Women's Politics and Islamic Horizons: Childrearing as Islamic Political Practice in Labiba Ahmad's al-Nahda al-Nisa'iyya, 1924-1939

Labiba Ahmad's monthly journal al-Nahda al-Nisa'iyya (The Women's Awakening) (1924-1939) played an important role in interwar Egypt's intellectual scene. Unlike better-known female contemporaries associated with secular nationalist parties like Huda Shaarawi and Ceza Nabarawi, Ahmad aligned herself with the Islamically-inclined Watani Party and led the Muslim Brotherhood's female wing. While many women writers supported female wage labor, removing the hijab, and sidelining Islam from public and political life, Ahmad articulated women's rights in Islamic terms – a vision largely absent from histories of Egyptian feminism and Islamism.  Secular Egyptian feminism presented domestic labor as a stepping-stone to wage labor and political participation. Ahmad's journal reenvisioned the role of domestic work by presenting an Islamist interpretation of tarbiya, the education and moral cultivation of children. Tarbiya's conceptual genealogy includes both Christian women trained in missionary schools and male reformers trained at Cairo's great mosque-university, al-Azhar. al-Nahda al-Nisa'iyya draws from this genealogy to present tarbiya as a radical form of Islamist politics, arguing that the correct ethical rearing of young minds at home enables the possibility of Islamic political futures. This idea remains central to Islamist women's politics today. By claiming tarbiya for an Islamic political vision, Ahmed and her co-authors reframed key hierarchies structuring Egyptian social and political life: between child and adult, public and private, individual and nation. In so doing, they challenged secular natonalism at its core, offering a theory of the political subject as built, not born that fundamentally questioned the self-owning agent assumed by secular liberal governance.