Nazira Zeineddine: the girl and the shaykhs

Abstract

For over forty years discussion and debate about the hijab had raged around the Muslim Arab world, and pitted conservatives against reformists within a political context shaped by European colonialism. In 1927 Syrian shaykhs announced that women must cover their faces. Women took to the streets, and a nineteen-year-old Druze woman from the Beirut bourgeoisie took to her desk. Quoting Islamic scriptures and contemporary religious and secular authorities on almost every page, Nazira Zeineddine wrote four hundred pages about the harm to society of covering women’s faces. Within a few months she published Unveiling and Veiling. The book, the first by a woman to detail women’s rights in Islam, was an attack on shaykhs who presumed to order women to cover their faces, and who manipulated interpretations of the Qur’an and hadiths with the sole goal of empowering men. In this essay, I will provide an overview of Nazira’s hermeneutics and my hypotheses for why she and her writings remained virtually unknown until the end of the 20th century.