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Doria Shafiq Research Paper

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DORIA SHAFIQ AND HER CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ARAB WOMEN'S LITERATURE
Doria Shafiq was a feminist and a philosopher. She was also an editor and a poet, and one of the principal leaders of the women’s liberation movement in Egypt in the mid-1940s meaning that she was a women’s rights activist. Through her efforts, she fought against women oppression in Egypt. Doria Shafiq was born in Tanta in the Nile Delta of Northern Egypt and studied in a French mission school. She was the youngest Egyptian at the age of 16 years to earn the French Baccalaureate degree. She wrote two journals one focusing on the merely utilitarian ends generally associated with Ancient Egyptian art and the second arguing that Islam amply recognized women’s equal rights. One of …show more content…

The end is where we start from. And every phrase and sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph. And any action is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start” (Queen of the Neighborhood, 2010). This was a story she wrote as an Egyptian woman as she wanted her life to be a work of art. It is also a story of one woman’s struggle against those conservative forces within her society, whether cultural, religious, or political that opposed the full equality of women. Shafiq was a woman who wanted to be a public heroine in a society that defined and circumscribed woman primarily in terms of helper, supporter, and moral guide to the family in the domestic sphere. Therefore, Doria Shafiq depicts a woman of strength, importance, dignity, and self-respect from her own exploits in pursuit of freedom. She participated in one of her …show more content…

When she was in Paris, she met and married her husband Nour Al Din Ragai a law student who was working on his PhD. When she returned to Egypt from Paris in 1940 upon the completion of her studies, she was more focused in contributing to the education of the youth in her society but was denied a chance by the dean of faculty of literature in Cairo University with the claim that she was too modern. In 1945, Shafiq was offered an opportunity to be the editor-in-chief of a French cultural and literary magazine addressing the country’s elite by the wife of Egypt’s then former King Fuad I. After accepting the position, the King’s wife died in 1947 and Shafiq took complete control of the union including its finances. Through her direction, the magazine gained regional status and also during this period is when she decided to take the opportunity and publish an Arabic magazine that was known as the ‘Daughter of the Nile’ with the intention to educate all women in Egypt and also help them have the most effective roles in their society. Her intentions were to ensure that women’s primary social problems are solved and included to the country’s policies. Through the union to help women, she also worked to eradicate illiteracy and in order to see this successful, she set up

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