Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Life and Works of 'A'isha Taymur

Mervat F. Hatem. Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Life and Works of 'A'isha Taymur. New York: Palgrave, 2011. 250 pages. Hardcover $90.00

Reviewed by Vickie Langohr

Aisha Taymur (1840-1902), one of the most prominent writers of the late nineteenth century in Egypt, showed astonishing literary range. Her social commentary attracted attention in the newspapers of the day, with her work on the bases of husbands' rights over their wives earning a critique which was more than twice as long as Taymur's work itself (131). Her love poems were widely known; Taymur's primary Arabic-language biographer noted that she heard one of her poems sung at a wedding in Palestine in the 1890s (169). Yet the content of Taymur's writings has rarely been analyzed at length in English, with the recent exception of Hoda al Sadda's Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892-2008.

Mervat Hatem's analysis of Taymur's writings shows how much we have missed by this omission. As Hatem notes, much work on the emergence of the "woman question" focuses on male authors such as Qasem Amin and his 1899 Liberation of Woman, or on the women's journals, written largely by Syrian women in Egypt, which began in 1892. These authors extensively discussed how improving women, particularly through better education, would strengthen women and the nation. By contrast, Taymur "viewed the cultural education of male children to be the most serious struggle facing the national community" (73), an idea developed in Nata 'ij al-Ahwal fi al-Aqwal wa al-Af'al (The Consequences of Circumstances in Words and Deeds) in 1887-88. Her central work on gender relations, Mir'at al-Ta 'mul fi al-Umur (A Reflective Mirror on Some Matters) (1892), which slightly preceded the first of the women's journals, initiated a debate which was "novel and exciting ... [because] women were not the objects of the discussion" (4): Taymur criticized greedy husbands and argued that their failure to support their wives invalidated their leadership rights over them. As Hatem argues, Taymur's work precedes, and her focus differs substantially from, many of the commentators who have been understood as initiating and monopolizing the discussion of gender issues.

Mira't was arguably the most radical of Taymur's writings, arguing that (Muslim) men's qawama (right to leadership) over their wives...