8. Famous Wombs and Women's memories

Gender, Nation, and Life Writing in Today's Egypt

For she is al-tāhira, the pure—she of good parentage and property, comely and consummate [dhāt al-hasab wa-al-māl wa-al-jamāl wa-al-kamāl]. . . . Khadīja grew up in a noble home, and her growth to adolescence was founded on praiseworthy morals and virtuous conduct. Khadīja was beautiful, light-skinned, tending to plumpness. She had fine black hair and large eyes.

. . . Her relationship with the Messenger was at first a business relationship, but Lady Khadīja noticed that Muhammad differed from the general run of shabāb [youth]. For he was a good person, and he stood out for the beauty of his person and his soul. She fell in love with him and longed to marry him. Yet how could that happen? For she was some years the older. But nothing can obstruct God's will. . . . Muhammad lived in Khadīja's house. He loved her, and his wife loved him. . . . [After his first revelation] Khadīja believed, and was the first woman to submit to Islam. She was the best of companions and helpers to her husband, for she was a sincere believer and a loyal and courageous woman. . . . Khadīja stood firmly beside the Messenger of God, encouraging and supporting him, and strengthening his heart.

Throughout Muslim-majority societies today, advertising life histories of the earliest Muslim women is one potent way to articulate visions of what gender ought to mean in a modern society. The message is anything but hidden: the life history of Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid that yields this chapter's epigraph appeared in a volume entitled Exemplary Women, published in Cairo in 1992.^[1]

Today, as competing groups seek to control, in Deniz Kandiyoti's words, the “'true' message of Islam . . . [as] the only legitimate ideological terrain on which issues pertaining to women can be debated,”^[2] early Muslim women emerge in print as female role models. The prominence of one figure or another may be traceable to the dominance of a certain political agenda. Fātima al-Zahrā‘‘ was advanced as the sole figure of authority over the collective imaginary of many women in Iran until the movement to topple the shah mustered Zaynab, sister of Husayn, for she was the courageous fighter, the ideal female revolutionary figure—and sibling of a martyr, to boot. With the revolution's consolidation, Fātima, embodiment of domestic fealty and piety, took center stage again. Carla Makhlouf notes that biographies of early Muslim women as “culture heroes” infused debates over women's status in North Yemen in the 1970s; others have noticed similar deployments across the region.^[3] Such role models become an active part of the present, of how women see their roles within a sphere defined by Islamic activism.

As we have seen, the writing of famous women's lives as performances of gender agendas is nothing new in modern Egypt. Nor is it new to inscribe early Muslim women's lives. In 1901, WomaninIslam had featured Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid in its very first issue:

[Khadīī;ja] was a resolute, intelligent, honorable woman. She had one of the most respectable ancestries of the women of Quraysh, and was among the wealthiest and noblest. Everyone in her clan wanted to marry her but none could. When she saw how Muhammad [had conducted himself in her trade] she sent for him and offered herself to him. He came with his paternal uncles to her father, who betrothed them and they were married. . . . Khadīī;ja was the first to trust him and take him at his word. When Gabriel taught him to perform the ablutions and the prayer, he came directly to Khadīī;ja and taught her that. She made her ablutions just as he did, and prayed just as he did.

“The Experiential Lessons to Be Drawn from This Life” are as follows: (1) Khadīī;ja chose Muhammad as an employee because of his reliability and truthfulness. (2) She chose him as a husband because of his fine morals. (3) Commerce is as suitable for a woman to pursue as for a man. (4) A woman's commerce not only benefits herself and her family, but might bring benefit on the whole group [jumhuūr] as well. (5) Women may be helpers to those who do great deeds. Thus was Khadīī;ja first to submit and believe in the Prophet's mission, before a single man converted. She helped him to propagate his mission.^[4]

I have argued throughout this book that such biographies addressed the question—a compelling one with the formation of nationalist ideologies under imperial rule—of how gendered divisions of labor might shift to better serve a new nation-state. Competing constructions of “woman's place” exemplified (and concealed) conflicting notions of what that state should be. It was in this period of nation formation that biographies of “Famous Women” became a regular feature in the many periodicals aimed at women as subject and/or audience. How did biographies affirm the fiction of the nation/state equivalence as the goal of the nationalist project? One way was to reiterate the myth of common origin and to construct ancient Egypt as an autonomous nation-state with, in addition, progressive practices concerning female status. Another was to celebrate early Muslim and/or Arab women as contributors to a community on its way to defining political boundaries.

As “Famous Women” were dwindling in 1950s women's magazines, and populist intellectuals such as Anwar al-Jundīī; were producing volumes of collected female biography, ‘‘A’ءisha ‘‘Abd al-Rahmān began to publish her lives of women of the Prophet's family, works that continue to be popular today, to judge by their many republications.^[5] In the 1980s and 1990s, the production of biographical sketches of “Famous Women” proliferated, shifting mostly from the periodical press back into the form of “collected biography,” especially among privately funded Islamist publishing houses. That so many of today's biographical collections are written by men echoes the medieval practice of writing biographical dictionaries, exclusively a male-authored tradition. The predominance of male biographers also conforms to the large percentage of male bylines in contemporary Islamist polemics on gender, although this is by no means exclusively a domain of male authorship/authority.^[6] This is in contrast to the earlier part of the century, when authorship or responsibility for production of biographies was more or less evenly divided between men and women.

All of this signals that biography remains a popular vehicle for debates on the “nature” of femininity and the requirements of “proper womanhood” in the context of competition to control the discursive construction of the ideal state in Egypt. This is particularly so with emerging discursive constructions of the contemporary state as inherently and necessarily Islamic, constructions that are neither radically disjunct from nor identical to theocratic ideologies of state formation proposed in the infancy of Egyptian nationalism, as the Lebanese sociologist Dalāl al-Bizrīī;, among others, has argued.^[7]

Viewing discursive competitions over the construction of an ideal state as shaped, among other things, by notions of gendered spaces, I use the lens of “Famous Women” biography to scrutinize the production of such spaces and to suggest how ideal femininities and—implicitly, through the construction of femininities—ideal masculinities emerge as crucial axes for organizing society. I historicize these texts—fifteen collections of biographies of women published from 1978 to 1995—by comparing them to parallel texts from early in the century.^[8] I focus on these collections' definitions of exemplarity, biographers' subject choice along axes of ethnicity, nationhood, chronology, and communal identity and on concepts of the female subject as represented in “Famous Women” biography from each era. I ask how the female subject is positioned with regard to assumptions about domesticity and a “public-private” distinction. I analyze the role of the male subject as player within the female life story, in the context of the implied audience constructed through textual clues. What, finally, does this genre tell us about the state of gendered discourse in Egypt now? I link this current strand of production of women's biography to the imperatives of emerging Islamist discourses, while recognizing that my brief analysis does not do justice to differences among those discourses and the groups that produce them. And I do not claim that these constitute the only arena of life history writing in Egypt today.^[9] Yet as a popularly produced, affordable, and widely available set of texts aimed at a nonacademic audience, such “Famous Women” collections contribute to ideas about the gendered organization of society in Egypt today. As was true early in the century, they are one facet of an enormous body of conduct literature aimed at defining and regulating social behavior through prescribing norms for the modern female/feminine subject.

I continue to insist in this chapter that one must pay attention not only to the subject matter but also to the internal textual construction of biographies.^[10] While apparently similar in their reliance on a premodern Arabic writing of notable women's lives, biographies from the two time periods show discontinuities that must be contextualized according to competing discursive constructions of the state in each period.^[11] This has everything to do with competing notions of what it is to be modern—and of the very need to articulate “modernity” as a mode of being. For “modernity” can be partly defined as the existence of a consciousness of historical rupture that separates the present from constructions of the past—even (or especially) when an explicit project of modernity, for example, in Egypt, requires repeated resurrections of those constructions of the past. This consciousness of historical rupture is more marked, more explicit, in biographies written in the context of the modernist–liberal nationalist–reformist discourse of the early twentieth century. Recall that this discourse unfolded in concert with the embrace by modernists of an ideology of liberal individualism wherein biography could serve as a supposedly unproblematic marker of personal identity as shaped by the trajectory of the nation-state.

