October 2006
Women in the Middle East: The Beacon of Change
The advancement of women’s rights in the Middle East is an important gauge for the progress of reform. Under the Middle East’s repressive regimes, women’s liberation will be a sure sign of the advance of universal freedoms. But what political reforms are underway for women’s legal rights across the region? Have pro-reform religious leaders succeeded in promoting new interpretations of Islamic texts regarding women? What roles do women have in the broader movement for political and economic reforms? What are the next steps in the battle for women’s rights?
These and other political, social, and religious questions were addressed at a daylong conference hosted by AEI on October 10. The conference brought together women of different nationalities, ethnic backgrounds, and religious and secular convictions to discuss the prospects for reform and radical change across the region. Participants represented Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Tunisia, Israel, Iran, and Iraq.
Michael A. Ledeen
AEI
When we look at the Middle East, we tend to focus on issues of security, like terrorism or radical Islam. But we may lose sight of other important elements in the region, especially women’s issues. Even though men are assumed to be running the world, change has often originated with revolutionary women in times of crisis.
Keynote Address
Wafa Sultan
Syrian-American writer
In the Palestinian territories in 2003, a mother killed her daughter in a “crime of honor.” The daughter’s offense was to have been raped by her two older brothers. In 2002, Saudi religious police from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice stopped girls from fleeing a burning building because they were not veiled. What vice were they preventing? What virtue were they promoting? Why is this inhumanity allowed to continue?
Sharia law grants men full control over women’s lives. It justifies and legalizes criminal acts committed by Muslim men that are punished forcefully elsewhere in the world. Boys are brought up to believe they are superior to women. A boy is brought up to see his father abuse his mother and sisters, and when he becomes an adult, he repeats this behavior. Women, conversely, are raised to see themselves as handicapped. They are told that their virginity defines their family’s reputation, that their only value lies in their abilities to provide pleasure to their husbands and to give birth to male children.
It is very difficult to free Muslim women in the region because of the pervasive belief that to free them is to act against the will of God. The individual women who have spoken out need to be heard and protected because they are the best candidates to produce social revolution. These women deserve continuous media attention.
At the political level, the liberation of Muslim women is key to the War on Terror. Only free women can produce good men. The United States cannot ally with regimes like Saudi Arabia that treat women as if this were the seventh century.
Panel I: Social and Religious Reforms--The Battle for Women’s Rights
Sawsan Hanish
Social researcher, Libya
Today, widespread violence causes physical and emotional injury and undermines human rights. Every year, 1.6 million women die from violence, and a million more suffer physical and emotional abuse. A female victim of violence, whether suffering from within the family or from the surrounding society, loses her sense of existence, her self-confidence, and her trust in others. Every human on the planet should have the right to be protected from violence.
Libyan laws are somewhat favorable to women. They guarantee maternity leave for women in the workforce and prevent employers from forcing women to perform hard labor. Women can choose their husbands, occupy senior positions in civil society, and receive disability insurance. Libya is also a signatory to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Furthermore, Libya was one of the first countries to sign the protocols on women’s rights attached to the African Charter on Human Rights. Libya remains committed to gender equality.
Regardless of these public strides, women are still marginalized in the family. Males remain completely dominant, and women are not allowed to add their voice. Male authoritarianism means that women do not have the social influence to stand up for themselves. Women who do stand up for themselves risk their reputations, and many others are simply unaware of the concept of gender equality and are thus unable to counter discrimination.
Legal reform and the development of an effective judiciary are important steps toward improving the condition of Libyan women. The media must portray women more positively. Religious leaders must condemn violence against women. The government must conduct research into women’s issues. Education for women must be strengthened.
