3. Exemplar and Exception

Biography in the Journal for Women

The Arabs take pride in their lineages; the refined woman takes pride in her style and speech; and here we are today taking pride in Miss Na‘‘īma al-Ayyūbī for her knowledge and literary gifts. How can we do otherwise? For she is the springtime yield of Egypt first and the East second, who has proven to her Western female colleagues that the Eastern young woman is no less perceptive or mentally capable. . . . We hope from the bottom of our hearts that her female [law] students take her as model so that through her Egypt gives birth to an elite group of refined and sound students who will turn out as excellently as their professor.

Hopefully our women, if they continue to write prose and poetry, will endow us with fine essayists and poets capable of competing with the men. Then we can write their biographies and speak of their talents' fine yield, as we have of this fine woman [Juliette Adam]. We think this requires only some exertion of will on their part. . . . We would like to feel so content, so pleased with them that we would not need to exalt a foreigner [gharīb, echoing gharbī, Westerner] or demand that she provide a model. Let us see this soon.

A biography of celebrated medieval French writer Christine de Pizan (1364–1430) appears in Young Woman of the East in March 1938. “The subject of the biography” (sāhibat al-tarjama) was “confronted by the criticism of many books in which the authors defamed women,” for she had criticized male writers “who had attacked women viciously without justification.” To counter them she had drawn on “the esteem for and glorification of woman” found in religious writings. A life of de Pizan published in the same journal twenty-six years earlier noted that she “defended women” in her volume on “the history of famous women” (The City of Ladies).^[1] Hints toward the rhetorical usefulness of exemplary gendered biography, these remarks invoked a trajectory of inscribing exempla that converged with Zaynab Fawwāz's writing of the tabaqāt/tarājim genre to produce a practice of exemplary biography in modern Egypt that de Pizan might not have found so foreign. As biography defended women, whether of medieval France or modern Egypt, it constructed a counterdiscourse to challenge those who “attacked women viciously.”

Shaping a Life

If biography could offer a cultural critique that softened some discursive edges of the woman question, it signaled bluntly an intention and potential to shape readers' and writers' lives. “Lives” that appear to be directly drawn from premodern sources were often framed in language that engraved a series of claims about modernity onto long-existing patterns of life-writing.^[2] In this chapter I turn to the rhetoric of exemplarity and generalization, which, I argue, signaled for readers the didactic primacy of the genre. To make my argument that “Famous Women” biographies comprised a textual intervention in the woman question more complex than it might appear, it may not be necessary to address that fraught question of “authorial intent.” Yet, I see the articulation of intent—in other words, a strategic rhetorical intentionality—as significant from an audience-centered perspective. Readers were being instructed to pay attention to the (textually constructed) lineaments of lived lives as they thought about their own.

First I examine strategies that explicitly signal a didactic exemplarity in the “Famous Women” genre: declaring female biography to be aimed at guidance through example; naming an individual subject a “paragon” or “fitting model”; exploiting that stated exemplary potential to propose usefully imitable qualities, to criticize disapproved social behavior, and to demolish the arguments of proponents of the status quo; deploying conventional formulae of approbation and compliment (for living subjects) and sorrowful praise (for the recently deceased) as semantically full guides to appropriate comportment; and calling subjects “sources of pride” or “of glory” for female readers. For these texts juxtapose a fairly narrow range of rhetorical strategies with a stunning array of lives. Thus, the variety we find within this genre is comprised within a remarkable consistency of articulated didactic intent across venues and over time. I go on to examine indirect modes of signaling exemplarity: the deployment of epithets and attributives, and a tactics of comparison that, among other things, shapes a productive intersection of cultural precedent with notions of exemplarity. Contemplating the use of local precedent, I suggest here and in later chapters how writers set this rhetoric of exemplarity into nationalist frameworks. Having explored the local roots of the genre in the first chapter, and the ambivalence toward nonlocal subjects in the second, I end this one by examining practices of gendered biography writing in North America and Europe to suggest common features of exemplary writing that writers in Egypt might have blended with their own knowledge of the Arabic biographical tradition.

How To Read a Life

In 1930, al-‘‘Aruūsa (The Bride) praised a recently issued biography of Caterina Sforza (1462–1509)—daughter of an Italian duke and his lover, and bold proxy ruler over feudal lands—authored by one Count Pasolini. “It would be good for every woman in the world to read it for the benefit it contains, because in her time Caterina Sforza played a great role, no less than those of the age's great men.” Thirty years earlier a life of Princess Gabriella Wiszniewska (d. 1903) published by Sociable Companion editor Alexandra Avierino—who became the princess's adopted daughter and heir to her title—had sounded no less urgent:

Recently I read a history of the life of a princess of the West, the greatest memorial a writer could present to princesses of the East, that they might discuss it in the front pages of their publications and make it the most eloquent of what they read to their daughters for amusing exchange of an evening. . . . I translated it with the intention of presenting it to the Companion's female readers, and its male readers too . . . so our princesses may learn.

Whether in 1903 or 1930, notices urging the utility of reading about other women's lives signaled that biography was to be instructive as well as entertaining, even if it was not always clear which facets of a life were to provide instruction, especially a flamboyantly rule-breaking life like Sforza's.^[3]

If the rhetoric of role modeling did not in itself indicate what was to be exemplary, when editors framed the biographical sketch in a rhetoric of exemplarity that pointedly appropriated the life narratives of other women as guides for conduct, that rhetoric did flag a mode of reading biography. Perhaps the apparent popularity of biography (to judge by its consistent presence in women's magazines) could be attributed to its entertainment value. Authors (like adab litterateurs long before) certainly registered the enjoyment that anecdotes about people could generate: Avierino, in The Sociable Companion, “decided to communicate [María Christina of Spain's] story because there is enjoyment and amusement in it.”^[4] Yet these texts' rhetorical strategies, which verge on the stern and the sermonizing, suggest considerably more. Like Petrarch in another time and place, for these writers illuminating the acts of the ancients—and the moderns—was to result in a blend of “pleasure” and “authority” vis-à-vis the reader.^[5]

Framing the Picture

The rhetoric of exemplarity frames these texts literally, for often an exemplary note sounds both at beginning and end. This rhetoric drew on familiar coinages: biographies in the earliest women's periodicals frequently opened with statements of purpose that yoked conventional vocabulary to hints of new agendas. Introducing a biography of American feminist Lucy Stone (1818–93), the inaugural issue (April 1903) of the Ladies' and Girls' Revue explained that “in this column are published biographies of famous women of East and West. May they be sound and serviceable models of virtue and goodness, of refinement and high-minded endeavor, and of the performance of duties.” The diction was conventional, but it opened a life history that was not. How was one to define “virtue” and “duty” through a reading of Stone's career? Stone may have been in the conservative flank of American feminist activism, but her life as narrated in the magazine—and in the context of elite Egyptian and Syrian female lives—did not sound so conservative. Perhaps formulae took on new semantic force when juxtaposed with this content: “When she married, her husband and the minister agreed to drop the phrase 'to obey the husband' from the service, because she was one of those who subdue others, not one who submits. . . . She was considered the leader of American women demanding that women have rights equal to men's in everything.”^[6]

Concluding Stone's life history, the author closed the frame but left it open-ended, linking the textual practice of biography to readers' lives. For after engaging with issues of women's rights, girls' education, and female employment outside the home, the text asked readers—female readers—to send in their reactions to Stone's activism, using it as a touchstone for the issue of domestic versus nondomestic work for women: “Judging which of these two is preferable is difficult, especially in a women's magazine in an Eastern country. So we will leave this judgment to the readers [fem.]. The magazine will publish the views they send in.” If biography could prescribe, it could also initiate dialogue on “sound and serviceable models of virtue and goodness.”^[7]

Precisely the same hortatory statement opened the next issue's biography—of Jeanne d'Arc. That Stone and Jeanne were this magazine's first two “models of virtue and goodness” might suggest an agenda privileging women's public and visible activism. Indeed, this biography foregrounds Jeanne's public career over the nurture-heavy themes that structure many later biographies. Yet this was not an unequivocal embrace of public female leadership. In what was “virtue” and “goodness” to consist? The Stone biography was the magazine's first feature following the opening editorial; its positioning as well as its prefatory words—on the qudwa sāliha, the fitting or sound model—privileged the notion of textual role modeling. But the rousing beginning afforded by Stone's career preceded “The Mother, Child, and School Section” and then “The Home, Kitchen, and Dining Table Section” wherein a careful definition of the term rabbat al-bayt (mistress of the house) suggests the changing semantic field of this term in Arabic. It was coming to incorporate what the English term “housewife” implied at the time, in concert with the normativizing of the nuclear family as ideal. Two pages of recipes followed. These features could almost constitute a response to the point raised at the end of Stone's biography. Yet Stone's example, in the narrativization of her life as public career, remained before the reader. Not only the space between Stone's life as produced by the magazine and the text's cautionary conclusion, but also the disjunction between Stone as role model and the guidance performed by the rest of the issue's pages generated an ambiguous message, the uncertainty magnified by the express use of a diction of exemplarity. Ironically, the article “Training in Comportment” in the “Mother, Child, and School” section emphasizes the role of imitation, of both immediate role models and those more removed, assuming a male child and a mother positioned to teach. “Tell him,” the magazine addresses the specifically feminine reader, “tell him the history of a famous man in his youth, for this is one of the things that will have a great impact upon him.”^[8]

Two years earlier, a similar declaration of intent prefaced Woman in Islam's second biography, gesturing toward an intended didactic effect upon both sexes, in line with the magazine's male ambit of authorship and evoked audience: “Our concern in the famous women's biographies we select is to set out their life courses, to investigate the truth, and to point out whatever observations emerge to draw the reader's attention to the life of the Muslim woman in various phases of history, that this may yield a lesson and a sermon.”^[9] Indeed, most of Woman in Islam's “Lives of Famous Women,” including this life of ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr, the prophet Muhammad's second wife, ended with “The Lessons to Be Learned from This Life.” Could there be a more explicit signal of biography's prescriptive potential? The journal's initial biography, of Muhammad's first wife, Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid (d. 619 C.E.), had spelled out a broader but equally pointed agenda.

We have made this feature part of the magazine's content; we will include biographies of famous women in the variety of their religions and nations, deceased and living. . . . We will rely on only the most dependable sources . . . and will begin with the most famous wives of our sayyid the prophet, God's blessings and salvation be his. The benefit this feature will provide is obvious, especially since we will append to every biography an experiential lesson [‘‘ibra] on what can be suitably imitated of the subject's morals and deeds.^[10]

Such reminders that this was not merely entertainment gave the feature (and the periodical) respectability, too—one that early fiction writers in Egypt, even those writing historical novels with heroines at the center, had not yet achieved in 1901. An impeccable subject and an irreproachable genre combined to give force to one of the “Lessons” afforded by Khadīī;ja's life: “that commerce is no less suitable for a woman than a man.”

A dozen years later, Malaka Sa‘‘d made the same linkage between experiential lessons and biography in her magazine, although the language was more flowery. This time the subject was Hatshepsut rather than Khadīī;ja or ‘‘A‘‘isha, bespeaking emerging interest in the nationalist possibilities of a pre-Islamic Nile heritage. “Over there, atop those horizons,” began The Gentle Sex, “the self circled for a moment on exploration's wings, then alighted on the trees of contemplation to reap from history's fertile garden the fruits of experiential lessons. . . . But we must say more, to elucidate the benefit we acquire from unfurling life histories of Famous Women. . . . We want to make of these little sermons a rebuke for our present, and to take from the past's fine examples a tutor for our future.”^[11]

The explicit enunciation of concern with “excellence” or “virtue,”^[12] regardless of how the text then filled these labels semantically, did not fade over the period with which I am concerned, nor did the positioning of this articulation shift. “It will be our concern,” announces Young Woman of Egypt in its first issue, nearly thirty years after Woman in Islam has emerged and disappeared, “to occupy ourselves continually with recording the history of those females who emerged as excellent in various eras and countries, whether they ruled or benefited their countries and homelands [bilād wa-awtān] by administering, leading armies, or emerging as a people's leader. We chose to investigate Queen Hatshepsut for this issue.”^[13]

This declaration is conspicuous for appearing to define as appropriate biographical subjects publicly political women, echoing The Ladies' and Girls' Revue's choice of Stone to inaugurate its biographical column years before. Yet Young Woman of Egypt's biography (unlike The Gentle Sex's life of Hatshepsut seventeen years earlier) suggests that Hatshepsut's power depended on her partisans' strength more than her own actions.^[14] Thus offering an equivocal message to female seekers of power, it is less ambiguous on exemplarity as a justification for biography: “I see her,” concludes the writer, “as nothing less than a miracle to ladies of her own generation, locus of respect and veneration to those females who came after her. For woman, when she acts carefully and deliberately, and shapes her life around work and virtue, leads the throngs to high ground and the country to pride. History is replete with deeds of women who far surpassed the men in many regions. We will offer the readers [masc. “inclusive”] their life histories [siyar], a lamp that with its guidance will give light to the awakening young women of Egypt.”^[15] This exemplarity operates via the paradox of inimitable imitability. Mu‘‘jiza (miracle) is derived from the semantic field of human inability. But its modern semantic field brings it close to the secular sense of the English term “miracle.” Hatshepsut in Young Woman of Egypt is one of many biographical subjects who hover discursively between the rhetoric of exemplarity and that of exceptionality. Here is a productive ambiguity that insists on both historical continuity and the historical break of modernity—or the imperative of both precedent and innovation—as it sketches blueprints for “today's women” through an exemplary Hatshepsut as historically specific locus of nationalist interest in pharaonic Egypt and as public woman.

