Lucia Sorbera, Biography of a Revolution. The Feminist Roots of Human Rights in Egypt (University of California Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Lucia Sorbera (LS): In 2011, I started dividing my life between Italy (my native country and where I received most of my schooling and university education), Australia (where I migrated with a young family to take up a lectureship in Arabic studies at the University of Sydney), and Egypt. I had been visiting Egypt regularly since the early 2000s, first as an Arabic learner and then to conduct archival research and fieldwork. In 2011, the interest in the Egyptian revolution was widespread, and I was invited to present my work both in Italian and Australian universities, as well as commenting for the media in both countries. This exposed me very early to the imbalance between what I was experiencing in Egypt—a blossoming of women’s political activism that was rooted in a very deep history—and its misrepresentations in the so-called West, where media and, in many ways, also academics (including many feminists) were representing it as a new phenomenon.
I had the intuition that, notwithstanding decades of Middle East feminist scholarship, a high level of obliviousness about Egyptian women’s history continues to permeate both the intellectual and the public sphere, resulting both in the erasure of women from the academic analyses of the Egyptian revolution and the reproduction of orientalist tropes in the media about Egyptian women. Women’s erasure was preventing a holistic understanding of the larger revolutionary process in Egypt, never mind its global and historical relevance, and it needed to be addressed. This motivated me to write this book: my intellectual frustration at the tenor of both the academic and the public debate was turned into creativity thanks to the energy I had felt, experiencing firsthand the Egyptian feminist fields in all their expressions—grassroots, political, intellectual, and creative-and reading deeply into the scholarship dedicated to it.
In other words, this book is both a homage to the feminist scholarship (and especially historiography) about Egypt that has been produced since the late 1960s, and to the extraordinary genealogy of women’s activism in Egypt in the twentieth and the twentieth-first centuries. In some ways, the book is also an archive of feminist scholarship and memories.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
LS: Biography of a Revolution is structured across thirteen chapters and divided into three thematic parts, throughout which it offers a sustained analysis of women’s influences on Egypt’s intellectual and political debates from the late nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on foundational feminist historiography and expanding its scope through decolonial and Indigenous epistemologies, the book foregrounds the experiences and ideas of successive generations of women political activists, offering a contrapuntal reading of Egyptian political history that repositions women from the margins to the center of the narrative. The biographies of the intellectuals and the activists included in the volume are not exhaustive nor merely exemplary but echo a larger feminist project (this is the meaning of collective biography in this book) and foreground the entanglements between feminist praxis and broader political imaginaries, situating Egyptian feminist thought as both a product and a producer of global intellectual currents. My decolonial approach is reflected in the choice and the analyses of the themes, where I am following the criteria of historical, geographical, and cultural contextualization, which means that for each period I study the issue that (according to my sources—a blend of archival, published, and oral history) is considered a priority by women who work on the ground. The first decades of the twentieth century focused on the intersection between nationalism, anti-colonial activism, and women’s political rights. Then I move into the post-WWII period, when the workers’ movement was more prominent, and I investigate women’s participation in it. The late 1960s and 1970s witnessed a growing militancy of women in the ranks of the student movement, and later in the 1980s, also the underground Marxist movement, which articulates socio-economic requests with an anti-imperialist agenda. The season of transnational feminism, the international conferences on women, and the development of women’s NGOs produced a focus on women’s bodily rights in the 1980s and the 1990s, and a stronger focus on human rights activism as well. I argue that women’s understudied and underestimated leading roles in the human rights movement are both a product of this century-long feminist genealogy and a primary root of the revolutionary process that emerged in 2011 and, in my view, is still boiling under the ashes of the January 2011 eighteen days. This is what I mean when I claim that women’s political activists, with their defiance, created the space that allowed the Egyptian revolution to happen. In doing so, Biography of a Revolution advances feminist critiques of nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, Marxism, and revolutionary thought from a southern epistemological standpoint.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
LS: I am a feminist historian, specializing in Arabic, Islamic, and Middle East studies. This book deepens and expands my PhD research, which was a comparative analysis of Egyptian and Italian women’s emancipationist movements in the interwar period (1920s to 1940s). At that time, I was inspired by the work of the historian Margot Badran, especially her monograph Feminists, Islam and Nation. Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt, and by Victoria De Grazia’s How Fascism Ruled Women: 1922-1945. When I learned about the International Women Suffrage Alliance’s Congress of 1923, which was held in Rome and for which an Egyptian delegation participated for the first time, I started digging in Italian, Egyptian, and European women’s archives to learn more about the experience of women’s internationalism, and especially the tensions between the concept of international sisterhood, colonialism, and, later, imperialism, as narrated by women who had been part of it. This academic background encouraged me to develop critical approaches to Eurocentric feminism, and to look at Egyptian and more broadly Arab feminism as a space of knowledge production, creative imagination, and social experimentation.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
