Time, Mar. 17, 2011
Silent
No More: The Women of the Arab Revolutions
By Carla Power
The
uprisings sweeping the Arab world haven't only toppled dictatorships.
Gone, too, are the old stereotypes of Arab women as passive, voiceless
victims. Over the past few months, the world has seen them marching
in Tunisia, shouting slogans in Bahrain and Yemen, braving tear
gas in Egypt, and blogging and strategizing in cyberspace. Egyptian
activist Asmaa Mahfouz, 26, became known as "The Leader of
the Revolution" after she posted an online video call to
arms, telling young people to get out onto the streets and demand
justice. In Libya, women lawyers were among the earliest anti-Qaddafi
organizers in the revolutionary stronghold of Benghazi. Arabs
were bemused that the Western media was shocked — shocked!
— to find women protesting alongside men. "There was
this sense of surprise, that 'Oh, my god, women are actually participating!'
notes Egyptian activist Hadil El-Khouly. "But of course women
were there, in Tahrir Square. I was there, because I'm Egyptian.
Everyone was there. You really felt we were all one."
But the bliss of revolutionary
dawn never lasts. When Tunisian women's groups held a post-revolution
rally to demand equality, thugs disrupted the gathering, yelling
"Women at home, in the kitchen!" And on March 8, a march
in Cairo to commemorate International Women's Day ended in violence,
with gangs of men groping protestors and telling them to go home.
"It was a horrible irony, that on International Women's Day,
a march for women's rights could face that kind of egregious harassment
in Cairo's Tahrir Square, a symbol of freedom," says Priyanka
Motaparthy, a research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa
division of Human Rights Watch. "It was an incredibly violent
way of trying to scare [the women] out of the public space."
(See 16 revolutionary women who changed the world.)
Women are good for
revolutions, but historically, revolutions haven't been good for
women. In 1789, French women took to the streets to protest against
high bread prices and the excesses at Versailles. They helped
topple the monarchy, but within a few years, the revolutionary
government had banned all women's political clubs. In Iran, women
came out in force to march against the Shah in 1979; Ayatollah
Khomeini rewarded them by requiring the veil and curbing their
legal rights. And now, as Tunisians and Egyptians hammer out the
nature of their nations' futures, women are being required to
fight for their rights in a whole new way. "There is no turning
back," says Margot Badran, Senior Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center in Washington D.C., and the author of Feminism
in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences. "The violence
[against the March 8 protestors] has only strengthened resolve."
The participation of
women during Tunisia and Egypt's transitions to democracy remains
a crucial litmus test of the revolutions. Exclude women, and the
whole concept of sweeping away a privileged political caste crumbles.
As Moroccan activist Saida Kouzzi observes: "If these countries
continue to neglect the rights of the great majority of their
citizens, then what good do these revolutions do?" (See why
Egypt and Tunisia's revolutions are not finished yet.)
Already there are subtle
— and not-so-subtle — signs that Arab women are being
sidelined. Essam Sharaf, Egypt's new prime minister, named just
one woman to his cabinet. For some women's rights advocates, his
creation of a committee dealing with women's advancement smacks
of tokenism. In Tunisia, activists are concerned about the potential
rise of political Islam. Sheikh Rashed Ghannouchi, leader of Islamist
party El Nahdha, who returned from decades of exile in January,
has sought to soften his party's earlier line on women's rights,
saying Tunisia's women need equality, and that he's supported
the country's progressive Personal Status Code — which bans
polygamy and child marriages, and guarantees women reproductive
rights and equal pay — for over 20 years. Still, women are
worried, says Nadya Khalife, of Human Rights Watch's women's rights
division, in an email. "Women activists want to ensure that
the gains [they have] made will not be set back by Islamist groups
who may call for Shari'a law, or stand in their way to improve
the Personal Status Code," she says. "Already, some
Islamist groups have started calling for mosques to be established
in schools, at the same time that women's groups are calling for
the separation of church and state."
Egyptian women have
been protesting the sexism they see creeping into their nation's
transitional structures. The 10-member Constitutional Committee,
which was tasked with coming up with constitutional amendments
after the fall of president Hosni Mubarak, didn't include a single
woman; the civil society group it consulted was called "The
Council of Wise Men." Women's groups were further outraged
when the Committee came up with Article 75, whose wording effectively
limits Egypt's presidency to men. "Egypt's president is born
to two Egyptian parents," it reads, "and cannot be married
to a non-Egyptian woman." When women's groups protested,
the framers argued that Arabic allows masculine nouns to include
women. It didn't wash; a coalition of 117 women's groups is now
calling for rewording. (Comment on this story.)
Some pundits have cautioned
a go-slow approach for what they see as special interest groups.
But activists fear that later could mean never. "Some people
are saying, 'Now is not the time for women's rights, disability
rights, children's rights,'" says activist El-Khouly. "They
claim: 'Once there's democracy, there will be democracy for everyone.'
But history has told us that women wait, wait, wait — and
then our rights never become a priority issue." (See TIME's
special package "The Middle East in Revolt.")
For women activists
in Egypt and across the region, the spirit of the Arab revolutions
means women's rights aren't special interests, but are intrinsic
to the people's demands for social justice and democracy. "It's
important to see women's rights as political rights," says
Mozn Hassan, director of the Cairo-based group Nazra for Feminist
Studies. "Women's activists have to change their dynamic,
and engage with larger political issues. But we don't expect it
to be easy. Tahrir Square was a utopia, and society doesn't change
in fifteen minutes."
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