Вы находитесь на странице: 1из 21

Women’s Studies, 38:273–292, 2009

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC


ISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 online
DOI: 10.1080/00497870902724612

ISLAM, WOMEN, AND WESTERN RESPONSES:


1547-7045Studies,
0049-7878
GWST
Women’s Studies Vol. 38, No. 3, February 2009: pp. 1–28

THE CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE OF EARLY


MODERN INVESTIGATIONS

BERNADETTE ANDREA
Islam, Women,
Bernadette Andrea
and Western Responses

The University of Texas at San Antonio

This article focuses on Western responses, both historically and


today, to the issue of “Women and Islam”—admittedly a mono-
lithic categorization that presumes both patriarchal and orientalist
reifications. Virginia Woolf, considered to be one of the fore-
mothers of contemporary Anglo-American feminism, dramatized
her personal and professional confrontation with such monoliths
in the archly ironic British Museum scene in A Room of One’s Own
(1929). Inundated by “an avalanche of books” written by men
about “WOMEN AND . . .”—from the “Condition in Middle
Ages of” to Alexander Pope’s influential pronouncement that
“Most women have no character at all”—Woolf highlights the
egregious discrepancy between the proliferation of male-
authored opinions on women versus her own experience of being
a woman writer (28–30). But it is precisely this liberal feminist
tradition, since its formulation at the end of the seventeenth
century, that has presumed English women (and, by extension,
Western women) to be the “freest” in the world with specific refer-
ence to Muslim women, assumed to be inherently oppressed.1
Historian Margaret R. Hunt reframes this assumption as a question

1
For the foundational work on liberal feminism and its prospects, see Eisenstein, The
Radical Future of Liberal Feminism. Like Eisenstein, I am using “‘liberal’. . . in its more histor-
ical sense and not in the everyday usage suggesting open-minded or receptive to change.
Liberal ideas are the specific set of ideas that developed with the bourgeois revolution
asserting the importance and autonomy of the individual. These ideas, which originated
in seventeenth-century England and took root in the eighteenth century, are now the
dominant political ideology of twentieth-century Western society” (4). In later works, such
as Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century, Eisenstein begins to address
how anti-Islamic and colonialist prejudices have shaped the perception that Western
women are “free and liberated compared to the ‘orient’” (42).
Address correspondence to Bernadette Andrea, Department of English, University of Texas
at San Antonio, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX 78249. E-mail: bernadette.andrea@utsa.edu

273
274 Bernadette Andrea

in her paper, “Women in Ottoman and Western European Law


Courts in the Early Modern Period, or, Were Western European
Women Really the Luckiest Women in the World?”2 She cites the
views of Mary Wollstonecraft, another one of Anglo-American
feminism’s foremothers, who more than a century before Woolf
argued for English women’s rights using the fallacy of the
enslaved Muslim wife as her foil. As Hunt concludes, early femi-
nists such as Wollstonecraft aligned with more conservative forces
as they “turned the claim that Western European Christian
women were the most fortunate women in the world, and Muslim
women the most oppressed, into an unassailable truth, indeed
one of the foundational truths of Western modernity” (2). Yet, as
I demonstrate in my recent book, not only was this view belied by
the facts, but eighteenth-century counter-orientalist feminists
such as Delarivier Manley and Mary Wortley Montagu contested it
from its inception.3 The most salient facts are, first, that English
wives possessed no inherent civil rights, including the right to
own property which constitutes the core of classical liberalism,
until the end of the nineteenth century when “The Married
Women’s Property Act” was passed; correspondingly, under
Islamic law, Muslims cannot be enslaved (hence, the fallacy of the
“Muslim wife as slave”) and Muslim women always had an inalien-
able right to own property. However, despite challenges within
the feminist camp to the alliance between the advocacy for
English women’s rights and their complicity with orientalism and
other imperialist discourses, the view that Western women—and
in the contemporary world, American women—are the “freest”
women in the world as opposed to inherently oppressed Muslim
women is still widespread.4
Let me give you a recent example of my own personal and
professional encounter with such views: On a trip to Turkey in fall
2007 with a group commemorating the 800th anniversary of the
birth of the world renowned poet, Mevlana Jalal al-Din Rumi—

2
I thank Professor Hunt for sharing this article with me.
3
For an extended analysis of the genealogy of “feminist orientalism” and those early
feminists who contested this alliance, see Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English
Literature, 78–104. Also see Andrea, “English Women and Islam, 1610 to 1690.”
4
On this persistent fallacy, see Ahmed, “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of
the Harem,” and Andrea, “Passage through the Harem: Historicizing a Western Obsession
in Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage.”
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 275

