Fatimah Rifaat (b. June 5, 1930, Cairo, Kingdom of Egypt – d. January 1996 Cairo, Egypt), better known by her pen name Alifa Rifaat, was an Egyptian author whose controversial short stories are renowned for their depictions of the dynamics of female sexuality, relationships, and loss in rural Egyptian culture. While taking on such controversial subjects, Fatimah Rifaat's protagonists remained religiously faithful with passive feelings towards their fate. Her stories did not attempt to undermine the patriarchal system; rather they were used to depict the problems inherent in a patriarchal society when men do not adhere to their religious teachings that advocate for the kind treatment of women. Fatimah Rifaat used the pseudonym Alifa to prevent embarrassment on the part of her family due to the themes of her stories and her writing career.
Fatimah Abdullah Rifaat was born on June 5, 1930, in Cairo, Egypt. Her father was an architect and her mother was a housewife. Her family boasted that their roots are said to extend back to Umar ibn al-Khattab, a companion and advisor to the prophet Muhammad. She was raised in provincial Egypt and spent most of her life there. Subsequently, rural Egypt became the setting for most of her stories. Her active interest in writing began at age nine when she wrote a poem expressing the despair in her village. For this, she was met with punishment by her family due to the poem's subject matter. Fatimah attended Misr al-Jadidah Primary school and The Cultural Center for Women for her intermediate education. She also attended the British Institute in Cairo from 1946 to 1949 where she studied English. When Fatimah expressed interest in continuing her education by enrolling in the College of Fine Arts in Egypt her father instead arranged for her to marry her cousin, a police officer.
For the first few years of their marriage, Fatima's husband allowed her to write and publish stories under her pseudonym despite the common idea of writing being a purely masculine field in Egyptian culture. She published her stories from 1955 until 1960 when she chose to stop after facing pressure from her husband to end her writing career. During this nearly 14-year period of literary silence, Fatimah pursued the study of literature, astronomy, and history. Despite her attempts at preoccupation through these means, Fatimah remained frustrated at her inability to express herself and the societal issues she faced as a woman through literary means.
In 1973, after facing a serious illness, Fatimah's husband allowed her once more to write and publish her work. She went on to publish a collection of short stories and two novels beginning with the short story "My World of the Unknown," for which she gained initial popularity.
Fatimah Rifaat's husband died in 1979. Although she traveled across provincial Egypt in accordance with her husband's transfers for work she never left Egypt until after his death. She continued on to make the hajj, the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca, in 1981 and traveled to multiple European and Arab states including England, Turkey, Germany, Morocco, and Austria.
For her writing career, Fatimah Rifaat became a member of the Federation of Egyptian Writers, the Short-Story Club, and the Dar al-Udaba (Egypt). She also attended the First International Women's Book Fair in London, England, in 1984 where she spoke about the rights of women in Islam and the topic of polygamy. In 1984, Fatimah Rifaat received the Excellency Award from the Modern Literature Assembly.
Fatimah Rifaat died at the age of 65 in January 1996. She left behind three sons and a body of over 100 works that have been translated into multiple languages and have been produced for television. Some of her works have also been read on the BBC.
As Alifa Rifaat, Fatimah Rifaat wrote in Arabic throughout her literary career. Her style, though focusing more on romance in the beginning of her career, later shifted to social critique after she met translator Denys John-Davies. Denys also persuaded her to write in a more colloquial style of Arabic, which although being a more accessible form of writing to the Egyptian population, was also during this period a less desired form of writing than the formal style. Her novels and short stories have been translated into multiple languages including English, German, Dutch, and Swedish. The most popular English translation of her work is of her collection of short stories, Distant View of a Minaret and Other Short Stories, which is translated by Denys Johnson-Davies.
Fatimah Rifaat, unlike the prominent Egyptian Feminist Nawal El Saadawi, focused her writing on women in traditional Islamic roles. In her autobiography Fatimah describes her father's lack of affection towards her as a possible root of her exploration of the needs and desires of men in terms of women. She continues on to relate that through her life she found that "all men seek is pleasure. For that reason I cry out for complete and complementary love in all my writings." Fatimah also expresses in her autobiography the need for men and women to only participate in intercourse when they are in a serene state, so that orgasm can be achieved, which she believes acts to strengthen faith in God.
Fatimah Rifaat's writing centers upon the silent plight of women in a patriarchal Muslim society. Her stories mainly take place in provincial Egypt. These stories handle themes such as sex, death, marriage, masturbation, clitoridectomy, love, teenage pregnancy, widowhood, and loss along with other controversial topics. During this time period, a woman was considered a purely sexual being, and the allowance of freedom of her sexuality was feared to result in fitna, or societal chaos. Although Alifa Rifaat strove to express through writing the sexual repression of women, her stories and her life were conducted in an orthodox Muslim manner and she did not advocate the rise of women against patriarchy. Most of Rifaat's female protagonists take a resigned or begrudgingly accepting stance towards the hardships they face in life. For Fatimah Rifaat, patriarchy is merely a fact of life and acceptable under Quranic terms, however it is the opposite and in some instances even the same gender's lack of observance towards religious teachings that acts as the catalyst to many of the protagonists’ problems. In her stories many of the sexual encounters take place during the characters' marriage and there is no instance of extra-marital male-female relationships as this would be considered purely sinful under the practice of Islam.
Some of Fatimah Rifaat's most popular stories include "Distant View of a Minaret," "Bahiyya’s Eyes," and "My World of the Unknown."
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