This article was originally published by Al-Ahram Weekly (18 – 24 June 2009, Issue No. 952).
Women’s equality and free choice as integral to religious ideals, human rights, and democracy were principles that resounded loud and clear in Obama’s speech at Cairo University co-hosted by Al-Azhar University, strongholds of secular and religious education in Egypt. Exactly one hundred years earlier, Malak Hifni Nasif, a 23-year-old writer, under the penname Bahithat Al-Badiya, published Al-Nis’iyyat, a collection of her writings and speeches calling for women’s rights — within the intermeshed frameworks of religious, human and national rights — intrinsic to the liberation of women and of Egypt under colonial occupation. Then, as now, young voices and women’s voices were especially fervent in crying out for multiple rights and a free democratic nation.
The same year of 1909 when Egyptian women were refused admission as regular students to the newly founded Egyptian University (as Cairo University was then called), they organised lectures by and for women in special rooms at the university on Fridays, the weekly day of recess when male students were absent. Twenty years later, in 1929, a group of women determined to get a higher education simply showed up at the university where they remained until their graduation four years later. Thanks to the generous bequest of land and money by a woman (Princess Fatma Ismail) when women were still denied entry, the university moved to the premises where Obama stood on 4 June 2009 delivering his words on women’s rights, freedom and democracy that echoed those of Egyptian women 100 years before.
While paying homage to history, Obama might have evoked the long and venerable tradition of feminism — within Islamic and national frameworks — in Egypt and elsewhere in the region and wider Muslim world, calling for the realisation of human rights, self-determination and democracy. In Cairo in 1911 Malak Hifni Nasif sent a set of women’s demands to the Egyptian Congress meeting to strategise independence and advance claims. Her list included, among others, demands for education for women in all fields and at all levels, work rights, and the right to participate in congregational worship in mosques. She could not appear in person to present these demands because in her time a woman’s face was not to be seen and her voice was not to be heard in public.
On 4 June 2009 it was a woman’s voice that resounded in the Great Hall of Cairo University announcing: "The president of the United States of America." This voice and the sea of women’s faces in the audience would have cheered Egyptian feminists and nationalist women who (except for a handful of spouses of nationalist leaders) had been barred from attending the opening of the first parliament in 1924 in the aftermath of the independence — albeit partial — for which they had so actively fought alongside male nationalists.
Over the past century, women in Egypt, thanks to their own efforts, have gained many rights and increased freedom to take charge of their lives, to make their own choices. There are also numerous examples of feminist activism in other Arab countries and throughout the Muslim world at large. If Muslim women in Egypt are now free to wear the hijab, or head cover, they were not free earlier not to cover their faces, nor are they to this day in some places. Women had been made to believe that the hijab, which then involved covering the face, and that hiding the face was an Islamic injunction. When women realised that masking the face (now called more correctly niqab ) was not required by religion they began to remove it, but this was by no means easy because of the persistence of social customs and pressures. These days the hijab in the form of a head covering — which many but not all Muslims believe to be a religious prescription — is only one way Muslim women choose to dress. The hijab does not signify "the Muslim woman". It is nice, Mr Obama, that Muslim women are free to wear the hijab in America and it is also nice that they are free not to. Muslim women, like other women, exhibit multiple forms of self-expression, including sartorial, which they find in keeping with their deeply held convictions.
The frames of Obama’s speech shifted between Muslim and Arab, between Muslim majority countries and communities, and Arab countries. Within both frames are found Muslims and people of other faiths. Within, as well as between, these frames or contexts we can find commonalties and differences; that is, lively and creative diversity. The freedom, rights and dignities of one individual, group and gender are the freedom, rights and dignity of all. Remembering the long decades of feminist activism of Egyptian women, Muslim and Christian together, and of women elsewhere in the region and in the wider Muslim world is telling. And paying homage is perhaps even more telling.
The message is now as it was then: women and nations claim, and wish to retain, their own independence, decide on their own forms of self-governing, and actively enjoy their individual and collective rights and justice. In the American president’s talk, echoes of generations of women’s voices in Egypt, the region and beyond could be heard along with the clamouring of the present generation of women for the inseparable principles of justice and equality basic to human rights and democracy to be translated into reality.
Margot Badran is fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars. Her latest book is Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences.