The Finest of Her Class

Abstract

What this study of the life, literary works, and contemporaries of ‵A’isha Taymur has done is to shed some light on (1) the way literature played a leading role in the invention of the nation through language, fiction, and poetry and (2) how the emerging national community, in turn, provided a context that influenced the themes and approaches that literary writers developed in their works. Contrary to the dominant modernist approach, which categorized the literary works produced in the nineteenth century as either traditional or modern in a linear narrative that searched for an abrupt formal and thematic break that signaled the successful modernization of the nation and its literary forms of expression, Taymur’s works combined elements of continuity and change reflected in the development of hybrid writing styles and literary forms coupled with introduction of novel perspectives couched in deceptively familiar social-political themes. As such, they allow us to recover a neglected part of the intellectual history of the 1880s and the 1890s that tested the ability of Islamic forms and themes to respond to change and contribute to the substantive debates on the problems facing nineteenth-century Egyptian society including the crises of dynastic government and the family. Taymur’s works supported the development of a synthetic reform agenda whose goal was to put modernity into the service of Islamic society and its distinct forms of expression.