Her weekly lectures to women at the Ibn Tulun Mosque drew a crowd of three thousand, which grew to five thousand during the holy months of the year (interview with the author, 13 September 1988). At the age of eighteen she founded the Jama’at al-Sayyidat al-Muslimat (Muslim Women’s Association), which, she claims, had a membership of three million throughout the country by the time it was dissolved by government order in 1964. Although for a short time she joined Huda Sha’rawi’s Egyptian Feminist Union, she came to see this as a mistaken path for women, believing that women’s rights were guaranteed in Islam. Her father encouraged her to become an Islamic leader, citing the example of Nusaybah bint Ka’b alMaziniyah, a woman who fought alongside the Prophet in the Battle of Uhud. The daughter of an al-Azhar-educated independent religious teacher and cotton merchant, she was privately tutored in Islamic studies in the home in addition to attending public school through the secondary level, and she obtained certificates in hadith, preaching, and Qur’anic exegesis.
1917), prominent writer and teacher of the Muslim Brotherhood, founder of the Muslim Women’s Association (1936-1964).
