A fighting chance
An Arab Spring for women: The missing story from the Middle East
BY SHAHIN COLE & JUAN COLE
The “Arab Spring” has received copious attention in
the American media but one of its crucial elements has been largely
overlooked: the striking role of women in the protests sweeping the
Arab world. Despite inadequate media coverage of their role, women
have been and often remain at the forefront of those protests.
As a start, women had a significant place in the
Tunisian demonstrations that kicked off the Arab Spring, often
marching up Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis, the capital, with their
husbands and children in tow. Then, the spark for the Egyptian
uprising that forced President Hosni Mubarak out of office was a
January 25 demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square called by an
impassioned young woman via a video posted on Facebook. In Yemen,
columns of veiled women have come out in Sanaa and Taiz to force that
country’s autocrat from office while in Syria, facing armed secret
police, women have blockaded roads to demonstrate for the release of
their husbands and sons from prison.
But with such bold gestures go fears. As women look to
the future, they worry that on the road to new, democratic
parliamentary regimes, their rights will be discarded in favour of
male constituencies, whether patriarchal liberals or Muslim
fundamentalists. The collective memory of how women were in the
forefront of the Algerian revolution for independence from France from
1954 to 1962, only to be relegated to the margins of politics
thereafter, still weighs heavily.
Historians will undoubtedly debate the causes of the
Arab Spring for decades. Among them certainly are high rates of
unemployment for the educated classes, neo-liberal policies of
privatisation and union-busting, corruption in high places, soaring
food and energy prices, economic hardship caused by the shrinking of
employment opportunities in the Gulf oil states and Europe (thanks to
the 2008 global financial meltdown) and decades of frustration with
petty, authoritarian styles of governing. In their roles as workers
and professionals as well as family caregivers, women have suffered
directly from all these discontents and more, while watching their
children and husbands suffer too.
In late January, freelance journalist Megan Kearns
pointed out the relative inattention American television and most
print and Internet media gave to women and, by and large, the absence
of images of women protesting in Tunisia and Egypt. Yet women couldn’t
have been more visible in the big demonstrations of early to
mid-January in the streets of Tunis, whether accompanying their
husbands and children or forming distinct protest lines of their own –
and given western ideas of oppressed Arab women, this should in itself
have been news.
Women take to the streets from Tunisia to Syria
To start with Tunisia, women there have in fact been
in the vanguard of protest movements and social change since the drive
to gain independence from France in the late 1940s. Tunisian women
have a relatively high literacy rate (71 per cent), represent more
than one-fifth of the country’s wage-earners and make up 43 per cent
of the nearly half-million members of 18 local unions. Most of these
unionised women work in the education, textile, health, city services
and tourism industries. The Tunisian General Union of Labour (French
acronym: UGTT) had increasingly come into conflict with the country’s
strongman, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, and so its rank and file
enthusiastically joined the street protests. Today the UGTT continues
to pressure the government formed after Ben Ali fled, to move forward
with genuine reforms.
In all of this, women opinion leaders played an
important part. To take one example, although like most prominent
Tunisians, movie star Hend Sabry had been coerced into supporting Ben
Ali and his mafia-like in-laws, when the anti-government rallies
began, she broke with the autocrat, warning him in a Facebook post
against ordering his security forces to fire on the protesters. Later,
she admitted to being terrified at making such a public gesture lest
her relatives in Tunis be harmed or she be permanently exiled from her
homeland.
In Egypt, the passionate video blog or “vlog” of Asmaa
Mahfouz that called on Egyptians to turn out massively on January 25
in Tahrir Square went viral, playing a significant role in the success
of that event. Mahfouz appealed to Egyptians to honour four young men
who, following the example of Mohammed Bouazizi (in an act which
sparked the Tunisian uprisings), set themselves afire to protest the
Mubarak regime.
Although the secret police had already dismissed them
as “psychopaths”, she insisted otherwise, demanding a country where
people could live in dignity, not “like animals”. According to
estimates, at least 20 per cent of the crowds that thronged Tahrir
Square that first week were made up of women, who also turned out in
large numbers for protests in the Mediterranean port of Alexandria.
Leil-Zahra Mortada’s celebrated Facebook album of women’s
participation in the Egyptian revolution gives a sense of just how
varied and powerful that turnout was.
As in Tunisia, Egyptian women make up a little more
than one-fifth of wage-earning workers – and labour has long been a
powerful force for change in that country. Before they began to
mobilise around the Tahrir Square protests, Egyptian workers had
staged over 3,000 strikes since 2004, with women sometimes taking the
lead. During the height of the protests against the rule of long-time
dictator Hosni Mubarak unionised workers even formed a new, nationwide
umbrella trade union.
In Libya, women’s protests proved central to the
movement of entire cities out of the control of Colonel Muammar
Gaddafi, as with Darnah in the eastern part of the country in
February. What makes the prominence of women demonstrators there so
remarkable is that city’s reputation as a stronghold of Muslim
fundamentalism. The abuse of women, a central issue in countries like
Libya, even burst into consciousness when a recent law school graduate
from a middle-class family in Tobruk, Iman al-Obeidi, broke into a
government press conference in Tripoli to charge that Gaddafi’s troops
had detained her at a checkpoint and then raped her. Her plight
provoked women’s demonstrations against the regime in the rebel-held
cities of Benghazi and Tobruk.
