Women and the Arab Awakening: Now is the Time

posted on: Oct 17, 2011

“ALL of us were there, throwing stones, moving dead bodies. We did everything. There was no difference between men and women.” So says Asmaa Mahfouz, an Egyptian activist, remembering the protests that felled Hosni Mubarak at the beginning of the year. Though some men told her to get out of the way, others held up umbrellas to protect her.

In Tunisia Lina Ben Mhenni, an activist, travelled round the country documenting protests on her blog, “A Tunisian Girl”. Besides photographing the dead and wounded, she included pictures of herself with male protesters at sit-ins in the Kasbah in Tunis. Tawakul Karman, awarded the Nobel peace prize at the beginning of October, has been a leading figure in the pro-democracy demonstrations in Yemen, camping out for months in front of Sana’a University, calling for Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s president, to step down. Defying their stereotype as victims of oppressive patriarchies, Arab women have made their presence a defining feature of the Arab spring.

The position of women in the Arab world has long been difficult. In 2002 the first Arab Human Development Report cited the lack of women’s rights as one of three factors, along with lack of political freedoms and poor education, that most hampered the region’s progress. Amid the loud calls for democracy in the early days of the uprisings, little was said specifically about women’s rights. But now that constitutions are being rewritten, many women in Egypt and Tunisia, whose revolutions are most advanced, hope to push their own liberation.

In Egypt, the sight of women protesting is hardly new. In 1919 veiled women in Cairo marched against British rule, calling for independence. In 1957 Egypt became the first country in the Arab world to elect a woman to parliament, having allowed votes for women only the year before. During the rule of Gamal Abdel Nasser girls were encouraged to go to school, and women exhorted to join the workforce, as part of the general push for economic development. In the 1970s under Anwar Sadat, and with encouragement from his wife Jehan, women made further gains. But since then progress has been stalled by the growing power of conservative religious groups.

Today Egypt’s women may work outside the home, go to school and university, and are free to vote and run in all elections. But women’s literacy stands at just 58%, and only 23% of workers are women. The country’s laws are a mixed bag. The constitution outlaws discrimination on the grounds of sex, but women are entitled to inherit only half as much as men. Husbands may divorce their wives in moments in front of a civil servant, but women endure lengthy court proceedings to do the same. A woman who remarries loses the right to custody of her children.

The condition of Tunisia’s women, by contrast, is unmatched in the Arab world. That is mostly thanks to Habib Bourguiba, the founding father of the modern Tunisian state, who outlawed polygamy, granted women equal divorce rights and legalised abortion. Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s toppled dictator, continued Bourguiba’s work, expanding parental, divorce and custody rights for women and promoting their education and employment. In 1960 nearly half of women were married by the time they had turned 20. By 2004 only 3% of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 were married, divorced or widowed. The literacy rate for women in Tunisia is now over 70%, though only 27% of the labour force is female. Women make up nearly two-thirds of university students, compared with two-fifths in Egypt.

For Mr Ben Ali, and to a lesser extent Mr Mubarak, defending women’s rights was a useful sop to the West. It provided an excuse for cracking down on their Islamist opponents. Their wives—Suzanne Mubarak in particular—were keen to hop on the feminist bandwagon. Mrs Mubarak pushed through laws banning female genital mutilation and allowing women to become judges. These laws still stand, but are tainted by their association with the former regime. This is unfortunate, says Hoda Badran, head of the Alliance for Arab Women. “They weren’t Suzanne Mubarak’s laws. She gave a little push towards the end, but we did the work.” Many in Egypt are already suspicious of the language of women’s rights, regarded by some as a Western import. In the effort to ditch everything connected to the Mubarak era, activists are worried that women’s rights will suffer.

Since January’s heady days, the voices in Egypt saying that women should leave the revolution to men have grown more insistent. At a demonstration on International Women’s Day in March, jeering men told those marching to go home and feed their babies. The police, too, as they broke up the march, told the women that this was no time for such rallies. More tellingly, the number of women in the cabinet has fallen from four to one. No woman is a member of the committee that is drafting the new constitution, though many are qualified to be. Essam Sharaf, Egypt’s prime minister, invited a group of women to meet him and discuss their worries, but little has come of it.

