zainab 261

Muhammad's professed neutrality had won him special treatment by

French officials, the region was under military control and visitors to the
al-Hamil zawiya were required to obtain permits from army officers in
Bou Saada.29 Yet direct intervention in the Rahmaniyya center was negli-
gible as long as Sidi Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim was alive. Once Zainab
assumed control of the zawiya, colonial interference increased markedly,
mainly because she was a woman.
Shaikh Muhammad centralized the administration of the sufi center's
numerous properties and complex affairs within his own hands. Never-
theless, he apparently kept Zainab informed of financial and other opera-
tions, viewing her as a confidante and perhaps as his successor. After Sidi
Muhammad's death, his daughter was the individual most knowledge-
able about the past and present social services offered to the community
by the Rahmaniyya zawiya. Zainab returned her father's affections, de-
scribing him as leading an exemplary life, moved by a love for others; she
cited "his pity for the disinherited, his generosity, his great theological
knowledge, disinterest in the things of this world, and his scrupulous
observance of Muslim law in all matters."30
In spite of having a number of suitors, Zainab at some point decided to
take a vow of celibacy and remained unmarried at her death. Her vir-
ginity, asceticism, simplicity of manners, and utter devotion to the needy
brought her popular veneration as a saint in the Sahara. Moreover, when
Zainab was in her late twenties, her father drew up a hubus document
that indicated the shaikh's respect for his daughter. In the 1877 document
Sidi Muhammad stated that his substantial possessions—land, houses,
fields, gardens, valuable household items, and so forth—were con-
stituted as hubus "in favor of his daughter Zainab and other children of
either the masculine or female sex." Any male heirs were to receive, as
was customary, double the share of the inheritance that females received.
Zainab, however, was singled out specifically to receive a "portion equal
to male" offspring, although her renunciation of the pleasures of mar-
riage meant that Zainab would have no heirs to complicate the matter of
inheritance.31 Twenty years later, Zainab relied in part on this document
to advance her claims against those of her cousin.

"A DANGEROUS WOMAN"

As Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim's health began to deteriorate, French

officials in the local Bureau Arabe pressed him to publicly designate a
successor. The shaikh demurred until the eve of his death. Under heavy
pressure from the commanding officer, Captain Crochard, whose official
mission was to force the Rahmaniyya leader to select someone compati-
ble with French interests, Sidi Muhammad finally named his nephew,
262 Julia Clancy-Smith

Muhammad b. al-Hajj Muhammad. His choice was made known in a

letter to military officers in the Bou Saada office dated March 1897. Never-
theless, the shaikh took no action to change the content of the 1877 hubus
document, and French officials were unaware of its existence until the
headship of the Rahmaniyya zawiya became a matter of dispute.
Whether Zainab knew of her father's letter to the Bureau Arabe designat-
ing her cousin as head shaikh is uncertain. Later, however, she based her
grievances against the Bureau Arabe in Bou Saada in part on this letter,
which may have been elicited from Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim when he
was ailing and his faculties declining.32 By the summer of 1897, the stage
was set for a confrontation.
Zainab's objections to Muhammad b. al-Hajj Muhammad's bid for the
directorship of the Rahmaniyya zawiya were twofold: her cousin's im-
pious behavior, which made him unworthy to succeed her father; and
more important, the specious nature of his claims as a legitimate suc-
cessor, meaning that Zainab (and others in the Rahmaniyya hierarchy)
rejected the nomination letter submitted by her father to Captain
Crochard. When Zainab's cousin tried to assert his authority in al-Hamil,
she took the keys to the various buildings and to the zawiya's coffers to
prevent him from assuming control over the sufi center. She also forbade
the zawiya's students and staff to obey his commands and wrote letters to
subordinate Rahmaniyya muqaddams discrediting her cousin's claims.
With al-Hamil's educational and devotional facilities off limits to him,
Muhammad b. al-Hajj Muhammad attempted to create a counterfollow-
ing among some of the zawiya's clients by establishing a rival school
outside the village. A little less than a year after the dispute broke out, he
had attracted only a small group of some thirty students to his side.33
Nevertheless, the struggle between Zainab and her cousin did
provoke divisions among her father's religious followers and the various
tribes in the Sahara. Zainab's bold actions presented Sidi Muhammad b.
Abi al-Qasim's closest spiritual associates with a rather serious dilemma.
She had declared that any Rahmaniyya brother who joined her cousin's
side "could no longer hope to see the door of Lalla Zainab's [zawiya] open
to him."34 Although some of her father's disciples believed Muhammad
b. al-Hajj Muhammad to be the legitimate successor, they hesitated to
openly disavow Zainab because of their great respect for her. Signifi-
cantly, Muslim Algerians' objections to Zainab's administration did not
necessarily revolve around the issue of gender. Some Rahmaniyya nota-
bles opposed both Zainab's and her cousin's claims, maintaining that
succession to al-Hamil should alternate between Shaikh Muhammad's
lineage and another prestigious Rahmaniyya sufi clan in the oasis of
Aulad Jallal.3*
Thus, for many Rahmaniyya members, the disagreement over Sidi
 The House of Zainab 263

Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim's spiritual heir was not—as far as we

know—primarily framed in terms of proper gender roles or boundaries.
Rather it was local colonial officials who were the most vehemently op-
posed to Lalla Zainab. Being a woman, they argued, she would be a
weak, pliable instrument in the hands of anti-French forces, "people of
intrigue and disorder."36 Predictably, colonial officers in Bou Saada por-
trayed Zainab's actions as the consequence of female conspiracies within
the zawiya's harim, instigated by her women companions, whose fami-
lies had sought asylum there from French justice. Captain Crochard thus
maintained that:
the two daughters of the former bash-agha of the Majana,
who . . . believed that [Zainab's cousin] was hostile to them and
would neglect their interests, began to create problems, adversely
influencing the daughter of the deceased shaikh. The bash-agha's
wives and daughters are friends of Lalla Zainab and portrayed
Muhammad b. al-Hajj Muhammad as an ambitious man who
wanted to control the material possessions of the zawiya in order to
seize the deceased shaikh's worldly goods.37
By the time that Crochard was writing this, he had largely failed in his
mission to "arrange" for a docile and pro-French male to succeed
Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim. More serious, however, was that Zainab
had brought a formal grievance to those at the pinnacle of authority in
French Algeria. Thus Crochard's vilification of Lalla Zainab reflects his
own precarious position within the colonial bureaucracy; in effect,
Crochard may have risked losing his command because of the actions of a
"rebellious woman."38
The death of her father and Crochard's efforts to undermine her au-
thority brought Zainab a greatly expanded public role as director of the
zawiya. Realizing the threat to her administration posed by authorities in
Bou Saada, Zainab decided to outmaneuver her opponents. In August
1897 she engaged the legal services of a French lawyer in Algiers, Maurice
Ladmiral, who was at the court of appeal in the capital. Ladmiral present-
ed Zainab's case to the procureur general of the republic, the highest
office within the colonial system of justice. The matter was then brought
to the attention of the governor-general of Algeria and the commanding
general of the province. In a letter to Governor-General Jules Cambon
(1891-97), General Meygret informed his superior that Zainab's com-
plaint "contains allegations of a very grave nature" regarding the conduct
of the heads of the Bou Saada office.39
Here it should be noted that, upon his nomination as governor-
general, Cambon had attempted to soften the regime's rather hostile
stance toward the Algerian sufi orders and to establish cordial relations
264 Julia Clancy-Smith

with the leaders of the "great brotherhoods," the Qadiriyya, Tijaniyya,

and Rahmaniyya.40 The intervention of the local Bureau Arabe into the
affairs of a "friendly" sufi center such as al-Hamil was viewed with dis-
pleasure in Algiers. Zainab's actions had, therefore, thrown the colonial
administration into a certain amount of disarray.
By doing this, Zainab also checkmated Crochard's move to put her
cousin into the office of head shaikh in al-Hamil. Moreover, she had done
so entirely within the prevailing system of colonial justice, displaying
a remarkable grasp of how that system functioned. Between 1897 and
1899, Zainab thus was locked in a struggle with two men, her paternal
uncle's son and Crochard. To his superiors Crochard naturally portrayed
Muhammad b. al-Hajj Muhammad in glowing terms—as a faithful, up-
right individual concerned only for the zawiya's welfare and the security
of France. Other French officials, however, had earlier expressed some-
what different opinions of Zainab's cousin, who was described as "of
average intelligence, ambitious, haughty, and prone to excess."41 These
evaluations were shared not only by Lalla Zainab but also by the inhabi-
tants of al-Hamil, who viewed Muhammad b. al-Hajj Muhammad as
"miserly and worldly," traits that were incompatible with popular vener-
ation and support for a sufi leader.42 Zainab's determined struggle
against her own cousin was therefore based on realistic fears that his
administration might prove detrimental to the zawiya's interests and to
the continuation of her father's work.
Zainab met with her nemesis, Crochard, on several occasions during
1897, engaging him in rather heated face-to-face confrontations over the
matter of the zawiya's headship. The issue involved more than spiritual
authority, for the division of the zawiya's properties among Sidi Muham-
mad's heirs was also at stake. In the course of one of their meetings,
Crochard scored a minor victory by bringing Zainab to his office against
her will. She had attempted to deal with him on her own turf, by obliging
Crochard to call at her residence in Bou Saada, and thus on her own
terms. Having failed at this, Zainab informed the Bureau Arabe au-
thorities that the letter of nomination obtained under duress from her
father was "apocryphal." They in turn accused her of being "une fille
insoumise," a rebellious daughter who ignored the last wishes of her
father.43 More telling were Crochard's concluding remarks, which reveal
the frustration experienced by those ostensibly in control of the local
Muslim population: "This affair demonstrates that Zainab is a dangerous
woman whose intrigues and activities should be closely surveyed. She
knows that a woman is always treated with circumspection and she takes
advantage of this in order to cause problems for the local [colonial] au-
thority which she believes is favoring her cousin in the matter of succes-
sion."44
 The House of Zainab 265

The next rounds, however, were won by Zainab. By the end of 1897,
General Meygret recommended to Jules Cambon that the colonial regime
refrain from further interference in the al-Hamil dispute, leaving Zainab
in control of the zawiya. Although she was left more or less in peace as
shaikha, at least one more attempt was made to undermine her authority.
In 1899 an Algerian by the name of Sa'id b. Lakhdar requested that the
Bureau Arabe in Bou Saada take action on his behalf against the
Rahmaniyya establishment. Lakhdar, who was mentally deranged,
maintained that Zainab's father had owed him the completely out-
rageous sum of 2.2 million francs. In addition, Sa'id ibn Lakhdar claimed
that the shaikh had named him as his khalifa, or successor! Local officials,
who seemed eager to entertain Lakhdar's clearly fraudulent claims—
perhaps out of spite—contacted Zainab about Lakhdar's complaint, de-
manding an explanation.45
Lalla Zainab deftly refuted all of Lakhdar's allegations by relying on
Muslim law and customary practices, French legal procedures, and her
own highly developed powers of reasoning. Among other things, she
observed that "there is no native Algerian in all of our region who has
ever possessed over two million francs in specie."46 Moreover, the sum
of money claimed by the plaintiff was not recorded in the zawiya's finan-
cial registers, nor did Lakhdar have a written receipt of deposit from
Shaikh Muhammad. Finally, Zainab pointed out the irrational nature of
the complaint brought against both the Rahmaniyya center and its female
director:
Sa'id ibn Lakhdar says that he deposited this sum of money with
my father. Assuming that the sum was in cash, [the plaintiff] would
have had to transport a heavy load of specie, requiring enormous
numbers of donkeys to deliver it to the zawiya . . . the claims of this
person have no foundation . . . however, one should see in this
affair the hand of someone other than Lakhdar who is a tool for
those who hate us and who are intent upon the ruin and loss of the
zawiya.47
Zainab's written rebuttals to the authorities are a tour de force of argu-
mentation; her letters reveal not only a complete familiarity with the
colonial regime—and the mentality of Algeria's French masters—but
also a profound sense of strategy. Moreover, her intimate knowledge of
the details of Sa'id ibn Lakhdar's financial relations with her father indi-
cate that Sidi Muhammad had kept his daughter informed of the zawiya's
banking operations.
It was during this incident that Lalla Zainab emerged as the protector
of the harim's female residents. Still pressing his financial claims, Sa'id b.
Lakhdar next sought to force the wives of Shaikh Muhammad to travel
266 Julia Clancy-Smith

together to Algiers to the tomb-shrine of Sidi' Abd al-Rahman al-Azhari,

the Rahmaniyya's founder. There, the women—some ten in number—
were to take an oath swearing that they knew nothing of the sum of
money owed, according to Lakhdar, by their deceased spouse. Lakhdar's
demands caused distress among the zawiya's female inhabitants. Once
more, Zainab skillfully refuted the legality of this demand, by appeals to
both Islamic law and French justice. If need be, she said, she would take
an oath on the tomb of Sidi 'Abd al-Rahman—an extremely serious act in
the eyes of Muslims—but the harim's women were not parties to the
dispute and were not to be disturbed.48

THE SHAIKHA AND THE "PASSIONATE NOMAD"

In 1902 a rather improbable relationship developed between Lalla

Zainab, by then regarded as a murabita, or living saint, and Isabelle
Eberhardt (1877-1904), the "passionate nomad." Isabelle was the illegiti-
mate daughter of a Russian nihilist and an aristocratic German woman.
Her childhood and upbringing in Europe were wildly eccentric, pre-
disposing Isabelle to unconventional behavior throughout her life. In
1897, the year of Shaikh Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim's death, Isabelle
and her mother moved to Algiers to escape personal tragedy and social
ostracism in Europe. Once in Algeria, Isabelle continued her study of
Arabic and of Islam, eventually converting to Islam as well as joining the
Qadiriyya sufi order. In 1902 she married an Algerian Muslim named
Sliman, a soldier in the colonial army, thereby acquiring French cit-
izenship.49
Isabelle aroused a great deal of overt hostility among colonial officials
and in European settler society, in part because of her evident sympathy
for Islamic and Arab culture. Her disorderly conduct—an undisguised
fondness for drugs and alcohol, illicit sexual liaisons, and dressing as a
native Algerian male—also caused dismay in French circles. (The Muslim
Algerians, in general, were much more tolerant of Isabelle's scandalous
ways.) In addition, Isabelle, as was true of so many Europeans in this
period, was fascinated by the Sahara, since as she put it: "in the really
Arab towns like the ksours [oases] of the south, the poignant and be-
witching atmosphere of the land of Africa is quite tangible."50 This attrac-
tion, and Isabelle's forays into the desert, alarmed some military officials.
By 1900 the Sahara was in a state of political unrest due to French thrusts
into Morocco via southwestern Algeria. A few years later Gen. Hubert
Lyautey attempted to exploit Isabelle's knowledge of the desert as part of
his policy of penetration pacifique.51
It is uncertain how or when Lalla Zainab and the Rahmaniyya center
first came to Isabelle's attention. Following Shaikh Muhammad's death in
 The House of Zainab 267

1897, large numbers of pilgrims gathered at his tomb in the zawiya's

mosque, seeking the saint's blessings. By this time too, Zainab's reputa-
tion for sanctity and miracles had spread far beyond the confines of al-
Hamil; many believed that she had inherited her father's baraka (blessing).
Women, both native Algerian and French, brought their ailing children to
Zainab, who had the ability to cure. The shaikha was "spoken of with
awe and reverence throughout every corner of Algeria where the
khouans [sufi members] of the Rahmanya were to be found."52 Isabelle
therefore may have heard about Zainab from fellow Muslims in Algiers or
from pilgrims. By then suffering from chronic malaria, syphilis, and per-
haps anorexia, Isabelle was bent on pursuing some vague mystical voca-
tion. In the summer of 1902, she traveled from Algiers to Bou Saada
expressly to visit Lalla Zainab at the zawiya.
Arriving at the oasis in July, Isabelle found that Zainab was away on
some unspecified mission. When the long-awaited meeting between the
two women did take place, it had an enormous impact on Isabelle, who
recorded their visit in her dairy. Apparently Isabelle bared her soul to
Lalla Zainab, describing at length the details of her tormented life, to
which the shaikha listened with evident sympathy. Zainab even assured
the European woman of her undying friendship, approving of Isabelle's
spiritual quest.53 In turn, Isabelle left a valuable and moving account of
the female saint and sufi, whom she described as dressed in the simple
white costume of the Bou Saada region: "Her face, tanned by the sun
because she travels frequently in the region, was wrinkled. She is nearly
fifty years old. Her eyes are kindly and in them burns a flame of intel-
ligence, though veiled by a great sadness. Everything—her voice, her
mannerisms, and the welcome she accords to pilgrims—expresses a pro-
found simplicity."54
According to Isabelle's account, Shaikh Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim
had designated Zainab to succeed him, educating her in the manner
"of the best of his students" in preparation for a role that was vastly differ-
ent from that normally reserved for ordinary Algerian women. Zainab
was clearly in control of the zawiya and of those affiliated with the
Rahmaniyya establishment in al-Hamil. "More so than any other of the
sufi centers, Zainab's zawiya is a refuge for the poor who come here from
all over."55 Isabelle noted that Lalla Zainab's health was declining. She
suffered from a painful throat disease that made talking difficult and
rendered her voice hoarse; their conversations were interrupted by a
"harsh cough that shook [Zainab's] frail body, fragile as that of a child
under its burnous and veils."56 A lifetime of fasting and asceticism had
left its mark on the shaikha; Isabelle was correct in anticipating Zainab's
approaching death.
In spite of the brevity of their first encounter, the two women took to
268 Julia Clancy-Smith

one another, and Zainab in turn confided in Isabelle. With tears in her
eyes, she told her European visitor: "My daughter . . . I have devoted
my entire life to doing good for the love of God. Yet, there are men who
refuse to recognize the good that I have done for them. Many hate and
envy me. And yet, I have renounced all in life: I never married, I have no
children, no joy/'57 The next year Zainab again welcomed Isabelle, who
by now clearly viewed the Algerian woman as her spiritual mentor as
well as her dearest female friend. Isabelle wrote in her dairy that "each
time I see LallaZaynab, I experience a sort of rejuvenation. . . . I saw her
yesterday twice in the morning. She was very kind and gentle towards
me and expressed joy at seeing me again."58 By this time, the friendship
developing between the two women was known to colonial authorities.
The French military had been discreetly surveying Zainab's activities
in al-Hamil since 1897 and monitoring Isabelle's movements as well,
although rather less discreetly. Isabelle's second journey to al-Hamil in
1903 was tracked by the colonial police, who gathered information about
the meetings at the zawiya. The two women's relationship was deemed
of enough political interest that the new governor-general, Charles Jon-
nart, urged the commanding general of the province of Algiers to dis-
cover the "subjects of the two women's conversations."59 It was only
with the first publication of Isabelle's diary in 1923, however, that their
conversations became known.60
The two women did not see each other again after 1903. The next year
brought Isabelle's death in a desert flash flood at 'Ain Sefra, where the
French army was poised to move into Moroccan territory. Lalla Zainab
also died in 1904 and was buried in the family cemetery in al-Hamil,
where her tomb-shrine became the object of veneration for pilgrims. Her
cousin Muhammad b. al-Hajj Muhammad accordingly assumed control
of the zawiya—seven years later than he had anticipated. Although he
was now the head shaikh of a large and prestigious Rahmaniyya center,
he was never highly regarded by the zawiya's clientele; Zainab's saintly
reputation completely overshadowed his.
On the eve of World War I another European woman, Helen C. Gor-
don, visited al-Hamil. A decade had passed since Zainab's death, but her
memory remained vividly alive among the villagers and sufi initiates: "So
beneficent had been her sway, so charitable was she that her memory is
still green in the hearts of her people, and by children her name is spoken
as one would whisper that of a revered saint, with awe and to bear
witness to the truth of some statement."6!
Zainab's story does not end here, however. An American woman
artist, Kate Delas, recently traveled through the oasis and found that
people there continue to talk about Zainab. Based on what she heard
from al-Hamil's inhabitants, Delas was able to draw a portrait of the
 The House of Zainab 269

shaikha.62 In independent postcolonial Algeria, Zainab remains the stuff

of legends and lore; and in spite of the terrible upheavals of the revolu-
tion, the zawiya still stands today.

Women in colonial societies were under a form of dual control com-

posed of two intersecting systems of patriarchy, one indigenous, the
other foreign and European. It is within these systems of domination that
Zainab's story must be considered. As a woman, Lalla Zainab was in
theory subject to the restrictions of a doubly patriarchal society. Yet she
was popularly regarded as a saint, a mystic, and a learned woman, in
addition to enjoying membership in a prestigious sufi lineage. Acquired
and inherited spiritual authority, and the immense social value placed on
the gift of baraka, made Zainab an extraordinary woman. As such, she
could move without censure outside of the gender boundaries con-
structed by her own culture and also defy, with relative impunity, those
imposed by the colonial order.
By virtue of saintliness, she acquired freedoms in native Algerian soci-
ety not normally the prerogative of ordinary women. More significantly,
Zainab confronted French officials with a boldness not readily accorded to
many Muslim men. She thus perceived, and used to advantage, the weak
points within the colonial system of domination—particularly the ab-
sence of effective mechanisms to deal with unsubmissive Muslim
women. Zainab did this openly and consciously in order to carry on her
father's work of cultural survival for the Algerian community, which also
entailed defying the wishes of some Muslim males.
In her diary, Isabelle pointed out the importance of Zainab's life and
the need to study the shaikha's story.63 At the same time, Isabelle's much
more flamboyant life and equally sensational death have perhaps drawn
attention away from Zainab, at least among Europeans. One reason that
Isabelle was able to move so freely about colonial Algeria was her an-
drogynous behavior. Isabelle "combined transvestism with Don
Juanism."64 She was both male and female, yet neither, and thus rejected
sexual and gender boundaries. Zainab in no way repudiated the norms
and conventions of her Arabo-Berber Muslim culture, which provided a
religious and social space for female religiosity, particularly within the
idioms of sufism and saint cults. Nor did she assume the headship of the
zawiya by adopting a male guise or masculine attributes. Unlike Isabelle,
Zainab did not dress like a man, and she expressed female chagrins and
desires to Eberhardt during their first meeting in 1902, especially the
emotional deprivation she felt at being childless.
Lalla Zainab's decision to remain celibate was an important compo-
nent of her saintly persona; it also relieved her of conjugal duties and the
distractions of child rearing, allowing her to devote all her energies to the
270 Julia Clancy-Smith

zawiya and to the needs of its numerous religious clients. Although un-
married women were normally considered inferior in status to married
women—remaining as "bint" all their lives—Zainab's vow of celibacy, as
a spiritual act, conversely brought immediate prestige.65 In addition,
Zainab was a "producer" of baraka, and that role brought her into the
public domain as dictated by popular religiosity. Yet the shaikha also
expanded her public activities to reach beyond the demands associated
with administering a sufi center. After her father's death, she traveled
and paid visits to colonial officials as part of her campaign to retain control
of the zawiya.
Conflicts over spiritual hegemony within, or among, the elites of the
North African brotherhoods were not uncommon at the end of the nine-
teenth century. French authorities frequently intervened to back one side
or another so as to ensure social order and political control. Zainab's
victorious struggle against both the French hierarchy and her own cousin
appears unique in the annals of colonial Algerian history. This
uniqueness may, however, be due in part to the lack of research devoted
to the experiences of Algerian women, whether ordinary or extraordi-
nary beings, in the past century.

