Al-Ahram Weekly | Books supplement

Portrait of Mai as a young woman

"All that mental joy that we yearn for and yet fail adequately to express is not yet ours. It remains lost in these countries, and those who understand its refinement and its nobility are rare; they are the ones who suffer"

Mai Ziyada

In the light of latter-day (Western) conceptions of the role of woman in society, the two essays included in this volume, first published in 1920 and 1925, respectively, and dealing with two early icons of "the woman's movement" in the Arab world -- the writer Malak Hifni Nassif (Bahithat Al-Badia, 1886-1918) and the poetess Aisha Taymour (1840-1902) -- could appear to be involuntarily ironic. "Turn-of-the-century Egyptian feminism was pretty sexist" is what they frequently, if unconsciously, seem to say. Yet Mai Ziyada's admirably level-headed sensibility, the depth and breadth of the sympathy she displays for her subjects and her consistently articulate tone all render the historical gap ultimately negligible. She was well aware of the dangers of a regressive or fundamentalist approach to the 'woman question', but also profoundly sensitive to her specific cultural predicament. In this she was far ahead of her time, and for this alone she deserves the title of pioneer. But there is also the depth of understanding Ziyada achieves through her sympathetic identification with her subjects, and her beautifully limpid prose -- a rich tapestry of rhetoric and confession, poetry and scholarship -- and this makes this book as much an engaging personal experience as an absorbing read.

Ziyada starts Bahithat Al-Badia, her account of the life of Malak Hifni Nassif, for example, with a personal account of how her involvement with Nassif began. Ziyada had written an article lamenting the loss of her favourite watch, and this had prompted Nassif, who apparently had somehow found the watch, to invite Ziyada to her winter residence in Helwan. Thus the two women knew each other initially only "through the pen", Nassif writing, "Come to me to fetch it, for it has sensed my longing to meet you and arrived early in anticipation of our encounter." And while thus offering fascinating insights into the mores of these early female intellectuals -- Ziyada supplies first-hand descriptions of Nassif's famous salon for example -- in six thematically sorted chapters her book juxtaposes intimate descriptions of Nassif's character and situation ("The Woman", "The Muslim", etc.) with probing analyses of her writing, and in so doing provides a comprehensive account of Nassif's contribution both to women's liberation and to other, broader aspects of female intellectual life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

"Out of her writings, opinions emerge and arguments are deduced," Ziyada writes, recalling the fact that she had begun writing her essay immediately after Nassif's death. "Out of her come the rays of light that illuminate these pages, which have been written in, and for, the Egyptian environment... I confess that it requires some effort for me to... forget the woman as I knew her in order that I should be influenced only by the thought of the writer... Yet I will also say that knowing the writer personally can be... immensely beneficial." And thus Ziyada guides the reader through Nassif's Al-Nissa'iyat (On Women), which contains the bulk of Nassif's thought, with a spontaneity that never reduces itself to coarseness. Although she quotes extensively, she can crystallise the gist of an argument in a few words and, fortunately for the millennial reader, when she disagrees, she disagrees firmly, clarifying her own position without failing to provide an apology for a writer with whom she can identify. Here, as Safynaz Kazem indicates in her invaluably informative introduction to the volume, it is "as if Malak Hifni Nassif were Al-Anissa Mai herself, reflected in a mirror".

Nassif's tirades against "the nuns' schools" (those run by nuns), for example, which seem to have been propelled principally by Muslim, arguably anti-Christian emotion, are thoughtfully and persuasively counteracted by Ziyada. "I do not defend the nuns' schools just for the sake of it," she writes, "but I was brought up in them for four years, and... did not find in them the defects mentioned in Al-Nissa'iyat [that they are morally harmful and educationally useless]. If anything, the problem with these schools is that they promote an excessive lack of interest in the world and the pursuit of a spiritual ideal that is seldom to be encountered in everyday life... so that the girl, on her return home, remains for a long time confused about the social circles in which she is expected to live. As for the deplorable lack of knowledge of Islamic history and of the Arabic language [that these schools might produce], this can only be blamed on the parents themselves. For what prevents them from teaching their daughters what they will after the girls leave school?"

