Int. J. Middle East Stud. 33 (2001), 171201.

Printed in the United States of America

Marilyn Booth
WOMAN I N I SLAM: MEN AND
THE WOMEN S PRESS
I N TURN- OF- THE- 20TH- CENTURY EGYPT
The first periodical in Egypt to focus on women as both subject and audience, Al-Fatat
(The Young Woman, 1892), heralded the founding by women of many periodicals for
women in Egypt. The womens press emerged in a time of intense public debate
concerning putative intersections of systemic gender relations and gender ideology
with anti-imperialist nationalism: what would constitute national strength sufficient
to assert, or force, an independent existence based on claims to autonomous nation-
state status?
1
Women writing in the womens press, as well as in the mainstreamor
malestreampress, shaped the debate over how gender did and should inflect so-
cial organization and institutional change.
2
Equally, male intellectuals and politicians
participated in a rhetoric of persuasion, edification, and ambition. When women and
men wrote treatises on what was called the woman question (qadw yat al-mara),
articles in the womens press challenged, debated, and refined the points of these
treatises. Writers approached that fraught question from another direction, too, es-
tablishing a thriving industry of conduct literature that fed on translations of European
works as well as original works by Egyptian and other Arab writers. Books on how
to behave as a proper father, a good mother, a fine son or daughter, or a responsible
schoolgoer went through numerous printings for a reading public prepared by various
rhetorics of nationalism, theology, and reform to bring this debate into everyday life
by following the guides for behavior that such literatureincluding essays in the
womens presssupplied.
3
Yet the term womens press encompassed a variety of magazines. Here I argue
that the rubric itself should be subject to question, for it names a set of discursive
objects that require analysis on the basis of internal differences as well as similarities.
Work on the womens press has spotlighted different ethnicities, nationalities, and
religious identities that went into its formation, but has tended, ironically, to minimize
markers of gendered difference. For the womens press was full of men: editors,
writers, publishers, funders. What difference did this difference make?
Indeed, certain journals defined then and later under the rubric of the womens
Marilyn Booth is an Independent Scholar and Fellow, Program in Comparative Literature, University of
Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, Urbana, Ill. 61801, USA; e-mail: m-booth@uiuc.edu.
2001 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/01 $9.50
172 Marilyn Booth
press were founded, edited, and almost entirely composed by men. Most significant
of all, I think, they construct a predominantly male readership as their desired purview.
Here I explore one niche in this vast discursive space: a magazine that emerged right
at the beginning of the 20th century and existed for only fourteen months. Al-Mara
fi al-Islam (Woman in Islam) was a forum for men concerned about the condition of
women, as its editor put it. In this essay, I characterize the journals politics of gender
by examining its stand on a famous male-authored turn-of-the-century pair of books
on the status of women in Muslim-majority societies. I suggest that both the audience
it sets up rhetorically and the choice and presentation of its proposed subject matter
make it difficult to consider this periodical as part of the womens press in any
uncomplicated sense. I argue that the periodicals biographies of Famous Women
inscribe it within the womens press yet simultaneously mark out a space of differ-
ence with respect to journals edited and scripted largely by women. Above all, I
suggest that this journal, focused ostensibly on women, was in fact talking about men.
Loudly defining the ideal woman through biography and other polemics, it was more
quietly articulating shifts in processdiscursively and in material lives and relation-
shipsin local concepts of the ideal man. Thus, I argue that a journal which has been
defined within the womens press was both for men and, ultimately, about men.
A WOMEN S PRESS ?
When one speaks of womens magazines, in any culture, the presumption is that
this comprehends periodicals aimed at a female audience and focusing on topics and
issues ostensibly of interest solely or mostly to women. In the global culture of the
late 20th centuryand in the context of the rise of feminisms and the energy gener-
ated through academic gender studies around the worldthe term womens maga-
zine might carry a pejorative echo in intellectual circles, a sense that such magazines
are defined by a sphere of activity that is traditionally female and therefore suspect.
At the same time, of course, the rise of cultural studies has made the examination of
womens magazines and other popular media quite respectableas long as one
reads them as a scholar, not as a consumer. (After all, Mrs. Beetons famous Book of
Household Management has just been reissued in Oxfords Worlds Classics, glossed
as a founding text of Victorian middle-class identity.
4
)
The realities of todays global capitalism mean that most magazineswherever
they are locatedare produced by corporations operating within capitalist struc-
tures that have been historically dependent on patriarchally organized work relations.
The question of male participation seems irrelevant in this context of highly structured
production. Moreover, womens journals are distinguished from feminist journals,
which do not dwell (except in theorized and historicizing terms) on bourgeois domes-
ticity or the how-to dailiness that the former encompass.
5
Such distinctions and conno-
tations were absent from what observers then and since labeled the womens press
of fin de sie`cle and early-20th-century Egypt. This began to change with the begin-
nings of a feminist press instituted by the Egyptian Feminist Union: it founded its
French-language organ lEgyptienne in 1925 and an Arabic-language equivalent (that
was, however, quite distinct) in 1937, al-Miriyya (The [Female] Egyptian). Beginning
also in the mid-1920s, the proliferation of a popular press focusing on mass culture
Men and the Womens Press 173
(radio, film) addressed itself to a female as well as a male audience and introduced
readers to the concept of a star culture. The term womens press as applied to this
historical moment embraced both the early periodicals geared to the discussion and
improvement of womens status and certain popular magazines, such as al-Arusa (The
Bride), a sort of hybrid between the earlier womens journals and the movie maga-
zines. This in turn presaged the appearance of later journals such as Bint al-Nil
(Daughter of the Nile) and Hawwa (Eve), whose feminist perspectives were framed
by close attention to womens fashion, adornment, and home management (as had
been true of some early journals).
6
When the womens press as descriptive rubric is applied to periodicals founded
by men (al-Arusa as well as al-Mara fi al-Islam), this runs the risk of minimizing
distinctions that help to refine our understanding of the entire discursive field of gen-
der and nationalism in Egypt in this period. At the same time, it is crucial to recognize
that mens participation in the womens press was not necessarily distinguishable in
terms of its textual presence per se. I want to insist, though, that the impossibility or
irrelevance of defining texts in this press necessarily as either female-scripted or
male-scripted points up the importance of analyzing these texts within their immedi-
ate contexts of production. I agree with Rita Felski that the specific contours of
mens or womens texts should not be seen as simply internal to a text; rather,
[they are] fundamentally shaped by the particular meanings and effects which accrue
to discourses publicly authored by women. The gender of authorship is a crucial factor
influencing the circulation and reception of textual meaning.
7
That is, I want to
argue that possible gendered differences in the writing of polemics, instructional texts,
biography, and fiction in these periodicals are to be constructed in historical rather
than in immediately textual terms that are sensitive to the representational power of
gendered authorship in a given time and place, coupled with the recognition that
different literary genres often overlapped in articulated intent and function. (Biogra-
phy and fiction were both polemical and instructional.) Beth Baron notes that early
male-edited womens journals in Egypt shared a concern for the symbolic meaning
of woman in society. . . . [They] politicized the issue of the rights of woman and . . .
used womens progress as a means to measure morality or modernity as against the
female-edited journals more pervasive concern with immediate issues of daily life.
8
This in fact was characteristic of male nationalists discourse on the woman question.
But I want to take the observation further by arguing that men writing on gender were
not simply concerned reformers who saw in the reforming of women the construction
of a strong nation and (not incidentally) a nationalist force that could take the offen-
sive.
9
And their concerns, as they wrote on the woman question, were no less concrete
than those of journals produced largely by women.
In a period in which emergent nationalist agendas competed, the woman question
offered an issue of central importance to the definition of a new society. It is by now
a truism to point out the symbolic importance of discursive gender politics to the
struggle for nationhood in Egypt (as elsewhere), and to suggest that mens writings
on the woman question had to do not so much with the life conditions of real women
as with competing nationalist ideologies that presume a nation maintained by a male
leadership. But what Mrinalini Sinha has said about gender scholarship on colonial
India can apply to work on Middle East societies, too: [a]lthough the scholarship on
174 Marilyn Booth
elite nationalism . . . has gone well beyond the nature of its impact on women or of
the history of womens contributions to nationalism, and has arrived at much more
sophisticated analyses of the constitutive role of gender in . . . nationalism, it has, nev-
ertheless, remained centred on the figure of the . . . woman.
10
This is understandable, for the Middle East as well as for India. As scholarly litera-
ture on gender in Middle East societies has become a major focus in Middle East
studies globally, feminist scholars (myself included) have been concerned to document
and analyze the ways that women have shaped discourses on gender through their
intellectual production as well as in their everyday lives. To focus on womens writ-
ings seemed especially important in light of the early emphasis on Qasim Amin
(18631908) as the father of Egyptian feminism and, in general, on mens discourse
as formative of shifting gender ideologies not only in Egypt but also (if to a lesser
extent) in other Arab societies, in Turkey, and in Iran.
11
Yet, at the risk of stating the
obvious, we must recognize that gender and women are not synonymous. More-
over, and perhaps less obviously, what has been identified as the woman question
at various historical moments and in a range of societies, including Egypt, needs to
be scrutinized equally as the man question. This endeavor is well under way in
gender scholarship on North American and European history and is equally sophisti-
cated in work on Indian colonial elites; Middle East scholarship has begun to engage
with it.
12
While recognizing that concepts of masculinity are local, that they shift over
time, and that multiple masculinities exist in any given time and place,
13
this compara-
tive work is helpful as we survey the complex gender discourse scene in turn-of-the-
century Egypt. Such scholarshipin which scholars of the Middle East have begun
to engageentails recognition of the obvious fact that most scholarship, in the con-
ventional sense, has been about men, and the contention that such scholarship, in
perhaps a more significant sense, has not really been about men at all.
14
In other
words, while conventional historiography has focused on the words and deeds of men,
it has not examined men as men; it has not considered the mutual constitution of
masculinities, mens social roles within, around, and outside the family, and social
power. Furthermore, much of the work on masculinity has focused on exclusively
masculine arenas, all-male institutions, without attending to it as a relative construct
that is also mutually dependent on assumptions about female and feminine identities
and changes in the family institution both as ideal and as experienced.
15
Yet the con-
struction of masculinity as a site of social power and negotiation entails a set of
positions from which to shape powerful social notions not only about men and mascu-
line identities, but also about women and ideals of femininity. Thus, the study of
masculinities becomes an imperative of feminist scholarship. Therefore, I ask what
mens writing on women and femininity has to say about mens gendered identities in
the historical context of changing political and economic structures in Egypt around
and after the turn of the century. What do these writings have to say about some mens
attitudes toward male experiences in the family and home? How have constructions
of gendered identities, of masculinities and femininities as relational concepts, been
constitutive of formations of nationalism in Egypt?
16
Furthermore, by focusing on the
overt discourse of womens status, reform, and feminism, thereby gendering
this discourse so as mostly to occlude what it has to say about concepts of masculin-
ity,
17
present scholarship has tended to reproduce a turn-of-the-century politics of gen-
Men and the Womens Press 175
der that it sets out to analyze. To consider the reformist discourses on women as
wholly derivative of European colonial discourse is to reproduce a line of attack that
was taken up by opponents of these discourses at the time. This does not mean, of
course, that either womens material conditions or colonialism as doctrine and political
practice was irrelevant to the shape these discourses took, for they were shaped partly
by local encounters with European colonial agendas.
Ibrahim Ramzi, founder of al-Mara fi al-Islam; Qasim Amin; and other national-
istically conscious men were re-forming their own senses of masculinity by defining
masculinity and nationhood together. In his important work Nationalism and Sexuality,
George Mosse demonstrated the interdependence of concepts of masculinity and na-
tion in the specific historical circumstances of 18th- to early-20th-century Germany
and England. Mosse proposed the key role of the mutually strengthening articulations
of nation, respectability, and masculinity in the formation of post-Enlighten-
ment Western Europe. Changing socio-economic patterns (the emergence of a bour-
geoisie invested in new professions and industries) and historical events (wars of
liberation and stages of imperial domination) shaped concepts of individual and com-
munal identity and proper behavior that both drew on and drew away from aristocratic
ideals of the past.
18
Thus, notions of chivalry could offer raw material to a developing
standard of moral virtue that scaffolded a bourgeois definition of male and female
identities and spheres. Institutional channels trained the young into such identities. As
Mosse says in his more recent book, true manliness had symbolized an essentially
healthy society, and this society, in turn, did not merely posit manliness as an ideal to
be reached but made it an integral part of its function. . . . [One must] consider the
principal means through which society itself transformed manliness from theory into
practice . . . how the very functioning of normative society became linked to the mas-
culine ideal.
