9 - Individualism and Political Modernity: Devout Catholic Women in Aleppo and Mount Lebanon between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Summary

Compared with the usual lack of documentation experienced by scholars studying the lives of Christian women in Islamic societies, the subjectmatter treated here rests on a large amount of documents dating from the midseventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. These documents deal with a group of Christian women, mainly from Aleppo, although some are from Lebanon.

This study begins with a presentation of these sources and the inevitable question regarding their authenticity and reliability. The fact that women's words have been delivered to us in written form means that they have been more or less reworked. The flood of words related by and about women, which could a priori be astonishing, might be easier to understand if it were put within the general modernisation and Westernisation process experienced by the Christian minorities in Lebanon and Syria (at least those who opted for the Roman Catholic Church and post-Tridentine Catholicism). As a result, the sincerity of these women's words is less important than what is learnt from them regarding the make-up of individual consciousness, the interiorisation of new social rules and the apparatus of power: the latter two not only offered public status to women, but even enjoined them to speak out.

The analysis of this process presented in this article was originally inspired by Max Weber who initiated the examination of the modernisation of postsixteenth century European societies.

writings about women and by women

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Western travellers and missionaries quite frequently viewed Eastern Christian women as being in an unfortunate position, similar to Muslim women. They never left their houses unless completely veiled in white calico, the colour and fabric alone distinguishing them from Muslim women. Married women also covered their faces in black crepe. This happened not only in towns where Muslims were in the majority, but even in villages wholly occupied by Christians. Women were excluded from education and political life and had fewer occasions to leave their homes than did Muslim women; they scarcely even visited the church. This picture must be corrected and nuanced by information about the role of women from judicial evidence, waqf and maḥkama documents. In the cities, at least, the position of women, as a whole, must have been less insignificant than outside observers of the time have led us to believe.