Nazira Zain al-Din

Nazira Zain al-Din was the daughter of Shaykh Saeed Zainal Din, a judge in Lebanon's High Court of Appeals and an intellectual scholar of Islam. She was also able to study and converse with various Islamic scholars (Ulama) during her lifetime. Many of these scholars were good friends of her father and spent a great deal of time in their home. By the time she was a young woman Nadira Zain al-Din was considered an extremely cultured individual, especially on Islam. After graduation from the Sisters of Nazareth Convent school, al-Din wished to pursue a medical education at St. Joseph's, an all-male jesuit school in Beirut. Unfortunately she was denied entrance because she was a woman. She decided to attend Lycée Français Laique, a coed French institution where she graduated at the top of her class, even above all of the French male pupils. After her graduation from Lycée Français Laique, she decided not to pursue any other higher education and from there al-Din was able to begin her writing career. ==Literary career==

She wrote her second book, The Young Woman and the Shaikhs later that year. This book is seen as a collection of direct responses to the criticism that she received from the Arab community regarding Unveiling and Veiling. The Young Woman and the Shaikhs attempts to rebuke arguments made by critics regarding the validity and credibility of Unveiling and Veiling. In it, Al-Din claims that she wrote her first book with "no companion or assistance except pens and ink pots, books and papers". Al-Din's works were considered a necessary response to the veiling of Middle Eastern women during this time. In her home of Lebanon and in many other parts of the Middle East, women were not allowed to leave the house without their face covered. This occurred at a time before women themselves reclaimed the right to wear the veil as a way to personally express their faith. During the 1920s, this "head-to-toe" covering was seen as a source of oppression and seclusion, "stemming from the logic of male ownership and female objectification" Al-Din's response to this societal issue left a remarkable impact on the Muslim community. She was one of the first women to use the Quran and other holy texts to question notions that were thought to have originated from them. Both of her works questioned the validity of the misogynistic interpretations of both the Quran and the Hadith. Rather than relying on these interpretations, she urged members of the Muslim community to use individual reason and judgement to distinguish between what is regarded as moral, and what is not. ==Later life==

She was eventually overcome by the opposition of most Muslims and her fellow Druze to her Western-influenced criticisms of Arab culture. A member of the upper class, she stopped writing after about five years and settled down with her husband and three sons at their mansion in Baaqline, Lebanon. She died in 1976 at the age of 68. Very little is known about al-Din's life in the decades after her writing and diatribes against Arab culture. ==External links==