Notes

1. For information on the Rahmaniyya zawiya in al-Hamil, see Archives du

Gouvernement General de 1'Algerie, Depot d'Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence (here-
after cited as AGGA), 16 H 8, "Notice sur 1'ordre des Rahmanya," 28 June 1895, and
2 U 20,2 U 21, and 2 U 22; Muhammad 'Ali Dabbuz, Nahdat al-Jaza'ir al-haditha wa
thauratuha al-mubaraka, 2 vols. (Algiers: Imprimerie Cooperative, 1965); and Abu
al-Qasim Sa'adallah, Ta'rikh al-Jaza'ir al-thaqafi (Algiers: Societe Nationale d'Edi-
tion et Diffusion, 1981).
2. On the life of Shaikh Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim, see Dabbuz, Nahda 1:52-
53; Muhammad al-Hafnawi, Ta'rifal-khalafbirijalal-salaf(l9W7't reprint, Tunis: Dar
al-Maktaba al-'Atiqa, 1982); and AGGA, 16 H 8, 2 U 20, 2 U 21, and 2 U 22.
3. AGGA, 16 H 8, "Notice sur Tordre des Rahmanya/7 28 June 1895; Rene Basset,
"Les manuscrits arabes de la zaouyah d'el-Hamel," Giornak delta Societa Asiatica
Italiana 10 (1896-97): 43-97.
4. Yvonne Turin, Affrontements culturels dans I'Algtrie coloniale: Ecoles, medecines,
religion, 1830-1880 (Paris: Maspero, 1971); Charles-Robert Ageron, Les Algeriens
Musulmans et la France (1871-1919), 2 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1968).
5. Ahmed Nadir, "La fortune d'un ordre religieux algerien vers la fin du XIXe
siecle," Le mouvement social, no. 89 (1974): 59-84. Nadir's study is the only recent
one devoted to the Rahmaniyya center in al-Hamil; see also Youssef Nacib,
Cultures oasiennes (Paris: Publisud, 1986).
6. For a fuller account of Shaikh Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim and his relations
 The House of Zainab 271

with the colonial regime, see Julia Clancy-Smith, "The Shaikh and His Daughter:
Coping in Colonial Algeria, c. 1830-1904," in Struggle and Survival in the Modern
Middle East, 1750-2950, ed. Edmund Burke III (London: I. B. Tauris and Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991); for the political activities of some
Rahmaniyya leaders, see Julia Clancy-Smith, "Saints, Mahdis, and Arms: Re-
ligion and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century North Africa," in Islam, Politics, and
Social Movements, ed. Edmund Burke III and Ira M. Lapidus (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1988), 60-80.
7. Ageron, Les Algeriens Musulmans; Julia Clancy-Smith, "In the Eye of the
Beholder: The North African Sufi Orders and the Colonial Production of Knowl-
edge, 1830-1900," Africana Journal 15 (1990); 220-57.
8. See, for example, Daisy Hilse Dwyer, "Women, Sufism, and Decision-Mak-
ing in Moroccan Islam," in Women in the Muslim World, ed. Lois Beck and Nikki
Keddie (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 585-98; Nancy Tapper,
"Ziyaret: Gender, Movement, and Exchange in a Turkish Community," in Muslim
Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination, ed. Dale F. Eickelman
and James Piscatori (London: Routledge, 1990), 236-55; the articles in Women in
Islamic Societies, ed. Bo Utas (London: Curzon, 1983); Jane I. Smith, ed., Women in
Contemporary Muslim Societies (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses,
1980); and a particularly fine account of present-day Algerian women and popular
religion by Willy Jansen, Women without Men: Gender and Marginality in an Algerian
Town (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987).
9. See, for example, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds.,
Women, Culture, and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), and
works, published and unpublished, by Mary Hegland; see also Caroline Walker
Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., Gender and Religion: On the
Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon, 1986).
10. On the Rahmaniyya and its founder, see al-Hafnawi, Ta'rif, 457-74, and
Sa'adallah, Ta'rikh 1:514-16; see also Julia Clancy-Smith, "The Saharan
Rahmaniya: Popular Protest and Desert Society in Southeastern Algeria and the
Tunisian Jarid, 1750-1881" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles,
1988), and Clancy-Smith, "Between Cairo and the Algerian Kabylia: The
Rahmaniya Tariqa, 1715-1800," in Muslim Travellers, ed. Eickelman and Piscatori,
200-216.
11. Louis Rinn, Marabouts et Khouan: Etude sur I'Islam en Algerie (Algiers: Jour-
dan, 1884), 473, 479.
12. AGGA, 16 H 2, "Renseignements sur les ordres religieux," 1903.
13. This incident was reported by Captain Marnier in AGGA, 16 H 2, on 1 Aug.
1849; Marnier also observed that "there are many woman members of the
Rahmaniyya in the region of Batna." Nevertheless, there were many more males
than females.
14. AGGA, 16 H 8, "Renseignements politiques," 1895; Octave Depont and
Xavier Coppolani, Les confreries religieuses musulmanes (Algiers: Jourdan, 1897),
388; Edmond Doutte, L'Islam algtrien en Van 1900 (Algiers: Mustapha, 1900), 72.
15. AGGA, 16 H 8, "Notice sur 1'ordre des Rahmanya," 28 June 1895.
16. AGGA, 16 H1, "Notice sur 1'ordre religieux de Sidi Mohammed ben Abd-er-
272 Julia Clancy-Smith

Rahman/' 1849; Edouard de Neveu, Les Khouan: Ordres religieux chez les Musulmans
de I'Algerie (Paris: Guyot, 1846), 118-19; Marthe and Edmond Gouvian, Kitab
Aayane al-Marhariba (Algiers: Imprimerie Orientate, 1920), 145-46.
17. Rinn, Marabouts, 457.
18. Gouvian, Kitab, 146.
19. AGGA, 16 H 8, "Renseignements politiques," 1895.
20. Auguste Cour, "Recherches sur 1'etat des confre'ries religieuses mus-
ulmanes dans les communes de Oum el Bouaghi, Ain-Beida, Sedrata, Souk
Ahras, Morsott, Tebessa, Meskiana, et Khenchela, en novembre 1914/' Revue
africaine 62 (1921): 299.
21. Aurelie Picard (1849-1933), for example, dominated the Algerian Tijaniyya
from 1883 until her death, and Emily Keene was "Sharifa" of the sufi order of
Wazzan; on these women, see Ursula K. Hart, Two Ladies of Colonial Algeria: The
Lives and Times of Aurelie Picard and Isabelle Eberhardt, Ohio University Monographs
in International Studies, no. 49 (Athens: Ohio University, 1987), and Emily, Sha-
reefa of Wazan, My Life Story, ed. S. L. Bensusan (London: Arnold, 1911).
22. Dabbuz does not mention Zainab in Nahda, although he discusses her
father at length and her cousin as well; Muhammad al-Hafnawi, who studied at
the al-Hamil zawiya under Zainab's father, mentions Lalla Zainab merely as "vir-
tuous daughter" in Ta'rif(p. 352). There may be a lack of material on Zainab in the
Arabic sources because Muhammad b. al-Hajj Muhammad, Zainab's first cousin
and rival, wrote the most comprehensive history of al-Hamil and a biography of
Shaikh Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim, still in manuscript form, which has been
invariably relied upon by subsequent writers.
23. The sole published article of recent date devoted to al-Hamil is Nadir's "La
fortune," which mentions Zainab only in passing since the real focus of the study
is the zawiya's holdings and monetary worth. The zawiya of al-Hamil is closed to
researchers at the present time.
24. AGGA, 16 H 8, "Notice sur 1'ordre des Rahmanya," 1895; Dabbuz, Nahda.
25. The report in AGGA 16 H 8 ("Notice sur 1'ordre des Rahmanya," 1895) notes
that a local maraboutic notable from the Bou Saada region incurred Sidi Muham-
mad b. Abi al-Qasim's wrath by daring to marry a former wife of the great sufi
leader. By taking the shaikh's divorced spouse into his own household, the local
marabout was attempting to assert his spiritual equality vis-a-vis the leader of al-
Hamil. On the shaikh's socially strategic marriages, see Jacques Berque, L'inte'rieur
du Maghreb, XVe—XIXe siecle (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 419-23.
26. AGGA, 16 H 8; Cecily Mackworth, The Destiny of Isabelle Eberhardt (London:
Quartet, 1977), 157.
27. On the harim, see AGGA, 16 H 8. Gustave Guiliaumet, Tableaux algeriens
(Paris: Plon, 1891), 119-26, describes a visit to the zawiya's harim by a group of
French ladies in the 1880s. The author, meeting Zainab at her father's residence,
noted her physical appearance: "His only daughter [was] a saintly creature whose
face was marked by smallpox and decorated with small tattoos" (p. 121). AGGA, 16
H 61 (report of 29 Sept. 1899) contains information concerning Zainab's assump-
tion of her father's role as protector of the zawiya's women (see below).
28. AGGA, 16 H 8 (1895).
 The House of Zainab 273

29. Clancy-Smith, "Shaikh"; Mackworth, Destiny, 155.

30. AGGA, 16 H 61 (29 Sept. 1899).
31. An exact French translation of the hubus document dated 31 Aug. 1877 is in
AGGA, 16 H 61 (3 Sept. 1897); an Arabic version is in 2 U 22.
32. AGGA, 16 H 61 (10 Mar. 1897).
33. AGGA, 16 H 8 (report of 21 Mar. 1898).
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid. Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim had inherited the baraka of the
Rahmaniyya leader of the Aulad Jallal zawiya in 1862 upon Shaikh Muhammad al-
Mukhtar's death. This, in theory, established a precedent for alternating spiritual
succession between the sufi-saintly lineages controlling the two sufi centers, a
principle observed by other branches of the Rahmaniyya.
36. AGGA, 16 H 8,16 H 61.
37. AGGA, 16 H 61.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ageron, Les Algeriens Musulmans 1:478-527.
41. AGGA, 16 H 8.
42. Helen C. Gordon, A Woman in the Sahara (New York: Frederick Stokes,
1914), 78.
43. AGGA, 16 H 61 (22 Oct. 1897).
44. Ibid.
45. AGGA, 16 H 61 (29 Sept. 1899) contains a French translation of Zainab's letter
to the commandment of Bou Saada. The original Arabic letter is in 2 U 22.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. AGGA, 16 H 61 (12 Dec. 1899) and 2 U 22, contain letters from Zainab. An
oath taken on the tomb of the saintly founder of the Rahmaniyya order was
regarded not only as a legally binding act but also as a religiously based affirmation
of the veracity of an individual's statement.
49. The literature, both colonial and recent, devoted to Isabelle Eberhardt is
too extensive to be cited here. The information on Isabelle contained in this chap-
ter is drawn from Mackworth's Destiny; Hart's Two Ladies; Annette Kobak's Isabelle:
The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); and Isabelle
Eberhardt, Lettres et journaliers, ed. Eglal Errera (Aries: Editions Actes du Sud,
1987); see also the review article by Margot Badran, "Deserts of the Heart," Worn-
en's Review of Books 5 (December 1987): 7-8, and Julia Clancy-Smith, "The 'Passion-
ate Nomad' Reconsidered: A European Woman in Algerie franchise (Isabelle
Eberhardt, 1877-1904)," in Complicity and Resistance: Western Women and Imperi-
alism, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 1992).
50. Kobak, Isabelle, 190.
51. Ibid., 207-30; Hart, Two Ladies, 98-101. Lyautey engaged Isabelle's services
in 1903 as the French army was moving into the Colomb-Bechar region on the
border between Morocco and Algeria. He did this not only because of Eberhardt's
familiarity with the desert, but also because of her friendship with Lalla Zainab.
274 Julia Clancy-Smith

The shaikha of the al-Hamil zawiya was in turn "close to the sheikh of Kenadsa/'
who was the head of the strategically placed Ziyaniyya sufi center just within
Moroccan territory. Lyautey was at this time courting the head shaikh of Kenadsa
as part of his plan for penetrating the sharifian state; see Kobak, Isabelle, 221.
52. Isabelle and her mother rented a house in Bone in 1897, which was located
near a Rahmaniyya zawiya. Gordon, A Woman, 77; Mackworth, Destiny, 155-56.
53. Eberhardt, Lettres, 189.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Mackworth, Destiny, 158.
57. Eberhardt, Lettres, 189.
58. Ibid., 203.
59. Kobak, Isabelle, 191.
60. Isabelle Eberhardt, Mes journaliers, preface by Rene-Louis Doyon (Paris: La
Connaissance, 1923).
61. Gordon, A Woman, 77.
62. This information was kindly provided by Kinza Schuyler, who now has the
"portrait'7 of Lalla Zainab painted by Kate Delas.
63. Eberhardt, Lettres, 189.
64. Gabriele Annan, "Roughing It," New York Review of Books 35 (22 Dec. 1988):
3.
65. Amal Rassam, "Women and Domestic Power in Morocco," International
Journal of Middle East Studies 12 (1980): 119-37.
 The Making and Breaking of
15
Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt

BETH BARON

Debate rocked elite circles in Egypt in 1904 when Safiyya' Abd

al-Khaliq al-Sadat, a notable's daughter, married Shaikh 'All
Yusuf, editor of the nationalist paperal-Mu'ayyad, against her
father's wishes. Having initially agreed to the betrothal of his
daughter to Yusuf, al-Sadat then postponed the wedding.
After four years of waiting, Safiyya consented to marry Yusuf
at the home of a relative, for under Islamic law she was of age
and able to contract a marriage herself. When al-Sadat learned
of the event, however, he took the case to the shari'a (Islamic
law) court, petitioning for an annulment. He argued that ac-
cording to Hanafi law (the school officially recognized by the
Ottoman government), there was a lack otkafa'a (suitability) in
this match. Although the Hanafi school is liberal in allowing a
mature woman freedom to choose her husband, it is strict in
evaluating suitability, stipulating that the man must be equal
to the woman or her family in wealth, occupation, lineage,
piety, and other attributes; as such, Hanafi law gives the
guardian the right to challenge a match. Al-Sadat won the
court case after widely publicized and highly controversial
proceedings. In the end, however, the parties were recon-
ciled, al-Sadat accepted Yusuf as a son-in-law, and Safiyya
returned to the husband of her choice.l
This story illuminates certain aspects of turn-of-the-cen-
tury Egyptian society. It shows, for example, shifting class
boundaries. Born in relative poverty in an Upper Egyptian
village, Yusuf had become a successful journalist in Cairo,
amassing considerable wealth. Yet journalism was not exactly
an esteemed profession, particularly to such notables as al-
Sadat, who traced his lineage to the Prophet Muhammad.
Yusuf's first wife had shared his "humbler" origins. Through
this second marriage he hoped to raise his social status and
gain greater respectability.

275
276 Beth Baron

Yet this is not just a story about' Ali Yusuf and class; it is also a story
about Safiyya al-Sadat and marriage. She consented to marry against her
father's will, corresponded with Yusuf to arrange the marriage, and re-
fused to return to her father's house during the trial, insisting on staying
with a third party instead. In attempting to marry the man of her choice,
Safiyya demonstrated remarkable tenacity. This story suggests that a new
notion of marriage—a union of choice based on mutual consent and
affection—had surfaced in turn-of-the-century Egypt.
In looking at Western family history, Lawrence Stone has argued that
the issue of "the timing and nature of family change from the traditional
to the modern" is of crucial importance. He characterized this transition
by (1) the weakening of the bonds of kinship; (2) a greater emotional
bonding between spouses, as marriage becomes "a matter of free choice
based on personal affection and sexual attraction rather than the result of
a mercenary arrangement made between the parents," with a concomi-
tant increase in the demand for divorce as an escape from unsatisfying
relationships; and (3) a change in attitudes toward children.2 This chapter
focuses on the second set of factors (marriage) in Egypt. Robert Spring-
borg has warned against dichotomizing arranged and free-choice mar-
riages for Egypt. He suggests that "marriages should be seen on a con-
tinuum, ranging from those entirely arranged by the parents and family
elders," in which the partners have no say and have not met, to those
"that are totally the product of the partners' instigation." The concept of
continuum proves useful, for the arranged marriage of today (in which a
couple that has been introduced meets frequently before marriage) is not
the arranged marriage of earlier generations.3 The goal here is to trace
movement along this continuum.
For most Egyptians, marriage is contracted according to Islamic law. A
normative Islamic marriage pattern emerged in the early centuries of
Islam that permitted men up to four wives and unlimited concubines and
made divorce easy for men but quite difficult for women.4 This legal
structure, combined with the wider social structure, discouraged strong
marital bonds, putting the patriarch rather than the couple at the center of
the family. Yet within the parameters established by law, in different
times and places, and among various strata, marital relations have devel-
oped in diverse ways.5 Here the specific concern is to trace the marriage
patterns of middle- and upper-class urban Egyptians in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
Edward Lane gave a rich description of practices in the 1830s in An
Account of the Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians. In looking at
various strata in towns and cities, Lane found arranged marriages, based
on a brideprice, of couples who did not meet until the wedding cere-
mony. Some brides were as young as twelve or thirteen and few older
 Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt 277

than sixteen. Incidences of polygyny were rare, perhaps one in twenty,

and according to Lane occurred more often among the "lower orders"
than the upper ones. Middle- and upper-class men, however, frequently
had concubines in addition to wives. Lane found rampant male-initiated
divorce and maintained that "there are certainly not many persons in
Cairo who have not divorced one wife, if they have been long married."6
More than a century later urban marriage patterns in Egypt had
changed significantly. Leila el Hamamsy wrote in the 1950s that "the
trends are towards a higher age of marriage among educated women.
Especially for those who want to attend the university, marriage may
have to wait until they reach the twenties. . . . Many of them would like
to choose their own husbands . . . [and] want to marry men closer to
their own age."7 In the 1980s Andrea Rugh observed that rational and
romantic approaches to marriage were still frequently at odds among the
urban lower classes.8 But the ideal of companionate marriage had spread
among the urban middle and upper classes. Though marriages might still
be arranged in these strata by family or friends, the couple usually met
before marriage as young people increasingly looked for love matches.
When did companionate marriage emerge in Egypt? Sources from the
1870s on show reformers criticizing marital and divorce practices and
promoting a new vision of conjugal relations, which paved the way for
new legislation in the 1920s. During this period urban middle-class and
upper-class Egyptians proved increasingly receptive to the idea of mar-
riage based on mutual affection. This was primarily a consequence of
internal changes in Egyptian society rather than a product of European
example.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

Nineteeth-century Egyptians were heirs to medieval Arabic poetry and

prose rife with stories of romance. One recurrent theme was that of
chaste love: In "Majnun and Laila," for example, conditions conspired to
prevent the couple from consummating their love through marriage.9 In
any case, many medieval writers held that union spoiled love, maintain-
ing that it thrived better before or outside of marriage. These writers
developed a "copious vocabulary" for love, and tended to use 'ishq,
hawa', and hubb interchangeably, though the first two terms sometimes
suggested lust and usually referred to greater intensities of love.10 Mod-
ern writers preferred the more moderate word hubb, emphasizing emo-
tional bonds and deemphasizing physical passion in their attempts to
couple love and marriage.
Love and marriage were the themes of many plays by the Egyptian
writer Ya'qub Sanu', who staged some of his dramas in Cairo in the early
278 Beth Baron

1870s and is credited with the founding of modern Arabic theater. His
play Bursat Misr (The stock market of Egypt) relates the story of a banker
who promises his sixteen-year-old daughter Labiba to a man she does not
love, disregarding her love for a less wealthy man. In the play al-'Alil (The
sick man), a father pledges his young daughter Hanim to the man who
heals him, unaware that she has been exchanging love letters with a
young man named Mitri. In yet another play, al-Sadaqa (Friendship), the
orphan Warda vows to marry her cousin Na'um, but when Na'um's
letters stop coming from England where he is studying, her aunt tries to
persuade her to marry another suitor. Dealing with the lives of middle-
and upper-middle-class Egyptians, these plays end happily as love tri-
umphs over all obstacles, especially family opposition. Audiences of di-
verse backgrounds responded enthusiastically to these plays, indicating
support for the idea of love as the basis of marriage.11
Turn-of-the-century writers echoed this idea. Sa'diyya Sa'd al-Din, an
Egyptian Muslim woman writing under the pseudonym Shajarat al-
Durr, stressed the companionate as well as the romantic dimensions of
love. Noting that a wife is the partner of a man in his life, she implied that
marriage should be monogamous, emotionally fulfilling, and long last-
ing. A few years later the Syrian immigrant writer Niqula Haddad linked
love and marriage in a book by that title, al-Hubb wa'l-zawaj (Love and
marriage).12 During this period there was an outpouring of romantic
literature in Egypt, including translations of European works and origi-
nal Arabic short stories and narratives. One of the earliest Egyptian nov-
els, Zainab, written by Muhammad Husain Haikal and published in 1914,
deals with love. It focuses on the peasant woman Zainab, who loves a
poor peasant named Ibrahim but is forced to marry someone wealthier.
When Ibrahim is sent away, she succumbs in despair to sickness and
death. Meanwhile, the landowner's son Hamid searches for love among
peasant and city women, yet fails to find it. According to Charles Smith,
the central issue of Zainab is "that of love, hubb, and the impossibility of its
fulfillment in Egypt." Haikal argued that true love, as opposed to physical
passion (hawa'), would not be realized until women were educated and
transformed from emotional to more rational beings.13
The idea that marriage should be based on love seemed to be spread-
ing, at least among the urban middle and upper classes. Malak Hifni
Nasif, a female essayist who wrote under the name Bahithat al-Badiya,
claimed that women were no longer satisfied only with clothes and food
like "one of the servants of the house," but wanted "marital happiness
more than previously," for they had learned that there is no reason to live
together "if love is not the basis of a couple's relations."14 Male and
female writers of various backgrounds pushed companionate marriage as
 Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt 279

an alternative to arranged marriages based solely on economic calcula-

tions.

THE CONTRACT

In Islamic law marriage is a contract. The groom is responsible for the

mahr (bridewealth), paid directly to the bride, with some portion deferred
in case of divorce or death.15 Once married, the husband is required to
provide adequate maintenance (food, clothing, and housing) for his wife
and their children. In return, the woman promises obedience. Marriage
was arranged through negotiations between families, who bargained
over the bridewealth and other details. Through advantageous alliances
families sought to improve their economic position, cement political ties,
or enhance their social prestige. In short, the marriage system operated
according to market principles, to the detriment of some women. "If she
is poor, he does not want her, and if she is rich, he wants her money,"
wrote Malak Hifni Nasif.16
Since the financial underpinnings of marriage were clear, changes in
the economy invariably had an impact on marital agreements in particu-
lar and on marriage patterns in general. For the growing middle class,
Egypt's entry into the world market resulted in greater preoccupation
with capital and consumption as the country became a market for Euro-
pean manufactured goods. A few writers in the early 1900s bemoaned
this situation, where money had become the "all and all" and marriages
based on "true lasting love" were rare.17 Greater financial risks and gains
raised expectations for the mahr. Some men, particularly those who
worked for the government, claimed that their salaries were not high
enough to enable them to save money. Hence they appeared to be "flee-
ing from marriage."18
Financial problems plagued the marital agreements of non-Muslims as
well as Muslims. Among Egyptian Copts and Jews the woman's family
was responsible for the dowry, sometimes providing the groom with
enough capital to start a business. Yet in turn-of-the-century Egypt fa-
thers seemed "unable to raise what the groom demands," preventing or
postponing some marriages.19 Expectations for the bridewealth and the
dowry were probably rising in a period of unprecedented speculation
and prosperity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twen-
tieth century. Then the 1907 economic crisis sent shock waves through
the marriage market, adversely affecting marital plans. Writers, es-
pecially those of the newly emerging middle class, criticized the empha-
sis placed on the financial considerations of marriage. They set out to
reform the business of arranging marriages, urging a shift in focus from
280 Beth Baron

the economic to the emotional compatibility of a couple, which meant

allowing couples to meet before marriage.

PREMARITAL MIXING

In the early nineteenth century agents and agencies helped parents or

parties to arrange marriages. In Cairo, for example, marriage bureaus
located partners for clients through a network of representatives in public
baths and slave markets. The marriage broker still appears in the twen-
tieth century, for example, in Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley, set in 1940s
Cairo.20 According to Islamic law an arranged marriage could not pro-
ceed until a girl had given her consent, though until a girl reached pu-
berty (the age of majority, set at no less than nine and presumed by age
fifteen), she did not have the right to voice approval or disapproval. This
meant that a girl was given a description and a name. Lack of response
was interpreted as acceptance, or a negative response was overruled and
girls were forced to marry against their will. Social critics called for more
informed choices, suggesting that the prospective bride and groom be
allowed to meet after their engagement and before marriage.21
A couple became engaged when parents, guardians, or representa-
tives had agreed to the mahr and read the opening verse of the Quran
together. Still, unless they were related (in which case they probably
knew one another), they could not meet, even in the company of others.
Many held that Islamic law forbade premarital meetings. Others main-
tained that custom, not law, prohibited engaged men and women from
meeting. The Islamic reformer Muhammad 'Abduh argued that all
schools permitted it.22 A few Muslims initiated premarital contacts in
enterprising ways. One man placed an advertisement in a newspaper
calling for a young Muslim woman to exchange letters with him, his only
stipulation being that she not be over twenty. Seventeen women re-
sponded, indicating that young people were attempting to communicate
with one another.23
Observers pointed to changing patterns among Copts, who had re-
cently permitted couples to meet before marriage. The patriarch encour-
aged this mixing in an 1895 encyclical letter to his clergy, instructing them
to ensure that mutual knowledge and consent existed before performing
the marriage ceremony.24 Copts were probably more open to supervised
premarital mixing because they did not have the options of polygyny or
easy male divorce. (Marriages could be dissolved upon conversion of a
spouse, a tactic occasionally used, or annulled; but divorces were granted
only on grounds of insanity or infertility.)
As Egypt was transformed from a family-centered society with little
geographical or social mobility into a more mobile society with a growing
 Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt 281

bourgeoisie, love matches became more accepted, particularly among the

urban middle and upper classes. Some men and women began to meet
before marriage to determine affinity and romantic possibility, but not yet
challenging parental prerogatives.25