who is particularly interesting to me because this thirteenth-cen-


tury Islamic scholar and mystic currently hails as the “best-selling
poet in America” (Rumi 527)—a significant percentage of this
group narrowed its engagement with the history, culture, and
people of the region into the challenge: “Why are Muslim women
so oppressed?” This challenge was aggressively reiterated in disre-
gard of the nuanced and honest responses of Muslim women of
deep scholarship and spirituality, whose knowledge and lives
refuted this “loaded question,” one which perpetuates the confla-
tion of the Muslim woman and oppression characteristic of “femi-
nist orientalism.” To reinforce Hunt’s conclusion—“the claim
that Western European Christian women were the most fortunate
women in the world, and Muslim women the most oppressed”
remains “one of the foundational truths of Western modernity”
(2)—upon my return to the United States after this trip, one of
the first news items I encountered satirically commented on the
protests planned by “David Horowitz’s conservative Freedom
Center” for its self-designated “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.”
The pièce de résistance involved “urging college students to stage sit-
ins outside the offices of women’s studies departments to protest
‘the silence of feminists over the oppression of women in Islam’
and to distribute pamphlets on Islamo-Fascism” (Dowd 27). With
such fallacies, which we shall see are rooted in the debates of the
early modern period, so widespread today in academia and
among the general public, a return to this earlier period is not
only relevant, but it is crucial for enabling us to intervene knowl-
edgeably in contemporary discussions of “Women and Islam.”
Only the combination of historical analysis and contemporary
engagement can decouple the terms “women” and “Islam” from
their monolithic conceptualization. This is the task of the balance
of the article, where I explicate the moment when “feminist
orientalism” was first articulated in the English tradition. The
conclusion returns to contemporary discussions as part of this
centuries-long history.

The Genealogy of Feminist Orientalism:


Seventeenth-Century Debates

Beginning with the patriarchal travel literature of the seven-


teenth century, the image of the Eastern—and, specifically, the
276 Bernadette Andrea

Muslim—woman became the basis for the uneasy marriage


between English women’s protests against gender oppression at
the turn of the eighteenth century and their complicity with the
orientalist and racist ideologies supporting England’s emerging
global empire.5 Yet, prior to Quaker women’s missions to conti-
nental Europe, the Americas, and the Ottoman Empire, starting
in the mid-seventeenth century, English women were explicitly
barred from foreign travel. As Fynes Moryson pronounces in An
Itinerary . . . Containing his Ten Yeeres Travell (1617) from the
British Isles through the Ottoman Empire, “women for suspition
of chastity are most unfit for this course,” which he reinforces
with the marginal gloss, “Women unfit to travell” (3: 350). This
passage comes at the beginning of Moryson’s discourse on “Trav-
elling in generall” (Part III, Book I), with the first chapter
labeled, “That the visiting of forraigne Countries is good and
profitable: But to whom, and how far?” (3: 349). Later he genders
the saying, “he hath lived well who hath spent his time retyred
[retired] from the world,” as applying exclusively to women. His
marginalia reads, “Perhaps a true saying for women” and his
commentary continues, “This may be true in women” (3: 355).
However, this ban on English women’s travel did not pre-
clude their presence in the spate of travelogues written by
English men such as Moryson. In particular, the lot of purport-
edly enslaved Muslim wives was frequently compared with that of
“freeborn Englishwomen,” who were celebrated in the patriar-
chal discourse of the period as living in a “paradise” for gender
relations.6 As Kenneth Parker points out in his collection of
Early Modern Tales of Orient, the embellished reports of the
Ottoman sultan’s absolutist domestic and expansionist foreign
policies,

reinforced a pre-existing stereotype of the Turk, as [to quote the Oxford


English Dictionary] “a cruel, rigorous, or tyrannical man; any one behaving
as a barbarian or savage; one who treats his wife hardly; a bad-tempered or
unmanageable man. Often with alliterative appellation, terrible Turk.” (18)

5
For the emergence and extent of this empire, see Lewis, The Oxford History of the
British Empire, particularly vol. 1, The Origins of Empire, and vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century.
6
Moryson cites “the Proverb, that England is the Hell of Horses, the Purgatory of
Servants, and the Paradise of Women” (4: 169). Cf. The Hardships of the English Laws in
Relation to Wives, 45–46, on this commonplace. I analyze this passage below.
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 277

Although Parker does not draw attention to the gendered


dynamic shaping this definition, the texts by male travelers he
adduces attest to the salience for nascent English feminism of
specifying a “Turk” as “one who treats his wife hardly.”
William Biddulph presents a typical example of this confla-
tion of patriarchalism and orientalism in The Travels of Certaine
Englishmen into Africa, Asia, Troy . . . and to sundry other places
(1609). In this frequently reprinted text, Biddulph introduces the
dictum that western women should feel grateful for their gen-
dered status quo because, according to him, Muslim women must
subsist as virtual slaves.7 As he intones to his intended audience in
England, “Heere wives may learn to love their husbands, when
they shal read in what slavery women live in other Countries, and
in what awe and subjection to their husbands, and what libertie
and freedome they themselves enjoy” (sig. A2; cf. Parker 85).8 In
a paradox constitutive of orientalist patriarchal discourse then –
and now–Biddulph evokes the image of the industrious, albeit
enslaved, Muslim woman to threaten what he describes as the
“many idle huswies in England” (36; cf. Parker 89).9 More
ominously, after incorrectly claiming that “whensoever he [a
Muslim husband] disliketh any one of them [his wives], it is their
use to sell them or give them to any of their men-slaves” (55; cf.
Parker 95), Biddulph predicts, “if the like order were in England,
women would be more dutifull and faithfull to their husbands
than many of them are” (55–56; cf. Parker 95). While one might
argue Biddulph is confusing the status of slave concubines and
legal wives, who could not be slaves, his previous claim that “their
custome is to buy their wives of their parents” suggests the orien-
talist equation of Muslim wives with slaves (55; cf. Parker 95).
Similarly, William Lithgow, in A Most Delectable, and True Discourse,
of an admired and painefull peregrination from Scotland, to the most
famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia and Affricke (1614), deems Turkish

7
Cf. Imber, who specifies, “with regards to property, Islamic law is unusual, although
not unique [Imber cites medieval Welsh law], in keeping the wife’s property separate
from her husband’s and in requiring the husband to make a payment to his wife at the
time of the marriage” (81). Hence, because under Islamic law “a slave cannot own property,”
Muslim wives cannot be slaves (93).
8
Early modern typography has been modernized as follows: u/v and i/j.
9
Parker transcribes “huswies” as “housewives,” although its root also denotes “hussies,”
as per the etymology for “housewife” in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989).
278 Bernadette Andrea

wives “not far from the like servitude [i.e. of slaves]; for the men
by the Alcoran [Qur’an], are admitted to Marry as many women as
they will, or their ability can keepe” (sig. I3v; cf. Parker 155).
Lithgow thus offers another instance of the negative comparison
with the orientalized woman to keep English women in their
place.10
As virtually the sole exception to this unrelenting patriarchal
orientalism, Joseph Pitts, who documented his sixteen years of
enslavement in Muslim lands in A faithful account of the religion and
manners of the Mahometans (1731, 3rd ed.), roundly critiqued the
misrepresentation of Muslim gender mores by writers such as
Biddulph and Lithgow. As Pitts explains,

It hath been reported, That a Mahometan may have as many Wives as he


pleaseth, tho’, if I mistake not, the Number may not exceed four;11 but
there is not one in a Thousand hath more than one [wife], except it be in
the Country, where some here and there may have two [wives]; yet I never
knew but one which had so many as three [wives]. (39; cf. Vitkus 243)

In fact, the Qur’anic injunction limits men to four wives, and only
insofar as they can treat all four wives equally–an impossibility
Islamic feminists argue renders this injunction moot (Women and
Gender 63). Hence, even Pitts’s defense relies on an orientalist
misconception. Barring this limited exception among English
male travel writers, the spurious image of Muslim wives as slaves
remained one Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who accompanied
her husband, the English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire
from 1716 to 1718, to Istanbul, felt compelled to correct. In her
Turkish Embassy Letters (published posthumously in 1763), she
corroborates, “’Tis true, their law permits them four wives, but
there is no instance of a man of quality that makes use of this
liberty, or of a woman of rank that would suffer it” (72). She like-
wise corrects the misconception that Greeks subjects of the sultan
were held as slaves (104; cf. 130). This passage indirectly counters

10
For a related discussion of Biddulph and Lithgow, see Matar, “The Representation
of Muslim Women in Renaissance England,” 52–55, although he does not consider En-
glish women’s writing.
11
The 1704, first edition, reads, “It hath been reported that a Mohammetan may have
as many wives as he pleaseth, and I believe it is so . . .” (Vitkus 243), with the rest of the
quote continuing as in the 1731 edition. Clearly, Pitts had refined his views in this latter
edition, drawing on more accurate information about Islamic marriage laws.
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 279

Alexander Pope’s patriarchal orientalist projection of “white” sla-


very onto Montagu, refusing to treat her as an interlocutor, as she
hoped, instead of a sex object (Grundy 130, 165).
In particular, the situation of English women in the era, as
detailed by The Law’s Resolutions of Women’s Rights (1632), was
governed by the doctrine of coverture, whereby “every feme
covert [a married woman under English common law] is quodam-
modo [in a certain way] an infant, for see her power even in that
which is most her own” (47). Succinctly put, “that which a
husband hath is his own” and “that which the wife has is the
husband’s” (46-47), including any inheritance she received, any
rents she collected, or any wages she earned. In the eighteenth
century, the influential jurist William Blackstone confirmed this
doctrine with his infamous phrase, “in law husband and wife are
one person, and the husband is that person” (Holcombe 18; cf.
25). This condition of legal nonage continued until the end of
the nineteenth century, when the British Parliament finally
passed the Married Women’s Property Act.
Montagu was intensely aware of the constraints the doctrine
of coverture placed on women, as she possessed no property of
her own during her marriage despite having been born into a
wealthy aristocratic family. By circumventing an arranged
marriage, which she considered “Hell itself,” she renounced the
contract that would have settled an independent portion of
wealth upon her (Grundy 46).12 Governed by the common law as
a feme covert, she ceded all former and future earnings and inherit-
ances to her husband. Montagu knew her entire married life that
she owned nothing, that her welfare was based entirely on her
husband’s largesse, and that even the heirloom jewelry she wished
to bestow on her beloved daughter was not hers to give but her
husband’s. As she wrote in the correspondence accompanying this
gift, “You have been the Passion of my Life. You need thank me
for nothing . . . I desire you would thank your Father for the
Jewels; you know I have nothing of my own” (Grundy 558).
Based on her firsthand experience in the Ottoman Empire,
characterized by her efforts to seek accurate information about
Islam from direct sources, Montagu learned that Muslim women

