May Her Likes Be Multiplied

Preferred Citation: Booth, Marilyn. May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2001 2001. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2r29n8h7/

May Her Likes Be Multiplied

Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt

Marilyn Booth

University of California Press

Berkeley Los Angeles London

© 2001 The Regents of the University of California

To M., A., A., E., and M.

Acknowledgments

Grants from several institutions have contributed to this book. I first began to think about this material while conducting related research as a fellow, first of the American Council of Learned Societies (1988–89) and then of the Fulbright Islamic Civilizations Program (1989–90). A research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1995–96) for work on Zaynab Fawwāz (research that is ongoing) contributed to the project, as did a second Fulbright fellowship (1998–99) for work on masculinity and the woman question. A Middle East Research Competition fellowship (1990, 1995) from the Ford Foundation allowed me to work on the contemporary material. A grant from the Research Board of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1994), helped me acquire additional material. I thank all of these institutions.

I am grateful to more people in Cairo than I can name. To Hagg Muhammad Sadiq and Hagg Mustafa Sadiq, I cannot adequately express my gratitude for the help in finding hard-to-access material. None of my work would be the same without it. What makes this working relationship even more precious is the friendship that has grown between my family and the entire Sadiq clan (including the cat!). I also owe a great debt of gratitude to the personnel of the Periodicals Room in the Egyptian National Library for their cheerful help. Over a few months in 1990, Ola Seif was an indispensable and creative research assistant, and pleasurable company, too. Cairo friends have been amazing in their support over the course of this project. John Swanson, as always, has been wonderfully generous with time, space, and emotional support. I also want to single out Sahar Tawfiq, Ibtihal Salem, Layla Marmoush, Amina O'Kane, and Rianne Tamis, although the list could go on and on.

Many colleagues and friends have read, listened to, commented on, and/or contributed to parts of this manuscript in its various incarnations. For invariably helpful and kind critiques, I want to thank Lila Abu-Lughod, Gaber Asfour, Margot Badran, Liz Bohls, Karen Booth, Don Crummey, Ken Cuno, Ginny Danielson, Alice Deck, Suad Joseph, Hilary Kilpatrick, Zachary Lockman, Hoda Lutfi, Sonya Michel, Val Moghadam, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Cynthia Nelson, David Prochaska, Hoda Elsadda, Don Reid, Zohreh Sullivan, John Swanson, Mohamed Tavakoli, Mary C. Wilson, and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. I also thank the University of Illinois Cultural Studies Group. Joel Beinin and Eve Troutt Powell were assiduous readers for the University of California Press, and I am grateful for their patience and their suggestions. Many friends in Champaign-Urbana have shown supportive kindness at the right moments; I want to single out Liz Bohls, Eren Giray, Kristen Dean-Grossmann, Sharon Irish, Cindy Mann, Nilofar Shambayati, and my fabulous and steadfast reading group (Nancy Abelmann, Frances Jacobson Harris, Jo Kibbee, Sally McMahan, Bea Nettles, Jeanie Taylor, Carol Spindel, and Karen Winter-Nelson). I owe a great debt to Lynne Withey, who for longer than I want to admit has encouraged this project patiently and with unfailing thoughtfulness and skill. I am grateful to Scott Norton and Lynn Meinhardt for shepherding the book through production, to Susan Ecklund for her careful and courteous editing, and to staff members of the University of California Press, who have been unfailingly pleasant and efficient.

Finally, I want to thank my children, Paul A. Cuno-Booth and Carrie M. Cuno-Booth, for their insights on Jeanne d'Arc, and equally for never letting me forget the centrality of domestic life and the importance of humility (“Mommy, you're still working on that1 book?”). And to Ken, more thank-yous than I can express for encouragement and forbearance, and for that ultimate act of love, giving up your computer at crucial moments.

Technical Note

I transliterate only Arabic's long vowels (except when capitalized in English), hamzas (except initial ones), and ‘‘ayns, eschewing distinctions between Arabic consonants that appear identical in English orthography; the distinctions will be obvious to those who need to know. In references, I transcribe non-Arabic proper names according to the orthography of biography titles. There was no standard orthography for these; often the same name appears differently from one text to the next (Hāt shibsūt, Hatshibsūt, Hātshibsū), as do other non-Arabic words. I have of course left such inconsistencies in place. When an English name or title spelled in Arabic ends in y (Lady, Mary), I transliterate it as y rather than īī; (Lādy, Māry).

Arabic versions of European names often proved difficult to decipher; some “Famous Women” are no longer famous enough to spark recognition. (Hannā Iskū khātūn—Anne Askew—kept me long guessing. But Fiktūriyā awf Shlizwīī;j Halstayn was appallingly clear.) Because I had to reconstruct European spellings from the Arabic orthography, there may be inaccuracies. When referring to historical figures in the text, I retain the transliteration of Arabic names, and premodern Turkish names as written in the Arabic alphabet, but not non-Arabic ones (including a few European names given to Arab women, depending on my sense of how they have predominantly been known; thus, Emily Sursuq but Rūz Antūn). At the first substantial descriptive mention of biographical subjects and other historical figures, I provide lifespan dates when available, but I could not locate them for everyone. For premodern Muslims, I try to give Islamic (A.H.) as well as Christian/common era dates. Because the point of dates is to give the reader context, I do not always provide dates for historical figures contemporary to and associated with biographical subjects (such as husbands).

For variety and ease of reading, I often refer to Arabic journals by my translated English versions of their titles; both are given in the index. I thank readers for their indulgence on these judgment calls. All quotations from magazines are my translations from the Arabic.

Prologue

She herself was the ultimate rule, the clearest exemplar of comportment, proper order, and refinement. Her movements and stillnesses, her words and her silences, her gait and her bearing, her eating and drinking, the arrangement of her hair and clothes, her manner of meeting people, and the disposition of her room and books and desk: all were lessons to us, a model we imitated.

Fortune did not favor me with an opportunity to see her, to acquire for myself a share in the lights of her knowledge.

On the evening of March 22, 1888, Maryam Nimr Makāriyūs, aged twenty-eight, called family and friends to her bedside in Cairo. Speaking words to break hearts, as her friend and witness to this scene Yāqūt Barakāt Sarrūf (d. 1937) described it, she closed her eyes and died just after midnight.

A month later, the Cairo magazine al-Muqtataf (The Selected) published Sarrūf's obituary of her schoolmate and intimate in its “Home Man-agement” section. Sarrūf traced Maryam's life from birth in Hasbiya, Syria, shortly before the 1860 Damascus massacre that left her father dead. She described Maryam's missionary-school education, her marriage to one of The Selected's founders and their relocation to Cairo in 1885 with Yāqūt in a wave of Arab intellectuals leaving Ottoman Syria for Egypt's more liberal atmosphere, and, a mere three years later, her illness and death. Sarrūf offered a narrative that another immigrant, Zaynab Fawwāz (c. 1850–1914), took as her source when she included Makāriyūs's life history in her mammoth biographical dictionary of women, Scattered Pearls on the Generations of Mistresses of Seclusion (1894). Some years later the same text, without Fawwāz's revisions, appeared in the magazine Fatāt al-sharq (Young Woman of the East), in the series that opened every issue, “Famous Women” (“Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘”).^[1]

Meanwhile, Sarrūf penned another obituary-biography in The Selected. Eliza Everett (1843–1902), an Ohio schoolteacher, taught Yāqūt and Maryam as schoolgirls. Praising Everett's dedication to educating a Lebanese Christian elite's daughters, Sarrūf remembered Everett's example as momentous to her own growth. Sarrūf allowed her own life to edge further into the story as she related from Egypt how Everett corresponded with graduates who had emigrated far, asking after their children “as a grandmother would of her own children's children.”^[2]

Yāqūt Barakāt Sarrūf wrote of women she knew, women who had shared her life. Yet she was contributing to a genre of biography writing that would move beyond personal acquaintance to embrace women of many times and places. When Zaynab Fawwāz published Sarrūf's life of Makāriyūs, she omitted markers of personal reference but retained the implication of benefiting from an exemplary life. This text embodies elements of exemplarity, circulation, connection, and repeatability that are at the core of my work. May Her Likes Be Multiplied argues for an approach to the writing of biography in modern Egypt that contemplates it as a gendered discourse of prescription by way of encouragement, a discourse of exemplarity through which women explicated and explored their situations and their hopes, a discourse of circulating texts in which women and men proposed and debated their ideas on social change and the pertinence of women's lives thereto. I privilege one biographical genre—the brief life sketch set within a larger publication context (biographical dictionary, periodical)—and one biographical gender, the writing of women's lives. The genre, gendered, was distinctly modern in its construction of a certain kind of life narrative. Yet, partaking of a venerable Arabic tradition of life writing, it exploited familiar features, for they provided markers of respectability and indigenous practice. That tradition had been a male province: now women and men sculpted those features in new ways for new agendas. It was a discourse anything but separate from emerging apparatuses of identity definition and social regulation inherent to the practices of nationalism. As Nira Yuval-Davis argues for national/ist projects, “Women usually have an ambivalent position within the collectivity. . . . they often symbolize the collectivity [sic] unity, honour, and the raison d'être of specific national and ethnic projects. . . . [But] they are often excluded from the collective 'we' of the body politic, and retain an object rather than a subject position.”^[3] I argue that biography was one means by which women might assert subject positions within the nationalist collectivity, writing themselves into life narratives that represented the sorts of subject positions they envisioned for themselves and their daughters. Perhaps these texts helped to counter constructions of gender that retained a notion of gendered divisions of labor as presocial. Biographies could suggest how individual lives and collective constructions of gender difference were mutually constitutive, and they hinted at how learning might shape life.

Sarrūf's biography of Makāriyūs was also metabiography. She highlighted a practice of gendered life writing by choosing to mention that among Makāriyūs's many roles was that of biographer. Sarrūf praised Makāriyūs's attention to the lives of al-Khansā‘‘ (d. A.H. 24/644 C.E.), a celebrated Arab poet as Islam emerged, and Zenobia (d. 274 C.E.), ruler of Palmyra. Makāriyūs had orated her life of al-Khansā‘‘ to the female literary group Bākūrat Sūriyā that she and other Beirut women had founded in 1880. Then The Selected published it.^[4] Sarrūf demonstrated her friend's craft by quoting Makāriyūs's critique of biographers who elide subjects' mothers and neglect childhood, that period when personality and future predilections emerge. Neither mothers nor childhood commanded much space in Arabic biographical practice; in her life of al-Khansā‘‘, Makāriyūs attacked “the historians” for this lacuna:

The historians said nothing to us of her mother's name. They did not bother to say a word about the woman who suffered through long nights because she cared about preserving her daughter's life and was devoted to raising her . . . as if forgetfulness and lethargy finish the mother off such that she is not fit to be mentioned even when her daughters are. Where is the fairness in that, when a girl's excellence is her mother's?^[5]
Then Sarrūf followed her friend's methodological map for biography. Constructing Makāriyūs's life, Sarrūf dwelled on the widowed mother's efforts to give her three sons and her daughter Maryam the best education available by moving to the big city, Beirut. Makāriyūs's mother, Sarrūf noted pointedly, insisted that her daughter graduate, an experience prohibited to her mother, “born and raised in an age that forbade girls' education, on the pretext that it was inappropriate and out of fear of its effect on them. This was what people of that time believed, a belief more reprehensible than sin.”^[6]

We know little of Yāqūt Barakāt Sarrūf's life. We know she was the daughter of a schoolteacher and that she married in 1878.^[7] We know women and men intellectuals attended salons at the home she shared with her husband, a writer and publisher. We know she was invited to become an honorary member of the Federation of Women's Clubs by its chair, Ellen Henrotin, of the elite Chicago circle that spearheaded the Columbian Exposition women's exhibition.^[8] We have her byline. From her tributes to Maryam Makāriyūs and Nasra Ghurrayib, we know when and how this close-knit group of Syrian intellectuals moved from Beirut to Cairo. We know that when Maryam became ill, Yāqūt traveled with her to rural Lebanon in search of a salutary climate and returned with her to Egypt shortly before her death. We know from her biography of Eliza Everett that she was part of a close female community at school, and we can guess that she long stayed in contact with her revered teacher, who wrote textbooks on theoretical astronomy and calculus in Arabic for her students.^[9] But when, in 1937, Khalīī;l Thābit Bek, a protégé of Yāqūt's husband, published Yāqūt's obituary, it did not offer the kind of biographical detail that Yāqūt had offered women readers in her biographies of others. Thābit praised her dedication to learning when young, and to her husband and children (and husband's protégés) when older. But if she was “a paragon of what the refined woman wants to be,” what did this paragon embrace beyond an organized domesticity and an informed and gracious sociability?^[10] And the only autobiography Yāqūt Barakāt Sarrūf ever published exists in her biographies of Makāriyūs, Ghurrayib, and Everett.

Two decades after the biography of Everett appeared, another Syrian intellectual in Egypt, Mayy Ziyāda (1886–1941), wrote her autobiography by writing biographies of three Arab women.^[11] Ziyāda was the first Arab woman to write full-length biographies in Arabic of other Arab women, a “first” in which she took pride, an act that shaped her life and her understanding of it. Although women and men would continue to write biographical sketches of famous women to entertain and instruct, Ziyāda's biographies of ‘‘A’ءisha Taymūr (1840–1902), Warda al-Yāzijīī;(1838–1924), and Malak Hifnī Nāsif (1886–1918) were a culmination of the genre I present in this book. Significantly, she chose contemporary and Arabic-speaking women as subjects, divulging a perception of collective purpose, community, and identity that transcended and respected differences of religion and origin. Taymūr was an Egyptian Muslim of aristocratic Turkish origin, al-Yāzijīī; a Syrian Christian, and Nāsif an Egyptian Muslim of a rising class that was beginning to replace the Turkish aristocracy. The affectionate correspondence between Nāsif and Ziyāda embodied shared concerns of elite women in Egypt—Egyptian and Syrian, Muslim and Christian.

Biography is always autobiography, as Ziyāda's biographies repeatedly adduce when the authorial “I” links the act of writing biography to individual and collective identity, and as later feminist scholars have insisted.^[12] Feminists have been at the forefront of scholarship on auto/biography that privileges this interweaving of lives. Perhaps women in Egypt who wrote of “Famous Women” were contemplating prospective autobiographies for their futures and those of their friends, pupils, and daughters. To write biography meant to focus on real women's struggles, with the interplay of discursive and extratextual elements that most struggles entertain. It meant empathy, strategy, commiseration, celebration, and sometimes critique. Reporting on the General Union of Women meeting of 1899, Yāqūt Sarrūf exclaimed:

Leave the male writers of Egypt and India to research and discuss the state of women in the East—whether it is permissible for them to uncover their faces, show their hands, and talk to anyone but their husbands and parents. . . . Indeed, let them raise women's hope that [men] will remove fetters even slaves are not bound in . . . and come with me for a moment. . . . You will see hundreds of the world's finest women gathered in a spacious meeting place . . . to declaim publicly on all facets of culture, society, and the branches of knowledge.^[13]

It was important to see what women were doing, not simply to hear the oratory of male intellectuals debating “women's status.” Reading hundreds of pages in women's magazines, reading the women as opposed to the polemics penned by men, one can almost physically feel the frustration of these early writing women as they give their sisters a verbal shake. This entailed an attitude toward education: “Even with all the opportunities she has to elevate herself, and the time in school, the young woman cannot hold conversation on the simplest subjects, unless the topic be clothes, irritation at the servants, her search for a certain food, or the like.” It may seem ironic now that the same women stressed education as a means to improve the domestic sphere (“. . . not to mention what appears to the observer as neglect of her home and failure to decorate it, even with a bit of her own needlework which, slight as it might be, would show that the mistress of the house possesses some good taste and ability to organize and maintain”).^[14] But biography helps us to see how “the domestic” could mean many things.

If prescriptive biography proclaimed an intent to channel women's lives along certain paths, the complexities of lived lives and of narration meant schoolgirls could read into these texts messages other than those “Famous Women” biography seemed to prescribe. For example, all sectors of the press addressed the issue of formal education for girls. Should it exist? Who should partake? What should be taught? Whether or not one supported girls' education, the prevailing (though contested) sentiment was that schooling ought to prepare the girl for home management and child rearing. Yet, as evident as the trained homemaker ideal is among the “Famous Women,” education also opens other avenues in a life story, paths that lead away from home. Speaking of women's autobiographies in twentieth-century France, Nancy K. Miller has said that “to justify an unorthodox life by writing about it . . . is to reinscribe the original violation, to reviolate masculine turf.”^[15] Autobiography—with its ascription, however elusive, of authorship—asserts responsibility for this “reviolation” in a blatant, and therefore particularly contestational, way. But biography trespasses the same ground, while treading more lightly by posing an ostensible distance between writing subject and biographical subject. In biographical dictionaries and women's magazines, writers in Egypt wrote women's biography into polemics on the woman question. They produced a body of texts at once defiant and ambivalent, argumentative and conciliatory. They instituted a discursive practice that sometimes converged with, sometimes challenged, other productions of “woman.” If it is easy now to read ambivalence and contradiction in these biographies (as I will do), it is crucial to place them in historical context, where “ambivalence” may become “multiple possibility” and “contradiction” looks more like the tensions wrought by this thing we call modernity.^[16] According to Yuval-Davis, “In order to understand th[e] centrality of gender relations to nationalist projects, one needs to analyse culture as a dynamic contested resource which can be used differently in different projects and by people who are differentially positioned in the collectivity.”^[17] Manipulated by writers with diverging agendas, biography contributed to defining women as symbolic representatives of the nation.

My focus on the production of meaning privileges texts' insertion within publication venues over authorship. As Mary Poovey argues, “If texts are parts of complex cultural economies . . . then no individual can originate meaning nor can he or she contain or foresee the effects the text will produce. If even the unconscious and language . . . are cultural constructs . . . [then] it is more important to look at the structure and deployment of signifying practices than their 'originality.'”^[18] Indeed, these biographies elude the assignment of individual authorship. By convention, editors held authorial responsibility for unsigned writings they published. But the circulation of texts created a complicated genealogy, not wholly matrilineal or patrilineal, Eastern or Western, Syrian or Egyptian, Christian or Muslim. Yet it does not matter if these texts were “original” in the sense of being authored “originally” for the context in which I found them. For their “originality” lies also in the public context in which they appear. The magazines, and their historical moment(s) of production, become part of the text's interior. The crucial nature of publication context, in the narrow sense of specific magazines and the broader sense of political context, the historicity of the texts, reminds us that a text cannot be read in isolation from either its pre-texts or its contexts. I agree with Nancy Armstrong, and find her argument useful as we look at different sorts of historicity these biographies elucidate, when she finds that

culture appears as a struggle among various political factions to possess its most valued signs and symbols. The reality that dominates in any given situation appears to be just that, the reality that dominates. As such, the material composition of a particular text would have more to do with the forms of representation it overcame . . . than with the internal composition of the text per se . . . [which] is nothing more or less than the history of its struggle with contrary forms of representation for the authority to control semiosis. In this respect, there is no inside to the text as opposed to the outside.^[19]

In my readings I highlight similarity because my objective is to set out the terms of a biographical discourse and to emphasize its presence across a range of journals and over a period of time. Feminist scholars today are sensibly focused on difference, and perhaps an insistence on similarity requires justification. I think it important to recognize that in a period of frank debate that might seem startling from the perspective of today's Egypt (where ethnic and religious identities and the terms of public debate on gender have rigidified somewhat in a climate of political and economic crisis), distinctions along lines of ethnic and geographic provenance, religious identity (as an instance of social belonging), and economic power engendered among the intelligentsia a search for points of commonality that could forge a nation. Textual repeatability and connection also created a history that sanctioned early feminist demands. At the same time, nationalists' and feminists' theorizations of community performed the familiar ideological operation of masking their own class identity by making it into a norm for proper citizenship. Commonalities among these texts suggest class-based agendas that subsumed other axes of difference. To point out only differences among texts, as to indicate only moments where texts distance the West rather than constructing identification with it, would be to tell only part of the story. I do offer instances of difference, as I link biographies to other texts. Consistency across the genre, by contrast, highlights the differences the “women's press” encompassed internally.

Women's magazines in Egypt from the 1890s on are a fabulous source for the study of gender politics. But what can a focus on a single genre in this wealth of writing tell us? Why study the “Famous Women”? To sort out the contradictory implications of nationalism for women demands (among other approaches) that we follow closely the rhetorical leads of discrete groups of texts while setting them firmly within the histories of which they are a part. This methodology, if unable to encompass “the big sweep,” usefully complicates our understanding of how gender, nationalist politics, and the search for indigenous identities intersected and competed under the weight of imperialist practices. Moreover, to focus on a single, popular, and often anonymously presented genre shifts the spotlight away from a few famous, endlessly repeated (and indisputably important) names—Hudā Sha‘‘rāwīī;, Qāsim Amīī;n, Nabawiyya Mūsā, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid. Biographies remind us that questions of gender redefinition were the province of many unnamed or uncelebrated women and men, albeit those of a small (but broadening) elite. Biography helps us to see feminism in Egypt (and resistance to it) as collective projects, not the work of just a few individuals but rather a sustained, multilayered conversation elaborated through many channels of cultural and political work that set new assumptions as they created new expectations. For these biographies were produced as social arrangements, and ideas about the organization of society were shifting and were shaping each other. They constituted one of many discursive forms that generated, and were configured by, an uneven shift to a modern form of patriarchy in the society in which these biographies were first consumed. At a time when Egyptian nationalisms and feminisms were taking shape, the question of siting women in an envisioned postcolonial nation was urgent and controversial, involving critical appropriations and rejections of models from outside the Arab world. There was no single nationalist or feminist answer to the question of women's place(s) but rather a multiplicity of ideological and activist offerings. Unpacking women's biography gives us not a straightforward map of the discursive production of “women” in a particular series of historical moments but a maze, forcing us to recognize the multilayered and at times internally contradictory nature of the politics of gender, nation, and class, as intellectuals in Egypt searched for answers to pressing problems they saw as facing the watan—both “homeland” and “nation.” It compels us to recognize that modernity, as it was being produced in Egypt, held perils and benefits for women (of some strata at least). It demands that we confront the complex ways in which writers deployed “foreign” discourses.

In her work on representations of the female in European modernities, Rita Felski finds that narratives of modernity diverge according to “the gender of their exemplary subjects.”^[20] Biographies of “Famous Women” were abundant—and are important—partly because they constructed a complex narrative of modernity that put female heroines at the center. They did not do so in isolation. But perhaps more than other writings, biography, in its mundane materiality, exposed the complicated implications for women of visions of modernity that were shaping and shaped by interrelated discourses of nationalism, anti-imperialism, pedagogy, and economic development in Egypt from the late nineteenth century on. Biography could make an epistemological claim on its readers that fiction—highly suspect throughout much of the period—could not. Narratives of women's lives enacted the particulars of an imagined gendered modernity that countered the dominant narrative of the modern—in Egypt as elsewhere—as masculine.

As I have said, what a reader now finds contradictory in these texts may not have looked so then. Insistent on attempting to read texts as they might have been read by their first readers, I prefer to read these biographies in their (cross-cultural) historical context without providing a “resolution” to conflicting messages within. Rather, I want to emphasize the possibility of conflict as significant and productive in itself, as a mode of reading that might produce different resolutions for different groups of people. Texts may carry contradictory messages according to the particular axes of power against which they are read.^[21] And these biographies were published in a period when social and political institutions were in upheaval. In the 1890s, a decade after Great Britain's occupation of Egypt (1882), London bureaucrats were constructing a colonial edifice on Egypt's accelerating integration into the European capitalist system, especially its indebtedness to British and French interests. Articles in the new nongovernment press took note of the pace of urbanization and the visibility of class differentiation. These processes took concrete form in new patterns of consumption, home life, dress, and sociability, evident not only for an elite of the wealthiest merchants and largest landowners, Egyptian and foreign, but increasingly for what the press began to call a tabaqa mutawassita, “middling layer” or class.

The idea that female lives must change had emerged among a few female and male intellectuals of the nineteenth-century elite, erupting into public debate by 1890. At a point when European imperialist supremacy shaped a questioning of local structures and practices that had already begun, the woman question was a symbolically powerful articulation of issues of regeneration and community identity, of the localization of European cultures, of individual and national economic empowerment. The “awakening” (nahda)—an intensive movement of intellectual selfsearching on behalf of a variously defined larger community that had begun early in the century—took on nationalist and anti-imperialist inflections. The nonofficial press that had emerged in the 1870s articulated a range of intellectual and political agendas and worked in tandem with the beginnings, in the new century's first decade, of organized party political activity. By now, earlier “stirrings of national self-consciousness . . . behind them . . . , something older and stronger, the wish of long-established societies to continue their lives without interruption,” had become “an articulate idea animating political movements.”^[22] Nationalist, anti-imperialist sentiment reached new activist heights in 1919, in popular fury about British resistance to the demand for independence. Women of all classes demonstrated their anger visibly, and the year after Egypt obtained a nominal “independence” in 1922, a few upper-class women under the leadership of Hudā Sha‘‘rāwī (1879–1947) founded al-Ittihād al-Nisā’ءī al-Misrī, the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU). Although its origins were predominantly aristocratic, the EFU developed a following among a broader, emergent elite that formed the audience for women's magazines.^[23]

From the 1890s on, male nationalist commentators staked out a range of stances on the woman question, signaling the centrality of that question to perceptions of individual and group identities caught up in competing nationalist programs. But for women it was not simply a question of what “women's backwardness” signified for a new (male-defined) nation. It was their lives. Writers like Fawwāz, Nāsif, Ziyāda, Musā, and others saw the interests of women as not necessarily represented in the discourse of male nationalists. To what extent were women's publicly articulated perceptions and arguments “feminist”? I think it is crucial in answering such questions to look at how specific strategies, textual and otherwise, suggest complicated negotiations toward change that (some) women sought to realize in their own and their children's lives. But perhaps it is not enough to show by one's actions that women can move into new arenas. Feminism entails a conscious articulation that this is a necessary and political move. But how much can we ask of “feminism” in a context where it was unnamed locally before the early 1920s?^[24] Must we demand an explicit articulation of programs vis-à-vis the state? The nation? How deliberate and defined must one's program be? I do not claim explicit “feminist” status for even a majority of these texts, but I do believe that many of them could have engendered a consciousness conducive to furthering goals that female and male gender activists were proposing. Other texts (or the same ones, simultaneously) might undermine those goals rhetorically, depending on the reader. For feminism as a historically shaped concept subject to debate was part of the ground on which intellectuals moved. When secularist reformist Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872–1963) introduced Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif's 1910 essay collection on gender politics, he criticized Europe's sayyidāt nisā‘‘iyyāt (feminist ladies) for demanding “absolute” equality. But for Nāsif abstractions were secondary. What was imperative was to contest essentialist, ahistorical visions of gender, as she did in her essays. What could be more feminist?^[25]

An activist debate on the meanings, interrelations, and effects of modernity, nationalism, and internal ethnic (Egyptian versus immigrant “Levantine”) and religious (Muslim versus Christian) difference shaped this intellectual and political ground, on which categories overlapped. Most Egyptians were and are Muslims, but the sizable Coptic Christian population had a vocal presence in the media and among the nationalist leadership. Ottoman Syrian immigrants were mostly Christian, but there were Muslims among them, such as Zaynab Fawwāz and prominent writer Muhammad Rashīd Ridā (1865–1935). A further difference was that between (the few) Shī‘‘īī; Muslim immigrants (Fawwāz) and Sunnīī; Muslims, immigrants (Ridā) and those native to Egypt.

Egyptian nationalism was split along several axes. There was the question of priorities. Should Egypt be rid of the occupiers before all else? Or was it preferable to privilege a gradual strengthening of social and political structures from within? And what of looking westward for guidance? There was the question of what the sources for moral authority should be, an issue raised repeatedly in women's magazines. In a society where religious affiliation was a primary and officially recognized marker of identity (and where church hierarchies and a state-sponsored Islamic establishment held sway over the social practice and legal standing of their adherents), some wanted to think in nation-based terms that would override religious identity as the basis of community. But if this was “secularism,” it did not entail removing religion from the public arena. Yet what role should religion(s) play? Nationalists who put Muslim identity in the forefront were grouped loosely into two camps which scholars have variously labeled as “Islamic modernist” or “reformist” and “conservative” or “organicist,”^[26] a division corresponding to perspectives on the position of Islam in state formation and the construction of a unifying national identity.^[27] Islamic modernists, emerging late in the nineteenth century, declared their intent to separate the prophet Muhammad's received message and exemplary practice in the earliest Muslim community from layers of doctrine and practice accumulated as Islam expanded geographically and ramified in its political structures and intellectual elaboration. For conservatives, Islam was “an inherited, balanced system of faith and action” based on the Qur’ءān and “the verifying authority of community consensus” through time.^[28] Conservatives were uncomfortable with modernists' willingness to abandon practices as inessential to an Islamic way and unsuitable to the demands of modern life. If conservatives tended to demand Britain's expulsion before all else, while reformists' cautiously positive evaluation of some Western institutions tended to temper their demands, correlation between political demands and ideologies was not always comprehensive. Nor was “Islam” (in its many definitions) hegemonic in determining Egyptian nationalist agendas. This complexity echoes through biographical sketches; religion—Islam, Judaism, various Christianities—invariably appears as one of many formative factors in the life histories of individuals and nations.

Margot Badran argues that from the late nineteenth century through the “first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the reforming, revitalizing doctrine of Islamic modernism accorded space for a feminism within the framework of the religious culture and provided a congenial climate for its evolution.”^[29] Moreover, Islamic modernism, with its emphasis on relying on and reinterpreting “the basics” (and who was to define what they were?), was not monolithic. Although it included recognition that gender regimes and attitudes about women and men as gendered beings were among features of the social landscape that must change, the extent of change and specific forms it should take were subject to debate.^[30] Take the example of Labīī;ba Ahmad (1875–1955) and her Majallat al-nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya (Magazine of the Women's Awakening). Because she opposed complete unveiling, made frequent pilgrimages to Mecca, and was later involved in Muslim Brotherhood–associated politics—together with the tendency to compare her to the secularist politics of the Copt Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik, the other female Egyptian editor of a major women's periodical in the 1920s—she and her journal have been considered “conservative” by some. But it seems to me that in the 1920s she represented a sophisticated culmination of Islamic modernism. In al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya she gazed approvingly toward Turkey, where women were filling jobs vacated by men. She dismissed the oft-expressed worry that a girl trained to work would be morally suspect:

Teach the girl religion from a young age, make her fear vice, interdict what the religion prohibits, fix her heart and soul on what is right and true, then cast her anywhere and you will see her preserve her virtue as she does her life. Teach the woman what will allow her to undertake what men do if she loses [her] men. Teach her how to be a merchant, an engineer, a nurse, and then to save this work for her time of need.^[31]

It was in al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya that Nabawiyya Mūsā wrote to call for a standard elementary curriculum, identical for both genders save for an added needlework unit for girls.^[32] It was there that, in 1930, a life of photography entrepreneur Anna Schreiber called on Egyptian girls to “hear” the message of Schreiber's example: “Here was a young woman . . . creating a new industry, . . . managing a big office, . . . and earning a great deal of money from her labor.”^[33] Muhammad Sādiq ‘‘Abd al-Rahmān, advocating the dismantling of men's absolute control over wives and daughters, found space for his views in Ahmad's journal.^[34] Differently inflected, it was no more “conservative” than secular-leaning journals of the decade (and was the only women's journal in Egypt to feature a life of Sappho!).

Yuval-Davis argues that within nationalist movements and emergent nation-state formations, especially in the colonized world, women's “emancipation” has stood in symbolically for a range of “political and social attitudes towards social change and modernity.” As many scholars have demonstrated, “Because the position of women has been so central to the colonial gaze in defining indigenous cultures, it is there that symbolic declarations of cultural change have taken place.”^[35] Hudā Sha‘‘rāwī certainly recognized this, complaining to Wafd leader Sa‘‘d Zaghlūl (1857/60–1927) that to ignore women's demands in the wake of their nationalist activism was to invite European observers' cynicism about the genuineness of women's patriotism and about nationalists' commitment to women's rights.^[36] Yet “emancipation” as a signifier of modernity could not erase “woman” as a signifier of (a threatened) collective identity. Yuval-Davis identifies a trajectory from women as “symbols of modernity” to women as articulations of European imperialism's reach and cultural power; and from women as “symbols of change” to women as “carriers of tradition,”^[37] a trajectory evident in the twentieth-century history of Egypt. Yet I would argue that all these symbolic burdens were simultaneously present for the urban, educated women of early twentieth-century Egypt and that their synchronic presence underlies the complex, ambivalent, often apparently contradictory messages that the “Famous Women” biographies held for female readers. This is why our late-twentieth-century analytic dichotomies of secular versus Islamist or progressive versus conservative are not always useful. Prominent writers and activists such as Rashīī;d Ridā or Ibrāhīī;m Ramzīī; (1867–1924) do not fit neatly or consistently into such slots, especially when these positionings are hyphenated (as they often are) into secular-progressive and Islamist-conservative and when such individuals' (often shifting) views on gender and social organization are introduced to complicate their nationalist programs. These men and others, as well as Labīī;ba Ahmad and other women, were searching simultaneously for an Islamic cultural authenticity and a modernizing ethos that would privilege some new roles for women. Biographies were one way to “deploy the idea and practice of the 'new woman' against the colonizer” as they upheld the continued cultural vitality of the “old woman.”^[38]

A “modernist” stance is manifest in biographies of Muslim women written and published by Muslim and Christian, Egyptian and Syrian, Sunnīī; and Shī‘‘ī. The dominant message I find in the “Famous Women” biographies of the first half of this century, as in the women's magazines overall but perhaps with greater emphasis in biography, is that Islam is flexible on social practice and gender, that from its beginnings it held out the possibility for women to make their own lives. Gender practices sanctioned by tradition were not immutable for the devout Muslim or Christian woman, suggested these texts. Indeed, many customs and rituals that both local reformers and representatives of imperialism railed against (although not necessarily in the same terms) were practiced by Muslims and Christians especially in rural Egypt, suggesting that they were not based in or at least not irrevocably bound to a specific religious identity. And Egyptian Muslim modernists and Coptic Christian nationalists, as well as Muslim and Christian reformists from Syria, had common if not identical concerns that surfaced in women's biography. For if Islamic modernists and traditionalists both sought to control the shape of a twentieth-century Islam, some nationalist inflections on Islamic modernism demanded a program that would subsume or at least incorporate religious boundaries into a secular nationalist identity, making possible an alliance with Egypt's Copts or other Arabic-speaking Christians. Adherents to this view believed that religion could shape the national heritage without governing the state. Christian and Muslim writers insisted that accentuating Islam's malleability allowed it to be a shared heritage that need not define the nation. Yet the implications of this convenient slippage were ambiguous for women. And neither the Coptic Patriarchate nor al-Azhar contemplated relinquishing control over the organization of family life among believers.

For all, how to situate “the West” was a difficult question. “It is worth recalling,” notes Pierre Cachia, “that 'Westernization' was a direction taken by local elites even before they had to bend to lasting foreign rule; that the driving force behind it was never submission but the desire for emulation as the surest means of self-assertion; that 'the West' adopted as an example, viewed as monolithic and often idealized, was an abstraction tinged by Arab perceptions of their needs and aspirations.”^[39] “West” and “East” (al-gharb and al-sharq) were both abstractions, frequently invoked ones. After Japan's victory over Russia in 1905, and as Egyptian nationalisms became more sharply defined, these terms accumulated new layers of meaning. Debate in journals for women took up the issue; in biographies, the varying meanings of these politically loaded abstractions surfaced as a site of ambivalence: al-gharb as simultaneously a focal point of admiration and emulation and a source of social disintegration and decay, al-gharb as conspicuous consumption both healthy and corruptive, algharb as threat and as promise. Like others concerned with distinct, local meanings of “Westernization” across the histories of colonized societies, I believe we must attend to the particulars of these discourses in their material historical contexts if we hope to understand how colonized elites operated and tried to shape their societies. I agree with Badran that Egyptian feminists did not see their feminism as derivative or alien.^[40] But they did recognize its multiple roots, and biography offered one means to articulate this. If it is pointless to define feminism as Western or Eastern, it is perhaps useful to examine in detail how “the West” was constructed in feminist and other gender-activist projects in a colonized society. That I find a synchronic and diachronic biographical continuum prevailing over a cultural discontinuity on biographical terrain is not at all to privilege or assume a “Westernizing” feminism. But it does compel us to ask: To what extent were nationalist and feminist formulations indebted to assumptions of European liberal political philosophy and liberal nationalist practice? How did these overlay (or suppress) other possible trajectories for gender politics? This seems a useful way to pose the question of “Western influence” that scholars of gender in/on Muslim-majority societies have tended to answer either by positing wholesale mimicry of colonial discourse or by rejecting the notion that there was any influence at all

Debating the localization of al-gharb had everything to do with contesting the meanings of independence and statehood. Constructing a nation, of course, had everything to do with the touchy issue of changing—or allegedly unchanging—gender roles. If Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias stress women's “ambivalent position,” they also emphasize the “central dimensions of the roles of women [as] constituted around the relationships of collectivities to the state.”^[41] Debates in Egypt—as in so many other emerging postcolonial states—over the appropriate boundaries for a national/ist “collectivity” constructed iconographies of the ideal woman as crucial to nationalist groupings' contesting visions of the emerging nation-state.^[42] More silently, this broached the issue of how male roles too might, or must, change. The practices that Islamic modernists saw as postclassical sedimentations to be dispensed with could be represented in the positioning of women. Debates over “secularism” as a basis for nationhood and social practice took place around the symbolic figuration of “Woman.” Touchstone issues—seclusion, veiling, and polygyny—were not controversial only because “reformers” coming from the imperial center fixed on them as institutions that, these interlopers claimed, kept Muslim societies “backward.” Locally, as I have said, Islamic modernists railed against such practices, dismissing them as accretions that harmed the social and economic health of the nation, and biography upheld this view. At the same time, featuring Western women's lives, biographies confirmed and complicated a consistent local discourse that defined and attacked a superficial sort of Westernization as ruining Egyptian womanhood—and threatening the identity and survival of the nation. This was and is a core theme in the culturalpolitical struggles of many Middle Eastern and/or Muslim-majority nations. Many commentators did pay a great deal of attention to what Westerners were saying. But we must not ignore the hybrid and creative uses to which such attacks were put locally, or ascribe reformist views entirely to a parroting of the West. It is also inaccurate, however, to deny that these modernists' views had anything at all to do with discourses traveling to colonized regions from the European metropolis.

As the discourse of the modernists furnished an ideological basis for a modernist nationalism that looked to Europe even as it formulated an anti-imperialist agenda, Muslim modernist nationalists (and Coptic Christian nationalists) had to act within a symbolic field of cultural and political assertion that constructed a range of “authentic” pasts—Muslim, Arab, Egyptian. In this they competed with those like Mustafā Kāmil (1874–1908) who, attacking modernity as Western and therefore suspect, saw the legal, social, and biological inequality of women as part of “the stable structures of past tradition” that, he believed, must underwrite any political formation.^[43] In these struggles an indigenous definition of modernity was at stake, and its contours took shape around the woman question. The work of Deniz Kandiyoti and Sylvia Walby links modernity to disturbances within preexisting modes of male dominance and domination, and other scholars have followed this lead. I concur with Kandiyoti and Yuval-Davis and Anthias, in the Mediterranean context, in emphasizing the fluidity of public-private boundaries, and “the private” as subject to organization and attempted regulation by the state. These are warnings against conceptualizing Mediterranean societies as moving cleanly from “private” to “public” patriarchies at a time of social transformation, of an erosion in the classic patriarchy that had tended (not uniformly, of course) to structure nonnomadic Muslim Middle Eastern and North African societies.^[44] Yet the concept of “public patriarchy” is useful in articulating how gender was pivotal to nationalist definitions of modernity that sought to yoke women's “awakening” instrumentally to the nation's progress from what nationalists termed “tardiness” or “backwardness” (ta’ءakhkhur). I theorize the mixed messages of the “Famous Women” biographies as arising from and helping to shape an emerging public patriarchy, defined by Kandiyoti as women's instrumental subordination within, rather than exclusion from, the public arena.^[45] Yet some women might have read in biography a menu of resistance to this modern patriarchy, for these constructions of lived experience could imply a difficult but not impossible reimagination of the self. Ultimately, though, these texts suggest that women would find it extremely difficult to escape the dominant nationalist program for social organization: the nuclear family as primary unit of the nation (attenuating more extended kin-based identities) and as that which—with “woman” at the center—would “produce a healthier nation.”^[46] It is a domain of struggle that remains central to Egyptian politics today.

Biography articulated the contradictory faces of modernist nationalist, and feminist, discourses. Redefining the “national[ist] family”^[47] as the productive unit of the nation and reorienting loyalties of subnational groups were moves sufficiently radical to necessitate an assertion that the modernist project (and, in its nationalist formulation, its “secularist” leanings) was culturally authentic in its foundations and outcomes. Moreover, to claim the territory of nationalist hegemony from the conservatives required this move, as Kandiyoti and others have observed. The dominant textual move in many biographies is one of attempted reconciliation, an exhortation to a specifically female modernity in line with “authenticity” (asāla) as represented in constructed lives of premodern Arab and/or Muslim women and pre-Islamic Egyptian women. Yet this also intimated flexibility, offering precedent for redefining a female arena.

To enter a debate that today engages many scholarly voices, let me hazard a further question. How are biographies part of the process through which people come to imagine a distinct nation? And how do they help to define the relationship between “nation” and “state”? Gabriel Piterberg argues persuasively, through a reading of Roger Owen and Sami Zubaida, that the idea of the “colonial state” was so well entrenched for educated publics in the Middle East by the 1920s that what might appear to be alternative ideologies of community, those of Arabism and the bonds of Islam, were “subordinated [as imaginings] to the model of the territorial nation.”^[48] How “imaginings” of gender regimes as central elements in constructions of both nation and state emerge in the texts of the period—as well as the ways that early gender activists sought to further their aims—seems to me to support this view. To what extent did biographies assume the right of the state to define and regulate family relations? And did they thus help to construct what Egyptians thought of as “the state” and to what extent they saw “the state” as intersecting with “the nation”? What responsibility did “the state” carry with regard to how women would fulfill their articulated responsibilities to “the nation”? The biographies I examine here are to be neither dismissed nor deplored as sanctioning a hegemonic (and monolithic!) view of ideal womanhood consonant with dominant territorial nationalist programs, nor are they to be celebrated as counterhegemonic. They are both; they are neither. Appearing in an era when liberal nationalist consciousness was becoming militant activism, biographies implied the nation as primary community. In a general sense, they express a nationalist orientation in the sense that the nation rather than, for example, an international community of women is the ultimate focus of political community and loyalty; women are praised above all for acting to benefit other women within a territorially defined state, and premodern women often are constructed anachronistically as acting on behalf of a “national” community. This is consonant with the growing awareness of intellectuals in Egypt of European notions of the state's centrality and is buttressed by the Egyptian state's growing power. The gradual, incomplete shift from an Ottoman-Islamic orientation that saw the Ottoman state as “an authentic, uncompromising opponent of Western imperialism” to a nationalist orientation focused on the territory of Egypt, the watan (homeland) as the “natural” site of state power and popular loyalty, can be traced through biography.^[49] And only occasionally did these texts imply activist feminism as taking precedence over nation-oriented work. But if, as I have suggested, we must define “feminism” as entailing, first, the recognition that social experience is gendered through social practice and that this has placed gender-specific restraints on women, and second, engagement in attempts to remove or temper such restraints, biographies carried feminist messages even as they proclaimed the precedence of service to the nation.

If, therefore, feminism in Egypt as elsewhere has been “bound to the signifying network of the national context which produces it,”^[50] in early-twentieth-century Egypt that meant articulating feminist goals within the shifting framework provided by modernist/secularist and conservative nationalisms and emphasizing adherence to local precedent. But this did not mean that women's articulations of feminist subject positions remained consonant with the views of liberal nationalist men. (Nor, of course, were women's feminisms homogeneous.) While biography upheld the outlines of a modernist program for women—management of the nuclear family as the site of nationalist strength (and indoctrination), and carefully delineated public work in the service of the nation—it also tentatively escaped those arenas by articulating women's needs, desires, and strategies for the self. Kandiyoti's notion of “patriarchal bargains,” women's tactics of maneuver and resistance within systems of male dominance, is useful here. The “Famous Women” biographies can be read as an elite strategy for pushing the boundaries—but only so far. That men also published “Famous Women” texts suggests shared cross-gender interests within a socioeconomic stratum, while warning against quick distinctions between women's and men's nationalisms. Were these biographies “reviolat[ions] of masculine turf”? Not unequivocally so.

Yāqūt Sarrūf's elegiac and didactic biography of her friend portended the outlines of the “Famous Women,” a genre that would become an institution in Arabic magazines published by and/or for women. That Sarrūf's life of Makāriyūs traveled into Fawwāz's remarkable 1894 collection and on to the long-running Fatāt al-sharq illustrates these texts' travels among venues and audiences. With this shifting publication context in mind, in chapter 1 I examine the “Famous Women” through the lens of Fawwāz's tome. That Sarrūf followed received literary practice for obituaries (punctuating mournful prose with sighing couplets of poetry) and for biographical notices (framing Makāriyūs's personality with epithets of praise adducing her moral qualities) suggests how old forms befit new uses. The genre of tarājim (life narratives) could be claimed for a common Arab cultural identity by Christian Arabs educated in European or American missionary schools and by Muslim Arabs trained through established channels of mosque- and home-based teaching and then in new government schools. Focusing on Fawwāz, chapter 1 asks how cultural traditions shaped women's biography. Women had been subjects in male-authored collections; material for women's life histories abounded in centuries-old multigeneric literary compendia. But to be the author, as a woman, of a biographical dictionary of women, and then to include non-Muslim and non-Arab women were unprecedented acts.^[51]

To whom were such works directed? In chapter 2 I take up the interlocutory rhetoric of these texts and the magazines in which they appeared. What assumptions do the biographies, and the magazines, make about readers? How do they help us define the textual construction and extratextual growth of a female readership in Egypt in the context of debates on the woman question and the proliferation of female-oriented conduct literature? When Sarrūf comments on the lack of educational opportunity for Arab women of an earlier generation through the image of her friend's mother, and then contrasts it with her own generation's situation, she postulates the identities of her readers, their aspirations, and what they need to hear. She constructs a textual audience, as editors of magazines for women would soon begin to do. Moreover, the subjects Sarrūf chooses—Makāriyūs, Everett, and her friend Nasra Ilyās Ghurrayib (1862–89)—and the way she deploys clichés of obituary writing to pose them as ideal gendered models construct a classed definition of audience and exemplarity. Yet these models are to transcend class and communal boundaries in a historical moment when lines are blurring. This textual construction helped to shape, as it echoed, the expanding taken-for-grantedness of a female readership (and listening audience) and the existence of a female consumer group for magazines and the products they would advertise. Among other things, the exemplary woman was one who could read, and reading would help to make her exemplary. Chapter 2 introduces the range of biographical subjects in periodicals by and/or for a growing cohort of educated women from inherited elite backgrounds or from what we can cautiously label bourgeois socioeconomic positions.

Defining readership means interrogating authorship. How do societal distinctions cut across labels of author/publisher, audience, and biographical subject? Women versus men as authors and publishers; Muslims versus Christians as authors and subjects; Egyptians versus Syrians in Egypt as authors, publishers, and subjects of biography; how do these intersect with the question of who to represent in biography? Arab women? Muslim women? Women from North America and Europe? Women of China and India? Most editors responded, “All of the above.” But the politics of subject choice, like correspondences between author/publisher and subject, are complicated. Much has been made of Egyptian Syrians' allegiance to the culture and even the political domination of the West; yet neither such allegiances nor local understandings of what “the West” meant were homogeneous. Sarrūf chose to celebrate the life of Eliza Everett, but Makāriyūs feted al-Khansā‘‘ and Zenobia of Palmyra—and Sarrūf praised her choices. I find that class affiliation or social belonging are more significant than ethnicity or religion to defining spheres of relevance for “Famous Women” in Egypt. Not simply a matter of affinity between compiler/author and subject, such choices were entangled in nationalist and gender ideologies. Selecting biographical subjects had everything to do with enacting an emergent bourgeois femininity elicited from and posed against a shared set of images of the Western Other. Emerging from several decades of feminist historical study, scholars of late British imperialism are now asking how the subject(ed) women of the empire were constructed in the service of domestic ideologies: how “the other woman” served not only with her daily labor but also with her image to shape British gender arrangements across the formative period of what we now label a “globalized”—and Western-dominated—political and economic system.^[52] It seems worth asking, though, how the women of the British metropole served not only through channels of work and travel but also discursively in the formation of other nations and other (subordinate) elites. These biographies suggest that as colonized women of the empire served as boundary markers in the ideological formation of what British women of different classes were to be, British women became markers of meaning in the formation of gendered colonial elites. In Egypt, biographies offer one measure of how privileged groups imagined social structures and sources of authority in “the West.” But this did not presume easy acceptance of such institutions.

The established practice of compiling biographical dictionaries had arisen partly from the need to record and evaluate the lives of those who transmitted the sayings and acts of the prophet of Islam, second only to the Qur’ءān as a source of belief and a model for Muslims in their daily lives. This evaluative quest produced an exemplary function. Sources for the ultimate exemplary life, subjects of biography also became models of proper comportment. As this biographical tradition ramified through centuries, exemplarity sounded a consistent if not ubiquitous rhetorical note. Having set out that tradition by juxtaposing it with Fawwāz's practice in the first chapter, and having examined the context for its modern rewriting in the second, I turn in chapter 3 to the rhetoric and internal patterning of biographies in the women's press. I suggest that writers of women's biography in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exploited this historically proliferating exemplary function to construct new, possible life paths for themselves and others. Writers integrated niceties familiar from premodern biographical writing into a new language of hortatory journalism addressing the reader in a prose more readable than the belletristic style that was moving out of favor. These texts simultaneously fulfilled and subverted generic expectations that biography readers might bring to the text. Exploiting the exemplary potential of the premodern biographical dictionary and deploying its terms, they shifted focus not only by selecting new biographical subjects along with the old but also by commending narratives of outward movement in women's lives. They gave women writers and readers new models of selfhood to consider, while the very temper of the text warned against the outright rejection of more familiar paths. As this “gendered rewriting”echoed an Arabic tradition,^[53] Fawwāz and magazine editors may have sought to authorize their own biographical practice, establishing a legitimacy they could exploit to their own ends. The terms might be familiar, but the substance of exemplarity for women was changing. Fawwāz's dictionary pointed the way, but later compilers exploited a rhetoric of exemplarity more explicitly. I return to the question of exemplarity in the final chapter. Precisely a century after Fawwāz wrote, compilations of “Famous Women” biographies in Egypt formulate exemplarity in different, if equally forthright, ways and rely equally but differently on the indigenous lineage of a biographical practice.

Chapters 4 and 5 trace the construction of “ideal femininities” according to emerging nationalist, feminist, and antifeminist agendas in Egypt, arguing through biography that these are complexly positioned and interrelated in the discursive field of the time. If Yāqūt Sarrūf emphasized her friend's mother's determination that her daughter earn a diploma, she also praised Makāriyūs for “founding a home she adorned with her appearance and organized with her judiciousness.”^[54] A few years later, biographies of “Famous Women” protested consistently that education and work outside the home did not distract women from domestic duties. I set out images of education, work and civic responsibility (chapter 4), and domesticity, marriage, and parenthood (chapter 5), as biography constructs them, against (other) polemics on “women's place,” arguing that biography complicates the picture of agendas across the period. Here my case for reading biography as conduct literature becomes explicit. I consider how biography, a genre that easily privileges an ideology of individualism, constructed paths of individual achievement for women and then mapped them against contours of female belonging that girls reading these lives could have elicited as simultaneously facilitative and constraining.

After all, “Famous Women” biography fulfilled that preliminary of feminist identity, the construction of a community of female achievement and struggle intimated in Sarrūf's evocation of her schooldays. Writers of biography in women's magazines were constructing an alternative history that moved between their own cultural inheritance and the narratives of others, as they explicitly declared. But this inclusory move occasioned ambivalence in the context of anti-imperialist struggle. Rather than ignore Western lives, writers appropriated them, claiming a right to make these narratives their own even as they declared the sufficiency of their own history to provide female role models. In chapter 6 I trace biographies of Jeanne d'Arc published in Egypt between 1879 and 1952, for her Egyptian lives (and status as most prevalent biographical subject in women's magazines in Egypt before the 1952 revolution) exemplify this uncertain movement between appropriation and rejection. Biographies of Jeanne also suggest how nationalists were creating an ethic of national belonging that, by celebrating the peasant as the backbone of Egypt, worked to occlude or at least minimize tensions about class divisions.

In chapter 7 I contemplate changing practices of writing women's lives as both the mass media and women's lived experiences were changing enormously. I speculate that several factors put pressure on women's life narratives—a popular mass-market press, expansion of the literate audience, women's visibility in the workplace, new forms of mass entertainment, and the encouragement of new consumption patterns. I follow a strand of antiexemplary/differently exemplary life writing and suggest that the novel's increasing respectability offered a new generic home for imagining exemplary gender roles, taking the burden off biography. If I do not treat in depth the century's middle decades, it is partly because biography as a staple feature in women's magazines dwindled.

My key primary material for chapters 2 through 7 consists of 571 biographies published in eighteen magazines focusing on women as writers, subject, and/or audience from 1892 to 1939, plus selected additional biographies from other magazines and collections from 1879 to 1967. The numbers should not spark awe: a large proportion (267) came from the long run of Young Woman of the East. But this textual profusion, permitting the exploration of complexity in a single genre's deployment, allows me to make some claims about relative emphases and consistencies.

In the final chapter I make a chronological leap that I hope offers the benefits of contrast even as it frames the elision of decades. Today, writers interested in furthering the Islamization of Egyptian society and the state are publishing collections of women's biography. I discuss contemporary collections of “Famous Women” biography in the context of discursive struggles to define nation and state at the end of the twentieth century by (as usual) defining “woman.” For inscriptions of women's lives still constitute one arena in which feminists, radical Islamist gender activists, and traditionalists contest the gendered organization of society.

Contemporary feminisms in Arab and/or majority Muslim societies pose critiques of assumptions historically grounded in the European liberal legacy. New approaches to studying the interrelations of state, civil society, and patriarchy in the Middle East, like Suad Joseph's concept of “relational rights” as an explanatory framework for social politics in Lebanon, do the same.^[55] At the turn of the century, if nationalists and feminists debated the material and psychic impact of taking on Western cultural and political traditions, and if this debate questioned the fit between political philosophies of al-sharq and al-gharb set up as a binary opposition, the assumption that a populace must be defined by the borders of a nation-state tended over time to subsume arguments that drew on the concept of the umma, the community of Muslims, as primary community. In fact, umma came to imply the national community while continuing to hint at other collective possibilities. Relationships of individuals to the state were formulated in classical liberal terms, modified to incorporate collectivities both subnational and supranational—an appropriation played out in biography, with the sovereign individual subject as ideal. Women's “outward” (yet qualified) movement as autonomous actors into a public domain is implied as positive although slightly dangerous—for the national community and the structure of the family more than in terms of women's subjectivities, in line with the “fraternal social contract” of the modern liberal state that Carole Pateman has delineated. “Famous Women” biographies simultaneously upheld and interrogated a cross-cultural generic expectation for biography that has proven hard to shake even now, despite a recent outpouring of scholarship that explodes conventional expectations of auto/biographical writing. Yet, telling a life as an individualized, linear narrative singled out from the lives of others, they also constructed shifting and seemingly contradictory senses of community. They invoked a supraethnic, suprageographic, supraclass community of women based on shared experience, which (uncomfortably for a late-twentieth-century scholar) might echo the self-serving naïveté of imperial feminisms. Moreover, this was not a sense of “community” in which most women in Egypt could participate. “Women” as a collectivity, as a group across which exemplarity based on comparison is possible, tended to be invoked within an unspoken construct of bourgeois class identity. How did discursively instituted cultural practices like biography writing define the ideal female citizen as a member of a certain class and a nonmember of other groups? A preponderant class identity implicit in these texts was in tension with nationalists' need to define an inclusive national community; in almost no biographies was “the peasant” an icon of nationalist womanhood. Hence Jeanne d'Arc's popularity for biographers in Egypt: what more respectable female peasant could one find? Prescriptive biography summons a second sense of individualism as it presupposes the individual who must be disciplined into her or his place in the community. In Egypt, biography writing as disciplinary practice was one of many discursive practices that worked to shape the model gendered citizen of a nation-state envisioned by nationalist reformers. Biographies of female subjects—whether authored by women or by men—were overtly, consistently didactic to a greater extent than were biographies of male subjects. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse remind us that producing the modern female as the object of social and sexual desire through conduct literature and fiction in Europe was central to shifts in political power and organization. Moreover, “It can be argued that the regulation of desire through representations of gender became the most efficacious form of social control.”^[56] These biographies illustrate this argument well and pose implications for the further study of political and social organization in modern Egypt. Positioning the female as the desired object—which also defined a new masculinity governed by desire for that object—demanded a literature that would discipline the female overtly and thereby shape the male by covertly governing the shape of his desire.

But how were these narratives elucidated by, and constitutive of, the lives of women and girls in Egypt at the time? If biography was performative in the sense of providing a possible set of responses to and critiques of available gendered models of the modern, how did it intersect with the nondiscursive experiences of its readers (a small, if growing, subset of Egypt's populace)? During the period I treat, the established boundaries of gendered experience within Egypt's urban middle and upper classes were changing as the political elite broadened from a landed aristocracy to include an emerging professional class, and as rapid urbanization and industrial development were changing the geographic distribution and class composition of the population. Not only were girls of the elite going to school, but by the twentieth century's second decade, they and their elders were also agitating for young women to enter the university and the professions, and to study overseas. The present turn to emphasizing the role of nonelites in nationalist activisms is laudable and overdue, but one must not dismiss the elites as monolithic. Not only is nationalism not homogeneous; elite nationalisms are not uniform. And “women” as a group marginalized until recently in studies on nationalism needs to be interrogated for divergent views within female elites, as well as the differing activities of discrete groups of women across the economic scale.

These texts might help us imagine the material and psychological changes that middle-class girls faced. But in discussing biography as a genre of exemplarity, I make a distinction between prescription and regulation. I see these texts as attempts to prescribe lives for girls and women. I do not assert regulation. For we cannot know how women in the past received these texts. Surely it must be conceived as a dynamic process. In a recent essay, Erika Friedl describes reactions of women in Iran to officially produced images of Fātima bt. Muhammad (605 A.H.–632 C.E.) and other women of the Prophet's family touted by upholders of the current regime in Iran as models of ideal womanhood. It is clear from these interviews that women do not receive these images passively or uniformly. They interrogate them, selecting some elements and rejecting others in their own self-formations of gendered identity—and with regard to their own ideas about what it is to be a modern woman.^[57] Accustoming the female reader to thinking about the lives of women as individual trajectories, as contests between autonomy and social constraint (a consistent theme), biography helped to construct the ideal (bourgeois) woman as the individualized subject of a national, putatively postimperialist state that was undergoing a difficult and prolonged birth as these biographies were appearing in print. At the same time, constructing a community of women that suppressed national boundaries and international power relationships, exemplary biography offered the encouragement of a collective history of heroines, that first-step feminist move. Through the popularity of the “Famous Women” genre early in this century, perhaps we can imagine the hopes and enthusiasms that some women were sensing as they urged and celebrated the nahda nisā‘‘iyya, the “women's awakening,” which female and male intellectuals prescribed as crucial to the success of a nahda that was to be cultural and economic and political, regional and nation-based, complementary to and a challenge to the hegemony of the West.

One of the pleasures of this project has been the elucidation of how Arab women one hundred years ago were portraying women of the West, a point that has startled audiences to which I have presented this material. That fact in itself is an indication that processes of cultural interaction are never unidirectional. Appropriating biography as a mode of conduct literature, women and men interrogated the interrelations of national and individual histories with the contemporary facts of nation and empire.

At the same time, these biographies were meant to be entertaining in their first publication venue. I hope my readers in the twenty-first century will find them as diverting as I do. And perhaps biography's persistence through Egypt's modern history offers yet another window onto a (dare I say it?) universal trait of human sociability. We people like to talk about, and to hear of, other people's lives.

Abbreviations Used in Notes

AF: Adāb al-fatāt
AJ: Anīs al-jalīs
AR: al-‘‘Aruūsa
DM: Zaynab Fawwāz, al-Durr al-manthuūr fī tabaqāt rabbāt al-khuduūr
F: al-Fatāt
F (NM): al-Fatāt (Nabawiyya Mūsā)
FM: Fatāt Misr
FMF: Fatāt Misr al-Fatāt
FN: Fatāt al-Nīl
FS: Fatāt al-sharq
H: al-Hisān
JL: al-Jins al-latīf
MM: Majallat al-mar’ءa al-misriyya
NN: Majallat al-nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya
R: al-Rayhāna
SB: Majallat al-sayyidāt wa-al-banāt
SN: Shahīrāt al-nisā‘‘ā’ء
SR: Majallat al-sayyidāt/al-sayyidāt wa-al-rijāl
UM: Ummahāt al-mustaqbal

Notes

1. Yāqūt Sarrūf, “Maryam Nimr Makāriyūs: Firāq al-rifāq,” al-Muqtataf 12:7 (Apr. 1888): 435–39. Zaynab Fawwāz, “Maryam Makāriyūs,” in Zaynab bt. ‘‘Alī b. Husayn b. ‘‘Ubaydallāh b. Hasan b. Ibrāhīm b. Muhammad b. Yūsuf Fawwāz al-‘‘Amilī, al-Durr al-manthūr fī tabaqāt rabbāt al-khudūr (Cairo/Būlāq: alMatba‘‘a al-kubrā al-amīriyya, A.H. 1312 [1894]), 497–510 (hereafter, DM or Scattered Pearls). Fawwāz does not attribute the biography to Sarrūf; she revises to rid the text of its obituary cast and first-person narrator. Sarrūf's text and byline reappear in Fatāt al-sharq 2:5 (Feb. 1908): 161–65. Makāriyūs appears in Zakhūra's biographical dictionary, typically as unnamed spouse of a biographical subject. Ilyās Zakhūra, Kitāb Mir’ءāt al-‘‘asr fī tārīkh wa-rusūmāt akābir rijāl Misr (Cairo: al-Matba‘‘a al-‘‘umūmiyya, 1897), 422.

2. Yāqūt Sarrūf, “Alayzā Afirīī;t,” al-Muqtataf 27:4 (Apr. 1902): 319–20; quotation on 320.

3. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), 47.

4. Sarrūf, “Maryam Nimr Makāriyūs,” 436. On Bākūrat Sūriyā, see Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 287. The essay on Zenobia appeared in al-Latā‘‘if (Pleasant Topics), another Syrian magazine in Egypt (edited by her husband, Shāhīī;n Makāriyūs).

5. Maryam Makāriyūs, “Bāb tadbīī;r al-manzil: al-Khansā‘‘,” al-Muqtataf 9:10 (July 1885): 622–29; quotation on 624. This was delivered as a speech on May 9, 1885.

6. Sarrūf, “Maryam Nimr Makāiyūs,” 435.

7. Jūrj Kallās, al-Haraka al-fikriyya al-niswiyya fī ‘‘asr al-nahda 1849–1928 (Beirut: Dār al-jīī;l, 1996), 54, citing Muhammad Bayham, al-Mar’ءa fī al-sharā‘‘i‘‘ wa-al-tārīkh (Beirut, 1921), 227.

8. At the same meeting, membership was voted for Lady Aberdeen (spouse of the British governor in India), Baroness Bertha von Satz, and Lady Emilia Dilke. “Shahīī;rāt al-nisūa‘‘,” Mir’ءāt al-hasnā‘‘ā’ء 1:2 (Nov. 15, 1896): 30. On Henrotin, see Jeanne Madeline Weimann, The Fair Women (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981), 13, 503, 524–25, 595.

9. Sarrūf, “Alayzā Afirīī;t,” 320.

10. Khalīī;l Thābit, “Yāqūt Sarrūf,” al-Muqtataf 91:5 (Dec. 1937): 513–15; quotation on 515. Zakhūra mentions Yāqūt by name and as a good woman who facilitated her spouse's work and networks (Mir’ءāt al-‘‘asr, 472)

11. Marilyn Booth, “Biography and Feminist Rhetoric in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt: Mayy Ziyāda's Studies of Three Women's Lives,” Journal of Women's History 3:1 (1991): 38–64.

12. I am indebted to these scholars' work. Liz Stanley notes that feminist biographers must recognize “that biography as a genre is by no means separate from the autobiography of those who produce it.” “Moments of Writing: Is There a Feminist Auto/biography?” Gender and History 2:1 (spring 1990): 59. Her The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) expands this recognition. See also Blanche Weisen Cook, “Biographer and Subject: A Critical Connection,” in Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about Their Work on Women, ed. Carol Ascher, Louise deSalvo, and Sara Ruddick (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 397; Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom, eds., Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Denise Farran, Sue Scott, and Liz Stanley, eds., Writing Feminist Biography, Studies in Sexual Politics nos. 13–14 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1986); a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Special Issue on Feminist Biography, 8:2 (fall 1993).

13. “Mu‘‘tamar al-nisā‘‘ al-‘‘amm,” al-Muqtataf 23:8 (Aug. 1899): 564.

14. Labīī;ba Hāshim, “al-Mutāla‘‘a,” AJ 2:11 (Nov. 30, 1899): 421–28.

15. Nancy K. Miller, “Writing Fictions: Women's Autobiographies in France,” in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 50; emphasis in the original.

16. I agree with Claudia Tate when she says that “we must be vigilant to place the assertion of female agency in these works in the context of the gender codes of their epoch.” See her Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 121. Tate's exploration of turn-of-the-century fiction by African-American women in this period is pertinent for her emphasis on how these novels could disseminate “new role models by inspiring ideal female ego formation in stories that evolve as the consequences of the heroine's pragmatic responses to her difficult situation” (65). Sentimental fiction in certain circumstances could be subversive—like exemplary biography.

In the turn-of-the-century Arab world, the debate on gender regimes—and especially on the issue of formal education for females—was often labeled qadiyat al-mar’ءa (literally, “the woman issue/question”) by those engaged in it. My use of the phrase “the woman question” refers to this Arabic discursive space, while recognizing that correspondences and appropriations linked it to debate on what was called the woman question in Western societies. I am not aware of any current scholarly attempts to trace the earliest use of the Arabic term qadiyat al-mar’ءa, an exercise that might prove instructive. Would it allow us to ask whether those who first popularized the phrase were translating, consciously or unconsciously?

17. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 23.

18. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 19–20.

19. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 23.

20. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 4.

21. “Axes of power” is Nancy Fraser's term; my use follows Felski's (Gender of Modernity, 32).

22. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1991), 309.

23. On the EFU and the women who founded it, see Badran, Feminists.

24. The earliest definitive use I have located for Egypt of nisā‘‘ī (feminine, pertaining to women) as unarguably “feminist” in a local context is in “al-Tatawwur al-nisāءī al-hadīth” (“The Modern Evolution of Feminism”) in Majallat al-mar’ءa al-misriyya 1:9 (Nov. 1920): 301–3; to dispel all doubt, the term is translated and printed in Latin characters. It was used earlier for European feminists (as in Lutfī al-Sayyid's preface to Nāsif's al-Nisā‘‘iyyāt, referred to later).

25. Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif, al-Nisā‘‘iyyāt (Cairo, 1910). The second, 1925, edi-tion was republished (1998) by Multaqā al-Mar‘‘a wa-al-Dhākira. Nāsif is often labeled “conservative”; as Hudā al-Sadda points out, introducing the new printing, this does not do justice to her complexity when read in the historical context of the essays' first publication in the newspaper al-Jarīda.

26. I find all these terms problematic. Some scholars use “Islamist” to link early strands and today's “Islamists,” but this further dilutes an overused term. Yet “organicist” implies a “more authentic” or “naturally” evolving stance, also problematic. “Reformist” obscures the fact that even conservatives had reform-oriented aims; in some ways they were as “modern” as modernists.

27. Hourani's classic analysis of the reformist versus “traditionalist” debate in his Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939, 2d. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), has been elaborated by many; here I follow Stowasser's distinction among approaches in the century-long “inner-Islamic debate.” Barbara Stowasser, Women in the Qur’ءan, Traditions, and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 4. The literature on Egyptian nationalism is too vast to cite; in thinking about intersections between nationalism, patriarchy, and feminisms in the region, I am indebted to the work of (and conversations with) Deniz Kandiyoti, Margot Badran, Suad Joseph, Gaber Asfour, Lila Abu-Lughod, Valentine Moghadam, and Afsaneh Najmabadi.

28. Stowasser, Women in the Qur’ءan, 6. New work on these issues is emerging so quickly that it is impossible to keep up with it. See the thoughtful discussion in Nilüfer Göle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). Göle tries to avoid the dichotomizing characterization of “modernist” versus “traditionalist.”

29. Badran, Feminists, 11.

30. Hence the debate over Qāsim Amīī;n's Tahrīr al-mar’ءa (1899) and alMar’ءa al-jadīda (1901), not simply a conflict between “liberals” and “conservatives” but a debate among supporters of change. We risk defining Islamic modernism tautologically as that which supported early feminism, excluding anything opposed to feminism as (by definition) not “Islamic modernism.” How basic a changed gender regime was to Islamic modernism demands further research.

31. Labīī;ba Ahmad in NN 3:2 (Feb. 1924): 38, in Ijlāl Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka al-nisā’ءiyya al-hadītha: Qissat al-mar’ءa al-‘‘arabiyya ‘‘alā ard Misr (Cairo: al-Matba‘‘a al-‘‘arabiyya al-hadīī;tha, 1973), 115–16. Khalīī;fa notes her later conservatism: she opposed (1930) women taking “men's jobs” (115).

32. Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 82.

33. “Nawābigh al-nisā‘‘: Fatāt tajma‘‘u tharwa kabīī;ra bi-tafkīī;rihā,” NN 8:2 (Feb. 1930): 56.

34. See, e.g., his open letter in NN 4:10 (Sept. 1926): 281. Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 89, mentions this.

35. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 60, citing Partha Chatterjee.

36. Translated quotation from Sha‘‘rāwīī;'s letter in Badran, Feminists, 82.

37. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 61.

38. Badran, Feminists, 48.

39. Pierre Cachia, An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 30.

40. Badran, Feminists, 20.

41. Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, “Introduction,” in Woman-Nation-State, ed. Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias (London: Macmillan, 1989), 1; also Valentine M. Moghadam, “Introduction and Overview,” in Gender and National Identity: Women and Politics in Muslim Societies, ed. Valentine M. Moghadam (London: Zed; Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 2.

42. On this see Deniz Kandiyoti, “Introduction,” in Women, Islam and the State, ed. Daniz Kandiyoti(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 1–21; her “Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 376–91; Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed, 1986); essays in Yuval-Davis and Anthias, Woman-Nation-State; Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990); R. Radhakrishnan, “Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Routledge, 1992), 77–95.

43. Kandiyoti, “Identity and Its Discontents,” 378–79; Stowasser, Women in the Qur’ءan, 6.

44. Deniz Kandiyoti, “Islam and Patriarchy: A Comparative Perspective,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, ed. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 31.

45. Kandiyoti, “Identity and Its Discontents,” 377.

46. Kandiyoti, “Introduction,” 9.

47. Kandiyoti observes that the reformist Committee for Union and Progress in Turkey defined the monogamous nuclear family as the “National Family” (“Introduction,” 11).

48. Gabriel Piterberg, “The Tropes of Stagnation and Awakening in Nationalist Historical Consciousness: The Egyptian Case,” in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, ed. James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 49.

49. Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 5; Hourani, Arabic Thought. In this brief treatment I cannot refer to the copious scholarship on this subject.

50. Kandiyoti, “Identity and Its Discontents,” 380.

51. On historically attested women in premodern Arabic works, see Hilary Kilpatrick, “Some Late ‘‘Abbāsid and Mamlūk Books about Women: A Literary Historical Approach,” Arabica 42 (1995): 56–78; Ruth Roded, Women in Islamic Biographical Collections: From Ibn Sa‘‘d to Who's Who (Boulder, Colo.: Lynn Reiner, 1994); D. A. Spellberg, Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of ‘‘A’ءisha bint Abi Bakr (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

52. Work along these lines is by now too vast to mention comprehensively; I have benefited from the following in particular: Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Anita Levy, Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832–1898 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion, and Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); and Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

53. Cf. Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Woman's Body, Woman's Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).

54. Sarrūf, “Maryam Nimr Makāriyūs,” 436.

55. Suad Joseph, “Problematizing Gender and Relational Rights: Experiences from Lebanon,” Social Politics 1 (1994): 127–85.

56. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, “The Literature of Conduct, the Conduct of Literature, and the Politics of Desire: An Introduction,” in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London: Methuen, 1987), 16. I discuss constructing masculinity through “woman” in “al-Mar’ءa fī al-Islām: al-Rijāl wa-al-sihāfa al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; Misr,” Abwāb 24 (2000): 114–30.

57. Erika Friedl, “Ideal Womanhood in Postrevolutionary Iran,” in Mixed Blessings: Gender and Religious Fundamentalism Cross Culturally, ed. Judy Brink and Joan Mencher (New York: Routledge, 1997), 143–57.

1. Scattered Pearls and Mistresses of Seclusion

Zaynab Fawwāz, Arabic Biographical Writing, and a Canon of Female Visibility

She was by nature a poet, refined and excellent, acute and intelligent. Her face held a hint of beauty; her loveliness was belles-lettres, and her adornment the eloquence of the Arabs.

This woman remains a paragon of goodness and initiative, never tiring of writing, always working to advance and benefit the girls of her kind. May God increase her likes among the women who have adopted paper as their mirror and ink as their tint and dye—those women who have made literature their jewelry and the branches of knowledge their cloaks.

Labāba Hāshim (c. 1880–1947) had published her monthly magazine Fatāt al-sharq (Young Woman of the East) just twice when, in December 1906, she announced a new feature: “We have launched this department to publish items about women famed for their refinement and knowledge. We entreat women to turn their attention to this subject, for they might find both delectation and benefit therein.”^[1] Hāshim's proclamation prefaced a three-page biography of the late Turco-Egyptian poet ‘‘A’ءisha Taymār.

Word for word, this biography had appeared twelve years earlier in Zay-nab Fawwāz's Scattered Pearls on the Generations of the Mistresses of Seclusion.^[2] In Young Woman of the East it carried no byline.^[3] When, five months later, Hāshim featured a biography of Zaynab Fawwāz herself, she remarked that “the toil [Fawwāz] put into this tome is evident, the valuable time it took her, over and above the household duties that were hers.”^[4] Hāshim was to draw on this “toil” extensively in forming the parade of “Famous Women” that would march beneath the masthead of her long-running magazine

With the word tabaqāt (generations) in her title, Fawwāz declared generic linkage to a centuries-old Arab/Islamic tradition of biographical dictionary compilation, the earliest surviving example of which is Muhammad Ibn Sa‘‘d's (d. A.H. 230/845 C.E.) Great Book of Generations.^[5] One way Ibn Sa‘‘d's compendium acted as a template for biographical dictionaries produced in centuries to follow was in reserving a separated-off textual space (in his case an eighth section) for female subjects who fulfilled the conditions for inclusion. Writing within an elite, culturally specific practice of narrating completed lives, Fawwāz appropriated a long-lived, male-authored genre for an emerging discourse of gendered experience and aspiration that would lay the groundwork for Arab women's ascendant feminisms.

By 1910, at least four compendia of biographies of notable women had been written and/or published in Egypt.^[6] That there was interest—among women and men intellectuals both—in the lives of “distinguished” women is hardly surprising. The role-modeling and evidentiary potentials in such life histories must have seemed obvious to those familiar with Arabic traditions of life writing. Perhaps the same held for those (such as some Syrian Christians) educated into Western literary traditions. Might they have seen examples of the “Famous Women” genre that had been popular in the West for more than a century?

In fact, Fawwāz was the second Arab woman to write a biographical dictionary of women. Another native of the Lebanon, an almost exact contemporary of Maryam Makāriyūs, Maryam Nahhās (Nawfal) (1856–88) saw a prototype of her first volume on famous women's lives, The Fine Woman's Exhibition of Biographies of Famous Women, published in 1879.^[7] It featured the life of the khedivial consort who underwrote publication, followed by lives of “a few famous women,” as Fawwāz put it. The second volume never appeared; apparently the manuscript was lost in the author's lifetime. But the project was ambitious. In February 1879, Nahhās's husband, Nasā Nawfal, placed an advertisement in Salīm al-Naqqāsh's and Adīb Ishāq's newspaper Misr (Egypt), describing the work as “in two parts of five to six hundred pages each . . . and adorned with portraits of the most famous Famous Women.” He called for subscribers.^[8] In a later issue he explained the genesis of its partial (and only) publication as he made a connection between the book and girls' pedagogical needs:

In response to the request of those concerned with spreading information and diffusing benefits, especially through a book that opens for girls of this age the paths of the sciences and literary arts, we have become determined, after relying on the Most High, to print Kitāb Ma‘‘rid al-hasnā’ء fī tarājim mashāhīr al-nisā’ء written by my wife al-sayyida Maryam Nawfal (Nahhās) and previously announced. It comprises biographies of every great woman who has become famous for intelligence and refinement, storming barricades,^[9] bold initiative or one of the virtues, whether deceased or living, ancient or recent. They include prophetesses, martyrs, holy women, empresses, queens, princesses, poets, writers, philosophers, scholars, brave fighters, leaders in learning and the arts, exemplars for their valor, and those who adorned literary gatherings with their writing and discoveries. There are also women who accomplished other deeds that fine men have been known for in all times and situations. . . . Subscribers pay thirty francs in advance, or fifty after publication. . . . To make this valuable and novel work's benefits widely known we have printed a prototype comprising examples of what it sets out to do, its format, letters, pictures, and the style of its biographies.^[10]

This description made a claim for women's public lives as exemplary. But it was Fawwāz's dictionary that saw the light of day. Published to acclaim, it was cited and excerpted in the women's press. Perhaps her growing renown as a writer and the enthusiastic support of Hasan Husnī al-Tuwayrānī (1850–97), editor of Cairo's al-Nīl (The Nile), enhanced her work's circulation.^[11]

To judge by the textual patterning of Nahhās's and Fawwāz's very different biographies of Jeanne d'Arc (see chapter 6), Nahhās might have been as conversant with the FemaleWorthies, a book of women's lives so popular in the West that its title came to label a genre, as with Arabic-language biographies. Without more of her writing extant, it is impossible to know. Fawwāz was closer in her biographical rhetoric to the Arabic tradition, for Scattered Pearls mediated between the tarājim tradition and the “Famous Women” columns. It was one of the first books in Arabic authored by a woman who wrote on the woman question in the Arabic “malestream” press. It appeared halfway between Great Britain's invasion of Egypt (1882) and the Dinshaway killings (1906) that would give anti-imperialist activism an added dose of urgency.^[12] It was Fawwāz's offering to the Women's Section of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, held in Chicago, donated as an example of Arab women's achievements, both her own and those whose lives and letters she memorialized. Its gems are my starting point in pondering how one textual history—the writing of gendered biography—has contributed to the discourse of postcolonial modernity within one society's history. For Fawwāz, Nahhās, and Hāshim were among the first generations of women to participate in an emerging discourse on gender's centrality in Egypt's struggle to wrest independence from colonial subjection.

I begin this chapter by introducing Fawwāz, examining how she set Scattered Pearls into debate on the woman question, and how she situated herself in a biographical tradition. Second, I position Scattered Pearls against the history of that genre whence came the term tabaqāt, one context in which Fawwāz's wonderful tome must be read. What difference did Fawwāz make in (and to) that context? To answer this question, I trace briefly the history of the genre in terms of, first, its potential as a genre of exemplarity and, second, its inclusion of and rhetoric on female subjects. I study Fawwāz's practice: Who does she target as subjects? How does she represent them? I examine the productive interplay between her often startling choice and presentation of subjects on the one hand and her reliance on rhetorical patterns and textual strategies sanctioned by centuries of biographical writing on the other. What stance does she take on features of the tradition: chains of authority, variant versions of narratives, anecdotal material? Does she editorialize overtly? How does she deploy epithets? How does she present life stages? Returning to the issue of exemplary subjects, I suggest that Fawwāz felt freer than would magazine editors to communicate sociosexual practice in medieval elite society, chronicled less in biographical tomes than in multigeneric belletristic (adab) works (although the same compiler might work in both, and they were somewhat contiguous generic territories; well defined, they drew from each other).^[13]

I think what Fawwāz produced made a difference to the production of gendered biography in periodicals. Scattered Pearls made space for, and began to outline, a canon of famous women. It offered a contemporary version of the ancient epithetic construction of the biographical subject, which magazines could then expand. It offered a language in which to express the changing experiences and expectations of (some) turn-of-the-century Arab women.

My work on those magazine biographies makes a difference in how I read Fawwāz. The exemplifying power of life narratives for literate women that Scattered Pearls suggested would become explicit in a press targeted at those reading women. Often drawing directly on Fawwāz's extraordinary labor, editors adopted the “Famous Women” (shahīrāt al-nisā’ءā’ء) sketch as a leitmotif. I suggest how Labība Hāshim's journal, for one, needed to make Fawwāz different according to the demands of her own (changing) context of reception. A reminder that the ground was shifting emerges in Fatāt al-sharq's appropriation of Fawwāz over its thirty-four-year life span (1906–39) and in the one entry Fawwāz wrote solely on the basis of a female acquaintance's oral information. With the life of Sharafiyya, daughter of Sa‘ād Qabūdān (b. A.H. 1260/1844 C.E.), Fawwāz edged closer to Hāshim and other editors in the women's press.

Finally, I imagine Scattered Pearls at the Chicago Exposition. Few visitors to the women's library—a major attraction of the Women's Building—could have read Fawwāz's reading of a world of women. Picture it on a shelf among English-language “Famous Women” volumes that might have been sent to the library. What did this presence mean, inserted into a celebration of the dominant “progress” of Western civilization?

“Pearls” of the 1890s: Biography and a Field of Female Activism

Fawwāz's version of Sarrūf's life of Makāriyūs is one of very few biographies in Scattered Pearls that comment explicitly—through the motif of girls' education—on changing possibilities for elite Arab women. It is also one of very few biographies of contemporary Arab and/or Muslim women in the volume (there are even fewer contemporary Europeans); a life of Maryam Nahhās Nawfal is another. But Fawwāz creates a semantically full contemporary scene of Arab women writing and reading when she reproduces their essays in the preface to Scattered Pearls and when, enumerating her sources, she mentions

my gleanings from articles by daughters of this age who have had the best of upbringings, have acquired learning in higher institutes, and then have become famous in this human world of ours. I quote some of their essays in this book's preface so its readers will be aware that in our age there have excelled women who surpass all predecessors, because their [men] who knew and followed the proper way granted them their rights.^[14]

Throughout the volume, Fawwāz reiterates this outpouring of Arab female literary skill. Of the few contemporaries she features, most are writers, and Fawwāz devotes page after page within the biography to reproducing their writing. I see this as a deliberate strategy that echoes and fills out the assertions Fawwāz makes in her preface: she wants to demonstrate that the contemporary cultural and political scene is shaped by women's as well as men's pens. Moreover, the texts she chooses are most often writings that expound the biographical subject's views on women's rights and gendered social organization. Her entry on Turkish intellectual Fatma Aliye (1862–1936) ends with Aliye's transcription of her dialogues with European women who had visited her in Istanbul, published at the time in Turkish and then in Arabic as “Women of Islam.”^[15] ‘‘A’ءisha Taymūr's life history includes not only excerpts of her poetry but also her essay on family reform.^[16] Fawwāz publishes a letter that Maryam Makāriūs sent in April 1887 to “the group of women who had obtained the school certificate in the Syrian Girls' School in Beirut,” an autobiographical text that expresses the author's longing to see old schoolmates again. She describes the writing process of Nahhās's biographical dictionary.^[17] That Fawwāz's excerpting of verses by premodern Arab poets is usually telegraphic highlights by contrast her decision to feature long contemporary writings on gender. A rare methodological aside does the same: offering a few lines from a seventy-nine-line poem by ‘‘Afrā’ء bt. Muhāsir b. Mālik (d. A.H. 28/648 C.E.), Fawwāz remarks, “We have left [out the rest] because of its fame and because we fear to digress from the subject.”^[18] Her notice on Turkish poet Sirrī Khānim (b. 1814) declines to reproduce poetry, “since it is not within the subject of this book.” Presumably the reason was not linguistic; two other Turkish poets are represented by lines in Turkish.^[19] Was it because Sirrī's poetry had little to do with female concerns as Fawwāz defined them?

Fawwāz's tactics in featuring her contemporaries' words not only back up her claim that “in our age there have excelled women who surpass all predecessors” but also have the effect of inserting Scattered Pearls right into the expanding debate on gender among late-nineteenth-century Arabic-speaking intellectuals. Historians have dispelled the persistent claim that the early debate over gender was strictly a male conversation. One way to delineate that conversation—of which Fawwāz, Hāshim, Sarrūf, Makāriyūs, and a growing number of Egyptian women, both Muslim and Christian, were a part—is to trace specific genres as pathways into that debate.

A Woman and a Work

Zaynab Fawwāz was something of an anomaly among the Syro-Lebanese intellectual émigré community in Egypt. A Sh#x012B;‘‘ī Muslim while most of the prominent Levant intellectuals in turn-of-the-century Egypt were Christians, she came from the poor, somewhat isolated region of Jabal ‘‘Amil in southern Lebanon (which had a distinguished history of Shī‘‘ī Muslim scholarly and poetic activity). Her class origin, too, was unusual among Syrian immigrant intellectuals. Of modest means, she had come to Egypt around 1870, possibly as a domestic employee to a wealthy family. Her earliest education had been at the hands of Fātima bt. As‘‘ad al-Khalīī;l (b. A.H. 1256/1840 C.E.), daughter and spouse of Lebanese feudal lords, a litterateur, and Fawwāz's first employer/patron. Once in Egypt, Fawwāz is said to have impressed al-Tuwayrānīī; and others, who took it upon themselves to further her literary training. Intersections of ethnicity and minority status, religion, class, and gender in Fawwāz's career await further research. This intertextual analysis of one work merely begins to situate her in a history of Arab feminisms.^[20]

In the 1890s, Fawwāz was gaining renown for essays on the woman question, published in the Egyptian nationalist press.^[21] Writing in one of those newspapers two years before the publication of Scattered Pearls, Fawwāz drew on precedent to urge more formal education for women, naming Arab women of the past who had striven to educate themselves and other females. “Were we to enumerate these women,” she remarked, “we would run out of space.”^[22] By her own calculation she had begun compiling her dictionary eight months before this article appeared.^[23] Juxtaposing Boudicca and Bakkāra, Shajar al-Durr and George Sand, Kanza, Cleopatra and Catherine the Great, Scattered Pearls gave substance to the enumerative and evidentiary strategy that Fawwāz deployed in her essay.

Linking exemplarity and biography, Fawwāz was operating firmly within the genre her title evoked. The tarājim genre emerged no later than two centuries after Islam's founding, probably in response to the need to construct life histories for those who had experienced and passed on the words and deeds (the Sunna) of the prophet Muhammad, sources of Islamic doctrine and Muslim practice second only to the Qur’ءān. Believers needed to evaluate the trustworthiness of individuals beginning with the Companions, male and female (sahāba, sahābiyāt), those relatives and associates of Muhammad who were the first transmitters of Hadith (Traditions, which made up the Sunna). Biographical dictionaries such as Ibn Sa‘‘d's Tabaqāt, Ibn ‘‘Abd al-Barr's (d. A.H. 463/1071 C.E.) al-Istī‘‘āb fī ma‘‘rifat al-ashāb, Ibn Hajar al-‘‘Asqalānīī;'s (d. 852 A.H./1449 C.E.) Tahdhīb altahdhīb, and his al-Isāba fī tamyīz al-sahāba focused on Muhammad's contemporaries and later Hadith transmitters. As the genre became a popular vehicle for Islamic elites desiring to construct their own histories, it came to include many individuals important to maintaining and transmitting the culture and governing apparatus. Criteria of selection varied, such as connection with a place (al-Hāfiz b. ‘‘Asākir's [d. A.H. 571/1176 C.E.] Ta’ءrīkh Dimashq), a vocation (Ibn al-Mu‘‘tazz's [d. A.H. 296/908 C.E.] Tabaqāt al-Shu‘‘arā’ءā’ء), or a century (Shams al-Dīn Muhammad al-Sakhāwīī;'s [A.H. 831/1428 C.E.–A.H. 902/1497 C.E.] al-Daw’ء al-lāmi‘‘ li-ahl al-qarn altāsiء).^[24] Scholarly attention to such works attests not only to today's academic fascination with auto/biography but also to their wealth of suggestion on the layered intersections of gender and social practice in Muslim-majority societies.

That the earliest Muslims' roles as social exemplars and transmitters of knowledge spurred the genre's development had implications for the resulting portraits. Huda Lutfi and Tarif Khalidi stress “moral edification” as an effect of biography that compilers advertised. Lutfi, in fact, sees this as a marked feature of entries on females in one compendium: “The edifying purposes of the biographer may have led [al-Sakhāwīī;] to accentuate the good qualities of the women so that they would be taken as prototypes to be emulated by others.”^[25] Scholars sensibly warn against any monocausal explanation of the genre's proliferation and deployment of subject choice.^[26] But it does seem that even as biographical practice transcended what may have been one originating function, a positive evaluative cast continued to dominate.^[27] This could imply the construction of moral exemplars, through both the sahāba and later subjects.

Fawwāz implies the biographical subject as exemplar in the preface to Scattered Pearls as she challenges the absence of women's experience from historical discourse. Because of Arab scholars' interest in history, lives of “the most important renowned men of the past” were on record.^[28] Yet

amidst all this activity I have observed no one going to the other extreme, reserving even a single chapter in the Arabic tongue for half the human world, in which one might assemble women who attracted fame for their merits and shunned bad traits. [No such work exists] even though a company of these women has excelled, with writings to their names by which they have rivaled the greatest learned men and engaged in poetic dueling with master poets.^[29]

Indeed, the book's title—ScatteredPearls—implies the fragmentary nature of female participation in written history, giving new meaning to a conventional vocabulary of book titling.^[30]

Fawwāz contrasts the dearth of scholarship on women—and the “extreme” position of choosing to write about them, which she claims no scholar had taken—with “histories” of men, some of which were “so long they required abridgement.” Was her silence on premodern compendia that did include women (mostly in separate sections), such as all of those noted above, a strategic absence, or was it a consequence of a gap in her reading? Ibn Sa‘‘d set a precedent when he devoted the final part of his Tabaqāt to women's lives, paralleling a spatial-cultural positioning of females that became dominant if not ubiquitous in the Muslim world.^[31] It seems unlikely that Fawwāz, marshaling an impressive array of sources that she carefully lists in her preface and refers to in individual biographies, would have had no knowledge of compendia that followed his example. If she had awareness but no access—quite possible at a time when women likely had to rely on whatever books they had at home or on male contacts—it would be characteristic of her to say so.^[32] She is also silent on the Ottoman-period dictionary of al-Ghazzī (d. 1651), which included women.^[33] These simply may not have been available. But given her careful scholarship (and character), it also seems probable that with her polemics she meant to target her contemporaries, and not just as readers. Jurjīī; Zaydān's (1861–1914) popular Tārīkh mashāhīr al-sharq(History of Famous Men of the East), which included no women, would not appear for another six years; but there was no lack of men's biography available in the 1890s, new and republished, collective and individual. Fawwāz herself is said to have authored a “men-only” dictionary, never published.^[34]

In this light it is useful to consider why Fawwāz chose to use the term tabaqāt in her title. Not every compiler of a biographical dictionary did. Tabaqāt (“layers”) in a biographical context took on the sense of “generations” and then “classes” or groups of people. Ibrahim Hafsi has delineated the aggregation over time of a vocabulary of biographical writing. He argues that the term tabaqāt, even as its meaning and use proliferated, implied hierarchies of both proximity and value. If this stemmed from nearness to the Prophet being one important criterion for the trustworthiness of Hadith transmission, in a modern context, “value” could imply “tal-ent.”^[35] Fawwāz may have chosen it primarily to signal a generic sense of belonging and to assure the respectability of her work, as biographical dictionary compilers had done before.^[36] Moreover, for a modern audience, especially a partly female and thus generally less lettered one, the medieval nuances of the term might well have been submerged in a cruder generic recognition of form. Yet perhaps Fawwāz meant to preserve notations of value and hierarchy, to claim both resemblance and value on the basis of gender but perhaps simultaneously to mock classical culture by applying the term to a group that had never borne it as a collective: women. The sharp edges of her polemics in the press suggest that she likely sensed the irony of applying a term that had historically signaled the public inscription of mostly public lives to those identified by their seclusion, rabbāt al-khuduūr. For the latter's collective definition was supposedly bounded by a physical, “scattered” isolation, one that Scattered Pearls challenged both by celebrating that “community” in print and by showing female lives as not bounded by gender-defined seclusion. “Le terme tabaqa, au singulier,” comments Hafsi, “designe le rang attribué à un groupe de personnages ayant joué un rôle dans l'histoire à un titre ou à un autre, classes en fonction de critères déterminés d'ordres religieux, culturel, scientifique, artistique, etc.”^[37] Perhaps Fawwāz deployed it to counter her predecessors' terms of classification, to assert gender as a historically significant category—to underline her preface's affirmation that her subjects made a difference in human history. Her contemporary Jurjīī; Zaydān used the term tabaqāt in one encyclopedic work, Tabaqāt al-umam wa-al-salā‘‘il al-bashariyya (Layers of the Nations and Human Descendants, 1912), a Darwinesque vision of hierarchized humanity.^[38] Did Fawwāz want to signal an/Other inclusiveness?

Nor did Fawwāz adhere to the tabaqāt or generational arrangement defined by Ibn Sa‘‘d's compendium. Compiling a geographically and diachronically wide-ranging dictionary, she preferred alphabetic organization (as had many compilers after Ibn Sa‘‘d). Yet, initiating her parade of women with Amina bt. Wahb, the prophet Muhammad's mother, Fawwāz's alphabetical order also signals a paradigmatic hierarchy of exemplarity, through privileging a proximity to the Prophet dependent on motherhood and the female line.

Whatever its basis, Fawwāz's claim that no precedents existed for her own book was an effective polemical strategy. It paralleled a productive tension that permeated her oeuvre, ran through the biographies that would soon flood the women's press, and found its culmination in the longer biographical studies of Arab women that Mayy Ziyāda was to publish a few years after Fawwāz's death. If it was useful for women staking out contemporary space to claim precedents and exemplars, it was also dramatically helpful to claim contemporary women's acts as unprecedented. After listing thirty-nine classical and contemporary sources for her work, only one penned by a woman (the dīwān or collected poetry of al-Khansā‘‘), Fawwāz refers to her “gleanings from . . . the daughters of this age.” Situating her work in this discursive collectivity of unprecedented women has the effect of distancing Scattered Pearls from its generic antecedents, while simultaneously constructing a notion of community both diachronic and synchronic among active women as subjects and producers of biography. The autobiographical element feminist scholars insist is inherent in the act of writing biography surfaces here, when Fawwāz privileges writing women like herself as both sources and subjects. The point is made none too subtly when her preface segues into those eight pages of essays on women's state penned by her peers.

But as Fawwāz lauds the woman writer she alludes autobiographically to the particular obstacles a woman faces as researcher and writer: “This was a difficult path, trying for every passerby, especially one like me, secluded and by a face-veil denied vigor.”^[39] Writing to Berthe Honoré Palmer (1849–1918) to ask about procedures for sending her dictionary to the Women's Section of the Chicago Exposition, she explains that she cannot present it personally: “If our customs permitted us—we Muslim women—to attend such gatherings, I would have endeavored to present it in person, to come to the Exposition with those women who will attend. But in compliance with religion's command, that I cannot do. Thus, I present my great gratitude to you, and my hopes for your fine efforts on behalf of women's progress.”^[40]

Veiling and seclusion as deterrents (but ultimately unsuccessful ones) to Fawwāz as she attempted to counteract the historiographical deficiency of male scholars stand in contrast to the imagery through which she has already named her act. For it was an act of “revealing the countenance of the excellent qualities of those women who possess excellent qualities” (fadā‘‘il, also moral excellence, virtues).^[41] This is a cautious unveiling not of the subject's face but of her “excellent qualities.” With her particular exploitation of the imagery of veiling, Fawwāz privileges this moral-intellectual “countenance” over the physicality that had remained a dominant marker of “woman” in her society. The act of undoing women's invisibility (hence challenging their seclusion?) contrasts with Fawwāz's criticism of scholars for not having made a space—even a separate one—for women.^[42] This authorial act also recalls a line in the poem ‘‘A’ءisha Taymūr composed to commemorate the publication of Scattered Pearls: “Women's status was raised / and after obscurity, ready acceptance adorned them with pride.”^[43]

If female visibility (important to any first-stage feminism) was Fawwāz's first goal and achievement, attained despite the obstacle of her own seclusion or physical invisibility, her imagery articulates a visibility not of physicality but of excellence and achievement, especially intellectual achievement.^[44] Without apology she quotes the opening to ‘‘A’ءisha alBā‘‘ūniyya's (A.H. 149/766 C.E.–A.H. 229/843 C.E.) commentary on a poem she also reproduces, “to make plain the biographical subject's excellence and high aspirations.”^[45] A cliché of compliment possesses semantic force in a work written to demonstrate women's achievements through history.

A rhetoric of exemplarity, inscribed in Fawwāz's emphasis on recording individual women's “excellent qualities” or “merits” and their exemplarity for other women of their own or later times, advances this visibility one step further. Pointing out a subject's exemplarity, a conventional generic move, enhances that woman's singularity even as it makes her into a model. Hence it operates as a mode of praise while also sounding a didactic note. Anne of Brittany (1477–1514) is a “model of virtue and striving.” Noting that a subject's peers took pride in her suggests a community of women while enhancing the subject's own name. Umm al-Kirām “was skilled at composing Andalusian muwashshahāt [strophic poems]; she was the pride of the women of the Arabs.” Semiramis of Assyria (fl. c. 800 B.C.) was “the glory of the women of ancient times and the light of that age's lamp.”^[46] We cannot dismiss this rhetoric as mere convention. For, as we have seen, Fawwāz underlines the import of such a semantically full reading when she refers to contemporary Arab women writers as active cultural players, and more pervasively when she constructs women as active, visible, and vocal in her preface and the biographies that follow it.

Gender and Genre in the Tabaqāt

To what extent does Fawwāz's biographical practice rewrite the classical genre that her title recuperates even as her preface ignores this genre's attention to women's lives? Some scholars argue that the medieval dictionaries' diversification in subject matter, treatment, and purpose over time did not mean a radical shift in focus. In M. J. L. Young's words, “Even when biography became a distinct genre in Arabic literature it never completely lost the characteristics linking it with the science of Hadith.”^[47] Hafsi argues that biographical practice underwent “spectacular transformations”;^[48] yet construction and content reveal continuity. Biographical dictionaries continued to immortalize a spiritual-political elite.^[49] Genealogies of kinship and knowledge transmission figured prominently, as did anything that might contribute to evaluating a subject's probity and intellect. The focus remained on the socially visible, intersubjective contours of experience, the subject constituted as a social and spiritual link within a set of hierarchies.

These pre-nineteenth-century dictionaries do not portray a world of gendered absolutes or opposites. They construct elite women as seekers and transmitters of knowledge, vocal participants in public life, and actors in the economy. “The ideal female image projected by al-Sakhāwīī;,” comments Lutfi, “comes through as the pious, modest, knowledgeable and generous woman. As a wife she is portrayed as patient, peaceful and frugal. Our biographer admires and respects women who seek learning and contribute to its propagation.”^[50]

Some attributives that described subjects were specific to women, but more were not. Yet concern with moral exemplarity, writers' affiliations, and the import of hierarchies of closeness to the prophet Muhammad^[51] interact with a perspective in line with the male-dominant structures of medieval Islamic societies. As in other medieval Arabic genres, in biographical dictionaries the domain of elite men's experience is the norm, the filter through which women's voices and acts appear.^[52] And while it can be argued that a cumulatively shaped portrait emerges out of the orally transmitted and written sources that biographers amassed, ultimately the compiler/writer controlled the construction of the life history. Denise Spellberg's analysis of shifting portrayals of the prophet's most famous wives, ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr and Khadīja bt. Khuwaylid, and his daughter Fātima reveals that “compilers” made shifts in diction significant to these portraits' symbolic power in competing political discourses.^[53] Compilers made choices about who and what to include, even if an accumulation of citations tempers the authority of a dominant narrative voice. When a compiler chronicles his contemporaries, it is harder to deny this authority.

While it would be inaccurate to claim that these premodern life histories construct a “private-public” dichotomy along gendered lines, privileging the “outer events” of an individual's adult life^[54] may have implications for presenting the gendered subject. As the textual layers of the biography give voice to a public world—a social framework of experience and action wherein male agency and visibility are the norm—women's lives emerge constructed in the terms of their mediated relationships to that world. This is evident in the choice of life events to narrate and the focalizations from which they are narrated. Sociolinguistic convention (grammatical patterns that positioned women as objects of action) and the subject's definition according to a patrilineal genealogy enhanced this perspective.^[55] The woman “subject” thus appears at least partly as object, anomaly, or absence. Many entries on women in these compendia are in fact entirely stories about men. The woman's presence as biographical subject seems a pretext. As a character within the text she is tangential, essentially an onlooker in an exchange or transaction between men, whether discursive, financial, or military. Or, her significance (the reason she is a biographical subject) hinges on relationships of kinship or marriage to a prominent man.^[56]

That Fawwāz focuses centrally rather than tangentially on “excellent” women, declaring this a worthy aim in itself, distinguishes her work from the biographical genre that evolved to ascertain the contributions of individuals to the codification and maintenance of Islamic normative practice. Her breadth of inclusion from the Arabic/Islamic world expands the notion of excellence from—most narrowly—the ambit of the prophet Muhammad's wives, forebears and descendants, and contemporaries within Meccan and Medinan society or—for a later period—from members of a Muslim elite.^[57] Rather, she includes de facto (rather than genealogically ascertained) members of that elite who were subjects of other kinds of collections, the adab works, which were not necessarily concerned with exemplarity. Thus, of the 312 subjects Fawwāz draws from the Arab/Islamic world, 33 are jawārī. These were highly trained musicians, singers, often poets, and sometimes concubines, purchased by members of the elite. They were part of the elite world socially but not in their ethnic and religious origins or their individual social status, although they could attain that status through marriage or childbearing.^[58]

That Scattered Pearls focuses only on women creates a cumulative portrait quite different from that of the traditional dictionaries. Rather than appearing as a small minority of a politically and intellectually active elite, women emerge as a multitude, albeit still an elite one.^[59] That it expands the arena to include women of the ancient Mediterranean, Europe, North America, and Muslim India shifts the cultural focus, implicitly authorizes new visions of community and comparison for Arab women readers, and offers that readership new role-modeling possibilities. By my count, of Fawwāz's 453 subjects, 73 were clearly European or American Christians plus one medieval European Jew. Another 68 were of the ancient world (pre-Islamic Egyptian Christians, Byzantines, pre-Christian Greeks and Romans, ancient Jews, ancient Egyptians including Ptolemaic rulers, preIslamic Persians, other ancient Easterners). One was a royal woman of non-Islamic Asia, another the daughter of a court minister in Sicily. Within the ambit of Islam, Fawwāz, from a Shī‘‘ī family, does not give particular pride of place to women revered by Shī‘īs as important to their own sense of historical identity. Nor does she give a negative portrait of ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr as premodern Shī‘ī biographers often did.^[60]

Thus, departing from the practice of featuring only Arab/Islamic subjects,^[61] Fawwāz constructs a circuit of possibility, emulation, and example-by-warning for women unrestricted by ethnicity, religious belonging, or a subject's relationship to an imperial center (an issue of debate locally as Fawwāz wrote her volume). If we cannot equate writing a biographical dictionary with the formation of a collective gendered identity, we can see how Fawwāz's reach might offer that possibility as her lives echoed through women's journals. As Hartmut Fähndrich observes of premodern dictionaries, “Each individual is placed in a double context . . . his own life as presented in his biography and . . . lives of all other individuals in the biographical dictionary.”^[62]

Yet Fawwāz also signals her own sense of belonging, her own cultural situation, in the proportions of identities she incorporates—a balance quite different from the mix in the women's magazines (even those edited by Egyptian Muslims, even those identified with an Islamist political outlook). The West as dominant political and economic power is outnumbered by the waves of Muslim, Arab, and Mediterranean (including Byzantine) women she features. If the term ruūm could slip from anciently naming the Byzantines to labeling western Europeans in their majority religious identity of Christians, still, the West in the sense of the powerful states of Fawwāz's time and as implied in her contemporaries' use of the term al-gharb was margin rather than center of her collection. Perhaps this also adumbrates its historical moment. A decade or two later, al-gharb was becoming more troublesome as a locus of desired imitation and of threat.

Finally, that with some exceptions Fawwāz focuses on women known for their deeds and legacies rather than primarily for their relationships to men places emphasis on women's agency, although relationships to men may have been (and are constructed as) significant to the female subject's ability to act. As was true of female subjects in earlier dictionaries, many of Fawwāz's “mistresses of seclusion” were prominent first because of men to whom they were attached. But Fawwāz emphasizes their own actions. Suzanne Necker's (1739–94) husband “took her as a helper and adviser and loved her; she deserved his love and esteem because she had made it her goal in life to please him.” Yet, Fawwāz asserts, as Joseph Necker became an eminent banker, he “depended on her in meeting his visitors and guests . . . and entrusted to his wife management of his household and his money. She would loosen and bind and sell and buy.” This image fits nicely into the emphasis on learned domesticity that we will find in the “Famous Women” biographies of the women's press, yet it is not the whole picture for Fawwāz. As minister of France, Necker “reformed financial affairs and concerned himself with reforming the prisons and hospitals. Primary credit goes to his wife, for she used to oversee the prisons herself, investigate conditions in them, and devise appropriate reforms. She founded a māristān in Paris that is still named after her.” Anna Manzolini (1706–74) learned the art of anatomical modeling from her husband but in her own right became famous as an artist and professor of anatomy.^[63] Women's own independent acts also shape Fawwāz's portraits of rulers or spouses of rulers. In both roles Fawwāz portrays women almost invariably, and approvingly, as active politicians. Fayrūz Khawinda (fl. eighth century A.H./fourteenth century C.E.), “daughter of Sultān ‘‘Alā’ء al-Dīn, ruler of Delhi in the country of the Hind,” was not only “solitaire of the age in beauty and splendor, intellect and cleverness—she of refinement and eloquence, of astuteness and elegance.” Her brother “submitted the reins of rule to her, such that with her judiciousness of opinion she put the kingdom into a state better than it had been in her father's time. Her brother [the sultan] took no decision without [getting] her opinion.”^[64] One of the most common epithets in Fawwāz's biographies of “royals” is masmuūat al-kalima, “one whose word is heard [and followed].”^[65] This contrasts strongly with the rare portrait of a ruling woman in al-Sakhāwīī;'s al-Daw’ء al-lāmi‘‘, which elicits from the biographer discomfort and disapproval.^[66] Yet Fawwāz's approbation is not without precedent here, if with Hilary Kilpatrick we scrutinize other premodern books about women. One Andalusian scholar's adab work represents Bilqīs of ancient Yemen as an able ruler: “The choice of Bilqīī;s as one of the exemplary figures in the framework of his book indicates al-Ma‘‘āfirīī;'s willingness to admit a woman who exercised power into his scheme of ideas.”^[67]

Fawwāz portrays women as strong and vocal, and as choosy marriage partners, and she includes subjects the women's magazines (and latetwentieth-century collections) would pass over, such as Euphrosine (b. 413 C.E.), a Christian saint born in Alexandria who refused to marry.^[68] Also unlike later biographers, Fawwāz occasionally places women in the space of grammatical subject rather than object when the verb is “to marry” or “to divorce.” “Every time she married a man and then saw a fault in him she satirized him in verse. The Bedouins came to fear her tongue.”^[69] Maintaining the concept of exemplarity, Fawwāz may be displacing its meaning and context. But we must not exaggerate her singularity. In turning to adab literature for material rather than relying strictly on the tabaqāt tradition, she would have found appropriate figures from Arab/Islamic history to populate her collection. As Kilpatrick remarks, some medieval works portray women who are worldly, wise, witty, and occasionally just a bit wild. Anything but retiring, they are “independent personalities [who] . . . possess insight, courage and culture”; they “behave irreproachably” but also “move around freely.”^[70]

This shift in focus, possibly toward the material of adab collections, can be seen as propelled by a modernist outlook. It coincides with Fawwāz's agenda as articulated in her essays: to propose boldly a cautious opening up of gendered social roles, more specifically to show the social and economic benefits of freeing women from restraints on their ability to achieve emotional, intellectual, and financial independence. She seems never to miss a chance to describe a woman earning her bread. After her father died, leaving her penniless, Necker “taught and lived from the wages of teaching.” Manzolini supported her family when her husband could not or would not.^[71] Maria Morgan, Sophie Blanchard, Rachel, Almaz: women's labor for a living is put in terms of necessity rather than choice, but these life histories support Fawwāz's call elsewhere that girls be trained to earn a living. She herself had to do so after her brother died.

Patterns of Representation

The actual texture of entries in Scattered Pearls, evincing a traditionalism of composition and outlook, often seems in tension with such a program. Content and diction frequently read as if they are taken verbatim from earlier sources, exhibiting a common and accepted practice but also a literary conservatism that characterized biographical dictionaries into the early twentieth century. Peering between the lines, though, we glimpse Scattered Pearls subtly displacing an established set of practices. These are not dissimilar from divergences that mark out the belletristic tradition as opposed to biographical writing, but they have productive and possibly rather different effects in the political and intellectual context in which Fawwāz worked.

Fähndrich and Fedwa Malti-Douglas accentuate the necessity of regarding the Arabic biographical notice as a system of representation rather than as a textually “transparent” mine of historical information.^[72] Hilary Kilpatrick, Barbara Stowasser, and Denise Spellberg examine the selective reproduction of material from existing written sources in life writing, while Wadād al-Qādīī; studies the internal organization of biographical dictionaries as shaped by social dynamics. All recognize the “compiler” as actively engaged in constructing life histories, displacing earlier work that tended to downplay the role of the compiler and the significance of the result.^[73] Like her predecessors, Fawwāz was a compiler; like them, she exercised her authorial role primarily in the choice and arrangement, the contextualization, and sometimes the embellishment of source material. Moreover, like Ibn Khallikān's (d. A.H. 681/1282 C.E.) Wafayāt al-a‘‘yān wa-anbā’ء abnā’ء al-zamān, Scattered Pearls moved close to the adab genre in highlighting the telling anecdote and omitting the scholarly apparatus of the tabaqāt works that its title evoked.^[74] Whatever the sources of Fawwāz's modifications to the tradition, in a context where gendering social roles was debated, the effect was to sketch the outlines of a biographical practice that could contribute to an articulation of emergent feminist goals.

Fawwāz herself notes that she has “tried to put aside all that might cause boredom, condensing chains of authorities and the tradition literature, places and times.” Here she echoes a goal of adab writers, “providing pleasure and shunning boredom.”^[75] If this seems a minor modification, the effect is not, for Fawwāz's strategy puts the focus on the subject herself rather than on her status as a link in a chain, whether biological or informational. For example, Fawwāz limits mention of a subject's teachers, the luminaries from whom she memorized Hadith, or those to whom she passed it on. Only one of the 1,075 women in al-Sakhāwīī;'s Book of Women appears in Scattered Pearls, the celebrated Damascene Hadith scholar ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Muhammad b. ‘‘Abd al-Hādīī; (d. A.H. 816/1413 C.E.).^[76] Fawwāz's brief sketch notes that ‘‘A’ءisha was sayyidat al-muhaddithīn in Damascus and mentions one transmitter from whom she “heard” (i.e., learned by memorization) al-Bukhārīī;'s compilation of Hadith and one man who memorized from her. But Fawwāz dispenses with the details of ‘‘A‘‘isha's learning and the ijāzas (licenses to teach certain works) she was granted, recorded meticulously by al-Sakhāwīī; in one of the longest entries in the Book of Women. The length attests to the subject's importance, but Fawwāz's version highlights the woman herself.

Fawwāz rarely reproduces different variants of the same narrative, as earlier writers, concerned with documentation, had done. Nor does she show much interest in Hadith wherein the subject is not a participant in the transmitted event but only the earliest transmitter. Characteristic of her predecessors, such interests tended to weaken the focus on the subject herself (or himself).^[77] Her entry on Umm Kulthūm bt. ‘‘Uqba mentions two verses her plight as a fugitive from Mecca is said to have occasioned, but these come last, after the observation that Umm Kulthūm “was the first female emigrant from Mecca to Medina.” The woman rather than the verses receives emphasis.^[78] On Barīī;ra, mawlat of ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr, she follows premodern biographies in stressing her importance concerning Hadiths on the status of freed female slaves. That Fawwāz includes these subjects at all may suggest attachment to earlier practice: they do not appear in the magazines.^[79] Yet Fawwāz does not dwell on details of ritual practice or social regulation that form the raison d'être of many biographies in the classical works.^[80]

Fawwāz's use of anecdotes also modifies received practice. Again, a deployment echoing adab literature is differently effective in Fawwāz's social and discursive milieu. In earlier compendia, anecdotes (akhbār) preceded by chains of transmitters but not framed by authorial commentary constituted a system of character evaluation wherein the author appeared a more or less neutral force—“simply” a compiler—even when anecdotes appear to have little connection other than circumstance with the woman subject.^[81] When Fawwāz relates a tale, it is more often one that highlights a character trait, one that spotlights the subject rather than surrounding men.^[82]

More telling is the stronger evaluative presence of a dominant narrative voice in Scattered Pearls as it presents and sometimes interprets quoted material for the reader. The compiler explicitly voices a judgmental role. Through anecdotes, Scattered Pearls portrays the prophet Muhammad's great-granddaughter Sukayna bt. al-Husayn (d. A.H. 117/735 C.E. or A.H. 126/743 C.E.) as lively, intelligent, and not at all cloistered. But should the point be missed, Fawwāz punctuates anecdotes with commentary: “Sukayna loved jesting, play, and musical entertainment, and was most clever. . . . Poets gathered round her, for she was witty and prone to playful joking; she was one of the best at poetry. . . . [In] another such story . . . her cleverness and her criticism of the greatest poetic luminaries were manifest.”^[83] These qualities emerge in Ibn ‘‘Asākir's portrayal of Sukayna, but his attention to isnād (chains of Hadith transmission) and to variants of the story attenuate them, while there is no overt intrusion by a dominant narrative voice.^[84]

Fawwāz's editorializing is more striking when generalizing commentary frames anecdotal material, foreshadowing the still more consistent use of generalization in the women's press. If such commentary echoed the tendency to add overt conclusions to portraits that Kilpatrick finds in certain late adab works portraying women, it is not along the same lines; the “withholding of moral judgements [in earlier works] [was] . . . evidently not to the taste of a later audience.”^[85] Fawwāz did not so much make moral judgments (although they are there) as take up gender politics and the gendered nature of experience. Relating anecdotes in the life of ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Talha (d. c. A.H. 101/719 C.E.), Fawwāz remarks that “it is evident from this narration that, regarding women, their [masc.] inclinations in that age were like those of Westerners in ours, not like our men, who fear to show that women have the slightest merit, out of a sense of jealous protection. Then they claim this as the greater honor.”^[86]

Fawwāz makes comparisons between women and men that have the effect of valorizing women's achievements and disputing traditional claims about “women's sphere.” Consonant with discourse on gender in Egypt in this period, she gives women “male qualities” that subvert stereotypical expectations. (In naming them as “male,” such a strategy also has the effect of solidifying those stereotypes by acknowledging and reiterating their pertinence to readers.)^[87] Isabella I of Castile and Leon (1451–1504) “combined the rational facility [‘‘aql] of men with the good traits [mahāsin] of women, adding graceful virtues not found in anyone.” Umm Sinān bt. Jashama, in the period of Islam's consolidation, “was one of the Arab [Bedouin] women poets described by adab [in both senses: refinement, skill in literary arts], who had great facility in versification and prose composition, with delicacy of meaning and precision of construction, and also with that extreme zeal of which men fall short.” Is this to be imitated or avoided? A yet more delicious reference to gendered characteristics—this time, to a stereotyped femininity—is Fawwāz's acerbic description of the nineteenth-century singer ‘‘Abdallāh al-Hāmūlīī; (1841–1901): “He resorted to the cunning of which women are [typically] accused” in his relationship with the famed and tragic singer Almaz (d. 1891).^[88] (Unlike writers of premodern biographical dictionaries, Fawwāz is stern toward male characters who wrong women or do not fulfill social duties.) In an epithetic style that magazines would adopt, Fawwāz praises women for gendered superlativeness, a tactic not unknown in premodern dictionaries:^[89] Fātima As‘‘ad al-Khalīī;l, the author's mentor, was possessed of “determination that surpassed the bold gallantry [shahāma] of men,” while “Maria Theresa bint Carlos al-rābi‘‘” (daughter of Charles VI) “surpassed the men in wisdom and understanding.” Marie Antoinette (1755–93) was known for “resoluteness and perspicuity of which the men were incapable.” It is this note on which the monumental Scattered Pearls comes to an end, as Fawwāz praises the indefatigable Lady Russell “bint Thomas Wriothesley” (1636–1723), “this excellent woman, in whom mingled women's sweetness, patience, and astuteness with men's zeal, wisdom, and boldness. She lived and died pure of story and quality, having written many letters that give her an exalted place among famous writers.”^[90] Fawwāz deploys the trope of adornment to dissolve male and female provinces. In her biography of Maryam Nahhās, the imagery of adornment and its economic implications describe Nahhās's work on her biographical dictionary. “She expended what remained of her resolve working on it, for its sake selling all the finery and jewels she had acquired, so it would not be said that knowledge and literature are men's [province], and beauty and gold are women's.” Of ‘‘A’ءisha al-Bā‘‘ūniyya she declares: “Literature gave her beauty, and the eloquence of the Arabs was her adornment.” This rhetoric would lace women's magazines; Helen Hunt Jackson (1831–85) “was adorned with the most excellent of ornaments: literature and work.”^[91]

Elsewhere Fawwāz reverses the strategy of gendered comparison but maintains the rhetorical force of generalization as she criticizes what she labels a gendered characteristic. That “Arriyā al-Rūmāniyya” (Arria, d. 42 C.E.) showed her stepson how to kill himself by offering herself as an exemplar elicits the comment: “This is the excessive affection that destroys, and it comes from women especially.”^[92] An overwhelming emphasis on the positive and exemplary is tempered, as in earlier dictionaries, by critical assessment. After all, exemplarity can be negative, as Hester Stanhope (1776–1839) shows: “The remains of the mausoleum built for her were almost completely obliterated. Thus there remained of that woman . . . and her deeds no trace [except] buried in the histories that preserved her mention, that she might be an exemplary warning to those who learn by example, a remembrance to those of sound mind.”^[93] Effectively this maintains biography's didactic role in shaping readers' lives through example.

Foregrounding a dominant narrative voice, demonstrating little interest in parallel accounts, and minimizing (although not eliding) source citations, this volume trains attention on the biographer as an active player in the construction of life histories. In her use of epithets and attributive adjectives, Fawwāz again follows a generic model only to modify it in accord with her focus on valorizing women's achievements. While formulaic (especially when multiplied into a eulogistic stream of labels), in the medieval compendia these are not lightly or universally applied, particularly in the earliest works.^[94] Spellberg has stressed the importance of epithets linked with the names of Khadīī;ja, ‘‘A‘‘isha, and Fātima, those women close to the Prophet of Islam whose “actions . . . became the earliest and most visible source of emulation for women of the Muslim community.” Spellberg calls these epithets representative of “an on-going, implicitly male, discussion of views on female virtue, behavior, and excellence.”^[95] Her analysis suggests the utility of inspecting the gendered deployment of epithets and attributives in the Arabic biographical tradition. In premodern works I have consulted, female subjects are characterized by modesty (hishma), beauty (jamāl), chastity or uprightness (‘‘iffa), and mildness of temper (damāthat al-akhlāq). Along with these biographers' male subjects, women are eloquent, intelligent, determined, pious, morally upright, versed in religious law, active in charity, and generally “known for good works” or “most excellent.”^[96]

The same qualities surface in Fawwāz's sketches. But eloquence, intelligence, and courage—as well as good looks—are more prevalent than piety, moral fortitude, modesty, or mildness of temper. A string of attributives often introduces Fawwāz's sketches, thereby immediately coloring the reader's act of interpretation as it echoes traditional biographical practice. Arwā bt. al-Harth, of the first Islamic century, was “solitaire of her age, eloquent woman of her epoch. When she orated she was excellent, and when she spoke, breviloquent; and no wonder, for she was the daughter of expressiveness, in language flawless and in judgment fair.” Esther bt. Abī Hā’ءil was “finest among women of her time in beauty, most glorious in appearance and most complete, in elocution and expression most sweet.”^[97] While such strings appear most often and elaborately in biographies of Arab/Muslim women, Fawwāz does transfer the locutions of indigenous female excellence to other climes. Artemisia I of Halicarnassus and Cos (c. 480 B.C.) was “one of those endowed with wisdom and understanding in matters of war and politics.”^[98] Elizabeth of Bohemia was “fine of qualities and refined”; Burnayqa, daughter of Lagus and Antiphone and spouse and mother of Ptolemies, was “one of the most beautiful and intelligent women of her time, in her views most accurate and in her thinking most astute.” Genevieve (b. 680), daughter of a French duke, was “one of the most exceptional women of her time in beauty and delicacy, best endowed with grace and gravity, the finest in conversation and company.” Catherine Henriette de Balzac, lover of Henri IV, sounds like a pre-Islamic poet: kānat badī‘at al-ma‘‘ānī ghāya fī al-jamāl wa-al-dalāl wa-al-dhakā’ء (“She was eloquent of locution, exquisite in her looks, superbly smart and subtle”). For women of every origin, superlatives are the order of the day: Semiramis was “most beautiful of her peers and most courageous of the people of her age.” Fawwāz generalizes from the epithetic string to make points about moral excellence and the power of knowledge. Anna Manzolini “had a great share of beauty yet she was virtuous, pure of story and feature; for knowledge gives, to those who possess it, invulnerability from the commission of sins.”^[99]

Still, Fawwāz tended to feature these strings of epithets more often when writing of subjects from the Arab Muslim past, and to deploy saj‘‘ (rhymed and rhythmic prose, a feature of premodern belletristic writing) in narrating the lives of women who could have been featured in earlier Arabic or Turkish biographical dictionaries or adab works. This suggests her heavy reliance on these traditional sources. Typical of these flourishes is her notice on Umm al-‘‘Alā’ء bt. Yūsuf al-Hijāriyya (fifth century A.H.), “a poet of intelligence, eloquence and culture, a woman beautiful and of good mind, accomplished and refined.”^[100] Translation does not convey such a string's resonance, for each term signifies on more than one level of meaning. The complex resonance of a string of epithets linked by the rhyme and rhythmic patterns of saj‘‘ cannot be fully explored here. But we can at least appreciate that when the occasional, often sparse, string of attributives in al-Sakhāwīī;'s or Ibn ‘‘Asākir's work becomes a flood in Fawwāz's rewriting, this “onomastic chain” prepares the ground for Fawwāz's emphasis on the female subject as active, articulate, and powerful. Ta’ءrīkh Dimashq—like Ibn Tayfūr's (d. A.H. 280/893 C.E.) Balāghāt al-nisā’ءā’ء and al-Qalqashandīī;'s (d. A.H. 821/1418 C.E.) Subh al-a‘‘shā fī sinā‘‘at al-inshā’ءā’ء— reproduces a dialogue between the early Muslim ‘‘Ikrisha bint al-At[r]ash and the first Ummayad khalīfa Mu‘‘āwiya.^[101] Embedded in Mu‘‘āwiya's reported speech is ‘‘Ikrisha's rousing oration to the ‘‘Alid troops—Mu‘‘āwiya's adversaries—at the Battle of Siffīī;n (657 C.E.). At the start, Ibn ‘‘Asākir simply notes that ‘‘Ikrisha was “among those women who went as an envoy to Mu‘‘āwiya.” Fawwāz, by contrast, begins: “She was eloquent of expression, a woman of sensitivity and culture, unrestrained in her speech, abundantly intelligent, combining the merits of literary prowess and courage.”^[102] Fawwāz affirms this by reporting ‘‘Ikrisha's speech “directly,” not as embedded in the speech act of a male protagonist. The flow of attributives emphasizing ‘‘Ikrisha's verbal and mental abilities, and the “unmediated” reporting of her speech, sustain focus on the female subject rather than on Mu‘‘āwiya as controller of discourse and validator of ‘‘Ikrisha's abilities. And Fawwāz's narrative (unlike Ibn ‘‘Asākir's) places ‘‘Ikrisha's speech before the visit to Mu‘‘āwiya (as it occurred historically), giving narrative precedence to her voice.

Writing in a decade in which women's behavior and girls' educational aspirations filled columns in the nationalist press, to exploit a conventional diction of praise as Fawwāz did surely bore a contemporary message for women. Nearly a decade before Qāsim Amīī;n published his controversial Liberation of Woman (Tahrīr al-mar‘‘a, 1899), ‘‘Alīī; Yūsuf's (1863–1913) nationalist newspaper al-Mu’ءayyad (in which Fawwāz published essays) was commending support for girls' education, criticizing aspects of the marriage institution in Egypt, and praising Fawwāz for her eloquence. And when it announced publication of ‘‘A’ءisha Taymūr's treatise on gender politics, The Mirror of Contemplation into Matters (Mir’ءāt al-ta’ءammul fī al-umuūr, 1893), it ended with a usage that would surface often in biographies in the women's press: “May God give the author the best recompense, and may God multiply her likes among Easterners, for she is worthy to make Egypt proud through her literary and scholarly works.”^[103] It was common to compliment a living subject by wishing that her or his likes be multiplied. But when Fawwāz and others writing women's biography exploited this usage, could it transcend its conventionality? Could flattery directed at an individual become exhortation, insinuating an agenda to expand what could count as allowable—indeed, praiseworthy—female acts? Fawwāz ended her sketch of Fatma Aliye by calling her “one source of pride for the secluded women of Islam, unequaled by Eastern and Western women alike. She lives in Istanbul. May God increase her likes, and with her may God extend the sciences and learning to our female sex.”^[104] Secluded Aliye had by then been published in Istanbul, Beirut, and Cairo. A few years later, Young Woman of the East would make a similar plea in its biography of Zaynab Fawwāz.^[105]

Stages of a Life

Scattered Pearls seems to exploit generic markers in the Arabic biographical tradition in a direction that accords with the author's undeniable interest in shifting social markers of gender while simultaneously reproducing much of the diction, organization, and content of earlier works both biographical and belletristic. Not surprisingly, Fawwāz remained closest to that tradition in her biographies of premodern Arab women. Her sketches of nineteenth-century women in the Arab/Muslim world, and those of the ancient Mediterranean, Europe, North America, and India, do not diverge radically from the pattern. But they make more mention of emotional life and childhood formation, offsetting the emphasis on the externals of the subject's adult life characteristic of classics of the genre, which Makāriyūs had criticized.

Whether or not this was a conscious strategy on Fawwāz's part, Scattered Pearls pinpoints aspects of early experience that were salient to existing debate on the woman question, notably the education of girls. Noting approvingly the interest biographical subjects took in girls' education, Fawwāz echoes the classical biographer's concern with training in the religious sciences but at the same time diverges from it. She seems to have a broader education in mind in terms of content and audience. She spells out a subject's curriculum more than once. Could this have offered guidance to a female reader? She details agendas and enumerates accomplishments in the sphere of girls' education. Such is the gist of her entry on Catherine II of Russia (1729–76), and it is central to her portrait of astronomer Maria Mitchell (1818–89).^[106] No doubt the shifts in diction Fawwāz articulates were to some extent the result of sources she could locate.^[107] But perhaps, consciously or unconsciously, she felt freer to diverge from tradition when writing lives that had been lived outside that tradition.

Sex and the “Single” Girl

Thus, Fawwāz's volume begins to rewrite the tradition of which it is a part. On the planes of geographic coverage, subject compass, thematic emphasis, and diction, Scattered Pearls announces a difference from premodern biography writing in Arabic while borrowing from that genre and from the adab tradition. At the same time, as the work creates a stylistic template and begins to define a canon of notable women that will help to shape gendered biography in the women's magazines, Fawwāz's “Mistresses of Seclusion” remain closer to that tradition than will the “Famous Women” of the magazines. Yet, offering a reminder that “modern” and “more liberal/liberated” are not synonymous, Fawwāz's literary conservatism paradoxically offers a female panorama that is in some marked ways more flexible on social behavior than are the “Famous Women” of the women's magazines. For as she implies a field of exemplarity for women readers, her narrative exceeds it: she does not limit herself to a cast of characters exemplary in the terms of her own society and her adult social position. Fawwāz dwells on many female lives not offered to readers of women's magazines in Egypt at the start of the century (or to any readers at its end in other than sensationalist terms). In fact, there is a dissonant convergence between a few of Fawwāz's biographies and the sensationalist life narratives of the entertainment press of the 1930s—not one, presumably, that Fawwāz would have foreseen. Fawwāz celebrates or at least seems to enjoy the textually evident sensuality of medieval Arab/Islamic culture. She certainly does not elide it. If she drew much of this delightful material from Arabic biographical works, she probably also relied on works of adab.

The early-twentieth-century women's magazines, unlike today's “Famous Women” collections, neither eschewed nor sensationalized the jawārī. They praised these women for their skill as poets and singers and noted their political influence. But Fawwāz features more of them and gives them more space. Of the thirty-three singer-entertainers she features, eleven appear in extant issues of Fatāt al-sharq. Fawwāz's versions are longer and fuller, featuring more anecdotal details on women's social and sexual encounters, challenging the literal meaning of her volume's title. She relishes a good love story with strong characters, male and female; and does not hesitate to use the term ‘‘āshiq/a (lover, m./f.), which I found in only one women's magazine biography, where it is a question of being accused of having a lover, not of actually having or being one!^[108] While many of Fawwāz's royals surface in the women's press, the royal mistresses she includes do not. She features the famous Cleopatra VII (69–30 B.C.); Young Woman of the East reproduces Fawwāz's biography with some significant editing to which I will return. Fawwāz offers a detailed life of the Egyptian singer Almaz as an exemplary figure beset by a grasping husband. No magazine features Almaz.

The result is a gripping read. If turn-of-the-century girls in Egypt were discouraged from reading novels because of the books' disreputable aura and supposed lack of educational merit, they could have found entertainment here. Alphonse, lover of Diyā‘‘, daughter of the head minister of Sicily, brings a skilled carpenter to create a concealed door between their quarters in Daddy's absence. Habāba keeps her master from “fasting and praying” to the point where he “developed a bad name.”^[109] Tragic lovers mingle with poets and writers. Fawwāz includes the legendary Arab romance of Buthayna and Jamīī;l but does not restrict herself to the heroic Arab past. Anne of Naples is judged in the text (“her friends persuaded her to remarry . . . but the marriage did not serve to change her degenerate conduct”) and is eventually punished in the narrative for her lack of virtue; Eleanora, lover of Alphonse II of Castile, is not.^[110]

In Scattered Pearls as in the magazines, neither exemplarity nor outré behavior (the latter much muted in magazines) is linked to a specific society. For Fawwāz, Anne of Brittany and Shawkār Qādin, Turkish royal consort, are both “models” of virtue.^[111] The contrast is strong with today's Islamist polemics, wherein women of the early Muslim community are paragons of the virtuous female, but women of the West and some contemporary Muslim women are portrayed as sources of sin and social unrest. Unlike the magazines (and certainly unlike today's biographies), Fawwāz features Christian saints and religious as well as Muslim ascetics and devout women. Saint Ursula, Radegund, Saint Olga, Saint Barbara, Saint Genevieve, Saint Brigitta, and Protestant martyr Anne Askew share the pages with Asmā’ء bt. Muhammad b. Susurīī;, Rābi‘‘a bt. Abīī; Bakr al-Najarīī;, Rābi‘‘a al-Shāmmiyya, the famous Sūfīī; Rābi‘‘a al-‘‘Adawiyya, Rābi‘‘a bt. Ismā‘‘īl, and three Zaynabs (Muhammad's daughter and granddaughter, the Imām Ahmad al-Rifā‘‘ī's daughter). Muslim religious figures outnumber Christians, especially when one adds to ascetics and devotees twenty or so religious scholars and Hadith transmitters; early Muslims significant to Islam's success, comprising about thirty “Scattered Pearls” depending on how some are counted; and a few later women who mustered courage and eloquence on behalf of the faith.

If virtue and vice blanket more than one continent, Fawwāz's methodological and stylistic preferences—eschewing long isnāds, favoring a variety of anecdotes over multiple versions of the same story, juxtaposing similarities of situation for women of different societies—highlight the agency of subjects who did not easily fit the mold for exemplary elite women as it was being defined in the press and in conduct literature from the late nineteenth century onward. Perhaps this brought her book nearer to, say, al-Isbahānīī;'s al-Imā’ء al-shawā‘‘ir (which Fawwāz does not list among her sources) in its focus on portraits of women as “cultural entertainers” and in its extreme selectivity of anecdotes, which Kilpatrick characterizes as “series of glimpses.”^[112] But it distanced her from those who had portrayed only women of Arab and/or Islamic societies.

The tarājim tradition did include subjects who cannot be regarded as exemplary. Critical assessment was part of the biographer's job, however subtly conveyed.^[113] But not only did the social and doctrinal needs that encouraged that tradition to emerge shape an exemplary impulse. That exemplifying pressure was perhaps strongest when it came to female subjects, especially since Muhammad's wives, by definition exemplary, headed the list of female biographical subjects. Yet, as Ruth Roded notes, not even all of that first golden generation, the Companions, appear in a positive light in premodern biographical collections.^[114]

One of Fawwāz's longest entries features ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Talha, famed not only as a traditionist and patron of poets but also as a beautiful and rather stormy partner of several men. Fawwāz does not shy away from the “titillating details” of ‘‘A‘‘isha's marital relationships that Roded claims later premodern biographers were likelier than earlier ones to include.^[115]This ‘‘A’ءisha does not appear in the women's magazines. From the perspective of the constantly articulated exemplarity of biographical subjects in the women's press, who else among Fawwāz's subjects would not fit? Good guesses are Eleanora de Guzman (lover of Alphonse II of Castile), Octavia, Eleanora, Umm Mūsā (“she of cunning and slyness”), Olympius, Irini, Hamīī;da (who could not find a husband to satisfy her), the two Annes of Naples, Dakhtanūs, Delilah of haircutting fame, Dahya (a Jewish Berber ruler who tyrannized Muslims), Zaynab (a Jewish woman who tried to poison Muhammad), Diyā‘‘, the Greek Faydar, and Fawwāz's Cleopatra, a rather different one than she who appears in Young Woman of the East: “She knew six languages well,” relates the magazine, “and has writings on adornment and other subjects to her name. She respected the scholars and drew them around her; she encouraged knowledge's banners to unfurl and the market for literature to expand. In sum, she united intelligence and ability.” Fawwāz, to the contrary, does not mince words on Cleopatra's seduction of Anthony and ends on a rather different note: “She loved dissolute behavior and wanted always to have a lover lying beside her. . . . She knew days so pleasant and delightful nights, lovely episodes and tales considered fine.”^[116] To end on storytelling, to relish Cleopatra's pleasant nights: this sets Fawwāz apart from the generally more circumspect women's magazines.

How many of these women did appear in Fatāt al-sharq or other magazines? Of the above, Cleopatra, Dahina, Zenobia, Sajāh, and Stanhope show up in extant issues of pre-1940 journals. If Fawwāz's “toils” shaped a canon on which editors drew, many of her subjects are absent from their “Famous Women” columns. Others, like Cleopatra, are differently drawn.

Rewriting Fawwāz

It seems probable that Fawwāz was the source for many “Famous Women” in Young Woman of the East, founded just over a decade after Scattered Pearls appeared in print.^[117] Labīī;ba Hāshim, who started the magazine in 1906, was a Syrian Christian resident of Egypt. Young Woman of the East took a cautiously secularist stance and emphasized unity among Muslims and Christians, Syrians and Egyptians. It questioned received notions about women's status, needs, and potentials and called for recognition of the domestic work as a sphere that demanded rigorous training and contributed to nation-building. These themes surface in biographical sketches. From its first issue (1906) through volume 26 (1931–32), 232 extant issues (out of 260) yield 232 biographies. The series continued until publication ceased: thirty-four extant issues (volumes 27–34) hold 35 lives.^[118]

Some profiles in Fatāt al-sharq are exact duplicates of those in al-Durr al-manthūr; some are nearly so.^[119] Others replicate Fawwāz's narrative but make significant additions, suggesting how the women's press elaborated Scattered Pearls. First, Fatāt al-sharq pursued a more consistent strategy of editorializing, often making a more explicit notation of exemplarity, a rarity in Scattered Pearls illustrated by Fawwāz's biography of Fatma Aliye. Fawwāz's biography of Circassian Mamluk consort Shawkār Qādin (twelfth century A.H.), founder of endowed projects that benefited Cairo's populace, is far longer than the biography in Young Woman of the East, which does retain Fawwāz's diction. But the magazine adds a gender-specific and contemporary thrust to Fawwāz's conventional finale. “God have great mercy upon her, and increase her likes [amthālahā]” in Scattered Pearls becomes “God increase her likes [mathīlātahā] among the women of this age” in the magazine.^[120] Fawwāz noted several female subjects' exemplary potential for women of her own or later times. But biographies in the women's press were more likely to spell out conclusions based on explicit judgment of character and intellect; in other words, they were more likely to take exemplary life writing right into the realm of conduct literature. In very similar biographies of Catherine I of Russia (c. 1683–1727), only Fatāt al-sharq comments: “Undoubtedly she garnered this great confidence from her husband only because of her abundant understanding, strong knowledge, fine politics, and an amazing quick-wittedness that raised her from her orphaned, poverty-stricken state to the height of the imperial throne.”^[121] Was this articulated concern with implications of women's personality traits the reason that Fatāt al-sharq avoided Fawwāz's more savory subjects, whether ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Talha or Madame du Barry?

