Marilyn Booth

WOMAN IN ISLAM: MEN AND THE “WOMEN'S PRESS” IN TURN-OF-THE-20TH-CENTURY EGYPT

The first periodical in Egypt to focus on women as both subject and audience, Al-Fatat (The Young Woman, 1892), heralded the founding by women of many periodicals for women in Egypt. The womens press emerged in a time of intense public debate concerning putative intersections of systemic gender relations and gender ideology with anti-imperialist nationalism: what would constitute “national” strength sufficient to assert, or force, an independent existence based on claims to autonomous nation-state status? 1 Women writing in the womens press, as well as in the mainstream—or “malestream”—press, shaped the debate over how gender did and should inflect social organization and institutional change. 2 Equally, male intellectuals and politicians participated in a rhetoric of persuasion, edification, and ambition. When women and men wrote treatises on what was called the “woman question” ( qadi¯yat al-mar[ham]a ), articles in the womens press challenged, debated, and refined the points of these treatises. Writers approached that fraught “question” from another direction, too, establishing a thriving industry of conduct literature that fed on translations of European works as well as original works by Egyptian and other Arab writers. Books on how to behave as a proper father, a good mother, a fine son or daughter, or a responsible schoolgoer went through numerous printings for a reading public prepared by various rhetorics of nationalism, theology, and reform to bring this debate into everyday life by following the guides for behavior that such literature—including essays in the womens press—supplied. 3

Translator v. author (2007)

This essay discusses translation practice in the context of recent North American and British marketing of works by Arab and/or Muslim authors, and the strong bias toward “transparent” translation that privileges sociological content over literary texture and the thickness of locale. Taking her recent translation of Raja’ al-Sani’s Banat al-Riyadh (Rajaa Alsanea, Girls of Riyadh, Penguin, 2007) as a case study, the author argues that revisions made by the press and author to her translation domesticate the text and mute the novels gender politics, while the authors assertion of the right to make these changes without the translators involvement, as well as the resulting published text itself, question prevalent notions of the “first-world” translators power to speak for “postcolonial” texts.

25 Years of Revolution Comparing Revolt and Transition from Europe 1989 to the Arab World 2014

When popular opposition to authoritarian regimes began bringing thousands of citizens out in the streets of Tunis in December 2010, and then in Egyptian cities in 2011, with repercussions that continue to rock the Arab region five years later, commentators within and outside the Middle East began invoking another date: 1989. That was shorthand for the series of popular uprisings and manifestations of discontent across Central and Eastern Europe that sought to dismantle Soviet-era regimes as the Soviet Union itself was undergoing what seemed then to be transformative change. In 2011, 1989 appeared to be a useful point of comparison to what was happening a bit further east. Could “the velvet revolution” explain something about “the jasmine revolution”? Was “revolution” the most appropriate term for what the Arab region was experiencing, or for what Eastern Europeans had carried out and witnessed? Were commonalities perceived by outsiders or by the revolutionary actors themselves significant, or were they simply surface appearances? How might the activists of 2011 learn from the cohorts of 1989? Could speaking truth to power result in real change, replacing entrenched post-World War II postcolonial regimes in the Arab region with the participatory institutions and the truly democratic structures of which so many in the region had long dreamed? Could lessons from the recent past of a nearby region give the now-fearless Arab demonstrators any pointers?

Locating Women's Autobiographical Writing in Colonial Egypt

This article explores the often faint strains of autobiographical writing affixed to female signatures in Egypt as feminist discourse was emerging. Rather than focusing on discrete “autobiographies” it argues that autobiographical writing was submerged in other genres; yet these fragmentary texts provided grounding for later, more overt autobiographical writing. An analytics founded in caution, flexibility, and respect is appropriate to a time when the feminine signature itself was fluid or uncertain. Authors considered are ‘A’isha Taymur, Zaynab Fawwaz, and Mayy Ziyada.

