Author's note: Many thanks to Mervat Hatem for a felicitous intellectual convergence on the subject of Bint al-Shatiʾ, to miriam cooke for her mentorship and support, and to Ebrahim Moosa for insightful suggestions on an earlier draft.

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³ Notable exceptions are Fariba Adelkhah, “Framing the Public Sphere: Iranian Women in the Islamic Republic,” Public Islam and the Common Good, 227–41; and Jawad, Hiafaa, “Islamic Feminism: Leadership Roles and Public Representation,” Hawwa 7 (2009): 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵ Cited in Kooij, C., “Bint al-Shati: A Suitable Case for Biography?” in The Challenge of the Middle East, ed. El-Sheikh, Ibrahim, van de Koppel, C. Aart, and Peters, Rudolph (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 1982), 70Google Scholar.

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⁹ Armstrong, Nancy, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. For the context of Arabic literature, see McLarney, Ellen, “Socialist Romance of the Postcolonial Arabic Novel,” Research in African Literatures 40 (2009): 186–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ The most important literary interpretations of the Qurʾan during this time were al-Khuli, Amin, al-Tafsir: Maʿalim Hayatihi, Manhajuhu al-Yawm (Cairo: Jamaʿat al-Kitab, 1944)Google Scholar; Qutb, Sayyid, al-Taswir al-Fanni fi al-Qurʾan (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1945)Google Scholar; and Muhammad Khalafallah, “al-Fann al-Qissasi fi al-Qurʾan al-Karim” (PhD diss., Fuʾad [Cairo] University, 1947). Earlier, Husayn's, TahaFi al-Shʿir al-Jahili (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub, 1926)Google Scholar used literary criticism to comment on certain inconsistencies in the Qur'an, causing an uproar.

¹¹ She recounts this in her biography of al-Khuli, , ʿAla al-Jisr: Usturat al-Zaman (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1967), 34Google Scholar.

¹² Husayn wrote his doctoral dissertation on al-Maʿarri in 1914 at the newly opened Egyptian University. He published eight works on al-Maʿarri, and Bint al-Shatiʾ published four. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, at the height of the boom in islāmiyyāt literature, al-Maʿarri experienced a renaissance, with Husayn's, Tajdid Dhikrat Abi al-ʿAlaʾ (Cairo: Matbaʿat al-Maʿarif, 1937)Google Scholar, al-ʿAqqad's, Mahmud ʿAbbasRajʿat Abi al-ʿAlaʾ (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub al-Haditha, 1939)Google Scholar, al-Shatiʾ's, Bintal-Haya al-Insaniyya ʿind Abi al-ʿAlaʾ al-Maʿarri (Cairo: Matbaʿat al-Maʿarif, 1939)Google Scholar, and al-Khuli's, Raʾi fi Abi al-ʿAlaʾ (Cairo: Jamaʿat al-Kuttab, 1945)Google Scholar. Why the revival of al-Maʿarri? Did al-Maʿarri's use of poetry and prose to probe religious and existential questions serve as model for these literary scholars turning to theological matters?

¹³ Hafez, Sabry, in Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse (London: Saqi, 1993)Google Scholar, brilliantly analyzes how this narrative discourse emerged from both indigenous forms of Arabic literary writing and imported genres.

¹⁴ Colla, Elliott, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 213–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Haykal, Muhammad Husayn, Hayat Muhammad (Cairo: Matbaʿat Misr, 1935), 71–73, 202–209Google Scholar. Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 57.

¹⁶ “Where in the 1920s the intellectual fashion had been to visit the Pharaonic ruins of Upper Egypt in order to realize one's Egyptian identity, in the 1930s a new trend took its place: that of proceeding to the Hijaz to experience personally the full effects of participation in the hajj. The content of such accounts usually combined description of the formal ceremonies of the Pilgrimage with analysis of the social and emotional meaning of taking part in this central event of the Muslim umma.” Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 60.

¹⁷ Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Bostock, Anna (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), 88Google Scholar. Hirschkind and Larkin argue that religion circulates through media, creating new kinds of imagined communities for the contemporary world, contradicting Walter Benjamin's understanding of mass technology as destroying religious aura. Hirschkind, Charles and Larkin, Brian, “Media and the Political Forms of Religion,” Social Text 26 (2008): 2–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Stowasser, Barbara, Women in the Qur'an: Traditions and Interpretations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 120Google Scholar; Booth, Marilyn, May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001), 281–311, 418n5Google Scholar. For a brilliant discussion of modern discourses of Islamic domesticity, see Shakry, Omnia, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Modern Middle East, ed. Abu-Lughod, Lila (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ ʿAbqariyyat Muhammad (Cairo: al-Maktabat al-Tijariyya, 1942); ʿAbqariyyat ʿUmar (Cairo: al-Maktabat al-Tijariyya, 1942); ʿAbqariyyat al-Sadiq (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1943); and ʿAbqariyyat al-Imam (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1943). Al-ʿAqqad's biographies of ʿAʾisha and Fatima do not carry “genius” in their title.

