A Century After Qasim Amin: Fictive Kinship and Historical Uses

of " Tahrir al-Mara '"

By Malek Abisaab and Rula Jurdi Abisaab
At a time of Islamist scripturalism, political defeatism, and haunting economic
divisions, the Egyptian government's Supreme Council of Culture organized a
conference to claim Qasim Amin's ideology as its own and to invoke its kinship ties
with the liberation of women. The six-day conference, which convened in Cairo
on October 23, 1999, hosted 40 sessions, 14 round tables, and 10 workshops
attended by more than 150 scholars and writers from Arab countries and around the
world.*
Neither an invocation of the Renaissance spirit of Muslim reformists a century ago,
nor homage to Qasim Amin, explains the true historical context of this occasion. On
the eve of the 21st century, Amin remains relevant not because of the similarities
between Amin's society and ours as a number of panelists liked to note but
rather by how well we can use his society as a subtext to recover our own and come
to terms with the dilemmas and social muddles that have rocked Egypt and the Arab
world since then. Muhammad al-Shadhili commented that it was as if time has not
passed in the Arab world. Another writer, Abdullah Nabhan, perceived the
preoccupation of the conference with women's issues as an extension of the question
of women's liberation raised during the Renaissance period. Jaber Asfour, the
director of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Culture, likewise stated that Amin's
convictions have not lost their credibility or their applicability, especially since the
grandsons of those who accused Tahrir al-Mara' ' (The Liberation of Woman) of
blasphemy have multiplied since the days of the enlightenment. These men, Asfour
added, have taken women writers to court, treating them like criminals, and
threatening to destroy their liberation movement. Nonetheless and despite the
growing and mutating forms of oppression against women since the 1900s the
world of the conferees is hardly the domicile of Qasim Amin or Huda Sharawi.
The conference and the papers delivered have generated substantial interest mainly
from the outside, particularly in the commentary elicited from Arab intellectuals as
expressed in the Arab press. Given this interest, we will explore two distinct facets
of the conference. The first is the historical relevance of Qasim Amin and his society
to ours, including the way in which selective messages of Tahrir are appropriated
to serve state feminism and governmental planning pertaining to women. Second is
the attempt of women intellectuals and feminists to reflect on the past century,
probing into their own history, struggles, and setbacks, and assessing future

challenges. The conferees devoted much of their efforts to the discussion of women's
confrontations
with salafi (ancestral
traditionalism),
usuli (fundamentalist),
islahi (reformist) andijtihadi (interpretive) Islamism (often treated as one uniform
entity); the two-edged sword of shari'ainterpretation; the gendered struggle over
legal frontiers; state policies on women; women's educational and occupational
progress; links between Arab and Western feminism; and the merits and likelihood
of eliminating gender from literature and language.
Rallying Force of Women's Liberation

Qasim Amin (1863-1908) was born into an aristocratic Ottoman family that had
ruled in Kurdistan during the mid-19th century and later moved to Alexandria ,
Egypt , where Amin was born. He graduated at the age of 18 with a degree in law
from the Khedival School and later occupied a high military rank in Isma'il's army.
A regular at the popular Cairene coffeehouse Matatya, Amin, along with figures like
Saad Zaghlul and Adib Ishaq, engaged in the lively discussions and debates which
Jamal al-Din al-Afghani initiated on the verge of Ahmad Urabi's 1880 uprising
against the Khedive, Tawfiq. Next, supported by a four-year government grant,
Amin left Egypt for France in 1881 to study at the College of Montpellier where he
became closely acquainted with Western political and legal thought. At the college
he had a short-lived love affair with a French woman known as Slafa. He worked on
the magazine Al-Urwa al-Wuthqa (The Solid Bond) and was the special translator
of Muhammad Abdu (1849-1905) during his residence in France .
After his return to Egypt in 1885, Amin married the daughter of Ibrahim Pasha
Khitab, joining an aristocratic Egyptian family, and was appointed a judge. Another
14 years passed before he would lay down his infamous work, Tahrir alMara', which received severe criticism in leading Egyptian newspapers. Amin
devoted Tahrir to the conditions of the aristocratic Egyptian women whom he
perceived as ignorant, idle, and in great need of educational guidance. He believed
that reforming theumma (nation) started with the reform of the family and women's
role within it; secluded and denied a certain level of education in the extended
patriarchal homestead, women could not succeed in raising competent children,
particularly male offspring, who would lead the Egyptian nation. This ignorance in
turn led to the reproduction of archaic values and decadent traditions. But before a
woman could have access to education and public life, Amin insisted that some
aspects of veiling and seclusion had to be changed. A woman's face and hands must
be free of coverings and unnecessary obstructions. He insisted that the Quran did not
extend veiling to the hands or the palms. Women who were not secluded, he argued,
succeeded in developing the necessary skills to manage their lives successfully even
if they were uneducated.

