CHAPTER FOUR

ANALYSIS OF LITERARY TEXTS

4.0 INTRODUCTION
This chapter analyses and examined the literary text Distant View of a Minaret, is a
collection of fifteen short stories that give readers a glimpse of what it means to be a woman
in an Orthodox Muslim society in Egypt. The stories are not interconnected, but together
they form a vivid portrayal of Rifaat’s world
4.1 A FEMINISM OF ONE’S OWN : DISTANT VIEW OF A MINARET
Distant View of a Minaret and Other Stories houses fifteen stories that explore female
sexuality, Muslim womanhood, and gender roles. Surprisingly (perhaps not?), Rifaat is not
widely read in the Global North and even across the Middle East. Surprisingly because– it’d
be safe to state that Rifaat pioneered postcolonial feminist writing tradition that throws
Islamic and colonial norms into question long before the concept of Islamic feminism was
coined. Not surprisingly because–unlike most Middle Eastern and/or Muslim feminists,
Rifaat reclaims the female body by deconstructing the patriarchal lens through which the
teachings of Islam are usually studied. She has been compared to Egyptian feminist
writer Nawal El Saadawi, but Rifaat’s style is unique and revolutionary. Her stories are
situated within an Islamic framework that allows her to create a feminism of her own. Since
Islam and empowerment are often misguidedly placed in contradiction to one another, it’s
easy to see why Rifaat is not a household name.
The sui generis nature of Rifaat’s writing stems from the limitations that were placed on her
as a creative writer. In “Writing Women’s Bodies,” Barbara A. Olive writes:

“Rifaat has not achieved her writing easily. Early in her life, Alifa was strongly reprimanded
by her older sister for writing, forcing Alifa to turn her energies to other pursuits. As a young
married woman, Alifa met with expulsion from her home and threat of divorce when she
related to her husband that she had published a story. Alifa’s attempt to continue writing
under a pseudonym failed—Rifaat’s given name is Fatima—her husband finally forcing her
to swear on the Quaran [sic] that she would stop writing. When, fourteen years later, after
having suffered symptoms of psychosomatic illness for an extended period, Alifa asked for
and was granted release by her husband from her promise not to write, she found that he had
forgotten the promise he had forced from her.”
The International Fiction Review vol. 23 (1996)
Despite her conservative upbringing, Rifaat’s stories convey a profound sense of originality
and resistance to the social norms. In this context, the question of sexuality and sexual
empowerment is central to the collection. Rifaat criticizes the power imbalance in marriages
sanctioned by patriarchy and views it as un-Islamic. Her incisive critique of patriarchal
values emerges as a thread that runs through the stories.

The first story of the collection “Distant View of a Minaret” opens with a scene that finds a
married couple in their bedroom– in a situation that is supposed to be intimate:
“Through half-closed eyes she looked at her husband. Lying on his right side, his body was
intertwined with hers and his head bent over her right shoulder. As usual at such times she
she felt that he inhabited a world utterly different from hers, a world from which she had
been excluded” (1).
The protagonist then recalls the husband’s adverse reaction to her last attempt to be explicit
about her desires: “Are you mad, woman? Do you want to kill me?”

The emotional distance between the couple is further highlighted as the husband continues to
“struggle in the world he occupied on his own,” and she asks herself, “Perhaps it’s me who is
at fault. Perhaps I’m unreasonable in my demands and don’t know how to react to him
properly” (2).

In a similar vein, “My World of the Unknown” the beautifully constructed piece that draws
upon mythical djinn imagery recounts the predicament of a sexually unfilled wife who finds
herself infatuated with a djinn that appears to her in the form of a female snake. Like the
wife in “Distant,” the wife in this story lives in a state of “torment”:

“…continuous torment for a strange feeling of longing scorched my body and rent my
senses, while my circumstances obliged me to carry out the duties and responsibilities that
had been placed on me as the wife of a man who occupied an important position in the small
town” (71).
The unbridled eroticism of the story is highlighted in a scene that depicts the wife’s sexual
engagement with the snake after which she loses interest in her husband:

[The snake’s] two tiny fangs, like two pearls […] caresses [my] body […] arriving at my
thighs, the golden tongue…inserted its pronged tip between them and began…sipping the
poisons of my desire and exhaling the nectar of my ecstasy” (73).
What is fascinating about Rifaat’s explicit portrayal of the sex scene is her justification of the
act through Islamic principles , which would otherwise be unacceptable based on the moral
codes of her society.

