Kadriye Hüseyin was a member of the Egyptian ruling family and a prolific intellectual whose works ranged from history books, essays, and poems to translations and travelogues, most of which she produced in Ottoman Turkish. Until very recently, however, Kadriye Hüseyin has been largely a forgotten figure within the scholarship on both the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. While the historians of the late Ottoman Empire did not pay Kadriye Hüseyin too much attention because she was born and raised in Egypt, the scholars working on modern Egypt ignored her works because she wrote in Ottoman Turkish. This paper will bridge this gap between these two trends of scholarship and introduce Kadriye Hüseyin as a clear representation of the Ottoman cultural consciousness that continued to flourish in Egypt in the beginning of the 20th century. Based primarily on books that she published between 1909 and 1915, it will argue that while Kadriye Hüseyin wrote in Ottoman Turkish and was intellectually nurtured by Ottoman literary traditions, such as the genre of “advice literature” and early Ottoman novels, she was also influenced to a great extent by the intellectual currents that were prevalent in Egypt at the time, most important of them being the publishing of biographies of famous women in Islamic history in an attempt to encourage the advancement of the status of women in the early-20th century Egypt. Through analyzing Kadriye Hüseyin’s works, the paper will situate Egypt firmly within the Ottoman context and demonstrate the cultural ties that continued to exist between Istanbul and Cairo, at a time when Egypt was becoming more autonomous within the Ottoman Empire. In so doing, the paper will contribute to the understanding of the history of modern Egypt as well as the late Ottoman Empire.

My thesis examines Ottoman imperial women’s contribution to the Tanzimat era (1839-1876), a period characterized by various attempts to reform the Ottoman Empire and curtail the nationalist movements of ethnic groups within its territory. I focus on two queen mothers who lived during this period; Bezmialem Sultan (1798?-1853) and Pertevniyal Sultan (1810?-1884). They were the last two queen mothers of the Ottoman Empire and the wives of Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808-1839), the so-called architect of the Tanzimat period. Scholars rarely mentioned them in regard to the Tanzimat. In my analysis the queen mothers’ vakfiyes played a key role since they constituted the most important written documents explaining their intentions, as well as the minute details of their projects. Comparing their charitable foundations’ deeds has shown that in their prayer sections and original vakfiyes both valide sultans employed not only the same format, but also exactly the same wording. In this respect, my analysis of these sources broadens our understanding of vakfiyes, since many scholars have claimed to find the patrons’ active voices in these sections per se. Besides the vakfiyes, I focused on many untapped archival sources, memoirs, travelers’ accounts, contemporary chroniclers, their own writings, as well as artworks dedicated to them. These archival sources have disclosed how¬?through their mosques, schools and hospitals?both queen mothers endorsed various pioneering projects. A closer examination of these projects reveals that they followed slightly differing patterns of patronage, sometimes also different from their sons’ patronage, even though they first and foremost had to support the legitimacy of their sons’ rules. These two queen mothers subtly guided not only their commissions’ construction, but also how individuals should experience these buildings. They mixed traditional concepts with new patterns in both architecture and function. The Tanzimat era can be better understood by analyzing the involvement and patronage of its queen mothers and evaluating diverse layers of power; the harem as an alternative site of power should not be disregarded. In this sense, my thesis contributes to the rich academic works concentrating on women’s patronage in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.

