Gender on the line in the long nineteenth century: translating violation and protection in Ottoman and Egyptian debates about the "woman question"
Panel 136, 2019 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 15 at 5:00 pm
Panel Description
This panel is the continuation of a collaborative research and writing project on translation and circulation of texts within the nineteenth-century Middle East, initiated in 2015. After four workshops and two upcoming volumes, the latter being a compilation of essays composed by pairs of scholars, on the production and translation of key texts in and into Arabic, Urdu, Ottoman Turkish or Persian, we have now converged to delve more deeply into turn-of-the-century negotiations of gender issues: core interrogations in the social reforms at stake in the late Ottoman period. Emphasizing the collaborative nature of translation practices, this panel will consist of three papers presented by six scholars in pairs. The papers analyze, across languages, texts that debate the "woman question" while challenging notions and representations of gender, sexuality, or abuse in the long nineteenth century, and exploring, through translation processes, the transformation of such notions and representations.
The "woman question" recurs across state, religious, gender, class and linguistic boundaries throughout the long nineteenth century: in fact, its invocation is often an attempt to dispute, interrogate or defend those very boundaries. The universalization of points of contention regarding the limits of women's rights and their public and private roles, in turn, had the effect of threatening various imaginings of where the line between what constituted the violation and protection of women ought to have been drawn, and by whom. Attempts at crystallizing such demarcations spurred reactions that quickly became engulfed in moral, civilizational, and existential debates.
Our panel brings into conversation two essays - Fatma Aliye's Women of Islam and Farid Wajdi's The Muslim Woman and their translations into Arabic, French, and Ottoman - with legal, institutional documents, in the form of various versions of the Ottoman and Egyptian penal codes, adapted from the 1801 French criminal code. Pairs of historians and comparatists examine how these texts and their translations attempted to define the line between the violation and protection of fin-de-siècle Muslim women, at the junction where nature, law, and custom meet. We particularly attend to how these texts articulate linguistic, gender and social frames, and how translation choices are made according to audience or purpose. Finally, while identifying and investigating interrelation between Egyptian and Ottoman discussions on gender our panel renders the enduring importance of French language and thought as a reference point in explanations of the Self at the edge of the long nineteenth century.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Marilyn L. Booth
-- Presenter
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Dr. A. Holly Shissler
-- Co-Author
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Dr. Hannah Scott Deuchar
-- Co-Author
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Dr. A. Ebru Akcasu
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Miss. Claire Savina
-- Presenter
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Dr. Maha AbdelMegeed
-- Co-Author
Presentations
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Dr. A. Ebru Akcasu
Co-Authors: Maha AbdelMegeed
Our paper evaluates selections from the writings of the Cairo-based scholar Muhammad Farid Wajdi (1878–1954) and their translations into Ottoman Turkish by the Istanbul-based poet Mehmed Akif (1873–1936). The selections come from Al-Mar’ah al-Muslima: Fi Al-Radd ‘Ala Al-Mar’ah al-Jadida (The Muslim Woman: a Response to the New Woman, 1902), which was written in response to Qasim Amin’s Al-Mar’ah al-Jadida (The New Woman, 1900). Immediately after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution relaxed censorship laws in the Ottoman dominions, Wajdi’s book-length refutation was made accessible to an Ottoman readership in serialized form on the pages of the newly-established periodical Akif was head writer and greatest contributor to, the Sirat-i Müstakim (The Straight Path). One year later, Akif’s translation of The Muslim Woman was published in book form. Through an analysis of the Muslim Woman and its translation, we investigate the manner in which the “woman question” becomes the crux of a complex process for the translation of paradigms for seeing modernity from within specific social positionalities. We are particularly interested in tracing two crucial underpinning dimensions. The first pertains to the way the assumption of a division between a public/private/and domestic spheres is operative for the arguments on the “woman question” (interlaced with assertions concerning human nature). We look at the particular terms used to name and signal these divisions between Arabic and Ottoman, noting the hermeneutical and social provenances of these terms in both contexts and attending to how they factor in their respective readers. The other relates to central moments in the argument where the translation does not just move between Arabic and Ottoman but includes French (thought/social reality) too. Specifically, we look at the translation and engagement with the work of Auguste Comte (1798-1857). These examples sharply complicate the division between source/target language, pointing to the convergences and shifts in meaning and significance, which are not solely shaped by the operations of language and translations, but by how the latter occur across specific social formations and particular positions in them. In this manner, the translational encounter between Wajdi and Akif can be placed within wider debates on women, “human nature,” and civilization that are simultaneously global and context-specific (the context here including the language itself and its history).
