ABSTRACT
To an outsider looking at Egypt the last stronghold of Muslim traditionalism in the middle of the last century, the country seemed to be inexorably on its way to modernisation and secularisation which had begun half, or almost a century earlier, manifesting itself most clearly in the abolition of the segregation of the sexes. In 1899 and 1900, the Egyptian lawyer Qāsim Amīn had published two pioneering works, Taḥrīr al-mar’a (The Liberation of Women) and al-Mar’a al-ğadīda (The New Woman) which met with strong but also fruitless opposition. While the conservative leaders of the religious al-Azhar University clung to what they considered an undebatable Islamic tradition, the wind was blowing in a different direction, as the debate around the Egyptian nation in the dusk of the Ottoman Empire came along with issues of modernity, secularism and gender. In 1923, the Egyptian feminist Hudā Ša‘rāwī publicly took off her veil after returning from a women’s conference in Rome, and her Egyptian Feminist Union undertook the task of preparing women to claim their rights through education and extensive social work among the poorer classes. By the time Ša‘rāwī died in 1947, other women’s organisations had begun to eclipse the Egyptian Feminist Union by providing a platform that addressed the more complex political and professional needs of this new generation of women. The revolution of 1952 put an end to colonial rule and marked the beginning of the secularist Nasserism and embraced this new middle-class agenda and used it as a source of national and international support (Hatem 2005: 68).
