pearls scattered: an introduction...i pearls scattered: an introduction o n the fourth day of the...

IPearls Scattered: An Introduction

On the fourth day of the Islamic month Rabi‘ I 1309 (7 October 1891), Zaynab Fawwaz began to write what would become a 552-page large-

folio volume comprising 453 biographical sketches of women across human history, al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur.1 As a compendium of lives narrated, biographical compendium, Pearls Scattered in Times and Places: Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces drew on the format, diction and titular idioms of a long-attested tradition in Arabic letters and Islamic schol-arship whilst moving away from that tradition in its cultural expansiveness, subject focus and stylistic diversity. More specifically, several features set Pearls Scattered apart: its feminine-gendered lens along with its temporally and geographically inclusive reach; an eclectic narrative construction drawing on diverse modes of biographical reportage and writing; and (like certain earlier biographical compendia) a roughly alphabetical organisation which placed women side-by-side who in history had hailed from truly ‘scattered’ temporal and geographical sites. And then there was the irony of the title, drawing on epithetic terms for women that marked them as sharing a condi-tion of protected seclusion or concealment, but over the course of the volume turning these terms inside out, exposing familiar idioms to semantic reinvig-oration. Scattered these women had been, but many were neither ‘ladies’ nor did they inhabit ‘cloistered spaces’. Pearls they were, but hardly ones hidden anonymously in oyster-shells. Fawwaz and those who praised her work would exploit the figurative potential of this image to its fullest.

Zaynab Fawwaz (c. 1846 or 1860–1914) set to work on her biographical compendium as she was starting to find a voice in the vigorous public sphere of 1890s Cairo. Al-Durr al-manthur was one of the first books by a woman to be published by the prestigious government press at Bulaq, Cairo, and

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2 | classes of ladies of cloistered spaces

likely the most massive female-authored volume to be issued there (ever). It was Fawwaz’s first book project, to judge by the title-page publication date (though not the back-page date of conclusion of printing). Meanwhile she was writing in other genres and milieus, and her one play, al-Hawa wa al-wafa’ (Passion and Fidelity, 1893), appeared in print before al-Durr al-manthur did. As she compiled the biographical dictionary and saw it through publication, Fawwaz was contributing frequently and fiercely to periodicals appearing in Cairo, Alexandria and Beirut. And her engagement in the intel-lectual project of the dictionary offered a source base, experimentation with variant modes of writing, and the grounding for a historical consciousness that she would draw upon as she began to write novels.

Some time ago I wrote on Pearls Scattered as a set of biographies that became a source for female exemplary biography in the early Arabic women’s press.2 Returning to it for a book on Zaynab Fawwaz’s writing career, I came to see it also as a richly layered artefact of historical writing that exemplifies a circulation of discourses and political concerns – and an emergence of new voices – embedded in the condition of colonial modernity that marked the Egyptian 1890s, though without supplanting other ways of being.

I decided that Fawwaz’s biographical opus deserved to be at the centre of its own book. This is the history of a book, in the several contexts that created it: readers, sources, announcements and declarations of impetus and intent, the praise of others, political contexts and public concerns. My book about her book explores Pearls Scattered by attending to its thematic scope and polemical force, embedded in a rich surrounding debate on women’s appropriate and attested activities in the Egyptian present of the 1890s, as channelled through her and other writers’ constructed memories of variously defined pasts. I attend to identifiable sources for Fawwaz’s writing in order to stage and ponder a related aspect of colonial modernity. This was the exchange, circulation and use of Arabic written legacies and of newly avail-able texts from elsewhere, in a decade that witnessed an explosion of printed works, both periodicals and books, and a discourse on nations, genders and ruling institutions that drew on commentary and observation locally, region-ally and globally.

This book is thus partly a meditation on a moment of intellectual pro-duction and how it entailed the circulation of texts, producing new works

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pearls scattered: an introduction | 3

out of old ones for envisioned emerging audiences including female readers. It is also an appreciation of a volume that we may consider the very first lengthy work in Arabic of women’s history – indeed, as I will argue, the first glimmer of Arab and Muslim feminist historiography, and indeed, a volume that in its scope, worlded women. Like other nineteenth-century authors such as Faris al-Shidyaq and Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, who reworked the classical maqama genre for new purposes and audiences in a new age, Fawwaz drew on older rhetorics and resources to create a work for modern times. Rewriting the genres of the Arabic literary legacy was at the heart of the nineteenth-century intellectual project known as the ‘awakening’ (nahda). Unlike most of her peers, however, and writing a work within the Arabic collected biography genre, Fawwaz was rereading contributions to the Arabic literary canon from an arguably feminist standpoint, finding her way along certain pathways of canonicity and making decidedly non-canonical mean-ings available to readers who might want to follow them. For Fawwaz and her peers, this was also a time of global vision: like encyclopedia compilers and world-history authors whom she drew on as sources, Fawwaz sought to bring the world to her readers.

Pearls Scattered was a work of compilation: this was a well-established approach to authoring a book, a practice of Arab intellectuals over many generations.3 Perhaps it was also an appealing working strategy for a new writer who had not had the benefit of sustained formal education. Compiling a dictionary, an author could base herself closely and cautiously on avail-able, credible and highly respectable sources, producing a work exhibiting a pedigree of literary and historical esteem. I argue that, although Fawwaz was copying from other sources, by putting them together and framing them as she did – by editing and producing them as a single and weighty material artefact bearing a feminine signature – Fawwaz made something new.

To some extent a palimpsest of precolonial texts, layered onto a modern consciousness of patterns of historical change, Pearls Scattered in title and con-tents gestured to the necessary if colonially constrained worldliness of local articulations and ambitions. It helped to initiate a feminism that was local in its grounding and sensibility, cosmopolitan in its comparative rhetoric and transnational awareness. But this was a cosmopolitanism sensitive to the une-venness of cultural, social and political-economic forces: Egyptian feminism

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could not but be a product, partially, of its colonial context, wherein under-standings of the gender order were embedded in and productive of colonialist ideology and yet could also provide challenges to it. Pearls Scattered exhibits the stresses and tensions of those formative conditions, which incorporated European and American modernities, Egyptian and Turkish modernities, the Arab-Islamic past and various pre-Islamic pasts as recorded in canonical texts – and also European premodernities as represented in life histories of ancient and medieval European women. Perhaps the book asks – even if the author does not consciously do so – what’s modern? Where’s modern? And how does historical representation get us there?

In her range and treatment of subjects, Fawwaz does not create a binarised subject of modernity: she does not pose ‘European modernity’ against ‘Arab tradition’. In a work that foregrounds history, the repeatability of aspects of feminine experience creates not an ahistoricity but a transcultural contempo-raneity. Representing historical women’s life experiences in a context where these illustrated issues exercising denizens of the local press – marriage prac-tices, women’s visibility, how to think simultaneously about education, work and (modern European) notions of domesticity – the book suggested that perhaps these dilemmas were not just crises of modernity, even if their erup-tion in colonial Egypt seemed to take new forms. Now and then Fawwaz does assume a teleological view of modernity akin to what would later be called ‘modernisation theory’ though she does not explicitly pose it as a unilateral west-to-east movement. This view of civilisational hierarchies, and of the concept of a necessary pathway trod first by European societies, was not just an intellectual pillar of imperial rhetoric (and belief). Arab reformers invoked it too, though not uniformly. It generated tensions for intellectuals working within conditions of colonial modernity. The discourse of west-led modernity was one of those conditions which had to be confronted somehow. Debates on gender could not escape this. After all, long before the 1890s, the notion that ‘the status of women’ in a society was the gauge of its ‘civilisational readiness’ was an unquestioned tenet of Euro/American political discourse. This signalled the centrality of the figure of ‘woman’ to colonial, national/ist, reformist and conservative visions of the future. Feminists could appropriate this centrality but they also had to contend with the contradictions it raised.

