Arab women agree on problems, not solutions

Women have played important roles in the Arab awakening but they now face an uphill struggle to consolidate their gains.

During the first panel of this week’s Woodrow Wilson Center about “Women after the Arab Awakening,” participants discussed the problems facing women on the Middle East.  Heads nodded and the audience, mostly women, groaned and laughed together.  All cringed when speakers presented alarming legal and cultural setbacks for women and smiled or applauded for stories of courage or insightful comments about the status of women.

In the second panel, when the speakers were asked to identify a path forward, tensions flared.  The audience tittered at provocative statements and the question and answer period turned into a heated argument.  Underlying the tension, were important issues:  the appropriate role of religion in government, the tension between Islam and feminism and the appropriate representation of minorities in democracies.

Dalia Ziada, one of Newsweek’s most influential women and CNN’s eight agents of change in the Arab World, sees politicians and political systems as only part of the problem.  Culture is also responsible.  Suzanne Mubarak advanced the status of women with the “khula” law giving women the right to divorce and other legislation allowing women to pass down their nationality.  President Mubarak allocated 64 seats in the lower house of parliament to women.  These legal successes did not result in meaningful improvement in status for women in Egypt because of culture.  Most women who ran for office had connections to Suzanne Mubarak or other leaders and were often not considered competent.

Rihab Elhaj, co-founder of the New Libya Foundation, made a similar point.  Eighty of the 200 seats in the Libyan parliament are allotted for political parties, which are required to include women alternately with men on their party lists.  This helped women get 33 seats, but they have not yet taken on leadership roles because they are unconnected to leading male politicians.

In Tunisia, culture and social norms have also interfered with women achieving the status laws allow.  Tunisia has a unique history of legislation promoting women’s rights.  But when Omezzine Khelifa, a political party leader in Tunisia and adviser to the Minister of Tourism, proposed parity, many disagreed.  Some thought it was not the time to deal with women’s issues.  Others opposed a parity law because it suggests that women are incapable of getting into public office any other way.  Parity in Tunisia passed, but as in Egypt it did not allow women to win 50% of the seats.  Most political parties chose men to head their lists, so women won seats only if a party received enough votes to win multiple seats.

Fahmia Al Fotih, Yemeni journalist, also described cultural barriers.  Several key women leaders during the revolution were subjected to harassment and even violence as a result of their participation in the protests.  A barrier was erected to keep women and men separate, but some women chose to ignore the barrier in protest and were often beaten as a result.  The National Consensus Government is composed of 35 members, of whom only three are women.

Not all problems in the Middle East can be attributed to patriarchal culture.  There are real legal, physical and social barriers preventing women from reaching high positions.  In Yemen, a humanitarian crisis has pushed political participation from many women’s minds as they struggle to feed their families.  According to an Oxfam report this year, four out of five Yemeni women report that their lives have gotten worse in the past twelve months.  Saudi blogger Hala Al Dosari recounted harassment by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a woman jailed for driving and a youth conference on the empowerment of civil society shut down at the last moment.  Ziada expressed concern about possible Egyptian legislation allowing marriage at 14 and female genital mutilation.  In Tunisia, Khelifa reported on the recent debate about whether women should be described as “complementary” or “equal” to men in the constitution.  Al-Nahda’s draft of Article 28 to the constitution, which used the “complementary” wording, was defeated, but the debate will not be over until the constitution is finalized.

The second panel was intended to address what should be done to solve these problems.  Syrian Honey Al-Sayed of Souriali Radio called for an effort to define equal roles for Syrian women now, before the revolution is over.  Heads nodded in response, given that so many of the speakers had noted how optimistic they were about women’s rights during their revolutions and how things changed afterwards.  Elhaj said that the change in Libya was not because of some Islamist scheme to remove women from the public sphere, but because of a natural reversion to the status of women prior to the revolution.  Al-Sayed argued that Syria might be able to avoid this if there is a large-scale education campaign and civil society organizations are developed now.

Gabool Al-Mutawakel, Youth Leadership Development Foundation co-founder, made a similar argument for working to keep the spirit of the Yemeni revolution going, but she offered new insight:  the problem facing women is the notion of “women’s issues.”  She cited a female politician who preferred to talk about being a woman in politics rather than her policy ideas.  Women will not succeed in Yemeni politics if the only areas about which they can speak with credibility are women’s issues.  Women must not just represent women, but all of Yemen.  Al-Mutawakel suggested we teach women about leadership, not just empowerment.  We should also foster a culture of competition where women learn how to win and lose.  Quotas can have the effect of killing a woman’s motivation to fight for a seat.

It was in this panel that tensions flared.  Hanin Ghaddar, a Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar and editor of NOW News, saw an inherent contradiction between feminism and Islam and argued for separation of religion and state in Lebanon.  The revolution taught her that small changes are no longer acceptable and that we need drastic, radical changes, which an Islamic government cannot offer.  Yassmine ElSayed Hani, Wilson Center Visiting Arab Journalist, argued on the contrary that separation of religion and state is not realistic in Egypt.  Sharia is a way of life that should not be reduced to the troubling laws in the Middle East that are supposedly based on it.  About 80% of the Egyptian population is Muslim, so the government should reflect the majority of the population.  Ghaddar argued in response that a democracy should protect the minority.  Ziada suggested that Egypt may not need a religious government exactly because its population is so religious.

There is agreement about the problems women in the Middle East face, but disagreement on what to do about them.