Qasim Amin

Qasim Amin (1863 to 1908) was an Egyptian jurist and judge, a figure of the Islamic modernist and national movements and a co-founder of Cairo University, remembered as an early advocate of women's rights in the Arab world. Born in Alexandria to a family of Ottoman Turkish and Arnaut descent, he took his law degree at the Khedival School in 1881 and studied for four years at the University of Montpellier. In 1885 he was appointed a jurist in the Mixed Courts of Egypt, entered the Government Division of Legal Affairs by 1887 and within four years became one of the Egyptian judges of the National Court, later serving as Chancellor of the Cairo National Court of Appeals. He helped found the National University, later Cairo University, as its first secretary-general and vice president. In The Liberation of Women of 1899 he argued against the veil, seclusion and early marriage and supported legislating divorce, though scholars still debate how far his work was feminist.