19
The dominance of this ideological constellation did not go unchallenged; in fact,
challenges were often (but not always) co-opted, as they also formed indispensable
boundaries against which normative masculinity could assert and define itselfun-
manly men, manly women, and other Others, both within and outside the nations
borders. To argue that what male intellectuals in Egypt had to say about women
constituted a commentary on masculinity demands recognition not only that gender is
a relational concept, but also that definitions of masculinity and modes of political
power are mutually constitutive. Mens institutionalized power over women as well
as over other men has been part of hegemonic constructions of masculinity as well as
of what it is to be a nation.
20
The power to define and regulate womens lives entails
defining what it is to be a man. Yet part of the power of hegemonic masculinityof
hegemonic anythingis that it may remain silent, seemingly not subject to debate.
So if, in R. Radhakrishnans eloquent phrasing, woman becomes the mute but
necessary allegorical ground for the transactions of nationalist history,
21
these transac-
tions may entail articulations where the category of womanness is not muted but,
to the contrary, defined loudly, while maleness is assigned its script more silently.
It is my contention that Qasim Amins works were controversial not only because
they redefined the sphere of women who were part of an emerging eliteor analyzed
a redefinition that was already taking shapebut because this entailed a veiled redefi-
nition of some mens spheres. Thus, it is important to investigate not only what male
176 Marilyn Booth
and female commentators in Egypt had to say explicitly about mens social roles and
identities, but also what writings on women conveyed implicitly about men. In other
words, what messages about masculine identities surface when we look at what is not
said about men, or at what is said of men in terms of their social relations with women
as well as other men? What do discourses on modernity that target women as that
which is to be modernized say about male identities?
If I am on the right course, it is crucial to make a distinction between at least some
male intervention in the womens press and womens founding roles in this institu-
tion. Indeed, this focus demands deconstruction of the term womens press, both as
used then and as embraced now. Early observers of the womens press in Egypt used
the term al-iafa al-nisaiyya (literally, womens journalism; by extension, the wom-
ens press) to refer to any publication having to do with women in any way, thereby
initiating a canonization process wherein commentators historicized a new presence
on the scene before it matured.
22
The term nisa itself was malleable. Although the
variant nisaw (al-niswiyya) is now used by feminists, in the early 1920s nisa came
to mean feminist as well as womens, depending on the context, and this slippage
could be very useful.
23
But are we to adopt this term, al-iafa al-nisaiyya, without
considering the horizon of impulses and interests across which it ranged? What of
a womens journal founded by a man whose concernperhaps obsessionwith
womens conditions yielded a submerged discourse on the state(s) of masculinity in
his society?
WOM AN I N I SLAM
The fortnightly magazine al-Mara fi al-Islam was founded by Ibrahim Ramzi in
1901.
24
The periodicals format might suggest the different ways in which male and
female journalists crafted womens periodicals, as Beth Baron suggests.
25
It appeared
more frequently; its title sketched an abstract notion of women, contrasting with the
literal or more concrete titles that, Baron finds, female editors preferred.
26
But I find
no evidence for Barons statement that it was one of the journals that shows the
presence of abundant female literary activity at the turn of the century.
27
For Woman
in Islam, founded by a male intellectual, contains male-authored material exclusively,
except for two biographies attributed to al-Durr al-manthur (Scattered Pearls)that
is, to a biographical dictionary of women published seven years earlier (1894), written
by Zaynab Fawwaz (c. 18501914), whose name does not appear in Ramzis journal.
And even these biographies, as we shall see, were framed by the words of men.
28
Ibrahim Ramzi Bek (18671924) was the great-grandson of Ali Agha al-Arduru-
mili, the surname signaling origins in Erzerum in eastern Anatolia. This great-grandfa-
ther immigrated to Egypt in the time of Muhammad Ali (r. 180548). Ibrahim was
born in the Fayyum, and there he founded the weekly magazine al-Fayyum (26 Janu-
ary 1894);
29
wrote a historical novel (al-Mutamid b. Abbada, Cairo, 1892); and wrote
a work on his birthplace, Tarikh al-Fayyum (History of the Fayyum, Fayyum, 1894).
He spent thirteen months in Paris, returned to live in Cairo, and founded al-Mara fi
al-Islam in March 1901. He published only fourteen issues; the last is dated 1 Novem-
ber 1901.
30
He founded another newspaper, al-Tamaddun (Becoming Civilized), two
weeks later. The first issue, (dated 17 November 1901), describes the magazine as
Men and the Womens Press 177
adabiyya tahdh biyya usbuiyya (a literary and instruction-oriented weekly
31
). He
published this periodical until 1904,
32
and his work Tarikh al-falasifa al-yunaniyyin
(1904) appeared first there. He knew French and Turkish well, as is suggested by the
contents of his womens magazine.
Ramzis Woman in Islam was a direct outcome of the publication of Qasim Amins
Tahrir al-mara (The Liberation of Woman, 1899) and then al-Mara al-jadida (The
New Woman, 1901), Amins response to critics of his 1899 book.
33
Introducing his
own response to these works, Ramzi declares that the very title Tahrir al-mara
sparked an outcry before people had even read the book. At first, the uproar people
made was not because they disagreed with each other on where the author had erred,
or on his analysis, but rather because the title alienated them and they rejected it. . . .
The Liberation of Woman rang in their ears like a lions roar. Their response was
just to draw back and hone their skills at casting opprobrium on its author.
34
The
book, says Ramzi, was the talk of the town. When it appeared, everyone talked about
iton the streets, in public and private social gatherings, among women in seclusion
in their quarters, and in their visits [to each other], and between them and their hus-
bands.
35
Many responses to Amin appeared in the press and in the form of published trea-
tises and speeches. Reactions to his book and the subsequent construction of Amin as
the father of Egyptian feminism have yet to be fully analyzed, although Coles
article on the debate went far in this direction.
36
Ramzis own response suggests the
degree of intensity this book and its successor generated. The essays he published in
al-Muayyad, he says, are the reason for [Woman in Islams] emergence from the
space of speech to the sphere of action.
37
Founding a periodical was indeed direct
political action: Ramzis characterization of this act expresses succinctly the predomi-
nant attitude among intellectuals to Egypts young non-government press. Journalism
was above all a tool for activist reform and political engagement that, in depth of
discussion and breadth of potential audience, could extend far beyond drawing-room
debate. Socio-political change required (and would result from) a public discourse,
even if it was one limited initially to a very small reading public.
38
Initial reactions to Tahrir al-mara, explained Ramzi, centered on accusations
against its author: the book represented satanically inspired, corrupt thought; it was
one of the schemes the British concocted to consolidate further their 1882 occupation
of Egypt; it was a result of the writers upbringing in Europe and desire to resemble
Europeans; it was Christian propaganda for the purpose of eradicating all honor and
religion that the Muslims retained; it was a tool in the Eastern Question, a process,
Ramzi declared, that had begun with the Crusades. Yet a few, Ramzi said, read it
carefully before they slandered the author, while otherseven fewerwere commit-
ted to moderation, justice, and good manners.
39
As I noted earlier, feminist scholars now who study the history of the woman
question in Egypt have been concerned to show that Qasim Amins posthumous status
as father of Egyptian feminismas the first to raise the issue of womens status
has occluded the contributions of women (as it has occluded those of other men) to
making gender politics a subject of public discourse before Amins books appeared,
as well as in the period of their controversial appearance. Yet to emphasize that he
was neither the first nor the only individual to raise this issue risks minimizing the
178 Marilyn Booth
fact that it was Amins work that generated a furious and more public debate on
gender than had been the case before. It was commentators at the time, not simply
historians writing later, who gave his books precedenceincluding commentators
who were knowledgeable about and sympathetic to womens own contributions to the
public debate.
That Amins words raised controversy when those of others did not does not turn
solely on either the explosive potential of his 1899 title or, as has been suggested, on
his status as a well-known lawyer in one of Egypts highest courts, or because he had
links to the British administration in Egypt.
40
That a male professional in Cairo
someone near the top of the shifting social hierarchy in urban Egypt, in other words,
at the pinnacle of a modernizing patriarchy
41
chose to speak out on this issue
meant that it had to be taken seriously by other men sharingand vying forthe
same social space.
42
If the woman question stood at the very center of the struggle to
define Egypts future, Amins work may have aroused anxiety partly because it high-
lighted mens unmet responsibilities and therefore raised questions about what it was
to be manly. And, as in Europe, the emergence of a call for womens rightshowever
these rights might be definedposed an incipient challenge to the gender division
so crucial to the construction of modern masculinity.
43
While in Egypt that call was
not yet institutionalized into a movement when Amin published these books, and
would not be so for nearly another quarter-century, readers of the press, presumably
among them Ramzi, had been subjected to this call for at least a decade in newspapers
such as al-Muayyad and al-Nil and magazines such as al-Muqtataf.
One of the most commented-on responses to Amin was a book by the rising indus-
trialist Muhammad Talat Harb, Fasl al-khitab fi al-mara wal-hijab (The Definitive
Word on Woman and Seclusion/Veiling, 1901), which had been preceded by his first
response, Tarbiyat al-mara wal-hijab (Womans Training and Seclusion/Veiling,
1899, rev. 1905).
44
Ramzi founded his magazine probably just before Harbs second
response; by the sixth issue (15 June 1901), he had received a copy from the author
that he reviewed in the issues opening essay.
45
In this essay and in his earlier essays on Amin, Ramzi places himself between
Amin and Talat Harb, claiming that they have both gone to extremes. Yet Ramzi
distances himself more from the latter than from the former, while lauding certain
points that each one makes. His critique of Amin takes the author to task for an
indiscriminate embrace of pro-Westernism; Qasim Amin should know better, he snaps.
Ramzis linkage between womens socially determined inferiority and the degener-
ation of the nation is more forceful, less forgiving even than Amins. He expresses
less concern for womens own needs and desires as he subordinates them to the needs
of the nation. In general, Ramzi lauds Amins attack on the seclusion of women. But
he criticizes Amin for advocating the immediate lifting of the veil and public mixing
of men and women, voicing some of the same concerns that women reformers were
raising or would raise about womens discomfort and mens public behavior, though
perhaps not for the same reasons.
46
Above all, insinuating the sexual forays of outsid-
ers in Egypt as assaults on national honor, and offering an ironizing invocation to the
difficulty of eviscerating imperialist institutions, Ramzi links his gradualist stance on
seclusion to imperialism. For as long as the Capitulations exist, we have to hide our
women as much as possible. Who would expose his woman to the revenge of a
Men and the Womens Press 179
foreigner who faces only the ruling of his own consul? . . . Better for us to retain the
present hijab until women have education and training, until men are made more
polite through more education, and until God does as He wills with the Capitula-
tions.
47
Thus, Ramzis stance on mens responsibility and its intersection with womens
visibility has everything to do with the British imperial presence in Egypt, and more
generally with European economic power as articulated through judicial preference in
Egypt. He modulates his stance on veiling and seclusion by reference to the Capitular
privileges of Europeans and European-protected subjects in Egypt: how can Egyp-
tians let their women run free as long as Europeans are not judicially responsible
for their own actions? As Sinha has demonstrated for late-19th-century Bengal, local
nationalists attempts to define gendered spheres there were anything but independent
of Britains imperialist presence. She stresses, indeed, that British and Indian con-
cepts of masculinity cannot be understood simply from the framework of discrete
national cultures; instead, they must be understood in relation to one another, and as
constitutive of each other.
48
But this is not the same thing as mimicry, no matter how
defined; that debates were mutually constitutive does not mean that those whocau-
tiously or incautiouslyadvocated changes in gender regimes were necessarily echo-
ing British colonialist discourse, which used the call for reform as a means to justify
continued colonialist stewardship, as they saw it. In Egypt, reformists could and did
return to indigenous sources and to arguments firmly within an Islamic framework to
argue womens visibility, the linkage of womens education to progress conceived as
an element in a cyclical history of human civilizations, and mens responsibility.