RAISING THE AGE AT MARRIAGE

After the marriage contract was finalized (the offer to marry was accepted
in front of two male witnesses), the event was usually publicized by a
wedding procession and party. Among the upper strata this celebration
increasingly incorporated Western food, fashion, and drink, reflecting
some degree of Westernization and changing values.26 In whatever way
they celebrated, women in turn-of-the-century Egypt seemed "pre-
destined" for marriage, for "sooner or later, with very rare exceptions,"
they were "subject to this natural law," in the words of Alexandra Avi-
erino, owner of the journal Anis al-jalis.27 But was it sooner or later?
Lane reported in the 1830s that most women married at age twelve or
thirteen and few later than sixteen. In late-nineteenth-century Egypt,
early marriage was still common, particularly in the countryside. Some
parents used early marriage to safeguard against illicit sexual activity;
others to force a desired match. By the early 1900s these unions were
viewed by many as dangerous and were blamed for a range of psycholog-
ical and physiological problems. Malak Hifni Nasif observed that many
girls who married at a young age developed "diseases of the nerves
(hysteria)." Doctors also documented the medical consequences of early
marriage, showing difficult and fatal deliveries.28
As a result of their growing awareness of the harm of early marriages,
reformers tried to prevent them, appealing to the different religious au-
thorities in Egypt. The Coptic patriarch supported this drive and refused
to issue a marital license before a girl reached the age of sixteen and a boy
twenty.29 Yet Muslim authorities could find no basis in Islamic law to
justify the establishment of minimum age limits. (The Prophet Muham-
mad had married ' A'isha when she was about six and consummated the
marriage a few years later.)30 Legislators and administrators tried differ-
ent tactics. A Muslim deputy introduced a bill into the legislative assem-
bly in 1914 that attempted to fix the marriage age at sixteen, but it was
defeated. A few years later administrators amended the penal code to
treat consummation of marriage with a child under twelve as rape,
though the marriage itself was considered valid.31 Then, in 1923, the
Egyptian Code of Organization and Procedure for Shari'a Courts re-
quired that all marriages be registered in order to make Jegal claims and
directed the courts not to hear claims of marriage if the bride was under
sixteen and the groom under eighteen at the time of the contract. Further-
282 Beth Baron

more, officials would not conclude or register a marriage contract be-

tween couples who had not reached these ages. Although such regula-
tions did not void child marriage per se, they did discourage it.32
The legal attempt to raise the age at marriage mirrored a trend already
under way. Qasim Amin, the author of several books on women and
society, noted in 1900 that the average age at marriage was generally
between twenty and thirty, whereas in the past it had been at maturity or
before.33 Statistics confirm this impression. The 1907 and 1917 censuses
show that most girls married between the ages of twenty and twenty-
nine, and the number of girls who married before this—the overwhelm-
ing majority of whom were fifteen to nineteen—was less than 10 percent
of the female population.34 Many young men, particularly professionals
of the new middle class, postponed marriage until they had earned de-
grees, found employment, and saved money, and many now wanted
educated wives. Young women entered the new state and private schools
in growing numbers, putting off marriage until they finished school.35
Influenced by a combination of medical, economic, and educational con-
siderations, women and men in the early 1900s were marrying at later
ages.
Reformers also condemned the related practice of marrying young
women to older men. Though the censuses give little indication of how
often this occurred, the much higher proportion of widowed or divorced
women over fifty (60 percent in 1907) to widowed or divorced men (10
percent) suggests that older men who remarried chose younger wives.36
Many Egyptians maintained that a husband should be ten to twenty
years older than his wife, but extreme gaps seemed improper.
The practice of marrying young girls to older men occurred among
rural inhabitants as well as among urban elites. Al-'Afaf carried the story
of the forced marriage of a twenty-year-old educated Cairene woman,
former secretary of a women's organization. "Without any shame" her
father and uncle decided "to sell her like a commodity" to a wealthy man
of eighty. She became distressed and "cut off her hair in despair"; after
the marriage she attempted suicide by throwing herself in the path of a
train. The editor of al-'Afaf used this story to illustrate the injustice of
marrying a young girl or woman to an older man, or any man, against her
will.3?
The ideal of companionate marriage based on mutual affection and
physical attraction implied marriage between adults relatively close in
age who sought a consensual and monogamous union. A clear trend
toward later marriage among the elites had begun, as had efforts to bridge
the age gap and to ensure consent. To what extent had multiple partners,
one of the main obstacles to the new marital ideal, been eliminated?
 Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt 283

TOWARD MONOGAMY

According to Islamic law a Muslim man could take up to four wives,

provided that he treated them equally (a stipulation that was morally but
not legally binding). At the same time, he could enjoy innumerable con-
cubines, female slaves who served as sexual partners. In the second half
of the nineteenth century female slaves were still purchased in Egypt,
including the highly prized Circassians. Free women decried the "army
of Circassians" that had conquered Egypt, "emerging victorious with the
best of our men."38 In 1877 the Anglo-Egyptian Convention outlawed the
slave trade, and in the following decades female slavery disappeared. Yet
concubinage, in any case, may have been losing ground as the ideal of
companionate marriage began to spread in some circles. Here Ottoman
attitudes present certain parallels. In looking at the literature of Ottoman
male reformists after 1860, Deniz Kandiyoti found "a rejection of the
slave girl . . . and a hankering for more companionate and romantic rela-
tionships" as a persistent theme.39
Did wives replace concubines as partners, causing an upsurge in poly-
gyny? The 1907 census reported 6 percent more married women than
men, which was taken to be a rough estimate of the rate of polygyny. This
corresponds to Lane's estimate in the 1830s of one marriage in twenty as
polygamous.40 Though it is difficult to know how much this figure had
fluctuated in the interim, the elimination of concubinage does not seem
to have caused an increase in the rate of polygyny. Rather, the demise of
slavery strengthened the institution of marriage and served as a neces-
sary first step toward the ideal of monogamy.
Although only a small minority of Egyptian marriages were poly-
gynous, the threat hovered over all women married to Muslim men, for
they could take additional wives at any time for any reason. Some men
became impatient when their wives did not conceive or produce sons in
particular. Other men planned second marriages to younger women.
One woman told a reporter from al-'Afafthat she had lived with and loved
her husband for many years, but that he had married a poor girl whom
she took in as a servant. The first wife then asked for a divorce.41 Second
wives were usually seen as intruders and cannot have enjoyed the com-
petition for the resources and attention of a shared husband.
Some women found divorce preferable to polygyny. "The first is pain
and freedom, and the second is pain and fettering," wrote Malak Hifni
Nasif.42 Yet a divorce under such circumstances was contingent on a
husband's approval, which was not always given. As a result, many
women felt trapped. A few killed husbands who took second wives;
some killed themselves. In one report from Port Said, a soldier's wife set
284 Beth Baron

herself on fire, "saying in her last breath that she committed suicide
because she was unable to continue near her co-wife."43
Reformers used the press and the podium to mobilize public opinion
against polygyny. Although attitudes began to change among certain
strata, legislation on this issue lagged as many Muslims continued to hold
as basic the right to four wives. A committee appointed in 1926 to recom-
mend reforms in the laws of marriage and divorce proposed a series of
articles limiting polygyny. But these articles were excluded from the 1929
reform law at the personal decision of King Fuad, in part because poly-
gyny was practiced mostly by peasants and therefore justified on the
grounds of its impact on the birthrate and the economy.44 In any case, the
flip side to polygyny was easy divorce, making serial wives a viable
alternative to concurrent ones.

DISSOLVING A MARRIAGE

As expectations for emotional fulfillment in marriage increased in Chris-

tian countries, so, too, did demands for ending dissatisfactory rela-
tionships. This meant expanding grounds for divorce, and in the process
deconsecrating marriage.45 By contrast, divorce was already legal under
Islamic law, for marriage was a contract that could be voided. According
to Hanafi law, a man could divorce his wife at will for whatever reason
without appearing in court. A woman, however, had few options for
dissolving a union. She could apply for judicial annulment on the
grounds of her husband's impotence, and upon reaching puberty a child
bride could repudiate a marriage not contracted by her father or grand-
father.46 Deserted, abused, and simply unhappy wives had little recourse
to divorce if their husbands would not consent. The challenge in Egypt in
the early twentieth century became one of striking a balance: expanding
women's grounds for divorce while limiting men's abuse of it.
Social critics first set out to document the results of the powerlessness
of women to leave their husbands. In one case reported in the press, a
woman from Bani Suwaif who could not get a divorce from her husband
killed him with the help of her cousin (who in the course of the crime
confessed his love for her). The two were caught after the body was
discovered; she was sentenced to twelve years in prison and he to death.
In another case, a father of five spent his wife's savings on prostitutes and
gambling, and when she attempted to leave threw her from the window
of their third-story apartment. Other abused wives took their own lives.
One Cairene woman who had become "debilitated by her husband's
treatment . . . and had given up all hope of deliverance from him" swal-
lowed a fatal dose of carbolic acid.47
Stories such as these generated debate about the need to expand worn-
 Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt 285

en's grounds for divorce. One woman told a reporter that she believed "a
young woman should be granted freedom in separating from a husband"
but was clearly looking for ways to reconcile Islamic law with contempo-
rary women's expectations. Some Egyptians argued that Islamic law al-
ready protected women, by giving them the right to stipulate grounds for
divorce in conditional clauses in their marriage contracts, providing that
their husbands agreed. Yet not many women knew that they had this
right or thought to use it on the eve of marriage, and in any case some
jurists considered these clauses invalid and nonbinding.48
Calls to grant women wider grounds for divorce, and to guarantee that
their separation did not hinge on a husband's approval, prior or other-
wise, culminated in new legislation. A 1920 law that was supplemented
in 1929 recognized four new conditions for judicial relief: if the husband
had a chronic or incurable disease, failed to provide maintenance, de-
serted his wife, or maltreated her, she could apply to a court for dissolu-
tion of the marriage.49 Part of a general reform of marriage and divorce
law that drew on the different Islamic law schools and minority opinions
within them, these articles sought to terminate unions that did not con-
form to the emerging ideal of companionate marriage. Yet efforts to limit
men's arbitrary ability to divorce their wives at will outside the court
proved less successful.

ATTEMPTS TO RESTRICT REPUDIATION

Unilateral divorce empowered men, for it could be used as a threat to

modify a wife's behavior or as a punishment to teach her a lesson. In most
cases it was reversible: a husband could take back his wife during the
waiting period (a few months set aside to see if she was pregnant) with-
out negotiating a new contract. Even after one or two divorces, the couple
could remarry. However, a third divorce or triple talaq (the oath of divorce
pronounced three times in a row) was final and irreversible. Hanafi law
was strict in this regard, considering a formula of divorce valid, whether
pronounced under duress or intoxification, as a threat or an oath, in
anger or in jest.50
This created hardships for women who wanted to return to their for-
mer husbands. One twenty-five-year-old woman in this predicament
asked a religious scholar for advice. She had lived with and loved her
husband, by whom she had two children, until he had pronounced a
triple talaq. Now he wanted her back, but she did not know what to do.5*
According to the law, whether or not her husband had intended to di-
vorce her, he had pronounced the formula and therefore the divorce
stood. Only if she contracted a marriage with another man, consum-
mated it, and he then divorced her could she remarry her first husband.
286 Beth Baron

Yet an interim marriage contracted for this purpose was illegal, though
not unknown. Reformers recognized that some legal change was needed
in this area.
Most wives were not taken back, and they left with their possessions
and the deferred portion of the bride wealth. A divorced wife did not re-
ceive any maintenance after the waiting period, though if she had small
children in her care she was supposed to receive money for them. Many
women returned to their families, but this was not always possible.52 The
plight of divorced women, who often had no legitimate way to support
themselves, led reformers to call for more work opportunities for
women.
Divorce seemed widespread to early-twentieth-century observers.
Men repudiated women for "weak reasons or none at all/'53 Yet to mea-
sure the frequency of divorce during this period is difficult. Censuses
listed divorced women as widows, and shari'a court records were not
necessarily accurate or comprehensive. In 1903, for example, the courts of
Egypt recorded 176,474 marriages and 52,992 divorces—more than two
divorces for every seven marriages, or a divorce rate of 30 percent. These
figures, however, did not necessarily reflect remarriages for which no
new certificate of marriage was needed and other marriages and divorces
escaped the notice of the courts.54
Whatever the figures, reformers found the number of divorces exces-
sive and sought to discourage unjust and unnecessary divorce. They
condemned men for repudiating older wives and wives who had not
produced male children. They also pointed out that the threat of di-
vorce—not only the act itself—was harmful. "Shajarat al-Durr" argued
that divorce caused a "lack of trust in a Muslim woman's heart" and
forced her "to use deceit, lies, and cheating" to please her husband. Yet
she did not call for elimination of divorce altogether, the absence of which
"would also have been damaging when the couple is unable to harmo-
nize in life and love/'55
The 1929 Law of Reforms in Marriage and Divorce dealt with certain
aspects of male divorce. It stipulated that divorces pronounced under
compulsion or while intoxicated (but not those made in jest) were invalid;
so, too, were oaths and utterances not intended to lead to divorce; finally,
almost all pronouncements of divorce were considered single and re-
vocable.56 The new law cleared up certain difficulties, but did not greatly
restrict unilateral male divorce. In the meantime, reformers tried to mod-
ify behavior by publicizing the problems caused by easy divorce.
In the Muslim Middle East, marriage has always been a contract that
could be voided. The debate surrounding divorce in early-twentieth-
century Egypt was an attempt to infuse that contract with greater mean-
 Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt 287

ing. Men had to be more committed to marriage and prevented from

repudiating wives at will. Women had to have more freedom to leave
unsupporting, diseased, or abusive husbands. It proved easier to expand
women's grounds for judicial divorce than to limit male prerogatives. Yet
demands for female-initiated divorce and reforms in this area should not
be taken as a sign of the decline of marriage or of the family. Rather they
should be seen as part of the effort to strengthen the couple and place it at
the center of the family, as well as further proof of the emerging ideal of
companionate marriage.

The ideal of companionate marriage began to spread in Egypt in the

early twentieth century among the urban middle and upper classes. Es-
sayists, dramatists, and novelists all argued for the need to make love a
cornerstone of marriage. At the same time young people asked to meet
before marriage to determine compatibility. For a variety of reasons men
and women married later, a delay that created the possibility for greater
intellectual and emotional affinity, raised expectations for the rela-
tionship, and probably decreased fertility. Though polygyny remained a
threat to many and a reality for a few, concubinage had been eliminated.
Female-initiated divorce became accessible in certain situations, whereas
male repudiation was slightly curtailed. Taken together the evidence sug-
gests that the marital ideal was in flux, moving along a continuum from
arranged marriages toward ones of greater choice.
The question of agency remains. What propelled the movement? Were
the urban middle and upper classes drawn toward companionate mar-
riage as a Western idea, or were other factors at work? Egyptian writers
rarely pointed to Western marital relations as a model, for many felt that
Western family ties were eroding and should definitely not be emu-
lated.57 Instead, indigenous economic developments, social changes,
ideological debates, and legal reforms all combined to reshape conjugal
relations. Other aspects of family life were probably undergoing parallel
transformations. In this regard it would be helpful to study changes in
the bonds of kinship and in attitudes toward children during the same
period.58 A shift from patriarchal to conjugal family may have begun,
marking the origins of a modern family type in Egypt.
One final question: What happened to Shaikh 'Ali Yusuf and Safiyya
al-Sadat, the couple who had married against her father's wishes and had
fought him in court to stay together? Though they remained married until
Yusufs death in 1914, theirs was not in the end a harmonious union.59
Selecting one's partner did not guarantee marital success, nor did it nec-
essarily promise more happiness than an arranged marriage. Still, unions
of love and choice were increasingly favored by young people.
288 Beth Baron

Notes

1. Esther Moyal, "al-Sayyid 'Abd al-Khaliq al-Sadat wa karimatuhu/' al-'A'ila

3, no. 11 (1 Aug. 1904): 83-84; Ahmad Baha' al-Din, Ayyam laha ta'rikh (Cairo:
Kitab Ruz al-Yusuf, 1954), 1:47-61; Abbas Kelidar, "Shaykh 'All Yusuf: Egyp-
tian Journalist and Islamic Nationalist/' in Intellectual Life in the Arab East, 1890-
1939, ed. Marwan R. Buheiry (Beirut: American University of Beirut Press, 1981),
18.
2. Lawrence Stone, "Family History in the 1980s: Past Achievements and Fu-
ture Trends," in The New History: The 1980s and Beyond, ed. Theodore K. Rabb and
Robert I. Rotberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 72-73, 83. Other
scholars reject the "traditional to modern" typology, preferring the "patriarchal to
nuclear" paradigm. See Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, "The Lore and Reality of
Middle Eastern Patriarchy," Die Welt des Islams 28 (1988): 496-512. Schilcher sug-
gests that patriarchy can be "a family pattern linked to a particular family's own
development cycle" and locates the advent of this pattern in early modern times.
3. Robert Springborg, Family, Power, and Politics in Egypt: Sayed Bey Marei
—His Clan, Clients, and Cohorts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1982), 29-30.
4. See Leila Ahmed, "Women and the Advent of Islam," Signs 11 (1986): 665-
91.
5. See, for example, Judith E. Tucker, "Marriage and Family in Nablus, 1720-
1856: Toward a History of Arab Marriage," Journal of Family History 13, no. 2 (1988):
165-79. Tucker shows the variety of marriage patterns among women of different
classes in the Palestinian town of Nablus.
6. Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern
Egyptians (London: Ward, Lock, 1890), 141-74.
7. L. S. el Hamamsy, "The Changing Role of the Egyptian Woman," in Readings
in Arab Middle Eastern Societies and Cultures, ed. Abdulla M. Lutfiyya and Charles
W. Churchill (Paris: Mouton, 1970), 597-98.
8. Andrea B. Rugh, Family in Contemporary Egypt (Syracuse: Syracuse Univer-
sity Press, 1984), 107-47; see also Edwin Terry Prothro and Lutfy Najib Diab,
Changing Family Patterns in the Arab East (Beirut: American University of Beirut
Press, 1974).
9. J. C. Burgel, "Love, Lust, and Longing: Eroticism in Early Islam as Reflected
in Literary Sources," in Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, ed. Afaf Lutfi al-
Sayyid-Marsot (Malibu, Calif.: Undena, 1979), 91-93.
10. Lois Anita Giffen, Theory of Profane Love among the Arabs: The Development of
the Genre (New York: New York University Press, 1971), 83-96, 129.
11. Matti Moosa, "Ya'qub Sanu' and the Rise of Arab Drama in Egypt," Interna-
tional Journal of Middle East Studies 5 (1974): 422-33; Shmuel Moreh, "Ya'qub Sanu':
His Religious Identity and Work in the Theater and Journalism, according to the
Family Archive," in The Jews of Egypt: A Mediterranean Society in Modern Times, ed.
Shimon Shamir (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987), 111-29.
12. Shajarat al-Durr, "al-Talaq wa ta'addud al-zaujat," Ants al-jalis 1, no. 7
(1898): 206. Shajar al-Durr was the name of a medieval woman ruler in Egypt,
 Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt 289

which in contemporary popular writing is usually rendered Shajarat. Niqula Had-

dad, al-Hubb wal-zawaj (Cairo: al-Matba'a al-'Umumiyya, 1901).
13. Charles D. Smith, "Love, Passion and Class in the Fiction of Muhammad
Husayn Haykal," Journal of the American Oriental Society 99, no. 2 (1979): 251;
Muhammad Husain Haikal, Zainab (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahda al-Misriyya, 1914).
14. Malak Hifni Nasif [Bahithat al-Badiya], al-Nisa1'iyyat (Cairo: Matba'at al-
Jarida, 1910), 3-4.
15. The term bridezvealth seems more appropriate than brideprice, for the money
went to the bride and not to her family, at least in theory. See Jack Goody, "Bride-
wealth and Dowry in Africa and Eurasia," in Bridewealth and Dowry, ed. Jack Goody
and S. J. Tambiah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 1-58.
16. Nasif, al-Nisa'iyyat, 57.
17. Rosa Antun, "al-Zawaj al-sa'id," al-Sayyidat wa'l-banat 2, no. 11 (1906): 307.
18. "Al-Zawaj," Ants al-jalis 1, no. 12 (1898): 383-88; "Kaifa natazawwaj wa
kaifa na'ish," Anis al-jalis 2, no. 9 (1899): 343-47.
19. Regina 'Awwad, "al-Zawaj," al-Sa'ada 1, no. 3 (1902): 51; see Mark Glazer,
"The Dowry as Capital Accumulation among the Sephardic Jews of Istanbul,
Turkey," International Journal of Middle East Studies 10 (1979): 373-80.
20. Nadia Tomiche, "Egyptian Women in the First Half of the Nineteenth
Century," in The Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East, ed. William R. Polk
and Richard L. Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 179;
Naguib Mahfouz, Zuqaq al-midaqq (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, n.d.); Midacj Alley (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1981).
21. See, for example, "al-Mar'a al-muslima fi Misr," Anis al-jalis 5, no. 2 (1902):
980-81.
22. Ibid.; see Muhammad 'Abduh, al-A'mal al-kamila li'l-Imam Muhammad
'Abduh, ed. Muhammad 'Imara (Beirut: al-Mu'assasa al-'Arabiyya li'1-Dirasat
wa'1-Nashr, 1972) 2:68-77.
23. "Al-Mar'a al-misriyya," Anis al-jalis 6, no. 9 (1903): 1546-54.
24. E. L. Butcher, Things Seen In Egypt (London: Seeley, 1910), 50-51.
25. "Al-Mar'a al-wataniyya," al-Sufur3, no. 140 (24 Jan. 1918): 2-3.
26. Fatima Rashid, "al-Afrah," Tarqiyat al-mar'a 1, no. 7 (1908): 98-101; Malak
Hifni Nasif, "al-A'ras," Anis al-jalis 7, no. 7 (1904): 1872-75.
27. Alexandra Avierino, "L'enseignement de la jeune fille," Le Lotus 2, no. 1
(1902): 20.
28. Lane, Manners and Customs, 143; Nasif, al-Nisa1 iyyat, 32; A. C. McBarnet,
"The New Penal Code: Offenses against Morality and the Marriage Tie and Chil-
dren," UEgypte contemporaine 10, no. 46 (1919): 383.
29. Butcher, Things Seen in Egypt, 50-51.
30. Nabia Abbott, Aishah: The Beloved of Mohammed (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1942), 6-7.
31. Anna Y. Thompson, "The Woman Question in Egypt," Moslem World 4, no.
3 (1914): 266; McBarnet, "New Penal Code," 382-86.
32. J. N. D. Anderson, "Recent Developments in Shari'a Law III," Muslim
World 41, no. 2 (1951): 113-15; John L. Esposito, Women in Muslim Family Law
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982), 52.
290 Beth Baron

33. Qasim Amin, al-Mar'a al-jadida (Cairo: Matba'at al-Sha'b, 1900), 98.
34. Ministry of Finance, The Census of Egypt, 1907 (Cairo: National Printing De-
partment, 1909), 92; Ministry of Finance, The Census of Egypt, 1917, vol. 2 (Cairo:
Government Press, 1921); McBarnet, "New Penal Code," 383.
35. Nabawiyya Musa, al-Mar'a wa'l-'amal (Alexandria: al-Matba'a al-
Wataniyya, 1920), 42-43; Elizabeth Cooper, The Women of Egypt (New York: F. A.
Stokes, 1914), 169. See Alexandra Avierino, "Matlab jadid," Anis al-jalis 2, no. 5
(1899): 173, for one group of bachelors who vowed to marry only educated wom-
en.
36. Census of Egypt, 1907, 92.
37. Sulaiman al-Salimi, "Rufaqa' bi'1-qawarir," al-'Afafl, no. 36 (17 Oct. 1911):
7. Al-Tayyib Salih describes the violent outcome of one such marriage in rural
Sudan in his novel Mausim al-hijra ila al-shamal (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1969), pub-
lished in English as Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys
Johnson-Davies (London: Heinemann, 1969).
38. Nasif, al-Nisa'iyyat, 14. For more on slavery and its demise, see Ehud
Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 1840-1890 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1982), 179-84; and Judith E. Tucker, Women in Nine-
teenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 191-93.
39. Deniz Kandiyoti, "Slave Girls, Temptresses, and Comrades: Images of
Women in the Turkish Novel/' Feminist Issues 8, no. 1 (1988): 40.
40. Census of Egypt, 1907, 91; Lane, Manners and Customs, 167.
41. Zakiyya al-Kafrawiyya, "Ma wara' al-khudur/' al-'Afaf 1, no. 19 (17 Mar.
1911): 2.
42. Nasif, al-Nisa'iyyat, 29.
43. Sulaiman al-Salimi, "Qatilatzaujiha,"/?/-'^/!, no. 34(4 Aug. 1911): 14-15;
al-Salimi, "al-Maut wa la al-darra," al-'Afaf'2, no. 52 (9 Feb. 1914): 8.
44. Anderson, "Recent Developments III," 124-26. At the time, overpopula-
tion had not yet become an issue of concern in Egypt.
45. See Roderick Phillip, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and a review of that book by
Lawrence Stone, "The Road to Polygamy/' New York Review of Books (2 Mar. 1989):
12-15.
46. J. N. D. Anderson, "Recent Developments in Shari'a Law V," Muslim World
41, no. 4 (1951): 271; Esposito, Muslim Family Law, 17, 53.
47. Sulaiman al-Salimi, "La tuharrijuha," al-'Afaf 2, no. 64 (19 June 1914): 6; al-
Laqita [the Orphan], "Qatil zaujatihi," al-Jins al-latif 12, no. 3 (1919): 99-104; al-
Salimi, "Rufaqa' bi'1-qawarir," al-'Afafl, no. 35 (13 Oct. 1911): 7; al-Salimi, "Ittaqi
Allah ya rajul," al-'Afaf 1, no. 29 (9 June 1911): 15.
48. Zakiyya al-Kafrawiyya, "Jam'iyya li-tahsin al-azya'," al-'Afaf 1, no. 26 (12
May 1911): 13-14.
49. Anderson, "Recent Developments V," 278-88; Esposito, Muslim Family
Law, 53-54.
50. Anderson, "Recent Developments V," 271-77.
51. "Su'al wa-jawab," al-'Afafl, no. 17 (3 Mar. 1911): 1.
52. See, for example, al-Salimi, "al-Mar'a al-mankuba/' al-'Afaf 1, no. 34 (4
Aug. 1911): 14.
 Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt 291

53. Alexandra Avierino, "al-Zawaj wa'1-talaq," Anisal-jalis 1, no. 8 (1904): 1914.

54. "As in India, it was thought advisable not to show divorced persons sepa-
rately from widowed" (Census of Egypt, 1907, 91). Great Britain, Public Record
Office, Foreign Office 407/163, no. 4, Cromer to Lansdowne, Cairo, 26 Feb. 1904,
"Annual Report of 1903." After 1897, documentation was needed to make claims
concerning marriage and divorce, thereby increasing incentive to record changes
in marital status.
55. Al-Durr, "al-Talaq," 203-6; see also Nasif, al-Nisa'iyyat, 60.
56. Anderson, "Recent Developments V," 271-87; Esposito, Muslim Family
Law, 58-59.
57. See Beth Ann Baron, "The Rise of a New Literary Culture: The Women's
Press of Egypt, 1892-1919" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles,
1988), chap. 9.
58. On parent-child relations in an earlier period, see Avner Giladi, "Concepts
of Childhood and Attitudes towards Children in Medieval Islam," Journal of Eco-
nomic and Social History of the Orient 32, no. 2 (1989): 121-52.
59. Kelidar, "Shaykh 'All Yusuf," 20.
 Artists and Entrepreneurs:
16
Female Singers in Cairo during the 1920s

VIRGINIA DANIELSON

Female professional musicians, often singers, have been at

the forefront of musical life in the Arab world historically. As
in other societies, however, concepts about musical accom-
plishment, as well as music criticism and commentary, often
written by men, have generally been constructed so as to ex-
clude women from the category of truly skilled and "serious"
musicians. Accounts of musical life have focused only infre-
quently on women. Unlike their male counterparts, female
performers have rarely been identified by their full names.
Too often they have been confused with dancers or pros-
titutes, especially by foreign observers.1
The development of commercial entertainment in Egypt
during the early twentieth century offered new oppor-
tunities for women, which they readily accepted. In Cairo, a
center for Arab musical life, female professional singers as-
sumed roles in commercial recording, musical theater, music
hall performances, and public concerts as these media devel-
oped in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ali
Jihad Racy noted the "expanding role of women in post-
[ World War I], Egyptian urban music" in commercial record-
ing during the first decades of the twentieth century, and
women's activities extended into all venues of commercial
entertainment, even into management, generally the
province of men.2 The concurrent emergence of many spe-
cialized magazines and newspaper columns dealing with
theater and music and of the memoir as a popular literary
genre during the 1920s allowed female singers to be seen

Research for this chapter was conducted in Egypt during 1982-

83 and 1984-86, when I collected data about the lives of more than
fifty female singers working in Cairo between 1850 and 1930. I am
grateful to the Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Fel-
lowship program for its generous support.

