1. “SN: Madām Taqlā Bāshā,” FS 19:1 (Oct. 15, 1924): 3–5.

2. “SN: al-Misiz Margharīī;t Wintiringham: al-Mar‘‘a al-thāniya fīī; majlis al-umma al-barīī;tāniyya,” MM 2:9 (Nov. 1921): 359–62; quotation on 362.

3. References to imperialism in the women's press are few but more common as time goes on. An essay in AJ (“Evils of the Nineteenth Century”) says “states' ambitions to possess weak and savage people and rule them contrary to their own customs and morals grew enormously,” and thus racially motivated killings were on the increase; there is frequent mention of the “horrible killings of past rulers like Darius and Alexander . . . but such are no less prevalent in this century.” AJ 2:2 (Feb. 28, 1899): 48–52; quotation on 48. After 1919, FS took a supportive stance toward the nationalists. A speech by Hāshim to Dār Jam‘‘iyyat al-Adab, summarized in “al-Nahda al-qawmiyya bayna al-taqālīī;d wa-al-‘‘ādāt,” FS 20:8 (May 1926): 349–54, refers to “guarding the wealth of the country from the greed of the foreigners” (349). JL, edited by an Egyptian and addressed to Egyptians, is less guarded. See Sayyidāt Misr, “Shumūs al-hayāt: Safha min a‘‘māl sayyidāt al-yawm,” JL 12:4 (Jan. 1920): 127–35, a re-port on the nationalist meeting at the Coptic cathedral; speakers mentioned Nitocris, ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr, and al-Khansā‘‘, “the finest model,” for she sacrificed her four sons in the Prophet's cause and then praised God. See JL's report on the women's demonstration in Cairo, in 12:4 (Jan. 1920): 143–44. MM's “Elderly Woman” asks her young listeners how they can see their own era as a time of freedom when the country is occupied. “Bāb al-rasā‘‘il: Min al-‘‘ajūz ilā hafdihā A. F.,” MM 4:2 (Feb. 1923): 91–94. “Have you not been attacked by armies . . . that first prepared the way through dealing with your morals? . . . In our age we were free; our own rulers ruled. . . . I was not a prisoner in my time; we were free and independent. I am a prisoner of your age and I want to return to the age of freedom and virtue that has ended. The end of my age was the occupation by the British.” This writer links political occupation to cultural imperialism, also using the rhetoric of motherhood to assert women's active participation in the society of past decades.

4. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 12.

5. “Ikrām kātiba muslima lil-qadīī;sa Jān Dārk,” al-Mashriq 19:2 (Feb. 1921): 108. This text was not published in Egypt, but it reproduces a text first published there, and al-Mashriq was read in Egypt. The characterization by birth and residence reproduces DM's title page.

6. “Al-Nahda al-nisā‘‘iyya fīī; al-‘‘ālam,” MM 4:7 (Sept. 1923): 352–55; quotation on 352. But at the same time, the speaker introduces her first as daughter and wife of great men, and only then as “leader of the women's awakening today.” The speaker alludes humorously to those who criticize Western role models. Mentioning Charlotte Cameroun, Lady Astor, and Emmeline Pankhurst, he interrupts himself to say parenthetically, “They'll say, those are English, we have nothing to do with them. Fine—balāsh England!” and then, mentioning Marie Curie as well as Jeanne d'Arc, says: “The impudent ones will say, take us away from those furriners. I take refuge in God.” Then he moves to pre-Islamic and contemporary Turkish women for his exemplars.

7. Of the sixteen biographies published in magazines in Egypt before 1940, five appeared in journals founded by Syrian Christians, four in journals founded by Egyptian Christians, one in a government school journal, and six in journals founded by Egyptian Muslims. Adding in Nahhās and Fawwāz, of identifiable authors two are Syrian Christian (and four unsigned biographies are published in Syrian Christian magazines), one (Fawwāz) is a Syrian Muslim, one is an Egyptian Christian (and three unsigned texts are published in Egyptian Christian magazines), and six are Egyptian Muslims (plus an unsigned text in an Egyptian Muslim–edited journal). Of biographies of others that mention Jeanne, one is in the Egyptian Muslim–edited NN, one in the Syrian Christian–edited SR, and three in the Syrian Christian–edited FS, although one of these is attributed to the Istanbul-based (but in Arabic) Muslim-edited al-Ittihād al-‘‘uthmānī

8. This was the Madrasat al-banāt al-thānawiyya al-amīī;riyya bi-al-Hilmiyya al-Jadīī;da, Cairo, one of the earliest state secondary schools for girls, upgraded from elementary school status.

9. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Shams al-tārīī;kh 2: Jān Dārk 'lā pusill' [sic; Fr. la pucille] fīī; al-qarn al-khāmis ‘‘ashara,” NN 2:4 (Nov. 1, 1922): 104–5; quotation marks in original.

10. In “A Working Girl,” New York Review of Books, June 25, 1981, 7, quoted in Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinnser, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 160.

11. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Jān Dārk 'lā pusill' fīī; al-qarn al-khāmis ‘‘ashara,” NN 2:4 (Nov. 1,1922): 104, 105.

