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  • Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Life and Works of 'A'isha Taymur by Mervat F. Hatem
  • Ferial J. Ghazoul
Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Life and Works of 'A'isha Taymur Mervat F. Hatem . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 234 pages. ISBN 978-0-230-11350-3.

This slim, but rich, book is an intellectual biography of a pioneering female figure who lived in Egypt and wrote—in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian—poems, a treatise interpreting women's rights in Islam, and an allegorical narrative. 'A'isha 'Ismat Isma'il Pasha Taymur (1840-1902) hails from a family originally from Iraqi Kurdistan. As the Ottoman Empire was multi-ethnic and allowed its many subjects to move and settle in different parts of its extended domain, cosmopolitanism was taken for granted. With a Circassian mother—a freed slave—and a Turkish-speaking father, the aristocratic Taymurs used Persian as the language of literature and refinement and Arabic as the language of religion and the people. Contextualizing historically and culturally this exceptional woman, as Hatem does, is not an easy task because so much is left unsaid in historical records on women's lives and so much of women's achievements has been marginalized if not misrepresented. When the question of women's liberation is raised in Egypt, everyone knows of Qasim Amin's book on the subject, written in 1899 and considered a breakthrough, Tahrir al-Mar'at (Liberation of Women). It tends to overshadow Taymur's sixteen-page treatise, entitled Mir'at al-ta'mul fi al-umur (Mirror of reflection on issues) which was published seven years earlier (in 1892) and triggered a debate on the rights of women, leading readers to question the privileges of men. Hatem revisits the [End Page 108] biography of this woman who has been acknowledged yet dismissed and recovers Taymur's own voice, despite silences and appropriations by other biographers (Zaynab Fawwaz, Mayy Ziyada, and Ahmad Taymur). Hatem highlights Taymur's pioneering views on gender and the rights of women she believed were inherent in Islam. In this, Hatem is successful, providing the reader with an intimate knowledge of this woman and her milieu. Hatem also attempts to situate Taymur within the Egyptian nation-building process and sees her as an agent of change: "More important than her ethnic and class roots was the fact that her views were unquestionably Egyptian in their sharp focus on and rootedness in the changes taking place in Egyptian society, including the Arabic language, literature, the family and, government" (9). This effort to Egyptianize Taymur is less successful, as Taymur is essentially affiliated to her class and the court, siding with Khedive Tawfiq rather than the people and the nationalist 'Urabi. Her lack of sympathy for freed slaves who left their masters' households and her painting them as corrupt betray loyalty to class rather than nation. In the finale of the book, Hatem seeks far-fetched images to link Taymur to Egypt: "Even though Taymur never explicitly identified herself as an Egyptian, in surrounding herself with these old fierce cats whose worship existed in the province of al-Sharqiya where the family at some point had land suggested that she identified with the ancient history of place and/or country [Egypt]" (203). Becoming the court poet of the unpopular Khedive Tawfiq, who notoriously supported the British occupation of Egypt, suggests that Taymur was involved in Egyptian politics as the author of somewhat heavy-handed propaganda poetry. She wrote, however, more personal poems, elegiac and erotic—some of which were put to music, sung at weddings, and heard as far as Palestine, as Mayy Ziyada reports in her biography of Taymur (169).

Taymur's fiction, Nata'j al-Ahwal, is allegorical and didactic, using the techniques of One Thousand and One Nights and that of the Mirror-of-Princes subgenre, to reveal—as Hatem carefully analyzes—the underlying political views of good government, the need for disciplined organization, and the dangers of wicked courtiers. Hatem's ability to present correspondences between the narrative and actual crises of dynastic government, including issues related to reform, is fascinating...

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