Nazira Zain al-Din

Nazira Zain al-Din was the daughter of Shaykh Saeed Zainal Din, a judge in Lebanon's High Court of Appeals and an intellectual scholar of Islam. While she spent most of her life in Ayn Qani, Lebanon, she was born in Istanbul where her father held a post at the time. Due to his background in the intellectual world, her father supported her educational endeavors and sent her to a French Catholic school in Lebanon. Nazira and her sister Munira were the first Druze girls to gain admission into St Joseph de l'Apparition and the Sisters of Nazareth Convent school, the French Catholic schools they attended for their primary education. In addition to this French Catholic education, al-Din's father made sure she was also well educated in Islam. She was well versed in the Quran, Hadith, and Sharia (Islamic law), all of which played an incredibly important role in her writing. She was also able to study and converse with various Islamic scholars (Ulama) during her lifetime. Many of these scholars were good friends of her father and spent a great deal of time in their home. By the time she was a young woman Nadira Zain al-Din was considered an extremely cultured individual, especially on Islam. After graduation from the Sisters of Nazareth Convent school, al-Din wished to pursue a medical education at St. Joseph's, an all-male jesuit school in Beirut. Unfortunately she was denied entrance because she was a woman. She decided to attend Lycée Français Laique, a coed French institution where she graduated at the top of her class, even above all of the French male pupils. After her graduation from Lycée Français Laique, she decided not to pursue any other higher education and from there al-Din was able to begin her writing career.

She wrote her second book, The Young Woman and the Shaikhs later that year. This book is seen as a collection of direct responses to the criticism that she received from the Arab community regarding Unveiling and Veiling. The Young Woman and the Shaikhs attempts to rebuke arguments made by critics regarding the validity and credibility of Unveiling and Veiling. In it, Al-Din claims that she wrote her first book with "no companion or assistance except pens and ink pots, books and papers". This was in response to the arguments that Unveiling and Veiling was plagiarized and supported by Christian missionary efforts. She also describes herself as a “sincere Muslim of truth” that wrote only on what "God Almighty" has willed, despite being Druze, an ethnoreligious group whose practices are not considered to be Islamic by most Muslims.

• Unveiling and Veiling: Lectures and Views on the Liberation of the Women and Social renewal in the Arab World (Al-Sufur wal hijab) 1928 • The Young Woman and the Shaikhs (Al-Fatah wa al-Shuyukh) 1928

She was eventually overcome by the opposition of most Muslims and her fellow Druze to her Western-influenced criticisms of Arab culture. A member of the upper class, she stopped writing after about five years and settled down with her husband and three sons at their mansion in Baaqline, Lebanon. She died in 1976 at the age of 68. Very little is known about al-Din's life in the decades after her writing and diatribes against Arab culture.