Amel Grami
University of Manouba, Tunisia
Strict interpretations of Islamic law have been used to justify violence and discrimination against women, but a growing group of educated Muslim women is looking deep into the Quran to find the gender justice they believe was the Prophet Muhammad’s original intent. Women’s Quran study groups have been formed to develop new evaluations of hadith in Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and elsewhere. Their position is that Islamic law is not “God’s law” but rather a human creation, and they analyze it from a feminist perspective. Many secular women prefer the concept of universal human rights to this approach. They believe that anything in the Quran that does not conform to universal human rights must be rejected. But religious women are fighting for rights by using the Quran. Since religion is power, it is logical to work for power through religion--to search for a more progressive sharia-based law.
Unfortunately, feminist readings have been completely rejected by mainstream Islamic scholars, as it is thought that the acceptance of modern values is de facto rejection of the Quran. Feminism is perceived to be incompatible with Islam, and women who reinterpret Islamic law are known as “bad daughters of Islam” or apostates and often receive death threats. In spite of this hostility, women sometimes participate in forums on Islamic law, and they have increasing access to the media. Religious institutions, however, are monopolized by men.
Rasha Shokr
Cairo Radio, Egypt
For a century, the problems of Egyptian women have fallen under the umbrella of problems already associated with the Arab world. But Egypt has its own distinct history and culture of gender equality.
In the nineteenth century, religion was not the main obstacle to women’s liberation in Egypt because it was not yet enshrined. Women wore the veil but more for social and cultural reasons than religious ones, and Jews and Christian Copts also wore it at the time. Egypt was the Hollywood of the East, and its women became dancers, pilots, and scientists. The middle class valued education for all children, male or female, and middle class women asked for and were given full roles in society.
In 1942, the first Egyptian women’s political party was formed; a second was formed seven years later. The battle for women’s rights in Egypt is old, but it was always a civil and constitutional struggle for women’s rights, not a battle over religious texts. The first Egyptian public school for girls was opened in 1873. By 1945, some 45,000 Egyptian girls were enrolled in the 230 public schools across the country.
After the 1952 Gamal Nasser coup, domestic matters became secondary to foreign matters--promoting Arab nationalism and the Palestinian cause surpassed any consideration of social issues. The attention of leaders was elsewhere, and the wealth of the middle class, which had earlier led the drive for women’s rights, eroded under Nasser’s socialism. In 1961, Nasser made Al-Azhar University into an institution of the state and turned its leaders into officials responsible for Islam. After that, all art had to be approved by religious authorities. This revolution implanted religion into the politics of the state and it established military rule, vastly limiting political participation for major groups of the population. The new political climate killed freedom, development, and progress for men and for women.
In the future, the struggle for the liberation of Egyptian women must be disentangled from the wider struggle for Arab women. This has created barriers to women’s liberation in Egypt.
Having half of a society rendered powerless is helpful to a dictatorship. There can be no true development without women and no political or economic gains without women. Creating a favorable political climate is the only way to women’s liberation. Human rights will only prosper when this is the will of a nation and governments take action to ensure favorable conditions for full equality.
Mireille Chidiac-El Hajj
Activist, Lebanon
On September 25, 2005, May Chidiac [Mireille’s sister] was targeted for death in a car bombing but survived the attack. “Why me?” she asked, emerging from a coma; she now uses artificial limbs. Events like this show us that the War on Terror is not just an American war, but a much wider conflict with deep effects for people all over the world.
Lebanese women suffer from domestic violence, sexual abuse, and discrimination, and the law does not criminalize this violence but permits it as legal “honor crimes.” There are, however, different conditions for women in different areas of the country and among Lebanon’s many religious groups.
The following steps must be taken to improve conditions for Lebanese women: First, universal education must be instituted everywhere. Today, it is available only in big cities but is not available elsewhere. Second, children must be taught that women can be full citizens, active in parliament and in commerce, rather than only wives and mothers. Third, the media needs to condemn the abuse of women. Fourth, there must be dialogue between husbands and wives. And finally, there must be dialogue between countries.