49
Outlining the substance of Talat Harbs attack on Qasim Amin, Ramzi lambastes
Harb (politely) for insisting on the maintenanceindeed, the intensificationof ex-
isting seclusionary practices, both life imprisonment in the home and the covering
of the entire female face except for one eye. Ramzi concurs with Amin (and situates
himself in the liberal Islamic reformist camp) in holding that the Qurans injunction
to modesty and general outlines on hijab must be followed in terms appropriate to
contemporary life. He reminds the reader that one accepts the view of todays men
of religion only when there is a conflict or lack of clarity in the sound religious
sources, and notes that this is not the case in what the Quran and hadith say on these
issues. He privileges malaa (the general good) over the words of the men of re-
ligion. He relates the hadith of a woman who, attending an oration by the khalifa
Umar, corrected Umar on a doctrinal point, whereupon the khalifa publicly acknowl-
edged that she was right. Ramzi uses this story somewhat tautologically to modern-
ize the concept of dw arura (necessity), which Talat Harb had invoked as governing
womens access to the world beyond the home. It must have been dw arura, declares
Ramzi, for this woman to attend Umars oration, since she was there; therefore, dw ar-
ura now must include womens obligation to seek knowledge. If women then were
permitted to attend public orations, women now must have the right to attend mosque
and school for educational purposesnot just to leave the home (if forced by the
absence of a male guardian) to make a living, or to die, as Talat Harb advocated.
But Ramzi supports Harbs point that the debate over seclusion and veiling should
stop in the interests of a practical focus on educating girlseven if the two mens
agendas differ.
50
180 Marilyn Booth
FROM CRI TI QUE TO AGENDA
Ramzis discussion of these controversial books set the stage for his own position on
the woman question. How does Ramzi set up his argument? Beginning with the very
first issues first substantive article, he moves from a critique of Westernization that
targets usthe entire Egyptian community, and perhaps the entire Islamic
ummato an impassioned call for tarbiya, or upbringing, training in the sense of
instilling morals that will uplift the nation.
Tarbiya was a key term that exemplified (and shaped) a new concern with organiz-
ing and managing society, an emphasis that elucidated the very depth of Westerniza-
tion whose outer trappings Ramzi (and many, many others) attacked as morally,
economically, and practically destructive of the integrity of the community.
51
Ramzi
distinguishes tarbiya as learning honorable moral behavior and praiseworthy prac-
tices in the home, as against the word he most often pairs with tarbiya, tal m (scho-
lastic education, from ilm, learning the branches of knowledge in school.)
52
For the
degenerate state of society, he says,
[T]he disgrace of what we have fallen into is not directly ours but rather is the disgrace of
those who did not attend to our tarbiya and tal m. . . . We have no powers of judgment, we are
subject to our own natures, we have no thought to preserving our selfhood and protecting our
future, to abandoning what harms us and taking what helps us. There is no doubt that the
ignorant one cannot be blamed for his ignorance.
53
The result, Ramzi says, linking it to the economic state of the community, is that all
houses, glory, and wealth disappear; the property of the people of the nation falls into
the hands of the foreigner.
54
Thus, tarbiya becomes a matter of economic and political
survival, sketched in concrete and abstract terms and linked directly to the presence
of economic imperialism.
And who might the disgraceful ones who have neglected tarbiya be? The reason
for all of this is mothers, not children. Had they taught us lessons in economy . . . we
would have been better workers as adults. Tarbiya is in the hands of women: we
must try to refine and teach them so that they can undertake the tarbiya of our [sic]
children, so that the umma will succeed through the success of its individuals. God is
the Guarantor of a felicitous outcome.
55
Certainly, Ramzis appeal is not far from Qasim Amins in Tahrir al-mara. Here
was the direct linkage between a definition of womens social function as immutable,
the capacity of men to act as good nationalists, and the fortunes of the nation (or of
the community of Islam), all bound together in a discourse of morality as that which
sanctioned a reformist mission. Moreover, for him as for Amin, women are both
victimizers and victims, for they misshape the young and yet (like the young) are
ignorant (and passive) and therefore cannot be blamed. Neatly, he reifies both a bio-
logical sense of gendered difference and a gendered social division of labor, which
was probably becoming more marked in the cities as, following a European capitalist
pattern, mens wage labor was increasingly separated from the home, and the local
elite began consciously to appropriate European patterns of social organization and
behavior.
Ramzi appears less able than Amin, though, to imagine other futures for women,
and as I have noted, he is bothered by Amins wholesale embrace of practices received
Men and the Womens Press 181
as Western at the time,
56
although he does not link Amins Westernizing zeal to his
connections among the local British colonial administration. Indeed, it is Amins
stance in his second book, al-Mara al-jadida, that Ramzi cannot countenance.
57
The
very first article in his periodical, as I said, attacks Westernization. Admitting that he
found some practices to praise during his own thirteen months in France, Ramzi
announces sternly that he found more practices to reject. He links the spread of West-
ernization in Egypt to the success of colonialist imperialism. In this light, it is not
surprising that he is more concerned (and less defensive) than is Amin about setting
his own reformist program within a reading of the Islamic sources.
Although Amin has been accused of misogyny for his negative portrayals of Egyp-
tian women,
58
in fact he is quicker than is Ramzi to assert that the ultimate responsibil-
ity for womens state is mens, for their neglect of womens minds, although Ramzi
does acknowledge this occasionally. Amin attacks men for this shortcoming in harsher
terms than does Ramzi. Neither appears misogynistic when lined up next to Talat
Harb.
But Ramzi, like both Amin and Talat Harb, focuses on the woman as the privileged
object of tarbiya because she is the (externally guided) agent of the tarbiya of men
and future mothers. In this magazine she is object rather than subject; she is the latter
only in the sense of one who is subjected.
59
Defined as outside the community of the
enlightened, she is the overdetermined target of enlightened nationalist mens concern.
But what happens when Ramzi makes a turn toward tarbiya as content rather than as
polemical locus?
If, as Baron says, the abstract titles of journals founded by men suggest that
male editors were generally more attracted by the ideal of woman than by the concrete
realities of womens lives, a pattern usually borne out by the contents of their pages,
60
this is tempered by the structure and contents of al-Mara fi al-Islams issues. For the
magazines polemics are interrupted by long chapters on the details of bringing up
baby, similar to regular columns on child care and education in journals edited by
women. True, this is instruction rather than description of the concrete realities of
womens lives, but the distinction might be more apparent than real: more often than
not, the womens magazines shaped their articles on daily experience around didactic
criteria and instructional rhetoric.
Yet there is a difference in the content of these minutely instructional features as
compared with those in the womens magazines. On the level of everyday practice,
the latter tended to assume the femaleness of the reader (or the listener): how-to
articles on cooking, home management and arrangement, servant management, disci-
plining children, and so forth were aimed at women. Woman in Islams practical
sections are addressed to men and define parenthood in particular, and household
management in general, as the spheres of men as well as of women. At the same time,
there is a clear division of labor parallel to the womens magazines emphasis on
womens control in the home. The womens magazines emphasized home management
and child care as work requiring training, offering women a sphere of expertise that
might enhance their status in the family and community. But it might also prepare
them for work outside the home, possibly resulting in more independence.
61
Al-Mara fi al-Islam, in contrast, posits an utterly instrumental view of womens
education, exhibiting a complete lack of concern about womens own self-fulfillment
182 Marilyn Booth
or their concerns about the nature of their relationships within the society. This instru-
mentalist view surfaces in Ramzis critique of received practices. If these beliefs
were limited only to them [women], it wouldnt matter; we would say, Do as you
like! But this is not the issue: this affects our property, our children, and our umma.
62
One unspoken assumption that surfaces here is that the training women were
receiving already from their mothers and through their own experience was unsuited
to the proper upbringing of children. Ramzi characterizes this received knowledge
narrowly, representing it above all in deep-rooted belief in the zar (spirit-calling cere-
mony), visiting saints tombs, and other practices that he disdainfully labels khurafat.
This was a common concern among male reformers at the time. Female writers were
not unconcerned about this issue, either: Zaynab Fawwaz wrote a treatise on the zar,
a common reference point for authors who wanted to point out the deleterious effects
on women of received practices. Perhaps the concern went deeper, excavating an
anxiety about acceptance in the modern world. The zar becomes the antithesis of a
desiredand male-controlledmodernity. Furthermore, it is a space where gender
and racial boundaries are dangerously blurred; hence its significance to a discussion
of normative masculinity.
63
Ramzi acknowledges that men may hold these beliefs, but he does not acknowledge
their direct participation, and he distances and racializes those men who actually run
the zar, mentioning only the most famous ones and ascribing to them Sudanese
or African origins. He suggests a racial basis to their power. Maybe their fame
comes from the fact that they are the most ignorant . . . or that the men of deepest
Africa are the nearest apparent thing to black afar t (spirits, devils).
64
Perhaps such
distancing makes it easier for him to feminize these practitioners and thereby to sepa-
rate the zar (and other khurafat) from the sphere of the normative and hegemonic
masculine, the respectable, the cleanly nationalist.
65
But these are not the only men
who receive the label unmanly from Ramzi. He faults men of his own social circle
for allowing women to hold zar sessions in their homes, implying that this is a moral
and unmanly failing. Thus, both the men associated with performing the zar and those
who allow it to happen (a backhanded assertion of womens powerlessness?) are
excluded from Ramzis ideal masculine, and, as they are attacked through the invoca-
tion of an ideal, hegemonic masculinity, they help to construct that very ideal by
contrast. But the zar leaders alone are permanently excluded; the others are temporary
exiles. For having set up his contrast, Ramzi then recuperates his ideal of manliness
by assuring the reader that many of these men do not themselves believe in the zar.
(One wonders here and elsewhere in the magazine where these mens enlightened
tarbiya could have come from, given Ramzis emphasis on the formative role of the
[bad] mother.) But then, their permissiveness is even graver, for they cannot be
excused on the basis of ignorance.
Perhaps male writers, as scornful as they were of the zar, could not quite dismiss
the beliefs that shaped it. But they could distance their own religious practice from
womens by aligning themselves with the high scholarly tradition and by insisting on
their legitimacy to pronounce a modern, reformist religion. This offered continued
authority over the lives of women at a time when perhaps the unquestioned authority
of (some) men in their families was beginning to seem at least ideologically fragile.
66
To align orthodox religious practice with being a proper man, as Ramzi comes close
Men and the Womens Press 183
to doing, was perhaps a means to assert the authority of both manhood and (their
version of) the faith.
This returns us to Mosses insistence on the importance of respectabilitya term
indicating decent and correct manners and morals, as well as the proper attitude
toward sexuality
67
in maintaining mutually supportive constructions of masculinity
and the nation. If in Muslim-majority nations the sources of Islamic law defined the
norms of respectability, inflected by local practices, one must remember that contem-
porary intellectuals wanted acceptance by Europe as modern, and perhaps this re-
quired an adaptable notion of respectability. To educate women was respectable
in a sense that Europeans would understand it; concomitantly, the zar was everything
that modern, nationalist respectability was not, for it incorporated what Ramzi implied
were both indecent manners and improper sexual attitudes. Ramzi contrasts the
tolerance among some men for the zara practice feminized and demonized by him
and others, and then presented as almost traitorous to the nationwith the father/
nation who thinks ahead, again invoking a sense of male-defined community through
a label, arar (s. urr), that bore a richness of connotation: the freedom to make good
decisions, the liberality of the noble and independent man. But we, who are free in
our actions (arar f af alina), shouldnt we prepare our little daughters for a good
future that will benefit our children and our umma?
68
THE EDUCATI ON OF DAUGHTERS
Ramzi also needs to deny that properly educated women already exist. Occasionally
acknowledging their existence, he calls them the rare one who is not to be judged.
69
In other words, this woman must be labeled exceptional to be accounted for. As we
shall see, this insistence contrasts with the journals own biographical practice, and
yet marks that biographical practice as diverging in intent from the biographical rheto-
ric of magazines edited by women. At another point, he contrasts his concept of the
well-trained woman with a patronizing description of educated women (al-mutaalli-
mat), suggesting the superficiality and duplicity of this education (another common
theme at the time) but at the same time occluding women of advanced literary and
religious educations who, however rare, did exist at the time and always had (as
Ramzi demonstrates in his choice of biographical subjects).
70
Ramzi says there is a
little variation among them [our women]:
Among them I know ones who have learned to read and write like one of the scribes of the
ancients. In other words, if [one of these women] were to pick up a newspaper she could read
it superficially (qiraa bas tw a). This constitutes a high level of learning among them. The edu-
cated among them are fewer than the few. Were I to converse a little with one of them, and to
send the rays of my thoughts into that which she conceals but which is practically visible
between her lips, she would reveal a truth: if she were to state her disbelief in khurafat she
would be going against her inner beliefs, out of fear that I would direct my censure at her. If
the conversation went on longer, she would speak her inner beliefs out loud. As she declares
that she is among those who do not believe in khurafat, especially the zar, [she also says] and
may God keep me from inclusion among the women who belong to the zar groups or attend
their sessions; God is between us and [the zar]. But what do we have to do with these things,
we are ignorant of what they are actually like? God protect us from them [m. pl.: the shaykhs/
184 Marilyn Booth
afar t of the zar], God make our words rest lightly upon them [i.e., not cause them to anger].
