By Mursi Saad El-Din From the start of Ramadan through to the end of the feast no one was spared the presence of the all-powerful soap opera; musalsalat, as these popular serial dramas are called, became an unequivocal part of our lives. Turning into so-called passive participants, we must have played some part in their unfolding; it would have been easy, for those of us who felt inappropriately invaded, to switch to a different channel. Yet even the children of the household would not hear of such plans; all were glued to the screen. Of all the soaps on offer I was drawn to Qasem Amin, a televised biography of the turn-of-the-century champion of women's liberation. Amin was part of the Arab renaissance, that great and glorious shift towards what was to be known as enlightenment; along with such figures as Saad Zaghloul, Gamaleddin Al-Afghani and Mohamed Abdou, he remains an icon of the pre-1952 new Egypt, an entity without which contemporary life would be unimaginable. The serial was an example of what historical drama should be about: upholding the facts in the framework of a compelling plot; and using imagination to imbue the characters with empathetic, flesh-and-blood plausibility. One fact that emerged in the serial was Amin's remarkable political maturity, the informed, knowledgeable adaptability of the groups of thinkers in which he belonged. A quick biographical sketch might help illuminate the significance of that fact. Born in 1863 to a Turkish father and Upper Egyptian mother, he grew up in an atmosphere of patriarchal autocracy: the women around him proved too meek for comfort, the moral restraint of the Turkish aristocracy stifling. His father's two wives not only refrained from sitting at the same table during meals, they even waited on their husband -- a sight Amin was to remember. Pursuing the usual educational path, Amin eventually enrolled at the School of Law and Administration, obtaining licence to practice in 1881, whereupon he received a scholarship to continue studying in France. At the time, under Khedive Ismail, Paris was the destination for bright young students who were thought to be there on a mission, as it were. Like Rifa'a Rafie El-Tahtawi under Mohamed Ali Pasha, Amin was ushered into a magic world of democracy, freedom and, most importantly for his career, a liberated female constituency. In 1885 he returned to Egypt full of revolutionary ideas, his principal concern being the status of women which he saw not as an isolated cause but as an essential aspect of historical progress, integral to the development of every facet of social life. "The evidence of history," Amin was to write in his seminal Liberation of Women, "confirms and demonstrates that the status of women is inseparably tied to the status of the nation in which they live. When the status of a nation is low, so does the status of women reflect uncivilised conditions. When it is elevated, by the same token... that status reflects an elevated civilisation." Qasem Amin, besides reawakening my admiration for the man and his contribution, set off a chain reaction in my mind. In ancient Egypt, I noted, women were regarded as the equals of men. They had the right to own property and land, to administer their own wealth and dispose of it as they saw fit. They were, in other words, economically independent. Gradually, however, bit by bit, these rights were taken away from Egyptian women. Patriarchal attitudes had always been present to some extent, of course. But by the time of Mohamed Ali, they had dominated society entirely. Going through phases akin to Yeats's "phases of man", I wondered, who would have thought that it would take centuries of subjugation and revolt, and the emergence of someone of Amin's stature, for the Egyptian woman's original status to be finally restored? Seeing as it generated all these ideas and feelings, perhaps the watching of television was not worthless, after all.
