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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 July 1999 Issue No. 437 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 July 1999 Issue No. 437
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Monthly supplement
July was always a month rich in revolution. Two recent books shed new light on key actors in the making of modern EgyptThe missing bust
Awraq Youssef Seddiq (The Papers of Youssef Seddiq), ed. Abdel-Azim Ramadan, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 1999. pp308The limits of allegiance
Shahadati lil-Ajyal (My Testimony to the Coming Generations), Helmi El-Said, Cairo: Dar Al-Mustaqbal Al-Arabi, 1999. pp271
Playing the British at their own game
Fayed -- The Unauthorised Biography, Tom Bower. Macmillan, 1998. pp496Discrepancies of doctrine
Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, Otto F A Meinardus, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999. pp344 + 24 b/w photographsFrom Ottomans to Officers
The Cambridge History of Egypt (2 vols.), volume 2, Modern Egypt from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. M W Daly, Cambridge University Press, 1998. pp464Functionalising religion
Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics and Religious Transformation in Egypt, Gregory Starrett, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998. pp308Recovered memories
Zaman al-nisaa wal zhakira al-badila (Women's Time and Alternative Memory), eds. Hoda El-Sadda, Somaya Ramadan and Omayma Abu Bakr, Cairo: Dar Al-Kutub, 1998. pp382The illusion of the journey
Travellers in Egypt, eds. Paul Starkey and Janet Starkey, I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 1998. pp318
Soon to appear, Stokely Carmichael's memoirs are themselves a part of history. Al-Ahram Weekly previews the manuscript and talks to the co-author
Rendezvous with history
Michael Thelwell helped Stokely Carmichael write his death-bed memoirs. Visiting Cairo recently, Gamal Nkrumah sounded him out on the political legacy of the Black Power movement
At a glance:Al-Hilal, a monthly magazine, Cairo: Dar Al-Hilal, July 1999
* Ibdaa' (Creativity), a monthly magazine, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, June 1999
Illustrations courtesy of International Commitee of the Red Cross
"Folk drawings and tales", Cairo, 1996
Recovered memories
Reviewed by Tahia Abdel-Nasser
Zaman al-nisaa wal zhakira al-badila (Women's Time and Alternative Memory), eds. Hoda El-Sadda, Somaya Ramadan and Omayma Abu Bakr, Cairo: Dar Al-Kutub, 1998. pp382
The collection of essays that comprises Zaman al-nisaa wal zhakira al-badila addresses women's history by focusing on different historical epochs and by analysing contemporary Arab women's reality through diverse approaches and from unique viewpoints. The essays seek to read Arab history from a female perspective and with a focus on the cultural and social development of gender. And underlying this gender approach to history is a belief in both the importance of the role of women in Arab history and their marginalisation in its documentation.
Omayma Abu Bakr, in A Reading of the History of Women Worshippers of Islam, looks for the first women worshippers and ascetics (abidat/zahidat), placing her study within the context of modern trends in the study of the history of religions from women's perspective. She examines the reasons why historians have neglected the life of women worshippers in the light of the social and cultural backdrop of the period, the relationship between Muslim women and religious spirituality, on the one hand, and social liberation, on the other, and the basis for assuming the presence of a feminine spirituality dissociated from male sufism.
In a study of Muslim women's historical conditions as filtered through the lexicon of Muslim biographies compiled by the traditional Muslim thinker Al-Sakhawi, Hoda Lutfi draws attention to the importance of extant texts and manuscripts about women and untraditional sources that do not record official events or dominant ideological opinions. Al-Sakhawi's historicising of 1,075 female personalities in the late Mameluke period offers his views on women in addition to information about women's social life, position in the family, economic status, education and sociopolitical contributions.
The collection does not present definitions of history but broaches the issue of history with questions and observations that show how the term is employed. And the history that the collection explores is not the history of power and rulers but a history of people and of disparate social classes.
Significant questions are posed in Hoda El-Sadda's introduction about how Arab history is known and written, who writes it, what personalities are preserved in collective memory and who determines the documentation of their lives. El-Sadda presents the group of articles as a reading of history that responds to dominant assumptions that women have not contributed to social life and as a negation of attempts to use history to perpetuate traditional female social roles.
The collection's attempt to trace women's participation in Arab history follows two courses: the first is a re-evaluation of the role played by a number of women neglected by historians while the second is a critical analysis of views on women in different epochs and social, cultural and political contexts, and of dominant ideological climates that produced unjustifiable stances and rationalisations.
Women's time, in the collection, is lost time in official books, surveys, statistics and dominant myths about women. Rima Hamamy re-evaluates inaccurate information in official statistics about the extent of Palestinian peasant women's contribution to national income under British rule and critiques a noticeable class discourse that focuses on the middle class and ignores diversity in women's conditions.
In "The French Expedition in Egypt: A Reading from a Feminist Perspective", Somaya Ramadan addresses the Napoleonic expedition's impact on the status of Egyptian women through her analysis of a maqama by Sheikh Hassan Al-Attar, and the marriage contract of the French ruler of Rosetta at the beginning of the expedition.
Ramadan does not provide answers -- in the spirit of this collection -- but draws observations from the silence engulfing Rosetta's women's revolt to obtain permission to go to the public baths, and presents significant ironies between the manifestation of respect for women by the French and the contemporary subordinate legal status of women in France.
Farida Banany analyses jurisprudence's (fuqaha) biased interpretation of Qur'anic verses and hadith, lays emphasis on the importance of women's participation in the explanation (ta'wil) of religious texts and challenges the assumption that the concept of equality is a Western import and a contradiction of Islam.
Historical documents and literary, legal or Qur'anic texts are closely analysed by scholars to yield up information about women's conditions in diverse epochs. Nadia Al-Sheikh analyses bias in male Arab Muslim discourse about Byzantine women to uncover ideological inclinations, social practices, moral and beauty standards and gender relationships in Arab Muslim society from untraditional sources within the disciplines of literature and geography.
Nahawand Al-Qadiri Issa searches Egyptian and Lebanese journalistic articles in the early twentieth century to discover the concerns of middle-class women while marriage contracts from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries are examined by Emad Abu Ghazi in a juxtaposition of women's ability in former times to include in the marriage contract conditions that were honoured by courts, and the attack on the project to amend the marriage contract in Egypt in 1995.
Articles that use multiple disciplinary approaches to Arab women's history provide a comprehensive view of Arab women throughout time. Anisa Al-Amin Marei analyses the character of Lebanese women in the post-civil war era by studying television material viewed by women and its impact. Marei links her analysis of psychological phenomena with Lebanese sociopolitical reality in an attempt to present an alternative mode of historical documentation.
The collection is a journey in Arab women's time that avoids predictable ground in favour of an exploration and contemplation of the dualities of contemporary Arab culture. Its objective is not only to collect accurate information about Arab women in a multitude of historical periods but also to re-evaluate both men and women's relationship with history. In its attempt to open to view a history about women, written from women's perspectives, the collection, rampant with open-ended debates, raises a resonant question about the possibilities of an unbiased memory.
