Public and Private in Middle Eastern Women's History

Abstract

It is remarkable that the conceptual framework of public and private spheres has never dominated Middle Eastern women's history. Given the media's sensationalist fascination with Muslim women's veils, one might have expected a vigorous scholarly critique of its simplistic dichotomies of public and private. While much has certainly been written about the current revival of veiling in Middle East, little has been written on the historical contexts that have defined the meaning of those veils. There has thus been virtually no debate about the usefulness of the terms "private" and "public" in defining those contexts. Why this suprising lacuna? It may simply reflect the thin ranks of historians who specialize in the Middle East. It also likely reflects postcolonial scholars' general distrust of terms that carry the baggage of Western imperial hegemony. As Europeanists have also acknowledged, Habermasian public and private spheres are historically contingent categories that do not travel well through European history, much less the histories of other regions. So the lacuna may be a healthy sign that scholars of the Middle East have avoided normative European categories that might distort local experience. But avoidance may also incur steep costs to historical understanding. First, by not interrogating the terms public and private directly, scholars are unable to check their misuse—for the terms are widely used by non-specialists in contemporary debates about modernity, democracy, women's status, and Islamic morality in the region. Second, rejection of universal categories in favor of localist terminology may encourage the cultural exceptionalism and essentialism that revisionist and feminist historians have sought to combat. A purely local focus denies the reality of transnational historical experience.