This chapter will deal with issues of women and family, gender, and gender roles in the Middle East and North Africa (the Ottoman, Turkish, Arab, and Iranian regions). In other Islamic societies, such as sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, the status of women, and their legal and cultural situations, are often very different. Yet it should be noted that many nineteenth-century trans-formations in women’s status were global phenomena, and much of what is discussed in this chapter can be more broadly applied to women’s global history.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought significant changes in the position of women throughout the world. Middle Eastern women were profoundly affected by the impact of European imperialism, by domestic political and economic reforms, by the entrance of the Middle East into new economic orbits, and by the introduction and circulation of new ideas about gender roles. The impact of these changes differed for women from different socioeconomic classes and different regions, but everywhere colonialism generated a crisis of confidence, a crisis of culture, and a crisis of daily practice in women’s lives. This chapter will emphasize certain key themes including legal reforms, education, labor, and social and political activism. While we look primarily at legal and political institutions, neither Islamic law nor state law fully defines family relations or the norms that govern women’s roles in society. Whatever state or religious law has to say about marriage, divorce, custody, inheritance, and other issues, custom, tradition, and communities profoundly shape the feelings and behaviors of individuals. In the real world, women also have to cope with the realities of financial resources, social status, educational background, the social authority of men and family matriarchs, the strength of personalities, and other daily considerations.

The history of Islam in the African continent falls into three geographical and historical zones. The Mediterranean littoral was conquered by Arab-Muslims and later by the Ottoman Empire and was a region of Arab-Islamic culture. West Africa, including the Sahara desert, and the savannah, forest, and coastal country south of the Sahara constituted a second region. Coastal East Africa and its hinterlands, including inland savannah country, was the third. The history of Islam in North Africa appears in conjunction with the history of the early Arab-Islamic conquests and the Ottoman Empire. However, the history of Islam in Africa cannot be separated from the interactions between Africa and the outside Muslim world, nor from its varied connections to Europe.

Islam

Three themes define pan-African history. The first is Islam. The Islamic period in Africa began in the seventh century with contacts among the newly founded Arab-Islamic empire and sub-Saharan and coastal East Africa. Whereas Islamic societies in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent were established by conquest and ordered by states, Islam in Africa, as in Indonesia, was diffused primarily by the migration of Muslim merchants, teachers, and settlers.

Two principal forms of state and society stemmed from the Prophet Muhammad. One was the caliphate, his successors who were deemed competent to give both political and religious leadership. The other was a community (umma), a religious body headed by those learned in law and theology who provided schools and courts, teachers and judges. Whereas the caliphate sponsored a version of Islam as a culture of imperial power and courtly accomplishments, in the oases of Arabia and garrison cities of the Middle East, the learned and the holy men cultivated Islam as a religion of law and piety, theology and devotion.

The formal teaching of Islam as a religion embedded in a community began with the Prophet. Later hadith reported that the Prophet used to sit in the mosque surrounded by students, whom he instructed in passages of the Quran. Other hadith recount how he sent teachers of the Quran (qurraʾ) to the Arabian tribes.

Alongside Sunni communities, the Shiʿis developed their own expressions of Islam. In one Shiʿi view, the source of true belief in each generation was ultimately not the text of tradition, nor the consensus of jurists, nor the piety of holy men, but loyalty to the Caliph ʿAli and his descendants. The true imamate or caliphate belonged in the family of the Prophet, the Hashimite clan. In the seventh and eighth centuries, this led to a number of political movements opposing the Umayyad and ʿAbbasid dynasties. Family loyalists tried again and again to seize the caliphate. (See Figure 4.)

Defeat channeled many Shiʿis from political activity into religious reflection. The defeat of the Kufan uprising led by al-Mukhtar in 687 prompted a turn to gnosticism – the belief that human beings embody a divine spark and that they must return from this world to their true divine realm. Gnosticism generated a large number of Shiʿi sects that denied the resurrection and believed in incarnation, transmigration of souls, and continuous living prophethood. Collectively these were called extremist sects (ghulat).

