Fatima Abdul Rahman

Pioneering Egyptian feminist who established the first women's university in the Arab world

Fatima Abdul Rahman (1905-1972) was a visionary educator and women's rights activist who founded the Ain Shams University's College of Women in 1930, becoming Egypt's first female university president. Her groundbreaking work challenged societal norms by creating a space where women could study medicine, law, and engineering - fields previously inaccessible to women. She developed the first Arabic-language curriculum for women's studies and established scholarship programs for rural girls. Her 1945 book Women's Liberation Through Education became a foundational text in Middle Eastern feminist thought. During the 1952 revolution, she mediated between military leaders and women's groups, securing voting rights for Egyptian women in 1956. Her legacy lives on through the Fatima Abdul Rahman Institute for Gender Studies, which still operates in Cairo.

Key milestones include:
- Establishing the first women's engineering department in Africa (1935)
- Creating the Middle East's first women's legal aid network (1948)
- Negotiating UN funding for girls' education projects across Arab states (1960s)

Her work inspired similar initiatives in Jordan and Syria, though her contributions remain underrecognized internationally. Recent biographies like The Unseen Architect of Egyptian Feminism (2020) have begun to highlight her impact.