Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879-1924) by Huda Shaarawi and Margot Badran

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Harem Years:
The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist
(1879-1924)
Huda Shaarawi
Margot Badran (translator and editor)
Feminist Press, 1986

"As an upper-class woman, Huda Shaarawi's social language was French. She also knew Turkish, the language of her mother and the Turco-Circassian elites and the royal family. But Huda had a special fondness for Arabic, her father's tongue and the national language. In later years, as the feminist movement broadened its base in Egypt and reached out to neighboring countries, Huda began to use Arabic more and more often in public, especially in her speeches.
It was in Arabic that Huda recorded her memoirs." p. 1
"At Cairo station one spring day in 1923, a crowd of women with veils and long, black cloaks descended from their horse-drawn carriages to welcome home two friends returning from an international feminist meeting in Rome. Huda Shaarawi and Saiza Nabarawi stepped out on the running board of the train. Suddenly Huda -- followed by Saiza, the younger of the two -- drew back the veil from her face. The waiting women broke into loud applause. Some imitated the act. Contemporary accounts observed how the eunuchs guarding the women frowned with displeasure. This daring act signaled the end of the harem system in Egypt. At that moment, Huda stood between two halves of her life -- one conducted within the conventions of the harem system and the one she would lead at the head of a women's movement." p. 7
      "The word harem, which to western eyes usually conjures up a host of exotic images, was simply the portion of the house where women and children conducted their daily lives. Harem also signified a man's wife or wives, and it connoted respect. In Egypt, as elsewhere in the cities of the Middle East, among the upper and middle classes in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (and even today in some places) women and men were kept apart. Women lived their lives within the private enclosures of their domestic quarters. When they went out they veiled their faces, thus taking their seclusion with them.
      Veiling and high seclusion were the marks of prestige and sought-after symbols of status. Only the few very wealthy families could afford the most elaborate measures for secluding women -- the grand architectural arrangements and eunuchs (castrated men who were usually slaves from Sudan) to guard their women and act as go-between with the outer world. In the houses of the poor, women and men were crammed together in the same, limited space. However, when poor women went out -- at they did far more often than their richer sisters -- they too veiled. Life was different in the countryside, where any visitor could plainly see peasant women moving freely with faces unencumbered by the veil.
      Veiling and the harem system were social conventions connected with economic standing. They had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. Even those in Egypt who knew better were usually loathe to admit it publicly, for honour was at stake. In Egypt, as in other Mediterranean societies, the honour of men and the family rested upon the sexual purity of women. A Way to guard purity was by keeping women secluded. IN Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish, Christina, and Muslim women in the cities all veiled. Lucie Duff Gordon, a perceptive Englishwoman who lived in Egypt in the 1860s, remarked that the Christians she saw in Upper Egypt were more fastidious than the Muslims in veiling.
      By the time Huda Shaarawi was born in 1879, Egypt had undergone a transformation begun early in the century when Muhammad Ali (ruler from 1805-1849) had rescued the country from its status as a province of the Ottoman Empire and set it up as a semi-autonomous state. To safeguard the new state he built a modern army. He modernized and expanded the health services to keep his troops fit and to increase the then sparse population of Egypt. He began a secular educational system for males which, by the 1870s, was extended to females. (Private, mainly religious, schools had opened for both sexes earlier.) He introduced important changes i n agriculture, especially the cultivation of long-staple cotton in the Nile Delta. During the American Civil War in the 1860s, when southern supplies of raw cotton to England were interrupted, Egyptian cotton filled the gap, bringing handsome revenues to Egypt. Around the same time railway lines began to be laid out, complementing the expansion of carriageways begun earlier in the century. In 1869, during the rule of Khedive Ismail (1863-1872), the Suez Canal was completed with help of forced labour from the Egyptian countryside. Cairo was given a new look in time to receive Empress Eugenie from France and hundreds of other foreign visitors. A centerpiece, the new Opera House, brought new outlets for entertainment. By the 1880s, not far to the south of the capital, Helwan, known for its sulfur springs, was developed as a winter resort for the wealthy.
