Abstract
It is almost impossible to understand the contribution of Ziyādah and her salon to the Nahḍah without a thorough and detailed analysis of her correspondence with her salon clientele and others. While we have enough information about the attendees of her salon, very little was written on her epistolary art, an art that is central to sociability since it builds on reciprocal exchange and sets up an egalitarian base that challenges claims of superiority, hierarchy, or absolutism. Letter writing in Ziyādah’s hands assumed the characteristics of her literary art, which can be summed up as persuasion, logic, a wealth of knowledge, and a mastery of classical and modern literature conveyed in an effective language. It is little wonder that in her hands epistolary exchange received an impetus that was much needed since the fifteenth century.1
When I write I am the speaker, and when I read I am the listener.
Mayy Ziyādah
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Notes
I refer in particular to al-Qāḍī Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qalqashandī’s (d. 821/1418) voluminous compendium Ṣubḥ al-A‘shā fī Ṣinā‘at al-Inshā’ (Dawn for the Benighted Regarding Chancery Craft). See Muhsin al-Musawi, “Pre-Modern Belletristic Prose,” in The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature. Arabic Literature to the Post-Classical Period, eds. Roger Allen and D. S. Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 101–133; see also his “Vindicating a Profession or a Personal Career? Al-Qalqashandī’s Maqamah in Context,” Journal of Mamluk Studies 7 (January 2003): 111–135.
See George Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West: with Special Reference to Scholasticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990).
Fauzi M. Najjar, “Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and the Egyptian Enlightenment Movement,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 31. 2 (November 2004): 195–213.
Ihsān ‘Abbās, Tārīkh al-Adab al-Andalusī: ‘Aṣr al-Ṭawāif wa-al-Murābiṭīn (‘Amman: al-Shurūq, 2001);
Iḥsān ‘Abbās, Tārīkh al-Adab al-Andalusī: ‘Aṣr Siyādat Qurṭubah (‘Ammān: al-Shurūq, 2001); Sharqāwī, Al-Andiyah al-Adabiyyah fī-al-‘Aṣr al-Ḥadīth;
‘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).
Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 14.
See Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender, and Ceremony in the Classical Ode (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), 18, 34, 42, 73, 76–79, 181–184, 208, 271, 277.
See also Muhsin J. al-Musawi, “Dedications as Poetic Intersections,” Journal of Arabic Literature 31.1 (2000): 1–37; also, with further details, in his Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 130–161.
Susan E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys 1660–1720 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 28.
al-Ṭannāḥī, Aṭyāf min Ḥayāt Mayy, 144; ‘Abd al-Laṭīf Sharārah, Mayy Ziyādah (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1965), 212–213.
Michael Ketcham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in the “Spectator” Papers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 125–132; see also Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 42.
Nina Rattner Gelbart, “The Journal des Dames and Its Female Editors: Politics, Censorship, and Feminism in the Old Regime Press,” in Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France, eds. Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 73–74.
Censorship was once nonexistent in Egypt; indeed, lack of censorship and the freedom of expression that was granted to journalists had led Syrian writers to escape Ottoman censorship for Egypt. See Caesar Farah, “Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Ottoman Syria and Egypt,” Nationalism in a Non-National State: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, eds. William Haddad and William Ochsenwald (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1977), 151–194; Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt, 34.
Malak Ḥifnī Nāṣif (1886–1918), known as Bāḥithat al-Bādiyah, was a teacher, writer, and poet from a well-known upper-class literary family. She was among the first women to attend the Saniyyah School and become a schoolteacher for girls. She was actively involved in the Egyptian women’s movement led by Hudā al-Sha‘rāwī, but her feminism was not as secular and Western-oriented as Hudā al-Sha‘rāwī’s. She published her articles in Aḥmad Luṭfī al-Sayyid’s al-Jarīdah and her speeches in a book titled al-Nisā’iyyāt (1910) (Women’s Affairs). In 1911 Malak Ḥifnī Nāṣif spoke at the National Congress and issued a set of feminist demands including women’s rights to education and work. For a thorough study of Malak Ḥifnī Nāṣif, see Margot Badran, “The Feminist Vision in the Writing of the Three Turn-of-the-Century Egyptian Women,” Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 15. 1/2 (1988): 11–20.
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© 2012 Boutheina Khaldi
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Khaldi, B. (2012). The Letter as Annex. In: Egypt Awakening in the Early Twentieth Century. Middle East Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137106667_5
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