Her sexual interaction with the snake is condoned, for the act occurs within the boundaries of
marriage. The snake marries the narrator, and their unification is sealed through the Koranic
verses that they recite together:

“Bride of mine, I called you and brought you to my home. I have wedded you, so there is no
sin in our love, nothing to reproach yourself about” (73).

Rifaat contests the patriarchal rhetoric that has infused the discourse on sexuality and
religion with a notion that women’s sexual desires are immoral. She views the sexist
discourse as an integral part of the societal order that promotes male supremacy, rather than
as a prescription of Islam. The imbalance of power in the marriages that Rifaat depicts points
to how the patriarchal rhetoric uses female sexual desire to debase and shame women.
Sexuality itself is not the concern here; the focus is on active female sexuality as Fatima
Mernissi interrogates in “The Muslim Concept of Active Female Sexuality.”
4.2 The Notion of Islam as a Solace is Introduced in the Story, “Telephone Call.”

In this story, another unnamed wife manages to overcome the loss of her husband through
the ease that the daily prayers, ablutions, and her prayer mat brings.

Through submission “to what the Almighty had decreed,” the narrator writes, “I finally felt
at peace with myself” (16).
Returning to the story that opens the collection, “Distant View of a Minaret,” Islam emerges
here as a spiritual source for fulfillment and empowerment. For instance, immediately after
her husband’s usual disappointing performance, the wife does ghusl, washing herself from
head to toe, and moves on to pray in the bedroom as she hears the call to prayer from the
minaret (2-3). After she’s finished with praying:

“She seated herself on the edge of the prayer carpet and counted off her glorifications of the
Almighty, three at a time on the joints of each finger. It was late autumn and the time for the
sunset prayer would soon come and she enjoyed the thought that she would soon be praying
again. Her five daily prayers were like punctuation marks that divided up and gave meaning
to her life. Each prayer had for her a distinct quality, just as different foods had their own
flavours” (3).
The juxtaposition of her unfulfilling marriage with her daily rituals is quite telling. Her
prayers, as well as her connection with God help her overcome the lack of emotional,
spiritual, and physical intimacy in her relationship. In other words, she is able to cultivate a
sense of self through her deep connection with God. Although the husband controls her
sexuality, Rifaat reverses the script by subtly pointing to a mode of agency practiced by
pious women, which is not necessarily politically subversive within the liberal context. The
wife’s agency in “Distant” is further consolidated at the end. After preparing the Turkish
coffee that she is about to serve her husband in the bedroom, she realizes that her husband
has had a heart attack:

“Just as [the coffee] was about to boil over she removed it from the stove and placed it on the
tray with the coffee cup, for he liked to have the coffee poured in front of him. She expected
to find him sitting up in bed smoking a cigarette. The strange way his body was twisted
immediately told her that something was wrong. She approached the bed and looked into the
eyes that stared into space and suddenly she was aware of the odour of death in the room.”
After telling her son to call the doctor, “She returned to the living room and poured out the
coffee for herself. She was surprised at how calm she was” (4).

What a brilliant final scene that is morbid and witty at once– the protagonist enjoying the
coffee prepared for her husband while waiting for the call to sunset prayer despite her
husband’s plight is a transgressive act that liberates her from the confines of domesticity.
Rifaat’s decision to finalize the story with the husband’s death can also be read symbolically
as a way to highlight how Islamic principles and traditional patriarchal norms are deeply,
misguidedly entwined.
 Rifaat was certainly an underrated Middle Eastern/North African/Muslim writer who
formed the essence of what is now conceptualized as Islamic feminism. Her writing reclaims
the female body, complicating the clichés about Muslim womanhood.