In order to understand the full significance of Tahrir, it is important to discover

why and for whom was it produced, and what social groups and political discourses
it served. Today we cannot simply reiterate that Tahrir attempted to establish a
new gender structure or that it was a milestone in women's path to emancipation and
independence. Beyond its importance for the aristocratic women of Egypt ,
was Tahrir truly the harbinger of new opportunities for Arab women across class,
region, ethnicity, and race? Did women's voices and varied methods of resistance to
male hegemony and attempts to renegotiate the gender structure go unmentioned?
Why did Amin's Tahrir, rather than the writings of the Maryam al-Nahhas (18561888) or Zaynab Fawwaz (c. 1860-1914) become the rallying force and the symbol
for the movement of women's liberation in the Arab world?
Four intertwined elements shed light on these questions. First, Amin tied the
nationalist project to the reform of upper-class patriarchy, targeting some, but not all,
practices of veiling and seclusion. Amin embellished the republican image of
women as the nurturers and shapers of the men of the nation whose advancement
meant that of a whole nation. Egypt's modern story features updated forms of male
control and gendered consciousness that are packaged in new, albeit conditional,
liberties for women within the domestic domain.
Second, in calling for an improved, partially ameliorated patriarchy, Amin was
essentially denouncing the cultural backwardness of the archetypal harem which
European colonialists attacked, projecting those inferior human qualities on Islam.
As such, Tahrir was a political and ideological commentary about what colonized
Egyptian society is not: namely, inferior and beyond cultural repair. The civilizing
force which Amin envisaged in the Egyptian nation was predicated on changing the
relationship of the dominant male elite toward their women. Abdullah Nabhan
underscored the growing importance of the modern state in post-colonial Egypt
where Amin's work was all the more relevant. As the Egyptian state takes form, so
does a new gender discourse that attempts to prove that its women are central to the
national economy and social development on a par with advanced European
nations.
Third, Amin's work is written by a male modernist to Muslim men, especially the
traditional landed aristocracy of late Ottoman Egypt whose women observed
different facets of veiling and seclusion. This social stratum was itself undergoing
important changes and was gradually overcome by the nationalist modernists. The
fact that Amin was one of the aristocrats and a distinguished official of the state,
namely aqadi (judge), made his work the more significant. He held the reigns of
interpretive shari'a and reformist Islamic politics of the highest form.
Indeed, the book was a shock to Egyptian society, as Mahmud al-Wardani noted,
though in reality it was mostly a shock to the traditional landed aristocracy who did
not yet realize that modernizing its control over women would in the long run be

