The new feminist wave passed on to the 1990s
with increased internal diversity, greater emphasis
on institutionalization and issue-oriented activism.
From the few metropolitan centers, it expanded
into smaller cities, and the intellectual monopoly of
secular, left leaning circles over the subject was to
some extent challenged with the rise of a women’s
rights discourse among Islamist women, and among
women active in the Kurdish nationalist move-
ment. Collaborations between women’s groups
and the government, especially at the local level,
produced new institutions such as shelters for bat-
tered women and a women’s studies library in
Istanbul. As a combined effect of Turkey’s ratifica-
tion of the United Nations Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against
Women (CEDAW) in 1985 and pressure coming
from feminist groups for its full implementation,
the 1990s and 2000s also witnessed modifications
in the Civil Code and criminal law toward greater
legal equality of men and women. Parallel to in-
creased feminist activism, moreover, there has been
an increase in the number of literary works by
women raising issues such as female sexuality, as
well as a visible upsurge in scholarly publications
on women’s studies and history, which, among
other things, recovered for contemporary feminists
in Turkey their long forgotten predecessors of the
late Ottoman era.
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the united states 597Ç. Tekeli, 1980’ler Türkiye’sinde kadın bakiçaçısından
kadınlar, Istanbul 1990, 1995^3.Ayfer Karakaya-StumpThe United StatesThe multiple challenges and issues confronting
Muslim women in their own communities, as well
as in their relations and interactions with main-
stream American society, have facilitated a spirit of
activism and engagement in public life. Across the
United States a number of community-based and
national Muslim women’s organizations and initia-
tives have formed, prompted by efforts to advance
Muslim women’s education and women’s rights, to
address women’s social and economic concerns and
to promote scholarship and activism on issues of
jurisprudence, theory, and hermeneutics (Webb
2000). Although many of these initiatives relate to
and have engaged in national and international
feminist campaigns and discussions, strategic al-
liances and efforts at coalition building between
American Muslim women and the broader feminist
movement have remained limited.
According to Fernea (1998) the word “femi-
nism” to many Muslim women in the United States
evokes an exclusively Western, almost imperialist
movement that does not affirm or validate faith-
centered identities and realities. A vast majority of
Muslim women have largely disengaged from the
feminist movement because they feel not only that
their diverse narratives and experiences as Muslim
women are silenced, but that the movement typi-
cally directs, defines, and prioritizes needs and
issues on behalf of Muslim women (Fernea 1998,
Haddad and Smith 1996, Webb 2000, Ahmed
1992). Ahmed (1992) points to a neocolonial
legacy embedded within the dominant feminist
movement that seeks to rescue the typical down-
trodden oppressed Muslim woman. Contemporary
feminist campaigns in the United States addressing
the “Muslim woman” issue, notably the campaign
to end gender apartheid in Afghanistan, echo this
critique. As Chishti (2003) indicates, the highly vis-
ible and politically charged campaign to “emanci-
pate” Afghan women successfully influenced United
States foreign policy toward Afghanistan. The
political campaign alienated many American Mus-
lim women not in terms of the actual goals, but
because of the dichotomized simplicity of pitting
secularism against religion and Western liberal
freedom against “backward” Islamic tradition. In
doing so, the feminist campaign not only heightened