Professor Marilyn Booth (Magdalen College) discusses her new translation of ‘Sa'iba’ by Alis al-Bustani (1891) with Samir al-Boustany and Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony’s College).
ABOUT THE BOOK
Alis al-Bustani's 'Sa'iba' (1891) is one of the earliest known novels authored in Arabic by a female writer. Written when the Arabic novel was only in its third or fourth decade, it takes up the leading fictional theme of the era: the question of young people's choices in marriage in a society where their elders traditionally made these decisions. In 'Sa'iba', the focus is on what happens after the wedding, as the eponymous heroine has to fend off a jealous cousin who believes he has a right to her. Drawing on motifs of Victorian Gothic writing, brought into an Arab-Turkish fictional context, the novel powerfully shows the continuing hold of old ideas about women's sexual susceptibility and moral 'weakness', as such ideas were slowly giving way among educated Arab and other Ottoman middle classes to new ideals of companionship in marriage.
Marilyn Booth's translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing the themes and social context of the novel, a time of modernizing efforts and pushback against European and American power and culture in the Arabic and Ottoman worlds.
Published by Oxford University Press in 2026: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/saiba-9780198921684?cc=gb&lang=en&
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TRANSLATOR BIOGRAPHY
Marilyn Booth is Professor Emerita at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. She was holder through 2023 of an endowed chair in contemporary Arab studies, and previously held a chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her published work focuses on nineteenth-century Arabophonewomen's writing and ideologies of gender debate, including the role of translation. Recent research fellowships include the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; l'Institut d'études avancées, Paris; Neubauer Collegium for Society and Culture, Chicago. She was visiting professor, l'EHESS, Paris, in 2024. She has translated many works of Arabic fiction into English.
