Women's Writing and Muslim Societies: The Search for Dialogue, 1920 - Present

by Sharif Gemie

Overview

This is the first book to evaluate works by Western and Muslim women writing about the Muslim experience in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and the United States. In addition, Sharif Gemie looks at how women’s writing about Muslim societies has changed over the past century, from the playful and humorous works by pioneering female travelers like Freya Stark and Edith Wharton, to more recent accounts marked by fear, hostility, and even disgust, such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter. Gemie also identifies and examines a new wave of female Muslim writers whose work touches on problems of integration, identity crises, and the changing nature of Muslim cultures. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780708325407
Publisher:	University of Wales Press
Publication date:	01/15/2013
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Sharif Gemie is professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Glamorgan.

Read an Excerpt

Women's Writing and Muslim Societies

The Search for Dialogue, 1920-Present

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By Sharif Gemie

University of Wales Press

Copyright © 2012 Sharif Gemie
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7083-2540-7

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CHAPTER 1

Travellers' Tales: a Typology

'This was never meant to be a book.'

Bee Rowlatt

The theme of the journey is present in all these hundred works. Sometimes it is there in the most obvious form, as a physical transition from A to B. But nearly always these hundred women are more interested in other aspects of travel: for them, the most important point of the journey is not tangible movement through space, but the more troubling, intangible changes that take place within the traveller; a process that can take a few days or last a whole lifetime. The manner in which these women use the image of the journey even in the titles of their works makes this clear. Sattareh Farmaian subtitles her autobiography 'A woman's journey from her father's harem through the Islamic revolution', and the title to Deborah Kanafani's work evokes how she 'found her way through politics, love and obedience in the Middle East'. Some of the most important journeys can be extremely short: when Susan Nathan travelled from Tel Aviv to the Arab town of Tamra, a mere hour's train journey, she realised that she had nonetheless crossed 'a boundary, one that is real as well as psychological'. Western polemicists such as Oriana Fallaci and Melanie Phillips do not travel, but their books concern migration and its effects: they are therefore still writing about travel, even if they are not travel-writers. In fact, only two of our authors are genuinely static. Shirin Ebadi's Iran Awakening is a political autobiography. Ebadi wrote her book while still living in Iran; she went into exile to Canada in 2009, and thus one could claim that her work was a 'chronicle of a journey foretold'. Nawal El Saadawi's The Hidden Face of Eve is a collection of essays written by an Egyptian doctor living in Egypt. There is no obvious journey here, but in an indirect, metaphorical manner, it could be said that her arguments have travelled from Egypt to the West; certainly, she discusses how Western readers will receive her arguments.

Most of the accounts of journeys in these works fall into one of three categories. There are the reasonably clear-cut examples of day-by-day travel writing written by the older orientalists; the more extended accounts of exile and migration, sometimes stretching over decades, produced by some of the Muslim writers; finally, the provocative idea of undertaking a journey to the other while staying within one's own country. Dervla Murphy wrote of 'travel of another sort' when she visited Bradford in 1986, and Sadek Hajji and Stéphanie Marteau undertook a 'Journey into Muslim France'.

This chapter will present a preliminary typology of these travellers' tales. In examining these hundred works we face a constant challenge: are these authors simply too different to permit any easy comparison? In this chapter I will address this question by exploring several means by which their works can be classified: by literary genres; by types of author; as different types of women's writing; as rather unusual forms of political commentary. As this book is not principally a work of literary criticism or analysis, the discussion of forms and structures will be brief. My intention here is not to establish one single, correct classification; like a pack of cards, these texts can be arranged and categorised in diverse ways. By considering different methods of classification, we can reach a clearer understanding of the nature of these books. Some important political issues will be introduced in this chapter, and then discussed at greater length in the chapters that follow.

Forms of writing

With a few important qualifications, this book is primarily concerned with three literary genres: travel writing, semi-autobiographical memoirs and polemics. These genres can be presented chronologically, as evolving forms but – in truth – they stretch over each other, across the decades, like irregular archaeological strata. Travel writing is undoubtedly the oldest form, and seemed to come almost instinctively to the first generation of twentieth-century women writers on Muslim societies. These colonists, colonists' wives and colonial civil servants refer back to the landmark works of T. E. Lawrence and – to a lesser extent – to the Thousand and One Nights and to Kipling. They write in the first person, and they date their entries, day by day, reasonably precisely: in such works one immediately gains a sense of the author's close emotional presence, and we share in their journeys as they move across new landscapes. Obviously, there is no fixed date for the final end of this genre: it remained the favoured form well into the 1960s, but Anne Brunswic was still using it to record her stay in Ramallah in 2004.

