It’s publication day for May Ziadeh’s Musings of a Young Woman, the second title in our ERASED NOT FORGOTTEN series, ed. Ibtihal Rida Mahmood.
In honor of the release, we share scholar-translator Dana Al Shahbari’s introduction to the volume, which you can find in our store and in select bookshops worldwide.
Introduction
It is perhaps most fitting to begin this introduction with the same question May Ziadeh poses in the opening lines of her 1922 book: “Do we, young women of today, write?” Her answer is a solid yes, followed by a nuanced reflection on the nature of women’s writing, with all its achievements and dangers. The boldness of the opening question in a work titled Sawāniḥ Fatāt (Musings of a Young Woman) may come as a surprise, yet even more daring statements follow. Sāniḥa, the singular form of sawanih, carries a dual meaning in Arabic: thought (fikra) and opportunity (furṣa). Through this deliberate wordplay, Ziadeh invites her readers to approach the book as a conceptual foundation and an opportunity to engage with the intersections of gender, literature, and cultural production during the Arab Renaissance, or Nahda.
By way of preface to the translation that follows, it is important to introduce the writer of these musings. Some readers may already be familiar with her name and work; others may have encountered her only in passing, while for many, this may be a first introduction. Mary Elias Ziadeh, later known as May Ziadeh, was born on the 11th of February 1886 in Nazareth, Palestine. In 1899, Ziadeh moved to Lebanon to complete her French secondary education in Aintoura, emigrating with her parents to Egypt in 1908. The move marked a significant milestone in her literary career, which began with a published volume of poetry in French, Fleurs de Rêve (Flowers of Dreams), signed under the pen name Isis Copia. Soon after, Ziadeh began publishing more frequently under her own name, in Arabic, in leading Egyptian newspapers, writing on various topics that were reflective of the Nahda: women’s rights and the broader significance of education, the resurgence of social and linguistic reforms, nationalism, and the call for knowledge exchange with different cultures through translation.
Bilingual in Arabic and French, Ziadeh learned English, Italian, German, Latin, and Spanish during her stay in Cairo and translated three European novels into Arabic. She synthesized new forms of knowledge through a wide range of genres and techniques, and she is best known for initiating a tradition of Arab women’s writing on women through her extensive biographies of Aisha Taymour, Warda al-Yaziji, and Malak Hifni Nasif. In addition to her dedication to writing, Ziadeh was engaged in public humanities, founding the Tuesday Literary Salon at her home and steering it for nearly twenty years; there, some of the most prominent Nahda thinkers, like Salama Musa, Taha Hussein, and Ahmed Shawqi, gathered to discuss literature, society, music, and politics. She was also a prolific orator who lectured in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt on the changing literary and socio-political landscapes, including the emancipation of women. For a long time, despite her activism and multifaceted engagement with the Nahda, Ziadeh’s name was (and still is) reduced to tropes of love and madness in Arab popular culture, especially because of her epistolary exchanges with Lebanese writer Gibran Khalil Gibran and her forced confinement at Asfuriyyah (formally, the Lebanon Hospital for the Insane) prior to her death in 1941. Such mythologized narratives, combined with a lack of critical studies and translations of her writings, left her name in a state of shallow iconicity within a discourse that privileges the sensational contours of a woman writer’s life over sustained engagement with her intellectual legacy.
Against this background, ArabLit Books is proud to pay homage to Ziadeh through a full translation, for the first time, of Ziadeh’s literature outside of its original Arabic. This circulation of Ziadeh’s literature in English opens a doorway for a new audience of Anglophone readers to engage with a writer who was deeply grounded in Arabic and the Arabic literary culture, but also never lost interest in worldly cultures and literatures. As Ziadeh writes elsewhere, her vast knowledge of multiple languages expanded the boundaries of her nationality and allowed her to imagine the whole world as a greater homeland. Ziadeh’s literature belongs to that world, and it’s about time for her literature to re-emerge on reading lists, discussion tables, and in classrooms. Her writing, as this book reveals, outlives its historical moment by speaking to timeless questions, ranging from reflections on time and being to authorship, agency, and the role of the (woman) intellectual.
The journey to translating Musings of A Young Woman began with an email to the founding editor of ArabLit, Marcia Lynx Qualey, in which I asked about the possibility of publishing my translation of one of its pieces, “The Memory of Baalbek’s Temple.” I had been working closely with this text—as with the book more broadly—as part of my PhD research on Ziadeh at the University of Cambridge. I was struck by the resonance of Ziadeh’s early decolonial reflections as she boarded the train from Beirut to the ruins of Baalbek in 1911. Today, for those of us witnessing a genocide unfold in Gaza, and a war on Lebanon, her words mirror our own grief over the loss of many lives and the mounting threats to historic sites and ruins, including Baalbek. In a later conversation, Marcia told me that ArabLit had already been considering a translation of one of Ziadeh’s works, and from there, the idea grew into a collaborative translation project that brought together scholars who engaged with Ziadeh’s work, like Marilyn Booth, Boutheina Khaldi, and myself, with dedicated translators interested in making her writing accessible to new audiences. Across the diverse genres that shape these musings, translators and editors worked together to remain faithful to Ziadeh’s voice: its irony and satire, its occasional assertiveness and fear, and its blend of the poetic and the direct. It is a voice that emerged in formative years for Arab women’s writing, and it is distinguished by its complexity and unique subjectivity.
