ICAIR Seminar - Shahida Bint al-Huda and Her Novels

Join ICAIR for an insightful seminar on the impact of Shahida Bint al-Huda’s novels on Iraqi society, presented by Dr. Hawraa Al-Hassan. The seminar will shed light on Shahida Bint al-Huda's foresight in leveraging the growing popularity of novels in the 1960s and 70s to promote Islamic values during a period of rising secularism in Iraq.

Shahida Bint al-Huda, born Amina Haydar al-Sadr in 1938 in Kadhimiya, Baghdad, was a prominent Iraqi educator, political activist, and writer. Guided and influenced by her brother, Ayatollah Sayyid Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, she played a vital role in promoting Islamic awareness among Iraqi women, establishing and leading several religious schools for girls. Bint al-Huda was deeply concerned with the challenges faced by Muslim women and the threats to Islamic ideology in Iraq. In her twenties, she began writing influential articles for the Islamic magazine al-Adwaa. Later, she turned to novel writing to reach a wider audience, using fiction to provide role models for women and critique the regime’s policies. In 1980, she and her brother were arrested and executed by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Dr. Al-Hassan will focus on three key aspects of Shahida Bint al-Huda’s novels: how they provided much-needed role models for young devout women at a time when secularism dominated Iraqi culture and public discourse; how Bint al-Huda used novels as a non-threatening medium to challenge the ruling Ba’th party’s policies towards women, engaging in a battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqi Shi’a women; and how Bint al-Huda’s works contributed to creating a sense of belonging among the religious and devout, which was crucial given that all sectors of Iraqi society had undergone unrelenting secularisation processes which threatened traditional ways of life.

This is an in-person event.

Dr. Hawraa Al-Hassan is an affiliated researcher with the University of Cambridge specializing in the modern Arab novel as a form of cultural history that intersects with the discourses of religion and nationalism. She is the author of Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba’thist State (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and recently contributed a piece on popular religious novels to an edited volume entitled Narratives of Dislocation in the Arab World: Rewriting Ghurba (Routledge, 2023).

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

WF House, Moorhall Road, Harefield, United Kingdom