Islam, Women, And Western Responses

Women’s Studies, 38:273–292, 2009Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00497870902724612

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GWST0049-78781547-7045Women’s Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3, February 2009: pp. 1–28Women’s Studies ISLAM, WOMEN, AND WESTERN RESPONSES: THE CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE OF EARLY

MODERN INVESTIGATIONS

Islam, Women, and Western ResponsesBernadette Andrea BERNADETTE ANDREA

The University of Texas at San Antonio

This article focuses on Western responses, both historically andtoday, to the issue of “Women and Islam”—admittedly a mono-lithic categorization that presumes both patriarchal and orientalistreifications. Virginia Woolf, considered to be one of the fore-mothers of contemporary Anglo-American feminism, dramatizedher personal and professional confrontation with such monolithsin the archly ironic British Museum scene in A Room of One’s Own(1929). Inundated by “an avalanche of books” written by menabout “WOMEN AND . . .”—from the “Condition in MiddleAges of” to Alexander Pope’s influential pronouncement that“Most women have no character at all”—Woolf highlights theegregious discrepancy between the proliferation of male-authored opinions on women versus her own experience of beinga woman writer (28–30). But it is precisely this liberal feministtradition, since its formulation at the end of the seventeenthcentury, 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

1For the foundational work on liberal feminism and its prospects, see Eisenstein, TheRadical 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 revolutionasserting the importance and autonomy of the individual. These ideas, which originatedin seventeenth-century England and took root in the eighteenth century, are now thedominant political ideology of twentieth-century Western society” (4). In later works, suchas Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century, Eisenstein begins to addresshow anti-Islamic and colonialist prejudices have shaped the perception that Westernwomen are “free and liberated compared to the ‘orient’” (42).

Address correspondence to Bernadette Andrea, Department of English, University of Texasat San Antonio, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX 78249. E-mail: [email protected]

274 Bernadette Andrea

in her paper, “Women in Ottoman and Western European LawCourts in the Early Modern Period, or, Were Western EuropeanWomen Really the Luckiest Women in the World?”2 She cites theviews of Mary Wollstonecraft, another one of Anglo-Americanfeminism’s foremothers, who more than a century before Woolfargued for English women’s rights using the fallacy of theenslaved Muslim wife as her foil. As Hunt concludes, early femi-nists such as Wollstonecraft aligned with more conservative forcesas they “turned the claim that Western European Christianwomen were the most fortunate women in the world, and Muslimwomen the most oppressed, into an unassailable truth, indeedone of the foundational truths of Western modernity” (2). Yet, asI demonstrate in my recent book, not only was this view belied bythe facts, but eighteenth-century counter-orientalist feministssuch as Delarivier Manley and Mary Wortley Montagu contested itfrom its inception.3 The most salient facts are, first, that Englishwives possessed no inherent civil rights, including the right toown property which constitutes the core of classical liberalism,until the end of the nineteenth century when “The MarriedWomen’s Property Act” was passed; correspondingly, underIslamic 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 withinthe feminist camp to the alliance between the advocacy forEnglish women’s rights and their complicity with orientalism andother imperialist discourses, the view that Western women—andin the contemporary world, American women—are the “freest”women in the world as opposed to inherently oppressed Muslimwomen is still widespread.4

Let me give you a recent example of my own personal andprofessional encounter with such views: On a trip to Turkey in fall2007 with a group commemorating the 800th anniversary of thebirth of the world renowned poet, Mevlana Jalal al-Din Rumi—

2I thank Professor Hunt for sharing this article with me.3For 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 EnglishLiterature, 78–104. Also see Andrea, “English Women and Islam, 1610 to 1690.”

4On this persistent fallacy, see Ahmed, “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions ofthe Harem,” and Andrea, “Passage through the Harem: Historicizing a Western Obsessionin 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-sellingpoet in America” (Rumi 527)—a significant percentage of thisgroup narrowed its engagement with the history, culture, andpeople of the region into the challenge: “Why are Muslim womenso oppressed?” This challenge was aggressively reiterated in disre-gard of the nuanced and honest responses of Muslim women ofdeep scholarship and spirituality, whose knowledge and livesrefuted 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 claimthat Western European Christian women were the most fortunatewomen 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 ofthe first news items I encountered satirically commented on theprotests planned by “David Horowitz’s conservative FreedomCenter” 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). Withsuch fallacies, which we shall see are rooted in the debates of theearly modern period, so widespread today in academia andamong the general public, a return to this earlier period is notonly 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 contemporaryengagement can decouple the terms “women” and “Islam” fromtheir monolithic conceptualization. This is the task of the balanceof the article, where I explicate the moment when “feministorientalism” was first articulated in the English tradition. Theconclusion returns to contemporary discussions as part of thiscenturies-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


Muslim—woman became the basis for the uneasy marriagebetween English women’s protests against gender oppression atthe turn of the eighteenth century and their complicity with theorientalist and racist ideologies supporting England’s emergingglobal empire.5 Yet, prior to Quaker women’s missions to conti-nental Europe, the Americas, and the Ottoman Empire, startingin the mid-seventeenth century, English women were explicitlybarred from foreign travel. As Fynes Moryson pronounces in AnItinerary . . . Containing his Ten Yeeres Travell (1617) from theBritish Isles through the Ottoman Empire, “women for suspitionof chastity are most unfit for this course,” which he reinforceswith the marginal gloss, “Women unfit to travell” (3: 350). Thispassage comes at the beginning of Moryson’s discourse on “Trav-elling in generall” (Part III, Book I), with the first chapterlabeled, “That the visiting of forraigne Countries is good andprofitable: But to whom, and how far?” (3: 349). Later he gendersthe saying, “he hath lived well who hath spent his time retyred[retired] from the world,” as applying exclusively to women. Hismarginalia reads, “Perhaps a true saying for women” and hiscommentary 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 byEnglish 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 genderrelations.6 As Kenneth Parker points out in his collection ofEarly Modern Tales of Orient, the embellished reports of theOttoman sultan’s absolutist domestic and expansionist foreignpolicies,

reinforced a pre-existing stereotype of the Turk, as [to quote the OxfordEnglish Dictionary] “a cruel, rigorous, or tyrannical man; any one behavingas a barbarian or savage; one who treats his wife hardly; a bad-tempered orunmanageable man. Often with alliterative appellation, terrible Turk.” (18)

5For the emergence and extent of this empire, see Lewis, The Oxford History of theBritish Empire, particularly vol. 1, The Origins of Empire, and vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century.

6Moryson cites “the Proverb, that England is the Hell of Horses, the Purgatory ofServants, and the Paradise of Women” (4: 169). Cf. The Hardships of the English Laws inRelation to Wives, 45–46, on this commonplace. I analyze this passage below.


Although Parker does not draw attention to the gendereddynamic shaping this definition, the texts by male travelers headduces attest to the salience for nascent English feminism ofspecifying 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 CertaineEnglishmen into Africa, Asia, Troy . . . and to sundry other places(1609). In this frequently reprinted text, Biddulph introduces thedictum that western women should feel grateful for their gen-dered status quo because, according to him, Muslim women mustsubsist as virtual slaves.7 As he intones to his intended audience inEngland, “Heere wives may learn to love their husbands, whenthey shal read in what slavery women live in other Countries, andin what awe and subjection to their husbands, and what libertieand freedome they themselves enjoy” (sig. A2; cf. Parker 85).8 Ina paradox constitutive of orientalist patriarchal discourse then –and now–Biddulph evokes the image of the industrious, albeitenslaved, Muslim woman to threaten what he describes as the“many idle huswies in England” (36; cf. Parker 89).9 Moreominously, after incorrectly claiming that “whensoever he [aMuslim husband] disliketh any one of them [his wives], it is theiruse 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 husbandsthan many of them are” (55–56; cf. Parker 95). While one mightargue Biddulph is confusing the status of slave concubines andlegal wives, who could not be slaves, his previous claim that “theircustome 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 mostfamous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia and Affricke (1614), deems Turkish

7Cf. Imber, who specifies, “with regards to property, Islamic law is unusual, althoughnot unique [Imber cites medieval Welsh law], in keeping the wife’s property separatefrom her husband’s and in requiring the husband to make a payment to his wife at thetime of the marriage” (81). Hence, because under Islamic law “a slave cannot own property,”Muslim wives cannot be slaves (93).

8Early modern typography has been modernized as follows: u/v and i/j.9Parker transcribes “huswies” as “housewives,” although its root also denotes “hussies,”

as per the etymology for “housewife” in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989).


wives “not far from the like servitude [i.e. of slaves]; for the menby the Alcoran [Qur’an], are admitted to Marry as many women asthey will, or their ability can keepe” (sig. I3v; cf. Parker 155).Lithgow thus offers another instance of the negative comparisonwith the orientalized woman to keep English women in theirplace.10

As virtually the sole exception to this unrelenting patriarchalorientalism, Joseph Pitts, who documented his sixteen years ofenslavement in Muslim lands in A faithful account of the religion andmanners of the Mahometans (1731, 3rd ed.), roundly critiqued themisrepresentation of Muslim gender mores by writers such asBiddulph and Lithgow. As Pitts explains,

It hath been reported, That a Mahometan may have as many Wives as hepleaseth, tho’, if I mistake not, the Number may not exceed four;11 butthere is not one in a Thousand hath more than one [wife], except it be inthe Country, where some here and there may have two [wives]; yet I neverknew 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 onlyinsofar as they can treat all four wives equally–an impossibilityIslamic feminists argue renders this injunction moot (Women andGender 63). Hence, even Pitts’s defense relies on an orientalistmisconception. Barring this limited exception among Englishmale travel writers, the spurious image of Muslim wives as slavesremained one Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who accompaniedher husband, the English ambassador to the Ottoman Empirefrom 1716 to 1718, to Istanbul, felt compelled to correct. In herTurkish Embassy Letters (published posthumously in 1763), shecorroborates, “’Tis true, their law permits them four wives, butthere is no instance of a man of quality that makes use of thisliberty, or of a woman of rank that would suffer it” (72). She like-wise corrects the misconception that Greeks subjects of the sultanwere held as slaves (104; cf. 130). This passage indirectly counters

10For a related discussion of Biddulph and Lithgow, see Matar, “The Representationof Muslim Women in Renaissance England,” 52–55, although he does not consider En-glish women’s writing.

11The 1704, first edition, reads, “It hath been reported that a Mohammetan may haveas many wives as he pleaseth, and I believe it is so . . .” (Vitkus 243), with the rest of thequote continuing as in the 1731 edition. Clearly, Pitts had refined his views in this latteredition, drawing on more accurate information about Islamic marriage laws.


Alexander Pope’s patriarchal orientalist projection of “white” sla-very onto Montagu, refusing to treat her as an interlocutor, as shehoped, instead of a sex object (Grundy 130, 165).

In particular, the situation of English women in the era, asdetailed by The Law’s Resolutions of Women’s Rights (1632), wasgoverned by the doctrine of coverture, whereby “every femecovert [a married woman under English common law] is quodam-modo [in a certain way] an infant, for see her power even in thatwhich is most her own” (47). Succinctly put, “that which ahusband hath is his own” and “that which the wife has is thehusband’s” (46-47), including any inheritance she received, anyrents she collected, or any wages she earned. In the eighteenthcentury, the influential jurist William Blackstone confirmed thisdoctrine with his infamous phrase, “in law husband and wife areone person, and the husband is that person” (Holcombe 18; cf.25). This condition of legal nonage continued until the end ofthe nineteenth century, when the British Parliament finallypassed the Married Women’s Property Act.