12. Felski, Gender of Modernity, 18–19.

13. “Jān Dārk,” in Maryam ibnat Jibrā’ءīl Nasrallāh al-Nahhās, qarīī;nat Nasīī;m Nawfal al-Tārabulusiyya al-Sūriyya, Mithāl li-kitāb Ma‘‘rid al-hasnā‘‘ fī tarājim mashāhīr al-nisā‘‘ā’ء (Alexandria: Matba‘‘at Jarīī;dat Misr, 1879), ?[7]–11. Zaynab Fawwāz, “Jān Dārk,” DM, 122–24. “Ashhar al-hawādith wa-a‘‘zam al-rijāl: Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” al-Hilāl 4:4 (Oct. 1895): 121–28; 4:5 (Nov. 1895): 166–68. *** [Farah Antūn], “Ashhar al-nisā‘‘: Jān Dārk: Fatāt anqadhat watanahā bi-al-harb,” SB 1:2 (May 1903): 37–39. “SN: Jān Dārk,” FS 5:4 (Jan. 1911): 121–23. “Ikrām kātiba muslima lil-qadīī;sa Jān Dārk,” al-Mashriq 19:2 (Feb. 1921): 108–14. Zaynab Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” FMF 1:3 (June 1921): 109–11. Mustafā Bahīī;j, “Jān Dārk,” NN 1:5 (Dec. 1921): 120–21. Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, “Shams al-tārīī;kh 2: Jān Dārk 'lā pūsill' fīī; al-qarn al-khāmis ‘‘ashara,” NN 2:4 (Nov. 1922): 104–5. “SN: Jān Dārk,” MM 6:5 (May 1925): 271–73. “Jān Dārk, aw al-fatāt al-shahīī;ra,” AF 1:5 (May 1926): 97–99. Hasan Muhammad Nūr, “Jān Dārk,” NN 4:12 (Nov. 1926): 405–6. Anisa [Miss] H. M. S., “Jān Dārk aw fatāt Urliyān,” NN 6:71 (Nov. 1928): 386–87. “Jān Dārk,” AR 225 (May 22, 1929): 3–4. Saniyya Zuhayr, “Min al-tārīī;kh: Jān Dārk munqidhat Faransā,” MM 14:3/4 (Mar./Apr. 1933): 99–101. “Jān Dārk,” Shahīrāt nisā‘‘ al-tārīkh fī al-sharq [wa-fī] al-gharb ma‘‘a 20 qissat ghurām li-ashhar al-‘‘ashīqāt fī al-tārīkh. [Mulhaq riwā’ءī li-jarīī;dat al-Sabāh] (Cairo: Matba‘‘at al-Sabāh, n.d. [early 1930s]), 14–15. “The Heroine Joan of Arc,” Al-Majalla al-sanawiyya li-madrasat al-Amīra Fawziyya al-thanawiyya lil-banāt [English section] 2 (1934): 4. “‘‘Uzmat al-wataniyya al-haqqa, aw Jān Dārk,” MM 18:3 (Mar. 1937): 81–84. Ahmad Sādiq Mūsā. “Butūlat Faransā fīī; sahā‘‘if rā‘‘i‘‘a min tārīī;kh Faransā: al-Munqidha,” al-Mahrajān 2:12 (June 1938): 65–71. Bint Uns al-Wujūd, “Qissat butūla niswiyya: Qadīī;sat shahr Mayū allatīī; taradat al-injilīī;z min bilādihā,” al-Amal 1:1 (May 6, 1952): 7–8. Other texts mentioning Jeanne include “A haqqan uhriqat Jān Dārk?” Rūz al-Yūsuf 1:3 (Nov. 9, 1925): 7. “SN: Fatāt Qarāqīī;sh,” FS 6:10 (July 1912): 361–63. “SN: Jān Dār al-‘‘arabiyya,” FS 14:2 (Nov. 1919): 41–42. “SN: Karistīī;n dīī; Bizān,” FS 6:4 (Jan. 1912): 121–23, attributed to “al-Raqīī;b.” “Al-Nābigha al-misriyya al-Anisa Zakiyya ‘‘Abd al-Hamīī;d Sulaymān,” NN 4:12 [48] (Nov. 1926): 412–14. ‘‘Abd al-Fattāh al-Sirinjāwīī;, “Batalāt al-tārīī;kh,” MM 8:1 (Jan. 1927): 51–53. “Nābighat al-Turkiyyāt: Awwal wazīī;ra fīī; al-‘‘ālam mar‘‘a [sic] sharqiyya: al-Sayyida Khalīī;da Adīī;b Hānim wazīī;rat al-ma‘‘ārif,” SR 5:2 (Dec. 1923): 23–25. At least three “Famous Women” compendia of the 1950s include Jeanne, Sūfīī; ‘‘Abdallah's Nisā‘‘ muhāribāt (1951), Mubārak Ibrāhīī;m's Nisā‘‘ shahīrāt (1952), and Anwar al-Jundīī;'s Shahīrāt al-nisā‘‘ā’ء (1958). The next decade saw a full-length biography, ‘‘Abd al-Latīī;f Muhammad al-Dumyātīī;, Jān Dārk: ‘‘ard wa-tahlīl wa-ta‘‘qīb (Cairo: Matba‘‘at al-Dār al-misriyya lil-tabā‘‘a wa-al-nashr wa-al-tawzī‘‘, 1966), beyond the scope of this discussion. In 1933, Ghānim Muhammad published Jān Dārk fī sabīl al-watan (Jeanne D'Arc in the Service of the Nation) (Cairo: Dār al-tibā‘‘a al-ahliyya), according to ‘‘Ayda Ibrāhīī;m Nusayr, al-Kutub al-‘‘arabiyya allatī nushirat fī Misr 1926–1940 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1980). I have not located this text. Because in this chapter I refer repeatedly to the small number of texts listed above, I give abbreviated references instead of the full references repeated elsewhere in the book.

14. Agnes Kendrick Gray, “Jeanne d'Arc after Five Hundred Years,” American Magazine of Art 22 (1931): 369.

15. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays, 124–51 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975), 131, 133, 144. Davis argues that practices of sexual inversion “could undermine as well as reinforce . . . assent [to the existing hierarchical social structure] through its connections with everyday circumstances outside the privileged time of carnival and stage-play. . . . The image of the disorderly woman did not always function to keep women in their place” (131), in contrast to the “uncommon women” who, though exceptional, reinforced the status quo by “us[ing] their power to support a legitimate cause, not to unmask the truth about social relationships” (133).