There has been a great deal of scholarship on the meanings and con-

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sequences of the intense conversation about ‘women’ amongst nineteenth-century intellectuals, women and men, in Egypt. Some studies emphasise women’s contributions to this debate, stressing their formative impact on the emergence and consolidation of Arab feminisms and women’s expanding participation in civic and political institutions from education, journalism and imaginative literature to social work, political groupings and state policy, and transnational feminism.4 Others accentuate this debate as underpinning the Egyptian anticolonial nationalist project in its many dimensions, and as reflecting and helping to consolidate new concepts of masculinity and moral politics.5 Some of these studies tend to situate women’s goals and achieve-ments as secondary to (or as squashed by) dominantly male-led political aspirations spurring family and legal reform. But as almost all of this scholar-ship acknowledges or demonstrates, these distinct emphases are not mutually exclusive trajectories, though they are not necessarily mutually reinforcing objectives either.

I hope this project reminds us that, while investments in ‘women’ as a project were multiple and various (as well as evolving and shifting), and while the sources people drew on to stage ‘women’ discursively were equally varied, we should not forget that for some women writing in the 1890s, the articulation of a new deal for contemporary women and girls was not all about the nation. Indeed, they saw their aspirations for choice and self-realisation already becoming a reality, though to some extent declarations about changes on the ground by Fawwaz and other women were performa-tive rather than summative, attempts to create a new sensibility and aware-ness. But the rhetoric of hope and historical change conveys their sense of agency and forward-looking determination, however partial and fragile a feminist future might be, and however complexly realised in the conjunc-tions of national aspirations, imperial interests and patriarchal pressures that in some ways were strengthened by the intimate involvements of European powers in the Arab region. Indeed, I believe the 1890s (and the next decade) constitute a moment of relative openness. After this time the pressures of anticolonial nationalist agendas with ‘the question of women’ at their heart would narrow, though certainly not erase, possibilities for feminist engage-ment independent of specific political agendas, even as women continued to negotiate aspirational pathways. To what extent the 1890s constituted a

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less restricted discursive if not social space in terms of what could be said is a question that requires additional fine-grained research into the conversations and activities of many, both those who were most visible and therefore have received the most scholarly attention, and those who were less prominent.

This book is located at the intersections of feminist history and histo-riography, gender studies, auto/biography studies, history of the book as artefact and process, and a practice of close intertextual reading. Grounding it in the gender-attentive study of fin-de-siècle Egypt as a colonial contact zone of intellectual-nationalist fervour, and focusing on the (many) moments across time encapsulated in the book that has generated this book, I see it also as a contribution to the vigorous interdisciplinary and cross-regional study of emerging feminisms, women’s varied politics of the intellect, and their reworkings of historiographical master discourses, particularly but not only in imperial-colonial frameworks. How can an elite premodern Arabic tradition of collected biography – or a transcultural practice of producing ‘great women’ in print – yield feminist historiography, particularly given the borrowings and circulations on which such compilations rely? How are such works intertextual not only in their borrowings but also in their resonance for and within a local discourse aimed at ‘reforming women’? If they also borrow women as biographical subjects from other social-cultural milieus, what are the power grids through which these women’s life histories are made to signify locally, particularly given the imperial-colonial context and the discourses of cultural-racial hierarchy that were such a key part of it? And what can the purchase be of such juxtapositions? What does a book such as Fawwaz’s tell us about the cultural and political moment in which it emerged, but also about the possibility of envisioning such texts cross-regionally as something more than simply celebrations of women unusual in their own milieus? Might we see the volume as a display of ways in which women as generally subordinate actors in patriarchally structured socialities both exerted power, broadly con-ceived, and have been victims of patriarchally defined expectations? Working through such questions, I have drawn upon the work of many scholars who have historicised and rethought women’s historiographical practices, includ-ing biography writing. I am indebted to those who have pondered ways in which feminisms over the world have been striated by imperial, colonial and national agendas, often producing gender-oriented activisms that may benefit

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some women but that do not further feminism as a politics of equal opportu-nity, social justice and self-realisation.

A Life Untold, a Work Compiled

Zaynab Fawwaz emerged into public view through her pen in the early 1890s when Arab women had just begun to publish books, essays and diwans (vol-umes of poetry). The earliest Arab women to publish – at least under their own names – were Christian Arabs from Ottoman Syria educated in mission-ary schools. But by the late 1880s Turkish-Egyptian poet ‘A’isha Taymur (1840–1902) had published her diwan, an allegorical novel and at least one newspaper essay – and she would be featured amongst Fawwaz’s Pearls.6 Yet Fawwaz was something of an anomaly even within the miniscule circles of Arab literary women of this era. Her life history – ironically, for someone who spent so much time compiling and thinking about other women’s life narratives – remains enigmatic. Those who have written about her have pro-posed various narrative trajectories for her life; some appear to be based partly on her fiction.7 In general she has received frequent notice but little sustained attention. In works on Egyptian feminism and Arab women’s writing, she is mentioned often as an early and strong writer, one of the first Arab novelists, an important contributor on ‘women’s issues’ to the press. Other than my previously published work on her there exists only one extended analysis of her writing, a comparison of her journalistic essays with those of Malik Hifni Nasif.8 Pearls Scattered, likewise, has been noted with admiration but not dis-cussed at length except in my 2001 study of biography in the women’s press.9 Only relatively recently have her works been widely accessible. I rely in my scholarship on the first published editions, read by her public in her lifetime.

Even Fawwaz’s birth date is a mystery. Sources give dates ranging from 1846 to 1860. This is a significant variation if we wish to consider the social and political environments shaping her coming-to-age or to evaluate her status as a writer in 1890s Cairo and her interactions with intellectual con-temporaries. Was she an age peer or a ‘younger sister’, for example, to the man who would become her Cairo champion, Hasan Husni al-Tuwayrani (born in 1849/50)? Similarly, was she almost of Taymur’s generation or firmly within the next? Sources agree that she was born in the town of Tibnin in Jabal ‘Amil, in the south of Lebanon, a region with a strong legacy of

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intellectual production amongst Shi‘i scholars and related literary activity. Jabal ‘Amil was rich in scholarly dynasties, private libraries and schools for boys.

It appears that Fawwaz was born into a Shi‘i family that was neither wealthy nor of recognised intellectual pedigree. We do know that she had a brother, with whom she would live later in life, in Cairo where he practised as a lawyer. Clearly the family had the means to seed professional ambitions in their offspring. We also know from her patronymic on the cover of Pearls Scattered that if her family was not materially wealthy nor of scholarly promi-nence, they did have a sense of lineage, for the name traces seven paternal generations. Fawwaz preserved the nisba (attributive, here of place of origin) al-‘Amili as part of her father’s name (and hence of hers), though she did not use it in any of her other published writings. After she gained renown as a writer based in Egypt, journalists and scholars in Jabal ‘Amil would praise Fawwaz as one of their own.10

Her biographical story line turns yet more mysterious. At some point, Fawwaz became part of the local feudal, regional-ruling household of ‘Ali Bek al-As‘ad and his wife, Fatima bt. (bint, daughter of) As‘ad al-Khalil (b. 1840), and also amongst Fawwaz’s Pearls (426–8).11 We do not know the circumstances: who initiated this arrangement, whether Zaynab was meant to be a servitor, companion, or both, or what the relation between the two families was. Again, it would be helpful if we knew Zaynab’s birth date, for it might clarify much about her and Fatima’s relationship. Were they only a few years apart, or was Zaynab separated from Fatima by a generation? Fatima was not only literate but composed poetry. In Fawwaz’s biographical diction-ary, she is presented as well-versed in jurisprudence too. She taught Zaynab to read and write, and perhaps to compose poetry. Whether she was more mistress-mentor or sister-friend we do not know, but Fawwaz’s biography of her evinces an affectionate tone and strong connection to the household.12

