Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah

Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah
Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah, circa 1970.
Born	(1921-12-25)25 December 1921 Calcutta, British India (now Kolkata, India)
Died	10 September 2000(2000-09-10) (aged 78) Karachi, Pakistan
Occupation	Writer, journalist, publisher
Spouse(s)	K. M. Hamidullah

Zaib-un-Nissa (Bengali: জেবুন্নেসা হামিদুল্লাহ) (transliterated Zeb-un-Nissa, Zaibunnissa, Zaibun Nisa, Zaibunisa, Zaib-un-Nisa, Zebunnissa, Zeb-un-Nisa) Hamidullah (Urdu: زیب النساء حمیداللہ‎; 25 December 1921 – 10 September 2000) was a Pakistani writer and journalist. She was a pioneer of Pakistani literature and journalism in English, and also a pioneer of feminism in Pakistan. She was Pakistan's first female columnist (in English), editor, publisher and political commentator. Zaibunnisa Street in Karachi was named for her.

Before independence in 1947, she wrote for many Indian newspapers, and was the first Muslim woman to write a column in an Indian newspaper. After independence, her column in the newspaper Dawn made her the first female political commentator in Pakistan. After she left Dawn, she became the founder and editor-publisher of the Mirror, the first social glossy magazine in South Asia. Due to her status as Pakistan's first female editor, she became the first woman to be included in press delegations sent to other countries. On one of these delegations, in 1955, she became the first woman to speak at the ancient al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt.

Zeb-un-Nissa Ali was born in 1921 to a literary family in Calcutta. Her father, S. Wajid Ali, was the first person to translate the writings of the well-known Urdu poet Muhammad Iqbal into Bengali, and was an avid Bengali and Indian nationalist and writer. She had two brothers, and one half-brother from her mother's second marriage. She grew up in a tightly-knit Anglo-Indian household filled with Bengali thinkers and philosophers of the age, as her father's house at 48, Jhowtalla Road, was something of a meeting place for the Calcutta literary circle. She started to write at an early age, and received considerable support from both her English mother and Bengali father. A lonely child, Zeb-un-Nissa took to writing poetry as a means to express her thoughts and emotions. Her later writing was affected by her trips to rural areas of Bengal and the Punjab, including her father's birthplace, the Bengali village of Tajpur. She was educated at the Loreto House Convent.