This is what the educated, literate woman says, so what of the ignorant one who has not enjoyed
the light of reading and writing.
71
As Ramzi claims to know his interlocutors inner beliefs better than she does, he
objects to both the style and the substance of her response. The woman betrays her
fear of the zar spirits revengeand she speaks like the uneducated. Which is worse?
She does not fit into Ramzis picture of the civilized society. How can a man hold
his head up in the community of men and of nations when the womenfolk speak and
act like this?
72
But Ramzi does surround this portrait with a diatribe against the exist-
ing state of education. If education changes a womans appearance but not her essence,
it is the fault of that education (and of fathers who enroll their daughters), not an
essential marker of woman. The critical focus is on the unthinking appropriation of
Western ways more than it is on women. Once more, women act as symbols of a
society in trouble. This, of course, occludes womens voices as it instrumentalizes
their bodies.
Yet the portrait assumes much. Even as Ramzi rejects imitation of European appear-
ances, he assumes throughout his writing the unquestioned superiority (and wide-
spread existence) of the nuclear family living separately from the extended family;
the preferability (and widespread existence) of the companionate marriage; and the
spatial organization, furnishing, and decor of the home to be modeled on European
patterns. If Ramzi is not so admiring of Western societies as is Amin, he accepts
unquestioningly some modes of social organization that are the logical outcome of
Amins agenda.
The content of a proposed education is to be strictly controlled. One of Ramzis
contributions to his journal is a series entitled Tarbiyat al-banat (The Training of
Girls), which is in fact a translation with some modification of Francois de Salignac
de La Mothe-Fenelons 17th-century treatise De leducation des filles (1687). Accord-
ing to John Lyons,
Fenelon emphasized the desirability of preparing women for activities carried out entirely in
the home. He contrasted the good domestic woman with the fashionable and public woman
of the salon.
Fenelon presented himself as the enemy of the artificial and the affected; for him, the domes-
tic woman was the woman returned to her supposedly natural state.
73
If it was ironicgiven his attacks on Westernizationthat Ramzi chose a French
work on girls education to translate, it was not surprising in light of Ramzis own
unstated assumptions about the superiority of Western modes of social organization.
Fenelons work was useful to Ramzi in supporting his emphasis on women as those
who train the next generation and his rejection of the superficial trappings of society
(i.e., in the West). De leducation des filles also insisted, as did Ramzi, on the danger-
ous malleability of children from babyhood on.
74
Although there was a very wide-
spread belief that a human nature existed, Fenelon realized that from their very first
moments children were already adapting to the society around them.
75
Fenelons perspective was in some aspects more conservative than Ramzis, a sub-
ject beyond the scope of this essay. The two would have agreed, however, not only
that men are in charge of women (Quran 4:34), but that men are in charge of
Men and the Womens Press 185
womens education. Ramzi exhorts his readers to try to refine and teach [women];
it is the father who must teach the mother how to refine and raise her child.
76
THE QUESTI ON OF AUDI ENCE
This emphasis on mens control of womens and girls training finds its rhetorical
parallel in Ramzis construction of audience. The very first line of the first issue,
announcing the journals raison detre, constructs this audience: O brothers of the
nation.
77
Ramzi continues: We have made this magazine specially devoted to inquiry on
raising womens situation, in the context of the deterioration of the state of men
when they, more than women, are more appropriately the subject of attention and
concern. My thinking has led me to a certain truth, which is the decline of mens
state, due to womens ignorance and poor upbringing.
78
In other words, the editors
concern begins explicitly with mens condition, not womens; the female state is sim-
ply instrumental to the fortunes of the maleand therefore to the nation. One might
argue that it is the emphasis on men that is instrumentalin other words, that Ramzi
tries to justify a concern with womens state by articulating a concern about men. But
the consistent focus of the magazine suggests that the perilous state of men is more
than a rhetorical ploy.
And the magazines thematic focus demands an audience of men, as it does an
exclusion of women, for if women desired and were able to read Ramzis magazine,
it would throw his rhetorical thrust into doubt.
79
The message is consistently man-to-
man. Every one of us is either a husband of a wife, a son of a mother, a brother to
a sister, a male relative of a female, or a friend or companion of a female (ash r li-
ash ra).
80
This homosocial address follows an invocation of our readers. And fi-
nally, Ramzi alludes to mens sexual desire with a forthrightness and camaraderie that
seem unlikely if he had assumed a female audience: Every sane man is well aware
of human sensitivity. He knows that the appearance of body parts that are kept hidden
because of carnal appetites affects him more than does the face that shows. That is
why God prohibited looking at anything but the face and hands. Even if a man has a
longing to look at the face, this does not arouse desire the way fullness on a chest
does.
81
The construction of a male audiencethe exclusion of womenis underlined by
the lack of womens authorship in this journal. Ramzi announces an inclusivityWe
have opened [the magazines] doors/sections (abwab) to all who want to write
82
but
this inclusivity appears to be a male all. If at least two of the biographical sketches
are taken from Zaynab Fawwazs al-Durr al-manthur, only one is acknowledged as
such. The journal is mostly written by Ramzi, with contributions from other men.
83
BI OGRAPHI CAL PRACTI CES
Elsewhere I have situated the Famous Women (shah rat al-nisa) genre of early
Arabic womens magazines in the context of a need articulated by intellectuals for
new gendered identities that were both individually framed and national/ist, a search
that was central to the construction of competing ideologies of nationhood. These
186 Marilyn Booth
biographical sketches, I have argued, constructed images of womanhood that were
intended specifically to be exemplary for the female readership of this press. As these
images illustrated in lively and concrete fashion the discursive stances of magazine
editors, they also provided concrete (and competing) responses to the question of what
an ideal national/ist woman should be. The tale of a life, howevereven a brief
narrativecould pose complications that were potentially disruptive to the programs
for women that a magazine might uphold. Such a biography could send messages that
might appear ambivalent, even contradictory, to schoolgirls reading these journals.
These biographies, I argue, inscribed deferred collective autobiographies for a future
that was still malleable, as women worked to define, and most often to broaden, their
own and their daughters circuits of action and expectation.
That Ramzi featured biographies of women in his male-written and male-oriented
journal complicates my notion of Famous Women biographies as collective autobi-
ography. How did biographies operate within and around the discursive space demar-
cated by Woman in Islam? A narrative of the life of Khadija bint Khuwaylid, first
wife of the Prophet Muhammad, concludes the inaugural issue. The biography is
preceded by an introduction:
We have instituted this regular feature as part of the magazine. In it we will encompass the life
histories of famous women. . . . The benefit this feature will provide is evident, especially since
we will append to each biography the experiential lesson and admonition (ibra) deducible from
it, the subjects moral conduct or actions that are suitable for imitation.
84
The didactic possibilities of biography are self-evident to Ramzi, yet he voices a need
to articulate (and therefore shape) the lesson that each life permits, lest the reader
draw the wrong lesson from the biography. This approach is in harmony with Ramzis
rhetorical practice throughout of lecturing men on how to shape and instruct women,
for the biography is presented, as it were, at one remove, or distanced from the reader
(and possible listeners) by the editors summarizing intervention. These biographies
and their ibra (admonitory lessons) serve to recapitulate and give evidence for the
polemics of other articles in each issue.
By the second issue, the proposed circuit of life writing has narrowed. The two-
part biography of Aisha bint Abi Bakr launched therein follows a second introduction
to the series: Our purpose in presenting the biographies of famous women is to set
out their life stories and to examine and bring to light the truth, noting our own
observations . . . by means of which we draw the readers [masc.] attention to the life
of the Muslim woman in the [different] historical phases, that this may yield an ad-
monitory lesson and a sermon (ibra wa-mawiza). Now the focus is not on women
of all societies but on the Muslim woman, consonant with Ramzis stated lack of
interest in women of European societies and his desire to find role models for women
among Muslim women. Yet in a later issue, Ramzi will present the life of the Italian
astronomer Maria Agnesi. Less surprising is his reproduction of Zaynab Fawwazs
praiseful life history of a contemporary Turkish writer, Fatma Aliye, for throughout
the journal he seeks a model for Egypt in Istanbul.
85
What lessons does Ramzi draw from the biographies he features, and what does he
emphasize? He certainly lauds women for their supportive roles in the family: as
perfect spouses, mothers, sisters, and/or daughters, like Khadija. Women may be
Men and the Womens Press 187
supportive helpers in the performance of great deeds, and thus was Khadija the first
to convert and believe in the mission of the Prophet before a single man was con-
verted.
86
The lessons to be learned echo Ramzis emphases throughout the journal. Thus,
his focus on benefiting the umma by training individuals, in the first issue, resounds
in anotherand rather differentlesson he adduces from Khadijas life: A womans
commerce and wealth benefits not only herself and her family but might bring benefit
on the whole group (al-jumhur), for Khadijas wealth helped the Prophet and ahl al-
bayt.
87
And is it any accident that a life of al-Khansa appears in the same issue in
which Ramzi disagrees with Talat Harb on the dw arura of girls education, even if it
requires leaving the home? Praising the Arabic language and the history of its poetic
art, and lauding al-Khansas recognized place therein, the biography concludes, with
a light touch of that mark of formal belletristic Arabic, rhymed and rhythmic prose
(saj): then it is no wonder we say women equal men in their concern with the
rational and transmitted sciences; even if women lag behind in the ranks of striking
and fighting and clashing with heroes, they are no less than men in matters which one
can teach, nor do they lag in obtaining that which minds can reach.
88
At the same time, some of these lessons seem to exceed Ramzis main thesis: that
women must be trained for the good of their children and hence the community and
nation. They certainly exceed Fenelon. For women are shown as active outside the
home: Khadija, the merchant; Nafisa, Maria Agnesi, and Fatma Aliye, the scholars
and teachers; al-Khansa, the public poet. Yet more often than not, these subjects are
also lauded specifically for their sacrificial roles on behalf of the community, through
the willingness to sacrifice husbands and sons (al-Khansa) and to benefit others
through their acquired wealth (Khadija) and knowledge (Nafisa).
More specifically, Ramzi focuses on attributes of good upbringing and solid com-
portment, thrift and simple needs, love of family and concern with charity as mark-
ers of estimable morals. Maria Agnesi, famous for her love of her parents and obedi-
ence to them, and her love and loyalty to her siblings, was not only a scholar, the
biography reminds readers: and she performed household duties to perfection.
89
This
echoes and illustrates certain lessons set out in a long article in the fifth and sixth
issues on the proper upbringing of children, especially girls. For girls, love of family
is to come first, as is duty to the home. In the biography, only after being assured of
Agnesis domestic loyalties and skills are we told that Agnesi was renowned in the
sciences of philosophy, and [the study of] languages.
90
A sketch of Nafisa reiterates
Ramzis emphasis on educationalthough the content of that education, as well as
its hoped-for outcome, is far more modest in his program than it was in Nafisas life.
91
Ramzis use of biography to make his polemical points concrete and to emphasize
their historically attested validity is compelling in light of his repeated disclaimer that
the few exceptions to the negative generalizations he makes about women are not to
be judged. That is, they are outside the circuit of normalcy and, therefore, of concern.
Yet at the same time he takes Famous Women as exemplars to be emulated.
Whereas in magazines edited by women the exemplary potential of biography is ex-
plicitly drawn, this motif does not operate within a rhetorical environment where
highly accomplished women are (silenced) exceptions to be dismissed. The tone in
those magazines, while didactic, is also celebratory. Moreover, unlike Ramzi, female
188 Marilyn Booth
writers in those magazines also name bluntly the difficulties women faced in making
their own futuresand in choosing them.
This distinction may have partially shaped a difference in magazine layout. In wom-
ens magazines, beginning with Fatat al-sharq, Famous Women biographies were
most often the leading feature. I have argued that this was a way to offer and to
celebrate an encouraging narrative of a womans life, as inspiration. It was also a
riposte, I think, to malestream magazines featuring of famous mens lives as their
opening essays.
92
Al-Mara fi al-Islam, in contrast, placed biographies of women at
the very back (in parallel with malestream magazines placement of biographical
sketches of women at the back, in the Home Management column). Biography
served Ramzi as a way to reiterate abstract discussions and how-to features, both
oriented directly to men and indirectly to women. If biography in Woman in Islam was
akin to the biographical polemics of female-edited womens magazines in cautiously
supporting some extra-domestic activity for women, Woman in Islams Famous
Women did not present the same range of activity. Although Ramzis biographical
feature did provide precedents for womens new lives, as in the magazines edited
by women, its fiercely didactic frame seemed to announce that biography was not
primarily a means to celebrate womens achievements.