Declarations of candidacy for exemplarity aimed at a young female readership in this press articulate what Michel Foucault has called “the shifts and reutilizations of identical formulas for contrary objectives” that mark discourse as discontinuous.^[16] If the role models these formulae introduced were often new, they were clothed in familiar rhetorical garb. Notations of exemplarity could arise from a flowery set of clichés of compliment; but in the context of the debate on “woman” and in the pointed uses to which that rhetoric was put, clichés become semantically full and politically potent messages. And, as we will see, these subjects were not necessarily exemplary on the same social terms through which such rhetoric had once operated.

Such generalized advertisements of exemplarity prepared the ground for the deployment of more specific formulae. As editors reminded readers repeatedly that they were to read these lives as role models, they informed them that the subject's life was a “fitting example” or a “fine model” for today's woman,^[17] one of practical benefit. “If any Syrian woman deserves to have a statue erected to articulate her famous feats,” declared Jurjīī; Niqūlā Bāz, writing on educator Maryam Jahashān (b. 1855), “the subject of this biography would be first. Therefore I write her life story for Young Woman of the East, hoping the young women will benefit from it.”^[18] The biographical text with its conventions is more than a praiseful tribute, the mark of exemplarity more than an abstract sign of politesse. The fatāt who reads the Fatāt is instructed to learn through imitation. Exemplars, as Timothy Hampton has noted for European Renaissance writers, are “living texts” that demand an active reading. The exemplary figure “makes a claim on the reader's action in the world.”^[19]

Sometimes the mark of active approbation—the label of contemporary exemplarity—stands on its own, leaving the reader to draw conclusions from the unfolding life narrative. “How excellent was this woman, and how fine it would be to resemble her,” exclaims a biographer of Marie de Sévigné (1626–96). The author praises de Sévigné's cultural priorities: “She came forth and grew as a flower among thorns yet no thorn ever scratched her. Honorable, virtuous, noble of morals, upright and respectable she lived, preferring scholarship and literature to amusement and enjoyment, and the company of scholars and litterateurs to that of any others.” But is it her predilection for “scholarship and literature” or her morals that are exemplary? Other roles are important, too: “She was a trustworthy wife, a mother in whom the traits of motherhood were abundant.”^[20] The text notes de Sévigné's “superiority to many men writers” and (quoting Lamartine) her “great influence over the civilizing of the world.” But her children and society's moral state, not her writing, are declared her main concern.^[21] Another biography of de Sévigné praises her for joining in her writing “the most elevated emotions of the mother combined with her own views of politics and society expressed without fear. . . . She is a paragon [mithāl] to follow in this sort of writing. Moreover, Madame de Sévigné is the best model [khayr qudwa] for women not only in her writing, which was first-class, or in the breadth of her knowledge, but also in her excellent virtue, her refinement, gravity, and good conduct.” The biographer stresses the subject's moral exemplarity further (and echoes a concern of the time about female forays into public space) in concluding that de Sévigné “associated with the people of her time only because she adored knowledge and literature.”^[22] As I shall pursue further in chapter 5, when texts signal to readers that they are to consider modeling their own conduct after biographical subjects, often the accent is on family-oriented loyalties. But domesticity is not the sole marker of how biography might shape a reader's future pursuits. Syrian writer and orator Hannā Kasbānīī; Kūrānīī; (1870–98)—the same one who attended the Columbian Exposition—“left literary remains that would prompt one to consider imitating her” and was cited by “a major Turkish newspaper” as an example of “Eastern women's readiness [for an active societal role].”^[23] Zenobia of ancient Palmyra, is a “praiseworthy paragon” (mithāl mahmuūd) who “bequeathed glory and might to her community (umma) and to all women, in the sphere of woman's energies.” This 1923 biography drew exemplarity from Zenobia's public persona, at a moment in which Egyptians were poised for constitutional government, Egyptian women were making forthright political demands for themselves, and optimism about the country's political future prevailed.^[24]

Thus is the ultimate compliment of labeling the biographical subject a paragon or exemplar spun out in a range of particular, historically tinted hues, guiding the inquisitive to read a specific content into a subject's exemplarity. This rhetoric frames the compliment as a proposition, as practical guidance directed at a reader rather than as mere compliment directed to the subject—or to “womankind.” “Elisabeth of Rumania” (1843–1916), in Young Woman of the East, augmented the formula with a figure of speech that displaced female aspiration from appearance to intellect: “How beautiful is woman when her ornament is literature, and how beautiful are queens when they are the likes of Carmen Silva, a fine model for the rest of womankind.”^[25] If this metaphor was so common it had become a cliché, when coupled with repeated emphasis on the primacy of educative and carefully identified reading to the ideal woman's formation, such “clichés” bore curricular significance. Sited as exemplar for impeccable akhlāq (morals)—with much of her life history elided, perhaps in deference to local sensibilities—George Sand (1804–76) is situated to provoke a local audience: “Best of exemplars in her morals and conduct, she spent most of her seventy-six years in service to learning, literature, and society. Truly in the history of her life can be found the finest model for human beings.” Strikingly, her akhlāq more than her writing are the grounds of her exemplarity; her quill itself takes on moral qualities. “She was . . . so strong in her morals that the men themselves use to envied her for them. . . . Her pen was chaste and pure, inscribing not a single word that was not for society's good and its reform. . . . We wish our women to take notice, to proceed as did the one we speak of here. Therein lies their felicity and ours.”^[26]

Contemporary Arab and/or Muslim women fit the part, too, acting simultaneously as exemplar and proof. Rujīna Khayyāt (b. 1888), a Copt from Asyut and a founding member of the Wafdist Women's Central Committee (WWCC), is claimed to have been “one of the first Egyptian women to be educated at a time when that was considered a defect in a female. . . . God willed that this fine woman would be an example [mathal] who would shame the partisans of that ancient view.”^[27] Her exemplary potential extends to male “partisans,” whose support was crucial if girls were to get educations. Virginie Bāsīlī, a wealthy Syrian Orthodox resident of Alexandria early in this century, is praised for her full-time volunteer efforts as director of a girls' school and, typically, for not seeking the limelight.

Forward, Virginie, for I have learned that you are bold in all that concerns what is right. And now I see you casting unripe grapes in the eyes of the girls who spend their time in amusement, sumptuous living, and trivia. Forward, O composer of the highest exemplar to the children of your kind, O sketcher of a work plan for our young women. Thus may they learn life's true meaning. You direct not merely a school but the awakening of a people, for you are pointing its fair sex down a new path.^[28]

In 1908, Young Woman of the East profiled another Syrian exemplar, writer ‘‘Afīī;fa Karam (1883–1924), then a twenty-five-year-old Arab Christian immigrant to North America from Ottoman Syria. Her life story (thus far) concluded in a tone at once fulsomely complimentary and fiercely prescriptive, perhaps given added exemplary power in that it was a narrative still unfolding.

We are hopeful that in future she will attain a high level [of achievement] and will be the best possible example for daughters of the East to follow: the most brilliantly shining lamp whose light will guide [them] to the paths of knowledge, so the daughters of the East will be freed from the shackles of empty fantasy and the abyss of decadence. Thus will they come to know that they were created for something better than serving the beauty of the face, and that their time is too precious to spend in front of the mirror.^[29]

But the community of “local” exemplars exceeded Arab boundaries. Biographies of non-Arab Muslims could simultaneously celebrate the presence of “local” precedents and criticize their (proclaimed) absence, claim community and alliance on the basis of religious identity while asserting territorial identity in the same breath, and announce resistance to the gaze of the West. Perhaps this was one reason that Egyptian women's magazines avidly followed the career of Turkish activist Halide Edip. Celebrated for her potential as exemplar, her image unites Turkish and Egyptian women through pride of achievement and aspiration in, significantly, a Coptic-edited journal:

The East may be proud of this great woman, who has shown the Eastern woman in a favorable light. We put this example before the Egyptian woman so she will learn how cultured her Turkish sister has become; we offer it in the knowledge that [similar] beginnings are occurring in our own community. . . . Our women's awakening has begun but has yet to achieve features that would yield true and full advancement.^[30]

Note that the exemplarity is addressed to “Egyptian” women rather than “Arab” or “Muslim” women. As I have noted, Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik's journal determinedly celebrated a secularist and territorially bounded nationalism, not surprising for a periodical edited by an Egyptian Christian. In the mid-1920s, Turkey's redefinition as a secular society with strong, local indigenous roots for collective identity was watched closely by Egyptian intellectuals.^[31] Secularist reformer Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk)'s Turkish nationalism, with which Halide Edip was prominently involved, intrigued many. That biographies highlighted a prominent and politically active Turkish woman needs to be regarded in this context. At the same time, ‘‘Abd al-Malik could point to her celebration of a Muslim exemplar, symbolic of a unity that transcended, or ignored, categories defined by religion.

Exemplary Conduct

Biography offers not only an exemplary feminine image but also a precise exemplary blueprint for action, for instance, in the pursuits of Princess Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein: “Her Highness is possessed of abundant knowledge and disciplined refinement. She is a skilled musician, an eloquent writer and one of the most prolific and deeply penetrating of composers. Her life, moving from immersion in books and inkwells to the huts of the poor and miserable, to shelters and hospitals, is the best exemplar of the finest life [khayr mithāl li-khayr hayāt].”^[32] This text names both attributes and a particular balance of activities as exemplary, for notations of qualities labeled exemplary flood this genre. The Baroness Ronsart (b. 1838), in Egypt because of her husband, stayed on after his death, “an exemplar of generosity and a succor to the poor.” Medieval Spanish Muslim ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; ‘‘Abdallāh al-Aysar, “daughter of a sultan, wife of a sultan, mother of a sultan,” showed “exemplary courage, reminding us of the epics' legends of heroism,” an interesting choice since those “legends of heroism” were mostly male tales. Charlotte Corday (1768–93) was “the paragon of resolution” (mithāl al-thabāt) at court and “the paragon of courage” as she faced the executioner.^[33]

Published in 1930, this biography joined a prevailing discourse in which women's visible activisms were both assumed and increasingly challenged in the name of family interests. For the rhetoric of exemplarity sought a disciplinary role, contrasting subjects' behavior to conduct that commentators attacked as characteristic of too many Arab youth, male and female. Urging “the women of Syria” to learn from educator Louisa Proctor's (1829–1907) example, Jurjī Bāz noted that in her childhood Proctor “did not free herself to go to places of amusement like other girls,” but rather cared for her mother.^[34] It was a message that readers of biography were to hear repeatedly, deployed across different spheres of behavior. Take Ptolemaic-period Alexandrian scholar Hypatia (c. 370–415)—“finest ornament among the women of her time.” Amīn al-Rīhānī burdens her with a decidedly exemplary role for the 1920s woman, based on the contrast between an idealized past and a defective present. She had the added virtue of “local” salience: Greek she might be, but after all, she illustrated the ancient flowering of knowledge in Alexandria as she provided a model of exemplary behavior. It was not so much a question of her “excellence, learning, and wisdom” or even of her “purity and respectability” in abstract terms.

As for her comportment, clothing, and way of life, she was a paragon [aya] of simplicity and loveliness. I imagine her in diaphanous white robes, standing before her pupils; she has plaited her hair with a silk ribbon. Down her shoulder drops the end of her wrap, and on her bare feet are simple Greek sandals. No cap weighs down her head; no corset weakens her lungs and heart. No high heels harm her spine and entire nervous system. A paragon of simplicity, capability, and beauty!

If only today's women would return to the simple, ancient Greek mode of dress. Five measures of delicate linen are preferable to twenty of heavy silk worked up in the latest fashion, for [the former] would not weigh down and pull your body—O lady of today—as if the body were your enemy. This is not even to mention the issue of economy and saving. But clothes and economy are not our subject right now. Let us return to Hypatia.^[35]

The trope of exemplarity serves contested gender agendas, conduct literature on proper comportment masquerading as biography.

