Zainab al-Ghazali
Egyptian activist (1923-2005)
Zaynab al-Ghazali (Arabic: زينب الغزالي; 2 January 1917 – 3 August 2005) was an Egyptian Muslim activist. She was the founder of the Muslim Women's Association (Jamaa'at al-Sayyidaat al-Muslimaat, also known as the Muslim Ladies' Society).
The historian Eugene Rogan has called her "the pioneer of the Islamist women's movement" and also said she was "one of [Sayyid] Qutb's most influential disciples."
Biography
Early life
Al-Ghazali was born in Mit Ghamr, a town in the Dakahlia Governorate in Egypt. Her father was educated at al-Azhar University, an independent religious teacher and cotton merchant. He encouraged her to become an Islamic leader citing the example of Nusayba bint Ka'b al-Muzaniyya, a woman who fought alongside Prophet Muhammad in the Battle of Uhud. She studied with Al-Azhar scholars.
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 Jama'at al-Sayyidat al-Muslimat (Muslim Women's Association), which she claimed had a membership of three million throughout the country by the time it was dissolved by government order in 1964.
Allegiance to Hassan al-Banna
Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, invited al-Ghazali to merge her organisation with his, an invitation she refused as she wished to retain autonomy. However, she did eventually take an oath of personal loyalty to al-Banna. Even though her organisation did not formally affiliate with the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Ghazali went on to play a significant role in the Brotherhood's attempted revival in 1964, after it was forcibly disbanded by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zainab al-Ghazali” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.