Balancing (muwazana), one of the earliest forms of classical Arabic literary criticism, consists of comparing poets, writers, or literary works to arrive at a critical judgment. It spans from early historical instances (such as the arbitration of Umm Jundub and al-Nābigha) through foundational texts like al-Āmidī’s work to contemporary studies. Feminist criticism, by contrast, is a modern, non-Arab concept focused on the study of women in literature—whether as authors or as subjects—yet its methodological tools remain unsettled.
This article proposes a hybrid comparative methodology that adapts the classical practice of balancing to the concerns of feminist criticism. Traditional balancing rested on personal taste, quantitative parity, and qualitative similarity. Feminist balancing, however, must confront the acknowledged quantitative disparity in literary production between the sexes (attributed to historical suppression of women’s writing) and evaluate qualitative depth through the explicit and implicit cultural patterns encoded in texts.
Three critical stances linking comparison to women are examined: (1) the stereotypical view of the female poet as primarily emotional, which both elevates and limits cultural analysis of her work; (2) “gender jealousy,” in which women critics defend the moral or social image of women rather than purely artistic criteria; and (3) the approach advocated here—comparison not of relative artistic merit between male and female poets, but of the differing concepts of poetry, life, and cultural encoding that their texts convey. The article thus seeks to establish a clear, usable comparative framework for researchers working at the intersection of classical Arabic criticism and feminist literary studies.