Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 July 2000 Issue No. 491
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Zeinab Radwan: A woman's world The struggle to succeed, not fear of failure -- that is what drives her Profile by Gamal Nkrumah

Zeinab Radwan likes to keep busy. "Some people aren't as driven as I am. Sitting around doing nothing doesn't appeal to me," she says briskly, settling into a comfortable chair in her daughter Reem's living room. She feels that the key to her career success -- earning a doctorate at a relatively young age, while simultaneously holding a job and raising two young children -- lies in her discipline and capacity to organise her time. "I never had difficulty studying, working and looking after my family," she says confidently.

Surely, there must be a drawback? Radwan's mind works visibly as she searches for an answer. "Yes, perhaps that is why I am hypertensive," she concedes. "Still, I would not have it any other way," she says, throwing her hands in the air and shaking her head with a soft chuckle.

She is an authority on Islamic jurisprudence, especially as it pertains to women, and the procedural aspects of personal status legislation. Radwan is motivated by a sense of the intrinsic worth of women. "That a Muslim woman must get permission to travel from her spouse and cannot travel without her husband's consent is preposterous, unconstitutional and un-Islamic. It is designed to humiliate Muslim women," she argues.

Radwan combines her academic and political careers carefully and sees the two as complimentary rather than conflicting. She is also a legislative committee member of the National Council for Motherhood and Childhood as well as a member of the executive committee of the National Women's Council (NWC). Radwan represented Egypt as part of the official delegation at several women's conferences including the Universal Decade of Women conference in Nairobi, Kenya in 1985 and the International Conference on Women and Islamic Legislation held in Islamabad, Pakistan in 1996. More recently, Radwan presented a paper about the law facilitating personal status judicial procedures in Egypt at the conference on Islamic Legislation and the Treaty on Eliminating all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, convened in New York from 29 February to 3 March.

Radwan is a member of the Shura Council as well as dean of Cairo University's Dar Al-Ulum (Fayoum campus) and head of the philosophy department -- a job she has held since 1990. She graduated with first-class honours from Ain Shams University's department of social and philosophical studies in 1964. After obtaining a master's degree in Islamic philosophy from Ain Shams, she immediately began work on a doctoral thesis, also at Ain Shams University, which she completed in 1972.

With a PhD in Islamic philosophy, the stage was set for Radwan to embark on an academic career. Her first job after graduation was at the National Centre for Social and Criminological Research (NCSCR). Starting in 1965 as a research assistant, she soon became head of a new unit specifically created to accommodate her research interests. Never one to mince words, Radwan had gone straight to her boss, Ahmed Khalifa, the first director of the NCSCR, and demanded the creation of a new research unit. "Either a unit is formed to suit my academic qualifications or I will have to give up this job," she told him point blank. Khalifa, to this day her mentor, happily obliged. He agreed to set up a special unit dealing specifically with political Islam as a social phenomenon. It was exquisite timing. With the rapid growth of Islamist militancy as a social movement in the 1970s, Radwan's research work acquired a new urgency and importance. She soon moved up to become senior lecturer, supervising the Islamic studies project at the NCSCR, and then became head of the centre's religious studies department.

Radwan, who readily admits to being a workaholic, emerged as a prolific research writer. She dislikes pressure but she works well under it. Radwan is driven by the struggle to succeed, rather than by fear of failure. She remembers the small offices in Garden City were she first started the job -- the NCSCR is now located in Agouza. It was in these offices that she churned out dozens of studies -- some of the most detailed and cited research documenting the social consequences of Islamist militancy.

It was at this point that she realised her vocation. Radwan describes herself as a modern Muslim, whose instinctive cultural reference is the Qur'an. But she holds what more conservative Muslims sometimes regard as unorthodox views. "But what are they conserving? Certainly not Muslim traditions. They hold on to customs and traditions that have been handed down but that are not necessarily Shari'a or Sunna [prophetic practice]," Radwan charges. "Take the khul' -- the Muslim woman's right to obtain a divorce on condition that she forgoes all her financial rights except child support. It was a fundamental right given to Muslim women. Why is it that we have to re-introduce it now? Why were some Muslim traditions conveniently ignored?" she asks.

Speaking of traditions: to veil or not to veil? Yes, that corny old question ironically kick-started her career. In 1982, Radwan delved deeply into the question of the hijab. To this day, there has not been as comprehensive a study of why women don the veil as the one she carried out. The study also featured a discussion of women's attire in Egypt from the earliest days of the Arab conquest until the present day. Radwan highlighted the differences in the dress codes of Muslim women from different social classes and backgrounds.

To millions of Muslim women around the world, dressing modestly, which invariably means wearing a veil, is a Qur'anic injunction that must be obeyed. Not so with Radwan. She insists that Islam does not enjoin women to don the veil, and believes that the veil was prescribed primarily to the Prophet Mohamed's wives and in the context of pre-Islamic Arabia, where women "were seen solely as sex objects."