LS: When I wrote the book, I had in mind a broad readership. I certainly wanted to be in conversation with academics working on and in Egypt, and especially Egyptian feminist scholars. This has thankfully occurred, as I had the opportunity to discuss the book with a group of researchers at CEDEJ in Cairo, and I am planning others with Egyptian colleagues both in Egypt and in the diaspora. University students are also my audience, and many of them have already approached me to run reading groups and seminars about the stories collected in Biography of a Revolution. Last but not least, I was happy to notice that the first to critically engage with the book were transnational creative writers (the very first review was by Jasmin Attia, for Markaz, and the Australian-Egyptian-Palestinian writer Jumaana Abdou offered a powerful reading of the book at the launch in Sydney) and literary bloggers and podcasters. This is an audience I was hoping but was not necessarily expecting to be able to reach; doing so confirms the power of women’s stories. The stories of the human rights defenders I narrate in this book, which are stories of immense sacrifice but also of joy, pride, and profound and long-lasting friendship, can have a huge impact on the ways decision makers and producers of knowledge (especially the media) look at Egypt and the Arab world. Women’s history is at the core of this political project. I conceived of this book as a project that positions Egyptian women at the center of both Egyptian and international politics, and I hope that the readers will feel inspired by the stories of these human rights defenders and that, in a historical conjuncture of deep crisis in human rights (both as an international law tool and as a social movement), they will find inspiration in revamping them.
J: What were the main challenges you have met while working on this book?
LS: Living a transnational life comes with a mix of privileges and burdens. I had to learn how to negotiate my commitment to different spaces, communities, and affects. Distance from the fieldwork was certainly a major challenge and, during the pandemic, the border politics adopted by Australia, paired with the austerity measures implemented by my university, cut me off from my fieldwork, intellectual network, and close family and friends for eighteen months. This was intellectually and emotionally difficult to manage, and it slowed down my work.
Another significant challenge was to gain trust in the field of feminist activism. It has taken time. This should not come as a surprise, given the dangerous space Egyptian women have always been operating. Let’s not forget that Egypt is under military rule and the spaces of political activism and dissidence, which are at the core of my research because women are at the core of them, are repressed and policed. I had to learn how to navigate spaces that could be dangerous for my interlocutors and friends, always keeping in mind that I was the one in a position of privilege and that, if the women I was close to were taking care of me, I also had a major duty of care for them, because they, as Egyptian citizens, were far more vulnerable than me. Trust is also difficult to gain because there are a lot of extractivist practices among scholars. Long-term and deep engagement, respect, and care have shaped not only my research practice but also my relationship with the women I have worked with, as well as my own personality over the years.
LS: What other projects are you working on now?
LS: I want to expand my reflection on women’s archives and women’s memories. This is taking me in multiple directions. Among the projects I am committed to is a study of community art activism in areas of social marginality and displacement, with a focus on one of Cairo’s informal settlements (Ezbet Kahirallah) and a slum in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. With my research partner, Prof Mark LeVine from UC Irvine, we are running a series of workshops on oral history and music to document the experience of writing history from below and creating archives on communities that postcolonial governments’ extractivism and necrocapitalism put at risk of survival. This is also part of a larger collaboration with my colleagues at the University of Sydney, in particular the Powerful Stories Network and the Chau Chak Wing Museum, with whom we are planning a series of publications and an art exhibition around the power of storytelling to transmit knowledge and create community resilience. My research remains anchored in the field of history, while also engaging with the big issues of the present: war, displacement, trauma, and especially women’s role in bearing testimony to it and transmitting transgenerational memories of resistance.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter One: Genealogies of Women’s Activism, pages 27 to 29)
In October 2014, I attended the premiere of the play Hawa al-Horreya (Whims of Freedom) by Egyptian feminist documentary theater director Laila Soliman, an interdisciplinary theater-maker whose work is renowned for exploring the relationship between collective memories and personal stories. Confirming Soliman’s long-standing commitment questioning official narratives of history with accounts of the more intimate, individual experiences, Hawa al-Horreya engages in an intense meditation about two crucial moments in Egyptian contemporary history: 1917–19 and 2011–13.
The performance took place at the Egyptian Centre for Culture and Arts–-Makan, located near the Mausoleum in memory of Saʿd Zaghlul, the nationalist leader and founder of the Liberal Constitutional Party (Wafd). His exile in 1919 along with several other members of a delegation (wafd) of Egyptian notables who attempted to join the Paris Peace Conference led to the eruption of a popular uprising in March of that year. The 1919 thawra, like 2011, was a mass national movement, a chaotic revolutionary time when social conventions were suspended, and women broke the rules of gender segregation and engaged in political militancy. Although it was violently repressed, the 1919 Revolution led to the unilateral granting of Egyptian independence by the British in 1922 and its memorialization—including the glorification of women’s participation in it—is part of Egypt’s cultural imaginary. In the wake of the 2011 Revolution, the memory of 1919 was not just repurposed by revolutionary forces, it was revamped in both popular and high-brow cultural productions.