Needless to say, Ziyada herself studied the Qur'an, as well as the Arabic language and Arabic calligraphy independently of the education she received at school. As Kazem points out, the fact that she learned French before Arabic and that her parents were religious Lebanese and Palestinian Christians did not prevent her from becoming one of the pillars of early 20th-century Arabic literature. As appendices to her book, Ziyada published the transcript of an interesting rhetorical exchange between Nassif and Qasim Amin, the foremost male champion of Egyptian women's liberation, and several interesting letters that she herself exchanged with Nassif, which shed considerable light on the preceding chapters.

Soon after finishing her life of Nassif, Mai Ziyada was invited to deliver a public lecture on a topic of her choice. She decided that "the best topic would be a rich female personality that... would present us, in the course of our research, with profound questions in ethics, literature and sociology, which we could investigate as closely as possible while at the same time drawing an exciting portrait of a woman." The resulting essay, which is perhaps a more straightforward "life and works" of its subject than is Bahithat Al-Badia, was Ziyada's tribute to the then famous but inadequately studied poetess Aisha Taymour, who had died around a decade before the first sessions of Ziyada's popular literary salon took place. The identification that Ziyada feels here for her subject is therefore purely speculative, and is different from that she was able to demonstrate in her essay on Nassif. However instead of introducing her subject through a series of personal anecdotes, Ziyada speaks of "the critic's sympathy" for her subject. "The critic's most necessary trait is that sympathy... which enables her to be temporarily liberated of her own egotism and to enter into the life of her subject, to feel with her... and to surrender herself to the factors that structured her subject's environment." This act of "surrender" to Taymour's environment, which meant a strategy of empathetic reconstruction, allowed Ziyada to probe a wide range of social and cultural issues, while at the same time providing an overview of Taymour's Turkish, Farsi as well as Arabic poetic oeuvres and a close analysis of her two prose works, Nata'ij Al-Ahwal (Consequent Ways) and Mir'at Al-Ta'amul fil Omour (The Mirror of Meditating on Matters). These, she says, were written to "fill the long empty hours not spent on the love of children, the duties of the household, the decorum of society, the strictures of worship or of versification."

Yet even here Ziyada does not take from her reader the pleasure of an unlikely personal encounter with her subject. As a child attending a wedding in Palestine she had been enchanted by some lines of Taymour's poetry that had been sung to the accompaniment of the oud as part of the wedding celebrations. This experience remained with her throughout her life, for, she writes, "I listened not with my youthful self as I was then, but with all the latent powers which the future was to nurture, with all the hope and despair, happiness and misery of my adult days."

In general the sheer detail of Ziyada's portrait of Taymour is astonishing. To compensate for the lack of personal acquaintance, Ziyada undertook research, interviewing Taymour's family and friends in an attempt to gauge what the writer had been like as a child and as a teenager, and how her difference between Taymour and her two sisters had first manifested itself. None of those still available to be interviewed could help Ziyada much however, and in the end she was obliged to rely on her own imagination, in so doing producing one of the most impressive poetic passages in this volume. Of Taymour's picture she comments, "We like to imagine in the two dark eyes such essential melancholy and overflowing emotion as would concur with the delicious brooding of the mouth."

On the other hand Taymour's struggle against her Circassian mother's insistence that she take up a career in needle-work (she had been married at 14), and her diligent efforts to acquire a literary education independently, in which she was partly aided by her father, become the basis of Ziyada's highly individual and perceptive analysis of the social constitution of the upper echelons of 19th-century Egypt and its implications for women's lives. That aristocrats had married their slave girls, Ziyada argues, was not necessarily a bad thing. "Humourists say that Adam was the happiest of husbands, because Eve had no family outside her marriage. Thus throughout his life Adam was spared the guiles of in-laws, and in reality this undesired interference is one of the defects of eastern society... It is through moderate socialising, retaining each family's customs and striving for its inner independence, its comfort, its secrets, that understanding between family relations and in-laws can be realised and mutual cordiality flourish."

In her critical assessment of the work, and particularly in the chapter on Taymour's two books in prose, Ziyada movingly reveals her subject's alienation, as a literary woman and an independent sensibility, in a relentlessly hostile environment. Her comments in this connection are something of a prophetic summing-up of Ziyada's own social and cultural dilemma, to which her identification with these two women bears abundant testimony. "All that mental joy that we yearn for and yet fail adequately to express," she writes, "is not yet ours. It remains lost in these countries, and those who understand its refinement and its nobility are rare; they are the ones who suffer."

Reviewed by Youssef Rakha

		Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 October 1999 Issue No. 451
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

The mirror of Mai