Young Woman of the East was more likely to set biography in a context of repeated or multiple activism, too. A text that could easily be taken from Fawwāz might be set into a new framework that moved individual life history onto a plane of collective female endeavor and heroism. The magazine's sketch of Boudicca (c. 26–60, umm qabīlat Barītāniyā, “mother of the Britannic tribe,” explains Fawwāz) follows Scattered Pearls closely. But, unlike the latter, it opens with a contextualizing statement linking the past with current events: “On the occasion of this war and the astonishing deeds of European women in it, we offer the life history of certain women famed for wartime acts in ages past. One was Boudicca.”^[122]

Fatāt al-sharq generalizes from Fawwāz's more straightforward narratives to deconstruct through example the gendered boundaries of expectation that constrain women. Of stunt aviator Sophie Blanchard, the maga-zine added to a life history that otherwise read almost exactly like that in Scattered Pearls: “She flew in many air shows crammed with onlookers, proving the strength of women's intelligence and their ability to resemble men in the deeds men do. . . . Often she encountered dangers sufficient to dissuade the strongest of men from this sort of work.”^[123] Such “proof” is expressed differently in a biography of the early Muslim warrior-poet Khawla bt. al-Azwar. Except for one phrase embedded in a khabar cited from al-Wāidī, Fatāt al-sharq repeats Fawwāz's entire entry, including the statement that Khawla “surpassed the men in valor and courage.” But while Fawwāz ends with the conventional statement that “fate mourns the likes of this one,” Fatāt al-sharq adds the following: “The example of her deeds refutes the argument put forth by those who slander women, saying weakness is one of women's natural qualities.”^[124] Surfacing often in biographies in women's journals, this sort of statement goes further in its assertions than Fawwāz was wont to do, invoking precedent to undermine assumptions that might limit women's choices and how women conceptualized or imagined them. That biographies in journals were more likely to make such generalizations reminds us that public discourse on the gendered organization of society was still young when Fawwāz published her collection. A decade or two later, that discourse pervaded the mainstream press and kept book publishers busy. Young Woman of the East's 1916 biography of another warrior-poet, Khazāna bt. Khālid b. Qart, who participated in early Muslim conquests, is nearly identical to Fawwāz's. The exception is a long opening that takes Khazāna as an example of the “noble character, excellent qualities, and literary boldness we see now in the women of Europe”—which also, says the biography, characterized ancient Arab women and proves that women are as “zealous and courageous” as men. Contrast is made between these two groups, on the one hand, and today's “Eastern woman,” on the other, who is then found lacking.^[125] Such a statement, which also echoes the time's orientalist discourse on Arab and Muslim women, is not to be found in Fawwāz.

Indeed, Fatāt al-sharq's reading of Sophie Blanchard's life links profiles of women to a feminist agenda. Fawwāz ends with Blanchard's death; Fatāt al-sharq adds a postscript:

There are many other women besides Madame Blanchard who have risked flying and have surmounted the terrors of aviation, among them the Baroness de la Rouche, whom we saw flying among competitors in Egypt, and others. We will discuss them in an upcoming issue to demonstrate the well-trained woman's ability to carry out the roughest kinds of work, her right to ascend to a position of equality with men, and the basis on which [women] are demanding rights that men have plundered, all these many years.^[126]

By the time this reworked version of Fawwāz's text appeared in Young Woman of the East, biography flooded the women's press, a player in the discursive arena of gender and nation. As that discourse became more defined in the 1920s and 1930s, women's life histories would serve an exemplary function that was more narrowly defined yet, in changing circumstances, increasingly broader in its purview of what contemporary women, especially Arab women, were doing. In an essay published in Fatāt alsharq's “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘” column in 1919, “Famous Women” are defined as “those who have distinguished themselves in the sciences, arts, litera-ture, and industries, and in different ages have sown the seeds of the women's awakening whose fruits have ripened in this time.”^[127] Magazines reiterate this focus through a growing focus on contemporary women. Fawwāz had included very few.^[128]

Yet Scattered Pearls may have begun to define a corpus of “Famous Women” for writers in the press. Its roster of nonroyal European and North American women seems not wholly an obvious one. If it is hardly remarkable to find biographies of Jeanne d'Arc, George Sand, Manon Roland, Germaine de Staël, Fanny Burney, Maria Mitchell, and Hester Stanhope in later magazines, it seems more surprising to find Sophie Blanchard, Maria Morgan, Adelina Patti, and Victoria Woodhull reappearing.^[129] Some prominent women from Islamic history whom one might expect to find on biographical pedestals appear neither in Scattered Pearls nor in magazines: the “Successors” (the generation after Muhammad, linked to him through mutual acquaintance), and scholars and legists ‘‘Amra bt. ‘‘Abd al-Rahmān and Hafsa bt. Sirīī;n.^[130]

Breaking a Mold

Zaynab Fawwāz exploited the akhbār of the medieval dictionaries to create “precedents” that could be interpreted anew and to comment on gendered boundaries of past and present. Scattered Pearls was a pivot point, a significant if not radical revision of the genre. If Fawwāz was more conservative in her biographical practice than magazine editors would be, if she was less likely to generalize or to draw conclusions about women's culturetranscending similarities, she was if anything more interested in the material circumstances of individual women and less circumspect about their adventures. As a source to which editors of women's magazines turned for inspiration and information, Scattered Pearls could have suggested to them the genre's identity-shaping possibilities while itself not fully exploiting that potential.

Does one of Fawwāz's contemporary subjects suggest that had she been able to free herself from classical texts she might have begun to institute a different biographical practice? For it is an entry that breaks more than one mold. Anomalous in the collection, this biography may signify that Fawwāz was interested in the same signposts that writers in the women's press would highlight. Fawwāz's source on the life of “Sharafiyya ibnat Sa‘‘īī;d Qabūdān” was a female acquaintance: “One of the ladies whose words can be trusted told me about her.”^[131] That she received the stuff of this life story orally suggests that its written form was Fawwāz's own. The entry situates the subject by patronymic, date of birth, and morality: hers is a story of “events that bear witness to her fidelity.” Explaining her motive for including Sharafiyya as “creating an eternal memory of this subject that will last the ages,” Fawwāz also names (defensively?) an interest in “the strange” as sufficient reason to include her. Sharafiyya's father had died when she was eight; “and this girl was of utmost gentility and sweetness, raised on fine principles. Her mother had taught her reading, writing, and handwork, and all that specifically concerns women of embroidery and the like, until she surpassed the girls of her time. She was obedient to her mother, guided by her [mother's] words; and that mother devoted herself to her with compassion and kindliness, until she turned eighteen.” Then ensues a tale of unrequited passion and loyalty worthy of the legendary Jamīī;l and Buthayna, with a tragic denouement and a rather anticlimactic ending: “She has been imprisoned in the house of her grief over thirty years now. Few would have such patience for this calamity.”^[132]

What I find most interesting here is Fawwāz's attention to Sharafiyya's upbringing and to mothering as an intensive process of compassionate training. This would be a dominant theme in the biographies—and other articles—of the emerging women's press. But Fawwāz's penchant for the dramatic love story would not. In the women's magazines, tragedy was more likely to be the result of a girl's thwarted professional ambitions.

Mistresses of Seclusion in Chicago

Fawwāz sent a copy of Scattered Pearls to Chicago, her gift to the Women's Building at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. In her letter to Berthe Honoré Palmer, chairperson of the Board of Lady Managers that organized the Women's Building exhibition, she ruefully pays a compliment: “To judge by what I know, American and European progress has not left for us—women of the East—any precedence in female industry. So I delved into general history and found that no one had written a history in Arabic to treat comprehensively famous women, their literature and progress past and present.” Fawwāz attributes her work to this desire to present a gift, and to create a presence for Arab women, at the exposition:

I saw no gift to offer to the women's exhibition from the likes of us, Eastern women, more worthy than this book comprising life histories of women in their generations. Determined, I set to work. . . . Praise to the Exalted One, by Whose Hand all happened as it should. In it I have brought together life histories of famous women of the Arabs, foremost women of the Europeans, queens of East and West, every fine writer, wise ruler, horsewoman/knight [fārisa], poet, orator, prose writer. I intended to present a copy for inclusion in the exhibit of the Exposition's women's section. But I do not know how to proceed in presenting an exhibit and have read no details in the Arabic press. I entreat you to tell me how to send the book.^[133]

Palmer responded: “Fine lady, your letter reached me on 30 July 1892. I am very happy to accept your lovely gift to the women's exhibition, the book you wrote on the condition of women. You can send it at your pleasure to my address and I will be happy to make a place for it in the women's library. I hope you will write to me . . . I would be most pleased if you would tell me what in your Islamic faith prevents you from attending the Exhibition.”^[134]

Those who organized the Women's Building exhibition had wanted to highlight women's industries. Early in the planning, some declared they must “begin with the Sandwich Islands and encircle the world in collecting an exhibit of women's work.” Gradually the idea of a library took form, and “books by women authors were sought,” although principally in the United States.^[135] Palmer sought support and material exhibitions by traveling privately to Europe, where her own social standing and political connections led her to seek out royalty and the upper echelons of society, such as philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906). She was in Europe in the spring of 1892, a few months before she heard from Fawwāz; perhaps it was the publicity of this European tour that made the news in Cairo. Most of the Board of Lady Managers' contacts with the rest of the world appear to have been very indirect,^[136] and Palmer's announcement to her October 1892 board meeting occluded non-Western contributions in her description of the Italian queen's lace collection:

Italy was almost the first to announce its committee, under the special patronage of Queen Margherita . . . who will send her marvelous collection of historical laces, some of which date back a thousand yearsbefore Christ, having been taken from Egyptian and Etruscan tombs. They are both personal and Crown property, having never before left Italy. . . . Accompanying this lace exhibit will be a collection of the work of the Italian women of today, a prominent feature of which is the lace made by the peasant women in the societies organized by, and under the direction of, the Queen.^[137]

That the laces stolen from Egyptian tombs had “never before left Italy”; that women from outside the West were to be represented, silently, by the ancient artifacts in European imperial collections, while once again the present would be represented by the women of Europe and North America—these ironies apparently escaped Palmer and her colleagues.

The women cited “pathetic answers from some of the countries where our invitation had been declined,” Tunisia for one. And “Syrian correspondents write that it will be impossible to secure the official appointment of a committee of women . . . as custom prevents women from taking hold of such work, and the government will lend no aid, but that an effort will be made to send a small exhibit, unofficially.”^[138] Had they not relied so strongly on government contacts, perhaps they would have found their orientalist preconceptions challenged.^[139] And if Palmer criticized “a lack of appreciation of the universality of women's work in the world,” she appeared to have little interest in the world outside western Europe, although in 1894–95 she “spoke with aristocratic women in Egypt and Turkey.”^[140] Did organizing the exhibit broaden her awareness?

Was Fawwāz's very act of enfolding a minority of women from the West within the procession of Arab/Muslim women a kind of anticolonial mimicry, as Fawwāz shaped those lives to some extent into the molds of premodern Arabic biography and then used them, and contemporary Arab/Muslim lives, to fracture that mold? That the polemics on gender she incorporated into her volume were all by Arab or Muslim women localizes the discussion of women's rights, displacing it from “the West” to “the rest.” That it was the European women who came to Fatma Aliye to have “Muslim women” explicated for them and in the process to have their own perspectives filtered through Aliye's articulation for the benefit of audiences in Istanbul, Beirut, and beyond, reiterates Fawwāz's own act of incorporation. Sending Scattered Pearls to the Columbian Exposition closes the circle. The material production of a book carried a message of both collaboration and opacity. “Here, a gift: we have inscribed you in our texts. But you cannot read how we read you.” Just west of the Women's Building, Egypt was inscribed very differently in the popular “belly dance” shows in the Little Egypt Theatre on the Midway. The Italian queen's laces—including mummy wrappings—were in a central gallery, the Hall of Honor; Smithsonian curators set up an “Indian and African display,” in line with the new discipline of anthropology's distancing, “nativizing” categorization of human populations.^[141]

Yet Fawwāz suggests a shared condition, a mark of female gender, in grouping her subjects under the rubric of “mistresses of seclusion.” If the term rabbāt al-khuduūr was a semantically empty synonym for “women,” Fawwāz's allusions to her own secluded state in her preface and in her letters to Palmer return it to semantic fullness. Many lives she features resonate ironically against the term, and against her own life situation. It is hard to believe she was unaware of the resonance.

Notes

1. “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘: ‘‘A’ءisha Taymūr,” FS 1:3 (Dec. 15, 1906): 65. What I translate as “items about” is akhbār, “anecdotes” or “news.” Akhbār were key structural elements in premodern Arabic biographical dictionaries.

2. Apparently DM was republished (1914), but I have not located that edition. On Labība Hāshim, see Yūsuf As‘‘ad Dāghir, Masādir al-dirāsāt al-‘‘arabiyya (Beirut, 1956), 2:1365–67; Filīb dī Tarrāzī, Tārikh al-sihāfa al-‘‘arabiyya, vols. 1–4 (Beirut: al-Matba‘‘a al-adabiyya, 1913–14), 4:296–97; FS 9:1 (1914): 43–50; FS 10:6 (1916): 232–3; Nādiyā Nuwayhad, Nisā‘‘ min bilādī (Beirut: al-Mu‘‘assasa al-‘‘arabiyya lil-dirāsa wa-al-nashr, 1986), 261–64; ‘‘Umar Ridā Kahhāla, A‘‘lām al-nisā‘‘(Beirut: Mu‘‘assasat al-Risāla, 1982), 4:290–94; Khayr al-Dīn al-Ziriklī, Al-A‘‘lām: Qāmuūs tarājim li-ashhar al-rijāl wa-al-nisā‘‘ min al-‘‘Arab wa-al-musta‘‘rabīn wa-al-mustashriqīn, vols. 1–8 (Beirut: Dār al-‘‘ulūm lil-malayīn, 1980) 5:240. See also Joseph Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany: Suny Press, 1995).

3. Unsigned texts were by convention editorial products, although this may mean they were reproduced from other sources. The common heading “Shahīī;-rāt al-nisā‘‘” (“Famous Women”) I abbreviate SN. All translations are mine.

4. “SN: al-Sayyida Zaynab Fawwāz,” FS 1:8 (May 15, 1907): 228.

5. Muhammad b. Sa‘‘d, al-Tabaqāt al-kubrā li-Ibn Sa‘‘d (Beirut: Dār Sādir wa-Dār Bayrūt, 1958). On these modes of organization see M. J. L. Young, “Arabic Biographical Writing,” in Religion, Learning and Science in the ‘‘Abbasid Period, ed. M. J. L. Young, J. D. Latham, and R. B. Serjeant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 171–72. As in the classical works of the genre, Fawwāz's entries range from one paragraph to upward of twenty large folio pages; the average is one-half to two pages.

6. In addition to Fawwāz, these included Maryam Nahhās's Ma‘‘rid al-hasnā’ء(see note 7); in Turkish, Muhammad Dhihnī, Mashāhīr al-nisā’ء, 2 vols. (Cairo: Dar al-tabā‘‘a al-‘‘āmira, A.H. 1294 [1877], A.H. 1295–96); and ‘‘Isā Iskandar al-Ma‘‘lūf, Nawābigh al-nisā’ء(cited as a source in FS [1910] and al-Athār [1912]; I have been unable to find the work). Later came Qadriyya Husayn Kāmil, Shahīrāt al-nisā’ء fī al-‘‘ālam al-islāmī,trans. ‘‘Abd al-‘‘Azīz Amīn al-Khanjī (Cairo: Husayn Hasanayn, 1924). Fawwāz cites Dhihnī in her entry on Habība bt. ‘‘Alī al-Harsakī, reproducing poetry in Turkish from Dhihnī (DM, 162). Dhihnī's subjects are Arab, Turkish, Persian, and/or Muslim or pre-Muslim women in the Qur’ءān; Cleopatra seems the only exception. I do not read Ottoman Turkish and cannot compare the volume rhetorically to DM.

7. DM, 516. Maryam ibnat Jibrā’ءīl Nasrallāh al-Nahhās al-Tarābulusiyya al-Sūriyya, Mithāl li-kitāb Ma‘‘rid al-hasnā‘‘ fī tarājim mashāhīr al-nisā‘‘ (Alexandria: Matba‘‘at Jarīī;dat Misr, 1879). Al-hasnā‘‘ā’ء signifies “the beautiful woman.” Yet as the feminine form of the adjective meaning “good” or “excellent,” it connotes qualities not limited to the physical, as I try to convey in my translation. This was published under the patronage of Jasham Affat Hānim, third wife of Khedive Ismā‘‘īl and patron of Egypt's first government school for girls. Fawwāz says there was a second volume, on living women (DM, 516), but does not mention the work among her sources and probably did not see it. She says Nahhās began working on this “general book to revive the mention of the girls of her gentle kind [sex]” in 1873 and described it as containing “biographies of famous women, alive and dead, arranged after the fashion of European dictionaries” (DM, 515). Attributing the publicity to Nahhās rather than to her husband, Fawwāz points out the project's unprecedented and all-consuming nature: “She announced this novel project in most of the newspapers, and expended what remained of her resolve working on it, for its sake selling [lit., spending] all the finery and jewels she had acquired” (DM, 515). Fawwāz also takes the opportunity to note both female networks and an early girls' school as she recounts Nahhās's efforts to publish:

When she had nearly finished the first part, she offered it to one who had become famous among the daughters of her kind as founder of the Suyūfiyya School in Cairo, which had about 300 female students . . . , Her Excellency the Princess Jasham Affat Hānim Effendi, third wife of His Excellency Ismā‘‘īl Pasha, the former Khedive. She showered the blessing of acceptance upon it sufficient to prompt its presenter to publish her gratitude and good wishes in al-Ahrām newspaper. . . . By order of Her Excellency a prototype of the book was published, comprising the introduction, a biography of the aforementioned Princess, and biographies of some famous women. . . . But the travel of the former Khedive with his noble family to Naples that year (1879) put a stop to efforts to complete the second part, biographies of the living. Moreover the strange events in which were lost part of the prepared materials and pictures that she had made ready to adorn the book obliged the writer to be patient as the days passed; in her chest there was rancor from the judgment of time and the stagnation of literary goods in the eastern lands. (DM, 515–16).

8. Nasīī;m Nawfal, “I‘‘lān,” Misr 2:34 (Feb. 20, 1879): 1.

9. The term here is sawla, assertive or aggressive behavior especially in a military context. I have never found this word used in any magazine biography of a famous woman.

10. Nasīī;m Nawfal, “I‘‘lān,” Misr 2:47 (May 24, 1879): 4. The advertisement ends with names of individual agents from whom the book can be purchased. Requesting subscriptions in advance was a popular means by which individuals funded the printing of their works.

11. Al-Tuwayrānīī; was a prolific poet, journalist, and writer on both social issues and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), a native of Cairo who late in life went to Istanbul, where he died.

12. Peasants from the village of Dinshaway were publicly hanged after they attacked some pigeon-hunting British officers who had accidentally shot a village woman. According to Baron, this nationalist cause célèbre was one factor that led to “the found[ing] of a cluster of periodicals by Egyptian women.” Baron, Women's Awakening, 28.

13. I thank Hilary Kilpatrick for urging me to consider the adab literature, although a comprehensive consideration of it would be beyond the scope of my project.

14. DM, 7.

15. This has been republished as Nisā‘‘ al-muslimīn: Hiwār bayna kātiba turkiyya muslima wa-rāhila faransiyya wa-faylisūfa injilīziyya hawla al-mabādi’ء al-insāniyya wa-al-‘‘aqīda al-islāmiyya, ed. Muhammad Ibrāhīm Sālim (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qur’ءan, n.d.), though comparison suggests unacknowledged editing. DM publishes three dialogues, Sālim, two. Fawwāz says the Arabic translation appeared in Beirut's Thamarāt al-funūn after appearing in Turkish in 1892 in Turjuman Haqiqat (DM, 370; text, 370–426). On Aliye, see Carter Vaughn Findley, “Fatma Aliye: First Ottoman Woman Novelist, Pioneer Feminist,” Histoire economique et sociale de L'Empire ottoman et de la Turquie (1360–1960, Collection Turcica, vol. 8 (Paris: Peeters, 1995), 783–94; idem., “La Soumise, La Subversive: Fatma Aliye, romancière et féministe,” Turcica 17 (1995): 153–76; I thank Carter Findley for providing me his scholarship on Aliye.

16. DM, 306–8. My translation of the essay appears in Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (London: Virago, 1990), 129–33.

17. DM, 500–508; DM, 515–16.

18. DM, 347. Other contemporary Arab subjects (Sharafiyya, 258–60, Fātima As‘‘ad al-Khalīī;l, 426–28, and Nasra Ilyās Ghurayyib, 524), are described as readers, as is Shawkār, 257–58.

19. Sirrī Khānim, DM, 242; Habība Hānim, DM, 162; Fitnat bt. Ahmad Pasha wālī Trabizond, DM, 440–42. The source for the former is given as Dhihnī.

20. On Fawwāz's life, see “SN: al-Sayyida Zaynab Fawwāz,” FS 1:8 (May 15, 1907): 225–28; Imilīī; Nasrallāh, Nisā‘‘ rā‘‘idāt min al-sharq wa min al-gharb (Beirut: Mu‘‘assasat Nawfal, 1986), 1:149–60; Nuwayhad, Nisā‘‘ min bilādī, 199–205; Kahhāla, A‘‘lām al-nisā‘‘ā’ء 2:82–91; Hilmīī; al-Nimnim, al-Rā‘‘ida almajhuūla (Zaynab Fawwāz 1860–1914) (Cairo: Dār al-nahr, 1998). On Fātima al-Khalīī;l, see DM, 426–28; Nuwayhad, 199–200.

21. Kitāb al-Rasā‘‘il al-zaynabiyya (Cairo: al-Matba‘‘a al-mutawassita, n.d. [1905]) is a compilation of essays and poems Fawwāz published in seventeen periodicals between 1892 and 1905.

22. Zaynab Fawwāz, “Taqaddum al-mar‘‘a,” al-Mu’ءayyad 3:686 (May 9, 1892): 2; al-Rasā‘‘il al-zaynabiyya, 5–10. Fawwāz's essay “al-Insāf” (published in al-Nīl, 1892; my translation, Badran and Cooke, Opening the Gates, 221–26) argues against women's confinement to the home, drawing on life histories of premodern rulers and early Muslim women.

23. In her preface, Fawwāz says she began the compilation or writing (ta’ءlīf) on 4 Rabī‘‘ I 1309 (Oct. 7, 1891) (DM, 6).

24. Ibn Hajar al-‘‘Asqalānīī;, Tahdhīb al-tahdhīb (Beirut: Dār Sādir, n.d.), “Kitāb al-nisā‘‘,” 12:397–504; idem., al-Isāba fī tamyīz al-sahāba, vols. 12–13, together with Abū ‘‘Umar Yūsuf b. ‘‘Abdallāh b. Muhammad b. ‘‘Abd al-Barr, al-Istī‘‘āb fī ma‘‘rifat al-ashāb, ed. Tāhā Muhammad al-Zaynīī; (Cairo: Maktabat al-Kulliyāt al-Azhariyya, 1397/1977); al-Hāfiz Ibn ‘‘Asākir, Tā‘‘rīkh madīnat Dimashq: Tarājim al-nisā‘‘, ed. Sakīī;na al-Shihābīī; (Damascus: Dār al-fikr, 1982); Ibn al-Mu‘‘tazz, Tabaqāt al-shu‘‘arā‘‘, ed. ‘‘Abd al-Sattār Ahmad al-Farāj (Cairo: Dār al-ma‘‘ārif, 1968), 421–27 (notices of four female poets end the work); Shams al-Dīī;n Muhammad b. ‘‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Sakhāwīī;, Al-Daw’ء al-lāmi‘‘ liahl al-qarn al-tāsi‘‘(Beirut: Dār Maktabat al-hayāt, n.d.), vol. 12, “Kitāb al-nisā‘‘.” Analysis of all biographical compendia that included female subjects is not my purpose; see Ruth Roded, Women in Islamic Biographical Collections: From Ibn Sa‘‘d to Who's Who(Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reiner, 1994).

25. Huda Lutfi, “Al-Sakhāwīī;'s Kitāb al-nisā‘‘ as a Source for the Social and Economic History of Muslim Women during the Fifteenth Century a.d.,” Muslim World 71 (1981): 107, 112; Tarif Khalidi, “Islamic Biographical Dictionaries: A Preliminary Assessment,” Muslim World 63 (1973): 55–58. Quote, Lutfi, “Al-Sakhāwīī;'s Kitāb al-nisā‘‘,” 110.

26. E.g., Roded, Women, 4–6. See also Ibrahim Hafsi, “Recherches sur le genre 'Tabaqāt' dans la littérature arabe,” I, Arabica 23 fasc. 3 (Sept. 1976): 227–65; II, Arabica 24 fasc. 1 (Feb. 1977): 1–41; III, Arabica 24 fasc 2 (June 1977): 150–86; and for related definitional work, Ch. Pellat, “Manākib,” EIii VI 349–57. See also Wadād al-Qādīī;, “Biographical Dictionaries: Inner Structure and Cultural Significance,” in The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East, ed. George N. Atiyeh (Binghamton: State University of New York Press; Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1995), 93–122. While warning against overestimating the rolemodeling function, Roded says, “The biographers' interest in women is directly related to the crucial role of the female Companions of the Prophet in various aspects of Islamic culture. These women served as religious models and precedents for later generations of Muslims” (Women, 11). Roded does not ask whether they served as social, or gendered, models. Exemplarity's import in rewritings of ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr's life is stressed by Spellberg but not necessarily as gendered exemplarity (e.g., Politics, 2).

27. See Fedwa Malti-Douglas, “Dreams, the Blind, and the Semiotics of the Biographical Notice,” Studia Islamica 51 (1980): 138 n. 1. On later dictionaries' preservation of “formal features” linked to Hadith criticism, see Hartmut Fähn-drich, “The Wafayāt al-A‘‘yān of Ibn Khallikān: A New Approach,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 93 (1973): 437.

28. Fawwāz shows a traditional tendency to equate biography and history. On this in the classical biographical dictionaries, see Lutfi, “Al-Sakhāwīī;'s Kitāb al-nisā‘‘,” 106 n. 9; on biography's “identification with” history, see Khalidi, “Islamic Biographical Dictionaries,” 56.

29. DM, 5–6.

30. Nusayr lists seven books published in Egypt in the nineteenth century whose titles began with al-Durr al-manthuūr—out of eighty-one that began with “Pearl” or “Pearls”! ‘‘Ayda Nusayr, al-Kutub al-‘‘arabiyya allatī nushirat fī Misr fīī; al-qarn al-tāsi‘‘ ‘‘ashara(Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1990), 343. Perhaps it is significant that Fawwāz used the collective form rather than the plural Durar, which many writers (including compilers of biographical dictionaries) had used.

31. Muhammad b. Sa‘‘d, al-Tabaqāt al-kubrā, vol. 8, “Fī al-nisā‘‘.” These constitute about 14 percent of biographies in the work, says Young, 15 percent according to Roded (Women, 3). On Ibn Sa‘‘d as biographer, see Young, “Arabic Biographical Writing,” 172–73. On his inclusion of women, see Roded, Women, chap. 2. Hafsi emphasizes Ibn Sa‘‘d's importance in setting a precedent for the inclusion and placement of female subjects (“Recherches,” 243–44). It was compendia focusing on early Muslim women that separated off sections on women, although al-Sakhāwīī;'s centennial dictionary did, too (Lutfi, “Al-Sakhāwīī;'s Kitāb al-nisā‘‘,” 105–6 n. 8). So did compendia based on other criteria, such as Ibn ‘‘Asākir's work. Centennial compendia, such as Ibn Hajar al-‘‘Asqalānīī;'s al-Durar al-kāmina fī a‘‘yān al-mi’ءa al-thāmina or the Ottoman dictionaries (see note 33), usually did not separate subjects by gender. Cf. Malti-Douglas: medieval adab works “most often arrange their contents according to a social hierarchy, in which women invariably find themselves near the bottom of the ladder, toward the end of the work”; she sees a parallel with biographical works (Woman's Body, 29; 29 n.1).

32. Her bibliography lists no compendia with separate sections on women but includes three in which women and men were listed together: Ibn Khallikān's Wafāyāt al-a‘‘yān, Ibn al-Athīr's Usd al-ghāba bi-ma‘‘rifat al-sahāba, and al-Sha‘‘rānīī; 's al-Tabaqāt al-kubrā.

33. As the other great Ottoman dictionaries, al-Muhibbīī;'s (1651–99) and al-Murādīī;'s (d. 1791) did not, except for one entry in al-Murādīī; which Fawwāz cites (her only citation to these works), in her entry on Zubayda bt. Sa‘‘d b. Ismā‘‘īl “al-Qustantīī;niyya” (DM, 218). She reproduces the first half of al-Murādīī;'s entry. See Muhammad Khalīī;l al-Murādīī;, Silk al-durar fī a‘‘yān al-qarn al-thānī ‘‘ashara (Baghdad: Maktabat al-muthannā, n.d.), 2:117–18, “Zubayda al-Qustantīī;niyya.” The others are Najm al-Dīī;n al-Ghazzīī;, al Kawākib al-sā‘‘ira bi-a‘‘yān al-mi’ءa al-‘‘āshira, ed. Jibrā’ءīl Sulaymān Jabbūr (Beirut: Muhammad Amīī;n Damaj wa-shurakāh, n.d.); Muhammad Amīī;n b. Fadlallāh al-Muhibbīī;, Khulāsat al-athar fī a‘‘yān al-qarn al-hādī ‘‘ashara (Beirut: Maktabat Khayyāt, n.d.). Fawwāz lists none of them among her sources (DM, 5–6).

34. See Nusayr, al-Kutub al-‘‘arabiyya allatī nushirat fī Misr fī al-qarn al-tāsi‘‘ ‘‘ashara, 245–50. Jurjīī; Zaydān, Tārīkh mashāhīr al-sharq fī al-qarn al-tāsi‘‘ ‘‘ashara (Cairo: Dār al-Hilāl, 1900). The work by Fawwāz is Madārik al-kamāl fī tarājim al-rijāl, which I have been unable to locate.

35. Hafsi, “Recherches,” 227–31.

36. Ibid., 234.

37. Ibid., 229.

38. Ibid., 173.

39. DM, 6.

40. Al-Rasā‘‘il al-zaynabiyya, 32. The letter appeared in al-Nīl 169 (August 3, 1892), dated “July 30.” Palmer was at the center of a group of Chicago women, “wives of the new wealthy bourgeoisie,” who organized the women's building. Weimann, The Fair Women, 6.

41. DM, 6.

42. Fawwāz uses the verb afrada, “to isolate” or “to set aside for” as well as “to devote [to].”

43. DM, 3.

44. Fawwāz echoes her own articulated sense of purpose when she characterizes the aim of Nahhās's biographical volume as “reviving mention of the daughters of her kind” (DM, 515). Cf. McLeod's comments on the significance for a history of feminism of de Pizan's Livre de la cité des dames. McLeod traces the construction of lives of individual women as exempla that served as arguments in an ongoing disputation over the gendering of social roles, culminating in the querelle des femmes. See Glenda McLeod, Virtue and Venom: Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 117.

45. DM, 293.

46. DM, 177, 54, 252.

47. Young, “Arabic Biographical Writing,” 169.

48. Hafsi, “Recherches,” 234.

49. But on the varying degrees of exclusivity found in leading dictionaries, see Khalidi, “Islamic Biographical Dictionaries,” 60–62; Pellat, “Manākib”; al-Qādīī;, “Biographical Dictionaries”; B. Scarca Amoretti, “‘‘Ilm al-Ridjāl,” EIii III, 1150–52.

50. Lutfi, “Al-Sakhāwīī;'s Kitāb al-nisā‘‘,” 110.

51. Note the order of biographies in Ibn Sa‘‘d, vol. 8, “Fī al-nisā‘‘”: Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid, Muhammad's first wife and earliest convert, then his close blood relations, followed in order by his later wives, those with whom marriage was not consummated, those betrothed to him but not married, other Muslim women who took the bay‘‘a (oath of allegiance), those from Quraysh then other affiliations, muhājirāt (those who emigrated from Mecca to Medina with or soon after the Prophet), ansār (Medinan Muslims), and finally women who related Hadiths not from Muhammad but from his wives. Fawwāz does not set up this sort of hierarchy.

52. Cf. Fedwa Malti-Douglas's Woman's Body, a reading through gender of medieval Arabic imaginative prose, authored by men. Malti-Douglas elicits strategies through which male narratorial control, establishing a gendered bond of brotherhood between narrator and auditor, banished women's voices and simultaneously showed them as dangerous.

53. Spellberg, Politics, and Denise A. Spellberg, “The Politics of Praise: Depictions of Khadija, Fatima, and ‘‘A’ءisha in Ninth-Century Muslim Sources,” Images of Women in Asian Literatures (Literature East and West), no. 26 (1990): 130–48. On the compiler's role, see also Fähndrich, “The Wafayāt”; Hartmut Fähndrich, “Compromising the Caliph,” Journal of Arabic Literature 8 (1977): 36–47, esp. 37–38, 40; Hilary Kilpatrick, “Autobiography and Classical Arabic Literature,” Journal of Arabic Literature 22 (1991): 1–20; 13 n. 91; Malti-Douglas, “Dreams,” 139; and Fedwa Malti-Douglas, “Controversy and Its Effects in the Biographical Tradition of al-Khatīī;b al-Baghdādīī;,” Studia Islamica 46 (1977): 115–31.

We can make another comparison to the “catalog-of-women” tradition. McLeod accentuates the mask of authorial objectivity—the role of the “compiler of sources”—through which early catalogers wrote, allowing them to reinterpret “authoritative” sources without comment. See Virtue and Venom, 3, 6, 41, 47, 56–57, 83.

54. Young, “Arabic Biographical Writing,” 172.

55. Recall Makāriyūs's criticism of biographers for not mentioning moth-ers. See DM, 499. In the classical compendia's biographies of women of the prophet Muhammad's family, maternal nasabs are mentioned; these are, of course, significant to the Prophet's genealogy.

56. Many of al-Sakhāwīī;'s entries on women give no information beyond the subject's linkage to a father or husband. An earlier example is Ibn Sa‘‘d's entry on Zaynab bt. Khuzayma, focusing on her husbands prior to Muhammad, then on their marriage, her death, and her query to the Prophet on freeing a slave (Kitāb al-Tabaqāt al-kabīr, 8:115–16). Roded says that “kinship to famous men is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the inclusion of many women in the biographical collections, but it is not the sole rationale”; to the extent women are shown as political actors, it is usually indirect involvement through male relatives' aegis (Women, 23, 37).

57. As Roded says, it is impossible to give socioeconomic specification to this population of biographical subjects—“by definition elite” (Women, 8).

58. At least two I classify as Jewish were from Jewish Arab tribes in the Hijāz. The “Arab/Muslim” rubric includes Turkish Muslims, four Indian Muslims of ruling families, one Nubian Muslim, and one Lebanese Druze.

59. Not only are far more men than women featured in the classic collections; a much larger proportion of men boast long entries.

60. See Spellberg, Politics. Roded mentions this “vilification” (Women, 29).

61. I use a doubled definition not to restrict the field of inquiry but rather to expand it and to suggest the impossibility of further categorization. Thus, “Arab/Islamic” has an “and/or” rather than exclusionary sense. As we shall see, this is demanded by the history itself; but to a large extent, and significantly, late-twentieth-century Islamist writings of women's lives tend to reimpose an exclusionary sense, demanding of its subjects that they be both Arab and Muslim.

62. Fähndrich, “The Wafayāt,” 436.

63. DM, 496, 497, 497, 179.

64. DM, 449.

65. DM, 3, 20, 64, 106, 222, 238, 277, 512, 515, 525.

66. Al-Daw’ء al-lāmi‘‘12:16–17 [no. 87: Tandū bt. Husayn b. Uways]. Lutfi comments: “It is apparent that it was difficult to acknowledge as legitimate the reality of her power in a patrilineal Muslim society” (“Al-Sakhāwīī;'s Kitāb al-nisā‘‘,” 123). Compare al-Sakhāwīī;'s portrait to FS 14:8 (May 15, 1920): 281, an utterly positive sketch which notes, among other things, that after Tandū's husband was killed, “she put the affairs of the state in order with a knowledge and determination of which the most powerful [or forceful] men fall short.” Al-Sakhāwīī; does not seem so disapproving when a woman exercises power from “behind the throne.” See his entry on Zaynab, wife of the amir Iynāl Ajrūd (12:44–45 [no. 261]).

Roded's findings corroborate my own, too; she says female subjects “are rarely portrayed as directly involved in political affairs” (Women, 37). Yet Roded describes several women who exercised political power, drawing on both biographical dictionaries and secondary sources (115–20). She states that biographers had other reasons, such as delineating kinship and marriage ties, to mention women at the centers of power (121). Fawwāz, on the other hand, appears interested—in portraits both of Arab and/or Muslim women and of European women—in convincing readers that the subject had real political power.

67. Kilpatrick, “Some Late ‘‘Abbāsid and Mamlūk Books,” 60.

68. DM, 42–43.

69. DM, 171. Another harasses her elderly husband into divorcing her (190); also, 525–28.

70. Kilpatrick, “Some Late ‘‘Abbāsid and Mamlūk Books,” 62.

71. DM, 496; 179.

72. Malti-Douglas, “Dreams”; Fähndrich, “The Wafayāt” and “Compromising the Caliph.”

73. See Hamilton Gibb, “Islamic Biographical Literature,” in Historians of the Middle East, ed. Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 59–60. Roded recognizes the existence of generic conventions but tends to take biographical writing as transparent. Mernissi's interest in biographies of Muslim women does not take into account the generic conventions that Roded does note. It is implicit in Mernissi's discussion that biographies can be used to political purpose, yet she seems to see them as transparent collections of facts. Fatima Mernissi, The Forgotten Queens of Islam, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). On their bio-graphical practice, see my “Women's Biographies and Political Agendas: Who's Who in Islamic History,” Gender and History 8:1 (Apr. 1996): 133–37.

74. Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt al-a‘‘yān, ed. Ihsān ‘‘Abbās (Beirut: Dar al-thaqāfa, n.d.), vols. 1–8. The first Arabic biographical dictionary to cover all periods, places, and professions, it treated only Muslim subjects, unlike Fawwāz's work. My mention of it in this context is indebted to Fähndrich's analysis (“The Wafayāt”). I noticed only eight biographies of women in the entire Wafayāt. Also pertinent is Hafsi's observation that increasing “vulgarisation” of the tabaqāt tradition late in its history (but prior to Fawwāz's time) meant greater selectivity in the use of isnāds (“Recherches,” 256–64).

75. DM, 6; Fähndrich, “The Wafayāt,” 440.

76. DM, 292–93; al-Sakhāwīī;, 12:81 [no. 495]. On her, see Jonathan Berkey, “Women and Islamic Education in the Mamluk Period,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, ed. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 151–52.

77. For a similar point, see Hilary Kilpatrick's discussion of “parallel accounts” in al-Isbahānīī;'s sketches of women slave-poets: “Women as Poets and Chattels: Abū l-Farag al-Isbahānīī;'s 'al-Imā’ء al-shawā‘‘ir',” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 9 (1991), 161–76; 174.

78. DM, 62–63. Roded notes intense interest and confusion among biographers over the identity of women like Umm Kulthūm who perhaps occasioned Qur’ءān verses (Women, 26–27).

79. DM, 94. On Barīī;ra, see Roded, Women, 30.

80. Roded, Women, 30–33.

81. The painstaking Ibn ‘‘Asākir seems to have taken this practice the farthest, reproducing variant after variant of anecdotal information without comment by an external narrator. Young notes that “effective characterization . . . often emerges from the recorded incidents in which [biographical subjects] play a part” (“Arabic Biographical Writing,” 180). On anecdotal presentation as a key to biographers' distinct styles, see Fähndrich, “Compromising the Caliph.” Examples of effective anecdotal characterizations are Ibn Sa‘‘d's entries for Safiyya bt. ‘‘Abd al-Muttalib (Kitāb al-Tabaqāt al-kabīr, 8:41–42) and Layla bt. al-Khatīī;m (8:150–51); al-Sakhāwīī; on his acquaintance Badī‘‘a bt. al-Sayyid Nūr al-Dīī;n (al-Daw’ء al-lāmi‘‘, 12:13, no. 61); Ibn ‘‘Asākir on Amīī;na bt. al-Sharīī;d (Ta’ءrīkh Dimashq: Tarājim al-nisā‘‘, 43–44).

82. E.g., in her notice on Saffāna bt. Hātim al-Tā‘‘iyya (DM, 244) compared with Ibn ‘‘Asākir's (Ta’ءrīkh Dimashq: Tarājim al-nisā‘‘, 140–54). However, this is not always the case, as is evident from comparing the notices on ‘‘Atika bt. Zayd in DM (320–22) and in Ibn ‘‘Abd al-Barr's al-Istī‘‘āb (no. 3424, pp. 74–82, dhayl al-Isāba, vol. 13). Fawwāz foregrounds the subject's eloquence through her choice of attributive adjectives and by quoting her poetry, while Ibn ‘‘Abd al-Barr places more emphasis on her beauty.

83. DM, 244, 245, 246.

84. Ibn ‘‘Asākir, Ta’ءrīkh Dimashq: Tarājim al-nisā‘‘, 155–71. Ibn Sa‘‘d's notice on Sukayna merely gives her paternal and maternal nasabs, names her series of husbands and her children, then relates a khabar on her death and mentions which men prayed for her soul (Kitāb al-Tabaqāt al-kabīr, 475). On the other hand, and to be fair to Ibn ‘‘Asākir, sometimes his lengthy entries give more of a portrayal than do Fawwāz's briefer sketches. Compare their treatments of Asmā’ء bt. Abīī; Bakr: DM, 33–34; Ta’ءrīkh Dimashq: Tarājim al-nisā‘‘, 3–33.

85. Kilpatrick, “Some Late ‘‘Abbāsid and Mamlūk Books,” 74.

86. DM, 291. This individual is one of early Islam's most controversial. On different readings of her life, see Roded, Women, 50–53; Kahhāla, A‘‘lām al-nisā‘‘, 3:137–55.

87. In “Fair and Equal Treatment,” Fawwāz rejects the reasoning of “the exception that proves the rule.” She mentions famous queens who have “ruled over men” and in the same breath compares them, in working outside the home, to ancient Bedouin and contemporary peasant, urban laboring, and petit bourgeois women (Badran and Cooke, Opening the Gates, 224–25).

88. DM, 74, 60, 78. Fawwāz spells the singer's name “Almas.” On this marriage, see Mahmūd Kāmil, ‘‘Abduh al-Hāmuūlī: za‘‘īm al-tarab wa-al-ghinā‘‘ (1841–1901) (Cairo: Muhammad al-Amīī;n, n.d. [1971]), 25–28.

89. Roded gives an example from Ibn Hajar's Durar (Women, 86).

90. DM, 428, 481, 484, 550. She gives Charles IV as father. “Astuteness”: fitna, a “naturally acquired” sagacity, as opposed to ‘‘aql, connoting intellectually acquired, trained intelligence. See also Umm Mūsā, DM, 63.

91. lil-rijāl al-‘‘ilm wa-al-adab wa-lil-nisā‘‘ al-jamāl wa-al-dhahab (DM, 515); jammalahā al-adab wa-hallathā balāghat al-‘‘arab (DM, 293). Jackson appears in FS 5:8 (May 15, 1911): 281–83; 283. This biography is said to be taken from al-Ma‘‘lūf's Nawābigh al-nisā‘‘.

92. DM, 21. A brief notice on Arria in The Gentle Sex feature employs the same descriptive phrase (mahabba zā‘‘ida), but rather than using this to make a general criticism of jins al-nisā‘‘, as Fawwāz does, it says that this quality “moved her to sacrifice herself” (JL 6:6 [Dec. 1913]: 179). Arria in fact is thought to have killed herself as an example to her husband, Paetus; e.g., see Joseph Adelman, Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement through the Ages with Life Stories of Five Hundred Famous Women (New York: John L. Rogers, 1926), 26. Glossed as “feminine” and praised in magazine biographies, self-sacrifice also acts to justify women's moves into new occupational spheres.

93. DM, 33.

94. The importance of epithetic signals in premodern Arabic biographical writing is suggested in the term manāqib, which came to mean “laudatory biography” out of a semantic field implying “qualities, virtues, talents, praiseworthy actions” (Pellat, “Manākib,” 349). Malti-Douglas highlights the significance of the “onomastic chain” of “names, attributes, and laudatives” that open the biographical notice (“Dreams,” 141; “Controversy,” 121–22). Roded notes the “stylized lavish praise” of the notice (Women, 69) but does not analyze its rhetorical organization.

95. “The Politics of Praise,” 132, 133. See also Politics, 85, and, on the importance of honorifics in creating a “hierarchy of excellence,” 151–53.

96. Lutfi's list of most common attributes in al-Sakhāwīī; (“Al-Sakhāwīī;'s Kitāb al-nisā‘‘,” 110) notes a “dislike” of “spendthrift, immodest, uncharitable and disobedient” women (111).

97. DM, 25, 36.

98. DM, 24. On Artemisia, see Guida Jackson, Women Who Ruled (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1990), 29.

99. DM, 50, 92, 130, 452, 351, 179.

100. DM, 54.

101. ‘‘Ikrisha's patronymic is al-Atash in Ibn ‘‘Asākir, Ta’ءrīkh Dimashq: Tarājim al-nisā‘‘, 254–55, and some other sources; in DM and FS, 1:2 (Nov. 15, 1906): 47–48, al-Atrūsh.

102. Ibn ‘‘Asākir, Ta’ءrīkh Dimashq: Tarājim al-nisā‘‘, 254; DM, 348.

103. “Mir’ءāt al-ta‘‘ammul fīī; al-umūr,” al-Mu’ءayyad 4:944 (Mar. 23, 1893): 3.

104. DM, 370.

105. FS 1:8 (May 15, 1907): 225–28.

106. DM, 456–57, 482.

107. It seems significant that she chooses to reproduce edited versions of Sarrūf's biographies, in other words, to choose a source who emphasized women's agency in expanding girls' education. Following Sarrūf closely but omitting the autobiographical “I” (and the third-person Sarrūf), she lauds the late Nasra Ilyās Ghurayyib for helping “the girls of her kind,” an oftenrepeated stamp of approval in biographies in women's magazines. In repeating Sarrūf's words on education and domesticity, she helps to circulate them (DM, 524).

It is not clear what sources Fawwāz used for women outside the Arab/Islamic spheres, although information on some ancient Hebrew women is found in Arabic sources. Of sources in languages other than Turkish or Arabic, she mentions only “the famous writer Madame A-w-n in her book comprising the lives of female heroes [abtāl al-nisā‘‘ā’ء]” (in her sketch on Aspasia of Miletos, DM, 27); and in her evaluative summation of Elizabeth I's qualities she says she is translating “F-r-u-d in his history” (DM, 48). Her entry on Isabella I of Spain refers to a presumably European source, putting it into an Arabic form of reference: qala briskūt (Prescott?) (DM, 73). Al-Muqtataf and al-Latā‘‘if were undoubtedly among her sources for Euro-American women but could not have provided all her material.

108. This is FS's biography of “Tuhfa”; unlike DM, the text speculates that she might have been a Sufi. FS 33:5 (1939): 257–59. It is worth noting the late date of this biography, too.

109. DM, 266–67, 161.

110. DM, 178, 51–52. Other negative assessments include Fawwāz's portraits of Eleanor of Aquitane (DM, 51) and Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great (DM, 72). Her portraits of Amalswinthe, regent and coruler of the Ostrogoths (sixth century C.E.) and of the Byzantine empress Euphrosine (reg. 1195–1203 C.E.) balance the positive and the negative (DM, 64–65, 43). Thus, although Euphrosine was “arrogant,” she was “characterized by a good mind, courage, and eloquence”—and the positive characteristics come first in Fawwāz's portrait.

111. DM, 177, 257–58.

112. Kilpatrick, “Women as Poets and Chattels,” 175.

113. Al-Sakhāwīī; was more ready than some to make negative evaluations as part of the biographer's duty. See Khalidi, “Islamic Biographical Dictionaries,” 59; Lutfi, “Al-Sakhāwīī;'s Kitāb al-nisā‘‘,” 107. Lutfi says al-Sakhāwīī;'s portraits of women tended to be less acerbic than those of men, perhaps due to the lack of professional threat they posed (110).

114. Roded, Women, 38. Fawwāz describes a few women as having unenviable traits: Zenobia of Palmyra was “overweening”; Anne of England and Scotland was a weak ruler. But Marie Antoinette is presented as having exemplary qualities, as is Sajāh bt. al-Hārith, would-be prophet and enemy of the early Muslims: “She was one of those women who were intelligent and wise, and was possessed of eloquence, courage, and sound opinion.” DM, 227, 176, 240.

115. Roded, Women, 53; DM, 283–91. But, tracing adab works, Kilpatrick suggests a greater conservatism over time, although she is careful not to generalize from a few sources (“Some Late ‘‘Abbāsid and Mamlūk Books,” 74–76). Roded notes that the number of women in biographical dictionaries dropped from the sixteenth century C.E. on, while it was the earliest Muslim women that remained important as role models (Women, 11–12).

116. FS 23:6 (Mar. 1929): 283. DM, 460.

117. Al-Rayhāna also took biographies from Scattered Pearls, such as “SN: Nazhūn al-Ghurnātiyya,” R 1: 6 (Aug. 1907): 181–83; DM, 519–20; R makes a few minor changes and one interesting omission. Mentioning poetry on Nazhūn by the Spanish Arab poet Ibn Quzmān, Fawwāz calls it “lines we have abstained from [printing] because it is not necessary and due to their transgression of the bounds of politeness” (520). R omits the final phrase.

118. No “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘” feature appears in 1:1, 3:8, 17:5, or 17:9. “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘” in 1:6 features an essay by Aliye, whose life appeared in 1:5; 2:6 offers a speech by Makāriyūs, whose life appeared in 2:5 (another indication that DM was the source; it appended the same texts to biographies). Collective essays published in the column are “Famous Women” by Warda alYāzijīī;, on Arab poets (10:6); an unsigned article on “Famous Women” (13:4); “Woman in the Age of the Pharaohs” (24:2); “Rā‘‘idāt al-āfāq” (“Female Pioneers of the Horizons”), translated by “al-Zahra” (Olivia ‘‘Abd al-Shahīī;d) from English (24:6); “Wives of French Presidents” (26:2, 26:3). Dār al-Kutub lacks vols. 27–32; I have been able to see only these issues. Volume 32 includes one collective article on “Some Famous Women in Syria” (including Zaynab Fawwāz), while 33:2 features “Woman in Japan” in its SN column.

119. Of my total of 267 biographies in FS, 27 are exact or near duplicates, all but three in volumes 1–11. Fully 73 more bear more than a passing resem-blance, while even more could have been based on Fawwāz, containing no additional material. Of 219 subjects (several appear more than once), 161 are in DM. Of the 58 subjects not in DM, probably 39 would have been too young for Fawwāz to feature; one is of Fawwāz herself. Only twice is DM cited as the source of a profile in FS: “SN: al-Sayyida Fātima bint al-amīī;r As‘‘ad al-Khalīī;l,” FS 2:2 (Nov. 15, 1907): 41–44; “SN: Maryam Nahhās Nawfal,” FS 2:3 (Dec. 15, 1907): 81–82. Recall that in the latter case, FS omits much of Fawwāz's text!

120. “SN: Shawkār Qādin,” FS 9:10 (July 1915): 361; DM, 257–58. FS leaves out the detailed list of waqfs given by Fawwāz, and a sentence: “She was pious, virtuous, one of the daughters of the Circassians who . . . obeyed their hus-bands and were sincere in their service.”

121. “SN: Kātirīī;nā al-ūlā imbirātūrat Rūsiyā,” FS 3:2 (Nov. 1908): 41–43; DM, 454–56.

122. FS adds a framing comment at the end, too: “History preserved a memory of her courage and greatness of self that erased the pain of whipping [alam al-jald].” “SN: Būdīī;siyā,” FS 10:2 (Nov. 1915): 41–42; quotation on 42. DM, 101–2. Indexing changes by disparities between profiles in Fawwāz's Scattered Pearls and in Fatāt al-sharq, the (later) magazine not only gives more play to domesticity but also occasionally gives a nationalist cast to the story; see chapter 2.

123. “SN: Madām Blanshār,” FS 4:5 (Feb. 1910): 161–62; DM, 487–88.

124. “SN: Khawla bint al-Azwar al-Kindīī;,” FS 6:9 (June 15, 1912): 321–26; DM, 184–87.

125. “SN: Khazāna bint Khālid b. Qart,” FS 10:5 (Feb. 1916): 161–62; DM, 183–84.

126. To complicate matters further, Fawwāz probably took her text on Blanchard from Salīī;m al-Bustānīī;'s al-Jinān. Early in its third year (1872), the editor published a long article entitled “Traveling by Air” on the history of balloon flight. A dramatic engraving of Sophie Blanchard, falling headfirst from a flaming balloon, accompanied the text, which narrated her ascent and fall. Fawwāz's text is identical but for a few omitted phrases. DM, 487–88. Salīī;m Afandīī; al-Bustānīī;, “Al-Masīī;r fīī; al-hawā‘‘,” al-Jinān 3:1 (Jan. 1, 1872): 8–19; on Blanchard, 14–15.

127. “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘,” FS 13:4 (Jan. 15, 1919): 121.

128. Women in DM still living when it was published—and whom Fawwāz alludes to as alive—are Fatma Aliye, Fātima al-Khalīī;l, Sharqiyya bt. Sa‘‘īī;d Qabūdān, Sophia Empress of Russia, Elizabeth of Rumania (Carmen Silva), Empress Eugénie, ‘‘A’ءisha Taymūr, and Fatnat bt. Ahmad Pasha. The recently deceased include Nasra Ilyās Ghurayyib, Maryam Makāriyūs, Maryam Nawfal, Sirrīī; Khānim, and Almaz. She refers to Maria Mitchell as “still living” (DM, 482): either she wrote the entry before Mitchell's death in 1889, copied it from an earlier source, or did not know of Mitchell's death. Roded erroneously states that these turn-of-the-century biographical dictionaries of women included no living subjects (Women, 11).

129. The nonroyal (including some who may have been linked to royal families) Westerners are Ann-Louise Germaine de Staël, Adelina Patti, Saint Ursula, Fanny Burney (d'Arblay), Hester Stanhope, Augustina “virgin of Saragossa,” Saint Euphrosine, Saint Olga, Saint Brigitta, Jeanne d'Arc, Genevieve “daughter of the Duc de Brebant from the provinces of France,” Saint Genevieve, George Sand, Ann Elizabeth “wife of the Negus,” Anne Askew, Anne Manzolini, Anne Radcliffe, Rachel, Manon Roland, Victoria Woodhull, Catherine [Ekaterina] Doumatovna Dashkoff, Maria Edgerton, Maria Mitchell, Maria Morgan, Marie d'Orléans, Sophie Blanchard, Marguerite of Navarre, Suzanne Necker, Christine Nilsson, and Lady Russell.

130. On whom see Roded, Women, 48–50. Another hint that Fawwāz helped shape a canon: Hind Nawfal herself was not profiled in the women's press as far as I know, but her mother, Maryam Nahhās Nawfal was, probably because Zay-nab Fawwāz included her in DM (515–16). See “SN: Maryam Nahhās Nawfal,”FS 2:3 (Dec. 15, 1907): 81–82. This is one of the few biographical sketches in FS attributed to Fawwāz: it is said to be “from the Scattered Pearls.”

131. DM, 258. She may have sought indirect oral information on at least one other subject: “I found no one who could notify me of any of her anecdotes and many jokes” (DM, 79).

132. DM, 258, 260.

133. Al-Rasā‘‘il al-zaynabiyya, 31–32.

134. This letter appears in al-Rasā‘‘il al-zaynabiyya, 64; it was published in al-Nīl 229 (24 Rabī‘‘ 1310) and the dateline is Chicago, Sept. 20, 1892 (al-Rasā‘‘il, 63).

135. Quoted in Weimann, The Fair Women, 36; ibid., 127.

136. Ibid., chap. 7.

137. Quoted in ibid., 137.

138. Ibid., 139.

139. It is unclear who the “Syrian correspondents” were or whether this had anything to do with the Fawwāz-Palmer exchange. See Weimann, The Fair Women, 274. She mentions Hannā Kūrānīī;, who attended, as “in charge of her country's exhibit at the Women's Building” (545).

140. Quoted in Weimann, The Fair Women, 234; ibid., 595.

141. See ibid., 264–65, chap. 15.

2. Siting Biography

A Politics of Address

As a child, [Qadriyya Husayn, daughter of Sultan Husayn] preferred perusing the pages of illustrated magazines and asking about what she saw there to playing with dolls. . . . She wrote many books, the most important of which in our opinion is Book of the Egyptian Queens.

Halide Edip is the lady to whom leadership of the women's awakening in Turkey eventually came, without any effort on her part to acquire this position, in the view of both the strong and gentle sexes. This is contrary to what we witness among certain literary ladies of the other countries [in the region], who have been set on making the ears of others ring with the words that woman has rights now suppressed, that between woman and man lies an enigma women must solve by striving to speak publicly and to write what is in their interest.

Qadriyya Husayn, Turkish princess in Egypt, wrote about Egyptian queens and early Muslim women. She carried on the work of Fawwāz and, like her, privileged some features of the tabaqāt tradition and muted others. These shifts emerged also in biographies of “Famous Women” (shahīrāt al-nisā’ءā’ء)— of Fawwāz, Husayn, and hundreds of others—that appeared in periodicals in Egypt targeted largely at women as subject and audience, and edited primarily by women. For, from its emergence in 1892, “the women's press” (al-sihāfa al-nisā’ءiyya) celebrated famous women, borrowing texts from Fawwāz and Husayn, and writing many others. We have already watched Labīī;ba Hāshim editing life stories taken from Scattered Pearls, carrying Fawwāz's shifts further: focusing more keenly on the subject's own life, minimizing her role as a link in a chain; intimating a political justification for the gendered manipulation of a rhetoric of exemplarity and precedent; inserting an intrusive and generalizing narrative voice that points up that justification; flooding the text with attributive adjectives and epithets, so prominent a feature of premodern biographical texts; attending to parental presence and childhood formation, emotions, and especially education; and expanding the range of biographical subjects. In this chapter I introduce that range while introducing the magazines themselves by scrutinizing the politics of address of the earliest ones. I set the emergence of women's magazines and the siting of “Famous Women” therein into Egypt's shifting political scene. As different interests governed distinctive magazines, they offered commentaries on that scene that were not wholly predictable. Through subject choice, biography proffered an indirect commentary on the politics of this press, while also tempering or challenging political orientations that surface in other texts in the same journals.

Siting Biography

Women's magazines for readers of Arabic and biographical dictionaries of and by women first appeared in Egypt, produced by women who had emigrated from Ottoman Syria and then by Egyptians. These magazines circulated outside of Egypt, and “Famous Women” appeared in journals founded elsewhere, but Egypt was the main site of production. The founding of more than twenty magazines for and/or about women by 1914, and fourteen more by 1935, suggests strong interest in capturing a growing female readership, although some “women's” magazines were directed more at men. But most journals featuring biography were produced predominantly by women and aimed rhetorically at a female audience, although men were usually welcomed by magazine rhetoric as contributors and readers. When excluded rhetorically from the circuit of writers, they appeared anyway. Journals for and about women that published biography included Hind Nawfal's al-Fatāt (The Young Woman, 1892–94); Alexandra Avierino's Anīs al-jalīs (The Sociable Companion, 1898–1908); Ibrāhīī;m Ramzīī;'s al-Mar’ءa fī al-Islām (Woman in Islam, 1901); Rūz Antūn's Majallat al-sayyidāt wa-al-banāt (Ladies' and Girls' Revue, 1903–4); Labīī;ba Hāshim's Fatāt al-sharq (Young Woman of the East, 1906–39); Jamīī;la Hāfiz's al-Rayhāna (Sweet Basil, 1907–?); Malaka Sa‘‘d's al-Jins al-latīf (The Gentle Sex, 1908–21); Sārah al-Mīhiyya's Fatāt al-Nīl (Young Woman of the Nile, 1913–15); Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik's Majallat al-mar’ءa al-misriyya (Egyptian Woman's Magazine, 1920–39); Labība Ahmad's Majallat al-nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya (Magazine of the Women's Awakening, 1921–39); Imilīī; ‘‘Abd al-Masīī;h's Fatāt Misr al-Fatāt (Young Woman of Young Egypt, 1921–24?); and Nabawiyya Mūsā's al-Fatāt (The Young Woman, 1937–42).^[1]

Biographies of notable women caught on quickly as a regular feature, appearing in sixteen out of twenty magazines published between 1892 and 1939 that I examined. Editors usually offered these one-half-page to eight-page profiles one to an issue, under the rubric “Famous Women” (shahīrāt al-nisā’ءā’ء) or a near equivalent. The biographies usually followed an established form, giving family information, epithets of praise, and a chronological narrative. Sometimes, although called “biography” or referring to sāhibat al-tarjama (owner/subject of the biography), they featured just one anecdote, especially in the case of premodern Arab women whose “biographies” were taken from earlier works and about whom much might not be known.

The first periodical for women to appear in Arabic, The Young Woman, published brief life narratives of seventeen women in its first and only twelve issues. In the ninth issue, biography was assigned its own heading, “Bāb tarājim mashāhīr al-nisā’ء” (“The Biographies of Famous Women Column”). Perhaps this constituted recognition that the genre had become integral to the periodical, which had marshaled famed females of past and present from its opening editorial on as it argued on behalf of female pens. Woman in Islam, founded by Ibrāhīī;m Ramzīī; in 1901 as a forum for debate among a group of men on the woman question, featured nine biographies in fourteen issues. The Ladies' and Girls' Revue, founded in April 1903, featured “The Most Famous Women” in its first four issues, supplied by Rūz Antūn's journalist brother, Farah, signing himself with three asterisks. Then the feature disappeared, although biographies returned in the magazine's sequel. And with the 1906 appearance of the long-running Young Woman of the East, the “Famous Women” were here to stay: almost every monthly issue until the last (1939) featured one, positioning her on the issue's first page. In fact, the magazine “was famous among its readers for its Famous Women.”^[2] Perhaps this was because, right under the masthead, the biographies offered a positive, encouraging opening to the journal's discussion of gender politics, for they celebrated women's achievements. Perhaps these sketches also held a certain comfort: life narratives, as Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom have pointed out, can provide “vicarious validation” of readers' lives in times of bewildering change. Yet, as Carolyn Heilbrun reminds us, “ambivalence and anxiety” also attend women's inscriptions of women's life histories, a feature by no means absent from these texts.^[3]

For it was a period of enormous political and social ferment. The biographies written by Nahhās and Sarrūf appeared in print as some Egyptians' disaffection with the closely held powers and aristocratic Turkish base of the khedivial regime was resulting in serious political upheaval. In what has come to be called the ‘‘Urābīī; movement, army officers in alliance with notables confronted the nominally Ottoman local sovereign, Khedive Tawfīī;q (r. 1879–92), scion of the dynasty founded by the Albanian Ottoman soldier Muhammad ‘‘Alīī; (r. 1805–48), and the Turkish ruling elite with demands to share power (1881–82). This worried Egypt's European creditors, leading to British military occupation (1882). London installed Evelyn Baring (soon to be named Lord Cromer) as consul general (1883) in the wake of popular unrest. Zaynab Fawwāz was writing her biographical dictionary during the first decade of British control. Protonationalist activities were temporarily muted, but state and nonstate actors were pressuring the British-“advised” administration on issues such as increased state spending on education for both boys and girls, while much cultural production still focused on Ottomanism as a possible response to British power.^[4] As Jacques Berque notes, it may have looked as if nothing was happening. There was little consensus among intellectuals on the occupation in its first decade, and some benefited from the changing economic contours of the time and the expanding opportunities for government employment. But the period saw an increase in the reporting (at least) of crime, signs of growing social dislocation, and perhaps a gathering sense of “inert frustration,” especially as Britain seemed to consolidate its hold in the mid-1890s.^[5] An intensified discussion of gender relations and roles mirrored and shaped further a sense of unease about the status of the family as the basis of social organization. Anxiety about the marriage institution was evident in writings of the time.^[6]

In the decade before World War I, as journals such as Anīs al-jalīs,al-Sayyidāt wa-al-banāt, Fatāt al-sharq, al-Rayhāna (the first women's periodical founded by an Egyptian woman), and al-Jins al-latīf were publishing biographies of European as well as Arab women, some nationalists looked hopefully to the West for political and social models, while others formulated Islamic-centered responses to events. Individuals moved between these views or tried to meld them. Mustafā Kāmil's Nationalist Party, founded in 1907, saw simultaneous loyalty to Istanbul and to a concept of Egyptian solidarity as compatible. Ahmad Lutfīī; al-Sayyid, spearhead of the Umma Party (founded the same year) and a supporter then and later of women's demands,^[7] was implacably opposed to Ottomanism; for him this was linked to the fraught issue of how Islamic loyalties might undermine Muslim-Christian solidarity within Egypt.^[8] Resentment against the British and against economic hardship had been symbolized violently in the Dinshaway incident of 1906 and the ensuing outcry. New political groupings and Lord Cromer's resignation attested to the growing intensity of nationalist sentiments. The British-imposed “Protectorate” of 1914 and the Great War complicated nationalist orientations, as London imprisoned pro-Ottoman activists who hoped early in the war that a German-Ottoman victory would mean London's departure from Cairo.

Following World War I, as more Egyptian-founded journals joined the earlier crop in publishing biography and (other) polemics on gender relations and nationalist needs, this range of views continued to be debated. A determinedly Egypt-centered nationalist focus articulated postwar political optimism and took to heart the Wilsonian rhetoric of national self-determination. When nationalists resolved late in 1918 to negotiate a changed political relationship with London, British fear of losing control resulted in the banishment of Sa‘‘d Zaghlūl and two other nationalists who intended to present Egypt's case to the Western powers and to international public opinion. Moving from small delegation to nationwide populist party, their Wafd (“delegation”)—with a charter emphasizing the rhetoric of selfdetermination and the impact of territorialist nationalist ideas—could not be easily suppressed as the British had assumed. The resulting wave of demonstrations and clashes beginning early in 1919, which enveloped not only Egypt's urban elite but also many from the countryside and from every economic stratum, brought women as political actors into sharp focus, to the distress of some and the exultation of others. As biographies of Jeanne d'Arc and Halide Edip were appearing in women's magazines, Muslim and Coptic women were leading demonstrations and organizing as nationalists, in the Wafdist Women's Central Committee (1919) and, a few years later (1922, 1923), in the Sa‘‘dist Women's Committee and the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU).^[9]

These events echo through biographies. Profiles from the 1920s that were almost identical to Fawwāz's modified the texts, casting their heroines in nationalist and modern terms that were hard to ignore. Sajāh bt. al-Hārith (fl. first century A.H./sixth century C.E.), “one of the wise and intelligent women, possessed of eloquence, courage, and sound thinking,” was an implacable enemy of Muhammad's first successor as leader of the young Muslim community. The epithetic celebration of Sajāh in Young Woman of the East is nearly identical to the depiction in Scattered Pearls, but the diction constructing Sajāh's confrontation with Abū Bakr's army is quite different. Fawwāz gives details that religious sensitivities in Egypt a couple of decades later might have prompted Labīī;ba Hāshim to omit (Sajāh's claim to be a prophet, her anti-Islam campaign). Young Woman of the East narrates a confrontation among peoples rather than prophets and, unlike Fawwāz, speaks of Sajāh “gaining the hearts of her folk.” Hāshim's journal, negotiating its place in 1920s Cairo, made the heroine's story a nationalist one and avoided sectarian details.^[10]

While many themes remained more or less consistent throughout the period, women's increased political activity in the nationalist fervor of the early 1920s left its mark on biography. Not only were biographies of Jeanne d'Arc as nationalist fighting woman clustered in the first half of the 1920s;^[11] those years of strenuous nationalist effort, of optimism interrupted by disappointment, and of women's political organizing on their own also saw other biographies featuring women as powerful political actors. Like Jeanne, these were among the most popular biographical subjects across the entire period, but they were featured more at this time: Khawla bt. al-Azwar, Halide Edip, Shajar al-Durr, Manon Roland. It was in early 1921, as women were active in boycotting the Milner Commission (sent from London to report on the situation), that Young Woman of the East featured Russian political activist Katirina Breshkovskaya (b. 1844), then seventy-seven, praising her nationalist jihad (struggle) and her commitment to “truth and freedom.”^[12]

In mid-1923, when optimism prevailed among Wafd supporters about Egypt's political future, even if its new independence was not complete, and when talk of a new constitution included women's hopes for political rights, the Magazine of the Women's Awakening published Mukhtār Yūnus's life of Khawla bt. al-Azwar. Invoking the authority of no less a figure than Khālid b. al-Walīī;d, general of Muhammad's forces as the community saw its first expansions beyond Arabia, Yūnus probably exaggerated Khawla's role, even as he repeated the discursive siting of “woman” as “man's helpmeet.” Al-Walīd “was determined that Khawla be man's partner in life, indeed in war”; Yūnus put her at the head of “the army of Islam, to fight the Byzantines.” Then Yūnus fashioned a crafty rhetorical link to the Egyptian nationalist cause: “By the sacrificed right of Egypt, there is no clearer proof, no stronger argument, that Muhammad's (peace be upon him) sharī‘‘a does not reject such a state of affairs.”^[13] And he attacked women's “discreditors,” deploying Qur’ءānic diction to declare them “astray” in their grasp of the faith.

For those associated with the EFU, the 1919 “revolution” was articulated as a watershed in women's emergence and, in a typical nationalist move, linked to either ancient Egyptian or early Arab women. Defining the legitimacy of her movement, Hudā Sha‘‘rāwīī; invoked the same double heritage proposed by biographies in the women's press and articles on women in Egyptian history: early Muslim as well as ancient Egyptian women had full rights that had later been eroded; and today's fallāha (peasant woman)—even if she was stereotyped, homogenized, and romanticized by urban upper- and middle-class women as the full working partner of her husband, happily engaged in home and field, always consulted—embodied the honorable continuation of that tradition.^[14] Women writing in magazines did not always agree with the EFU's agenda, but they had the same historicizing narrative. A parallel but not identical nationalist narrative to that of male territorialist nationalists, its moments of glory and crisis were gendered female.

Many of these 1920s biographies depicting women as public political actors appeared in the Magazine of the Women's Awakening. If this journal bore the stamp of an Islamic politics, even in the “secular nationalist” decade of the 1920s such a politics did not preclude visible, and independent, female activism. Witness its founder's own stance. During 1919–23, Labīī;ba Ahmad was very involved in getting nonelite women into nationalist activism. She wrote on gender issues in nationalist terms. An EFU charter member, Ahmad parted company with its program. And her Islamic orientation did not banish the pharaonic heritage from her journal. Writing in 1926, Muhammad Kāmil al-Bannā declared in an open letter to Egyptian girls going overseas on study missions, “Hold fast to your religion, for it is a protection for you . . . then, read your history and you will learn the meaning of seriousness and initiative. . . . Remember, you are the descendants of a nation on whose Nile shores were implanted the two most deep-rooted civilizations in existence . . . the Pharaonic and the Arab.”^[15] When violent public protest in 1921–22 greeted Zaghlūl's second banishment, the British declared Egypt's “independence” (1922) but retained a major military presence and reserved much military, financial, and other administrative power for London. Negotiations between Egyptian leaders and the British government would continue to have unsatisfactory results through the 1920s, as London yielded only nominal ground. The Wafd won elections but was not permitted to hold on to power long. In government from March to November 1924, the Wafd presided over a moment of some optimism that, as I have said, is evident in rhetoric on gender relations, as well as in other issues of nation-building. The view that intellectuals must take an active role in changing popular perceptions, which Gershoni and Jankowski trace through writings of male nationalist intellectuals of the 1920s,^[16] was shared by female intellectuals. Biographies of women articulate the idea that intellectuals instigate change through transforming communal self-perceptions. Gershoni and Jankowski pay no attention to thematics of gender, but these were central to the “revolutionary” spirit of the times, to the sense of some that they were living in a period of major transformation. Feminists were among those who entered the political fray with their own demands. Was it accidental that Young Woman of the East's biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) appeared in January 1925, stressing how hard she had had to struggle with the United States Congress to get any recognition of her demands on behalf of American women? Or that the same biography emphasized how much she was mourned, having pinpointed a source of national strength—“the path she sketched out for the national community's [umma's] two halves, that they might proceed equally and in cooperation”?^[17]

But with the takeover of a British-engineered and palace-dominated government headed by Ahmad Ziwar at the end of 1925, optimism waned even as Wafd support continued (the party was returned repeatedly as a parliamentary majority). The continuing sabotage of constitutional government through the late 1920s and the 1930s, and the resulting three-way power struggle between the palace, the British, and the political parties, led to political maneuvering that looked increasingly self-interested, corrupt, sterile, and hopeless. A corollary for some was disillusionment with parliamentary democracy as a system that had not lived up to the image thatpro-Western commentators had sketched of it. And if that system was corrupt, so perhaps were social practices that observers associated with it, such as women's consistent visibility in the workplace. In the early 1930s, the combination of increasing economic hardship and fierce political repression generated disaffection and cynicism among growing numbers of educated young Egyptians. These developments were potentially disastrous in terms of expanded rights for urban, middle-class women: it was no wonder that there was a backlash against girls in higher education and in professional positions, for lack of work opportunities became a touchstone issue for youth groups of the 1930s. This also may have been a response to women's continuing political visibility. For women's public involvement in the difficult politics of the late 1920s through the 1930s continued, with protests against the repressive practices of the ministry of Ismā‘‘īl Sidqīī; (1930–33) that extended to participation in general strikes. (Latīī;fa Sālim notes that encounters between politically active women and the police in the 1930s were represented pictorially in the press to increase the populace's fervor.) Perhaps Labīī;ba Ahmad's politics had become more conservative by the 1930s, but her journal continued to portray women's political activism in an anticolonial context, through biography. Sarujini Naidu's (1879–1949) life history therein links the Indian and Egyptian struggles against British imperialism through the channel of popular opinion: “It escaped [the British] that in the view of every Egyptian, Naidu's imprisonment was a matter of glory and a source of pride—that the fetters on Naidu's hands and feet were actually bracelets and anklets.”^[18] And when the parties declared a national front in 1935, women welcomed it but warned that if it did not succeed, women would be out in the streets once more.^[19] Rather than seeing groups such as the Young Men's Muslim Association and the Muslim Brotherhood as opposed to women's rights because of their Islamic orientations, it seems more productive to see an Islamically couched rhetoric of opposition to women's public professional and political presence as serving the interests of groups that felt their socioeconomic position threatened. And rhetorical focus on the West as a site of moral degeneration could fuel a backlash against “modern women” labeled “Western,” an issue Arab feminists face to this day.

Throughout this period, biography as a disciplinary practice targeted an ideal female subject who was product of and witness to these events: daughters of a new elite envisioned by and embodied in the liberal nationalist leadership. Including (if sometimes distancing) members of the Turkish-Egyptian aristocracy, major landowners, leading merchants, and the highest religious authorities, this elite drew in provincial notables, a few settled Bedouin leaders, and the upper echelons of urban entrepreneurs. The newly minted professional, often but not exclusively the offspring of traditional elites, was part of this loose grouping. Increasingly, the new elite could be partially characterized as “upper middle class,” and its members spoke Arabic rather than French or Turkish. Here the ideal female citizen was supposed to emerge, in carefully controlled circumstances. Here, “Famous Women” biographies were to accomplish their political work, for they were part of a growing industry of prescriptive text production.

At the end of the nineteenth century, book production and circulation in Egypt had expanded greatly. The spread of education, the marketing of ever-cheaper books, pamphlets, and magazines, and the formation of more accessible Arabic prose styles both reflected and produced a broader reading and book-buying public. From the 1890s on, as the “Famous Women” biographies appeared, so did a flood of prescriptive and didactic literature aimed at women and the family as a unit. At its center was a concern with gender relations and sexuality. Domestic manuals and conduct books, treatises on “women and Islam,” studies of “women in society,” and new school texts all contributed to marking the boundaries of gendered social roles. They delineated the sphere of domestic activity; instructed readers in their duties as parents, children, spouses, homemakers, and breadwinners; and defined relations between religious faith, civic responsibility, and gendered divisions of labor. Concerned above all with women's relationships to home and society, the “Famous Women” biographies were part of this technology of prescription. Perhaps biography was particularly powerful, for it acted as conduct literature that worked “by appropriating positive prescriptions rather than immobilizing prohibitions.”^[20] The rise of this conduct literature suggested the crystallization of forms of political organization and regulation that members of the rising elite saw as necessary to the formation of a state that would answer their needs. Biography's prescriptive power operated through its circulation in this discursive economy of conduct, but it was a strand of conduct literature that emphasized formation of the individual subject over subjection to an authoritarian moral code. At a time when social codes were changing for the bourgeoisie, this suited liberal nationalist discourse. Foregrounding a linear narrative of progress through the formation of an individual ego, biography demonstrated, perhaps more powerfully than other genres circulating at the time, the shaping force of particular ideologies and institutions on individuals. In turn, by celebrating prominent figures, it suggested the power individuals could have in shaping their societies.

The Magazine and its Readers

Magazines were one venue for this literature of conduct. If female audience was a concern of women writing in The Selected,^[21] it drew a more marked rhetorical stance in women's magazines, which in turn reflected a changing situation as that audience grew.^[22] But female authorship and female readers were of varying concern to different magazines, and this shaped their outlooks. One way to access differences among journals is through the politics of address.

As Beth Baron points out, early women's magazines in Egypt addressed a similar range of issues.^[23] Yet in terms of address they diverged. This was not entirely a split along gendered lines in terms of magazine editorship. Thus, the term “the women's press” becomes problematic, although we must honor the use by editors themselves, and commentators at the time, of this rubric to describe (at times) what they were doing. As we shall see, The Young Woman and The Sociable Companion resembled each other in their assumption that schooling girls and putting girls in school were already well-established practices, at least discursively. But these first women's magazines in Egypt are otherwise quite different, dispelling an appearance of sameness through the women's press and challenging the notion that periodicals' outlooks depended overwhelmingly on ethnicity or religion, for the editors of both were of Syrian Christian origin. The Young Woman, admittedly hard to characterize for its short run, took a stance I see as more woman-oriented, even protofeminist, signaled by thematic emphasis, authorship, and a rhetorical construction of audience. The Selected was correct to herald The Young Woman as a “forum for women's pens,” although two of its biographies (Annie Besant, Maria Morgan) were taken from The Selected and were not necessarily from women's pens. Another (“Mrs. Frank Leslie”) was from Kawkab Amīrikā. But its articles, and a poem in its praise, were either by the editor or by women writing in: Zay-nab Fawwāz, called the magazine's authorized Cairo representative; ‘‘Afīī;fa Azan from Tanta; Esther al-Azharīī; translating Dumas; unsigned letters written from a female grammatical and situational position; Maryam Khālid, “our official representative in Dayr al-Qamar and Mount Lebanon”; and letters from Hannā Kūranīī; at the Columbian Exposition. The naming of female “representatives” or correspondents is especially intriguing. If signing one's name to a piece of published writing was a mark of individuality to which female writers had yet to become accustomed, as Baron notes^[24]—and a feminist act in itself—then naming a woman as a wakīla was a way to assert even greater female authority.

The Young Woman, announcing itself as a publication “specializing in its own sex,”^[25] addressed itself most often and explicitly to a female audience. Fawwāz asked women to write in response to her question: Was “men's” or “women's” work more exhausting? Azan addressed “sayyidātī al-fādilāt,” “my excellent ladies.” That Kūrānīī; directed her missive from Chicago to Nawfal, in the feminine singular, created a sense of female intimacy that would be recuperated in later magazines through the regular feature of “letters between female friends.”^[26] As Kathryn Shevelow has suggested for a different time and place, deploying such terms of address repeatedly through the magazine creates the audience whose existence it proposes to assume.^[27]

Alexandra Avierino's (1872–1926) practice was different. Her opening editorial for The Sociable Companion did express a hope to benefit women who love to read and the “mistresses of literature.” She solicited contributions from female writers “who wish to lift up the girls of our kind”; she wanted to provide a “place to publish that which gives them pride.”^[28] The first issue includes articles by Labība Hāshim and “one of the ladies”; the second, essays by Esther Moyal and Labība Sham‘‘ūn, “daughter of the famous poet Warda al-Yāzijī.” But from the initial volume the magazine includes many articles by men. Most of the signed female names are those of Christians (and Moyal was Jewish); the men are Muslims,^[29] a matter of accessibility perhaps, of not finding enough women, or Muslim women, to write. Yet other editors located them.

Thus, when Hind Nawfal wrote that she had founded The Young Woman “for nothing other than to defend pilfered rights and to turn attention to required duty”^[30]—a phrase absent, as far as I know, from Avierino's journal—this articulation is supported by the magazine's focus on female authority, articulation, and experience. Conjoined, they suggest a proto-feminist outlook. The Sociable Companion does not, in authorship or, usually, content.^[31] Drawing heavily on men's pens, it targeted male readers by invoking male social roles in direct address.^[32]

In 1903, The Sociable Companion published a notice welcoming the advent of the next women's magazine on the scene, Rūz Antūn's (1882–1955) Ladies' and Girls' Revue. Like The Young Woman, this magazine announced that it would publish only letters and essays by females. But it specified that communications from male readers should go to “the management”—Rūz's brother Farah—while those from female readers should go the proprietor herself.^[33] More than Avierino's journal, Antūn's emphasized the importance of a female circle of communication. The editor speaks to an audience more often than not defined grammatically in the feminine plural, even as it evokes male familial authority: “We think any mother of a family who reads this will want it in the home, or any [male] head of family . . . for his wife and daughters.” A feature called “The Wronged Woman Column” is defined as the province of “Eastern women and girls,” where they can correspond, and “is not to be read by anyone but female readers.”^[34] Among early magazines, the Ladies' and Girls' Revue's woman-to-woman specificity in both audience invocation and subject distinguished it from The Sociable Companion. Its biographies, too, were more detailed in their narratives of female lives and, as we shall see, diverged in a rhetoric of positive exemplarity from The Sociable Companion's dismissal of Arab women as potential role models. In line with this, the Ladies' and Girls' Revue took a more hands-on approach than did Avierino. Its “Home Management” section, rather than containing polemics on the home as well as conduct material, focused on “the kitchen and the dining table.” And it separated off men's writing on women (at least theoretically, in the first issue) by instituting the feature “News of the East's Women in [the East's] Press,” to give female readers “a chance to see men's views of them . . . and to urge male writers to write on women's issues in the East.”^[35] Men, it seems (with the exception of brother Farah!), were to be contained as commentators within this feature. The Ladies' and Girls' Revue created a sense of shared female community through the presence of female characters within the text, too. “Hadīī;th al-sālūnāt” (“Talk of the Salons”) introduced “proper” etiquette for social gatherings and criticized social practices by enacting them under the critical, commenting gaze of a participant-observer.^[36] Issues were “discussed” by women speakers in the pages of the magazine, a strategy distinct from that of “speaking to” women from the position of editor. Antūn appears more intent than Avierino on invoking, and thereby creating, a female readership, and on providing a forum for women to write—a step The Young Woman had heralded but a bolder one than it was able to take. In this light, the more sustained interest in “Famous Women” in both The Young Woman and the Ladies' and Girls' Revue as compared to The Sociable Companion might be seen as an integral part of forming this imagined community of women as audience, speakers, and actors.^[37]

When Labīī;ba Hāshim announced her Young Woman of the East in October 1906, she defined it as a place where women could publish, but which “men of the East” would also enjoy reading “from the hands of its women.” She distinguished between men writing on women out of “knowledge and opinion” and women writing about themselves “as [they] believe and feel” and—with their more intimate knowledge of women's lives—being better able to draw women as readers into “that in which lies the good of the country and their own benefit.”^[38] But the magazine is addressed to a mixed audience, both genders are targets of its criticism, and both write.^[39] This tended to be true of later women's magazines, although not uniformly.^[40]

Margot Badran has emphasized divergences in women's and men's feminisms in early-twentieth-century Egypt. At the time, and as Hāshim's words suggest, some recognized a gendered distinction in the interests that underlay writing on the woman question. Praising Nāsif's al-Nisā’ءiyyat soon after its publication, Rashīd Ridā, by now the famed editor of the religious reformist journal al-Manār, commented: “In truth I say that what this writer has written at the beginning of her career is better in expression and outlook than what many men have written. Most of the men have supplied theoretical views and personal longings or [have called for] imitation of the Europeans and the Europeanized, while she has constructed her words on learned independent judgment and independence [of view], basing them on three foundations: first, the faith; second, experience; and third, the welfare of the Egyptian woman.”^[41] Although biography, like other material in the press, cannot be uniformly distinguished in terms of the gender of authorship, the instrumental and nation-oriented emphasis of men writing versus a concern with how social change would affect women's lives evident in women's writing does surface. Biographies in the male-oriented and entirely male-authored Woman in Islam emphasized in its “lessons” what women could do for the nation or, more ambiguously, “the community.” So did later biographies by men such as Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus.^[42]

Territory and Faith

Gender was not the only marker of difference in the “women's press.” As is already evident, many founder-editors, especially in the early period, were Ottoman Syrian immigrants to Egypt, for members of that populace had been leaving their homeland since the mid–nineteenth century because of economic hardship and political repression, including censorship. In the context of nationalist politics and economic transition, relations were complicated between Egyptians and the Syrian immigrants. The Syrians in Egypt were mostly Christians, either Syrian Orthodox or Protestant converts educated in foreign missionary schools. Many Egyptians saw Syrians as benefiting from, and often complicit in, British rule. Through the legal system of the Capitulations, minorities had channels for preferential treatment. Some Egyptian nationalists reached out rhetorically to their Arab (including Syrian) “brothers” while simultaneously voicing disaffection with and scorn for the Syrian presence in Egypt. Such a stance combined economic and political worries: many Syrians were suited educationally for work in the British regime, including in pro-British journalism, and were unafraid of voicing pro-British views.^[43] The Syrian-run press tended toward a pro-British (or, almost as bad, “neutral”) stance, although this was not always the case, nor was it always consistent over time. To the extent that this press was pro-West, often it was a matter of cultural identification more than of strict political allegiances. The closer links of the Syrian middle class to Europe were evident in print.

Casting their biographical nets, the earliest journals seemed to suggest a clear politics of identification. In The Young Woman, twelve out of fifteen profiles featured Western women; in The Sociable Companion's 1898 volume, it was six out of six (not including the West-focused collective biographical essays). The Ladies' and Girls' Revue featured three Western women out of four biographical subjects in 1903. The Egyptian Muslim nationalist Ibrahīī;m Ramzīī;'s choices were starkly different in Woman in Islam: six premodern Arab women plus Fatma Aliye and Maria Agnesi.

Yet things were more complicated, in biography as in life. Some prominent Syrian intellectuals sympathized vocally with Egyptian nationalists, and among writers, ethnic and religious differences did not preclude social and intellectual exchange. Syrian Christian editors emphasized shared regional or “Arab” interests. In biography, therefore, and especially with the advent of Young Woman of the East, they celebrated Arab Muslim women as exemplars for Arabs while mostly ignoring non-Arab Muslims. They included Western women but, as we shall see, privileged the Arab and Muslim ones in numbers, while the Egyptian Coptic-run Gentle Sex featured a far higher percentage of Westerners, at least until the heyday of nationalist activism.^[44]

Muted if not silent on separatist Egyptian nationalisms, at least before 1919, Syrians did laud Egyptian women through biography. At the same time, Syrian women were not absent from Egyptian-run magazines. In 1927, Labība Ahmad's journal featured Nāzik al-‘‘Abid, praising not only her willingness to brook “eccentricity” because she closeted herself to read “all she could find” but also her support for Syrian independence and her struggle to get the vote for Syrian women.^[45] When the Magazine of the Women's Awakening published a photograph of Rūz Antūn in July 1923, it praised her work “in the service of the Egyptian woman long ago. We do not forget her excellence or that of her magazine in the worlds of literature, childrearing, and education. May God multiply working women, and take the hand of awakening women.”^[46] Thus, to label the “Famous Women” genre as “Syrian” because almost all of the earliest women's magazines, and early “general-interest” magazines that included biographies of women, were run by Syrians; and then to consider this genre as therefore Western-oriented, would be to oversimplify its genealogy and circulation and the nature of its didactic presence. Zaynab Fawwāz, whose example in writing biography was manifest in the many borrowings from her volume that editors (Christian and Muslim, Syrian and Egyptian) allowed themselves, was from a culturally active Shī‘‘ī Muslim region. Her subjectivity did not entail identification with European (Christian) states, and, as we have seen, she looked to an indigenous heritage of biography writing. In this she influenced Syrian Christian, Egyptian Sunnī Muslim, and Egyptian Coptic Christian biographers. The premodern presence of women in Arabic biography, and the featuring of early Muslim heroines, gave both Syrians and Egyptians an indigenous authority and source of respectability for new writings of women's lives. At the same time, as we have seen, Fawwāz inserted histories of women of the West among those of Muslims. If Syrian Christians' closer ties to Europe motivated them to present Western lives in generally (but not unequivocally) positive terms, they had been preceded by a Muslim writer in doing so.^[47]

What of magazines edited by Egyptian Christians? Copts stressed cross-religious national unity and Coptic contributions to nation-building. Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik's Egyptian Woman's Magazine, labeling its sought audience according to a territorially based identity, took a resolutely secular stance and showed interest in the activities of the EFU and its leaders' contact with international feminism, while also emphasizing women's familial identity and duties as primary. Some Muslim editors, to the contrary, focused on Islam as the basis of a new society, although, as I have suggested, in the context of competing nationalisms and a vocal reform movement, this meant different things to different people. Labīī;ba Ahmad's Magazine of the Women's Awakening, founded a few months after the Egyptian Woman's Magazine, did not signal territorial identity in its title. It shifted between “conservative” and “modernist/reformist” positions within an outlook shaped by adherence to Egypt's majority faith as primary shaper of the social structure.

These contemporaneous magazines' deployment of biography as a didactic form in the service of a “modern” womanhood converged substantially. Many subjects appeared in both journals: Zenobia of Palmyra, Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif, Safiyya Zaghlūl, ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr, Jeanne d'Arc, Khawla bt. al-Azwar, and Catherine the Great. In fact, ‘‘Abd al-Malik might be thought the more “conservative” if one were to judge by the relative preponderance of “woman-behind-the-man” biographies. And Ahmad's journal featured a higher number of publicly politically active women. Rather than conservative versus liberal, they were differentially modern(ist).^[48]

Statistics on the two journals' choices of biographical subject do imply different interests and perhaps different audiences. Fifty-four percent of biographies (20 of 37) in the Magazine of the Women's Awakening through 1935 were of Arab Muslims or pre-Islamic Arabs in the Arabian peninsula; Ahmad included no Arab Christians. Thirty-five percent (13) were of European or Euro-American Christians. Of the 96 individual biographies in Egyptian Woman's Magazine through 1939, 23 percent (22) were of Muslims, Turkish or Arab. Two percent (2) were of Syrian Christians, 4 percent (4) of Copts, and 58 percent (56) of European or Euro-American Christians. A fairly neat reversal in the numbers of Arab/Muslim versus European/ Christian subjects obtains; the complete lack of both Arab Christians and ancient Egyptians in Ahmad's journal contrasts with the presence of both in ‘‘Abd al-Malik's. Featuring the rare Christian subject (not an Egyptian or Arab), the Magazine of the Women's Awakening downplays the religious aspect. Its 1927 biography of Russian warrior queen and saint Olga (890–969), “authored” by Durriyya Muhammad ‘‘Alī Bek, is a near copy of Fawwāz's text with a few details omitted and some stylistic modernization. The text ends with Fawwāz's line “Through her wisdom she won over everyone's hearts” and omits the rest of Fawwāz's text, on Olga's devoutness at life's end and the Russians' veneration of her “as a saint.” It also omits a clause in Scattered Pearls that explains widowed Olga's life as divided “in two distinguishable parts, one devoted to politics and the other to religion and pious worship.”^[49] Did these omissions have to do with the magazine's self-presentation as a Muslim-oriented publication? It was Coptic editors, not surprisingly, who gave most play to women of the pharaonic period, although Syrians and Egyptian Muslims did so as well. The Egyptian Women's Magazine, appearing in January 1920, reflected the new atmosphere of Egyptianist national identity and enthusiasm in its evocation of a pharaonic Egyptian female collective identity. It is in the early 1920s that biographies of ancient Egyptian female heads of state are clustered. Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik featured Nitocris and Hatshepsut three times each in extant issues. To focus on ancient Egyptian women was to echo the insistence of Egypt's nationalists in the first decade of the twentieth century on pharaonic Egypt's key position in world history. Interest in women's status in ancient Egypt predated the pharaonist nationalism of the 1920s. Even with his Ottoman orientation, nationalist leader Mustafā Kāmil had celebrated ancient Egypt as a society where social harmony had fostered world prominence; ancient Egypt thus was a usable model for the present.^[50] In 1890, ‘‘Alīī; Effendi Jalāl published a treatise entitled Mahāsin āthār al-awwaliyīn fīmā lil-nisā‘‘ wa-mā ālayhinna fī qawānīn qudamā‘‘ al-misriyyīn(Merits of the Legacy of the Ancestors in What Is Due to Women and What Should Be Expected of Them in the Laws of the Ancient Egyptians). The author expounded on Egyptian women's personal status rights, property rights, and “equality with men in inheritance” and on the economic organization of the family. Al-Mu’ءayyad praised the book and author.^[51] But the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb at the end of 1922 gave new force to the nationalist elite's articulation of a sense of indigenous identity drawn from ancient Egyptian splendor. The new nation-state, as far from real autonomy as it was, deserved a new historical narrative, and it was found in the history of pre-Islamic Egypt. If it remains open to question how these views were consumed beyond the tiny elite that generated them, certainly for those intellectuals who saw a reformulation of gender roles as part of a nationalist quest, ancient Egypt provided rich digging. Egyptian nationalists took the pharaonic period as offering a prototype for the traits of the modern nation. In women's magazines, biographies of women acted as illustrations of more general articles on ancient Egypt that implied or asserted that Egypt's felicitous position in the ancient world was due to harmonious gender relations based on respect for women and codified rights. The further implication was, of course, that if Egypt was to return to a position of greatness, equivalent gender relations were key in modern Egypt. It was useful to see modern Egyptian women as latently possessing the idealized traits of the ancient pharaonic queens and their nameless subjects. If the pharaonic period was a model for Egyptian independence, then that period's “liberated” and “equal” women must reappear. Such large claims mirrored those of enthusiastic pharaonist nationalists in the mid-1920s, for whom pharaonism was “the emotional pivot of Egyptian territorial nationalism.”^[52] Thus biographies positioned ancient Egyptian women at center stage in world history. Hatshepsut (d. 1458 B.C.) was particularly useful, as a sovereign of the Eighteenth Dynasty, for nationalists who deployed pharaonic Egypt as a symbol of modern Egypt's potential greatness saw the New Kingdom as the glory period. Hatshepsut could thus represent both national glory and female prominence.

Syrian-run magazines were less enthusiastic about ancient Egypt. They tended to stress shared identities of geography and ethnicity while largely ignoring separatist histories and divergent religions. Subtleties of focus and diction might bespeak a cautious attitude toward mention of religious identities in minority-edited magazines, although perhaps this is to overread. Fawwāz's life of Nā‘‘ila bt. al-Farāfisa b. al-Akhwas b. ‘‘Amr (fl. seventh century C.E.), spouse of the caliph ‘‘Uthmān who intervened and lost two of her fingers when his assassins burst in, mentions that her father was a Christian. Labīī;ba Hāshim's otherwise similar text does not.^[53] A collective article on “Famous Women” published late in Young Woman of the East's run (1937) links subjects by geography (Ottoman Syria) and profession or predilection (intellectuals) but is silent on religion. The subjects include three Sunnīī; Muslims, one Shī‘‘ī Muslim, and four Christians.^[54] Even here, one must be cautious about generalizing. Young Woman of the East presented Titi Shiri (1640–1570 B.C.) and Nefertari. It celebrated Young Turk Ottomanism, Arab pride, and Egyptian history. In early volumes most of its “Famous Women” are Muslim Arabs.^[55]

If Gershoni and Jankowski are correct in assessing the Egyptian (male) nationalist elite's overall attitude toward non-Egyptian Arabs in the mid-1920s, articulated in a “systematic demonization of the Arabs [as] . . . an integral part of the reification of Egypt” or as a “deliberate restriction . . . to serve Egyptian nationalist interests,”^[56] female intellectuals writing biography held up a different emphasis, that of the continued relevance of earlier and contemporary Arab experience to even an Egypt-centered ethos that hoped for indigenously defined change. Biographies of non-Egyptian Arab women from pre-Islamic times to the present were consistently important from the 1890s (Fawwāz), through the “Egyptianist” years of the 1920s, and into the supposedly more “Arab-oriented” years of the 1930s. At the same time, a growing number of biographies of contemporary Arab women, and especially Egyptians, in journals of the late 1920s and 1930s, especially those edited by Egyptians, both Muslims and Coptic Christians, suggested a growing confidence and possibly the influence of ideologies of Arab nationalism emerging to rival Egypt-centered nationalisms.^[57] In the feminist sphere, this shift, plus growing disaffection with colonial feminisms within international feminist organizations, led to a greater emphasis on regional feminism.^[58] This shift, added to the greater number of available Arab biographical subjects able to represent a balance of domestic energy and public visibility, may also have enlarged the focus on contemporary Arab and other “Eastern” subjects in the “Famous Women” columns. Such lives maintained agendas that “Famous Women” biographies had implied since the 1890s while offering models closer to home and simultaneously celebrating changes in elite urban Egyp-tian women's everyday lives.

Gazing Westward

All the women's magazines, whatever their origins and outlooks and whatever the year, demonstrate keen awareness of events marking histories of gender politics in Europe and North America and a determination to produce those events discursively for their readers, in essays, translations, and summaries of articles from the presses of England, the United States, and France. Both Syrian- and Egyptian-run magazines voiced an interest in women of the West, and both were cautious about the limits of identification. Gendered biography, as a discourse of exemplarity—a discursive instrument for reshaping women—brought together traditions and texts from “East” and “West”—and in the process encoded “East/West” as a site of interrogation and conflict. Yet it was simultaneously a site authorizing mutual admiration, a territory where women's solitary and collective struggles triumphed, even as other articles criticized “the West.”

In 1919, in the thick of nationwide and cross-gender public activism against British control of Egypt, The Gentle Sex announced a new policy for its biographical practice. It began by inscribing national duty centrally, as it secured exemplarity for national progress. “If a nation wants renewal and progress, its individual members take as examples those great people who preceded them, who succeeded and took great steps along the road of genius.” The Western women this magazine had featured were active in ways “useful to their countries,” and this was both integral to their fame and indispensable to their utility as models: “We promised ourselves al-most from the magazine's founding to open [each issue] by speaking of lives of individual ladies who became famous in the West through their beneficial deeds . . . and made their own lives exalted examples to those growing to adulthood after them. From our Western sisters, we hoped, Eastern women would elicit that which would make our souls strive for the heights and yearn to awaken.” Announcing a shift from “Western” to “Eastern” subjects—surely a significant political choice for the times—the journal declared it would now offer local exemplars:

Some years passed, and we began taking pride in our own dear ladies who . . . had taken it upon themselves to labor with the pickax of honor, planting seeds of greatness in their young. Now it is our due to take pride in Eastern women generally, and Egyptian women in particular, for among them have emerged [women] far greater than those Western women who are famous. We love to bring out the truth and to encourage our Egyptian sisters. This compels us to no longer restrict ourselves to histories of famous European women. From now on we will strive to tell many histories of ancient Egyptian queens and Eastern women geniuses. Let them be a visible example to today's rising young women, who spare no effort for Egypt's emergence and success. . . . God grant us success in what holds the good of our community and our country.^[59]

Active women's exemplarity and national progress were inseparable; and now an exemplarity from outside, tainted by its association with those who ruled Egypt, could be rejected.

Such a declaration reminds us that 1919, the high point of popular resistance to Britain's imperial presence, was a pivotal point in Egyptians' and other Arabs' formation of a collective identity. Yet such rhetoric was not wholly borne out in practice, for in the women's magazines (including The Gentle Sex), Western biographical subjects continued to appear. This was as true of Egyptian-run as of Syrian-run periodicals, although for some (especially The Gentle Sex) the percentage of “locals” grew. In fact, this journal had already featured Arab women: two premodern Muslims, poet-singer Fadl and poet Laylā al-Akhyaliyya, three years before; and pre-Islamic poet Amina bt. ‘‘Utayba. The 1920 volume had a more pronounced emphasis, with ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr, Fātima al-Nabawiyya (Muhammad's great-granddaughter), de facto ruler Sitt al-Mulk, all prominent in Islamic history. The Gentle Sex referred to ancient Egypt's queens; but it is noteworthy that this Coptic-run journal focused on Arab Muslim subjects.

But since the start of the women's press, Western examples had served as rhetorical provocateurs, and they continued to play that role. Announcing publication of a new book-length biography of Florence Nightingale (1820–1910)—“one of the most valuable books to appear recently”—Young Woman of the East declared that “her biography was the finest exemplar one could present to ladies and girls.” This had prompted Olivia ‘‘Uwayda ‘‘Abd al-Shahīī;d—author of some of the “Famous Women” sketches—to translate the biography, published in Arabic by the Cairo YWCA, “as beneficial to her Eastern sisters.”^[60] Louisa Proctor's “good morals and praiseworthy qualities” of “modesty, purity, veracity, loyalty, a sense of honor, initiative, persistence, and self-denial,” were also to spur imitation. Jurjīī; Bāz, indefatigable journalist–reformer–gender pundit, had collected tributes to this wealthy English traveler, charity patron, and “founder of the English schools in Shwayfat, Lebanon,” according to the subtitle of Young Woman of the East's biography, for a memorial volume, Echo of the Traces of Louisa Proctor.^[61]

He opened it with a biography of the late lamented, sketching her so as to make apparent her praiseworthy character. This was in order to prod the women and girls of Syria to imitate and learn from her. And no wonder, for the intelligent person knows well that a nation advances according to the advancement of its women; and the true writer is the one who with his writings aspires to benefit his national community and to cure its social ills. . . . We have summarized the late lamented's biography from his valuable book; we publish it with gratitude to him for this valuable masterpiece. We hope the excellent writers follow in his footsteps; indeed, we entreat them to do so, and to devote their energy to that which will benefit the Eastern woman and create a desire in her to acquire learning and knowledge. For such is the finest service that the nation [al-watan] can record for them in lines of gratitude.^[62]

The motif of East-West comparison, with its implicit or bald commentary on the imperialist division of the modern world, frequently takes shape in these biographies through a rhetoric of exemplarity yoked to the provocative categorization of audience versus subject along East-West axes. I see this as more often than not a tactical move, not a signal of a West-toxified gaze. Labeled an “Eastern woman,” the implied or hoped-for reader is instructed to take note of exemplarities that arise from what is presented as their binary opposite. The Sociable Companion's 1899 series on European and American academics exploited this strategy:

It is especially painful for this Eastern women's magazine not to see among our women any ornament with which to adorn its front pages. . . . Even if [the magazine] wanted to vaunt a daughter of her kind and boast before men of her abilities, it finds only the woman of the West with whom to adorn itself by publishing her portrait and example. . . . Yes, she is a woman like us; and she gives us the most splendid indication of how prepared and inclined women are to advance. But how delighted we would be if she were one of us.^[63]

When life narratives in women's magazines deployed a cautiously favorable position on European and Euro-American practices, they assumed this stance to score critical points about their own audience's environment. Biographies measured prevailing attitudes in Egypt (or “among the Arabs” or “in the East” or “among our men”) toward European women's nondomestic work against what they constructed as the personal and especially societal benefits of such work, through positively cast descriptions of what were characterized as “Western” outlooks and practices. American astronomer Maria Mitchell took her Vassar students on field trips; “and this, girl students going hundreds of miles to observe a solar eclipse, is something men in the East do not conceive of even in their dreams.”^[64] Or the comparison was implicit, presenting what were said to be an Arab subject's atypical circumstances as that which should become the norm. When a biography of Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif commends her husband's supportive attitude toward her writing and publishing, it notes that this “freedom of opinion allowing her to publish” is “infrequent among Egyptian men.”^[65] A pointedly provocative comparison ends Young Woman of the East's biography of Louisa May Alcott (1832–88). Calling her novels “ones that would shape and refine the daughters of her kind in every stage of their life,” it upholds the suitability of young women reading “useful” fiction. But it says more: “I beg the literarily inclined readers [al-qāri’ءāt aladībāt], as they turn the pages of Louisa Alcott's biography, to not let it occur to them to compare her nation [umma] to ours in terms of relative esteem for female writers. I am loath to wound their delicate feelings, to cause their tears to flow in regret at an age that its children [or sons] imprint in such a way that our grandchildren will regard it in sarcasm and mockery.”^[66] The text sets this declaration against the recent celebrations in England of Alcott's one hundredth birthday, during which “the English named a hospital after her, to acknowledge the good she did for all of the Western nations.”^[67] If some comparisons across continents that largely ignored contemporary global politics worked with the other strategies of comparison (women to men, present to past) to emphasize what was shared and positive, others acted to elicit emotions of shame in the interests of spurring action. As editors accumulated a critical mass of women exemplars across time and space, presented in complex social environments of constraint and possibility, they purposively emphasized what they saw as uneven rates of advancement. Reading biography tactically was to instigate self-improvement.

Most often the imperialist framework goes unmentioned, a startling silence, juxtaposed to life histories shaped in immediate ways by subjects' insertion into the politics of imperialism. At the same time, contemporary politics were one extratextual framework in which these would have been read. We can only wonder whether (and for whom) this made the biographies' messages of exemplarity more or less effective, more or less alienating. “The Eastern woman adopts much from the Western woman in her new awakening,” begins the Egyptian Woman's Magazine's sketch of Isabel Burton, defined as linguist, writer, traveler, charity worker, and spouse of British traveler, consul, writer, and translator Richard Burton, not a neutral figure in the history of British colonial endeavor. “I have happened upon useful information about a Western woman who lived in our lands for many years and was the finest example [khayr mithāl] of the virtuous and active woman. . . . I wanted there to be benefit to us in telling it.”^[68] “Not miserly” in the time she spent on the heavy duties of a consul's wife in Damascus, Burton studied Arabic and thoroughly researched “the state of the country and the customs of its people. . . . Her knowledge and her activity went together with an energy the like of which is rare in men or women. She was skilled at swordplay and equestrian ability, as she was patient about hardships” in traveling with her husband.^[69] The biography goes on to praise Burton's allocation of time and her attention to the domestic instruction of Damascus ladies. “The likes of this excellent lady,” concludes the editor, “are suited to be an exemplar for our awakening ladies [sayyidātinā alnāhidāt].”^[70] Absent is any indication that Burton's pursuits—or Proctor's, or Nightingale's—might have furthered the imperialist blueprints of her native country.^[71] If this abstraction of the biographical subject from her historical context has the effect of privileging the notion of exemplarity across boundaries, and if it suggests a potential for female “bonding” across cultures, it might also privilege an implicit alignment of class over nation, or signal ambivalence between the two. In the context of a dominant liberal nationalist ideology that drew lessons from European histories of nation formation, these women's contributions to their own nations could be glossed as acts to emulate, as long as the implications for imperialist success remained elided. To further their claims, British feminists drew on imperial ideology. Without calling it by name, women in Egypt invoked imperial success to assert theirs.^[72]

Yet if biographies evoked the promise of shared interests among rising bourgeois women wherever they might be, while ignoring how nationalist identities might occlude other kinds of community and identity, the issue of which ethnicities and nationalities might serve as a model for whom did not go wholly unchallenged—especially as nationalist rhetoric and activism intensified after World War I. As early as 1903, Rūz Antūn's brother Farah, writing “Famous Women,” took a stance both defensive and as-sertive as he inscribed the life history of al-Khansā‘‘: “If women of the West take pride in Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Staël, and Madame Roland, women of the East have the right to be proud of al-Khansā‘‘ and other women whom we will mention.”^[73]

Constructing Community

Thus, in biography, terms of communal inclusion shift across and within magazines, by gender, geography and citizenship, religion, and (only implicitly) class. But they do not do so evenly or with complete consistency. In both Syrian- and Egyptian-edited magazines, biographies of Western women throughout the period exhibit a complicated blend of approbation, sought solidarity, defensiveness, and criticism toward their subjects. They simultaneously approve and criticize Western feminist agendas as part of a local discourse of modernity that sought to appropriate “Western” features on locally defined terms. It was also a question of recognizing a “local” heritage and criticizing the “Europeanizing” patina (of knowledge as well as dress and comportment) that girls were said to be acquiring. “Tell me,” says the Egyptian Woman's Magazine commentator “the Elderly Woman,” addressing young female readers nearly a quarter century after the first Arab women's journal had appeared: “Tell me, who among you knows the history of the Arabs? . . . Do you learn anything about Arab women, their brilliance, the events in which they participated? Yet you know a great deal about the history of the West and its women.”^[74]

From the very start, even as some biographies set Western women on pedestals, other rhetoric in the magazines betrayed an anxiety—an edge both defensive and assertive—about the appropriation of Western women as exemplary. As editors and correspondents voiced resentment about Western stereotypes and misconceptions about Arab women past and present,^[75] magazine polemics tended to emphasize the assertive edge of comparison—claiming Eastern women's precedence and superiority in matters where the West claimed its own. It is an assertive edge more muted in biography because of the latter's exemplary function and generally sympathetic portrayals of women's struggles. Yet, as we saw in Antūn's biography of al-Khansā‘‘, the edge is there, and it echoes a theme present in women's magazines from the start, although inconsistently. In its opening editorial, The Young Woman had referred to pharaonic Egyptian women as exemplifying “the sorts of glory and perfection that to this day not a single woman of the West has attained.”^[76]

Yet it was Western women that The Young Woman featured in biography. Profiling Italian singer Adelina Patti, the magazine did imply an interest in (or display a defensiveness about) Arab subjects: “In coming issues, God willing, we will mention Jamīla the Medinan, ‘‘Aqīla al-‘‘Aqīqiyya, Khālida, Rubayta, and others who were the most learned of God's creatures in music—along with Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt, and other famous actresses.”^[77] But the Swedish opera star Christine Nilsson (1843–1921) was the only other singer to actually appear in later (extant) issues.

Young Woman of the East, on the other hand, began with “local” models: a premodern Arab Muslim, then contemporary Turkish, Egyptian, and Syrian Muslims before a Syrian Christian appeared. The single Western subject in its first volume was presented with apology—and perhaps the exception was acceptable because Olga de Lébédef had come to Egypt. The magazine's very first subject, Ikrisha bt. al-Atrūsh, who goaded the army of ‘‘Alīī; at Siffīī;n, narrated how she gave a call to arms and articulated a stance on social responsibility that could have come from any earlytwentieth-century Egyptian liberal nationalist.^[78] Six years later, however, Hāshim remembered the inception of this feature differently as she introduced her profile of Salīī;ma Abū Rāshid with a rhetorical emphasis similar to that of Avierino's, though couched in more positive terms:

When I began to publish biographies of famous women in this magazine, which was when it first came out, I thought I would not find among ladies of the East a number sufficient to cover the first volume's issues. So, I said to myself, I'll find what I need among famous women of the West. But I had not gone far with this feature before I saw the distinguished women racing to outdo each other in the arena of pens, showing rapid progress and astonishing advancement.^[79]

Such choices had to do, too, with political sensitivities. Recall that Hāshim and the Antūns, as Christian Arabs from the Levant, could provide a common source of pride and political focus by giving precedence to the lives of Arab women. They could prove nationalist credentials—or obviate a need to focus on national loyalties—and perhaps could undermine accusations of collusion with European powers. These biographies of Arab women in Syrian Christian-edited magazines mirrored a general tendency of turnof-the-century Christian Arab writers to stress their commonness with Muslim compatriots. Even Avierino, declaring a dearth of Eastern subjects, invoked the names of Laylā al-Akhyaliyya and al-Khansā‘‘. Arab predecessors did exist; but “who will bring us portraits of them?” Was this a veiled reference to Arab women's relative lack of visibility in the rewriting of nationalist histories? When a journal did take a stance on which lives to feature, the parade of “Famous Women” in its pages did not always conform to that stance. Perhaps Woman in Islam was not particularly interested in “the West”; its biographical column's purview was defined as “the lives of Muslim women.” What was Maria Agnesi doing there, in September 1901, following the greats of Islam's founding years—“Khadīī;ja bint Khuwaylid wife of the Prophet,” “‘‘A’ءisha Mother of the Believers,” “the brilliant poet alKhansā‘‘”? Could Agnesi's ethnicity and religion be overlooked because she represented a dedication to learning that Woman in Islam proposed as appropriate for women?

Perhaps this range of subjects simply betokened the journals' insatiable, sometimes indiscriminate, need for material month after month. Perhaps also it was perceived as easier or less controversial to open the lives of non-Arab women to public purview. Perhaps editors felt that the points they were trying to make were expressed most clearly through presenting Western women's lives. Yet it seems just as attributable to unresolved questions that marked competing nationalist, and feminist, landscapes of the future. If magazines were firm about linking women's work to “national duty” and to “love of country”—or explaining it as “service to one's gender and nation”^[80]—it was not always clear what that meant. How much of “the West” to admit? Inscriptions of Western women's lives tended to suppress this question even as other texts in these magazines raised it, in favor of an instrumental emphasis on what was perceived as a crucial linkage between national prosperity and women's work, whether or not in a space defined as “domestic.” Badran suggests that this approach to the woman question was favored by male modernists.^[81] Women certainly appropriated it, perhaps strategically, as did men writing “Famous Women” biographies. The Egyptian Woman's Magazine's (unsigned) biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning insisted on the utility of poetry-as-women's-work in constructing a communal (national) identity: “Many of England's choice women have emerged as outstanding; some of the finest have become famous. Their renown has reached the entire civilized world. They are always mentioned with great respect, for they have been a great benefit to their country and generally for humanity. . . . No wonder the magazine takes interest in a famous poet involved in promoting and elevating English arts and letters and propagating the spirit of progress and nationhood.”^[82] In individual biographies, the balance between approval and criticism directed at a Western subject depended less on her ethnic, national, or religious identity—or on her position within the matrix of imperialist power relations—than on how well she conformed to whatever model of woman as ideal citizen that a given periodical's editorials and articles advanced. These biographies deploy a complex rhetoric of community and othering in the service of exemplarity. That they sometimes romanticize; that they mostly repress issues of class difference, social fragmentation, and the power relations wrought by imperialism—these suggest that the priority here was the molding of the emerging middle-class Arab woman into an identity that lauded more than it rejected the paths that privileged women of “the West” were said to be tracing. At the same time, if magazines could parade “local” women without defining the ambit of “local,” this carried its own nationalist message, too.

If ethnic and religious differences did orient women's magazines, affected (but did not wholly govern) subject choice, and shaped subtle differences in presentation, within this variety the biographies are striking for the more or less unified didactic mission they cumulatively construct and the repeatability of the images they engender. This repeatability highlights, by contrast, what is the most significant kind of difference these texts offer: the simultaneous existence of potentially contradictory messages within single biographies.

Notes

1. Also included in magazines publishing biography are Antūn's sequels, Majallat al-sayyidāt/al-sayyidāt wa-al-rijāl (Ladies'/Ladies' and Men's Revue), which began with vol. 3:1 (Nov. 1921) and ran through 1931; al-Rajā‘‘ā’ء (Hope, 1922); al-Hisān (Belles, 1924–59; I covered 1924–30); Adāb al-Fatāt (Letters/Morals of the Young Woman, 1926); Fatāt Misr (Young Woman of Egypt, 1930); al-‘‘Arūsa (The Bride, 1925–39); Ummahāt al-mustaqbal (Mothers of the Future, 1930). I examined all extant magazines aimed at a female audience in this period; I do not mention those in which no biographies appeared. For reasons of space I have not included journals that began right at the end of the 1930s and lasted into the 1940s, notably al-Tāliba (founded 1938), which did publish “Famous Women” sketches; from Nabawiyya Mūsā's al-Fatāt, I give a few examples but do not discuss the journal's biographies comprehensively. Nor do I include in the counted sample articles of collective biography, entries from biographical dictionaries, or biographies from pre-1940 mainstream magazines, a few of which I mention in the book.

Mir’ءāt al-hasnā‘‘, the “women's journal” founded by “Maryam Mazhar” (male journalist Salīī;m Sarkīī;s) in 1896, had a double-paged “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘/Mashāhīī;r al-rijāl” feature with short news of European royalty and celebrities, and later, local men and women. It sought contributions: “The management announces that it accepts every news item readers send on native women [al-nisā‘‘ al-wataniyyāt] from Syria and Egypt or foreign women if it concerns news of goodness and virtue, literary refinement, and knowledge [al-fadl wa-al-adab wa-al-‘‘ilm].” The first issue featured the queen of England, the empresses of Austria and Russia, Sarah Bernhardt, Princess Beatrice, Juliette Adam, and the duchess of Fyfe, whose aversion to publicity led her to wear “a thick niqāb.” Mir’ءāt al-hasnā‘‘ 1:1 (Nov. 1, 1896), 6. Male criteria for inclusion differed slightly: al-fadl wa-al-shuhra wa-karam al-akhlāq wa-al-‘‘ilm (goodness, fame, noble morals, knowledge) (7). Not biography, the feature hinted at the exemplifying potential of famous personalities.

On the early women's press, see Beth Baron, The Women's Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), which surveys the magazines and their institutional beginnings; Ijlāl Khalīī;fa, “Al-Sihāfa al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; Misr, 1919–1939” (M.A. thesis, Cairo University, 1966), introduction. On later journals, see the work just cited, and idem., “Al-Sihāfa al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; Misr, 1940–1965” (Ph.D. diss., Cairo University, 1970). On the EFU journals, see Badran, Feminists.Al-Hasnā‘‘ā’ء (Beirut) and al-Mar’ءa al-jadīda (Damascus) carried “Famous Women” features, which I consulted but do not discuss here. I also rely on Tarrāzīī;, Tārīkh; Nuwayhad, Nisā‘‘; Kustākīī; ‘‘Attāra, Tārīkh takwīn al-suhuf al-misriyya (Alexandria: Matba‘‘at al-taqaddum, 1928); Yūsuf Q. Khūrī, ed., Mudawwanat al-sihāfa al-‘‘arabiyya, vols. 1–2 (Beirut: Ma‘‘had al-inmā‘‘ al-‘‘arabīī;, 1985).

2. Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 49.

3. Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom, “Introduction,” in Bell and Yalom, Revealing Lives, 1; Carolyn Heilbrun, “Margaret Mead and the Question of Women's Biography,” in Hamlet's Mother and Other Women (New York: Ballantine, 1990), 27.

4. Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, introduction.

5. Jacques Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution, trans. Jean Stewart (New York: Praeger, 1972), chaps. 4–5; quotation on 199.

6. Anxiety about the marriage institution was articulated in the main-stream nongovernmental press from its inception. Not only polemics on marriage and news from Europe about climbing divorce rates and declining birth rates but also local events reported in newspapers' hawādith columns contributed to this anxiety. The events were not new; their reporting, and therefore their discursive presence for a wide audience, was. The first years of the nationalist daily al-Mu’ءayyad occasionally featured stories about women who killed or tried to kill their husbands, e.g., 2:313 (Dec. 23, 1890): 2; 3:595 (Jan. 17, 1892): 3; 3:604 (Jan. 27, 1892): 2.

7. But recall his less than enthusiastic reference to European feminism in introducing Nāsif's Nisā‘‘iyyāt.

8. Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, 7–10.

9. On Egyptian feminisms' intersections with these processes, see Badran, Feminists; Khalīfa, al-Haraka; Leila Ahmad, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Amal al-Subkī, Al-Haraka al-nisā‘‘iyya fī Misr mā bayna al-thawratayni 1919 wa-1952 (Cairo: al-Hay‘‘a al-misriyya al-‘‘āmma lil-kitāb, 1986); Thomas Philipp, “Feminism and Nationalist Politics in Egypt,” in Women in the Muslim World, ed. Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 277–94; Juan Ricardo Cole, “Feminism, Class, and Islam in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 13 (1981): 387–407; Beth Baron, “Mothers, Morality, and Nationalism in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt,” in The Origins of Arab Nationalism, ed. Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S. Simon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 271–88; idem., “The Construction of National Honour in Egypt,” Gender and History 5 (1993): 244–55; Irène Fenoglio-Abd el Aal, Défense et illustration de L'Egyptienne: Aux débuts d'une expression féminine (Cairo: CEDEJ, 1988); Latīfa Sālim, al-Mar’ءa al-misriyya wa-al-taghyīr al-ij-timā‘‘ī (Cairo: al-Hay‘‘a al-misriyya al-‘‘āmma lil-kitāb, 1984).

10. “Sajāh bt. al-Hārith,” FS 21:2 (Nov. 1, 1926): 49–50. DM, 240–41.

11. Three in 1921 (NN, NN, FMF),one in 1922 (NN), one in 1925 (MM), two in 1926 (AF, NN). Others were more scattered: 1903 (SB), 1911 (FS), then 1929 (A), 1933 (MM), 1937 (MM).

12. “SN: Kātirīī;na Brishkufskāyā,” FS 15:5 (Feb. 15, 1921): 161–67. The text quotes an autobiographical passage resonant perhaps for some elite readers in Egypt; the subject recalls her sensitivity to the chasm that divided her aristocratic childhood from the “fallāhīn” she visited (163).

13. “Bint al-Azwar,” NN 2:11 (June 1, 1923): 298–99.

14. On Sha‘‘rāwīī;'s explication of the EFU program, see Badran, Feminists, 91–92.

15. Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 59–65, 83. NN, she says, was first to get “many” Egyptian women writing. She stresses Ahmad's nationalist work and provision of “a pulpit for women's issues,” putting NN in the lead of the women's movement. Badran, Feminists, 96. Muhammad Kāmil al-Bannā, “Ilā fatayātinā al-mab‘‘ūthāt,” NN 4:5 (Apr. 1926): 148.

16. Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt.

17. “Ilīī;sābāt Stāntūn mu‘‘assisat al-nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya al-amirīī;kiyya,” FS 19:4 (Jan. 15, 1925): 145–46.

18. Habīī;b Jamātīī;, “SN: Shā‘‘irat al-Hind (Sārūjīī;nīī; Nāyidū),” NN 11:3 (Mar. 1, 1933): 100. Another profile of Naidu reminded readers of pressures on visibly activist women, although it did not criticize such pressure. She had been entrusted with the Indian people's hopes (and called by them “the Jeanne d'Arc of India”) because “so far she has walked a rightly guided path that her worst enemies cannot dispute.” AR 1:70 (June 2, 1926), 6.

19. Sālim, al-Mar’ءa al-misriyya, 38–40.

20. Ann Rosalind Jones on strategies of sixteenth-century European writers, as conduct books taking court behavior as their ideal were giving way to manuals stressing “domestic virtues.” Ann Rosalind Jones, “Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women's Lyrics,” in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Methuen, 1987), 68.

21. Maryam Makāriyūs published an essay on relative air and water temperatures in al-Muqtataf, consonant with its mission to educate readers in “Western” science; but unlike other articles on atmospherics, this is addressed to women. The author refers to “my female neighbors” who declare their wells warm in winter and cold in summer; “they attribute this to a special force in the well's source or an extraordinary blessing befalling it or other things that we do not doubt are purely legendary. I desired to speak on this hoping to meet acceptance and benefit my female companions in a way simple [to fathom].” “Harārat al-miyāh,” al-Muqtataf 2:10 (1877): 223–24.

22. Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz noted the growing potential readership of newly educated women and girls in connection with the production of women's magazines. See his “al-Majallāt al-nisā‘‘iyya,” FS 2:6 (Mar. 15, 1908): 212–15.

23. Baron, Women's Awakening.

24. Ibid., 43–50, 177.

25. “Idāh wa-iltimās wa-istismāh,” F 1:1 (Nov. 20, 1892): 3.

26. The earliest of this genre of letters between female friends I have found is “Sahīī;fat al-udabā‘‘: Bayna sadīī;qatayni, al-risāla al-khāmisa,” R 1:6 (Aug. 1907): 159–62.

27. Zaynab Fawwāz, “Iqtirāh,” F 1:3 (Feb. 1, 1893): 115–16. ‘‘Afīī;fa Azan, “al-‘‘Ilm wa-al-‘‘amal,” F 1:3 (Feb. 1, 1893): 116. Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge, 1989).

28. “Bismillāhi al-Fattāh,” AJ 1:1 (Jan. 31, 1898): 5.

29. An article by “Shajarat al-Durr” might have been by Muslim writer Sa‘‘diyya Sa‘‘d al-Dīī;n. Baron thinks she used this pen name in AJ (Women's Awakening, 22), since she founded a magazine by this name. But that magazine is not extant and comparisons cannot be made; this remains speculation. Fawwāz used this pen name too, although in F she signed her name, so this was probably someone else. The first article signed by “Shajarat al-Durr” (in 1:7 [July 31, 1898]) is a hard-hitting attack on divorce and polygyny; this seems at odds with Baron's observation that at first AJ avoided religious topics (Women's Awakening, 107). She cites Martin Hartmann (107–8), writing in 1901, who appears not to have read Avierino's paper carefully, for it did express itself vigorously on such issues before 1901.

30. “I‘‘lān min idārat jarīī;dat al-Fatāt,” F 1:10 (Feb. 15, 1894): 435.

31. Even in AJ one senses exasperation two years later, when Avierino speaks of “the Sunna of gradualism” and the necessity of listeners repeatedly hearing “the hopes of the East's women and those men who support them.” “‘‘Awd ‘‘alā bad‘‘,” AJ 4:7 (July 31, 1901): 715–19; quotations on 716, 715. Khalīī;fa stresses progressive aspects of AJ: it criticized abuse against women (alHaraka, 98).

32. Signals in this magazine suggest it was addressed to men as much as to women; see an announcement of “Mrs. Catherine Istifān's school for girls in Muharram Bek (Alexandria),” addressed to fathers (“I‘‘lān,” AJ 2:7 [July 30, 1899]: 281); and the article “Choosing Wives” by “al-‘‘Ujayzīī;” (AJ 2:8 [Aug. 31, 1899]: 298–301). The same author later writes an article on choosing husbands, saying he “wants to be fair”; but in the title, it is addressed to fathers! “al-‘‘Ujayzīī;,” “Li-yanzir ahadukum ayna yadi‘‘u karīī;matah,” AJ 2:12 (Dec. 31, 1899): 64–68. Also (as in most women's magazines), the poetry of social criticism in AJ is authored by men and focuses on the state of the female in Egyptian society. See also an article in 3:3 by “Zakiyya” addressed to “O men of virtue” (111–15). The same issue features a speech given by Farīī;da Mūsā ‘‘Ufaysh in Beirut, to a female audience. Yet the two preserve a gendered difference in address: the speech addresses female comportment and bahraja, while the article directed to men addresses the meaning of learning and the significance of female education to the production of better mothers and economizing homemakers. AJ's predominance of male writers is paralleled as early as 2:3 by what appears a circumscribed interest in gender issues: women appear only through the existence of a “Home Management” section, where we learn that “woman is Sultan in her household.” “Tadbīī;r al-manzil,” AJ 2:3 (Mar. 31, 1899): 110–12. Increasingly, in volumes 3–4, the polemics are unsigned (hence by the editor) or signed by men; only conduct material is by women.

33. “Muqaddima,” SB 1:1 (Apr. 1903): 1.

34. Ibid., 2. “Bāb al-nisā‘‘ al-mazlūmāt,” SB 1:1 (Apr. 1903): 17. Invocations of a female authorship and readership include a reference to “we Easterners” as nahnu al-sharqiyyāt (“‘‘Awā‘‘idunā al-dhamīī;ma,” SB 2:1 (Nov. 1904): 8); and one to “Many of the readers” as kathīrāt min al-qāri’ءāt (“Akhbār al-sayyidāt,” SB 2:1 (Nov. 1904): 30, but this refers to subscribers as both female and male). A reference to “complaints of male and female readers” precedes examples almost entirely of females writing in. The magazine does not usually subsume the female reader in the “masculine universal,” although one article in this issue, “Wearing Décolleté,” refers to readers in the masculine (9). When Farah Antūn explains the temporary suspension of SB as linked to his own maga-zine's problems, he addresses “the readers” as solely female (Farah Antūn, “‘‘Awdat Majallat al-Sayyidāt: Ilā hadarāt qāri’ءāt majallat al-Sayyidāt fīī; Misr wa-khārij Misr,” SB 2:7 [May 1906]: 177–80.) When he praises female subscribers for the “gentleness and delicacy” in their letters, saying “all their letters to the magazine went through my hands” (179), this puts in question the male-female division of responsibility for correspondence the first issue announced. What did this mean for SB's “female” orientation?

35. “Akhbār nisā‘‘ al-sharq fīī; sihāfatih,” SB 1:1 (Apr. 1903): 23. My impression (requiring further reading) is that the truly women-oriented magazines, unlike AJ or MI, spend a greater proportion of space discussing men's conduct. Perhaps editors of male-oriented, male-authored magazines did not wish to do this. An essay on “the sagacious husband” says women readers responded to SB's two articles on “the two [kinds of] wives, intelligent and ignorant” by declaring that if one wants to see thinking wives one must provide thinking husbands. “Wājibāt al-zawj al-‘‘āqil, wa-wājibāt al-zawj al-jāhil,” SB 2:1 (Nov. 1904): 10–13; quotation on 10.

36. This feature first appears in 2:1; the editor feels compelled to define “salon”—a place to receive visitors and hold conversations. In line with SB's rather defensive (unlike AJ's) and selective adoption of practices and discourses it defines as “Western,” the editor justifies using the French term in place of an Arabic word “because the former is more widely used and sounds better to the ear.” “Hadīī;th al-sālūnāt,” SB 2:1 (Nov. 1904): 1–4.

37. One wonders also whether Avierino's hero worship of Gabriella Wisznieska, later her adoptive guardian and the only female whose biography is featured after volume 2 of AJ, might have contributed to a relative lack of interest in other female “role-model” lives.

When Rūz “revived” her journal in 1921, it claimed to be a “general-interest” magazine; nisā’ءī was further down the list of descriptive subtitles, and now “readers” (masculine “universal”) or “readers, male and female” were ad-dressed. Rūz's position shifted; still owner of the license, she was now “editor of the women's section,” while her husband, Niqūlā Haddād (a prolific novelist), was “editor in charge” on the masthead of 3:1 (Nov. 1921). See “Muqaddimat al-sana al-thālitha,” S 3:1 (Nov. 1921): 1. “Talk of the Salons,” articles on “women's subjects,” and news of women's activities around the world re-mained, but as the scope “broadened” there were losses, among them the “Famous Women” (a few obituary-biographies of Syrian women appear). There is less sense of a dialogue among women. The magazine engages in self-criticism: its first two years had been “narrow in focus”; now it was “family,” not “women.” “What women read [on the family] is worth men reading too.” “Baynanā wa-bayna al-qāri’ءāt wa-al-qurrā‘‘,” S 3:1 (Nov. 1921): 64. The family focus is obvious in its obituary-biographies; see chapter 5.

38. “Iftitāh,” FS 1:1 (Oct. 15, 1906): 1–2.

39. See “Rijāl al-sharq wa-al-iqtisād,” FS 1:1 (Oct. 15, 1906): 3–6, a critique directed to men; and “Wājibāt al-zawja,” FS 1:1 (Oct. 15, 1906): 11–15, on duties of both parents to daughters (but focused on that duty as preparing the daughter to be a proper spouse). Later it features the essay “Duties of the Husband,” previously published in al-Diyā‘‘, in which Hāshim had published fic-tion (pp. 40–45). From 1910 on, there seems to be an increasing number of male contributors.

40. FMF addresses itself at the start to female and male readers but notes in its prefatory article that its parent organization is composed mostly of female teachers. This is its primary audience, but it announces a concern to reach women “who have been kept from education.” Al-Idāra, “Muqaddima,” FM 1:1 (Apr. 1921): 3–4. In volumes 1 and 2 all articles carry female bylines or are by the female editor except for a translated book excerpt (1:6); a poem by Ahmad ‘‘Abd al-Majīī;d, teacher in the Female Normal School in Alexandria (2:1); and a response to an article called “If I Were a Man” that objects to the author's attack on men's behavior toward women. ‘‘Abbās Amīī;n Khalīī;l, “Law kuntu imra‘‘a,” FM 2:4 (July 1922): 109–11. The magazine expresses its authorship policy here: it has “decided to print this despite [the magazine] being specifically for women's pens, because such a response can come only from a man.”

41. “Taqrīī;z al-matbūāt al-jadīī;da: al-Nisā‘‘iyyāt,” al-Manār 14:1 (Jan. 30, 1911): 72. Nāsif was the only woman whose obituary-biography was published in al-Manār, literally encircled by a string of obituary-biographies of male religious scholars. “Bāhithat al-Bādiya wa-Hifnīī; Nāsif Bek: Wafātuhumā watarjamatuhumā,” al-Manār 21:2 (Mar. 2, 1919): 105–9; “Bāhithat al-Bādiya—tatimmat tarjamatihā,” al-Manār 21:3 (May 29, 1919): 163–68. Ridā also praised Mayy Ziyāda's study of Nāsif, recognizing its uniqueness at that time as a work by an Arab woman on an Arab woman's life and work. Al-Manār 23:1 (Jan. 28, 1922): 77–78.

42. What men's discourse on the woman question signified is beyond the scope of this book, but I want to propose here that to focus on “women” in the context of “nation” was, among other things, to institute a discourse on masculinity that restricted the need to talk about men as “men,” or to broach the possible relationships between “men” and a “private” sphere as constructed in the public, discursive realm through biography and other texts. To elide “men” was to construct a silence that could effectively maintain a naturalizing link between “women” and “domesticity.” See Booth, “al-Mar’ءa fī al-Islām,” where I question the term “women's press”; my use of it here follows its widespread use in Arabic within the period I treat to describe all periodicals taking “women” as subject matter or predominantly targeted at a female audience.

43. Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, 15–16.

44. In its early years FS published the following number of Arab and/or Muslim women: 1906–7, 11 out of 12; 1908, 7 out of 9; 1909, 5 out of 9; 1910, 4 out of 10; 1911, 6 out of 10; 1912, 5 out of 9. For the period 1913–20, when FS and JL were both appearing, the numbers are as follows: 1913, FS, 5 out of 7; JL, 2 out of 5; 1914, FS, 2 Arab women and 3 ancient “eastern” women; JL, no Arab/Muslim/Eastern women out of 6 biographies; 1915, FS, 9 out of 11; JL, 0 out of 3; 1916, FS, 5 out of 7; JL, 1 out of 7 (the Begum of Bhopal is another); 1917, FS, 11 out of 11; JL, 2 out of 3; 1918, FS, 3 out of 3; JL, 0 out of 5; 1919, FS, 9 out of 9; JL, 0 out of 4 (one is Esther bt. Abīī; Hā‘‘il); 1920, FS, 9 out of 10; JL, 4 out of 4. This is significant: at the height of nationalist activism in Egypt, JL abruptly turns to Arab subjects, while both magazines suddenly profile women known for political prominence and nationalist activism.

45. Muhammad ‘‘Abd al-Fattāh Ibrāhīī;m, “‘‘Azīī;māt al-nisā‘‘ fīī; al-‘‘ālamayni al-sharqīī; wa-al-gharbīī; qadīī;man wa-hadīī;than 5: Nāzik ‘‘Abid,” NN 5:53 (May 1927): 166–68. “I admire the woman who makes her own way in life and works to give her name eternity,” says the biographer.

46. NN 2:12 (July 1923): 329.

47. Although DM was published in 1894, it was complete by November 1892 when F first came out, if we are to judge by Fawwāz's letter to Palmer, published in al-Nīl in August 1892, saying her book was complete and she hoped to send it to the Columbian Exposition. On Syrians in the women's press, see Baron, Women's Awakening, and Thomas Philipp, “Feminism and Nationalist Politics.”

