Bint Al Shati’ & the Forgotten Histories of Al-Nahda
Introduction
Aisha Abd Al Rahman, born in 1913 in Egypt, believed that she was wished into existence. This existence, she reminisces in her autobiography Ala Al-Jissr Bayn Al-Hayah wa-l-Mawt, translated to On the Bridge Between Life and Death, is an inheritance of knowledge, passed down to her by her father in the shape of books.1 Aisha mythologized her life in her autobiography, painting an image of a young Arab girl who was guided through life by visions and dreams, determined to overcome insurmountable obstacles that stood in the way of her life’s mission of becoming a scholar. In her early work, the young girl from Damietta, a port city on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, wanted her readers to know that she was excellence incarnated—there is no humility or false humbleness in her writing.
When Aisha’s mother was pregnant, her father, a great sheikh in Damietta, had prayed for a child, specifically male, to inherit his library.2 In her autobiography, she clearly expressed her father’s dismay at having a girl, yet she nevertheless saw herself as the sole inheritor of his scholarly legacy. The young girl spent her days between perusing the vast library at home and causing mischief by the shore with her playfellows, later characterizing herself with the sobriquet Bint Al Shati’, or Daughter of the Shore.
Bint Al Shati’s life encompassed a series of hard-won battles for a young Arab woman seeking an education; a story much neglected in the scholarship on the years of Al-Nahda, or the Arab Renaissance. Aisha’s childhood, education, and later her entanglement with the Arabic press, enriches and complicates our understanding of the Egyptian fin-de-siècle culture and the dominant narrative of Al-Nahda that is based on binaries and absolutes. In this essay, I set out to bring attention to Bint Al Shati’s intellectual legacy, particularly her contributions to the Arabic press, which remains understudied and requires further attention. The Arabic printing age in secondary sources mainly focuses on the intellectual legacies of the likes of Jurji Zaydan and Rashid Rida. Only recently do we see a resurgence of scholarship on female contribution to that time period, namely what is termed as feminist press and periodicals. However, Bint Al Shati’, as I intend to unearth through her written works, is part and parcel of the intellectual tapestry of Egyptian history. It would not be fair, as I imagine her to agree, to situate her as a minority or a representative of counterculture.
Storytelling & Early Enculturation
Aisha’s childhood, through the influence of her parents, significantly shaped her self-mythologized life and sense of identity. The oral storytelling tradition of the city of Damietta, which Aisha’s mother practiced regularly, fermented her early fascination with knowledge development. She writes:
“My mother would scare me with her fantastical tales about the river jinn that sometimes came out of their underwater caves, swimming up to the surface, vying for a catch from us humans! She also told me of what happens when the jinn would capture humans and condemn them to live a life below the surface, and so they would never return to our life again.”3
The influences of her unique upbringing are echoed in the several short stories she authored, including in the collections Sirr Al-Shati’, or Secret of the Shore, published in 1952, and in Imra’a Khati’a Wa Qissass Min Al-Qarya, or A Fallen Woman and Stories from the Village, published in 1958. Concurrently with traditional storytelling, Aisha’s father and maternal grandfather also represented Islamic scholastic inheritance in her most formative years. Her father hailed from the governorate of Monufia, and after attaining a degree from Cairo, he arrived in Damietta to teach at the male elementary school and eventually resided in Al-Bahr Mosque, the equivalent of Al-Azhar in the Delta region. Her father, early on, set up their house library as a space for her home-schooling.4 She explains that she was allowed some liberties of pursuing an education, but on her father’s own terms.5
Hence, after the 1919 revolution gripped Egypt as a whole, the young girl in Damietta sought to revolt against her acquiescence to her father’s limitations of her intellectual aptitude. At the age of seven, Aisha’s friends had enrolled in the elementary school for girls in the district.6 There is a dearth of secondary scholarship on the phenomenon of schooling at a local level, particularly in the case of Damietta. Olga Verlato is one such scholar who is interested in looking at how “examining these schools allows us to reconsider the alleged insularity of different communities, while at the same time exposing the forms of discrimination created and reinforced by the workings of the schools through their pedagogical and administrative choices.”7 A study of Bint Al Shati’s journey through the education system in Egypt, in her own documentation of the experience, sheds light on the history of Egyptian schooling in general, and on the history of Arab women’s schooling at the turn of the twentieth century.
