Zainab al-Ghazali
Zaynab al-Ghazali (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.
Quotes
edit- I feel that my father was always here with me and this feeling of accompaniment is not the same with my other family members.
- I pray the morning prayer. After repenting for my sins and praying to the Prophet for almost an hour, I listen to the news from the world. Then, I remain with the greatness of the Holy Qur’ān and with the Prophetic aḥadīṯh until the sleep catches me and I sleep an hour or two. Afterwards, I go to my office and I perform the two bowings of the duha [a morning prayer], after which I do not leave my office except for prayers or for an appointment out of the house, and all my appointments out of the house are in the interests of the da‘wa.
- She is allowed, for instance, to run for public office or to hold the position of a judge; I am however against the idea that a woman should be allowed to hold the position of President or Prime Minister of a Muslim
nation.
- That in a perfect world, where jihād is not necessary, women would not need to leave their home. On the one hand, then, women’s permissible political work is not seen to threaten the gendered status quo, since it does not entail achieving power. Once a metaphor for nation-building, the woman now has become “the metaphor for a family-centered and Islamically defined social cohesion. On the other hand, however, even if these women leave home when the faith calls,
they cannot be totally “domesticized” and modern notions of “public” and “private” are ill-suited to define their lives. The emphasis on women’s primary loyalty to the faith, even if framed within their role as wives and producers of future Muslims, means that women are not shown as necessarily relegated exclusively to the domestic sphere. Thus, even though the boundaries of the domestic are permeable only in specific circumstances, protecting the faith and preserving the community provide compelling reasons to disobey fathers and husbands.