The First Arab Feminist: long before the two books by Ahmad Amin which are regarded as the first expressions of Arab feminism, and long before Huda Sha`rawi and Nadhirah Zayn Ad-Din--the latter is far more interesting and significant than the former but less studied in Western and Arab writing, there were expressions of liberal feminist thought in the Arab world. One can refer to Butrus Al-Bustani's speech in 1848 on Ta`alim An-Nisa' (Education of Women). But even before that, there is a much ignored voice, that of As`ad Al-Khayyat. In his book published in 1847 in London, titled A Voice from Lebanon: with The Life and Travels of Assaad Y. Kayat, Kayat [sic] expresses very liberal (European liberal that is) and enlightened views about the education of women. The book is a very interesting memoir by an Arab who traveled in Europe in the middle of the 19th century. The book is very hard to find (I first found it in Widener Library at Harvard University), but is available in a lousy (and dishonest) and very abridged translation by Mikha'il Sawaya published in Lebanon in the early 1950s. Sawaya deleted from the book all negative references to Muslims (although Kayat was not as unfavorable to Muslims as other Christian writers at the time), and accounts of his work for Christian European missionaries, among other matters.
PS: lest Lebanese nationalists treat him as a Lebanese nationalist, and lest LBC-TV features him as a "famous Lebanese" in their silly segments, Khayyat frequently refers to himself as "Syrian." He also did not mention tabbulah once in his 400 page biography.