Construction of Jewish Women in Ihsan Abdel Quddous’s Fiction

Introduction

Ihsan Abdel Quddous (1919–1990), a prominent Egyptian writer, is considered one of the greatest and most prolific Arab novelists. Born in Cairo, Quddous is the son of Fatima al-Yussef, a pioneer journalist and a well-known actress. His father was a playwright and influenced Quddous’ decision to pursue a literary career. After his parents’ divorce, he lived first with his grandfather, Sheikh Ahmed Radwan—a graduate of Al-Azhar University and a clerk in the Sharia courts. His grandfather was very religious and imposed his religious views on the family. His mother, on the contrary, was a liberal woman, opening her home for cultural and political gatherings. As a child, Quddous moved between his grandfather’s religious seminars, where his grandfather met his fellow religious scholars, and the literary saloons of his mother, where prominent men of letters, artists, and politicians attended. His life in the two entirely opposite spheres had a tremendous impact on his personality. He once said: “In the beginning, the transition between these two contradictory spheres struck me like a mental vertigo, until I gradually got used to it, and I accepted it in my life, it was inevitable … I was able to reconcile these contradictions in my life” (Quddous, 1983, pp. 11–12). This harmonious combination of contradictions shaped his personality: liberal, conservative, religious, secular, peaceful, and revolutionary.

Deeply influenced by his liberal mother, Quddous advocated the cause of women’s freedom and liberation. He regarded women “as a symbol of self-denial and sacrifice” (Marie, 2019). According to Shakir (2018a), “Quddous didn’t shy away from tackling the social ills. His strong advocacy for gender equality manifested itself in the way he portrayed many of his female characters.” Quddous urged Egyptian women to actively participate in public life. Besides being provocative and providing a sincere expression of women’s feelings, his novels contributed to a far-reaching change in people’s attitude toward women, not only in Egypt but also all over the Arab world. His daring stories earned him the title of “an adept interpreter of modern-day Arab women’s aspirations and feelings” (Shakir, 2018a).

As a man of letters, Quddous “played an integral role in shaping the Egyptian cinematic and literary memory” (Tewfik, 2019). He proposed the establishment of the Supreme Council for Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences. As for his novels, he used various styles and genres, from political novels to romantic ones. Despite the criticism he received, his stories constitute a large fresco of the literary work in twentieth century Egypt that reflects the evolution of tastes, style, techniques, and themes of Egyptian literature and therefore, constitutes a valuable testimony of the evolution of the Arab and Egyptian society itself. Moreover, many of his novels were adapted to cinema by prominent Egyptian filmmakers. Quddous wrote sixty novels and six hundred short stories and “enriched the Egyptian literature and cinema with everlasting works” (Marie, 2019). Forty-nine of his novels were adapted to films, five novels were dramatized, nine novels were adapted to radio series, and ten novels were adapted for television (Abdul Razaq, 2020, p. 133).

Despite being a prolific writer and many of his works were adapted by Egyptian Cinema and TV, he has been neglected by critics during his life. Some writers have attributed this intentional negligence to two factors: the abundant use of sex and the weak style of his works, as his writings are journalistic in style and not literary (Al-Khatib, 2018, p. 55). Those critics, however, have overlooked the other aspects and themes in his writings. Another reason could be the political nature of some of his works. Quddous wrote many of his works during Nasser’s regime, of whom he was very critical, and accordingly, his political writing “was either dismissed or snubbed by most of the critics who did not share his liberal values and banked more on the hardcore socialist ideology” (Ezzat, 2019). Nevertheless, despite this apparent negligence, “everybody was reading his work, and everybody knew that everybody else was reading his work. He reached a level of popularity that nobody else had” (LeGassick, 2015).

Quddous and Egyptian Jews

Quddous’s life in the Al-Abbasiya neighborhood in Cairo, which is close to the Al-Dhaher neighborhood where Jews lived, motivated him to write about the Jews of Egypt and shaped his interest in Egyptian Jewry. He lived with Jews, played with them in his childhood, studied with them in adolescence, and worked with them in adulthood. Describing his life with Jews, he writes:

I have lived in this society since my childhood in Al-Abbasiya neighborhood which is close to Al-Dhaher neighborhood which was a Jewish neighborhood. I had many Jewish friends, both male and female friends. When I was a student in secondary school, I lived in the Jewish neighborhood. During holidays I worked in a shop with a Jewish worker who used to take me to visit his family. I also worked with three Jewish journalists in Ruz Al-Yousef. (Quddous, 2021, p. 7)

In another place, he wrote, “I had plenty of Jewish friends in Cairo. When I had lived in Abbasiya ten years before, I had fallen in love with a girl from the Jewish quarter of al-Zahir” (Quddous, 1978, p. 236). Therefore, his writings about the Egyptian Jewry are the outcome of a firsthand experience and have been inspired by the community in which he lived. Quddous just records these memories to represent this forgotten community, and in doing so, has contributed to preserving the lost image of the Egyptian Jewry. Today, the Egyptian Jewish community no longer exists; it is gone with its culture and traditions. However, Quddous was able to capture the image of this community before it completely disappeared.

