Feminist theory and the liberal ideological foundations it emerged from are a uniquely post-enlightenment, Western phenomenon. In modern times, the imagined scale of “social progress” still weighs heavily in the favor of Western countries, leading to practices that would be considered extreme even to an audience from a decade prior.

Countless articles from Muslim Skeptic attest to the fact that this is an inherent and unavoidable feature of all progressive ideological currents. Humanity must move “forward,” as defined by liberal theory, even at the behest of all other moral considerations.

When Western ideology began to spread across the rest of the world as a result of violence and indoctrination, many colonized Muslims failed to acknowledge the devastating evils of feminism, either due to personal desires or ignorance. It thus fell squarely upon the shoulders of the Islamic state and ‘ulama’ to bear the burden of educating people on these matters.

But how effectively did the Muslim world and, in particular, the middle east deal with the rise of feminism within its borders during the “pan-Islamist” revivalism of the late 19th century?

The Tanzîmât and Gender Ideology

The first discussions of gender roles in the Middle East began during the Tanzîmât era of the Ottoman Empire, when the importation of European post-enlightenment ideology intensified. Unsurprisingly, the initial wave of liberalization among Muslims was entirely produced by upper-class, mentally colonized men among modernist reformers, rather than grassroots movements. But this group was but a second-rate parallel to the true accelerators of liberal ideology within the Ottoman intelligentsia: Western-owned private schools.

Following a series of devastating military losses over the 18th and 19th centuries, the “Sublime Porte” was forced to sign a number of agreements with the ascendant colonial powers, known as capitulations. These terms included a guarantee allowing European states to open schools and institutions for the purported benefit of Christian minorities living as subjects of the Muslim empire.

The first girls’ school was established in Beirut as early as 1828 by American missionaries. This was followed by many more built over the course of the 1830s and ‘40s. There is very clear evidence that these schools, despite their religious presentation, were involved with the dissemination of the nascent feminism that had already begun establishing a grip over Europe.

It could even be argued that the emphasis on “women’s liberation” was more greatly placed on people living under Islamic rule than it was back home, with both Christian and secular liberals obsessing over the imagined plight of Muslim women.

As mentioned before, foreign schools were established for the express purpose of educating minorities living under Ottoman rule. But with the growing socio-economic disparity between the Christian and Muslim subjects of the empire becoming prominent, the Muslim urban-elite were drawn to educate their sons and daughters in these Western institutions.

It is notable that with the large-scale failure of the missionary project in the Muslim world (see my earlier article, “The Colonial Playbook: 19th Century Psyop Against “Islamist” Caliph Abdul Hamid II”), the strategy of these foreign schools shifted to a more “secular” and “universal” education project, implicitly widening the net of indoctrination to include Muslim children from well-off families. The impact this phenomenon would have on the Ottoman Muslim intelligentsia was described with alarm by state officials:

“ … over 5,000 children in Beirut—90% of whom were Ottoman subjects—attended foreign and non-Muslim community schools … The Governor of Beirut warned that Muslim children attending foreign schools were absorbing foreign influences and growing alienated from Islamic traditions.“[1]

This is no doubt a crippling issue that our communities face in modern times all the more apparently.

Recognizing that enemy powers were investing millions into educating the populace on Western lines, the reformist rulership under Sultan Abdul Majid (1839–1861) and Abdul Aziz (1861–1876) began to play catch-up by opening state-owned schools and making primary education compulsory for both boys and girls.

Despite these attempts, the counter-education would remain heavily underfunded, and no serious effort was taken to keep Muslim children out of Western schools. After Sultan Abdul Hamid II (may Allah have mercy on him) became absolute ruler in 1878, however, the state policy would shift towards aggressively combatting Westernization and putting Islamic unity at the forefront of an ideological war against the colonialists.

Istibdâd Era and Women’s Education

Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s legacy is often lampooned by secularizing elements today and historically for presiding over a period of what is derogatorily known as “istibdâd” or despotism. This is contrasted with the relatively reform-minded sultans that preceded him, as well as the liberal secular Young Ottomans/Turks that he clashed with early during his rule and ultimately brought to an end.

