Amin presented the case for Arab women’s rights in two books published at the turn of the century, The Liberation of Women and The New Woman.7 In the first of these, he announces that ‘I do not believe there is a single educated Egyptian who doubts his country’s immense need for reform’, adding that this needs to start in the family. ‘The status of women,’ he says, ‘is inseparably tied to the status of a nation’, which leads to the proposition that the status of the nation will remain low as long as the status of women within it is low. While ‘the Islamic legal system, the Shari’a, stipulated the equality of women and men before any other legal system’, this original equality has been lost, and men of his generation commonly ‘despise’ women, destroying their minds by denying them education and trivializing their lives by denying them a role in society’s affairs. ‘What do you understand a woman to be?’ he demands of his (presumably) male readership. ‘Like a man, she is a human being.’ However, generations of distorted thinking have caused this to be overlooked, with the result that women have become unfit for their roles as wives and mothers. They make poor wives, since a man will ‘conceal his joys and sorrows from’ an uneducated wife with whom he has little in common. They make imperfect mothers, since they are unable to awaken the intellectual curiosity of their children. At best, such women are ‘pleasant pet[s]’, Amin says, like the ‘angels in the house’ that populate the works of Dickens. At worst, a man ‘despises [his wife], treats her as nonexistent, and excludes her from his affairs.’
In her discussion of Amin the Egyptian historian Leila Ahmed draws attention to the connections between women’s emancipation and national development and between the restoration of the original equality enjoyed by men and women in the Muslim religion and the modernization of the condition of women to bring it into line with international norms. (Amin makes unflattering comparisons between the ‘advanced’ condition of women in Europe and their ‘backwardness’ in Arab societies.) These features of his thought place it in the mainstream of the nahda: there is the emphasis, for example, on the renovation of Arab society by restoring what has become corrupted and by imitating European models; there is the concern that Arab societies, in imitating Europe, may be in danger of losing part of themselves. These things had the negative effect of suggesting that ‘improving the status of women entails abandoning native customs’, with resistance to improvement carried out under the impact of western ideas functioning ‘as a sign of resistance to imperialism, whether colonial or postcolonial.’ Styles of traditional dress, such as the veil, seen by Amin as a sign of female seclusion, were ‘tenaciously affirm[ed] as a means of resistance to Western domination,’ for example, making women’s authenticity dependent on veiling and living in a ‘traditional’ way.8
Concerns of this kind were also raised about the work of Huda Shaarawi, founder and first president of the Egyptian Feminist Union, and president of the Arab Feminist Union on its founding in Cairo in 1944, which had branches throughout the Arab world. Shaarawi and her associates fought for the improvement of women’s education and working conditions, as well as for political suffrage. In many of these campaigns she was disappointed, since, as she explains in her memoirs, while women had taken part at the side of men in the struggle for political independence, their ‘great acts and endless sacrifices do not change men’s views of women’.9 Sharaawi was born into the aristocracy, and she was, her translator explains, a member of the last generation ‘to experience harem life from childhood through mature adulthood’. Women of her class ‘lived their lives within the private enclosures of the domestic quarters. When they went out they veiled their faces, thus taking their seclusion with them,’ rather in the manner of the Ottoman women described in Pierre Loti’s novels. It was while she was on the way back from an international conference in 1923 that Sharaawi publicly removed her veil on her arrival at Cairo railway station. For her, this signalled the casting off of inherited attitudes and the advent of the new woman. For her opponents, it represented a betrayal of authentic ideas of the feminine and the blind imitation of the West. These differing views have resonated down the decades.10
Nevertheless, the appearance of female characters in Arabic fiction shows some of the gains that were being made. Mahfouz’s novels, for example, are often concerned with the emancipation of women from their traditional roles and the various kinds of stresses to which this could give rise. The expansion of women’s roles and life-chances is a major feature of the Cairo Trilogy, for example: whereas Amina, wife of Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, lives a highly restricted life in volume one, Sawsan Hammad, fiancée of her grandson Ahmad, is a political activist and feminist in volume three. In works like Midaq Alley and The Beginning and the End the choices open to women within the family or in the larger social environment are explicitly identified and their narrowness criticized. Both of these novels dramatize the apparent impossibility of escape from the narrow environment of home and family, leading Hamida in the former novel and Nefisa in the latter to despairing, tragic ends.