Radwan asserts that the contexts in which the veil was prescribed cannot be overlooked. Surat Al-Ahzab, usually cited by those who enjoin Muslim women to wear the hijab, was revealed to the Prophet Mohamed soon after the controversy that surrounded his marriage to Zeinab bint Jahsh. The chapter enjoins Muslim men to speak with the prophet's wives from behind a hijab or screen, also rendered veil. The Qur'an also enjoins the prophet's wives to "draw their veil over their bosoms and not display their beauty" in Surat Al-Nur, after the palanquin incident (Al-Ifk), in which Aisha bint Abi Bakr, a wife of the prophet, went missing in the desert after the camel carrying her palanquin left without her. She was accompanied back to the prophet's camp by a man, triggering great controversy as to appropriate behaviour for Muslim women.

Radwan's was a pioneering study and a brave one, for many clerics hotly dispute her views. The ripple effects of her study politicised her. The Ford Foundation as well as a number of Western embassies, including those of the United States and the United Kingdom, expressed interest in the findings. Her research is currently deposited at the Library of Congress. She was also approached by the Japanese, who wanted to know how the findings of the study would impact their export sales to Egypt and the Middle East. Her work drew her into the limelight and, while she is not a diva by nature, she is no shrinking violet.

After Radwan's work on the veil came a project of the teaching of religion -- religious textbooks in primary and secondary school curricula, to be precise. The study revealed that religious textbooks were changed on average every three years, but, Radwan says, the effort at indoctrination was consistent. The policies elaborated during the period she was examining (principally the Sadat years) were influenced by the individuals implementing them, but prejudice intruded all along the line. "I call it the cut and paste method," she explains. "Textbooks must be constant over many years for students to trust the system. But if we say something is true today and deny it tomorrow, students will lose faith in us. Consistency is at a premium."

Invariably, the religious standpoint of the curriculum changed with ideological and political transformations at the state and national levels. "Religion is used to further a particular political line," Radwan argues. "Immediately after the 1952 Revolution, religious texts in schools were manipulated to condemn the monarchy, then to promote socialism, to incite hatred of Jews, and, in the Sadat years, to bolster the open-door policy. People simply lost faith in the state and in the government-authored syllabi. People found refuge in the mosques and took to religious books more often than not written by Islamist militants."

Radwan elaborates on the methodology that guided this particular project. "We registered every news item, article or analytical piece that touched upon religion and religious matters. The researcher also has to win the trust of the people he or she is interviewing. Winning this trust is key to entering their world, which otherwise remains closed to outsiders. We focused on the Sadat era, when the Islamist militant groups were publishing so much religious literature, most of it politically charged. We compared their literature with the government's religious curricula and discovered why the militants were winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the students."

To the layman, Radwan's prickly research topics often seem too academic or too controversial. She mines sensitive themes -- of that there is no doubt -- and her work over the years has acquired a certain depth. Radwan insists that religious fundamentalism and fanaticism cannot serve as premises for thinking about moral issues and, indeed, subvert healthy debate.

Radwan believes that Islamist militancy works from the very premises on which Muslim societies base their entire value systems. The militants, she believes, forcibly contrive continuity from what they understand of the Qur'an and the prophet's Sunna. Still, she was taken aback when she realised the full extent of the power the Islamist militant students wielded at Dar Al-Ulum. "I studied the situation, watching and learning quickly from both my colleagues and the students. I began to organise day trips to museums and arranged for war veterans, army generals and public figures to give lectures. Some of the students became very hostile and tried to intimidate me. They doubted my Islamic credentials because I was not veiled, and openly said so. They hurled sexist slurs at me. But I stood my ground and showed them that when cornered I can be just as vicious as they are." The steely look in Radwan's eye shows she is dead serious. The experience was obviously hair-raising, but she was determined to show the recalcitrants who was boss. She refused to be brow-beaten and instead bared her teeth and revealed a shockingly different side to her nature -- the fearless fighting spirit of a legendary Amazon.

"You are free to believe what you will, but I cannot accept proselytes in this institution of higher learning," she told the leaders of the militant Islamist movement on campus. "If you try to intimidate or indoctrinate your fellow students I'll call in the security forces and the police." She did not hesitate to do so on numerous occasions. "I also forbade them to take their exams in jail," she says. "I meant it, and I made sure everyone abided by the new rules."

The policy bore fruit. This, she believes, is no small feat, considering that Fayoum governorate generally and Dar Al-Ulum in particular were long considered hotbeds of militant Islam. Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiya's Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, now jailed in the US, hails from Fayoum; the Muslim Brotherhood's Sayed Qutb and Hassan El-Banna all studied at Dar Al-Ulum. "These students were brainwashed. They were given subversive books that made a mockery of true Islam and traditionally tolerant Islamic teachings. There were evil forces at work. The student leaders were funded by sinister forces bent on violence and disorder." She applied harsher methods of persuasion mercilessly. "I had to make a stand. I demonstrated in no uncertain manner that it was I, and not they, who was in charge of Dar Al-Ulum."

