Ottoman History Podcast - Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

with Susanna Ferguson hosted by Chris Gratien | What does the history of modern Arab political thought look like from the perspective of women authors? In this podcast, we sit down with longtime Ottoman History Podcast contributor Susanna Ferguson to explore this question, which animates her new book Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought. Previous scholarship has focused on the role of women in dicsussing the roles of women, but as Prof. Ferguson argues, women writers of the 19th and 20th century can also be studied as producers of social theory and commentators on the important matters of their era. In our conversation, we use the lens of public discourse about child-rearing or tarbiyah as a window onto ideas about a wide range of topics, including morality, labor, and democratic governance. In doing so, we consider the importance of seeing the Arab world as a source of portable ideas about modern society, as opposed to a merely passive recipient of Western modernity.    « Click for More »

So there's a large literature, as many of our listeners will know, that tells us about sort of the major intellectual developments in Ottoman and Arab thought from the 19th to the 20th centuries, which is often understood to kind of encompass the period of an intensified encounter with Europe, with European imperialism, with global capitalism capitalism and with state reform. I noticed in those canonical accounts that when women enter that picture, they really only ever enter as authors and thinkers on the question of women. So women are allowed to talk about women and men talk about everything else. We look to men for our theories of democracy, society, capitalism, imperialism, whatnot in the Arab world.

I wanted to think about what the history of modern Arab thought might look like if we looked at it from the perspective of women's writing. What other kind of history of Arab thought could we come up with? And it really started with a basic question, which was what were people talking about in the pages of the women's press, right? What were the issues or concepts or questions that they were, that they spent the most sort of page numbers dealing with? One of the things that they talked about more than anything else was this question of child rearing or Tarbiyye.

Welcome to the Ottoman history podcast. I'm Chris Grayton and you're joining us for a very special episode. It's one of our rare moments where we get to welcome onto the program one of our longtime contributors who's now completed a book of their own. Our guest is Susanna Ferguson. Susie, welcome. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure to record with you. We've recorded together a lot over the years.

You have, by my count, participated in roughly, I don't know, 50 interviews on Autumn in History podcast over the years since 2014, a full decade. It's a high number. You've been doing with us? Yeah. So it's no ordinary guest, but we are here to do what we do best, which is talk about a brand new book, Labors of Love, Gender, Capitalism and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought. In our conversation today, we'll center on the subject of child rearing,

but place child rearing, the raising of children, at the center of some of the big developments in the history of the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East, with a focus on the Arabic-speaking regions of the empire, especially Lebanon and Egypt. So Professor Ferguson, if I may start by asking you about the framing of the book, I'd like you to talk about the work you're doing here in concept history. Looking at the concept of Tarbia, could you say more about what this concept of Tarbia or child rearing encompasses for the period you're looking at and how it is distinctive

from any other word we could just use to describe the rearing and education and raising of children into adults? This is a word that's interesting for a couple of reasons. It travels like many concepts do with kind of sister concepts. So we could think also about the Arabic word talim, which roughly translates to kind of book learning or education. And also the older tradition of thinking about ethical cultivation is in the Islamic tradition or tahdi bil-akhlaq, right, which is also revived in the late 19th century. Tarbiya is different from those two words and came to my sort of interest and attention in part because it is the one that is feminized between about 1830 and 1930. This is the work

of the ethical cultivation of children, the upbringing, the raising, the formation of children that gets assigned to women in the home. And what that meant is that women writers came to occupy a sort of position of authority in defining what this work meant and what it could do. And that was the story I was really interested in telling through what I call a feminist concept history of Tarbiyah in the Arabic women's press between about 1850 and 1939. And as you said, Tarbiyah in modern context is laden with sort of a moral content as well.

If someone lacks Tarbiyah, it's synonymous with them somehow not knowing how to behave properly and having not formed into a proper adult. And I guess this notion of somebody lacking Tarbiyeh is a product of the time period you're looking at. But as you've said, what's interesting here is that yes, if we look at the women's press, they're focused on issues that broadly impact women

and women are clearly tasked with specific roles. Well, I should also say that itself is not something we should take for granted, right? That is a development of this period, or at least so I argue in the book. When you look at the classical tradition, 10th, 11th century writers on Tatibe-l-Ahlak, for example, they are talking about a process of ethical subject formation

that is happening in a kind of intimate relationship between a male sheikh and a male student, right? So we're not dealing with young children and women are not involved. So for example, in one of the prominent dictionaries of the mid 19th century from 1863, Arabic English Dictionary by Edward Lane, Tarbia still very much has this kind of masculine subject. The entry reads something like, you know,

for Tarbia, he raised, he reared, he fostered, i.e. his child, right? So it's still a he agent. By the 1880s, what you start to see, partly through the work of women writers and male theorists writing about women and women's work, is that this has become a feminized domain. So the idea is that women actually are the ones who do this work of essential ethical and political subject formation in the early years of childhood, or even in pregnancy, even in the womb.