On April 15, Yemeni president for life Ali Abdullah
Saleh scolded women for “inappropriately” mixing in public with men at
the huge demonstrations then being staged in the capital, Sanaa, as
well as in the cities of Taiz and Aden. In this way, the issue of
women’s place in the mass protests against decades of autocracy was,
for the first time, explicitly broached by a high political figure –
and the response from women couldn’t have been clearer. They came out
in unprecedented numbers throughout the country, and even in the
countryside, day after day, accusing the president of “besmirching
their honour” by implying that they were behaving brazenly. (It is a
long-standing value in the Arab world to avoid impugning the honour of
a chaste woman.) In other words, they turned his attempt to invoke
Arab mores about women’s seclusion from the public sphere into a
rallying cry against him.
Women of a certain age who lived in the southern part
of the country found the president’s taunt particularly painful, given
that they had grown up in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY),
ruled by a communist regime that promoted women’s rights. They were
not subjected to more conservative norms until Saleh united the PDRY
with northern Yemen in 1990. Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, only about a
quarter of Yemeni women can read and write, only 17 per cent have
finished high school and only five per cent are wage-earners though
most work hard all their lives, many on farms. Still, in urban areas
such as Aden, Taiz or Sanaa, middle and upper-middle-class women have
an important place in the professions and business, or as
schoolteachers, and more than a quarter of college students are
women.
Faced with the power of outraged women, Saleh quickly
backed off, maintaining that, as a secular Arab nationalist, he
believed they should be full participants in the political affairs of
the nation. He had simply been wondering aloud, he claimed, how
members of the opposition Islah party, a fundamentalist Muslim
organisation, were so willing to allow women to march in the streets
against him when they favoured women’s seclusion on all other
occasions.
In Syria as well, on several occasions women have
shown their strength and bravery, turning out in forceful
demonstrations – sometimes without men but with their children in tow.
Near the town of Bayda, for instance, thousands of women shouting “We
will not be humiliated!” cut off a coastal road to protest a
heavy-handed government policy in which the secret police of President
Bashar al-Assad had arrested their demonstrating male relatives. On
other occasions Syrian women have staged all-female marches to demand
democracy and changes in regime policy.
Protecting women’s gains
Despite the centrality of women activists to the Arab
Spring, they have seldom been recognised as of real significance by
most of the male politicians who will undoubtedly benefit from what
they have accomplished. It was, for example, striking that women were
without representation on the commission appointed to revise the
Egyptian Constitution in preparation for September elections and that
only one woman (a Mubarak holdover at that) was appointed to the
29-person interim cabinet.
In addition, patriarchal forces such as Muslim
fundamentalist groups and clergy are determined that women’s rights
should not be expanded in the wake of these political upheavals. As an
omen in the wind, when a modest-sized group of 200 women showed up at
Tahrir Square on March 8 to commemorate International Women’s Day,
they found themselves attacked by militant religious young men who
shouted that they should go home and do the laundry.
Women’s groups and progressive movements are
understandably apprehensive about the possibility that, in Tunisia and
Egypt, Muslim fundamentalist movements will become more influential in
Parliament and push through laws to the disadvantage of both women and
secularists. Yet they have been remarkably unwilling to let such
considerations deter them from embracing democracy, something
secular-leaning dictators Ben Ali and Mubarak had warned them
against.
The likelihood of an actual Muslim fundamentalist
takeover in either country remains minimal for the foreseeable future.
In Egypt, the military government has so far retained a Mubarak-era
ban on the Muslim Brotherhood putting up candidates under its own
banner. As a result, its candidates will run as the representatives of
other small parties. In addition, the organisation has pledged to
contest parliamentary seats in only a limited number of electoral
districts so as to allay middle-class fears that their goal is an
Iran-style fundamentalist takeover of the country. Admittedly, Muslim
conservatism will likely burgeon as a political current more generally
in Egypt, whatever the shape of the next Parliament, posing a
challenge to women’s rights.
For instance, some Brotherhood officials have let slip
that they will indeed be working for the implementation of a medieval
form of Islamic law which would include the segregation of women and
men in the workplace while the mufti or chief adviser on Islamic law
to the government in Egypt has called for a “review” of secular
personal status laws that favour women, and which had been supported
by Suzanne Mubarak, the fashionable wife of the deposed dictator.
In Tunisia, the long years of repression under Ben Ali
left the leading fundamentalist group, Al Nahda, or the Renaissance
party, weakened. In any case, its leader Rachid Ghannouchi has been
speaking of institutionalising a “Turkish model” and says that unlike
the Egyptian Brotherhood, he supports the right of a woman to become
the country’s president.
