Islam and the Traditional Gender Hierarchy: 1983–1992

The ethnographic study of the relationship between gender and Islam in Turkey has a recent history dating to the early 1980s. This chapter analyses studies published between 1983 and 1992, which have common discursive practices in terms of their focus on how women’s subordination is legitimized by Islamic beliefs and traditions. The ethnographies produced by Carol Delaney (The seed and the soil: Gender and cosmology in Turkish village society. University of California Press, 1991), Julie Marcus (A world of difference: Islam and gender hierarchy in Turkey. Zed, 1992), Nancy Tapper (Gender and religion in a Turkish town: A comparison of two types of formal women’s gatherings. Routledge, 1983; Muslim travellers: pilgrimage, migration, and the religious imagination. Routledge, 1990) and Nancy Tapper and Richard Tapper (The birth of the Prophet: Ritual and gender in Turkish Islam. Man, 22, 69–92, 1987) constitute the initial discursive period, with several commonalities in their research questions and analyses. Even though the ethnographic discourse represented by these studies might seem too limited to be defined and examined as a discursive period, it is still possible to recognise and point out circulated statements and representations of gender and Islam in Turkey, the most important of which is the assertion that Islam establishes a gender hierarchy. The analysis argues, however, that these studies have predominantly Eurocentric and essentialist approaches to the subject. They represent Muslim Turkish women as victims of religion, patriarchy and traditions, and fail to consider the complexity and diversity of Islamic beliefs and rites. The lack of comprehensive contextualization and a dynamic historical approach to Islamic culture in Turkey leads to generalizations about a persistent and constant religious structure legitimizing the gender hierarchy.