Genealogy of the emergence of the question of clothing reform in Egypt’s women movement

Following the publication of the liberation of woman in 1899, the issue of womenchr('39')s rights, especially the issue of clothing reform, became the focus of the Egyptian social reform movement. Dozens of books have been published rejecting or endorsing Aminchr('39')s book. This literary controversy the aforementioned year regarded as the beginning of the process of clothing reform. Of course, there is no doubt that Amin drew the attention of many thinkers to the issue of hijab by writing this book, but long before the publication of the book, a discourse was forming that eventually led to the publication of this book and the rise of intellectual debates about the hijab in the twentieth century. The process of shaping this discourse is the subject of this research. This paper aims to use the genealogical method of Michel Foucault to study the factors and contexts that helped shape the trend of clothing reform. The results of this study show that as a result of the political and social developments of the nineteenth century, a discourse emerged in Egypt that gradually turned the issue of clothing reform into a serious issue in Egypt.