Indonesian society than in many other Islamic soci-
eties, and nationalists did not restrict women to a
domestic sphere protected from the colonial state,
as in the Middle East and India. This fluidity per-
mitted wider women’s mobilization and more
political options. Rather than confront the fateful
choice between patriotism or liberation, Indone-
sian women adopted Islamic modernist discourses
opposed to colonial modernism. Unlike most Mid-
dle Eastern women, they obtained suffrage from
their colonial government.
Other scholars have emphasized the power of
state and social structure, in addition to discourse,
in marginalizing women in civil society. Frierson
(1996) argues that Muslim Ottoman women who
founded charities, published journals, opened shops,
and ventured into the new public arena were care-
ful not to stray too far from official Islamic norms,
for they recognized that Abdülhamid II’s state had
staked the Ottoman future upon a Islamized equiv-
alent of European national identity and civil society
(see also Deringil 1998). Even in Arab provinces
like Beirut, the Ottoman state intervened vigor-
ously to regulate morality, including gender rela-
tions, in new forms of public space (Hanssen 2001).
During the First World War, however, states in both
the Middle East and Europe encouraged women’s
mobilization. Women’s organizations mushroomed
to meet the needs of the wounded and poor, to build
girls’ schools, and publish consciousness-raising
journals, laying the groundwork for the formal
movements of the interwar period.
But while wartime policies may have promoted
the growth of women’s movements, postwar struc-
tures of colonial rule often reinforced male domi-
nance. As Thompson (2000) has shown, Syrian and
Lebanese women living under the French Mandate
confronted colonial alliances that bound civil society
to the patriarchal power of tribal chiefs, religious
patriarchs, and large landowners. This predisposed
opposition groups to overcome their class differ-
ences by also agreeing to exclude women from civil
society. These political pacts reinforced religious
laws that guaranteed men’s power over wives and
daughters, and continued to weaken the women’s
movement’s ability to mobilize long after inde-
pendence. In Egypt, not only Cromer’s ideology,
but also British support of the monarchy and
landowning class subverted the constitutional gov-
ernment established in the 1920s, and so marginal-
ized women and the poor in politics. The weakness
of the British mandatory state in Palestine contrib-
uted to the absolute breakdown of civil society there;
as a result, Fleischmann (2003) argues, feminist
and class politics were submerged into the violent
overview 37nationalist conflict between Arabs and Zionists.
The effect of colonial policy on Islamic societies
of West Africa is debated. Callaway and Creevey
(1994) argue, for example, that France’s more
interventionist rule in Senegal created greater space
for women’s mobilization than did British policy in
Nigeria, where the state granted greater autonomy
to Muslim religious leaders. Cooper (1998), on the
other hand, argues that women’s oppression was
not merely the result of unfettered Islam: Both
French and British policies toward separate Hausa
populations in Niger and Nigeria undermined
women’s prestige as scholars and their access to
farmland, which were the critical prerequisites to
their growing seclusion in the twentieth century.
Other scholars dispute the primacy of state struc-
ture in determining women’s participation in civil
society. Charrad, in her study of North Africa
(2001), proposes kinship structure as the more
important factor. She argues that the strength of
tribes in Algeria and Morocco forced the French to
cooperate with them in policies that encouraged a
paternalistic conservatism toward women’s status.
Only in Tunisia, because of its weaker tribal power
and precolonial legacy of bureaucratic centraliza-
tion, were the French able to enact legal reforms
that would strengthen women’s status in civil soci-
ety. In her study of South Asia, Jalal (1991) privi-
leges class interest over either state or kin structure.
She argues that Muslim women in colonial India
were not passive victims of male nationalists’
heightened cultural protectiveness; rather, elite
women were complicit in efforts to maintain seclu-
sion as a marker of their class and religious status.
They began attending formal schools primarily as a
defense against the influence of Christian mission-
ary schools, not as a step toward autonomy and
participation in a liberal civil society.The contemporary period
Colonial-era legacies of binary discourse, iden-
tity conflict, and political structure inform research
on Muslim women in contemporary civil societies.
In postcolonial Lebanon, Algeria, and Pakistan,
for example, scholars have found that postcolonial
anxiety over religious identity and communal
boundaries has intensified pressure to exclude
women from civil society. Joseph (2000), for exam-
ple, argues that communal bargaining in Lebanon
since independence has produced pacts between the
state and religious leaders that have reinforced kin-
ship ties and undercut women’s individual rights.
Similarly, in Algeria, Cheriet (1996) argues, the
weak independent state adopted populist policies
that gendered civil society by buying men’s loyalty