House as novel, novel as house: The global, the intimate, and the terrifying in contemporary Egyptian literature

Contemporary Arabic fiction traces displacement and the importance of place within experience of war and tyranny, migrations and forced dislocation, economic hardship and political disillusionment. Three Egyptian novels from the cusp of the 21st century construct houses as structures of displacement, anxiety and crowding. Hopes engendered by Egypt’s 1952 revolution, progressively dismantled, inhabit structures that mark out precarious existences for Egyptian youth.

Textured Feminisms Cairo, Tokyo, Beijing, 1907

Comparing He-Yen Jhen’s work to that of her Egyptian contemporary Malak Hifni Nasif allows lateral thinking across Asian and African societies on how feminists articulated their stances with regard to male counterparts in their own societies, as well as the shifting gender-differential practices of the Euro/American societies that they critically evaluated. Can such comparisons elicit shared vocabularies—and parallel silences—that help us to situate feminisms historically as both cosmopolitan and deeply local interventions in times and places marked by late imperial capitalism?

Insistent Localism in a Satiric World: Shaykh Naggār’s ‘Reed-Pipe’ in the 1890s Cairene Press

This plaintive line appears in a colloquial Arabic poem in the Cairo-based journal Al-Arghūl (the reed-pipe) soon after its founding in September 1894. Entitled ‘A Load of Poetry: The Reed-Pipe’s Zajal on Fashion’, the three-page poem attacks Egypt’s fin de siecle youth as a ‘good-for-nothing generation’ (gīl khāyib). It is a generation that drinks alcohol, sucks up Egypt’s resources, gets pregnant before marriage, fears no father or mother, never suckled on the milk of good upbringing, and rides around Cairo, especially to the Rawda pleasure-garden area, in European-style phaetons, sporting tarbushes and zikittas (jackets) and no beards. It is a generation of mōda, fashion; the label, a European loanword, verbally enacts the invasive presence that penetrates this satirical poem.

What’s in a Name? Branding Punch in Cairo, 1908

In February 1908, a double-page colour cartoon appeared in the new Cairo-based journal al-Siyāsa al-musawwara (politics illustrated, founded December 1907). Reflecting on the ‘press wars’ in Cairo at the time, the cartoon features men in fezzes and coats (and one in a turban and abāya) representing editors of leading nationalist and anti-London newspapers—al-Liwāʾ (founded 1890, Mustafa Kamil), al-Muʾayyad (founded 1889, ʿAli Yusuf), and al-Minbār (founded 1906, Hafiz ʿAwad). Marching in procession, each bears a banner on which the title of his newspaper is stamped in Arabic and English. They head in the direction indicated by a sign saying ‘To the Way of Independence [sic] and Lyberty [sic]’ (in both English and Arabic). To the right, a beast with cloven hooves and three human heads (ears pointed) carries three flags with small Union Jacks on them. The heads face in three directions, straining against each other. One faces a sign saying ‘To the way of protection’—in Arabic, himāya, meaning also the ‘Protectorate’. This was the fiction by which London named its occupation of Egypt, which had lasted for a quarter century. One of the triple Union Jack flags bears the name AL MOKATTAM (al-Muqattam)—a newspaper slammed in the nationalist press as funded by and supportive of the British occupation.

