Who are we if we don’t control our own narratives?

من نحن إذا لم نتحكم في سرد رواياتنا؟

Nasawiyyah: Arab Media History

Nasawiyyat (Arab feminists) have played a central role in the development of Arab media and anti-colonial nationalist consciousness. Despite this fact, little is known amongst general audiences about the rich legacy of Arab women’s contributions to Arabic mass-media culture. Nasawiyyah*: Arab Media History addresses this problem by illuminating Arab women’s revolutionary feminist ideas and media productions from the 20th century to contemporary Arabic and English-speaking internet audiences.

Nasawiyyah: Arab Media History presents exhibits featuring writings and digitized archival records around the lives and ideas of Arab women media workers from the 20th century through anti-colonial feminist perspective. We situate contemporary uses of feminist and digital media activism in a longer history.

*Nasawiyyah: Feminism in Arabic

Multimedia Exhibits

Arab Feminist Organizations

Eastern Women’s Congress for the Defense of Palestine (1938)

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Arab Feminist Revolutionaries

This exhibit explores Mayy Ziadeh’s impact on Arabic literary culture and multilingual media, highlighting her role as a feminist who navigated Arabic and French literary spheres to advocate for Arab nationalist thought. It features digitized items from her archive held at the American University of Beirut.

This exhibit explores the pioneering feminist work of Marie Ajami and her magazine Al-Arous, highlighting its role in advocating for feminist justice and anti-colonial resistance in early 20th-century Syria. It features digitized excerpts from al-Arous magazine.

This exhibit highlights the contributions of Zaynab Fawwaz to Arabic print culture, focusing on her role as a journalist, writer, intellectual, and feminist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It features excerpts from her feminist compendium titled al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur, a book offering 456 women’s profiles from history (p.1894), held at the Qatar National Library, and other articles she published in Egyptian and Syrian periodicals.