And this transforms, I think, not only what it means to be a woman, right? So this kind of work comes to define this category of what it means to be a woman, but it also changes how people think about the political and social importance of this work of making a person. And that, you know, becomes really central, I think, to most of or many of the dominant ideological problems of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It dovetails completely with what we see happening in Europe and the United States during that time as well,

but would that have been equally true statement, what you just said about the medieval Islamic approach to Tarbiyye, would that have been true as well in Europe that actually it was sort of not ensconced in these like things we take for granted today but that are very modern that this is like a woman's like moral duty in the family or whatever. Yeah, I mean you can see in the work of philosophers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau a kind of interest in an emerging consensus about what is the work

of women's child rearing labor, right? And it does take on many of these kind of same valences of moral and ethical and political cultivation of men that you see in the Arab world. So part of what I'm trying to say in the book is that the prominence of this concept and this conversation in the Arabic women's press can actually help us to look again

at some of the sort of canonical debates in European or American intellectual history and view them in a new light. So one of the things I ask is what would a history of Tarbiyah open up for us if we asked it about France or about Britain or about the United States? And I think actually the concept and the richness that it is imbued with by Arab women writers could offer us a way to reread some of these questions of gender, sexuality, and reproduction within other intellectual traditions as well. We're going to talk more about that, but since you know you've already mentioned Locke and Rousseau and these figures, but also like talked about how your real goal in this work was to

see where women are active in the development of the times, you know, the big development of the times. And we'll remind our listeners of the title, Gender, Capitalism and Democracy. I was hoping that you could give us some brief background on the political developments or larger historical trajectory of the Middle East region during the time period you're looking at, because it is a very formative period in this region's history, overlapping and interrelated experiences of imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, and so forth. How do you periodize the political developments and how do they relate to these debates about Tarbiyah?

The way this period of roughly sort of 1830 to 1930 is talked about is, as you said, one that is marked by the intensification of European imperialism, right, with French and Italian interference in Lebanon in the 1860s and the British invasion of Egypt in 1882. It's also narrated as a period of global capitalist integration,

where commodities like silk and cotton and citrus build the Middle East or the broader Ottoman world into a global economy in a very unequal way. And it's also a period marked by war, right? I mean, big parts of the way that we think about this time have to do with questions of civil war. And then obviously if the coming of World War I, which brings the end of the Ottoman Empire

and the rise of modern Arab nation states. Tarbia offers us a really different story, right? And so I think about this as a kind of feminist periodization. How would we re-understand what matters about time in this moment if we looked at it from women's writing? And what we find is that obviously questions of nationalism and imperialism and violence are not absent, but we're offered a much more overlapping

set of concerns that at least the way that I understand it in the book kind of build on each other as the decades go on. So in the 1850s and 60s, what you really see if you're looking at this period through the lens of Tarbea is an obsession with civilization and progress, right? And women become kind of central, their upbringing work becomes central to a collective unit

and its ability to progress, you know, as one writer put it, up the ladder of civilization. By the 1880s and 90s, when you have women writers and editors starting their own magazines and penning articles for themselves, they make the argument that women's work is actually central to the construction of this new idea called society.

This idea that there is some kind of secular collective unit that needs to be shaped and formed if people are gonna live together. And they place women's work at the center of that project. And by the early 20th century, they are placing the work of women and the work of child rearing in particular at the center of what it means to labor, right?

So if we think about this as a period of expanding wage work across the region and a new idea of what it means for labor to be bought and sold, they are using women and women's bodies as a kind of limit case for thinking about what kinds of work can be commodified. And then by the end of the period, by the 1920s and 30s, when

you have the emergence of modern Arab nation states like Lebanon and Egypt, with hopes for full independence and popular sovereignty, but not yet the reality of it. Lebanon comes under French mandatory control. And while Egypt attains partial independence from the British after World War I, the British remain, you know, very involved in Egyptian politics after that. So in this period of sort of constricted sovereignty, Tarbiye becomes for them the essential way that they are going to make people for a free nation.

