Women’s Times
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I read the book’s title: Women’s Time and Alternate Memory (Cairo: Women&Memory Forum, 1998), then I read the articles in thebook. I re-read the title anew, and wondered about the absence of theword “history” from the title of a book basically about history. What is therelationship between history and women’s time? Is it a relationship ofopposition? The answer inheres in the connotations that have come todefine, and have become inseparable from, the term “history”: such as theproblematic of the category of the “real”, that is, the disappearance of thedemarcation line that differentiates “the real” from “the imaginary”; thebreakdown of the concept of “objectivity” in itself, which was used as amask and a pretext for insidious forms of bias, extremism, and intellectualhegemony; universality and what follows from it as ignoring thespecificities of culture, gender, race, or class; the assumption of theexistence of a static human essence that is common to humanity at large,irrespective of differential natures and circumstances; the assumption thatthe dominant code is the “norm” and all that differs from it is a “deviationfrom the norm”; hence the exclusion of the different as “abnormal” oreven pathological; clinging to the myth of transparency, that is, that history-as a science- does not allow for subjectivity or interpretation indocumenting reality, hence overlooking the role of power in interpretingand creating reality; the importance of “interpreting interpretations”, andthe realisation that the narrative of history is not transparent/scientific oran identical copy of reality, but is an expression of the narrator’ssubjective point of view.
History, men’s time, disappeared from the book’s title, but it did not disappear from women’s time. The authors of the eighteen articles that make up the book do not adopt an attitude towards history based on conflict which aims at displacement – though women were among history’s prime victims - for the rejection of history and its replacement with women’s time can only lead to isolationism, especially that it is from history that the legitimacy of existence is derived. Their relationship with history is more of a “dialogue”, which involves simultaneous retrospection/retrieval and critique of history, with the aim of revising and purging history of its biases and filling its silent spaces.
 The articles mark a rigorous exploration of women’s affairs across centuries. The search has numerous directions: Imad Abu-Ghazi scrutinises marriage contracts ranging from the ninth and up to the nineteenth century. By highlighting a past when women had more rights than the present (as reflected in their marriage contracts), the writer leads us to question the status quo, to de-normalise the present. He also casts doubt on the assumption that women’s status has improved in the present. In her analysis of the image of the Byzantine woman in the Arab writers’ discourse, Nadia al-Cheikh revolutionises conventional approaches to Arab women’s history, by following an indirect route that would uncover the Islamic society’s attitude towards Muslim women through examining its ideologies vis-a-vis women in general. Farida Bennani re-reads religious texts in an attempt to dig out Islamic values of justice, that have become shrouded by bias in Islamic jurisprudence as well as civil laws, which in their turn, are coloured by the socio-political background rather than the original religious texts themselves. In the context of recent studies in the history of religions, Omaima Abou-Bakr studies pioneer ascetic women: “Abidat”, in an attempt to trace and revive women’s forgotten historical role in religious life and their contribution to the Sufi spiritual sphere.
The book brings together articles by researchers of diverse specialisations in the humanities: history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, press and mass media, as well as law. This diversity is reflected in the unconventional research methodologies employed. Both Anisa al-Amin Marei and Iman Bibars employ anthropological research methodologies, despite their different themes and approaches [psychological, sociological respectively]; hence historicizing contemporary women’s everyday life, filling gaps, and complementing official historiography.
Besides the diversity of approaches and methodologies, the articles represent “multiplicity in difference”. Simultaneously as points of view vary, there is a consensus on one position, namely: a differential position to the dominant discourse. That is, perspectives –like women’s time itself – are heterogeneous, even when dealing with common themes. Although a number of researchers tackle the modernist discourse [Mervat Hatem, Hoda Elsadda, Najlaa Hamada, Somaya Ramadan], yet their perspectives are diversified. Mervat Hatem renders doubtful the unquestioned historical belief in the boost in Egyptian women’s status during the nineteenth century. In tracing Aisha al-Taymuria’s life and breakdown [for feeling responsible for her daughter’s premature death] the writer uncovers the paralysing and destructive effect that modernity can have on women’s lives due to the inherent contradictions in a modernist discourse that expects of a woman –in order to be liberated- to become a man and a woman simultaneously. She is forced to adopt the modernist male role together with her own feminine role that continues to operate in a patriarchal context. On the other hand, Hoda Elsadda examines the biographies of “Aisha” the wife of the prophet, to uncover the ideologies that underlie these biographies, and the extent to which they abide by modernist discourses. Whereas biographies represent for Hoda a site of differences over the concept of identity, she lays bare the political employment of biographies as a tool for imposing certain concepts and connotations of cultural identity. For Najlaa Hamada, biographies are reflections of early Muslim women’s lives, in contrast to the illusory images of their lives in the works of theorists. The researcher sees biographies akin to literature in their intimate relatonship with life, in contrast to theories that stereotype women’s role in society. Despite the differences between adherents of tradition and modernity, both are divorced from reality, and “fear the other”; they are driven more by this fear, to weaken the position of the other, than by an “honest” desire to study reality, she argues. In an attempt to transcend such opposition and reductionism between tradition and modernity, and in her belief in the
Interpenetration of binary oppositons in a history that is bound to colonialism, Somaya Ramadan studies the period of the French invasion of Egypt, to tackle the question of modernity. Her study raises a number of questions about the nature of “modernity”. If Egyptian women were legally, rather than “superficially” (the European style liberation) liberated, doesn’t this place the idea of heritage itself in a new light away from backwardness? Does “heritage” have modern undertones? Is there a kind of backwardness represented by those [once colonised] native intellectuals, who judge their heritage from their coloniser’s standpoint?
