The very posing of this impact question, as far as the field of Middle Eastern women's and gender history is concerned, would have been unthinkable twenty-five years ago. As of the early 1980s, we could count on one hand the number of published monographs in the field. Historians (and here I include myself) were still focused on a compensatory agenda with the modest goal of integrating some female experiences into the historical narrative; we wrestled with the problem of identifying sources that could capture, somehow, the female voice. We have come a long way since those days of theoretical and methodological innocence, and the field has burgeoned in terms of coverage, sophistication, and the contributions it stands to make, at least in principle, to charting new issues and approaches in women's and gender history.

Many of the accomplishments of the field over the past couple of decades are surveyed and analyzed in Nikki Keddie's Women in the Middle East: Past and Present (Princeton University Press, 2007). I will not attempt to summarize the very helpful information and critiques she provides but instead will point to a few of the areas in which historians of the Middle East have done research that should command the attention of other women's and gender historians, no matter their regional or chronological specialty. First, Islam exemplifies the complexities of religious discourse on women and gender issues. A number of historians have traced the history of hermeneutics in Islam, with an eye to locating such issues in a broad political and social context. Kecia Ali, Denise Spellburg, and Barbara Stowasser are just a few of the scholars who grapple with how an Islamic discourse, or rather a variety of discourses, developed over time as a product of interaction between received tradition and the ongoing experiences of Muslim communities. Their approach is nuanced and unapologetic and serves as a model of how historians of religion could tackle the interplay of text and context.

Second, I hold up the study of elite women and the gendered role they played in the household politics of the early modern period. Jane Hathaway, Afaf Marsot, Margaret Meriwether, and Leslie Peirce are among those who have drawn attention to the critical role women played in ensuring the continuity and legitimacy of political systems based on households, both local and imperial. Their work has much to contribute to an understanding of any political system—and there were many throughout history—in which access to and exercise of power were mediated by ties of kinship.

Third, we have seen exciting developments in the field of law and society. Historians of women and gender in the Middle East have been in the forefront of merging social history and Islamic legal studies to produce fascinating work on legal doctrines and practices as they shaped, and in turn were modified by, changes in family structure, state interventions, and the agency of ordinary people. Iris Agmon, Annelise Moors, Maya Shatzmiller, and Amira Sonbol, among others, have presented a series of complex case studies in which Islamic law and legal institutions underwrote gendered oppression and domination on the one hand and yet provided opportunities for empowerment and justice on the other hand.

Fourth and finally, a number of Middle East historians have written on nationalism and gender in ways that set a new standard. Margot Badran, Beth Baron, Ellen Fleischmann, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Lisa Pollard, and Elizabeth Thompson—by no means a comprehensive list—have all contributed careful studies of how gender issues and nationalism entwined to create the ‘new woman,’ who played THE critical role in the making of the ‘new nation.’ This work has great import for the study of all colonial and postcolonial nationalisms, no matter the region.

We can legitimately crow about the achievements of women's and gender history in the Middle East field, but have we garnered the attention and respect of our colleagues who work on other regions? One way to measure resonance is to assess the extent to which this research has found its way into the mainstream historical narrative reflected in recent world history textbooks, arguably one of the highest impact genres of history writing. A quick look is sobering. Most college textbooks in use today still highlight the exceptionalism of women of the region, whether styled as Arab, Muslim, or Middle Eastern. These texts do not usually engage the problems of interpretation raised by historians of Islam; instead they subscribe to Islamic essentialism, characterize Muslim women as ‘traditionally secluded and inferior to males in Islamic society,’Footnote ¹ and rely on journalistic, sensationalist, and highly anecdotal accounts of contemporary Muslim women to suggest that Islam constructs women as oversexed and unfit for education.Footnote ² Images of the veil and female seclusion pervade world history texts, many of which are fundamentally ahistorical in their coverage of gender as they leap from the early Islamic period in the 7th century to 20th-century social reforms, with scant attention to any intervening developments.

One striking exception is the story of elite women in the early modern period, particularly women of the Ottoman imperial harem and Mamluk households. Many of the standard world history texts describe how these women used their wealth and power to pursue personal and familial agendas in household and palace politics, a new understanding of the politics of the period that has secured a place in the historical narrative. Why has this scholarship received such a welcome in the wider field? The coherence and clarity of the arguments, as well as the striking parallels to gendered politics in early modern Europe and Asia, captured the imagination of women's and gender historians elsewhere and facilitated the integration of this research into the wider field. I suspect other factors at work as well: the study of these elite women challenges Islamic essentialism only indirectly, and indeed often coexists with the assumption that most (i.e., nonelite) women were victims of Islamic misogyny, so it does not contest the larger narrative.

We can expect, of course, a considerable lag between the generating of new material and insights and their integration into textbooks, which tend to embrace such scholarly shifts very slowly and cautiously. However, there are other indications of the difficulties we face vis-à-vis the wider field. One is the ‘Middle East as the missing piece’ phenomenon, the glaring absence of a chapter on our region in many thematic collections on women's and gender history. We have room for some optimism here, however, if the recent publication of Women's History in Global Perspective (University of Illinois Press, 2004), sponsored by the American Historical Association and edited by Bonnie Smith, indicates a change in the winds. These three volumes include chapters by Julia Clancy-Smith and Nikki Keddie on Muslim and Middle Eastern women that eschew exceptionalism and essentialism in favor of comparative and deeply historicized approaches. More importantly, other chapters on gender, nationalism, and feminism draw extensively on research and insights from historians of the Middle East even though their authors, Mrinalini Sinha and Susan Kent, are not Middle East experts.

Still, outside of a few discreet areas, such as gendered politics of the early modern period and colonial and postcolonial nationalisms, our impact has been limited despite how much we have to offer. Some very interesting work on religion and on Islamic law, for example, has not received the attention it deserves in the wider field in spite of heightened attention to these issues in public discourse. Is this because our colleagues in women's and gender history find it difficult to evaluate this work, caught as they are between a popular discourse on the victimhood of Muslim women on the one hand and the apologetic tone of some of our public intellectuals on the other hand? Or have we failed to present our research in such a way that it transcends the Middle East? The case for the significance of our work and our region is ultimately ours to make.