At once human and not human: Law, gender and historical becoming in colonial Egypt

Gender and History

Volumn 23, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 235-249

  Esmeir, Samera ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COLONIALISM; GENDER ISSUE; ISLAMISM; POWER RELATIONS; SOCIAL HISTORY; WOMENS STATUS;

EGYPT;

EID: 79960689779     PISSN: 09535233     EISSN: 14680424     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2011.01636.x     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 'AreWomen Human Beings? A Consideration of the Major Error in the Discussion Woman Suffrage', Harper's Weekly, 25 May 1912, pp. 11-12.
2. Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
3. This argument about the coloniality of the inclusion of the colonised in the realm of humanity and the law departs from accounts that only focus on powers of exclusion. The articles by Miriam Ticktin and Megan Glick in this forum also direct their critical gaze at governmental practices of inclusion.
4. Talal Asad, 'Conscripts of Western Civilization', in Christine Gailey (ed.), Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), pp. 333-52.
5. Samera Esmeir, 'On Making Dehumanization Possible', PMLA 121 (2006), pp. 1544-51.
6. Tantawi Jawhari, Ayna al-Insan (1911; repr. Cairo: Dar al-nahda al-'arabiyya, 1978).
7. Sylvia Wynter, 'Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation - An Argument', CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003), pp. 257-337.
8. John and Jean Comaroff, 'New Persons, Old Subjects: Rights, Identities, Moral Communities', in John and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South Africa Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 365-404.
9. I draw onWael Hallaq's work on the transition from juristic authority to state authority, which is not limited to Egypt. Wael Hallaq, 'Juristic Authority vs. State Power: The Legal Crisis of Modern Islam', Journal of Law and Religions 19 (2003-04), pp. 234-58.
10. Marianne Constable, The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and the Changing Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
11. H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).
12. Historians of Egypt have debated whether its history during 1882-1936 can be labelled colonial. This is mainly because Egypt was never officially declared a colony and because many of the reforms introduced at the timewere put forward by Egyptians.
13. Nathan J. Brown, 'Lawand Imperialism: Egypt in Comparative Perspective', Law and Society Review 29 (1995), pp. 103-26;
14. Nathan J. Brown, The Rule of Law in the Arab World: Courts in Egypt and the Gulf States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For a different perspective that articulated the coloniality of Egypt and that informs my work, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
15. Talal Asad, 'Reconfigurations of Law and Ethics in Colonial Egypt', in Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 205-56;
16. Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing and Liberating Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
17. James Bernard Murphy, The Philosophy of Positive Law: The Foundations of Jurisprudence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
18. Hannah Arendt, 'Decline of Nation-State; End of Rights of Man', in Hannah Arendt, Imperialism: Part Two of the Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1985), pp. 147-82, here p. 171.
19. 'Abdullah, Slama, Muqaddimat al-qawanin (Introduction to the Laws) (Cairo: Matba'at Ra'amsis, 1913), pp. 12-13.
20. 'Abdullah, Muqaddimat al-qawanin, vol. 1, pp. 24-5.
21. Ahmad Safwat, Muqaddimat al-qanun (Introduction to the Law) (Cairo: Matba'at al-Qahira, 1924), my emphasis, p. 171.
22. Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind have consistently argued against the dichotomies of agency/subordination and reason/authority. See SabaMahmood, The Politics of Piety (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005);
23. Charles Hirschkind, Ethics of Listening: Affect, Media, and the Islamic Counter- Public (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
24. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 153.
25. Abd al-Aziz Jado, Al-Sheikh tantawai jawhari: Dirasa wa-nusus (Al-Sheikh Tantawi Jawhari: A Study and Texts) (Cairo: Dar el-ma'arif, 1980).
26. Jawhari, Ayna al-Insan, pp. 29-30.
27. Jawhari, Ayna al-Insan, p. 30.
28. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 350.
29. Jawhari's invitation to seek the human as it extends beyond its corporeal confinement does not fully cohere with the politics of corporeal vulnerability that Ticktin and Glick critically assess in this issue. It is because women are thought of as corporeally distinct that their bodily vulnerability distinguishes them from the human.
30. The seminal work of Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985);
31. Omnia El Shakry, 'Body Politics: Gender, Reproduction and Modernity', in The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 165-96;
32. Omnia El Shakry, 'Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in the Turn-of-the-Century Egypt', in Lila Abu-Lughod (ed.), Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 126-70;
33. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, esp. Part 3, pp. 125-234
34. Mervat Hatem, 'Secularist and Islamist Discourses on Modernity in Egypt and the Evolution of the Post-Colonial Nation-State', in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito (eds), Islam, Gender and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 85-99;
35. Beth Baron, TheWomen's Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society and the Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994);
36. Margrot Badran, Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995);
37. Pollard, Nurturing the Nation; Wilson Jacob, Working Out Egypt (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
38. cite from the English translation of the two books that were published together as one book in English. Qasim Amin, The Liberation of Women, The New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism, tr. Samiha Sidhom Peterson (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000), p. 7.
39. In her introduction to The New Woman, the translator argues the view that the second book more openly espoused western analysis. See Samiha Sidhom Peterson, 'Introduction', in Liberation and the NewWoman, pp. 115-18.
40. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, pp. 59-60.
41. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 11.
42. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, pp. 115-16, my emphasis.
43. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 1.
44. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 14.
45. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 12.
46. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 63.
47. See e.g., Shibli Shmayyil, Kitab falsafat al-nushu' wal-iritiqa' (The Philosophy of Evolution and Development) (Cairo: Matba'at al-muqtataf, 1910). See also George Zeidan, Kitab 'aja'ib al-khalq (Wonders of the Creation) (Cairo: Matba'at al-hilal, 1912).
48. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 63.
49. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 188.
50. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 188.
51. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 188.
52. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 119.
53. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 119.
54. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 119.
55. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 126.
56. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, pp. 120-26.
57. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 121.
58. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 121.
59. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p.126.
60. Amin, Liberation and The New Woman, p. 126.