Islamic Politics, Street Literature, and John Stuart Mill: Composing Gendered Ideals in 1990s Egypt

Abstract

Islamic Politics, Street Literature, andJohnStuartMill: ComposingGendered Ideals in 1990s Egypt Marilyn Booth In a small book sold on a downtown Cairo street in 2002, at a stall that spilled across the pavement, a dialogue between female univer sity students enacts the question of whether hijab is essential to the practice of one's faith as a Muslima, a female Muslim. In the book— as in common usage — hijab signifies modest dress, ideally (although not always) entailing loose clothing covering everything except face and hands, plus little or no use of cosmetics or conspicuous jewelry.1 The conversation among the book's characters takes place in a uni versity quadrangle and ranges across different topics, drawing on sources from history, Quran exegesis, and hadithnabawi (attributed sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) to contemporary scandal and newspaper clippings. Some of the students are muhajjabat(hijab-wear ing females) who draw books from their satchels in support of their arguments. Among them is Fatima who, along with her classmates, gradually persuades an uncovered classmate named Mayy to their argument that Islamic dress is inseparable from the correct practice of their shared faith. Mayy collapses into the arms of her muhajjabat classmates, overcome. Embracing her, they draw her away to a place of repose and contemplation for the purpose of adjusting her bodily and psychological contours to the coalescing landscape of the perfect society that can only be realized, the young women suggest, through the constant human performance of submission to the divine will. Feminist Studies39, no. 3. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 596 Marilyn Booth 597 This book, Wajhunhila makiyaj(A face without makeup) by Muna Yunus, published in 1993 by an Islamic press in Cairo, is one of an enormous number of inexpensively printed tracts available up and down the streets of Cairo and other cities and towns in Egypt.2 At the annual Cairo International Book Fair, the largest and oldest book fair in the Arab world, Islamic-identified publishing houses are packed with customers buying such books along with embossed hardcover editions or facsimile reprints of hadith,medieval legal sources and other religious texts, often newly introduced and annotated. The dis course on Islamic practices as a basis for politics in Egypt has been accompanied for over a century by the production of manuals to guide believers in their daily lives. This literature of conduct draws on the Prophet's sunna(his example in word and deed) to enact a proper, pious life. Such popularly aimed manuals, however, focus especially on assigning specific gender roles and social spaces to women as hold ers of family and community honor. These conduct manuals and related texts are aimed at believers and elucidate the prevailing rhetoric on Islam and Islamic governance. They do so to propose the cultivation of an everyday gender activ ism in the service of visions of a modern gender order predicated on clearly defined boundaries of gendered comportment, articulated as a requirement of Islamic practice, and conveyed through a discourse reliant on Islam's foundational texts. This essay addresses three such texts among many possible candidates: the aforementioned A Face Without Makeup-, Ibrahim Mahmud's Awdatfatat (Return of a young woman), another Egyptian book focused on feminine comportment published in the 1990s; and an Arabic translation of and commentary on John Stuart Mill's The Subjection ofWomen, firstpublished in England in 1869 and in Egypt in 1998—which I also found for sale on a Cairo pavement. I examine how the framing of this translation, through the translator's lengthy introduction, contributes to local Egyptian concepts of how to be a proper Muslim woman. All products of the 1990s, these three works draw on capacious historical representation, and—in the case of Mill—bring a nineteenth-century European text into dialogue with late twentieth-century Egyptian experience. I do not suggest that these three texts are any more significant than hun dreds of similar texts available in street stalls up and down Egypt's urban landscapes. But they are indicative of an expansive, popularly 598 Marilyn Booth aimed, and easily available discourse on how to enact Islamic under standings of gender as the fabric of Egyptians' everyday lives, even as...