The new realities of state and religious institutions were reflected in an abundant literature of political theory. This theory had three principal branches: a Sunni theory of the caliphate that was the work of the scholars, a Persian-inspired genre of mirrors for princes, and a philosophical theory of the ideal state composed by commentators on Plato and Aristotle. Each of them responded in part to the changing social universe and in part to their own literary canons, but they also embodied a common perception of the ultimate significance of politics and community. The shared values and assumptions bring us to the core of the post-imperial conception of an Islamic society.

Sunni theory

The Sunni theory of the caliphate was set forth in theological and juridical treatises. Sunni writers tried to explain why there should be a caliphate at all, what purposes the office served, what qualifications were required of its incumbents, how they were to be selected, and what were the obligations of subjects. The underlying assumption of the Sunni literature was that rulers held office to implement Islamic law and maintain the existence of the Muslim community. Before the middle of the tenth century, Muslim political debates turned on the question of who was qualified to hold this office. Sunnis proposed certain personal qualifications combined with an electoral process to guarantee the legitimacy of a ruler. Whereas Sunni authors discussed the formalities of assuming the office, including the formal act of designation, consultation with the religious scholars, the oath of investiture, and the contract with the community, legal thinking in effect justified the actual pattern of succession and especially the designation by the incumbent of his heir.

With the centralization of state power came a new rhetoric of legitimacy. The early caliphate had been a series of individual reigns deeply dependent on the religious qualities of the caliphs, and their personal connection to the Prophet. After the first four caliphs, the various contenders for the position adopted different claims. ʿAli and his descendants claimed the right to the caliphate as a matter of family relation to the Prophet, the Kharijis on the basis of religious purity, and others on the basis of their Meccan tribal heritage. The Caliph Muʿawiya asserted the legitimacy of his reign in terms of Arabian tribal culture, but after the second civil war ʿAbd al-Malik based his claim to rule on his services to Islam.

At the same time, the caliphs adopted the ancient symbols of divinely granted rule expressed in poetry and literature, philosophy and science, and art and architecture. To define the authority of the regime and the legitimacy of the ruling classes, they propagated a cosmopolitan culture implicitly wider in scope than Islam. A literary and philosophical culture presented a vision of the universe as a whole, of the role of the state and the ruler in the divine plan, of the functioning of human society, and of the nature of human beings and their destiny in this world and the next. In Umayyad and ʿAbbasid times, this vision was expressed partly in Islamic religious terms and partly in literary and artistic terms inherited from Greco-Roman, Persian, and Indian cultures.

For almost a millennium after the Arab conquests of the seventh century, the Arabian Peninsula was not integrated into the Middle East. Although the Arab conquests began a new era in Middle Eastern history, they left Arabia drained of much of its population and relegated to a politically marginal role in early Islamic history. Later, in the Ottoman period, Egypt and the Arab Fertile Crescent became provinces of the empire, but, with the exception of peripheral areas, Arabia did not. Unlike Egypt and the Fertile Crescent states, the peninsula was governed by family and tribal elites. Islam was a crucial factor in the unification of disparate clan and tribal groups into regional confederations and kingdoms. In the imamate of Yemen and the sultanates of Oman and Saudi Arabia, religion and state were closely identified. While the shaykhs of the Persian Gulf region did not formally claim charismatic religious authority, the rulers were considered the heads of the religion, responsible for the implementation of Islamic values. Throughout the peninsula, the ʿulamaʾ, whether Zaydi, Shafiʿi, Ibadi, or Wahhabi, also played an important role as political advisors to rulers, administrators of judicial and educational institutions, and a source of moral advice and political legitimacy. Only since World War II has the peninsula become subject to the forces that have shaped the rest of the Middle East.

Yemen

Yemen has an exceptional position in the history of the Arabian Peninsula. Throughout their history, North and South Yemen had different regimes and different religious orientations. Since ancient times the south has been the center of an agricultural and state-organized society. The north has a tribal and pastoral population. Yemen was converted to Islam during the lifetime of the Prophet and was later absorbed into the early Umayyad and ʿAbbasid empires.

