Sultana's Dream Read online

  4. See, for example, Papanek and Minault, eds., Separate Worlds, p. 23.

  5. See especially Sylvia Vatuk, “Purdah Revisited: A Comparison of Hindu and Muslim Interpretations of the Cultural Meaning of Purdah in South Asia,” in ibid., pp. 54–78.

  6. Jeffery, Frogs in a Well.

  7. Sharma, “Women and Their Affines,” p. 226.

  8. Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 56-57.

  9. Akbar S. Ahmed, Pakistan Society: Islam, Ethnicity and Leadership in South Asia (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 29.

  10. Jeffery, Frogs in a Well, p. 165.

  11. Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, p. 165.

  12. For recent examples, see Akbar S. Ahmed, Pakistan Society, pp. 32-33.

  13. Ibid., pp. 29–30.

  14. Charles Allen, ed., Plain Tales from the Raj (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd., 1975), p. 235.

  15. Mrs. Meer Hassan Ali, Observations on the Mussulmauns of India: Descriptive of Their Manners, Customs, Habits and Religious Opinions, made during a Twelve Years’ Residence in their immediate Society, 2 vols. (London: Parbury, Allen and Co., 1832). Second ed., edited with notes and a biographical introduction by W. Crooke, appeared in 1917 and was reprinted in India (Delhi: Deep Publications, 1975).

  16. Katherine Mayo, Mother India (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1927), pp. 111, 32.

  17. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), pp. 119–22, 127–29, 438–39.

  18. S. Abul A’la Maududi, Purdah and the Status of Woman in Islam, trans, and ed. Al-Ash’ari (Lahore: Islamic Publications Ltd., 1972), p. 37.

  19. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Liberation Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1972), p. 99.

  20. Riffat Hassan, “Equal Before Allah?: Woman–Man Equality in the Islamic Tradition,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 17, no. 2 (Jan.–May 1987): 2–4. See also Hassan, “Women in the Context of Change and Confrontation within Muslim Communities,” in Women of Faith in Dialogue, ed. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1987), pp. 96–109.

  21. Mazhar ul Haq Khan, Purdah and Polygamy: A Study in the Social Pathology of the Muslim Society (Peshawar: Nashiran-e-Ilm-o-Ta-raqiyet, 1972), p. 1.

  22. Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shaheed, eds., Women of Pakistan: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back? (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1987), pp. 78–79.

  23. S. Abul A’la Maududi, Purdah and the Status of Woman, p. 59.

  24. Fatna A. Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984), p. 3.

  25. Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, p. 165.

  26. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).

  *A rough translation of Hamida Khala is “Aunt Hamida.” It is a pseudonym.

  Glossary

  Ammajan

  Mother

  Anchal

  The end of a sari

  Apajan

  Older sister

  Ayah

  Maidservant, particularly one taking care of children

  Begum

  (Turkish) The wife of a Beg, a titled nobleman; by extension, a Muslim gentlewoman; analogous to Madame or Signora

  Brahmo

  A member of Brahmo Samaj, a movement founded by Ram Mohan Roy in 1828 to encourage modernization and female education; not to be confused with Brahmin, the highest caste classification in Hindu society

  Burqa

  An all-enveloping tentlike cloak worn by some Muslim women in public in South Asia

  Dada

  Older brother

  Gurkha

  A Nepali ethnic group, many members of which served in the British army, now also in the Indian army

  Hadith

  Religious tradition based on the sayings of the Prophet

  Jihad

  Holy war

  Mardana

  Men’s quarters where they receive guests; outer rooms or apartments; compare with zenana

  Motichur

  A type of candy popular in Bengal and Bihar and in present-day Bangladesh

  Muni

  A Hindu religious seer and lawgiver

  Puthi

  A popular tale written in verse

  Teapoy

  A small, three-legged table for serving tea

  Zemindar

  A large landowner

  Zenana

  Women’s living quarters; note that men sleep and often eat in the women’s part of the house; by extension, secluded women

  Publications of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

  Motichur, Part 1. Gurudas Chattopadhyaya & Sons, 201 Cornwallis Street, Calcutta. 1908. A collection of articles published from 1903–4 in various journals.