Montagu was intensely aware of the constraints the doctrineof coverture placed on women, as she possessed no property ofher own during her marriage despite having been born into awealthy aristocratic family. By circumventing an arrangedmarriage, which she considered “Hell itself,” she renounced thecontract that would have settled an independent portion ofwealth upon her (Grundy 46).12 Governed by the common law asa feme covert, she ceded all former and future earnings and inherit-ances to her husband. Montagu knew her entire married life thatshe owned nothing, that her welfare was based entirely on herhusband’s largesse, and that even the heirloom jewelry she wishedto bestow on her beloved daughter was not hers to give but herhusband’s. As she wrote in the correspondence accompanying thisgift, “You have been the Passion of my Life. You need thank mefor nothing . . . I desire you would thank your Father for theJewels; 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 aboutIslam from direct sources, Montagu learned that Muslim women

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


were under no such disadvantage, as “those ladies that are rich hav-ing all their money in their own hands, which they take with themupon 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 theycontrol their persons and property upon marriage (72).13 Regard-ing women’s economic rights, then, Islamic law as applied in theOttoman Empire was far more advanced than England’s commonlaw for almost a century past the publication of Wollstonecraft’s AVindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which is considered “thefounding 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 thosewriters from 1690 to 1710 who emphasized her countrywomen’soppression as wives (Rogers 71; cf. Perry 99). She sought toprovide alternatives to patriarchal marriage in her inauguralmanifesto, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I (1694, 1695,1696), which presented a controversial blueprint for ProtestantEngland’s first female college. This treatise was followed by A Seri-ous Proposal to the Ladies, Part II (1697, 1703, 1706, 1730) inresponse to patriarchal resistance to her initial proposal. Astell’sfinal feminist treatise, Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), devel-oped her ongoing critique of the double standard structuringEnglish gender relations. Throughout her oeuvre, Astell especiallychallenged the legal principle of coverture, whereby wivesremained under the “authority and protection” of their husbands.Significantly, she remained unmarried.

Much admired by the younger Montagu, Astell was asked in1724 to prepare a preface for the Turkish Embassy Letters. As sherecords, “the noble Author had the goodness to lend me her M.S.[manuscript] to satisfy my Curiosity in some enquirys I madeconcerning her Travels.” Astell, in other words, had access to asound cross-cultural critique of English marriage customs, withspecific reference to the relative benefits of Islamic law. In herpreface, she condemns the malice and ignorance of “MaleTravels,” including the patriarchal orientalist writers surveyedabove (234). Against their aspersions, she urges her readers to

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


“be better Christians than to look upon her [i.e., Montagu, andby extension Astell] with an evil eye” (235). Although Astelladheres to a Christian standard, set in opposition to the largelyeastern tradition of the “evil eye,” she refrains in this mature workfrom establishing Islam as a negative foil.14 In addition, while inher earlier polemics she equated English women’s oppressionunder 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 feministorientalist followers. This rhetorical choice is significant, as thepolemic Astell initiated at the end of the seventeenth century wassoon 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 earlymodern England. Although wrongly ascribed to Astell in somesources, the pamphlet clearly counters her conservative Toryfeminism, based on a “Christian Platonist belief,” with “the languageof 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 hierarchicalpatriarchal 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 theirInventions, so it increas’d their Jealousie, and sharpen’d their Tyrannyover 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, likeour Negroes, in our Western Plantations, are born slaves, and live Prisonersall 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 writerpoints out the hypocrisy of a legal system based on rights of libertyand property which are denied to half the population” (194).

14Astell’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 thejoyfull tydings tell,/ And spare no labour to convert them all:/ But ah my Sex denies methis” (Perry 61).


