Introduction: Class, Gender and Empire
The debate over women wearing the niqab (face veil) in late-nineteenth to early-twentieth-century Egypt illustrates well the intersection of class, gender, and empire. The vast majority of Egyptian women were peasants who could not wear a niqab while working in the fields. The practice was restricted to women of the urban elite. The middle-class pioneers of the Egyptian women’s movement focused their efforts on education and marriage rights, not the niqab. Nabawiyya Musa, the first Egyptian woman to graduate from high school and later the first woman school headmistress, appears in a widely circulated photo without a niqab. But she did not advocate making the niqab a central issue. Malak Hifni Nasif, another prominent women’s educator, opposed unveiling and argued that many of the wealthier women who did so were motivated by attraction to European fashion.
Nonetheless, Qasim Amin’s attack on the niqab in The Liberation of Women (1899) became the centerpiece of the debate—an expression of gender hierarchy and class privilege that persists in many contemporary discussions of this issue. Amin, a French-educated lawyer and the son of an aristocratic Turkish father, accepted much of the colonial-Orientalist characterization of Egyptian women as backward compared to European women. His arguments appear to be primarily motivated by the belief that moderately educated women were the most appropriate companionate marriage partners for “modern” middle-class and elite men and mothers for future nationalist sons.
Amin frequented the intellectual circle around Muhammad ‘Abduh, the modernist chief mufti of Egypt who may even have written the section of The Liberation of Women that argues that shari‘a requires that women wear a hijab (headscarf), but not a niqab. Lord Cromer, the British proconsul in Egypt, supported ‘Abduh’s appointment as chief mufti in 1899, considered him a friend, and regarded ‘Abduh and his circle as “the natural allies of the European reformer.” But while Cromer apparently supported Qasim Amin’s limited conception of women’s “liberation,” he was unequivocally a male supremacist at home. In 1909, after returning to Britain under the cloud of the Dinshaway Incident, Cromer became the founding president of the Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage and its successor organization, the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage.
Huda Sha‘arawi, who was raised in a harem as a member of a wealthy family, is the icon of Egyptian feminism. In 1923, returning from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Congress in Rome, she and her young protégée, Ceza Nabarawi, disembarked at Cairo Station without their niqabs. Sha‘arawi’s authority, due to her class position and nationalist credentials, quickly and organically made the niqab unfashionable.
Empire and its aftermath remain gendered today. Following the 2001 US assault on Afghanistan, then first lady Laura Bush asserted, “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. . . . The fight against terrorism is also a f ight for the rights and dignity of women.”Contemporary French politics and culture are obsessed with veiled Muslim women. Former president François Hollande opined, if France “can offer the conditions for [a Muslim woman’s] self-fulfillment, she will free herself from her veil and become a French woman, whilst remaining religious, if she wants to be, capable of having an ideal.” These are updated versions of imperial feminism—what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak termed “white men . . . saving brown women from brown men.”
(Joel Beinin in A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa, Stanford University Press, 2021, pp. 11-13 of the ebook version)
The West has traditionally refused to see in any aspect of Muslim culture and life the possibility—indeed, the inevitability—of regeneration and modernity. This black spot has existed for hundreds of years, but recently it has got bigger and darker.
It dissuades us from trying to understand the past, encouraging us, instead, to go off on tangents, enter blind alleys and credit the claims of demagogues and simplifiers. It is an impediment to a balanced and coherent vision of world history.
In an era when a great many atrocities have been committed in the name of Islam, our ability to appraise Muslim civilisation has been impaired by a historical fallacy propagated by triumphalist Western historians, politicians and commentators, as well as some renegade Muslims who have turned on the religion of their births. These people are united in demanding that the religion of Muhammad re-examine its place and conscience in the modern world. Islam, they say, should subject itself to the same intellectual and social transformations that the West experienced from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and which laid the foundation for contemporary society. Islam needs its Enlightenment. Islam needs a Reformation, a Renaissance and a sense of humour. Muslims should learn to take “insults to their prophet in good part and stop looking at their holy book as the literal word of God—just as many adherents of Christianity and Judaism have done.
The idea behind these counsels is a simple one. Internal deficiencies have barred Islamic civilisation from a number of indispensable rites of passage, without which it will never emerge from its state of backwardness. But these commentaries say more about the people who make them than they do about Islam.
If you think that modern Islamic civilisation has been untouched by reform, it stands to reason that a whole range of characters familiar from your own history will be absent from the pages of the Islamic past: that the world of Islam continues to await its secular philosophers, its feminists, its scientists, its democrats and its revolutionaries. Equally, who can dispute that an Islamic history bereft of intellectual and political reform will inevitably miss out on social and cultural modernity? Politics, education, science, medicine, sex—for more than 1.5 billion Muslims on the earth today (almost a quarter of the world’s population) the list of areas that have yet to be smiled on by modernity is literally endless.
(Christopher Bellaigue, The Islamic Enlightenment, 217, Vintage edition, Introduction xix-xx)
The concept and reality of ‘modernity’ – capitalist modernity – has to be carefully examined in order to see to what extent such modernity advanced, regressed or blocked women’s struggle, progress and emancipation. One has only to think of the roles of the international financial institutions in shaping the political economy of many countries, privatisation, wars, support of authoritarian regimes, reproduction of class and power relations, treatment of refugees and double standards, support of so-called ‘moderate’ oppositions, even the complicity of a few NGO’s in the imperialist designs and preserving the status quo, etc. etc.
Admittedly, Bellaigue recommends we exercise caution when evoking terms such as ‘modernity’. “When dealing with terms that have arisen and acquired currency in the West, such as ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’,” he writes, “one should exercise caution. The word ‘Enlightenment’ is perhaps the trickiest benchmark of all because it comes with its own baggage of self-congratulation.” (ibid., xxvii)
"This image has also become a stereotype because it is simplistic in its pitting supposedly free sisters in the West against wretched victims in Arab countries. Muslim societies are assumed to have sweeping patriarchal structures, while it is claimed that Western societies are pictures of progressive modernity, says Swiss social anthropologist Annemarie Sancar. Neither of these absolute views are correct."
Women and Gender in Islam (a book by Leila Ahmed)
Maryam al-Asturlābiyya (10th century)
Táhireh / Qurrat al-Ayn (1814/17-1852)
Fatma Aliye (1862-1936)
Malak Hifni Nasif (1886-1918)
Huda Sha’arawi (1879-1947)
Bibi Khanoon Astarabadi (1858-1921)
Zaynab Al-Ghazali (1917-2005)
Doria Shafik (1908-1975)
Inji Efflatoun (1924–1987)
Fatma Mernissi (1940-2015)
Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim (1930-2017)
Nawal Al-Saadawi (1931-2021)
The BBC, unsurprisingly, ignored that El-Saadawi was anti-capitalist and belonged to the “historical socialist-feminists,” (her own words).
- Women, Egypt and Religion
- Life and times via her writings
- Meet Egypt’s most radical woman
- The many lives of Nawaal El-Saadaawi
- The pioneering anticolonial feminism of Nawal el Saadawi
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