292
 Artists and Entrepreneurs 293

more clearly as both artists and entrepreneurs. This chapter presents a

view of the lives of some of these women, including the young Umm
Kulthum, and their roles in the cultural life of the society and, to some
extent, as public figures communicating with an ever-growing audience
via the nascent mass media.

MUSICAL LIFE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY EGYPT

Documentation for musical life in nineteenth-century Egypt is not readily

available, but it is clear that musical entertainment accompanied special
occasions such as saints' days, weddings, and holidays of all sorts
throughout the country. The performers at these events were sometimes
local people, frequently professional in the sense that they were recog-
nized for unusual musical skill and compensated for their performances,
sometimes very well, regardless of whether musical performance con-
stituted their only occupation. Some were full-time entertainers.3 Many
traveled from the capital to the countryside or from town to town, by
invitation, to perform at special events. Although ostensibly private,
these occasions in fact usually involved whole communities, including
those who could not themselves afford to hire musicians. Singers also
performed in coffee houses under the patronage of the management or
those patrons who could offer gifts.
Women performed in most of these contexts. They recited the Quran,
usually for other women, and sang religious repertories professionally.
Best known during the nineteenth century was al-Hajja al-Suwaisiyya,
an Egyptian from Suez whose brother, husband, and son performed with
her as accompanists. She appeared wearing a malaya (a long black wrap),
head covering, and face veil. From her home region of Suez she moved to
Port Said and eventually to Cairo, where she sang regularly at the coffee
house called Monsieur Antoine near the 'Ataba in the center of the
city.4
The female professional singers of Cairo during the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries were usually identified as 'awalim (s. 'alima).
They maintained their own trade guild (ta'ifa) and performed under
contract to individual patrons for specific occasions. Most of the 'awa-
lim about whom information is available were born in Egypt, often to
working-class families in Cairo. Although some were Christian and oth-
ers Jewish, the majority were Muslim. Most of them married tradesmen
from their family neighborhoods and continued to perform after mar-
riage. In some cases other members of the women's families were also
musicians or singers, including husbands and daughters. Al-Hajja Huda,
for example, leader of the guild of 'awalim in the early twentieth century,
294 Virginia Danielson

was born in 1880 in the Muski area of Cairo. The daughter of a miller, she
also married a miller to whom she bore three daughters and a son. All
three daughters later became 'awalim.5 Among the most fondly remem-
bered of the 'awalim was Bamba Kashshar (d. 1917), the daughter of al-
Shaikh Muhammad Kashshar of Hayy al-Sha'rani in Cairo. Three of her
nieces—Fathiyya, Mufida, and Ratiba Ahmad—became famous profes-
sional singers during the 1920s.
The most accomplished singers were in great demand, held in high
esteem, and able to profit handsomely from the money given them by
audience members. The gifted few attracted the patronage of elite fami-
lies, including the royal family, who supported a number of 'awalim,
actually taking the women into the household. European visitors ob-
served singers in these elite contexts and noted that excellent singers won
great acclaim and were literally showered with money. In the homes to
which Edward Lane was invited, "they sit in one of the apartments of
the hareem, generally at a window looking into the court. The wooden
lattice-work of the window, thought too close to allow them to be seen by
persons without, is sufficiently open to let them be distinctly heard by the
male guests sitting in the court or in one of the apartments which look
into it."6 Georg Ebers wrote, "Here, as in Europe, among these favoured
mortals, the women hold their own against the men in number and
estimation/'7 Unquestionably the most famous was Almaz, who at-
tracted the patronage of Khedive Isma'il. A talented young woman born
to a Lebanese family in Alexandria, Almaz performed professionally for
private parties and was compared favorably with the best singers, male
and female, of her day. She married her principal competitor, 'Abduh al-
Hamuli, reputed to be the best male singer of his century.8 Almaz and the
other court singers led prosperous lives in opulent circumstances as long
as their talents lasted. When they aged and their voices failed, they relied
on marriages or work in the less ratified surroundings of the music hall to
sustain themselves. Their careers were extraordinary compared with
those of most other singers.
Public commercial entertainment establishments proliferated in urban
areas during the nineteenth century. The development of the Azbakiyya
Garden brought with it restaurants and open-air music halls. The area of
Azbakiyya had long been a gathering place for entertainment; after Fri-
day prayers in the early sixteenth century, animal tamers and public
games could be seen there. By the nineteenth century, the center of the
Prophet's birthday celebration was Azbakiyya. After the arrival of the
French, "local Christians and Europeans . . . started taverns, restau-
rants, and cafes in the European style" in the area.9 The Garden itself
included cafes and "kiosks," where European and Egyptian music was
 Artists and Entrepreneurs 295

performed, and eventually housed Sala Santi, one of Cairo's foremost

music halls of the early twentieth century.
A theater district grew up in the area, which featured European pro-
ductions, annual seasons at the Opera House (with "closed boxes for
Moslem ladies"), and Arabic adaptations of European plays as well as
original Arabic theater. Performances by local singers during the inter-
missions became standard, and many young singers began their careers
in this manner.10
Commercial entertainment spread to Raud al-Faraj, located on the
banks of the Nile northwest of the Azbakiyya area. During the first
quarter of the twentieth century, such stars as Fatma Rushdi, Na'ima al-
Masriyya, and Ratiba Ahmad began careers in Cairo or spent the waning
years of their careers in the theaters and music halls of Raud al-Faraj.11
Small theaters also appeared in the so-called popular quarters of Cairo.
Muhammad' Abd al-Wahhab began his career there, and Umm Kulthum,
among many others, sang public concerts at the small theaters when she
moved from her village to Cairo in the early 1920s.
Activities such as commercial recording accelerated after the end of
World War I. The 1920s were a relatively prosperous time in Egypt during
which commercial entertainment of all sorts was well supported. The
professional guild of female singers who contracted for specific occasions
largely gave way to singers (and actresses) who contracted by themselves
or through theatrical agents with institutions such as theatrical com-
panies, recording companies, and theater management for seasons or
years at a time. By the beginning of World War I, few old-style 'awalim
remained. Some of the older singers made the transition from one milieu
to the other, and newcomers launched themselves immediately into the
commercial enterprise.

FEMALE SINGERS IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY CAIRO

Tauhida and Na'ima al-Masriyya represented the older generation of

singers in the 1920s. Tauhida, an immigrant of Syrian extraction, began
her career as a singer and dancer working in the Azbakiyya area. She
married an Egyptian Greek, who opened the club Alf Laila wa Laila
especially for her, where she was the featured singer from 1897. After he
died she continued to own and manage the business until her death in
1932. Tauhida made few, if any, commercial recordings, but as an accom-
plished singer and fud player, she retained a loyal, if relatively small,
audience.12
Raised in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Cairo, Na'ima al-
Masriyya became a professional singer to support herself following a
296 Virginia Danielson

divorce. At first she sang with two neighborhood women for local wed-
dings. As her reputation spread, she moved to music halls in the provin-
cial cities of Egypt, then to Raud al-Faraj, and finally to the main theater
district. By 1927 she had purchased her own casino, the Alhambra, which
she managed herself, appearing as the star singer and planning the other
entertainment.
Musical theater had become increasingly popular in Egypt and was
probably the most popular type of theatrical production in the Arab
world, for as was commonly said, more than plot or production, the
audience came to see a singing star. Since the mid-1910s, following the
successful performances of Munira al-Mahdiyya (c. 18957-1965), musical
theater had been an important venue for female singers. Born in the
provincial town of Zaqaziq and educated at a convent school there, as a
child Munira al-Mahdiyya sneaked out of her house at night to hear the
popular singer al-Lawandiyya. Munira eventually left home to pursue a
career in Cairo, and by 1913 she was singing nightly at the famous coffee
house Nuzhat al-Nufus. She later sang at the Alhambra and the Eldorado
and was one of very few women to make commercial recordings at that
time. After the British authorities closed Nuzhat al-Nufus, Munira, with
the help of director 'Aziz 'Id, joined a theatrical company. In about 1915
she became a member of the troupe headed by Salama Hijazi, who had
established musical theater as a popular art in Egypt. With the onset of his
final illness, she performed the male roles written originally for Hijazi to
great acclaim and subsequently formed her own company, performing
roles written especially for her. Her company frequently performed na-
tionalistic songs that were summarily censored by British colonial au-
thorities. These incidents increased Munira's popularity and led to the
slogan "Hawa' al-hurriyya fi Masrah Munira al-Mahdiyya" (There is love
of freedom in the theater of Munira al-Mahdiyya).13
Munira personally assumed management responsibilities for her
troupe, negotiating with theater owners, composers, lyricists, and sing-
ers, planning schedules and meeting payrolls, as well as performing
herself. She occasionally hired an artistic director to help with these
tasks, but inevitably rejected his judgment in favor of her own and re-
sumed decision making herself. She was a great entertainer, on stage and
off. Her theater and home became gathering places for many notable
politicians and journalists of the day. Sa'd Zaghlul and Husain Rushdi
Pasha were among her admirers. A strong personality, she was a pioneer
among women in commercial recording and musical theater.
Public concerts emerged as a new and attractive mode of entertain-
ment. Fathiyya Ahmad (18987-1975), a talented and successful singer in
musical theater, left that stage in 1925 to devote herself to public concerts
and private parties in order to exercise greater control over her repertory.
 Artists and Entrepreneurs 297

Fathiyya was the daughter of a Quran reciter and the niece of 'alima
Bamba Kashshar. She began her theatrical career in about 1910, with the
companies of Najib al-Rihani and Amin Sidqi. She enjoyed great success
in musical theater and recorded extensively. A relatively quiet person-
ality, Fathiyya Ahmad kept her personal life from the newspapers. She
married a well-off landowner in the early 1920s and left professional life
for several years beginning in 1929 to have children. When she returned
in 1931, she appeared regularly as the featured star at a music hall owned
by Badi'a Masabni, and she assumed the management of the hall when
Badi'a toured.14 A gentle and dignified woman and accomplished singer,
she performed professionally until about 1950.
Badi'a's music hall, or sala, was a landmark in the entertainment busi-
ness of Cairo.15 Born in Syria in the 1890s, Badi'a worked as a singer and
dancer in music halls in Syria, the Levant, and Egypt, supporting herself
with the proceeds of her work and the assistance of a series of wealthy
lovers. She moved to Cairo in 1921 and quickly became the star of Najib
al-Rihani's theatrical troupe. She married al-Rihani in 1923, then left him
and his troupe in 1926. Using her accumulated cash, she opened her own
music hall, Sala Badi'a. It was an immediate and sustained success and
drew rave reviews until she retired from the business in the 1940s.
Sala Badi'a featured a varied program designed around a single female
singing star. Badi'a hired performers and trained her own dancers. She
constantly sought new entertainment and afforded first opportunities to
singers Laila Murad, Farid al-Atrash, Najat 'Ali, and Nadira. Badi'a in-
stituted a weekly matinee for women only, which was quickly imitated by
other music halls and theatrical companies. She was tireless in overseeing
her sala. The success of Sala Badi'a prompted other singers, including
Mari Mansur, Fatma Qadri, 'Aliyya Fauzi, Ansaf, Ratiba Rushdi, and
others, to open their own music halls.16
A determined business woman and colorful personality, Badi'a was
the subject of many stories. It was said that she would argue with a
waitress, a singer, or even a customer over a single piaster. On one
occasion, she reportedly threatened to shoot any editor who published
compromising information about her varied, and in many respects unfor-
tunate, background. Her divorce from al-Rihani remained a topic of gos-
sip for years: Badi'a initiated the separation while on tour with al-Rihani's
troupe in North Africa. Having discovered al-Rihani with a French
actress, she said nothing, but packed her bags and left town in the middle
of that night, leaving the troupe without a star and, according to her note,
leaving al-Rihani to his French woman.17
Unquestionably the most important singer of the century, Umm
Kulthum began her career in Cairo during the 1920s in the shadows of
Munira, Fathiyya, and Badi'a and in the environment they had collec-
298 Virginia Danielson

tively fashioned. Umm Kulthum was born to a poor village Quran reciter
who augmented his income by singing for weddings and holidays in the
area near his village in the eastern Delta. Realizing his daughter's talent at
an early age, he took her along with his son and nephew to perform with
him. She soon became the family star. After several years of increasing
and lucrative opportunities, the family moved permanently to Cairo to
advance Umm Kulthum's career.18
Like other singers in Cairo, Umm Kulthum gained access to perfor-
mance opportunities with the help of mentors, usually male, who were
often musicians or well-to-do audience members. Hers included the re-
ligious singer al-Shaikh Abu al-'Ila Muhammad, the composer Zakariyya
Ahmad, and the poet Ahmad Kami. Abu al-'Ila introduced Umm
Kulthum to Kami (who would write more than half of the lyrics she sang
during her career), and Kami in turn introduced her to the array of literati
and politicians who formed his acquaintance. She was aided by elite
families, including the 'Abd al-Raziqs and the family of Amin al-Mahdi,
at whose homes she performed. Medhat Assem, then a young boy who
was taken by his mother to visit the 'Abd al-Raziqs, described Umm
Kulthum's appearance there as follows:
The ladies were in one room and Umm Kulthum was singing.
She was probably invited because someone of the 'Abd al-Raziq
family heard her in one of the villages in which they owned land.
She wore a yellow dress of the plainest sort and a black head cover-
ing. After she sang the ladies literally pushed her into the men's
salon to sing for them. Umm Kulthum was all alone and terrified.
All the heads of state were there, as they gathered at the house to
talk politics, current events, literature and so on. In the beginning
the guests turned away from her to conversations with their neigh-
bors. But her voice had hardly left her throat when conversations
stopped and a deep silence fell on the place for several seconds.
Umm Kulthum sang religious words. . . . The audience turned
their attention to her and requested many repetitions and returns.
The ;Abd al-Raziqs invited Umm Kulthum more than once to sing
in their home, and this opened the doors of other houses to her.19
Such invitations enhanced her reputation generally.20
Umm Kulthum was initially viewed as countrified, unsophisticated,
and unschooled. "She sang old songs in the style of the saints' day cele-
brations, accompanied by her father and a chorus made up of turbanned
religious men/' according to composer Muhammad al-Qasabji. For those
prepared to honor tradition, she was "a beautiful country girl . . . [who]
stood among her family in the clothes of a Bedouin man; she sang vintage
Egyptian music, consisting of religious songs. She raised her angelic
 Artists and Entrepreneurs 299

voice calling forth in it the voices of the authentic religious Egyptian

people." For others, she was "a tradition-bound imitation" with a strong
but unruly voice and little knowledge of art.21 Most abhorrent was her
accompanying ensemble of male vocalists, her father and relatives from
her village, men of modest talent who were viewed as old-fashioned and
completely unsophisticated: "Do you know anyone who does not com-
plain about their presence around her in this contemptible manner which
invites only disgust, especially when they raise their ugly voices roaring
like the sound of a camel screaming in distress. . . . What is even more
ridiculous is that, when people clap for Umm Kulthum, one of them
stands up, in all his repulsiveness, smiling and saluting the au-
dience. . . . Such dull baseness ruins art."22
An ambitious woman, Umm Kulthum was not content to occupy the
marginal position accorded female reciters of the Quran and religious
singers. She learned new musical styles and practices, copied the man-
ners of the elite of the city, and eventually replaced her father's ensemble
with professional instrumental accompanists. Opportunities to sing in
Cairo increased for Umm Kulthum between 1917 and 1922. Her early
engagements consisted of appearances at small nightclubs outside the
main theater district, small concerts in the working-class areas near the
Husaini mosque, performances between the acts of plays in the large
theaters, and informal gatherings and prenuptial parties at or near the
homes of wealthy families. These were typical opportunities for a new-
comer. She later moved to such major music halls as Sala Santi and
eventually booked herself into the larger theaters, including the largest,
Azbakiyya Theater, which seated about eight hundred people.
Her father made the business arrangements for her concert ap-
pearances through theatrical agents. Usually a series of concerts was
booked and advertised at once. The agent arranged advertising, rented
the premises or settled a fee with club managers, and paid Umm
Kulthum, after taking a percentage for himself. Like almost every other
entertainer in Cairo, Umm Kulthum complained vociferously about the
agents' efforts to increase their shares of the profits. Unfortunately, her
father was not particularly savvy in business matters, and eventually (by
about 1928) Umm Kulthum assumed personal control of her contracts
and finances.
Umm Kulthum preferred to sing two public concerts per week during
the season, three if necessary, and she augmented this schedule with one
or two private parties. Like other singers, she experienced bad seasons,
as indicated by the following: "To induce people to come to her concerts,
promoters have also billed 'the astonishing man who eats 300 eggs, 50
pieces of bread, and 10 jars of pickles/ . . . The name of Umm Kulthum
used to be enough."23 When her revenues were lower than usual in 1927-
300 Virginia Danielson

28 (a difficult season for many entertainers), she performed more fre-

quently and scheduled public concerts in provincial cities—Luxor,
Asyut, al-Minya, Bani Suwaif, and Alexandria. While in a city, she would
give one or two public concerts and also perform at the homes of the local
elite. Like other traveling female stars, she was generally invited to stay at
one of these homes, typically the town house of a wealthy landowner
such as Islam Pasha in Bani Suwaif or Muhammad Bey Sha'rawi in al-
Minya.24
It was in the realm of commercial recording that Umm Kulthum expe-
rienced the success that sustained her during her early years in Cairo.
Recordings had been extremely popular in Egypt since 1904 and were
played throughout the country on gramophones in coffee houses or in
the houses of well-to-do villagers whose neighbors were invited to listen.
Recording companies, although usually conservative and disinclined to
chance a new singer, were also eager to capture as large a share of the
market as possible.25 Thus Odeon Records recruited Umm Kulthum in
1923 and between 1924 and 1925 released fourteen songs sung by Umm
Kulthum and written by composers on retainer to the company. The discs
were recorded in groups of five to ten, each batch governed by its own
contract.
Umm Kulthum's first records were an immediate success and sold
completely in a short time. The large volume of sales surprised recording
executives as well as the singer herself, who had declined to accept a
percentage of sales in favor of a very modest fee paid at the time of
recording. She later attributed the large sales to her long years per-
forming throughout the eastern Delta, where she was better known to a
wider audience than the urban singers were: "Everyone from the coun-
tryside in whose home or at whose wedding I sang, bought my records in
order to be able to say to his friends, 'Come and listen to the girl who sang
at my daughter's wedding/ "26
Most singers sold their recordings for a flat fee, leaving all rights to
profits to the recording company. Others took a percentage of sales,
usually 3,5, or 10 percent, occasionally more, payable to the artist during
her lifetime and to her estate after death. The percentage of sales option
could be very profitable, but like most female singers Umm Kulthum was
wary of such contracts and changed her mind only after suffering sub-
stantial losses with flat fees. Following her initial success, Umm Kulthum
negotiated the highest recording fee in Cairo c. 1924, £E50, or about $250
per side.27 Mansur 'Awad, the new director of Odeon's principal com-
petitor, Gramophone Records, lured Umm Kulthum away from Odeon
Records in 1926 with an even larger contract, which also secured her
annual income, an unusual feat in the volatile entertainment business.
The contract provided that Umm Kulthum receive an annual retainer of
 Artists and Entrepreneurs 30!

£E2,000 and £E80 per recording, rising to £E100 per disc in 1927, whereas
other stars made £E10 to £E50 per disc without an additional retainer.28
The terms of Umm Kulthum's contract, which allowed her to choose
her own accompanists and to exercise final judgment on the release of the
songs, were the best in Egypt. Her success in commercial recording was
critical, for it stabilized her uncertain income at an early stage and thus
permitted her to exercise greater choice in performing opportunities
thereafter. Combined with her artistic accomplishments, her success in
commercial recording cemented a perception of her as "the best" singer
and afforded her great freedom in the further development of her career.

COMMON GROUND

Contrary to the popular wisdom that female singers were foreign or non-
Muslim, most of the female singers working in Cairo between 1850 and
1930 were native Egyptians and most were Muslim. Occasionally they
came from families in which other members were also musicians or sing-
ers, but such was not the norm. Almost all for whom data are available
were born to lower-class families, and success in entertainment offered
them a means of upward mobility economically and, to some extent,
socially.
Most of the singers eventually married. The 'awalim about whom
information is available married tradesmen from their natal quarters. The
later generation of singers usually married into a higher economic stra-
tum than their own, espousing titled landowners or upper-middle-class
professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Divorces or multiple mar-
riages figured in the lives of some: Munira al-Mahdiyya married and
divorced at least five different men; Ratiba Ahmad, according to one
journalist, set records for marriages and divorces.29 Many, however, re-
mained married to the same man all their lives.
Blatantly immoral conduct clearly was not tolerated from star female
singers. Badi'a Masabni's series of lovers was public knowledge and
drew occasional negative comment. Ratiba Ahmad was castigated for her
habitual rowdiness and public drunkenness. Whereas a strong, outgo-
ing, fun-loving personality was rewarded, some semblance of decent
public behavior was also expected. Prostitution as such was associated
with a lower echelon of entertainer and in most instances, not surpris-
ingly, was a last resort.
The commercial environment presented more problems for the enter-
tainers than did private homes and community gatherings: audiences
were larger and often unknown to the singer, alcoholic beverages were
sold, and patrons were occasionally rowdy. In some cases, singers em-
ployed by the music halls and cafes were required to socialize or drink
302 Virginia Danielson

alcohol with patrons. Tauhida, for instance, after much negotiation re-
portedly signed a contract stipulating that she could not be compelled to
sit with customers or to drink more than five glasses of cognac in one
evening.30 Journalists ruefully reported occasions on which audience
members tried to embarrass performers or compel them to sing only
requests. A reviewer in 1922 deplored an incident at a concert by the then
new singer, Umm Kulthum. Having accepted an audience request, the
"sweet young singer" was interrupted by a "harsh voice" from the bal-
cony commanding her to stop the song and sing another instead. In spite
of protestations from the partisans of the initial request and Umm
Kulthum's promise to sing the second request after she finished the first,
the group in the balcony began "screaming, whistling and clapping un-
til the place was in disorder and the audience upset, and the cry 'Long live
the people—Down with Umm Kulthum!7 became 'Long live "This is the
night of a lifetime" [the first song]—Down with "It is impossible for me
not to love"' [the second], and so on until the curtain fell. Then the yell-
ing and screaming only increased." Later that month, Umm Kulthum re-
luctantly sang "You hurt me, my cousin," which was requested, in the
opinion of the reviewer, only to embarrass her; her cousin, to whom she
was believed to be betrothed, was one of her accompanists at the time.
When Fathiyya Ahmad performed in the provincial city of al-Minya in
1927, her performance was disrupted by two local prostitutes who made
"suggestive gestures" to men in the balcony. In the 1930s, when she was
managing a music hall herself, Fathiyya complained that, whereas
drunken patrons were bad enough, even some of the dancers in the show
were drunk. Asmahan frequently recalled the bad days of her early career
in music halls by complaining about the behavior of drunken au-
diences.31 Although such incidents were occasional, difficult audiences
afflicted almost every female singer, compelling each to find a way to deal
with them. A common strategy was to "pack" the audience with a large
coterie of one's own supporters, who would loudly voice approval of the
singer and handle problematic patrons themselves. These cliques of sup-
porters (or "courts" as they came to be known) brought their own prob-
lems, as< the singers insisted they be admitted free of charge, a practice
objectionable to owners and other patrons alike. The behavior of these
enthusiasts was occasionally theatrical and distracting in itself. One of
Fathiyya Ahmad's "court," for instance, moved by her performance, was
reported to have blown "resounding kisses to each of his table compan-
ions, and then to everyone else he recognized in the room."32
All of the women mentioned here commanded a great deal of money.
A conservative estimate of Umm Kulthum's income in 1926-27 would be
well over £E5,000 (or $25,000), and Fathiyya Ahmad's about £E2,200
($11,000). Female concert singers generally made more than actresses or
 Artists and Entrepreneurs 303

