1 Lebanon
Yumna al-âId
Introduction
As a poet, al-Khansaâ was held in high esteem. She had her own place in the âUkaz market next to the equally renowned poet al-Nabigha, and the Prophet attested to her poetic superiority by dubbing her âthe best poetâ (notably, not the best female poet). Critic and grammarian al-Mufaddal al-Dabbi (d. 786) was of the opinion that among all the Arabs, al-Khansaâ had composed the best line of auto-panegyric, while in his Kitab al-Aghani (Book of Songs) tenth-century scholar Abu-l-Faraj al-Isfahani includes her among those poets whose verses were chosen for the one hundred songs sung in the days of Harun al-Rashid. But when the Umayyad poet Jarir was asked who the best poet was, he responded, âMe, were it not for that devious woman.â1 Jarirâs description of al-Khansaâ as âdeviousâ implicitly attests to her superiority even as he rejects it. Women were not usually superior; therefore, al-Khansaâ is devious, or somehow underhanded.
Fuhula, or poetic virility, was a value that inhabited the popular consciousness, referring to that which ensured the continuity and sovereignty of the tribe. Poets who composed satirical lampoons or panegyric, for themselves or others, were valued over those who composed elegiac or lyric poetry, just as those who waged war and fought were held in more esteem than those who lovingly and with a willing spirit produced with their hands, served, educated, and raised children. Such values, grounded in social or historical conditions, sanctify the continuity of power and justify its authority, despite changing conditions and historical developments. The injustice they entail is great for the ruled, and even greater for women, who are twice burdened, once by their sex and again by their social status as part of the ruled.
Realizing the strong links between the political, the literary-cultural, and the social, women at the beginning of the Arab renaissance understood that their own liberation was dependent on liberating the collective consciousness from traditional values that sanctified their inferiority and made them, according to âAnbara Salam al-Khalidi (1898â1986) in her memoirs, hostages to âimprisoning wallsâ and âdraping curtains.â2 For the same reason, men of the renaissance also realized that national liberation and societal development were vitally dependent on womenâs emancipation, which would bring them out of a seclusion that strangled their abilities to a world which they could take part in shaping. In both casesâwomenâs desire for their own liberation and menâs desire for national liberationâwomen were seen as the cornerstone of the construction and advancement of society. The school, as a means of instilling and disseminating knowledge, was thus the starting point of the renaissance in the Arab East. In Lebanon, foreign missions were active in establishing schools early on. The first was the Anglican mission, which established what later became known as the American University in 1820. More schools followed, and by 1860 there were thirty-three, most of them in Beirut.
Beirut was well situated to be the link between East and West, a free space for cultural dialogue, open to the West and its rationalist civilization. With the escalating Druze-Christian sectarian conflict in Mount Lebanon from 1840 and the 1860 massacres, there was a marked increase of foreign communities in Beirut, and Western consulates and the main mission schools relocated there.3 It was in these foreign, religious schools that most female pioneers were educated. They were Christians, and they represented the minority that came from educated, well-off, enlightened households. Initially, education was not within the reach of the poor and it was not for girls. The few national schools that existed were established for boys, and people saw no good in sending their girls to school.
The first pioneer, Zaynab Fawwaz (1846â1914), did not go to school. Chance alone gave the childâborn into a modest, rural homeâthe opportunity to learn to read and write. Fatima Khalil, the wife of âAli Bey al-Asâad, then the feudal lord of Mount âAmil, taught the young Zaynab. With her intelligence and zeal, Zaynab read voraciously and eventually stepped into the spacious world of knowledge in Egypt.
The Christian nature of education at the foreign missions meant that enlightened Muslims who were willing and able to educate their girls refrained from sending them to the foreign schools, fearing that the wider public would accuse them of blasphemy and that their daughters would be harmed or humiliated as a result. Thus, while Warda al-Yaziji (1838â1924), Labiba Mikhaâil Sawaya (1876â1916), and Labiba Hashim, for example, went to American missionary schools, âAli Salam, a prominent and enlightened Muslim of Beirut, sent his daughter âAnbara to a shaykha (learned woman) who taught girls basic reading skills. The writer âAnbara Salam al-Khalidi related later how, when she was ten years old, people would shout at her, âGo home!â as she was on her way to her lessons. She spoke of how Professor âAbd Allah al-Bustani was persuaded by her father to teach her the principles of Arabic at home and how prominent Muslims convinced one another that âthe advancement of the community starts with the education of girls,â4 which prompted them to establish a girlsâ school in Beirut.
It was forbidden for a girl to appear in a public place, and her voice was taboo. The day that âAnbara Salam stood on the podium to speak, wearing her full veil, one of the men spoke up, âWhat an inauspicious disgrace! How can her father allow his daughter to speak before a gathering of men? By God, by God, Iâd like to shoot her and spare the world from her.â5 The young âAnbara had to wait until 1928 to remove her face veil, while Warda al-Yaziji, older than her, had left hers behind decades earlier.
