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Dr. Eng. Omar Abul Fadl, Dr. Abdin's only son, is in a class all of his own: In his quiet, modest, retired manner, his is a character and epic that deserves to be told. We shall not do that here... but suffice it to say that at the end of her life journey, it was he who shouldered the greatest burdens of her privileged company, sacrificing all and sundry to be there at the greatest hour of need. By the end of the journey too, an astounding mother-son bond that had been buried deep throughout her life, manifested itself in all its brilliance. Omar might be a great and self-effacing character, who had proved himself at the various posts he had occupied in his career through academia, to a stint with Kuwait Petroleum, landing a senior post in Abidjan in the African Development Bank, would leave all to come home to become his mother's devoted spirit and garner her blessings. However, the burden was truly great and he wore himself out to live up to his promise to carry the torch... for despite a sterling character and competences, he like his siblings, was just an ordinary human... no match to the legend that was his mum... Who could have matched a woman who ran so many realms in shadow empire - out of the limelights ? Who could have fought the battles she ended up waging in a world that had sunk to the dregs in terms of the pervasive corruption that had cranked the core of a society beset with conundrums of a souring, scorching process going on in the name of various 'open door' guises from modernization, to neo-colonialism, to development, to globalization?
As the steermanship of the veteran Association she had founded over forty five years earlier, devolved on his shoulders as a trust, in the founding mother's dying wish, he delivered his presentation at the commemoration service with a concise two-part power point show: one reviewing the foundations with an eye on stressing continuity and beckoning to the tasks ahead. See FOUNDATIONS above - and the other was a more intimate reflection on some of the prominent stations in her personal life and career...the Zahira Bio Show, a flash back on the travails and trials of the Founder and Architect of a project of community renewal and development in times of dire need to combat more than the unholy trinity of evils in any underdeveloped or historically distorted society: Disease, Ignorance, and Poverty...
This is the story that is covered in the show that follows.
A note to add here, is that Zahira's sibling, Fatma Abdin, the celebrated pathologist and gynecologist, long time career in the academy in Cairo University and later Chair in Azhar University, would pass away exactly nine days later, singling the end of the immediate progeny of the late Egyptian Senator, Hafez Bey Abdin. The two older sisters had left the world stage in sequence of age, with Zinat, the eldest, followed by Fardous (Dosa), but Fatma, the third of four surviving daughters, despite her being five years older than Zahira, waited on her youngest sister, as it were, to see her safely go... before she too could leave in peace, at the bid of her Creator's Call...
Dr. Fatma Abdin is survived by an only son, Walid al Shafei - an engineer and notable business man. Her life was marked by an indelible tragedy with the loss of a gifted daughter in her prime: a brilliant medical student, in her third year of medical school, back in the sixties... It was a terrible accident on the Cairo-Alexandria desert road, struck down by an army vehicle that was irresponsibly driven without any headlights in a dangerous pitch dark road ... the mother was in the seat next to the driver, her daughter, and though smashed and battered, survived the accident which instantly killed the driver! Shaiyem Shafei's memory is etched in the school of medicine in different ways, including an auditorium named after her, and a college mosque edified to her memory... apart from living in the hearts and minds of those who knew her. Her mother never recovered the loss, even though she buried herself in her private practice, her teaching, her specimens and... the greatest collection of which she bequeathed to the Azhar University, Dept. of Pathology, where she set up a museum for the donation to the benefit of all future students and the advancement of scientific research in her field ...
It was only natural that Zahira Abdin's family should embrace and honor her memory as they planned their own mother's memorial at Dar al Hikma that day... Within the next two years her son Walid would commemorate her memory in his own way, through establishing one of the grandest community mosques in her birth place area in the vicinity of the pyramids...
Omar's preview of his mother's life story, who was also the acclaimed umm al attibaa, would duly begin with reference to the loyal memory of his aunt, her sister, noting the c.v. that was then made available to him at the last moment by his cousin.
Each of the sisters represents a model in her own right... Each deserves to be remembered and honored, not simply as a story of success of practicing Muslim women in their professional careers as scientists, academics, public figures and community workers, but as personal characters that tell of the individuals and variations that go into the making of the women in the ummah today. (More than one speaker at the ceremony paid their respects in such terms, with the intellectual insights coming from the ALWANI TRIBUTE constituting a substantial contribution. )The fact that one sister may have outshone the other in unfathomable ways... speaks to the different predilections in our human natures and in the options we choose for ourselves... Comparisons are unfair, unless they are made with an eye to learning more about ourselves and our lots in life... and of how to use this legacy to educate and motivate more young women to follow and outdo those that have gone before... It is ironic that the less worldly model, she who took her bearings from a world beyond this world, ended up by leaving imprints on this world, lessons for the here and now, that would provide a rich fund for posterity to draw on.... While those who confine their endeavors in large measure to the here and now... may often leave the stage with waning reserves... Each individual life is great in its own right and light... But we cannot all be expected to measure to the few among us who might be larger than life:
What is it that makes for this difference? How much is destined and how much elected?... Perhaps a study of the saga of the Abdin daughters in the context of their society and culture and times may provide an interesting focus to launch the venture in an enterprise of tracking the biographies of as many of the families that have made our community / communities in the contemporary 'Muslim Orient' what they are today. The times call for this unraveling of these stories in a world bereft of much of its self-consciousness and identities are confounded... I can think of dozens of worthwhile family tales to share, just from my small circle of friends... and when asked why, I believe it is because our historical culture as an ummah, has taught us to value the family as a cornerstone of society and culture... and makes us realize that the individual's worth as self, is fundamentally nurtured and cultivated in that primal haven and core, from which the matrix of viable community springs forth... Even though this goes against the grain of a European modernity that is fixated on subjectivity and individualism... I feel that if society in the Muslim world is to maintain its integrity it must develop its sense of its strengths as well as its weaknesses, and stand its ground as it opens out to the modern world. Otherwise, if it blindly stumbles right and left, and persists in the reactive mode, it is unlikely that the millennium will bring it anything more than the irresolvable conundrums that are threatening to dissolve its very ligaments...
But this trek belongs to another page in our website here at 'muslim women studies'... and so we will return to the Zahira Bio Show... that set us social scientists, historians and students of culture and civilization on these broader sundry reflections...