16. As I have said, most of these texts are unsigned and so, by convention, editors' responsibility. But a higher percentage of Jeanne d'Arc biographies is attributed to specific contributors than is true of the “Famous Women” genre in women's magazines as a whole.

17. Constructing an “alternative political idiom to that of republicanism,” the Action française adopted Jeanne as “the icon of integral nationalism” based on a monarchical state. Jeanne's legendary purity and devoutness lent their aura to the antirepublican cause, while the Action française also benefited from Jeanne's resurrection as saint and the nationwide celebrations of the half millennium that had passed since her emergence and immolation. Jeanne's image offered an avenue for female participation in the cause, for women were major benefactors to, and organizers of, the “Denier de Jeanne d'Arc,” which offered material support for the Action française's young male militants. Martha Hanna, “Iconology and Ideology in the Idiom of the Action française, 1908–1931,” French Historical Studies 14:2 (1985): 215–39; 216. I am indebted to Natalie Zemon Davis for directing me to this essay.

18. Maurice Barrès, Autour de Jeanne d'Arc (Paris: Librairie ancienne Edouard Champion, 1916). See especially, in this collection of essays, “Jeanne d'Arc et les jeunes filles de Paris.” On Jeanne as symbol in Vichy France, see the brief comments in David O'Connell, “1920: Bourgeois Sin (Jeanne d'Arc Is Canonized)”, in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 855–61. Decades later, Jeanne became the “favorite national icon” of far-right racist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen; her image hovered over left-right struggles to control a concept of national/ist belonging. Steven Laurence Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution: Disputed Legacies, France, 1789–1989 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 53.

19. Ann Bleigh Powers, “The Joan of Arc Vogue in America, 1894–1929,” American Society Legion of Honor Magazine 49:3 (1978): 177; 178; 180; illus. 179. The period saw “the Joan works of some thirty American authors” (180).

20. Powers, “The Joan of Arc Vogue,” 185. On the troops' song, see Polly Schoyer Brooks, Beyond the Myth: The Story of Joan of Arc (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 160. See also Helen Harriet Salls, “Joan of Arc in English and American Literature,” South Atlantic Quarterly 35 (1936): 173, 176, 178, 180. She quotes American playwright Percy MacKaye as saying, in a preface to the eighth edition (1918) of his 1906 play Jeanne d'Arc, “Before 1914, the memory of Jeanne moved us as a beautiful legend, a rapture of imagination; today, in the great war still raging, her image quickens us with contemporaneous heroism, a rapture of reality” (180).

21. If interest in Jeanne in Egypt coincided with these moments, on what sources did writers in Egypt depend? Later biographers of Jeanne in Egypt echoed earlier ones but revised details, a hint of changing imperatives. If Europeanlanguage sources were preeminent, authors almost never cited them. (As we have seen, in a few “Famous Women” sketches European sources are cited, but only once for Jeanne, in the “Young Woman of Qarāqīī;sh” sketch, discussed below, where there is specific motivation to mention the source.) Some editors read English, more often French; some (especially Syrian Christians) traveled and had family ties to Arab communities in Europe and North and South America. That Jeanne's name was always transliterated from the French rather than the English (“Jān Dārk” not “Jun awf ark”) might suggest French channels of information; but many writers in English used the modern French version of “Jehan's” name, too.

Did the early films that did so much to popularize Jeanne play in Egypt? Major studios like Paramount had a commercial presence there (personal communications from Walter Armbrust and Roberta Dougherty, Feb. 1996), but if that increased the possibility that DeMille's film (produced by Paramount) did show, I have found no direct evidence of Jeanne's cinematic presence in the theaters of Cairo and Alexandria. For a select list of films, see Nadia Margolis, Joan of Arc in History, Literature, and Film: A Select, Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1990), 393–402.

In light of Egyptian nationalists' interest in Japan as a non-Western model after its defeat of Russia in 1905, could anyone in Egypt have learned of Kanichi Awaya's 1884 translation of Janet Tuckey's 1880 Joan of Arc, the Maid, an English work “influential and respected in its time”? Or, much later, of Jun Ishikawa's novel Fugen (1936)? See Margolis, Joan of Arc in History, Literature, and Film, 135. The only non-Western works on Jeanne this bibliography lists are the two Japanese ones. Tuckey's book might have been a source for writers in Egypt.

22. The first six pages following the frontispiece are missing in the University of Cairo copy, the sole one I have located. Page 7 begins in the middle of the political context that probably is the first section of the Jeanne d'Arc biography. It seems likely that this was the first biography to follow that of Jasham; it is followed by Catherine I of Russia and Layla bt. Hudhayfa b. Shaddād.

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

24. DM, 122.

25. Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (New York: Knopf, 1981), 33–43. Warner shows that in Europe Jeanne had to be given a physical presence through writing and the visual monuments erected to her memory. “Beauty” was a sign of Jeanne's virtue (37). With the post-Renaissance rewriting of Jeanne from Amazon to romantic heroine, a feminine physicality was given especial prominence (213–14).

26. Farag, “Al-Muqtataf”; Beth Baron, “Unveiling in Early TwentiethCentury Egypt: Practical and Symbolic Considerations,” Middle Eastern Studies 25 (1989): 370–86.

27. In Maurice Boutet de Monvel's 1896 children's biography, Jeanne's long, light-brown hair became a short cap as soon as she defined her mission. Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Joan of Arc, introduced and translation edited by Gerald Gottleib (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library and Viking Press, 1980). Warner mentions long hair as an emerging motif and sign of Jeanne's beauty (Joan of Arc, 213–14).