beneficial for its image and social position and its relations with the
British. Tahrir must have had a different impact on other segments of the literate
male population and the few working-class men in the rural regions who may have
known about its contents indirectly. For the most part, the wives, sisters and mothers
of these men were only partially secluded or veiled if at all. Amin denounced the
religious dignitaries and conservative political leaders who resisted any attempt to
change the old social norms. He urged his fellow men to understand that certain
traditions had served the interests of their predecessors and but must be seen as
transient and incompatible with the 1900s. Noteworthy was his insistence that
the shari'a was inconstant that in as much as it was based on social and human
praxis, it was mutable and capable of accommodating new conditions without
violating the fundamentals of Islam.
The fourth element, print culture, whose value the prominent qadi understood quite
well, forced Egypt 's learned men to take note. Around this same time a female
literary culture was blossoming in Egypt, and Beth Baron, a professor of history,
made insightful conclusions about this culture in her book, The Women's
Awakening in Egypt, showing that while upper-class women were authoring
biographical dictionaries, novels, domestic literature, and translated works, the
learned Arab society and later Orientalists gave precedence to men's works.
Moreover, the print culture, accessible to the male literati, helped disseminate
Amin's version of Tahrir at a time when actual female voices from below were
able, due to their distinct class conditions and personal experiences, to exert more
modest, incremental limitations on male authority. Many working women had
already succeeded in overcoming seclusion and veiling. The reaction
to Tahrir cannot be simply understood on the basis of Amin's espousal of Western
ideas but rather on how his ideas were played out in Egyptian society at different
class levels and shaped by his role as a judge and a nationalist.
Furthermore, Tahrir cannot be seen as a mirror reflecting the overall conditions of
aristocratic women, or the meanings of their veiling practices, which over the 20th
century shifted from being insignias of class and status to signs of backwardness and
confinement.
Today, behind the rhetoric of women's progress which most speakers felt they could
recapture by evoking the spirit of Tahrir, it is doubtful whether the Egyptian
government was proposing fundamental legal and political gains for women by
hosting the conference. The conditional and selective developments permitted by
state officials could be gleaned from the statements of Amina al-Jundi, the Minister
of Social Affairs in Egypt , who explained that the government has formulated a plan
to solve the problems facing women, particularly those caused by women
themselves such as the practice of clitorectomy. The government has been using
state feminism to pose itself as an alternative to the literalist Islamists, constantly
redefining women's rights as it jockeys for the most favorable position. When the

language of liberation means control of demographic explosion and dispersing the

appeal of Islamism, then it is warmly adopted by the government. We have to
remember though, that in most of its policies concerning women, the government
had so far appeased Islamists in several areas, not the least of which is family law.
Rediscovering Women's Histories

Beyond the historical links between Amin's time and ours, and the role
of Tahrir in women's emancipation or lack thereof, the conference became an
occasion for evaluating women's conditions across national lines, casting their
histories in terms of personal freedom and political control.
Two important groups of women found only a marginal voice at the conference:
working women, and Islamist (reformist, militant, or traditionalist) women. The
Islamist position was present only through representatives of official statepropagated Islam, such as Afaf al-Najjar, a professor of Islamic Studies at al-Azhar,
who confirmed along with many panelists that there is an enlightened humanitarian
Islam and another dark, reactionary, and male-tailored Islam. Jaber Asfour explained
that Islam, as the religion of the majority, is not an obstacle to women's progress nor
does it prevent them from exercising their social, economic, or political rights.
Rather, the rigid and conservative interpretations of Islam that emerged in times of
backwardness, impotence, defeat and suppression are the threat to women.
Arab-American anthologist and translator Salma Khadra al-Jayyusi too asserted that
Islam is not responsible for stagnation and backwardness. This, she noted, was
evident in the millions of veiled women who have invaded public space, attaining
university degrees and assuming paid positions in various fields. In common with a
number of other panelists, al-Jayyusi considered education and employment two
significant criteria for measuring progress among Arab women. She attempted to
separate the issue of veiling from women's progress and pursuit of modern goals
without examining the full range of veiling practices in rural and urban Arab
societies or the varied implications these practices have for women's sexuality and
control over their bodies, according to a report in the London based weekly AlMushahid Assiyasi. Dismissing feminist interpretations of the scriptures, al-Najjar
upheld the universal and obligatory nature of veiling which, in her view, remains
valid for every time and place. She also endorsed the literal Quranic truism that
women are inherently inferior to men because they are deficient naqisat in
intellect and faith.
Many speakers saw revivalist Islam in all its different shades as anathema to
women's progress. Leila Abdul-Wahhab lamented the alarming setbacks which the
question of women's emancipation has suffered under the onslaught of
the usuli vision and practices. The Islamist obsession with banishing moral
corruption from Muslim society, she noted, did not allow us to see the social

