The Path to Nationalism
Shaarawi was born in 1879 into a wealthy landed family in Upper Egypt, about 150 miles south of Cairo. Her father was Muhammad Sultan, a prominent politician who held a series of governmental posts in the Khedivate, and was eventually elected first president of the Egyptian Representative Council. Shaarawi's birth and status meant that her education was extensive, and she spoke Arabic, French, and the Turkish of her Circassian mother. Her early life was marked by difficulty as well; her father's death when she was only five and her marriage to her much-older legal guardian at the age of thirteen meant that Shaarawi left childhood behind quickly.[1]
Shaarawi's husband Ali Shaarawi was politically active as well, and after their marriage in 1892 she soon became drawn into her husband's activities. Her first interest was education, and she sought to make the educational opportunities that had been afforded her available to other Egyptian women too. Shaarawi began by organizing and sponsoring lectures for women to attend, and this was among the first public activities offered middle- and upper-class Egyptian women, who were largely confined to the harem.[2] Shaarawi began to sense the tremendous power and influence women could wield in Egyptian affairs if they could only move beyond the confines of the harem and out into the world, and particularly if given the opportunity to communicate en masse with each other. Shaarawi established a school for girls that taught academic instead of "practical" subjects, and in her efforts she was supported and inspired by educational modernizers like Rifa'a al-Tahtawi and Muhammad Abduh.[3]
From Egyptian Nationalist to Egyptian Feminist
In the aftermath of World War I, there was hope among Egypt's elite that the time had come for independence from British control. An Egyptian delegation (wafdin Arabic) was sent to London, but their concerns were dismissed and the delegation treated contemptuously. Upon their return to Egypt, the delegates formed the nationalist Wafd party, which sought to overturn British rule. Ali Shaarawi became one of the leaders of the Wafd party, and young Huda soon became involved in the nationalist movement.
In the 1919 Revolution, Shaarawi led the women of Cairo into the streets in support of the Wafd. The British commander ordered them to disperse, but the women stood firm, and for three hours they stood under the blazing Egyptian sun, steadfastly refusing to move until the soldiers backed down. Shaarawi's granddaughter Sania Shaarawi describes her grandmother pulling her dress slightly apart at the chest and saying to a British soldier, "You will have to shoot me. Much trouble for you, but you will have to do it."[4]
Shaarawi soon organized the women's branch of the Wafd party, known as the Wafd Women's Committee, and together with Safia Zaghloul, wife of the Wafdparty chair Saad Zaghloul, she headed the Committee.[5] Nationalist aims met with success in 1922, when the British recognized Egyptian independence, but success was quickly followed by disillusion for Shaarawi.[6] After fighting side by side with their men, many women of the Committee mistakenly believed that their full political emancipation would be granted them in Egypt's new constitution. "Women's great acts and endless sacrifices do not change men's views of women," Shaarawi wrote in her memoirs. "Through their arrogance, men refuse to see the capabilities of women."[7]
The lack of rights for women in the newly autonomous Egyptian government radicalized Shaarawi, and her husband's death in 1922 freed her for action. In 1923, she traveled to Rome for the first meeting of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. She and her companions were the only delegates there with veiled faces, and they quickly agreed to remove their veils to facilitate communication with their European sisters. Upon their return to Cairo, Shaarawi believed it would be hypocrisy to continue to wear the veil, and she performed what her granddaughter later called the "spectacular gesture" of publicly removing her veil.[8] The crowd of Wafdist and feminist women awaiting her at the railway station immediately imitated her, and the Egyptian feminist movement was born.
From Egyptian Feminist to Arab Feminist
The year of her return from Rome, Shaarawi founded the Egyptian Feminist Union, Egypt's first national women's organization. Shaarawi came to believe that Egypt's national destiny and the destiny of its women citizens were inextricable, and saw her feminist work as an outgrowth of her nationalism. The Union published a newspaper and journal, worked to reform family law, and lobbied for greater oversight of women's exploitation in labor, but the main objective was always the right of Egyptian women to vote.[9]
Shaarawi began to attend women's conferences in Europe frequently, and in the late 1930s, the Arab women of Palestine appealed to Shaarawi for help. She began to see the cause of Egyptian feminism as tied to feminism throughout the Arab and Muslim world, and it was Shaarawi who organized the first Arab Feminist Conference, held in Cairo in 1944. In her opening speech, Shaarawi emphasized two themes common to her work: that the full political emancipation of women was their right by Sharia, and their prerogative as the ones who had worked to eliminate oppression and injustice in their colonized homelands. "Gentlemen," she pleaded, "I do not believe that the Arab man who demands that others give him back his usurped rights would be avaricious and not give the woman back her own lawful rights, all the more so since he himself has tasted the bitterness of deprivation and usurped rights."[10]
Shaarawi founded the Arab Feminist Union in 1945, seeking to unite the aims and aspirations of all Arab women. She died in 1947, awarded Egypt's highest civilian honor — but still unable to vote. Women were finally granted the right to vote in Gamal Abdel Nasser's constitutional reforms of 1956.
