Throughout the last three decades, the Arab region has attracted the unwanted attention of
the rest of the world because of its spiralling political upheaval. This unrest has caused
migration, economic and cultural changes, and eventually a spring of revolutions and
protests in demand of reform. Arab countries are now in the spotlight of global current
affairs, and all the imperfections regarding their cultural, social, and gender inequalities
have surfaced to the foreground.
Arab women novelists have been addressing feminist issues for centuries, chipping away
at the stereotypical image of the meek and voiceless Arab woman that comes hand in hand
with Orientalism. Through their fiction, writers such as Nawal El Saadawi, Hanan Al-
Shaykh and Fadia Faqir have promulgated a bold brand of Arab feminist thought.
This interdisciplinary thesis explores the Greater Syrian and Egyptian woman's novel
written between 1975 and 2007. Through the in-depth analysis of Arab women's
novels available in English, I attempt to uncover the many reasons behind today's gender
inequality in Greater Syria and Egypt. By examining contemporary Arabic narrative styles
and cultivating traditional Arab story-telling methods, the creative element of this thesis
uses fiction to expose social and political injustice. The novel within this thesis challenges
different forms of patriarchy that are dominant in the region, and endeavours to document
a historical, on-going revolution