A Quiet Revolution (6 page)

the key importance of ending the Islamic practices of veiling and segre- gation. This was essential, he wrote, because of the “great influence” that women exercised as wives and mothers over “the characters of their hus- bands and sons.” The position of women in Islam and the practices of veiling and segregation self-evidently, Cromer declared, “produced a de- teriorating effect on the male population.” Consequently, the “position of women in Egypt, and in Mohammedan countries generally,” he fur- ther asserted, was itself the “fatal obstacle” obstructing the attainment of “that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of European civilization.”
21

Changing the position of women in Egypt was thus the prerequi- site to the country’s advancement and thus also to Egypt’s gaining inde- pendence from Britain. It was necessary, first, to breed Egyptian men who were capable of taking over the reins of power from the British. Achieving this and other necessary conditions for independence, ac- cording to Cromer, could be the “work of years or ‘possibly’ genera- tions.”
22

While this was Cromer’s rhetorical stance regarding women and Islam, on the practical level his rule contributed little to improving the condition of women in Egypt. As we saw earlier, he chose not to invest government revenue in education despite the growing demand from Egyptians for schools, including schools for girls. Furthermore, he re- fused to fund a school for female doctors that had been functioning since

the
1830
s, agreeing only to continue to fund the training of women as midwives. When told of the local preference among women to be treated by women doctors, Cromer replied, “I am aware that in exceptional cases women like to be attended by female doctors, but I conceive that in the civilized world, attendance by medical men is still the rule.”
23
‌

One further aspect of the contemporary scene must be taken into ac- count, as it sheds light on the debate around the veil, and on the intense and ferocious discussions Amin’s book provoked.

Through the Cromer era, and particularly in the
1890
s and early

1900
s, there were political divisions in Egypt between, on one side, a group of intellectuals and politicians who in some ways welcomed and supported the British presence as preferable to the autocratic govern- ment of local rulers, who governed under the overall suzerainty of the Ottoman Sultanate in Turkey. Their hope was to work collaboratively with the British administration toward establishing Egypt as an inde- pendent, democratically governed nation free of both British control and Ottoman rule. This group (often referred to as the liberals), which included Amin, were on cordial terms with Cromer, with whom they were willing to work toward the goal of eventual independence. Conse- quently, this group was on poor terms with the Khedive Abbas Hilmi, who had succeeded his father Tewfik as ruler of Egypt and who, unlike his father, did his best to resist the British, whose dominion he bitterly resented.

On the other side from these “liberals” were nationalist and pan- Islamist politicians and intellectuals who were deeply opposed to the British Occupation and who called for Islamic unity and solidarity in the face of European imperialism, as well as for the restoration of ties with Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire. This faction, hated by Cromer, was often befriended and secretly supported by the khedive. The views of the liberals—whose careers Cromer backed in various ways—would gain in influence through the Cromer era and come to gain dominance for the following two or three decades. Saad Zaghloul, for example, who was ap- pointed minister of education by Cromer, would become the country’s

first elected prime minister in
1923
. Cromer also helped advance the ca-

reer of Muhammad Abduh, an Islamic thinker and reformer who was critical of local autocratic forms of government. Cromer, as he noted in
Modern Egypt,
assisted in bringing about Abduh’s appointment to the important post of chief mufti of Egypt in
1899
.
24

Abduh, who studied at al-Azhar and spent a period of exile in France, became prominent for his call for the reform of Islam and the reinterpretation of the Islamic heritage, including the reinterpretation of key Quranic verses directly affecting women, such as those referring to polygamy. Correctly interpreted, Abduh argued, this verse would be seen to be indicating that polygamy was permissible only in exceptional circumstances.
25
Cromer appreciated the positions Abduh took and de- scribed him as someone who “admitted the abuses which have sprung up under Oriental Governments” and who “recognized the necessity of Eu- ropean assistance in the work of reform.” Muslims such as Abduh, Cromer further wrote, were the “natural allies of the European reformer” and thus deserved “all the encouragement and support which can be given them.”
26

The reformist positions Abduh took, as well as, perhaps, his cordial relations with Cromer, would earn him the enmity of many in the reli- gious classes of Egypt, as well as that of the khedive. Describing Abduh as “in reality an Agnostic,” Cromer wrote that he was on “bad terms” with the khedive, that he faced strong opposition from “conservative Muslims,” and that he was able to retain his post as mufti of Egypt only by virtue of “strong British support.”
27
However, in fairness to Abduh it should be noted that scholars have long debated Cromer’s motivation in including these remarks on Abduh in his book, as well as his motiva- tion in characterizing him as an agnostic. Similarly, some debate the significance of the fact that Abduh, like his mentor al-Afghani, were members of Masonic Lodges.
28

According to a noted Abduh scholar, Muhammad ‘Amara, the book
The Liberation of Woman
was not written by Amin alone. Rather, it was the product of collaborative efforts by Amin and other members of the group of liberal Egyptian intellectuals who gathered that summer in Geneva. According to ‘Amara, Abduh in particular contributed significant por-

tions of the book. At the time of its publication there were rumors that the book had been written at Cromer’s urging.
29
And certainly the views that Amin and his collaborators gave voice to in this book
,
and those that Cromer would later publish in his
Modern Egypt
, seem to directly echo one another. To be sure, both books expressed views on Islam and women that were in wide circulation in European societies in that era. However, their close resemblances may also have been reinforced by con- versations that Amin and Abduh and others of their circle may have had with Cromer.

