Despite the small geographic size of the Zanzibar isles, they have always attracted a substantial share of scholarly attention, including that of two recent Herskovits Award finalists.^{Footnote 1} However, with the important exception of Laura Fair’s Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Ohio University Press, 2001), most monographs on these East African islands have not focused significantly on gender and/or women’s issues. The recent publication of four works has helped remedy this deficiency by enriching our understanding of the lives of Zanzibari women over the last century and a half: Elke Stockreiter’s Islamic Law, Gender and Social Change in Post-Abolition Zanzibar, Elisabeth McMahon’s Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa, Corrie Decker’s Mobilizing Zanzibari Women, and Akbar Keshodkar’s Tourism and Social Change in Post-Socialist Zanzibar. Considered as a group, these books provide an argument against the long-held scholarly assumption that the patriarchal society of Zanzibar and its practices of female seclusion (purdah) totally restricted women’s mobility. While patriarchy has been oppressive for Zanzibari women and has engendered numerous disadvantages, these authors highlight the agency throughout the years of the women living in the islands by exploring the avenues they took in navigating their labyrinthine challenges. These works advance our knowledge of the complex layers of social relationships that have existed over the past two centuries and illuminate both the shifts and the continuities in women’s lives in these Indian Ocean islands. In the process they challenge and complicate simple constructs of women as resisters—either overtly fighting male elites or struggling against the colonial state. Finally, they also advance the study of Zanzibar as whole, since to varying degrees each author considers the peculiarities of Pemba Island, which has received far less attention than the more urban and populous island of Unguja to the south.^{Footnote 2}

Elke Stockreiter and Elisabeth McMahon have joined a growing number of historians who are turning to court records to better understand the cultural values and social dynamics of African societies. Stockreiter explores the Arabic-language legal records from Zanzibar Town, while McMahon engages with the probate records from little-studied Pemba. The result is a reconstruction of the multiple dimensions of women’s agency in Zanzibar during the late 1800s and the postemancipation years of the British Protectorate. Stockreiter focuses primarily on women’s economic agency, while McMahon explores their social mobility, and both authors effectively demonstrate women’s legal agency in Zanzibar—contra the notion that women were excluded from the legal world of sharia.

Stockreiter examines divorce proceedings and property disputes to reassess the tools women used to gain economic freedom and thus social power. Her unique contribution is her deep understanding of the intricacies of Islamic law and how the minutia of Islamic legal practice played out in women’s lives. Even though it has long been argued that the widely known practice of talāq (repudiation) disadvantaged women when it came to marital power dynamics, Stockreiter demonstrates that Zanzibari women from all levels of society had recourse to procedures that ended their marriages, and they often did so in ways that maintained their financial independence from their husbands and male relatives. She explores two lesser-known, but more frequently utilized, types of Islamic divorce known as faskh and khul‘, by which Zanzibari women successfully obtained a divorce by suing their husbands for outstanding debts (such as maintenance obligations or a deferred dower—a common practice in Zanzibar), “defects of the husband,” or cruelty, or on the grounds that the spouse lacked kafā’a, or equality (often related to ethnicity and slave status). Moreover, for some women the “repudiation” of their husbands was a strategy to end their marriage and maintain their financial rights, because in such cases a positive ruling from the kadhis (judges administering Islamic law in the islands) usually meant that the man had to pay the woman the remaining portion of her dower, thus providing her with some financial capital as she began her new life. Stockreiter even found that many women in Zanzibar had greater economic capacity than their husbands. Women’s sources of wealth derived from inheritance, the dower, and in the cases of poorer women, employment outside the home, and Zanzibari women often used this wealth to invest in both moveable and real property. Not only was being a property owner seen as a respectable form of income for Zanzibari women, but the wealth derived from such endeavors also remained in the wife’s hands since Islamic law does not stipulate that spouses must share their wealth. In fact, Stockreiter argues that husbands were more likely than wives to borrow money from their spouses, and that wives frequently leant money to their husbands, acted as their financial guarantors, and exerted legal and marital pressure to force husbands to pay off their debts.

While Stockreiter challenges assumptions about Zanzibar patriarchy through an exploration of women’s economic mobility, McMahon demonstrates that Zanzibari women, even former slaves, had opportunities for social mobility. McMahon describes how the slow advance of British legal dominance over the islands at the turn of the twentieth century helped initiate a shift in the Zanzibari understanding of heshima, moving it away from notions of “honor” based on power to notions of “respectability” founded more on an individual’s behavior and propriety. This newer understanding enabled women to exert a greater amount of control over their individual reputations and social standing. Individuals attempted to establish their heshima through their behavior, clothing, speech, economic independence, hard work, honesty, creditworthiness, and, importantly, religious practice. McMahon describes how emancipated female slaves flocked to tarika (Sufi orders), which enabled women to display their piety publically, gain both baraka (blessings) and heshima, and integrate into local communities without the need of marrying local men. McMahon also highlights the structures of patronage and support that women relied on to help them mitigate their vulnerability and gain social capital. They sought solutions through interactions with missionaries and British colonial officials as well as through various forms of kinship networks. She concludes that while Zanzibari women were generally more vulnerable than men, they showed an incredible amount of resourcefulness in their confrontations with patriarchy.