Whereas most of the articles deconstruct the “content” of the historical narrative, using the double process of retrieval/retrospection and criticism, a number of articles represent -in their form- a revolution in the traditional structure of the historical text, together with the connotations of that historical form: linearity, progression, chronology, logic, etc. In their employment of the imagination and emotions, the writers are releasing creative energies and infinite possibilities that inhere within these elements, which were the very object of marginalisation within the traditional historical text. In Anisa al-Amin Marei’s article: “The Post- War Woman in Lebanon”, the writer uses language to inscribe the specificity of woman’s writing: its multiplicity, spontaneity, and circularity. She inscribes her difference onto the text, sheds everything that may obstruct the word, and in her words the public and the private melt together: “Where shall I start from? I do not get along with the external creaking. I am more familiar with internal faces, eyes, talk that no one listens to nor hears, and that remains imprisoned within”. And in Mariam Buzeid’s article: “Women, Inhibited Memory, Disabling History”, the writer frees the suppressed imagination. She uses it to tackle the problematic of the absence of woman’s voice from history and to dig out from memory what has been marginalised: “How difficult it is to grasp the transparent silk threads that interpenetrate the metal chains of history”. She also refers to the “Tivinagh” writing as representative of woman’s creativity, for it was the “Tarvian” bedouin women who invented the script and wrote poetry using its symbols. In opposition to male writing “Tivinagh” script is as free and flexible as the imagination of its inventors; and since both sexes used it and then abandoned it, there is still hope to revive it, just as there is hope to dig out from memory alternative relationships between men and women. Hence, through the imagination the writer transcends the closure of binary oppositions, and sexual difference replaces sexual opposition that is present in male writing.
Heterogeneity inheres within women’s time, women’s time is in fact times, that are in continuous motion and change; within it inheres a new philosophy of history based on a conception of history as mobile rather than homogeneous, open to multiple meanings, diverse interpretations for single events, and liable to be configured in various ways.
Rania Abdel Rahman
 
Women’s Time and Alternate Memory (Cairo: Women&Memory
Forum, 1998) includes the following articles: Tawfiq Bachrouch, “A Feminist Alternate History”; Mariam Buzeid, “Women, Inhibited Memory, Disabling History”; Noha Bayoumi, “The Suppressed in the Inscribed Time”; Huda Lutfi, “AL-Sakhawi’s Kitab Al-Nisa’ as a Source for the Social and Economic History of Muslim Women During the Fifteenth Century AD”; Nadia al-Cheikh, “The Self and the Other: The Byzantine Woman in Islamic Sources”; Nahawand al-Kadiri Issa, “The Problematic of the Enlightenment era in Lebanese Women’s Press (1892- 1920)”; Imad Badreddin Abu-Ghazi, “A New Reading of Old Documents: Notes on Some Arab Documents in Egypt”; Omaima Abou-Bakr, “A Reading of the History of Muslim ‘Abidat”; Farida Bennani, “Feminist Voices in Religious Debates”; Iman Bibars, “My Relationship with Om- Nader and Shadia: The Interrelated Relationships Between The Researcher and the Researched”; Anisa al-Amin Marei, “The Post-War Woman in Lebanon”; Mervat Hatem, “Tears of ‘Aysha Taymur: A Critique of Modernist and Feminist Discourses in Nineteenth Century Egypt”; Najlaa Hamada, “Images of Arab Women: Everyday Reality, Literature, Tradition and Westernisation”; Rema Hammami, “Gender, Labor and Culture: Remembering Experiences of Labor Among Palestinian Peasant Women Prior to the ‘Nakbe’ of 1948”; Islah Jad, “Forgotten History: Who Remembers Women’s Roles in Politics”; Somaya Ramadan, “The French Invasion of Egypt: A Feminist Reading”; Hoda Elsadda, “Women’s Biographies and Cultural Identity: Representations of ‘Aisha Bint Abi Bakr”.
 

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