The SOAS Journal of Postgraduate Research, Vol. 8 (2015) 46 Re‐reading Huda Shaarawi’s “Harem Years”– Bargaining with the Patriarchy in the Changing Egypt Julia Lisiecka Abstract: This paper re‐examines the legacy of influential Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi; in particular, the uneasy relationship between feminism, nationalism and Islam. The research focuses on Shaarawi’s memoirs, which challenge both the patriarchal structure in Egypt as well as the Western orientalist imaginary of harem life. The paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of these issues by examining Shaarawi’s relationship to Islam. In her view, Islam has been falsely portrayed as the source of gender inequality, while Shaarawi traces it rather to class divisions and elitist practices of exclusion. Furthermore, the paper explores the evolution of feminism in the context of the emergence of a national movement in colonized Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The paper argues that those transformative decades were characterized by a reversed social order in which, as in Bakhtin’s carnival, the oppressed temporarily gained voice. Yet, their demands were soon marginalized. The national movement demanded women return to the patriarchal structure as an act of decolonisation. The circumstances and other sources of Shaarawi’s activism, such as Woolf’s symbolic “room of her own” and her cultural and social capital allowed her to manoeuvre between nationalism, feminism and Islam and to “bargain with patriarchy.” The Harem and the Transition Times Huda Shaarawi, daughter of a wealthy provincial administrator from Upper Egypt and a Circassian mother, grew up in Cairo in an isolating surrounding of high‐class women from an aristocratic milieu. Her life reflected the experience of the last generation of aristocratic Egyptian women who were brought up in the segregating reality of harem, and thus she was both an object and a subject of a social transition. In her childhood and early adulthood, Huda Shaarawi experienced a rapid expansion of Cairo and growing European, particularly English and French, political and cultural influences in Egypt. While Cairo witnessed a growing trend of migration, many of the new and rich inhabitants of the city kept their ties with their rural estates becoming absentee landlords. As in the case of Shaarawi’s father, the landlords created ties with the Turco‐Circassian ruling class through marriage. Thus, Huda Shaarawi’s identity was a patchwork of the Egyptian landlord tradition, the Turco‐Circassian heritage, and European influences. Shaarawi’s interaction with this multicultural and multilingual milieu most likely prepared her for a more independent, critical perspective on each of these cultures, and opened her up to thinking out of accepted schemes. The harem, as experienced by Huda Shaarawi, has been distorted in Western historiography and literature, where it was portrayed as a place of complete isolation of passive and childlike women, who were kept there to fulfil the desires of rich men. In the book “Unveiling the Harem,”