WOMAN IN ISLAM: MEN AND THE “WOMEN'S PRESS” IN TURN-OF-THE-20TH-CENTURY EGYPT

Abstract

The first periodical in Egypt to focus on women as both subject and audience, Al-Fatat (The Young Woman, 1892), heralded the founding by women of many periodicals for women in Egypt. The women's press emerged in a time of intense public debate concerning putative intersections of systemic gender relations and gender ideology with anti-imperialist nationalism: what would constitute “national” strength sufficient to assert, or force, an independent existence based on claims to autonomous nation-state status?¹Women writing in the women's press, as well as in the mainstream—or “malestream”—press, shaped the debate over how gender did and should inflect social organization and institutional change.² Equally, male intellectuals and politicians participated in a rhetoric of persuasion, edification, and ambition. When women and men wrote treatises on what was called the “woman question” (qadi¯yat al-mar[ham]a), articles in the women's press challenged, debated, and refined the points of these treatises. Writers approached that fraught “question” from another direction, too, establishing a thriving industry of conduct literature that fed on translations of European works as well as original works by Egyptian and other Arab writers. Books on how to behave as a proper father, a good mother, a fine son or daughter, or a responsible schoolgoer went through numerous printings for a reading public prepared by various rhetorics of nationalism, theology, and reform to bring this debate into everyday life by following the guides for behavior that such literature—including essays in the women's press—supplied.³