48. The EFU's French-language journal, L'Egyptienne, which I do not in-clude in my study, published portraits of famous women, predominantly Egyptians but also others, at the start of every issue (see Badran, Feminists, 103–4), akin to the biographical sketch under the masthead of Young Woman of the East.L'Egyptienne's “hors-texte” portraits carried only brief captions. The journal's occasional biographical sketches were usually of different women: poets Henriette Roland Holst, Helene Vacaresco (with portrait), and Anne de Brancovan; magician Wanda Landowska, Marie Curie, Hester Stanhope. Neither biographies nor captioned portraits in this journal tended to claim the didactic terrain of exemplarity that other magazines' biographies did. And the “hors-texte” frequently featured prominent men: Clot Bey, Mustafa Kemal, Gandhi, Zaghlūl, Wīī;sā Wāsif. Was there a deliberate politics of personality here? For the “hors-texte” subject (of either gender) was most often “Eastern,” while profiles within the magazine tended more to feature European subjects. The EFU's later Arabic-language journal al-Misriyya (founded 1937) had no regular biography feature, but it highlighted accomplishments of contempo-rary Egyptian women and at least once featured an ancient Egyptian woman. This was Unekhs neb atun, daughter of Akhenaten and spouse of Tut-ankhamen; the article says little about her. Isīī;z Habīī;b al-Misrīī;, “Malikāt Misr al-qadīī;ma: Unikhs nab ātun,” al-Misriyya 3:49 (Feb. 15, 1939): 12–13. The author's sister Eva was managing editor. Occasional biographical subjects include Pocahontas (3:66 [Nov. 1, 1939]: 16–18) and several Indonesians in an essay by “an Indonesian youth” disturbed by a lack of information on Indonesia in the Egyptian press (3:50 [Mar. 1, 1939]: 25–32).

49. Durriyya Muhammad ‘‘Alīī; Bek, “Min shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘: Ulghā imra‘‘at Iyfūrdūr,” NN 5:57 (Sept. 1927): 307; DM, 71, 72, 71. If Olga's conversion led to the spread of Christianity in Russia, neither Arabic biography mentions it. Jennifer S. Uglow, The Continuum Dictionary of Women's Biography, ex-panded edition (New York: Continuum, 1989), 412.

50. Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, 12–13.

51. al-Mu’ءayyad 2:277 (Nov. 10, 1890): 3.

52. Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, 164; more generally, chap. 8.

53. DM, 516–18; “SN: Nā‘‘ila zawjat ‘‘Uthmān b. ‘‘Affān,” FS 13:2 (Nov. 15, 1918): 41–42.

54. “SN: Ba‘‘d al-shahīī;rāt fīī; Sūriyā,” FS 32:5 (Feb. 1937): 257–59.

55. Hāshim featured articles on the Syrian community, whether in their homeland, in Egypt, or in the Americas, but she had a more Egypt-centered perspective than did earlier Syrian editors, at least to judge by the greater number of Egyptians writing for her, Muslims but also Copts, and an evidently more intense interest in ancient Egyptian history as providing precedents and pride.

56. Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, 97, 105. But as they note elsewhere, one must keep in view the simultaneous production of seemingly clashing views even within one person's writing (xiii).

57. SR (edited by Syrian Christian Rūz Antūn and her husband) featured eight Syrian Christians, one Copt, and one Muslim Egyptian (Umm Kulthūm) out of eleven biographies in extant issues, 1923–26; its predecessor, SB (1903–5), offered lives of four European or American women and one ancient Muslim, al-Khansā‘‘. Out of 96 biographies in extant issues from 1920 to 1938, the Egyptian Copt-edited MM featured one contemporary Copt (1924); two Syrian Christians (1923, 1926); three contemporary Egyptian Muslims (1920–27, each twice: S. Zaghlūl, M. H. Nāsif, the queen mother); and—unique in these magazines—a portrait of an “ordinary Egyptian [Muslim], Umm Muhammad” (1926); two more Copts and another Muslim Egyptian (1934); and Nāsif again (1938). NN, with far fewer profiles (37 in extant issues, 1921–35), featured seven Egyptian Muslims, one (Zaghlūl) twice, and no Egyptian Copts or Syrian Christians. JL, once it turned to “local” subjects, focused entirely on early Muslim women. Al-Hisān in 1926 featured only Arabs (if one admits Zenobia to this group), only one contemporary, Syrian Chris-tian singer Mary Jubrān, and, deceased two decades before, Taymūr (13 biographies total in this volume).

58. Badran, Feminists, 108–10. The combination of an internationalist outlook and a class alliance visible in Sha‘‘rāwīī;'s brand of feminism is not dissimilar to the foci of women's magazine biographies. Both manifested elitism in interest and approach. Badran situates the EFU's turn toward international feminism in the post-1919 disappointment of feminists with nationalist men's loss of enthusiasm for women's rights (92). This makes sense, but perhaps the internationalist turn, coupled with class considerations, was also produced by the very nature of the movement. In biography this internationalist/class identity is evident before Egypt gained its “independence.”

59. “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘,” JL 12:3 (Dec. 1919): 81, 81–82.

60. “Athār adabiyya: Malikat al-mumarridāt,” FS 19:2 (Nov. 15, 1924): 85, 86.

61. Jurjīī; Bāz, “SN: Luwīī;zā Birūktir,” FS 3:1 (Oct. 1908): 3–8; quotation on 6.

62. Ibid., 8.

63. “Suwar al-majalla: Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘,” AJ 2:6 (June 30, 1899): 205–6. There follows acknowledgment of great Arab women of the past, but the emphasis throughout is on comparing women “of the West” and “of the East.” The magazine does label the great women of the Arab/Islamic past as a “legacy” Arab women will regain.

64. Sālim says school field trips for girls became generally accepted only in the 1930s (al-Mar’ءa al-misriyya, 89). “SN: Māriyā Mitshil al-falakiyya,” MM 8:1 (Jan. 1, 1927): 9. That this text appeared in al-Muqtataf in 1898 suggests the complexity of circulation and “origins”; it seems women's magazines insistent on their indigenous character did not find it troublesome to borrow from periodicals known for West-identified stances. Of course, there may have been an earlier, or interim, publication of this biography that was the “origin” of its appearance in MM.

65. “SN: Bāhithat al-Bādiya wafātuhā wa-tarjamatuhā,” MM 6:9 (Nov. 15, 1925): 466–67, likely by Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik. Another biography of Nāsif asks: “I wonder how much more she would have written if her husband [a prominent nationalist Bedouin leader] had not cast her into the desert far from the sessions of the men of literature?” Muhammad ‘‘Abd al-Fattāh Ibrāhīī;m, “‘‘Azīī;māt al-nisā‘‘ fīī; al-‘‘ālamayni al-sharqīī; wa-al-gharbīī; qadīī;man wa-hadīī;than 4,” NN 5:52 (Apr. 1927): 136–37. This was authored by a man; juxtaposing the two gestures toward a phenomenon we have seen, women's more cautious rhetoric on the woman question versus men's more direct attacks on practices they regarded as retrograde. But both passages make women's intellectual output, or at least its production in print, dependent on men's setting or relaxing of boundaries. The comment that points to restrictions on women in a patriarchal society comes from NN.

66. “SN: Lūwīī;zā Alkūt,” FS 27:5 (Feb. 1933), 225, 226.

67. al-umam al-gharbiyya kaffatan. Ibid., 226.

68. “Al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam: Lādy Burtun,” MM 7:4 (Apr. 20, 1926): 187.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid., 189.

71. Kerber notes but does not consider the presence of British figures among the “Famous Women” roster of those calling for female education in immediately post-Revolutionary America—the possibly paradoxical figuration of exemplarity through those who were part of a British colonialist hegemony. As in Egypt, Mary Wortley Montagu was a subject (Kerber, Women, 206).

72. See Burton, Burdens of History.

73. *** [Farah Antūn], “Ashhar al-nisā‘‘: al-Khansā‘‘: Ashhar shā‘‘irāt al‘‘arab,” SB 1:3 (June 1, 1903): 77. This biography carried the same prefatory words about famous women as fitting models that SB's biographies of Stone and Jeanne d'Arc had carried.

74. “Mudhakkirāt ‘‘Ajūz, 13,” MM 4:3 (Mar. 1923): 119.

75. E.g., see a letter in F 1:4 (Mar. 1, 1893): 153; a book notice in AJ 1:10 (Oct. 31, 1898): 330–31; an article on the reception of the Egyptians at the Rome Conference in FS 17:8 (May 15, 1923): 288–93, by Nabawiyya Mūsā; “Khawātir al-amīī;ra,” JL 12:8 (May 1920): 364.

76. “Idāh wa-iltimās wa-istismāh,” F 1:1 (Nov. 20, 1892): 3.

77. “Adilīī;nā Bātīī;,” F 1:1 (Nov. 20, 1892): 14.

78. Attributed to Tammām Karkabīī;, this biography is identical to DM's (348–49). “‘‘Ikrisha ibnat al-Atrūsh,” FS 1:2 (Nov. 15, 1906): 47–48.

79. “Al-Anisa Salīī;ma Rāshid, [sic] nazīī;lat Misr,” FS 6:9 (June 15, 1912): 349. It is interesting that the subject was, like Hāshim, a Syrian immigrant to Egypt. “She is the only woman in our present era who manages a political newspaper; Egypt welcomes the mistresses of finesse and literature [good comportment] just as Syria takes pride in its daughters in the Arab countries.”

80. “Al-Fatāt,” F 1:10 (Feb. 15, 1894): 436.

81. Badran, Feminists, 16–17.

82. “Misiz Barawnin,” MM 8:5/6 (May 15, 1927): 260–63; quotation on 260.

3. Exemplar and Exception

Biography in the Journal for Women

The Arabs take pride in their lineages; the refined woman takes pride in her style and speech; and here we are today taking pride in Miss Na‘‘īma al-Ayyūbī for her knowledge and literary gifts. How can we do otherwise? For she is the springtime yield of Egypt first and the East second, who has proven to her Western female colleagues that the Eastern young woman is no less perceptive or mentally capable. . . . We hope from the bottom of our hearts that her female [law] students take her as model so that through her Egypt gives birth to an elite group of refined and sound students who will turn out as excellently as their professor.

Hopefully our women, if they continue to write prose and poetry, will endow us with fine essayists and poets capable of competing with the men. Then we can write their biographies and speak of their talents' fine yield, as we have of this fine woman [Juliette Adam]. We think this requires only some exertion of will on their part. . . . We would like to feel so content, so pleased with them that we would not need to exalt a foreigner [gharīb, echoing gharbī, Westerner] or demand that she provide a model. Let us see this soon.

A biography of celebrated medieval French writer Christine de Pizan (1364–1430) appears in Young Woman of the East in March 1938. “The subject of the biography” (sāhibat al-tarjama) was “confronted by the criticism of many books in which the authors defamed women,” for she had criticized male writers “who had attacked women viciously without justification.” To counter them she had drawn on “the esteem for and glorification of woman” found in religious writings. A life of de Pizan published in the same journal twenty-six years earlier noted that she “defended women” in her volume on “the history of famous women” (The City of Ladies).^[1] Hints toward the rhetorical usefulness of exemplary gendered biography, these remarks invoked a trajectory of inscribing exempla that converged with Zaynab Fawwāz's writing of the tabaqāt/tarājim genre to produce a practice of exemplary biography in modern Egypt that de Pizan might not have found so foreign. As biography defended women, whether of medieval France or modern Egypt, it constructed a counterdiscourse to challenge those who “attacked women viciously.”

Shaping a Life

If biography could offer a cultural critique that softened some discursive edges of the woman question, it signaled bluntly an intention and potential to shape readers' and writers' lives. “Lives” that appear to be directly drawn from premodern sources were often framed in language that engraved a series of claims about modernity onto long-existing patterns of life-writing.^[2] In this chapter I turn to the rhetoric of exemplarity and generalization, which, I argue, signaled for readers the didactic primacy of the genre. To make my argument that “Famous Women” biographies comprised a textual intervention in the woman question more complex than it might appear, it may not be necessary to address that fraught question of “authorial intent.” Yet, I see the articulation of intent—in other words, a strategic rhetorical intentionality—as significant from an audience-centered perspective. Readers were being instructed to pay attention to the (textually constructed) lineaments of lived lives as they thought about their own.

First I examine strategies that explicitly signal a didactic exemplarity in the “Famous Women” genre: declaring female biography to be aimed at guidance through example; naming an individual subject a “paragon” or “fitting model”; exploiting that stated exemplary potential to propose usefully imitable qualities, to criticize disapproved social behavior, and to demolish the arguments of proponents of the status quo; deploying conventional formulae of approbation and compliment (for living subjects) and sorrowful praise (for the recently deceased) as semantically full guides to appropriate comportment; and calling subjects “sources of pride” or “of glory” for female readers. For these texts juxtapose a fairly narrow range of rhetorical strategies with a stunning array of lives. Thus, the variety we find within this genre is comprised within a remarkable consistency of articulated didactic intent across venues and over time. I go on to examine indirect modes of signaling exemplarity: the deployment of epithets and attributives, and a tactics of comparison that, among other things, shapes a productive intersection of cultural precedent with notions of exemplarity. Contemplating the use of local precedent, I suggest here and in later chapters how writers set this rhetoric of exemplarity into nationalist frameworks. Having explored the local roots of the genre in the first chapter, and the ambivalence toward nonlocal subjects in the second, I end this one by examining practices of gendered biography writing in North America and Europe to suggest common features of exemplary writing that writers in Egypt might have blended with their own knowledge of the Arabic biographical tradition.

How To Read a Life

In 1930, al-‘‘Aruūsa (The Bride) praised a recently issued biography of Caterina Sforza (1462–1509)—daughter of an Italian duke and his lover, and bold proxy ruler over feudal lands—authored by one Count Pasolini. “It would be good for every woman in the world to read it for the benefit it contains, because in her time Caterina Sforza played a great role, no less than those of the age's great men.” Thirty years earlier a life of Princess Gabriella Wiszniewska (d. 1903) published by Sociable Companion editor Alexandra Avierino—who became the princess's adopted daughter and heir to her title—had sounded no less urgent:

Recently I read a history of the life of a princess of the West, the greatest memorial a writer could present to princesses of the East, that they might discuss it in the front pages of their publications and make it the most eloquent of what they read to their daughters for amusing exchange of an evening. . . . I translated it with the intention of presenting it to the Companion's female readers, and its male readers too . . . so our princesses may learn.

Whether in 1903 or 1930, notices urging the utility of reading about other women's lives signaled that biography was to be instructive as well as entertaining, even if it was not always clear which facets of a life were to provide instruction, especially a flamboyantly rule-breaking life like Sforza's.^[3]

If the rhetoric of role modeling did not in itself indicate what was to be exemplary, when editors framed the biographical sketch in a rhetoric of exemplarity that pointedly appropriated the life narratives of other women as guides for conduct, that rhetoric did flag a mode of reading biography. Perhaps the apparent popularity of biography (to judge by its consistent presence in women's magazines) could be attributed to its entertainment value. Authors (like adab litterateurs long before) certainly registered the enjoyment that anecdotes about people could generate: Avierino, in The Sociable Companion, “decided to communicate [María Christina of Spain's] story because there is enjoyment and amusement in it.”^[4] Yet these texts' rhetorical strategies, which verge on the stern and the sermonizing, suggest considerably more. Like Petrarch in another time and place, for these writers illuminating the acts of the ancients—and the moderns—was to result in a blend of “pleasure” and “authority” vis-à-vis the reader.^[5]

Framing the Picture

The rhetoric of exemplarity frames these texts literally, for often an exemplary note sounds both at beginning and end. This rhetoric drew on familiar coinages: biographies in the earliest women's periodicals frequently opened with statements of purpose that yoked conventional vocabulary to hints of new agendas. Introducing a biography of American feminist Lucy Stone (1818–93), the inaugural issue (April 1903) of the Ladies' and Girls' Revue explained that “in this column are published biographies of famous women of East and West. May they be sound and serviceable models of virtue and goodness, of refinement and high-minded endeavor, and of the performance of duties.” The diction was conventional, but it opened a life history that was not. How was one to define “virtue” and “duty” through a reading of Stone's career? Stone may have been in the conservative flank of American feminist activism, but her life as narrated in the magazine—and in the context of elite Egyptian and Syrian female lives—did not sound so conservative. Perhaps formulae took on new semantic force when juxtaposed with this content: “When she married, her husband and the minister agreed to drop the phrase 'to obey the husband' from the service, because she was one of those who subdue others, not one who submits. . . . She was considered the leader of American women demanding that women have rights equal to men's in everything.”^[6]

Concluding Stone's life history, the author closed the frame but left it open-ended, linking the textual practice of biography to readers' lives. For after engaging with issues of women's rights, girls' education, and female employment outside the home, the text asked readers—female readers—to send in their reactions to Stone's activism, using it as a touchstone for the issue of domestic versus nondomestic work for women: “Judging which of these two is preferable is difficult, especially in a women's magazine in an Eastern country. So we will leave this judgment to the readers [fem.]. The magazine will publish the views they send in.” If biography could prescribe, it could also initiate dialogue on “sound and serviceable models of virtue and goodness.”^[7]

Precisely the same hortatory statement opened the next issue's biography—of Jeanne d'Arc. That Stone and Jeanne were this magazine's first two “models of virtue and goodness” might suggest an agenda privileging women's public and visible activism. Indeed, this biography foregrounds Jeanne's public career over the nurture-heavy themes that structure many later biographies. Yet this was not an unequivocal embrace of public female leadership. In what was “virtue” and “goodness” to consist? The Stone biography was the magazine's first feature following the opening editorial; its positioning as well as its prefatory words—on the qudwa sāliha, the fitting or sound model—privileged the notion of textual role modeling. But the rousing beginning afforded by Stone's career preceded “The Mother, Child, and School Section” and then “The Home, Kitchen, and Dining Table Section” wherein a careful definition of the term rabbat al-bayt (mistress of the house) suggests the changing semantic field of this term in Arabic. It was coming to incorporate what the English term “housewife” implied at the time, in concert with the normativizing of the nuclear family as ideal. Two pages of recipes followed. These features could almost constitute a response to the point raised at the end of Stone's biography. Yet Stone's example, in the narrativization of her life as public career, remained before the reader. Not only the space between Stone's life as produced by the magazine and the text's cautionary conclusion, but also the disjunction between Stone as role model and the guidance performed by the rest of the issue's pages generated an ambiguous message, the uncertainty magnified by the express use of a diction of exemplarity. Ironically, the article “Training in Comportment” in the “Mother, Child, and School” section emphasizes the role of imitation, of both immediate role models and those more removed, assuming a male child and a mother positioned to teach. “Tell him,” the magazine addresses the specifically feminine reader, “tell him the history of a famous man in his youth, for this is one of the things that will have a great impact upon him.”^[8]

Two years earlier, a similar declaration of intent prefaced Woman in Islam's second biography, gesturing toward an intended didactic effect upon both sexes, in line with the magazine's male ambit of authorship and evoked audience: “Our concern in the famous women's biographies we select is to set out their life courses, to investigate the truth, and to point out whatever observations emerge to draw the reader's attention to the life of the Muslim woman in various phases of history, that this may yield a lesson and a sermon.”^[9] Indeed, most of Woman in Islam's “Lives of Famous Women,” including this life of ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr, the prophet Muhammad's second wife, ended with “The Lessons to Be Learned from This Life.” Could there be a more explicit signal of biography's prescriptive potential? The journal's initial biography, of Muhammad's first wife, Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid (d. 619 C.E.), had spelled out a broader but equally pointed agenda.

We have made this feature part of the magazine's content; we will include biographies of famous women in the variety of their religions and nations, deceased and living. . . . We will rely on only the most dependable sources . . . and will begin with the most famous wives of our sayyid the prophet, God's blessings and salvation be his. The benefit this feature will provide is obvious, especially since we will append to every biography an experiential lesson [‘‘ibra] on what can be suitably imitated of the subject's morals and deeds.^[10]

Such reminders that this was not merely entertainment gave the feature (and the periodical) respectability, too—one that early fiction writers in Egypt, even those writing historical novels with heroines at the center, had not yet achieved in 1901. An impeccable subject and an irreproachable genre combined to give force to one of the “Lessons” afforded by Khadīī;ja's life: “that commerce is no less suitable for a woman than a man.”

A dozen years later, Malaka Sa‘‘d made the same linkage between experiential lessons and biography in her magazine, although the language was more flowery. This time the subject was Hatshepsut rather than Khadīī;ja or ‘‘A‘‘isha, bespeaking emerging interest in the nationalist possibilities of a pre-Islamic Nile heritage. “Over there, atop those horizons,” began The Gentle Sex, “the self circled for a moment on exploration's wings, then alighted on the trees of contemplation to reap from history's fertile garden the fruits of experiential lessons. . . . But we must say more, to elucidate the benefit we acquire from unfurling life histories of Famous Women. . . . We want to make of these little sermons a rebuke for our present, and to take from the past's fine examples a tutor for our future.”^[11]

The explicit enunciation of concern with “excellence” or “virtue,”^[12] regardless of how the text then filled these labels semantically, did not fade over the period with which I am concerned, nor did the positioning of this articulation shift. “It will be our concern,” announces Young Woman of Egypt in its first issue, nearly thirty years after Woman in Islam has emerged and disappeared, “to occupy ourselves continually with recording the history of those females who emerged as excellent in various eras and countries, whether they ruled or benefited their countries and homelands [bilād wa-awtān] by administering, leading armies, or emerging as a people's leader. We chose to investigate Queen Hatshepsut for this issue.”^[13]

This declaration is conspicuous for appearing to define as appropriate biographical subjects publicly political women, echoing The Ladies' and Girls' Revue's choice of Stone to inaugurate its biographical column years before. Yet Young Woman of Egypt's biography (unlike The Gentle Sex's life of Hatshepsut seventeen years earlier) suggests that Hatshepsut's power depended on her partisans' strength more than her own actions.^[14] Thus offering an equivocal message to female seekers of power, it is less ambiguous on exemplarity as a justification for biography: “I see her,” concludes the writer, “as nothing less than a miracle to ladies of her own generation, locus of respect and veneration to those females who came after her. For woman, when she acts carefully and deliberately, and shapes her life around work and virtue, leads the throngs to high ground and the country to pride. History is replete with deeds of women who far surpassed the men in many regions. We will offer the readers [masc. “inclusive”] their life histories [siyar], a lamp that with its guidance will give light to the awakening young women of Egypt.”^[15] This exemplarity operates via the paradox of inimitable imitability. Mu‘‘jiza (miracle) is derived from the semantic field of human inability. But its modern semantic field brings it close to the secular sense of the English term “miracle.” Hatshepsut in Young Woman of Egypt is one of many biographical subjects who hover discursively between the rhetoric of exemplarity and that of exceptionality. Here is a productive ambiguity that insists on both historical continuity and the historical break of modernity—or the imperative of both precedent and innovation—as it sketches blueprints for “today's women” through an exemplary Hatshepsut as historically specific locus of nationalist interest in pharaonic Egypt and as public woman.

Declarations of candidacy for exemplarity aimed at a young female readership in this press articulate what Michel Foucault has called “the shifts and reutilizations of identical formulas for contrary objectives” that mark discourse as discontinuous.^[16] If the role models these formulae introduced were often new, they were clothed in familiar rhetorical garb. Notations of exemplarity could arise from a flowery set of clichés of compliment; but in the context of the debate on “woman” and in the pointed uses to which that rhetoric was put, clichés become semantically full and politically potent messages. And, as we will see, these subjects were not necessarily exemplary on the same social terms through which such rhetoric had once operated.

Such generalized advertisements of exemplarity prepared the ground for the deployment of more specific formulae. As editors reminded readers repeatedly that they were to read these lives as role models, they informed them that the subject's life was a “fitting example” or a “fine model” for today's woman,^[17] one of practical benefit. “If any Syrian woman deserves to have a statue erected to articulate her famous feats,” declared Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, writing on educator Maryam Jahashān (b. 1855), “the subject of this biography would be first. Therefore I write her life story for Young Woman of the East, hoping the young women will benefit from it.”^[18] The biographical text with its conventions is more than a praiseful tribute, the mark of exemplarity more than an abstract sign of politesse. The fatāt who reads the Fatāt is instructed to learn through imitation. Exemplars, as Timothy Hampton has noted for European Renaissance writers, are “living texts” that demand an active reading. The exemplary figure “makes a claim on the reader's action in the world.”^[19]

Sometimes the mark of active approbation—the label of contemporary exemplarity—stands on its own, leaving the reader to draw conclusions from the unfolding life narrative. “How excellent was this woman, and how fine it would be to resemble her,” exclaims a biographer of Marie de Sévigné (1626–96). The author praises de Sévigné's cultural priorities: “She came forth and grew as a flower among thorns yet no thorn ever scratched her. Honorable, virtuous, noble of morals, upright and respectable she lived, preferring scholarship and literature to amusement and enjoyment, and the company of scholars and litterateurs to that of any others.” But is it her predilection for “scholarship and literature” or her morals that are exemplary? Other roles are important, too: “She was a trustworthy wife, a mother in whom the traits of motherhood were abundant.”^[20] The text notes de Sévigné's “superiority to many men writers” and (quoting Lamartine) her “great influence over the civilizing of the world.” But her children and society's moral state, not her writing, are declared her main concern.^[21] Another biography of de Sévigné praises her for joining in her writing “the most elevated emotions of the mother combined with her own views of politics and society expressed without fear. . . . She is a paragon [mithāl] to follow in this sort of writing. Moreover, Madame de Sévigné is the best model [khayr qudwa] for women not only in her writing, which was first-class, or in the breadth of her knowledge, but also in her excellent virtue, her refinement, gravity, and good conduct.” The biographer stresses the subject's moral exemplarity further (and echoes a concern of the time about female forays into public space) in concluding that de Sévigné “associated with the people of her time only because she adored knowledge and literature.”^[22] As I shall pursue further in chapter 5, when texts signal to readers that they are to consider modeling their own conduct after biographical subjects, often the accent is on family-oriented loyalties. But domesticity is not the sole marker of how biography might shape a reader's future pursuits. Syrian writer and orator Hannā Kasbānīī; Kūrānīī; (1870–98)—the same one who attended the Columbian Exposition—“left literary remains that would prompt one to consider imitating her” and was cited by “a major Turkish newspaper” as an example of “Eastern women's readiness [for an active societal role].”^[23] Zenobia of ancient Palmyra, is a “praiseworthy paragon” (mithāl mahmuūd) who “bequeathed glory and might to her community (umma) and to all women, in the sphere of woman's energies.” This 1923 biography drew exemplarity from Zenobia's public persona, at a moment in which Egyptians were poised for constitutional government, Egyptian women were making forthright political demands for themselves, and optimism about the country's political future prevailed.^[24]

Thus is the ultimate compliment of labeling the biographical subject a paragon or exemplar spun out in a range of particular, historically tinted hues, guiding the inquisitive to read a specific content into a subject's exemplarity. This rhetoric frames the compliment as a proposition, as practical guidance directed at a reader rather than as mere compliment directed to the subject—or to “womankind.” “Elisabeth of Rumania” (1843–1916), in Young Woman of the East, augmented the formula with a figure of speech that displaced female aspiration from appearance to intellect: “How beautiful is woman when her ornament is literature, and how beautiful are queens when they are the likes of Carmen Silva, a fine model for the rest of womankind.”^[25] If this metaphor was so common it had become a cliché, when coupled with repeated emphasis on the primacy of educative and carefully identified reading to the ideal woman's formation, such “clichés” bore curricular significance. Sited as exemplar for impeccable akhlāq (morals)—with much of her life history elided, perhaps in deference to local sensibilities—George Sand (1804–76) is situated to provoke a local audience: “Best of exemplars in her morals and conduct, she spent most of her seventy-six years in service to learning, literature, and society. Truly in the history of her life can be found the finest model for human beings.” Strikingly, her akhlāq more than her writing are the grounds of her exemplarity; her quill itself takes on moral qualities. “She was . . . so strong in her morals that the men themselves use to envied her for them. . . . Her pen was chaste and pure, inscribing not a single word that was not for society's good and its reform. . . . We wish our women to take notice, to proceed as did the one we speak of here. Therein lies their felicity and ours.”^[26]

Contemporary Arab and/or Muslim women fit the part, too, acting simultaneously as exemplar and proof. Rujīna Khayyāt (b. 1888), a Copt from Asyut and a founding member of the Wafdist Women's Central Committee (WWCC), is claimed to have been “one of the first Egyptian women to be educated at a time when that was considered a defect in a female. . . . God willed that this fine woman would be an example [mathal] who would shame the partisans of that ancient view.”^[27] Her exemplary potential extends to male “partisans,” whose support was crucial if girls were to get educations. Virginie Bāsīlī, a wealthy Syrian Orthodox resident of Alexandria early in this century, is praised for her full-time volunteer efforts as director of a girls' school and, typically, for not seeking the limelight.

Forward, Virginie, for I have learned that you are bold in all that concerns what is right. And now I see you casting unripe grapes in the eyes of the girls who spend their time in amusement, sumptuous living, and trivia. Forward, O composer of the highest exemplar to the children of your kind, O sketcher of a work plan for our young women. Thus may they learn life's true meaning. You direct not merely a school but the awakening of a people, for you are pointing its fair sex down a new path.^[28]

In 1908, Young Woman of the East profiled another Syrian exemplar, writer ‘‘Afīī;fa Karam (1883–1924), then a twenty-five-year-old Arab Christian immigrant to North America from Ottoman Syria. Her life story (thus far) concluded in a tone at once fulsomely complimentary and fiercely prescriptive, perhaps given added exemplary power in that it was a narrative still unfolding.

We are hopeful that in future she will attain a high level [of achievement] and will be the best possible example for daughters of the East to follow: the most brilliantly shining lamp whose light will guide [them] to the paths of knowledge, so the daughters of the East will be freed from the shackles of empty fantasy and the abyss of decadence. Thus will they come to know that they were created for something better than serving the beauty of the face, and that their time is too precious to spend in front of the mirror.^[29]

But the community of “local” exemplars exceeded Arab boundaries. Biographies of non-Arab Muslims could simultaneously celebrate the presence of “local” precedents and criticize their (proclaimed) absence, claim community and alliance on the basis of religious identity while asserting territorial identity in the same breath, and announce resistance to the gaze of the West. Perhaps this was one reason that Egyptian women's magazines avidly followed the career of Turkish activist Halide Edip. Celebrated for her potential as exemplar, her image unites Turkish and Egyptian women through pride of achievement and aspiration in, significantly, a Coptic-edited journal:

The East may be proud of this great woman, who has shown the Eastern woman in a favorable light. We put this example before the Egyptian woman so she will learn how cultured her Turkish sister has become; we offer it in the knowledge that [similar] beginnings are occurring in our own community. . . . Our women's awakening has begun but has yet to achieve features that would yield true and full advancement.^[30]

Note that the exemplarity is addressed to “Egyptian” women rather than “Arab” or “Muslim” women. As I have noted, Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik's journal determinedly celebrated a secularist and territorially bounded nationalism, not surprising for a periodical edited by an Egyptian Christian. In the mid-1920s, Turkey's redefinition as a secular society with strong, local indigenous roots for collective identity was watched closely by Egyptian intellectuals.^[31] Secularist reformer Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk)'s Turkish nationalism, with which Halide Edip was prominently involved, intrigued many. That biographies highlighted a prominent and politically active Turkish woman needs to be regarded in this context. At the same time, ‘‘Abd al-Malik could point to her celebration of a Muslim exemplar, symbolic of a unity that transcended, or ignored, categories defined by religion.

Exemplary Conduct

Biography offers not only an exemplary feminine image but also a precise exemplary blueprint for action, for instance, in the pursuits of Princess Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein: “Her Highness is possessed of abundant knowledge and disciplined refinement. She is a skilled musician, an eloquent writer and one of the most prolific and deeply penetrating of composers. Her life, moving from immersion in books and inkwells to the huts of the poor and miserable, to shelters and hospitals, is the best exemplar of the finest life [khayr mithāl li-khayr hayāt].”^[32] This text names both attributes and a particular balance of activities as exemplary, for notations of qualities labeled exemplary flood this genre. The Baroness Ronsart (b. 1838), in Egypt because of her husband, stayed on after his death, “an exemplar of generosity and a succor to the poor.” Medieval Spanish Muslim ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; ‘‘Abdallāh al-Aysar, “daughter of a sultan, wife of a sultan, mother of a sultan,” showed “exemplary courage, reminding us of the epics' legends of heroism,” an interesting choice since those “legends of heroism” were mostly male tales. Charlotte Corday (1768–93) was “the paragon of resolution” (mithāl al-thabāt) at court and “the paragon of courage” as she faced the executioner.^[33]

Published in 1930, this biography joined a prevailing discourse in which women's visible activisms were both assumed and increasingly challenged in the name of family interests. For the rhetoric of exemplarity sought a disciplinary role, contrasting subjects' behavior to conduct that commentators attacked as characteristic of too many Arab youth, male and female. Urging “the women of Syria” to learn from educator Louisa Proctor's (1829–1907) example, Jurjī Bāz noted that in her childhood Proctor “did not free herself to go to places of amusement like other girls,” but rather cared for her mother.^[34] It was a message that readers of biography were to hear repeatedly, deployed across different spheres of behavior. Take Ptolemaic-period Alexandrian scholar Hypatia (c. 370–415)—“finest ornament among the women of her time.” Amīn al-Rīhānī burdens her with a decidedly exemplary role for the 1920s woman, based on the contrast between an idealized past and a defective present. She had the added virtue of “local” salience: Greek she might be, but after all, she illustrated the ancient flowering of knowledge in Alexandria as she provided a model of exemplary behavior. It was not so much a question of her “excellence, learning, and wisdom” or even of her “purity and respectability” in abstract terms.

As for her comportment, clothing, and way of life, she was a paragon [aya] of simplicity and loveliness. I imagine her in diaphanous white robes, standing before her pupils; she has plaited her hair with a silk ribbon. Down her shoulder drops the end of her wrap, and on her bare feet are simple Greek sandals. No cap weighs down her head; no corset weakens her lungs and heart. No high heels harm her spine and entire nervous system. A paragon of simplicity, capability, and beauty!

If only today's women would return to the simple, ancient Greek mode of dress. Five measures of delicate linen are preferable to twenty of heavy silk worked up in the latest fashion, for [the former] would not weigh down and pull your body—O lady of today—as if the body were your enemy. This is not even to mention the issue of economy and saving. But clothes and economy are not our subject right now. Let us return to Hypatia.^[35]

The trope of exemplarity serves contested gender agendas, conduct literature on proper comportment masquerading as biography.

Compliment and Comportment

Thus the image and vocabulary of “the exemplar” exploited linguisticsocial convention to promote a set of blueprints for gendered conduct, aimed at women, whether making an interventionary case for new agendas or attempting to counter them in the name of tradition, cultural authenticity, religion, or social stability. Conventional diction also took on new semantic force when biographies ended with the hope that “the likes” of the subject “would be multiplied.” This formula of politesse most often closed biographies of contemporary Arab women, Christian or Muslim. It was a phrase of compliment one would pay to a living subject, the likes of Rujīna Khayyāt: “May God multiply her likes: devoted, sincere, and hardworking.”^[36] As we saw in chapter 1, Zaynab Fawwāz had offered such a compliment to Fatma Aliye, and then Young Woman of the East's appropriation of this biography turned the complimentary phrase into a more pointed wish for Arab society—and for contemporary Arab women. Labība Hāshim paid a similar compliment to Zaynab Fawwāz herself in the first year of her magazine (epigraph to chapter 1) and then echoed herself in a life of Lebanese philanthropist Emily Sursuq the next month: “We hope continued advancement for her, and we ask God to make her likes abundant among women and to recompense her in the best possible way for her deeds.”^[37] The cliché carried new resonance in a context where competing models of active femininity were at stake, and when it was Arab women in the public spaces of magazine publishing, charity work and education, and even commerce and industry, whose “likes,” it was urged, must increase. Coptic merchant Haylāna ‘‘Abd al-Malik—“the only Egyptian woman who has worked in trade, succeeding to an extent that is delightful”—had neither the class antecedents nor the formal education of many magazine readers. But as a prominent Wafd supporter, she “transcended” both class and gender, for her work was legitimated by her nationalist contributions. “Through her efforts God has benefited this nation [umma], so thirsty for the appearance of many of her beneficial likes.”^[38]

Occasionally this compliment was paid to one long dead—but always with relevance to the living. Recall Young Woman of the East's pointed addition to Fawwāz's pious wishes for Shawkar Qādin, celebrated for her charity work: “God increase her likes among the women of this age.”^[39] The pre-Islamic Yemeni ‘‘Ufayrā’ء bt. ‘‘Abbād al-Jadasiyya, defined first as the sister of a tribal leader and then as “one with self-esteem and by nature free,” stirred her people to action against a tyrannous overlord with a rousing poem. “The tribe would not have liberated itself were it not for the strong selfpossession of a noble woman. May God increase her likes in every region.” ‘‘Ufayrā’ء's resonance for contemporary nationalist activists was perhaps too strong to ignore. Yet similar phrasing enframed a few European women, too. Angela Burdett-Coutts is lauded for her energy as a charity patron, a role contrasted favorably with her earlier penchant for expensive garb. “May God reward her well for her praiseworthy efforts and increase her likes, for she is a fitting model to be followed by those of wealth and ease.”^[40]

The compliment of wishing profuse imitators upon the subject could be turned to a conduct-related task mentioned in the last chapter: provoking local readers to competitive action. English housing reformer Octavia Hill (1838–1912) was profiled a month after her death:

How fine it would be if her likes were abundant in our East such that it would awaken, rise from its mean station, and come to equal the European countries in its ascending progress. . . . If just one young woman could have such a great impact on her country, there is no doubt that the fine women of our era, joining together to found associations and literary clubs, following the path of the subject of this biography in improving the state of the poor, would ultimately reach a desirable level of reform, reviving hopes that had died.^[41]

A biography of George Sand also incites its presumed audience: “When will there exist in our country the likes of this eloquent author?” And, explicitly linking audience-in-the-text to that beyond: “Indeed, when will the women writers, let alone the men writers, enjoy the likes of this status among readers?”^[42] A related nudge came from ‘‘Isā Iskandar al-Ma‘‘lūf, commemorating Syrian writer Mariyānā Marrāsh (1848–1919). Claiming her precedence among Arab women in writing for the press, he foregrounded her reformist prose, aimed at “inciting women to attain true cultural refinement [tamaddun].” Orientalists and local scholars had praised her; so had poets, “all of which indicates the status of our biographical subject among intellectuals of her time, male and female. No wonder her loss is a loss to literature, God be merciful to her . . . and may God compensate literature with many women of her likes from among those women who love knowledge.”^[43]

As this suggests, the exemplary function of biography could resonate through dramatic illustration of a subject's exemplarity for an audience within the text that stood in for the implied reader/listener. As a girl at the convent Manon Roland (1754–93) “showed such outstanding ability in every scholarly field she studied that she became a model [qudwa] for her companions [fem.], a fitting exemplar [mithāl sālih] for them.” Perhaps not only for them; the text adds what might be a subtle comment on the effect of contemplating one's own society. As the future revolutionary spent time comparing the greatness of the Greek and Roman societies with the state of her own society, “she would drown in tears.”^[44] That this life appeared in 1922 at the height of women's nationalist visibility is surely significant.

A biography of Sociable Companion editor Avierino in Young Woman of the East remarked that “the journalists knew the worth of this fine lady and vied to publish her picture. . . . She has in her possession letters of praise from East and West, and especially from Egypt, thanking her for her striving [jihad] and zeal. Their [male] authors acknowledge that their daughters have either entered school in imitation of her or have taken her guidance. . . . They do not neglect a single suggestion [of hers].” When Avierino gave a speech in Paris on “the Eastern woman's excellence and rapid advancement,” the secretary of the Ministry for the Colonies exclaimed that “due to her he now understood the true status of the Eastern woman, of whom the subject of the biography was a model example [namuūdhaj].” We write this, concludes the biography, “hoping she will be a sound model [qudwa sāliha] for those among women of the East who are searching for greatness—indeed, to those men who are searching as well.”^[45] Exemplary within the narrative of her life through the testimony of others, that life as narrative was also to be used profitably by its latest interpreters, those “outside” the text. Here was the double rhetorical role of “the West.” Its praise sought, its emulation proposed, it was also to be distanced and chided for not recognizing the existence of homegrown models who exemplified Arab nations' fitness for equal, independent status in the world of modernity.

Exemplarity in Death

The tone of praise and retrospective evaluation of a life's legacy demanded by obituary composition, coupled with a de rigueur set of compliments to the deceased, also suited a practice of exemplary biography dedicated to encouraging the living along certain paths. Salīī;ma Abū Rāshid, a Syrian journalist who died in 1919 at about the age of thirty, was memorialized in Young Woman of the East. “An exemplar for women in gravity, pleasantness, well-considered opinions, and fine principles,” she was celebrated for her impact. “Thus we lost her, excellent literary woman. Remembering her, we recall the literary ability and knowledge, the excellence, pleasantness, fine comportment, and goodhearted nature that adorned her. A flower she was, planted on Lebanon's slopes, to wilt after perfuming her milieu with her fragrance and adorning it with her refined sensibility: bloom of the wādī whose fragrance was not limited to its own valleybut spread everywhere.”^[46] Similarly accentuated is an obituary of Italy's Queen Margherita (d. 1926), after anecdotes establish her courage and firm will: “And so she marched forward until she passed from her life's final stage last month, her legacy holding exempla worthy to be followed.”^[47]

Kevin Hayes has noted the exemplary possibilities of biographical sketches of young women that accompanied published funeral orations in colonial North America: “While postmortem praise always must be viewed with caution, the eulogistic portrayal of women certainly illustrates a feminine ideal. . . . In a biographical sketch published with Victorina, Cotton Mather's funeral sermon for his daughter Katherine, Thomas Walter wrote that her education led her to excel not only at housewifery but also at writing.”^[48] Linda Kerber also marshals funeral sermons and confessional tracts as she speaks of instituting historical and contemporary role models for “republican womanhood” in the early United States:

When Rush and Webster told women to read history they were thinking of Livy and Tacitus, of Rollin and Macaulay. But the narrative of a life like that of Mrs. [Eleanor Reed] Emerson, while generally categorized as a devotional tract, was also a history dealing with themes central to the life experience of women of the post-Revolutionary generation. . . . Under the trappings of a traditional devotional tract is a biography of an intense young woman who explored more widely than most of her peers the options open to her community and her generation.^[49]

Whatever the context, public mourning was an effective conduit for exemplary messages. Writer Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif was universally mourned by Egypt's women's press after her untimely death in 1918. The short biographies these obituaries featured were filled out by Mayy Ziyāda's longer biographical and critical study published soon thereafter in al-Muqtataf. Nāsif was described as exemplary in personal conduct and literary and reformist energies alike, and, in a tactic we have already seen, contrasted implicitly with young women (magazine readers) of the present. Not only, said Young Woman of the East, was Nāsif “enamored from an early age with study and reading” and admired at school “as she was later the locus of respect among the entire nation.” Not only “did she energize every movement aiming to awaken and elevate woman.” In addition, “God have mercy upon her, she inclined to simplicity in dress.” The crescendo of features casts the praise that ends her obituary into something more than conventional eulogy, echoing the obituary of her contemporary, and sister writer, ‘‘Afīī;fa Karam. “She went to her Lord leaving behind fine deeds, traces, and literary remains that are suitable examples for girls and women to follow, a lamp whose beams should guide them.”^[50]

Illustrating exemplary qualities, Nāsif's life offered a commentary on less-than-exemplary behavior among those the journals hoped to shape. In her writings, said Young Woman of the East, Nāsif criticized women enamored of “frippery and adornment” (bahraja wa-zīna). The Egyptian Woman's Magazine exploited the opportunity afforded by Nāsif's example to pose a critique of existing schooling and its products. Describing her as a serious schoolteacher—“above girls' practices these days, which are open to criticism”—it criticized “English education” as leading to al-tafarnuj, “acting like Europeans,” the superficial imitation of European lifeways for which the local press scolded Egyptian youth of both sexes.

Exemplarity was to shape behavior; it also constructed a female collective, the guides and the guided, the mentors and the magazine readers. Maria Morgan's 1892 obituary opened with a declaration: “Mistresses of the pen have lost one of their own.” As this declaration celebrated the lineaments of individual achievement by the recently deceased, and as it drew on conventional contours of respectful obituary writing, the obituary summoned a community of women and an identity in formation in Egypt, “mistresses of the pen.” Biography also offered an opportunity to mention other accomplished women, linking biographer to subject, creating a sense of community. When Labīī;ba Hāshim wrote a biography of astronomer Elizabeth Flammarion, she remarked that some of her information had come from “letters she wrote to a friend of hers whom I got to know on board ship between Bordeaux and Rio de Janiero, prose writer and poet Margaret Brasillier. This woman related all she knew about the subject of the biography; very refined, she is one of those ladies whose likes are rare.”^[51] Exemplarity hovers among subject, source, and writer.

Taking Pride

Of Khadīja bt. al-Sultān Jalāl al-Dīn ‘‘Umar of Bengal (d. A.H. 770/1368 C.E.), Zaynab Fawwāz had advised: “Let women take pride in the likes of this queen, for she was ruler over almost two thousand islands,” her reign one of “justice and fairness” that her people grieved to see end.^[52] The compliment that a subject was a source of pride to her community, to her age, or—frequently in these biographies—to “the daughters of her kind” also constructed a sense of female community whether synchronic or diachronic, within a culture or across cultures. This might also link writer, subject, and audience, as it fulfilled the didactic function of signaling an exemplary subject. “A sufficient reason to glorify and take pride in her is that she was the first woman in the nation of the French to appear in the world of literature and publishing,” Young Woman of the East's 1912 biography of Christine de Pizan declared.

This evocation of female linkage through the emotion of “pride” and the implication that this is a factor, or should be one, in contemporary formations of subjectivity among women relies on a premodern linguistic conceit. The writer, muhadditha, and calligrapher Shuhda bt. Abīī; Nasr Ahmad b. al-Faraj b. ‘‘Umar al-Ibārīī; (d. A.H. 574/1178 C.E.) was called, in her time, “Fakhr al-nisā‘‘” (the pride of women).^[53] A biography of Zaynab (1827–85), daughter of Egypt's modern dynast Muhammad ‘‘Alīī;, calls this princess who was active in charity and concerned with politics “pride/glory of the girls of her time.”^[54] And the queen of Romania was “the pride of women and their proof against men [who doubted women's mental prowess].”^[55] The word fakhr and its derivatives combine notions of “pride” and “glory”; to judge by a life of Theresa of Bavaria, biographers were aware that to evoke a sense of gendered pride was to cue an exemplifying function. Constructing an aura of pride around the role of exemplar allowed this author to expand on the issue of women broaching the all-male bastions of higher learning, in this case the symbolic importance of women being accepted in the most elite associations. The subject's credentials are established first:

The honor and rank of royalty, the bloom of youth, and the augustness conferred by glory and luxury did not deter her from acquiring scholarly knowledge. For from an early age she submerged herself in reading and learning until she emerged as outstanding and won the literary fame for which she had hoped among Germany's scholars and notables. She then devoted herself to writing so that her knowledge would be paired with labor. . . .

And while recently the French have been vying to have women join higher academic organizations, Germany has gone ahead and implemented this proposition by accepting ladies of merit in scientific associations; the famous Metternich Scientific Association proceeded to inaugurate this project by accepting the aforementioned princess as an honorary member. This is the first time women have been accepted in the highest academic circles, and we congratulate the fair sex on the example of this princess who has garbed them in a pride that will not end and a glory that will not elapse.^[56]

An invocation of shared pride emerges from narrative fullness—the subject's life trajectory plotted as a series of actions that had led to renown, making her status as “Famous Woman” inevitable. Qualities shaping the emplotment frame the “pride” that signals exemplarity. “The exemplary deed is placed in the exemplary life; it is read as a momentary sign of the hero's virtue.”^[57]

These conventions were by no means absent in collections of men's biography. Syrian writer Ilyās Zakhūra's Mir’ءāt al-‘‘asr (1897) was one rich compilation. Often his sketches ended with pious hopes for a long, successful life and delineated a subject's sifāt (attributes); alternatively, they praised a life completed for its usefulness.^[58] Scattered throughout are biographies that end with the “multiplication” formula. ‘‘Uthmān Pasha Ghālib al-Akram was “a courageous hero and skillful administrator, of generous nature and mild temper, may God increase his likes and let him enjoy a long and upright life.”^[59] In this collection women appeared only within their husbands' biographies.^[60] About thirty years later, journalist Zakīī; Fahmīī; published a like volume, its title an echo of Zakhūra's, to cover his own generation (but beginning, like Zakhūra's, with biographies of khedives, sultans, and princes, past and present, from Muhammad ‘‘Alīī; Pasha on). All the subjects were male, but there was a difference that bespoke the new political temper: after the royals came Tutankhamen and then, after a digression on the Egyptian parliament, next in the time-politics hierarchy was nationalist leader Sa‘‘d Zaghlūl, who would die a few months after the book's publication. This work, too, drew on conventional marks of approbation.^[61] Such texts were among many that were shaping changing notions of masculinity. But rarely have I seen the consistent, pointed extension of formulaic usages as in biographies of women.^[62] And when biographies of prominent men appeared in women's magazines (less frequently, as a rule, than those of women), they were less likely to be framed by the rhetoric of exemplarity, though they did not lack laudatory diction. Nor did they further exploit the convention of “pride.” Biographies of women often asserted that a female either did or should take “pride in herself.” World traveler Jessie Ackerman “has the right to be proud of herself without fear of objections or adversaries, for she is the greatest woman who has circled the world, and she has done so six times.”^[63]

Indirect Exemplarity: The Qualities of a Good Woman

Amīī;n al-Rīī;hānīī;'s lyrical mental picture of Hypatia's clothing habits follows a long string of epithetic description. This “ornament among women” was also “chief of Platonic philosophy, friend to princes, fond of scholarship and scholars, guide to rulers, enemy of fanaticism and superstition.” Moreover, “This virtuous pagan was very beautiful, eloquent, strong of critique, apposite in her views, quick on her feet, noble in her qualities.”^[64]

Description of status takes on moral resonance: ‘‘iffa, the chaste state of “the virgin philosopher,” becomes a marker of the excellence of this paragon-though-a-pagan. To engrave the picture deeply, the author provides a contrasting vision via reference to another Greek Egyptian, Cleopatra VII (69–30 B.C.): “We have all heard of Cleopatra, the sly and debauched one; but who among us has heard of Hypatia, the scholarly and chaste virgin?” Assuming the mantle of antiexamplar, Cleopatra is Hypatia's rhetorical reverse.^[65] Scholarship and morality, twinned markers of exemplary womanhood, oppose Cleopatra's “sly and debauched” character.

If biography was to encourage girls and women to look beyond the home, and parents and husbands to look on approvingly, writers had to proceed circumspectly. If biographies of contemporary, publicly active women could echo not only the exemplarity of the Prophet's wives but also the venerable tradition of tabaqāt in Arabic letters, so much the better. When Fawwāz gathered together her Scattered Pearls in the early 1890s, she might have drawn on American and European compendia of women's biography, but, as we have seen, the Arabic tradition provided a more familiar (and unimpeachable) discursive and social model.^[66] Praiseful attributes and telling anecdotes had structured these premodern literary models; Fawwāz followed precedent, accenting certain qualities as positive and ordering attributes and epithets in hierarchies. Biographies in magazines summoned the same flood of adjectival excellence. For qualities that had made possible the acquisition of learning and literary skill produced exemplary models for the modern girl. ‘‘A’ءisha bt. ‘‘Alī b. Muhammad (d. A.H. 816/1413 C.E.), scholar and Hadith transmitter, “she of experience and knowledge, a fine calligrapher, vivid of heart, strong of memory, quick to memorize,” was also “sublime of attributes, gentle of heart, sharp of mind and fine of merits.”^[67] The pre-Islamic poet al-Du‘‘ajā’ء bt. al-Muntashir b. Wahb was “an eloquent poet, august in her imagery, strong in her rhymes,”^[68] and she was not alone. Many are the women “famous for fadl [virtue, excellence] and perfection” (such as Nitocris), “celebrated for virtue and knowledge” (such as Clémence Royer),^[69] or “beautiful of nature and aspect” (Alexandra of England, poets Mufaddala bt. ‘‘Arfaja al-Fazārī and Safiyya bt. Musāfir, Abbasid jāriya and spouse of al-Mutawakkil Sha‘‘ānīn, Fatimid royal consort and ruler Sitt al-Mulk bt. al-‘‘Azīz, ‘‘Amra bt. al-Nu‘‘mān al-Bashīr, Marie de Sévigné, ‘‘A‘‘ida, daughter of the Ethiopian monarch Amūn Sīrū, journalist Salīma Abū Rāshid).^[70] Turkān Khātūn (d. A.H. 487/1094 C.E.), consort to the Sultan Malikshāh and partner in rule, covered the ground of superlatives well: “She was famed for strength of mind and abundance of determination; she was distinguished for wisdom, good management, high aspiration, courage, and magnanimity.” Italian polymath Maria Agnesi (1718–99) was “an amazing model and great rarity [qudwa ‘‘ajība wa nādira gharība], one of probity [‘‘afāf], refinement [adab], simplicity and sincere fidelity.” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762)—sounding biographically like a premodern Arab poet—“was famous for liveliness of mind, vividness of heart, beauty of aspect, and perfection of morals. Of fine learning, she was unique among her peers in knowledge and virtues.” A biographer of Charlotte Corday put a traditional set of attributes into a rather untraditional context: “Those who saw her under the executioner's knife said she was pretty of countenance, attractive of features, delicate of stature, her gaze intimating courage and fidelity.”^[71] Hatshepsut, providing an “experiential lesson” and a “little sermon” for readers in 1913, offered a convergence of stellar qualities. Dahā‘‘, cunning or shrewdness, often uncomplimentary when labeling females, is positive here: “With Hatshepsut, leadership meets laudable shrewdness, political savvy embraces tact, bold initiative shakes hands with rare intelligence. . . . Greetings to the daughter of Tutmose I, heir to his sterling qualities.”^[72]

As I noted with regard to Fawwāz, translation cannot do justice to the constellation of qualities each label conveys. Yet the semantic field is suggested in the qualities that—through more than half a century of top billing: intelligence, wisdom, courage and boldness, determination, good judgment, eloquence, high ambition, modesty, charity, and loyalty. If premodern dictionaries had ascribed these to eminent women, for twentieth-century compilers they could embody different resonances. In fact, such epithets paralleled qualities nationalist writers had been urging as crucial to the nation's future in the aftermath of the British occupation. In an early issue of al-Mu’ءayyad, a writer urged his readers: “How pressing is our need for the merits of initiative [iqdām], firmness [thabāt], patience [sabr], application [or assiduousness: muzāwala], sincerity in work and active endeavor as we strive, and care to preserve general benefit so that the nation [al-watan] will grow prosperous through us and we through it, to emerge triumphant in this race in which only the alert come through with flying colors.”^[73] The gendered application of epithets in women's biographies echoed a society-wide plea, while often instructing women how to acquire, reveal, or apply those qualities. Their examples were to produce results firmly within Egypt's twentieth-century economic and political trajectory. For, as is true of notations of exemplarity, epithetic portraits could take on marked resonances. If writers wanted to convince parents that a singing career was respectable, they could gesture to local history: the moralizing ring of attributes sounds through a life of Ummayyad-period singer Jamīī;la al-Sulamiyya (d. A.H. 125/742 C.E.), who was “as famous for probity, keeping protected [from immoral conduct], purity, sedate dignity, and the arts of refinement [ādāb] as she was for singing.”^[74]

Even biographies of contemporary women published late in this period took up the traditional listing of attributes, amplified according to agendas of indigenous modernity. Theodora Haddād (d. 1889), daughter of a Tripoli (Lebanon) family eminent in its intellectual pursuits, was “known for intelligence of mind, mildness of temper, agreeableness of character, nobleness of nature, and strength of memory. And I remember”—said her niece, quoted in 1934—“her brilliance of mind and how she would relate line after line from Ibn ‘‘Aqīl.” Theodora loved algebra, engineering, and plant biology; she regretted the absence of a zoological park in her homeland. She published essays on “the importance of women's status and her influence in society. One proof she used was to say that most great men had inherited their talents from their mothers,” such as Henri IV, “son of that fine woman of august mind, Anne of Navarre [sic].”^[75] When Jurjī Bāz wrote a biography of Syrian writer Māry ‘‘Ajamī (1888–1965) to celebrate the twenty-fifth year of her literary career, he did not stop at the cliched expression “she unites art and utility” but gave it contemporary content, describing ‘‘Ajamī's methods of research and writing. “She writes out [every] speech and delivers it before her sisters, observing the extent of its impact on them so as to correct what seems weak.” Furthermore, and not to be overlooked, “She likes simplicity in her way of life, and is self-denying, free in her thinking, frank in her speaking, bold and dedicated. For twenty-five years she has toiled up the path of literature. What a priority it is for me to write her biography, and for Fatāt al-sharq to publish it.”^[76]Combining a traditional epithetic opening with an unconventional life was ‘‘Isā al-Ma‘‘lūf's description of Salmā Qusātilī (1870–1917): “She was a skilled writer and proficient physician, beautiful of demeanor, incisive of mind, eloquent of tongue, strong of memory.” An unmarried twenty-year-old, she joined her brother in Alexandria and pursued her writing. She taught in a Damascus girls' school, studied medicine in Beirut and Cairo, and became a known gynecologist and writer who moved between Egypt and al-Shām. “This energetic young woman spent her life a virgin, standing on her own two feet to serve literature and the girls of her kind in Egypt. She was famed for self-reliance and individual effort, until she died, a foreigner in Cairo. God have mercy on her and compensate her brother Nu‘‘mān Effendi, who had the preponderant role in her training and education.”^[77]

Laudatory attributes that one would expect to find in an obituary take on substance when the story of a life newly over fills them out. Jessie Hogue (1866–1905), born in Egypt to Scottish missionary parents, was “the learned, active, devout, virtuous lady” who had just died in childbirth in Alexandria when the Ladies' and Girls' Revue published its 1905 tribute. At college in Edinburgh, she was “a paragon of sweet pleasantness, delicacy and application [lutf, riqqa, ijtihād] among her peers,” taking prizes that proved “her skill, progress, and excellent comportment.” After returning to Egypt as a missionary, she was appointed to coadminister the girls' school in Asyut, for “five years in which she spared no energy,” and then for eleven years ran the girls' high school, “raising excellent ladies.”^[78] An obituarybiography of Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) calls her “sharp of intelligence, pure of mind, beautiful of self” and praises her work on education and the many articles she wrote for the cause of emancipation. Summarized from the American Arabic-language periodical al-Hudā,^[79] this text may have come from the pen of ‘‘Afīfa Karam, founder-editor and herself twice a bio-graphical subject in Young Woman of the East—in 1908 when still at the start of her career (“she began her life of the pen in 1903”), as quoted earlier, and then, tragically, less than two decades later, as Labība Hāshim penned her obituary: “Adornment of women's literature in the New World, pride of Eastern ladies, she adorned the newpapers with the pearls of her words, and with a necklace of expressions in women's defense she girded the throat of woman.” For the periodical al-Hudā was “a sword she brandished against traditions, awaking her countrywomen from the lethargy of inaction and ignorance. She walked before them, bearing the banner of literary freedom: 'woman is the foundation of the nation's ascent.'”^[80]

Sometimes a string of attributes that opens a biography in a traditional manner is repeated and its effect strengthened within the context of an anecdote that portrays the subject's personality, a feature of premodern Arabic biography, as we saw in chapter 1. Al-Jumāna bt. Qays b. Zuhayr al-‘‘Absīī;, pre-Islamic Arab poet, prose writer, and learned individual, “was among the most distinguished women of the Arab [Bedouin] in adab [conduct and literature] and morals; she was wise, widely knowledgeable, eloquent in speech, refined in her expressions, well-grounded in her impressions.” The biography relates a conflict between her father and grandfather that Jumāna defused “with her wisdom and determination.”^[81]

Of course these epithets and attributes are all the more resonant as they convey a semantic field of meaning. Possibly the best example of this for both its complexity and its ubiquity is that of fadl and its female adjectival form, fādila, as well as the related noun form fadīla (virtue, good quality). With the significance of “adding excess,” the root word also connoted “preference” and came to signify “first,” “best,” and any sort of superlative quality. More specifically, it connoted virtue. In these biographies “virtue” is moral goodness, superiority, refinement, meritoriousness, graciousness. An attribute of compliment—many a “fine lady” (sayyida fādila) herein—it becomes more than flattery as the biography fills out the substance of eminence and compliment.

The shifting use of signifiers as attributes and epithets is wonderfully evident in the adjective hurra. It labeled the free (hurra) women of the early Islamic community to distinguish them from captive women brought into the community, and it took on the related meaning of “respectable.” Yet in a context where the women's press talked of hurriyyat al-mar’ءa, “the freedom of women,” and of hurriyyat al-fikr wa-al-ra’ءy, “freedom of thought and opinion,” the adjectival form captured more than one resonance. If de Sévigné “lived honorable, virtuous, noble of morals, upright and hurra,” did hurra signify “respectable” or “free”?^[82]

Perhaps the single most common word in these biographies is adab. Texts exploited the term's range of meanings. In fact, it was probably convenient to maintain ambiguity between “refinement” and “good comportment” or “good manners” and “literature” when writing women were seeking to increase their numbers but in a nonthreatening manner. The reiterated pair of adab wa-jamāl, straight out of premodern biographies, had multiple import for modern women.

Breadth and height and brilliance and glory, of mind, heart, will, and tongue: such is the preponderance of these adjectival strings. “Foresight” links Fayrūz bt. ‘‘Alā’ء al-Dīī;n to ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Muhammad; “judiciousness” binds them both to Sitt al-Mulk, Habūs al-Shihābīī;, Sarojini Naidu, and Kanza Umm Shamla. “Courage and boldness” unite Jeanne d'Arc, Laylā bt. Tarīī;f, Bakkāra al-Hilāliyya, Agnes Weston, ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; ‘‘Abdallāh, Lady Baker, Alexandra Avierino, Hannā Kūrānīī;, Mary Kingsley, and Hind bt. Zayd. And “strength of will” pairs Hatshepsut with Charlotte Corday, Finnish scholar-journalist Mieke Freyburg, ‘‘Atiyyāt “the Copt,” and Haylāna ‘‘Abd al-Malik, a coreligionist of a much later generation.

The exemplary function of attributes was nothing new; Stowasser notes it for women who appear in the Qur’ءān:

Even the most literalist interpreters past and present . . . have also recognized the symbolic dimension of the Qur‘‘anic message on the women figures of the sacred past. It is the Qur‘‘an itself that establishes some of the 21 women as “examples” . . . of sin and righteousness, weakness and strength, vice and virtue. In the female protagonists, sin is exemplified as rebellion against God, unbelief, and also disobedience toward the husband if he be righteous. Virtue is faith to the point of martyrdom, obedience to God, “purity,” and obedience to the husband if he be righteous; it is also modesty, bashfulness, and motherly love.^[83]

But for the journals as for Fawwāz, “virtue” was cast more widely, while, like Stowasser's reading of the rhetoric of the exemplary female, magazine biographies yoked attributes to expected social roles. Attributes signaled excellence by naming qualities said to attract men to “Famous Women” as marriage partners—a pointed comment on changing marriage practices in turn-of-the-century Egypt and on the discursive environment that helped to shape them. Obedience, however, was not at the top of these lists.^[84]Napoleon II was attracted to Eugénie's (1826–1920) “sweetness of speech and rare intelligence”; “she shared with him in administering the law and studied ministers' decisions. . . . During her time on the throne she demonstrated firm will, determination to follow through, and foresight that her enemies acknowledged even before her friends could do so.” Bonaparte loved Josephine (1763–1814) for her “rare good qualities and fine virtues.” The letters she wrote to him after their divorce demonstrate her “delicacy of feeling, nobleness of morals, and breadth of culture.” What cements a marriage? The Sultan Malikshāh “saw in [Turkān] political skill and sound views that attached him to her ever more strongly and intensified his respect for her ideals.” Jahangir, Mughal ruler of India, was “captivated” by Nūr Jahān's (1571–1646) wisdom and good guidance, “so he handed over the reins of power and she became 'the one who commands and prohibits' the people, directing the rudder of politics on the straightest of courses.”^[85] These texts were becoming available to schoolgirls as companionate marriage, based on respect and affection between partners, was becoming an established elite ideal in Egypt.

Vying with the Men

Biographers deployed attributes according to gendered preconceptions, too, simultaneously accepting and challenging gender stereotypes. Isabella I of Spain (1451–1504) “combined men's rational intelligence with women's fine qualities. She was distinguished by probity and piety, and the beauty of her countenance was matched by the goodness of her disposition. She was the color of pale wheat, her eyes were blue and her hair blond. She was tall, and as famous for her gentleness and gracefulness as she was for strength of will and sincerity of resolution.”^[86]

Comparisons of other sorts contributed to an implicit exemplarity. Female subjects “vied with the men in all their accomplishments”^[87] and “surpassed male peers.”^[88] Aspasia of Miletos (fl. fifth century B.C.x) “did things the strongest of men could not do. . . . There thronged to her door scholars, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and men of eloquence.”^[89] The “Famous Women” frequently have men “thronging” to their doors, drawn as much (suggest the texts) by brilliance as by beauty, perhaps indicative of how biographies that constructed exemplary women were also helping to shape notions of a new masculinity appropriate to nationalist ambitions. Similar is the claim that men listen to, and learn from, these women, that it is their knowledge above all that constitutes their authority. ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr, “most eloquent of the folk of her age,” was one: “Having memorized more than anyone else the Hadith and Qur’ءān, . . . the hearts of the men were in accord about obeying her and responding to her call.” Jamīī;la al-Sulamiyya taught male singers, and to her they attributed their skill.^[90]

To compare across genders, of course, was to invite stereotyping. George Sand “for her entire writing life took a name characteristic of men as her own emblem. Even so, you would not be able to distinguish her from them [i.e., men] in self-possession and composure, evenness of emotion, loftiness of thought, and towering strength of judgment.” Defined according to characteristics gendered as “male,” Sand stands above other French female writers grammatically as she is situated against them through the deployment of superlatives. Yet the text hastens to distance Sand from suspect motives for her “masculine” preferences. Thus it confirms the social context in which she lived and wrote as one difficult for independent women. “The reader should not assume that her adoption of this male name signified any sort of weakness on her part, or that she was [unfairly] shielding herself against the violent attack and disparagement of an age that took no heed of women or their writings, or that she wrote what a woman's pen would be abashed to inscribe.”^[91] Then the text invokes her as model.^[92]

French journalist Caroline Guebhard, “Madame Sévèrine” (1855–1929), refused a government post with the reasoning that she was “still a woman.” The magazine explains: “By that she meant she was sensitive and gentle, not finding a position agreeable at a time when people were being oppressed.” She chose to “serve her nation” from outside the government.^[93] Qualities called “female” thus take on political meaning and efficacy, although simultaneously they reify gender distinctions. Biographies also perform this reification by generalizing about “female” qualities and motives. Women write “from sentiment,” claim biographies of English writer Ellen Thorncroft and French writer Myriam Harry. In the first case this is posed as a compliment; in the second, as critique, as the biographer finds fault with Harry's writings on Arab society. Another strategy of reification is to assert that a subject “transcends” female qualities. De Sévigné “was a woman but she held fast and strong to the scepter of literature.”^[94]This can afford an opportunity to criticize local belief. If men established the foundations of scientific study, comments a biography of Maria Agnesi, women participated, too, “and reached a level the sons of the East can scarcely believe.” Agnesi is remembered “as the greatest of men are.”^[95]

Furthermore, a few biographies insist that a woman's fame is not the result of her being an exceptional woman but rather because of qualities that transcend or blur gender boundaries. ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; ‘‘Abdallāh al-Aysar's fame was not solely the result of her being “a princess or woman sharing in rule, but rather because of her strong personality and lofty example, her sublime spirit and brave heart as she faced each danger.” In pointing this out the biographer hazards the danger of solidifying boundaries by highlighting their existence. He relies on gendered labels as he lauds her further. “The brave princess was able to escape from prison through her initiative, boldness, and [the sort of] courage that creates heroes from men.”^[96] As male approval becomes a signifier of female greatness, commercial success and economic power draw male applause. Scholars and writers crowded around “the famous Mrs. Frank Leslie” (1828–1914; we never learn her given name) after her businessman husband's death propelled her into the publishing business. “She left them gazing at her reverently as she sat with the great men of business on their knees before her.” She was “the epitome of initiative, the example of seriousness who made the great look small.”^[97]

The comparison to men is by no means exclusively a modern biographical phenomenon. It occurs in transmitted anecdotes about ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr, al-Khansā‘‘ and, says Roded, Umm al-‘‘Izz Nudar bt. Ahmad (A.H. 702/1302 C.E.–A.H. 730/1329 C.E.), more pious and knowledgeable in the law than most men,^[98] who does not appear in extant issues of any magazine. Yet the repetition of this motif in magazines—its insertion into general statements of women's equality to men in intellect, energy, and articulative ability—carried a specific message historicized by its publication context. To emphasize women's worth being proven through male admiration or successful competition with male peers is double-edged to say the least. A deeply patriarchal notion, it yet offers vicarious self-validation, as Janice Radway and Rachel Brownstein suggest in their otherwise very different studies of how female readers and female heroes interact.^[99] If it might reify the gendered isolation of certain qualities as “male” or “fe-male” by reinscribing them in gendered categories, a strategy of comparison could also question the categories.

Thus, lives of eminent women as inscribed by Zaynab Fawwāz and by editors in the early women's press followed medieval biographical dictionaries in emphasizing received notions of women's “proper” attributes. Yet it was easy to find in the traditional sources attributes that could strengthen women's sense of self and lead them on to new paths. To repeat endlessly—and therefore to attempt to normalize—such attributes as “bold initiative” and “eloquence” in new discursive contexts was to work toward legitimizing new subjectivities by taking up the terms of the old. It was a reverse discourse that could be both expansive and constricting. Repeating these attributes and linking them to the idea of comportment and moral strength furthered the notion of imitation that the rhetoric of exemplarity implied as its goal. New and old mingled, for if these qualities were to be inculcated and exercised in new contexts, they were not to diminish old and familiar virtues, however unstable the correspondence between virtue and action might be. As Hampton comments, “The question of exemplarity involves the way in which texts are public artifacts, documents designed to affect the public sphere. As such, their depictions of the relationship between models of action from the past and readers in the present are inevitably marked by transformations in the public space addressed.”^[100] Those who would fix a canon of exemplary qualities by constructing a canon of exemplary women had to respond to definitions of contemporary gendered space that were contested in public discourse.

Exemplary Precedents

It is rare that the prophet Muhammad's wives and female descendants, invoked so frequently now as models for women, are labeled explicitly as exemplary in these journals. This is true of magazines edited by Muslims as well as those with Christian editors, with the consistent exception of the male-edited Woman in Islam. One is tempted to attribute this relative silence on the exemplificatory usefulness of “Mothers of the Believers” and their descendants to the often greater conservatism of diction in biographies of early Muslim women in the press; for, as I have suggested, many appear to have been taken more or less word for word from premodern sources that did not so pointedly indicate the exemplary potential of celebrated women. Yet writers do not hesitate to construct explicit exemplars from the life narratives of other premodern Arab and/or Muslim women. Either it was assumed by writers that women of the Prophet's family would be regarded by female readers as role models, or these figures were not seen consistently by writers as particularly privileged exemplars.

One biography in the Islamic-identified journal Magazine of the Women's Awakening did claim ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr explicitly for “today's” women. But as it relies on traditional epithets, this 1928 biography sketches a portrait of the companionate marriage that women's magazines and nationalist ideologues were championing from the turn of the century on in Egypt.^[101] Not alluding to the historical conflicts Spellberg has traced over how ‘‘A‘‘isha's life narrative should be told, it adheres to the hagiographic positivity that marks exemplary biography, commenting merely that ‘‘A’ءisha left “everlasting memory and a good reputation.” It voices a hope in religiously echoing diction: “I beg God that our Muslim women will be willing to act according to her life story and to follow her way.” “Life story” here is sīra rather than tarjama, presumably echoing sīrat al-nabī, the biography of the prophet Muhammad, and “way” is sunna, akin to the Sunna, or exemplary path, of Muhammad that Muslims are to follow. Transferring these notions from the life of the Prophet to a female domain places emphasis on the role model aspect. Is it by chance that the writer, ‘‘Alīī; Fikrīī;, author of books on girls' curriculum and female comportment, dwells almost solely on ‘‘A’ءisha as spouse in the growing conservatism of the late 1920s?^[102]

Writing a quarter century earlier, the biographer of ‘‘A’ءisha in Woman in Islam, with a target audience of men rather than women, had not shied away from her political role or controversies surrounding her. “The hearts of the men were in accord in obeying her and responding to her call. . . . She stirred up the umma.” She is presented as a vocal and politically active individual to whom all listen, “loud of voice, eloquent of speech, and sound in her logic.” What “lesson” does the magazine provide? “No woman has been as famous in Islam as ‘‘A‘‘isha. Most beloved wife of the prophet, she was the paragon of wives who fulfill what is due in marriage to their husbands.” But she also “led the army and undertook the acts of heroes in war, and traditions were related from her. Thus may women be chaste, eloquent, brave and honorable, learned, and active in the demands of the world and the hereafter.” Exemplary as a “wife,” ‘‘A’ءisha is narrated here also through events that privilege other roles and qualities.^[103] The subtly divergent emphases of these two texts are explicable in each one's immediate publication context and historical moment (a male, turn-of-the-century nationalist agenda seeking differentiation from conservatives and Westernizers, versus a quasi-maternalist agenda and time in which women's rights advocates had become defensive). Through biographies of women around the Prophet, the earlier journal stressed women's abilities as equal to—significantly, as sometimes identical to—men's in the spheres of trade and religious learning.^[104] Such emphases distanced Ramzīī;'s journal from the work of two other male writers on the woman question, Muhammad Tal‘‘at Harb, insistent that women stay home, and Qāsim Amīī;n, gazing West.^[105]

Early Muslim role models were infinitely useful: as they drew on, and away from, premodern biographical inscription, magazine editors celebrated the same subjects medieval compilers had selected, even if with relatively less attention to the Prophet's wives. If “Western” or “modern” lives, local or not, were useful to interrogate shifting possibilities in women's lives, precedents closer to home and rooted in a familiar history that could invoke associations of cultural pride and community strength might make it harder to argue against “new” lives. When controversy erupted in 1911–13 over women leaving their homes to go to lectures organized for them at the Egyptian University, and then over the presence of women's names on the envelopes that bore invitations to further lectures—for then the mail carrier could see those names, traditionally off limits to all but related males—women and their male supporters argued from history, noting that early Muslim women had gone to public meetings.^[106] Biographies constructed these irreproachable sources as not denying extradomestic endeavor to Muslim women. Indigenous precedent created a multiply useful exemplarity. Representing new pursuits as rooted in one's own history, they distanced the imperialist West as model and thereby formed a resistance to its incipient cultural and more than incipient political hegemony.

Thus, constructions of Muslim women's lives (Arab or not) were said repeatedly to disprove popular but erroneous notions of Islamic doctrinal deterrents to women's expanded lives, echoing the arguments of Islamic modernists in the mainstream press. Such images were framed by the modernist claim that many practices labeled “Islamic” were traditionalist accretions not dictated by Islamic law. Khawla bt. al-Azwar rode into battle to save her brother. If this justification could be glossed as a “feminine” aim, the text claimed that her life story “shows that Islamic civilization is not against women's advancement, nor does it bar her from sharing worldly affairs with men.”^[107] Even when a text portrays a Muslim woman as aberrant—outside norms defining most women's lived experience and expectations—the very denial that her life enacted a redefinition of limits could open those limits to question. The life narrative itself becomes a hujja, at once proof and argument, that stands as an example of female possibility. Profiling the reigning Begum of Bhopal in 1916, The Gentle Sex called Bhopal “the world's only state to be ruled solely by women, even though it is a Muslim state, holding to the religious law that—according to what is said—does not in any circumstance entrust rule to a woman. This is the highest proof of the talents distinguishing this woman, through which she has been able to triumph over her subjects' beliefs in this regard.”^[108] In general and in specific ways (getting inoculated!), the Begum had offered a fine model to her subjects. Having presented the broader implications of her public persona, the writer makes explicit the didactic possibilities:

Many imagine that if a woman accedes to rule she cannot possibly handle it well or be a successful administrator. . . . Fortunately events contradict and invalidate such a fantasy. Thus women demanding women's rights can truly demolish the argument of their opponents who deny women's capability and fitness to manage the business of rulers, by pointing out the Indian [state of] Bhopal, where most recently three women have ruled in succession. It has become the best Indian state in terms of organization and security, raising the level of civilization, and progress in science and knowledge. The credit for this astonishing advance goes to the ability and concern of the three women who have ruled it from 1844 to this day.

Yet the text ends: “Her Majesty, like all other Muslim women, avoids sitting with [unrelated] men, preferring to remain apart in her palace.”^[109] As they probe, the biographies also reassure.

As we have seen, if Arab and Muslim histories provided local precedents, so did Egyptian history, particularly in the 1920s when British heavy-handedness, maturing nationalist formulations of identity, and archaeological finds combined to spark intense public interest in ancient Egypt. Not surprisingly, the Egyptian Woman's Magazine, with its determinedly Egyptian perspective and Coptic editorship, profiled the female rulers of ancient Egypt more often and at greater length than did any other journal.^[110] As exemplars, though, these figures could be problematic for writers, especially for one male writer who employed the figure of Hatshepsut, offering a dramatic rendering of her life but then demolishing her as a female role model. “There is no clearer proof of her astonishing supremacy and extreme cleverness than her ability to prevail over [Thutmose III]. . . . Had he been merely a man, that would be proof enough. But he was a powerful tyrant!” From this stance the writer injects biography into contemporary gender debate, taking issue with those who say Hatshepsut was strong because she had strong partisans, and linking her strength and ambition to “love of her patrie,” as well as to personal attributes of self-love, strength of will, determination and courage. But there is more. “Every attempt to find a justification for why she prevailed over him . . . other than her amazing ability is futile. . . . That this woman sat on the throne of pharaohs hinged on the strength of her intelligence and mental agility.”^[111] This historical argument launches the writer straight into debates on gender and “Westernization” in 1926, as women's increased political and professional demands were making some nervous and as the early sheen of pharaonist nationalism was fading under the pressure of disillusioning politics. Having enumerated Hatshepsut's qualities, the writer worries about those who might take her as a model:

I believe I have said all I have the energy to say about that great queen from the perspective of history. I will not offend if I end my commentary to you, reader [masc.], with a question. Do you see anything to stand in the way of calling her “queen of modern events,” now that you have learned she was the first woman to wear the garb of men?? And when this is an issue reintroduced among lovelies of the West today? And [since she was] first to make herself equal, in reality, to the greatest men?! Which women of the world today are demanding. And [since she was] first to call herself by men's names?! Which thus far no female has gone so far as to do. And [since she was] first to don a fake beard? Which we have not heard of a single female doing.
She was also first to abase her husband—among those women of whom history has spoken—which is very widespread among wives now. Personally, I think she deserves this appellation, but I have no power over the beliefs of the readers [masc.], nor do I know to what extent the gentle sex might resent her for having attempted to transgress the natural binding restrictions of her sex, the most monumental of things that woman guards carefully. Nor do I want to state openly what the strong sex feels toward the likes of Queen Hatshepsut. . . . For I am not prepared to brook attacks from those fiery women [al-thā‘‘irāt]. All I can say openly without fearing the consequences is that if she would not concern herself with being like men then without a doubt she would garner great sympathy and approval from both sexes, her own gentle sex because she has raised its status and proven its buried intelligence and wondrous capability, and the strong sex because they view woman as a true paragon when she achieves superiority in a certain sphere.
In short, no one alive can evade [Hatshepsut's] femaleness despite her “beard” and her attempt to escape this label . . . this lovely label.
Hatshepsut continued to rule the Nile Valley with supreme wisdom and zeal, and in her hands the country achieved wealth and prosperity. She died regretted by her people, for they worshiped her and esteemed her abilities. . . . The truth is that she remains [alive], as long as a single living soul repeats her name, linking it to phrases of glory and greatness.^[112]

Acknowledging Hatshepsut's greatness, the writer cannot accept her as paragon. Would female readers have agreed? The concept of exemplarity is elusive in profiles of Nitocris and Hatshepsut, yet it hovers. Like the resuscitation of Muslim ancestors, exemplarity here is contextualized according to the availability of indigenous models. Not only does these rulers' status as constructed in these texts elicit commentary on the shape of a much later politics of gender in Egypt, and on the societal context in which later generations have matured on the banks of the Nile; but also their very presence is telling when set against the loud absence of a more famous “ancestor,” Cleopatra, who appears rarely as biographical subject,^[113] and, as we have seen, becomes an antiexemplar when al-Rīī;hānīī; deploys her image to highlight by contrast the exemplary life (and apparel) of Hypatia. The mere name of “Cleopatra” stands in for a constellation of qualities that are the opposite of exemplary. Yet a later writer would be able to vaguely domesticize even Cleopatra, as Europeans had long done, too.^[114] And Ahmad Shawqīī;'s 1929 play The Violent Death of Cleopatra presented her as an Egyptian nationalist.^[115] But it was not an image picked up by women's magazines; perhaps Jeanne d'Arc was a more reassuring figure.

Drawing Conclusions

Zenobia of Palmyra was “exemplary in her political acumen. . . . She bequeathed glory and might to her community, and to all women. . . . She was a laudable exemplar, . . . and those prejudiced toward men ought to study history.”^[116] Zenobia's biography, like Hatshepsut's, yokes exemplarity to a general declaration about history's relevance to contemporary gender politics. Often these texts signal how biography is to be read by generalizing from the life history, usually as either an introduction or a conclusion to the biography “proper.” Far more than in Scattered Pearls, biographies in women's magazines draw generalizing conclusions from life narratives to offer a pointed comment on gender politics of the day, thereby exploiting the exemplary framework to its fullest. One of the fiercest users of biography for exemplifying purposes was Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, whose biographical series “The Sun of History” in the Magazine of the Women's Awakening consistently drew exemplary lessons from historical profiles. He praised Catherine II (1729–96) for “following in the footsteps of her forebear Peter the Great in conquest and reform”—but especially by founding girls' schools through which she “gave life to the women's awakening in Russia which had been throttled in its youth.” Asked Yūnus:

After such models, will the men's party raise their voices and announce to women the death of their [fem.] awakening, and reject movement along paths of advancement? . . . The man who strives to weaken woman is working actively to abase the situation of his own mother, sister, daughter, and wife. Who can possibly be of harder heart, of rougher feeling, than one who cuts off his own roots and lops off his branches? I do not believe anything will remain of those rigid folks after this day.^[117]

Usually more positively than in the case of Hatshepsut, local precedents were important to make strong cases, as in a 1928 biography of Sukayna bt. al-Husayn: “The history of the Arabs after Islam's founding is adorned with the profuse and glorious deeds of women, demonstrating that the gentle sex has the aptitude for refinement and independence in every era, if education for women is available and if they receive a sound and proper upbringing, and all channels appropriate to the time are established—and if they are not tyrannized by the strong sex.” Sukayna, thus, “was brought up according to the requisites of her time, and learned the knowledges of her people, and grew up loving knowledge and literature.”^[118] Historical comparisons serve a hortatory function in the context of the rhetoric of exemplarity by pointing out a “golden age” when women were active and, explicitly or implicitly, contrasting that with a later time while reminding readers of the local precedent. “The women of the Bedouin were distinguished by extreme loyalty, just as they combined adab [in both senses], courage, and knowledge.” Thus opens a biography of poet Latīfa al-Haddāniyya, an orphan whose paternal uncle “raised her on the finest exemplary pattern of good morals and the best traits.”^[119] The term jāhiliyya (period of ignorance), signifying pre-Islamic society, takes on ironic resonance:

The Arab woman in her jāhiliyya often preceded men into battle. . . . If they were not fighters, they were healers, or they spurred [the men] on, or carried water or bound wounds. Thus they witnessed the events and mingled in the ranks of warriors, saw the dead and wounded, shared the pride of the victorious . . . and scorned and mocked the cowardly and weak. More than a few of these situations influenced women's morals after Islam's arrival, and we still read of those women of courage and valor from that age. If this causes today's lady a delighted amazement, in that day it was not particularly astonishing.

The comparison becomes more explicit in this post–World War I context: “Asmā’ء [bt. Yazīī;d] treated the wounded. . . . We know that what the ladies of our time, the age of the Twentieth, did in the last general war was preceded by Umm Salama [Asmā’ء] and her likes, thirteen hundred years and some before the world knew the Red Cross and Red Crescent!”^[120]

Such assertions underline the didactic and political deployment of female biography. People today call the past a dark age, comments a profile of Abbasid-period poet Umm al-Sharīf. Yet if one scrutinizes the past's eminent individuals, one sees that—men and women—they worked for “country and children.” Not like today, when men spend their time in the bars and women theirs in the shops. No indeed! The reigning caliph respected Umm al-Sharīf and sought her political advice. “Here is the judiciousness of women's views, and their strength of will and ability in the past.”^[121] The life of Sukayna quoted previously contextualizes her by asserting that “many from the history of the Arabs excelled in science, literature, and general merit, equivalent to women of the West, so advanced in this era. And they attained influence.” Perhaps it is no accident that Sukayna begins to sound like a contemporary salon hostess: “She opened the doors of her home to poets, litterateurs, and legists, and made it a nādī for reciting and judging poetry, exchanging opinions and ideas, and investigating topics crucial to her countrymen.”^[122]

The Poet's Platform

Poet Warda al-Yāzijīī;—who is called “the best model for the excellent and learned Eastern woman” in an obituary-biography that celebrated her eighty-seven years^[123]—used the “Famous Women” column of Young Woman of the East to expound on these points and simultaneously to launch a critique of contemporary society. This is worth quoting at length, for it encapsulates strategies presented in this chapter and themes that will resurface. Appropriating the magazine's “Famous Women” column for a collective article on five medieval Arab Muslim poets of Andalusia, alYāzijīī; used biography not only to present women's writing but also as a polemical platform for her most extensive published comment on her society's gender politics. “In Andalus a number of female poets were famous,” she starts. “They were competitive with the men.”^[124]

Al-Yāzijīī; spends little time on the poets' lineages or other traditional concerns. Like Fawwāz in Scattered Pearls, she focuses on the women themselves. But the second half of her essay leaves these individual women behind to construct an argument for their contemporary exemplarity. She begins with a notation of plenitude, a common rhetorical tactic among writers of female biography in these journals. “The reader of history and biography, especially the history of Andalusia, finds among the women mentioned poets and writers . . . so numerous one cannot do justice to them in such an essay. I have chosen passages . . . that show women's penchant in those eras for the literary arts. . . . Intelligence and talent so adorned their natures that they were hardly below the level of men.”^[125]

This comparison launches another, an intragender one, that provokes as it describes:

Undoubtedly, if the women of our time would occupy themselves with literary and intellectual matters they could compensate for how they have lived; for their lives are spent in pursuing what is useless, adorning their persons, and imitating senselessly. [Had they done otherwise,] geniuses would have appeared by now, achieving renown and glory, their names inscribed eternally on the pages of time. For women of that age had neither better minds nor broader milieux than do those of today—if we truly wished to follow in their footsteps.^[126]

But this is not the only point al-Yāzijīī; wants to make, even if she has to advance some exaggerated claims, romanticizing the jāhiliyya to didactic purpose:

Yet we do not absolve men. For when a woman observes her father, brothers, and all other men to whom she is connected and among whom she lives, in possession of literary refinement and knowledge, she wants to tread their path. . . . The most proximate testimony we have for this is the [Arab] women of the jāhiliyya. Despite the lack of schools, despite the absence of formal education, and despite the illiteracy (with rare exceptions) of their men, most of these women were eloquent indeed. Among them were poets too numerous to count, and orators perhaps, and those whose manner of speaking would baffle our era's most fluent litterateurs. And the reason is simple. Wherever they went they heard only poetry and fine speech, as is well known of those who lived in tents and tended animals.
The men of our time, however, pay scarce attention to literary and intellectual concerns and rarely take interest in anything but luxury, amusement, property acquisition, and frippery. The educated ones go no further than the women we have already described. They learn a European language and spend their time reading novels, which by and large corrupt morals and manners. Moreover, as has been said, they resemble the European foreigners in every particular; no trace remains of national identity [al-wataniyya]. Our homes, clothing, social gatherings and conversations are all European, yet we are remote from the Europeans' sciences, manufacturing, and other positive achievements. It is as if we had [decided to be] content with the mere shell of resemblance. If only, with all of this, we could resemble those among them who are great, who are noble, in morals and conduct! A visit to one of their honorable families for purposes of appraisal would show them as they truly are; as quite the opposite of those appearances that we take such pride in adopting. Or, to be more exact, as contrary to the bad qualities we take from their vulgar folk—the dissolute behavior, shameless dress, and loud discussion of disgraceful topics that the very pen is too embarrassed to trace. Furthermore, these practices [do not even efface] habitudes to which some of our women are known to adhere: superstitious beliefs, fantasies, futile but firmly held convictions that only sound, proper knowledge can strip away. The outcome is evident, for a child's earliest knowledge comes mostly from his mother.

Rather than simply announcing her “Famous Women” as exemplars for today, al-Yāzijīī; deploys them as signs for an extended critique of contemporary society that centers on, but does not simplistically attack or blame, female conduct and the choices women are making. Neither her complaints nor her solutions are extraordinary; and, in temper with the times, she declares that Western women have “gone to extremes” in their educational and professional pursuits. This keeps them from the household; yet, assuming a certain class identity, al-Yāzijīī; reminds her readers that Godgiven leisure time must be used wisely, to read “useful books” or to write poetry.^[127] Her analysis echoes nationalist reformist discourse of the time, both secularist and Islam-oriented. She sees contemporary education for both sexes as problematic in its privileging of a patina of Westernizing culture. Unlike many male reformist commentators of her time, though, al-Yāzijīī; does not single out women. Men, too, she notes, read novels and luxuriate in the trappings of Western finery, whether material or discursive culture. She also links “property acquisition” to the pursuit of luxury. Yet she goes on to collapse this tendency into the trope of motherhood as a site for fashioning the future society. While she criticizes men for not providing good role models, it is the female role model of the idealized medieval and pre-Islamic poet—eloquent in her compositions, connected to her community—that underlies her plea as she ends by urging the responsibility of women writers to the reform of their (national) community.

This essay exemplifies a tension between the narrative demands of the biographical notice or sketch on the one hand and the rhetorical demands of exemplarity on the other. Hampton notes that the “depiction of exemplarity . . . is marked by a series of rhetorical and epistemological paradoxes involving the interpretation of the past and its application to practical political action. Humanist writing on exemplarity is seen as caught between a veneration of the timeless value of ancient models as patterns for action and a sharp awareness of the contingency that divides modern readers from ancient exemplars.”^[128] Hampton is careful to root his findings in the specific history of the European Renaissance humanists' shifting deployments of exemplarity in the interests of establishing civic virtue among European male elites. But his observations are applicable to my material, although here the “contingency” of the modern context—that of an emerging nation struggling with self-definition in a context of heterogeneous identities, and in the clutch of European colonial control—generates as many ellipses as it does declarations. Exemplarity sits uneasily, whether a premodern Arab or Muslim woman, or a premodern or contemporary European woman, takes on the mantle of mithāl. When it is a contemporary or near-contemporary indigenous model, there are other silences, of class and minority status. And, as we have seen, old terms of exemplarity shift meaning as they become markers of a modern self. Yet the gaps themselves are productive as they seek to provoke the anticipated reader. “Changes in representations of exemplary figures can be seen as symptoms of political and ideological struggles that demand new figurations of the self. These figurations, embodied in the heroic model held up as an image to the reader, in turn act dialectically to produce new discursive modes for representing virtue and, ultimately, new literary forms.”^[129] The new self is decidedly a female self. It is not so much part of an emerging elite as a definition of that elite, marked by the competing agendas that biography encapsulates. And occludes. There emerges through biography what Nancy Armstrong sees emerging from conduct literature in another time and place, a “figure of female subjectivity, a grammar really.”^[130]

Other Sources, Sources of Otherness

Writers of biography in Egypt probably took whatever material they could find. Women's press editors were avowedly interested in the discursive productions of European women and men, and periodicals and books show up frequently in magazine essays, as well as notices of new publications, many of them translations. Much of the conduct literature available to Egypt's growing reading public, including treatises on how to educate girls, was translated, such as Ibrāhīī;m Ramzīī;'s rendition of Fénélon's popular De l'education des jeunes filles, published serially in his Woman in Islam. But references in these magazines (as in Scattered Pearls) to European and American sources for exemplary biography are rare, frustratingly vague, or absent. Rūz Antūn mentioned among her sources by English and American writers a work entitled Dictionary of Biographies and Principles of Famous Women and Men. Saniyya Zuhayr attributed at least part of her biography of Catherine de Medici to Lydia Hoyt Farmer's popular book on famous queens. A short notice on Muhandisū, daughter of the Pharaoh Siyūkhānīī;th II, is taken from Gaston Maspero, writing probably in Le Figaro.^[131] Authorship is often complicated in these texts. The biography of Halide Edip in Ladies' and Men's Revue summarizes from “the New York Times bureau” and from the memoirs of Henry Morgenthau, ambassador in Istanbul at the start of World War I, quoting a letter from his daughter Helen describing her meeting with Edip.^[132]

There was no lack of English- and French-language volumes of “Famous Women” biography at the time. They were often as explicit as their Arabic counterparts about the exemplary potential of a lived female life as constructed in narrative, although one difference was that European and North American collections might be produced with the visual component prominent: reading biography offered an excuse to gaze at engravings of female faces and figures. As time went on, “Famous Women” in Egypt might offer a sketch or photograph, but this was not a consistent or prevailing practice (until the advent of theater and movie magazines). In any case, writers in Egypt could have easily located a convergence between the rhetorical strategies of European or American works and those elicited from premodern Arabic sources. If Sidney Dark's Twelve Great Ladies—like his Twelve Bad Men—was written, allegedly, just for entertainment,^[133] Emily Peabody's Lives Worth Living yoked exemplarity, biography, and pedagogy in its title. Is this why it went through two editions and eleven printings from 1915 to 1926? The author's foreword is forthright about the authority of female exemplary biography: “Our young women are ready to devote themselves to Christian service when the meaning of true Christian womanhood in the home, the church, and the community is revealed to them. For this purpose the study of biography makes the strongest appeal. We are all influenced more by 'living, concrete models than by abstract principles of virtue.' . . . In the hope that the significance of lives that are worth living may lead other lives into noble and ennobling service, these lessons offer their message to the young women who shall study them.”^[134] Decades earlier, the “new edition” of Phebe Hanaford's Daughters of America; or, Women of the Century (1882) had been explicit about its potential for shaping female readers in its dedication. “To the women of future centuries of the United States of America / This record of many women of the first and second centuries, whose lives were full of usefulness, and therefore worthy of renown and imitation, is now inscribed.”^[135] Hanaford's starting point is almost exactly that of many reformist writers in Egypt: “History shows that no nation can enslave its women, but it insures its own barbarism. . . . The advancement of any nation is marked by the progress of its women.” But her teleology diverges. For if “the women of Pagan Greece and Rome were not altogether unworthy of praise,” she goes on to declare that “Christianity must be regarded as the greatest force in the elevation of woman in every age and nation. . . . Many a Christian teacher is needed to follow in the footsteps of Mungo Park and Livingstone, of Stanley and Bayard Taylor, before the land of the Nile will show a place of culture and advancement for woman.”^[136] Lives of “Famous Women” in Egypt over the next decades might be read as a resistant response to this declaration.

Probably most successful in this wave of American “Famous Women” collections appearing the decade before Fawwāz's Scattered Pearls was Sarah K. Bolton's Lives of Girls Who Became Famous, appearing in 1886, then again in 1914, and with a revised edition nine years later. The publisher enthused that it was

first brought out as a companion volume to “Poor Boys who became Famous” and has had a success quite as great. Edition after edition has appeared. . . . Who can measure the good that these two books have accomplished? How many other ambitious boys and girls have been spurred on to high endeavor by these stories of what other boys and girls have done? . . . There are now twentyfive life stories in all, each replete with inspiration for other girl readers.

Note how the gendering of readers along the axis of the gender of the subjects is assumed. It is no wonder that this volume, later translated into Arabic, was so popular, for it is written in an engaging style with a great deal of dialogue. As in biographies in women's magazines in Egypt, Bolton slips in the occasional didactic notation of what women should be doing. George Sand “had found, like Victor Hugo, that time is a very precious thing for those who wish to succeed in life.” Bolton had already described Sand's earliest ventures into publication. “The education of most women was so meager that the articles would have been considered of little value. Happily our present-day colleagues are changing this estimate of the sex. Women do not like to be regarded as inferior; then they must educate themselves as thoroughly as the best men are educated.”^[137]

The constructed lives of women and the function of exemplarity intertwine almost by definition in these works, sometimes in spite of authors' professed loyalty to “objectivity” or “mere portrayal.” In William Hardcastle Browne's Famous Women of History (1895), “the compiler has restricted his descriptions to sketches merely biographical. He has not criticized the individual, nor reviewed her works, where she has acquired fame in art or literature, but has confined himself to a brief notice of her life.”^[138] Yet judgmental epithets abound. Just on the first page, Abassa, “sister of Haroun al Raschid, caliph of the Saracens,” was said to be “beautiful and accomplished,” and English actress Frances Abington (1731–1815) was “elegant in manners, tasteful in dress, but corrupt in morals.” Roman empress Galeria was an “exemplary wife,” while Sarah Siddons's (1755–1831) “figure was symmetrical, her countenance beautiful, and her deportment majestic. Her private character was irreproachable.”^[139] If female fame is not built on exemplarity and judgment, the note of exemplarity hovers in the moralizing rhetoric through which these subjects are constructed. Judgment seems inseparable from female biography, even in a work that states plainly its restriction to “biographical particulars” alone.

This had been a hallmark of biographical writing on women in European histories; Christian hagiography had laid the groundwork. By the time George Ballard was writing his Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1752), such collections had “dropped out of circulation because people were more interested in secular success,” yet little in the way of female biography had replaced them: a few sensational tales, reportage of spouses, mothers, and daughters of kings and notables, and some family memoirs and hagiographic eulogies, useful in the service of exemplarity as we have seen for Egypt.^[140] Ballard's collection of the lives of sixty-four scholarly women, “respectable and pious,” articulated his belief that biography should “record lives that best deserve imitation.” He sought to prove women's intellectual prowess, but whatever respect his work garnered among peers arose from its exemplary potential. “If they valued his efforts, it was not because he was recovering lost information about women with real claims to prominence, but because his book might arrest the attention of light and frivolous women of fashion and give them better examples to emulate.”^[141]

If such collections were so numerous and popular one hundred years later, was this connected to the growing popularity of conduct literature aimed at women? A European biographical collection such as H. G. Adams's Cyclopaedia of Female Biography (1869) yields many parallels with the “Famous Women” of the early Arabic press. A similar mix of rulers, royal consorts, scholars, prose writers, poets, military heroines, and saints obtains. Adams even includes ten Arab subjects, although five are assimilable to a European (Spanish) heritage, as the Arab history of Spain is glossed as a mere interlude. These subjects join others, predominantly of the West,^[142] in forming a nearly eight-hundred-page parade of women; many are described as exemplary.^[143] As in Egypt, the biographical sketch afforded an opportunity for overt prescription in gendered behavior. Frances Erskine Calderon de la Barca, immigrating to North America with her natal family after her father's death, taught in a school her mother and sister established. “This portion of her history is a model for young ladies, who should cheerfully assist in sustaining themselves and others dear to them, whenever such necessity occurs.”^[144] Adams even evaluates other collections of female biography according to their worth as guides to gendered identity and conduct.^[145] In these metacommentaries on the genre, Adams exposes the interested nature of collections such as his own. Women's biography can never be “merely for entertainment.”

Scholars have recognized the didactic power of these biographical collections in European and American contexts. Kevin Hayes, describing colonial American women's reading, notes that “historical and biographical treatments of women taught conduct through example.” One was a work that became widely known as The Female Worthies, which implicitly conveyed notions of the feminine ideal that aligned it with conduct books. The women portrayed within the work were “eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments.” Those who gave advice on what women should read, such as clergyman John Fordyce, instructed that “history and biography were worth reading because they provided examples of 'passions operating in real life and genuine characters; of virtues to be imitated, and of vices to be shunned.'”^[146] This didactic emphasis was often trumpeted in the titles of works, such as an 1833 volume by “an American Lady,” Sketches of the Lives of Distinguished Females, Written for Girls, with a View to Their Mental and Moral Improvement.^[147] Would any of these have shown up next to Scattered Pearls in the women's library at the Chicago Exposition?

Kate Flint, examining attitudes toward women as readers in nineteenth-century England, also sees “the numbers of brief biographical compilations [of female subjects] produced during the period” as evidence of the strong belief not only that “identification was believed to happen when one read” but also that women were especially susceptible to this identificatory role, whatever direction the identification might take.^[148] Reading about lives, therefore, could be usefully—or dangerously—influential. If the conservative Robert Johnson of Belsize College for Ladies emphasized in an 1860 lecture the importance to “Female Education” of “accounts of Eminent Women, honourably distinguished for the faithful and intelligent discharge of their duties,” some twenty years later the feminist Englishwoman's Review praised a collection of biographies of “Celebrated Women Travellers” for different but no less directed aims: “If the book serves as an encouragement to ladies to undertake independent and varied expeditions, it will have served its purpose.”^[149] The memoirs of English feminists were sprinkled with mention of lives of famous women as inspiratory material, and in Constance Elizabeth Maud's feminist novel No Surrender (1911), it was a parade of female eminence that persuaded the main character to become a suffragist.^[150] Shakespeare's heroines, too, became actors in “the fashioning of womanhood through both moral education and the production of sets of heroine pictures,” as well as textual portraits such as Anna Jameson's popular Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical. The Egyptian arts and political weekly Rūz al-Yūsuf (founded 1925) featured an excerpt in its second issue.^[151]

In France, too, an important girls' textbook of the late nineteenth century relied on biographical sketches:

Convinced that it was more useful for girls to know about illustrious women like Saint Genevieve than about Alexander the Great, [Ernestine] Wirth deliberately provided notable female role models but, at the same time, chose examples to underscore the message that domestic economy was more important for a girl's future than algebra and geometry. . . . Although the military feats of Joan of Arc and Jeanne Hachette were hardly traditional feminine activities, these two shared with such women as Louis IX's mother or Madame de Maintenon the virtue of serving others.^[152]

French textbooks echoed popular biographical-portraiture works like Sainte-Beuve's Galerie de Femmes Célèbres and Nouvelle Galerie, a copy of which I found in a private library in Cairo. The author makes representational claims, if lightly; Mme de la Vallière's piety made of her a living exemplar.^[153]

Long before the Englishwoman's Review, women's periodicals and “ladies' repositories” in Europe and America, like those in Egypt, featured “Famous Women” profiles as part of a self-defined didactic mission, intersecting, as in Egypt, with a declared intent to entertain and amuse. The London Ladies' Monthly Museum (1798–1832), edited by “a Society of Ladies,” offered engraved portraits and “profiles” that emphasized moral qualities as they alluded to less-than-moral pasts.^[154] Earlier in the eighteenth century, when Richard Steele's Female Tatler was “set up for Morality,” it included “harmless, almost edifying features such as a 'Table of Fame,' made up of biographical accounts of women noted for their achievements—a feature intended 'for the Encouragement of the Sex . . . to demonstrate that Women are as capable as Men of Sublimity of Soul.'” The Dublin Ladies' Journal (1827) contained “undeniable Examples of the Fair Sex who have surprisingly distinguished themselves in all kinds of human literature.”^[155] Biography was part of “a sustained campaign to impose a personal set of standards and values [i.e., the editors'] on the woman reader.”^[156]

As less personally stamped journals proliferated, biography continued to play the double role of entertaining and prescribing. The American Jewess (1895–99) utilized biography as a role-modeling tool for the “New Woman” of the upper middle class to whom the magazine was aimed. The Business Woman's Journal (founded 1889), “which unabashedly addressed the American woman as worker,” featured “a successful woman” in each issue. “By recording the deeds of the brave we hope to inspire the feeble.”^[157] Biography suited the conduct-oriented, individualist approach of many journals. The conservative Ladies' Repository, founded as a Methodist Episcopal alternative to the more worldly Godey's, aimed to “exemplify female virtue through the publication of female biography of high order.”^[158] Volume 2 (1842) featured Abigail Morris, in the tradition of obituarysermons celebrating the exemplarity of “Christian suffering”; Jeanne d'Arc; and an exemplary biography of an evangelist, spouse of a judge and congressman. Some thirty years later, volume 34 contained a biographical sketch of mathematician Mary Somerville drawn from her recent memoirs. “Mrs. Somerville was, in most respects, the model woman of history, and it is her chiefest glory that she was a real woman. . . . If this article shall succeed in bringing this noble life more prominently before the young women who read the repository, so that they will make it a careful study, until they are imbued with her spirit and actuated by her lofty purpose, the object of the writer will have been attained.”^[159] Uniting themes of women's struggles for education and professional achievement, the difficulty of combining careers with domestic duty, and professional women's interest in expanding women's rights, this biography would have sounded familiar to readers of al-Jins al-latīf except in its enthusiastic reproduction of Somerville's sentiments of Christian piety. But what is most interesting about the volume's biographical sketches is that they stand side by side with essays urging women's right to vote, to obtain higher education, and to receive equal work for equal pay. Readers of exemplary biography, such as the serious young women envisioned by the biographer of Somerville, would have read these lives in conjunction with other material in the same issues. What would they have defined as worthy of imitation: Somerville's persistent scholarship, the pious suffering of Mary Clark Cole, or the independence of mind of Sanjogata, “the Last Ranee of Delhi,” as they contemplated these from within a differently patriarchal system?

As Hampton comments for the texts he studies, “the notion of reader response as imitation is inscribed as both a thematic concern and a rhetorical strategy” in exemplary biography. He advises that “the history of exemplarity can illuminate the history of models of selfhood, or what Foucault and de Certeau call 'subjectivization': the history of how individuals are made subjects of particular discourses.”^[160] One question then becomes how histories of subjectivization, traced for European histories by Hampton and others, and activated in a gender-specific context by writers from de Pizan and Boccaccio to Sarah Hale and many others of her time, intersects with histories of subjectivization in—for example—Arab societies of the Middle East that experienced Europe's colonization. Through the cultural training of many writers in Egypt yoked to the historical accident of their submission to European cultural and political domination, such writers had access to, and were partially shaped by, European histories of exemplary writing. They mediated those histories through, among other things, the cultural forms of an indigenous history of exemplary writing.

Grappling with the question of what exemplarity is—and of what is exemplary—the biographer moves within a social and historical context made material in the audience that she or he seeks to move rhetorically. This entails a philosophy of what biography is and a strategy about what it can or should or might do. Close textual analysis suggests a belief in the didactic, extratextual shaping power of biography for young women readers of Arabic in a certain time and place. With its pointed introductions, exploitations of familiar formulae, generally positive tenor, and truth claims, biography could do its remodeling work in the most concrete fashion possible, constructing a linear narrative of individual “progress” construed both as movement out of the home and as learned activity within it. Biography offered a narrative of life as discipline, of narrative as a series of moments that display self-discipline, education, and subjectivization in the terms of accepted social norms. Scholars recognize the power of exemplary biographies to shape the subject; the internal rhetoric of biography confirmed how she was to be shaped.

Exemplar or Exception?

It might be argued that to focus on individual “notable” figures privileged exceptionality rather than exemplarity even as, in Egypt, it also tended to support the idea of a national community based on individualistic enterprise over relational outlooks. Many “Famous Women” do appear as exceptional, one-of-a-kind, alone of their sex. Even as the exceptional woman is celebrated for her exceptionality—for the inimitable difference that makes her “famous”—she becomes exemplary, hence imitable. Many a woman was “distinguished from all other women of her time” or “sur-passed them” for her poetry (al-Khansā‘‘), her scholarship (Fātima As‘‘ad al-Khalīī;l, Fawwāz's mentor), her piety (Sufi poet Rābi‘‘a al-‘‘Adawiyya [c. A.H. 100/718 C.E.–A.H. 185/801 C.E.], “model of perfection in her era”), or “strength of mind and body,” in which Maria Morgan “was distinguished from the daughters of her kind and from many of its sons.” As we have seen, many also—in a rhetorical move with its own significance, both reifying and interrogating hierarchies of patriarchy—“surpassed their male peers.” The gap between exceptionality and iterability constructs a representational anxiety about matching the model, one encapsulated perfectly by sixteenth-century conduct book writer Thomas Salter: “Our wise Matrone, shall reade or cause her Maidens to reade, the examples and lives of godly and vertuous Ladies. . . . You shall never repeate the vertuous lives of any such Ladies . . . but you shall kindle a desire in them to treade their steppes, and become in tyme like unto them.”^[161] Yet through the rhetoric of exemplarity and the teleological notion of individual and society-wide progress that these magazines upheld, the unique becomes potentially multipliable. It is this multipliable woman that transforms biography into conduct literature. The framing rhetoric of exemplarity accomplishes this didactic move.

Putting the rhetoric of exceptionality into the service of exemplarity and repeatability advanced rather than impeded the normalization of prescribed role models. It paralleled the construction over centuries of the unique position of the “Mothers of the Believers,” the prophet Muhammad's spouses—as exemplary, repeatable paragons of the good Muslim woman, most recently in collections of women's biography published by Islamist presses. “Presented as repeatable women,” in Afsaneh Najmabadi's words,^[162] subjects of biography constituted both reassuring precedents and unprecedented guides for those Arab women whose lives were beginning to look markedly unlike their mothers'—even if the older generation might not be reassured by the distribution of exemplarity or by the range of lives onto which it was mapped.

As terse as these biographical sketches were, they complicate readings of the press aimed at women that privilege the more explicitly didactic and instructional material of that press. Yet these biographies were no less didactic than other articles, as they constructed subjectivities through which an emerging group of educated, urban, middle- and upper-class women, as both writers and readers, might articulate (and authorize) their own senses of self. The construction was a two-way process, involving readers as well as writers of biography. If the active female reader could read a range of messages off biography, then in a fluid and elusive sense, complicated by many layers and ambiguities of authority in an emergent press for women, biography might represent a collective autobiographical project. As much as this was an inscription of pasts, it was a writing of changing presents and hoped-for futures. As in Christine de Pizan's fifteeenth-century catalog of women, Livre de la cité des dames, the biographical sketch could act to urge women's attention to self-definition, a quest in which editor/author/compiler and audience/readers-writing-in were to share.^[163] Or, to put it differently, it could encourage girls “to want to become a heroine, to have a sense of the possibility of being one.”^[164] Yet biography was “safe.” By focusing on others' lives, by addressing controversial desires and demands through the medium of biography, one might deflect direct attack. By writing on Malak Hifnī Nāsif, Mayy Ziyāda criticized polygyny and women's seclusion, sensitive issues she never addressed directly in her enormous corpus of social commentary. Perhaps Christine de Pizan had resorted to female exempla for a similar reason. Threatened with prison, said the 1938 biography in Young Woman of the East, de Pizan refused to recant and “went on treating women's subjects until her last breath.”^[165]

Notes

1. “SN: Madām dīī; Kātīī;l,” FS 32:6 (March 1938): 221–22; quotation on 222. “SN: Kristīī;n dīī; Bīī;zān,” FS 6:4 (Jan. 15, 1912): 121–23; quotation on 122. The title of the first text refers to her married name, de Castel. The second text is attributed to al-Raqīb, presumably the newspaper founded by Jūrj Tannūs in July 1911. It was announced in FS 6:1 (Oct. 1911): 27, so Hāshim knew it.

Nadia Margolis notes that for de Pisan, “each heroine's role as feminist exemplum becomes increasingly accentuated.” Margolis, “Christine de Pizan and the Jews: Political and Poetic Implications,” in Politics, Gender, and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Margaret Brabant (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992), 61. Christine M. Reno comments that “Christine was already bringing the praise of women closer to her own world and indeed universalizing the category of outstanding women.” Reno, “Christine de Pizan: 'At Best a Contradictory Figure'?” in Brabant, Politics, 182.

2. This contrasts with Roded's finding that later premodern biographical dictionaries “for the most part . . . related information about women from earlier sources without comment despite the claim that orthodox scholars and legists of the formative Abbasid period and later selected, altered, and interpreted the sources of Islam to the detriment of women. We can only speculate as to the attitude and purpose of authors' transmitting information about women in earlier periods. Was this information really at odds with the role of women in their time, as is often presumed? If so, how did they regard this change?” Roded, Women, 10.

3. “SN: Kātirīī;n Sfūrza,” AR 264 (Feb. 19, 1930): 15; Muhammad ‘‘Ubayd, “Hammat amīī;ra: ‘‘ibra wa-dhikrā,” AJ 6:10 (Oct. 31, 1903): 1577–82. The subtitle (“A Lesson and a Remembrance”) and opening statement adumbrate biog-raphy's didactic function: “We are in an age in which women's ability need not be specially pointed out; or if it does this is to indicate distinctions in excellence and advancement.” On Avierino and her relation to Wizniewska, see Baron, Women's Awakening, 17–20. On SN's popularity, see also “al-Shi‘‘r al-nisā’ءī al-‘‘asrīī; wa-shahīī;rāt nujūmih,” NN 7:7 (July 1929): 211. Announcing Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz's Beirut magazine al-Hasnā‘‘, FS signals biography's appeal. Describing early issues, it mentions the “Shahīrāt al-nisā‘‘” column first. “Athār adabiyya,” FS 4:2 (Nov. 1909): 71.

4. “Malikat Asbāniyā,” AJ 1:5 (May 31, 1898): 137. Such an emphasis shapes AR, as in its life of Christine of Sweden (see chapter 7): “her life is a history of dangers, adventures, passion, and destruction” and, better than fiction, is featured “for purposes of enjoyment and entertainment.” “Al-Malika Karistīī;n al-iswijiyya: Nabdha min tārīī;kh hayātihā al-mufcama bi-al-hawādith,” AR 315 (Feb. 11, 1931): 3.

5. Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 4.

6. “Ashhar al-nisā‘‘: Lūsīī; Stūn Blākwāl: Za‘‘īmat al-mutālibāt bi-huqūq al-nisā‘‘ fīī; Amīī;rikā (su’ءāl lil-qāri’ءāt fīī; mawdūء qadīī;m),” SB 1:1 (Apr. 1, 1903): 4–6. The term musāwāh signifies both “equality” and “equivalence,” a convenient slippage for early feminists and a reminder to later readers that our analytic distinction between “equivalence/difference” and “equality/identity” feminisms remains elusive in some historical contexts. Stone kept her maiden name, but this text uses her husband's name (while noting that she did not take it!). I cannot help but wonder if this had anything to do with Syrian (unlike Egyptian) women adopting the European practice of taking their spouse's surname, as did SB editor, Rūz Antūn Haddād. The text finds it “strange that she did not take her husband's name but was known by her own, and this was with her husband's consent because he did not contravene her will” (5). What I translate as “sound and serviceable” is one word, sālih, that encompasses both senses.

7. Ibid., 5–6, 4. In extant issues of SB, I did not find readers' comments on this biography.

8. “Bāb al-umm wa-al-walad wa-al-madrasa: al-Tarbiya al-adabiyya,” SB 1:1 (Apr. 1, 1903): 7.

9. “Sīī;rat SN: ‘‘A’ءisha Umm al-mu‘‘minīī;n,” MI 1:2 (Apr. 15, 1901), 26; part 2 of this biography is published in MI 1:3 (May 1, 1901): 43–46. Females are subsumed grammatically by the male reader (al-qāri’ء). Magazines run by women often broke the convention of using the “male universal” and constructed their audience grammatically as female, but MI did not, a sign of its primary in-tended audience, women's guardians.

10. “Sīī;rat SN: Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid zawjat al-nabīī; ‘‘alayhi al-salāt wa-al-salām,” MI 1:1 (Mar. 25, 1901): 14.

11. “Fatāt al-Nīl” [psued.], “Al-Malika Hātāsū aw Hāt-shibsūt,” JL 6:3 (Sept. 1, 1913): 69. A biography of traveler Isabella Bird in the Beirut journal al-Hasnā‘‘ā’ء also elucidates the prescriptive role of “Famous Women”: “Nothing propels woman onto the path of upward development and induces her to a life of erudition and greatness like reading biographies of outstanding women. For through those lines she hears a voice calling to her: By the likes of these, countries derive pride and nations advance. How can what is feasible for this woman not be feasible for you, when you are her partner in flesh and blood, equal to her in the powers of the mind and the female sentiments? Indeed, you have better circumstances; the spirit of this age is more conducive. . . . [The woman reader] will want to measure herself against the ideal of the one whose life history she reads, and walk in her footsteps.” Tawfīq Zaybaq, “Misiz Bīī;shūb: Iyzābillā Bird,” al-Hasnā‘‘ā’ء 2: 9 (Mar. 1911): 321.

12. A useful ambiguity produced by a range of meanings evoked by the root fadl (see later discussion).

13. “Safha matwiyya: al-Malika Hatshibsūt aw Khatāsū,” FM 1:1 (Feb. 15, 1930): 16.

14. Ibid., 16–17. This equivocal portrait diverges in emphasis from sketches of Hatshepsut in MM, where the Egyptian people are assumed to have easily accepted a female ruler; there, the text vociferously rejects the proposition that Hatshepsut maintained her power due to her supporters' strength. After all, it asks, do strong backers emerge from a void? “Al-Qism al-tārīī;khīī;: al-Malikāt fīī; al-tārīī;kh: Malikāt Misr: al-Malika al-thāniya Hātāsū,” MM 7:9/10 (Nov./Dec. 1926): 466–69, 474–76; “Malikāt Misr: al-Malika Hātshibsū wa-tusammā aydan Ramakā,” MM 8:4 (Apr. 15, 1927): 207–8.

15. “Safha matwiyya: al-Malika Hatshibsūt aw Khatāsū,” FM 1:1 (Feb. 15, 1930): 16–17. FM seems careful in its culturally distributive deployment of paragons. In 1:2, fronted with an image of Madonna and child, it offers the life of ‘‘A’ءisha Umm al-mu‘‘minīī;n!

16. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990 [1978]), 100.

17. See “Al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam: al-Lādy Burtūn,” MM 7:4 (Apr. 20, 1926): 187–89; “SN: Rujīī;nā Khayyāt,” MM 4:7 (Sept. 1923): 369–70; “alAnisa Na‘‘īma al-Ayyūbīī;,” MM 15:9/10 (Nov. 1, 1934): 353–54; Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Shams al-tārīī;kh 4: Zaynab fīī; al-qarn al-thālith al-mīī;lādīī;,” NN 2:6 (Jan. 1, 1923): 161–64; “SN: Ilisābāt malikat Rūmāniyā aw 'Karmin Silfā,'” FS 10:7 (Apr. 1916): 241–43; Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “SN: Hannā Kasbānīī; Kūrānīī;,” FS 2:10 (July 15, 1908): 362–66; idem., “SN: Luwīī;zā Prūktur,” FS 3:1 (Oct. 1908): 4–8; “al-Anisa Firjīī;nīī; Bāsilīī; karīīmat Antūniyus Bāsilīī;,” SR 8:6 (Apr. 30, 1927): 415–16.

18. Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “SN: Maryam Jahashān,” FS 5:9 (June 15, 1911): 321–25; quotation on 322.

19. Hampton, Writing from History, 11, 3.

20. “SN: Madām dīī; Sayfinay,” MM 6:4 (Apr. 15, 1925): 188, 186.

21. Ibid., 188.

22. “SN: Madām dīī; Safinayh,” FS 15:6 (May 15, 1921): 201–4; quotation on 204.

23. Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “SN: Hannā Kasbānīī; Kūrānīī;,” FS 2:10 (July 15, 1908): 364, 364–65.

24. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Shams al-tārīī;kh 4: Zaynab fīī; al-qarn al-thālith al-mīī;lādīī;,” NN 2:6 (Jan. 1, 1923): 161–64.

25. “SN: Ilisābāt malikat Rūmāniyā aw 'Karmin Silfā,'” FS 10:7 (Apr. 1916): 243. This is another example of the more marked tendency in FS than in Scattered Pearls to draw an explicit generalization from a life story; see DM, 53.

26. “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘ wa-mashāhīī;r al-rijāl: Jūrj Sānd,” JL 7:3 (Sept. 1914): 84–89; quotations on 88–89, 85.

27. “SN: Rujīī;nā Khayyāt,” MM 4:7 (Sept. 1923): 369–70. On the WWCC, see Badran, Feminists, 80–81; on Khayyāt, 96–97.

28. The male banī jinsiki suggests an ungendered object (“children of your kind”). This mini-profile is embedded in an article whose title refers to a Syrian donor to the school and deploys the rhetoric of exemplarity: “Madrib al-mathal fīī; al-ihsān: al-Sayyida Haylāna Sayyāj: Akbar al-muhsināt wa-al-muhsinīī;n min al-Sūriyyīī;n: Haflat hajar al-zāwiya li-madrasatihā” (“Exemplar in Charitable Giving: Mrs. Haylāna Sayyāj, Biggest Female or Male Donor from among the Syrians: School Cornerstone Ceremony”), SR 8:6 (Apr. 30, 1927): 414–16. The end goads men to match women in giving without seeking renown, “feminine” traits urged for an exemplary masculinity.

29. “SN: al-Sayyida ‘‘Afīī;fa Karam, nazīī;lat Niyū Yūrk,” FS 2:4 (Jan. 15, 1908): 121–22; quotation on 122. Cf. an announcement of Malikat al-yawm, “arabized” by ‘‘Afīī;fa Karam, which praises the translator for her qualities, adding: “With me the reader will hope that her likes be multiplied in the East so that from its air will be dispelled the darkness of backwardness and deterioration.” “Athār adabiyya,” FS 3:3 (Dec. 1908): 107. Inhitāt (deterioriation) was among nationalists' most frequently used terms to describe women's state in “the East.”

30. “Al-Mathal al-a‘‘lā lil-mar‘‘a al-sharqiyya: Khālida Adīī;b Hānim,” MM 2:8 (Oct. 1921): 313–15.

31. See, e.g., Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, 82–83.

32. “Sāhibat al-sumuww al-malikīī; al-amīī;ra Fiktūriyā awf Shlizwīī;j Halstayn,” JL 9:5 (Nov. 1916): 161.

33. “SN: al-Barūna dīī; Rūnsārt,” FS 10:9 (June 1916): 323. Muhammad ‘‘Abd-allāh ‘‘Inān, “SN: ‘‘A’ءisha al-Hurra,” FS 33:8 (May 1939): 337, 337. Ahmad ‘‘Arafa Munīī;b, “Sharlūt Kūrdāy wa-āthāruhā fīī; al-thawra al-faransiyya,” NN 8:8 (Aug. 1930): 282.

34. Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “SN: Luwīī;zā Prūktur,” FS 3:1 (Oct. 1908): 4.

35. Amīī;n al-Rīī;hānīī;, “SN: Hibāsiyā,” MM 8:2 (Feb. 15, 1927): 79, 79, 80. Essentially the same text had already appeared: Amīī;n al-Rīī;hānīī;, “SN: Hibāsiyā: Mahd al-‘‘ilm al-hadīī;th wa-al-faylusūfa al-‘‘adhrā‘‘,” MM 5:9 (Nov. 15, 1924), 473–75.

36. “SN: Rujīī;nā Khayyāt,” MM 4:7 (Sept. 1923): 370.

37. “SN: al-Sayyida Imīī;līī; Sursuq,” FS 1:9 (June 15, 1907): 258.

38. “SN: al-Sayyida Haylāna ‘‘Abd al-Malik,” MM 5:6 (June 15, 1924): 324.

39. “SN: ‘‘Ufayrā‘‘ bt. ‘‘Abbād,” MM 9:2 (Feb. 1, 1928): 85. “SN: Shawkar Qādin,” FS 9:10 (July 1915): 361. DM, 258.

40. “Al-Bārūna Burdit Kūts,” F 1:1 (Nov. 20, 1892): 10. Unusually, the model is not gender-specific; the text uses the “universal masculine” ashāb. The text ascribes Burdett-Coutts's widespread renown entirely to her charity work and does not mention that she was a lavish society hostess, nor that in 1881, at the age of sixty-seven, she married her much younger secretary (Uglow, Continuum Dictionary, 96). Nor does an obituary, “Al-Bārūna Burdit Kūts,” JL 9:2 (June 1916): 41–42, whose exemplary message hints at a class identification and alludes to the contested local practice of secluding females and occluding all mention of their names. “She began her life with no special distinction to her name . . . like many girls who remain unmentioned beyond the borders of their properties. . . . We see so many enfolded in shrouds, embraced by graves, and we learn their name only from the funeral announcement. . . . [Burdett-Coutts took on] the most noble acts human beings can perform, lightening the burdens of the poor [and thus was known to] people of every class, as far as Queen Victoria. . . . Her fine deeds and qualities gave her everlasting mention” (41–42).

41. “SN: al-Anisa Uktaviyā Hīī;l,” FS 7:3 (Dec. 15, 1912): 81–84; quotation on 84.

42. “SN: Jurj Sand,” FS 4:6 (Mar. 1910): 201–3; quotation on 203. This text followed Fawwāz closely, but Scattered Pearls offered no rhetorical question to pique the reader.

43. ‘‘Isā Iskandar al-Ma‘‘lūf, “SN: Mariyānā al-Marrāsh al-Halabiyya,” FS 13:9 (June 15, 1919): 345–51; quotations on 348, 351.

44. “SN: Madām Rūlān,” FS 16:9 (June 15, 1922): 321, 321. A life of Roland in the same journal ten years earlier called her “a source of pride to the nuns and an example to her schoolmates” in her intellectual skills “SN: Madām Rūlānd al-faransiyya,” FS 7:1 (Oct. 15, 1912): 3–5; quotation on 3. This seems to be from DM, with omissions. Reference to being a role model occurs in both and MM, calling her a qudwa sāliha li-rafīqātihā. “SN: Madām Rūlān,” MM 6:3 (Mar. 15, 1925): 158–59. JL calls her “a paragon of delicacy, sweet gentleness, piety and politeness” in the convent. “Mādām Rūlān,” JL 6:9 (Mar. 1914): 235–39; quotation on 236.

45. Ahmad Afandī Muharram and Walī al-Dīn Yakan Bek, “SN: al-Amīra Aliksandrah dī Afirīnuh Fizinūska,” FS 10:1 (Oct. 1915): 2–11; quotations on 3–4; 4–5. Published before the political troubles with Egypt's government leading to Avierino's arrest and attempts to deport her (Baron, Women's Awakening, 19–20), the text is authored by two men close to the ruling family to whom she had dedicated her magazine. Labība Hāshim, editor of FS, where this appeared, had published in AJ.

Andalusian poet Maryam bt. Abīī; Ya‘‘qūb al-Ansārīī; also becomes an exemplarin-text through a poem written to her: “You resemble Mary the Virgin in piety and have surpassed al-Khansā‘‘ in poetry and example.” Reproducing Maryam's clever verse word play (mu‘‘ārada) in response, the text displays her lively wit rather than simply informing us of it. “SN: Maryam bt. Abīī; Ya‘‘qūb al-Ansārīī;,” FS 11:4 (Jan. 15, 1917): 137.

46. “SN: Salīī;ma Abīī; Rāshid,” FS 14:9 (June 15 1920): 321–23. The wādī refers to her family's geographic seat. The text is atttributed to “al-Nisā‘‘iyyāt,” presumably by Bāz, which I have been unable to locate. Kallās cites Bāz's Nisā‘‘iyyāt (Beirut: al-Matba‘‘a al-‘‘abbāsiyya, 1919). Salīī;ma Abū Rāshid, director of the newspaper al-Basir, founded Fatāt Lubnān (Young Woman of Lebanon) in Beirut in January 1914. On the first issue's cover, two Lebanese cedars shade a young woman in European dress who sits beneath the smaller tree, avidly reading a book. In her preface she invokes a precedent: famous women of the past “who emerged as brilliant in the literary arts, poetry, politics, and determination.” Salīī;ma, “Muqaddima,” Fatāt Lubnān 1:1 (Jan. 1, 1914): 2.

47. “SN: Margherīī;tā malikat Iytāliyā,” FS 20:5 (Feb. 1926): 193–194; quotation on 194.

48. Kevin J. Hayes, A Colonial Woman's Bookshelf (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 25, 26.

49. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 260–61.

50. “SN: Bāhithat al-Bādiya,” FS 13:3 (Dec. 15, 1918): 81, 81, 82, 82, 83.

51. “SN: Ilīī;zabit Flamariyūn,” FS 19:5 (Feb. 15, 1925): 193–94.

52. DM, 182. A less detailed biography of her in FS does not use this diction but is less equivocal in asserting Khadīī;ja's primacy as ruler. When she married, her husband became her chief minister, but she did not submit to him; rather, “it was she who handled the affairs of state in the best possible way.” This emphasis resounds in the title, introducing her as Sultan rather than by her patronymic. “SN: Khadīī;ja sultānat al-Hind,” FS 21:8 (May 1, 1927): 337–38.

53. Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt al-a‘‘yān, 5:477. See also Kahhāla, A‘‘lām alnisā‘‘, 2:309. Fawwāz does not mention this epithet (DM, 256–57). Another muhadditha was Fakhr al-Nisā‘‘ bt. As‘‘ad al-Isbahāniyya. Kahhāla, A‘‘lām al-nisā‘‘, 4:157.

54. “SN: al-Amīī;ra Zaynab,” FS 22:7 (Apr. 1928): 289.

55. “Al-Malikāt al-‘‘ālimāt,” AJ 2:6 (June 30, 1899): 210.

56. “Al-Barinsīī;s Tarīī;zā al-Bāfāriyya,” F 1:4 (Mar. 1, 1893): 150, 151. I am unsure of the association; the Arabic orthography is “m-tayn-k.”

57. Hampton, Writing from History, 12.

58. Of ‘‘Alīī; Mubārak: “God have mercy upon him and benefit Egyptian lands with the effects of his actions and his glorious deeds.” Zakhūra, Kitāb Mir’ءāt al-‘‘asr, 92.

59. Ibid., 174. Of Ahmad Hishmat Pasha, “may God multiply his likes among men” (270); of Amīī;r alāy Hasan Bek Riyād, “may God increase his likes and benefit the nation through his deeds” (305).

60. Women of the elite Syrian immigrant community receive more attention in the same author's al-Suūriyyuūn fī Misr, I (Cairo: al-Matba‘‘a al-‘‘arabiyya, 1927).

61. Zakīī; Fahmīī;, Safwat al-‘‘asr fī tārīkh wa-rusuūm mashāhīr rijāl Misr (Cairo: Matba‘‘at al-i‘‘timād, 1926). See biographies of Muhammad Sa‘‘īī;d Pasha (183), Yūsuf Sulaymān Pasha (202), Ahmad Dhū al-Faqqār (202)—“His likes be multiplied for the good and elevation of Egypt”—Muhammad Fathallāh Barakāt (210), and others. Fahmīī; introduces the work by evoking the rolemodeling potential of lives from the past—history as the stories of great men and their deeds.

62. I make no blanket claim; my reading of men's lives from this period is not exhaustive.

63. “Al-Anisa Jisy Akirmān,” JL 9:4 (Oct. 1916): 121.

64. Amīī;n al-Rīī;hānīī;, “SN: Hibāsiyā,” MM 8:2 (Feb. 15, 1927): 79, 79–80.

65. Ibid., 79, 79–80, 79. The same appears in the 1924 abridged version of this text. Of “The Queen of Sheba,” another author says: “If Cleopatra was famous in history for her beauty and her love stories with kings and rulers, the Queen of Sheba was famous for gravity, seriousness of view, and her search for the wellsprings of wisdom.” Su‘‘ād Muhammad Nadā, “Malikat Sibā,” MM 13:1/2 (Jan./Feb. 1932): 64. See a life of Zenobia, described as beautiful with white teeth; “even so, not a single woman stood above her in ‘‘iffa watasawwun.” She never used beauty to betray an opponent, “as Cleopatra tried to do.” Rizqallāh Minqariyūs al-Sadafīī;, “SN: Zinūbiyā (Zaynab) malikat Tadmūr,” MM 2:10 (Dec. 1921): 391–94; quotation on 393. The pair ‘‘iffa watasawwun labels Theodora after her “repentance.” Cleopatra also plays the role of antiexemplar in a biographical series in NN, where her beauty and “influence on men” are compared to those of Lady Hamilton on Lord Nelson. Ambivalence toward her image as a symbol of Egyptian greatness versus her image as a woman emerges: Though she is said to have ruled a people who were “the foundation of civilization,” the portrait is negative and contrasts thematically with the next in the series, on Syrian nationalist Nāzik al-‘‘Abid, whom the author praises for “making her own way in life.” Mahmūd ‘‘Abd al-Fattāh Ibrāhīī;m, “‘‘Azīī;māt al-nisā‘‘ fīī; al-‘‘ālamayni al-sharqīī; wa-al-gharbīī; qadīī;man wa-hadīī;than,” NN 5:49 (Jan. 1927): 19.

66. Recall that in her preface Fawwāz lists classical Arabic sources and alludes to European-language sources, mentioning a few in entries. I have no evidence yet that European collections of women's biography were available in Egypt in this period, but it is likely. The earliest translation I have found is Tamādir Tawfīī;q's 1959 rendering of Sarah K. Bolton's Lives of Girls Who Became Famous (1923). There were earlier translations of book-length biographies and memoirs, such as al-Hilāl's translation of a biography of Catherine II, Kātirīn al-thāniya, ashhar al-khāti’ءāt min sāhibāt al-tījān (Cairo: Matba‘‘at al-Hilāl, 1922). And there were biographies of Western figures based on European sources, such as al-Sabāh's biography of Marie Antoinette, claiming “this effort is the first in the Arabic language to present a precise and comprehensive historical biography, a genre now popular in Western literatures.” Qissat al-malika Māry Antwānayt (Cairo: Matba‘‘at jarīī;dat al-Sabāh, n.d.), “Muqaddima,” [no page number].

67. “SN: Sitt al-‘‘Aysh,” FS 14:6 (Mar. 15, 1920): 201.

68. “SN: al-Du‘‘ajā‘‘,” FS 19:3 (Dec. 15, 1924): 97.

69. “Malikāt Misr: al-Malika Nīī;tūqarīī;s,” MM 8:4 (Apr. 15, 1927): 207. “SN: Klaymans Rūyir,” FS 15:7 (Apr. 15, 1921): 244.

70. “SN: Aliksandra malikat al-Inkilīī;z,” FS 20:3 (Dec. 15, 1925): 97–100; “SN: Mufaddala al-Fazāriyya,” FS 24:10 (July 1930): 501–2; “SN: Safiyya bt. Musāfir,” FS 25:4 (Jan. 1931): 169; “SN: Sha‘‘ānīī;n zawjat al-Mutawakkil al‘‘Abbāsīī;,” FS 23:9 (June 1929): 449; “SN: Sitt al-Mulk bt. al-‘‘Azīī;z billāhi alFātimīī;,” FS 21:4 (Jan. 1, 1926): 145; “SN: ‘‘Amra bt. al-Nu‘‘mān,” FS 22:3 (Dec. 1, 1927): 97; “SN: Madām dīī; Safīī;nayh,” FS 15:6 (Mar. 15, 1921): 202; “SN: ‘‘A‘‘ida bt. Malik al-Habasha Amūn Sīī;rū,” FS 33:4 (Jan. 1939): 227–28; “SN: Salīī;ma Abīī; Rāshid,” FS 14:9 (June 20, 1920): 321.

71. “SN: Sharlūt Kurdāy,” FS 19:6 (Mar. 15, 1925): 241–44; quotation on 244.

72. “Fatāt al-Nīī;l” [pseud.], “al-Malika Hātāsū aw Hāt-shibsūt,” JL 6:3 (Sept. 1, 1913): 69–75; quotation on 70. “SN: al-Lādy Māry Mūntāgū,” FS 4:1 (Oct. 15, 1909): 2–3. “Sterling qualities” is my translation for manāqib, a term used in heroic biographies.

73. The text says America's colonization led to its first occupants' suppression because they were unready to face “this civilization.” “Yā banīī; Misr,” al-Mu’ءayyad 1:2 (Dec. 4, 1889): 1.

74. “Bāb tarājim mashāhīī;r al-nisā‘‘: Jamīī;la,” F 1:11 (Mar. 1, 1894): 491. Tuhfa “the Ascetic”—“skilled at singing and playing the lute”—was distracted by love but concealed it, and perhaps it was the mystic's love for her creator, for it was never proved that she had a lover. “SN: Tuhfa al-Zāhida,” FS 33:5 (Feb. 1939): 257–59; quotation on 257.

75. The writer must mean Jeanne d'Albret (1528–72), daughter of Margaret of Navarre and Henri d'Albret, and mother of Henri IV, who herself ruled Navarre. “SN: Tiyūdūrā Haddād,” FS 28:8 (May 1934): 393, 394. Embedded early in the text is the name of her niece, physician Dr. Anīī;sa Sayba‘‘a, whose memoir of Aunt Theodora follows; it is not clear whether the rest of the text is hers. A 1926 obituary-biography of Anīī;sa's mother, Catherine Haddād, called her “the first mother [in Ottoman Syria] to believe in sending her daughter to England to study medicine; she is now a famous physician. She sent her second daughter to France to study law and she is now a famous lawyer. So the first female doctor and the first female lawyer in the East were brought up by this fine woman. That was in the time when mothers of the East prohibited their children from the sciences [or branches of knowledge] because they could not stand the separation.” “Kātirīī;n Haddād,” SR 8:2 (Dec. 31, 1926): 127–28.

76. Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “al-Yūbīī;l al-faddīī; lil-ānisa Māry ‘‘Ajamīī; sāhibat 'Majallat al-‘‘Aruūs' bi-Dimashq,” FS 20:9 (June 15, 1926): 403–7; quotation on 407. Bāz employed an epithetic and vocative mode to imply Hannā Kūrānīī; as gendered model: “O pride of the Syrian gentle sex, peace be upon you and every educated, refined Syrian woman who puts her efforts into the elevation of her sex and the good of her nation.” Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “SN: Hannā Kasbānīī; Kūrānīī;,” FS 2:10 (July 15, 1908): 362–66; quotation on 366. Parts of this text read like an obituary. The subject had died ten years before; perhaps this was not the first publication. Or maybe it was hostage to Bāz's high-flown style.

77. ‘‘Isā Iskandar al-Ma‘‘lūf, “SN: al-Tabīī;ba Salmā Qusātilīī; al-Dimashqiyya,” FS 14:7 (Apr. 15, 1920): 241, 242–243, 244; from his Nawābigh al-nisā‘‘, which I am unable to locate.

78. “Wafāt sayyida fādila,” SB 2:5 (Apr. 1905): 144, summarized from Najm al-sharq.

79. “SN: Jūliyā Wārd Haw,” FS 5:2 (Nov. 15, 1910): 42, 43.

80. “SN: al-Sayyida ‘‘Afīī;fa Karam,” FS 19:2 (Nov. 15, 1924): 50–51.

81. “SN: al-Jumāna,” FS 10:10 (July 1916): 361–62.

82. “SN: Madām dīī; Sayfinay,” MM 6:4 (Apr. 15, 1925): 186. The term echoes across the life narratives of two very different Arab personalities of widely separated eras and environments: ‘‘Ufayrā‘‘ bt. ‘‘Abbād was “hurra by nature,” and Bint al-Shāti‘‘ was a fatāt hurra. “SN: ‘‘Ufayrā‘‘ bt. ‘‘Abbād,” MM 9:2 (Feb. 1, 1928): 85; I. ‘‘A. N. [Ibrāhīī;m ‘‘Abd al-Latīī;f Na‘‘īī;m], “Fī al-mir’ءāt: Ibnat al-Shāti‘‘,” NN 13:2 (Feb. 1935): 47–48.

83. Stowasser, Women in the Qur’ءan, 20.

84. Or even, usually, at the bottom, in these texts; but see chapter 5.

85. “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘,” MM 1:7 (Sept. 1920): 343, 346. “SN: Jūzifīī;n,” FS 16:6 (Mar. 15, 1922): 202. “SN: Turkān Khātūn al-Jalāliyya ibnat Tughfuj Khān, min nasl Farasiyāb al-Turkīī;,” FS 10:4 (Jan. 1916): 121. “SN: Nūr Jahān,” FS 11:7 (Apr. 15, 1917): 281.

86. “SN: al-Malika Iyzabillā al-awwal [sic],” FS 16:2 (Nov. 15, 1921): 43. DM (73–75) offers more details but similar description. Compare an American “Famous Women” collection of 1926: “Isabella was beautiful in person, of pleasing manners and kindly heart, though of inflexible will, proud, ambitious, and exceedingly punctilious” (Adelman, Famous Women, 43). In the Arabic version, pride and will are implied as positive qualities, as they are throughout this genre.

87. Al-Zahra [Olivia ‘‘Abd al-Shahīī;d], “Rā‘‘idāt al-āfāq, FS 24:6 (Mar. 1930): 277–88; quotation on 279. This is said to be “arabized from the English.” The metropolitan, pro-imperialist, racist views posed here toward Africans as objects of the described explorers' energies thus were not “originally composed” with FS's audience in mind. Yet, situated in this journal, “arabized” by a well-known Coptic writer from Upper Egypt, they become part of local discourse.

On “competing with the men” see also, e.g., “SN: Hassāna al-Nimayriyya,” FS 13:7 (Apr. 15, 1919): 265. Female poets are commonly said to “compete with the male poets”; this alludes to a specific cultural history, muءārada in Arabic poetry, where poets build poems on lines composed by others. Al-Khansā‘‘ is said repeatedly to have been unequaled among female poets and considered “one of the stallions of poetry”—that is, in the very highest echelon of Arab Bedouin male poets. MI's “experiential lesson” ending its life of al-Khansā‘‘ explains her superiority as follows: first, “no nation [or community] however civilized can be as proud of their language as are the Arabs, . . . and if we recognize that she was considered among the best, then it is no surprise when we say woman equals man in the rational and traditional sciences. If she has lagged behind him in combat and heroic actions, she has been no less than he in matters of the mind, not lagging in acquiring that to which minds attain.” “Sīī;rat shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘: al-Khansā‘‘,” MI 1:6 (June 15, 1901): 95. In another life: “In that age women competed with men in poetry and outdistanced them.” Sahīī;fat al-adab: al-Khansā‘‘,” H 1:18 (Jan. 23, 1926): 2.

88. Khawla bt. al-Azwar al-Kindīī; “surpassed the men in courage and the women in beauty.” “SN: Khawla bt. al-Azwar al-Kindīī;,” MM 9:5/6 (May/June 1928): 226. Maria Agnesi “began to study philosophy and the law, surpassing her male peers.” “Māriyā Anaysy,” MI 1:11 (Sept. 1, 1901): 175. A life of Agnesi from A‘‘lāmal-Muqtataf calls her “superior in maths and memory” to most men. “SN: Māriyā Aghnasy,” MM 7:2 (Feb. 15, 1926): 84. Egyptian lawyer Na‘‘īma al-Ayyūbīī; bested her male classmates in law school. “Al-Anisa Na‘‘īma al-Ayyūbīī;,” MM 15:9/10 (Nov. 1934): 353. Barrett Browning surpassed male poets. “SN: Misiz Barawnin,” FS 32:3 (Dec. 1937): 130. Al-Yāzijīī;, in elegies for her father and brother (typical poetic arenas for female Arab poets), “composed what the best male poets would be incapable of.” “SN: al-Sayyida Warda al-Yāzijīī;,” FS 2:1 (Oct. 15, 1907): 2–3.

89. “SN: Asbāsiyā zawjat Biriklis,” FS 7:5 (Feb. 15, 1913): 161.

90. “Sīī;rat shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘: ‘‘A’ءisha umm al-mu‘‘minīī;n,” MI 1:2 (Apr. 15, 1901): 26–29; and MI 1:3 (May 1, 1901): 43–46; 44. “SN: Jamīī;la al-Sulamiyya,” FS 33:7 (Apr. 1939): 281–82. “Bāb tarājim mashāhīī;r al-nisā‘‘: Jamīī;la,” F 1:11 (Mar. 1, 1894): 490–91. Agnesi and others are described as being successfully “tested” by prominent men. “Māriyā Anaysy,” MI 1:11 (Sept. 1, 1901): 175. Men's acceptance becomes the measure of a woman's excellence. For ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr, “the male geniuses of her time established her prominence and superiority.” ‘‘Alīī; Fikrīī;, “Bāb al-tārīī;kh: al-Sayyida ‘‘A’ءisha radiya Allāh ‘‘anhā,” NN 6:4 (Apr. 1928): 119–20 (part II). See also “SN: Hamda bt. Ziyād,” FS 15:1 (Oct. 1920): 3. The rhetoric of “surpassing” men shapes discussion of marriage. See chapter 5.

91. “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘ wa-mashāhīī;r al-rijāl: Jūrj Sānd,” JL 7:3 (Sept. 1914): quotations on 84, 85.

92. Ibid., 85–86, 85.

93. “Madām Sayfayrīī;n,” AJ 1:3 (Mar. 31, 1898): 65–67; quotation on 66. This text is reproduced word for word as “SN: Madām Sayfayrīī;n/Gibhār,” FS 3:10 (July 1909): 361–62.

94. Muhammad ‘‘Abd al-Fattāh Ibrāhīī;m, “‘‘Azīī;māt al-nisā‘‘ fīī; al-‘‘ālamayni al-sharqīī; wa-al-gharbīī; qadīī;man wa-hadīī;than 4,” NN 5:52 (Apr. 1927): 136–37. “Al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam: Maryam Hārry, kātiba mustashriqa,” MM 7:4 (Apr. 20, 1926): 186–87. “Al-Qism al-tārīī;khīī;: Madām dīī; Sayfinay,” MM 7:5 (May 20, 1926): 239–41; quotation on 240. In Harry's biography “feminized” traits and a critique of orientalist writing converge, but it is her “femaleness” rather than an orientalist outlook that is said to shape her “faulty” writing. Despite her spending time with women in “the East,” she missed much “because she is a woman and the emotions still have an impact on her that defeat rationality” (186). It also says she “supports the national homeland for the Jews and praises the Jews' activities in Palestine” (187) and attacks “Christians and Muslims chaotically.” A good writer, says the author, she could “benefit East and West together if she would not give in to the imagination or be too quickly taken in by appearances, or sacrifice meaning to style”; Easterners should read her books so they know what is being written about them. Harry visited Egypt, interviewed Sha‘‘rāwīī; and Mūsā for her Les derniers harems, and contributed to the EFU's L'Egyptienne (Badran, Feminists, 105, 278 n. 69).

95. “SN: Māriyā Aghnasy,” MM 7:2 (Feb. 15, 1926): 84.

96. Muhammad ‘‘A. ‘‘Inān, “SN: ‘‘A’ءisha al-hurra,” FS 33:8 (May 1939): 337, 339.

97. “Misiz Firānk Lisly al-shahīī;ra,” F 1:3 (Feb. 1, 1893): 101–3. Née Miriam Florence Folline, she turned around her publisher husband's failing magazine business after his death. The text does not say that “part of her fortune . . . was devoted to the advancement of woman suffrage” (Adelman, Famous Women, 247; here she is also “Mrs. Frank Leslie”).

98. Roded, Women, 82.

99. Rachel Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xiv, 101. Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). I find useful Brownstein's insistence on how novels offer girls “structures they use to organize and interpret their feelings and prospects” (xviii) in the absence of gendered heroic histories. I concur with her on the double-edged nature of a feminine heroic self-consciousness as shaped by literary texts. But she does not always allow the possibility of resistant readings.

100. Hampton, Writing from History, 5.

101. Baron, Women's Awakening; see also chapter 5.

102. ‘‘Alīī; Fikrīī;, “Bāb al-tārīī;kh: al-Sayyida ‘‘A’ءisha radiya Allāh ‘‘anhā,” NN 6:4 (Apr. 1928): 119–20. “O what pride and glory Sayyida ‘‘A’ءisha preserves! She who was able through a long stretch of the Messenger's noble life to give him joy and repose, to fill his heart with delight and companionship. In his noble eyes she was the figure that gave materiality to felicity; the only thing lacking her in this life was motherhood.” When Fikrīī; turns to her life after Muhammad's death, he emphasizes not political activism but her charity, ability at fiqh, and yearly pilgrimages. Fikrīī; wrote conduct-oriented material for girls' schools and ‘‘Izzat al-nisā‘‘ā’ء (Cairo: Matba‘‘at al-wā‘‘iz, 1905) while a clerk at the khedivial kutubkhāna. In its preface he says his curricular books needed to be “supported and strengthened” by one offering sermons and guidance (3).

103. On divergent narratives of ‘‘A‘‘isha's life, see Spellberg, Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past. FM's biography is differently didactic. “[‘‘A‘‘isha] was a sound exemplar of fidelity and self-sacrifice; even so, a possessive jealousy toward [Muhammad] used to seize her, as it does other women. . . . From the necklace incident you can understand ‘‘A‘‘isha's status and virtue. As we see how much the human self is influenced by honor, likewise we learn the measure of jealousy that women's hearts hold against other women.” “Ibn Hayyān,” “Umm al-mu‘‘minīī;n: al-Sayyida ‘‘A‘‘isha, li-mu‘‘arrikh kabīī;r,” FM 1:8/9 (Sept./Oct. 1930): 20–21, 23–24.

104. “Sīī;rat SN: Khadīja bt. Khuwaylid zawjat al-nabīī; ‘‘alayhi al-salāt wa-al-salām,” MI 1:1 (Mar. 25, 1901): 14–16. “Sīī;rat SN: al-Sayyida Nafīī;sa al-‘‘Alawiyya,” MI 1:5 (June 1, 1901): 75–76.

105. See Booth, “al-Mar’ءa fī al-Islām.”

106. Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 85.

107. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Shams al-tārīī;kh: Bint al-Azwar,” NN 2:11 (June 1, 1923): 298–99; quotation on 299.

108. “Al-Mar‘‘a al-wahīī;da bayna hukkām al-Hind: Sāhibat al-sumuww Bigim awf Bhūpāl,” JL 9:3 (Sept. 1916): 81–84; quotation on 83.

109. Ibid., 82, 83. She reigned until 1926.

110. No pharaoh appears (in extant issues but for a negative portrait of Cleopatra). The 1932 discovery of Giza's fourth pyramid generates a news item featuring “the queen who constructed it” in its title; the article (in the “Famous Women” section) concerns the excavation. “SN: Khānat Khaws: al-Haram al-rābi‘‘ fīī; al-Jīī;za: al-Malika allatīī; aqāmatuh,” NN 10:3 (84) (Mar. 1, 1932): 105–6.

111. “Al-Qism al-tārīī;khīī;: al-Malikāt fīī; al-tārīī;kh: Malikāt Misr: al-Malika al-thāniya Hātāsū (1),” MM 7:9/10 (Nov./Dec. 1926): 466–69, 474–76, 474.

112. Ibid., 476.

113. In FS in 1929, and in DM.

114. See Mary Hamer on Cleopatra's domestication in Europe, “the translation into domesticity which closes off all ambiguity and threat.” Signs of Cleopatra: History, Politics, Representation (London: Routledge, 1993), 43. That these figures must be domesticated repeatedly suggests that this move does not “close off” ambiguity—or threat.

115. I thank Don Reid for suggesting this. The play is Masra‘‘ Klīyuūbātrā (Cairo: Matba‘‘at al-ma‘‘ārif, 1929). Occasionally “Cleopatra” is a pseudonym, as in the essay “Woman's Power.” Kilyubātra, “Al-Mar‘‘a—2—Quwwat al-mar‘‘a,” R 1:6 (Aug. 1907): 153–57.

116. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Shams al-tārīī;kh 4: Zaynab fīī; al-qarn al-thālith al-mīī;lādīī;,” NN 2:6 (Jan. 1, 1923): 164.

117. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Shams al-tārīī;kh: Kātirīī;nā al-thāniya li-Rūsiyā fīī; al-qarn al-thāmin ‘‘ashara al-mīī;lādīī;,” NN 3:2 (Sept. 1923): 52.

118. “SN: Sukayna,” MM 9:2 (Feb. 1, 1928): 85–86, 86.

119. “SN: Latīī;fa al-Haddāniyya,” FS 13:1 (Oct. 1918): 2.

120. “SN: Asmā’ء bt. Yazīī;d: Sahābiyya, khatīī;ba, shujā‘‘a,” FS 18:1 (Oct. 1923): 3–5; quotations on 4, 5.

121. “Sahīī;fat al-adab: Umm al-Sharīī;f,” H 1:19 (Jan. 30, 1926): 2–3. See also “SN: Zarīī;fa ibnat Safwān,” FS 25:5 (Feb. 1931): 225–26, a tale of star-crossed lovers. “Thus were the sensations of love among the [ancient] Arabs, men or women. They would destroy themselves for fidelity's sake . . . they were untouched by temptation and cared not for material things; their souls were still free of the possessive desires that dominate today's emotions” (226). Typically, DM (278–79) carries no such homily. Women's magazines were not alone in propagating this message. Al-Manār narrated a famous dialogue among premodern Arab women on what constituted the best woman and the finest man, adding its own ironizing comment: “If we compare those women to the educated ones among our women today we recognize the great gap between illiterate Jāhiliyya women and educated Muslim women. Not, I declare, in eloquence alone but also in conduct and eminence of thought.” “Fakhr nisā‘‘ al-‘‘arab,” al-Manār 3:25 (Nov. 4, 1900): 611–12.

122. “SN: Sukayna,” MM 9:2 (Feb. 1, 1928): 86.

123. “Warda al-Yāzijīī;,” SR 5:5 (Mar. 15, 1924): 308–9; quotation on 308.

124. Warda al-Yāzijīī;, “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘,” FS 10:6 (Mar. 1916): 201–6; quotation on 201.

125. Ibid., 203. See FS's biography of poet Mufaddala bt. ‘‘Arjafa al-Fazārīī;: “What the volumes of Young Woman of the East since its founding have established, in the life histories of famous women of the Arabs, is their eloquence, literary skill, and ability to work the arts of poetry. If we wanted to count the geniuses among these women we would not have enough volumes to do so.” “SN: Mufaddala al-Fazāriyya,” FS 24:8 (May 1930): 389. When she appears in the column two months later, the opening stresses that famous women have disappeared from public knowledge. “Many women of the Arabs were distinguished by attributes and talents such that they deserve to be inscribed eternally in letters of light. But their memory is not well known, so the researcher finds them, like flowers of lavender, hidden in the folds of leaves [pages].” “SN: Mufaddala al-Fazāriyya,” FS 24:10 (July 1930): 501–2; quota-tion on 501. DM (512) gives attributes but has none of either sketch's generalizing beginning.

126. Warda al-Yāzijīī;, “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘,” FS 10:6 (Mar. 1916): 203–4.

127. Ibid., 204–6.

128. Hampton, Writing from History, x.

129. Ibid., 5.

130. Armstrong, Desire, 60.

131. “Al-Muqaddima,” SB 1:1 (Apr. 1, 1903): 3. Saniyya Zuhayr, “Min al-tārīī;kh: Imra‘‘a lā dīī;n lahā wa-lā ‘‘ātifa!” MM 14:5/6 (May/June 1933): 199 n. She calls the book Kitāb ashhar al-malikāt, a reference to Farmer's book. “AlMisriyyāt fīī; al-tārīī;kh: Misriyya malika ‘‘alā al-Isrā’ءīliyyīī;n,” MM 13:1/2 (Jan./Feb. 1932): 50–51; from al-Fīghār. Highlighting an Egyptian woman “ruling the ancient Jews” is interesting in light of the time, which saw anxiety over Jewish immigration to Palestine. See also an obituary of Maria Theodorovna of Russia, from an essay by “Count Kokonitsoff” for a Russian journal. “Al-Imbirātūra Māriyā Thiyūdūrufnā wālidat al-qaysar Niqūlā al-thānīī;: safha tārīī;khiyya,” MM 11:1/ 2 (Feb. 15, 1930): 49–51.

132. “Nābighat al-Turkiyyāt: Awwal wazīī;ra fīī; al-‘‘ālam mar‘‘a [sic] sharqiyya: al-Sayyida Khalīī;da Adīī;b Hānim wazīī;rat al-ma‘‘ārif,” SR 4:2 (Dec. 1923): 23–25.

133. Sidney Dark, Twelve Great Ladies (London: Hodder and Stoughton, n.d. [1928]), preface.

134. Emily Clough Peabody, Lives Worth Living: Studies of Women, Biblical and Modern, Especially Adapted for Groups of Young Women in Churches and Clubs, University of Chicago Publications in Religious Education, Constructive Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915, 1923), xi, xi–xii. I located this work in the United States and in the library of the American University in Cairo. “Lives” are divided into “lessons”; study questions hint at female figures' exemplary force.

135. Phebe Hanaford, Daughters of America; or, Women of the Century (Augusta, Maine: True and Co., n.d. [new ed., 1882]).

136. Ibid., 20, 25, 27, 30.

137. Sarah K. Bolton, Lives of Girls Who Became Famous, rev. ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1923), 29, 22.

138. William Hardcastle Browne, Famous Women of History, Containing Nearly Three Thousand Brief Biographies and over One Thousand Female Pseudonyms, Philadelphia, 1895. The copy I saw lacked part of the title page, hence publisher information. The preface is unnumbered.

139. Browne, Famous Women of History, 1, 1, 161, 340.

140. According to Ballard's twentieth-century editor. George Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for Their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and Sciences, ed. Ruth Perry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985 [1752]). The quotation is from Perry's “Introduction,” 28. On these other works, see 28–30.

141. Perry in Ballard, Memoirs, 30, 31, 37–38. Perry says Ballard “toned down his feminist polemic” after receiving negative reactions from male intellectuals.

142. But including a few of Europe's “Others” also featured in Egypt: Zenobia, Bilqis, Hypatia, plus Bibi Jand and the Assyrian Nitocris. H. G. Adams, ed., Cyclopaedia of Female Biography; Consisting of Sketches of All Women Who Have Been Distinguished by Great Talents, Strength of Character, Piety, Benevolence, or Moral Virtue of Any Kind (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1869). The Arabs are “Abbassah,” sister of Harūn al-Rashīī;d (2); Aisha, “a poetess of Spain [when] . . . the Moors had possession of that kingdom” (24); “Alphaizuli, Maria, a poetess of Seville . . . called the Arabian Sappho” (by whom?!) (32); ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr (82); “Fatimeh . . . mother of all Mahommedan dynasties” (296); Khaula [bt. al-Azwar] (436); “Leela . . . celebrated for her learning” (458); Rodhia, a Spanish scholar (653); Zaida, “Moorish princess” and Christian convert (783); “Zobeide” (Zubayda), spouse of Harūn al-Rashīī;d, “beautiful, pious, and benevolent” (786).

143. Singer Catherine Gabrielli “in all her conduct was an example to her sex, and a blessing to society” (Adams, Cyclopaedia, 340). Abigail Adams is called frugal, hospitable, faithful, and charitable. “In her family relations, few women have left a pattern more worthy of imitation by her sex” (6). Of playwright and philosopher Catherine Cockburn: “That she was scrupulous never to neglect any womanly duty, gives added importance to her example of improvement” (196).

144. Adams, Cyclopaedia, 143. Bianca Capello offered a different lesson. As in Egypt, it is not one directed solely at “young ladies.” “We learn from this example of perverted female influence the great need of judicious education for the sex” (149).

145. His entry on Jacquette Guillaume dwells on her Les Dames Illustres (1665) in which, Adams says, she sought to prove female superiority but did not “distinguish sufficiently between the manifestations of the distinctive characters of man and woman. . . . She had never studied the Bible . . . grand charter of woman's rights” (Cyclopaedia, 353). He judges the biography collections of Irish writer Julia Kavanagh, the first on eighteenth-century French women and the second, “women of all ages eminent for piety and benevolence.” “Her usual tone is sound and healthy, notwithstanding her continental education” (433). He quotes Sarah Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book, author of the famous collection Woman's Record, on her motivation: “The mental influence of woman over her own sex . . . so important in my case, has been strongly operative in inclining me to undertake this my latest work, “Woman's Record.” . . . I have sought to make it an assistant in home education; hoping the examples shown and characters portrayed, might have an inspiration and a power in advancing the moral progress of society” (362).

146. John Fordyce, Sermons (Philadelphia: for Thomas Dobson, 1787), 139, quoted in Hayes, A Colonial Woman's Bookshelf, 77. Hayes mentions among biographical collections Ballard's Memoirs and the “Worthies,” or Biographium Foemineum: The Female Worthies; or, Memoirs of the Most Illustrious Ladies of All Ages and Nations (1766) (A Colonial Woman's Bookshelf, 72–73; quotation, The Female Worthies, pp. v–vi [73]).

147. An American Lady, Sketches of the Lives of Distinguished Females, written for Girls, with a View to Their Mental and Moral Improvement (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833).

148. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 36–38. She also mentions “role-modelling articles” in the popular Girl's Own Paper (37). Flint gives examples of positive biographical images, but it is not her project to examine the rhetoric.

149. Both quoted by Flint: Robert Johnson, Lecture on Female Education (1860), 24 (Flint, The Woman Reader, 131–32); Englishwoman's Review 14 (1883): 257 (Flint, 150).

150. Flint, The Woman Reader, 239–48, 313.

151. Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (London: Saunders and Otley, 1833). According to Georgianna Ziegler, curator of the wonderful exhibit “Shakespeare's Unruly Women,” which I saw at the Folger Library, Washington, D.C., in May 1997, in this repeatedly published work Shakespeare becomes a moral instructor “to illustrate the various modifications of which the female character is susceptible. . . . The inspiration for Jameson's work then is not so much commentary on Shakespeare as a desire for the morally improving education of contemporary women.” Georgianna Ziegler, “Queen Victoria, Shakespeare, and the Ideal Woman,” in Georgianna Ziegler with Frances E. Dolan and Jeanne Addison Roberts, Shakespeare's Unruly Women (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1997), 14–15. The citation to the journal is “Al-Nisā‘‘ fīī; riwāyāt Shakisbīī;r: Nabdha min maqāl tahlīī;līī; lil-kātiba al-injilīī;ziyya Hannā Jaymis naqlan ‘‘an kitabihā al-mumti‘‘ al-Nisā‘‘ fī riwāyāt Shakisbīr (lil-ustādh al-adīī;b ‘‘Abd al-Rahmān Sidqīī;),” Rūz al-Yūsuf 1:2 (Nov. 2, 1925): 7. Fātima Yūsuf's journal—outside the circuit of this study—supported women's rights to work for pay and exhorted young Egyptian females to take jobs in shops and the civil ser-vice. See, e.g., “Nisā‘‘iyyāt: al-Mar‘‘a al-misriyya wa-al-‘‘amal,” Ruūz al-Yuūsuf 1:4 (Nov. 16, 1925): 6.

152. Ernestine Wirth, Livre de lecture courante des jeunes filles chrétiennes, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1870, 1872), quoted in Linda L. Clark, Schooling the Daughters of Marianne: Textbooks and the Socialization of Girls in Modern French Primary Schools (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 24–25. Twenty-two pre-1914 girls' textbooks included at least one notable woman, says Clark (180 n. 84).

153. M. Sainte-Beuve, Nouvelle Galerie de Femmes Célèbres, tirée des Causeries du Lundi, des Portraits littéraires, etc. (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1882).

154. Alison Adburgham, Women in Print: Writing Women and Women's Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972), 210–11.

155. Adburgham, Women in Print, 62, 61; quotation from the Dublin Magazine, 77.

156. Cynthia White, Women's Magazines, 1693–1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1970), 27. White traces a history of professionalization and expansion in content and authorship. While the history of women's magazines in Europe and North America is beyond the scope of this book, mention of parallel emphases is useful when we bear in mind that editors of Arabic women's magazines probably saw contemporaneous magazines from the West, even if references to this are agonizingly sparse in the Arabic press. See Shevelow on what the Addison and Steele journals meant for women (Women and Print Culture). White and Shevelow diverge in methodology but agree in seeing increasing emphasis on domesticity with the growing popularity of the notion that women were innately mentally inferior to men rather than merely “different.” This meant also a newly “prim” tone and stress on training in moral conduct, and implied class specificity: expansion of the reading public meant the advent of a readership that sought (or editors believed they sought or needed) training in “middle-class” comportment. I concur with Shevelow in seeing the possibly ambiguous effects of a press that simultaneously opened opportunities for public expression to women and rhetorically curtailed the space of their agency. Shelley M. Bennett, “Changing Images of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England: The 'Lady's Magazine,' 1770–1810,” Arts Magazine 55:9 (May 1981): 138–41, argues that “Famous Women” images intersected with growing stress on “the rewards of domesticity” and an “obsession with eroticized helplessness” (140); earlier journals “counterbalanced” such visual scenes “by delineations of women's strengths” (139) as in a 1770s series, “The Female History of Great Britain,” featuring, among others, Boudicca (April 1775). Its emphases echoed exemplary images in Egypt: “The editor praised these British heroines for their 'heroic virtues and social endearments exemplified by noble instances of courage, fortitude, sagacity, unspotted honour, and conjugal fidelity'” (140). Such images played a nationalist role, celebrating women's contributions to the empire's prehistory.

157. Barbara Straus Reed, “The American Jewess,” in Women's Periodicals in the United States: Social and Political Issues, ed. Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 15. Therese L. Lueck, “The Business Woman's Journal,” in Endres and Lueck, Women's Periodicals, 43, 39. Paul Kostyu calls biography a standard element in the “crusading zeal” of the era's magazines. “The Ladies' Repository,” in Women's Periodicals in the United States: Consumer Magazines, ed. Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 181.

158. Quoted by Kostyu, “The Ladies' Repository,” 182. The magazine became more liberal in the late 1840s, calling for women's public work in the abolitionist movement, although after the Civil War editors reverted to a conservative stance on women's roles (Kostyu, “The Ladies' Repository,” 184–87).

159. Charles W. Cushing, “Mary Somerville,” Ladies' Repository 34 (Aug. 1874): 95–100, and 34 (Sept. 1874): 197–202; 201–2.

160. Hampton, Writing from History, 303, 300–301.

161. Thomas Salter, A Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie (1579), quoted in Flint, The Woman Reader, 23.

162. “Comments” (presented at “Women, Culture, Nation: Egyptian Moments,” New York University, April 7, 1995).

163. McLeod, Virtue and Venom, chap. 5.

164. Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine, xix.

165. “SN: Madām dīī; Kātīī;l,” FS 32:6 (Mar. 1938): 222.

4. May Our Daughters Listen

Readers, Writers, Teachers

She is an excellent writer in whom it is our right to take pride—and to adorn Young Woman of the East with her portrait. No wonder, for she has distinguished herself by the noblest qualities and most exalted sensibility. To the loveliness of her attributes she has added the beauty of her hard work as she has exerted herself to acquire knowledge. . . . She spends her time serving humanity, sowing the seeds of learning and refinement in the Coptic Girls' School of Asyut. . . . We ask God to reward her well and to multiply her likes among women so the East will advance. For no country ascends except by means of its women.

How wondrous are concealed strengths when stirred by justice's demand; and how much more wondrous that a woman alone would shoulder this, relying after God on herself and her unswerving courage. . . . Such was Madame Popp—or wretched, despised worker Adelheid . . . whose struggle [jihad] was crowned with success; who through resolute ambition acceded to a seat in the Municipal Council of Vienna. Shortly thereafter she won a seat in the Austrian parliament and is now a leading member, one of those whose voices are heard in every session offering apposite opinions, criticizing proposals, and executing projects! Conceived in destitution, raised in surroundings of hardship, growing up in misery's embrace, and coping with poverty, this woman reached such a high position, member of Parliament, through her own resolve, self-reliance, and fine patience . . . after suffering what many men of today would be incapable of bearing. How many have reached a state of despair. She arrived after heroic struggle on life's battlefield. She attacked difficulties head on and broached the chasm that separated a poor, feeble, female worker from . . . centers of influence and authority, such that she could dictate her will to the government. . . . So to my excellent female countrywomen I proffer these lines, this pure white page full of so many exemplary lessons and sermons from the life of a woman who strove and endured, not letting despair into her heart, until she attained the highest of positions. To every girl and woman I direct my words. Let those words be a guiding lamp. . . . Will keen ears and alert hearts heed them?

Constructing exemplarity and community, “Famous Women” biographies inscribed both precedents and potential lives for editors and readers, echoes of, or templates for, these women's unwritten autobiographies. Not that Arabic language autobiography was an unwritten genre. Pre-nineteenth-century men had tackled the writing of the self. Possibly one medieval woman did, too—the scholar ‘‘A’ءisha al-Bā‘‘ūniyya, a biographical subject in Woman in Islam (1901) and Young Woman of the East (1908). Zaynab Fawwāz and ‘‘A’ءisha Taymūr had written autobiographically—if sparely—to explain their immersion in literature. As time went on—and with “Famous Women” ensconced in women's journals—Egyptian feminists wrote autobiographies, as did entertainers.^[1] But writing the self openly for publication, like signing one's name to a printed work, went against elite women's training. “Famous Women” offered an indirect narrative of self that was more respectable, more veiled (if often quite transparent). Writers could urge readers to consider narratives for their own lives in an unthreatening manner as biography displaced personal destinations onto maps of others' lives. As Carolyn Heilbrun observes, “Well into the twentieth century, it continued to be impossible for [Western] women to admit into their autobiographical narratives the claim of achievement, [or] the admission of ambition.”^[2] Writing and reading others' lives were means to imagine “unacceptable” futures.

Situating these biographies in magazines edited by women, and then invoking female interlocutors who might benefit from imagining these lives, created a sort of women's space and constructed an ideal female reader, paralleling the ideal of active womanhood that biographical subjects embodied. Fawwāz may not have envisioned a mostly female audience for her work; when she wrote, that audience was tiny. But women's magazines—and biographies therein—assume and construct an active, female reader. In a “women's press” much of which was authored by men, perhaps biographies of women enhanced the discursive construction of a sense of female community that, as we have seen, some magazines communicated. In any case, magazines and biographies therein assumed a shared context in which reading holds the power to change the subject who reads. Textual construction of a readership, coupled with signals that one target audience for magazines was the schoolgirl population, shaped the narrative, implying biography as conduct literature. This built on a tactics of publicity: announcements of new magazines mention the presence of “Shahīī;rāt alnisā‘‘” columns and solicit biographies by readers, suggesting the genre's popularity with audiences magazines constructed as desirable.^[3]

Continuing to argue that female biography consistently proposed an exemplary message and that it held much internal variety, this chapter unpacks discourse on girls' education as biography displayed it, in conjunction with the textual construction of the female reader. I then ask what biography said about gendered (and generation-specific) norms of public behavior as a symbolic field in which social, economic, and political agendas were contested—and which shaped polemics on education. For example, what did biography communicate about female dress as a socially and economically overdetermined arena of discipline and personal expression? Why was a key symbolic issue—whether or not women should veil—mostly absent in biography? Then, how was the issue of women's paid employment constituted in women's magazines and in biography? How did public politics as a sphere of female action and ambition shape life narratives? Did biographies and other material in the women's press articulate a feminist politics? And what messages did the many lives of female rulers convey? For as biography acted out the themes and interests of magazines, it supported and challenged explicit agendas, posing them more ambiguously than did other texts in the same magazines.

The Girl Who Reads: Education, Magazines, and Biography

Recall that Malak Hifnī Nāsif “was enamored from an early age with study and reading” and was admired by school authorities.^[4] An Egyptian of the next generation, Zakiyya ‘‘Abd al-Hamīd Sulaymān, daughter of a settled, landowning Bedouin, blazed through the school system, according to a 1926 biography. Her father, “though exemplifying the era into which he was born, absorbed into his being this age's noblest inclinations, for he saw girls' education as a religious duty precisely akin to educating boys.” As adults, Nāsif and Sulaymān wrote in the women's press—the same press that featured them as biographical subjects and constructed their lives as exemplary in the educational paths they trod and in the work their educations led them to perform: educating other females and writing on their behalf. Zakiyya was among the first Egyptian females sent on scholarship to England. She returned to a career in the Ministry of Education, setting up preschools, training teachers, and giving public lectures. “No music brought the happy news of her birth, yet her birth itself was the glad tidings of reform.”^[5] Perhaps Zakiyya, profiled in the Magazine of the Women's Awakening, was the sort of reader editors envisioned. For these magazines targeted schoolgirls and female teachers as this population grew. That they invoked—and thereby helped to shape—an audience defined by schooling (whether as pupils, teachers, or parents) is itself a sign of how education for girls was expanding. Editors vied for the attention of this audience, and for Education Ministry money. “One reason we are ushering in our new year so cheerfully and with redoubled endeavor,” explained the Egyptian Woman's Magazine in 1921, “is that our honorable Education Ministry and some provincial administrative councils have decided to subscribe to our magazine for girls' schools under their aegis.” Both this journal and the Magazine of the Women's Awakening made formal agreements with the ministry concerning distribution to government girls' schools. And, thanking supporters in 1923, Young Woman of the East “single[d] out for mention the honorable Ministry of Education which has looked upon Young Woman of the East with sympathy and approval, putting it in the hands of women teachers and female pupils.” The cover of the April 1922 issue of Young Woman of Young Egypt—a magazine founded by and for female teachers, in which Zakiyya Sulaymān wrote—announced that the Education Ministry had decided to subscribe, presumably for its schools. Recapitulating the history of women's magazines in Egypt, Amīī;na Rif‘‘at praised Young Woman of Young Egypt (in which her history appeared!) by saying the Education Ministry had stipulated that all its girls' schools subscribe because of the magazine's emphasis on “moral/literary elevation and a high [level] of education.” A decade earlier, Young Woman of the East praised the governor of al-Gharbiya province, Muhammad Muhibb Pasha, as a paragon among men. After all, he had ordered seventy subscriptions of the magazine for schools in his province “because of the benefits for girls that he saw it to contain.” And a decade before that, members of the Egyptian royal family had shown support for new women's magazines by buying subscriptions for girls' schools.^[6] Such patronage—private or governmental, local or nationwide—suggests converging interests of magazine publishers and school funders in getting the magazines to schoolgirls and teachers. That articles directly address schoolgirls, and describe schoolgirls reading the magazines, implies specific consciousness of these audiences (and the financial support they could bring). When Alexandria Avierino visited a girls' school, a pupil, Bahiyya Farghalīī;, delivered an oration in which she said, “We always read your magazine, as a guiding lamp, a model of excellence and success.”^[7]

Paralleling the attention to a school audience, exhortations to exemplarity in biography often imply as reader the fatāt, the adolescent girl or young unmarried woman presumably still in formation regarding her outlook, her akhlāq (that ubiquitous term encompassing moral attitude and conduct), and her ādāb (manners, refinement). Indeed, women's magazines, girls' schools, and biography were textually linked. The “Sun of History” series in the Magazine of the Women's Awakening, featuring Jeanne d'Arc, Zenobia of Palmyra, Catherine II of Russia, and Khawla bint al-Azwar, had been written as a course of history lectures for one of Cairo's earliest government secondary girls' schools. Textbooks produced for emerging girls' schools, such as the popular reader and etiquette manual (a combination of import) The Book of Morals for Girls (1918) by Muhammad Rakhā and Muhammad Hamdīī;, included—observed Young Woman of the East—“small features on some women of East and West who became famous.”^[8] Muhammad Effendi Muhammad's Adab al-bint (1915), explained The Gentle Sex, comprised not only “investigations into public morals . . . a girl's duties after school, duties of the wife and mother, proper upbringing for children, moral training among the [ancient] Arabs, and disapproved-of customs in Egypt” but also “attributes of some women of the world and famous Arab women.”^[9] Exemplary biography was a familiar element in school and conduct books. Whether a schoolgirl or that emerging, problematic figure, the unmarried female graduate with the leisure middle-class life ideally included, the young female consumer of print found “Famous Women” everywhere.

The same issue of The Gentle Sex that praised Adab al-bint carried an article linking the felicitous life to books: “The person who despises books will not be happy, while the one who loves even a single useful tome cannot possibly have a life of utter wretchedness.”^[10] If magazines were interested in a schoolgirl audience, if they saw their own mission as educative, and if editing magazines went hand in hand not only with advertising conduct books for schoolgirls and how-to manuals for women but also with composing them,^[11] it is not surprising that editors emphasized the benefits of reading and offered guidelines for what to read. The Young Woman commented that when girls leave school, many of them want to maintain their habits of reading and learning but do not know how to proceed. They read novels (romans) that only make them “fall where they wanted to ascend.” Reading is assumed as a means of self-improvement; reading solely for amusement is suspect.^[12] In The Sociable Companion, Labīī;ba Hāshim—one of the earliest Arab women to write and publish fiction—discussed the beneficial nature of novels: for they show the consequence of virtue and vice. She praised Niqūlā Haddād's (1870–1954) new novel Kulluh nasīb (1901) for representing “the corrupt among women's practices” while ascribing the problem to parental ignorance and poor teaching methods in schools. “Every Eastern woman must read the likes of this novel,” she asserted, warning that the language “is a bit strong and might wound the female reader, especially she who is ignorant, giving her an aversion to reading further.”^[13] In the essay “Reading” Hāshim begged girls to avoid complacency about having an elementary school education, to go on reading, “especially the secluded one, for she has no other means to broaden her understanding.”^[14] In her journal Hāshim gave advice on curriculum, urging school principals to use Yūsuf Sfayr's new Taraqqī al-‘‘ā’ءilāt fī tarbiyat al-banāt (The Elevation of Families through the Education of Girls, 1910?) to teach female pupils how to read.^[15] She praised Adele Jārīī;dīī;nīī;'s novel al-Fatāt al-sharqiyya (The Eastern Young Woman, 1909), pleading with girls to read it for benefit and encouraging women to write similar novels.^[16] But if novels were still suspect—obliging fiction writers to insist repeatedly on their utility—biography was not. Pleasurable to read, it was also useful, respectable, and indigenous.

As Hāshim and other editors urged girls to read, read, read, biographies offered role models of the reading subject. Like Nāsif's, many biographies mention a love of reading. Marie Bashkirtseff (1860–84), a Russian painter and memoirist, “read Aristotle, Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare when not yet seventeen.”^[17] Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1837–1915), an English writer, read all she could find when young. Charlotte Corday shut herself in her room to read Rousseau and Plutarch. Manon Roland “grew up with a passion for books.”^[18] More detail might imply an approved reading program. “From an early age” Mary ‘‘Ajamīī;

loved to read, starting with the illustrated publications that the American missionaries distributed, the novel Genevieve translated by Mīkhā‘‘īl Jahashān, the newspapers al-Manār, al-Mahabba, and Lisān al-Hāl, the magazines al-Muqtataf and al-Hilāl, and, when she had nothing else, her siblings' schoolbooks, some of which she found difficult. To fathom them she resorted to dictionaries, as when she read On Natural Philosophy in English. . . . [H]er brother Iskandar was unable to explain some meanings so she relied on the dictionary, searching for every word she didn't know, spending whole days trying to compre-hend certain points. After reading all [her siblings'] books—things she understood and things she did not, histories of the Romans, Egypt, and Syria, books by the Americans, [books on] the art of rhetoric and the science of logic, on literature, religion, and advanced subjects—her great desire to read motivated her to borrow Banī Hilāl tales and entertaining love stories. Then she was guided to the scholar Nu‘‘mān Qusātilī's library. She read the pick of it and was lucky to find Farah Antūn's al-Jāmi‘‘a very beneficial to her. Worried about her health, often her family blocked her from going to extremes in her reading. She would flee to the roof with her book, exploiting the light of the new moon.^[19]

Hasīb al-Hakīm, who wrote frequently for the Egyptian Woman's Magazine from Europe, sent a poignant biography of Austrian labor activist Adelheid Popp (1869–1939) addressed specifically and didactically to his country-women (this chapter's epigraph). The narrative emphasized reading.

Little Adelheid worked at an age when girls like her played. . . . She began to love the company of books, . . . hardly finishing one before beginning another, so that her spirit was nourished with lofty ideas and the fruits of mature minds, and she began to look to the future. . . . The girl bore every possible misery and hardship in life with astounding patience and rare courage; she worked incessantly and hard, earning barely enough to live as a respectable, honorable, self-respecting young woman.

xLater, “Our young woman's situation improved and so she applied herself eagerly to reading valuable books in belles-lettres. . . . She came to prefer reading to eating.” As she developed an interest in workers' rights, she began to read history.^[20]

Early brilliance is emphasized in biographies of scholars such as Maria Agnesi and ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Muhammad b. ‘‘Abd al-Hādīī;.^[21] Perhaps these paragons would encourage bright young female readers to pursue their own studies. Maybe, like Manon Roland, they would “learn a great lesson about people, their evils, tricks, and deceptions”; for when she read La Nouvelle Héloïse it was not the “corrupt morals portrayed therein” that “attached themselves to her mind.”^[22] Perhaps they would follow other role models, novelists celebrated through biography for writing “useful” novels that shaped estimable morals—‘‘Alā’’ءilī and Alcott, Austen and Avierino.^[23] Perhaps to focus on academic achievement in the persona of the reading girl was a happy ending that challenged widespread critiques of the existing education system as producing only “finished” girls who played piano and spoke French.

Reading in the Classroom

If asserting the utility of reading was key, insisting on further expansion of formal education for girls was crucial. The daughters of a socioeconomic transition into a class structure that gave an emerging bourgeoisie dominance, these girls were the beneficiaries of nationalist leaders' keen interest in expanding a school system constricted by British oversight.^[24] As Beth Baron explains, early women's journals devoted much ink to the issue of education. She traces a shifting focus. Magazines had first to make the case for opening girls' schools. Then they could investigate conditions and curricula in the two-tiered state system of traditional Qur’ءān schools (kuttābs) and new elementary schools (for poor and/or rural girls and for middle-class urban girls, respectively), missionary schools, and private schools started by Egyptians. Girls' education had surfaced as an issue simultaneously with modernizing discourse in Egypt, early in the nineteenth century. The existence of schools funded through private, often religiously oriented initiative and/or foreign aegis was one stimulus for demands that the Egyptian government found girls' schools; the first was initiated by the khedive's spouse in 1873.^[25] While some male reformers urged attention to girls' schooling on the basis that it was more important than boys' education—for it was girls who would educate the children—the number of schools grew slowly, in a context where the early nationalist press was complaining of the poor state of boys' education under the British colonial regime.^[26] Meanwhile, a few girls attended Qur’ءān schools and were educated at home. As Tucker notes, the problem was not lack of interest (among the elite), for in the 1890s demand exceeded supply. Support for the idea of educating girls grew rapidly at century's end, says Baron, as documented in reports by British officials countering well-justified accusations in the local press that they sought to limit education for both sexes by restricting resources. Perhaps the nationalist press itself is a better source for gauging local opinion. In the 1890s it was urging readers to support girls' education, through polemics on its benefits, reports on girls' schools, and announcements of how and where to apply. Al-Mu’ءayyad reported the founding of a private school by one Maryam Ghabrīl, praising her for “serving the daughters of her nation well [or charitably]. What increases our pleasure is the success of this project in the shortest imaginable period of time, for many girls applied, all daughters of Fayyūm's notables.”^[27]

Thus, education for girls was already an issue when the earliest women's magazines appeared. After a year of publishing al-Fatāt, Hind Nawfal contemplated the daughters of the middle and upper classes, worrying about the futures of educated girls. “When a girl leaves school, we see her sitting still in her father's home, looking like nothing so much as a sweet-scented flower.”^[28] Initiating a complaint that would become common in the women's press—that upper- and middle-class girls were spending their leisure hours in either lethargy or questionable pursuits—this essay is interesting for its assumption, in 1894, that school already structured (elite urban) female adolescent life. The essay “The Education of Girls” (1898) in Avierino's Sociable Companion also suggests what a well-established subject this already was: “We do not intend in this essay to speak about the necessity of girls studying, for many pens have articulated this.”^[29] Another writer in this magazine calls girls' education (in 1899) “a subject exhausted by researchers, male and female.”^[30]

But it was not “exhausted,” to judge by the women's magazines. For along with a claim on schoolgirls as audience went a thematic focus on female education as the crux of debate on women's status. Indeed, girls' education as a crucial building block of the nation was a leitmotif throughout the women's and nationalist press and through the entire period I study.^[31]From al-Fatāt to the magazines of the 1930s, biographies both supported and subverted explicit educational agendas of women's magazines and were part of magazines' mission to be “a little school for educated females in the schools.”^[32] Although by the 1930s more girls from an ever broader social spectrum were attending school, and had won the right to higher education, women's magazines could not be complacent, for the content and extent of girls' education remained contested. In 1934, a writer in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine, agreeing that “educated” girls were a good thing, exclaimed: “But we don't want her to learn how to sit on a chair, pen in hand, with a notebook, writing a letter of fiery desire or clutching a romantic novel. Rather, we want her to learn correct household management.”^[33]

Exemplary Women and Educating Girls

A hilarious article by Zaynab Fawwāz in al-Fatāt sketches a dispute over exemplary women in the Qur’ءān and the Prophet's family as a site for satirical condemnation of women's ignorance of their own heritage and the bases of their religion. Its didactic framework positions it as an argument for educating women on both religious and national grounds. Fawwāz sets the scene with an invocation that (given both her temperament and the ensuing narrative) rings sardonic: “We must thank God—mighty and glorious is He—for the men of our age who have granted us the right to build schools for educating girls, so that learned women have graduated from them.” Using the metaphor of the veil to characterize women's ignorance, the author then divulges: “One of the more bewildering sights I have witnessed is those women who know only what nature has taught them.” Visiting an acquaintance, she listens as her hostess expands on the theme of the young female's inferiority and uselessness, for she “does nothing but eat and drink while the boy works and earns.” Fawwāz protests that if the girl gets an education she can work and earn as he does, whereupon her astonished interlocutor asks, “Are we Europeans such that we educate our girls like men?” This may be acceptable for Christians but certainly not for Muslims, she insists. Arguing from sacred history, Fawwāz attempts to persuade her otherwise: the wife Muhammad loved best was the most knowledgeable one. A funny argument erupts, replicating the gathered women's speech patterns: was the name of the Prophet's wife Amina (his mother) or Khadīja (not the wife Fawwāz implied)? The authority of “the effendi” (husband of one present) and a midwife is invoked. “Much dispute arose among them, and voices were raised. . . . The aforementioned effendi had entered a nearby room, and we learned of his arrival. I thanked the Lord who had brought him so he could solve this . . . philosophical disputation.” Admitting to uncertainty, the effendi thinks the Prophet's mother was named Khadīja, whereupon his triumphant wife crows, “Did I not tell you it was Khadīja? Because the effendi knows; it was he who told me that reading is reprehensible for women. When we went to my daughter's grave, my son Muhammad started reciting the Chapter of Mary but the effendi shushed him. 'My son,' he said, 'do not read the Chapter of Mary in front of the women, because it is not proper for them to hear it.'” What, Fawwāz asked, did “Mary” contain that was so bad for women? “Well, she was a prophet, and she was ours, but the Christians took her and made her their prophet [nabiyya] so it is not right for us to hear her Chapter.” Comments Fawwāz: “When I heard this overwhelming piece of news I stood up and left, praising God who gives us release and has preferred us over so many of his creatures.”^[34]

This dispute over exemplary women might signify that issues of knowledge and women's sphere were related by women, in their everyday life, to competing models of exemplary womanhood. Or it might imply that knowing the canonically exemplary figures for Muslim women was so irrelevant to most lives that women did not know Amina from Khadīī;ja from ‘‘A‘‘isha! Either way, it depicts a societal resistance to educating girls—and signals a discursive presence that textually constructed and then battled that resistance. Such a critique pervaded women's magazines. When Labīī;ba Hāshim published a speech she had delivered in the Lebanon—“The Education of Girls”—she was reiterating an edgy criticism of men who complained that knowledge harms women. The worst harm, she said, was defective knowledge. As an example she criticized “the Lebanese” for judging people according to religious identity rather than “principles and acts,” concluding that “our girls must learn their duty to God and homeland.”^[35] Those opposing female education stood in the way of national progress, traitors to the nation above which hovered the specter of religious division. Taking a different tack in his “Word to the Ladies,” Muhammad Munīī;r defined “the nation's weapon” as “the training of its young,” an absent army as long as women remained uneducated. Corralling the argument from history, invoking the keyword tamaddun as a process of instituting modernity that recuperated ancient Egyptian history, Munīī;r declared,

We Egyptians have known the value of woman . . . we knew the benefit of educating, training, and taking interest in her, after [the period of] tyranny, of stripping away her rights. We are at the start of a new civilizing process. . . . History relates to us the courage of women, such that [male] readers judge them favorably against many men. And you, O Egypt, cradle of ancient civilization whose traces still draw wonder in our civilized world; is not your soil suited now to yielding women famous for courage and bold initiative in the nation's benefit, like Cleopatra who sat on dominion's throne, who made kings and caesars dizzy?
Egypt needs training for its daughters; it needs proper upbringing for them because in their hands will be the men of the future.^[36]

A curious context for Cleopatra as exemplar! Yet her (ambiguous) localness made her useful when “nation,” invoked as supreme justification for girls' schooling, trumped other variables.

West, East, and Education

As essays looked to the West, asserting links between “progress,” national strength, and female education, biographies of Western women depicted achievements gained through girls' education. Yet a more familiar past also offered precedents. As we have seen, to establish Muslim and/or Arab “grandmothers” as exemplary for modern girls eased editors' mission of persuasion. Writers elicited unchallengeable precedents for educating girls from Islam's history, as in a 1901 profile of Sayyida Nafīsa (A.H. 145/762 C.E.–A.H. 208/823 C.E.), descendant of the Prophet, transmitter of religious knowledge, devout ascetic: “A woman who reached this pinnacle of piety and was so learned that Imām Shāfi‘‘ī came to her to hear Hadith deserves to have her name inscribed in history. She is a lesson to those who heed lessons, an example that proves to those Egyptians who remain naive that seeking knowledge is everyone's duty, in which it is possible for women and men to be equal.” If knowledge was “duty,” surely it must be pursued?^[37] Of course, such a biography lent support to the Islamic modernist position that “Islam” in itself did not preclude “modern” pursuits such as the education of girls. Nafīsa could sanctify nationalists' insistence that the nation would need knowledgeable women. At the same time, she represented the modest Muslim woman whose knowledge was transmitted from home. As Badran notes, writers sought justification for educating girls in the Islamic and pharaonic pasts,^[38] paralleling a tactic utilized in biography. This was not a neat divide according to the editor's ethnicity or religion. Fawwāz's attack on women's isolation from knowledge of even the “Mothers of the Believers” appeared in Nawfal's al-Fatāt, edited by a Syrian Christian.

Reminding readers of multiple precedents for the refined Arab female, biographies celebrated the greater opportunities open to contemporary girls, often through acerbic comparison to the past, recent or remote, geographically close or far. To ridicule narratives of opposition was to lay a rhetorical scaffolding for tales of impeccable achievement and “success.” Futile it was, implied biography, to oppose the movement for girls' education. Both West and East offered biographical opportunities to contrast present and past. Recall the 1923 sketch of charity worker Rujīī;na Khayyāt that called her “one of the first Egyptian women to be educated, at a time when that was considered a defect in a female.”^[39] If Florence Nightingale lived now, commented a 1934 biography, she could have studied nursing, but in England then, it was considered a shameful pursuit for middle-class women.^[40] Telling the life of physician and medical school administrator Louisa Aldrich Blake (1865–1925) yields an opportunity to contrast the vast difference in numbers of female medical students in England “then” and “now.”^[41] And Lucy Stone's “father was wealthy enough to send her to school as he did her brothers had he wanted; but in those days, academic knowledge was not permissible for girls. Rather, it was one of those blessings only boys were given.”^[42] Hudā Sha‘‘rāwīī;'s recollection in her memoirs of her frustration at being denied an education because she was female echoes repeatedly through these biographies.^[43] A more subtle contrast structures a “local” history: ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr “did not receive any of the fundaments of education [usuūl al-tarbiya wa-al-ta‘‘līm] from which women in this age draw benefit, but she had that practical training that was widespread in the homes of the nobles from among the Bedouins in Islam's earliest times: training in good morals and virtues.”^[44]

Biography offered encouragement when enthusiasm for girls' education seemed at an ebb, too—for the women's press elucidates an uneven history of achievement and expectation. An essay by Romantic poet and polymath Ahmad Zakī Abū Shādī (1892–1955) in Young Woman of the East (1909) commented that parents who had rushed to place daughters in school had then pulled them out and into seclusion, disappointedly assuming that the unsatisfactory education they saw their girl children obtaining was the education reformers had envisioned. Perhaps the “awakening” had not come to a full stop, said Abū Shādī, but very few persevered in pursuing its aims. Like others, he based his argument for strengthening curriculum rather than withdrawing girls from school on what he described as the full publi c role of pre-Islamic Arab women.^[45] Biographies in these early volumes of Young Woman of the East support and sustain the points Abū Shādī and others make about precedents for girls' education and its potential. Maryam Makāriyūs, Sabīha, ‘‘A’ءisha al-Bā‘‘ūniyya, Mariyānā Marrāsh, Maryam bt. Abī Ya‘‘qūb al-Ansārī, Shuhda bt. Abī Nasr, Malak Hifnī Nāsif, Maryam Nahhās, Fatma Aliye, Zaynab Fawwāz, Admā Sursuq, Nūr Jahān: appearing in Young Woman of the East's first thirteen years, life narratives of them all accented learning as crucial to these Arab and/or Muslim women's fitness as adults who taught, raised, materially supported, or ruled others. Meanwhile, biographies of early and medieval Muslim women—like Asmā’ءal-‘‘Amiriyya, “one of Andalus's literary women”—imply links between their learnedness in language and the arts of literature and oratory, and their ability to influence the community. And as the consistent presence of premodern Arab poets and Hadith transmitters among the “Famous Women” implied learning's significance, it allowed biography to pose the question of how girls should be educated by offering a comparative modality of critique. A sketch of al-Khansā’ء in the Ladies' and Girls' Revue contrasted the erudition of ancient Arab women with contemporary experience: “Today they enter a girl in school and spend several years educating her until she can read . . . or write three words, two of which are wrong.”^[46]

At the same time, biographies of Western women counteracted negative portraits of “the educated European woman” that editors, and writers such as Abū Shādīī;, sketched.^[47] As writers made an equation between education, freedom, and license, biographies offered a counterdiscourse that equated education and responsibility. Maria Mitchell, Christine de Pizan, French journalist “Sévèrine,” Louisa Proctor, Queen Victoria: all exemplified educated women of seriousness, probity, and intellectual achievement—even if they were of the West.

Agendas in Tension

Tension within a single publication venue between essays that placed limits on the consumption of education and biographies that threatened to explode those limits emerges early and starkly in The Sociable Companion. Men writing in Avierino's first volume instructed her to make the magazine “an instrument of education,” to constantly demand more girls' schools from the government, and to get her colleagues in other magazines to write on this topic;^[48] but they also cautioned against unregulated education for girls. “A woman adorned with knowledge” is certainly preferable to an ignorant one, said Ahmad Muharram. But her knowledge must be “limited and specific,” not exceeding necessity, nothing that would “distance her from her true and specified place . . . for she was not created to reveal the obscurities of the sciences . . . or to be a philosopher. . . . Take the hand of our women, found schools of knowledge and training so that woman will be strengthened to manage her household, to organize it and to raise her children properly.”^[49] This was no departure from the editor's rhetoric, to judge by her own response to the question of learning's impact on “women's selves.” Finding Muharram's warning about limits “on the right track,”^[50] Avierino linked “increasing drunkenness among women in England” to the spread of “unlimited knowledge.” Labeling this an urban problem, she explained a lower incidence of “corruption” and “female licentiousness” in the countryside: in villages and on farms, “girls learn only reading, writing, and a bit of knowledge [sufficient] to push away the harms of ignorance,” whereas cities harbored “many girls' schools and they were permitted to learn as much as they wanted.” She would be the last to oppose female education, but it must not be “knowledge linked to a craft or profession, that is, engineering, medicine, law or clerking.”

Yet her stance seems challenged by collective “Famous Women” biographies in The Sociable Companion. These portrayals focus on female educators of females, thereby skirting the issue of mixing with the other sex and foregrounding the most accepted profession for Arab females. Yet they do not paint a canvas of strictly limited “knowledge for women.”^[51] For even as the journal's polemics privilege restrictions that “ought” to govern the education of “Eastern” girls, a biographical series lauding European women's contributions to teaching other females cannot help but highlight their own intellectual achievements. Furthermore, the notion that one educates both as teacher and as exemplar of the erudite woman emerges in Avierino's presentation of biography as didactic medium. Offering portraits of her subjects positioned over their biographies, Avierino couples the role-model motif with a stress on learning: “Perhaps the effect of gazing at the portraits will occasion interest in acquiring knowledge, and seriousness in imitation, for often human beings are influenced only by means of the senses.”^[52] This observation (perhaps motivated also by defensiveness about publishing women's portraits) precedes depiction of other sorts of “influences.” If readers think gains in female education are limited to “one or two countries,” they should look to Finland, where Mieke Freyburg, “known since adolescence for her firm will and great desire to learn, . . . put her all into serving knowledge and elevating her nation, through teaching and founding a women's newspaper to work on women's liberation and other things. . . . Her great hope is to be Inspector of Elementary Education.”^[53] One month earlier the series featured German scholars who taught young women and profiled Alice Luce, professor at Smith and Wellesley, and Alice Freeman Palmer (1855–1902), who at Wellesley had “dedicated herself to serving young women. Her work was esteemed so highly . . . she was appointed Head.” Asks the editor: “When, I wonder, will we see among us the likes of these women? It is a dream difficult to realize in this time of ours. Who knows if it will be achieved in the time of our children or grandchildren?”^[54] Had local girls followed the restrictive warnings of Avierino's journals—restrictions to which she certainly did not adhere in her own life—that dream would indeed have been “difficult to realize.”

A few years later The Gentle Sex was more forthright as it employed the argument from “Famous Women” to argue for an education (ta‘‘līm) that would make women “equal to” men. Answering a query posed by a Miss J. Girgis on whether women “have the right to equality with men in society,” the magazine calls it a much-asked question; “one of the basic aims of our magazine is to establish this right.” Noting American women's political demands, the magazine declared,

Whoever has studied history knows women's excellence and ability to match men in men's affairs since times remote. . . . Let us mention some famous women such as Madame de Sévigné, . . . Madame de Staël who astonished scholars of her age, . . . Hypatia, . . . and some who ruled and performed their duties perfectly, like Zenobia of Palmyra and other rulers like Victoria queen of the English. With this, no one can deny that learning makes women equal to men.^[55]

As biography weighed in on one of the time's hottest topics—whether, why, how, and which girls should be educated—it reiterated dominant themes in the magazines, emphasizing the importance of education to personal happiness, family viability, and national strength—but not necessarily in that order. In the third issue of The Young Woman, an open letter on “Knowledge and Work” inscribed to a community of female readers had urged young women to pursue education first because knowledge “gives honor to the society” and then because a girl without knowledge lives without tasting “the pleasure of life.” Acknowledging personal happiness as an impetus to and consequence of education, it yoked girls' schooling to national progress: success, progress, and advancement depend on “women's high-minded ambitions and resolutions, and where there is knowledge there is desire to act.” Education must be used, insisted the magazine. In the next issue, the biography of Theresa of Bavaria enacted the same argument. From an early age she devoted herself to reading and learning, and then to writing, “so that her knowledge would be paired with labor.”^[56] Biography constructed girls' education as harnessed to the public good. Yet the individualist temper of the genre and the positive tenor of these texts—the teleological notion of a life culminating in “success,” however that was to be defined—might mute the trope of personal sacrifice in favor of personal ambition.

Men's Roles

Concluding her portrayal of the women's argument over Khadīī;ja's identity, Fawwāz voiced a motif that would be dominant throughout the women's press as she turned from censuring the female audience within the text to addressing a male audience beyond:

So contemplate, men of the East, how neglect leads to ruin. How can you hope for your children's success and your souls' repose as you, or some of you, toss on the mat of naivete and ignorance? . . . Between them, three of those women have twelve daughters. The woman of the house . . . has four, her sister-in-law who swore by the midwife, three, and her daughter, five. If from one household twelve girls go out and populate twelve homes on a foundation of ignorance—well, let those of intelligence take note.

Fawwāz sent this article to al-Nīl, where many of her essays appeared, “so the generality of folk might read my essay and see the necessity of educating girls.”^[57]

As writers urged men to found girls' schools and to send their daughters to learn, in biography parents—and especially that popular figure, the supportive liberal dad—received praise for encouraging daughters' education.^[58] As writers attacked men for keeping daughters home, biographical fathers foster the desires of intellectually inclined daughters, often against material constraints and social expectations (if they do not die in a daughter's childhood, becoming absences that motivate—and justify—female employment). Jane Austen's (1775–1817) father, “despite his straitened circumstances, concerned himself with giving her an education not customary for eighteenth-century folk.”^[59] As de Pizan exemplifies education's impact, her life history traces the educating father who makes a difference:

She grew up in the fourteenth century, that is, in the age of ignorance and decadence, when woman was a domesticated animal, abased and submissive, driven like sheep. . . . Indeed, perhaps sheep had higher status and more importance in men's eyes. But fortune served the subject. Her father . . . important at the French court, prepared for her education and gave her useful books. . . . She acquired knowledge that opened her eyes to the humiliating servitude that was women's lot. Grieved, she applied herself to learn more and practice writing . . . to push tyranny away from woman and lift her from this ignorance.^[60]

Mariyānā Marrāsh's mother, wrote ‘‘Isā al-Ma‘‘lūf, was from the famous al-Antākīī; family, “possessed of excellence and letters—in an age in which Eastern women received no education due to the dearth of girls' schools and the public's belief that it was not fitting to educate a girl, 'so she would not sit in the men's reception room,' [they said].” But her father, Fath allāh, with his “passion for knowledge,” put his five-year-old daughter in the Maronite school, having taught her “the basics” at home.^[61] A joint biography of the Lebanese sisters and writers Anīsa and ‘‘Afīfa Shartūnī, who died suddenly and young (1883–1906, 1886–1906), stresses that when their father saw his daughters' bent for writing he encouraged them and read poetry to them often.^[62] “Elizabeth bint Daniel Cady” Stanton's (1815–1902) father “concerned himself with her tarbiya” and entered her in school, where she excelled.^[63] Suzanne Necker got the basics of knowledge from her clergyman-father. Betsy Taqlā's (1869–1924) father “lost sleep over her upbringing and that of her siblings to an extent proverbial to this day.”^[64] Two biographies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) single out her father. In the Egyptian Woman's Magazine he is unsupportive, which mirrors negative polemics in that magazine on men's lack of support for female education.^[65] In The Gentle Sex, though, he “assumed her education and upbringing himself” when she distinguished herself from other daughters of the elite intellectually. In him “she saw the youthful friend in her amusements, the schoolteacher in her training, and the merciful father” who, “pleased and proud,” paid to print her first narrative poem.^[66] In another case, elder brother stands in for the benevolent patriarch. Salmā Qusātilīī;'s brother (whose library Mary ‘‘Ajamīī; devoured) “propagated in her the spirit of the nahda, especially after he published his novel Anīs wa-Anīsa on that subject. She used to declare and believe, 'Woman can keep up with man in every sort of deed.'”^[67] When Warda al-Yāzijīī; “reached the age of twelve and showed signs of intelligence and a longing for knowledge, her father began to train her in grammar until she excelled. Then he tutored her in the sciences of poetic meter and rhyme, and began to read his poems to her until she developed a desire to write poetry. She showed facility, which intensified his admiration and desire to prepare her for poetic composition.”^[68] This picture, which might encourage a father (not to mention a daughter), contrasts with Warda al-Yāzijīī;'s own memories at eighty, comforted by seeing today's “girls of my kind” in a far better state than her own generation. She recalls her father's refusal when a school head inquired if she would teach. The patriarch (an “enlightened” leader of the early literary nahda) refused on the basis that it was not fitting that a girl leave her father's house to work. Poetry was one thing; working outside the home for pay, another. And “none of the men,” alYāzijīī; went on, worked to get his daughters educated. “The females who read in those days were fewer than few.”^[69] Perhaps, then, the educating father was more an ideal to urge than a historical reality, but biography made the ideal discursively real by setting it into women's lives, as it reiterated magazines' insistence on the importance of the supportive father.

And times were changing, as al-Yāzijīī;'s reference to the past hinted. Another Arab poet to benefit from a concerned father was Egyptian Amīī;na Najīī;b (1887–1917), dead at the age of thirty and mourned in the “Famous Women” column of Young Woman of the East. Here, though, if the biography called attention to her education at home by her father, the “finest” (male) teachers, and her brother, it also mentioned her mother as a formative educative influence. Amīna “grew up loving literature; she inherited its spirit from her father and mother together.”^[70] It is both parents, together, who give the child her first education, insisted women's magazines; a few biographies supplied illustrations. The biography of Manon Roland in The Egyptian Woman's Magazine stresses parental responsibility for education by contrasting her “strong” childhood education with what might have been expected from her environment and intimating education's importance by constructing an adulthood of exemplary conduct and courage. Roland knew hardship “of a sort in which children's upbringing can rarely be good. . . . Yet the young girl had a fine upbringing and broad education, due to the care and concern of these parents, for they knew the value of training, understood education's import, and undertook that which the obligations of motherhood and fatherhood demand.” The result was exemplary: “She did not go along with her dreams and fancies but believed only what she knew to be right, and where truth resides. This is rare—as rare as the likelihood that her peers would occupy themselves in serving the home with skill and understanding, learning and study. And she perused the biographies of the great.”^[71]

Mothers and Education

“Occupying themselves in serving the home with skill and understanding”: the “Famous Woman's” mother as educator—and the “Famous Woman” as mother-educator—are ubiquitous yet elusive, more complex figures than the ideal supportive father. The coupling of mothers of “Famous Women” and education is signaled more by elision than by declaration; the educative role of the mother who is herself a “Famous Woman” surfaces overwhelmingly in her domestic role, as we shall see in the next chapter. This gap between the “Famous Woman” as product of her father and the “Famous Woman” as educating mother articulates a long historical moment. “Famous Women” were (with some exceptions) not their mothers. A new education for girls would produce a different female generation, one that would educate daughters, one where educated/educating mothers were not exceptional. The exceptional educated mother who did produce a “Famous Woman” proved the point through her (at least discursive) rarity. In biography the absence of an educated mother keen on her daughter's education emerges through the emphasis on fathers and more explicitly. Although when Young Woman of the East featured Germaine de Staël-Holstein (1766–1817) it had recently published a life of her mother, Suzanne Necker, in its biography of de Staël it barely mentioned Necker (hardly an “ignorant mother”). It singled out her father as the source of her interest in politics.^[72]

In contrast, singling out the mother as educated educator of her daughter enacts the importance of this educational agenda. As a young woman, Hannā Kūrānīī; was “safeguarded by the ropes of educated refinement, as happens with the daughters of educated, trained mothers.”^[73] Maryam Makāriyūs, having benefited from a mother who, although widowed, was determined to educate all her children, raised her own three children herself “and was determined to educate them.”^[74] A profile of Princess Juliana of Holland, heir to the throne, focuses first on her mother, Queen Wilhelmina, careful and serious educator. The biography hints at an agenda; it was not only the queen's “precise observations on issues of upbringing and training” that led her to engage “the best professors to teach her daughter, to broaden her mind, and strengthen her emotions”; it was also “the blows of punishment by isolation” that Wilhelmina had experienced as a child. Thus, for Juliana she sought a more socially satisfying and instructive upbringing.^[75]

More often it is the “Famous Woman” herself rather than her mother who is the educated educator. Olga de Lébédef (b. 1853), Russian traveler, scholar, and charity patron, “took her daughters along on every trip to instill in them a love of study and increase their knowledge.”^[76] But de Lébédef's case is unusual: when it is her own children that a “Famous Woman” educates, most often the emphasis is on sons, the “nationalists of the next generation,” consonant with the concerns of the male-run nationalist press. When it is the children of other women whose education she supervises, she is lauded for educating girls. Women did not teach in boys' schools in Egypt, but historical reality seems more than convenient to the polemical focus of the magazines.

Teachers

For if mothers educate sons, teachers educate the mothers of those sons, producing a genealogy played out in biography. If girls' education was to expand, and especially if it was to be a national (and nationalizing) education, one dependent neither on British administrators nor on European missionaries, a local cadre of female teachers was crucial. It was not accidental that teaching was one of the earliest professions to become acceptable for Arab women. And from the 1920s on, schoolteachers themselves protested the presence of foreign women as school supervisors, to the dismay of some Education Ministry bureaucrats.^[77] Feminists (among others) who wanted to see women in the professions could draw on nationalist arguments to support their call. At the same time, in this period female teachers in Egypt had to be unmarried. Thus, conveniently, one could champion teaching as a career without broaching the sensitive subject of how a married woman was to divide herself between home and profession. Those who were educating a new generation of girls became subjects of celebratory biography, reprising other material in the press that urged young women to consider teaching careers. An article on “Eastern women's” advancement in Young Woman of the East singled out women teachers for praise and warned readers that “those who have attained a share of knowledge are duty-bound to use it, to benefit homeland and nation . . . and not to leave it locked up in their brains . . . for this is equivalent to the wealthy but miserly person who does not give to the poor.” Knowledge as possession is akin to the religious duty of alms: it must be proffered for the general good. Invoking a local and female audience, the author claimed that

we women have not served our society in any way worth mentioning to this day; the manifestation of Western civilization we have acquired is mere imitation derived from proximity, from mixing with the Europeans. . . . Among us only a few deserve respect and praise: the refined female educators who expend the bloom of their youth within school walls, spending life's springtime to benefit their sisters. . . . The great majority of educated women stay aloof from all beneficial work. . . . Perhaps the remnants of ignorance recite to them verses of disdain for work and women who do it. . . . Sisters, let us become active . . . that we may follow the footsteps of those fine Arab women who preceded us and simultaneously walk the path of serious initiative that our female peers in the West tread.^[78]

Such a call worked in tandem with biographies of missionary teachers in the Arab world. The ultimate goal was their replacement, but their efforts were important to this aim. Significantly, it was magazines run by Christian, especially Syrian, women, that featured missionary teachers, for many of the Syrian Christian writers, and Copts too, had been educated in missionary schools and were less sensitive about such schools' continuing presence in the Arab world. So Louisa Proctor could exemplify the properly educated girl who becomes the properly educating woman. “Brought up in the concerned care of her parents on honorable principles, she grew up showing piety and virtue. She did not arrogantly disregard this blessing or use it for the airs of youth, freeing herself for places of amusement or letting an inclination for whims and passions guide her as they did her female contemporaries.” As a teacher, she was “characterized by great cleanliness, methodicalness, and perfection”; she was “strong of memory” and widely knowledgeable, competent in “all remaining types of female work.”^[79] The “Famous Woman” as teacher accomplished two representational functions. She supported the agenda of the girls' education movement, and she offered a respectable example of the career woman, for the task of educating girls could be presented as extended motherhood. When the late Jessie Hogue was praised for educating girls in Asyut's secondary school to become “excellent ladies,” the products of her labor were categorized typically: “From beneath her hand were graduated refined mothers.”^[80] These biographies show how missionaries' agendas could converge partially with local nationalist agendas: not an agenda of conversion, naturally, but one of producing trained mothers, the new domestic woman. The modernity of this agenda sounds clearly through biographies that echoed the coupling of al-tarbiya wa-al-ta‘‘līm found in the press. In the early 1890s, Fawwāz showed awareness of modern rhetoric around early childhood training when she used this diction. De Staël's “mother assumed her education [ta‘‘līmahā] but was ignorant of the requisites of a guided upbringing [tarbiya], [such as] observing children's state to discern their moods, inclinations, and the direction of their emotions. For she was stern and hard on her daughter in educating her; severity was her habitual practice in childrearing and discipline.”^[81]

If polemics on teaching in the women's press echoed a hegemonic male nationalist agenda, naming the female teacher as educator of the next generation of mothers of sons, subjects of biography did not remain neatly within a domesticized articulation of female education. Role models through narration of their own struggles to become educated and their work with the next generation, they also emerge often as scholars and professionals for whom domestic life was clearly secondary (recall The Sociable Companion's series). And this was not just in the West. Salmā Qusātilīī; not only produced “many girl graduates” in Damascus; having had an early “inclination to reading and self-reliance,” she also translated and wrote essays for the Alexandria periodical al-Rāwī. For al-Latā‘‘if she wrote on female education in Damascus, referring to manuscripts on medieval education and documenting the history of existing girls' schools, in one of which she taught before moving to Egypt to practice as a gynecologist. Thus did she “stand on her own two feet to serve literature and the girls of her kind in Egypt.” The Egyptian Woman's Magazine's 1927 biography of Maria Mitchell praised the West because there women were “numerous” in the sciences and “compete with men.”^[82] Anna Letitia Aiken Barbauld (1743–1825) and her husband opened a school that grew famous “for Mrs. Barbauld's literary fame and persistence in work.”^[83] Barbauld was an intellectual raised in Dissenting circles in England, a respected writer on civil rights issues and literary critic, before she was a boarding-school proprietor.^[84] Yet it is her pedagogy that this biography highlights: her school texts, it says, were among her most valuable writings.

Mitchell and Barbauld fit the agenda, but—pace Avierino—it was important to find local exemplars in history, a biographical constant we have already seen in unpacking the rhetoric of exemplarity. Scholar Zaynab bt. Muhammad b. ‘‘Uthmān b. ‘‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Dimashqiyya (A.H. 685/1286 c.e.–A.H. 799/1396 C.E.), a teacher “with more than fifty pupils” in her circle, provides a pretext to mention other premodern precedents: “Many like her from among the women of the Arabs worked in teaching.” Fawwāz, in contrast, had privileged al-Dimashqiyya's exceptionality: “No woman like her has been heard of, who instituted a teaching circle in which gathered students the like [or extent] of hers.”^[85] With the need for precedents in mind, the debate over girls' education infused the life narrative of another premodern subject when Young Woman of the East profiled a medieval scholar growing up “in the embrace of learning and literature.” Khadīī;ja bt. ‘‘Alīī; bt. ‘‘Umar b. Abīī; Hasan al-Ansārīī; (A.H. 788 modern/1386 C.E.–A.H. 873/1468 C.E.) “wrote women's epistles in which she urged the girls of her kind to read and keep pace with men in their knowledge, thereby attaining high status among scholars of her age and litterateurs of her time.” This echoes nothing so much as the status of Labīī;ba Hāshim and her colleagues, women lauded by liberal male intellectuals of their time for urging other women to pursue education.^[86]

A few biographies of premodern subjects incorporate the diction as well as the themes of contemporary writing on early childhood education. Pre-Islamic Arab poet Fātima bt. Ahjam, characterized not by a lengthy paternal nasab but only by that of her immediate family, mother as well as father, “grew up between them with the finest tarbiya and on the firmest of bases.”^[87] A later biography of Fātima is equally attuned to timely themes: “Her father concerned himself with her acquisition of culture and knowledge [tathqīfihā wa-ta‘‘līmihā]. Thus she united adab and ‘‘ilm.”^[88] This emphasis shapes a life of the poet and muhadditha Fātima bt. Jamāl al-Dīn Sulaymān (A.H. 620/1223 C.E.–A.H. 708/1308 C.E.), who “acquired knowledge and Hadith from her father.”^[89] Of Fayrūz bt. ‘‘Alā’ءal-Dīn, famous for sound judgment, intelligence, breadth of knowledge, and refined manners, we learn that her father, the Sultan of Delhi, “took pride in her and trained his sympathies and affection on her to the exclusion of the rest of the family.”^[90]

Paying For It All

Not only teachers but also founders and funders of girls' education feature as “Famous Women,” hardly surprising when nationalists were urging private initiatives in education to compensate for government stinginess, and feminists like Nabawiyya Mūsā were starting girls' schools. Charitable contributors to and founders of girls' schools were among the most popular “Famous Women”; when this was but one of many activities in a life, it often received disproportionate emphasis. Of all the doings of Catherine II of Russia, it was her establishment of girls' schools that received most attention in a 1911 sketch; other biographies also highlighted her support for girls' education.^[91] Fātima Haydar Fādil, a princess of the Egyptian-Turkish royal family, was “the democratic Egyptian princess” for her active interest in education and support for poor girls, in a profile that took her efforts as a tangible sign of “women's awakening.”^[92] “Mrs. Frank Leslie” not only employed many women in her late husband's business, but “when she saw that there exist many women with vigorous minds who have no means to show their strengths, she opened a school which she put in the hands of learned and energetic women.”^[93] Affordability was an issue. Leslie and others are praised for starting schools for poor girls, a concern evident also when biographies feature girls and parents struggling to pay for education.^[94]

And on more than one plane, education was a struggle. Biography illustrated the frustrations of those who wrote in support of girls' education. The Ladies' and Girls' Revue had accentuated the unwillingness of Lucy Stone's father to educate her, and her own determined (and successful) efforts to acquire learning. A sketch of Indian nationalist leader and poet Sarujini Naidu lauded her determination despite difficulties to get an education in England.^[95] Over and over, biographies of scholars and writers pointedly described the process of gaining knowledge as a struggle, not only for Arab or Indian women but also for other Mediterranean, and European, women, from Hypatia to Maria Agnesi to Marie Curie. This was one way to attack lack of support, material or familial, for female education. In Chapter 3 we saw Jurjīī; Bāz offer Maryam Jahashān as a model for young women. But what was the content of her exemplarity? She had a “natural disposition” toward the public good, specifically to “serve the girls of her kind.” She also had a religious vocation. When her prominent Beirut family tried to dissuade her from joining a convent, her resolve was such that she fled secretly to another convent. Located by her “family with government help,” she was persuaded to return to Beirut when the family promised her freedom to pursue charity work. Torn between religious and social vocations, she began a career in girls' education among the Greek Orthodox, her coreligionists, “in greater need than daughters of other communities.” She taught; she ran a school; she founded an organization to educate orphan girls. “It is enough,” concludes Bāz, “that she accustomed women to supporting education at a time when men were stingy with their aid.”^[96]

Unfulfilled or postponed dreams shape life stories, too. Narrating Mary ‘‘Ajamīī;'s early life, the same author ended: “She retains a longing of which she has often dreamed, waiting for the right chance. But her father died, the war broke out, and one obstacle after another barred her. She hoped to go to one of Europe's or America's institutes of higher education to expand her knowledge and skills, no matter what age she had reached.”^[97] In a nearidentical text appearing almost simultaneously in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine, an added section on her parents describes (unusually) Mary's mother: “She married illiterate. After all her children arrived she learned to read and began to study the Bible.”^[98] Indignation, hope, and struggle indexed choices for which young readers and their mothers might strive, indices that reflected and intervened in a wide-ranging discourse on gendered experience. It began with girls' access to learning, which women as parents, teachers, editors, writers, and translators sought a part in shaping.

Curricula

Biography not only celebrated girls' desires to learn and their struggles for knowledge and degrees but also, echoing other writing in women's magazines, implied specific curricular choices. If magazines were “little schools,” teaching everything from comportment to child raising to what one could properly read to the status of women in the Qur’ءān, they discussed what “bigger” schools should be teaching. Early magazines—the Ladies' and Girls' Revue,The Young Woman, and The Sociable Companion—made the equation between national strength, family vitality, and educated mothers. The next generation took up specific pedagogical goals and curriculum.

The most sustained example of increasing specialization and a shift from arguing for female education to a focus on pedagogy and curriculum is the content—indeed, the genesis—of Young Woman of Young Egypt. Like earlier magazines, it urged attention to the home as the “first school,” insisting that parents needed to know child psychology and acting as a normal school for mothers. Educator Zakiyya Sulaymān's first essay for the magazine dwelled on “domestic felicity,” offering practical suggestions to the educating mother: treat your male and female children equally, participate in their studies, discuss with them their observations and games, read to them for half an hour every night at bedtime. Founded as the mouthpiece for a female teachers' organization, though, the journal articulated women's changing employment situation and growing confidence as it addressed the needs and interests of professional schoolteachers. Sulaymān's next essay was on “the history of the science of pedagogy,” and she defended the methods of Froebel while comparing them to the Montessori system.^[99] In the first few issues alone, female educators filled a column called “Outlooks on Teaching,” writing on teaching geography, the importance of language instruction and learning through play, and techniques for teaching natural history.^[100] The magazine instructed on “Home Management” too. If it implied a female continuum between mothering and teaching, it addressed “the working woman's misery” (in Europe more than in Egypt).^[101] “Famous Women” in the first two years of Young Woman of Young Egypt are few but speak to the journal's interests, although the absence of professional teachers is striking: Lady Astor as mother and politician, Jeanne d'Arc as self-sacrificing nationalist, Marie Curie as prize recipient, “Russia's former empress as wife and mother.” Elsewhere, biography becomes a platform for an educational agenda, indeed, for discussing the very terms that ground ongoing debate over education. Writing in the Magazine of the Women's Awakening, ‘‘Abd al-Halīī;m Sālim of Alexandria offers a biography of Louisa Campan (1752–1822), but three out of its five pages constitute a discourse on altarbiya wa-al-ta‘‘līm.

We want to convey to the Awakening's female and male readers something of the history of women's education, its variety of methods, and the life stories of famous educators in France. We desperately need to become acquainted with the science of female education, its expansion, and how to establish principles for a sound Egyptian training for girls. . . . The present women's movement will not advance unless the methods adopted for educating girls change.

That the writer goes on to specify those principles as necessarily suitable for “the Egyptian Muslim spirit and customs” is in line with this maga-zine's focus. That he takes France as a model is in tension with other articles in the magazine that reject European models.

The author defines education as “encouragement to follow a model”; no wonder he chooses biography as his medium. The good (and female) raiser of children “impels her children to imitate” good comportment. Maternal competence means making the qudwa concrete, for her tarbiya begins “with the cradle.” It is father's “influence,” mother's “guidance,” and teacher's “instructions” under which the child thrives. Ta‘‘līm is one thing, tarbiya another, and the former is set firmly within the home. “The consummate tarbiya is in coupling knowledge with virtue.” Mothers are to inculcate the latter, teachers the former. Proper mothers produce “a sound, refined generation”; and herein lies the justification, and the urgency, of “refining women” (tahdhīb al-nisā‘‘ā’ء). That this disquisition lies within, and introduces, a biographical text demonstrates both the primacy of this issue and the perceived didactic and justificatory usefulness of biography. The life narrative that follows Sālim's history of the debate on education for girls in France offers predictable themes: the father who goes to great effort to educate his young, “although he had many,” and the early emergence of signs of intelligence and readiness in little Louisa Henriette. After a spell as tutor at court, suddenly obliged to support a number of dependents, she begins a school based on the program outlined above.^[102] Significantly, it is tarbiya rather than ta‘‘līm that names her profession and passion: here is the educator as “extended mother.” A maternal trope—which could justify women's entrance into the profession of teaching even as it professed an educational agenda—shapes many biographies.

Education and Motherhood

“Mme Campan had a natural inclination [kānat miyāla bi-gharīzatihā] for training children. As a young girl, whenever she saw children, she wanted to assume their tarbiya.” And when Napoleon Bonaparte asked Campan what was lacking for the young of France to perfect their education, her response was “Mothers!” The diction of “motherhood” as “natural” is put to use to support teaching the young as a female profession. If maternal metaphors made teacher training for Arab girls a more palatable idea, the slippage between educating and mothering also produced biographies that collapsed women's education into motherhood, recuperating a dominant theme of some magazines. When the adoptive mother of Rāhīl ‘‘Atā (1823–1894) died, “her father undertook her training and her graduation in the literary arts and household management as his wife had intended.” This biography—by ‘‘Isā al-Ma‘‘lūf—is a flawless example of the male reformer's vision of the perfect educated wife. For Rāhīl was a model graduate of the first Beirut girls' school, where she “acquired the finest morals” (plus “perfect English”). So, when young Butrus al-Bustānī (1819–97), a major light of the nahda, “became acquainted with her, he saw her ādāb and good management, her knowledge and exalted morals. Thus he fell in love with her—and with her partiality to him, which was because of his learning.” Once married, “managing her home and raising her children [nine, eight of whom lived] did not prevent her from sharing with her husband supervision of the National School they founded, caring for the health of the young pupils, managing the servants, perfecting the food, and offering him some of the views that distinguished her.”^[103] Note the order: Rāhīl's domestic skills first define her sphere of work in the school; only then do we hear of her “opinions.” Finally we hear more: “She loved to read works of philosophy in Arabic and English, and books on literature and morals. In her children, male and female, she propagated a love of knowledge and an inclination for reading useful books. She was an exemplar in excellence of character, a genius in perfecting knowledge.” After the deaths of her husband and eldest son, she “concerned herself with raising her children, and helped to complete her husband's intellectual and literary projects.” What is the lesson with which we are left? “May God have mercy upon her, and multiply her likes among our women in household management, perfection of knowledge and excellence of child raising, for these are the finest attri-butes of the woman in every age.”^[104]

Indeed, what was education for? Betsy Taqlā (1869–1924), widow of al-Ahrām's founder-editor, took over her late husband's position at the helm of Cairo's most important newspaper and its publishing house, “directing their politics in the best possible way. Through her hard work, tirelessness, guidance, vigilance and knowledge she doubled its vitality and integrity . . . for the sake of serving the nation.” “Frank” in her opinions, Taqlā “did not air a view until she had given it thorough study.” When it came to girls' education, she published her views “from time to time on the pages of al-Ahrām. She did not think it sufficient that a girl learn to read and write. Rather, limiting education to reading and writing constituted a flaw and deficiency only compensated by learning how to regulate and conduct the home, household management, the rudiments of medicine, economy and how to meet the needs of the family.”^[105] In other words, a woman at the top of one of Cairo's prominent establishments, vocally supporting girls' education, implied its content and aim to lie within the ambit of domestic employment. Biographies praised the Begum of Bhopal not only for capable rule but also for expanding girls' educational opportunities (a photograph posed her with a granddaughter, “pursuing higher education in the colleges of England”). Yet on the occasion of her retirement, Young Woman of the East noted that the Begum wanted to concentrate on social issues, founding more educational institutes for males and females “and working to improve curricula and expand the sciences of home management for girls.”^[106] Such emphases echoed a consistent theme throughout the press and period, education for enlightened motherhood and informed domesticity, producing the mother who knows proper child care and can provide her child a “first school.” A man from Damietta put it into a written oration to his spouse on their wedding night:

I chose you over other girls in the quarter because you were famed for your proper upbringing and sound training. Your excellent powers of understanding and foresight led me to hope from my heart that were I to surprise you in our first moment [of marriage] with advice or admonition rather than flattery I could be confident that you would not react with anger. . . . For when a married pair know their rights and duties, felicity results. . . . You learned these rights and duties long ago, as a pupil who stood out among her classmates. . . . You epitomized the drive of your school and its fine production of mothers of the future, mistresses of the home. . . . Yet a girl with this background might think she knows all, when she has yet to learn complex lessons wrought only by life together. . . . With all due respect for your views and esteem for your knowledge, I desire you to study my moral character. I want to teach you my preferences . . . so you do not have to learn them over time . . . and so you come to want only what I want, and to feel antipathy solely toward my dislikes. Enough for this evening. Get some rest.^[107]

This writer echoes the deployment of attributes, the precedence of education and “moral beauty,” the paramount interest in a female education that will be deployed within the family, that biographies propose even as they offer alternative narratives.

Magazines offered templates for the educating mother. The column “Between a Mother and Her Child,” in Young Woman of the East, featured dialogues on the roots of plants, the nature of clouds, plant germination, and the like, enacting both the desired form and a proposed content for a mother's didactic role.^[108]Imitatio as learning is acted out in texts that signal a certain class identity yoked to an image of the hands-on mother: “Najīī;b and his mother sat in the garden of their home. His mother busied herself working a stocking while the boy played with a little toy boat his uncle had given him. . . . His mother drew near to the water, and her crochet hook fell in and sank.” Why? Because it was metal. A couple of pages later, the listening son comments: “Aah, now I understand how steamships float,” whereupon his mother explains, “This is what we call 'relative mass.'”^[109] If the magazine offers a feminized version of The Selected, the mode of transmitting knowledge diverges in its mother-to-child (usually a son), woman-to-woman structure, of which “Famous Women” biographies were an element.

The precise production of an emulative educative curriculum within the magazines reiterates the rhetorical emphasis on the mother as “first school,” which the magazines uphold ad infinitum from the 1890s on. At the same time, biographies in the 1930s especially suggest how girls' education was changing. Taking for granted the inclusion of “home management” in the female curriculum, they also accepted women's professional ambitions. Egyptian poet and writer Jamīī;la al-‘‘Alā’ءilīī; wanted to be a writer from the age of nine. But her mother, her aunt, and everyone else laughed at her—except for the head of her school, Hudā al-Hakīm, “now head of Hilwān Secondary School [for Girls].” Yet when al-‘‘Alā’ءilī took a diploma, it was in “household management,” for by then home economics had made it into the Egyptian curriculum for females. She taught at Tanta's Normal School, “spending her days teaching and her evenings with laundry, ironing, cooking, and baking, until she collected a fine treasure in the art of home management, which a year later she presented as Sa‘‘ādat al-mar’ءa (Woman's Felicity).” Noticed by a newspaper editor, she was asked to write, and also corresponded with “our magazine,” but the head of the school where she taught forbade it, and her family treated her ill. Yet “now” (this profile, like others in the 1935 volume of Magazine of the Women's Awakening, blends biography and interview) she writes stories that aim “to offer a model to men and women unlike the Egyptian story [as it now exists] with its base qualities.”^[110] Al-‘‘Alā’ءilī's struggle for a professional life entailed working within the domestically oriented female curriculum of the time, a modern curriculum that borrowed a sign of modernity—the “professional” woman of the house—from Europe and Islamized it. Yet she carved out a writing career for herself and became a recognized, published poet.

By the 1920s, support for female education had become complicated by educated girls' own demands and needs.^[111] As the EFU and its journals addressed girls' education, the issue of secondary and university schooling had become pressing, for now the elite harbored a group of elementary school graduates who wanted to continue their education.^[112] Biographers celebrated local heroines (Durriyya Fahmīī;, Na‘‘īma al-Ayyūbīī;) who had gone far beyond elementary school. Again, biographies of graduates, professionals, and serious readers perhaps provided the “happy endings” that parents and educators did not always see around them.

Education for the Nation

How might education strengthen national consciousness? Praising the numbers of educated women in Turkey following the 1908 Young Turk revolution, Fatāt al-sharq had linked educational opportunity for girls to images of women as models of national vitality.^[113] Specifically, it yoked Turkish constitutionalism's success to the visible activisms of educated females on behalf of reformist elements in the state, noting “the Ottoman woman's . . . strong hand” in the ascension of constitutional politics. Then it summoned biography as an educative tool. It had already presented Fatma Aliye's history, and here came Saniyya Hānim, “who arose, an orator, among folk of learning and literature.” Such biographies were offered “in service to daughters of the East and out of our pride in their praiseworthy deeds.” Yet if “the Ottoman nation is not devoid of numerous women who have surpassed the West's women in learning and letters,” it is to the next generation's education that this accrues. Addressing “excellent learned Ottoman females,” urging them to “walk side by side with the men, working to steady them in preserving freedom and independence,” the text instructs them—and its more immediate Arabic-speaking audience:

Know, dear women, that the country's progress depends more on you than on the men, for you are the basis of the awakening, of building the society. . . . Rear your children properly, implanting in their hearts that golden rule, 'love of the nation is part of belief' . . . and found national schools . . . then the folk of the West will know that behind those gauzy hijābs are faces to shame the sun in their splendor, for they incline solely to the beauty of learning; and sparkling eyes that gaze only upon the perfection of virtue and comportment.^[114]

Equating education, morality, inner beauty, modesty, careful child raising, and national strength, the magazine offered its program for women through exemplars across the Mediterranean of which a modern nation could be proud. Published in the decade before the British Protectorate was imposed, when many were looking with interest at Ottoman reformism as a possible model and others were seeking to impress opinion in the capitals of Europe, when the liberal secularist journal al-Jarīda had recently emerged, and in a journal run by an Ottoman subject sympathetic to Egyptian nationalist and feminist activism, this article looked both East and West, and created a local national ethos that could embrace Muslim Egyptians and Ottoman Syrians, without, presumably, alienating nationalist Copts!

But the widespread exhortation to build nations by building loyal little bodies and souls was laced with specific anxieties. If girls were educated, might this dilute national consciousness? In the decades following Young Woman of the East's celebration of modern Ottoman womanhood, this worry proliferated as girls' education expanded. Of paramount symbolic and practical concern was the language of instruction, generating mounting anxiety by the early 1920s as intellectuals and politicians worried whether the young “independent” Egyptian state could at least assert a measure of authority over the cultural construction of its citizens. In Young Woman of Young Egypt, Amīī;na ‘‘Awda addressed her peers in the feminine plural form: “In casting off your language, you are casting off your nation.”^[115] Yet it was not a new issue. In the 1890s, when The Young Woman had urged readers to think about yoking education to work, it warned that if educating girls was a crucial duty, it was equally important to educate them “in the national language.”^[116]

Hāhim's journal showed more explicit concern with the issue of foreign education than other early Syrian-run magazines. Perhaps this helped to shape her practice (at the start) of featuring Arab biographical subjects—among them poets, no less (‘‘Ikrisha in the second issue, Taymūr in the third, and al-Khansā‘‘ in the fourth).^[117] Reader Rūz Jalakh of Beirut worried that Arab women had had to subscribe to foreign (“Western”) women's magazines and asked “the daughters of my kind” how many were competent in reading Arabic and how many would pick up a book or women's magazine in Arabic.^[118] In the same issue, noting that the hijāb did not prevent women from acquiring knowledge, “contrary to what many assert,” the editor declared that since most Egyptian girls were educated in foreign schools, their Arabic was poor; the management was willing to correct or translate letters before printing them.^[119] In line with biographies' emphasis on fathers' roles in education, an essay warning that French-language education alone was not appropriate addressed “men of learning,” urging them to teach their daughters; the “few hours they spend in school” were not sufficient.^[120] Reporting on one of the lectures for women at the new Egyptian University, Hāshim criticized the lecturer's focus on women in ancient history as impractical but was scathing on the fact that it was delivered in French (by a French national). “No more than twenty” Egyptians attended, in contrast to a recent speech in Arabic by Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif for which “the lecture hall was filled with women.”^[121]

Language as trope gave material form to worries that girls would lose their national identity to the extent they were out in the world—but language might mask other, related concerns. Women's magazines addressed controversies over the sort of education available to girls and the wisdom of sending girls (like Zakiyya Sulaymān) overseas for higher education funded by the Egyptian state (which had sent male students abroad since the early nineteenth century). Then biographies (like Zakiyya's) assured readers that such overseas experience had not led to the horrors opponents sketched. Other biographies illustrated how overseas educational experience served the nation. Lauding Sarujini Naidu as a nationalist leader in colonized India, a profile linked her political efficacy to the “respect” she got in England “due to her literary status and expertise in their nature and morals.”^[122]

Paragons of Purity

Worries over how national/ist identity and girls' education intersected arose from—or were rhetorically justified by—concern about the rising generation's behavior, especially that of its female half. We saw in chapter 3 that female exemplarity was contingent on (narrated) behavior. Anxiety over the comportment of contemporary adolescent girls and young women was one impetus for magazines' rhetorical emphasis on domestic training as the heart of female education. From the 1890s on, crime rates and the consumption of alcohol and drugs, thought to be on the rise and apparently an increasingly visible aspect of the fastchanging urban scene, were certainly on the rise discursively. Daily press reporting, new in Egypt, gave “scandalous” events the permanence and substance of the printed page; perhaps they inflated the anxieties of the elite's older generation. As one newspaper noted, “Among matters incompatible with moral behavior is the phenomenon we see of women—not men—opening bars for purposes of intoxication, and hashish cafés too. If only those women would limit themselves to that. But no—they imbibe both sorts with the men. This makes them quarrelsome and dissolute, and then they go out into the streets in a state humanity abhors.”^[123] If newspapers did not express such worries about “quarrelsome and dissolute” men, these reports intimated fear that old social boundaries were disappearing, articulated further in reports on prostitution in the 1890s nationalist press. Prostitutes were moving into “good” neighborhoods, provincial reporters warned. No one could tell the difference now between prostitutes' “houses” and those of respectable families. The further implication was that (other) women might follow “bad examples”:

One of those women who claim to be pure and virtuous has gotten into the habit of entering a foreign-owned bar at night and drinking herself into a state of intoxication, to the point where she . . . is much talked about. The police staked her out. After she left the drinking establishment, her good judgment and reason gone, they seized her and wrote the requisite report. We hope the justice system will punish her for her famed dissoluteness, immoral behavior, and corrupt morals; for there is no doubt that her presence among respectable people is anathema to proper comportment, especially since the cunning she employs is more harmful than [the behavior of] those women who know nothing of sly trickery.^[124]

Could such reports—and dialect poetry, cartoons, and articles in an emergent popular press that lampooned such behavior from the 1890s on—have intensified apprehension about the moral effects of sending one's daughter to school?

A quarter century of “the knowledge movement” in our country, moaned The Sociable Companion in 1899, and youth are more arrogant and lethargic than ever, while the market for foreign clothes has gone wild.^[125] Was this a class-specific worry contingent on the ascent of a new bourgeoisie? In her article “Reading,” Hāshim linked the utility of words to the “problem” of leisure, exclaiming that reading is useful to the young female if it “fills her free time so she does not engage in useless pursuits such as gossip, censure, and gambling.” She advised girls to join literary societies. Despairingly, Hāshim concluded (some years before she founded her own journal), “I write these words knowing they will have no further impact, but one must.”^[126] Perhaps the words had no effect, but writers continued to pen them.

To focus on education offered an opening to criticize the younger generation's pursuits in the name of channeling them toward the sort of education the magazine supported. To focus on education also offered a strategy to defuse claims made by those opposed to expanded education. Before the turn of the century, a writer in The Sociable Companion was declaring, “It is not knowledge that has spoiled most of the women of France and America . . . but the type of knowledge . . . which has brought the daughters of our kind in the West to this corrupt state of utter freedom and competition with men in all desires and whims.”^[127] Ensuing critiques of education deployed biography alongside essays on curricula, methods, and types of schooling, as the learned eloquence of ancient Arab poets was contrasted with a present-day education that taught Arab girls to read French novels and disdain housework, and as “Famous Women” who took education seriously were contrasted favorably with those about them. This articulated an implicit critique of predominant social behavior among the class making up the magazines' readership and, in the production of the exceptional/exemplary subject, showed less-than-exemplary comportment as threatening to the prescription for female success that biographies asserted. Marie de Sévigné, educational role model, becomes the foil for her peers. She differed from the many young women and men at the French court “without employment or aim, living a life of ease, which saps people's sense of decency, freedom of conscience, and strength of will.” This exceptionality makes her exemplary: de Sévigné, “fresh flower” at court and fatāt ‘‘azīma, lived a pure life and so gave lessons in comportment by being an example to others.^[128] English scientist Agnes Clark (b. 1844) “had astounding patience for observation and calculation. While her female peers were spending their evenings in amusement, parties, and dances, she was making astronomical observations.”^[129] Manon Roland “was not among those females who amuse themselves of an evening chez great families; she restricted her admiration, and her visiting, to those women of true greatness unconcerned with money or glory.”^[130] Dutch artist Joanna Koerten (1650–1715), famed for her intricate portraits and scenes cut from paper, “was set apart from the other girls in that she paid no attention to amusements but was caught up in portraying everything she saw, animate and inanimate.”^[131] Again, perhaps “local” role models were most impressive, although in some cases one has to wonder whether Egyptian readers found exemplary Syrians “local” enough. Emily Sursuq was sent by her father from Beirut to Alexandria to complete her schooling. Characterized by “the most splendid ornaments of beauty,” she married her paternal first cousin and “appeared to the world crowned by the ornaments of virtue and perfection, and became famous for doing good and rescuing the poor”—representing perfectly the transition from premarriage “beauty” to postmarriage “virtue.” She built a school for girls in Beirut and initiated other philanthropic projects—pursuits, remarked the magazine, “among those matters that so infrequently a young [unmarried] woman thinks of or a [married] woman concerns herself with, especially in this era. For amusement places have become numerous, and among [today's] people the malady of gambling has spread, so that now [1907] there hardly exists a woman who is not tempted by these harmful pursuits and whose mind doesn't descend to the abyss of decadence and indolence.” As inhitāt and khumuūl (decadence and indolence) became the twinned watchwords of reformers in the press, characterizing both European societies and a local and usually feminized modernity they saw in formation, “Famous Women” represented—sometimes explicitly—their opposite. “We hope,” declared the magazine, “for [Sursuq's] continued advancement, and we ask God to make her likes abundant among women and to recompense her in the best possible way for her deeds.”^[132] As Sursuq becomes the categorical opposite of “decadence and indolence,” her example draws sanctification through resort to a commonly accepted diction of religious virtue and reward that, moreover, usefully elided distinctions between Christian and Muslim, or Syrian and Egyptian.

But whatever the society of origin, particularly stark examples were entertainers, immediate objects of suspicion; and this served a particular local agenda. Of Jenny Lind (1820–87), The Egyptian Woman's Magazine commented primly, “It was never known of the Swedish nightingale that she spent [money] on pleasures, or that arrogance and reckless frivolity possessed her. Rather, in the bloom of youth and beauty, at the summit of her glory and fame, she was a paragon of purity, fidelity, probity, self-denial, and modesty. . . . She spent all that came to her on charity.”^[133] In a single move the magazine presents its exemplary program to women and assesses disapprovingly an image of public gendered behavior that had become almost a local cliché. A 1933 biography, its message was nothing new in the context of reporting on urban girls' and women's increasing fearlessness about public appearances. Precisely forty years earlier, al-Mu’ءayyad had called indignantly upon the state to do its duty, articulating a role as mediator between government and the governed (a function al-Mu’ءayyad also assumed when provincial writers begged the government to provide more schools and doctors). The newspaper yoked “national honor” and women's comportment.

Many who desire the nation's good honor and want to preserve its moral comportment have asked us to beg our exalted government to prohibit [or: restrict] women who ride in open carriages, showing off their adornments and frippery, and weaving through the lines of men's carriages at public recreation spots. Such acts encompass things detrimental to good behavior and diminish the worth of the country's honor. If these women are prostitutes, the system stipulates that they not be present in these locales that are not concealed from the eyes of the populace and leading members of the upper strata—not to mention the presence of secluded ladies from famous families in their covered carriages. If among these showy women are ones who are not prostitutes, it is incumbent upon their like not to ride in uncovered carriages, drawing accusations and raising suspicions.^[134]

At the same time, as women professionals were emerging in Egypt, such portraits as Lind's implicitly refuted negative stereotypes of the singer-entertainer, an attempt to reassure girls (and their parents) that the entertainment professions could be respectable for females. Early-twentieth-century biographical sketches of entertainers emphasized moral impeccability and the respectable fame of artistry. If magazine editors could accomplish this by telling the lives of premodern court entertainers (sometimes without reproducing all anecdotes associated with them!), increasingly they could also celebrate contemporary Arab artists who would occasion a flourish of proud regional identity: Beiruti Mary Jubrān, who moved to Egypt via Damascus, was “like a valuable jewel in a heap of sand.” Florence Fawwāz, Lebanese-Australian, had recently sung at the Royal Opera in London, attaining “a position as high as that of Sarah Bernhardt.” Umm Kulthūm was already (in a 1927 biography) “foremost female singer of the East today.”^[135] Exemplary for their public conduct at least as much as for their art, these subjects echo a biographer's praise of Sarah Bernhardt that privileged moral example over skill. She advanced the acting profession, “becoming the exemplar whose steps must be followed, especially since she enhanced acting's standing through her lofty morals, pride of self and compassionate soul, her love of good, her work of charity and mercy.”^[136] A biography of Russian dancer Anna Pavlova (1882–1931), too, emphasized her compassion and its concrete manifestation in her charity activities.^[137] The early 1930s saw a furious debate over the wisdom of founding a training institute for actresses in Egypt. Biographies, emphasizing the fine akhlāq of contemporary performers, added voices to the debate and not incidentally paralleled lives of medieval female singerentertainers in the courts of the Islamic empire: ‘‘Arīī;b, Burqa, and “Badhal the singer,” who “combined beauty of face, beauty of art, and beauty of character traits, and enjoyed thereby a high status among her peers.”^[138]

As Hāshim's article suggested, the “problem” of leisure was yoked early on to the issue of education, articulated repeatedly in a context of voiced anxiety over the state of the world, especially observations on “the West” as representative of a moral breakdown that observers saw repeated locally and most often located in female behavior—and desire.^[139] To judge by the space it consumed in women's magazines, as well as in newspapers like al-Mu’ءayyad, the issue of young women's willful leisure—a problem specific to, and defined by, the middle and upper classes—generated great anxiety long before the 1920s.^[140] Writing from Alexandria, Ilyās Effendi Lutfallāh commented in 1907 (and one wonders how he knew):

Now we often see a girl reaching the age of shabāb [that period just before adulthood] not knowing female duties. You will see her spending most of her day gazing out of the window of her home, waiting to see so-and-so pass so she can criticize how he walks and moves; and then she looks at so-and-so to censure her looks and style of dress. Learning the whereabouts of a dance hall, she flies to it with untiring keenness. But if asked to rise early and attend to the home and its cleaning, she excuses herself on the grounds that she does not have the ability and fears that someone will see her doing these lowly sorts of work.^[141]

Contrast this with a notation of how Maria Mitchell spent her daily hours as a “Famous Woman”:

In the library she saw the astronomer Laplace's work Mecanique célèste and the mathematician Gauss's Theoria Motus and read them as would a thorough, careful person wanting to derive benefit. She read many other scientific books but did not abandon performing her share of the housework, whenever necessity called for it. One day she wrote in her dairy saying she got up at six o'clock in the morning, baked bread, repaired the lamps, put on coffee, and prepared breakfast before seven o'clock. She was determined to measure the position of a meteor, so she went to the office and began measuring at half past nine, finishing in three hours; but the result did not fit her observation, which made her unhappy. She left it to another time and returned home to complete some tasks. She read the monthly Astronomical Newsletter and found in it a new way to measure the light of stars. . . . She got up the next day and prepared breakfast with her own hand and returned to the observatory. If she grew tired she would relax with the plaiting known as tatting, and if she tired of both she would rest by reading Humboldt. . . . If unable to carry out observations in the evening because of heavy storms and cloud cover, she would make the next day's bread and tat until sixteen hours had passed.^[142]

Victoria of Germany (1840–1901) was another busy “Famous Woman,” specifically “at home”: “In her new home [bayt, here the residence of the heir to the throne] her normal activities were reading, writing, drawing, and etching. She was greatly occupied by philosophy and economy. She translated into English some German books . . . and wrote one on duties of Ministers in a constitutional state.”^[143] “Famous Women” do not suffer from the “problem” of leisure. If they have it, they read and write, like Victoria of Germany, or do needlework, like Maria Mitchell, Jane Austen, and Victoria of England, or they turn their attention to charity, like Emily Sursuq.^[144] They are almost always of a class whereby this is possible—notwithstanding articles throughout the women's press on how the truly productive Egyptian woman is located in the peasantry.^[145]

Magazines yoke modes of spending time symbolically to modes of dress, and both to the concept of national responsibility through the trope of thrift. Victoria of Germany economized so as not to exceed her (princely) income. As the female reader is warned against tabarruj (showy adornment, articulated in a combination of dress and behavior), she is told to economize in the household and in her own person. The female body, adorned and publicly visible, is the locus of danger, the symbol of Western penetration. Female sexual purity, female comportment, and national integrity are mutually defining. In its “Our Blameworthy Practices” column, the Ladies' and Girls' Revue criticized parents who spent as much money on dance lessons as on “lessons in reading”; equally, it criticized those who forbade dance altogether. When the aim was exercise, and dance was limited to the home, the magazine approved; if it was for purposes of “coquetry” (i.e., in public), the magazine censured it and went on to attack “wearing décolleté.” The next month it attacked moda (fashion), made tangible as an imported practice in the European loanword that articulated it. Moda made the prohibited permissible and the permissible prohibited, sighed the journal, deploying the diction of harām/halāl, with its religious overtones and political echo.^[146]

The first issue of Young Woman of the East complained that most parents were satisfied to give their daughters a superficial refinement, “polishing the externals so she appears lustrous to the young man. . . . It is better that a young woman not take beauty as the foundation for her future.” The same essay stressed that a woman's finest attribute was “economy. . . . Peace and a simple life are far preferable to all the embellishments in the world if these come with fatigue and fights.”^[147] The interrelated tropes of economy, modesty, and national strength—all signified in controlling female appearance and behavior—contoured Labība Hāshim's journal. A few pages on she announced a column on proper clothing for women, for not only do “clothes indicate character,” but, more dangerously, one can read a woman's thoughts from her apparel.^[148] So, when The Gentle Sex praised peasant women as epitomes of female strength and seriousness in the service of the nation, simplicity of dress was a marker of excellence. Unconcerned with wearing “fancy clothes,” the peasant woman “knows good works are all that last, and is certain that the finest adornment consists of energetic work, [moral] perfection, and probity.” (That simplicity of dress is ascribed as informed choice on the part of the peasant woman is a stunning reminder of the romanticized vision of the peasantry that nationalist ideology incorporated.)^[149]

These were not lone voices. The emphasis on economy in Young Woman of Young Egypt focused more on the home-nation nexus, less on female appearance, but it quoted Lady Astor wishing all women would dress simply: “I always wear black when going to Parliament.”^[150] The Egyptian Woman's Magazine's critique took form as a generational gesture when “the elderly woman” censured her young female “listeners” for being consumed by “perfecting your adornment and splendor. . . . Was not our era in its simplicity better than yours?”^[151] Fashion—specifically, wearing clothes that would draw attention in public—was an issue of national honor (karāmat al-watan). For woman's body was the arena where economic and cultural imperialism plied their wares and where national integrity answered back. So, in exemplary biographies the female body from Hypatia to Astor is simply clothed, a figuration of respectable public behavior that in turn implies a moral and thrifty patriotism (just as “beauty” is constructed as a moral more than a physical attribute). Warning that, “no matter how wealthy, one should exercise good management and wisdom” in choosing clothes, Hāshim tells a melodramatic story of negative exemplarity: an upper-class woman, refusing to help an impoverished compatriot buy medicine for her dying husband, wears clothes and jewelry the cost of which would feed a poor family for months or years.^[152] In biography, Maria Agnesi and Juliana of Holland are lauded for charity work and simplicity of dress. It is modesty and aversion to fame that cloak exemplary women (Alexandra of England, Marie Curie, Angela Burdett-Coutts, Emily Sursuq, Fātima al-Khalīl).

Against the repeated complaints and exhortations of women's magazines, the “Famous Woman,” with her chaste, simply clothed, morally upright body, appears both exceptional and exemplary. If few women know the arts of economy, comments one writer, there do exist “excellent women whose wisdom and comportment befit imitation.”^[153] As Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif is lauded for having “spent her short life writing and compiling, and filled newspaper columns with sociological research focusing on woman, her education, and the necessity of her awakening,” it is also her preference for simplicity of dress that Young Woman of the East finds noteworthy. Would the verse biography of Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid that Nāsif had begun composing before her death have carried the same exemplary message?^[154] Aspasia, similarly, “was not one of those women of coquetry who pride themselves on [or compete in] jewelry and clothing. Rather, she was among the folk of discernment, raised with philosophers and wise men.”^[155] Other portraits link exemplary comportment as represented in female dress to a nationalist agenda, sometimes anachronistically. A life of Zenobia of Palmyra, praising her political prowess, knowledge of languages, and “great beauty,” declares she wore only cloth woven in “the East” to encourage indigenous industry, and jewelry of local black stone, “aiming to divert [women] from pretexts to squander money, charging them to economize.”^[156] This text preceded Egyptian women's efforts to institute local boycotts of English goods; perhaps such biographies helped to prepare the discursive ground for nationalist economic activism.

Drawing on John Armstrong and Benedict Anderson to conceptualize “border guards” who police the exclusionary boundaries of imagined national identities, Yuval-Davis reminds us that women are often the most visible, hence the most carefully watched, of such guards. Behavioral practices and ways of dress that threaten an us/them division may become targets of nationalist anxiety.^[157] For girls to take an interest in styles and practices identified with Europe jeopardized a sense of exclusionary belonging while symbolizing a freedom that threatened the control of the patriarchal family. Modernity or treachery? No wonder journals offered ambiguous messages.

As magazine editors attacked female practice in their society, “Famous Women” within their magazines were parallel voices, described as and praised for criticizing their peers' contemporary behavior and working for behavioral transformations, usually through professional roles deemed respectable for women: educators, charity activists, or writer-reformers. Describing a subject's reforming efforts offered an indirect rhetoric of criticism that readers could interpret as analytically careful treatments of European practice and then could apply to the local scene. “Most of” the writings of Cécile de Mirabeau (b. 1850) comprised “tarbiya and the need to improve the conditions of family life, and criticism of women of the rich and noble for laziness, sleeping too much, living lives of inaction and amusement among dance halls and gambling places in winter and beaches and the like in summer. These were all among the causes of bad morals and bad health, and they endangered the structure and order of the family, especially since most Parisian women are debauched. . . . She wrote with amazing courage that no other writer of the time had.”^[158] Prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) took on young women “who understood nothing of virtue, honor, or good works”; with her “pure and strong spirit,” she turned them into “serious, hardworking, virtuous young women.”^[159] Such narratives imply an elitist outlook on the part of biographer or magazine, for—in line with upper-class Arab women's activities—it was the elite woman in biography who “reformed” the working girl.

To Veil or Not To Veil

Sufuūr (unveiling) was a complicated issue entangled with that of dress: opponents raised the nationalist ante by linking it to elite women's interest in European fashions. A symbol of modernity, “unveiling” could, however, unleash the issue of “cultural authenticity” as it broached issues of consumption, national economic self-sufficiency, and imitation of the imperialist.

But one way to counter this argument was to trivialize it by ignoring it. Women's comportment was founded on other practices, such as seeking solid education and professional self-realization. As Badran says, “Unveiling was never part of the Egyptian feminist movement's formal agenda.”^[160] Indeed, it was irrelevant to most aspects of that agenda, and it is not surprising to sense that female intellectuals saw it as a focus of male discourse (recall Sarrūf's impatient reference to it). As men debated it furiously into the late 1920s, women writing in the press reacted to this debate but did not tend to privilege it. There were practical reasons: from the early 1920s, elite Egyptian women were beginning to unveil, and their Syrian Christian peers had already done so (meanwhile, in the women's press commentators regularly observed that peasants never had veiled). Women, moreover, were sensitive to the psychological difficulties of unveiling and in general saw no reason to insist on it. As females in Egypt drew assurance from education and activism, they would have the confidence to unveil if they wished; if not, this need not hamper their pursuits. A few biographies predicted as much. But more often in biographies the veil was an absence. When hijāb as either “veil” or “seclusion” (physical separation from men) appeared, as in the portrait of the Begum of Bhopal, it highlighted women's power despite its presence—or rather through it, by studied contrast. Biography was in itself a statement of female visibility; no further comment was needed. The rarity of references to hijāb in exemplary biography suggests that perhaps biographies revealed women's concerns and agendas to a greater extent than did (other) polemics on the status of women. Hijāb as institution was slyly submerged in hijāb as metaphor for the modest probity that women's rights advocates insisted came from learned comportment and industry. Nasra al-Barīī;dīī;—a Christian—was lauded for hard work in educating girls. Then there was her modesty: “She served her country nearly fifty years, curtained behind the hijāb of her work, expecting no thanks.”^[161]

Women, Work, and Struggle

Unveiling? Women had more important issues to worry about. In 1935 the Egyptian Woman's Magazine congratulated Durriyya Fahmīī; for her successful struggle to obtain a higher education in France, the first “Eastern” woman to attain a doctorat d'état (on George Sand, another biographical subject in women's journals). Inscribing her life as one of kifāh and nidāl (struggle),^[162] the biography celebrated Fahmīī; because she had set an Egyptian precedent for female educational achievement—and because she was poised for a career. Long before, Young Woman of the East's 1908 life of Hannā Kūrānīī; had recounted that after attending the Columbian Exposition she had stayed in the United States trying to earn her own living “by relying on herself, without need for a husband or brother.”^[163]From the 1890s through the 1930s, women's struggles for livelihood and professional success shaped biographical texts, articulating a real-life struggle for a growing number of women in Egypt. It was in the early 1930s that the issue of women's paid employment came to the fore for feminists, Badran argues; perhaps biography had been a modest ally in paving the way, for it had long been an isssue there.^[164]

Right at the turn of the century, a few women and men had called for women's right to work. From the start, education and medicine were deemed acceptable; women's involvement in these spheres was seen as practical necessity due to the cultural ban on mixing of the sexes (and, as I have said, to the call for a truly national education system). Some went further. Mahmūd Ibrāhīī;m, writing in The Sociable Companion, argued that women ought to be accepted in the civil service. Zaynab Fawwāz called for women's rights to work in the early 1890s. Later, Ataturk's policy of permitting Turkish women to fill positions that men had left for nationalist reasons generated comment, both positive and negative, in Egypt. But many opposed waged and professional work for women on the basis that this would threaten the honor not just of women but also of “the family.”^[165] The discussion was classed; repeatedly, writers noted that peasant women “had always worked outside the home,” but they rarely addressed issues of peasant or working-class women's economic rights, working conditions, or double burdens.

As in other spheres, the year 1919 made a difference in terms of women's public visibility. It was a watershed that led, among other things, to new magazines calling for women's extradomestic activism, albeit in the context of national need.^[166] Biography generally supported women's right to work, defining some limits yet always threatening to undermine them, while as always intimating the external and psychological constraints females faced.^[167] Stories of women suffering for “atypical” careers drove the point home, as exceptionality was put in the service of a changing concept of what gender norms should be. Jeanne d'Arc was “scorned” by the male establishment, but this was “in conformity to the women's awakening [of her time]. . . . She committed no crime . . . except doing men's work.”^[168]

Much has been made of the domesticizing agenda of women's magazines in Egypt,^[169] and, as we shall see, domesticity was a central organizing trope in biography. But so was earning a wage. “Famous Women” who had successfully broached male bastions of employment seemed poised to encourage would-be imitators through the medium of exemplary biography. Biographies praised businesswomen like Elsa Ryder, determined to finish her father's railway extension projects in the southern United States and facing gender discrimination as she searched for financing.^[170] Entrepreneurship implied a model to follow in a biography of American photographer Anna Schreiber, obliged to earn a living when her father “could not offer his family all they needed from the fruits of his labor.” Able only to find work as a servant, on her own initiative she went to New York City and knocked on doors. Successful as a company employee, she saved to buy a camera so she could work at something she enjoyed. Commercial photography gave her wealth and fame. “Thus was a young woman able, with her intelligence, seriousness and patience, to create a new profession . . . and now here she is managing a big photography bureau in one of New York's fanciest streets and earning a great deal of money from her work. Do you not hear this, O young woman of Egypt?”^[171] A dramatic profile in Adāb al-fatāt (not one of the more liberal magazines) of “Miss Sears,” actor and playwright, tells a similar tale. At her father's sad tale of losing his wealth in a farming venture, she knows she must act: “Our girl had a duty to fulfill: she had to support her family, and she was still young.” Working as a saleswoman did not last long, for “her impetuous self, high hopes, and sincere will found no repose. She was always thinking of her future, bent over her study and reading—for she stole time and held it fast in order that she might read.” Self-education, hard work, and a sense of duty led her into secretarial training, newspaper work, and—after a dramatic meeting with Sarah Bernhardt—acting and playwriting. “In all this time she did not stop working at other things for a single moment. She opened a typing bureau that employed twelve girls.” Should the message be lost, the finale recaptures it, addressing readers of both genders: “Thus you see, O female reader, O male reader, this young woman's star rose because looking to the future was her qibla. . . . She did not sit quietly, looking on; she had great ambitions and no fear of work; indeed, she wanted to know the extent of her ability.” Religious overtones give the message somber force: “looking to the future” is Sears's qibla, her consistent and sanctified point of reference, a reference to the Muslim's obligation to face Mecca in prayer. Moreover, her life history is a jihad, a sanctified struggle, yoked here to attributes of patience and work.^[172]

These biographies articulate a mix of desire, ambition, and obligation. When women's magazines discussed paid employment for women, it was framed as necessity more often than choice. Women ought to be able to earn a living, should the need arise, asserted magazines from al-Fatāt on.^[173] Whether this was a tactical move or a matter of conviction, biography echoed it. “Famous Women” earn their first wages more often than not as the outcome of a male guardian's death or desertion. The subject may achieve wealth and renown, but it is not desire that (rhetorically) fuels her odyssey in the first place. Françoise de Maintenon “worked to live.”^[174]Most biographical subjects whose public work these magazines highlight are orphans in the Muslim sense (i.e., their father has died) or widows. The Selected's 1892 obituary for Irish horse trainer and journalist Maria Morgan, republished in The Young Woman, gave her prominence in business as well as culture: “Mistresses of the pen have lost a woman considered foremost among them, indeed among masters of the pen and men of business.” Narrating Morgan's path from childhood to death (a story not lacking in dramatic elements), the obituary-biography declared her obliged to earn her living because her society's religious law gave her father's wealth to his son. According to The Selected's criteria this story had a happy ending, for from her earnings Morgan was able to build a manor, that emblem of Victorian capitalist respectability. And so, “with her pen she wrote on the brow of fate, 'Women are no less than men.'”^[175] But it was the much later biography in Young Woman of the East that drew an admonition from Morgan's story. She had to work “to earn her sustenance and that of her little sister. . . . The circumstances made her realize that fate holds no security, and that it is absolutely indispensable for a young unmarried woman [bint] to learn a trade by which she can live should fate betray her one day.”^[176] Such “circumstances” held steady across centuries and cultures. Christine de Pizan, left in debt and alone by the deaths of her father and husband, “resorted to her reed pen, unsheathing a sword with which to ward away the attacks of the armies of poverty and misery from herself and her children. . . . Her contemporaries . . . called her a genius, especially since she was the first woman in France to earn her living by the pen.” Theodora, born into “poverty and obscurity,” her father dead when she was six, worked hard as an actress and, with her two sisters, at needlework.^[177] Jane Austen, from a poor family, “committed herself to working hard at writing novels so she could earn her living.”^[178] After her father's death, Greta Garbo insisted on working, although her mother tried to keep her in school. “Her fine soul dictated that she not be a burden to her family. . . . Greta's inner self was reinvigorated with the meager wage she began to get, with which she helped her mother, even if this [work] was not what she aimed for with her ambitions and hopes.”^[179] To earn a living was to fulfill family need rather than personal desire in these biographies, paralleling the discourse on women's employment in the women's press, especially before the 1930s. Yet personal ambition—not to mention fame—shapes these life histories in a way that polemics on women's employment in these magazines did not. Essays on women's rights to work were by and large defensive, using the issue of employment in time of need as a justification for more educational opportunity but siting it along axes of need, modesty, personal sacrifice, and unselfish community service, as well as primary loyalty to the domestic. These lineaments shaped biographies, but trajectories of ambition and achievement challenged them. Desire as the foundation of professional ambition contoured biography far more than the (other) polemics of women's magazines, especially in the lives of female writers, offering us an autobiographical echo of the magazine editors' and contributors' own lives and concerns. A headline presents American novelist Fannie Hurst (1885–1968) as exemplar in her professional life: “The Success of an American Writer: A Model We Present to Our Educated Young Women!” Taken from an American newspaper, the profile is sited within local gender politics. “When they choose a future for themselves, many girls confront some obstacle, major or minor, that offers them no encouragement. Those who fall, their forces spent, do not fulfill their hopes; but those who stand firm are victorious and achieve success. . . . We do not have enough space to relate all the hardships this superb writer faced.”^[180]

Professional ambition, political power, and material desire could be merged and elicited from lives of women at the center of power. Early on, the interest magazines show in female monarchs and women powerful at court takes an intriguing twist in The Sociable Companion. Profiling “Learned Queens,” the journal highlights not so much their learning or power as their ability to earn a living! “If half of what is said of them is true, it suffices to indicate their excellence and knowledge, and to prove they are capable of amassing wealth, not to mention supporting themselves, from the fruits of their minds.” If Rumania's queen

were to be blocked from the income of her throne, she would without a doubt be enriched from the earnings she would get from the plays she writes and the fine poems she composes. . . . We do not know whether this queen sells the fruits of her mind to the good men in Europe or whether she gives them gratis to newspapers and presses, since she is a queen and commerce is not appropriate for her. But what is certain is that if she were to engage in selling and buying the outpourings of her pen, she would have an ample income . . . especially since in addition to the craft of the pen she has shares in a number of mental and manual industries which . . . place her in the highest ranks of men.^[181]

Lest the female reader drop everything in pursuit of a career or a wage, though, The Sociable Companion's enthusiastic feature on queens capable of earning a living is immediately followed by an essay that takes “the English woman” explicitly as a model:

If we proceed on the basis that the progress of nations and peoples depends on the status and advancement of woman, then there is no one more fitting than the Englishwoman to take as a model to imitate and in whose footsteps to follow. For if the truth be spoken, England is the preeminent kingdom, the greatest and furthest along in civilization. It attained this lofty position only through the good minds of its men, the honor of their souls and the strength of their bodies. And all of this—as is well established in people's minds—is nothing other than the seedling of woman's right hand.

An allusion to British imperial strength links women's roles to the health of the empire: “Thus, it is incumbent upon us to scrutinize how they have done it, those men who practically rule the world with their strength and ability, so we can learn how they live in order to resemble it . . . so we translate here a passage we found in a magazine that describes the Englishwoman, specifically the daughter of London. . . . It is not devoid of entertainment value.” Yet what sort of model? The essay makes no mention of women earning a living or getting professional training:

First and foremost, the Englishwoman is a true mistress of the home. She is a wise manager, protective of her valuable time of which she does not waste a single minute on things without return or benefit, and is very involved in caring for her children and husband. . . . Truthfully there is no one more able than the Englishwoman to undertake the business of preparing children, through sound and correct upbringing, to be men [rijāl]. Hardly does the child tumble from his nest before she teaches him to swim, kick, and ride horses . . . for in truth life is nothing but a struggle in which only the strong and able triumph. This is the secret of the might we see now in the English, their ability to tower over all other peoples and nations. So let the striving women work toward the likes of this; let Eastern women imitate this model.^[182]

Within the individualist trajectory of biography, social constraint as a theme intimated an ideal that relied on a bourgeois economic and social positioning. Poverty and aristocratic ease alike represent barriers to individual achievement that women must overcome as they work to fulfill personal goals and serve society. Adelheid Popp's biography narrates a struggle to overcome a childhood marked by extreme poverty, child labor, an alcoholic father, and a home for poor girls.^[183] As this text lauds Popp's adult activism on behalf of a female proletariat, it approvingly narrates her entry into the middle class and defines this move as crucial to the success of her work. Perhaps the author, based in Europe, had read Popp's autobiography, for the agenda of the Egyptian Woman's Magazine in which this biography appeared suited the “successive stages of enlightenment and optimism despite her struggles” that, according to Mary Jo Maynes, Popp's autobiography, like other socialist autobiographies of the period, articulates.^[184]

English prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, in contrast, had to “overcome” the aristocratic ease of her childhood. Inherited wealth is constructed here as a burden, a seduction threatening women's self-realization and ability to work for the nation (if it is not harnessed to philanthropy).^[185] Florence Nightingale, leaving behind the privileges of the rich to care for the poor, showed determination in the face of family resistance (and, conveniently, abhorred fame, if we are to believe this writer).^[186] Sympathetic yet stern commentary on social status and reformist work suggests the social mapping and collective identity of magazine editors.

It is not surprising that more of these biographies appear in Egyptian-run magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, when a local bourgeoisie had achieved a measure of cultural hegemony. Nor is it surprising, given the accent on individual(ist) effort that exemplary biography in these magazines celebrates, to find independent thinking located as crucial to women's formations of self and to the endeavors that made them “famous.” Biographies of Elizabeth Fry, Jeanne d'Arc, and others praise fearlessness in speech and action, and “freedom of thought.”^[187] Yet, as in other magazine polemics on “women's place,” the formation of a female self in biography takes place within the rhetorically policed borders of a discourse of relational action. Women's independent thinking is constructed as positive when it serves community needs. Thinking for oneself, and against the social grain, produces judicious and bold action inscribed in collective memory—and with political overtones resonant in early twentiethcentury Cairo. ‘‘Ufayrā‘‘ bt. ‘‘Abbād, that third-century C.E. poet of the Arabian peninsula who stirred her people to revolt against a tyrannous overlord, could easily become a contemporary heroine: “Were it not for the strength of character of a fine woman, [her] tribe would not have liberated itself. . . . May God increase her likes in every region.”^[188] The collective good, in a time of nationalist activism that engaged and needed women, was an unassailable justification for women's public work. Recall that in the early 1920s' climate of fierce debate over women and public politics, Mukhtār Yūnus made some blunt points through his biography of the warrior Khawla. As she “led the [Muslim] army . . . with rare courage,” the acquiescence of the Muslim military commander proved the legitimacy of women's public actions (for the collective good):

And here is Khālid b. al-Walīd, who was as we know the honored and devout Companion [of Muhammad] and sword of God, resolute that Khawla be man's partner in life, indeed, in war. . . . We will relate event upon event, and support one argument with another, to pull away the veil that has descended on the hearts of those who discredit religion and do not judge or interpret well. They accuse women falsely . . . They are in error, claiming to be the religion's protectors when they are its worst enemies.

But even this author is careful: “We do not mean by this that women should take risks.”^[189] Qualities to be cultivated, such as judicious thinking, acted as proofs that women's expanded lives had not been socially destructive. Modesty was not simply a marker of the excellent woman; it reminded the reluctant of the working woman's continued acceptable femininity. Baron claims that early magazines “depicted Western working women as defeminized”; but early and late, biography complicated the message. “While Europe and America spoke in glowing terms of [Marie Curie's] discoveries, she returned to her laboratory in silence and modesty that indicated the sum of her personal greatness.”^[190] An article on France's first female judge praised her for simplicity and modesty. If she made her living from teaching law in a women's college, she

was so noble in character that she did not turn up her nose at helping her mother in her free time to take care of household needs. This emboldens us to say, taking her as an example as well as many women we have gotten to know who have taken up men's occupations, that industry has no negative impact on women's good qualities, nor does it lessen in the slightest the attributes she has been granted—her readiness for managing home and family.

The author demolished the claim that working women would neglect the domestic by reference to the Egyptian peasant woman, “the most chaste of wives and devoted of mothers” despite her fulltime work outside the home.^[191] As in so much of nationalist rhetoric, the idealization of the peasant elides the different interests of peasant and emergent bourgeois women as it also erases the existence of the “double burden.”

Reforming Women

Not only teachers of girls were lauded for selfless work “on behalf of their kind.” Praiseworthy were those who publicized women's conditions and worked to improve women's lot.^[192] Adelheid Popp's “defense of the rights of women recorded glory and respect for her.”^[193] Biographies of philanthropists, numerous throughout the period, privileged “hands-on” charity work, as did the EFU.^[194] Insisting on such work's feminine appropriateness, writers could further the notion of public work as acceptable. Describing her own daughters, Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik was proud that one already had in mind that she would found schools, clinics, and women's refuges. Such “dreams,” she said, might not please all mothers. But they would benefit the nation as well as the individual.^[195] When Balsam herself was a young reader, The Young Woman had featured among its first “Famous Women” philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, still alive when she appeared in the magazine's inaugural issue. If, as Badran argues, “by no means was it easy or always possible to draw upper- and upper-middle-class Egyptian women into corporate relief work,”^[196] perhaps biographies of philanthropists and activists could accustom potential young donors and activists of schoolgirl age to the idea, especially as philanthropy shifted from the traditional awqāf (religious endowments) sphere to associations focusing on direct work with poverty-stricken Egyptians. Many biographies of European women portrayed this kind of activism as a laudable aspect of modern womanhood: Burdett-Coutts's charity work combined with her renunciation of finery made her exemplary.^[197] Did such biographies also help to accustom girls to the idea of philanthropy as a national civic duty rather than a strictly religious one? Perhaps this was one argument for featuring Arab models, who might exemplify the indigenous roots of emerging activisms and solidarities that opponents would try to dismiss as “coming from the West.” Betsy Taqlā “hung her hopes for progress and advancement on the women's awakening, so she participated in most of the women's organizations, in Europe, America, and Egypt. . . . Her work was not limited to teaching and talking. . . . She was a founder of Mabarrat Muhammad ‘‘Alī.”^[198] Theodora Haddād, “with the help of some young women,” founded a scientific society before which she spoke, also publishing essays on “the importance of woman's role and her influence on society.”^[199] Fawwāz had described at some length the ambitious philanthropic building programs of premodern Muslim women of ruling families, a pursuit that Leslie Peirce notes broadcast both those women's public roles and the image of dynastic power that Ottoman and earlier rulers needed to maintain.^[200] Others are lauded for the same. Fātima bt. Jamāl al-Dīī;n Sulaymān (A.H. 620–708), renowned transmitter of traditions and poet, “towered over folk of her time, men and women,” in founding and funding schools, hospitals, and takāyā (hospices), for which she appointed administrators and stipulated salaries.^[201]

Many women are praised for supporting “women's rights,” a theme that is explicated increasingly over time as a logical outcome of professional energies. One biography of the French scholar Clémence Royer (1830–1902) cites her “decisive influence in supporting and demanding women's rights”;^[202] a later one couples this with her educational work: “She began to deliver speeches to women on the science of logic and other sciences necessary for women, and she became famous for defending the rights of woman.”^[203] Dr. Christine Bonnefait (b. 1862), a biologist, celebrated as a determined, successful scientist, worked on behalf of women in public politics. “Concerned with political issues since she was small, she undertook praiseworthy works and adopted known stances that proved her fitness to represent the daughters of her kind, because of her breadth of mind . . . she was delegated by the women of Norway. . . . She still works hard to serve Norway's women.”^[204] But “women's rights” are often left undefined, a silence that articulates sensitivity over some rights in Egypt.

