In one of the interviews collected in Advocate of Dialogue (Ünal and Williams 2000:139), Hocaefendi (esteemed teacher) Fethullah Gülen cites “the wife of an English ambassador” who traveled throughout the Otoman Empire during the early eighteenth century as exemplary in her accurate understanding of the rights for women as established in the Qur’an.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who accompanied her husband on his embassy to the Ottoman court from 1716–18, learned that women under Islamic law could own property, could stipulate provisions in their marriage contract, and could ensure their privacy even from their husbands.[1] None of these rights were available to English women until the end of the nineteenth century, after which they continued to be contested.[2] Gülen’s citation of Montagu, the remarkable woman who challenged the West’s distorted view of Islam with particular reference to gender, relates fundamentally to his abiding goal to promote dialogue between different cultural and religious groups, starting within Turkey during the 1990s and currently extending around the globe. Yet, one of the primary obstacles to this dialogue, despite Montagu’s interventions in the eighteenth century, remains the West’s distorted view of the rights and roles of Muslim women. As Leila Ahmed documents, the “Western narrative” from Montagu’s era onwards maintains that “Islam was innately and immutably oppressive to women, that the veil and segregation epitomized that oppression, and that these customs were the fundamental reasons for the general and comprehensive backwardness of Islamic societies” (Ahmed 1992:149, 151–52). However, as Sherif Abdel Azeem Mohamed establishes in his study “Women in Islam versus Women in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition” (1995) and as Montagu knew from personal experience, the Judeo-Christian tradition followed literally disadvantaged women to a far greater degree than did the Islamic.[3] The West’s distorted view of women and their rights according to the Qur’an thus functions not only to prevent interfaith dialogue due to inimical stereotypes, but also presents particular dangers to Western women who fall into these fallacies. More than once, women of Judeo-Christian backgrounds seduced by a false sense of superiority over Muslim women have been steadily deprived of their corresponding rights (Ahmed 1992:153).
In this paper, I pursue a dialogic analysis by considering Gülen’s responses to questions about women and their rights from an Islamic perspective alongside Montagu’s perception of Muslim women’s rights during her travels throughout the Ottoman Empire. This analysis seeks to correct the stereotypical tendencies of Western discourses on Islam, including mainstream Western feminist discourses; it also expands the challenge to the accretion in Muslim communities of customs that have compromised the full expression of women’s rights according to the Qur’an. Finally, in the spirit of Montagu’s quest for accurate knowledge about Islam in assessing her own tradition, this analysis turns to the limits of the Judeo-Christian framework for women’s rights. Ultimately, I hope this dialogue across cultures and centuries between Gülen and Montagu will yield a historicized analysis of gender able to promote the rights for women which both these exemplars advocated.

Fethullah Gülen on the Rights of Women

As Thomas Michel affirms, Fethullah Gülen has emerged at the forefront of a movement for “[i]nterreligious dialogue,” and more broadly a “dialogue of civilizations,” based on the principles of love, tolerance, and peace at the root of Islam (Michel 2004:i). As a respected teacher, preacher, and public figure for over four decades in his native Turkey, Gülen broke through numerous barriers to initiate discussions between otherwise separate religious and secular communities, first within Turkey and subsequently extending globally (Saritoprak and Griffith 2005). In addition to inspiring independent foundations, schools, and mass media based on these principles, Gülen continues to write prolifically about contemporary issues from an Islamic perspective. For instance, he addresses women’s rights, which has taken center stage in the so-called “clash of civilizations,” in numerous essays and interviews.[4] The controversy surrounding this issue has come from two sources in recent history: (1) the orientalist misrepresentation of all Muslim women as oppressed due to their religion, a view which gained force during the Western European colonial occupations from the nineteenth century onwards, and (2) the contemporaneous resurgence of what has been called “Islamic fundamentalism,” which like other fundamentalisms selectively deploys religious texts to enforce confining and discriminatory policies against women.[5] Gülen responds to both tendencies by drawing on his firm foundation as an “intellectual-ulama” or thoroughly trained scholar who seeks the fundamentals of Islam in a holistic reading of the Qur’an, with support from the Prophet’s Sunna, rather than in subsidiary commentaries or customs (Bulaç 2005:199; Tuncer 2006). His extensive education in the traditional Islamic sciences thus renders him an authority in a manner many modern pronouncers on Islam, often with dangerous consequences, are not.[6] Moreover, his openness to currents in Western literary, philosophic, religious, and scientific thought renders his message more accessible to a diverse global audience. Since the 1990s, in particular, Gülen’s views have been disseminated to Western, and especially English-speaking, audiences via the internet and international publishing ventures.
