My great great grandmother, Umm Al-Khair bint Khidr أم الخير بنت خضر, photographed in Cairo, Egypt on May 14, 1922 (photographer unknown). She was known as Sitt ست Umm Al-Khair, which literally means “lady” in Arabic.

Like her daughter, she too adopted the style of urban Egyptian ladies when she settled in Cairo. Her black scarf (tarha طرحة) is worn in the more traditional way tucked behind the ears with the rest of the scarf serving as a cape (younger women tied their scarves in the back keeping up with 1920s fashion). Her yashmak يشمك (white face veil) can be seen hanging down one side of her face and tucked under the scarf exposing her face for the photo. She is wearing a collared white blouse buttoned up to the top, an outer skirt of black satin fastened on one side using a neat row of black buttons, and black heels.

Her father was a Yemeni trader from the Mnibari منيبارى family of the Red Sea port city Al-Hudaydah. Her mother was half Somali and half Indian. According to her great niece, she lived in Aden near the historic Al-Aydarus mosque. Her family then moved to Zanzibar where she met and married my great great grandfather who was her father’s friend and possibly business partner. She lived there until she moved to Egypt with my great grandmother Sekina in 1915, a year after Umm Al-Khair’s husband passed away.

She was a poet and valued education. She had previously traveled to Egypt earlier in the 1910s accompanying her older daughter Fatma and her younger son Zein El-Abedeen to enroll them in schools in Cairo (French and English respectively). It is said that she used to host women’s literary salons in her home in Cairo but we unfortunately don’t have any of her poetry saved. The only thing we have left of her belongings is a very interesting book of prayers that had been passed on to her by her Yemeni family.