OverviewIn many respects, the study of gender and nation-
alism in Islamic societies is in its early phase. At the
same time, our knowledge about women’s expe-
riences in nationalist movements has expanded
considerably in the last two decades thanks to
micro-level studies conducted by historians and
social scientists. With this in mind, the goal of this
overview, rather than summarizing an abundance
of findings and conclusions, is to point at a major
watershed in the study of gender and nation. What
is emphasized here, then, is the current methodolo-
gical shift from questions associated with women’s
emancipation and political agency to explorations
of nations as fundamentally gendered constructs.
This conceptual development is a result of recent
paradigmatic shifts occurring in both fields of gen-
der studies and the study of nationalism.
Nation and emancipation:
fulfilled and unfulfilled
promises
Most of the research on the subject of women
and nations in Islamic societies has been dedicated
to the issues of legal rights and political or cultural
emancipation. To be sure, feminist ambitions were
part and parcel of nationalist agendas since the
earliest manifestations of nationalism in Islamic
countries. For many Muslim women in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, participa-
tion in nationalist activity offered new channels to
the public space. Contrary to the traditional view
of Muslim women as utterly confined to the domes-
tic sphere and consequently alienated from every-
thing public or political, women’s social agency
in public spaces had been exhibited long before
nationalism. Women exercised political influence
through social networks in imperial courts and
households, by applying to judicial courts, and in
numerous other forms of daily interaction, not
always documented. Nevertheless, one of the new
elements introduced by nationalism, which seemed
promising at the time in terms of female emancipa-
tion, was the factor of mass politics. This was made
possible by the press and some new mechanisms of
political grouping. For the first time women re-
sorted to nationalist idioms to promote feminist
agendas through the press in Egypt, Iran, and the
Nation, Women, and Gender
Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth century, and
similarly in Central Asia (especially Tatar women)
in early twentieth century. In the first quarter of the
twentieth century, the era of mass politics was also
marked by the new phenomenon of large-scale
demonstrations, wherein women from all social
strata took an active part in anti-colonial activities,
as was the case in Iran, Egypt, and some of the
Ottoman domains.
The early marriage between nation formation
and discourses of female liberation was evident
throughout the Islamic world. Algeria is a sympto-
matic case in point. After independence, Algerian
female liberating discourse had recourse to women’s
share in the national struggle. The nation-emanci-
pation linkage was even more conspicuous in the
last years of the Ottoman Empire. Subsequent to
the 1908 revolution, as soon as women entered the
arena of political activism, their claims for rights
were expressed in patriotic terms, a trend that was
to be continued in the republican period. Female
emancipation was a component of nationalist dis-
courses also in Afghanistan, under King Amàn
Allàh and in Iran under Reza Shah, which looked
at the Young Turks, and later Mustafa Kemal’s
regime, as models to be followed. Correspondingly,
the need to liberate women in Central Asian society,
embedded in a nationalist discourse, was an inte-
gral part of the ideology of Jadidism (the movement
for cultural reform in Central Asia at the turn of the
twentieth century).
In most of the Islamic countries, the involvement
of women in the nationalist discourse suggested a
new era of female political and cultural agency.
However, more often than not, the post-independ-
ence phase marked a setback for feminist move-
ments. The Turkish liberation movement was the
only case in which women made their way into the
leading core of the nationalist movement (Halide
Edib is a salient example), while the general rule
for other nationalist movements was that the
Woman Question should be postponed until after
independence.
It is often argued that throughout the twentieth
century women realized that the formulation of
“first nation then emancipation” was not to be ful-
filled soon. According to the same common wisdom,
women participated in nationalist movements with
the supposition that the realization of the national