THE ARAB WOMAN is a most fascinating creature. Is she veiled? Is she not veiled? Is she oppressed? Is she not oppressed? Were her rights greater before Islam? Are her rights greater after Islam? Does she have a voice? Does she not have a voice? Book titles and book covers in the West tell part of the tale: behind the veil, beyond the veil, veiled women, partially veiled women, voices that have been heard, voices that are waiting to be heard, and on and on.' Advocates of opposing sides unceasingly cheer one view or another. From the East, writings emerge to support one or another of these positions. Arab feminists rally with their Western counterparts; Muslim apologetic materials provide fodder for the equivalent Western stance.

                This futile dialogue on gender and women has long attracted the West.  The image of women languishing, under the,  yoke of, Islam titillates the Western observer and permits him to place himself in the superior position. Women and their role become a stick with which the West can beat the East. More than that, the liberation of women in the East poses its own special dilemmas, complicating and aggravating this dialogue. Since,as Fatima Mernissi eloquently argues, women's liberation in the modern

Middle East is associated with westernization, the entire subject, willy nilly, becomes enmeshed in political and civilizational debates. 2  The parallel literary critical dialogue on women in the Arab world is still in its infancy. The "images of women" tradition still dominates. This, as Toril Moi has shown for Western feminist criticism, is a stage that, though necessary, must be transcended. 3 In the study of contemporary Arabic literature, the process has begun, particularly in the areas of war, violence, and gender. The book-length studies by Miriam Cooke and Evelyne Accad are breaking ground and paving the way for more complex literary and cultural questions .4 For the body, and for all of classical Arabo-Islamic letters, the territory remains, if I may use this word, virgins

Woman's Body, Woman's Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing proposes to investigate precisely those intersections found in its title. The work is both revolutionary and heterodox in more than one way. It is not restricted chronologically, transcending the traditional critical divisions in Arabic letters that permit scholars to speak, on the one hand, of classical or medieval Arabic literature, and, on the other hand, of modern literature. It argues that, in the centuries-old Arabic textual tradition, a dialectic operates between mental structures involving women and sexuality in the modern age and their antecedents in the classical period, that modern literature must also be seen against its classical background. The breaking of chronological boundaries is coupled with a breaking of textual or generic limits. The Arabo-Islamic writing of this book's title will not be isolated simply in belletristic works. Philosophy, mysticism, geography, cosmography, biography: all are essential players in the gender game and in the propagation of cultural ideas and values. Religio-theological conceptions find their way into the world of lexicography and philology. That is why this discourse is Arabo-Islamic. Some of the texts under discussion are among the most profane possible; others are classics of Islamic religious writing. But in even the most profane locations, religious referents abound, especially when the subject is women. Historically, Arabic culture has been, and remains, an essentially Islamic one, though there are, of course, non-Arabic Islamic cultures. But the Arabo-Islamic  discourse is not the statement of the religion Islam in ideal terms, or even as most Muslims today might wish to understand it. It is the reflection of a civilizational reality  in which religious values and ideals become embodied in  the literary and cultural expressions of historical Middle Eastern societies. All of the texts analyzed are, or were, influential. But many are not in the canon. Breaking down this barrier is as important as breaking down the chronological one.

The cultural world of this Arabo-Islamic discourse is that of prose, and in the classical period, that of the male scriptor. This is not entirely a coincidence. Prose by its nature permits a clearer representation, a more elaborate reformulation and restructuring of the world. Mimesis is tied to its essence. This is especially clear when prose is compared to traditional Arabic poetry, a highly conventionalized form. While certain carefully defined poetic sub-genres were assigned to women, the world of prose was effectively closed to them.6 Hence, it is on prose that we shall concentrate, though it must be remembered that certain forms of classical Arabic prose include and effectively subordinate verse selections within their discourse.'

Little did Shahrazads know when she stepped into the textual world of The Thousand and One Nights that she would one day become a pawn in this game of gender politics. Little did she know that she would engender (in both senses) modern texts that would recast her own story. Little did she know that her control of narration (alas, but a fleeting phenomenon) would be used to argue in favor of the Arab woman's access to discourse.9 This symbol of storytelling, this mistress of narrators East and West has a saga so dramatic that it overshadows the true gender dynamics in the text (chapter 1). Her entrance into the world of Arabo-Islamic discourse is much discussed, her exit not. Pitted against a royal serial murderer, she exploits her body and her words to lead him back to normality. Her attempts to create a functioning heterosexual couple are played out against a greater civilizational pull for a male homosocial couple. Shahrazad herself will open the door for us. She will lead us not into her own nights of storytelling but into an investigation of the explosive relationship among sexuality, the body, and woman's voice in the Arabo-Islamic sphere. The gender dynamics her odyssey (in its largest possible meaning) creates will have an uncanny tendency to recur throughout the present book.

