Writing Women's bOdies On the Palimpsest of Islamic History

Abstract

Arab women writers' new turn to Islamic history is informed by burgeoning Islamic fundamentalist movements throughout the Arab-Muslim world, and the continuous threat they pose to women's struggles for rights. In the view of women writers, the fundamentalist narrative's strongest claims for legitimacy are penned on the female body in an ongoing process that has contained women, muted their voices, and screened out their agency. Arab women have thus set on the perilous task of rewriting Islamic history. Unlayering the palimpsest of the fundamentalist narrative, engaging its ambiguities, activating its silences, interrogating its in-between(s), and filling in its blanks, women's writings make available numerous visions of female-ness, and a whole cosmology of female struggles that have been consciously overshadowed by male texts. The female body, as an object of writing, is transfigured into a subject writing its own text(s), thus repositioning women's role as shapers of history and makers of culture. Providing a critical appraisal of Fatima Mernissi's and Assia Djebar's works, this article analyzes the many discursive strategies used to refigure the body as a site from which and for which women can intervene to create multifaceted spaces of oppositional agency and political empowerment.