Abstract
Abstract Lebanese-Egyptian Zaynab Fawwāz (ca. 1850-1914) was an unusual presence in 1890s Egypt: an immigrant from Shīʿī south Lebanon, without major family support, she created an intellectual place for herself in the Cairo press, generating a forthright voice on women’s needs as distinct from “the nation’s.” Like most Arabophone writers on “the Woman Question,” Fawwāz addressed girls’ education, but she focused less on domestic training than on work and income, gender-defined dependency, and exploitation. She highlighted gender-prejudiced uses of religious knowledge to further masculine privilege. Framing her arguments within terms of engagement defined by Islamic sharīʿah, she appropriated and redefined keywords for an indigenous feminism. She repurposed the Islamic-Arabic genre of biographical writing for feminist-inflected history writing. I consider how Fawwāz deployed terminology and genre to contest patriarchal readings of Islamic practice sustained by assumptions of masculinist authority. Fawwāz’s writings remind us that secularism was never inherent in Arabophone feminist theorizing, nor were the earliest Arab feminisms Western derivatives. Historical assemblages shaped by Islamic (and Christian) worldviews yielded creative syntheses that were firmly indigenous.
Highlights
When Zaynab Fawwāz introduced her in-progress biographical dictionary project—a compendium of world women’s lives through recorded history—to readers of the Beirut newspaper Lisān al-ḥāl in March 1892, she addressed Arab women, asking them to send her their biographies
Zaynab Fawwāz was an unusual presence in the 1890s Cairo intellectual scene not just because she was female, or because even among writing women at the time she had a distinct voice, and because she was an immigrant from predominantly Shīī south Lebanon
The decade in which Fawwāz emerged as a public voice—the 1890s—in addition to being a politically difficult one, fell within a longer period known at the time as al-nahḍah, variously translated as “awakening” or “renaissance” but more literally and appropriately as “getting to one’s feet.”
Summary
The decade in which Fawwāz emerged as a public voice—the 1890s—in addition to being a politically difficult one, fell within a longer period known at the time (and ever since) as al-nahḍah, variously translated as “awakening” or “renaissance” but more literally and appropriately as “getting to one’s feet.” Across the Ottoman Empire, this comprised a knowledge movement of intellectual and ruling elites. Fawwāz wrote across genres but consistently within the terms of engagement defined by Islamic sharīah as realized in daily life practices and as formed and understood within historical narratives of the Muslim ummah (community) Though she could (and did) respond to the European-provenant ‘scientific’ discourse that many elite Arab men (as well as their peers in Europe) were deploying against the frightening specter of women’s demands for greater participation and authority in society, Fawwāz spoke most often—overtly and deliberately—as a female Muslim believer interrogating the intellectual legacy of her belief community. She staged her European biographical subjects as available but partial models for her Arabophone readers
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