Qasim Amin

Qasim Amin (1 December 1863 – 23 April 1908) was an Egyptian jurist, an Islamic modernist, one of the founders of the Egyptian national movement and a co-founder of Cairo University; he has been called one of the Arab world's "first feminists", though that label remains the subject of scholarly controversy. ^{1 2}

His books The Liberation of Women (1899) and The New Woman (1900) criticised veiling, seclusion, early marriage and the denial of education to Muslim women, arguing that the Quran does not teach this subjugation but rather supports women's rights — arguments his beliefs often supported with Quranic verses. ¹

Amin was born in Alexandria to a Turkish father, Muhammad Amin Bey — formerly governor of Diyarbekir Vilayet, later commander of Khedive Isma'il Pasha's army and holder of large feudal estates in Alexandria and Diyarbekir — and an Arnaut (Albanian) mother from the family of Muhammad Ali, daughter of Ahmad Bey Khattab, a grandson of Tahir Pasha, nephew of Muhammad Ali Pasha. ¹

He attended primary school in Alexandria and, from 1875, Cairo's Preparatory School, whose curriculum was strict and heavily Europeanised; in 1881, aged seventeen, he received his law degree from the Khedival School of Law and was one of 37 students awarded a government scholarship to the University of Montpellier in France, where he spent four years. ^{1 2}

After his education in France, Amin was appointed in 1885 a jurist in the Mixed Courts of Egypt, which combined the Napoleonic judicial system with Islamic law and were noted for judgments based on valid and sound reasoning; by 1887 he had entered the Government Division of Legal Affairs, within four years he was selected as one of the National Court's Egyptian judges, and he became Chancellor of the Cairo National Court of Appeals. ^{1 2}

He was one of the founders of Cairo University, then the National University: a member of its constituent committee, its first secretary-general and its vice-president, insisting that Egypt needed a Western-style university. ¹

Amin became a central figure of the Nahda (Awakening) and a follower and friend of Muhammad Abduh, whose philosophies he accepted; the English article records that The Liberation of Women was co-written with Abduh and Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid. ^{1 2}

Like Abduh, he blamed Islamic traditionalists for the moral and intellectual decay that, in their view, had led to Islam's colonisation, and he held that raising women's status must greatly improve the nation; he was also influenced by Darwin, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill. ¹

In 1894 he published in French Les Égyptiens, a response to the Duc d'Harcourt's criticism of Egyptian life and women; in it he defended Islam's treatment of women rather than Egyptian women themselves, and, dissatisfied with his own rebuttal, he began the campaign that followed. ^{1 2}

In The Liberation of Women (1899) he called for the education of women to primary level, modification of the legislation on divorce and polygamy, and abolition of the veil, supporting his beliefs with many Quranic verses — while maintaining his belief in patriarchal domination within the family. ¹

In The New Woman (1900), considered the more liberal book, he envisioned a "new woman" emerging in Egypt modelled on the Western woman, using social Darwinism as his argument: "A woman may be given in marriage to a man she does not know who forbids her the right to leave him and forces her to this or that and then throws her out as he wishes: this is slavery indeed." ¹

This section reports positions and the criticism of them as the sources give them; it is not the museum's verdict on Amin or on his arguments.

Amin refuted polygamy, saying it "implied an intense contempt of women", held that marriage should be a mutual agreement, and argued that the purely oral triple divorce was not serious enough and contributed to Cairo's high divorce rate. ¹

He opposed the veil as the major pronouncement of women's oppression, saying the niqab made women impossible to identify, more noticeable to men and more distrusted, and he pointed to Western men's treatment of women — schooling, walking unveiled, speaking their minds — as a freedom that "contributed significantly" to their nations' knowledge. ¹

Contemporary feminist scholars, notably Leila Ahmed, have challenged his status as the supposed "father of Egyptian feminism": in the gender-segregated society of the time he could have had very little contact with Egyptian women beyond family, servants and possibly prostitutes, so his portrait of Egyptian women as backward and ignorant rested on very limited evidence; Ahmed concludes that he in effect substituted Western androcentrism for Egyptian androcentrism, not feminism. ¹

The historian Mona Russell likewise challenges his "new woman" as neither new nor synonymous with the Western woman; and critics read his praise of colonial justice — "We today enjoy a justice and a freedom the like of which I do not think Egypt has ever witnessed at anytime in the past" — as proof of his admiration for the foreign rule his class position and foreign education disposed him to. ¹

In his own family he could not dissuade his wife Zeyneb, daughter of Admiral Amin Tafiq, whom he married in 1894, from wearing the niqab; his plan was instead to teach the younger generation of females, like his daughter, that they should not wear it. ¹

Amin died in Cairo in 1908, aged 44. The Arabic article and Wikidata date his death 23 April 1908; the English article's lead gives 12 April 1908. The discrepancy is recorded in the museum's data record, which follows the first two sources. ^{2 3 1}

• English Wikipedia article on Qasim Amin (revision 1380784547); Arabic Wikipedia article (revision 76322621); Wikidata item Q740282. No source names a school of Islam for him; Wikidata records his religion as Islam only, and his school remains unknown in the museum's record. The English article conflicts with the Arabic article and Wikidata on his day of death (12 April vs 23 April 1908).