[1] Huda Shaarawi, Harem Years, The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, trans. Margot Badran (New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1987) 23-58.
[2] Emory University Scholar Blogs, Huda Shaarawi, https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/12/shaarawi-huda
[3] Shaarawi, 13.
[4] Terek Osman, "The Rise and Fall of Arab Liberalism," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xeuVZLs5p0
[5] Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi, Casting Off the Veil: the Life of Huda Shaarawi, Egypt's First Feminist, (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2012) 106-122.
[6] Shaarawi, 122.
[7] Shaarawi, 131.
[8] Osman, "The Rise and Fall of Arab Liberalism."
[9] Lanfranchi, 217-236.
[10] Nancy Forestell and Maureen Moynagh, eds., Documenting First Wave Feminisms, Volume One: Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013)
Shaarawi was born in 1879 into a wealthy landed family in Upper Egypt, about 150 miles south of Cairo. Her father was Muhammad Sultan, a prominent politician who held a series of governmental posts in the Khedivate, and was eventually elected first president of the Egyptian Representative Council. Shaarawi's birth and status meant that her education was extensive, and she spoke Arabic, French, and the Turkish of her Circassian mother. Her early life was marked by difficulty as well; her father's death when she was only five and her marriage to her much-older legal guardian at the age of thirteen meant that Shaarawi left childhood behind quickly.[1]
Shaarawi's husband Ali Shaarawi was politically active as well, and after their marriage in 1892 she soon became drawn into her husband's activities. Her first interest was education, and she sought to make the educational opportunities that had been afforded her available to other Egyptian women too. Shaarawi began by organizing and sponsoring lectures for women to attend, and this was among the first public activities offered middle- and upper-class Egyptian women, who were largely confined to the harem.[2] Shaarawi began to sense the tremendous power and influence women could wield in Egyptian affairs if they could only move beyond the confines of the harem and out into the world, and particularly if given the opportunity to communicate en masse with each other. Shaarawi established a school for girls that taught academic instead of "practical" subjects, and in her efforts she was supported and inspired by educational modernizers like Rifa'a al-Tahtawi and Muhammad Abduh.[3]
From Egyptian Nationalist to Egyptian Feminist
In the aftermath of World War I, there was hope among Egypt's elite that the time had come for independence from British control. An Egyptian delegation (wafdin Arabic) was sent to London, but their concerns were dismissed and the delegation treated contemptuously. Upon their return to Egypt, the delegates formed the nationalist Wafd party, which sought to overturn British rule. Ali Shaarawi became one of the leaders of the Wafd party, and young Huda soon became involved in the nationalist movement.
In the 1919 Revolution, Shaarawi led the women of Cairo into the streets in support of the Wafd. The British commander ordered them to disperse, but the women stood firm, and for three hours they stood under the blazing Egyptian sun, steadfastly refusing to move until the soldiers backed down. Shaarawi's granddaughter Sania Shaarawi describes her grandmother pulling her dress slightly apart at the chest and saying to a British soldier, "You will have to shoot me. Much trouble for you, but you will have to do it."[4]
Shaarawi soon organized the women's branch of the Wafd party, known as the Wafd Women's Committee, and together with Safia Zaghloul, wife of the Wafdparty chair Saad Zaghloul, she headed the Committee.[5] Nationalist aims met with success in 1922, when the British recognized Egyptian independence, but success was quickly followed by disillusion for Shaarawi.[6] After fighting side by side with their men, many women of the Committee mistakenly believed that their full political emancipation would be granted them in Egypt's new constitution. "Women's great acts and endless sacrifices do not change men's views of women," Shaarawi wrote in her memoirs. "Through their arrogance, men refuse to see the capabilities of women."[7]
The lack of rights for women in the newly autonomous Egyptian government radicalized Shaarawi, and her husband's death in 1922 freed her for action. In 1923, she traveled to Rome for the first meeting of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. She and her companions were the only delegates there with veiled faces, and they quickly agreed to remove their veils to facilitate communication with their European sisters. Upon their return to Cairo, Shaarawi believed it would be hypocrisy to continue to wear the veil, and she performed what her granddaughter later called the "spectacular gesture" of publicly removing her veil.[8] The crowd of Wafdist and feminist women awaiting her at the railway station immediately imitated her, and the Egyptian feminist movement was born.