Veering Between Tradition & Modernity
The gendered restrictions set upon Bint Al Shati’ are complex, and invariably intertwined with the debates over tradition versus modernity that were prominent at the time. In the case of Taha Hussein (1889-1973), a prominent Egyptian writer and scholar of Al-Nahda or the Arab Renaissance, the move away from traditional schooling opened a vast world of texts, approaches, and new identity formation schemes, in line with the glamours of modernity usually framed in secondary scholarship.8 With Bint Al Shati’ disaffected in the stages of her education, we are offered a different lens to the formal boundaries of the governmental school system in the urban setting.
Particularly noteworthy in her autobiography is Aisha’s keen sense of observation on her different educational experiences, instilled in traditional education through her father’s religious schooling, on the one hand, and the amiriyya, or the governmental system of schooling, which propelled her to the gates of the Egyptian University (now Cairo University), on the other. She relates a memory of an inspector conducting an examination of her development at school when she was first enrolled, impressed with her responses to his queries and praising her for it. Yet, she writes, “I was confounded by his naivety, for I knew quite well that what he saw as excellence in my behavior is shared by all of the students at the religious seminary in Damietta.”9 At that point, the well-rounded education she earned did not take place within the setting of the formal classroom. Enculturation, coined by Dr. Lucie Ryzova in the context of colonial Egypt when discussing the rise of the modern educated efendi, an Arabic title of nobility, occurred outside of institutional learning, meaning that the common Egyptian’s world-view, intellectual interests, and writing practices were predominantly constructed by private reading, public gatherings in literary salons, and the rising popular Arabic press.10 Unlike the cases of the Egyptian efendis, their educational tract, and their infatuation with the modern schooling systems of Cairo that Ryzova thoroughly conceptualizes, Bint Al Shati’s tale differs drastically.
It is worth noting that Bint Al Shati’s restrictions by her father were particularly directed towards modern schooling, and not simplistically against a woman’s education, in general. As a traditionally educated religious scholar, he found it pertinent to instruct his daughter in religious fields, encouraging her to join teaching circles in the mosque and engage in scholarly debates with the young students and scholars who frequented his office after teaching hours. However, it was the young girl’s maternal grandfather who fought for his granddaughter’s enrollment into formal schooling.
Furthermore, Bint Al Shati’s struggles to engage with her classmates once she was enrolled formally were two-fold. First, the class disparity she experienced both in the elementary school in Damietta and then in the urban schools of Tanta and Cairo deemed her unable to connect with her peers, who did not have to work alongside their studies as she did. She additionally writes that her classmates found her odd because of her visions and premonitions, “disapproving of a young girl of only ten who is so affected by a passing dream she had. If they had grown up in my environment, and inherited my psychological and mental heritage, they would not dismiss me so.”11 Bint Al Shati’s enculturation and education, as such, traversed, as well as blurred, the lines between what is seen as modernity and tradition, as well as the institutional and the communal.
Literary Influences On Aisha’s Rise
Bint Al Shati’s first proper introduction to the Arabic press began while she looked after her ailing maternal grandfather. Between studying and learning at school, Bint Al Shati’ was overwhelmed by guilt for her grandfather’s state and spent most of her free time keeping him company. For three years, she read periodicals and newspapers to him daily, including Al-Ahram and Al-Muqattam, and wrote articles for him. She recounts:
“Among my daily duties was to purchase Al-Ahram and Al-Muqattam on the way from school, and read them aloud to him. I would also sit by his bedside during the weekends to dictate his articles, which he would send to the rulers in Egypt and the daily newspapers […] I spent three years diligently doing my duties. In the beginning, it was a matter of fulfilling my debt to my grandfather, except that slowly I began to love writing, and it filled me with satisfaction to see what I had been dictated by my grandfather to appear in the periodical. I began to focus my energy and attention on developing my style and intonation.”12
This private reading and infatuation with the Arabic press was part and parcel of Bint Al Shati’s enculturation and the development of her intellectual approach. At only twelve years old, Aisha recited from memory the poetry of Ka‘b ibn Zuhair, Tarafah ibn Al ‘Abd, and Al Muhalhil ibn Rabi‘a Al Taghlabi before a committee of examiners, constructing the literary and scholarly texts and bookish culture that developed her world-view.13 The role of bookshops and publishing houses was central to her childhood, citing a great debt to Maktabat Al-Sarwi in Al-Mansura that “opened up a new horizon for [her] with its book borrowing scheme.”14 Some of the titles of the texts that were available to her include Mustafa Al Manfaluti’s arabized novels, Jurji Zaydan’s Islamic history novels, Plato’s The Republic translated by Hanna Khabbaz, Taha Hussein’s The Days, The Odyssey translated by Wadi’ Al Bustani, and One Thousand and One Nights.15
