Kadriye Hüseyin: A Forgotten Ottoman-Egyptian Female Intellectual

Who was she? And why was she important?

Aug 04, 2024

For my first post on the history of the Ottoman Empire, which I hope to integrate into my Substack moving forward, I wanted to write about Kadriye Hüseyin, an Ottoman-Egyptian female intellectual from the early 20^th century. She is actually not very well-known, even among Ottoman historians, but she is a very interesting figure who also has a personal significance for me, which I will explain later in this essay.

Who was she, and why was she important?

Kadriye was a princess from the Egyptian ruling family. She was a member of the Mehmed Ali Pasha dynasty that ruled Egypt between 1805 and 1952, and was born and raised in the Egyptian palace. More importantly, however, she was a feminist intellectual who wrote in Ottoman Turkish and made significant contributions to the Ottoman cultural environment in the early 20^th century, particularly on the status of women in Ottoman society.

And that is what makes her so fascinating.

Although she was a princess and a member of the Egyptian ruling elite, little is known about Kadriye’s life. For some of you, this may come as a surprise. It certainly did for me when I was first doing research on her for my dissertation. It does make sense, however, when you realize that back in the day, it was frowned upon for elite Muslim women to make their lives public. In fact, when Muslim women from elite backgrounds first started to write in the public sphere, they did so using pseudonyms, for fear of losing their respectability. It was only later that they started to sign their works with their real names.

Kadriye was born in 1888 in Cairo. Her father was Hüseyin Kamil Pasha, who would go on to become the “sultan” of Egypt after Britain, which had been occupying Egypt since 1882, declared it a protectorate in 1914.

(As an aside, I’m going to refer to her by her first name throughout the article as opposed to her last name, Hüseyin, which is her father’s name, simply because I don’t want to define her through her father. I want to give her back her individuality, so to speak, and since writing her full name every time I talk about her is cumbersome, I’ll just go with Kadriye.)

Kadriye married twice, both times to men from the Ottoman-Egyptian bureaucratic elite. She lived in Istanbul between 1922 and 1930 and went back to Cairo after Egyptian King Fuad summoned the members of the royal family and basically ordered them to reside in Egypt. After 1952, when the Egyptian military overthrew the ruling dynasty, Kadriye was tried along with the rest of the members of the ruling family but was released, and she died in 1955 in Cairo after a brief spell abroad.

This is pretty much everything we know about her life. Sadly, the same is also true for her intellectual background. Although she produced a number of important works, we don’t have a lot of information about her education. We can pretty much guarantee that she had private tutors at the palace who taught her Turkish, Arabic, and French. Her works show that she had a good command of all three languages. She was also familiar with works on Western philosophy, European literature, and different Islamic literary genres. She wrote a number of books in Ottoman Turkish while also contributing to the journals in Istanbul, especially on the “woman question” in the Ottoman, and the wider Islamic world. Apparently she was also a painter, as I had learned while I was working on this piece , which makes her even more of an interesting figure.

Before I go on further, I want to contextualize the intellectual environment Kadriye was taking part in. In the late 19^th and early 20^th-century Ottoman world, the “woman question” was emerging as an important issue that intellectuals felt an urgent need to address. Ottoman and Egyptian domestic life witnessed major transformations from the mid-19^th century onwards, including the transition from extended households to nuclear families. As a result, women came to be seen increasingly as responsible for the moral and intellectual development of their children who, it was assumed, would then go on to become productive citizens of the future and work towards the progress of the nation.

I may go back to this topic in a later article if anybody is interested, but for now, suffice it to say that women in the late 19^th century Ottoman Empire and Egypt came to be seen as the bedrock upon which the emerging nation would be built. As a result, there were great debates about the status of women in the press, while the political and cultural elite started to put more and more emphasis on the need to educate women.

It was not only men, however, who debated these issues. Female intellectuals were very active in voicing their opinions, too. They had their own magazines, aimed specifically at a female audience, and they were vocally expressing their opinions on the role that women should play in society.

Kadriye was one of the key players in these debates. She was a firm believer in the necessity of advancing Muslim women’s social status and argued that women’s progress was the most important precondition for the progress of Muslim societies. She did this, however, from an Islamic reformist perspective and took the position that women should work towards furthering the nation’s progress through educating the children at home as future productive and loyal citizens.

To better understand the way Kadriye approached the issue, we need to take a brief detour and talk about what Islamic reformism was.

Islamic reformism was an intellectual movement that emerged as a reaction to the crisis that Muslim societies found themselves in throughout the 19^th century, especially vis-à-vis European countries. What Islamic reformists, such as Muhammad Abdou and Rashid Rida, were arguing was this: they believed that Muslim societies fell into a “decline” because the Muslims stopped following the teachings of Prophet Muhammad. According to them, the time of Prophet Muhammad and the four caliphs who came after him was a “golden age.” The Islamic reformists wanted to return to this great time where, they argued, the Muslims excelled because they followed the principles of “Reason.”

This was not a full-on reactionary movement, however. The Islamic reformist thinkers also proposed to bring together the principles of Islam and modernity. They wanted to show that Islam was compatible with the demands of the modern world. In a sense, we can say that they advocated for a “conservative” path to modernity.

Kadriye was very much influenced by this intellectual trend that had a wide audience in Egypt in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. She also believed that the Muslim world was in a state of decay and argued that the only way out of this difficult situation was to return to the principles of the Islamic “golden age,” where, as she set out to demonstrate, women’s status was much more advanced than the period she was living in.

Her most important work in this vein was a biographical dictionary called Muhaderat-i Islam (translated as "Virtuous Ladies of Islam"). In this book, Kadriye compiled biographies of famous women from Islamic history and, using their life stories, advanced her own arguments on the status of women in Muslim societies of her time.

This book was published in 1913, right after the Ottomans suffered a truly massive defeat in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and lost huge amounts of territory. It literally presented a life-and-death moment for the Ottomans, where the future of the Empire was very much at stake. Kadriye perceived this catastrophe as ample proof of the rapid decline of Muslim societies and went on record to say that if the Ottoman Empire (and Muslim societies in general) wanted to survive, then they better make improving women’s status an integral part of the battle. And the remedy she proposed was pretty straightforward: look back at the golden age of Islam and copy, or maybe I should say take inspiration from, what they used to do (especially when it came to the status of women.

Kadriye paid particular attention to the idea of Muslim women’s education in the past. This was her way of addressing the contemporary debates that went on in the Ottoman world in general and in Egypt in particular. She gave multiple examples of educated Muslim women from Islamic history who played important roles in their societies. A classic case was that of Aisha, Prophet Muhammad’s wife, who was reputed to be an authority when it came to religious matters. Kadriye also recounted many stories of women poets from different historical periods, such as the Abbasid princess Abbase, who, according to Kadriye, was so highly trained that she was considered to be a scholar at the time.

Whether the examples she gave were historically accurate is mostly beside the point. What she aimed to do was to present a particular version of Islamic history to prove the point that Islam was not inherently an obstacle to educating women (as some Orientalists claimed at the time). Why, then, she also asked, were the women being deprived of education in her own day and age? What kept women from (re)gaining their rightful status in society? The answer, according to her, lay in the fact that Muslim societies strayed away from the principles and practices that made them great in the first place.

This was a forceful critique at the time. It did not mean, however, that Kadriye advocated for full equality between men and women. In fact, she wanted women to be educated so that they could raise better children, which, for her, was the most important duty of a woman. In that sense, she again proved herself to be a devotee of Islamic reformist principles. However, she still believed that women had a crucial role in the advancement of the “nation” as a whole even though she approached the issue through what we can now label as a more “conservative” perspective.

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