                 Shahrazad then speaks. But woman's voice is more than a physiological faculty. It is the narrative instrument that permits her to be a literary medium, to vie with the male in the process of textual creation. Shahrazad demonstrates to her literary cousins and descendants that an intimate relationship must be created between writing and the body. This mistress of the word is a mistress of the rush as well.

In Woman's Body, Woman's Word, some of the most quasi-sacred texts of the Arabo-Islamic sphere will be made to stand alongside The Thousand and One Nights, subject to the gender microscope. As the editors of, and the contributors to, Rewriting the Renaissance eloquently demonstrate, the reexamination of cherished texts from different angles, principally feminist ones, is a most enriching experience.'° After the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, Claudine Herrmann, Margaret R. Miles, and Elaine Pagels, how can one leave the Arabo-Islamic stones unturned?"

An objection can be raised, however. Are feminist or gender-conscious approaches appropriate to a non-Western society, especially if feminism is considered an ideology of Western origin? Are not gender relations different in non-Western societies? Of course, they are; and we shall see some of the ways. Gender-conscious, analyses are vital when the culture in question uses gender as a major organizing principle, in social organization mentalities or, as is usual, in both. Who would deny that  this has been the casein the --most cultural sphere, as it has been  in the world of the Christian and post-Christian West? The fact that such  struggles and ideologies combine with other kinds of issues in many Third  World contexts, and whether one wishes to consider the resulting amalgams sufficiently distinct to apply neologisms like post-feminism, changes nothing in this fundamental reality.12 Consciousness of gender and arguments about the roles of men and women were not brought to the Arab world by Western feminists, like serpents in the Garden of Eden. These issues have always been major and fully conscious preoccupations of Arab writers who have filled their literature with chapters and books on women, their roles, their problems, and the like.

Medieval Arab critics did not consider The Thousand and One Nights serious literature. More respectable, because linguistically more sophisticated, was the largely anecdotal prose genre referred to by Western scholars as adab. The rich medieval adab corpus that gave birth to those delightful trickster character types, also begat the "woman" as character type (Chapter 2 . The female defined by her gender, is made to enter, the pantheon of adab character types largely through her witty manipulation of the body. Her ruse is thus close, if not identical, to that of Shahrazad .

The dangers inherent in this female body are never far away, however. Ibn al-Batanuni's (ca. 900/1494) vision seems at the outset to vie with the more profane adab one (chapter 3). But his misogynist recasting of sacred history can only operate because the cultural forces behind it are extremely strong. The Qur'anic phrase that serves him as an anti-female refrain centers on woman's guile and is evoked in The Thousand and One Nights. These literary worlds may seem superficially distant, but their gender dynamics are most certainly not.

Perhaps the best solution to this ever-present threat in woman's body is that of the Andalusian philosopher-physician, Ibn Tufayl (d. 581/ 1185-1186) (chapter 4). His mystico-philosophical allegory, Hayy ibn Yaqzdn, is one of the monuments of classical Arabo-Islamic civilization to weather the test of time. The story has the makings of a fairy tale: a young boy on a desert island is nurtured by a gazelle and grows up learning all he needs to learn, eventually turning to the mystic way of life, which he shares with another male. A disturbing negation, when not an absence, of sexuality characterizes this text.  Hayy ibn Yaqzan vies with The Thousand and One Nights in popularity: modified versions of the story turn up in the contemporary Middle East in children's books, in comic-strip form, and as subjects of paintings.

Ibn Tufayl sets up his ideal male world on the island of al-Waqwaq, a legendary and phantasmagoric locus where women grow on trees. Medieval geographers and cosmographers will flesh this out, demonstrating that more is at stake in Ibn Tufayl's male utopian vision than simply an occultation of the female. Societies of women that propagate themselves, cities of women: these all become part of the fantasy world of the medieval Arabic male narrator (chapter 5).

Though Ibn Tufayl's text has one foot in geographical and cosmographical works, its other foot is just as solidly planted in the AraboIslamic philosophical consciousness. Hence it is that woman's body and woman's word enter a different realm, that of the flight from sex, the female, and corporeality. Asexual philosophy and sexual geography are but two facets of the same phenomenon (chapter 5).

From classical Arabo-Islamic prose, some of which dates to the ninth century, to contemporary Arabic prose--quite a chronological leap! And chronology is only part of the issue. How is this possible? How can such a radical analytical step be justified? True, there are essential differences between classical Arabo-Islamic prose and its modern descendant. Some twentieth-century literary forms, such as the novel and the short story, do not have classical antecedents. Their external form is influenced by the parallel developments in modern Western prose. Problems of literary closure differ between classical and modern Arabic prose: the adab work, for example, is composed of a great number of independent literary units ranging from the anecdote to a verse from the Muslim holy book. The spirit of classical Arabic texts diverges from the modern counterparts with their greater emphasis on the individual. But there are essential points of convergence, areas of mental structures that link modern Arabic prose to its literary predecessors.