Compliment and Comportment

Thus the image and vocabulary of “the exemplar” exploited linguisticsocial convention to promote a set of blueprints for gendered conduct, aimed at women, whether making an interventionary case for new agendas or attempting to counter them in the name of tradition, cultural authenticity, religion, or social stability. Conventional diction also took on new semantic force when biographies ended with the hope that “the likes” of the subject “would be multiplied.” This formula of politesse most often closed biographies of contemporary Arab women, Christian or Muslim. It was a phrase of compliment one would pay to a living subject, the likes of Rujīna Khayyāt: “May God multiply her likes: devoted, sincere, and hardworking.”^[36] As we saw in chapter 1, Zaynab Fawwāz had offered such a compliment to Fatma Aliye, and then Young Woman of the East's appropriation of this biography turned the complimentary phrase into a more pointed wish for Arab society—and for contemporary Arab women. Labība Hāshim paid a similar compliment to Zaynab Fawwāz herself in the first year of her magazine (epigraph to chapter 1) and then echoed herself in a life of Lebanese philanthropist Emily Sursuq the next month: “We hope continued advancement for her, and we ask God to make her likes abundant among women and to recompense her in the best possible way for her deeds.”^[37] The cliché carried new resonance in a context where competing models of active femininity were at stake, and when it was Arab women in the public spaces of magazine publishing, charity work and education, and even commerce and industry, whose “likes,” it was urged, must increase. Coptic merchant Haylāna ‘‘Abd al-Malik—“the only Egyptian woman who has worked in trade, succeeding to an extent that is delightful”—had neither the class antecedents nor the formal education of many magazine readers. But as a prominent Wafd supporter, she “transcended” both class and gender, for her work was legitimated by her nationalist contributions. “Through her efforts God has benefited this nation [umma], so thirsty for the appearance of many of her beneficial likes.”^[38]

Occasionally this compliment was paid to one long dead—but always with relevance to the living. Recall Young Woman of the East's pointed addition to Fawwāz's pious wishes for Shawkar Qādin, celebrated for her charity work: “God increase her likes among the women of this age.”^[39] The pre-Islamic Yemeni ‘‘Ufayrā’ء bt. ‘‘Abbād al-Jadasiyya, defined first as the sister of a tribal leader and then as “one with self-esteem and by nature free,” stirred her people to action against a tyrannous overlord with a rousing poem. “The tribe would not have liberated itself were it not for the strong selfpossession of a noble woman. May God increase her likes in every region.” ‘‘Ufayrā’ء's resonance for contemporary nationalist activists was perhaps too strong to ignore. Yet similar phrasing enframed a few European women, too. Angela Burdett-Coutts is lauded for her energy as a charity patron, a role contrasted favorably with her earlier penchant for expensive garb. “May God reward her well for her praiseworthy efforts and increase her likes, for she is a fitting model to be followed by those of wealth and ease.”^[40]

The compliment of wishing profuse imitators upon the subject could be turned to a conduct-related task mentioned in the last chapter: provoking local readers to competitive action. English housing reformer Octavia Hill (1838–1912) was profiled a month after her death:

How fine it would be if her likes were abundant in our East such that it would awaken, rise from its mean station, and come to equal the European countries in its ascending progress. . . . If just one young woman could have such a great impact on her country, there is no doubt that the fine women of our era, joining together to found associations and literary clubs, following the path of the subject of this biography in improving the state of the poor, would ultimately reach a desirable level of reform, reviving hopes that had died.^[41]

A biography of George Sand also incites its presumed audience: “When will there exist in our country the likes of this eloquent author?” And, explicitly linking audience-in-the-text to that beyond: “Indeed, when will the women writers, let alone the men writers, enjoy the likes of this status among readers?”^[42] A related nudge came from ‘‘Isā Iskandar al-Ma‘‘lūf, commemorating Syrian writer Mariyānā Marrāsh (1848–1919). Claiming her precedence among Arab women in writing for the press, he foregrounded her reformist prose, aimed at “inciting women to attain true cultural refinement [tamaddun].” Orientalists and local scholars had praised her; so had poets, “all of which indicates the status of our biographical subject among intellectuals of her time, male and female. No wonder her loss is a loss to literature, God be merciful to her . . . and may God compensate literature with many women of her likes from among those women who love knowledge.”^[43]

As this suggests, the exemplary function of biography could resonate through dramatic illustration of a subject's exemplarity for an audience within the text that stood in for the implied reader/listener. As a girl at the convent Manon Roland (1754–93) “showed such outstanding ability in every scholarly field she studied that she became a model [qudwa] for her companions [fem.], a fitting exemplar [mithāl sālih] for them.” Perhaps not only for them; the text adds what might be a subtle comment on the effect of contemplating one's own society. As the future revolutionary spent time comparing the greatness of the Greek and Roman societies with the state of her own society, “she would drown in tears.”^[44] That this life appeared in 1922 at the height of women's nationalist visibility is surely significant.

A biography of Sociable Companion editor Avierino in Young Woman of the East remarked that “the journalists knew the worth of this fine lady and vied to publish her picture. . . . She has in her possession letters of praise from East and West, and especially from Egypt, thanking her for her striving [jihad] and zeal. Their [male] authors acknowledge that their daughters have either entered school in imitation of her or have taken her guidance. . . . They do not neglect a single suggestion [of hers].” When Avierino gave a speech in Paris on “the Eastern woman's excellence and rapid advancement,” the secretary of the Ministry for the Colonies exclaimed that “due to her he now understood the true status of the Eastern woman, of whom the subject of the biography was a model example [namuūdhaj].” We write this, concludes the biography, “hoping she will be a sound model [qudwa sāliha] for those among women of the East who are searching for greatness—indeed, to those men who are searching as well.”^[45] Exemplary within the narrative of her life through the testimony of others, that life as narrative was also to be used profitably by its latest interpreters, those “outside” the text. Here was the double rhetorical role of “the West.” Its praise sought, its emulation proposed, it was also to be distanced and chided for not recognizing the existence of homegrown models who exemplified Arab nations' fitness for equal, independent status in the world of modernity.

Exemplarity in Death

The tone of praise and retrospective evaluation of a life's legacy demanded by obituary composition, coupled with a de rigueur set of compliments to the deceased, also suited a practice of exemplary biography dedicated to encouraging the living along certain paths. Salīī;ma Abū Rāshid, a Syrian journalist who died in 1919 at about the age of thirty, was memorialized in Young Woman of the East. “An exemplar for women in gravity, pleasantness, well-considered opinions, and fine principles,” she was celebrated for her impact. “Thus we lost her, excellent literary woman. Remembering her, we recall the literary ability and knowledge, the excellence, pleasantness, fine comportment, and goodhearted nature that adorned her. A flower she was, planted on Lebanon's slopes, to wilt after perfuming her milieu with her fragrance and adorning it with her refined sensibility: bloom of the wādī whose fragrance was not limited to its own valleybut spread everywhere.”^[46] Similarly accentuated is an obituary of Italy's Queen Margherita (d. 1926), after anecdotes establish her courage and firm will: “And so she marched forward until she passed from her life's final stage last month, her legacy holding exempla worthy to be followed.”^[47]

Kevin Hayes has noted the exemplary possibilities of biographical sketches of young women that accompanied published funeral orations in colonial North America: “While postmortem praise always must be viewed with caution, the eulogistic portrayal of women certainly illustrates a feminine ideal. . . . In a biographical sketch published with Victorina, Cotton Mather's funeral sermon for his daughter Katherine, Thomas Walter wrote that her education led her to excel not only at housewifery but also at writing.”^[48] Linda Kerber also marshals funeral sermons and confessional tracts as she speaks of instituting historical and contemporary role models for “republican womanhood” in the early United States:

When Rush and Webster told women to read history they were thinking of Livy and Tacitus, of Rollin and Macaulay. But the narrative of a life like that of Mrs. [Eleanor Reed] Emerson, while generally categorized as a devotional tract, was also a history dealing with themes central to the life experience of women of the post-Revolutionary generation. . . . Under the trappings of a traditional devotional tract is a biography of an intense young woman who explored more widely than most of her peers the options open to her community and her generation.^[49]

Whatever the context, public mourning was an effective conduit for exemplary messages. Writer Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif was universally mourned by Egypt's women's press after her untimely death in 1918. The short biographies these obituaries featured were filled out by Mayy Ziyāda's longer biographical and critical study published soon thereafter in al-Muqtataf. Nāsif was described as exemplary in personal conduct and literary and reformist energies alike, and, in a tactic we have already seen, contrasted implicitly with young women (magazine readers) of the present. Not only, said Young Woman of the East, was Nāsif “enamored from an early age with study and reading” and admired at school “as she was later the locus of respect among the entire nation.” Not only “did she energize every movement aiming to awaken and elevate woman.” In addition, “God have mercy upon her, she inclined to simplicity in dress.” The crescendo of features casts the praise that ends her obituary into something more than conventional eulogy, echoing the obituary of her contemporary, and sister writer, ‘‘Afīī;fa Karam. “She went to her Lord leaving behind fine deeds, traces, and literary remains that are suitable examples for girls and women to follow, a lamp whose beams should guide them.”^[50]

Illustrating exemplary qualities, Nāsif's life offered a commentary on less-than-exemplary behavior among those the journals hoped to shape. In her writings, said Young Woman of the East, Nāsif criticized women enamored of “frippery and adornment” (bahraja wa-zīna). The Egyptian Woman's Magazine exploited the opportunity afforded by Nāsif's example to pose a critique of existing schooling and its products. Describing her as a serious schoolteacher—“above girls' practices these days, which are open to criticism”—it criticized “English education” as leading to al-tafarnuj, “acting like Europeans,” the superficial imitation of European lifeways for which the local press scolded Egyptian youth of both sexes.

Exemplarity was to shape behavior; it also constructed a female collective, the guides and the guided, the mentors and the magazine readers. Maria Morgan's 1892 obituary opened with a declaration: “Mistresses of the pen have lost one of their own.” As this declaration celebrated the lineaments of individual achievement by the recently deceased, and as it drew on conventional contours of respectful obituary writing, the obituary summoned a community of women and an identity in formation in Egypt, “mistresses of the pen.” Biography also offered an opportunity to mention other accomplished women, linking biographer to subject, creating a sense of community. When Labīī;ba Hāshim wrote a biography of astronomer Elizabeth Flammarion, she remarked that some of her information had come from “letters she wrote to a friend of hers whom I got to know on board ship between Bordeaux and Rio de Janiero, prose writer and poet Margaret Brasillier. This woman related all she knew about the subject of the biography; very refined, she is one of those ladies whose likes are rare.”^[51] Exemplarity hovers among subject, source, and writer.

Taking Pride

Of Khadīja bt. al-Sultān Jalāl al-Dīn ‘‘Umar of Bengal (d. A.H. 770/1368 C.E.), Zaynab Fawwāz had advised: “Let women take pride in the likes of this queen, for she was ruler over almost two thousand islands,” her reign one of “justice and fairness” that her people grieved to see end.^[52] The compliment that a subject was a source of pride to her community, to her age, or—frequently in these biographies—to “the daughters of her kind” also constructed a sense of female community whether synchronic or diachronic, within a culture or across cultures. This might also link writer, subject, and audience, as it fulfilled the didactic function of signaling an exemplary subject. “A sufficient reason to glorify and take pride in her is that she was the first woman in the nation of the French to appear in the world of literature and publishing,” Young Woman of the East's 1912 biography of Christine de Pizan declared.

This evocation of female linkage through the emotion of “pride” and the implication that this is a factor, or should be one, in contemporary formations of subjectivity among women relies on a premodern linguistic conceit. The writer, muhadditha, and calligrapher Shuhda bt. Abīī; Nasr Ahmad b. al-Faraj b. ‘‘Umar al-Ibārīī; (d. A.H. 574/1178 C.E.) was called, in her time, “Fakhr al-nisā‘‘” (the pride of women).^[53] A biography of Zaynab (1827–85), daughter of Egypt's modern dynast Muhammad ‘‘Alīī;, calls this princess who was active in charity and concerned with politics “pride/glory of the girls of her time.”^[54] And the queen of Romania was “the pride of women and their proof against men [who doubted women's mental prowess].”^[55] The word fakhr and its derivatives combine notions of “pride” and “glory”; to judge by a life of Theresa of Bavaria, biographers were aware that to evoke a sense of gendered pride was to cue an exemplifying function. Constructing an aura of pride around the role of exemplar allowed this author to expand on the issue of women broaching the all-male bastions of higher learning, in this case the symbolic importance of women being accepted in the most elite associations. The subject's credentials are established first:

The honor and rank of royalty, the bloom of youth, and the augustness conferred by glory and luxury did not deter her from acquiring scholarly knowledge. For from an early age she submerged herself in reading and learning until she emerged as outstanding and won the literary fame for which she had hoped among Germany's scholars and notables. She then devoted herself to writing so that her knowledge would be paired with labor. . . .