Even more than Mahfouz, middle-brow writers of the 1950s and 1960s such as the journalist and novelist Ihsan Abdel-Quddus made the throwing off of the constrictions on women’s lives into an explicit theme of their writings. One of Abdel-Quddus’s best-known novels, for example, I Am Free,11 deals with the struggle of a young woman from a middle-class family to detach herself from inherited moeurs and to choose a life to her own liking. It is the freedom to make such choices that allows her to say at the end of this text, ‘I am free’. Elsewhere in the Arab world, Leila Baalbaki in Lebanon achieved a succès d’estime with her 1957 novel I Live and became as representative an author of the period as Françoise Sagan, author of Bonjour tristesse, in France. I Live dramatized the condition of young women in at least some parts of the Arab world who were finding new paths for themselves in defiance of inherited conceptions of a woman’s role and status in society.12 Baalbaki is also the author of a much-anthologized short story, ‘A Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon’;13 another Lebanese woman writer often compared to Baalbaki and Sagan is Colette Khouri (b. 1937), the author of a novel, Days with Him, in which the heroine ‘abandons her feckless lover’.14 Finally, in 1960 the Egyptian novelist Latifa al-Zayyat, less journalistic and more intellectual in profile, published a striking bildungsroman, The Open Door, which was taken at the time as summarizing the aspirations of the ‘new woman’. She now realized herself in the context of national and political struggle, leaving the private sphere of home and family far behind her.15
Yet, despite the interest of this early work it was only in the 1970s in the work of the Egyptian feminist Nawal al-Saadawi and the Moroccan Fatima Mernissi (originally written in French) that Arab feminism began to gain real international exposure. Al-Saadawi is perhaps the best-known contemporary Arab feminist, and many of her books have been translated into English. Woman at Point Zero, for example, is a fictional reconstruction of the life of a prostitute, while The Hidden Face of Eve is a wide-ranging work on women in the Arab world. Al-Saadawi is also the author of various autobiographical works, among them Memoirs of a Woman Doctor and Memoirs from the Women’s Prison.16
14. Egyptian feminist and novelist Nawal al-Saadawi
These two books present the struggle of Egyptian and Arab women for equal consideration with men through al-Saadawi’s memories of her own career. Herself a distinguished physician, at one point holding a senior position in the Egyptian ministry of health, al-Saadawi comments in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor on the stilted expectations that hold many women back in the Arab world and on the suffocating framework within which many are condemned to live their lives. Early in her life, she became aware that she was a ‘girl’; in other words a potential source of shame. Whereas boys were allowed to do what they liked, girls were shut away indoors, ‘as if … in chains’, condemned to the ‘hateful, constricted world of women with its permanent reek of garlic and onions’. A conflict developed ‘between me and my femininity’, and she was ‘filled with a
great contempt for womankind’. Whereas ‘manhood was a distinction and an honour, … womanhood was a weakness and a disgrace,’ the only way out of which being through education. Al-Saadawi chose medicine as a challenge and an escape, as well as a way of proving that she was the equal of any man. Men, in fact, she later discovers, are frauds, their self-confidence merely a reflection of the fact that they, unlike their sisters, mothers or wives, feel that they ‘own the past, the present and the future’.17
Against masculine posturing al-Saadawi pits ‘my strength, my knowledge, [and] my success in my work’, qualities that come to the fore in Memoirs from the Women’s Prison. Arrested in a crackdown against the opposition in September 1981, al-Saadawi was sent to prison. Meeting her fellow prisoners, some of whom are intellectuals but most of whom are not, she draws a connection between the state’s authoritarian control of the public sphere and the authority exercised by a father, a brother or a husband over the lives of women in the private sphere of the family. ‘Behind every one of these women prisoners is a man: a father branding his daughter for a life of thievery, a husband beating his wife into practising prostitution, a brother threatening his sister so she will smuggle hashish.’ Despite their political differences, or, in the case of the non-political prisoners their lack of political awareness, al-Saadawi stages herself as leading a kind of ‘feminist revolt’ against the policies of the state (‘Down with the Open Door Policy, and Camp David, and normalization of relations! Down with the new colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism!’) and the rule of men in general.18
