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