Moving forward in time, Corrie Decker’s Mobilizing Zanzibari Women argues persuasively that from the late 1920s through the end of the colonial period Zanzibari women continued to strive for educational and professional advancement while simultaneously expanding the notions of respectability by working to redraw the boundaries of heshima. Decker’s narrative points out the historical irony that even though it was Arab male elites and colonial officials who initially pushed for the establishment of girl’s education in the 1920s in order to uphold their “regime of respectability”—which included specific notions about seclusion, propriety, and development—these schools produced female graduates who successfully transformed the social definitions of respectability to include the attributes of publically active, self-reliant, middle-class professional women. Decker’s significant research also challenges some of the common notions about the movement for women’s rights in African and Muslim societies more broadly. She effectively demonstrates that the struggle for the advancement of women in Zanzibar (maendeleo wa wanawake) was separate from the politics of nationalism and thus was very different from women’s movements in the West. She shows specifically that for Zanzibari women the main goal was self-reliance, rather than some abstract notion of gender equality or enfranchisement. These women’s struggle was not against the colonial state or overtly against male patriarchy, but against the conservative supporters of the older notions of heshima. In this regard one of the most novel aspects of Decker’s work is the way she treats the multidirectional interplay between men’s discourses and women’s actions. To do this she employs an important distinction between “mobilization” and “mobility.” Whereas the male elite, colonial officials, and nationalist politicians all tried to mobilize women for their own agendas, the women of Zanzibar were able to work with these various groups to obtain economic mobility, social acceptance, and financial security. Thus, even though motivations may have differed, the discourses of men and women coincided at various times. Rather than reducing the story of the women’s movement to the simple binary of female resisters versus controlling men, Decker thus provides a clear picture of the complex web of interactions and interests that existed among various groups.

Decker also enters into the complex scholarly debates about the ethnic and racial politics in the islands during the mid-twentieth century. Here she contends that in their quest to expand notions of heshima, professional women, especially teachers, defied ethnic and class divisions in Zanzibari society. She points out, rightly, that women placed a greater emphasis on their individual and collective mobility than on ethnic patriotism and that they experienced the “time of politics” (146) differently than most men did. Indeed, her female correspondents apparently attached little importance to ethnic (as well as class) distinctions, and because of this, Decker intentionally downplays these aspects of their identities. However, her arguments about how women defied ethnic boundaries might have been stronger if she had provided this information.^{Footnote 3} She asserts that female Zanzibari students never came exclusively from elite families during this period and that nonelite girls (i.e., those from “African” and other non-Arab families) had access to schools. She also argues that female teachers worked to undermine racial and political divisions. This seems probable, but specific demographic information about the class and ethnic makeup of the student population, or at least more explicit details, would have made the claims about interethnic interactions and their effects more convincing. Nevertheless, Decker, along with the other authors discussed here, has deepened the scholarly discussion about the complicated and contingent nature of racial, ethnic, and class identities in Zanzibar by exploring the gendered elements of these dynamics.

The fourth work reviewed here, Akbar Keshodkar’s Tourism and Social Change in Post-Socialist Zanzibar, may lack the clarity and polish of the other three, but it does an excellent job of documenting the ways in which Zanzibari women continue to navigate social spaces and redefine heshima up to the present day. The main contribution of Keshodkar’s work is that it provides an update on the status of the well-documented debates surrounding the two competing and exclusionary visions of Zanzibari identity first articulated during the “time of politics” in the 1950s and ’60s, when one group excluded others on the basis of religion and “civilization” (i.e., ustaarabu, based on Arab cultural and religious traits) and the second group based its exclusionary practices on race. While the promotion of certain articulations of ustaarabu were restricted during the twenty-year socialist period, the postsocialist milieu has opened up space for Zanzibaris to rearticulate ideas of ustaarabu and promote their exclusionary visions of Zanzibari civilization. At the same time, developments in the postsocialist era have produced new challenges to the centrality of ustaarabu and especially to the maintenance of heshima; in particular, the growth and dominance of the tourism industry and tourist sector jobs—along with the resulting commodity consumption, individualism, and pursuit of modern lifestyles—have threatened these values. Yet once again women are playing an important role in reformulating notions of respectability and the means by which heshima can be achieved. Carrying on from the late colonial period, when female teachers promoted the idea of self-reliance as a central pillar of heshima, women today maintain their heshima through the choices they make when working outside the home—a new necessity for most women in the postsocialist economy. Even though paid employment is now a necessity for most Zanzibari women, they are promoting their respectability, Keshodkar argues, by asserting that heshima represents a rejection of idleness (zurura). Moreover, female honor and respectability are now determined more by women’s behavior and the way women conduct themselves in public spaces as opposed to their obedience to the mandates of others.

All of these authors have thus encouraged scholars of Zanzibar to reassess their assumptions about women’s mobility in the islands since the days of the sultanate, arguing that women had far more individual agency than was previously believed. Even though the patriarchal culture of Zanzibar has been oppressive, it has never been completely paralyzing. Women have had far more tools, resources, and avenues open to them than was previously assumed, and they have often taken (and continue to take) initiative in order to advance their own social, economic, and professional status. These authors recognize that such options were not available to all women in all places and at all times, and they draw attention to the additional barriers some women faced due to geographical location, age, concubinage, and other factors. But collectively they give a much more nuanced view of the possibilities women had in moving through Zanzibari society, and they provide much needed scholarly attention to the changing forms of women’s respectability and empowerment throughout the last two centuries.