Expert Opinion
Strong, Intelligent, Shrouded: Arab Women Fight to Defend their Rights

12.12.2011

German journalist Mathieu von Rohr wrote an article for DER SPIEGEL about women in the Middle East after the Arab revolutions.

The Arab Spring seemed to herald a new era of emancipation for women in the Arab world. But Islamists are on the rise in Tunisia and Egypt, and there are worrying reports of sexual assaults on demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Many women in the region fear a rollback of what rights they had under the dictators.

The West is confused. In January and February, many were enthusiastic about the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, particularly when it came to the role women played. Women protested alongside men on Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis and on Tahrir Square in Cairo. Their involvement conveyed a new image of Arab youth and Arab women. The many photographers in Cairo and Tunis sent their editorial offices images of attractive women taking part in the revolution.

People in the West recognized themselves in the faces of the young female protesters, and they were pleased that people in these countries were not as different as many had previously believed. The certainty that Arabs were incompatible with democracy was destroyed, as well as the cliché of the Arab woman as a passive, oppressed being.

None of the uprisings in the Arab countries would have been possible without the participation of women. They were among the first to protest at the Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain, they organized women's protests in Syria, they were part of the Libyan uprising from the start, and a Yemeni activist was one of the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

All of this explains why so many people have been disappointed by news reports in recent weeks. In Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began and where women enjoy more freedom than anywhere else in the Arab world, the Islamists emerged from the recent election as the strongest party. The same thing is likely to happen in Egypt, which is currently holding elections. And not a single woman was appointed to the council that has been charged with drafting a constitution.

Did Arab women fight for their freedom, only to then lose even the rights they had previously enjoyed under the dictators?

There has long been an urban class of well-educated, professional women in Tunisia and Egypt. But achieving women's rights was a project of the elite. For despots like former Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali or former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, it was also a means to an end. They used their support for women's rights to lead the West to believe that their regimes stood for progress.

Ironically, in Egypt it was Suzanne Mubarak, the now-hated wife of the former president, who championed women's rights and fought the horrific practice of female genital mutilation. Although she made some progress, many of her achievements on behalf of women are now associated with her name.

It is not surprising that an Islamic counter-model is now gaining traction in the wake of the overthrow of regimes that masqueraded as Western and secular. Particularly in Tunisia, the secular elite always behaved as if it were more European than Arab, emulating the lifestyle of the former colonial power, France. In the upscale suburbs of Tunis, it was not unusual to see women wearing short skirts, and feminists were proud of it.

Self-determined women don't necessarily have to look the part envisioned by the West. Years ago, researchers with the Washington-based think tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace identified a movement that could be characterized as Muslim emancipation within such organizations as the Egyptian Muslim Sisterhood. Even this group of conservative Muslim women encompasses a new generation of self-confident activists who are educated, claim their rights and insist on being heard within their organizations.

Many of them were at the front of the protest marches last winter, and now they are there again, side-by-side with secular female protesters. Together they are facing off against the most noxious adversary of Egyptian women: the military. During the revolution on Tahrir Square, many young Egyptian women experienced gender equality for the first time. They protested together with the men and were just as instrumental in bringing down Mubarak, and there were no sexual assaults during that period.

Since then, it has been primarily the security forces and Egypt's military council that have sought to put women in their place through violence -- not the Islamists.

In Tunisia, the Islamists under Rachid Ghannouchi purport to be more favorable to women than anywhere else. In the election campaign, they insisted that they would not seek to scale back equal rights, and they are not interested in polygamy or making it compulsory for women to wear the headscarf. They cite the moderate Islamist governing party in Turkey, the AKP, as a model.

But many conservatives feel emboldened by their election victory, and there has also been worrisome news coming from Tunis. Women report that they have been criticized in public for their style of dress. At the university, male students prevented female lecturers who were allegedly dressed immodestly from entering lecture halls. // Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Source: spiegel.de