Kadriye Hüseyin: A Feminist Intellectual in Late Ottoman Egypt

Presented by Doğa Öztürk (Ottoman Encounters)

This program was organized and will be presented by Naila Hassan, (program coordinator and CCNY Bookhouse resident)

Reservations in person.

Reservation online.

Princess Kadriye Hüseyin (1888–1955) was born into the dynasty of Mehmed Ali Pasha, which ruled Egypt from 1805 to 1952. She wrote her major works in Ottoman Turkish and published widely in Istanbul journals. While for historians of the Ottoman Empire she was not “Ottoman enough,” for Egyptian historians, she was not “Egyptian enough.” As a result, she has been largely forgotten. 

This talk draws on the five books she published between 1909 and 1915 to make two main arguments. First, she consistently identified herself as an Ottoman, most strikingly during the Balkan Wars, which shows that elite identity in early twentieth-century Egypt was fluid and situational rather than strictly Egyptian. Second, writing from an Islamic reformist perspective, she argued that women’s education was a precondition for the progress of Muslim societies, and she turned the old genre of the biographical dictionary into a critique of her own society. Her story asks us to look again at both Ottoman Egypt and the history of Muslim women in the early twentieth century. 

Doğa Öztürk is a scholar of Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. He holds a PhD in History from Ohio State University, an MA in Middle East and Mediterranean Studies from King’s College London, and a BA in Economics and Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia. He is currently working on his first book, tentatively titled Layered Loyalties: Nationalism and Imperial Belonging in Late Ottoman Egypt. He is an associate fellow at the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Middle East Studies Association.

He is the editor of the weekly newsletter Ottoman Encounters.

Dr. Öztürk also works as a political and security risk analyst focused on Turkey and the Middle East. Since 2023 he has  written country risk reports for Fitch Solutions on crime, defense and security, trade and logistics, and labor markets, covering countries from Türkiye and the Caucasus to the Gulf, Europe and Asia. Before that, he covered Turkey’s domestic and foreign policy for Janes. He works with sources in Turkish, English, Arabic, French, and Spanish. This work sharpens the same skill that drives the newsletter: taking a complex historical or political picture and making it clear without losing what makes it true.