Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) was as a forceful voice in support of womens rights to education and work choices in colonial-era Egypt. Her volume of 453 womens lives, al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur (Pearls scattered in times and places: Classes of ladies of cloistered spaces, 1893-6) featuring Boudicca, Catherine the Great, Zaynab (the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad), Victoria Woodhull, the Turkish poet Sirri Hanim and many others built on the Arabic-Islamic biographical tradition to produce a work for women in the modern era, grafting European, Turkish, Arab, and Indian life narratives, amongst others onto Arabic literary patterns In Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces Marilyn Booth argues that Fawwazs work was less exemplary biography than feminist history, in its exploration of achievement but also of patriarchal trauma in the lives of women across times and places. She traces Fawwazs creative use of her sources, her presentation of biographical narratives in the context of the political essays she wrote in the Arabic press, her publicised dialogue with the President of the Board of Lady Managers of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition where she attempted to send the volume and how her inscription of a feminine ancient history diverged from that of men writing history in 1890s Egypt.
Arvustused
Marilyn Booth is to be lauded for her careful and sophisticated analysis of Zaynab Fawwazs biographical work Scattered Pearls. Thanks to her masterful study, Fawwaz and her literary production can now be recognized as constituting an important piece in the shaping of a colonial modernity in the Arab world in the late nineteenth century and signaling an emerging Muslim feminist consciousness at this time. This important work will be read with avid interest by all those who are interested in the holistic history of fin-de-siècle Egypt that includes both mens and womens voices and in exploring its larger contemporary implications. * Asma Afsaruddin, Professor of Islamic Studies, Indiana University *
Pearls Scattered: An introduction
A womens world history, in the world of Arabic letters: A readers view
Founding mothers, speaking sisters: Lineaments of community in history
Writerly pursuits: A compilers archive
A beckoning Compass and circulating lives: The Bustani encyclopedia and other
nineteenth-century sources
Interlocutors? Men authoring womens history in the 1890s
Framing a history of the present: or, Did the Pearls scatter to the Worlds
Fair?
Violent romances: The bodily drama of patriarchal trauma
Conclusion: A world of women, feminist history and the importance of the
feminine signature
Appendix I: Fawwazs Biographical Subjects: A List
Appendix II: Translations
Notes
Bibliography
Marilyn Booth is Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, University of Oxford. Her most recent monograph, The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (2021), is amongst numerous publications on early feminism, translation, and Arabophone womens writing in Egypt and Ottoman Syria. Initiator of the Ottoman Translation Studies Group, she edited Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Translator of eighteen published works of fiction and memoir from the Arabic, she was co-winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Jokha Alharthis Celestial Bodies.