We have disparate narratives concerning Fawwaz’s move to Cairo and her life just preceding it. Yusuf Muqallad’s 1959 biography (published seri-ally in the Jabal ‘Amil-based journal al-‘Irfan) states that, still in Tibnin, she had married another member of the al-As‘ad household, a groom and falconer (and perhaps her relative), but they were divorced and after that she went to Egypt. Muqallad (who had some local information) believed

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she wanted to continue her education and was able to go to Egypt because at least one family member (probably her brother) already was there. Other sources have claimed that she left Jabal ‘Amil to avoid either being betrothed or continuing in a contracted marriage, first travelling north to Beirut and finding domestic employment in an elite household, and then travelling on to Egypt’s port city, Alexandria, with that family. Or, asserts yet another narrative, she went to Alexandria with her own birth family aged ten. As unlikely as this seems given her time in the al-As‘ad family, it is possible. That she claimed on the title page of Pearls Scattered to be ‘Syrian by birth and homeland, Egyptian by upbringing and residence’ might support this view.

Once in Egypt, Fawwaz somehow met the newspaper publisher and writer Hasan Husni al-Tuwayrani (1849/50–97), a native-born Egyptian of Turkish origin active first in Ottoman journalistic circles and then in those of Cairo. He wrote prolifically in Arabic and Turkish and was a poet of some note.13 She might have met him through the aristocratic Yakan family also of Turkish origin; it has been suggested that they were the family with whom she had found employment. Or he might simply have seen what we believe was her first published essay, appearing in the Beirut newspaper Lisan al-hal on 27 April 1892, and then either before or after she sent an essay to his newspaper, al-Nil (1891–5), he contacted her. This is the impression left by his introduction when she published there for the first time (30 June 1892). Al-Tuwayrani had not been long back in Egypt, returning sometime after the closure of his Istanbul periodical al-Insan (1884–9); indeed, he was still resid-ing in Istanbul when he published an essay in al-Mu’ayyad (1889–1909) in December 1890.14 He became a mentor to Fawwaz. Through the mid-1890s al-Nil published most of her essays.

The 1890s were Fawwaz’s productive decade, seeing publication of most of her essays, Pearls Scattered, her play and the first of two novels. Typically for the time, she wrote across genres: she also composed some poetry of occa-sion in the monorhyme qasida (ode) form. Her essays appeared in al-Nil and in other leading newspapers and magazines. She conducted debates in the press with other writers, women and men. Living the semi-secluded life of an elite but not wealthy Arab Muslim woman, she used the press to create a public presence with her voice. She was amongst a small knot of Arab and/or Muslim women in her time – several of whom she commemorated in her

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volume of biography – who challenged prevailing gender practices and urged support for girls’ education, women’s rights to work outside the home, later marriages (which also meant not withdrawing girls from school so soon and more likelihood of asking their consent to a spousal choice), and (though more quietly) a role in public politics.

Most of Fawwaz’s essays for the press, and a few poems, were collected for publication during her lifetime, appearing as al-Rasa’il al-zaynabiyya (the Zaynab Epistles) in late 1905 or early 1906.15 Labiba Hashim (1882–1947), editor of Fatat al-sharq (Young Woman of the East, 1906–39), announced the book in late 1906, saying that Fawwaz had given her a copy. Hashim labelled Fawwaz ‘famous’ and lauded her for having many sterling qualities that Fawwaz had attributed to others in Pearls Scattered: astuteness, intel-ligence, virtue or excellence, and initiative. That her writing was so eloquent was proof of these qualities, commented Hashim, and a testament to the age: ‘for she is amongst the finest lady writers (afadil al-sayyidat al-katibat) in whom the east takes pride . . . we urge everyone to read it, to enjoy the pearls of its benefits and its themes. It can be obtained from the writer at Suq al-Silah Street in Cairo’.16 And so Fawwaz added another string of pearls to her literary gems. Four issues further on, she would be the subject of a biography in Hashim’s magazine.

Because the two women knew each other (how closely, we do not know) might we regard this biography, published when Fawwaz was alive, as defini-tive on Fawwaz’s early life? For Hashim, Fawwaz was born in 1860 and moved at the age of ten to Alexandria, where

she began to study reading and writing with the professor Shaykh Muhammad Shibli, a graduate of the mosque [school] of Shaykh Ibrahim Pasha in Alexandria. She then learned grammatical inflections, rhetoric, prosody and history with the professor Hasan Husni al-Tuwayrani . . . and composition and grammar with the professor Shaykh Muhyi al-Din al-Nabahani. She excelled at all of these subjects. She had an inclination for composing poetry and was skilled at it; she has a diwan of poetry that is not yet published.17

In her essays, Fawwaz’s arguments were sharp and her logic unrelenting but her manner was not always elegant: her Arabic style does not suggest truly

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extensive training in the language arts. Nor does al-Tuwayrani’s announce-ment of her appearance in al-Nil suggest long acquaintance. The diwan, as far as we know, never appeared in print. This biographical narrative is also the source for the claim that Fawwaz had several manuscripts in prepara-tion, including a biographical dictionary of men entitled Madarik al-kamal fi tarajim al-rijal (Mature minds and acumen in life-histories of the men).18 Might this suggest that Fawwaz was devoted to biography as a genre, to his-tory as a craft? I think it does hint that whilst Pearls Scattered was surely both an outcome of and source for Fawwaz’s commentaries on gender politics, it was also the yield of a historical outlook which is equally evident in her fiction. There is no reason to disbelieve the existence of these unpublished manuscripts, though they may have been unfinished or even aspirational projects. But with regard to the narrative of Fawwaz’s earlier life, we must consider the possibility that Fawwaz might have chosen to ‘rewrite’ her own life through this biography published by an acquaintance and sister writer. She may have wished to offer an Egypt-centric and more respectable ver-sion of her own early history than other narratives have left for us. The biographical narrative(s) of Fawwaz’s own life history parallel and mirror the availability and multiple uses of biographical narratives of her subjects, in the elements of choice, dramatic progression, silences, and evaluative purpose that underlay her own work and the earlier scholarship upon which she drew.

Fawwaz’s novels, like Pearls Scattered, took history as their starting point and the interrelation of gendered constraints and political possibilities and ambitions as their themes. Her first novel, Husn al-‘awaqib, aw ghada[t] al-zahira (1899), which can be translated two ways (Good Outcomes, or the Lovely Maiden of al-Zahira; Happy Endings, or Ghada the Radiant) builds on Fawwaz’s early life in Jabal ‘Amil.19 I have argued elsewhere that Fatima As‘ad al-Khalil was likely Fawwaz’s model for the heroine – and Tibnin’s Crusader-era fortress features in the story. Like many a nineteenth-century Arabic novel, it is a thickly peopled melodrama depending on a series of unlikely coincidences, echoing the texture of folk epic and employing its stock characters. It addresses the question of how gender politics are key in political contestation and rule, as do many biographies in Pearls Scattered.20 Fawwaz’s second novel, Riwayat al-malik Kurush awwal muluk al-fars (King

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Cyrus, first of the Persian rulers, 1905), also brings together history, romance and a commentary on the politics of marriage.21

