Feminism(s) in Egyptian Autobiographies: Navigating Education, Religion, and the State

The paper seeks to understand the ways in which decolonization impacted women's constructions of the self and the other in relation to ideas of modernity, feminism, and education. The paper argues that education impacted middle class women's negotiations of modernity, nationalism, and global feminism between 1952 and 1970. Further, through an analysis of three notable memoirs, it is possible to examine the ways that women's upbringing in the era of decolonization formed their ideas of nationalism, religion, and feminism in different ways based on their relationships to class, education, and family. Regardless of class, women are not a homogenous category and engaged with a range of ideologies, theories, and practices as a result of their quotidian experiences in Egypt during the decolonial period. Likewise, their definitions and experiences of education varied and included the British system in Egypt and in the metropole, the Egyptian university system, and religious education. The three authors, Zaynab al-Ghazali (1917-2005), Lelia Ahmed (1940-), and Nawal al-Saadawi (1931-2021) have been widely circulated, taught in a variety of universities and translated, as examples of feminist literature about Islam and Arab Feminism. Through their memoirs, the women explore the ways their childhoods informed their sense of gender, their experiences with religion, its interplay with their educational experiences, and the navigations of the decolonization process in Egypt. Each memoir offers a unique perspective on the relationships between religion, education, and the state which complicates the narratives of a stark binary between religion and secularism, Western ideas about education and development, and state narratives that tied feminism to the national cause. The paper argues that by examining memoirs we glean insight into the circulation of ideas about feminism and women's roles in society which tells us about how women engaged with nationalism, religion, and gender.