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