And while recently the French have been vying to have women join higher academic organizations, Germany has gone ahead and implemented this proposition by accepting ladies of merit in scientific associations; the famous Metternich Scientific Association proceeded to inaugurate this project by accepting the aforementioned princess as an honorary member. This is the first time women have been accepted in the highest academic circles, and we congratulate the fair sex on the example of this princess who has garbed them in a pride that will not end and a glory that will not elapse.^[56]

An invocation of shared pride emerges from narrative fullness—the subject's life trajectory plotted as a series of actions that had led to renown, making her status as “Famous Woman” inevitable. Qualities shaping the emplotment frame the “pride” that signals exemplarity. “The exemplary deed is placed in the exemplary life; it is read as a momentary sign of the hero's virtue.”^[57]

These conventions were by no means absent in collections of men's biography. Syrian writer Ilyās Zakhūra's Mir’ءāt al-‘‘asr (1897) was one rich compilation. Often his sketches ended with pious hopes for a long, successful life and delineated a subject's sifāt (attributes); alternatively, they praised a life completed for its usefulness.^[58] Scattered throughout are biographies that end with the “multiplication” formula. ‘‘Uthmān Pasha Ghālib al-Akram was “a courageous hero and skillful administrator, of generous nature and mild temper, may God increase his likes and let him enjoy a long and upright life.”^[59] In this collection women appeared only within their husbands' biographies.^[60] About thirty years later, journalist Zakīī; Fahmīī; published a like volume, its title an echo of Zakhūra's, to cover his own generation (but beginning, like Zakhūra's, with biographies of khedives, sultans, and princes, past and present, from Muhammad ‘‘Alīī; Pasha on). All the subjects were male, but there was a difference that bespoke the new political temper: after the royals came Tutankhamen and then, after a digression on the Egyptian parliament, next in the time-politics hierarchy was nationalist leader Sa‘‘d Zaghlūl, who would die a few months after the book's publication. This work, too, drew on conventional marks of approbation.^[61] Such texts were among many that were shaping changing notions of masculinity. But rarely have I seen the consistent, pointed extension of formulaic usages as in biographies of women.^[62] And when biographies of prominent men appeared in women's magazines (less frequently, as a rule, than those of women), they were less likely to be framed by the rhetoric of exemplarity, though they did not lack laudatory diction. Nor did they further exploit the convention of “pride.” Biographies of women often asserted that a female either did or should take “pride in herself.” World traveler Jessie Ackerman “has the right to be proud of herself without fear of objections or adversaries, for she is the greatest woman who has circled the world, and she has done so six times.”^[63]

Indirect Exemplarity: The Qualities of a Good Woman

Amīī;n al-Rīī;hānīī;'s lyrical mental picture of Hypatia's clothing habits follows a long string of epithetic description. This “ornament among women” was also “chief of Platonic philosophy, friend to princes, fond of scholarship and scholars, guide to rulers, enemy of fanaticism and superstition.” Moreover, “This virtuous pagan was very beautiful, eloquent, strong of critique, apposite in her views, quick on her feet, noble in her qualities.”^[64]

Description of status takes on moral resonance: ‘‘iffa, the chaste state of “the virgin philosopher,” becomes a marker of the excellence of this paragon-though-a-pagan. To engrave the picture deeply, the author provides a contrasting vision via reference to another Greek Egyptian, Cleopatra VII (69–30 B.C.): “We have all heard of Cleopatra, the sly and debauched one; but who among us has heard of Hypatia, the scholarly and chaste virgin?” Assuming the mantle of antiexamplar, Cleopatra is Hypatia's rhetorical reverse.^[65] Scholarship and morality, twinned markers of exemplary womanhood, oppose Cleopatra's “sly and debauched” character.

If biography was to encourage girls and women to look beyond the home, and parents and husbands to look on approvingly, writers had to proceed circumspectly. If biographies of contemporary, publicly active women could echo not only the exemplarity of the Prophet's wives but also the venerable tradition of tabaqāt in Arabic letters, so much the better. When Fawwāz gathered together her Scattered Pearls in the early 1890s, she might have drawn on American and European compendia of women's biography, but, as we have seen, the Arabic tradition provided a more familiar (and unimpeachable) discursive and social model.^[66] Praiseful attributes and telling anecdotes had structured these premodern literary models; Fawwāz followed precedent, accenting certain qualities as positive and ordering attributes and epithets in hierarchies. Biographies in magazines summoned the same flood of adjectival excellence. For qualities that had made possible the acquisition of learning and literary skill produced exemplary models for the modern girl. ‘‘A’ءisha bt. ‘‘Alī b. Muhammad (d. A.H. 816/1413 C.E.), scholar and Hadith transmitter, “she of experience and knowledge, a fine calligrapher, vivid of heart, strong of memory, quick to memorize,” was also “sublime of attributes, gentle of heart, sharp of mind and fine of merits.”^[67] The pre-Islamic poet al-Du‘‘ajā’ء bt. al-Muntashir b. Wahb was “an eloquent poet, august in her imagery, strong in her rhymes,”^[68] and she was not alone. Many are the women “famous for fadl [virtue, excellence] and perfection” (such as Nitocris), “celebrated for virtue and knowledge” (such as Clémence Royer),^[69] or “beautiful of nature and aspect” (Alexandra of England, poets Mufaddala bt. ‘‘Arfaja al-Fazārī and Safiyya bt. Musāfir, Abbasid jāriya and spouse of al-Mutawakkil Sha‘‘ānīn, Fatimid royal consort and ruler Sitt al-Mulk bt. al-‘‘Azīz, ‘‘Amra bt. al-Nu‘‘mān al-Bashīr, Marie de Sévigné, ‘‘A‘‘ida, daughter of the Ethiopian monarch Amūn Sīrū, journalist Salīma Abū Rāshid).^[70] Turkān Khātūn (d. A.H. 487/1094 C.E.), consort to the Sultan Malikshāh and partner in rule, covered the ground of superlatives well: “She was famed for strength of mind and abundance of determination; she was distinguished for wisdom, good management, high aspiration, courage, and magnanimity.” Italian polymath Maria Agnesi (1718–99) was “an amazing model and great rarity [qudwa ‘‘ajība wa nādira gharība], one of probity [‘‘afāf], refinement [adab], simplicity and sincere fidelity.” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762)—sounding biographically like a premodern Arab poet—“was famous for liveliness of mind, vividness of heart, beauty of aspect, and perfection of morals. Of fine learning, she was unique among her peers in knowledge and virtues.” A biographer of Charlotte Corday put a traditional set of attributes into a rather untraditional context: “Those who saw her under the executioner's knife said she was pretty of countenance, attractive of features, delicate of stature, her gaze intimating courage and fidelity.”^[71] Hatshepsut, providing an “experiential lesson” and a “little sermon” for readers in 1913, offered a convergence of stellar qualities. Dahā‘‘, cunning or shrewdness, often uncomplimentary when labeling females, is positive here: “With Hatshepsut, leadership meets laudable shrewdness, political savvy embraces tact, bold initiative shakes hands with rare intelligence. . . . Greetings to the daughter of Tutmose I, heir to his sterling qualities.”^[72]

As I noted with regard to Fawwāz, translation cannot do justice to the constellation of qualities each label conveys. Yet the semantic field is suggested in the qualities that—through more than half a century of top billing: intelligence, wisdom, courage and boldness, determination, good judgment, eloquence, high ambition, modesty, charity, and loyalty. If premodern dictionaries had ascribed these to eminent women, for twentieth-century compilers they could embody different resonances. In fact, such epithets paralleled qualities nationalist writers had been urging as crucial to the nation's future in the aftermath of the British occupation. In an early issue of al-Mu’ءayyad, a writer urged his readers: “How pressing is our need for the merits of initiative [iqdām], firmness [thabāt], patience [sabr], application [or assiduousness: muzāwala], sincerity in work and active endeavor as we strive, and care to preserve general benefit so that the nation [al-watan] will grow prosperous through us and we through it, to emerge triumphant in this race in which only the alert come through with flying colors.”^[73] The gendered application of epithets in women's biographies echoed a society-wide plea, while often instructing women how to acquire, reveal, or apply those qualities. Their examples were to produce results firmly within Egypt's twentieth-century economic and political trajectory. For, as is true of notations of exemplarity, epithetic portraits could take on marked resonances. If writers wanted to convince parents that a singing career was respectable, they could gesture to local history: the moralizing ring of attributes sounds through a life of Ummayyad-period singer Jamīī;la al-Sulamiyya (d. A.H. 125/742 C.E.), who was “as famous for probity, keeping protected [from immoral conduct], purity, sedate dignity, and the arts of refinement [ādāb] as she was for singing.”^[74]

Even biographies of contemporary women published late in this period took up the traditional listing of attributes, amplified according to agendas of indigenous modernity. Theodora Haddād (d. 1889), daughter of a Tripoli (Lebanon) family eminent in its intellectual pursuits, was “known for intelligence of mind, mildness of temper, agreeableness of character, nobleness of nature, and strength of memory. And I remember”—said her niece, quoted in 1934—“her brilliance of mind and how she would relate line after line from Ibn ‘‘Aqīl.” Theodora loved algebra, engineering, and plant biology; she regretted the absence of a zoological park in her homeland. She published essays on “the importance of women's status and her influence in society. One proof she used was to say that most great men had inherited their talents from their mothers,” such as Henri IV, “son of that fine woman of august mind, Anne of Navarre [sic].”^[75] When Jurjī Bāz wrote a biography of Syrian writer Māry ‘‘Ajamī (1888–1965) to celebrate the twenty-fifth year of her literary career, he did not stop at the cliched expression “she unites art and utility” but gave it contemporary content, describing ‘‘Ajamī's methods of research and writing. “She writes out [every] speech and delivers it before her sisters, observing the extent of its impact on them so as to correct what seems weak.” Furthermore, and not to be overlooked, “She likes simplicity in her way of life, and is self-denying, free in her thinking, frank in her speaking, bold and dedicated. For twenty-five years she has toiled up the path of literature. What a priority it is for me to write her biography, and for Fatāt al-sharq to publish it.”^[76]Combining a traditional epithetic opening with an unconventional life was ‘‘Isā al-Ma‘‘lūf's description of Salmā Qusātilī (1870–1917): “She was a skilled writer and proficient physician, beautiful of demeanor, incisive of mind, eloquent of tongue, strong of memory.” An unmarried twenty-year-old, she joined her brother in Alexandria and pursued her writing. She taught in a Damascus girls' school, studied medicine in Beirut and Cairo, and became a known gynecologist and writer who moved between Egypt and al-Shām. “This energetic young woman spent her life a virgin, standing on her own two feet to serve literature and the girls of her kind in Egypt. She was famed for self-reliance and individual effort, until she died, a foreigner in Cairo. God have mercy on her and compensate her brother Nu‘‘mān Effendi, who had the preponderant role in her training and education.”^[77]

Laudatory attributes that one would expect to find in an obituary take on substance when the story of a life newly over fills them out. Jessie Hogue (1866–1905), born in Egypt to Scottish missionary parents, was “the learned, active, devout, virtuous lady” who had just died in childbirth in Alexandria when the Ladies' and Girls' Revue published its 1905 tribute. At college in Edinburgh, she was “a paragon of sweet pleasantness, delicacy and application [lutf, riqqa, ijtihād] among her peers,” taking prizes that proved “her skill, progress, and excellent comportment.” After returning to Egypt as a missionary, she was appointed to coadminister the girls' school in Asyut, for “five years in which she spared no energy,” and then for eleven years ran the girls' high school, “raising excellent ladies.”^[78] An obituarybiography of Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) calls her “sharp of intelligence, pure of mind, beautiful of self” and praises her work on education and the many articles she wrote for the cause of emancipation. Summarized from the American Arabic-language periodical al-Hudā,^[79] this text may have come from the pen of ‘‘Afīfa Karam, founder-editor and herself twice a bio-graphical subject in Young Woman of the East—in 1908 when still at the start of her career (“she began her life of the pen in 1903”), as quoted earlier, and then, tragically, less than two decades later, as Labība Hāshim penned her obituary: “Adornment of women's literature in the New World, pride of Eastern ladies, she adorned the newpapers with the pearls of her words, and with a necklace of expressions in women's defense she girded the throat of woman.” For the periodical al-Hudā was “a sword she brandished against traditions, awaking her countrywomen from the lethargy of inaction and ignorance. She walked before them, bearing the banner of literary freedom: 'woman is the foundation of the nation's ascent.'”^[80]

Sometimes a string of attributes that opens a biography in a traditional manner is repeated and its effect strengthened within the context of an anecdote that portrays the subject's personality, a feature of premodern Arabic biography, as we saw in chapter 1. Al-Jumāna bt. Qays b. Zuhayr al-‘‘Absīī;, pre-Islamic Arab poet, prose writer, and learned individual, “was among the most distinguished women of the Arab [Bedouin] in adab [conduct and literature] and morals; she was wise, widely knowledgeable, eloquent in speech, refined in her expressions, well-grounded in her impressions.” The biography relates a conflict between her father and grandfather that Jumāna defused “with her wisdom and determination.”^[81]

Of course these epithets and attributes are all the more resonant as they convey a semantic field of meaning. Possibly the best example of this for both its complexity and its ubiquity is that of fadl and its female adjectival form, fādila, as well as the related noun form fadīla (virtue, good quality). With the significance of “adding excess,” the root word also connoted “preference” and came to signify “first,” “best,” and any sort of superlative quality. More specifically, it connoted virtue. In these biographies “virtue” is moral goodness, superiority, refinement, meritoriousness, graciousness. An attribute of compliment—many a “fine lady” (sayyida fādila) herein—it becomes more than flattery as the biography fills out the substance of eminence and compliment.