      During the nineteenth century, there was a continued expansion of Cairo as Egyptians, and also significant numbers of foreigners, moved to the capital. Men like Huda's father, starting out as village notables and rising through the provincial administration, were attracted to the capital as the Turco-Circassian rule drew Egyptians from different parts of the country into the central administration . meanwhile, sons of families from the growing rural middle class were attracted to Cairo by new educational and professional opportunities which also provided mobility for young urban men. " p. 7 - 10
      "There was an awareness, relatively early in the nineteenth century, of the need to draw women into the mainstream of national development. In 1832, under the auspices of Muhammad Ali, a school was opened to train women to be medical assistants. Initially it had trouble attracting candidates. Four years later, the ruler appointed a Council for Public Education to investigate creating a state school system for girls, but it proved premature. In the 1860s, Khedive Ismail encouraged advisers like Ali Pasha Mubarak and Shaikh Rifai al-Tahtawi to prepare public opinion to support female education, which they did in two books. Shaikh al-Tahtawi reminded people that Islam extolled education for women and men alike. He also argued that the new society, and families themselves, would benefit from the education of girls. When the first state school for girls finally opened in 1873 under the patronage of Ismail's third wife, Tchesme Afit Hanim, it was an important breakthrough. The Siufuyya School, as it was called, served girls from the more progressive families of high state functionaries and white slaves from the royal and aristocratic households. However, it would take some two generations or more before tuition at school became routine for daughters of upper-class families. meanwhile, they, like Huda, were entrusted to the care of tutors imported into the harems.
      Concern for the development of women also emanated from the centre of Muslim learning, al-Azhar University, in the voice of Shaikh Muhammed Abduh, the Islamic modernist who proclaimed the vital role Islam had to play in modern society. He argued that rational inquiry and concern for the welfare of society must guide the application of Islamic teachings. National development was being impeded because Muslims had neglected the true spirit of Islam, he said, and women especially were kept back. They had been deprived of enjoying full advantage of the rights Islam granted them. He advocated the restoration of these rights.
      In the 1890s women began to analyze their own condition. Talk about how social custom but not Islam held women back occurred in upper-class harems. Only in places like Huda's memoirs and family papers do we get hints of this, for these discussions had no public outlet. However, simultaneous to this hidden debate, middle-class women began to write about women's rights and responsibilities in the journals they found as early as 1892. Most of the early writers and founders of journals were of Syrian Christian background and the products of girls' schools that had begun to appear in the nineteenth century; a few of these early writers were Muslims and Jews. The audience for this writing was other women.
      During the same period, a few men neither commissioned by the state nor from the religious community, started to analyze the condition of women. In 1894, a young Coptic (indigenous Christian) lawyer, Murqus Fahmi, published a drama called The Women in the East attributing Egypt's 'backwardness', to use the term of the day, to the condition of women and the family. He argued that when women in ancient Egypt and early Islam had enjoyed rights civilization had flourished. He was equally critical of Copts and Muslims for secluding women and keeping them down. His book was privately printed in a limited edition and, like the women's writings, had a restricted circulation.
      Neither the women's writings nor Fahmi's books which expounded views radical in their day attracted the angry protest that greeted the books of a Muslim lawyer and appellate court judge, Qasim Amin, who took up a similar theme. In The Liberation of Women, published in Cairo in 1899, he told his readers that Islam did not require women to veil and that veiling and seclusion had kept women from enjoying the rights Islam granted them (an echo of Shaikh Muhammed Abduh) (see note 5). This book and The New Woman, published the following year, were read with appreciation by Huda and other women in the harems. However, they elicited an impassioned response from men, who produced more than thirty books attacking Amin.
      Against this background of change in the nineteenth century is set Huda Shaarawi's childhood and emergence into adulthood that her memoirs recall. The outlines of her life mirrored those of other upper-class girls: education at the hands of tutors in the harem, closely supervised recreation , an early arranged marriage, motherhood, and a gradual expansion of leisurely and instructive pursuits as an adult.
