Islam, Gender, and Colonialism

Catalog description

In the latter 19th and early 20th centuries South Asians became increasingly concerned with women’s education and other social issues related to gender. Following the fall of the Mughal Empire in 1857, the class of urban gentry previously associated with government service and land ownership struggled to shore up the boundaries of their communities. For Muslims particularly, as the place of religion was pushed from the public to the private sphere, the middle class sought to ground itself in a discussion of what constituted proper female behavior. Influenced by the advent of the Victorian purity text in the same period, Indian authors (primarily male) began to weigh in on female propriety. Nazir Ahmed is the most prominent author of 19th century Urdu purity texts, which sought to demonstrate praiseworthy female behavior. Students will have a chance to look at theoretical texts related to gender, as well as read primary sources of influential purity texts written by Nazir Ahmed and Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi. Playful and subversive fictional accounts challenged some of these reformist mores. Newspaper accounts contemporary to the period will also provide context on the gender debate. Male norms of comportment were equally crucial in the debate regarding gender boundaries – our discussion of purity texts will include the importance of male behavior, and the pleasure of transgression associated with crossing gender boundaries.