The shifting use of signifiers as attributes and epithets is wonderfully evident in the adjective hurra. It labeled the free (hurra) women of the early Islamic community to distinguish them from captive women brought into the community, and it took on the related meaning of “respectable.” Yet in a context where the women's press talked of hurriyyat al-mar’ءa, “the freedom of women,” and of hurriyyat al-fikr wa-al-ra’ءy, “freedom of thought and opinion,” the adjectival form captured more than one resonance. If de Sévigné “lived honorable, virtuous, noble of morals, upright and hurra,” did hurra signify “respectable” or “free”?^[82]

Perhaps the single most common word in these biographies is adab. Texts exploited the term's range of meanings. In fact, it was probably convenient to maintain ambiguity between “refinement” and “good comportment” or “good manners” and “literature” when writing women were seeking to increase their numbers but in a nonthreatening manner. The reiterated pair of adab wa-jamāl, straight out of premodern biographies, had multiple import for modern women.

Breadth and height and brilliance and glory, of mind, heart, will, and tongue: such is the preponderance of these adjectival strings. “Foresight” links Fayrūz bt. ‘‘Alā’ء al-Dīī;n to ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Muhammad; “judiciousness” binds them both to Sitt al-Mulk, Habūs al-Shihābīī;, Sarojini Naidu, and Kanza Umm Shamla. “Courage and boldness” unite Jeanne d'Arc, Laylā bt. Tarīī;f, Bakkāra al-Hilāliyya, Agnes Weston, ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; ‘‘Abdallāh, Lady Baker, Alexandra Avierino, Hannā Kūrānīī;, Mary Kingsley, and Hind bt. Zayd. And “strength of will” pairs Hatshepsut with Charlotte Corday, Finnish scholar-journalist Mieke Freyburg, ‘‘Atiyyāt “the Copt,” and Haylāna ‘‘Abd al-Malik, a coreligionist of a much later generation.

The exemplary function of attributes was nothing new; Stowasser notes it for women who appear in the Qur’ءān:

Even the most literalist interpreters past and present . . . have also recognized the symbolic dimension of the Qur‘‘anic message on the women figures of the sacred past. It is the Qur‘‘an itself that establishes some of the 21 women as “examples” . . . of sin and righteousness, weakness and strength, vice and virtue. In the female protagonists, sin is exemplified as rebellion against God, unbelief, and also disobedience toward the husband if he be righteous. Virtue is faith to the point of martyrdom, obedience to God, “purity,” and obedience to the husband if he be righteous; it is also modesty, bashfulness, and motherly love.^[83]

But for the journals as for Fawwāz, “virtue” was cast more widely, while, like Stowasser's reading of the rhetoric of the exemplary female, magazine biographies yoked attributes to expected social roles. Attributes signaled excellence by naming qualities said to attract men to “Famous Women” as marriage partners—a pointed comment on changing marriage practices in turn-of-the-century Egypt and on the discursive environment that helped to shape them. Obedience, however, was not at the top of these lists.^[84]Napoleon II was attracted to Eugénie's (1826–1920) “sweetness of speech and rare intelligence”; “she shared with him in administering the law and studied ministers' decisions. . . . During her time on the throne she demonstrated firm will, determination to follow through, and foresight that her enemies acknowledged even before her friends could do so.” Bonaparte loved Josephine (1763–1814) for her “rare good qualities and fine virtues.” The letters she wrote to him after their divorce demonstrate her “delicacy of feeling, nobleness of morals, and breadth of culture.” What cements a marriage? The Sultan Malikshāh “saw in [Turkān] political skill and sound views that attached him to her ever more strongly and intensified his respect for her ideals.” Jahangir, Mughal ruler of India, was “captivated” by Nūr Jahān's (1571–1646) wisdom and good guidance, “so he handed over the reins of power and she became 'the one who commands and prohibits' the people, directing the rudder of politics on the straightest of courses.”^[85] These texts were becoming available to schoolgirls as companionate marriage, based on respect and affection between partners, was becoming an established elite ideal in Egypt.

Vying with the Men

Biographers deployed attributes according to gendered preconceptions, too, simultaneously accepting and challenging gender stereotypes. Isabella I of Spain (1451–1504) “combined men's rational intelligence with women's fine qualities. She was distinguished by probity and piety, and the beauty of her countenance was matched by the goodness of her disposition. She was the color of pale wheat, her eyes were blue and her hair blond. She was tall, and as famous for her gentleness and gracefulness as she was for strength of will and sincerity of resolution.”^[86]

Comparisons of other sorts contributed to an implicit exemplarity. Female subjects “vied with the men in all their accomplishments”^[87] and “surpassed male peers.”^[88] Aspasia of Miletos (fl. fifth century B.C.x) “did things the strongest of men could not do. . . . There thronged to her door scholars, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and men of eloquence.”^[89] The “Famous Women” frequently have men “thronging” to their doors, drawn as much (suggest the texts) by brilliance as by beauty, perhaps indicative of how biographies that constructed exemplary women were also helping to shape notions of a new masculinity appropriate to nationalist ambitions. Similar is the claim that men listen to, and learn from, these women, that it is their knowledge above all that constitutes their authority. ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr, “most eloquent of the folk of her age,” was one: “Having memorized more than anyone else the Hadith and Qur’ءān, . . . the hearts of the men were in accord about obeying her and responding to her call.” Jamīī;la al-Sulamiyya taught male singers, and to her they attributed their skill.^[90]

To compare across genders, of course, was to invite stereotyping. George Sand “for her entire writing life took a name characteristic of men as her own emblem. Even so, you would not be able to distinguish her from them [i.e., men] in self-possession and composure, evenness of emotion, loftiness of thought, and towering strength of judgment.” Defined according to characteristics gendered as “male,” Sand stands above other French female writers grammatically as she is situated against them through the deployment of superlatives. Yet the text hastens to distance Sand from suspect motives for her “masculine” preferences. Thus it confirms the social context in which she lived and wrote as one difficult for independent women. “The reader should not assume that her adoption of this male name signified any sort of weakness on her part, or that she was [unfairly] shielding herself against the violent attack and disparagement of an age that took no heed of women or their writings, or that she wrote what a woman's pen would be abashed to inscribe.”^[91] Then the text invokes her as model.^[92]

French journalist Caroline Guebhard, “Madame Sévèrine” (1855–1929), refused a government post with the reasoning that she was “still a woman.” The magazine explains: “By that she meant she was sensitive and gentle, not finding a position agreeable at a time when people were being oppressed.” She chose to “serve her nation” from outside the government.^[93] Qualities called “female” thus take on political meaning and efficacy, although simultaneously they reify gender distinctions. Biographies also perform this reification by generalizing about “female” qualities and motives. Women write “from sentiment,” claim biographies of English writer Ellen Thorncroft and French writer Myriam Harry. In the first case this is posed as a compliment; in the second, as critique, as the biographer finds fault with Harry's writings on Arab society. Another strategy of reification is to assert that a subject “transcends” female qualities. De Sévigné “was a woman but she held fast and strong to the scepter of literature.”^[94]This can afford an opportunity to criticize local belief. If men established the foundations of scientific study, comments a biography of Maria Agnesi, women participated, too, “and reached a level the sons of the East can scarcely believe.” Agnesi is remembered “as the greatest of men are.”^[95]

Furthermore, a few biographies insist that a woman's fame is not the result of her being an exceptional woman but rather because of qualities that transcend or blur gender boundaries. ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; ‘‘Abdallāh al-Aysar's fame was not solely the result of her being “a princess or woman sharing in rule, but rather because of her strong personality and lofty example, her sublime spirit and brave heart as she faced each danger.” In pointing this out the biographer hazards the danger of solidifying boundaries by highlighting their existence. He relies on gendered labels as he lauds her further. “The brave princess was able to escape from prison through her initiative, boldness, and [the sort of] courage that creates heroes from men.”^[96] As male approval becomes a signifier of female greatness, commercial success and economic power draw male applause. Scholars and writers crowded around “the famous Mrs. Frank Leslie” (1828–1914; we never learn her given name) after her businessman husband's death propelled her into the publishing business. “She left them gazing at her reverently as she sat with the great men of business on their knees before her.” She was “the epitome of initiative, the example of seriousness who made the great look small.”^[97]

The comparison to men is by no means exclusively a modern biographical phenomenon. It occurs in transmitted anecdotes about ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr, al-Khansā‘‘ and, says Roded, Umm al-‘‘Izz Nudar bt. Ahmad (A.H. 702/1302 C.E.–A.H. 730/1329 C.E.), more pious and knowledgeable in the law than most men,^[98] who does not appear in extant issues of any magazine. Yet the repetition of this motif in magazines—its insertion into general statements of women's equality to men in intellect, energy, and articulative ability—carried a specific message historicized by its publication context. To emphasize women's worth being proven through male admiration or successful competition with male peers is double-edged to say the least. A deeply patriarchal notion, it yet offers vicarious self-validation, as Janice Radway and Rachel Brownstein suggest in their otherwise very different studies of how female readers and female heroes interact.^[99] If it might reify the gendered isolation of certain qualities as “male” or “fe-male” by reinscribing them in gendered categories, a strategy of comparison could also question the categories.

Thus, lives of eminent women as inscribed by Zaynab Fawwāz and by editors in the early women's press followed medieval biographical dictionaries in emphasizing received notions of women's “proper” attributes. Yet it was easy to find in the traditional sources attributes that could strengthen women's sense of self and lead them on to new paths. To repeat endlessly—and therefore to attempt to normalize—such attributes as “bold initiative” and “eloquence” in new discursive contexts was to work toward legitimizing new subjectivities by taking up the terms of the old. It was a reverse discourse that could be both expansive and constricting. Repeating these attributes and linking them to the idea of comportment and moral strength furthered the notion of imitation that the rhetoric of exemplarity implied as its goal. New and old mingled, for if these qualities were to be inculcated and exercised in new contexts, they were not to diminish old and familiar virtues, however unstable the correspondence between virtue and action might be. As Hampton comments, “The question of exemplarity involves the way in which texts are public artifacts, documents designed to affect the public sphere. As such, their depictions of the relationship between models of action from the past and readers in the present are inevitably marked by transformations in the public space addressed.”^[100] Those who would fix a canon of exemplary qualities by constructing a canon of exemplary women had to respond to definitions of contemporary gendered space that were contested in public discourse.

Exemplary Precedents

It is rare that the prophet Muhammad's wives and female descendants, invoked so frequently now as models for women, are labeled explicitly as exemplary in these journals. This is true of magazines edited by Muslims as well as those with Christian editors, with the consistent exception of the male-edited Woman in Islam. One is tempted to attribute this relative silence on the exemplificatory usefulness of “Mothers of the Believers” and their descendants to the often greater conservatism of diction in biographies of early Muslim women in the press; for, as I have suggested, many appear to have been taken more or less word for word from premodern sources that did not so pointedly indicate the exemplary potential of celebrated women. Yet writers do not hesitate to construct explicit exemplars from the life narratives of other premodern Arab and/or Muslim women. Either it was assumed by writers that women of the Prophet's family would be regarded by female readers as role models, or these figures were not seen consistently by writers as particularly privileged exemplars.