singers in plays and bore fewer expenses, because makeup and some-
times costumes were paid for by the individual performer. Women's fees
were roughly equal to men's for concerts and recordings and sometimes
higher.33
Women pursued careers in this difficult arena for the rewards they
believed could be obtained: recognition of their artistic talent, personal
fame, and fortune. A number of them succeeded in attaining their goals
by dint of artistic creativity, good business sense, and careful negotiation
of the difficult and demanding career path. In addition to their artistic
contributions, these women had a lasting impact on the role of women in
the public eye in Egypt.
Although their individual approaches to their careers were different,
these women were generally ambitious and hard working, and they in-
vested a great deal of energy and effort into ensuring artistic and commer-
cial success. Although their financial rewards were great, their schedules
were not easy. During the season most of them worked at least three and
often five nights per week, performing on stage for periods of three to five
hours. Days were spent planning upcoming events, courting journalists,
and for such women as Badi'a Masabni and Munira al-Mahdiyya, manag-
ing the business of a music hall and theatrical troupe, respectively. Dur-
ing the summers most of the women toured and planned the following
year's commitments. Efforts were made in the off season as well to remain
in the public eye.
Most of the female stars eventually assumed the management of their
own careers and money, seeking the counsel of others but retaining the
ultimate decision making. Stars such as Umm Kulthum, Munira al-
Mahdiyya, and Badi'a Masabni became competent business people and
developed reputations as tenacious negotiators. Most of the female stars
deliberately built up savings accounts, and many invested in residences
and other real estate,34
Male and female singers, as well as actors, actresses, and dancers,
occupied relatively low social positions. Marriage into the elite classes
was almost impossible. Egyptian feminist Huda Sha'rawi initially de-
clined even to permit her photograph to appear in the then-theatrical
magazine Ruz al-Yusuf, for fear that she might be associated with
actresses. The prevailing attitude had two aspects: one was the belief that
musical performance was an unworthy use of time. When Zakariyya
Ahmad, for instance, announced his intention to compose music for the
theater, his father's response was "What! You're the son of educated
religious men and you're going to become one of those whose lives
[consist of] 'Oh my night, oh my eyes'?!"35 Another was the association
of entertainment, particularly commercial entertainment, with such vices
as prostitution, drunkenness, gambling, consumption of drugs, and un-
304 Virginia Danielson

dignified public display. The area of Azbakiyya had long included taverns
and brothels, and the resulting problems for performers have already
been noted. The presence of foreign soldiers in Egypt exacerbated the
situation, as these men, alone on holiday in the city, had plenty of money
and few constraints. It was generally believed that their behavior encour-
aged vice and, in turn, corrupted Egyptian youth.36
At the turn of the century, female singers were commonly associated
with "light" entertainment. Their repertories were depicted as musically
and textually simple, lacking both serious poetic content and sophisti-
cated musical composition. Whereas Lane found a number of female
singers to be "learned," they were generally viewed as unskilled com-
pared with their male counterparts and overlooked altogether in serious
discussions of music. In his turn-of-the-century book on music, Kamil al-
Khula'i ignored female singers entirely, except to comment on their
"complete ignorance" of the principles of their art.37 Women were associ-
ated with a genre of song called the taqtuqa, a strophic piece in colloquial
Arabic dealing with coquetry or other common amorous themes. By con-
trast, the classical qasida was considered to be a male genre, optimally a
musically sophisticated rendition of a literary text containing allusions to
Arabic literature or to historical and religious events.38 In fact, a number
of female singers were credited, however grudgingly, with having mas-
tered the repertory of sophisticated song ordinarily associated with their
male counterparts. Almaz was the most famous of them, and others
included Waduda al-Manyalawiyya, Sakina Hasan, al-Sitt Nuzha, al-
Hajja al-Suwaisiyya, Asma' al-Kumsariyya, and Munira al-Mahdiyya.39
By virtue of their achievements, the women who engaged in commer-
cial entertainment demanded and were accorded a measure of public
respect. Led by Umm Kulthum and Fathiyya Ahmad, and built on the
memories of notable 'awalim such as Almaz and religious singers such as
Sakina Hasan, these women raised the visibility of female singers and
firmly established them in the public eye as respectable individuals and
accomplished artists. Throughout her long career, Umm Kulthum exhib-
ited a dignified demeanor, and she is widely credited today with having
raised the level of respect for female singers generally.

The commercial enterprises of recording and radio and the performers

who engaged in them had a dramatic effect on the musical life of Egypt.
Because phonograph players and radios were shared and were fre-
quently found in such ordinary places as coffee houses and grocery
shops, the commercial music produced and performed in Cairo reached
all parts of the country, and eventually all of the Arab world. The impact
of the singers, especially those cognizant of their larger audience, ex-
 Artists and Entrepreneurs 305

tended well beyond their immediate listeners; they became familiar fig-
ures throughout Egypt.
Women singers seized the opportunities commercial entertainment
offered. They were able to do so because Egyptian society had for years
enjoyed and supported female singers, and the male owners of the nas-
cent commercial institutions, seeking the largest possible share of the
market, were willing to exploit the women's talents. Not content with this
alone, female stars took matters into their own hands, managing their
careers and owning their establishments. Umm Kulthum eventually as-
sumed positions of leadership and control on the governing board for
music programming for radio, as seven-term president of the musicians'
union, and on federal commissions for funding of musical activity. Umm
Kulthum in particular, but other female singers as well, set standards of
public behavior for entertainers by carrying concepts of dignity familiar to
many ordinary Egyptian women into the domain of commercial enter-
tainment. Using the opportunities available to them, the female singers
of Egypt attained the fame and fortune they sought and, along the way,
implanted an image in the public eye of the female singer as a talented
and accomplished individual.

Notes

1. In Egypt, the word musician (musiqi, f. musiqiyya) refers to an instrumen-

talist; singers are designated by a variety of different terms, including mutrib (f.
mutriba) and mughanni (f. mughanniyya). For the purposes of this chapter, I have
adopted the English usage, which subsumes singer as a type of musician. The
relative importance of the singer compared with instrumentalists is a long-stand-
ing feature of Arab musical life. See, for instance, Habib Hasan Touma, "History
of Arabian Music: A Study/' World of Music 22 (1980): 72; also Kamal al-Najmi's
"Umm Kulthum al-khalida wa mustaqbal al-ghina' al-'arabi" (The eternal Umm
Kulthum and the future of Arabic song), al-Kawakib (25 Feb. 1975). Research on the
roles of female singers during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods is currently
being conducted by Suzanne Meyers Sawa (see her "Role of Women in Musical
Life: The Medieval Arabo-Islamic Courts/7 Canadian Woman Studies 8 [1987]: 93-
95). The anonymity of female singers in Tunisia's history is discussed by L. Jafran
Jones, "A Sociohistorical Perspective on Tunisian Women as Professional Musi-
cians," in Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Ellen Koskoff (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1989), 69-83. Hiromi Lorraine Sakata notes "the com-
mon tendency in many societies to ignore the contributions of women and to
allow them to go unrecognized because so often the cultural definitions of music
and musician focus solely on male traditions" ("Hazara Women in Afghanistan:
Innovators and Preservers of a Musical Tradition," in Women and Music, ed.
Koskoff, 94). See also Jennifer Post, "Professional Women in Indian Music: The
Death of the Courtesan Tradition," ibid., esp. 97-98.
306 Virginia Danielson

2. All Jihad Racy, "Musical Change and Commercial Recording in Egypt,

1904-1932" (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1977), 193.
3. The best surveys of nineteenth-century musical life are Ali Jihad Racy, "Mu-
sic in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: An Historical Sketch," Selected Reports in Eth-
nomusicology 4 (1983): 157-79, and Habib Hasan Touma, "Die Musik der Araber im
19. Jahrhundert," in Musikkulturen Asiens, Afrikas, und Ozeaniens im W. Jahrhundert
(Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1973), 49-71. See also Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of
Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), chap. 6. In the 1907and 1917
censuses for Egypt numerous individuals in every part of the country identified
themselves as professional musicians, singers, dancers, and music teachers.
Nizarat al-Maliyya, Ta'dad sukkan al-qutr al-Misri fi sana 1325 hijriyya—sana 1907
miladiyya (Cairo: al-Matba'a al-Amiriyya bi-Misr, 1909); Egyptian Ministry of Fi-
nance, Statistical Department, The Census of Egypt Taken in 1917, 2 vols. (Cairo:
Government Press, 1920).
4. Fikri Butrus, A'lam al-musiqa wa'l-ghina' al-'arabi (Stars of Arabic music and
song) (Cairo: Al-Hai'a al-Misriyya al-'Amma li'1-Kitab, 1976), 92; Raja' al-Naq-
qash, "Aswat atrabat ajdadana" (Voices that charmed our grandparents), in Lughz
Umm Kulthum (The secret of Umm Kulthum) (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1978), 153.
5. Butrus, A'lam al-musiqa, 125.
6. Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern
Egyptians Written in Egypt during the Years 1833-1835 (The Hague: East-West Pub-
lications, 1978), 494, see also 355.
7. Georg Ebers, Egypt: Descriptive, Historical and Picturesque, trans. Clara Bell
(London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1883), 2:312, 314; see also Lucie Duff Gordon,
Letters from Egypt (1865; reprint, London: Virago, 1983), 20; and Muhammad
Mahmud Sami Hafiz, al-Musiqa al-misriyya al-haditha (Modern Egyptian music)
(Cairo: Maktabat al-Anjlu al-Misriyya, 1982), 9.
8. Butrus, A'lam al-musiqa, 61-62.
9. Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Azbakiyya and Its Environs, Supplement aux Annales
Islamologiques, Cahier no. 6 (Cairo: Institut Frangais d'Archeologie Orientale,
1985), 76, see also 25.
10. Karl Baedeker, Egypt and the Sudan: Handbook for Travellers, 6th ed. (Leipzig:
Baedeker, 1908), 37, also 32 and 47, and 7th ed. (1914), 37. Cf. an account written
by J. W. McPherson in 1902: "Sabry had tickets for the Ezbekieh Gardens where an
unique kind of Gala was proceeding. We stayed there until midnight listening to
Native and European singing, watching Turkish sword-dancing and sham fight-
ing and innumerable shows" (Barry Carman and John McPherson, Bimbashi
McPherson: A Life in Egypt [London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1983], 36).
According to Baedeker's 1908 and 1914 guidebooks, "cafes in the European style,
at which beer and other beverages are obtained, abound in and near the
Ezbekiyah; none of them are suitable for ladies." Almaz and 'Abduh al-Hamuli
sang during entr'actes, popularizing the practice. Mahmud Kamil, al-Masrah al-
ghina'i (Cairo: Dar al-Ma'arif, 1977), 12.
11. Ruz al-Yusuf, no. 107 (24 Nov. 1927), 20; al-Sabah, no. 188 (2 May 1930), [5]
and [40]; "Hikayat Fatma Rushdi" (The story of Fatma Rushdi), al-Fanan, no. 2 (4
Dec. 1962), 27-29; "Fathiyya Ahmad," al-Kawakib (5 Dec. 1978), 34-35.
 Artists and Entrepreneurs 307

12. Ruz al-Yusuft no. 74 (31 Mar. 1927), 13, no. 237 (29 Aug. 1932), 24-25;
Mahmud Kamil, Muhammad al-Qasabji (Cairo: Al-Hai'a al-Misriyya al-'Amma li'l-
Kitab, 1971), 147; Ahmad Abu al-Khidr Mansi, al-Aghani wa'l-musiqa al-sharqiyya
baina al-qadim wa'l-jadid (Oriental songs and music, ancient to modern), 2d ed.
(Cairo: Dar al-'Arab li'1-Bustani, 1965-66), 185-86; al-Naqqash, "Aswat," 154-55.
13. Al-Masrah, no. 27 (24 May 1926), 23; Ruz al-Yusuf, no. 83 (9 June 1927), 11,
no. 48 (29 Sept. 1926), 15, no. 176 (10 June 1930), 24.
14. Ruz al-Yusuf, no. 240 (18 Sept. 1932), 18, no. 272 (1 May 1933), 30; al-Masrah
(14 June 1926), 25.
15. Sala, meaning literally "hall," was a term applied to places of entertainment
that featured musicians, singers, dancers, and variety acts, and where drink and
often food were served. One sat at small tables, in a style similar to that of a
Western nightclub. Such places were also called clubs (klub, nadi) or casinos (ka-
zinu), although gambling was not necessarily available.
16. Al-Masrah, no. 48 (22 Nov. 1926), 16, in which the author claimed that
Badi'a "proved again that women can do and obtain what they want"; al-Sabah,
no. 105 (1 Oct. 1928), 11; Ruz al-Yusuf, no. 40 (4 Aug. 1926), 6-7, no. 74 (31 Mar.
1927), 18, no. Ill (Dec. 1927), 17-18, no. 164 (18 Mar. 1930), 17, no. 176 (10 June
1930), 17, no. 77 (17 June 1930), 17, no. 178 (24 June 1930), 16, no. 219 (25 Apr.
1932), 21, no. 234 (8 Aug. 1932), 26. The music halls were usually situated in older
theaters, such as the Biju Palace, which were rented on short-term leases by the
singer or by a financial backer on her behalf. Most closed after two years or less.
17. In her memoirs, Badi'a told of being sexually assaulted as a young girl. The
resulting scandal led her mother to move the family from its village. Nazik Basila,
Mudhakkirat Badi'a Masabni (The memoirs of Badi'a Masabni) (Beirut: Dar Mak-
tabat al-Haya, n.d.); see also Ruz al-Yusuf, no. 97 (15 Sept. 1927), 12; and Mahmud
Rif'at al-Muhami, ed., Mudhakkirat Badi'-Khairi: 45 sana taht adwa' al-masrah (The
memoirs of Badi' Khairi: 45 years under the lights of the theater) (Beirut: Dar al-
Thaqafa, n.d.), 118.
18. Most information about Umm Kulthum's life presented here has been
gleaned from a survey of Egyptian periodicals from 1924 to 1975 and from person-
al interviews with her associates and family. The most useful larger biographical
works are Muhammad al-Sayyid Shushah's Umm Kulthum: Hayat Nagham (Umm
Kulthum: A life of song) (Cairo: Ruz al-Yusuf, 1976); Ni'mat Ahmad Fu'ad's Umm
Kulthum wa-'asr min al-fann (Umm Kulthum and an era in art) (Cairo: Al-Hai'a al-
Misriyya al-'Amma li'1-Kitab, 1976); and Umm Kulthum's memoir, as told to
Mahmud 'Awad, Umm Kulthum allati la ya'rifuha ahad (The Umm Kulthum nobody
knows) (Cairo: Mu'assasat Akhabar al-Yaum, n.d.), which has been translated
into English in Elizabeth W. Fernea and Basima Bezirgan, eds., Middle Eastern
Muslim Women Speak (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977).
19. Personal communication from Medhat Assem, 28 Jan. 1986.
20. Among the important relationships of mentors to young musicians were:
theatrical director 'Aziz 'Id and young actresses Ruz al-Yusuf, Munira al-
Mahdiyya, and Fatma Rushdi; composer and theatrical entrepreneur Salama Hi-
jazi and Munira al-Mahdiyya; politician and orator Fikri Abaza and young singer
Najat 'AH; poet laureate Ahmad Shauqi and his friends among Egyptian politi-
308 Virginia Danielson

cians such as Makram 'Ubaid, and singer-composer Muhammad 'Abd al-

Wahhab; composer Daud Husni and singers Fatma Sirri and Asmahan; pianist-
composer Medhat Assem and aspiring singer Farid al-Atrash; and poet 'Abbas
al-'Aqqad and singer Nadira. Familial relationships among musicians were less
common; the principal support system and means of entree into commercial
entertainment was the mentor-newcomer relationship. These relationships also
demonstrate the strong and sometimes personal connections between musicians
and influential members of the elite, a significant aspect of musical patronage in
Cairo even in the commercial environment.
21. "Dhikrayat ma'a al-Qasabji" (Memories with al-Qasabji), based on inter-
views with him in 1955, al-Kawakib (11 Feb. 1975), 33-35; Husain Fauzi, in Wada' 'an
Umm Kulthum (Farewell to Umm Kulthum), ed. Muhammad 'Umar Shatabi
(Cairo: Al-Markaz al-Misri li'1-Thaqafa wa'1-A'lam, 1975), 55; al-Masrah, no. 24 (3
May 1926), 15, no. 29 (7 June 1926), 20.
22. Al-Masrah, no. 26 (17 May 1926), 15.
23. Ruz al-Yusuf, no. 31 (2 June 1926), 12.
24. Ibid., no. 115 (21 Feb. 1928), 16, no. 119 (29 Mar. 1928), 16, no. 125 (1 May
1928), 19, no. 141 (28 Aug. 1928), 17, no. 145 (22 Jan. 1929), 17; al-Sabah, no. 67 (9
Jan. 1928), 4. Cairene singers toured in Syria and Palestine, North Africa, and even
South America, especially during the summer months, and their recordings were
marketed in these places as well.
25. Racy, "Musical Change," 126-27, 129.
26. Quoted in Fu'ad, Umm Kulthum, 98; see also 'Awad, UmmKulthum, 62-64.
27. By way of comparison, Columbia Records paid Bessie Smith, one of their
top artists, $150 per side in 1923. See Chris Albertson, Bessie (New York: Stein and
Day, 1982), 45.
28. Ruz al-Yusuf, no. 48 (29 Sept. 1926), 14-15. Umm Kulthum's contract in 1928
dollars would amount to about $10,000 per annum in retainers and $400-$500 per
disc recorded. By comparison, Bessie Smith's second contract with Columbia in
1926 specified $200 per usable side (for at least twelve and up to as many discs as
she chose to record in that year) with no retainer (Albertson, Bessie, 98).
29. Ruz al-Yusuf, no. 185 (30 Aug. 1930), 18.
30. Fu'ad, Umm Kulthum, 58.
31. Al-Kashkul al-musawwar, no. 57 (18 June 1922), 6, no. 58 (25 June 1922), 4; al-
Sabah, no. 28 (11 Apr. 1927), 14; Ruz al-Yusuf, no. 260 (6 Feb. 1933), 28-29; Muham-
mad al-Taba'i, Asmahan tarwi cjissataha (Asmahan tells her story) (Cairo:
Mu'assasat Ruz al-Yusuf, 1965), 45-46.
32. Ruz al-Yusuf, no. 243 (9 Oct. 1932), 28.
33. My estimate of Umm Kulthum's income includes £E1,660 for two public
concerts weekly during a season lasting from October through May; £E960 for one
private party weekly during the same season; £E2,000 annual retainer from Gram-
ophone Records; and £E80 for each of about ten new records; for Fathiyya's, £E600
from recordings, £E500 from touring Syria, about £E600 from appearances at Sala
Badi'a during an abbreviated season, since she spent two months in Syria, and
perhaps another £E500 from private parties.
34. Fatma Sirri and Badi'a Masabni had large bank accounts. Tauhida owned a
 Artists and Entrepreneurs 309

music hall and several residential buildings.' Aziza Amir purchased rental proper-
ty in fashionable Garden City. Umm Kulthum bought land in her home village.
35. Zakariyya's father was referring to a common text for vocal improvisation,
Ya lail, ya 'ain (quoted in 'Awad, Umm Kulthum, 47). Sha'rawi's action was reported
in al-Masrah (31 May 1926), 4. Condemnation of music altogether on orthodox
Islamic religious grounds was uncommon in Egypt. A good discussion of the
prevailing view of music held by the religious establishment in Egypt appears in
Kristina Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qur'an (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1985), chap. 3.
36. Nahid Ahmad Hafiz summarized commonly felt sentiments when she
wrote that Cairo during the colonial period "was a place of many vices, for exam-
ple gambling, licentiousness, usury, drunkenness, drugs and prostitution, all of
which resulted from colonialism" "Al-Ughniya al-misriyya wa-tatawwuruha
khilal al-qarnain al-tasi' 'ashr wa'1-ashrin" (Egyptian song and its development
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) (Ph.D. thesis, Helwan University,
1977), 216.
37. Lane, An Account, 355; Kamil al-Khula'i, Kitab al-musiqa al-sharqiyya (Orien-
tal music) (Cairo: Matba'at al-Taqaddum, c. 1904), 91.
38. Racy, "Musical Change," 53, 200-3; Hafiz, al-Musiqa, 9.
39. Racy, "Musical Change," 48-49,201; Mansi, al-Aghani, 173-74,180; Butrus,
A'lam al-musiqa, 85-86.
 Biography and Women's History:
17
On Interpreting Doria Shafik

CYNTHIA NELSON

This chapter addresses the issue of shifting boundaries be-

tween self and other as this occurs in the process of interpret-
ing the life of an Egyptian woman. It also raises certain
epistemological and methodological questions concerning
women's experience and women's history in the Middle
East. What are the presuppositions underlying the biog-
rapher-memoirist relationship in writing a woman's life?
What is the nature of interpretive inquiry followed by the
biographer as she attempts to recover and reconstruct
knowledge of the other, primarily through personal docu-
ments we call memoirs? How do such attempts to recover
women's voices and women's lives inform contemporary
feminist discourse on the Middle East?
Tentative answers to these questions emerge from my ex-
perience writing the biography of Doria Shafik. An Egyptian
woman best known nationally and internationally during
the 1940s and 1950s as a militant feminist, she fought for
women's full political equality until she was put under house
arrest in 1957 for her strong protests against Gamal Abdel
Nasser's regime and her demands for the restoration of de-
mocracy in Egypt. She spent the remaining eighteen years of
her life in veritable seclusion before leaping to her death from
her sixth-floor apartment in Cairo on 20 September 1975.
Many scholars have argued recently that there is and can
be no neat and simple divide between the factual and the
fictional, whether in autobiography, biography, or ethnogra-
phy, for each of these forms of discourse is dependent on the
transforming creating medium of the writer and her states of
consciousness.1 Biography then becomes a process of "con-
structing the other," in which the story that emerges reflects
the biographer's mode of organizing, her translation and
"reading" of the many levels of experience embodied in
those memoirs and personal documents where the encoun-
310
 Biography and Women's History 311

ter takes place. What those levels of experience are and how they are
woven into the biographer's story constitute the methodology of the
work. I do not presume to "explain" Doria Shafik's life, but rather to try to
"grasp" it—perhaps only fleetingly—in the context of its various levels of
meaning. The connection between us, then, is that of the impact of one
humanity on another.
My first encounter with Doria Shafik occurred in the summer of 1983 in
Cairo, when her two daughters presented me with a gift of five volumes
of her collected poems.2 At that moment I had no intention of writing her
biography. It was only later (1984-85), while teaching at the University of
California at Santa Cruz, that I met Akram Khater, a young Lebanese
graduate student who took an independent study with me on the history
of women's movements in the Middle East. From those readings and
discussions my curiosity was sufficiently aroused that I felt a serious
biographical study of Doria Shafik was not only relevant to a number of
my own intellectual interests but also, given the sparse mention of her in
the literature, long overdue. Returning to Egypt in the spring of 1985,1
broached the idea in a letter to her daughters expressing my desire to
undertake a biographical study of their mother:
Through those verses which I have read, I have heard a voice, that
despite its Egyptian roots in the desert and the Nile, despite its
confrontation with a history that was not mine, despite its own
unique biographical trajectory, has touched me by its paean to soli-
tude. I have wanted to know more about the life behind that voice,
particularly since there seems to be a "conspiracy of silence" con-
cerning her role in the struggle for women's rights in the Egyptian
women's movement of the 1940's and 1950's. Emma Goldman once
wrote: that the real revolutionist—the dreamer, the creative artist,
the iconoclast in whatever line—is fated to be misunderstood, not
only by her own kind but often by her own comrades. That is the
doom of all great spirits: they are detached from their environment.
Theirs is the lonely life—the life of the transition stage, the hardest
and most difficult period for the individual as well as for a people. In
many ways Doria Shafik personifies that life of the transition stage.
Through undertaking to write her biography we can explore the
intersection of self and society.3
Their response was and continues to be both enthusiastic and encour-
aging. And it is thanks to their trust that Doria Shafik's personal memoirs
and unpublished papers have been generously shared. From that time
until the present Doria Shafik and I have been engaged in a process of
"constructing the other." We have met in that interstitial space shared by
those who have crossed the boundaries of each other's culture.
312 Cynthia Nelson