As Egyptian resistance to the British Protectorate imposed in 1914 culminated in the 1919–22 struggles against continued British “protection” and London's refusal to allow Egyptian delegates at the postwar peace conference, feminists led by Hudā Sha‘‘rāwīī; were key players—demonstrating, leading boycotts against British goods each time negotiations with London froze, distributing leaflets, writing letters. So were women outside of the urban upper-class power center, as prisoners, leaflet smugglers, provisioners, and martyrs. For Sha‘‘rāwīī;'s group and other elite women, this activism encouraged organization; it was in this struggle's aftermath, precisely four years after the elite women's first nationalist demonstration, that the Egyptian Feminist Union was founded. Women's involvement in nationalist politics of the early 1920s gave them confidence about further participation in political life, creating assumptions that were often dashed.^[205] At the same time, nationalist politics gave women a sphere for public activism that was difficult for even opponents of expanded visibility and opportunity for women to oppose.^[206]

Through the 1920s, women both in the EFU and outside it were active in opposing the sabotage of constitutional government and calling for both national rights and women's participation. Munīī;ra Thābit, a strong Wafdist supporter, founded her journal Hope after Zaghlūl's resignation following the 1924 assassination of a British official, Lee Stack. Thābit, daughter of a civil servant, had called for women's formal political rights since 1919, and she resumed the call in Hope, just as the EFU had taken up this issue after its founding. Women's magazines (including the Syrian-run Young Woman of the East and Ladies'/Ladies' and Men's Revue) followed the issue avidly. Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik, apparently a close friend of Sha‘‘rāwīī;'s, detailed the course of women's demands in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine.^[207] Women also exploited political differences to try to get their rights on the nationalists' agenda, and, although angry at being excluded from the vote, they followed parliamentary debates closely.^[208]That elite women publicly aired their own political differences by splitting into new groups perhaps showed their growing confidence, although this was also influenced by splits among male nationalists.^[209] But while Egyptian women entered the scene as visible political beings on behalf of rights both for women and for the nation, women's magazines showed an equivocal and varying attitude toward political rights. The Egyptian Woman's Magazine not only exulted about the fine showing made by the Egyptian delegation to the 1923 Rome Conference of the International Alliance of Women (IAW) but also quoted Hudā Sha‘‘rāwīī; telling a journalist that it had been women's public participation in the 1919 nationalist demonstrations that had caused them to “cast off all their old practices.”^[210] Yet nationalist politics was one thing, women's rights and feminist demands another. The magazine reported feminist acts and women's doings around the world.^[211] It extolled Egyptian women's demands for a redefined family life and more educational opportunity. But it equivocated on whether Egyptian women had immediate political demands. Europeans might be calling for women's right to vote, and yes, married women should have more rights to run their own affairs. If working for a wage, a married woman should be able to retain her own money. But political rights weakened the marital bond, said the journal; they threatened the family. Women had a right to “moral” or “mental” equivalence (al-musāwāh al-ma‘‘nawiyya), but they must remember that woman “was created to be a mother and head of her little kingdom.” Then they would recognize that it sufficed for husbands to be “the family's delegate” in political issues. “She can best serve her nation through educating her children so they will one day be the sound foundation on which the national community's felicity can be erected.” Another article—noting that on the occasion of the IAW conference there were those who had undertaken “an enemy maneuver against the women's movement in this country”—explained, “We Eastern women do not feel the same about political matters as do Western women.”^[212] The writer criticized men for believing women wanted equal political rights; but she did not deny that they might want—and be ready for—such rights in the future. Reassuring critics, she also left the door ajar; not wanting political rights now “does not prevent us from observing how things proceed . . . and learning from [Western women's] experience.” Like unveiling, this was a front on which women's outlooks often diverged from those of male reformers. More cognizant of the social and psychological difficulty of fast transformation, women tended to a gradualism that could take on conservative tones.^[213] Yet readers could have found a multiplicity of messages in other magazines.

Throughout 1918 and 1919, Young Woman of the East praised European women's war work and took it as a basis for demanding women's rights internationally. Perhaps the timing was significant as a moment of optimism in Egypt generally, and for feminists specifically. Badran notes that it was in the “final phase of militancy . . . that progressive nationalist men's rhetoric of women's liberation was most vocal.”^[214] It is in the early 1920s that the Jeanne d'Arc biographies by men are at their most militant, and then that Mukhtār Yūnus writes his forthright lectures on women's lives. Once “independence” was gained and a constitution was in the works, feminists' demands were no longer so appealing to some.

What of biography? Women's rights activists could be lauded if they were carefully described as selfless and modest, and if their efforts could be seen in the context of nationalist struggle:

As we said, this lady [Sarujini Naidu] was chosen recently as leader of the Indian National Congress. . . . It is well known of her that she did not accept this position out of love for fame but rather because she wanted to serve her country and especially the daughters of her kind who remain in a condition of decline. Those who know Mrs. Naidu know how zealous she is on behalf of the Indian woman; [they know] her belief that [the Indian woman] will shake off the dust of lethargy and rise as one to demand her rights and to strive to raise her moral and social level of existence. It is guessed that the new nahda of the Turks will have a great influence on the state of the Indian woman.^[215]

Meanwhile, some men, praising individual women through biography, used it as a platform to criticize feminists, as we saw with Hatshepsut. Muhibb al-Dīn al-Khatīb, writing a biography of Halide Edip for Young Woman of the East, used her to attack feminists at a time (1922) when nationalistically active, feminist women were making political demands on the emerging state (epigraph to chapter 2). Edip was the passive object “to whom” leadership “came”—in contrast to the women al-Khatīb opposed, those who kept people's ears “ringing” with their talk of rights. The text implies an alignment of feminist activism with moral corruption as it distanced Edip's activism from both: “Certainly Halide Edip proclaimed struggle for the sake of women, but her efforts were directed at moral and intellectual ignorance in general, to the social ulcers that had disfigured the body of the East, keeping it from attaining the West's position in organization, comportment, and social usefulness. She looked at the essence of the matter, not its contingent characteristics; to the causes of corruption, not its results.”^[216]

Yet other biographies suggested strong support for women's political rights and celebrated women's visibility as public political actors. In its first year the Egyptian Woman's Magazine praised Margaret Winteringham, member of the British Parliament, for working toward women's equality in political rights and articulated a clear precedent, not without local implications in November of 1921. As Egypt was negotiating its demand for independence, in a period that had witnessed the widespread use of the public petition for nationalist demands, the biography inserts Egyptian women's political demands into the agenda:

The Egyptian Woman hopes that to the Egyptian daughters of our kind will be given the success that Western women have attained, and that our “parliamentary dreams” will be realized when Egypt reaps the fruits of its national[ist] struggle [jihad watanī], so it will have a free legislature like the British Commons, its chairs honored by the seating there of a refined woman from among the daughters of our kind, who are deprived of rights.^[217]

Does a gender-based alliance sit uneasily here with nationalist loyalty? Or is the irony particularly delicious? Praising a female MP, alluding to all women's lack of political rights—could this not intimate that in Egypt, too, women's political rights should follow independence? What were women's “parliamentary dreams”?

Earlier magazine editors had insisted that the political arena was not the province of their magazines. Hind Nawfal disclaimed an interest in politics in her opening editorial, and next came a biography of Queen Victoria that did not focus on her as a political actor.^[218] Announcing her magazine, Alexandra Avierino barely addressed politics as a potential theme. Getting young people of both sexes out of “alleys and quarters” and into school “must be every writer's subject, every national's conversational topic, if his heart hold a speck of conscience and sympathy for his nation,” The Sociable Companion asserted. This was preferable to speaking of “politics and related matters.”^[219] In later years, as Avierino became disciple and then adoptive heir to Wiszniewska, the magazine followed the activities of the Alliance Universelle des Femmes pour la Paix that she had founded.^[220]Avierino herself was so active in politics that nationalists tried to have her deported,^[221] but in the pages of her magazine, political intrigue and activism akin to her own were not pursuits she advised other women to take up. Yet even in the early magazines biographical sketches narrated women's struggles for political rights. Seven months before her priority-setting editorial on politics, Avierino had featured a biography of American colonist Margaret Brent, who (the text said) had demanded access to all meetings of the Maryland assembly but was refused. Had she succeeded, the biography claimed, women would have had equal political rights with men two centuries ago. “Hardly do we try to do anything new but it has been done before,” sighed the writer.^[222]

So biography complicated early magazines' stances on political rights. Rejecting a political role for themselves, journals offered biographies that reinserted an interest in women's political rights around the world. At the same time, largely eliding the issue of political demands, these magazines articulated no rearguard action; they did not need to actively deny that women wanted political rights, as some later magazines did. For the early magazines did not have to contend with the backlash against increased rights to education and work—and the inevitable question of political rights—of the late 1920s and especially the 1930s. Nor was women's visible participation in nationalist politics yet an urgent issue, as it became from 1919 on.

Spanning two generations of women's magazines, The Gentle Sex suggests the sustained ambiguity of stances on this issue. More than a decade before pharaonism became a reigning nationalist trope in Egypt, the magazine described women in ancient Egypt as politically active. Announcing as its agenda Egyptian women's “return to their original state,” it then defined that “state” as educating children and tending the “domestic kingdom, in cooperation with her husband who is akin to the king of the family while she is its head minister.”^[223] And responding to a reader's question, the journal described American women's demands for political equality as premised on the argument that, since men had proved incapable women should try, and would raise politics from its state of corruption; for “women use politics to elevate the nation, not for their own glorification.”^[224] Yet the article went on to situate women in the home, raising warriors of the future. Offering contemporary biography in the context of the ongoing Great War, the magazine privileged the domestic as women's war front in the sketches “Madame Joffre” and “Lady Roberts.” Self-sacrifice, nurture, and servicing the men were women's national duty in time of war, if one is to draw a message from the magazine's 1915 biographies.

The year before, though, The Gentle Sex had featured Christabel Pankhurst (1880–1958). How important a mother's example could be to a daughter's upbringing, it exclaimed, for she had been sentenced recently to hard labor as an anarchist. “It is not surprising when a girl grows up to be like her mother!” declared “the woman from Luxor.” The text did not exactly praise Pankhurst. Indeed, it took her as an antiexemplar and urged “the young Egyptian woman” not to swerve from her “decreed” place. “Mannish women are no model for you.” Evoking keywords in the gender discourse of the time, it equated tabarruj with tarajjul with tatarruf: ostentatious adornment, masculinization, and extremism. But was it this didactic horror that had led “the woman from Luxor” to preserve a portrait of Pankhurst in her trunk? Moreover, from a “recently translated” article the author summarized, the reader could visualize Pankhurst in her public actions. Would readers agree with “the woman from Luxor,” horrified as she imagined Pankhurst “leading the young women of our Egypt”?^[225] If no such ambiguity surrounded women engaged in public politics on behalf of the nation, still, the vantage point from which they were to donate their energies was open to question. The Gentle Sex praised women who had gone into the streets as Egyptians protested London's banishment of the nationalist delegation early in 1919, and it used the event to recuperate Egypt's ancient heritage. “The finest adornment that can encircle this issue, the thing of which we are proudest, is the action of our Egyptian women. . . . Were we to page through the history books we would find that Egyptian women of ancient times enjoyed preeminence and learning equivalent to that of the men, and among them were many queens.” Yet it defined Egyptian women as “the greatest encouragers of men.” If women were “the pillars of the nation,” it was because (to anticipate my next chapter) they had learned “to teach children properly and not leave them to the servants.”^[226] Habūs, daughter of the Amīr Bashīr al-Shihābī, a feudal Lebanese ruler, was politically active with and then against her father, fleeing after a plot against him failed. But her biography's finale accentuates a different kind of productivity. She had four sons, all brilliant Shihābīs thanks to her good child rearing.^[227]

Women are at their political best, in biography as in other polemics in this press, when they defer to male nationalist agendas. Emmeline Pankhurst dropped feminist demands to work in the war effort, the Egyptian Woman's Magazine noted approvingly. Her tactics comprised takhrīb (wanton destruction), it said, but if men had used such methods, women had to, too.^[228] Of several biographies of Manon Roland, it is one published in 1926 (after Egyptian women had become active and visible nationalist agitators) that begins by locating Roland in an active female collectivity—energetic on the nation's behalf. “Many women served humanity during the French Revolution, examples of honorable morals, lamps of freedom, fraternity, and equality, after they had stirred up ideas, activated people's concern and zeal, and striven as heroes do to rid themselves of tyranny and oppression.” Roland's example yields an observation that echoed Egyptian nationalist fireworks, accenting her active role in her husband's work, subsuming female endeavor in male public activism:

There is no doubt about it. A great lady who emerges from within lethargy's walls to raise herself from hut to palace—ascending from the masses' embrace to the bosoms of the elite in their sessions—and encourages her spouse to confront hardship, guiding him in administration and politics and making him reach the position of Minister; a woman who . . . fuels the fires of the corrective revolution and, when the souls of the revolutionaries are satisfied, resists and curbs them and then goes a victim to this great work; a woman whose spouse finds it so difficult to live on afterward that he . . . commits suicide—there is no doubt that she deserves to retain a good name, a farreaching reputation, eternal mention.^[229]

And, to cap it all: “Especially because despite it all she was not distracted from managing and administering her household nor did she neglect her daughter's rearing or education at her own hands, nor turn a deaf ear to moans of the sick and demands of the miserable . . . nor give in to arrogance and laziness.”^[230] Eschewing the publicly political in editorials, early women's magazines reinserted it, cautiously and perhaps unconsciously, through the kitchen door of women's biography. As later magazines paid avid attention to women's political demands, they did not necessarily give these demands explicit support. But through biography vivid descriptions of famous female, and feminist, activisms were on display for readers, even when the narrative frame subordinated public acts to family demands.

The Queen and Female Employment

“How delicious it is,” begins a biography of Nitocris (fl. fifth century B.C.), “for there to strike the ear of a researcher into Egypt's ancient history the mention of a woman who ruled Egypt and ran its affairs, next to the names of the [male] Pharaoh-heroes, especially as this was about sixteen centuries before the Messiah.”^[231] As we have seen, biographies of ancient Egyptian female monarchs abounded in magazines founded by Egyptian women. Two themes ran through all these portrayals. First, the general status of women in ancient Egypt meant it was not surprising to find a female ruler taken seriously. Second, therefore, women—whether royals or commoners—had an excellent deal in ancient Egypt long before they were treated properly in “the West”—as the reference to “sixteen centuries before the Messiah” suggests. Female pharaohs offered both an indigenous precedent and a competitive edge, useful in refuting the notion that “women's rights” or public work were Western imports. Not only could pharaohs represent the alleged status of ancient Egyptian women; they represented women's capability to lead and act without bringing up the vexed issue of electoral rights. So did biographies of any women rulers, from the Pharaoh Nitocris to Zenobia to Shajar al-Durr, Catherine the Great, and the Begum of Bhopal.^[232] Such texts foregrounded political acumen and activism, easy to find in the annals of premodern Muslim dynasties. Nūr Jahān (1571–1634?) of Mughal India (having captivated her husband, as we saw in chapter 3) had

the entire kingdom in her hands, and she commanded and prohibited as she saw fit. Nothing lacked her except the khutba. . . . She would meet with the princes of the kingdom and review its troops. . . . She made the politics of the country good and purified her husband's court of corruption. She was a savior for the oppressed, a refuge for those in hard luck. She brought up the daughters of the poor, married them off, and gave them dowries from her private funds.

The biography does not mention that she probably obtained power because her husband was addicted to drugs and alcohol; nor does it mention her less endearing qualities, a love of luxury and engagement in a factionalism that provoked civil war. But the trope of war does call attention to her power. When her husband was taken prisoner she went out at the head of what is labeled her army; “she attacked the enemy and cast it off with her own hand, showing courage and initiative that lit the fires of zeal in the breasts of her men. . . . He returned to his country triumphant and honored, and credit goes to his wife's bravery and wisdom.”^[233] But to make the picture perfect, this exemplary subject withdrew into solitude at her husband's death, devoting the rest of her life to charity work. The text implies that his death, not the assumption of power by another, caused her to retire, and that it was her choice to do so.

Similarly, Justinian was attracted to Theodora (497–548) not simply by her “beauty” but even more by her “vigor and comportment.” Indeed, she showed great intelligence in running the kingdom, says Young Woman of the East, and demonstrated “determination and courage.” If her husband handled insurrection firmly and properly, “credit in that was due to Theodora's steadiness and her sound views. The period of her [sic] rule was twenty-two years.”^[234]

Unusually, a biography of Umm al-Banīī;n, spouse of the Ummayyad caliph al-Walīd b. ‘‘Abd al-Malik, begins with a bouquet of flowery epithets describing him as a fine ruler concerned with his subjects. Yet these epithets are ultimately hers; “his concern for [his subjects] was due to Umm al-Banīī;n's words of guidance, and her skill in the ways of politics. Her word was implemented, her opinion followed; indeed she had dominion over him.” Interesting is the choice of ‘‘āwana (to help or support): she “was able to give him support in implementing justice and mercy.” Umm al-Banīī;n is thus in a supportive role; yet she is not. An anecdote that demonstrates her eloquence as a mode of power and refutes the notion that women have no place in public politics inserts itself.^[235] Such biographies, like those of Muslim females at centers of power in Scattered Pearls, are silent on premodern controversies over politically active females; they make their point by simply presenting these women as active, powerful, and respected, thereby distancing the portraits from misogynist polemics.^[236] At the same time, because so many of these women exercised power through husbands and especially sons, their images suited perfectly a discourse that displayed public roles and “private” energies as mutually reinforcing. And, as we shall see in the next chapter, profiles of female rulers address more than one agenda.

If the picture is not entirely rosy, this is because some texts dwell on difficulties women faced in maintaining authority.^[237] A biography of Ayyubid ruler Shajar al-Durr asks: “But is it possible in the East for a woman's glory to continue even if she is possessor of a crown?”^[238] Yet biographies of rulers supported women's visible public employment and activism as sanctioned, successful, and in the public good, while avoiding issues of political rights and career choices. Biographies of widows as willing and competent but involuntary CEOs combine the same elements. Profiling a contemporary Syrian émigré to New York, Lydia Tadros, the Ladies' Revue invoked the cluster of achievement and anxiety that by the 1920s shaped elite discourse on women's work:

Every Easterner is pleased to see, with every passing day, new proof of Eastern woman's ascent, progress, competence, and readiness for work, if man would make way for her and undo the bonds of traditions that tie her hands. We say “if” because no matter how much woman frees herself of bonds (and as we have said before, we have entered the age of women's freedom), we see her still fettered.For every time we take a step down freedom's path we find ourselves still moving according to the outlook of those who have long prevailed in power. But men who study social conditions, taking note of their shifts and direction, have begun to learn of woman's ability. Woman! worthy of an ample share of such freedom, an open way for talents through which she helps the world . . . unfortunately, in our sad East the ongoing movement for women's liberation does not distinguish between what is permitted and what is disallowed, or among different levels or stages of the women's awakening. Thus we hear sometimes the sound of grating without any true grinding accompanying it. . . . So instead of our awakening being pushed forward we see a group dragging it back . . . by not distinguishing between one sort of woman and another. . . .
I offer these words to introduce a Syrian lady who has begun to oversee New York's greatest business, that of the late Ni‘‘ma Tadros.^[239] Our readers [masc.] and those who read newspapers of America and the East know of this great man and the great commercial establishment he founded in New York, opening branches in the East until his capital was reckoned in millions of riyāls. This big enterprise is now steered by Madam Lydia Tadros, his widow, with a surpassing competence that she has practiced since her late lamented's time, when she gave opinions and shared in administration, even if from behind a curtain.

Thus we congratulate Sayyida Lydia on her ability and fitness, and on the confidence her late beloved vested in her. We hope her mission becomes a model Eastern women can take as a pattern, so they will move ahead as she has, proving able and ready for momentous deeds. Her independence in business, we hope, initiates a new, practiceoriented awakening for those women able to undertake useful work. We hope her working life offers a lesson to our women from which they will learn that woman, properly prepared for work, given a free hand, is every bit as competent as man. It pleases me to publicize that my longtime friend gives her all to support the idea of women entering the workplace—the concept on whose strings our magazine has played time after time since its founding.

This energetic, organizationally capable woman has no need to work. She is wealthy and could spend [the rest of] her years relaxing, spending money, and having fun, playing poker and spending hundreds of riyāls on amusement. She could have hundreds of dresses tailored, indeed thousands; she could enjoy all the fine things of life in her elegant, immense palace. But her lively mind and superior upbringing hail the delight and benefit to be found in work; they orient her desires toward expenditure on projects beneficial to the human species. . . .

So I congratulate you, my friend, on your new task and your rare personality, as I congratulate myself on our friendship, alive and evergrowing. In you I have learned what a devoted wife means; in you I have found the highest example of motherhood, household manager, and work supervisor. I have known you as the paragon of devoted loyalty, trustworthiness, and true friendship. . . . And now in you I see how . . . the noblest sort of honor is found in love of work. . . . I see you carrying patriotism's banner, national unity's flag, the placard of the women's awakening, and the torch of freedom through a night whose darkness has lasted long. Let these praiseworthy qualities live; let the Tadros name be congratulated, for it includes you, preserver of its generosity, glory, and pride.^[240]

Emphasizing the expansive and encouraging women onto new paths, magazine biographies foregrounded “Famous Women” as fully and thoughtfully using their own resources—physical, mental, material, and situational—to push changing role patterns in certain directions. Whether Sitt al-Mulk or Lucy Stone, Aspasia of Miletos or “‘‘Atiyyāt the Copt,” women act to shape their own destinies in these individual dramas. But, as these narratives remind readers, to act is to struggle with the given contours of one's social environment. They applauded a woman's persistence in pursuing goals despite obstacles erected by social expectation, and they praised those who took advantage of auspicious circumstances. Yet the thematics of social constraint articulate an underlying assumption that individual action and women's emergence into public space—into “men's work”—are necessarily good and positive moves. The possible costs to women were not debated through biography, although sometimes the costs to families were. To emphasize movement outward was in line with a liberal nationalist ethos of individualist effort on behalf of community, with the goals of public patriarchy. Yet, as we shall see, it was both tempered and given a certain inflection by the thematics of domesticity, positing a more relational ethos, albeit one shaped by a traditionalist image of women as nurturers.

I end this chapter with the eloquent, somber biography of American educator Mary Lyon (1797–1849) by Mary ‘‘Ajamīī;, published in Young Woman of the East in 1934, for it weaves together strands I have spun. ‘‘Ajamīī; credits her subject as one who helped “raise women's education to the level of men's at a time when no one seriously considered this.”^[241] There is the familiar theme of the father who dies young, and a portrait of Mary's mother through the eyes of her neighbors, “divided between admiring the cleanliness of her children and her energy on the farm.” Mary, sensitive and sharply intelligent, “surpassed all other girls in the village school” and, by age thirteen, had sole responsibility for “serving the home.” She saved the weekly riyāl her brother gave her, adding it to her income from “spinning and sewing in leisure hours.” Working as a teacher for low pay, “she saved this money, not swaggering with fripperies and silks, . . . yes, she collected those riyāls to enter an institute of higher education in a neighboring city.” Further financial problems dogged her progress, but “she hunched over her studies, giving this blessing its due respect and casting light on the darkness of her worries.” As a teacher she told her students to make the most of their money and time; and a quote from one of her speeches articulates a nationalist program consonant with the biography's time and place: “Teach [hadhdhibū] women and they will teach men for you. Accustom women to love what is good and serve the one who is near, and they will accustom their children.” Having conceived the idea of founding a college for women, she held meetings in which she “made clear . . . the excellence of knowledge; with it, women would certainly recuperate the felicity of men.” ‘‘Ajamīī; is indignant over the gossipy attacks Lyon faced, traveling and working with a male colleague. “Such was public opinion on an honorable, hardworking woman. But things have changed. The world has begun to let the echo of woman's voice resound, to take her hand and fill her heart with delight, to thank her for her loyalty.” Describing the waves of flowers that graced Lyon's grave, ‘‘Ajamīī; concluded simply: “These are the sweet scents of true civilization.”^[242]

Notes

1. On autobiographies of early feminist leaders, see Margot Badran, “Expressing Feminism and Nationalism in Autobiography: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Educator,” in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 270–93; Hoda Sha‘‘rawi, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879–1924), ed. and trans. Margot Badran (London: Virago, 1986). On premodern autobiography, see Edebiyat (fall 1996). On al-Bā‘‘ūniyya I am indebted to Dwight Reynolds and Emil Homerin. On early entertainers' autobiographies, see Virginia Danielson, “Artists and Entrepreneurs: Female Singers in Cairo during the 1920s,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, ed. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991). On women writers signing their names, see Baron, Women's Awakening, 43–50.

2. Carolyn Heilbrun, “Non-autobiographies of 'Privileged' Women: England and America,” in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 70.

3. When Nabawiyya Mūsā founded al-Fatāt in 1937, she called for bio-graphical contributions: “Al-Fatāt welcomes valuable studies and research on 'Famous Women' in different eras sent by readers, men and women.” The notice appeared at least twice. “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘ bi-aqlām al-qurrā‘‘ wa-al-qāri’ءāt,” al-Fatāt (Mūsā) 1:2 (Oct. 27, 1937): 18, and 1:3 (Nov. 3, 1937): 22.

4. “SN: Bāhithat al-Bādiya,” FS 13:3 (Dec. 15, 1918): 81. Also in Adāb al-fatāt: “SN: Bāhithat al-Bādiya: al-marhūma al-sayyida Malak Nāsif,” AF 1:2 (Feb. 1926): 25–27.

5. “Al-Nābigha al-misriyya al-Anisa Zakiyya ‘‘Abd al-Hamīī;d Sulaymān,” NN 4:12 (Nov. 1926): 412–14; quotations on 412, 412.

6. Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik, “Muqaddimat al-sana al-thāniya,” MM 2:1 (Jan. 1921): 1–2. Amīī;na Rif‘‘at, “Tadwīī;nāt,” FM 2:4 (July 1922): 114–18; 117. “Muhammad Muhibb Bāshā,” FS 7:9 (June 1913): 347–49 (presumably the same Muhibb Pasha that Berque claims was first in Egypt's commercial upper crust to allow his daughters to unveil; Egypt, 472). See also Labīī;ba Ahmad in NN 3:3 (Oct. 1923): 109; “Fatāt al-sharq fīī; ‘‘āmihā al-thāmin ‘‘ashara,” FS 18:1 (Oct. 15, 1923): 1–2. On the agreement with the Education Ministry, see Fenoglio-Abd el Aal, Défense, 31. MM announced that the recent Dhikrā Bāhithat al-Bādiya, commemorating Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif, was bought in bulk by wealthy individuals for distribution in girls' schools in Egypt and Sudan (MM 1:9 [Nov. 1920]: 320). On earlier journals, see Baron, Women's Awakening, 68, 91, 92. The continuing importance of patronage emerges in an open letter from ‘‘Abd al-Malik to the Minister of Education, complaining that subscriptions taken by the ministry and provincial councils had decreased by more than half. MM 14:5/6 (May/June 1933): 156.

7. “Al-Madrasa al-wataniyya,” AJ 4:7 (July 31, 1901): 739–40. Baron mentions this incident (Women's Awakening, 97 and 220 n. 83).

8. FS 13:1 (Oct. 15, 1918): 35–36.

9. “Adab al-bint,” JL 7:7 (Jan. 1915): 264.

10. A telling contrast emerges: “The difference between this era's nationalist and the barbarian of yesteryear is in books.” “Al-Sa‘‘āda wa-sadāqat al-kutub,” JL 7:7 (Jan. 1915): 239.

11. Editors advertised their own works by excerpting them and announcing hoped-for publication if readers would subscribe in advance. Labīī;ba Hāshim excerpts her book The Mother and the Men of the Future, unpublished at the time. See didactic dialogues in FS 2:6 (Mar. 15, 1908) and 3:7 (Apr. 1909); the book is announced as not yet published. Malaka Sa‘‘d told readers: “With the great need we perceive for a book to guide women to their most vital house-hold duties, I have devoted much thought to filling this void . . . resulting in a book I call Rabbat al-dār. . . . One can subscribe inexpensively. I hope soon to obtain support from readers, men and women, to bring this book out so it can be of benefit.” “Thamra jadīī;da,” JL 7:2 (Sept. 1914): 79–80. She succeeded, thanking writers for praising the book in poetry and prose, and telling readers where to buy it. “Kitāb Rabbat al-dār,” JL 7:7 (Jan. 1915): 260–63.

12. The article reminds us of the preponderance of foreign education in Egypt at the time: “One girl asked us to guide her to French women writers . . . whom she can read without hanging her head in shame if surprised by a visitor.” The list includes “Famous Women” of later magazines: Sand, de Sévigné, de Staël. “Fā‘‘ida adabiyya,” F 1:10 (Feb. 15, 1894): 446, from Beirut's Lisān al-Hāl. Baron discusses reading in this press (Women's Awakening, 84–90).

13. Labīī;ba Hāshim, “Taqrīī;z wa-intiqād,” AJ 6:5 (Apr. 30, 1903): 1417–20; quotations on 1418. AJ praised Fawwāz's novel Husn al-‘‘awāqib as “full of exemplary lessons, worthy of the finest praise for its fine author whose likes, we hope, will multiply in this country.” AJ 2:6 (June 30, 1899): 236.

14. Labīī;ba Hāshim, “al-Mutāla‘‘a,” AJ 2:11 (Nov. 30, 1899): 421–28; quotation on 423.

15. FS 4:6 (Mar. 1910): 227.

16. FS 4:3 (Dec. 1909): 115.

17. “SN: “Māry Bāshkir staf [sic],” FS 17:4 (Jan. 15, 1923): 121–22. Taken from an article by Anatole France, it reads in part like a traditional Arabic biography with epithets traditional in form but “off” in content. She is “blonde of hair, round of cheeks, short of nose, thin of lip, deep of glance” (121). Bashkirtseff is known for her journal, in which she celebrated her strong sense of self; reviewers criticized her frank self-confidence. Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter, eds., Revelations: Diaries of Women (New York: Vintage, 1975), 46–55.

18. “Māry Ilīī;zābith Barādūn,” JL 11:7 (Jan. 1919): 97–98. “SN: Sharlūt Kurdāy,” FS 19:6 (Mar. 15, 1925): 241–44. “Mādām Rūlān,” JL 6:9 (Mar. 1914): 235–39. Biographies also mention married women (e.g., Augusta Victoria of Germany) making time for reading, echoing a concern of magazine editors.

19. Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “al-Yūbīī;l al-faddīī; lil-ānisa Māry ‘‘Ajamīī; sāhibat 'Majallat al-‘‘Arūs' bi-Dimashq,” FS 20:9 (June 15, 1926): 404.

20. Hasīī;b al-Hakīī;m, “SN: Min al-kūkh ilā al-barlamān: Mādām Bawb,” MM 8:3 (Mar. 15, 1927): 117–19.

21. “SN: Māriyā Aghnasīī;,” MM 7:2 (Feb. 15, 1926): 84–86. “SN: Māriyā Ajnisīī;,” FS 23:5 (Apr. 1929): 337–38. “SN: ‘‘A’ءisha al-Dimashqiyya,” FS 28:9 (June 1934): 449.

22. “Mādām Rūlān,” JL 6:9 (Mar. 1914): 237, 236.

23. “Fīī; al-mir’ءāt: Jamīī;la al-‘‘Alā’ءilīī;,” NN 13:3 (Mar. 1935): 83–84. “SN: Luwīī;zā Alkūt,” FS 27:5 (Feb. 1933): 225–26. “Jān Awstīī;n,” JL 11:3 (Sept. 1918): 33–34. “SN: al-Amīī;ra Aliksāndrah dīī; Afirīī;nuh Fizinūskā,” FS 10:1 (Oct. 1915): 2–11.

24. This is not the place to offer a detailed discussion of early schooling. In English, see Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 122–30; Baron, Women's Awakening, chap. 6; Badran, Feminists, 143–48.

25. This excludes the earlier midwifery school, started for specific training purposes. It is difficult to imagine the school, or even Muhammad ‘‘Alīī;'s hiring tutors for his daughters, as suggesting commitment to broader girls' education; but perhaps, as Badran argues, this provided a model for elite families. See Tucker, Women, 123–25; Badran, Feminists, 8–9.

26. Repeatedly al-Mu’ءayyad's provincial correspondents reported bad conditions in kuttābs and unsatisfactory educational results. See al-Mu’ءayyad 1:3 (Dec. 8, 1889): 2; 1:173 (July 2, 1890): 3 (Asyut); 2:271 (Nov. 3, 1890): 2 (Sohag); 2:309 (Dec. 18, 1890): 1; 3: 638 (Mar. 7, 1892): 2 (Mansura); 3:658 (Mar. 30, 1892): 2. Other articles complain that schools, curriculum, teachers, and the populace's awareness of education's importance are not what they should be: “Wajhat al-muta‘‘allim,” al-Mu’ءayyad 1:5 (Dec. 10, 1889): 1; “Taqaddum al-ma‘‘ārif fīī; al-diyār al-misriyya,” 1:186 (July 9, 1890): 1; articles in 1:216, 1: 221, 1:223, 1: 240; 2:474, 2: 477, 2:480, 3: 562; 4:920; 4:921, by no means an inclusive list. The paper noted the support of Egypt's highest (Egyp-tian) civil servants for better education: “al-Hathth ‘‘alā al-ta‘‘allum,” 1:214 (Aug. 26, 1890): 1; and expressed anxiety over the presence, funding, and drawing power of foreign schools in Egypt: “al-Madāris al-ajnabiyya fīī; al-diyār al-misriyya,” al-Mu’ءayyad 1:255 (Oct. 13, 1890): 1; “Mādha yaqsidūna?” 2:325 (Jan. 6, 1891): 1; “Al-Madāris al-ajnabiyya fīī; al-diyār al-misriyya,” 2:331 (Jan. 13, 1891): 1; “Ta‘‘mīī;m al-ta‘‘līī;m,” 3:624 (Feb. 20, 1892): 1.

27. Tucker, Women, 127, 131. Al-Mu’ءayyad 3:563 (Dec. 10, 1891): 2. It is hardly surprising that polemics on schooling in al-Mu’ءayyad focused on the poor state of boys' schools, given prevailing social and ideological conditions. If boys' education was in crisis, could one expect even supporters of girls' schooling to privilege it? Yet the newspaper reports on girls' schools, with approving notices of new school openings, prize ceremonies, and exhibition days. “Yesterday a troupe of students from the French School for Girls . . . founded three years ago . . . acted a play on the stage at Azbakiyya Gardens, and declaimed a number of essays in Arabic, French and Italian. The audience was astonished by their fine delivery, considering their young age; for all were between eight and ten years old.” 2:554 (Nov. 30, 1891): 3.

28. “Al-Fatāt,” F 1:10 (Feb. 15, 1894): 436–46; quotation on 440.

29. “Ta‘‘līī;m al-fatāt,” AJ 1:7 (July 31, 1898): 193–97; quotation on 194.

30. ‘‘Afīī;fa Salīī;b, “Al-Mar‘‘a wa-al-ta‘‘līī;m,” AJ 2:7 (July 31, 1899): 258–60; quotation on 258.

31. A powerful article in JL (1916) invokes “the case of Miss Asmā Mansūr—indeed, the case of the Egyptian woman” to attack the government for restricting female education. Mansūr had sought and obtained permission to take the secondary school entrance exam; “after hard work to prepare,” the decision had been reversed. This, commented the magazine, happened after “our Sultān” had called for an expansion in education for boys and girls; Egypt was indeed “the land of wonders and contradictions.” “Does the government want to say to daughters of the Nile: 'Education is prohibited to you'? Does the school administration want to say to the civilized world, 'We do not let our daughters learn'? . . . or to say to the civilization of the twentieth century, 'We do not want mothers for our sons who know the meaning of true child raising, good character, and proper knowledge; we want them to be wives and no more'?” “Qadiyat al-Anisa Asmā Mansūr: bal qadiyat al-mar‘‘a al-misriyya,” JL 9:4 (Oct. 1916): 143–44.

32. “Khitām al-sana al-ūlā li-Majallat al-Sayyidāt,” SB 1:12 (Mar. 1904): 372–75; quotation on 372. The essay continues: “From there, the principles and fundaments it teaches can be extended to the uneducated [women].” In MM: “I say the best literary schools are useful magazines; taking their founders' hands is the best way to serve literature. The magazines most urgently in need of support are our women's journals, primary means to refine souls and culture minds. Despite the need for the benefits they offer, they are few in number and not widely available.” Yūsuf Hamdīī; Yakan, “al-Sawānih al-yūsufiyya 6: ‘‘adad al-adab,” MM 4:4 (Apr. 1923): 181–82; 182.

33. ‘‘Alīī; al-Jubaylīī; al-Ghazālīī;, in MM 14:7 (1934): 240, quoted in Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 114. This should be the issue for September 1933; Khalīī;fa gives it as 1934.

34. Zaynab Fawwāz, “al-‘‘Ilm nūr,” F 1:10 (Feb. 15, 1894): 159–63.

35. Labīī;ba Hāshim, “Ta‘‘līī;m al-banāt,” FS 4:3 (Dec. 1909): 82–86. Harsh criticism of opponents of girls' education comes in an attack on the flamboyant, controversial Shaykh ‘‘Abd al-‘‘Azīī;z Jāwīī;sh, reporting on a speech in which he allegedly said a pure heart was all a woman needed. Unusually pointed for FS, this was possible perhaps because it appeared under the foreign byline of Olga de Lébédef, an “orientalist” Hāshim met in Cairo and whose biography she featured in FS's first year. The editor, concurring, slyly suggested the ubiquity of the discourse on female education: “It is well known that woman has the same natural right as man to develop her mind to the furthest limit for which she is prepared.” The attack drew fire from Ibrāhīī;m Ramzīī;, onetime editor of Woman in Islam, who claimed that Jāwīī;sh's one speech on the subject defined the province of girls' education as domestic but permitted “a proper measure” of reading and writing, a bit of geography, history, and the principles of arithmetic, “but first she must have a refined and purified self and a good upbringing.” See “Al-Mar‘‘a al-sharqiyya wa-al-shaykh ‘‘Abd al-‘‘Azīī;z Jāwīī;sh,” FS 4:7 (Apr. 1910): 249–50; Ibrāhīī;m Ramzīī;, “al-Mar‘‘a al-sharqiyya wa-al-ustādh ‘‘Abd al-‘‘Azīī;z Jāwīī;sh,” FS 4:8 (May 1910): 298–301. The magazine asks de Lébédef to respond, assuring “the writer and Jāwīī;sh” that its only aim is “to reform the situation of woman, half the nation, in whose hand is the life of the whole nation” (301).

36. Muhammad Munīī;r, “Kalima ilā al-sayyidāt,” FS 1:10 (July 15, 1907): 295–96; quotation on 295. He calls on “wealthy” ladies to fund schools for poor girls, who “float on the seas of superstitions and ancient fancies such that not a one is fit to be mistress of a house, running it on a sound social basis.” Such fancies, he says (reiterating a common theme) come from ignorant mothers (296).

37. “Sīī;rat SN: al-Sayyida Nafīī;sa al-‘‘Alawiyya,” MI 1:5 (June 1, 1901): 75–76, quotation on 76. The masculine “universal” plural in “those Egyptians who remain naive” may imply male guardians foremost, offering a reminder of MI's primary audience. Note that the text carefully delineates where “it is possible for women and men to be equal.”

38. Badran, Feminists, 145.

39. “SN: Rujīī;na Khayyāt,” MM 4:7 (Sept. 1, 1923): 369.

40. “SN: Malāk al-rahma: al-Sayyida dhāt al-misbāh,” MM 15:1/2 (Jan./Feb. 1934): 70–72.

41. “Tabīī;ba jarrāha,” AR 1:9 (Dec. 22, 1926): 3.

42. “Ashhar al-nisā‘‘: Lūsīī; Stūn Blākwāl: Za‘‘īmat al-mutālibāt bi-huqūq al-nisā‘‘ fīī; Amīī;rikā (su’ءāl lil-qāri’ءāt fīī; mawdūء qadīī;m),” SB 1:1 (Apr. 1, 1903): 4.

43. Badran, Feminists, 34–35.

44. “Sīī;rat SN: ‘‘A’ءisha Umm al-mu‘‘minīī;n,” MI 1:2 (Apr. 15, 1901): 27.

45. “Mas‘‘ala fihā nazr,” FS 3:7 (Apr. 1909): 262–68. In the next issue (pp. 302–5) he takes up Umayyad and Abbasid women. Men's treatment of women made the period one of “tyranny and corruption”; men, to blame for today's situation, must undertake “the reform of women” (305).

46. “SN: Asmā’ء al-‘‘Amiriyya,” FS 11:5 (Feb. 15, 1917): 185. *** [Farah Antūn], “SN: al-Khansā‘‘, ashhar shā‘‘irāt al-‘‘arab,” SB 1:3 (June 1903): 76.

47. Abū Shādīī; on “the new woman”: FS 3:9 (June 1909): 335–39; 3:10 (July 1909): 365–70.

48. M. L., “Misrīī;,” “Huqūq al-mar‘‘a al-muslima,” AJ 1:8 (Aug. 31, 1898): 231–35, one in a series of responses to a speech by ‘‘Umar Bek Lutfīī; to a female audience at “the women's conference” in Geneva, reproduced in AJ 1:4 (Apr. 1898): 97–100.

49. Mahmūd Hamdīī; al-Sakhāwīī;, “Al-Fatāt al-sharqiyya,” AJ 2:1 (Jan. 31, 1899): 17–21. The author is a school head. This article is interesting, but not unrepresentative, for its defense of men against accusations that they are to blame for polygyny, divorce, and late nights out.

50. More so than Ahmad Abū Jundiyya's statement that a woman of knowledge will be aware of its consequences, earning honor and “becoming a paragon of perfection, a model in good acts.” “Ajwibat al-iqtirāh,” AJ 2:1 (Jan. 31, 1899): 22–28; Muharram's letter, 22–24, Abū Jundiyya's, 24–25. Abū Jundiyya distinguishes “useful and beneficial knowledge” from “futile” learning that leads one to follow “passions” but does not specify a “proper” female sphere of knowledge. Writers rarely expressed anxiety over the impact of “futile” knowledge on men.

51. AJ 2:1 (Jan. 31, 1899): 25–28. She speculates that if women become educated they will no longer obey their husbands, who will thus “be obliged to use physical force . . . and we fear a return to our first age of woman's servitude and abasement, which is what must happen if woman extends her present freedom” (28).

52. “Suwar al-majalla: Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘,” AJ 2:6 (June 30, 1899): 205–9; quotation on 209.

53. “Suwar al-majalla: Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘,” AJ 2:8 (Aug. 31, 1899): 285–89; quotation on 287. This also features a Russian philosopher and American scholar Carey Thomas, “to whom goes the greatest credit for founding many institutes of female education. . . . She is absolutely devoted to serving young women, whom she loves and honors” (289).

54. “Suwar al-majalla: Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘,” AJ 2:7 (July 31, 1899): 245–49; quotations on 248, 249.

55. [Response to a letter], JL 1:4 (Oct. 1908): 114–16; quotation on 115–16.

56. ‘‘Afīī;fa Azan, “al-‘‘Ilm wa-al-‘‘amal,” F 1:3 (Feb. 1, 1893): 116; “al-Barinsis Tarīī;zā al-Bāfāriyya,” F 1:4 (Mar. 1, 1893): 150–51.

57. “Al-‘‘Ilm nūr,” 162.

58. As Afsaneh Najmabadi has observed for Iran and Baron for Arab cultures, the father stood at the center of premodern writing on child raising, which “mirrored a legal reality—children belonged to the father.” Baron, Women's Awakening, 159; Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 91–125. Now the spotlight was on mothers. Yet through biography and other articles fatherhood received attention.

59. “Jān Awstīī;n,” JL 11:3 (Sept. 1918): 33–34; quotation on 33.

60. “SN: Madām dīī; Kātīī;l,” FS 32:6 (Mar. 1938): 221–222; quotation on 221.

61. ‘‘Isā Iskandar al-Ma‘‘lūf, “SN: Mariyānā al-Marrāsh al-Halabiyya,” FS 13:9 (June 15, 1919): 345–51; quotations on 346–47, 347. The author dwells on al-Marrāsh's father; see also note 67.

62. “SN: Anīī;sa wa-‘‘Afīī;fa Shartūnīī;,” FS 5:3 (Dec. 5, 1910): 81–84.

63. “SN: “Ilīī;sābāt Stāntūn, mu‘‘assisat al-nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya al-amīī;rikiyya,” FS 19:4 (Jan. 15, 1925): 145–46; quotation on 145. A later biography says it was her father's preference for his son over his daughters—“the bitterness of injustice she tasted while still a child”—that spurred her intellectual and athletic excellence. “SN: Misiz Ilīī;sābāt Stāntūn,” FS 26:5 (Feb. 1932): 225–26; quotation on 225.

64. “SN: Madām Niykur,” FS 16:4 (Jan. 15, 1922): 121–22; “SN: Madām Taqlā Bāshā,” FS 19:1 (Oct. 15, 1924): 3–5; quotation on 3. A later life of a famous daughter portrayed her father—Ramsey MacDonald, surrounded by his children, reading to them. “Let us speak of the head of the household who raised this young woman”; his influence produced Isabel's preference for a simple life and led to her decision to marry a “simple builder.” Nasīī;f Mīī;khā’ءīl, “SN: Ishabāl Mākdūnāld tatazawwiju muqāwilan,” MM 19:3/4 (Mar./Apr. 1938): 118–20; quotations on 119.

65. “Misiz Brawnin,” MM 8:5–6 (May 15, 1927): 260–63. Attacks on men's lack of support: “Fīī; sabīī;l inhād al-mar‘‘a: Madhā yuqālu ‘‘an al-mar‘‘a?” MM 4:1 (Jan. 1923): 4–5; Duriyya Imām Fahmīī;, “Bāb al-tarbiya wa-al-akhlāq: al-Hāja ilā tarbiyat al-banāt wa-mazāyāhā,” MM 4:2 (Feb. 1923): 71–72.

66. “Ilisabāt Bārat Birūninj,” JL 9:1 (May 1916): 6–11; quotations on 6, 7.

67. ‘‘Isā Iskandar al-Ma‘‘lūf, “SN: al-Tabīī;ba Salmā Qusātilīī; al-Dimashqiyya,” FS 14:7 (Apr. 5, 1920): 241–44. This is one of al-Ma‘‘lūf's biographies that begin with information on men of the family. I think this needs to be seen not simply as a male-centered focus but as an indication of reformers' notions of masculinity at this time: part of the portrait of the enlightened Arab nineteenth-century intellectual for al-Ma‘‘lūf is that he is surrounded by educated females. The author mentions Nu‘‘mān's wife, Nadā Kalīī;la, as a learned writer who has written a book on mathematics, and his two daughters Asmā’ء and Farīī;da as litterateurs.

68. “SN: al-Sayyida Warda al-Yāzijīī;,” FS 2:1 (Oct. 15, 1907): 7. FS's obituary=biography refers to this text: “We were aiming to inform her literary colleagues, female and male, of her excellence and the history of her pure and useful life.” “SN: al-Sayyida Warda al-Yāzijīī;,” FS 18:5 (Feb. 1924): 1–6; quotation on 2.

69. Warda al-Yāzijīī;, “Ta‘‘ziyatīī;,” FS 13:4 (Jan. 15, 1919): 128.

70. “SN: al-Sayyida Amīī;na Najīī;b fīī; sinn al-thalāthīī;n (1887–1917),” FS 23:3 (Dec. 1928): 103–5. The text does not describe her mother as it does her father, perhaps for lack of information.

71. “Madām Rūlān,” MM 6:3 (Mar. 15, 1925): 158, 159. But seven years later MM profiles her in a reversal of the “woman-behind-the-man” theme, portraying a strong woman supporting a weak man: “If his wife had not helped him, supporting his back from behind, his impotence would have appeared more clearly and his position would have been shaky from the first.” I find it significant that the tone of this text is negative; the portrait constructs Roland as arrogant, superficial, hasty, emotional, and sly, linking this to a gendered evaluation of traits: she “had the mind of a man but she preserved the mood of a woman.” “Madām Rūlān,” MM 13:5/6 (May/June 1932): 230–34; quotations on 234, 233. “It might be that among the imaginings that make history look like legend is that a woman had power over the Girondin platform” (231).

72. “SN: Madām dīī; Stāyil,” FS 16:8 (May 1922): 281–86; “SN: Madām Niykur,” FS 16:4 (Jan. 15, 1922): 121–22.

73. Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “SN: “Hannā Kasbānīī; Kūrānīī;,” FS 2:10 (July 15, 1908): 362.

74. Yāqūt Sarrūf, “SN: Maryam Nimr Makāriyūs,” FS 2:5 (Feb. 15, 1908), 161, 162; reprinted from al-Muqtataf. Makāriyūs's speech reproduced in the next issue, “Raising Children,” foregrounded the speaker's maternal role yet defined her as a public speaker: “SN: Tābi‘‘at tarjamat al-marhūma Maryam Nimr Makāriyūs,” FS 2:6 (Mar. 15, 1908): 201–8. This illustrates FS's reliance on Fawwāz; the speech forms part of her life of Makāriyūs (DM, 504–8).

75. “Al-Amīī;ra Yūliyāna al-Hūlandiyya,” FS 25:2 (Nov. 1930): 66–68.

76. “SN: Jullanār Hānim aw Mme Olga de Lébédef” [the latter name in Roman characters], FS 1:7 (Apr. 15, 1907): 197–98.

77. Muhammad Abū al-Is‘‘ad, Nabawiyya Mūsā wa-dawruhā fī al-hayāt al-misriyya (1886–1951), Ser. Tārīī;kh al-Misriyyīī;n 69 (Cairo: al-Hay‘‘a al-misriyya al-‘‘āmma lil-kitāb, 1994), 19–21. He dates this to 1926.

78. “Al-Mar‘‘a al-sharqiyya: Mā yajibu ‘‘alayhā ‘‘amaluh al-yawm,” FS 13:5 (Feb. 15, 1919): 187–90; quotation on 187–89.

79. Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “SN: Luwīī;zā Prūktur,” FS 3:1 (Oct. 1908): 4, 6–7.

80. “Wafāt sayyida fādila,” SB 2:5 (Apr. 1905): 144.

81. DM, 18. Possibly this line was translated from a European source; that does not lessen its interest as a text helping to shape a local language of modernity around child-rearing methods.

82. ‘‘Isā Iskandar al-Ma‘‘lūf, “SN: al-Tabīī;ba Salmā Qusātilīī; al-Dimashqiyya,” FS 14:7 (Apr. 5, 1920): 241–44. “SN: Māriyā Mitshil al-falakiyya,” MM 8:1 (Jan. 15, 1927): 6–9, 8.

83. “Annā Lititsiyā Barbawld,” JL 11:4 (Oct. 1918): 49–50.

84. Folger Collective on Early Women Critics, Women Critics 1660–1820: An Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 174.

85. “SN: Zaynab bt. Muhammad b. ‘‘Uthmān b. ‘‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Dimashqiyya,” FS 11:10 (July 15, 1917): 425; DM, 228.

86. “SN: Khadīī;ja al-Ansāriyya,” FS 14:10 (July 15, 1920): 361. She does not appear in DM.

87. “SN: Fātima bt. Ahjam b. Dandana al-Khuzā‘‘ī,” FS 9:9 (June 1915): 321. The title retains a more traditional three-generation patronymic.

88. “SN: Fātima bt. Ahjam b. Dandana al-Khuzā‘‘ī,” FS 22:6 (Mar. 1928): 241. These biographies follow DM closely but diverge in mentioning her father's concern with her education and emphasizing her upbringing, suggesting these themes' modernity (DM, 363–64).

89. “SN: Fātima bt. Jamāl al-Dīī;n Sulaymān,” FS 25:1 (Oct. 1930): 2–3.

90. “SN: Fayrūz bt. al-Sultān ‘‘Alā’ء al-Dīī;n,” FS 25:2 (Nov. 1930): 57–59. DM does not have this emphasis, but both texts note her influence over her brother during his reign (DM, 449–50).

91. “SN: Kātirīī;nā al-thāniya,” FS 6:1 (Oct. 15, 1911): 2–5, describes the clerical school for girls she founded as well as her sports arenas for females, and says she attempted to bring girls of different ethnicities together. See also Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Bāb al-tārīī;kh: Shams al-tārīī;kh: Kātirīī;na al-thāniya li-Rūsiyā fīī; al-qarn al-thāmin ‘‘ashara al-mīī;lādīī;,” NN 3:2 (Sept. 1923): 51–52. Catherine probably paid more heed to boys' education than girls' (communication from Mark Steinberg, May 1998), but these texts privilege the latter.

92. “Al-Barinsīī;s Fātima Haydar Fādil,” MM 4:8 (Oct. 1, 1923): 439.

93. “Misis Frānk Lislīī; al-shahīī;ra,” F 1:3 (Feb. 1, 1893): 101–3; quotation on 102.

94. E.g., Muhammad Munīī;r, “Kalima ilā al-sayyidāt,” FS 1:10 (July 15, 1907): 295–96.

95. “Ashhar al-nisā‘‘: Lūsīī; Stūn Blākwāl: Za‘‘īī;mat al-mutālibāt bi-huqūq al-nisā‘‘ fīī; Amīī;rikā (su’ءāl lil-qāri’ءāt fīī; mawdūء qadīī;m),” SB 1:1 (Apr. 1, 1903): 4–6. “‘‘Alam al-mar‘‘a: Za‘‘īī;ma hindiyya tanzimu balīī;gh al-shi‘‘r bi-al-lugha al-injiliziyya,” AR 1:70 (June 2, 1926): 6, 7.

96. Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “SN: Maryam Jahashān,” FS 5:9 (June 15, 1911): 321–25.

97. Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “al-Yūbīī;l al-faddīī; lil-ānisa Māry ‘‘Ajamīī; sāhibat 'Majallat al-‘‘Aruūs' bi-Dimashq,” FS 20:9 (15 June 1926): 403–7.

98. Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “SN: Māry ‘‘Ajamīī;,” MM 7:6 (June 20, 1926): 324–26; quotation on 324.

99. Zakiyya ‘‘Abd al-Hamīī;d Sulaymān, “al-Sa‘‘āda al-manziliyya,” FM 1:1 (Apr. 1921): 14–21; idem., “Mabāhith ‘‘ilmiyya: Tārīī;kh ‘‘ilm al-tarbiya: Frūbil wa-Muntisūrīī;,” FM 1:2 (May 1921): 55–57.

100. Farīī;da Ahmad, “Fī al-ta‘‘līī;m al-jughrāfīī;,” FM 1:1 (Apr. 1921): 28–30; Zakiyya ‘‘Abd al-Hamīī;d Sulaymān, “Fīī; al-ta‘‘bīī;r ‘‘an al-khātir,” FM 1:2 (May 1921): 62–63; Nafūsa Khalīī;fa, “Ba‘‘d arā‘‘ fīī; al-ta‘‘līī;m: al-Ta‘‘līī;m bi-wāsitat al-la‘‘b,” FM 1:3 (June 1921): 90–92; Wadūda al-Sadr, “Khitta li-dirāsat al-tabī‘‘a,” FM 1:3 (June 1921): 96–99.

101. Hanīfa Hifnī Nāsif, “Sālih al-rijāl fī ‘‘itā‘‘ haqq al-intikhāb lil-nisā‘‘,” FMF 1:3 (June 1921): 79–85. The journal's emphasis was not unique. For 1919–20, The Gentle Sex announced a new column putting family at the center (“especially since there is consensus on the family as foundation of the nation”) and discussing “new discoveries” in education, relying on European and American periodicals. “Iftitāh al-sana al-thāniya ‘‘ashara,” JL 12:1 (Oct. 1919): 2–4; 2, 3.

102. ‘‘Abd al-Halīī;m Sālim, “Tarājim al-murabbiyāt al-shahīī;rāt: Madām Kambān,” NN 3:6 (Jan. 1924): 211–15.

103. Apparently al-Bustānīī; wanted to found a parallel girls' school, according to Bāz (cited in Kallās, al-Haraka al-fikriyya, 24).

104. ‘‘Isā Iskandar al-Ma‘‘lūf, “SN: Rāhīī;l ‘‘Atā zawjat al-mu‘‘allim Butrus al-Bustānīī;,” FS 14:1 (Oct. 15, 1919): 1–4. Note that she is defined as wife rather than daughter in the title.

105. “SN: Madām Taqlā Bāshā,” FS 19:1 (Oct. 15, 1924): 3–5; quotations on 4.

106. “SN: Bijūm malikat Bhūbāl,” FS 21:1 (Oct. 1926): 2–3.

107. ‘‘Alīī; Afandīī; ‘‘Alīī; al-‘‘Azabīī;, “Laylat al-zifāf,” FS 1:5 (Feb. 15, 1907): 135–37. The monologue continues; see idem., “Thānīī; laylat al-zifāf,” FS 1:7 (Apr. 15, 1907): 206–7.

108. E.g., FS 13:2 (Nov. 15, 1918): 46–48; 13:3 (Dec. 15, 1918): 84–86.

109. “Basā‘‘it ‘‘ilm al-tabī‘‘a: Bayna umm wa-waladihā: al-Thuql al-naw‘‘īī;,” FS 18:1 (Oct. 15, 1923): 7, 8.

110. A. c. N., “Fīī; al-mir’ءāt: Jamīī;la al-‘‘Alā’ءilīī;,” NN 13:3 (Mar. 1935): 83–84; quotations on 83, 83, 84.

111. Girls on education missions to Europe, and girls in Egypt, sometimes resisted the domestic curriculum mapped out for them. Sālim, al-Mar’ءa almisriyya, 76–77; Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 248.

112. Badran, Feminists, chap. 8.

113. “Al-Fatāt al-‘‘uthmāniyya,” FS 3:1 (Oct. 1908): 11–14; “Al-‘‘Ilm ba‘‘da al-dustūr al-‘‘uthmānīī;,” FS 3:1 (Oct. 1908): 14–20. For a similar didactic strategy, see “al-Mar‘‘a al-amīī;rikiyya,” FS 3:3 (Dec. 1908): 83–87.

114. “Al-‘‘Ilm ba‘‘da al-dustūr al-‘‘uthmānīī;,” FS 3:1 (Oct. 1908): 14–20; quotations on 18, 19, 19–20.

115. Amīī;na ‘‘Awda, “Al-Lugha wa-al-watan,” FM 1:6 (Sept. 1921): 190–92; quotation on 192.

116. ‘‘Afīī;fa Azan, “al-‘‘Ilm wa-al-‘‘amal,” F 1:3 (Feb. 1, 1893): 116.

117. In 1:5 Turkish writer Fatma Aliye, in 1:6 an article by Aliye in the SN slot, in 1:8 Fawwāz, in 1:9 Emily Sursuq, in 1:10 a return to poets with ‘‘Aliyya bt. al-Mahdīī;. Featuring de Lébédef (1:7), she was apologetic about the choice. Only in FS's third year did she begin to feature other European women.

118. Rūz Sālim Jalakh, “Fīī; hālatinā al-ijtimā‘‘iyya,” FS 1:4 (Jan. 15, 1907): 99–101.

119. “Al-Nisā‘‘ al-sharqiyyāt,” FS 1:4 (Jan. 15, 1907): 113. Baron (Women's Awakening, 83–84, 137–39) says this issue was at its height in the century's first decade.

120. It also instructs fathers not to leave girls' education to their mothers, on the grounds that mothers do not understand its importance. “Nisā‘‘ al-sharq wa-al-lugha al-‘‘arabiyya,” FS 2:1 (Oct. 15, 1908): 19–22. A writer in MM criticizes parents (of both sexes) who regard girls' education as “a sort of polish or luxury,” noting that “in recent years” there has been much competition among mothers and fathers to acquire this for daughters, when they cannot even speak their own language properly. Fathiyya ‘‘Abd al-Wahhāb, “Bāb al-tarbiya wa-al-akhlāq: Māhiyat al-ta‘‘līī;m wa-kayfa yajibu an yakūna,” MM 4:4 (Apr. 1923): 186–88.

121. “Al-Jāmi‘‘a al-misriyya wa-al-muhādarāt al-nisā‘‘iyya,” FS 4:4 (Jan. 1910): 123–28. These lectures had just begun. This must refer to Mlle A. Couvreur's series. Seconded from the Lycée Racine in Paris, she was chosen as head of the new extracurricular women's section by “Egyptian nationalist men . . . [who] bypassed their own female compatriot [N. Mūsā]” (Badran, Feminists, 54). Syrian (including Hāshim) and Egyptian women would give lectures there. Couvreur's lectures appeared as La Femme aux différentes époques de l'histoire: Conférences faites aux dames égyptiennes (Cairo: Université égyptienne et Librairie Diemer; Le Puy: Peyriller, Rouchon & Gamon, 1910).

122. “‘‘Alam al-mar‘‘a: Za‘‘īma hindiyya tanzimu balīī;gh al-shi‘‘r bi-al-lugha al-injiliziyya,” AR 1:70 (June 2, 1926): 6.

123. “Mukātabāt: Būlāq, li-mukātibinā,” al-Mu’ءayyad 1:12 (Dec. 18, 1889): 3.

124. This was in Fayyum; on December 27 the paper reported that the police chief had “expelled” the woman, but soon she returned to the same bar. 2:316 (Dec. 27, 1890): 2.

125. ‘‘Afīī;fa Dimitrīī; Salīī;b, “al-Mar‘‘a wa-al-ta‘‘līī;m: li-madhā tata‘‘allimu al-mar‘‘a” (2), AJ 2:9 (Sept. 30, 1899): 334–38; quotation on 337. She calls for girls' schools “like those for boys” and girls' compulsory education “so they will be raised with strong and sound principles.” What pleasure will it be for you, she asks “the young man,” to spend the bloom of youth among notebooks and inkwells only to return home to find “the sovereign state of disorder, filth, and chaos ruling your residence?” To anticipate our next theme, she equates an absence of clean clothes with lack of “true manners.” See a speech by Farīī;da Mūsā ‘‘Ufaysh, reprinted in AJ 3:3 (Mar. 31, 1900): 101–6.

126. Labīī;ba Hāshim, “al-Mutāla‘‘a,” AJ 2:11 (Nov. 30, 1899): 423, 427–28.

127. “Ihdā al-sayyidāt al-fādilāt,” “al-‘‘Ilm wa-al-mar‘‘a,” AJ 2:4 (Apr. 30, 1899): 143. What is needed, the article specifies, are “knowledge and religion” together, for religion gives tarbiya and husn al-sīra. Here, the opposition of ‘‘ilm and tarbiya (as moral training) is clear. The essay distinguishes prerevolutionary French women, “with their learning, paragons of probity, obedience, and virtue,” from those produced by the Revolution, once “the recent governments' men abolished the science of religion from the schools” (144–45).

128. “Madām dīī; Sayfīī;nay,” JL 7:2 (June 1, 1914): 41–46.

129. “SN: Aghnas Klārk,” FS 28:2 (Nov. 1933): 1–2.

130. “Mādām Rūlān,” JL 6:9 (Mar. 1914): 236.

131. “Jūn Kūrtin,” F 1:1 (Nov. 20, 1892): 15–16. Koerten appears in Adams's Cyclopaedia, 439.

132. “SN: al-Sayyida Imīī;līī; Sursuq,” FS 1:9 (June 15, 1907): 257–58.

133. “Bāb shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘: al-Bulbul al-suwaydīī;,” MM 14:9/10 (Nov./Dec. 1933): 207.

134. al-Mu’ءayyad 4:1119 (Oct. 30, 1893): 3.

135. Ahmad Mahfūz Hasan, “Ahādīī;th al-Hisān: al-Fatāt al-nābigha al-Anisa Māry al-jamīī;la,” H 4:10 (Jan. 9, 1929): 20–21, 26. “Bāb al-funūn al-jamīī;la: Kawkab masārih al-tamthīī;l wa-al-ghinā‘‘ al-yawm: Flawrans Fawwāz alastirāliyyat al-umm wa-al-lubnāniyyat al-ab,” SR 4:9 (July 15, 1923): 567. “Al-Anisa Umm Kulthūm: Ulā mughanniyyāt al-sharq al-yawm,” SR 8:8 (July 1927): 531–34.

136. “Sārā Birnār: Nābighat al-tamthīī;l wa-nādirat al-‘‘asr,” SR 4:7 (May 1923): 440. Florence Fawwāz follows two issues later. Nafs anuūf may suggest something closer to haughtiness than the more neutral “self-pride,” but I suspect it was chosen to rhyme with ruūh ‘‘atuūf. A life of Bernhardt celebrates her public life and fame but then tries to subsume it in the private by emphasizing the centrality of her role as mother to her own self-image and happiness, implying this as the source of her consummate acting. This obituary demonstrates a hierarchy of values that does not privilege the acting profession: “The world from one end to the other sorrows because Sarah was not just that famous actress but was greater than an actress: Sarah was a 'great woman.'” “Sārah Birnār,” MM 4:4 (Apr. 1, 1923): 218–21; quotation on 218. Both texts stress that she was also a writer, perhaps thereby giving her greater respectability.

137. “SN: Anna Baflūfa 1,” FS 25:6 (Mar. 1931): 281–85. This text offers a double first-person tribute to the recently deceased dancer with autobiographical overtones, mostly a memoir by opera administrator Catherine Eggleston Roberts that the translator “al-Zahra,” hearing of Pavlova's death, recalled reading several years before. “Egypt still remembers this lady who elevated the art of dance, and still talks of her visits in 1923 and 1928” (285).

138. “SN: ‘‘Arīī;b,” FS 7:10 (July 1913): 369; “SN: Burqā,” FS 22:2 (Nov. 1, 1927): 50; “SN: Badhal al-mughanniyya,” FS 22:1 (Oct. 1, 1927): 5–6.

139. If observed in male behavior, this is explained as the result of poor upbringing—by the mother, of course. See Booth, “al-Mar’ءa fī al-Islām.”

140. The call for educated women's right to work outside the home was linked to polemics on the danger of leisure. In the 1870s al-Tahtāwīī; gestured to this issue, as he called for girls' education.

141. Ilyās Lutfallāh, “Maqāla fīī; tarbiyat al-banāt,” FS 1:6 (Mar. 15, 1907): 168.

142. “SN: Māriyā Mitshil al-falakiyya,” MM 8:1 (Jan. 15, 1927): 6–7. A near-identical biography appeared in al-Muqtataf in 1898, unacknowledged in MM. Unfortunately, space prohibits speculation on the difference it might make to read the same text in 1898 or 1927, in a general or women's magazine. This is not the only repeated biography; Agnesi is another.

143. “SN: Fitūriyā imbirātūrat Alamānyā,” FS 15:10 (July 15, 1921): 361–62.

144. Responding to AJ's call for contributions, Labīī;ba Hāshim said she felt encouraged to write and wanted to spend time on anything that would benefit females; but there were obstacles. Most females who work are unmarried, she said; married women have no time. But they can do literary or charity projects. Labīī;ba Hāshim, “Wājibāt al-zawja,” AJ 1:1 (Jan. 31, 1898): 24–27.

145. Magazines recognized that Egyptian peasant women did not have the “problem” of leisure, and indeed held them up as romanticized exemplars of women who “do it all.” A mordant notice in AJ says mortality statistics in England showing more women than men living beyond the age of one hundred were explained by claiming that women “do not bear the hard work of life.” This cannot apply everywhere, said AJ, “especially not in our Egyptian lands . . . where women practically work harder than men, plowing the earth, carrying water, bearing heavy loads on her head, sharing all of men's fatigue and effort except in [the arena of] knowledge, for there she shares nothing. Perhaps our government was aware of this energetic work on the part of the Egyptian woman, and realized that if it were to educate her in schools her hard work would lessen and there would no longer be in its country anyone to sell eggs or dates, to carry meat on her head from the butcher's to the markets.” “Hadith al-Anīs, AJ 2:1 (Jan. 31, 1899): 39–40. SB contrasts the peasant woman's “productive work” with that of the city woman “who spends most of her life a prisoner in the house.” “Al-Mar‘‘a al-misriyya bi-al-ams wa-alyawm,” JL 1:3 (Sept. 1908): 65–69; quotations on 65–66.

146. “‘‘Awā‘‘idunā al-dhamīī;ma 8,” SB 2:1 (Nov. 1904): 6–9, including “Libs al-dikūlīī;t,” 8–9. “‘‘Awā‘‘idunā al-dhamīī;ma 9,” SB 2:2 (Dec. 1904): 37–39. In the nationalist press, questions of national interest often took rhetorical form in harām versus halāl, expressing a moral system defined through Islamic precepts. The collapsing of national/ist endeavor and religious fervor emerges in the slogan: hubb al-watan min al-īmān [Love of the nation is from/part of belief]. See al-Mu’ءayyad 4:1068 (Aug. 29, 1893): 2.

147. “Wājibāt al-zawja,” FS 1:1 (Oct. 15, 1906): 12, 13.

148. Significantly, a focus on apparel is to include discussion of proper embellishment and movements. “Al-Mar‘‘a wa-al-malābis,” FS 1:1 (Oct. 15, 1906): 17–21. This concern does not disappear over time; see, for example, “Tadbīī;r al-manzil: Malābis al-sayyidāt,” FS 17:6 (Mar. 15, 1923): 231–32. Elucidating a class outlook typical for these magazines is an essay on “al-Akhlāq wa-alādāb.” Good morals show in comportment, and thus “civilized peoples” have put great care into training their children so that “even when still little they will embarrass neither their parents nor their nation.” The counterexample given is of an educated individual (male) who does not know table manners—how to use a knife and fork among them—indicative of a certain classed, urban modernity that this magazine assumes as the norm. FS 13:1 (Oct. 15, 1918): 4–7. Yet an article by ‘‘Afīī;fa Karam, reprinted from her New York periodical al-Hudā, provides an antidote to the flood of critique that excoriates women for appearance and behavior and seeks to shape comportment. Men criticize women for wearing corsets, says Karam, but would they be happy if women did not? Men despise and scorn zīna and tabarruj, but they never cease their extravagant praise of beauty. Men want “cultured” women, but when they see female learning bearing fruit, they target these women with the thorns of their satire and oppression. “Adāb wa-‘‘ādāt,” FS 1:6 (Mar. 15, 1907): 178–80 (subtitled “What Angers Women in Men”).

149. J., “al-Mar‘‘a al-misriyya bi-al-ams wa-al-yawm,” JL 1:3 (Sept. 1908): 66–67.

150. Farīī;da Ahmad, “al-Usra: al-iqtisād,” FM 1:1 (Apr. 1921): 8–13. “Awwal sayyida fīī; al-barlamān,” FM 1:6 (Sept. 1921): 195.

151. “Bayna al-‘‘asr al-mādīī; wa-al-hādir: mudhakkirāt ‘‘ajūz,” MM 4:1 (Jan. 1923): 10. The ‘‘ajuz reminds us that older women are offered the national task of regulating “appropriate” behavior, including appearance. See Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 37.

MM consistently critiques through comparison in its “al-Nahda alnisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam” (“The Women's Awakening around the World”) column, for instance, calling Javanese women “the epitome of simplicity in most matters,” including marriage practices. Java's people are “a people who take every new thing that is useful and are not partisans of the old except to the extent of maintaining their national identity . . . a people ready to advance to the ranks of civilized nations.” “Al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam: Shay‘‘ ‘‘an al-mar‘‘a fīī; jazīī;rat Jāwā,” MM 4:1 (Jan. 1923): 32–33. In China, Muslim and non-Muslim women alike are “unveiled like European women . . . but do not at all resemble [European women] in terms of frequenting the streets and going repeatedly to places of amusement.” “Al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam: Fī al-Sīī;n,” MM 4:4 (Apr. 1923): 189–92. And, “The Indian woman does not spend the kind of time on adornment and fashion that other women do. She is, rather, the most stellar exemplar of moderation.” “Al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam,” MM 6:6 (June 15, 1925): 285–88; quotation on 286.

152. “Al-Mar‘‘a wa-al-malābis,” FS 1:1 (Oct. 15, 1906): 19, 20. “Jazā‘‘ alihsān,” FS 1:1 (Oct. 15, 1906): 25–32.

153. “Nisā‘‘ al-sharq wa-al-iqtisād,” FS 1:2 (Nov. 15, 1906): 33–37; quotation on 34.

154. “SN: Bāhithat al-Bādiya,” FS 13:3 (Dec. 15, 1918): 82, 82, 83.

155. Asbāsiyā zawjat Biriklīī;s,” FS 7:5 (Feb. 15, 1913): 162.

156. “SN: Zinūbiyā (malikat Tadmūr),” FS 9:1 (Oct. 1914): 2–4, 3.

157. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 23; see also 45–46.

158. “Madām Jīī;b,” AJ 1:5 (May 31, 1898): 130–31.

159. “SN: Suwar min risālat al-mar‘‘a: Sadīī;qat al-masājīī;n: Ilīī;zābīī;t Firāy,” MM 15:3 (Mar. 15, 1934): 118–21.

160. Badran, Feminists, 23.

161. Dalāl Safadīī;, “al-Anisa Nasra al-Barīī;dīī;,” SR 8:1 (Nov. 30, 1926): 60.

162. “Min Mutāla‘‘ātīī;: al-Duktūra Duriyya: Ma‘‘a al-mar‘‘a fīī; kull makān,” MM 16:8 (Oct. 1, 1935): 313–14.

163. Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “SN: Hannā Kasbānīī; Kūrānīī;,” FS 2:10 (July 15, 1908): 364. Ironically, Kūrānīī; insisted that women lacked the capability to work outside the home, e.g., in an essay in the Beirut newspaper Lubnān to which Fawwāz responded energetically in al-Nīl (the response appearsin Badran and Cooke, Opening the Gates, 221–26). On this 1890s debate, see al-Nimnim, al-Rā‘‘ida al-majhuūla, 77–94. Equally ironic given Kūrānīī;'s history of public speech making for fees in the United States was her insistence that for women to claim equality of employment opportunity with men was a sort of “Europeanization” (tafarnuj) tantamount to the imitation of clothing and lifestyle that Arab intellectuals were criticizing.

164. Badran, Feminists, 165.

165. Tucker claims nonelite women might lose custody of children because they worked outside the home (Women, 58–60). On attitudes toward women's professional work, see Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, chap. 6. The AJ article is Mahmūd Ibrāhīī;m, “Mustaqbal al-nisā‘‘ fīī; Misr,” AJ 3:9 (Sept. 30, 1900): 345–49. He celebrates the “emergence of [women in Egypt] from decadence and ignorance” due to the founding of schools and parents' interest in them. He gestures to the nationalist worry about Egypt's reputation and the role of women's status therein, when he calls this “an indication of the interest of Egypt's populace in educating women, not as foreigners say of them, that they are enemies of girls' education and the advancement of woman” (345). He is concerned about graduates' futures and criticizes the Education Ministry for not instituting postelementary study. He notes that regulations about civil service employment make no mention of gender; but, he asks, does this right really extend to females? (346). He dismisses the argument from customary cultural practice for excluding women as “weak,” especially “if we consider ourselves following the path of civilization and contemporary progress” (347). He hypothesizes that the governent is “afraid” to institute higher education for girls “lest they demand their rights and their equivalence to men; then it would be obliged to keep abreast of them on these demands” (347). He takes as evidence the energetic work of women “especially in America.” Ibrāhīī;m was associated with the Tanta civil court.

166. Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 57.

167. “SN: Malāk al-rahma, al-sayyida dhāt al-misbāh,” MM 15:1/2 (Jan./Feb. 1934): 70–72; Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “SN: Māry ‘‘Ajamīī;,” MM 7:6 (June 20, 1926): 324–26; “al-Anisa Na‘‘īī;ma al-Ayyūbīī;,” MM 15:9/10 (Nov. 1934): 353–54; “Min Mutāla‘‘ātīī;: al-Duktūra Duriyya: Ma‘‘a al-mar‘‘a fīī; kull makān,” MM 16:8 (Oct. 1, 1935): 313–14.

168. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Shams al-tārīī;kh: Jān Dārk 'lā pūsill' fīī; al=qarn al-khāmis ‘‘ashara,” NN 2:4 (Nov. 1922): 272–73.

169. See chapter 5. Demands of editors—and their representation in biography—were not so different from those the EFU made on the state: higher minimum marriage ages, more stringent laws around divorce and polygyny, more schools for girls. The EFU campaigned to restrict polygyny, qualify divorce rights, and end the practice of bayt al-tā‘‘a (women's forced return to husbands' homes); biographies tended to present the positive side, to represent these practices as future absences. The EFU was probably more forthright on political demands, both women's access to the vote and the nation's demand for more autonomy, but magazines (notably MM) did follow these demands—a reminder of the polyvalent content of women's magazines.

170. “SN: Iylā Raydar,” FS 32:10 (July 1938): 569–71.

171. “Nawābigh al-nisā‘‘: Fatāt tajma‘‘u tharwa kabīī;ra bi-tafkīī;rihā,” NN 8:2 (Feb. 1930): 54–56; quotation on 56.

172. “Al-Sabr wa-al-‘‘amal—aw—jihād Miss Sirz,” AF 1:3 (Mar. 1926): 49–53; quotations on 50, 53.

173. Al-Fatāt is somewhat vague on this, yet its biographies are not. AJ notes that women fall into prostitution because they do not have an education that would permit them to earn a living “in an honorable fashion.” “Ta‘‘līī;m al-banāt,”AJ 2:2 (Feb. 28, 1899): 57–63; 61. There is certainly a class element here: the government should fund schools for poor women “not to make them scholars but so they will not be evil, for we see female degeneracy on the increase in our country” (62). Work outside the home is presented in this period as both necessary and dangerous. SB notes that changes in the social system that weaken family structure oblige many women, especially young unmarried ones, to earn a living, but then calls “giving complete freedom to women in the West” one cause (not effect) of this change; the Western woman “has come to conduct herself in society like a man, obeying her whims; her conduct has led her not to want legal marriage.” Thus, she has “been obliged to leave her domestic kingdom” and “exceed the sphere of home management”—not, says the magazine, a development to laud. “As‘‘ila sahhiyya wa-adabiyya: Taqallud al-mar‘‘a ‘‘amal al-rajul,” SB 2:12 (Sept. 1906): 335–36. On work and the “problem” of middle-class leisure, see, e.g., “al-‘‘Amal wa-al-sayyidāt,” SB 2:3 (Jan. 1905): 65–68, addressed “to the ladies who consistently experience discomfort, boredom, and depression, for there is no cure like work.”

In later magazines, the fact that women work outside the home is assumed although not presented as unproblematic. An announcement in The Ladies' Revue articulates the assumption but also specifies appropriate arenas of fe-male employment when it says it will reserve a place for short advertisements at a low fee for women seeking work “as nannies and teachers of academic knowledge, languages, piano, sewing, embroidery, and so forth.” S 3:1 (Nov. 1921): 64. But its “Mamlakat al-mar‘‘a” offers anecdotes of working women such as England's “first female engineer” (S 4:6 [Apr. 15, 1923]: 345–47). FS, a long-running magazine that spanned both periods, offers an index of changing concerns, although it remained more focused on comportment than on social conditions compared with FMF and MM. In 1908 it offered brief examples of professional and businesswomen in the United States: a farmer, rancher, criminologist, nurse, and astronomer. “Aqwāl ‘‘an al-mar‘‘a,” FS 2:4 (Jan. 15, 1908): 137–38. An essay later that year praised “the American woman” for advancing into “all areas of work” but noted that “she remains devoted to caring for the men of the future”; the rest of the article focused on women's work in early childhood education. “Al-Mar‘‘a fīī; Amīī;rikā,” FS 3:3 (Dec. 1908): 83–87. Another asserted that women's political and professional work in America had flourished due to the elite's belief in education and “civil equality” for women. Najīī;b Mādīī;, “al-Mar‘‘a,” FS 3:8 (May 1909): 286–89. Hāshim reproduced much of Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif's famous speech at al-Jarīda headquarters, including a passage on how spheres of work once women's had now become exclusively male due to technological inventions; increases in leisure meant women needed other pursuits. Labīī;ba Hāshim, “Awwal khatīī;ba misriyya,” FS 3:9 (June 1909): 323–35. Following World War I, FS and other magazines reported approvingly on European and American women filling “male” occupational roles, saying this had provided a basis for demanding political rights as well as continued employment. “Al-Hayāh al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam,” FS 13:2 (Nov. 15, 1918): 56–58; Tawfīī;q al-Habīī;b, “al-Mar‘‘a wa-al-harb,” FS 13:4 (Jan. 1919): 139–41; “al-Nisā‘‘ wa-al-‘‘amal,” FS 26:3 (Dec. 1931): 128–29. Precedents were adduced, too; if Bāz took his examples of working women from contemporary Europe and North America (“al-Hayāt al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam: al-Mar‘‘a wa-al-‘‘ilm,” FS 18:6 [Mar. 1924]: 10–17), others took them from ancient Egypt; typically, a line is drawn from pharaonic-age women who worked “alongside their husbands” in the fields and in commerce, to contemporary peasants (“al-Mar‘‘a al-misriyya,” FS 17:5 [Feb.15, 1923]: 161–65; quotation on 164–65. See also “al-Mar‘‘a fīī; Misr ams wa-al-yawm,” JL 1:2 [Aug. 1908]: 37–40; and Girgis Fīī;lūthānūs ‘‘Awad, “al-Qism al-tārīī;khīī;: al-Mar‘‘a al-misriyya qadīī;man wa-hadīī;than [‘‘awd ‘‘alā bad‘‘],” MM 4:3 [March 1923]: 143–46).

Somewhat impatiently, in 1933 FS comments: “There is still a party of the sons of this age who believe that women devoting themselves to occupations outside management of their homes destroy their femininity.” Naming prohibition of women without males to support them from work as scandalous, the article notes that a woman with few domestic duties is subject to inactivity, “the laboratory of the devil.” There will come a time when this group will recognize the worth of work, says the article, reprising, even so, the “equal but different” argument as it seemingly argues against it. “Thalāthata shilīī;nāt thaman al-mar‘‘a,” FS 28:7 (Apr. 1933): 353–57; quotation on 356–57.

174. When de Maintenon became royal consort, one of her first actions, says the text, was to found a girls' school, second only to “reforming court.” “SN: Madām dīī; Māntinūn,” FS 15:9 (June 15, 1921): 321–27; quotation on 322. She is praised for maintaining virtue in an age of “bad morals.”

175. “Khasārat rabbāt al-aqlām,” al-Muqtataf 16:11 (Aug. 1892): 779–80. Described first as one in a company of educated women (“mistresses of the pen”), Morgan then punctures gendered boundaries, as someone who “ought to be counted with men of the pen and businessmen.” The lack of parallelism (no “women of business” surround Morgan, although her sister is called a successful professional photographer) might intimate the greater acceptability (as well as familiarity) of writing, or generally of intellectual pursuits, as a female career.

176. “SN: Madām dīī; Māntinūn,” FS 15:9 (June 15, 1921): 321. “SN: Māriyā Murgān,” FS 24:9 (June 1930): 445.

177. “SN: Kristīī;n dīī; Bīī;zān,” FS 6:4 (Jan. 15, 1912), 121. “SN: al-Malika Thiyūdūrā (zawjat al-malik Yūstaniyānis),” FS 5:5 (Feb. 15, 1911): 162.

178. “Jān Awstīī;n,” JL 11:3 (Sept. 1918): 34.

179. “Tārīī;kh hayāt Grīī;tā Gārbū (1),” FS 28:7 (Apr. 7, 1934): 373. The rest of this three-part biography narrates Garbo's determined struggle to achieve an acting career. “Tārīī;kh hayāt Grīī;tā Gārbū (2),” FS 28:8 (May 1934): 424–26; “Tārīī;kh hayāt Grīī;tā Gārbū (3),” FS 28:9 (June 1934): 466–72. A biography of French actress Rachel (1821–58) emphasizes her determination in the face of poverty, quoting Alfred Musset on a dinner at her home where she did the cooking and described her poverty-stricken childhood as her mother and sis-ters gestured angrily to her to stop. “She responded that poverty held no shame; rather, she was proud to have come from such a situation and to have gotten to her present state through her own hard work. . . . I left awed by her hard work and persistence [ijtihād wa-thabāt].” The finale reiterates Musset. “In her work she showed firmness and determination despite poverty that [even] a man's zeal would be unable to overcome.” “SN: Rāhīī;l al-mumaththila al-shahīī;ra,” FS 7:6 (Mar. 15, 1913): 201–5; quotations on 204, 205. A later biography says: “She saved a great deal of money, and would pay all she earned to her father; he had forced her to tour all the cities of France out of greed.” “SN: Rāhīī;l (Rāshil),” FS 25:8 (May 1, 1931): 413–16; quotation on 415.

180. “Najāh kātiba amrīī;kiyya: Mithālun nuqaddimuh ilā fatayātinā al-muta‘‘allamāt!” MM 4:10 (Dec. 15, 1923): 541–42; quotation on 541.

181. “Al-Malikāt al-‘‘ālimāt,” AJ 2:6 (June 30, 1899): 210–13; quotations on 210, 211. The article describes an unnamed Russian princess who, “if she were kept from her salary . . . or had ambitions to gain more, could be very rich from her pen running across the paper if she did not want her foot to run across the stage” (211). Also featured: Queen Margherita of Italy as writer; the queen of Portugal as physician; the queen mother of Germany as musician and horticulturist (212). The article's conclusion intrigues: “As for the European kings who are capable of making a living from their knowledge, we do not think they are as numerous or as knowledgeable as the queens, perhaps because their occupation with politics deterred them from other work” (213).

182. “Al-Mar‘‘a al-inkilīī;ziyya,” AJ 2:6 (June 30, 1899): 213–15; quotations on 213, 215.

183. Hasīī;b al-Hakīī;m, “SN: Min al-kūkh ilā al-barlamān: Mādām Bawb,” MM 8:3 (Mar. 15, 1927): 118.

184. Mary Jo Maynes, “Gender and Narrative Form in French and German Working-Class Autobiographies,” in Personal Narratives Group, Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 110.

185. “SN: Suwar min risālat al-mar‘‘a: Sadīī;qat al-masājīī;n: Ilīī;zābīī;t Firāy,” MM 15:3 (Mar. 15, 1934): 118–21.

186. “SN: Malāk al-rahma: al-Sayyida dhāt al-misbāh,” MM 15:1/2 (Jan./Feb. 1934): 70–72.

187. “Ilisābat Firāy, II,” JL 8:10 (Apr. 1, 1916): 335–39. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Shams al-tārīī;kh: Jān Dārk 'lā pūsill' fīī; al-qarn al-khāmis ‘‘ashara,” NN 2:4 (Nov. 1922): 271–73; idem., “Shams al-tārīī;kh: Bint al-Azwar,” NN 2:11 (June 1, 1923): 298–99. “al-Khansa‘‘,” MM 6:1 (Jan. 15, 1925): 49–52. It is noteworthy that Yūnus's series, written as history lessons for schoolgirls, particularly emphasizes these qualities.

188. “SN: ‘‘Ufayrā‘‘ bint ‘‘Abbād,” MM 9:2 (Feb. 1928): 85. See also “Sahīī;fat al-adab: Hind bint ‘‘Utba,” H 1:20 (Feb. 6, 1926): 3; “SN: Umm al-Banīī;n,” FS 24:3 (Dec. 1929): 113–15; Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Shams al-tārīī;kh: Zay-nab fīī; al-qarn al-thālith al-mīī;lādīī;,” NN 2:6 (Jan. 1923): 161–64.

189. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Shams al-tārīī;kh: Bint al-Azwar,” NN 2:11 (June 1, 1923): 298–99.

190. Baron, Women's Awakening, 148. “SN: al-Nisā‘‘ al-‘‘āmilāt: Madām Kūrīī;,” MM 6:8 (Oct. 15, 1925): 447.

191. Penned by a French woman living in Tanta, spouse of an Egyptian physician, this explicitly addresses “the Egyptian woman who lives in Cairo or Alexandria, whether a mother or a wife” yet also disclaims an intent to call for women to work outside the home: “We do not ask our chaste, secluded females to follow in the footsteps of Miss Anna Chanoiun (?), working to become lawyers, for that would be hard . . . but we demand that they work on their thinking and vision.” [Jihān Dīī;firīī;], “al-Mar‘‘a muhāmiyyatan,” AJ 2:8 (Aug. 31, 1899): 317–21.

192. “Al-Anisa Jisy Akirmān,” JL 9:4 (Oct. 1916): 121. “SN: Jullanār Hānim aw Mme Olga de Lébédef,” FS 1:7 (Apr. 15, 1907): 193–201. “al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam: Maryam Hārry, kātiba mustashriqa,” MM 7:4 (Apr. 20, 1926): 126–27. All are praised for taking an interest in women of societies other than their own and writing about these women's lives. Women praised for writing about and working to improve conditions of women's lives in their own societies include Zaynab Fawwāz, Hannā Kūrānīī;, Fatma Aliye, Virginie Bāsīī;līī;, Nasra Barīī;dīī;, Fātima Haydar Fādil, Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif, and Maria Mitchell.

193. Hasīī;b al-Hakīī;m, “SN: Min al-kūkh ilā al-barlamān: Mādām Bawb,” MM 8:3 (Mar. 15, 1927): 119–20. This biography is followed by an article on “Nā‘‘ibāt hizb al-‘‘ummāl” that speaks of three female Labor Party delegates—noting that all are unmarried.

194. On philanthropy as upper-class women's activism, see Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, “The Revolutionary Gentlewomen in Egypt,” in Women in the Muslim World, ed. Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 261–76. On it as one progenitor of the EFU, see Badran, Feminists, chap. 2.

195. Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik, MM 4:2 (Feb. 1923): 87–90. The eldest daughter, she said, wanted a strong education so she could become editor of the maga-zine.

196. Badran, Feminists, 50.

197. “Al-Bārūna Burdit Kūts,” F 1:1 (Nov. 20, 1892): 8–10. Jins, translated here as “race,” can also denote “gender”; it simply means “kind.” In this context “race” is likely the dominant sense.

198. “SN: Madām Taqlā Bāshā,” FS 19:1 (Oct. 15, 1924): 4.

199. “SN: Tiyūdūrā Haddād,” FS 28:8 (May 1934): 394.

200. Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 198–205.

201. DM, 366. “SN: Fātima bt. Jamāl al-Dīī;n Sulaymān,” FS 25:1 (Oct. 1930): 2–3; quotation on 3.

202. “SN: Klaymans Rūyir,” FS 15:7 (Apr. 15, 1921): 241.

203. “SN: Madām Rūyay, ashhar kātiba faransiyya,” FS 26:4 (Jan. 1932): 170. See also “SN: Klaymans Ruyah,” FS 32:4 (Jan. 1937): 193–95.

204. “Bāb shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘: al-Duktūra Karīī;stīī;n Bunayfayh, mandūbat nisā‘‘ al-Nūrwayj fīī; ‘‘Usbat al-umam,” MM 2:2 (Feb. 1921): 78, 77. Bonnefait's mother receives credit for producing her but for moral, not intellectual, training: “To her mother goes the greatest credit in instilling virtues in her and forming her according to sound principles of behavior.”

205. Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 160; Sālim, al-Mar’ءa, 26–29. Women were angry that the 1924 speech at the opening of Parliament made no mention of women's participation in 1919.

206. Sālim, citing the liberal newspaper al-Sufuūr (May 1919): “The most implacable partisans of old [ways] began marching in the demonstrations alongside a wife or daughter” (al-Mar’ءa, 28).

207. Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik had headed a Coptic girls' school in Sohag before founding her magazine. Eva Habīī;b al-Misrīī;'s speech at ‘‘Abd al-Malik's memorial service celebrated her as a foremother for the new generation and placed her in the nationalist narrative as an activist spurred by the nationalist movement as it gathered momentum in 1918. “Kalimat ra’ءīsat al-tahrīī;r fīī; haflat ta‘‘bīī;n al-marhūma Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik,” al-Misriyya 3:69 (Dec. 15, 1939).

208. Sālim, al-Mar’ءa, 25–50, esp. 42–44; Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 168–72, 232–33; Badran, Feminists, chap. 11.

209. Sālim, al-Mar’ءa, 34–37; Badran, Feminists, 80–88. The Sa‘‘dist Women's Committee under Sharīī;fa Riyād and Esther Fahmīī; Wīī;sā, formed after Sha‘‘rāwīī;'s differences with Sa‘‘d Zaghlūl led to her departure from the Wafdist Women's Central Committee, was active in protesting curtailments of civil rights, while Safiyya Zaghlūl maintained a public political presence that continued after her husband's death in 1927 (see chapter 5).

210. “Al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam,” MM 4:6 (June 1923): 297–308. On the conference see Badran, Feminists, 108–10. MM reported the conference closely.

211. E.g., see “Barlamān nisā’ءī,” MM 4:6 (June 1923): 311, on news that the National Women's Party (USA) was to set up a shadow congress: “We welcome this and wait with bated breath, for women need this sort of practical experience.” Ironically, this follows a commentary on the IAW conference that privileges women's role in the family. A. F., “Irfa‘‘ī al-‘‘alam,” MM 4:6 (June 1923): 309–11. Two years later MM reports on French, German, and Indian women's activism for political rights. “Al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam,” MM 6:4 (Apr. 1925): 195–96.

212. “Fī sabīī;l inhād al-mar‘‘a: lā istiqlāl wa-la khudūء!” MM 4:4 (Apr. 1923): 169–72. “Fī sabīī;l inhād al-mar‘‘a: Madhā yanqimūna minnā?” MM 4:5 (May 1923): 225–27; quotation on 227. A speech by Martin Howell, American consul, to the graduating class of the American College for Girls urged them to follow their inclinations in choosing career paths: “The doors are open,” and in the United States, some women had won elections. Yet he followed this immediately with a different message: “The undeniable truth is that woman's sun shines best in the home and school. . . . If we look at the history of famous women who entered politics and achieved distinction in social leadership, we do not find that their influence can be rightly said to match that of women who dedicated themselves fully to preparing the souls of children.” The home was woman's “mighty kingdom, whose influence surpasses that of kings. . . . Let us take from the history of famous women the likes of Isabella and Catherine de Medicis, Christiana, Marie Antoinette, Josephine, Queen Elizabeth; let us compare their influence with that of the mothers of Moses and John, with Mary mother of the Messiah and Mary Washington, mother of America's liberator.” “Bāb al-ijtimā‘‘: Shams al-mar‘‘a tashriqu fīī; dārihā wa-madrasatihā,” MM 4:6 (June 1923): 312–14.

213. Badran has long made this point with regard to the early Egyptian feminists. In MM see also Jān Kānūdū, “al-Nisā‘‘ wa-al-siyāsa fīī; Misr,” MM 7:2 (Feb. 15, 1926): 72–73. The next month an essay comments that women have always been politicians because that was the only way they could acquire anything within the private sphere. If politics had been a part of men's lives, it had been the sum total of women's. Thus, it was not surprising that Lady Frances Balfour was asking that a fair share of government positions be allotted to women. Yet the historical examples adduced offer an ambivalent view at best of female politicians, perhaps in line with the rather tart observations at the start. “Al-Niswa al-siyāsiyyāt,” MM 7:3 (Mar. 15, 1926): 135.

214. Badran, Feminists, 13.

215. “‘‘Alam al-mar‘‘a: Za‘‘īī;ma hindiyya tanzimu balīī;gh al-shi‘‘r bi-al-lugha al-injilīī;ziyya,” AR 70 (June 2, 1926): 6.

216. Muhibb al-Dīī;n al-Khatīī;b, “SN: al-Sayyida Khalīī;da Adīī;b,” FS 17:1 (Oct. 15, 1922): 3–10; quotation on 3. Later the author calls her educational work “positive”; Edip focused on practical reform “rather than wasting her time and that of her male and female readers by creating a to-do around Turkish women's electoral participation” (4). He attributes Edip's “devotion to true knowledge” to “the influence of her late husband,” professor of mathematics and astronomer (3–4).

217. “SN: al-Misiz Margharīī;t Wintiringhām: al-Mar‘‘a al-thāniya fīī; majlis al-‘‘umūm al-barīī;tānīī;,” MM 2:9 (Nov. 1921): 359–62; quotation on 362. This biography had been preceded in 2:7 and 2:8 by profiles of two other outspoken public political figures: ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr and Halide Edip.

218. “Idāh wa-iltimās wa-istismāh,” F 1:1 (Nov. 20, 1892): 1–6; “Jalālat Fiktūriyā, malikat Injiltirā al-mu‘‘azzama,” F 1:1 (Nov. 20, 1892): 6–7. See Baron, Women's Awakening, 168–69; I find more ambiguity over the question of political rights in even the early magazines than does Baron, as I hope this section suggests.

219. “Ta‘‘līī;m al-banāt,” AJ 2:2 (Feb. 28, 1899): 57–58. This article said that if women could not be elected representatives, they should have a voice with those representatives whom their husbands and sons had elected, so it asked the government to set aside money for schools. It scolded “men of the government” through direct address: you are to blame for every poor woman who is bad; this should claim attention before irrigation, public health, and the like.

220. See Baron, Women's Awakening, 18, and the articles she lists (199 n. 19), plus the first mention of the Alliance and conference in AJ, “Al-Mar‘‘a wa-al-salām,” AJ 2:8 (Aug. 31, 1899): 303–6, which makes the following rather strong assertion: “[Woman] will attain her hopes soon, when she obtains all her rights and from a position of strength obliges man to divide everything evenly with her; thus she will destroy the edifice of his tyranny in running everyone's affairs.”

221. See Baron, Women's Awakening, 19–20.

222. “Jadda karīī;ma awwal man talabat bi-huqūq al-mar‘‘a,” AJ 1:7 (July 1898): 242–45; quotation on 245. Typically, given the exigencies of exemplary biography, coupled with the (unarticulated) class allegiance of AJ, the text is silent on how class shapes demands for public political rights. Yet “[Brent] is represented as an early feminist because of her demand for two votes in the assembly, one for her freehold, another for her position as executor” (Uglow, Continuum Dictionary, 87).

223. “Al-Mar‘‘a fīī; Misr: Ams wa-al-yawm,” JL 1:2 (Aug. 1908): 37–40; quotation on 39.

224. [Untitled], JL 1:4 (Oct. 1908): 114–16.

225. Al-Uqsuriyya, “'Amā āna an yathnīī; al-jumūh lithām,'” JL 6:5 (Nov. 1, 1913): 129–34. This was one pen name of the Coptic writer Olivia ‘‘Abd al-Shahīī;d; another was “al-Zahra.” She quotes Tennyson to back up her rejection of a “Western” model.

226. “Sayyidātunā al-misriyyāt,” JL 11:8 (Feb. 1919): 113–14. But a group of readers asks whether public emergence was “appropriate to the honor of Egyptian females.” Sayyidāt Misr, “Shumūs al-hayāt: Safha min a‘‘māl sayyidāt al-yawm,” JL 12:4 (Jan. 1920): 127–35; quotation on 129.

227. “SN: Habūs ibnat al-Amīī;r Bashīī;r al-Shihābīī;,” FS 4:3 (Dec. 1909): 81–82.

228. “Wafāt Misiz Bānkhurst a‘‘zam za‘‘īma niswiyya ‘‘arafathā Injiltirā: Safha min tārīī;kh jihād al-mar‘‘a al-injiliziyya,” MM 10:1/2 (Jan./Feb. 1929): 52–53. This commendatory description of the feminists' willingness to submerge their demands in the war effort might signal both a nationalist loyalty and a conservative or hesitant attitude toward feminist activism. The magazine deploys this biography to call for “moderation” in demanding rights for women, intriguing in light of nearly a decade of organized, named feminist activism in Egypt. Had there been no world war, the text argues, perhaps there would have been civil war in England over women's suffrage.

229. “Madām Rūlān,” MM 6:3 (Mar. 15, 1925): 158.

230. Ibid.

231. “Malikāt Misr: al-Malika al-ūlā Nīī;tūqarīī;s,” MM 7:8 (Oct. 20, 1926): 413. This is the Nitocris mentioned by Herodotus, who may or may not have existed, not the Assyrian queen Naqi‘‘a/Nitocris.

232. Ibid., 413–15; “SN: Kātirīnā al-ūlā imbirātūrat Rusiyā,” FS 3:2 (Nov. 1908): 41–43; “SN: Samīrāmīs malikat Ashūr,” FS 4:4 (Jan. 1910): 121–22; “Bilqīs malikat al-Yaman,” MM 10:10 (Dec. 15, 1929): 413–14; “SN: Ahmas Nifirtāri,” FS 8:7 (Apr. 1, 1914): 245; “Al-Qism al-tārīkhī: al-Malikāt fī al-tārīkh: Malikāt Misr: al-Malika al-thāniyya Hātāsū,” MM 7:9–10 (Nov.-Dec. 1926): 466–69, 474–76; “Malikāt Misr: al-Malika Hātshibsū wa-tusammā aydan Ramakā,” MM 8:4 (Apr. 15, 1927): 207–8; Durriyya Muhammad ‘‘Alī Bek, “Min shahīrāt al-nisā‘‘: Ulgha imra‘‘at Ayghradūr,” NN 5:57 (Sept. 1927): 307; “SN: Sitt al-Mulk bt. al-‘‘Azīz billāhi al-Fātimī,” FS 21:4 (Jan. 1, 1926): 145; “SN: Sitt al-Mulk” FS 23:8 (May 1929): 293–94; “SN: Sitt al-Mulk bt. al-‘‘Azīz billāhi al-Fātimī,” JL 12:7 (Apr. 1920): 217–18; “SN: Sitt al-Mulk,” FS 30:1 (Oct. 1, 1935): 4; “SN: Kātirīnā al-thāniya,” FS 6:1 (Oct. 15, 1911): 2–5; Mufīda ‘‘Abduh, “Malikāt al-tārīkh: Kātirīnā al-thāniya,” MM 16:3 (Mar. 1, 1935): 94–95; “SN: Kātirīnā al-thāniya imbirātūrat Alamāniyā [sic],” NN 10:5/86 (May 1, 1932): 159–60; “SN: Kātirīnā al-thāniya imbirātūrat Alamāniyā [sic],” FS 32:8 (May 1938): 449–52; Rizqallāh Minqāriyūs al-Sadafī, “SN: Zinūbiyā (Zaynab) malikat Tadmur,” MM 2:10 (Dec. 1921): 391–94; “SN: Zinūbiyā (malikat Tadmūr),” FS 9:1 (Oct. 1914): 2–4; “SN: Sabīha malikat Andalus” FS 10 (May 1916): 281–85; Yūnus's lives of Zenobia and Catherine II.

233. “SN: Nūr Jahān,” FS 11:7 (Apr. 15, 1917): 281–82. The khutba (oration) refers to mentioning the ruler's name in the Friday mosque sermon, a sign of formal recognition.

234. “SN: al-Malika Thiyūdūrā (zawjat al-malik Yūstaniyānis),” FS 5:5 (Feb. 15, 1911): 161–63. This presumably refers to the 532 C.E. Nika riots.

235. “SN: Umm al-Banīī;n,” FS 24:3 (Dec. 1, 1929): 113–15.

236. See Spellberg, Politics; Mernissi, Forgotten Queens; Peirce, The Imperial Harem.

237. “SN: Shajarat al-Durr,” FS 7:8 (May 1913): 289–90; “Al-Mar‘‘a al-wahīī;da bayna hukkām al-Hind: Sāhibat al-sumuww Bigim awf Bhūpāl,” JL 9:3 (Sept. 1916): 81–84; “SN: Shajarat al-Durr,” MM 4:5 (May 1, 1923): 262–63, attributed to the Turkish-Egyptian princess and writer Qadriyya Husayn.

238. “SN: Shajarat al-Durr,” MM 4:5 (May 1, 1923): 262–63, attributed to Qadriyya Husayn.

239. An obituary for him appears in SR 7:6 (May 1926): 313–18. After “a sound upbringing,” he began a wood manufacture enterprise in Syria, then added carpets. In 1920 he returned “to the East” after three decades abroad; two years later he built a “large palace” in Brooklyn (315).

240. Rūz Haddād, “Sayyida sūriyya tudīī;ru mahallan tijāriyyan ‘‘azīī;man fīī; Niyū Yūrk,” SR 7:7 (June 30, 1926): 377–78. See also “SN: Madām Taqlā Bāshā,” FS 19:1 (Oct. 15, 1924): 3–5, an obituary-biography of the widow of al-Ahrām's founder, who took over her husband's position as head of the major newspaper and press after his death. As in the case of Tadros, the text glosses this act as selfless “service to the nation” (5).

241. Māry ‘‘Ajamīī;, “SN: Māry Liyūn,” FS 28:6 (Mar. 1934): 281–87; quotation on 281.

242. Ibid., 285, 287.

5. Catherine the Great's Embroidery and Maria Mitchell's Stewpot

Discursive Domesticities

Anyone observing [Fatma Aliye] devoting herself heart and soul to learning would think she had neglected the essential household tasks secluded ones must perform. But she did not neglect constant improvement in the occupations mistresses of seclusion must learn; in this she shone among her peers. . . . She undertook her own agenda of composing scholarly works but could not find the time necessary to prepare them for publication, because first and foremost she was occupied with the concerns women naturally acquire, like home management and child rearing.

She was famed for justice, resolve, mildness. . . . Royal duties did not avert her from domestic obligations. Indeed she was much concerned with raising and educating her children. Moreover, she supervised the management of her palace and properties. . . . It is said she was a good cook, especially skilled at making sweets. To fine attributes she joined beauty of face, sweetness of elocution, and elegance of conversation. Thus was she a paragon of womanly perfection.

In sum, this queen's determined efforts resulted in manifest progress that was the envy of other nations. . . . But nothing distracted her from occupying herself with the art of embroidery.

An obituary for Almāza Kayrūz (d. 1928), Lebanese immigrant to South Africa, begins on a conventional note. “I bring you the sad news of the death of an excellent woman, one deemed the best of models for women, a [source of] pride to the daughters of her kind. She was famed for her virtues, praiseworthy qualities, charity, and energetic work.” What sort of “praiseworthy qualities” and “energetic work” made her “the best of models”? Widowed in 1892, a young woman with four children, Kayrūz had tried to maintain the family farm in the Lebanon. “But she saw no alternative to emigration, and left the homeland for Transvaal with her two sons, leaving her two daughters well-protected. . . . She worked in commerce to the extent her experience and finances permitted; it was not long before her intelligence, hard work, and probity rewarded her with success.” This was not the whole story.

Overwhelmingly concerned with raising her sons, she was a severe disciplinarian who kept close watch over their behavior and morals. . . . Thus did her sons grow up to become energetic men adorned with the virtues and praiseworthy qualities of their mother. They built a superb success upon hers. Their upright conduct rewarded them with great success, ample income, happy marriages, and fine children. They acknowledge the credit; their accomplishment redounds to their mother's care.^[1]

A successful businesswoman, Kayrūz was an exemplary subject ultimately as the mother of successful sons who embodied their mother's “virtues and praiseworthy qualities” through a masculine-defined, class-specific, modern pattern of “success” based on bourgeois entrepreneurial energy. For if her work in commerce had been important to assuring their careers, the work of discipline and moral example overshadowed it in the biography's rhetoric. And over the course of the biographical narrative her daughters disappear from view, presumably also to raise exemplary sons.

If the rhetoric of exemplarity I traced in chapter 3 acted as a signpost for destinations it mapped, it did not in itself privilege one life path or definition of “success” over another, or distribute exemplarity evenly across every female endeavor. Throughout this press and period, “Famous Women” exhibit a double move. The particular lives featured, framed in the rhetoric of exemplarity, suggest a desire to legitimize expanded lives for women but simultaneously a will to bound that expansion. This double aspiration, rendered in biography, also acts to reassure those who might be nervous about some women's and girls' changing desires and life patterns. In parallel, a dominant tactical move in biographies of women with waged work or public careers is to assert the primacy of domestic loyalties while making the claim that duty at home need not obviate another career. It is no accident that we witness Catherine the Great at her embroidery, Fatma Aliye raising children, Jane Austen sewing, Queen María Christina boiling sweets, Zaynab Fawwāz and Maria Mitchell washing the cooking pots.

This rhetorical dialectic operates in tandem with discursive constructions of companionate marriage as desirable and then expectable, and of the nuclear family as the ideal unit of national organization—norms and structures already in the process of formation that articulated the emergence of changing work patterns for (some) men, too. Instituting a certain ideal of family relations, these biographies, like conduct literature and emergent fiction, took on the ideological task that Nancy Armstrong has described for fiction and conduct literature in eighteenth-century England: “Authors and readers—men and women both—used the same rules to formulate a new mode of economic thinking, even though they represented that thinking as pertaining only to women. . . . By virtue of its apparent insignificance, a body of writing concerned with devising a special kind of education for women in fact played a crucial role in the rise of the new middle classes in England.”^[2] Armstrong—as well as Judith Newton, Mary Poovey, Mary Ryan, Leonore Davidoff, Catherine Hall, and others—links the rise of conduct books for women in England to the centrality of the “new domestic woman” in cementing ascendant bourgeois power configurations. This “new domestic woman” was to be educated in frugality, to “complement [her husband's] role as an earner and producer with hers as a wise spender and tasteful consumer.” It was this figure of the desirable educated homemaker who “first encroached upon aristocratic culture and seized authority from it.”^[3] If Armstrong perhaps binds this figure too closely to the hegemonizing ascendancy of bourgeois culture without considering alternative kinds of power—or resistance—that might become possible,^[4] still, I find her argument suggestive for a very different historical context, in which the rise of new norms that facilitated a certain kind of socioeconomic hegemony was complicated by the urgency of casting that hegemony in nationalist, anti-imperialist terms of identity. The image of the new middle-class woman figured a certain kind of ascendancy; it was the grounds for an assertion of how that ascendancy could guarantee the “progress” of a nation along individualist liberal norms. Through the figuration of domesticity, biography in Egypt helps us to see just what demands were to be made upon this female figure as the grounds of a particular framing of national/ist strength and pride. It helps us see where notions of “home” intersected with demands of “nation,” and how politically significant the configurations of women, work, and home were. In this chapter I analyze the double move of expansion and constraint that governs the deployment of domesticity in these biographical texts. But does a dichotomous categorization of “expansion” and “constraint” capture what is going on in the text, or what might have been going on among text, audience, and editors? Domesticity helped to shape, name, and signal the semiotics of modernity; but it is just as important not to dichotomize the multiple effects and impacts of “modernity” as it is crucial not to reduce “modernity's” contesting elements and actors to “Western” versus “indigenous” or, even worse, “modern” versus “traditional.” Nor is it possible to define the trajectory of modernity as a linear one of “progress.” If “progress” was defined as linear and outward in some polemics in this press and in some biographies, other biographies probed or hedged that movement. Was women's access to waged work necessarily “positive”? Or “liberating”? Were the professionalization of the domestic sphere and the assertion of women's power through maternalist discourse “empowering”? Or did these simply imprison? To what extent did biography prescribe, and to what extent did it articulate the stresses and achievements already present in magazine readers' lives? One might assume that as time passed and as “Famous Women” came to include more contemporary Arab and/or Muslim women with extradomestic professional careers, the domestic imperative would become more muted. But in the late 1920s and 1930s the “woman-behind-the-man” was more in evidence as biographical subject. This figure reflected (and helped to solidify) the crystallization of a nationalist gender politics; but it also acted as a rearguard action, a gesture to defend women's movement into public life. For some, highlighting women's domestic roles was a negative reaction to social change. The backlash of the 1930s was probably partly a response to women's increasing activity in the professional workplace. Badran notes that feminists themselves “stepped up the discourse on the importance of women's family roles.”^[5]

We must remind ourselves, too, that magazines by their nature do not speak with one voice, even though the context for periodical production in this historical moment was one in which journals were often outlets for particular groups or agendas, or were clearly the products of one or a very few individuals. Even if Alexandra Avierino was the voice behind The Sociable Companion, “her” magazine did not speak with one ideological tongue. Nor, as I have argued, did its interests necessarily converge with those of other women's magazines. By the time it announced its new “Home Management” feature (not until its second year, 1899), its contents exhibited less interest in gender than most of the other “women's magazines.” As in The Selected, it would tend to isolate much of its explicitly woman reader–oriented material within this feature, thereby rhetorically presuming a comprehensive correspondence between “domesticity” and “woman.” But this was in tension with its biographies, which undermined rather than enhanced the programmatic rhetoric of other texts published under the same editor's aegis. As we know, the magazine's life histories featured women scholars and educators who taught not home management but rather the hard sciences, or journalists such as Juliet Adam and “Sévèrine” (Caroline Remy Guebhard). Meanwhile, the prefatory words of “Home Management” declared sternly that “woman's true function given her by nature is motherhood” and warned that the “rare intelligence” and “broad learning” that women had “sometimes” achieved must not “offer woman an occasion [or reason] to neglect her duties toward others.” Defining domestic tasks as wājibāt, the text argued that such “duties” entailed conditions too numerous and vital to cover in one article. So the magazine would now carry a regular feature.^[6] Yet the next issue assured readers that the topic was not limited to “matters inside the home” but encompassed “everything connected with family and social life, in all stages and situations. . . . Indeed, it would be more appropriate to call this feature 'Life or World Management' . . . for the home in truth is the world in miniature.” This privileged women's sphere as comprehensive, yet an ideal of carefully circumscribed domesticity supplied the magazine's justification for female education: “If we insist on educating the woman and improving her conditions this is only in order that she will comprehend the task assigned to her.”^[7] Were readers of Avierino's biographical sketches puzzled as they learned of professors of linguistics, philosophy, history, and literature as well as the sciences? Was it enough that this parade of academic excellence was qualified by the fact that most of Avierino's subjects had careers teaching in women's colleges or gymnasia? Perhaps more important, biographies that “gave proof of woman's glory” and the rhetoric of the “Home Management” column privileged women's impact on society as all-encompassing, even (or especially) when exercised from the home. The journal had invoked the metaphor of the “women's ship of state.” As Judith Newton observes for England, the language of reform and the demarcation of social spheres along gendered lines blurred the very divisions that language was in the business of constructing. To call women “ministers of the interior”—or, in Egypt, to remind readers of women's ship of state—“insinuates as many parallels between women and men, domestic and public, as it does differences, and, as part of an argument for excluding women from formal political power, it also politicizes the domestic sphere.”^[8]

There is no doubt that Avierino and other writers in Egypt were drawing on concepts of domesticity that elites in Europe and North America had elaborated, crystallizing in an “ideal of the 'notable housewife'” and through a discourse of “rationalizing” housework, mutually reinforcing concepts that were at their discursive height by the mid–nineteenth century in North America, and earlier in Europe.^[9] Featured in English and American women's reading material, surely the “notable housewife” found her way into “Famous Women” texts in Egypt through the wide reading of editors and others. As time went on, such tropes were appropriated and rearticulated through translations and locally composed conduct books. Yet premodern Arabic biographies could also supply a usable rhetoric of household management, as long as the reader could ignore that the “household” evoked by such texts was an enormous Abbasid or Ottoman court complex, hardly to be “managed” in the same way as the nuclear-family domicile.

In the United States “the ideology of domesticity arose in the middle class and may well have been one of the principal means by which the middle class assumed a self-conscious identity in the antebellum period.”^[10] It was conceived as an arena of power: “The domestic sphere was not viewed as an ahistorical enclave where people could meet basic needs . . . but rather as a dynamic scene of actions that could affect the outcome of history.”^[11] In Britain “the empowering of the middle classes” through “dissemination of a new female ideal” in fiction and conduct literature has generated strong claims made eloquently by Armstrong:

To consider the rise of the domestic woman as a major event in political history is not, as it may seem, to present a contradiction in terms, but to identify the paradox that shapes modern culture. It is also to trace the history of a specifically modern form of desire that . . . changed the criteria for determining what was most important in a female. In countless educational treatises and works of fiction that were supposedly written for women, this form of desire came into being along with a new kind of woman. And by representing life with such a woman as not only desirable but also available to virtually anyone, this ideal eventually reached beyond the beliefs of region, faction, and religious sect to unify the interests of those groups who were neither extremely powerful nor very poor.^[12]

This unifying ideal helped to fuse a collective identity that nurtured European imperial energies. Because the cult of domesticity “did little or nothing to challenge the idea of sexual asymmetry,” it could also involve “invidious assumptions about women of other classes, regions and ethnic origins.”^[13] Classist, ageist, and racist notions were served by the professionalization of the domestic sphere. In the United States this took the form of an emphasis on “training” immigrants into a “native” AngloSaxon North American norm; in England, it fueled missionary work and secular feminist reformist energies in the colonies, giving “civilizational” justification to the imperial march, as simultaneously it articulated social reform among Britain's “domestic” poor.^[14] The discourses of colonial “civilizing” and domestic “reform” shaped each other. As Karen Hansen remarks,

In the politics of colonial domination, the conceptual construction of domesticity was at the forefront of change, as were those who gave it institutional efficacy. Thus ideas of domesticity constitute a central dimension of this encounter and offer startling insights not only into the development of empire and the colonial experience, but also into the everyday world of the postcolonial era. . . . The ideologies associated with domesticity played a crucial and as yet insufficiently acknowledged role in influencing the cultural ordering of African history.^[15]

In Egypt, if this ideal fueled colonialist energies, its appropriation into the formation of a middle-class female subject position meant it became available as a distinctive marker of social positioning. Furthermore, it was something to be “taught” by those so positioned to other women locally, as a process, a way to organize space, and a moral outlook on the world. It intersected with the notion that benevolence and charity work were appropriate for elite women.

As I have said, the nationalist search for an origin or essence that would signal the difference and authenticity of the nation centered in the 1920s on ancient Egypt; for those worried about national unity, this was less problematic than the Islamic past. Constructing ancient Egyptian womanhood in terms of domesticity, companionate marriage, and learned motherhood offered a localized modernity that exemplifies what Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies as the different authenticity that is yet “amenable to global-European constructions of modernity so that the quintessentially nationalist claim of being 'different but modern' can be validated.”^[16] Women's magazines constructed ancient Egyptian women as exemplary and efficient homemakers; they constructed modern descendants who had not made it into the middle classes as needing “guidance” to fulfill these roles. It was the emergent bourgeoisie, with its consuming modernity, that defined those roles and decided who “lacked” them, even as that bourgeoisie also “needed” the ideal peasant to complete its own formation of a national identity.^[17] Through biography, among other forms of discourse, this “mission” was sanctioned: as we have seen, “Famous Women” were lauded for their efforts at domestic education not only among the girls of the middle class but also among the poor, and not only in Egypt but also in “the West.” An ascending hegemony of the bourgeoisie that Europe had already witnessed on its own terrain could be localized, feminized, and asserted as a nationalist goal and strategy through biographical presentation: educator Mary Lyon and prison reformer Elizabeth Fry become local heroes.

But Claudia Tate has suggested that domesticity as an ideal could be appropriated for the political agendas of subordinate groups, and this has implications for its ambiguous positioning (to late-twentieth-century readers, at least) as part of a rising bourgeois identity among colonized elites. She traces the construction of a domestic ideal in late-nineteenth-century novels by African-American women. Tate's historical contextualization of these novels suggests to her that, far from representing a mode of escapism from the growing and increasingly violent racism of post-Reconstruction America, this fiction inserted itself into contemporary politics by generating a political discourse of civil responsibility. For readers, “bourgeois domesticity, an assimilationist discourse for inspiring racial integration, was a politically liberal objective.”^[18] In Egypt, as the local elite appropriated this concept to strengthen its position against other groups of Egyptians, it could also use it to assert its own modernist vitality vis-à-vis the colonialists. Perhaps domesticity was a derivative discourse, and perhaps local commentators were mimicking their British rulers, as Leila Ahmed has argued.^[19] But it was a discourse that had its own cluster of local meaning and creative possibility for a local elite. Domesticity European-style was not appropriated uncritically, either. Helping local female elites to assert their own place in a discourse of national assertion and civic responsibility, its outlines were permeable and occasionally open to question.

As Baron says of the women's magazines in Egypt before 1919, “They all devoted large sections to instructions on housekeeping. They elevated a domestic ideal and then offered readers training in how to live up to it.”^[20] But some did this more than others, while biography echoed, illustrated, and also probed critically that ideal, or rather its situating in the complicated lives of women. Assuming a gendered division of labor, Zaynab Fawwāz had asked in al-Fatāt whether men's work or women's—“pregnancy, childbirth, child raising, home management, and the like”—was more fatiguing.^[21] Biographies did not wholly uphold this gendered division of labor. Of the seventeen profiles in The Young Woman, only two posed domesticity as central (Rāhīl al-Bustānī, Maria Theodorovna), and in neither was it an exclusive focus. For domesticity as an articulated rhetorical space would become more marked after the turn of the century. But domestic space was not wholly absent from the magazine; the “Famous Women” profiles in its first issue are interrupted by an article on embroidery.^[22] Nawfal's opening article (featuring women famous for eloquence, intelligence, and the ability to impose a public self, but who were also celebrated for self-effacement) introduced themes that would run throughout this press, notably the importance of trained daughters who would become responsible women—“educated by wealth and disciplined by poverty”^[23]—and the notion of moral and intellectual “adornment” as preferable to the physical. Yet one of its first biographies does not fit the gendered labor divide that the opening assumes even as it celebrates notable women's many pursuits.

Women, Biography, and the Domestic in Two Parallel Presses

The one-page obituary-biography of Irish horse trainer and journalist Maria Morgan featured in August 1892 in The Selected, a major cultural monthly, appeared four months later in the first issue of The Young Woman. By then it had also appeared in the first issue (September 1892) of al-Hilāl (The Crescent), which quickly emerged as a rival to The Selected among leading “general-interest” (and male-run) magazines. Two years later, Fawwāz included precisely the same narrative in Scattered Pearls, minus the opening sentence that marked it as an obituary.

The Selected had welcomed The Young Woman as a forum solely for women's pens, echoing founder Hind Nawfal's declaration of the journal's envisioned community. But how did this situate Maria Morgan's life history, imported word for word from the male-scripted Selected?^[24] True, al-Muqtataf's biography-obituaries of Maryam Makāriyūs, Nasra Ghurrayib, and Eliza Everett were attributed to Yāqūt Sarrūf, as was its life of Maria Mitchell. And the journal's life of al-Khansā‘‘ was written by Maryam Makāriyūs. But other biographies of women in that journal (such as Morgan's) were not attributed to female authorship.^[25] That Morgan's life history circulated from general magazines to a journal targeted at females suggests that “Famous Women” attracted more than one audience. But behind an apparent similarity in biographical practice stood a set of differences that highlight the domestic more as a space for debate in the women's press and more as a taken-for-granted category of gendered experience in the “malestream” magazines. Sarrūf's biography-obituaries and Makāriyūs on al-Khansā‘‘ hover somewhere between, marking out a space of difference.

Maria Morgan's life history as first published in The Selected celebrated an individual whose fame rested on her visibility, her public persona, indeed, her showmanship as both equestrian and journalist. Morgan's family life goes unmentioned but for the fact that she and her sister traveled and worked together: they were public people together. This is the portrait of a businesswoman, a skilled professional in more than one sphere, a woman compelled to earn her living who makes such a success out of it that at her death she is building a large home, a woman for whom marriage and children are not part of the picture. Morgan as biographical subject does not simply repress the image of the domestic woman; she overturns it.^[26]

Like Morgan, most women featured in The Selected from 1890 to 1914 were highly visible career women (often unmarried and childless) or ruling monarchs. But it seems less the female life that interests the editors, or even the life history's implications for reimagining gendered divisions of labor, than the life insofar as it intersects with the journal's overarching pedagogical agenda. Offered in the service of discussions that engage the editors, Annie Besant's (1847–1933) biography is a mere prelude to an elaborate, negative explication of Theosophy, as is a life of Helena Blavatsky (1831–91). That of Clémence Royer (1830–1902) prefaces her commentary on and a translation of Darwin.^[27] Yet as a journal devoted to propagating a vision of secularist, European-oriented national development according to teleological notions of scientific progress and the tenets of social Darwinism,^[28]The Selected featured articles on the need to educate women to take conscious part in national regeneration. The periodical's biographies of women suited this aim as they underwrote other preoccupations. Mostly silent on where the domestic fit into these lives, a majority of women's biographies appearing in The Selected's first thirty volumes were positioned at the back of the magazine (just as the women's section had come last in some early Arabic biographical dictionaries). Set off from the magazine's featured articles, they appeared in the regular column “Tadbīr al-manzil”—“Home Management.” Perhaps this was the substance of Zaynab Fawwāz's complaint that no one was writing women's lives, for these women's biographies were not part of the life-and-times sweep of history inscribed in biographies of men, almost invariably lodged in the front of the general magazine among leading articles.^[29] Celebrated for their work outside the home, these women subjects are set firmly within it by the magazine's positioning of their life stories—the silent assumption that women's lives could be collapsed into “Home Management.” What sort of message did it convey, that Maria Morgan's life history was followed by short pieces on the benefits of drinking lemon juice, the virtues of proper hospitality, and new means of banishing insects from the home? Perhaps these companion entries made it possible to eschew mention of Morgan's domestic life: they reminded readers that “Home Management,” after all, was to be both women's priority and an arena for knowledge, professionalism, and control.^[30]

Yāqūt Sarrūf's biographies did probe connections between domestic life, intellectual and professional endeavor, and women's friendships and collective work. She also alluded to a specifically female audience as those who would be reading biographies in the magazine's “Home Management” section when, eulogizing her friend Nasra Ilyās Ghurayyib (1862–89), she said, “The late lamented was one of womankind's finest. I enjoyed her friendship for a time and learned something of the history of her life. Now I summarize it for the honorable female readers of al-Muqtataf to lighten the pain of separation that lies in my soul.” She took to heart Makāriyūs's insistence on the importance of bringing maternal influence to light in female biography, too, as she sounded themes we have encountered, and ones that would run incessantly, if not always explicitly, through female biographies of the next fifty years at least. Nasra, she said,

nursed on the milk of learning in [Tarābulus, al-Shām's] schools, for her mother was one of womankind's best. From her [Nasra] inherited goodness of morals, purity of intentions, and gentleness of nature. She was her [mother's] only one, and so [her mother] dedicated herself to raising her, and through example and trained upbringing [al-qudwa wa-al-tarbiya] was able to instill these fine attributes. For these three forces—inheritance, example, trained upbringing—are the source of morals and their support. Rarely is a branch healthy when the trunk is malignant; rarely can a branch be rotted when the trunk is sound.^[31]

In this life addressed to female readers, Ghurayyib is the exemplary female reader, and her example leads to collective female endeavor identified by the gendered and mutually reinforcing combination of education and domesticity:

She used to love al-Muqtataf, perusing it and studying the subjects it presented. She took pleasure in scientific research, listening to it and participating as one who understood its fine points. She read a great deal and was precise in her critique; if a book pleased her, she advised her female friends to read it, and if she found something ill-advised she would toss [the book] away and berate its writer.
When we came to Cairo—my beloved friend the late Maryam Makāriyūs and I—we took up residence in a home near hers. Our bonds of affection grew strong. Often she talked with us about woman's condition in the [Arab] East.^[32] How we all wished for the spread of girls' education and refinement in a manner that would turn their attention away from acquiring the mere husks of European civilization as sufficient and would entice them to acquire the sublime virtues that elevate a woman's state and prepare her to raise and train the human species.^[33]

At the center of “Home Management” stood reading mothers who could articulate girls' education as an expansion of domestic duty—for both the teachers and the taught.

When Jurjī Zaydān's upstart Crescent challenged The Selected at the end of 1892, the first page featured “The Most Important Events and the Greatest Men.” As history and the heroic life story defined each other, the (male) individual as history maker almost always got the spotlight.^[34] Seeking a more popular readership, The Crescent had found a formula that apparently worked: as its editors dictated changes in content and format over the next two decades, this feature remained. Perhaps it sparked instant interest, for The Selected followed suit, launching its own series in December 1893 with a life of Egyptian educator ‘‘Alī Mubārak (1823–93). But in The Crescent's first issue, Maria Morgan was relegated to page 28.^[35] It is hard not to see the steady stream of “Famous Women” in early women's magazines as a riposte to general-interest magazines' concept of history as a parade of male actors, especially since women's magazine subjects were often as prominently positioned as the men of The Crescent, directly under the masthead. Their headings echoed the rubric of The Crescent, too, yet it seems significant that most women's magazines after The Young Woman chose the feminine plural adjectival form shahīrāt over the masculine (“inclusive”) mashāhīr that had been used in nineteenthcentury biographical dictionaries of women. In positioning and heading, biographies in women's magazines announced a response to “malestream” history.

No longer relegated to the back pages,^[36] no longer encompassed by the “Home Management” section, women's biography in the women's press gave domesticity a sustained centrality—and interrogation—that it did not have in these general-interest magazines.^[37] Morgan's biography, (re)appearing in The Young Woman, was among a minority of biographies that gave domesticity short shrift. Published in the earliest women's journal, it upheld a tentative move toward utilizing women's life histories in the service of new agendas, signaled in Hind Nawfal's prefatory editorial when she invoked historical precedents for women standing proud: Jeanne d'Arc, Hypatia, al-Khansā‘‘, recent French journalists, and ancient Egyptian pharaohs.^[38]

Nawfal's biographies tended to be very condensed. But The Young Woman's longest biography, “Her Majesty the Empress of Russia,” gave domesticity pride of place. In fact, The Young Woman's fullest statement of domesticity is its biography of Maria Theodorovna.^[39] Perhaps we should ask: What else could a women's magazine do? As the Personal Narratives Group has written, “Women's personal narratives are, among other things, stories of how women negotiate their 'exceptional' gender status both in their daily lives and over the course of a lifetime. They assume that one can understand the life only if one takes into account gender roles and gender expectations. Whether she has accepted the norms or defied them, a woman's life can never be written taking gender for granted.”^[40] According to Linda Kerber, Revolution-era American women were hampered by a lack of role models from an immediate and local past that could justify through precedence women's political involvement; but useful role models had to mediate between multiple exigencies, strategies, and desires. “What American women needed—not least for rhetorical purposes—was an example of a woman of substantive intellectual accomplishment who had not rejected the domestic world when she moved into the public one.”^[41] Domesticity had to position extradomesticity. Newton makes the point that writers of domestic manuals in England could situate their own nondomestic pursuits in a “female” sphere by emphasizing the domestic sphere as a professional space for all (middle-class) women.^[42] Responding to the realities of its women readers' (and editors') lives as positioned in the domestic, the women's press in Egypt could highlight the gendered nature of experience by foregrounding the domestic as one domain—but not the domain—of women's lived experience, creating a slippage both productive and confining. The few biographies attributed to female authors in alMuqtataf—women associated with its male founder-editors, women who had to negotiate constantly in their own lives between their reading, writing, and public activities on the one hand and their duties to husbands, households, and offspring on the other—prepare the way when they construct that negotiation as shaping a woman's life. Other biographies elide this element but implicitly acknowledge it by their siting in “Home Management.”

Yet this was also a question of time. In 1890s Egypt, “Home Management” as female work was still an emergent construct, even though, as I have said, it could echo the “household management” of earlier, elite Arab or Muslim women, which encompassed quite a different (although not wholly dissimilar) set of duties than those implied in turn-of-thecentury lives. Fawwāz had mentioned tadbīr al-manzil with reference to very few women, elaborating it most when she defended her Turkish peer Fatma Aliye against anticipated accusations of neglect to female duty (this chapter's epigraph). But her entry on Mary Sophia of Russia vocalizes the praiseworthy domestic competence that would saturate women's magazines:

Daughter to the King of Denmark, sister of the Empress of Austria and the Princess of Wales, . . . wife of the heir to the English throne, she is princess of this era's women, their literary light in this day and age. Simply raised in her father's home, no more extravagantly than those of middling economic status among the world's women, beginning in her youth she expelled all arrogance and haughtiness. Thus is she to this day, when her position is such that about one hundred million necks bow before her. God augmented her glory and perfection with natural talents; she is very gentle, sweet, and mild-tempered. Even more amply provided is she with a good mind, a sharp intellect, an ability to perceive and call things as they are, and good intuitive grasp. God distributed to her gentle frame a strength and courage rare and precious in the strongest of men. One of the noble aspects of her nature is that she loves His Majesty the Emperor her husband greatly; she has a propensity for doing good and urging learning, and she does not like to interfere much in matters of politics. She is intent on action and absolutely detests laziness and the indolent. She loves to read useful books, and sews most of her clothes with her own hands, revealing a certain unpretentiousness in her noble self. She does not like extravagance and waste. With the help of one excellent woman she herself educates her three sons and two daughters. Drawn to lessons and reading, she has reached the point where she speaks several languages. In sum, her noble attributes make her an exemplary lesson and warning for women of the world without exception: one that returns arrogant women to humble mildness, the lethargic to activity and initiative, the extravagant to economy, the uncharitable to the love and performance of good deeds.^[43]

In the women's press, this constellation of competence, constant occupation, thrift, modesty, and restrained pride would become embodied in one “Famous Woman” after another. As an emerging motif in Egypt, female domestic identity was more consistent and textually pivotal in twentieth-century magazines than it had been in Fawwāz's volume or other nineteenth=century works. For example, while Fawwāz described at length Maryam Nahhās's biographical dictionary and obstacles she encountered in writing it, Fatāt al-sharq (unusually, citing its life of Nahhās as “from al-Durr al-manthuūr”) omitted much of Fawwāz's narrative on the dictionary to focus on family: “She was a fine litterateur and an eloquent writer, and her devotion to knowledge and literature was no less than her interest in managing her household and raising her children properly.” This allows the magazine—writing at least a dozen years after Fawwāz—to mention Nahhās's two daughters, Sara and Hind, “who have become famous for knowledge and literature/refinement; to their names they have many writings which show the eminence of their upbringing and the breadth of her [sic] knowledge.” In one sentence, the magazine praises three women, asserts the mother's literary ability, and assures readers of her continuing maternal focus, evident in her daughters' literary prowess rather than in her own biographical dictionary!^[44]

Negotiating Domesticity

If readers of The Gentle Sex in 1910 learned that Jane Austen “is considered to be in the ranks of England's greatest novelists” and that her father showed inordinate concern (for his time and place) in her education, they also learned that “she skillfully practiced many kinds of handwork.”^[45] Lebanese charity patron Admā Sursuq echoed the well-rounded training Austen is praised for upholding: “She was superb in the Arabic and French tongues and perfected many sorts of handwork.”^[46] Needlework takes on a metaphorical function, standing in for a set of gendered and classed expectations, signaling an appropriation of modern middle-class European womanhood that was to center on creating beauty and maintaining thrift in the (urban, middle-class, European-furnished) home.^[47] Needlework could represent local histories of feminine identity and work; but the needlework in biography, as in women's-magazine patterns, was not the needlework of village or Bedouin women crafting their intricately decorated robes.

Repeatedly, and until at least the mid-1930s, the great majority of biographical sketches present home, “handwork,” and family as the central and indivisible concerns of “Famous Women.” Biographers rank a woman's occupations through the discursive organization of a life. The domestic comes first; other pursuits follow. The biography of Maria Agnesi in Woman in Islam begins not with her scholarly work but with her love and loyalty to her family as well as her domestic abilities: “She performed her household duties to perfection,” we learn, before we hear of her renown in the sciences.^[48]This Agnesi is exemplary: approving of her “simplicity,” the writer calls her a “great model.” “Famous Women” lives yoke exemplarity to the primacy of domestic responsibility as a welcomed, often eagerly sought, presence in married women's (and unmarried daughters') lives. Sursuq was exemplary not only because she served and fed the sick “with her own beautiful hands” but also because she epitomized the good wife and mother, so efficient she had time to sew clothes for the poor. From this happy example the author draws a lesson:

We have related her life history, and those of [other] fine eastern women, to immortalize their feats and to stimulate the interest of the many women who spend their lives working to drain their husbands' blood and destroy their children's manners through superstitions, foolishness, gossip, gambling, and other trivialities. . . . Our aim in publishing deeds of worthy women extends to elucidating their excellence in a tangible way that will catch [people's] attention and make an impact on their minds. Could we but say that a single one of the middleclass women who get their clothes from the seamstress and delegate the business of caring for their homes and children to servants (unconcerned by the distress this will cause their husbands, the grief it will instill in their children, and the wear and tear it will visit on their homes), could we but say that she had studied the acts of the subject of this biography, especially her leisuretime pursuits, then would she not feel ashamed, upon comparing them with her own acts? Would she not see in herself a flaw compared to that good woman, wholeheartedly engaged in sewing clothes for the poor? Would she not blame herself for killing valuable time uselessly and sacrificing money for needless aims? Surely she would. . . . God, we ask to be led to what is best and beneficial for daughters of our kind. Then will we reckon that we have taken a step forward and have placed a cornerstone in the foundation of women's progress.^[49]

Domesticity, practiced assiduously and passed on to others, was the “cornerstone” of women's “progress” and therefore, hinted biographies, of the nation's. It shaped and defined women's other contributions. The biography of Maria Mitchell in Young Woman of the East put the domestic squarely first. Mitchell “used to prepare the food, wash the pots and pans, do her sewing and embroidery, and after that dedicate herself to studying scientific and astronomical writings.”^[50] Fawwāz, writing the life of Mitchell, had reversed the order but still inserted the domestic centrally into the subject's educational pursuits: “She had a strong inclination toward the mathematical sciences and she excelled in them even as she undertook the housework, washing the dishes and so forth. But her father did not try to turn her away from her natural inclinations.” In her essays Fawwāz stressed that women must have the option to train for work outside the home. Recall that her own working background diverged utterly from that of early women's magazine editors, able to depend on the income of male family members. Although Fawwāz was quick to note that Mitchell's studies did not keep her from the kitchen, by opposing “housework” and “natural inclinations” she subtly undermined the notion that women's work and domesticity were identical or even essentially linked. But strategically women had to balance the two: “[Mitchell] used to say that woman can learn seven languages as she works with her hands in sewing and embroidery. . . . [As director of the local public library] she would often make socks by hand while the book lay open before her.”^[51] Perhaps because Yāqūt Sarrūf had authored The Selected's biography of Mitchell, this version of her life also narrated her baking and tatting. After all, readers found her in the “Home Management” column.