contradictions and economic dependency that have already undermined women's

development.
In our view, there are several trends with different characteristics. These trends,
depending on the internal social system in which they have functioned over time,
have indeed taken varied approaches toward the issue of women. Notwithstanding,
most of the modern Islamist movements have taken great pains and performed many
legal gymnastics to define gender relations quite narrowly and to organize all areas
of male control over women's sexuality, reproduction, and labor. To make the picture
even more complex, a number of native Islamist movements have co-opted versions
of feminism that led to either a partial or a false sense of female empowerment.
The conferees concurred that women have been subjected to systematic, multifaceted oppression accompanied by women's failed attempts to reverse the situation.
Al-Jayyusi noted that women are fighting on two fronts: against men who reject the
principle of gender equality, and women who act upon the very social norms that
undermine their own positions. Women who internalize the precepts of submission
cannot be armed with courage.
Measuring Progress

Those who emphasized an incremental progress in women's history pointed to

education and employment as two central expressions of such progress. Lebanese
scholar Dalal al-Bizri noted that despite the great burdens women carry and the
suppression they face, they continue to improve their social conditions and
manipulate the law to their advantage, achieving a number of goals.
Cynthia Nelson, a Western scholar, argued that missing from the overall picture of
women's development is the kind of education which leads to the creation of new
principles of freedom for women and men. Basma al-Batriq tried to dislodge the
myth that women who work in the media have achieved equality with men in terms
of salary and benefits, and Najwa Kamil, an Egyptian writer, showed that women in
the press continue to face problems pertaining to the nature of their work, as well as
discrimination in benefits and salaries.
Another yardstick the panelists used to assess women's progress was political
participation and leadership. Muna Makram Ubayd, an Egyptian political scientist,
noted that for the most part, the espousal of women's rights is of marginal
importance to Arab political movements and parties, and at times is exploited for
male political gains. Unless women create their own political discourse, their cause
will not be viable, she said.
In a round table on Women and Authority, chaired by Hisham Sharabi, the
panelists agreed that the state was a major culprit in the regressive situation of
women. Syrian sociologist, Muna Fayyad, highlighted the marginal representation of

Lebanese women in the parliament, political organizations and parties. Similarly,

Nimah Khalid reminded us that even among Palestinian women, whose record of
political activism outweighs that of their Lebanese sisters, the Palestinian Union of
Women does not include members from the larger mass of Palestinian women.
Syrian scholar Georgette Attiyyah pointed to the significant psychological impact of
subordination to male authority, around which grow myths about women's mental
inferiority. These myths become self-fulfilling prophecies. This, she noted, is evident
among many Arab women who, even when assuming leadership roles or decisionmaking posts, continue to feel defeated within.
Aside from discussions on education and employment, few if any of the speakers
analyzed transformations in women's material conditions, in either rural or urban
settings, that could be linked to decisive improvements in their social status, political
power, and personal freedom. Little is also known about the opportunities and
aspirations of working women in peasant and industrial labor. The conditions
leading to the transformation of the family, patriarchal patterns of control, gender
relations, women's domestic and market labor, class division and state policies, are
all key factors in assessing women's conditions, the nature of their struggles and the
extent of women's success in their struggle for liberation.
Violence is inflicted upon women world-wide, Hanan Jumah declared, and in the
Arab World the penal code(qanun al-uqubat) encourages and protects male abuses
and aggressions. She called for the establishment of havens for female victims of
violence. Moreover, many of the laws implemented by Arab states contradict the
international agreements they have signed to promote women's human rights. The
Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour discussed her personal dilemma with the law after
marrying Palestinian poet, Maryad al-Barghuti; Egyptian law prohibited both her
husband and son from attaining Egyptian citizenship, permanent residence, or the
right to study and work in Egypt. Both Fatimah Khaffaji and Munira Ahmad, two
Egyptian intellectuals who focused on Egyptian and Gulf women respectively,
underscored the limitations on women's personal status under the penal code and
thus on their struggle for equality with men. For example, the law still gives a
husband the right to prevent his wife from traveling.
Jamal al-Banna, Hasan al-Banna's brother, felt that women could not fulfill their
political rights and lost real opportunities for self-actualization on the basis of a
conservative reading of the religious text. Kuwaiti novelist Laila Othman, who was
interrupted and criticized several times by members of the audience, argued that in a
small country like Kuwait , the activities of anti-feminist religious groups affiliated
with powerful political parties prove to be detrimental to women's advancement.
These groups have intervened in school curriculums, turning them into rigid
conservative educational programs. In an interview with Al-Mara' al-Jadidah
published by the conference, Othman discussed the harassment she had endured at
the hands of Islamists who denounced her novels as pornographic. Indeed, there is a

