Nawal el Saadawi and "The Fall of the Imam"

This week, in my course on Muslim Women Writers, we have been discussing Nawal el Saadawi's The Fall of the Imam. Reading this engaging novel, which moves freely between dream and reality, memory and fantasy, and is peppered with irony, sarcasm, and sharp wit, we see its underlying continuous indictment of oppression and injustices perpetrated in the name of religion.

In order to gain a sense of the issues that are central in Nawal el Saadawi's life and work, and to witness the spirit of her activism as a champion of women's rights, we watched this video

From "Sultana's Dream" to "So Long a Letter"

My Muslim Women Writers course has concluded its fifth week. Having read Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's Sultana's Dream and Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter, we are now reading Nawal el Saadawi's The Fall of the Imam. I just want to say a word about the first two.

Both are works of social criticism, albeit in different ways. Published in 1905, Sultana's Dream presents a reversal of purdah, the tradition of separation of the sexes and the seclusion of women. In the imaginary country of Ladyland, men are kept in seclusion while women run the affairs of the country, with dreamlike efficiency and success.



Set in Senegal, So Long a Letter deals with polygamy, the situation of girls and women, and the political condition and future of a country. Even though the letter writer, Ramatoulaye, has suffered immensely as a result of the insensitive behaviour of men, especially her husband, she avoids any simplistic casting of all men as perpetrators of evil and women as innocent victims. She acknowledges that there are good and bad people on both sides.

While Sultana's Dream describes an utopia and was ahead of its time, So Long a Letter deals with contemporary issues in a realistic manner. It dwells on women's experiences in an Islamic society, especially their relations with men. As a work of social criticism, it highlights the need for social change.

I Am Teaching Leila Aboulela's "Minaret" Again

This week, in my African Literature summer course, I am teaching Leila Aboulela's Minaret. We started the course with Ama Ata Aidoo's Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa, went on to Athol Fugard's Valley Song, then Mia Couto's The Tuner of Silences, then Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.

I am teaching Minaret for the second time, having first taught it in the spring. As I did then, I have started with an introduction to Islam, because Minaret deals with the lives of Muslims. I also feel privileged to talk about Islam in view of the widespread ignorance of it in American society. Having been born and raised in Tanzania, about half of whose people are Muslim and about half Christian, living in relative harmony, I enjoy sharing with students my experience of Islam and Muslims.

This time around, having talked about the origins and the five pillars of Islam, and about the Qur'an and the hadiths, I have started focusing on the novel, intending to go through it at a measured pace, in order to explore it as well as possible.

With its opening words, "Bism Allahi, Ar-rahman, Ar-raheem," Minaret inducts the reader into the world of Islam. In class today, I dwelt on this phrase, which means "In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful," and explained its significance in Islam and in the daily lives of Muslims. I went on to explain other references to Islam featured in the first several pages of the novel. I have no doubt that my students will both enjoy and learn much from this novel.

On my part, especially today, I have been thinking about other works of fiction I have taught, written by African Muslim women. These are Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter, Alifa Rifaat's Distant View of a Minaret, Nawal el Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero and The Fall of the Imam. I am dreaming of someday creating a course on writings by Muslim women. As Muslims say, Insha Allah, God willing.