American writer Helen Hunt Jackson “combined managing home and family, conversing with writers, and holding the reed pen, with magnanimity and scope, as the finest woman does. . . . Her passions were writing, reading, and managing the family.”^[52] Christini Hindiyya (d. 1924), Egyptian Armenian spouse of famous bookseller and printer Amīī;n Effendi Hindiyya and graduate of a convent school, excelled in the French language and “through hard effort” learned Italian and Arabic, “not to mention her own Armenian tongue.” Yet for what is she exemplary? Mother of four children, “she brought them up on the most perfect paradigm of virtue and excellent manners. Thus was she a fine paragon for the mothers in whom nations take pride, just as she was a model of the good wife and wise homemaker, from whom spread the rays of joy and sympathy to benefit her own, to brush away from them the clouds of domestic events and to remove family sorrows and weariness.” It is not surprising to find such superlatives in an obituary (“she based her life on performance of duty and service to humanity, and no wonder hearts begin weeping for her before eyes can even grow full”). But it is instructive to see her linguistic attainments overwhelmed by her “model” performance as wife, mother, and charity patron.^[53] And in any case, facility at language was as much the marker of an accomplished and appropriate upper-middle-class wife as it was a sign of intellectual prowess.

Similarly, if Hannā‘‘ Kūrānīī; was, for Jurjīī; Bāz, “the pride of Syrian womanhood,” perhaps it was not just her literary remains that would “encourage one to take her as a model.” She worked to change stereotypes of “Eastern women” by giving speeches in North America and tried “to improve the situation of the girls of her kind.” But as Bāz describes her as speaker and writer, he has something to add: “Even with her absorption in writing, speaking, and studying, she engaged herself in handwork and was a perfect homemaker, except that she was not happy in her marital life because she was not given children.” A defensive note creeps into characterization of her career: “She spent her years on behalf of that which a young woman does after she has completed her womanly duties.”^[54] If Bāz makes the point that Kūrānīī; tried in North America to earn her own living “through self-reliance, without needing a husband or brother,” he constructs a female public working life within the priority of domestic “duty.”^[55]

The more public the woman, the more forcefully the point needed to be made. The biographies of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Young Woman of the East both describe her activism as the outcome of terrible gender discrimination—“she burned with zeal for the daughters of her kind.” But both also end by recuperating the domestic role: “With all of the great works and beneficial efforts this woman achieved, she did not neglect her household duties or the raising of her two daughters and seven sons. Indeed, she raised them on the firmest kind of disciplined training.” In the earlier biography, foregrounding the domestic does allow the text to articulate another outcome. Stanton “taught her daughters, like her sons, occupations by which they could make a living when in need. Often she spoke and wrote urging that girls be taught honorable trades so they would not become burdens on others. Her words were well-received, and American women's inclinations turned to teaching the arts and working outside the home.” But a decade later, the second life of Stanton ended on an unequivocally domestic note, while not mentioning Stanton's daughters: “She was blessed with seven boys whose upbringing she undertook in the best possible manner. Her public efforts did not distract her from her domestic duties.” The proclamation rings louder for its insertion in an uncompromising narrative trajectory, from portrayal of Stanton's father as openly preferring his son to the historicization of her struggle: “In her time women were treated in a humiliating way and oppressed. They had no rights equivalent to men's. This stirred up sāhibat al-tarjama's soul, filling her breast with rancor toward the tyrannous men of her nation.”^[56]

It is an emphasis that ranges across societies and times. British birth control campaigner Marie Stopes (1880–1958), described as an energetic scholar, speaker, and suffragist, “with her devotion to science and occupation in teaching, writing, and speech making, undertook every aspect of her household duties and sewed her clothes with her own hand. It was reported that she said a woman can do many things besides managing her household if she schedules every occupation.” Thus ends her life history, on a didactic note that has nothing (directly) to do with the source of Stopes's fame.^[57] Similarly, Mariyānā Marrāsh's learning “did not distract her from her domestic duties; she was an exemplar in comportment and household management, a good wife and wise mother.”^[58] If one life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) praises her marriage as the epitome of a companionate relationship (“constant tending, compassion, and mutual sacrifice between that married pair attained their ultimate meaning”), another declares that study and focused reading did not turn her away from domestic duty or charity. This is one biography among many that link exemplary personal and domestic life to the fulfillment of social duty.^[59] When Hind Nawfal published a life of Warda al-Yāzijī, it was not just poetic skill but also her “consummate” child rearing and “utterly simple” way of life that were exemplary.^[60] Adelheid Popp's biography, unusually, states that her husband helped her, reversing the usual lines of authority found in these texts. But the domestic cannot be completely elided: “Her interest in [the issue of] unions for female workers and their protection grew, despite her painstaking attention to her interior space [dākhiliyyatihā, her domestic space], husband, and children.”^[61] And the essay “The History of the Feminist Movement in Britain,” published in Young Woman of the East in 1930, segues into a biography of Emmeline Pankhurst after critically comparing contemporary French feminists' capitulation before the “tenaciousness” of their legislature to the “fatigue and misery” brooked by feminists in Britain.^[62] The biography does privilege public political action. The English feminists believed “they would never have their complete rights if they were not specifically said to have political equality with men, and there was no way they could achieve this while staying within legal means, so they went out into the streets and began smashing window fronts.” But simultaneously it positions Pankhurst resolutely between husband and children. Narrating her education and growing awareness of gender inequality, the text characterizes her marriage as one of “complete harmony and tranquillity; she had five children with whose upbringing she was wonderfully concerned, but even with her interest in her children she would devote herself to working on social issues, for her husband had sown these seeds in her mind.” Marriage assumes centrality both as a time-consuming occupation and as the source of her inspiration to pursue political work. But as the text unrolls again from individual into a hint of collective biography, the text fixes on Pankhurst's leadership in decision making. As the educative homemaker motif appears to justify her public work, the level of detail about suffragists' political actions, including hunger strikes, makes overt editorial comment unnecessary and intimates sympathy between writer and subject(s).^[63]

These exemplary portraits as prescriptive texts stressed the positive. However, an intermittent proscriptive note invaded biographies to further instill the primacy of domesticity. Negative assessments of individual women's assays into public life, rare as they are in biographies (unlike other texts in the same journals), suggested that new pursuits could go only so far. They hinted at ambivalence, even hostility, about redefining gendered divisions of labor, just as the insistence in one biography after another that public life had not hindered domestic energy might. But we must recall, too, that this was a tactic by which magazines could mount a critique of modernity as defined in the changing social practices of “the West” in order to insert a locally moderated modernity instead. If the construction of domesticity as a privileged female sphere owed much to European social thought, one way the construction could be claimed locally was to assert Western women's dangerous deviation from it even while repeatedly protesting their adherence. Putting the domestic first, biographies declared that “Famous Women” of the West (Isabel Burton, Maria Mitchell, Marie de Sévigné, Sarah Bernhardt, Manon Roland) did not allow public careers to impinge upon “womanly” duties to home management, husband, and children. Celebrating initiative in learning and work, biographies countered critiques of Western women's trajectories even as they criticized the destinations to which these paths might lead. Yet when the Ladies' and Girls' Revue declared Lucy Stone its first biographical subject because she was “first to call for restitution of women's rights in America,” and went on to narrate Stone's defiance of her family and her public activism, still it concluded that her work

has had an impact on American women's thinking. We see the results in the way they have “burst forth.” But we think such unrestrained movement is not devoid of serious harm even if it carries great benefits . . . to wit, that society can draw on the energy, seriousness, and strengths of half of humanity. . . . For women have talents men do not possess. The harms enter in the disturbance this causes to the family system, when a woman leaves her house for the crush of business, where she will not find herself honored and respected as she is in the home—not to mention her neglect of children and household.

This is the “tough call”—public activism versus “children and household”—that the magazine asks readers to debate in letters to the editor, in its mission to define models of “virtue and goodness . . . and performance of duty.”^[64] Yet its own intervention proactively shapes those responses as it warns of a loss of “respect.” The question mark that lay between narrating a public life and prescribing a reader's life is evident here within the text; it mirrors an ambiguity in the larger corpus of the individual who wrote most of this journal's biographies. In his journal al-Jāmi‘‘a, founded after he immigrated to Alexandria in 1897, Farah Antūn discussed female education at length, questioning the right to access training that might lead to extradomestic pursuits.^[65] Yet biographies Antūn published in his sister's magazine could have encouraged readers to envision lives outside the domestic ambit.

Other biographies are explicit about fears—or accusations—that might shadow the visibly active woman. The Selected's biography of Isabel Arundel Burton (1831–96) had (unusually) privileged and celebrated her wifely role. In the Egyptian Woman's Magazine some years later, a biography alluded to the anxieties that women's multiple activities and desires might engender before insisting that Burton's example undermined any such worry:

The one who studies the . . . deeds of this vigorous lady will wonder whether she had enough time left to concern herself with her marital duties and household occupations. Indeed, some might imagine that the knowledge and ability given to her, and the valuable aid she has given her husband, would encourage her to rebel against him or to neglect his domestic needs. [They might imagine] that since she occupied herself with many important matters outside her home she could not pay heed to her internal affairs and might feel they were below her. Or [they might think] the frequency with which she mixed with important people, foreigners and locals, engaged her to the exclusion of the little Burtons' needs.^[66] But none of these fancies has any basis in fact. Lady Burton neglected not a single one of woman's duties. She directed the affairs of her household decisively and wisely, and attended to the minutiae of her servants' work. Her care embraced her horses and garden, where she normally spent part of every day, working with her hands.
As for her husband, he was virtually her idol. She spared no effort for his comfort and contentment, just as she was his right hand in most of his work. Whatever time she had left she spent partly in exchanging visits with local women, with whom she enjoyed conversing about family matters, enlightening their minds and broadening their understanding.^[67]

Burton's exemplary domesticity makes her the perfect reformer, “enlightening” women around her. Surely the message would not have been lost on privileged readers in Egypt, surrounded on their ‘‘izbas (agricultural estates) by the equivalent of tenant farmers' families.^[68]

To privilege women's domestic work was to satisfy more than one agenda. It reassured critics that women were not deserting the home. It helped construct the emerging model of the trained housewife as essential to an ideal nuclear family (separated from the extended kin group, harmonious through companionate marriage, bringing up well-trained, obedient, actively patriotic male children), and as crucial to the management of society in its class divisions. Articulating new ways to organize home life, the focus on home management might discreetly defuse conservative opposition to new career paths. For “many women's personal narratives unfold within the framework of an apparent acceptance of social norms and expectations but nevertheless describe strategies and activities that challenge those same norms.”^[69] Perhaps such biographies gave female readers enhanced self-esteem as they evaluated their own domestic skills. Perhaps these texts contributed, with other factors, to giving women a sense of enhanced power even if within a circumscribed sphere. As Glenna Matthews notes, “When a culture enshrines the home and the moral authority of the mother to the extent that American culture did in the mid–nineteenth century, a wife has a rationale for advancing her claims.”^[70] Although it is important to be careful to not claim too much for the power that domestic authority could confer, it is also important to recognize that a greater sense of authority—and the ambiguities this could conjure—might lead to expanded dreams. For the domestic ideal itself, stressing learned competence yet justifying it by reference to women's “natural” faculties, harbored contradictions. Even as traditional epithets buttressed women's inscription in the domestic, the “Famous Women” biographies provide one more warning that the role of the domestic in discourses on women, especially in emerging feminist discourses, is open to question. When domesticity is constructed as a privileged site giving women special powers, foregrounding and then conscripting a moral precedence linked to home management and motherhood, does this simply enhance women's place in the home, or does it begin to displace the notion of home? Does it confine women's authority or construct a basis for new ways of thinking and acting? For Egypt, Baron has argued that the early women's press was at the center of a “new ideology of domesticity [that] gave women greater responsibility in the home without challenging its boundaries.” Badran emphasizes a clear break between “the cult of domesticity” and emerging feminisms.^[71] Neither viewpoint quite incorporates the productive contradictions and ambiguities that domesticity as a learned ideal, and then biography as a signifier of uneven accommodations between lives and discourses, both generated and masked.

Of Ballooning and Feminism

Claiming the domestic as an arena of initiative and strength might have unexpected consequences, hinted a 1914 biography in The Gentle Sex of French balloonist Sophie Blanchard (d. 1819) and a 1917 biography in Young Woman of the East of American feminist Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927). Blanchard's biography opens with a declaration that could have come out of a mid-Victorian English domestic manual (perhaps it did): “Life is beauty. And woman is the beauty in life, a flower that buds in earthly life's garden to adorn the lifetime of man. She is multiple meanings, all pure and marvelous; in her smiles resides a light that dissipates the darkness of trials and strengthens the faltering step.”^[72] This preface echoes the volume's opening editorial, two pages earlier, which called the magazine “a ripening flower that strives and works for what holds the good of the nation.”^[73] The metaphor constructed a link between women's acts and the nation, between domestic and national duty. Yet this “flower” was not all sweetness and light. “Yes, she is sweetest when she knows her duty and understands her life's aim, when she exemplifies boldness and courage. It pleases us to acquaint our women readers with a lady who was an example of determination and courage. We mean Madame Blanchard—this lady who became famous with her husband Blanchard for flying.”^[74] The image of marriage constructed in this biography questions even as it celebrates the ideal of companionate marriage. Blanchard is shown to be supportive to her balloonist and inventor husband's aims even as a widow poverty-stricken by the late Jean-Pierre François Blanchard's (1753–1809) consuming passion for aviation.^[75] “She was determined to follow in the path he had trod and so she began to ascend in the air.”^[76] For it was after his death that she became a famous aviator in her own right, whom crowds flocked to see. Moreover, according to this biography, she earned back the money he had lost with her narrow escapes and daring fireworks displays in midflight. Widowed, Blanchard displaces the male wage earner without upsetting the structure of differential gendered roles. Yet her own rise to fame subverts the ideal of informed domesticity spelled out in the opening lines.

But it is the domestic that provides a parting word of advice. The narrative that ends with Blanchard's dramatic death moves into a finale that recapitulates the opening, framing the didactic message of this life history within the four walls of domesticity.

Then the ropes that bound the balloon chamber where she sat burned and it plummeted, and so Madame Blanchard fell onto a city roof and thence to the ground, and died instantly. Thus ended that life so replete with persistence and occupation. We hope our women will learn an exemplary lesson [umthuūla] of perseverance and endurance from Madame Blanchard in the occupations for which they were created, and the duties assigned them as daughters, mothers, and wives.^[77]

Women are to elicit an example, but only of “perseverance.” They are to turn this example to good use in their domestically defined roles, dictated by God and nature. But the double resonance of umthuūla—as “example” and as “warning”—and the conjunction separating “occupations” and “duties” hint at the potentially multiple meanings of this life for readers. Reading perseverance in Sophie Blanchard's life, might schoolgirls have dreamed an ascent into the air?

The biography of Victoria Woodhull in Young Woman of the East solicits rather than exceeds the domestic sphere; yet here again, silences in the narrative might propose more than one path into the future for young female readers. Praising Woodhull's reformist tenacity as she faced vociferous opposition, and describing her commercial success at banking, the text takes a stance: “Because every reformer has enemies and persecutors who oppose him out of fanatic partiality for the old, the subject of the biography and her sister had many persecutors.” Narrating her activity on behalf of women's “national rights” (huquūq wataniyya) and in the process assuming the legitimacy of women's political rights as citizens, the text does not expound Woodhull's agenda or her belief in personal and sexual freedom. It characterizes her “free principles” as centered on curriculum for girls' schools, “drawing parents' and teachers' attention to the imperative of concerning themselves with preparing the girl to be mistress of a home and raiser of children, and not to let her restrict herself to adornment and showiness as she was doing at that time.” This gives a specific content to the biography's opening statement:

On the occasion of the present women's awakening and the equality of Western women with men that has emerged from it—their [Western women] acquiring their national and social rights in total—we decided to publish a biography of Victoria Woodhull the American. For she was among those who set the cornerstone in the foundation of women's progress and freedom. Her sister, Tennessee Clavin, worked with her; they strived in a most excellent manner to give visibility to women's capability and readiness for equality with men.^[78]

The text privileges a female curriculum that defines women by informed domesticity. But the narrated lives of Woodhull and Clavin as independent, fearless activists (even with the text's biographical ellipses) pose multiple possibilities.

Regal Chores

Ironically, given the fact of colonial power relations, European monarchs were serviceable exemplars in this sphere, too. Being queen did not affect Alexandra of England's (1845–1925) regard for domestic matters, said a biography published following Edward VII's death in 1910 (an article on her displaces an obituary for him). Nor did it keep her from reproducing this system—from “training her daughters in the occupations of the home.”^[79] Like other royals, Alexandra is celebrated for her exemplary domesticity. Perhaps the writer assumed that those who could read (or afford) the magazine were sufficiently au courant with public life in England to situate her domesticity in the context of her public visibility as princess of Wales for thirty-seven years, queen for nine, and—by the time of her obituarybiography in Young Woman of the East—queen mother for another decade and a half. The sketch articulates a theme that resounds through the genre and the women's magazines overall, the mutually constitutive and almost sacred intersection of domesticity and nation: “God give her great mercy and multiply her likes among women working for the good of nations.” What sort of working woman was the deity to multiply? “Queen Alexandra undertook her children's tarbiya in the best manner. She trained her children in house management and handwork, and therefore was the finest of models for mothers and homemakers, especially since she herself did much of the work, sewing clothes and the like for the poor and orphans. She pushed the women of her court to assist her in this, and from them that spirit was propagated to the rest of the women of her [sic] kingdom.” Modesty and simplicity, qualities emphasized throughout the “Famous Women” biographies, are key components. “The grandeur and brilliance of rule did not match the modesty and gentleness of this queen, with her concern for her family. From the height of her glory she supervised the tiniest domestic details, concerning herself especially with her husband's comfort and her children's close supervision.” As in biographies of premodern Arab women, anecdotes tell the tale; and “there were many such events all of which indicate that she was a competent mistress of the household, an excellent wife, and a wise woman, just as she was a great charity patron.”^[80] Note the order.

As biographies of royals construct blueprints for women, they offer the portrait of an ideal family, simultaneously confirming the notion of the family as microcosm of the nation. In a joint 1898 biography of “Emperor William and His Wife,” the Sociable Companion begins with him, a rarity in these biographies (until the 1930s, as we shall see). After describing William's education, training, and public duties, the text notes that “despite [his occupation with matters of state] he is a consummate father, who perfectly fulfills fatherhood's criteria, and [shows] compassion in raising his children and undertaking their education and training in the finest manner.”^[81] Six pages of him, and then the biography moves to her. Famous before her marriage for “beauty, good comportment, and fine morals,” Augusta Victoria (1858–1922) did not disappoint, continuing to exhibit “virtues and praiseworthy qualities” (and bearing seven children).

But it is the royal family's daily schedule that forms the text's truly exemplary figure. Their life is “utterly simple and free of pretension. They all arise early and eat breakfast together at one table. The children go to their lessons, the emperor to meet his ministers, and the empress to manage her home.” If the text adduces her “love of useful books and music” and charity activities, it is the domestic realm that makes her exemplary, and that subsumes the rest. And the authority she accrues is infinitely expandable:

We have published [her life] in our women's magazine solely as a guide to the daughters and ladies [i.e., unmarried and married females] of our East, as a token of this fine empress's excellence. . . . If her desire lay in being the greatest empress on earth she would be, for Germany is a great and able state. If it lay in being a wife and a mother akin to the finest mothers of this age she would be, for there is no one more delicate, compassionate and gentle in handling [people] and managing the upbringing of her seven children whose training she assumed herself. This is why they emerged with the noblest morals imprinted in their souls, the most heightened senses of delicacy and responsibility sketched on their consciences, fit to be models for the children of monarchs, therefore for everyone on earth who wishes to be characterized by the finest traits and noblest morals.
Moreover this empress—despite her glory, her honor, and the hundreds of servants she has—assumes the work of her home by herself, like a wise and virtuous woman. She likes to know the state of everything in her home so she can prove to the world's women that a woman must not let anything divert her from the conditions of her household. For this home, whether that of a mighty emperor or a small peasant, is a metaphor for a kingdom that must be run and cared for; its head [ra’ءīs] must himself be its guardian and caretaker [walī], always aware of how everything is proceeding. This is contrary to what we witness in the rich women among us whom God blessed with wealth but kept from having intelligence and good comportment, such that they left their homes to servants to dispose of as they wished, and the honor of those homes became dependent on the will of the servants. . . . Were you to ask one of the rich women among us about the state of her household in any detail, she would imagine you were insulting her . . . and would assert that this is not her business, but is one of those inferior matters that the lowly servants handle. But the great empress is proud that she runs her household herself and raises her own children, bringing all her powers and efforts to bear. No gambling pulls her away from her children, for she is too dignified to allow a dīnār to touch her little finger except when she is giving it to a poor person in need. She does not take the sort of interest in clothes that would keep her from paying attention to her daughters. She wears things only of the proper simplicity and does not practice deception for the sake of beauty as do most wealthy women; she has sufficed with the beauty God gave her and the jewelry of glory and true honor, and has done without other adornment. . . .
She does not act so because she feels unimportant or inferior . . . but rather so she can be a sound model [qudwa sāliha] for women. Thus, if a woman wants visible corroboration in matters of home, husband, and children, she can look and see the empress of Germany herself doing likewise, and she will know that duty is thus. For a person relies on the great to provide a model, and finds there the most wonderful justification. . . . And how suited are our wealthy women in this poor country to take as a model Her Majesty the Empress Augusta: to be honorable women when that is appropriate, mothers when it is the time to mother, raisers of children when it is the time to nurse [murabbiyyāt hīn al-radā‘‘a], those who train and refine when it is the time to educate, servers in the home when it is the time to hold no confidence in a servant. Then, after that, they [fem.] can provide a model to the poor, who will act as they do . . . instead of seeing them in their finery and therefore considering them an enemy.
So let our women be like the empress and our men like the emperor, and felicity and happiness will be ours.^[82]

The power of this image emerges in its transference to a very different socioeconomic context, for the role model constructed by the empress's biography is not so different than the message suggested in a portrayal of the childhood of Greta Garbo (b. 1905). Her father's income was low, but through “his wise wife's good management” it sufficed to support the family.

Her mother was a fine, energetic woman who took the strongest of interest in cleaning her house, cooking her food, sewing her clothes and those of her children with her own hand. She expended her husband's small income with wisdom and economy so the family would lack none of life's necessities. Thus all were content with that wholesome life in its remoteness from luxury's motives, and love fluttered its wings of harmony and contentment among this family's members. When the food was gone, you would see the mother going to wash the dishes, Greta and her sister at her side helping her by drying and putting them away, then each heading silently for her own bed.^[83]

Biographies that offered such model “typical” days were giving narrative form to magazine articles, conduct literature, and housekeeping manuals such as Malaka Sa‘‘d's Mistress of the Home.^[84] Women were to become the family clocks; biographical subjects personified a new, “modern,” attitude toward and management of time. Women were to internalize a disciplinary schedule based on the demands of the public work of husbands, in an “efficient” gendered division of labor.^[85] Biography suited this didactic demand: it pleasantly offered a material outline for the flood of instructions now visited on female readers.

To position hands-on domesticity as that which centrally structured lives of women rulers and royal spouses from Nefertari to Victoria was to insist that the link between women and domestic duty could not be shattered by either class or the most overt kinds of status and power. That this was a preoccupation of the press in the context of the prevalent discourse on how women's duty to the nation must be channeled is suggested by the divergence between Fawwāz's biography of Queen Victoria and Fatāt al-sharq's, some fifteen years later (1910), which contain some long identical passages. Both emphasize her strong training; the magazine stresses that she saw this as “duty.” The magazine, not Fawwāz, calls her “simple in her dress.” Most telling, while Fawwāz ends by describing Albert's efforts to develop education in general, the magazine ends with a physical and “moral” description of Victoria that privileges the hands-on maternal role and her charity interests. It ends with a statement not found in Scattered Pearls: “And thus was this queen a skilled and knowledgeable person, a fine wife, an excellent mother, and an organized mistress of the home—as she was a great queen.”^[86] Again, note the order. Another biography of Victoria in Young Woman of the East (1922) emphasizes her political and social reforms in the name of empire. Yet the finale privileges another message: “In all stages of her life the queen was a sound and fitting example to the daughters of her kind; for the occupations of queen did not turn her away from the duties of wife and mother; rather, in her domestic life she was a model for girls, wives, and mothers, as she was in her political life a model for kings and queens.”^[87] The monarch's exemplary home life is to inform the nonroyal female's domestic self-definition, as her persona furthers the discursive division between ruler and ruled, private and public. Of course, in England and throughout the West, Victoria played this role.

Yet biographical deployments of the domestic also offered a warning that women's domestic work was not a suitable pretext for constraining their public lives. Victoria's daughter Victoria, empress of Germany (1840–1901), had devoted herself to study from an early age, emphasized her biography. After her marriage, as described in chapter 4, she had read, drawn, etched, studied philosophy and economics, and translated and written books “that explicated Germany's hopes . . . then she researched the relationship between politics and religion, showing with clear proofs the necessity of separating the authority of church and state. She wrote a book on the duties of ministers in a constitutional state which made an impact in her country.” She may have done all this at home, but her activities put her in the public eye: many criticized her involvement in politics and scholarship, as well as her vocal support for constitutionalism, “as if such was not suitable for a princess.” Years later, her son sought her counsel frequently, noted the biography: “If God had lengthened her days into 1914, with her influence she could have gotten her son to change the course of politics, saving the world from the disasters and horrors of the Great War.” But inserted at the center of this text we find: “Her occupation with literature did not distract her from her household duties. Her private correspondence indicates the efforts she made to reduce household expenses below the income she and her husband brought in.”^[88] One profile after another stresses that domestic duty does not deter women from intellectual and professional pursuits. Labība Hāshim's first article for The Sociable Companion seems a prescient outline of “Famous Women” rhetoric, not in Avierino's journal so much as in her own later Young Woman of the East. If married women have no free time, she declared, household duties need not keep them from small projects—literature or charity.^[89] The only difference between this advice and the thrust of magazine biographies was that “Famous Women's” projects tended not to be “small.” Adelheid Popp's activism was not slowed by home and family, her biographer marveled.^[90] Lucy Stone's “duties to her son and family did not keep her from maintaining her agenda of research and speech making.”^[91] Such reminders operated a subtle but important shift from biographies that stressed merely the centrality of domesticity. The confrontational work of the divorced and childless Zaynab Fawwāz did not mean she ignored the dust balls, but the dust balls did not keep her from her literary pursuits, either:

One of this fine woman's unique qualities is her love for the daughters of her kind, her ready defense of them at every turn. Often she has debated the men writers and litterateurs on this, desirous of strengthening Eastern woman's condition and preparing the way for her advance. On top of this, she is attractive of appearance, sweet of speech, enjoyable in her presence, far removed from pretension or arrogance. She avoids affectedness and flattery in conversation and is among the very finest mistresses of the home in knowledge, training, and consummate skill.

Yet her performance of these womanly duties has not kept her from working in the literary arts, as witnessed by her many compositions. . . . Her hard toil is evident, the valuable time this work of hers has taken over and above her household duties. . . . May God increase her likes.^[92]

Rarely is attention to the household presented as an obstacle. ‘‘A’ءisha Taymūr's marriage did not prevent her from acquiring learning, says a biography in The Belles.^[93] But if many, many biographies protest that domestic duty does not hinder a woman's immersion in intellectual interests, a few do hint that domestic responsibilities and a husband's expectations could restrict a subject's ability to engage in intellectual or professional pursuits. Perhaps this was the ultimate message of Hāshim's “small projects.” As Matthews notes, nineteenth-century female activists in the United States who took the domestic sphere as the site of moral authority “did not assume that there was any contradiction between activism and devotion to the home.”^[94] At the same time, the real constraints and tensions of real lives might challenge this assumption: “The new roles for the home and the new female activism generated both a heady sense of possibilities and uneasiness, sometimes coexisting in the same person.”^[95] In another biography of ‘‘A’ءisha Taymūr, “household tasks prevented her from devoting herself to learning and literature.”^[96] And recall Fawwāz on Aliye.

Explicit mention of household work marks biographies of contemporary Arab women—like Fawwāz and Taymūr—and women of the West. Very rarely does it structure biographies of Arab or Muslim women of the past, although their inscription within family is paramount. That many biographies of early Muslim women were reproduced verbatim or nearly so from premodern sources illustrates the novelty of this discourse of domesticity. It had not marked the premodern discursive production of premodern Arab or Muslim elite women's lives (and their own lived experiences of “domesticity” were both widely varied and very different than those of female turn-of-the-century magazine readers). Writers could allude to the “household management” of, for example, Ottoman sultans' mothers and consorts, but they were exploiting a very different context to introduce a concept of domestic duty pertinent to contemporary lives. Associated with the West, it was no less a part of young urban middle-class Arab females' new educations. Its appropriation could be cast in local cultural terms, its lineaments discussed minutely, its importance emphasized through constant discussion. In its tenth issue, inviting contributions, al-Fatāt expressed interest in “academic and literary discussions [or controversies], plus household obligation, marital rights, and various sorts of handwork.”^[97] The magazine articulated a division: polemics and intellectual work versus domestic subjects. But both were within its ambit, as “subjects concerned with strengthening excellence [or virtue] and the women's literary/moral awakening.” The moral as well as practical import of domesticity was signaled in the diction magazines deployed. From al-Fatāt on, domestic occupations are often labeled wājib or mahamma (duty or task/mission), while other occupations might be shughl or ‘‘amal (work), words that defined men's work outside the home.^[98]

Times might change, but at the end of the thirties biographies maintained their approving delineation of domestic skills while continuing to occlude the labor that actually kept middle- and upper-class households in operation.^[99] If in the United States “passivity” was the “mark of the good housewife” by the early twentieth century—for she was supposed to listen to the experts and consume the ready products of American industry^[100]—this was not the case in Egypt. Biographies (like other writings in women's magazines) sketched anxiety about the consumption patterns encouraged by the incursion of European industrial capitalism as they asserted the benefits of the disciplinary role of new patterns of domesticity that this capitalism had also helped to shape. And it depended on which consumption patterns: timesaving gadgets for the home sparked interest, while female moda (fashion), as we have seen, drew revulsion.

Yet an anxiety about defining and privileging the homemaker role may have supplied an impetus for the “woman behind the man” emphasis at a time when the visibility and vocality of women's public ambitions were growing fast. In the late 1930s, the Egyptian Woman's Magazine interlaced its “Wives of the Great” series—discussed later—with two “daughters of the great.” Megan Lloyd-George was “a skilled conversationalist, an entertaining companion, and lady of a household who knew how to run it with precise organization that mistresses of the great families envied.” Furthermore, if Lloyd-George was skilled at piano, embroidery, golf, tennis, and driving automobiles, she was also “an expert in all matters of home management.”^[101] The opening explained that Lloyd-George “united the virtues of yesterday's woman with the merits of the modern young woman” and exclaimed that it was no wonder, with her parentage, that she had been immersed in politics since an early age. But repeated mention of her house-management skills, and then of her surrogate-mother skills as an aunt, preceded and were more elaborate than the brief, carefully qualified mention of her feminist views at the end.^[102]

If female biography could take on a momentum that was frightening, the domestic might proffer a comforting antidote. And not only in Egypt. Joseph Adelman, documenting “feminine achievement through the ages” in his 1926 volume of biography, inserted a detour on “Limitations of Women,” excerpting clergyman John Todd's 1867 speech “An Old Fashioned Talk on the Woman Question.” Todd (a founder of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) emphasized “natural” difference based on women's “bodily organization”: “You cannot invent. You cannot compete with men in a long course of mental labor.” A woman is “queen of the home.” “Our wives perfect all that is good in us.” Adelman admitted the domestic centrally into biography through the authority of another man's words. This was how biographies of public women were to be read.^[103] In Egypt, the act of reassurance became if anything more insistent as time went on. If career women and rulers in both name and fact were exemplary from the start in women's magazines produced in Egypt, so also—and increasingly—were a panoply of stay-at-home moms (often against an anachronistic backdrop of modern domesticity) and women-behind-the-men. I see this both as an effect of the backlash against the increasingly visible political work and career ambitions of middle-class women and as one element shaped by, and shaping, post-1919 nationalist ideology. Feminist goals explicitly articulated by the EFU and by individuals clashed with the outlook of those who sought to shape the postcolonial Egyptian state.^[104] Was it complacency or worry when a writer signing himself “A Free [-Thinking?] Man” in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine expressed confidence that women in a future, independent Egypt would not “strive to be more than solely a mother and mistress of a home”?^[105] In 1922, this was a clear statement of (some, “liberal”) men's expectations. “Let men remember always,” said this free thinker, “that the Egyptian woman strives today in the arena of the nationalist movement not only to be happy but to be, before all else, free.” Some EFU women would not have agreed with his definition of either “happy” or “free” (let us not forget that hurra could still signify gendered respectability). Simultaneously, though, the rhetoric of domesticity could valorize female authority as based in but by no means limited to the home. Learned domesticity (including an efficiency that makes time for nondomestic pursuits after housework is done and children are disciplined) could operate as a sign of civic participation and national/ist contribution.

Domestic duty as a defined space, separated from yet yoked to daily pursuits not included in the domestic, was a sign of modernity for these women engaged in rewriting their own lives. Key in the formation of a modern “public” patriarchy, its explication in print—the endless circulation of domestic details and the debate over how the domestic should define girls' education—gave the domestic a public presence.^[106] It put the family at the center of national life.^[107] Domesticity, as Baron observes, could represent stability in a bewilderingly changing world, as it could argue for the public value of women's work. And it could lend support to calls for female education when coupled with the assertion that schoolgirls would learn domestic skills in the classroom.^[108] Not surprisingly, biographies of teachers and women who founded schools often emphasized their interest in teaching “home management.” Urging education for girls, said the Ladies' and Girls' Revue, was not so that a woman could teach school but rather so she could “train those around her.”^[109] Years later, as we have seen, even the teacher-oriented Young Woman of Young Egypt emphasized motherhood as the primary female occupation and spent pages on detailed advice on providing early childhood education at home.

The intensity of this debate, in the press and in many, many books targeted to women's conduct and published in this period, put women's domestic work in the spotlight as a public act for the nation. That celebrating the domestic meant something more than, or other than, simply keeping women at home is signaled in a profile that is unusual for going as far as it does to sketch a hegemonic domesticity. Adāb al-fatāt's sole extant life of a non-Western woman profiles Safīī;na ‘‘Ubayd, member of one of Egypt's most prominent Coptic families, “famous,” says the biography, for “complete obedience and utter submission” in her father's house.

Her mother was proud to say in front of others, “My daughter Safīī;na has never fatigued or upset me in all the days of my life.” When little she busied herself with all the occupations of the home despite the presence of servants [khaddāmīn wa-jawārī]. Fearing she would tire from so much work, her mother would request that she stop working so hard. But [Safīna] would say, with all affection and respect, . . . “Mama, God created me with two hands so I could work, and gave me health so I could work; and what makes me happy, mama, is to dirty my hands in the kitchen. My honor lies in cleaning and straightening the house, and my pleasure in running the household and overseeing the work of the servants. . . . ” It grieved Sayyida Safīna to see a girl show aversion to entering the kitchen and shy away from grasping the broom and duster. Often she said frankly in front of the girls at her school, “Girls, when I was a girl in the house of my father I worked at everything. I did not shy away from any household task. This is what has been of benefit to me now that I am older. So you must not simply make do with your studies, your clean clothes, and sitting before the piano, or hunching over your reading. Rather, link it all to chopping onions in the kitchen, pounding garlic and pepper and salt, becoming a skilled cook, cleaning house, and not relying on servants—because they are not forever.”

From a perfect daughter, Safīī;na became a perfect wife:

She lived with her husband in all affection and faithfulness, performing her conjugal duties so completely that he came to feel that God's greatest earthly blessing to him was his wife. . . . [When he became ill,] she dedicated her most valuable time to serving him and doing all that would make him comfortable. . . . Never did her husband enter his house to discover that she was out. Indeed, she was akin to the best European women in keeping to his regular mealtimes and hours of rest and sleep. . . . In truth she is considered a sound and fitting exemplar for every wife due to her admirable qualities, a wife's finest adornment.

But that was not all:

She dedicated herself, her body and her property and all that was dear, to her two daughters. . . . She nursed them with strong faith, piety and probity along with the milk; they came out the very copies of her. She never put a cane to either one, nor did they ever hear an inappropriate or painful word. With gentleness and love she captivated them, and they were more compliant than her fingertips. . . . These girls' fine upbringing and suitability delighted many women. Let every mother follow this mother's path in tarbiya.

But even ‘‘Ubayd did not stay at home. She founded a school for girls in 1904, extending her work in tarbiya by instituting a curriculum that included English, French, piano, needlework, and sewing. “From this school graduated wives and mothers whose husbands take pride in their superb tarbiya, praising this noble lady's energy . . . as she serves homes, families, and the nation.” “The deeds of this noble lady are not matched by many men,” ends this profile.^[110]

Homes and Thrift

Behind the emphasis on domesticity's value lay unease about the national economy, expressed as the belief that economizing was both a moral virtue and a practical necessity. Baron observes that this was especially urgent after the 1907 recession. Preaching thrift as well as “the new emphasis placed on productivity and order” through biographical exemplarity echoed other features in these magazines.^[111]The Sociable Companion praised Siberian marriage practices: a newly married woman must prepare food for her husband immediately to demonstrate her suitability as “mistress of the home.” If she could not do so, this brought shame on her family. The magazine went on to lament what it saw as modern practices locally, attacking “our civilized women” for believing that to enter the kitchen was shameful. The article linked this behavior to the fortunes of middle-class entrepreneurship, spelling out in the process clearly gendered domains. In other words, domestic behavior was of direct import to the economic health of the nation—and to the power of the bourgeoisie to lead other classes. Significant are phrases that suggest an assumption that the family property or source of income is exclusively men's, contrary to Islamic practice where women retained their own property. “She remains firm in this belief until her home is ruined and her husband's property vanishes in the hands of the servants, as she consoles herself with the declaration that she is civilized.”^[112]Fatāt al-sharq also criticized the young woman who scorns the work of the home by linking this to a reprehensible lack of thrift. Mothers must realize that they provide examples to their daughters, and must provide fitting ones.^[113] In the essay “The Women of the East and Economy,” Young Woman of the East romanticizes a local past as a time when women “of the East” led simple, frugal lives, needing no more than “one gown at a time” and focusing on “household duties.” If women had no learning “the like of women of this age,” that “ignorance lived in harmony” was preferable to “modern women's manners and knowledge with the care, anxiety, and discord these entail.” Describing the present as a time of “extravagant expenditure,” the essay situates spendthrift ways as specifically feminine behavior and decries “learned” women's scorn for household work:

She who believes there is shame in the work of the house is wrong; nothing witnesses a woman's excellence and good upbringing as well as housework. It is not enough that she work solely for the sake of working or entertaining herself; she must give preference to the sorts of occupations that lighten the burden of expenditure. For example, she should not work at embroidering a pillow while hiring a seamstress to make her son's shirt.^[114]

Lauding Jane Austen's needlework was not just to praise a learned domesticity but also to suggest thrift and good time management as qualities of the properly “learned” woman.

The space the household sphere occupied in the women's press suggests that working out its relationship to extradomestic work was not easy: the editors themselves, Baron notes, “experienced a tension between their literary and domestic lives.”^[115] No wonder it was a subject that engaged compilers of biography. That it was to be a part of the definition of the new woman is signaled in a silence that differentiates the “Famous Women” biographies from both the lives of those editors and the “how-to” articles and books they wrote. As quoted passages have illustrated, the servants these women had (and assumed their audience had), and the ink they spilled discussing servant management in their magazines, appear in the biographies mostly as negative foils to the competent, hands-on, housewifemanager. Or the servant is the “dangerous” other who steals household resources, corrupts children, and (worst of all?) may not always “be there.” While a few biographies—of Asquith, ‘‘Ubayd, Mary Stuart—note excellence of servant management and treatment as among the subject's virtues, more often it is the “Famous Woman” herself who does the housework, even (or especially) when she has domestic help. For this is part of her exemplarity, one that elides her class position as it celebrates her competence. The 1925 biography of Queen Alexandra in Young Woman of the East made no mention of servants: she was an example of hands-on domesticity. Recall, too, that wealthy Admā Sursuq made time to sew for the poor; her biography mentions her wealth but not her servants.^[116] This was one way in which the liberal discourse of women's “emancipation” in Egypt constructed a classed female body that erased signs of economic oppression and possible resistance.^[117] As it insisted on the importance of domesticity, biography assigned roles in “the management of class” to the middle-class female reader “through domestic signifying practices” that, as Elizabeth Langland has argued with regard to nineteenth-century English fiction, took the form of a moral vocabulary of domestic human management.^[118]But these biographies' primary signifying practice with respect to servant management was an erasure that simultaneously served the domestic ideal, the ideology of national unity, and the management needs of a dominant class.

Yet if the ideal of the household manager became more insistent over time, perhaps that was partly because its fissures did, too. Even the rather conservative Egyptian Woman's Magazine probed, ever so gently, the assumptions implicit in this nationalist-sanctioned ideal. An article on “famous women” in the new Soviet Union raised the issue of women's double burden. The Russian government had given women new responsibilities without lightening the old ones. In conversation with Liliana Zinoviev, the (translated American) writer observed that Zinoviev had said—with a smile—that she and her husband both took part in revolutionary struggle, but that she alone was charged with raising the children.^[119]

Marriage: A Working Relationship?

Malak Hifnī Nāsif's “life with [her husband] was a pleasure trip that lasted only a short while, and a fine paragon of felicitous married life.”^[120] Another biography of Nāsif calls her “the paragon of the good (proper) wife [mithāl al-zawja al-sāliha]” and notes that her husband was “her greatest encourager and best helper in continuing to publish her ideas and views.”^[121] Christine de Pizan's husband “did not block his wife from occupying herself with intellectual matters; indeed, he gave her freedom to write and compile.”^[122] And “marriage did not distract [Alexandra Avierino, married at sixteen] from the various categories of knowledge and literature; she devoted herself to reading, and freed herself to write.”^[123]The representation of marriage in these biographies privileges the notion of the companionate union, which in turn helps to construct the image of the nuclear family as the building block of the nation. This ideal had emerged discursively among Arab and Turkish reformers of the nineteenth century, as it had among elites in India struggling with their own modernity under the yoke of colonialist “reform.”^[124] But if companionate marriage, like “rationalized” housework, was part of the baggage of Western-defined modernities, it, too, was appropriated variously by local intellectuals. When, in 1898, The Sociable Companion's attack on polygyny and Muslim men's easy access to divorce constructed monogamous, companionate marriage as an ideal about which there was uncontested consensus—“For there is agreement in the human world that a wife is her husband's partner in life”^[125]—did this imply the hegemony of “Western” notions for the educated elites of colonized nations, or did it question that hegemony by appropriating that ideal as a matter of local (class-specific) consumption?For colonial Bengal, Chakrabarty locates the notion of friendship in marriage as a British intervention, “reflect[ing] the well-known Victorian patriarchal ideals of 'companionate marriage.'” But as “male and female reformers embraced [it] with great zeal” in Egypt as in Bengal,^[126] in Egypt at least they localized its attributes through a discourse not reducible to European ideological production, in the context of an emergent middle-class elite's double task: to define itself against other socioeconomic strata locally and to assert its authority as the group that would lead the nation to independence.

Baron has traced companionate marriage as a “new marital ideal” in turn-of-the-century Egypt.^[127] If The Sociable Companion assumed its ubiquity, the amount of space it commanded in the women's and nationalist press suggests it was an ideal in the process of institutionalization. An anonymous commentator praised The Sociable Companion's first year for highlighting “important topics, especially marriage, one of the most important, which has been ignored by all our periodicals in the East” (a questionable assertion if one reads periodicals of the time).^[128]

As in the case of domestic work, biographies generally upheld the polemics of the magazines but also probed them. Overwhelmingly presented as a positive relationship for all involved,^[129] companionate marriage is portrayed as a working relationship in both senses of the phrase, a union of equals in which gendered tasks may give way to identical and shared pursuits. This poses an intriguing if only partial shift from the dominant discourse of the magazines, which reiterated gendered positioning in marriage as complementary and fairly fixed. Aspasia of Miletos, defined first in Young Woman of the East and The Gentle Sex as “the wife of Pericles” (following Fawwāz), was “devoted to her husband, handling his every whim, and sharing his work and ideas completely.” Yet this portrait of wifely devotion is double-edged, for it is Aspasia, not her husband, who is described as at the center of intellectual activity and who “did things the strongest men could not.”^[130] Asserting repeatedly that women known for their own endeavors and capacities were loyal spouses who embodied an emerging norm of companionate marriage, perhaps biographies raised questions in readers' minds about what exactly that meant.

Biographies verbalized the companionate ideal as they asserted the importance of wifely conduct—and did so more loudly as time passed. Whereas Woman in Islam's biography of Sayyida Nafīī;sa focused on proving Islam's support for female education, and Fawwāz stressed Nafīī;sa's extreme piety, asceticism, and performance of religious duty, eighteen years later (1919), Young Woman of the East called her “the best of excellent wives.”^[131] While Fawwāz described Sha‘‘ānīī;n, jāriya and consort of the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil, as “among the most favored of his women,” Young Woman of the East added “and among those closest to him.”^[132] In their otherwise similar biographies of Shajar al-Durr (d. 1258), Young Woman of the East diverges from Fawwāz in adding to a description of her marriage that “she remained with him in love and tranquillity.”^[133] That there was a need to continually urge this ideal of harmonious marriage was hinted at in the speech by Nāsif that Hāshim attended and reported. Men's and women's complaints about each other were on the increase, she said. “They sense a deficiency in our training, an uneven quality to our education, while we feel their arrogance and sense of superiority.”^[134]

The construction of monogamous companionate marriage as the norm is especially conspicuous when it shapes the life narrative of a premodern woman. Zaynab bt. Hudayr of the Banīī; Tamīī;m “was famous for beauty of the face, eloquence of the tongue, refinement of manners and comportment, excellence of household management, and self-consumption in love for her husband and obedience to him, and working to make him happy.” This ancient exemplar becomes the perfect wife who creates the perfect husband out of her perfection (that is, her obedience and subservience to his needs, but also her trained excellence). Published in 1938, the text puts the stress on “love,” the ideal of the loving and companionate marriage, but where the wife's “occupation” is above all her husband's contentment. The text's modernity emerges in its choice of diction, siting husn idārat manzilihā (the fine management of her domicile) next to more traditional attributes. Fawwāz does not use this diction, nor does she speak of Zaynab “working to make him happy.” She simply calls her “one of the sage women of that time, and one of the most obedient to their husbands.”^[135]

Biographies, like other polemics in the women's press, intimated that happiness in marriage was women's responsibility. However, unlike those other polemics, which stressed women's duties more than men's,^[136] they implied that unhappy marriages were the fault of men. If the spotlight fell on the happy companionate marriage, especially among contemporary subjects,^[137] when biographies narrated negative portrayals of marriage, it was usually the husband's conduct that was at fault; the exemplary abandoned or abused wife struggled with the disappointment, hardship, and increased responsibility that fell disproportionately on her. In a 1921 biography, Marie de Sévigné's husband “did not esteem her or value her knowledge and virtue but abandoned her for the pleasure spots.”^[138] She continued to try to reform him through love.

Did readers read criticisms of specific marriage practices into biographies? It is hard to deny that at least some writers of biography were deliberately supporting feminist polemics on the marriage institution. Witness a brief profile of a Bedouin of ancient Arabia, Kaltham bt. Sa‘‘d of the Quraysh. The Belles ended a tale right out of the medieval compendium al-Aghānī, wherein Kaltham insisted that a man who had spent a month with her marry her, by asserting that “the women of the Arabs [i.e., Bedouin] had complete freedom in choosing a spouse without interference from their parents, so he would not be beholden to them. Do our daughters and parents have the like now?”^[139] The handed-down life story of a woman from the geographic and genealogical heart of Islamic history—the tribe of Quraysh—advances a possible precedent for rejecting parental rights to choose a daughter's spouse.^[140]

Biographies implicitly criticized practices that early feminist commentators targeted. Establishing a legally protected minimum marriage age for girls was one of organized Egyptian feminism's first official demands to the new nationalist government. Although a law to this effect was issued promptly (1923), enforcement remained a problem, and thus the practice continued to draw comment through biography as well as other means.^[141] So did the related practice of forcing girls to wed against their will, especially to marry men much older than themselves.^[142] Juliette Adam's (1836–1936) parents forced her into a marriage with a lawyer twice her age, and “with him she lived a life of abasement and misery.”^[143] Pre-Islamic Arab poet “Dakhtanūs al-Tamīī;miyya” left her first husband “because of his age, even though he was noble and wealthy.”^[144] A biography of Hind bt. ‘‘Utba in Young Woman of the East narrates her fear that her father would choose a spouse with whom she could not live, or “whose morals would differ from hers.” So she insisted successfully that he present the suitor's situation and qualities to her first. If the text was taken straight from premodern anecdotes of this amazing individual, it seems pertinent to note that Fawwāz's earlier biography of Hind had focused more on Hind's public role in early Islamic history and less on the story of her marriage.^[145] In a climate where feminists were insisting on changes in the marriage institution, biographies supported their demands by narrating examples both woeful and hopeful.

Beware, said the Ladies' and Girls' Revue to its young female readers, of marrying the youth who does not earn every penny he spends.^[146] Biographies reiterated this by showing spendthrift husbands as responsible for failed marriages and female hardship, at a time when the profligate habits of the young were a popular subject in the press. In 1914, a biography of Marie de Sévigné in The Gentle Sex showed her working to return her “degenerate” husband to his good sense, exemplifying “the true measure of a woman who is mentally and morally sound.” After his death, she gave her all to her children, thereby becoming “a fine exemplar to be followed.” (For putting her all into tarbiya was “no small thing for a young woman of twenty-three living in a time that was the epitome of moral decadence.”) Yet this biographer also implicitly criticizes the contemporary practice of marrying off young girls to elderly men, voicing indignation that de Sévigné's daughter married a shaykh and became “a sacrifice on the slaughtering table of true honor.”^[147]

Throughout this period the incidence of marriage between Egyptians (men) and Europeans (women) drew fierce comment in all sectors of the press—even as, through biography, specific European women (along with specific Arab women) are described as exemplary marriage mates.^[148] The point, of course, was to turn local girls into partial carbon copies so Egyptian males would not go off in search of foreign wives. It was also a classed discourse. Articles lambaste the “lower-class” European women that elite Egyptian men bring home. To criticize the practice through biography was to buttress a discourse that was instituting the Egyptian middle-class girl, daughter of professionals, as the norm and ideal within patriarchal nationalist confines. The occasional biography became a platform for attacking “mixed marriages.” As it elaborated nationalists' interest in pre-Islamic Egyptian history as serving a semiotics of national unity over either religious division or “Ottomanist” sentiments, Egypt's heritage was summoned in this as in other issues of gender organization. An ancient and elite Egyptian, Muhandisū, daughter of a pharaoh and sometime ruler, becomes the ideal “local” spouse that today's Egyptian men spurn:

Thus were Egyptian women of another age the great hope and wish of the world's great kings. But now—alas! The Egyptian man flaunts marriage with a European no matter how base and low of nationality and class she is, so it will be said that he is attached to a civilized woman. He finds the Egyptian female repugnant and keeps aloof from her so he will not be accused of degraded taste. . . . This attitude is very bad; it does not proffer the sacred esteem in which our countrywomen [wataniyyātinā] ought always to be held.^[149]

Drawing on an entirely different cultural context, a profile of a contemporary French writer praised her for prolific production of works “that refine morals” and focused on her recent novel, “in which she made clear the harms that arise from marriage between foreigners.” Delineating the plot, the writer concludes, “thus ended the tragedy of their marriage, as the narrative of every marriage between foreigners tends to end, with either separation or misery.”^[150] Here biography and conduct-oriented didactic fiction support each other as disciplinary discourses, as they do in biographies of other novelists: Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Braddon, Jamīī;la al-‘‘Alā’ءilīī;.

Cross-class marriages were becoming an issue at a time when economic transformation was producing new wealth and membership in the aristocracy no longer defined elite status. Was this the subtext to a male postal worker's biographical sketch of Isabel MacDonald? The central motif was the decision by England's “first lady after the queen” to marry across class lines, to a building contractor,^[151] values instilled, suggested the text, by her social democratic father.

Polygyny, though, a sensitive matter, was harder to attack, especially for magazines run by non-Muslims. As in the issue of veiling, if biography supplied a tactics of critique, it did so largely by absence. Presenting one monogamous union after another, biography implied monogamous as well as companionate marriage as the modern ideal. The two biographies of Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif quoted at the start of this section elide her co-wife. When polygyny is mentioned—as it is in another biography of Nāsif—it is to criticize the institution. Young Woman of the East did not say that Nūr Jahān was Jahangir's favorite wife; simply, it mentioned no others.^[152] Turkān Khātūn's guardian stipulated that the Sultan Mālikshāh was not to take another wife if he married her.^[153] Such indirect critiques of polygyny, through its erasure, were mirrored in a nostalgic treatment of women's status in ancient Egypt that extolled ancient Egyptian men for choosing monogamy.^[154] A Coptic writer in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine exploited local histories. The ancient Egyptians taught the Greeks about monogamy, even if Herodotus thought it was the other way around. For the “Egyptian government saw a great danger in [multiple wives and concubines], because problems arise when there are co-wives.” Their minds are not at ease, explained the essay, the men pay no attention to their many children, there is a lack of fairness, and the women work against each other and ignore their child-rearing duties.^[155]

The men who praised and urged the ideal of companionate marriage in the pages of women's magazines and the reformist press had their biographical doubles in husbands who are said to proclaim loudly the credit due their wives. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's spouse “spoke loudly of her superiority to him and acknowledged the benefits he had accrued because of her. How often she had saved him from slipping into intolerance, and had pushed him with the gentleness of her words, her good guidance and correct views.” Much of his work and fame were due to her, he said,^[156] as Pericles also said of Aspasia.^[157] These two cases seem ironic, since these women gained at least as much public fame as did their husbands. Other supportive spouses are hinted to have been the more intelligent of the pair. Recall that Suzanne Necker's ambitions were for her husband, who “left his private business to his wife; her management was excellent and she spent a share on charity.” Helping her husband, she “gave him her views, which were accurate, got him to reform the prisons and hospitals, and inspired him to most of the beneficial works that occurred in his time [as French minister of finance].”^[158] Elizabeth Flammarion, married to astronomer Camille Flammarion, accompanied him “in all his travels; she was always with him when he carried out observations.” Moreover, “She gave him her sober comments and apposite opinions, for she is no less knowledgeable than he and might surpass him in patience at measuring stars.”^[159]

The motif of the woman as more active partner in a marriage resounded in the many biographies of women said to have given their spouses political advice on “the greatest affairs of state.” The husband of Sabīī;ha “ruler of Andalus” (c. A.H. 335–398) turned power over to her “because of the astuteness and firmness of judgment he saw in her. So this great woman undertook her task in proper manner, working to reform the situation of the nation [umma].” The biography describes her expanding education, organizing the army, putting down a rebellion, taking part in negotiations.^[160] Another biography of Sabīī;ha situates her first in the happy home of the perfect nuclear family, companionate wife to al-Hākim al-Mustansar billāhi. But such an arrangement is a two-way street. He “considered himself the most fortunate of creatures, for he had a wife who could organize and direct, who was learned and loved.” She began to take a part in rule and

astonished the men of the government. For al-Hākim was one of those men who have proper appreciation and give things their rightful due. He was charmed by his wife's merits in matters of rule and administration, so he publicly made her his partner in rule and gave scope to her influence and impact. . . . She did not reach this level until after her husband had begun to aid and support her, to give her the respect, honor, and esteem she deserved.

Was this an unsubtle message to the would-be perfect husband?^[161]

Ancient Egyptian royal Titi Shiri's (1640–1570 B.C.) advice was needed not by her husband but by her grandfather. On the basis of the status Egyptian women held and the subject's long experience at the center of power, her biographer declares that “there is no doubt she raised her voice high and gave a decisive opinion about what he must do. . . . She insisted that her view be preserved, her voice heard.”^[162] And it was Madame de Maintenon who “got [Louis XIV] to do most of the useful works for which his name has garnered eternal mention.”^[163]

A whole subgenre took this motif further, that of “woman-behind-the-man” biography. If pre-Islamic and early Islamic women were lauded for following their men individually and collectively into battle, urging them on, and if medieval Muslim consorts of sultans and caliphs had advised their sexual partners (and sons, and fathers) vociferously, the modern woman in biography stands by (or behind) her man. The late 1920s ushered in a particularly receptive period for this image. While biographies of the late 1920s and the 1930s highlighted educated networks of local professional women, as described in the previous chapter, this was also the heyday of the “woman-behind-the-man” biography, increasingly so into the second half of the 1930s. For several months in 1938–39 the biography column of The Egyptian Woman's Magazine was occupied by the series “Wives of Great Men” (most by one male author). The series highlighted male political leaders; each title subsumed the subject's identity in her husband's: “The Wife of Chiang Kai-Shek,” “The Wife of Franklin Roosevelt,” “The Wife of Neville Chamberlain,” “The Wife of [French politician] Deladier,” “The Wife of Samuel Hoare.”^[164] These texts gave prominence, in thematic order and amount of column space, to husbands' careers and through them to the immediate prewar public scene, but they insisted that the profiled “wives of” should bear at least half the credit for those careers. The narratives profiled women's public action, carefully circumscribed but articulated as independent. It was not because he was her husband, declared the author, that Lady Maude Hoare supported her spouse's political views, but rather because she held the same political principles; often she argued with her husband's adversaries. On the other hand, these are gendered roles. Maude had always encouraged Samuel, “until he was victorious on life's battlefield.”^[165]

The biography's triumphant approval of this supportive wifely role seems startling when we recall that four years earlier, in 1935, Sir Samuel Hoare had become notorious among politically active Egyptians for announcing, in London, that if Egypt's 1930 constitution was “unpopular,” the 1923 constitution was “unworkable”—a declaration that “infuriated” university students in Cairo and sparked nationalist demonstrations.^[166]

Likewise, the sketch of Eleanor Roosevelt in this series presents Franklin's presidency as a partnership. Mrs. Chamberlain (we never learn her given name in the biography) is portrayed as a dedicated, selfless, and consummate homemaker and is praised, typically, for a lack of ostentation and extravagance: “She works in her home in the same way as does any destitute wife. She prepares his food with her own hand.” But what would a reader have thought, turning to the next page? For “this great woman cannot be content with, or fully occupied by, her work in the home. Rather, today she occupies a high position in the life of English society and participates, with the amplest of shares and the greatest of efforts, in political life. Each week she convenes a women's Council of Ministers, composed of the wives of the Ministers of Government.” The text claims great influence for this council: “Many Government perspectives and political projects are the echo of what the wives say and propose in this meeting of theirs.”^[167] The motif of marital influence is taken furthest in the biography of Deladier, for she had died early in her husband's career. It was her “spirit” or “soul” that had inspired him and maintained its steady influence—not to mention her domesticity: “She furnished a peaceable, salubrious home for him in which he found repose . . . and devoted herself to raising his [sic] children . . . and then she died.” Readers might not have taken comfort in the author's conclusion. This widower “obliges us to believe the words of the one who said: 'The influence of the loyal, beloved woman does not appear as deep and pervasive in her life as it does in her death.'”^[168]

Young Woman of the East, although it praised women's abilities to combine homemaking and professional life, did not focus so explicitly on “the woman behind the man.” A few months before The Egyptian Woman's Magazine inaugurated its “Wives” series, a biography of “Madame Ludendorf” in Young Woman of the East carried an implicit critique of those who would give domesticity pride of place, as it inserted an approving notice of the subject's modesty:

She would have gained great renown [as a literary figure] among the members of her nation . . . had not the German government worked to efface the mention of the working woman in her country, giving preference to the active homemaker. But the spirit of courage and initiative, and the qualities of tolerance and persistence, that she inherited from her father made her follow the way her talents pushed her without demanding praise or fame.
Yet this is not as forthright a critique as one might think, for we soon hear of her marriage: “And what a fine and devoted wife she was, what an organized mistress of the home.”^[169] Although, late in its career, Young Woman of the East demonstrated an interest in women's waged work and public political struggles, it continued to assume domesticity and marriage as the core of female life.^[170]

Woman-behind-the-man biography was not new in the twenties, simply more numerous.^[171] When The Gentle Sex published the profile “General Joffre and His Wife” (1915), the notion of the parallel but distinct spheres of male and female as shaping the social organization of the successful nation-state was clear. The text begins by introducing him as a great man, watching over and protecting his army and thus serving his country in the early days of the Great War. With a linguistic parallelism his wife is introduced as a virtuous woman watching over and protecting him. Together they represent “the living forces” in their “great country.” He is propelled by her love, by “the heart of the good wife”; if French men are proud of their military leader, then French women are fortunate to be proud of his wife (whose given name we never learn). He embodies strength; she, loyalty and duty. The text ends by saluting the subjects as both a coupled and a single model, in a crescendo of fulsome labels that name the spheres of national strength and allude to its continued generation: “Greetings, O noble wedded pair. Greetings to the examples [amthāl] of duty and national[ly oriented] life. Greetings to the representatives of eternal, living France. Greetings, O fitting model [qudwa] for fine families. Greetings, O exemplar [mathal a‘‘lā] of glorious deeds and noble qualities. . . . Future generations salute you.”^[172] (Given the British Protectorate imposed on Egypt months before, perhaps saluting the strength of French society and military prowess had more than one significance.)

The Magazine of the Women's Awakening, sometimes considered “conservative,” as I have said, because it articulated an Islam-oriented perspective, in fact gave little prominence to women-behind-the-men, al-though one of its biographies of Jeanne d'Arc waxed eloquent on women's behind-the-scenes importance. Of course, the same point could be made in other ways. In April 1935, the magazine's cover showed a nuclear family, in a European-style parlor, father reading out loud, mother sewing, elder brother listening attentively (his fez a smaller copy of his father's), and the two youngest children playing on the floor with a toy horse and doll, respectively. Over the side table hangs a large, framed and labeled picture of the Ka‘‘ba in Mecca.

But it is from the second half of the 1920s that these “wife-behind-the-husband” sketches proliferate, particularly in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine.^[173] When “al-Zahra” (the Upper Egyptian Coptic writer and translator Olivia ‘‘Abd al-Shahīī;d) wrote the life of “Mrs. Darwin”—again, we never learn her first name—she began with the subject's marriage. Totally embedded in her husband's life, Mrs. Darwin fulfilled the author's opening declaration: “Surely the history of wives of great men yields a detailed portrait of their husbands' history. Among them there was not a one who exerted herself and her forces to furnish the means of repose to her husband, and to share the responsibilities of his work, as much as Mrs. Darwin.” He could not have done what he had done “if he had married a woman who was not good”—or appropriate or suitable or sound (ghayr sāliha). “But Mrs. Darwin was one of those women who are calm, devoted, and distinguished superbly by zealous concern, sympathy, and self-sacrifice, exerting the self and all that is dear for the sake of the other's comfort.” Al-Zahra makes this point over and over, praising the subject's “detailed program” for her domestic life (and her forbearance in having her home “crowded” with insects). Here is the biography of a companionate marriage. Husband and wife spent their evenings playing backgammon; she had to curb his love of sweets. Appropriate to the theme, there is more here on his personality than hers. And God blessed him with eight children whom “he brought up on virtue and fine morals, teaching them the lessons of personal freedom.” As her role in raising the children is minimized, she becomes his mother, doubly the “woman-behind-the-man” as she shows him “the compassion of the merciful mother to her only son.”^[174] Briefly the author mentions that she reviewed his manuscripts, too.

Even feminist educator Nabawiyya Mūsā (1886–1951), who dedicated her life to teaching and running girls' schools and never married, offered this narrative of intensely companionate marriage based on loyal female domesticity in her magazine's “Famous Women” series. A profile of Marie Curie begins with an autobiographical echo of Mūsā's own struggle: “The young woman suffered many hardships for the sake of [completing her education]. She expended extraordinary effort until finally in 1891 she was able to enroll in the Sorbonne.” But much of the narrative centers on Pierre's courting, and then on Marie's trials as a novice homemaker. Yet as it privileged domesticity, this text highlighted the difficulties of a married woman's life: “Marie's life was harder than her husband's, for in addition to her work in the laboratory she had to undertake all those matters particular to women. Yes, Marie was a cook and server as she was an astounding scholar. When married, she could not neglect material matters as she had done when restricting herself to scientific study.” A whole section on “Marie, home manager” shows how heavy her burden was, as it describes her pride at Pierre's domestically oriented praise. And “not a year passed before she was a skilled cook. Thus was her day divided: eight hours of research and three for the household, which is the basis in the life of every successful wife.” If her life “would be eternally mentioned in history, next to Edison's and Marconi's,” it is not her science that we hear of here.^[175]Yet the text poses a critique of the burdens visited on women by “companionate” marriage.

Asserting that women-behind-the-men ought to be known, in the same breath and consistently biographies extol the virtues of modesty and retirement as well as simplicity and thrift. “The politician might be very famous, and perhaps his wife is the cause behind his fame, but people do not know,” complains The Gentle Sex's biography of Lady Margaret Asquith (1864–1945). The biography focuses only on her wifely role and skill as political hostess, eschewing mention of her support for feminist goals, her writing, or her flamboyance.^[176] When a prominent man's love for his spouse is said to be generated by his respect for her intelligent advice (in the biographies she is also usually “possessed of a good share of beauty”), the image includes a training in modesty, as in a biography-obituary of Queen Margherita of Italy:

Her husband loved her as much as he respected her, because of the fine mind, far-sightedness, loyalty in loving the people and impartial concern for their interest. He came to her in everything, telling her his ideas and secrets, seeking her advice in administering the kingdom's affairs. She met him with useful advice and well-thought-out views . . . losing sleep over the interests of his flock.”

But her husband's esteem for her did not puff her up with the spirit of arrogance. Rather, it made her respect him all the more, and feel ever more ready to respond to his requests.^[177] Passing away the previous month, the biography ends, Margherita “left a legacy of examples worthy to be followed.”^[178] Of course, she also had “the best sort of upbringing.”^[179]

Interrogating the place of domesticity and marriage in women's lives could emphasize the common lot of women, downplaying differences, for example, between women of “East” and “West.” Such qualities as these “women-behind-the-men” are said to possess, for example, occlude the unequal power relationships of imperialism. Safiyya Zaghlūl (1876–1946), spouse of Egypt's nationalist leader, and Lady Roberts, spouse of Britain's late commander in chief in India, are both exemplary. For “history . . . is replete with cases of wives who gave their husbands devoted service . . . not to mention undertaking the affairs of their domestic kingdom.”^[180] The motif of the “woman-behind-the-man” was a perfect way to advance the notion of companionate marriage as socially and nationally productive. And if this motif could articulate a certain measure of female power, it also warned of female responsibility for national success (or the lack of it). Had Lady Roberts “been full of self-love or lacked natural or moral courage, Lord Roberts would not have reached the rank of Commander . . . rather, she would have turned him from his determination, and stood as an obstacle in the path of his advancement. How lucky is humanity in this devoted service and rare dedication.”^[181] Or, how lucky was the British Empire.

But awareness of local agendas permeated biography, too. A profile of Wayzero, empress of Ethiopia, summarized from a book in press on “Wives of the Great,” calls her “a good exemplar in nationalism and sacrifice.” In Ethiopia's war against Italy she did not want to appear on the battlefield as previous empresses had done, for she believed women had spheres (or battlefields: mayādīn) other than that of war. She herself preferred to cook and bind wounds, a role that would have been familiar to premodern Arab “Famous Women.” Praised as devout and modest, the empress is criticized for attachment to tradition, for listening to the priests, for being “against civilization and the awakening [al-nahda].”^[182] The biography thus becomes simultaneously an encomium to separate gendered social roles in which “woman” is associated with “nurture” and “compassion,” a blueprint for female action as both retiring and publicly significant, and an attack on social forces that resist reform. What clearer statement could there be of (a certain) domesticity as synonymous with a desired modernity capable of powerfully resisting European imperialism?

The complexity of both agendas and lives (and a fine twist on the themes of companionate marriage and the woman-behind-the-man) emerges in an article praising Jurjīī; Bāz for his efforts on behalf of female education and raising women's status: this, says The Ladies' Revue, is how Bāz serves his nation. If Bāz's agenda goes forward, there will come a time in which women will produce the kind of men “that women want.” Expressing regret that his magazine (the Beirut-based al-Hasnā’ء) has closed, the author comments:

If one means to further his call has been shut, another is open; and it is more influential and effective. We mean his fine spouse, no less desirous than he of serving the country in the same way: that of elevating the Eastern woman. She has a rare advantage among women, for she is a physician. Her honorable profession provides an ongoing relationship with various women, in whom she instills sound instruction and noble morals. She is their finest exemplar of the refined woman, the best model of the contemporary lady who works to benefit the nation as community.^[183]

For if the “woman-behind-the-man” becomes increasingly popular as the twenties and thirties pass, so does a rewriting of lives that can be interpreted as feminist. Jamīī;la bt. Nāsir al-Dawla al-Hasan b. ‘‘Abdallāh b. Hamdān—“Jamīī;la the Hamdāniyya”—was “famous among the women of the Arabs [Bedouin] for intelligence, wisdom, and generosity. Nature shaped her with the most splendid jewels of Her beauty; she was perfect of appearance and nature.” Growing up in “the cradle of luxury,” she showed early “the imminent signs of quickness and a love of learning. She was a far-sighted thinker who understood the errors of the social structure; the lowness of women's status and the denial of her rights pained her. So she refused to marry, loathing the idea of a man ruling her. She was firm in her resolve to remain a virgin until life's end, despite the many suitors that swarmed around her, desiring marriage.”^[184]

Mothering

“It is astounding,” remarks the Egyptian Woman's Magazine as it profiles “Mothers of Famous Men,” “that the woman who taught George Washington honorable virtues and the principles that made him able to undertake his immortal deed . . . does not get the attention and respect from people that she deserves.” But, the magazine adds immediately, “this neglect, we discovered after investigation, is simply an indication of her desire for modesty and retirement.”^[185]

Mothers-behind-the-sons were ubiquitous in this press. As we have seen, the active and educated mother was a visible protagonist in the discursive politics of women's magazines. The biographical subject enacted these polemics by representing the consummate mother. Two sketches of George Sand published sixteen years apart suggest how the image of the perfect mother grew more explicit, more pointed over time. After her divorce, said Fawwāz in Scattered Pearls (1894), “[Sand] concerned herself with her children's upbringing.” In 1910, Young Woman of the East, apparently copying that biography, added a qualifying phrase: “[Sand] concerned herself with her children's upbringing as is fitting for a wise and rational mother.”^[186]

Like domestic management, motherhood emerges through biography both as a sole occupation that commands respect and demands knowledge and as one privileged duty among several pursuits. Either way, biographies sternly legislate individual agency: the worst mother is a passive one. This mirrored the discourse of the women's and reformist-nationalist presses. As in the West, “motherhood was discussed almost as if it were a fourth branch of government, a device that ensured social control in the gentlest possible way.”^[187] Repeatedly, great claims are made for motherhood: “No great male person comes into this existence,” declares another article on “Mothers of Famous Men” in The Egyptian Woman's Magazine, “without being preceded by a great female person.” The rhetorical progression of this essay fascinates. Beginning with an epigraph in which, it explains, wālid (male parent) refers to both fathers and mothers, by the end of the first paragraph it is solely mothers who are the focus. And the conclusion? “From reading biographies of the famous, we see that fathers often chose positions and occupations for their sons to which the children did not incline; no one extracted them from these dilemmas and set them on the right paths except their mothers.”^[188]

A woman's attention to her children's trained upbringing is paramount, for a proper mother is reflected in her children's tarbiya, declares “the Queen of Spain” (María Christina).^[189] In the world of the “Famous Women” columns, queens are as good at hands-on mothering as they are at housework. Queen Victoria “spent at least an hour a day playing with her children. . . . It is useful in this regard to note that this fine queen who left an excellent impact was a model to women in her children's upbringing.”^[190] And as magazine polemics and the prescriptive book industry complained of Egyptian women who left their children to the servants,^[191] in biography servants never appear rearing children.^[192] Biographies that insisted on the hands-on motherhood of “Famous Women” implied the same message, as did biographies like the Ladies' and Girls' Revue's obituary of teacher Jessie Hogue, who produced “trained mothers.” The evocations of exemplarity both general and pointed, the transformations of polite discourse into didactic exhortation, the use of historical exempla and comparison, intergender and intergeographic contrasts, came together in the service of this term that resounds throughout these biographical texts and indeed throughout the women's press and nationalist and reformist discourse in general throughout this period: tarbiya. The term comes to the fore with the biographical subject as mother. Sound tarbiya as the ultimate mark of the good mother was posed as the antithesis of those social practices that the press lambasted. It was domesticity that brought together qualities of the good/bad woman that we saw in the last chapter. Mariyānā Marrāsh's

three children followed in her footsteps in their intelligence, for [in their mother] they had a good trainer of children [murabbiyya], a tender mother, a paragon in polite behavior and home management. . . . For she is not like the rest of the Europeanized Eastern women who work to drain their husbands' blood through what they spend on whimsical, flimsy European clothes, and in how they dedicate their time to superstitions, foolishness, and idleness, censuring others as they gamble and pursuing other disgraceful acts.^[193]

Child rearing was a national issue in more than one sense. The editor of The Sociable Companion reported a conversation with an unnamed man who criticized “the Eastern, Ottoman woman of the middle and upper classes” for hiring foreign nursemaids and nannies and then sending their children to foreign schools. Both practices separated them not only from their mother tongue but also from the watan itself. But in the name of national unity, it was apparently not enough to hire a local child minder. Mothers were to raise their own children, and hence “refining” or “training” them was the linchpin of national unity.^[194] It is noteworthy, I have suggested, that ancient Egyptian women appeared as trained housewives and mothers in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine.^[195] And it is a message that stretches across nations and ethnicities: “[Madame de Maintenon's] goal at the Sancerre school was to prepare for the sons of her nation [abnā’ء watanihā] wise mothers, cognizant of their duties and competent in undertaking them. . . . She derided schools that made no mention of marriage in female pupils' hearing, that were more interested in fancy than in the truth.”^[196]

We saw in the last chapter that the tropes of girls' education and motherhood were intertwined. The proper mother produced through biography educates her daughter into good motherhood, as does the teacher. This image reprises other material in the magazines, upholding a rhetorical pattern that consistently surfaced in discourse on female education. To insist on the importance of educating girls was in fact an insistence on the importance of training sons—not “daughters and sons”—to be “fine national[ist] citizens.” Girls are subjects as future mothers.^[197] Of course, this had everything to do with an instrumental focus that arose from the intersection of nationalism and motherhood. A girl's education was to benefit the nation first, through its direct impact on her sons. Any other possible life goals are rarely at issue here.^[198] Yet if writers felt they had to emphasize benefits to the nation, perhaps biography provided a way out by focusing on girls' and women's own trajectories, their own struggles to attain their goals, despite the heavy rhetoric of national and family benefit that framed those life stories. We can only speculate about the extent to which this articulates a strategic rhetoric.

For a different context, Kerber notes, “The Republican Mother was an educated woman who could be spared the criticism normally addressed to the Learned Lady because she placed her learning at her family's service.” Defining women by their family work, the image could be mobilized in the name of women's public work as reformers under the banner of “maternalism.”^[199] In Egypt the double potential of this rhetoric grew increasingly forceful in the magazines of the 1920s. An essay in Young Woman of the East sounded a familiar note by emphasizing the value of female education for enlightened motherhood. But from being “half the nation” woman becomes “the nation in its entirety.” For its felicity is due ultimately to her impact, and “every sincere nationalist, every male and female writer, must train interest on her elevation.”^[200] On the one hand, the female is subsumed in motherhood, given no (rhetorical?) choice in fashioning an identity; on the other, she swallows up the (passive) male in the utter comprehensiveness of her importance. As Armstrong argues for the trope of domesticity in English fiction, the “separation” between public and private cannot be seen either as wholly imposed from without or as signaling a depoliticizing or repressive move. Separating “the language of sexual relations from the language of politics” was, to the contrary, a power move, toward “a new form of political power.”^[201] Even though, as we have seen, narrated lives showed education leading to other careers, education for domesticity was a biographical constant. Wilhelmina is lauded for giving her daughter an education, but it is not Juliana's intellectual training on which the biography focuses. “Princess Juliana has experience in preparing delicious food, and she takes pride in this.” As in other biographies of royals, the desire to show simple living and hands-on domestic work as unimpeachably respectable, coupled with the focus on female education as forming the perfectly prepared middle-class woman, come together to funnel “education” into “food preparation.”^[202]

Whatever a “Famous Woman” had been or done, at whatever historical moment, she might qualify as a paragon of modern motherhood, bringing up useful sons or daughters trained to raise useful sons: “There is no doubt that Titi Shiri had prepared her children from a young age with advice and guidance.”^[203] The Marquise de Rambouillet's (1588–1665) mother “nursed her with the milk of virtue and love of knowledge, and gave special concern to her training.” And high status makes no difference: “She is the queen of Belgium. I write of her not as a queen, but as a mother for whose head compassion has laced a wreath; no longer does she take notice of the royal crown.”^[204]

Mothers are praised for compassion, but biographies tend to privilege the duty of tarbiya over emotional support.^[205] As in the biography of Almāza Kayrūz, women's mothering role is constructed as actively contributing to their children's successes; mothers of biographical subjects, as I noted in the last chapter, are lauded for pursuing daughters' educations; then they are said to have been influential for their daughters' careers.^[206] This was especially so in girls' education, not just in schools but also at home. If seeking knowledge was “everyone's duty”—as Woman in Islam's profile of Sayyida Nafīsa declared—this was not only an invitation to action directed at girls but also a matter of parental responsibility. Even as biographies celebrated supportive, educating fathers, they maintained that mothers were in charge of children's training. This probably reflected not just the division between early childhood training at home and later training in school but also the lived experience of women writers, for fathers—more likely to be educated themselves, and circulating outside the home—were in more of a position to advocate for their daughters' formal education. And if they were educated, they had no excuse for laxity, biographies harshly critical of unsupportive fathers imply.^[207] Yet this motif also underlined male modernist nationalists' interests. One reason they pushed girls' education was to increase the chances that rising liberal professionals like themselves could find educated wives who would reportedly be good companions, skilled home managers, and, of increasing interest, respectably articulate appendages in public. Perhaps this was why most “woman-behind-the-man” biographies, when attributed, were by male writers. The order of importance ascribed to a woman's work as mother and career woman parallels the precedence given to home management. As noted earlier, the biography of Queen Victoria in Young Woman of the East concludes “and thus was this queen a skilled and knowledgeable person, a virtuous wife, an excellent mother, a skilled mistress of the home—just as she was an august ruler.” This was not a finale found in the otherwise similar biography in Scattered Pearls sixteen years earlier. Nefertari exemplifies “the good, proper mother and the striving spouse”; only then is she also “the noble queen and wise administrator.” At the same time, this ordering of roles concludes a text that describes Ahmose Nefertari as the first Egyptian queen to actually rule despite the presence of a legal heir, and “this is one of the proofs of the strong influence of women at that time.” Similarly, two biographies of María Christina of Spain, one published in 1898 and the other in 1934, mention that she ruled the nation after her husband's death as regent for her son, but especially in the later sketch it is her mothering that is central.^[208] Marie de Sévigné's life history begins by foregrounding the social contingency that shapes women's pursuits: “It is a great thing for a woman to be proud of her brilliant abilities—not because such brilliance is rare, but because circumstances make brilliance in women a rare happenstance.”^[209] But if the reader expects a discussion of that “brilliance,” she must wait, for the biographer declares that “one can write of de Sévigné's life as wife, mother, and famous writer”—and does so in that order. The section on her intellectual, writing life is not only last but also shortest.

Inscribed at the center of hundreds of biographical sketches, domesticity derived its importance both from its relation to women's lived experience and from the urgency of defining the relationship between gender and space in a developing ideology of the nation. But there is no suggestion in these texts—or in other texts in the early Arabic women's press, with rare exceptions—that major acknowledged transformations in the social organization of gender, ones that might make (even some) women's lives easier or more guided by notions of self-fulfillment, must or should follow from heralded changes in women's lives. As Matthews says with regard to the deployment of domesticity in nineteenth-century North American rhetoric, “There was nothing naïve about using the home to justify female activism. Rather, using the home was a brilliant and hard-headed tactic.” But it is just as important to recall her warning: “Domestic feminism was sounder as a tactic than as a long-term strategy because it necessarily employed arguments that took women away from the natural rights case for female participation in public life and toward asymmetrical sex roles.”^[210] In neither the United States nor Egypt did “domestic feminism” radically transform ideas about what women should be doing, although it could expand their domain. In this context it is useful to recall the concept of maternalism as developed by scholars of women's activisms on state maternal and child health policy. “Maternalism” designates the multiple meanings and effects that could accrue when women advanced a notion of the maternal as directly pertinent to work in the sphere of state policy. As Seth Koven and Sonya Michel have noted, under this banner women could work deliberately toward autonomy in their own lives. Yet the banner could be appropriated by paternalist forces working “on behalf of infants, the race, and the nation.”^[211] The domestic could, and did, inscribe many things to many people.^[212] Support for girls' education and women's right to paid employment were premised on collective social (and implicitly class-based) need rather than individual desire: education for sober motherhood, wages to support a family lacking a male head. If one's career could not be subsumed under either rubric, then it must be glossed as self-sacrifice on behalf of the nation.

Home and Nation

If domesticity delineated a space of both regulation and self-affirmation for women, it also represented a source and microcosm of nationalist effort. The instrumentality of the idea of home, with “woman” written at the center, to the concept of nation has engaged much recent scholarship across many histories.^[213] In Egypt as in other sites of nationalist struggle, the inscription of the maternal body onto the map of nationalist aspirations (both modernist and conservative) has been identified as constitutive of nationalist ideologies. This nationalist maternal body figures centrally in discourses on gender in Egypt through this period.^[214] Ahmad's Magazine of the Women's Awakening linked this maternal embodied nationalism to the exemplarity of gendered biography amid the fervent nationalist activism of 1921, in a call “To Our Girls”:

I do not neglect to give you your due, O noble Egyptian young woman, for you have learned what prepares you to be a mother in the true sense. You are able to read the life histories of those who came before, and to extract from the treasures of literature that which nourishes growing ones. For it is you upon whom the felicity of your nation rests, through raising your children, working for your spouse's repose, and managing your home.
Do not think that you are the first young woman to want reform and yet meet resistance. Go back to the histories of the Arab women of the desert. Look to your grandmothers, your mothers, and the strength of resistance in struggle that they had. . . .
I do not deem you anything but well acquainted with the situations of the Bedouin women, mistresses of seclusion, and famous women I have mentioned. All you lack is to follow the path they attained.
You are the entire national community. You are its glory. You are the hopes of the Egyptians, and from you the nation requires the emergence of the most skilled male nationalists [wataniyyīn] and intellectual leaders.^[215]

Nationalist resistance through economic boycotts as well as more direct means, and whether in the Revolutionary-period North American colonies or in Egypt in 1919, needed women and made “the form of female patriotism” an issue.^[216] The consolidation of a successful American nationalism had depended on the political role of the home; not only boycotts but also cookbooks were patriotic tools that had distanced a new polity from the “mother” country through both resistance and formation of a new collective identity.^[217] Constructing domesticity in local, authentic terms (linking it to images of ancient Egyptian women, early Muslim women, and contemporary Egyptian peasant women, and thereby occluding its role in middle-class economic ascendancy) was one response to the perceived strength of colonial powers.

Thus biography casts mother and wife as perfect females and perfect female political subjects. While the companionate wife and the educated and educating mother as icons of nationalism were anticipated in the biographies of the earliest magazines, we have seen how texts of the 1920s and 1930s etched them more starkly, as the “Famous Women” rubric yielded on occasion to “Mothers of Great Men” and “Wives of the Famous.” In the context of emerging nationalism, the queen as female model to the nation (or empire, ironically) converged especially usefully with a ubiquitous image, “Mother of the Nation.” Perhaps Khadīja bt. Khuwaylid, first wife of the First Muslim, was the ultimate “local” woman-behind-the-man. As we shall see, she plays that role in exemplary biography at the end of the twentieth century. Early in this century, though, it was not Khadīī;ja but Safiyya Zaghlūl who enacted this role most consistently in “Famous Women” biography. Unlike Khadīja, she could represent national unity rather than an Islamic identity as paramount, while being (conveniently for this discourse) Muslim. Married to the nationalist leader Sa‘‘d Zaghlūl, when her husband was exiled by the British, sparking widespread demonstrations, Safiyya kept the nationalist fires burning domestically. Nationalists continued to meet in their home, “Bayt al-umma” (“the home of the nation,” exemplifying the metaphorical fit between healthy home and strong nation).

Zaghlūl's public role was defined as a maternal one. Qamar ‘‘Abduh, writing in the Magazine of the Women's Awakening during Sa‘‘d Zaghlūl's ministry, implored, “O God . . . from the likes of Safiyya Zaghlūl make for us striving and knowledgeable mothers who sacrifice themselves for the love of Egypt, for You are the One who Grants.”^[218] Perfect exemplar of modern nationalist wifehood, Zaghlūl, “Mother of the Nation,” appeared regularly as one of the women's magazines' shahīrāt al-nisā‘‘ā’ء especially after her husband Sa‘‘d's death in 1927. Featuring her in his “Great Women in the Eastern and Western Worlds Ancient and Modern” series in the Magazine of the Women's Awakening in the same year but before Sa‘‘d's death, Muhammad ‘‘Abd al-Fattāh Ibrāhīī;m addressed the female reader explicitly as he declared that Safiyya would have influenced anyone she married.^[219] ‘‘Abbās Hāfiz, in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine, went further, expending two out of five columns devoted to Zaghlūl as “Famous Woman” in lyrical celebration of the woman-behind-the-man ideal, an evocation that claims privileged power but of a strictly defined genderbound sort: “Truly, the great always and forever need outstanding spouses, and women of great disposition. The intelligent wife of the brilliant hero husband is the pre-eminent requirement and greatest wish, and those to whom nature has not given this gift have thus been denied a goodly share of the talents of greatness, the requirements of everlasting [fame].” When Hāfiz moves to Zaghlūl, it is Sa‘‘d rather than Safiyya who focalizes the text; through his eyes Hāfiz indirectly attacks women by implying Safiyya's exemplary exceptionality. Leading public demands for independence, confronting the British,

Sa‘‘d understood that he had left behind him, at home, an exalted soul whose heart had reconciled itself to bear the ache of his absence were he to remain absent; the agony of his exile if he were borne into exile; the anguish of his martyrdom if such was fated. . . . So Sa‘‘d proceeded on his way without hesitation, strengthened by the courage of his wife in the intensity of her dedication and loyalty. From the house no moans or cries ascended to detain him, nor any fever of weeping. For the woman who, knowing her husband is about to confront danger, does not restrain him as he strides forth for the sake of a mission in which disastrous results may await him, and does not cling crying to his throat . . . indeed, a rarity in the world of women.^[220]

Safiyya's presence contrasts with the relative absence of Egyptian feminist leaders as “Famous Women” in magazines before the 1940s. Magazines reported on feminists' activities, but perhaps Safiyya was a more reassuring icon of womanhood, at least in the late 1920s. And as it was repeatedly articulated in profiles, Safiyya Zaghlūl's iconic status as “Mother of the Nation” vied with another icon, “Mother of the Beneficent Ones,” the Turco-Egyptian queen mother.^[221] Competing notions of who was to stand for the nation, and how it was to be politically organized, were scripted onto the images of female icons. Moreover, featuring “women behind the men” as icons of both exemplary womanhood and nation might have been a reaction to feminists' growing demands from the late 1920s on for political rights, and their refusals to delay those demands further in the name of “nation.” As biography could fulfill feminist goals, it also could confront them. Magazine editors, reporting on Egyptian feminist demands, were more cautious than those at the forefront of organized feminism.

As in the case of Safiyya Zaghlūl, Lady Asquith, and Mme. Joffre, it was often in relation to a male leader's national(ist) work that the woman behind the man was lauded as honorable and unrecognized, her status emphasized by the occlusion of her own first name as she epitomized the perfect partner. No less celebrated was the mother behind the son, willing to sacrifice her son for a cause presented as nationalist, often anachronistically. The “enlightened motherhood” motif echoes through profiles stressing the crucial impact of mothers on famous sons such as Saint Augustine and George Washington (what better icon of nationalist success?).^[222]

Biographies also inscribed the maternal figure metaphorically in a context of service to the community, most often implied to be a national community, imperialism occluded. Florence Nightingale, it is said in a 1909 biography, cared for the soldiers in the Crimea “just like a mother.” Nasra al-Barīī;dīī;, an unmarried schoolteacher, was like a mother to the girls in her school in Syria.^[223] A structurally complicated profile of Anna Pavlova (1882–1931) does trace some of her work as a dancer, but a reproduced dressing-room dialogue privileges her charity work. When she speaks of the Paris refuge for exiled Russian girls that she founded, “we see not the laughing dancer, but the mother.” There ensues a monologue on “the useful training that will prepare them to be the fitting young women that new Russia wants.”^[224] The Begum of Bhopal was like a mother to her subjects. Perhaps displacing the woman ruler into mother made her public role less objectionable. Elizabeth of Belgium became known as “our little mother” for her hands-on charity work, notes her biographer approvingly, offering the perfect paternalistic vision of the Belgian kingdom as one big happy family with the queen as mother. “Motherly” duty as “patriotic” duty exalts this subject and makes her exemplary: “There is nothing finer than following the model of the angels and the heavens!”^[225] Elizabeth Fry's work in prison reform emphasizes this as “woman's mission,” glossing such public activism as nurturing, therefore as an acceptable extension of domestic work.^[226] But perhaps the best example of conflating a paternalistic class politics of charity and reform with the motif of “motherhood” glossing public service to the nation is a profile of Englishwoman Agnes Weston in The Gentle Sex in 1916. She and her aide Miss Wintz had “hearts full of love for their nation, their spirits distinguished by the attributes of bold initiative and courage.” Opening clubs for sailors in the British navy, Weston “was able . . . to spread the spirit of virtue and decency in their soiled souls; she felt indescribable pleasure at seeing the fruits of her laboring to straighten their crooked morals . . . such that the nation received men . . . who were its pride and support.” They called her “our mother”; she “laid the cornerstone of a solid organizational structure for protecting the morals of the navy's men.”^[227]

And then there was the steady example of Zaghlūl. Announcing a “small book” on Sa‘‘d's banishment that “thousands of readers are grabbing,” the Ladies' Revue reproduced a chapter describing Safiyya “word for word, because we are confident that it is more effective than any large tome to teach our women what the mother of the newborn holding on to independence ought to be like.”^[228] Privileging the maternal role and extending it into the nurture of society built a narrative of useful domesticity that fed perfectly into nationalist narratives.

Yet, just as situating the domestic as women's privileged site made it respectable to imagine other lives, yoking the domestic to national duty offered a language in which women's direct public participation in the construction of the nation could be articulated as it gave women more authority at home. From the metaphorical extension of mothering and the emphasis on selflessness, it was a short jump to highlighting her patriotic acts as a woman's main contribution. As patriotism and active participation in a nationalist struggle defined the domestic (if publicized) acts of Safiyya Zaghlūl and Mary Washington as biographical subjects, they marked the public work of Egyptian merchant Haylāna ‘‘Abd al-Mālik, English feminist Emmeline Pankhurst, and Turkish activist and writer Halide Edip.

To read the narrative of domesticity in early-twentieth-century Egypt as enhancing women's authority in the home, and no more, is to ignore the multiplicity of messages these biographies held. They opened a space in which to interrogate boundaries even as they reiterated them. They gave (some) women new models of selfhood to consider as they reaffirmed the old. Readers might be encouraged by the actual narrative of a woman's initiative in pursuing a chosen public career even as the narrative frame prescribed her primary role to be domestic. Judith Newton's argument about conduct manuals in early Victorian England holds also for the material I present here: that “this feminization and domestication of science . . . cannot merely be read as a conservative regulation of consent, just as the professionalization of women's domestic work cannot be interpreted merely as one more argument for keeping women in the home.”^[229] Equally, “The belief that domestic life and moral sensibility constituted a female domain was much more than a sop to the woman. Although it did not seem to be political or economic on the surface, female authority was nevertheless real.”^[230] Both professionalization and the elevation of domestic life operated on multiple levels.

Even as they historicized, celebrated, and shaped women's movement out of the home, biographies incessantly articulated both continuity and change in the relationships between women and domestic duty. If linking women and the domestic was nothing new, defining women's relationships to the domestic discursively was new. In fact, the domestic as a space that claimed attention was new. The need to define how “woman” and “home” overlapped was crucial to (and necessitated by) the shift from a traditional patriarchy to a new public patriarchy inflected by nationalism. The equation of women and the domestic could no longer be taken for granted in a milieu where women's duties were defined in terms of the nation's needs, which could not be fulfilled wholly in the home. Striking for the ways they push out the acceptable boundaries of selfhood for a female audience, the biographies also hedge this expansion, marking domestic duty as central to women's lives. Like many other texts in the women's magazines, they construct a domestic economy emphasizing efficient management, hygiene, and thrift. This appears to accord with nationalist thought that constructed women's activities as expansions of and accompaniments to their domestic work, in the service of the national “family.” As Partha Chatterjee suggests for nineteenth-century Indian nationalist thought on women's place, the domestic sphere could expand out of the home as long as this expansion was regulated and defined as part of that which remained “private” or could represent “the spiritual.”^[231] Yet perhaps this dichotomy is too neat. Could this tidy ideological move not escape its envisioned containment? Did it result in real tensions in the material lives of some girls and women? Could it have had the unforeseen consequence of encouraging women to transgress the neat boundaries nationalist thinkers were assiduously setting for them? Was it an “innocent” way of posing a challenge to emerging outlines of a “public patriarchy”?

Scholarship on gender politics in Egypt has tended to deemphasize the multiple and possibly expansive inscriptions the domestic could generate, the possibility that articulating women's work in domestic space might serve to push as much as to constrict women's movement into other spaces and, indeed, to blur boundaries between those spaces. As it performed a practically oriented ideological task of demarcating the domestic as a serious professional sphere, perhaps biography—with its message that “real women had done it all (but not easily)”—answered a psychological need as how-to manuals could not. That it was concerned with helping middleclass women negotiate new pressures in their working lives is suggested by the different positionings of the domestic in mainstream versus the women's magazines.

Even as a domestic ideal structures one life history after another, biography opens up a space of other possibilities. More discreetly yet forthrightly than other forms of prescriptive and polemical literature on “woman's place” available at the time, these biographies question the linking of women and the domestic by highlighting it as a fluid and changeable space. Equivocally positioning “the domestic,” biography might stabilize feminine identity around the domestic as it simultaneously operated to push the boundaries of what home and family meant—what the domestic ruled out and what it could allow. To go further, emphasizing the domestic as women's sphere could give credibility and even familiarity to the idea of extradomestic activity for women, already articulated in the mainstream press by Fawwāz. Indeed, framing public lives within domestic concerns made the expansive work of biography possible by downplaying any perceived threat to the accustomed social order.^[232] Hudā Sha‘‘rāwīī; herself was careful to remind interlocutors of her attention to maternal duty—the domestic loyalty that made all else thinkable.^[233] But that order was changing. Biographies of the late 1930s tended to present extremes: the “woman behind the man” or the career woman—or she who was intensely both.

I have suggested that much of this biographical writing shows a conscious practice of cautiously providing models for change, a practice I have no difficulty in labeling as feminist. For this forthrightly pedagogical act is built discursively on the recognition that those defined as “women” confront immediate barriers to their own attempts at self-definition. But this obliges us to confront the very conditions of possibility for the emergence of feminisms in that particular time and place. As Inderpal Grewal has insisted in the case of nineteenth-century India, “The formation of a modernist feminism . . . utilized colonial modernity and altered it through oppositions to nationalist and colonialist patriarchy.” Discourses of domesticity were crucial not only to constructions of gendered difference but also to articulations of class and race in an imperial context—to “relations between [or with] women of other classes and races.” At the same time, they offered a ground for an indigenous feminist articulation: “home not only as the original site of nationalism but also of feminism, since it is here that women can resist nationalist formations by rearticulating them as a site of struggle rather than of resolution.”^[234] Deploying the rhetoric of home as nation, as a site of purity, discipline, and national resistance, writers in Egypt also displaced it, making of it a home base from which women of a certain class could travel elsewhere—as long as they returned. For biography intimated the complexity of local discourse on how sites of contact and collision between “East” and “West” were also shaping the mundane lives of many.

Notes

1. “Dhikr al-sadīī;q ilā al-abad: wafāt khayrat al-sayyidāt fīī; al-Mahjar,” SR 9:10 (Sept. 1928): 739–40.

2. Armstrong, Desire, 60.

3. Ibid., 59.

4. Elizabeth Langland makes a similar critique in Nobody's Angels: Middle=Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 3 n., 5.

5. Badran, Feminists, 136. Badran argues that the EFU's al-Misriyya (founded 1937) differed from earlier “domestically oriented” magazines be-cause it focused on the wife's role as well as the mother's (137–38). Yet discussion of marriage and wives' (and husbands') roles pervaded earlier journals (and books). When the EFU used “maternal” arguments to call for women's paid employment Badran sees this as a feminist strategy; she labels other women's uses of similar arguments as “the cult of domesticity” (175–76, 214), although they used these to further demands for political rights and paid employment. If EFU arguments differed in substance, it is perhaps a matter of divergent contexts more than of textual differences.

6. “Tadbīī;r al-manzil,” AJ 2:3 (Mar. 31, 1899): 110–12; quotation on 111.

7. “Tadbīī;r al-manzil,” AJ 2:4 (Apr. 30, 1899): 155–57.

8. Judith Newton, “'Ministers of the Interior': The Political Economy of Women's Manuals,” in her Starting Over: Feminism and the Politics of Cultural Critique (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 126.

9. On “rationalizing” housework, Leonore Davidoff's pioneering article highlighted issues many scholars have since taken up for European societies and then for intersections of ideologies of domesticity and imperialist practices in the imperializing metropole and post/colonized societies. Leonore Davidoff, “The Rationalization of Housework,” reprinted in her Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (New York: Routledge, 1995), 73–102.

10. Glenna Matthews, “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), xiii, also 11, xvi. On the rhetoric of domesticity as a vocation in post-Revolutionary America, see Kerber, Women, chap. 7. But, noting that “the pride women expressed in their new learning was balanced by the promise that traditional values would be upheld and maintained” (212), Kerber does not adduce possibly expansive messages that contradictory, ambiguous, or ambivalent rhetoric might hold. This may be partly because she seems to see subject formation as prior to its constitution by and in language.

11. Matthews, “Just a Housewife,” 57.

12. Armstrong, Desire, 9, 1.

13. Matthews, “Just a Housewife,” 34, 33.

14. I cannot cite all work in this vein; see, e.g., Karen Tranberg Hansen, ed., African Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), especially Jean Comaroff and John L Comaroff, “Home-Made Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in South Africa,” 37–74; Poovey, Uneven Developments; Levy, Other Women; Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Burton, Burdens of History.

15. “Introduction,” pp. 1–33 in Hansen, African Encounters, 4–5. On the intersection of domesticity and civil society as concepts constructing a “public-private” division, and its centrality in the discourse of improvement by reformist nationalists looking to Victorian England and differentiating themselves from the imperial enterprise, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The DifferenceDeferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 373–405. I find his discussion useful for Egypt. But he seems to see the “new woman” and her double, the “uneducated housewife/mother,” as wholly creations of nationalist/reformist anxiety about the domestic as a newly identified space of national strength (378).

16. Chakrabarty, “The Difference-Deferral,” 373, citing Chatterjee.

17. See chapter 6.

18. Tate, Domestic Allegories, 92. Cf. LaRay Denzer, “Domestic Science Training in Colonial Yorubaland, Nigeria,” in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen Tranberg Hansen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992): “Domestic science, which today seems so constraining to female ambition and equality, became a means for increasing women's participation in the colonial economy and raising their social status” (124).

19. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, chap. 8.

20. Baron, Women's Awakening, 155.

21. Zaynab Fawwāz, “Iqtirāh,” F 1:3 (Feb. 1, 1893): 115–16.

22. F 1:1 (Nov. 20, 1892), 14–15.

23. Hind Nawfal, “Idāh wa-iltimās wa-istismāh,” F 1:1 (Nov. 20, 1892): 1–6; quotation on 2.

24. Al-Muqtataf noted al-Fatāt's appearance: while writers were founding periodicals in unprecedented numbers, this one was “an orphan . . . exclusively dedicated to subjects of interest to women and opening its pages to women writers only.” “Al-Fatāt,” al-Muqtataf 17:3 (Dec. 1892), 209–10; quotation on 209. Mentioning F's “Famous Women” feature, the text notes that its life of Morgan came from al-Muqtataf (210). In F and al-Hilāl this text is attributed to “al-Muqtataf.”

25. Mitchell's biography does not carry a byline in al-Muqtataf, but in its general index the article is attributed to Sarrūf. See Hay‘‘at al-dirāsāt al-‘‘arabiyya, al-Jāmi‘‘a al-Amrīī;kiyya fīī; Bayrūt, Fihris al-Muqtataf 1876–1952, vol. 2 (Beirut: American University in Beirut, 1968), 382. In the article “Women Astronomers” in al-Muqtataf attributed to Yāqūt Sarrūf's translation of an essay by “Monsieur Lākranj” (LaGrange?) from “Jarīī;dat al-samā‘‘ wa-al-ard,” Sarrūf adds a sentence on Mitchell; the original apparently did not mention her. (Sarrūf also expands the mention of Caroline Herschel.) “Al-Nisā‘‘ al-falakiyyāt,” al-Muqtataf (Bāb tadbīī;r al-manzil) 10:6 (Mar. 1886): 371–73; her additions, 372.

26. “Khasārat rabbāt al-aqlām,” al-Muqtataf 16:11 (Aug. 1892): 779–80.

27. “Hannā Bizānt wa-al-falsafa al-sharqiyya,” al-Muqtataf 17:8 (May 1893): 515–20; “Madām Blāfātsky wa-al-diyāna al-sirriyya” [attributed to Max Müller], al-Muqtataf 17:10 (June 1893): 668–70; “Madame Clemance [sic] Augustine Royer” [in Latin letters], al-Muqtataf 23:8 (Aug. 1899): 561–63.

28. Much of its material came from English periodicals. Ya‘‘qūb Sarrūf (Yāqūt's spouse) published his translation of Samuel Smiles's Self-Help in 1880. Al-Muqtataf was largely silent on Britain's presence in Egypt. Nadia Farag, “Al-Muqtataf 1876–1900: A Study of the Influence of Victorian Thought on Modern Arabic Thought” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1969).

29. Where biography prefaces a general topic (Besant, Blavatsky, Royer) or profiles a ruling monarch (Victoria, Catherine II, empress of China), it merits inclusion in front with the men. The queen of Rumania, writer and charity patron, like Sarrūf's friends, is in “Home Management.” Fourteen out of twenty-four biographies through 1913 are in “Home Management.”

30. Later years saw the link between “Home Management” and female biography formalized. In the January 1926 issue of al-Muqtataf (68:1, 71), we find under “Bāb tadbīī;r al-manzil: al-Ihtifāl bi-dhikrā Bāhithat al-Bādiya” an explanation: “We opened this section to include all that it is important for the woman and folk of the house [ahl al-bayt] to know concerning child raising, food arrangement, clothing, drink, the residence, adornment, the life histories of famous women, and other similar subjects that will bring benefit on every family” (my emphasis).

31. Yāqūt Sarrūf, “Bāb tadbīī;r al-manzil: al-Sayyida Nasra Ilyās,” al-Muqtataf 13:8 (May 1889): 549–50; quotations on 549.

32. The author uses the same verb (dhākara) with which she had described her subject's mode of tackling “scientific study” and subjects in al-Muqtataf. It suggests not light conversation about “woman's condition” but something more serious. The verb connotes memorization and study.

33. Yāqūt Sarrūf, “Bāb tadbīī;r al-manzil: al-Sayyida Nasra Ilyās,” al-Muqtataf 13:8 (May 1889): 550.

34. The first volume's “Ashhar al-hawādith wa-a‘‘zam al-rijāl” featured Napoleon Bonaparte, various Ottoman sultans, Confucius, Peter the Great, George Washington, the Emir ‘‘Abd al-Qādir, Victor Hugo, Muhammad ‘‘Alīī;, and Ramses II. The series featured “Eastern” and “Western” subjects from the start, except when it came to women.

35. On Zaydān's and his son's editorial directions, see Tarrāzīī;, Tārīkh, 3:86–89, who emphasizes their grasp of what readers across classes and ages wanted, the magazine's popularity, and the editorial concern with educating youth. See also Vernon Egger, A Fabian in Egypt: Salamah Musa and the Rise of the Professional Classes in Egypt, 1909–1939 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986), 13–17, 69–70, 169–70. Zaydān's exclusion of women from The Crescent's biographical feature, and from his biographical dictionary, is intriguing, since female protagonists structured many of his historical novels.

36. Should a link be made between the single exception and its male authorship, editorial control, and primary implied audience? In Ibrāhīī;m Ramzīī;'s al-Mar’ءa fī al-Islām, biographies of women were the last feature. This had a framing effect, too, but gave less prominence to life narratives.

37. A few did center on domesticity. A sketch of Lady Isabel Burton (1893) focused almost entirely on her marriage, stressing her influence over Richard Burton because she made wifehood a profession. This is preceded in “Home Management” (18:1, Oct. 1893) by a notice on writer Josephine Butler, quoted as saying girls need to know their worth and be able to depend on themselves financially. She then assures readers that she considers her wife and mother roles preferable to all else she has done. Al-Muqtataf's biographical practice had its own complexities. Space considerations prevent their exploration here.

38. Hind Nawfal, “Idāh wa-iltimās wa-istismāh,” F 1:1 (Nov. 20, 1892): 3–4.

39. See my analysis in “May Her Likes Be Multiplied: 'Famous Women' Biography and Gendered Prescription in Egypt, 1892–1935,” Signs 22:4 (summer 1997): 872–74.

40. Personal Narratives Group, “Origins,” in their Interpreting Women's Lives, 5.

41. Kerber, Women of the Republic, 226. “If they compiled lists of illustrious women, they had to range far back in the past: to Catherine of Siena, to Elizabeth I” (32).

42. Newton, “'Ministers,'” 140–41.

43. DM, 511.

44. The son is mentioned but not by name, attribute, or profession. The magazine says following issues will feature biographies of the daughters, but in extant issues I have not found them. Another difference is that detailing the subject's educational program, Fawwāz mentions “all kinds of handwork” last; FS adds “in addition to what adorned her of al-ādāb wa-al-tarbiya.” DM, 515–16; “SN: Maryam Nahhās Nawfal,” FS 2:3 (Dec. 15, 1907): 81–82; quotation on 82.

45. “Jān Awstīī;n,” JL 11:3 (Sept. 1918): 33.

46. Ibid., 33; “SN: al-Sayyida Admā Sursuq,” FS 2:7 (Apr. 15, 1908): 243.

47. Denzer notes the prominence of needlework in missionary strategies to teach “Victorian middle-class virtues” as well as to gain converts. “Domestic Science Training,” 118.

48. “Sīī;rat SN: Mariyā Anaysy,” MI 1:11 (Sept. 1, 1901): 175–76.

49. “SN: al-Sayyida Admā Sursuq,” FS 2:7 (Apr. 15, 1908): 244, 245.

50. “SN: Māry [sic] Mitshil al-falakiyya al-amīī;rikiyya,” FS 5:1 (Oct. 15, 1910): 5.

51. DM, 482.

52. The author ends with a verse homily on a good woman's qualities. ‘‘Isā Iskandar al-Ma‘‘lūf, “SN: Haylāna Hunt Jaksūn al-shā‘‘ira al-nāthira,” FS 5:8 (May 15, 1911): 281–83.

53. “Al-Marhūma Kristīī;nīī; Hindiyya,” FS 19:7 (Apr. 1925): 329.

54. Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “SN: “Hannā Kasbānīī; Kūrānīī;,” FS 2:10 (July 15, 1908): 364, 365.

55. His compatriot ‘‘Afīī;fa Karam's obituary-biography of Julia Ward Howe in her North American Arabic periodical al-Hudā (republished in FS) did not specify whether Howe's “best possible upbringing at home and school” entailed domestic training. But Howe expressed this in her memoir: “But surely, no love of intellectual pursuits should lead any of us to disparage and neglect the household gifts and graces. A house is a kingdom in little and its queen, if she is faithful, gentle and wise, is a sovereign indeed.” Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences 1819–99 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 216 f., quoted in Matthews, “Just a Housewife,” 73.

56. “SN: “Ilīī;sābāt Stāntūn, mu‘‘assisat al-nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya al-amirikiyya,” FS 19:4 (Jan. 15, 1925): 145–46; quotation on 146; “SN: Misiz Ilīī;sābāt Stāntūn,” FS 26:5 (Feb. 1932): 225–26; quotations on 226.

57. “SN: al-Duktūra Māry Stūbs,” FS 28:7 (Apr. 1934): 337. By then, Stopes's famous Married Love had been translated twice into Arabic: by Salīī;m Khūrīī; and ‘‘Abbās Hāfiz as Jannat al-azwāj (Cairo: Matba‘‘at al-Muqtataf wa-al-Muqattam, 1925) from the fourteenth English printing, introduced by Jessie Murray [Jāsīī; Murrī], “one of the famous physicians”; and in a forty-five-page, cheaply printed, abridgement, Firdaws al-azwāj, trans.Yūsuf Labīī;b (Cairo: al-Matba‘‘a al-mutawassita, n.d.).

58. “SN: Ba‘‘d al-shahīī;rāt fīī; Sūriyā,” FS 32:5 (Feb. 1937): 257–59. In a collec-tive article where each subject has one paragraph, for this to occupy so much of Marrāsh's space is striking.

59. “Ilīī;zābith Bārīī;t,” JL 11:2 (June 1918): 17; “SN: Misiz Barāwnin,” FS 32:3 (Dec. 1937): 130. None of the four lives of Browning in women's journals mention how she married.

60. And this leads her to conclude: “I ask for the East that its prosperity and benefit be made complete in this age by many women who will be guided by the light of that Yazijian star . . . enough glory for her that she is a woman who has surpassed men and competed equally with Western women in the noblest of arenas.” “Wardat al-‘‘Arab,” F 1:7 (June 1, 1893): 302, 305. Presumably the “arena” was literature; perhaps she was competitive, too, in domesticity. A few years later, another biography of Warda implores, “We ask God to make her life long and benefit us with her knowledge, for He is the Generous Giver.” “SN: al-Sayyida Warda al-Yāzijīī;,” FS 2:1 (Oct. 15, 1907): 7. She did not die until 1924.

61. Hasīī;b al-Hakīī;m, “SN: Min al-kūkh ilā al-barlamān: Mādām Bawb,” MM 8:3 (Mar. 15, 1927): 118.

62. “As the Westerners say in their proverbs, there is no rose without thorns,” comments the writer. This essay dates the “true women's awakening” in England to 1900, thereby asserting its contemporaneity with the nahda nisā‘‘iyya in Egypt as most commentators were then locating it.

63. “Tārīī;kh al-haraka al-nisawiyya fīī; Baritāniyā,” FS 25:1 (Oct. 1930): 6, 6, 7, 8–13. The article is followed immediately by one on the feminist movement in Japan (14) and “al-Mar‘‘a fīī; al-hayāt al-ijtimā‘‘iyya” (14–15), describing the head of a Richmond publishing house, Gillian Bowman, who had to fight for her position “because the southern states deny women [the right] to engage in business.” The finale: “With all the many duties she must perform in her large firm, she finds time to care for her children and play a serious role in Richmond society” (14).

64. “Ashhar al-nisā‘‘: Lūsīī; Stūn Blākwāl: Za‘‘īmat al-mutālibāt bi-huqūq al-nisā‘‘ fīī; Amīī;rikā (su’ءāl lil-qāri’ءāt fīī; mawdūء qadīī;m),” SB 1:1 (Apr. 1, 1903): 5. Cf. an article in SB 2:12 that warns against the dangers of women working outside the home.

65. See Kallās, al-Haraka al-fikriyya al-niswiyya, 38–42.

66. Or “little matters”: asāghirihim.

67. “Al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam: Lādy Burtūn,” MM 7:4 (Apr. 20, 1926): 188–89. A feature on women around the world, this did not usually focus so fully on one individual.

68. See Langland, Nobody's Angels, 56–58, on home visits as an exercise in teaching domesticity.

69. Personal Narratives Group, “Origins,” 7.

70. Matthews, “Just a Housewife,” 28.

71. Baron, Women's Awakening, 166. Both “religious nationalists” and “secular nationalists” extolled women's domestic roles (Badran, Feminists, 13). Both were influenced by a vision of modernity in which women's domestic roles might be differently defined. Baron and Badran view the textual construction of the domestic as a cult of domesticity that hampered women's wider movements, although their analyses differ: Baron sees this literature as empowering for women within the home, and as not totally antithetical to feminism, but she does not see it as feminist in the sense of working to redefine and/or erase gender boundaries. She also says the “adoption of a domestic ideology by female intellectuals in Egypt was in part a strategic decision” (Women's Awakening, 167), with which my findings are in accord. Although Baron emphasizes the constraining force of domestic ideology, she points to its legitimating function in women's nationalist activism. See her “Mothers, Morality, and Nationalism in Early Twentieth Century Egypt,” in The Origins of Arab Nationalism, ed. Rashid Khalidi et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 271–88. Badran separates feminism from discourses of domesticity, although she agrees, citing my earlier work, that biography might have worked differently (Feminists, 64–65). While I concur that literature on domestic roles in this period could have circumscribed women's self-images and visions, I think it likely that women were capable of using domestic manuals without letting these wholly define their futures. Without evidence on reader response we cannot know. And the term “cult of domesticity” oversimplifies the discussion of domesticity in both the women's and nationalist presses. Domesticity was not just an ideal to be preached but an unavoidable aspect of women's lives. Women both Syrian and Egyptian, and of all religious groupings present in Egypt, probed its meaning and studied its place in their lives. Few women who wrote in the press, whatever their origins, religious identity, or class, seemed to regard it as women's only sphere, either practically or ideally. Its discussion also represented an acknowledgment and a rewriting of nationalist prescriptions for patriotic Egyptian women. The actual rhetoric around domesticity was potentially empowering as much as limiting, the doubled message of domesticity and boundaries there for the transgressing particularly evident in biography. And the same commentator could take varying stances on domesticity in different discursive contexts. Zaynab Fawwāz, whom Badran takes as exemplifying the “antithesis of the cult of domesticity” (65), posited domesticity's centrality elsewhere: like other writers, she could exploit the concept when necessary, and it is impossible to say to what extent her use of it was strategic. In this sense, the primacy of domesticity as a theme in the women's press is consonant with Badran's emphasis (as in the issue of veiling) on feminists' stances as concrete and practical, entwined in and totally a part of their everyday social experience. Also, the discussion of domesticity in Egypt started before women had realistic opportunities to move into public life (pace Badran, Feminists, 64). I agree that it was partly a “discourse of containment,” but this is more pertinent from the late 1920s, after the advent of organized feminism and in conjunction with a general move toward greater social conservatism at a time when nationalist political ideals and programs had been discredited by fragmentation and public perceptions of corruption and impotence within the ruling elite.

72. “SN: Madām Blanshār,” JL 7:1 (May 1, 1914): 4.

73. “Iftitāh sanat al-majalla al-sābi‘‘a,” JL 7:1 (May 1, 1914): 1–2; quotation on 2.

74. “SN: Madām Blanshār,” JL 7:1 (May 1, 1914): 4–5.

75. Jean-Pierre did much to popularize ballooning and achieved instant fame when he crossed the English Channel in 1785. The JL text attributes his financial ruin to expenditure on ballooning; other sources cite bad investments. See Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. (1991), 2:272–73; Encyclopedia Americana (1992) 4:58. On Sophie, see Ann Hodgman and Rudy Djabberoff, Sky-stars: The History of Women in Aviation (New York: Atheneum, 1981), 6–8.

76. “SN: Madām Blanshār,” JL 7:1 (May 1, 1914): 5.

77. Ibid., 6.

78. “SN: Fiktūriyā Wudhūl,” FS 12:2 (Nov. 15, 1917): 41–43; quotations on 42, 42, 41. This was published ten years before Woodhull's death, at a time when she had become more conservative (Uglow, Continuum Dictionary, 588–89). Still, that it implies the animosity toward Woodhull as arising from her stance on curriculum and her publishing (without details), and makes no mention of her belief in free love, is striking. Fawwāz's entry on her (DM, 445–48) could have been the source.

79. “SN: Aliksandrā malikat al-Inkilīī;z al-mutawaffīī;,” FS 4:10 (July 1910): 361–64; quotation on 362. This adjective refers to her late husband.

80. “SN: Aliksandrā malikat al-Inkilīī;z,” FS 20:3 (Dec. 15, 1925): 97–100; quotations on 100, 98, 99, 100. An obituary-biography of Alexandra published the same day in The Egyptian Woman's Magazine is less overtly polemical but poses an implicit exemplarity as it takes the reader through Alexandra's day, from “awakening to the hubbub of her children” to her morning reading (“she would read to herself, contrary to the custom followed in the palaces of queens and princesses”), to lunch with her husband, “tête-à-tête as the Westerners say, in her service only a single doorman standing outside the room who would enter only to the sound of the bell.” “SN: al-Malika Aliksandrā: hayātuhā akhlāquhā ‘‘ādātuhā awqātuhā,” MM 6:10 (Dec. 15 1925): 539–42; quotation on 541. The title juxtaposes biography, moral training, and the specificity of guidance characteristic of conduct literature: “Queen Alexandria: Her Life, Her Morals, Her Practices, Her Schedule.”

81. The author goes on to note that he is “rare” among men in so completely mastering the attributes he “unites.” An explicit emphasis on the domestic element of fatherhood was emerging in many writings by men on the woman question. See my “al-Mar’ءa fī al-Islām.”

82. “Tarjamat al-imbiratūr Ghilyūm wa-qarīnatih,” AJ 1:11 (Nov. 30, 1898): 340, 341, 343, 344, 344–47. FS published a near copy in 1922, but the differences are instructive. FS omits the emperor's biography, placing more emphasis on Augusta, and adds to AJ's list of roles “a scholar among scholars and donor to the poor.” Describing the family's daily schedule, FS says that when the children were at their lessons and hubby with his ministers, Augusta “would go back to reading beneficial writings, in literature, philosophy, morals, and music.” Not just a predilection, reading is a habit, part of a daily schedule. FS injects a historical note, writing after World War I: German women “vied to model themselves after her and were the best help to their men in bearing the difficulties that came to Germany.” But FS, like AJ, maintains the linkage between exemplarity and domesticity. “SN: al-Imbiratūra Awghūsta Fiktūriyya,” FS 16:7 (Apr. 15, 1922): 241–43. A 1934 profile also in FS shows similar emphases. After marriage she was “embraced as an exemplar of the excellent wife, the teaching mother, and the wise household organizer.” And “she was not averse to entering the kitchen herself and preparing certain foods and sweets with her own hand for the emperor.” She aimed “to prove to the women of the world that there is nothing so imperative as to take a woman away from her household duties.” It repeats the theme of the “dangerous” servant and offers a telling anecdote: “It is said the servants and cooks went on strike . . . so the empress and her daughters undertook the cooking, performing so well that William said he had never tasted food of such quality or palate.” This biography ends with a homily on female influence as being through “good qualities” rather than—as some women think—“beauty.” And it names these qualities. “SN: Awghūsta Fiktūriyya, zawjat Ghilyūm althānī, imbiratūr Alamānyā al-sābiq,” FS 33:4 (Jan. 1934): 193–95.

83. “Tārīī;kh hayāt Grīī;tā Gārbū (1),” FS 28:7 (Apr. 1934): 369–73; quotations on 369, 370.

84. Baron (Women's Awakening, 157) offers an example of a schedule spelled out by a periodical, al-Sufūr, founded by liberal men to discuss the need to “unveil” society, and not a women's journal, to judge by my perusal and discussion with Muhammad ‘‘Afīī;fīī; (Cairo, 1998).

85. Chakrabarty's analysis of chronological time and schedules as fundamental to an emerging concept of colonial modernity among the Bengali bhadralok could be pursued along different cultural lines for Egypt; at this point I lack textual evidence to do so. On the import of time-space concepts to a regime of modernity in Egypt, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). On regulating time as an element in (and sign of) disciplined domesticity in the colonial context, see Chakrabarty, “The Difference-Deferral,” 378.

86. “SN: Fiktūriyā malikat al-inkilīī;z wa-imbirātūrat al-Hind,” FS 4:9 (June 1910): 321–27; quotation on 327. DM, 442–46.

87. “SN: Fīī;ktūriyā malikat al-inkilīī;z wa-imbirātūrat al-Hind,” FS 16:10 (July 15, 1922): 361–63. That female exemplary biography tended to become more didactic over time is suggested when we contrast the “objective,” uneditorializing style of F's 1892 life of Victoria. “Jalālat Fīī;ktūriyā malikat Injiltirā al-mu‘‘azzama,” F 1:1 (Nov. 20, 1892): 6–7.

88. “SN: Fitūriyā imbirātūrat Alamanyā” FS 15:10 (July 15, 1921): 361–62, 364, 362.

89. Labīī;ba Hāshim, “Wājibāt al-zawja,” AJ 1:1 (Jan. 31, 1898): 24–26.

90. Hasīī;b al-Hakīī;m, “SN: Min al-kūkh ilā al-barlamān: Madām Bawb,” MM 8:3 (March 15, 1927): 117–21.

91. “Ashhar al-nisā‘‘: Lūsīī; Stūn Blākwāl: Za‘‘īmat al-mutālibāt bi-huqūq al-nisā‘‘ fīī; Amīī;rikā (su’ءāl lil-qāri’ءāt fīī; mawdūء qadīī;m),” SB 1:1 (Apr. 1, 1903): 5.

92. “SN: al-Sayyida Zaynab Fawwāz,” FS 1:8 (May 15, 1907): 227–28.

93. “Sahīī;fat al-adab: ‘‘A’ءisha al-Taymūriyya,” H 1:20 (Feb. 6, 1926): 2. This text notes that she occupied herself with “administering the home” and with her children, but also that she wrote articles on girls' education for publication in the press, as well as poetry.

94. Matthews, “Just a Housewife,” 59, speaking of Antoinette Brown Blackwell.

95. Ibid., 72.

96. “SN: ‘‘A’ءisha Taymūr,” FS 17:3 (Dec. 15, 1922): 81.

97. F 1:10 (Feb. 15, 1894): 434.

98. “Al-Fatāt,” F 1:10 (Feb. 15, 1894): 436–46, especially 436. On this article's call for acceptable work for unmarried young women, see chapter 4. But it does support a gendered division of labor as divinely decreed: “As for imposing work on both sexes . . . it is evident from the divine text that men work the land and women have the children; comprised in this female work is the house, everything linked to it, and the hard work that follows from this” (440).

99. In its discussions of domesticity, al-Fatāt offers a clearer class distinction than do later magazines, in which the growing power of domesticity as a representation worked to “efface” class distinctions. After distinguishing “Eastern” from “Western” girls, F argues that Eastern girls of the “lower classes” help parents in the work of the house; “these are the kind of wives men want.” In the middle class, if the mother cannot afford servants, she relies on her daughters. In the upper classes, either girls have “adopted the customs of the Europeans” or retained “the good customs of their ancestors”; or they help their mothers in order to learn, since “girls of the East find no school for home management to teach them what is necessary except the school of the mother.” “Al-Fatāt,” F 1:10 (Feb. 15, 1894): 436–46; quotations on 445. Using idārat al-bayt rather than ‘‘amal al-bayt might signal an elite focalization wherein “management” of servants is assumed.

100. Matthews, “Just a Housewife,” 190.

101. “SN: Mīī;gān Luwīī;d Jūrj,” MM 19:10 (Dec. 1938): 421. The other is Isabel (“bint Ramsay”) MacDonald, praised for assuming domestic responsibility for 10 Downing Street at age twenty. Then her election to the London Council is mentioned. Nasīī;f Mīī;khā’ءīl, “SN: Ishabāl Mākdūnāld tatazawwiju muqāwilan,” MM 19:3/4 (Mar./Apr. 1938): 118–20.

102. She was “one of the most zealous supporters of female emancipation and rights [for women] equal to those of men. In this regard she says women must establish through deeds, not words, that they are worthy to acquire this equality and are not inferior to men in readiness and ability.” “SN: Mīī;gān Luwīī;d Jūrj,” MM 19:10 (Dec. 1938): 421, 421, 422 n.

103. Adelman, Famous Women, “Limitations of Women,” 189–91.

104. Badran, Feminists, chaps. 4 and 11.

105. Rajul hurr, “al-Misriyya,” MM 3:3 (Mar. 1922): 102. The same writer made the equation between the happiness of the family and the nation's success.

106. I thus disagree with Ghada Talhami's claim, for Islamist rhetoric in 1970s–1980s Egypt, that “for the first time what was considered the private realm became open to public debate and polemics.” Ghada Hashem Talhami, The Mobilization of Muslim Women in Egypt (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 145.

107. A series of essays published late in 1914 in The Gentle Sex declared the importance of an affective history of the family to human history.

108. See Baron, Women's Awakening, 158.

109. “Al-Umm wa-al-walad wa-al-madāris: al-Tarbiya al-adabiyya,” SB 2:1 (Nov. 1904): 23.

110. “SN: Al-Sayyida Safīī;na ‘‘Ubayd,” AF 1:1 (Jan. 1926): 6–8. This immediately precedes an article on “the Egyptian woman in ancient times” that offers a rather different role model:

The first Egyptian woman had a virtuous freedom and an honorable liberation. She lived well and sat with men in public ceremonies. People's noble upbringing meant they permitted to outsiders [i.e., non–family members] all that was permitted to relatives. Married couples sat together in their reception rooms to receive and welcome visitors. . . . Herodotus was amazed and pleased by the civilization and advancement he saw there, especially women coming and going just like men, participating equally in work and taking positions, with equal skill. Woman in the era of pharaohs, Persians, and Greeks [in Egypt] had great position and power; she gave birth to the builders of the pyramids and Karnak. . . . She had the widest share of true learning; you would see her at home, the most wonderful wife, mother, organizer, child raiser. O young woman of Egypt, then be persistent in your awakening and follow the way of your ancient Egyptian mother. Perform that which will return to you your initial greatness—and be confident. (9)

111. Baron, Women's Awakening, 157.

112. “Hadīī;th al-Anīs,” AJ 2:6 (June 30, 1899): 240–41. This was not the only mention of servants in AJ's domestic column. See, e.g., “Tadbīī;r al-manzil,” AJ 2:7 (July 31, 1899): 277–80.

113. Ilyās Afandīī; Lutfallāh, “Maqāla fīī; tarbiyat al-banāt,” FS 1:6 (Mar. 15, 1907): 167–69.

114. “Nisā‘‘ al-sharq wa-al-iqtisād,” FS 1:2 (Nov. 15, 1906): 33, 36. The fact that the article discusses sewing a “shirt” rather than the customary gallabiyya suggests the author's (and magazine's) Westernizing outlook.

115. Baron, Women's Awakening, 120.

116. “SN: al-Sayyida Admā Sursuq,” FS 2:7 (Apr. 15, 1908): 243–45.

117. Armstrong, Desire, 27. Armstrong points to the elision of female labor in the conduct book genre in England. The ideal female “labor” was supervision of servants and self-regulation, extended safely into the public sphere as a “benevolent paternalism” toward those victimized most directly by the industrial revolution.

118. Langland, Nobody's Angels, 12.

119. Taken from an essay by American socialist writer Frances Treet [?] in La Clarté [?]. A French woman living in Russia told her husband that if she was going to do the cooking (there was a servant shortage, explained the essay), he could do the washing. “Al-Mar‘‘a al-rūsiyya fīī; al-‘‘asr al-sūfiyīī;tīī;,” MM 3:3 (Mar. 1922): 110–14. The article compared Russian women's acts to the “sickly women's movement,” “sum” of Western European women's efforts (111).

120. “SN: Bāhithat al-Bādiya,” FS 13:3 (Dec. 15, 1918): 81.

121. Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik, “SN: Tārīī;kh al-marhūma Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif,” MM 2:1 (Feb. 1921): 31–36.

122. “SN: Madām dīī; Kātīī;l,” FS 32:6 (Mar. 1938), 221.

123. “SN: al-Amīī;ra Aliksandrah dīī; Afirīī;nuh Fizinūskā,” FS 10:1 (Oct. 1915): 2–3.

124. See Grewal, Home and Harem; Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 233–53; Chakrabarty, “The Difference-Deferral”; Baron, “Mothers”; Beth Baron, “The Making and Breaking of Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, ed. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 275–91. Khalīī;fa emphasizes al-Tahtāwīī;'s contribution to the ideal of companionate marriage, for he stressed the importance of the intellectual bond in marriage (al-Haraka, 21–22).

125. Shajarat al-Durr, “Al-Talāq wa-ta‘‘addud al-zawjāt,” AJ 1:7 (July 31, 1898): 203–6; esp. 206.

126. Chakrabarty, “The Difference-Deferral,” 373, 374.

127. Baron, Women's Awakening, 164–66, and her “The Making and Breaking.”

128. Exclaiming that marriage is more important than “what Mercury is like” or a description of schools of philosophy, which “no one remembers . . . or understands, just a waste of ink on paper,” the writer might be mocking The Selected. “Risālat fādil,” AJ 2:1 (Jan. 31, 1899): 11–13.

129. Only very occasionally does the marriage relationship of a married subject go unremarked, as in al-‘‘Aruūsa's profile of Sarojini Naidu; it says she had married upon her return from England, but nothing more. “‘‘Alam almar‘‘a: Za‘‘īī;ma hindiyya tanzimu balīī;gh al-shi‘‘r bi-al-lugha al-injiliziyya,” AR 70 (June 2, 1926): 6. In another biography the marriage is mentioned in the context of Naidu, a Brahmin, marrying a non-Brahmin and being one of the first to call for “mixed marriages.” “Zahra” [Olivia ‘‘Abd al-Shahīī;d], “SN: Sārūjīī;nīī; Nāyidū,” FS 26:7 (Apr. 1, 1932): 337–40. But it is worth mentioning that as flamboyant Naidu's comings and goings were reported in India, her husband was a “shadowy figure.” See Parama Roy's fascinating analysis of Naidu in Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), chap. 5; on her husband, 143–44.

130. “Aspāsiyā zawjat Biriklīī;s,” JL 11:9 (Mar. 1919): 129. “SN: Asbāsiyā zaw-jat Biriklīī;s,” FS 7:5 (Feb. 15, 1913): 161–63; 161. (This is a copy of DM, 26–28, but it omits a section on Pericles' emotions.)

131. “Sīī;rat SN: al-Sayyida Nafīī;sa al-‘‘Alawiyya,” MI 1:5 (June 1, 1901): 75–76; quotation on 76. DM, 521–24; “SN: al-Sayyida Nafīī;sa al-‘‘Alawiyya,” FS 13:5 (Feb. 15, 1919): 185. FS also speaks of her almsgiving and “boldness for the sake of truth” (186). DM's description of her tomb construction yields mention of another eminent woman, mother of the sultan, who gave money.

132. DM, 256; “SN: Sha‘‘ānīī;n zawjat al-Mutawakkil al-‘‘Abbāsīī;,” FS 23: 9 (June 1929): 450.

133. DM, 255; “SN: Shajarat al-Durr,” FS 7:8 (May 1913): 289.

134. “Awwal khatīī;ba Misriyya,” FS 3:9 (June 1909): 323–35; quotation on 326. In this vein see also “Fīī; sabīī;l inhād al-mar‘‘a: Madhā yuqālu ‘‘an al-mar‘‘a?” MM 4:1 (Jan. 1923): 4–5.

135. “SN: Zaynab ibnat Hudayr,” FS 33:3 (Dec. 1938): 129; DM, 228–29.

136. I am not suggesting that women's magazines ignored men's roles; I have proposed that magazines intent on a female audience tended to confront men's behavior more minutely. As always, the breadth of this field of magazines complicates the picture. But polemics on marriage (authored by both women and men) tended to place more responsibility on women. One example: an essay in FS darkly warns women who are not ready to regard marriage as a sacrifice on their part; its statement that “she must treat him as she wants to be treated” is the only hint that men's behavior is part of the picture. “Wājibāt al-zawja,” FS 1:1 (Oct. 15, 1906): 11–15. The dominant discourse on marriage thus diverges from that on girls' education, in which men's roles (positive and negative) are consistently stressed. Of course, since girls' education was supposed to lead to exemplary adulthoods as wives and mothers, these topics are intertwined.

137. The life of Amīī;na Najīī;b, unusually, refers to the unhappy marriage of a recently deceased and local subject: “We do not speak of her married life; it is known that she was unhappy.” “SN: al-Sayyida Amīī;na Najīī;b fīī; sanat althalāthīī;n (1887–1917),” FS 23:3 (Dec. 1928): 103–5.

138. “SN: Madām dīī; Safinayh,” FS 15:6 (Mar. 15, 1921): 201.

139. [Untitled], H 1:29 (Apr. 10, 1926): 2–3.

140. A twist on this theme is given by the famous “Laylā al-‘‘Afīī;fa” (d. 483 C.E.), who did not want to marry “outside the family” but was reluctant to go against her father's wishes when he betrothed her to the son of a Yemeni ruler. “She guarded herself and took the name of 'the Chaste.'” This story has a happy ending; Laylā married her beloved cousin. The text reproduces a bit of her poetry, but this is mostly a story about men fighting over women. “SN: Laylā al-‘‘Afīī;fa,” FS 7:4 (Jan. 15, 1913): 121–22.

141. Badran, Feminists, 127–28.

142. On condemning child marriages, see Baron, Women's Awakening, 165. These criticisms addressed changes already under way. At least in cities, girls were marrying later (163–64).

143. “SN: Madām Admūn Adām,” FS 15:3 (Dec. 1920): 83.

144. “SN: Dakhtanūs al-Tamīī;miyya,” FS 13:10 (July 15, 1919): 386.

145. “SN: Hind, umm amīī;r al-mu‘‘minīī;n Mu‘‘āwiya. Shā‘‘ira fasīī;ha nabīī;la,” FS 18:4 (Jan. 1924): 2–4; DM, 537–39. Note that FS's title presents Hind as mother and poet, rather than by the more traditional patronymic Fawwāz uses. I am not sure what to make of another biographer of Hind: “She insisted on choosing her own husband, took the wilder one, and had Mu‘‘āwiya; is there not a lesson for our daughters and parents in this?” “Sahīī;fat al-adab,” H 1:20 (Feb. 6, 1926): 3.

146. “Bāb al-tarbiya wa-al-ta‘‘līī;m: Ikhtiyār al-zawj: Tahdhīī;r lil-fatāyāt min al-fityān,” SB 2:9 (June 1906): 245–46. This journal's many features on marriage, tending to offer more specific advice to young women on the brink of marriage than did other magazines, even later ones, is consonant with its “hands-on” approach and woman-centered audience invocation.

147. “Madām dīī; Sayfīī;nay,” JL 7:2 (June 1, 1914): 43, 44, 45. See also “SN: Madām dīī; Sayfīī;nay,” MM 6:4 (Apr. 15, 1925): 186–88.

148. Badran sites this issue in the late 1930s (Feminists, 138) but it was an issue of public discussion earlier. On “mixed” marriage, see, e.g., “Shabābunā wa-banātunā,” MM 3:3 (Mar. 1922): 88–89; “Bāb al-rasā‘‘il: Zawāj ‘‘Alīī; Bek Fahmīī; Kāmil bi-ajnabiyya!” MM 4:4 (Apr. 1923): 208–10 (a letter from T. Hamdīī; and editor's response). It criticized the editor of NN for publicizing this marriage. This could be a criticism of polygyny; the writer says the event “has ended the hopes of his first, Egyptian, wife” (208). It notes the “contradiction” of this article in NN being followed by a “Mudhakkirāt” feature that attacks marriage with foreigners as leading to unhappiness. Articles on alleged national styles of womanhood make the same point. See Shaykh ‘‘Alīī; ‘‘Abd al-Rāziq, “Al-Fatāt al-injilīī;ziyya,” FS 13:3 (Dec. 15, 1918): 129–34.

149. “Al-Misriyyāt fīī; al-tārīī;kh: Misriyya malīī;ka ‘‘alā al-Isrā’ءīliyyīī;n,” MM 13:1/2 (Jan./Feb. 1932): 50–51; quotation on 51.

150. The writer was Michele David [?]; the novel's title is translated as Nihāyat al-safar (End ofthe Voyage) and had come out “this year” (1938). “SN: Mīī;shāl Dāfīī;t,” FS 33:1 (Oct. 1938): 3–4.

151. Nasīī;f Mīī;khā’ءīl, “SN: Ishabāl Mākdūnāld tatazawwiju muqāwilan,” MM 19:3/4 (Mar./Apr. 1938): 118.

152. “SN: Nūr Jahān,” FS 11:7 (Apr. 15, 1917): 281–82.

153. “SN: Turkān Khātūn al-Jalāliyya ibnat Tughfuj Khān, min nasal Farasiyāb al-Turkīī;,” FS 10:4 (Jan. 1916): 121–23. DM's biography of Turkān says her mother handled the negotiations, and makes it clear—as FS does not—that Turkān had the last word (DM, 106–9).

154. This article, unusually for a magazine run by a non-Muslim, attributes the “decline” in women's situation to “one of the principles of the Islamic religion . . . the law of hijāb” (as seclusion), but it does not mention polygyny. “Al-Mar‘‘a fī Misr: Ams wa-al-yawm,” JL 1:2 (Aug. 1908): 37–40; quotations on 38.

