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ABSTRACT
In nineteenth-century Egypt, the ‘Women Question’ reflected a battle over the cultural content of the nation in the production of a ‘New Woman’. Eastern feminists were entangled in the complexities of colonial and local discourses on women. ‘A‘isha Taymur & Malak Nasif engaged in discussions and debates with male-counterparts on these. Their thought centered on ushering new ways of thinking through the formation of an alternative Eastern feminist project that retained indigeneity and benefited from universal tendencies. They offered their own interpretations, and expressed the viability of multiple notions/discourses and complex realities in the formation of a new woman.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Robert Tignor, Egypt: A Short History (United States: Princeton University Press, 2011), 14.
2 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (United States: Yale University Press, 1993), 151.
3 Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (London: Rutledge, 2007), i.
4 Marilyn Booth, Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de- siecle Egypt (UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 4; Tignor, Egypt, 14.
5 Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr., Modern Egypt: The Formation of a Nation-State (London: Westview Press, 1988), 22.
6 Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism (United States: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 21.
7 Goldschmidt, Modern, 30; Maha Habib, Muslim Identities and Modernity: The Transformation of Egyptian Culture, Thought and Literature (United Kingdom: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 43–5.
8 Albert Hourani, Philip Khoury, and Mary Wilson, eds., The Modern Middle East (London: I.B.Tauris, 2014), 85; Booth, Classes, 4, 16–8.
9 Midgley, Feminism, 34–5.
10 Nikki R. Keddie, ‘The Past and Present of Women in the Muslim World’, Journal of World History 1, no. 1 (1990): 77–108, 96; Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (UA: University of California Press, 2002), xvii; Ahmed, Women and Gender, 129.
11 Ahmed, Women and Gender; Keddie, ‘The Past & Present’; Margot Badran, Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences (United States: Oneworld Publications, 2009).
12 Booth, Classes, 4.
13 Badran, Feminism in Islam, 18; Booth, Classes, 16.
14 Lila Abu-Lughod, eds., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 8.
15 Badran, Feminism in Islam, 20.
16 Ahmed, Women and Gender, 174–5.
17 Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women; Mervat Hatem, Literature, Gender and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: the Life and Works of ‘A’isha Taymur (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2011); ‘Negotiations of a Feminist Agenda between the European and the Colonial’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7, no. 1 (2011): 70–89; Booth, Classes.
18 Booth, Classes, 19–22.
19 Khalil Thabit, ‘Muqadimah’, in Hilyat Al Tiraz (Al Qahira: Matba’it Dar Al-Kitab, 1952), 7; Suhair Qalamawi, ‘Aisha Taymuriyyah’, in Hilyat Al Tiraz (Al Qahira: Matba’it Dar Al-Kitab, 1952), 23.
20 Ahmad Kamal, ‘Jadati, ‘Ard wa Tahlil’, in Hilyat Al Tiraz (Al Qahira: Matba’it Dar Al-Kitab, 1952), 15–9.
21 May Ziyadeh, ‘Katibah Tuqadim Sha’irah’, in Hilyat Al Tiraz (Al Qahira: Matba’it Dar Al-Kitab, 1952), 33–4; Mervat Hatem, ‘Taqdeem: Mir’aat al-Ta’ammul fi-l-Ummur’, in Mir’aat al-Ta’ammul fi-l-Umuur (Al Qahira: Multaqa al-mar’a wal-thakira, 1892).
22 Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, ‘The “Tomboy” and the “Aristocrat”: Nabawiyyah Musa and Malak Hifni Nasif, Pioneers of Egyptian Feminism’, in Social History of Late Ottoman Women: New Perspectives, ed. Duygu Koksal and Anastasia Falierou (Brill, 2013), 297.
23 Ibid., 298.
24 Omaima Abou-Bakr, ‘Why do We Need an Islamic Feminism’, in Feminist and Islamic Perspectives: New Horizons of Knowledge and Reform (Denmark: The Women and Memory Forum, 2013), 4–9.
