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G&S Typesetters PDF proof C H A P T E R T H R E E Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist A Double Text In this chapter, I look at a text by Huda Shaarawi (1879–1947) entitled Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist.1 Huda Shaarawi must have been known throughout the urban upper and middle classes of her day for her leading role in establishing the first Egyptian women’s union and for her participation in the nationalist uprising against the British. Nowadays she is known to those interested in the history of the Arab women’s movement primarily through her memoirs. Harem Years is the only English-language book associated with her name. Shaarawi’s memoirs are a good example of early Arab feminism, which is embedded in the nineteenth-century reform movement and in the early-twentieth-century nationalist movement. The tensions and conflicts recounted by Shaarawi in her memoirs are typical of the lives of many women of her generation, class, and background. Harem Years, as it is presented by Margot Badran, is also a good example of how nonwestern women and their writing have recently been introduced to the west and of the issues raised by this process. Harem Years can be looked at as a double or a two-in-one text: the first is Huda Shaarawi’s memoirs (dictated in Arabic to her secretary, Abd al-Hamid Fahmi Mursi, in the 1940s); and the second is Margot Badran’s Englishlanguage text (published in 1986), although the book is overtly presented as by Shaarawi. It is quite important to keep this in mind when reading the book, because the memoirs and Harem Years are meant for two different sets of readers. Shaarawi’s memoirs were originally written—and, according to Shaarawi’s cousin, meant to be published—for an Arabic-speaking public. Harem Years is obviously addressed to the English-speaking world: it is translated , edited, and introduced in such a way as to make the book as attractive to an English reader as possible. The book thus raises a whole set of ideological assumptions connected with modern feminism. My analysis examines the implications of such issues as the conditions of production and publication for a feminist reading, for whom the text is meant, and the lack of shared 35 03-T2696 8/14/03 5:16 PM Page 35 G&S Typesetters PDF proof knowledge between different cultures. But before dealing with such editorial and technical concerns, I want first to deal with another set of issues related more to Shaarawi’s memoirs as an autobiographical act by a woman—and to do so without rigidly separating Harem Years from the memoirs. The Memoirs My reading of Shaarawi’s memoirs centers on three main closely related issues . First, Shaarawi’s feminism is strikingly embedded in her sense of nationalism . Second, she is constantly identifying herself socially, through a family structure and within the Ottoman upper class. Third, through the act of writing her memoirs, Shaarawi nevertheless appears to present a constructed self, fully aware of its distinctiveness. In my attempt to define autobiographical writing as a political/textual site of subject formation, Shaarawi’s memoirs may be viewed as a tool for the development of her political consciousness —jointly in terms of family position, class, and gender—and as a means of self-construction and self-evaluation, in light of these questions. Shaarawi’s Nationalist and Reformist Feminism As previously argued, most women’s liberation movements in the developing countries are closely associated with the rise of nationalism; that is, the struggle for women’s rights is a main part of the general political struggle against both colonial and local forms of oppression.2 This is an especially appropriate way to approach the memoirs of Huda Shaarawi, a turn-of-the-century Egyptian advocate of women’s rights who lived at a crucial time in Egyptian and Arab history. Shaarawi was by no means the first Arab or the first Egyptian woman to fight for women’s rights. Nor was she a literary figure, unlike most of the early Arab generations of women’s rights advocates. Her memoirs , however, are considered one of the earliest (if not the earliest) nonfictional autobiographical works by an Arab woman to be published in modern Arab literary history. Although written in the early 1940s, Shaarawi’s memoirs were published posthumously in 1981 as al-Raida al-Arabia al...

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