Hoda El-Saadi is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilization at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and a co-founder of the woman and memory forum. She received both her BA and MA from the American University in Cairo and her PhD from Cairo University in Islamic History. She has a wide variety of teaching experiences. Through teaching at both national and international Universities and through participating in graduate educational workshops at different national universities, she gained valuable experience leading undergraduate and graduate discussion sections for both history and non-history majors. El Saadi developed an interest in gender issues in the Islamic tradition. She worked on a project to produce a series of occasional papers on the work of women. The objective of her research is to empower women by making available historical information that demonstrates women’s involvement in public life. She believes that social and cultural issues should be studied in relation to larger issues such as Islamic law, Islamic civilization and the changing social political and economic structures. There is an urgent need to study Islamic law in order to understand the development in the social practices, and to find out how Islamic law and local practices shaped Islamic societies. This made her recently join the Islamic studies program at AUC, and earn a diploma in the field. Two early published book in Arabic is; El Saadi, Hoda & Amina el Bindari. Al_Awqaf fi Suwar wa Sutur. Cairo; Women and Memory, 2006 and El Saadi, Hoda & Mounira Soliman. Ra’idat al Fann al Masry al Mu’asir. Cairo; Women and Memory, 2008.
Some of her recent publications are;
Selected English publications:
- “Gulf Women and The Economy: Pre-oil Gulf States.” In Gulf Women , edited by Amira Sonbol, 147-165. Qatar: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation, 2012.
- “Interventions.” International Journal of Post Colonial Studies 14, no. 4 (2012): 625-635.
- “Islamic Feminism in Egypt: Between Acceptance and Rejection.” In Arab Feminism: Gender Equality in The Middle East, edited by Rafif Sidawy and Noha Bayoumi Jean Maqdisi. London: IB Tauris, 2014.
- El Saadi, H. and Aya Sami. Questions and Answers about Gender and Feminism [Cards]. Cairo: Women and Memory Forum, 2016
- Fiqh Rulings and Gendering the Public Space: The Discrepancy between Written Formality and Daily Reality.” In “Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice: Processes of Canonization, Subversion and Change,” edited by Nevin Reda & Yasmin Amin. Toronto: McGill Queen’s University Press (forthcoming January 2021).
- . ‘Historicizing Muslim Marriage Practices in Pre-Modern Islamic Egypt’. In Justice and Beauty in Muslim Marriage: Towards Egalitarian Ethics and Laws, edited by Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani, Jana Rumminger and Sarah Marsso, pp. 315-336. London: Oneworld Publications.
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