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Mainstreaming Middle East Gender Research: Promise or Pitfall?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Ruth Roded*
Affiliation:
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Extract

From The Advent Of Middle Eastern Studies, the ‘status of the Muslim woman’ was a major subject of interest, not to say fascination. Women in Middle Eastern society were depicted as invisible, downtrodden figures, whiling away their time in harems, ignorant of anything but the most frivolous matters, and prone to childlike behavior. A handful of outstanding, unique women were portrayed either as ideal paragons or as evil shrews.

In the wake of the feminist movement of the 1960s, Middle Eastern ‘women’s history’ gradually began to modify these stereotypes. During the last two decades, new research has revealed the varied roles women have played in the economic, social, and cultural life of the Middle East. Quantitative studies of economic records have produced provocative findings on the ownership and management of property by women.

Type
Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2001

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a panel on “Mainstreaming Gender” at the German Middle East Studies Association (DAVO) annual conference, Mainz, 12 October 2000. It was also discussed at the workshop on “Defining Middle Eastern Gendered Identities” at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, Jerusalem, 10 January 2001. I wish to thank the workshop participants and in particular Noga Efrati, the principle discussant, for their trenchant comments. The anonymous MESA Bulletin reader helped me clarify and hone my thesis.

References

page 15 note 1 Massive evidence of female property-ownership derives primarily from quantitative data on women’s Islamic endowments (awqaf, evkaf). See Ruth Roded, “The Waqf in Ottoman Aleppo: A Quantitative Analysis,” and Abraham Marcus, “Piety and Profit: The Waqf in the Society and Economy of Eighteenth Century Aleppo,” unpublished papers presented at The International Conference on Social and Economic Aspects of the Muslim Waqf, Jerusalem, June, 1979; Öner Lutfi Barkan and Ekrem Hakki Ayverdi, Istanbul vakiflan tahrir defterleri: 953 (1546) tarihli (Istanbul: Baha Matbaasi, 1970); Bahaeddin Yediyildiz, Institution du vakf au XVIII siècle en Turquie: étude socio-historique (Ankara: Société d’Histoire Turque, 1985); Daniel Crecelius, “Incidences of Waqf Cases in Three Cairo Courts: 1640–1802,” Journal of the Economie and Social History of the Orient 29 (1986): 176-89; Gabriel Baer, “Women and Waqf: An Analysis of the Istanbul Tahrir of 1546,” Studies in Islamic Society: Contributions in Memory of Gabriel Baer, eds. Gabriel R. Warburg and Gad G. Gilbar (Haifa, Israel: Haifa University Press, 1984); Roded, “Quantitative Analysis of Waqf Endowment Deeds,” Osmanli Araştirmalari 9 (1989): 51-76; Tucker, Judith E., Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meriwether, Margaret L., “Women and Economic Change in Nineteenth-Century Syria: The Case of Aleppo,” in Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers, ed. Tucker, Judith E. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 6583Google Scholar; Reiter, Yitzhak, Islamic Endowments in Jerusalem Under the British Mandate (London: Frank Cass, 1996)Google Scholar; Reiter, , Islam in Jerusalem (Kluwer Law, 1997)Google Scholar; Doumani, Beshara, “Endowing Family: Waqf, Property Devolution, and Gender in Greater Syria: 1800-1860,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (1998): 341CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The extent to which women managed waqf endowments is still open to debate, see: Baer and Meriwether cited above and Meriwether’s “Women and Waqf Revisited: The Case of Aleppo, 1770-1840,” in Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era, ed. Madeline C. Zilfi (Brill: Leiden, New York, Köln, 1997), pp. 128-152. The prominent role of women in the sale and purchase of real estate, their financial activity providing loans and credit, and in particular their rental of immovable property all point to some degree of property management. See Ronald 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 18 (1975): 51-114; Abraham Marcus, “Men, Women and Property: Dealers in Real Estate in Eighteenth-Century Aleppo,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 26 (1983): 137-63; Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt; A.-K. Rafeq, “City and Countryside in a Traditional Setting: The Case of Damascus in the First Quarter of the Eighteenth Century,” in The Syrian Land in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Thomas Philipp (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992), pp. 295-321; 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; Masters, Bruce, The Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1600-1750 (New York: New York University Press, 1988); Miriam Hoexter, “The Participation of Women in Economic Activities in Turkish Algiers,” (unpublished paper).Google Scholar

page 16 note 1 Women appeared regularly in the law courts as litigants in 17 to 68 percent of the cases, depending on time and venue. Quantitative data may be found in Jennings, “Women in Early Seventeenth Century Ottoman Judicial Records,” Marcus, “Men, Women and Property,” and Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. Innumerable studies of women’s claims in the Muslim law courts have been published in the last decades adding human dimensions to the statistics and raising a multitude of questions for further re search.

