Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- I Pearls Scattered: An Introduction
- II A Women's World History, in the World of Arabic Letters: A Reader's View
- III Founding Mothers, Speaking Sisters: Lineaments of Community in History
- IV Writerly Pursuits: A Compiler's Archive
- V A Beckoning Compass, Circulating Lives: The Bustani Encyclopedia and Other Nineteenth-century Sources
- VI Interlocutors? Men Authoring Women's History in the 1890s
- VII Framing a History of the Present: or, Did the Pearls Scatter to the World's Fair?
- VIII Violent Romances: The Bodily Drama of Patriarchal Trauma
- Conclusion: A World of Women, Feminist History and the Importance of the Feminine Signature
- Appendix I: Translations
- Appendix II: List of Fawwaz's Pearls
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
II - A Women's World History, in the World of Arabic Letters: A Reader's View
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- I Pearls Scattered: An Introduction
- II A Women's World History, in the World of Arabic Letters: A Reader's View
- III Founding Mothers, Speaking Sisters: Lineaments of Community in History
- IV Writerly Pursuits: A Compiler's Archive
- V A Beckoning Compass, Circulating Lives: The Bustani Encyclopedia and Other Nineteenth-century Sources
- VI Interlocutors? Men Authoring Women's History in the 1890s
- VII Framing a History of the Present: or, Did the Pearls Scatter to the World's Fair?
- VIII Violent Romances: The Bodily Drama of Patriarchal Trauma
- Conclusion: A World of Women, Feminist History and the Importance of the Feminine Signature
- Appendix I: Translations
- Appendix II: List of Fawwaz's Pearls
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There appeared, on 21 June 1893, an announcement in al-Nil:
Pearls Scattered in Times and Places: Lives of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces:
A momentous and splendid book [kitab jalil] for which there has been no precedent nor has its like ever been achieved. It unites an eloquent mode of expression with a graceful and delicate subject, conveying in excess of fiveto- six hundred biographies of mistresses of seclusion [rabbat al-khudur] and the famous [mashhurat] amongst the fair sex in all eras. It is authored by the esteemed writer, Madame Zaynab Fawwaz. Printing has gotten underway in the Bulaq Publishing House, and subscriptions are set at thirty piastres for the first deadline. Those who want to own it can send the sum to the honourable lawyer Mr. Muhammad ‘Ali Fawwaz Efendi, attorney, brother of the esteemed writer, in Muhammad ‘Ali Street. Or that person may correspond with the office of our newspaper for the same purpose.
Similar advertisements had appeared already; the earliest I have seen came out in the same newspaper on 30 March 1893 beneath similar advertisements for ‘A'isha Taymur's treatise on marriage, Mir'at al-ta'ammul fi al-umur (Mirror of Contemplation on Matters, 1892/3), and Fawwaz's play, al-Hawa wa alwafa’ (Passion and Fidelity, 1893).
In tracing the intertextualities, paratexts and travels of a single book as a window onto the intellectual production of the nahda, a first step is to consider how the book came into being as a material artefact. As the text above indicates, when these notices appeared, the book in its entirety was not yet in print – and the vague reference to ‘five-to-six hundred biographies’ suggests the final text was not yet fixed. (Nor was the title: tarajim rather than tabaqat appears here.) The publication history of Pearls Scattered is complicated, hinting at the difficult processes that at least some authors in 1890s Cairo had to go through in order to see their works in print. The project spanned October 1891 to March 1896.
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- Information
- Classes of LadiesWriting Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de-siecle Egypt, pp. 31 - 94Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015