Fann wa-Fiṭra: Art and Instinct

This chapter discusses Bint al-Shatiʾ's Omdurman lecture “The Arab Literary Woman Yesterday and Today,” where she reflects at length on women's literary and intellectual participation in public life. She also talks about (romantic) affect and an instinct for the divine—two concepts, wijdān and fiṭra, that she weaves together. She connects affect to the “law of instinct and the model (the sunna) of nature”—what has been fertile ground, she declares, for woman>'s “literary existence” in Arab and Islamic history. Fiṭra is profoundly gendered in the writings analyzed in this book.