And so instead of these sort of questions of European colonial and economic penetration, and then the question of sort of violence and state collapse, which I think is the dominant narrative of the period as it's narrated in most textbooks and most history courses. What looking at it from the perspective of women and from the perspective of Tarbia does is to offer us this really different set of concerns

that build on each other over a period of about 100 years to place women's child rearing work at the heart of some of the major questions, I think, of modern social theory around the world. Right. And you give such great examples of how that's the case throughout the book. And as time goes on, a lot of the insights that these women writers are providing are really incisive looks at the times they live in. Which is to say that the framing you offer, for me as someone who has to teach this kind of stuff in classes on the Middle East, is potentially really valuable. We're talking about child rearing, it's something that people imagine is happening inside the home but in talking about it, it's all about what's going on outside the home. And it's not placing it in these like culturally essentialist or comparative modes that seem inescapable

in these conversations. I have trouble getting students to stop thinking comparatively about gender and family in the Middle East because they're trained into it by society, but also on some level I some level, I subconsciously have trouble thinking outside that framework as well. And so, you know, I was wondering since, since, you know, we're going to talk about some other stuff, but if you could give some examples of material from the book that kind of does

this and offers a new way of thinking about this, that isn't always reflexively comparative and kind of shows how the writers you're looking at are really talking about life and times without it being qualified necessarily by a cultural modifier. Yeah, I'm really glad you asked that question because that is, maybe I'll talk very quickly about my general sort of orientation towards that question and then give a specific example.

So in general, I also teach on women and gender in the Middle East. I think this is a course for reasons that would be interesting to discuss that's offered across United, US-based and Anglophone general universities, maybe more than any other kind of course about the region other than just a general sort of historical survey.

And I've always been disquieted by that. I think that that actually is a symptom of what you're talking about, which is that the questions of women, gender and sexuality are often used or framed implicitly in American context in a way that emphasizes what I often call the region's assumed belatedness and lack. So this idea that this is a place that is behind,

backwards, worse, different. And I think that this is true even of a lot of the really inspiring and groundbreaking work that has come out of, for example, anthropologies of gender and sex in the Middle East in the 2000s. Because what a lot of that work did, while it did a lot of amazing work to try to understand

the specificities of these different life worlds, for example, I'm thinking of Saba Mahmoud's work on Islamist women, which is a field-changing book and is read across by students of religion and sexuality in many different places. But what it did was to emphasize that this is a place that is valuable because it is a location of cultural difference, right?

This is where we can go to find ways of being, ways of thinking about life that are not subsumed into the same logics of European social theory and late capitalism that we now think have failed us. And we want to go out to the other parts of the world and find the things that are going to rescue us from that. And I really didn't want to be part of that enterprise, which isn't to say that it hasn't produced some really interesting work, but it's to say that for me, I wanted to emphasize how Arab women

have always been capable of theorizing their own social conditions in a way that is much more interesting than sort of Western assumptions and desires for them to be locations of sort of extreme patriarchy or something that's worse than wrong with sexuality. It's much more interesting to read Arab women as theorists and as interlocutors than as symptoms

of something that you already think you know what it is. And the second thing is that I don't want to look to spaces, intellectual worlds in the Middle East or elsewhere as repositories of cultural difference that can be used as a kind of salvage mechanism for the things that we now deem to have failed us about the way we think about the world in the West. So instead, what I wanted to do was think about

how are Arab women actually theorizing much broader questions that really are the questions of global modernity, right? So this is questions like the place of gender and sex in social life, the meaning ofity, right? So this is questions like the place of gender and sex in social life, the meaning of work, right? What does it mean to work in a wage society? The question of how do you imagine a world outside of colonial temporality, this temporality of sort of some countries being ahead and others being behind, right? So how can their thought and their production actually help

us to think through these questions that are by no means specific, or I should say they are specific to their context in the way that they are framed, but they are not unique. And they can speak, I think, to debates in the history and present of social theory that, you know, in ways that we have a lot to learn from. So let me give you an example. I just talked a lot to learn from. So let me give you an example, I just talked a lot. One of the folks that I learned the most from in my reading for this book was Libby Behashim,

who was the editor of the longest running women's magazine based in Cairo, or woman edited magazine based in Cairo, which was called Fatah Tasharq, the young woman of the East, ran from 1906 to 1939. And Hashim was editor for most of that time and also wrote many articles in the journal. In 1911, she becomes one of the first women

to give a series of lectures from the stage of the newly founded Egyptian University in Cairo. And the subject of that lecture series is, not surprisingly now to our audience, Tarbiye, right, is the upbringing of children. And so in that lecture series, which is later published as a book, she covers kind of like every possible aspect

of what it means to raise a child. But she's particularly interesting on the question of breastfeeding, which is not a thing that comes up usually when you talk about social theory, right? If you look at books, like if you looked at like summary books of like modern social thought,

like I haven't done this, but I imagine that the word breastfeeding rarely appears. But in the history of social thought through Tarbiya, breastfeeding is a key site where women writers like Hashim are trying to suss out what is the line between kinds of work that can be bought and sold, right? Kinds of work that can be commodified, that can be alienated and kinds of work that cannot.

