388 discusion 3

GOING GLOBAL: THE TRANSNATIONAL

RECEPTION OF THIRD WORLD

WOMEN WRITERS

Edited by AMAL AMIREH AND LISA SUHAIR MAJAJ

GARLAND PUBLISHING, INC.

A MEMBER OF THE TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP

NEW YORK & LONDON

2000

Published in 2000 by Garland Publishing, Inc. A Member of the Taylor & Francis Group 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001

Copyright© 2000 by Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

Printed on acid-free, 250-year-life paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Packaging "Huda": Sha'rawi's Memoirs in the United States Reception Environment

MOHJAKAHF

The memoirs of Huda Sha'rawi (Mudhakkirati, Cairo: Dar al-Hila!, 1981) have been abridged, translated, and transformed into a text widely avail­ able to the English-reading public and frequently taught in U.S. college courses in disciplines such as history and literature, and in interdiscipli­ nary programs such as women's studies and Middle Eastern Studies. The translation endeavor that produced Margot Badran's Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (New York: The Feminist Press, 1986) is a valuable one and alerts Anglophonic readers worldwide to the work of this woman of achievement and influence. Harem Years was what led me to deeper study of Huda Sha'rawi's life and work and to the research for this article. However, the translation and publication of Harem Years occurs within a specific reception environment-the "First World" An­ glophonic market, which is shaped by a "horizon of expectations"' for writing by and about Arab and Muslim women. The process of this re­ ception restricts the range of meaning made possible in the Arabic text. Knowing these distortions will help educators use the English translation more effectively, not only in teaching about Egyptian feminism but also in explaining how the politics of reception can constrain our reading of a text from an Arab woman.2

Hans Robert Jauss's work provides the insight that a reading pub­ lic's "horizon of expectations" is formed by "what the public already un­ derstands about a genre and its conventions" (Guerin, 338) and by "a reader's knowledge and assumptions about the text and literature in gen­ eral" (Childers and Hentzi, 258). The United States reading public, de­ spite promising resistances here and there, takes in data about women

148

Packaging "Huda": Sha'rawi's Memoirs in the United States 149

from the Arab world mainly by using conventions emergent from a long

history of Western stereotypes about the Arab peoples and the Islamic re­

ligion. I find that these conventions take shape today in three stereotypes

about the Arab woman: One is that she is a victim of gender oppression;

the second portrays her as an escapee of her intrinsically oppressive cul­

ture; and the third represents her as the pawn of Arab male power. To

describe the process by which the Arabic text of the memoirs is trans­

formed by being cast toward this set of expectations is to shift from

blaming the translator toward seeing the translation of a text as part of a

process larger than one individual will.

The pressures of the United States reception environment work in

four ways in the transformation of the Arabic text, Mudhakkirati, into the English text, Harem Years. Sha'rawi's engagement with Arab men in relationships that she saw as satisfying and enriching is minimized; her

orientation toward Europe is exaggerated; and her command of class

privilege is camouflaged. Finally, her story, which, in Mudhakkirati, is the story of a public figure, is recentered in Harem Years around private life and the "harem." In these ways, Sha'rawi can be accommodated

within the United States reading environment as a victim and an escapee

and shielded from the negative category of pawn.

PACKAGINGS: VICTIM, ESCAPEE, OR PAWN

Western literature has not always represented women from the Arabo­

Islamic world in this threefold typology that I outline here. My study of

the earliest representations of the Muslim woman in European literature

suggests that medieval and Renaissance representations differed consid­

erably from those of later periods and do not construct her as victim.

Rather, the opposite-in these early texts, the Muslim woman is a vi­

rago. 3 Over the course of the past four hundred years, however, against

the changing material and ideological grounds of the relationship be­

tween Western Europe and the Islamic world, a very different discourse

emerged. The new discourse, Orientalism, expanded most during the

nineteenth century and depended on a "positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient

without ever losing him the relative upper hand" (Said, 7). One of its

constants has been the representation of Islam as innately oppressive

to women. Drawing on the late nineteenth-century relations between

Britain and Egypt, Leila Ahmed shows that "the thesis of the new colo­

nial discourse of Islam centered on women-was that Islam was innately

150 The Writer as Text

and immutably oppressive to women, that the veil and segregation epito­ mized that oppression" (I 994, 151-152). The twentieth-century U.S. re­ ception environment is heir to this discourse. Decolonization, the Cold War, the post-1967 emergence of independent Palestinian movements, the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the current climate of preoccupation with an "Islamic threat," have shifted the material conditions and the ideological climate for "the Western narrative of women in Islam" (Ahmed's phrase, 1994, 149). For example, the image of Palestinian women as fighters and Iranian women as supporters of the Islamic Revo­ lution complicated the picture of Arab and Muslim women as having to be either victims or escapees. The idea of a fanatic Arab or Muslim woman who is a pawn of her culture is related to these developments.

Second-wave United States feminism of the 1960s and 1970s and the ensuing critique of its limitations by women of color have opened spaces where these stereotypes are reiterated on one hand and subjected to new challenges on the other hand. Chandra Talpade Mohanty points out that Arab women are specifically included in the process by which Western feminist discourse "colonizes" an entity called "Third World woman," casting her as silent victim in need of discursive succour from her more liberated "Western" sisters. This process creates an irreducible "Third World women's difference." With this useful term, Mohanty gives a name to the assumption that the women of the "Third World" are some­ how inherently oppressed and that this always already oppressed state is defined by their gender and their being "Third World." Therese Saliba, Marsha J. Hamilton, and others detail the ways this "third worlding" continues to happen with regard to Arab women in United States acade­ mic and popular settings, feminist and otherwise.4

The concept of the Arab woman as "escapee" was given to me by Barbara Nimri Aziz, a journalist with a disciplinary grounding in anthro­ pology whose work intersects with academic discourse but occurs pri­ marily in radio and print mass media.5 Aziz, from her years of work between the East Coast of the United States and the Arab east or mashreq (Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan) interviewing people and documenting lives, garnered the insight that United States audiences, when faced with an Arab woman who did not fit the victim mold, tried to understand the woman as an "escapee" from her culture. "How brave," they seemed to be saying, "she has been able to escape from that terribly oppressive world" of Islam and Arab-ness. 6

Marnia Lazreg's "Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria" suggested to me the third concept in

Packaging "Huda": Sha'rawi's Memoirs in the United States 151

this typology describing the range of contemporary United States repre­ sentations of "the Arab woman." Lazreg, in the course of a larger argu­ ment, says that one of the implications of United States feminist discourse "is that an Arab woman cannot be a feminist (whatever the term means) prior to disassociating herself from Arab men and the cul­ ture that supports them!" (332). Citing Elly Bulkin's work, she notes that if Arab women do not separate from common causes with Arab men, they "are accused of being 'pawns of Arab men.' " An Arab woman who seems to wield some degree of power in her society and/or does not di­ vest herself of Arab culture and attachments to Arab men must be operat­ ing under a false consciousness and is a "pawn." The concept of the Arab woman as "pawn" is a useful refuge when a system of representation whose range for Arab women extends from "victim" to "escapee" is con­ fronted with data that does not fit either of those categories. Like the other two concepts, it is an evasion of an alternative, if difficult, path: the deconstruction or demystifying of the irreducible difference attached (in Western discourse) to women in the Arabo-Islamic world and the ap­ proach to them and their texts with as much nuance, rigor, and openness of paradigm as is applied to the study of European and American women's literature and literary history.

