ABSTRACT
In today’s Saudi Arabia, ‘change’, ‘reform’, ‘transformation’ and the ‘woman question’ cannot be read in isolation from an ideology such as saḥwa. Indeed, this very point provided reason enough for me to examine it as a pillar in the shaping of both the public discourse and cultural identity at crucial points in these writers’ ‘historical’ lives. It also led me to examine what Saddeka Arebi rightly dubs the ‘double struggle’ of Saudi Arabia’s women writers, who continue to be torn between local and global discourses of power. On the one hand, the saḥwa strengthened limiting definitions of women as both cultural markers of the nation and sole bearers of Islam, an enervating process that slowly but deliberately turned them into symbols of either shame or honour. This development has shaped an entire literary genre, affecting the various voices and themes that different generations of female authors chose in order to subvert the prevailing ‘master narrative’. On the other hand, Western discourses have continued their intervention in the region under the pretext of ‘promoting women’s rights and democracy’, igniting antagonism in Arabia towards anything coming from the West – especially incessant calls for women’s rights.
