Introduction

Introduces the outlines of Zaynab Fawwaz’s biography and published oeuvre, in the context of the nineteenth-century Arab/ic Nahda, or knowledge movement, and the centrality of questions of gender to that series of initiatives. Considers her distinct approach to questions of gender and society by setting out a feminist analytic that distinguishes ameliorative gender activism from critique of gender as a system of hierarchical social relations based on sex-gender differentiation and instituting and maintaining patriarchal and masculinist authority over females and the young. Suggests how debates on gender in 1890s Egypt were entangled with debates across the world, and how Arabophone intellectuals used certain keywords and conceptual categories to join debate, and describes communities of discourse, or senses of audience, that animated Fawwaz. Attention to audience and terminology, and to the rhetorical uses of affect, are aspects of a methodology of deep listening which requires close attention to not only Fawwaz’s writings, but those with which they were in dialogue.