  Sultana’s Dream. S. K. Lahiri & Co., College Street, Calcutta. 1908. Originally published in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, Madras, 1905.

  Motichur, Part 2. Mrs. R. S. Hossain (publisher), Calcutta. 1921. Dedicated to Apajan Karimunessa Khanam.

  Padmaraga (Ruby). Mrs. R. S. Hossain (publisher), Calcutta. 1924. Dedicated to Dada Abul Asad Mohammed Ibrahim Saber.

  Avarodhbasini (The Secluded Ones). Mohammadi Book Agency, 29 Upper Circular Road, Calcutta. 1928. Dedicated to Ammajan Rahatunnessa Sabera Chowdhurani. Also appeared as a series of columns in the Monthly Mohammadi, 1928–29.

  Rokeya Racanavali (Collected Works of Rokeya), edited by Abdul Quadir. The Bangla Academy, Dhaka. 1973.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ROKEYA SAKHAWAT HOSSAIN (1880–1932) was a Bengali Muslim writer and feminist activist who founded the first Muslim girls’ school in Calcutta in 1911.

  The Feminist Press is an independent, nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. Founded in 1970, we began as a crucial publishing component of second wave feminism, reprinting feminist classics by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and providing much-needed texts for the developing field of women’s studies with books by Barbara Ehrenreich and Grace Paley. We publish feminist literature from around the world, by best-selling authors such as Shahrnush Parsipur, Ruth Kluger, and Ama Ata Aidoo; and North American writers of diverse race and class experience, such as Paule Marshall and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. We have become the vanguard for books on contemporary feminist issues of equality and gender identity, with authors as various as Anita Hill, Justin Vivian Bond, and Ann Jones. We seek out innovative, often surprising books that tell a different story.

  See our complete list of books at feministpress.org, and join the Friends of FP to receive all our books at a great discount.

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE FEMINIST PRESS

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  eISSBN: 9781558617339 |ISBN: 978-1-55861-454-3

  From India to Sudan to England, and finally to the island of Manhattan, poet Meena Alexander traces her growth as a writer and a woman over borders, through decades, and across cultures. Memories of a privileged childhood in postcolonial India and Africa surface amid her present life in multicultural America. This defiant writer continues to challenge the meaning of being born a female of color in a period of postcolonial turmoil—and of life as a South Asian American woman poet in a post-9/11 world.

  “Meena Alexander will be a part of the history of global culture. She knows how it looks, feels, tastes, and sounds; how it creates and splits identity. Ten years ago, she published an extraordinary memoir, Fault Lines. Now, with her habitual courage and subtlety and eloquence, she has interlaced the memoir’s words with new experiences, perceptions, pain, and visions. Fault Lines is faultless.”

  —Catharine R. Stimpson, University Professor and Dean of the Graduate School, New York University

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rth

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  —Bapsi Sidhwa, author of Cracking India

  Touba and the Meaning of Night

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  eISBN: 9781558616318 | ISBN: 978-1-55861-557-1

  A major literary event, the publication of Touba and the Meaning of Night introduces English-speaking readers to the masterpiece of a great contemporary Persian writer, renowned in her native Iran and much of Western Europe. This remarkable epic novel, begun during one of the author’s several imprisonments, was published in Iran in 1989 to great critical acclaim and instant bestseller status—until Shahrnush Parsipur was again arrested a year later, and all her works banned by the Islamic Republic.

  Touba and the Meaning of Night explores, from a distinctly Iranian viewpoint, the ongoing tensions between rationalism and mysticism, tradition and modernity, male dominance and female will. Throughout, it defies Western stereotypes of Iranian women and Western expectations of literary form, speaking in an idiom that reflects both the unique creative voice of its author and an important tradition in Persian women’s writing.

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  “Shahrnush Parsipur’s Touba and the Meaning of Night is considered one of the unsurpassed masterpieces of modern Persian literature.”

  —Iranian, com

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  “A sweeping chronicle … [displaying] deft utilization of magic realism and Persian myths … rich and well-crafted. For all fiction collections.”

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  eISBN: 9781558617599 | ISBN: 9781558617537

  This modern literary masterpiece follows the interwoven destinies of five women—including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a prostitute, and a schoolteacher—as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, this unforgettable novel depicts women escaping the narrow confines of family and society, and imagines their future living in a world without men.

