The Arab Nahda from Feminist Perspective
Esther Moyal's writings in the Arab Renaissance
Sara Molaie
Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. Her research work is on 19th-century Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew women poets.
This article is part of the“The Arab Renaissance in Contemporary Eyes” project, which is the fruit of cooperation between Henna Platform and The Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. In this project, Henna team provides editorial assistance to the graduate and undergraduate students to publish their final papers on Henna’s website. You read in this series of articles: Intellectuals of the Modern Arab World by Jens Hanssen,Taha Hussein and the Dialectic of Arab Enlightenment by Quinn Teague-Colfer, Cultural Healing After Tragedy by Timothy Boudoumit, The Importance of Being Wrong by Shauna McLean, and Self-definition in Changing Worlds by Mosab Alnomire.
Translated to Arabic by Ola Barqawi.
Tarek El-Ariss, the Lebanese scholar of modern Arabic and comparative literature and Arab cultural history, edited The Arab Renaissance: a Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda in 2018, as a rare bilingual (Arabic and English) selection of the works of prominent figures of the Nahda. The chosen figures are intellectuals, clergy, writers, activists, and political individuals, and they debate education, technology, gender roles, and traditional practices, both in secular and religious contexts. The Arab Renaissance is not simply a collection of some leading 19th-century Arab intellectuals, but by selecting those figures and their works, El-Ariss and his colleagues address new notions and understandings of the Nahda. I want to highlight the importance of revisiting the Nahda today by highlighting the elements of feminism and the participation of non-Muslims in the Nahda.
Tarek El-Ariss’s Call: Trials of Arab Modernity
The Nahda is normally understood as a movement that finds its origin and its development through its link to the political circumstances of foreign rule. The dominant perception is that the French invasion of Egypt, and later the British occupation, acted as a violent awakening moment that called the Arab world to reform cultural and religious life and revive the Arabic language as a return to ‘authenticity’ (asạ ̄la) and as a mean to reconcile religious principles with enlightenment and modernity. The Nahda, then, emerged as the building of a new collective identity and eventually Arab nationalism in response to the colonial power.
In Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political, El-Ariss invites the readers to reread the history and the project of the Nahda. Through an etymological discussion of the word hadith (new), El-Ariss re-conceptualizes the term modernity in Arabic literature. He claims that modernity was not just a single occurrence of an innovation (ihdāth) in the 19th century, but it was a series of events (ahdāth). The modern should be perceived as a mode of experience and affect.
There was not a moment of newness for Arabs to become modern, as opposed to remaining traditional, but rather a series of “trials” that have been experienced from the 19th century to the 21st century. Trials of Arab Modernity offers a number of texts by prominent as well as less-recognized 19th, 20th, and 21st-century Arabic literature writers and highlights their experience of affective dissipation, insecurity, ideological vulnerability, and confusion in their encounter with modernity. El-Ariss counts these moments as “trials” through which the concept of “modern” becomes comprehensible. These trials are “never realized or complete, arising from experiences of anxiety and disorientation, fascination and confusion,” but have had a major influence on the way we think about our world.
Decentralizing modernity from a single fixed event and from ideal practices moves the concept of modernity away from the notion that modernity in the Arab world was a process of emulation of the West. This way, El-Ariss challenges the common dichotomous notions of modernity vs. tradition or East vs. West. It becomes impossible to separate the East from the West, because as Taha Hussein, the 20th century Egyptian scholar and educator, pointed out in The Future of the Culture in Egypt, the culture and civilization of the Arab world and Europe are unbreakable. When one looks at Alexandria in Egypt, Greek influences are everywhere, for Alexandria and Greece have been one region until late antiquity.
Esther Moyal: A 19th Century Activist of Women’s Rights
The Arab Renaissance: a Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda is an attempt to release the concept of modernity and the Nahda in Arabic literature from mistaken discursive boundaries. El-Ariss and his co-translators invite their audience to reread al-Nahda and offer new notions to the concept of Arab modernity. In one of the chapters, Lital Levy provides Esther Moyal’s biography and the translation of two of Moyal’s works: first, a letter to the al-Hilal journal and the second, an introduction to the biography of the prominent French novelist, journalist, and prominent Dreyfussard, Émile Zola.
