The above excerpt is from a 1917 intelligence report commissioned by the British Colonial Government’s Department of Information. The report explores pan-Turanianism, a political movement to bring the world’s Turkic and Turkish-speaking peoples into unity, as it related to pan-Islamism, a parallel political movement to unite Muslims of the world. The text discusses these two supranational ideologies as a source of tremendous anxiety for the British colonial apparatus precisely for their ability to transcend national borders and create lines of political mobilization that extended beyond the nation-state. The report went on to state that, in the regions of West and Central Asia, rather than being ideologically incompatible, “Pan-Turanianism and Pan-Islamism do not conflict with each other.”2 The fear of “a Turkish-Islamic State in Central Asia” uniting with Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan, the report noted, “would threaten India in the gravest way.” The text demonstrates how these lines of solidarity posed a physical threat to the British empire and an existential threat to the emergence of bounded nation-states coexisting in a new world order as determined by the victorious allies at the close of World War I.What struck my attention about this document was not its geopolitical paranoia, a truly commonplace feature in the British colonial archives of the time, but its mention of a woman, and by her name—Halide Edib. Several months of poring over the British Library’s India Office Military Records revealed that a reference to a woman for her political contributions was a rarity. This particular name stood out to me because earlier that year I had come across it in an equally unexpected place: on the pages of one of the first Afghan newspapers, Sirāj al-Akhbār, edited by the pan-Islamist reformer and Afghan statesman Mahmud Tarzi (1865–1933).3 Again, it represented one of the few times a woman was mentioned by name in the archive. The newspaper celebrated Edib (1884–1964), an Ottoman Turkish novelist and political activist in the nationalist movement, for much the same reason that she vexed the British. Tarzi, a reformer who drew on a transregional model of Islamic activism to articulate a vision for modern Afghan statehood, shared a speech that Edib had delivered to women at an assembly in Istanbul in 1913. He described her as a “positive role model” because she exhibited the progress of Muslim women in Islamic countries.4Both the British intelligence report and the speech reproduced in Sirāj al-Akhbār shed light on a rarely explored aspect of the lives of Edib and other elite women, like Mahmud Tarzi’s own daughter, Suraya Tarzi (1899–1968), who became the first queen of Afghanistan and played a role in the politics of the interwar Middle East and South Asia. Though hailed as nationalist figures—and often organizing for nationalist causes—their names, words, and bodies circulated transregionally and informed a broader discourse of women’s rights and activism. In this short essay I explore how tracing the lines of supranational “pan-” organizing from Turkey to the regional “periphery” of Afghanistan and on to South Asia offers a lens for mapping women’s movements (and history) in this critical period of anticolonial state formation. In turn, I contend that attending to feminist history adds a new layer to our understanding of transnational solidarities in this period.Pan-Islamism is a term of many meanings that carry colonial resonance. The word itself is most probably rooted in a British translation of the Ottoman Turkish ittihâd-ı İslâm (lit. Islamic unity), which described a growing belief among Turkish intellectuals of the mid-nineteenth century in the importance of reviving unity across the Islamic world in the face of colonial expansion. Of pan-Islamism, Johan Mathew (2017: 959) observes that British colonial officials sought to counter its transnational reach and thus “domesticated” it by denying it any legitimacy as a mode of political organizing beyond its use as a tool for disruption, a trend that has filtered into academic literature employing the term. Relatedly, scholars—myself included—have tended to “domesticate” women’s movements in the early twentieth-century Middle East by placing them within the default analytic framework of the nation. Yet a serious engagement with transnational political organizing involves moving beyond the limits of the national community and forcing the gaze toward the so-called peripheries of the Middle East—Afghanistan, Morocco—or toward new spatial conceptions altogether.When we look across and above regions in the interwar period, we find women moving beyond the boundaries of the nation in myriad ways. One of these women was Suraya Tarzi. As the daughter of the Afghan, pan-Islamist intellectual Mahmud Tarzi and Asma Rasmiya, a Circassian-Arab citizen of the Ottoman Empire, she herself was a transregional figure. Born in Damascus, Suraya Tarzi had been educated at home and spoke and read Arabic and Persian. She moved to Afghanistan during her childhood and later married the future monarch, Aman Allah Khan (r. 1919–29). Reflecting the couple’s reformist ideas, theirs was the first monogamous royal marriage in the country’s history. During her reign Queen Suraya carved a new role for women at the center of the Afghan state-building project. Much like her royal peers in Iran and Egypt, she spearheaded the development of educational institutions and charitable organizations (Paidar 1997: 104). Women’s education in Afghanistan was, in fact, in part made possible in the interwar period by the transregional circulation of women. Indian and Turkish women taught in the first school for girls, Maktab-i Mastūrāt, and staffed the first women’s hospital. Moreover, one of the few published eyewitness accounts of this school was written in Arabic by Hanifa Khouri (1929), an Egyptian feminist who visited Afghanistan at the invitation of the queen and wrote about her travels from the vantage point of a regional feminist solidarity (Hannun 2020: para. 10). Unlike other royal women in the region, when Suraya Tarzi spoke publicly about her efforts on behalf of women, her words resembled those of her feminist peers, like Edib and Huda Sharaawi (1879–1947). Her statements also echoed those of male modernist pan-Islamist reformers like Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) and Ahmed Midhat (1844–1912). Given the influence of the latter scholars on her father’s intellectual output, it is likely that she was well versed in their thought.Suraya Tarzi justified education in typical reformist terms as a means to encourage women to be more productive members of the nuclear family unit and nation, but she also went further and argued it was valuable for their development as individuals with the capacity to amass religious and communal