Dr. Amal Abdullah Juma Al Qubaisi represents Abu Dhabi on the Federal National Council, with a special interest in education and young people’s issues. Right now, she is the President of the Council. The council serves as the United Arab Emirates advisory body that also reviews and recommends federal draft laws. In 2009 Dr. Al Qubaisi was the first female elected to the council.
She was the head of the United Arab Emirates delegation to the second regional conference for women parliamentarians and decision makers in the Gulf Corporation Council countries in 2007. As a trained architect she has also worked with UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, on conservation projects in Al Ain, a lush green city near Abu Dhabi with a network of underground water channels.
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Born in 1848, Tjut Njak Dien played an integral role in Indonesian resistance to Dutch imperial forces in the late 19th and early 20th century. When the Dutch invaded Aceh, a northern province in Indonesia, Dien followed her father and husband and re-emerged ten years later as a guerilla commander. Pretending to surrender to Dutch army forces, Dien and her husband joined a Dutch army unit; eventually the two were able to replace as many of the Dutchmen in their unit as they could with Acehnese fighters from their old guerilla units. Observing and learning some of the Dutch’s military strategy, Dien and her husband set up the Dutch army for an “attack” on the Acehnese, for which of course the Acehnese were prepared.
Dien continued to lead Acehnese warriors, battle after battle. Many years after her first husband passed away, Dien married another warrior and gave birth to a girl. After the death of her second husband and daughter, Dien continued to fight against the Dutch until she was taken as a political prisoner in the early 1900s. Dien was banished to Sumendang, a town in West Java, Indonesia. As the only female political prisoner, she became well respected as a scholar of the Qur’an and when she passed in 1908 she was known as Ibu Perbu, Queen of Jihad. In 1964 President Sukarno of Indonesia declared Tjut Njak Dien a national heroine. Today, many Acehnese people visit her tomb in Sumendang.
Rebiya Kadeer was born in 1947 in China. Married twice and the mother of 11 children, Ms. Kadeer is one of China’s most prominent advocators for the rights of women and the Uyghur community, a Muslim-majority ethnic group in China. She is the president of the World Uyghur Congress, which represents the Uyghur community in exile.
As a laundress, Ms. Kadeer founded and directed a large trading company in Xinjiang. She used her resources to provide fellow Uyghurs with training and employment. In 1999 she was arrested by the Chinese government on charges of “providing secret information to foreigners.” Before her arrest, Ms. Kadeer was running the program “1,000 Families Mother’s Project,” which helped Uyghur women start businesses. After spending five years in prison, Ms. Kadeer was released. She currently resides in Virginia, USA.
Nawal El Saadawi is a world famous Egyptian novelist. She is the author of more than 40 books, fiction and non-fiction, and notably writes in Arabic. Her works range in topic but many detail the situations affecting women in Egypt.
In 1969 Dr. El Saadawi published “Women and Sex,” which criticized Female Genital Cutting and linked sexual problems to political and economic oppression, and was banned by political and religious authorities. Shortly after, in 1972, she lost her job in the Egyptian Ministry of Health, and in 1981 she was sent to prison by then-Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat. Under constant scrutiny by the government and religious organizations, Dr. El Sadaawi continued to write about women in Egypt. As recently as 2001, three of her books were banned at the Cairo International Book Fair.
She had been awarded several national and international literary prizes, lectured in many universities, and participated in many international and national conferences. In May 2009 she presented at the Arthur Miller Lecture at the Pen International Literary Festival in New York. Throughout her career her works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have been taught throughout the world.
Born with the name Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, in 1936 in Cherchell, Algeria, Assia Djebar would become the country’s most distinguished female writer. Through her novels and film Ms. Djebar challenged colonial histories in order to redefine notions of Algerian culture, specifically through the female voice. Ms. Djebar was the first Algerian women to be accepted at the École Normale Supérieure, a prestigious French institute for higher education in Paris.
In 1957, she published her first novel La Soif under the pen name Assia Djebar. Between 1957 to 1967 she wrote four novels (La Soif, Les Impatients, Les Enfants du Nouveau Monde, Les Alouettes Naives), which all dealt with the political realities of colonial and post-colonial Algeria.
After studying classical Arabic in the 1970s, Djebar has attempted to write in both French and Arabic. When writing in French Ms. Djebar has added sounds and rhythms of the Arabic language and received applause for turning the language of the colonizer, French, into language of resistance. At the University of Algeria, Ms. Djebar taught history and since the 1990s she has been recognized for a number of awards, and she was recently nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Dr. Aminah McCloud is a professor of religious studies and director of the Islamic World Studies program at DePaul University in Chicago, USA.
Dr. McCloud converted to Islam in 1966 and her academic work illuminates the intersection between the African-American community, women, and Islam in the 20th and 21st centuries. A Fulbright Scholar, McCloud is the author of African American Islam, Questions of Faith, Silks: The Textures of American Muslim Women’s Lives, Transnational Muslims in American Society. She is currently working on Owning Islam: African American Islam in the 21st Century. Dr. McCloud is also a board member of Radio Islam, the Institute for Social and Policy Understanding, and the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project.
As one of the few female members of the Turkish Parliament, Nursuna Memecan serves as a representative of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party on the Parliamentary Assembly Council of Europe. In the PACE she is on the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe and a member of committees that demonstrate a commitment to gender equality. She has participated on the committee on equal opportunities for women and men, migration, refugees and population, the honouring of obligations and commitments by member states of the council of Europe (mentoring committee), and sub-committees on equal participation of women and men in decision-making, on population, and on violence against women.
Zainab Salbi is co-founder and CEO of Women for Women International, a grassroots international humanitarian and development organization that helps women in war-torn areas rebuild their lives, families, and communities. Since 1993 Women for Women has provided 250,000 women rights awareness training, vocation skills education and access to income generating opportunities so they can contribute politically and economically to their societies. The organization has also worked with community leaders to improve women’s rights and socioeconomic opportunities. The organization has disbursed over $79 million in direct aid, micro credit loans, and other services.
Ms. Salbi is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a member of the International Women’s Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations. Bill Clinton honored her work in Bosnia in 1995, and she was named Time Magazine’s “Innovator of the Month” and received Forbes’ Trailblazer Award. She also earned the 2010 David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership Award. Salbi has served on the Board of Directors for WITNESS, an international human rights organization, and as part of the United Nations Civil Society Advisory Group, which was formed with the goal of bringing more women into peace and security endeavors.
As co-author of the best-seller Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam, she recounts the experience of growing up in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s rule. In her second book, The Other Side of War: Women’s Stories of Survival and Hope, Ms. Salbi tells the stories of female war survivors.
