At Once Human and Not Human: Law, Gender and Historical Becoming in Colonial Egypt

Abstract

At least two articulations of the human occupied the historical stage of colonial Egypt around the turn of the twentieth century. The first was juridical and secular; the second was Islamic and mystical. Belonging to two traditions, the first enjoyed concrete colonial-institutional support; the second, deprived of institutional backing, was marginalised in the colonisation of Egypt and the consolidation of the modern state. This article explores these two articulations of the human and how they intersected hierarchically in Egypt. One significant point of intersection was what came to be known as the 'woman question'; it highlighted the concrete gendered meanings of both concepts and their historical disciplinary operations.In the course of debating the nature of the liberation of women, recourse was made to the figure of the human, particularly by Qasim Amin, a major reformer and jurist in Egypt. Anticipating contemporary feminist arguments that 'women's rights are human rights', Amin mapped out the liberation of women on the path of becoming human. Amin's recourse to the human was by no means unique to Egypt. Charlotte Perkins Gilman also famously asked in 1912 whether women were human beings. 1 There is also the long history of women's struggles in France demanding rights equal to those of men that were inscribed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. 2 Yet, Amin's preoccupation with the humanity of women also shed light on the respective traditions that informed his own conceptualisation of women's humanity. Written during the era of English colonial rule, his texts manifested affinities with the colonial understanding of the human that sought to humanise the colonised. His texts also wrestled with aspects of the Islamic tradition and their translation into modern secular terms. Amin's writings, then, are a fruitful site for interrogating competing concepts of the human and how they confronted each other to produce a particular gendered concept. In the process, he curtailed other scenarios for conceiving of gender and the human, and in colonial fashion disposed of other traditions guiding how human subjects can go about living and acting politically in this world.What follows is an examination of these competing articulations and their intersection in the writings of Amin on gender. The first two parts of this article examine the two concepts of the human -the secular-juridical and the Islamic-mystical -and the third analyses their intersection, the hierarchy that came to organise the relationship C 2011 Blackwell Publishing

Gender, History, and Sovereignty

“…However, as Esmeir writes, "if the human is the teleology of modern law, as the gendered colonial history of Egypt shows, the human status of the now-included gendered subjects also introduces relationships of bondage with the law, making gender politics that rely on the figure of the human ever more juridical." 14 Thus, releasing life from the thrall and subjugation of sovereignty cannot occur in terms of a gender politics, or any other politics, that repeat its terms. These were lessons I had only partially learned in writing Working Out Egypt, which may explain why they were forgotten in the initial quest to write a history, however alternative, of sovereignty.…”