CHAPTER 4
Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender
Deniz Kandiyoti
Islam, gender and modernity: Genealogies of a debate
Like all historical and political debates, diverse strands of engagement with
Islam, gender and modernity have been a product of their times. It is commonly
acknowledged that the ‘woman question’ that emerged at the turn of the nine-
teenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was coloured by a persistent
preoccupation with the effects of encounters with the West, either through
direct colonial domination (as in Algeria and Egypt) or through the increas-
ing encroachment of Western powers (as in the Ottoman Empire and Iran).
Concerns with women’s rights, centring around issues of education, veiling and
polygyny, coincided with a broader agenda about ‘progress’ and advocacy for
social reform. Mainly drawn from rising middle classes, culturally and economi-
cally integrated into the Western sphere of infl uence, Muslim reformers were
opposed by those who felt marginalised and threatened by such encroachment.
At the heart of the debates between reformers and their more conservative
critics lay the issue of the compatibility of Islam with modernity, a concern that
became pivotal to the political articulation of competing visions of society.^1
However, the routine invocation of colonial encounters as the midwife of both
modernist reformism and conservative reaction singled the area of gender rela-
tions out as a central node in a broader ideological debate where notions of
cultural authenticity (expressed through an Islamic idiom) were pitted against
‘foreign’ contamination (with modernisation being equated to Westernisation).^2
These tropes have exhibited remarkable resilience and longevity and have, if
anything, experienced a revival in the wake of global Islamic resurgence and,
more recently, the polarisation occasioned by the so-called war on terror.
Yet, the actual histories of modernisation and state-led reforms in the Muslim
world have been remarkable in their diversity. After the First World War, the
demise of the Ottoman Empire and the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian
Empire gave rise to two leading idioms for women’s emancipation that were to
leave an enduring legacy throughout the twentieth century: those of nationalism
and socialism. These currents informed the early stirrings of feminism in the
Muslim world, as elsewhere.^3 After the big wave of decolonisation following the
Second World War, a period of state-led development gave rise to a variety of
‘state feminisms’, underwritten by educational and legal reforms. Post-colonial