page 16 note 2 Shatzmiller, Maya, “Women and Wage Labour in the Medieval Islamic West,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997): 174206CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nègre, Arlette, “Les Femmes Savantes Chez Dahabi,” Bulletin d’Études Orientales 30 (1978): 119126Google Scholar; ar-Raziq, Ahmad ʿAbd, La femme au temps des mamlouks en Égypte (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1973)Google Scholar; Lutfi, Huda, “Al-Sakhawi’s Kitab al-Nisa’ as a Source for the Social and Economie History of Muslim Women During the Fifteenth Century A.D.,” Muslim World 21 (1981): 104124Google Scholar; Miriam Hoexter, “La shurta ou la répression des crimes à Alger a l’époque turque,” Studia Islamica, LVI (1982), pp. 120-22; Larguèche, Abdelhamid, “Anthropologie de la prostitution dans la ville arabe,” in Marginales en terre d’Islam, Dalenda and Abdelhamid Larguèche, eds. (Tunis: Cérès Productions, 1992), pp. 1383Google Scholar; Baer, Gabriel, Egyptian Guilds in Modem Times (Jerusalem: The Israel Orientai Society, 1964)Google Scholar; Cohen, Amnon, The Guilds of Ottoman Jerusalem (Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 2001)Google Scholar; Dengler, Ian C., “Turkish Women in the Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age,” in Women in the Muslim World, eds. Beck, Lois and Keddie, Nikki (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Jennings, “Women in Early Seventeenth Century Ottoman Judi cial Records;” Gerber, “Social and Economic Position of Women in an Ottoman City;” and Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt.

page 16 note 3 Roded, , Women in Islamic Biographical Collections: From Ibn Séd to Who’s Who (Boulder & London: Lynne Rienner, 1994), pp. 6389Google Scholar; Berkey, Jonathan P., “Women and Islamic Education in the Mamluk Period,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, eds. Keddie, and Baron, Beth (New Haven: Yale University,1991), pp. 143157Google Scholar; Edib, H., The Memoirs of Halide Edib (London: John Murray, 1926), pp. 8589Google Scholar; Garnett, Lucy M. J., The Women of’Turkey and’Their Folk-lore(London: David Nutt, 1893), pp. 382417.Google Scholar

page 17 note 1 Peirce, Leslie Penn, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

page 18 note 1 Afaf Lutfi Marsot has argued persuasively that upper and upper middle class women would require considerable organizational ability to run a household that fed hundreds daily and provided lodging for dozens of relatives, retainers, and guests. The managerial skills demonstrated by women in a domestic framework could be transferred into other realms. Marsot, Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid, “Revolutionary Gentlewomen in Egypt,” in Women in the Muslim World, eds. Beck, Lois and Keddie, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

page 18 note 2 Thompson, Elizabeth, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

page 19 note 1 Jennings, “Women in Early Seventeenth Century Ottoman Judicial Records.”

page 19 note 2 Marcus, “Men, Women and Property.” Marcus found women involved in 63 percent of the real estate transactions in Aleppo compared to the 40 percent in seventeenth-century Kayseri found by Jennings, but this disparity should be treated with caution since there are methodological differences between the two studies.

page 19 note 3 The quantitative data is from Jennings, “Women in Early Seventeenth Century Ottoman Judicial Records.” Some other evidence on the use of agents may be found in Goitein, Shlomo Dov, A Mediterranean Society (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967), v. 1, p. 129Google Scholar; Cohen, Amnon and Simon-Piqali, Elisheva, eds. Jews in the Moslem Court: Society, Economy and Communal Organizations in Sixteenth Century Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, 1993)Google Scholar; Gerber, , “Social and Economic Position of Women in an Ottoman City;” Meriwether, Margaret L., The Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999); Madeline C. Zilfi, “‘We Don’t Get Along:’ Women and Hul Divorce in the Eighteenth Century,” Women in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 264–96.Google Scholar

page 20 note 1 Meriwether, “Women and Economic Change in Nineteenth-Century Syria.”

page 20 note 2 Ahmed, Leila, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (Yale University Press: New Haven & London, 1992).Google Scholar

page 21 note 1 Doumato, Eleanor, “Gender, Monarchy, and National Identity in Saudi Arabia,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 19 (1992), pp. 3147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 22 note 1 The classic monograph on women’s roles in bedouin clashes is Use Lichtenstadter, Women in the A/yam al-cArab: A Study of Female Life During Warfare in Pre-Islamic Ara bia (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1935). The image of women in descriptions of the battles led by the Prophet Muhammad is almost identical to that described by Lichten stadter. An indication of the contribution of women and other non-combatants in urban fighting was explicated by a follower of the Prophet Muhammad before the battle of Uhud. Describing what would transpire if the Muslims waited in Medina for the enemy to enter the city, he said: “if they come in, the men will fight them and the women and children will throw stones on them from the walls” (Ai-Sira al-nabawiyya li-Ibn Hisham, eds. M. al-Saqa’ et. al. [Beirut: Dar al-Khayr, 1990], v. 3, p. 52; Guillaume, A., trans. The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah [Oxford: Oxford Univer sity Press, 1955], p. 372). By contrast, with the establishment of an Islamic empire with more institutionalized military forces, women are depicted as remaining at home and sending their men off to battle. See, for example: cAli b. al-Hasan Ibn cAsakir, Tarikh madinat Dimashq: Tarajim al-nisa’. ed. Sukayna al-Shihabi (Damascus, 1982), p. 204. Over a thousand years later, women of Baghdad quarters trilled with their voices to spur residents to combat against opposition neighborhoods in Mamluk conflicts (cAli al-Wardi, Lamahat ijtimaciyya min tarikh al-ciraq al-hadith [Baghdad, 1969], v. 1, pp. 150–52).Google Scholar

page 22 note 2 When the Prophet Muhammad went out to the battle of Uhud, two old men were sent up into the forts with the women and children, Ibn Hisham Arabic v. 3, p. p. 70/English p. 383.