28. DM, 122.

29. Ibid.

30. Nahhās prefaces her biography with a political history of fifteenthcentury France, but since the first part of the text is missing, her precise opening strategy cannot be known. The extant text begins in the middle of this summary of events. Nahhās then renders Jeanne with a dramatic license Fawwāz probably did not even consider: “[Jeanne] would go into the evergreen forest near her home and sit near a spring. She let her thoughts roam in contemplation's pasture, pondering the misery of her homeland, her head hanging low” (7). She might have followed a European-language source; perhaps Fawwāz's observation that Nahhās's work was “organized after the fashion of the European dictionaries” applied to narrative strategy as well as organizing principles (DM, 515; Fawwāz notes here that Nahhās had learned English in school). The contrast between these women's portraits of Jeanne highlights their different educations—one in European Christian missionary schools in the Lebanon, the other tutored in adulthood by scholars of classical Arabic rhetoric.

31. Nahhās, Mithāl, 7. Several names of individual fighting women follow this statement.

32. Ibid., 9.

33. Warner, Joan of Arc, 213–17; 236–38. On the shift in Jeanne's image from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, from Renaissance Amazon to child-savior of the nation, see Warner and also Régine Pernoud, Joan of Arc, trans. Jeanne Unger Duell (New York: Grove Press; London: Evergreen Books, 1961), chap. 1.

34. Nahhās, Mithāl, 7, 9–10; Fawwāz, DM, 122–23; “Jān Dārk,” al-Hilāl, 123–24; *** [Farah Antūn], “Jān Dārk,” SB, 37–38. Al-Hilāl devotes proportionately more space to the political scene than to Jeanne's life history than do the women's magazines and biographical dictionaries. This is in line with the tendency in these “general-interest” magazines to subordinate life histories of women to intellectual and/or cultural trends to which the subject can be linked.

35. Fawwāz, DM, 122. When the English saw Jeanne all in white, on her white horse and grasping her white banner, says Fawwāz, “they fled from before her like donkeys in fright, from thralldom taking flight” (123).

36. “Jān Dārk,” al-Hilāl, 125. A year later, Mark Twain's mock memoir of Jeanne used a similar metaphor: “For more than three quarters of a century the English fangs had been bedded in [France's] flesh.” Jean Francois Alden [Mark Twain], Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte (Her Page and Secretary), Freely Translated Out of the Ancient French into Modern English from the Original Unpublished Manuscript in the National Archives of France (New York: Harper and Bros., 1896), 6.

37. Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” FMF, 109, 109, 109, 110.

38. The verb also means “to treat with humiliation.”

39. Bahīī;j, “Jān Dārk,” NN, 121. This is one of many instances of Bahīī;j's close but inexact echoing of Fawwāz. The latter says that Jeanne “had to traverse 150 leagues of territory saturated by the English and encompassed by sly trickery” (DM, 122). Bahīī;j adds the dabābāt.

40. Yūnus, “Jān Dārk 'lā pūsill,'” NN, 105.

41. “Jān Dārk,” MM (1925), 271, 272.

42. Gottleib, “Introduction,” Boutet de Monvel, Joan of Arc, 10.

43. Jeanne as anti-imperialist heroine was not wholly unprecedented. Perhaps writers in Egypt took inspiration from the Irish. John Daly Burke's 1798 play, Female Patriotism: Or, the Death of Joan of Arc, “heap[ed] abuse on the English” (Powers, “The Joan of Arc Vogue,” 180).

44. “Jān Dārk,” AR, 3. Cf. Hanna, “Iconology,” 219–21, 234–37, on the thinly veiled political messages produced by the Action française's use of Jeanne.

45. “Jān Dārk,” AR, 3. The religious overtones of “suffering the evil of punishment” were surely not lost on readers.

46. Marilyn Booth, Bayram al-Tunisi's Egypt: Social Criticism and Narrative Strategies (Reading, U.K.: Ithaca, 1990), 58. Anisa [Miss] H. M. S., “Jān Dārk aw fatāt Urliyān,” NN 6:71 (Nov. 1928): 386.

47. Hourani, Arabic Thought, 78–79.

48. Ibid., 79; 195–200.

49. The transcripts of Jeanne's condemnation and rehabilitation trials speak of her going “to France” (probably the Ile de France) from “her land,” Lorraine, which had an equivocal relation to France. Régine Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself and Her Witnesses, trans. Edward Hyams (New York: Stein and Day, 1966; reissued, Lanham: Scarborough, 1982), 145–46, 180, 184, 247.

50. Nahhās, Mithāl, 11. Her finale affirms watan's emerging sense through the adjective watanī, signifying “patriotic” and then “nationalist” as patriotism became a matter of nationalist orientation: “Thus was condemned a young woman who united in her person the best of qualities, the most perfect and complete of virtues, the greatest of patriotic merits” (11).

51. “Jān Dārk,” SB, 37, 37, 37, 38.

52. “Jān Dārk,” FS (1911), 123. In a biography of Christine de Pizan in the same journal exactly one year later, Jeanne—subject of de Pizan's last literary work—is “the great heroine of France, victim of patriotism/nationalism [al-wataniyya], and exemplar of courage.” “SN: Karistīī;n dīī; Bizān,” FS 6:4 (Jan. 1912): 121.

53. DM, 122; “Ikrām kātiba,” 108. Al-Mashriq also used watan in its opening subtitle to Fawwāz's text: “The Origins of Jeanne d'Arc and her mission to rescue her watan” (108), and in a footnote that criticizes Fawwāz for “exaggerating” Jeanne's state of confusion after Charles insisted that she not return to Domrémy. “She remained for a time in a state of confusion and doubt but finally deemed it wise to sacrifice her own position in the service of her watan” (112 n. 2).

54. Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” FMF, 109.

55. Ibid., 110. But the near interchangeability of the two and the use of the singular watan over the plural awtān to refer to France as a whole also sug-gests that the plural bilād had now come to take on its twentieth-century singular sense as “country” rather than “regions” or “towns” (Jeanne sees ruin and destruction in her bilād [109]; she aims to throw the English out of the French bilād territories [110]). Yet older usages have a tenacious hold: “Jeanne's soul longed to return to her bilād to see her family and mawātins” (here, as the local populace rather than as “compatriots”) (111). When it is noted at the end that she “sacrificed herself for her bilād,” again this is the broader usage (111).

56. Bahīī;j, “Jān Dārk,” NN, 121.

57. Ibid., 122, 122; Yūnus, “Jān Dārk 'lā pusill,'” NN, 273.

58. Hourani, Arabic Thought, 194.

59. Jeanne's likeness bears the caption “She it was who rescued her watan from the hand of the enemy” (“Jān Dārk,” MM, 270). And umma is unambiguous: the French umma celebrates its national holiday (‘‘īd watanī) (270, picture caption).

60. “Jān Dārk,” MM, 271, 271. Jeanne tells the king, “My heart holds an innocent wataniyya; I want to rescue my tortured watan and bilād. I want the freedom of poor, wretched France” (271). Her words were “magic,” not that of sorcery but of “true wataniyya's flame” (272).

61. Ibid., 273.

62. “‘‘Uzmat al-wataniyya al-haqqa, aw Jān Dārk,” MM (1937): 81. Watan and al-wataniyya occur at least a dozen times; Jeanne's self-sacrifice is a nationalist one. This “true patriotism” compelled Jeanne to do nothing other than “sacrifice her life for the sake of rescuing her country” (81); not one voice was raised to save her “when her defense of her watan was her whole crime. . . . God have mercy on the martyr to patriotism and loyalty [al-wataniyya waal-wafā‘‘ā’ء]” (84).

63. Warner, Joan of Arc, 239–42.

64. Anderson and Zinnser, A History of Their Own, 160; also 213; Warner, Joan of Arc, 240–45.

65. Her fifteenth lecture, delivered February 10, 1910, reprinted in Couvreur, La Femme, 249–66.

66. A few biographies note that “the French sold Jeanne to the English,” but the English are the ultimate villains throughout this set of texts. In general the trial and execution are not portrayed as the work of a French ecclesiastical institution aligned with the English. Rather, they are forthrightly “a blotch on the pages of English history,” “a mark of shame on the brow of imperialism” (Mūsā, “Butūlat Faransā,” al-Mahrajān [1938], 71; “Jān Dārk,” Mulhaq al-Sabāh, 15). Sādiq puts more blame on the French. After jealousy broke out among the French army commanders (perhaps an implicit reference to the difficulty of being a female in Jeanne's position), “her situation deteriorated, her star descended, and they [the French] left her a prisoner in enemy hands” (“Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” FMF, 11). Yūnus says the “people of Burgundy took her prisoner and sold her to the English, an act of treachery on their part toward their country, and a crime against a loyal girl” (“Jān Dārk 'lā pusill,'” NN, 105). But he deploys this to stress that this “crime” occurred only because Jeanne transgressed accepted gender boundaries.

67. “Jān Dārk, aw al-fatāt al-shahīī;ra,” AF (1926), 97. And France is “her beloved watan” (98).

68. Ibid., 99.

69. “Jān Dārk,” MM (1925), 272.

70. Ibid., 273.

71. As‘‘ad Arqash, “Tilka Jān Dārk innamā Turkiyya,” FS 3:1 (Oct. 1908): 22–24.

72. Fenoglio-Abd el Aal, Défense, 95–96, 119.

73. “‘‘Uzmat al-wataniyya al-haqqa, aw Jān Dārk,” MM (1937), 81.

74. With a fortunate choice of adjective whose double meaning resonates, Haylāna ‘‘Abd al-Malik, a Coptic merchant in Tanta, is called “the noble/self-made [‘‘isāmiyya] woman, the only Egyptian woman who has worked in trade and succeeded in it to an extent that makes one rejoice.” She grew up in Tanta, illiterate, “her only legacy a fiery soul and a strong will.” Description of how she supported the local peasantry by single-handedly raising the price of cotton precedes a declaration that she did her share for the nationalist movement by opening her storehouse to the followers of Sa‘‘d Zaghlūl for their rallies. “Haylāna ‘‘Abd al-Malik,” MM 5:6 (June 15, 1924): 324. This biography also supports the magazine in noting Copts' contribution to the nation while highlighting the subject's work for the Coptic community: she “fought against injustices done to Copts [in Tanta].” Popp is another working-class subject, lauded, as I have said, for helping other working-class women but at the same time for pulling herself into the middle class. Hasīī;b al-Hakīī;m, “Min al-kūkh ilā al-barlamān: Madām Bawb,” MM 8:3 (Mar. 15, 1927): 117–21. A biography dramatically rendered of one Alice Ayres (d. 1885), described as a domestic servant of a member of the English bourgeoisie, says that the subject “sacrificed her life in good faith to save those who were not her kin.” She saved the family's children (and lost her life) in a fire. The biography opens with a homily valorizing women's self-sacrifice for their community—whether defined by family or nation. ‘‘Iffat Sultān, “al-Tadhiya: Alīī;s Ayirs: Fatāt injilīī;ziyya bāsila,” JL 7:8 (Feb. 1915): 265–69; quotation on 265. Similar themes emerge in a unique profile of an “ordinary Egyptian,” “Al-Sitt Umm Muhammad,” MM 7:5 (May 20, 1926): 267. A clear indication of class orientation closes a biography of Catherine I of Russia: “She was one of the most honorable and refined women, despite her base origins and the obscurity of her lineage.” “Kātirīī;na al-ūlā imbirātūrat Rūsiyā,” FS 3:2 (Nov. 1908): 41–43; quotation on 43. Such phrases draw upon the conventional diction of classical biographical dictionaries and pinpoint the elite bias of this genre.