READERS AND THE NATI ON
O brothers of the nation: the use of watan here stands out against the collective
named by the magazines title and its explanatory subheading: a scientific and educa-
tional magazine that inquires into the raising of womans situation in Islam.
93
Watan
as well as community of the faith are invoked as the author laments the passing of
the greatness of both the Islamic empire and Pharaonic Egypt. In the context of the
authors invocation of maleness, this suggests a double, overlapping framework for a
sense of unity, of shared masculine purposea male nationalism whose territorial
and affiliative boundaries of inclusivity are uncertain and shifting but are clearly
drawn along the divisions of both gender and class.
94
The invocation of a male audience might suggest a homosocial bonding, a camara-
derie that Mosse has emphasized as crucial to constructions of masculine nationalism
in England and Germany. If this camaraderie was often a product of wartime, it
could outlast it while building on an 18th-century construct of male friendship as a
serious and productive bond. Moreover, this homosocial bond cemented the clear divi-
sion of gender roles not only by constructing mens and womens friendships differ-
ently but also by furthering the notion that the creation of societies and states was a
masculine task.
95
The European history of mens friendships cannot simply be super-
imposed on another history, yet perhaps its corollary could be found in a sense of
brotherhood in the umma. And, as we shall see, Ramzi explicitly invoked friendships
among men.
Thinkers in Egypt, such as Ramzi, emphasizedas did many in the Westthat the
ultimate national cement was the companionate heterosexual couple. Yet implicit in
Ramzis man-to-man rhetoric is the urgent construction of a shared male agency that
will name, institute, and shape this heterosexual bond. This in turn will produce the
next generation of our (nationalist) sons.
Men and the Womens Press 189
The ideal of masculine companionship and independence might coexist uneasily or
ambivalently with the ideal of the bourgeois nuclear family.
96
Yet as long as women
could be kept at home, forming a sort of threshold that divided a mans supposedly
autonomous existence in the world from his family identity while maintaining his
domestic kingdom, the homosocial national/ist order was hardly threatened. In this
male homosocial order, women are instrumental. They produce companionship and
meals for their husbands and tarbiya for their sons and the next generation of educat-
ing mothers (for such is the definition of daughters). Women are silent in producing
this system, passive recipients of the training men define and offer. Even if bio-
graphical sketches in Woman in Islam contest (slightly) this vision of social organiza-
tion, it is held firmly in place by the assumptions that underlie Ramzis rhetoric.
This homosocial order is buttressed by a moral order that Ramzi regards as in crisis.
Repeatedly he voices concern for the akhlaq of the community. Again, there is a
hierarchy. Womens corrupt akhlaq infect their (our) children, and therefore the
community. Ramzi links this to a concern with the material basis of the modern family
and nation. Unless they are trained, women squander mens money and therefore
harm their family (and nation): ignorance [among women] causes bad health in chil-
dren and the dispersal of mens money, and is the reason why the bonds among
individuals of the community of Islam in every country dissolve.
97
Although they have the same impact on children (and on women), mens akhlaq
more directly reflect a moral degeneracy that is a sign ofindeed, is coterminous
withthe nations weakness. Gambling, a ubiquitous signifier of moral and material
decay in Egyptian discourse at the time, is a useful example for Ramzi: do you not
find that many youths, even those who have studied in Europe and ought to be models
of Western progress . . . have fallen morals and ignoble principles. Some of them be-
lieveand state publiclythat gambling is a proof of progress. . . . What praisewor-
thy work did our youths undertake for either themselves or their nations?
98
But above all, it is womens ignorance that constitutes a religiously grounded
shame that men must bear, and this moral shame is in turn linked to the nations
political and economic subordination:
We know that every umma is duty-bound to strive as hard as possible to obtain knowledge of
the word of God . . . and the positive sciences . . . and we know that to learn what is necessary
religiously and intellectually we must know the alphabet. . . . Then, were we to really look at
our womens state of ignorance, even in what we call the abcs, we would castigate and scorn
ourselves. Indeed, we would weep bitter tears . . . and we would not be amazed when others
abase us . . . or when they take over our properties while we are not looking.
99
That this passage is couched in rhymed and rhythmic prose (saj) that echoes the
Quran seems to be no accident. Though this belletristic style was still acceptable in
elite discourse at the time, it symbolized an archaism that writers were attacking as
unsuitable to the modern ages communications needs. And Ramzi does not use it
consistently. Its appearance here suggests a heightened level of rhetoric, an intensified
censure.
This male shame may turn to alarm when womens childrearing has deleterious
effects on the virtues of the young male. Ramzi again invokes khurafat in the form
of spirits, not just of the exorcism, sometimes invoked to scare children into good
190 Marilyn Booth
behavior: The mother who frightens her son by [mentioning] afar t is the mother
who roots cowardice in his mind. That is a vice that will hurt him in the future; he
will become a coward frightened even of his own shadow. And after that can one
hope that he will defend his watan, his honor, or his life?
100
But the mother must
also guard against partiality:
The mother who in her conduct makes distinctions between son and daughter, succoring the
boys more than the girls and giving [the former] precedence over [the latter] is the mother who
roots egotism and selfishness in their minds and removes them from justice and equality, so
that when they grow up they have a bent for tyranny against the weak, especially women like
her. Is it not her duty to raise them to love equality and justice?
101
The essence of Ramzis argument is that she must do this for the sake of the boys, so
that they grow up just, more than for the sake of the little girl who might be treated
poorly. It is the former whose justice will shape the nation. And the man-to-man
tenor of the magazine is hardly disrupted by the single series published therein that is
addressed to women: selections from one of the prolific author Francis Mikhails
books on home management. For here are the nuts and bolts of the training that men
are told to instill in their women, right down to the basal and baqdunis (onions and
parsley).
102
M ASCULI NI TY, FATHERHOOD, AND THE NATI ON
As suggested earlier, a key link between masculinity and nationalism that does not
surface directly in Ramzis more abstract essays emerges in his (and other mens) how-
to articles. Mens responsibilityindeed, masculine identityis defined somewhat
differently in the two categories of texts. In his polemics, Ramzi targets the mother
as the agent of childrens upbringing, although she is a rather passive agent, more a
channel for male-dictated education. In his articles on hands-on tarbiya, however,
Ramzi stresses the roles of both parents and makes fatherhood a central defining
identity of the responsible nationalist man.
103
This is not a distinction between tarbiya
and tal m as womens and mens spheres, respectively, but rather an emphasis on
tarbiya as the province of both parents. Ramzis terms of address contrast markedly
with those of Mikhail, whose female-addressed work focuses on cooking, cleaning,
and ridding the manzil of insects.
Fatherhood, Ramzi implies, is a mark of manliness (unlike cooking). Irresponsible
male parenting, like gambling, carries with it a moral shame that threatens murua,
manliness, with all the virtues it encompasses, especially a sense of honor construed
not only as focused on the behavior of women, but as entailing the proper upbringing
of children. To not bear this responsibility is to be feminized and also to be equated
with irresponsible youth.
As I have hinted, Ramzi makes the assumption throughout that men already have
the bases (if not the domestic details, provided by Ramzi and his colleagues) of the
sound knowledge that will allow them to bear this ultimate responsibility. This
assumption contradicts his assertion that the upbringing of male children is endan-
gered by the fact that it is ignorant women who raise them. This carries a classist
bias, for Ramzi assumes as the norm an urban male head of household who is suffi-
Men and the Womens Press 191
ciently stable financially to have a household with servants. He assumes a household
in which the man goes out to work and the woman stays home. He is taking as the
norm the rising bourgeoisie (and the remnants of the Ottoman aristocracy that were
slowly beginning to practice European bourgeois modes of daily life, if not economic
activity). These strata were at the center of nationalist politics. Such a man, Ramzi
presumably assumes, would have had the benefit of (male-run) education either by
tutors or outside the home. Class infuses his concept of the manly man as both
wealthy and polite.
104
As I have already noted, Mosse charts the coterminous and inter-related ascendancy
of nationalist ways of thinking and respectability as a concept that, in concert with
economic activity, defined the middle classes.
105
For both the English and the Ger-
mans, the wars against the French Revolution and Napoleon were waged on behalf
of patriotism and morality, both of which determined the direction of the new national
self-consciousness.
106
Central to this ascendancy were definitions of masculinity and
femininity that, even as they shifted, were constructed as immutable:
Nationalism and respectability assigned everyone his place in life, man and woman, normal
and abnormal, native and foreigner; any confusion between these categories threatened chaos
and loss of control. The clear and distinct roles assigned to men and women were basic. . . .
Masculinity meant depth and seriousness, while the feminine was shallow and often frivolous.
. . . Alongside the idealization of masculinity as the foundation of the nation and society,
woman, often accused of shallowness and frivolity, was at the same time idealized as the guard-
ian of morality, and of public and private order. . . . Woman was not confined to the family, yet
the roles assigned to her were conceived of as passive rather than active.
107
Mosses analysis is suggestive for 19th- and 20th-century Egypt, even when the over-
whelming factors of European imperialist control, local cultural and political heri-
tages, and a moral system based on the sources of Islamic law are taken fully into
account. Although respectability could not be defined exactly as it was in European
societies, what male reformers said as they focused intensely on women suggested an
anxiety about respectability and a recognition that respectable manlinessin the form
of possessing a properly educated and educating wife or daughterwas entailed in
nationalism. This in turn hints at a changing concept of honor. If honor remained a
marker of manliness in practical terms, it now meant not only the control of womens
sexuality, but also the (proper) control of their education. It also meant staying within
the bounds of ones livelihood (best achieved by teaching ones wife how to manage
a budget). Mens honor was also encapsulated in refuting Western observers equation
of veiling and seclusion with society-wide ignorance and backwardness. To edu-
cate women was to assert a right to that respect.
108
Mosse wonders how the father used appeals to nationalism in order to strengthen
his patriarchal powers.
109
Ramzi exemplifies one method. To control the wife as
educator within the family was, Ramzi as much as says, to be a good nationalist. One
could both maintain the hold of a (changing) patriarchy and be a modern, sensitive,
nationalist man by becoming involved in childrens education. For Ramzi, the father
at home was an active observer who built on his observations by taking action that
ultimately would benefit the nation.
110
In early-20th-century Egypt, notions of honor and reputation as founded on wom-
ens sexuality became nationalist tropes, Beth Baron has argued, both shaping and
192 Marilyn Booth
strengthening the image of the nation as family.
111
British soldiers attacks on Egyptian
women, as reported in the local press, became matters of national honor. Thus, the
nationalist cause could be phrased in terms of religious and customary beliefs and
practices salient to the masses of Egyptians that the nationalist leadership needed to
mobilize. We have seen that Ramzi linked national and nationalist honor and anti-
imperialism to the issue of womens seclusion by naming the Capitulations as an
obstacle to womens public, visible presence in society. This discourse was emerging
at a time that the central ritual of national bonding [through public ceremony] was
mainly a male experience.
112
This would not be the case some twenty years later.
Barons findings support my emphasis on male homosocial bonding as central to male
nationalist discourse at the time. But the framing of honor as national, I argue,
was useful not only as a means of mobilizing the masses. In the context of accelerat-
ing social change, including the emergence of women as visible and acknowledged
agents (not only symbols) of nationalist action, it offered the male nationalist leader-
ship a useful discursive grounding for the construction of an appropriate concept of
elite nationalist masculinity that, however new, could be shaped in familiar terms and
asserted as a hegemonic ideal of masculinity in process. It also offered a practical
discursive framework for sensitivities attendant on class anxieties: the maintenance of
a respectable income and a way of life that increasingly distinguished at least some
nationalist intellectuals from Egyptians of other cultural and economic identifications.
Here perhaps was a grounding for a new patriarchy as the basis of a gender order that
would suit both the modern world and the faith as arbiter of social practice. As
Mrinalini Sinha reminds us, to examine colonial masculinity is to recognize the
multiple axes along which power was exercised . . . among or within the colonisers
and the colonised as well as between.
113
Definitions of masculinity could instrumen-
talize emerging or re-solidifying class boundaries within the colonized space, and
could express areas in which a colonized male elite might feel quite at home with
certain members of the colonizing elitealthough they might frame those spaces of
confirmation quite differently.
Mosse de-emphasizes fatherhood as a marker of modern, nationalist masculinity in
the West, but John Tosh, Ralph LaRossa, Mark E. Kann, and others have focused on
attitudes toward fatherhood as a defining element in national histories and the defini-
tion of republican citizenship, as well as an indicator of shifting relationships between
men and domestic life.
