and occasional hostess of salon evenings, Huda Sha`arawi, used to grant scholarships to writers enabling them to study in Europe at her own expense. Ideas of educational reform and feminism were also occurring elsewhere in the Arab world, with the Syrian writer and scholar, Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883) in Lebanon among the first to advocate women’s right to education in 1847. Two decades later in Tunisia, the reformist, Ahmed Kheireddine, stressed the importance of women's education in the running of households and raising children. This was a small, but crucial step in the emancipation of women in society. Later in Egypt, after the British had occupied Egypt of Egypt they also contributed to the reform of women's education. In his work entitled, Modern Egypt, Lord Cromer, who had served for almost thirty years as High Commissioner of Egypt, "...by confining the sphere of women's interest to a very limited horizon, cramps the intellect and withers the mental development of one-half of the population in Moslem countries.". The European powers at that time aimed to establish an Arab elite class that supports their colonization policies in the Arab World. Therefore, education was made more accessible for those who were ready to detach from their cultural roots and embrace that of the colonial powers. This strategy was common in almost all the places that colonialism existed. Arab people still hold the perception that their leaders, whose families gained power from that time, are puppets to the western powers and that feeling may have stemmed from that period of time. Therefore, many Arabs believe that colonialism had a very bad effect on the political, cultural, social, and economic life of the vast majority of the Arab people. By 1924, when the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the American University of Beirut began accepting applications from women, the norm that "Knowledge rather than ignorance preserves women's dignity and morality" had been firmly established. In the face of confinement and exclusion from the formal education system, middle-class women overcame their exclusion and marginalisation from society, holding informal literary or study circles in their family homes. Moreover, women such as Mayy Ziyadah and Mary 'Ajami went on to pursue higher education in Europe, returning to set up well-known salons and contributing immeasurably to literary circles, print and production in the Arab world. Women and the public sphere At the turn of the nineteenth century, the idea