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Imad Abou Ghazi, Mohammad Dakroub, Lateef Zaytouni |
Arab women have been
historically constrained by a rich yet limiting oral tradition from the time
Scheherazade started spinning tales for her tyrannical husband-monarch to
avoid being decapitated. Afterwards, ensnared by a male world whose
patriarchs were to be constantly appeased, women started craving
independence, wanting their personal reflections, stories, and voices to
resonate freely in the public sphere and escape the iron grip of the family
circle that had suppressed them so far. Hence, Arab women took to the pen.
With this brief overview of Arab women's voyage into literacy and
composition, Professor Lateef Zaytouni opened the panel discussion on the
newly published Mawsouat Al Katiba Al Arabiyya (Encyclopedia of the Arab
Woman Writer; 1873-1999).
The discussion, organized by the Anis K. Makdisi Program in Literature, was
held on February 22 in West Hall. It was moderated by Zaytouni who said that
the four volumes of the encyclopedia were put together by twelve researchers
who worked for six long years to complete a literary project that would
induce Arab men to acknowledge female literary potential and evaluate women
based on their intellectual achievements. The encyclopedia was also intended
to act as a buffer against the re-emergent “fundamentalist trends” that aim
to “re-position women in their traditional cocoon.”
The chief editor of the encyclopedia, Hasnaa Moqdashi, spoke next, followed
by Imad Abou Ghazi, an Egyptian history researcher and professor of
literature at the University of Cairo. Moqdashi spoke of the problems the
researchers faced in assembling the different texts and biographies.
Disparaging the endemic lack of appreciation of women’s literary works in
the Arab world, she said that most Arab countries did not, at the time the
research was conducted, even have full-fledged bibliographies of women’s
writings.
Relating this problem to the general lack of cultural awareness in many Arab
countries, Abou Ghazi provided some statistics about the encyclopedia,
saying that it encompasses the works of 1,142 writers, who are classified
under ten categories and assigned to six literary genres.
Cultural critic Mohammad Dakroub, stressed the rarity of many of the primary
texts covered by the project.
Professor Youmna El Eid, a contributing editor and researcher, concluded the
discussion by explaining the criteria applied in the selection of the
fiction and poetry entries. She expressed hope that the encyclopedia will
act as the harbinger of an official Arab effort to revoke centuries of
female invisibility, exclusion, and illiteracy.
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