The women’s movements that emerged in the Middle East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to advance women’s legal, social, and economic status took on a new mission in the aftermath of World War I: to acquire political rights. Feminists in the newly established nation-states in Turkey, Iran, and the Arab world began to passionately campaign for the right to vote shortly after the end of war, employing different methods such as writing in the press, giving public speeches, organizing demonstrations and marches, and establishing links with other feminists around the world and in the region. Although the attempts of their Western counterparts to gain voting rights have been the subject of many scholarly works, the struggle of Middle Eastern suffragists have only recently begun to receive attention, and studied almost exclusively within the context of the nation-state that they operated in. This paper explores the suffrage movement in the Middle East from a comparative and transnational perspective by analyzing the origins, agendas, and strategies of the women in Turkey, Iran, and Egypt who campaigned for political rights. Examining the similarities and differences between their backgrounds, discourses, and methods, it discusses the Turkish, Iranian, and Egyptian suffragists in comparison to one another. Based on primary sources such as memoirs, women’s periodicals, newspapers, travel accounts, and reports of foreign officials and missionaries as well as secondary literature, this paper reveals the complex nature of the suffrage movements that gained momentum in different parts of the Middle East following World War I. It argues that while they differed in certain ways, the Turkish, Iranian, and Egyptian campaigns for women's political rights all drew their inspiration from an authentic blend of multiple sources: the rules of Islam, the needs of the nation, and the requirements of civilization.

During the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire—and later the newly founded Turkish Republic—was a "key referent" for Egypt’s elite intellectual culture. Egyptian feminists became active observers of the development of women’s rights reforms in Turkey, and they used Turkey as a role model—a potential roadmap—to articulate demands for change in specific areas for action, and to mobilize public and institutional support for their cause. As an Islamic country which ruled Egypt for almost four centuries, Turkey became a vessel, now distant yet still familiar, through which feminist ideas were communicated to Egyptian society. Turkey provided an extra layer of Islamic padding to cushion the effects of their feminist agenda, ideas that otherwise could have acquired edge more quickly, if associated with Westernization. Therefore, Turkey became a signifier of "how to become part of the modern world while remaining Muslim," and thus functioned as an alternative to, or a bulwark against, Western—read colonial—imperial and intellectual hegemony. Egyptian feminists thus justified their demands through the Turkish example in order to mobilize a sense of empathy from conservative voices, some of whom remained loyal to Egypt’s Ottoman past; indeed some had a continuing respect for the Ottomans as the defenders of Islam, coupled at times with a certain nostalgia for Muslim unity. Egyptian feminists’ preoccupation with Turkey also had its limits. Many of the feminists in Egypt did not fully embrace the Turkish model. Instead, Turkish feminism and its attendant discourses became open to a more diffuse process of "endless and relentless filtering, rendering, deconstructing, rethinking or contenting" before being used as a didactic tool for arguing the merits of a particular reform program in Egypt. Egyptian feminists, liberal and conservative alike, agreed that the Turkish model represented an inherent potential for women’s emancipation, not only in Egypt but also in the Middle East, but in their efforts to promote Turkey as a role model, they tried to maintain a delicate balance between the sympathetic observers and the worried detractors of the Kemalist reforms in Egypt and the larger Islamic world. Drawing on newspapers, periodicals, and public lectures in Egypt, this paper examines the ways in which gender politics in the newly founded Turkish Republic, once entitled to the authority of the Islamic Caliphate, shaped Egyptian feminism during the early twentieth century.

This research compares the implications of Islamic veiling in Iran and the United States, and explores how the Islamic hijab becomes controversial in these two countries in different ways. Depending on the geopolitical situation of a region and cultural background of a nation, Muslim women have different experiences regarding Islamic veiling. Many transnational feminists, such as Chandra Mohanty, believe in the necessity of the contextualization of social and cultural phenomena (Mohanty 1988, 75). I argue that the way some feminist activists defend Muslim women’s community in the United States blocks any possibility of constructive critical thinking about Sharia Law and its impacts on many women’s lives outside the United States. The fear of being accused of promoting Islamophobia affects many feminist activists’ efforts for achieving women’s rights in other Islamic countries. On the one hand, since January 2017 and the beginning of President Trump’s administration, some Muslim women who wear Islamic hijab have encountered new challenges. On the other hand, The Islamic Republican government’s enforcement of Islamic hijab on women has revived and perpetuated a form of Islamic patriarchy in Iran since the early 1980s. In response, Iranian women have contested Islamic hijab law through collective resistance and manipulation of clothing styles. However, since the last Iranian presidential election in May 2017, Iranian women have started to systematically challenge Islamic hijab. This research examines Islamic hijab from two perspectives. First, I argue that Islamic hijab as a social practice is politicized differently in Iran from how it is in the United States, and women are always the societal group most affected by such politics. Second, I argue that during this political struggle, fear of being accused of being an Islamophobe obstructed transnational support of the Iranian feminist movement. Drawing on the approaches of transnational feminists such as Breny Mendoza and Richa Nagar, and using the recent feminist movement in Iran as a case study, I want to elucidate the necessity of accountable solidarities among feminists across and beyond borders, regardless of attaching to any system of belief. This paper does not offer any solution or prescription, and does not take any stand toward Islam either. However, it examines how the over-defensive stance toward hijab and Sharia Laws exemplified by activists like Linda Sarsour, who was a well-known character in the January 2017 women’s rights march, overshadows the struggles of other feminists against discriminatory Sharia Laws in other countries.