Restoring History, Recording History: From Bint al-Shati' to Samar Yazbek
Panel 087, sponsored byAssociation for Middle East Women's Studies (AMEWS), 2017 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 19 at 3:30 pm
Panel Description
When Arab women writers first gained visibility in the late 19th Century, they started to claim their fair share as narrators of history. This panel starts with the first case of feminist scholastic exegesis by Bint al-Shati’, who resorted to Adab or a literary approach toward the Quranic exegesis, and rediscovered the life of the Prophet Muhammad through vignettes of the women in his life. Rendering the classical Islamic materials in a new style, Bint al-Shati’ brought forth a tafsir of the Quran, and an interpretation of the Islamic heritage from the woman exegete’s perspective. Feminist exegesis highlights pioneer women writers’ attempts to tell their own (hi)story as Muslim women and to claim their rights through a clear understanding of Islamic scripture.
Like their foremothers who sensed the responsibility to record the history they had lived and known as women, contemporary women writers are living the history, making the history and recording it. While the pioneer exegetes dissolved the dichotomy between “subjectivity” of literary critics and the objectivity of Divine Truth, contemporary women writers break the dichotomy of the “private” and the “public”. Panelists discuss how women writers Fadia Faqir and Samar Yazbek deal with “grand topics” like social conflicts, wars and ideological struggles by narrating experiences of individuals.
Since the revival of Islamic fundamentalism in the 1970’s, especially after 911, Islamic radicalism and “war on terrorism” provided new motifs for literature, and Fadia Faqir’s 2014 novel belongs to this category. In this novel, 2 first-person narratives take us from Jordan to Afghanistan and England. Lives of 3 nations affected by terrorism intertwine with the relationship of a daughter and her terrorist father. Both their bodies and voices become expressions for what they experience as history, and women’s embodied recording of history develops a new feminist awareness.
Already a prominent voice, Samar Yazbek became even more engaged since the outbreak of Syrian Civil War, and her 2015 memoirs confirm Emerson’s claim that “there is properly no history, only biography.” A “female flanueuse”, Yazbek returns to a war-torn Syria and her suffering citizens, to follow the on-going history of her country, to reflect upon the setbacks, and to foresee a potential rise from the ashes.
From restoring a “past” to recording the “present”, Arab women writers have moved in from the margins to become part of the canon.
In Baw?b?t Ar? al-?Adam (The Crossing, 2015), Syrian writer Samar Yazbek chronicles her return to Syria on three separate occasions between 2012 and 2013. Typical of Arab diaspora women writers, who carry the homeland’s pain within in exile and whose shuttle journeys inevitably lead them back to the homeland, Yazbek’s homecoming is motivated by a profound need to reconnect with the spatial dimensions of her country, and to understand the reasons behind the revolution’s setbacks.
The Crossing uncannily captures the dismemberment of the country, the horrific destruction to both country and citizens alike, and the surreal absurdity of the civil war in Syria. As she walks through the demolished streets and talks to the victims, Yazbek assumes a dramatically different role than the typical flanueur (tourist). The flanueur as a figure, first developed by Baudelaire and later disseminated in the works of Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau, establishes walking as primarily a masculine urban act, capable of retrieving the lost history of the city (Benjamin 1985, de Certeau 1984). By contrast, the female flanueuse, as depicted in Yazbek, is interested not in retrieving but in exposing the discontinuity of the architecture, the dismemberment of both the city and its people. She does not depict pictures through her singular lens, but rather captures the national body politic by recounting the collective viewpoints of the Syrian people. Yazbek’s detours do not follow typical street routes, but traverse through people’s homes, making unusual, yet necessary, topographic and intimate connections. The parallel between “linguistic uttering and pedestrian uttering” in Yazbek’s diaries reveal the difference between the female flanueuse, who regains the dismembered bodies’ agency in her narrative, and the stance of the world as a male flaneur engaged in passive voyeurism that locks the body in arresting paralysis.
Yazbek’s diaries celebrate the Syrian body in its overcoming of decades of fear, in its courageous stance against tyranny, its subsequent dismemberment by regime fire, and potential rise from the ashes after the dust settles. The Crossing articulates how Syrians defy the forced burial of their urban landscape by charting a new revolutionary cartography that resists the discourse of death.
What we call adab is located in a constellation of historical shifts from the era of the pre-Islamic qa??da until now. The emergence and codification of Arabic belles lettres has also resulted in the formation of aesthetic and philological principles that at once elevated adab and distinguished it from non-literary forms of human expression while belittling it in comparison to i?j?z al-Qur’?n. In this paper, I argue that the aesthetics of adab which eventually resulted in the formation of a host tradition of al-naqd al-adab?, have in modern times created a boomerang effect that brought the tools of literary criticism back to the benefits of Quranic exegesis, rescuing it from the persistence of rigid and inflexible ideologies. This new approach of modern Arabic literary criticism, which was boldly ventured by Taha Husayn in Pre-Islamic Poetry, begins with alienating itself from what it studies, namely becoming the reverse of dogmatism and nationalism in an era infested with both. In this spirit of desacralizing both traditionalism and fanaticism, al-naqd al-adab? prepared the reader to look at sacred tradition both scientifically and historically, that is with a disinterestedness that could only proceed from a methodical linguistic and aesthetic assessment. Regardless of whether this disinterestedness from the text was ever achieved or not in modern Quranic tafsir, the Mujaddid?n, the mid-twentieth century school pioneered by Am?n al-Kh?l?, Mu?ammad A?mad Khalafall?h and ??isha ?Abd al-Ra?m?n (Bint al-Sh??i?), has managed to establish an adab-inspired and dogma-free literary approach to exegesis. In particular, Bint al-Sh??i?’s work, al-Tafsir al-Bay?ni lil-Qur??n al-Kar?m [Rhetorical Explication of the Glorious Qur??n] (1962-1968) offers a philological and rhetorical examination of the Qur??n’s Meccan chapters in a revolutionary scholastic approach that sums up the efforts of her school quite effectively. I aim to show how Bint al-Sh??i?’s critical insights and adoption of a literary approach, arguably the first scholastic exegesis ever attempted by a woman, reinvigorate the synergies between adab and the Qur??n.
I will focus on the feminist aspect of the lives of three Muslim Arab women considered to be saints. I will look at the narratives told about and by them that provide examples of empowerment through some form of spiritual practice, especially jihad. The hagiographies of the Basra saint Rabi`a al-`Adawiya al-Qaysiya (717-801), the Tunisian Lalla Aisha Manoubiya (1180-1267) and the Egyptian Zaynab al-Ghazali (1917-2005) confirm the consequential impact of their lives and the narratives they have inspired. Each sought to bring those with whom she came into contact closer to God. The first serious enumeration of the lives of Sufi women saints is Abu `Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami’s (d.1106) 11th century Mention of Pious Sufi Women. He begins with Rabi`a, providing a few extant citations with chains of authority going back three centuries that define Rabi`a the saint and specialist in the “study of legal doctrines pertaining to worship.” Several other Sufi women find a place in his encyclopedia. I will pose and try to answer the following questions: How has the legend of the 8th century Rabi`a al-`Adawiya shaped the frame narratives of other Muslim women’s hagiographies? Are the similarities between the Rabi`a legend, the myths surrounding the 13th century Lalla Aisha Manoubiya and the prison memoir of the 20th century Zaynab al-Ghazali indicative of a pattern in woman sainthood? Or, is there a trunk narrative to which new details from the life of a later saint return to embellish the original story?
