nity and liberation struggles, achieving fame and a
wide readership in the Muslim world at large, as
they forwarded arguments debating possible roles
for women. Many had recognizably feminist agen-
das; many made traditional arguments for women’s
participation in the workforce and public life after
their children were school-age or older; many
argued for a preservation of local ethnic traditions
that defied Qur±ànic injunctions for women’s rights
in family and property laws.
Colonial and postcolonial
struggles
While men were the leaders of most anti-colonial
struggles at the beginning of the twentieth century,
women rose to prominence as heroes of the resist-
ance and protectors of guerrilla fighters through-
out the century. Their fame was sharply curtailed,
however, by traditional attitudes compounded of
Greco-Roman and Mesopotamian imperial cul-
tures with a broad variety of tribal cultures that
privileged men’s roles in warfare and resistance
over that of women. An early exception was Mus-
tafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey,
who instituted universal public education and
female suffrage in the 1920s and 1930s, arguing
that giving women equal rights was a way of pay-
ing off the debt Turkey owed them for their heroic
service during the First World War and the war for
Turkish independence (see Figure 6).
While Iran was not formally colonized, it had
been an intense focus of Anglo-Russian conflict
since the nineteenth century, with England attempt-
ing to protect its south Asian colonies, and Russia
pushing toward Iran’s rich reserves of manpower,
wealth, and natural resources. Most activist intel-
lectuals focused intensely on preserving or regain-
ing Iran’s economic independence from these
struggles even as the ruling dynasty and local gov-
ernors traded resources for cash at a stunning rate,
leaving much of Iran’s economic potential in the
hands of foreigners. After the Constitutional
Revolution of 1905–11, boycotts of colonized sec-
tors of the economy, and the establishment of the
Pahlavìregime in the 1920s, Iranian elites took the
newly discovered resources of oil to fuel rapid mod-
ernization of state institutions, economic sectors,
and the peoples of Iran. In a highly controversial
move, the first PahlavìShah of Iran banned the veil
from public life, compelling observant Muslim
women to remove this ritually significant means of
preserving modesty from their daily practice.
Despite his dictatorial policies that, in the end,
stripped women and men alike of civil rights, some
women were able to take the terms of Iranian
overview 781modernity as presented to them, and manipulate
those terms to expand the possibilities of their pub-
lic roles. Still further to the East, Muslim scholars
in British India and Dutch Indonesia drew on
debates from Iran and the Ottoman Empire as they
developed their own anti-colonial struggles, and as
they negotiated their own terms of modernity.
Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, the
long-time trickle of emigrants from Muslim regions
to the United States and Europe took on the force
of streams and then rivers, with enough Christian
Syrians and Armenians in Boston, for example, to
found their own papers and build neighborhoods
that replicated socioeconomic patterns in their
countries of origin. Starting at the end of the twen-
tieth and beginning of the twenty-first century,
Muslim emigrants began to outnumber Christian
and Jewish emigrants from the Middle East to the
United States and Europe, and as a result, new
debates over Muslim identity in concert with
new national identities – German, Canadian,
American – forced new formulations of male-
female legal and social issues. These fast-paced
debates and adaptations played out in diaspora at
the same time that Muslims were coming to equally
rapid, some would say forced, terms with new
national identities in what has been traditionally
recognized as the Muslim world in Eurasia, Africa,
South Asia, and Southeast Asia.The nation-state era
From the middle of the twentieth century, and
earlier in Iran and South Asia, European radical
ideas had been adapted to the purposes of anti-
European colonial struggles, and then into the
project of building former colonies and mandate
territories into modern nation-states. The first gen-
eration of Arab revolutionaries of non-elite origins,
such as Gamal Abdel-Nasser in the 1950s, were
socialist and secularist military men. They saw all
elements of their populations as resources to be
developed (and in many cases exploited) in order to
build their territories into strong, economically and
politically independent nation-states. Most signally
in socialist Iraq of the late 1960s and 1970s,
women were sent to school by state edict, trained in
modern professions, and given jobs ranging from
factory worker to trained surgeon and engineer.
These programs were resisted, in turn, by religious
Muslims who saw the turn toward secular states as
a danger and a betrayal of Muslim tradition. Like
the thinkers of the late nineteenth century in the
Ottoman Empire and Egypt, they rehabilitated
Islam and argued that Muslim women had tradi-
tonal rights, privileges, and protections that they