By chance, on the same day I attended Hawa al-Horreya, I visited the Bayt al-Ummah (House of the Nation), the name by which the home of Saʿd Zaghlul and his wife, Safiyya, now a state museum, has been known ever since. Margot Badran documented that in 1919 Safiyya Zaghlul continued to use their home for Wafdists’ meetings while her husband was in exile. Her role in maintaining the young party’s existence no doubt accounted for the fact that even two years later British intelligence ordered she was to be “closely watched.” Safiyya Zaghlul signed the women’s petition to European consuls demanding Egyptian independence in 1919 and, although she has been largely neglected by the historiography about the Egyptian nationalist movement (but not the feminist one), she was a political figure who crafted her own public image as “Umm al-Misriyyin” (Mother of the Egyptians), linking her public role in the nationalist movement to the symbol of motherhood.
This history constitutes the background of Whims of Freedom, but it is not its focus. By reading the papers of the Milner Commission, which arrived in Egypt in December 1919 to investigate the causes of the anticolonial uprising, the play brings to the stage the story of a young woman who reported a case of rape during the Revolution—significantly, like numerous young women did in the wake of the 2011 Revolution, ninety-five years after the events of 1919. Inspired by their involvement in the 2011 events, Soliman and her coauthors Alia Mosallam, Mustafa Said, Zeinab Magdy, and Nanda Mohamed initiated a conversation with a new generation of historians interested in working-class Egyptians who after WWI were imprisoned, tortured, raped, and killed for taking part in anticolonial protests. The play’s narrative builds what literary scholar Dina Heshmat has describes as a “counter-archive,” a process of not simply adding previously erased stories but a method of interrogating the same logic of archiving.
The combination of the two experiences on the same day, the visit to the Zaghlul museum and the play, inspired me to think more deeply about the “counter-archive” constituted by what in the Introduction to this book I have named the long feminist century in Egypt, and within it about the four picks of women’s revolutionary activism (the 1919 Revolution, the student and workers’ movement in the 1940s and the 1970s, and the January 25 thawra) unravelling along multiple, long-lasting, and underlooked genealogies of women’s political activism. “Archives are collective, like collective memory, and just like memory has holes, archives also have holes,” declares the lecturer played in Whims of Freedom by Zainab Magdy.
Meeting with Soliman, we discussed the historical questions her play inspired. What are the “holes” in Egyptian popular memory of revolution and women’s experience of it the play helps us see, if not fill? By opening with the excerpt of a letter by political prisoner Alaa Abd el-Fattah to his friend Alia Mosallam, and intersecting it with Soliman’s homage to two female artists and entrepreneurs of the early-twentieth-century artistic scene (Munira al-Mahdiyya and Naʿima al-Masriyya), and with the tribute to the courage of the countryside women who denounced their rape by British soldiers in the play weaves a transgenerational thread of memories made of hope, joy, and grief that unravels along a century of political activism in Egypt, where every political transition is marked by the visibility of women, from the anticolonial revolution, throughout the multiple phases of the postcolonial process of state-building, to the 2011 January Revolution.
Analyzing the oral histories I have recorded with Soliman and with other women activists of the generations who animated political opposition in the second half of the twentieth century through the 2011 Revolution, particularly, the 70s student movement, I found confirmation that this thread is not linear; it is patchily documented at best, but it is powerful.
A few months after the meeting with Soliman, I visited Professor Laila Soueif, a longtime human rights defender, founding member of the March Movement for the Autonomy of Egyptian Universities (in 2004), and mother of Alaa Abd El-Fattah, at her Cairo University. The stories she told me about her youth in the early seventies reminded her of the early days of the 2011 Revolution: “One of the first things I said the first night we spent in Tahrir, I told Sanaa [her youngest daughter]: ‘Eis is what I did. I was just about the same age as you.’ Sanaa replied: ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t take as long!’ ”LV Together, the stories collected in this chapter untangle a thread of memory, investigating the complex questions surrounding the concepts of a feminist tradition and genealogies of Egyptian feminism over the twenty century and the first decades of the twenty-first. In so doing, it offers a contrapuntal history of the process of modernization in Egypt, its entanglements with colonial capitalism, the desire for social justice that animated the militancy of women in the Marxist organizations in the 40s, the ambivalent experiences of women in the student and leftist movements of the 70s, and the continuities of colonial and patriarchal practices in the postcolonial nation state and their impact on women.