My sources for assessing Gülen on the rights of women consist of articles and interviews translated from Turkish to English drawn from archives on his website and from published collections of his writings. These sources represent the sum of Gülen’s views currently accessible to an English-speaking audience and should be supplemented by scholars conversant with Gülen’s complete works in Turkish.[7] Nevertheless, because one of Gülen’s goals is interfaith and intercultural dialogue, a focus on his writings translated for an English-speaking audience is warranted when assessing his intervention into current debates about the status of women, not only in the Muslim context but in the Judeo-Christian as well. Hence, I am interested in the ideals Gülen enunciates, which he presents as Qur’anic, rather than their implementation or lack thereof in Muslim communities, including those defining themselves as Gülen’s followers. Several sociological studies have suggested Gülen’s ideals may not be completely practiced in these communities. Only further field research can determine if this is indeed the case.[8]
Gülen’s views on the rights of women were first translated for an English-speaking audience in the collection Pearls of Wisdom (2000a). Using an aphoristic style, Gülen focuses on women’s traditional position as the first educators of their children and as those charged with “establish[ing] order, peace, and harmony in the home.” He continues, “at a time when some are in search of a new place for them in society, we would like to remind them once again of the unique position God bestowed upon them” (Gülen 2000a:52 ). Gülen additionally addresses the use of women as “objects of pleasure, means of entertainment, and material for advertising,” which he deplores. He rejects the focus on external beauty, exhorting women to focus on “the road of immortality.” Implicitly, he also addresses men who are prone to focus on externals, instead counselling them to turn their “familiar looks” to “instinctive feelings of contemplation” for what is immortal as expressed through the wisdom, delicacy, and refinement of his ideal woman. Hence, Gülen rejects the patriarchal logic that men’s desire is women’s fault. He is firm in asserting daughters should be deemed “very valuable,” and he suggests this valuing of women should be extended beyond the family into society (Gülen 2000a:53). Yet, Gülen remains critical of modern “champions of women’s rights and freedoms” who reduce such liberty to sexual license, as in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States (Gülen 2000a:54). Western feminists themselves have cast a critical eye on this conflation of liberty with license, noting such “rights” served mostly to extend males’ access to women while relieving men of their traditional responsibilities. However, feminists, not only in the West, have guarded against the opposite extreme of barring women from the public sphere in response to such excesses. With many women claiming their “Islamic right” to be educated and to earn a living, this early essay consequently begs questions as to what degree does Gülen support this resurgent movement and to what degree does he adhere to traditions that would confine women to the home.[9]
While Gülen’s stance regarding women’s roles outside the home remains ambiguous in this early essay, elsewhere he specifies, “although it is fundamental that girls be brought up to be delicate like flowers and mild and affectionate educators of children, due attention must be given to making them inflexible defenders of truth. Otherwise, we shall have transformed them into poor, impotent beings for the sake of delicacy and mildness.” Explicitly asserting the fundamental equality of males and females, Gülen concludes: “we must not forget that female lions are still lions” (Ünal and Williams 2000:310/. Even more tellingly, at a 1995 Ramadan dinner in Istanbul, to which only “a small number of women had been invited,” Gülen made a point of encouraging Professor Nur Vergin and journalist Nuriye Akman to give “short speeches.” In addition, Gülen “called Nur Vergin to his table from her seat at a table of journalists.” The report on this diner states that not all the women were “covered” (i.e., dressed in hijab, with a headscarf covering the hair and neck and loose clothing covering the body), and some were “strikingly dressed.” As the reporter notes, “just as this [recognition of women in the public sphere] led to an increased attack against Fethullah Hoca in Cuma’s latest issue, it was also perceived as a challenge to Islamic groups that don’t share his views on women” (Onal 1995/. Ultimately, Gülen’s commitment is to the truth of Islam, based fundamentally in the Qur’an, rather than to “feminism” as such. However, if, as recent writers on women and Islam have claimed, the Prophet Muhammad’s immense respect for women and unwavering commitment to their rights may be seen as “feminist” in the most basic sense, then perhaps Gülen’s views are more complex than his early essay on Women suggests.[10]
Gülen’s subsequent statements on women’s rights come almost entirely in response to questions from interviewers, though he has published some essays on polygamy related to the overall issue.[11] In a 1997 interview, subsequently published in Advocate of Dialogue (Ünal and Williams 200/ , he was asked about contemporary pressures to “separate men and women in society and in places of worship,” which the interviewer felt contradicted earlier Islamic practices, particularly in a Turkish context. Gülen concurs, “women and men prayed together in mosques during the time of the Prophet,” meaning women were not barred from mosques, though men and women did not pray shoulder to shoulder (Ünal and Williams 2000:139). As he elaborates, while women may be exempted if they so choose from “perform[ing] their prescribed prayers in mosques,” they “should not be banned if there is no justifiable reason for banning them.” In other words, he refutes the faulty logic that exemption, initially motivated by consideration for women who had childrearing responsibilities, constitutes exclusion, which would be an unwarranted discriminatory practice against all women. He supports this conclusion by adding an account from the time of the Caliph ‘Umar, when a woman in the congregation challenged the Caliph’s interpreting a particular verse of the Qur’an to the financial detriment of women. Famously, the Caliph admitted he had “‘erred, and the woman spoke the truth.’” Gülen concludes this interview by stressing his concern, which he repeats elsewhere, that “secondary issues,” such as barring women from mosques or requiring them to cover their heads, have overshadowed the core requirements of Islam, starting with the five pillars of the witnessing to God’s oneness and the Prophet’s message, prescribed prayer, fasting during Ramadan, the payment of zakat in charity, and pilgrimage to Mecca if possible (Ünal and Williams 2000:14.[12]
