Women Claim Islam

Creating Islamic Feminism Through Literature

Miriam Cooke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135959432
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This provocative collection addresses the ways in which Arab women writers are using Islam to empower themselves, and theorizes the conditions that have made the appearance of these new voices possible.

1

Arab Women’s Literary History

Before looking at the most recent developments in Arab women’s writings, which have moved from a generally secular focus to an increasingly Islamic orientation, it is necessary to situate these writings more broadly within their historical context. In this chapter I examine the ways in which some Arab women have used their stories to change conceptions of modern Arabic literature. There are many issues that have concerned Arab writers in the twentieth century, but two narratives have had a particular impact on the way in which Arab intellectuals shape their experience. The first is the War Story; the second is the story about the emigrant’s experience after leaving the homeland.

It is not generally known that Arab women have been writing and publishing fiction since the end of the nineteenth century. Three Lebanese women, Zaynab Fawwaz (1860–1914), Labiba Hashim (1880–1947), and Mayy Ziyada (1886–1941), and in Egypt Aisha Taimuriyya (1840–1902), should be considered the pioneers of Arab women’s literary history. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed more women taking up the pen, yet their works received so little notice that it was as though they had not written. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that sporadic critical attention was paid to a few, like the Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi, the Lebanese Layla Baalbaki, and the Syrian Colette Khuri. During the 1980s, however, this situation changed as these women’s fiction began to be translated. In 1986, at the first International Feminist Bookfair in London, two Arab women writers were introduced to the English-speaking world. The publishing house Quartet brought out in English the Lebanese Hanan al-Shaykh’s controversial novel on the Lebanese civil war, The Story of Zahra (1980), and the Egyptian Alifa Rifaat’s Distant View of a Minaret (1986), a collection of stories about lonely women in Cairo. Fourteen years later, Arab women writers are much better known at home and abroad.

Critical Response

Recognition abroad is more than paralleled by an upsurge in creativity at home. Even in Saudi Arabia, where women’s education was introduced in the 1960s only, women are publishing in growing numbers. In November 1999 I was invited to give the keynote address to the first conference of Saudi women writers. Drawing only from cities on the Red Sea coast, the conference nonetheless managed to assemble over sixty women. The critical response to this literary activity always takes time.

The first serious attempt to categorize and take stock of the productivity of Arab women writers came in 1986, when Joseph Zeidan published a bibliography of 486 women who wrote in Arabic between the 1880s and 1980s. Almost half of these women had published two or more books. Whereas during the first half of this century there were few women writing anywhere outside the literary centers of Cairo and Beirut, by the 1970s in every single Arab country women were beginning to write. Zeidan’s staging of this process is revealing. Between the late nineteenth century and 1930, he found only twenty women who had written (some in magazines only), with about five women writing per decade. This number then doubled to ten between 1930 and 1940, and during the next decade fifteen women published. Between 1950 and 1960 their numbers more than doubled to thirty-three, and between 1960 and 1970 this last number almost tripled to ninety-six. By the next decade, the last to be covered by the bibliography, 129 women were writing, even in the countries of the Arabian Peninsula where education for women was new. In 1999 Zeidan published a revised version of the 1986 bibliography to extend it up to 1996. This updated bibliography contains information on an astounding 1,271 women. In other words, with the addition of only a few years at both ends he was able to almost triple the number of entries.

Over the past century, hundreds of women have been writing despite a meager critical response. Until recently, the few scholars who were at all interested framed Arab women’s writings chronologically within totalizable stages each with its own sense of closure. In general, critics have noted development from personal preoccupations to sporadic expressions of political awareness as the writers’ countries went through wars of independence from colonial rule. Some critics have praised evolution from the poor to the good; from imitation through identity formation to nationalist preoccupations; from the personal to the political. Modernization is good, and particularly for women (cf. Zeidan 1995).

