Essay

In this essay I will compare between the story of Zahra by hanan el shik and the wiles of men by salwa bakr . first of all both el shik and bakr are arab women. Hanan Al-Shaykh was born in 1945 in Beirut, Lebanon. Al-Shaykh began writing at a young age and by sixteen had essays published in the newspaper she would eventually work for, al-Nahar. She attended the American College for Girls in Cairo, Egypt from 1963 to 1966. After her graduation she worked in television in Beirut and as a journalist for a women's magazine, Al-Hasna, before landing a job at al-Nahar in 1968. She worked at the newspaper until 1975. In 1982 Al-Shaykh moved to London. The story of zaha was one of her successful novels, she also wrote; Misk al-ghazaal (Women of Sand and Myrrh), Faras Al-shaitan, Barid Bayrut(Beirut Blues). Al-Shaykh has also written two plays, Dark Afternoon Tea in 1995 and Paper Husband in 1997. Though she speaks English fluently, Al-Shaykh continues to write solely in Arabic. She still resides in London.
Salwa Bakr (سلوى بكر) was born in 1949 in Matariyya, Egypt to a railroad worker. The stories and rituals of her widowed and unschooled mother sparked her interest in the world views and speech styles of the poor or uneducated women who inhabit much of her fiction. Bakr was educated in the Cairo area, receiving a degree from the College of Business at Ayn Shams University in 1972 and a second degree in literary criticism in 1976. Her early stories explore the lives of women marginalized by poverty or social norms. In her collections Zinat in the President's Funeral Procession (1986) and An al-ruh allati suriqat tadrijiyyan (About the soul that gradually was stolen, 1989), Bakr focuses on portraying women's emotional worlds and the material circumstances of their lives through a language that claims a middle ground between standard and colloquial Arabic.

Hanan al-Shaykh is one of the leading contemporary women writers in the Arab world. Her books are rich portrayals