Today's biographies privilege historical elision. That is, assumptions of identity rather than of difference between the early days of Islam and the present shape constructions of women's lives, while the history in between is elided. Early in the century, to the contrary, when “Famous Women” texts narrativized such historical parallels, they were obliged to rhetorically surmount the obstacles posed by invoked, intervening history. Today's contrasting elision of past and present exemplifies what Dalāl al-Bizrīī; has explicated as the “mythic particularity” of contemporary Islamisms, wherein “Islam” is presented as outside of space and time, as decidedly not subject to the vicissitudes of a suspect human history. The present, in such a perspective, must collapse into the past.^[12] I argue that this ideological move is accomplished among other disciplinary channels through the rhetoric of exemplary female biography that takes lives of the earliest Muslim women as literal models for today's women. Yet, even as this rhetorical move appears to reject the historically conscious liberal individualism of an earlier time, it accepts biography as a discipline of individuation (as well as a certain kind of community), thus as a marker of (individual) historical movement. This is one way it announces its own participation in a political project of modernity.

Rita Felski has argued that the divergent and often contradictory concepts of modernity that characterize contemporary discourse in the West on modernity as a semantic field are grounded in differently gendered narratives of what it means to be modern. Postmodern thinkers, whether masculinist or feminist, have replicated the narratives of modernity they seek to deconstruct by positing fixed categories of identity as definitive of modernity. Such narratives may counterpose a masculine modernity—focusing on spatial movement, discourses of the public, and so forth—to a feminine conservatism or antimodernity, and they tend “to replicate an established view of modernity in terms of a polarized opposition between individual and society,” whereas narratives that take into account an analysis of modern femininity point “to the centrality of familial ties and identities—as mother, daughter, wife—in the construction of modern forms of subjectivity.”^[13] In other words, women, to enter modernity, have to overcome masculinist symbolic representations of the female as antithetical to the modern. This is so whether the representation of femaleness takes place within struggles over modernity at a given historical juncture in the past or instead is an embodiment imposed by “postmodern” critics seeking to analyze that earlier moment.

Of course for a society subject to Western imperialism, the act of equating the female with antimodernity intersects with a Western imperialist ideological and practical move to equate non-Western and antimodern (a popular subject of inquiry in contemporary postcolonial studies). The texts with which I work are shaped by the imperative of responding to both of these categorizing moves, and textual ambiguities signal in part an unfinished struggle to define modernity and femininity together. Through the genre of “Famous Women” biography in today's Egypt, we can continue to consider how women and men have sought to destabilize the equation of woman/antimodernity and that of colonized society/antimodernity, equations that of course have undergirded political projects of domination, whether along gendered or geographic lines. We can also elucidate Felski's observation that modernity, as a kind of periodicization, differs from other periodizing “in possessing a normative as well as a descriptive dimension”—and how, “rather than inscribing a homogeneous cultural consensus, the discourses of modernity reveal multiple and conflicting responses to processes of social change.”^[14] Biographical sketches of women in periodicals in Egypt prior to 1940 constructed a rhetoric of exemplarity that left no ambiguity about its project: calling attention to certain women's lives as models for behavior and praising individual women for achievements and attributes. Ambiguity did shape the stuff of those models, the stipulation of what constituted praiseworthy action and achievement. As I have shown, diction and subject choice relied on, but did not exclusively follow, the Arabic genre of biographical writing that had emerged no more than two hundred and some years after Islam's founding and had given writers a literary structure within which to work.

There related to us Muhammad b. ‘‘Umar from Mūsā b. Shayba from ‘‘Umayra bt. ‘‘Ubaydallāh b. Ka‘‘b b. Mulk from Umm Sa‘‘d bt. Sa‘‘d b. al-Rabī‘‘ from Nafīī;sa bt. Umayya sister of Yu‘‘lāb. Umayya: I heard her say: Khadīī;ja was a person of nobility, of great wealth, of commerce. She traded in Syria . . . and hired men. . . . When the Messenger of God reached the age of twenty-five and had no name in Mecca except that of the Trustworthy One, Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid sent to him to ask him to go to Syria as her commercial agent. . . . And he did so. . . .

Nafīī;sa said: She sent me to him surreptitiously to propose marriage to her and it was done, and she sent to her uncle . . . and he came. The Messenger of God came in with his paternal uncles and one of them married him [to her].^[15]

The third-century A.H. collection authored by Ibn Sa‘‘d in which this biography of Khadīī;ja appeared began to set a pattern for the biographical treatment of women as well as men. As Denise Spellberg has demonstrated brilliantly for ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abi Bakr, from a very early period in Islamic history the women of the Prophet's family were posed as exemplars for women while serving simultaneously as images around which competing definitions of community and leadership crystallized.^[16] The premodern presence in Arabic literature of biographical sketches of women, and the featuring of early Muslim heroines, gave modern writers—whether Syrian or Egyptian, Muslim or Christian, women or men—an indigenous authority and source of respectability for new writings of women's lives. As nationalist-oriented writers at the turn of the century sculpted modern role models for women from the bodies and lives of premodern Muslim women, they could reject the notion that modernity and Westernization were synonymous. That about half of the role models featured in print were of the West perhaps appears now as a brief interruption in a history of writing women's lives.

Early in the century, divergences among different nationalisms stemmed partly from the very attempt to define modernity. Recall that some intellectuals espoused a secularist program based on a reformist Islam articulated by Muhammad ‘‘Abduh and his circle. Arguing that their Islam distinguished personal faith and communal behavior from state construction, they insisted that Egypt's strength depended on a crosscommunal alliance realized in the shape of a European-style nation-state. To different degrees they sought models in Europe while subjecting those models to cultural critique. Another group saw Islam as a wholistic program for state construction, founded in what they saw as an unchallengeable history of Islamic rule, in which those of other faiths would have the status of non-Muslim minorities. They sought models in that history and rejected the West as an alien teleology; yet they accepted certain assumptions that girded the West as model, as their ideological grandchildren do today.^[17]

When it came to envisioning an ideal womanhood, I have argued, the distinctions were not so clear—especially, perhaps, when women were writing the biographies. But for both women and men, it was not so much a conflict between “modernity” and “antimodernity” that was at stake as a contest between two versions of modernity.^[18] A common insistence on careful management of the nuclear family as the production site of nationalist (however defined) strength and indoctrination did not signal agreement on whether this could entail (limited, carefully defined) public work for women in the service of the nation (or on what a “nuclear family” comprised). Yet I have argued that before the 1950s this genre of exemplary biography tended to echo (and to shape) the secular or “liberal nationalist” outlook on women's employment, one in the service of a public patriarchy wherein certain kinds of paid employment situated outside the home could be defined and contained as a kind of extended domesticity. At the same time, it was the domestic front that was defined as central to female identity, binding the female as individual to the nation as collective identity. Domesticity as a space of learned feminine action could act as a sign of modernity for some women, as it also articulated the needs of a public patriarchy and a consequent urgency to define spaces of “masculine” and “feminine” action. (Emphasis on the domestic may also reflect a sense of nostalgia, which recent thinkers on modernity have posited as a product of modernity. The maternal home becomes a utopia, an envisioned site of stability in a world no longer perceived as stable.) And to privilege domesticity did not preclude a life outside the home. In fact, the first facilitated the second.

Thus, women known for public roles might be featured for their domestic lives. This strategy elided possible points of conflict or tension between the two as it solidified a binarizing ideology of public-private that rested on both indigenous and imported notions of gendered divisions of labor. When Queen Victoria was praised first as a homemaker, wife and mother, and only secondarily as a monarch (and not attacked at all as a symbol or architect of late British imperialism), what was one to think? What about actress Sarah Bernhardt as a doting mother, motivated in her career only by the presence of her son? Yet emphasizing duty to family could suggest other paths, whether or not this was the intention of the biographer. What about stunt flyer Sophie Blanchard, paying her husband's posthumous debts by achieving fame as a daredevil balloonist? What about one of “the lessons to be learned” from Khadīī;ja's life—that commerce is as suitable for a woman as for a man? Biographies of well-known women could probe (male) nationalist boundaries for women—whatever they were—by articulating the (elite) female subject's perception of her needs and outlining strategies for self-realization. In this sense, I have argued, some “Famous Women” texts comprised women's autobiographical acts that focused on the future—as ideal, as challenge—as much as on the past.

