عنوان

"We Can Defend Our Rights by Our Own Efforts":

Number

TLpq2420877061

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

"We Can Defend Our Rights by Our Own Efforts":

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Demirhan, Ansev

Title Proper by Another Author

Turkish Women and the Global Muslim Woman Question, 1870-1935

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Aydin, Cemil

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2020

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

226

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Text preceding or following the note

2020

Text of Note

This dissertation analyzes how Ottoman and Turkish women Muslim intellectuals established a set of arguments to advance women's rights, through their engagement with the "global Muslim woman question." Fighting against Orientalized misconceptions of Muslim women, these intellectuals engaged in both transregional and national debates about the rights, social positions, and "empowerment" of Muslim women. Of course, Western feminists and male Muslim modernists also debated the conditions of Muslim women, the causes of their problems and the solutions for their "oppression." But historians have allowed their words to obscure Muslim women's own intellectual visions, agency, and activism. As a corrective to this oversight, my project explores three different historical moments of globally engaged Muslim women intellectuals from the 1870s to the 1930s in the context of the late-Ottoman Empire/Republic of Turkey. And it moves beyond the question of how Muslim modernists reacted to European claims of Muslim women's oppression, focusing instead on how Muslim intellectuals, especially Muslim women, initiated and developed their own conversations about the place of women in society. The debate this study examines appeared globally in the 1880s in an imperial context, continued during the Constitutional Era, and reemerged with renewed intensity during the cultural revolution and secularist reforms in Turkey during the interwar period. The dominant political forces and policies during these historical moments overruled the efforts of Muslim women intellectuals, and scholars have replicated their omission from historical narratives. Exploring responses to this question in a global context reveals how ideas permeated imperial, national and regional boundaries, challenging the notion that the advent of the nation-state gave rise to national debates on the woman question that eclipsed transregional identifications and global connections. In other words, national concerns on the proper role for women in society and politics did not replace the global Muslim woman question for Muslim women intellectuals. This study focuses on three moments in the emergence and evolution of the global Muslim woman question. Throughout each of these periods, global engagement, facilitated through the intellectual efforts of Muslim women, created a distinct conversation that simultaneously focused on the need for reform within Muslim traditions, while also countering Eurocentric liberal prejudices. The women in this study had to navigate a fine line between critiquing Orientalism and demanding more rights at home. The latter could easily be used as proof and justification by westerners that all Muslim women were, in fact, subjugated. I argue that the Muslim women who participated in this debate continually provided a double-critique on Eurocentric racial discourses on Muslim societies and gender inequality within their own societies. I further contend, these women consciously used an Islamic framework to demand their increased social and political rights because it enabled them to undercut the notion that Islam was at the root of their oppression. And, their reinterpretation of Islamic traditions undermined possible criticisms against their feminist agenda, by bolstering arguments for their rights with claims of religious morality.

Middle Eastern history

Womens studies

World history

Aydin, Cemil

Demirhan, Ansev

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y