Fawwaz’s own politics of marriage were quite startling for her era – even if we discount the biographical narratives about running away from one or more men in Jabal ‘Amil, which may have had their origins in her fiction, an example of how women’s imaginative literature, across cultures, has often been assumed to tell their own lives. What we do know is that at some point, probably in the mid-1890s and before al-Tuwayrani returned to Istanbul, where he died in 1896/7, Zaynab received a letter from a Syrian journalist, writer and civil servant in the Ottoman provincial government, Adib Nazmi al-Dimashqi (c. 1840–1915?), in which he proposed marriage. It seems that Nazmi had read one or more of Fawwaz’s writings and they had begun a cor-respondence. Al-Tuwayrani apparently acted as Fawwaz’s agent in negotiating this marriage, even signing the marriage contract, for by then (if my specula-tions on timing are correct), Fawwaz’s brother – with whom she had been living in Cairo – had died in January 1894, leaving her bereft of male family support. Thus, when Fawwaz left for Syria she had never met her husband. Surprises awaited her. Nazmi was residing in a small village in the Hawran, as an official of the government. Fawwaz discovered not only that she could not easily procure Egyptian newspapers there, but that she had three co-wives and was expected to educate one or more of Nazmi’s daughters – perhaps an uncomfortable twist to her emphases in Pearls Scattered and other writings on the importance of the father keen to educate his daughters.22 It was not long (though we do not know how long) before Fawwaz asked for a divorce and returned to Cairo, reportedly to Nazmi’s dismay.23 She may have remarried, to an officer in the Egyptian army about whom nothing is known. But it seems most likely that she spent the remainder of her life unattached.

When Fawwaz died in February 1914, Egyptian newspapers eulogised her as a leading writer and social commentator. She had come a long way, in every sense, from her childhood days in a Shi‘i town in the rural if richly lettered south of Lebanon. She was a scrapper and a survivor, like many of the subjects in her biographical dictionary. Like them, she was a remarkable woman who insisted that others listen.

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Thinking in the 1890s

Whenever Fawwaz did arrive in Egypt, she came into a rapidly shifting society, demographically, politically, socioeconomically and culturally. The occupation of the country by British forces in 1882 was the culmination of decades of upheaval and financial crisis. The next thirty years would see radi-cal changes on the ground and the emergence of vigorous nationalist resist-ance to the increasingly entrenched imperial presence. Although Egypt was never formally a colony of the British Empire, the advent of British political and financial control – under the guise of stewardship – meant that Egyptians experienced the conditions of late European colonial rule with its psycho-logical, physical, economic, institutional and discursive stresses, including tensions around gendered behaviour and gender-specific expectations. This juncture built on social processes and conversations that had already begun but were pitched in certain directions by the colonial encounter. Fawwaz, coming from Ottoman Syria, had a double perspective on empire, having experienced the stresses of Ottoman rule that would seed restlessness in the Empire’s Arab territories. The political history into which she came as an immigrant to Egypt barely surfaces in Pearls Scattered, but her essays indicate that it was certainly part of the political consciousness that produced her oeuvre.

Events in Egypt had been shaped partly by reform and modernisation efforts in the Ottoman Empire, but also by that empire’s gradual loss of territory and western European rivalries that were entangled in regional politics. The increasing integration of the eastern Mediterranean into wider commercial-financial circuits meant that western European governments, banks and financiers came to hold disproportionate power, and surplus capi-tal was invested increasingly in profitable ventures far abroad (particularly where it was possible to demand favourable legal conditions encouraging such investment). This meant also a growing European population in Egypt, particularly in its cities, and thus the greater visibility of other socialities. While Egyptian visitors to Europe – and those witnessing the brief French expedition at the start of the century – commented on the different patterns of elite gender relations and public behaviour that they encountered, it was another matter to encounter these ‘at home’. Debates on gender locally – and

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specifically on women’s behaviours and visibility – may have been fuelled partly by this presence but they were engendered more broadly by concern about ‘the west’ as model.24 This was central to the nahda or ‘awakening’, that multi-faceted intellectual movement stretching from (at least) the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. The nahda saw vigorous ques-tioning of received modes of thought and writing, and of social and political organisation, amongst Arab elites across the region. It constituted a collective self-interrogation with its intellectual roots in both indigenous Arab histories and cultural accomplishments, and a renewed familiarity with the societies of Europe, together with their scientific and literary achievements – and their political expansion as imperial powers.25

Intellectuals tried to craft a new language for what they saw as a new era full of possibilities as well as incipient catastrophes. This intellectual reawakening – with its accompanying and necessary technological advances, such as more available publishing presses and swifter communications – invigorated Arab letters and arts, sustained and called for expansion of education, and led to an outpouring of newspapers, magazines and books. These publications also debated the changes of which they were a part: the impact of new technolo-gies, changing consumption patterns and their putative economic impact (for which women were often blamed in the press), new ideas about governance and social institutions, shifting habits of social interchange and entertain-ment, and new intellectual outlooks. These were unevenly salient, far more evident in the juxtapositions and encounters of urban culture. They were fuelled by the ambitions of Egypt’s ruling dynasty, founded by the Albanian Ottoman soldier Muhammad ‘Ali (r. 1805–48) out of the disorder following Napoleon’s brief occupation of Egypt (1798–1801). The Egyptian govern-ment borrowed heavily from European banks to fund modernisation projects and infrastructural improvements launched by Muhammad ‘Ali’s successors, especially Khedive Isma‘il (1830–95, r. 1863–79).26 The Suez Canal (1869) was a drain on the state treasury, increasing the country’s debt to French interests and – with its grand opening – indicating Isma‘il’s determination to put Egypt on the European map. The opening was attended by European celebrities, including France’s Empress Eugénie (1826–1920, empress 1853–70 as consort of Napoleon III). In her biography of Eugénie, Fawwaz narrates this episode. That she chooses diction associated with Islamic duty (sunna,

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the proper way, the example of the Prophet; fard, religious obligation) to highlight Eugénie’s pre-eminence and role-model aptness whether in Europe or in Egypt exemplifies Fawwaz’s clever blurring of ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ female subjects through biographical rhetoric:

With her God-given goodness and sweet ways, fine upbringing, adroit grace, delicate elegance, and wit, she rose in her husband’s era to a status the seven heavens would envy . . . All took it as sunna to respect her, and as fard to extol her excellence. Remember, when she came to Egypt in the year when the Suez Canal’s opening was feted, Egypt’s beloved [‘aziz Misr, the Khedive] was at her service and numerous emirs of east and west fell into position in her retinue (72).

By the time Fawwaz wrote this, the British were consolidating their control over Egypt. It was not until the early 1900s that disaffection with the British presence, evident earlier in the press, crystallised into an identifiable nationalist movement under the tireless, eloquent leadership of the rising professional Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908), who founded al-Liwa’ in 1900 as its organ. In speeches and articles, Kamil orchestrated a collective voice out of a mounting and diverse cacophony of political critique and popular senti-ment. In the 1890s, prior to an organised politics of anticolonialism in Egypt, Kamil and Fawwaz were amongst those writing from perspectives contoured by the suffering, humiliation and outrage that the colonial encounter engen-dered, and also the possibilities and opportunities it might yield to individu-als and groups. Fawwaz’s writings on girls’ education, for instance, are framed within the struggle between British officials and local educators, intellectuals and benefactors for control of institutions and curricula, and debates on how Egyptians should or could benefit from educational developments elsewhere.