The power that the Sultan pulled out of the hands of the liberal intelligentsia was, however, primarily put into the service of pan-Islamism and keeping the caliphate in one piece. Indeed, over the 30 years that Sultan Abdul Hamid ruled absolutely, the Ottoman state maintained its territorial integrity (including against encroaching Zionists), and it even won a significant military confrontation with Greece in 1897, which was celebrated across the Islamic world as a victory for the ummah as a whole.

One of the chief ways in which Sultan Abdul Hamid stood as a mediator between Western indoctrination and his Muslim subjects was through a concerted effort to wrestle the prevailing ideological narratives out of the hands of the kuffar.

Shutting down the foreign schools established all over the empire would be a violation of the capitulations, leading to a full-scale war between the great powers of Europe and the Ottomans, which the Sultan knew would be disastrous (Sultan Abdul Hamid had, after all, taken absolute power away from the liberal constitutionalists after their incompetence led to a catastrophic defeat against Russia from 1877–1878). As such, he would instead do the next best thing: limit the building of new Western-owned schools and engage in a crackdown on the enrollment of Muslim children into them:

“In another decree dated 8 November 1893, Abdülhamid II declared that officials who failed to comply with the rule requiring a sultanic decree (ferman) to be obtained for foreign schools would be considered to have committed treason … In an order sent to all provincial and district muftis and their deputies on 14–15 December 1898 … to investigate whether Muslim children were attending foreign schools and to report the results to the Palace … In December 1900, (an order) requested that if there were Muslim children attending non-Muslim and foreign schools, they be “withdrawn in a proper manner,” and that a register showing their guardians’ names, hometowns, and occupations be sent to Istanbul … Abdülhamid II … by a decree dated 1902 categorically banned Muslim children from attending non-Muslim schools.”[2]

At the same time, the Sultan recognized that mere punishments would not be enough to dissuade the Muslim urban-elites and state officials from putting their sons and daughters into foreign schools, as underhanded means were employed:

“While Gülistan İsmet and Halide Edip (two highly prominent Turkish feminist authors of the early 20th century) pursued their education at the American Girls’ College by way of subterfuge, there was increasing pressure from Muslim bureaucrats and officers for their daughters to enjoy openly the same educational benefits open to the daughters of their Balkan, Armenian, and Greek colleagues at the minority and mission schools.”[3]

As such, Sultan Abdul Hamid would also initiate a campaign to invest massively into expanding the state-owned education infrastructure, directing the children of state officials away from Western indoctrination into a curriculum meant to instead benefit the Muslims.

This was especially pursued in the empire’s Arab provinces, where the Sultan intended to educate the sons of Arab notables to serve as his state officials. The vast majority of education expansion was targeted at men and boys. However, significant effort was also put into building primary schools for girls from ages 7 to 11. This was by design, as the entire foundation of female education was to prepare young girls to be capable wives and mothers, and explicitly not to have a career or attain a higher education. This is further demonstrated by the state-backed press of the Hamidian era.

RELATED: The Perils of “Educating” Our Daughters

The Printing Press and Guided Dialogue

The printing press was another key institution which Sultan Abdul Hamid brought under control. Putting the press under the educational ministry and a state censorship apparatus, Sultan Abdul Hamid desired to block foreign ideological currents from using the media to harm his people.

Contrary to popular belief, however, this was done in quite a nuanced manner. Rather than blotting out all traces of foreign ideology outright (which would have likely been impossible anyway as the intelligentsia was already overwhelmingly Westernized at this point) the Sultan cultivated an environment where some level of discourse was acceptable, so long as the Islamic position was emphasized and ultimately upheld. One of the methods employed was to refute arguments against traditional Islamic practices by using Western methods and discoveries.

An example of this is in a newspaper called Malûmât, wherein the Ottoman Muslim academic Mahmud Es’ad and feminist author Fatma Âliye debate on the issue of polygamy. Es’ad argued that not only was polygamy an institution clearly established by Allah and His Messenger ﷺ but that it also perfectly aligns with human nature. He also brought the example of increased prostitution in Christian Africa as a result of forced monogamy following Christianization:

“Mandatory monogamy … would necessarily force part of the female population into extramarital affairs or even prostitution. Christian missionaries in Africa who imposed monogamy on the population unleashed such unintended consequences. Mahmud Es‘ad wrote brothels were built alongside African churches as a result of the outlawing of polygamy.”[4]

Es’ad’s argument rings true to this day, seeing as how modern statistics have demonstrated the massive STD disparity between the Muslim and Christian majority regions of Africa.

