Huda Sha'arawi

Huda Sha'arawi (23 June 1879 – 12 December 1947) was an Egyptian feminist and nationalist leader, founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union and its president until her death, and a founding figure of the Arab Feminist Union. ^{1 2}

She was born Nour Al-Huda Mohamed Sultan Shaarawi in the Upper Egyptian city of Minya, into a wealthy landowning family: her father, Muhamed Sultan Pasha Shaarawi, later became president of Egypt's Chamber of Deputies, and her mother, Iqbal Hanim, was of Circassian descent, sent from the Caucasus to live with her uncle in Egypt. ^{1 3}

She led Egypt's women in the 1919 revolution, founded the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923, and in the same year removed her veil in public on her return from the Rome congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance — a landmark event in the history of Egyptian feminism. ^{2 1}

She was raised with her brother Omar in her father's house in Cairo, and was educated from an early age, studying grammar and calligraphy in several languages; the Arabic article records that she memorised the Qur'an by the age of nine, an achievement it describes as unprecedented for a girl at the time. ³

Her father died at Graz in Austria on 14 August 1884, when she was five; her eldest cousin, Ali Sha'arawi, became her guardian and trustee of her father's estate. ^{3 1}

Despite home tutoring in Arabic, Turkish, French, calligraphy and piano, her sex barred her from continuing her studies, and the Arabic article recounts how the favouring of her younger brother over her was among the shocks that formed her early awareness of the difference between the sexes. ³

At thirteen she was married to her cousin and guardian Ali Sha'arawi, who was some forty years older and already married with three daughters. ^{3 1}

Her mother arranged an unusual clause in the marriage contract: it was to be monogamous, and void if he took another wife; when he returned to his first wife, she separated from him at fourteen, remaining legally married but living apart for seven years. ³

The scholar Margot Badran, quoted in the English article, holds that this separation gave her time for an extended formal education "as well as an unexpected taste of independence". ¹

She resumed the marriage in 1900 under family pressure, bore a daughter, Buthayna, and a son, Muhammad, and wrote poetry in both Arabic and French. ³

In 1909 she founded Mubarrat Muhammad Ali, among the first philanthropic societies run by Egyptian women, offering social services to poor women and children, and helped establish a dispensary for poor women and children in response to widespread infant mortality. ^{3 1}

She helped organise the Intellectual Association of Egyptian Women in 1914, the year she first travelled to Europe; the women's salons of Cairo discussed, as the Arabic article puts it, Islam as a source of women's rights against the customs and social practices that confined them. ^{1 3}

She spoke in public for the first time in 1918, aged forty, delivering a eulogy for the feminist pioneer Malak Hifni Nasif (Bahithat al-Badiya). ³

In the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 she led women of the elite in protests demanding independence from Britain and the release of the detained nationalist leaders, while lower-class and rural women assisted and joined the street protests alongside men. ^{1 3}

She worked alongside her husband, who stood as acting vice-president of the Wafd; he kept her informed so that she could take his place if he or other Wafd members were arrested. ¹

On 12 January 1920 the women who had taken part in the protests founded the Wafdist Women's Central Committee and elected her its first president. ^{1 3}

She led Egyptian women's pickets at the opening of Parliament in January 1924 and submitted a list of nationalist and feminist demands, which the Wafdist government ignored, whereupon she resigned from the Wafdist Women's Central Committee. ¹

After her husband's death in 1922 she decided to stop wearing her traditional veil. ¹

The English article and Encyclopaedia Britannica date her most famous act to 1923: returning from the Ninth Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Rome, she removed her veil and mantle at a Cairo train station; the women who came to greet her were shocked at first, then applauded, and some removed their own veils and mantles. ^{1 2}

The Arabic article dates the event to 1921, at the reception of Saad Zaghlul returning from exile, and says she and her secretary Ceza Nabarawi removed the veil and trod on it before the crowds; the museum records the disagreement between the accounts in the source entity. ³

