Female Muslim intellectuals: understanding the history of Turkey's woman question through the construction of Islamic tradition

This paper assesses how Muslim women's roles in society proved a topic of central concern for three prominent female Muslim intellectuals, Fatma Aliye (1862-1936), Halide Edip (1884-1964), and Sâmiha Ayverdi (1905-1993). Collectively spanning the course of a century, their discourses on Muslim women were indicative of the larger historical context of their time. Each individual intellectual engaged with the topic of women's societal roles and employed an Islamic framework to answer the Ottoman Empire's, and subsequently Turkey's, woman question. I argue that while each woman struggled with different historical actors and moments, all of them, through their activism and understanding of women constructed Islamic tradition in a manner that emphasized the importance of women in both the religious and sociopolitical milieu.Master of Art