[Discussion] bk rev.: Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. Volume One

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Suad Joseph, ed. Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. Volume One:
Methodologies, Paradigms and Sources. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers,
2003. 682 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $229.00
(cloth), ISBN 9-0041-1380-0.
*Reviewed by:* Sunaina Maira, Asian American Studies, University of
California at Davis.
*Published by:* H-Gender-MidEast <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egend-mid/>
(October, 2004)
Astutely Conceptualized: Interdisciplinary, Transhistorical, and
Transnational

The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (EWIC) is a historic,
timely, and ambitious project that exemplifies a moment in the academy
when the study of "women and Islamic cultures" is being consolidated,
establishing itself as an "interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and
transnational" area, according to the general editor, Suad Joseph (p.
xxxiii). The encyclopedia is an intervention into the relationship of
women's/gender studies to Middle East studies and a way to account for
the delayed absorption of feminist critique by Middle East studies,
compared to other fields, according to Joseph (p. xl). The first volume
of EWIC, "Methodologies, Paradigms, and Sources," makes an important and
unique contribution because it is not a collection of summaries of
research areas, but presents "critical tools" that scholars and students
can use in their own research (p. xxii). In the introduction, Joseph
explains the goals of the project and notes that scholars were asked to
consider "primary sources and how their use has informed and shaped what
is considered to be 'known' about women" and to "evaluate important
changes in methodologies and sources" and the "specific political and
social conditions under which knowledge is produced over time" (p. xxiii).

The introduction also addresses the tensions between "the ways in which
encyclopedia projects tend to stabilize concepts and the editors'
efforts to complicate and destabilize them" (p. xxii). Joseph notes that
four of the encyclopedia's primary organizing concepts--Islam, region,
nation-state, and periodization--as well as the notion of feminism, of
course, are "troubled, shifting, politically burdened" concepts that
must be challenged, even as the encyclopedia documents research focused
on these notions. This astute approach to encyclopedic knowledge
provides a critical and important epistemological lens through which to
read the entries in the first volume.

The volume is organized into two sections: first, thematic entries,
focused on diverse regions covering periods from the sixth century in
the Middle East, just before the rise of Islam in that area, and just
prior to the introduction of Islam in other regions, to the present. The
second section consists of disciplinary entries, spanning the major
disciplines as well as interdisciplinary fields, such as women's
studies/gender studies, Islamic studies, and legal studies, and also
conceptual/methodological fields such as "Orientalism" and "oral
history." This allows for a historically and culturally situated
understanding of research paradigms and methods for studying women and
Islamic cultures, as well as disciplinary and interdisciplinary
approaches to the field; this organizational distinction is useful
because it forces attention to the ways in which paradigms and sources
are shaped by research approaches to specific periods, regions, and
disciplinary areas of knowledge, even if these categories are not always
explicitly reflected on in all entries. There is an interesting
connection, and sometimes an overlap, between the first and second
sections, for the various periodized/regional entries generally emerge
from disciplinary fields, and the disciplinary entries conceptualize
regions and periods in diverse ways, thus providing multiple
perspectives on questions of methodology and paradigms.

One of the themes highlighted at the end of the introduction is one of
the key themes running through the entire volume, namely, that "women
are often the litmus test of what constitutes 'modernity.' Women are
seen as the signifier par excellence of a culture, of a nation, of a
civilization" (p. xlix). As Gail Minault points out, "Women remain
symbolic both of everything that is wrong with society and of everything
that men want their society to be" (p. 178). This is a significant issue
for the discussion of sources across the thematic entries, for several
of them point to the ways in which women were charged with representing
the nation and were associated with social reforms and legal or cultural
debates, shaping the nature of sources available on women in Islamic
cultures and restricting archives. Many scholars observe that documents
addressing women produced by male reformers in various societies do not
focus enough on women's daily lives and silence female voices. But Julia
Clancy-Smith argues that one strategy to counter this bias in sources is
to read these materials "against the grain" (p. 113). In some instances,
court and legal records have helped counter stereotypes of Muslim women
as inherently helpless and powerless (pp. 345, 430).

Several entries also demonstrate how Orientalism and colonialism have
shaped archives of knowledge about women and Islamic cultures. European
colonial regimes in regions from North Africa to Southeast Asia produced
documents about colonized populations for social control, so the archive
during colonial periods in many regions consists largely of missionary
tracts; colonial ethnographies; adminstrative, legal, and military
documents; and writings of European travelers and settlers (p. 100).
This textual and visual archive has all the problems of colonialist and
Orientalist representations of women in Islamic cultures and of the
empires' political and strategic interests, for example, a preoccupation
with the mysterious harem in various regions (p. 64) and on tribals and
nomads in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Afghanistan (p. 256). There
is a tension between relying on sources that focus ideologically on
women as symbolic of social and political issues and trying to go beyond
political and judicial documents to look at the daily life of "ordinary"
women (p. 179). Some scholars point out that elites tended to record
their lives more than non-elites (p. 102) and that turning to women's
literature, including memoirs and fiction, women's magazines, and other
visual and poetic sources can shed light on the lived experiences of
women across class backgrounds (pp. 64, 180, 344). Another strategy is
to "seek out women's oral accounts using technologies derived from
cultural anthropology" (p. 180).

There is an acknowledgment in the book that the influence of imperial
and political interests continues to shape research on women and Islamic
cultures, for "Western geopolitical and strategic concerns" underlie the
current interest in "Islam and Arabness" (p. 198). A few scholars,
including the editor in her introduction, explicitly discuss the
politics of terminology, the production of categories such as "Muslim,"
"Middle Eastern," or "Arab" in conjunction with various shifts in state
policies, particularly those of the United States. (pp. xxii, 192, 197).
Some of these policies are associated with political interventions that
have devastatingly tangible effects. For example, Laura Bier notes the
burning of the Iraqi national archives in April 2003 during the U.S.
invasion of Iraq (p. 201). One of the entries also explicitly points to
the politics of the researcher's own position and identifications as
they affect research on women and Islamic cultures (p. 363).

The disciplinary entries make note of shifts in various fields as they
affect methods and paradigms for the study of women and Islamic
cultures, for example, the "Islamic trend" in women's history that has
brought a "critical and contextualized reading of Islamic texts" (p.
347). In contrast, the entry for political science observes that the
discipline's reliance on rational choice theory and institutional
sources neglects the activities and agency of women (p. 409). The
institutionalization of women's studies in the United States has also
obviously provided a context for the study of women and Islamic
cultures, but this has also been accompanied by the biases of Western
feminist discourse that has overlapped in many instances with
Orientalist and imperialist approaches. This perhaps explains why there
are two entries in the book for women's studies, one specifically
focused on "Euro-American Women's Studies and Islamic Cultures," in
addition to an entry for "Sexualities and Queer Studies."

The entries in both sections of the volume represent an enormous amount
of hard work by an impressive collection of scholars and a very
significant collection of expertise and critique. The first volume of
the encyclopedia is clearly an astutely conceptualized project that that
will greatly advance and support research on women and Islamic cultures
at a critical moment in the development of this field of study.