Abstract
This chapter examines the way in which the “new woman” figure was constituted in Egypt at the turn of the century as a dangerous reader of fiction and, in turn, as an unsecured text. Selim focuses on two Egyptian male-authored novels that inscribe this problematic on the body of the new woman in reformist terms: the education of women (Wealth and Want, 1904) and a newly constituted ethics of erotic love (Egypt’s Secrets, 1906). She then turns to examine a pseudotranslation (A Secret to End All Secrets, 1906) by the Lebanese writer, educator and feminist Esther Moyal, which mobilizes a variety of adaptation strategies to parody and challenge the disciplinary concerns and masculine anxieties of the reformist author.
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Notes
- 1.
In one of many examples of this discourse, Fuʾad Salim, in his translator’s preface to The Fidelity of Spouses (Wafaʾ al-zawjayn), insists on the necessity of fiction that celebrates “honorable love in its most comely form … although the novel will inevitably be shot through with amorous scenes that bring a flush to the reader’s cheeks,” MS44:3–4.
- 2.
Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), 24.
- 3.
Upper middle-class women frequently accompanied their husbands on trips abroad during this period. Beth Baron relates the following anecdote from a 1910 publication, which sums up a number of new consumption practices and leisure activities: “One British traveler returning to Europe by steamship in the early 1900s seemed surprised at the conduct and reading matter of Muslim women, who had stayed ‘shrouded up to the eyes’ until they reached the ship and then appeared the next morning at the public meal ‘unveiled, bareheaded, clad in the latest Parisian traveling fashion and supplied with French novels.” E. L. Butcher cited in Baron, Women’s Awakening, 83.
- 4.
Publishers, journalists, teachers, activists and philanthropists came from the broad spectrum of the middle class and the aristocracy and were native Egyptian Muslim to Muslims and Christians of Syrian and European extraction. Professional singers and actresses meanwhile came from working-class backgrounds with equally diverse ethnic origins. See Danielson, “Artists and Entrepreneurs.”
- 5.
European prostitutes in Egypt, some of whom were victims of the thriving white slave trade, were mostly of Greek and Italian extraction. Sherry Sayed Gadelrab, Medicine and Morality in Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2017), 147.
- 6.
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6.
- 7.
See Russell, Creating the New Egyptian Women (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 44–5 for a description of these attitudes.
- 8.
Marilyn Booth notes that in the last decade of the nineteenth century, demand outstripped supply. May Her Likes Be Multiplied (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 139. By 1899 one writer in Anis al-jalis referred to the topic of education as “a subject exhausted by researchers male and female” (Ibid., 117).
- 9.
As were women from poor and working families. See Margot Badran (Feminists, 142–164) for a comprehensive account of women’s education and the burgeoning state and private school system (including teacher training colleges) in turn-of-the-century Egypt.
- 10.
Baron, Women’s Awakening, 13–37.
- 11.
Juan Cole, “Feminism, Class and Islam in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” IJMES 13 (1981): 390.
- 12.
Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, 55–6.
- 13.
See Ibrahim al-Hawari, Naqd al-riwaya, 25–132.
- 14.
Lovell notes that the novel underwent two periods of expansion in England. Immediately following on the brief moment of the “fathers”—Smollett, Fielding and Richardson—the first period (1770–1820) “degenerates” into “mere entertainment” thanks to the bestselling gothic fiction churned out by profitable publishers and mostly authored by women. This is the moment when the novel was figured as a dangerous, infantile or escapist, and feminine commodity. The second period (1840–1894) is when the genre moves back to men and forward to realism, thereby regaining the status of “literature.” Though women dominated the first period as writers and readers and still played a huge part in production (often under pseudonym) and consumption in the second period, Lovell notes that the genre was nonetheless still overwhelmingly policed by men. Consuming Fiction (London: Verso, 1987), 73–82. According to Pamela Gilbert the pleasure/instruction binary was itself gendered in nineteenth-century criticism, with pleasure as feminine and instruction as masculine. Disease, Desire and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 31. The taxonomy was also coded in class terms whereby the fiction as infection metaphor Gilbert explores produced the category of “sensational” fiction as the appropriate reading material for “the semi-literate”: domestic servants and shopkeepers (also mostly women).
- 15.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 22.
- 16.
Ibid., 29.
- 17.
Ibid., 77.
- 18.
Ibid., 13.
- 19.
“Reading Novels,” Al-Muqtataf , August 1907: 671–2. In The Economy of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) Deidre Lynch describes how encouraging the practice of re-reading (as opposed to cursory or pleasure-reading) was central to the ways in which the cultivation of literary and social distinction amongst middle-class readers (and particularly women) coincided with the recuperation of the novel as a high literary form (130–133; 138–146).
