Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt, 1892–2008 by Hoda Elsadda (review)

At once a researcher in gender studies and an insider to ongoing debates on women’s rights in the Egyptian political and cultural scene, Hoda Elsadda offers in this book a sort of quintessence of her reflections on, and experience in, the field. Wisely focusing on Egyptian novels, avoiding the traps of a too wide scope of research, the book is an ambitious and captivating attempt to revisit “the modern Arab literary tradition from a gender lens” (xiv), foregrounding representations of femininity and masculinity in Egyptian narratives published between 1892 and 2008.

Elsadda’s demonstration is built on works that challenge the modernity versus traditionalism binary, as well as that of Islamism versus secularism, shedding a critical light on the choices of a “male nahda elite” who “shaped the nation in their own image” (xiv); it thus aims at showing how the establishment of the literary canon is linked with gender issues.

The book follows a chronological progression, divided into three parts: the first one devoted to narratives of the very beginning, from ‘A’isha Taymur to Tawfiq al-Hakim, the second to novels centered on tropes of nationalistic struggle, and the third to contemporary writings from the nineties of the past century. In the first chapters, Elsadda engages in a debate with which she is familiar, as founder and head of the Women and Memory Forum in Cairo—women’s rights and situation at the turn of the century—analyzing works by ‘A’isha Taymur, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, Qasim Amin, Malak Hifni Nasif, Labiba Hashim, as well as a women’s magazine, al-Fatah, established by Hind Nawfal. She foregrounds the way narratives by men stress the need for a “new woman,” rendering the Egyptian “eastern” woman responsible for the “backwardness” of Egyptian society, and presents a counter-narrative, by Malak Hifni Nasif, marginalized “in mainstream cultural memory” because of “her early critique of the dominant nationalist discourse on gender” (27). She reminds the reader of the limits of Qassem Amin’s seminal Tahrir al-Mar’a (The Liberation of Women, 1899), usually presented as a pioneering work on women’s emancipation in the Arab world. While the chapter is in many ways interesting, the reader would have expected more close-reading analysis of literary works Elsadda refers to as having been unfairly excluded from the canon, such as Labiba Hashim’s Qalb al-Rajul (Man’s Heart, 1904), which “was not acknowledged as an important contribution to the beginnings of the Arabic novel because of its divergence from the nahda narrative about ideal modern masculinity” (5).

Instead, Elsadda devotes three lengthy chapters to a critical reading of seminal works situated at the center of the canon, reexploring them to shed light on the “new masculine identity,” “the new man,” “whose representations … within the Egyptian nationalist narrative” have not received sufficient attention”—unlike “the new woman.” In chapter 2, she thus examines fictions by Haikal (whose Zeinab was for a long time presented as the first Arabic novel until more recent works underlined the importance of Al-Saq ala al-Saq [Leg over Leg] by Faris al-Shidyaq), as well as other works, like al-Mazini and al-Rafi’i, among others. She concludes by discussing “the contested nature of the markers of identity,” stressing the fact that literary representations of feminine and masculine identities transcend boundaries of conservative versus liberal binaries. In chapter 3, Elsadda enters into a discussion with the scholars whose work addresses the beginnings of the Arabic novel, dedicating the chapter two to Tawfik al-Hakim novels, rooting his misogyny in a “beleaguered colonized consciousness” (73). Chapter 4 analyzes Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy (1956–1957), “an artistic rendition of a national liberal discourse,” the characters of Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawwad and Amina being “icons of Traditional Man and Womanhood,” mocked as “parodies of a traditionalism that … had to be denigrated” (96). Elsadda also convincingly argues that the...