Here, despite all my recourse to depersonalized processes, I wish to find succour in Lazreg's appeal to some late humanism and assert that none of this is inexorable. A "First World" feminist exercise of discursive power over "Third World" subjects is not an inescapable given deter­ mined by the identity or physical location or education of the writer or reader. In other words, all Western writers are not a priori guilty of colo­ nizing Arab women, nor are all women and men of Arab origin automat­ ically innocent of this distorting representational practice. The "victim, escapee, or pawn" triad is a frame of reference ready to bog anyone. I agree with Lazreg that "the misrepresentation of 'different' women is a form of self-misrepresentation" (338). Uncritical acceptance of these three stale categories for Arab women is a quagmire of unoriginal think­ ing that readers, as well as publishers and translators, can understand and resist. Responsible scholarship is still possible in the age of the post­ modern.

COMPARING MUDHAKKIRATI TO HAREM YEARS

Sha'rawi (1879-1947) was a pioneer in the women's rights movement in the twentieth century and was as much in the vanguard of the Egyptian

152 The Writer as Text

nationalist movement as a woman of her era could be. She was among those public figures who left us a written record of their lives as makers of modern Egypt, in such company as Sa'd Zaghloul and Muhammad Hassanein Haykal. After a coming-of-age section, which takes up thir­ teen of the forty-five chapters comprising the Arabic text, Mudhakkirati, her memoirs leave aside her personal life to tell mainly of her life as a public figure in Egypt's coming-of-age as a nation. This story includes the public debates taking place in Egypt in the early decades of the twen­ tieth century, not only debates over women's roles, but debates over the type of government Egypt would have, its relationship with Sudan, the role of the king, relations with Turkey and Britain, and so forth. Her sweep of experience includes observations of nationalist leader and oc­ casional Sha'rawi nemesis Sa'd Zaghloul, glimpses of Taha Hussain and other intellectuals, milestone events in Egypt's educational institutions, the emergence of international feminism, the emergence of inter-Arab feminism, the growth of Egyptian newspapers, and more.

The Arabic version tells the story by interspersing her narrative with reports, letters, and documents; approximately one hundred in all. About a fourth are penned by Sha'rawi; most of the other articles were written to or about her during the course of her life. The Arabic book consists of a one-page publisher's preface, a short introduction by Dr. Amina Sa'id, and 450-some pages of text, which end abruptly in medias res since Sha'rawi did not live to complete the task. Harem Years contains eighty pages of translation proper, preceded by a chronology, preface, and intro­ duction and followed by an epilogue, appendix, and notes. It is a transla­ tion, with some rearrangement and abridgement, of the first thirteen chapters that are present in Mudhakkirati. The epilogue in Harem Years summarizes material corresponding approximately to the next dozen chapters of Mudhakkirati.

It is important to note that the person finally responsible for editing the manuscript resulting in Mudhakkirati was her secretary, Abd al­ Hamid Fahmy Mursi. Amina Sa'id describes Mursi's role in her intro­ duction to the memoirs: "He gave it to us without any compensation. He absolutely refused to allow us to recompense him even for a little of what he was burdened with in putting these memoirs in order and preparing them for printing and publication. He did this in fulfillment of his duty to execute the testament which his spiritual mother Huda Sha'rawi left for him. She chose him out of all her disciples, male and female, to order them and publish them at an appropriate time" (Sha'rawi, 9).7 This ap­ pears to be an effort to confirm the legitimacy of Mursi's editorial work

Packaging "Huda ": Sha 'rawi 's Memoirs in the United States 153

and establishes Mudhakkirati's line of descent, so to speak, from Sha'rawi. We see a parallel effort in Harem Years when the translator re­ counts that Sha'rawi's niece Hawa Idris granted Badran access to a copy or portion of the manuscript and gave her permission to translate and pub­ lish it. The manuscript Badran worked with and the manuscript Mursi worked with may not have been the same; apparently Mursi's manuscript was more complete. In any case, the Arabic version, in its arrangement and selection of documents, enacts the voice of a public figure, who, like all public figures, utilized the services of a committed, expert staff in pro­ ducing her public voice. Thus, there is no need to continue the debate that occurred between Badran and Mervat Hatem on the pages of the Associa­ tion for Middle East Women's Studies newsletter over whether or not there was one "pure," originary Arabic document embodying the intent of its author without mediation of any sort (see Badran, 1988a & 1988b, Hatem 1988). My purpose here is simply to compare the two published books to see what we can learn from the transfiguration of Sha'rawi's memoirs from one readerly context to another.

BANISHING BELOVED BASBAS

Sha'rawi's memoirs begin with her memory of the death of her father. Much has already been said about the importance of Sha'rawi's vindica­ tion of her father, Sultan Basha, in the second chapter of her memoirs and the inclusion of documents authored by his contemporaries to sub­ stantiate Sha'rawi's defense. Badran has been duly criticized for relegat­ ing it to an appendix and overriding the primacy of Sha'rawi's concern with this issue. Badran's response points out that much of the chapter is composed of documents authored by others, inserted into Sha'rawi's text by her secretary-editor. This rendering of the apologia for the father as an appendix has been criticized by Mervat Hatem ( I 988) and Leila Ahmed (1987), and responded to by the translator (Badran, 1988a & 1988b). My interest in the shift in the placement of the father between the Arabic and the English versions of the memoirs is that it is part of a pattern in which the English version minimizes the presence of male figures whom Sha'rawi describes with affection and pride. Huda Hanim's paternal grandfather, al-Haj Sultan, does not appear in the English version. The narrative about the father, aside from the apologia section, has been mod­ ified in specific ways. The brother, who is at least retained in the English translation, is nevertheless affected by the pressures of the recepLion process.

154 The Writer as Text

Sha'rawi's concern to establish her ancestral roots, very understand­ able in the Arabic context given the importance of genealogy in Arabic tradition, does not appear in the English version. She writes in Mud­ hakkirati:

I have heard from some of our relatives who have heard from their fa­ thers and grandfathers that my father was of Arab [i.e., Arab bedouin] origin. His ancestors settled in the land of Hijaz and a group of them migrated to Egypt before the era of Ali Basha and took it as their land

and married Egyptian women. Based on what I have been told, my grandfather al-Haj Sultan was the head of the fifth generation of his family in Egypt ... He was famous for generosity and kindheartedness and goodnaturedness. So involved was he in benevolent and charitable deeds and so overflowing was his piety that his contemporaries used to say: He is a saint who embodies all the blessings of his family and all those around him. ( 14)

Sha'rawi goes on to relate, with dramatic panache, several anecdotes il­ luminating her grandfather's generosity, charity, and kindliness. He was, she says, a man who even allowed his tenant farmers to cheat him out of money rather than embarrass them by calling their bluffs.

