Malti-Douglas awarded $100,000 Kuwait Prize for Arts and Letters

By Jeff Austin

The Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS) has awarded Fedwa Malti-Douglas the 1997 Kuwait Prize for Arts and Letters, one of the highest honors given in Kuwait for intellectual achievement.

The Kuwait Prize is given to outstanding researchers and scientists for their work in basic and applied sciences, arts and letters, Arabic and Islamic scientific heritage, and economic and social sciences. The honor includes a monetary award of 30,000 Kuwaiti dinars (approximately $100,000), the KFAS shield and a certificate of recognition. Malti-Douglas will be invited to Kuwait for a week to receive the award and deliver a scholarly public lecture.

"We are all thrilled that a friend and colleague has been awarded an international prize of such prestige and distinction," said Suzanne Stetkevych, chairperson of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program at IUB. "It certainly reflects well on IU to have a scholar of this caliber among us."

Beyond the prestige and recognition the award may bring to specific programs and IU in general, Malti-Douglas hopes that the greatest impact will be on relations with Arab countries and on ties between Arab studies here and in the Arab world. "Arab studies in the United States needs this connection," Malti-Douglas said. "In the region itself, there is often more openness to new ideas in the humanities, as well as a greater willingness to take an approach to culture that asks new and challenging questions."

Photo by Chris Meyer
Malti-Douglas expressed gratitude to the KFAS and her IU colleagues for their support.

Kuwait's willingness to award such an honor to a female scholar may seem surprising, but this is a frequent subject of misunderstanding. Malti-Douglas explained that although the situation of women varies greatly from one Arab country to another, generally, many professions, including medicine, have long been more open to women than many Western countries. "Generally speaking, and paradoxical as it might seem to most Americans, it is easier for a woman professional to be taken seriously in her profession in most Arab countries than it is for a woman in the United States," Malti-Douglas said.

Just as many Arab countries are open to achievement among professional women, Malti-Douglas harbors a similarly open and exploratory attitude toward culture and scholarship. Beginning her academic career in medieval Arabic prose, she has branched out into other forms and periods of Arabic narrative and related topics. Her work is characterized by a desire to re-examine cultural materials afresh, using contemporary critical methodologies and asking new questions. She is willing to look at texts and kinds of texts that have not been previously explored by literary and cultural scholars, whether these texts be comic strips, philosophical allegories or books on women.

For the Kuwait Prize competition, Malti-Douglas included in her submission her 1985 book, Structures of Avarice, which deals with collections of stories about misers by two authors from medieval Iraq, one of whom, al-Jahiz, is probably the most famous writer in the long history of Arabic prose. She also submitted her 1991 Woman's Body, Woman's Word, which studied medieval and modern texts, ranging from The Thousand and One Nights to geographical and philosophical works.

This has been a big year for Malti-Douglas. In addition to the Kuwait Prize, her novel, Hisland: Adventures in Ac-Ac-ademe, a satire of academic life in the Western world, recently appeared in the Margins of Literature Series from the State University of New York Press.

"I am especially grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences, and especially to Dean Morton Lowengrub, for the support I have received over the years that I have been at IU," Malti-Douglas said. "The faith and confidence that Dean Lowengrub as well as other IU officials, such as Vice Chancellor Deborah Freund, Chancellor Ken Gros Louis and President Myles Brand, have had in me over the years have helped sustain me."