Scholarship on women during the Mamluk period has been fruitful since Abd ar-Raziq’s monograph on the subject, yet a comprehensive discussion of royal women, such as that of Leslie Peirce’s Imperial Harem for the Ottoman case, has not yet been undertaken. This talk is a step in that direction, analyzing the public presence of Mamluk princesses. I argue that not only were they engaged in politics and society, but also that their primary sphere of influence was in spaces that could not quite be defined as completely public or private. This talk will problematize categories of gender, class, and space through the lens of the accounts of prominent chroniclers of this period, notably al-Maqrizi, Ibn Taghribirdi, and Ibn Iyas. Elite women had paradoxically both greater and fewer opportunities to engage in public life than their lower-class counterparts – while on one hand they were expected to keep stricter seclusion, on the other they could weld power through wealth, alliances, and influencing prominent political figures. Royal women’s presence in the “public” eye furthermore exemplifies the problems with categorizing public and private space in the premodern period. Though medieval scholars conceptualized of a difference between the private life of the home and the public life of the street, their writings indicate that many aspects of life, spaces, and events blurred the lines between them. Royal women were quite influential in the spaces deemed “semi-public”: making strategic alliances and engaging in diplomacy; influencing the Sultan’s decisions and, in the cases of minor sons, likely being a strong influence; using their wealth in calculated ways; making connections between households; and attending celebrations and state ceremonies that allowed them to network with women of other prominent households. The paper will also analyze how the public perception of elite women could be seen as a reflection of popular consensus about the Sultan and, thus, the stability of the Sultanate. At the same time, the most public excursion of royal women, their pilgrimage parades, was a way for the Sultanate, through its female members, to project images of grandeur and piety to its populace.

When Turkey’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, women from the Republican People’s Party, along with women from the Nationalist Action Party and the Freedom and Democracy Party (the former a nationalist-secular minority party and the latter a recently-established Kurdish secular party) have found themselves in the position of advocating for women as members of opposition secular parties in an increasingly Islamist, majority-party-dominated system. This paper makes three claims regarding women in opposition parties. The first is that these women represent a broad array of political ideologies. Therefore, the one-time dominant paradigm of “feminism versus Islam” is inadequate in describing the breadth of ideologies these women hold, as demonstrated through a content analysis of campaign materials from all three secular parties (Marshall 2005, Arat 1998, Diner and Toktas 2010). I argue that while the secular parties disproportionately emphasize “women’s issues” during campaigns and in legislation, each party does so using distinctly different and sometimes conflicting approaches. Second, this paper utilizes interview data from party volunteers to discuss how female candidates are of increasingly importance to attracting party volunteers. As White (2008) and Arat (2007) demonstrate, Islamist parties began using women’s branches to woo supporters beginning in the 1990s; the AKP and other parties continue to effectively employ such techniques today (interviews, Ankara, May 2010; Istanbul, June 2015). Secular parties have built women’s branches with the intent of utilizing them for campaigning in ways similar to that of the AKP. However, my research indicates that the parties’ more progressive ideologies conflict with utilizing women in such a subservient role. Ultimately, this results in fewer volunteers and volunteers who are less committed to the parties (when compared to AKP volunteers) (interviews, Istanbul, June 2015 and October 2015). Finally, this research demonstrates that this diversity in ideologies and issues that opposition parties hold has led to even more difficulty in effectively addressing women’s issues—or opposing the dominant Islamist party in any way. Consequently, although the number of female politicians in opposition parties has been increasing, opposition parties lack of power and the parties’ lack of ability to work with each other has resulted a lack of policy aimed at promoting women’s equality. It has also resulted in an inability to work together to resist policies proposed by the majority party that aim to dismantle women’s rights (interviews, Istanbul June 2015).

This paper examines the phenomenon of female religious authority in an upper middle class Sufi order in Turkey, named Rifaiyye. It focuses on the charismatic female leader of Rifais, Shaykha Cemalnur Sargut, a former chemistry teacher. Founded in late 19th century by Kenan Rifai, the Rifais intellectualize Sufism in particular ways that are conducive to their modern pious subjectivities that have little resemblance to other modern-pious Islamic movements. They reconfigure the discourses and practices of Islam and modernity in novel ways with particular implications for gender norms. Their disruption of normative Muslim gender discourse involves discarding bodily modesty codes such as veiling and gender segregation, and the extension of women’s public participation to the level of community and spiritual leadership. Female leadership in religious orders that are composed of both men and women is highly unusual in Turkey, if not in the entire Islamic world. In taking on this position of power, Cemalnur Sargut challenges the patriarchal gender bias of mainstream Islamic tradition. She has become a nationally renowned figure with her media appearances and publications. Her bestselling books are devoted primarily to providing exegeses of Quranic verses informed by her distinct Sufi interpretations. Her fame has grown globally through her academic investments such as initiating endowed chairs and research institutes in Sufi studies around the world, including UNC-Chapel Hill in the US, Peking University in China, Kyoto University in Japan and Uskudar University in Turkey. In this paper I consider both the sources of Cemalnur Sargut’s charisma and the implications of her model of leadership for gender-progressive Islam in Turkish society. Drawing on Warner’s work (2003), I investigate the extent to which Sargut’s leadership and gender discourse constitute a “counterpublic.” Although she forms a public that is in conflict with the norms and contexts of the normative religious environment in Turkey, she rejects the concept of “counterpublic” both in the feminist front and the religious. She often underscores that Sufism promotes unity rather than opposition, and therefore, she does not embrace an Islamic feminist approach to confront the Islamic public. As such, she downplays her gender as irrelevant to her religious authority. I argue that her cautionary position and quietist attitude in forming a “counterpublic” can said to be a political strategy of non-confrontational engagement with the mainstream Turkish-Muslim patriarchal state and society within which she operates.