There are several reasons, blending the personal and professional

dimensions of my self, why the life of Doria Shafik is particularly interest-
ing. Paramount is the woman herself: complex, contradictory, and con-
troversial. She grew up in a very modest and traditional middle-class
family in the provincial Delta towns of Tanta and Mansura during a
period when Egypt was in the throes of great internal turmoil following
World War I, embodied in the 1919 revolution. During the 1920s and
1930s, when for women of her class background endowed with intel-
ligence, ambition, and beauty there were few outlets from the constraints
of tradition except through education, Doria exploited that avenue to the
fullest and obtained her doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1940.4 But her
ultimate ambition was to enter the public and political domain. And it
was within the context of post-World War II Egypt that Doria Shafik was
able to catapult herself into national and international prominence. As an
intellectual she represented a model radically different from Huda
Sha'rawi as a leader of the women's movement in Egypt.5 Doria began
her career as an inspector of French-language teaching in the secondary
schools of Egypt, then turned to journalism before emerging as the mili-
tant leader of a self-conscious feminist struggle for women's full par-
ticipation in the political life of her country. Her public career ended in
1957 when, in her quixotic public defense of liberal democracy, she pitted
herself against Nasser at a time when "populism" had become the domi-
nant political ideology of the majority of the Egyptian people.
Married to a brilliant and socially prominent lawyer and the mother of
two beautiful and talented daughters, Doria Shafik also pursued a public
career as a poet, publisher, and political activist. By 1945 she was the
owner and editor-in-chief of the French literary and cultural magazine La
femme nouvelle (The new woman) and the founder of two Arabic maga-
zines: Bint al-Nil (Daughter of the Nile), a woman's magazine oriented to
the emerging middle class, and Katkut (Little chicken), one of the first
children's magazines published in the post-World War II period. She also
established a feminist union and a political party under the name of Bint
al-Nil, through which she challenged the bastions of male authority un-
der both pre-revolutionary and revolutionary regimes. She fashioned her
feminist consciousness through activism: storming the Egyptian Parlia-
ment; attempting to run illegally for parliamentary elections; staging sit-
ins to protest the British occupation; and undertaking hunger strikes. She
expressed her feminist vision through writing. Between 1944 and 1955
Doria Shafik published seven books in French and Arabic, including two
volumes of poetry, one novel, and four books dealing with Egyptian
feminism.6 She was invited to lecture on the Arab women's struggle to
audiences in Europe, the United States, India, and Pakistan. Her protest
against the erosion of democracy under Gamal Abdel Nasser led to her
 Biography and Women's History 313

house arrest in 1957. Although she was politically and socially secluded
from public life thereafter until her death in 1975, her name still evokes
strong reactions in Egypt.7
Within the post-World War II context of social and political upheaval,
Doria Shafik attempted to shape a new woman's consciousness in Egypt
on several fronts: first, through the pages of her magazines; second,
through her feminist organization and political party; and finally,
through her books on the history and political situation of Egyptian
women. At the same time that she was engaged in this "feminist strug-
gle" she was also developing a reputation among the francophiles of
Egypt as a woman of impressive aesthetic sensibility, both as the editor-
in-chief of the prestigious cultural and literary magazine Lafemme nouvelle
and as a poet, described by Pierre Seghers "as that instant of splendid
gravity, an exceptional being of meditation and action, a bearing, an allure
that passed through Time."8 The dynamism and tension among these
interlocking and sometimes contradictory strands and demands in her
life—the cultures of the East and the West, the languages of Arabic and
French, the meditative mode of the poet and the activist mode of the
feminist, the exigencies of domestic and public responsibility—contrib-
ute to her fascination.
In spite of a growing interest in and literature on women and women's
movements in Egypt and the Middle East,9 there is a surprising lack of
attention to the post-World War II period. The recovery of Doria Shafik's
life may shed light on both the historical period and the women's move-
ment.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT IN EGYPT

Women's active participation in the political life of Egypt has a long his-
tory. Most contemporary scholars associate the beginnings of an authen-
tic Egyptian women's movement with the 1919 revolution. Although
earlier writings by Egyptian women reflect a concern with nationalism, it
was only in the 1920s when Huda Sha'rawi broke with the Wafd that the
women's movement turned away from nationalist politics.10 Many writ-
ers recount the accomplishments of the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU),
established by Sha'rawi in 1923, as examples of feminist struggle. Simi-
larly, these writers date the demise of the movement to the period be-
tween the late thirties, with the onset of World War II, and 1947, when
Sha'rawi died.11 The period 1945-59 is usually overlooked in analyses of
the women's movement in Egypt. Yet, I would argue, it was then that the
women's movement came of age, in the sense that: (1) it experienced a
diversification in ideology, tactics, and goals; and (2) it began to transcend
its elitist origins and membership. Moreover, in this post-World War II
314 Cynthia Nelson

period the women's movement consciously shifted away from being a

welfare-oriented, mostly philanthropic activity, to a more politicized
movement that linked the struggle for women's full participation in the
decision-making processes to such political and social concerns as the
nationalist movement and class struggle. Generally, the women's move-
ment in Egypt went through two main phases. The first started between
1919 and 1923 with the founding of the EFU by Huda Sha'rawi. This phase
continued up to the end of the "liberal experiment" in Egypt around the
late 1930s.12 During World War II feminist activity in Egypt was almost
nonexistent and only came to life again in 1945. This was the beginning of
the second phase in the history of the Egyptian women's movement,
which was characterized by a more radical approach and which ended in
1959 when the state under Nasser clamped down on any independent
political action.
Throughout the first phase (1923-39) in the history of the Egyptian
women's movement there was a definite separation between the social
and the political issues in society. The EFU viewed the social problems of
Egypt (bad health conditions, poverty, prostitution, and illiteracy) not as
the results of a specific socioeconomic structure, but rather as caused by
the neglect of the state in its responsibilities toward the people. The EFU
argued that the state had a responsibility to maintain the morality of the
nation, as well as its welfare, although it defined women's issues from the
narrow and class-based perspective of upper-class women. Its appeal
was thus limited, and its goals were not derived from a real understand-
ing of the situation of most women in Egypt. To some extent it followed,
in this regard, the political practices of most parties in Egypt during the
1920s and 1930s, which regarded politics as the prerogative of the edu-
cated elite. In confronting social problems, however, even from the
heights of the elite, the EFU was bringing into the political arena, albeit
indirectly, the idea of the social responsibility of the state to the people.
By the end of World War II hard economic realities and the obvious
corruption and inadequacy of the ancien regime (the monarchical system
under King Faruq) provided impetus for a general radicalization of Egyp-
tian politics. The women's movement experienced a similar transforma-
tion. In this heated environment many young Egyptian feminists came of
political age and became involved in the struggle for women's rights.
They were convinced that the tactics of the EFU were as outdated as its
goals. No longer was the establishment of a health clinic or the distribu-
tion of charity, according to the new feminists, an adequate solution to
social problems, nor did equal rights mean simply access to education.
During this postwar period other voices—those of a younger and more
radical generation of Egyptian women—began shaping a different public
discourse on the goals of the feminist movement. Reflecting the liberal
 Biography and Women's History 315

ideology of the modern secularists was the voice of Doria Shafik, whose
rhetoric and activism centered on attaining the full political and legal
rights of women. There were also voices of the progressive left, such as
Inji Aflatun, whose rhetoric and activism followed the Marxist argument
that the socioeconomic class system underlying the oppression of
women had to be changed. The Islamic conservatives opposed both of
these tendencies over the question of women's rights. The men of re-
ligion vehemently criticized the more visible "modernist" Doria Shafik,
perceiving her claims as the most direct threat to conservative Islamic
values and tradition. In short, the women's movement became much
more politicized and overtly political in its demands.13
It is precisely in the context of the events erupting in Egypt following
World War II, particularly the struggle for national independence from
British occupation, that we can best understand Doria Shafik's role in the
history of Egypt.

MEMOIRS

Since it is through her memoirs that we can explore how Doria Shafik
perceived and experienced her own life situations as well as the historical
conditions that fostered her political consciousness and action, it is impor-
tant to understand how these memoirs came to be written. Doria Shafik
wrote three different versions of her memoirs during the last twenty
years of her life. These are not so much separate and distinct stories as
they are three different angles of vision of the same life story. The first
version was begun in 1955 in response to a specific request from the editor
of the then Harper and Brothers Publishers for Doria to write her "per-
sonal story that would give you the opportunity to say all the things you
believe in and are working toward in your public life." For various rea-
sons the project was unfinished, and in the fall of 1956 the Suez War
erupted and all correspondence between Harper and Doria ceased. The
second version was begun following her dramatic protest against Nasser
and subsequent house arrest in 1957. These memoirs were written in
French, the medium of her poetic and literary expression, under condi-
tions of political and social confinement and "official" condemnation.
Over the next sixteen years of solitude and semiseclusion until her
tragic death in 1975, Doria Shafik continued to explore the "profound
meaning of my own existence" through the act of writing.141 wondered
why it was that she wrote the final version of her memoirs during this
period. "In order to see clearly into myself. In sounding the Past, the
Present will be brought to view and then I may look to the Future with
more clarity. Writing this book will help me to be aware of the essential
meaning of the events surrounding me."15
316 Cynthia Nelson

These three manuscripts are the different voices of a self creating and
re-creating, what Phyllis Rose would call a personal mythology: "that
highly personal configuration of significance by which a person views his
own experience/'16 By reading back and forth among these different
voices I begin to see how each reveals as well as conceals something that
expands and enriches my understanding of the whole person. They also
help me grasp the significance of other materials concerning the trajec-
tory of her life and the historical context, thus revealing how knowledge
is constructed through a process of dialogue not only between Doria
Shafik and her own self-reflections, but also between her reflections and
those of her biographer. Through this dialogue the biographer attempts
to discover how self and society intersect. By following Doria Shafik's
own quest for meaning within a society from which she always felt es-
tranged, we catch a glimpse of Egypt in a time of stress and transforma-
tion, "the life of the transition stage/'

INTERPRETING DORIA SHAFIK

Doria Shafik always perceived her own life as intimately connected to

and influenced by those explosive social and political transformations
that her country had to suffer. As she wrote in her memoirs, "My life
began with the First World War and ever since has been a continual
struggle." The official records give her year of birth as 1908, but this fact
tells us less about Doria Shafik's perception of herself and her world than
does her metaphorical association of life "beginning" with World War I.
From this period onward, an old order was crumbling in the face of
increasing discontent over how Egypt was to be governed. It was a histor-
ical moment that witnessed the appearance of the nationalist leader Sa'd
Zaghlul, the Wafd, and the rise of the Egyptian nationalist movement,
which erupted into the revolution of 1919; the emergence of an authentic
Egyptian women's movement under the banner of Huda Sha'rawi; the
creation of Egypt's first constitution and the experiment with liberal de-
mocracy that led to the struggles between the palace, the Wafd party, and
the British over who controlled the reins of power; the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism under Hasan al-Banna; the outbreak of World War II and
the postwar struggle for independence from colonial rule; the unfolding
of the Cold War between Russia and the United States; the Palestinian
question and the creation of the state of Israel with the subsequent Arab-
Israeli wars; the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and the rise to power of
Nasser; the Baghdad Pact and the Bandung Conference of 1955; the rise of
the nonaligned movement; and the Suez crisis of 1956.
Throughout this period Doria Shafik's life unfolded. Born on 14 De-
cember 1908 in the home of her maternal grandmother in Tanta, Ghar-
 Biography and Women's History 317

biyya, she was the third child and second daughter of the six children of
Ratiba Nasif Qassabi Bey and Ahmad Chafik Sulaiman Effendi. The titles
bey and effendi distinguish the class backgrounds of her parents. Doria's
mother belonged to a high-status rural notable family (bey), but her
mother's mother, widowed and having failed to produce any male heirs,
lost control over her share of the inheritance to her uncle and grand-
uncle,17 leaving Ratiba without wealth of her own. Doria's father came
from a petty bourgeois background and worked as a civil engineer for the
Egyptian government. Marriage between such distinct social classes was
very unusual during this period, but because Ratiba Nasif had no wealth
and was under the guardianship of her uncle, she was married off into the
effendi class. Doria spent the earliest years of her childhood in Mansura,
where her father had a job as a civil engineer and which she remembered
with great nostalgia. When she reached primary school age she was
separated from her parents and sent to live with her grandmother in
Tanta, where she completed her primary education in the well-known
French mission school, Notre Dame des Apotres. A few years later, when
Doria was barely thirteen, her mother died in childbirth. This was the
single most devastating experience of her childhood and created a sense
of loss and abandonment that stayed with her throughout her life. As she
recounts in her memoirs: "The loss of my mother left a wound so huge
that it marked the whole of my life. As an outlet for my despair and
desolation I concentrated all my energy into reading and studying. The
result was that I progressed so rapidly that I found myself in the same
class as my sister."18
She obtained her certificate from the preparatory school of St. Vincent
de Paul in Alexandria, where she had gone to live with her father and
brothers after her mother's death. Her elder sister, Sorayya, who was
married and raising their younger sister, Laila, also lived in Alexandria.
At that time there was no girls' lycee (French secondary school) in Alex-
andria, and Doria's father could not afford to send her to the boarding
school in Cairo. But Ahmad Chafik,19 a self-educated and pious Muslim
whom Doria often compared to Balzac's self-sacrificing Pere Goriot,
strongly supported his daughter's precocious intellectual talents. He al-
lowed her to prepare for her examinations at home under the guidance of
male tutors, among them a Belgian who taught philosophy at the boys'
lycee. It was thanks to his intellectual encouragement and the moral and
financial support of her father that Doria, at the age of sixteen, was the
youngest to sit and successfully pass the examinations for the French
baccalaur£at in June 1925, achieving the second highest score in the coun-
try. Doria's ambitions to continue her education finally evoked the sup-
port of Huda Sha'rawi, who secured for her a scholarship from the Minis-
try of Education to attend the Sorbonne. In August 1928, Doria left alone
318 Cynthia Nelson

for Paris and spent the next four years studying for her diploma of state in
philosophy. She returned to Egypt in the summer of 1932, hoping to
reconcile her own ambitions with the country she loved but from which
she felt estranged. She taught at the newly opened girls' lycee in Alex-
andria20 for a couple of years, but because of some unhappy circum-
stances centering on family and social pressures to marry, she returned to
Paris in 1936 to pursue her ultimate goal of "obtaining the highest degree
in the world." While there she met her cousin, whom she had known
during her childhood years in Tanta but with whom she had lost contact
after the death of her mother. He was on scholarship from King Fuad I
University (now Cairo University), studying for his doctorate in law at
the University of Paris. What began as a casual meeting between relatives
who had been childhood friends and now were strangers together in a
foreign culture quickly developed into a whirlwind courtship of love and
marriage. Through her own free choice and without dowry (she accepted
a symbolic 25 piasters) or parental approval, Doria Shafik and Nur al-Din
Regai were married in 1937, the same year the young King Faruq married
Safinaz Zulfiqar, the popular Queen Farida. After completing their doc-
toral theses, Nur and Doria returned to Cairo on the eve of the outbreak
of World War II in Europe. Doria wanted very much to teach philosophy
at the University of Cairo but was refused by the dean of the Faculty of
Arts, Ahmad Amin, on the grounds that because of "her beauty and
modern style she was not suited to instruct young men." She returned to
the Ministry of Education and worked as the inspector of French lan-
guage throughout the secondary schools of Egypt for the duration of the
war years. Also during this period she gave birth to her two daughters,
Aziza in 1942 and Jihan in 1944.
But Doria did not feel that she had fulfilled her ambition. Eager to be
more actively involved in public affairs, Doria began searching for an
outlet and in 1945, through a connection of her husband's, was offered
the position of editor-in-chief of a new magazine to be founded by
Princess Chewikar, the ex-wife of King Fuad and founder of the benev-
olent association La Femme Nouvelle.21 Doria comments in her memoirs
that she was not altogether happy in that milieu and became sensitive to
popular criticism that she must be in the pay of foreign powers since she
was writing a magazine in French. It was then that she decided to launch
her own Arabic-language magazine, Bint al-Nil, through which she con-
tinued to champion the equal rights of women. Finally, signaling her
impatience with the prevailing complacency of the government toward
women's political and legal rights, Doria Shafik took the decisive step in
March 1948 of establishing her Bint al-Nil Union on behalf of the complete
emancipation of Egyptian women. The factors that led to this decision
were her experiences as the owner and editor-in-chief of her magazines,
 Biography and Women's History 319

La femme nouvelle and Bint al-Nil and the death of Huda Sha'rawi in De-
cember 1947.22
The letters from readers in response to the column "Let Bint al-Nil
Solve Your Problems" made Doria Shafik acutely aware that "nearly all of
the difficulties facing Egyptian women centered around polygamy and
hasty divorce by men without protection for women and children."23
Initially she tried to help these women on a case-by-case basis through the
creation of an employment bureau in her Bint al-Nil office. She tried to
find work for the young and healthy and referred the old and indigent to
friends who worked in the various benevolent associations whose specif-
ic aims were to provide public assistance. But it was quickly evident to her
that this strategy was addressing only a "small section of the millions of
women suffering from the same injustice." She attempted to enlist the
support of male members of Parliament to elaborate laws guaranteeing
women family security. But nothing was done. As she states in her
memoirs:
It was obvious to me that women representatives were essential in
Parliament. They must not only be present in the legislative cham-
bers when laws concerning them are legislated; but also they must
be involved in writing the laws. It would be the only answer to the
problem of formulating laws that really did further the cause of
women. It was not surprising that the only two bills presented in
1923 by Huda Sha'rawi (one for limiting polygamy and the other for
curbing easy divorce) had long been forgotten; while all other laws
concerning men were developing and improving according to their
growing needs. Women as half the nation had to be represented in
Parliament, and justly protected. But why should men alone repre-
sent their nation? Women should have an equal say in the laws that
ultimately affect them and their children. The only solution was to
build up a Feminist Union to demand political rights for women.
With this objective in view the Bint al-Nil movement was launched.
Doria Shafik was convinced that she was not creating just another wom-
en's association but initiating a new and invigorated Egyptian feminist
movement, whose primary purpose at its inception was to proclaim and
claim the full political rights of women. By this act Doria Shafik was
openly asserting her leadership of a moribund movement, which she felt
had been ineffective and inadequate to reach this ultimate goal since the
death of Huda Sha'rawi. In addition, by addressing herself to middle-
class women and their problems, Bint al-Nil Union reflected a departure
from the earlier elitist women's organizations, like the Egyptian Feminist
Union and the plethora of social welfare associations. In purpose and
constituency Bint al-Nil was attractive to a growing middle-class youth
320 Cynthia Nelson

coming out of the national universities, and in its organization and exten-
sion throughout Egypt was aiming to be much broader in its membership
than the EFU.
Many young women students and graduates were attracted to Bint al-
Nil Union because it provided an alternative to the older EFU. A look at the
roster of its members or at the photographs of its meetings shows many
young faces and names that are Egyptian, as opposed to those of Turkish
origin, and without "Hanim" (elite Turkish title for women) preceding
them. These women were seeking to define a new position for them-
selves in Egyptian society that would take them beyond the boundaries
of house and marriage and into the realm of public life and work.
Governed by an executive committee composed of middle-class pro-
fessional women, Bint al-Nil Union focused its goals on three main objec-
tives: (1) to establish the constitutional and parliamentary rights of the
Egyptian woman in order to defend the laws guaranteeing those rights;
(2) to diffuse cultural, health, and social services among poor Egyptian
families through the promotion of literacy programs and the creation of
small industries to augment their earnings; (3) to call attention to the
conditions of these families, especially maternal and child care, through
the full use of all mass media, conferences, and editorials and to adopt
every means that would guarantee their protection and support. Thus
the demand for political rights was followed by an extensive plan of social
reform which began with a campaign against illiteracy among adult
women. Bint al-Nil founded centers in Cairo, Alexandria, and several
provincial towns throughout the Delta where women were taught the
rudiments of reading and writing, some elementary hygiene, and trades
they could work at in their homes to augment family income.24
How did Doria Shafik and her Bint al-Nil Union appeal to the various
social classes within Egyptian society during this period? Shafik was of
that generation of young middle-class women who received their educa-
tion at French religious mission schools. The contradictions within her
own provincial middle-class background and her liberal education
helped convince her that Egyptian women would be able to break the
chains of tradition only when they had access to decision-making posi-
tions within society. This would come through obtaining their full politi-
cal rights, which would allow women not only to vote but also to be
elected into the spheres of institutionalized power, that is, the Parlia-
ment. In this stance Doria Shafik took the liberal ideology of the EFU one
step further, becoming more militant in her reformist ideas and action
than Huda Sha'rawi. One also must understand that Doria Shafik
thought of herself as the symbol of the new Egyptian woman emerging
after World War II—highly educated, articulate, internationalist, urbane,
 Biography and Women's History 321

attractive, and elegantly well dressed. She presented herself, quite inten-
tionally, as different from the secluded, traditionally clad, silent majority
of Egyptian women. Militant while remaining feminine ("our feminism is
entirely feminine"), Shafik was out to conquer the male elite sphere of
politics. At the beginning of her career she might have defended the
upper classes as the "natural" rulers of Egypt, particularly since she
worked closely with Princess Chewikar and Princess Faiza on the maga-
zine La femme nouvelle. By the end of the 1940s, however, she was defi-
nitely becoming one of the leading spokespersons for the middle class,
which she considered eligible to rule.
Education, public health, and change in the family status law were just
as important in the eyes of Doria Shafik and other middle-class women
who joined her as they had been for the earlier feminists.25 But politics
was their dominant concern, especially for a class that did not own the
means of production and thus did not exercise much control over the
process of decision making. The only route to power, given that birth and
money were the prerogatives of the elite, was parliamentary politics.
Thus Shafik directed most of her energy toward that goal. Her demands
before and after the 1952 revolution were for the rights of women, at least
educated ones, not only to vote but to run for public office as well. The
demonstrations, newspaper articles, lectures, and hunger strikes were
all for the sake of getting access to the voting booth and to Parliament.
The two magazines that Doria Shafik published and edited displayed
her changing feminist and political consciousness during this period.
Prior to 1948 her editorials in Bint al-Nil were basically an extension of the
moral feminism of the EFU, although in the voice of a different class. After
1948 she shifted toward a more radical demand for equal rights. The titles
of the two magazines, The New Woman and Daughter of the Nile, embody
this development in feminist discourse and vision. The new woman as-
sumes the presence of the old woman, and provides a dichotomy be-
tween the old and the new. A reading of both magazines gives one the
idea that Shafik's new woman, as well as that of other members of the
Bint al-Nil Union, is one of the secular liberal middle class who dresses in
affordable, fashionable elegance, exercises to maintain a healthy
youthfulness, and raises her children the modern, that is, Western way.
Bint al-Nilfs modern woman is as aware of the politics of the world as she
is of dinner etiquette. Although the magazine did not actively call for
women to go out and work or deal with peasant and working-class wom-
en's lives and issues, it did concentrate on the special problems of emerg-
ing middle-class women—as homemakers, wives, and mothers—as well
as those of professional, educated, and working women. Its readership,
which also extended outside of Egypt, was primarily made up of these
322 Cynthia Nelson

"new" middle-class women and their families. It was primarily through

Bint al-Nil that Shafik's feminist platform and ideology reached beyond
Egypt's borders to other Arab countries.26
By replacing the vague title The Egyptian Woman of the magazines of the
EFU27 with the more specific title Daughter of the Nile, Shafik was sym-
bolically excluding identification with the Turko-Circassian elite and ap-
pealing specifically to women of Egyptian background. At the same time
her title did not refer to any specific class of Egyptian women, whether
rural or urban, Copt or Muslim. In an atmosphere of highly charged
nationalist discourse that emphasized the dichotomy between Egyptian
and foreigner, this title implied a rejection of the view that her vision of
society and women's position within it was "foreign." In other words,
with the symbolic title Daughter of the Nile Doria Shafik was not only
attempting to claim leadership of the women's movement from the EFU
but also asserting her own Egyptian identity.28
Other evidence suggests that Doria Shafik, through the Bint al-Nil
Union, wanted to lead a total movement toward full political participa-
tion for women, but attempts to unify with other women's groups to
achieve this objective proved illusory in the long run. One of Doria
Shafik's first moves following the establishment of Bint al-Nil Union was
to travel to Zurich to affiliate her union with the International Council of
Women (icw).29 On 30 March 1949 La Bourse egyptienne reported the al-
liance of two feminist parties—the Egyptian Feminist party and Bint al-
Nil (to be called collectively the National Council of Women in Egypt)—to
represent Egypt within the International Council of Women. The inability
of the leaders to agree on fundamental issues, not to mention the struc-
tural difficulties raised by such a merger, precluded the success of such an
alliance. Consequently Fatma Nimat Rashid declared her "withdrawal of
the National Feminist Party from the ICW" on 20 February 1950 in a
statement to Le journal d'Egypte. The Bint al-Nil Union announced itself,
thereafter, as the National Council of Women in Egypt—Bint al-Nil and
from then on gathered momentum over the issue of full political rights for
women. At the same time, however, Doria Shafik continued to be the
focus of critical attacks from both the left and the right within Egypt. One
leader of the Muslim Brothers, Muhammad Fahmi ;Abd al-Wahhab, im-
pugned her motives for affiliating with the icw, calling it a "movement of
mutiny against the morals and traditions of Islam" and suggesting that
she was playing into the hands of Western colonialism and Zionism. But
Doria Shafik was not deterred, and in 1955 she tried to establish a new
and broader-based Arab feminist union that would follow the one estab-
lished in 1944 by Huda Sha'rawi. But she met with resistance, both from
those who identified strongly with the EFU and the memory of Huda
Sha'rawi30 and from the progressive forces, who never felt comfortable
 Biography and Women's History 323

with Shafik's liberal ideology, particularly at a time when Nasser was

establishing his own brand of Arab socialist solidarity.
There were moments, however, when Bint al-Nil and the other wom-
en's organizations came together over women's rights. In February 1951
Doria Shafik organized a mass rally at the American University in Cairo.
As she describes in her 1955 memoirs: "My strategy was to unite the
largest number of women regardless of their ideologies or their particular
relation to Bint al-Nil, in order to build one front. We would invade the
Parliament with the objective of demanding our political rights and at the
same time prove to society the solidarity of all women in this demand and
thus create a major social repercussion."
Nearly fifteen hundred women marched the few blocks to Parliament
to "take it by storm." This demonstration evoked satirical comment from
Shafik's critics, who found it inconceivable that Ceza Nabarawi, "spir-
itual daughter" of Huda Sha'rawi, would participate with Shafik, whom
she disliked intensely.31 More strident reaction against Shafik came from
the conservative Islamic organizations. Following both the storming of
Parliament and Shafik's attempts to run for political office, the issue of
women's rights became newsworthy and a veritable tirade erupted. In
1952 Akhir Sa'a published a series of polemical exchanges between mem-
bers of different Islamic organizations and Doria Shafik. Under the ban-
ner "Islamic Congress against Bint al-Nil: Islamic Organizations Rise to
Resist the Feminist Danger," we read:

Eastern women have become fond of imitating Western women.