Educating Females

Late-twentieth-century collections of famous women's life histories published in Egypt are no less overtly didactic than were the biographies of eighty years ago. Authors are explicit about the exemplary function of their productions. Umayma Muhammad ‘‘Alīī;'s prologue to her Wives of the Prophet: Mothers of the Muslims: Modesty, Honor, Purity begins:^[19]

The Muslim woman of this era lacks a proper model, a fine exemplar that she may imitate and by which she will be guided. Generation upon generation [of females] have left the path . . . to become the founts of temptation and discord [fitna], of seduction [ighwā‘‘ā’ء]. Thus have they become sources of social misery. How many crimes are committed in our society that originate from a woman who has seduced, emboldened, or incited. . . . This is due solely to her lacking a good model in this society where evils abound and earthly appetites and pleasures proliferate.

But the House of Prophecy embraced many types of believing mothers. . . . Truly it was a most excellent household. All of those women were co-wives of the same mind, existing harmoniously, acting as model for the daughters of the Muslims, their wives, and their mothers. And I hope that through this book God provides benefit to every female who desires good guidance, proper conduct, piety, modesty and probity, prosperity, richness of the self, and happiness.^[20]

This preface elides everything between the time of the Prophet and today by assigning to it the rubric of female sin. Women are at once the source of social misery and the victims of a lack of ideological direction. Biography is to rectify this lack. Women's adherence to discursively set norms that attain extradiscursive authority by being based on “real lives” will erase their guilt for leading post-Medinan society badly astray. This insistent articulation of biography's didactic, disciplinary role, echoing the Arabic tradition of biographical composition, contrasts with the ideological presuppositions of a Western, post-Enlightenment tradition of biography writing that insisted until recently on the genre's “purity” and “objectivity” (even as volumes of women's biography evaluated their “character”), as it insisted (until postmodernism) on the sovereignty of the individual as a unified and consistent subject.

As this and other prefaces to the contemporary compendia, and the biographies themselves, collapse women's multiple identities into one domestic face, and efface historically attested conflicts among the early Muslim female paragons, they seem to leave little room for ambiguity about how they are to be read. ‘‘Abd al-‘‘Azīz al-Shinnāwī offers the attributes of the ideal woman as an explicit role model: “This book, Wives of the Companions, and those that will follow it, God willing, take up the biographies of women who were believing, humble and obedient before God, truthful, submissive, alms-giving, and who fasted, in order that I may place before the Muslim home the proper model, the fine exemplar, for our women to imitate.”^[21] In some cases, the title is sufficient: Khālid al-Sa‘‘dāwīī; calls his collection Exemplary Women.

This contemporary wave of Islamist exemplary female biography was ushered in by a series of features on early Muslim women published by Zay-nab al-Ghazālī in the Muslim Brotherhood–associated periodical al-Da‘‘wa (The Call) between June 1979 and September 1981.^[22] Echoing al-Ghazālī's own use of early Muslim women as exemplars in her speeches,^[23] these texts explicitly spell out the exemplary duty of the “Famous Woman.” Embarking on a life of Khadīja, al-Ghazālī reminds her reader that in the Qur’ءān Muhammad is offered as “an excellent model for those who believe in God and the Last Day.” Al-Ghazālī links Muhammad's exemplarity immediately to that of his wives, invoking concurrently their singularity and their representational perfection, a common, perhaps obligatory, move in exemplary biography:

He was a model [qudwa] in every matter of faith and life in the world; and the Mothers of the Believers, wives of the messenger of God, were everlasting models. They were not like any other woman, according to the text of the Noble Qur’ءān. It is appropriate that we present them to our women and our young girls that in them they may find the pleasing model and the living exemplar. And the first with which we begin is the Mother of the Believers Khadīja.^[24]

While al-Ghazālīī; appears to address herself to a female audience, alShinnāwīī; addresses his work to men, as those who are to instruct women (and will be the ultimate beneficiaries of this act!). He makes a hierarchical move that echoes men writers of women's biography at the turn of the century who phrased their message in terms of a male homosocial bond.^[25]Women are to “imitate”; meanwhile, the (male) reader may be “refreshed” or “invigorated” by the lessons deducible from these models, “for the Messenger of God said: 'What the [male] Muslim derives most benefit from after devout belief in God is a pious and good wife. Her business is to obey him. When he looks at her, she pleases him; when he adjures her to do something she does it fully; if he absents himself she shows good will, she protects and preserves him, in [caring for] her self and his property.'”^[26]This exemplifies contemporary Islamists' adherence to a “natural” division of labor based on gender difference, signaled in the Qur’ءān's (variously interpreted) dictum that men are one step above women, a separation unequivocally maintained in these biographies.

Biographies maintain an instructional tone through direct address to young people, usually markedly inclusive of both genders, though sometimes invoking a specifically female audience: “To you, O female reader, O male reader, this text applies. . . . Imagine if every Muslim woman pon-dered the story of Umm Sālim's patience and acted accordingly, so as to be among those who win God's acceptance.”^[27] Explanatory glosses and interpretive interjections, as in the past, support the instructional, interventionary perspective of the text.^[28] In fact, these texts operate directly as a tafsīr (interpretative explanation of sacred and supporting texts) on gender, more specifically on women's desired comportment, as the interpreted text becomes the textual fabric of contemporary society written large. ‘‘Abd Ghālib ‘‘Isā, quoting the verse of the Hijāb, says: “I want to mention here that this wise Qur’ءānic directive commanded by the Lord of the two worlds, who knows that which is concealed, is not specific to the wives of the Prophet but is directed generally at all believing women who are not forbidden as marriage partners [due to blood and other ties] for a man. We ask God for release from the condition we are in today.”^[29]

Setting up the rhetoric of a didactic presence aimed at female behavior but through the “instructive guidance” of male family members (usually husbands)^[30] allows the mostly male authors of these collections to assume the mantle of teacher/authority.^[31] The rhetorical move of addressing biographies to men and making them responsible for educating females is paralleled in the text by portraying early Muslim women as those who listen and learn. Women do not produce the discourse, either within or around the text. They learn it, echo it, follow it at home.^[32]

The features I have noted—explicit exemplarity, gender-specific didacticism, the collapse of historical periods, the assumption that biography can offer an extratextual “truth” that corroborates the ultimate truth of the Qur’ءānic text and acts as a pattern for the text of social behavior, suggest a particular practice of didactic exemplary life writing that inundates Cairo newsstands now and contrasts with earlier constructions “Famous Women” in Egypt.

Subject Choice

I have proposed that early in the twentieth century, ethnicity and/or citizenship were not the most crucial factors in constructing local heroines. If silence on these markers of difference loudly structures many pre-1940 biographies, though, conflicting ideas (which also changed over time) regarding the appropriateness of “Western” role models are evident in the internal rhetoric of those texts, as we have seen. While some authors/editors/compilers lauded Western women (of a certain class) as appropriate role models for their readers, unease about the Western biographical subject is evident at least by the early 1920s. Yet Western women continued to appear in the “Famous Women” columns even as magazine editors declared their shift to “Eastern” biographical subjects. Above all, for fervent nationalists, Jeanne d'Arc could be a heroine for young Egyptian female and male nationalists, even (or especially) as they denounced the presence of Europe in Egypt.