114
Ramzis writings suggest that for reforming Egyptian men
who linked early childhood education to the state of the nation, and the state of the
nation to the moral strength and self-image of thinking men, engaged fatherhood was
a central sign of the manlyand therefore nationalistman. Also, insisting on the
importance of fatherhood could be a means to re-assert control over women, for it
meant a refusal to cede territory in the sphere of child raising
115
just as companion-
ate marriage signified that women would now be taught by their husbands (if they
had not already been educated by their fathers) to be attractively respectable modern
companions. To call for the training of women and girls, and to stipulate what this
meant, was perhaps as much a move of containment as of advancement. Women were
as much a protected category as before; the difference was in how they were to be
protected. At the same time, only some men were capable of protecting them. Early
reformist enthusiasts on the woman question, implicitly recasting masculinity through
Men and the Womens Press 193
overt discussion of femininity as a deferred discourse on masculinity, were reasserting
the social power of some men by constructing a hegemonic masculinity that was
neither fully familiar nor entirely new, one that took its definition partly in the act of
defining a nationalistically inflected set of controls on elite womens lives. Perhaps
this is one reason that hijab took on such symbolic resonance. Marking womens
bodiesinsisting on the importance of fixing potentially society-wide (though medi-
ated by class) signs of the social femininewas (and is) a means to assert competing
versions of masculinity as hegemonic with respect to each other as well as to the
(covered) female body. And in the first instance, it was the father who controlled this
trained-training being and more or less covered female body.
Emphasizing fatherhood in al-Mara fi al-Islam in turn fostered implicit male homo-
social bonding as a marker of nationalism. Ramzi urges the reader to observe his
friends and thereby to collect images of fatherhood, both positive and negative. Fur-
thermore, the reader should, if necessary, educate his friends into proper fatherhood.
Here was one reason that friendship among men was to be prized and cultivated. On
the other hand, friendship among women, Ramzi suggested, was to be suspected and
curtailed. (After all, it might threaten mens control over womens lives.) And anyway,
claimed Ramzi, among many others, womens friendships dealt only in trivia. Surely
this could not be good for the nation. The world of womens sociability and ex-
changeas elite men were imagining and describing itdefined through contrast a
respectable, masculine code of behavior, as it formed the gendered territory on which
male nationalists were ready to sow their serious, educative seed.
NOTES
1
Later in the 20th century, that early womens press in Egypt and Lebanon has captured academic
attention, first in Egypt and Lebanon and then also among scholars based in Europe and North America:
see Ijlal Khalifa, Al-Sihafa al-nisaiyya fi Misr, 19191939 (M. A. thesis, Cairo University, 1966); idem.,
Al-Sihafa al-nisaiyya fi Misr 19401965 (Ph.D. diss., Cairo University, 1970); Ire`ne Fenoglio-Abd el
Aal, Defense et Illustration de lEgyptienne: Aux debuts dune expression feminine (Cairo: CEDEJ, 1988);
Beth Baron, The Womens Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven, Conn., and
London: Yale University Press, 1994); Marilyn Booth, Biography and Feminist Rhetoric in Early Twenti-
eth-Century Egypt: Mayy Ziyadas Studies of Three Womens Lives Journal of Womens History 3 (1991):
3864; idem, May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Famous Women Biography and Gendered Prescription in
Egypt, 18921935, Signs 22 (1997): 82790; idem, The Egyptian Lives of Jeanne dArc, in Remaking
Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1998), 171211; Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making
of Modern Egypt (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Nahawand al-Qadiri Issa, Tahrir al-
mara ma bayna al-sihafa al-nisaiyya al-Lubnaniyya wa-Qasim Amin, paper delivered at the conference
Murur miati amin ala tahrir al-mara al-arabiyya, Supreme Council for Culture, Cairo, October 1999.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. For their comments, I am grateful to Juan Cole and two anonymous
readers for IJMES.
2
The term malestream signifies the close association between the predominant daily newspapers and
monthly magazines on the one hand, and male culture, direction, and assumptions about male power in
the sphere of public discourse and political action on the other. I am speaking here about a male-dominated
discursive sphere more than male or female authorship as such, although as will become clear, gendered
authorship and audience is significant in the journal I discuss.
3
I outline these approaches in Booth, May Her Likes, and in idem, Prologue, May Her Likes Be
Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2001). I am especially indebted to the following works in thinking about intersections among nation-
194 Marilyn Booth
alism, Islamic reformism, and patriarchy in Egypt: Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age,
17981939, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Barbara Freyer Stowasser, Women
in the Quran, Traditions, and Interpretation (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation; Deniz Kandiyoti, Introduction, in Women, Islam and the State, ed.
Deniz Kandiyoti (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 121; idem., Islam and Patriarchy, in
Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, ed. Nikki Keddie and Beth
Baron (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 2342; idem., Identity and its
Discontents: Women and the Nation, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed.
Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 37691. To make
analytical distinctions among different strands of nationalist- and reformist-inspired thought is not to imply
that these strands were always separate in politics or polemics; indeed, a complex relation among them
obtained. I hope this essay is a modest contribution toward illustrating how such complexities emerged in
discourse on gender.
4
Isabella Beeton, Mrs. Beetons Book of Household Management, ed. Nicola Humble, abridged ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
5
Furthermore, feminist journals are generally produced by groups of women, although this, too, has
shifted over the past decades under the pressures of maintaining a financially viable vehicle in todays
world.
6
See Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, chaps. 23, for more discussion of differences among these
journals.
7
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 33.
8
Baron, The Womens Awakening, 76.
9
Revising this essay, I came upon Deniz Kandiyotis contemplations on similar matters in her The
Paradoxes of Masculinity: Some Thoughts on Segregated Societies, in Dislocating Masculinity: Compara-
tive Ethnographies, ed. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994),
197213. As in so much work on gender, Kandiyoti leads the way here, too. She, too, is skeptical about
early male reformers motives: I could only explain this type of discourse as the emergence of a novel
male agenda which did not necessarily have as its main concern womens liberation, but rather their own:
ibid., 198. Kandiyoti goes on not to analyze that reformist discourse, as I try to begin to do here, but to
unpack fictional and autobiographical treatments of male socialization in various Muslim Middle Eastern
contexts.
10
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The Manly Englishman and the Effeminate Bengali in the
Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 181.
11
The exemplary text for Egypt is Coles important article on Amin and Talat Harb: Juan Ricardo Cole,
Feminism, Class, and Islam in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt, International Journal of Middle East Studies
13 (1981): 387407. See also, for example, Hourani, Arabic Thought.
12
Until recently, most of this scholarship centered on Europe and the Americas, as did more general
studies on masculinity and social organization, studies of the history of fatherhood, and work on images
of men. There is by now too vast a literature to cite comprehensively; I cite works I have found most
helpful. In addition to other citations laternotably, the work of George Mossesee R. W. Connell,
Gender and Power (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987); idem., Masculinities (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolu-
tion (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); Harry Brod, ed., The Making of
Masculinities: The New Mens Studies (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987); Jeff Hearn and David Morgan,
ed., Men, Masculinities, and Social Theory (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Ralph LaRossa, The Modern-
ization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1997); Judith Newton and Judith Stacey, Learning Not to Curse; or, Feminist Predicaments in Cultural
Criticism by Men: Our Movie Date with James Clifford and Stephen Greenblatt, in Starting Over: Femi-
nism and the Politics of Cultural Critique, ed. Judith Newton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1994), 14976. Work on the formation of the American republic has stressed its dependence on assumptions
of citizenship as a masculine province. See, for example, Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect
and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Jonathan
Goldberg, Bradfords Ancient Members and A Case of Buggery . . . Amongst Them, in Nationalisms
and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger (New York and
Men and the Womens Press 195
London: Routledge, 1992), 6072; Mark E. Kann, A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered
Language, and Patriarchal Politics (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998).
Mrinalini Sinha broke new ground in pinpointing convergences of imperialist and nationalist ideologies
through constructions of masculinity in colonized India. Sinha on Bengal, Deniz Kandiyoti on Turkey, and
Afsaneh Najmabadi on Iran look at intersections of colonialism and masculinity from perspectives of the
colonized: Sinha, Colonial Masculinity; Kandiyoti, The Paradoxes of Masculinity; Afsaneh Najmabadi,
Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran, in Remaking Women, 91125.
13
As emphasized, for instance, in the anthropologically based inquiries in Cornwall and Lindisfarne,
Dislocating Masculinity.
14
Harry Brod, Introduction: Themes and Theses of Mens Studies, The Making of Masculinities, 2.
15
Michael Roper and John Tosh made this point especially forcefully in their Introduction: Historians
and the Politics of Masculinity, in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Michael
Roper and John Tosh (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 124, esp. 23.
16
In his response to Partha Chatterjees influential work on intersections of nationalism in India with
the political programs of marginalized groups (The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993]), R. Radhakrishnan asks how it comes to be
that nationalisms form the horizon for other politics, which must represent themselves as nationalist
to get a hearing. Yet this very process cannot help but reciprocally shape concepts of nationalism: R.
Radhakrishnan, Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity, in Nationalisms and Sexualities,
7795.
17
It does not occlude the question of why womens status was important to male nationalists. This is
addressed at some length by Thomas Philipp, Feminism and Nationalist Politics in Egypt, in Women in
the Muslim World, ed. Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 27794;
Cole, Feminism, Class; Hourani, Arabic Thought; and Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Histor-
ical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1992). Badran
has focused on the differences between mens and womens feminisms and nationalisms in Egypt. See
Margot Badran, Dual Liberation: Feminism and Nationalism in Egypt, 1870s1925, Feminist Issues 8
(1988): 1534; idem., The Origins of Feminism in Egypt, in Current Issues in Womens History, ed.
Arina Angerman et al. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989); idem., Preface, in Ire`ne Fenoglio-
Abd el Aal, Defense et Illustration de lEgyptienne, 612; idem., Competing Agenda: Women, Islam and
the State in 19th and 20th Century Egypt, in Women, Islam and the State, 20136.
18
Respectability had first accompanied the triumphant bourgeoisie and served to legitimize and define
the middle classes as against the lower classes and the aristocracy. In the nineteenth century, it was to
serve the needs of a class seeking stability amid changes it had itself initiated. George Mosse, Nationalism
and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press, 1985), 9.
19
George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 133.
20
Roper and Tosh, Introduction, in Manful Assertions; also making this point powerfully are Tim
Carrigan, Bob Connell, and John Lee, Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity, in The Making of Mascu-
linities, 63100. Say Cornwall and Lindisfarne, It is useful to think of those ideologies which privilege
some men (and women) by associating them with particular forms of power as hegemonic masculinities
. . . [these] define successful ways of being a man; in so doing, they define other masculine styles as
inadequate or inferior. . . . The experience of hegemony lies in the repetition of similar, but never identical,
interactions: Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, Introduction, in Dislocating Masculinity, 3, 10;
see also their Dislocating Masculinity: Gender, Power and Anthropology, (pp. 1147 in the same vol-
ume). By emphasizing masculinity and femininity as mutually constitutive in this paper, I am not denying
the importance of variation and competition among versions of each, a point that Cornwall and Lindisfarne
want to emphasize. I think their criticisms of earlier work on masculinity as occluding internal relationality
are importantparticularly their point that some studies on masculinity tend to reify certain forms of
masculinity (see idem, Dislocating, 2034)but at times overdone.
21
Radhakrishnan, Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity, 84.
22
See, for example, Jurji Niqula Baz, al-Majallat al-nisaiyya, Fatat al-Sharq 2, 6 (1908): 21215
(which includes al-Sham); Majallatuna al-nisaiyya, Fatat al-sharq 7, 9 (1913): 38284; Tawfiq Iskarus,
196 Marilyn Booth
al-Majallat al-nisaiyya fi Misr, Majallat al-mara al-misriyya 7, 1 (1926): 42. For a later and different
use of terminology, see Ali Muhammad Khalil, Al-Sihafa al-niswiyya bi-Misr, bi-munasabat dukhul
Majallat al-mara al-misriyya fi amiha al-ishrin, Majallat al-mara al-misriyya 20, 3 (1939): 10913.
23
Badran, Preface, in Defense et Illustration de lEgyptienne and Feminists, Islam, and Nation; see
also Marilyn Booth, Exemplary Lives, Feminist Aspirations: Zaynab Fawwaz and the Arabic Biographical
Tradition, Journal of Arabic Literature 26 (1995): 12046; 120, n. 4.