Panel II: Political Reforms--Legal Rights for Women
Ruthie Blum
Jerusalem Post
Unlike the women from Arab countries who are here today, an Israeli woman did not need courage to come to this conference. Israeli women are free to criticize their state, religion, and leaders without any fear; they risk no harm by exercising their will or participating in society as actively as men. Likewise, Israeli women’s individual rights are protected under law from infringement by their male counterparts whether or not they are related to them. Differing from its regional neighbors in all other respects, Israel’s connection to the Middle East is purely geographical in nature.
Promoting the status of women in Islamic countries is the most effective strategy for inducing a positive, moderating transformation in Islamic society and for eroding the foundations of fundamentalist fanaticism. In the struggle for advancing women’s rights, Israeli women can be the beacon of change and reform in the Middle East.
Mariam Memarsadeghi
Freedom House
Iran’s antidemocratic nature is buttressed by an ideological regime and above all rooted in a fascist constitution. The Iranian constitution positions the nation’s supreme leader unchecked above all other state institutions, creates those institutions to serve the supreme leader in defeating democratic demands and aspirations, and contains clauses which formally and explicitly deny equality to female citizens. Rather than non-state actors or a movement threatening women’s rights in Iran, it is the state itself which is the chief impediment to progress in the Middle East.
Since the Iranian Revolution, the compulsory hijab led to the degeneration of women’s rights. As women were penalized for not adhering to the dress code, the exclusion of women in education and the workforce was systematically realized through the enforcement of hijab. Women in high-ranking positions were executed or demoted, and the female half of Iran’s population withdrew into the home. Excluded from political dialogue and at a loss for any other outlets, undercover Islamist feminists found that they could make ground in fighting for their civil liberties by drawing on Islamic rhetoric. One such feat was the revival of the 1967 liberal family law that had been repealed following the revolution.
Worldwide preoccupation with the Iranian nuclear issue serves as a suitable decoy for international censure as the republic continues to violate women’s rights. While the media focuses on U.S.-Iranian relations, there is no coverage of the near complete eradication of reformist nongovernmental organizations, publications, books, periodicals, and independent newspapers in the past two years.
Shortly before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election as president, the largest protest since 1979 was held in Tehran when a declaration signed by ninety women’s groups and 2,000 women protestors demanded changes to the constitution. Women in Iran are fully conscious of the fact that their equality hinges on fundamental reform of the constitution, yet despite strong articulation of their demands, there have been only setbacks since Ahmadinejad’s rise to power.
Pascale Warda
Iraqi Council of Representatives
Although Iraqis were liberated from the terrible regime of Saddam Hussein, their expectations for democracy were never realized, and their situation seems only to have worsened. Iraqi women have a history of democratic and political activism dating back to when Iraq’s first female minister was appointed to government long before Saddam's regime came to power. More recently, Iraqi women participated in countless meetings and demonstrations demanding equal and just representation across all administrative and official areas for the 55 to 60 percent of the population which they make up. Their efforts, while not entirely met, succeeded in implementing a minimum quota of 25 percent female representation in Parliament.
Yet the events of the last few years have been discouraging to the women’s movement in Iraq. The reversal of earlier strides is tangible in the steady reduction of female parliamentary representation: where there were once seven female ministers, the number shrunk to six and then dropped to a mere three, where it now stands. Another disappointment has been the common practice of appointing unqualified women--oftentimes relatives--who serve to simply fill the quota requirement, rather than allowing capable and educated women to enter Iraqi politics.
In their battle over women’s rights, Iraqi feminists have spent the past year focusing on citizenship, a universal term that is part of the political language used in Iraq’s constitution. The term is empowering due to its democratic underpinnings and can be used as a compelling tool in abolishing the second-class status of Iraqi women and the hypocrisy of their government.
In attempts at democratization, Iraq faces challenges similar to those of other Islamic countries in the region. Officials repeatedly return to the same unanswered question: where is the common ground between Islamic and democratic principles? Iraqi women differ from other Middle Eastern women in that they carry on with their human rights objectives, albeit with caution, despite the suppression and violence they often encounter.
AEI interns Daniel Dale and Daphne Lemonis prepared this summary.
