cate a changed role for women to be achieved
through specific moral and practical education.
This reformist program represented male intrusion
into a segregated female world over which women
had previously exercised a substantial degree of
autonomy.
In order to spread their message, Muslim reform-
ers utilized the new print technology which had
been introduced to India by the British, publishing
a range of short tracts, journals, manuals, and nov-
els. Despite a shared agenda, two main strands may
be identified within this genre of literature. The
first encompassed traditional Muslim scholars
(≠ulamà±) who devised a program of reform largely
independently of European influence. With regard
to gender, this approach meant that no distinction
was made between the moral and intellectual capa-
bilities of men and women. A key example of this
type of text was Bihishti Zewar(Heavenly orna-
ments) by the Deobandi scholar, Mawlana Ashraf
≠AlìThànawì(1864–1943). It advocated that both
sexes should follow the example of the Prophet and
read religious texts in Arabic (though girls were
expected to begin their training in the vernacular).
The second strand included social reformers,
known as Islamic modernists, who were motivated
by their encounter with the colonial power to take
example from European prototypes. In particular,
they were inspired by Victorian notions of bour-
geois domesticity to argue that women had special
moral and spiritual qualities that prepared them for
an exalted role within the home. Representative
authors of this type of literature included Nazir
A™mad (1833?–1912) and Al†àf £usayn £àlì
(1837–1914).
Other Muslim reformers took practical steps to
found private schools for girls from the 1880s.
Prominent early examples included the Nampalli
Girls School in Hyderabad (founded 1890), the
Victoria Girls High School in Lahore (founded
1906), the Zenana Madrasa in Aligarh (founded
1906), and the Muslim Girls School in Lucknow
(founded 1912). The key aim of these institutions
was to prepare girls to better fulfill their future
roles as wives and mothers of the Muslim commu-
nity. In doing so, their achievements should not be
overstated; by the time of the 1931 census, only 1.2
percent of Indian Muslim women (as compared to
1.9 percent of Indian women as a whole) were lit-
erate. Yet female education did have a number of
unforeseen and often paradoxical effects as well.
The institutionalization of certain customary prac-
tices, such as purdah, in girls schools, for instance,60 colonialism and imperialism
stimulated a demand for segregated medical and
educational facilities to be staffed by Muslim
female professionals, including teachers, doctors,
and nurses. School attendance also fostered
women’s interest in social service organizations and
Urdu journalism, while cultivating broader net-
works of female communication. The result was a
burgeoning of Muslim women’s activism in the
Indian subcontinent in the early decades of the
twentieth century. Like prior efforts by male re-
formers, it sought to introduce incremental change
to society by building on Islamic norms.
The first stage in this process was the establish-
ment of women’s journals to which Muslim women
themselves contributed. Some of the first were
Tahzib un-niswan(founded 1898, Lahore), Khatun
(founded 1904, Aligarh) and ≠Ismat(founded 1908,
Delhi), though a large number of other titles soon
proliferated across India in Urdu and other regional
languages. These journals provided reading mate-
rial to newly educated women on topics as diverse
as female education, women’s rights in Islam,
health, nutrition, home economics, and gardening.
By the 1920s, they also began to take up more
explicitly feminist issues, including female suffrage,
legislative reform, economic independence, “love”
marriages, and the relaxation of purdah, while also
reporting on contemporary politics and travel.
Certain Indian Muslim women also wrote longer
pieces, including novels, manuals, and reformist
tracts. At the forefront of this movement were
pioneering figures, such as Muhammadi Begam
(1878?–1908) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
(1880–1932), who introduced a distinctly feminine
sensibility to Urdu literature for women. It was to
be developed by a later generation of female au-
thors, including Nazr Sajjad Hyder (1894–1967)
and Ismat Chughtai (1911–91).
Other Muslim women took practical steps for
women’s education and emancipation by establish-
ing schools, health programs, and women’s organi-
zations. Leading figures in this field were the
Nawab Begams of Bhopal, Sikandar (1816–68),
Shah Jahan (1838–1901), and Sultan Jahan (1858–
1930), who used their semi-autonomous state in
central India as a testing ground for women’s
reform. Specific projects included schools for elite
and less privileged girls (the best known being the
Sultania Girls School, founded 1903), a purdah
women’s hospital (founded 1891), and a women’s
social club (founded 1909). The last Begam of
Bhopal also sought to lay the foundations of an
autonomous women’s movement in India in which