And they do this in a really interesting way. And obviously these are middle-class women who are speaking to kind of emergent concerns about whether or not it's okay to hire a wet nurse. And I should say that this is a practice that historians of the Arab East and the Muslim world have documented was kind of not a big deal in previous centuries, right?

This was a normal thing that you could find in like marriage contracts that would like, they would hire a wet nurse and there's no big deal. That is not the case by the early 20th century. Women like Labiba Hashim are on a war path about breastfeeding. They are like, this is work that you cannot alienate. This is work that cannot be bought or sold

because it is about moral cultivation, right? So there's something about embodied, morally foundational women's work that defies the logic of commodified labor. So I'll just read you a very quick quote from her 1911 lectures. And she's talking here about why it's so terrible to pay someone to breastfeed your child. And she says, the working class woman who you would hire to do this work was not, quote, not only ignorant of the rules of health, but she does not feel the loving

tenderness that leads mothers innately to look after their children, end quote. So in other words, for her, by virtue of the fact that they are waged, right, by virtue of the fact that they are paid for this work, the woman becomes untrustworthy, right, Precisely because of the wage. So she goes on to say, you know, if this wet nurse becomes sick or is unwell or her milk dries up for some reason, and this is the rest of the quote,

she might hide it out of necessity because she does not want to be fired or to lose her salary. And instead she'll feed the child something hard for him to digest, right? So the idea here is that this question of breastfeeding becomes this line between what can and can't be waged in a society that's being transformed by, we're told by the literature, the rise of global capitalism

and the expansion of the idea and then later the reality of waged work, right? So this is a way in which we can look closely at the concerns that come to the fore through Arab women's thought in their writing and use those questions to actually go back to some of the canonical questions of the 20th century, like what the heck is waged work?

Why can some work be paid for and other work isn't? What does that mean for us as a society? Were there other feminist writers at the time who said that wet nursing is actually important because it liberates mothers from something or that there is nothing wrong with this being a indeed respected waged profession that also enables women to put their pursuits elsewhere?

That's a great question. I did not find that in the text that I read. It does not mean it doesn't exist, but it wasn't in the women edited magazines, articles on Tarbiyah, which is an interesting, if true would be an interesting reflection. I would expect arguments like that to come to the fore maybe later in the history of our feminist thought

when questions of sort of women's wage work rise to the fore again after World War II under the sort of emergence of state feminism under Gamal Abdel Nasser. I think the other reason that that might not have happened if indeed it didn't happen or at least the reason it might not have appeared in these texts is because they're,

the women that I'm writing about by and large, I mean, some of them were part of what has been known, become known as the Arab feminist movement, right? So women like Julia Dimashkiye, who was a theorist of Tarbiye, was also an active proponent of women's rights in other domains. But not all of them were.

And I think in many ways, contemporary readers of this book will find many of these women to seem kind of retro, because they're not all suffragettes, they're not all defendants of women's right to work outside the home. They are invested in a deeply kind of heteropatriarchal complementarity vision,

where women's work is this kind of work of moral cultivation and child rearing, and then that means that they can't be politically active in other ways. And so I think that there was in some ways a disconnect between this tendency of women's writing and the tendency that is more often, and about which frankly there's a lot more scholarship

of what we call Arab feminism, right? So the women who are making cases for changing the status of women in ways that are recognizable as feminist today. And what you just said, I mean, to the point about social theory, I mean, a lot of the social theory that we often draw on could actually be argued is quite conservative or regressive, or however you wanna put it,

like very invested in a hetero patriarchal world that is, and indeed that theory generally tends to be theory want to put it, like very invested in a hetero patriarchal world that is, and indeed that theory generally tends to be theory that reflects the perspectives of elite white men. By the same token, you point out in your book that the class of people who seem to be most interested in writing and theorizing Tarbiyyat are elite and specifically the emerging middle class that is defining itself in a very middle class way through questions like Tarbiyah. And so we can see that reflected in the example you gave.

But you also say in the book that we don't want to reduce this to class, that actually just seeing this in sort of a Bordusian kind of manner as a form of distinction, like good middle class people raise their kids right, lower class people raise their kids wrong, that there's more to the story than that. Can you elaborate on that? AMBER It's absolutely the fact that the discourse about Tarvya is part of an emerging project of class distinction. Lots of other folks have made, or various other folks have made this point, maybe Ken Kuno most explicitly, in the sense that exactly what you described, right? And this is also not a phenomenon that's unique to the Islamic world or the Middle East, right?