One biography in the Islamic-identified journal Magazine of the Women's Awakening did claim ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr explicitly for “today's” women. But as it relies on traditional epithets, this 1928 biography sketches a portrait of the companionate marriage that women's magazines and nationalist ideologues were championing from the turn of the century on in Egypt.^[101] Not alluding to the historical conflicts Spellberg has traced over how ‘‘A‘‘isha's life narrative should be told, it adheres to the hagiographic positivity that marks exemplary biography, commenting merely that ‘‘A’ءisha left “everlasting memory and a good reputation.” It voices a hope in religiously echoing diction: “I beg God that our Muslim women will be willing to act according to her life story and to follow her way.” “Life story” here is sīra rather than tarjama, presumably echoing sīrat al-nabī, the biography of the prophet Muhammad, and “way” is sunna, akin to the Sunna, or exemplary path, of Muhammad that Muslims are to follow. Transferring these notions from the life of the Prophet to a female domain places emphasis on the role model aspect. Is it by chance that the writer, ‘‘Alīī; Fikrīī;, author of books on girls' curriculum and female comportment, dwells almost solely on ‘‘A’ءisha as spouse in the growing conservatism of the late 1920s?^[102]

Writing a quarter century earlier, the biographer of ‘‘A’ءisha in Woman in Islam, with a target audience of men rather than women, had not shied away from her political role or controversies surrounding her. “The hearts of the men were in accord in obeying her and responding to her call. . . . She stirred up the umma.” She is presented as a vocal and politically active individual to whom all listen, “loud of voice, eloquent of speech, and sound in her logic.” What “lesson” does the magazine provide? “No woman has been as famous in Islam as ‘‘A‘‘isha. Most beloved wife of the prophet, she was the paragon of wives who fulfill what is due in marriage to their husbands.” But she also “led the army and undertook the acts of heroes in war, and traditions were related from her. Thus may women be chaste, eloquent, brave and honorable, learned, and active in the demands of the world and the hereafter.” Exemplary as a “wife,” ‘‘A’ءisha is narrated here also through events that privilege other roles and qualities.^[103] The subtly divergent emphases of these two texts are explicable in each one's immediate publication context and historical moment (a male, turn-of-the-century nationalist agenda seeking differentiation from conservatives and Westernizers, versus a quasi-maternalist agenda and time in which women's rights advocates had become defensive). Through biographies of women around the Prophet, the earlier journal stressed women's abilities as equal to—significantly, as sometimes identical to—men's in the spheres of trade and religious learning.^[104] Such emphases distanced Ramzīī;'s journal from the work of two other male writers on the woman question, Muhammad Tal‘‘at Harb, insistent that women stay home, and Qāsim Amīī;n, gazing West.^[105]

Early Muslim role models were infinitely useful: as they drew on, and away from, premodern biographical inscription, magazine editors celebrated the same subjects medieval compilers had selected, even if with relatively less attention to the Prophet's wives. If “Western” or “modern” lives, local or not, were useful to interrogate shifting possibilities in women's lives, precedents closer to home and rooted in a familiar history that could invoke associations of cultural pride and community strength might make it harder to argue against “new” lives. When controversy erupted in 1911–13 over women leaving their homes to go to lectures organized for them at the Egyptian University, and then over the presence of women's names on the envelopes that bore invitations to further lectures—for then the mail carrier could see those names, traditionally off limits to all but related males—women and their male supporters argued from history, noting that early Muslim women had gone to public meetings.^[106] Biographies constructed these irreproachable sources as not denying extradomestic endeavor to Muslim women. Indigenous precedent created a multiply useful exemplarity. Representing new pursuits as rooted in one's own history, they distanced the imperialist West as model and thereby formed a resistance to its incipient cultural and more than incipient political hegemony.

Thus, constructions of Muslim women's lives (Arab or not) were said repeatedly to disprove popular but erroneous notions of Islamic doctrinal deterrents to women's expanded lives, echoing the arguments of Islamic modernists in the mainstream press. Such images were framed by the modernist claim that many practices labeled “Islamic” were traditionalist accretions not dictated by Islamic law. Khawla bt. al-Azwar rode into battle to save her brother. If this justification could be glossed as a “feminine” aim, the text claimed that her life story “shows that Islamic civilization is not against women's advancement, nor does it bar her from sharing worldly affairs with men.”^[107] Even when a text portrays a Muslim woman as aberrant—outside norms defining most women's lived experience and expectations—the very denial that her life enacted a redefinition of limits could open those limits to question. The life narrative itself becomes a hujja, at once proof and argument, that stands as an example of female possibility. Profiling the reigning Begum of Bhopal in 1916, The Gentle Sex called Bhopal “the world's only state to be ruled solely by women, even though it is a Muslim state, holding to the religious law that—according to what is said—does not in any circumstance entrust rule to a woman. This is the highest proof of the talents distinguishing this woman, through which she has been able to triumph over her subjects' beliefs in this regard.”^[108] In general and in specific ways (getting inoculated!), the Begum had offered a fine model to her subjects. Having presented the broader implications of her public persona, the writer makes explicit the didactic possibilities:

Many imagine that if a woman accedes to rule she cannot possibly handle it well or be a successful administrator. . . . Fortunately events contradict and invalidate such a fantasy. Thus women demanding women's rights can truly demolish the argument of their opponents who deny women's capability and fitness to manage the business of rulers, by pointing out the Indian [state of] Bhopal, where most recently three women have ruled in succession. It has become the best Indian state in terms of organization and security, raising the level of civilization, and progress in science and knowledge. The credit for this astonishing advance goes to the ability and concern of the three women who have ruled it from 1844 to this day.

Yet the text ends: “Her Majesty, like all other Muslim women, avoids sitting with [unrelated] men, preferring to remain apart in her palace.”^[109] As they probe, the biographies also reassure.

As we have seen, if Arab and Muslim histories provided local precedents, so did Egyptian history, particularly in the 1920s when British heavy-handedness, maturing nationalist formulations of identity, and archaeological finds combined to spark intense public interest in ancient Egypt. Not surprisingly, the Egyptian Woman's Magazine, with its determinedly Egyptian perspective and Coptic editorship, profiled the female rulers of ancient Egypt more often and at greater length than did any other journal.^[110] As exemplars, though, these figures could be problematic for writers, especially for one male writer who employed the figure of Hatshepsut, offering a dramatic rendering of her life but then demolishing her as a female role model. “There is no clearer proof of her astonishing supremacy and extreme cleverness than her ability to prevail over [Thutmose III]. . . . Had he been merely a man, that would be proof enough. But he was a powerful tyrant!” From this stance the writer injects biography into contemporary gender debate, taking issue with those who say Hatshepsut was strong because she had strong partisans, and linking her strength and ambition to “love of her patrie,” as well as to personal attributes of self-love, strength of will, determination and courage. But there is more. “Every attempt to find a justification for why she prevailed over him . . . other than her amazing ability is futile. . . . That this woman sat on the throne of pharaohs hinged on the strength of her intelligence and mental agility.”^[111] This historical argument launches the writer straight into debates on gender and “Westernization” in 1926, as women's increased political and professional demands were making some nervous and as the early sheen of pharaonist nationalism was fading under the pressure of disillusioning politics. Having enumerated Hatshepsut's qualities, the writer worries about those who might take her as a model:

I believe I have said all I have the energy to say about that great queen from the perspective of history. I will not offend if I end my commentary to you, reader [masc.], with a question. Do you see anything to stand in the way of calling her “queen of modern events,” now that you have learned she was the first woman to wear the garb of men?? And when this is an issue reintroduced among lovelies of the West today? And [since she was] first to make herself equal, in reality, to the greatest men?! Which women of the world today are demanding. And [since she was] first to call herself by men's names?! Which thus far no female has gone so far as to do. And [since she was] first to don a fake beard? Which we have not heard of a single female doing.

She was also first to abase her husband—among those women of whom history has spoken—which is very widespread among wives now. Personally, I think she deserves this appellation, but I have no power over the beliefs of the readers [masc.], nor do I know to what extent the gentle sex might resent her for having attempted to transgress the natural binding restrictions of her sex, the most monumental of things that woman guards carefully. Nor do I want to state openly what the strong sex feels toward the likes of Queen Hatshepsut. . . . For I am not prepared to brook attacks from those fiery women [al-thā‘‘irāt]. All I can say openly without fearing the consequences is that if she would not concern herself with being like men then without a doubt she would garner great sympathy and approval from both sexes, her own gentle sex because she has raised its status and proven its buried intelligence and wondrous capability, and the strong sex because they view woman as a true paragon when she achieves superiority in a certain sphere.

In short, no one alive can evade [Hatshepsut's] femaleness despite her “beard” and her attempt to escape this label . . . this lovely label.

Hatshepsut continued to rule the Nile Valley with supreme wisdom and zeal, and in her hands the country achieved wealth and prosperity. She died regretted by her people, for they worshiped her and esteemed her abilities. . . . The truth is that she remains [alive], as long as a single living soul repeats her name, linking it to phrases of glory and greatness.^[112]

Acknowledging Hatshepsut's greatness, the writer cannot accept her as paragon. Would female readers have agreed? The concept of exemplarity is elusive in profiles of Nitocris and Hatshepsut, yet it hovers. Like the resuscitation of Muslim ancestors, exemplarity here is contextualized according to the availability of indigenous models. Not only does these rulers' status as constructed in these texts elicit commentary on the shape of a much later politics of gender in Egypt, and on the societal context in which later generations have matured on the banks of the Nile; but also their very presence is telling when set against the loud absence of a more famous “ancestor,” Cleopatra, who appears rarely as biographical subject,^[113] and, as we have seen, becomes an antiexemplar when al-Rīī;hānīī; deploys her image to highlight by contrast the exemplary life (and apparel) of Hypatia. The mere name of “Cleopatra” stands in for a constellation of qualities that are the opposite of exemplary. Yet a later writer would be able to vaguely domesticize even Cleopatra, as Europeans had long done, too.^[114] And Ahmad Shawqīī;'s 1929 play The Violent Death of Cleopatra presented her as an Egyptian nationalist.^[115] But it was not an image picked up by women's magazines; perhaps Jeanne d'Arc was a more reassuring figure.

Drawing Conclusions

Zenobia of Palmyra was “exemplary in her political acumen. . . . She bequeathed glory and might to her community, and to all women. . . . She was a laudable exemplar, . . . and those prejudiced toward men ought to study history.”^[116] Zenobia's biography, like Hatshepsut's, yokes exemplarity to a general declaration about history's relevance to contemporary gender politics. Often these texts signal how biography is to be read by generalizing from the life history, usually as either an introduction or a conclusion to the biography “proper.” Far more than in Scattered Pearls, biographies in women's magazines draw generalizing conclusions from life narratives to offer a pointed comment on gender politics of the day, thereby exploiting the exemplary framework to its fullest. One of the fiercest users of biography for exemplifying purposes was Muhammad Mukhtār Yūnus, whose biographical series “The Sun of History” in the Magazine of the Women's Awakening consistently drew exemplary lessons from historical profiles. He praised Catherine II (1729–96) for “following in the footsteps of her forebear Peter the Great in conquest and reform”—but especially by founding girls' schools through which she “gave life to the women's awakening in Russia which had been throttled in its youth.” Asked Yūnus:

After such models, will the men's party raise their voices and announce to women the death of their [fem.] awakening, and reject movement along paths of advancement? . . . The man who strives to weaken woman is working actively to abase the situation of his own mother, sister, daughter, and wife. Who can possibly be of harder heart, of rougher feeling, than one who cuts off his own roots and lops off his branches? I do not believe anything will remain of those rigid folks after this day.^[117]

Usually more positively than in the case of Hatshepsut, local precedents were important to make strong cases, as in a 1928 biography of Sukayna bt. al-Husayn: “The history of the Arabs after Islam's founding is adorned with the profuse and glorious deeds of women, demonstrating that the gentle sex has the aptitude for refinement and independence in every era, if education for women is available and if they receive a sound and proper upbringing, and all channels appropriate to the time are established—and if they are not tyrannized by the strong sex.” Sukayna, thus, “was brought up according to the requisites of her time, and learned the knowledges of her people, and grew up loving knowledge and literature.”^[118] Historical comparisons serve a hortatory function in the context of the rhetoric of exemplarity by pointing out a “golden age” when women were active and, explicitly or implicitly, contrasting that with a later time while reminding readers of the local precedent. “The women of the Bedouin were distinguished by extreme loyalty, just as they combined adab [in both senses], courage, and knowledge.” Thus opens a biography of poet Latīfa al-Haddāniyya, an orphan whose paternal uncle “raised her on the finest exemplary pattern of good morals and the best traits.”^[119] The term jāhiliyya (period of ignorance), signifying pre-Islamic society, takes on ironic resonance:

The Arab woman in her jāhiliyya often preceded men into battle. . . . If they were not fighters, they were healers, or they spurred [the men] on, or carried water or bound wounds. Thus they witnessed the events and mingled in the ranks of warriors, saw the dead and wounded, shared the pride of the victorious . . . and scorned and mocked the cowardly and weak. More than a few of these situations influenced women's morals after Islam's arrival, and we still read of those women of courage and valor from that age. If this causes today's lady a delighted amazement, in that day it was not particularly astonishing.