By the eighteenth century a global system of Islamic societies had come into being throughout Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Each was built on the interaction of Middle Eastern Islamic state, religious, and communal institutions with local social institutions and cultures, and in each case the interactions generated a different type of Islamic society. Although each society was unique, they resembled one another in form and were interconnected by political and religious contacts and shared values. Thus they made up a world system of Islamic societies.

Islamic societies from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries had a complex structure. In some cases Muslim communities were isolated pastoral, village, or urban minorities living within non-Islamic societies. Examples of this type are lineage groups united by shrine veneration in the northern steppes of Inner Asia and parts of the Sahara and merchant communities in China or West Africa. In African societies the Muslim presence was centered around small communities such as lineage groups, teachers and disciples, Sufi brotherhoods, or networks of merchants. Merchant communities were established as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the western Sudan. By the eighteenth century, there were Muslim merchant enclaves in the central Sudan, Berber holy lineages in the Sahara region (zawaya or insilimen), cultivator and merchant communities and scholarly lineages such as the Saghanughu (called Wangara or Dyula) in the Volta River basin and Guinean forests, and Jakhanke lineages of cultivators and scholars in the Senegambia region. In East Africa, Muslim communities were settled in the coastal towns. In Ethiopia and Somalia they were present among Galla and Somali peoples. In general these Muslim communities were scattered, had no territorial identity, and did not constitute governments.

The caliphate and Islam

Like the Umayyads, the ʿAbbasids pursued two kinds of legitimation, Islamic and imperial. From the beginning, the caliphs were involved in religious matters, but their engagement was limited. The Rashidun caliphs – as companions of the Prophet – left authoritative precedents in many matters of law. ʿUthman promulgated an official edition of the Quran. Muʿawiya tried to exert influence over communal-religious leaders by appointing Quran readers and judges. Caliphs built mosques, protected the pilgrimage, proffered justice to the people, and waged war on behalf of the Islamic empire. In the reigns of ʿAbd al-Malik and his successors, the construction of great mosques defined the caliphs as patrons of Islam who glorified their religion and made it prevail over Byzantine Christianity. The Caliph ʿUmar II came to the throne from an earlier career in Medina engaged in legal and religious activity and brought to the caliphate a renewed concern for communal-religious issues. The later Umayyads assumed the right to intervene in theological matters; they executed Qadari theologians who proclaimed God’s power absolute and, by implication, subordinated the authority of the caliphs. Their court poets bestowed on them the grandiose title of God’s deputy (khalifat Allah).

The ʿAbbasids reaffirmed the Islamic basis of their legitimacy. In the course of their anti-Umayyad revolution, the early ʿAbbasids tried to promote their claim to rule as Hashimites; being the family of the Prophet, this revered lineage stood above all ethnic, tribal, regional, and local interests. They also maintained that the right to rule was assigned to the founder of their lineage, Ibn al-ʿAbbas, by the Prophet himself. As caliphs, they inherited the attributes of religious authority: the Prophet’s cloak, stave, and ring. The royal name was inscribed on coins and the borders of ceremonial garments (tiraz) and was invoked in the Friday sermon (khutba). They themselves claimed to be appointed by God to follow in the ways of the Prophet and to lead the Muslim community along the path of Islam. The idea of God’s caliph was invoked in ʿAbbasid as well as in Umayyad poetry.

The delineation of Arabic-Islamic religion and culture and Muslim identities was a centuries-long process. Its social basis was the integration of Arab-Muslim, convert, and non-Muslim populations in the cities founded or settled by the Arab-Muslims. Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Kufa, Basra, Baghdad, and other cities were the homes of new Islamic societies that integrated the cultures of Arabia and the conquered peoples. The new civilization amalgamated Arabian language, poetry, and religion and late antique imperial symbols and literary and artistic cultures, as well as Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian religious values and family and communal institutions.

