CONTRIBUTION

Doctors Sami al Ani and Hilal Naji who edited Poetry by Women confirm this, and they both lament the great loss of women's poetry. They explain that the book they published, which contains 38 women poets, represents only a fraction of a manuscript collected Almrzubani, whose pages exceed 600, most of which they were unable to locate. Various sources agree that this work Poetry by Women consisted of five to seven volumes. Kufti saw the introduction to the sixth volume, but more recently the entire work was considered "lost." What al Ani and Naji found was the last 59 pages of the third volume, which carries the title: Third Volume of Poetry by Women. Hence, what they have published probably represents only one tenth of the original manuscript that was put together in the eleventh century. Other sources refer to four other books of poetry by women which were collected, seen and read in the second half of the tenth century but none of which can be found today (A Hundred Years of Arab Women's Novels).
The next step in my search was to move from identifying and locating works to writing about them. Having read the works themselves, I had to read all the criticism available about them before venturing my own assessment of them. 

There were two tendencies which critics demonstrated while dealing with women's novels: the first was that the works were an extension of women's bodies and the heroines only the representatives of women writers in the texts; the second was that the topics of these writings could not possibly generate public interest because they only related to love, family and children, reflecting by that the restricted world within which women are living. Only articles or very small segments of books were devoted to novels written by women and only to prove they did not deserve more attention. Well-known critics devoted neither time nor energy to such a marginal topic. 
Even women critics, whose names began to be known in the Arab world, dissociated themselves from women's writings and concentrated on the important works by men. Sometimes books were written on the status of the novel in Syria, for example, without a single woman novelist being mentioned, although it is a well-known fact that there are many women novelists in Syria. Young women students who started to specialize in the subject were so keen to echo the opinions of their supervisors and to belittle women's creativity without ever shedding light on the quantity or the quality of women's works, that it became irrelevant that these works were conducted by women students. In brief, the image of the Arab women novelists as portrayed by the criticism available did not accurately represent what Arab women had done during the twentieth century.

 Women were not only the first ones to write novels in Arabic, they were also the first ones to deal with certain topics, sometimes decades before men did. For example, still today, Arab critics claim that Twfiq al Hakim, especially in his novel A Bird from the East, was the first writer to discuss issues such as the relationship between East and West, and that the novel The Season of Migration to the North by the Sudanese writer al Tayb Saleh, was one of the first works to discuss such a theme in fiction. Yet in 1906 Afifeh Karam, the Lebanese novelist, published her novel, Badiah wa Fouad, in which she concentrated on the cultural clash between East and West and the potential sources of mutual misunderstanding between them. She refused to follow the stereotype of glorifying Arab and Muslim culture at the expense of Western culture. In addition, Labiba Hashi, Zaynab Fawaz, Aycha Taymour and most Arab women journalists concentrated on these issues decades before the publication of Hakim's novel, which is always taken by critics to be a pioneering example of such a discussion. Before the First World War Arab women's novels were trying to create bridges between the Arab and the Western cultures and strike at the root of misconceptions. Yet, no critic in the Arab world has ever mentioned in a lecture, or article or any other study the contribution of women in this regard. My expectation is that they are even unaware of this contribution.

During the first half of this century most Arab countries were fighting against foreign mandate or foreign occupation. As is usually the case during times of crisis women were requested to play a role in defending their countries. Women led demonstrations calling for the release of nationalists from prison and expressing their extreme objections to colonial plans, which aimed at dividing and weakening their nation. As writers, Arab women novelists were trying to catch up with this new image of women, against the social dogma which portrays women as potential adulteresses. Men were not seen as the adversaries but as the victims of distorted social concepts of women. Widad Sakakine from Syria wrote her first novel Arwa Ben al Khutob in which she not only absolved the heroine of all accusations, which mostly concerned her sexual behavior, but she also turned the protagonist into into a saint who was able to heal the ill and restore the sight to the blind. Sabriaya Muhammad from Iraq and Hiam Nuwilati from Syria described the behavior of men, who acted like kings in the social world. They loved, got married, and then divorced, oppressing talented women whenever necessary and for whatever reason. Lebanese writer Hind Salameh in Al Hijab al Mahtoouk and Palestinian writer Fathiye Mahmud al Batih agreed with Sakakini, Muhammad and Nuwilati that men need to be educated about women's nature. The audience they aimed to address was made up of both men and women: the major objective being to change the attitude of men towards women. Emily Nasrallah from Lebanon devoted a few of her novels to discussions of how women are subjugated in rural areas, women's early attempts to rebel against the feudal system, and the humiliation which sometimes pushed women to the verge of suicide. In many of these novels, men discovered that they were the victims of their misunderstanding of women. What is interesting was that women writers asked not for equality with men but for equal opportunities with them. They directed their efforts against social and political injustice and not against men as adversaries.

In the 1950s three very important novels were published in the Arab World, whose echo can still be heard today: Al Jamiha (The Wild Horse) by Egyptian writer Dr. Amina Said; Ana Ahiya, by Lebanese writer Layla Baalbaki; and Days with Him, by Syrian writer Kuliet Khuri. In 1950 Amina Said wrote what could be considered an early version of Taher Benn Jelloun's The Sand Child. The heroine is a young girl whose father wanted to bring her up as a boy rather than as a girl so that she would be strong and deal with a society that has no place for femininity or emotions. The heroine, like Fatma, or Ahmad in Ben Jelloun's novel, ends up being a freak because she is neither able to preserve her nature nor to exchange it with a masculine nature. 
 

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