155. Jirjis Fīī;lūthānūs ‘‘Awad, “al-Qism al-tārīī;khīī;: al-Mar‘‘a al-misriyya qadīī;man wa-hadīī;than (‘‘awd ‘‘alā bad‘‘),” MM 4:3 (Mar. 1923): 143–46; quota-tion on 144. The writer saw Egypt's peasants as preservers of ancient customs; even in the age of “polygyny's licentiousness” they practiced monogamy to avoid “the conflict that happens among co-wives.” There is no hint here that poverty might have something to do with it. Jirjis Filūthanus ‘‘Awad, “al-Qism al-tārīī;khīī;: al-mar‘‘a al-misriyya qadīī;man wa-Hadithan (‘‘awd ‘‘alā bud‘‘),” MM 4:6 (June 1923): 334–35; quotation on 335. Constructing Egypt's women as models for Greece echoed nationalists' claim that Egypt was the West's “first teacher.”

156. “SN: “Ilīī;sābāt Stāntūn, mu‘‘assisat al-nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya al-amirikiyya,” FS 19:4 (Jan. 15, 1925): 146.

157. “SN: Asbāsiyā zawjat Biriklīī;s,” FS 7:5 (Feb. 15, 1913): 161–63.

158. “SN: Madām Niykur,” FS 16:4 (Jan. 15, 1922): 121, 122. Fawwāz's traditional diction foregrounds Necker's business prowess: “He gave his wife management of his home and properties and she loosened and bound and sold and bought.” DM, 497. But Fawwāz stresses her submersion in her husband's life: “Her husband took her as helper and adviser, and loved her; she deserved his love and esteem because she had made it her life's goal to please him” (496). “It is meet that he grieved and mourned her, for she raised the banner of his glory and lit the pathways of his life with her intelligence, acumen and the loftiness of her refinements” (497).

159. “SN: Ilizābīī;t Flamāriyūn,” FS 19:5 (Feb. 15, 1925): 193–94. Nine years later, a biography takes another path. In the context of Flammarion's work on starting a women's antiwar organization in France, it highlights her opinion that since women do the educating, through a certain kind of tarbiya women can have an influence “that international conferences have not had.” “SN: Madām Flamāriyūn,” FS 28:5 (Feb. 1934): 225.

160. “SN: Sabīī;ha malikat al-Andals,” FS 10:8 (May 1916): 281–85; quotation on 281.

161. “Al-Amīī;ra Sabīī;ha malikat Qurtuba,” H 1:36 (May 29, 1926): 2–3; quotations on 3.

162. “SN: al-Malika Tīī;tīī; Shīī;rīī; hawālīī; 1640–1570 BC,” FS 24:1 (Oct. 1929): 1–9; quotation on 5–6. The biography is authored by “Hātūr” (Hathor).

163. “SN: Madām dīī; Māntinūn,” FS 15:9 (June 15, 1921), 323.

164. The earliest I found was third in the series and unattributed: “Zawjāt al-‘‘uzamā‘‘—3: Zawjat Shiyāng Kay Shak,” MM 19:3/4 (Mar./Apr. 1938): 104–7. See also Abū Kawkab al-Sabāh, “Zawjāt al-‘‘uzamā‘‘: Zawjat Frānklīī;n Rūzafalt,” MM 20:1/2 (Jan./Feb. 1939): 16–19; idem., “Zawjāt al-‘‘uzamā‘‘: Zaw-jat Nifīī;l Shambirlīī;n,” MM 20:7 (Sept. 1939): 282–86; idem., “Zawjāt al‘‘uzamā‘‘: Zawjat Dilādiyeh,” MM 20:8 (Oct. 1939): 334–36; Mu‘‘arrikh, “Zawjāt al-‘‘uzamā‘‘: Zawjat Samuwīī;l Hawr,” MM 20:9 (Nov. 1939): 363–65. A biography of Queen Mary of England published in this period does not place her in this series but in the title calls her “Model of Mothers and Wives” and reiterates her exemplariness in the text. Fā‘‘iza ‘‘Abd al-Hamīī;d Ahmad, “al-Malika Māry al-Barīī;tāniyya: Qudwa lil-ummahāt wa-al-zawjāt,” MM 19:10 (Dec. 1938): 422–23. Reference is made in the biography of Deladier to a biography of Dona Rachel Mussolini in an earlier issue, implied to be by the same author. This is probably not the one published four years earlier: ‘‘. M., “Zawjāt al‘‘uzamā‘‘: Zawjat Mūsūlīī;nīī;: wa-lamha tārīī;khiyya ‘‘anhā wa-‘‘anuh,” MM 16:10 (Dec. 1, 1935): 431–33. It stresses her loyalty to home and family, her focus on child raising and lack of interest in politics. Other essays in these magazines emphasized this behind-the-scenes role, for example in “Markaz al-mar‘‘a,” MM 1:2 (Feb. 1920): 41–43. “No great man arrives in this world unless a great woman has preceded him, who is his mother,” declared the long article “Ta‘‘thīī;r al-mar‘‘a fīī; mabādi‘‘ al-rajul wa-‘‘awātifih” by “Madame Farīī;d Fanjarīī;” (JL 12:7 [Apr. 1920]: 218–21; quotation on 218). The article moves to wives of great men—Gladstone, Sam Houston, Napoleon, Tamerlane, and the Abbasid caliphs.

165. Mu‘‘arrikh, “Zawjāt al-‘‘uzamā‘‘: Zawjat Samuwīī;l Hawr,” MM 20:9 (Nov. 1939): 363–65; quotation on 363.

166. See Ahmed Abdalla, The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt 1923–1973 (London: Al Saqi, 1985), 39–40.

167. Abū Kawkab al-Sabāh, “Zawjāt al-‘‘uzamā‘‘: Zawjat Nifīī;l Shambirlīī;n,” MM 20:7 (Sept. 1939): 282–86; quotations on 284, 285.

168. Abū Kawkab al-Sabāh, “Zawjāt al-‘‘uzamā‘‘: Zawjat Dilādiyeh,” MM 20:8 (Oct. 1939): 334–36; quotation on 335.

169. “SN: Madām Lūdindūrf,” FS 32:7 (Apr. 1938): 385–86, yet another biography foregrounding a husband seeking political advice, “proving his esteem for her level of knowledge.” Like other nationalist-oriented publications in Egypt, FS had no problem celebrating women associated with the Nazi regime, in light of continued British military presence in Egypt. Cf. the 1935 life of “Mussolini's Wife” referred to in note 164.

170. Thanking its readers and funders for a quarter century of support, the magazine's twenty-sixth volume noted that it had tried to serve Arabic letters by publishing on topics that drew readers and “guided young women to perform their household duties in the best possible manner, which will guarantee the happiness of families and the glory of the nation.” A few pages in, “The Misery of Beauty” concluded that physically attractive women's “sufferings” in the workplace “from the envy of female colleagues” could only be ended by marriage to “a young man of good morals.” This was juxtaposed with an article on women's accomplishments in electoral politics in the United States, Europe, and Australia. “Fatāt al-sharq fīī; sanatihā al-sādisa wa-al-‘‘ishrīī;n,” FS 26:1 (Oct. 1931): preceding page 1; “Shaqā‘‘ al-jamāl,” 9–10; “al-Nisā‘‘ wa-al-siyāsa,” 21–27. The issue's biography combined these emphases. Marriage was “a dilemma” for “princesses who naturally incline to seek their hearts' desires,” but Empress Zita (b. 1891) of Austria had been fortunate. A great reader as a child, she found a perfect companionate union in private life and public, a coupling of felicity, politics, and fortitude. It was she who had kept her husband from abdicating. “SN: al-Imbirātūra Zīī;tā,” FS 26:1 (Oct. 1931): 1–6. A profile of Zita two years later takes her life as a widowed refugee in Spain as exemplary of praiseworthy fortitude. “Virtue is not when one sits atop the throne of glory and wealth.” It was her “patience and courage that raised her status among women and put her into the ranks of famous women in whom we take pride and whose deeds we praise.” “SN: Zīī;tā: Imbirātūrat al-Nimsā al-sābiqa,” FS 28:1 (Oct. 1933): 2–3; quotation on 2. Her assumption of domestic tasks and thrift make her exemplary: “You can see the queen every morning going to market, net bag in hand. She buys the bread, meat, and legumes she needs and returns to her kitchen to do the cooking herself. When she has prepared lunch, she moves on to cleaning house, sewing clothes, darning socks, and other women's work. . . . There is no doubt that anyone who sees this fine woman in her kitchen peeling and chopping onions and potatoes, after she once sat on a throne that encompassed beneath its supports a large portion of Europe, cannot but stand humbly before her, bowed in respect” (3).

171. Other biographies articulating the “woman-behind-the-man” motif before the mid-1920s include profiles of Lady Asquith and Lady Roberts in JL (in 1913 and 1915, respectively) and of Josephine, de Maintenon, Necker, and Roland in FS (in 1912, 1921, 1922, and 1922).

172. “Al-Jinirāl Jūfr wa-qarīī;natuh,” JL 7:9 (Mar. 1915): 305–6.

173. In addition to texts I have mentioned, these include in MM profiles of Roland (1925), Zaghlūl (1927, also 1924), Rachel Mussolini (1935), Mrs. Darwin (1930), Empress Waizero of Ethiopia (1936), and—in the mothers-offamous-sons department—Monica, mother of Saint Augustine (1926), and the mother of George Washington (1926), as well as a collective article on mothers of famous men (1924). In other magazines they include two profiles of Zaghlūl in NN (1927) and one in AR (1932); a feature on Shajar al-Durr (H, 1926), one on the mother of Napoleon Bonaparte, described as “Mrs. Charles Bonaparte” (AF, 1926), another on Mussolini (F [NM], 1938), and two collective articles, on “wives of French presidents” (FS, 1931, in two installments), and on women who influence great men (NN, 1927) that mentions Jeanne d'Arc and Safiyya Zaghlūl, “who would be great even if she were not married to [Sa‘‘d] Zaghlūl.” This is in the series by Ibrāhīī;m that included the profile of Zaghlūl analyzed earlier. Muhammad ‘‘Abd al-Fattāh Ibrāhīī;m, “‘‘Azīī;māt al-nisā‘‘ fīī; al-‘‘ālamayni al-sharqīī; wa-al-gharbīī; qadīī;man wa-hadīī;than,” NN 5:50 (Feb. 1927): 62–63. The much larger overall number of biographies in FS than in MM makes the preponderance in the latter of “woman-behind-the-man” texts more striking. Another sign of this focus is that later magazines refer to subjects in the titles of their profiles more often as “wife of” rather than the traditional “daughter of” found in Fawwāz. E.g., “SN: Nā‘‘ila zawjat ‘‘Uthmān b. ‘‘Affān,” FS 13:2 (Nov. 15, 1918): 41–42; DM, 516–18.

174. Al-Zahra, “‘‘Uzamā‘‘ al-rijāl wa-qarīī;nātuhum: Misiz Dārwin,” MM 11:7 (Sept. 15, 1930): 262–65.

175. “SN: Madām Kūrīī;,” F (NM) 1:5 (Nov. 18, 1937): 37–39. Mūsā's first biography (Rachel Mussolini) similarly emphasizes simplicity and hands-on domesticity. “SN: Zawjat al-sinyūr Mūsūlīī;nīī; tut‘‘imu dajājahā biyadihā wa-takhriju ilā al-sūq wa-al-salla mu‘‘allaqa fīī; dhirā‘‘ihā,” F (NM) 1:4 (Nov. 10, 1937): 43–45.

176. Uglow, Continuum Dictionary, 32. This article is said to summarize an article in “one of the big ladies' magazines,” presumably in England. It is fascinating in its emphasis on tarbiya; it is unclear whether this is from the “translated” article. After describing her skill as a political spouse, it calls her the “first woman to gain the approval of all, and no wonder for her tarbiya prepared her to be thus. Her father [Sir Charles Tennant] raised her to be capable at mixing with politicians, writers, and aristocrats; and also how to treat the servants. . . . Her own daughter grew up resembling her, which prophecies a great and glorious future.” Describing her domestic schedule, the sketch exemplifies the elision that characterizes this genre. If it was Margot Tennant's father who raised her appropriately to fulfill her adult role in society, it is she herself who raises the children so that her husband will be free to pursue his public career. “As for the personal life of the Lord in his home, the Lady does not cause him to complain of a single thing. For she arises at eight a.m. and does not retire before one a.m. Not to mention that she concerns herself with the minutiae of her children's upbringing to the extent of not requiring her husband's help in anything. She does not fall short in attending most sessions of Parliament over which her husband exercises responsibility.” Asquith was prime minister from 1908 to 1916; that is, when this appeared. “Imra‘‘a fādila,” JL 6:2 (June 1913): 33–35; see 33, 35 n.

177. “SN: Margharīī;tā malikat Iytaliyā,” FS 20:5 (Feb. 1926): 193–94; quotation on 194.

178. One life of Nāsif mentions her husband's encouragement for her writing and that “other women were proud of her writings, and she obtained fame no other Egyptian in her time achieved. But none of this changed her morals or modesty in the slightest.” Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik, “SN: Tārīī;kh al-marhūma Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif,” MM 2:1 (Feb. 1921): 31–36. See also a biography of Zaynab bt. Muhammad ‘‘Alīī;, who, visiting the poor at home and giving sums to mosques, schools, and hospitals, “helped anonymously because she did not require fame from her work nor did she want thanks for her charity.” “SN: al-Amīī;ra Zaynab,” FS 20:8 (May 1926): 335–36; quotation on 335. But it is refreshing to hear in her case that “none of this distracted from her interest in politics, in which her views were respected; she held an esteemed place in Ottoman court circles” (336). In “SN: Wardat al-‘‘Arab,” F 1:7 (June 1, 1893): 301–5, modesty is a trait of the subject and a quality instilled in her children through her “perfect child rearing.”

179. “SN: al-Malika Margharīī;tā,” MM 7:1 (Jan. 15, 1926): 17–18.

180. “Nisā‘‘ mashāhīī;r al-rijāl: al-Lādy Rūbirts,” JL 7:10 (Apr. 1915): 345–49. This is said to be “arabized with some freedom from the writer on society Beryl Adam.” It would be nice to know what changes were made! Perhaps it is significant that this appeared before the nationwide nationalist activism of 1919. As we have seen, profiles of wives of British politicians appear in MM in the late 1930s, but perhaps all were comfortably far away. I have found no profiles of women who were in Egypt because of their association with the British imperial civil service.

181. “Nisā‘‘ mashāhīī;r al-rijāl: al-Lādy Rūbirts,” JL 7:10 (Apr. 1915): 345–49; quotation on 349.

182. ‘‘Alīī; Muhammad Nadā, “Zawjat al-Najāshīī; 2, mulakhkhassa min kitāb Zawjāt al-‘‘uzamā‘‘,” MM 17:1/2 (Jan./Feb. 1936): 70–73. I have not located this book.

183. “Mamlakat al-mar‘‘a: al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya wa-Jurjīī; Bāz,” SB 3:4 (Jan. 15, 1923): 181–83. This is how the magazine announces a new feature, “Woman's Kingdom,” to “record every deed done for Women's Awakening . . . we want to broadcast the credit due those fine women and men who work to elevate women; we will publish their portraits if feasible. We do this as a means to encourage energetic people.”

184. “SN: Jamīī;la al-Hamdāniyya,” FS 28:10 (July 1934): 505.

185. “Ummahāt al-rijāl al-‘‘izām,” MM 7:8 (Oct. 20, 1926): 447. This was “arabized” by Antūniyūs Bashīī;r; this could mean a relatively straightforward translation or a freer borrowing.

186. DM, 133; “SN: Jurj Sand,” FS 4:6 (Mar. 1910): 201–3; quotation on 203.

187. Kerber, Women, 200.

188. “Wālidāt mashāhīī;r al-rijāl,” MM 5:7 (Sept. 15, 1924): 368–69.

189. “Malikat Isbāniyā,” AJ 1:5 (May 31, 1898): 139.

190. “Al-Mulūk al-mutasābūn: Qudwa lil-abā‘‘ wa-al-ummahāt,” SB 2:7 (May 1906): 185–87. This article adumbrates ideas about fatherhood, too, declaring sovereigns “a model for fathers and mothers”; King Edward played with his grandsons, one of Henri IV's ministers found him on all fours playing horsy with the heir to the throne, and Napoleon “never tired of playing with his one son.” The text thus legislates playfulness as an attribute of exemplary masculinity. It criticizes parents who discipline and train their children solely through commands and threats.

191. E.g., “al-Umm wa-al-walad wa-al-madāris: al-Tarbiya al-adabiyya,” SB 2:1 (Nov. 1904): 23–25.

192. An exception is ‘‘Iffat Sultān's sketch of Alice Ayres; see chapter 6 note 74. It illustrates a common tendency in “Famous Women” texts: when working=class or peasant women are subjects, it is because their acts benefit the nation as defined by a middle-class elite. The best example is Jeanne d'Arc (see chapter 6).

193. Rizqallāh Afandīī; Khawwām, “SN: al-Sayyida Mariyānā Marrāsh,” FS 5:10 (July 15, 1911): 362.

194. Avierino thanked him for his concern and warned readers to heed his warnings, which seems rather ironic in light of her British passport and apparent interest in international renown. “Al-Wataniyya wa-al-mar‘‘a al-‘‘uthmāniyya,” AJ 1:7 (July 31, 1898): 207–11.

195. Jirjis Fīī;lūthānūs ‘‘Awad, “al-Qism al-tārīī;khīī;: al-Mar‘‘a al-misriyya qadīī;man wa-hadīī;than (‘‘awd ‘‘alā bad‘‘),” MM 4:3 (Mar. 1923): 143–46.

196. “SN: Madām dīī; Māntinūn,” FS 15:9 (June 15, 1921), 324–25.

197. Baron says that “the new literature [on child raising, from the late nineteenth century] . . . focused more on the female child than had earlier literature” (Women's Awakening, 159). True, but the focus remained more on the son, or on the girl-child as putative mother. Articles linking motherhood to raising sons are too numerous to list; this cannot be dismissed as use of the “masculine universal” gender as conventional linguistic practice. Hāshim puts it in a nutshell, speaking of women's responsibility for the nation's felicity: “It is she that nourishes the man when he is an infant, rears him when he is young, is his companion when he is an adolescent, guides him when he is an adult, and aids him as an elderly man.” “Muqaddimat al-sana al-thālitha,” FS 3:1 (Oct. 1908): 1–2. Calls for a domestic curriculum were detailed: see an essay by a reader spelling out consequences for the nation. Duriyya Imām Fahmīī;, “Bāb al-tarbiya wa-al-akhlāq: al-Hāja ilā tarbiyat al-banāt wa-mazāyāhā,” MM 4:1 (Jan. 1923): 71–72.

198. Kerber implies that this elision marked the ideology of Republican Motherhood in the immediate postrevolutionary United States, too (Women, 229–31).

199. Ibid., 228; 284–85. Cf. Matthews: “The new valorization of 'home,' 'mother,' and 'wife' had profound consequences for American women. With home seen as the front line of action to produce virtuous citizens, women would need adequate training for their new tasks” (“Just a Housewife,” 21). See also Kerber, Women, chap. 7. Tate (Domestic Allegories, 14) also places “politicized motherhood” at the center of the novels she studies, whether “conservative or liberal.” Kerber notes the “ambivalent discourse” of female education in the early American republic: “On the one hand, republican political theory called for a sensibly educated female citizenry to educate future generations of sensible republicans; on the other, domestic tradition condemned highly educated women as perverse threats to family stability” (Women, 10).

200. “Muqaddimat al-sana al-thālitha,” FS 3:1 (Oct. 1908): 2.

201. Armstrong, Desire, 1.

202. “Al-Amīī;ra Yūliyāna al-Hūlandiyya,” FS 25:2 (Nov. 1930): 66–68.

203. “Hātūr,” “SN: al-Malika Tītīī; Shīī;rīī; hawālīī; 1640–1570 BC,” FS 24:1 (Oct. 1929): 3.

204. “SN: al-Markīī;zah dīī; Rambūyah,” FS 15:4 (Jan 15, 1921): 121. “AlFallāha,” “'Umm' al-biljīī;k,” JL 7:6 (Dec. 1914): 185.

205. The mother's emotional role emerges in a biography of Mary Stuart (1542–87), who, after a “praiseworthy upbringing,” lost her mother at the age of eight: “And she was in the greatest possible need of her supportive affection . . . for she left her very young, not understanding life's affairs.” Muhammad ‘‘Abd al-Karīī;m al-Sahalīī;, “Māry Stūart,” AR 2:58 (Mar. 10, 1926): 6.

206. “SN: Jullanār Hānim aw Mme Olga de Lébédef,” FS 1:7 (Apr. 15, 1907): 197–98; Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, “SN: “Hannā Kasbānīī; Kūrānīī;,” FS 2:10 (July 15, 1908): 362–66; “SN: ‘‘Amra ibnat al-Khansā‘‘,” FS 3:9 (June 1909): 321–22. In the title, poet ‘‘Amra is daughter of her mother, one of Arabic literature's most famous poets. Texts may pointedly mention a subject's mother: see “Sīī;rat SN: ‘‘A’ءisha umm al-mu‘‘minīī;n,” MI 1:2 (Apr. 15, 1901): 26. This was a received practice (Roded, Women, 12) put to new use, as we saw for Sarrūf on Makāriyūs. As Sarrūf's text circulated, the criticism of silence on mothers was repeated.

207. “Sharlūt Barunteh” (Charlotte Bronte), JL 11:6 (Dec. 1918): 81–83; “SN: Misiz Barawnin” (E. Barrett Browning), MM 8:5/6 (May 15, 1927): 260–63. Silence on unsupportive mothers bespeaks fathers' greater ability to act but may also be due to a lack of information on mothers.

208. “SN: Fiktūriyā malikat al-Inkilīī;z wa-imbirātūrat al-Hind,” FS 4:9 (June 1910): 327. DM, 442–46. “SN: Ahmas Nifirtārīī;,” FS 8:7 (Apr. 1914): 245. “SN: Karistiyānā,” FS 29:2 (Nov. 1, 1934): 57–59. “Malikat Isbāniyā,” AJ 1:5 (May 31, 1898): 137–41.

209. “SN: Madām dīī; Sayfinay,” JL 7:2 (June 1, 1914): 41.

210. Matthews, “Just a Housewife,” 89.

211. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “Introduction: 'Mother Worlds,'” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (New York: Routledge, 1993), 18–19; 24, 4–6. Embracing activisms that might or might not be feminist, “maternalism” defines a concept of active public service as opposed to motherhood as a private act grounding the nation from a “protected” (isolated) site.

212. Cf. Kerber:

Searching for a political context in which private female virtues might comfortably coexist with the civic virtue that was widely regarded as the cement of the Republic, [some women] found what they were seeking in the notion of what might be called “Republican Motherhood.” The Republican Mother integrated political values into her domestic life. Dedicated as she was to the nurture of public-spirited male citizens, she guaranteed the steady infusion of virtue into the Republic. . . . This new identity had the advantage of appearing to reconcile politics and domesticity; it justified continued political education and political sensibility. But the role remained a severely limited one. (Women, 11–12)

213. Benedict Anderson's now-classic work on nationalism has been criticized for not attending to this nexus (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. [London: Verso, 1991]). The mutually bracing configuration “home”/“nation” is especially powerful if we couple Anderson's concept of “imagined community” as necessary to “nation” with Armstrong's observation that the space of the household as constituted through the modern discursive genres of the conduct book and domestic fiction became crucial to a notion of community: “By occupying a place in the mind, the household made it possible for masses of diverse individuals to coexist within modern culture” (Armstrong, Desire, 258).

214. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 111–13; Badran, Feminists, 63; Baron, “Mothers.”

215. “Ilā fatayātinā,” NN 1:1 (Aug. 1921): 73.

216. Kerber, Women, 9. Of course, vastly different legal systems and political situations shaped the issue; to suggest its ubiquity is not to propose an elision of historical circumstances!

217. Matthews, “Just a Housewife,” 6–9.

218. Qamar ‘‘Abduh, “Rajulun yusayyi‘‘u ummatahu,” NN 4:1 (Aug. 1924): 2.

219. Muhammad ‘‘Abd al-Fattāh Ibrāhīī;m, “‘‘Azīī;māt al-nisā‘‘ fīī; al-‘‘ālamayni al-sharqīī; wa-al-gharbīī; qadīī;man wa-hadīī;than 3,” NN 5:51 (Mar. 1927): 95–96. NN featured Zaghlūl again after Sa‘‘d's death, with a text from al-Balāgh: “SN: Safiyya Zaghlūl,” NN 5:58 (Oct. 1927), 348–49.

220. ‘‘Abbās Hāfiz, “SN: Safiyya Zaghlūl ka-mathal a‘‘lā lil-zawjāt alwafiyāt,” MM 8:8 (Oct. 1927): 386–89; quotations on 387, 388. Space does not permit me to unpack the rhetoric of this rich text; e.g., use of the ungendered zawj with gendered qualifiers domesticizes the discussion of “heroism.”

221. “Al-Mar‘‘a al-wahīī;da bayna hukkām al-Hind: Sāhibat al-sumuww Bigim awf Bhūpāl,” JL 9:3 (Sept. 1916): 81–84; Dalāl Safadīī;, “al-Anisa Nasra al-Barīī;dīī;,” SR 8:1 (Nov. 30, 1926): 60; ‘‘Abbās Hāfiz, “SN: Safiyya Zaghlūl ka-mathal a‘‘lā lil-zawjāt al-wafiyāt,” MM 8:8 (Oct. 1927): 386–89; Muhammad ‘‘Abd al-Fattāh Ibrāhīī;m, “‘‘Azīī;māt al-nisā‘‘ fīī; al-‘‘ālamayni al-sharqīī; wa-algharbīī; qadīī;man wa-hadīī;than 3,” NN 5:51 (Mar. 1927): 95–96; “SN: Sāhibat al-sumuww Umm al-muhsinīī;n” (attributed to al-Siyāsa), MM 4:8 (Oct. 15, 1923): 434–38; “SN: Umm al-muhsinīī;n sāhibat al-sumuww, al-amīī;ra al-jalīī;la, al-wālida al-mu‘‘azzama,” MM 4:9 (Nov. 15, 1923): 475.

222. Mrs. Hallcelebrated a parallel influence: “In few does the benefit conferred on society shine more conspicuously than in that gentle and amiable queen, mother of Alfred the Great, by whose beneficent attention to the education of her sons, some of the brightest rays of light have been shed on our English literature.” Mrs. Matthew Hall, Lives of the Queens of England before the Norman Conquest (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1859), x–xi.

223. Tawfīī;q Afandīī; Zurayq, “SN: Flūrins Nāyitinkayl,” FS 3:6 (Mar. 1909): 202. This echoes Nightingale's own studied inscription of image within public discourse (Poovey, Uneven Developments, chap. 6). Dalāl Safadīī;, “al-Anisa Nasra al-Barīī;dīī;,” SR 8:1 (Nov. 30, 1926): 60.

224. “Annā Baflūfa 1,” FS 25:6 (Mar. 1931): 281–85; quotations on 283, 284 (by Catherine Eggleston Roberts, arabized and expanded by “al-Zahra”).

225. “Al-Fallāha,” “'Umm' al-biljīī;k,” JL 7:6 (Dec. 1914): 185, 187.

226. “SN: Suwar min risālat al-mar‘‘a fīī; al-hayāt: Sadīī;qat al-masājīī;n: Ilīī;zābīī;t Firāy,” MM 15:3 (Mar. 15, 1934): 118–21. “It may be that patriotism required translation into charity and service before it could be made plausible to the millions of women whose lives were defined by their domestic responsibilities” (Kerber, Women, 111).

227. “Miss Agnes Weston [in Latin letters]: Ajnas Wistūn: Umm albahriyya al-barīī;tāniyya,” JL 9:6 (Dec. 1916): 201–6; quotations on 201, 203, 204.

228. “Al-Mathal al-a‘‘lā lil-mar‘‘a al-sharqiyya al-rāqiyya. Mathal min risālat Udhkurū Sa‘‘dan wa-suhubahu al-mu‘‘taqalīn,” S 2:5 (Mar. 1922): 298–301; quotation on 298.

229. Newton, “'Ministers,'” 145–46.

230. Armstrong, Desire, 42.

231. Chatterjee, “Nationalist Resolution.” Kandiyoti cautions against seeing state regulation of women's public movement as an expansion of the private sphere (“Identity and Its Discontents”). Yet public patriarchy, entailing state regulation, has a part in defining “the private.”

232. I am grateful to Afsaneh Najmabadi and Zachary Lockman for helping me to clarify this.

233. Badran, Feminists, 38.

234. Grewal, Home and Harem, 15, 11, 7.

6. Jeanne D'arc, Egyptian Nationalist

Community, Identity, and Difference

What could be more amazing than a weak girl of sixteen standing alone to save France, raising to the throne a weak king, expelling the English from their fortresses and castles, breathing into the souls of the French the spirit of noble audacity and boldness, and elevating them to the highest rank of nations?

Her education along European lines merely kindled the hatred her heart held toward the European politics that is consummating the East's enslavement. When the British tried to put her in political detention, she disguised herself in a green turban and fled like a Hajji going to Mecca. She appeared on the battlefield to ignite the fire of zeal in the soldiers, as if she were the Turks' Jeanne d'Arc. Halide's boldness opened the Eastern woman's Awakening—that woman who had slept the sleep of slavery for so long.

From Hatshepsut to Safiyya Zaghlūl, from Alexandra Avierino, Marie Antoinette, and Juliet Adam to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sarujini Naidu, and Helen Modjeska, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Betsy Taqlā to Jeanne d'Arc, biographical subjects “East” and “West” are united textually by “love of nation.” Taqlā “took pride in her Easternness and jealously guarded its honor with a fervor that knew no bounds, despite being raised in Europe and in European schools.” She favored appropriating Europe's “good aspects” but criticized those who scorned the heritage of their ancestors. She “detested those who did not work for the watan, and was not afraid to say so.”^[1] If women's work for the watan is biographically inscribed most vociferously in a vigorous domesticity, we have already seen that a different page could be taken out of exemplars “West” and “East.” Recall the profile of Winteringham, British MP, in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine, expressing the hope that “our 'parliamentary dreams' will be realized when Egypt reaps the fruits of its national struggle, so it will have a free legislature like the British Commons, its chairs honored by the seating there of a refined woman from among the daughters of our kind, who are deprived of rights.” Typical in sketching Winteringham as exemplary in her role as a politician working for women's rights and “reform” in education and social policy, this text is unusual among “Famous Women” texts in articulating intersections of political rights, gender politics, and colonialism. “Daughters of our kind” resonates uneasily against the division between English and Egyptian women inherent in the allusion to national rights, as the author cannily exploits the subject's position in the legislature of the colonial power to intimate hope for a particular kind of modeling that centers both on women's aspirations and the nation's—on women's direct participation in a national electoral politics.^[2]

Ironically, putting “nation” first meant celebrating “national” loyalties of Western subjects without attending to their implications for global power relations. Such a silence mirrored women's magazines' self-distancing from “politics.” Yet, as we have seen, biographies articulated or implied political demands and aspirations that magazine editorials often vigorously denied.^[3] And if it was sensitive to use Western role models, especially in the 1920s, at the height of nationalist action in Egypt, in this context they had their uses. If, as Yuval-Davis reminds us, the imperial state situates different national groups differently with respect to the same state,^[4] biographies of women from the imperial center could temporarily erase that difference both on the basis of a class identification between writing women in Egypt and their biographical subjects and because these subjects acted to give legitimacy to the demands of women in Egypt that they be given equal status as citizens. As feminists in Egypt began to demand the vote, in the context of maneuvering over the form constitutional government would take following the British declaration of Egypt's “independence,” biographies highlighted women's political activism elsewhere, forcing it into a nationalist mold.

French Peasants and Others

For a publicly visible Syrian in Egypt like Betsy Taqlā, it was most comfortable to collapse watan and “East,” to define patriotism as pride in “the East.” By way of Jeanne d'Arc, another Syrian, Zaynab Fawwāz, became an example of how biography could serve a notion of “national” community that transcended potentially divisive unities. Reproducing Fawwāz's 1894 biography of Jeanne in 1921, the Beirut magazine al-Mashriq declared:

On the occasion of our College's celebrations to honor Saint Jeanne d'Arc, we thought it fitting to publish this biography by one of the skilled women writers who is a Muslim lady: Zaynab Fawwāz. . . . In this life history we found evidence of its writer's fine taste and judiciousness, as well as her elegant style and fluent expression. This writer . . . comes from both the Syrian and the Egyptian lands: she is Syrian by birth and homeland, Egyptian by upbringing and residence. Both nations have the right to list her among their women writers.^[5]

That a journal which consistently made use of European-language sources chose to feature Jeanne as inscribed by an Arab woman is significant. Al-Mashriq's prefatory words placed the writer in a community of illustrious Arab women and among a supraethnic society of female notables, including Jeanne. That a Christian-run journal in Ottoman Syria chose to run a biography by a Muslim writer of a Christian saint celebrated by a Christian missionary college in Beirut is no less striking for signaling a cross-religious solidarity; the notation that Fawwāz was Muslim is pointed indeed. “Community” along confessional lines was not celebrated in biographical texts; a collective identity based on religious belonging could endanger the primacy of an identity based on loyalty to a territorially defined nation or region. The reminder that Syrian and Egyptian alike could claim Fawwāz emphasized community and solidarity at a time when Egyptian separatist nationalism was on the ascendant. “Famous Women” tended to privilege community (however defined) over division; the genre fostered cross-boundary exemplarity over discrete local or religious identities (even when journals emphasized one identity over another through their choice of bio-graphical subjects), while yoking that exemplarity implicitly to national and Arab regional political imperatives. In this context, famous names like Jeanne's were malleable—whether appropriated or distanced, claimed or used as foil. In a speech in Paris, Majd al-Dīn Hifnī Nāsif (Malak's brother and biographer) honored Hudā Sha‘‘rāwī for her courage in confronting British soldiers. “I will not try to call her the Jeanne d'Arc of Egypt, for to this day Egypt has not had a Jeanne d'Arc; but as she supports the movement with her efforts and money, I call her the Hudā [Guidance] of Egypt.”^[6] That Jeanne, a beatified and then canonized European Christian—a figure who epitomized Frenchness and Christianness—was featured repeatedly in journals by and for Syrian Christian, Egyptian Christian, and Egyptian Muslim women exemplifies the shifting and ambiguous senses of community and identification in the political discourse of the time.^[7] Jeanne was featured in the “Sun of History” series in Magazine of the Women's Awakening, announced as “an excerpt from the history lessons that Professor Shaykh Mukhtār Yūnus delivers to the pupils of the State Secondary Girls' School in Hilmiyya al-Jadīda, Cairo.”^[8] Were schoolgirls caught up in the drama and solemnity of the month's lesson, opening almost in the tones of a Friday mosque sermon?

Some of those whom God created in the image of humankind think Woman unfit for momentous deeds. By your Lord! Those people are prone to error, and mistaken is their vision. Throughout history [Woman] has refuted their view, proving them to be on the wrong track. Here is a fragrant image for you: a short life history of a young woman. Aged men whom earthly life had made senile were incapable of doing what she did. For in 1429 the English set siege to Orleans. A peasant girl came forth to rescue it, one sprouted from the earth of Domrémy. . . . With great effort she won over the hearts of the naive and gained the favor of Charles VII, after he and more than one of his ministers had mocked her. Yet such derision was in line with the “women's awakening” in France at that time.^[9]

Yūnus's two-page biography of Jeanne appeared nine months after Britain announced Egypt's “independence.” Published in a milieu of nationalist, anti-imperialist activism, this “short life history of a young woman” was anything but remote from the struggle to define a nationalist agenda. Jeanne's life as narrated by the shaykh confronted an urgent issue. How must inherited concepts of a gendered and classed division of labor shift if the envisioned nation was to emerge?

Of the hundreds of “Famous Women” profiled in women's magazines in Egypt before 1940, Jeanne d'Arc appeared most frequently of all. Jeanne as biographical subject enjoyed even more space than popular subjects who were closer to home: Safiyya Zaghlūl, Halide Edip, and Nitocris; Khawla bint al-Azwar, Zenobia of ancient Palmyra, Malak Hifnī Nāsif. Jeanne d'Arc took the spotlight more often than any other non-Arab or non-Muslim woman, too. Why Jeanne? Was it simply that Jeanne has been “one of the most resonant and flexible symbols in the whole of human history,” as Keith Thomas has said?^[10]I think it is more. No single response answers the question, Why Jeanne? Rather, a cluster of images brought together suggests that Jeanne's persona, rewritten in Egypt by editors, regular contributors, and readers writing in, could symbolize identities of immediate import to competing agendas and local struggles. Jeanne could represent the anti-imperialist activist, serving a nation in formation; the devout believer, putting personal faith into action on the nation's behalf; the peasant, loyally bracing the national struggle; the young woman, bravely reconciling duty to nation with duty to family. Jeanne's encapsulation of the struggle between divergent loyalties and identities, rather than simply her ability to represent those loyalties, is a key to why Jeanne was such a popular subject. The image of Jeanne could order (if ambiguously) these loyalties in a hierarchy; it could give primacy to one definition of community over another; it might offer a dramatic transcendence of potentially fractured loyalties. My reading of biographical sketches of Jeanne d'Arc published in Egypt 1879–1939 explores how Jeanne fit into local agendas. Positioning her in a protofeminist vision gave way increasingly to her insertion in a liberal nationalist and anti-imperialist agenda that demanded a unificatory narrative of nationalist strength to incorporate and subsume all classes and both genders in the cause. I examine the motifs and rhetoric that constructed a Jeanne suitable for local consumption, emphases that furthered liberal nationalist agendas on the politics of religious identity and gender simultaneously. I look at how the politics of gender and nation intersected with the fact of Jeanne's Westernness: for biographers in Egypt territorialized and domesticated this icon of Western nationalisms, feminisms, and subnational resistances to national hegemonies. As we saw in chapter 5, women's magazines, and biographies within, articulated the domestic as a modern space encapsulating “woman.” But biography tended to pose (upper- and middle-class) women's modernity as a fluid space (to a point) of movement and transference between domestic and public, a point displayed in the figure of Jeanne d'Arc. The Magazine of the Women's Awakening reminded readers monthly of the centrality of domestic space to the nation's fortunes, for on its front cover it carried two banners: “Awaken your women, and your nations will live” and “Nations are made by men, and men by mothers.” A feminine modernity could be proposed as the space between the juxtaposition of the magazine's two epigrams and Yūnus's biography of Jeanne d'Arc. “Every awakening has opponents,” warned Yūnus as he exhorted women to persist. The word “awakening” is gendered feminine; the next sentence offered a double reading. “It/she succeeds through strength of will, by surmounting (with firm persistence and patience) the difficulties obstructing it/her.” Yūnus's finale questioned the ideological and practical boundaries around women's lives. He challenged the precept that women must be defined by the domestic, the private, the secluded (and in assuming this as women's lot he exposed his classed vision: peasant women had never been veiled or secluded). He set a vision of women's place within the teleological notion of progress implied by the rhetoric of “awakening” that grounded the magazine in which he wrote. Modern France had finally recognized Jeanne's import and erected statues of her. “For every nation that diminishes the value of its women brooks speedy ruin.”^[11]

When this biography appeared, it had been thirty years since women in Egypt had begun publishing magazines for female readers and forming new kinds of organizations, from charitable projects to study circles, that allowed intellectual exchange and encouraged the formation of new social networks. But the question of how to site this activity remained vital. So, increasingly, did the issue of what women's political work as citizensubjects of the nation was to be. As Rita Felski reminds us, (European) women activists' appropriations of public space, of roles reserved for men (at least normatively), cannot be ignored as factors in the construction(s) of European modernities.^[12] The same is true of Arab women activists. Three years before this text appeared, women of all classes—aristocrats and early professional women, women of the peasantry and emerging proletariat—had been visible as participants in the nationalist demonstrations of 1919, and magazines celebrated this visibility. Publication of Yūnus's overtly didactic biography of Jeanne d'Arc preceded by five months the founding meeting of the EFU. As a gender-conscious practice of historical study in/on Muslim-majority societies moves beyond a simplistic binarizing of “Western” versus “indigenous” sources for the construction of gender in those societies, it is useful to attend to the “Famous Women” biographies. For they contest such a simple view even as they suggest the importance of class as a modality that represses aspects of (imperialized) experience in the interests of capturing the right to represent local ideals of gendered behavior. Jeanne d'Arc, epitome of Western politico-ideological histories, malleable symbol of how gender might (and might not) inflect contests over the definition of national identities, is one splendid if startling focus for these questions as they were playing out in Egypt. The Egyptian lives of Jeanne d'Arc exemplify the appropriation of a single figure by competing identities and ideological interests, a leitmotif in Jeanne d'Arc's posthumous history in the West.

Most of the twenty biographies I discuss are clustered between 1921 and 1939.^[13] I consider the emergence of Jeanne in Egypt in the context of her contemporaneous image in France and the United States, two likely if not always directly traceable sources on Jeanne for writers in Egypt. For Jeanne's popularity in Arabic not only coincided with a crucial political period in Egypt but also followed on the heels of heightened political exploitation of her image in Europe and the “Joan of Arc vogue” in the United States. In the West, the Jeanne d'Arc rage was fueled by the propaganda needs of World War I; by the immediate postwar efforts of those who wanted the commemoration of Jeanne to become simultaneous—indeed, synomous—with the French nation's celebration of itself; by Jeanne's canonization, conveniently timed in 1920; and by the five hundredth anniversaries of her moment of glory (1429) and her death (1431). The memorials these moments produced provided a culmination to “the cult of Jeanne.” Writing in 1931 on Jeanne's memorialization in stone, Agnes Kendrick Gray enthused not only that she was kept alive in Orleans, Lorraine, and Rouen but also that “she is remembered in the uttermost parts of the earth.”^[14] Gray may not have had Cairo in mind, but in Egypt, biographies of Jeanne from the early 1930s paraded Jeanne's commemorations for local readers, as they had lauded her canonization a decade before (as much in Muslim-edited as in Christian-edited magazines).

To propose a dialectic of local suitability and appropriation of the West as sculptor of these texts, I delineate the construction of Jeanne in Fawwāz's Scattered Pearls and in Nahhās's Fine Woman's Exhibition. They offer grounds for a potentially feminist reading of female heroism as legitimate in, indeed crucial to, public politics and as an act historically grounded and collectively situated. Next, I trace Jeanne's sharpening image as resistance leader, shaped by shifts in the local political scene. Tracing two other facets of her image significant to political discourse at the time—Jeanne as peasant and as young woman—I suggest that feminist readings of Jeanne were shaped by, and then uneasily submerged in, the imperatives of an emerging anticolonialist and postcolonial nationalism that had to clarify the gender boundaries of a nation in formation. I propose that Jeanne as local hero—as a symbol of community—was an ambivalent but appropriate figure for readers' and writers' attention in Egypt. Her image as a performance of femininity raises questions. Could the astounding events of Jeanne's life, constructed in local magazines, be truly domesticated for the consumption of Egypt's growing (if still tiny) population of literate girls and women? Where did Jeanne sit, between an emergent feminist consciousness and nationalist programs that recognized the need for women's symbolic and on-the-ground participation in nation formation but preferred to ignore the implications of this for social organization along patriarchal lines? Where to place Jeanne within a post-1919 organized feminism that wanted to support but not subordinate itself to the nationalist imperative, in a postwar context shaped locally by Wilsonian slogans of self-determination juxtaposed with the quashing of nationalist hopes by Britain, and the popular response thereto? Where did Jeanne belong in the struggle to define a collective identity based on the various aptitudes posed by a pharaonic, early Christian, Muslim, and (much later) Arab nationalist and anti-colonialist heritage? Since the time of Christine de Pizan, Jeanne has been appropriated by Western feminists (in act when not yet in name) as a woman who openly transgressed all the gendered boundaries of her society. Feminists among Jeanne's local biographers gestured toward this image while carefully framing it in locally acceptable terms that sometimes traced and sometimes buried the questions Jeanne's history still bears, and the power it holds. These texts remind us how polyvalent, creative, and local are feminist acts and meanings (even when they appear to be “borrowed”), as they articulate with other agendas and grow out of specific historical moments. Natalie Zemon Davis has argued that in early modern France, images of “disorderly” and “uncommon” women could both solidify and undermine the social status quo, and that “play with the exceptional woman-on-top, the virtuous virago, was . . . a resource for feminist reflection on women's capacities.” Among such figures was Jeanne d'Arc. “By the early eighteenth century,” says Davis, “speculation about virtuous Amazons could be used not only to praise the wise rule of contemporary lawful queens . . . but also to hint at the possibility of a wider role of citizenship for women.”^[15] In Egypt, lives of Jeanne and other “uncommon women” played a similar role, sanctioning nationalist agendas for state construction while encouraging women to think beyond the limits—but not far beyond. And that Jeanne d'Arc was featured in journals run by Copts, Egyptian Muslims, and Syrian Christians (and in a Syrian Muslim's biographical dictionary) suggests the power and mutability of her image as it exemplifies the permeability of ethnic, religious, and political boundaries when it came to writing exemplary lives in Egypt.^[16]

Jeanne in the Canon

In France early in this century, Jeanne powerfully symbolized national identity, securing tropes of purity and exclusivity, of the necessary crystallization of an idea of nation against a defined other. Martha Hanna has shown the pivotal tractability of the symbolic Jeanne in the political contestations of the time, especially in the campaign of the royalist opposition group Action française against the Third Republic.^[17] When, during World War I, this group deferred to the national crisis, Jeanne became a symbol of national resistance and reconciliation—and, ironically, of French-British unity against Germany. Republican propagandist Maurice Barrès vociferously put forth Jeanne as a national heroine who united classes and genders behind the war effort.^[18]

In the United States, it was Jeanne's declaration as “Venerable” in 1894 that sparked “an adulation which lasted for over three decades,” as “American periodicals . . . cause[d] Joan of Arc's name to become a familiar household word.” It may well have been these periodicals from which writers in Egypt obtained their material. For Americans, it was Jeanne's life, her qualities of “courage, truth, purity, gentleness, and beauty,” the romantic possibilities of her image, that popularized her and shaped the presentation of and response to wildly successful treatments like Mary Hartwell Catherwood's fiction “The Days of Jeanne d'Arc,” serialized in 1897 and published in book form immediately thereafter. In a time of crisis, Jeanne appeared on posters exhorting women as citizens and patriots (but not as military leaders): “Joan of Arc Saved France / Women of America / Save Your Country / Buy War Savings Stamps,” said one.^[19] Jeanne as the icon of French resistance in the Great War shaped Cecil B. DeMille's enormously popular film Joan the Woman (1916), starring Geraldine Farrar, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the “Marseillaise” (paralleling the unhesitant tendency of Jeanne biographers in Egypt to exploit anachronisms when politically useful, as we shall see). In the trenches, American soldiers adopted Jeanne as heroine; French and American soldiers together sang “Joan of Arc, They Are Calling You.” For Americans in general, “Joan's romantic, idealistic character took on yet another dimension, that of the great patriot who had fought to drive the enemy from French soil.”^[20] Interest in Jeanne in Egypt coincided with and followed these moments and the outpouring of publications in Europe and North America, scholarly and popular, on the French saint.^[21] Yet the path of cultural translation, of how Jeanne's story traveled to Egypt, remains obscure, for (in the best tradition of Jehannic lore) this was not a path of carefully constructed academic stepping-stones but one of popular-journalistic traversings, of memory, fascination, and romance.

The Earliest Biographies

In Egypt Jeanne's history appeared not only in Fawwāz's Scattered Pearls—the same year Jeanne was declared Venerable—but also in its predecessor, Nahhās's The Fine Woman's Exhibition of Biographies of Famous Women (1879). In the slim sixteen-page prototype that made it into print, at least five closely printed folios were occupied by Jeanne d'Arc.^[22] Recall that the French heroine was a presence from the very inception of the women's press, too. In the opening editorial of The Young Woman, Maryam's daughter Hind Nawfal named Jeanne as one foremother to emulate.^[23]

Fawwāz's life history of Jeanne d'Arc begins with a physical portrait: “Jeanne d'Arc . . . was a French girl who was clear [or: pure] of complexion, slender of build, deep-black of eye, with coal-black hair falling over her shoulders.”^[24] Although we have no evidence to ascertain the historical Jeanne's precise physical features, European iconography had constructed a physical presence that Fawwāz drew upon.^[25] In a culture where upper- and middle-class women's hair was covered, and usually their faces as well (although that was changing among Syrian Christians, like the Nahhās/Nawfal family),^[26] such physicality of description might seem startling. Was the image of femininity displayed meant as a veiled criticism of hijāb (veiling and seclusion)? Or was it to offer an unmistakable marker of the feminine that readers could not ignore? Or were Fawwāz and others simply reproducing European images? Of course, those images displayed bodies from full-figured to Twiggie-like, the hair from short and blonde to long and dark, garb from a no-nonsense tunic and armor to a flowing skirt or a gold-worked gown.^[27] That writers in Egypt invariably chose long, uncovered hair and “pure” white attire for Jeanne might articulate a desire to emphasize the feminine as visible yet, when visible, as incorruptible.

Fawwāz, remember, had referred autobiographically to seclusion's constraining effect in her preface to Scattered Pearls. Possibly she sketched the image of Jeanne's dark tresses as a pointed commentary on the constraints that governed her life and that of other “mistresses of seclusion.” Certainly, Jeanne's physicality, in Fawwāz's words, communicated a publicly visible female presence. Yet it is a cautious visibility: Fawwāz's portrait of Jeanne echoes a terminology and ideal of feminine beauty common in Arabic (male-scripted) belletristic and biographical tradition. More important, for Fawwāz physical features articulate a moral countenance, a metaphorical function in line with premodern Arabic biography writing and with other portraits in Scattered Pearls—as well as with the conventions of Victorian writing in England: “Visible on her comely countenance were qualities of bashfulness and gentle sweetness, while her features gave indication of resolve, aspiration, and self-possession.”^[28] Not only would later biographies of Jeanne reiterate this cluster of characteristics; throughout the “Famous Women” genre, this was the core of the ideal woman: bashful and resolute, sweet and self-possessed, mild and highly ambitious. Such a mix of traits was crucial for the dynamic yet self-effacing female presence that many in Egypt, both women and men, saw as underwriting their vision of national progress. Indeed, this image could be seen to embrace the contradictory faces of modernity for women in Egypt.

Yet Fawwāz's version is not so self-effacing. For the heroine-appropriate characteristics that define Jeanne precede a portrait of dynamism, public performance, and vocality, probing the “bashfulness” of the heroine's demeanor. “How often she mounted her horse and raced ahead competitively when it was not saddled or bridled, out of boldness and chivalry. She was possessed of eloquent speech whose good sense was plain, of deeds based on rectitude, soundness, and utility.”^[29] Fawwāz employs traditional Arabic literary imagery to pose a profile of the active, utterly visible woman who crosses established, socially sanctioned gendered boundaries of behavior (without benefit of saddle or bridle!).

Although, as we have seen, Fawwāz patterned her entries on the rhetorical contours of earlier biographical practice, her use of conventional formulae gestured toward an exemplarity that exceeded the boundaries of accepted gender roles for the old and even the newly emerging urban elites. This was consistent with her essays in the general press, attacking commentaries that misrepresented, to Fawwāz, women's social experience, their abilities, and their needs.

Nahhās, writing earlier, eschewed reliance on medieval Arabic biography's rhetorical contours that allowed Fawwāz, fifteen years later, to highlight women's visibility through the ages and simultaneously to subvert conservative notions of women's place.^[30] What Nahhās chose to elucidate via Jeanne was a women's history of public activism, another kind of visibility crucial to the formation of local feminisms. Packing in names of notable women, she summoned an ongoing collective history of female achievement and evoked the power of famous female lives to motivate young girls: “Jeanne recalled what she had heard about women famous for courage [basāla] and audacious initiative [iqdām] who had saved their countries from destruction, such as the women of Bohemia who had borne arms and defended their homeland's honor.”^[31] Nahhās affirms this sense of linkage two pages later, characterizing Jeanne herself with basāla and iqdām, “through which the French were able to expel the English from the country they had taken over.”^[32] Given credit for the final expulsion of the English years after her death, Jeanne's action and qualities recuperate precisely those of the “women of Bohemia.”

If biographies furthered notions of community as female, crossing boundaries of chronology and culture, increasingly they also defined “community” as national or regional. Evident in the Jeanne d'Arc biographies, this is inseparable from the growing imperative of nationalist anti-imperialist resistance to Great Britain. Privileging the image of the uncompromisingly visible and publicly active woman, Nahhās and Fawwāz set the stage for her inscription as nationalist heroine in later biographies.

Jeanne D'arc in the Nation's Service

Marina Warner dates Jeanne's transformation into a French national heroine as beginning in the sixteenth century, along with her rebirth as “romantic heroine,” removed from the fearsome implications of the previous image of Jeanne as Amazon. Yet it was in the late nineteenth century that she became a “serious political symbol” of unity and national optimism, an embodiment of prevailing European concepts of nationalism.^[33]In Egypt as in France and the United States, in the first decades of the twentieth century Jeanne was coming to represent for some an ideal of national unity, collective vigor based on selfless individual initiative, and community resistance to external aggressors. If in France she stood at the symbolic center of the struggle between monarchism and republicanism, in Egypt she embodied the urgency of a popular response to imperialist force, a response that could (for a time) work with constitutional monarchism. The period of these texts' appearance was that in which the vocabulary of nation and anti-imperialism became so semantically full that popular songs and poetry needed only to allude to a few key words to rouse popular sentiment.

The pre-1919 biographies of Jeanne in Egypt treated the English with relative forbearance. Fawwāz, Nahhās, an 1895 biography in The Crescent, and the 1903 sketch in The Ladies' and Girls' Revue all inclined to dispassionate description of Jeanne's political context.^[34] Even so, traditional metaphors and rhetorical patterns, intermittently punctuating the text, called attention to a context of uneven and implacable struggle. For example, Fawwāz selectively utilized rhymed and rhythmic prose (saj‘‘), a marker of linguistic and literary superiority since before the age of the Qur’ءān's revelation, but one moving out of favor in Fawwāz's adulthood as writers sought more direct means of communication. The sparseness of Fawwāz's saj‘‘gave it added semantic effect, for it highlighted a certain motif: “France was on the edge of a pit of flame, as the English with their wars made her taste humiliating woe mixed with shame.”^[35]The Crescent employed a worn literary conceit, possibly borrowed from a European text; but it took on a fresh resonance when it was “the claws of the English” from which Jeanne had to rescue France.^[36] The 1911 biography in Young Woman of the East proposed a motif popular in later texts: Jeanne's death was a “black stain on the English” that history had preserved.

With the second wave of women's journals, founded in the early 1920s predominantly by Egyptians rather than immigrant Syrians, Jeanne appeared in full nationalist garb, bedecked with dazzling anti-British trimmings. Surely this was a product of both changing times and the changing constitution of the women's press. It may have also articulated feminists' struggle to maintain visibility for the issue of women's place in the context of urgent anti-imperialist activism. Ironically, as we have seen, this was the period when some women and men were rejecting the idea of Western models for Arab women—when Coptic editor Malaka Sa‘‘d rehearsed the strategy of featuring (white) Western women as historically necessary but spelled out changing tactics of biography production in a context of self-justification and assertion against the West. Yet the 1920s saw publication of at least nine biographical sketches of Jeanne, plus numerous references to Arab and Turkish women as “Jeannes d'Arc.” Clearly her credentials were transferable.

The first postwar biography of Jeanne in Egypt appeared in Young Woman of Young Egypt. Founded in April 1921 by Emily ‘‘Abd al-Masīh, also a Copt, the periodical played up cross-religious unity—as its stable of authors, not limited to Copts, confirmed. Its third issue featured “Jeanne d'Arc: Young Woman of Orleans” by Zaynab Sādiq (a Muslim). Here, the diction of imperialist blight was sharper: the English “plunder and pillage.” “Ruin and destruction” spur Jeanne to action. “Zeal” guides Jeanne more than divine voices do, and hamās can have a secular political connotation as much as a religious one. No subtle treatment here of the outcome, either: “[Jeanne] gave the English the worst sort of defeat.”^[37]

This diction prepares the ground for a telling anachronism that first appears in a biography published later that year; for from the 1920s on, repeated anachronisms lace the rhetoric that frames Jeanne's life. In the Magazine of the Women's Awakening, it is not the English but the British army that Jeanne faces! But there were no “British” until nearly three centuries after Jeanne. This usage becomes even more conspicuous for its siting in a traditional metaphor heard in The Crescent's biography of a quarter century earlier: “That girl it was,” says Mustafā Bahīī;j, “who rescued France (her dear homeland) from the claws of the powerful British army. It was practically trampling her country underfoot with its horses' hooves,^[38] and piercing city walls with the force of its projectiles and strength of assault.” When Bahīī;j says Jeanne went to the Dauphin “after crossing 150 leagues . . . through regions crammed with the dabābāt of the English and surrounded by trickery and frightening things,” it is tempting in light of his evocation of “the British army” to read dabābāt not as medieval catapults but as a modern semantic reincarnation: tanks.^[39] That resistance to the English touched the lives of the populace in 1919—and that Egyptian women died confronting them—surely enhanced Jeanne's salience as nationalist icon.

Biographies of the 1920s modify and embellish earlier motifs. Yūnus's “History Lesson” (1922), quoted earlier, echoed Bahīī;j on the English, even though otherwise the two biographies were very different. Yūnus went one step further, referring to “the settler-colonialists” from whom Jeanne freed Orleans.^[40] In 1925 a biography in the secular nationalist Egyptian Woman's Magazine yoked Bahīī;j's diction to Yūnus's: “She had to cross 150 leagues through regions packed with the settler-colonialist English and surrounded by trickery and dangers.” This text reinforces the equation of “English” and “colonialist” by incorporating anti-imperialist rhetoric prevalent at the time in Egypt in popular speeches, poems, and songs. Charles VII asks Jeanne: “How can I part from the one who has saved France from capture, slavery, and servitude?”^[41]

These texts articulate Jeanne's iconic utility through the interlaced and shifting lexicon of nation, community, religious belief, and imperialism, side by side with an unhesitant deployment of anachronism juxtaposed with imagery and rhetorical patterning familiar to a turn-of-the-century educated Arabic speaker. Perhaps writers were taking a page out of French artist Maurice Boutet de Monvel's beloved, widely known 1896 children's biography of Jeanne. On the title page, “the Maid, in medieval armor, leads eager French riflemen dressed in the uniforms of 1896. Presumably she is leading them to a victory, one that perhaps will help the nation forget [its] defeat . . . in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. The battles listed on the standard . . . are those of Napoleon's pre-Waterloo triumphs. . . . de Monvel's pictures may depict the fifteenth century, but his writing is infused with the nationalistic fervor of the 1890s.”^[42]

For neither in France nor in Egypt was Jeanne's depiction unmediated by contemporary political events. Descriptions of fifteenth-century France seemed highly appropriate to Egyptian politics of the 1920s and 1930s.^[43]Indeed, it is difficult not to see the political turmoil of early-twentiethcentury Egypt in these biographies—not just in the characterization of the “rapacious enemy” but also in a representation of domestic politics.^[44] Charles VII is portrayed as weak and as “living a life of degradation and apathy in his court, surrounded by a retinue with no concern but food and drink. It never occurred to them to think about France as it was perishing, and suffering the evil of punishment.”^[45] If this echoed the image of Charles VII dominant in European Jeanne legends, it is easily read as an acceptably veiled comment on the internal politics of resistance in Egypt. Disaffection with Egypt's Sultan (later King) Fu’ءād I had been openly expressed in 1919 through colloquial poetry. Through the 1920s the same attitude obtained. “Fu’ءād's failure to assume a strong nationalist stance in the face of British control (as well as his propensity for good living à la européene) had made him an object of scornful indifference to much of the local populace, and a source of despair to the nationalist leadership.” Perhaps a brighter icon was needed, and perhaps Jeanne suggested one. A 1928 biography in The Women's Awakening opens with Jeanne's legacy to French national/ist pride: “She is the young woman who raised the head of the French high in the sky of glory.”^[46]

Nation and Homeland

As these texts articulated an anti-imperialist stance with growing precision and fierceness, they show how the term watan was shifting unevenly from meaning “homeland” to signifying “nation,” and they also show the complex interplay of timing and magazine identity in the deployment of rhetoric. Rifā‘‘a al-Tahtāwīī; (1801–73), incontestably the most influential mid-nineteenth-century thinker, writer, translator, and educator for the next generations of reform-minded Egyptians, had used watan both as a vague marker of common identity and more concretely to refer to a political entity that would generate patriotic feelings among a territorially defined populace, now conceived as active, responsible political subjects.^[47] Moreover, “this natural community . . . [was] Egyptian and not Arab.” Early in the new century, as Britain declared it impossible that Egypt ever be an independent entity, watan came to signify activist nationalist patriotism and resistance to a seemingly immovable European presence both political and financial.^[48] As in political tracts, in the Jeanne texts watan shifted from meaning “homeland” or “place of birth” to signifying “nation.” While this echoed the ambiguous meaning of the French pays and the geographic complexity of Jeanne's movements,^[49] it also spoke to shifting loyalties and ideologies in Egypt.

For Nahhās, watan signaled a prenationalist sense of “homeland,” but her usage hinted at the term's shifting application—and the very flux in the idea of “nation” itself. Jeanne's “heart broke even more when the English reached the environs of her birthplace [watan].” Although Nahhās labels the whole of France with the plural awtān (homelands or regions), the Bohemian women who “defend the watan's honor” adduce a territorially and spiritually encompassing “homeland,” a politicized one. Watan's spiritual fullness emerges when Nahhās juxtaposes it with bilād, physical territory the English had seized, which is used consistently at this time, and in the later women's magazines, as a more neutral term. The Bohemian women's heroism resounds in a shifting second-person address as Nahhās links her invoked audience to Jeanne: “Tell, O Jeanne, do you die hands fettered, after your sword was at the enemy's head? . . . O virgins, do you mourn on all counts a girl who dies for love of her watan? She readied the victor's wreath for it, but it pretended not to notice her and willfully neglected to rescue her from destruction.”^[50]

In 1903 the Ladies' and Girls' Revue was labeling France a single watan. The title advertised “a young woman who rescued her watan through war”; the English laid siege to “[Jeanne's] watan France”; and she prayed tearfully after hearing of the English victory over “her watan.” A telling detail buttressed this usage: it was not Jeanne's own standard that she carried into battle (as historically attested), but rather “the flag of France.”^[51]For Young Woman of the East in the next decade, the newer sense of watan was taken for granted: Jeanne at her rehabilitation trial “was said to have been a martyr to her religion, her watan and her sovereign.”^[52] Yet the older, localized meaning had not disappeared: after the crowning at Rheims, Jeanne intended to return to her watan (homeland, place of birth).

With the refinement of a specifically Egyptian cultural nationalism diffused through the media, the Jeanne biographies of the 1920s articulate watan as collective homeland and nation, overwhelming the localized meaning. Fawwāz had referred neutrally to French lands as bilād, but al-Mashriq's 1921 introduction, as it reproduced her life of Jeanne, noted that Fawwāz herself could be claimed by the two watans, Syria and Egypt.^[53] In Young Woman of Young Egypt (1921), Jeanne's voices tell her, “Rise, O Jeanne, rescue your watan and crown the heir-apparent of France king over your bilād.”^[54] If bilād and watan appeared synonymous, watan bore the emotional and symbolic weight, as that which the people must “rescue.” The imagery of teleological nationalism supplemented this sense: Jeanne tells Charles she is meant not only to expel the English but also to “raise France to the highest levels of glory and power.”^[55] As this echoes Jeanne's reported speech, it encapsulates a slogan of nationalist discourse in 1920s Egypt.

Bahīī;j's biography, also in 1921, labeled France Jeanne's “dear watan.”^[56] But more pervasive was its use of umma as “national community,” people as distinct from the state—for Jeanne d'Arc was “that courageous woman whose government and national community have mounted national/patriotic festivities one after another, to immortalize her memory and acknowledge her excellence and courage.” The recent celebration in Rheims, said the writer, was “a meeting point for government and national community” (hukuūma wa-umma), reprising nationalist leaders' theoretical and practical concern with the relationship between ruler and ruled. For Yūnus, months later, the umma was central, too: “For every umma that diminishes the value of its women brooks speedy ruin. . . . The strong ummas are not so: they allow women their share in life and recognize them as the umma's foundation, epitome and sign of its glory.”^[57]

But the use of umma might signal that the terms of national community were still contested. In a journal that proclaimed the primacy of the nation yet also the preeminence of Islam as communal structure and identity, the term's signification was complex. It had long implied “the Muslim umma,” the totality of the prophet Muhammad's community through history. Yet writers had begun to use umma to signify “any group of people bound together by some tie.”^[58] It was coming to mean the community of the nation. That Bahīī;j and Yūnus, writing in the Muslim-identified Magazine of the Women's Awakening, use umma repeatedly instead of watan might suggest that umma could better incorporate a useful ambiguity.

The Egyptian Woman's Magazine made watan dominant, consonant with the outlook of a periodical whose title proclaimed a nation-oriented sense of identity and community consonant with its editor's Coptic background.^[59] Jeanne epitomizes patriotic nationalism: “Jeanne felt a love of the watan; she sensed the blood of wataniyya running in her veins.” Wataniyya's target is clear: it is in this text that Jeanne crosses “territories packed with the imperialist English.”^[60] The rhetoric builds to a climax in the best tradition of nationalistic fireworks. Protesting that “the pen is utterly incapable of describing an innocent girl burning for the sake of her watan and bilād,” the biographer elicits a general lesson: “Jeanne stood before the fires, imploring her tortured bilād, urging the men to be patient and continue their sanctified struggle [jihad]. 'There is no human,' she said, 'not even an animal so remiss in what he owes his country [bilād] that he prepares the way for its enemies to possess it—unless he is an inani-mate being with no heart, no emotional being.'”^[61]National struggle against a “possessing” enemy is now the very mark of sentient being.

That watan and al-wataniyya had become unambiguous and pervasive terms by the 1930s is implied in the title of a 1937 biography in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine, where the motif took precedence over the subject's identity: “The Greatness of True Patriotism, or Jeanne d'Arc.”^[62] And then, for a 1952 biography in Munīī;ra Thābit's fiery Hope at a tense historical juncture, if the anti-imperialist imperative had become so forceful as to practically silence the diction of nationalism, watan emerged in the banner Jeanne raised in the Rheims cathedral. The fluttering symbol of nationhood was so powerful for Egyptians in 1952 that, again, the anachronism of referring to a French national flag in 1429 went unremarked.

Faith, the Nation, and a Tragic End

If the Egyptian Woman's Magazine identified with a brand of nationalism not defined by a specific religious identity, that did not mean the divine could not be invoked. In the West, Jeanne had become more a secular than a religious symbol by this time, infused with the romantic conception of nature as defining goodness and conferring grace.^[63] This may have been as true for the religious establishment as for the proponents of a romantic nationalism; scholars have suggested that Jeanne was canonized in 1920 “not for her visions or her exploits in the name of the faith but for her exemplary life.”^[64] Moreover, in the context of post-Enlightenment rationalism in Europe, the character of Jeanne's “voices” was problematic—were they of divine, external provenance, or were they the product of Jeanne's inner imaginings? Finally, Jeanne's story posed a challenge to religiously defined authoritarianism because by highlighting the role of the French bishopric in Jeanne's trial and execution writers could attack the established Church as a bigoted, reactionary force in French history and could highlight its class interests against those of the bourgeoisie and peasantry. In many European treatments, Jeanne's own religiosity was subsumed in her usefulness as a populist, anticlerical symbol. That post-Enlightenment commentators could not appreciate the miraculous power of Jeanne's presence was recognized by a French participant in Egypt's educational system. When Mlle A. Couvreur spoke on women's history to the extracurricular women's lecture series at the Egyptian University in 1910, she devoted an entire lecture to Jeanne d'Arc. She emphasized the social role of faith in Jeanne's success; had Jeanne emerged “today,” with its rationalist outlook, she would not have found the same response.^[65]

Thus, to highlight Jeanne as a religious icon posed something of a departure from contemporary Western iconography.^[66] But for writers in Egypt, to explain Jeanne's mission as a divine one suited a milieu in which obedience was unquestioningly a matter of submission to divine law. Of even greater salience was the notion of religiosity as providing an unassailable sanction and source of energy for nationalist action. Adāb alfatāt's 1926 life of Jeanne confirmed the bond between divine sanction and nation, repeating the imagery of blood/patriotism conflated: “God foreordained a girl in whose veins the blood of patriotism ran hotly.”^[67] This anchors the finale's call to arms: “Truly the way of God is the way of the nation. Whosoever dies for the sake of the nation indeed has died in the way of God.”^[68]

While earlier biographies in Egypt had spoken of Jeanne's mission as divinely appointed, it was in the early 1920s that the bond between God and nation was firmest: “In her heart she bore unflagging faith and firmness. She strove for the nation's sake until God inscribed a mighty victory for her and she scattered her enemies completely.”^[69] A dramatic finale to this biography invoked that cross-culturally captivating image of Jeanne as heroine of the oppressed:

God knows she was innocent . . . but what does the weak, wronged one do before tyrannical powers? . . . How fervid the moan of the wronged, innocent ones, as it ascends to the heavens to affirm the glory of the soul, the greatness of the spirit. It inscribes an everlasting document, witness to humanity's wrongdoing, its tyranny to and enslavement of weak brothers. . . . The sharp curses the weak bring down on the tyrannical strong are the sole power in the hands of the weak. O that the tyrannical oppressor listen to the moan of the anxious, to the wail of the wronged! When the fires rose, Jeanne entered. She began to murmur, to say unintelligible things, to supplicate her tortured nation with an agony that made her harsh, hardhearted enemies weep.^[70]

The text cables the sanction of the divine to the moral inevitability of the triumph of the weak. In the context of hopes wrought locally by Woodrow Wilson's postwar declaration of the right of self-determination, nationright was literally sacred.

For liberal nationalist thinkers in Egypt, “secularity” presumed that individuals had a religious identity and a sense of community based on religion, but that such a sense could be subordinated to identity as a member of a territorially defined nation. This view presumed the coexistence of different religions under a single deity—and under a single state. A 1908 poem in Young Woman of the East invoked Jeanne to warn against letting religion split the nation: “Leave religion to the temples and make the principle of nationalism the focus of your eyes.”^[71] Yet as Irène Fenoglio-Abd el Aal has noted, religion was assumed unquestioningly as the grounding not only of the ethical domain but also of nationalism in (some) 1920s Egyptian women's magazines. For the Magazine of the Women's Awakening, this was an Islamic grounding; for the Egyptian Woman's Magazine, it was a “more discreet,” unspecified religious basis.^[72] In either case, writers in Egypt accepted without question that Jeanne took her cues from divinely inspired visions. For it was convenient indeed that divine sanction could legitimate both nationalist struggle and women's visible participation therein. Perhaps ironically, Jeanne as nationalist icon became if anything more appropriate, as an Islamic orientation contested the ethos of secular territorialist nationalism in the 1930s.

What message might Jeanne's tragic end, not at all muted in these biographies, offer to young women in Egypt? That they must ultimately sacrifice their own interests to those of the nation elided the question of what their own interests might be. Jeanne's individuality and her anguish disappear beneath the glory of her sacrifice, as she supplicates not God but her “tortured nation.” Putting community above self was a goal to be constantly borne in mind, and the confluence of national need and religious obligation emerged in a diction whose religious overtones could hardly be overlooked: “Is there anything more awesome than sacrifice!—the sacrifice of evanescent matter for the sake of the eternal nation's pleasing prosperity?”^[73] In these biographies, Jeanne is sacrificed not because she is a female out of bounds but because she is a successful anti-imperialist who awakens her “nation” to action yet must suffer for it.

If Jeanne's image(s) encapsulated unresolved tensions between individual and community identity, between definitions of proper gendered comportment and ideas about national duty that marked liberatory discourses of the time, there was another crucial element to her embodiment of the nation for readers in Egypt. As we have seen, the subject of the “Famous Women” genre was almost invariably aristocratic, wealthy, or middleclass. These were the women whose lives were to be emulated, just as these were the readers that magazine editors envisioned. But the Jeanne biographies, taking a potent symbol of national strength as their focus, had to take account of a world beyond that of an emerging national(ist) bourgeoisie. They did so in terms that harnessed that world to an Egyptian liberal (bourgeois) nationalist program.

Class and Nation: the Peasant As Nationalist Icon

If class was generally unspoken as a marker of ideal womanhood in the “Famous Women” texts, it was nonetheless articulated in the choice of biographical subjects and the life pattern constructed as that of the “ideal woman,” as it was in the emplacement of the figure of the servant within the discourse of domesticity. Of course, as middle-class women began to populate the professional working stratum in the early twentieth century, biographies of middle-class Egyptian women became more numerous in magazines catering to them, while European middle-class women notable for public and especially intellectual achievements, or alternatively (or simultaneously!) for their woman-behind-the-man roles, had been profiled all along. Women outside this socioeconomic range rarely appeared. The image of the ideal female citizen was constructed on a bourgeois ideal of national unity. When the rare working-class woman did appear, almost invariably the motif of individual effort on behalf of the nation framed her. This gave the subject significance, whether Haylāna ‘‘Abd al-Malik, self-made Egyptian merchant, Alice Ayres, servant in an English household, or Adelheid Popp. Service to the nation allowed her to be a subject.^[74] And it narrowed the gap between her and her upper-class compatriots, who are portrayed, as I have said, “teaching” peasants, villagers, and tenants. Halide Edip used to ride a horse through the front ranks of the Turkish army, encouraging the soldiers, says the biography that calls her “Jeanne d'Arc of the Turks”; “then, returning from the battle lines, she would mix with the village women, delivering educational and patriotic homilies to them.”^[75]

Warner claims that one element of Jeanne d'Arc's iconic affinity was that she was “above” class. She exemplified prophecy as “a career open to talents” and, as peasant, she fit the revolutionary ideal of nobility conferred by merit rather than by birth.^[76] And by the late nineteenth century, in the embrace of romantic nationalism in Europe, the child-peasant overshadowed other available images of Jeanne.^[77] But in the Egyptian context Jeanne's utility was not so much in occluding class as in incorporating it into a nationalist ideology, not quite the same thing. Jeanne offered an impeccable representation of the peasant as pillar of the nation. If the image was borrowed, that did not mute its resonance on the Egyptian scene.

Jeanne's village origins are not dwelled upon in the earliest biographies from Egypt.^[78] It is the flood of biographies in the 1920s that celebrate Jeanne as peasant—biographies that appear in Egyptian-run magazines, at a time when Egyptian nationalism was heavily imbued with a “salt-of-the-earth” romanticism. They are the same biographies, by and large, that highlight resistance to “the British” as colonizers. Yūnus, writing in 1922, is the first to label Jeanne a fatāt fallāha, a “peasant girl, grown from the earth of Domrémy, fleeing from her father the shepherd.”^[79] This precedent occurs in a narrative that explicitly exemplifies a “universal” lesson—historically attested, teleologically inevitable, the author suggests—about ignoring women's abilities: “This fine woman was burned in the Rouen marketplace. About fifty years later people realized her worth, and filled the French air with statues of her. For people had come to understand woman's status, to comprehend that she might surpass man. Perhaps a woman could even lead men. For every nation that diminishes the value of its women brooks speedy ruin.”^[80] As we have seen, Yūnus ties this in to the fortunes of the nation. That the label of “peasant” first occurs here signals the urgency of representing the peasant as well as the female in such a way as to foster the formation of an ethos of national, “classless” unity.

Jeanne's childhood provides a narrative of pastoral that romanticized the peasantry in line with the prevailing liberal nationalist discourse. For the Egyptian Woman's Magazine in 1925, “[Jeanne's] childhood was naive and pure, as is the case for offspring of herdsmen who know nothing of this life but fresh air, light, freedom, and their songs, which they chant standing next to their quiet livestock.”^[81] Jeanne's family did indeed make a living from its own livestock. The family was not wealthy, but it had a solid economic base, and Jeanne's father may have held official posts in Domrémy.^[82] He was hardly the “herdsman” of these sketches, perhaps the reflection of an urban, nationalist bourgeois perception of rural society.^[83]The unsullied goodness of the Ideal Peasant is yoked to the “true national sentiment” Jeanne embodies.^[84]

That the stalwart, close-to-nature peasant and the courageous nationalist leader could merge in one figure on horseback accentuated the trope of the fallāh(a) as backbone of the nation. This was an image dear to the hearts of many nationalist intellectuals, often urbanites who looked back nostalgically to rural roots. For nationalists, the peasant was the natural heir to ancient Egypt's perfection; if Egypt was to have its own literature, the peasant must be at its center. Muhammad Haykal (1888–1956), from a prominent, well-off, urbanized family that of course retained its rural landowning base, gave himself the pseudonym “An Egyptian Fallāh” when he published his novel Zaynab: Manāzir wa-akhlāq rīfiyya (Zaynab: Rural Scenes and Morals) in 1913.^[85] This classic of romantic nationalism constructed the peasant strikingly in the title character. Zaynab is victim both of constraints imposed on females in her milieu and of class-based injustice. Perhaps the trod-upon Zaynab could metamorphose into a positive heroine in the figure of Jeanne d'Arc, an image more akin to the heroic fallāha-as-Egypt works of the sculptor and national hero Mahmūd Mukhtār (1891–1934). At the same time, Jeanne was helpfully distant. Celebrating her peasant origins did not require attending to the conditions of life peasants in Egypt endured.

Just as in France Jeanne could come to represent the nation, in Egypt she could represent the perfect nationalist product of a concern with “uplifting” the peasant and “training” women—all for the betterment of the nation. She could stand at the intersection of nationalist and feminist concerns—for, as Badran notes, the peasant woman symbolized the freedom of both the nation and women for early feminists.^[86] Jeanne could designate individual initiative, the primacy of national duty and the incorporation of religious loyalties therein, the necessity of sacrifice for the nation, and the virtue of the rural populace. For Zaynab Sādiq, writing in Young Woman of Young Egypt in 1921, Jeanne “grew up in that pure village life goodhearted, sweet and gentle to others, possessed of devoutness and zeal.” This notion of the purity of village life as formative underlies the portrait; it precedes all else. If the word “peasant” is absent, an attitude toward class and family origin emerges in the next sentence's grammatical structure: “She was of poor parents; yet she was characterized by refinement and bashfulness” (my emphasis). For Sādiq these markers of a good upbringing signaled social origins that Jeanne did not have; yet Jeanne conformed to the signal qualities of the good (middle- to upper-class) woman. Simultaneously, a consciousness of class as defining social experience sets this text apart from the earlier biographies, for “because of her social status [Jeanne] was afraid that people would mock her and scorn her thoughts.”^[87]

For Young Woman of Young Egypt, Jeanne as savior of her watan was equally an exemplar of female self-sacrifice.^[88] If Jeanne embodied Egyptian nationalist ideals effectively, in the terms of local gender politics she could be constructed as unthreatening. Her assumption of a “male” role could be glossed as anomalous even as it underlined the lengths to which the loyal “citizen,” male or female, might go in the interests of the nation. Jeanne's femaleness featured prominently in these texts. It made her exemplary. But it was not necessarily Jeanne as public figure alone that was to be emulated. The same biographies that emphasized Jeanne's peasant origins and privileged the diction of anti-imperialist nationalism tended to feature the domestic, nurturing Jeanne. For an active public woman must return to the hearth. The domestic had to frame the rest—even if highlighting women's other pursuits implicitly questioned motherhood and home management as privileged or all-consuming identities.

The Family: Nationalist Father, Nurturing Mother

As we have seen, the “Famous Women” biographies continually construct images of family and parental roles as central to the self-fulfillment and sense of duty (familial/national) of the ideal modern woman. The family grouping presented in biography is insistently nuclear, consonant with liberal nationalist analyses of how women as the core of a well-defined family unit were to advance national development. It was not only the “Famous Woman” who provided the model but also her parents. The Jeanne biographies were no exception.

Recall that the ideal father for a “Famous Women” was that ubiquitous figure in liberal male nationalist discourse of the time, the supportive liberal father who actively sought his daughter's education. The villain was the one who resisted, vocally and by erecting obstacles to his daughter's professional desires. Jacques d'Arc, an ambiguous enough figure in “Jehannic studies,” is not a neutral figure in these texts. By and large he appears as villain: an obstacle to Jeanne's desires, he is also a foil that highlights her determination. For Fawwāz, Jeanne's “father showed her harshness and violence to the point where she would flee”—an echo of Fawwāz's attacks on the treatment of girls in her essays in the press.^[89] For The Morning, Jacques's alleged bad treatment contrasted with Jeanne's goodness. When Jeanne's father heard she was having visions, “he beat her until she was forced to flee, to work as a servant with a widow who owned a hostel. There she appeared an exemplar of the chaste, active, serious girl.”^[90]

By the mid-1930s, though, the family rather than just the father takes center stage. An ideal image of the nuclear family—complete with a clearly defined gendered division of labor—permeates a 1938 biography in The Festival: “It was her three brothers who helped her father in tilling the soil and tending the livestock. As for Jeanne and her sisters, they took care of the housework, mended the clothes, did needlework, and so forth.”^[91]Here, the ideal domestic female subsumes the ideal peasant girl, out tending her family's flocks. Within this image of the nuclear family, Jeanne's father appears as a goodhearted man who cared for his children, who opposed Jeanne out of concern rather than fixed ideas of a girl's place.

Recall, too, that in the “Famous Women” texts collectively, mothers—both mothers of biographical subjects and subjects themselves—get plaudits as conscientious parents for whom motherhood (“training” the offspring) is central. Yet, consciously or not, such mothers prepared daughters for more than one kind of work and more than one avenue to selffulfillment. The power of the image of the educating mother emerges in The Festival's biography of Jeanne. Having disposed of the father, the author declares: “His wife Isabella cared for [the children] and taught them how to read and write.”^[92] The specificity of this description, its consonance with liberal nationalist views of women's role as educators of future nationalists (and also with the programs of early feminists), stands out against Jeanne's known history. While by the end of her life she was able to sign her name, she probably had at most only “some rudimentary writing ability.” And her mother was almost certainly illiterate.^[93]

After the Battle: The Heroine as Homebody

Jeanne's insertion into the domestic follows a dominant rhetorical practice in the “Famous Women” genre, the construction of domesticity as the anchor of female existence, but an anchor with many ropes. Through the 1930s the perfect nationalist woman as portrayed in biography combines informed domesticity with work outside the home constructed as unthreatening to a strictly gendered division of labor. Most (but not all) types of work approvingly portrayed (charity work, teaching, writing) also presume a certain class identity by assuming achievable levels of education, leisure, and income. We have seen that these texts also celebrate full-time wives and mothers of nationalists. But I have argued that these portraits are subject to competing interpretations. Putting domesticity at the core made it possible to argue for other lives.

The Jeanne texts demonstrate how biography could convey an ambiguous message to Egyptian schoolgirls, for Jeanne's life fit uncomfortably at best into a narrative of domesticity and clearly defined gender roles. Jeanne's apparent rejection of a domestic life (through her acts if not her words), her insistent virginity, her visibility, and her cross-dressing contradict the message of domesticity's centrality.^[94] How was her image reconciled with it? The attributes that mark Jeanne from one biography to another echo those that characterize other “Famous Women”: determination, intelligence, boldness, integrity, steadfastness. Her image contrasts repeatedly with that of Charles VII as vacillating and fearful. Adversity and opposition intensify her will to act, as when she meets only “scorn and indifference” from “the commander of the French armies, because of the grossness of his nature, the harshness of his heart, and his arrogance; but she could not be budged.”^[95] Her sterling qualities overwhelm all else and defuse resistance to her acts: “Even her enemies mourned her for her steadfastness and courage . . . and admitted she was the best of maidens in character and religion.”^[96] Such qualities become exemplary markers of the feminine, underlined when the Egyptian Woman's Magazine inserts a generalizing declaration into its biography of the Maid of Orleans: “And woman is resolute if she determines so to be.”^[97]

These narratives highlight Jeanne's visibility. Yet, if Jeanne as historical figure was in the limelight, Egyptian biographies depicted her as uninterested in public fame and celebration. Jeanne's alleged rejection of Charles's planned banquet after the victory at Orleans, for instance, illustrated simultaneously her seriousness, her selflessness, and her modesty: “The king invited her to a feast but she refused, saying it was a time for effort and determination, not for revelry and gratification.”^[98] Modesty implied simplicity, too; her attested love of finery never appears in these texts.^[99]This silence supported the fervid, media-wide warnings of a purported increase in ostentatious women, especially those consuming European fashions, who are criticized in other biographies through the deployment of models of simplicity and seriousness.

As in European representations of Jeanne at the time, the Egyptian texts gloss her masculine dress as a battlefield necessity. The possibility of a more abiding interest in cross-dressing does not arise. In fact, her shift in attire serves to reify rather than to question the borders of gendered “nature”: “Hardly had Jeanne changed her garb than her nature changed; she became as if a man with a ringing voice and fine audacity.”^[100] (None of these biographies voices caution about representing aspects of Jeanne's person or experience that were and are open to question.^[101] Ambiguity about her life would not suit her aura as an exemplary figure meant to rouse enthusiasm.) Her masculine demeanor is offset by emphasizing her flowing hair and the whiteness (purity!) of her garb, perhaps another way to express the message conveyed by European paintings of Jeanne in armor and flowing skirt.^[102] These biographies articulate a concept of femininity shaped by national duty—and national duty as shaped by a concept of feminine action. Jeanne, domesticated, counters the “masculine” aspects of her public heroism and reifies the division of “public” and “private” into “masculine” and “feminine.”^[103] Jeanne at home in Egypt constructs an image of acceptable feminine action consistent with dominant motifs in the “Famous Women” genre, notably women's activism as selfless and communityoriented. A trajectory of emergence from and return to the home defines the enterprise. Such constructions uphold an essentialist view of women's nature yoked to nationalism as domestic duty:

[Jeanne] breathed into [the army] her patriotism and zeal so their hearts were set on fire. How beautiful is the holy striving of woman, how innocent her fidelity. She is loyal to her nation as to her child; she loves her country as she loves flowers and sweet basil. She has no greedy ambitions: it cannot be said that she has incentives, as certain men do, for her love of the nation. No: she loves it because she sees this as her duty.^[104]

Jeanne even became the model woman behind the man, stretching the tension between contemporary ideal and historical image to the breaking point. “It is indisputable,” begins Mustafā Bahīī;j in 1921, introducing his biography of Jeanne,

that woman is the secret of life and sovereignty; upon her rest the pillars of elevation and progress. For woman was created to be the greatest spur to man; it is she who provokes his ambitions and stirs up his zeal and emotions. Indeed, she is his hand, his tongue; she leads him. Woman was and still is the goal toward which man strives: she is his mother, his sister, his wife, from whom are composed families, communities [or nations], peoples.^[105]

For Bahāij, women's “important role in the histories of civilization” both derives from and justifies attention to her upbringing, for this is “a greatness dependent on her possessing and maintaining her attractiveness, delicacy, beauty of countenance and sentiments and emotions, and other matters of character through which she has been able to steer things. . . . Therefore it is incumbent on rational [men] to bring up women in a good and pure way, empty of defects and of the filth of association. . . . The pure, self-possessed woman is the working force that has benefited the world in momentous ways.”^[106]

Thus, it is not surprising that Bahīī;j's Jeanne was “famous among her folk and [national or religious] community for purity, devoutness, and strength of conviction.” Is it also not surprising that Bahīj, reproducing Fawwāz's physical description of Jeanne, omits the clauses on flowing hair and equestrian abilities? Is it surprising that he also fails to mention the Dauphin's initial resistance to Jeanne? For when she declares that she will “save the throne, he smiled a great smile and rejoiced.” Perhaps “woman's influence” was all that was necessary. Yet even Bahīī;j cannot domesticate Jeanne fully: “She appeared before the army bristling with arms, in one hand a spear and in the other a standard, . . . perfectly executing the deeds of horsemanship until she bewitched the onlookers.” But in the end, signaled by Jeanne's “bewitching” work, it is female physicality that counts: “She went before [the enemy] wearing a white costume. . . . When the English saw her in this amazing form they were filled with terror and fled.”^[107]

The message schoolgirl readers were to receive inscribed definite boundaries around women's public activism. For example, an oft-repeated motif in the Egyptian biographies was Jeanne's celebrated desire to return home after the crowning at Rheims: “Today I have fulfilled all I promised to do for your victory, so free me and I shall return to my father, that I may watch the livestock and spin wool in conformity to the ways of the house in which I was raised.” Yet Jeanne's desire to return home communicates an ambiguous message. For she never did return.^[108]

The Egyptian Jeanne (like many other “Famous Women”) shows sensibilities these biographers define as feminine. She did not kill with her own hands, they stress, a point on which she insisted during her condemnation trial (1431).^[109] Biographies celebrate her nurturing capacity. For The Crescent, only “caring for the poor” lifted Jeanne's low spirits in the uncertain time after Charles's crowning.^[110] For Sādiq, “her compassion meant she did not fail to bind the wounds of stricken enemies.”^[111] In the trial transcripts, witnesses did talk of her occupation with the local poor; she spoke of her distress at seeing blood flow.^[112] But writers in Egypt emphasized compassion as a marker of the feminine more than as a sign of intense piety and virtue.

The Egyptian Jeanne's pointedly feminized nationalist role reaches its rhetorical height in Saniyya Zuhayr's 1933 biography in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine. Zuhayr couples her essentialist blueprint of complementary gender roles with a high-romantic image of Jeanne: “With her femininity and tenderness woman is able to do what the strongest, most courageous men cannot, for in that gentleness and tenderness resides a magic that pierces to the depths of [people's] hearts, giving them whatever stamp the woman desires and wills.”^[113] Jeanne fits the mold. Watching her father's sheep “imprinted her with that gentleness and softness. She became famous in her environs for her purity and her compassion for the sick and poor.”^[114] News of war stirred up “sympathy and mournfulness” in young Jeanne. Her description echoes Romantic-era images of Jeanne popular in the West (and earlier treatments in Egypt), for “she wore the garb of soldiers but no helmet. Her beautiful hair ran freely on her shoulders, bound by a white band, so that she was distinguishable among the soldiers.”^[115] Jeanne's actions as constructed in these texts conform to this “feminine” image: she was “respected” and “worshiped” by the soldiers and “did not intervene in their technical movements but rather left that to the commander, Dunois. She limited herself to urging on [ighrā‘‘ā’ء] the troops [by telling them] God was with them.”^[116] Here, Zuhayr follows a European thematics of Jeanne evident from the earliest sources, but one from which Jeanne's legend as constructed by popular collective memory in the West diverges. It is most likely that Jeanne did not “lead” the troops in the sense of being the military commander in charge. However, it seems unlikely that her role was limited to that of “urging on.” Contemporary and later sources attest that commanders sought her judgment on tactics and that she was indeed in the thick of battle. “In the matter of war she was very expert,” testified the Duke d'Alençon at her rehabilitation trial, “in the management of the lance as in the drawing up of the army in battle order and in preparing the artillery. And at that all marveled.”^[117] Zuhayr emphasizes a battlefield role that feminizes Jeanne's image according to prevailing constructions of nationalist femininity in Egypt, which themselves were constructed partly out of nineteenth-century European gender ideologies. At the same time, this role fits nicely into the high Arabic tradition, wherein it is a commonplace that pre-Islamic and early Muslim women frequented the battlefields—to encourage and shame “their men” into action.

Zuhayr insistently denies any threat that Jeanne as symbol might pose to received notions of gender boundaries: “When the battle [at Orleans] ended, her feminine characteristics returned to her. She wept at the blood and the slain she saw, and the moaning of the wounded she heard.”^[118]These boundaries had shifted substantially by the 1930s, when this text appeared. Perhaps Zuhayr's insistence was comforting to some, dubiously nostalgic to others.

Community and Communities

The Jeanne biographies gave urgency to the question of whether Egyptian national identity and the formation of feminist discourses could depend on models appropriated from the West. If Jeanne could serve as a faultless anti-imperialist heroine and exemplar, some editors were uncomfortable with the level of decontextualization that Jeanne as exemplar demanded. I noted in chapter 2 that as nationalist resistance to Great Britain saturated Egyptian society, anxiety about using Western subjects pervaded the “Famous Women” sketches. If exemplary biography constructed a female community that superseded national and ethnic boundaries, and if it occluded power asymmetries between colonizer and colonized, a discourse that interrogated notions of community often framed individual “Famous Women,” including Jeanne d'Arc. Mobilizing a theme common in nationalist and reformist discourses, this approach voiced admiration for what (aristocratic and middle-class) women of the West had achieved, as it articulated a critical position on European and North American societies and asserted local pride and identity defined against that collective Other.

Further complicating the issue of intellectual Arab women's attitudes toward European women, if some biographies repressed links between liberal ideologies of gender and imperialist practices by celebrating European women whose achievements had advanced their nations' expansionist objectives, others questioned the narrative of colonial superiority by showing “their women” as subject to the same restraints as “ours,” in the process also foregrounding a putative class alliance. Biographies rejected the metropolitan doctrine that the (elite) colonized subject was innately inferior by privileging commonalities of experience and divergent social conditions. They asserted local histories against imported ones, resisting Egypt's incorporation into a historical narrative written by the colonizers. Twice, Young Woman of the East profiled an anonymous “Young Woman of Qarāqīsh [a town in Libya].” The first time was in 1912, the year after Italy had invaded Libya, generating impassioned sympathy and anxiety in Egypt.^[119] According to Badran, the war “propelled Egyptian women into collective action,” relief work to support the Libyans.^[120] The second profile came out in 1919 during the most intense period yet of nationwide anti-British action in Egypt, and at a time when the Libyan resistance was pushing the Italians to the coast.^[121] In both cases the narrative celebrated Libyan popular resistance to Italian imperialist desire and pointedly noted the cross-gender (but highly differentiated) nature of this resistance: “The women show no less courage [than the men] in the thick of the fray, for they follow their men and encourage them. They do not fear the sound of heavy guns.”^[122] This echoed the gendered battlefield function attested in medieval biographies for preIslamic and early Muslim women, intertextually articulated in Zuhayr's biography of Jeanne. Utilizing this material, editors celebrated women's battlefield presence, but here Young Woman of the East went further, naming an exhortatory role as equal in activism and courage to men's fighting role and constructing a village heroine who led “sons of her people” into battle; who, wounded, “remained courageous” and upright.^[123] The young woman of Qarāqīsh bore an uncanny resemblance to Jeanne d'Arc.

Indeed, European journalists were calling this young woman “the second Jeanne d'Arc,” said Young Woman of the East (1912). But the European media label was an unacceptable frame for the heroine's life story. “We believe this courage coming from Arab girls to be nothing strange among us. So we should name her Khawla [bint al-Azwar, famous early Muslim warrior, another popular “Famous Woman”].” Instead of relying on European sources, the text quoted an essay on the Libyan heroine published by Fatma Aliye in the Istanbul press. Aliye elaborates on the “Khawla” theme by enumerating Muslim women once prominent in military conflict (with some exaggeration). Her choice of example is strategic: these women fought the Crusaders.

The French have Jeanne d'Arc. Just one, but they never forget her. Yet the pages of our history overflow with reports of our daughters whose courage raised them to the ranks of heroes. Can we add this woman's name to those of her forebears?
When the Crusader armies attacked Aleppo, Hanīfa—daughter of al-Malik al-‘‘Adil, ruler of Egypt, and niece of the famous Salāh al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī [Saladin]—led an army to defend her homeland. She gave the enemy huge losses and the worst sort of defeat, making [the army] retreat. The one who defeated King Louis, or St. Louis, in the battle of Mansura was Shajarat al-Durr, leader of an army.^[124]
The effect is to construct a collective resistance to a European naming of Arab/Muslim/colonized experience and simultaneously to chastise a community for ignoring its own historical precedents. Aliye's rhetoric overwhelms the singularity of Jeanne d'Arc by asserting a numerical superiority of “local” fighting women. Ultimately, this resistance—and this gendered collectivity—embrace an urban Turkish Muslim (Aliye); a Syr-ian Christian resident in Egypt (Labīī;ba Hāshim, as Young Woman of the East's editor and biographical columnist); a rural Libyan Muslim (the young woman of Qarāqīsh); an early Arab heroine from the Arabian peninsula (Khawla); and two medieval Muslim women leaders (Aliye's heroines Hanīī;fa and Shajar al-Durr).^[125]

The 1919 version omits Aliye's text. And where the first text rejected the label “the second Jeanne d'Arc,” the second embraced a variant, “the Arab Jeanne d'Arc.” No discomfort with the borrowed name? Perhaps now it was enough to change the modifier. The new appellation gave the subject a regional collective identity and implied Arab solidarity against European colonialisms, subordinating the heroic European figure to a politics of anti-imperialism.^[126] And Jeanne's example suggests how the construction of both commonality and separate histories in “Famous Women” narratives contests a long-standing assertion that feminist agendas in Egypt were of Western origin. To argue that liberal feminist programs were uncritically Westernist—or that nationalist and feminist treatments of the women question were wholly derivative of colonial discourse—ascribes an inaccurate passivity to local debates and fails to appreciate the complex deployments of Westernizing discourses. Quite literally, writers used and contested Western images in the service of their own agendas. The complexity of this position is beautifully illustrated by the Magazine of the Women's Awakening's 1926 biography of Zakiyya ‘‘Abd al-Hamīd Sulaymān, which narrated Zakiyya's career from study in England to educational leadership and a high position in Egypt's administration. Anecdotes from Zakiyya's student life construct a powerful model:

An English[-nationality] teacher was explaining the life history of Jeanne d'Arc to her class. When she reached the point of [Jeanne's] rout of the English, [Zakiyya] clapped her hands without even being aware of it, so taken was she by the idea of heroism. When [the teacher] came to how that courage was consumed by fire, tears came from [Zakiyya's] eyes—the most eloquent possible expression of her innermost being; and then she shouted, “Let the English leave our country!” The teacher was astonished and said to her in a tone full of insinuation, “You are still Egyptian?” [Zakiyya] answered her without a pause, “This eternal [source of] pride will always be mine.”^[127]
This passage challenges a common complaint in the Egyptian press of the time: that Egyptian girls in European schools, whether in Egypt or abroad, were losing their Egyptianness. At the same time, it probes the role of local representatives of the imperial center. Badran notes that Englishwomen teaching in Egyptian schools imparted what they saw as “monolithic and unchanging imperatives of indigenous patriarchy.”^[128] Perhaps biography was a strategy to undermine this lesson. Certainly, Zakiyya's biography operated as a showdown with these arrogant, imperious attitudes, this feminine version of high European colonialism. The biography aligns biographer and subject with a strong anti-imperialist stance; it implies that individual goals and nationalist ones need not be in conflict. Moreover, the text illustrates the didactic potential of biography in the training of a female elite. Jeanne as exemplar turns Zakiyya into exemplar.^[129]

A Conclusion

Jeanne's presence in Egypt exploited her European personae. Egyptian nationalist and feminist agendas intersected conveniently with changing European images of Jeanne; from available iconography, authors in Egypt chose what they found useful. These texts mirrored the contours of the romantic humanist inscription of Jeanne dominant in nineteenth-century France. Jeanne as peasant, Jeanne as symbol of a strong and independent nation, Jeanne as an example to women—all found their way into Egypt. What did not appear was the skeptical, rationalist strain in European polemics on Jeanne, the romantic notion of inner inspiration rather than external, divine direction, or the relative lack of interest in Jeanne as religious icon in a turn-of-the-century America shaped by the ideology of Protestantism.^[130]

Above all, the iconography of Jeanne in Egypt exploited her potential as a figure of anti-imperialist struggle that embodied a liberal nationalist program. For in a single persona she could combine the tropes of unificatory nationalism (rendering temporarily unproblematic, if not invisible, the divisions of gender, region, class, and even religious identity), women's active social participation as crucial to successful nationhood, and the struggle of minority groups for justice against fearsome odds. She was the female leader contesting gender oppression in her own life to act on behalf of a community. For Irish nationalists, Maude Gonne was “the Irish Joan of Arc”; for English feminists, Christabel Pankhurst was the “Warrior Maiden”; for a young African-American female, Ida B. Wells became a “Joan of Arc” model.^[131] And in an Egypt demanding freedom from European colonial rule, writers turned Jeanne's image against its Western origins, exploiting a potent Western cultural symbol as a visible sign of East-West encounter, a tragic yet inevitably triumphant struggle of weak against strong.

Clearly, these biographical sketches do show a chronological trajectory, even as they exhibit continuity of theme. Early feminists tended to emphasize community as female, while those most concerned with a nationalist agenda, or a regional Arab struggle for autonomy against Ottomans and Europeans alike, stressed community as ethnic or national, downplaying differences of gender, religion, and territorial loyalty. For Fawwāz, contributor to the mainstream press on women's need for independent employment possibilities and greater mobility, as well as ripostes to those who highlighted gender differences as natural and immutable, Jeanne was the model of a publicly active woman who could transgress received gender boundaries when necessary, and who commanded respect for her public work. Such emphases grew more muted over time as a politics that defined women first and foremost as the educated and educating mother became paramount, and as reformist nationalists' interest in allying with feminists plummeted after “independence.”^[132] This image had to contend with Jeanne as anti-imperialist heroine, as the articulation of an anti-British nationalism grew increasingly urgent.

Fighting “British imperialism,” Jeanne could stand for a national resistance that highlighted women and the peasantry, foregrounded selflessness and sacrifice as the duty of women and peasants, and helped define nation as inclusive while romanticizing the terms of that inclusiveness. Impeccable in her saintly aura, Jeanne could embody a gendered nationalist identity simultaneously militant and domesticized, heirarchical and classless. As Nira Yuval-Davis notes, the notion of the nation-state as always already existent authorizes nationalist ideologies. “The effect of this fiction is to naturalize the hegemony of one collectivity and its access to the ideological apparatuses of both state and civil society.”^[133] In Egypt (as elsewhere), the women of a middle-class professional elite that also gave the nationalist movement much of its articulate constituency were defining “women” as characterized by international similarities and, to a much smaller extent, by interclass ones. Yet, at the same time, it is evident in the polemics of the women's press that such similarities, constructed along the axis of gender, were to remain subordinate to the nation-state fiction. In biography, this is particularly evident in accounts of nonelite women—whether Jeanne d'Arc or Adelheid Popp—where their discursive access to renown is based, first, on their contribution to the formation of the nation-state and, second, on their ability to take on aspects of a local middle-class identity as it was being hegemonically defined by writing women (and men).

The extent to which Jeanne's Egyptian lives were “feminist” and “Arab” depends entirely on the immediate context of production in which they surfaced. This context is itself responsive to the complexity of defining identities against discursive and material onslaughts on Egyptian society, personal and communal seductions from within and without, and modes of defining nation and society that were fiercely local and self-consciously modern. Negotiating the move between territories of the home and community space was justified in terms of national need.

In Egypt as elsewhere, Jeanne's image invites attention to intersections of national and sexual politics, and to how the female body resides at the very center of political contestation, where—to quote Nancy Armstrong again—“culture appears as a struggle among various political factions to possess its most valued signs and symbols.”^[134] In Egypt as elsewhere, Jeanne's femaleness provided a point of interrogation as much as an image of accepted, unquestioned heroism. That Jeanne could be appropriated at all in Egypt reminds us how unpredictable may be the interactions of nationalist, anti-imperialist, and pro-West discourses; but also of the power of that common confluence of the national and the sexual, the female body as emblematic of the nation. The equivocal nature of Jeanne's image for Egyptians reminds us that, as Eve Sedgwick has said, “it may be that there exists for nations, as for genders, simply no normal way to partake of the categorical definitiveness of the national, no single kind of 'other' of what a nation is to which all can . . . be definitionally opposed.”^[135] At the same time, Jeanne's story defined as “categorical other” the imperialist presence of Great Britain and reminded readers of the enormity of the empire's reach, geographically and historically.

Perhaps Jeanne's popularity in Egypt during the period of nationalist struggle was sustained by her “anti-British” aura. In one further, subtle, way, too, Jeanne's image may have been key to defining localized modernities in which the links between knowledge of “the West” and how to use, or not use, that knowledge were contested. “Who among you is ignorant of what that honorable, courageous young woman Jeanne d'Arc did in the fifteenth century?” The Gentle Sex asked its readers as it set out its own program. “How she led the armies of France and rescued her country with the help of Charles VII from the English attack on it.”^[136]Knowing about Jeanne d'Arc may have represented a certain level of cultural knowledge. In one essay that exhibited the complexity of cultural sources, borrowings, and journeyings in this time and place, familiarity with Jeanne's life narrative becomes a marker of elite tamaddun (being civilized).^[137]

Yet Jeanne's imagic power arose especially from a convenient cluster of characteristics that narratives of her life could foreground, and from the power of her image to explore and resolve the troubled relationships between the communities she could represent, above all the conflicted relationship between emerging feminism and nationalism. The rhetorical power of her image in these texts underlines my argument that women's biography worked to stabilize a model of womanhood appropriate to the demands of an emerging ethos of nationalist state construction. Yet narratives of a life could break open the socially sanctioned boundaries of female experience, potentially destabilizing any fixed image of “womanhood.” As subjects of biography, not only Jeanne but an admirer of Jeanne could accomplish this, as the biography of Zakiyya ‘‘Abd al-Hamīd Sulaymān, English-trained daughter of a Bedouin leader, shows. Zakiyya's zeal is firmly nationalist and is not linked explicitly to imagining possibilities for her own life. As some writers of biography sought to direct women's energies toward “national needs,” women and girls could read off a message of self-determination, individual as well as collective. That Zakiyya had a high-profile public career when this biography appeared could not have escaped readers' notice.

In 1937, The Egyptian Woman's Magazine called Jeanne d'Arc “an aberrant exemplar to her kind.”^[138] This captures perfectly the doubleedged prescriptive potential of the “Famous Women” biographies as performances of a gendered and colonized modernity. Along with Victoria Woodhull, Sophie Blanchard, and Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif, Jeanne d'Arc, “aberrant” and “exemplar,” could mark out more than one future for imaginative schoolgirls in early-twentieth-century Egypt.

An Epilogue

Jeanne drew to her full height as anti-imperialist heroine two months before the July Revolution that brought the Free Officers to power. When Munīī;ra Thābit reissued her Hope, the first issue featured Jeanne's life story—quite something in a journal that insisted on its Egyptianness.

If this biography preceded the Revolution, its diction anticipated it and overwhelmed the biographical focus. In the title, Jeanne's heroic act and her iconic status replaced her name: “Story of Feminine Heroism: The Saint of the Month of May Who Threw the English Out of Her Country.” Hope introduces Jeanne as “the village maid whom divine concern chose and recruited to liberate her country from British colonialist imperialism.” The voices tell Jeanne to “rescue France from the British occupation,” and Jeanne bests “the occupiers of Orleans” rather than “the beseigers” of earlier texts. Charles is uncrowned because of “the British occupation and the disasters and chaos it brought.”^[139] Finally, the linkage becomes explicit. In court, “they fettered [Jeanne] in their imperialist fashion, just as they did in Dinshaway in Egypt. . . . History recorded this savagery five centuries ago on the list of the terrible deeds of British imperialism, a list so replete it has overrun the edges [of the page].”^[140] Recall that “Dinshaway” named a 1906 execution of peasants that explosively turned Egyptian public opinion against the British. It remained so important in the nation's memory that to compare Jeanne's fetters to those of the villagers was a powerful rhetorical move forty-six years later.

Nahhās, writing more than seventy years before Hope's founding, had also called attention to the unerasable responsibility for Jeanne's death.She had drawn out the religious rather than the political underpinnings of Jeanne's story, and she did not label those threatened by divine wrath as imperialist or as necessarily the English; they could have included the collaborating French. The reference was simply to “a fate [or: judgment] to be borne by the doer of the deed on the Day of Reckoning. . . . That doer will be guilty in the court of History.”^[141] Now the sin was imperial reach, but it still carried the threat of divine retribution.

Confirming or contesting dominant notions of femaleness was not the paramount concern of Hope's biography. Here Jeanne's usefulness as a specifically female role model was muted, compressed under the weight of nationalist identity markers. And perhaps to have such a role model was less urgent at a time when women were highly visible in public pursuits. In any case, from title to conclusion, gender politics yielded to the national crisis. If the subtitle advertised a “story of female heroism,” that specificity disappeared in the finale: “If we now celebrate the holiday of the martyr of Rouen as we taste the bitterness of the British occupation, we have no recourse but to hope that God gives to Egypt and the Sudan a Jeanne d'Arc, male or female, to expel the English from our country.”^[142] In a journal that announced itself on the first issue's cover as a “révue féministe politique, organe de la femme égyptienne militante,” this might seem surprising. Yet editor Munīī;ra Thābit tended throughout her magazine to privilege the militant and the unificatory over the feminist, even if Hope was a “profeminist, Wafdist newspaper.”^[143] It gives one pause to realize that the photograph on the cover of this founding issue features a beaming nuclear family: King Fārūq, the queen, and “the [newborn] heir”—the first son after several daughters, who are absent from this carefully composed portrait.^[144] Perhaps the struggle over identities via Jeanne d'Arc was over, for the moment. Had the nation/the family won?

Notes

1. “SN: Madām Taqlā Bāshā,” FS 19:1 (Oct. 15, 1924): 3–5.

2. “SN: al-Misiz Margharīī;t Wintiringham: al-Mar‘‘a al-thāniya fīī; majlis al-umma al-barīī;tāniyya,” MM 2:9 (Nov. 1921): 359–62; quotation on 362.

3. References to imperialism in the women's press are few but more common as time goes on. An essay in AJ (“Evils of the Nineteenth Century”) says “states' ambitions to possess weak and savage people and rule them contrary to their own customs and morals grew enormously,” and thus racially motivated killings were on the increase; there is frequent mention of the “horrible killings of past rulers like Darius and Alexander . . . but such are no less prevalent in this century.” AJ 2:2 (Feb. 28, 1899): 48–52; quotation on 48. After 1919, FS took a supportive stance toward the nationalists. A speech by Hāshim to Dār Jam‘‘iyyat al-Adab, summarized in “al-Nahda al-qawmiyya bayna al-taqālīī;d wa-al-‘‘ādāt,” FS 20:8 (May 1926): 349–54, refers to “guarding the wealth of the country from the greed of the foreigners” (349). JL, edited by an Egyptian and addressed to Egyptians, is less guarded. See Sayyidāt Misr, “Shumūs al-hayāt: Safha min a‘‘māl sayyidāt al-yawm,” JL 12:4 (Jan. 1920): 127–35, a re-port on the nationalist meeting at the Coptic cathedral; speakers mentioned Nitocris, ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr, and al-Khansā‘‘, “the finest model,” for she sacrificed her four sons in the Prophet's cause and then praised God. See JL's report on the women's demonstration in Cairo, in 12:4 (Jan. 1920): 143–44. MM's “Elderly Woman” asks her young listeners how they can see their own era as a time of freedom when the country is occupied. “Bāb al-rasā‘‘il: Min al-‘‘ajūz ilā hafdihā A. F.,” MM 4:2 (Feb. 1923): 91–94. “Have you not been attacked by armies . . . that first prepared the way through dealing with your morals? . . . In our age we were free; our own rulers ruled. . . . I was not a prisoner in my time; we were free and independent. I am a prisoner of your age and I want to return to the age of freedom and virtue that has ended. The end of my age was the occupation by the British.” This writer links political occupation to cultural imperialism, also using the rhetoric of motherhood to assert women's active participation in the society of past decades.

4. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 12.

5. “Ikrām kātiba muslima lil-qadīī;sa Jān Dārk,” al-Mashriq 19:2 (Feb. 1921): 108. This text was not published in Egypt, but it reproduces a text first published there, and al-Mashriq was read in Egypt. The characterization by birth and residence reproduces DM's title page.

6. “Al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam,” MM 4:7 (Sept. 1923): 352–55; quotation on 352. But at the same time, the speaker introduces her first as daughter and wife of great men, and only then as “leader of the women's awakening today.” The speaker alludes humorously to those who criticize Western role models. Mentioning Charlotte Cameroun, Lady Astor, and Emmeline Pankhurst, he interrupts himself to say parenthetically, “They'll say, those are English, we have nothing to do with them. Fine—balāsh England!” and then, mentioning Marie Curie as well as Jeanne d'Arc, says: “The impudent ones will say, take us away from those furriners. I take refuge in God.” Then he moves to pre-Islamic and contemporary Turkish women for his exemplars.

7. Of the sixteen biographies published in magazines in Egypt before 1940, five appeared in journals founded by Syrian Christians, four in journals founded by Egyptian Christians, one in a government school journal, and six in journals founded by Egyptian Muslims. Adding in Nahhās and Fawwāz, of identifiable authors two are Syrian Christian (and four unsigned biographies are published in Syrian Christian magazines), one (Fawwāz) is a Syrian Muslim, one is an Egyptian Christian (and three unsigned texts are published in Egyptian Christian magazines), and six are Egyptian Muslims (plus an unsigned text in an Egyptian Muslim–edited journal). Of biographies of others that mention Jeanne, one is in the Egyptian Muslim–edited NN, one in the Syrian Christian–edited SR, and three in the Syrian Christian–edited FS, although one of these is attributed to the Istanbul-based (but in Arabic) Muslim-edited al-Ittihād al-‘‘uthmānī

8. This was the Madrasat al-banāt al-thānawiyya al-amīī;riyya bi-al-Hilmiyya al-Jadīī;da, Cairo, one of the earliest state secondary schools for girls, upgraded from elementary school status.

9. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Shams al-tārīī;kh 2: Jān Dārk 'lā pusill' [sic; Fr. la pucille] fīī; al-qarn al-khāmis ‘‘ashara,” NN 2:4 (Nov. 1, 1922): 104–5; quotation marks in original.

10. In “A Working Girl,” New York Review of Books, June 25, 1981, 7, quoted in Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinnser, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 160.

11. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Jān Dārk 'lā pusill' fīī; al-qarn al-khāmis ‘‘ashara,” NN 2:4 (Nov. 1,1922): 104, 105.

12. Felski, Gender of Modernity, 18–19.

13. “Jān Dārk,” in Maryam ibnat Jibrā’ءīl Nasrallāh al-Nahhās, qarīī;nat Nasīī;m Nawfal al-Tārabulusiyya al-Sūriyya, Mithāl li-kitāb Ma‘‘rid al-hasnā‘‘ fī tarājim mashāhīr al-nisā‘‘ā’ء (Alexandria: Matba‘‘at Jarīī;dat Misr, 1879), ?[7]–11. Zaynab Fawwāz, “Jān Dārk,” DM, 122–24. “Ashhar al-hawādith wa-a‘‘zam al-rijāl: Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” al-Hilāl 4:4 (Oct. 1895): 121–28; 4:5 (Nov. 1895): 166–68. *** [Farah Antūn], “Ashhar al-nisā‘‘: Jān Dārk: Fatāt anqadhat watanahā bi-al-harb,” SB 1:2 (May 1903): 37–39. “SN: Jān Dārk,” FS 5:4 (Jan. 1911): 121–23. “Ikrām kātiba muslima lil-qadīī;sa Jān Dārk,” al-Mashriq 19:2 (Feb. 1921): 108–14. Zaynab Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” FMF 1:3 (June 1921): 109–11. Mustafā Bahīī;j, “Jān Dārk,” NN 1:5 (Dec. 1921): 120–21. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Shams al-tārīī;kh 2: Jān Dārk 'lā pūsill' fīī; al-qarn al-khāmis ‘‘ashara,” NN 2:4 (Nov. 1922): 104–5. “SN: Jān Dārk,” MM 6:5 (May 1925): 271–73. “Jān Dārk, aw al-fatāt al-shahīī;ra,” AF 1:5 (May 1926): 97–99. Hasan Muhammad Nūr, “Jān Dārk,” NN 4:12 (Nov. 1926): 405–6. Anisa [Miss] H. M. S., “Jān Dārk aw fatāt Urliyān,” NN 6:71 (Nov. 1928): 386–87. “Jān Dārk,” AR 225 (May 22, 1929): 3–4. Saniyya Zuhayr, “Min al-tārīī;kh: Jān Dārk munqidhat Faransā,” MM 14:3/4 (Mar./Apr. 1933): 99–101. “Jān Dārk,” Shahīrāt nisā‘‘ al-tārīkh fī al-sharq [wa-fī] al-gharb ma‘‘a 20 qissat ghurām li-ashhar al-‘‘ashīqāt fī al-tārīkh. [Mulhaq riwā’ءī li-jarīī;dat al-Sabāh] (Cairo: Matba‘‘at al-Sabāh, n.d. [early 1930s]), 14–15. “The Heroine Joan of Arc,” Al-Majalla al-sanawiyya li-madrasat al-Amīra Fawziyya al-thanawiyya lil-banāt [English section] 2 (1934): 4. “‘‘Uzmat al-wataniyya al-haqqa, aw Jān Dārk,” MM 18:3 (Mar. 1937): 81–84. Ahmad Sādiq Mūsā. “Butūlat Faransā fīī; sahā‘‘if rā‘‘i‘‘a min tārīī;kh Faransā: al-Munqidha,” al-Mahrajān 2:12 (June 1938): 65–71. Bint Uns al-Wujūd, “Qissat butūla niswiyya: Qadīī;sat shahr Mayū allatīī; taradat al-injilīī;z min bilādihā,” al-Amal 1:1 (May 6, 1952): 7–8. Other texts mentioning Jeanne include “A haqqan uhriqat Jān Dārk?” Rūz al-Yūsuf 1:3 (Nov. 9, 1925): 7. “SN: Fatāt Qarāqīī;sh,” FS 6:10 (July 1912): 361–63. “SN: Jān Dār al-‘‘arabiyya,” FS 14:2 (Nov. 1919): 41–42. “SN: Karistīī;n dīī; Bizān,” FS 6:4 (Jan. 1912): 121–23, attributed to “al-Raqīī;b.” “Al-Nābigha al-misriyya al-Anisa Zakiyya ‘‘Abd al-Hamīī;d Sulaymān,” NN 4:12 [48] (Nov. 1926): 412–14. ‘‘Abd al-Fattāh al-Sirinjāwīī;, “Batalāt al-tārīī;kh,” MM 8:1 (Jan. 1927): 51–53. “Nābighat al-Turkiyyāt: Awwal wazīī;ra fīī; al-‘‘ālam mar‘‘a [sic] sharqiyya: al-Sayyida Khalīī;da Adīī;b Hānim wazīī;rat al-ma‘‘ārif,” SR 5:2 (Dec. 1923): 23–25. At least three “Famous Women” compendia of the 1950s include Jeanne, Sūfīī; ‘‘Abdallah's Nisā‘‘ muhāribāt (1951), Mubārak Ibrāhīī;m's Nisā‘‘ shahīrāt (1952), and Anwar al-Jundīī;'s Shahīrāt al-nisā‘‘ā’ء (1958). The next decade saw a full-length biography, ‘‘Abd al-Latīī;f Muhammad al-Dumyātīī;, Jān Dārk: ‘‘ard wa-tahlīl wa-ta‘‘qīb (Cairo: Matba‘‘at al-Dār al-misriyya lil-tabā‘‘a wa-al-nashr wa-al-tawzī‘‘, 1966), beyond the scope of this discussion. In 1933, Ghānim Muhammad published Jān Dārk fī sabīl al-watan (Jeanne D'Arc in the Service of the Nation) (Cairo: Dār al-tibā‘‘a al-ahliyya), according to ‘‘Ayda Ibrāhīī;m Nusayr, al-Kutub al-‘‘arabiyya allatī nushirat fī Misr 1926–1940 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1980). I have not located this text. Because in this chapter I refer repeatedly to the small number of texts listed above, I give abbreviated references instead of the full references repeated elsewhere in the book.

14. Agnes Kendrick Gray, “Jeanne d'Arc after Five Hundred Years,” American Magazine of Art 22 (1931): 369.

15. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays, 124–51 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975), 131, 133, 144. Davis argues that practices of sexual inversion “could undermine as well as reinforce . . . assent [to the existing hierarchical social structure] through its connections with everyday circumstances outside the privileged time of carnival and stage-play. . . . The image of the disorderly woman did not always function to keep women in their place” (131), in contrast to the “uncommon women” who, though exceptional, reinforced the status quo by “us[ing] their power to support a legitimate cause, not to unmask the truth about social relationships” (133).

16. As I have said, most of these texts are unsigned and so, by convention, editors' responsibility. But a higher percentage of Jeanne d'Arc biographies is attributed to specific contributors than is true of the “Famous Women” genre in women's magazines as a whole.

17. Constructing an “alternative political idiom to that of republicanism,” the Action française adopted Jeanne as “the icon of integral nationalism” based on a monarchical state. Jeanne's legendary purity and devoutness lent their aura to the antirepublican cause, while the Action française also benefited from Jeanne's resurrection as saint and the nationwide celebrations of the half millennium that had passed since her emergence and immolation. Jeanne's image offered an avenue for female participation in the cause, for women were major benefactors to, and organizers of, the “Denier de Jeanne d'Arc,” which offered material support for the Action française's young male militants. Martha Hanna, “Iconology and Ideology in the Idiom of the Action française, 1908–1931,” French Historical Studies 14:2 (1985): 215–39; 216. I am indebted to Natalie Zemon Davis for directing me to this essay.

18. Maurice Barrès, Autour de Jeanne d'Arc (Paris: Librairie ancienne Edouard Champion, 1916). See especially, in this collection of essays, “Jeanne d'Arc et les jeunes filles de Paris.” On Jeanne as symbol in Vichy France, see the brief comments in David O'Connell, “1920: Bourgeois Sin (Jeanne d'Arc Is Canonized)”, in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 855–61. Decades later, Jeanne became the “favorite national icon” of far-right racist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen; her image hovered over left-right struggles to control a concept of national/ist belonging. Steven Laurence Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution: Disputed Legacies, France, 1789–1989 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 53.

19. Ann Bleigh Powers, “The Joan of Arc Vogue in America, 1894–1929,” American Society Legion of Honor Magazine 49:3 (1978): 177; 178; 180; illus. 179. The period saw “the Joan works of some thirty American authors” (180).

20. Powers, “The Joan of Arc Vogue,” 185. On the troops' song, see Polly Schoyer Brooks, Beyond the Myth: The Story of Joan of Arc (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 160. See also Helen Harriet Salls, “Joan of Arc in English and American Literature,” South Atlantic Quarterly 35 (1936): 173, 176, 178, 180. She quotes American playwright Percy MacKaye as saying, in a preface to the eighth edition (1918) of his 1906 play Jeanne d'Arc, “Before 1914, the memory of Jeanne moved us as a beautiful legend, a rapture of imagination; today, in the great war still raging, her image quickens us with contemporaneous heroism, a rapture of reality” (180).

21. If interest in Jeanne in Egypt coincided with these moments, on what sources did writers in Egypt depend? Later biographers of Jeanne in Egypt echoed earlier ones but revised details, a hint of changing imperatives. If Europeanlanguage sources were preeminent, authors almost never cited them. (As we have seen, in a few “Famous Women” sketches European sources are cited, but only once for Jeanne, in the “Young Woman of Qarāqīī;sh” sketch, discussed below, where there is specific motivation to mention the source.) Some editors read English, more often French; some (especially Syrian Christians) traveled and had family ties to Arab communities in Europe and North and South America. That Jeanne's name was always transliterated from the French rather than the English (“Jān Dārk” not “Jun awf ark”) might suggest French channels of information; but many writers in English used the modern French version of “Jehan's” name, too.

Did the early films that did so much to popularize Jeanne play in Egypt? Major studios like Paramount had a commercial presence there (personal communications from Walter Armbrust and Roberta Dougherty, Feb. 1996), but if that increased the possibility that DeMille's film (produced by Paramount) did show, I have found no direct evidence of Jeanne's cinematic presence in the theaters of Cairo and Alexandria. For a select list of films, see Nadia Margolis, Joan of Arc in History, Literature, and Film: A Select, Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1990), 393–402.

In light of Egyptian nationalists' interest in Japan as a non-Western model after its defeat of Russia in 1905, could anyone in Egypt have learned of Kanichi Awaya's 1884 translation of Janet Tuckey's 1880 Joan of Arc, the Maid, an English work “influential and respected in its time”? Or, much later, of Jun Ishikawa's novel Fugen (1936)? See Margolis, Joan of Arc in History, Literature, and Film, 135. The only non-Western works on Jeanne this bibliography lists are the two Japanese ones. Tuckey's book might have been a source for writers in Egypt.

22. The first six pages following the frontispiece are missing in the University of Cairo copy, the sole one I have located. Page 7 begins in the middle of the political context that probably is the first section of the Jeanne d'Arc biography. It seems likely that this was the first biography to follow that of Jasham; it is followed by Catherine I of Russia and Layla bt. Hudhayfa b. Shaddād.

23. Hind Nawfal, “Idāh wa-iltimās wa-istismāh,” F 1:1 (Nov. 20, 1892), 3.

24. DM, 122.

25. Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (New York: Knopf, 1981), 33–43. Warner shows that in Europe Jeanne had to be given a physical presence through writing and the visual monuments erected to her memory. “Beauty” was a sign of Jeanne's virtue (37). With the post-Renaissance rewriting of Jeanne from Amazon to romantic heroine, a feminine physicality was given especial prominence (213–14).

26. Farag, “Al-Muqtataf”; Beth Baron, “Unveiling in Early TwentiethCentury Egypt: Practical and Symbolic Considerations,” Middle Eastern Studies 25 (1989): 370–86.

27. In Maurice Boutet de Monvel's 1896 children's biography, Jeanne's long, light-brown hair became a short cap as soon as she defined her mission. Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Joan of Arc, introduced and translation edited by Gerald Gottleib (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library and Viking Press, 1980). Warner mentions long hair as an emerging motif and sign of Jeanne's beauty (Joan of Arc, 213–14).

28. DM, 122.

29. Ibid.

30. Nahhās prefaces her biography with a political history of fifteenthcentury France, but since the first part of the text is missing, her precise opening strategy cannot be known. The extant text begins in the middle of this summary of events. Nahhās then renders Jeanne with a dramatic license Fawwāz probably did not even consider: “[Jeanne] would go into the evergreen forest near her home and sit near a spring. She let her thoughts roam in contemplation's pasture, pondering the misery of her homeland, her head hanging low” (7). She might have followed a European-language source; perhaps Fawwāz's observation that Nahhās's work was “organized after the fashion of the European dictionaries” applied to narrative strategy as well as organizing principles (DM, 515; Fawwāz notes here that Nahhās had learned English in school). The contrast between these women's portraits of Jeanne highlights their different educations—one in European Christian missionary schools in the Lebanon, the other tutored in adulthood by scholars of classical Arabic rhetoric.

31. Nahhās, Mithāl, 7. Several names of individual fighting women follow this statement.

32. Ibid., 9.

33. Warner, Joan of Arc, 213–17; 236–38. On the shift in Jeanne's image from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, from Renaissance Amazon to child-savior of the nation, see Warner and also Régine Pernoud, Joan of Arc, trans. Jeanne Unger Duell (New York: Grove Press; London: Evergreen Books, 1961), chap. 1.

34. Nahhās, Mithāl, 7, 9–10; Fawwāz, DM, 122–23; “Jān Dārk,” al-Hilāl, 123–24; *** [Farah Antūn], “Jān Dārk,” SB, 37–38. Al-Hilāl devotes proportionately more space to the political scene than to Jeanne's life history than do the women's magazines and biographical dictionaries. This is in line with the tendency in these “general-interest” magazines to subordinate life histories of women to intellectual and/or cultural trends to which the subject can be linked.

35. Fawwāz, DM, 122. When the English saw Jeanne all in white, on her white horse and grasping her white banner, says Fawwāz, “they fled from before her like donkeys in fright, from thralldom taking flight” (123).

36. “Jān Dārk,” al-Hilāl, 125. A year later, Mark Twain's mock memoir of Jeanne used a similar metaphor: “For more than three quarters of a century the English fangs had been bedded in [France's] flesh.” Jean Francois Alden [Mark Twain], Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte (Her Page and Secretary), Freely Translated Out of the Ancient French into Modern English from the Original Unpublished Manuscript in the National Archives of France (New York: Harper and Bros., 1896), 6.

37. Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” FMF, 109, 109, 109, 110.

38. The verb also means “to treat with humiliation.”

39. Bahīī;j, “Jān Dārk,” NN, 121. This is one of many instances of Bahīī;j's close but inexact echoing of Fawwāz. The latter says that Jeanne “had to traverse 150 leagues of territory saturated by the English and encompassed by sly trickery” (DM, 122). Bahīī;j adds the dabābāt.

40. Yūnus, “Jān Dārk 'lā pūsill,'” NN, 105.

41. “Jān Dārk,” MM (1925), 271, 272.

42. Gottleib, “Introduction,” Boutet de Monvel, Joan of Arc, 10.

43. Jeanne as anti-imperialist heroine was not wholly unprecedented. Perhaps writers in Egypt took inspiration from the Irish. John Daly Burke's 1798 play, Female Patriotism: Or, the Death of Joan of Arc, “heap[ed] abuse on the English” (Powers, “The Joan of Arc Vogue,” 180).

44. “Jān Dārk,” AR, 3. Cf. Hanna, “Iconology,” 219–21, 234–37, on the thinly veiled political messages produced by the Action française's use of Jeanne.

45. “Jān Dārk,” AR, 3. The religious overtones of “suffering the evil of punishment” were surely not lost on readers.

46. Marilyn Booth, Bayram al-Tunisi's Egypt: Social Criticism and Narrative Strategies (Reading, U.K.: Ithaca, 1990), 58. Anisa [Miss] H. M. S., “Jān Dārk aw fatāt Urliyān,” NN 6:71 (Nov. 1928): 386.

47. Hourani, Arabic Thought, 78–79.

48. Ibid., 79; 195–200.

49. The transcripts of Jeanne's condemnation and rehabilitation trials speak of her going “to France” (probably the Ile de France) from “her land,” Lorraine, which had an equivocal relation to France. Régine Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself and Her Witnesses, trans. Edward Hyams (New York: Stein and Day, 1966; reissued, Lanham: Scarborough, 1982), 145–46, 180, 184, 247.

50. Nahhās, Mithāl, 11. Her finale affirms watan's emerging sense through the adjective watanī, signifying “patriotic” and then “nationalist” as patriotism became a matter of nationalist orientation: “Thus was condemned a young woman who united in her person the best of qualities, the most perfect and complete of virtues, the greatest of patriotic merits” (11).

51. “Jān Dārk,” SB, 37, 37, 37, 38.

52. “Jān Dārk,” FS (1911), 123. In a biography of Christine de Pizan in the same journal exactly one year later, Jeanne—subject of de Pizan's last literary work—is “the great heroine of France, victim of patriotism/nationalism [al-wataniyya], and exemplar of courage.” “SN: Karistīī;n dīī; Bizān,” FS 6:4 (Jan. 1912): 121.

53. DM, 122; “Ikrām kātiba,” 108. Al-Mashriq also used watan in its opening subtitle to Fawwāz's text: “The Origins of Jeanne d'Arc and her mission to rescue her watan” (108), and in a footnote that criticizes Fawwāz for “exaggerating” Jeanne's state of confusion after Charles insisted that she not return to Domrémy. “She remained for a time in a state of confusion and doubt but finally deemed it wise to sacrifice her own position in the service of her watan” (112 n. 2).

54. Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” FMF, 109.

55. Ibid., 110. But the near interchangeability of the two and the use of the singular watan over the plural awtān to refer to France as a whole also sug-gests that the plural bilād had now come to take on its twentieth-century singular sense as “country” rather than “regions” or “towns” (Jeanne sees ruin and destruction in her bilād [109]; she aims to throw the English out of the French bilād territories [110]). Yet older usages have a tenacious hold: “Jeanne's soul longed to return to her bilād to see her family and mawātins” (here, as the local populace rather than as “compatriots”) (111). When it is noted at the end that she “sacrificed herself for her bilād,” again this is the broader usage (111).

56. Bahīī;j, “Jān Dārk,” NN, 121.

57. Ibid., 122, 122; Yūnus, “Jān Dārk 'lā pusill,'” NN, 273.

58. Hourani, Arabic Thought, 194.

59. Jeanne's likeness bears the caption “She it was who rescued her watan from the hand of the enemy” (“Jān Dārk,” MM, 270). And umma is unambiguous: the French umma celebrates its national holiday (‘‘īd watanī) (270, picture caption).

60. “Jān Dārk,” MM, 271, 271. Jeanne tells the king, “My heart holds an innocent wataniyya; I want to rescue my tortured watan and bilād. I want the freedom of poor, wretched France” (271). Her words were “magic,” not that of sorcery but of “true wataniyya's flame” (272).

61. Ibid., 273.

62. “‘‘Uzmat al-wataniyya al-haqqa, aw Jān Dārk,” MM (1937): 81. Watan and al-wataniyya occur at least a dozen times; Jeanne's self-sacrifice is a nationalist one. This “true patriotism” compelled Jeanne to do nothing other than “sacrifice her life for the sake of rescuing her country” (81); not one voice was raised to save her “when her defense of her watan was her whole crime. . . . God have mercy on the martyr to patriotism and loyalty [al-wataniyya waal-wafā‘‘ā’ء]” (84).

63. Warner, Joan of Arc, 239–42.

64. Anderson and Zinnser, A History of Their Own, 160; also 213; Warner, Joan of Arc, 240–45.

65. Her fifteenth lecture, delivered February 10, 1910, reprinted in Couvreur, La Femme, 249–66.

66. A few biographies note that “the French sold Jeanne to the English,” but the English are the ultimate villains throughout this set of texts. In general the trial and execution are not portrayed as the work of a French ecclesiastical institution aligned with the English. Rather, they are forthrightly “a blotch on the pages of English history,” “a mark of shame on the brow of imperialism” (Mūsā, “Butūlat Faransā,” al-Mahrajān [1938], 71; “Jān Dārk,” Mulhaq al-Sabāh, 15). Sādiq puts more blame on the French. After jealousy broke out among the French army commanders (perhaps an implicit reference to the difficulty of being a female in Jeanne's position), “her situation deteriorated, her star descended, and they [the French] left her a prisoner in enemy hands” (“Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” FMF, 11). Yūnus says the “people of Burgundy took her prisoner and sold her to the English, an act of treachery on their part toward their country, and a crime against a loyal girl” (“Jān Dārk 'lā pusill,'” NN, 105). But he deploys this to stress that this “crime” occurred only because Jeanne transgressed accepted gender boundaries.

67. “Jān Dārk, aw al-fatāt al-shahīī;ra,” AF (1926), 97. And France is “her beloved watan” (98).

68. Ibid., 99.

69. “Jān Dārk,” MM (1925), 272.

70. Ibid., 273.

71. As‘‘ad Arqash, “Tilka Jān Dārk innamā Turkiyya,” FS 3:1 (Oct. 1908): 22–24.

72. Fenoglio-Abd el Aal, Défense, 95–96, 119.

73. “‘‘Uzmat al-wataniyya al-haqqa, aw Jān Dārk,” MM (1937), 81.

74. With a fortunate choice of adjective whose double meaning resonates, Haylāna ‘‘Abd al-Malik, a Coptic merchant in Tanta, is called “the noble/self-made [‘‘isāmiyya] woman, the only Egyptian woman who has worked in trade and succeeded in it to an extent that makes one rejoice.” She grew up in Tanta, illiterate, “her only legacy a fiery soul and a strong will.” Description of how she supported the local peasantry by single-handedly raising the price of cotton precedes a declaration that she did her share for the nationalist movement by opening her storehouse to the followers of Sa‘‘d Zaghlūl for their rallies. “Haylāna ‘‘Abd al-Malik,” MM 5:6 (June 15, 1924): 324. This biography also supports the magazine in noting Copts' contribution to the nation while highlighting the subject's work for the Coptic community: she “fought against injustices done to Copts [in Tanta].” Popp is another working-class subject, lauded, as I have said, for helping other working-class women but at the same time for pulling herself into the middle class. Hasīī;b al-Hakīī;m, “Min al-kūkh ilā al-barlamān: Madām Bawb,” MM 8:3 (Mar. 15, 1927): 117–21. A biography dramatically rendered of one Alice Ayres (d. 1885), described as a domestic servant of a member of the English bourgeoisie, says that the subject “sacrificed her life in good faith to save those who were not her kin.” She saved the family's children (and lost her life) in a fire. The biography opens with a homily valorizing women's self-sacrifice for their community—whether defined by family or nation. ‘‘Iffat Sultān, “al-Tadhiya: Alīī;s Ayirs: Fatāt injilīī;ziyya bāsila,” JL 7:8 (Feb. 1915): 265–69; quotation on 265. Similar themes emerge in a unique profile of an “ordinary Egyptian,” “Al-Sitt Umm Muhammad,” MM 7:5 (May 20, 1926): 267. A clear indication of class orientation closes a biography of Catherine I of Russia: “She was one of the most honorable and refined women, despite her base origins and the obscurity of her lineage.” “Kātirīī;na al-ūlā imbirātūrat Rūsiyā,” FS 3:2 (Nov. 1908): 41–43; quotation on 43. Such phrases draw upon the conventional diction of classical biographical dictionaries and pinpoint the elite bias of this genre.

75. “Nābighat al-Turkiyyāt: Awwal wazīī;ra fīī; al-‘‘ālam mar‘‘a [sic] sharqiyya: al-sayyida Khalīī;da Adīī;b Hānim wazīī;rat al-ma‘‘ārif,” SR 4 (Dec. 1923): 24–25. Perhaps the Jeanne d'Arc comparison is strengthened by the portrait of Edip (24), holding the reins of her horse, head covered but face visible.

76. Warner, Joan of Arc, 97, 246.

77. Ibid., chap. 12. Boutet de Monvel's biography is suffused with images of children, and it emphasizes Jeanne as child/peasant.

