She says the success was based on a single factor: “We broke the barrier of fear. There used to be so many taboos. Once that barrier is down, the people can do anything.”
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They got rid of a dictator, but the old regime was still intact a year later when we met. “The objectives of the revolution have not been fulfilled,” Elsadda told me. “But now we have to give it time.” Justice and equality for all Egyptians is the goal, but women are working on changing the personal status laws, which contribute to such bizarre contradictions in women’s circumstances. On the one hand, the laws control the personal affairs of women; for example, a man can divorce his wife simply by saying, “I divorce you.” After fifty years of marriage, a woman can find herself out on the street. On the other hand, the country’s labour laws are among the best in the world for women and at state institutions, such as the university where Elsadda works: there, the percentage of women on the staff reflects the proportion of women in society.
Egypt’s personal status laws are derived from Islamic codes that dictate the rules of marriage, divorce and inheritance. This legal structure is distinct from the rest of the Egyptian legal system, which is based on French civil law. During the past decade, the government has reformed some of the more egregious gender inequities in these laws, but women still face discrimination.
In 2000, when a no-fault divorce law was proposed and passed, a woman had to give up her financial rights, return her dowry and exempt her husband from any future financial obligation in order to get a divorce. Although a man could have a divorce simply by stating the desire, the so-called reform means a woman has to go to court, and she needs to prove physical harm as a reason for the collapse of the marriage. “You need a broken leg and a witness to the attack, and then you need to wait six to eight years in court,” says Elsadda. And the no-fault law contains a provision that was also a setback for women’s rights: women no longer have the right to travel abroad without the husband’s consent. What’s more, Muslim women are prohibited from marrying Christian men, and non-Muslim women who marry Muslim men are subject to Islamic law. The women who marched and shouted and stood in solidarity with the men on Tahrir Square thought that these unfair laws would be negotiable in the new post-Mubarak Egypt. But they were in for a nasty surprise.
It was during the demonstrations that followed the eighteen-day revolution—particularly on March 8, International Women’s Day—that women’s issues were brought into sharp focus on Tahrir Square. The hostility and violence unleashed against women protesters on March 8 shocked everyone. Women were harassed verbally and physically by menacing groups of men who accused them of adopting Western agendas and going against the cultural values of Egypt. Female protesters were dragged from the square and subjected to brutal “virginity tests” by the military—some of them in front of a crowd, others reportedly in a kitchen at the nearby military headquarters.
Samira Ibrahim, twenty-five, had travelled from her small town in Upper Egypt—an eight-hour train ride to Cairo—to attend the protest. When we sat together in a café in Cairo a year later, her emotional scars were still in evidence. Clearly agitated, she fidgeted as we talked, checked her mobile every few seconds and spoke at a staccato pace. “They forced me to remove my clothes,” she said. “When I struggled, they beat me. They used electric shocks on me, and it was an officer who did the virginity test [using his fingers to find out if her hymen was intact]. I felt like I’d been raped.” Sexual violence was the tool men used to silence these female human rights defenders on the front lines.
Ibrahim is a petite woman, barely five feet tall, with cover-girl good looks and wearing model-like makeup. She turned up in jeans, with an animal-print scarf wrapped around her head in the new fashionable “big hijab” style that swirls fabric into a crownlike headdress, and carrying a shoulder bag with a slogan on it that read, “No to emergency laws, no to military rule, no to criminalizing strikes and protests.” She was feisty and furious at once. She’d made headlines when she decided to sue the military for the assault on her. And again when she won the civil case she’d brought against them. Although she was told by the military commander in charge of the men who assaulted her that the soldiers would not act that way again, the assurance wasn’t enough. According to Ibrahim, the soldiers’ description of the assault on her—claiming that a doctor had examined her hymen—wasn’t the truth. “It was an officer who sexually assaulted me,” she says. “They wanted to humiliate me. I wanted to make sure they don’t get to do that to anyone ever again.” So she lodged a complaint against the military. “I’m not afraid of them,” she said. A month later, the military tribunal pursuing her complaint acquitted the officer accused of administering the virginity test. But Ibrahim isn’t through with them yet. She wants justice and says eventually she’ll get it by pursuing her case using internatonal law.
The line in the sand that the men drew at Tahrir Square on International Women’s Day is something the women protesters, who had stood with them through the revolution, are still coming to terms with. Elsadda says there may be an explanation for the vicious male backlash: “We followed the Western model of modernity in every way except the family. Even in the Nasser regime in 1956, when women could do everything in the public sphere, the private one was not touched. In the seventies, a woman minister in the government was actually stopped from leaving the country at the airport by a husband who felt she should stay at home. Until recently a woman needed her husband’s permission to get a passport.”
As for violence against women, Elsadda says the level is about the same in Egypt as it is in most other places. But, she cautions, changing Egyptian attitudes toward women isn’t easy.
“What I want for Egyptian women is the same thing I want for the country—equality, autonomy and fair personal status laws,” she tells me.
Although most people accuse the military of forsaking their support of the people in Tahrir Square and blame the fundamentalist Islamists for the government’s failure to fulfil the objectives of the revolution, there are two things that the revolution has accomplished for women: a sense of empowerment and bringing more women into politics. “History says women are part of the revolution, but once the political pie is divided up, the danger is that women will be excluded,” Elsadda warns. After the protests, she joined a political party for the first time in her life. She thinks that the main challenge for women today is guarding against the backlash coming from all sides.
She raises a very interesting and little-known fact about Egyptian politics, which she calls the First Lady Syndrome. “One of the key obstacles that women’s rights activists will face in the months and years to come is a prevalent public perception that associates women’s rights activists and their activities with the ex–first lady, Suzanne Mubarak.”
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, particula
rly 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.
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