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Miral Mahgoub al-Tahawy
Miral al-Tahawy is an award-winning Egyptian novelist and short story
writer, and an affiliated member of the Virginia G. Piper Center for
Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, AZ, where
she is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Head of
Classics and Middle Eastern Studies at the School of International Letters
and Cultures (SILC).
She earned her Ph.D. from Cairo University, in Arabic language and
literature. Her dissertation, “The Arabic Desert Novel: The Sacred and
Its Forms in Pastoral Imagination,” focuses on social, political, and
religious tribal taboos in modern Arab novels.
Miral was a Fulbright International Scholar at Columbia University.
She was awarded two years post-doctoral research and a teaching
fellowship at New York University. She was also an international
visiting scholar in the Department of Foreign Languages, Appalachian
State University, Boone, NC; the Middlebury College Intensive Language
Program, Middlebury VT; the Monterey Institute of International Studies,
Monterey, CA; and the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian
Languages and Cultures (MESALC), University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, VA.
Her academic research interests cover a wide area, including Arabic
literature, gender issues, and feminist movements, with particular
attention to the tribal desert novel, Bedouin folk tradition, oral poetry, and
modern Arab women’s writing.
Miral has published two scholarly books in Arabic. The first,
Muharramat, Qabaliah (Tribal taboos: Aesthetics and the artistic
formation of the Arabic desert novel; Beirut, 2008), explores implications
of the image of the sacred pastoral landscape in the Arabic novel, the
ways in which many Arabic novels represent it, and the symbolic forms
that desert spaces take in embodying various cultures’ identities in Arabic
writings.
The second, Kitabet Al Mohramat Fi Al Riwayaa Al Arabia Al Nisaia
(Across the generations: Arab women and taboos in Arabic literature;
Cairo/Beirut: Al Dar Al Masriah Al Lubnaniah [Egyptian Lebanese
Publishing House], fall 2016), looks into the social polemics of receiving
and accepting texts in the Arabic world, how these texts crisscross with
religious, social, and political taboos, and the ensuing problems of
censorship, banning, and confiscation. It offers an overview of major
works in modern Arabic literature that have provoked confrontations with
state power, with readers themselves, or with religiously motivated
groups.
Miral has published nine refereed book chapters in English on
contemporary Arab women’s writing within the contexts of social taboos,
gender issues, women’s bodies and sexuality in modern Arabic literature,
and the literary writing of ethnic minorities, including marginalized Arab
groups such as the Bedouins and the Tuareg. Among these are:
“Reverence of the Beloved in Sufi Tradition: A Study of the Image
of the Beloved in Arabic Women’s Writings.” In The
Beloved in Middle East Literature: The Culture of Love and
Languishing, ed. Alireza Korangy, Hanadi al-Samman, and
Michael Beard. London: I. B. Tauris Publishing House, fall
2016.
“Timbuktu, the Legendary City and the Tuareg’s Legacy: A Study
of the Novel Magi (Al -Majus) by the Libyan Writer Ibrahim
Al-Koni.” In The City in Pre-Modern and Modern Arabic
Literature, ed. Nizar Hermes and Gretchen Head.
Edinburgh/London: The Centre for Visual Anthropology at
Goldsmiths, fall 2016.
“Women’s Writing in the Land of Prohibitions: A Study of Alifa
Rifaat and the Female Body Protest as a Tool for Rebellion.”
In Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures, ed. Gul
Ozyegin. London: Ashgate Publishing House, 2015.
“Women’s Writing as a Question of Feminism.” In Min Fami:
Arab Feminist Reflections on Identity, Resistance, and
Space, ed. Ghadeer Malek and Ghaida Moussa. Toronto:
Inana Publishing House, 2014.
As a literary figure Miral was named “One of the Most Influential
Writers of the Oriental World” by Zenith (a German magazine), in
2009, and one of most powerful Middle Eastern writers by Forbes
magazine in 2014.
Her literary work is recognized and cited by other academics in Middle
East Studies both for its literary merit and its utility in discussing
literature in translation and women’s writing as a form/genre in Arab
society. She has written four award-winning novels, each of which has
garnered national and international recognition. Most are now taught
around the world as part of standard curricula in Arabic literature in
translation. Her literary work has now been translated into more than 15
world languages.
Her creative work include Al-Khibaa (The Tent), which came out in 1996.
It focuses on women and Bedouin life in Egypt, and was selected as the
best literary work in English translaton by the American University of
Cairo. It became a bestseller. The novel was published in Arabic in more
than six editions. The Tent was translated into English, French, Italian,
German, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Hindi, Urdu, Dutch, and 14 other
languages.
Al-Bazingana Al-Zarka’a (Blue Aubergine) followed in 2000 and is about
the 1980s Islamic uprising in Egypt. For this book, Miral won the
Egyptian National Prize. She is the first female novelist to do so. Like
The Tent, Blue Aubergine was translated into several foreign languages,
including English, French, German, Danish, and Italian.
Miral’s third novel, Nakarat El-Zeba’a (Gazelle Tracks), is a historical
novel about Bedouin families in Egypt at the beginning of the nineteenth
century; it traces the changes in women’s lives through this time. Gazelle
Tracks won Best Novel of the Year at the Cairo Book Fair and was
translated into many languages.
Miral’s fourth novel, (Brooklyn Heights), released in Arabic 2010, is an
intimate look at a woman’s sudden immersion into American culture. It
was awarded the 2010 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature at the
American University in Cairo. The English translation of Brooklyn
Heights, published in 2011 by Faber and Faber in the UK, was chosen as
the Best Translated Arabic book and was shortlisted for the “Arabic
Booker” Prize, an international prize for Arabic fiction.