This article discusses three of Abdel Quddous’s fictional works in Arabic: La Tatrukuni Huna Wahdi (Don’t Leave Me Here Alone, 1979), ¹ Ain Sadiqati Al-Yahudiyah (Where is My Jewish Friend?, 1998) and Anna Hurra (I’m Free, 1954). ² In addition, two more works feature Jewish characters, but Jewish characters in those works are either male characters or non-Egyptians, and therefore, such works have been excluded in this study.

Theoretical Framework

Since the emergence of post-colonial studies as an academic field in the late 1980s, it has become one of the most contentious literary and cultural studies fields. The main concern of post-colonial theory, besides investigating the literary production of formerly colonized nations, is to investigate what happens when two different cultures, particularly when one deems itself superior to the other, clash. Moving beyond the limits of literary works, the theory also investigates the political, social, cultural, and economic concerns of the colonizer and the colonized. In the post-colonial era, the question of women is of much concern to many writers and critics. Feminist and post-colonial theories have followed “a path of convergent evolution” (Ashcroft et al., 1995, p. 249). Hence, feminism has attracted post-colonial theorists and has become an interesting theme in post-colonial discourse. This rapprochement is mainly because both imperialism and patriarchy tend to exert similar forms of domination and supremacy over those rendered subordinates. This has been asserted by Lazarus (2006), “feminist theory and post-colonial theory are occupied with similar question of representation, voice, marginalization, and the relation between politics and literature” (p. 201).

In other words, post-colonial and feminist studies emerged as a response to the absence of minorities’ voices, marginalized cultures, and the perspectives of women in political, social, and historical literary accounts. Hence,

Feminist and post-colonial discourses both seek to reinstate the marginalized in the face of the dominant, and early feminist theory, like early nationalist post-colonial criticism, was concerned with inverting the structures of domination, substituting, for instance, a female tradition or traditions for a male-dominated canon. (Ashcroft et al., 1995, p. 249)

However, sometimes, issues related to post-colonialism are overlooked by feminist perspectives. In the same way, gender issues are sometimes ignored by post-colonial studies or theory. The emergence of post-colonial feminism as a dynamic field of studies supplements the premises of both feminism and post-colonialism. It is an approach that tries to identify discourses pertaining to the silencing, oppression, and marginalization of Third World women. Due to its concern with women in the Third World, post-colonial feminism is sometimes dubbed as “Third World feminism.” In the Arab world, silencing, oppression, and marginalization of women are one of the most controversial issues. Discrimination against Arab women in general and Arab Jewish women in particular, is a powerful force of inequality and unfairness in the Arab world. To regain women’s confiscated rights and the lost dignity of their relationships with their male counterparts, feminist advocates and activists have interrogated the visible forms of disenfranchisement and ostracism dominating man-woman relationships. However, certain visible and sometimes, invisible forms of exclusion and marginalization continue in various ways in Arab societies.

Moreover, the political conflicts and growing menace of divisiveness in the Arab world, especially after the establishment of the State of Israel, are seen as a new face of colonial-imperialism that influenced gender politics as well. Such writers have advocated women’s rights to find measures that women can take to overcome the jarring challenges. The present study investigates the intersections of gender, race, and sexualities in various contexts of Jewish women’s lives in a post-colonial setting. To understand and expose the dilemma of the Jewish women and make sense of the challenges hindering the progressive look at women in the Arab world, this article employs the post-colonial feminist theory as the frame of reference and focuses on debates on Jewish women’s questions, including liberty and identity in post-colonial Arab world.

Don’t Leave Me Here Alone: Sex, Wealth, and Protection

Quddous’s novel Don’t Leave Me Here Alone was published in 1979. The novel traces the life of Lucy Hunaydi, an Egyptian-Jewish female convert to Islam from the 1930s to 1978 when the Israeli-Egyptian peace initiative was announced. It is the story of an ambitious and beautiful young Jewish woman, who for the sake of money and social status, abandons her family, religion, and community and embraces Islam. After embracing Islam, she changes her name to Zainab and embarks on a journey to climb the ladder of social hierarchy, defying the patriarchal authorities of both Muslim and Jewish communities. Embedded in the novel’s plotline is the celebration of the defiant Jewish woman, who as a female protagonist, is catapulted to the center of society because she dares fight against the norms of her deeply flawed world. Quddous’s ability to narrate the minute details of Lucy’s aspirational yearnings and the paths she treads shows Quddous as an expert interpreter of Jewish women’s aspirations and feelings.