Elsewhere Gülen was asked even more pointed questions about women’s rights and roles in the public sphere. He begins by establishing the reciprocity between man and woman based on his reading of the Qur’an: “Man without woman, or woman without man cannot exist; they were created together.” Hence, “Man and woman complement each other” (Ünal and Williams 2000:138).[13] In The Messenger of God: Muhammad (2005a), Gülen states his view even more strongly:
Women are secondary beings in the minds of many, including those self-appointed defenders of women’s rights as well as many self-proclaimed Muslim men. For us, a woman is part of a whole, a part that renders the other half useful. We believe that when the two halves come together, the true unity of a human being appears. When this unity does not exist, humanity does not exist—nor can Prophethood, sainthood, or even Islam. [Gülen 2005a:162]
Gülen acknowledges potential differences between men and women: for instance, “men usually are physically stronger and apt to bear hardship, while women have deeper emotions; they are more compassionate, more delicate, more self-sacrificing.”[14] However, such differences should not become grounds for hierarchy. Again drawing on the Qur’an, Gülen confirms, “God created everything, from sub-atomic particles to human beings, in pairs to form a unity” (Ünal and Williams 2000:138). The radical nature of these claims for a Western audience, which are really claims from the Qur’an, can only be appreciated if we recall that in the Judeo-Christian tradition Eve is seen as derivative of Adam and the source of all evil as the instigator of the Fall (Genesis 3; 1 Timothy 2:11–15). One of Montagu’s near contemporaries, the great seventeenth-century English poet John Milton, summarized the Western view in his epic poem, Paradise Lost, when he declared of Adam and Eve: “He for God only, she for God in him” (Book 4, line 299).[15] Such a view, which formed the basis of discriminatory cultural, legal, religious, and social practices against women in the West for centuries, runs completely contrary to Gülen’s model of equality in complementarity, which is based in the Qur’an. 1992:42–43; Stowasser 1994:25–38; Wadud 1999:19–20; al-Disuqi 1999:7–8; Barlas 2002: 40, 135–39).
Moreover, Gülen’s assessment of the differences between men and women runs counter to a second discriminatory tradition in the West: the authoritative classical Greek legacy epitomized by the philosopher Aristotle.[16] Aristotle opined that women were “imperfect men,” hence incomplete beings inherently subject to subordination and enslavement. Moreover, his hierarchy hinged on the association of reason with men, and emotion, deemed an inferior quality, with women. Gülen does not reproduce this hierarchical model of gender difference, instead specifying that in general greater physical strength characterizes men and in general deeper emotions, such as compassion, characterize women. Such emotion, therefore, is not seen as weakness, as in the Aristotelian tradition, but as civilizing. Reason, moreover, is not exclusively men’s province, but is shared by the human pair. In response to questions about “the female role,” Gülen further clarifies: “in the social atmospheres of Muslim societies where Islam is not ‘contaminated’ with customs or un-Islamic traditions, Muslim women are full participants in daily life” (Ünal and Williams 2000:138). Since the Islamic world of the Middle Ages shared in the classical Greek legacy, some of those contaminations are similar to those that have shaped the Western tradition. To counter these un-Islamic accretions, Gülen cites as a role model ‘A’isha, one of the Prophet’s wives, who “led an army” (more accurately translated as “was one of the leading figures” in the army) and “was a religious scholar whose views everyone respected.”[17] He reiterates the point he made in an earlier interview that “women prayed in mosques together with men” and “an old woman could oppose the caliph in the mosque in a judicial matter.” He finally responds, “there’s no reason a woman can’t be an administrator,” and “Hanafi jurisprudence says that a woman can be a judge.” It is in this interview that Gülen cites “the wife of an English ambassador” to the Ottoman Empire, who during the eighteenth century “highly praised the women and mentioned their roles in Muslim families and society with admiration” (Ünal and Williams 2000:139). This woman was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose understanding of women’s rights in her Turkish Embassy Letters I shall explicate in the next section of this essay.[18] Gülen’s most recent discussion stresses that he does not promote excluding women from specific roles: “The contribution of women in certain fields of life is not banned in Islam, provided the physical conditions have been taken into consideration and their working conditions are suitable.” He reiterates, “women have indeed contributed in every field of life (throughout history). For instance, they were allowed to participate in battles; their education was not only desired, but actively sought and encouraged.” Gülen cites many instances of such women, not restricting his examples to the Prophet’s wives. He concludes, “In Islam, there is no such thing as limiting the life of women or narrowing their fields of activity.” The restrictions on women in Muslim communities, he stresses, must be seen in light of customary practices and political agendas that are not necessarily Islamic. “Women,” Gülen underscores, “can assume any role.” However, his focus ultimately, for men as well as women, is on “ful[filling] their faith” rather than achieving worldly ends. Hence, “there may be some women who can fulfill their faith while employed in the public service, while others at home may fail in observing the faith fully.”[19]
Gülen is categorical in asserting that women are not limited to—or, in the interviewer’s terms, imprisoned in—the home. He also refutes the fallacy that women are inferior to men, which has marred the discourse of many traditional scholars, by reiterating difference does not mean hierarchy. As he points out, the four major Islamic schools of jurisprudence, which developed more than a century after the life of the Prophet, were shaped by “the culture of the time,” wherein the expanding Muslim empires had incorporated the un-Islamic traditions of the Persian Sassanids and the Grek Byzantines, such as slave concubinage, seclusion of women in harems, and polygamy as a norm for upper-class men. Gülen even claims in some cases women may be seen as superior to men, citing the praise of the Prophet for mothers over fathers and clarifying, once again, that the exemptions the Prophet established out of consideration for women did not mean they should be deprived of their equal access to places of worship, the ability to make a living, consent in marriage, and so on.