Arab Women Writers: An Anthology of Short Stories, edited by Dalya Cohen-Mor

This collection of Arabic short stories in translation presents 60 stories by 40 authors from 14 Arab nations, across several writing generations. In that sense, it is both a rather standard anthology, sampling a broad tradition for ‘representative’ texts, and an ambitious project that, as Dalya Cohen-Mor describes, demanded first locating and then reading hundreds of stories among the thousands that have been written and published by many, many female Arab writers across many decades. The editor claims that this volume’s novelty lies in its focus on female authors, calling it the first of its kind in being organised ‘around the genre of the short story and its individual female practitioners’ (p. 1). Having myself compiled and translated an anthology of stories by eight female Egyptian writers (certainly, a less ambitious focus than that of the volume under review), which was published more than a decade and a half ago, this claim gave me pause. But what really surprised—and appalled—me was the imprint left here by Dalya CohenMor’s framing hand. In her introduction and through her organisation of the stories—as well as the criteria she employed to choose them—Cohen-Mor presents an extraordinarily rigid and outdated picture of both Arab women’s writing and the concerns and social spheres that she argues these stories ‘reflect’ (pp. xiii, 2). Cohen-Mor cannot be accused of methodological obscurity: she makes her criteria for choice, organisation, and translation very plain. These are not literary criteria. Says Cohen-Mor in her preface, ‘My recurrent observation that the life of women in the Arab world is poorly understood and inadequately described in the West, provided the main impetus to study and collect stories by and about women from different parts of the Arab world’ (p. xii). This sociological imperative yields a geographical and generational emphasis on variety of content rather than of literary strategy or voice. Every story chosen, this editor notes, ‘had to meet several requirements: tell the story well, reflect the current interests and concerns of Arab women, add a viewpoint to the myriad voices of Arab women writers, and help to represent the many countries of the Arab world’ (p. xiii). To give precedence to representation, in this case, means that Arab women writers (or a subset of them) are made to stand for ‘Arab women’ as a category. Over and over, although Cohen-Mor emphasises variety as measured by geography (‘across the Arab world’, p. 1), she deploys a homogenising rhetoric of representation through her repeated references to ‘the Arab woman’ or ‘Arab women’ and her privileging of portraiture and experience. Although these writers offer ‘multiple voices’, they ‘articulate the female experience’ (as singular?) ‘over the past half-century in an area stretching from the Middle East to North Africa’ (p. 1). That Cohen-Mor wants to offer a ‘wealth of material’ to ‘deepen Western understanding’ (p. 1) also assumes ‘Arab’ and ‘Western’ Middle Eastern Literatures, Vol. 12, No. 1, April 2009

Des Voix contre le silence, by Anne Marie Miraglia

A leitmotif in Anne Marie Miraglia’s study of narrative voice and/as gender politics in North African francophone novels by eight female writers is the sheer courage that these and other writing women exercise by virtue of writing and publishing, and by virtue of what they have to say. In the first decade of a new millennium, when literary production by Arab women has become a strong presence on regional and world stages (not to mention Arab women’s participation in myriad transnational institutions and conversations), it might seem that to insist on the inherent boldness of a woman’s act of writing is a bit passé. And if one can agree with Miraglia that—at least in the Maghreb—women’s writing has faced fewer problems of reception when it has centred on patriotic themes (e.g. women’s participation in wars of liberation) than when it has offered critiques of women’s status, is this not largely a thing of the past? If feminist fictional critiques of gender-based discrimination have often been glossed by commentators as a writing of ‘personal rebellion,’ whereby such authors are then denounced as ‘assimilationist’ (to French colonial policies, presumably) and ‘treasonous’ (to the nation) (p. 4), is this not the work of a very small and retrograde group of conservative critics? Published in 2005, Des Voix contre le silence thus occasionally seems a touch anachronistic, as though it were written some time ago. Moreover, although the author has consulted a few novels and studies from the turn of the new millennium, her study is rooted in critical and theoretical work of the 1990s and before, which would not be a problem except that the book occasionally makes claims that are ambiguously ahistorical. Yet the past is never over. Reading Miraglia’s reminder that women have often chosen pseudonyms to protect themselves from attack engendered both by their gender identity and by the topics they choose to articulate, I’m reminded of how depressingly consistent this feature of women’s writing has been for over a century, and how many still face censure or even physical danger for what they write. There remain strong pressures on women in most Arab societies to write circumspectly, respectably and respectfully, if indeed they must write at all. And there remains the strong tendency to equate women’s writing, whatever the genre and whatever the language, with the personal experience of the writer—especially, as in many of the novels this book treats, when first-person narration is the writer’s choice of narrative technique. Locally, women may continue to face critique and perhaps even personal danger when they dare to write and sign their names; and globally, critical engagement with their writing may continue to treat Maghrebi women’s texts as documents of the social. Although the social and the thematic are arguably less the focus in recent academic Middle Eastern Literatures, Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2009