²⁰ Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 65, esp. 54–78.

²¹ Smith, “‘Cultural Construct’ and Other Fantasies,” 95–102.

²² Hirschkind, Charles, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 105Google Scholar.

²³ Lia, Brynjar, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement (Reading, U.K.: Ithaca Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

²⁴ See discussions of daʿwa in Wickham, Carrie Rosefsky, Mobilizing Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 119–45Google Scholar; Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 79–82; and Bayat, Asef, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 136–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Smith, “The Crisis of Orientation,” 382–410.

²⁶ Jürgen, Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Burger, Thomas (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991), 43Google Scholar.

²⁷ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 105–106.

²⁸ Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 51.

²⁹ Misr, Jumhuriyyat, al-Dustur 1956 (Bulaq: al-Matbaʿat al-Amiriyya, 1956), 11Google Scholar.

³⁰ See, for example, ʿAli ʿAbd al-Wahid Wafi's Huquq al-Insan fi al-Islam (Human Rights in Islam, 1957), namely, his chapters on “Aspects of Discrimination between Women and Men,” 121–216.

³¹ Laura Bier, “From Mothers of the Nation to Daughters of the State: Gender and the Politics of Inclusion in Egypt, 1922–1967” (PhD diss., New York University, 2006), 156–57.

³² Nelson, Cynthia, Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart (Cairo: University of Cairo Press, 1996), 171–74Google Scholar.

³³ Mervat Hatem, “The Egyptian Revolutionary Context and Bint al-Shati's Construction of the Biographies of Women from the Prophet's Family,” lecture, Duke University, 17 September 2009.

³⁴ Jumhuriyyat Misr, al-Dustur, 105–106; Mervat Hatem, “Postcolonial Perspectives on de facto Secularism, Religion, and Gender in Nasser's Egypt,” unpublished article.

³⁵ Safran, Nadav, “The Abolition of the Shari'a Courts in Egypt,” The Muslim World 48 (1958): 20–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ Bier, Mothers of the Nation, 149.

³⁷ Asad, Talal, “Reconfigurations of Law and Ethics in Colonial Egypt,” in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 230–31Google Scholar.

³⁸ Raʾuf, Hiba, al-Marʾa wa-l-ʿAmal al-Siyasi: Ruʾiya Islamiyya (Herndon, Va.: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), 191Google Scholar.

³⁹ ʿAisha ʿAbd al-Rahman, “Fi al-Ahwal al-Shakhsiyya,” al-Ahram, 3 December 1959. See Bier's excellent discussion of public debate over the nature of bayt al-ṭāʿa in Mothers of the Nation.

⁴⁰ Stowasser, Barbara Freyer, “Women and Citizenship in the Qurʾan,” in Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History, ed. Sonbol, Amira El Azhary (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 23–38Google Scholar. Ali, Kecia, “Progressive Muslims and Islamic Jurisprudence: The Necessity for Critical Engagement with Marriage and Divorce Laws,” in Progressive Muslims: On Gender, Justice, and Pluralism, ed. Safi, Omid (Oxford: One World, 2003), 163–89Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Bier, Mothers of the Nation, 170, 194.

⁴² Bint al-Shatiʾ, “al-Mafhum al-Islami li-Tahrir al-Marʾa,” lecture, Islamic University of Omdurman, 1 February 1967 (Cairo: Matbaʿat Mukhaymir, 1967), 12.

⁴³ Raʾuf, al-Marʾa wa-l-ʿAmal, 180. Also see Pateman, Carol, “Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy,” in Public and Private in Social Life, ed. Benn, S. I. and Gauss, G. F. (London: St. Martin's Press, 1983), 283–84Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Brown, Wendy, “Liberalism's Family Values,” in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 134–65Google Scholar. Her argument draws on Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the sexual contract in the context of Egypt, see Mervat Hatem, “Egyptian Discourses on Gender and Political Liberalization: Do Secularist and Islamist Views Really Differ?” Middle East Journal (1994): 661–76.

⁴⁵ Brown, States of Injury, 136, 152.

