Abstract
Despite its strong appeal to the most prominent intellectuals we usually associate with the Nahḍah, Ziyādah’s salon has not been given its due as a microcosmic public sphere in modern Arab literary history. Unless we concede to the fact that her salon involved the most prominent figures at the turn of the century, we are in danger of jumping over this dynamic space. Although scholars have offered insights into “Egyptianist” and Arab-Islamite elites,1 they have overlooked how Ziyādah’s salon was not only a medium of diversified cultural transmission and dissemination, but also a physical and communicative space for leaders and prominent functionaries from both factions. Ziyādah, I will argue, was part of the matrix of the Nahḍah and was more actively involved in its project than has been hitherto recognized. She orchestrated the kind of discourse that Jürgen Habermas associates with the authentic public sphere. Through careful planning and discreet engagement with the Egyptian and Arab cultural milieu, she attracted the most prominent intellectuals not only to attend her salon and participate in its proceedings, but also to propagate the ideas and debates of the salon through media channels in the public sphere. Indeed, this study claims that the salon functioned, in the terms of Jürgen Habermas’s communicative rationality, in “a democratic context in which anyone may question the argumentative claims of anyone else” as long as all gather there to reach an understanding.2
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Notes
See Israel Gershoni, “The Evolution of National Culture in Modern Egypt: Intellectual Formation and Social Diffusion, 1892–1945,” Poetics Today 13.2 (Summer 1992): 325–350.
See Mark Poster, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 23.
For a definition of the word “salon,” see Oxford English Dictionary; Dena Goodman, “Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions,” French Revolution in Culture, special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies 22.3 (Spring 1989): 330 n. 2.
“‘Al-nadiyy’ and ‘al-nādī’ are al-majlis and from them comes Dār al-Nadwah which is the house of Quṣay (Ibn Kilāb ibn Murrah) in Mecca. They used to convene there to consult with each other … and we say ‘nadawtu’ and ‘andū al-qawma,’ which means I rally them. The origin of ‘al-nadiyy’ is the majlis of the people of al-nadiyy, the generous.” As cited in ‘Alī Muḥammad Hāshim, Al-Andiyah al-Adabiyyah fī-al-‘Aṣr al-‘Abbāsī fī-al-‘Irāq ḥattā Nihāyat al-Qarn al-Thālith al-Hijrī (Literary Circles in the Abbasid Age in Iraq until the End of the Third Century) (Beirut: Manshūrāt Dār al-Āfāq, 1982), 50. In the Abbasid period the word “majlis” referred to the circles of savants and teachers. See ‘Alī Muḥammad Hāshim, Al-Andiyah, 54;
Al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā, Amālī al-Murtaḍā (Cairo: Dār Iḥyā’ al-Kutub al-‘Arabiyyah, 1954), 2, 44.
‘Abbās Maḥmūd al-Aqqād, Rijāl ‘Ariftuhum (Men I have known) (Cairo: Dār al-Hilāl, 1963), 208.
Ḥusayn ‘Umar Ḥamādah, Aḥādīth ‘an Mayy wa Asrār Ghayr Mutadāwalah min Ḥayātihā (Unknown Interviews on Mayy and Secrets about Her Life) (Damascus: Dār Qutaybah, 1983), 56.
Fatḥī Raḍwān, ‘Aṣr wa Rijāl (An Era and Its Men) (Cairo: Maktabat al-Anglū al-Miṣriyyah, 1967), 334.
‘Ukāẓ is a “Town south-East of Mecca (q.v.) where an annual fair was held in pre-Islamic times, for several weeks. Much poetry was recited during the fair which was, however, abolished by the Prophet Muḥammad.” As cited in Ian Richard Netton, A Popular Dictionary of Islam (London: Curzon Press, 1992), 251.
James W. Brown, Fictional Meals and Their Function in the French Novel: 1789–1848 (Buffalo, London, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 7.
Cited in Evelyn Gordon Bodek, “Salonières and Bluestockings: Educated Obsolescence and Germinating Feminism,” Feminist Studies, 3.3/4 (Spring–Summer 1976), 188.
Edmond and Jules Goncourt, The Woman of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Minton, Balch, and Company, 1927), 98.
The term “Bluestockings” was coined by the English salonnière Elizabeth Montagu (d. 1800) to refer to a male scholar who wore blue stockings—lower-class attire—instead of white ones. As the word evolved, it acquired a derogative meaning. It referred to learned and pedantic women in Montagu’s salon and other salons. See Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-century Italy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 9; Bodek, “Salonières and Bluestockings,” 187.