25 Booth, Multiplied, xxi–xxii.
26 ‘A’isha Taymur, Hilyat Al Tiraz (Al Qahira: Matba’it Dar Al-Kitab, 1952), 265–6.
27 Malak Hifni Nasif, An-Nisa’iyyat (Al Qahira: Mu’assasat Hindawi Lita’lim wa al-Thaqafah, 2014), 9, 11–2, 15.
28 Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘The Marriage of Feminismt and Islamism in Egypt: Selective Repudiation as a Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics’, in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (US: Princeton University Press, 1998), 8.
29 Mervat Hatem, Literature, Gender and Nation-Building, 151–94.
30 ‘Aisha Taymur, Mir’aat al-Ta’ammul fi-l-Umuur (Al Qahira: Multaqa al-mar’a wal-thakira, 1892), 30.
31 Ibid, 32–6.
32 Hatem, Literature, Gender and Nation-building, 115.
33 Ibid., 5–6.
34 Taymur, Mir’aat, 40–1.
35 Ibid., 28–30, 40.
36 Hatem, Literature, Gender and Nation-building, 1–2.
37 The challenge for women within a Euro-Christian tradition was Doctrinal sin and a related hierarchy of being, solidified in the seventeenth century by ideas on nature that enter the lexicon re-enforcing the religion-nature-science connection in subordinating women. A deconstruction of the connection took place within the Victorian era in the context of ‘New Woman’ debates. Asserting enlightenment principles, the rhetoric shifted to affirmations of the natural, immutable principles and rights of mankind, and therefore male and female socio-cultural and legal equality. Denis O, Lamoureux, ‘Beyond Original Sin: Is a Theological Paradigm Shift Inevitable?’ Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 67, no. 1 (2015): 35–49; Paul Anthony, ‘Sex, Sin and the Soul: How Galen’s Philosophical Speculation became Augustine’s Theological Assumptions’, Conversations: A Graduate Student Journal of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theology 1, no. 1 (2013): 1–14.
38 Ahmed, Women and Gender, 79–86.
39 Ibid, 86.
40 Omaima Abou-Baker, ‘Surat a’rajul Fi Al-Kitabat Al-Islamiyyah Bayn A’Tafaseer Al-Qadimah wal-Haditha’, in ‘A’isha Taymur: Tahadiyat A-Thabit wal-Mutaghayir Fi Al-Qarn A-Tasi’ ‘Ashar, ed. Huda A’Sadah (Mu’asasat Al-Mar’a wa-thakira, 2004), 144–5.
41 Ibid., 155–6.
42 Sheikh Abdullah al-Fayoumi, ‘Lisan al-Jumhour ‘ala Mir’aat ‘al-Ta’ammul fi-l-‘Umuur’, in Mir’aat al-Ta’ammul fi-l-Umuur (Al-Qahira: Multaqa al-mar’a wal-thakira, 1892), 47–9, 59.
43 Ibid., 60–8.
44 Taymur, Mir’aat, 29–31, 34.
45 Omaima Abou-Baker, ‘Turning the Tables: Perspectives on the Construction of “Muslim Manhood”’, Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 11 (2013): 89–107.
