Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions Lila Abu-Lughod Rewriting Feminist Beginnings: The Nineteenth Century 1. Women, Medicine, and Power in Nineteenth Century Egypt, Khaled Fahmy 2. 'A'isha Taymur's Tears and the Critique of the Modernist and the Feminist Discourses on Nineteenth Century Egypt, 5 Mervat Hatem Mothers, Wives, and Citizens: The Turn of the Century 3. Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran, Afsaneh Najmabadi 4. Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn of the Century Egypt, Omnia Shakry 5. The Egyptian Lives of Jeanne D'Arc, Marilyn Booth Islamism, Modernism, and Feminisms: The Late Twentieth Century 6. Eluding the Feminist, Overthrowing the Modern? Transformations in Twentieth Century Iran, Zohreh T. Sullivan 7. The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt: Selective Repudiation as a Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics, Lila Abu-Lughod Afterword: Some Awkward Questions on Women and Modernity in Turkey, Deniz Kandiyoti

Preface:

This book grew out of my strong sense that emerging in Middle East studies was a fundamentally new way of thinking about the implications for women of the projects of modernity. This new thinking was enabled by the mature scholarship on "the woman question" that had been developing over the last two decades, scholarship characterized by fine historical research, critical social analysis of the contemporary scene, and intense intellectual debate. It was also enabled by the wider reading by feminist scholars of the Middle East of contemporary theory and historical work about and from other regions, whether Europe or South Asia. Although there are some differences in theoretical approach and interpretation among the contributors to this volume, four features distinguish our collective effort. First, we question the familiar dichotomy that has opposed tradition to modernity, relegating women's domesticity to the realm of conservatism and tradition and labeling women's emergence into the public sphere, whether in politics, employment, or education, as radical and new. Several of the chapters examine the modernity of early twentieth century domesticity itself, and the discourses about nationalism that supported it. Others consider the modernity of the gender politics of contemporary Islamism. Second, we are suspicious about the way modernity is so easily equated with the progress, emancipation, and empowerment of women. Some chapters reexamine iconic figures and institutions in the narrative of modern Middle Eastern women's progress. Others explore the ambiguities and contradictions of the programs intended to make women modern, programs related in particular to education, marriage, and rational, scientific forms of conduct, including child rearing. We ask not just what new possibilities but what hidden costs, unanticipated constraints, novel forms of discipline and regulation, and unintended consequences accompanied such programs. Third, we take seriously the vexed question of the relationship of Europe to Middle Eastern projects of remaking women. We try to steer a measured course between glossing over and overemphasizing the role of the West (in its variety and its local appropriations), looking for ways to acknowledge the specificities of local feminisms while interrogating the complex ways in which European colonial power was fundamental to the historical development of the Middle East. This inescapable history and its postcolonial legacy, as the chapters on the late twentieth century show, have profoundly affected, in sometimes counter-intuitive ways, its gender politics. Finally, we use a broad definition of feminism in this volume, not confining ourselves to women's movements per se (ably studied by others before us) but including the wide range of projects having women as their object. We try to set such projects, whether initiated and promoted by men or women, within their historical, political, and social contexts. This has meant placing such projects not along a trajectory of liberation from patriarchy but squarely within the messy situations of state-building, anti-colonial nationalism, changing social orders, and the emergence of new classes. At the same time, although we have not focused specifically on women's activism, we have tried to remain attuned to the ways in which women shaped and reshaped the projects that affected them; in the case of feminism, this has usually meant middle class and elite women...