A closer look at the texts, however, reveals that different things were happening in different places during a single time period; women’s preoccupations fluctuated from one period to another, from one country to another, and even from one woman to another at various points during her life. Individual women writers might range across a spectrum of topics, so that sometimes they might write of themselves, at other times of what was happening to the men and women in their communities. Women, like men, think and write about more than one thing at the same time, and this is particularly true in the course of a career.

Women in the Arab world have long written about politics, if often indirectly, in ways that have been particularly revealing. Their literary negotiations with those in positions of domestic, local, and international power have highlighted the tensions that postcolonial societies confront as they deal with the legacies of colonialism while trying to find an honorable place in an unfriendly world. Each novel or short story rarely serves as an allegory but rather as a stone in a mosaic where its preoccupations resonate with those of others.

Arab women respond to each other, test local possibilities, plug into transcultural concerns. Their collective literary project can best be appreciated in anthologies, which provide the context that gives the individual piece of writing meaning and impact beyond itself. Anthologies of women’s writings do more than contextualize; they ensure that the collective expression is not silenced with the elimination of one voice. Anthologies exemplify the Woolfian maxim that great works and writers do not emerge out of a void but rather out of a larger literary enterprise. When Yusuf al-Sharuni published The Night After the 1001 Nights in 1975, he introduced twenty Egyptian women writers into a literary world that had refused to acknowledge that women had been writing, except as oddities to be exceptionalized. His first words are, “Women’s relationship with storytelling is ancient,” and he predictably, in view of the title of his book, mentions Sheherezade, the legendary storyteller of 1001 Nights. But he is not merely drawing on myth and folklore when he extols women’s contributions to Arabic literature. He compares literary developments in the twentieth-century Arab world, which he calls “a radical transformation as astounding as the invention of the automobile,” with socioeconomic changes in women’s roles and rights (al-Sharuni 1975:8). The stories al-Sharuni anthologizes focus on women’s struggles against unfair expectations for women’s behavior. Their collection in one volume with a large bibliography demonstrated for the first time how active women have been and for how long.

Another important anthology was Layla Muhammad Salih’s Women’s Literature in the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf. Its publication in 1982 revealed that despite the lack of widespread education in the region and general representations of radical segregation and therefore of public invisibility and political acquiescence, several women had been writing for a long time and in ways that were remarkably critical of their societies. Many of these women questioned the relevance of the term “women’s literature,” preferring to be counted with their male colleagues. Physical apartheid should at the very least be countered with literary integration.

My own writing, whether it takes the form of monograph or anthology, has consistently engaged Arab women’s collective literary endeavors. War’s Other Voices (1988) collects the testimony of women who had written about the Lebanese civil war between 1975 and 1982. I called these women the Beirut Decentrists in order to draw attention to them as a school of writers who had collectively contributed as women citizen-combatants to the literature on the war. Reading their texts together allowed me to discern a transformation in the writers’ consciousness and self-representation. For the Beirut Decentrists the chaos could not be described as a revolution or as a just war pitting the good against the bad. It was a bad war fought for individual gain, and it destroyed the nation on whose behalf it was said to have been waged.

In Women and the War Story (1997), I analyzed the production of other groups of women who wrote about the Algerian war of independence, the Palestinian reactions to Israeli occupations in 1948 and then after 1967, and the Iran-Iraq War. Reading their writings together revealed a difference in self-perception between women who participated in the precolonial and colonial wars as opposed to postcolonial wars. Anticolonial women fighters saw themselves as doing what the men did. Cross-dressing did not change their perception of who they were and how the roles that they might play in the postbellum society might change. Women in the postcolonial wars, on the other hand, did not even have to take up arms to see themselves as combatants. They portrayed themselves as women combatants who were fighting not as men but specifically because they were women, sometimes directly targeted for harm. When they named what they had done “combat,” they transformed their consciousness about themselves, as well as about their society. They came to understand that nations struggling to be free need all of their citizens to fight for them. When the previously excluded became combatants they changed not only the nature of the fighting, they also began to make a dent in the armor of the War Story.

