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This chapter focuses on Fawwaz’s portraits of early Muslim women, especially those of ahl al-bayt, the Prophet Muhammad’s family and lineage. It highlights her presentations of Alid and early Shi’i women given Fawwaz’s origins in the Shi‘i region of Jabal ‘Amil, Lebanon. Discussing women’s roles in the rift which led later to the development of sects in Islam, it finds that the biographical dictionary features an unusually high proportion of pro-‘Ali (Alid) and then Shi ‘i women, and that in their orientation these biographies signal a quiet but discernible Shi‘i perspective or allegiance. It then discusses Fawwaz’s emphases in her biographies of Muslim contemporaries: scholarship, literature, and reform, and how her life histories of Arab or Muslim contemporaries parallel those of Europeans.

This chapter examines the biographical writing of Mayy Ziyada, whose writings on Malak Hifni Nasif and 'A'isha Taymur sought to remind a mobilized public of women's contributions to the nation. Still, Ziyada reinforced ambivalent attitudes to women, since her biographies apportioned a derivative role to women in Egyptian national history. By critically reconsidering Ziyada's output and the activities of her chosen subjects, this chapter alerts readers to the problematic incorporation of women into the Egyptian nation, through the devaluation of gender difference and a stress on national homogeneity. Her contribution is important in its own right, but it also highlights the importance of viewing other geographical contexts in the Middle East and beyond through a similar analytical and methodological prism.

This chapter considers how a volume such as this was celebrated and advertised locally, and how Fawwaz’s contemporaries ‘blurbed’ it for audiences. How did such a framing contribute to the era’s discourse on women’s rights? It then turns to Fawwaz’s attempt to send her volume to Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair and her correspondence with Berthe Honore Palmer, chair of the Board of Lady Managers. It sets this venture into the context of the Women’s Building and Library founded for the Fair and the American founders’ attitudes toward feminism, international collaboration, and the female populations of societies colonized by European powers. It traces Arab women’s response to the Chicago venture, focusing especially on Hanna Kurani who spoke at the Congress of Women. It also sets Arab women’s attempts to participate in the Exposition within the reaction in Egypt to the way Egypt was represented at the fair, and the controversial presence of dancers who were allegedly from Egypt, in the Midway’s Egyptian café.