Hatoon al-Fassi

Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi (هتون أجواد الفاسي) is a Saudi Arabian historian, author and women's rights activist. She is 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. Based on her research into the pre-Islamic Arabian kingdom of Nabataea, al-Fassi claims that women in the ancient 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 was active in a similar campaign for the 2015 municipal elections. She was arrested in late June 2018 as part of a crackdown on women's rights activists and was released almost a year later, in early May 2019. In November 2018, while still in jail, she was awarded the MESA Academic Freedom Award for 2018.