One hundred years after biographies of Jeanne d'Arc, Khadīī;ja, and hundreds of other “Famous Women” began to appear in Arabic magazines, famous women are alive and well in Egypt. But Jeanne d'Arc—not to mention Queen Victoria, Nefertari, Sarah Bernhardt, Sophie Blanchard, ‘‘Afīī;fa Karam, and Safiyya Zaghlūl—is not among heroines of today. Khadīī;ja, Khawla, ‘‘A‘‘isha, and Asmā’ء bt. Abīī; Bakr—who used to populate the same pages as Jeanne, Victoria, Nefertari, and Sarah—have the popular rolemodeling biographical collection almost to themselves now.

The political, economic, and cultural imperialism of the West has been a target of Islamist discourse, and it is hardly surprising that in this context Western women would not be featured as role models. While not a collection of biography, Bint al-Hudā's essay “The Heroism of the Muslim Woman” sets up its exclusive focus on women of early Islam—example after example of heroic women on the battlefield and at home—by emphasizing the equality of humanity that is central to the Islamic system. She contrasts this with the West, wherein “all” women from ancient Greek society on have been degraded, commodified sex objects.^[33] In today's biographies Western women, often unnamed and targeted as an undifferentiated group, are negative exemplars.^[34]

Al-Bizrīī; traces the existence of “two Easts” in contemporary Islamist discourse: one perfect and ahistorical that contrasts with the (historical, degenerate) “West”; and second, the “East” of today, historically defined and corrupt, derivative of the “West.” In contemporary Islamist biographical works, references to Western women and to contemporary women of Muslim societies conform to this scheme. Both are constructed as simultaneously corrupt and trivial. Spatially, it is the exit from the home to work or to be politically active outside the sphere of the Islamic Call that generates both corruption and triviality. This is contrasted, in the works of Zay-nab al-Ghazālīī; and Bint al-Hudā, for example, with the women of the Prophet's time, who left the house (according to these biographies) only temporarily and in service to the Call.

“Civilization” stands in for “Western” civilization, indeed, only for its consumer aspects, and is evil; it is counterposed to piety and faith, in other words, to the early Muslim community. Thus, in writing Twenty Women in Light of the Qur’ءān, ‘‘Abd al-Mu‘‘izz Khattāb is

trying to uncover the nature of females as God presented it. The aim is to find in their life histories a sermon and moral lesson to place before the women of this generation who have been swept up by the corrupt current of civilization into a destructive whirlwind from which there is no rescue save for the one who adheres to this religion and has learned the way to God.^[35]

As in Islamist discourse more generally, in contemporary biography or in references to famous women, Western women are a doubled synechdoche for consumption, as objects of male consumption and as consumers of material goods. If this echoes the construction of the exemplary role model at the beginning of this century, it is less equivocal now. Western women are an absence, its territory outlined by contrast to the perfect role model whose body rejects those tainted practices. In his biography of Fātima bt. Muhammad, ‘‘Isā pointedly asks “the male Muslim and the female Muslim” to note the simplicity of her trousseau.

The one channel through which women of the West become acceptable as exemplary women is conversion to Islam. Thus, the title of Majdīī; Fathīī; al-Sayyid's collection of women's biography says it all: Women Who Have Come to Know God: Story of the Submission [to Islam] of Thirteen of Europe's Famous Women.^[36] So it is with contemporary Arab women: celebrities are celebrated for their “conversions” to a life of piety. From being “outsiders” associated with Westernization, they come inside: to the umma, and to the home.^[37]

But to define changes in criteria of subject choice since the first half of the century, we must go beyond the opposition of “East” and “West.” Recall that in the earlier period, what might be termed a “secular” approach often prevailed; that is, a subject's religious identity was not necessarily mentioned. If a woman (modern or premodern) was explicitly mentioned as Muslim, it was usually to show that her life refuted what were labeled as popular but erroneous notions of Islamic limits on women's life choices, in line with the arguments of the early Muslim modernists. As in the 1901 biography of Khadīī;ja quoted previously, biographies construct these lives as offering a Sunnafor Muslim women's extradomestic endeavors, framed by the Islamic modernist/secular nationalist claim that many practices labeled “Islamic” were late, customary grafts onto Islamic law, therefore inessential and, moreover, un-Islamic. If the popular biographical subject Khawla bt. al-Azwar joined battle to save her sibling, her life story “shows that Islamic civilization is not against women's advancement, nor does it bar her from sharing worldly affairs with men.”^[38] That this message is a recurring motif in early-twentieth-century exemplary biography suggests the force of the Islamic reformist concept of modernity, especially when it surfaces in magazines identified today as part of an Islamist genealogy. I have offered this as one sign that we cannot always distinguish neatly the differently positioned groups of the early twentieth century by their stances on gender in modernity.

In contemporary collections, to the contrary, not only are the subjects almost exclusively Muslim (except when they are related to pre-Muslim prophets, and then they are constructed as pre- rather than non-Muslim), but their Muslim-ness also is paramount. In fact, it is only their Muslimness that can counteract their femaleness, as we shall see. And it is not just the subjects of contemporary biography who are explicitly Muslim; the audience invoked in these collections is also named as Muslim, as will have been noticed in the invocations of exemplarity quoted earlier. While the invoked audience once was “today's Egyptian (or Arab) woman,” now it is “today's Muslim woman.” Indeed, confessional identity can take precedence over gender, for the Muslim woman may be exemplary for men as well—as long as they are Muslim men.^[39]

Third, while once there was a mingling of ancient and modern women in the “Famous Women” sketches—and in fact a tendency into the 1930s and 1940s to profile contemporary women in preference to women of an earlier time—today the focus is singularly on women of early Islamic history, with very few exceptions. Role models emerge from the era of Muhammad and (to a lesser extent) that of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, the “golden age” of Islam. In contrast, in the early decades of the twentieth century, premodern Muslim women featured as positive role models were as likely to hail from the Ummayyad or Abbasid periods of Islamic political and cultural splendor as from the hallowed time of the Rightly Guided.^[40] If later (medieval) Muslim women are featured now, it is often for a negative didactic purpose. For example, where in the 1920s biographical sketches of jawārī in women's magazines lauded them as accomplished poets, singers, and political advisers, now they are ignored or rejected. Introducing his collection, Muhammad al-Kuwayfīī; makes reference to ‘‘Umar Ridā al-Kahhāla's five-volume biographical dictionary of Arab and Muslim women (a standard, comprehensive, highly useful reference).^[41] He calls it a “fine” work but goes on to comment not only that it is “difficult for the common person to purchase and peruse” but also that

it includes biographies of some of the women poets and singers, and others whose lives we do not envision people occupying themselves with. I liked the idea of compiling the lives of women of creditable performance in the history of Islam or in human history . . . or who had a good impact on life in its various aspects, so as to be easily accessible to the greatest number of girls and mothers. I shortened them considerably [from al-Kahhāla] and sufficed with giving that which is beneficial and established, to the exclusion of all else.^[42]

Female Subjectivities

Biographies published early in this century celebrated early Muslim women (as well as contemporary Arab and/or Muslim and European women) for offering their readers what the biographers valorized as expanded lives offering greater choice. They suggested that neither gender nor religious identity had to define social roles. Biographies of the same subjects today celebrate them for the clarity and uniformity they offer as gendered role models for Muslim women. This distinction is important to the differing (if overlapping) concepts of the female subject discernible in most of the biographies from each period.