4.3 The Cry of a Mother Hen:

Alifa Rifaat speaks for Muslim women in Egypt Few domestic birds are as protective of their
young ones as a mother hen is of her brood of chicks. The cry of a mother hen both
announces the presence of a predator in the vicinity and establishes the need for its chicks to
seek refuge under her wings. Her wings effectively become their only assured means of
survival. Like a protective mother hen, Alifa Rifaat unveils the many wrongs perpetuated
against women in her society, but at the same time she upholds the Islamic way of life as the
ideal. Her short story collection, Distant View of a Minaret, is an anthology of fifteen stories,
including a translator’s foreword by Denys Johnson-Davies. With the exception of one story,
“At the time of the Jasmine”, the lead characters in all the stories in this collection are
females – either women battling with problems in their marriages and reminiscing over their
childhood, or young girls moving from a state of innocence into one of guilt. Although
critics (Johnson-Davies 1983: viii; Contemporary Authors Online, 2001: 2) have argued that
Rifaat’s main themes are sex and death, a closer reading of the fifteen stories in the
collection reveals multiple themes pertaining to women’s lot in Islam, such as marriage,
love, interrelationships, teenage pregnancy, bereavement, widowhood, old age, loneliness,
estrangement, and, above all, loss. In this case, sex and death become merely generic terms
encompassing a broad range of themes, in which the term “sex” would include sexual
relationships, gender relationships, and interrelationships like mother-daughter and father-
son, while “death” includes loss of spouse, loss of innocence, loss of faith and loss of
meaningful relationships. What is particularly striking about Rifaat’s stories is the openness
with which she treats the subject of sex within marriage. Although her lead female characters
tend to adopt an attitude of resignation as a way of dealing with problems of sex and
sexuality in marriage, the act of writing women’s lives in itself gives them a voice. Thus,
Rifaat does not only speak for Muslim women in Egypt but, in fact, reveals herself to be an
advocate of gender justice. In her study of women in the novels of Mariama Bâ and Aminata
Sow Fall, Dorothy Wills (1995: 162) notes that in Senegalese culture speech is classed as
action, and thus to speak much or to complain indicates non-nobility and to assert one’s right
is to violate one’s claim to nobility. The result is that women are forced to be silent and
submissive in order to be seen as noble, good or pious (Wills 1995: 164). While this
phenomenon does not directly apply to women in Arabo-Islamic culture, it does indicate that
the silence of women is something that is imposed on them through value systems informed
by patriarchal ideology. Rifaat captures this trend in four of her stories depicting women
forced to adopt silence as a coping mechanism.
The title story “Distant view of a minaret” is a beautifully constructed piece of
narrative in which the “Muslim concept of active female sexuality” (Mernissi 1987: 27) is
played out in a dramatic mode. Although sexual references are explicit in this story, Rifaat
sidesteps an endorsement of soft pornography by situating the descriptions within the
sanctity of marriage. The story opens with the male and female character involved in sexual
activity. In spite of the intimacy of the act, the female character feels estranged from her
husband: “as usual at such times she felt that he inhabited a world utterly different from hers,
a world from which she had been excluded” (1).3 The rift between them is indicated by the
fact that he inhabits a world of his own, while she remains indifferent to his movements, her
eyes roving around the room, taking note of the cobwebs that need to be brushed off the
ceiling and her toenails that need to be trimmed. Tellingly unnamed, the female character
recalls her desperate attempts to get her husband to feel her sexual needs: “when they were
first married she had tried to will her husband into sensing the desire that burned within her
and so continuing the act longer”; but “she had been too shy and conscious of conventions to
express such wishes openly” (1). Her inability to openly discuss her wishes with her husband
points to a code of silence by which sexual matters between them remain a forbidden
subject. This silence shrouding the subject of sex transcends male-female relationships, for
even when married women talk about their sexual relationships with their husbands they do
so in “hushed terms” (1). Thus, the female character is trapped in a situation where she
cannot freely express her wishes and desires either to her husband or to her women friends.
In an attempt to overcome this barrier she resorts to body language in making her husband
feel her need, “but on each occasion, when breathlessly imploring him to continue, he would
– as though purposely to deprive her – quicken his movements and bring the act to an abrupt
end” (1). Having failed to communicate her need by action, the character eventually gives up
and submits to a “passive role” (2), which allows her husband absolute control over their
sexual life. In effect, her sexuality becomes passive not by choice or nature but through the