Moira Ferguson, in Subject to Others: British Women Writers andColonial 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 Relationsfrom Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid, concluding,

By theorizing about women’s rights using old attributions of harem-basedslavery in conjunction with denotations of colonial slavery, Wollstonecraftwas a political pioneer, fundamentally altering the definition of rights andpaving 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, whenapplied 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 womenwho “are born slaves” in the “Eastern parts of the World.” As such,the Defence merely transfers the orientalist fallacies of earlier maletravel writers into an anglocentric feminist framework. It does notoffer the “transcultural perspective” Zonana recommends, follow-ing contemporary Islamic and Third World feminists (595).

Hence, it is misleading for Ferguson to conflate her analysisof “British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834” withthe core thesis of Edward Said’s Orientalism, as she does in herepigraph to Subject to Others.15 Rather, the references in An Essayin Defence of the Female Sex to eastern despotism and “our Negroes”highlight the ambivalence rooted in the historical conditions oflate seventeenth-century England.16 On the one hand, as NabilMatar has demonstrated in studies such as Turks, Moors, and

15Ferguson’s epigraph to Subject to Others—“Slaves speak ‘through and by virtue of theEuropean imagination’”—quotes Said’s Orientalism, 56, but elides the original subject of thesentence, which was “Asia” as represented in the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus’s ThePersians (472 BCE).

16Ferguson 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-eighteenthcentury and later (15–18). Her intervention into the study of British women and slaverywas innovative and remains crucial. My critique of the limits of her analysis thus consti-tutes an extension of her groundbreaking work.


Englishmen in the Age of Discovery and Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689, the slavery of English men and women still had currencyin the Islamic world during this era; on the other hand, themodel of racial slavery St. Clair Drake documents in Black FolkHere and There concurrently emerged to support England’saccelerating imperialist project. In vacillating between theseimperialist 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 tothe claims of English women who sought greater access to theliberties associated with individual ownership. Rather thanadvancing a comparative feminist critique of global malesupremacy, then, the writer of the Defence allies herself with theorientalism of her countrymen to advance the imperialist thrustof 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 theseventeenth century through the eighteenth century. For instance,in the same year as the aforementioned Defence, Elizabeth Johnsonprefaced the anonymous Poems on Several Occasions (1696) withthe declaration,

We complain, and we think with reason, that our Fundamental Constitutionsare destroyed; that here’s a plain and an open design to render us meerSlaves, perfect Turkish Wives, without Properties, or Sense, or Souls; and areforc’d to Protest against it, and appeal to all the World, whether these arenot 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 thedebate that had persisted in the West for millennia, based onclassical and patristic pronouncements, as to whether women hadsouls: “nay, when some of ‘em won’t let us say our Souls are ourown, but wou’d perswade us we are no more Reasonable Creatures


then themselves, or their Fellow-Animals” (sig. a2v).17 Yet, the prefacedoes not condemn the disabilities of the western tradition, butdisplaces them onto an imaginary “orient,” which defines femi-nist orientalism.

This displacement of “the source of patriarchal oppressiononto an ‘Oriental,’ ‘Mahometan’ society, enabling British readersto contemplate local problems without questioning their ownself-definition as Westerners and Christians,” is epitomized byWollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which toreiterate is considered “the founding text of Western liberal femi-nism” (Zonana 593, 599). In one of her several negativereferences to Islam, Wollstonecraft declares,

Thus Milton describes our first frail mother; though when he tells us thatwomen are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannotcomprehend his meaning, unless, in the true Mahometan strain, hemeant to deprive us of souls, and insinuate that we were beings onlydesigned by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratifythe 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 tothe widely distributed Norton critical edition of Wollstonecraft’sVindication (2nd ed., 1988): “Islam (the religion whose chiefprophet was Mohammed) did not allow women to go to heavenand denied them souls” (19n2). By contrast, Montagu, centuriesearlier, clarified: “our vulgar notion that they [Muslims] do notown women to have any souls is a mistake” (100). While shewrongly states in this letter that paradise from an Islamic perspec-tive is closed to women, in a subsequent letter she correctsherself, “’tis certainly false, though commonly believed in ourparts of the world, that Mohammed excludes women from anyshare in a future happy state” (109). Still not completely clearabout Islamic doctrine on this matter, she describes, althoughperhaps tongue-in-cheek, a paradise in which wives are separatedfrom their husbands, with the suggestion: “the most part of them[the wives!] won’t like it the worse for that” (110). Yet as Islamicfeminists today have underscored, in contrast to the still current

17For a record (and a refutation) of the popular view that persisted in the West formillennia that women have no souls, see Nolan.