⁴⁶ Asad, Formations of the Secular; Bier, Mothers of the Nation.

⁴⁷ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 105.

⁴⁸ Wickham, Mobilizing Islam, 34.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Bayat, Making Islam Democratic, 20, 33.

⁵¹ al-Shatiʾ, Bint, Maqal fi al-Insan: Dirasa Qurʾaniyya (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1969), 7Google Scholar. “Her” refers to the feminine “humanity” (insāniyya), a literary double entendre that Bint al-Shatiʾ clearly intended.

⁵² “O humanity, you strive toward your Lord and you will meet him” (Qurʾan 84:6) (my translation).

⁵³ After al-Khuli's student Muhammad Khalafallah argued for the Qurʾan as a literary document (versus a historical one), al-Khuli was banned from teaching the Qurʾan. For a discussion of debates over literary interpretations of the Qurʾan, see Abu-Zayd, Nasr, “The Dilemma of the Literary Approach to the Qurʾan,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 23 (special issue on literature and the sacred) (2003): 22–34Google Scholar; and Benzine, Rachid, Les nouveaux penseurs de l'Islam (Paris: Albin Michel, 2004), 149–72Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ al-Shatiʾ, Bint, Maqal fi al-Insan (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1969)Google Scholar, al-Tafsir al-Bayani li-l-Qurʾan al-Karim, vol. 2 (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1968), al-Qurʾan wa-l-Tafsir al-ʿAsri (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1970), Muqaddima fi al-Manhaj (Cairo: Maʿhad al-Buhuth wa-l-Dirasat al-ʿArabiyya, 1971), al-ʿIjaz al-Bayani li-l-Qurʾan wa-Masaʾil Ibn al-Azraq (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1971), al-Shakhsiyya al-Islamiyya (Beirut: Jamiʿat Bayrut al-ʿArabiyya, 1972), and al-Qurʾan wa-Qadaya al-Insan (Beirut: Dar al-ʿIlm li-l-Malayin, 1972).

⁵⁵ al-Khuli, Amin, Manahij Tajdid fi al-Nahw wa-l-Balagha wa-l-Tafsir wa-l-Adab (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1961), 305–12Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Bint al-Shatiʾ, Maqal fi al-Insan, 63. See Boullata, Issa J., “Modern Qurʾan Exegesis: A Study of Bint al-Shati's Method,” The Muslim World 64 (1974): 103–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Two of Boullata's students wrote their master's theses on Bint al-Shatiʾ’s Qurʾan interpretation but do not probe her larger contributions to literature, gender politics, and Islamic thought. Muhammad Amin, “A Study of Bint al-Shati's Exegesis” (master's thesis, McGill University, 1992); Syamsuddin Sahiron, “An Examination of Bint al-Shati's Method of Interpreting the Qurʾan” (master's thesis, McGill University, 1998).

⁵⁷ Samuel Coleridge developed the idea of the literary text as organic whole, an idea incorporated into Arabic literature by al-ʿAqqad, Mahmud ʿAbbas and al-Mazini, Ibrahim in al-Diwan: Fi al-Adab wa-l-Naqd (Cairo: Dar al-Shaʿb, [1921])Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Al-Khuli, Manahij Tajdid, 312–13.

⁵⁹ Bint al-Shatiʾ's theory of synonyms was important to religion, law, theology, and philosophy as well as linguistics, grammar, and rhetoric. Boullata, “Bint al-Shati's Method,” 111; and Amin, “Bint al-Shati's Exegesis,” 75.

⁶⁰ Bint al-Shatiʾ, “Kitabuna al-Akbar,” lecture, Students’ Union of the Islamic University of Omdurman, 8 February 1967 (Cairo: Matbaʿat Mukhaymir, 1967), 6, 11.

⁶¹ Peter Wright, “Modern Qurʾanic Hermeneutics” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2008). Wright links romanticism to the development of literary interpretations of the Qurʾan but focuses on romanticism's historicization of the Qurʾan rather than on the role of divine inspiration in literary creation.

⁶² Bint al-Shatiʾ, Maqal fi al-Insan, 61–118. See also Boullata, , “Modern Qurʾan Exegesis,” 112–13; and Yudian Wahyudi, “ʿAli Shariʿati and Bint al-Shatiʾ on Free Will: A Comparison,” Journal of Islamic Studies 9 (1998): 35–45Google Scholar.

⁶³ Bint al-Shatiʾ, “al-Mafhum al-Islami li-Tahrir al-Marʾa,” 6.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 5.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 12.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 13.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 10.