Regarding prayer, he emphasizes “full submission” to God is its raison d’être, which, as he clarifies in other interviews, does not mean women should be barred from mosques, but that both men and women should ensure their modesty in such contexts. Regarding the headscarf for women, particularly in the Turkish context in which women wearing hijab were barred from public universities, Gülen recalls his advice during this crisis that the education of women was most important, and that the headscarf is not a principle of the faith.[20] Gülen also provides an illuminating example, particularly in the present climate when Westerners tend to equate all instances of Islamic hijab with women’s oppression, of his audience with Pope John Paul II, when a woman in his delegation was barred from the Vatican because “the Pope does not meet with women.” As Gülen rightly remarks, if the Head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs in Turkey announced he “meets only men, he does not accept women this would be headlines.”
Yet, Gülen may be too sanguine in his assessment of the veil in the Christian tradition when he states, “if alternations had not happened in the essential sources of Christianity and if the clothing of women, like the nun’s covering were mentioned in their present sources, they would not oppose the headscarf” (2005d). In reality, the connotations attached to women covering their heads are vastly different in the Christian and Islamic sources, with the Pauline letters specifying that women must cover their heads because they are derivative of men and the sources of all evil as daughters of Eve (1 Corinthians 11:3–10; 14:34–35). Such injunctions, which formed the basis of the household code in Western Christianity, resulted in centuries of oppression for women under Catholic and Protestant governments. By contrast, the source texts in the Qur’an that have been interpreted to account for women’s covering (whether that means “bosoms,” as specified in Sura 24:31, or also the head, as implied by the use of the noun khimar or “headcovering”) are not coded with similar denigrations of women as derivative or devils.
The first passage related to women’s covering actually begins with the command to men to lower their eyes and remain chaste, before turning to women, using exactly the same language, as well as accounting for the erogenous quality of women’s bosoms to apply additional advice. A modest society from a Qur’anic perspective, therefore, begins with men controlling their behavior and not, as some interpreters attempting to exclude women from the public sphere would have it, with the uncontrollable attractions of women. The second passage related to women’s covering in the Qur’an focuses on protecting women in a context of extreme sexual harassment, which was perpetuated by the men of the Jahiliyyah (Age of Ignorance), some of whom were hypocritically claiming they were Muslim. In a truly Islamic society, this passage implies, women would not be subject to such harassment; hence, the phenomenon of moral “guardians,” whether state sponsored or not, to compel women into compliance with strict dress codes seems to conform more to the practices of the age of ignorance. In summary, the fundamental message of the Qur’an is that every member of society should seek to be modest, both male and female, and that a society in which women are not harassed is ideal. Hence, hostility to hijab from Western women should be traced to the connotations of inferiority and subordination associated with veiling in the Pauline letters, which contrasts with the very different basis for women’s covering articulated in the Qur’an.
Gülen’s interview for The Muslim World (Sarıtoprak 2005), a prestigious academic journal focusing on Christian–Muslim relations, synthesizes his views on women’s rights articulated over a decade and a half in print: “Woman is equal to man in the rights of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom to live a decent life, and freedom of finance. Equality before the law, just treatment, marriage and founding a family life, personal life, privacy and protection are all among the rights of women. Her possessions, life and dignity are assured like that of men. Violation of any of these rights results in severe punishment.” She is therefore ontologically equal, as well as “free and independent before the law.” As for specifics, he adds that the stipulation regarding two women (really one woman, with the other to remind her) substituting for one man when testifying relates to “oral testimony with regard to financial matters and loans” and that this injunction does not apply to women alone, but to men who were inexperienced in financial matters during the Prophet’s time, such as Bedouins. It should not be extended as a universal injunction that women cannot testify to legal matters, nor that they are worth half a man (Sarıtoprak 2005:464, 465).
