Sadhij Nassar

Sadhij Nassar was born in Haifa in 1900. Her father, Shaykh Badi’ullah Baha’i, was of Iranian origin and came from Acre. She was educated at the Sisters of Nazareth School in Haifa, and she was proficient in four languages. In 1923 she began writing for al-Karmil, the Haifa newspaper founded in 1908 by Najib Nassar, whom she married and whose paper she went on to help edit and run. She and Najib had a son, Faruq.

In 1926 she opened a section of the paper called “The Women’s Section.” It carried pieces by men and women both, and its politics were unmistakable: she told Palestinian mothers to raise daughters and sons on the same terms, argued for educating women and finding them work, attacked the social conventions she thought were holding the country back, and pressed Palestinian women to enter political life and take part in resisting British rule and Zionist colonisation. By 1932 she was running two columns, one on women’s questions and one on social affairs.

The organising ran alongside the writing. In 1930, with Mariam al-Khalil, she co-founded the Arab Women’s Union in Haifa, which became a significant force in the general strike of 1936, and she marched in the women’s demonstrations that accompanied it. She was among the first Palestinians to see that the national movement had to reach rural women, and she spent a period living in the Baysan district trying to organise the women farmers there — an effort her own biographers record as unsuccessful. In October 1938 she went to Cairo as part of the Palestinian women’s delegation to the Eastern Women’s Congress for Palestine, convened at Huda Sha’rawi’s invitation, and was elected secretary of the conference bureau. In 1944 she addressed the General Congress of Arab Women at the Cairo Opera House, urging the Arabs to act to save Palestine before it was too late.

She was the first Palestinian woman the British Mandate arrested for nationalist activity. They took her in late 1938 and charged her with supplying arms to the rebels, describing her in their own papers as a “very dangerous woman” and a “prominent agitator.” She was held at the Bethlehem detention camp for eleven months while a campaign for her release grew from local to international. Her husband wrote to her in prison to say that if he did not enter history because of al-Karmil, he would certainly enter it because of her.

She went back to the paper. The Mandate closed it repeatedly and then, in 1944, invoked the emergency regulations and sealed its premises for good. After the Nakba she took refuge in Lebanon and wrote for al-Yawm about what had happened to Palestine, then moved to Syria and published in al-Qabas. She died in Damascus in 1970 and is buried there.

Sources

• Sadhij Nassar — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest), Institute for Palestine Studies
• Sadhij Nassar (1900–1970) — Institute for Palestine Studies
• Sadhij Nassar — Wikipedia