Doria Shafik

Al-Ghazali’s contemporary Doria [pronounced Dorriya] Shafik (1908–1975) was in many ways her exact opposite. Where al-Ghazali’s home environment nurtured in her a powerful sense of the rich resources, the repleteness, of the Islamic heritage, Shafik’s underscored the superiority of the West and, at least by implication, the inferiority of the native. Shafik attended a kindergarten run by Italian nuns and at the age of eight was sent away from home to live with her grandmother in Tanta, so that she could attend the French mission school there—which her mother had attended—rather than the local Arabic school. Shafik’s mother’s family was, according to the daughter, “an old upper-bourgeois Egyptian family which had lost most of its fortune”; her father, of “a less well-known family,” was a government employee. On graduating, with brilliant distinction, Shafik was set on attending the Sorbonne, though by this time— 1930—women had just begun attending the university in Egypt. Her father, who could not afford to send her, encouraged her to pursue her idea of presenting her case to Shaʿrawi. Shaʿrawi responded with an invitation to meet and informed her that she would arrange a scholarship for her.

Shafik’s account of the interview reveals how her desire was focused not merely on continuing her education but on studying abroad—in the West— and it reveals how her adulation of the West was charged with an emotional intensity. Shaʿrawi welcomed her with “such charm and simplicity” that Shafik, who had lost her mother when she was eleven, at once felt in her “a warmth that resembled that of a mother ... a mother who would take my hand and guide me towards my future.” Her account of the scene continues: “She saw how moved I was and did everything to make me feel at ease. ... ‘I am happy to see you are so smart,’ she said; I am pleased that a girl of your standard will represent Egypt abroad.’ ‘Then you think my departure is possible?’ I asked. ‘Why not? Tomorrow someone will speak about you to the Minister of Education.’ She saw so much emotion and gratitude on my face that she asked me: ‘Why this ardent desire to study abroad?’... I was near to tears. She noticed it and without waiting for the answer, quickly changed the subject” Shafik did go abroad for her studies and returned with a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1940. She taught briefly at the Alexandria College for Girls and at the Sannia School, then was a French-language inspector for the Ministry of Education, after which she left this job for journalism. She founded three women’s magazines, including one with Dr. Ibrahim ʿAbdu, the feminist journal Bint al-Nil (Daughter of the Nile), which appeared continuously from 1945 to 1957, when it was closed down by Nasser, who also placed Shafik under house arrest. The editorials that Shafik wrote were, to begin with, hesitant in their demands for equality for women; she was aware that such demands might endanger women’s right to male economic support and that addressing them would entail finally resolving the question of who was responsible for the home. By 1948, however, her resolve was firm, and she founded the Bint al-Nil Union with the object of obtaining “full political rights for women.” She immediately affiliated the new organization with the International Council of Women, under the name the National Council for Egyptian Women, and was thereupon elected to the executive committee of the parent group. Because there were numerous women’s organizations in Egypt by this point, others resented and contested Shafik’s thrusting herself and her organization forward as representing all women’s organizations, and the issue was publicly aired in the press of the day.

The Bint al-Nil Union took its first militant action in 1951, when Shafik led a thousand women in a demonstration at the Egyptian parliament, disrupting its session for three hours. They only dispersed when the presidents of both chambers promised to support their feminist demands. The action provoked outrage among the Islamic conservatives. The head of the Union of Muslim Associations in Egypt (which included the Muslim Brethren) sent a cable of protest to the king, demanding that he abolish women’s organizations that called for participation in politics, that he force women to return to their homes, and that he enforce the use of the veil.

Shafik’s union even had its own paramilitary unit of two hundred women who had received military training. In 1952, in the series of strikes and demonstrations that began on January 16, when students and others made clear their opposition to the government, to the king, and to the British, the paramilitary unit also joined in the action, surrounding Barclay’s Bank and preventing employees and others from entering. Not long before, Shafik had heard a lecture on women in India emphasizing that women’s liberation accompanied and followed from their struggle for national liberation, and thought the gesture against British domination would generate popular support. The British responded to the general disturbances, which included students’ openly displaying arms and using them against the police, by deciding to occupy Cairo. When the British ordered the police to surrender their weapons, they refused, so the British destroyed the police compound and decimated its Egyptian defenders—over fifty police were killed and many more wounded. The next day, January 26, the mobs burned Cairo.