The 1890s, when Fawwaz’s writing career was at its most vigorous, was a time of social and cultural ferment, perhaps even the decade when the nahda crested, though its intellectual waves would surge long afterward. It was crucial, for Fawwaz and many others, that this was the decade which saw a newly invigorated and technologically possible print culture locally, as well as better communications that allowed newspapers produced in Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut, Damascus and Istanbul to circulate more widely and

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swiftly. Newspapers, magazines and published books had existed for several decades, but in 1892–8 periodical publishing saw a quantum leap. This was due not only to technological but also to political factors, for as the power struggle in Egypt grew fiercer, various factions – the Palace, the British, and the French as well – were ready to fund some publishing ventures.27 Book publishing increased enormously too. We may draw here on Benedict Anderson’s well-rehearsed argument about the cruciality of print culture to the development of a discursive space of nationness wherein readers could see themselves constructed as part of a community through what they read and knew others were reading.28 Yet we must bear in mind that oral culture and conversation, reading out loud to an audience that might not be literate, and manuscript circulation continued to animate the cultural scene, as did oral recitation of siyar (epics). Histories Fawwaz offers converge at times with images of warrior women in popular epics, circulated in print and through oral performance,29 a reminder of the rich vernacular and classical-Islamic literary heritages upon which she could draw. Furthermore, although it may be that feminism as a collective possibility became feasible through print, evidence from European history for feminist articulations and circuits of con-versation and written communication in pre-print or limited print situations surely had its parallels in nineteenth-century elite Arab women’s experience, before and during Fawwaz’s life.30

Nevertheless, the press and book publishing leapt in capacity in the 1890s and this is enormously significant to the articulation of gender issues in the decade. The newspapers in which Fawwaz published emerged at the start of the decade. A couple of years later appeared the first women’s magazine, al-Fatat (The Young Woman, 1892–4), in which Fawwaz contributed at least four articles plus a taqriz (praise-blurb), and whose ‘Cairo agent’ or official representative she was (suggesting that early women’s magazines begun by Syrians of Christian provenance in Egypt appealed to a cross-community audience and production ‘team’).31 Fawwaz had recourse to many printed sources as she researched Pearls Scattered; the range of material her volume mobilises testifies to the vitality of the publishing scene as she wrote. As a ‘cloistered lady’ herself, she could not traverse public spaces in search of manuscript archives or even printed books. Her archive was dependent on circulating print material and the homes of – and conversations with – female

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friends, perhaps including their libraries. Like some western European and Ottoman writers whom she memorialised, as a female historian she had to find her histories through the archives of overlapping domestic circuits.

Expansion of press and book production was supported by expanding literacy. Sustained debates in print echoed others carried out in cafes, salons and newspaper bureaus. Arabic novels entered the print scene; growing numbers of translations, pseudo-translations and other rewritings of non-Arabic texts appeared. The theatre projected a consistent presence in Cairo and Alexandria, and satirical journals lampooned government officials, the religious establishment, and the ‘Europeanising’ youth of the bourgeoisie. Ideas about appropriate national/ist curricula and educational provision were floated. Language reform in the interests of broader public debate generated support and controversy. Scientific ideas and cultural conversations took on greater currency and consideration.

This was the period in which, arguably, Arab feminism began, though there had been important writings on gender in earlier decades. From the early 1890s, ‘women’ saturated public discourse. There was a qualitative as well as a quantitative intensification of debate on the issue, a shift from more occasional exchanges to sustained debate and pointed argument amongst a set of intellectuals, women and men. Familiar gender arrangements were con-tested and upheld throughout the decade. Debates on gender as a key axis of social organisation joined, intersected with and shaped the gamut of political and social issues that confronted commentators. Fawwaz participated ener-getically in these conversations. Pearls Scattered grounded and legitimated her polemics, as it supplied historical depth, scholarly breadth, generic respect-ability and rhetorical force.

The rise of an Islamic modernist movement fostered new intellectual perspectives on social organisation and governance, with its argument that Islam as practiced by its earliest adherents but shorn of certain legalistic accruals of the intervening centuries was a flexible, appropriate model for modern life and offered guidance on new thinking about girls’ and women’s due in education, marriage and mobility. Some of Fawwaz’s biographies of early Muslim women support this view implicitly. Her writings and those of many others make it clear that this was a period of change in process in gender relations and modes of patriarchal family/social organisation. The

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controversial works of the lawyer Qasim Amin (1863–1908), Tahrir al-mar’a (Emancipation of Women, 1899) and al-Mar’a al-jadida (The New Woman, 1900, a response to critics of the earlier work), were a culmination rather than a starting point of these debates.32 Women and men wrote in the press and published tracts, novels and poems articulating (or contesting) new concepts of marital relations, family divisions of labour, girls’ education and right to have a say in spousal choice, and the fraught question of women in public space. All were amongst Fawwaz’s concerns; all emerge through the bio-graphical sketches of Pearls Scattered. They were issues couched increasingly in terms of ‘the nation’ and its future: although these discussions were shaped inevitably within a colonial/colonised discourse, it was the ‘national’, not surprisingly, that explicitly framed these discussions, even in the 1890s. This has led scholars to emphasise the national/ist more than the colonial context of feminism, though each is entangled in the other. In this regard, as in others, much more could be done to compare Fawwaz’s work with collected women’s biography in other nineteenth-century venues, but I have preferred to focus on drawing out the intertextual complexities of this work in its own complicated enough cultural context.

If Fawwaz’s volume did not take up explicitly the particular historical conditions of late imperialism as lived by those in Egypt, still it must be read within the larger historical context in which it emerged. Perhaps one way to approach the question of how Fawwaz and other early gender activists negoti-ated their times is to note that Pearls Scattered includes a few subjects who were instrumental to British colonialism or were local-regional reminders of European imperial aspirations (Queen Victoria, Hester Stanhope, Empress Eugénie, Jane Elizabeth Digby Lady Ellenborough); or who experienced it as imperialised subjects (‘A’isha Taymur, Agostina the ‘virgin of Saragossa’ and, anachronistically, Jeanne d’Arc).33 It may seem curious that, writing at the height of British imperial power in Egypt, Fawwaz could appreciate the instruction in history that prepared Victoria to be a strong imperial mon-arch. But Victoria’s presence in Pearls Scattered (as in like volumes elsewhere in the world) materialised the complex criss-crossings of local intellectual debates – and of early feminisms in colonised spaces. The conundrum was how to exploit Other histories without falling victim to them. Feminism in Egypt and in other colonised sites has since its inception faced the charge

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of colonial collusion, as an ‘import from the west’. This would become a thoroughly rehearsed issue in Egypt by the 1920s. Decades earlier, Fawwaz and other women and men struggled with how to appropriate indigenously, particularly in the sensitive region of gender relations. Her answer seems to have been to enfold represented lives from other world regions partially within Arab-Islamic rhetorical and social expectations of the time – but to use that appropriation, and lives from her own heritage communities’ history, to undermine the very expectations that she courted rhetorically. Her volume, deploying Arabic-Islamic lettered tradition and borrowing from works by Arab Christian near-contemporaries, counters what has been at least an implicit tendency in some historical scholarship on Arab gender activism to dichotomise ‘Islamic-indigenous’ and ‘Christian-westernist’ writers and activists as if there were no conversations or criss-crossing appropriations amongst them. I see the early conversations that eventually produced a range of feminist activisms as less bounded. While certainly these identities partly shaped individual and collective agendas, they were perhaps not as predic-tive of, or as definitive to, individuals’ engagements then as they may appear now when analytically dissected by scholars seeking to map the intellectual terrain of the eastern Mediterranean’s fin de siècle. A figure such as Zaynab Fawwaz (who bridged or at least interrupted more prevalent identities in Egypt by being an Ottoman Syrian Shi‘i Muslim living there) and an intel-lectual project such as Pearls Scattered in Times and Places: Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces provide an example of the eclectic spirit of much of the nahda’s intellectual ijtihad (striving) and the unpredictable circulations of ideas and images that resulted.