The reports by professionally trained women, such as those written by the sociologist Ruth Woodsmall or the archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, suggest a shift away from this established format. As political issues and social debates grew more important, the simplicity of the day-by-day record no longer seemed so attractive or useful; it actually prevents longer discursions on substantial points, and often reduces the author's thoughts to a constant recital of first impressions. By the 1980s and 1990s the memoir – or the semi-autobiographical memoir – had become the norm. In part, this may simply be because the nature of the journey changed: when the surgeon Pauline Cutting was posted to the Bourj al-Brajneh Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, she arrived in a plane in 1985 and flew out in 1987: such speedy journeys provide little material for the type of mock-heroic recitals of extended odysseys that the older orientalists liked to tell. Between those two dates, she made some journeys to different bases for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, but it was clear that the substance of Cutting's experience could not be expressed through a series of vignettes concerning the different places that she had seen, for the most important aspect of her work was her long period of enforced immobility in a refugee camp under siege. Furthermore, the important new authors of the 1990s, the many Muslim women who began to publish their works with increasing frequency, never make use of the travel-writing format. For these new generations of writers, a reflexive dimension was an essential component of their works, and this could not be expressed through the older format. However, similarities remain: these memoirs are always first-person works, and they are often still structured around journeys.

Finally, some writers turn to a form that is less obviously rooted in the revelation of self and accounts of travel: the polemic. Chahdortt Djavann's Bas les voiles! (Down with the Veil!), published in 2003, could be cited as marking an important turning point. These writers wish to distance themselves from the established traditions of personal and confessional literature, and to claim a wider viewpoint. They are no longer merely witnesses or participants; they are accusers and judges. Their works are more explicitly angry; indeed, as will be seen, they frequently offer the raw emotion of their words as a guarantee of their authenticity. Sometimes – as in the case of Melanie Phillips's Londonistan – they move from the first person to the more impersonal third person, but in most cases, despite the claim to a wider viewpoint, these authors still write as 'I', and their works often retain a substantial autobiographical dimension. Thus, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes that 'I used to be a Muslim; I know what I am talking about.' Furthermore, their works often make comparisons between diverse places and regions and thus retain a similarity with the older forms of travel writing.

The majority of the works to be considered in this book can be fitted reasonably easily into one of these three formats. This is not to say that no other formats are used. Several female authors have edited collections of interviews. This format is nearly always justified by the author with a statement along the lines of 'I wished to give speech to those who have none', or that the author aims to present 'a personal history of the Palestinians, in their words, to provide a more humanist understanding of what it means to be Palestinian in the twenty-first century'. The results are often disappointing. Inevitably, a collection of different 'speeches' lacks consistency, and once the author has given these texts the high status of the 'speech of the speechless', it then becomes almost impossible to criticize them. Paradoxically, it is often the author's or editor's interventions, introductions and conclusions that are more revealing than their painstakingly gathered interviews. Only an extremely well-edited collection, such as that presented by Bouzar and Kada, or a more synthetic approach, such as that taken by Pardis Mahdavi, escape this contradiction.

Other formats are available. Zlata's Diary is a simple, unadorned diary by a teenage girl from Sarajevo: an effective and moving account of a tragic experience. Laura Blumenfeld's Revenge: a Story of Hope is constructed as a type of extended meditation on the ethics of revenge, caused by the shock she felt after a terrorist attack on her father. In practice, the work takes the form of a series of journeys to different sources of opinion and evidence. British comedian Shappi Khorsandi has attempted to tell a migrant's story as comedy in A Beginner's Guide to Acting English. While one can hear her distinctive, resonant voice reaching the punchlines at the end of the paragraphs, the final result is not impressive: neither particularly amusing nor genuinely observant. Two other contemporary British writers – Zaiba Malik and Shelina Janmohamed – frequently adopt a semicomic tone; Malik's We Are a Muslim (2011) is particularly striking, for humour and tragedy run parallel in her work, giving it a distinctive, edgy feel. A couple of French-language works have – apparently – pioneered the female Muslim erotic confessional, one of which is presented as 'the audacious and sensual confession of a modern Sheherazade'. Here it is noticeable how hard the publishers work to exploit an apparently exotic coupling. Imagine – a Muslim woman with a sex life! Who would have thought it possible? Obviously, Muslim women have as much right to produce pornography/erotica as anyone else, but these works seem to say more about French obsessions with a mysterious, sensual Orient than about women's self-discovery. One or two of our hundred works stray into the less-than-attractive format of the semi-ghost-written celebrity autobiography, but even here there are some surprises. Waris Dirie's Desert Flower tells her extraordinary story, from desert nomad to supermodel, and while some passages seem to celebrate the glamorous lifestyle of the permanently gorgeous, the narrative is laced with sufficient self-deprecating humour to avoid vanity, and the work ends with a moving, heart-felt plea against the practice of female genital mutilation. Jehan Sadat's autobiography does follow some easily recognisable clichés of the rags-to-riches story, but also includes some extended passages of perceptive observation concerning the state of Egypt. The last minority genre worth noting are works that are constructed as dialogues, of which I have only found a few examples: Bee Rowlatt and May Witwit, Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad and Daniela Norris and Shireen Anabtawi, Crossing Qalandiya, to which Bouzar and Kada's distinctively edited collection of interviews could be added. These works raise questions about power, politics and the nature of dialogue to which I will return in the conclusion.

Women writing to women

In a possibly over-schematic manner, one can identify five principal types of author among the sample of a hundred works. These can be listed in an approximately chronological fashion.

