J. Conrad, Heart of darkness, London 1995.
C. D. Cowan and O. W. Wolters, Nineteenth century
Malaya. Origins of British political control, London
1961.
D. Eickelman and J. Piscatori (eds.), Muslim politics,
Princeton, N.J. 1996.
J. S. Furnivall, Colonial policy and practice. A compara-
tive study of Burma and Netherlands India, New York
1956.
L. Hesselink, Prostitution, a necessary evil particularly in
the colonies. Views on prostitution in the Netherlands
Indies, in E. Locher-Scholten and A. Niehof (eds.),
Indonesian women in focus. Past and present notions,
Dordrecht 1987, 205–24.
E. Keddie, The past and present of women in the Muslim
world, in World History1 (1990), 77–108.
D. Langmore, Missionary lives. Papua, 1874–1914,
Honolulu 1989.
G. Lerner, The origins of patriarchy, New York 1986.
E. Locher-Scholten, Women and the colonial state,
Amsterdam 2000.
L. Manderson, Women, politics and change, Oxford
1980.
A. McClintock, Imperial leather. Race, gender and sexu-
ality in the colonial contest, New York 1995.
F. Mernissi, Women and Islam. A historical and theologi-
cal enquiry, Oxford 1991.
P. Mille and A. Delmaison, La femme et l’homme nu,
Paris 1924.
H. Ming, Barracks-concubinage in the Indies, 1887–
1920, in Indonesia35 (1983), 65–93.
H. Ridley, Images of imperial rule, New York 1983.
E. Sadka, The protected Malay states, 1874–1895, Kuala
Lumpur 1968.
A. L. Stoler, Carnal knowledge and imperial power, in
M. Leonardo (ed.), Gender at the crossroads of knowl-
edge, Berkeley 1991, 82–5.
——, A sentimental education. Native servants and the
cultivation of European children in the Netherlands
Indies, in L. J. Sears (ed.), Fantasizing the feminine in
Indonesia, Durham, N.C. 1996, 71–91.
——,Carnal knowledge and imperial power. Race and
the intimate in colonial rule, Berkeley 2002.
A. Summers, Damned whores and God’s police, Cam-
berwell, Vic. 2002.
N. Yuval-Davis and F. Anthias (eds.), Women, nation,
state, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire 1989.Susanna G. RizzoEgyptThe onset of British occupation of Egypt in 1882
dealt a critical blow to independent Egyptian mod-
ernization and signaled the colonial restructuring
of the society. Nowhere were the new relations of
power between colonizer and colonized more
apparent than in the area of gender relations and
policies. British colonial government used the edu-
cation of Egyptian women to prove its civilizing
mission to its Oriental subjects. While some women
writers ignored and/or were critical of that Orien-
talist discourse, which assumed the inferiority of
the Orient and the superiority of the Occident,
many men and women internalized it in their writ-66 colonialism and imperialism
ings on gender roles and relations. More seriously,
Egyptian nationalists found themselves in the para-
doxical position of having to defend the status of
women in Islamic societies while recognizing the
need to overcome their backwardness. As a result,
their gender discourses and policy agendas reflected
a strong underlying belief in the necessity of fol-
lowing in the footsteps of the Occident as a devel-
opmental other.
≠â±isha Taymùr’s Natà±ij al-ahwàl fi al-aqwàl wa
al-af≠àl(Consequences of changing conditions as
they relate to speech and deeds) offered the first
commentary on the crises of dynastic government
and community that paved the way for British
occupation and colonialism. Published in 1888
under strict British censorship, it stressed the need
to struggle to overcome these crises through the
transformation of Islamic traditions as a guide for
the reorganization of the key political, economic,
and social institutions of society. With that aim,
Taymùr advocated the nationalization of dynastic
government and the overcoming of class cleavages
through the revival of fraternal relations of solidar-
ity and the downsizing of polygamous marriages as
means of infusing Islamic society with new sources
of dynamism (Taymur 1888).
In contrast, Syrian Christian and Jewish women,
who were graduates of missionary schools where
the Orientalist discourse on knowledge and society
was part of the curriculum, used a derivative of that
discourse in the earliest women’s journals calling on
the Orient to copy the gender roles in the Occident.
Toward that goal, the early journals, which
included Hind Nawfal’s al-Fatà(Girl, 1892), Louisa
Habbalin’s al-Firdaws(Paradise, 1896), Maryam
Mazhar’s Mir±at al-™asnà±(Mirror of beauty, 1896),
Alexandra Avierino’s Anìs al-jalìs(The familiar
companion, 1898), and Esther Azhuri’s al-≠â±ila
(Family, 1899), emphasized womens’ education as
part of the development of modern domesticity in
the family (Baron 1994, Fawwaz n.d., 7–16, Hatem
2002).
When in the 1890s the British colonial govern-
ment finally turned its attention to education in
general and girls’ education in particular, it
declared itself to be committed to the expansion of
girls’ education as part of the civilizing mission.
Paradoxically, its educational policy was restrictive
(Tucker 1985, 125) and focused on the acquisition
of basic literacy skills at the elementary school (kut-
tab) level and channeling very young girls into the
study of domestic sciences (ibid. 126). It ended free
public education for girls and relied on private
schools to satisfy the needs of the middle classes.
This represented a break with the precolonial