Ancient Histories in the Here and Now

Europe was not far away: in an Egypt occupied by Britain after 1882, and subject before that to European financial control and entrepreneurial per-meation, Europe was here and its presence raised urgent questions. To answer them, many turned to the ancient history of their own region as well as to histories of others, and did so in many forms: history textbooks, polem-ics drawing on historical exempla, didactic historical essays in a range of periodicals, commentary on histories of ‘the east’ produced by western ori-entalists. Through biographies and historical forays, major magazines such

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as al-Muqtataf popularised history as the province of the well-rounded and modern reader. Orit Bashkin argues that for the Arab elites of this period, ‘knowledge of world history in general, and of the ancient Middle East in particular, came to be understood as the signifier of modernity itself.’34 And as she notes, the celebration of ‘golden ages’ had practical implications for the claims that rising nationalisms needed to make in face of imperial arguments about alleged lack of readiness for self-government or cultural hierarchies. Elliott Colla has shown the emergence of a new perspective on the ancient Egyptian past that made it part of a teleology of local modernity.35 Fawwaz’s book responded to and may have helped sustain the ‘obsession with history’ amongst Arab intellectuals of the nahda.36

As Donald Reid has shown, whilst Europeans played key roles in form-ing the institutional foundations for recovering and studying ancient history in Egypt, from the 1830s onward Egyptian intellectuals were dedicated to illuminating their own pasts.37 This line of enquiry was central to the nahda. Fascination with ancient (as well as more recent) histories pervades Arabic intellectual production of the era. As Bashkin says,

To justify their claims historically, many [Arab and Ottoman intellectuals] emphasised the connections between the East and the West, and the influ-ence of Middle Eastern cultures . . . on the West. They looked to models of hybridity and reciprocity in the past as a way of validating cultural choices made in the present.38

Returning to ‘local’ ancient history was a way to think about empire, commu-nity, and possibility.39 Fawwaz’s compilation of lives demonstrated to readers that what had been accomplished by early modern and modern European women had its parallels in the ancient Middle Eastern world as well as in its more recent histories.

If the 1920s were the heyday of Pharaonism in conjunction with the vigorous post-war Egyptian nationalist movement, pride in their ancient Egyptian heritage was abundantly evident amongst Egyptians writing in the nineteenth century. In 1868 the educationist and indefatigable writer Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi (1801–73) produced the first Arabic-language history of ancient Egypt.40 The next year, French archaeologist Auguste Mariette’s guidebook to the new Egyptian museum appeared in Arabic translation, stat-

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ing that the aim was ‘to explain the contents of the museum Mariette created to Egyptians so that they will know about their ancestors’. At least for some, the generic masculine of written Arabic did not mean a solely masculine audience. A German artist’s rendering ‘showed veiled Egyptian women and a Western woman tourist and girl looking at the sphinxes in the forecourt’.41 The translator, ‘Abdallah Abu al-Su‘ud, with two classmates, also rendered a French-language history of ancient Egypt into Arabic, and declared that this work was meant to give readers historical models: Egyptians must follow the ‘glorious virtues’ of ‘their ancestors’.42 History writing – and reading – were didactically motivated and enfolded a sense of patriotism; or in Fawwaz’s case, gender solidarity. Such histories were followed in the 1890s not only by more works on ancient Egypt43 but also, as we shall see, by works specifically on women of the ancient eastern Mediterranean and beyond.

The press took part in this awareness-raising of Egypt’s and the region’s ancient pasts, the most famous example being the title of what became Egypt’s leading newspaper, al-Ahram (The Pyramids), established in 1876. In the 1890s press one finds notices of schoolboys visiting ancient monu-ments and admonishments of Egyptians for neglecting their past. As early as 1867, ancient Egyptian images on Egyptian postal stamps taught Egyptians to see them as ‘national symbols’, images creating a reality they were meant to reflect.44

What about the post-Pharaonic ancient era? Reid argues, ‘Many [Europeans, including those furthering study of ancient monuments in Egypt] denied any Greco-Roman debt to ancient Egypt or saw it as merely a stepping stone to the greater glories of Greece and Rome.’45 Furthermore, ‘by 1914 no Egyptian had yet tried to make the Greco-Roman heritage central to Egyptian national identity’.46As we shall see in Chapter VI, a contemporary of Fawwaz’s translated a book on women in ancient Egypt from the French wherein the Greeks are seen as Egypt’s nearby and contaminating Others. But some writers paid more positive attention. Al-Tahtawi’s work on ancient history, says Reid, spent far more pages on Greeks, Romans and Byzantines than on the Pharaonic period, and approvingly called Greece ‘the daugh-ter of Egypt’.47 ‘Ali Mubarak’s (1823–93) monumental topographical work al-Khitat al-tawfiqiyya al-jadida li-Misr al-Qahira (1886/7), which Fawwaz listed amongst her sources, featured Ptolemaic-period history when relevant

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to the location under discussion. The Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria was founded in 1892, as Fawwaz was working on her volume.

If studying one’s past was integral to a modern national/ist conscious-ness, investigation of a feminine past was significant for awareness and change in the present. In the discourse on civilisations and modernity that animated intellectuals in the Arab world as much as anywhere else, the woman ques-tion was one of several important interrelated issues that nourished histori-cal inquiry. An article on Greek and Roman history in al-Tahtawi’s 1870s journal Rawdat al-madaris al-misriyya declared what had become a mantra in European imperial ‘developmentalist’ circles and dated back to the European Enlightenment: that the status of a society relative to others was indicated in the status and treatment of ‘its’ women.48 Some women espoused this, too: a serialised article published in 1893 in al-Fatat rehearsed the notion that a society’s ‘progress’ was ascertainable from the ‘status of the women’.49 In this fascinating essay that moves from ancient Egypt to contemporary Paris by way of Baghdad and Cordoba, women in Egypt become both the equals of and the precedents for all women. They are the measure by which history was to be judged. Thus, when the ancient Hebrew Joseph espies Zulaykha, ‘eloquent and strong-willed’, this encounter yields a generalised declaration that ‘men in that era shared with women all positions and all kinds of work. Women took central status in temples, feasts and dances, much more than we see now amongst European women’. The article contrasted the civilising energies of the Ptolemies to ‘the Gauls, the ancient people of France, the Britons, the ancestors of England, and the Germanic tribes’ as ‘barbarians of the north when Alexandria was a treasure of writings’ from many ancient eastern societies ‘not to mention the freedom, culture and civilisation that women of Egypt possessed’. To our eyes now rather contradictorily, the article then insisted that ‘across two thousand years it was almost never heard of for an Egyptian woman to lose the practice of purity and chastity’ since priests kept them in line with extreme measures. ‘And Egyptian women did everything that men did, even swimming in the Nile and racing sidesaddle as European women do now . . . and aquiring intellectual and moral knowledge since education was compulsory for every girl to the age of eighteen.’50

Al-Fatat asserted that ancient Egyptian priests were fierce about women’s behaviour ‘because they knew that women are the most important and ben-

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eficial members of society; if women are sound, they knew, men will be too’. In conclusion, the essay declares, ‘Most of European women’s cus-toms and clothing were adopted from those of the ancient Egyptian women’. Collapsing together the Pharaonic and Ptolemaic eras, and taking ‘women in Egypt’ rather than a specific ethnicity or period as the relevant category, the article shows the imprint of developmentalist or conjectural historical narratives about gender but sites the origins of western women’s practices in Egypt. It takes local interest in ancient ‘local’ histories in a gender-political direction.