Orientalists

Women of leisure but, more often in the decades after the Second World War, women freely adopting travel as a means to discover new experiences, and even to search for the exotic. This category eventually blurs with the 'intrepids', those who took the hippy trail out to the East in the 1960s and 1970s, and with some rather ambitious tourists.

Professional women

Whether sociologists, anthropologists, reporters, surgeons, nurses or aid workers, these are women whose journeys are structured by the demands of their profession. As trained, professional people they often possess a certain set of standards by which to judge the societies they visit: their attitudes are therefore often more critical, more judgemental than those of the orientalists.

Migrant Muslims

This is a complex category, for often their migration is not a simple process. For example, Afschineh Latifi was born in Iran in 1969. She left with her mother in 1980, and then followed a complex, difficult route across Europe before finally reaching the USA in 1982. She then finally travelled, briefly, to Iran in 1995. If we consider her at that point, should we classify her as an Iranian returning to Iran, or as an American visiting Iran? While this category of author is clearly the one which is growing fastest, and has produced some memorable and striking works, it is significant that rather than producing a simple narrative which asserts a clear Muslim identity, their works describe a far more tortuous process.

Western Muslims, converts

This, too, is a complex category. For example, Qanta Ahmed is an American-trained doctor and a Muslim. She applied to work in Saudi Arabia in about 1999. She considered that she 'knew' Islam, but she was often bewildered and sometimes alienated by what she found in Saudi Arabia – and yet, on visiting Mecca, she then experienced a type of spiritual re-awakening. We face the same question as in the previous category: should we see this as her 'return' to a Muslim country, or as her first visit?

Polemicists

To date, these have largely been Western women writing about the presence of Muslims in Western countries, and often expressing radical antipathy to aspects of Muslim culture. Their narratives are less autobiographical and less travel-orientated than the previous works, but it is noticeable that often they still write in the first person. Recently, some Arab women have adopted this form of the essay in a manner that seems to counter the Western narratives: the work by Joumana Haddad is particularly noteworthy in this respect.

Having recognised these different types of writing, we can now consider some similarities and contrasts within the texts.

Mary Louise Pratt distinguished two types of colonial travel writing: a bureaucratic, information-gathering form, and a sentimental form, more concerned with desire, sex, spirituality and individual experience. Among these hundred works, there is no doubt that the second is clearly the most common. An observation by Vita Sackville-West illustrates this point. In 1926, she reminded herself of the following advice concerning how a writer should construct a memoir: 'let him write to his public as to a familiar friend'. Something of this ethic seems to run through all these works. Frequently, there is a type of rough-and-ready, amateur quality to them: one basic point that cannot be overstressed here is the variety of the authors' experience and competence. On the one hand, there are authors such as Sackville-West, Dervla Murphy, Melanie Phillips, Mai Ghoussoub and Azar Nafisi, each of whom could be described as professional writers, who are fully capable of writing clear, elegant, expressive prose. On the other hand, the majority of these hundred women are amateur authors, whose works are often their first publications. In many cases they write because they feel they have to. Their texts begin as diaries, letters and blogs, and the final manuscripts retain the immediacy of such personal writing. These are formats that are suitable for the part-time, non-professional writer but also – it must be noted – they are formats that can be flawed by repetitiveness, shallowness and obsessional qualities. The meeting of amateur author and serious dilemma leads to some unusual and distinctive results. For example, consider the manner in which Carol Anway, an American Christian, describes the most desperate spiritual and familial crisis in her life, when she feared that her recently converted daughter was leaving her for Islam. Anway explains her feelings by referring to songs by the Beatles: 'Yesterday', a time when she was happy and felt reasonably confident in herself, and 'Hey Jude', a moment when she needed to take stock of her life, and face the future. The final impression from these pages is confused: certainly, one sees an inexperienced writer trying her hardest to describe some impossibly difficult feelings; one senses her anguish, but there is also something almost too intimate in the simple naivety of her writing. Similar issues arise in other texts. 'BAM!' is the term that Na'ima Roberts chooses to evoke her first step towards her conversion to Islam, a conversation with an Egyptian woman.29 'Why?!!!' cries Betty Mahmoody when she learns that an American woman has voluntarily chosen to live in the Islamic Republic of Iran.30 One has to be clear here: this is not bad, stupid or incompetent writing; it is not writing that deserves to be dismissed; it is often writing that has a significant documentary value, which can be thought-provoking, perceptive, gripping and hard-hitting; equally this is not sophisticated, professional writing, and its commercial success raises the question of why this form of informal, semiautobiographical amateur memoir has grown increasingly popular.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Notes on Citations

Introduction: A Party with a Hundred Women: on Dialogue, Orientalism and Women’s Writing
1. Travellers’ Tales: a Typology
2. Author and Self
3. The Politics of Time and Space: a Fractured Modernity
4. Voyages in Manistan: the Female Traveller and the Secret Woman
5. Islam: Return Journeys
6. Towards Dialogue?
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Innovative. . . . This book is especially recommended for those interested in women’s studies, Muslim studies, and comparative literature.

Choice - B. Harlow