Aside from the issue of the apologia for her father, there are some other differences between the English and Arabic versions in the way Sha'rawi describes her father. In Harem Years we do not find Sha'rawi's praise of her father's virtues (e.g. "generosity, loyalty, elevation, attach­ ment to the symbols of religion," 12). Adjectives such as "beloved" that Sha'rawi frequently uses when speaking about her father do not make it through the translation process (32). The translator says in her preface that she has made "some minor deletions to remove repetitions or the oc­ casional over-elaboration" (3). It is true that Sha'rawi's praises of family and friends are repetitious and indulge in Arabic conventions that might be tiresome for the Anglophonic reader. Still Sha'rawi 's gracious curtsies to these conventions of generous praise are part of her narrative persona.

While the tedious historical detail of Sha'rawi's apologia for her fa­ ther might raise budgetary and marketing worries for a publisher, the omission of the charming stories about her grandfather and the adjective "beloved" modifying the father is puzzling. It can only be explained by the pressures of the reception environment that I have described. The ex­ cision of the paternal grandfather encourages the tendency of the Anglo­ phonic reader to see Sha'rawi as a woman severed from her roots, a

Packaging "Huda ": Sha 'rawi 's Memoirs in the United States 155

victim-turned-escapee. A kindly Arab paterfamilias does not fit the ex­ pectations of United States readership. A story of an Arab woman's es­ cape from the gender oppression of the "harem" requires rather less glowing portraits of the Arab men who lived in those "harem years." If Badran were to translate Sha'rawi's warmth of tone toward her father and grandfather, the reception apparatus would veer toward labeling Sha'rawi a pawn of Arab men. The pawn stereotype is something Bad­ ran, as a sincere advocate for Sha'rawi before the United States reader­ ship, swerves to avoid. Whether this protective instinct is articulated and conscious or not, it is an observable example of the reception environ­ ment shaping the way the material emerges in English.

Sha'rawi's beginning her account with a recital of her lineage and the virtues of her fathers is a rhetorical move embedded in the traditions of Arabic literature. In Arabic poetry, for example, fakhr (the boast) and nasab (genealogy) are important initiatory elements. Sha'rawi's opening words in the Arabic version are: "When I stand before the memories of my childhood . . . " In this metaphor, memory is a site. She does not sim­ ply remember; she stands before the memory site. She goes on to re­ member and lament the way that knowledge of her father's death was kept from his children by "the kindred" and "the servants," and the shel­ tering customs of the upperclass in those days. The whole passage, then, is a circumspect way to lead into her father's death.

Where does Sha'rawi's language come from in this opening passage of her memoirs? Sha'rawi's opening alludes to a conceit that permeates all of Arabic culture from high poetry to folksong, the waqf 'ala al-atlal (standing at the deserted site). The classical Arab poet always stands fig­ uratively before the old campsite in order to begin speaking. A renowned example is "Let us stand, you two, and weep, at the remembrance of loved one and home," the opening line of the best-known ode of pre­ Islamic poet Imra'ul Qais.8 In this conceit, remembering is a "standing before" and a calling up of the presences who used to inhabit the now­ abandoned ruins. Sha'rawi activates this conceit at several points in a narrative that is also about the structure of memory and knowledge ("And today I close my eyes and I retrieve memories of those empty rooms one by one. I see my mother . . . " Sha'rawi, 57). Thus, not only the priority of place granted the father and grandfather in the memoirs, but the language of the narrative itself invests Sha'rawi in her Arabo-Islamic heritage. These enriching relationships of an Arab feminist with her own culture are difficult to portray given the poverty of a reception environ­ ment that wants to imagine Arab women only as victims, escapees, or

156 The Writer as Text

pawns. Mudhakkirati evinces a woman who, far from desiring escape from her people, saw women's liberation as something nourished by love for her family and rooted in her own culture.

In the Arabic version, Sha'rawi describes her close and loving rela­ tionship with her brother as a mainstay in her life, so much so that when he died suddenly, as a young man, she wanted to kill herself, reconsider­ ing only when she remembered that she had two small children counting on her as a mother. Let us see how the relationship with the brother is transformed by the reception process. Here is a key passage about the brother from the Arabic version: "I loved my brother with an endless love, despite my jealousy of him. And my affection for him was in­ creased by his delicate health. Knowing that he would keep alive the name of my beloved father also increased my love for him, love buoyed by the praiseworthy qualities with which he was graced. My attachment to my brother multiplied after a certain incident . . . " (Sha'rawi, 65). Sha'rawi goes on to describe a story Badran also includes, in which her brother refuses to snitch on her to their mother. Here is the translator's treatment of this passage: "Despite my jealousy I loved my brother very much. My attachment to him was strengthened still more by an incident that occurred one day . . . " (37). The translator changes the order, skips the praise, and leaves out the name of the father binding the siblings to­ gether, but does keep the general sense of the relationship and does in­ clude the incident narrated as evidence of her brother's loyalty to her. We may regard this as a good faith rendering of the Arabic version despite the reordering and excisions. From here, however, let us go to a blurb on the back cover of the English paperback edition, where reviewer Hanna Papanek characterizes Sha'rawi as expressing "bitter jealousy of the brother whom all favored over her." How far this is from what the Arabo­ phonic reader is given to understand about the brother-sister relationship. This is an excellent example of how the process of reception is larger than the will of the individual translator. The translator has included the passages related to the brother Umar, passages that place young Huda's moments of jealousy in context as part of a relationship of mutual trust, intense loyalty, and tender, protective love. It is true that the translator has subtly shifted Sha'rawi's emphasis. However, it is quite a leap from there to Papanek's complete mis-characterization of the brother-sister re­ lationship. I believe we must tum to the victim part of my threefold ty­ pology to understand this leap. The workings of a larger grid of reception, which insists on Sha'rawi as unidimensional victim of gender oppression, overcome, in this case, even the efforts of the translator to

Packaging "Huda ": Sha 'rawi 's Memoirs in the United States 157

relay the textual evidence to the contrary. The Papanek blurb, in turn, be­ comes a frame of expectation influencing any reader who picks up the paperback edition.

