In Memory of Malak Hifni Nasif and May

In the last years of the nineteenth century and the first of this spacious century — during that graceful leap, clothed in all manner of arts, of Arabic literature's attempts at refinement and cross-fertilization and at breaking with the conventions agreed upon by the literati of the frozen centuries — there stood out on the canvas of literature two names of two great women writers. They were a lodestar for the sensitive souls among the masters of letters and a lamp by whose gentle, penetrating radiance they lit the road of truth and goodness; and they went on in give and take until expression grew even for them and opinion ran straight, and then they were voicing their thoughts and their admiration for woman — for instance in such a poem as the one Ahmad Shawqi addressed to Malak Hifni Nasif, which opens:

Songful one — O Malak of the canaries, O prince of the nightingales

or in such a poem as the one Ismail Sabri addressed to May, which opens:

O haunt of the gazelle, today I know for certain that in you I have stormed a lion's den

Malak Hifni Nasif and May are two women of letters whose like the history of Arabic literature has not favored us with since the days of Sukayna bint al-Husayn. And though the distance between them was wide in temperaments, inclinations, environment, and creed, one road united them: this wrong which we women still feel even now, inflicted on us by certain men against the truth of woman — that even if she were not keener than they in intelligence and more understanding of the realities of things, she surpasses them in decisiveness, resolve, and hardiness of grain, above all once she has studied, absorbed, and compared.

Yes, both writers felt this wrong, and each set about defending the being of her sex as far as she could find a way, in her own particular language, formed by environment, school, religion, and heredity.

May says: “The public claims that its desire to savor woman's writing does not express any esteem for that writing, or any acknowledgment of the truth of her insight, but only that her writing is one manifestation of the general feminine self.

“Some thinkers have gone to extremes — especially some who have persuaded themselves that they are thinkers — these have gone to extremes in separating woman from the human species, which they have all but confined to man. The fact is that every merit distinguishing woman springs from the universal human soul, every defect marring her goes back to the common human frailty, and every trace of her intelligence is but one face of general human thought.”

And May says in another place, in the voice of a girl watched over by her family with strict surveillance:

“Treatment like this makes me doubt my own goodness and my dignity, and rage and pride may drive me to do what I would never do if my family trusted me. Plants are free — why should people not be free?

“I say freedom and I mean it; it is not license, as many claim. The difference between them is that the one has limits which the other tears down and oversteps.”

And Malak Hifni Nasif says: “Nothing vexes me more than men's claiming that they pity us. We are no object for their pity; we are worthy of their respect — let them exchange the one for the other. Pity comes only from the sound to the sick, or from the great to the lowly. Which of the two kinds do they take us for? By God, we disdain to be either.”

And she goes on in this vein: “Men tell us, and assert it positively: you women were created for the home, and we were created to earn the living. Would that I knew what law to that effect ever came down from God. If they were fair and not partisan, they would not taunt us with our scant genius, or with the fact that no one has ever heard of one of us changing a rule in arithmetic or geometry, for instance. Let one of them kindly tell us what he himself has derived from those rules. We acknowledge to the men of invention and discovery the greatness of their works — but had I boarded the ship with Christopher Columbus, it would not have been beyond me, either, to discover America!”

Malak Hifni was a storm — roaring, scowling, mocking, attacking. She loosed lightning at one moment and thunder at another, fearing, in speaking the truth, no blamer's blame. What she saw and heard among the daughters of her sex in general, and Muslim women in particular, wore upon her nerves, and she let it fly in scorching gusts, because she did not wish upon them what she had seen, nor accept for them what she had heard. She looked toward a higher level for woman — and perhaps she will attain it one day, so long as right is on her side.

And May was a teeming sea, drinking deep of the rivers that pour into it and scarcely quenched, surging and swelling under the storms that clash upon it. But when its waves draw near the shore, they draw near slowly and lightly, and no sooner do they touch the brown sands than they retreat, gathering up their train for fear some grains of sand may have clung to it and sullied its whiteness.

And with all that, she never ceased returning to the charge, time and again, to achieve what she wished of the reform of woman, of institutions, and of the world.

May and Malak Hifni Nasif were a necessary need of that era, that through them the elements of progress and reform in literature might be complete.

The divergent voices ringing in the ear of existence with clear signs of lawful magic lacked a feminine voice to soften the sharpness of that clangor and pave the way for a lofty literature that would take its fitting place among the living literatures.

As for the influence each of the two writers wrought, singly, upon modern literature — criticism above all — it is great and effective, and demands a broad study that cannot be summed up in a hasty sketch like this, limited to minutes.

God rest Malak Hifni Nasif, and God rest May. The first rendered the Muslim woman a shining service such as hundreds of women like her could not have rendered her all at once.

And the second bestowed upon Arabic literature a splendor of her own splendor, so that it thrilled from its farthest reach to its nearest, glorifying the personality of woman in May, offering up those fragrant breaths, and making for her, in the innermost core of its heart, a temple where she might devote herself and worship.