The government introduced martial law and scrambled to regain control. The king appointed al-Nahhas military governor-general of the country, then abruptly dismissed him. Another strong man of politics, ʿAli Maher, formed an independence government, which resigned on March 1. Parliament was dissolved and elections postponed indefinitely. It is in the context of this general instability that a military coup, on July 23, 1952, terminated the monarchy, exiled King Farouk, and brought Nasser to power.

The Free Officers, who had carried out the revolution, did not have a clear ideological or political agenda upon taking power but developed it as they consolidated their control. Their first declared objective was the expulsion of the British, and they immediately began negotiations for the evacuation of the canal zone. Domestically, the direction of their policy was suggested by the introduction, in 1952, of the agrarian reform laws limiting individual ownership of land to two hundred fedans. To eliminate possible opposition from the Brethren and the Wafd, all political parties were dissolved and banned in 1953. The monarchy was abolished, and Egypt was declared a republic. In 1954 an agreement was signed with Britain arranging British withdrawal from the Suez Canal but allowing Britain to use it as a base in case of war. In October, when Nasser was making a speech about the agreement, a Muslim Brother attempted to assassinate him—the Muslim Brethren had criticized him continually. The leaders were arrested, six were executed, and thousands were thrown into prison. In 1956 a new Constitution was promulgated; it replaced the parliamentary system with a presidential republican system. It defined Egypt as a democratic republic and—a novel element—as an Arab state forming an integral part of the Arab nation and committed to socialist economic and social policies. In 1956, too, in response to the abrupt withdrawal of a British and American loan for financing the High Dam project, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. The response to this was the Tripartite Aggression: the British, French, and Israeli invasion of Egypt. An international outcry—including a U.S. denunciation of the action, in terms suggesting that the Western powers were acting in a colonialist fashion, and a Russian threat to use force—ended the aggression. For the Arab world, and the larger third world, Nasser emerged from these events as a symbol of the struggle against Western domination.

Shafik continued her campaign for women’s political rights during these events. In March 1954 a constitutional assembly was formed to adopt or reject a proposed new constitution, an assembly that included no women. Shafik felt that excluding them threatened them: “Lacking women, the Assembly might adopt a constitution in which women’s rights were not guaranteed. ... I decided to play the last card. I decided to go on a hunger strike to death for ‘women’s full political rights’.” She proceeded with her hunger strike, taking care to ensure that it would receive wide attention. She sent cables to the major leaders in Egypt and to Egyptian and foreign press agencies, stating that her objective was full political rights for women and declaring, “I protest against the formation of a Constitutional Assembly without women’s representation. I will never agree to be ruled by a constitution in the preparation of which I had no say.” She was joined in her strike by fourteen other women in Cairo and by members of the Bint al-Nil Union in Alexandria. The governor of Cairo was dispatched to inform her that the new Egyptian constitution would guarantee full political rights for women. Shafik asked him to put this in writing. He replied, “But Madame Shafik, I cannot ask the government to put this in writing. It is impossible.” She then asked him to put in writing what he had been sent to announce. The governor agreed, and the strike ended. Shafik was gratified by this outcome and by the comment her action had drawn in the international press. She wrote the following month in Bint al-Nil that the press perceived the action “with what it implied of meanings greater and more profound even than the rights of women ... the strength of the democratic trend and the rooting of a new popular consciousness in Egypt... the consciousness that could tolerate no longer to be patient about rule with no parliament, no constitution, no freedom.”

The 1956 Constitution granted women the vote, yet it limited the right to vote to women who asked for it, a condition that was not applied to men. Shafik filed a legal protest, declaring that the Bint al-Nil Union refused to accept a “fragment” of political rights. In 1957 she made a further, dramatic protest. She announced to President Nasser and the Egyptian and foreign press that she was going on a hunger strike to the death to protest “against the infringement of my human freedom on two fronts—the external and the internal: (1) the Israeli occupation of Egyptian land [Israel took its time about withdrawing from the Sinai after the Tripartite Aggression] and (2) the onset of dictatorship that is leading Egypt into bankruptcy and chaos,” and to carry out her threat, she went to the Indian Embassy. This was Shafik’s last public stand. Her associates at Bint al-Nil forced her to resign and, along with all other women’s associations in Egypt, publicly denounced her as a traitor. Nasser placed her under house arrest and closed down the Bint al-Nil Union and journal. Shafik continued to write but underwent several mental breakdowns, which culminated in her suicide in 1976.

