c. 1850 - 1914
Lebanese essayist, novelist, poet, and dramatist.
Zaynab Fawwaz immigrated from south Lebanon to Egypt as a young woman and became a prominent writer on gender issues in the nationalist press. Much remains mysterious about her early life: She was the daughter of a Shiʿite family of modest means from Tibnin, Jabal Amil, and as a young girl she apparently was employed or taken into the local ruling household of Ali Bey al-Asʿad. She caught the attention of Ali Bey's consort, Fatima bint Asʿad alKhalil, a literate woman who taught her the rudiments of reading and writing, and perhaps more. Sources provide divergent narratives on Fawwaz's first marriage(s) and her move to Egypt. She became the protégée of newspaper publisher and litterateur Hasan Husni Pasha al-Tuwayrani, in whose newspaper, al-Nil, she published essays in the early 1890s while also publishing in women's journals and other periodicals. Her essays and poetry were published in al-Rasaʾil al-Zaynabiyya (The Zaynab epistles, c. 1906); like other intellectuals of her time, she wrote across genres, publishing a massive biographical dictionary of famous women, al-Durr almanthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur (Scattered pearls on the generations of the mistresses of seclusion, 1894), as well as two novels, Husn al-awaqib aw Ghada al-zahira (Good consequences, or Ghada the radiant, 1899) and al-Malik Kurush awwal muluk al-Fars (King Kurush, first sovereign of the Persians, 1905), and one play, al-Hawa wa al-wafa (Passion and fidelity, 1893). She is considered an Arab feminist pioneer; her work is notable for emphasizing the importance of women's access to income-generating employment.
Bibliography
Booth, Marilyn. May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Fawwaz, Zaynab. "Fair and Equal Treatment," translated by Marilyn Booth. In Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, edited by Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Zeidan, Joseph. Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years andBeyond. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
— MARILYN BOOTH
