Pearls Scattered: An Introduction
Pearls Scattered: An Introduction
This chapter introduces the book at the centre of this study, a mammoth biographical dictionary of 453 world women published in Arabic in Cairo 1893-6 at Egypt’s government printing press; and its author, Zaynab Fawwaz, an immigrant from southern Lebanon to Egypt who wrote on gender politics in the press and also wrote two novels, a play and some poetry. The chapter places this book in the context of scholarship on gender politics, feminism, nationalism and anti-colonialism, and early feminist discourse in the Arab region and especially Egypt. In that context, the fin-de-siècle interest in ancient history – Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Semitic – evident in Egypt’s and Arabic Ottoman publications, receives attention as it relates to Fawwaz’s outlook on women’s history.
Keywords: Nationalism, Egypt, Feminism, Biography, Jabal ‘Amil, Women writers, Ancient history, Ptolemaic, Egyptology
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