Women’s and gender history began to move in a comparative direction during the late 1990s, opening up new possibilities in scholarship about Western and non-Western contexts alike. Sonya Michel (1998: 189) asked, “Why the comparative turn, and why now?” According to Michel, “The proliferation of historical knowledge about women and gender invites broad cross-cultural and transhistorical comparisons” (190) and a “collective commitment to fighting national parochialism” (Rupp 2008: 33; see also Offen 2010). However, this is not the only reason. The field of women’s and gender history is inherently comparative and itself invites, generates, and even requires a comparative framework to understand when, where, under what conditions, and in which forms patriarchy exists, persists, or weakens. This is especially true for Middle Eastern and North African contexts, where scholarship on gender is often directly pertinent to women’s rights activism (Booth 2003). Such scholarship is also relevant to activism in Western contexts, but the fundamental issues faced by many women in countries with high human rights violations make the outcome of their activism all the more urgent, as Turkey’s recent withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention illustrates.1 This urgency and the need to dismantle patriarchal structures has “quickened the impulse” toward comparison in the field of women’s and gender history (Michel 1998: 189). Feminist scholars, or scholars who study gender with feminist aspirations, have thus discovered “comparison” as a useful method of analysis. However, even while accepting its potential, obstacles such as language and the need for multiple regional specializations in the historical discipline present practical barriers to scholars who aim to forge a comparative history in the Middle East and North Africa. This article proposes a framework for the further development of the comparative method in women’s and gender history. Not only does it encourage a broader and more in-depth understanding of feminism in the Middle East, but it also disentangles the evolution of feminism in different contexts from the dominant nationalist narratives that have been so frequently applied to them.2Although historiography in Middle Eastern women’s history has developed rapidly in the last decades, scholarship on the comparative history of feminism in the Middle East has been limited.3 The scholarly literatures on women’s history in the Ottoman-Turkish milieu and in the Arab world have so far been segregated from each other.4 Much of the scholarship on Ottoman and Turkish women has been published in Turkish, with comparatively little in English.5 In contrast, many leading scholars writing on women in the Arab world publish in English.6 While some of them engage Arabic sources and Arabic-language scholarship in a productive way, they lack the training to read studies in Turkish. Under these circumstances, women’s historians who read only English have fragmentary impressions of the origins, nuances, and perhaps even futures of feminism in the Middle East. Because of these limitations, even regional specialists cannot yet fully appreciate how much Arabic-speaking and Turkish-speaking feminists had in common as both movements emerged, and consequently how Middle Eastern feminism developed simultaneously as both a local and a regional movement. For this reason alone, a comparative study of the history of both Turkish and Arabic feminist movements is needed and is certain to yield major new findings.Although the current trend in feminist scholarship emphasizes transnational connections and flows, for Middle Eastern feminisms in particular, a comparative approach may be better suited to unpack the dynamics between societies once closely entangled. As Marc Bloch (2015: 47) argued in 1967, a comparative method proves more useful when it involves “a parallel study of societies that are at once neighboring and contemporary, exercising a constant mutual influence,” and “owing their existence in part at least to a common origin.”7 Building on Bloch’s work, Philipp Ther (2003: 47) notes that, rather than assessing two realities to show how different they are, comparisons “need to be put on a relational basis, where mutual influences” (and interactions) “between compared cases are taken into account,” while also highlighting important parallelisms and illuminating complex political, institutional, and social differences. In other words, “doing comparative studies as relational studies” means centering the relationships between comparative units, as well as putting terms that “have been traditionally pushed apart” into new relationships (Shih 2015: 436). This methodology, which complicates the standard comparative analysis of nations and nation-states through a combination of comparative and “integrative history,” is a good tool not only for the entangled histories of Europe but also for the entangled histories of empires and their provinces.8 Such an approach provides a more useful lens than a transnational framework, which can restrict or distort the relationships between different units, especially in the period prior to the development of discrete nation-states in the Middle East.Egypt and the Ottoman center (later Turkey) demonstrate the interconnection of evolving feminist discourse along the lines that Bloch imagined, as their two centers of cultural production, Cairo and Istanbul, maintained a constant and mutual flow of local interaction among elite women during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The entangled character of Ottoman and Egyptian feminisms (for a detailed examination, see Torunoğlu 2019) was not limited to the exchange of ideas between the two centers. Rather, it was characterized by its “structural connectedness,” as the development of feminism in the two centers was “mutually correlated” and sometimes even “structurally dependent” (cf. Ther 2003: 71).9 For instance, in 1906 Labība Hāshim, a successful editor and writer and the founder of one of the earliest women’s magazines