Miriam Cooke - Nazira Zeineddine: A Pioneer of Islamic Feminism

TITLES IN THE MAKERS OF THE MUSLIM WORLD SERIES

Series Editor: Patricia Crone,

Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi, Samer Akkach

Abd al-Malik, Chase F. Robinson

Abd al-Rahman III, Maribel Fierro

Abu Nuwas, Philip Kennedy

Ahmad al-Mansur, Mercedes Garca-Arenal

Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Christopher Melchert

Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi, Usha Sanyal

Akbar, Andr Wink

Al-Mamun, Michael Cooperson

Al-Mutanabbi, Margaret Larkin

Amir Khusraw, Sunil Sharma

Ashraf Ali Thanawi, Muhammad Qasim Zaman

Chinggis Khan, Michal Biran

El Hajj Beshir Agha, Jane Hathaway

Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis, Shazad Bashir

Ghazali, Eric Ormsby

Hasan al-Banna, Gudrun Krmer

Husain Ahmad Madani, Barbara Metcalf

Ibn Arabi, William C. Chittick

Ibn Fudi, Ahmad Dallal

Ikhwan al-Safa, Godefroid de Callatay

Karim Khan Zand, John R. Perry

Mehmed Ali, Khaled Fahmy

Muawiya ibn abi Sufyan, R. Stephen Humphreys

Muhammad Abduh, Mark Sedgwick

Nasser, Joel Gordon

Sadi, Homa Katouzian

Shaykh Mufid, Tamima Bayhom-Daou

Usama ibn Munqidh, Paul M. Cobb

For current information and details of other books in the series, please visit www.oneworld-publications.com

NAZIRA ZEINEDDINE

A Oneworld Book
Published by Oneworld Publications 2010
This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications 2013

Copyright miriam cooke 2010

All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781851687695
eISBN 9781780742144

Typeset by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India

Oneworld Publications
10 Bloomsbury Street, London, WC1B 3SR, England

Stay up to date with the latest books, special offers, and exclusive content from Oneworld with our monthly newsletter

Sign up on our website

www.oneworld-publications.com

PART I

PART II

I n late 1928 the Thabits threw a party to celebrate the publication of a book about women and Islam. The rich and famous of Lebanon and Syria, including even the Syrian prime minister, Taj al-Din al-Hasani, were in attendance. The prime minister arrived late, but as far as the editor of The Lost Journalist was concerned, the absence of the sun in the sky did not eclipse the brilliant light of the suns that filled the sumptuous halls of the Thabit palace, foremost among them Miss Nazira Zeineddine, author of Unveiling and Veiling. She was la femme du jour (The Girl and the Shaykhs (Al-fatat wa al-shuyukh), p. 23).

Nazira Zeineddine was a Druze woman from Lebanon who single-handedly took on the Islamic authorities of her day. Heedless of their power, she wrote two long books in defense of Muslim womens rights. Her carefully crafted polemic against the face veil, her passionate defense of womens intellectual equality with men, and her condemnation of institutionalized misogyny among men of religion caused a furor. Within five years, however, the writer and her books slipped between the lines of history. The clerics had won.

In Opening the Gates. A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, an anthology Margot Badran and I published in 1990, we included a snippet from Unveiling and Veiling. Readers were intrigued by this text which anticipated the fin de sicle Islamic feminist movement by over sixty years. Who was this Nazira Zeineddine? What shot her into the stratosphere of international attention? How was it that such a luminary should shine so briefly and then be extinguished so completely? We didnt know. Then in 1998, Syrian scholar and politician Bouthaina Shaaban blew the dust off the two books and reprinted them. The arguments of Unveiling and Veiling and The Girl and the Shaykhs were as fresh and relevant as they had been in 1928 and 1929. But the story of her life remained unknown.

For years, the only biographical information I could find were passing references to her education scattered in her two books. Then, in the summer of 2007, Lebanese political scientist Aida al-Jawhari published Ramziyat al-hijab: mafahim wa dalalat (Symbolism of the Veil: Concepts and Meanings), an analysis of both books. It included a six-page biography of Naziras father Said Bey Zeineddine, a lawyer who had trained in Istanbul at the end of the nineteenth century. He had worked in several Ottoman cities in todays Turkey and Syria and was then appointed the first president of the court of appeals in Beirut.

With this information in hand, I traveled to Kozan, Adana, Istanbul, and Edirne Province in Turkey where Naziras father had held various posts. I found nothing. In the summer of 2008, the centenary of Naziras birth, I flew to Lebanon, and pieces of the puzzle tumbled into place. I learned that Nazira was born in Istanbul and that her childhood home was a three-hundred-year-old mansion in Ayn Qani, a tiny village perched high in the Druze Mountains of the Chouf.

From Ayn Qani I drove the ten miles to Baaqline, where her husbands mansion is now a college for Druze students. In the sixteenth century, the Druze Prince Fakhruddin had ruled the region from Baaqline.

I discovered that she had had a sister and two brothers, and had married and had three sons. I met some of the surviving members of her family. Her youngest brothers only son, Said Zeineddine, gave me photographs and letters, and a book hot off the press. It was Nazira Zeineddine: Pioneer of Womens Liberation by Nabil Bu Matar, his Arabic teacher at the Chouf National College in Baaqline. During Teachers Day in 1981, Said had given Bu Matar his aunts two books. A few years later, while Said was studying in Egypt he learned that the books had inspired his teacher to write a thesis. However, Bu Matar died in 1995 before finishing the book. It took thirteen more years for his wife Hayat to complete the project, and the book was published in August 2008, a few days before my arrival. In November, I traveled to Kuwait to interview Said at greater length.

I spent time with Samia Saab, daughter of Naziras cousin, Najla Saab (19081971) with whom Nazira spent the World War I years in Ayn Qani. Samia drove me to Karakol Druze where Nazira had grown up. The Zeineddine house had been next to the building where Charles de Gaulle had stayed between 1929 and 1932, during his first tour of duty in the Mandate army. We found the building, with a sign recording de Gaulles stay, but next to it was a parking lot. The house had been torn down years earlier.