Interlocutors? Men Authoring Women’s History in the 1890s

This chapter juxtaposes Fawwaz’s use of female biography with selected works by male contemporaries that include biographies or mention of famous women. These comprise a treatise on marriage by Hamza Fathallah; a translation of a French history of ancient Egypt focusing on women, authored by Georges Paturet and translated by ‘Ali Jalal; a history of pre-Islamic women by Habib al-Zayyat al-Dimashqi; and a marriage and conduct manual for young men, by Husayn Fawzi. They all differ markedly from Fawwaz’s dictionary, in emphasis and subject choice. It is fascinating that several Arab male intellectuals of the late 19th century wrote on the ancient history of women in the region, but what kinds of messages did their works yield?

Founding Mothers, Speaking Sisters: Lineaments of Community in History

This chapter focuses on Fawwaz’s portraits of early Muslim women, especially those of ahl al-bayt, the Prophet Muhammad’s family and lineage. It highlights her presentations of Alid and early Shi’i women given Fawwaz’s origins in the Shi‘i region of Jabal ‘Amil, Lebanon. Discussing women’s roles in the rift which led later to the development of sects in Islam, it finds that the biographical dictionary features an unusually high proportion of pro-‘Ali (Alid) and then Shi ‘i women, and that in their orientation these biographies signal a quiet but discernible Shi‘i perspective or allegiance. It then discusses Fawwaz’s emphases in her biographies of Muslim contemporaries: scholarship, literature, and reform, and how her life histories of Arab or Muslim contemporaries parallel those of Europeans.

Conclusion: A World of Women, Feminist History and the Importance of the Feminine Signature

The Conclusion assesses the overall agenda and force of Fawwaz’s biographical dictionary, and its contribution to the study of collective biography as a cross-societal feminist project. It also recaps the findings of each chapter and especially the divergences between Fawwaz’s practice and the historical works by the male authors analysed earlier. It ends by considering the different usages or significance of hijab in Fawwaz’s work as contrasted with the other authors considered here.

Pearls Scattered: An Introduction

This chapter introduces the book at the centre of this study, a mammoth biographical dictionary of 453 world women published in Arabic in Cairo 1893-6 at Egypt’s government printing press; and its author, Zaynab Fawwaz, an immigrant from southern Lebanon to Egypt who wrote on gender politics in the press and also wrote two novels, a play and some poetry. The chapter places this book in the context of scholarship on gender politics, feminism, nationalism and anti-colonialism, and early feminist discourse in the Arab region and especially Egypt. In that context, the fin-de-siècle interest in ancient history – Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Semitic – evident in Egypt’s and Arabic Ottoman publications, receives attention as it relates to Fawwaz’s outlook on women’s history.

Violent Romances: The Bodily Drama of Patriarchal Trauma

This chapter considers the presence of violence in a volume of women’s biography, linking it to a critique of patriarchy that undergirds Fawwaz’s project as a public intellectual. It assesses the volume’s use of tragic romance as a political feminist strategy, drawing on work by Joan Wallach Scott, Helene Moglen, and others and theorizing a concept of ‘patriarchal trauma’. It focuses on biographies of the Egyptian singer Almas (or Almaz), Persian Babi activist Qurrat al-‘Ayn, legendary Frenchwoman Genevieve de Brabant, Cleopatra VII, Jane Digby, a Sicilian princess named Diya’, and others.

Framing a History of the Present: or, Did the Pearls Scatter to the World’s Fair?

This chapter considers how a volume such as this was celebrated and advertised locally, and how Fawwaz’s contemporaries ‘blurbed’ it for audiences. How did such a framing contribute to the era’s discourse on women’s rights? It then turns to Fawwaz’s attempt to send her volume to Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair and her correspondence with Berthe Honore Palmer, chair of the Board of Lady Managers. It sets this venture into the context of the Women’s Building and Library founded for the Fair and the American founders’ attitudes toward feminism, international collaboration, and the female populations of societies colonized by European powers. It traces Arab women’s response to the Chicago venture, focusing especially on Hanna Kurani who spoke at the Congress of Women. It also sets Arab women’s attempts to participate in the Exposition within the reaction in Egypt to the way Egypt was represented at the fair, and the controversial presence of dancers who were allegedly from Egypt, in the Midway’s Egyptian café.

A Beckoning Compass, Circulating Lives: The Bustani Encyclopedia and Other Nineteenth-century Sources

This chapter considers Fawwaz’s use of contemporary Arabic sources, notably the Arab world’s first modern encyclopedia (produced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century), a world history in Arabic, and contemporary magazines published in Egypt. Her use of these sources challenges scholars’ tendencies to categorise intellectuals of the time according to their origins and religious affiliations, for Fawwaz drew liberally on these works by Syrian Christian writers and reformers as well as briefly on a Turkish-language compilation. The chapter incorporates a study of the Bustani encyclopedia focusing on its treatment of biography as well as its articulated sense of readership, and its use of a modern apparatus of subject organisation and alphabetization, which Fawwaz followed to a large degree, while cleverly maintaining the sense of Islamic priority evident in early biographical dictionaries by placing Muhammad’s mother Amina at the very start of her volume. The chapter continues the analysis of the previous chapter of how Fawwaz appropriated and modified the contents and diction of her sources.

Writerly Pursuits: A Compiler’s Archive

This chapter discusses the biographical dictionary’s indebtedness to a long tradition in Arabic letters of prosopography and exemplarity, and specifically how Fawwaz draws on both the form and the content of this tradition and yet also draws away from it in giving emphasis to particular subjects and pursuits, highlighting women’s ambitions and achievements and minimizing their embeddedness in ancestry. It traces her use of well-known premodern sources. It considers Fawwaz’s own explication of method in her preface and the extent to which 19th-century women could even access sources for history writing, an issue raised by what might seem the puzzling absence of certain leading premodern biographical dictionaries that feature female subjects.

A Women’s World History, in the World of Arabic Letters: A Reader’s View

Gives a history of the volume’s publication and circulation within the context of the early non-official press and book publishing sector in Egypt, followed by a discussion of the book’s themes as illustrated by its biographies of individual women. These themes include the importance for girl readers of learning history, or history reading as moral pedagogy; the importance and ideal content of girls’ education; marriage as supportive and destructive to women, and the new ideal of ‘companionate marriage’; women and political power; women and scholarship; and women and waged work. These were all addressed in Fawwaz’s essays as well, some of which feature here. Discussion of individual biographies offers a sense of the wide-ranging geographical and temporal scope of Fawwaz’s achievement.