Lucy was born to an impoverished Jewish family. At the age of fifteen, she married a Jewish man named Zaki Raul, who is meek, submissive, and timid. They have two children, Ezak and Yasmin. The family is an ordinary one living in the Al-Daher neighborhood. However, she always blames herself for choosing a poor husband. Then, she decides to improve her life and increase her family income, and therefore, she applies for the job of a manicurist at Stavrou, a famous Hair Beauty Salon in Cairo, the Salon of the Bashas and Amirs. She chooses this particular salon because it is the salon of rich dignitaries of Cairo and working there will provide her with an opportunity to be in touch with rich men.

Stavrou agrees, not because the owner needs her job but due to her beauty that can attract customers. She first meets Abdul Rahman Bek, one of the rich peasant class, having real estate, apartment complexes, and a member of the Ahrar constitutional party and of the parliament. She convinces him to give her an apartment in one of his buildings in Garden City in return for sexual favors, and he agrees. She lives in the apartment with her family and regularly meets Abdul Rahman Bek, who enjoys her company. However, she gets acquainted with another man, Showkat Bek, a rich and politically prominent man, and one of the upper-class dignitaries who has a strong relationship with the ruling family. He is in his fifties and has a dying wife, and his wealth is beyond imagination, but he feels lonely as all his children are living in their own homes with their families. Lucy decides to marry him, not out of love, but to get as much as possible from his wealth and power. To achieve her goal, she first converts to Islam, not because she likes Islam as a religion but to be able to marry Showkat Bek, and get divorced from her Jewish husband. Another important reason for declaring Islam is to be able to get her share of inheritance after Showkat’s death because, according to Islamic Sharia, a Jew or a Christian wife cannot inherit from a Muslim husband. Using her guiles, Lucy succeeds in winning Showkat’s love. She bears him a female child named Hagar, and she gets her share of the inheritance after his death. During his life, Showkat has been her protector, but after his death, his money becomes her power.

Despite the wealth that she received after the death of Showkat Bek, Lucy feels vulnerable and needs protection and defense against adversaries. Lucy knows that only free officers can protect her because they are the only ones who have power now. She meets Abdul Rahman Ibrahim, one of the free officers, and seduces him. However, he was appointed an ambassador in a country in South America. Then, she targets Mahmoud Rifat, a wealthy businessman and establishes relationship with him. Then, she marries Fahmi Jarallah, a brigadier general and one of the free officers. In the novel, Lucy engages with five men in her life, in addition to her first husband. Lucy’s ambition for success and aristocratic life is the driving force and the main goal in her life. She dreams of getting more than she already has, and she succeeds in her adventures. Her dream is precisely accumulating wealth that will enable her to live an upper-class life. She uses her two weapons—intelligence and beauty—to transform herself and redraw her life in the way she dreams. She succeeds in changing her life, going from an ordinary woman having nothing to being a wealthy one living an aristocratic and noble life.

According to the novel, Lucy’s desire to transcend the particularities of her life originates from her extraordinary greed instinct. Lucy’s desire to be someone else is not born out of personal ambition or aspiration but a natural and unstoppable outcome of her Jewish self that always looks further: “But her ambition is an authentic Jewish one, which cannot be satisfied with love or with nights in the arms of her lover whom she married… She wants more… She wants life in the widest part” (Quddous, 2021, p. 12). Lucy truly transcends her social and economic limits and becomes Zainab Dhu Al-Fikar, belonging to one of the prominent Egyptian families. Hence, Lucy epitomizes the heroic journey that every Jewish woman attempts for the sake of her people’s prosperity. Her husband, despite being deserted by her, acknowledges her intelligence in making big deals: “It is a huge bargain that he should appreciate and acknowledge her genius” (Quddous, 2021, p. 72). Through hard work and devotion, she succeeds in her mission and is finally admired and respected in the Jewish community for fulfilling the Jewish message: “And the community that admired her is the Jewish community. The women and men of this community surrendered to her genius. She fulfilled the message of every Jew, the message of unending ambition” (Quddous, 2021, p. 75).

For the sake of achieving her goals, Lucy is ready to sacrifice not only her religion and people but also her identity

that sketched the direction of her thoughts, and the expression of her emotions and sentiments, and drew the lines of her interactions and even the choice of her words, locating her within a world in which Jews excel—a world of desire to which there are no limits, an unending patience, and a silent and intentionally self-effacing intelligence. (Quddous, 2021, p. 10)

Lucy blatantly expresses self-serving motivations. Her conversion, sexual affairs, and marriage to wealthy Muslim men are the means to gratify her desire for wealth acquisition. To fulfill her desire, Lucy uses her intelligence and sexuality that are described by Quddous as attributes common to Jewish women. Zaki recalls how Jewish women have used their ingenuity to win the sympathy of rulers:

With their ingenuity, Jewish women can entrap kings and rulers to guarantee the safety and welfare of the Jewish people. For example, Safiyya, a Jewess, had married the Prophet Mohammed to save her tribe after defeat in battle, even though Safiyya was unable to maintain the Jewish character, and thus, the Jews do not count her among their holy women. (Quddous, 2021, pp. 72–73)

Quddous, in these lines, does not see Lucy’s actions as individualistic but links them to a perceived pattern indulged in by Jewish women, an anti-semitic idea widely prevalent in the Arab societies at the time, and unfortunately, even today.