For Fawwaz, the Ptolemaic period yielded a feminine heritage worthy of inclusion, even if it was not a uniformly uplifting one. If this does not challenge Reid’s finding that ‘by 1914 no Egyptian had yet tried to make the Greco-Roman heritage central to Egyptian national identity’, it does suggest that for some, the ancient Macedonians were recognised as a part of the nation’s history.51 Greco-Egyptian Ptolemaic women are more important in Fawwaz’s volume than are the more famous women of classical Greece or Rome. Echoing al-Tahtawi’s history, Fawwaz featured far more Ptolemaic women – including Cleopatra VII, who al-Tahtawi did not see as an ‘ances-tor’ to be proud of – than Pharaonic women, possibly due to a dearth of sources.52 By contrast, in the 1910s–20s, biographies in the women’s press would feature Pharaonic women and almost no Ptolemaic-period women, reflecting and contributing to Pharaonist nationalism. Historically, the Ptolemaic queens, it can be argued, played particularly active roles in Egyptian rule. Through the long history of the Pharaonic dynasties, very few women took on roles other than that of consort. Yet this was a highly significant and multiply defined role crucial, Joyce Tyldesley argues, to the maintenance of kingship, not only in producing heirs but in upholding the ideological and social apparatus of the kingly institution.53 Those women who became kings – Nitocris, Sobeknefru, Hatshepsut, Tawasret – or at least the later ones, generally represented themselves in masculine regalia and tended to rule with or on behalf of young sons or brother-husbands but as the dominant ruling partner.54 As early as the Old Kingdom, queens exercised authority as regents, an extension, notes Tyldesley, of their service ‘deputiz[ing] for absent husbands’.55 The early dynastic era and the New Kingdom both saw queens who were powerful and authoritative.

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The only pre-Ptolemaic Egyptian figure who appears in Pearls Scattered is Nitocris (called here Niktursis), of the Old Kingdom Sixth Dynasty. Like many other Pearls, Nitocris is described as ‘leading woman of her era in graciousness and beauty’ – echoing the description given by Ptolemaic-era historian Manetho.56 She was also

the most famous daughter of her Egypt [or her territory, misriha] in virtue, goodness and perfection, the most profusely endowed of the learned folk [‘ulama’] of her age in brains and cleverness, and the best provisioned in determination and intelligence. It was said that the Egyptians were imbued with love of her. So dazzled by her were they that after her death they elevated her to the ranks of those they worshiped (528).

Not only ancient Egypt but also the ancient Semitic civilisations of the region, as well as ancient Persia, received the attention of intellectuals. Al-Muqtataf, an influential journal that sought to teach readers about world civilisation and European scientific and technological advances, featured arti-cle after article on ancient Semitic languages and societies.57 Again, Fawwaz’s book may be both an indication of this interest and a factor in its spread. Her inclusion of ancient, sometimes semi-legendary, queens of the region – Bilqis, Zenobia, Daluka, Nitocris – posed an ‘indigenous’ panoply of fighting queens alongside the ancient Briton Boudicca.

For Fawwaz, as for female writers across the world, to produce and frame biography as an accessible historiography of feminine experience was both an obvious and an appealing mission. It is easy to dismiss ‘great woman’ biogra-phy as elitist in content and approach. Yet it is a powerful vehicle for asserting femininity’s historicity and thus mutability, embedded in a narrative of social progress, as well as for ‘dramatizing the encounter between a responsible individual and the intractable, opaque world of power . . . [biographical his-tories] gave a privileged role to the female character in history in mediating the national past, and a sense of what it feels like to be a pawn in the progress of society’.58 And one reason ancient history was significant – for instance – in the Scottish Enlightenment was that it offered images of public roles for women that more recent histories might not yield: representations of ancient Celtic women on the battlefield, of Boudicca as an emblem of implacable

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courage and initiative. This offered a national narrative in which women were prominent at the (myth-laden) origins.59 Merging biography, curricu-lum vita, romance, historiography and affect through the female protagonist, the biographical compendium had been at the heart of women’s rich histo-riographical traditions in various European sites, whilst cultural legacies of China, Japan, India and the Islamicate eastern Mediterranean offered longue-durée biographical traditions replete with material for rewriting women’s lives as history. One might also consider biography’s appeal to a new readership, as affective human-interest narrative, indeed as heroic drama, and as ethi-cal project, useful for various purposes: for after all, what at times has been dismissed as the ‘recovery’ of life narratives is not a transparent exercise but rather an interested, and variably analytic, one. Yet these traditions remind us that the didactic force of ‘great lives’ might suggest to readers a foreclosing rather than an opening of behavioural pathways.60

Tracing Text and Context

Having set Pearls Scattered into Fawwaz’s intellectual trajectory and her his-torical moment in this introductory chapter, I turn to readerly perspectives in Chapter II. While I cannot but approach this work as a twenty-first-century scholar, I try to envision Pearls Scattered as an 1890s reader would encounter it: ideally, as Fawwaz implied in her preface, a younger female reader of the Egyptian fin-de-siècle, one of those whose essays she reproduces and therefore re-circulates, or one who was benefiting from the new and as yet sparse opportunities for formal female education. What would such a reader locate in the volume? I point briefly to genres of reading and listening that might enhance readers’ receptivity: not only the biographical tradition but also popular epic and the emerging Arabic novel with its focus on marriage plots and female protagonists. I represent Pearls Scattered first as an array of human subjects and themes. I introduce its strategies of presentation, characterisa-tion and evaluation, emphasising Fawwaz’s focus on history as an essential element in girls’ education. The volume’s vigorous narratives of women’s life histories give us subjects who come alive on its pages through the messiness of their narrated histories, the strength of their endeavours, and their sometimes appalling ends. We begin to see paradoxes in these life histories, tensions in their tellings.

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Chapter III takes up Fawwaz’s constructions of early Muslim lives, espe-cially those of women associated with ‘Ali b. Abi Talib, the heroines of Fawwaz’s birth community, the Shi‘a. I also discuss her inclusion of nine-teenth-century subjects, the still-living and the recently deceased. Both sets of subjects suggest particular circles of identity within the much larger sphere of Fawwaz’s compilation, which ranges locationally from the Uzbek heart-land and the Maldives, courtesy of Ibn Battuta’s (d. 1377) celebrated travel narrative, to the North American far west. (For readers interested in the sweep of Fawwaz’s biographical lens, a list of her subjects appears as Appendix II.)

I then turn to writerly concerns. How did Fawwaz compile this mass of lives narrated, a populace that embraced both figures of the ancient Fertile Crescent and women who would outlive its author-compiler? What were her sources, and how did she use them, Ibn Battuta and others? Chapter IV addresses the genre of Arabic collected biography, or the tabaqat/tarajim tradition. The title Fawwaz chose, and the book’s format, gave her volume the familiar patina of that hallowed legacy for her more learned readers at least. Fawwaz’s uses and deflections of the long-honed Arabic practice of biographical construction become evident when we examine the intertex-tuality of Pearls Scattered with pre-nineteenth-century Arabic works, and then – in Chapter V – against sources composed and compiled by her own near- contemporaries, though this entails further discussion of much earlier sources, and ordains close attention to minute changes from source text to host text. I devote this attention to how the source texts are ‘translated’ for a new context out of a conviction that it is only through textual repeti-tions, echoes, erasures and departures that we have access to the histories of text formation and circulation that yielded the modern works of Fawwaz’s time. Understanding the minutiae of compiling, borrowing, rewriting, elid-ing, translating, repositioning and juxtaposing earlier texts – and recontex-tualising them – is crucial to tracing such histories, and to considering how Fawwaz made strategic use of tradition. Asma Afsaruddin, studying the pres-entation of female Companions and successors – the first two generations of Muslims – in early and later medieval biographical dictionaries, notes that ‘such rhetorical deviations [between Ibn Hajar’s and Ibn Sa‘d’s biographies] are highly revealing of how societal conceptions of women’s agency and proper conduct in the public realm came to be progressively defined and

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restricted in the late medieval Muslim world’. In my work on biographies at the turns into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries I have found a similar narrowing trajectory in life narratives of early Muslim women through close textual analysis.61 Synchronic as well as diachronic substitions, deletions and so forth tell us much about formations of gender, femininity and modernity in the late nineteenth century and after. But what is also interesting is that Fawwaz adapted the format of the heritage tarjama (biographical notice; pl. tarajim) to the life narratives of non-Muslim subjects, and to material she took from other premodern genres: chronicle, travelogue, and multigeneric works on artists and writers and their legacies (adab).

