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 Fawwazs 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 Fawwazs 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.

Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) was a forceful voice in support of women's rights to education and work choices in colonial-era Egypt. This book explores the writing and influence of her landmark piece al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur the first Arabic-language global biographical dictionary of women.

This book focuses on women and translation in cultures 'across other horizons' well beyond the European or Anglo-American centres. Drawing on transnational feminist connections, its editors have assembled work from four continents and included articles from Morocco, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia, Columbia and beyond. Thirteen different chapters explore questions around women's roles in translation: as authors, or translators, or theoreticians. In doing so, they open new territories for studies in the area of 'gender and translation' and stimulate academic work on questions in this field around the world. The articles examine the impact of 'Western' feminism when translated to other cultures; they describe translation projects devised to import and make meaningful feminist texts from other places; they engage with the politics of publishing translations by women authors in other cultures, and the role of women translators play in developing new ideas. The diverse approaches to questions around women and translation developed in this collection speak to the volume of unexplored material that has yet to be addressed in this field.

Negotiating Palestinian Womanhood: Encounters between Palestinian Women and American Missionaries, 1880s–1940s is the first analytical study to examine the American Quaker educational enterprise in Palestine since its establishment in the late nineteenth century during the Ottoman rule and into the British Mandate period. This book uses the Friends Girls School as a site of interaction between Arab and American cultures to uncover how Quaker education was received, translated, internalized, and responded to by Palestinian students in order to change their position within their society’s structural power relations. It examines the influence of Quaker education on Palestinian women’s views of gender and nationalism. Quaker education, in addition to ongoing social and political transformations, produced mixed results in which many Palestinian women showed emancipatory desires to change their roles and responsibilities in either radical, moderate, or conservative ways. As many of their writings in the 1920s and 1930s illustrate, Quaker ideals of internationalism, peace, and nonviolent means in conflict resolution influenced the students’ advocacy for cultural nationalism, Arab unity across tribal and religious lines, and responsible citizenship.

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-siecle demonstrates. The end of the 19th century in Egypt witnessed crisscrossing and conflicting political currents as well as fluctuating economic, geopolitical, social conditions, demographic conditions and cultural processes. Like Egypt's 20th-century fin-de-siecle, 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.

A study of the career and writings of Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) an early feminist thinker and writer in Egypt. It focuses on her newspaper essays, novels, poetry, and her play which was the first to be published by a female author in Arabic.

The Ottoman Syrians - residents of modern Syria and Lebanon - formed the first Arabic-speaking Evangelical Church in the region. This book offers a fresh narrative of the encounters of this minority Protestant community with American missionaries, Eastern churches and Muslims at the height of the Nahda, from 1860 to 1915. Drawing on rare Arabic publications, it challenges historiography that focuses on Western male actors. Instead it shows that Syrian Protestant women and men were agents of their own history who sought the salvation of Syria while adapting and challenging missionary teachings. These pioneers established a critical link between evangelical religiosity and the socio-cultural currents of the Nahda, making possible the literary and educational achievements of the American Syrian Mission and transforming Syrian society in ways that still endure today.

This Edinburgh Companion seeks to develop a postcolonial framework for addressing the Middle East. The first collection of essays on this subject, it assembles some of the world's foremost postcolonialists to explore the critical, theoretical and disciplinary possibilities that inquiry into this region opens for postcolonial studies. Throughout its twenty-four chapters, its focus is on literary and cultural critique. It draws on texts and contexts from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries as case studies, and deploys the concept of 'post/colonial modernity' to reveal the enduring impact of colonial and imperial power on the shaping of the region. And it covers a wide and significant range of political, social, and cultural issues in the Middle East during that period - including the heritage of Orientalism in the region; the roots and contemporary branches of the Israel-Palestine conflict; colonial history, state formation and cultures of resistance in Egypt, Turkey, the Maghreb and the wider Arab world; the clash of tradition and modernity in regional and transnational expressions of Islam; the politics of gender and sexuality in the Arab world; the ongoing crises in Libya, Iraq, Iran and Syria; the Arab Spring; and the Middle Eastern refugee crisis in Europe.

How to raise a child became a central concern of intellectual debate from Cairo to Beirut over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intimately linked with discussions around capitalism and democracy, considerations about women, gender, and childrearing emerged as essential to modern social theory. Arab writers, particularly women, made sex, the body, and women's ethical labor central to fending off European imperial advances, instituting representative politics, and managing social order. Labors of Love traces the political power of motherhood and childrearing in Arabic thought. Susanna Ferguson reveals how debates around raising children became foundational to feminist, Islamist, and nationalist politics alike—opening up conversations about civilization, society, freedom, temporality, labor, and democracy. While these debates led to expansions in girls' education and women writers' authority, they also attached the fate of nations to women's unwaged labor in the home. Ferguson thus reveals why women and the family have been stumbling blocks for representative regimes around the world. She shows how Arab women's writing speaks to global questions—the devaluation of social reproduction under capitalism, the stubborn maleness of the liberal subject, and why the naturalization of embodied, binary gender difference has proven so difficult to overcome.

The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. In scope, the book encompasses the genesis of the Arabic novel in the second half of the nineteenth century and its development to the present in every Arabic-speaking country and in Arab immigrant destinations on six continents. Editor Waïl S. Hassan and his contributors describe a novelistic phenomenon which has pre-modern roots, stretching centuries back within the Arabic cultural tradition, and branching outward geographically and linguistically to every Arab country and to Arab writing in many languages around the world. The first of three innovative dimensions of this Handbook consists of examining the ways in which the Arabic novel emerged out of a syncretic merger between Arabic and European forms and techniques, rather than being a simple importation of the latter and rejection of the former, as early critics of the Arabic novel claimed. The second involves mapping the novel geographically as it took root in every Arab country, developing into often distinct though overlapping and interconnected local traditions. Finally, the Handbook concerns the multilingual character of the novel in the Arab world and by Arab immigrants and their descendants around the world, both in Arabic and in at least a dozen other languages. The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions reflects the current status of research in the broad field of Arab novelistic traditions and signals toward new directions of inquiry.