Radwan, however, used reason as well as her own brand of discipline. She explained to her students that political opposition and dissent have always been characteristic of Islam. "During the Prophet Mohamed's own lifetime, there were political differences between the Ansar -- the local people of Madina -- and the Muhajirin, the Meccans who immigrated with the prophet to Madina. And after the prophet's death, there were the Khawarij, the Mo'tazilites and the Shi'ites."

Despite her willingness to stand up and speak out in such confrontations, Radwan prefers to work behind the scenes -- it is clear from the way she discusses her research how much she loves the work itself; but, when called upon to play a more visible role, she is by no means camera shy. "I feel more comfortable with research work. But I now enjoy teaching, too," she says. "I always take time to choose my research team carefully. I don't want people who are in it for the money. I have always wanted dedicated researchers who valued the work we were doing, who had a real interest and showed enthusiasm for the work. All researchers had to undergo a three-month course in research methodology. They were trained to ask the right questions in the proper manner. They were encouraged to formulate interesting questionnaires that would produce insightful findings," she explains.

Radwan herself was "always really rather serious and studious." She was raised by her maternal grandmother, who used to catch her reading in bed in the dark. "Once, when I was 12, I went to the movies with my family," she says wryly. "At the time, I was studying for my preparatory school exams. I just knew that I had to make up for the day spent at the cinema. It so happened that some relatives visited us soon after, and I remember informing them after the customary greetings that I was sorry I could not stay with them because I needed to attend to my studies. They were taken aback and thought that I was very odd."

But even then, Radwan was hardly paralysed by the world outside her books. "I was not a shy child. I was outgoing and friendly. I used to go up to total strangers and chat with them. I found old people especially interesting."

She was the only girl in her father's household -- her three other paternal siblings are male -- but that never seemed to bother her. For as long as she can remember, she has been driven by a strong belief that she can excel at any endeavour. Perhaps she wanted to prove to her father that she could do just as well as his three sons. She used to visit him and his new family occasionally, and was heart-broken when he died. She was away on holiday at the time, and her husband, Ali Leila, decided not to tell her until she returned.

Her mother had two sons and four daughters after she remarried; Radwan's stepfather treated her kindly, "like a little princess," she muses. She notes that he never raised his hand to her, even though he sometimes hit his own children.

Radwan, it seems, is quite strict about manners herself. She is a disciplinarian, but makes a clear distinction between coercion, which she says never bears fruit, and common sense. Her daughter once insisted on going swimming when she was ill, and Radwan accepted willingly -- but warned her that, if she went, Radwan would not take her to the doctor. It was her choice, her mother explained. "I never thought mother would follow through with her threat," Reem recalls. "So I went swimming before I had recovered." Radwan stuck to her guns, even when Reem ran a high fever, and refused to take her to the doctor. Reem was terrified, but learned her lesson. "It was a tough one," she laughs wryly.

Today, Reem's daughter Mahi is the apple of her grandmother's eye. "There was an immediate bond," Radwan says of her grandchild. "My children are the most precious things in my life. They are closest to my heart. I believe that no matter how hard one works or how important and enjoyable one's work is, one should spend time with one's children." True to her beliefs, she raised Reem and her brother Mahmoud almost single-handedly while her husband taught at various universities in the Gulf for over 15 years. "Disciplining teenagers is not always easy," she smiles.

Still, Radwan's role as a mother never prevented her from being promoted and finding favour with her superiors. She is diligent, and never felt that being a woman affected her work in any way. "If anything, being a woman is an advantage." Ironically, the only serious trouble she ever had at work was with a woman, Nahed Saleh, who succeeded Ahmed Khalifa as NCSCR director. Saleh closed down the religious studies unit and the daggers were drawn. "For seven long years, we battled it out in the courts," Radwan explains, shaking at the memory. She eventually won the legal battle, but by then she had left the world of research for university lecturing. "When I left the NCSCR, I applied for a teaching position at Cairo University. I presented my research, and was immediately accepted," Radwan says.

"I was never daunted by threats," she notes, drawing a deep breath. "I have nothing to fear when I know I am in the right -- not even when my opponent is a minister." Indeed, she took former Minister of Social Affairs Amal Osman to court, claiming that the minister was disrupting her work, and won. Only the intervention of Mervat Tellawi, who succeeded Osman as social affairs minister, prompted Radwan to forfeit her claim to compensation. She was later Tellawi's adviser on women's affairs.

Between research, motherhood, political life and the ups and downs of her career, does Radwan have time for anything else? Well -- reading, of course. "When I pick up a good novel, I cannot put it down," she confesses. "I also love children's books. I used to think it odd that [late President Anwar] El-Sadat watched a Western before going to bed every night. But now I can see why. I simply cannot sleep without a good book."

photos: Khaled El-Fiqi

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