12
Erickson emphasizes the liabilities of coverture, even as she acknowledges some of
the means by which upper-class families sought to temper the common law (3–20).
280 Bernadette Andrea

were under no such disadvantage, as “those ladies that are rich hav-
ing all their money in their own hands, which they take with them
upon a divorce with an addition which he [the divorcing husband]
is obliged to give them.” On this basis, she deems “the Turkish [Mus-
lim] women as the only free people in the empire” because they
control their persons and property upon marriage (72).13 Regard-
ing women’s economic rights, then, Islamic law as applied in the
Ottoman Empire was far more advanced than England’s common
law for almost a century past the publication of Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which is considered “the
founding text of Western liberal feminism” (Zonana 599).
As “the first systematic feminist in England,” preceding Woll-
stonecraft by a century, Mary Astell stood at the forefront of those
writers from 1690 to 1710 who emphasized her countrywomen’s
oppression as wives (Rogers 71; cf. Perry 99). She sought to
provide alternatives to patriarchal marriage in her inaugural
manifesto, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I (1694, 1695,
1696), which presented a controversial blueprint for Protestant
England’s first female college. This treatise was followed by A Seri-
ous Proposal to the Ladies, Part II (1697, 1703, 1706, 1730) in
response to patriarchal resistance to her initial proposal. Astell’s
final feminist treatise, Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), devel-
oped her ongoing critique of the double standard structuring
English gender relations. Throughout her oeuvre, Astell especially
challenged the legal principle of coverture, whereby wives
remained under the “authority and protection” of their husbands.
Significantly, she remained unmarried.
Much admired by the younger Montagu, Astell was asked in
1724 to prepare a preface for the Turkish Embassy Letters. As she
records, “the noble Author had the goodness to lend me her M.S.
[manuscript] to satisfy my Curiosity in some enquirys I made
concerning her Travels.” Astell, in other words, had access to a
sound cross-cultural critique of English marriage customs, with
specific reference to the relative benefits of Islamic law. In her
preface, she condemns the malice and ignorance of “Male
Travels,” including the patriarchal orientalist writers surveyed
above (234). Against their aspersions, she urges her readers to

13
Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, traces women’s property rights in early Islamic
societies, including the Ottoman Empire (110–12).
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 281

“be better Christians than to look upon her [i.e., Montagu, and
by extension Astell] with an evil eye” (235). Although Astell
adheres to a Christian standard, set in opposition to the largely
eastern tradition of the “evil eye,” she refrains in this mature work
from establishing Islam as a negative foil.14 In addition, while in
her earlier polemics she equated English women’s oppression
under patriarchy with slavery, figured “strictly as a metaphor”
(Perry 8), she here refrains from casting Muslim wives as slaves,
unlike the patriarchal orientalist travel writers and their feminist
orientalist followers. This rhetorical choice is significant, as the
polemic Astell initiated at the end of the seventeenth century was
soon co-opted by the latter tendency.
An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex . . . Written by a Lady (1696)
complicates the retrospective view of a feminist consensus in early
modern England. Although wrongly ascribed to Astell in some
sources, the pamphlet clearly counters her conservative Tory
feminism, based on a “Christian Platonist belief,” with “the language
of political libertarianism,” characteristic of the 1688 Whig Revolu-
tion (Jones 193). It thereby positions English feminism on the foun-
dations of “liberal individualism” in the tradition of John Locke
(Radical Future, 5; cf. 33–54). In tracing this shift from hierarchical
patriarchal privilege to horizontal individual rights, a “fraternal”
model that continues to exclude women (Pateman 3), its anony-
mous author (probably Judith Drake) determines,

As the World grew more Populous, and Mens Necessities whetted their
Inventions, so it increas’d their Jealousie, and sharpen’d their Tyranny
over us, till by degrees, it came to that height of Severity, I may say Cruelty,
it is now at in all the Eastern parts of the World, where the Women, like
our Negroes, in our Western Plantations, are born slaves, and live Prisoners
all their Lives. (21–22; cf. Jones 210)

As Vivien Jones in Women in the Eighteenth Century comments, by


“using a recurrent analogy with anti-slavery arguments . . ., the writer
points out the hypocrisy of a legal system based on rights of liberty
and property which are denied to half the population” (194).

14
Astell’s juvenilia includes a poem linking her nascent feminism to Christian prosely-
tizing: “How shall I be a Peter or a Paul?/ That to the Turk and Infidel,/ I might the
joyfull tydings tell,/ And spare no labour to convert them all:/ But ah my Sex denies me
this” (Perry 61).
282 Bernadette Andrea

Moira Ferguson, in Subject to Others: British Women Writers and


Colonial Slavery, similarly adduces the Defence as an instance of
“extra-colonial expropriations of the language of slavery” (22; cf.
24). She extends this argument in Colonialism and Gender Relations
from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid, concluding,

By theorizing about women’s rights using old attributions of harem-based


slavery in conjunction with denotations of colonial slavery, Wollstonecraft
was a political pioneer, fundamentally altering the definition of rights and
paving the way for a much wider cultural dialogue. (33)