Employing women in public work stimulates their emancipation
from the bonds of men. If a woman is economically independent,
she will refuse to submit to the man and will neglect her home and
children. The result will be the breakdown of family unity and the
resultant breakdown of society. When she demands the right of
suffrage she contradicts nature!!! Recently an adventurous move-
ment has begun which defies the limits set by God and dares to
challenge Islamic beliefs, thus creating a serious danger to the na-
tion. This devilish movement is made up of women who are not
attached to their homes and do not carry out family duties such as
taking care of their husbands and children. They are inspired by
imperialistic foreign influences which are moving against our re-
ligion and social system. Our reputation shall be ruined, as this
movement proclaims principles that are obviously contradictory to
Islam—that is, the restriction of divorce and polygamy. Therefore
the General Association of the Islamic Organizations of Egypt re-
quests his Majesty: (1) to abolish women's organizations that call for
participation in politics; (2) to force Muslim women to return to
324 Cynthia Nelson

their homes and tables with the necessary legal codes to protect
them from corruption; [and (3) to strictly impose the veil.]32
In her rebuttal, "One Woman Against the Flood," Doria Shafik an-
swered:
I have never known of a cause opposed by such insults, attacks, lies
and silly thoughts as the cause of women. Only its opponents have
been heard. And people listen to them as if they alone were the
leaders of guidance and minarets of right religion. The makers of
these anecdotes have closed their eyes to the facts: the education of
girls at a university is a fact; the employment of women in public
service is a fact; and women's constitutional rights is a problem that
will be solved in spite of the opposition, the meetings, the insults
and accusations because it is a logical and just cause supported by
the merciful and generous religion of Islam. Our cause is destined
ultimately to be achieved, in spite of their futile objections.
Following the storming of Parliament, Doria Shafik focused her strug-
gle almost exclusively on obtaining full political rights for women.33 In
October 1951 she formed a Bint al-Nil political party composed mostly of
university students, which men as well as women joined. In March 1952
she submitted her registration papers to run for election to the Egyptian
Parliament, although there was no official recognition of women's suf-
frage. After she was refused she filed suit before the State Council to
amend the election law. On 23 July 1952 the revolution took place, and
Doria Shafik was optimistic that "the leaders of the Egyptian Revolution
would in time realize the second revolution, no less important than the
first, that of giving women an equal say in the laws of the country." And
she waited. Even after the Bint al-Nil political party was abolished along
with all other political parties in 1953, Doria Shafik continued to expect
that the issue of women's political rights would receive attention. She
grew impatient, however, with the lack of government action and "when
on 12 March 1954, I read that the Constitutional Assembly would con-
vene with no mention in the newspaper that women would take part I felt
women's rights were in danger. I decided to play the last card. I decided
to go on a hunger strike to death for women's full political rights."34
And, indeed, at noon that day at the Egyptian Press Syndicate, Doria
Shafik began her hunger strike in which she was joined by eight other
women, "not only to protest the omission of women's political rights in
the new provisional constitution of the Revolution but also to underscore
the strength of the democratic trend and its roots in the popular con-
sciousness that could no longer tolerate to be patient about rule with no
 Biography and Women's History 325

parliament, no constitution and no freedom/'35 It ended when Muham-

mad Naguib (then president of Egypt) promised to give her petition
serious consideration. This act brought Doria Shafik and her feminist
struggle national and international publicity. She received cables from
more than fifty Arab, Western, and Third World women's organizations
as well as from individuals supporting her actions. Several of these orga-
nizations invited Shafik to present lectures on the theme "The Arab
woman in contemporary politics." In October 1954 she left for a three-
month lecture tour around the world. Her first stop was the United
States, at the invitation of the American Friends of the Middle East, which
led to Harper and Brothers' suggestion that she write her autobiography.
In 1956 women's right to vote became Egyptian law, but Doria felt that the
law equivocated by stipulating that women had to apply in order to vote,
which would discriminate against women by requiring them to demon-
strate their literacy (a condition not required of men). She publicly pro-
tested, which further alienated her from the Nasser regime.
During the later 1950s, when Nasser's regime was consolidating
power, the issue of women's rights was subsumed under the goals and
aspirations of the new socialist state. Political parties, the press, and
women's organizations were superseded by a larger state-controlled
system. Within this historical context Doria Shafik took her final public
stance—not for women's rights, not for national liberation, but for what
she believed was the broader issue of human rights. On Wednesday, 6
February 1957, she walked into the Indian Embassy, having announced
to the press that she was "going to hunger unto death as a protest
against the infringement of my human freedom on two fronts—the
external: (1) the Israeli occupation of Egyptian land, and the internal: (2)
the onset of dictatorship that is leading Egypt into bankruptcy and
chaos."36 This was to be her final political protest. Nasser placed her
under house arrest, withdrew her civil rights, and ordered her name
banned from public print. Her former comrades within the Bint al-Nil
Union forced her resignation.37
Ceza Nabarawi and Inji Aflatun drafted and circulated a petition en-
titled "Egyptian Women Condemn the Position of Doria Shafik." Al-
though the document bore the names of twenty-seven women represent-
ing more than a dozen different women's groups, professions, and
syndicates, it was never published. Essentially it denounced Shafik's
actions as counterrevolutionary:

We the Egyptian women are astonished by Mrs. Doria Shafik's

statement and we declare our severe disapproval of her act that
distorted the reputation of the Egyptian Women's movement
326 Cynthia Nelson

abroad. This movement entered into a new phase after the rise of
our national revolution in 1952 and after the Egyptian woman got
her political rights in the new constitution. Therefore our women's
movement became a people's movement apart from the individual
leadership that is built on personal propaganda.

This totally unsympathetic response to Shafik's dramatic act under-

scores the deep-seated opposition to her not only among the progressive
left but also among many secular Nasserites. From their point of view
Shafik was too ideologically committed to Western bourgeois values of
liberal humanism with its emphasis on social and legal reform based on a
democratic system of parliamentary government—a system that in
Egypt had allowed uncontrollable power to fall into the hands of the few.
Whereas the leftist progressive women were organizing people's re-
sistance groups among the lower classes within the orbit of the general
revolutionary struggle against imperialist domination, class hierarchy,
and economic inequality, Doria Shafik was championing values of indi-
vidual freedom expressed in the feminist struggle for "political rights."
Through the pages of her Bint al-Nil editorials, Shafik was openly hostile
both to communism and to what she believed was the rise of dictatorship.
She consciously avoided joining any political party or social movement
except her own Bint al-Nil party, which many considered ineffectual and
futile in the face of the national anti-imperialist struggle facing Egypt (the
Israeli occupation of Arab land after the 1956 Suez War). Her open chal-
lenge to Nasser during this most critical phase of the Cold War era when
Egypt was under attack by the Western imperialists was interpreted by
her opponents as direct evidence of "playing into the hands of the en-
emy." As the petitioners asked: "Wouldn't it have been more proper for
Mrs. Doria Shafik to show her jealousy about the 'liberation of the coun-
try' by participating in the women's resistance committees during the
Tripartite treachery by our enemy against Egypt our cherished country
instead of remaining in complete isolation?"
Ironically, this political stance of remaining apart led to her final isola-
tion—house arrest and then self-imposed seclusion. Within a few
months her magazine had been destroyed along with her personal pa-
pers and files, and Doria Shafik disappeared from public life until her
tragic death on 20 September 1975 brought her name for the last time onto
the front pages of the Egyptian press.

To conclude this chapter, let us return to our original question: what

theoretical contribution can the attempts to recover women's voices and
women's experiences make to contemporary feminist discourse on
 Biography and Women's History 327

women in the Middle East? Recently Arab and non-Arab feminist schol-
ars have begun to call for a different focus on Middle Eastern societies.
This is a call to those doing research on Middle Eastern societies not
merely to include a paragraph or two on the generic category "women,"
but to begin to reinterpret society from a new perspective, one that is not
dominated by patriarchal notions of power and action in society. Doing
research on women thus becomes a way of deconstructing dominant
patriarchal social science theories and notions of historical relevance,
including certain presuppositions about feminism and Islam. It is in this
context that I see the relevance and importance of discovering and re-
covering the hidden voices of Middle Eastern women, such as Doria
Shafik, to examine how particular conditions of women's lives have fos-
tered different kinds of political consciousness and action in the shaping
of recent Egyptian history. Several themes emerging from our brief excur-
sion "interpreting Doria Shafik" argue for the relevance of memoirs to the
construction of women's history in the Middle East.
The first centers on an issue that not only dominated Dona's thought
and political activism but also seems to plague feminist scholars today:
the compatibility of Islam and feminism. Some contemporary Arab femi-
nist scholars argue that if any significant advance is to be made in the
status of women, there must be a complete severance of Islamic tradition
from the issue of the position and status of women. A truly decisive
breakthrough will depend on the reassertion of a secular culture that
seems today everywhere under siege. "If feminism is defined as a strug-
gle against every inherited tradition and instinctive value informing rela-
tions between men and women, Arab feminism has yet to emerge into
the light of day."38
Embedded in that position is a presupposition of a negative and binary
opposition between Islam and women: that Islamic tradition is some
static, monolithic cause contributing universally to female oppression
throughout Middle Eastern societies. And it denies the validity of the
subjective experiences of Middle Eastern women struggling to find
meaning in a world structured as much by economic, political, and cul-
tural factors as by religion. Just as there is "at heart of the feminist project,
East and West, a desire to dismantle the existing order of things and
reconstruct it to fit one's needs, there is also a difference among feminists,
East and West in the grasp they have on the existing order and the tools
they use to dismantle it."39
Doria Shafik's experience is instructive in this context, for in many
ways her entire life represented a continual revolt against the view of
Islam as some immutable Fate constraining women either to accommo-
date or to apostatize. Her feminist struggle was aimed at dismantling a
328 Cynthia Nelson

political and legal system that kept women apart from the centers of
power. She viewed her radical, militant strategy as compatible with a
secular Islamic value system reflecting the continuity of thought of those
ardent secular liberals of an earlier generation, Qasim Amin and Taha
Husain.40
Another theme discussed among contemporary feminists and re-
flected in Doria Shafik's life is the role of the woman intellectual in bring-
ing about change in society. Doria Shafik was trying to forge a public
political space for women on different grounds than those of women
leaders who came before her. She challenged dominant Islamic ideology,
and by her own personal example she tried to redefine women's own
conceptions of themselves and their place in the wider political system.
This is still a burning issue within the Arab Islamic East. As Sidonie Smith
has recently commented: "Suspended between culturally constructed
categories of male and female selfhood, women, particularly the literate
and educated, would have discovered a certain fluidity to the boundaries
of gender. These sliding spaces of ideology and subjectivity she would
have negotiated in greater or lesser degrees of conformity and re-
sistance/'41 Doria Shafik was an educated woman who could visualize
the broader context of her historical situation. She was a nonconformist
who could "break out of the mold." In that context, Doria believed the
educated woman had an important role to play as a force in bringing
about new synthesis or harmony in society, not only between men and
women—her vision of feminism and the feminist project was not of a
continuous struggle between men and women but rather of their harmo-
ny, understanding, and cooperation—but also between the classes. She
argued that educated women could erase the class differences in Egypt by
spreading ideas of the women's movement beyond the elite to the rest of
the Egyptian women. Thus middle-class women, as intellectuals, were to
be the mediators not only between the sexes but also between the es-
tranged classes of Egypt. These women would create national unity.
Nationalism and feminism were fused in Doria Shafik's vision, and as an
intellectual she reflected the romanticism and rationalism inherent in the
liberal and bourgeois ideology of middle-class women more than the
political consciousness of either the communist left or the fundamentalist
right.
A final theme emerging from her memoirs and relevant to contempo-
rary feminist discourse on the Middle East is the whole question of the
authenticity and relevance of an Arab or Egyptian feminism itself. There
are those who would argue that Egyptian feminism is nothing more than
an imported ideology, and that Doria Shafik was more European than
Egyptian. Historically, Egypt after World War II was a society in fermenta-
 Biography and Women's History 329

tion struggling to change. There were many radical forces on both the left
and the right—the Communists, the Socialists, the Muslim Brothers, the
New Wafd—trying to mobilize the masses. Doria Shafik appeared on the
scene fervently believing in two goals: the modernization of Egyptian
society following the chaos of World War II; and changing the status of
Egyptian women as a strategy toward achieving this modernization. It is
true that in her dress and physical appearance Doria Shafik appeared the
epitome of the Westernized Egyptian woman, but her objectives and her
commitment to free herself and her society from the "chains of the past"
were authentically Egyptian, grounded in the cultural roots of her past as
well as in the present realities of her own society. That the rank and file of
Egyptian women could not identify with her was as much a consequence
of her own personality—her public image—as it was of her message. Her
public persona was daring, proud, self-centered, and strong willed. She
has been variously described as the "perfumed leader"; a "radical"; a
"danger to the Muslim nation"; a "militant feminist"; the "beautiful
leader"; a "taste of candied chestnut"; the "woman of the 88 eyebrows"; a
"traitor to the Revolution"; the "only Man in Egypt." As one prominent
Nasserist journalist for al-Ahram recently confided: "Doria Shafik empha-
sized the 'modernistic' in her appearance but what she was saying was
right and we students at university supported her. She was out of tune
with her times."42
From the perspective of this chapter it is useful to see feminism in the
context of specific Egyptian historical circumstances that shaped the ide-
ologies and strategies of particular Egyptian women in their search for
explanations to the contradictions that they had experienced in their own
lives. These conditions were not so much imported as they were the
result of an actual historical encounter between Egypt and the West. This
opened up the possibilities of choice for an increasing number of women
from middle-class backgrounds and led to the conviction that women
could be an important force for changing oppressive and unjust condi-
tions within their own society. As such, feminism in its Egyptian context
became a conscious strategy to obtain more rights within specific histor-
ical realities. In other words, the choice of feminism by some women was
a conscious decision and a tactic that they knew would bring them into
direct conflict with their own society. And some women, like Doria
Shafik, paid a heavy price for their commitment. What this interpretation
offers to those contemporary feminists looking for "women" to "write
her self" is the recognition that Doria Shafik had a voice in shaping a
feminist discourse and practice at a certain moment in Egyptian history
when women were redefining themselves in the face of changing real-
ities. But we also hear through those memoirs and poetry the echoes of
330 Cynthia Nelson

another voice, etched in pain and loneliness, which reverberates "the life
of the transition stage, the hardest and most difficult for the individual as
well as for a people/'43

Notes

1. Stephen Gates, ed., Biography as High Adventure (Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 1986); Marc Pachter, ed., Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); Johannes Fabian, Time and
the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983); James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The
Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985);
George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An
Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986).
2. Larmes d'lsis (Tears of Isis) and Avec Dante aux enfers (I-IV) (With Dante in
hell) (Paris: Pierre Fanlac, 1979).
3. Author's letter to the daughters, 14 Feb. 1985.
4. Doria Shafik was one of the first Egyptian women to receive a doctorat d'etat
in philosophy from the Sorbonne. She wrote two theses: Uart pour I'art dans Egypte
antique (Art for art's sake in ancient Egypt) and La femme et le droit religieux de
I'Egypte contemporaine (Women and religious law in contemporary Egypt) (both
published Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1940).
5. I consider Doria Shafik an intellectual not only because she self-
consciously set about to question those social, cultural, and legal traditions she
viewed as oppressive and inimical to the full equality of women in her society, but
also because she engaged, more directly than the women of the previous genera-
tion, in the intercultural political discourse surrounding feminism and Islam.
6. La femme nouvelle en Egypte (The new woman in Egypt) (Cairo: Schindler,
1944); Tatawwur al-nahda al-nisa'iyya fi Misr (The development of women's renais-
sance in Egypt), coauthored with Ibrahim 'Abduh (Cairo: Maktabat al-Tawakkul,
1945); La bonne aventure (The good adventure) (Paris: Pierre Seghers, 1949); L'es-
clave sultane (The sultan's slave) (Paris: Editions Latines, 1952); al-Kitab al-abyad li-
hucjuqal-mar'a al-siyasiyya (The white book on the political rights of women) (Cairo:
Maktabat al-Sharqiyya, 1953); Uamour perdu (The lost love) (Paris: Pierre Seghers,
1954); al-Mar'a al-misriyya min al-fara'ina ila al-yaum (The Egyptian woman from the
Pharaohs until today), coauthored with Ibrahim 'Abduh (Cairo: Matba'at al-Misr,
1955). Ibrahim 'Abduh was the founder of the Department of Journalism at Cairo
University and its leading professor from the 1930s until the 1952 revolution.
7. Following the presentation of my paper on Doria Shafik at an international
colloquium in Cairo in 1985, an angry debate among several Egyptian participants
erupted over Shafik's role in the history of the women's movement in Egypt. One
person (a leftist) suggested that Doria Shafik was a traitor to the revolution and did
not merit a biography. See Cynthia Nelson, "The Voices of Doria Shafik: The
Shaping of a Feminist Consciousness," Feminist Issues 6, no. 2 (1986): 15-31.
 Biography and Women's History 331

8. Personal communication from Seghers to the daughters following Shafik's

death. Pierre Seghers was her friend and mentor and the publisher of her poetry.
9. Leila Ahmed, "Feminism and Feminist Movements in the Middle East," in
Women and Islam, ed. Aziza al-Hibri (New York: Pergamon, 1982); Lois Beck and
Nikki Keddie, eds., Women in the Muslim World (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1978); Elizabeth W. Fernea and Basima Bezirgan, eds., Middle Eastern Mus-
lim Women Speak (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977); Mervat Hatem, 'The
Enduring Alliance of Nationalism and Patriarchy in Muslim Personal Status
Laws," Feminist Issues 6, no. 1 (1986): 19-43; Thomas Philipp, "Feminism and
National Politics in Egypt," in Women in the Muslim World, ed. Beck and Keddie,
277-94; Earl Sullivan, Women in Egyptian Public Life (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1986).
10. The Wafd (delegation) is the name of the first organized mass party in
Egypt, founded by Sa'd Zaghlul in 1918. Sha'rawi headed the women's committee
within this party.
11. Arslan Bohdanowicz, "The Feminist Movement in Egypt," Islamic Review 8
(August 1951): 24-33; Ijlal Khalifa, al-Haraka al-nisa'iyya al-haditha (The modern
women's movement) (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub, 1973); Amal Kamil al-Sabaqi, al-Haraka
al-nisa'iyya ft Misr ma baina al~thauratain 1919 wa 1952 (The women's movement in
Egypt between the two revolutions 1919 and 1952) (Cairo: Hai'at al-Kitab
al-'Amma, 1987); Kumari Jayawardena, "Reformism and Women's Rights in
Egypt," in Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, ed. Kumari Jayawardena
(London: Zed, 1986), 43-56.
12. This term is used by Afaf Luth* al-Sayyid Marsot in her history of this
period, Egypt's Liberal Experiment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
13. See Akram Khater and Cynthia Nelson, "al-Harakah al-nissa'iyah: The
Women's Movement and Political Participation in Modern Egypt," Women's Studies
International Forum 2, no. 5 (1988): 465-83; and Selma Botman, "The Experience of
Women in the Egyptian Communist Movement, 1939-1954," Women's Studies In-
ternational Forum 11, no. 2 (1988): 117-26.
14. She was to pen seven volumes of poetry, another novel, and several philo-
sophical and political essays, as well as numerous translations of sections of the
Quran into English and French. She learned Italian in order to read Dante in the
original.
15. Unpublished memoirs, 1975. This last version was in English, her least
comfortable language. One might speculate that she wrote in this language as
another intellectual challenge to herself.
16. Phyllis Rose, A Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt
and Brace, 1978), 9.
17. When wealth meant land it was not uncommon for a male to assume
responsibility for the management of the woman's property, especially if the
woman was unmarried, widowed, or illiterate. See Judith E. Tucker, Women in
Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). This
was not formal disinheritance, which would have been illegal under Islamic law,
but rather a de facto control over the woman's wealth, which in the case of Doria
Shafik's grandmother ultimately led to its alienation. Because of his great wealth,
332 Cynthia Nelson

Doria's grand-uncle was elected senator to the first Parliament of Egypt in 1924,
representing the Wafd party from Tanta.
18. Unpublished memoirs, 1975.
19. The different spelling of the last name is linked to this period of Doria's life.
Doria's dearest friend, whose last name was Soriatis, was frightened about the
school preparatory examinations. As seating for the exam was alphabetical, Doria
changed the spelling of her name from Chafik to Shafik so that she could sit near
her friend to offer moral support.
20. Following Doria's outstanding performance and the pressure from other
families, the French decided to open a girls' lycee in Alexandria.
21. Many Egyptians with whom I spoke believe that, after having been di-
vorced by Fuad for not producing a male heir, Chewikar took her revenge by
initiating Faruq into his life of corruption and dissipation. After the death of
Chewikar in 1947, Princess Faiza, who had assumed the leadership of the benev-
olent association, agreed that Shafik should assume the ownership and the re-
sponsibility for the complete production of the magazine. From that moment until
its demise in the early fifties, many, both in Egypt and in Europe, regarded La
femme nouvelle as a literary and cultural magazine of the highest caliber. The
magazine was oriented toward the French-speaking elite of both Egypt and the
West and focused its articles on the art, poetry, literature, and history of Egyptian
culture.
22. That Huda Sha'rawi died on Doria Shafik's thirty-ninth birthday was in-
terpreted by her imaginative and poetic mind as a symbol of the mystical bond
between them, signifying that Doria had a special mission to continue the work of
her childhood heroine and benefactor.
23. Unpublished memoirs, 1955.
24. By 1952 thirty such centers were in operation and, according to one of the
members of Bint al-Nil Union, there were nearly eighty by 1954. The provincial
centers were run by local committees affiliated with the Bint al-Nil central commit-
tee in Cairo, which was in charge of determining policy. Each local committee had
its own elected officers, and an annual report on activities and budget was for-
warded to Cairo. Graduates of the center's training programs automatically be-
came members of the movement. Interview with Ragia Raghib, 4 June 1986.
25. See Shafik and ' Abduh, Tatawwur, chap. 5, on the importance of education
as a means of liberating women from the shackles of ignorance and male domina-
tion.
26. Bint al-Nil's monthly circulation often reached or surpassed five thousand
copies. Informants from Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon remembered read-
ing not only Bint al-Nil but also Shafik's children's magazine, Katkut.
27. The Egyptian Feminist Union published two magazines entitled The Egyp-
tian Woman—one in French, L'Egyptienne, and one in Arabic, al-Misriyya.
28. In her poetry and her memoirs she often used the image of the river to
express the spiritual affinity she felt toward the Nile.
29. The icw was founded in 1888 in Washington, D.C., and is the oldest and
perhaps largest feminist organization in the world, represented by "national
councils composed of national and local women's organizations. It serves as a
 Biography and Women's History 333

medium for consultation among women on those actions necessary to promote

the welfare of mankind, the family, children, and the individual, advises women
of their rights and their civic, social, and political responsibilities, works for the
removal of all that restricts women from full participation in life, and supports
international peace and arbitration." See Bibliography of International Organizations
(1986), 300.
30. Letter from Ibtihaj Qaddura to Hawa Idriss, the young cousin of Huda
Sha'rawi, 14 Dec. 1955.
31. Ahmad al-Sawi, al-Ahram, 20 Feb. 1951.
32. This plea to the government to actively forbid women's organized activity
demanding their rights was sent to King Faruq and signed by Liwa Sulaiman' Abd
al-Wahhab Sobol, head of the Union of Muslim Associations. Among other sig-
natures on the petition were those of Shaikh' Ali al-Mansuri, representative of the
Muslim Brothers, and Muhammad Fahmi 'Abd al-Wahhab, who also wrote the
article "Relation between the Feminist Movement in Egypt and British Imperi-
alism."
33. The exceptions were Bint al-Nil's joining a mass protest march in
November 1951 against the British occupation of Egypt, particularly the massacre
of Egyptian resistance forces in the Canal Zone, and a symbolic boycott of Bar-
clay's Bank—just two days before the burning of Cairo in January 1952.
34. Unpublished memoirs, 1955.
35. Editorial in Bint al-Nil (April 1954), 3.
36. Unpublished memoirs, 1975.
37. Several informants expressed to me their belief that the regime "forced"
these women's organizations to publicly condemn Shafik's action.
38. Mai Ghoussoub, "Feminism—or the Eternal Masculine—in the Arab
World," New Left Review 161 (1987): 18.
39. Marnia Lazreg, "Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Wom-
an on Women in Algeria," Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 81.
40. See Shafik's thesis La femme et le droit religieux (1940), as well as her early
essay "Une petite mot," UEgyptienne 4, no. 38 (1928): 12-14, for insight into her
views about Islam.
41. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women's Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987).
42. Personal communication from Ahmad Baha al-Din.
43. Quoted in frontispiece to Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman:
A Biography (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984).
This page intentionally left blank
 Contributors

