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
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]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]
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.