The Contribution of Arabic Literature to World Literature: Radwa Ashour’s Siraaj a Case in Point

Radwa Ashour identifies herself as an Arab woman and a Third World citizen (“My Experience with writing” 170). Throughout her career she has also consciously referred to her upbringing in the Cairo of the fifties and the sixties and her early schooling in a French school where teachers and students were predominantly French, and made her and her other Egyptian classmates feel inferior (“Tajrubati fil Kitaba” 121). She is also a graduate and later a scholar/ academic of English literature, in addition to the fact that she earned her PhD from the University of Massachusetts in the USA. This biographical snapshot is not meant introduce Ashour. It is rather meant to give a brief idea of the rich experience she had and to reflect on Ashour’s existence –by virtue of her background, historical moment, education, and choice – between the Arabic speaking world and the English speaking world in various capacities. Given her makeup as a person, academic and writer, and based on personal choices, Ashour was also an ‘oppositional’ and ‘worldly’ intellectual in the Saidian sense of the term. According to Edward Said, the critic/ criticism is “worldly and in the world so long as it opposes monocentrism, a concept …[Said] understand[s] as working in conjunction with ethnocentrism, which licenses a
The Contribution of Arabic Literature to World Literature:
x I (84)
culture to cloak itself in the particular authority of certain values over others” (53). This was part of the larger endeavor of Radwa Ashour. The themes of her writings – fiction and non-fiction – reflect this deep consciousness of the questions relevant to her own society, but are expressive of universal values as well [1]. Thus, this paper argues that Ashour’s works are not only a milestone in Egyptian literature but are also part of the world literature tradition.