Aisha Taymur

Aisha Taymur (1840–1902), in full Aisha E'ismat Taymur, Arabic 'A'isha al-Taymuriyya, was an Egyptian poet and writer who composed in Arabic, Turkish and Persian, and is regarded as one of the pioneers of modern Arabic women's writing. ^{1 2}

Writing from inside an elite household of state and letters, she argued for women's rights on the ground of rights she held Islam had granted them, mourned her daughter in elegies ranked among the finest of the modern age, and took up her pen against Qasim Amin's call for unveiling. ^{1 2}

Taymur was born in a palace in Darb Saada, in Cairo's Darb al-Ahmar — then a quarter of the aristocracy — into an Egyptian family of Turco-Kurdish origin from Iraqi Kurdistan; her father, Isma'il Pasha Taymur, headed the Khedivial diwan's foreign bureau and then the diwan itself, and her mother Mahtab Hanum was a Circassian freed slave. ^{2 1}

Her mother tried to teach her embroidery, as girls were taught, but her father understood her bent for reading and brought her two tutors, one for Persian and one for the Arabic sciences; Taymur's own account, quoted in the Arabic article, tells how she fled the embroidery tools "as prey flees the net", loved "the scratching of the pen on paper", and heard her father tell her mother: "Leave this child to paper and pen" — adding that if his daughter Ismat became a writer and poet it would bring him mercy after his death. ^{2 1}

Her father educated her in the Quran, Islamic jurisprudence, Arabic, Turkish and Persian, and taught her composition; she voiced her anger at segregation in poems at thirteen, and her education was necessarily confined to the home, as for women of her time in Egypt. ¹

At fourteen, in 1854, Taymur married — the Arabic article names him Muhammad Bey Tawfiq al-Islambuli, the English article Mahmud Bey al-Islambuli; the discrepancy is recorded — and moved with him to Istanbul, where she studied with two women teachers learned in grammar, morphology and prosody until she excelled, mastering poetic composition in Arabic alongside her Turkish and Persian. ^{2 1}

She assumed the education of her brother Ahmed Pasha Taymur, whose father had died when he was two; she raised and taught him until he became a leading researcher and novelist of the Arab literary revival, and she was aunt to the playwright Muhammad Taymur and the novelist Mahmud Taymur. ^{2 1}

In 1873 her daughter Tawhida died at twelve of an unknown illness; Taymur mourned her for seven years, weeping until her sight weakened and she fell out of poetry and literature, and she burned all her poems except a few; her elegies for Tawhida are considered the best in that genre in modern times. ^{2 1}

Her father died in 1882 and her husband in 1885, which prompted her return to Egypt, where she resumed her writing and studied poetic composition with female tutors. ¹

Taymur wrote poetry in Arabic, Turkish and Persian: her Arabic diwan Hilyat al-tiraz [Decorative Embroidery] was published in Cairo in 1884, and she also left a Persian diwan printed in Egypt, Istanbul and Iran. ^{2 1}

Her prose includes Nata'ij al-ahwal fi-l-aqwal wa-al-af'al [The Consequences of Circumstances in Words and Deeds] (1887), printed in Egypt and Tunis, the novel al-Liqa ba'd al-shatat [The Meeting after Dispersion], and another novel left unfinished in her hand. ^{2 1}

In her sixteen-page booklet Mir'at al-ta'ammul fi al-umur [The Mirror of Contemplation] (1892), she reinterpreted the Quran to suggest it was markedly less patriarchal in its requirements of Muslims than was traditionally thought. ¹

She deliberately used the word insan, "human being", rather than "man", so that readers would weigh her argument as a human being's and not by her sex, and she used imagery of female solitude to make the life of women in Egypt visible to her readers. ¹

This section reports positions as the sources give them; it is not the museum's verdict.

In articles published in the journals al-Adab and al-Mu'ayyad, Taymur opposed the views of Qasim Amin and his call for unveiling (sufur) — although she was herself among the earliest campaigners for women's rights and education, her pen stood in the opposing camp to Muhammad Abduh's disciple on the question of the veil specifically. ²

In the assessment of Mervat Fayez Hatem, quoted in the English article, Taymur used fiction, social commentary and poetry to expand the definition of the nation-building process to include different social classes, ethnic groups and women of different generations and nationalities, putting her narrow class roots into the service of the larger community, and so deserved the title "the Finest of Her Class" — one translation of her diwan's title, Hilyat al-tiraz. ¹

Modern literature calls her the "mother of Egyptian feminism": her works came out amid a socioeconomic transformation in which Egyptian women were realising they were being deprived of some of the rights Islam gave them, and she worked with other female intellectuals and activists to campaign for education, do charitable work and challenge colonialism. ¹

In 1898 Taymur fell ill with a disease of the brain that lasted four years, until she died in Cairo in 1902. The sources conflict on the day in May: the Arabic article gives 2 May in one passage and 25 May in another, and Wikidata gives 26 May 1902, so the museum record dates the death by year only and records the conflict. ^{2 3}

• English Wikipedia article on Aisha Taymur (revision 1368939201); Arabic Wikipedia article (revision 76373228); Wikidata item Q2876220. The two encyclopedias differ on her husband's name (Muhammad Bey Tawfiq al-Islambuli in the Arabic article; Mahmud Bey al-Islambuli in the English), and the Arabic article is internally inconsistent on her day of death. No source names a school of Islam for her, and Wikidata records no religion for her at all.