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The chapter sets out a history of Zaynab Fawwaz’s birthplace, the Ottoman territory of Jabal ‘Amil, at the southern tip of Mt Lebanon, as a region that was both marginalized and a centre of Shi‘i intellectual activity. Particular attention is paid to the clan of al-As‘ad, paramount rulers in whose provincial court Zaynab spent some time, and to local historical memory that would have been part of her formation. Fawwaz’s biography of her mentor there, Fatima bint al-As‘ad, suggests her attachment to this childhood venue. The chapter assesses what we know of Fawwaz’s early biography, through competing narratives that even pose very different birthdates, from 1845 to 1860. It provides background for Chapter 9, on Fawwaz’s first novel, which took up the history of this feudal family.

This chapter treats Fawwaz’s first novel, Husn al-‘awaqib. Set in a chronotope analogous to the author’s birthplace in southern Lebanon, the novel traces a struggle over political power within a local feudal clan in parallel with a young woman’s struggle to marry her chosen partner; the two strands are really one, concerning the power and ultimate inefficacy of extreme patriarchal control, under which neither polity nor family can thrive. The chapter explores the novel’s quasi-autobiographical element. The political history of Jabal ‘Amil is a crucial backdrop that illuminates Fawwaz’s departure from the public historical record in service of her outlook.

This chapter examines the economic ecology of the two regions from which Eastern Mediterranean migrants to French West Africa hailed – the Matn, in central Mount Lebanon, and Jabal ‘Amil, to the south. It argues that, contrary to long-established narratives which saw migration as the outcome of political oppression and social strife, it was largely economic in nature. While European demand for Lebanese silk brought prosperity to the Matn’s cultivators in the mid-nineteenth century, pulling the region into the world economy, it also accustomed them to a certain degree of prosperity; when the fortunes of sericulture began to wane, some took to migration to maintain their families’ status, establishing an enduring propensity for migration. Migration, then, was not the preserve of the poorest, but of those with the means to move. This was all the more the case in Jabal ‘Amil, where migration was the preserve of men of the middling sort from the region’s market towns.

This chapter introduces the book at the centre of this study, a mammoth biographical dictionary of 453 world women published in Arabic in Cairo 1893-6 at Egypt’s government printing press; and its author, Zaynab Fawwaz, an immigrant from southern Lebanon to Egypt who wrote on gender politics in the press and also wrote two novels, a play and some poetry. The chapter places this book in the context of scholarship on gender politics, feminism, nationalism and anti-colonialism, and early feminist discourse in the Arab region and especially Egypt. In that context, the fin-de-siècle interest in ancient history – Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Semitic – evident in Egypt’s and Arabic Ottoman publications, receives attention as it relates to Fawwaz’s outlook on women’s history.

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.