75. “Nābighat al-Turkiyyāt: Awwal wazīī;ra fīī; al-‘‘ālam mar‘‘a [sic] sharqiyya: al-sayyida Khalīī;da Adīī;b Hānim wazīī;rat al-ma‘‘ārif,” SR 4 (Dec. 1923): 24–25. Perhaps the Jeanne d'Arc comparison is strengthened by the portrait of Edip (24), holding the reins of her horse, head covered but face visible.

76. Warner, Joan of Arc, 97, 246.

77. Ibid., chap. 12. Boutet de Monvel's biography is suffused with images of children, and it emphasizes Jeanne as child/peasant.

78. Biographies in Nahhās, al-Hilāl, Fawwāz, SB, and FS (which says she was born of poor parents and had no education). Al-Hilāl mounts a critique of both “great-man” [sic] biography and the “superstition” of ordinary folk (rural or urban is not specified, although the context is what the “village folk” had to say about Jeanne) when the signs that allegedly attended Jeanne's birth are mentioned only to be debunked: “You hardly ever read the history of a great man, especially leaders and heroes, without seeing in them events they say happened just before birth or at the hour of birth that indicate a prophecy of [that person's] arrival. . . . There might not be any truth in these narratives except a mere expression that was uttered by the mother, the female neighbor, or the midwife” (166). This gender-specific critique echoes attacks in the press and in fiction at the time on “popular belief” as detrimental to national strength and the national economy.

79. Yūnus, “Jān Dārk 'lā pusill,'” NN, 104.

80. Ibid., 105.

81. “Jān Dārk,” MM, 271.

82. Warner calls her father “dean” of the village (Warner, Joan of Arc, 58). “In 1423 Joan's father was the villager who signed the agreement with the leader of a band of soldiers, a yearly fee levied on each household paid so that there would be no pillaging” (Anderson and Zinnser, A History, 116). It is clear from witnesses at the time that the family was propertied but not wealthy, and was respected by the villagers as “honest and decent farmers and true Catholics of good repute.” See Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself, 16–20; 17.

83. These texts conflate “herdsman” and “peasant,” not the same thing; nor would their roles be conflated in the context of Egypt's ecology and society.

84. For AF (1926), Jeanne is a “girl shepherdess, of fine physical constitution and nature, living the life of those villagers, free of artificiality” (“Jān Dārk,” 97). For others she simply “tends her father's flocks” (“Jān Dārk,” AR, 3). See also Zuhayr, “Min al-tārīī;kh: Jān Dārk munqidhat Faransā,” MM (1933). “The work she did was watching her father's livestock” (99).

85. His primary motive may have been to conceal his identity, for the dubious image of a fiction writer was not consonant with his career as a lawyer. In later editions his name appeared on the title page. See Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction, 2d ed. (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 33–35.

86. Badran, Feminists, 92.

87. Zaynab Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” 109–10. No doubt writers in Egypt picked up this image from European sources; in fact, they could have taken a page right out of de Monvel: “[Her folks] were honest people, simple laboring folk who lived by their toil. . . . She was a sweet, simple, upright girl. Everyone loved her, for all knew that she was kind-hearted and was the best girl in the village. A hard worker, she aided her family in their labors. During the day she led the animals to pasture or joined her father in doing heavy work; in the evening she sat spinning at her mother's side and helped her with the housework.” Boutet de Monvel, Joan of Arc, 13.

88. This fit FMF's rhetoric perfectly. Indeed, the same author wrote on the self-sacrifice women must practice for those around them. Taking care of oneself was also a duty—for the sake of others. Zaynab Sādiq, “Wājib al-mar‘‘a nahwa nafsihā,” FMF 1:5 (Aug. 1921): 154–56.

89. DM, 122. SB and FS (1911) do not mention him. From the 1920s, see Bahīī;j, “Jān Dārk,” NN, 120; Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān”; “Jān Dārk,” AF. Some from this decade subsume him in the “village family famous for piety and goodness.” Yūnus is more complex; Jeanne is “fleeing from her father the shepherd” (“Jān Dārk 'lā pusill,'” 104). The father is the focus for an implicitly critical attitude to the peasant family; this may suggest a classist outlook on the part of the author.

90. “Jān Dārk,” Mulhaq al-Sabāh, 14. There is disagreement over whether relations between Jeanne and her family were affectionate. Pernoud concludes from trial documents that they were, and that her father felt an affectionate concern for her (Joan of Arc by Herself, 126). But, she notes, views to the contrary exist. Jeanne's story offers scope to criticize arranged marriage. Some Egyptian versions narrate Jeanne's refusal to comply with a betrothal (an event not established by the sources, but unquestioned in these texts). Jeanne's father's role as matchmaker, rather than the youth's as suitor, is primary (Nahhās, Mithāl, 8; Al-Hilāl, 123). This narrative line thwarts the unsupportive father who tries to deflect his daughter by inserting her into the usual domestic slot.

91. Mūsā, “Butūlat Faransā,” 66.

92. Ibid.

93. Margolis, Joan of Arc in History, Literature, and Film, 243; Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself, 213; Warner, Joan of Arc, 105; Frances Gies, Joan of Arc, the Legend and the Reality (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 21.

94. Warner notes that for a medieval woman who “contravened the destined subordination of her sex” by, for example, donning male garb, this garb could act as “armour, both defensive and aggressive”; simultaneously she could use domesticity as a defense (Warner, Joan of Arc, 153). Jeanne “only insisted on it once” during her trial (160): “For spinning and sewing let me alone against any woman in Rouen” (Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself, 16).

95. Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” FMF, 110. In the narrative context this is inaccurate; it was the commander of the Vaucouleurs fort, nearest fort to Domrémy, to whom Jeanne first went.

96. Ibid., 111.

97. “Jān Dārk,” MM, 271. This text calls Jeanne's “firmness . . . proof of the true [or sincere] nature of woman's will and her moral courage” (273). These generalizations open out a second interpretive possibility for the text's construction of the struggle between weak and strong, by collapsing the colonizer/colonized binary into a male/female one, a well-recognized conjunction in postcolonial studies.

98. Fawwāz, DM, 123.

99. Warner, Joan of Arc, 158.

100. Ibid., 147. Anisa [Miss] H. M. S., “Jān Dārk aw fatāt Urliyān,” NN 6:71 (Nov. 1928): 387. Warner notes that in sixteenth-century (and later) European treatments of Jeanne, her “male dress is glossed over. She is armed and cuirassed as a practical measure. No inquiry is made into the disturbing and deep ambivalence of Joan's need to wear male dress far from the battlefield” (213). In Egyptian biographies Jeanne's reversion to male garb after her imprisonment is explained as the ruse of her captors, not as her desire.

101. An article in Ruūz al-Yuūsuf took a stand on the controversy over whether it was indeed Jeanne who was burned at the stake in 1431; but this was not a biography. “A haqqan uhriqat Jān Dārk?” Ruūz al-Yuūsuf 1:3 (Nov. 9, 1925): 7.

102. Cf. one scholar's conclusion about the effect of certain early-twentieth-century English-language biographies of Jeanne: “The Maid of Orleans emerges a real girl as well as a genius, with the radiance of her young womanhood sublimated by her 'mission' to an ineffable whiteness.” See Helen Harriet Salls, “Joan of Arc in English and American Literature,” South Atlantic Quarterly 35 (1936): 175. See the pictorial images reproduced in Warner, Joan of Arc, between pages 176 and 177; Pernoud, Joan of Arc, 12–19, 52. Again, the emphasized motif of whiteness has a basis in the documents (Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself, 83, 112).

103. A move, argues Warner, that shaped Jeanne's post-sixteenth-century image in France: “Joan's Amazonian likeness had to be softened to be countenanced at all: her transvestism, her armour, her inviolability had to seem something that in the final conclusion was offered on the altar of male supremacy. . . . Joan's life is a tribute to the traditional sphere of man, as opposed to woman. . . . She became a talisman for a host of causes conducted by men. . . . [Yet] because she was undeniably female, she was a figurehead for the women's side in one phase of the lasting struggle” (Warner, Joan of Arc, 217–18). Perhaps this is why she was attractive to male nationalists writing in Egypt.

104. “Jān Dārk,” MM, 272. This digression gives immediacy to the abstraction quoted earlier, from the same biography, on women's strength of will.

105. Bahīī;j, “Jān Dārk,” NN, 120.

106. Ibid.

107. All quotes in ibid., 121.

108. Fawwāz, DM, 123. Also, in the 1920s, this recapitulates the theme of the happy nationalist peasant: “She wanted to return to her earlier life, among the sheep and fields of the folk of her dear village” (Nūr, “Jān Dārk,” NN [1926]: 405. Again, writers in Egypt were making use of a motif popular in Joan's political “rehabilitation” in France (Warner, Joan of Arc, 217).

109. “The life history of this girl was pure; she did not dirty her hands with bloodshed” (“Jān Dārk,” FS, 123; also “Jān Dārk,” AR, 3; “Jān Dārk,” AF, 98). Al-Hilāl, however, claims she “killed 700 soldiers” (“Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” 126). Mūsā also presents her as in the thick of the fighting (“Butūlat Faransā,” 70).

110. “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” al-Hilāl, 167.

111. Sādiq, “Jān Dārk, fatāt Urliyān,” FMF, 110. Sketching her childhood preoccupations substantiates Jeanne's role in battle: she “was concerned with the weak and cared for the sick” (Nūr, “Jān Dārk,” NN, 405). So does the increasingly explicit, descriptive emphasis on the domestic: as a girl returning home from tending the flocks, “she sat beside her mother sewing clothes and embroidering cloth and listening to stories of the war” (“Jān Dārk,” AR, 3). Cf. Boutet de Monvel's treatment (Joan of Arc, 28, 36, 40).

112. Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself, 17–20, 65; 64, 86, 92.

113. Zuhayr, “Jān Dārk munqidhat faransā,” MM, 99.

114. Ibid.

115. Ibid., 100.

116. Ibid. I have translated the verbal noun ighrā‘‘ as “urging on,” but the emphasis on Jeanne's femininity makes it hard to ignore a more common connotation, “tempting” or “alluring”; in no other biography does this term appear.

117. Pernoud, Joan of Arc by Herself, 63; see also 62, 65, 84; Warner, Joan of Arc, 7. Warner says “Joan's prowess was not credited to her military skills until the rehabilitation of 1456. . . . Instead, the miraculousness of her victories was stressed, even by her enemies” (80). The legend was so firmly set that even a 1930s writer who is anxious to retrieve “the real Joan [who] has been gradually emerging from the mists of legend and prejudice” (Salls, “Joan of Arc in English and American Literature,” 168) labeled her “commander-in-chief of an army at seventeen” (167).

118. Zuhayr, “Jān Dārk munqidhat Faransā,” MM, 100.

119. This had enormous political implications for the region, which was not lost on local audiences. “The defense of the [Ottoman] empire's integrity in Libya quickly became a popular political cause throughout the Muslim world.” Lisa Anderson, “Ramadan al-Suwaylihi: Hero of the Libyan Resistance,” in Struggle and Survival in the Middle East, ed. Edmund Burke III (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 120.