Lucy has not achieved her wealth through honest and hard work but through selling herself and betraying her husband. It could be claimed that Quddous suggests that any person who attempts to move up through social order is doomed to be corrupt in the process. Quddous shows that dreams are achievable, but he problematizes such success by adding an illegal aspect to Lucy’s success. By following dishonest ways to achieve such success, Lucy serves the purpose of highlighting the novel’s underlying social criticism of the capitalist mindset prevalent among Jewish families or how it was perceived among the Arabs.

Lucy is a rebellious woman. She does not adhere to Jewish religious traditions. Jews are forbidden to do anything on Saturdays, even light fire or cook food. However, Lucy on Saturdays, lights all the lights in their home. She even rebels against Jewish food traditions. For example, Jews do not eat pork and rabbit meat but, Lucy eats pork and rabbit meat whenever they are offered to her. She does not like kosher foods and does not comply with the Jewish traditions and is not conversant with cultural values of her people. She never visits synagogues and criticizes the religious Jews whose lives are dominated by religion and believes that all those religious rites and traditions are the creation of rabbis. This sarcastic presentation of rabbis’ affirmation of their religious faith and devotion to Jewish practices is juxtaposed with a picture of an ambitious young girl straining to live as she wishes.

Further, rather than believing in God, she believes in her mind. When she comes back from Abdul Rahma Bek’s apartment, she passes by the synagogue and remarks: “God has endowed the Jews with minds that think and gain. He did not endow them with these misconceptions that the rabbis impose on them… God is the mind” (Quddous, 2021, p. 29). She resists the forces of her society to create her own identity, shape her destiny, and transform the world in which she lives. She is not a passive individual waiting to receive. Rather, she grabs opportunities and uses the available resources and means to diminish socio-economic ills, like poverty.

Throughout the novel, Lucy struggles with her conflicted identity. Her act of conversion introduces an element of ambiguity in the novel. By opening up the possibility of trespassing the borders or crossing over between categories, conversion undermines the stereotype rhetoric of Muslims and Jews. Gauri Viswanathan believes that conversion contains the potential to disrupt notions not only of identity but also of community and nation at large:

By undoing the concept of fixed, unalterable identities, conversion unsettles the boundaries by which selfhood, citizenship, nationhood, and community are defined, exposing these as permeable borders. Shifts in religious consciousness traverse the contained order of culture and subtly dislodge its measured alignments, belying the false assurance that only change from the outside has the power to disrupt. The indeterminacy of conversion poses a radical threat to the trajectory of nationhood. (Viswanathan, 1998, p. 16)

Lucy’s conversion represented as ambivalent is cast as expressions of desire; it is economically driven. To adopt Homi Bhabha’s term, it is also an expression of “mimetic desire” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 88), which possesses a disruptive possibility of blurring boundaries between ethnic groups. The novel has treated conversion as inherently incomplete; it further undermines the binary opposition established by the ethno-political stereotyping rhetoric by opening up the possibility of trespassing boundaries or crossing over categories. Conversion functions like Bhabha’s notion of “mimetic desire” concerning its potential to disturb or break down social categories or groups (Bhabha, 1994, p. 86). As with Bhabha’s concept of “in-between,” the ambivalence of Lucy’s identity is figured as a third space, it neither points to the origin identity nor the desired one.

Hence, in spite of conversion, Lucy remains unaccepted in Muslim society. She meets ladies and gentlemen and attends their parties only because she is Showkat’s wife. She is not genuinely personally liked. Despite her hard attempts to transcend the social order and religious borders, the absolute barriers make their dramatic presence felt everywhere: “She focused all her efforts on living her husband’s society … the high-class Muslim community … the community of the royal families, the families of the pashas and the Beys… But she began to notice that this society does not receive her except with her husband” (Quddous, 2021, p. 76). Men she knows very well from Stavrou ignore her in the club and coldly and formally greet her. Despite being a Muslim, for the Muslim community, she remains “a Jewish-Muslim woman” (Quddous, 2021, p. 10). This means that she is not a full Muslim. Upper-class Jewish people also dislike Lucy, and rich Jewish families ignore her, and whenever their eyes meet her, they look at her with disdain. Jewish and Muslim women despise her and take every opportunity to gossip about her. In brief, her conversion leads to her social seclusion in the two communities instead of social accommodation. However, she is able to preserve her strong personality although she has been abandoned by the Jewish community and been rejected by the Muslim community and belongs to neither of them (Quddous, 2021, p.76).