The comparison becomes more explicit in this post–World War I context: “Asmā’ء [bt. Yazīī;d] treated the wounded. . . . We know that what the ladies of our time, the age of the Twentieth, did in the last general war was preceded by Umm Salama [Asmā’ء] and her likes, thirteen hundred years and some before the world knew the Red Cross and Red Crescent!”^[120]

Such assertions underline the didactic and political deployment of female biography. People today call the past a dark age, comments a profile of Abbasid-period poet Umm al-Sharīf. Yet if one scrutinizes the past's eminent individuals, one sees that—men and women—they worked for “country and children.” Not like today, when men spend their time in the bars and women theirs in the shops. No indeed! The reigning caliph respected Umm al-Sharīf and sought her political advice. “Here is the judiciousness of women's views, and their strength of will and ability in the past.”^[121] The life of Sukayna quoted previously contextualizes her by asserting that “many from the history of the Arabs excelled in science, literature, and general merit, equivalent to women of the West, so advanced in this era. And they attained influence.” Perhaps it is no accident that Sukayna begins to sound like a contemporary salon hostess: “She opened the doors of her home to poets, litterateurs, and legists, and made it a nādī for reciting and judging poetry, exchanging opinions and ideas, and investigating topics crucial to her countrymen.”^[122]

The Poet's Platform

Poet Warda al-Yāzijīī;—who is called “the best model for the excellent and learned Eastern woman” in an obituary-biography that celebrated her eighty-seven years^[123]—used the “Famous Women” column of Young Woman of the East to expound on these points and simultaneously to launch a critique of contemporary society. This is worth quoting at length, for it encapsulates strategies presented in this chapter and themes that will resurface. Appropriating the magazine's “Famous Women” column for a collective article on five medieval Arab Muslim poets of Andalusia, alYāzijīī; used biography not only to present women's writing but also as a polemical platform for her most extensive published comment on her society's gender politics. “In Andalus a number of female poets were famous,” she starts. “They were competitive with the men.”^[124]

Al-Yāzijīī; spends little time on the poets' lineages or other traditional concerns. Like Fawwāz in Scattered Pearls, she focuses on the women themselves. But the second half of her essay leaves these individual women behind to construct an argument for their contemporary exemplarity. She begins with a notation of plenitude, a common rhetorical tactic among writers of female biography in these journals. “The reader of history and biography, especially the history of Andalusia, finds among the women mentioned poets and writers . . . so numerous one cannot do justice to them in such an essay. I have chosen passages . . . that show women's penchant in those eras for the literary arts. . . . Intelligence and talent so adorned their natures that they were hardly below the level of men.”^[125]

This comparison launches another, an intragender one, that provokes as it describes:

Undoubtedly, if the women of our time would occupy themselves with literary and intellectual matters they could compensate for how they have lived; for their lives are spent in pursuing what is useless, adorning their persons, and imitating senselessly. [Had they done otherwise,] geniuses would have appeared by now, achieving renown and glory, their names inscribed eternally on the pages of time. For women of that age had neither better minds nor broader milieux than do those of today—if we truly wished to follow in their footsteps.^[126]

But this is not the only point al-Yāzijīī; wants to make, even if she has to advance some exaggerated claims, romanticizing the jāhiliyya to didactic purpose:

Yet we do not absolve men. For when a woman observes her father, brothers, and all other men to whom she is connected and among whom she lives, in possession of literary refinement and knowledge, she wants to tread their path. . . . The most proximate testimony we have for this is the [Arab] women of the jāhiliyya. Despite the lack of schools, despite the absence of formal education, and despite the illiteracy (with rare exceptions) of their men, most of these women were eloquent indeed. Among them were poets too numerous to count, and orators perhaps, and those whose manner of speaking would baffle our era's most fluent litterateurs. And the reason is simple. Wherever they went they heard only poetry and fine speech, as is well known of those who lived in tents and tended animals.

The men of our time, however, pay scarce attention to literary and intellectual concerns and rarely take interest in anything but luxury, amusement, property acquisition, and frippery. The educated ones go no further than the women we have already described. They learn a European language and spend their time reading novels, which by and large corrupt morals and manners. Moreover, as has been said, they resemble the European foreigners in every particular; no trace remains of national identity [al-wataniyya]. Our homes, clothing, social gatherings and conversations are all European, yet we are remote from the Europeans' sciences, manufacturing, and other positive achievements. It is as if we had [decided to be] content with the mere shell of resemblance. If only, with all of this, we could resemble those among them who are great, who are noble, in morals and conduct! A visit to one of their honorable families for purposes of appraisal would show them as they truly are; as quite the opposite of those appearances that we take such pride in adopting. Or, to be more exact, as contrary to the bad qualities we take from their vulgar folk—the dissolute behavior, shameless dress, and loud discussion of disgraceful topics that the very pen is too embarrassed to trace. Furthermore, these practices [do not even efface] habitudes to which some of our women are known to adhere: superstitious beliefs, fantasies, futile but firmly held convictions that only sound, proper knowledge can strip away. The outcome is evident, for a child's earliest knowledge comes mostly from his mother.

Rather than simply announcing her “Famous Women” as exemplars for today, al-Yāzijīī; deploys them as signs for an extended critique of contemporary society that centers on, but does not simplistically attack or blame, female conduct and the choices women are making. Neither her complaints nor her solutions are extraordinary; and, in temper with the times, she declares that Western women have “gone to extremes” in their educational and professional pursuits. This keeps them from the household; yet, assuming a certain class identity, al-Yāzijīī; reminds her readers that Godgiven leisure time must be used wisely, to read “useful books” or to write poetry.^[127] Her analysis echoes nationalist reformist discourse of the time, both secularist and Islam-oriented. She sees contemporary education for both sexes as problematic in its privileging of a patina of Westernizing culture. Unlike many male reformist commentators of her time, though, al-Yāzijīī; does not single out women. Men, too, she notes, read novels and luxuriate in the trappings of Western finery, whether material or discursive culture. She also links “property acquisition” to the pursuit of luxury. Yet she goes on to collapse this tendency into the trope of motherhood as a site for fashioning the future society. While she criticizes men for not providing good role models, it is the female role model of the idealized medieval and pre-Islamic poet—eloquent in her compositions, connected to her community—that underlies her plea as she ends by urging the responsibility of women writers to the reform of their (national) community.

This essay exemplifies a tension between the narrative demands of the biographical notice or sketch on the one hand and the rhetorical demands of exemplarity on the other. Hampton notes that the “depiction of exemplarity . . . is marked by a series of rhetorical and epistemological paradoxes involving the interpretation of the past and its application to practical political action. Humanist writing on exemplarity is seen as caught between a veneration of the timeless value of ancient models as patterns for action and a sharp awareness of the contingency that divides modern readers from ancient exemplars.”^[128] Hampton is careful to root his findings in the specific history of the European Renaissance humanists' shifting deployments of exemplarity in the interests of establishing civic virtue among European male elites. But his observations are applicable to my material, although here the “contingency” of the modern context—that of an emerging nation struggling with self-definition in a context of heterogeneous identities, and in the clutch of European colonial control—generates as many ellipses as it does declarations. Exemplarity sits uneasily, whether a premodern Arab or Muslim woman, or a premodern or contemporary European woman, takes on the mantle of mithāl. When it is a contemporary or near-contemporary indigenous model, there are other silences, of class and minority status. And, as we have seen, old terms of exemplarity shift meaning as they become markers of a modern self. Yet the gaps themselves are productive as they seek to provoke the anticipated reader. “Changes in representations of exemplary figures can be seen as symptoms of political and ideological struggles that demand new figurations of the self. These figurations, embodied in the heroic model held up as an image to the reader, in turn act dialectically to produce new discursive modes for representing virtue and, ultimately, new literary forms.”^[129] The new self is decidedly a female self. It is not so much part of an emerging elite as a definition of that elite, marked by the competing agendas that biography encapsulates. And occludes. There emerges through biography what Nancy Armstrong sees emerging from conduct literature in another time and place, a “figure of female subjectivity, a grammar really.”^[130]

Other Sources, Sources of Otherness

Writers of biography in Egypt probably took whatever material they could find. Women's press editors were avowedly interested in the discursive productions of European women and men, and periodicals and books show up frequently in magazine essays, as well as notices of new publications, many of them translations. Much of the conduct literature available to Egypt's growing reading public, including treatises on how to educate girls, was translated, such as Ibrāhīī;m Ramzīī;'s rendition of Fénélon's popular De l'education des jeunes filles, published serially in his Woman in Islam. But references in these magazines (as in Scattered Pearls) to European and American sources for exemplary biography are rare, frustratingly vague, or absent. Rūz Antūn mentioned among her sources by English and American writers a work entitled Dictionary of Biographies and Principles of Famous Women and Men. Saniyya Zuhayr attributed at least part of her biography of Catherine de Medici to Lydia Hoyt Farmer's popular book on famous queens. A short notice on Muhandisū, daughter of the Pharaoh Siyūkhānīī;th II, is taken from Gaston Maspero, writing probably in Le Figaro.^[131] Authorship is often complicated in these texts. The biography of Halide Edip in Ladies' and Men's Revue summarizes from “the New York Times bureau” and from the memoirs of Henry Morgenthau, ambassador in Istanbul at the start of World War I, quoting a letter from his daughter Helen describing her meeting with Edip.^[132]

There was no lack of English- and French-language volumes of “Famous Women” biography at the time. They were often as explicit as their Arabic counterparts about the exemplary potential of a lived female life as constructed in narrative, although one difference was that European and North American collections might be produced with the visual component prominent: reading biography offered an excuse to gaze at engravings of female faces and figures. As time went on, “Famous Women” in Egypt might offer a sketch or photograph, but this was not a consistent or prevailing practice (until the advent of theater and movie magazines). In any case, writers in Egypt could have easily located a convergence between the rhetorical strategies of European or American works and those elicited from premodern Arabic sources. If Sidney Dark's Twelve Great Ladies—like his Twelve Bad Men—was written, allegedly, just for entertainment,^[133] Emily Peabody's Lives Worth Living yoked exemplarity, biography, and pedagogy in its title. Is this why it went through two editions and eleven printings from 1915 to 1926? The author's foreword is forthright about the authority of female exemplary biography: “Our young women are ready to devote themselves to Christian service when the meaning of true Christian womanhood in the home, the church, and the community is revealed to them. For this purpose the study of biography makes the strongest appeal. We are all influenced more by 'living, concrete models than by abstract principles of virtue.' . . . In the hope that the significance of lives that are worth living may lead other lives into noble and ennobling service, these lessons offer their message to the young women who shall study them.”^[134] Decades earlier, the “new edition” of Phebe Hanaford's Daughters of America; or, Women of the Century (1882) had been explicit about its potential for shaping female readers in its dedication. “To the women of future centuries of the United States of America / This record of many women of the first and second centuries, whose lives were full of usefulness, and therefore worthy of renown and imitation, is now inscribed.”^[135] Hanaford's starting point is almost exactly that of many reformist writers in Egypt: “History shows that no nation can enslave its women, but it insures its own barbarism. . . . The advancement of any nation is marked by the progress of its women.” But her teleology diverges. For if “the women of Pagan Greece and Rome were not altogether unworthy of praise,” she goes on to declare that “Christianity must be regarded as the greatest force in the elevation of woman in every age and nation. . . . Many a Christian teacher is needed to follow in the footsteps of Mungo Park and Livingstone, of Stanley and Bayard Taylor, before the land of the Nile will show a place of culture and advancement for woman.”^[136] Lives of “Famous Women” in Egypt over the next decades might be read as a resistant response to this declaration.

Probably most successful in this wave of American “Famous Women” collections appearing the decade before Fawwāz's Scattered Pearls was Sarah K. Bolton's Lives of Girls Who Became Famous, appearing in 1886, then again in 1914, and with a revised edition nine years later. The publisher enthused that it was

first brought out as a companion volume to “Poor Boys who became Famous” and has had a success quite as great. Edition after edition has appeared. . . . Who can measure the good that these two books have accomplished? How many other ambitious boys and girls have been spurred on to high endeavor by these stories of what other boys and girls have done? . . . There are now twentyfive life stories in all, each replete with inspiration for other girl readers.

Note how the gendering of readers along the axis of the gender of the subjects is assumed. It is no wonder that this volume, later translated into Arabic, was so popular, for it is written in an engaging style with a great deal of dialogue. As in biographies in women's magazines in Egypt, Bolton slips in the occasional didactic notation of what women should be doing. George Sand “had found, like Victor Hugo, that time is a very precious thing for those who wish to succeed in life.” Bolton had already described Sand's earliest ventures into publication. “The education of most women was so meager that the articles would have been considered of little value. Happily our present-day colleagues are changing this estimate of the sex. Women do not like to be regarded as inferior; then they must educate themselves as thoroughly as the best men are educated.”^[137]

The constructed lives of women and the function of exemplarity intertwine almost by definition in these works, sometimes in spite of authors' professed loyalty to “objectivity” or “mere portrayal.” In William Hardcastle Browne's Famous Women of History (1895), “the compiler has restricted his descriptions to sketches merely biographical. He has not criticized the individual, nor reviewed her works, where she has acquired fame in art or literature, but has confined himself to a brief notice of her life.”^[138] Yet judgmental epithets abound. Just on the first page, Abassa, “sister of Haroun al Raschid, caliph of the Saracens,” was said to be “beautiful and accomplished,” and English actress Frances Abington (1731–1815) was “elegant in manners, tasteful in dress, but corrupt in morals.” Roman empress Galeria was an “exemplary wife,” while Sarah Siddons's (1755–1831) “figure was symmetrical, her countenance beautiful, and her deportment majestic. Her private character was irreproachable.”^[139] If female fame is not built on exemplarity and judgment, the note of exemplarity hovers in the moralizing rhetoric through which these subjects are constructed. Judgment seems inseparable from female biography, even in a work that states plainly its restriction to “biographical particulars” alone.

