6 - Translating Qasim Amin’s Arabic Tahrir al-marʼa (1899) into Ottoman Turkish

Summary

Introduction: The Context of Qasim Amin’s Translation into Ottoman Turkish

To most educated Arabs of the early twentieth century, Qasim Amin (1863–1908) needed no introduction. His work, Tahrir al-marʼa (‘The emancipation of women’, 1899), which was followed by his al-Marʼa al-jadida (‘The new woman’, 1900), had made him famous – as well as notorious – among Arab readers in Egypt as well as the rest of the Ottoman Arab provinces. Even people who hadn’t read his work were constantly exposed to articles commenting on it –praising, endorsing, critiquing, and occasionally savagely attacking it. As Ibrahim Ramzi, one of Amin’s contemporaries in Cairo, wrote: ‘When [the book] appeared, everyone talked about it – on the streets, in public and private social gatherings, among women in seclusion in their quarters, and in their visits [to each other], and between them and their husbands.’ Tahrir al-marʼa called for women’s primary education; deplored their confinement; advocated uncovering the face and hands of women, and thus limiting the covering to the parts of the body mandated by the shari‘a; and argued for a limited emancipation so as to produce better wives and mothers, both for the family’s and the nation’s sake. Indeed, Amin’s work, as well as subsequent discussions of it, equated Egyptian women’s situation with that of the nation. In fact, Lisa Pollard has suggested that

Amin’s agenda in The Liberation of Women and The New Woman had much less to do with liberating women than it did with exposing the home and its domestic relations as a means of illustrating that Egypt was ‘modern’ and politically capable, and, therefore, of securing a place for itself among modern, independent nations.

Tahrir al-marʼa was truly epoch-making, precisely because it generated such an intense and long-lasting debate – even if in fact many of its arguments had been made earlier, including by women, without provoking such controversy. As Marilyn Booth has pointed out:

It was Amin’s work that generated a furious and more public debate on gender than had been the case before. It was commentators at the time, not simply historians writing later, who gave his books precedence – including commentators who were knowledgeable about and sympathetic to women’s own contributions to the public debate.