When he wrote his book ‘Taḥrīr al-Mar'ah’ (1989), (The Liberation of Women), the Egyptian aristocratic judge and national activist, Qāsim Amīn did not know that 120 years later, his book would be a double-edged sword. Already at the time, he realized that instead of reforming the nation by opening a certain level of education to women, this led to archaic values and decadent traditions of an extended patriarchal homestead.