As we have seen, early in this century it was the sovereign individual subject who appeared as the ideal in these biographies, even when work on behalf of the community (local, national, religiously defined) was stressed and lauded, tempering the sought autonomy of the subject. Women's “public” work could be defined as female sacrifice on behalf of others—a traditional and cross-cultural trope of feminine acceptability grafted onto a new situation. Women's work was often cast in the supportive role, especially as supportive of disadvantaged females, nationalist husbands, and baby boy nationalists. Yet biographies of the early twentieth century tended to exhibit individual women's determination to define and achieve their own goals, even when the result could be articulated as communal betterment. This emphasis on women's work as “service to society” has been a theme in men's writing on the woman question in Egypt since the turn of the century. Leila Ahmed has called it one of the many common threads that link Muhammad ‘‘Abduh to the Muslim Brotherhood in the era of its founder, Hasan al-Bannā, and after.^[43]

In today's biographies the collectivity is paramount and is the sole justification for women's action outside of nuclear family boundaries (which assumes as the norm a quite new definition of “the family,” at least one that would not have governed the universe of early Muslim women). Moreover, the collectivity is unequivocally the umma of Islam. Eighty years ago it was more often watan (nation), or a prenational but territorially defined collectivity, stressing unity across confessional borders in the interests of the dominant secular nationalist ideology. Now it is umma—and that term carries no ambiguity, in contrast to early in the century, when it was shifting from the premodern sense of the community of Muslims into near synonymity with the term watan. Khadīī;ja is lauded as helpmeet to her husband in spreading the message of Islam, as well as in calming his fragile nerves. Other women are shown as active in the faith's propagation but not in the institution of a secular state. And nowhere is there an emphasis now on women working to benefit a collectivity specifically of women.^[44]

In today's biographies the ordinary limits of women's everyday experience are permeable only if the Islamic umma is threatened. Here the woman is Muslim first, female second. But the transgression is always shown to be temporary, consonant with the emphases of contemporary Islamist discourse and activism, and illustrative of the rhetoric of exceptionality, wherein certain personages are defined as outside the ordinary woman's reach as they are simultaneously defined as exemplary. Let us turn to a famous female example who, as we have seen, wrote other women's lives as exemplary. Zaynab al-Ghazālīī;'s independence with regard to her own marriages, and her clear prioritizing of duty to the faith before duty to the family, might provide a countermodel. In fact, though, it parallels contemporary presentations of early female Muslim activists.^[45] For as al-Ghazālīī; has always made clear, transgressing the boundaries of exemplary female comportment is a performance available to a small and select group of activists, those working to realize the Islamist society of the future. Once this is achieved, even these exceptional women are to return to their domestic duties. Al-Ghazālīī;'s biography of Khawla bt. al-Azwar shows this trajectory. It begins with a generalizing declaration that sets out a gendered political program for today's Islamist communities: “The Muslim woman bore her responsibility capably in life's arenas. She lived inside the home [practicing] successful leadership, and participated in the battles to build the state by raising her children, and in the tumult of battle she was an exemplar and model; and one of the unforgettable Muslim women was Khawla bt. al-Azwar.”^[46]

Here (and typically), women's role in war is mentioned last. But it is in this arena that the anecdotes of Khawla are sited, overwhelming the primary situating of “the Muslim woman . . . inside the home.” Yet, in the second part of al-Ghazālīī;'s sketch, we are reminded of the equation between motherhood and jihad, the struggle for personal and communal spiritual perfection. While al-Ghazālīī; begins with an explicit reference to both genders of parents, this slips at the end of the paragraph into an emphasis on mom.

The armies of Islam were victorious through noble fathers and mothers who . . . prevailed over this world for the sake of men raised in their laps . . . and they in turn conquered it for God and he subdued it for them. For if they were in possession of their souls, minds, and wills, it was due to the virtue they had drunk in with their mothers' milk, mothers who had lived for duty and for the truth before living for their own personal needs or psychological appetites.^[47]

The third installment ends in a pointedly contemporary lesson, after describing Khawla's successful strategy to free a group of women from imprisonment: “That was what the women did, Khawla at their head, working to stir up the army until the Muslims achieved victory. And where are the daughters of Islam today? Where are its women, its mothers? Why do we see the arena of work on behalf of Islam empty of them? We [females] reclaim the history of Khawla, ‘‘Afrā‘‘, and those women.”^[48]

It might seem tempting to recuperate this biography as a call for women to assume an eminently public role. Yet al-Ghazālīī; carefully places this role within the ambit of domestic duty, by equating “women” and “mothers,” as she recasts what appears in premodern sources as an independent action on the part of the women as a supportive, subordinate act that fit in to women's traditional role in battle, that of stirring up the men. (As was true early in the century, many women in these contemporary collections are portrayed as battlefield cheerleaders and nurses, roles given much respect as involving action under fire.)

In contemporary Islamist movements, women's allowable political work is construed as support. They may come out to demonstrate, particularly to show emotion; they are a useful rank and file, putting into effect the details of political programs defined by political men.^[49] Such a political role does not threaten the gendered status quo, for it has nothing to do, as al-Bizrī notes, with achieving power. Women interiorize this spelled-out political role, one defined, al-Bizrīī; comments, by emotion and a return to the home.^[50] In biography, women are shown to accept happily this pattern of temporary exit according to the needs of male politicians. What a contrast with biographies of Shajar al-Durr, Catherine II, Halide Edip, Sitt al-Mulk, Boudicca, Christabel Pankhurst, and others featured in Egyptian magazines at the turn of the century! Similarly, al-Ghazālī reveals Khadīja as a superbly domestic creature, not even mentioning her earlier life as a merchant (in stark contrast to the construction of Khadīja's life in 1901). Al-Ghazālī depicts Khadīja as a married woman at home; the narrative begins as her husband returns in fear from his first vision. We get no glimpse of Khadīja's life before her marriage to Muhammad, no view of her socioeconomic status in Meccan society; she is identified completely in her role as wife. Narrating her life as if it is a universal pattern, a story for unnamed “Woman,” al-Ghazālī articulates a lesson, adducing within the value of biography as a guide to future action: “Thus does the wise, mindful, good wife study thoroughly the life story [sīra] of her husband and his good traits. As a consequence she understands that he has been prepared for an event of great consequence. She reassures and steadies him, and stands by his side, and takes him to Waraqa b. Nawfal.”^[51] The scene shifts back to the individual life story, but what we are told is that Khadīja earns her home in paradise for having been Muhammad's best helper and greatest support. “Thus,” concludes al-Ghazālī, “was the fidelity and good companionship between the greatest of husbands and the greatest wife. I present [this] as guidance, as a model to be followed. God be pleased with you, O Mother of the Believers Khadīja.”^[52] Even as she leads a life defined by public political work, al-Ghazālī (like other female Islamist activists) stresses in her writings that in a perfect world, one beyond the necessity for jihad, women will not need to leave the home. This feature of contemporary Islamist discourse resounds in contemporary biography.

In sum, women's biography continues to offer a complex meditation on the interrelations of women's different and potential roles. But the message has shifted. Readers early in the century could draw a message of either ambivalence or multiple possibility from the “Famous Women” biographies. Now there is a clearer hierarchy of roles. The narrative subordinates ventures outside the home to a woman's domestic role far more sternly than in the past.

Biographies of premodern Muslim women published early in this century were often taken, perhaps indirectly, from premodern sources. As we have seen, they contrasted to some extent in construction, style, and tone with biographies in which the domestic and the public were clearly marked out. The latter were most often biographies of Western women, past or present, or contemporary Arab and/or Muslim women. The same cannot be said for the biographies available to reading women in Egypt now. While, as in the earlier period, biographers quote the early Muslim sources for these women's lives, and feature extensive passages verbatim from the Hadith, the biographies of the 1990s cannot be seen as anything but unequivocally modern. It is biographies of premodern Muslim women that become illustrations of a modern public-domestic divide. Authors interrupt their importations of source material from Hadith to map a modern public-domestic distinction onto the life histories of their subjects.

Early in the century, biographies tended to stress that a woman's aspirations to a world outside the domestic did not keep her from fulfilling what were defined as her primary duties in the home. Now the domestic is both equated with the nuclear family and unequivocally presented as woman's permanent domain. Her hard work therein is emphasized and lauded. Al-Kahhāla's biography of Fātima bt. Muhammad, which reproduces premodern biographical sources scrupulously and does not add contemporary editorializing, features among other anecdotes ‘‘Alīī;'s description of how his spouse wore out her grinding stone. The famous passage characterizes their life as one of poverty and hardship. ‘‘Isā, on the other hand, prefaces ‘‘Alīī;'s words with a paragraph that recuperates those words as evidence of what a dedicated homemaker Fātima was:

When Sayyida Fātima, God be pleased with her, married, she served in the home of her husband and did all in her ability to make her husband happy, to keep her home clean and lovely, a place of repose and joy.