In this, he is looking to former Turkish
fundamentalists like Recep Tayyip Erdođan and Abdullah Gül who, tired
of being imprisoned by and butting heads with the secular Turkish
establishment, founded the Justice and Development Party. Since coming
to power in 2002, they have fought for a pluralistic system as a way
of making a place for more traditional Muslims in society and politics
without pushing for the implementation of medieval Muslim legal codes.
Still, as backlash reactions like the attack on the
International Women’s Day protest have set in, activists on women’s
issues and progressives are wondering how to ensure that women’s gains
this spring will not be rolled back. In Egypt, prominent newscaster
and critic of the Mubarak regime Buthaina Kamel has her own idea about
how to gain women’s rights in a new, more democratic environment. She
is running for president, something inconceivable in the Mubarak era.
Even if her run gets little traction, her candidacy is
nevertheless deeply symbolic and historic – and another strikingly
brave act by a woman in this new era in the Arab world. (Her decision
is, of course, opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood.) Other Egyptian
women are hoping that the Constitution can be rewritten to strengthen
women’s rights and that the 64 seats set aside for women in the
previous Parliament will be retained.
Politicians in the transitional government of Tunisia,
for decades the most progressive Arab country with regard to women’s
rights, are determined to protect the public role of women by making
sure they are well represented in the new legislature. Elections are
now planned for July 24 and a high commission was appointed to set
electoral rules. That body has already announced that party lists will
have to maintain parity between male and female candidates.
In such a list system, you don’t vote for an
individual but a party, which has published an ordered list of its
candidates. If the list gets 10 per cent of the vote nationally, it is
awarded 10 percent of the seats in Parliament and can go down its
ordered list until it fills all those seats. Parity for women means
that every other candidate on the ordered list should be a woman,
ensuring them high representation in the legislature. This procedure
is sometimes called a “zipper” gender quota. Quotas for female
legislators are common in Scandinavia and in the global South.
Although the Tunisian requirement for gender parity
remains controversial in some quarters, Ghannouchi’s Al Nahda party
recently came out in support of it. In contrast, Abdelwaheb El Hani,
leader of the newly founded right of centre party Al Majd, complained
that the rule was “a violation of freedom of electoral choice” and
insisted that he doubted it would be effective in promoting women’s
representation. In contrast, the leftist Al Tajdid (Renewal) party
praised the move as “historic” and pledged to make women’s equality an
“irreversible accomplishment and an effective reality in Tunisian
political life”. Indeed Al Tajdid wants an explicit equal rights
amendment put into the Constitution.
Giving women a fighting chance
The Arab Spring has proven an epochal period of
activism and change for women, recalling the role of early feminists
in the 1919 Egyptian movement for independence from Britain, or the
important place of women in the Algerian revolution. The sheer numbers
of politically active women in this series of uprisings however, dwarf
their predecessors. That this female element in the Arab Spring has
drawn so little comment in the West suggests that our own narratives
of, and preoccupations with, the Arab world – religion,
fundamentalism, oil and Israel – have blinded us to the big social
forces that are altering the lives of 300 million people.
Women have been aided by this generation’s advances in
education and the professions, by the prominence of articulate women
anchors on satellite television networks like Al Jazeera and by the
rise of the Internet and social media. Women can assert leadership
roles in cyberspace that young men’s dominance of the public sphere
might have hampered in city squares.
Their prominence in the labour movements and at the
public rallies in Tunisia and Egypt moreover, underlines how much more
of a public role they now have than is usually acknowledged. Even the
trend toward wearing a headscarf among women in Egypt during the past
two decades has been seen by some social scientists as a step forward.
It has been a way for women to enter the public sphere and work
outside the home in greater numbers than ever before while maintaining
a claim on conservative ideals of chastity and piety.
Women activists of the Arab Spring have come from all
social classes, since it has been a mass movement. Middle and
upper-class women often focus their political energies on issues of
political representation and on laws affecting women’s equality.
Seeking constitutional guarantees of electoral parity is one possible
way of responding to any patriarchal political backlash.
Working-class women are particularly concerned with
wages and workers’ rights. Stronger unions would improve women’s
prospects for greater rights. Women’s health, literacy and material
well-being are concerns of all women. During the age of the dictators
the nation’s wealth was often usurped by a narrow elite of politically
connected families. A democratisation of politics could potentially
lead to more state resources being devoted to women and the poor.
Keep in mind that women such as Buthaina Kamel knew
the risks when they called for Mubarak to step down. Whatever their
patronising appeals to feminist themes, authoritarian regimes like
Mubarak’s and Ben Ali’s politically oppressed and stole from everyone
in society, including women, and they had proved increasingly unable
to deliver the social services and employment on which women and their
families fundamentally depend for a better life. Before, women could
be marginalised at will by the dictators whenever they made demands on
the regime. Now, at least, they have a fighting chance.
(Shahin Cole holds an LLB from Punjab University Law
School in Pakistan and has lived in Egypt and Yemen. Juan Cole is the
Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the
Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan and the
author of Engaging the Muslim World. This article was posted on
TomDispatch.com on April 26, 2011.)
Courtesy:
www.tomdispatch.com
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