Scholars of the history of Arab gender activism have recognised that Qasim Amin's famously explosive Tahrir al-mar'a (1899) – which earned him the title, from the early 1920s onwards, of the ‘Father of Egyptian Feminism’ – did not come out of a discursive vacuum. Arab female intellectuals (‘A'isha Taymur, Zaynab Fawwaz and Maryam Makariyus) were already writing on questions of gender right; male educators (Butrus al-Bustani in Ottoman Syria, ‘Ali Mubarak and Rifa'a al-Tahtawi in Egypt and Namık Kemal in Ottoman Turkey) had advocated for schooling girls, and not always solely to make them better mothers to baby nationalist men.

That questions of gender saturated the Arabic publishing scene of the decade before Amin's book appeared is less recognised: all but a few leading writers and publications remain untapped sources. Yet in the 1890 press and book publishing sector of Egypt, gender trouble could be found everywhere: on the front pages of daily newspapers, in magazine features, in back-page reports on everyday events and crime, throughout poetry (formal and colloquial), in novels (translated or not) and in biography. In one way or another, by the mid-1890s, ‘women and the nation’ already constituted a ramified discourse. This chapter examines texts that approached gender politics in that decade by turning to history – indeed, to ancient history. How did authors deploy historical narratives to intervene in debates on gender in the first decade, when such debates truly could be said to circulate publicly to a (small) reading public through print channels? Was there a specific tenor to this conversation in the 1890s?

I discuss three works: ‘Ali Jalal's AH 1308 (1890–1 CE) Mahasin athar al-awwaliyyin, fima lil-nisa’ wa ma ‘alayhinna fi qawanin qudama’ al-misriyyin [Merits of the Ancestors’ Traces, on Women's Duties and Legal Places, in the Ancient Egyptians’ Laws and Graces]; Habib Effendi al-Zayyat al-Dimashqi's al-Mar'a fi al-jahiliyya [Women in the Pre-Islamic Era], al-Diya’'s 1899 gift to subscribers; and Shaykh Hamza Fathallah's Bakurat al-kalam ‘ala huquq al-nisa’ fi al-Islam [First Lights on Islam and Women's Rights], also appearing in AH 1308 (1890–1 CE).