EXAGGERATING EUROPE

Albert Hourani's blurb on the back cover of the English book reads, "Harem Years shows how a gifted and sensitive woman, brought up in seclusion but with a knowledge of French that opened a window onto European culture, gradually became aware of her own predicament and that of her sex and society." There is no doubt that Sha'rawi, as a member of the sophisticated Egyptian upper class under the Turkish khedive (ruler), was exposed to a wide variety of cultures, European cultures being significant among them. It is also clear that Europe was slowly re­ placing Turkey as a preferred focus for her class during the early decades of the century. However, the English version exaggerates the European element in Sha'rawi's memoirs.9

On the first page of her preface to the translation, Badran reverses the order in which Sha'rawi learned languages, emphasizing first the chronologically last of the three: "As an upper-class woman, Huda Shaarawi's social language was French. She also knew Turkish, the lan­ guage of her mother and the Turco-Circassian elites and royal family. But Huda [sic] had a special fondness for Arabic, her father's tongue and the national language" ( I ). By contrast, we learn from Sha'rawi's narra­ tive that French lessons did not begin until after she had finished her courses in Arabic, religion, and the Qur ' an at age nine, and that she was eagerly buying cheap Arabic tales from the peddlers as well as reciting Turkish and Persian poetry, long before she could read a word of French (47). The Arabophonic reader would understand that Sha'rawi suffered from the common problem of diglossia resulting from the large gap be­ tween formal standard Arabic and the vernacular, a problem more pro­ nounced for those with restricted access to education, and therefore, very much connected to gender. The Anglophonic reader may not, however, understand that Sha'rawi's primary language of daily interaction was Egyptian Arabic, even with the multilingualism common to her class. Sha'rawi's style of narration (inasmuch as it can be assumed to be basi­ cally hers, after editing by her secretary) shows the imprint of her early education in the occasional echo of Qur ' anic diction (for example, the phrase "when war had put away its garments," 38, comes straight from the Qur ' an 's Sura Muhammad, verse 5).

158 The Writer as Text

Many of the Arab, Turkish, and African characters who people the Arabic narrative are eliminated or reduced in the English version. For ex­ ample, Sha'rawi describes how her mother always observed the Night of Mid-Sha'ban by inviting a sheikha (religious female elder) to assemble everyone in the heart of the house and lead the family in a prayer recital: "After we finished feeding the poor, we would gather in a large room. Sheikha Jalsan would then come and sit in the middle of the room and re­ cite for us the prayer of mid-Sha'ban and we would repeat after her in upraised voices. This prayer had an affect upon us of great awe and reverence" (54). The story of Fatanat, a feisty lower-class woman who leaves her husband and seeks refuge with Huda Hanim's mother, is left out of the English version. The intrigues of the lively lower-class peddler women-Sha'rawi goes on indignantly for pages about them-are given only a few lines. The Circassian cousin Huriya gets a whole page in Mudhakkirati, where Sha'rawi describes Cousin Huriya's adventures as a soldier and includes an interpolated story narrated by the warrior woman herself (37-38). This cousin only gets an aside in a subordinate clause in Harem Years (25). These omissions reduce the number of in­ digenous women who do not fit the victim mold and who provide the reader with non-European models that may have excited the imagination of young Huda Hanim. At the same time, almost every single mention of Mme Richard and Mme Rushdi, European friends of the family, is re­ tained in the English version, which abridges so much else.

The way in which some European characters are cited is also rele­ vant. The Harem Years text frequently uses the given name of Rushdi Basha's wife, Eugenie Le Brun, which has the effect of highlighting her Europeanness rather than the fact that she was the wife of a prominent Egyptian. In Mudhakkirati, Sha'rawi never calls her friend anything but "Haram Rushdi Basha." This is a reflection of Sha'rawi's respect for pro­ priety, titles, and seniority, but it also draws the reader's attention to Mrs. Rushdi's investiture in her Egyptian context. Sha'rawi's memoirs cer­ tainly draw a picture of a close friendship with Mme Rushdi, and Badran transmits Sha'rawi's sense that her friend had a deep and lasting effect on her: " . . . even after [Mme Rushdi's] death I felt her spirit light the way before me" (Badran, 82). The significance of this passage, with its em­ phasis on Sha'rawi's friendship with the European woman, is granted more weight in the English version than in the Arabic by its positioning. The passage closes Part Three of the English text, whereas in the Arabic text it is embedded within a chapter. In contrast, the English text omits a similar sensation that Sha'rawi recounts after the death of another friend,

Packaging "Huda ": Sha 'rawi 's Memoirs in the United States I 59

Egyptian feminist Malak Nasef: "After that, I used to search for her dur­ ing the critical days that we traversed during the Revolution and after it, and I used to call to her in my soul, but her voice did not reverberate except within my conscience" (Sha'rawi, 160). 10 In Mudhakkirati, Sha'rawi mentions her love and admiration for the Princess Amina, wife of the Khedive Tawfiq, before her mention of Mme Richard, a European friend of her mother; the translated text reverses the order in which they are mentioned. The English text also leaves out an incident in which Mme Richard seeks refuge in the Egyptian customs of gender segrega­ tion to evade sexual harassment from a European man, her husband's boss (Sha'rawi, 68). In the Arabic memoir, European culture appears to be one influence among several present in Sha'rawi's world, without overshadowing the others. European friends and mentors are important in Sha'rawi's social circle, but there are Egyptian and Turkish friends and mentors who have comparable places in her life.

The Arabic narrative does not allow the impression that the Euro­ pean women are all liberated while Arab women are all oppressed. Sha'rawi in Arabic does tell the story of Eastern women who suffer from oppressive conditions, such as Atiyya Hanim, but also describes the case of a Frenchwoman condemned for murdering a man who slandered her sexual honor in the newspaper (Sha'rawi, 139-140). Sha'rawi is shocked that no one in Paris seems to sympathize with the woman, who is, in her view, a victim of male exploitation of women's vulnerability when sex­ ual purity is the issue. This story does not make it into the English text. Atiyya Hanim's story of Eastern women's oppression, however, is trans­ lated in full as "Portrait of the Hard Life of a Woman."

The reader of Sha'rawi's memoirs in Arabic will be struck by the en­ ergy with which she decries Western stereotypes of Egyptian women and by Sha'rawi's refreshing assumption that women in Europe and the United States are as much in need of Arab feminists' succour as the re­ verse. When she is wrapping up the Rome conference in 1923, she and the other attendees are granted an audience with Mussolini. Sha'rawi does not miss the opportunity to put in a good word for the Italian woman: "I repeated my personal appeal that the Italian woman be granted political rights" (Sha'rawi, 260). The reader never gets the sense that Sha'rawi thought of herself on inferior ground with European women. A similar confident tone informs Sha'rawi's United States tour and her lectures to Americans in various venues, reminding the reader that American women were not that much further along in their struggle than Egyptian women at that time. Moreover, Sha'rawi narrates several

160 The Writer as Text

incidents that highlight her insistence on Egypt's place among nations, as when the Egyptian delegation at the Rome conference notices the ab­ sence of an Egyptian flag among the other flags and quickly produces a large flag to be given pride of place next to the Italian flag.

