Born in Alexandria in 1863, Qasim Amin was a significant figure in the intellectual and political circles of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. He is most famous for his treatment of the “woman question,” the debate over the place of women in society that took place among nationalists and Islamic religious modernizers during this period. Amin’s writings on women have earned him the title in some quarters of the “first feminist” in the Arab World, but critics have seen him instead as a promoter of colonial values and of a narrow, elite perspective stemming from his aristocratic origins and Westernized education and career.