- 20.
Al-Khuri, “Al-Riwayat,” 15–16. Khuri’s early usage of the word riwaya denotes both literary fiction and stage drama. His praise of the riwaya opens with Kipling’s stories and closes with the work of the actor/director Najib al-Haddad. The representation of character is of course what unites both novel and play.
- 21.
Margot Badran refers to this as the common perception of women’s “omnisexuality” (Feminists, Islam and Nation, 67). See also Sherry Sayed Gadelrab, Medicine and Morality in Egypt, for a fascinating history of the early medical discourse on women’s sexuality in Egypt.
- 22.
See Kenneth Cuno, Modernizing Marriage (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2015), 45–76.
- 23.
Ibid., 104; Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 26–30.
- 24.
See Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 95–127.
- 25.
A high nationalist project reflected in the title of Tawfiq al-Hakim’s seminal 1933 novel ʿAwdat al-ruh (The Return of the Spirit) which chronicles the education of a middle-class Egyptian youth against the backdrop of the 1919 revolution.
- 26.
Cole, “Feminism, Class and Islam,” 391–2. Lisa Pollard offers an example of this process of status-usurpation in her discussion of women’s fashions: the new agrarian capitalist elite wanted “to set itself apart” from civil servants with Turkish backgrounds. Pollard documents the changing fashions over the course of the nineteenth century and sets them in a socio-economic context (Nurturing the Nation, 41–42). See also Nancy Micklewright, “London, Paris, Istanbul and Cairo: Fashion and International Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” New Perspectives on Turkey 7 (1992): 125–136.
- 27.
Cole, “Feminism, Class and Islam,” 392.
- 28.
Russell, Creating the New Egyptian Woman, 129–30.
- 29.
Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, 186.
- 30.
Russell, Creating the New Egyptian Woman, 130.
- 31.
Chatterjee, Nation and its Fragments, 131.
- 32.
Gadelrab notes that many contemporary women activists reproduced this discourse as the price to be paid for their entry into public life. Medicine and Morality, 148.
- 33.
Qasim ʾAmin, The Liberation of Women and the New Woman (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1992), 22.
- 34.
Cole, “Feminism, Class and Islam,” 399.
- 35.
Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 12.
- 36.
In Muwaylihi’s Hadith ʿIsa Ibn Hisham, the ʿUmda and his companions plot to extract and seduce a young cloistered girl of good family (“as pure as the morning dew”) from her home. The girl willingly agrees to the assignation but the ʿUmda’s plans to enjoy her are thwarted by a subsequent series of misadventures. See Allen, A Period of Time, 297; 304–5; 322.
- 37.
ʾAmin, Liberation, 52–3. The Arabic terminology interpolated into Samiha Sidhom Peterson’s translation of this passage is taken from the Arabic edition cited in the bibliography.
- 38.
Ibid., 53. ʾAmin’s advice here brings to mind the moral of a much earlier narrative on the slippery sexuality of women, that of the demon’s unwilling bride in the famous frame tale of the Thousand and One Nights .
- 39.
Ibid., 56.
- 40.
See ʾAmin, Tahrir, 95–101.
- 41.
Cited in Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, xxiv.
- 42.
In 1905, for example, ʿAwad ran a debate in Al-Muʾayyad newspaper on the respective merits of religious versus government primary education.
- 43.
The newspaper (1889–1912) was founded by Mustafa Kamil but effectively owned by ʿAli Yusuf who was also editor-in-chief for much of its run. It was anti-British, pro-palace and pro-Ottoman, and had a liberal editorial policy that solicited contributions from prominent and intellectually and politically diverse contributors, from Muhammad ʿAbdu, Mustafa Kamil and Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul to Mustafa al-Manfaluti, Saʿd Zaghlul and Abbas Mahmud al-ʿAqqad. For more information on the paper, its owner and collaborators, see Sulaiman Salih, Al-Shaikh ʿAli Yusuf wa jaridat al-Muʾayyad (Cairo: Al-Hayʾa al-misriyya al-ʿamma lil-kitab, 1990).
- 44.
ʿAwad was imprisoned by the British for part of the war but is also known to have accompanied the Khedive on his pilgrimage to Mecca at some point during his early exile.
- 45.
Three of these were published in The People’s Entertainments : the work under discussion, plus Fushat al-ʾamal (adapted “from English,” MS4) and Al-Husul ʿala zawja (adapted from the work of “a famous Irish author,” MS21–25). The purportedly autobiographical authored novel for which he is remembered today is Al-Yatim (The Orphan, 1903).
- 46.
Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, 78.
- 47.
Ibid., 111.
- 48.