The Anglophonic reader would naturally have an interest in know­ ing about the European people in Sharawi's life. But the overall effect of this pattern of excisions and inclusions is to exaggerate the European el­ ement in the English text. This effect is shaped by the readerly expecta­ tion of Arab woman as escapee. The back cover blurb from the prominent Middle East Studies scholar Hourani reinforces the idea that Sha'rawi could only have been rescued from her narrow straits as an Eastern woman through a European "window" of rescue.

CAMOUFLAGING CLASS

The English version of Mudhakkirati softens Sha'rawi's class biases, very evident in the Arabic publication, in keeping with the pressures of the United States reception environment to see Sha'rawi as an idealized victim and a heroic rebel against her society. Harem Years does give the reader information about class in the front and end matter of the book, but does not reveal or analyze Sha'rawi's elegant dodging of class issues in her narrative.

Sha'rawi's nostalgia for the days when families such as hers were served by a small army of slaves, employees, and peasant farmers might temper the sympathy a United States readership would have toward the ostensible victim of harem life. She looks back on those years with hap­ piness, she says, "especially when I am confronted with some of the modern customs, which make me long to return the past, and all it con­ tains of custom and memories" (Sha'rawi, 56). What are these customs that she longs to revive? She continues:

I recall, for example, our grand house with its spacious apartments and vast parlor, and how it used to teem with slavegirls and bondsmen. They were well-trained to work, sincere in performing their duties, sensitive to the responsibilities placed on their shoulders, respectful of their employers, careful with the things in their hands, and loving to­ ward the children of their employers who were born under their hands. Each one would rise to his task in the best manner and would accom­ pany us for better or for worse, and would never reach his hand toward anything, no matter how costly, and would not covet a single thing but

Packaging "Ruda": Sha'rawi's Memoirs in the United States

the good pleasure of those who had authority over him. And we recip­

rocated this love with them, and appreciated in them this loyalty.

(56---57)

161

Sha'rawi never baldly calls the eunuchs "eunuchs"; the translation does (39). Nor does Sha'rawi nakedly term her husband's first consort a "slave-concubine," as Badran does; rather she uses the decorous term "um awladuhu" (mother of his children), which underlines the legal rights and improved status (she could no longer be sold) the woman had gained by virtue of bearing the children of a free man (Sha'rawi, 82). This evasion on Sha'rawi's part might be clarified by a translator's note. To eliminate Sha'rawi's evasion in the translation of the text itself, how­ ever, disables the reader from learning something from the narrator's del­ icate circumlocutions.

When the Revolution of 1919 excites the masses to do more than just support the transfer of power from elite Britons to elite Egyptians, but to revolt against the landowning system itself, Sha'rawi is quick to censure the "excesses" of the crowds. These excesses are attacks on the houses of English gentry in Sha'rawi's village, whose privileges strik­ ingly resemble the privileges of Sha'rawi's own family. She reports that her nephew risked his life to prevent this destruction of English residen­ tial property (Sha'rawi, 17 I ). This passage is not in Harem Years ' section summarizing the Revolution.

Details in the Arabic text that allow the reader to see Sha'rawi's class bias in play are more often than not absent from the English version. One example is the story of Sha'rawi's first shopping trip. In Mudhakkirati, Sha'rawi goes on for pages about the intrigues of the door-to-door peddlers, lower-class women who, she says, ruined "great families" with their intrigues, even attempting to fall between herself and her husband. These entrepreneurs were also loansharks (Sha'rawi, 61). Her fierce "I hated those women (niswa)" (Sha'rawi, 61) is translated as "I didn't like most of these peddlers" in Harem Years ( 48). In Mudhakki­ rati, when Sha'rawi recounts how she gained her mother's approval for her novel first shopping trip to a department store in the city, she says that what finally persuaded her mother is the prospect of cutting out the prof­ its of these meddlesome peddler middlewomen with "their evils and ma­ lignities" (89). In Harem Years, the class antagonism of this passage is blunted. The desire to eliminate the peddlerwomen is not mentioned; that part of the passage seems to have been abridged into the phrase "wise spending": "I finally persuaded my mother to accompany me. She was

162 The Writer as Text

then quick to see the advantages of shopping in person. Not only was there a wide range of goods to choose from but there was money to be saved through wise spending." (Badran, 69). Mudhakkirati allows us to see, perhaps in spite of Sha'rawi, that feminist consciousness conceived in privileged terms of personal autonomy was played out against a colo­ nial economy in which modernization profited Western business and cer­ tain affluent sectors of Egyptian society at the expense of vast numbers of local distributors and small producers (Ahmed, 1994, 146).

The English text changes Sha'rawi's use of the word "ladies" (sayyi­ dat), which, though it may be an unconscious reflex on Sha'rawi's part, is accurate, to "women" (nisa'). The title of the Wafd Central Ladies Com­ mittee is rendered "Wafd Central Women 's Committee" in English. It was really composed of ladies, women of high status and great privilege in their society. (The high point of Sha'rawi's naivete about class is when she-still very young-and Mme Rushdi decide that women's struggle in Egypt would best be furthered by building a tennis court [Sha'rawi, 99] .) Softening the elitism of the committee's title in English translation makes invisible to the Anglophonic reader the most salient drawback of early feminism in Egypt. This is the will of elite women to "appear on the feminist stage as representatives of the millions of women in their own societies. To what extent they do violence to the women they claim au­ thority to write and speak about is a question that is seldom raised" (Lazreg, 332). Leila Ahmed's reading of Sha'rawi is a critique of this vi­ olence, a markedly different reading from the naivete about class that Harem Years asks its readers to have (Ahmed, 1994, 176-I 79). Badran 's second book shows that she does understand the complex of class issues in which the nationalist and feminist activities began. It is the vulnerabil­ ity of Harem Years to the pressures of reception reserved for Arab women's writing that obscures the issue of class.

To her immense credit, of course, Sha'rawi went on to found institu­ tions that addressed women's health, education, and poverty. She gener­ ously opened her house and her patrimony to enable future generations of Egyptian women to reach the highest levels of a formal education de­ nied to Sha'rawi, and generally to gain more access to the resources of their society. Her work netted a minimum marriage age for both sexes, pushed for limits on polygamy, and strove for women's inclusion in po­ litical rights. As Amina Sa'id puts it in her introduction to the Dar al­ Hilal publication, Sha'rawi may have been "born in a golden cradle, but she rejected amusement and chose to spend her life in struggle and strife for the sake of the most noble and lofty of goals" (Sha'rawi, 7). It is that

Packaging "Huda ": Sha 'rawi 's Memoirs in the United States 163

record of accomplishment, even with its flaws intact, which will serve Sha'rawi; there is no need to render her politically correct in our terms today. However, showing Sha'rawi's aristocratic bent would go against the grain of United States readerly expectations that an Arab feminist be an idealized victim rather than a grand and regal lady.

