Professor Omaima Abou Bakr has taught English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University since 1992. She completed her academic training at Cairo University (B.A.), North Carolina State University (M.A.), and the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.). Her doctoral thesis was a study of the poetry of the Andalusian Sufi poet and philosopher, Abū al-Ḥasan al-Shushtarī (1212-1269 CE). In 1996, Professor Abou Bakr became a founding member of the Women and Memory Forum in Cairo, an institution focused on generating positive awareness about the cultural history of women in Arab and Middle Eastern societies. She has published extensively in the fields of comparative literature, Sufism, Islamic feminism, and Qurʾānic studies.

The following interview was conducted on April 30, 2025. The interview includes reflections on Professor Abou Bakr’s educational background and experience in Egypt and the United States, the case of Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd (d.2010), the nature of Sufism, the historical development of Islamic feminism in Egypt, the unique voice of Gamāl al-Bannā (d.2013), the question of divorce in Islamic tradition,  colonialism, and Asmāʾ al-Sharqāwī’s recent book, Kāmilāt ʿaql wa dīn (“Complete in Reason and Religion”), among other topics.

Interview Excerpt

MA: Who would you have been reading in the 1990s about Islamic feminism? Many of the scholars that I'm aware of in Islamic feminism really weren't published seriously until around the 2000s. I guess there was Fatema Mernissi (1940-2015). Were there some figures that you found to be collaborators that you were thinking alongside?

OAB: To be honest, Nawāl al-Saʿadāwī (1931-2021) was a significant influence. Although, as you know, Nawāl al-Saʿadāwī is put in a “secular” box. But I remember, again in Berkeley, I came across her first book, Al-Wajh al-ʿĀrī Li-l-Marʾa al-ʿArabiyya (“The Naked Face of the Arab Woman”) which was first published in 1977. It was a strictly feminist book, and it had an impact on me, I have to admit. It's honest to say that. I don't want to pretend that now I'm all religious, I have to hate it. I have to be honest about the journey. So Nawāl al-Saʿadāwī, for sure, was like the spark. And then Faṭema Mernīssī as well and her book The Veil and the Male Elite, which was published in the late 1980s. But that one, again, was shocking. But it is the shocking books that make you think, right? They challenge you to study and research for yourself. So again, to be fair and to be honest about Mernīssī’s achievement, as far as I'm concerned, she was the first to scrutinize details in the Islamic tradition. She looked at the specifics of ḥadīth transmission and so on.

And at that time, if you want to talk about changes in public religion, we were not used to anyone speaking about religion except the religious establishment. Only the sheikhs and the al-Azhar scholars talked about religion. Not women scholars, let alone women in general. There were very few exceptions to this, perhaps someone like ʿĀʾisha ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (1913-1998) in Egypt. So, women like Mernīssī were pioneering. That was pioneering for an anthropologist. She didn't even say that she was a Muslim or Islamic feminist, or anything at that time. But she produced very interesting knowledge, and she opened the door for many of us to read elements of the Islamic tradition from a more critical perspective. If we are tracing the chronology, it was in 1999 that I first read Amina Wadud's (b.1952) book, Qurʾan and Woman.

MA: Were there people in Egypt reading this material with you in the 1990s?

OAB: Yes, it was the beginning, of course. I myself was still exploring whether this will work or not. And we were still even experimenting with the term al-Niswiyya al-Islāmiyya or “Islamic feminism.” We were experimenting with that, and people were shouting at us from all directions. But at that time there were two entities. The Women and Memory Forum, which I had joined at the time, is an NGO and research center on women's cultural history. It was not an Islamic organization. It was not leftist or secular. It was just a group of women, academics, and researchers interested in women's cultural history in the Arabic tradition. And when I joined this group of friends, each one of us was interested in a specific period. And I said I'm interested in learning more about this track of patriarchy in theology and women's history in pre-modern Islamic history. There was a camaraderie.

But at that time there was also another organization that didn't last as long that was formed by Dr. Mona Abū al-Faḍl (d.2008). This was an organization that was called the Association for Women and Civilization Studies. They issued three journals in Arabic, and it was quite interesting.  I didn't know this at the time, but they were also trying to do this project of revisioning Islamic history from a gender-sensitive perspective. But they were all Islamic, not Islamist, with no relation to the Muslim Brotherhood by any means, but interested in this civilizational, intellectual Islamic project. And that's when I began to be friends with them. This is an answer to your question about whether at that time, in the late 1990s or early 2000s, whether other people were beginning to work on these ideas.

MA: I know there is a longer legacy in the modern Middle East. You have these iconic figures like Huda Shaʿarāwī (c.1879-1947) and Qāsim Amīn (1863-1908) from Egypt, as well as figures like Tāhar Haddād (1899-1935) from Tunisia. But in your experience as an academic very much at the heart of the academic world of Egypt, which is Cairo University, you felt that it wasn't until the late 1990s and early 2000s that there were really noticeable efforts at doing something that we would recognize as Islamic feminism. Is that correct?

OAB: I understand what you are saying. In my view, and in my analysis of the history of women activists in the Egyptian feminist movement since the turn of the century and the 20th century, there are stages, of course, or there are different waves. My contention is that the religious component, particularly the Islamic component, has always figured as sort of a given in the women's movement. And I'm going to explain how that is different from now or from after 2000. If you go back to the activism of Huda Shaʿarāwī or Malak Ḥifnī Nāṣif (1886-1918) and other early Egyptian women who were involved in journalism and in establishing women's magazines and journals, there was always discussion about the correct application of Islamic law when it comes to women's rights. Because at that time the advocacy was for women's education, for women to go into the university, for women to go into parliament, into political life, into the public sphere, and to stop the very rigid segregation at the time. We're talking about the early 20th century. Marrying off women, particularly in the upper classes, without seeing the suitors. There were some customs definitely that the women activists argued were not Islamic, such as depriving women of education.

So this religious component was implicit and present early on even it was not explicitly stated as an ideological or intellectual position. But to fast forward to the post-2000, this was not as self-conscious as what happened after 2000, when Islamic feminism began to emerge as a distinct movement. Not a separate movement—maybe that's not a good choice of word—but an independent movement that was more aware of its unique identity. I always use that to describe the movement. Okay, yes, we are feminists. Yes, we are Muslim or Islamic, and we began to write about it. These are the methods that we're going to use. We're going to look at the Qurʾān that way. We're going to look at the ḥadīth that way. So there has been this development in recent decades in the areas of theology and methodology.