Western stereotype of “Mahomet’s paradise” as a place of sensualpleasures for males only, the Qur’an presents numerous descrip-tions of paradise inclusive of women and men equally (Wadud44-61). Astonishingly, treatments of “postcolonial Islam” muststill 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, andpernicious, fallacies, in the legal sphere, The Hardships of theEnglish Laws in Relation to Wives (1735) juxtaposes “the Privilegeof the Free-born Subjects of England” (1; cf. Jones 217), withinwhich category the author includes “his Majesty’s faithful Femalesubjects” (2; cf. Jones 217), with the alleged despotism of the“Grand Seignior [or Ottoman sultan] in his Seraglio [or imperialharem]”(3; cf. Jones 218).18 This passage continues,

since supposing a Man no Christian [she is referring to the rise of Deismin England], he may be as Despotick (excepting the Power over Life itself)as the Grand Seignior in his Seraglio, with this Difference only, that theEnglish Husband has but one Vassal to treat according to his variableHumour, 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 Ottomansultan’s harem might give some wives a respite from husbandlydespotism, whereas English women receive the brunt of theirhusband’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 deviationfrom what should be her liberty as a “Free-born English wife” (11).But the cases this treatise adduces show that “the Estate of Wivesis more disadvantagious than Slavery itself” under Englishcommon law (4; cf. Jones 218), where they lack privacy, property,and other fundamental civil rights.

In addition to recognizing Muslim women’s inalienableright to maintain and manage their own property, whether as

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


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 GrandSignor himself, when a pasha [a high ranking member of theOttoman ruling class] is executed, never violates the privileges ofthe harem (or women’s apartment) which remains unsearchedentire to the widow” (72). Yet, when The Hardships of the EnglishLaws in Relation to Wives challenges this commonplace, which wehave seen early seventeenth-century male travel writers pro-moted, that “England is the Paradise of Women” (45), she does soby 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 enjoyingsuch invaluable Privileges as they do here”(45–46). Such are thecontradictions of feminist orientalism.

In the literary sphere, which offered a unique space forEnglish 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 supportingthemselves, the only profession that actually developed for themwas writing” (21)—the trope of “harem slave” also persisted as afoil. Popular writers such as Penelope Aubin and Eliza Haywood,who “was averaging a novel every three months through the1720s” (Ballaster 103), based their success on the “female captiv-ity narrative or narratives about white women living as captives inIslamic 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 endemicwithin the body of Europe itself” (50). Similarly, SusannaCentlivre, one of the most successful playwrights of the era, withtwo of her plays among the “four non-Shakespearian comedieswritten before 1750 . . . still being regularly performed” at theend of the nineteenth century (Pearson 202), hinged her plotson the “Liberties of an English wife” as opposed to eastern, andespecially Islamic, gender oppression (Centlivre 103). She thusconfirms the tendency to articulate feminist demands throughorientalist discourses.19 Commenting on this proliferation of

19For an astute analysis of Centlivre’s articulation of liberalism and feminism, seeKreis-Schinck 71–82, 179–86.


