The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz

Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt

Marilyn Booth

Focuses on an important early voice in Arabic on gender justice in the context of an array of writers, many of whom are now barely remembered
Examines debates on gender, society, and the nation in leading Arabic newspapers of the time as well as in more obscure ones
Offers many excerpts in translation of Fawwaz's work and that of others, to give readers a window on the intensity of gender-focused debates in Arabic, and how they were related to similar debates elsewhere in the world
Provides an original study of women's involvement in nineteenth-century Arabic theatre
Presents chapters that stand on their own as thematic investigations of core issues for 1890s nationalists and feminists, while also speaking to each other
Assesses Fawwaz's use of keywords and concepts common in nineteenth-century discourse in the Arabic Nahda, or knowledge movement

The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz

Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt

Marilyn Booth

Description

Zaynab Fawwaz (d. 1914) emerged from an obscure childhood in the Shi'I community of Jabal 'Amil (now Lebanon) to become a recognized writer on women's and girls' aspirations and rights in 1890s Egypt. This book insists on the centrality of gender as a marker of social difference to the Arabic knowledge movement then, or Nahda. Fawwaz published essays and engaged in debates in the Egyptian and Ottoman-Arabic press, published two novels, and the first play known to have been composed in Arabic by a female writer. This book assesses her unusual life history and political engagements—including her work late in life as an informant for the Egyptian khedive.

A series of thematically focused chapters takes up her views on social justice, marriage, divorce and polygyny, the 'gender-nature' debate in the context of local understandings of Darwinism, education, and imperialism and Islamophobia, attending also to works by those to whom Fawwaz was responding. Her role in the first Arabic women's magazine, and her contributions to later women's magazines, are part of the story, too. Further chapters consider her uses of history in fiction to criticize patriarchal control of young women's lives, and her play as an intervention into reformist theatre, and the question of women's access to public culture in 1890s Egypt. Questions of desirable masculinities are central to all of these. Fawwaz was also known for her massive biographical dictionary of world women. In that work as in her essays, Fawwaz articulated an ethics of social belonging and sociality predicated on Islamic precepts of gender justice, and critical of the ways male intellectuals had used 'tradition' to silence women and deny their aspirations.

The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz

Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt

Marilyn Booth

Introduction: Feminism, Communities, and Zaynab Fawwaz
Part I: Lives and Texts
1:Formations: A Birthplace, a Family, a Voyage
2:Egyptian Connections and the Nationalist Press
Part II: Zaynab Fawwaz Efendi, 'Bearer of the Banner of Justice'
3:Social justice and activist subjects
4:Fawwaz in al-Fatat
5:Marriage and silences
6:'This tyranny you have called Nature': Misogyny and/as science
7:Education: Not 'whether' but 'why'
8:Gender solidarity and patriotic disillusion: The politics of 1900
Part III: Politics of Romance: Fictions, Histories, and Feminine Voices
9:Good consequences, feminine choices: Public politics and the rights of the young (1895/1899)
10:Theatre and Morality, Passion and Fidelity (1893)
11:Cyrus the Great in 1905: Rewriting Herodotus in the feminine
Part IV: Fin de siècle
Later life
Bibliography

The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz

Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt

Marilyn Booth

Author Information

Marilyn Booth, Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, University of Oxford

Marilyn Booth earned her doctorate in Middle East History and Modern Arabic Literature from St Antony's College, University of Oxford. She has taught at American University in Cairo, the University of Illinois, Brown University, University of Edinburgh as Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies, and currently, Magdalen College and the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford as Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Chair. She has published books and essays on intersections of gender history, Arabic literature, and women's writing in nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Egypt, and is a prize-winning literary translator and co-winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.