Nazira Zeineddine: the girl and the shaykhs

For over forty years discussion and debate about the hijab had raged around the Muslim Arab world, and pitted conservatives against reformists within a political context shaped by European colonialism. In 1927 Syrian shaykhs announced that women must cover their faces. Women took to the streets, and...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Cooke, Miriam
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:Brasil
Institución:Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
Repositorio:Sociologias (Online)
Idioma:inglés
portugués
OAI Identifier:oai:seer.ufrgs.br:article/125405
Acceso en línea:https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/sociologias/article/view/125405
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Arab feminism
Islam
hijab
Muslim women
women’s rights
feminismo árabe
islam
hiyab
mujeres musulmanas
derechos de la mujer
islamismo
mulheres muçulmanas
direitos das mulheres
Descripción
Sumario:For over forty years discussion and debate about the hijab had raged around the Muslim Arab world, and pitted conservatives against reformists within a political context shaped by European colonialism. In 1927 Syrian shaykhs announced that women must cover their faces. Women took to the streets, and a nineteen-year-old Druze woman from the Beirut bourgeoisie took to her desk. Quoting Islamic scriptures and contemporary religious and secular authorities on almost every page, Nazira Zeineddine wrote four hundred pages about the harm to society of covering women’s faces. Within a few months she published Unveiling and Veiling. The book, the first by a woman to detail women’s rights in Islam, was an attack on shaykhs who presumed to order women to cover their faces, and who manipulated interpretations of the Qur’an and hadiths with the sole goal of empowering men. In this essay, I will provide an overview of Nazira’s hermeneutics and my hypotheses for why she and her writings remained virtually unknown until the end of the 20th century.