long list of Arab women novelists whose works have become much-awaited
occasions for salafis and mujtahids alike to expose the moral decadence of female
intellectuals as a sign of the degeneration of Arab Muslim society at large. Many
women novelists have even received direct threats from Islamist groups.
Siham Qulaybu, a delegate from the University of Jerusalem, explained the
oppressive conditions Israeli law imposes on Arab women of Jerusalem . If one
marries a man who is not a native of Jerusalem, the husband is prohibited from
living in Jerusalem with his wife. This puts the woman in the difficult position of
deciding whether to leave Jerusalem to lead a normal family life or to stay and
defend her rights as an Arab citizen of the city.
Empowerment or Isolation

Egyptian novelist Salwa Bakr argued that male biases and stigmas inherent in the
Arabic language reflect deep-seated gender inequalities in Arab society at large.
Although many panelists may have agreed with this statement, they were divided on
whether a radical transformation of gender structure in Arab society should start
within society or with the language itself, and whether a fundamental alteration of
the latter would actually lead to a new gender awareness. Zulaikha Abu Risha, a
Jordanian poet and critic, proposed a new consciousness of language as a means
for social reform and gender equality. She noted that the elimination of certain
grammatical rules promoting the male language of taghlib (dominance) would force
men to understand the frustrations women feel whenever they are addressed in the
masculine form. Author Hussa Munif opposed the feminization of the Arabic
language, arguing that it would give a false sense of gender equality, making it easier
to overlook the discriminations against women. Madihah Dus also questioned the
call for the feminization of language as yet another version of domination.
A parallel debate emerged around literature in a round table chaired by Sabri Hafiz,
a professor of Arabic literature. The panelists were divided between advocates of a
feminine literature and humanitarian literature, strangely posed as distinct and
separate entities. Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury encouraged women writers to put
an end to writing invested in the emotional defense of women's rights. He urged
them instead to join the mainstream by defining their private concerns and
presenting their conditions critically and imaginatively. With this overarching
generalization about the emotionality of women novelists and little appreciation
for their varied social and ideological concerns, Khoury's invitation to his undefined
mainstream lures women into a male mainstream within which female literature
is not viable.
Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh asked: If we discarded our feminine/feminist
writing, then who will continue to write about our personal experiences? Dhabyah
Khamis, poet and novelist, pointed to the absurdity of literary critics who demanded

the production of humanitarian rather than feminine literature when they live in
societies that prevent women from writing [creatively] except under suppressive
conditions. On the other end, Moroccan novelist and critic Muhammad Baradah
found it necessary to search for a method of literary criticism devised exclusively to
evaluate women's literature. Not unlike Khoury's views, Baradah's position leaves
one wondering whether such views comprise an improvement in gender
consciousness or a segregation that would demote women's literature or banish it
altogether. Ashur felt that writing consciously feminine literature is a grave error
because women have long suffered from narrow spaces and intellectual
confinement, a marginalization they are deliberately continuing. Hanan al-Shaykh
corroborated with this view, adding that women should be ashamed of characterizing
their literature as nisa'i feminine. She nonetheless embraced and took pride in
women's and feminist literature.
Reconfiguring the Relations between Arab and Western Feminism

