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" “We Can Defend Our Rights by Our Own Efforts”: Turkish Women and the Global Muslim Woman Question, 1870-1935 "
Demirhan, Ansev
Aydin, Cemil
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1053779
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| Doc. No
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TL52896
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| Main Entry
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Demirhan, Ansev
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| Title & Author
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“We Can Defend Our Rights by Our Own Efforts”: Turkish Women and the Global Muslim Woman Question, 1870-1935\ Demirhan, AnsevAydin, Cemil
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| College
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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| Date
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2020
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| Note
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226 p.
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| Abstract
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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.
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Middle Eastern history
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Womens studies
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World history
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Aydin, Cemil
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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