Like Ziadeh’s other published books, Musings of a Young Woman is a curated collection of pieces that first appeared in newspapers before being gathered into book form. However, Musings holds a distinctive place in Ziadeh’s literary oeuvre for a number of reasons: most notably, it’s her most experimental work in terms of form, and it is among the most expansive in the range of themes it covers. If we think about Ziadeh’s literary salon as a microcosm of Nahda, as Khaldi argues, then Musings can be read as its written counterpart, a record that invites us into an Arab woman’s journey of becoming a writer, especially as she entered male-dominated publishing spaces in the turbulent times of World War I, coupled with the rise of national aspirations in Egypt. What new space did women come to inhabit? And how did the boundaries of private and public shift at the turn of the century?
While there is no single answer to these questions, the opening piece of Musings, titled “the First Musing,” offers some directions and context for readers encountering the book more than a century after its publication. In it, Ziadeh explicitly addresses the double-edged nature of the reception of Arab women’s writing, where its acknowledgment is often tinged with dismissal. Because the tradition of women’s writing was meager, to borrow her words, women writers had to navigate tensions between the hovering presence of the critic and the expectations of the reading public while carving a space for themselves in society and literature. Ziadeh is troubled by readers who only “leaf through” texts written by women simply because they view it as a manifestation of the common female self. On the contrary, she invites her readers—then and now—to continually question, define, and redefine their relationship with the text through a serious engagement with women’s writings. As she further argues, the label of women’s literature doesn’t exclude such literature from its place in the “general human thought.” While gender remains a defining dimension of these texts, Ziadeh ultimately situates women’s writing within broader intellectual histories of the Nahda, Arabic literature, and beyond.
Following this manifesto, Musings of a Young Woman opens onto a rich literary world that traverses multiple forms, such as the free-verse romantic poem “Guard Your Heart Carefully,” the play “An Hour with a Strange Family,” the short story “The Story of the Woman with a Story,” and others. While these genres have since evolved, and their contours have become more clearly defined, it is important to recognize their roots in those nascent and early works that would later take on a more established character in Arabic literature. In the book, we also meet Ziadeh the student, not only the author, at Cairo University, where she was among the first generation of women to join university classrooms in Egypt. She reflects on this experience with a striking awareness of its historical moment; inside the lecture halls, a new intellectual horizon was opening, while beyond those same walls, the upheavals of World War I continued to unfold. It’s in these musings that we glimpse an incomplete project for Ziadeh titled “Memoirs of Cairo University.” Although this project never saw the light, its early conception is significant since it anticipates the memoirs genre that would later flourish in the Arabic literary scene, especially among women writers whom Ziadeh would go on to inspire, such as Anbara Salam Khalidi, Nawal El Saadawi, and Fadwa Tuqan—all of whom were familiar with and influenced by her work. In “Our Letters of Today and Yesterday,” Ziadeh emerges as a literary critic attentive to the transformations of language in her moment, especially in the art of letter-writing. Without dismissing the richness of classical Arabic heritage, she questions the persistence of verbose writing in correspondence and privileges a subjective and unique style of writing. Coming from a woman of letters with a remarkable intellectual command like Ziadeh, and an epistolary network spanning the Arab world, Europe, and America, this text attests to her interest in the future of Arabic writing at a time marked by the rapid expansion of print culture and the press.
Ziadeh’s book opens onto far more analysis than any introduction can fully encompass. At best, this space can gesture toward some of its nuances while acknowledging the new cultural spotlight it acquires through translation. In her return, Ziadeh encourages us to keep asking fundamental questions about writing, its functions and constraints, and the challenges early Arab women writers faced in transformative and transforming spaces, both private and public, personal and political. These musings further invite us to read Ziadeh’s voice independently and beyond reductive tropes that have long shaped her reception, and to examine key cultural, philosophical, and literary questions that continue to reverberate today.
This book offers a fertile ground for Arab women readers, writers, and scholars to reflect on the conditions of writing, a little over 100 years after its publication. How far have we come? And what obstacles persist? With the sweeping journey across personal, social, and literary history, Ziadeh explores relations of women writers with themselves and with other women; with men as fathers, readers, and critics; and with the surrounding political and social environment. She contests what it meant for a woman writer to enter a publishing industry shaped by patriarchal norms at the turn of the twentieth century in Cairo, and how women writers collectively navigated the tension between marginalization and the assertion of their literary significance. In the pages that follow, we travel back in time and read, through Ziadeh’s literary I/eye and in a new language, the worlds she inhabited and experienced in the classroom, the courtroom, the streets of Cairo, and at her writing desk. Being as stylistically innovative and daring as they are, these musings stand at the forefront of Ziadeh’s creativity. At the same time, they testify to Ziadeh’s early recognition of the dialectic between literature and ideology, and of literature’s capacity to question and unsettle inherited structures on diverse and overlapping grounds.
A century on, Musings of a Young Woman invites scholars to trace the silenced in the archive and to read anew the poetics and politics of Arab women’s writing in a site of intersecting colonial and patriarchal tensions. It is our hope that this translation will open the way for further engagement with Ziadeh’s works across languages. “The Memory of Baalbek’s Temple” is already being translated into Spanish, and Ziadeh’s feminist voice, once heard in the halls of Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut, and whose words circulated through the national and international press, deserves a renewed recognition and a wider place in the literary world.
Dana Al Shahbari
University of Cambridge, March 2026
Also watch this book pre-launch event:
We also recommend:
Yahya Ashour’s “The Violence of English,” new from The Key