Writing Middle Eastern Lives: Biography in Modern Arab History

Middle East Centre Booktalk

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, author of ‘An Impossible Friendship’, Marilyn Booth, author of ‘The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz’, and Peter Hill, author of ‘Prophet of Reason’, discuss the writing of biography in modern Middle Eastern history. Book abstracts: ‘An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948’ – In Jerusalem, as World War II was coming to an end, an extraordinary circle of friends began to meet at the bar of the King David Hotel. This group of aspiring artists, writers, and intellectuals—among them Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sally Kassab, Walid Khalidi, and Rasha Salam, some of whom would go on to become acclaimed authors, scholars, and critics—came together across religious lines in a fleeting moment of possibility within a troubled history. What brought these Muslim, Jewish, and Christian friends together, and what became of them in the aftermath of 1948, the year of the creation of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba? Sonja Mejcher-Atassi tells the story of this unlikely friendship and in so doing offers an intimate cultural and social history of Palestine in the critical post-war period. She vividly reconstructs the vanished social world of these protagonists, tracing the connections between the specificity of individual lives and the larger contexts in which they are embedded. In exploring this ecumenical friendship and its artistic, literary, and intellectual legacies, Mejcher-Atassi demonstrates how social biography can provide a picture of the past that is at once more inclusive and more personal. This group portrait, she argues, allows us to glimpse alternative possibilities that exist within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine. Bringing a remarkable era to life through archival research and nuanced interdisciplinary scholarship, ‘An Impossible Friendship’ unearths prospects for historical reconciliation, solidarity, and justice. ‘The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt’ – Zaynab Fawwaz (d. 1914) emerged from an obscure childhood in the Shi’I community of Jabal ‘Amil (now Lebanon) to become a recognized writer on women’s and girls’ aspirations and rights in 1890s Egypt. This book insists on the centrality of gender as a marker of social difference to the Arabic knowledge movement then, or Nahda. Fawwaz published essays and engaged in debates in the Egyptian and Ottoman-Arabic press, published two novels, and the first play known to have been composed in Arabic by a female writer. This book assesses her unusual life history and political engagements—including her work late in life as an informant for the Egyptian khedive. A series of thematically focused chapters takes up her views on social justice, marriage, divorce and polygyny, the ‘gender-nature’ debate in the context of local understandings of Darwinism, education, and imperialism and Islamophobia, attending also to works by those to whom Fawwaz was responding. Her role in the first Arabic women’s magazine, and her contributions to later women’s magazines, are part of the story, too. Further chapters consider her uses of history in fiction to criticize patriarchal control of young women’s lives, and her play as an intervention into reformist theatre, and the question of women’s access to public culture in 1890s Egypt. Questions of desirable masculinities are central to all of these. Fawwaz was also known for her massive biographical dictionary of world women. In that work as in her essays, Fawwaz articulated an ethics of social belonging and sociality predicated on Islamic precepts of gender justice, and critical of the ways male intellectuals had used ‘tradition’ to silence women and deny their aspirations. ‘Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East’ – In 1813, high in the Lebanese mountains, a thirteen-year-old boy watches a solar eclipse. Will it foretell a war, a plague, the death of a prince? Mikha’il Mishaqa’s lifelong search for truth starts here. Soon he’s reading Newtonian science and the radical ideas of Voltaire and Volney: he loses his religion, turning away from the Catholic Church. Thirty years later, as civil war rages in Syria, he finds a new faith – Evangelical Protestantism. His obstinate polemics scandalise his community. Then, in 1860, Mishaqa barely escapes death in the most notorious event in Damascus: a massacre of several thousand Christians. We are presented with a paradox: rational secularism and violent religious sectarianism grew up together. By tracing Mishaqa’s life through this tumultuous era, when empires jostled for control, Peter Hill answers the question: What did people in the Middle East actually believe? It’s a world where one man could be a Jew, an Orthodox Christian and a Sunni Muslim in turn, and a German missionary might walk naked in the streets of Valletta.