Abstract
In May 1923, the early Arab feminist and nationalist leader Hudā Sha‘rāwī was on her way home from Rome, where she had attended an International Woman Suffrage Alliance meeting as head of the Egyptian delegation. As her train approached Cairo station, she, stepping out onto the running board, removed her niqāb in public for the first time. This symbolic gesture was met with applause from the crowd of mainly upper-class women who had gathered at the station in support of the founder and first president of the Egyptian Feminist Union. While few followed suit in removing their veils at the station that day, Sha‘rāwī’s gesture was pivotal in the history of Egyptian feminism, as it marked a transition to a more active, assertive stance against the forms of patriarchal oppression by which women were socially and politically marginalized, their personal freedoms curtailed, and their voices subdued. It was a public call-to-arms that heralded a new phase of the feminist movement in Egypt, and, by extension, in the Arab world.
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Notes
For Sha‘rāwī’s account of the early Egyptian feminist movement and her involvement in it, see Huda Shaarawi, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879–1924), trans. Margot Badran (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1987).
Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1992), p. 2.
For further detail on Egyptian women’s activism against British colonialism, see Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 107–134. For more on Palestinian women’s early activism, see
Julie Peteet, “Women and the Palestinian Movement: No Going Back?,” MERIP Middle East Report 138 (1986), pp. 20–24. It must be noted, however, that women’s participation in such national struggles was often not as effective as they hoped in significantly impacting the social sphere. See
Rita Giacaman and Penny Johnson, “Palestinian Women: Building Barricades and Breaking Barriers,” in Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation, ed. Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989), pp. 155–163.
Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 3.
Hanan Awwad, Arab Causes in the Fiction of Ghādah al- Sammān, 1961/1975 (Sherbrooke: Editions Naaman, 1983), p. 19.
See Evelyne Accad, Veil of Shame: The Role of Women in the Contemporary Fiction of North Africa and the Arab World (Sherbrooke: Editions Naaman, 1978), pp. 107–109.
Suhā Ṣabbagh, “Palestinian Women Writers and the Intifada” Social Text 22 (1989), p. 62.
Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), pp. 2–3.
See Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke (Eds.), Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (London: Virago Press Limited, 1990);
Joseph Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995);
Lila Abu-Lughod (ed.), Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and
Lindsey Moore, Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film (London: Routledge, 2008).
See Cooke (1996); Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001); Baron (2007);
Samira Aghacy, Masculine Identity in the Fiction of the Arab East since 1967 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009); and
Hoda Elsadda, Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel—Egypt, 1892–2008 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012).
See Abu-Lughod (1998); Miriam Cooke, Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism Through Literature (London: Routledge, 2000);
Nawar al-Hassan Golley (Ed.), Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007); and Moore (2008).
See Anastasia Valassopoulos, Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural Expression in Context (London: Routledge, 2007); Baron (2007); and Elsadda (2012).
See Evelyne Accad, Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York: New York University Press, 1990);
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Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Minnie Pratt, and Robin Riley (Eds.), Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism (London: Zed Books, 2008); and
Carol Cohn (Ed.), Women and Wars: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2012).
See Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb (Eds.), Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Middle East (London: Saqi Books, 2006);
Lahoucine Ouzgane (Ed.), Islamic Masculinities (London: Zed Books, 2006);
Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006);
Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Aghacy (2009).
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 191.
Nasr Hamid Abu-Zeid, “Women in the Discourse of Crisis,” in Seen and Heard: A Century of Arab Women in Literature and Culture, ed. Mona N. Mikhail (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2004), p. 60.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 407.
Quoted in Tarek El-Ariss, Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (New York: Fordham, 2013), p. 10.
Roger Allen, “Literary History and the Arabic Novel,” World Literature Today 75.2 (2001): 205–213.
Frank Schulze-Engler, “Theoretical Perspectives: From Postcolonialism to Transcultural World Literature,” in English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion, ed. Lars Eckstein (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), pp. 20–31.
Arianna Dagnino, “Transculturalism and Transcultural Literature in the 21st Century,” Transcultural Studies 8 (2012), p. 2.
On the relationship between transculturalism and cosmopolitanism, see Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
Al-Tāhir al-Hammāmī, M‘-al-Wāqi‘īyah fī-al-‘Adab wa-l-Fan (Realism in Literature and Art) (Tūnis: Dār al-Nashr lil-Maghrib al-Arabī, 1984), p. 57.
See Daphne Grace, The Woman in the Muslin Mask: Veiling and Identity in Postcolonial Literature (London: Pluto, 2004);
Suzanne Gauch, Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Moore (2008); and
Anna Ball, Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective (London: Routledge, 2012). For an overview of the rich debate on orientalism and Middle Eastern feminism, see Lila Abu-Lughod, “Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies,” Feminist Studies 27.1 (2001).
See Abu-Lughod (1998); Cooke (2000); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Moore (2008).
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© 2016 Kifah Hanna
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Hanna, K. (2016). Introduction. In: Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137545916_1
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