Esther Azhari was an author, feminist, and translator born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Beirut in 1873. She received a solid college education in missionary schools, and along with her activist role in the issues of women, she contributed to Arabic newspapers and journals of her time. She married Dr. Simon Moyal, an active Nahdawi from Jaffa who was a member of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani’s circle when they lived in Istanbul. When they moved to Cairo, she founded a journal for women al- ‘Aila (the Family) in 1899 and directed a school for Muslim girls. In her translations, she favoured Émile Zola novels.
Esther Moyal’s Letter to the Al-Hilal Journal
There are two excerpts from the writings of Esther Moyal. One of them is her letter to the journal al-Hilal (The Crescent), in response to one of Dr. Amin Effendi al-Khuri’s claims. In her letter Is it Befitting of Women to Demand the Rights of Men? Esther targets al-Khuri for making a poor argument that placed women equal to horses and donkeys for having confined minds, and she defended women’s intellectual capacity in bold language.
In her letter, Moyal does not simply try to demonstrate that women are equal beings to men, but instead, she turns the glances of her readers to the ladies in her community, who were appreciated and recognized for their strong intelligence. As part of her defense, she emphasizes that the reason that women had just recently entered the domain of scholarship was not their shortcoming, but it was caused by “the stronger sex’s disdain for them” by people like Dr. Amin Effendi al-Khuri.
How Does the Translation of Esther Moyal’s Letter Relate to the Nahda?
Esther Moyal’s letter has significance on multiple levels. First, it breaks the common assumption that Nahda was confined to male intellectuals. Many intellectual women also contributed to the project of the Nahda. However, despite their great contribution, these women have not been acknowledged, and their work has not been read. El-Ariss’s Arab Renaissance is a loud call to acknowledge the Nahdawi women and read their impressive contributions.
Second, Esther comes from a Jewish background. It is important to note that, simultaneously with the Nahda, the Jewish diaspora in Europe was contributing to the project of Haskala (Jewish enlightenment) and later Tehiya (revival). Esther Moyal’s fluency in French and English and her copious translations into Arabic discredit the assumption that the Nahda is something restricted to Arab Christians or to an Islamic context. The presence of figures like Esther Moyal proves that the process was fluid, and El-Ariss appropriately introduced Esther Moyal under the chapter Transnational Connections in his anthology. Through her vast literary output and her awareness of parallel contemporary movements, Moyal contested many ideas from outside the Arab world.
Third, the Nahda has not merely been a top-down project, but also a bottom-up movement. In the 19th century, individuals and people read the newspapers or journals and were aware of their surrounding communities and thinkers. They used to discuss language, representation, and politics. They had the awareness that they were like agents who had a role in thinking, engaging, and changing society. Activists, journalists, feminists, translators, and intellectuals of modest means had also been involved in shaping Nahda.
Tarek El-Ariss and Bell Hooks
El-Ariss’s reconceptualization of modernity, as a series of events in many people’s lives, reminds me of bell hooks’ Theory as Liberatory Practice. In her article, Hooks challenges the dichotomy between theory and practice. Hooks affirms theory as a form of social practice and points out that theories are always responses to real-life experiences. In other words, building theory should be perceived as a process and should belong to all. She emphasizes that “personal testimony, personal experience, is such fertile ground for the production of laboratory feminist theory because usually it forms the base for our theory-making.” With the benefit of bell hooks’ insights, the Nahda can be perceived through a democratic lens, in which all people’s experiences or “trials” of encounter with modernity contribute to the shaping of the concept of Arab modernity. This way, the Nahda becomes an ongoing process, not a certain event at a certain time moving towards a predetermined end.
Bibliography
El-Ariss, Tarek. 2018. The Arab Renaissance : a Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda. Edited by Tarek El-Ariss. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.
El-Ariss, Tarek. 2013. Trials of Arab Modernity Literary Affects and the New Political. 1st ed. New York: Fordham University Press. 2-3 [Original source: https://studycrumb.com/alphabetizer]
Hooks, Bell. 1991. “Theory as Liberatory Practice.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 4 (1):1-12.
Husayn, Taha. The Future of Culture in Egypt. Washington: American Council of Learned Societies, 1954.1-10
