Knowledge is Power: Education is Jihad in Nimat Sidqi's Teachings

Muslim women writers harness the power of Islamic knowledge toward cultivating women’s intellectual authority in Islamic societies, though their contributions have been sorely neglected. NiÊzmat Sidqi— leader, preacher, and writer—worked with the preaching and welfare organization Jamaat Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhamadiyya, the more academic counterpart of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Her writings were pivotal to cultivating the most salient concepts of gender that emerged in the late 20^th century, about modesty and agency, religion and sexuality, motherhood and family, knowledge and education. Her pamphlet al-Tabarruj (“Adornment,” 1967) helped spearhead the “return to veiling” (Êzawadat al-hijab) movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Though she spent decades leading women’s study sessions in her home, she only began publishing her ideas in the mainstream press in the late 1960s and early 1970s, just at the moment of the Islamic revival’s emergence in Egypt.

Sidqi writes about the power of knowledge to unlock the treasures of “adab”—a word that connotes both belles-lettres and literature, as well as ethics and righteous comportment. This jihad of the mind for God, she says, emerges out of education (tarbiya), discipline (tahdhīb), and enlightenment (tanwir) that liberate the human heart and body from the shackles of jahiliyya, or (un-Islamic) ignorance. This paper focuses on how Sidqi understands the Islamic concept of tarbiya (“education”), with its attendant struggles and disciplines, as jihad. Through her writings, she re-defines classical Islamic terms for a new generation of Muslim women intellectuals.