Zain-ed-Din, Nazira. “Unveiling and Veiling: On the Liberation of the Woman and Social Renewal in the Islamic World,” in Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, ed. Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
Nazira Zain-ed-Din, considered the first Arab woman to offer a detailed re-interpretation of the Quran in favor of women's rights, was born in Lebanon in 1905. Her father was a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence and strongly supported her education and intellectual growth. When she published her book Unveiling and Veiling in 1928 at the age of 20, she received severe threats, especially from Muslim clerics and jurists, because of her proposal that the Quran be re-interpreted, because the current interpretations are oppressive to Muslim women. Her death date is unknown.
In “Unveiling and Veiling,” Zain-ed-Din refutes that the veil (niqab in Arabic) as an Islamic obligation for Muslim women. She compares the Eastern and Western societies, defining the former as veiled and the latter as unveiled, and has concluded that the unveiled parts of the world tend to be far more intellectually advanced than the veiled countries. She argues that the niqab is an insult to not just women but all of society, and finds it unintelligent that morality is measured by how veiled a woman is. Zain-ed-Din also asserts that a woman’s veiling implies that she cannot protect herself without it and that it is a great hindrance in her advancement; she refutes the concept of modesty and morality by challenging men to wear the veil as well if they are any more moral, chaste, and virtuous than women are. She finds the notion and implication of man’s domination over woman harmful for society, maintaining that the misconception of the superiority of man in terms of inheritance, testimony, ad polygamy are to men’s own disadvantage. She supports this argument using the Quran, sayings of the Prophet, and interpretations of early Muslim scholars like Mohammad Abduh (d. 1905).
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