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Co-Authors: A. Holly Shissler
This paper examines the celebrated Ottoman author Fatma Aliye Han?m and her influential essay, The Women of Islam (Nisvan-? Islam, 1892). Fatma Aliye’s nominal reason for writing it was to correct misconceptions about Ottoman women’s lives that she had found to be commonly held among even educated European visitors to the Ottoman Empire. The so-called “Woman Question” was a topic at the top of commentators’ agenda both in Europe and the Middle East at the time. Fatma Aliye addressed many current and vexed issues, speaking to matters such as slavery, especially female slavery, in the Ottoman Empire as compared to the treatment of servants in Europe; marriage, polygyny, and divorce and the question of what Islam does or does not mandate in this matter; and fashion and women’s sartorial choices in various social contexts and across time. Yet, as topical as the essay was for European readers, it was written in Ottoman Turkish and in that sense it was obviously addressed to an Ottoman, rather than European, audience. The essay was an instant success and was translated into Arabic and French almost immediately (with further additional translations into both languages later on). We will examine The Women of Islam in the context of both actual translation—i.e., its various French and Arabic editions—and as a form of cultural translation. In the second capacity The Women of Islam has at least three aspects: It explains to European women how “properly” to see Muslim women; it admonishes Muslim women how “properly” to present themselves to European visitors; and it quickly assumed importance as a fundamental document for Muslim women on how to embody a modernist Islam. In this latter sense it contributed to the establishment of Fatma Aliye as an “exemplary women” often invoked in compilations in Muslim contexts focusing on notable and accomplished women.
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Miss. Claire Savina
Co-Authors: Hannah Scott Deuchar
Our paper re-examines the role of translation and adaptation in late Ottoman penal reform, focusing particularly on the shifting legal articulations of sexual violence. Reading the Ottoman and Egyptian penal codes, adapted from the 1801 French criminal code, we investigate how legal status and representation of sexual violence were altered, displaced, received or renewed, tracing the emergence of rape, in particular, as a sexual crime whose delineation and penalization respond to the changing lexica of gender, (private) property, and (public) morality. The Ottoman Penal Code of 1858 combined its French original with tenets from existing shar?’a practice whereas the Penal Code introduced in 1875 in semi-autonomous Egypt was in fact a relay translation based on the Ottoman Code: it was replaced in 1883 by a direct translation from the French. Translation was not limited to the official codes themselves: versions in the many languages of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, including Italian and Greek, were printed and published in the press. While work in literary studies has identified rape as a metaphor for colonial translation, our paper examines a more material connection between the two. We investigate the legal codification of sexual violence as a process that occurred in translation: both the verbal translation of legal lexica across and within languages, and the cultural translation of one penal system into another. Translation, in this reading, is not a mere literary pursuit, but a social practice, key to legal articulations and representations of sexuality and gender, and participates, we argue, to the challenging definition of what is rape.
Of course, legal change cannot be reduced to institutional penal codes: crime was produced and punished in streets, homes, police stations, forensic hospitals, courts and a range of media, in concert with - and sometimes in spite of - the codes themselves. Our study acknowledges their limitations as indicators of de facto legal and social practice; instead, it asks what they reveal about translation as a process of codification. Reading the official codes alongside the circulating translations in the press, and the legal texts they came to replace, we approach the text as a body in which legal and translation practices, and shifting notions of gender and sexuality, converge and interact with one another. If “rape is a form of social performance”(BOURKE, 2007), its codified wordings and forms of penalization embody the reform of society at stake in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and Egypt.
