Overview

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 patterns In 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.

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Marilyn Booth is to be lauded for her careful and sophisticated analysis of Zaynab Fawwaz's biographical work Scattered Pearls. Thanks to her masterful study, Fawwaz and her literary production can now be recognized as constituting an important piece in the shaping of a 'colonial modernity' in the Arab world in the late nineteenth century and signaling an emerging Muslim feminist consciousness at this time. This important work will be read with avid interest by all those who are interested in the holistic history of fin-de-siecle Egypt that includes both men's and women's voices and in exploring its larger contemporary implications. -- Asma Afsaruddin, Professor of Islamic Studies, Indiana University

"""Marilyn Booth is to be lauded for her careful and sophisticated analysis of Zaynab Fawwaz's biographical work Scattered Pearls. Thanks to her masterful study, Fawwaz and her literary production can now be recognized as constituting an important piece in the shaping of a 'colonial modernity' in the Arab world in the late nineteenth century and signaling an emerging Muslim feminist consciousness at this time. This important work will be read with avid interest by all those who are interested in the holistic history of fin-de-si´ecle Egypt that includes both men's and women's voices and in exploring its larger contemporary implications."" -- Asma Afsaruddin, Professor of Islamic Studies, Indiana University"

Marilyn Booth is to be lauded for her careful and sophisticated analysis of Zaynab Fawwaz's biographical work Scattered Pearls. Thanks to her masterful study, Fawwaz and her literary production can now be recognized as constituting an important piece in the shaping of a 'colonial modernity' in the Arab world in the late nineteenth century and signaling an emerging Muslim feminist consciousness at this time. This important work will be read with avid interest by all those who are interested in the holistic history of fin-de-si cle Egypt that includes both men's and women's voices and in exploring its larger contemporary implications. -- Asma Afsaruddin, Professor of Islamic Studies, Indiana University

Author Information

Marilyn Booth holds the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Edinburgh.

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