ideal and brought about the construction of a con-
cept of national honor. This development did not
imply an invitation to women to take part in the
national game. On the contrary, it perpetuated
their absence from it as bona fide actors and full
partners by reducing their roles to subjects and
symbols of a nationalist consciousness monopo-
lized by men (Baron 1993). Hence, in spite of the
promise embedded in the mass politics of national-
ism to incorporate all members of the nation, male
or female, the gendered nature of nationalism actu-
ally worked against the inclusion of women. While
in many instances early Muslim reformers made
efforts to emphasize the inclusiveness of the nation
to non-Muslim members of the national commu-
nity, women were located through the familial
metaphor not within the inclusive brotherhood of
all men, but as auxiliary to the national fraternity
as wives, mothers, or daughters.
According to the conventional modernist narra-
tive, women’s progress could be achieved only
through state-led modernization and seculariza-
tion. This founding concept, exhibited in Turkey
under Mustafa Kemal and in Iran under Reza Shah,
meant that women who were unwilling to come to
the public on the state’s terms were excluded from
the political field of the nation. In fact, some recent
versions of the Islamist agenda, well rooted in mod-
ernist and nationalist discourses, have meant new
options of inclusion for many women. In Iran
female illiteracy has been eradicated, in Turkey the
growing challenge of the Islamist movement made
it possible for religious women to step into the
political field on their own terms, and in occupied
Palestine the Hamas movement has enabled
women to participate in the struggle for liberation
and even to acquire the prestigious status of shà
hida(martyr), a category formerly reserved only
for men.
Some of the recent studies on gender and nation
in Islamic countries, which treat the nation as a
culturally gendered construct, have stressed the
male-oppressive nature of the nationalist (and
modernist) discourse. This tendency may be partly
explained by the critical approach of cultural stud-
ies toward the “project of modernity” and partly
by historians’ awareness that female emancipation
is still an unfinished business in most parts of the
Islamic world. Nevertheless, the emancipatory
potential of nationalist discourses should not be
downgraded. Although patronizing and limiting in
many ways, it was the modernist visions of Iranian,
Turkish, and Central Asian nationalisms under
Reza Shah, Mustafa Kemal, and Jadidism respec-
tively that provided for the first time the opportu-
overview 521nity for millions of women to enter public spaces on
a large scale by virtue of their position as “mothers
of the nation.” Hence, the cultural refashioning of
women’s position in Islamic societies in the frame-
work of nationalism was neither totally oppressive
nor entirely emancipatory. The “modern educa-
tional regimes, deeply gendered from the start” set
in motion both emancipatory and disciplinary
trends. The former made it possible for women to
enjoy a moment of freedom and sharing public
spaces with men while the latter contained regula-
tory practices and concepts that set boundaries to
women’s participation in public life (Najmabadi
1998b).
In the final analysis, it is important to bear in
mind that crucial as they were, the early moments
of nationalism in the Islamic world were far from
being the last word on the meanings of maleness
and femaleness in the never-ending process of
inventing the nation. Visions of nation and gender,
highly allied from the start, have been constantly
negotiated between women and men, governments
and citizens. Gendered concepts of nations have
been time and again modified to adapt to changing
realities and concepts in numerous and conflicting
fashions that are still waiting to be studied.Bibliography
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