Amina al-Said was among the first Egyptian women to attend Cairo University after its founding in 1908. She was also among the first women to take off the veil. She went on to become a leader in the Egyptian feminist movement. She wrote a biography of the English poet, Lord Byron, but was better known in Arab literary circles for her articles in the Egyptian press.
"Mushakl al-Marat al-Muslima (The Problems of Muslim Women)
"...The truth is that the condition of Muslim Arab women is deficient relative to the truly civilized. As we look at her in country after country, she is far from being a whole and productive citizen.
It is not fair to blame religion for this. Islam has assigned to the woman a preferred status as an independent human being, and confers upon her an equal share with men in rights and duties...
[al-Said cites Islam's "golden age" as a time when Muslim culture coincided with the religious value of equality between men and women, and blames European colonialism of the Middle East for the backward slide of women.]
I am not hopeful unless these laws are changed. Laws pertaining to inheritance, divorce, alimony, as well as the great number of husbands who toy with the honor of women morally, sociologically, and economically stand in the way of a higher consciousness of complete humanity. It is futile for us to expect good from Muslim women before we resolve all of her legal worries and create justice between her and the male in the area of inheritance rights, and before we take away from the man his right to toy with the sanctity of married life...
The Muslim woman thus lacks a distinctive individuality. She is a strange mixture of east and west, neither one nor the other. She is in a period of extreme transition with the new struggling mightily with the old and neither yet clearly emerging to dominate the other. The educated Muslim woman finds herself stuck between the old and the new and she is confused. She is unable to forget what life was like for her mother, and she is unable to make for herself yet a new life...But, today's stage of violent reaction will eventually settle out in favor of a new-found individuality which will gain her a distinctive place in the company of the world as a whole."
"Mushakl al-Marat al-Muslima," Al-Hilal Magazine, vol.23, No. 1 (Cairo, January 1, 1955), pp. 153-157. Translated by Ted Thornton, NMH Middle East Resource Center.