HAREM/ZING THE NARRATIVE

Mudhakkirati means "My Memoirs." Amal Amireh points out that "Shaarawi 's title puts her at the center of her own narrative, emphasizes her subjectivity and agency, and identifies her as the source of enuncia­ tion" (23). The Feminist Press book Harem Years, on the other hand, "identifies Shaarawi with an institution and locates the narrative in a harem" (23). Harem Years targets for translation, with rearrangement and abridgement, only the early chapters, which are about Sha'rawi's girl­ hood and coming-of-age. The translator's division of the material is structured around the notion of "harem": "The Family," "Childhood in the Harem 1884-92," "A Separate Life 1892-1900," and "A Wife in the Harem 1900-18." An epilogue summarizes the events of several more chapters, which cover the beginning of Sha'rawi's work as a nationalist and feminist public figure. Badran explains, "After Part Four, Huda's [sic] account changes in tone and content. She begins to speak about how she and other women became nationalist activists and started the femi­ nist movement. This portion of her memoirs becomes fragmentary" (3). It is this portion that represents the bulk of the Arabic version. Its "frag­ mentary" nature consists of the back-and-forth between direct narration and interpolated documents. The meaning of Sha'rawi's story in the Ara­ bic version lies, I believe, in the weaving between her narration and the documents, and in the relationship between the personal story and the much more expansive political story. The transformation of Sha'rawi's account into a harem memoir makes the English version a radically dif­ ferent reading experience from the Arabic version. The English version permits the reader to relegate Sha'rawi's writings to a harem of "First World" creation, a ghetto where Arab women's writing is put by the United States reception process, there to languish behind the mystique of "Third World woman's difference." Perhaps a full translation of the por­ tion summarized in the epilogue would have counterbalanced this haremizing effect.

Every text creates its ideal reader by implying the body of knowl­ edge and the expectations the reader is presumed to possess. 1 1 The readers

164 The Writer as Text

toward whom the book Harem Years gestures in its title, prefatory and end matter, covers, and the texture of the text itself, are expected to ap­ proach the book with the harem genre in mind. The translator says that the text "will appeal to anyone eager to know about life in the harem-a word highly charged in the Western popular imagination . . . . First-hand accounts by women who lived in harems are rare." Here is the transla­ tor's explanation of the memoirs' importance: "The Memoirs of Huda Shaarawi have dual significance. They give insight into harem experi­ ence in Egypt in its final decades. At the same time they reveal how the roots of upper-class women's feminism in Egypt are found in the nexus of their harem experience and growing change around the turn of the century" (20). The Egyptian publisher's preface asserts the significance of the memoirs on very different grounds: "This book is considered among the most important and most valuable to appear in the Kitab al­ Hilal series from its inception, because it treats the most monumental po­ litical events of the first half of our modern history. The immortal leader recounts these events within her memoirs, which she wrote herself, aim­ ing at the utmost probity in every word which her pen inscribed" (Sha'rawi, 2). The Arabic version of Sha'rawi's memoirs calls for a reader with knowledge of certain conventions, too; the knowledge de­ manded is of the topography and society of pre-WWII Cairo, its old buildings, bridges, and streets, its customs, protocols, and niceties.

The translator seems to offer a critique of the Western harem genre, saying that it mystifies what was "simply the portion of the house where women and children conducted their daily lives" (7). Amal Amireh ar­ gues that "this critique of 'harem writing' turns out to be an empty ges­ ture" (23), because so many other elements of the English text are cast toward the conventions of the harem literature genre. The diction and syntax of the English book's front matter, for example, calls into play the rhetorical affects of the Western harem literature genre: "The harem or household where Huda [sic] grew up in Cairo was in the then new and fashionable area of Ismailiya . . . Here the mature Sultan Pasha kept his Cairo harem-Huda's [sic] mother and his wife, (who figures in the memoirs) and their children." Sultan Basha's wives were not "kept" any more than Lady Cromer or Mme Rushdi or women of the upper classes in the United States were "kept" anywhere by anyone. Rather, they nego­ tiate places for themselves among the choices made available to them in ways tempered by their degree of access to resources and privileges. The grammatical subordination of the Eastern women in this clause is a rhetorical trigger alluding to the Western heritage of harem stories about

Packaging "Huda": Sha 'rawi 's Memoirs in the United States 165

subordinated Eastern women and makes little sense if separated from this reception environment.

The placement and captioning of photographs in Harem Years refer the reader to knowledge gained elsewhere about "the harem." One photo placed in the section on holidays is captioned, "Huda [sic] and friend pose in Egyptian peasant dresses. Dressing up was a favourite pastime in the harem" (47). The second sentence reminds the reader of the framing notion "harem," although the word is not in the accompanying text at all. What the caption alludes to is the convention that ennui was a defining characteristic of "harem life" and required especial effort at amusement to relieve. This notion of "the harem" as a site of trivial amusements in­ fantilized the women who were the objects of observation. 1 2

The translator explains that she uses the English word harem because the "standard transliteration 'harim' would be unfamiliar to the general reader" (3). Perhaps the use of something unfamiliar to the general reader, with an explanation, might have jolted the reader out of the comfortable pattern of expectations and created a more challenging and transformative reading experience. In any case, there is barely any use of the word harim in the entire Arabic text to worry about. Sha'rawi only uses the word once in 457 pages. 1 3 The English version uses the word harem twenty-five times in the Introduction alone and numerous more times in endnotes and captions. By contrast, the only time Sha'rawi uses a special term to refer to a household location is when she mentions the salamlik, a room to which men were restricted when they came to visit (Sha'rawi, 33). In Ara­ bic, Sha'rawi does use "haram" for "missus," so that, just as Lady Cromer is the woman whose name is subordinated to Cromer's by marriage, "Haram Rushdi Basha" is Rushdi's wife. Harem is not- an operative term in the Arabic memoirs because it does not delineate a meaningful cate­ gory for Sha'rawi. Harem is the word of the outside looking in. Sha'rawi's terms represent the narrative perspective of the writerly self looking out and moving about the world in ways that seem natural to her (and which are hardly more restrictive than the orbits of the average Victorian or Ed­ wardian woman of the same class). When Sha'rawi does write specifically about the household site, her description does not have that oppressed vic­ tim tone. Rather, she writes in glowing terms that "Our house was guided by regularity and was the epitome of calm. Tranquility was settled upon it, as a result of accord between the servants and concord and cooperation between all who were in it" (Sha'rawi, 58).