Several steps back

More disturbing is the attitude of Egypt’s military rulers. On March 9th, fed up with the slow pace of reform, protesters returned to Tahrir Square to restate their calls for freedom, justice and equality. The army broke up the demonstration and arrested scores of demonstrators, including at least 18 women. While held they were beaten, threatened with charges of prostitution and forced to submit to “virginity checks”. At first the army denied that the checks had taken place. In May, however, a senior general admitted it had been done so that the women would not later claim that they had been raped by soldiers. “The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine,” he explained. “These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square.”

Tunisian women have suffered no such abuses. Already far in advance of Egypt, their legal position has not changed since the revolution. But they fear it may. For Tunisian women, it is a question of preserving rights, rather than winning new ones, says Mouna Dridi, a specialist in constitutional law at the University of Tunis. They look anxiously at what has happened in Iraq, where the overthrow of a tyrant does not seem to have helped women.

Though women suffered under the general horror of Saddam Hussein’s rule, they were free to work, to walk the streets unveiled, and to go to school. In parts of Iraq much of that has since changed as religious groups have grown in influence. In the early years of Baath rule, women were declared equal under the law and were required to attend literacy classes (though some were prevented from doing so by conservative family members). The position of women deteriorated after the 1991 Gulf war, as Saddam embraced Islamist and tribal groups to boost himself politically, and it seems to have fallen further as a result of the Western invasion. More than half of the women interviewed for an Oxfam report in 2009 had been forced to leave their homes since 2003, either because of violence or to seek employment. Nearly four-fifths had stopped attending high school or university. Forty percent of those with children said that the children were not going to school; lack of security was the main reason for keeping sons at home, but daughters were kept away because it was “too expensive”, or because they were forbidden to attend.

To ensure that women do not slip back, and that they play their proper part in the new post-revolutionary politics, Tunisia is using the law. Parties competing in October’s elections for a new constituent assembly will have to include women on their electoral lists, or they will not be allowed to take part. This will certainly go some way to promoting women; but with more than 100 parties competing in the elections, most will win only one seat which will go to the (usually male) candidate heading the list. Only one large group, the Democratic Modernist Pole, an alliance of several parties, has promised to put women at the head of half its lists.

Egypt has taken similar steps. In 2009 parliament passed a law allocating 64 seats out of 518 in the People’s Assembly to women. Since the revolution this quota has been abolished, to the concern of some women but the satisfaction of others. Those women appointed through the quota system were seen, rightly or wrongly, as stooges of Mr Mubarak.

In the elections due in November 70% of MPs will be elected via party lists which must include at least one woman. This means, according to one government spokesman, that women will get at least 29% of seats in the new parliament. Quite how he came to this figure is unclear. Even if women are included in party lists, no order has been issued about how prominently they should appear. Many fear they will be placed so low that their presence will make little difference.

The old quota system was bad, acknowledges Mozn Hassan, the director of Nazra for Feminist Studies, a Cairo-based organisation that researches women’s rights and whose members include a number of Islamic feminists. “It put women in high positions without the relevant experience. Only those with money could do it. It gave a bad impression of women.” Under the new list system, women are unlikely to win many seats, she admits. But it is better to have ten women in parliament who have worked hard and deserve to be there, she insists, than to have many more who have no idea what they are doing.

Ms Hassan also advises women MPs to show the country what they can do; to try to get on to the health or economics committees, rather than committees aimed specifically at women, and to give those mostly-male forums a woman’s perspective. At least one woman is taking that advice to its limit. Bothaina Kamel, a former television presenter, announced in April that she would be the first woman in Egypt’s history to run for president. Inexperienced as she is, and certain to lose, she proves at least that a woman can contest the top job in the land.

Islamist friends—or foes

Odd as it seems, the new parity laws are likely mostly to benefit Islamist parties. Nahda (Awakening), Tunisia’s main Islamist group, is the only party big enough to field male and female candidates in all constituencies. Smaller parties will struggle to put women on their lists and, without them, they will be disbarred. Even the Progressive Democratic Party, the one Tunisian party with a female leader, has women topping only three of its 33 lists.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt faces similar pressures. Thoroughly conservative, the Brothers will probably be the strongest group in Egypt’s new parliament, and they will have to respond to their voters. Since the revolution the group has become more conciliatory to women, accepting, for example, that one might run for president. But worries persist that, if victorious, they might try to introduce sterner and more discriminatory laws.

