A Speech by Nour Hamada: Tehran, 1932

Nour Hamada was born in Baakline, in the Shouf district of Mount Lebanon, her family's ancestral home. Various sources date the year of her birth from 1887 to 1898 (although always January 3). The Hamada family/clan has provided Druze religious leaders for centuries, and family materials identify Nour as the daughter of "Sheikh Muhammad bin Qasim bin Husayn... the first Sheikh of a united Druze community" (Hamada Family). She was educated by her father and then in Beirut. Newspaper articles indicate that she studied at the American University (Massé 1933, 46),¹ but family materials point to St. Joseph's University. She was fluent in English, Turkish, and French and a poet in Arabic. Her older brother was Sheikh Husayn al-Hamada, who followed his father as community religious leader. She was particularly close to her younger brother with whom she shared an interest in the promotion of Arabic language and literature.

Little is known of her marriage, which was childless and seems to have been brief. Said Bey al-Naaman Hamada was a kinsman and a Syrian-French military officer. One document indicates that he encouraged her to de-veil.² By 1932, she was widowed and receiving his military pension (USINS 1935b).

Hamada applied for a Lebanese passport right before the Tehran session of the 1932 Second Eastern Women's Congress, and a year later she secured a visa to come to the U.S. (USINS 1935b). In addition to the American contacts of her brother, who had visited the U.S. starting in 1929, she had her own contacts through the women's movement. She may have made these contacts through the feminist community in Geneva, with whom she was in communication by 1930 (USINS 1930).

In November 1933, she arrived in the U.S. to attend the Ninth Annual Conference of the Committee on the Cause and Cure of War in Washington, DC. Subsequently, she associated herself with the National Woman's Party.³ At a feminist meeting in New York City, Hamada explained that she had come

to meet the women of the United States, to visit their organizations and to study their methods, so that I can take back to the women of the Orient a knowledge of how we can all work together for these things which we women are all seeking…. I find that we are truly sisters in our aims and purposes.⁴

Her purpose in the U.S. was to write a history of the women's movement "in my native tongue Arabic to be translated into English."⁵

Over the next two years, Hamada lived with relatives in the Syrian immigrant community in the Detroit area, with occasional visits to her brother in New York City, where he was associated with the Arabic-language newspaper al-Bayan. In Detroit she studied English during the day and taught Arabic to the local Syrian community in the evening (USINS 1935a). Due to her ignorance of the conditions of her admission to the country, as well as hospitalization for an illness, Hamada overstayed her three-month visa (USINS 1936a). By fall of 1935, she was being actively pursued by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (USINS). Over a two-year-long battle, she sought to stay in the U.S., and the U.S. government sought to deport her. She appealed to colleagues in U.S. feminist organizations, who were able to use their government connections to get several temporary delays on her deportation. Describing Hamada as a distinguished leader of the "women of the Orient," an officer of the National Woman's Party wrote on her behalf, "it seems to us that women of other parts of the world who are eager to learn of us, should be given the opportunity to do so..." (USINS 1936f). A group of Syrian American women from Michigan and Massachusetts sent a petition to the USINS on her behalf, testifying that she had been their Arabic teacher and "peace and goodness to all has been her teachings to us" (USINS 1936e...