Not only is the word harim missing, but the issue of seclusion as a problem is not an organizing principle in Mudhakkirati. If Huda Hanim

166 The Writer as Text

and her contemporaries seem to live in seclusion to Western observers, there is nothing secluded about her life as she describes it. Her mother's house is awhirl with guests, visitors, sojourners, petitioners, to the extent that young Huda Hanim finds the openness of the household taxing (33). The poor teem at the door for alms; the relatives come and go summer and winter; the upper-class men and women make the rounds of social calls; Mother plays cards with friends, does charitable affairs, keeps up with court life; Huda Hanim enjoys visiting friends, neighbors, kin, the palace, Jabaliya, and vacationing in Helwan, Ramleh, Alexandria, and Minya. A young woman of quality in tum-of-the-century London or Paris could not have led a less "secluded" life, except that she would have been permitted to sit, under close supervision, with gentlemen callers. By contrast, the problem of seclusion seems to the English reader a central issue defining Sha'rawi's lifestyle. 1 4

Even the editorial mistakes in the text suggest that the editing process is not free from the pressures of the reception environment. One phrase in the Arabic version refers to Mme Sha'rawi and Mme Rushdi conversing about "offspring and immortality." This slips past the editors of the English version as "offspring and immorality, " a strange associa­ tion that caused me to do a double take. It could, of course, be a simple typographical error. On the other hand, the harem, in the conventions of Western discourse about the harem, was, in fact, considered a place of both excessive offspring and excessive immorality. Could this have con­ tributed to this error getting past an editorial eye embedded in the United States horizon of expectations that I have described?

A final issue, albeit minor, that reinforces the packaging of Sha'rawi as a victim in the English version is the treatment of Sha'rawi's mother. Harem Years introduces Sha'rawi's mother by explaining that mother, though Circassian, was not a slave ( I 6). Separated from a reception envi­ ronment built for Muslim-women-as-victim stories, such an observation adds strangely little. Migration from the Caucasus to the Arab world was not unusual during this period of Czarist conquest, and free Circassians did live in Egypt. Introducing the mother as not-a-slave, then rearranging the material so that the memoir begins with the mother instead of the fa­ ther, heightens the perception of the reader that this is the story of a vic­ tim, the subjugated daughter of supine "harem women" (a Badran term, 19). Shaw'rawi's narrative preserves enough indeterminacy and com­ plexity in drawing the mother figure to allow the reader to wonder if she might have had more influence on her famous daughter than is assumed, as Leila Ahmed's invaluable work on Sha'rawi points out. It is the

Packaging "Huda ": Sha 'rawi 's Memoirs in the United States 167

mother's angry stance against Sha'rawi's husband, for example, that en­

abled Sha'rawi to defy him and live apart because his polygamy was un­

acceptable to her. Here is a woman who could not read or write, and yet

extracted from her daughter's suitor a pre-nuptial agreement preserving

her rights-and insisted on enforcing it. The daughter later will lead a

campaign that works within Islamic legal traditions to limit polygamy.

Perhaps Iqbal Hanim had an unacknowledged influence on the work of

her daughter.

REOPENING SHA'RAWI'S MEMOIRS

Let me say here, as I have maintained throughout, that this is not a cri­

ticism of particular translating individuals or editing individuals for

anything so nebulous and B-movie conspiratorial as harboring neoimpe­

rialist sentiments or practicing neocolonial feminism. "The most I can

say," to draw upon Spivak, "is that it is possible to read these texts . . . in

a politically useful way. Such an approach presupposes that a 'disinter­

ested' reading attempts to render transparent the interests of the hege­

monic readership" ( 1989, 1 9 1 ). Amireh adds a moral motivation for

examining this issue: "The emphasis on difference, unfortunately, under­

mines the book's ability to build bridges of solidarity and understanding

among women from different cultures" (22). 1 5 There are also aesthetic

reasons to call for the challenging of reader expectations in translating

texts across culture. Wolfgang Iser says,

. . . expectations are scarcely ever fulfilled in truly literary texts. If they were, then such texts would be confined to the individualization of a given expectation, and one would inevitably ask what such an intention was supposed to achieve . . . For the more a text individualizes or con­ firms an expectation it has initially aroused, the more aware we be­ come of its didactic purpose, so that at best we can only accept or reject the thesis forced upon us. More often than not, the very clarity of such texts will make us want to free ourselves from their clutches. (53)

This calls for texts that make reading less smooth. It calls for publishers,

translators, authors, and readers to become conscious of comfortable pat­

terns of reception of the sort that restrict Arab women's writings to the

ghetto of victims, escapees, and pawns. If we are to continue discussing

Huda Sha'rawi in English through the medium of Harem Years, it is im­

portant to be aware of the limitations put on the text by its Anglophonic

168 The Writer as Text

reception environment. It may be desirable, in addition, to let multiple translations abound so that one English version does not become the only funnel through which the Anglophonic reader knows Sha'rawi. 16

Looking forward, more study of the Sha'rawi phenomenon using re­ ception theory may be able to make sense of the stridently conflicting views held about Huda Sha'rawi in Arab countries. In that contest, some on the Left who are in blithe ignorance of the woman and her work in­ voke her name willy-nilly. In one instance, she is invoked in support of change in the superstructure and the relations of production, 17 which might have perturbed her as much as did the attacks on propertied classes during the Revolution of 191 9. Sha'rawi's moderate, reformist approach, which justified improving the education and position of women mainly in terms of women's roles as mothers in the new nation and which op­ posed a change in Islamic inheritance laws, was hardly radical feminism. Meanwhile, some people on the right consider her name anathema and her work a blasphemy against God, country, and family. 1 8 Sha'rawi's personal decorum and concern to observe propriety in all her actions can hardly have been studied by these opponents, with whom she actually may have more in common than some of her modern-day supporters. Happily, there are also more measured voices in the Arab reception of Sha'rawi. But a survey of that reading environment requires another pol­ itics of reception study.

Sha'rawi is a figure who merits careful rereading. What is the mean­ ing of Sha'rawi's life and work-for Egypt in her own period, first of all? How has Sha'rawi's meaning changed since she became an icon for women's liberation and how is she read by contesting ideological groups? What local and regional meanings does her example hold for women's movements in Egypt, the Arab world, and the world? How can our "global" age benefit from the discursive record of her work in the in­ ternational feminist arena? These are questions that take Sha'rawi's sig­ nificance out of the harem of Third World women's difference and into relevance for women and men everywhere.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I thank the staff of the National Library in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emi­ rates, for their assistance, and Fulbright College at the University of Arkansas for the 1996 Research Assignment that allowed me to write this essay.

Packaging "Huda ": Sha'rawi's Memoirs in the United States 169

NOTES

1The term is from the work of Hans Robert Jauss. See Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 982).

21 thank Lisa Suhair Majaj, Deborah Najor, and Amal Amireh for inviting

me to be a discussant on their 1 995 MESA panel on Arab Women's Writing and

Politics of Reception. Exposure to their ideas, and encouragement from Leila

Ahmed at the same MESA, invigorate the argument I develop here. 3Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagent to Odal­

isque. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1 999). 4See their articles and also those by Azizah al-Hibri and Mona Fayad in

Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists, Joanna Kadi, ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1 994 ).

5Places where her work can be found in this intersection are her essay "Un­

picked Fruits" in Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists, Joanna Kadi, ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1 994 ), 56-6 1 , and an essay on the tomboy in Arab culture, "AI-Dawwara," in Jo 's Girls; Tomboy Tales of High Adventure, True Grit, & Real Life, Christian McEwen, ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1 997), 250-256.