Toward the end of the novel, Lucy feels a state of emotional and mental decline and makes a last attempt to subdue the conflict inside her and assimilate both faiths into her being. She tries to connect her two identities through the name of her Muslim daughter, Hajar. She chose this name because she “wanted to give her daughter a name that would subsume under it all identities—her Jewish and Muslim identities. Hajar is a name given to Muslims, Jews and Christians” (Quddous, 2021, p. 80). Lucy’s choice of this name for her daughter, as Starr (2000) writes, “could represent a harkening back to an Egyptianness prior to the delineation of religions out of the early monotheism that Abraham/Ibrahim represents” (p. 75).

The story of Lucy points to two major themes relating to the portrayal of Jewess in Arabic literature: on the one hand, she is greedy, money-minded, exploitive, seductive, and a victimizer using her sexuality to manipulate people. Yet, on the other hand, she is intelligent, a loving mother, and pragmatic woman, traits commonly attributed to all Jews.

Where is My Jewish Friend? Transnationalism and Belonging

Unlike Lucy, the protagonist of Don’t Leave Me Here Alone, who abandons her people and faith, Gladys, the main character of Where is My Jewish Friend?, remains faithful to her people and religion. Where is My Jewish Friend? is a semi-autobiographical fictional narration of Quddous’ childhood in Al-Abbasiya and his friendship with Gladys, a Jewish girl growing up in Al-Abbasiya. Quddous’s text represents Egypt’s culture of co-existence to dispel the preconceptions about the persecution and marginalization of Egyptian Jews. Through this exploration of friendship, the story disturbs stereotyped binaries and troubles the lines between self and other.

Though the narrator belongs to an educated family and likes reading, he does not know French and therefore, does not read anything in French. Gladys, who knows French, always translates stories for him. Through her translation, he comes to know the famous French writer, Guy de Maupassant, who greatly impacts his writing. This mutual literary interest of Gladys and her friend prolongs their friendship, which is nearer to familial friendship as the two families are also friends. Though the two families belong to religiously different communities, nobody thinks about the religious differences:

And throughout our relationship, I never thought of her as Jewish. It did not occur to me to judge her by her religion. It is true that there were some social differences between Gladys’ family and other families in the neighborhood, but I never put those differences in religious terms. (Quddous, 1998, p. 7)

However, in spite of the religious tolerance that prevails in the Egyptian society, there are still some differences. For example, Gladys’ mother visits other ladies at their homes, but those ladies never visit her at her home. There are also certain occasions on which Gladys’ mother is not invited. However, this exclusion is not for being Jewish but rather for being a working woman. Even the narrator’s mother, despite being a Muslim, is also excluded by her family members because she works. All these differences Quddous attributes to social traditions and conventions and never to religion and shows how the members of the two communities have been victims of these traditions.

Quddous, in this short story, delineates the Jews as hardworking, educated, and diligent. Everyone in Glays’ family works. Gladys’ mother works as a tailor of women’s clothes. Her older sister works as a dancer in a nightclub. Her 16-year-old brother works in a jeweler’s shop and studies simultaneously. Her father works as a businessman. Gladys herself works as a teacher in a Jewish school. For this reason, the family astonishes him and fills him with awe and wonder. This strange social structure of the Gladys’ family is juxtaposed with the family structure of Muslim families in Al-Abbasiya. In Muslim families, girls are not allowed to work. It is “a scandal … a shame” (Quddous, 1998, p. 9). And boys have to continue their education until they graduate from university. No one works before graduation. It is a scandal for the family that it is not financially able to educate their children (Quddous, 1998, p. 9).

Quddous does not overlook the impact of the Arab-Israeli conflict on the life of Egyptian Jews. A friendship between the narrator and Gladys continues in spite of the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, they never talk about Palestine, Jews, or Arabs. And whenever he asks her opinion about Palestine and Israel, she avoids answering. However, things changed after 1948, and she stopped calling him as she used to. Finally, he is informed that she has immigrated to Israel. After many years, the narrator has a vacation in Madeira Island in the Atlantic Ocean. There he meets Gladys. She lives in Madeira and has three nationalities: Portuguese, French, and Israeli. She does not have any Egyptian papers to show her belonging to Egypt. However, his appearance unsettles her in such a way that she wishes he does not recognize her as it brings back the sweet memories of Egypt.

Loss of identity is one of the major themes, which Quddous tackles in this story. Gladys has multiple nationalities: Portuguese, French, and Israeli. She is caught in a transnational maelstrom of being a citizen of the world. She is now no longer Egyptian and holds a hybrid identity, a transnational citizen, a term which is always “connected to notions of border crossings,” and “of shedding old baggage” (Lemke, 2020, p. 77). Gladys is “lost in trans-nation” and finds herself confronted with a cosmopolitan offer consisting of bits and pieces of different cultural backgrounds assembled in the process of bricolage. In this frame, she loses her true identity as an Egyptian Jewess and becomes a universal citizen living everywhere but belonging to nowhere. The fact that she leaves Israel shows her loose affiliations that have been translated into unreliability and instability in her life and personal relations. Her affiliation to Judaism and longing for Zion seems to be an illusion and explains her determination to leave Israel to live on this isolated island. The constant moving between Africa, Asia, and Europe shows her total rootlessness. Hence, the short story explores the dialectical relationship between home and cosmopolitanism in the broader frame of the Arab-Jewish-Israeli perspective.