This had been a hallmark of biographical writing on women in European histories; Christian hagiography had laid the groundwork. By the time George Ballard was writing his Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1752), such collections had “dropped out of circulation because people were more interested in secular success,” yet little in the way of female biography had replaced them: a few sensational tales, reportage of spouses, mothers, and daughters of kings and notables, and some family memoirs and hagiographic eulogies, useful in the service of exemplarity as we have seen for Egypt.^[140] Ballard's collection of the lives of sixty-four scholarly women, “respectable and pious,” articulated his belief that biography should “record lives that best deserve imitation.” He sought to prove women's intellectual prowess, but whatever respect his work garnered among peers arose from its exemplary potential. “If they valued his efforts, it was not because he was recovering lost information about women with real claims to prominence, but because his book might arrest the attention of light and frivolous women of fashion and give them better examples to emulate.”^[141]

If such collections were so numerous and popular one hundred years later, was this connected to the growing popularity of conduct literature aimed at women? A European biographical collection such as H. G. Adams's Cyclopaedia of Female Biography (1869) yields many parallels with the “Famous Women” of the early Arabic press. A similar mix of rulers, royal consorts, scholars, prose writers, poets, military heroines, and saints obtains. Adams even includes ten Arab subjects, although five are assimilable to a European (Spanish) heritage, as the Arab history of Spain is glossed as a mere interlude. These subjects join others, predominantly of the West,^[142] in forming a nearly eight-hundred-page parade of women; many are described as exemplary.^[143] As in Egypt, the biographical sketch afforded an opportunity for overt prescription in gendered behavior. Frances Erskine Calderon de la Barca, immigrating to North America with her natal family after her father's death, taught in a school her mother and sister established. “This portion of her history is a model for young ladies, who should cheerfully assist in sustaining themselves and others dear to them, whenever such necessity occurs.”^[144] Adams even evaluates other collections of female biography according to their worth as guides to gendered identity and conduct.^[145] In these metacommentaries on the genre, Adams exposes the interested nature of collections such as his own. Women's biography can never be “merely for entertainment.”

Scholars have recognized the didactic power of these biographical collections in European and American contexts. Kevin Hayes, describing colonial American women's reading, notes that “historical and biographical treatments of women taught conduct through example.” One was a work that became widely known as The Female Worthies, which implicitly conveyed notions of the feminine ideal that aligned it with conduct books. The women portrayed within the work were “eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments.” Those who gave advice on what women should read, such as clergyman John Fordyce, instructed that “history and biography were worth reading because they provided examples of 'passions operating in real life and genuine characters; of virtues to be imitated, and of vices to be shunned.'”^[146] This didactic emphasis was often trumpeted in the titles of works, such as an 1833 volume by “an American Lady,” Sketches of the Lives of Distinguished Females, Written for Girls, with a View to Their Mental and Moral Improvement.^[147] Would any of these have shown up next to Scattered Pearls in the women's library at the Chicago Exposition?

Kate Flint, examining attitudes toward women as readers in nineteenth-century England, also sees “the numbers of brief biographical compilations [of female subjects] produced during the period” as evidence of the strong belief not only that “identification was believed to happen when one read” but also that women were especially susceptible to this identificatory role, whatever direction the identification might take.^[148] Reading about lives, therefore, could be usefully—or dangerously—influential. If the conservative Robert Johnson of Belsize College for Ladies emphasized in an 1860 lecture the importance to “Female Education” of “accounts of Eminent Women, honourably distinguished for the faithful and intelligent discharge of their duties,” some twenty years later the feminist Englishwoman's Review praised a collection of biographies of “Celebrated Women Travellers” for different but no less directed aims: “If the book serves as an encouragement to ladies to undertake independent and varied expeditions, it will have served its purpose.”^[149] The memoirs of English feminists were sprinkled with mention of lives of famous women as inspiratory material, and in Constance Elizabeth Maud's feminist novel No Surrender (1911), it was a parade of female eminence that persuaded the main character to become a suffragist.^[150] Shakespeare's heroines, too, became actors in “the fashioning of womanhood through both moral education and the production of sets of heroine pictures,” as well as textual portraits such as Anna Jameson's popular Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical. The Egyptian arts and political weekly Rūz al-Yūsuf (founded 1925) featured an excerpt in its second issue.^[151]

In France, too, an important girls' textbook of the late nineteenth century relied on biographical sketches:

Convinced that it was more useful for girls to know about illustrious women like Saint Genevieve than about Alexander the Great, [Ernestine] Wirth deliberately provided notable female role models but, at the same time, chose examples to underscore the message that domestic economy was more important for a girl's future than algebra and geometry. . . . Although the military feats of Joan of Arc and Jeanne Hachette were hardly traditional feminine activities, these two shared with such women as Louis IX's mother or Madame de Maintenon the virtue of serving others.^[152]

French textbooks echoed popular biographical-portraiture works like Sainte-Beuve's Galerie de Femmes Célèbres and Nouvelle Galerie, a copy of which I found in a private library in Cairo. The author makes representational claims, if lightly; Mme de la Vallière's piety made of her a living exemplar.^[153]

Long before the Englishwoman's Review, women's periodicals and “ladies' repositories” in Europe and America, like those in Egypt, featured “Famous Women” profiles as part of a self-defined didactic mission, intersecting, as in Egypt, with a declared intent to entertain and amuse. The London Ladies' Monthly Museum (1798–1832), edited by “a Society of Ladies,” offered engraved portraits and “profiles” that emphasized moral qualities as they alluded to less-than-moral pasts.^[154] Earlier in the eighteenth century, when Richard Steele's Female Tatler was “set up for Morality,” it included “harmless, almost edifying features such as a 'Table of Fame,' made up of biographical accounts of women noted for their achievements—a feature intended 'for the Encouragement of the Sex . . . to demonstrate that Women are as capable as Men of Sublimity of Soul.'” The Dublin Ladies' Journal (1827) contained “undeniable Examples of the Fair Sex who have surprisingly distinguished themselves in all kinds of human literature.”^[155] Biography was part of “a sustained campaign to impose a personal set of standards and values [i.e., the editors'] on the woman reader.”^[156]

As less personally stamped journals proliferated, biography continued to play the double role of entertaining and prescribing. The American Jewess (1895–99) utilized biography as a role-modeling tool for the “New Woman” of the upper middle class to whom the magazine was aimed. The Business Woman's Journal (founded 1889), “which unabashedly addressed the American woman as worker,” featured “a successful woman” in each issue. “By recording the deeds of the brave we hope to inspire the feeble.”^[157] Biography suited the conduct-oriented, individualist approach of many journals. The conservative Ladies' Repository, founded as a Methodist Episcopal alternative to the more worldly Godey's, aimed to “exemplify female virtue through the publication of female biography of high order.”^[158] Volume 2 (1842) featured Abigail Morris, in the tradition of obituarysermons celebrating the exemplarity of “Christian suffering”; Jeanne d'Arc; and an exemplary biography of an evangelist, spouse of a judge and congressman. Some thirty years later, volume 34 contained a biographical sketch of mathematician Mary Somerville drawn from her recent memoirs. “Mrs. Somerville was, in most respects, the model woman of history, and it is her chiefest glory that she was a real woman. . . . If this article shall succeed in bringing this noble life more prominently before the young women who read the repository, so that they will make it a careful study, until they are imbued with her spirit and actuated by her lofty purpose, the object of the writer will have been attained.”^[159] Uniting themes of women's struggles for education and professional achievement, the difficulty of combining careers with domestic duty, and professional women's interest in expanding women's rights, this biography would have sounded familiar to readers of al-Jins al-latīf except in its enthusiastic reproduction of Somerville's sentiments of Christian piety. But what is most interesting about the volume's biographical sketches is that they stand side by side with essays urging women's right to vote, to obtain higher education, and to receive equal work for equal pay. Readers of exemplary biography, such as the serious young women envisioned by the biographer of Somerville, would have read these lives in conjunction with other material in the same issues. What would they have defined as worthy of imitation: Somerville's persistent scholarship, the pious suffering of Mary Clark Cole, or the independence of mind of Sanjogata, “the Last Ranee of Delhi,” as they contemplated these from within a differently patriarchal system?

As Hampton comments for the texts he studies, “the notion of reader response as imitation is inscribed as both a thematic concern and a rhetorical strategy” in exemplary biography. He advises that “the history of exemplarity can illuminate the history of models of selfhood, or what Foucault and de Certeau call 'subjectivization': the history of how individuals are made subjects of particular discourses.”^[160] One question then becomes how histories of subjectivization, traced for European histories by Hampton and others, and activated in a gender-specific context by writers from de Pizan and Boccaccio to Sarah Hale and many others of her time, intersects with histories of subjectivization in—for example—Arab societies of the Middle East that experienced Europe's colonization. Through the cultural training of many writers in Egypt yoked to the historical accident of their submission to European cultural and political domination, such writers had access to, and were partially shaped by, European histories of exemplary writing. They mediated those histories through, among other things, the cultural forms of an indigenous history of exemplary writing.

Grappling with the question of what exemplarity is—and of what is exemplary—the biographer moves within a social and historical context made material in the audience that she or he seeks to move rhetorically. This entails a philosophy of what biography is and a strategy about what it can or should or might do. Close textual analysis suggests a belief in the didactic, extratextual shaping power of biography for young women readers of Arabic in a certain time and place. With its pointed introductions, exploitations of familiar formulae, generally positive tenor, and truth claims, biography could do its remodeling work in the most concrete fashion possible, constructing a linear narrative of individual “progress” construed both as movement out of the home and as learned activity within it. Biography offered a narrative of life as discipline, of narrative as a series of moments that display self-discipline, education, and subjectivization in the terms of accepted social norms. Scholars recognize the power of exemplary biographies to shape the subject; the internal rhetoric of biography confirmed how she was to be shaped.

Exemplar or Exception?

It might be argued that to focus on individual “notable” figures privileged exceptionality rather than exemplarity even as, in Egypt, it also tended to support the idea of a national community based on individualistic enterprise over relational outlooks. Many “Famous Women” do appear as exceptional, one-of-a-kind, alone of their sex. Even as the exceptional woman is celebrated for her exceptionality—for the inimitable difference that makes her “famous”—she becomes exemplary, hence imitable. Many a woman was “distinguished from all other women of her time” or “sur-passed them” for her poetry (al-Khansā‘‘), her scholarship (Fātima As‘‘ad al-Khalīī;l, Fawwāz's mentor), her piety (Sufi poet Rābi‘‘a al-‘‘Adawiyya [c. A.H. 100/718 C.E.–A.H. 185/801 C.E.], “model of perfection in her era”), or “strength of mind and body,” in which Maria Morgan “was distinguished from the daughters of her kind and from many of its sons.” As we have seen, many also—in a rhetorical move with its own significance, both reifying and interrogating hierarchies of patriarchy—“surpassed their male peers.” The gap between exceptionality and iterability constructs a representational anxiety about matching the model, one encapsulated perfectly by sixteenth-century conduct book writer Thomas Salter: “Our wise Matrone, shall reade or cause her Maidens to reade, the examples and lives of godly and vertuous Ladies. . . . You shall never repeate the vertuous lives of any such Ladies . . . but you shall kindle a desire in them to treade their steppes, and become in tyme like unto them.”^[161] Yet through the rhetoric of exemplarity and the teleological notion of individual and society-wide progress that these magazines upheld, the unique becomes potentially multipliable. It is this multipliable woman that transforms biography into conduct literature. The framing rhetoric of exemplarity accomplishes this didactic move.

Putting the rhetoric of exceptionality into the service of exemplarity and repeatability advanced rather than impeded the normalization of prescribed role models. It paralleled the construction over centuries of the unique position of the “Mothers of the Believers,” the prophet Muhammad's spouses—as exemplary, repeatable paragons of the good Muslim woman, most recently in collections of women's biography published by Islamist presses. “Presented as repeatable women,” in Afsaneh Najmabadi's words,^[162] subjects of biography constituted both reassuring precedents and unprecedented guides for those Arab women whose lives were beginning to look markedly unlike their mothers'—even if the older generation might not be reassured by the distribution of exemplarity or by the range of lives onto which it was mapped.

As terse as these biographical sketches were, they complicate readings of the press aimed at women that privilege the more explicitly didactic and instructional material of that press. Yet these biographies were no less didactic than other articles, as they constructed subjectivities through which an emerging group of educated, urban, middle- and upper-class women, as both writers and readers, might articulate (and authorize) their own senses of self. The construction was a two-way process, involving readers as well as writers of biography. If the active female reader could read a range of messages off biography, then in a fluid and elusive sense, complicated by many layers and ambiguities of authority in an emergent press for women, biography might represent a collective autobiographical project. As much as this was an inscription of pasts, it was a writing of changing presents and hoped-for futures. As in Christine de Pizan's fifteeenth-century catalog of women, Livre de la cité des dames, the biographical sketch could act to urge women's attention to self-definition, a quest in which editor/author/compiler and audience/readers-writing-in were to share.^[163] Or, to put it differently, it could encourage girls “to want to become a heroine, to have a sense of the possibility of being one.”^[164] Yet biography was “safe.” By focusing on others' lives, by addressing controversial desires and demands through the medium of biography, one might deflect direct attack. By writing on Malak Hifnī Nāsif, Mayy Ziyāda criticized polygyny and women's seclusion, sensitive issues she never addressed directly in her enormous corpus of social commentary. Perhaps Christine de Pizan had resorted to female exempla for a similar reason. Threatened with prison, said the 1938 biography in Young Woman of the East, de Pizan refused to recant and “went on treating women's subjects until her last breath.”^[165]

Notes