By contrast, I maintain that Wollstonecraft in her evocation of


“harem-based slavery” consolidates the model of feminist orien-
talism promoted by the Defence. As I have demonstrated, such
“anti-slavery arguments,” to return to Jones’s terminology, when
applied to the Islamic as opposed to the transatlantic case, encap-
sulate the orientalism associated with emerging liberal feminism,
which articulated its goal of expanded property rights for “free-
born Englishwoman” through the negative foil of those women
who “are born slaves” in the “Eastern parts of the World.” As such,
the Defence merely transfers the orientalist fallacies of earlier male
travel writers into an anglocentric feminist framework. It does not
offer the “transcultural perspective” Zonana recommends, follow-
ing contemporary Islamic and Third World feminists (595).
Hence, it is misleading for Ferguson to conflate her analysis
of “British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834” with
the core thesis of Edward Said’s Orientalism, as she does in her
epigraph to Subject to Others.15 Rather, the references in An Essay
in Defence of the Female Sex to eastern despotism and “our Negroes”
highlight the ambivalence rooted in the historical conditions of
late seventeenth-century England.16 On the one hand, as Nabil
Matar has demonstrated in studies such as Turks, Moors, and

15
Ferguson’s epigraph to Subject to Others—“Slaves speak ‘through and by virtue of the
European imagination’”—quotes Said’s Orientalism, 56, but elides the original subject of the
sentence, which was “Asia” as represented in the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus’s The
Persians (472 BCE).
16
Ferguson distinguishes between what she calls “Barbary Coast slavery” and “British co-
lonial slavery” (Subject 11; cf. 14–15), although her sources are all from the mid-eighteenth
century and later (15–18). Her intervention into the study of British women and slavery
was innovative and remains crucial. My critique of the limits of her analysis thus consti-
tutes an extension of her groundbreaking work.
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 283

Englishmen in the Age of Discovery and Britain and Barbary, 1589–


1689, the slavery of English men and women still had currency
in the Islamic world during this era; on the other hand, the
model of racial slavery St. Clair Drake documents in Black Folk
Here and There concurrently emerged to support England’s
accelerating imperialist project. In vacillating between these
imperialist registers, the Defence establishes its feminism by posi-
tioning the imagined slavery of Muslim wives and the actual sla-
very of Africans in the “New World” in diametrical opposition to
the claims of English women who sought greater access to the
liberties associated with individual ownership. Rather than
advancing a comparative feminist critique of global male
supremacy, then, the writer of the Defence allies herself with the
orientalism of her countrymen to advance the imperialist thrust
of English feminism.

The Genealogy of Feminist Orientalism:


Eighteenth-Century Developments

The feminist orientalist opposition between Turkish women’s


“natural” slavery and the “unnatural” constraints English patriar-
chy placed on ostensibly “freeborn” English women was reiter-
ated in polemical, literary, and legal texts from the end of the
seventeenth century through the eighteenth century. For instance,
in the same year as the aforementioned Defence, Elizabeth Johnson
prefaced the anonymous Poems on Several Occasions (1696) with
the declaration,

We complain, and we think with reason, that our Fundamental Constitutions


are destroyed; that here’s a plain and an open design to render us meer
Slaves, perfect Turkish Wives, without Properties, or Sense, or Souls; and are
forc’d to Protest against it, and appeal to all the World, whether these are
not notorious Violations on the Liberties of Free-born English Women?” (sig. a3;
cf. Jones 144–45)

Preceding this feminist orientalist assertion is a reference to the


debate that had persisted in the West for millennia, based on
classical and patristic pronouncements, as to whether women had
souls: “nay, when some of ‘em won’t let us say our Souls are our
own, but wou’d perswade us we are no more Reasonable Creatures
284 Bernadette Andrea

then themselves, or their Fellow-Animals” (sig. a2v).17 Yet, the preface


does not condemn the disabilities of the western tradition, but
displaces them onto an imaginary “orient,” which defines femi-
nist orientalism.
This displacement of “the source of patriarchal oppression
onto an ‘Oriental,’ ‘Mahometan’ society, enabling British readers
to contemplate local problems without questioning their own
self-definition as Westerners and Christians,” is epitomized by
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which to
reiterate is considered “the founding text of Western liberal femi-
nism” (Zonana 593, 599). In one of her several negative
references to Islam, Wollstonecraft declares,

Thus Milton describes our first frail mother; though when he tells us that
women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannot
comprehend his meaning, unless, in the true Mahometan strain, he
meant to deprive us of souls, and insinuate that we were beings only
designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify
the senses of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation.
(19; cf. 10, 29)

Strikingly, this orientalist fallacy persists in the editorial gloss to


the widely distributed Norton critical edition of Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication (2nd ed., 1988): “Islam (the religion whose chief
prophet was Mohammed) did not allow women to go to heaven
and denied them souls” (19n2). By contrast, Montagu, centuries
earlier, clarified: “our vulgar notion that they [Muslims] do not
own women to have any souls is a mistake” (100). While she
wrongly states in this letter that paradise from an Islamic perspec-
tive is closed to women, in a subsequent letter she corrects
herself, “’tis certainly false, though commonly believed in our
parts of the world, that Mohammed excludes women from any
share in a future happy state” (109). Still not completely clear
about Islamic doctrine on this matter, she describes, although
perhaps tongue-in-cheek, a paradise in which wives are separated
from their husbands, with the suggestion: “the most part of them
[the wives!] won’t like it the worse for that” (110). Yet as Islamic
feminists today have underscored, in contrast to the still current

17
For a record (and a refutation) of the popular view that persisted in the West for
millennia that women have no souls, see Nolan.
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 285

