social roles as benchmarks of civilization, British
imperial agents used women to legitimate their
imperial oppression of indigenous societies in vast
areas of the Islamic world, including large territo-
ries in the Arab Middle East. However, although
imperial agents claimed their agendas were meant
to advance women’s social positions, the experi-
ence of imperialism was often less than rewarding
for women’s personal and public lives.
At its height, the British Empire was deeply
entrenched in the Arab world, directly administer-
ing and/or controlling the governments of Egypt,
Sudan, Palestine, Transjordan (now Jordan), Aden
(now in the Republic of Yemen), Kuwait, Iraq,
Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman. Some nations, such as
Egypt, were directly ruled, while others, such as
Iraq and Transjordan, were established as manda-
tory nations with Arab monarchs at the head of
government. In all of these territories, British impe-
rialists assaulted local Islamic culture from several
angles in the name of women’s liberation. Male
political leaders, feminists, and missionaries were
all anxious to denigrate local leadership and cul-
ture in the name of freeing local women from
oppression. However, an unavoidable consequence
of such a tactic was tremendous resentment against
the imperialists, whom their subjects viewed as
hypocrites unwilling to admit their real goals for
imperial control: the exploitation of local people
and resources to create greater wealth and power
for Britain.
One of the most decisive locations for gendered
rhetoric in the British Empire was in Egypt.
Formally occupied by Britain in 1882, British rulers
often used what Leila Ahmed (1992) has called
“colonial feminism” to claim the need for British
rule in the name of liberating Egyptian women
from native patriarchy. Casting Islam as a primary
force oppressing Egyptian women, the British
leader Lord Cromer used visible markers such as
the ™ijàband the practice of maintaining harems as
evidence for his case in destroying local autonomy
in Egypt. Cromer claimed that British rule would
usher in a new era for Egyptian women, at the
expense of Islamic leadership and culture, which he
believed was morally and spiritually corrupt.
However, British policies focused on window-
dressing, rather than actual change for the better-
ment of native women’s lives. A highly sexualized
discourse denigrating the practices of veiling and
polygamy drove anti-Islamic theories in the impe-
rial theater and the metropole, while imperial poli-
cies continued to decrease women’s actual mobility
through society. For instance, the British govern-
ment in Egypt increased tuition costs for elemen-
middle east, british 71tary education, making education for girls less
accessible, at the same time that leaders such as
Cromer were decrying education statistics among
Muslims in the empire.
Such practices were often interpreted by British
subjects as typical of an oppressive ruling elite out
to destroy native leadership and values. At the same
time, they were reinforced by other Britons work-
ing in non-official capacities to promote the
empire’s social, spiritual, and political leadership in
Islamic nations. Feminists sought to export ideas
about women’s social and political participation to
Arab women, while missionaries were eager to con-
vert Muslim and Christian Arabs to Protestantism.
Although these groups did not always agree in
Great Britain, missionaries and feminists alike
expended tremendous energy abroad to establish
their ideals of domesticity, education, and spiritual-
ity. They also reached out to Muslim women living
outside the purview of direct imperial rule, hoping
to erode indigenous patriarchy in places such as the
Ottoman Empire. In this way, they paved the way
for more formal colonial rule in places such as
Palestine before the Ottoman Empire was disman-
tled after the First World War.
Missionary bodies such as the Church Mission-
ary Society, the Society for Promoting Female Edu-
cation in the East, the Jerusalem and the East
Mission, and the London Missionary Society estab-
lished scores of churches, schools, and “houses of
industry” aimed at drawing Muslim women away
from Islam and toward Protestant Christianity. The
predominant discourse directed toward would-be
converts was a firm belief that Islam was an evil
religion, and an indicator of its wickedness was the
seclusion and veiling of women. Although mission-
aries often found themselves in conflict with British
governmental authorities, their message of the
superiority of British modes of religion, domestic-
ity, and child-rearing usually assisted the larger
imperial effort to expand British influence and
domination.
British feminists, too, traveled throughout the
empire, disseminating their beliefs in women’s edu-
cation and public participation among Muslim
women. They often focused their attention on a
desire to remove the veil from the bodies of Muslim
women, attacking the cultural context of Islamic
civilization and promoting Western dress as the
first step toward Westernization in other aspects of
life as well. British feminists put forward their
nation’s models of education, dress, and marriage
practice among imperial subjects, even at a time
when they themselves did not have equal property
rights in their own country, or the right to vote or