NOTES TO PAGES 449–54- For an interesting and useful elaboration of this argument, see Johannes Fabian’sTime
and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Other(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). - The wonderfully evocative and telling phrase ‘‘waiting room of history’’ I borrow from
Dipesh Chakrabarty, though Amit Chauduri notes that the German playwright Heiner Muller also
used it to refer to the Third World in a 1989 interview. Amit Chauduri, ‘‘History’s Waiting Room,’’
Australian Financial Review(August 6, 2004), http://www.afr.com/articles/2004/08/05/1091557987
708.html (May 12, 2005). - See Leila Ahmed,Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate(New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), esp. chap. 8. - On the universalizing intent of particularly British colonial discourse, see Edward W. Said,
Culture and Imperialism(London: Vintage, 1993), esp. the first three sections of chap. 2, ‘‘Consoli-
dated Vision’’ (73–132). On Egypt ‘‘as mirror of the Arab world in the modern age,’’ a common
standpoint among scholars, based on Egypt’s influential cultural, intellectual, political, and social
role in the modern Middle East, see Ahmed,Women and Gender in Islam, 6. Just as important,
however, has been the West’s habit of selectively universalizing Egyptian discourse, when conve-
nient. So, e.g., the fatwa of the head ulama of Al-Ahzar University fully affirming the right of the
French state to prohibit headscarves within its domain has been given wide coverage by the Western
press and various publicists. These like to present the ulama as embodying the highest (and implic-
itly universal) Islamic authority, but leave aside considering his complex local relations to the Egyp-
tian state (his employer), along with the dose of practical cynicism with which his decision has been
received by those portions of the Egyptian and broader Islamic public that do take such complex
local relations into account. - Ahmed,Women and Gender in Islam, discusses these developments in chap. 2, ‘‘The Medi-
terranean Middle East.’’ I should note that there has been much questioning of the historical validity
and thoroughness of Ahmed’s account of the ancient Middle East. My initial introduction of this
section as a story, then, was in full awareness of the complex location of storytelling between
fabrication and truth. Elaborating as it does on weak historical evidence, the account here is as
much a narrative of what might have been as of what actually was. The point is to enable a creative
rethinking of the relation between Europe and the Middle East, Christianity and Islam. To reimag-
ine our past, so that we can reconsider the present. This is always risky. Always. But vital too.
Precisely because we need new imaginations to uncover new facts. - Linda Kerber and Jane DeHart-Mathews, eds.Women’s America: Refocusing the Past,2d
ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 224. - The case of the Dutch, once Europe’s largest ‘‘Islamic’’ empire, offers an intriguing and
important divergence in this regard. While the Netherlands, like the rest of the West, experienced a
number of strong feminist impulses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these were
effectively contained within and by the nation’s ‘‘pillarized’’ socio-political structure. That is, the
vast majority of women, including women’s rights activists, continued to remain first and foremost
committed to their pillar—Protestant, Catholic, Socialist, or Liberal—rather than to their gender
or to an imagined (trans)national community of sisters. Correspondingly, issues such as Dutch
women’s underemployment relative not only to men but to other Western women rarely were
raised to the level of national issues. Not only did this mean that Dutch women’s nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century activism challenged reigning divisions between male and female spheres
less radically than did the work of Anglo-American women activists—even when they shared spe-
cific goals such as suffragism—but, more significantly, their concerns were not able to lay claim to
and reconfigure the public and political world in their own terms, as did Anglo-American women
activists. The twofold result is that such feminist discourse remained largely unavailable (and unap-
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