had lost under secularist regimes. They argued that
unveiled women in the workplace were vulnerable
to sexual harrassment, and that a woman living
under Muslim law had more property rights, civil
rights with respect to marriage, and public respect
than did the “new women” of secular Iran, Egypt,
or Turkey in their Western suits and Western jobs.
The Muslim Brotherhood supported the formation
of a women’s auxiliary, the Muslim Sisterhood, and
women rose to political prominence through the
organization. Women’s rights have been entangled
in this struggle for decades now, and can be seen in
varying forms in Muslim-majority societies as dif-
ferent as post-revolutionary Iran, the Kingdom of
Morocco, and wartorn Indonesia.
Important developments have taken place in
Southeast Asia or in formerly low-visibility groups
that have a dramatic impact via the Internet, cheap
recorded media such as cassettes and compact
disks, and ease of travel. One figure who has risen
to new prominence comes out of a tradition, Sufism,
with terms of sociopolitical engagement very dif-
ferent from those discussed so far. A Naqshbandì
shaykh originally from Beirut, Muhammad Hisham
Kabbani, has continued the tradition of writing
biographies of the Prophet’s female companions,
and is a strong advocate of women’s rights under
Sharì≠a. He has also argued for adaptation of
Islamic social and legal traditions to changing
terms of a new era and new settings for Islam. He
founded an organization, Kamilat, to advocate for
women’s rights and give guidance to modern
Muslim women in matters large and small, and
appointed his wife, Hajja Naziha Adil, as executive
co-chair. The current executive director of this
organization, Hajja Taliba Jilani, is an American
convert to Islam. Women play prominent roles as
writers, correspondents, and objects of discussion
in Kamilat, and like many new Muslim organiza-
tions, Kamilat has established a strong presence on
the Internet at <www.kamilat.org>, but is also
under constant attack from more mainstream and
right-wing Muslim organizations. At the same
time, Muslim men and women of all denomina-
tions are under fire from secularists in the countries
to which they have emigrated, including those
where freedom of religion is enshrined as a found-
ing value of the state. Muslim women are, perhaps,
finding new variants of patriarchal support for
their rights in new state settings in a world-wide
diaspora. It remains to be seen how this will play
out in terms of individual rights within Muslim
communities, and within various political regimes.
From the nineteenth century, then, male politi-
cians, activists, and intellectuals have attempted to782 womens right’s: male advocacy
change the status of Muslim women, and to delimit
or expand their public roles, as key elements of
strategies of modernization, anti-colonial resist-
ance, state-building, and internal reform. The
Turkish feminist Çirin Tekeli put this dynamic in a
wry formulation, asking “how is it that we are
emancipated, but not liberated?” – by which she
meant that Turkish women were emancipated from
above for the purposes of the state, but that they did
not set the terms of their own liberation through
struggle and demands from below. Turkey is the
most stark example of this dynamic, but it has vari-
ations throughout the Muslim and non-Muslim
world. Even as male state actors have seen uses for
women in public life, they have been less concerned
with improving the actual conditions of women’s
(or other citizens’) daily lives, so that most Muslim
women in most national and diasporic settings, like
their sisters elsewhere, continue to carry the burden
of housework and child rearing while also pursuing
a career outside the home. The continuing inequal-
ities in professional, political, and home life leave
the question of male advocacy of women’s rights
vexed by two questions. First, why do men advo-
cate an expansion of women’s roles in their soci-
eties? And second, what happens to male advocacy
when women advocate for themselves and demand
more than their male “advocates” are willing to
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