Intelligent Souls?

Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

Samara Anne Cahill

2019
244 pages
$34.95
ISBN 9781684480975
Transits

Intelligent Souls? offers a new understanding of Islam in eighteenth-century Britain. Samara A. Cahill explores two overlapping strands of thinking about women and Islam, which produce the phenomenon of "feminist orientalism." One strand describes seventeenth-century ideas about the nature of the soul used to denigrate religio-political opponents. A second strand tracks the transference of these ideas to Islam during the Glorious Revolution and the Trinitarian controversy of the 1690s. The confluence of these discourses compounded if not wholly produced the stereotype that Islam denied women intelligent souls. Surprisingly, women writers of the period accepted the stereotype, but used it for their own purposes. Rowe, Carter, Lennox, More, and Wollstonecraft, Cahill argues, established common ground with men by leveraging the "otherness" identified with Islam to dispute British culture's assumption that British women were lacking in intelligence, selfhood, or professional abilities. When Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she accepted that view as true - and "feminist orientalism" was born, introducing a fallacy about Islam to the West that persists to this day.

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Reviews
"Cahill threads a tricky needle admirably: she contextualizes and takes seriously Wollstonecraft's thinking without letting her Islamophobia off the hook. . . . Cahill hammers home the political stakes of her argument and narrows in on the longstanding effects that this specific Islamophobic idea has had in the years after the Vindication." - Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Fall 2022

"Intelligent Souls presents a deep historical excavation that challenges the secularist biases undergirding histories of feminism and orientalism." - Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Fall 2022

"Intelligent Souls? is well written and argued and presents vignettes from hundreds of treatises and novels. Where too many plot synopses can be considered a fault in a work of literary criticism, Cahill shows how this can be done in an interesting way. At the same time, she gives readers access to obscure texts they would not otherwise read but should read if they want to understand the role of Islam in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English intellectuals' engagement in polemics around women's rights as human rights." - miriam cooke, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, July 2021

"[Cahill] opens an archive of political, legal, and literary texts that can help us understand how Western voices have long leveraged Islamic otherness and how their feminism (whether cynical, accidental, or sincere) has served discourses of Western patriarchalism and superiority." - Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Fall 2020

"Cahill's interventions in Intelligent Souls? are as much literary as they are historical, theological, and political, and she effortlessly passes between disciplines to produce rich and rewarding scholarship." - Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, October 2020

"Samara A. Cahill has produced a comprehensive study of one of the central tropes in the evolution of feminist orientalism, from the turbulent 1690s to the revolutionary 1790s, with detailed analyses drawing on a variety of discourses, both competing and complementary, from an impressive array of genres and texts." - Martine W. Brownley, Emory University

"Troubling and important, this study is crucial reading for all who wish to understand how racism and religious bigotry informed early assertions of (European, Christian) women's rights, and thus how the work of assembling more intersectional, inclusive feminisms can proceed." - Laura M. Stevens, The University of Tulsa

About the author:

Samara Anne Cahill is assistant professor of eighteenth-century English literature in the Division of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her articles on topics ranging from feminist orientalism to trade networks to Enlightenment environmentalism have appeared in the journals The AnaChronisT, Assuming Gender, Green Humanities, Religion in the Age of Enlightenment, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. She has received several grants, including one from the Singapore Ministry of Education for her project on sustainability and the Enlightenment. She is a founding board member of both the Southeast Asian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Samuel Richardson Society. She is currently the book review editor for Religion in the Age of Enlightenment.

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