Dena Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime,” History and Theory 31.1 (February 1992): 15;
Vivien Jones, “Introduction,” in Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity, ed. Vivien Jones (London; New York: Routledge, 1990), 5–6.
Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life,” 15; Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 3.
De Thierry Belleguic, “Introduction: L’espace public de la sphère domestique dans le monde français du xviiie siècle,” in Altered Narratives: Female Eighteenth-Century French Authors Reinterpreted, ed. Servanne Woodward, vol. 1 of the Eighteenth-Century French World Center (London; Canada: Mestengo Press, 1997), xi.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 50.
Cited in Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 99.
Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2004), 2.
As cited in Gharīd al-Shaykh, Mayy Ziyādah Adībat al-Shawq wa al-Ḥanīn (Mayy Ziyādah: The Writer of Passion and Longing) (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyyah, 1994), 31.
Jean de la Fontaine, “Discours to Madame de La Sablière,” in The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine, ed. and trans. Norman B. Spector (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [1988]), 487.
Mimi Hellman, “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.4, Sites and Margins of the Public Sphere (Summer 1999): 432.
As cited in Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: New York Review Books, 2005), 356.
As cited in Sandra Jaida N’Ha, John Spayde, and the Editors of Utne reader, eds. Salons: The Joy of Conversation (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers, c. 2001), 22.
The articles first appeared in Al-‘Uṣūr, 1929. See Anwar al-Jundī, Al-Ma‘ārik al-Adabiyyah fī Mṣir mundu 1914–1939 (Literary Quarrels in Egypt since 1914–1939) (Cairo: Maktabat al-Anglū al-Miṣriyyah, 1983), 439.
See Qustakī Ilyās Aṭṭārah, Tārīkh Takwīn al-Ṣuḥuf al-Miṣriyyah (The History of the Formation of the Egyptian Journals) (Alexandria: Maṭba‘at al-Taqaddum, 1928).
As cited in John Sloan, “Quarrels and Coteries in the 1890s,” The Yearbook of English Studies 36.2, Victorian Literature (2006), 258.
As cited in al-Kuzbarī, Mayy aw Ma’sāt al-Nubūgh, 1: 315–316; Widād Sakkākīnī, Mayy Ziyādah fī Ḥayātiha wa Āthārihā (Mayy Ziyādah in Her Life and Works) (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, [1969]), 178.
Katharine A. Jensen, “Male Models of Feminine Epistolarity; or, How to Write Like a Woman in Seventeenth-Century France,” in Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 37.
As cited in Stephen Miller, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 6.
Erica Harth, “The Salon Woman Goes Public … or Does She?,” in Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, eds. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 181.
As cited in Najīb Tawfīq, Ismā‘īl Ṣabrī Bāshā, Shaykh al-Shu‘arā’: Ḥayātuh wa Atharuh fī-al- Adab wa fī ‘Aṣrih, 1854–1923 (Ismā‘īl Sabrī Pasha, the Master of Poets: His Life and Influence on Literature and on His Time, 1854–1923) (Cairo: al-Hay’ah al-Miṣriyyah al-‘Āmmah lil-Kitāb, 1985), 204.
As cited in al-Ṭannāḥī, Aṭyāf min Ḥayāt Mayy, 23; Mayy’s British contemporary Virginia Woolf highlights man’s motives behind his predilection for war and his “lack of civilization,” as she calls it. She says: “True, they have money and power, but only at the cost of harbouring in their breasts an eagle, a vulture, forever tearing the liver out and plucking at the lungs—the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition which drives them to desire other people’s fields and goods perpetually; to make frontiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their children’s lives.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York and Burlingame: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1957), 38–39.
Muṣṭafā Shihābī, Al-Shadharāt: Maqālāt wa Muḥāḍarāt fī-al-Adab wa-al-‘Ilm (Al-Shadharāt: Articles and Lectures on Literature and Science) (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Jadīd, 1966), 281.
‘Abd-al Rāziq advocates the separation of Islam and state. The main thrust behind his argument is that the two main sources of sharī ‘ah (Islamic law), Qur’ān and sunnah, neither demand nor reject the caliphate as a political institution. This led to his condemnation by a council of ‘ulamā’ of al-Azhar University and he was forbidden from holding any public office. See John. J. Donohue and John L. Esposito, eds. Islam in Transition (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 29–37.
See Boutheina Khaldi, “Epistolarity in a Nahḍah Climate: The Role of Mayy Ziyadah’s Letter Writing,” Journal of Arabic Literature 40.1 (Spring 2009): 1–34, esp. 25–29.
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© 2012 Boutheina Khaldi
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Khaldi, B. (2012). The Salon as a Public Sphere. In: Egypt Awakening in the Early Twentieth Century. Middle East Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137106667_3
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