To conclude my explication of Gülen’s views on women’s rights, Iwish to return to an earlier essay, “The New Man and Woman,” first published in Turkish in 1998 and translated into English as part of the collection, Towards a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance (2004d). While in this essay Gülen does not address women’s rights as such, it is significant, particularly for a Western audience, that he pairs “man and woman” consistently as he imagines his ideal human. For Gülen, “These new people will be individuals of integrity who, free from external influences, can manage independently of others;” “Truly independent of any worldly power, they will think and act freely, for their freedom will be in proportion to their servanthood to God;” “They will think, investigate, believe, and overflow with spiritual pleasure” (Gülen 2004d:81). In the balance of this essay, Gülen stresses such people consist of women and men equally. Such inclusive language has been one of the major achievements of Western feminists, who were able to institute this shift only in recent decades. Hence, it may come as a surprise to many Westerners that Gülen is following Qur’anic practice, instituted in the seventh century of the Christian era, in using genderinclusive language. Indeed, it was in response to the question of one of the Prophet’s wives, Umm Salama, that the revelation began to convey in unambiguous language the fundamental equality between men and women that stands as one of the central themes of the Qur’an (Sura 33:35).[21] Fethullah Gülen, in his commitment to returning to these sources, even when they conflict with traditions that sometimes stand as norms in Muslim communities today, therefore becomes a champion of women’s rights by scrupulously following the path of the Prophet Muhammad.

Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters

Having established Fethullah Gülen’s views on women’s rights, as expressed in a decade and a half of articles and interviews translated into English for a global audience, I wish to turn to “the wife of an English ambassador” he cites as exemplary for her broadminded quest to seek accurate information about Muslim women’s status at a time when English (and other Western European) men regurgitated salacious images of “the harem.” Prior to examining Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, however, I must briefly survey the primary events of her life in the context of her society to establish a point of reference for her challenge to patriarchal orientalist clichés. As with most English women of her time, who were “understood either married or to be married,” the pivotal event in Montagu’s life consisted of matrimony (Klein 1992:28). As an aristocratic woman, Montagu could expect to have no say in this matter. The English upper-class at the time deemed marriage to be a property transaction, whereby the father of the potential bride “sold” his daughter for gain (Montagu 1993:xi). Montagu felt the injustice of this system keenly, particularly when she learned the man her father had chosen for her without her knowledge or consent seemed, in her terms, “Hell itself ” (Grundy 1999:46). Despite being barred from a formal education (as was the norm for English women in her era), she possessed an immense hunger for knowledge, an exceptionally quick wit, and a writing style praised by the luminaries of her day. The man she chose to marry against her father’s wishes, therefore, was one she felt could be more amenable to her desire to expand her knowledge through education and travel.
This man, Edward Wortley Montagu, came from a rising middleclass family, and therefore lacked the property and pedigree an aristocratic father desired from his daughter’s marriage. Edward and Mary therefore eloped. Though this decision expressed Montagu’s desire for selfdetermination, which was completely denied by her society, it was disastrous to her financially. English common law, in diametrical opposition to the rights established for women in the Qur’an, deprived women upon marriage of all property rights, including the right to any wages they earned or any inheritance. A dowry in the English tradition, unlike the mahr established in the Qur’an, was transmitted from the father of the bride for exclusive use of the husband. The mahr constituted a radical gain for women’s rights, as it is presented solely to the bride as a condition of the marriage and becomes her inalienable property. The English aristocracy sought loopholes to the liabilities for women in English common law by establishing trusts or “portions” for their daughters in competing jurisdictions. A woman who eloped with a man not of her father’s choosing, however, would not qualify for the “portion” that would provide her with a modicum of financial security. Montagu was well aware her entire married life that she owned nothing, that her welfare was based entirely on her husband’s largesse, and that even the heirloom jewelry she wished to bestow on her daughter was not hers to give but her husband’s (Grundy 1999:558). This awareness of the liabilities women experienced under English law and custom, which could impoverish even privileged aristocratic women, made Montagu one of the first English feminists.
Some commentators have opined that Lady Mary wed the lowerstatus Montagu, who did become a rich and powerful politician and businessman, because his interest in the diplomatic service might enable her to fulfill her dream of traveling abroad, which was a standard part of a young male aristocrat’s education but an impossibility for all but a very few English women. When her husband was assigned the position of “Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of Turkey,” she was ecstatic. This embassy threaded its way through the major cities of Germany and the Hapsburg Empire, which encompassed modern day Austria and Hungary (the latter acquired from the Ottomans between 1699 and 1737). She entered the Ottoman Empire in the regions of modern Serbia, where she discussed Arabic language and literature and debated the status of women with the urbane Achmet Bey. Her next stop at Sofia, now the capital of Bulgaria, was the scene of the most commented upon passage in Montagu’s account: the Turkish bath scene (Montagu 1993:57–6/. Montagu then travelled to Adrianople, and finally to the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul.