domineering, selfish act of her husband. In a revised edition of her book Beyond the Veil:
Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society the Moroccan sociologist Fatima
Mernissi (1987: 44–45) explains that what Muslim theory considers destructive to the social
order is active female sexuality rather than sexuality itself, for while sexuality per se is not a
danger, the woman is fitna – “a living representative of the dangers of sexuality and its
rampant disruptive potential”. Thus, to maintain the social order, female sexuality must be
made inactive, if not non-existent. Rifaat in “Distant view of a minaret” shows just how male
agency is instrumental in this process. The lead character’s husband does not only fail to
satisfy her sexual needs but also to realize that they even exist. As a result, sex with her
husband has become more of a ritual than an expression of love, and the silence shrouding
their relationship is cemented through her sexual passivity. The Islamic way of life becomes
the only constant in her life, for “her five daily prayers were like punctuation marks that
divided up and gave meaning to her life” and “each prayer had for her a distinct quality, just
as different foods had their own flavours” (3). This suggests that Islam alone provides solace
to women battling with marital problems, and deviating from its teachings may result in
alienation of one’s self from God, in which case one would only have a distant view or
perception of the Supreme Being, represented here by the minaret.
The significance of the title of the story surfaces as the female character sits near a
window after the sexual act and looks out at the city of Cairo. She observes that Cairo, which
used to have “countless mosques and minarets”, now has only the single visible minaret, “the
tall solitary minaret that could be seen between two towering blocks of flats” (3). She notes
that “this single minaret, one of the twin minarets of the Mosque of Sultan Hasan, with
above it a thin slice of the Citadel, was all that was now left of the panoramic view she had
once had of old Cairo” (3). The solitary minaret is a symbol of the female character herself, a
lonely, unhappy woman in an unfulfilled marriage, who is caught between two overpowering
blocks: a patriarchal culture which inhibits woman’s sexuality, on the one hand, and
woman’s desire to be sexually fulfilled, on the other. This juxtaposition brings out the
contrast between male attitudes toward women’s sexuality and women’s right to loving and
kind treatment in marriage as prescribed by the Qur”an.4 Thus, one could say that Rifaat’s
construction of woman against a backdrop of deteriorating religious amenities symbolizes a
collapse of social institutions when religious duties are not performed to satisfactory levels.
Rifaat’s concern about woman’s lot takes another dimension in “Bahiyya’s eyes”, a
story in which she shows that “this business of womanhood is a heavy burden”
(Dangarembga 1988: 16). Although the story is written in the epistolary mode in which the
lead character, Bahiyya, is writing to her daughter in the city to inform her of her impending
blindness, the narrative voice gives it the quality of a song of lament, making it affective in
profound ways. By making Bahiyya tell her own story – a story of woman’s powerlessness
in the face of deep-rooted customs – Rifaat breaks the silence cloaking the Egyptian woman.
The lead character, whose name means the one with beautiful eyes, is an aging widow with
failing eyesight, which the doctor attributes to “the flies and the dirt” (6) but which Bahiyya
knows is caused by “all the tears I shed since my mother first bore me and they held me by
the leg and found I was a girl” (7). Thus, Bahiyya’s gradual loss of sight results from the
many tears shed for her own and other women’s lot in a patriarchal society, making her
decry even her own gender.
This is a beautifully crafted story in which the theme of sex is approached through
gendered difference between males and females and the practice of clitoridectomy. Bahiyya
learns about the process of procreation by observing animals like cats and dogs, noting the
similarity in their ways of mating, and bit by bit she is able to understand how the same thing
happens between men and women. Thus, it is only by adopting a system of self-education
that she begins to understand the dynamics of sex and sexuality. Responding to the dictates
of her curious mind, she creates her parents out of mud, putting in-between her father’s legs
“a thing like a cat’s tail” and giving her mother “something like a sort of mulberry” (9). The
poignant irony is that the pre-teen Bahiyya’s growing curiosity results in a group of women
forcefully and crudely excising her clitoris with a razor blade. The cruelty with which the rite
is performed on the bewildered nine-year old is embedded in the narrative tone as the
incident is recounted: Then early one day as I was about to go out to have a look at my mud
things and see whether or not they’d dried yet in the sun, I found the women coming in and
gathering round, and then they took hold of me and forced my legs open and cut away the
mulberry with a razor. They left me with a wound in my body and another wound deep
inside me, a feeling that a wrong had been done to me, a wrong that could never be undone.
And so the tears welled up in my eyes again. (9)