in Cairo, Fatāt al-Sharq (Young Woman of the East), which ran for three decades from 1906 to 1939 without interruption, wrote a petition to Yıldız Palace requesting permission to distribute her journal in Lebanon.10 In her petition, Hāshim wrote that this journal, published by Ottoman women for daughters faithful to the empire and discussing issues purely “Ottoman” in content (Risâle-i mezkûre sırf Osmanlı ve fevâʾid-i ilmiyye ve edebiyyeden mâʿadâ hiç bir şeyden bahs etmemekte), included nothing harmful that would require its prohibition.11 After the content of the journal was inspected, Hāshim’s request was accepted by the palace.12 As this example demonstrates, prominent women writers and women’s organizations in Egypt at the time were mindful of the political news coming from Istanbul, positioned themselves vis-à-vis a broader Ottoman audience, and were in communication with the Sublime Porte. Thus, in line with what Bloch (2015) outlined in his refinement of the comparative method, Egyptian feminism and Ottoman feminism should not be simply treated as equivalent or discrete units of comparison. Instead, an integrated approach that tells the history of Egyptian feminism in dialogue with Ottoman (and later Turkish) feminism, and then examines the feminist debates in Cairo and Alexandria in conjunction with those in Istanbul, would create a more complete picture, allowing analysis of the Ottoman heritage of Egypt as well as a sense of Turkey’s continued influence over the intellectual climate of post-Ottoman Egypt.13 This does not mean that the production of feminist knowledge was unidirectional or that Turkey was the origin of all feminist knowledge and Egypt merely its recipient. It means that “Cairo continued to have substantive legal, familial, commercial, cultural, and religious bonds with Istanbul well into the twentieth century” (Reimer 2011: 149), well after its formal separation from the Ottoman Empire.14In underscoring this common historical heritage and dialectic interaction, it is important to ask when and how we disentangle once entangled histories to create two geographic units without collapsing them into a simple, certainly not useful or desirable, center-periphery dichotomy. In the context of Middle Eastern history, this question holds especially true for the turn of the twentieth century, when nationalism began to expand in both centers, eventually leading to political and cultural separation. An integrated approach balances this separation with the continued interweaving of the two units, recognizing the gradual distancing and increasing independence of Egypt from the Ottoman center while also making a case for the continued legacy of the Ottoman Empire in post-Ottoman Egypt.15 Building on these connections, Egyptian feminists of the early twentieth century, for instance, leveraged the fact of Turkey’s burgeoning feminist movement to solicit the support of conservative voices who remained loyal to Egypt’s Ottoman past. They also advocated a continuing respect for the Ottomans as the defenders of Islam, coupled at times with a “certain nostalgia for Muslim unity” (Reimer 2011: 163). Thus the relationship between the two feminist movements consisted of not only the cross-fertilization of new ideas and discourses but also a complex engagement with deeper and localized roots, such as religion, history, and culture. Understanding the development of Turkish and Egyptian feminisms as grounded in a common historical heritage but subject to different political and reform strategies as well as responding to the needs of their respective societies helps explain the very different expressions that they ultimately embodied.As previous scholars have pointed out, a comparative historical framework always carries the risk of “flatten[ing]” or “homogenizing” the events “by overlooking subtleties and nuances that are specific to a certain time, place, and culture” (Allen 2006: 98). Certainly, a sound comparative analysis must recognize its own limits. A successful comparative approach, however, reveals the “uniqueness of different societies” (Sewell 1967: 210, 211) while also taking care not to mistake for “purely local” what is in fact “a general phenomenon,” and thus helps formulate new questions for historical research. In the context of Middle Eastern feminisms, some questions have arisen that can be addressed only through a robust comparison: Why was feminism considered radical in some regions but not others? What can be discerned from looking at the overlap between secular and religious discourses in articulating feminism in distinct sociohistorical locations? How can we situate two very different strands of feminism within a political history that created the possibility for unity across language and culture?Although transnational historical research can be a useful framework to reveal connections across particular politically defined spaces, it does not always account for the political structure of the Middle East prior to the 1920s. While historians often give preference to nation-states as units of analysis because they can be treated as “relatively closed entities” (Ther 2003: 46), in the nineteenth century only two major powers existed in the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire and the Qajar Empire of Iran. It was only in the twentieth century that the number of states increased almost tenfold with the establishment of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and others after 1925. In such a politically, socially, and culturally interwoven geography, a relational or reciprocal comparative analysis can better highlight how commonalities prevailed among seemingly distinct political units, while also emphasizing the underlying dynamics that created both similarities and differences. While this task is certainly beyond an individual researcher, a combination of comparative and integrative history can make a powerful contribution to the understanding of cross-cultural feminist formations in the Middle East in both their early and their contemporary forms.