From Bint Al Shati’s early development we see what Ryzova terms “the narratives of ‘becoming efendi’ or efendification.”16 While Ryzova looks into the social “process of making one’s son an efendi through modern schooling,”17 I show how Aisha’s private reading, or mutala‘a, and later foray into the world of print journalism, was what resulted in her enculturation. Among the other texts she read are Badr Al Din Al Zarkashi’s Al-Burhan Fi ’Ulum Al-Qur’an, Jalal Al Din Al Suyuti’s Al-Itqan Fi ’Ulum Al-Qur’an, and the Qur’anic exegesis by Muhammad ibn Jarir Al Tabari, which she boasted of whilst attending a lecture as an undergraduate student in the Egyptian University in 1936. The lecture was taught by Professor Amin Al Khouli who would later become her husband and life-long partner.18
Bint Al Shati’s love of books initiated her involvement in public life through the recently established and popularized printed periodicals. The press and journals of the time functioned as “venues” that allowed for the “articulation of efendi subjectivity” as a site of performance for “a national community of similarly minded men (and to a lesser degree, women) with a shared perspective on society and history […], and their own role in it.”19 The growing group of efendiyya who became journalists and scholars included those not necessarily following traditional learning tracts, instead self-enculturated, as in the cases of Bint Al Shati’, Muhammad Zaki Mujahid,20 and the philologist Mahmud Shakir.21 For them, belonging to one another was based upon a cultural position that in most cases meant they came from “peasant” origins and found themselves embroiled in the urban capital.22
In the first years of the 1930s, during her stay in the dormitories of the Teachers School, Aisha revived her love for writing in periodicals. At the school’s library, she came across issues of Al-Nahda Al-Nisa’iyya, or the Women’s Renaissance periodical, and submitted a poem of hers titled Longing for Damietta.23 Bint Al Shati’ came to write in various other periodicals over the years, most prominently Al-Hilal, Al-Risala, Al-Adib, Al-Ahram, and Al-Nahda Al-Nisa’iyya. Almost 165 articles were written by Bint Al Shati’ from 1910 until 2007.24 In Al-Hilal, she ran an advice column titled, Iza Sa’altani?, or If You Ask Me, where she first wrote posing as the character of Eleanor Roosevelt.25 By the time her career picked up as a lecturer in the 1950s, the same publishing house began to print her name as Dr. Bint Al Shati’.26
Before beginning her university career and gaining regional renown to have her own column, Bint Al Shati’ experienced a more hands-on approach. In the early 1930s, she continued to send contributions to Al-Nahda Al-Nisa’iyya, run by the infamous Labiba Ahmad who also founded Jam‘iyyat Nahdat Al-Sayyidat Al-Misriyyat, or the Society of Egyptian Ladies’ Awakening, following the 1919 Egyptian Revolution.27 Ahmad, impressed with her writing style and dedication, invited Aisha to her office in the Abedin district to discuss her future in the periodical. For four Egyptian pounds a month, starting in October 1933, Bint Al Shati’ became an editor and ghost-writer, writing Ahmad’s editorial work for her and running the periodical herself. She finalized the form and format of the issues, and took them to Matba‘at Hijazi, or Hijazi Printing, in the Gamiliyya area, returning once more to proofread the first batch and then to pick up the printed issues and deliver them to the periodical office. The circulation process was also the responsibility of the then twenty-year-old Aisha, delivering reader subscriptions as well as mass sales of the periodicals.28
Conclusion
Bint Al Shati’s contribution to the Arab press remains grossly understudied in understanding the history of Arab intellectual development. A young twenty-year-old girl from Damietta, running the entire editorial, publication, and circulation of a prominent periodical is a fascinating foray into the world of Arab print at the time. It is a period that requires a thorough examination of the role of non-elite and rural writers such as Bint Al Shati’, in an attempt to intellectually unearth more forgotten histories that shaped Al-Nahda. Running this periodical was to Aisha a laborious discomfort,29 particularly so for forcing herself to become a writer twice her senior, where she would have to emulate another woman’s thoughts and experiences. She took a vow from that year forward, that she would not allow “any environment in the capital [Cairo], not even the university, to fold [her] within its shadow and strip away [her] sense of self.”30
Aisha Abd Al Rahman passed away in 1998, never ceasing to exert her presence, intellect, and linguistic style on the Arabic publishing scene. Her legacy celebrates a vast intellectual heritage that to this day remains insufficiently examined by secondary scholarship. Her varying roles as an editor, scholar, short story writer, and journalist still await thorough academic, cultural, and social investigation.
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The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author, and do not represent Fiker Institute.
