Introduction

Middle Eastern women have been involved in their countries' wars since the end of the nineteenth century, but their participation was rarely noted. At best, condescending acknowledgement emphasized the anomaly so that the transgression on male terrain should not provide a precedent. Whatever women wrote about their experiences during times of national violence was quietly ignored. During the 1980s, however, scholars began to consider women's writings on wars in the region, and it became apparent how significant their roles had been and how familiar women were with violence at both national and individual levels.

This volume introduces writers from Turkey, Syria, Algeria, Sudan, and Egypt who have focused on women's confrontations with physical and epistemic violence. Although none of these articles deals with the recent Arab uprisings and the subsequent suppression of women's contributions to their success, their stories hover. Whether the woman was a prominent political figure, like the Egyptian Nabawiyya Musa and the Turkish Halide Edib Adivar, who wrote her life, or a fictional Sudanese, Syrian, or Palestinian woman fighting for survival, each was a product of national turmoil and betrayal. These essays consider the struggles of women not only to survive but also to assert their right to a place in the national story.

Christina Civantos examines the literary trajectory of one of the pioneers of the Egyptian feminist movement through her memoir. Whereas most accounts of the educator Nabawiyya Musa focus on her political career in the wake of the 1919 revolution, Civantos shifts the lens to her writing and to her fraught relationship with her pen. What did it mean, she asks, for a respectable Egyptian woman to pick up a pen at a time when such an action was considered inappropriate, vulgar, and even dangerous since only men or European women were authorized to write? It meant wresting power out of the hands of those who wished to prohibit such audacity. But it was not enough to write; young Musa wanted to write love poetry, and when she did her brother ridiculed her for her poor command of Arabic grammar. He had thrown down the gauntlet, and Civantos goes on to trace in entertaining detail how Musa picked it up. Indeed, Musa went further than any other woman of her time when she decided to write her autobiography. Asserting her empowered sense of self, Musa penned a personal story enmeshed in the collective history of her nation.

This is what the famous Turkish warrior and nationalist Halide Edib Adivar also did. In his fascinating exploration of her legacy, Erdag Göknar revises conventional versions of Adivar's life and role in the formation of the early Turkish Republic as it rose from the ashes of the cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire. He reads her Turkish 1921 melodramatic novel, The Shirt of Flame, and the second volume of her memoirs in English, The Turkish Ordeal (1928), together to show how she negotiated her feminist and nationalist identities. These texts present the complicated interplay of state, transnational, and grassroots feminisms. Anticipating the struggles between feminism and nationalism that marked twentieth-century independence movements in the region, Adivar accuses the secular state of exploiting women's images to spectacularize its modernity. Adivar's sense of betrayal by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who employed military and state power to further his patriarchal cultural revolution, comes through clearly. Göknar shows how these texts by two people who knew each other well and who had once shared a vision for their country ultimately proposed radically different models for the nation-state.

Shirin Edwin's article about Leila Aboulela's The Translator examines the crisis of an observant Muslim woman far from her homeland who falls in love with a Christian man her faith forbids her to marry. Responding to many critics' readings of this acclaimed novel, Edwin insists on the importance of analyzing the couple's relationship in human rather than ideological terms. Edwin reads this important novel closely to provide an in-depth analysis of the role of religion, especially Islam, in the daily lives of those forced to live in exile.

Looking at three recent novels that connect women...