Abstract
This chapter will offer a study of the only work of fiction that Taymur published in 1887/8. Rather than focus on where Nata’ij al-Ahwal stands vis-à-vis the modern Arabic novel, I wish to emphasize its use of the form of Shahrazad’s One Thousand and Owe Nights to address the concerns of the newly emerging national community. While Benedict Anderson treated the modern novel as the only literary form capable of representing the “nation,” Taymur’s use of the structure of One Thousand and One Nights, which included a frame story coupled with a “story within the story,” successfully accomplished this goal through the use of what I categorize as a hybrid narrative that used an old literary form to analyze many of the changes taking place in the different arenas of the community and their connections to each other. In the process, she offered readers ways of recognizing and understanding old cultural bonds they shared with one another as well as their present concerns as members of an imagined national community.
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Your highness, he who wishes to evaluate
the advice given to him by others, must
accept as truthful that which is familiar
to the common folk [al-‵amma]… Whatever
is met with the peoples’ [al-nas] approval
should be followed and that which is censured
should be avoided. A rational man is he who
follows the examples set by others.1
—Nata’ij al-Ahwal
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Notes
‵A’isha Taymur, Nata’ij al-Ahwal- fi Al-Aqwal wa al- Al-Af‵al (Cairo: Matba’t Muhammad Effendi, 1887/8), 23.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1996), 25.
Sugata Bose, “Space and Time on the Indian Ocean Rim: Theory and History,”, Modernity and Culture, from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, eds. Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C. A. Bayly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 369.
Anne McClintock, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Nationalism, Gender and Race,”, Becoming National: A Reader, eds. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 259.
Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1991), 4–5.
D. A. Spellberg, Politics, Gender and the Islamic Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (Beirut: Maktabat Lubnan, 1974), 161.
Sabry Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse (London: Al-Saqi Books[0], 1993), 131.
Leslie P. Pierce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16.
Aziz al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship (London: I. B Tauris, 1997), 159–63.
Ibid., 84–85; Stephen Sperl, “Islamic Kingship and the Arab Panergyric Poetry in the Early 9th Century,” Journal of Arab Literature 8 (1997), 20–35.
Hubert Darke, trans., The Book of Government or Rules for Kings, the Siyasat-nama or Siyar al-Muluk of Nizam al-Mulk (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), chap. 14–22.
Cited in Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974), 397.
Edward W Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 153–54.
Arthur Goldschmidt Jr., “The Historical Context,”, Understanding the Contemporary Middle East, eds. Deborah Gerner and Jillian Schwedler (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004), 44.
Eve M. Troutt Powell, “From Odyssey to Empire: Mapping the Sudan through Egyptian Literature in the Mid-19th Century,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (August 1999), 414.
When colonel ‵Urabi, with army battalions behind him, presented Khedive Tewfik with the “just” wishes of the army and the nation, Tewfik replied, “‘You have no rights to these wishes. I inherited this land and you are my slaves. …’ [In response,] ‵Urabi said: “God created us free and not as inheritance or property. By God, we will not be inherited or enslaved from this day forward.” Ahmed ‵Urabi, Mudhakaratal-Za‵im Ahmed ‵Urabi (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1989), 75.
Robert Hunter, Egypt Under the Khedives, 1805–1879 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 1984).
Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot offered a nuanced discussion of justice as the rallying cry of the popular rebellion that brought Muhammed Ali to power. The populace defined the justice of the rulers to include integrity, predictable/fair taxation, law and order, and abiding by popular consensus. An unjust ruler was tyrannical and deserved to be deposed by the common people. Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 40, 47, 49. During the ‵Urabi revolution, ‵Urabi called on the khedive to “restrict his power to the proper sphere.”
Juan Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 237.
Taymur, Nata’ij al-Ahwal fi al-Aqwal wa al-Af‵al, 104. This passage was translated by the author. Taymur incorporated some of these same themes in poems she wrote to celebrate the return of Khedive Tewfik to his throne after the failure of the ‵Urabi revolution in Egypt in 1882. They included the monarch’s special relationship to God and his good fortune, honor, and virtue, noble stock and old lineage as the primary values upheld by his government. ‵A’isha Taymur, Hilyat al-Tiraz (Cairo: n.p., 1892), 15–16, 21–22.
Ilyas al-’Ayubi, Tarikh Misr fi ‵Ahdal-Khidiwi Ismail, 1863–1879 (Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 1990), 2:135–44.
Ali al-Hadidi, Abdallah al-Nadeem, Khateeb al-Wataniya (Cairo: al-Hay‵at al-Misriya al- ‵Amma lil Kitab, 1987), 45–46.
A. M. Broadly, How We Defended Ahmed ‵Arabi and His Friends (Cairo: Research and Publishing Arab Center, 1980), 376–77.
Ehsan Yarshater, ed., The Cambridge History of Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3:171.
Abdel Halim Abu Shuqa, Tahrir al-Mar’at fi ‵Asr al-Risalat (al-Kuwait: Dar al-Qalim, 1990), 2:450.
Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male and Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975), chap. 1.
Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13.
While she lobbied for her son, Nizam al-Mulk supported the son of a rival wife. As a result, she threatened to influence her husband against him. See Denise Spellberg, “Nizam al-Mulk‵s Manipulation of Tradition: ‵A’isha and the Role of Women in the Islamic Government,” Muslim World 78, no. 2 (April 1988), 117.
Stephen Sperl, Mannerism in Arabic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 77.
Nelly Hanna, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Ismail Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998), chap. 3.
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 138, 140, 144.
Mervat Hatem, “The Politics of Sexuality and Gender in Segregated Patriarchal Systems: the Case of Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” Feminist Studies12, no. 2 (Summer 1986), 251–74.
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© 2011 Mervat F. Hatem
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Hatem, M.F. (2011). The Crisis and Reform of Islamic Dynastic Government and Society. In: Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118607_4
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