Changes conceptions of women’s public space in the Kurdish city

Due to some ambiguities in defining the domain of public space in traditional Islamic cities and gaps in the knowledge related to the Kurdish cities, this paper examines the conception of the public domain in the Kurdish context. Drawing on points of similarities and differences with Iranian and Islamic contexts, we delineate the intricacies of how Kurds conceptualised the public domain, and specifically how females have experienced that domain, with regard to the common view of “unsafeness”. We also describe the role of women and their relationship to space outside of kinship ties. The paper concludes that the Kurdish context to some extent is different from other Islamic and Iranian contexts, due to the status of Kurdish women and the socio-political and environmental circumstances which marked that society. Therefore these conditions led to a kind of soft boundary between the two realms of public and private life and, thus, allowed the possibility of women’s negotiation with public domain more than in other Islamic cultures. In Women’s social realm today, it became clear that the traditional way of public gathering was gradually being kept on the periphery of the city to such an extent it only remained appropriate among the poor and uneducated families, those who settled either in the city’s traditional part or on the fringe.