78. Biographies in Nahhās, al-Hilāl, Fawwāz, SB, and FS (which says she was born of poor parents and had no education). Al-Hilāl mounts a critique of both “great-man” [sic] biography and the “superstition” of ordinary folk (rural or urban is not specified, although the context is what the “village folk” had to say about Jeanne) when the signs that allegedly attended Jeanne's birth are mentioned only to be debunked: “You hardly ever read the history of a great man, especially leaders and heroes, without seeing in them events they say happened just before birth or at the hour of birth that indicate a prophecy of [that person's] arrival. . . . There might not be any truth in these narratives except a mere expression that was uttered by the mother, the female neighbor, or the midwife” (166). This gender-specific critique echoes attacks in the press and in fiction at the time on “popular belief” as detrimental to national strength and the national economy.

79. Yūnus, “Jān Dārk 'lā pusill,'” NN, 104.

80. Ibid., 105.

81. “Jān Dārk,” MM, 271.

82. Warner calls her father “dean” of the village (Warner, Joan of Arc, 58). “In 1423 Joan's father was the villager who signed the agreement with the leader of a band of soldiers, a yearly fee levied on each household paid so that there would be no pillaging” (Anderson and Zinnser, A History, 116). It is clear from witnesses at the time that the family was propertied but not wealthy, and was respected by the villagers as “honest and decent farmers and true Catholics of good repute.” See Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself, 16–20; 17.

83. These texts conflate “herdsman” and “peasant,” not the same thing; nor would their roles be conflated in the context of Egypt's ecology and society.

84. For AF (1926), Jeanne is a “girl shepherdess, of fine physical constitution and nature, living the life of those villagers, free of artificiality” (“Jān Dārk,” 97). For others she simply “tends her father's flocks” (“Jān Dārk,” AR, 3). See also Zuhayr, “Min al-tārīī;kh: Jān Dārk munqidhat Faransā,” MM (1933). “The work she did was watching her father's livestock” (99).

85. His primary motive may have been to conceal his identity, for the dubious image of a fiction writer was not consonant with his career as a lawyer. In later editions his name appeared on the title page. See Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction, 2d ed. (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 33–35.

86. Badran, Feminists, 92.

87. Zaynab Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” 109–10. No doubt writers in Egypt picked up this image from European sources; in fact, they could have taken a page right out of de Monvel: “[Her folks] were honest people, simple laboring folk who lived by their toil. . . . She was a sweet, simple, upright girl. Everyone loved her, for all knew that she was kind-hearted and was the best girl in the village. A hard worker, she aided her family in their labors. During the day she led the animals to pasture or joined her father in doing heavy work; in the evening she sat spinning at her mother's side and helped her with the housework.” Boutet de Monvel, Joan of Arc, 13.

88. This fit FMF's rhetoric perfectly. Indeed, the same author wrote on the self-sacrifice women must practice for those around them. Taking care of oneself was also a duty—for the sake of others. Zaynab Sādiq, “Wājib al-mar‘‘a nahwa nafsihā,” FMF 1:5 (Aug. 1921): 154–56.

89. DM, 122. SB and FS (1911) do not mention him. From the 1920s, see Bahīī;j, “Jān Dārk,” NN, 120; Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān”; “Jān Dārk,” AF. Some from this decade subsume him in the “village family famous for piety and goodness.” Yūnus is more complex; Jeanne is “fleeing from her father the shepherd” (“Jān Dārk 'lā pusill,'” 104). The father is the focus for an implicitly critical attitude to the peasant family; this may suggest a classist outlook on the part of the author.

90. “Jān Dārk,” Mulhaq al-Sabāh, 14. There is disagreement over whether relations between Jeanne and her family were affectionate. Pernoud concludes from trial documents that they were, and that her father felt an affectionate concern for her (Joan of Arc by Herself, 126). But, she notes, views to the contrary exist. Jeanne's story offers scope to criticize arranged marriage. Some Egyptian versions narrate Jeanne's refusal to comply with a betrothal (an event not established by the sources, but unquestioned in these texts). Jeanne's father's role as matchmaker, rather than the youth's as suitor, is primary (Nahhās, Mithāl, 8; Al-Hilāl, 123). This narrative line thwarts the unsupportive father who tries to deflect his daughter by inserting her into the usual domestic slot.

91. Mūsā, “Butūlat Faransā,” 66.

92. Ibid.

93. Margolis, Joan of Arc in History, Literature, and Film, 243; Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself, 213; Warner, Joan of Arc, 105; Frances Gies, Joan of Arc, the Legend and the Reality (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 21.

94. Warner notes that for a medieval woman who “contravened the destined subordination of her sex” by, for example, donning male garb, this garb could act as “armour, both defensive and aggressive”; simultaneously she could use domesticity as a defense (Warner, Joan of Arc, 153). Jeanne “only insisted on it once” during her trial (160): “For spinning and sewing let me alone against any woman in Rouen” (Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself, 16).

95. Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” FMF, 110. In the narrative context this is inaccurate; it was the commander of the Vaucouleurs fort, nearest fort to Domrémy, to whom Jeanne first went.

96. Ibid., 111.

97. “Jān Dārk,” MM, 271. This text calls Jeanne's “firmness . . . proof of the true [or sincere] nature of woman's will and her moral courage” (273). These generalizations open out a second interpretive possibility for the text's construction of the struggle between weak and strong, by collapsing the colonizer/colonized binary into a male/female one, a well-recognized conjunction in postcolonial studies.

98. Fawwāz, DM, 123.

99. Warner, Joan of Arc, 158.

100. Ibid., 147. Anisa [Miss] H. M. S., “Jān Dārk aw fatāt Urliyān,” NN 6:71 (Nov. 1928): 387. Warner notes that in sixteenth-century (and later) European treatments of Jeanne, her “male dress is glossed over. She is armed and cuirassed as a practical measure. No inquiry is made into the disturbing and deep ambivalence of Joan's need to wear male dress far from the battlefield” (213). In Egyptian biographies Jeanne's reversion to male garb after her imprisonment is explained as the ruse of her captors, not as her desire.

101. An article in Ruūz al-Yuūsuf took a stand on the controversy over whether it was indeed Jeanne who was burned at the stake in 1431; but this was not a biography. “A haqqan uhriqat Jān Dārk?” Ruūz al-Yuūsuf 1:3 (Nov. 9, 1925): 7.

102. Cf. one scholar's conclusion about the effect of certain early-twentieth-century English-language biographies of Jeanne: “The Maid of Orleans emerges a real girl as well as a genius, with the radiance of her young womanhood sublimated by her 'mission' to an ineffable whiteness.” See Helen Harriet Salls, “Joan of Arc in English and American Literature,” South Atlantic Quarterly 35 (1936): 175. See the pictorial images reproduced in Warner, Joan of Arc, between pages 176 and 177; Pernoud, Joan of Arc, 12–19, 52. Again, the emphasized motif of whiteness has a basis in the documents (Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself, 83, 112).

103. A move, argues Warner, that shaped Jeanne's post-sixteenth-century image in France: “Joan's Amazonian likeness had to be softened to be countenanced at all: her transvestism, her armour, her inviolability had to seem something that in the final conclusion was offered on the altar of male supremacy. . . . Joan's life is a tribute to the traditional sphere of man, as opposed to woman. . . . She became a talisman for a host of causes conducted by men. . . . [Yet] because she was undeniably female, she was a figurehead for the women's side in one phase of the lasting struggle” (Warner, Joan of Arc, 217–18). Perhaps this is why she was attractive to male nationalists writing in Egypt.

104. “Jān Dārk,” MM, 272. This digression gives immediacy to the abstraction quoted earlier, from the same biography, on women's strength of will.

105. Bahīī;j, “Jān Dārk,” NN, 120.

106. Ibid.

107. All quotes in ibid., 121.

108. Fawwāz, DM, 123. Also, in the 1920s, this recapitulates the theme of the happy nationalist peasant: “She wanted to return to her earlier life, among the sheep and fields of the folk of her dear village” (Nūr, “Jān Dārk,” NN [1926]: 405. Again, writers in Egypt were making use of a motif popular in Joan's political “rehabilitation” in France (Warner, Joan of Arc, 217).

109. “The life history of this girl was pure; she did not dirty her hands with bloodshed” (“Jān Dārk,” FS, 123; also “Jān Dārk,” AR, 3; “Jān Dārk,” AF, 98). Al-Hilāl, however, claims she “killed 700 soldiers” (“Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” 126). Mūsā also presents her as in the thick of the fighting (“Butūlat Faransā,” 70).

110. “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” al-Hilāl, 167.

111. Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” FMF, 110. Sketching her childhood preoccupations substantiates Jeanne's role in battle: she “was concerned with the weak and cared for the sick” (Nūr, “Jān Dārk,” NN, 405). So does the increasingly explicit, descriptive emphasis on the domestic: as a girl returning home from tending the flocks, “she sat beside her mother sewing clothes and embroidering cloth and listening to stories of the war” (“Jān Dārk,” AR, 3). Cf. Boutet de Monvel's treatment (Joan of Arc, 28, 36, 40).

112. Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself, 17–20, 65; 64, 86, 92.

113. Zuhayr, “Jān Dārk munqidhat faransā,” MM, 99.

114. Ibid.

115. Ibid., 100.

116. Ibid. I have translated the verbal noun ighrā‘‘ as “urging on,” but the emphasis on Jeanne's femininity makes it hard to ignore a more common connotation, “tempting” or “alluring”; in no other biography does this term appear.

117. Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself, 63; see also 62, 65, 84; Warner, Joan of Arc, 7. Warner says “Joan's prowess was not credited to her military skills until the rehabilitation of 1456. . . . Instead, the miraculousness of her victories was stressed, even by her enemies” (80). The legend was so firmly set that even a 1930s writer who is anxious to retrieve “the real Joan [who] has been gradually emerging from the mists of legend and prejudice” (Salls, “Joan of Arc in English and American Literature,” 168) labeled her “commander-in-chief of an army at seventeen” (167).

118. Zuhayr, “Jān Dārk munqidhat Faransā,” MM, 100.

119. This had enormous political implications for the region, which was not lost on local audiences. “The defense of the [Ottoman] empire's integrity in Libya quickly became a popular political cause throughout the Muslim world.” Lisa Anderson, “Ramadan al-Suwaylihi: Hero of the Libyan Resistance,” in Struggle and Survival in the Middle East, ed. Edmund Burke III (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 120.

120. Badran, Feminists, 50.

121. Anderson, “Ramadan al-Suwaylihi,” 121.

122. “SN: Fatāt Qarāqīī;sh,” FS 6:10 (July 1912): 361–63, 361.

123. “SN: Jān Dār [sic] al-‘‘arabiyya,” FS 14:2 (Nov. 1919): 41–42, 42.

124. “SN: “Fatāt Qarāqīī;sh,” 362–363.

125. That the “Young Woman of Qarāqīī;sh” is anonymous, an everywoman, identifiable as only “Jeanne d'Arc” or “Khawla,” enhances this collective emphasis.

126. “Arab” first signified Bedouin, and that could have been meant here, but given the thrust of both versions, the broader, newer meaning seems to take precedence.

127. “Al-Nābigha al-misriyya al-Anisa Zakiyya ‘‘Abd al-Hamīī;d Sulaymān,” NN 4:12 [48] (Nov. 1926): 412–14; quotation on 412.

128. Badran, Feminists, 42. The text exemplifies the concrete treatment of issues that “Famous Women” texts could accomplish. One reason girls' education was controversial was that it consumed limited funds. Even more so was Egyptian government sponsorship of educational missions abroad for girls like Sulaymān. For a century, young men (potential bureaucrats) had been sent to Europe; young women were first sent in 1901, for teacher training. This was hotly protested: “Conservatives opposed the idea of sending Muslim women to Christian countries for higher education” (Baron, Women's Awakening, 131). For a time only non-Muslims were sent, but gradually Muslims rejoined (131–32). That Labīī;ba Ahmad's NN featured one of these students in approving terms suggests how difficult it is to affix analytically stable labels in this period.

129. Further anecdotes reiterate Zakiyya's exemplarity:

In London, an English girl—[Zakiyya]'s frequent companion—told her proudly that it was England that had forbidden the enslavement of individuals. [Zakiyya] an-swered her in the tone of one in the right censuring another: “But it is the same [country] that has regarded as lawful the enslavement of whole peoples.” With a start, the [other] girl changed the subject. “Do you know of any greater [person] than this King?” [Zakiyya] replied, “The heart of a progressive Egyptian woman.” The girl said nothing more.
[Zakiyya] was sitting with an English lady in London, who in the course of conversation asked, “Why does Egypt demand freedom when it is one of the world's poorest nations?” Hardly had she finished her question when Miss [Zakiyya] answered, “That is why it is demanding freedom.” In these anecdotes, of which there are hundreds . . . her personality shines, lit up with love for her homeland [watan] and possessive zeal toward it. (“Al-Nābigha al-misriyya al-Anisa Zakiyya ‘‘Abd al-Hamīī;d Sulaymān,” NN 4:12 [48] [Nov. 1926], 412–13.)

130. Powers, “The Joan of Arc Vogue,” 178.

131. Warner, Joan of Arc, 259; Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 3. For directing me to Wells I am indebted to Alice Deck.

132. Badran, Feminists, 13.

133. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 11.

134. Armstrong, Desire, 23.

135. Eve Sedgewick, “Nationalisms and Sexualities in the Age of Wilde,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Routledge, 1992), 241.

136. “Al-Gharad min inshā‘‘ hadhihi al-majalla,” JL 1:1 (July 1908): 5–8; quotation on 6.

137. An article in Young Woman of the East taken from “the Jeanne d'Arc Journal” and sent by a European or American man who was heading to China with missionaries gave the response of a high Chinese official to the question of what “his people thought about the savior of France.” People in Europe are accustomed to representing China as “a country mired in the darknesses of primitivity,” he said, but we are moving fast toward “the same level of civilization as Europe.” The masses know nothing of Jeanne, but the elite do. “Not a one of our religious figures, even though most follow Confucius, does not believe in the divine mission of Jeanne. . . . Thus the savages of the Far East prove they are more accurate in their opinions than are some European historians.” “Muqtatafāt: Ra‘‘y al-sīī;niyīī;n fīī; Jān Dark,” FS 4:6 (Mar. 1910): 219–20.

138. “‘‘Uzmat al-wataniyya,” 81.

139. Bint Uns al-Wujūd, “Qissat butūla niswiyya: Qadīī;sat shahr Mayū allatīī; taradat al-injilīī;z min bilādihā,” al-Amal 1:1 (May 6, 1952): 7–8. This was the first issue of the new series (note 144).

140. Ibid., 8.

141. Nahhās, Mithāl, 11.

142. Bint Uns al-Wujūd, “Qissat butūla niswiyya,” 8. This is the volume's first biography, and it is not inserted in a biographical series. The editorial preface announces that “the editorial staff of al-Amal has decided to publish in sequence, under 'Political History,' some glances at the history of British [sic] imperialism in France” (7).

143. Badran, Feminists, 153. On al-Amal's program, see Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 65–66, 172. Thābit was the first Egyptian woman to graduate from the French law school in Cairo and the first college-educated female journalist (Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 132). She founded al-Amal in 1925 to mount a Wafdist attack on the English-appointed prime minister, Ahmad Ziwar Pasha (169). But the journal emphasized women's needs and human rights, carrying the rubric “Journal in Defense of the Rights of Women” and calling openly for women's public political rights. Closing in 1926, it resumed under the new rubric, in 1952, when the nature of the state appears to take precedence over women's rights. I say this tentatively, having not seen all issues.

144. This portrait did not reflect Fārūq's image among the populace. See Berque, Egypt, 660–61. But it is also well to remember that there was a long, often practically motivated practice in the Egyptian press of paying homage to the royals, often patrons of these publications.

7. From Sober To Salacious

Women's Biography as Spectacle

She stands out as one of the most able and skilled of Eastern women, one of those refined, educated women who manage their duties excellently and handle their affairs with wisdom and vision. Moreover, she is one of those who take in their stride the advances of the age, to the extent that these suit Eastern customs and do not transgress sacred religious principles.

And thus did death put an end to the evils of Mata Hari, the dancer who infatuated thousands.

On January 26, 1927, The Bride carried three pictures under its masthead. The largest showed the prince of Wales offering a farewell kiss to his brother's wife. To the side appeared two faces, the first belonging to the “leader of the women's awakening in Persia, Zuhra Hānim Haydār.” Ira-nian women had been hugely influential in their country's “modern awakening,” explained the caption. They were “distinguished by their dedication to their nation and great desire to acquire learning, so that you even find among village women those who compose poetry and discuss philosophy on the basis of knowledge and reading.” The caption below the lower photograph was quite different. “This is not a portrait of a pretty actress,” announced the magazine, “but of a thief, a highway robber and famous murderer. Her name is Rebecca Bradley, and she was recently arrested in America as she stormed a bank.”^[1] The masthead carried the description The Bride had borne since its 1925 founding: “Al-‘‘Aruūsa is a magazine of entertainment, literature, science, and history, featuring photographs of contemporary events and famous ladies of the world, published weekly by Iskandar Makāriyūs.”

The family names of magazine proprietors were not changing as quickly as were magazines themselves. A contemporary of the Egyptian Woman's Magazine, the Magazine of the Women's Awakening, and Young Woman of the East in its later years, The Bride signaled the presence of a new sort of face on the journalistic scene. Since the late nineteenth century, readers and listeners in Egypt had enjoyed many satirical-colloquial periodicals, and some had featured caricatures of politicians. But the illustrated weekly of news and entertainment was just emerging, soon to be joined by magazines that specialized in theater, radio, and film. That women were important as magazine consumers is attested by The Bride's focus and longevity. It survived as a weekly magazine into the early days of World War II, when rising costs and paper shortages drastically curtailed popular periodical production.

And that “Famous Women” continued to be important to this type of magazine was signaled by their inclusion as part of the periodical's mission. But now it was “portraits” rather than “biographies” that were prominent. Before the turn of the century, sketched portraits had accompanied biographies of women intermittently. Women's magazines of the early 1920s did start to publish photographs of Egyptian and Syrian, aswell as European and American, women, although complaints from editors suggest that many women were reluctant to provide their likenesses. The Egyptian Woman's Magazine, describing American traveler Grace Seton's interview with Safiyya Zaghlūl, observed that Zaghlūl had given Seton special permission to photograph her. “For honorable Muslim women to this day do not permit their portraits to be published.”^[2] This was in late 1924, a few months before The Bride's first issue. Eighteen months later, Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik published a family portrait—of herself, husband, and two daughters—explaining that “a group of the magazine's readers requested that we publish a portrait of our daughters, and in compliance we publish this family portrait for the first and final time.”^[3] But photographs in the early years of this magazine were rare, perhaps for reasons of cost as much as modesty. The EFU's French-language magazine, L'Egyptienne, had the financial backing of Hudā Sha‘‘rāwīī;, and, as Badran notes, it was “not inexpensive” for the time. Perhaps this was as important as its feminist outlook and French-speaking, upper-class audience in sustaining its “hors-texte” publication of women's portraits.

And, as we have seen across the genre of “Famous Women” biography, there was no necessary correlation between ideological outlook and the profusion of pictures. Labība Ahmad may have carried more articles on hijāb than did her more secularly oriented sisters in publication. But Labība herself had no qualms about appearing in full-page portraits in her religiously oriented magazine. And the Magazine of the Women's Awakening published a photograph of Zaghlūl, head uncovered, in October 1922. Yet it was a controversial issue. Al-Hisān defended itself from charges that it was un-Islamic with reference to its publication of a photograph of Safiyya Zaghlūl in its first issue (1925), as it published a photograph of both Zaghlūls one year later. The magazine gave a history of prominent Egyptian women allowing publication of their photographs: the first, it said, had been Nāsif; and then, after consulting with her husband, Zaghlūl had followed suit and after her, “the illustrated magazines began obtaining photographs of leaders from among excellent women, and confronted many obstacles and difficulties in obtaining them. This year, we anticipate receiving their photographs without problem—otherwise, what photographs will the women's magazines publish?” Do Egyptian women, the journal asks (perhaps alluding to its rival, al-‘‘Arūsa), want Egypt to be represented by photographs of “dancers, actresses, singers, and the like”? It specifically requests that teachers and school principals send their photographs.^[4]

As The Bride featured portraits, it also offered biographies, and this chapter's epigraph from its profile of the Begum of Bhopal confirms that it offered names familiar to the readers of women's magazines. Not only the Begum but also Safiyya Zaghlūl, Sarujini Naidu, Marie Curie, and of course Jeanne d'Arc appeared. It demonstrated intense interest in European royalty, although it did not tend to celebrate queens as paragons of domesticity. No other magazine had featured the notorious Christina of Sweden (1626–89), “this mannish woman who was eccentric of nature beyond one's power to imagine.”^[5] Unlike the other magazines, it showed an abiding interest in royal mistresses—and not ones famed for charity or for work in girls' education.

And rather than featuring a series called “Mothers of Great Men” or “Famous Women,” The Bride featured “Famous Women Criminals,” “Shahīrāt al-mujrimāt.” This did not necessarily preclude the didactic possibilities of biography. A profile of English thief Emily Lawrence began by declaring that “most female criminals” are distinguished by “conceit and self-confidence.” Though often “a paragon of beauty,” the female criminal is not necessarily so, but her face proves as good an indicator of character as did the countenances of paragons of virtue in the women's magazines. “As for the criminal with whom we are concerned, she was not beautiful at all. But her features harbored something that helped her execute her hellish plans.” She “studied the life style of the elite” until she could imitate them; and “the strange thing is that . . . she came to believe she was one of them.” What was the moral here? Although she stole a great deal of jewelry, “even so she was always in need of money.”^[6] Mary Levy's case was different: with a “lazy husband who had no liking for work or self-exertion,” and a rich but “miserly” uncle, she became a murderer “no less crafty” than Lawrence.^[7] Lucy Fairs echoed but subverted the usual attributive practice of “Famous Women” biography, for she “was possessed of excessive intelligence and pervasive trickery.” Out of prison after serving time for attempting to pilfer an inheritance, she was more determined than ever to steal.^[8] Chicago Mary “used to rely on her beauty, and it never failed her.”^[9]

The Bride featured many female entertainers, too, but few were virtuous role models signaling the respectability of a singing career for the young Arab woman.^[10] Raquel Miller, a famous actress, had decided to go into a convent, the magazine announced, and hence it would offer her biography. Despite the convent as news hook, the biography went on to focus on her love life, for she had made her decision after “not letting any sort of pleasure go untasted.”^[11] In this magazine, entertainers embody enticing faces and questionable acts. If Hikmat Fahmīī; (in a rare portrait of an Egyptian actress) had brought “calm and attractiveness” from the rural environment of her childhood, she now used “the weapons of her eyes,” and many actors had fallen to this “Sultaness of Love.”^[12] “Biography” collapses into “love story” over and over, as in a serial “real-life story” about Madame Lubisco “arabized” by ‘‘Abbās Hāfiz and published in the magazine's tenth year. And it was not fādila but fātina (alluring, captivating, seductive) that was The Bride's hallmark epithet. Such a label could be applied to La Belle Otero (Caroline Puentovalga, 1868–1965), whose “depravity reached such heights that we do not dare describe it on the pages of The Bride.”^[13] (Immediately below this biography was an announcement: “The Bride is the magazine of the family, the magazine of ladies.”) Sister biographical subjects were “Princess Python,” Amy Crocker Galtizin; Françoise Etiné, “the ferocious cat”; Claude France, “or the beautiful spy”; and of course the inimitable Mata Hari.

Here was a modern discourse on that ages-old theme, kayd al-nisā‘‘, “the trickery of women”; on femininity as a socially disruptive force. Whether it was with the aid of physical beauty or a six-shooter, woman was disturbance and commodity. A feature called “Beauties of History” remarked that “beauty might be misfortune for a woman” and went on to say that Cleopatra's beauty had been nothing compared with the lovelies of this age.^[14] Yet this was a divergent biographical discourse in another sense. Many of The Bride's subjects had grown up in poverty, and if the point was to highlight rags-to-riches romance, was that the only message? These subjects are depicted as determined to fight their way into income, if not respectability. All the “Famous Women Criminals” are portrayed as using their ruthless intelligence against the uncaring wealthy. Many, despite the epithets bestowed on them, are sympathetic characters against backdrops of moneyed and male evil. If this was biography as spectacle, it was also more democratic. Perhaps it signaled a changing readership as well as new cultural forces.

Moreover, this was not the whole story. In its very first issue The Bride featured a short profile of Esther Fahmāī Wīī;sā, one of the many founding members of the Wafdist Women's Central Committee. The magazine hoped that “many Egyptian women would follow in her footsteps.”^[15] The second issue opened with a “never-before-published” portrait of a young-looking Safiyya Zaghlūl, her coiffed hair uncovered. The accompanying text emphasized her political energies as well as her supportive role as spouse. On page three, two columns of statistics dispelled the notion held by “those of ease and wealth, the bureaucrats and those of their class” that Egyptian women worked solely as home managers and parents, “a belief far from the truth.”^[16] Two issues later, an enormous portrait and forthright text celebrated Hudā Sha‘‘rāwīī;, acknowledged leader of Egypt's first organized and named feminist acts, a patriot who brooked no compromise with nationalist demands that put women's needs last. Sha‘‘rāwīī; was not a biographical subject in extant issues of (other) 1920s women's magazines, although they reported her comings and goings. Was she too independent—and too close for comfort—to serve as a role model? But if Egypt's men could be lauded for their nationalist efforts, announced The Bride, this woman deserved even more; for she had worked on behalf of women.^[17] The magazine followed political demands of Egyptian women as well as women internationally, alongside its advertisements for beauty aids and fashions. Celebrating Florence Fawwāz as a lauded opera star in Australia and London, it assumed a stance of local pride: “We should be more delighted with her than are the English.”^[18]Al-‘‘Aruūsa followed battles over women's admission to professions and asserted women's equal abilities,^[19] although perhaps its examples were not to the taste of some. In the same issue that celebrated Sha‘‘rāwīī;, an essay on “Famous Women” declared that just as many females as males had been imprisoned or executed for political reasons and crimes. Brief lives of Anne Boleyn, Jane Grey, Mary Queen of Scots, Charlotte Corday, and Marie Antoinette followed. If they were “victims of political passions,” at least their strengths were not said to be in the arena of home management.^[20]

Yet the mixed messages biography could generate—and the explicit attempt to instruct female readers on how to read a life according to gendered prescriptions—emerge forcefully in The Bride's biography of Caterina Sforza. It begins, as I noted in chapter 3, by declaring the educational utility of biography—this woman's life history would be good “for every woman in the world to read . . . for the benefit it contains.” Female readers are reminded that greatness and gender are independent variables: “because in her time Caterina Sforza played a great role, no less important than those of the age's great men.” What role? “In her life, Caterina committed crimes the recall of which makes bodies shiver. Yet she also tendered good works that every living conscience remembers with gratitude and every refined soul approves. She left legacies of great benefit to the daughters of her kind.” The biography describes her assumption of military leadership and soldiers' garb to defend the city her husband ruled against the forces of Cesare Borgia. But how? “Taking up the sword,” she also “tried to cast fitna among the enemy ranks with the aid of her compelling beauty.” That her success was temporary is perhaps one of the biography's more subtle messages.

At this point the female reader is instructed further on how to read a female life. For “the military deeds that Caterina performed are not what ladies need to concern themselves with reading. Rather [they should concern themselves with] her interest in matters pertaining to women, her valuable investigations into techniques a woman must pursue to preserve her beauty, make her face pretty and delicate of appearance, and influence men's minds so they are attracted to her.” The text reproduces Sforza's recipes for clarifying the complexion and whitening the teeth. But this prescriptive narrowing at the biography's end sits uneasily with the military feats female readers are told to ignore, for the latter take up twice as much space on the page as Caterina's legacy to the female complexion.^[21]

This biography of Sforza also keys us into how the politics of “East” and “West” appeared rather differently in al-‘‘Aruūsa than in women's magazines, but how in fact these politics form a sort of bridge between the biographies of this period and the rhetorical contours of their descendants late in the twentieth century. If The Bride celebrated Safiyya Zaghlūl as model nationalist and mother and Nabawiyya Mūsā as the epitome of the dedicated teacher, it took on Mata Hari as the epitome of evil. All criminals and beauty queens, and almost all entertainers, who appear in this magazine were of the West. So were English physician Louisa Aldrich Blake as well as Marie Curie and Jeanne d'Arc, of course, but such figures were in a minority as “Famous Women” in this magazine. This was a trend that the EFU's French-language magazine, L'Egyptienne, would recognize in its own 1934 profile of Curie, when it remarked that “in a time of publicity when eyes have time only for actresses,” it was important to mourn Curie's death and to think about her life.^[22]

Thus, even in The Bride, biographies worked on several levels. Managing images of womanhood that were unstable, acting as a prescriptive technique that was both expansive and narrowly though unevenly regulatory, these texts suggest the multiple strands of thought and experience that nourished early debates on the woman question, as they also intimate the difficult negotiations that Arab feminists would face in years to come. The Bride is indicative of new pressures and interests on the popular magazine scene. For the sensational and the salacious became gradually more marked as it moved into its second half decade.

Later Women's Aagazines

Biographies of “Famous Women” continued to appear in post–World War II women's periodicals. If the spotlight was increasingly on Arab and Muslim women, this was not entirely so. In its first year, Fātima Ni‘‘mat Rāshid's 1940s journal Fatāt al-ghad carried biographies of Zaghlūl, Curie, Jane Addams, “Mme. Chiang Kai-Shek,” and Helen Keller. Jamīī;la al‘‘Alā’ءilīī;'s al-Ahdāf (1948–51?) featured “literature of the jawārī” and a few “Striving Women,” all local: Hudā Sha‘‘rāwīī;, Mayy Ziyāda. Munīī;ra Thābit, as we know, allowed Jeanne d'Arc into the pages of al-Amal, but other articles tended to incorporate news of women's activities into discussions of politics, while profiling a few recently deceased men and women and offering brief news of a few prominent local writers and activists—Bint alShāti‘‘, Durriyya Shafīī;q, Amīī;na al-Sa‘‘īī;d.

The message had become more muted, too. Early in the century, readers were instructed repeatedly to look to the lives of famous women for models. Their granddaughters were left to draw their own conclusions, even as biographies became less common in magazines geared to them. The 1950s' crop of girls' school magazines, funded by the Nasser government, contained almost no biographies, although a predecessor, the 1934 annual of the Princess Fawziyya Secondary School for Girls, had featured “The Heroine Joan of Arc,” written in English by a student.^[23] In 1958, ‘‘A’ءisha ‘‘Abd al-Rahmān, “Bint al-Shāti‘‘,” then an assistant professor, published a study on mystic poet Rābi‘‘a al-‘‘Adawiyya in the ‘‘Ayn Shams University Women's College annual.^[24]

It might be argued that textual role models were no longer urgent at a time when women's visibility in the workplace and universities carried its own message. I think biography also was a casualty of the direction in which these magazines tended to move, toward greater commercialization and focus on the realms of fashion and home commodities. Many magazines of the 1940s and after, beginning with Anā wa-anta (founded 1936), showed “little interest in women's minds.” Profiles of famous women were likely to focus on “Beauty Queens in History,” as a series in this journal did, featuring Cleopatra, Nefertiti, and Queen Farīī;da.^[25]

But the relative absence of biography also might have reflected the growing presence of autobiography in magazines and elsewhere. In the 1930s, Jamīī;la al-‘‘Alā’ءilāī had written a very personal, autobiographically tinged sketch of Mayy Ziyāda, carrying on Mayy's own practice. Maga-zines of the 1920s had begun to admit writing in an autobiographical form in the genre of “letters” between friends that bore messages congruous with magazines' critiques of gendered behavior. They featured occasional “autobiographical” texts, although, I suspect, some were written by editors. (Recall the Egyptian Woman's Magazine's “Memoirs of the Elderly Woman,” a wonderful vehicle for social critique.) The genre of letters between friends, or of “Memoirs,” with the autobiographical possibilities each one bore, also afforded an intimate tone of address to an implied female audience, and therefore a continuous construction of that audience, as I argued in chapter 2. In the fourth volume of the Magazine of the Women's Awakening, the first-person narrator of “Mudhakkirāt ‘‘Ādila” (Memoirs of ‘‘Ādila / “A Just Woman”) lectured her friend Nabīī;la (“A Noble Woman”) on morals, principles of behavior, the importance of religion, and so forth. Addressing “my sister,” the “writer” of these “letters” was also addressing her other reading “sisters,” the magazine's sought audience of schoolgirls and other females.^[26] And The Bride had published a profile of Nabawiyya Mūsā that was proto-autobiography. She talked of her early life. (Yet the profile's title highlighted less her early life than a question: “Why does she refuse marriage?”)^[27]

Without a doubt it was becoming more acceptable to construct one's own life for readers, as Nabawiyya Mūsā did with her “Dhikrayātīī;” (“My Memories”) series in her journal, al-Fatāt, beginning in 1939.^[28] Mūsā's memoirs recapitulated many issues articulated in the “Famous Women” texts. She was the heroine, beset by life's trials.^[29] Perhaps Munīī;ra Thābit's al-Amal did not feature biographies (except, of course, for Jeanne d'Arc) because the magazine was replete with its editor's autobiographical musings. In 1956, I‘‘tidāl Hammūda culminated the short history of her periodical Fatayāt Misr (1956–57?) with a long autobiographical piece on her struggle to find an outlet for her political beliefs. Journals of the 1940s and later began to feature interviews with contemporary women—as the Magazine of the Women's Awakening had done in the 1930s. These profiles played the same role biography had played earlier.

If biography had become less important as a mode of imagining alternative lives, this was also probably because of the radically changing status of fiction and especially the growing number of published female fiction writers. Scholars of English cultural history have argued that women of the Victorian English bourgeoisie might have drawn on literary characters as a source for self-modeling, a way of “developing character.” Others have maintained that fiction has fulfilled that need for females ever since.^[30] In early twentieth-century Egypt, there was not yet a respectably established fictional tradition into which women could read or, indeed, write, their changing expectations, although scholars are now delving into the early assays into modern Arabic fiction and finding women at the forefront.^[31] It is notable, too, that some of the earliest male novelists placed female heroines at the center of their work; could they have provided imaginative fields in which reading girls might roam? Jurjīī; Zaydān's historical novels are the obvious referent, but Niqūlā Haddād and others seemed equally interested in the fictional possibilities of female protagonists.^[32]

Yet it must be remembered that female protagonists of early fiction by men often were a downtrodden lot. They exposed through their fictional biographies the state of women/the nation against which their creators railed. Biographies of “Famous Women,” by contrast, drew on both images of strong women and the respectability—and cultural purity—of the Arabic biographical tradition. But as the century went on, female readers could turn to female characters crafted by women to furnish their imaginations with heroines, and with the truth claims that—fortunately or not—tend to shape popular attitudes toward the relationship between female writers and their fictions. Al-‘‘Alā’ءilīī;, who in a profile in the Magazine of the Women's Awakening had declared her interest in fiction that would teach morals, gave her own fiction and essays pride of place over biography in her magazine al-Ahdāf. And with Latīī;fa al-Zayyāt's acclaimed 1960 bildungsroman al-Bāb al-maftuūh (The Open Door), adolescent girls could identify with a young female heroine, struggling with her sexuality and restraints on her public nationalist activism, who imagines herself as Marie Curie.

It is worth recalling, too, the emergence of a curious genre in the 1920s that bridged “autobiography” and “fiction” more deliberately, perhaps, than do most autobiographies, at least until recently. This was the sensational memoir of either a “fallen” individual or a working-class subject, published for the delectation of a literate, elite audience outside the lifeworld of the “autobiographical I.” Invariably, these works are said to be authored by the subject at the center but “edited” or “refined” by educated males. They are significant in this context for tracing “life histories” against frameworks of clearly articulated moralist/reformist aims. The Memoirs of an Egyptian Lady in Waiting, published serially in 1927, purport to tell the story of the “author,” Zaynab Muhammad, who describes herself as daughter of a bey, of Turkish family no less. She is driven from her “palace” by the evil intentions of her dissolute half brother, who tricks her loving father into repudiating her (after, by the way, he has spent a great deal of money on her education by tutors and at the Saniyya School). She embarks on a series of adventures in, among other things, Cairo houseboats, notorious at the time as upper-class brothels. The narrative affords a lively critique of polygyny, the ease of divorce, the Capitular Protections that European residents enjoyed and some locals exploited, police corruption, and other issues of concern at the time. It is given an aura of respectability by Zaynab Muhammad's preface:

To you, O fathers; to you, O mothers; to you, O awakening youth of Egypt, young men and young women, indeed, to all the children of the East, and especially to the noble Egyptian nation, I am honored to present these memoirs. I undertook them for the purpose of deterring families. My memoirs apply themselves to the serious offenses of clans who have fallen into vice. At the same time, they urge virtue and combat vice with a sword brandished; indeed, in them the reader will find signs of purity and probity, nobility and honor. Moreover, he will find the causes of the Egyptian nation's ta’ءakhkhur, and the secrets of the degradation that prevails over the children of the radiant Nile Valley.^[33]

Here was a “biographical” form that could entertain as it claimed reformist aims; that, in installment after installment, could narrate “vice” in the name of “virtue.”

As biography in women's magazines waned, women's biography was revived in volumes of collected “Great Women” by Nasserist, populistoriented writers, beginning in the mid-1950s. These, too, offered role models, tuned to a new ideology. When Fā‘‘iza ‘‘Abd al-Majīī;d published al-Mar’ءa fī mayādīn al-kifāh (Woman in Fields of Battle) in Egypt's government publishing house in 1967, the woman with hair streaming and arm uplifted on the cover represented both the premodern Arab subjects that filled the book's first half and the European women of the second half—as well as the book's final subject, a woman killed during the massacre of Palestinians in Dayr Yassin, Palestine, in 1948. If Fātima al-Zahrā‘‘ and Asmā’ء bt. Abīī; Bakr were named exemplary models for Arab women, Jeanne d'Arc's biography echoed the third worldist rhetoric of Nasserist Egypt even in its title: “Woman and the Struggle to Liberate Peoples: Jeanne d'Arc.” Commented ‘‘Abd al-Majīī;d: “Jeanne d'Arc's cry for freedom still sweeps across oppressed peoples to settle as firm belief deep within.”^[34] And Jeanne's mission “to her people was nothing other than a new belief in a new world of freedom and salvation.”^[35] The description takes a page from Nasser's domestic policy, too, as the author refers to the plight of the French peasantry under English rule. “Those good peasants, how could they survive after the land had been plundered from them? For it was tantamount to their soul, to the blood vessels that allow life. . . . Were its soil and yield prohibited to them [harām ‘‘alayhim] after that day [of English occupation], yet permitted [halāl] to every tyrant?”^[36] Blending Nasserist socialist and anti-imperialist rhetoric with religious diction, Jeanne's example—and malleability—remained useful in Egypt.

In the tradition of Zaynab Fawwāz and Mayy Ziyāda, today's Arab feminists have produced biographies of illustrious forebears whom they see as underwriting their own work and sense of career. Many of those writing biography are, like Fawwāz and Ziyāda, from the Lebanon, although of course their Lebanon is a different one.^[37] The role-modeling potential remains evident. Lebanese novelist Emily Nasrallāh remembers that when she published biographies of noted women in the Lebanese women's magazine Fayruūz, she “wanted to say to my Arab sisters, 'Fine, make yourself beautiful, but remember that you have something upstairs.'” And she deliberately chose women who “accomplished something on their own.”^[38]

But in Egypt, and elsewhere too, the production of biographical compilations is proceeding apace in association with a renewed marketing of conduct literature aimed at defining and regulating female behavior. Much of this literature—and many of the biographical works associated with it—consists of republication of medieval material, in new packaging, often with editors' or publishers' prefaces that yoke the text to the contours of contemporary society. Lives of women of the prophet Muhammad's family circulate endlessly. As was true early in the century, and as we will see in chapter 8, they work to define and stabilize gender identities and relations by offering what are seen as suitable role models for women.

Notes

1. AR 3:104 (Jan. 26, 1927): 1.

2. The magazine published the interview in edited form in its “Famous Women” column—another example of complicated authorship. “SN: alSayyida al-‘‘azīī;ma haram Zaghlūl Bāshā,” MM 5:8 (Oct. 15, 1924): 405–7; see 405.

3. Facing the first page (p. 57 of the volume) of MM 7:2 (Feb. 15, 1926).

4. “Al-Sana al-thāniya lil-Hisān,” al-Hisān 2:1 (Oct. 1, 1926): 22.

5. “Al-Malika Karistīī;n al-iswijiyya: Nabdha min tārīī;kh hayātihā al-mufcama bi-al-hawādith,” AR 7:315 (Feb. 11, 1931): 3, 8. The subject is praised for sagacity and devotion to books, but these are foreclosed by a return to the same theme: “Despite the breadth of her interests and variety of her leanings she manifested a strange eccentricity that did not issue from an enlightened mind” (3). Another feature calls her “the queen who did not bathe all her life.” “Malika lam tastahamm tūl hayātihā,” AR 7:347 (Sept. 23, 1931): 2.

6. “‘‘Alam al-mar‘‘a: Shahīī;rāt al-mujrimāt: Imīī;līī; Lawrins: al-Lissa allatīī; atba‘‘at rijāl al-būlīī;s,” AR 2:58 (Mar. 10, 1926): 10–11.

7. “‘‘Alam al-mar‘‘a: Shahīī;rāt al-mujrimāt: Māry Līī;fy al-qātila,” AR 2:60 (Mar. 24, 1926): 10.

8. “‘‘Alam al-mar‘‘a: Shahīī;rāt al-mujrimāt: Lūsy Fāyirs,” AR 2:61 (Mar. 31, 1926): 3.

9. “‘‘Alam al-mar‘‘a: Shahīī;rāt al-mujrimāt,” AR 2:64 (Apr. 21, 1926): 10–11; quotation on 11.

10. Mary Reinhart, though, excelled both at the study of law and at acting after the Russian Revolution left her no family members to support her. “Fatāt manfiyya ta‘‘iddu al-yawma nābighat al-masrah al-faransāwīī;,” AR 8:402 (Oct. 12, 1932): 3.

11. “Rākīī;l Milir ajmal mumaththilat Urubbā ta‘‘zimu ‘‘alā dukhūl al-dayr,” AR 2:116 (Apr. 20, 1927): 8.

12. “Hikmat Fahmīī; Hawwā‘‘ al-marāqis,” AR 10:491 (Aug. 1, 1934): 17.

13. “Awtirū al-Hasnā‘‘ al-imra‘‘a allatīī; ‘‘ashiqahā imbirātūrāni, wa-allatīī; bi-sababihā al-mi’ءāt,” AR 2:119 (May 11, 1927): 2.

14. “‘‘Alam al-mar‘‘a: Jamīī;lāt al-tārīī;kh: qad yakūn al-jamāl shu‘‘man ‘‘alā al-mar‘‘a,” AR 2:88 (Oct. 16, 1926): 3.

15. “Al-Za‘‘īī;ma al-misriyya Istīī;r Fahmī Wīī;sā,” AR 1:1 (Jan. 28, 1925): 12. On Wīī;ssā in the WWCC, see Badran, Feminists, 80, 81.

16. “Sināءāt al-nisā‘‘ fīī; Misr: Khamsa malāyīī;n imra‘‘a yashtaghilna li-yaksabna,” AR 1:2 (Feb. 4, 1925): 3.

17. “Za‘‘īī;mat al-nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya al-misriyya al-Sayyida Hudā Hānim Sha‘‘rāwīī;,” AR 1:3 (Feb. 11, 1925): 1.

18. “Al-Nābigha al-sūriyya fīī; fann al-ghinā‘‘ al-urūbbīī;—Flūrins Awstrāl,” AR 1:6 (Mar. 4, 1925): 1. This profile does not focus on her family as did the 1923 biography of Florence Fawwāz in SR.

19. Sālim, al-Mar’ءa al-misriyya, chap. 4.

20. “Shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘ allawātīī; hukima ‘‘alayhinna bi-al-mawt,” AR 1:3 (Feb. 11, 1925): 10–11.

21. “SN: Kātirīī;n Sfūrzā,” AR 5:264 (Feb. 19, 1930): 15.

22. Jeanne Marques, “Martyre de la science, Madame Curie est morte,” L'Egyptienne 10:104 (July–Aug. 1934): 2–5; 2.

23. “The Heroine Joan of Arc,” Al-Majalla al-sanawiyya li-Madrasat al-Amīra Fawziyya al-thānawiyya lil-banāt 2 (1934): “English Section,” 4.

24. ‘‘A’ءisha ‘‘Abd al-Rahmān, “Rābi‘‘a al-‘‘Adawiyya, adīī;ba shā‘‘ira,” Hawliyat Kulliyyat al-banāt bi-Jāmi‘‘at ‘‘Ayn Shams 1 (July 1958): 27–45.

25. Khalīī;fa, “Al-Sihāfa al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; Misr min sanat 1940 ilā 1965,” 41–50. Khalīī;fa says Anā wa-anta did not become a “women's journal” until 1942 (41–43).

26. E.g., “Mudhakkirāt ‘‘ādila,” NN 4:1 (Aug. 1924): 16–17. On the back cover, the magazine reminds readers that the Education Ministry, the provincial councils, and the Iraqi Education Ministry have all officially licensed distribution of the magazine to their schools.

27. “Man hunna za‘‘īmāt al-nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya? al-Anisa Nabawiyya Mūsā tuhaddithunā ‘‘an nash‘‘atihā al-ūlā!: Li-madhā tarfidu al-zawāj?” AR 2:270(Apr. 2, 1930): 2.

28. See Badran, “Expressing Feminism.”

29. See Badran, Feminists, 39–45.

30. E.g., works I have cited by Radway and Brownstein. On auto/biography, fiction, and “developing character” see Kali A. K. Israel, “Writing inside the Kaleidoscope: Rerepresenting Victorian Women Public Figures,” Gender and History 2:1 (spring 1990): 40–48.

31. I am thinking especially here of the work of Ulfat al-Rūbīī;. My own work on Zaynab Fawwāz also tries to place this early fiction into the perspective of the woman question.

32. Female characters, often based on historical figures, were among the earliest protagonists of Arabic novels. Two of the serial novels Salīī;m al-Bustanīī; published in al-Jinān were Zinuūbiyā (the Palmyra queen, vol. 2, 1871), and Buduūr (daughter of an Umayyad caliph, vol. 3, 1872). Thus al-Bustānīī; covered two grounds of Arab identity: ancient Semitic and Islamic.

33. “Muqaddimat wādi‘‘at al-mudhakkirāt,” Zaynab Muhammad, Mudhakkirāt wasīfa misriyya: ‘‘Ashiq ukhtih, “put into a novelistic form, corrected and polished by the two famous writers, Muhammad Bek Ahmad al-Buhaydī and Mahmūd Effendi Kāmil Farīd” (Cairo: Muhammad Mursī Husayn, for Maktabat al-nashr wa-al-ta‘‘līf, n.d. [1927]), 2. At least five installments appeared. The three I have ob-tained all carry a “preface” insisting on the work's moral and reformist utility. Ads announce Nisā‘‘ al-ءālam, Mudhakkirāt ‘‘āmil fī biqā‘‘ al-ءāhirāt (Memoirs of a[Male] Worker at Sites of the Prostitutes), and Mudhakkirāt mumaththila (Memoirs of an Actress), by Sarah Bernhardt. Others of this genre are Mudhakkirāt ‘‘arbagī and Mudhakkirāt mūmis. See my “Roman or Reform? Confessional Memoirs and Educating the Populace in 1920s Egypt” (paper delivered at “The Arts in Arab Societies: Culture in a Transnational Era,” Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., April 1999).

34. Fā‘‘iza ‘‘Abd al-Majīī;d, al-Mar’ءa fī mayādīn al-kifāh (Cairo: al-Mu‘‘assasa al-misriyya al-‘‘āmma lil-ta‘‘līī;f wa-al-nashr, 1967), 67.

35. ‘‘Abd al-Majīī;d, al-Mar’ءa fī mayādīn al-kifāh, 67. An idea of sacred mission is invoked, but the nationalist aspect is uppermost: “her sacred nationalist mission that is not to be vanquished” (68). The author refers to “the unity of the nation” and justifies crowning Charles as “safeguarding the unity of the nation [as people] and liberating the nation [as place/entity]” (70). “Whether hardships are simply trainers for peoples, or trials nothing other than unifying factors for nations . . . the grave danger fashioned them into a living, strong fabric pushing forth to sacrifice itself for the nation, that seat of honor, that arena of work” (70). The text is saturated with Nasserist tropes. The “workers and craftsmen” joined the struggle and “gave it victory” (71). Jeanne “struggled until the English evacuated [jalā] her nation” (71). And were it not for Jeanne's actions, “the French would not have found strength or faith to struggle for freedom . . . to form a bloc [al-takattul min] behind the idea, or to find means that would help them rid themselves of the foreigner's oppression and a servitude that abases” (72).

36. ‘‘Abd al-Majīī;d, al-Mar’ءa fī mayādīn al-kifāh, 70.

37. I am thinking of works by Emily Nasrallah, Rose Ghurayyib, Nadia Nuwayhad, and, earlier, Wadad Sakakini and Emily Ibrahim. These are by no means the only examples.

38. Author's interview with Emily Nasrallāh, Cairo, 1990.

8. Famous Wombs and Women's memories

Gender, Nation, and Life Writing in Today's Egypt

For she is al-tāhira, the pure—she of good parentage and property, comely and consummate [dhāt al-hasab wa-al-māl wa-al-jamāl wa-al-kamāl]. . . . Khadīja grew up in a noble home, and her growth to adolescence was founded on praiseworthy morals and virtuous conduct. Khadīja was beautiful, light-skinned, tending to plumpness. She had fine black hair and large eyes.
. . . Her relationship with the Messenger was at first a business relationship, but Lady Khadīja noticed that Muhammad differed from the general run of shabāb [youth]. For he was a good person, and he stood out for the beauty of his person and his soul. She fell in love with him and longed to marry him. Yet how could that happen? For she was some years the older. But nothing can obstruct God's will. . . . Muhammad lived in Khadīja's house. He loved her, and his wife loved him. . . . [After his first revelation] Khadīja believed, and was the first woman to submit to Islam. She was the best of companions and helpers to her husband, for she was a sincere believer and a loyal and courageous woman. . . . Khadīja stood firmly beside the Messenger of God, encouraging and supporting him, and strengthening his heart.

Throughout Muslim-majority societies today, advertising life histories of the earliest Muslim women is one potent way to articulate visions of what gender ought to mean in a modern society. The message is anything but hidden: the life history of Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid that yields this chapter's epigraph appeared in a volume entitled Exemplary Women, published in Cairo in 1992.^[1]

Today, as competing groups seek to control, in Deniz Kandiyoti's words, the “'true' message of Islam . . . [as] the only legitimate ideological terrain on which issues pertaining to women can be debated,”^[2] early Muslim women emerge in print as female role models. The prominence of one figure or another may be traceable to the dominance of a certain political agenda. Fātima al-Zahrā‘‘ was advanced as the sole figure of authority over the collective imaginary of many women in Iran until the movement to topple the shah mustered Zaynab, sister of Husayn, for she was the courageous fighter, the ideal female revolutionary figure—and sibling of a martyr, to boot. With the revolution's consolidation, Fātima, embodiment of domestic fealty and piety, took center stage again. Carla Makhlouf notes that biographies of early Muslim women as “culture heroes” infused debates over women's status in North Yemen in the 1970s; others have noticed similar deployments across the region.^[3] Such role models become an active part of the present, of how women see their roles within a sphere defined by Islamic activism.

As we have seen, the writing of famous women's lives as performances of gender agendas is nothing new in modern Egypt. Nor is it new to inscribe early Muslim women's lives. In 1901, WomaninIslam had featured Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid in its very first issue:

[Khadīī;ja] was a resolute, intelligent, honorable woman. She had one of the most respectable ancestries of the women of Quraysh, and was among the wealthiest and noblest. Everyone in her clan wanted to marry her but none could. When she saw how Muhammad [had conducted himself in her trade] she sent for him and offered herself to him. He came with his paternal uncles to her father, who betrothed them and they were married. . . . Khadīī;ja was the first to trust him and take him at his word. When Gabriel taught him to perform the ablutions and the prayer, he came directly to Khadīī;ja and taught her that. She made her ablutions just as he did, and prayed just as he did.
“The Experiential Lessons to Be Drawn from This Life” are as follows: (1) Khadīī;ja chose Muhammad as an employee because of his reliability and truthfulness. (2) She chose him as a husband because of his fine morals. (3) Commerce is as suitable for a woman to pursue as for a man. (4) A woman's commerce not only benefits herself and her family, but might bring benefit on the whole group [jumhuūr] as well. (5) Women may be helpers to those who do great deeds. Thus was Khadīī;ja first to submit and believe in the Prophet's mission, before a single man converted. She helped him to propagate his mission.^[4]

I have argued throughout this book that such biographies addressed the question—a compelling one with the formation of nationalist ideologies under imperial rule—of how gendered divisions of labor might shift to better serve a new nation-state. Competing constructions of “woman's place” exemplified (and concealed) conflicting notions of what that state should be. It was in this period of nation formation that biographies of “Famous Women” became a regular feature in the many periodicals aimed at women as subject and/or audience. How did biographies affirm the fiction of the nation/state equivalence as the goal of the nationalist project? One way was to reiterate the myth of common origin and to construct ancient Egypt as an autonomous nation-state with, in addition, progressive practices concerning female status. Another was to celebrate early Muslim and/or Arab women as contributors to a community on its way to defining political boundaries.

As “Famous Women” were dwindling in 1950s women's magazines, and populist intellectuals such as Anwar al-Jundīī; were producing volumes of collected female biography, ‘‘A’ءisha ‘‘Abd al-Rahmān began to publish her lives of women of the Prophet's family, works that continue to be popular today, to judge by their many republications.^[5] In the 1980s and 1990s, the production of biographical sketches of “Famous Women” proliferated, shifting mostly from the periodical press back into the form of “collected biography,” especially among privately funded Islamist publishing houses. That so many of today's biographical collections are written by men echoes the medieval practice of writing biographical dictionaries, exclusively a male-authored tradition. The predominance of male biographers also conforms to the large percentage of male bylines in contemporary Islamist polemics on gender, although this is by no means exclusively a domain of male authorship/authority.^[6] This is in contrast to the earlier part of the century, when authorship or responsibility for production of biographies was more or less evenly divided between men and women.

All of this signals that biography remains a popular vehicle for debates on the “nature” of femininity and the requirements of “proper womanhood” in the context of competition to control the discursive construction of the ideal state in Egypt. This is particularly so with emerging discursive constructions of the contemporary state as inherently and necessarily Islamic, constructions that are neither radically disjunct from nor identical to theocratic ideologies of state formation proposed in the infancy of Egyptian nationalism, as the Lebanese sociologist Dalāl al-Bizrīī;, among others, has argued.^[7]

Viewing discursive competitions over the construction of an ideal state as shaped, among other things, by notions of gendered spaces, I use the lens of “Famous Women” biography to scrutinize the production of such spaces and to suggest how ideal femininities and—implicitly, through the construction of femininities—ideal masculinities emerge as crucial axes for organizing society. I historicize these texts—fifteen collections of biographies of women published from 1978 to 1995—by comparing them to parallel texts from early in the century.^[8] I focus on these collections' definitions of exemplarity, biographers' subject choice along axes of ethnicity, nationhood, chronology, and communal identity and on concepts of the female subject as represented in “Famous Women” biography from each era. I ask how the female subject is positioned with regard to assumptions about domesticity and a “public-private” distinction. I analyze the role of the male subject as player within the female life story, in the context of the implied audience constructed through textual clues. What, finally, does this genre tell us about the state of gendered discourse in Egypt now? I link this current strand of production of women's biography to the imperatives of emerging Islamist discourses, while recognizing that my brief analysis does not do justice to differences among those discourses and the groups that produce them. And I do not claim that these constitute the only arena of life history writing in Egypt today.^[9] Yet as a popularly produced, affordable, and widely available set of texts aimed at a nonacademic audience, such “Famous Women” collections contribute to ideas about the gendered organization of society in Egypt today. As was true early in the century, they are one facet of an enormous body of conduct literature aimed at defining and regulating social behavior through prescribing norms for the modern female/feminine subject.

I continue to insist in this chapter that one must pay attention not only to the subject matter but also to the internal textual construction of biographies.^[10] While apparently similar in their reliance on a premodern Arabic writing of notable women's lives, biographies from the two time periods show discontinuities that must be contextualized according to competing discursive constructions of the state in each period.^[11] This has everything to do with competing notions of what it is to be modern—and of the very need to articulate “modernity” as a mode of being. For “modernity” can be partly defined as the existence of a consciousness of historical rupture that separates the present from constructions of the past—even (or especially) when an explicit project of modernity, for example, in Egypt, requires repeated resurrections of those constructions of the past. This consciousness of historical rupture is more marked, more explicit, in biographies written in the context of the modernist–liberal nationalist–reformist discourse of the early twentieth century. Recall that this discourse unfolded in concert with the embrace by modernists of an ideology of liberal individualism wherein biography could serve as a supposedly unproblematic marker of personal identity as shaped by the trajectory of the nation-state.

Today's biographies privilege historical elision. That is, assumptions of identity rather than of difference between the early days of Islam and the present shape constructions of women's lives, while the history in between is elided. Early in the century, to the contrary, when “Famous Women” texts narrativized such historical parallels, they were obliged to rhetorically surmount the obstacles posed by invoked, intervening history. Today's contrasting elision of past and present exemplifies what Dalāl al-Bizrīī; has explicated as the “mythic particularity” of contemporary Islamisms, wherein “Islam” is presented as outside of space and time, as decidedly not subject to the vicissitudes of a suspect human history. The present, in such a perspective, must collapse into the past.^[12] I argue that this ideological move is accomplished among other disciplinary channels through the rhetoric of exemplary female biography that takes lives of the earliest Muslim women as literal models for today's women. Yet, even as this rhetorical move appears to reject the historically conscious liberal individualism of an earlier time, it accepts biography as a discipline of individuation (as well as a certain kind of community), thus as a marker of (individual) historical movement. This is one way it announces its own participation in a political project of modernity.

Rita Felski has argued that the divergent and often contradictory concepts of modernity that characterize contemporary discourse in the West on modernity as a semantic field are grounded in differently gendered narratives of what it means to be modern. Postmodern thinkers, whether masculinist or feminist, have replicated the narratives of modernity they seek to deconstruct by positing fixed categories of identity as definitive of modernity. Such narratives may counterpose a masculine modernity—focusing on spatial movement, discourses of the public, and so forth—to a feminine conservatism or antimodernity, and they tend “to replicate an established view of modernity in terms of a polarized opposition between individual and society,” whereas narratives that take into account an analysis of modern femininity point “to the centrality of familial ties and identities—as mother, daughter, wife—in the construction of modern forms of subjectivity.”^[13] In other words, women, to enter modernity, have to overcome masculinist symbolic representations of the female as antithetical to the modern. This is so whether the representation of femaleness takes place within struggles over modernity at a given historical juncture in the past or instead is an embodiment imposed by “postmodern” critics seeking to analyze that earlier moment.

Of course for a society subject to Western imperialism, the act of equating the female with antimodernity intersects with a Western imperialist ideological and practical move to equate non-Western and antimodern (a popular subject of inquiry in contemporary postcolonial studies). The texts with which I work are shaped by the imperative of responding to both of these categorizing moves, and textual ambiguities signal in part an unfinished struggle to define modernity and femininity together. Through the genre of “Famous Women” biography in today's Egypt, we can continue to consider how women and men have sought to destabilize the equation of woman/antimodernity and that of colonized society/antimodernity, equations that of course have undergirded political projects of domination, whether along gendered or geographic lines. We can also elucidate Felski's observation that modernity, as a kind of periodicization, differs from other periodizing “in possessing a normative as well as a descriptive dimension”—and how, “rather than inscribing a homogeneous cultural consensus, the discourses of modernity reveal multiple and conflicting responses to processes of social change.”^[14] Biographical sketches of women in periodicals in Egypt prior to 1940 constructed a rhetoric of exemplarity that left no ambiguity about its project: calling attention to certain women's lives as models for behavior and praising individual women for achievements and attributes. Ambiguity did shape the stuff of those models, the stipulation of what constituted praiseworthy action and achievement. As I have shown, diction and subject choice relied on, but did not exclusively follow, the Arabic genre of biographical writing that had emerged no more than two hundred and some years after Islam's founding and had given writers a literary structure within which to work.

There related to us Muhammad b. ‘‘Umar from Mūsā b. Shayba from ‘‘Umayra bt. ‘‘Ubaydallāh b. Ka‘‘b b. Mulk from Umm Sa‘‘d bt. Sa‘‘d b. al-Rabī‘‘ from Nafīī;sa bt. Umayya sister of Yu‘‘lāb. Umayya: I heard her say: Khadīī;ja was a person of nobility, of great wealth, of commerce. She traded in Syria . . . and hired men. . . . When the Messenger of God reached the age of twenty-five and had no name in Mecca except that of the Trustworthy One, Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid sent to him to ask him to go to Syria as her commercial agent. . . . And he did so. . . .
Nafīī;sa said: She sent me to him surreptitiously to propose marriage to her and it was done, and she sent to her uncle . . . and he came. The Messenger of God came in with his paternal uncles and one of them married him [to her].^[15]

The third-century A.H. collection authored by Ibn Sa‘‘d in which this biography of Khadīī;ja appeared began to set a pattern for the biographical treatment of women as well as men. As Denise Spellberg has demonstrated brilliantly for ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abi Bakr, from a very early period in Islamic history the women of the Prophet's family were posed as exemplars for women while serving simultaneously as images around which competing definitions of community and leadership crystallized.^[16] The premodern presence in Arabic literature of biographical sketches of women, and the featuring of early Muslim heroines, gave modern writers—whether Syrian or Egyptian, Muslim or Christian, women or men—an indigenous authority and source of respectability for new writings of women's lives. As nationalist-oriented writers at the turn of the century sculpted modern role models for women from the bodies and lives of premodern Muslim women, they could reject the notion that modernity and Westernization were synonymous. That about half of the role models featured in print were of the West perhaps appears now as a brief interruption in a history of writing women's lives.

Early in the century, divergences among different nationalisms stemmed partly from the very attempt to define modernity. Recall that some intellectuals espoused a secularist program based on a reformist Islam articulated by Muhammad ‘‘Abduh and his circle. Arguing that their Islam distinguished personal faith and communal behavior from state construction, they insisted that Egypt's strength depended on a crosscommunal alliance realized in the shape of a European-style nation-state. To different degrees they sought models in Europe while subjecting those models to cultural critique. Another group saw Islam as a wholistic program for state construction, founded in what they saw as an unchallengeable history of Islamic rule, in which those of other faiths would have the status of non-Muslim minorities. They sought models in that history and rejected the West as an alien teleology; yet they accepted certain assumptions that girded the West as model, as their ideological grandchildren do today.^[17]

When it came to envisioning an ideal womanhood, I have argued, the distinctions were not so clear—especially, perhaps, when women were writing the biographies. But for both women and men, it was not so much a conflict between “modernity” and “antimodernity” that was at stake as a contest between two versions of modernity.^[18] A common insistence on careful management of the nuclear family as the production site of nationalist (however defined) strength and indoctrination did not signal agreement on whether this could entail (limited, carefully defined) public work for women in the service of the nation (or on what a “nuclear family” comprised). Yet I have argued that before the 1950s this genre of exemplary biography tended to echo (and to shape) the secular or “liberal nationalist” outlook on women's employment, one in the service of a public patriarchy wherein certain kinds of paid employment situated outside the home could be defined and contained as a kind of extended domesticity. At the same time, it was the domestic front that was defined as central to female identity, binding the female as individual to the nation as collective identity. Domesticity as a space of learned feminine action could act as a sign of modernity for some women, as it also articulated the needs of a public patriarchy and a consequent urgency to define spaces of “masculine” and “feminine” action. (Emphasis on the domestic may also reflect a sense of nostalgia, which recent thinkers on modernity have posited as a product of modernity. The maternal home becomes a utopia, an envisioned site of stability in a world no longer perceived as stable.) And to privilege domesticity did not preclude a life outside the home. In fact, the first facilitated the second.

Thus, women known for public roles might be featured for their domestic lives. This strategy elided possible points of conflict or tension between the two as it solidified a binarizing ideology of public-private that rested on both indigenous and imported notions of gendered divisions of labor. When Queen Victoria was praised first as a homemaker, wife and mother, and only secondarily as a monarch (and not attacked at all as a symbol or architect of late British imperialism), what was one to think? What about actress Sarah Bernhardt as a doting mother, motivated in her career only by the presence of her son? Yet emphasizing duty to family could suggest other paths, whether or not this was the intention of the biographer. What about stunt flyer Sophie Blanchard, paying her husband's posthumous debts by achieving fame as a daredevil balloonist? What about one of “the lessons to be learned” from Khadīī;ja's life—that commerce is as suitable for a woman as for a man? Biographies of well-known women could probe (male) nationalist boundaries for women—whatever they were—by articulating the (elite) female subject's perception of her needs and outlining strategies for self-realization. In this sense, I have argued, some “Famous Women” texts comprised women's autobiographical acts that focused on the future—as ideal, as challenge—as much as on the past.

Educating Females

Late-twentieth-century collections of famous women's life histories published in Egypt are no less overtly didactic than were the biographies of eighty years ago. Authors are explicit about the exemplary function of their productions. Umayma Muhammad ‘‘Alīī;'s prologue to her Wives of the Prophet: Mothers of the Muslims: Modesty, Honor, Purity begins:^[19]

The Muslim woman of this era lacks a proper model, a fine exemplar that she may imitate and by which she will be guided. Generation upon generation [of females] have left the path . . . to become the founts of temptation and discord [fitna], of seduction [ighwā‘‘ā’ء]. Thus have they become sources of social misery. How many crimes are committed in our society that originate from a woman who has seduced, emboldened, or incited. . . . This is due solely to her lacking a good model in this society where evils abound and earthly appetites and pleasures proliferate.
But the House of Prophecy embraced many types of believing mothers. . . . Truly it was a most excellent household. All of those women were co-wives of the same mind, existing harmoniously, acting as model for the daughters of the Muslims, their wives, and their mothers. And I hope that through this book God provides benefit to every female who desires good guidance, proper conduct, piety, modesty and probity, prosperity, richness of the self, and happiness.^[20]

This preface elides everything between the time of the Prophet and today by assigning to it the rubric of female sin. Women are at once the source of social misery and the victims of a lack of ideological direction. Biography is to rectify this lack. Women's adherence to discursively set norms that attain extradiscursive authority by being based on “real lives” will erase their guilt for leading post-Medinan society badly astray. This insistent articulation of biography's didactic, disciplinary role, echoing the Arabic tradition of biographical composition, contrasts with the ideological presuppositions of a Western, post-Enlightenment tradition of biography writing that insisted until recently on the genre's “purity” and “objectivity” (even as volumes of women's biography evaluated their “character”), as it insisted (until postmodernism) on the sovereignty of the individual as a unified and consistent subject.

As this and other prefaces to the contemporary compendia, and the biographies themselves, collapse women's multiple identities into one domestic face, and efface historically attested conflicts among the early Muslim female paragons, they seem to leave little room for ambiguity about how they are to be read. ‘‘Abd al-‘‘Azīz al-Shinnāwī offers the attributes of the ideal woman as an explicit role model: “This book, Wives of the Companions, and those that will follow it, God willing, take up the biographies of women who were believing, humble and obedient before God, truthful, submissive, alms-giving, and who fasted, in order that I may place before the Muslim home the proper model, the fine exemplar, for our women to imitate.”^[21] In some cases, the title is sufficient: Khālid al-Sa‘‘dāwīī; calls his collection Exemplary Women.

This contemporary wave of Islamist exemplary female biography was ushered in by a series of features on early Muslim women published by Zay-nab al-Ghazālī in the Muslim Brotherhood–associated periodical al-Da‘‘wa (The Call) between June 1979 and September 1981.^[22] Echoing al-Ghazālī's own use of early Muslim women as exemplars in her speeches,^[23] these texts explicitly spell out the exemplary duty of the “Famous Woman.” Embarking on a life of Khadīja, al-Ghazālī reminds her reader that in the Qur’ءān Muhammad is offered as “an excellent model for those who believe in God and the Last Day.” Al-Ghazālī links Muhammad's exemplarity immediately to that of his wives, invoking concurrently their singularity and their representational perfection, a common, perhaps obligatory, move in exemplary biography:

He was a model [qudwa] in every matter of faith and life in the world; and the Mothers of the Believers, wives of the messenger of God, were everlasting models. They were not like any other woman, according to the text of the Noble Qur’ءān. It is appropriate that we present them to our women and our young girls that in them they may find the pleasing model and the living exemplar. And the first with which we begin is the Mother of the Believers Khadīja.^[24]

While al-Ghazālīī; appears to address herself to a female audience, alShinnāwīī; addresses his work to men, as those who are to instruct women (and will be the ultimate beneficiaries of this act!). He makes a hierarchical move that echoes men writers of women's biography at the turn of the century who phrased their message in terms of a male homosocial bond.^[25]Women are to “imitate”; meanwhile, the (male) reader may be “refreshed” or “invigorated” by the lessons deducible from these models, “for the Messenger of God said: 'What the [male] Muslim derives most benefit from after devout belief in God is a pious and good wife. Her business is to obey him. When he looks at her, she pleases him; when he adjures her to do something she does it fully; if he absents himself she shows good will, she protects and preserves him, in [caring for] her self and his property.'”^[26]This exemplifies contemporary Islamists' adherence to a “natural” division of labor based on gender difference, signaled in the Qur’ءān's (variously interpreted) dictum that men are one step above women, a separation unequivocally maintained in these biographies.

Biographies maintain an instructional tone through direct address to young people, usually markedly inclusive of both genders, though sometimes invoking a specifically female audience: “To you, O female reader, O male reader, this text applies. . . . Imagine if every Muslim woman pon-dered the story of Umm Sālim's patience and acted accordingly, so as to be among those who win God's acceptance.”^[27] Explanatory glosses and interpretive interjections, as in the past, support the instructional, interventionary perspective of the text.^[28] In fact, these texts operate directly as a tafsīr (interpretative explanation of sacred and supporting texts) on gender, more specifically on women's desired comportment, as the interpreted text becomes the textual fabric of contemporary society written large. ‘‘Abd Ghālib ‘‘Isā, quoting the verse of the Hijāb, says: “I want to mention here that this wise Qur’ءānic directive commanded by the Lord of the two worlds, who knows that which is concealed, is not specific to the wives of the Prophet but is directed generally at all believing women who are not forbidden as marriage partners [due to blood and other ties] for a man. We ask God for release from the condition we are in today.”^[29]

Setting up the rhetoric of a didactic presence aimed at female behavior but through the “instructive guidance” of male family members (usually husbands)^[30] allows the mostly male authors of these collections to assume the mantle of teacher/authority.^[31] The rhetorical move of addressing biographies to men and making them responsible for educating females is paralleled in the text by portraying early Muslim women as those who listen and learn. Women do not produce the discourse, either within or around the text. They learn it, echo it, follow it at home.^[32]

The features I have noted—explicit exemplarity, gender-specific didacticism, the collapse of historical periods, the assumption that biography can offer an extratextual “truth” that corroborates the ultimate truth of the Qur’ءānic text and acts as a pattern for the text of social behavior, suggest a particular practice of didactic exemplary life writing that inundates Cairo newsstands now and contrasts with earlier constructions “Famous Women” in Egypt.

Subject Choice

I have proposed that early in the twentieth century, ethnicity and/or citizenship were not the most crucial factors in constructing local heroines. If silence on these markers of difference loudly structures many pre-1940 biographies, though, conflicting ideas (which also changed over time) regarding the appropriateness of “Western” role models are evident in the internal rhetoric of those texts, as we have seen. While some authors/editors/compilers lauded Western women (of a certain class) as appropriate role models for their readers, unease about the Western biographical subject is evident at least by the early 1920s. Yet Western women continued to appear in the “Famous Women” columns even as magazine editors declared their shift to “Eastern” biographical subjects. Above all, for fervent nationalists, Jeanne d'Arc could be a heroine for young Egyptian female and male nationalists, even (or especially) as they denounced the presence of Europe in Egypt.

One hundred years after biographies of Jeanne d'Arc, Khadīī;ja, and hundreds of other “Famous Women” began to appear in Arabic magazines, famous women are alive and well in Egypt. But Jeanne d'Arc—not to mention Queen Victoria, Nefertari, Sarah Bernhardt, Sophie Blanchard, ‘‘Afīī;fa Karam, and Safiyya Zaghlūl—is not among heroines of today. Khadīī;ja, Khawla, ‘‘A‘‘isha, and Asmā’ء bt. Abīī; Bakr—who used to populate the same pages as Jeanne, Victoria, Nefertari, and Sarah—have the popular rolemodeling biographical collection almost to themselves now.

The political, economic, and cultural imperialism of the West has been a target of Islamist discourse, and it is hardly surprising that in this context Western women would not be featured as role models. While not a collection of biography, Bint al-Hudā's essay “The Heroism of the Muslim Woman” sets up its exclusive focus on women of early Islam—example after example of heroic women on the battlefield and at home—by emphasizing the equality of humanity that is central to the Islamic system. She contrasts this with the West, wherein “all” women from ancient Greek society on have been degraded, commodified sex objects.^[33] In today's biographies Western women, often unnamed and targeted as an undifferentiated group, are negative exemplars.^[34]

Al-Bizrīī; traces the existence of “two Easts” in contemporary Islamist discourse: one perfect and ahistorical that contrasts with the (historical, degenerate) “West”; and second, the “East” of today, historically defined and corrupt, derivative of the “West.” In contemporary Islamist biographical works, references to Western women and to contemporary women of Muslim societies conform to this scheme. Both are constructed as simultaneously corrupt and trivial. Spatially, it is the exit from the home to work or to be politically active outside the sphere of the Islamic Call that generates both corruption and triviality. This is contrasted, in the works of Zay-nab al-Ghazālīī; and Bint al-Hudā, for example, with the women of the Prophet's time, who left the house (according to these biographies) only temporarily and in service to the Call.

“Civilization” stands in for “Western” civilization, indeed, only for its consumer aspects, and is evil; it is counterposed to piety and faith, in other words, to the early Muslim community. Thus, in writing Twenty Women in Light of the Qur’ءān, ‘‘Abd al-Mu‘‘izz Khattāb is

trying to uncover the nature of females as God presented it. The aim is to find in their life histories a sermon and moral lesson to place before the women of this generation who have been swept up by the corrupt current of civilization into a destructive whirlwind from which there is no rescue save for the one who adheres to this religion and has learned the way to God.^[35]

As in Islamist discourse more generally, in contemporary biography or in references to famous women, Western women are a doubled synechdoche for consumption, as objects of male consumption and as consumers of material goods. If this echoes the construction of the exemplary role model at the beginning of this century, it is less equivocal now. Western women are an absence, its territory outlined by contrast to the perfect role model whose body rejects those tainted practices. In his biography of Fātima bt. Muhammad, ‘‘Isā pointedly asks “the male Muslim and the female Muslim” to note the simplicity of her trousseau.

The one channel through which women of the West become acceptable as exemplary women is conversion to Islam. Thus, the title of Majdīī; Fathīī; al-Sayyid's collection of women's biography says it all: Women Who Have Come to Know God: Story of the Submission [to Islam] of Thirteen of Europe's Famous Women.^[36] So it is with contemporary Arab women: celebrities are celebrated for their “conversions” to a life of piety. From being “outsiders” associated with Westernization, they come inside: to the umma, and to the home.^[37]

But to define changes in criteria of subject choice since the first half of the century, we must go beyond the opposition of “East” and “West.” Recall that in the earlier period, what might be termed a “secular” approach often prevailed; that is, a subject's religious identity was not necessarily mentioned. If a woman (modern or premodern) was explicitly mentioned as Muslim, it was usually to show that her life refuted what were labeled as popular but erroneous notions of Islamic limits on women's life choices, in line with the arguments of the early Muslim modernists. As in the 1901 biography of Khadīī;ja quoted previously, biographies construct these lives as offering a Sunnafor Muslim women's extradomestic endeavors, framed by the Islamic modernist/secular nationalist claim that many practices labeled “Islamic” were late, customary grafts onto Islamic law, therefore inessential and, moreover, un-Islamic. If the popular biographical subject Khawla bt. al-Azwar joined battle to save her sibling, her life story “shows that Islamic civilization is not against women's advancement, nor does it bar her from sharing worldly affairs with men.”^[38] That this message is a recurring motif in early-twentieth-century exemplary biography suggests the force of the Islamic reformist concept of modernity, especially when it surfaces in magazines identified today as part of an Islamist genealogy. I have offered this as one sign that we cannot always distinguish neatly the differently positioned groups of the early twentieth century by their stances on gender in modernity.

In contemporary collections, to the contrary, not only are the subjects almost exclusively Muslim (except when they are related to pre-Muslim prophets, and then they are constructed as pre- rather than non-Muslim), but their Muslim-ness also is paramount. In fact, it is only their Muslimness that can counteract their femaleness, as we shall see. And it is not just the subjects of contemporary biography who are explicitly Muslim; the audience invoked in these collections is also named as Muslim, as will have been noticed in the invocations of exemplarity quoted earlier. While the invoked audience once was “today's Egyptian (or Arab) woman,” now it is “today's Muslim woman.” Indeed, confessional identity can take precedence over gender, for the Muslim woman may be exemplary for men as well—as long as they are Muslim men.^[39]

Third, while once there was a mingling of ancient and modern women in the “Famous Women” sketches—and in fact a tendency into the 1930s and 1940s to profile contemporary women in preference to women of an earlier time—today the focus is singularly on women of early Islamic history, with very few exceptions. Role models emerge from the era of Muhammad and (to a lesser extent) that of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, the “golden age” of Islam. In contrast, in the early decades of the twentieth century, premodern Muslim women featured as positive role models were as likely to hail from the Ummayyad or Abbasid periods of Islamic political and cultural splendor as from the hallowed time of the Rightly Guided.^[40] If later (medieval) Muslim women are featured now, it is often for a negative didactic purpose. For example, where in the 1920s biographical sketches of jawārī in women's magazines lauded them as accomplished poets, singers, and political advisers, now they are ignored or rejected. Introducing his collection, Muhammad al-Kuwayfīī; makes reference to ‘‘Umar Ridā al-Kahhāla's five-volume biographical dictionary of Arab and Muslim women (a standard, comprehensive, highly useful reference).^[41] He calls it a “fine” work but goes on to comment not only that it is “difficult for the common person to purchase and peruse” but also that

it includes biographies of some of the women poets and singers, and others whose lives we do not envision people occupying themselves with. I liked the idea of compiling the lives of women of creditable performance in the history of Islam or in human history . . . or who had a good impact on life in its various aspects, so as to be easily accessible to the greatest number of girls and mothers. I shortened them considerably [from al-Kahhāla] and sufficed with giving that which is beneficial and established, to the exclusion of all else.^[42]

Female Subjectivities

Biographies published early in this century celebrated early Muslim women (as well as contemporary Arab and/or Muslim and European women) for offering their readers what the biographers valorized as expanded lives offering greater choice. They suggested that neither gender nor religious identity had to define social roles. Biographies of the same subjects today celebrate them for the clarity and uniformity they offer as gendered role models for Muslim women. This distinction is important to the differing (if overlapping) concepts of the female subject discernible in most of the biographies from each period.

As we have seen, early in this century it was the sovereign individual subject who appeared as the ideal in these biographies, even when work on behalf of the community (local, national, religiously defined) was stressed and lauded, tempering the sought autonomy of the subject. Women's “public” work could be defined as female sacrifice on behalf of others—a traditional and cross-cultural trope of feminine acceptability grafted onto a new situation. Women's work was often cast in the supportive role, especially as supportive of disadvantaged females, nationalist husbands, and baby boy nationalists. Yet biographies of the early twentieth century tended to exhibit individual women's determination to define and achieve their own goals, even when the result could be articulated as communal betterment. This emphasis on women's work as “service to society” has been a theme in men's writing on the woman question in Egypt since the turn of the century. Leila Ahmed has called it one of the many common threads that link Muhammad ‘‘Abduh to the Muslim Brotherhood in the era of its founder, Hasan al-Bannā, and after.^[43]

In today's biographies the collectivity is paramount and is the sole justification for women's action outside of nuclear family boundaries (which assumes as the norm a quite new definition of “the family,” at least one that would not have governed the universe of early Muslim women). Moreover, the collectivity is unequivocally the umma of Islam. Eighty years ago it was more often watan (nation), or a prenational but territorially defined collectivity, stressing unity across confessional borders in the interests of the dominant secular nationalist ideology. Now it is umma—and that term carries no ambiguity, in contrast to early in the century, when it was shifting from the premodern sense of the community of Muslims into near synonymity with the term watan. Khadīī;ja is lauded as helpmeet to her husband in spreading the message of Islam, as well as in calming his fragile nerves. Other women are shown as active in the faith's propagation but not in the institution of a secular state. And nowhere is there an emphasis now on women working to benefit a collectivity specifically of women.^[44]

In today's biographies the ordinary limits of women's everyday experience are permeable only if the Islamic umma is threatened. Here the woman is Muslim first, female second. But the transgression is always shown to be temporary, consonant with the emphases of contemporary Islamist discourse and activism, and illustrative of the rhetoric of exceptionality, wherein certain personages are defined as outside the ordinary woman's reach as they are simultaneously defined as exemplary. Let us turn to a famous female example who, as we have seen, wrote other women's lives as exemplary. Zaynab al-Ghazālīī;'s independence with regard to her own marriages, and her clear prioritizing of duty to the faith before duty to the family, might provide a countermodel. In fact, though, it parallels contemporary presentations of early female Muslim activists.^[45] For as al-Ghazālīī; has always made clear, transgressing the boundaries of exemplary female comportment is a performance available to a small and select group of activists, those working to realize the Islamist society of the future. Once this is achieved, even these exceptional women are to return to their domestic duties. Al-Ghazālīī;'s biography of Khawla bt. al-Azwar shows this trajectory. It begins with a generalizing declaration that sets out a gendered political program for today's Islamist communities: “The Muslim woman bore her responsibility capably in life's arenas. She lived inside the home [practicing] successful leadership, and participated in the battles to build the state by raising her children, and in the tumult of battle she was an exemplar and model; and one of the unforgettable Muslim women was Khawla bt. al-Azwar.”^[46]

Here (and typically), women's role in war is mentioned last. But it is in this arena that the anecdotes of Khawla are sited, overwhelming the primary situating of “the Muslim woman . . . inside the home.” Yet, in the second part of al-Ghazālīī;'s sketch, we are reminded of the equation between motherhood and jihad, the struggle for personal and communal spiritual perfection. While al-Ghazālīī; begins with an explicit reference to both genders of parents, this slips at the end of the paragraph into an emphasis on mom.

The armies of Islam were victorious through noble fathers and mothers who . . . prevailed over this world for the sake of men raised in their laps . . . and they in turn conquered it for God and he subdued it for them. For if they were in possession of their souls, minds, and wills, it was due to the virtue they had drunk in with their mothers' milk, mothers who had lived for duty and for the truth before living for their own personal needs or psychological appetites.^[47]

The third installment ends in a pointedly contemporary lesson, after describing Khawla's successful strategy to free a group of women from imprisonment: “That was what the women did, Khawla at their head, working to stir up the army until the Muslims achieved victory. And where are the daughters of Islam today? Where are its women, its mothers? Why do we see the arena of work on behalf of Islam empty of them? We [females] reclaim the history of Khawla, ‘‘Afrā‘‘, and those women.”^[48]

It might seem tempting to recuperate this biography as a call for women to assume an eminently public role. Yet al-Ghazālīī; carefully places this role within the ambit of domestic duty, by equating “women” and “mothers,” as she recasts what appears in premodern sources as an independent action on the part of the women as a supportive, subordinate act that fit in to women's traditional role in battle, that of stirring up the men. (As was true early in the century, many women in these contemporary collections are portrayed as battlefield cheerleaders and nurses, roles given much respect as involving action under fire.)

In contemporary Islamist movements, women's allowable political work is construed as support. They may come out to demonstrate, particularly to show emotion; they are a useful rank and file, putting into effect the details of political programs defined by political men.^[49] Such a political role does not threaten the gendered status quo, for it has nothing to do, as al-Bizrī notes, with achieving power. Women interiorize this spelled-out political role, one defined, al-Bizrīī; comments, by emotion and a return to the home.^[50] In biography, women are shown to accept happily this pattern of temporary exit according to the needs of male politicians. What a contrast with biographies of Shajar al-Durr, Catherine II, Halide Edip, Sitt al-Mulk, Boudicca, Christabel Pankhurst, and others featured in Egyptian magazines at the turn of the century! Similarly, al-Ghazālī reveals Khadīja as a superbly domestic creature, not even mentioning her earlier life as a merchant (in stark contrast to the construction of Khadīja's life in 1901). Al-Ghazālī depicts Khadīja as a married woman at home; the narrative begins as her husband returns in fear from his first vision. We get no glimpse of Khadīja's life before her marriage to Muhammad, no view of her socioeconomic status in Meccan society; she is identified completely in her role as wife. Narrating her life as if it is a universal pattern, a story for unnamed “Woman,” al-Ghazālī articulates a lesson, adducing within the value of biography as a guide to future action: “Thus does the wise, mindful, good wife study thoroughly the life story [sīra] of her husband and his good traits. As a consequence she understands that he has been prepared for an event of great consequence. She reassures and steadies him, and stands by his side, and takes him to Waraqa b. Nawfal.”^[51] The scene shifts back to the individual life story, but what we are told is that Khadīja earns her home in paradise for having been Muhammad's best helper and greatest support. “Thus,” concludes al-Ghazālī, “was the fidelity and good companionship between the greatest of husbands and the greatest wife. I present [this] as guidance, as a model to be followed. God be pleased with you, O Mother of the Believers Khadīja.”^[52] Even as she leads a life defined by public political work, al-Ghazālī (like other female Islamist activists) stresses in her writings that in a perfect world, one beyond the necessity for jihad, women will not need to leave the home. This feature of contemporary Islamist discourse resounds in contemporary biography.

In sum, women's biography continues to offer a complex meditation on the interrelations of women's different and potential roles. But the message has shifted. Readers early in the century could draw a message of either ambivalence or multiple possibility from the “Famous Women” biographies. Now there is a clearer hierarchy of roles. The narrative subordinates ventures outside the home to a woman's domestic role far more sternly than in the past.

Biographies of premodern Muslim women published early in this century were often taken, perhaps indirectly, from premodern sources. As we have seen, they contrasted to some extent in construction, style, and tone with biographies in which the domestic and the public were clearly marked out. The latter were most often biographies of Western women, past or present, or contemporary Arab and/or Muslim women. The same cannot be said for the biographies available to reading women in Egypt now. While, as in the earlier period, biographers quote the early Muslim sources for these women's lives, and feature extensive passages verbatim from the Hadith, the biographies of the 1990s cannot be seen as anything but unequivocally modern. It is biographies of premodern Muslim women that become illustrations of a modern public-domestic divide. Authors interrupt their importations of source material from Hadith to map a modern public-domestic distinction onto the life histories of their subjects.

Early in the century, biographies tended to stress that a woman's aspirations to a world outside the domestic did not keep her from fulfilling what were defined as her primary duties in the home. Now the domestic is both equated with the nuclear family and unequivocally presented as woman's permanent domain. Her hard work therein is emphasized and lauded. Al-Kahhāla's biography of Fātima bt. Muhammad, which reproduces premodern biographical sources scrupulously and does not add contemporary editorializing, features among other anecdotes ‘‘Alīī;'s description of how his spouse wore out her grinding stone. The famous passage characterizes their life as one of poverty and hardship. ‘‘Isā, on the other hand, prefaces ‘‘Alīī;'s words with a paragraph that recuperates those words as evidence of what a dedicated homemaker Fātima was:

When Sayyida Fātima, God be pleased with her, married, she served in the home of her husband and did all in her ability to make her husband happy, to keep her home clean and lovely, a place of repose and joy.
Her husband Sayyidunā ‘‘Alīī;, God be pleased with him, told this story of her, out of pride and contentment in her: “The daughter of the Messenger of God—God's prayers and peace be upon him—and the most honored of folk in his eyes, who was also my wife, wore down the grinding stone so much that it imprinted her hand, and drew water with the water-skin so often it left a mark on her breast, and swept the house until she filled her robes with dirt, and lit the flame below the pot so frequently she soiled her clothes and suffered harm.”^[53]

In many of these biographies we follow the male players in the biography from home to public sphere and back. The women stay at home but invariably have knowledge that the men need, and this role is praised as crucial and demanding.^[54] The wives of the Companions, as portrayed by al-Shinnāwīī;, know exactly who has converted, and their husbands ask them for this information. They are forthright and fearless in expressing their opinion, particularly when they must assure dubious male family members of the power, authority, and appeal of Islam.

Yet most often these conversations take place explicitly within the home. In al-Shinnāwīī;'s Mothers of the Companions, women's narrative role is to answer questions about the folk of the community and to ask questions that allow the men to speak of Muhammad and to explicate the new faith. The motif of the male (husband or son) as teacher runs throughout the book. Rayta bt. Munabbah is the pivot in a generational conflict between her husband, commander of the Muslim forces during the expansion out of Arabia ‘‘Amr b. al-‘‘As, and her son. She appears in order to inquire about Muhammad; her son responds. Rayta asks her son to show her how to pray and inquires about the new policy on alcohol and infidelity, eliciting a detailed explanation. Like other female subjects in these collections, she stands in for the female interlocutor/reader who is to be instructed on the fundamentals of her faith. This reiterates women's domestic positioning while reminding female readers of their duty to be active and knowledgeable believers. Moreover, it echoes a specifically Islamist polemic, which “was not simply a recitation and regurgitation of Islamic feminine virtues but a call to action and rededication that flattered female followers with a message that assigned them the most crucial role in the struggle for a just Islamist society.”^[55]

Yet it is Rayta who knows what is happening in the community. If her channels of information are domestic ones, this attests to the centrality of the home and of female activities to the vitality, indeed the maintenance, of the community in a time of vulnerability. It suggests the permeability of boundaries—although not their dissolution. It complicates notions of female seclusion by dislocating knowledge as the privilege of a male/public identity, by questioning, indeed, the binarisms of public-private, visibility-seclusion, power-powerlessness.

Duties to the domestic and obligations to the faith suggest not conflictual domains in today's “Famous Women” biographies but arenas that may require negotiations, resonating nicely in a late-twentieth-century context:

“Were I not pregnant in my ninth month,” said Umm Kujja, “I would go out [to battle] with you [pl.], a mujāhida [fighter] preparing food and water for you, and putting salve on wounds.”^[56]
Her husband drew close to her and whispered in her ear: “My love, I am coming back to you with a victory, God willing.” He returned from the Battle of Badr on the day she gave birth to a second daughter, “and how he had hoped that the newborn would be a boy. But it was God's will, which the Muslim accepts with all assurance and security.” [At the Battle of Uhud], she said to him “You intend to obtain the garb of jihad on your own? My dear husband, I have not known you to be so egotistical. When I stayed behind on the day of Badr, it was only because of my pregnancy. But now I am going with you to my Lord.”
Her husband smiled and asked her: “Where will we leave our daughters?” “With my mother,” she answered. And the two spouses went . . . and what happened happened. . . . Umm Kujja returned from the battle alone, weeping. I wonder, was she crying out of joy that her husband, her beloved, had gone with the living to their Lord? Or . . . because she had not accompanied her husband in the journey to eternity? Or because she had become a widow, and how would she face life without her partner who had been her whole life? But faith was her companion, and loyalty to the memory of her husband was an impetus to face life for the sake of her two daughters.^[57]

The female returns to the hearth. And where women voice their opinions, by and large they defer to men, who are constructed as indisputable heads of household and as the leaders of society, in line with Islamist polemics from reformist to revolutionary, and from the turn of the century to today.^[58] In contemporary biography, women defy their husbands only to convert to Islam. (They are also shown as taking up jihad without mention of permission from husbands, contrary to a view Ghada Talhami suggests may be dominant: “Present-day advocates of the Islamist view claimed that women needed their husbands' permission to participate in the Jihad except in cases of naked aggression against the Muslim community.”^[59] The biographies tend to support, therefore, what Talhami labels as an approach specific to the more revolutionary groups, which see women's jihad as duty rather than as something merely urged upon them.^[60]}

Still, if these women leave home only when the faith calls, they cannot be totally domesticized. If the visibility of the Prophet's wives was historically a sociopolitical issue, a modern division of public-private (which Islamists do not gloss as “Western”) sits uneasily on these lives. Moreover, the imperative of emphasizing women's primary loyalty as being to the faith, even if this can be squared with the domestic by emphasizing women's contribution as that of wife and producer of future Muslims, means that women are not shown as necessarily obedient to the dictates of the domestic sphere. If certain contemporary male Islamist commentators on female space have ruled that having dinner ready for the menfolk takes precedence over going to the mosque to pray, this message would sit uneasily in many of today's biographies.^[61]

Thus boundaries of the domestic are permeable, but only in certain carefully defined circumstances. Protecting the faith and preserving the community provide unchallengeable reasons to disobey fathers and husbands, a theme emphasized in contemporary biographies of wives and mothers of the Companions—hardly any of whom appear in my texts from the earlier period. Thus, Ramla (Umm Habīī;ba), stood up to her father and her first husband in the name of her faith, notes al-Sa‘‘dāwīī;. Yet—ever the good daughter—Ramla is quick to forgive. Rewarded by marriage to the Prophet, she (perfect caretaker and pupil) is the perfect wife: “Ramla, wife of the Prophet, Mother of the Believers, lived in the home of God's Messenger, honored and respected, watching over the comfort of the Messenger of God and learning from him.”^[62]

But wanting to get an advanced education or choose a public career—goals that served to articulate and justify girls' resistance to uncooperative fathers in biographies eighty years ago—are not proposed now as appropriate challenges to paternal authority. Indeed, the point becomes moot in a genre that presents only early Arab Muslim women of the Arabian peninsula as subjects and ignores the need and/or desire of today's women for permanent, income-generating employment outside the home. As the life of Umm Kujja just quoted illustrates, today's exemplary life story unfolds within a set of domestically focused expectations and issues that address a contemporary, young female audience: pregnancy, child care, marriage versus the umma. The use of detail spells out ideal, and expected, comportment. After the death of her second husband, Khadīja refused many suitors: “Perhaps she abstained from marriage because she was occupied with her small, orphaned children. And she recognized that she should not just let her assets go, without forethought to their use, for then the household money might run out. So she put it into commercial transactions which she carried out while secluded in her house.”^[63]

The caveat that Khadīī;ja was secluded as she carried out her business is a contemporary addition, one I have never found in the early-twentieth-century biographies, where seclusion and the veil are loudly silent. This illustrates the way modern and very specific distinctions of public and private have become firmly entrenched as part of a modern ethos—but must still be spelled out.

Concomitantly, today's biographies emphasize emotional fulfillment as women's reward from marriage and family. Unlike early-twentieth-century sketches (and premodern Arabic biographical notices), today's lives of early Muslim women travel inward, into the subject's emotions. Khadīja may have been secluded for business, but as the same biography tells us:

When Sayyidunā Muhammad drew near to the house, with his comely demeanor and noble features, she hurried to welcome him at the door, giving him greetings of return, in a voice overflowing with sweetness, gentleness, and compassion. He raised his face to her in thanks, for he had been averting his eyes, then he told her of his trip, the profits from his commerce, and the perfumes he had brought her from Syria. She listened to him, half-bewitched. When he said good-bye and departed, she remained standing there, following him with her eyes until he disappeared at the curve in the road. And Sayyidunā Muhammad went on his way, feeling a sort of contentment and repose. . . .^[64] [Talking to her confidante Nafīī;sa, Khadīī;ja] did not hide her admiration for Sayyidunā Muhammad. . . . [Nafīī;sa told her to marry him.] Khadīī;ja felt confused about what to say, for she liked the idea, but the Trustworthy One might not, and she must hide her desire until his might appear. . . . The married couple was happy, with the affection and compassion that was established between them and that remained firm. And our Great Mother found out that her trustworthy one was the consummate husband, the most flawless husband there could ever be. . . . [She died] in the arms of the husband by whose love she had been consumed since the day she had met him.^[65]

This Harlequin romance version of Khadīja's life contrasts with the biography of the same subject published in Woman in Islam in 1901, intent on her public life. The nineties Khadīja is emphatically a domestic creature. This 1993 biography, the 1992 sketch of Khadīja quoted at the start of this chapter, and al-Ghazālī's Khadīja all emphasize the sentiment of domestic life, the emotional construct of monogamous heterosexual love as underlying the ideal Muslim couple and, by extension, the ideal community. Of course Khadīja, as Muhammad's sole spouse during her lifetime, is especially useful here. But the first polygynous household in Islam is glossed as a series of monogamous relationships. Marriage, as portrayed here and in most other contemporary biographies of women of Muhammad's time, is companionate, harmonious, emotionally fulfilling for both partners, a partnership that unites religious duty in the larger community with the duty of maintaining the family as the basic unit of society. The harmony can be threatened only (and temporarily) by the greater loyalty that the individual—male or female—owes to God and the furtherance of the faith. At the same time, this portrayal undergirds a basic assumption of Islamist discourse on gender, that which underlies the belief in women's and men's roles as complementary. “Women's emotionalism” has long been one of the pillars on which Islamist gender ideology, in all its manifestations, bases its gendered division of duties in the ideal society.^[66] Unlike in traditional biographies, emotional relationships between spouses are dramatized through dialogue:

“Was our separation easy for you, Abū al-‘‘As?” asked Zaynab.
“It was the torture of love, Zaynab. By God, after you, life was not sweet for me.”^[67]

But marriage, as saturated in emotional satisfaction as it is shown to be, is dictated by the requirements of the community of faith, as signaled in the subtitle to ‘‘Isā's portrait of Umm Sālim bt. Malham, mother of one of Muhammad's companions: “Islam before Affection.” The subject “found in Abū Talha all the qualities she hoped for in a man, but he was an unbeliever. May God's mercy be upon her, her principles and her faith had an impact on her desire for Abū Talha.”^[68]

This is given further emphasis by the relatively greater focus now on adult social roles, whereas early in the century there was more attention to childhood training. This distinction alerts us to one divergence between early- and late-twentieth-century modernities. As we saw, it was important in the 1920s to assert over and over the value of girls' education; focusing on the supportive father as decision maker furthered the message. In the 1990s, girls' schooling is taken for granted: after all, it has been compulsory in Egypt since 1952 (al-Bizrīī;, like others, notes that education is one of the gains from feminism that can never be “unsaid”).^[69] This is not because it would be anachronistic to mention “schooling” in biographies of early Muslim women, for eighty years ago parallels were drawn between the intellectual training of, for example, Sayyida Nafīī;sa and the need to educate girls of the nascent Egyptian nation. Perhaps this is hardly necessary now. But it also serves to emphasize women's domestic rather than public roles.

Role of the Male Character

At least Khadīī;ja is at the center of the biographies I have quoted. In alShinnāwīī;'s Wives of the Companions and Mothers of the Companions, each chapter is headed by the name of a woman, but most of these women are conspicuous for their absence in the texts themselves. They exist as wives and mothers, mediating the exchanges between their men—often between fathers and sons. They are praised for bringing up good Muslim sons (as some biographical subjects of the 1920s were praised for raising good nationalist sons). Women's role as those who “build the kind of men that we need to fill the ranks of the Islamic call” sounds clearly through these biographies of early Muslim mothers.^[70] For al-Ghazālīī;, Asmā’ء bt. Uways was (in an interesting rhetorical link to contemporary institution-building!) “one of the excellent Muslim sisters; she was possessed of courage, frank speech, and the desire for what is right”^[71] and a transmitter of knowledge to whom male companions of Muhammad came for opinions. But it is in her motherhood that Asmā’ء becomes exemplary, demonstrating “the courage of Muslim women who have given birth to the men who in the battlefield were deadly lions, and in the circles of knowledge and learning were unshakable mountains.”^[72] “Courage”—an epithet applied to both men and women of this early period, and expanded to label other kinds of public work undertaken by female biographical subjects constructed at the turn of the century, now is displaced onto childbirth.

Indeed, the titles of al-Shinnāwīī;'s volumes indicate a predominant feature of collections of women's biography now. Even in the titles, women are usually selected for, and defined by, their relationship to famous men, and especially to Muhammad or, to a lesser extent, to notable men of the early Muslim community. These collections are not titled “Famous Women” or something similar, but rather “Wives of . . . ,” “Daughters of . . . ,” “Mothers of . . . ” (if not a title that points to the didactic aim: “Virtuous Women,” “Exemplary Women,” and so forth). Women are referred to in their domestic social roles first and foremost (wife, daughter, mother, aunt), and concomitantly in their relationships to men.

That it is not even the woman subject who is the focus of attention is admitted explicitly by al-Shinnāwī. After noting the exemplary didactic function of writing about the mothers of the Companions, al-Shinnāwīī; comments: “I have not written a history of those female Companions; nor do I want to give the readers too much of their greatness and importance. Rather, my aim has been to familiarize the readers with the life of the most truthful and sincere one, God's prayers be upon him.”^[73] This discursive moment elides the very genre of women's biography. It is not their lives that are of interest but rather the life of Muhammad, as portrayed in the exchanges between him and his male companions, and then between them and their mothers. Consequently, women actually appear on very few pages of this book; Hamna bt. Sufyān appears on three of the nine pages dedicated to her life. As in so many of these biographies, when she appears, it is as the object of a catechism. The conflict between the new belief system and the old is played out in the mother-son conversations, as she asks him: “Did you go yesterday to al-Lāt, did you make obeisance to the goddesses before you slept?” When she asks, later, “You want to leave our goddess for a mad poet?!” he answers with a verse from the Qur’ءān.^[74]

In contrast to what I find among the “Famous Women” of nearly one hundred years ago, I am tempted to label the contemporary material as a subgenre, that of “Famous Wombs.” If that subgenre was around in the 1920s, in conjunction with the nationalist emphasis (among all kinds of nationalists!) on the roles of mothers in producing nationalist sons, now it is dominant: “The rank and honor ascribed to these women come from the fact that they carried in their pure and devout wombs the models for humanity. They bore the guardians of belief, those who conveyed the Call. . . . It is enough honor for the mothers that they were the vessels that preserved, sustained and protected those geniuses through whom humanity was elevated.”^[75]

Not only is woman's glory her womb, but the womb is also personified; now it is the womb that is pure and devout. The womb is the whole woman. Thus, says al-Sa‘‘dāwīī; in his preface, Islam is liberatory for women, but it is a freedom earned through—and deserved because of—wifehood and motherhood to sanctified men. It is caregiving that offers women status and “freedom”: even al-Sa‘‘dāwīī;'s dedication defines women in terms of piety and motherhood. Even so, the composite exemplar this volume offers is more complex. These famous wombs are known for the qualities that advanced the early umma, especially through protection of—and advice to—Muhammad.

Tracing Islamist notions of the vanguard to the thought of Mawdudi, Talhami notes that this vanguard takes its immediate texture from the society of Mecca under siege. It is this society that much of the biographical writing produced by Islamist-oriented presses in Egypt portrays. The women of this early community thus provide exemplary models of vanguardist struggle; yet their part is mostly one of support, of staying at home and keeping their ears open, of learning the ritual, learning the prayer, of educating the young (males) to their Islamic duty.^[76] As I have noted, this is a different emphasis from that of biographical writing early this century, where the individual woman rather than the community was the biographical subject. While her work was often said to be in the service of the community and while educating the young was a primary duty, the spotlight was on the woman herself to a far greater extent, and on her struggle to maintain the balance between family duty and a sought, partial autonomy the desirability of which was most often taken for granted in the turn-of-the-century texts, as long as it was not a selfish autonomy. Overall, the didactic thrust of popular “Famous Women” biography now appears to be less conflicted than it was, and far more explicitly bent on emphasizing women's ideal as unequivocally focused on family and home; and thereby defining masculinity, once again, as unequivocally linked to the public sphere, to movement from domestic to public space, while the women wait at home, tallying recent converts. This articulates the position of the patriarchal family in Islamist discourse as building block and microcosm of society. Such an emphasis may also work as cultural defense: “the Muslim family” has been presented by Islamist writers as the bulwark against European imperialism and colonialism since the time of the Crusaders.^[77]

If woman is womb, what does she produce? Nationalist sons once, active Muslim sons now, or at least prophet sons who paved the way (fully half of Kishk's book is taken up by a biography of Mary, mother of Jesus). She is the womb for the male Muslim, for the leader, for the (Islamically defined) nation and state. Kishk links Hagar, mother of Ismā‘‘īl, to the triumph of Islamic history, as teleological and as universal. “God's prayers be upon Ibrāhīī;m,” the biography ends; there is very little about Hagar here.^[78]

Once woman was the metaphor for nation-building; now she is the metaphor for a family-centered and Islamically defined social cohesion. If she can represent a threat to that cohesion, when properly trained she is also the savior of the umma:

How great is our need today for the good and pious wife. For our enemies have assailed Islam, giving off their poison and sowing the seeds of doubt and error, that our feet may wander astray from the straight path. Hopefully the book Wives of the Companions will be a lamp to light the way for those whose eyes and understanding have become blinded, onto the way of right guidance.^[79]

Implicitly, contemporary women following the guidance of these models will be savior of the umma in danger. As educated women were once necessary to the fortunes of the nation, now pious women are necessary to the future of the rightly guided community. It seems no accident when the great poet al-Khansā‘‘ is labeled “believer and mother” rather than “poet.

The tension that does arise in these texts is that between duty to the faith and duty to the family, a conflict absent from the biographies of a century ago. This explicates a contemporary dilemma for women, as it reflects debates going on among Islamist women activists. If, within Islamist polemics, “unlike women's familial roles, women's rights to participate in public life and to qualify for public office were hotly disputed” (and still are),^[80] what seems not open to debate is that women's public work must be on behalf of the Call. It is here that she can attain (relative) autonomy.^[81]Yet “women's rights” are not ultimately linked to the autonomy of the subject.^[82]

If the women are barely visible in many of these sketches, why, then, write women's biography? Is it simply a matter of finding an attractive way to present Islamic history and doctrine to female readers? Perhaps. Or of strengthening a master narrative and simultaneously corroborating its gender ideology? Woman as helpmeet, woman as producer of men, woman as facilitator: surely, it is this. But I think it is more. In looking at gendered social roles as presented in women's biography, one must look at men as well as women. How is masculinity defined and situated in each case? What is the ideal masculine? Recall the presence of both male interlocutor and male character as teacher. I have argued elsewhere that male-authored writings on women (now as at the start of the century, biographical or not) demand analysis as a discourse on masculinity, a conversation perhaps not yet acceptable on its own terms. One must write the oppositional term, one must write femininity, to get at masculinity. This imperative, I think, is much of what the dynamic of the woman question is about, now and eighty years ago.

In Conclusion

To explore the interrelations of local concepts of modernity, contesting notions of what an “ideal” gendered division of labor in society might be (for the division itself is hardly questioned), and to begin to ask how gender remains central to defining competing politics of the nation, I have sketched out the phenomenon of Islamist publishing in Egypt over the past two decades, through the lens of the production and popularity (at least with publishers) of biographies of famous Muslim women. No longer is it respectable to feature women of the West. This may represent, ironically, a convergence of a Nasserist legacy and later Islamist ideologies.

Looking at the present affords an opportunity to take stock of biography through the century as an exemplary genre. That these contemporary biographies embed the female subject in a discursive context that privileges the patriarchal family reminds us that citizenship in most Muslim-majority societies today is derived through membership in a patriarchal family. It also reminds us of the extent to which public political contestation takes place within a set of assumptions instituted by those who see sacred law as the sole and incontestable basis of the nation-state.Nearly a century ago, some “Famous Women” biographies seemed to question the links between sacred law, patriarchy/family, and new notions of citizenship in a nation-state. They questioned the authority of the father and husband over the daughter's and wife's future plans. They emphasized women's struggles as individuals while also stressing the value of women's relational work. As magazines proclaimed their lack of connection to the political sphere, biographies portrayed women's struggles to be part of that sphere. As magazines foregrounded women's domestic energies, sometimes ambiguously, biographies argued that domesticity could not foreclose other lives. Were such strategies (if strategies they were) defensive moves, or were they positive reevaluations of female subjectivity, of notions of community and citizenship? Or were they both, simultaneously? Did they construct each other? To see in these texts constructions of a different female subjectivity, of an individualism that might have challenged an equation between “woman” and “family,” is not to assume the necessary preferability (or possibility!) of “autonomy” or “individualism,” for women or for men. But it does suggest that such a privileged individualism was integral to the idea of modernity—just as integral as the prescription of learned domesticity for women, presented as a choice they might make, and (no less important) as a nationalist and public act.

In its own small way, biography helped to prepare the ground for, and then to support, an organized feminist movement in Egypt and the accelerating entry of women into a range of professions. Biographical texts were also part of the semiotic history that shaped limitations on that movement. Yet the shifting rhetoric within individual biographies also suggests ambivalence toward these changes, as it implies a strategy of careful, qualified movement. Proposing through the rhetoric of exemplarity a set of agendas, biographies also posed the implied conflicts and anxieties that social transition visits on individuals. Focusing on material lives, biography could express with a kind of intimate ruefulness the unresolved questions for everyday living raised by changing articulations of gender, nation, and modernity.

Biographies of women have been used for shifting and sometimes antithetical ideological purposes. They have represented competing definitions of what it is to be modern. Focusing on the complex trajectories of individual lives, though, they may offer possibilities to women that contradict or transgress the boundaries they appear to set. And we must remember, with Erika Friedl, that positioning women by dramatizing new life histories of women of the past is always subject to question. Women are not passive recipients of these texts, even if writers and publishers would like them to be. Texts may prescribe a certain kind of modernity, now an Islamist-defined modernity among others; but can they regulate?

What of feminist countermoves? Although they are set to a far greater extent in an academic framework, initiatives like the Women and Memory Forum and Nour Publishing House in Cairo are working through periodicals, books, and conferences to bring the lives of earlier Arab and/or Muslim women to public attention. In Morocco, Fātima Mernissi has written on medieval female Muslim rulers to challenge the notion that there is no historical precedent for Muslim women's publicly exercised political authority.^[83] In Lebanon, feminist writers have produced biographical dictionaries of Arab women, and in Palestine, the Bir Zeit University Women's Studies Program keeps memories alive. Autobiographies and memoirs of contemporary intellectually and politically active secularist women, like the late Latīī;fa al-Zayyāt, provide alternative life stories to which increasing critical attention is paid.^[84]

Dalāl al-Bizrīī; locates the challenge to the “Islamist authenticity” (asāla) movement today in the question of whether it can preserve its roots, as it asks what she identifies as the most important questions facing Arab societies today while remaining open to dialogue and to other histories.^[85] For example, can Islamists debate on common terrain with Arab and Muslim feminists on the basis of shared concerns about the commodification of girls and women, however the source of that commodification is identified? And how might the discursive construction of women's life histories open debate around shared concerns? Questions posed along one ideological axis can lead to unexpected results. Narrating lives, plots become complicated.

Notes

1. Khālid Muhammad al-Sa‘‘dāwīī;, Nisā‘‘ mithāliyyāt (Cairo: Maktabat alturāth al-islāmīī;, 1992), 11–15.

2. Deniz Kandiyoti, “Islam and Patriarchy: A Comparative Perspective,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, ed. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 23.

3. Dalāl al-Bizrīī;, Dunyā al-dīn wa-al-dawla: al-Islāmiyyuūn wa-iltibāsāt mashrū‘‘ihim (Beirut: Dar al-nahār, 1994), 215, citing F. Azari. Carla Makhlouf, Changing Veils: Women and Modernisation in North Yemen (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 91; William R. Darrow, “Woman's Place and the Place of Women in the Iranian Revolution,” in Women, Religion, and Social Change, ed. Yvonne Y. Haddad and Ellison B. Findly (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 311–12, 316; Yvonne Y. Haddad, “Islam, Women and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Arab Thought,” pp. 275–306 in Haddad and Findly, Women, 295. Algeria's salafī Islamist thinkers “exhorted women to model their behavior after the virtuous wives and daughters of the founder of Islam and his companions. They circulated biographies of such women that emphasized their religious faith, their sense of duty, and their spirit of sacrifice.” Marnia Lazreg, “Gender and Politics in Algeria: Unraveling the Religious Paradigm,” Signs 15:4 (1990): 763.

4. “Sīī;rat shahīī;rāt al-nisā‘‘: Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid zawjat al-nabīī; ‘‘alayhi al-salāt wa-al-salām,” MI 1:1 (Mar. 25, 1901): 14–16.

5. Thus these life histories by ‘‘A’ءisha ‘‘Abd al-Rahmān (Bint al-Shāti‘‘) hold an exceptional position in my chronological map: first published in the early 1950s in Dār al-Hilāl's monthly series Kitāb al-Hilāl, they have been repeatedly reissued, often with new publishers' prefaces. Other collections from the 1950s have been reprinted: e.g., Sūfī ‘‘Abdallāh, Nisā‘‘ muhāribāt (Cairo: Dār alma‘‘ārif, 1951, 1991). Because my approach emphasizes contexts of material production and reception as key elements of textual meaning, I see these republished collections as acting within both their first publication/reception context (the 1950s) and the 1980s–1990s period. This is particularly true of Bint al-Shāti‘‘'s enormously popular works. While I do not discuss them explicitly, they can be seen as part of the contemporary “Famous Women” biographical scene because of their ubiquity on the market. See Stowasser's analysis of them in her Women in the Qur’ءan, chap. 10, emphasizing a blend of “storytelling” style and emphasis on domesticity (120) that situates them as precursors to the texts I describe here. But I disagree with Stowasser's implication that a “modern focus” and “domesticity” operate as opposing terms in the texts (120).

6. See Talhami, Mobilization, 124.

7. Dalāl al-Bizrīī;, “Al-Mar‘‘a al-lubnāniyya wa-'al-sahwa' al-islāmiyya,” in al-Bizrīī;, Dunyā, 195–226. Emphasizing the modernness of “all 'fundamentalism'”—for it is contemporary discourses that define what are chosen as “fundamental,” Sami Zubaida links the history of political Islam in Egypt to the concept of the nation-state: “In Egypt modern political Islam started in the second half of the nineteenth century in anticipation of a modern state on the European model which it mostly welcomed, but constructed in terms of 'original' Islam, as against the degenerate religion of the dynastic polity it opposed. Subsequent movements in Egypt assumed the model of a modern nation state and sought ways, intellectually and politically, to Islamise this model.” Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State: Essays on Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East (London: Routledge, 1989), 39; on “fundamentalism” and modernity, 38.

8. Two are undated, but circumstantial evidence suggests they are from the 1980s or 1990s. Khadīī;ja al-Qummah, Nisā‘‘ al-Islām: al-Mujāhidāt fī sabīl Allāh (n.p, n.p. [privately printed], n.d.); Muhammad Ibrāhīī;m al-Kuwayfīī;, Nisā‘‘ fādilāt (n.p.: Manshūrāt Dār al-nasr, n.d.). This is not to imply that collections I discuss are the only ones of this kind. As this book goes to press, I am finding more and more.

9. Government and semiofficial printing houses have produced biographical series for young people that parallel series production by Islamist presses, such as Dār al-da‘‘wa's “Zawjāt al-nabīī;,” al-Markaz al-‘‘arabīī; lil-tawzī‘‘'s “Nisā‘‘ fīī; tarīī;q al-jihād,” and Dār al-i‘‘tisām's “Nisā‘‘ warā‘‘ al-ahdāth.” These all deserve study for which I have no space here. Dār al-ma‘‘ārif's series “Great People Who Lived by Hope” includes Hellen Keller and Elizabeth Barrett Browning among its fourteen (Western and Arab) subjects. Dār al-Hilāl has reissued Mayy Ziyāda's studies of Nāsif and Taymūr (July 1999). See also Nukhba min al-kātibāt wa-al-bāhithāt, Misriyyāt rā‘‘idāt wa-mubdi‘‘āt (Cairo: al-Hay‘‘a al-misriyya al-‘‘āmma lil-kitāb, 1995). These can be construed as attempts to counter the wave of Islamist biography with popular biographies of secular-leaning Egyptian women. Of course, scholarly biographies of such figures and other notable women have appeared; those are not my subject here.

10. Scholars have mentioned the salience of early female Muslim lives to contemporary polemics on gender but have not explored the texts themselves, beyond general comments on the subjects chosen. They include Ahmed, Talhami, Badran, and those mentioned in note 3. Stowasser and Spellberg analyze a few biographies but focus predominantly on the premodern period.

11. Clearly the period 1975–95 is an arbitrarily chosen one within which enormous social and economic change has taken place. But in terms of the history of modern Egypt, this period also exhibits a consistency of ideological, political, and economic direction; moreover, it can be said to embrace two generations of writers. A fuller analysis of these recent works could cover more texts and distinguish among different decades. That is not my purpose here.

12. And: “A universal characteristic of Islamic discourse is its attempt to recreate a homogeneous community, through the reconstruction of a past whose cultural definitions and conflicts have lost their political significance. By selectively appropriating this past, lending it divinity and imposing it on the present, the struggle of socially disadvantaged groups and classes is diverted from the centres of power to 'imagined' areas of conflict.” Hala Shukrallah, “The Impact of the Islamic Movement in Egypt,” Feminist Review 47 (summer 1994): 15–32; quotation on 16.

13. Felski, Gender of Modernity, 3.

14. Ibid., 13, 15.

15. Muhammad b. Sa‘‘d, al-Tabaqāt al-kubrā, 8:15–16.

16. Spellberg, Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past.

17. Al-Bizrī, for example, insists on the modernity and “Westernicity” of today's Islamists, while recognizing a great deal of variation within the outlooks and programs of specific groups. Because “Islamists” today function in a different historical moment and therefore must be differently contextualized, it is troublesome to use the same term for an earlier period. However, I have not found a suitable alternative. Here I use “Islamists” rather than “conservatives” as I did earlier to suggest a very specific trajectory linked to contemporary politics.

18. I am certainly not the first to suggest this. Among precedents are the numerous and inspiring works of Margot Badran, Lila Abu-Lughod, Muhammad Tavakoli, and Afsaneh Najmabadi.

19. The use of subtitles emphasizing moral qualities is notable throughout the contemporary collections, although this is perhaps the most striking example. It represents an alternative strategy for stressing to an implied audience the didactic role of the biographies in the collection.

20. Umayma Muhammad ‘‘Alī, Zawjāt al-rasuūl: Ummahāt al-muslimīn: ‘‘Iffa, sharaf, tahāra (Cairo: Dār al-rawda lil-nashr wa-al-tawzīء, n.d. [1993]), 5–6.

21. ‘‘Abd al-‘‘Azīī;z al-Shinnāwīī;, Zawjāt al-sahāba (Mansūra: Maktabat al-īī;mān, n.d.), 5. Al-Shinnāwīī; follows a different strategy in his collections of biographies of the wives and daughters of Muhammad. He prefaces them with carefully chosen excerpts from the Qur’ءān: from Sūrat al-Ahzāb v. 28–29, where God tells the Prophet to tell his wives they can have either the life of the world with its adornment or God and his prophets; and that the muhsināt will be rewarded; ‘‘Abd al-‘‘Azīī;zal-Shinnāwī, Zawjāt al-rasuūl (Mansūra: Maktabat al-īī;mān, n.d. [1994]), 3; and v. 59, telling the Prophet to advise women of the believers to draw their coverings about them; ‘‘Abd al-‘‘Azīī;z al-Shinnāwīī;, Banāt al-rasuūl (Mansūra: Maktabat al-īī;mān, n.d. [1995]), 3.

22. Republished as “Qabas min mu‘‘mināt,” in Al-Dā‘‘ā’ءiya Zaynab alGhazālī: Masīrat jihād wa-hadīth min al-dhikrayāt min khilāl kitābātihā, ed. Ibn al-Hāshimīī; (Cairo: Dār al-i‘‘tisām, n.d. [1409/1988]), 169–88. On page 226 are dates of journal issues in which sketches appeared (in a different order than in the republished version). These consist of seven profiles of women of the early community, a three-part life of Khawla bt. al-Azwar, and (published later) a sketch of Hagar.

23. For example, as quoted in al-Bizrīī;, Dunyā, 236–37.

24. Al-Dā‘‘ā’ءiya, 169. There is a discrepancy between calling this the first publication and the dates listed. I have not been able to locate issues of this journal to compare texts or corroborate dating.

25. Booth, “al-Mar’ءa fī al-Islām.”

26. Similarly in this author's Ummahāt al-sahāba: “The book Mothers of the Companions which I present to the readers offers examples of women whom Islam elevated, that they may be a lantern, an example to be imitated. The fault is not the sun's if the blind person does not see it” (5).

27. ‘‘Abd Ghālib Ahmad ‘‘Isā, Nisā‘‘ mu’ءmināt (Beirut: Dār Ibn Zaydūn, 1987), 50–51 (published in Beirut, this circulates in Cairo). Or see al-Sa‘‘dāwīī;'s introduction to his life of Khadīī;ja: “So come, all, let us get to know this believing personality” (Nisā‘‘ mithāliyyāt, 11). And the end: “Does she not deserve our unwavering esteem and respect?” (17).

28. These collections can be grouped stylistically into ones that rely almost entirely on passages from Hadith and to a lesser extent the Qur’ءān; and those crafted as fictional narratives with heavy reliance on dialogue. (Of course, many Hadith contain or consist of dialogue, as does much of the Qur’ءān, so those that follow these sources closely are not devoid of dialogue.) Of those that use the former strategy, some gloss heavily, making it clear that they assume an audience ignorant of much Qur’ءān and Hadith vocabulary. ‘‘Isā (Nisā‘‘ mu’ءmināt) takes this furthest, footnoting difficult vocabulary and explaining even basic terms such as munāfiquūn (22), sahāba (38), and ansār (40).

29. ‘‘Isā, Nisā‘‘ mu’ءmināt, 26–27. This is offered in the context of narrating ‘‘A‘‘isha's life. The biography ends with examples of her great piety in her old age and makes no mention of her politically controversial activities. Cf. Spellberg, Politics, on the ability of commentators through the ages to ignore ‘‘A‘‘isha's politics or controversial events in her life when expedient.

30. See my later comments on the role of male players as characters in these biographies. In the earlier period the father's role was stressed, as we saw, while now the husband is predominant. I speculate that this parallels an emphasis early in the century in nationalist rhetoric on childhood formation and the importance of early training to adult success as contrasted with a greater emphasis in contemporary Islamist polemics on adult social roles as impermeable.

31. This is in line with the rhetorical practice of many contemporary Islamists who claim for themselves the authority to speak by eliding the distinction between “Islam” and “Islamism” (see, e.g., al-Bizrīī;, Dunyā, 232–36). Recall that most of these collections are by men.

32. This articulates Islamists' emphasis on propagating their authority through understanding, through persuasion rather than by force (al-Bizrīī;, Dunyā, 205–6).

33. Bint al-Hudā, Butuūlat al-mar’ءa al-muslima. This work bears no date, place of publication, or publisher; part of a series (no. 10), it is numbered pp. 207–36.

34. Negative models otherwise are rare, not surprising in a genre of exemplary lives, and as in the earlier period. Negative models often reinforce the message conveyed by exemplary lives: “As there are among men lost ones, blinded to the truth even when in enlightened hands, so there are women, those too haughty to accept guidance. These two women [the wives of Noah and Lot] were in the house of prophecy, each the wife of an honorable messenger whose home was filled with the light of God, . . . but she did not benefit from this light, instead turning away from her husband” (Khattāb, ‘‘Ishruūna imrā‘‘a, 12; emphasis mine). Note that this is couched in terms of women rejecting guidance; it is their husbands (not God) from whom they “turn away”—an indication of the inseparability of social and religious duty (obeying husbands is a religious duty).

35. Khattāb, ‘‘Ishruūna imrā‘‘a, 7.

36. Majdīī; Fathīī; al-Sayyid, Nisā‘‘ ‘‘arafna Allāh: Qissat islām thalātha ‘‘ashrata imrā’ءatan min shahīrāt Urubbā (Tantā: Dār al-Sahāba lil-turāth, 1992).

37. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt,” Social Text 42 (1995): 53–67.

38. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Bint al-Azwar,” NN 2:11 (June 1, 1923): 299.

39. See, e.g., ‘‘Isā, Nisā‘‘ mu’ءmināt: “If only every Muslim man and woman would peruse this blessed, fine life history it would be for him a light by which to be guided” (5).

40. If of a later time they are almost invariably of Arab ancestry. An exception that seems to prove the rule is al-Kuwayfīī;'s Nisā‘‘ fādilāt, which includes a few women of Perso-Indian ancestry; out of seventy-two women featured in this collection, one—Marie Curie—is neither Muslim nor “Eastern.”

41. A‘‘lām al-nisā‘‘ fī ءālamay al-‘‘arab wa-al-islām, 5 vols. (Beirut: Mu‘‘assasat al-Risāla, 1984).

42. al-Kuwayfīī;, Nisā‘‘ fādilāt, 5. Indeed, his biographies tend to be exact or near-exact copies of those in al-Kahhāla, omitting the different variants from Hadith that al-Kahhāla scrupulously gives and therefore creating a more straightforward, “readable,” narrative. The question of authors' use of sources here, as for the earlier period, is a fascinating one. In particular, these authors' use of and/or expressed attitudes toward the works of al-Kahhāla and ‘‘A’ءisha ‘‘Abd al-Rahmān are worth exploring further, but this is impossible here due to space constraints. This issue is entangled with the question of attitudes toward or construction of implied audiences. Al-Kuwayfīī; is typical in wanting to reach “the greatest number of girls and mothers” [sic—and of course this terminology is significant!]. Other authors show this construction of a popular audience by taking care to use a simple, straightforward style and to explain words taken from the Hadithand Qur’ءān.

43. See the quotation from Hudaybīī; in Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 195.

44. The one exception is al-Sa‘‘dāwīī;'s biography of Kubaysha bt. Ma‘‘n. He emphasizes her service to women in going to Muhammad to ask whether she could remarry: “Look,” says al-Sa‘‘dāwīī;, “here is Kubaysha now, standing before the Messenger of God, telling her story, setting out her problem and that of the daughters of her kind” (42). But as in many of al-Sa‘‘dāwīī;'s biographies, the raison d'être is not to laud a woman for working on behalf of other women as much as it is to illustrate one of asbāb al-nuzuūl, contexts of Qur’ءānic revelations. The point of women's biography here is to instruct readers in the background necessary to read the Qur’ءān intelligently.

The shift from emphasizing the individual to stressing the collectivity is overdetermined. It not only suggests an acceptable ideological justification for women's nondomestic work but also can be seen as a move of cultural resistance against a perceived Western cult of individualism. Moreover, it may fulfill a psychosocial need. As Leila Ahmed has noted, to join an Islamist group promises the “comfort” of community in a context of social and economic alienation (Women and Gender in Islam, 223). In these thickly peopled biographies, there emerges an implicit emphasis on Islam as community. Within this, there is the comfort of having a clearly defined role. Biography can fulfill an important psychological function in offering a supposedly straightforward and “real,” attested, path to felicity, in concert with the reassurance that ideologies of Islamism offer to many (al-Bizrīī;, Dunyā, 203).

45. Zaynab al-Ghazālīī;, Ayyām min hayātī (Beirut: Dār al-shurūq, 1986), first published in 1977 and reissued in multiple printings.

46. Al-Ghazālīī;, Al-Dā‘‘ā’ءiya, 181.

47. Ibid., 182.

48. Ibid., 183.

49. Al-Bizrīī;, Dunyā, 14, 214. This parallels Islamist discourse on women working outside the home: it is justifiable to rectify temporary financial need, or if the movement needs womanpower, but not as a permanent state or for self-fulfillment. Women's political work is glossed as dilettantism (al-Bizrīī;, Dunyā, 210). This theme emerges in the cited essay by Bint al-Hudā.

50. Ibid., 214.

51. Al-Ghazālīī;, Al-Dā‘‘ā’ءiya, 169.

52. Ibid., 171.

53. ‘‘Isā, Nisā‘‘ mu’ءmināt, 36. Al-Kahhāla, A‘‘lām al-nisā‘‘ā’ء 4:110.

54. Al-Sa‘‘dāwīī; emphasizes Umm Salama's opinions as important to her husband Muhammad, beginning his biography with a generalizing statement:

There are those who ignore the opinions of women, and prohibit women from having ideas. To those people I offer the position taken by this [subject]—and a position taken with whom? With the Messenger of God. . . . [There follows description of the situation following the Treaty of Hudaybiyya, when Muhammad has trouble getting his followers to obey his orders.] Here the role of the Muslim woman emerged, as did her influence in resolving this dangerous situation, an honorable role that Islamic history recalls and respects. The Messenger of God came to his wife Umm Salama and told her what had happened. Do you know what position the Mother of the Believers took? Or what her thoughts were? Or her part in this crisis? . . . The Messenger of God relates [the events] to his wife, to a woman, and seeks her advice in a serious matter, and listens to her, and takes her advice, and sees no disgrace in that, when he is the leader of men, and the Prophet of God. . . . My friends, is that not a woman participating, with her thinking and her views, in her society's problems? And the very Messenger of God did not prevent her from doing so! History tells us of many women of opinions, ideas, and principles, who took honorable stands that history has recorded. (Nisā‘‘ mithāliyyāt, 23–25).

55. Talhami, Mobilization, 140.

56. Note the reference to an accepted female role on the battlefield, presented repeatedly, as it was early in the century. Yet, then and now, this role's dominance is tempered by portraits of warrior women—now exclusively Muslim; then they included Boudicca, Jeanne d'Arc, and others.

57. Al-Sa‘‘dāwīī;, Nisā‘‘ mithāliyyāt, 48–49.

58. Comments Talhami, “Women are expected to cooperate with their husbands, for disobeying any head of an institution will destroy its system and disrupt progress” (Mobilization, 131).

59. Ibid., 133, citing the polemicist Mahmoud A. H. Muhammad.

60. Ibid., 133–34.

61. Al-Bizrīī; quotes Muhammad al-Ghazālīī;, speaking in a public forum in 1986: “If the man or children needs food prepared or a reposeful welcome, the woman stays in her home. It is not fitting for her to go to the mosque and leave the house neglected. She will attain the merit/recompense [of a good deed] from the group from which she stayed away for a legitimate [shar‘‘ī] reason” (Dunyā, 210).

62. Al-Sa‘‘dāwīī;, Nisā‘‘ mithāliyyāt, 30.

63. ‘‘Alīī;, Nisā‘‘ al-nabī, 8.

64. At this point comes a comment that seems pointed in today's political climate: “He had returned from his journey in a sound and safe position, and no harm had come to him from the Jews.”

65. ‘‘Alīī;, Nisā‘‘ al-nabī, 9–19.

66. Generalized declarations on women's emotions and practices mark these texts: “She [‘‘A‘‘isha] felt the jealousy that women feel” (al-Shinnāwīī;, Zawjāt al-rasuūl, 49); “She [Sarah] began to scream, and struck her face as women do when they are amazed. She said, 'yā waylata,' which is a word in women's mouths when something that amazes them suddenly comes to them” (‘‘Abd al-Hamīī;d Kishk, Ummahāt al-anbiyā‘‘ [Cairo: Dār al-manār, 1995], 16).

67. Al-Shinnāwīī;, Banāt al-rasuūl, 13. This text also features Zaynab's inner thoughts as emotional confusion. The same story occurs, but without dialogue or dramatic details. Emphasis on internal wondering is also found in alShinnāwīī;'s life of Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid (Zawjāt al-rasuūl, 5).

68. The author then quotes the Hadith in which Umm Sālim asks him to convert as her dowry, and he does so. The rest of the biography centers on how she worked for the happiness of her son, asking Muhammad to pray for him. The evidence that she was highly intelligent is that she took her son to serve the Prophet when he came to Medina (‘‘Isā, Nisā‘‘ mu’ءmināt, 47).

69. Al-Bizrīī;, Dunyā, 199–200.

70. Zaynab al-Ghazālīī;, quoted in Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 199.

71. Al-Ghazālīī;, al-Dā‘‘ā’ءiya, 177.

72. Ibid,. 178. Similarly, al-Ghazālīī; explains that Rumaysā‘‘, a favorite of contemporary biographers rarely found at the turn of the century, turned down suitors because she wanted to focus on bringing up her son (179–80).

73. Al-Shinnāwīī;, Ummahāt al-sahāba, 5.

74. Ibid., 7, 11. Similarly, Kishk's volume on mothers of the prophets focuses on the stories of the prophets themselves, via the theme of the mother. Women provide a way to tell a story about men. In this context the descriptive strategies of some biographers are almost too good to be true: “The face of the sun hid behind the mountains of Umm al-Qurā [Mecca] like a virgin concealing herself in her bower when the caravan could be seen approaching from Syria, nine hundred burdened mounts. Maysara hurried to the foremost of the ladies of Quraysh to tell her the good news that her caravan had arrived.” Al-Shinnāwīī;, Zawjāt al-rasūl, 4.

75. Kishk, Ummahāt al-anbiyā‘‘, 5.

76. Talhami, Mobilization, 70 ff.

77. Ibid., 137. This is also emphasized by Kandiyoti.

78. It is worth noting here that Kishk's biographies especially (but not exclusively) carry barely veiled allusions to the current political situation in Egypt. Kishk's biography of the mother of Moses envelops a long digression on just rule and God's treatment of oppressive rulers, juxtaposed with a portrait of the good ruler who does not go against God's ruling. Don't think God is ignorant of the corruption in the country, warns the author (19–22). See also 28–30, where the author emphasizes the absolute nature of divine control over events and states the inevitability of undergoing hardship for the cause. Yet punishment of the tyrant is also inevitable; but patience is necessary. In this book, “the believer” is male; woman is “the pious vessel.” Having given birth, she drops out of the picture.

79. Al-Shinnāwīī;, Zawjāt al-sahāba, 5.

80. Talhami, Mobilization, 131–32. This, she says, was linked to disputes over the place of democracy within an Islamist system, with revolutionaries labeling these as antithetical systems.

81. These biographies tend (with some exceptions) to support a somewhat more conservative agenda than is found in the writings of certain “reformist spokesmen” such as Muhammad al-Ghazālīī; (e.g., see Talhami's descriptions of his writings, Mobilization, 125 ff.), in terms of women's confinement to the home, for example, and the lack of desirability of her work outside the home “as a secular vocation” (130). Yet they tend to follow al-Ghazālīī; (who invokes early Muslim women as exemplars) in allowing women to work within the sphere of al-da’ءwa (the Islamic Call) (Talhami, Mobilization, 130–31, 133).

82. As Talhami says, in this polemical writing “the emphasis is not on women's rights but on the relevance of these rights to the social good” (Mobilization, 128). ‘‘Abd al-Mu‘‘izz Khattāb makes this dilemma explicit when he says in his prologue to Twenty Women in Light of the Qur’ءān: “Perhaps my most important aim in this book has been to clarify that woman has a responsibility independent of the man; that she bears the consequences alone whatever her relation to the man, and whether he was prophet or tyrant. For in the face of principle or belief, ties are cut; the human being comes alone before his creator.” Yet, his sketches (more complex than some I have referred to here) still tend to privilege women's domestic roles. Khattāb, ‘‘Ishruūna imra’ءa, 7. This follows a moving dedication to the author's late sister, praised above all for her piety.

83. Mernissi, Forgotton Queens. On Egypt, see my “Coming to Light: Nour Publishing House and the Production of Gendered Knowledge,” Middle East Women's Studies Review 12:1 (March 1997): 7–8. Addressing the Association of Middle East Women's Studies, Soraya Altorki highlighted the roles of Nour and the Women and Memory Forum in producing alternative knowledges of the historical record. Soraya Altorki, “Change from Within: Retrospect and Prospect in the Study of Arab Women” (paper presented at the Middle East Studies Association Thirty-first Annual Meeting, San Francisco, November 22, 1997).

84. E.g., see Muhammad al-Jawādīī;, Mudhakkirāt al-mar’ءa al-misriyya (Cairo: Dār al-shurūq, 1990). See Kallās, al-Haraka al-fikriyya, 38–42.

85. Al-Bizrīī;, Dunyā, 231–233.

Selected Bibliography

I. Periodicals

Adāb al-fatāt
Anīs al-jalīs
al-‘‘Aruūsa
al-Fatāt
al-Fatāt (Nabawiyya Mūsā)
Fatāt Misr
Fatāt Misr al-Fatāt
Fatāt al-Nīl
Fatāt al-sharq
Hawliyat Kulliyyat al-banāt bi-Jāmi‘‘at ‘‘Ayn Shams
al-Hilāl
al-Hisān
al-Jins al-latīf
The Ladies' Respository
al-Latā‘‘if
L'Egyptienne
Al-Majalla al-sanawiyya li-Madrasat al-Amīra Fawziyya al-thānawiyya lil-banāt
Majallat al-mar’ءa al-misriyya
Majallat al-nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya
Majallat al-sayyidāt wa-al-banāt
Majallat al-sayyidāt/al-sayyidāt wa-al-rijāl
al-Manār
al-Mar’ءa al-jadīda
al-Mashriq
Mirāt al-hasnā‘‘ā’ء
al-Misriyya
al-Mu’ءayyad
al-Muqtataf
al-Rajā‘‘ā’ء
al-Rayhāna
Ruūz al-Yuūsuf
al-Sufuūr
Ummahāt al-mustaqbal

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