These questions about what good mothering looks like, who can mother, who mothers right, who mothers in a pathological way, right? These are deeply embedded in class distinction, also in the contemporary United States as elsewhere. So there's no question that that's part of the story, and that we have to bear in mind that these are women writing by and large from an emerging middle-class subject position where they're trying to define themselves against the working class,

as we saw in the Libyei Behasim quote I just gave, but also against the elites, because the elite families in Egypt, for example, are the ones who have tons of wet nurses and nannies and maids and, you know, they're not engaged in the kind of labor of bourgeois domesticity, right? So we can see it very much in that light. The point that I want to make, though, is that that's true of every text that we read. Every text that we read in any language in any place is the product of a certain set of social conditions and in some ways reflects them and it's important to think about that. But when is that the end of the story, right?

When we read Marx or when we read Plato or when we read, you know, Chris Creighton, we don't sit and think, oh, well, you know, I know how much money their family had and I know sort of where they sat in society and therefore I don't really need to read the book because I already know kind of exactly what it's gonna say and I have nothing to learn from this, right?

So what I'm, basically what I'm saying is that it's a starting point to frame the social conditions of intellectual production, but it's not the end. If we go on to think about what would it mean to read Theorists of Tarbia, Arab women, in the same way that we read Karl Marx or John Smith or Chris Grayton or any number of people engaged in you know reading and writing um we might learn a lot of things about the world that they lived in

and the world that in many ways they helped to form it's that part of the story that is the most interesting for me. Right and this this comes back to this question of social theory and you know I appreciated the citation, but I think we've already talked about multiple occasions that when I'm being cited as a social theorist, I prefer the pronunciation of Gratian because a social theorist should have a name like Gratian or Foucault or Bourdieu or Deleuze or Debord and so forth.

And what I'm getting at, and this is maybe we're stepping a little bit away from the book, but I think this is an important conversation to have and you're the right person to talk to about it. Academics and humanities and social sciences draw pretty heavily on what we call social theory. And for the past decades, there's been a real crisis over the fact that the established social theorists that people keep coming back to tend to be elite European men. And even that some of the new stuff that's been developed back to tend to be elite European men. And even that some of the new stuff that's been developed

seems to somehow have to find its way back to Hegel or find its way back to some of these more canonical figures. I think that that's all accurate and true. And I think in part, what I am trying to say is that we need to widen our sort of possible interlocutors, right? Which is not to say that I don't find it useful to read and think with many of the folks that you mentioned.

And you know, I'm also, I want to be really clear that I'm not like a social theory nativist. Like I don't think that like Arab women's social theory is better to describe the Arab world because it's Arab or whatever. I actually think that concepts are useful based on what you can do with them. And it matters somewhat less to me where they came from in a certain way. It's sort of what they make possible to think and do

and why that's helpful for whatever project you're after. I mean, in my case, the project I was after was sort of reframing questions of modern social thought through women's work. So I found Arab women's writing on Tarvier to be more useful in some ways than things like Marx or whatever. But I also found other, you know, I found the work of Sylvia Federici and Nancy Fraser to also be really useful, right? So it's about what concepts can do and not where they came from, I think. That's the most kind of compelling way for me to think about that problem.

But it is true that we have a very narrow range of people who we look to as theorists who can produce concepts that travel, that can be used to describe multiple contexts. And I think what I'm arguing is that we wanna broaden that number. We wanna, you know, if we say only this handful of, you know, elite European men or whatever

are available to us as producing thought that might travel beyond the like particular conditions of its original articulation, right? These questions of class and whatnot that we've been talking about. We really narrow our ability to see the world. I mean, again, I don't think this is like, and I say this in the book, I again, I don't think this is like,

and I say this in the book, I mean, I don't think this is like world changing possibility, but I do think that thinking and analyzing conditions of the past and present is a part of what it means to be a human being and also what it means to imagine how things might be different. I find describing what you're talking about as social theory really refreshing because,

and again, this is not such an academic point, but I'm like, if you look at the lives the men who have made our canonical economic and social theory red, a lot of them have this alienation from the stuff of life in a way that is weird. If you look at how Mark spent his evenings or how a lot of these lives ended up, you realize maybe in part the insight or the prescience these people had is somehow reflected in the struggles

they had in their own life. But also that is like where we're getting our canon. Again, it's not just that they're men or that they're from a particular place or class, it's that their life experiences they're having as they're writing this theory that then becomes portable and disembodied from them is very specific oftentimes. Well, and what's part of one of the things

