The editorial board of the Ostour journal of historical studies has prepared a special collection of studies on women’s history, spanning several upcoming issues. The dossier comprises a selection of essays examining the status, roles, and experiences of women in the Arab world across various historical eras, reflecting a diversity of topics, approaches, and source materials. This project contributes to the advancement of historical research on women and seeks to broaden interest in this field – an area that, despite receiving growing scholarly attention, has been overshadowed by other areas of historical inquiry.
This initiative stems from a growing awareness of the importance of women’s history as a vital gateway to understanding Arab societies of the past. Studying women’s history not only helps fill gaps left by traditional historical narratives but, more importantly, offers a more comprehensive perspective on the structure and transformation of these societies, by highlighting women’s roles, experiences, and positions within social, economic, cultural, and political systems. It also a re–examines deeply ingrained perceptions regarding historical actors, mechanisms of power, and social relations, thereby helping to reconstruct our understanding of the past in light of emerging questions and approaches in historical research.
Accordingly, the dossier encompasses a collection of studies addressing women’s history in the Arab world, across different periods and from diverse angles. It also features reviews of several recently published books in the field and a translation of a significant study on female historians in France. The latter is not intended to divert attention from the dossier’s subject matter or geographical scope, but is included as it offers the opportunity to broaden our inquiries into women’s history and to engage with alternative approaches to the field, thereby enriching scholarly debate and facilitating the use of comparative methods. This dossier does not aim to provide an exhaustive overview of the field or to cover every issue within it. Instead, it seeks to expand the scope of interest in the subject, to introduce some of the key research pathways within it, and to present examples of work that reflect the field’s vitality and the diversity of questions and sources within it.
In this context, the subject of women’s history prompts several observations regarding the current state of Arab historical writing.
The first concerns the limited attention paid to women’s history in general compared to other historical fields that have dominated scholarly interest – whether political, diplomatic, or military history, or the history of elites and institutions. Despite the accumulation of a significant corpus of knowledge in recent decades, the presence of women in Arab historical writing remains insufficient to allow for the integration of their experiences into the broader narratives of Arab societies.
Secondly, the volume of foreign – specifically Western – studies on women’s history in Arab countries exceeds that produced by Arab academia. The subject of women attracted early interest from Orientalists and Western researchers as far back as the 19th century, although this interest was largely rooted in perceptions linked to Orientalist views of Arab and Islamic societies. Early studies focused on issues such as the harem, the veil, polygamy, and the status of women in Islam, framing these topics as expressions of the East’s distinctiveness in contrast to the West.
This approach helped promote interpretations that reduced the conditions of women to generalized cultural and religious explanations, producing stereotypes that overlooked the diversity of women’s experiences and their varying historical and social contexts. However, the field has undergone a significant shift since the 1970s, with the rise of social history and gender studies which have examined the formation of relations involving masculinity, femininity, and power. This has shifted the field’s focus from merely examining the status of women to studying their history as historical agents – and subsequently to exploring their economic, social, cultural, and political roles within Arab and Islamic societies.
A third observation concerns the imbalance in attention paid to different periods in much of the existing scholarship. Researchers have focused attention primarily on the modern and contemporary eras; specifically on themes such as the nahḍa (the Arab “renaissance” movement of the 19th century), reform, colonialism, and nationalist and feminist movements. This has resulted in a scarcity of studies addressing the status and roles of women during antiquity and the medieval period, leaving vast areas of women’s history in the Arab world in need of further research and investigation.
Fourthly, one may note the overlap sometimes found between historical research on women in Arab countries and feminist activism aimed at the liberation of women and the defence of their rights. Feminist movements have played a crucial role in drawing attention to women’s issues and advocating for their inclusion in scholarly research, and feminist consciousness is not inherently at odds with the demands of historical research – provided that hypotheses are tested against sources and that researchers avoid selectivity and the projection of present–day concepts onto the past. Nevertheless, the logic of historical research differs from that of activism. Historians must proceed from their own questions, sources, and historical problematics, while drawing upon methodologies and approaches born of the epistemological shifts within the humanities and the social sciences. This can contribute to an understanding of women’s situations across various temporal and social contexts, avoiding the projection of contemporary perceptions and values onto the past, for the aim of writing history is not to pass judgment or to champion causes, but rather to strive for historical understanding and to interpret phenomena within their own specific conditions and contexts. The intertwining of the whims of the past with the biases of the present can distort one’s view of events.
A fifth observation concerns the institutional structure of historical production in the Arab world. Despite much progress in the field of women’s history in recent decades, its presence within university curricula, research projects, and specialized journals has remained relatively limited. This is reflected in the volume and pace of the accumulation of specialist scholarly output. This is linked, in part, to the apparently limited presence of female historians within certain Arab academic and research institutions – an issue that itself requires rigorous study to determine the extent of its prevalence and to explain structural factors within the Arab world’s system of historical knowledge production.
However, this observation should not obscure another reality – that the growing number of female researchers engaging in historical studies has not necessarily translated into a focus on women’s history. Like their male counterparts, these researchers have dedicated themselves to a wide range of historical topics and fields. Consequently, the limited production of scholarship in this area cannot be attributed solely to an absence of female historians or a lack of their institutional presence; it is also shaped by prevailing research choices and the ranking of women’s history within the priorities of Arab historical research.
In light of these observations, this collection aims to broaden the scope of interest in women’s history by highlighting women’s experiences across various historical periods, showcasing the latest research in the field, and fostering scholarly discussion of the related methodological and epistemological issues. It seeks to illuminate the diverse situations and roles of women across different eras and Arab societies, thereby contributing to a balanced historical understanding and reintegrating women as key agents in the making of history – rather than as marginal subjects within historical narratives.
In addition to material on women’s history, this issue includes other studies covering a variety of historical topics. The dossier comprises five studies that do not necessarily appear sequentially within this issue but are distributed among its other contents, in keeping with Ostour’s tradition of arranging studies within a given issue chronologically according to the historical periods they address. Latifa El Bouhsini examines the social status of women within the medieval Moroccan family, focusing on the system of male guardianship (qiwāma) and the negotiation strategies used to mitigate its impacts. Fares Atasi traces the expansion of girls’ education in Syria during the late Ottoman era, navigating the interplay between official reforms, grassroots initiatives, and policies of Ottomanization. Hoda Elsadda re–examines the history of the Egyptian feminist movement as a continuous trajectory of struggle and negotiation with the state. Slaheddine Ben Frej analyses the stakes involved in modernizing the Tunisian family, as well as the associated intellectual and social tensions, both before and after independence. Walid Cherqaoui explores the experiences of Moroccan Marxist–Leninist female activists during the “Years of Lead” under King Hassan II, addressing the questions of reflection, ethics, and nomenclature raised by documenting their history.
The collection also includes three book reviews, covering the anthropology of women, women’s freedom in contemporary Moroccan history, and Islamic feminism and post–liberation discourse in Algeria. Additionally, it features a translated piece on the history of women and the early female historians who studied it, in France during the 19th and early 20th centuries, as mentioned above. Collectively, these diverse studies present a multidimensional picture of women’s presence in Arab history. They situate the evolution of writing on women’s history within a broader context that draws upon other historical and historiographical experiences, while raising questions that the collection will continue to explore in future issues.
In concluding this introductory note, we extend our sincere thanks and appreciation to historian Latifa El Bouhsini, who prepared the concept note for this issue and contributed to reviewing several of the included studies, thereby enriching its content and enhancing its scholarly coherence.