From Egyptian Feminist to Arab Feminist
The year of her return from Rome, Shaarawi founded the Egyptian Feminist Union, Egypt's first national women's organization. Shaarawi came to believe that Egypt's national destiny and the destiny of its women citizens were inextricable, and saw her feminist work as an outgrowth of her nationalism. The Union published a newspaper and journal, worked to reform family law, and lobbied for greater oversight of women's exploitation in labor, but the main objective was always the right of Egyptian women to vote.[9]
Shaarawi began to attend women's conferences in Europe frequently, and in the late 1930s, the Arab women of Palestine appealed to Shaarawi for help. She began to see the cause of Egyptian feminism as tied to feminism throughout the Arab and Muslim world, and it was Shaarawi who organized the first Arab Feminist Conference, held in Cairo in 1944. In her opening speech, Shaarawi emphasized two themes common to her work: that the full political emancipation of women was their right by Sharia, and their prerogative as the ones who had worked to eliminate oppression and injustice in their colonized homelands. "Gentlemen," she pleaded, "I do not believe that the Arab man who demands that others give him back his usurped rights would be avaricious and not give the woman back her own lawful rights, all the more so since he himself has tasted the bitterness of deprivation and usurped rights."[10]
Shaarawi founded the Arab Feminist Union in 1945, seeking to unite the aims and aspirations of all Arab women. She died in 1947, awarded Egypt's highest civilian honor — but still unable to vote. Women were finally granted the right to vote in Gamal Abdel Nasser's constitutional reforms of 1956.
[1] Huda Shaarawi, Harem Years, The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, trans. Margot Badran (New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1987) 23-58.
[2] Emory University Scholar Blogs, Huda Shaarawi, https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/12/shaarawi-huda
[3] Shaarawi, 13.
[4] Terek Osman, "The Rise and Fall of Arab Liberalism," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xeuVZLs5p0
[5] Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi, Casting Off the Veil: the Life of Huda Shaarawi, Egypt's First Feminist, (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2012) 106-122.
[6] Shaarawi, 122.
[7] Shaarawi, 131.
[8] Osman, "The Rise and Fall of Arab Liberalism."
[9] Lanfranchi, 217-236.
[10] Nancy Forestell and Maureen Moynagh, eds., Documenting First Wave Feminisms, Volume One: Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013)
In this documentary edited by political-economist and author Terek Osman, Prof. Marilynn Booth of the University of Edinburgh and Huda Shaarawi's
granddaughter Sania Shaarawi discuss Shaarawi's role in the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. Sania Shaarawi refers to her grandmother's "taste for spectacular gestures" in her defiance of British soldiers. (See especially 2.14 to 6.00) Veiled women demonstrating in the 1919 Revolution.
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Young Huda Shaarawi in Cairo, ca. 1910
Huda Shaarawi (left) with Safia Zaghloul, wife of nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul
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Women of the nationalist Wafd Party's Central Committee in 1925, including veiled and unveiled women.
Nabawiyya Musa, Huda Shaarawi, and Saiza Nabawari at International Feminist Conference Rome 1923
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Excerpt from Shaarawi's Opening Speech to the first Arab Feminist Conference,
Cairo 1944
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Arab woman who is equal to the man in duties and obligations will not accept, in the twentieth century, the distinctions between the sexes that the advanced countries have done away with. The Arab woman will not agree to be chained in slavery and to pay for the consequences of men's mistakes with respect to her country's rights and the future of her children. The woman also demands with her loudest voice to be restored her political rights, rights granted to her by the Sharia and dictated to her by the demands of the present. The advanced nations have recognized that the man and the woman are to each other like the brain and heart are to the body; if the balance between these two organs is upset, the system of the whole body will be upset. Likewise, if the balance between the two sexes in the nation is upset it will disintegrate and collapse. The advanced nations, after careful examination into the matter, have come to believe in the equality of sexes in all rights even though their religious and secular laws have not reached the level Islam has reached in terms of justice to the woman.
