Finding Women and Gender in the Sources: Toward a Historical Anthropology of Ottoman Tripoli

This article offers an anthropological reading of Ottoman sources on Libya to shed light on the history of women in Islamic contexts while addressing key issues of gender, power, and representation in history writing. It features the potential of a method that, while illuminating the presence of women in a variety of archival and textual Ottoman sources, questions the gendered nature of their representations as historical subjects. In so doing, the article contributes to current debates on history writing and articulates the perspective of a scholar of Women's History in the Islamic context. The article first outlines some of the challenges that have been identified and tackled by feminist historians over recent decades as for the search for sources in which women's lives can be retraced. It then introduces the main sources that were used in the research - a civic chronicle and a petition - and proposes more general reflections on method in historical research, in which the possibility of tracking women's life journeys in predominantly masculine sources is critically explored. Finally, a series of female figures emerging from such sources as for the case of Ottoman Tripoli (North-Africa) is studied, with an effort of reflection on social typologies and categories in which women were often reduced to clichéd characters like the Wife, the Widow, the Slave, and the Prostitute.