Western stereotype of “Mahomet’s paradise” as a place of sensual


pleasures for males only, the Qur’an presents numerous descrip-
tions of paradise inclusive of women and men equally (Wadud
44-61). Astonishingly, treatments of “postcolonial Islam” must
still assert that “Islam, unlike the belief widespread in Christen-
dom for so long, never asserted that ‘women have no souls’”
(Majid 111).
To return to the early modern roots of these persistent, and
pernicious, fallacies, in the legal sphere, The Hardships of the
English Laws in Relation to Wives (1735) juxtaposes “the Privilege
of the Free-born Subjects of England” (1; cf. Jones 217), within
which category the author includes “his Majesty’s faithful Female
subjects” (2; cf. Jones 217), with the alleged despotism of the
“Grand Seignior [or Ottoman sultan] in his Seraglio [or imperial
harem]”(3; cf. Jones 218).18 This passage continues,

since supposing a Man no Christian [she is referring to the rise of Deism


in England], he may be as Despotick (excepting the Power over Life itself)
as the Grand Seignior in his Seraglio, with this Difference only, that the
English Husband has but one Vassal to treat according to his variable
Humour, whereas the Grand Seignior having many, it may be supposed,
that some of them, at some Times, may be suffered to be at quiet. (3–4; cf.
Jones 218)

With this twist, the author suggests that polygamy in the Ottoman
sultan’s harem might give some wives a respite from husbandly
despotism, whereas English women receive the brunt of their
husband’s capriciousness in their monogamous marriages. Still,
the Muslim woman is assumed to be the benchmark for oppres-
sion of wives, with the English woman’s condition a deviation
from what should be her liberty as a “Free-born English wife” (11).
But the cases this treatise adduces show that “the Estate of Wives
is more disadvantagious than Slavery itself” under English
common law (4; cf. Jones 218), where they lack privacy, property,
and other fundamental civil rights.
In addition to recognizing Muslim women’s inalienable
right to maintain and manage their own property, whether as

18
Ç0rakman locates the emergence of the “oriental despot” stereotype at the turn of
the eighteenth century; Peirce details the realities, versus the western fantasies, of the
Ottoman imperial harem established in the sixteenth century.
286 Bernadette Andrea

wages, inheritance, or the required dowry (mahr), which the hus-


band provided the wife, Montagu was amazed at the right to pri-
vacy that Muslim wives were afforded. As she records, “the Grand
Signor himself, when a pasha [a high ranking member of the
Ottoman ruling class] is executed, never violates the privileges of
the harem (or women’s apartment) which remains unsearched
entire to the widow” (72). Yet, when The Hardships of the English
Laws in Relation to Wives challenges this commonplace, which we
have seen early seventeenth-century male travel writers pro-
moted, that “England is the Paradise of Women” (45), she does so
by contrasting the inherent despotism of “the Grand Seignior . . .
in Turkey” with the ideal of English liberty (46), despite the fact
“that England is also, the Paradise of Men, no Subjects enjoying
such invaluable Privileges as they do here”(45–46). Such are the
contradictions of feminist orientalism.
In the literary sphere, which offered a unique space for
English women’s agency¸—as Katherine Rogers points out,
“despite this increasing recognition [during the eighteenth cen-
tury] that women had to have better opportunities for supporting
themselves, the only profession that actually developed for them
was writing” (21)—the trope of “harem slave” also persisted as a
foil. Popular writers such as Penelope Aubin and Eliza Haywood,
who “was averaging a novel every three months through the
1720s” (Ballaster 103), based their success on the “female captiv-
ity narrative or narratives about white women living as captives in
Islamic harems.” As Diane Long Hoeveler continues, such narra-
tives “constituted a way of refusing to address forms of racial,
social, and sexual discrimination that were actually endemic
within the body of Europe itself” (50). Similarly, Susanna
Centlivre, one of the most successful playwrights of the era, with
two of her plays among the “four non-Shakespearian comedies
written before 1750 . . . still being regularly performed” at the
end of the nineteenth century (Pearson 202), hinged her plots
on the “Liberties of an English wife” as opposed to eastern, and
especially Islamic, gender oppression (Centlivre 103). She thus
confirms the tendency to articulate feminist demands through
orientalist discourses.19 Commenting on this proliferation of

19
For an astute analysis of Centlivre’s articulation of liberalism and feminism, see
Kreis-Schinck 71–82, 179–86.
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 287

female writers in the eighteenth century, John Duncombe in The


Feminiad (1754) also uses orientalist comparisons, as when he jux-
taposes “the freeborn sons of Britain’s polish’d isle” with “that
dreary plain,/ In loathsome pomp, where eastern tyrants reign,/
Where each fair neck the yoke of slav’ry galls,/ Clos’d in a proud
seraglio’s gloomy walls,/ And taught, that level’d with the brutal
kind,/ Nor sense, nor souls to women are assign’d” (8; cf. Jones
171). Hence, while Hannah Cowley’s play, A Day in Turkey (1792,
2nd ed.), might countenance a conservative brand of feminist
agency in the harem (Garcia 221–63), it is finally Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication, epitomizing “the fullest explicit feminist orientalist
perspective,” that determined the course of mainstream anglo-
centric feminism in subsequent centuries (Zonana 599).
In summary, the persistent fallacy of Muslim women’s inher-
ent oppression vis-à-vis Western women’s natural freedom has led
modern scholars of feminism in eighteenth-century England to
dismiss Montagu’s understanding of Muslim women’s rights—
which, we have seen, far exceeded English women’s rights—as
“perverse” rather than based on historical realities. In Rogers’s
words, “Of course she must have realized that this was a frivolous
proof of liberty and that Turkish women were even more
restricted and less valued than English ones” (94; cf. 4). But it is
just this fallacy, as we shall see, that blinds western women to their
own disabilities, which continue to this day despite the dogma
that Western women are “the luckiest . . . in the world” (Hunt 1).20