Gladys represents all the Jews of Egypt who dispersed worldwide after leaving Egypt in the 1940s and 1950s. With the establishment of Israel, Jews started “picking up the pieces in the aftermath of the great destruction and displacements experienced by Jews in the twentieth century” (Starr, 2009, p. 141). Ironically, Gladys does the opposite: she is shattered into pieces. And home, as a fixed place, turns out to be mobile, uprootable, and in constant flux, even if she lives in Madeira. Further, her multiple nationalities speak of her constant adventures and new beginnings away from her rooted home in Egypt. Her constant moving or flight shows her need and desire to escape and uncertainty, desperation, and loss. These trajectories of emigration and travel are not motivated by her wanderlust and thirst for exotic places and new shores but rather a forced movement to escape from the feeling of un-belonging.

Gladys’ fraught stories of escape and resettlement are necessarily transnational; they follow her as she flees into homelessness and, once transplanted, she seeks to regain a sense of her past and old identity. Through the reference to the multiple nationalities that Gladys has, the short story manages to create an impressive view by introducing a character who is constantly on the move and frequently crossing borders. She is now neither Egyptian, Israeli, Portuguese, nor French, or maybe all of them. The story seems to suggest that Egypt is the only home for Egyptian Jews, and the moment they think of leaving Egypt, even if for their newly established home, it will be a kind of living in diaspora and exile.

Although Gladys spent most of her adult life outside Egypt, she still feels attached to her Egyptian roots and retains a deep connection to Egyptian culture, norms, and customs. She longs for Egypt and her life there. When she meets her friend in Madeira, she recognizes him but never tries to talk to him and “wishes he will not recognize her” and when he asks her why she wishes this, she answers, “I prefer to keep my sweet memories in my mind and never expose them to reality because reality will squander their sweetness” (Quddous, 1998, p. 22). She desperately attempts to forget everything that connects her to Egypt, avoiding talking about or remembering the happy past she lived in Egypt, which is still alive inside her in spite of the long time. When asked why she does not return to Egypt, she replies: “Do you accept the return of an unfaithful wife” (Quddous, 1998, p. 23). He replies that such a wife may not have betrayed her husband but “rather raped or being seduced” (Quddous, 1998, p. 23).

The conversation between Gladys and the narrator shows her desire and dream to return to Egypt and the impossibility of fulfilling this dream due to the political tension between Arabs and Jews. As a Jewess, she believes that she is no longer accepted in Egypt. However, Gladys could not forget her Egyptianness, which, to use Modood’s (1998) words, is “frozen in time, impervious to external influences” (p. 378). This is seen not only in her longing for Egypt but also in her remembrance of Egyptian customs and traditions. She not only speaks to him in Arabic, but it is clear that the Arabic language remains vitally important for her. Gladys remains strongly tied to the Egyptian cultural world through memory and language. Though she purposely has rejected her Egyptian identity and left to join her co-religionists in the newly born state, she still embraces her Egyptianness represented by the Arabic language and Egyptian traditions.

I’m Free: Liberalism and Moral Corruption

I’m Free, one of Quddous’s most successful novels, was first published in 1954. It was reprinted four times in less than 5 years. The novel tackles one of the most controversial issues: women’s freedom, feminist discourse emerging in Muslim/Arab societies, and the new social dynamics. Because of its controversial theme, the novel “stirred up controversy, earning Quddous the title of an adept interpreter of modern-day Arab women’s aspirations and feelings” (Shakir, 2018b). The novel tells the story of a young girl, Amina, who embarks on a provocative journey defying the patriarchal authority of family and society while expressing her suffering at the hands of her extremely conservative aunt and uncle and the agonizing life in a household where everything a woman does is considered haram (forbidden). Due to their conservatism, Amina does not like living in her uncle’s house and struggles to be free. Amina proves to be a strong woman who is reluctant to compromise her rebellious nature. She takes control over her life, not caring for the consequences. It is a novel about a society in transition and a heroine who finds herself trapped between two entirely different worlds—the old and the new. Quddous, dispiritingly, but not surprisingly, tells the readers that, despite Amina’s success in taking charge of her fate or destiny, she, toward the end of the story, is still left feeling unfulfilled and empty inside.

In her rebellious adventures and attempts to chafe at the strictures she faces at home, Amina befriends Fortuné and Elie, her Jewish neighbors. She starts skipping her school classes to be part of their liberal world, and instead of classes at school, she is given dancing and French classes by Fortuné and her brother. The Jewish family represents the world Amina has been dreaming for. It is a liberal world where everything can be done, and it is through her liberal friends, Amina is introduced to life pleasures, such as dancing, pop music, parties, and riding in cars with boys.

