Qasim Amin

Qasim Amin (1863-1908) was an Egyptian jurist, one of the founders of the Egyptian National Movement and Cairo University, and is considered by many to be the first Arab feminist.

Qasim Amin pointed out the plight of Aristocratic Egiptian women who could be kept as a "prisoner in her own house and worse off than a slave". Amin criticised this from a basis of Islamic scholarship and said that women such as these could only develop to the stage where they would be competent to bring up the nation's children if they were freed from the seclusion which was forced on them by "the man's decision to imprison his wife" and given the chance to become educated.^{Qasim Amin by Ted Thornton, from History of the Middle East Database, retrieved 2004/12/29 from http://www.nmhschool.org/tthornton/mehistorydatabase/qasim_amin.htm}

1. ^  A Century After Qasim Amin: Fictive Kinship and Historical Uses of “Tahrir al-Mara '”, Malek Abisaab and Rula Jurdi Abisaab, Al Jadid, Vol. 6, no. 32 (Summer 2000), retrieved 2004/12/29 from http://www.aljadid.com/features/ACenturyAfterQasimAmin.html.