authority in their own right. In 1922, in a royal proclamation announcing new state provisions in women’s education, Queen Suraya stated, “A man and a woman together form a complete human being, as the survival of both is essential for the continuation of the human race.”5 As she noted, each had different responsibilities. For the female half, this included child-rearing, managing the household, and preparing food, while the male half was tasked with earning a living to provide for their families. This statement, which looked remarkably similar to the reasoning published by her father in the pages of Sirāj al-Akhbār, was typical of both pan-Islamist and secular reformers around the region (Shakry 1998). At the same time, however, Suraya Tarzi provided an argument for women’s education that was distinctly feminist, Islamist, and more progressive than any advanced by her father. Citing the Qurʾan and examples from the sunna, she argued that, according to the shariʿa, women could serve as qadis (judges in shariʿa courts), a radical claim that is still widely contested (Jones 2019). In the same speech, she made a similarly feminist argument for vocational schooling as a means of “help[ing] women learn new skills and become financially independent in order to release themselves from total financial dependence on their husbands or their families.” In both cases, the nationalist and utilitarian arguments for educating women and training them in professional skills that were typical of the male reformist press of the time were overshadowed by a decidedly feminist argument for women’s self-reliance and individual advancement.Suraya Tarzi’s ideas were not simply in dialogue with the pan-Islamist press; she played an active role in that press by contributing her own writing to it. We find her words and deeds on women’s education and the veil published in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, English, and Urdu in the Middle Eastern and South Asian presses of the 1920s.6 In this way, ideas that challenged and expanded on the beliefs of male reformers regarding the purpose of women’s intellectual advancements spread throughout the region.Queen Suraya’s reign, which lasted until 1929, took place during a transitional time in Middle Eastern and South Asian politics. In 1924 the end of the Ottoman caliphate, whose existence had driven pan-Islamist organizing over the previous century, dealt pan-Islamism and pan-Turanianism a significant blow. States in the region increasingly opted to organize along the lines of territorial nationalism (Ahmed 2017: 205), and the nation coalesced as the default vehicle through which state actors wielded patriarchal power. The top-down, autocratic, modernizing projects of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey (Dogangün 2019) and Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran (Najmabadi 2000) typified this trend. As a result, toward the end of the 1920s feminists in the Middle East started to transcend the nation as well as the national more formally in their organizing against patriarchy.This brings us back to Edib, whose work on behalf of the Ottoman state in the early decades of the twentieth century began this essay. After fighting for Turkish nationalism through the early 1920s, by the end of that decade she exhibited ambivalence about the national project because of its failures toward women. In particular, she was critical of Atatürk’s patriarchal nationalism (Göknar 2013). It was on a trip to India in the 1930s, a detail that underscores the importance of women’s physical movement in building transregional women’s solidarity in the period, that Edib most clearly articulated how feminism transcended the nation. During a series of lectures delivered at New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia in 1935, she argued: “Though men may belong to differentiated groups called races and nations, the female of the human species remains the same. A man from Turkey may not be able to understand Indian men, a woman from Turkey will understand Indian women, and vice versa” (Edib 1935: 193). For Edib, feminist solidarity was predicated on the supranational notion that women faced concerns that united them, thus overshadowing national and ethnic allegiances.This same thinking animated the regional women’s congresses, which reached their zenith in the 1930s (see Robinson’s contribution in this roundtable). The Eastern Women’s Congresses of 1930 and 1932 and the All Asia Women’s Congress of 1931 brought together women from the Middle East and South Asia to build a new framework for advancing women’s rights (Mukherjee 2017; Weber 2008). This included Afghan women as well as figures like Khouri, who had visited and written about Afghanistan at Suraya Tarzi’s invitation in the 1920s. In their political organizing, the women who attended these conferences spoke for and as part of national communities but found an emancipatory potential in transcending these by reinforcing their regional, spiritual unity in opposition to what they perceived as the soulless modernity of the West.7 This idea echoed the earlier intellectual discourse of pan-Islamism, which sought national progress while underscoring the moral and ethical superiority of the supranational Islamic umma (community of believers). Indeed, when the organizer of the Eastern Women’s Congress spoke of a “chain of countries” whose women were linked from Japan to Turkey, one could hear Mahmud Tarzi writing in his newspaper of a united “religious nation” extending from Java to China to India to the Balkans two decades earlier.8The discussion above has gestured to how pan-Islamism and feminism are more united than scholars have thus far attended to. Important feminist reformers, like Edib and Suraya Tarzi, came to their political consciousness amid these supranational movements and drew on their discourses. Even before the transregional women’s congresses of the 1930s and the emergence of a formal transregional women’s movement, feminist ideas and the voices of these women circulated through the pan-Islamist press of the 1910s and 1920s. Like the pan-Islamist reformers, elite feminists of the interwar Middle East often had more in common with one another than they did with women of a different class or educational background who shared their national frames, an observation that reverberates in criticism of the internationalism of elite feminist movements from Egypt to Afghanistan today (Mahmood 2011: 37–39; Mir-Hosseini 2006: 645). From a methodological perspective, the transregional salience of pan-Islamism and interwar Middle Eastern feminism forces us to look above and between national borders. To get a complete picture of feminist movements in the interwar period, even within their national contexts, scholars must go beyond the linguistic and spatial frames of the nation.