Shaykha Munira al-Qubaysi (1933-2022)

“The Muslim world has lost a giant today. This morning Shaykha Munira Qubaysi passed away in Damascus at the age of 89 on December 26, 2022. She started a women’s movement in the 1960s whose impact would reverberate around the world for decades to come. She taught girls and women to love Allah in the most profoundly spiritual way that went beyond legalisms, rigidity, and harshness.

She was one of the first women to wear hijab while also pursuing a higher education in the 1950s at a time when going to college meant that women had to sacrifice their outward religious practice. She earned a Bachelor of Science in biology when religious families commonly did not let their daughters study past the sixth grade and had them married early. She drove her own car at a time when few men drove, let alone women in hijab. She even became famous for a while in the 1970s for being the only covered woman in Damascus who drove.

She modeled to an entire generation of women that they could be pious and devout while also caring for families, attaining the highest level of education in universities, and having a career. Her closest students were erudite Islamic scholars who published exceptional works in sira, each of the four schools of fiqh, hadith, two large volumes of khutbas for all occasions, theology, and various other subjects. Her closest students were not only learned women in the Qur’an who spent their nights in pious devotion, but they were also physicians, professors, schoolteachers, principals, lawyers, pharmacists, and engineers in the daytime.

She followed the model of Khadija and believed that it was important for women to have their own source income so that women preachers, teachers, and guides could do their work without depending on their religious communities for financial support. She established a network of schools that served as a safety net for thousands of unmarried women who needed to support themselves and married women who wished to contribute to society beyond the walls of their home. Her network of schools ranged from pre-school through high school and extended well beyond the borders of her homeland. Shaykha Munira’s schools transformed several generations of boys and girls. Boys who grew up seeing kind, intelligent, accomplished, pious, and devout women who taught them to love their faith in school, grew into men who would respect their wives, mothers, and sisters. Girls who grew up seeing strong, intelligent, kind, and pious women in school, gained confidence in their faith and saw a model for what Muslim women could achieve.

Her success in building schools and hospitals (one of her students established a women’s hospital for women run by women) is also important to understand within the context of the modern history of Syria in which quality modern education and healthcare was mostly run by foreign missionaries living in Syria since at least the nineteenth century. Shaykha Munira’s response to the negative impact of these schools on the identity of Syrian Muslims by establishing competing institutions that were indigenous to the region while maintaining the same and often superior standards of service, significantly shifted Syrian urban culture which had become heavily colonized by French cultural ideals by the 1960s.

Regularly studying, reciting, and learning the Qur’an are foundational spiritual practices that form the bedrock for Shaykha Munira’s movement. While at the same time, joy, fun, and love are essential components of her educational curriculum of imparting faith to children. Shaykha Munira’s students taught children with so much joyful creativity, that learning the Qur’an became associated with singing, sweets, friendship, parties, and field trips in the collective memories of kids. Spending the summers with friends learning the Qur’an and stories about their faith became highlights of each year for the generations of youth who were transformed in the process.

As her work continued for decades, her fame became known around the world and women came from the corners of the earth to spend time in Damascus and learn from the students she mentored into scholars and spiritual mentors in their own right. Women from the United States, United Kingdom, all of the Arab world, almost all countries in Europe, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Turkey and even from places as far as the Comoros Islands came in droves to learn from the women scholars of Damascus, many of whom whose presence alone was transformative to the soul.

Her humility and vigilance to remain unknown may cause many to overlook the extent of her global influence during the seventy years of her work. However, it would not be an exaggeration to state that Shaykha Munira al-Qubaysi was one of the most formative Muslims who shaped the Islam of the twentieth century. Some outsiders to her movement with limited knowledge labeled her students by her name. But this label was always firmly rejected by her saying that her students were nothing more than Muslim women whose scholarship, devotion, and achievements were a manifestation of Islam’s 1400-year tradition of beauty, piety, and learning. Her life’s work was dedicated to uplifting Muslims and Islam. It was never centered on any movement or personality. She taught her students to not waste time debating detractors and to never speak ill of others working for Allah. There is so much more that can be said, but I will end here for now.

Inna lillah wa inna ilayhi raji’un. Our hearts grieve, our eyes shed tears. But we only say what is pleasing to Allah.”

Author: Unknown