The question of sources leads on to the scene of writing. In Chapter VI, I place Pearls Scattered beside several contemporaneous works that presented composite historical narratives on women in the context of 1890s debates questioning the spaces and functions assigned by gender to individuals in Arab societies, and in Egyptian urban society in particular. This chapter elab-orates the point made above about the nahda’s production of history writing, but specifically with regards to women’s history. All in all, when Fawwaz’s work is set in the context of the 1890s as a time of vivid, ardent and well-circulated argumentation, as well as the earliest attempts by Arab women and men at a mode of writing that can be termed women’s history, it takes on particular contextual and contestatory resonance. The men authors I consider in Chapter VI drew on history for an agenda in and of the present – as did Fawwaz – but in distinct ways which set her book off by contrast.

Fawwaz both echoed and distanced herself from the men who wrote on women’s history. This moves us to the question of how Fawwaz framed her own book through her preface and the praiseful ‘blurbs’ in prose and poetry submitted by intellectual acquaintances and mentors. How does each author’s self-enunciative preface define ‘good’ versus ‘great’ women (if they do), and to what ends? Drawing on Gerard Genette’s discussion of paratexts – texts that surround, announce and define a text, thereby shaping the potential readings that a given historical consumer of the text might be encouraged to elicit – I elaborate these elements of peritext (texts appearing in the same pub-lished volume as the biographies themselves). I suggest how they authorise Fawwaz’s project and link it to her status as a commentator on gender politics and an early practitioner of women’s – and feminist – history in Arabic. I see

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her preface equally as peritext and as internal to the text, for in the preface her own biography begins to emerge, linking her as an evaluative narrating persona to the subject-objects of her discourse, and also to her readers.

In this context of paratextual apparatus, in Chapter VII I discuss Fawwaz’s deployments of writings by other 1890s Arab women within her own work as an embedded political framework for her venture. This was also a publicity move, collective in spirit if not in execution, activated through a collected presentation of voices and life narratives partly constructed out of texts authored by, and conversations with, other women. Such an embedding of others’ texts became a proof-text advertising the vigorous contributions of her peers to the history Fawwaz was enunciating. It thereby served as a performa-tive paratext, creating what it purported to announce. And it reminds us of the inescapably autobiographical and collective nature of biography writing, shaped through the prism of the author-compiler’s lived and social intellect, a self likely affected by the very act of writing others’ lives-in-communities.62

Moving to a broader paratextual and contextual geography, Chapter VII also poses Pearls Scattered in a transnational discursive and material circuit. This was initiated through the worldwide attention aroused by the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago as it moved in 1891–3 from ambitious preparation stages to exhibiting ‘the bounties of this earth’, as one Arabic press article put it. That Fawwaz, at least declaratively and imaginatively, des-patched her work to the Woman’s Building in Chicago opens up the writing of Arab women’s biography and history to international circuits of women’s activism that the Exposition did much to spur, even as its exclusions and silences elevated some histories above others.

In a sense, paratextual and intertextual spheres that shaped the concep-tion, writing and reception of Fawwaz’s project before and at publication are what link the chapters of this book. They comprise a set of contexts conjoined by a book’s conjuring of them. They offer an array of ways to think about intersections between book publishing, the press, gender as a locus of proliferating public discourse, and women as writers and readers – including their access to and creation of archives. They place local productions of global women’s histories in a national/ist milieu and in an international-imperial political setting where the stakes for women’s history within the gender poli-tics of imperialism were high.

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I end by returning to the readerly. Reading Fawwaz’s book through pulses of memory, violence and affect leads me in the final chapter and conclusion to questions of fictionality and romance, prosopography and exemplarity, historiography and chronicity, and thence to the possibility of feminist his-tory in Fawwaz’s milieu. One of the features that has kept me in thrall to this book – that has exerted an affective pull on me as a reader – is the tension it harbours between hailing exemplarity in Fawwaz’s preface – as a paratex-tual frame for how to read the biographies as well as the stated criterion for selecting them – and the narratives themselves, as well as the juxtaposition of wildly diverse narrative and life trajectories. Many of the biographical profiles are also in tension with Fawwaz’s title, as it gestures to rhetorical tradition and social practice but resonates ironically in resistance to these. Was this simply an example of how a conventional rhetoric of biographical justifica-tion, as a moral map for readers, must sit uneasily over many of the human ‘exemplars’ it invokes, when stories of human encounter in their affective fullness and self-centred interest are told? That might be provocative enough.

But I began to see something more, a feature that strongly distinguishes Fawwaz as a writer of women’s history from others of the time and, I believe, allows us to think of Pearls Scattered as a work of feminist history. These texts do follow rhetorical conventions and cultural-generic precedent, and the book parallels trans-cultural female collective biography published elsewhere and in other languages, in emphasising the worthy, the beautiful and the useful as signposts of ‘famous-women’ lives narrated. But this exemplarity-trajectory is criss-crossed and interrogated by another which the volume sustains just as strongly: a narrative of patriarchal trauma. By ‘patriarchal trauma’, I mean the violences visited on women: on the body; through affective and vocal silencing; and against exertions or expressions of agency, including desire, by and because of the gender orders prevalent in their own historical moments. I explore Pearls Scattered for its inclusion of narratives of violence, emotion and affect. In the spirit of Zaynab Fawwaz and her nineteenth-century interlocutors, I have given this chapter a near-rhymed title, one I like to think that Fawwaz might have chosen, if writing in another era and a different language, but with adher-ence to the rhymed prose titling practices to which some still held in her time.

This exposes Fawwaz as a maker of a local feminism that drew from many histories and gestured outward from its own cultural and social context of

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production to insist both on re-archiving women’s exercise of agency on their own behalf and others’, and to document a history of gendered discrimina-tions. This was the necessary history for arguing contemporary women’s due. It is a feminist outlook that does not announce itself explicitly but rather surfaces through balancing narratives of vocality and initiative with the recur-ring narrative of patriarchal trauma. This repeated narrative trajectory sets Fawwaz’s work apart from those of other Arab women writing in the press at the time, though perhaps it does thread itself more consistently through women’s fiction in that era. Fawwaz mingled romance-like narratives with the conventions of elite biography writing. Because she composed her work as an instantiation of a genre that was respectable, and respectably indig-enous, it would not face the opprobrium or (at the least) the trivialisation that romance narratives did encounter, whether in the form of new novels, translations of European novels, or popular epics.

This is where Fawwaz’s Pearls Scattered has led me. A work that announced its participation in a long tradition of Arabic collected biography, in its specificity it intervened in debates of the 1890s (and after), by insisting on the relevance of (narrating) women’s lives in the past to the lived present, by placing local debates in the context of a women’s world history, and by subjecting histories of Other women to the rhetorical patterns of Arabic col-lected biography. Dependent on and respectful of the work of male writers (and thereby also demonstrating the presence of women historically in male intellectuals’ writings) Fawwaz’s work departs from them in placing women’s historical presences at the centre – and not always for reasons of enviable imitability. It was a project that grew out of and nourished Zaynab Fawwaz’s many interventions in the politics of the 1890s.

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