The Contemporary Relevance of Early Modern Investigations

So where does this understanding of the historical roots of femi-


nist orientalism leave us today? At the most basic level, after
engaging this genealogy, we can no longer unthinkingly accept
the cliché that Muslim women are inherently oppressed and

20
As Erickson details, “In the twentieth century all overt legal restrictions have been
removed, and yet women as a group remain at a profound economic, social and political
disadvantage. Women today predominate among those receiving income support or
welfare from the state—at the identical rate that they predominated in the seventeenth
century among those in receipt of parish poor relief. And an equivalent proportion of the
poor then and now are single mothers, although the causes of their singleness have shifted.
Women today earn only about two thirds of what men earn. But women have earned
approximately two thirds of men’s wages for the last seven centuries” (3).
288 Bernadette Andrea

Western women (especially American women) are the “freest” in


the world. Such stereotypes, I want to underscore, not only
impact women in the Muslim world (as well as Muslim women in
the West), but they stymie the efforts of Western women as a
whole to achieve gender equity in their patriarchal societies. To
cite a significant instance, historian Leila Ahmed in her ground-
breaking study of Women and Gender in Islam addressees the nine-
teenth-century suffrage movement, which overlapped with the
height of Western European imperialism in the Middle East, to
show how the Western feminist alliance with orientalism—what
she calls “colonial feminism”—ultimately served to disable Western
women (151). As Ahmed documents, the very colonial officials
(at the time, exclusively male) who enforced the notion that
women in the Islamic world must abandon their religion and cul-
ture to be liberated simultaneously waged a vicious battle against
women in their home countries who were fighting for the vote
(153). Yet Western feminists then—and now—shared the
assumption that Muslim women must abandon their religion and
culture to be liberated. As a result, when Western feminists align
themselves with patriarchal orientalist views, they—wittingly or
not—participate in a colonial project that restricts the freedom of
all women, including themselves.
To cite an instance even closer to home, and with which I’ll
conclude, I’d like to share an incisive response to an earlier pre-
sentation of the historical material I’ve covered here. In March
2004, during Women’s History Month at the University of Texas
at San Antonio, I discussed the genealogy of the “feminist orien-
talist” fallacy that Muslim women are inherently oppressed and
Western women are the “freest” women in the world with an audi-
ence that consisted primarily of students from a large “Introduction
to Women and Gender Studies” class.21 Professor Marian Aitches,
an audience member who regularly teaches in the Women’s Stud-
ies program, brought to the attention of the class the otherwise
ignored irony of the major news story of the month as only one of
the many contemporary instances of “feminist orientalism.” If you

21
I thank Professor Kirsten Gardner, Department of History, University of Texas at
San Antonio, for inviting me to speak to her class in March 2004. I also thank Professor
Bindu Malieckal for inviting me to present a version of this article at the Center for
Religion and Public Life, Saint Anselm College, February 2008.
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 289

recall, at this time, media pundits were praising the “progress” of


Muslim women who were being guaranteed, apparently due to
American pressure, 23% of the seats in Afghanistan’s governing
body and 25% in Iraq’s (Dale A19). Muslim women, asserted the
mainstream Western media, were being “saved” from the oppres-
sion of Islamic law by the more liberal West. Yet, as Professor
Aitches pointed out, this percentage would be a vast improve-
ment on the representation of women in the governing bodies of
the United States, where women at the time occupied only 14%
of the seats!22 Zillah Eisenstein, in Against Empire: Feminisms, Rac-
ism, and the West, documents these discrepancies in further detail,
showing how President Bush and his administration, with full
complicity of the mainstream media, “called for women’s rights
in Afghanistan while he eliminated several federal offices charged
with protecting women’s interests here at home” (171).23 “Femi-
nist orientalism,” still a fundamental feature of our political
unconscious, thus continues to blind us to our own disabilities as
Western women even as we are led to believe that Muslim women
are inherently more oppressed.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Leila. “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem.” Feminist


Studies 8 (1982): 521–34.
———. Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992.
An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex . . . Written by a Lady [Judith Drake].
London, 1696.
Andrea, Bernadette. “English Women and Islam, 1610 to 1690.” In: The History of
British Women’s Writing: 1610–1690. Ed. Mihoko Suzuki. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, forthcoming.
———. “Passage through the Harem: Historicizing a Western Obsession in Leila
Ahmed’s A Border Passage.” In: Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity
Through Writing: 3–15. Ed. Nawar al-Hassan Golley. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP,
2007.
———. Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2007.
Astell, Mary. The First English Feminist: Reflections Upon Marriage and Other Writings
by Mary Astell. Ed. Bridget Hill. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1986.
Ballaster, Ros, ed. Fables of the East: Selected Tales, 1662–1785. Oxford: Oxford UP,
2005.

