Arabic Literature - Women in Arabic Literature

Women in Arabic Literature

Whilst not playing a major part in Arabic literature, women have had a continuing role. The earliest poetesses were al-Khansa and Layla al-Akhyaliyyah of the 7th century. Their concentration on the ritha' or elegy suggests that this was a form deemed acceptable for women to work with. A later poetess Walladah, Umawi princess of al-Andulus, wrote Sufi poetry and was the lover of fellow poet ibn Zaydun. These and other women writers suggest a hidden world of female literature. Despite their lack of prominence among the literary elite, women still played an important part as characters in Arabic literature. Sirat al-amirah Dhat al-Himmah, for example, is an Arabic epic with a female warrior as protagonist, and Scheherazade cunningly telling stories in the Thousand and One Nights to save her life.

Modern Arabic literature has seen a greater number of female writers' works published: May Ziade, Fadwa Touqan, Suhayr al-Qalamawi, Ulfat Idlibi, Layla Ba'albakki, Zuhrabi Mattummal, Hoda Barakat and Alifa Rifaat are just some of the novelists and prose writers. There has also been a number of significant female academics, such as Zaynab al-Ghazali, Nawal el-Saadawi and Fatema Mernissi who, amongst other subjects, wrote of the place of women in Muslim society. Women writers in the Arabic world have unavoidably courted controversy. Layla Ba'albakki, for instance, was charged with insulting public decency with her collection of short stories entitled A Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon.