274 DESTINY DISRUPTED
which was interwoven with a universal assumption that the public realm be-
longed exclusively to men and that women were properly kept sequestered in
a private world, cut off from politics and production.
And yet, all across the world, in Europe as much as in the Islamic
world, before industrialization, a great deal of manufacturing was actually
in the hands of women, since almost everything of value was produced in
or near the home. Women wove the cloth and made the garments. Women
had a big role in animal husbandry. Women transformed the raw products
of flocks and fields into useful products, and they practiced many other
handicrafts as well. When these processes were mechanized, "cottage in-
dustries" went under and left countless women out of work.
In Europe, large numbers of these women then went to work in facto-
ries, shops, and eventually offices. Given the European social structure,
they could do so: it caused some social and psychological disruption, to be
sure, but women had already won access to the public realm, and so they
could go to work outside the home, and they did, and out of this great
movement, which was going to happen anyway, came the philosophical
musings, political theorizing, and social activism known today as femi-
nism, a movement premised on the existence and sanctity of individual
rights. (Only after a concept of "the individual" exists can one say, "Every
individual has rights" and once that assertion is accepted, one can enter-
tain the notion that women might have the same rights as men, since both
are individuals.)
In the Islamic world, the pervasively embedded division of the world
into a masculine public realm and a feminine private one made the move
from cottage industries to industrial production much more problematic
and produced social dislocations that were much more wrenching. It re-
quired, first of all, overturning that whole divided social system, which
struck at the core of family life for every family and left unsettled ques-
tions of identity for both men and women at the deepest level of con-
scious and even subconscious life, as became most evident by the late
twentieth century.
But also, replacing guilds with factories meant severing the connection
between manufacturing and Sufi orders, which at some level implied sev-
ering the connection between spirituality and work. What's more, moving
production into factories required that people start living a life regulated