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CONTRIBUTION
Women's journals constituted a major part of their contribution to the literary scene during the first half of the twentieth century. What has to be remembered here is that the line that separates the writer and the journalist in the Arab worlds has always been a line in the sand. Between 1892 and 1950 many Arab women devoted their efforts to publishing their own journals as an expression of their literary and political activism. Before the First World War there were in the Arab world more than 25 journals owned, edited, published and distributed by women. These were very serious journals, the equivalent of which cannot be found today in Arab countries. They drew writers, both men and women, from all corners of the Arab world and there was no topic that was too sacred, too small or too embarrassing for them to discuss on the pages of these journals. No Arab woman today would dare discuss the feminist, Islamic, social or political issues which were discussed on the pages of these journals during the first half of the twentieth century. Hence, the publication of Nazira Zein Din's books Al Sofour wal Hijab and Al Fatat wal Shieukh in 1928 and 1929, in which she provides the first feminist interpretation of Islam, comes as a natural consequence of the lively and daring feminist arguments which characterized this era. Just a few of these journals, listed with their editor, publication location and date, include:
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Anis al Galis, Alexandra
Aferno, (also the owner) (Alexandria, Egypt, 1898); Shajarat al
Durr, Sadieh Abdol Din, (Egypt, 1901); The Mirror, Aniseh Attah Allah, (Egypt, 1901); Happiness, Rojena
Awad, (Egypt, 1902); The Bride, Mary Ajami, (Damascus, 1905); al Khadre (al
Hareem), Afifeh Saab, (Lebanon, 1912); Fatat al Nile, Sara al
Muhiyya, (Cairo, 1913); and Fatat Lubnan, Salima Abo Rashid, (Lebanon, 1914). What has to be mentioned here is that Arab countries were still forming a stronger cultural and political entity, as the Sikes Biko Agreement, which dissected Arab countries into small entities, was not in existence then, and therefore the movement of both books and persons was much more fluid among Arab countries than it became after independence. Thus these Arab women were moving from one Arab country to another, reading for each other, working with each other and exchanging views and perspectives.
When I got a Fulbright grant in 1990 I wondered whether I should spend the year working on the Arab women's press or Arab women's novels as I was conducting research in both areas. I finally decide in favor of the latter. A well-known critic in the Arabic department of Damascus university said to me: "What are you going to work on? There are only two Arab women novelists: Ghada al Samman and Nawal Saadawi and there isn't enough material to write about them." Other "specialists" in Arabic literary criticism confirmed to me that women wrote mostly about their personal experiences, which could not be considered literature as such. As we had learned at school that the first novel in Arabic,
Zaynab, was written by Muhammed Heikal in Egypt in 1914, I was advised to start my study of Arab women Novelists around 1950, because it must be only then, and after Arab men had been writing the novel for a few decades, that Arab women have caught up with the trend.
For the first year or so I tried to do just that, but my research led me to discover much earlier texts by women than this proposed date. I even found novels which date back to an earlier period than the so-called first Arab novel written by Muhammad
Heikal. When I found Afifeh Karam's novels Badiah wa Fouad and Ghadat Amshiet published in 1906 and 1907, my first reaction was that this could not be true because if it were they would have been noticed by critics and mentioned as pioneering works in the history of the Arab novel. It did not cross my mind then that there could be material that was simply ignored by mainstream criticism, which I thought, couldn't be anything but objective and comprehensive. Later on, I came across works by Labuba
Hashim, most strikingly her novel, Qalb al Rajul (The Heart of Man, 1904), but the finding that made me stop and rethink my study plan and my assessment was the discovery of Zaynab
Fawaz, the Lebanese writer (1846-1914) who wrote novels, plays, poetry and an anthology of women writers and activists in both East and West, and yet her name was totally new to me. It was only then that I started to think that what others had written about women's novels might not be enough guidance for me and that I would have to chart my own way not only in unraveling new titles but also in reading and assessing what was available. It was only then that I dared to think that what is known of novels written by Arab women does not at all present the complete story. Since then I have started to have serious doubts not only about what is claimed to be available but also about the evaluation and interpretation of it. In brief, I started then to doubt the opinions of "experts" and stopped feeling apologetic for coming from a different discipline. I felt that there's an important task that needs to be done and I was glad that I was engaged and doing it.
Since then I have found out that the first Arab novel was written by a woman, fifteen years before any Arab man tried his hand at this literary genre. Husn al
Awaqib, by Zaynab Fawaz, was published in 1899. Before 1914, the alleged date of the "first Arab novel," Arab women had already written and published over ten novels. No literary critic can claim that
Zaynab, by Muhammad Heikal, is a better text than these novels written by women. In retrospect, the early presence of women writers made sense, because women were the first storytellers. Shahrazad was the perfect example of a woman weaving words as a means of defense against physical violence. So how could women suddenly have disappeared once the official writing of the novel started?
There is nothing new here. This is an old rule, only applied to a new genre. Arabic literature, which is known to be one of the oldest literatures in the world, started with poetry. For over fifteen centuries, Arabic literature consisted only of poetry, yet the names of the known Arab women poets could be counted on the fingers of one hand and their subject was always bemoaning a dead relative or praising a male counterpart. Evidence suggests that most of the poetry said by Arab women was either not recorded or was lost after recording it. In a book about women literature in the pre-Islamic period, edited by Muhammad
Mabadi, the editor stresses that women writers who appear in this book represent only a fraction of women who said poetry and composed prose in the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods. He believes that there were two reasons for this: the first one was that when Arabs started to register their poetry they concentrated their efforts on what has been written by men because of its superior literary value and did not pay much attention to women's poetry because it was "feminine and weak." But even the little of women's poetry that was recorded was lost during foreign invasion and the burning of libraries.
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