Alis al-Bustani
Marilyn Booth (translation)
Paperback, 176 pages
9780198921684

‘Let us go on, then! And I will tell you the story of my sister and her daughter, from beginning to end.’

Alis al-Bustani’s Sa’iba (1891) is one of the earliest known novels authored in Arabic by a female writer. Written when the Arabic novel was only in its third or fourth decade, it takes up the leading fictional theme of the era: the question of young people’s choices in marriage in a society where their elders traditionally made these decisions. In Sa’iba, the focus is on what happens after the wedding, as the eponymous heroine has to fend off a jealous cousin who believes he has a right to her. Drawing on motifs of Victorian Gothic writing, brought into an Arab-Turkish fictional context, the novel powerfully shows the continuing hold of old ideas about women’s sexual susceptibility and moral ‘weakness’, as such ideas were slowly giving way among educated Arab and other Ottoman middle classes to new ideals of companionship in marriage.

Marilyn Booth’s translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing the themes and social context of the novel, a time of modernizing efforts and pushback against European and American power and culture in the Arabic and Ottman worlds.