In a series of letters that modify her arguably exoticist Turkish bath scene, Montagu describes several visits to the personal quarters of highranking Ottoman ladies. These letters chart Montagu’s developing understanding of Muslim women’s rights. Ultimately, the positive assessment she made propelled her to reflect on the relative liabilities of her own tradition. The first of her new acquaintances, whom Montagu describes as “the Grand Vizier’s lady,” has been identified as the wife of Arnaud Khalit Pasha, “who had been in office since August 1716” (Montagu 1993:176 n. 166). Montagu’s initial impressions of the Grand Vizier’s wife included her clothing (she wore a modest “sable vest”), her graciousness (she presented Montagu to “half a dozen of her friends with great civility”), and her character (“she seemed a very good woman, near fifty years old”). Montagu clearly expressed surprise at the simplicity of the lady’s surrounding, indicating the Grand Vizier’s wife “guessed at my thoughts and told me that she was no longer of an age to spend either her time or money in superfluities; that her whole expense was in charity, and her employment in praying to God.” Montagu’s surprise was occasioned, perhaps, by stereotypes of Eastern, and particularly Muslim, decadence circulated by previous travel writers, all of whom were male. It is therefore significant that she presents this counter-example, based on her own experience, of an upper-class Ottoman woman of great, though understated, piety. The lady’s husband, moreover, is presented along with her as “entirely given up to devotion.” This Grand Vizier, stresses Montagu, “never looks upon any other woman and, what is much more extraordinary, touches no bribes,” including an attempted bribe from Edward Wortley Montagu (Montagu 1993:87).
By this point, Montagu can confidently reject all previous travelogues, exclusively by men, as full of falsehoods. Referring to the popular narrative by Jean Dumont, she writes:
’Tis a particular pleasure to me here to read the voyages to the Levant, which are generally so far removed from truth and so full of absurdities I am very well diverted with them. They never fail to give you an account of the women, which ’tis certain they never saw, and talking very wisely of the genius of men, into whose company they are never admitted, and very often describe mosques which they dare not peep into. [Montagu 1993:104][22]
She extends this scathing critique to other male travel writers, including the seventeenth-century English men Paul Rycaut and George Sandys (Montagu 1993:138, 145).[23] Montagu continues her praise of the Ottoman world she was coming to know in greater depth, endorsing its legal system: “I am also charmed with many points of the Turkish law, to our shame it be spoken, better designed and better executed than ours” (Montagu 1993:108). She also reiterates her praise of the Qur’an, whose translations into Western European languages she now understands as distorted by political and doctrinal animosity. Though in a previous letter she purveyed the incorrect notion that Paradise in the Islamic view is closed to women, in this letter she states “’tis certainly false, though commonly believed in our parts of the world, that Mohammed excludes women from any share in a future happy state” (Montagu 1993:109). Montagu presents, though perhaps tongue-in-cheek, a paradise in which wives are separated from their husbands, with the suggestion “the most part of them [the wives!] won’t like it the worse for that.”[24] Finally, when addressing women’s exclusion from “affairs of state” or “the fatigues of war,” Montagu stresses the Almighty, from the Ottoman Muslim perspective, “has entrusted them with an Office which is not less honourable, even that of multiplying the human race” (Montagu 1993:11/. Her tone becomes quite biting as she addresses her interlocutor, a Catholic priest, with this praise of motherhood over his church’s privileging of lifelong celibacy.
Recounting another visit to a high-ranking Ottoman woman, “the Sultana Hafise, favourite of the last Emperor Mustafa [1695–1703]” (Montagu 1993:113), Montagu presents the Sultana as a paragon of virtue. Following the death of the Sultan, “she passes her time in uninterrupted mourning with a constancy very little known in Christendom” (Montagu 1993:114). The Sultana becomes Montagu’s direct source to challenge the multiple stereotypes of the imperial harem promulgated by male travel writers: for instance, “she assured me that the story of the Sultan’s throwing a handkerchief is altogether fabulous” (Montagu 1993:116).[25] In her next visit, this time returning to “the palace of my lovely friend, the fair Fatima” (Montagu 1993:118), Montagu employs a reverse gaze, as she had done earlier in the Turkish bath scene, whereby she becomes the object of scrutiny. In this case, Fatima remarks, “‘You Christian ladies,’ she said with a smile that made her as handsome as an angel, ‘have the reputation of inconstancy, and I did not expect, whatever goodness you expressed for me at Adrianople, that I should ever see you again.’” By the time of this return visit Montagu could “understand her [friend’s] language,” a testament to her commitment to learning firsthand about the Turkish culture in which she lived (Montagu 1993:119).
Importantly, as she becomes a more informed participant in Ottoman culture, Montagu refrains from presenting an unrealistically idealized representation of women’s status. For instance, she records the discovery of a murdered woman, found “naked, only wrapped in a coarse sheet, with two wounds with a knife, one in her side and one another in her breast.” As “no woman’s face being known” outside her immediate family due to traditional veiling, no one could identify the victim (Montagu 1993:135).[26] Yet, in the same letter as this cautionary tale, she includes a story that suggests Muslims may be more desirable than Christians as husbands. She begins authoritatively: “I am well acquainted with a Christian woman of quality who made it her choice to live with a Turkish husband” (Montagu 1993:136). A Spanish woman captured by a Turkish Admiral, upon her family’s rendering her ransom with the request that she return to be placed in a convent, demanded the Admiral marry her to restore her honor. She also demanded the entire ransom, which was substantial, for her “portion” or mahr. As Montagu records, the Admiral “married her [returning the ransom to her family and paying her mahr out of his own fortune] and never took any other wife and (as she says herself) she never had any reason to repent the choice she made.” Moreover, Montagu suspects it wasn’t just a matter of honor motivating the Spanish woman’s marriage proposal, but this woman “might be reasonably touched at his generosity, which is very often found amongst Turks of rank” (Montagu 1993:137). This episode marks the end of Montagu’s ample, and ultimately well-informed, praise of Turkish Muslim women, as well as Ottoman culture more generally. Subsequent letters record her return trip through the Mediterranean, where she was much less generous in her observations of tattooed Tunisian women, who were also relatively darker-skinned than the elite Turkish women Montagu praised. Nevertheless, in taking the Turkish Embassy Letters as a whole, we see that Montagu’s commitment to learning the Turkish language, conversing with Muslim men and women, and investigating insofar as she could the Islamic religion resulted by the end of her Ottoman sojourn in a document refuting the central fallacies that still compromise Christian–Muslim dialogue today.

