the emergent capitalist bourgeoisie, and were there-
fore distinct from the state. Outside Europe, mod-
ern civil societies were most often products of state
reforms, and so were located not separately from
the state but at the intersection of the political and
social spheres. They also reflected the conditions of
the economic periphery. Modernization in most
Islamic countries did not come with the prosperity
and liberty experienced in Europe: rather, it came
as the tool of intrusive governments and foreign
colonizers. These factors combined to make the
new civil societies sites of tremendous tension that
often focused on issues of gender. Indeed, women
often became a principal site upon which political
and social cleavages opened. This contentiously
gendered origin of modern civil societies would
have profound effects upon women’s strategies of
mobilization and their futures as citizens.
Scholars have studied the gendering of civil soci-
ety in modern Islamic societies primarily from two
perspectives, that of discourse and that of insti-
tutional structure. Ahmed (1992), Abu-Lughod
(1998), and others locate the origins of Muslim
women’s marginalization as citizens in the binary
gendered discourse in the colonial era. Typical was
the notoriously anti-suffragist British ruler of Egypt,
Lord Cromer, who pronounced Egypt doomed to
backwardness as long as its women remained
veiled. Elites replicated that public-private, mod-
ern-traditional dichotomy in books like Qàsim
Amìn’s Ta™rìr al-mar±a (The liberation of women,
1899), which argued that Egypt’s path to moder-
nity lay in the unveiling and education of its women.
This modernist argument provoked a reactionary
politics of authenticity by nationalists and Islamists
who urged women to stay home and protect indige-
nous family values. This colonial binarism ulti-
mately worked against women who fought for an
equal voice in civil society, Ahmed argues, because
it forced them to choose between their liberation
and their patriotism, a choice eventually symbol-
ized by their decision of whether or not to veil:
“And therefore, ironically, it is Western discourse
that in the first place determined the new meanings
of the veil and gave rise to its emergence as a sym-
bol of resistance” (Ahmed 1992, 164).
Even where Europeans did not directly rule, anx-
ious discourses about Islam and gender identity in
civil society exploded, as in the Constitutional
Revolutions in Iran (1905–11) and the Ottoman
Empire (1908–12). As Brummett (2000), Afary
(1996), and others have shown in studies of the rev-
olutionary press, gender became a touchstone of
debates about democracy, Islam, and modernity.
Erstwhile revolutionary allies, secular nationalists,36 civil society
and Islamic reformers soon split bitterly around the
issues of women’s education, suffrage, and even
dress. After the First World War, Göle (1996) argues,
Turkish Kemalists made the unveiling of women
and the abolition of Islamic laws central to what
became an authoritarian, Westernizing project.
Kemalists’ destruction of gender segregation was
an all-out attack on the Islamic social order. Paidar
(1995) argues that the Iranian Constitutional Revo-
lution produced a dominant discourse of modern-
ization under the Pahlavìdynasty (to 1979) that
emphasized women’s education and unveiling but
left women firmly under religious law and male
authority at home.
In the contentious discursive field that shaped
public life, women sought to avoid the traps that
would cast them as either anti-Islamic or anti-mod-
ern. It was a struggle simply to make their voices
heard in public, as opponents employing a hard-
ened Islamic discourse or patriarchal nationalism
silenced women teachers and writers in early twen-
tieth-century Iran, intimidated women writers and
speakers and thus closed down women’s journals in
Syria and Lebanon, and harassed even the great
Egyptian singer, Umm Kulthum (Milani 1992,
Thompson 2000, Danielson 1999). Some women
bridged secular-Islamic cleavages of public-private
by mobilizing under the banner of religion. In India,
Muslim women found space to mobilize within the
broader Islamic revival; they advocated health
reforms to assure the biological future of their com-
munity and wrote in Urdu-language journals (Ali
2000). In Algeria they used desert Sufi ribà†s as
bases of influence (Clancy-Smith 1991). In Egypt,
women triangulated nationalist and Islamist dis-
courses in various ways. The Muslim Sisters and
other populist Islamic women’s movements advo-
cated women’s reforms within an Islamic frame-
work while biographies of famous Muslim women
inspired women to public action (Booth 2001,
Badran 1991). But there was a danger in pushing
religious reform too far. For example, in Beirut in
1928, Nazira Zayn al-Din published a book,
Veiling and Unveiling, that reinterpreted scripture
to call for a return to the basic egalitarian principles
of Islam and to remove the veils of medieval tradi-
tion that bound women. It unleashed a tide of con-
demnation from conservative clerics that effectively
silenced her (Thompson 2000).
Locher-Scholten (2000) argues that Indonesian
women adopted a particularly successful strategy
under Dutch rule, in contrast to the paralyzing
power of binary discourses in the Middle East.
Local culture and economic practice kept the line
between public and private far more fluid in