There was thus a vital need to establish national schools for girls and awaken public opinion as to the importance of girlsâ education. Both Christian and Muslim women pioneers in Lebanon stepped up to the task. In 1881, Emily Sursuq and Labiba Jahshan jointly founded the first institute for girlsâ education. It was, as Salma al-Saâigh said, a model for the establishment of institutes in the East and in âpreserving the national language most perfectly.â6 In addition to schools, pioneering women founded womenâs associations and salons to support the womenâs awakening, give them a space in society, and contribute to their advancement. In 1914, women in Beirut established a womenâs association called the Vigilance of the Arab Woman. In 1917, a girlsâ club was opened which soon became a literary and social salon that received distinguished writers, poets, and doctors passing through Beirut. The women were not intimidated by rumors at the time that âmixed dances were constantly held [in the club].â7After the First World War, Julia Tuâma Dimashqiya, a Christian married to a Muslim, established a womenâs association for women of both confessions whose objective was âelevating womenâs cultural level.â8
Women pioneers of the renaissance in Lebanon were mindful of discrimination between Christians and Muslims, sought to strengthen the Arabic language as part of the liberation project from Ottoman tyranny and Turkization, and took Arab nationalism as their national identity.
In 1928, a number of womenâs associations from Syrian and Lebanese cities met to form the Womenâs Union, and the unionâs first conference was held the same year, achieving its aspirations for religious and national inclusiveness. The conference cemented the literary status of women, embodied in the first female pioneer to revive Arabic poetry, Warda al-Yaziji: to mark the occasion, a commemorative portrait of her was unveiled on a wall in Beirutâs National Library next to other prominent Lebanese writers. âAnbara Salam was named the representative of women at the conference as an expression of the Muslim-Christian concord: Salma al-Saâigh commented, âSheâs a Muslim and al-Yazijiya is a Christian! Literary ties are the strongest bonds, and devotion to knowledge is like devotion to religion. God created people of knowledge, like people of religion, to serve the truth.â9
Lebanese women also played a notable role in establishing and writing for newspapers and magazines. Alexandra Khuri Averino founded Anis al-jalis in 1898, followed by Labiba Hashimâs Fatat al-sharq in 1906 and âAfifa Karamâs al-Marâa al-Suriya in 1911. Most of them settled in Egypt or the Americas, like many male Lebanese writers and intellectuals, searching for spaces of freedom, and this was a decisive factor in establishing their presence as writing women.
Zaynab Fawwaz, the first to write of womenâs issues in the Egyptian press, first and foremost in al-Nil, considered girlsâ education âthe primary foundationâ for the improvement of young people. According to Fawwaz, a child raised by an ignorant mother learns all the faults that stem from this ignorance, and no teacher or school can correct them, just as one cannot shore up an unstable building. Fawwaz concluded that the benefit of educating women accrues to men in particular in âchildrearing, housekeeping, and companionship to the husband.â10 In highlighting womenâs role in social improvement, Zaynab Fawwaz reconsidered the work that women do in the homeâwork that is deemed worthless and insignificant by men. In her newspaper articles, Fawwaz was keen to stress equality between men and women: âKnow that the spirit is an abstract essence, neither male nor female, but it is influenced by the physical form, and thus the capacities of men and women differ. Each one is half the world, and the importance of their positions derives from this equal proportion.â11
Mayy Ziyada (1886â1941) also made substantial contributions to newspaper writing. Ziyada came to Egypt from a convent school in Nazareth. Since her father was an editor for the Cairo-based al-Mahrusa, she met many writers and journalists. After studying Arabic and the Arabic literary tradition, she gave lectures and speeches, and her literary salon attracted intellectuals, writers, and poets. Most of her lectures were published as articles in the press. In her articles and talks, Mayy Ziyada evinced a deep awareness of the right of human beings, particularly women, to freedom and justice. She went beyond the liberation of Arab or Eastern women in her writings to address the institution of human slavery in history, linking it to systems of human governance. She believed that in liberational revolutions, like the French revolution, women found the opportunity to rise âfrom under the feet of the crushing master.â12 In the family, she maintained, the master is the father; he rules over the members of the family much as his leader rules over him.13 Ziyada defined nationalism as a human concept that went beyond religious identity and social and religious differences and gave everyone his or her due.14 On the basis of this definition, Ziyada engaged those who disregarded the Arabsâ rights and saw them only as desert-dwellers who are good at nothing âsave plundering, theft, and destruction.â15 She highlighted the value of Arab civilization and its contributions to the world and discussed the importance of Arabic, seeing in its emergence âa link of goodness and light between the empty ages and the modern centuries.â16
Like other writers of her era, Mayy Ziyada addressed two major issu...