24
Woman in Islam is labeled a magazine on its masthead. According to Kustaki Attara, it was founded
on 15 March; according to Filib di Tarrazi, on 1 April. The first issue is in fact dated 25 March 1901. See
Kustaki Attara, Tarikh takwin al-suhuf al-misriyya (Alexandria: Matbaat al-Taqaddum, 1928); Filib di
Tarrazi, Tarikh al-sihafa al-arabiyya, vols. 14 (Beirut: al-Matbaa al-adabiyya, 191314) 4:28889.
25
Baron, The Womens Awakening, 76.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., 22. Because al-Mara fi al-Islam is the only one among the journals Baron mentions here of
which there are extant copies, as far as either Baron or I know (The Womens Awakening, 201, n. 46), this
seems quite a leap to make.
28
Zaynab bint Ali Fawwaz al-Amili, Kitab al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur (Cairo/
Bulaq: al-Matbaa al-amiriyya, 1894). On Fawwazs dictionary, see Booth, Exemplary Lives and May
Her Likes Be Multiplied, chap. 1. I am writing a book on Fawwaz and her oeuvre; I am grateful to the
National Endowment for the Humanities for funding the research.
29
This founding date comes from Tarrazi, Tarikh. According to Mudawwanat al-sihafa al-arabiyya, vol.
1, ed. Yusuf Q. Khuri and Ali Dhu al-Faqqar Shakir (Beirut: Mahad al-inma al-arabi, 1985), this was
published until 1895 (ibid., 1:332).
30
We know this to be the case because Ramzi offered the complete Woman in Islam magazine [sic]
for sale from his Matbaat al-Tamaddun once he was publishing his next newspaper, al-Tamaddun. An
advertisement for it appears on page 4 of the earliest issue of al-Tamaddun in the Egyptian National
Librarys collection, no. 79 (2 July 1903). It states that the volume consists of 224 pages, which is where
no. 14 ends.
31
Tahdh biyya signals refinement or polishing but was often used more generally for instruction,
though privileging a moral and cultural component, as opposed to tal m. Attara (1928) calls it a literary
political newspaper (Takwin, 285). My biographical information on Ramzi comes from Khayr al-Din Ziri-
kli, al-Alam: Qamus tarajim li-ashhar al-rijal wal-nisa min al-Arab wa-mustarabin wal-mustashriqin,
vols. 18 (Beirut: Dar al-ulum lil-malayin, 1980), 1:39; but see later. Bibliographical information comes
from Zirikli, al-Alam; Tarrazi, Tarikh, 4:178, 288, 336; Ayda Ibrahim Nusayr, al-Kutub al-arabiyya allati
nushirat fi Misr 19001925 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1983); idem., al-Kutub al-arabiyya
allati nushirat fi Misr fi al-qarn al-tasi ashara (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1990); Mudaw-
wana 1:112, 332, 434. Nusayr lists works by two different Ibrahim Ramzis under the same index entry in
her volume on the early 20th century. The second Ibrahim Ramzi (18841949) was a playwright, short-
story writer, and translator of works on agriculture from English. He was born in the city of Mansura to
Uthman Bek Ramzi, also said to be of Turkish origin, and it is unclear whether this family was related to
the one in Fayyum. In al-Mara fi al-Islam, Ramzi mentions two children who died in infancy or early
childhood and would have been born later than this second Ibrahim Ramzi. On the later Ibrahim Ramzi,
see Ibrahim Afandi Ramzi, Majallat al-Shabab 1, 5 (15 Rabi I 1334): 234. In some cases, I have not been
able to locate these works by Ibrahim Ramzi and thus to ascertain the authors identityfor example, in
a 1921 translation that could conceivably be by either one.
The biographical compiler Ilyas Zakhura, a contemporary of Ramzi, wrote a charming entry on Ramzi
in his Kitab Mirat al-asr fi tarikh wa-rusumat akabir rijal Misr (Cairo: al-Matbaa al-umumiyya, 1897),
55356. He would have been about 32 when this book appeared; he was not yet a bey, and was publishing
Fayyum at the time: He was bornGod make him live long and increase his likesin the city of Fayyum
on 4 Rajab al-mubarak 1284, to parents of fine ancestry, goodness, and generosity; and he had the best of
upbringings and trainings . . . on his face were the signs of intelligence . . . that presaged a good future. In
the beginning they put him into the Fayyum elementary schools . . . and then sent him to the French prepara-
tory Madrasat Marsil in Cairo. He studied Arabic, French, and Turkish . . . and surpassed all his peers who
had entered the aforementioned school before him. . . . On the sixth of January 1894, he founded al-Fayyum
and it circulated widely. . . . [H]e published the first issue on the day Khedive Abbas Hilmi was in town,
Men and the Womens Press 197
and gave him the first copy of the first issue; so he was granted a private audience. . . . He founded the
Literary Renaissance Society and was elected its [first] president for a three-year term. . . . He had married
one of the ladies of the Yakan family. . . . With all the knowledge he had gathered, he still aspired to
understand its summits and so he traveled to Europe in order to be capable of benefiting the nation more
than he had already done. . . . May God increase his likes. That Ramzi was able to marry into the aristo-
cratic Yakan family, with its royal ties, suggests that he was indeed of patrician lineage.
32
Tarrazi lists this periodical as a newspaper (Tarikh, 4:178) and classes al-Mara fi al-Islam as a maga-
zine (ibid., 4:288) and al-Fayyum as well (ibid., 4:336). In references later, I abbreviate al-Mara fi al-
Islam as MI.
33
On Amins education, family, and work, see Muhammad Amara, ed., Qasim Amin: al-Amal al-kamila
(Cairo: Dar al-shuruq, 1989), 2027. In the khedivial secondary school that he attended, he was in the
French section (ibid., 21). Not long after his 1881 graduation from the School of Law and Administration,
he went to France on an educational mission; he remained at the University of Montpellier for advanced
law study, returning to Cairo in 1885.
34
Al-Mara fi al-Islam 1: Masalatuna al-hadira, MI 1, (1901): 6. This is the first of four essays on
Amins book that Ramzi says he published in al-Muayyad and republishes here, in four parts, the first two
appearing in MIs first issue (see MI 1, 1 [1901]: 5). That newspaper was founded in December 1889 by
Ali Yusuf to articulate nationalist demands and support the Khedive Abbas against the British.
35
Ibid., 6.
36
I am conducting research on this topic as part of a larger project on masculinities and the woman
question, funded by a Senior Research Fellowship from the Fulbright Commission in Egypt (199899).
37
Hajatuna ila al-tarbiya, ashadda min hajatina ila al-talim, MI 1, 1 (1901): 5.
38
In this light, though, it should be recalled that a major topic of concern among writers was the accessi-
bility of Arabic to those who did not have advanced training in the sciences of language. Elsewhere I have
argued that this was one reason that written colloquial poetry flourished at this time (Marilyn Booth,
Colloquial Arabic Poetry, Politics, and the Press in Modern Egypt, International Journal of Middle East
Studies 24 [1992]: 41940). But more significant, and lasting, was the focus on simplifying newspaper
Arabic so that it would reach a wider audience.
39
Al-Mara fi al-Islam 1, 6, 7.
40
Amara, Qasim Amin; Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam. Ahmed has suggested the dependence of
Egyptian male nationalist discourse concerning gender on British imperialist discourse with reference to
the writings of Amin. Her insight needs to be modulated by a closer investigation of the relations between
these discourses and by examination of the local field of discourse in which Amin wrote. The reception
of such works was no straightforward matter: even Amin did not uniformly (over time, across different
works, and even within single works) accept what were generally seen as European practices, while Ramzi
and other writers were more critical. Yet Ramzis writings are shaped by certain assumptions about social
organization that can be traced to European forms. If Amins canonical writings have been branded as
simplistically imitative of a British high imperial agenda, the complexity of how discourses on gender and
nationalism intersect with each other and with this agenda must be approached through detailed attention
to the rhetoric of a much broader range of writings.
41
See Booth, Prologue, in May Her Likes Be Multiplied, and the works of Kandiyoti and others cited
therein.
42
Coles article (Feminism, Class) on mens responses to Amin emphasizes individuals class position-
ing (upper-middle versus lower-middle) as shaping their stances on the woman question, suggesting a
competition along class lines for political ascendancy. Baron questions this view by privileging differences
within what she sees as a single social stratum rather than between Coles upper-middle and lower-middle
classes (Baron, The Womens Awakening, 116).
43
Mosse, The Image of Man, 78.
44
It seems to me significant that Harb used the term tarbiya rather than talim, as many commentators
did; if to some extent these terms became interchangeably used for the early education and training of
children, the former emphasizes upbringing as moral training and the latter, scholastic education. See later.
45
Fasl al-khitab fi al-mara wal-hijab, MI 1, 6 (1901): 8185.
46
See Badran, Competing Agenda and Feminists, Islam, and Nation; and Booth, May Her Likes Be
Multiplied.
198 Marilyn Booth
47
Al-Mara fi al-Islam 4: Masalat al-hijab, MI 1, 3 (1901): 3940.
48
Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, 7.
49
Omnia Shakry and Gail Minault emphasize the indigenous Muslim legacy of a thesis of decline that
underlay the call for womens education as the path to regeneration and (a non-Western) modernity: Omnia
Shakry, Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt, in Remaking
Women; Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Womens Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
50
Fasl al-khitab fi al-mara wal-hijab, 8385. On Harbs outlook on nationalist reform and innovation,
a view dismissive of (and misogynistic on) changes in gender roles and in the definition of masculinities
and femininities, see Jacques Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution, trans. Jean Stewart (New York
and Washington: Praeger, 1972), 33436. On his response to Amin, see Cole, Feminism, Class.
51
Timothy Mitchell discussed this term in the context of colonized modernity in Egypt. See his Colonis-
ing Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 88. For an elaboration of its use with regard
to discourse on childrearing practices at the turn of the century see Shakry, Schooled Mothers.
52
Hajatuna, 5.
53
Ibid., 4.
54
Ibid., 4.
55
Ibid., 5. The pronoun our could refer to both women and men here, but posed against a feminine
they it hints at fatherly prerogative.
56
True, Qasim Amin did not tell us to follow them in these practices [dancing with related men, being
with ones fiancee unchaperoned, sitting with a friends wife in his absence, kissing a friends wife on the
cheek at the New Year] but he did suggest total imitation, when he should have qualified this. For he
knows that civilization (al-muduniyya) is not free of defect: Al-Mara fi al-Islam 4, 40.
57
In his critique Ramzi does not distinguish between the differing contents of Tahrir al-mara and
al-Mara al-jadida (although he does comment in his introductory remarks that the two differ). But he
chides Talat Harb for taking a previous book by Amin (his first) as representing his views, which he has
betrayed in his new books; people can change their minds, comments Ramzi.
58
I do not agree with Ahmeds characterization of Amins writing as misogynistic, for he casts his criticisms
of women clearly within a rhetoric of ultimate male responsibility for a situation that is alterable: Ahmed,
Women and Gender in Islam, chap. 8. He does not make an essentialist claim, in other words. At the same
time, this view is paternalistic in asserting that women need to be shaped through mens instruction.
59
On the problematics of subjecthood in Qasim Amins work, see Muna Abu Sinna, Qadiyat al-mara
huna wa-hunaka, in her Naqd aql al-mara (Cairo: Dar Qaba, 1997), 71106.
60
Baron, The Womens Awakening, 76.
61
On status enhancement, see Baron, The Womens Awakening; on contradictory messages discernible in
the womens magazines, see Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied.
62
Al-Mara fi al-Islam 3: Tarbiyatuha wa-talimuha aydan, MI 1, 2 (1901), 2021.
63
In my ongoing work on Zaynab Fawwaz, I analyze a debate on the zar carried out in two periodicals
among Fawwaz and some male reformers. Minault notes that Muslim male reformers in northern India
attacked practices and received beliefs that women performed in the zenana, including exorcisms, partly
at least because such all-women ceremonies . . . were arenas over which men had no control, and that
made reformers . . . very uncomfortable (Minault, Secluded Scholars, 49).
64
Al-Mara fi al-Islam 2: Tarbiyatuha wa-talimuha, MI 1, 1 (1901), 1011.
65
Effeminacy, Mosse notes, was a border marker for the prevailing notion of masculinity; it was trou-
bling, perhaps because it was a blurred border (see e.g., The Image of Man, 83). This seems to emerge in
discourse on the zar in Egypt.
