An Invitation into the Mehfil: Muslim Women's Interregional Intellectual Networks

Abstract

Scholarship on prominent women's organizations of the early twentieth century highlights how American and European suffragists participated in and published reports about one another's activities. Less well-known are the exciting circuits of exchange that took place between women in Asia and Africa in spaces emerging out of colonial modernity. In this article, I explore how such circuits evoke cultural institutions embedded within shared histories of courtly patronage of the performing arts and rhetoric. To this end, I posit the mehfil as an alternative paradigm to capture how women's ideational networks operated within the Perso-Arabic sphere in the first half of the twentieth century. The mehfil, in addition to delineating neglected circuits of women's intellectual exchanges, also demonstrates how such exchanges, if attended to, pose certain tensions with known feminist histories. By broadening the definition of who we think of as early women activists or as pioneers of women's intellectual networks, it interrogates and intervenes within our understanding of first-wave feminisms. By foregrounding the interaction of claims for gender justice with anti-imperialist discourse, the mehfil provides an early model of women's collectivity that hinges not on demands for suffrage or other legislative reform, but on critique of colonial patriarchy.