Hatoon al-Fassi

Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi هتون أجواد الفاسي
Born	1964 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Nationality	Saudi Arabian
Occupation	Assistant professor

Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi (هتون أجواد الفاسي) is a women's rights activist and an associate professor of women's history at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, where she has been employed since 1989 and at the International Affairs Department at Qatar University. At the university, al-Fassi carries out historical research. Al-Fassi claims from her research into the pre-Islamic Arabian kingdom of Nabataea that women in the kingdom had more independence than women in modern Saudi Arabia. Al-Fassi was active in women's right to vote campaigns for the 2005 and 2011 municipal elections and is active in a similar campaign for the 2015 municipal elections.

Hatoon al-Fassi is a member of the traditional Sufi Al-Fassi family from Makkah, that descends from the Sharifi house of Muhammad that belongs to the Hassani Idrissi branch of this line. Through her father Sheikh Ajwad al-Fassi and his father Sheikh Abdullah al-Fassi, she is a great-great-granddaughter of Qutbul Ujood Hazrat Muhammad al-Fassi (Imam Fassi), the founder and spiritual head of the Fassiyah branch of the Shadhiliyya Sufi order, the twenty-first Khalifa (representative) of Imam Shadhili. She is thus a direct descendant of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Her mother is Sheikha Samira Hamed Dakheel, who belongs to the branch of the Hijazi tribe of Harb that resided in Jeddah. She has a brother, Sheikh Muhammad Ajwad al-Fassi, a lawyer and a sister, Hawazan Ajwad al-Fassi, a poet.

Al-Fassi was raised in a family that encouraged her to think independently of school and media ideas about women's rights. She obtained undergraduate degrees in history in 1986 and 1992 from King Saud University (KSU) and a PhD in ancient women's history from the University of Manchester in 2000.

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