Her husband Sayyidunā ‘‘Alīī;, God be pleased with him, told this story of her, out of pride and contentment in her: “The daughter of the Messenger of God—God's prayers and peace be upon him—and the most honored of folk in his eyes, who was also my wife, wore down the grinding stone so much that it imprinted her hand, and drew water with the water-skin so often it left a mark on her breast, and swept the house until she filled her robes with dirt, and lit the flame below the pot so frequently she soiled her clothes and suffered harm.”^[53]

In many of these biographies we follow the male players in the biography from home to public sphere and back. The women stay at home but invariably have knowledge that the men need, and this role is praised as crucial and demanding.^[54] The wives of the Companions, as portrayed by al-Shinnāwīī;, know exactly who has converted, and their husbands ask them for this information. They are forthright and fearless in expressing their opinion, particularly when they must assure dubious male family members of the power, authority, and appeal of Islam.

Yet most often these conversations take place explicitly within the home. In al-Shinnāwīī;'s Mothers of the Companions, women's narrative role is to answer questions about the folk of the community and to ask questions that allow the men to speak of Muhammad and to explicate the new faith. The motif of the male (husband or son) as teacher runs throughout the book. Rayta bt. Munabbah is the pivot in a generational conflict between her husband, commander of the Muslim forces during the expansion out of Arabia ‘‘Amr b. al-‘‘As, and her son. She appears in order to inquire about Muhammad; her son responds. Rayta asks her son to show her how to pray and inquires about the new policy on alcohol and infidelity, eliciting a detailed explanation. Like other female subjects in these collections, she stands in for the female interlocutor/reader who is to be instructed on the fundamentals of her faith. This reiterates women's domestic positioning while reminding female readers of their duty to be active and knowledgeable believers. Moreover, it echoes a specifically Islamist polemic, which “was not simply a recitation and regurgitation of Islamic feminine virtues but a call to action and rededication that flattered female followers with a message that assigned them the most crucial role in the struggle for a just Islamist society.”^[55]

Yet it is Rayta who knows what is happening in the community. If her channels of information are domestic ones, this attests to the centrality of the home and of female activities to the vitality, indeed the maintenance, of the community in a time of vulnerability. It suggests the permeability of boundaries—although not their dissolution. It complicates notions of female seclusion by dislocating knowledge as the privilege of a male/public identity, by questioning, indeed, the binarisms of public-private, visibility-seclusion, power-powerlessness.

Duties to the domestic and obligations to the faith suggest not conflictual domains in today's “Famous Women” biographies but arenas that may require negotiations, resonating nicely in a late-twentieth-century context:

“Were I not pregnant in my ninth month,” said Umm Kujja, “I would go out [to battle] with you [pl.], a mujāhida [fighter] preparing food and water for you, and putting salve on wounds.”^[56]

Her husband drew close to her and whispered in her ear: “My love, I am coming back to you with a victory, God willing.” He returned from the Battle of Badr on the day she gave birth to a second daughter, “and how he had hoped that the newborn would be a boy. But it was God's will, which the Muslim accepts with all assurance and security.” [At the Battle of Uhud], she said to him “You intend to obtain the garb of jihad on your own? My dear husband, I have not known you to be so egotistical. When I stayed behind on the day of Badr, it was only because of my pregnancy. But now I am going with you to my Lord.”

Her husband smiled and asked her: “Where will we leave our daughters?” “With my mother,” she answered. And the two spouses went . . . and what happened happened. . . . Umm Kujja returned from the battle alone, weeping. I wonder, was she crying out of joy that her husband, her beloved, had gone with the living to their Lord? Or . . . because she had not accompanied her husband in the journey to eternity? Or because she had become a widow, and how would she face life without her partner who had been her whole life? But faith was her companion, and loyalty to the memory of her husband was an impetus to face life for the sake of her two daughters.^[57]

The female returns to the hearth. And where women voice their opinions, by and large they defer to men, who are constructed as indisputable heads of household and as the leaders of society, in line with Islamist polemics from reformist to revolutionary, and from the turn of the century to today.^[58] In contemporary biography, women defy their husbands only to convert to Islam. (They are also shown as taking up jihad without mention of permission from husbands, contrary to a view Ghada Talhami suggests may be dominant: “Present-day advocates of the Islamist view claimed that women needed their husbands' permission to participate in the Jihad except in cases of naked aggression against the Muslim community.”^[59] The biographies tend to support, therefore, what Talhami labels as an approach specific to the more revolutionary groups, which see women's jihad as duty rather than as something merely urged upon them.^[60]}

Still, if these women leave home only when the faith calls, they cannot be totally domesticized. If the visibility of the Prophet's wives was historically a sociopolitical issue, a modern division of public-private (which Islamists do not gloss as “Western”) sits uneasily on these lives. Moreover, the imperative of emphasizing women's primary loyalty as being to the faith, even if this can be squared with the domestic by emphasizing women's contribution as that of wife and producer of future Muslims, means that women are not shown as necessarily obedient to the dictates of the domestic sphere. If certain contemporary male Islamist commentators on female space have ruled that having dinner ready for the menfolk takes precedence over going to the mosque to pray, this message would sit uneasily in many of today's biographies.^[61]

Thus boundaries of the domestic are permeable, but only in certain carefully defined circumstances. Protecting the faith and preserving the community provide unchallengeable reasons to disobey fathers and husbands, a theme emphasized in contemporary biographies of wives and mothers of the Companions—hardly any of whom appear in my texts from the earlier period. Thus, Ramla (Umm Habīī;ba), stood up to her father and her first husband in the name of her faith, notes al-Sa‘‘dāwīī;. Yet—ever the good daughter—Ramla is quick to forgive. Rewarded by marriage to the Prophet, she (perfect caretaker and pupil) is the perfect wife: “Ramla, wife of the Prophet, Mother of the Believers, lived in the home of God's Messenger, honored and respected, watching over the comfort of the Messenger of God and learning from him.”^[62]

But wanting to get an advanced education or choose a public career—goals that served to articulate and justify girls' resistance to uncooperative fathers in biographies eighty years ago—are not proposed now as appropriate challenges to paternal authority. Indeed, the point becomes moot in a genre that presents only early Arab Muslim women of the Arabian peninsula as subjects and ignores the need and/or desire of today's women for permanent, income-generating employment outside the home. As the life of Umm Kujja just quoted illustrates, today's exemplary life story unfolds within a set of domestically focused expectations and issues that address a contemporary, young female audience: pregnancy, child care, marriage versus the umma. The use of detail spells out ideal, and expected, comportment. After the death of her second husband, Khadīja refused many suitors: “Perhaps she abstained from marriage because she was occupied with her small, orphaned children. And she recognized that she should not just let her assets go, without forethought to their use, for then the household money might run out. So she put it into commercial transactions which she carried out while secluded in her house.”^[63]

The caveat that Khadīī;ja was secluded as she carried out her business is a contemporary addition, one I have never found in the early-twentieth-century biographies, where seclusion and the veil are loudly silent. This illustrates the way modern and very specific distinctions of public and private have become firmly entrenched as part of a modern ethos—but must still be spelled out.