22
For corroboration, see “Women Revel in Taste of Freedom.”
23
For further details, see Eisenstein, Sexual Decoys, 120–21.
290 Bernadette Andrea

Biddulph, William. The Travels of Certaine Englishmen into Africa, Asia, Troy . . . and
to Sundry Other Places. London, 1609.
Centlivre, Susanna. The Artifice. London, 1723.
Cowley, Hannah. A Day in Turkey; or, the Russian Slaves. 2nd edition. London, 1792.
Ç0rakman, Asl0. From the “Terror of the World” to the “Sick Man of Europe”: European
Images of Ottoman Empire and Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth.
New York: Peter Lang, 2002.
Dale, Helle. “Girl Power Advances: New Deal for Afghan and Iraqi Women.” The
Washington Times 10 Mar. 2004, OPED: A19.
Dowd, Maureen. “Rudy Roughs Up Arabs.” The New York Times 17 Oct. 2007:
Section A, Editorial Desk, 27.
Drake, St. Clair. Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology, 2
vols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987–90.
Duncombe, John. The Feminiad. A Poem. London, 1754.
Eisenstein, Zillah R. Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism, and the West. London: Zed
Books, 2004.
———. Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century. New York:
Routledge, 1996.
———. The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism. New York: Longman, 1981.
———. Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy. London: Zed
Books, 2007.
Erickson, Amy Louise. Women and Property in Early Modern England. London:
Routledge, 1993.
Ferguson, Moira. Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to
Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.
———. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834.
London: Routledge, 1992.
Garcia, Humberto. “Hannah Cowley, the Female Wits, and the Unfeminine Politics
of the Turkish Harem.” Islam in the English Radical Protestant Imagination, 1660–
1830. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
2007: 221–63.
Grundy, Isobel. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives. With an explanation of the original
curse of subjection passed upon the woman. In an humble address to the legislature
[Sarah Chapone]. London, 1735.
Hoeveler, Diane Long. “The Female Captivity Narrative: Blood, Water, and
Orientalism.” In: Interrogating Orientalism: Contextual Approaches and Pedagogi-
cal Practices. Ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass. Columbus: Ohio State
UP, 2006: 46–71.
Holcombe, Lee. Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in
Nineteenth-Century England. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1983.
Hunt, Margaret. “Women in Ottoman and Western European Law Courts in the
Early Modern Period, or, Were Western European Women Really the Lucki-
est in the World?” Conference paper, Attending to Early Modern Women,
University of Maryland at College Park, 2003.
Imber, Colin. “Women, Marriage, and Property: Mahr in the Behcetü’l-
Fetava of Yeni1ehirli Abdullah.” Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle
Islam, Women, and Western Responses 291

Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era. Ed. Madeline C. Zilfi. Leiden: Brill,
1997: 81–104.
Johnson, Elizabeth. “Preface to the Reader.” Poems on Several Occasions. Written by
Philomela [Elizabeth Singer Rowe]: sig. a2–a5v. London, 1696.
Jones, Vivien, ed. Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity.
London: Routledge, 1990.
Kreis-Schinck, Annette. Women, Writing, and Theater in the Early Modern Period.
Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001.
Law’s Resolutions of Women’s Rights. Daughters, Wives and Widows: Writings by Men
about Women and Marriage in England, 1500–1640. Ed. Joan Larsen Klein.
Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992: 27–61.
Lewis, Franklin D. Rumi: Past and Present, East and West—The Life, Teachings and
Poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi. Oxford: Oneworld, 2000.
Lewis, William Roger, gen. ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998–99.
Lithgow, William. A Most Delectable, and True Discourse, of an admired and painefull
peregrination from Scotland, to the most famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia and
Affricke. London, 1614.
Majid, Anouar. Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World.
Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000.
Matar, Nabil. Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2005.
———. “The Representation of Muslim Women in Renaissance England.”
Muslim World 86 (1996): 50–61.
———. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia
UP, 1999.
Montagu, Mary Wortley. Turkish Embassy Letters. Ed. Malcolm Jack. Athens: U of
Georgia P, 1993.
Moryson, Fynes. An Itinerary Containing his Ten Yeeres Travel, 4 vols. Glasgow:
James MacLehose and Sons, 1907–08.
Nolan, Michael. “The Mysterious Affair at Macon: The Bishops and the Souls of
Women.” New Blackfriars 74 (1993): 501–07.
Parker, Kenneth, ed. Early Modern Tales of Orient. London: Routledge, 1999.
Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1988.
Pearson, Jacqueline. The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists,
1642–1737. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1988.
Perry, Ruth. The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1986.
Peirce, Leslie P. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire.
New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
Pitts, Joseph. A faithful account of the religion and manners of the Mahometans. In
which is a particular relation of their pilgrimage to Mecca . . . The third edition, cor-
rected, with additions. London, 1731.
Rogers, Katherine M. Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England. Urbana: U of
Illinois P, 1982.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Vitkus, Daniel J., ed. Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives
from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia UP, 2001.
292 Bernadette Andrea

Wadud, Amina. Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s
Perspective. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. Carol H. Poston.
2nd. ed. New York: Norton, 1988.
“Women Revel in Taste of Freedom.” The Australian 10 Mar. 2004: WORLD-
TABLE, 9.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Grafton, 1977.
Zonana, Joyce. “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Struc-
ture of Jane Eyre.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (1993):
592–617.

Вам также может понравиться