Lessons from a Cross-Cultural Dialogue Across the Centuries

Fethullah Gülen’s gloss on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who is not well known by even educated English readers today, attests to the depth of his commitment to interfaith and intercultural dialogue. The issues raised in this analysis of Gülen’s assessment of women’s rights from an Islamic perspective and Montagu’s developing understanding of Muslim women’s relatively higher status than the English women of her era are therefore methodological as well as historical. For instance, while Christians, who traditionally reject Islam as coming after their revealed books, remain ignorant of the status of women as specified in the Qur’an, Muslims may also remain ignorant of aspects of Christianity beyond the Gospels. My explication of the Christian view of veiling, which is specified in the Pauline letters, as distinct from the Qur’anic view exemplifies this need to seek accurate knowledge of each other’s religious traditions.
For Montagu, her developing understanding revealed to her the limits of the Judeo-Christian tradition for achieving gender justice. Though women and men in England throughout the seventeenth century attempted to employ scriptural exegesis to argue for women’s spiritual and social equality, this effort had exhausted itself by Montagu’s era in the absence of any clear articulation of women’s rights in the generally accepted Christian canon (Andrea 2007). At the close of the seventeenth century, Mary Astell, considered the first English feminist in the sense she articulated a discourse of rights, had to turn to the nascent liberal political theory of John Locke to advance the cause of women, even though she was a profoundly religious woman (Perry 1986:8–9). Montagu, who admired Astell so much she asked her to prepare a preface for the Turkish Embassy Letters, turned to the Enlightenment doctrine of deism, which rejected revealed religion altogether. Had she been able to remain in the Ottoman Empire, she might have followed other paths, as did the woman in the last episode Montagu records of her Turkish sojourn. Reading Fethullah Gülen’s assessment of women’s rights from a Qur’anic perspective puts this option into focus.
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[1] For the application of Islamic law in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century, see Zilfi 1997:28–47, 81–104, and 105–27.
[2] According to the eighteenth-century jurist William Blackstone, “by marriage the very being or legal existence of a woman is suspended, or at least it is incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection and cover she performs everything, and she is therefore called in our law a feme covert” (Holcombe 1983:25). This absence of rights for English women continued until parliament passed the Married Women’s Property Rights Acts in 1870 and 1882. However, married women in jurisdictions influenced by English traditions could not hold bank accounts, take out loans, or have credit cards in their own names until the 1970s (Women’s history in America).
[3] The reprint of this article in The Fountain, a journal produced by Gülen’s followers, does not include the epilogue from the original, which condemns the deviation in practice throughout the current Muslim world from the rights and status for women established by the Qur’an.
[4] Gülen (2004d:255–57) categorically rejects the “clash of civilizations” thesis, elaborated most controversially by Samuel Huntington.
[5] I use the term “fundamentalism” with caution, since this politicization of religion encompasses major religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism, along with Islam. For an examination of Gülen’s teachings as a tool to challenge Christian fundamentalism, see Ashton (2005). For a wide-ranging analysis of “Islamic fundamentalism” or “Islamism” that establishes Gülen’s rejection of these political ideologies, see Barton (2005).
[6] Such as Osama bin Laden, whom Gülen deems defective in Islamic understanding (2004c:217–19; 2004a).
[7] For instance, Gülen’s mentioning of Rabi’a Adawiyye [or Basri] as a leading Sufi figure in various sermons is not yet accessible to a non-Turkish-speaking audience. My thanks to the Editorial Committee for the Second International Conference on Islam in the Contemporary World for drawing my attention to this reference. Also see Smith (1997).
[8] Yavuz (2003b:29) observes that “Gülen himself is more practical and progressive than his community.” For interviews of women in the Gülen movement within Turkey, see Özdalga (2003), and as immigrants to the United States, see Stephenson (2006).
[9] Cooke defines “Islamic feminism” as the recourse of Muslim women to their rights through a non-patriarchal interpretation of the Qur’an, which means the rejection of a definition of women’s rights (or restrictions) via the corpus of medieval commentaries or entrenched customs (2001:ix-xvii). An “Islamic feminist” contrasts in this sense with a secular feminist, who feels she must reject religion in order to achieve gender justice. Samples of this resurgent movement include the writings of women and men, such as Engineer (1992), Wadud (1999), al-Disuqi (1999), and Barlas (2002). For a critique of the “Islamic feminist” label as too narrow, see Abugideiri 2001:18 n. 36.
