OverviewRecent research on Muslim women’s lives out-
side the home and harem has called into question
accepted truths about the nature of their seclusion.
An important branch of this scholarship has
focused on Muslim women as citizens in civil soci-
ety. Scholars have engaged the prevailing liberal
model of civil society, defined as an arena of public
discourse and action separate from political, eco-
nomic, and domestic spheres (Cohen and Arato
1992, Butenschon 2000, Norton 1995). The col-
lective impact of this engagement constitutes a revi-
sionist literature that rejects strict divisions of
public and private as Eurocentric and that instead
emphasizes the fluidity of power networks and the
negotiated nature of boundaries between state,
market, and family in many postcolonial and
Islamic societies. Many of these scholars have found
evidence of civil society where liberal thinkers have
found only absence: in the medieval era, in the
Ottoman Empire, and under military dictatorships
today. They have also exposed the gendered pro-
cess by which civil society has been historically con-
structed, challenging essentialist views of Islam as
synonymous with patriarchy and antithetical to
democracy. By focusing on the importance of inter-
mediary groups in the creation of political dis-
courses and structures, this literature challenges
easy equivalences between Islam, women’s oppres-
sion, and dictatorship.
Early and medieval Islamic
societies
Scholars of Islam’s earliest centuries have re-
examined legal discourses that appear to have mar-
ginalized women in communal and political affairs.
Mernissi (1991) has argued that the Prophet estab-
lished at Medina the principle that all believers are
equal before God through a revolutionary confla-
tion of public and private spheres: he situated his
wives’ apartments adjacent to the first mosque and
took them along to battlefields so that they might
participate fully in communal affairs. Stowasser
(1994) has similarly observed that seventh-century
Medinan women took public oaths of allegiance
and service to the community. However, she argues
that the Prophet’s later revelations explicitly de-
Civil Society
fined a private family sphere for women and chil-
dren that was off-limits to strangers, especially
men. The intent was not, however, to cut women off
from politics. Stowasser and other scholars use the
term segregation rather than seclusion to empha-
size women’s separate but nonetheless important
Qur±ànic role in what may be called the earliest
Islamic civil society. Scholars generally agree, how-
ever, that this egalitarian ideal was corrupted after
the Prophet’s death, when Persian and Byzantine
patriarchal values influenced Muslim legal scholars’
readings of scripture. As Spellberg (1994) has shown,
Sunnìand Shì≠ìscholars used ™adìthconcerning the
Prophet’s favorite wife, ≠â±isha, to ban women from
politics altogether. In ninth-century legal discourse,
women’s segregation became seclusion.
This portrait of legal isolation from political and
communal affairs has been challenged, however, by
late medievalists who have had greater access to
historical sources that suggest how Muslim women
actually lived. From the eleventh century, a new,
Islamic civil society appears to have emerged out-
side Arabia. A new patrician class of scholar-
merchant families reordered urban life around
distinctively Islamic institutions that had varying
degrees of autonomy from the state (Bulliet 1972,
Lapidus 1988). In Arab lands, Goldberg (1993) has
argued, scholar-merchant elites actively protected
their autonomy from monarchy through their
mobility and their control of legal interpretation.
He and other scholars have challenged old views
that there was no “public” life in medieval and
early modern Islamic cities simply because they did
not exhibit the formal and autonomous institutions
or mental divisions between public and private that
characterized the European world (Reynolds 2001).
Recent research on the Ottoman eighteenth cen-
tury, for example, suggests that the devolution of
political power from Istanbul did not produce a
chaos of private fiefdoms, but rather new, dense
networks of fiscal, cultural, and political influence
that bound public and private interests across the
empire (Salzmann 1993).
Within the robust urbanism of merchants’ ba-
zaars, waqffoundations for families and charities,
private madrasacolleges, and Sufi mystical brother-
hoods, women were surprisingly active. In Mamluk
Cairo, for instance, elite women routinely owned
residential and other properties and expended fam-