6Personal communication from Barbara Nimri Aziz, May 1 993. 7 All translations from the Sha'rawi text are my own. 8The first hemistich of Imra ul-Qais's famous "hanging ode" or mu 'allaqa, a

pre-Islamic poem whose opening lines are almost universally memorized in the

Arab world (translation mine). 9Even a short account of Sha'rawi's earliest political and organizational ex­

perience, her membership in a ladies' committee supporting the Turks in their

war against the Greeks in 1 895, which in the Arabic account occurs in her early

married life before separation, does not appear in Harem Years. 10Badran includes this passage in her book, Feminists, Islam, and Nation:

Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1 995).

1 1Walker Gibson calls this "the mock reader"; Gerald Prince, "the narratee";

others, "the implied reader." 12Some of the earliest examples of this convention occur in Samuel John­

son's Rasselas and Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women. 1 3Sha'rawi uses the word harim once, when she explains that she chose a man

to tutor her in Arabic who was elderly enough to enter the harim of their house without offending the conservative sensibilities of her family (Sha'rawi, 83).

1 70 The Writer as Text

1 4See Leila Ahmed's review of Harem Years, "Women of Egypt," The Women 's Review of Books, Nov. 1 987, 7-8, and Amal Amireh, "Writing the Dif­ ference: Feminists' Invention of the 'Arab Woman,' " in Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women's Literature and Film, Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose, eds. (New York: Garland, 1996), 1 85-21 1 .

1 5She is speaking here o f Nayra Atiya's Khul-khal: Five Egyptian Women Tell Their Stories but in an essay that also analyzes Harem Years, beginning with her next sentence.

161 thank Heidi Liddle for the following references toward pursuing the translation angle: Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevore, eds., Translation, History, and Culture (London: Printer Publishers, 1990); Lori Chamberlain, "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation," in Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjec­ tivity, Ideology, Lawrence Venuti, ed. (London: Routledge, 1 992), 57-74.

17 Abd al-Azim Ramadan does this in his introduction to Nabil Raghib, Huda Sha 'rawi wa 'Asr al Tanwir; Tarikh al Masriyun (Cairo: al-Hay'a al-Mas­ ri ya al-'Amma Iii Kutub, 1988). Raghib himself shows he has read the memoirs only hastily by making obvious reading mistakes, such as when he assumes Sha'rawi is referring to her own mother instead of her father's other wife when she says, "I loved this woman with a great love" (in fact, she very pointedly does not say this about her mother) and goes on to explain how that "great love" was so formative an influence on the psychological preparation of the leader (55).

1 80ne such attack is carried out by Muhammad Fahmy Abd al-Wahhab in a booklet entitled, "Women's movements in the east and their links to imperialism and international Zionism"-Al-Harakat al-Nisa 'iya fi al-Sharq wa Silataha bi al-Isti'mar wa, al-Suhyuniya al-Alamiya (n.p.: Dar al-I'tisam, n.d.). Another ex­ ample of this is Wahby Sulaiman Ghawaji, Al Mar 'a al-Muslima, (Beirut: Mu'assassat al-Risala, 1982), 148-153.

WORKS CITED

Abd al-Wahhab, Muhammad Fahmy. N.d. Al-harakat al-nisa 'iyya fi al-sharq wa silatiha bi al-isti 'mar wa al-suhyuniyya al- 'alamiyya. N.p.: Dar al-I'tisam.

Ahmed, Leila. 1987. "Women of Egypt." The Women 's Review of Books, Nov. ( 1 987): 7-8.

---. "Between Two Worlds: The Formation of a Tum-of-the-Century Egypt­ ian Feminist." Life/Lines: Theorizing Women 's Autobiography. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck, eds. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, ( 1 988). 154-174.

- - -. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale UP, 1994.

Packaging "Ruda": Sha 'rawi's Memoirs in the United States 17 I

Amireh, Amal. "Writing the Difference: Feminists' Invention of the Arab Woman." In Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women 's Literature and Film. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose, eds. New York: Garland, 1996. 1 85-21 1 .

Atiya, Nayra. Khul-Khaal: Five Egyptian Women Tell Their Stories. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1 982.

Aziz, Barbara Nimri. "AI-Dawwara." In Jo 's Girls; Tomboy Tales of High Adven­ ture, True Grit, & Real Life. Christian McEwan, ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. 250-256.

Badran, Margo, trans. Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist. New York: Feminist Press, 1 986.

- -- . "Badran's Response [to Mervat Hatem's Review of Harem Years.]" AMEWS NEWS (Association of Middle Eastern Women's Studies), 2, 7 May ( 1 988a).

- -. "Critical Forum." AMEWS NEWS 2, 8 Oct. ( 1 988b): 1 7-20. - -- . Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt.

Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1 995. Bassnett, Susan and Andre Lefevere, ed. Translation, History and Culture. Lon­

don: Printer Publishers, 1 990. Chamberlain, Lori. "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation." In Rethinking

Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. Lawrence Venuti, ed. Lon­ don: Routledge, 1 992. 57-74.

Childers, Joseph and Gary Hentzi. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1 995.

Hatem, Mervat. "Feminist Analysis and the Subjection World of Women." AMEWS NEWS (Association of Middle East Women's Studies) 2, 6 Feb. ( 1 988): 7-9.

Ghawaji, Wahby Sulaiman. Al-mar'a al-muslima. Beirut: Mu'assassat al-Risala, 1982.

Guerin, Wilfred. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Iser, Wolfgang. "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach." In Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, Jane Tompkins, ed. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1 980. 50-69.

Jauss, Hans Robert. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis, Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1 982.

Johnson, Samuel [ 1 709-1 784]. History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927.

Kadi, Joanna. Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists. Boston: South End Press, 1 994.

172 The Writer as Text

Kahf, Mohja. Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque. Austin: U of Texas P, 1999.

Lazreg, Marnia. "Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria." In Conflicts in Feminism. Evelyn Fox Keller and Marianne Hirsch, eds. New York: Routledge, 1 990. 326-248.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse." In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1 99 1 . 51-80.

ul-Qais, Imra. "Mu'allaqa," Sharh al Mu 'allaqat al 'Ashr wa Akhhar Shu'ara 'i­ him. Ahmad bin Amin al-Shanqiti and Fayez Tarhini, eds. Beirut: Dar al­ Kitab al-' Arabi, 1 994. 25-33.

Raghib, Nabil. Huda Sha 'rawi wa 'Asr al Tanwir. Cairo: al-Hay'a al-Masriyya al-' Amma Ii al-Kutub, 1 988.

Said, Edward. Orienta/ism. New York: Vintage Books, 1 979. Sha'rawi, Huda. Mudhakkirati. Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1 981. Wollstonecraft, Mary f 1759-1 797] . A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Lon­

don and New York: Penguin Books, 1 992.