Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies Shahrazad Tells Her Story by Nawar Al-Hassan Golley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. 236 pages.)

Abstract

In writing Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies: Shahrazad Tells Her
Story, Nawar Al-Hassan Golley’s goal is to fill a critical gap. Recent books
like Marilyn Booth’s May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender
Politics in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) analyze
women’s relation to biography from Zainab Fawwaz’s Scattered Pearls (1894) onward. However, any critical analysis of Arab women’s autobiography
is scarce, if not non-existent. In its efforts to fill this critical gap, Reading
Arab Women’s Autobiographies carves out a dual readership. Delineating
past and present meanings both within and without Islam of “Arab,” “Arab
world,” “hijab,” and “harem” with an eye to the non-Arab reader, Golley’s
analysis of five autobiographical texts and three anthologies of women’s collected
stories simultaneously participates in a conversation with other Arab
women scholars about modes of text production, distribution, and the overall
place of women’s autobiography within Arab feminism.
Part 1, “Political Theory: Colonial Discourse, Feminist Theory, and
Arab Feminism,” contains three chapters: “Why Colonial Discourse?”;
“Feminism, Nationalism, and Colonialism in the Arab World”; and “Huda
Shaarawi’s Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist.” In the first
two, the author argues for the inclusion of gender-related issues within colonial
discourse analysis and for the necessity of adopting Spivak’s “strategic
essentialism” when speaking of “Arab women.” In outlining a brief history
of Arab feminism, Golley strives to both demystify the “aura of exoticism”
that has surrounded Arab women and to demonstrate that Arab feminism “is
not alien to Arab culture.” ...