Recent polls have shown over 60% of Egyptians agreeing that sharia should be the sole source of law in the country, and almost a quarter saying it should be one of several sources. The Muslim Brothers, if they won Egypt’s elections, would be unlikely to introduce a Saudi interpretation of Islamic law, but they will be watched closely now to see if they make the Egyptian legal system less friendly to women.

Shahira Amin, a journalist who was deputy head of the state-owned Nile TV until she resigned in February, says that the Brothers have been forced to change their spots. Ms Amin, who is making a documentary about the Muslim Sisters, the female wing of the Brotherhood, is impressed by the role women are playing in the movement, especially in the Egyptian Trend party, a breakaway group of younger Brothers. Content with the rights they are accorded under Islam, they consider themselves equal in any case. “They are part of the debate; and they are just as fiery as the boys. These women are not taking a back seat.” Ms Mahfouz agrees. “I am not too worried about the Muslim Brothers, especially the younger ones,” she declares. “We will all be part of the decisions to come.”

But many others, especially those who have been campaigning for many decades, remain queasy. Fatma Khafagy, a founding member of the People’s Socialist Alliance who is standing for parliament, is sceptical about the Brotherhood and their female associates. The Muslim Sisters take their orders from the Brothers, says Ms Khafagy, and all their leaders are men. She chafes at their emphasis on a traditional, family role for women: “Discrimination against women begins at home.”

Tunisian women are similarly worried by Nahda and its more extremist elements. “Maybe its leaders have the right visions,” says Emna Ben Jemaa, a journalist and blogger, “but we don’t know about the rank and file.” And, she continues, no one knows who will succeed Rachid Ghannouchi [Nahda’s leader]. “That is the problem with Nahda; we have no guarantees about the future.”

The idea of introducing some form of laïcité, France’s dearly held ideal of strict secularism, in part to protect the rights of women, has been mooted. Ms Dridi, the constitutional lawyer, is unconvinced: “When the state is not involved in religion, the field is free for the Islamists.” But she is not over-worried about the threat they pose to women’s rights: “Women are present everywhere in Tunisia. I don’t see how you can limit them.”

From the ground up

The revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt were not about women’s rights. Indeed, many of those most closely involved are critical of the notion. For Ms Mahfouz, it is a question of human rights for all Egyptians: “If I succeed there, I’ll get women’s rights.” Sally Zohneh, another young activist, agrees. Society is already so fragmented, she argues, that it makes no sense to add another division setting women against everyone else; this is a time for everyone’s freedoms, not women’s in particular.

On the other side, those who have been fighting for women’s rights for decades are uneasy about postponing the battle. “They say that when democracy and equality are attained, they will trickle down to women. They think it will fracture the revolutionary ideals to focus on women’s rights now,” says Ms Badran, speaking of young Egyptian protesters. She disagrees with them. “This is the time for change.”

Activists like her, however, hardly represent the mass of Arab women. Much of the progress on women’s rights in the Arab world has come as a result of declarations from above, rather than pressure from below. It has been largely an issue for the elites, and a hobby-horse for presidents’ wives; and what is given with one hand may be taken back with the other. The recent decision of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah to allow women to vote in municipal elections is a case in point. Kuwait has, at the emir’s insistence, introduced female MPs, but its parliament has also trimmed women’s rights in other ways, for example by introducing segregation in Kuwaiti universities.

Women’s rights have yet to become an issue that moves the general public. The number of female candidates elected is of less interest to many women than how they will feed their children, whether they can get them to a clinic, or whether they will be able to send them to school. Those clamouring for change in Egypt and Tunisia today are mostly NGO workers, campaigners, lawyers, academics and politicians. But to their voices have been added those of the women protesters who came out in their tens of thousands and demanded an end to the old way of life.

It is even more vital, then, that the new governments in Egypt and Tunisia are made aware of women at the outset. As they draft their new constitutions, they have an unparalleled opportunity to incorporate a broader interpretation of women’s rights. If the old laws are not changed now, it will be many years before such a chance presents itself again. “We are in a scary situation,” says Ms Hassan. “We don’t know what the future holds.” But change, she feels, must be coming.

The Economist