Reformist women in early 20th century Egypt and lessons for the present

Dr. Margot Badran

Margot Badran presently holds the Reza Khatib and Georgeanna Clifford  Khatib Visiting Chair in Comparative Religion at St. Joseph’s College, Brooklyn.  A historian of the Middle East and Islamic societies and a specialist in gender studies, she is a Senior Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. She was previously Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Religion and Preceptor at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa at Northwestern University. She has lectured widely in academic and popular forums in the United States, as well as in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. Along with her scholarly publications she also writes on feminism and gender for the Al Ahram Weekly in Cairo.

Selected Publications

Gender and Islam in Africa: Women’s Discourses, Practices, and Empowerment (The Woodrow Wilson Press, forthcoming 2011).

“Où en est le féminisme islamique?,” Critique internationale (Institute of Political Science of Paris), special issue on Le féminisme islamique edited by Stéphanie Latte Abdallah (Feb. 2010).

“Reformist Women as Feminists in Pursuit of Equality in the Islamic World,” in Middle East Program Occasional Paper Series, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC Spring 1 (2009).

Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences (2009), Oneworld Press, Oxford 2009).

Opening the Gates: An Arab Feminist Anthology (2004), Indiana University Press. (selections from 1st edition in German and Dutch)

Feminism, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (1995), Princeton University Press. (also in Arabic)

Reformist women in early 20th century Egypt and lessons for the present

In this paper I revisit Egyptian women reformers in the early 20th century who generated a feminism of their own referred to as secular feminism connoting a national feminism. The creators of this feminism were Egyptian citizens, both Muslim and Christian, and their intended beneficiaries were to be all Egyptians of whatever class, creed, and gender, during a time of ongoing modernization and at a moment of transition from colonialism to semi-postcolonialism.  In the more immediate sense, it was generally women of the middle strata, both Muslim and Christian, who would benefit most from new opportunities in education and work. The sought-after reform of the Muslim Personal Status Code campaign from within the secular feminist movement that drew upon the discourses of secular nationalism, Islamic reform, and humanitarianism (later human rights).  Pioneering Egyptian feminists at the same time engaged in regional and international (as it was then called) reform and activism with women of various nationalities and religions. In my paper I argue that the inclusivity across religious lines that Egyptian women reformers as feminists practiced in the early 20th century offers a model of collaborative feminist work for contemporary activists as they endeavor to reform the Egyptian Muslim Personal Status Code mobilizing Islamic feminist discourse in Egypt and transnational contexts, in tandem with other discourses. Collaborative reformist activism would better reflect the waq’a, contemporary reality, and mu’amalat or social relations at a time when there are increased religiously-mixed marriages in Egypt and among Egyptians and others abroad could stand to reduce the communalism creeping into public life bifurcating the nation and transnational feminist work.