Concomitantly, today's biographies emphasize emotional fulfillment as women's reward from marriage and family. Unlike early-twentieth-century sketches (and premodern Arabic biographical notices), today's lives of early Muslim women travel inward, into the subject's emotions. Khadīja may have been secluded for business, but as the same biography tells us:

When Sayyidunā Muhammad drew near to the house, with his comely demeanor and noble features, she hurried to welcome him at the door, giving him greetings of return, in a voice overflowing with sweetness, gentleness, and compassion. He raised his face to her in thanks, for he had been averting his eyes, then he told her of his trip, the profits from his commerce, and the perfumes he had brought her from Syria. She listened to him, half-bewitched. When he said good-bye and departed, she remained standing there, following him with her eyes until he disappeared at the curve in the road. And Sayyidunā Muhammad went on his way, feeling a sort of contentment and repose. . . .^[64] [Talking to her confidante Nafīī;sa, Khadīī;ja] did not hide her admiration for Sayyidunā Muhammad. . . . [Nafīī;sa told her to marry him.] Khadīī;ja felt confused about what to say, for she liked the idea, but the Trustworthy One might not, and she must hide her desire until his might appear. . . . The married couple was happy, with the affection and compassion that was established between them and that remained firm. And our Great Mother found out that her trustworthy one was the consummate husband, the most flawless husband there could ever be. . . . [She died] in the arms of the husband by whose love she had been consumed since the day she had met him.^[65]

This Harlequin romance version of Khadīja's life contrasts with the biography of the same subject published in Woman in Islam in 1901, intent on her public life. The nineties Khadīja is emphatically a domestic creature. This 1993 biography, the 1992 sketch of Khadīja quoted at the start of this chapter, and al-Ghazālī's Khadīja all emphasize the sentiment of domestic life, the emotional construct of monogamous heterosexual love as underlying the ideal Muslim couple and, by extension, the ideal community. Of course Khadīja, as Muhammad's sole spouse during her lifetime, is especially useful here. But the first polygynous household in Islam is glossed as a series of monogamous relationships. Marriage, as portrayed here and in most other contemporary biographies of women of Muhammad's time, is companionate, harmonious, emotionally fulfilling for both partners, a partnership that unites religious duty in the larger community with the duty of maintaining the family as the basic unit of society. The harmony can be threatened only (and temporarily) by the greater loyalty that the individual—male or female—owes to God and the furtherance of the faith. At the same time, this portrayal undergirds a basic assumption of Islamist discourse on gender, that which underlies the belief in women's and men's roles as complementary. “Women's emotionalism” has long been one of the pillars on which Islamist gender ideology, in all its manifestations, bases its gendered division of duties in the ideal society.^[66] Unlike in traditional biographies, emotional relationships between spouses are dramatized through dialogue:

“Was our separation easy for you, Abū al-‘‘As?” asked Zaynab.

“It was the torture of love, Zaynab. By God, after you, life was not sweet for me.”^[67]

But marriage, as saturated in emotional satisfaction as it is shown to be, is dictated by the requirements of the community of faith, as signaled in the subtitle to ‘‘Isā's portrait of Umm Sālim bt. Malham, mother of one of Muhammad's companions: “Islam before Affection.” The subject “found in Abū Talha all the qualities she hoped for in a man, but he was an unbeliever. May God's mercy be upon her, her principles and her faith had an impact on her desire for Abū Talha.”^[68]

This is given further emphasis by the relatively greater focus now on adult social roles, whereas early in the century there was more attention to childhood training. This distinction alerts us to one divergence between early- and late-twentieth-century modernities. As we saw, it was important in the 1920s to assert over and over the value of girls' education; focusing on the supportive father as decision maker furthered the message. In the 1990s, girls' schooling is taken for granted: after all, it has been compulsory in Egypt since 1952 (al-Bizrīī;, like others, notes that education is one of the gains from feminism that can never be “unsaid”).^[69] This is not because it would be anachronistic to mention “schooling” in biographies of early Muslim women, for eighty years ago parallels were drawn between the intellectual training of, for example, Sayyida Nafīī;sa and the need to educate girls of the nascent Egyptian nation. Perhaps this is hardly necessary now. But it also serves to emphasize women's domestic rather than public roles.

Role of the Male Character

At least Khadīī;ja is at the center of the biographies I have quoted. In alShinnāwīī;'s Wives of the Companions and Mothers of the Companions, each chapter is headed by the name of a woman, but most of these women are conspicuous for their absence in the texts themselves. They exist as wives and mothers, mediating the exchanges between their men—often between fathers and sons. They are praised for bringing up good Muslim sons (as some biographical subjects of the 1920s were praised for raising good nationalist sons). Women's role as those who “build the kind of men that we need to fill the ranks of the Islamic call” sounds clearly through these biographies of early Muslim mothers.^[70] For al-Ghazālīī;, Asmā’ء bt. Uways was (in an interesting rhetorical link to contemporary institution-building!) “one of the excellent Muslim sisters; she was possessed of courage, frank speech, and the desire for what is right”^[71] and a transmitter of knowledge to whom male companions of Muhammad came for opinions. But it is in her motherhood that Asmā’ء becomes exemplary, demonstrating “the courage of Muslim women who have given birth to the men who in the battlefield were deadly lions, and in the circles of knowledge and learning were unshakable mountains.”^[72] “Courage”—an epithet applied to both men and women of this early period, and expanded to label other kinds of public work undertaken by female biographical subjects constructed at the turn of the century, now is displaced onto childbirth.

Indeed, the titles of al-Shinnāwīī;'s volumes indicate a predominant feature of collections of women's biography now. Even in the titles, women are usually selected for, and defined by, their relationship to famous men, and especially to Muhammad or, to a lesser extent, to notable men of the early Muslim community. These collections are not titled “Famous Women” or something similar, but rather “Wives of . . . ,” “Daughters of . . . ,” “Mothers of . . . ” (if not a title that points to the didactic aim: “Virtuous Women,” “Exemplary Women,” and so forth). Women are referred to in their domestic social roles first and foremost (wife, daughter, mother, aunt), and concomitantly in their relationships to men.

That it is not even the woman subject who is the focus of attention is admitted explicitly by al-Shinnāwī. After noting the exemplary didactic function of writing about the mothers of the Companions, al-Shinnāwīī; comments: “I have not written a history of those female Companions; nor do I want to give the readers too much of their greatness and importance. Rather, my aim has been to familiarize the readers with the life of the most truthful and sincere one, God's prayers be upon him.”^[73] This discursive moment elides the very genre of women's biography. It is not their lives that are of interest but rather the life of Muhammad, as portrayed in the exchanges between him and his male companions, and then between them and their mothers. Consequently, women actually appear on very few pages of this book; Hamna bt. Sufyān appears on three of the nine pages dedicated to her life. As in so many of these biographies, when she appears, it is as the object of a catechism. The conflict between the new belief system and the old is played out in the mother-son conversations, as she asks him: “Did you go yesterday to al-Lāt, did you make obeisance to the goddesses before you slept?” When she asks, later, “You want to leave our goddess for a mad poet?!” he answers with a verse from the Qur’ءān.^[74]

In contrast to what I find among the “Famous Women” of nearly one hundred years ago, I am tempted to label the contemporary material as a subgenre, that of “Famous Wombs.” If that subgenre was around in the 1920s, in conjunction with the nationalist emphasis (among all kinds of nationalists!) on the roles of mothers in producing nationalist sons, now it is dominant: “The rank and honor ascribed to these women come from the fact that they carried in their pure and devout wombs the models for humanity. They bore the guardians of belief, those who conveyed the Call. . . . It is enough honor for the mothers that they were the vessels that preserved, sustained and protected those geniuses through whom humanity was elevated.”^[75]

Not only is woman's glory her womb, but the womb is also personified; now it is the womb that is pure and devout. The womb is the whole woman. Thus, says al-Sa‘‘dāwīī; in his preface, Islam is liberatory for women, but it is a freedom earned through—and deserved because of—wifehood and motherhood to sanctified men. It is caregiving that offers women status and “freedom”: even al-Sa‘‘dāwīī;'s dedication defines women in terms of piety and motherhood. Even so, the composite exemplar this volume offers is more complex. These famous wombs are known for the qualities that advanced the early umma, especially through protection of—and advice to—Muhammad.

