Authors: Sally Armstrong
The fundamentalists argue that Egypt has to deal with the negative consequences of Mubarak’s corrupt regime, one of them being the part his wife played in destroying the values of the Egyptian family. In particular, critics point to her role in endorsing legal modifications of the personal status law, which undermined the stability of the family. As head of the National Council for Women (NWC), Suzanne Mubarak was the one who pushed these laws through parliament. Trying to expunge any sign of the former president’s wife’s activism is part of the argument against women’s rights going on in Egypt today.
The laws that were passed or modified since 2000 (the divorce law, the citizenship law and the guardianship law), as well as setting a quota that guaranteed women sixty-four seats in parliament, are now described by fundamentalist men as evidence of Suzanne Mubarak’s anti-family agenda. They claim that “all the laws that were passed with the backing of Suzanne Mubarak were politically motivated to serve the interests of the ruling elite,” says Elsadda. “Already, this public perception [from fundamentalists] is being politically manipulated to rescind laws and legislative procedures that were passed in the last ten years to improve the
legal position of women, particularly within personal status laws. These laws are deliberately being discredited as ‘Suzanne’s laws,’ or more pejoratively as ‘
qawanin al-hanim
’ [referring to Mubarak’s wife as a woman with an entourage and part of the ruling elite].”
She says the question people need to ask is this: Were these laws politically motivated by a corrupt agenda of a corrupt regime or did they arise out of years of work by women’s rights activists? Can they rightly be described as “Suzanne’s laws”? If the answer is no, as Elsadda would argue, what’s going on? Why does the new regime want to discredit the work the activists have done?
Women’s organizations had begun to worry about the way Suzanne Mubarak was co-opting their issues when she created the National Council for Women in 1995. She’d been at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and had come home ashamed of how far behind Egyptian women were. The activists say she might have had the best of intentions in establishing the council, but it soon became a way of controlling what advances women could make. Elsadda explains, “The NCW competed with existing women’s organizations, sought to appropriate women’s activism and work and tried to monopolize the movement by speaking on behalf of all Egyptian women. NCW members were disproportionately represented in local, regional and international media and forums. Women’s rights activism became linked with the projects of the first lady.”
This is the conundrum women the world over invariably face—whatever progress they make, there always seems to be some self-appointed organization ready to claw back gains either in the name of God or to “protect family values.” Women need to be wily in the ways they make change. Like Hangama Anwari in Afghanistan, who cleverly positioned her survey on polygamy to
catch out those who are defying Islam rather than being critical of a custom approved by the Quran. And Judge Owuor in Kenya, who cautioned the lawyers on the judicial reform case, advising, “We need to sneak the law into the middle of the code and presume most MPs won’t read the whole thing. Or wait for a day when the members who are against it are not in the parliament.”
The women in Egypt are attempting similar manoeuvres to protect the gains they have made in the face of those who want to annul them. They’re lobbying the newly elected members of parliament, keeping their demands in front of the people, and are fully prepared with research data to take on those who claim the gains they made in recent years are tainted by the old corrupt regime.
There’s a new generation of Egyptian women who have come into their own in the sunlit days of the revolution. Women like Mazn Hassan, the executive director of Nazra for Feminist Studies, a women’s organization that aims to bring gender equality to Egypt. The mandate at Nazra is to attract young women and a new generation of activists and researchers who can establish and entrench women’s rights in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. For them the time for promises is over. They want action and are prepared to do the heavy lifting to get it. Their goal is to examine the obstacles to women’s advancement and create nothing less than a societal debate on women’s issues.
Before the revolution, Hassan says, “the government ran the women’s movement. It was for upper-class women. Now we’re writing a new history in Egypt and women need to be there in that history.” Originally from Saudi Arabia, where she says there are two spaces—the public one for men and the private one for women—Hassan believes women in Cairo have a sense of the
street, and their attitudes are different. “Women are changing their traditional role of being nice, modest, married mothers to being involved in the public life of the country.” She feels the patriarchy has to be thrown off, and among the new activists of Cairo, there is a lot of support for her views. When I visited the Nazra office, I was surprised to find women and men there in equal numbers. Hassan says the movement needs men as well as women to make change in Egypt, and if they can make effective change, she believes that the sexual equality revolution will spread to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait as well.
One of the things she is relying on is a new project called the Women and Memory Forum, which researches and documents the role played by women in the region’s cultural and intellectual history. Hoda Elsadda is one of the founders of the forum and says the research they do examines historical and cultural data from the Arab world with gender sensitivity. They are carefully constructing a database of women’s accomplishments and a library of their work in order to establish a baseline for Arab women to go forward.
Hassan says it helps women today to see how women’s rights issues played out in political and ideological struggles in Egypt that go back to the early stages of nation-building in the nineteenth century, when women asserted their views and contributed to Egypt’s modernity. In 1899, when Qasim Amin published a seminal text on the history of Egypt,
Tahrir al-Mar’a
(Liberation of Women), he was stating facts that governments still need to hear today: that the backward status of women was the reason for the backwardness of the country, and that improvement of the status of women was a prerequisite for the modernization and progress of the country.
More than a hundred years later, in 2002, the United Nations issued a report with the same advice. The UN Arab Human Development Report was written by a group of distinguished Arab intellectuals and highlighted three “deeply rooted shortcomings which have created major obstacles to human development.” These three deficits? The lack of freedom, education and the empowerment of women. The report’s authors called for “the complete empowerment of Arab women, taking advantage of all the opportunities to build their capabilities and enabling them to exercise those capabilities to the full.” The UN Arab Development Report issued three years later, in 2005, carried the same message: “Gender inequality is generally recognized as one of the main obstacles to development in the Arab region.”