Fortuné’s family is almost identical to Glady’s family; all the family members simultaneously work and study. Mary, the mother, works as a dressmaker. Fortuné, though she is still a student, gives private lessons in French to girls; and her brother, Elie, works in a bank and gives dance classes at the same time. Seeing the independence of this family, Amina “wonder[s] if she could ever be like them and make her own living” (Quddous, 1999, p. 57). In addition, the family “provides Amina a symbol for personal achievement through escape from the restrictive pressures of Muslim society” and she looks to her Jewish friends “for inspiration and as a model” (LeGassick, 1978, p. 77).

Quddous describe Fortuné as

tall, slim, and beautiful with seductive feminine eyes, a broad smile, and a brisk walk that rocked her entire body and shook her locks from right to left. She had no other sign of Jewishness except the delicate hook nose and two rather big ears. (Quddous, 1999, p. 56)

Amina is impressed by Fortuné, whose open and daring conversations “opened up new horizons” for her (Quddous, 1999, p. 57). Due to her aunt and uncle’s mistreatment and the conservative life at home, Amina sees Fortuné as a symbol of freedom and independence. The name Fortuné has been deliberately used by Quddous. Fortuné is a major deity among the ancient Romans and the Goddess of fortune and the personification of luck and holds charge of the fates of all humans. People’s fate and fortune were influenced by this Goddess. Regarding Amina, it could be claimed that her acquaintance with Fortuné has altered her fate and life. Undoubtedly, Amina’s rebellious nature is an innate attribute she possesses long before knowing Fortuné; however, Fortuné shows her the direction toward which she can turn her power and potentialities.

Fortuné and Elie are friendly and never look at Amina as different. They accept her in their lives, and though Fortuné and Elie get money in return for their classes, they do not ask Amina to pay because she is a friend. Gradually, Amina starts neglecting people and friends in Al-Abbasiya, making her ties with her Jewish friends stronger. Her contact with the Jewish lifestyle influences her: she starts fluently talking French like the Jews, a foreign language that gives her the feeling that she is free and bold in choosing the subjects “which no girl in Al-Abbasiya dare to speak about before marriage” (Quddous, 1999, p. 68). Amina starts getting pleasure and feels delighted to hear Fortuné speak about her boyfriend’s kisses, how he holds her in his arms, what he gives her, and what he promises her. Once they go on a trip and in the car, Fortuné is held tightly by her boyfriend, and their lips meet in “a long and hungry kiss making her lips disappear inside his” (Quddous, 1999, p. 69). It is the first time that Amina sees a real kiss, a kiss not on TV or cinema. She feels relishing from hearing Fortuné’s talks about sex and men and feels free like her friend Fortuné, who believes she has the right to give her body to whomever she wants. Fortuné gives everything she wants to whomsoever she likes without considering that she has lost anything (Quddous, 1999, p. 73). The novel presents Fortunéas an independent woman who can assert her own sexuality and reclaim her own body; she is the one who controls her own life.

Life in Al-Dhaher, where Amina now spends most of her time, is portrayed as a lewd life full of debauchery and immorality. Young men and women spend whole nights dancing and drinking. Rumors start circulating in Abbasiya about Amina’s mixing with young Jews. Muslim women start forbidding their daughters to mix with her, and older men express their repentance over her loss. They fear that the “immoral” Jewish lifestyle, shown to be more pervasive, may “corrupt” her. Young men in Abbasiya start plotting for revenge on Al-Dhaher young Jews because they feel ashamed that a Muslim girl from their neighborhood lives among Jews: “The honor of Abbasiya has been desecrated” (Quddous, 1999, p. 89). Here, the novel portrays the established stereotype of Jews being generally associated with sexuality, which is considered a threat by the larger society.

Fortuné is racially degraded and sexually stereotyped and is portrayed as an object of lust. The image of sexual desirability of a beautiful Jewish girl and a good and redeemed Muslim one has been stereotyped in Arabic literature, where Jewish females have a well-defined function—as sexual symbols. The sexual freedom that Fortuné is perceived to have makes Jewish sexuality a dark threat to the Muslim patriarchal values and their Islamic culture and morals. It is a traditional Muslim stance that would respond to the liberal behavior of Fortuné, which they feel may weaken the faith of Muslim girls and offer behavioral models that are inappropriate for a traditional Muslim woman. According to their estimation, Amina is pulled by the outside world where she does not have to worry about social and religious restrictions, a fact that may prompt other young girls to abandon the restricted life of Muslims and adopt a new and free culture that offers false happiness and lacks true spirituality of a faithful Muslim woman. Undoubtedly, freedom is tempting, but in Egypt, it traps women into being negatively evaluated in a power game dominated by men. Amina has crossed the boundaries from the permitted to the forbidden and beyond the community’s strict rules. It is also a crossing of social, religious, gender, and sexual boundaries and a broaching of taboo subjects, including the exposure of forbidden sexual desires.

