The emergence and evolution of Egyptian feminism is an integral, but previously untold, part of the history of modern Egypt. Drawing upon a wide range of women's sources - memoirs, letters, essays, journalistic articles, fiction, treatises, and extensive oral histories - Feminists, Islam, and Nation tells this story. Margot Badran shows how Egyptian women assumed agency and in so doing subverted and refigured the conventional patriarchal order.

Unsettling a common claim that "feminism is Western" and dismantling the alleged opposition between feminism and Islam, the book demonstrates how the Egyptian feminist movement in the first half of this century both advanced the nationalist cause and worked within the parameters of Islam. Badran offers an innovative reinterpretation of modern Egyptian history by demonstrating the gendered nature of nationalist, Islamic, and imperialist discourses.

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The book shows how Egyptian women, attentive to the implications of gender, played vital roles, both as movement activists and everyday pioneers, in the construction of citizenship and the institutions of a modern state and civil society. Badran argues further that, of all the forces that shaped and reshaped modern Egypt, feminism constituted the most sustained critique - from within - of state and society.

Feminists, Islam, and Nation not only expands our understanding of modern Egypt and our historical knowledge of feminist movements, but also contributes toward theorizing and further defining feminism.