Amina al-Sadr

Who was Amina al-Sadr?

Amina Haydar al-Sadr, known as Bint al-Huda, was an Iraqi educator and political activist who was executed by Saddam Hussein along with her brother, Ayatullah Sayyid Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, in 1980.

Aminah Haidar as-Sadr was born in 1938 in Kazimiyah, Baghdad where she would eventually establish several religious schools for girls. Bint al-Huda played a significant role in creating Islamic awareness among the Muslim women of Iraq. She was in her twenties when she began writing articles in al-Adwaa, the Islamic magazine printed by the religious intellectuals of Najaf, Iraq in 1959. She was also well known for her participation in the Safar Uprising in 1977.

Bint al-Huda grew up with a serious love of learning. She soon became aware of what she perceived to be the Muslim women’s sufferings and the great disasters which were damaging Islamic ideology in her country.

In 1980, the religious leader Ayatollah Sayyid Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr and his sister, Bint-al-Huda, were arrested and later executed by the Iraqi regime. The regime never returned her body, but her burial site is said to be in Wadi AlSalam, Najaf.