Islamic identities developed only slowly, and some scholars have questioned if there was a “Muslim” identity at all in the years after the death of Muhammad. If not, when did a Muslim identity come into being? One theory is that the conquerors first identified themselves not as Muslims but as a community of believers, a coalition of peoples of faith fighting the enemies of God. They were an assembly of monotheists, and the people of each faith had their own book and their own laws. Only after a century did they accept Muhammad as their prophet and the Quran as their holy book. The idea of a multireligious community was indeed implied in Muhammad’s early teaching, but with the struggles for power in Medina and the exile or execution of the most powerful Jewish clans, it is not likely that this concept lasted even to the end of Muhammad’s life. In Medina, the revelation of new ritual and family laws and of a sacred Arabian history for Muslims already implied the beginnings of a separate communal identity.

In the first part of this book we reviewed the beginnings and early development of Islam and attempted to show how early Islam was a part and continuation of late antique Greco-Roman and Persian civilizations. Islam goes back to the Prophet Muhammad, the revelation of the Quran, and the first Muslim communities in Mecca and Medina, but the Islamic religion was the amplification of these teachings, carried out in later centuries, not only in the original home of Islam in Arabia but throughout the whole of the vast region from Spain to Inner Asia conquered by the Arab-Muslims. The Islamic religion came to encompass not only the Quran and the example of Muhammad but a vastly expanded range of religious literatures and practices, including law, theology, and mysticism, developed in numerous schools and subcommunities. Islam in this sense refers to the whole panoply of religious concepts and practices through which the original inspiration was later expressed. Similarly, Islamic-era philosophy, poetry and belles lettres, arts, and sciences were also continuations of both the Arabian and the broader regional cultures of late antiquity. In this larger body of literature, arts, and sciences, religious and nonreligious influences intermingled. Islamic political, economic, and social institutions were also built on the same template as those of past empires, economies, and societies.

The appropriation of the past was in part unconscious and in part deliberate. The vast reach of the Islamic empires, the broad recruitment of the imperial elite, and the cosmopolitan quality of Baghdad brought the whole of the ancient Middle Eastern heritage into the purview of Islam. The new elites were impelled to generate a unified culture to provide a coherent way of life in their melting-pot cities, to integrate the disparate elements of the new elite, and to articulate the triumph, the legitimacy, and the permanence of the new order. These needs could only be fulfilled by the assimilation of the crucial elements of the ancient heritage.

The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire was one of the more complex cases in the transition from eighteenth-century Islamic imperial societies to modern national states. The Ottoman regime was suzerain over a vast territory, including the Balkans, Turkey, the Arab Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and North Africa. Its influence reached Inner Asia, the Red Sea, and the Sahara. While the empire had gone through a period of decentralization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had begun to give ground to its European political and commercial competitors, it retained its political legitimacy and its basic institutional structure. In the nineteenth century, the Ottomans restored the power of the central state, consolidated control over the provinces, and generated the economic, social, and cultural reforms that they hoped would make them effective competitors in the modern world.

While the Ottomans struggled to reform state and society, they depended increasingly upon the European balance of power for survival. Until 1878, the British and the Russians offset each other and generally protected the Ottoman regime from direct encroachment. Between 1878 and 1914, however, most of the Balkans became independent and Russia, Britain, and Austria-Hungary all acquired control of Ottoman territories. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire culminated at the end of World War I in the creation of Turkey and a plethora of new states in the Balkans and the Arab Middle East. The effects of European intervention mingled with the Ottoman institutional and cultural heritage to generate what we recognize as modern Middle Eastern society. The modern Turkish state emerged out of the reforms promulgated in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman Empire, and reforms in the period of national independence under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk. These reforms were challenged in the late twentieth century by a revived assertion of Islam. Turkey today is ruled by a democratically elected Islamic party and has the world’s sixteenth-largest national economy.