that's specific about it is their distance from questions of reproduction. Right, and that's again why I find this particular conceptual universe that takes shape around Tarbeah to be helpful for my purposes, because this is a world in which a friend once joked that the sort of airport novel or airport self-help book version of this book

would be called, Who Will Watch the Kids? This is not a question that is at the forefront of Marx's mind for whatever reason, but it is at the forefront of Lebibah Hashim's mind. Who is gonna watch the kids while we're out there having voting and doing popular sovereignty and working for a wage and making a society and publishing in a free press and doing, you know,

making a nation, doing all of the big stuff that the 20th century is known for, the 19th century is known for, right? The Project of Ottoman Reform. Who is watching the kids while we do that? And who, to be more specific, who is raising the men and later women, for some people, who are gonna be essential to that project?

And that is the question that I think has gone under-theorized and ignored by many social theorists. Obviously, there's a rich tradition of socialist feminist theorizing that has put a spotlight on that question, but I have been amazed at how sort of weakly that has resonated into the halls of what Marilyn Booth would call

male stream social theory, right, men's social theory. So I'm inspired by that work, but I think we need more. Like you can't write a history of capitalism or a history of Ottoman reform or a history of the Arab liberal age of democracy without asking who is gonna watch the kids. And that is what Libiba Hashim and her colleagues have to tell us.

And that is something, I don't think that you can write a history of American left organizing in the 21st century without asking that question. And so this is a very portable set of conceptual tools. On this point, I wanted to ask you about the word that when I saw it in your title,

I actually was shocked. I see a lot of book titles, I know what they look like, they're all the same. And then I saw the word democracy in a place where I didn't expect to see it. Cause there's like a,'s like a cultural social history bent to this book and scholars who are interested in this topic for the Middle East

in the 19th and 20th century don't always want to foreground the question of democracy. And it's also, democracy can be a very bro-y question for various reasons to be brief about it. But I like the way you intervene in how we talk about democracy through this work. So, I mean, so how do we get there though? How do we get from the subject of child rearing

in the middle of the 19th century, who will watch the kids, which is a moral question, it's also a class question, it's also a practical question with women working more outside the home, to the point of talking about this very crucial 20th century concept of democracy. Yeah, well, I really appreciate that question because I included that word exactly for that reason. I wanted to surprise and annoy people, both,

I think, historians who shear away from the word in part because it is such an, you know, like an inchoate, like unformed concept, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. Like the question of when does democracy begin in the Middle East is a big mess. You can't, I mean, it depends on who you ask or a million possible periodizations. And in part, it's because what we now know is democracy or what we think we know,

I actually don't think anybody knows. I mean, maybe some of our listeners have definitions at hand, but I think there's actually a huge amount of variety in what people think they're talking about when they use the word democracy, even in contemporary political science or whatever. They have many sub definitions, let's say.

So it annoys historians for that reason because it's very slippery. Like, when does it start? What can we call democracy? What isn't stressful to periodize? But it also, I think I wanted to send up a flag precisely to the people who write about the question of democracy in the Middle East,

which is often written about in the same vein as the question of women and sexuality that we talked about earlier, right? So democracy is another site where the Middle East is assumed to be weird, culturally specific, you know, belated, lacking, right? There are all these like indexes. And I wanted to ask the question of like,

well, what is this democracy that we think we know what it is and find it lacking? And I do know that political scientists have their own sort of metrics that they've created from their own minds. But I wanted to ask, well, what could this thing have meant to people in Egypt in 1919, 1920, right? So Egypt becomes independent from the British in 19, partially independent from the British in 19,

partially independent from the British in 1919 for the first time. So they are now, you know, Egyptian elites and middle classes are now in charge of a state that has actual popular sovereignty to a degree for the first time, right? And they're faced with a serious problem. Like what is this thing where people vote?

Like it's what journalist Rashid Rida called in 1908 after a similar moment in the Ottoman world, the Ottoman constitutional revolution, the rule of the community by the community. Like what the heck is that? How does it work? Who votes for what? How do we know people are going to vote for the right thing? What if they don't vote for the right thing? I mean, again, these are questions that are not gone, right? I mean, we are in, you know, scholars based in America in 2023. I mean, how do you know people are gonna vote for the right thing in a democratic election?