66
I am indebted to one of the anonymous IJMES readers for suggesting this line of thought. Useful here
is Kimmels observation that [t]he historical evidence [from England and the United States] suggests that
while both masculinity and femininity are socially constructed within [the] historical context of gender
relations, definitions of masculinity are historically reactive to changing definitions of femininity. Such a
claim runs counter to traditional formulations of gender: Michael Kimmel, The Contemporary Crisis
of Masculinity in Historical Perspective, in Making of Masculinities, 123; the emphasis is in the original.
67
Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 1.
68
Al-Mara fi al-Islam 3, 21.
Men and the Womens Press 199
69
Al-Mara fi al-Islam 2, 9.
70
At another point, Ramzi notes that the number of educated women has increased markedly over the
past decade.
71
Al-Mara fi al-Islam 2, 11.
72
Interestingly, Ramzi suggests that womens adherence to khurafat is based on a sophisticated reason-
ing as to how these practices fit into their religious faith: Al-Mara fi al-Islam 2, 11.
73
John D. Lyons, 1689: Pedagogy, in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cam-
bridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), 372.
74
Bab al-tarbiya wal-adab, al-fasl al-thani: Ala man tajibu al-tarbiya, MI 1, 1 (1901): 1314; Bab
al-tarbiya wal-adab, al-fasl al-thalith: Kayfa takunu al-tarbiya, MI 1, 2 (1901): 24.
75
Lyons, 1689, 372.
76
Hajatuna, 5; Bab al-tarbiya wal-adab, al-fasl al-thani, 14. See also Tarbiyat al-bint, MI 1, 4
(1901): 6061, a letter from the father of a young girl to her mother, in which he shows her how to raise
her daughter. Criticizing the content of girls schools, he tells his spouse, You, my dear, are the most
suitable person to concern yourself with educating your daughter on the foundations that you learned from
me. Teach her Arabic, the language of our fathers and grandfathers, so she can read and write without
making errors. Teach her sewing so that she wont need a seamstress who will take from her many times
what the cloth is worth. Do not be sparing on the subjects of cooking and food preparation, so that she
can present food that is both tasty and salutory to her husband and children. See also Muqabala bayna
imraatayni al-turkiyya wal-misriyya, MI 1, 5 (1901): 6668.
77
Ghayat al-majalla, MI 1, 1 (1901): 1.
78
Ibid., 2.
79
My claim that a male audience is being constructed does not depend simply on the use of the linguistic
male gender, for that can include (subsume) women. Rather, the claim is based on a linguistic context
that makes it clear that the addressed readers are masculine. Ikhwan, though, is a special case, for although
this is simply a use of the male gender, akh/ikhwan is exclusive and is not used to refer to women, like
other words specifically denoting male kinship positions or the male sex, such as rajul and ab and unlike,
for example, insan.
Other examples exist of the rhetorical construction of a male audience: separating reader from
woman, Ramzi urges: Tell me, reader, what woman does not believe in mashahira [pierced bits of stone
for a magic practice]?: Al-Mara fi al-Islam 2, 10. Elsewhere he links himself again to this male audi-
ence: I do not need to describe the present condition of women. You know better than I the degree of her
inferiority in understanding, and the effort we must expend to elevate her condition, showing compassion
and sympathy to the weaker sex. We are more refined and noble than to be likened to those who have
said, This is what our forebears have visited upon us [and to leave it at that]: Majmuat al-kamal, MI
1, 3 (1901): 34. This is in a speech reproduced here, so the homosocial linkage is explicable in light of
the immediate discursive context, but the diction harmonizes with that throughout the journal. Ramzi even
sets up a cross-generational homosocial link when, in his final chapter on tarbiya (and these are directed
to male readers and through them to mothers), he says, Since our daughters today are the wives of others
than us in the future, we must accustom them to all that will please and comfort their husbands so that
they [the daughters] will live with them in felicity and harmony: Bab al-tarbiya wal-adab, MI 1, 6
(1901): 91. Throughout, Ramzi refers to our women and women are always referred to in the third
person, while men are referred to in the plural first person, the second person, and the third person. Finally,
there is Ramzis concluding piece of advice to his chapters on upbringing: If you, reader [m.] of this
chapter, find a father complaining to you about how his children behave, tell him it is his fault for neglecting
their tarbiya: ibid., 92.
80
Al-Mara fi al-Islam 2, 9.
81
Al-Mara fi al-Islam 4, 39.
82
Mushtamilat al-majalla, MI 1, 1 (1901): 3.
83
These were mostly republished texts: a treatise on seclusion by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani written in
Turkish in response to Qasim Amin (al-Ihtijab, nos. 47); another response to Amin, by Shaykh Abd
al-Rahman Zaghlul, teacher of Arabic at the Oriental Languages Institute in Berlin (nos. 813); al-Tarbiya
wal-tashkhis, by one H. T., one of the leading professors, no. 2); an article on womens customs thirty
years ago by Ahmad Faris [al-Shidyaq] that the editor had found in Fariss periodical al-Jawaib (no. 12);
200 Marilyn Booth
excerpts from al-Tadbir al-manzili lil-banat by Faransis (Francis) Afandi Mikhail (nos. 713); and from
Ramzis own instructional manual, now in press; Bab al-tarbiya wal-adab, al-fasl al-thani, 12; poems
by Hafiz Ibrahim (no. 8); and Sulayman al-Bustani (no. 3).
Even in 1901, Ramzi could have found essays by Muslim women to feature. After all, his colleague Ali
Yusuf had been publishing essays by Zaynab Fawwaz (under her byline) in al-Muayyad since 1892. And
he included at least one Christian male writer; there were a number of Syrian Christian women writing in
the press by this time, whether in womens magazines (edited by women) or the mainstream press.
84
Sirat shahirat al-nisa, MI 1, 1 (1901): 14.
85
Majmuat al-kamal, MI 1, 3 (1901), 3336; Muqabala bayna imraatayni, al-turkiyya wal-misriyya,
MI 1, 5 (1901): 6568; Akhbar al-nisa, MI 1, 11 (1901): 176.
86
Sirat shahirat al-nisa: Khadija bint Khuwaylid, zawjat al-nabi alayhi al-salat wal-salam, MI 1, 1
(1901): 16.
87
Ibid.
88
Sirat shahirat al-nisa: al-Khansa, MI 1, 6 (1901): 95.
89
Sirat shahirat al-nisa: Mary Anayzi, MI 1, 11 (1901): 175.
90
Ibid.
91
Sirat shahirat al-nisa: al-Sayyida Nafisa al-Alawiyya, MI 1, 5 (1901): 76.
92
Booth, May Her Likes, 86366.
93
Tarqiya signals promoting or advancing as well as raising.
94
Several times, Ramzi makes references or inferences that elucidate the class-bound nature of his project
and of his sense of individual and group identity and political belonging. Let the reader [a husband of a
wife, a son of a mother, etc.] realize that I am not talking about the inferior/base (munhatta) class of
Egyptians but rather the upper and middle classes. . . . The lower class is nothing more than a tool moving
according to the will of the other two classes, in accord with what God ordained about the power of the
high one over the low one: Al-Mara fi al-Islam 2, 9. If Ramzi is true to the precepts of Islam when
he notes that one is judged above all by adab whether one is rich or poor, he says further that the best
person is the one who combines one or more of these attributes [position, status, wealth, and power] with
adab: Bab al-tarbiya wal-adab, al-fasl al-thani, 1213. In speaking of an educational program for chil-
dren, he talks of the importance of exercise and equates this with set times for play in their gardens and
public recreational facilities, suggesting in the former people of means, and in the latter also, at the time,
a certain social level and either leisure on the part of a parent or the ability to hire a caregiver. It is not
mentioned that peasant children certainly got plenty of exercise through their agricultural work; nor is
concern ever expressed about children working long hours indoors: Bab al-tarbiya wal-adab, al-fasl al-
thalith, 26. Ramzis entire critique is focused on the behavioral patterns of the elite; he is uninterested in
other Egyptians. This is not true of all other reformist writers at the time, although it does roughly parallel
Qasim Amins focus. Of course, the medium of a periodical presupposed an elite audience.
95
Mosse, The Image of Man, 73.
96
Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, chap. 4. Yet this is not so simple as the insideoutside division
that some have mapped onto gender roles. Here, the notion of a public patriarchy that allows women
limited public space is pertinent. For sources on and discussion of this, see Booth, Prologue, in May Her
Likes Be Multiplied.
97
Al-Mara fi al-Islam 3, 21.
98
Hajatuna, 4.
99
Al-Mara fi al-Islam 2, 910.
100
Al-Mara fi al-Islam 3, 23.
101
Ibid., 24.
102
Muqtatafat min al-Tadbir al-manzili lil-banat, li-hadrat al-fadil Faransis Afandi Mikhail, MI 1, 12
(1901): 190. Mikhail went on to advance a project to start schools in home management, the fate of
which I have not been able to ascertain. Among his works are the textbooks Al-Tadbir al-manzili al-hadith
(Modern Home Management) (Cairo: Matbaat al-maarif, 1910) and al-Nizam al-manzili (System of the
Household) (Cairo: Matbaat al-maarif, 1913). The work published in al-Mara fi al-Islam was possibly an
earlier version of the first work listed here; a comparison is beyond the scope of this essay, but analysis
of these texts is part of my ongoing work on masculinity and the woman question.
103
Although this does not contradict the insights of Najmabadi on Iran (Crafting an Educated Housewife
Men and the Womens Press 201
in Iran) and Baron, The Womens Awakening, on Egyptthat by the turn of the 20th century the discursive
focus on child rearing had shifted from the male to the female parentit may complicate any discussion
of maternally focused child-rearing instruction in womens journals.
104
In both Nationalism and Sexuality and The Image of Man, Mosse emphasizes the importance of im-
ageof a concept of masculine good looks that bespoke a new focus on the body and communicated
the belief in physiognomy, the idea that a persons character was visible in his (or her) appearancein
instilling and maintaining the nationalismrespectabilitymasculinity triumvirate. It seems to me, though,
that good looks and health also hint at socio-economic status in terms of moral virtue, a point Mosse
does not raise. To achieve the healthy good looks that upholders of a dominant practice of social masculinity
urged would seem to require more than a subsistence income. In the discourse of Ramzi and others in
Egypt, this implied socio-economic status emerges more clearly as a factor in respectability, perhaps
because of the economic anxieties engendered by the overtly exploitive presence of imperialist Europe in
Egypt.
105
Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 45.
106
Ibid., 6.
107
Ibid., 1617.
108
See Zehra F. Arats excellent analysis of the motives behind Kemalist reforms of the gender order in
early-20th-century Egypt, in Turkish Women and the Republican Reconstruction of Tradition, in Recon-
structing Gender in the Middle East: Tradition, Identity, and Power, ed. Fatma Muge Gocek and Shiva
Balaghi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Although that was later than the period discussed
here, the general point holds. For a related point, see also Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, 142, where she
notes how the British colonizers could use social reform as a handy stick with which to beat Indian
nationalists while masking Indian mens lack of access to the realm of political reform.
109
Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 19. See also Hunts suggestive thesis about the imagery of father-
hood as a prop of national unity in her Family Romance.
110
Tarbiyat al-bint, 6061. But it is well to keep in mind LaRossas distinction between the culture
of fatherhood and the conduct of fatherhood (Modernization of Fatherhood, 11)or, more generally,
to remember that discourses on normative behavior and even a widespread acceptance of such norms do
not necessarily mean that the practice of that behavior is widespread. To highlight the mother in questions
of child rearing might also have to do with the formation of the middle class household as shaped by an
increasing segregation of home from workplace, although not as thoroughly as has been documented for
European industrial-era societies. Therefore, it could be seen as an element in the definition of a new
masculinity as external to the home, yet as a controlling, supervising presence: hence those vehement calls
in the press for men to be at home in the evening.
111
Beth Baron, The Construction of National Honour in Egypt, Gender and History 5 (1993): 24455.
112
Ibid., 248.
113
Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, 1.
114
In A Republic of Men, Kann focuses on patriarchal discourse as a formative element in American
national formation. And see LaRossa, Modernization of Fatherhood; John Tosh, Authority and Nurture in
Middle-Class Fatherhood: The Case of Early and Mid-Victorian England, Gender and History 8 (1996):
4864. Mosse emphasizes the fathers role as disciplinarianand [t]he family gave support from below
to that respectability which the nation attempted to enforce from above (Nationalism and Sexuality, 19)
but not so much as a training ground into masculinity for the father himself.
115
Brod notes a healthy suspicion of the new fathering literature: does it surrender or reestablish
male power in the face of feminist gains for women? (Introduction, in Making of Masculinities, 16);
see also LaRossa, Modernization of Fatherhood, 25.