Islam has given her the right to vote for the ruler and has allowed her to give opinions on questions of jurisprudence and religion. The woman, given by the Creator the right to vote for the successor of the Prophet, is deprived of the right to vote for a deputy in a circuit or district election by a (male) being created by God. At the same time, this right is enjoyed by a man who might have less education and experience than the woman. And she is the mother who has given birth to the man and has raised and guided him. The Sharia gave her the right to education, to take part in the hijra, and to fight in the ranks of warriors and has made her the equal to the man in all rights and responsibilities, even in the crimes that either sex can commit.
However, the man who alone distributes rights, has kept for himself the right to legislate and rule, generously turning over to his partner his own share of responsibilities and sanctions without seeking her opinion about the division. The woman today demands to regain her share of rights that have been taken from her and gives back to the man the responsibilities and sanctions he has given to her. Gentlemen, this is justice, and I do not believe that the Arab man who demands that others give him back his usurped rights would be avaricious and not give the woman back her own lawful rights, all the more so since he himself has tasted the bitterness of deprivation and usurped rights.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Arab woman who is equal to the man in duties and obligations will not accept, in the twentieth century, the distinctions between the sexes that the advanced countries have done away with. The Arab woman will not agree to be chained in slavery and to pay for the consequences of men's mistakes with respect to her country's rights and the future of her children. The woman also demands with her loudest voice to be restored her political rights, rights granted to her by the Sharia and dictated to her by the demands of the present. The advanced nations have recognized that the man and the woman are to each other like the brain and heart are to the body; if the balance between these two organs is upset, the system of the whole body will be upset. Likewise, if the balance between the two sexes in the nation is upset it will disintegrate and collapse. The advanced nations, after careful examination into the matter, have come to believe in the equality of sexes in all rights even though their religious and secular laws have not reached the level Islam has reached in terms of justice to the woman.
Islam has given her the right to vote for the ruler and has allowed her to give opinions on questions of jurisprudence and religion. The woman, given by the Creator the right to vote for the successor of the Prophet, is deprived of the right to vote for a deputy in a circuit or district election by a (male) being created by God. At the same time, this right is enjoyed by a man who might have less education and experience than the woman. And she is the mother who has given birth to the man and has raised and guided him. The Sharia gave her the right to education, to take part in the hijra, and to fight in the ranks of warriors and has made her the equal to the man in all rights and responsibilities, even in the crimes that either sex can commit.
However, the man who alone distributes rights, has kept for himself the right to legislate and rule, generously turning over to his partner his own share of responsibilities and sanctions without seeking her opinion about the division. The woman today demands to regain her share of rights that have been taken from her and gives back to the man the responsibilities and sanctions he has given to her. Gentlemen, this is justice, and I do not believe that the Arab man who demands that others give him back his usurped rights would be avaricious and not give the woman back her own lawful rights, all the more so since he himself has tasted the bitterness of deprivation and usurped rights.
Further Resources:
books
Casting Off the Veil: The Life of Huda Shaarawi, Egypt's First Feminist, by Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi
I.B. Tauris & Co.: London 2012
Documenting First Wave Feminisms: Volume 1: Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents (Studies in Gender and History)
by Nancy Forestell and Maureen Moynagh
University of Toronto Press : Toronto 2013
Harem Years: the memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, by Huda Shaarawi, translated/edited by Margot Badran
The Feminist Press at the City University of New York: New York 1987
Historical Dictionary of Women in the Middle East and North Africa, by Ghada Talhami
Scarecrow Press: Blue Ridge Summit, 2013
online information
Emory Scholar Blog on Post-Colonial Studies: Huda Shaarawi
The Rise and Fall of Arab Liberalism: Making of the Modern Arab World #1 (video)
general information podcasts (available on iTunesU)
Is the Hijab Required Dress for Muslim Women?
Women's Rights in Islam
books
Casting Off the Veil: The Life of Huda Shaarawi, Egypt's First Feminist, by Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi
I.B. Tauris & Co.: London 2012
Documenting First Wave Feminisms: Volume 1: Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents (Studies in Gender and History)
by Nancy Forestell and Maureen Moynagh
University of Toronto Press : Toronto 2013
Harem Years: the memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, by Huda Shaarawi, translated/edited by Margot Badran
The Feminist Press at the City University of New York: New York 1987
Historical Dictionary of Women in the Middle East and North Africa, by Ghada Talhami
Scarecrow Press: Blue Ridge Summit, 2013
online information
Emory Scholar Blog on Post-Colonial Studies: Huda Shaarawi
The Rise and Fall of Arab Liberalism: Making of the Modern Arab World #1 (video)
general information podcasts (available on iTunesU)
Is the Hijab Required Dress for Muslim Women?
Women's Rights in Islam