⁶⁸ Bint al-Shatiʾ, “al-Adiba al-ʿArabiyya Ams wa-l-Yawm,” lecture, Islamic University of Omdurman, 13 February 1967 (Cairo: Matbaʿat Mukhaymir, 1967), 5, 7, 8.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 9.

⁷⁰ Bint al-Shatiʾ, ‘Ala Jisr.

⁷¹ Bint al-Shatiʾ, “al-Adiba al-ʿArabiyya Ams wa-l-Yawm,” 18.

⁷² Ibid., 3.

⁷³ Masʿud, Jubran, al-Raʾid: Muʿjam Lughawi ʿAsri (Beirut: Dar al-ʿIlm, 1965), 1594Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ In al-Taswir al-Fanni, Qutb writes: “The point of departure for lasting faith is conscience and feeling [wijdān] . . . the closest path to the conscience is the perceptive faculty and the closest path to feeling [wijdān] is sensory perception . . . The Qurʾan always proceeds by touching the perceptive faculty and awakening the senses, penetrating directly through them to insight and extending them to feeling/spirit/psyche [wijdān] . . . these open the door to enlightened insight that righteous instinct grasps” (184–85).

⁷⁵ Haj, Samira, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, and Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 114–15Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ Bint al-Shatiʾ, “al-Adiba al-ʿArabiyya Ams wa-l-Yawm,” 18.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 24.

⁷⁸ Over subsequent editions of Social Justice in Islam, Qutb changes his use of fiṭra from meaning a natural, animal-like instinct of needs (the vernacular, lay sense of fiṭra) to the sense of God-given nature. William E. Shepard documents these changes in Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism: A Translation and Critical Analysis of Social Justice in Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 33n82, 35n95, 42n17, 71n202.

⁷⁹ Bint al-Shatiʾ, “al-Adiba al-ʿArabiyya Ams wa-l-Yawm,” 24.

⁸⁰ Ibid., 20.

⁸¹ Ibid.

⁸² Ibid.

⁸³ Ibid., 13.

⁸⁴ Writers associated with the revival similarly combine this sense of fiṭra as God-given nature and fiṭra as human instinct governing family relations. Raʾuf draws on Qurʾanic language nearly verbatim (which she renders in italics): “The foundation of the family is connected to the creation of God according to which he created people, from the desire of each of the sexes for the other. And this drive is what makes the family one of the social models [sunan]. The importance of legislation is in its preservation of love, mercy, and tranquility. This is a trait at the core of human nature [fiṭra] according to God's creation.” Raʾuf, al-Marʾa wa-l-ʿAmal, 187.

⁸⁵ Bint al-Shatiʾ, “al-Mafhum al-Islami li-Tahrir al-Marʾa,” 10–11.

⁸⁶ For discussions of the assumed universal (European male) subject of human rights discourses, see Domna Stanton and Judith Butler, eds., special issue on “The Humanities in Human Rights: Critique, Language, Politics,” PMLA 121 (2006).

⁸⁷ Bint al-Shatiʾ, “al-Qurʾan wa-Huquq al-Insan,” lecture, Islamic University of Omdurman, 19 January 1968 (Cairo: Matbaʿat Mukhaymir, 1967), 4.

⁸⁸ al-Halim Abu Shuqqa, ʿAbd, Tahrir al-Marʿa fi ʿAsr al-Risala: Dirasat Jamiʿat al-Nusus al-Qurʾan al-Karim wa-Sahihay al-Bukhari wa-Muslim, 6 vols. (Kuwait: Dar al-Qalam, 1990)Google Scholar; Kishk, Muhammad Jalal, Tahrir al-Marʾa al-Muharrara (Cairo: al-Mukhtar al-Islami, 1979)Google Scholar; idem, al-Hurriyya fi al-Usra al-Muslima (Cairo: al-Mukhtar al-Islami, 1979); Tantawi, Muhammad Sayyid et al. Muʾtamar Tahrir al-Marʾa fi al-Islam (Cairo: Dar al-Qalam li-l-Nashr wa-Tawziʿ, 2004)Google Scholar; ʿImara, Muhammad, Tahrir al-Marʾa min Awham al-Mutajahilin (Cairo: Al-Azhar Magazine, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ al-Shatiʾ, Bint, “Islam and the New Woman,” lecture in Padua, Italy, trans. Anthony Calderbank, “Gender and Knowledge: Contribution of Gender Perspectives to Intellectual Formations,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 19 (1999): 197Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 198.

⁹¹ Ibid., 201.

⁹² Ibid., 202.