Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (23 page)

61
The UNESCO Statistical Yearbook reports that Egyptian women made up
36
percent of the total number of students enrolled in postsecondary institutions in 1996, including and technical schools. This fi does not include enrollment at the University of al..Azhar and at private institutions of higher learn

than through a brief examination of the life of Zaynab al-- hazali. Al..Ghazali is believed to have been the fi prominent female daeiya in Egypt, and her trajectory as a daeiya exemplifi key developments in the history of women's daewa since the 1 940s. Ironically, her story is one that remains largely undoc.. umented and, it would be fair to say, even unknown among the participants of the women's mosque movement.62

the secular/religious trajectory of the female dctiya

Zaynab al-- hazali (b. 1917) is credited with establishing a women's organiza.. tion called the Society of Muslim Ladies (Jamaeat al..Sayyidat al.- imat) in the late 1930s, which was initially dedicated to providing charitable services to poor women and children. The Society later expanded its role to training women in the art of preaching so that they could instruct women in religious issues either in their homes or at mosques. During the fi t few years of the So.. ciety's operation, the institute ( known as the "Center for Preaching and Ad.. vice") was affi iated with the University of al.-Azhar, and many well..-

eulama' reportedly came to lecture on subjects such as exegesis of the Quran and the badith, the basic rules of Islamic j urisprudence
(fi ),
and religious exhortation (al..Hashimi 1989, 205 ) .63 Women received six months of train..

ing and were then appointed to state..- un mosques to provide religious lessons to other women. They were, at this point, referred to as waei�at rather than da\yat.64 Even after the institute's affi iation with al..Azhar ended (around 193 8-39 ), al..Ghazali's organization continued to train women in the art of re.. ligious exhortation well into the late 1 95 0s.

According to her biographers, al..Ghazali had no formal training in reli.. gious issues and never received an education beyond secondary school ( al..

62
While there are a few biographies of Zaynab al..Ghazali in Arabic ( al, Arabi
1996;
al,
Hashimi
1989, 1990),
and a couple of short entries on her life in English (Badran
1995;
Hoff
1985 ),
to my knowledge there is no extensive history in English, Arabic, or French of the work conducted by al..Ghazali's organization, the Society of Muslim Ladies. I have been able to piece
together a rough account of the work conducted under the auspices. of this organization fr a va, riety of sources, including al,Ghazali's own writings, Arabic and English commentaries on her published work, and personal interviews with Zaynab al,Ghazali and her secretary conducted
over a period of several months in
1996.
I have also drawn upon a series of tape..- inter.. views with al..- conducted in
1992
by a member of the Brotherhood that were part of her private collection, but which to my knowledge have not been disseminated or published to date.

63
Significantly, al,Ghazali's institute had almost the same name as the state,run institute of
preaching at al ..Azhar University that was reserved for men. The former was called Maehad al,
Wae� wal.- and the latter Qism al,Wae� wal, Irshad.

64
Notably, al,Ghazali did not use the term daewa to describe her work at the time, and it was only when she became active in the }v lim Brotherhood that she assumed the title daeiya.

Arabi 1 996, 1 7-62; al..Hashimi 1990, 29-30). She, like the male
dueat65
of her time, was self trained in issues of religious doctrine and exhortation. Al..Ghaz.. ali had already become a powerful orator and public fi when Hasan al.. Banna asked her to combine her eff with those of the Muslim Brothers. Her participation would have been a boon to the Brothers since they did not have a signifi history of public involvement with women's issues. Even though al..Ghazali never formally merged her organization with the Brother.. hood, the Society of Muslim Ladies came to be perceived as part of the Islamic opposition to the govern because of al..Ghazali's close ties with the

Brotherhood. In the later years of the Society's association with the Brother.. hood, al..Ghazali's organization published a j ournal entitled
al..Sayyida al.. Muslimat
(1954-56); a quick survey of this publication reveals that though

the Society continued to train women in preaching, its public profi had be.. come enmeshed in the political struggles Egypt was undergoing at the time.66 The fate of the Society and the Muslim Brothers became further intertwined when al..Ghazali became one of the main coordinators of the Brotherhood af.. ter most of its leadership was jailed under President Gamal Abdul Nasser (Ke.. pel 1986; Z. al..Ghazali 1 995 ). In 1965 Nasser dissolved the Society of Muslim Ladies, and Zaynab al..Ghazali was imprisoned for six years.67 After her release from prison, al..Ghazali was prohibited from speaking publicly, but she contin- ued to hold religious lessons in private homes. She also wrote on the topic of women's daewa and maintained a regular correspondence with young Muslim women and men from all over the Arab world who asked her for advice. 68