The Gulf War Story

Arab women have written a great deal about war because in many ways it has become part of many of their lives. The war may be civil as in Lebanon, anticolonial as in Algeria and all the countries that shook off colonial rule in the mid-twentieth century, or apparenty conventional as was the Iran-Iraq War. Alternatively, it may be more metaphorical or spiritual even, as in the notion of jihad, or religious struggle against the current condition of ignorance and corruption (see chapter 4). This awareness of the prevalence of violence, both organized and random, has arguably become a part of everyday lives. Technology has facilitated the generalization of war in postmodernity. States have sponsored and companies have created weapons that travel such great distances that the fiction of a place of fighting has become difficult to sustain. If there is no front and it is not clear who are the combatants, how are we to know when the fighting has begun in such a definitive way that it warrants the name of war? And if we do not have clear signals about the beginning of wars, how can we end what was never declared to have started? All of this uncertainty and its concomitant uncontrol is monitored by the mass media and then telecast into homes in the heart of New York City, the Borneo rain forest, and the Sahara Desert.

However, there is one war-related certainty: women are involved in postcolonial wars in a way that was never before so clear. Women may have always been with men in war as nurses, as camp followers, as cross-dressing soldiers, but they have not before fought as women. During anticolonial wars in Asia and Africa women were represented as guerrilla fighters, hijackers, and organizers of local resistance movements. More recently, as in the Palestinian popular uprising, women have fought as mothers, confronting the soldiers with their maternal bodies so as to disable conventional means of violence. Yet even when women do not choose to engage in combat, they may be forced into it because their bodies are officially designated military targets for rape or for bombs.

Arab women are telling many individual stories about their encounters with violence, both organized and disorganized. They are eloquent about the Gulf War, which has played such an influential role in Arab identity construction, particularly in the United States (see chapter 6). In 1991 the controversial, censored Kuwaiti poet-princess Su’ad al-Sabah published an anthology of ironic and bitter poetry on the Gulf War entitled Will You Let Me Love My Country? The poems delve into the spiritual crisis experienced by most Arab intellectuals, but most of all by the children, in the wake of the war. She evokes the dissonance between the rhetoric of Arab unity, learned from schoolbooks, and the fragmented, fractured reality just lived in the Gulf (al-Sabah 1991:97). Her anger at the Iraqi government does not extend to the people. As we shall see, Kuwaiti women writers understood that the Iraqi people are not to blame. She writes: “The great Iraqi people will remain in my heart forever, for they are certainly innocent” (112).

Iraqi and Kuwaiti women questioned grand narratives about medieval dictatorships confronting modern democracies, good Muslims opposing bad Muslims. These women’s different stories need to be read as testimonials, a special kind of witness that allows others to glimpse another kind of reality that challenges the absoluteness of the Gulf War Story as it has been told by those in power, whether in the United States or in Iraq.

On January 17, 1991, the Gulf War broke out. Two weeks earlier, the French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard had published in the French newspaper Libération the first of three articles on the war. Convinced, as many of us were at the time, that the spectacle of preparations for war might dispense with the need for actual warfare, he declared his thesis: “The Gulf War will not take place.” He was shortly proven wrong when in a remarkably traditional manner George Bush declared war on Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Undaunted, Baudrillard stuck to his guns. For three long weeks, the United States and its allies mercilessly bombed the Iraqis, but the inventor of hyperreality remained skeptical, asking in his second article: “The Gulf War: is it really taking place?” What, one might ask, was he questioning? The “really” or the “place”? Apparently, he could not tell if this was a war or just the “illusion of massacre” (Baudrillard 1995:58). On March 29, 1991, he dealt the warness of the Gulf War his coup de grace: “The Gulf War did not take place.” In this final essay, he writes that

a war without victims does not seem like a real war but rather the prefiguration of an experimental, blank war, or a war even more inhuman because it is without human losses. No heroes on the other side either, where death was most often that of sacrificed extras, left as cover in the trenches of Kuwait, or civilians serving as bait and martyrs for the dirty war…. The minimal losses of the coalition pose a serious problem, which never arose in any earlier war. The paltry number of deaths may be cause for self-congratulation, but nothing will prevent this figure being paltry. (73)

At a time when we are all fascinated by the virtuality of our lives, it is more than ever critical that we hold on to their materiality also.