Tracing Islamist notions of the vanguard to the thought of Mawdudi, Talhami notes that this vanguard takes its immediate texture from the society of Mecca under siege. It is this society that much of the biographical writing produced by Islamist-oriented presses in Egypt portrays. The women of this early community thus provide exemplary models of vanguardist struggle; yet their part is mostly one of support, of staying at home and keeping their ears open, of learning the ritual, learning the prayer, of educating the young (males) to their Islamic duty.^[76] As I have noted, this is a different emphasis from that of biographical writing early this century, where the individual woman rather than the community was the biographical subject. While her work was often said to be in the service of the community and while educating the young was a primary duty, the spotlight was on the woman herself to a far greater extent, and on her struggle to maintain the balance between family duty and a sought, partial autonomy the desirability of which was most often taken for granted in the turn-of-the-century texts, as long as it was not a selfish autonomy. Overall, the didactic thrust of popular “Famous Women” biography now appears to be less conflicted than it was, and far more explicitly bent on emphasizing women's ideal as unequivocally focused on family and home; and thereby defining masculinity, once again, as unequivocally linked to the public sphere, to movement from domestic to public space, while the women wait at home, tallying recent converts. This articulates the position of the patriarchal family in Islamist discourse as building block and microcosm of society. Such an emphasis may also work as cultural defense: “the Muslim family” has been presented by Islamist writers as the bulwark against European imperialism and colonialism since the time of the Crusaders.^[77]

If woman is womb, what does she produce? Nationalist sons once, active Muslim sons now, or at least prophet sons who paved the way (fully half of Kishk's book is taken up by a biography of Mary, mother of Jesus). She is the womb for the male Muslim, for the leader, for the (Islamically defined) nation and state. Kishk links Hagar, mother of Ismā‘‘īl, to the triumph of Islamic history, as teleological and as universal. “God's prayers be upon Ibrāhīī;m,” the biography ends; there is very little about Hagar here.^[78]

Once woman was the metaphor for nation-building; now she is the metaphor for a family-centered and Islamically defined social cohesion. If she can represent a threat to that cohesion, when properly trained she is also the savior of the umma:

How great is our need today for the good and pious wife. For our enemies have assailed Islam, giving off their poison and sowing the seeds of doubt and error, that our feet may wander astray from the straight path. Hopefully the book Wives of the Companions will be a lamp to light the way for those whose eyes and understanding have become blinded, onto the way of right guidance.^[79]

Implicitly, contemporary women following the guidance of these models will be savior of the umma in danger. As educated women were once necessary to the fortunes of the nation, now pious women are necessary to the future of the rightly guided community. It seems no accident when the great poet al-Khansā‘‘ is labeled “believer and mother” rather than “poet.

The tension that does arise in these texts is that between duty to the faith and duty to the family, a conflict absent from the biographies of a century ago. This explicates a contemporary dilemma for women, as it reflects debates going on among Islamist women activists. If, within Islamist polemics, “unlike women's familial roles, women's rights to participate in public life and to qualify for public office were hotly disputed” (and still are),^[80] what seems not open to debate is that women's public work must be on behalf of the Call. It is here that she can attain (relative) autonomy.^[81]Yet “women's rights” are not ultimately linked to the autonomy of the subject.^[82]

If the women are barely visible in many of these sketches, why, then, write women's biography? Is it simply a matter of finding an attractive way to present Islamic history and doctrine to female readers? Perhaps. Or of strengthening a master narrative and simultaneously corroborating its gender ideology? Woman as helpmeet, woman as producer of men, woman as facilitator: surely, it is this. But I think it is more. In looking at gendered social roles as presented in women's biography, one must look at men as well as women. How is masculinity defined and situated in each case? What is the ideal masculine? Recall the presence of both male interlocutor and male character as teacher. I have argued elsewhere that male-authored writings on women (now as at the start of the century, biographical or not) demand analysis as a discourse on masculinity, a conversation perhaps not yet acceptable on its own terms. One must write the oppositional term, one must write femininity, to get at masculinity. This imperative, I think, is much of what the dynamic of the woman question is about, now and eighty years ago.

In Conclusion

To explore the interrelations of local concepts of modernity, contesting notions of what an “ideal” gendered division of labor in society might be (for the division itself is hardly questioned), and to begin to ask how gender remains central to defining competing politics of the nation, I have sketched out the phenomenon of Islamist publishing in Egypt over the past two decades, through the lens of the production and popularity (at least with publishers) of biographies of famous Muslim women. No longer is it respectable to feature women of the West. This may represent, ironically, a convergence of a Nasserist legacy and later Islamist ideologies.

Looking at the present affords an opportunity to take stock of biography through the century as an exemplary genre. That these contemporary biographies embed the female subject in a discursive context that privileges the patriarchal family reminds us that citizenship in most Muslim-majority societies today is derived through membership in a patriarchal family. It also reminds us of the extent to which public political contestation takes place within a set of assumptions instituted by those who see sacred law as the sole and incontestable basis of the nation-state.Nearly a century ago, some “Famous Women” biographies seemed to question the links between sacred law, patriarchy/family, and new notions of citizenship in a nation-state. They questioned the authority of the father and husband over the daughter's and wife's future plans. They emphasized women's struggles as individuals while also stressing the value of women's relational work. As magazines proclaimed their lack of connection to the political sphere, biographies portrayed women's struggles to be part of that sphere. As magazines foregrounded women's domestic energies, sometimes ambiguously, biographies argued that domesticity could not foreclose other lives. Were such strategies (if strategies they were) defensive moves, or were they positive reevaluations of female subjectivity, of notions of community and citizenship? Or were they both, simultaneously? Did they construct each other? To see in these texts constructions of a different female subjectivity, of an individualism that might have challenged an equation between “woman” and “family,” is not to assume the necessary preferability (or possibility!) of “autonomy” or “individualism,” for women or for men. But it does suggest that such a privileged individualism was integral to the idea of modernity—just as integral as the prescription of learned domesticity for women, presented as a choice they might make, and (no less important) as a nationalist and public act.

In its own small way, biography helped to prepare the ground for, and then to support, an organized feminist movement in Egypt and the accelerating entry of women into a range of professions. Biographical texts were also part of the semiotic history that shaped limitations on that movement. Yet the shifting rhetoric within individual biographies also suggests ambivalence toward these changes, as it implies a strategy of careful, qualified movement. Proposing through the rhetoric of exemplarity a set of agendas, biographies also posed the implied conflicts and anxieties that social transition visits on individuals. Focusing on material lives, biography could express with a kind of intimate ruefulness the unresolved questions for everyday living raised by changing articulations of gender, nation, and modernity.

Biographies of women have been used for shifting and sometimes antithetical ideological purposes. They have represented competing definitions of what it is to be modern. Focusing on the complex trajectories of individual lives, though, they may offer possibilities to women that contradict or transgress the boundaries they appear to set. And we must remember, with Erika Friedl, that positioning women by dramatizing new life histories of women of the past is always subject to question. Women are not passive recipients of these texts, even if writers and publishers would like them to be. Texts may prescribe a certain kind of modernity, now an Islamist-defined modernity among others; but can they regulate?

What of feminist countermoves? Although they are set to a far greater extent in an academic framework, initiatives like the Women and Memory Forum and Nour Publishing House in Cairo are working through periodicals, books, and conferences to bring the lives of earlier Arab and/or Muslim women to public attention. In Morocco, Fātima Mernissi has written on medieval female Muslim rulers to challenge the notion that there is no historical precedent for Muslim women's publicly exercised political authority.^[83] In Lebanon, feminist writers have produced biographical dictionaries of Arab women, and in Palestine, the Bir Zeit University Women's Studies Program keeps memories alive. Autobiographies and memoirs of contemporary intellectually and politically active secularist women, like the late Latīī;fa al-Zayyāt, provide alternative life stories to which increasing critical attention is paid.^[84]

Dalāl al-Bizrīī; locates the challenge to the “Islamist authenticity” (asāla) movement today in the question of whether it can preserve its roots, as it asks what she identifies as the most important questions facing Arab societies today while remaining open to dialogue and to other histories.^[85] For example, can Islamists debate on common terrain with Arab and Muslim feminists on the basis of shared concerns about the commodification of girls and women, however the source of that commodification is identified? And how might the discursive construction of women's life histories open debate around shared concerns? Questions posed along one ideological axis can lead to unexpected results. Narrating lives, plots become complicated.

Notes