Many assumed that the women of the Middle East had broken the ties that have bound them to second-class citizenship when they bravely sallied forth in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and elsewhere. Their slogan was “We will not be quiet.” Women such as Tawakkol Karman, who led the protests in Yemen and won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her work; Lina Ben Mhenni from Tunisia, whose blogs in French, English and Arabic kept the country informed during the uprising; Razan Ghazzawi, a Syrian who tweeted news updates and was detained for two weeks; and Zainab Alkhawaja, who stood her ground against tanks at Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout—all helped crush the stereotype of the subservient Arab woman and paved the way for reform, insisting that women’s rights are human rights belonging to every citizen.
When Karman, who founded an organization called Women Journalists without Chains, received the Nobel Prize, she delivered a warning with her address: “The democratic world, which has told
us a lot about the virtues of democracy and good governance, should not be indifferent to what is happening in Yemen and Syria, and what happened before that in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and happens in every Arab and non-Arab country aspiring for freedom. All of that is just hard labour during the birth of democracy, which requires support and assistance not fear and caution.” Then she tossed a bouquet to her Arab sisters “who have struggled to win their rights in a society dominated by the supremacy of men.”
The message is that although women in Saudi Arabia are lashed for driving a car, and on Tahrir Square they were arrested as whores while marching for liberation, and in Iraq they can be stoned to death for being seen with a man they aren’t married to, the process of change has started. Women in most of the Arab world are still denied equal status with men, and the fundamentalist politicians on the rise want to keep women down, but the message from experts worldwide that becomes louder with every passing year is that women are the way forward, the route to ending poverty, improving the economy and stopping conflict.
In Egypt, Elsadda told me that getting rid of a dictatorial regime was the first step. Now, she says, they need to make sure there is more space for a women’s movement and for the participation of women. If all the studies around the world are correct, that will mean a more prosperous Egypt.
Like others, she is perplexed by the number of fundamentalists who won in the first democratic election in her country in fifty years, but she feels that the enormity of the change the revolution has brought to Egyptian society is bound to need a period of time for adjustment, for rethinking the way the society will operate. For that reason, she estimates that it will take at least two or three years to achieve the goals of the revolution.
That said, the changes for women in Egypt and elsewhere have already begun. In Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, women’s rights are still highly contested, but the movement to alter thinking that is thousands of years old is burgeoning. The extremist mullahs in Afghanistan are being cornered by women reformers and invited to talk. The laws in Pakistan—the hated Hadood Ordinances that called for four male witnesses to prove a woman didn’t cause her own rape, for example—have been challenged by women’s groups and are slowly but surely being moderated.
Women are still caught by the tripwires of religion and culture in the villages, but the chiefs and religious leaders are beginning to listen to scholars who claim that the sacred texts do not support the oppression of women. The education and health care of women is top of mind in many more villages today than it has ever been before. And it’s women themselves who are driving that change. For instance, in Lebanon women started
Jismi.net
(
jismi
means “my body” in Arabic), whose aim is to deal with issues related to the body and sexuality that have been considered private matters and taboos that shouldn’t be discussed. The launch of that website is as significant as the publication of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
in 1969. Forty-three years later, it’s a repeat performance in the Arab world, but this time it’s for men as well as women. The traffic on the site is extraordinary: young men claiming all they know about sex they learned in porn magazines and women saying the only thing they’ve been taught about their bodies is how to use sanitary pads.
Isobel Coleman says that in 2010, when her book
Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women Are Transforming the Middle East
, came out, some people said, “What change? These countries will never change.” It seemed to her critics that the thugs in power
and the fundamentalists at the gate would forever oppress women.
But when I interviewed Coleman a year later, she said, “There has been revolutionary change, profound demographic change, and women are at the forefront of many of these changes. Across the broader Middle East, women are the majority of college graduates.” She cited impressive numbers: 70 percent of graduates in Iran are women, 63 percent in Saudi Arabia, 55 percent in Egypt. “Even though there are enormous barriers in the workplace, women are determined to make change. Many are members of Islamic movements and wear the head scarf, but you can’t conflate that with them wanting to return to the traditional private role for women. They’re actively promoting change—seeking jobs, engaged in the future of their countries. They’ll be a big part of driving change in that part of the world.” And that was before all the events of the Arab Spring.
Women have a natural facility with grassroots movements, shared leadership and collegiality, skills that contribute enormously to the anatomy of change. A classic example comes from Canada during the emotionally tumultuous months when the Constitution was being patriated in the early 1980s and the old Bill of Rights, part and parcel of Canada’s colonial past, was being replaced with a homegrown Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Canadian women saw the patriation as an opportunity to enshrine equal rights for women in the new charter. The iconic former editor of Canada’s largest-circulation women’s magazine,
Chatelaine
, Doris Anderson had left her editorial post and taken up the presidency of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, an arm’s-length body established by the government to push change for women forward. From her desk in the nation’s capital, she led the charge to include women in the
process of patriation and constitution writing. She organized a women’s conference to gather input from every region of the country and to inform delegates about progress or lack of it on the Charter. Suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, the government cancelled her conference.
Anderson realized it was a strategic move by a federal government that was tiptoeing through the delicate proceedings hoping to bypass the demands the women were making, so she made a move of her own; she went public and resigned her post. What happened next was vintage grassroots politicking. The newspaper columnist Michele Landsberg, who seemed to have the ear of every woman in the country, wrote brilliant commentaries about the situation and kept her readers up to speed while alerting women about the next steps. Women across Canada, who had been following the proceedings, decided that no one was going to cancel their conference and told Anderson they’d meet her in Ottawa on Valentine’s Day 1981 and go ahead even if they had to have the meeting in a café.