Western cultural critics have shown the continuing influence of age-old paradigms, despite-momentous, social and economic changes. I shall show the same for the dominant civilization of the Middle East Longue duree cu tura perspectives must be explored  especially in areas so closely-in-intertwined at once with the most intimate of values and the most sacred of ,texts. Most of the medieval texts that we shall consider have their versions or their echoes in the books sold on the street corners of Arab cities today At the present moment, when some of the most important intellectuals and political organizers of the region are seeking their models in either the Islamic Middle Ages or the time of the Prophet, one cannot deny this culture its profound sense of historical continuity.

But dramatic is the difference when modern texts are the responsibility of female scriptors What Woman's Body, Women's Word is proposing is not a survey of the images of women in classical and modern Arabic prose but  rather the analytical confrontation of classical prose text by male scriptors and modern prose texts by female scriptors. Linking the two are woman's body and woman's word. Rather than a direct continuation, we have a response. Classical male scriptors warned of the tricks of women.

The modern feminist response to the predominant classical mental structures is conditioned by two new circumstances. The first is a greater access to print for Arab women, especially in the narrative and descriptive genres hitherto closed to them. The second is the emergence of feminism itself, permitting the modern female writer to challenge the sexist and patriarchal assumptions of the Arabic literary canon. Nevertheless, she must work through this complex of inherited values, even when subverting them. The woman Arab writer of the late twentieth century achieves her literary voice, but she too must do so through the body.

Modern Arabic women's literature was not, born in the last decade. Its germs were already present in the nineteenth century. Parallel with, yet somewhat behind, male Arabic literature, its development increased in the twentieth century, accelerating even faster after the Second World War." In our days, "the literature of long finger nails," as one male critic has called it, 14 has become increasingly ubiquitous. Nevertheless, it is only in the last few decades that modern Arabic Literature and with it modern Arabic women's literature, has achieved a level of relative frankness on questions of corporality and sexuality.15 Even now, however, neither has achieved the sexual openness that characterized virtually all of classical Arabic letters.16 Hence, it is from the women writers of our own day that we must seek responses to the challenges of the classical male scriptors.

It is perhaps not coincidental that the most uncompromisingly feminist of all modern Arabic authors should be a female physician. The Egyptian Nawal al-Sa'dawi has made her mark on the international feminist movement with her outspoken opinions on woman's sexuality and position in the Middle East. The Hidden Face of Eve has been widely translated." More than any other contemporary writer, it is al-Sa'dawl whose concerns with the body are unquestioned. Her first novel, Mudhakkirdt Tabiba (Memoirs of a female physician) is a feminist response to that male classic of modern Arabic autobiography, al-Ayyam (The days), by the twentieth-century Arab world's leading modernizer, Taha Husayn (chapter 6). The literary dialogue she undertakes with the male text is articulated through a complex relationship among blindness (Taha Husayn was blind), sexuality, and woman's physicality. This nexus of mutually defined physicality is a classical Arabo-Islamic mental construct, existing in literary, legal, and theological sources.

Yet the narrator of Memoirs manages to transcend her body, to go beyond its social and physical constraints. The catalyst is medicine itself, of course, a science of the body. The social power of the physician exorcizes the weakness of the female (chapter 7). Science, however, cannot be the sole balm; it must be combined with art. And this for Nawal alSa'dawi is in a larger sense the act of writing, the act of textual creation.

The ability of her female narrators to control discourse, to utter words, becomes a major issue in her fiction. Many of them can do so only through the intervention of a female physician, in an interesting framing technique of narration within narration: feminist and subverted echoes of Shahrazad. The initial Foucauldian power relationship has not substantially changed. As the physician is in a subject-object relationship with her patient, so the physician as purveyor of discourse is in a similar power relationship with her unframed narrator. Writing, like medicine, is articulated through the body. Though medicine becomes the key that unlocks gender boundaries, it brings one, in an ironic way, back to the body.

If medicine as linked to corporality is what gives much of Nawal alSa'dAwi's fiction its feminist raison d'etre, it is corporality of a different but related kind that proves to be important in `Abla al-Ruwayni's subversive biography of her dead husband, Amal Dunqul (chapter 8). Until his tragic death from cancer, the young Amal Dunqul was Egypt's leading poet. The supposed biography of the poet represents a rebirth for his widow, permitting her to take control of the discourse. A poet lives through his verbal art, and it is this that `Abla al-Ruwayni must subvert to have the right to her own narrative. In the process, sexual roles are inverted and the corporality of the male redefined. But `Abla al-Ruwayni's postmortem text is also dialectically reacting with the tradition, especially the classical ritha that elegiac poetry most often reserved for women. Much like her narrative sisters, she ties herself to the tradition while pulling away from it.