      Huda Shaarawi, was born Nur al-Huda Sultan in 1879, on the estate of her father, Sultan Pasha, a notable from Upper Egypt, in the town of Minya, an are rich in sugarcane fields and dotted with ancient temples and tombs. Huda's father had acquired immense wealth in land -- he left 4400 faddans to his heirs -- and by the end of his life had risen through the provincial administration to hold the position of president of Egypt's Chamber of Deputies." (1 faddan is about 1.038 acres) pp. 13-15
      "The Memoirs of Huda Shaarawi had a dual significance. They give insight into harem experience in Egypt in its final decades. At the same time they reveal how the roots of upper-class women's feminism in Egypt are found in the nexus of their harem experience and growing up with change around the turn of the century. We see that women's participation in the national movement did not produce feminism (as frequently assumed) but was the turning point for moving from changes in consciousness and the using of close and expanding connections between women to public activism.
      The Memoirs provide valuable clues as to why Huda was the first to emerge publicly as a militant feminist. She came from a class able and eager to exploit the advantages of modernization in everyday life, hence supporting innovation, yet a class also eager to maintain its privileges and apartness. Controlling women was seen as crucial to this. Maintaining visible honour was dependent upon the seclusion of women and honour had important political implications. Female seclusion separated women from men but also distanced women from different classes. Early Egyptian feminism not only challenged the patriarchal order but was an ideology that superseded class and was all the more threatening to the old order because it was grounded in Islam.
      At the level of everyday existence, the old harem life had become untenable for women like Huda. The growing strains and contradictions were becoming insupportable. In Huda's life a particular confluence of larger events and personal circumstances coupled with an acute sensitivity explains her evolving feminism. Huda observed gender inequalities as a young child and suffered from them. Outside circumstances temporarily removed her from marriage, giving her time on her own, when her understanding of what it was to be a woman deepened. She engaged in innovative activities that broke through the narrowness of mainly family circles and, together with other women, created new institutions. When the national independence movement took to the streets she was ready to play an active role and also capitalized on her husband's role as a leading figure in the nationalist movement. However, when independence was announced and the call went out for 'normalization,' for women to return to their old harem lives, Huda was free from the controls of a patriarchal family -- husband, father, and brother were gone. She was a nature woman in her forties. She was ideological and practically prepared. She had control over vast personal wealth. She had the respect conferred by family and class, sustained by her own irreproachable behavior, and enhanced by her important role in the independence struggle. Perhaps most important of all, she had courage and commitment. Huda Shaarawi's memoirs are a unique testament to all this." pp. 20 - 22
"Plenty of lurid tales were circulated by ignorant outsiders about Egyptian morals. Foreigners not infrequently departed from Egypt under the mistaken impression they had visited the houses of respectable families when, in truth, they had fallen into the hands of profiteers who, under the guise of introducing they into the harems of great families, had in fact led them merely to gaudy brothels." p. 80
"Huda and other upper-class women had been living through a period of change and confrontation, as her accounts reveals, themselves hidden by the discretion and distancing harem convention required. When the Egyptian nation under imperialist oppression rose up to take matters into its own hands, the only way to achieve independence, all Egyptians participated. Upper-class women ignored harem convention, and so did men, in the fight for national liberation. Women's unprecedented acts were welcomed and justified by national needs." p. 112
"Not only did women of all classes rise up together but women of different religions worked closely together. Huda remarks on the solidarity of the various religions in Egypt which would not allow the colonial power to ignite sectarian strife. She says, 'The British claimed our national movement was a revolt of the Muslim majority against religious minorities. This slander aroused the anger of the Copts and other religious groups. Egyptians showed their solidarity by meeting together in mosques, churches, and synagogues. Shaikhs walked arm in arm with priests and rabbis.' " p. 119
:"Huda was known not only in Egypt and in the international feminist community -- through ties with the International Alliance of Women of which she became vice-president -- but also in other Arab countries. In the late 1930s, when political crises mounted in Palestine, Arab women contacted Huda for help. She took political action and collected funds to send to Palestine. At the same time she organized a conference of Arab women in Cairo to deal with the Palestinian situation. The women's collective nationalist activity led to collective Arab women in Cairo to deal with the Palestinian situation. The women's collective nationalist activity led to collective Arab feminism in a manner reminiscent of Egyptian women 's earlier move from nationalist to feminist activism. Huda organized a second conference of Arab women in Cairo in 1944, where the women formed the Arab Feminist Union and elected Huda president." p. 135
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