46 Taymur, Mir’aat, 32–5; Hatem, ‘Taqdeem’, 7–25.
47 Taymur, Mir’aat, 32–6, 38–40; Hatem, ‘Taqdeem’, 9–10.
48 Omaima Abou-Baker, ‘Surat a’rajul’, 155–6.
49 Taymur, Mir’aat, 29–30, 34.
50 Ibid., 40–1, 60.
51 Hatem, Literature, Gender and Nation-Building, 3.
52 Ibid., 62.
53 Ibid., 58.
54 Taymur, Hilyat, 265–7.
55 Hatem, Literature, Gender and Nation-Building, 62, 160.
56 Ibid., 195.
57 Nasif, An-Nisa’iyyat, 10.
58 Ibid., 9–10, 26, 28.
59 Ibid., 11–2.
60 Ibid., 21.
61 Ibid., 10–1.
62 Ibid, 11, 14.
63 Ibid, 9.
64 Ibid, 14.
65 Ibid., 14–15.
66 Ibid 26, 28.
67 Ibid, 29, 26.
68 Ibid., 29–31.
69 Mayeur-Jaouen, ‘The Tomboy’, 307.
70 Malak Hifni Nasif, An-Nisa’iyyat, 16.
71 Ibid., 18.
72 Ibid., 22.
73 Ibid., 22–3.
74 Ibid., 22.
75 Ibid., 24.
76 Ibid., 18–9.
77 Qasim Amin, ‘The New Woman’, in The Liberation of Women & the New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism (Egypt: The American University in Cairo Press, 2002), 115.
78 Ibid., 40.
79 Amin, ‘Liberation’, 18–25.
80 Ahmed, Women and Gender, 161–6.
81 Ibid., 51.
82 Ibid., 64–5.
83 Amin, ‘Liberation’, 17.
84 Mayeur-Jaouen, ‘The Tomboy’, 311.
85 Malak Hifni Nasif, An-Nisa’iyyat, 17–9.
86 Ibid., 19.
87 Omnia Shakry, ‘Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Reading in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt’, in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 126–7, 139, 145–7.
88 Nasif, An-Nisa’iyyat, 19.
89 Ibid., 19.
90 Ibid., 19–20.
91 Within the context of his discussion on the intellectual progress and the advance of societies, he asserts that that there is a notable ‘difference between the Sudanese and the Turks comparable to the differences in their intellectual status [and that] … [T]he differences between Egyptians and Europeans also need to be considered in this context’. Amin, Liberation, 5.
92 Nasif, An-Nisa’iyyat.
93 Hoda Yousef, ‘Malak Hifni Nasif’, 74.
94 Booth, Classes, 4.
95 Abu-Lughod, Remaking, 7.
96 Marilyn Booth, ‘Woman in Islam: Men and the “Women’s Press” in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 2 (2001): 171–201, 179.
97 qtd. in Midgley, Feminism, 39.
98 Leila, Women and Gender, 39, 128. Massad, Islam, 21, 82; Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: from Termagant to Odalisque (United States: University of Texas Press, 1999), 112–3; Katherine Bullock, Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical & Modern Stereotypes (United States: The International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2002), 7.
99 Leila, Women and Gender, 39, 128.
100 Midgely, Feminism, 9–10, 14.
101 George Mosse, The Image of Man: the Creation of Modern Masculinity (UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3–4, 6–7.
102 Booth, Press, 174.
103 Booth, Press, 174. Marilyn Booth, ‘Wayward Subjects and Negotiated Disciplines: Body Politics and the Boundaries of Egyptian Nationhood’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (2013): 353–73, 367.
104 Yousef, Negotiations, 78–9.
105 Abu-lughod, Remaking, 10.
106 Ibid., 8; Booth, Press, 185, 189.
107 Ibid., 180; Amin, Liberation, 18-15.
108 Ibid., 180–18; Abu-lughod, Remaking, 10.
109 Ibid., 185; Ibid., 9–10; Amin, Liberation, 17.
110 Ibid., 180; Yousef, Negotiations, 74, 77.
111 Ibid., 180–2.
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Maha F. Habib
Dr. Maha F. Habib, a graduate of the University of Exeter, specializes in postcolonial, cultural and literary studies, with an interest in the Arab and Muslim world. Her research concerns include: studies of Arab and Muslim society, culture, thought and identity; women’s writing and activism; Arab migration & diaspora; and, Arabic literature. Dr. Habib has authored various works, including the book Muslim Identities and Modernity: the Transformation of Egyptian Culture, Thought and Literature.