female writers in the eighteenth century, John Duncombe in TheFeminiad (1754) also uses orientalist comparisons, as when he jux-taposes “the freeborn sons of Britain’s polish’d isle” with “thatdreary plain,/ In loathsome pomp, where eastern tyrants reign,/Where each fair neck the yoke of slav’ry galls,/ Clos’d in a proudseraglio’s gloomy walls,/ And taught, that level’d with the brutalkind,/ Nor sense, nor souls to women are assign’d” (8; cf. Jones171). Hence, while Hannah Cowley’s play, A Day in Turkey (1792,2nd ed.), might countenance a conservative brand of feministagency in the harem (Garcia 221–63), it is finally Wollstonecraft’sVindication, epitomizing “the fullest explicit feminist orientalistperspective,” 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 ledmodern scholars of feminism in eighteenth-century England todismiss 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’swords, “Of course she must have realized that this was a frivolousproof of liberty and that Turkish women were even morerestricted and less valued than English ones” (94; cf. 4). But it isjust this fallacy, as we shall see, that blinds western women to theirown disabilities, which continue to this day despite the dogmathat 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, afterengaging this genealogy, we can no longer unthinkingly acceptthe cliché that Muslim women are inherently oppressed and

20As Erickson details, “In the twentieth century all overt legal restrictions have beenremoved, and yet women as a group remain at a profound economic, social and politicaldisadvantage. Women today predominate among those receiving income support orwelfare from the state—at the identical rate that they predominated in the seventeenthcentury among those in receipt of parish poor relief. And an equivalent proportion of thepoor 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 earnedapproximately two thirds of men’s wages for the last seven centuries” (3).


Western women (especially American women) are the “freest” inthe world. Such stereotypes, I want to underscore, not onlyimpact women in the Muslim world (as well as Muslim women inthe West), but they stymie the efforts of Western women as awhole to achieve gender equity in their patriarchal societies. Tocite 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 theheight of Western European imperialism in the Middle East, toshow how the Western feminist alliance with orientalism—whatshe calls “colonial feminism”—ultimately served to disable Westernwomen (151). As Ahmed documents, the very colonial officials(at the time, exclusively male) who enforced the notion thatwomen in the Islamic world must abandon their religion and cul-ture to be liberated simultaneously waged a vicious battle againstwomen in their home countries who were fighting for the vote(153). Yet Western feminists then—and now—shared theassumption that Muslim women must abandon their religion andculture to be liberated. As a result, when Western feminists alignthemselves with patriarchal orientalist views, they—wittingly ornot—participate in a colonial project that restricts the freedom ofall women, including themselves.

To cite an instance even closer to home, and with which I’llconclude, I’d like to share an incisive response to an earlier pre-sentation of the historical material I’ve covered here. In March2004, during Women’s History Month at the University of Texasat San Antonio, I discussed the genealogy of the “feminist orien-talist” fallacy that Muslim women are inherently oppressed andWestern women are the “freest” women in the world with an audi-ence that consisted primarily of students from a large “Introductionto 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 otherwiseignored irony of the major news story of the month as only one ofthe many contemporary instances of “feminist orientalism.” If you

21I thank Professor Kirsten Gardner, Department of History, University of Texas atSan Antonio, for inviting me to speak to her class in March 2004. I also thank ProfessorBindu Malieckal for inviting me to present a version of this article at the Center forReligion and Public Life, Saint Anselm College, February 2008.


recall, at this time, media pundits were praising the “progress” ofMuslim women who were being guaranteed, apparently due toAmerican pressure, 23% of the seats in Afghanistan’s governingbody and 25% in Iraq’s (Dale A19). Muslim women, asserted themainstream Western media, were being “saved” from the oppres-sion of Islamic law by the more liberal West. Yet, as ProfessorAitches pointed out, this percentage would be a vast improve-ment on the representation of women in the governing bodies ofthe 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 fullcomplicity of the mainstream media, “called for women’s rightsin Afghanistan while he eliminated several federal offices chargedwith protecting women’s interests here at home” (171).23 “Femi-nist orientalism,” still a fundamental feature of our politicalunconscious, thus continues to blind us to our own disabilities asWestern women even as we are led to believe that Muslim womenare inherently more oppressed.

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Islam, Women, And Western Responses

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