  This volume is the first author-approved translation of Women Without Men.

  “With Women Without Men, Shahrnush Parsipur reaffirms the simple truth that fragility and strength live side by side, and these attributes are volatile, precious, and endlessly female.”

  —Shirin Neshat, from the introduction

  “Parsipur is a courageous, talented woman and…a great writer.”

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  —Publishers Weekly

  “These delightfully inventive interwoven tales of five contemporary Iranian women take on the author’s world with all the grace of Calvino’s sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness.’ A masterful voice in international fiction now available to readers in the English-speaking world.”

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  eISBN: 9781558617124 | ISBN: 9781558614932

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  Through Mamdouh’s strikingly inventive use of language, Huda’s stream-of-consciousness narrative expands to take in the life not only of a young girl and her family, but of her street, her neighborhood, and her country. Alia Mamdouh, winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Award in Arabic Literature, is a journalist, essayist and novelist living in exile in Paris. Long banned from publishing in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, she is the author of essays, short stories, and four novels, of which Naphtalene is the most widely acclaimed and translated.

  “Describes in poetic, incantatory language the city’s domestic life … [and] around this private world swirl the politics of the 1950s in Iraq.”

  —New York Tunes Book Review

  “The first novel by an Iraqi woman to be published in English in the United States … is a hallucinatory incantation, a fevered dream and nightmare and, finally, a lyrical evocation of a place disappeared.”

  —Ms.

  “Beautifully evokes the sounds and scents of old Baghdad, as in her descriptions of Friday night prayers: stained tiles and worshipers with sweat-glistened faces, bare feet and non-stop supplications, incense and perfumes.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Naphtalene sings life at its most intense … Alia Mamdouh’s stunning gesture is to have turned over the keys of the narrative to the violent sensitivities and superior intelligence of childhood. Naphtalene is an enchantment bordering on myth…. A marriage of the primordial and of modernity, of fury and of love.”

  —Hélène Cixous, from Foreword

  “In the long lost Baghdad of childhood, where love and subversion and respect are melted in a pot of poetry and illusion, the life of a family and their neighbors evolves around the female energy moving between a memorable grandmother and her rule-breaking granddaughter. Naphtalene is a beautiful novel that will help preserve in our hearts the memory of a city systematically being destroyed under our very eyes.”

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  Harem Years

  Huda Shaarawi

  ISBN: 9780935312706

  In this firsthand account of the private world of a harem in colonial Cairo, Shaarawi recalls her childhood and early adult life in the seclusion of an upper-class Egyptian household, including her marriage at age thirteen. Her subsequent separation from her husband gave her time for an extended formal education, as well as an unexpected taste of independence. Shaarawi’s feminist activism grew, along with her involvement in Egypt’s nationalist struggle, culminating in 1923 when she publicly removed her veil in a Cairo railroad station, a daring act of defiance.

  “Through her careful translation and interpretation of the memoirs of Huda Shaarawi—Egypt’s first and foremost feminist nationalist, born more than a hundred years ago—Margot Badran presents a complex picture of a fascinating reality. Born into an upper-class family, Huda Shaarawi tells of her bitter jealousy of the brother whom all favored over her, of the limits placed on the education she craved, and of her eventual triumph as a leader of other women. In the best tradition of feminist scholarship, Margot Badran contributes substantially to our understanding of both Egyptian history and the development in Egypt of a feminist movement with roots in the harem.”

  —Hanna Papanek, Center for Asian Development Studies, Boston University

  “This is a moving evocation of a vanished world. Harem Years shows how a gifted and sensitive woman, brought up in seclusion but with a knowledge of French that opened a window
onto European culture, gradually became aware of her own predicament and that of her sex and society. In Margot Badran’s faithful and elegant translation, Huda Shaarawi’s memoirs will have a permanent place in the literature of women’s studies and of middle eastern history.”

  —Albert Hourani, Fellow of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University

  “Harem Years is the first of its kind. The memoirs of the early Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi, the book is a touching, fascinating account of a woman’s struggle to assert herself in a segregated society.”

  —Afaf Lutfy Al Sayyid Marsot, professor of history, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of California at Los Angeles