Qasim Amin

Qasim Amin (Alexandria, 1863 - Cairo, 1908) was an Egyptian jurist connected to Islamic modernism and to the founding of the Egyptian national movement and Cairo University. He is often described as one of the first feminists of the Arab world, although that label remains a matter of scholarly debate. He wrote in Arabic and French, and his work centred on the condition of Egyptian women, whom he saw as central to the country's backwardness.

Born in Alexandria into a well-off family, he studied law in Cairo and later received a government scholarship to continue his training at the University of Montpellier, where he spent four years. Back in Egypt he built a career as a judge and lawyer in the country's courts and helped establish the national university in Cairo. In Paris he had come into contact with Muhammad Abduh, a leading reformer whose ideas he absorbed and for whom he worked as a translator.

His first book, Les Égyptiens, appeared in 1894 as a reply to a work by the Duke of Harcourt that defended the British presence in Egypt. Amin defended his country and Islam against that colonial view, though he later said he was unhappy with the defence. In 1899 he published The Liberation of Women, which attacked the veil, the seclusion of women, early marriage and the lack of education, and proposed reform based on a fresh reading of Islam. A year later came The New Woman, a response to his critics that pictured an educated, modern Egyptian woman shaped by European models. Both books provoked strong opposition.

His legacy is mixed. He pushed the situation of women to the centre of public debate in the Arab world, but historians such as Leila Ahmed have argued that his portrait rested on limited contact with Egyptian women and on a European model he admired almost without reservation. He died in Cairo in 1908.