Samiha Ayverdi (1905-1993) was the charismatic Sufi shaykha of the Rifai Order. She was also a novelist, poet, and intellectual writer of the Turkish Conservative Right. As a part of modernizing and Westernizing reforms, the single party secular regime did not only ban the Sufi lodges in 1925, but also discarded the traditional cultural forms in music and arts in Turkey. Under these conditions, Ayverdi started to disseminate Sufi ethics in her novels and poems. She also founded several civil society associations dedicated to the preservation of the classical Turkish-Islamic heritage in literature, fine arts, music, and architecture. Her literary books and civil society associations re-opened the gates of Sufism in Turkey. Ayverdi was dedicated to preserve and revive the Classical Turkish arts, music, poetry, literature, and architecture because she believed that these traditional cultural forms embodied the ethos of tawhid (Unity of God). She promoted the Islamicate (Hodgson 1961) material culture in arts, architecture, music, and poetry not only as a means to cultivate an ennobled ethical self but also as a celebration of beauty attributed to the Jamali names of God. She perceived “aesthetics” as an indispensable mirror reflecting the discourses of tawhid, adab, and Sufi ethics. Ayverdi was a visionary guardian of the tradition as she updated, adapted and reformulated the Rifai tradition by filtering its historical Sufi precepts such as “selfless service” through the demands of the contemporary context. She reformed the Rifai tradition of “modern dervishhood” by directing her followers to serve the national community by reviving classical Turkish arts, literature, and music as Sufi practice of devotion to God. She believed that her cultural foundations were the new forms of the modern Sufi lodges (tekke). Like her late master Kenan Rifai, she did not define tekke merely as a sacred space of worship, but as the hearths of knowledge (irfan) in the service of the community.

This paper aims to explore the role of Congress of Indonesian Women ?Ulam?? (Kongres Ulama Perempuan Indonesia/KUPI) as a forum for women ?ulam?? in addressing social issues in Indonesia. It will portray how a group of women ?ulam?? from various religious affiliations met and tried to find solutions for social problems on violence and injustice against women. This congress was held in view of the increasingly marginalized position of women ?ulam??. As stated by Fatima Mernissi (1991, 8-9), the marginalization of women has occurred structurally from the seventh century on in the Islamic world through the manipulation of religious texts. They were manipulated structurally in the sense that all power, political, economic, and social, has been used to legitimize men’s interests in the interpretation of religious teachings. Since then, the role of women in public affairs has almost disappeared from historical records. Their rights also began to be unequal compared to their male counterparts. Therefore, through the congress, held on April 25-27, 2017, it is hoped that people’s views on women will change, that women have equal rights to men in mastering Islamic religious sciences, and that Islamic religious authority is not men’s monopoly. Some questions that will be discussed in this paper are as follows. What is the significance of the organization of the congress for gender awareness in Indonesia? How did women ?ulam?? express their agency through the organization of the congress? What can be implied from the organization of the congress by the religious community in the modern Indonesian state? In answering these questions, this study will use Saba Mahmood’s (2005) view on the agency. It argues that the organization of the congress was a kind of agency of Indonesian women ?ulam?? as a response to women and social issues in Indonesia. Furthermore, since these women ?ulam?? used religious reasoning in expressing their ideas in response to social dynamics, their movements can be considered as a manifestation of religious expressions in the public sphere. Moreover, when results of the congress were later recommended as a state policy, the movement has become a civil society force that can enrich discussions in the public sphere. When religion is able to dialogue and enrich the spirit of democracy and liberalism, then the secular state has actually failed. Therefore, this study will support Talal Asad’s (2003) and Cassanova’s (1994) argument on the failure of secularization.

This study is an initial attempt to understand the complexity of deveiling at a time when the headscarf has finally received ultimate respect and recognition by the Turkish state after decades of non-toleration and humiliation. After explaining how the merging of political Islam and the Turkish state led to the monopolization of public Islam by erasing the multiplicity of meanings underlying Islamic ethical practices, the paper portrays the search of pious Muslim women for their own subjectivity without falling into the binary of Islamist and secularist political projects.  Why this can be named a search for a non-politicized piety is discussed through the narratives of six informants, who are aware of the instrumentalization of the women’s sartorial styles by utilitarian political discourses and who actively desire to distance themselves from these by an act of deveiling while maintaining their adherence to Islamic ethical norms. These narratives reveal that, the attempt of cultivating a non-politicized piety still takes place within and in relation to the political upheavals created by the political rule as it shifts into authoritarianism. Contrary to popular accounts of deveiling as a total repudiation of Islamic norms, the cases of deveiling in this study aim to show how their act of deveiling communicates an intricate form of political and religious agency expressed from within an insecure, vulnerable position.