Authorizing feminist readings of Islamic history: Zaynab Fawwaz and the gender politics of Egyptian public discourse in the fin-de-siécle

Lebanese-Egyptian Zaynab Fawwaz (c 1850-1914) was an unusual presence in 1890s Egyptian discourse: a largely self-taught immigrant from ShiÊzi south Lebanon, a woman who wrote and published without major family support, a forthright voice on women’s needs as distinct from ‘the nation’s’. Like most Arabophone writers on ‘the woman question’ (only a few were female, fewer still were female and Muslim), Fawwaz trained her eyes on girls’ education; but she focused less on domestic training and more on work and income, gender-defined dependency and exploitation, and the uses of religious knowledge. She addressed the relationship between female mobility and feminine intellectual self-realisation. Framing her arguments within terms of engagement defined by Islamic shariÊza, she appropriated keywords to redefine them for an indigenous feminism: sunna (path, as defined by the Prophet’s example), or farḍ (religious obligation). She repurposed a premodern Islamic-Arabic genre, tabaqat (biographical notices/dictionary), appropriating its respectability for feminist-inflected history writing. I consider how Fawwaz deployed terminology and genre to contest patriarchal readings of Islam sustained by assumptions of masculinist authority, and quietly she introduced aspects of a Shi’i perspective into an overwhelming Sunni publication space. Her writings challenge later scholarly approaches to Arab gender politics that have gotten politically trapped within pre-assumed binary categories: east/west, christian/muslim, liberal/conservative. Fawwaz’s writings remind us that secularism was never inherent in Arab feminist theorizing, nor were the earliest Arab feminisms Western derivatives. Secular formulations emerged from particular historical assemblages and existed alongside perspectives shaped by Islamic (and Christian) worldviews.