Literary Representations of Female Identity: 

Feminisms in Arab-Muslim Societies and 

Clashing Paradigms on Conceptions of 

Modernity, Tradition, and Selfhood 

Safoi Babana-Hampton 

Abstract 

The essay examines the texts of the two women writers - Leila 

Abouzeid (from Morocco) and Nawal El Saadawi (from Egypt) 

- as offering two female perspectives within what is commonly

referred to as "feminine" writing in the Arab Muslim world. My

main interest is to explore the various discursive articulations of

female identity that are challenged or foregrounded as a positive

model. The essay points to the serious pitfalls of some feminist

narratives in Arab-Muslim societies by dealing with a related

problem: the author's setting up of convenient conceptual

dichotomies, which account for the female experience, that

reduce male-female relationships in the given social context to a

fundamentally antagonistic one. Abouzeid's novel will be a case

study of a more positive but also realistic and complex perspec­

tive on female experience.

Introduction 

The question of Muslim identity in the face of shifting cultural paradigms 

has long been at the heart of the debate on modernity and tradition in the 

Arab-Muslim world. As suggested by the epigrammatic words of Foucault 
and al-Ghazzali above, these shifting cultural paradigms revolve (among 

other things) around changing perceptions of the (female) body as a locus of 

identity. In Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point 'Zero' and Leila Abouzeid's 

Safoi Babana-Hampton is a doctoral student of French literature at the University of 
Maryland, College Park. Maryland.