The third encounter, XV- Ikhwan women in the dock:
Zeinab el-Ghazali (January 2, 1917 - August 8, 2005) was a prominent Egyptian Islamist and arguably the most famous woman Islamist internationally. She was the founder of the Muslim Women's Association (Jamaa'at al-Sayyidaat al-Muslimaat), and was closely associated with the Ikhwan. Her father was an Al-Azhar-educated independent religious teacher and cotton merchant. He encouraged her to become an Islamic leader citing the example of Nusaybah bint Ka'ab al-Maziniyah, a woman fought alongside Mohamed in the Battle of Uhud. For a short time during her teens, she joined the Egyptian Feminist Union only to conclude that “Islam gave women rights in the family granted by no other society”. At the age of eighteen, she founded the Jamaa'at al-Sayyidaat al-Muslimaat (Muslim Women's Association), which she claimed had a membership of three million throughout the country by the time it was dissolved by the government order in 1964. Hassan el-Banna, the founder of the Ikhwan, invited el-Ghazali to merge her organisation with his, an invitation she refused as she wished to retain automony. However, she did eventually take an oath of personal loyalty to Banna. (Mahmoud 2005: 68). The fact that her organisation was not formally affiliated with the Ikhwan was to prove useful after the Ikhwan was banned, as for a time el-Ghazali was able to continue to distribute their literature and host their meetings in her home. Her weekly lectures to women at the Ibn Tulun Mosque drew a crowd of three thousand, which grew to five thousand during holy months of the year. Besides offering lessons for women, the association published a magazine, maintained an orphanage, offered assistance to poor families, and mediated family disputes. The association also took a political stance, demanding that Egypt be ruled by the Qur'an. el-Ghazali's own life stands in contradiction to some of her professed beliefs. Although she wrote that it was a “crime” for a woman to seek a divorce, she made no secret of the fact that she had divorced her first husband because of his discomfort at her public career. Her memoir describes how she told her husband that her oath of loyalty to Hassan el-Banna meant that her devotion to the Islamist cause would always come before her marriage, and if ever the two should conflict, the marriage would end. In justifying her own exceptionality to her stated belief in a woman's rightful role, el-Ghazali described her own childlessness as a “blessing” that would not usually be seen as such, because it freed her to participate in public life. Her second husband died while she was in prison, having divorced her after the government threats to confiscate his property. el-Ghazali's family were angered at this perceived disloyalty, but el-Ghazali herself remained loyal to him, writing in her memoir that she asked for his photograph to be reinstated in their home when told that it had been removed. After the assassination of Hassan el-Banna in 1949, el-Ghazali was instrumental in regrouping the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1960s after the staggering blow the Ikhwan suffered following the 1954 attempt on the life of the then Prime Minister Gamal Abdul Nasser. She was sentenced to twenty-five year of hard labour for her role in the 1964 Ikhwan plot. However, she was released in 1971 (together with many other convicted Ikhwan members under Anwar el-Sadat's Presidency in 1971. She died in 2005. Zeinab el-Ghazali described her prison experience, which included sufferings of many heinous forms of torture, in a book entitled Ayyam min hayyati (Days from my life), published in English under the title “Return of the Pharaoh”. The “Pharaoh” referred to is President Nasser. el-Ghazali depicts herself as enduring torture with strength beyond that of most men, and she attests to both miracles and visions that strengthened her and enabled her to survive. Zeinab el-Ghazali was also a prolific writer, contributing regularly to major Islamic journals and magazines on Islamic and women's issues. Although the Islamic movement throughout the Muslim world today has attracted large number of young women, especially since 1970s, Zeinab el-Ghazali stands out thus for as the only woman to distinguish herself as one of its major leaders. (To be continued) [email protected]
A series of weekly articles drawing on the archives of The Egyptian Gazette, written by Sami El-Shahed, a former Editor-in-Chief of The Egyptian Gazette.
