ABSTRACT
If real Muslim women were only marginally involved—in the flesh, as it were—in “modern” institutions like state schools and voluntary associations, the Muslim woman as a discursive construct was becoming a steady presence in the Bosnian public sphere. From the turn of the century, the debate on women’s social and political place in society—and through this, the debate on gender relations more broadly—was labeled as the “woman question.” A global phenomenon par excellence, crossing both the industrializing West and its colonial space, this debate assumed different facets according to local circumstances. In the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the debate was—at least in the case of Muslims—highly communitarized. In other words, it gave birth to a separate debate on Muslim gender relations, i.e., the Muslim woman question. Both in the West and in the Muslim world, this debate and its different variations—education, reproductive rights, suffrage, bodily autonomy, legal position in marriage, medical rights—became a way to discuss the place of men and women in modernity. This chapter examines the evolution of the Muslim woman question in Habsburg Bosnia, by focusing on three main questions. First, I will look at how the arguments that nourished this debate were developed by Bosnians, not in some kind of splendid isolation, but were shaped by the constant circulation of people, and the translation of texts, across empire borders. Second, this chapter will try to prove that the debate on women was not uniquely the business of men, and that, on the contrary, some women succeeded in making their voices heard. Third, that Muslim women too, on the eve of the Great War, had their word to say. Special attention will thus be devoted to the Muslim woman question as seen from the perspective of these aforementioned real, in-the-flesh Muslim women, and to the potential specificities of their discourse.
