Was Antun Sa’adeh concerned with the women's question? Did he fight against the discrimination of women? Did he promote their emancipation? And to what extent has his ideology contributed to social and cultural transformations in women's lives? To answer these questions, we must examine what occupied Sa’adeh throughout his career. Certainly, if the women's question did concern him, it was not his primary focus. His main preoccupation was the revival of the entire Syrian nation. Therefore, to understand his stance on women, we must consider his national project as a whole and his objectives for his nation. In light of this broader understanding, we can better assess his position on women's issues.

Born in 1904, Antun Sa’adeh grew up in a highly cultured family in a village with an active intellectual life and a relatively well-educated population. Influenced by his immediate social milieu and the political circumstances of the time, particularly the devastation of World War I, Sa’adeh sought internal solutions to the social, cultural, and political ills he perceived in his society. He believed the main issue in his fragmented country was the loss and confusion of national identity, coupled with the absence of political unity, aspirations for political strength, and the pursuit of a better life.

Sa’adeh aimed to achieve national integration and guide his society toward a just, good, and beautiful life. He stated, “We are not like those who direct their attention to the beyond existence. Rather, we are like those who aspire by their nature to achieve a beautiful and sublime existence in this life and to ensure the continuity of this life as beautiful and sublime.” [1]  He sought to accomplish this by elevating his people to higher levels of morality and instilling values such as liberty, justice, righteousness, goodness, duty, responsibility, and equality. Sa’adeh aspired to create a new society free from exploitation and oppression. However, this vision was challenging to achieve in a society deeply divided by social cleavages, problems, and psychological barriers. The Syrians were socially disintegrated, split into quarreling groups and factions with allegiances to a multiplicity of racial, sectarian, and tribal identities. Their social life was based either on religious sectarianism or tribal organization, characterized by stagnation, institutional deficiency, and national debilitation. Sa’adeh stated:

National debilitation was general to the extent that it came close to irreducibly destroying the nation’s personality. All that was left to the nation were a few institutions such as religious authority, places of worship, feudal order, the extended clan system, or the blood-tie of families.[2]

The situation seemed irremediable when considering the existing maladies, such as sectarianism, tribalism, feudalism, communal disharmony and distrust, corruption, exploitation, discrimination, fear, and submission, to name a few. Sa’adeh’s solution was straightforward: to replace the existing order with a new secular system led by a national party free from discrimination. Adel Beshara illustrates this solution:

The plan was simple enough: to take on the might of the existing order through a ‘Party’ of devoted, dedicated, selfless, even Puritan men and women, united in a common cause. It was no easy task by any stretch of the imagination, but the power of Sa´adeh's thought, his single-mindedness of purpose, and the trenchancy of his analyses carried the day through. The idea grew into a vision, the vision into a party, and the party into a living organ. Not a lifeless dogma, but a vision for action. After that, there was no turning back. Everything else was now trifles, hypocrisy, and “parson’s talk”. The victory was the only commandment to observe.[3]