[10] Hasan (2000:124) asserts that “the Prophet Muhammad was one of the world’s first feminists and that Islam is a feminist’s religion.” Nomani (2005:198) references Hasan when affirming “the prophet was Islam’s first feminist.” The term feminist, which was coined at the end of the nineteenth century is not necessarily amenable to cross-cultural application. Indeed, it is anachronistic when applied to Montagu. The focus on women’s rights may be more apt, though when the term feminist is used in this essay it is in its basic sense, which is synonymous with Gülen’s concern with the rights of women.
[11] Gülen’s discussions of polygamy focus primary on Prophet Muhammad, defending him against Western aspersion. Regarding current arguments for polygamy, Gülen concludes that “if polygamy is considered as a stain on Islam and causes people to turn away from Islam, a Muslim does not have the right to practice it” and that “no one can consider marrying four women a matter of fulfilling a sunna; they can’t claim to have fulfilled any religious law by doing so” (Ünal and Williams 2000:143–44).
[12] Nomani (2005:205) records how some “American mosque leaders” “tried to rationalize discrimination through a hadith: ‘Do not prevent your women from [going to] the mosques, though their houses are best for them.’ Scholars consider this hadith an allowance, not a restriction. The prophet made the statement after women, busy with household chores, complained when he said Muslims get twenty-seven times more blessing when praying at the mosque” (interpolation in the original).
[13] Here Gülen suggests that Adam preceded Eve in creation, a Judeo-Christian view that other Qur’anic interpreters contest (Ünal and Williams 2000:138; also 2005a:164; cf. Engineer
[14] For a Western feminist view that resonates with Gülen’s, see Gilligan (1982). Gilligan “came to be known as the founder of ‘difference feminism.’ Many feminists insisted that there are no differences between males and females. Gilligan asserted that women have differing moral and psychological tendencies than men. According to Gilligan, men think in terms of rules and justice and women are more inclined to think in terms of caring and relationships. She asks that Western society begin to value both equally” (Women’s intellectual contributions). For the “sameness versus difference” debate in Western feminism, see Hirsh (199 and Andrew (2005).
[15] Milton first published this epic poem, considered the greatest in the English language, in 1667, with an expanded definitive edition published in 1671. Paradise Lost remained influential into the twentieth century.
[16] Aristotle’s influence also informed medieval Islamic exegesis, from which it was transmitted into the Western tradition and embedded into Christian theology through Thomas Aquinas (Peters 1968).
[17] My thanks to Muhammed Cetin, President of the Institute of Interfaith Dialog, for clarifying the language of this passage. Also see Abbott (1998).
[18] Other than a few incidental emendations, Jack’s modernized edition of Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters closely follows the first published version of Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M---y W---y M----e: written, during her travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, to persons of distinction (Dublin, 1763).
[19] For his part, Gülen, responding to charges that he engaged in political subversion, stresses that his “attention has never wavered from the ultimate goal of my life, i.e. searching for God” (Cetin, 2005:152).
[20] On the political circumstances surrounding the ban on headscarves in public institutions in Turkey, see Cetin 2005:147. Gülen discusses the headscarf issue in several interviews, though he does not do so in isolation from related questions about Islamic dress for men (Ünal and Williams 2000:62–64, 140–41; Yavuz 2003b:29).
[21] On Umm Salama’s question, which inspired this revelation, see Barlas, 2002:20. Gülen also cites an occasion when the Prophet consulted Umm Salama on a matter crucial for the nascent Muslim community. As Gülen concludes, “In doing this, he taught Muslim men an important social lesson: There is nothing wrong with exchanging ideas with women on important matters, or on any matters at all” (Gülen 2005a:162). On consultation as an Islamic imperative, see Gülen 2005c:43–58, where he again mentions Umm Salama. Also see Nadvi 2003:55–66.
[22] Dumont authored Nouveau Voyage au Levant (1694), which was translated into English in 1696. This travelogue went through four English editions by 1705.
[23] Rycaut authored The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1667), The History of the Turkish Empire from the Year 1623 to the Year 1677 (1680-79), and The Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches (1679). Sandys authored A Relation of a Journey Begun 1610 Containing a Description of the Turkish Empire, of Egypt, of the Holy Land, of the Remote Parts of Italy (1615).
[24] Countering stereotypes of “Mahomet’s paradise” as a place of sensual pleasures for males only, the Qur’an presents numerous descriptions of paradise inclusive of both female and male believers (Wadud 1999:44–61).
[25] According to Montagu’s modern editor, “the reference is to an incident, recorded by [Paul] Rycaut, [Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668)] in which the Grand Signor [Ottoman sultan] threw his handkerchief to one of the women in the Seraglio as a sign that she should come to his bed” (Montagu:1993:178 n. 225).
[26] Montagu frequently donned the traditional veil while in the Ottoman Empire (1993:71, 92, 95, 126–27). She felt this “Turkish habit [or mode of apparel]” gave Muslim women “more liberty than we have” (Montagu 1993:69, 71).

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