N E R M I N A B A D A N - U N A T was professor of political science at Ankara

University until her retirement and is now associated with Bosporus Univer-
sity, Istanbul. She is author of Women in the Developing World: Evidence from
Turkey and editor of Women in Turkish Society.
L E I L A A H M E D is associate professor of women's studies and director of
Near Eastern area studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is
author of Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate.
B E T H B A R O N is assistant professor of history at City College, City
University of New York. She has written articles on Egyptian society and
politics and is currently working on a book on women, culture, and the press
in Egypt.
J O N A T H A N P. B E R K E Y i s assistant professor of religion at Mount
Holyoke College. He is author of The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval
Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education.
J U L I A C L A N C Y - S M I T H is assistant professor of history at the University
of Virginia. She is author of numerous articles on North African history,
including chapters in Islam, Politics, and Social Movements and Muslim Trav-
ellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination.
V I R G I N I A D A N i E L S O N i s project administrator for a bibliographic
project at Harvard University's Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library. She has com-
pleted a doctoral dissertation on Umm Kulthum, the Arab world's most
famous modern singer. She has published and lectured on the subjects of
Arabic song, tradition and music in Islamic religious expression, and women
in musical life in the Middle East.
E R I K A F R i E D L i s professor of anthropology at Western Michigan
University. She is the author of Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village.
M A R Y E L A I N E H E G L A N O i s assistant professor of anthropology at
Santa Clara University. Her works include Religious Resurgence: Contemporary
Cases in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism (editor, with Richard Antoun) and
articles on revolution, religion, women, and local politics in Iran.
D E N I Z K A N D i Y O T l i s senior lecturer in the social sciences division,
Richmond College, Surrey, England. She is the author of Women in Rural
Production Systems: Problems and Policies and editor of Women, Islam and the
State.
N I K K I R. K E D D i E i s professor of history at the University of California at
Los Angeles. Among her books are Roots of Revolution: An Interpretive History
of Modern Iran and Women in the Muslim World (editor, with Lois Beck). She is

335
336 Contributors

the editor of the new multidisciplinary journal, Contention: Debates in Society,

Culture, and Science.
H U D A L U T F l i s associate professor of Middle Eastern history at the
American University in Cairo, Egypt. She is author ofal-Quds al-Mamlukiyya:
A History of Mamluk Jerusalem Based on the Haram Documents.
C Y N T H I A N E L S O N is professor of anthropology at the American
University in Cairo, Egypt. She has published articles on women and politics
in several journals, including American Ethnologist and Women's Studies Inter-
national Forum, and edited The Desert and the Sown.
C A R L F. R E T R Y is associate professor of Middle Eastern history at
Northwestern University. He is author of The Civilian Elite of Cairo in the Later
Middle Ages and is currently writing a book on the political economy of Egypt
prior to the Ottoman conquest. Petry serves on the executive board of the
American Research Center in Egypt.
D O N A L D Q U A T A E R T i s associate professor of history and director of the
Southwest Asian and North African program at the State University of New
York at Binghamton. His books include Social Disintegration and Popular Re-
sistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881-1908 and The Ottoman Empire: Its Society
and Economy, 1300-1914 (associate editor, with Halil Inalcik, editor).
P A U L A S A N D E R S is assistant professor of history at Rice University. She
has published articles on Fatimid ceremonial and historiography and has
recently completed the book Ritual, Politics, and the City in Fatimid Cairo.
D E M I S E A. S P E L L B E R G i s assistant professor of history and Middle East
studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has also taught in the Wom-
en's Studies and Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. Her work on
gender and Islamic history has been published in Muslim World and Literature
East and West.
J U D I T H E. T U C K E R is associate professor of history at Georgetown
University. She is author of Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt and of numer-
ous articles on women and the family in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Egypt and Palestine. She is also a contributing editor of the Middle East Report.
 Index

Abbasid period, 58-59, 60, 62, 68, 69, Ayyubid period, 122, 144
70 Azbak, 133
Abbott, Nabia, 46, 50, 54
Abduh, Muhammad, 280 Baibars, Sultan, 126, 150
Abortion, 63, 189-90 al-Baladhuri, 52, 53
Abu Bakr, 47, 48, 64 Bangladesh, 34-35
Adultery, 5, 74, 75, 86, 107 al-Banna, Hasan, 316
Aflatun, Inji, 315, 325 Barquq, Sultan al-Zahir, 145
Agriculture: male versus female farm- Barsbay, Sultan, 101, 131
ing systems, 25-26, 27; women's role Battle of the Camel, 45-55
in sub-Saharan Africa, 28-31; in Iran, Bed fee, 107-08, 118
207-11 Bint al-Nil, 312, 318, 319, 321-22, 326,
'Ahd ceremony, 257 332n26
Ahmad, Fathiyya, 294, 296-97, 302, 304 Bint al-Nil party, 324, 326
Ahmad, Ratiba, 294, 301 Bint al-Nil Union, 312, 318-20, 321,
Ahmad, Zakariyya, 298, 303 322, 323, 332n24, 333n33
Aibak, 125 Birth control, 9, 63
'A'isha (bint Abi Bakr), 7, 10, 45-55, Boserup, Ester, 25, 27
281 Bourguiba, Habib, 16, 17
'A'isha bint 'Abd al-Hadi, 151-52, Brideprice/bridewealth, 26, 32, 279,
156n27 286, 289nl5
Algeria, 17, 254-70 al-Bukhari, 50, 52, 147
'Ali (ibn Abi Talib), 7, 48, 49, 52-53, 54 Burqa. See Veiling
Aliabad women: political roles of, 215-
29; public-private dichotomy as ide- Cairene women: participation in popu-
ology in, 216-18; and myth of public- lar religious festivals, 99-100, 115-16;
private dichotomy, 218-21; sexual during fourteenth century, 102-18;
role of, 223; reproductive role of, domestic life of, 103-06, 117-18; and
223-24; domestic labor of, 224; family peddlers, 104, 106; working-class
relations of, 224; religious role of, women, 105-06, 118; and weddings,
224; verbal and intellectual role of, 106; and divorce, 106-07; and sexu-
224-25; emotional and moral role of, ality, 107-08; rituals of purity, 108-
225; leadership of, 225; symbolic role 09; and view of female body, 109-11;
of, 225-26; coping mechanisms of, dress of, 109-11; childbirth and, 111-
226-27; historical development of po- 12; death and funerary rituals of,
litical roles, 227-29 112-15; social entertainment of, 116-
Amin, Qasim, 232, 328 17
Amina bt. Isma'il, 132-33 Cambon, Jules, 263-64, 265
Amir, 'Aziza, 309n34 Camel, Battle of the, 45-55
'Ammar Ibn Yasir, 52-53 Carpetmaking, 170-72
Ataturk, 14, 15, 178-79, 180-81, 188, Chewikar, Princess, 318, 321, 322n21
191 Childbirth, 111-12, 221
Awlad 'Ali, 32 Children. See Family
337
338 Index

China, 34, 35-36 in, 17, 19, 312-30; feminism in, 19,
Class differences: and veiling and se- 310-30; Bedouins of, 32; during four-
clusion, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 33; and inheri- teenth century, 99-118; fiscal dilem-
tance, 6; and Western influences, 14; mas of the Mamluk state, 126-29;
impact on classic patriarchy, 33-34; women as custodians of property in
in fourteenth-century Egypt, 106-07, later medieval Egypt, 129-37; Islamic
118; in marriage and divorce, 239, education in the Mamluk state, 143-
242, 250-51 55; marriage and divorce in modern
Concubinage, 8, 63, 141n37, 283 Egypt, 275-87; female singers in,
Contraception. See Birth control 292-305
Cotton industry. See Textile manufac- Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU), 313,
turing 314, 319-20, 322, 332n27
Coulson, Noel, 61 Egyptian Muslim Brethren, 17
Cousin marriage, 3, 4, 5, 32, 238-39 Employment: new positions in labor
Crochard, Captain, 261-64 market for women, 15, 21nl9; impact
of classic patriarchy on women's em-
Death and funerary rituals, 81, 82-83, ployment, 33-34; dependence on
112-15, 119n26, 221 women's wage labor, 35; veiling and,
Delas, Kate, 268-69 36; in textile manufacturing, 161-73;
Divorce: in the Quran, 4, 6, 8; re- of Aliabad women, 230nlO; female
strictions on, 16; in Islamic law, 60, singers in Egypt, 292-305
61, 63, 120n36; by repudiation, Endogamy, 3, 26, 31, 260
94n36; in fourteenth-century Egypt, Eunuchs, 11, 90n8
106-07, 120n36; in Turkey, 178; in
Nablus, 239-42; khul' divorce, 241, Factories. See Textile manufacturing
252nl5; in modern Egypt, 284-87; of Faiza, Princess, 321, 332n21
female singers in Egypt, 301 Family: parent-child relationship and,
Dowry, 4, 7, 32 6, 243-47; structure in patriarchy, 6-
Dress, 17, 18, 83-84, 109-10, 187, 7, 31-33; in sub-Saharan Africa, 29-
194n26. See also Veiling 30; and Islamic education in the Mid-
dle Ages, 146-47, 149; in rural Iran,
Eberhardt, Isabelle, 266-68, 269, 273- 207-08, 209-11; of Aliabad women,
74n51 222-23, 24; study of, 233-37; in
Edib, Halide, 178 Nablus, 233-51; marital relationship
Education: and changes in women's and, 237-43; role of wife's brother in,
status, 13, 15, 16, 33; Islamic educa- 247-48; and other kinship relations,
tion in the Mamluk state, 143-55; 247-49; grandparents in, 248-49; and
madrasas, 143-46, 148-49, 150; of production of female gender, 249-51;
women during later Middle Ages, Western family history, 276. See also
145-48; private teaching circles in Kinship; Marriage
mosques and homes, 149-51; and Farming. See Agriculture
hadith transmission, 151-55; in Tur- Faruq, King, 314, 318, 333n32
key, 177-78, 183-88, 193n21 Faskh, 240
EFU. See Egyptian Feminist Union Fasting, 109, 110
Egypt: historical context of women's Fatima bint al-Zahir Tatar, 131-32, 133,
movement in, 13, 33, 313-15; politics 134
 Index 339

Fatima bint 'Ala' al-Din 'Ali b. Khalil b. Ibn Qutaiba, 53

Khassbak, 134-36, 141n38 Ibn Sa'd, 52, 53
Female body, view of, 109-11 Ibrahim Pasha, 249
Feminism: and interpretation of Quran, icw. See International Council of Wom-
5-6; and concept of patriarchy, 24-26; en
in Turkey, 189-90; in Egypt, 310-30 'Id, 'Aziz, 296, 307n20
fiqh, 144, 154-55 Ijaza, 143
Fitna, 50-51, 55, 75, 90n6 Ijma', 60
Fuad, King, 284, 318, 332n21 7/m, 148-50, 154
Inal, Sultan, 122, 131, 132
Gathering productive system. See Incest taboos, 87-88
Hunting-gathering productive sys- India, 17, 33-34
tem Infanticide, 4
Gendering: definition of, 79; her- Inheritance: in Quran, 4, 5; class dif-
maphrodites and, 88-89 ferences and, 6; in urban versus rural
Generation, theory of, 76-77 areas, 6; Islamic law and, 8; control
of, 26; various interpretations of, 64;
Haddad, Niqula, 270 hermaphrodites and, 81-82; in
Hadiih, 23, 146, 147, 151-55 Nablus, 243-44, 252n9. See also Prop-
Haikal, Muhammad Husain, 278 erty rights
al-Hakim, 101-02 International Council of Women (icw),
Hanbal, Ibn, 50, 51 322, 332-33n29
Haqq al-firash, 108 Iran: Pahlavis in, 17; women's status in,
Harem rule, 11 18, 19, 36-37; gender performances
Harim, 233, 260 in rural Iran, 195-213; ethnographic
Harun al-Rashid, 55 setting of rural Iran, 198-200; ma-
Hasan al-Basri, 66-67 chismo subculture of men in, 199-
Hermaphrodites, 76-89, 91n9, 92nl4 200; hunting-gathering productive
History. See Middle Eastern women's system in, 200-204; pastoral produc-
history tive system in, 204-07; agricultural
Homosexuality, 88 productive system in, 207-11; politi-
Honor and shame, code of, 9, 26, 41n34 cal roles of Aliabad women, 215-29
Huda, al-Hajja, 293-94 Islam: gender inequalities and, 1-2, 46;
Hunting-gathering productive system, gender relations in Quran, 4-7; ap-
in rural Iran, 200-204 peal to women, 17-19; reformist ap-
Husain (Imam), 222 proach to, 19; patriarchy and, 23-38;
Husain, Taha, 328 Umayyad period of, 58, 59-60, 69;
Abbasid period of, 58-59, 60, 62, 68,
Ibn al-'Arabi, 69-70 69, 70; early Islam and the position of
Ibn al-Hajj, 100-18, 119n3, 146, 151 women, 58-71; interpretation of the
Ibn al-Hajjaj, 147, 152 Quran and, 63-65; male-female rela-
Ibn Gharib, Sharaf al-Din, 130 tions in medieval Islam, 74-76
Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani, 147, 151 Islamic dress. See Dress
Ibn Hisham, 152 Islamic law: schools of, 8, 60-61; on
Ibn lyas, 122, 134, 137 marriage, 8, 237-43, 279-84; modern-
Ibn Malik, 154 ist interpretations of, 15; various in-
340 Index

Islamic law (continued) Madrasas, 143-46, 148-49, 150, 154, 254

terpretations of, 59, 61-62; evolution al-Mahdiyya, Munira, 296, 301, 303,
of, 59-62; hermaphrodites in, 76-89; 304, 307n20
education in, 143, 144, 146, 148-49; Mahfouz, Naguib, 280
on divorce, 239-42, 284-87; on par- Mahr,32, 279. See also Bride-
ent-child relationship, 243-47; on price/bridewealth
kinship relations, 247-49 Majlis, 143
Islamic revival, 16-19, 187-88, 190, al-Malik al-Salih Ayyub, 125
194n26, 316 Mamluk state: status of women in rul-
Isma'il, Khedive, 294 ing class, 122-26; fiscal dilemmas of,
Isma'ili Shi'ism, 65 126-29; women and property man-
Isnad, 152 agement in, 129-37; Islamic educa-
Israel, 16, 17 tion in, 143-55
Manufacturing. See Textile manufactur-
Jaqmaq, Sultan al-Zahir, 131-32, 133 ing
al-Maqrizi, 101, 102, 116, 118nl
Kalam, 153 Marriage: cousin marriage, 3, 4, 5, 9,
Kandiyoti, Deniz, 181, 283 32, 238-39; women's condition in, 6-
Katkut, 312, 332n26 7, 31-33; Islamic law and, 8; tempo-
Khadija, Lalla, 257-58 rary marriage, 8; mother's role in, 9;
Khadija, 4, 7, 10, 150 age at, 16, 237-38, 281-82; in sub-
Khairbak Hadid al-Ashrafi, 130-31 Saharan Africa, 29; in tribes, 47; as
Kharijite movement, 65-66 established by Muhammad, 58;
Khomeini, Ayatollah, 18, 19, 36, 224 Quranic precepts on, 59, 61-62; her-
Khul', 241, 252nl5 maphrodites and, 87-88; rules con-
Khuntha. See Hermaphrodites cerning, 94n34; in fourteenth-century
Kinship: in sub-Saharan Africa, 29; bi- Egypt, 106; in Turkey, 178; wedding
lateral kinship systems, 41n34; in customs, 221; in Nablus, 237-43, 250;
rural Iran, 207-08, 209-11; in Nablus, minor marriage, 238, 281; in modern
247-49. See also Family; Marriage Egypt, 275-87; contract of, 276, 279-
Kuttab, 254 80; and love, 277-79; premarital mix-
ing and, 280-81; toward monogamy,
Lafemme nouvelle, 312, 319, 321, 332n21 283-84. See also Divorce; Family;
Labor market. See Employment Kinship
Lakhdar, Sa'id b., 265-66 Martyrdom, ideology of, 229-30n8
Lane, Edward, 276, 281, 283, 294, 304 Masabni, Badi'a, 297, 301, 303, 307nl7,
Law. See Islamic law; Legal reforms; 308n34
Quran; and areas of law, such as Mashyakhas, 153
Divorce, Marriage al-Masriyya, Na'ima, 295-96
Legal issues. See Islamic law; Quran; Menstruation, 108-09
and areas of law, such as Divorce, Mernissi, Fatima, 33, 36
Marriage Meygret, General, 263, 265
Legal reforms, in Turkey, 188-92, Middle East. See names of specific
194n28 countries
Lyautey, Hubert, 266 Middle Eastern women's history: ne-
 Index 341

gleet of, 1; ideology and, 1-2; in pre- marital relationship in, 237-43; par-
Islamic Near East, 2-4, 46, 47, 49; ent-child relationship in, 243-47;
Quran and, 4-7; cycles of freedom kinship relations in, 247-49
and restriction, 7-13; Western influ- Nafacja, 108, 241, 244-46, 247
ences on, 13-17; changes in women's Naguib, Muhammad, 325
position in last two centuries, 13-19; Nasif, Malak Hifni, 278, 279, 281, 283
shortcomings of, 23-24, 37-38; four- Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 310, 312-13, 314,
teenth-century prescriptive literature 325, 326
and, 100-103, 117-18, 118-19n2; pri- National Liberation Front, 17
orities in, 233-34; study of family in, Nikah, 74
233-34; biography and, 310-11, 326- North Yemen, 21nl3
30
Modesty, 82, 84, 225-26. See also Seclu- Oil industry, 16, 17
sion; Veiling Oman, 13, 32, 34
Mohair industry, 169-70 Ottoman Empire: harem in, 11; veiling
Mo'men, 216 in, 12; women's contributions in, 126,
Monogamy, 62, 283-84 180; and demise of Mamluk regime,
Morocco, 36 144; household economies in, 161-
Mu'awiyya, 49 63; textile manufacturing in, 161-73;
al-Mu'ayyad Shaikh, Sultan, 145 collapse of, 178; Westernization of,
Muhaddithun, 151-52 180
Muhallil, 106, 120n36
Muhammad (the Prophet): wives of, 4, Pahlavis, 17
5, 7, 10, 45, 47, 50, 52, 54, 143, 281; as Pakistan, 19
reformer, 46; marriage and, 58; as Parents. See Family
judge, 59; Quran as exact words of, Pastoral productive system, in Iran,
63-64, 65; on menstruation, 108 204-07
Muhammad, al-Nasir, 134, 135, 144 Patriarchal bargains, 27, 34-35
Muhammad 'Ali, 33 Patriarchy: Islam and, 23-38; radical
Muhammad b. 'Abd al-Rahman al- feminists' view of, 24-25; concept of,
Azhari, 256 24-28; Marxist or socialist feminists'
Muhammad b. Abi al-Qasim, 254, 255, view of, 25-26; autonomy and pro-
260-63, 266-67, 273n35 test in sub-Saharan Africa, 28-31;
Muhammad b. al-Hajj Muhammad, subservience and manipulation in
255, 259, 262, 264, 268 classic patriarchy, 31-35; women's in-
Mulazama, 153 vestment in, 34-35; breakdown of,
Munazara, 154 35-37
Muqaddamat, 256 Peddlers, 104, 106
Murabita, 266 Political roles: of 'A'isha bint Abi Bakr,
Music, in Egypt, 292-305, 305nl 45-55; of Aliabad women, 215-29;
Mustafa Kemal. See Ataturk and public-private dichotomy as ide-
ology, 216-18; and myth of public-
Nabarawi, Ceza, 323, 325 private dichotomy, 218-21; women's
Nablus: family in, 233-51; as admin- movement in Egypt, 312-30
istrative and business center, 235-37; Polygamy/polygyny: in the Quran, 4,
342 Index

Polygamy/polygyny (continued) Reproduction, 26-27, 76-77, 223-24

6, 8, 15, 17, 59, 61-62; outlawing of, Reza, Shah Muhammad,203
16; rationale for, 18; in Africa, 26, 29; Rtoat, 150-51
Muhammad's practice of, 47; in Is- Ritual purity, 90n8, 108-09, 257
lamic law, 61-62, 63, 283; in Turkey, Rural areas: inheritance in, 6; veiling
178; in Nablus, 237, 239; in modern and seclusion in, 14; household econ-
Egypt, 283-84, 287 omies in the Ottoman Empire, 162-
Popular religious customs, 99-100, 105, 63; gender performances in rural
115-16, 221-22, 224 Iran, 195-213; political roles of Al-
Prayer, 80-81, 257 iabad women, 215-29
Property rights, 6, 20n9, 26, 32, 122-37, Rushdi, Husain, 296
331-32nl7. See also Inheritance
Prostitution, 301, 302, 303 Sadat, Anwar, 17
Public-private dichotomy: as ideology, al-Sadat, Safiyya, 275-76, 287
216-18; myth of, 218-21; and roles of al-Sairafi, 131, 132, 133
Aliabad women, 221-27 al-Sakhawi, 146, 147, 149-50, 151, 153,
Purdah, 30, 33 156n9
Purity. See Ritual purity Sala, 297, 307nl5
Salah al-Din (Saladin), 123
Qadhf, 75, 86 Sanu', Ya'qub, 277-78
Qaitbay, Sultan, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, al-Sarakhsi, 77, 84, 87, 91-92nl4, 92-
141n39, 155n8 93nn21-22
Qala'un, Sultan, 126, 127 Sauuids,2l6
Qansuh al-Ghauri, Sultan, 127, 136, Seclusion: in pre-Islamic Near East, 2-
141-42nn45-46 4; origin of, 2-4, 12; in the Quran, 4-
Qansuh Khamsmi'a, 135 5; of Muhammad's wives, 5, 46, 47;
Qarmati movement, 65, 68-69 class differences and, 7, 9, 33; op-
Qasida, 304 position to, 12; Tillion's view of, 26;
Quran: gender relations in, 2, 4-7, 75; in Nigeria, 29, 30; in contemporary
inheritance rules in, 4, 5; veiling and Iran, 211-12
seclusion in, 4-5; adultery punish- Sex, biological determination of, 77-79,
ment in, 5; breaking and bending 92nnl8-19, 92-93nn21-22
rules in, 5; beating of wives in, 5, 8; Sexuality, 6, 9, 10, 36, 63, 66, 107-11,
interpretation of, 5-6, 15, 19, 63-65; 118, 223
reformist interpretation of, 5-6, 19; Sha'ban, Sultan al-Ashraf, 144
polygyny and, 8, 59; modernist in- Shafik, Doria, 310-30, 330n5, 332nl9
terpretations of, 15; Muhammad's al-Shaibani, Muhammad, 84, 92nl9
wives and, 46, 47, 54; ethical Shaikhs, 143, 146, 254, 269
egalitarianism in, 58, 62; as legislative Shajar al-Durr, 125
document, 59; creation doctrine in, Shajarat al-Durr, 278, 286
76 Shams (Mother of the Poor), 69
Shaqara, Khawand, 130-31
Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya, 66-68, 256 Sha'rawi, Huda, 303, 313, 314, 316,
Rahhala, 152 317, 319, 320, 322, 323, 332n22
Religious customs. See Popular religious Shi'ism, 8, 10, 12, 65, 78, 144
customs Silk industry, 163-65
 Index 343

Singers, 292-305, 305nl Umayyad period, 58, 59-60, 69

Sirri, Fatma, 308n34 Umm Kulthum, 295, 297-301, 302, 303,
Slander. See Qadhf 304, 305, 308nn28, 33, 309n34
Slavery, female, 8, 10, 11, 63, 84-85, United Arab Emirates, 13
93-94n29, 283 Urban areas: veiling and seclusion in,
Social classes. See Class differences 3, 4, 5, 6; inheritance and, 6
South Yemen, 13, 16 Usul, 153
Stern, Gertrude, 4, 46 'Uthman, 48, 49, 64
Sub-Saharan Africa: female farming
system in, 25, 26, 27; autonomy and Veiling: class differences and, 2, 3, 7, 9,
protest in, 28-31 33; in pre-Islamic Near East, 2-4;
Sufism, 10, 65-68, 69-70, 72n23, 99, origin of, 2-4, 12; in Quran, 4-5; of
115-16, 188, 254-70 Muhammad's wives, 5; urban areas
Sufyan al-Thauri, 67 and, 6; women's acceptance of, 7, 17,
Suhba, 153 18, 34, 36-37; opposition to, 12; reac-
Suicide, 35-36, 284 tion to French in Egypt, 13; for
Sunni, 8, 60, 144 Muhammad's wives, 47; in Turkey,
al-Suwaisiyya, al-Hajja, 293, 304 187, 194n26
al-Suyuti, Jalal al-Din, 151
Wa<7/, 8, 130-32
Taghri Birdi al-Mu'adhdhi, 144 Watt, W. Montgomery, 46, 49
Talacj, 239-40, 241 Wife beating, 5, 8
Taqtuqa, 304 Wikan, Unni, 32, 34
Taricjas, 255, 257 Women as dangerous, 3, 50-51, 55,
Tatar, Sultan, 131 72n23, 75, 90n6, 100-101
Tauhida, 295, 302, 308-09n34 Women's Action Forum, 19
Textile manufacturing, 161-73 Women's groups: women's theater
Tillion, Germaine, 3, 26 games, 13; women's rituals, 13, 30;
Tomb visiting, 114-15 all- women's groups in Iran, 201-02,
Tribes: definition of, 3-4; gender 213-14n6
egalitarianism in, 11-12, 20n9, 21nl3 Wool industry. See Textile manufactur-
Tunisia, 16, 17 ing
Turkey: Ataturk's reforms in, 14, 15-16,
177, 178-82, 188, 191; textile man- Yusuf, Shaikh 'Ali, 275-76, 287
ufacturing in nineteenth century,
161-73; education in, 177-78, 183- Zaghlul, Sa'd, 296, 316
88, 193n21; professional and academ- Zainab, Khawand, 122, 137
ic women in, 184-87, 191; legal re- Zainab, Lalla, 254, 255, 258-70, 272n27
forms in, 188-92. See also Ottoman Zainab al-Tukhiyya, 146-47, 154
Empire Zakat, 246
Turkish Women's League, 179 Zangid period, 144
Zawiya, 254-55, 257, 258, 259, 268
Ulama (alini), 147-48 Zina. See Adultery
'Umar, 8 Zubaida, 55