ily wealth to fund schools and charities, while
poorer women worked outside the home in a vari-
ety of occupations as peddlars, bathhouse atten-
dants, medical and spiritual advisors, and domestic
servants. Women played similar roles in early mod-
ern Istanbul and Aleppo. In imperial capitals and
provincial seats alike, they built mosques, libraries,
and clinics for the poor, and they participated in
political revolts and religious movements (Keddie
and Baron 1991, Sonbol 1996, Marcus 1989, Ham-
bly 1998). In West Africa, Muslim Hausa women
remained active in public and retained authority in
the local religious tradition of Bori through the
eighteenth century (Callaway and Creevey 1994).
And in eighteenth-century India, elite Muslim
women used their seclusion as a political resource
in resisting British interference in their regions
(Barnett 1998). Elite women’s activities should not
be understood as simply extensions of state power.
As Faroqhi (2000), Babayan (1998), and others
have shown, art, architecture, and charity were
activities embedded in urban social networks.
The precise nature of pre-nineteenth-century
civil society – and the extent of women’s participa-
tion in it – remains unclear. Current research on the
Islamic past also lacks clarity on how the gendering
of civil society changed over time and space.
Certainly, the nature of the state regime was a
major factor. A comparison of seventeenth-century
Isfahan and Shahjahanabad, for example, shows
that the poorer but more homogeneously Muslim
Iranian capital permitted a greater role in architec-
tural patronage for non-imperial women while the
heterogeneous Mughal capital relaxed norms of
seclusion and permitted a greater public role for
royal women (Blake 1998). And scholars of the
Ottoman Tulip Period in the early eighteenth cen-
tury have demonstrated how the state deliberately
altered gender boundaries as part of a broader cul-
tural policy, and how it had to negotiate with other
interests in order to do so (Zarinebaf-Shahr 1998).
Indeed, class played an important role in gendering
civil society. Ascendant military and scholarly fam-
ilies appear to have imposed class-based definitions
of male and female space to mark their status as
Petry (1991), Khouri (1996), and Zilfi (1996),
among others, have shown.
Colonial-era reforms
From the late nineteenth century, civil societies in
Islamic countries clearly underwent a substantial
transformation. Shifting trade routes, new tech-
nologies of transportation and communication,
European intervention, and state reforms com-
bined to alter society and the nature of public life.
overview 35By 1900, cityscapes had been transformed to in-
clude new forms of public spaces in governmental
centers, parks and gardens, theaters, and even retail
shops. Educational, cultural, political, and charitable
associations mushroomed as elite classes mobilized
around various programs of social and political
reform. A vibrant press thrived in varying degrees
of autonomy from the state. Meanwhile, workers
began to form unions independent of their artisanal
masters and often in defiance of state regulation.
Women’s participation in the new civil societies
took on new, more institutionalized forms that
would coalesce into formal women’s movements in
the early twentieth century. By 1900, elite Egyptian
women had founded journals, schools, and charity
organizations that carved a newly public sphere of
social and cultural reform, autonomous from the
British-controlled state. Like women reformers in
Tunisia, the Levant, Turkey, Iran, India, and Indo-
nesia, they reconceived the household and house-
wife as part of – not apart from – the nation and
society, and as principal sites of modernization and
progress. Calls to educate mothers of citizens
spread across the Islamic world, signaling this ex-
pansion of women’s role in civil society. Women in
Indonesia, for example, established groups in every
major town to promote women’s education and
social reform (Lochar-Scholten 2000). In 1928 they
held their first national congress, the same year that
Lebanese and Syrian women federated their
groups. Elites were not alone in promoting social
change. Before the First World War, women peas-
ant migrants returned to Mount Lebanon from
the Americas to promote new gender roles in
Lebanese family and society (Khater 2001).
Modernization did not necessarily mean libera-
tion – or liberalism. In Islamic countries as in
European ones, women’s emergence into new
urban public arenas was fraught with conflict. Men
were rankled by the intrusion of women into spaces
formerly reserved for them. Male writers expressed
fear that educated women would no longer obey
their husbands. These common gender anxieties
took on forms distinctive from Europe when they
reflected not only the discursive repertoire of Islam,
but also the different trajectory of social and polit-
ical development in countries built upon different
social structures and shaped by European indus-
trial capitalism and colonization. First, new forms
of association may have reflected social changes
common to those in Europe, but they also coex-
isted, and competed, with older social networks
and Islamic institutions such as Sufi brotherhoods
and charitable institutions. Second, modern civil
societies formed in Western Europe as arenas for