Shafik’s gestures seem overdramatic and disproportionate, and her arrogant and contemptuous attitude toward Nasser is astonishing in its miscalculation and misreading of the political realities of her society. Nasser, abhorred in the West and especially in Britain, where he was regarded as an upstart dictator, was a national hero at home, and in protesting his dictatorship, Shafik was playing to the wrong—Western—gallery. In Egypt, where he was a hero, it was political suicide not to at least pay lip service to that dogma. Many of Shafik’s political gestures, and the last most particularly, seemed to have been conceived and enacted with a Western audience in mind. Her immediate denunciation by her associates reflects the repressive atmosphere created by the regime, her associates presumably deeming it necessary for their own political survival to instantly denounce her as a traitor. Yet perhaps there was more at stake than immediate political survival, for denouncing her was in effect to collaborate with the regime in silencing radical criticism. Whether Shafik’s gestures and criticisms were politically astute or not, they drew attention to genuine transgressions on the part of a regime growing more brutally repressive toward its critics every day; the society would doubtless have been healthier and state abuses perhaps somewhat curbed had there been many more Doria Shafiks.

Shafik and al-Ghazali are contrasting figures in some obvious ways. Al- Ghazali was tenaciously committed to indigenous culture and to pursuing feminism—or, at any rate, female subjectivity—in indigenous terms, and Shafik consistently exemplified, in her pursuit of education and Western-style feminist goals and in her public actions, a sense of the superiority of the West. The two appear also to have had contrastingly constituted personalities, in ways perhaps not unrelated to the different attitudes toward indigenous culture that imbued their childhood. Whereas al-Ghazali’s life bespeaks a powerful self-confidence, an ability to rise to each new situation and negotiate it with astuteness to further her purpose, to always function with assurance, surviving imprisonment and torture and emerging the more determined, Shafik’s life in almost every sense exemplifies the opposite. Shafik’s postures vacillated between arrogance and timidity. In spite of her undeniable brilliance, she was singularly inept at accurately gauging the political and social realities of her world and seems often to have been at odds with that world. In the end she apparently underwent personal disintegration when faced with the tribulations that the Nasser regime inflicted on her. Shafik was, to be sure, an inwardly reflective individual, an intellectual, and a writer, with several books of poetry and prose (published in France) to her credit. The differences between the two women pointed to here are noted, not to diminish the fragile, reflective, and anguished consciousness in favor of the self-assured and determined, but rather to perhaps represent contrasting models of the possible psychological consequences of colonization and the ways in which these intertwined with and affected the feminist vision that a woman embraced and articulated. Al- Ghazali’s conviction of the superiority of her culture, a conviction vigorously nurtured in childhood, is replicated psychologically as an unshakable sense of her own worth and a firm inner solidity—and a determination to find feminism within Islam. It stands in contradistinction to the adulation of the West and the disparagement of the native, implied or explicit, that formed Shafik’s background and informed her childhood and was perhaps replicated psychologically as an internalized self-hatred and self-rejection (of the native in herself) and as a divided, disintegrative sense of self, with the inevitable agonies that must follow from a consciousness divided against itself.

It should not be concluded, however, that biculturalism in a colonized subject necessarily entails the internalization of a sense of the superiority of the colonizer’s culture or that it necessarily results in an unstable, divided sense of self. Nor should it be concluded that the combination of feminism with biculturalism entails the internalization of a sense of colonial superiority or results in a precarious sense of self. Neither appears to have formed elements in Inji Efflatoun’s life: she was bicultural, and she, too, was subjected to hardships by the regime—in her case, for her communist activities. She continued to paint during her imprisonment (1959–63), taking her fellow prisoners for her subject and creating a powerful record of women in prison.