Very stressful problem, right? I mean, you just call one of them the democratic party and it solves it. That's right. Well, yeah. No, I mean, the Egyptians definitely tried that. They had all kinds of names for different parties and they actually had a really vibrant debate

about the role of the party. But anyway, that's another story. So what I wanted to say was that actually what I found when I looked at what happened to the concept of Tarbiya in the 1920s and 30s, particularly in Egypt, which is in this situation, sort of popular sovereignty for the first time, is that it becomes essential to how people are thinking

about this problem of democracy. And the problem is this, and I'll just put it really bluntly, as anybody, as everybody knows, people are not born free and self-owning like they need to be for their votes to legitimate the state, right? That's the deal that we apparently make according to, you know, social theorists and democracy. We give up our autonomy and freedom, you know, through this process of representation in which we sort of freely and self-owningly choose to vote in a certain way. But the problem is nobody's born able to do that, right? And so what comes in to fill the

gap? Well, it's the moral, ethical, feminized work of child rearing and cultivation that has been framed in the preceding decades through this concept of Tarbiyeh, right? So it's actually women's work in making people, making men in this context, because it's only men who have the vote in Egypt as in many other countries in the 1920s and 30s, including France, I might add, that is gonna sort of like bridge the gap between the squalling infant who doesn't know anything

and the free self-owning man who's gonna cast his sort of reasoned vote for the right kind of politics. And again here it's important that these people are elites and middle classes, right? So they are not populists. They are not interested in, you know, unformed, immoral, criminal, unlettered peasants casting votes for people who are not like them. This is not a future that they want to see in any way, right? And so Tarbiya becomes in many ways a mechanism of control.

And in the words that they would put it probably of social cultivation of formation into a society, which again, is not a thing that is gone, right? I mean, I think that we still think about education in these terms, it's about making citizens. And so part of what I think the concept of Tarbiya does for us is it puts that question of what I call political reproduction in conversation with the questions we talked about earlier about work, right, about how do you make workers for a laboring society, which is obviously also feminized in what feminist theorists have called social reproduction. So Tarbia becomes essential to democracy

and it also becomes essential to capitalism. And that's what this history can show us. But to your point about our writers being complex, thinking individuals about the times they live in and not merely embodiments of a particular social class, on the point of women, some of your writers do push back against the way in which men are painting with a broad brush about women,

including maybe lower class, uneducated women who can't read and write, pushing back against the idea that cultural capital, like literacy and such things, or the ability to train a child on the piano is a one-to-one equivalent with raising, like, a proper political subject. It's like, no, a lot of us were raised by women who couldn't do the things that we valorized culturally and we turned out fine. So maybe you could, so that's kind of where we get into the feminist dimension of this discourse on Tarbiyer, right? Yeah, I mean, it's certainly one of the problems that they struggle with, right? Is how is it that we, this generation of middle-class women can be in charge of this work

when like our mothers were not like educate this kind of project of modern moral education or whatever has to start somewhere and so there's always gonna be the generation of mothers before who didn't have the tools and therefore like so how do you explain that? And that's a problem that continues to sort of possess women writers through the 30s. And I think it's actually a broader question that resonates in literary works and in other works,

what to do about the figure of the mother. And you actually see it in memoirs as well, the sort of way that women writers, especially like someone like Huda Sharawi who becomes a kind of luminary of the Egyptian feminist movement. I mean, she has a lot to say about her father and how he supported her education

and sort of brought her up in a kind of modern good way. But often the mother figures are absent or they're kind of like ambivalent. And so I think that speaks to that problem that they face on that kind of temporal glitch that they face. So the other thing that happens to the question of the uneducated woman, right? Or the women who didn't have the kind of benefit of modern Taibia that they're promoting and presumably

giving to their kids or having somebody give to their kids, is that this, let's say, kind of blurriness or confusion about where the roots of good Taibia actually lie. Do they lie in knowing how to teach somebody the piano, or do they lie in being a person of good ethics whose breast milk can transmit those ethics, which is indeed a case that some of them make? This actually comes to be a kind of position of power for women in the 20s and 30s as male state bureaucrats start to kind of try to seize this politically important work, especially in the era of popular sovereignty, of Tarbia for the state, right? So they start to argue that it's actually not these women who we can't really trust and we can't really surveil

and we kind of think are not doing a great job. It's actually male preachers and school teachers and scout leaders who are gonna do this work of raising boys for the nation, right? And women, I think, are able to push back on that precisely because of the kind of figure of the unlettered or uneducated woman who is nonetheless of strong moral character, right?

