An intellectual biography of early Arabic feminist Zaynab Fawwaz and a study of her life in Ottoman Syria and Egypt, in the context of debates on gender, modernity and the good society, 1890s-1910. Chapters take up her writing and debates in which she participated, concerning social justice, girls’ education, marriage, divorce and polygyny, the question of ‘Nature’ and Darwinist notions of male/female, and intersections of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and feminism. Fawwaz also wrote two novels and play, which are analysed in the context of fiction rewriting history, and on theatre as a reformist tool of public education in turn-of-the-century Egypt. The book also comprises a study of some important periodical venues for public debate in Egypt in this period, particularly the nationalist press and one early women’s journal, and it highlights the writings of lesser-studied journalists and other intellectuals, within the context of the Arab/ic Nahda or intellectual revival. It argues that Fawwaz’s feminism, based on an Islamic ethical worldview, was distinct from prevailing ‘modernist’ views in posing a non-essentialist, open-ended notion of gender that did not, for instance, highlight maternalist discourses. Fawwaz’s own background was Shi’i, an element that was quietly present in her work.