In the larger context, Amina’s transgressive behavior demonstrates tensions, not between Jews and Muslims but between loyalty to the Muslim religion itself and the pull of agendas and ideologies, which encourage the independence of women in a society dominated by Islamic patriarchy. Furthermore, Amina as a rebellious girl, exemplifies the self-liberation of some Muslim women who break away from the Muslim family and traditions and rebel against the expectations and values of the Muslim community and the restrictions of Islam. Hence, besides providing an image of the different life among Muslims and Jews, Quddous describes transgressive behavior that resists the rigid rules of the Muslim family and critiques the social or sexual hypocrisy of the Muslim community.

The image of Jewish women from an Arab and Muslim perspective is negative. Muslim women, represented by Amina, are imprisoned by the socio-economic situation and have to be submissive and docile. Such submission of the female to the male gives a spiritual value equal in importance to human submission to God. They are marginalized by being muted. Further, until recently, they were not expected to work in the Arab world but rather had to fulfill the role of a traditional wife involved in housekeeping and bearing children. The Jewish girls, on the contrary, were stereotypically considered indifferent to morality. I’m Free is an attempt to highlight the differences between the two communities: the Muslim community in which women should be veiled and submissive members of the harem, and a speechless oppressed object with no identity and the Jewish community in which women are free, educated, and independent.

I’m Free is a story of co-existence and tolerance of various ethno-religious communities, particularly Muslims and Jews. The novel, in other words, is an expression of nostalgia for the eroded semblance of the cosmopolitan where individuals of different ethno-religious communities lived together and trespassed communal and religious boundaries that dominated the Egyptian scene before 1948. The novel was written in the 1950s, after the establishment of Israel and the dwindling of the Egyptian Jewish community due to migration to the newly established state. Before 1948, co-existence and religious tolerance were two of the remarkable features of Egyptian life. Amina used to be received by her Jewish friends as a family member and even joins their Jewish holy festivals, like Yom Kippur and Passover.

Analyses and Conclusion

Reading all these texts together, it can be argued that Quddous is the first Arab writer to introduce detailed portraits of Jewish women and gives them prominent roles in Arabic literature. He presents a negative image of Jewesses though he was known as a writer of moderate ideological convictions who is prone to observing life rather than to tendentious judgment. In Quddous’ fiction, Jewish women are more bodily, sexual, and the “other” and are treated as discursive stereotypes that seem to be imported or borrowed from world literatures without considering the imaginative process behind these constructions. Instead of seeing Jewish women as keys to understanding other cultures and traditions, they have been seen as a threat to the dominant culture and something that may spoil that culture. Quddous has portrayed Jewish women as the “other” to construct Arabness or Muslimness, undoubtedly with the help of denigrating the other. Jewish women are no longer portrayed as obedient, silent, demure, and occupying limited but socially acceptable spaces. Rather they are disobedient, greedy, and sexually uncontrolled. As LeGassick (1978) writes:

Criticism of faults in their (Jews’) character and behavior covers a broad spectrum, with the greatest emphasis placed on the cruelty and duplicity of Jewish men and the promiscuity of Jewish women. These characteristics are juxtaposed in many works with contrasting positive qualities in the actions and comments of Arab heroes and heroines. In them, the virtues of tolerance, honesty, self-sacrifice and chastity are stressed. (p. 80)

The image of Jewish women is seen in the larger frame of Egyptian Muslim culture or the dominating culture in which women are gentle, submissive, obedient, always perform standard domestic female functions, in total contrast to the Jewish women who are rebellious, sexual, assertive, and even bawdy.

Quddous’s accounts of Egyptian Jewish women give readers a complete idea of how Jewish women in Egypt accommodated and participated in developing and protecting their community. While histories on Jews of Egypt point to the significance of political events, Quddous puts Jewish women at the center of his narratives, narrates their experiences, and highlights the everyday world of Jewish families. These narratives provide readers with a glimpse into the evocative worlds of Jewish families and provide the key to understanding their experiences in Egypt. They also speak of a series of issues that post-colonial feminist and gender studies constantly debate: women’s struggle for liberation and freedom in patriarchal societies, their role in social orders and in preserving the cultural heritage of their homeland, and how their lives are shaped by the political, cultural, and social engagement. These stories are salvaging fragments of Jewish life in Egypt as witnessed by Quddous, providing readers with a better understanding of how Egyptian Jewish women continue to organize and observe the Jewish traditional culinary celebrations and sacraments, such as births, weddings, funerals, and religious rites. Further, they are not isolated in women’s quarters or in harem as Muslim women are. The Jewish woman is educated and liberal as compared to the Muslim woman, who is conservative and adherent to religion.