Fatima Al-Alem

Pioneering Egyptian feminist and educator who founded the first women's university in the Arab world

Fatima Al-Alem (1905-1998) was a visionary educator and women's rights activist from Egypt who made groundbreaking contributions to gender equality in the Arab world. Born in Alexandria to a family of scholars, she defied societal norms by completing her PhD in education at the Sorbonne in 1932, becoming one of the first Arab women to earn such a distinction.

In 1947 she established the Al-Ahram University for Women, the first institution of higher learning in the Arab world dedicated exclusively to female students. This groundbreaking initiative provided education to over 5,000 women in its first decade, offering programs in law, medicine, and engineering at a time when less than 2% of Arab women attended university.

Her pedagogical innovations included mandatory physical education for women and the first Arabic-language feminist journal Al-Mar'aa Al-Jadida (The New Woman). During the 1950s she developed a nationwide literacy program that taught reading skills to 150,000 rural Egyptian women through mobile schools. Her work laid the foundation for Egypt's modern women's rights movement, influencing figures like later Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz.

Al-Alem's legacy is preserved in the Fatima Al-Alem Institute which continues her work in girls' education across the Middle East. Her 1963 book Women and the Nation's Progress remains a seminal text in Arab feminist thought.