Abstract
Abstract
Saudi novelist Badriyya l-Bišr, a well-known advocate for women’s rights in her country, uses her novel
Hind wa-l-ʿaskar
1 (Hind and the Soldiers) to trace the growth and the struggle of a young woman in a rigid, conventional society. As the novel’s title suggests, the female protagonist, Hind, finds herself in a situation of war at different stages in her life—war against various forces that deny her self-expression and jeopardize her happiness as a human being. Yet the novel is not just a series of complaints about the grievances experienced by women in Saudi Arabia; it focuses in the main on women’s potential and their power to use their judgment and arm themselves with all the weapons available to them in order to overcome oppression and marginalization.