Âliye, as typical of feminist authorship under Islamic guises, argued that polygamy was no longer necessary in society even if it was better than adultery. The back and forth went on for a couple of articles, but the last word was given to a new, third figure: the Tatar author Ismail Gasprinsky. Gasprinsky would go even further than Es’ad in defending the traditional Islamic position regarding polygamy, arguing that the Muslim world should not look to Europe for any moral or legal guidance whatsoever. In fact, he believed that Europe would eventually understand that polygamy was in fact superior to monogamy in its benefits, alignment with human nature, and suppression of adultery, and they would thus legalize it:

“Ismail Gasprinskii underlined this point at the end of the article series – that to outlaw polygamy was its own form of ignorance. Such a prohibition was worse than what European society accused Muslim society of doing by allowing polygamy in the first place. Permitting it conformed to logic and wisdom, and it benefited human society. It was a matter of stupidity and foolishness to consider it an offense or crime.”[5]

The newspaper publication concluded in this manner, with the traditional Islamic position being thoroughly vindicated even on a secular functionalist basis, as the Hamidian publications intended.

This methodology would extend to female-oriented outlets, such as a particularly prominent newspaper known as the Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete. Women’s newspapers were not an innovation of Sultan Abdul Hamid’s era, with the first one addressing Muslim women being established in 1869. Christian minorities preceded Muslims in this ground as well, such as the newspaper known as “Guitar” in 1861, whose primary author was an Armenian woman. As the vast majority of authors in all of these newspapers were in fact the daughters, wives, and mothers of the Ottoman intelligentsia, it should come as no surprise that the liberal feminist current was greatly overrepresented in their ranks.

Despite this, just as in the case of the polygamy debate, the state at the time of Sultan Abdul Hamid was able to direct the tone and content of the published articles for the most part. One of the most common themes in the articles of Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete was on the issue of women’s education and its purpose.

Firstly, it is important to understand that the word used for the late Ottoman understanding of education was terbiye, rather than the later Turkish eğitim. The word terbiye implies the correct upbringing, discipline, and cultivation of values in an individual. On the other hand, terms like eğitim or “education” are generally understood as referring to accumulation of secular knowledge for the benefit of the individual in attaining a prospective career or increasing in social status in a modern context.

This distinction may seem semantic, but in the context of the Hamidian education system, the implication was clear: the correct disciplinary upbringing of women in any educational context was to prepare them to be suitable wives and mothers. This is contrasted with the role terbiye has for men, whose primary role was professional and career-oriented:

“Authors on the duties of women made precisely this point, insisting that the world was divided into men’s professions and women’s nurturing and that pursuing one left insufficient time for the other … They (women) learned about the storage and preservation of food, laundry, tailoring, children’s nutrition, including nursing, wet-nursing, bottle-feeding, and weaning.”[6]

A six part series titled “A Study of Women’s Education,” published in the Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete, asked the question of if women should join men in pursuing education similar to the American and European model; or if terbiye should mean entirely different things for each gender. The answer was clear:

“Returning to the European model (for comparison), the author argued that girls who excelled in engineering or astronomy would be unversed in the mechanics of running a household, and the reader was reminded at this point that the happiness of the household was the foundation and guarantee of a nation’s happiness … Knowing how to supervise a budget or cook dinner was juxtaposed with knowing advanced mathematics and understanding the movements of the planets, and the conflict between the two types of knowledge led the author into yet another peroration about the importance of examining closely the subject of women’s education.”[7]

Carrying on, the author explains:

“The repetition of this pattern, pointing up a conflict between what was in essence a professional education and women’s natural constitutions and duties, encompassed within the domestic sphere, and then moving into a lengthy disquisition on the importance of the topic of women’s education, makes it abundantly clear that the heart of the matter lay, for this author and hundreds of others who wrote for the popular press, in the dangers of educating women away from hearth and home. In fact, the remaining articles in the series did little more than repeat this theme.”[8]

It’s interesting that an argument similar to this is made by brother Daniel Haqiqatjou in relation to women’s education, wherein women with career oriented lifestyles will not be able to properly fulfill the requirements of femininity and motherhood. Furthermore, the notion of hypergamy, where women will become dissatisfied with their lot in life once they receive higher education and thus increase in social status compared to their perceived spouses (another argument made by brother Daniel), has some precedence in Hamidian era Ottoman press as well:

“In the final article of the series, the author proposed that Ottoman women be excluded from advanced education on the grounds that a person should be educated according to his or her rank in society … arguing on the grounds that a porter or locksmith, given a full education, would become unhappy with his position in life, and try to rise above it. Since society had need of people to fulfill these sorts of jobs, it would be feckless to educate them beyond their needs.”[9]

RELATED: Are Wives Responsible for Housework in Islam?

