She was sentenced to 25 years of prison in
1965 for conspiring to overthrow Egypt’s govern-
ment but served only six. Al-Ghazali’s memoirs
about her prison years were published in 1977
(published in English as Return of the Pharaoh:
Memoirs in Nasir’s Prison). In this autobiographi-
cal account, she described how her faith helped
her withstand the horrible tortures she suffered at
the hands of government agents, and she denied
charges that the brotherhood had ever conspired
to overthrow the government violently. anWar
al-sadat (r. 1970–81) freed al-Ghazali and other
members of the brotherhood after he became
president as part of a strategy to win support of
Muslim activists. He needed them to consolidate
power and undermine the influence of the late
Abd al-Nasir’s supporters, many of whom were
Arab socialists. After her release, al-Ghazali con-
tinued an active career of teaching and writing for
Islamic periodicals. Her articles on women and
family life urged women to educate themselves
about what she held to be Islam’s true values,
arguing that the religion offers both women and
men all their rights and that they do not have to
turn to the West to obtain them. She hoped that
by cultivating Islamic values at home, women
could contribute to the moral and political trans-
formation of the wider society. In her later years,
al-Ghazali avoided overt political activity but
worked on a Quran commentary. Al-Ghazali
was married twice, divorcing her first husband
because he had interfered with her Jihad and mar-
rying the second only after he had agreed not to
interfere with her daawa activities. She never had
children.
See also islamism; shaaraWi, hUda.
Further reading: Zainab al-Ghazali, Return of the Pha-
raoh: Memoirs in Nasir’s Prison. Translated by Mokran
Guezzou (Broughton Gifford, U.K.: Cromwell Press,
1994); Valerie J. Hoffman, “An Islamist Activist: Zaynab
al-Ghazali.” In Women and the Family in the Middle East,
edited by Elisabeth Warnock Fernea, 233–254 (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1985); Saba Mahmood, Poli-
tics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).Ghulam Ahmad (ca. 1830–1908) the self-
proclaimed Mahdi and founder of the Ahmadiyya
movement of Islam in colonial India
Ghulam Ahmad, also called Mirza Ghulam Ahmad
Qadiani, founded an Islamic missionary revival
movement in British india known as the ahmadi-
y ya in 1889. He came from a prosperous family of
Sunni Muslim landowners in the small town of
Qadian in the Punjab region of northern India. He
received a good edUcation but resisted his father’s
wishes that he become a lawyer or work for the
British colonial government. Instead, Ghulam
Ahmad pursued a religious life—for a period of
about 20 years he claimed to receive revelations
from God, and through his writings and mission-
ary efforts he attracted a following that grew to
about 20,000 members by the time of his death
in 1908.
At the end of the 19th century, several Muslim
empires were coming to an end. Muslim lands
were increasingly falling under the direct or indi-
rect control of European colonial powers, and
Christian missionaries from Europe were seeking
converts among Muslims. Ghulam Ahmad was
among those Muslims who felt that their religion
needed to be revived and reformed in order to sur-
vive. He saw himself as “the light of this dark age,”
a “rightly guided one” (mahdi), and the peace-
ful renewer of the religion, who was expected to
appear at the beginning of the 14th century on the
Islamic calendar (1300 A.H. coincided with 1882
on the Western calendar). His followers, especially
the Qadiani branch of the Ahmadiyya move-
ment, also think that Ghulam Ahmad claimed
to be a prophet, which has offended other Mus-
lims because a central Islamic belief is that there
can be no prophets after mUhammad (d. 632).
In response to this criticism, the Qadianis have
argued that there are two kinds of prophet: those
who bring God’s law and those who make it work.Ghulam Ahmad 263 J