See Hoda Elsadda, Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 16–17 on the gendered reformist conflation of music with “the West.” The term franji as both proper noun and adjective derives from the pre-modern term for the French (Franks) and encodes a long history of encounter with the other, both hostile and convivial, from the Crusades in medieval times onwards. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the term loses much of its ethnic and political specificity and comes to function as a catch-all signifier denoting cultural “westerness” in the ambivalent moral sense discussed above. In this turn-of-the-century discourse, to become “franjized”—to acquire the accoutrements of a European lifestyle—was counted as a form of unpardonable mimicry. Rebecca Johnson offers a fascinating analysis of this nexus of value surrounding the “translated” imported commodity in “Importing the Novel: the Arabic Novel in and as Translation,” Novel: A Forum for Fiction 48, no. 2 (2015): 251–4.
- 49.
“Shakwat al-ʾummahat,” Al-Muqtataf (October 1903): 874–877. The article had originally been published in Rashid Rida’s Al-Manar.
- 50.
Cited in Booth, May Her Likes be Multiplied, 117.
- 51.
In the iconic skit “’Arabi tafarnaja,” the late nineteenth-century reformer ʿAbdalla al-Nadim satirically describes an encounter between a young provincial man newly returned from his education in Europe and his illiterate peasant mother. Al-Tankit wal-tabkit, no. 1 (June 6, 1881): 7–8.
- 52.
See Pollard, Nurturing the Nation, 126–7 for a discussion of Modern Home Economics, a typical Egyptian school textbook for girls from 1916.
- 53.
Nahdawi reformists were obsessed with the upper-class wedding as a spectacle of franjized decadence and excess. The trope is one that appears again and again in the writing of the period. Mona Russell cites a sketch by ʿAbdalla al-Nadim published in Al-Tankit wal-tabkit in which two women discuss how fancy weddings instill class envy and social climbing in women guests (Russell, Creating the New Egyptian Woman, 45). Also see Muhammad ʿUmar, Hadir al-misriyyin, for yet another iteration of this general theme: “Marriages of the rich” (30–33).
- 54.
The word for “veil” used here is habara; a black silk outdoor wrapping used to cover the entire body and head. On the other hand, hijab was used in a much broader sense, to indicate an economy of “veiling” that included the act whereby an adolescent girl would be formally confined at home and thus hidden from public view.
- 55.
Beth Baron quotes Elizabeth Cooper’s late nineteenth-century memoir, The Women of Egypt, on “the intense conceit” of Egyptian girls who had learned to read (Women’s Awakening, 83).
- 56.
Gilbert, Disease, Desire and the Body, 52–3.
- 57.
Ibid., 18–19.
- 58.
Ibid., 26.
- 59.
Gilbert follows a fascinating debate in the contemporary English press about the popular suspicion that circulating libraries encouraged the spread of gonorrhea via infected books (Ibid., 56).
- 60.
Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 17–23.
- 61.
Muhammad ʿUmar’s, Hadir al-misriyyin offers a fascinating window into the moral and social practices around which the new middle classes in Egypt were constituted. ʿUmar arranged the book in three sections structured around class: the rich, the poor and “those in the middle.” While the rich are generally described as having abandoned their traditional roles as a socially responsible landed gentry in favor of the decadent westernized urban lifestyles described above, the “traditions” of the poor are held to be long-standing sites of corruption and degradation.
- 62.
See Hamdi al-Sakkut, Al-Riwaya al-ʿarabiyya al-haditha: bibliugrafia wa madkhal naqdi 1865–1995 (Cairo: Maktabat dar al-kutub al-misriyya, 1995), vol. 4 for a list of Haddad’s authored novels (including a couple of misidentified adaptations).
- 63.
See Chap. 8 for a detailed discussion of this genre.
- 64.
The phenomenon of Egyptian men marrying the family governess or “dancers [and] showgirls” is briefly discussed by Badran (Feminists, Islam and Nation, 9–12) and Russell (Creating the New Egyptian Woman, 83). For a detailed discussion of contemporary Egyptian critiques of mixed marriages, see Hanan Kholoussy, “Stolen Husbands, Foreign Wives,” Hawwa, Vol. I (2003): 206–240. By the 1920s this kind of intermarriage and the furious debates about it in the Egyptian women’s press culminated in the scandal of the playboy Prince ʿAli Fahmi; a wealthy landowner who married a Frenchwoman of obscure provincial origins and who was allegedly murdered by her in London some years later. For a fascinating history of the scandal, the trial and the social context, see Salah ʿIsa, Ma’sah Madam Fahmi (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2011).
- 65.