Was the Gulf War not a war for Baudrillard because there were so few Western losses and the massacre was of Iraqi sacrificed extras? I suspect that it was not a war for still another reason: it did not provide an “alibi” for savagery (76). Unlike World War II, it did not produce great war stories. Listen to the regret and nostalgia in the following passages: “Since this war was won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like had it existed. We will never know what an Iraqi taking part with a chance of fighting would have been like. We will never know what an American taking part with a chance of being beaten would have been like” (61). This illusion of massacre did not pit good against evil. It had lost its libidinal attraction: “[w]ar stripped of its passions, its phantasms, its finery, its veils, its violence, its images: war stripped bare by its technicians even, and then reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics, as though with a second skin” (64). War as a woman, or rather a robot.

Baudrillard was not alone. The Gulf War was and remains for many in the West an event hard to frame in a story. Throughout the fall of 1990, the U.S. press was filled with debate about intervention in southwest Asia. After the outbreak of the air war, however, the media’s patriotic hype silenced dissenting voices. What followed, behind the screen of clean weapons and surgical airstrikes, was confusion, friendly fire, and a brutality that the press did not cover. What we did hear about was “a global confrontation between humanity and bestiality, a battle between civilization and barbarism. This was a war to defend the principles of modernity and reason against the forces of darkness” (Aksoy and Robins 1992: 202).

The best version of the U.S. Gulf War Story was told by Richard Cheney, the U.S. secretary of defense. It took the form of a Final Report of Congress: Conduct of the Persian Gulf War, that “pursuant to Title V, Public Law 102–25… discusses the conduct of hostilities in the Persian Gulf theater of operations” (xiii). In seventeen pages, the “Military Victory over Iraq” is loudly trumpeted. Like all good war stories, this one provided a blueprint for the next time around. The war in question began on January 17, when President George Bush launched the first strikes on Iraq. From August, when the U.S. buildup began, the war would not have provided such a neat model for the conduct of future wars. Restricted to the shorter period, it became a circumscribed battle as told by John Keegan in The Face of Battle (1976). This battle demonstrated how well the U.S. defense system works, since it could contend with the “fourth largest army in the world, an army hardened in long years of combat against Iran” (xiii, my emphasis). The war confirmed that funding to the Department of Defense must not be reduced: “If we fail to fund the training and high quality we have come to expect, we will end up with an organization that may still outwardly look like a military, but that simply will not function” (xxx). The Gulf War provided an unprecedented marketing opportunity for the Department of Defense, which could show off its “revolutionary new generation of high-technology weapons” (xviii), these wonderful weapons they were testing for the first time.

This U.S. Gulf War Story, like all war stories, promised that there would be more wars because good wars make you proud (Theweleit 1993). Pride is the single most important factor in the U.S. Gulf War Story; Cheney’s parting paragraph goes as follows:

America can be proud of its role in the Persian Gulf war. There were lessons to be learned and problems to be sure. But overall there was an outstanding victory. We can be proud of our conviction and international leadership. We can be proud of one of the most remarkable deployments in history. We can be proud of our partnership in arms with many nations. We can be proud of our technology and the wisdom of our leaders at all levels. But most of all we can be proud of those dedicated young Americans soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who showed their skill, their commitment to what we stand for, and their bravery in the way t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Arab Women’s Literary History
• 2. In Search of Mother Tongues
• 3. Reviewing Beginnings
• 4. A Muslim Sister
• 5. Multiple Critique
• 6. Changing the Subject
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Permissions
• Index