And that moral character, that loving tenderness that Libby Behasim talked about is, for some of them, what's really at the heart of this process, right? So it's not about what you know, it's not something that some male bureaucrat who's hired and surveilled by the state apparatus can do. It's something that actually resides within the woman's body and within the woman's heart. And that is the kind of ground that they're left standing on as these male bureaucrats kind of come to try to take over this position of power and authority that I think has been sort of unwittingly

ceded to women in the preceding decades. And to reiterate your point, your larger point, that you make in the introduction of the book and that you've been hammering home, you know, for those who are like, wow, this sounds like really familiar to like what I already know from American history with some differences, as you state,

like it's important for us to think of Beirut or Cairo as equally being the center and the source of history and not just, you know, the recipient or somehow in a comparative context. But I think I want to endorse the perspective that writing in English in the context we're writing in the 21st century that perhaps like Cairo and Beirut are even more the place we need to put at the center if we really want to think outside the box about these questions. I don't know, maybe you could say because this is such a culturally non-specific topic that has been talked about in a really culturally specific way, what your view of the point of doing this kind of work is

for a larger discussion about history? So I'll make two points. The first is that I don't understand the concept of Tarbe to be culturally specific, but I do understand it to offer something to the way that we've thought about these questions of women's work and representation of sort of feminist histories of capitalism and democracy

that have been formulated from other places, right? And so many listeners will be familiar in some ways I'm sure with work on France or on the United States, which as you say, raises many of the same kinds of questions. What I didn't yet find in that work, and again, there may well be work out there that I'm not aware of,

in which case I'd love to read more and hear more, but what I didn't find in those combinations was a reading of these questions of women, capitalism, democracy, that could put together the questions of social reproduction, right? How to make workers for capitalism, with the question of political reproduction, how to make citizens for democracy, right? And to me, that nexus is essential, right? Because we can think of capitalism and democracy as two of the kind of dominant social formations of the 20th century of the modern age, right?

But what holds them together? Patriarchy, or if not patriarchy, if we don't wanna give it a normative valence, what holds it together is women's work and the category of women. And I think this is something that I did not find in works that deal with similar trajectories in France or Japan or the United States. This is what I think Arab women have to add

to that conversation that is new. And it's also what's essential, right? Because it's what helps us to understand why this project of binary gender has been so hard to unseat, right? Because it's what helps us to understand why this project of binary gender has been so hard to unseat, right? Why is it so hard to give up on the idea that there is such a thing as a biological woman? Well, in part, it's because the figure

of the biological woman has been placed at the cornerstone of the way that we live, capitalism and democracy. Without that person who's loving tenderness and heart and body and breast milk and womb, like make people into workers and make people into citizens, the whole thing falls apart, right? And I think that that's a pretty important intervention that women like Libby Bahasham and others mentioned in the book helped me to see. So that's the first thing I want

to say. The second thing to your question about why look at questions of modern social thought from Cairo and Beirut, it is my inclination that those are the places to look. And I had to think a little bit about why that is. But the thought that I have is it has to do then also with a third tenet of sort of the modern age, if you want, right? Which is colonialism, which is the emergence of formal colonial apparatuses and later informal ones that distribute resources across the world in a deeply unequal and coercive way. And so it then does not surprise me that we may find some of the most incisive analysts

and critics of that phenomenon from among the writing and thinking classes, right, which is whose work we have left that we have access to in many cases of the places that lived the brunt of that system. I mean, it's the people at the receiving end of that system who may be some of its most kind of inspired and incisive analysts. And I think we have done that to some extent.

I mean, people read people like Frantz Fanon, or other often almost exclusively male post-colonial figures in this light. But I think we could look back actually to earlier ages and say, okay, what is it that the people who experienced the transition to a kind of colonial capitalist society, like how did they analyze it?

What did they think was happening? Well, this is just one of the points that makes this book really a read for people who study the modern Middle East. And hopefully a few people who tend to not pick up a book with gender in the title will be drawn into this one. Not just because of capitalism and democracy being in the title will be drawn into this one. Not just because of capitalism and democracy being in the title, but because it actually gives us a refreshing way to look

at familiar questions. It was an honor to be the person from our robust team of Ottoman history podcasters to talk to you about your own book. And I look forward to learning from it immensely. Next time I have to teach the modern Middle East in just a little bit different light. Thank you so much for coming on the program. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. And thank you for everything you've done over the years to bring the Ottoman history podcast listeners who are in the tens of thousands.

Let's say there's many thousands of people. Our cultural reaches is broad. Who have benefited from the immense amount of time, the labor of thousands, let's say there's many thousands of people. Our cultural reach is broad. Who have benefited from the immense amount of time, the labor of love that you've put into this work and to really help scholars work shine and also engage critically and seriously with them. It's great work and it's all the more reason why people should go out and check out

your own labor of love, labors of love, gender, capitalism and democracy in modern Arab thought out this year from Stanford University Press. Thanks Chris. Thank you. Thanks to everyone for listening and until next time, take care. you