WRITING IN THE WILDERNESS

To assess Arab women's writings in the twentieth century, we must go back to the latter half of the nineteenth. The late 1880s were a time of turmoil in Egypt, the contemporary cultural heartland of the Arab world. There was a climate of openness and acceptance of the new. Egypt was attracting Arab intellectuals – including women like the Lebanese Zaynab Fawwāz (1850–1914) in 1870, Wardah al-Yāzijī (1838–1924) in 1899 and the Palestinian-Lebanese Mayy Ziyādah (1886–1941) in 1908 – who could not find such intellectual freedom at home. Many of these immigrants became journalists, thus overcoming their outsider status and becoming intellectually integrated into their new society. Persistent contact with Europe throughout the nineteenth century was beginning to have a profound effect in Egypt. The values and philosophies of this alien culture were being absorbed and slowly transformed into indigenous commodities. The novel and the short story became for the Egyptians, as for their European counterparts, forays into reality. Writers, using these genres, could begin to create themselves as subjects within their transforming social context.

Women, too, were beginning to write. Contrary to what is generally believed, there were some women in the nineteenth century who were educated and could write.