Within a decade of her act, many Egyptian women had stopped wearing veils and mantles, a state that lasted for decades until a later retrograde movement. ¹

The English article notes that her decision was part of a wider women's movement and was influenced by the French-born Egyptian feminist Eugénie Le Brun, while it contrasted with the thinking of feminists such as Malak Hifni Nasif. ¹

In 1923 she founded the Egyptian Feminist Union and became its first president, remaining its president until her death, according to the English article and Britannica; the Arabic article dates the Union's formal constitution to 1927 and her presidency from that year to 1947. ^{1 2 3}

Characteristic of liberal feminism in the early twentieth century, the Union sought to reform laws restricting personal freedoms, such as marriage, divorce and child custody, and pressed for women's education and suffrage. ¹

She launched the fortnightly French journal L'Égyptienne in 1925 to publicise the cause, and from 1937 published it in Arabic as al-Misriyya ("The Egyptian Woman"). ^{1 2}

She represented Egypt at women's congresses in Graz, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Marseille, Istanbul, Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Interlaken and Geneva, and advocated peace and disarmament. ¹

At the Twelfth International Women Conference in Istanbul (18 April 1935) she was elected vice-president of the International Women's Union; she regarded Atatürk as a role model and addressed him directly in Turkish, telling him that if the Turks called him Atatürk ("Father of the Turks"), she called him "Atasharq" — Father of the East. ^{1 3}

She was a founding member of the Arab Feminist Union and its president, and in 1944 convened the Arab Women's Congress, whose resolutions demanded political equality with men and restrictions on divorce and polygamy; Britannica describes her as the founding president of the Arab Feminist Union in 1945. ^{3 2}

In 1938 she and the Egyptian Feminist Union sponsored the Eastern Women's Conference for the Defense of Palestine in Cairo, and in 1945 she received the Order of Virtues. ¹

This section sets out different positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum. The primary statements behind some of these positions have not yet been checked, and this is stated here so the reader can judge.

Supporters. Her supporters regard her as the founder and symbolic standard-bearer of Egypt's women's movement: even though only some of her demands were met in her lifetime, she laid the groundwork for later gains by Egyptian women. ^{1 2}

Critics. The Arabic article reports the criticism that her installation as the movement's pioneer eclipsed other pioneers and wronged Nabawiyya Musa in particular; that her leadership served a landowning class anxious to lead in every field; and it casts doubt on claims that her wealth funded scholarly missions, noting that no scholar educated at her expense is named. ³

A family dispute. The Arabic article, following Mustafa Amin's book "Personal Matters", recounts a long dispute between her and her son's wife, the singer Fatma Sirri, over the paternity of her granddaughter, which ended in a court ruling for the child; it is a family matter, recorded here briefly and as attributed to its source. ³

She recounted her early life in her memoir Modhakkerātī ("My Memoir"), translated and abridged into English as Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, 1879–1924. ¹

She died in Cairo on 12 December 1947, of a heart attack, while writing from her sickbed a statement demanding that the Arab states stand united over Palestine, according to the Arabic article. ^{3 2}

Institutions, schools and streets across Egypt bear her name; she was the subject of a major English-language biography by Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi in 2012; and Google marked her 141st birthday with a Doodle on 23 June 2020. ^{3 1}

• English Wikipedia article on Huda Sha'arawi (revision 1372745115); Arabic Wikipedia article «هدى شعراوي» (revision 76664694); Urdu Wikipedia article (revision 11793203); Wikidata item Q2423343; Encyclopaedia Britannica entry "Huda Sharawi" by Jennifer Jaffer.
• The sources differ on two dates: the unveiling (1923 in the English article and Britannica, on her return from Rome; 1921 in the Arabic article, at Saad Zaghlul's reception) and the founding of the Egyptian Feminist Union (1923 in the English article and Britannica; a formal constitution in 1927 in the Arabic article). The museum presents both accounts and does not decide between them.