The masculine noun muhdhi literally means “exalted,” “respected,” or “elevated.” Historically, its feminine version muhdhiya referred to a favorite concubine. In this sense the latter usage was distinct from zawja (wife). Domestic slavery was outlawed in Egypt in 1877 but according to Ken Cuno the practice of concubinage lingered on till the beginning of the twentieth century (Cuno, Modernizing Marriage, 19–44). That Josephine’s official standing in Naʿim’s household is that of muhdhiya points to the ways in which this institution overlapped with the more modern qualification of mistress. Before he secretly marries her, Josephine is ostensibly Naʿim’s mistress and yet the fact that she occupies an official position in his household evokes the older terminology of legal possession.
- 66.
See Elsadda’s discussion of this “new man” figure in Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel, 24–5.
- 67.
Haddad, along with Farah ʾAntun and Salama Musa, are generally acknowledged to have introduced socialism into Egyptian intellectual life and politics. Salama Musa founded the Egyptian Socialist Party in 1921, and soon thereafter, Muhammad Bikhit, then-Grand Mufti of Egypt, issued a fatwa prohibiting socialism. While Haddad never officially joined the party, he defended it passionately in the press and persistently advocated for a Fabian brand of socialism in books and articles throughout the teens and twenties.
- 68.
Rosa ʾAntun (1882–1955), sister and collaborator of the more famous Syrian emigree author Farah ʾAntun , taught at the American missionary school in Egypt and worked with her brother on the publication of the periodical Al-Jami’a (1899). In 1903 she founded a women’s journal, Al-Sayyidat wal-rijal. See Baron, Women’s Awakening.
- 69.
Haddad wrote for many of the publications of the day and served as an editor at Al-Ahram , Al-Muqtataf, Al-Mahrusa and Al-Raʾid al-misri. In 1907 he accompanied his brother-in-law Farah ʾAntun to New York, where they tried—and failed—to establish an Arabic-language daily newspaper. Haddad returned to Cairo two years later and collaborated with his wife on her periodical.
- 70.
Baron, Women’s Awakening, 26.
- 71.
Haddad and ʾAntun were constantly subjected to government censorship and police harassment during the teens and twenties. According to Rif ʿat al-Saʿid, ʾAntun once reassured Haddad that, in case they were forced to shut down their newspaper, “we’ll pull a fast one on them: we’ll publish books and novels instead; the people are clever, and they’ll understand.” Rif ʿat al-Saʿid, “Niqula Haddad: alif baʾ al-ʾishtirakiyya al-misriyya,” April 12, 2017, Albabwabanews.com. https://www.albawabhnews.com/2473837
- 72.
Moyal graduated from the American College for Girls in Beirut in 1890 and in 1893 began teaching at the Scottish Church Mission there. She was active in a number of early local feminist organizations like the Lebanese Women’s League, Bakurat Suriya (“The Dawn of Syria”) and Nahdat al-Nisaʾ (“The Awakening Women”) and in 1893 traveled to Chicago to represent Lebanon at the women’s section of the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Baron, Women’s Awakening, 20–21). See also Behar and Benite, “Esther Azhari Moyal” and Levy, “Arab Jewish Intellectuals.”
- 73.
Moyal uses the term ʾaghniyaʾ al-suqa (wealthy commoners) which she glosses in parenthesis as burgwazi (bourgeois) (MS39:8).
- 74.
“He was assailed by suspicion and worry. He began to violently reproach the image of this cunning woman for her comportment, and for having deceived the public opinion that considered her to be the chastest woman in all Paris when in reality she was a vile and obscene creature who had accepted this ugly dwarf as a lover. The madness of love or the intoxication of passion were improbable excuses; such a man, with his hideous face, could never be the object of love, only that of greed—surely she must covet his wealth! Had her vileness and obscenity reached such a level that she would sell herself and expend her honor like the lowest of prostitutes?” (MS39:31).
- 75.
For another (in)famous American dentist residing in France, see the biography of Thomas Wiltberger Evans, who rescued the Empress Eugenie from angry Parisian crowds in the wake of Napoleon III’s defeat at Sedan. Alan Albright, “Thomas W. Evans: a Philadelphian ‘Yankee’ at the Court of Napoleon III,” Ourstory.info. http://www.ourstory.info/library/1-roots/Evans2.html. Accessed March 16, 2019.
- 76.
Lynch, Economy of Character, 126.
- 77.
Allen, A Period of Time, 292.
- 78.
Lynch, Economy of Character, 142.
- 79.
Allen, A Period of Time, 292.
- 80.
Terry Eagleton, Ideology: an Introduction (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 5–6.
- 81.
Allen, A Period of Time, 296.
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Selim, S. (2019). New Women and Novel Characters. In: Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20362-7_5
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