Cynthia Nelson argued that the interaction between the Third World and Arab
society on the one hand, and Western modernization on the other, introduced to the
latter new ideas about justice and women's rights which were hard to ignore. She
emphasized, however, that the Arab feminist movement was not merely an echo of
the Western precedent, despite the fact that women's demand for equal rights with
men was considered an expression of the colonial period. Anwar Mughith, professor
at the University of Halwan in Cairo, proposed that the women's movement
internationally offered the best avenue for interaction among cultures and
civilizations. The Arab women's movement, he said, interacts with its European and
American counterparts on three distinct levels. The first is philosophical,
emphasizing fundamental concepts of human freedom. The second is moral,
proposing women's liberation as a way for the triumph of good against evil. Mughith
explained that the moral argument attempts to show that confining women to the
patriarchal household limits their abilities whereas work outside the house
transforms them into complete and fulfilled human beings, as Muhammad Abdu and
Faris al-Shidyak had advocated. The third level relates to the social value given to
the liberation of women. Mughith, echoing the view of several other conferees,
reminded us that colonialism gave the feminist Arab discourse a suspicious overtone
as a manifestation of colonial penetration and control.
Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, a history professor at UCLA, discussed three central
elements in the American feminist movement, namely: the emphasis on women's
control over their bodies including freedom of choice in marriage, including
remaining single; the extent of their authority in comparison to men; and their access
to job opportunities and equal material rights. American feminists insisted that
without total equality with men, no liberation is complete. Marsot noted that as long
as men monopolize centers of political power, the legal system, and the economy,

equality is an illusion. As such, for Marsot, women must achieve some type of
progress because ultimately freedom is a relative issue.
Nuna al-Bahir, who agreed that the concept of feminism cannot be discussed in
isolation from the Western context that produced it, asserted that a real concern for
women's rights did exist in the Arab world independently of the West. Al-Bahir
noted that Western feminist movements looked at their Arab counterparts as
backward and incapable of making decisions. The European feminists' perceptions
of Arab women rest on the self-other dichotomy; the self is perceived as advanced
and domineering, while the other is backward and inferior even if it does own
critical economic resources.
In commenting on the conference, al-Bizri noted that for better or worse, the
Western world remains the model for imitation as it was during the Renaissance
period. She noted that such an imitation poses problems because the West has
indeed advanced multiple and contradictory models, particularly regarding women's
status and goals. She noted that our soil is no more prepared to receive modernity
(al-hadatha) than that of Amin's time because it lost its originality. Al-Bizri,
however, conceptualized historical change on the basis of levels of absorption of
tradition versus modernity and how they are gauged by Arabturath , culture. She
explained that several cultural layers had piled up above the traditional and the
modern before political Islam rose to complicate the Arabs' relationship to
modernity. In our view, the transformation of Arab culture, a question that is central
to the question of women's liberation, does not follow a mechanical course of layer
piling of static traditions or the coexistence side-by-side, without fusion, of the
traditional and the modern. Rather, it involves processes of appropriation,
amelioration, or rejection of Western values, culture, and traditions. This
assessment is not determined by abstract intellectual attitudes toward the many
Wests that exist but rather by the social processes in which society, economy, and
polity are constantly interacting. These processes differ from one Arab society to
another over the course of history, creating as such a dynamic and constant
development of turath that is at once traditional and modern.
Finally, we need to appreciate the variety of Islamist and feminist-Islamist
movements and ideologies. Indeed, the Tunisian Rashid al-Ghanushi's support for
women's full particiption in governmental affairs, and the Sudanese Major Maryam
al-Sadiq al-Mahdi's rejection of anything less than full equality with men at the level
of political and military command, are a far outcry from the Wahhabi outlook on
women. That said, we must not exaggerate the achievements of Islamist feminism
which need to be cast first in terms of the larger population of women and not the
elite that is, even (especially!) the wives, daughters, and sisters of Islamist leaders
and second, in terms of fundamental legal changes pertaining to women's control
of their sexuality, reproduction, labor, and political leadership across class, ethnicity,
and race.

This essay appeared in Al Jadid, Vol. 6, no. 32 (Summer 2000)

Copyright by Al Jadid (2000)