Marilyn Booth

My Grandmother's Cactus

Stories by Egyptian Women

Claire Savina

A vigorous translation scene across the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire-government and private, official and amateur, acknowledged and anonymous-saw many texts from European languages rewritten into the multiple tongues that Ottoman subjects spoke, read and wrote. Just as lively, however, was translation amongst Ottoman languages, and between those and the languages of their neighbours to the east. This proliferation and circulation of texts in translation and adaptation, through a range of strategies, leads us to ask: What is an 'Ottoman language'?This volume challenges earlier scholarship that has highlighted translation and adaptation from European languages to the neglect of alternative translations, re-centring translation as an Ottoman 'hub'. Collaborative work has allowed us to peer over the shoulders of working translators to ask how they creatively transported texts between as well as beyond Ottoman languages, with a range of studies stretching linguistically and geographically from Bengal to London, Istanbul to Paris, Andalusia to Bosnia.

Circulating Texts from Bombay to Paris

Ottoman Translation

Explores translation in the context of the multi-lingual, multi-ethnic late-Ottoman Mediterranean world. Fénelon, Offenbach and the Iliad in Arabic, Robinson Crusoe in Turkish, the Bible in Greek-alphabet Turkish, excoriated French novels circulating through the Ottoman Empire in Greek, Arabic and Turkish: literary translation at the eastern end of the Mediterranean offered worldly vistas and new, hybrid genres to emerging literate audiences in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Whether to propagate 'national' language reform, circulate the Bible, help audiences understand European opera, argue for girls' education, institute pan-Islamic conversations, introduce political concepts, share the Persian Gulistan with Anglophone readers in Bengal, or provide racy fiction to schooled adolescents in Cairo and Istanbul, translation was an essential tool. But as these essays show, translators were inventors, and their efforts might yield surprising results.

Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean

Migrating Texts

Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) was as a forceful voice in support of women's rights to education and work choices in colonial-era Egypt. Her volume of 453 women's 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 patternsIn 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.

Writing Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de-siecle Egypt

Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces

Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) was a forceful voice in support of women's rights to education and work choices in colonial-era Egypt. This book explores the writing and influence of her landmark piece al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur the first Arabic-language global biographical dictionary of women.

Classes of Ladies

Zaynab Fawwaz (d. 1914) emerged from an obscure childhood in the Shi'I community of Jabal 'Amil (now Lebanon) to become a recognized writer on women's and girls' aspirations and rights in 1890s Egypt. This book insists on the centrality of gender as a marker of social difference to the Arabic knowledge movement then, or Nahda. Fawwaz published essays and engaged in debates in the Egyptian and Ottoman-Arabic press, published two novels, and the first play known to have been composed in Arabic by a female writer. This book assesses her unusual life history and political engagements—including her work late in life as an informant for the Egyptian khedive. A series of thematically focused chapters takes up her views on social justice, marriage, divorce and polygyny, the 'gender-nature' debate in the context of local understandings of Darwinism, education, and imperialism and Islamophobia, attending also to works by those to whom Fawwaz was responding. Her role in the first Arabic women's magazine, and her contributions to later women's magazines, are part of the story, too. Further chapters consider her uses of history in fiction to criticize patriarchal control of young women's lives, and her play as an intervention into reformist theatre, and the question of women's access to public culture in 1890s Egypt. Questions of desirable masculinities are central to all of these. Fawwaz was also known for her massive biographical dictionary of world women. In that work as in her essays, Fawwaz articulated an ethics of social belonging and sociality predicated on Islamic precepts of gender justice, and critical of the ways male intellectuals had used 'tradition' to silence women and deny their aspirations.

Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt

The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz

Egypt just before political eruption! Turns of the century in Africa's northeastern corner have been critical moments, ushering in overt popular activism in the hope of radical political redirection--as this volume's focus on Egypt's 19th-century fin-de-siecle demonstrates. The end of the 19th century in Egypt witnessed crisscrossing and conflicting political currents as well as fluctuating economic, geopolitical, social conditions, demographic conditions and cultural processes. Like Egypt's 20th-century fin-de-siecle, much of this ferment was a prelude to the more visible and politically eruptive events of the next decades, when Egypt's popular resistance burst onto the international scene. But its subterranean cast was no less dynamic for that.

Colonial Quiescence, Subterranean Resistance

Long 1890s in Egypt

Marilyn Booth's elegantly conceived study reveals the Arabic tradition of life-writing in an entirely new light. Though biography had long been male-authored, in the late nineteenth century short sketches by and about women began to appear in biographical dictionaries and women's journals. By 1940, hundreds of such biographies had been published, featuring Arabs, Turks, Indians, Europeans, North Americans, and ancient Greeks and Persians. Booth uses over five hundred "famous women" biographies—which include subjects as diverse as Joan of Arc, Jane Austen, Aisha bt. Abi Bakr, Sarojini Naidu, and Lucy Stone—to demonstrate how these narratives prescribed complex role models for middle-class girls, in a context where nationalist programs and emerging feminisms made defining the ideal female citizen an urgent matter. Booth begins by asking how cultural traditions shaped women's biography, and to whom the Egyptian biographies were directed. The biographies were published at a time of great cultural awakening in Egypt, when social and political institutions were in upheaval. The stories suggested that Islam could be flexible on social practice and gender, holding out the possibility for women to make their own lives. Yet ultimately they indicate that women would find it extremely difficult to escape the nationalist ideal: the nuclear family with "woman" at its center. This conflict remains central to Egyptian politics today, and in her final chapter Booth examines Islamic biographies of women's lives that have been published in more recent years.

Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt

May Her Likes Be Multiplied

An interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the harem as it was imagined, represented, and experienced in Middle Eastern and North African societies, and by visitors to those societies.

Envisioning Places and Living Spaces

Harem Histories

Nawal El Saadawi

In1981, the celebrated author and activist Nawal el Saadawi was imprisoned by theSadat regime in her native Egypt, for 'crimes against the state'. Throughhaunting and evocative prose, Saadawi here recounts how she and her fellowprisoners continued to resist even in captivity, and to form a community whichtranscended divisions between secular and religious activists. She reveals boththe harrowing detail and the everyday mundanity of prison life, as well as the braveryand resolve of all women resisting oppression - and of political prisoners aroundthe world. Memoirs from the Women'sPrison is an unforgettable, landmarkwork of prison writing that offers a rare insight into the indomitable, soaringliterary mind of the Arab world's leading feminist.

Memoirs from the Women's Prison

A study of the career and writings of Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) an early feminist thinker and writer in Egypt. It focuses on her newspaper essays, novels, poetry, and her play which was the first to be published by a female author in Arabic.

Feminist Thinking in Fin-De-siècle Egypt

Rajaa Alsanea

The tale of four young women university students from Riyadh follows their struggles to navigate the precarious paths between desire, fulfillment, and Islamic tradition while witnessing how the Arab world is being changed by new economic and political realities.

Girls of Riyadh

A history of women in Egyptian society as seen through the lens of prescriptive biographies of famous women, published in popular magazines and directed to a female audience.

Marilyn Booth

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