This dissertation comparatively analyzes the role of Islam, secularism and reform in the development of feminism in Egypt and Turkey in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Based on two years of archival research in Turkey, Egypt, and the United Kingdom, my work establishes a dialogue between Turkish and Egyptian feminisms, compares secular and Islamic trends within them, and takes stock of their interactions with and resistances to western feminisms. As the modern period opened, what are now Turkey and Egypt were still parts of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire. The main center of Turkish-language cultural production was Istanbul, and the main center of Arabic-language cultural production was Cairo. The feminist movements of the region developed accordingly. I argue that in Turkey, feminist endeavors gradually carved out a congenial secular space—bypassing religion, or at least loosening the rigid understandings of Islam—where older traditions and more modern structures continued to coexist but with little connection between them. In contrast, Egyptian feminists’ modes of approach and analysis tended to conform to traditional and legalistic norms that governed the discussion of the women’s role in society. Although Egyptian feminist thought expanded with concepts like humanism and secularism, these concepts were constantly and carefully modulated with a native, vernacular, Islamic discourse. The material that I present in this dissertation suggests that in societies with a strong heritage of secular liberal reform, wherein progressive tradition is engineered by intellectual and official cadres, such as in the Ottoman center and in the Turkish Republic, feminism becomes a state-centric political project and an intellectual exercise in which more conservative manifestations of feminism are side-lined for the sake of a swift rate of progress. But in societies with a strong heritage of Islamically grounded modernization and social advances, such as in Egypt, feminism is rooted in, nourished by, and highly responsive to social, cultural, and religious norms, fostering social mobilization at a broader stratum, yet at a much slower, or more gradual, rate of progress.
Although historiography in Middle Eastern women’s history has developed rapidly during the last decades, scholarship on the comparative history of feminism in the Middle East has been severely limited. Just as important, there is a century-long lacuna in the history of the women’s movements in Turkey, with relatively few studies examining the period 1880-1980. As I hope to prove, comparative research on Turkey and Egypt, whose feminist movements had common origins and constantly influenced each other, will yield richer, more nuanced results than an individual history of each movement could potentially offer. By means of a comparative analysis, I wish to discover both the unique and the shared socio-historical configurations of each feminist movement, and to prevent one-dimensional narratives focusing on other issues—particularly nationalism—from dominating our reading of these feminist movements, which responded to many issues. This approach counteracts the homogenization of the histories of feminists whose needs and interests differed as vastly as those articulated by the Turkophone and Arabophone movements, especially during the era of colonialism. By comparing what have been considered as two different feminist movements, detached regionally from each other and globally from western feminist movements, this dissertation illuminates the significance of Middle Eastern women’s movements that have never yet been understood in their full historical context.