Afifa Karam

Afifa Karam (, ; July 22, 1883 – July 28, 1924) was a Lebanese-American journalist, novelist, and translator. A writer for the New York City-based Arabic-language daily newspaper Al-Hoda, Karam authored three original Arabic novels as well as a number of Arabic translations of novels from English and French. She was an advocate for women's rights in the Mahjar, or Arab diaspora, and of Arab Feminism.

Early life Afifa Karam was born in Amsheet, then in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, to Yusuf Salih Karam (1822-1895) and Frusina Habib Sharbel. Her family were wealthy Maronites, and her father Yusuf was a doctor in the Ottoman army. Karam was educated in local missionary schools until the untimely and unexpected death of her father when she was thirteen. Subsequently, she was married to her cousin, Karam Hanna Salih Karam (known as John Karam or K. John), who had emigrated to the United States six years prior. In 1897, she and her husband moved to the United States and settled in Shreveport, Louisiana. That same year, Karam founded The New World: A Ladies Monthly Arabic Magazine which gave way two years later to a second publication, Syrian Woman , founded by Karam in 1913.

Literary innovation As a first generation immigrant writer, Karam's literature questioned and negotiated between inherited Arab and American values, and promoted the social emancipation and education of Levantine-American immigrants, particularly the women among them. She criticized restrictive gender roles and practices that she deemed oppressive to women. Karam's stories show man as oppressor and woman as oppressed, and condemn the governmental and religious institutions that uphold such unjust practices in Lebanon.

Karam's novels did not circulate widely in the Arab world. None of her novels was republished until the centennial republication of her first novel Badī'a wa Fu'ād by Sa'īd Yaqṭīn (Rabat: Manshūrāt al-Zaman, 2007). Nonetheless, Karam's novels are some of the earliest Arabic literary texts written in that form.

Relationship to the Arabic literary scene Through the international world of Arabic journalism, Karam was part of the literary scene in Cairo and the Levant, which was the locus of the Arabic literary and cultural Renaissance (al-Nahda). Feminist currents spread among a segment of the Arab intelligentsia, giving rise to the establishment of a number of women's journals just before and just after the turn of the twentieth century. In an early issue of her journal The New Women's World, Karam pays homage to the women's magazines in Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus, calling her own journal their "child."

Works Karam's novels and translations include: Badī'a wa Fu'ād (1906) Fāṭima al-Badawīyya (1908) Ghādat 'Amshīt (1910) Nānsī Stāyir (1914) [Arabic translation of Nancy Stair by Elinor Macartney Lane] Riwāyat 'Ibnat Nā'ib al-Malik (1918) [Arabic translation of Une fille du régent by Alexandre Dumas] Muḥammad 'Alī Bāsha al-Kabīr (1919) [Arabic translation of Muhammad Ali und Sein Haus by Luise Muhlbach]