ABSTRACT
Heroines of the revolution, seductive concubines, power-hungry mothers of sultans, victims of centuries of oppression, revolutionary heroines – women in Ottoman and modern Turkish historiography have been restricted to a few, limited and stereotypical roles by most historians until recently. The entertainment value of these images has proven hard to resist for scholars and laypeople alike, even with the shaming adjective of (Said’s definition of) ‘Orientalist’ to condemn them, and even after efforts in the last few decades to displace these images with more balanced reckonings of women’s roles in societies of South-west Asia and North Africa. As Bernard Lewis pointed out in the 1960s, women had far more varied roles in Middle Eastern society than most scholars have commonly allowed. Early on in his writings, Lewis included images of women and words of women in his highly textured accounts of the early modern Ottoman Empire and of modern Turkey. 1 There were only a few other scholars writing in European languages from the 1960s through the 1970s who included women’s experiences in their reckonings of the Ottoman past, or who focused on women as a legitimate topic of study. 2 Most feminist historians in the 1960s and 1970s who wrote about the pre-1908 Ottoman past also largely dismissed it as an era of obscurantist Islam and oppressive sharia traditions. They argued that by comparison with the Kemalist, secularist vision of women’s potential, early modern and modern Ottoman women were silenced, segregated and that even elite and royal women were capable of attaining only a sycophantic and manipulative sort of power, devoid of authority recognized as legitimate by their contemporaries. 3