120. Badran, Feminists, 50.

121. Anderson, “Ramadan al-Suwaylihi,” 121.

122. “SN: Fatāt Qarāqīī;sh,” FS 6:10 (July 1912): 361–63, 361.

123. “SN: Jān Dār [sic] al-‘‘arabiyya,” FS 14:2 (Nov. 1919): 41–42, 42.

124. “SN: “Fatāt Qarāqīī;sh,” 362–363.

125. That the “Young Woman of Qarāqīī;sh” is anonymous, an everywoman, identifiable as only “Jeanne d'Arc” or “Khawla,” enhances this collective emphasis.

126. “Arab” first signified Bedouin, and that could have been meant here, but given the thrust of both versions, the broader, newer meaning seems to take precedence.

127. “Al-Nābigha al-misriyya al-Anisa Zakiyya ‘‘Abd al-Hamīī;d Sulaymān,” NN 4:12 [48] (Nov. 1926): 412–14; quotation on 412.

128. Badran, Feminists, 42. The text exemplifies the concrete treatment of issues that “Famous Women” texts could accomplish. One reason girls' education was controversial was that it consumed limited funds. Even more so was Egyptian government sponsorship of educational missions abroad for girls like Sulaymān. For a century, young men (potential bureaucrats) had been sent to Europe; young women were first sent in 1901, for teacher training. This was hotly protested: “Conservatives opposed the idea of sending Muslim women to Christian countries for higher education” (Baron, Women's Awakening, 131). For a time only non-Muslims were sent, but gradually Muslims rejoined (131–32). That Labīī;ba Ahmad's NN featured one of these students in approving terms suggests how difficult it is to affix analytically stable labels in this period.

129. Further anecdotes reiterate Zakiyya's exemplarity:

In London, an English girl—[Zakiyya]'s frequent companion—told her proudly that it was England that had forbidden the enslavement of individuals. [Zakiyya] an-swered her in the tone of one in the right censuring another: “But it is the same [country] that has regarded as lawful the enslavement of whole peoples.” With a start, the [other] girl changed the subject. “Do you know of any greater [person] than this King?” [Zakiyya] replied, “The heart of a progressive Egyptian woman.” The girl said nothing more.

[Zakiyya] was sitting with an English lady in London, who in the course of conversation asked, “Why does Egypt demand freedom when it is one of the world's poorest nations?” Hardly had she finished her question when Miss [Zakiyya] answered, “That is why it is demanding freedom.” In these anecdotes, of which there are hundreds . . . her personality shines, lit up with love for her homeland [watan] and possessive zeal toward it. (“Al-Nābigha al-misriyya al-Anisa Zakiyya ‘‘Abd al-Hamīī;d Sulaymān,” NN 4:12 [48] [Nov. 1926], 412–13.)

130. Powers, “The Joan of Arc Vogue,” 178.

131. Warner, Joan of Arc, 259; Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 3. For directing me to Wells I am indebted to Alice Deck.

132. Badran, Feminists, 13.

133. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 11.

134. Armstrong, Desire, 23.

135. Eve Sedgewick, “Nationalisms and Sexualities in the Age of Wilde,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Routledge, 1992), 241.

136. “Al-Gharad min inshā‘‘ hadhihi al-majalla,” JL 1:1 (July 1908): 5–8; quotation on 6.

137. An article in Young Woman of the East taken from “the Jeanne d'Arc Journal” and sent by a European or American man who was heading to China with missionaries gave the response of a high Chinese official to the question of what “his people thought about the savior of France.” People in Europe are accustomed to representing China as “a country mired in the darknesses of primitivity,” he said, but we are moving fast toward “the same level of civilization as Europe.” The masses know nothing of Jeanne, but the elite do. “Not a one of our religious figures, even though most follow Confucius, does not believe in the divine mission of Jeanne. . . . Thus the savages of the Far East prove they are more accurate in their opinions than are some European historians.” “Muqtatafāt: Ra‘‘y al-sīī;niyīī;n fīī; Jān Dark,” FS 4:6 (Mar. 1910): 219–20.

138. “‘‘Uzmat al-wataniyya,” 81.

139. Bint Uns al-Wujūd, “Qissat butūla niswiyya: Qadīī;sat shahr Mayū allatīī; taradat al-injilīī;z min bilādihā,” al-Amal 1:1 (May 6, 1952): 7–8. This was the first issue of the new series (note 144).

140. Ibid., 8.

141. Nahhās, Mithāl, 11.

142. Bint Uns al-Wujūd, “Qissat butūla niswiyya,” 8. This is the volume's first biography, and it is not inserted in a biographical series. The editorial preface announces that “the editorial staff of al-Amal has decided to publish in sequence, under 'Political History,' some glances at the history of British [sic] imperialism in France” (7).

143. Badran, Feminists, 153. On al-Amal's program, see Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 65–66, 172. Thābit was the first Egyptian woman to graduate from the French law school in Cairo and the first college-educated female journalist (Khalīī;fa, al-Haraka, 132). She founded al-Amal in 1925 to mount a Wafdist attack on the English-appointed prime minister, Ahmad Ziwar Pasha (169). But the journal emphasized women's needs and human rights, carrying the rubric “Journal in Defense of the Rights of Women” and calling openly for women's public political rights. Closing in 1926, it resumed under the new rubric, in 1952, when the nature of the state appears to take precedence over women's rights. I say this tentatively, having not seen all issues.

144. This portrait did not reflect Fārūq's image among the populace. See Berque, Egypt, 660–61. But it is also well to remember that there was a long, often practically motivated practice in the Egyptian press of paying homage to the royals, often patrons of these publications.