It is perhaps no literary accident that it should be a female poet the Palestinian Fadwa Tucan who best redefines the classical (chapter 9). Her prose medium is the autobiography, a revered and established form,  even in classical Arabic letters. But hers is an account that exploits a non­-linear form, that redefines a life story. At the same time, Tuqan's odyssey  is a revolt against the central physical image of giving birth, as it is a  seizure of woman's right to speak. Her Mountain Journey, Difficult Journey reformulates issues that will have proven so central in Woman's

 Body, Woman's Word, from Shahrazad to Nawal al-Sa'dawi.  Classical or modern, woman's voice in Arabo-Islamic discourse is indissolubly tied to sexuality and the body. Whether a woman must speak through the body (as in the classical) or in reaction to it (as in the modern), the conclusion remains the same. For woman, the word remains anchored to the body.

[1]  For some examples of this phenomenon, see Fedwa Malti‑Douglas, "Views of Arab Women: Society, Text, and Critic," Edebiyat 4 (1979): 256‑273.

[2]  Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1975), pp. 99-102. See, also, the pamphlet by Muhammad Fahmi 'Abd al-Wahhab, al-Harakdt al-NisViyya ft al-Sharg wasilatuha bil-Isti'mar wal‑Sahyuniyya al- Alamiyya (Cairo: Dar al-I'tisam, 1979).

[3]  Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 42-49.

[4]  Miriam Cooke, War's Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Evelyne Accad, Sexuality and War. Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York: New York University Press, 1990).

[5]  A recent article by Leila Ahmed, "Arab Culture and Writing Women's Bodies," Feminist Issues (Spring 989): 41-55, seeks to understand a story by Alifa RiFat against the context of classical Arabic medical lore. These issues, I expect, will be given fuller treatment in Ahmed's forthcoming book

[6]  In her book, al-Mar'a ft Adab al-Asr al-`Abb&s£ (Baghdad: Dar al-Rashid lil-Nashr, 1981), Wajida Majid `Abd Allah al-Atraqji includes examples of what she considers "women's literature." But, except for poetry, which she also treats separately, her examples consist essentially of either the remarks of women quoted in works by men (which I deal with, for example, in chapter 2) or of incidental writings, like personal letters that sometimes made their way into histories or male writings. They do not constitute socially sanctioned literary production.

[7]  A study of the gender politics of Arabic poetry would be a book of its own. Poetry as well as some other topics are treated in a chapter in the forthcoming book by J. C. Biirgel, Allmacht and Machtigkeit (Munich: Beck, forthcoming).

[8]  The names of the four leading characters from the frame of The Thousand and One Nights vary slightly from one edition to another. I have decided to follow the forms found in the Bulaq edition, cited in chapter 1 below, because they are closest to the most common forms used in the Middle East and the West.

[9]  See, for example, Barbara Harlow, "The Middle East," in Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women, compiled by Marian Arkin and Barbara Shollar (New York: Longman, 1989), p. 1165.

[10]  Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

[11]  Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Claudine Herrmann, Les voleuses de langue (Paris: editions des femmes, 1976); Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

[12]  See, for example, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

[13]  Their Lives: A Hundred Years of Arab Women's Writings," World Literature Today 60 (Spring 1986): 212-216.

[14]  Mahmud Fawzi, Adab al‑Axdfir al‑Tawda (Cairo: Dar Nahdat Misr lil-Tab' walNashr, 1987).

[15]  Turn-of-the-century women writers, by comparison, are in a different mental universe. See, for example, Bahithat al-Badiya [Malak Hifni Nasif], al-Nis&'iyyJt (Cairo: Dar alHudA lil-Tab' wal-Nashr wal-tawzi n.d.); Irene Fenoglio-Abd el Aal, Defense et illustration de l'Egyptienne: Aux debuts dune expression feminine (Cairo: Centre d'Etudes et de Documentation Economique, Juridique, et Sociale, 1988).

[16]  See, for example, the bowdlerization of the editor of al-Suyuti, Nuzhat al-Julasa' fi Ash'ar al-Nisd', ed. 'Abd al-Latif 'Ashur (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qur'an, 1986), p. 10.

[17]  The original Arabic title is: al-Wajh al-Ari lil-Mar'a al- Arabiyya, which translated literally means: The naked face of the Arab woman. See Nawal al-Sa'dawi, al-Waih al- ArF lit-Mar'a al-Arabiyya (Beirut: al-Mu'assasa al-'Arabiyya lil-Dirlsat wal-Nashr, 1977). For the English translation, see Nawal el-Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World, trans. Sherif Hetata (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982).