It is striking how little reference contemporary Arab women writers make to al-Saadawi. Rather than continuing her activism, their writings seem to be self-absorbed, making only glancing reference to public concerns. Miral al-Tahawy has already been noted in this context, and May Telmissany might also be mentioned, whose novel Dunyazad established her as an author to watch.19 In this short piece, 120 pages all told, Telmissany opens up a ‘societal space that male writers have been unable (and perhaps also unwilling) to explore: the complexities of family relationships and especially of gender differences,’ in the words of her translator. Organized around the death of a child, Dunyazad, the novel recounts a mother’s agonizing grief over her loss. The writing functions both as an attempt to communicate the ‘taste, shape, and smell of pain’ and as a form of therapy: the story is like a personal diary not meant to be read by others, working instead as a way out of loss. ‘Writing Dunyazad,’ the author explains, means ‘invoking the letters of her name to help me forget.’ Dunyazad, the name of Shaharazad’s sister in The Arabian Nights, has a particular resonance for any woman writer. In the Nights, Shaharazad’s apparently endless stories save her life, since had her husband not wanted to hear them he could have sent her to the executioner, as he had his previous wives. While Telmissany’s narrator is not ‘writing for her life’ in the way that Shaharazad told stories for hers, the act of writing seems to function as a form of private therapy, a necessary retreat from almost overwhelming concerns. There is an obvious contrast between this kind of writing and that of al-Saadawi, with its advertised commitment to public concerns.
Other Egyptian women authors well known in translation include Alifa Rifaat and Salwa Bakr, both writers of short stories (though Bakr has recently also published a number of novels). The former, unusual because of her positioning outside the ranks of the upper middle classes from which Egypt’s women writers mostly come, began to publish late in life following years of writing surreptitiously in defiance of strict family norms. Stories such as ‘Thursday Lunch’ or ‘Me and My Sister’ present the loneliness of lower middle-class women either caught in marriages that give them no satisfaction, as in the former, or, like the young woman in the latter, ‘sitting at home waiting for someone to come and marry her’. Rifaat’s work has attracted comment because of its exploration of sexual themes and the bitter compromises her female characters are sometimes called upon to make, such as in ‘Badriyya and Her Husband’, in which Badriyya’s husband is homosexual (‘the wife’s the last to know’), or ‘An Incident in the Ghobashi Household’, which concerns a mother, her daughter and an illegitimate child.20 Salwa Bakr, younger than Rifaat but from a similar background, has specialized in related subject matter, her stories treating the lives of women for whom, in her translator’s words, ‘politically, economically and socially life has been set in certain moulds and only with courage can one break out of them,’ if one can at all. ‘That Beautiful Undiscovered Voice’, for example, presents a middle-aged woman who discovers she has a previously undiscovered singing voice. Family circumstances oblige her to deny it. ‘The Sorrows of Desdemona’ describes the thoughts of a schoolgirl, who, trapped in a narrow family environment, finds temporary outlet for her feelings in school drama lessons, and nowhere else.21
Finally, a last set of women writers has emerged in recent decades in Lebanon. One of these, Hoda Barakat, is discussed below; the best known to English-speaking readers is probably Hanan al-Shaykh, though novels by Ghada Samman have also been translated. What links these authors together is their shared experience of the Lebanese civil war, which, starting in 1975 and ending in 1990, left Lebanon devastated and much of its population in exile.22 It was against this background that women became ‘impatient with husbands, brothers, sons and fathers,’ in the words of one critic, at least some of whom were caught up in the violence. Women sought to imagine ‘a society that no longer posited male ascendancy as the sine qua non of future co-existence’. Reflection on the war, its ‘catalytic effect’, caused such writers to ‘recognize … their previous oppression and marginalization’ and to call for the creation of ‘a transformed national consciousness’ as a result of the unravelling of Lebanese society.23
Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra, for example,24 describes the life of a young woman originally from the south of Lebanon in war-torn Beirut, where she discovers that the atmosphere of fear has caused people to draw closer to each other, offering new possibilities for affective relations, and that violence has become a way of life, overwhelming human ties. Having fallen in love with a member of one of the city’s militias, Zahra’s story ends when she is imprisoned and killed by him. Al-Shaykh’s later works, including Women of Sand and Myrrh, a set of related short stories,25 and Only in London,26 present women’s lives in the Lebanese (and Arab) diaspora, the first set in an unnamed Gulf country, the latter in London. Ghada Samman’s Beirut Nightmares27 also records a female narrator’s experience of the war, this time in some 150 short sections (‘nightmares’) that dwell on the chaos and the need to re-evaluate life in the light of it. Trapped in her flat, ‘a defenceless noncombatant in the middle of a battlefield’, she records the breakdown of normal social relations and the violence that has replaced them, together with the hardening of the barriers between the city’s communities. A young man is shot in the street in a revenge attack, ‘the only thing that mattered was that he be of a different religion’; her lover, Yousif, is ‘killed by armed men at a checkpoint. Just like that, for no reason’; a group of boys are tortured to death, their torturer later sleeping ‘as soundly as if he’d conquered five virgins, one after the other’.
These events cause the narrator, modelled on Samman, to question both the pre-war society that had given rise to them, as well as her possible implication in such events. ‘You find yourself re-examining everything and the place it’s occupied in your life … [The war] like a masterfully crafted mirror reveals to those who dare to gaze into it the flimsiness of what we call the “bond of human fellowship”.’ Is she partly responsible for the violence, having previously called for the ‘overthrow’ of existing society? Is it possible to remain ‘neutral’ in the face of such events? Whose ‘side’ is she on?
15. Beirut during the Lebanese civil war
Recent works of fiction also illustrate marginal forms of sexual identity or minority regional or ethnic identities. There is, for example, the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany’s recent The Y
acoubian Building, mentioned again in the Conclusion to this book, which presents sexual themes with what might be thought to be unusual frankness in today’s conservative atmosphere.28 There is also al-Shaykh’s Women of Sand and Myrrh, which presents homosexuality among women as a form of sexual manipulation against a background of ‘nothing but drinking, eating, telling silly stories, seeing who’s got the nicest clothes’. (There is little lesbian presence in modern Arabic literature, and what there is is not valorized; even feminist authors often produce surprisingly conventional representations of sexuality.) While Mahfouz’s novels had presented male homosexuality among the working classes (in Midaq Alley) and among the upper classes (in Sugar Street) as an ordinary part of the Cairene landscape, making contemporary frankness unexceptional except with regard to explorations of female sexuality, more recent works have been written against a different background in which explicitly gay identities have been developed along the lines of what has taken place in the West.
As a result, while neither Al Aswany nor al-Shaykh betrays much sense of the politics of gay identity, as opposed to the presentation of gay characters, identity politics nevertheless form a part of the background to their texts in a way that they do not to those of Mahfouz. This is the case because of the continuing prejudice against men and women who admit homosexual preferences or adopt a gay identity in many Arab societies29 and because of the development since the 1980s of a politics of gay identity in western societies. It might be added that Mahfouz’s presentations of male homosexuality are unapologetic in a way that Al Aswany’s are not, and there is no sense in Mahfouz’s novels that homosexuality is a foreign contagion, as there is in The Yacoubian Building. Indeed, Arab critics have noted the homophobic presentation of gay sexuality in Al Aswany’s novel and its conservative ‘moral’ tone, which is entirely absent from the works of Mahfouz.30
A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature Page 13