Marilyn Booth – författare

Egypt just before political eruption! Turns of the century in Africa’s northeastern corner have been critical moments, ushering in overt popular activism in the hope of radical political redirection — as this volume’s focus on Egypt’s 19th-century fin-de-siècle demonstrates. This period witnessed crisscrossing and conflicting political currents as well as fluctuating economic, geopolitical, social and demographic conditions and cultural processes. Like Egypt’s 20th-century fin-de-siècle, much of this ferment was a prelude to the more visible and politically eruptive events of the next decades, when Egypt’s popular resistance burst onto the international scene. But its subterranean cast was no less dynamic for that.

Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) was as a forceful voice in support of women’s rights to education and work choices in colonial-era Egypt. Her volume of 453 women’s lives, al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur (Pearls scattered in times and places: Classes of ladies of cloistered spaces, 1893-6) – featuring Boudicca, Catherine the Great, Zaynab (the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad), Victoria Woodhull, the Turkish poet Sirri Hanim and many others – built on the Arabic-Islamic biographical tradition to produce a work for women in the modern era, grafting European, Turkish, Arab, and Indian life narratives, amongst others onto Arabic literary patternsIn Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces Marilyn Booth argues that Fawwaz’s work was less ‘exemplary biography’ than feminist history, in its exploration of achievement but also of patriarchal trauma in the lives of women across times and places. She traces Fawwaz’s creative use of her sources, her presentation of biographical narratives in the context of the political essays she wrote in the Arabic press, her publicised dialogue with the President of the Board of Lady Managers of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition – where she attempted to send the volume – and how her inscription of a feminine ancient history diverged from that of men writing history in 1890s Egypt.

Contributors. Asma Afsaruddin, Orit Bashkin, Marilyn Booth, Nadia Maria El Cheikh, Julia Clancy-Smith, Joan DelPlato, Jateen Lad, Nancy Micklewright, Yaseen Noorani, Leslie Peirce, Irvin Cemil Schick, A. Holly Schissler, Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) was as a forceful voice in support of women’s rights to education and work choices in colonial-era Egypt. Her volume of 453 women’s lives, al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur (Pearls scattered in times and places: Classes of ladies of cloistered spaces, 1893-6) – featuring Boudicca, Catherine the Great, Zaynab (the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad), Victoria Woodhull, the Turkish poet Sirri Hanim and many others – built on the Arabic-Islamic biographical tradition to produce a work for women in the modern era, grafting European, Turkish, Arab, and Indian life narratives, amongst others onto Arabic literary patternsIn Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces Marilyn Booth argues that Fawwaz’s work was less ‘exemplary biography’ than feminist history, in its exploration of achievement but also of patriarchal trauma in the lives of women across times and places. She traces Fawwaz’s creative use of her sources, her presentation of biographical narratives in the context of the political essays she wrote in the Arabic press, her publicised dialogue with the President of the Board of Lady Managers of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition – where she attempted to send the volume – and how her inscription of a feminine ancient history diverged from that of men writing history in 1890s Egypt.