On the fourth day of the Islamic month Rabi’ I 1309 (7 October 1891), Zaynab Fawwaz began to write what would become a 552-page largefolio volume comprising 453 biographical sketches of women across human history, al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur. As a compendium of lives narrated, Pearls Scattered in Times and Places: Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces drew on the format, diction and titular idioms of a longattested tradition in Arabic letters and Islamic scholarship whilst moving away from that tradition in its cultural expansiveness, subject focus and stylistic diversity. More specifically, several features set Pearls Scattered apart: its feminine-gendered lens along with its temporally and geographically inclusive reach; an eclectic narrative construction drawing on diverse modes of biographical reportage and writing; and (like certain earlier biographical compendia) a roughly alphabetical organisation which placed women sideby- side who in history had hailed from truly ‘scattered’ temporal and geographical sites. And then there was the irony of the title, drawing on epithetic terms for women that marked them as sharing a condition of protected seclusion or concealment, but over the course of the volume turning these terms inside out, exposing familiar idioms to semantic reinvigoration. Scattered these women had been, but many were neither ‘ladies’ nor did they inhabit ‘cloistered spaces’. Pearls they were, but hardly ones hidden anonymously in oyster-shells. Fawwaz and those who praised her work would exploit the figurative potential of this image to its fullest.

Zaynab Fawwaz (c. 1846 or 1860–1914) set to work on her biographical compendium as she was starting to find a voice in the vigorous public sphere of 1890s Cairo. Al-Durr al-manthur was one of the first books by a woman to be published by the prestigious government press at Bulaq, Cairo, and likely the most massive female-authored volume to be issued there (ever). It was Fawwaz's first book project, to judge by the title-page publication date (though not the back-page date of conclusion of printing). Meanwhile she was writing in other genres and milieus, and her one play, al-Hawa wa al-wafa’ (Passion and Fidelity, 1893), appeared in print before al-Durr almanthur did.