The inner spaces of the Muslim World

Although much of this book is about the history of Muslim states and empires, regions that lay outside of the boundaries and authority of individual states or empires are essential to understanding the political and cultural geography of the Islamic world. These regions are the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the great inner deserts of Central Asia and the African Sahara. The oceans, steppes, and deserts both isolated regions from one another and allowed them to be linked together by travelers, traders, missionaries, and conquerors. Each of these regions cultivated cultural and religious practices and social networks that crossed political borders. The cross-regional connections help explain the diffusion of Islam from the seventh to the eighteenth century. They were arenas of religio-cultural transmission. From the sixteenth century, however, they also became arenas for the growing power of European states and their subsequent commercial and colonial domination of both the inner spaces and the regional territories of the Muslim world.

The Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean

The Mediterranean – from Spain in the northwest and Morocco in the southwest to Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt in the east – was first integrated under the rule of the Roman Empire and Hellenistic culture. With the creation of a second capital at Constantinople and the fall of Rome to “barbarian” invaders, the region began to fragment. The late Roman or Byzantine Empire continued to rule over the Balkans, Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt, but independent states were formed by Gothic and Celtic peoples in the former Western European provinces of the Roman Empire and in parts of North Africa. The region was further divided by religious differences among Christians.

From the Safavid period (1501–1722), Iran inherited the pattern of state, religious, and tribal (uymaq) institutions that shape its history to the present day. The Qajar dynasty, which ruled Iran from 1779 to 1925, resembled its Safavid predecessors in that it was a weakly centralized regime faced with strong provincial tribal forces and an increasingly independent religious establishment. In the nineteenth century, European conquests, cultural influence, and above all economic penetration polarized state and society and led to the constitutional revolution of 1905, in which a coalition of intellectuals, ʿulamaʾ (in the Iranian case, often called mullahs), merchants, and artisans attempted to create a parliamentary regime. After an anarchic period, a military officer, Reza Shah Pahlavi, seized control of the state. The Pahlavi period, from 1925 to 1979, virtually repeated the earlier history. The Pahlavis sought to centralize state power and modernize the Iranian economy and society, and again provoked scholar-led nationwide resistance in the name of Islam. For 200 years, the struggle between the state and the ʿulamaʾ was a principal feature of Iranian history.

Qajar Iran: the Long Nineteenth Century

The modern cycle began with the Qajars, who came to power after a period of anarchy and tribal struggles. Their regime was never consolidated. Their armies were composed of a small Turkoman bodyguard and Georgian slaves; the central administration was a court government too underdeveloped to tax the country effectively. The provinces they ruled were fragmented into innumerable tribal, ethnic, and local factions headed by their own chieftains. A combination of formal governmental appointments, control of land, rights to collect taxes, and the power to administer justice and mediate disputes made tribal chiefs virtually independent of the state. Khans and ilkhans governed their own tribes. Even the authority of khans was by no means absolute since it depended upon the ability to rally support from lesser chiefs who had to be coerced, cajoled, bought off, or otherwise made allies of the paramount khans. Town quarters and guilds also had a degree of political autonomy. The Qajars, moreover, never captured the aura of legitimacy that had surrounded the Safavids. They maintained their suzerainty by exploiting the rivalries of lesser chiefs.

The modern history of Arab North Africa parallels the history of the Arab Middle East. By the nineteenth century, North Africa was substantially Muslim. Sufism played a large part in the organization of rural communities, and states were legitimized in Islamic, rather than patrimonial, cosmopolitan, or ethnic terms. The urban populations were Arabic in speech and culture, although in the southern, Saharan, and mountain regions, Berber was the common language and the basis of social identity.

In the pre-modern era, there were considerable variations in the social and political structure of each region and state, but in each one, lineage communities were the basis of society and pastoralists were an important social and political force. Under Ottoman suzerainty, some consolidation took place, but Libya had no central government and the Tunisian and Algerian states did not extend to the whole territory of each country. Morocco maintained a central state by emphasizing the Islamic credentials of its sultans. Islam played a crucial political role both in the integration of tribal communities and the legitimization of regimes.