Charis Waddy was an Australian-born British author, lecturer and Islamic scholar.
20 Facts About Charis Waddy
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Charis Waddy worked full-time with the Oxford Group from 1935 after which it became Moral Re-Armament.
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Charis Waddy wrote The Muslim Mind in 1976 and authored Women in Muslim History four years later.
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Charis Waddy received the Pakistani Sitara-i-Imtiaz in 1990 and was highly regarded worldwide by Muslims.
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On 24 September 1909, Charis Waddy was born in Parramatta, New South Wales, Australia.
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Charis Waddy was the daughter of the clergyman Percival Stacy, who was headmaster of The King's School, Parramatta, and the journalist Etheldred Stacy.
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Charis Waddy matriculated to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, graduating in 1931 with a Bachelor of Arts first degree in Oriental Languages.
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Charis Waddy thus became the first woman to graduate from an Oxford college with an Oriental Languages degree.
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Charis Waddy then earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree studying the 13th-century historian Ibn Wasil at the SOAS University of London in 1934 and was the first woman to obtain this feat.
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Charis Waddy joined the Oxford Group as a full-time worker in 1935, before it became Moral Re-Armament, which supported construction faith communities worldwide.
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Charis Waddy spent three years in West Africa in the mid-1950s with the writers of the 1957 feature film Freedom.
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Charis Waddy went back to the Middle East in the 1960s and wrote her first book, Baalbek Caravans, in 1967 about her experiences of a long-term stay in Lebanon.
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Charis Waddy published, The Muslim Mind, after her heavy travelling of the Middle East in 1976 and would be published in three editions.
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Charis Waddy's objective was to explore the approach of Muslims to contemporary and practical issues such as family life, forgiveness, the meaning of Jihad, the Quran, war and women's rights and featured quotes from several friends of hers and high-figure officials in the Middle East.
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Charis Waddy lectured as a visiting professor on Mediterranean History at Cairo University in 1977.
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Charis Waddy chronicled the lives of Muslim women across history whose achievements are not known to an average Western citizen and used English secondary sources.
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Three weeks following Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984, Charis Waddy was invited to lecture at the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan ashram in Calcutta and went on to give a talk at the Islamic medical institute Hamdard Pakistan.
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Charis Waddy helped with the re-development of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.
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Charis Waddy was a member of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, the Committee for British-Arab University Visits and the Council for Arab-British Understanding.
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Charis Waddy contributed to several Middle East studies journals and the Times Educational Supplement.