Al..Ghazali's genealogy as a daeiya was a product of the sociopolitical ethos of her times and the new possibilities that were opening up for women at the tum of the twentieth century. Al-- hazali reached adulthood when there had already been almost three decades of women's activism in Egypt, much, but not all, of which was linked to the emergent nationalist movement of that time.69 According to historian Beth Baron, a vigorous women's press had

6
5
The term
du.:
refers to men who undertake daewa; see note 33 above.

66
It remains unclear what the level ofpolitical involvement was for the women enlisted in the preaching institute of the Society. In speaking to al,Ghazali and her secretary, I got the impres, sion that there was a small core of women, along with al,Ghazali, who were politically active, but that most of the women at the institute remained uninvolved.

67
For an account of her years in prison, see Z. al,Ghazali 1995.

68
Al,Ghazali remains one of the few contemporary women to have published commentaries on the Quran and the b. see Z. al.- 1994a, 1994b, 1996a. For a compilation of her correspondence with young men and women, see Z. al,Ghazali 1996b, 1996c.

6
9
Given the manner in which the "woman question" had become intertwined with the very defi and character of anticolonial politics, it is not surprising that this renaissance in women's activities coincided with the burgeoning of the nationalist movement in Egypt (Ahmed 1992; Haddad 1 984 ). Yet, as historians of Egypt have been carefu to point out, women's groups,

emerged during the period from 1 892 to 1920, with nearly thirty journals "by, for, and about women"
(al..-majallat al..-nisa:)iyya)
representing a range of politi- cal positions ( Baron 1994 , 1 ) . This was accompanied by an effl of women's charitable associations, which served as the springboard for women's entry into public and political life, and which continued well into the 1 940s.70 At the same time, a broad urban culture emerged of women delivering speeches to other women, speeches that were published in the organizations' journ and by the emergent nationalist press (Baron 1994, 18 1-82).71 Al- Ghazali's activism, therefore, occurred at the height of the early nationalist period in Egypt wherein the status of women and their visibility in public life was made a key signifi of the new nation, an emphasis that later declined once independence from colonial rule had been achieved.

Zaynab al.-Ghazali's fi exposure to women's activism came at the age of sixteen when she joined the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU), an affi iation that she reportedly later terminated because of the EFU's "secular orientation" (al.- rabi 1 996; al.-Hashimi 1990, 33-34). 72 While a few women's organiza.. tions oriented around an Islamic framework had been established earlier in the century-a group called Tarqiyyat al..- r'a (Society for Women's Progress) had been created as early as 1 908 to promote the enforcement of the shar"(a (Baron 1994, 176-7 7 )-most of the early associations formed by women tended to privilege a secular..nationalist discourse. That said, it should be noted that even secular organizations, such as the EFU, never renounced reli.. gion or understood secularism to imply atheism. As Margot Badran has pointed out, the EFU and other feminists "shied away from a secularism which severed all links with religion" (Badran 1 991, 210-1 1) .

Despite the shared propensity of the Society of Muslim Ladies and organi.. zations like the EFU to embrace some form of religiosity, there were important diff rences between them. To begin with, in contrast to the EFU, the Society was open only to Muslim women ( and not, therefore , to Egypt's Christian and Jewish population). Secondly, the EFU's basic platform and the platforms of

fr the late nineteenth century onward, were not simply mouthpieces for nationalist political parties but they in fact continued to adopt positions that opposed those of the male leadership of many of the groups with which they worked (Badran 1995 ; Baron 1994).

70
See Salim 1984, 52-65 ; Badran 1995 , 11 3-23 ; Baron 1994, 1 68-75 .

71
While many of the women engaged in these activities belonged to the elite strata of Egyp, tian society, some, like al,Ghazali, were from the middle or upper,middle class. See Baron's inter, esting discussion of the class composition of the Egyptian women's movement from 1892 to 1 920 (1994, 1 16-21) .

72
Even though al,Ghazali discontinued her participation in the EFU, she claims she never op, posed the EFU's activities and that there continued to be sporadic cooperation between the Sod, ety of Muslim Ladies and the EFU (Badran 1991 ).