Battle for Hearts and Minds

Unfortunately however, due to the aforementioned liberalism that had penetrated much of the Ottoman academic class at the time, there was a near constant tug-of-war between many of the latent feminist authors with deep inferiority complexes towards Western society and the ministries tasked with censorship. This conflict led to subversive content making its way through the cracks on numerous occasions:

“Fiction is less complicated only by comparison to the compound of front-page condemnation of women defeminized by pursuing higher education, and of women who neglected their households to pursue a profession, combined with subversive short items in the back pages which celebrated or at least did not condemn the professional successes of women abroad.”[10]

Despite the acute financial issues plaguing the Ottomans until the very end of the Sultan’s rule, Sultan Abdul Hamid oversaw the opening of almost 10,000 schools across the empire. But as a testament to how dire the need to counter the indoctrination of colonial ideology had become in the Muslim territories, the number of students attending foreign schools consistently remained many times higher than those opened by the Muslim state. In 1896 for instance:

“…83,000 (predominantly non-Muslim) students were being educated in the foreign and minority middle schools, while the comparable sultan’s schools were providing an education for only 31,000 students”[11]

Although the Sultan had put up a respectable fight by the time of the Young Turk Revolution that removed him from power in the year 1908, the insurmountable imbalance in terms of economic and military superiority had already been established for almost a century, meaning that the war to win over the “hearts and minds” of the Muslim world would remain an uphill battle.

With the shift in ideology from Islamic unity to a kind of “secular Ottomanism,” the revolution against Sultan Abdul Hamid marked a rapid increase in the number of Muslim students attending Western schools, presumably due to the relaxation of government concern. Furthermore, the overt language of feminism and its socio-political machinations would be unleashed with the so called “Second Constitutional Period”:

“After the defeat of Abdülhamid II in 1908, bolder steps were undertaken by women such as the discarding of veils, special lecture series for women, publishing women’s journals and establishing women’s organizations and clubs … The magazines of this period were an important factor in the adoption of Western life-style and behavior … With the İkinci Meşrutiyet (Second Constitutional Period) these journals (also) started attacking the institution of polygamy, which was widespread among the ruling class.”[12]

This trend of rapid liberalization and feminism would continue unabated well into the Republican era, with similar ideological takeovers occurring all over the rest of the Islamic world.

Learning from the mistakes and achievements of our predecessors in religion, it is an obligation upon Muslims everywhere to continue wrestling the ideological monopoly out of the hands of the disbelievers.

And Allah ﷻ knows best.

RELATED: Contextualising Female Scholarship in Islam

Notes

[1] Ercan Uyanık, “Yabancı Okullarda Eğitim Gören Osmanlı’nın Müslüman Çocukları (1865–1908),” Diyalektolog: Ulusal Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, no. 14 (Spring 2017): p. 4.

[2] Ibid, pp. 12–14.

[3] Elizabeth Brown Frierson, “Unimagined Communities: State, Press, and Gender in the Hamidian Era” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1996), p. 139.

[4] Scott Rank, “Polygamy and Religious Polemics in the Late Ottoman Empire: Fatma Âliye and Mahmud Es’ad’s Ta’addüd-i Zevcât’a Zeyl,” Cihannüma: Tarih ve Coğrafya Araştırmaları Dergisi 1, no. 2 (December 2015): p. 69.

[5] Ibid, p. 73.

[6] Frierson, “Unimagined Communities,” pp. 157–158.

[7] Ibid, p. 127.

[8] Ibid, p. 127.

[9] Ibid, p. 128-130.

[10] Ibid, p. 199.

[11] Ibid, p. 96.

[12] Vuslat Devrim Altınöz, “The Ottoman Women’s Movement: Women’s Press, Journals, Magazines and Newspapers from 1875 to 1923” (MA thesis, Miami University, 2003), p. 14.