Gender, Islam, and 19th-Century Brava: A Brief Note

The study of gender in Islam underwent a reformation in the last quar-ter-century largely due to the emergence of post-colonial theory and its formidable works such as Edward Said’s Orientalism. Scholars were tasked with (re)examining the distorted histories seeped in Western predispositions. As empire unraveled, so did the traditional narratives to which it catered and a defined body of scholarship tailored to reas-sessing these narratives emerged. Leila Ahmed wrote that in Islamic history, “the constructs, institutions and modes of thought devised by early Muslim societies that form the core discourses of Islam have played a central role in defining women’s place(s) in Muslim societ-ies.”1 Nonetheless, it was Western discourses reared by colonial domi-nation that determined our perception of women in Islamic societies. Imperial powers used the position of women as a point of departure for a broad attack on Islamic cultures. Often opponents of female lib-eration in their respective countries, colonialists used feminism as a tool to denigrate “Other ” men and to justify the policies of “actively trying to subvert the cultures and religions of the colonized.”2 This rhetoric was an emblem of European chauvinism and orientalist litera-ture. For a while Western feminists would also employ this framework in their analysis of Muslim women. The presumption was that Islam fundamentally constricted women’s status and identity in a way that Western women did not experience. While in the West, women could criticize, challenge, and redefine their culture, women in the “Islamic world ” had to part with their culture and beliefs when pursuing self-determination.3 It was this perspective vended in Western academies that engendered relevance to contemporary counter-discourses