The Liberation of Woman
received enthusiastic praise from the British-backed paper
al-Muqattam,
which hailed it as the best book to appear in years. It triggered the first major controversy to erupt in the Arabic press: more than thirty books and articles were published in re- sponse to it, the majority of them critical. In particular, the book drew angry responses from nationalists and pan-Islamists, people who above all were opposed to the British Occupation. They argued, among other things, that what was needed was not the hasty imitation of the West in all things, which
The Liberation of Woman
seemed to advocate, but rather a return to Islamic values accompanied by the judicious adoption of cer- tain Western practices.
30

Some of Amin’s nationalist critics, for example, were not opposed to the idea of women’s education; on the contrary, some called for their education well beyond the primary level, which was all that Amin had called for. On the other hand, however, they objected to Amin’s call for unveiling and to his unqualified and undiscriminating enthusiasm for everything European. Some of those opposed to unveiling included, to be sure, women who were allied to nationalist pan-Islamist figures, but they also included women who were evidently speaking or writing from what we would call today a feminist position. One woman, for example, objected to the fact that men were yet again telling women what they should or should not wear. Man, this writer lamented, was once more “being as despotic about liberating us as he has been about our enslave- ment. We are weary,” she concluded, “of his despotism.”
31

The divide between Amin and his supporters, on the one hand, and his critics, on the other, was not in reality a divide between feminists and

anti-feminists but rather between those who were strongly anti-British and opposed to the Occupation and those who, like Amin, took a more sanguine view of Cromer and the British presence.

Such, then, were the origins of the notions informing Hourani’s as- sumption in the
1950
s that the presence or absence of the veil in a given Muslim society was a sign of whether that society was “advanced” or “backward,” marching forward on the path of progress or remaining mired in the old order. Thus by the mid-twentieth century, when Hourani was writing, the European views and narrative of the veil that had been imported and launched into circulation in Arabic at the end of the nineteenth century had become the commonplaces of the day, not only for Hourani and most Westerners but also, by and large, for many middle- and upper-class people living in Muslim-majority cities around the world.

These ideas, emerging in Egypt at the level of intellectual and po- litical debate, proved tremendously influential in the history of the unveiling movement. They were particularly influential in terms of fos- tering and promoting a particular ideological framework and way of un- derstanding the meaning of the veil’s presence or absence, a framework that would gain widespread acceptance in Egypt and also (as Hourani indicated) in due course in many other Arab societies.

The most prominent proponents and opponents of unveiling were men who had the privileges of class and status and carried political clout in the social and cultural domains. But at least one elite woman, Princess Nazli, also was a strong proponent of unveiling and an influential mem- ber of these high-level intellectual and political circles. Another impor- tant female figure in the history of early twentieth-century feminism was Huda Sha‘rawi, also a woman of the upper classes, whose life and activ-

ities have been extensively chronicled by Margot Badran. As a young woman in the
1900
s, Sha‘rawi organized lectures for women and helped establish a philanthropic society. In
1923
she founded the Egyptian Fem- inist Union (al-Ittihad al-Nisa’i al-Misri), and she remained the spokes- person for feminism in Egypt until her death in
1947
. Zainab al-Ghazali, the future Islamic leader, would briefly join the Egyptian Feminist Union

at the age of sixteen, but she would leave it within the year to found her own women’s organization.
32

In fact, though, the unveiling movement that would sweep across much of the Muslim world over the course of the first half of the twentieth cen- tury took place above all at the level of ordinary people. On the level of day-to-day experience it was, after all, women who unveiled, essentially for their own reasons—reasons that were expressive of their individual desires and hopes about how to live, and of their own views on fashion and as to proper and attractive dress.

Perhaps their decisions in the matter of the veil also were informed by the ongoing debates among men and members of the upper classes— European and Egyptian. But it is quite likely that the kinds of arguments that Cromer and Amin were making—that the veil denoted some sort of inherent inferiority of a given religion, race, or civilization—were by no means the most significant factors in women’s decisions about whether to veil. It is possible, too, that such discussions going on in the rarefied world of the elites, would have been perceived by many women as ab- struse and irrelevant debates that were scarcely even on their radar screens.

Whether to wear the veil was, for the women of the day, a matter of fashion and of wearing proper and appropriate dress. In Muslim-ma- jority societies up to that era, wearing the veil had not been confined to Muslims. Rather, until the colonial era, the veil (in the sense of head- covering) was considered proper dress for all women, regardless of reli- gion. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women covered their heads and wore some version of what we today call the veil. As the wave of unveil- ing began to quietly gather force at the turn of the century, Christian and Jewish women seemed to be unveiling just slightly ahead of their Mus- lim sisters. Evidently, though, most at this point considered the custom to be a “cultural norm rather than a religious imperative.”
33
At any rate, the practice of wearing the veil was not confined to or (among Egyp- tians) associated specifically with Islam and Muslim women. Salama

Musa, for example, a noted Coptic intellectual and journalist of the era, mentioned in his memoir that his mother and sisters unveiled in
1907
and
1908
.
34
It was in these years, as the European understanding of veil-

ing as a practice only of Muslim women began to gain ground in Egyp- tian society, that veiling would become identified as a uniquely Islamic practice.

As we have seen, the currents of fashion and the desire for things European had been flowing with their own force and speed through the preceding decades. Those who could afford to replaced their old furni- ture with European-style tables and chairs and so on. The new furniture implied and often inevitably required different ways of daily living. Many people now sat on chairs instead of cross-legged on cushions or with their legs drawn up beside them on ottomans, and they ate at tables in- stead of perhaps sitting around trays on the floor.

As European ways and people became a more familiar part of the mental and physical landscape for Egyptians, and as the dazzling and ex- traordinary technologies of Europe—from trains to telephones, elec- tricity, street lights, tramways, and motorcars—increasingly became part of their world, the desire to live, dress, and
be
like Europeans, to have and enjoy the amenities that Europeans enjoyed, gathered pace.