An Arab Spring for Women
The Missing Story from the Middle East
By Shahin Cole and Juan Cole
Tom Dispatch
April 26, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175384/tomgram%3A_shahin_and_juan_cole%2C_the_women%27s_movement_in_the_middle_east_/

The "Arab Spring" has received copious attention in the
American media, but one of its crucial elements has been
largely overlooked: the striking role of women in the
protests sweeping the Arab world. Despite inadequate
media coverage of their role, women have been and often
remain at the forefront of those protests.

As a start, women had a significant place in the
Tunisian demonstrations that kicked off the Arab Spring,
often marching up Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis, the
capital, with their husbands and children in tow. Then,
the spark for the Egyptian uprising that forced
President Hosni Mubarak out of office was a January 25th
demonstration in Cairo's Tahrir Square called by an
impassioned young woman via a video posted on Facebook.
In Yemen, columns of veiled women have come out in Sanaa
and Taiz to force that country's autocrat from office,
while in Syria, facing armed secret police, women have
blockaded roads to demonstrate for the release of their
husbands and sons from prison.

But with such bold gestures go fears.  As women look to
the future, they worry that on the road to new,
democratic parliamentary regimes, their rights will be
discarded in favor of male constituencies, whether
patriarchal liberals or Muslim fundamentalists.  The
collective memory of how women were in the forefront of
the Algerian revolution for independence from France
from 1954 to 1962, only to be relegated to the margins
of politics thereafter, still weighs heavily.

Historians will undoubtedly debate the causes of the
Arab Spring for decades.  Among them certainly are high
rates of unemployment for the educated classes,
neoliberal policies of privatization and union-busting,
corruption in high places, soaring food and energy
prices, economic hardship caused by the shrinking of
employment opportunities in the Gulf oil states and
Europe (thanks to the 2008 global financial meltdown),
and decades of frustration with petty, authoritarian
styles of governing.  In their roles as workers and
professionals as well as family caregivers, women have
suffered directly from all these discontents and more,
while watching their children and husbands suffer, too.

In late January, freelance journalist Megan Kearns
pointed out the relative inattention American television
and most print and Internet media gave to women and, by
and large, the absence of images of women protesting in
Tunisia and Egypt. Yet women couldn't have been more
visible in the big demonstrations of early to mid-
January in the streets of Tunis, whether accompanying
their husbands and children or forming distinct protest
lines of their own -- and given Western ideas of
oppressed Arab women, this should in itself have been
news.

Women Take to the Streets from Tunisia to Syria

To start with Tunisia, women there have, in fact, been
in the vanguard of protest movements and social change
since the drive to gain independence from France of the
late 1940s. Tunisian women have a relatively high
literacy rate (71%), represent more than one-fifth of
the country's wage earners, and make up 43% of the
nearly half-million members of 18 local unions.  Most of
these unionized women work in the education, textile,
health, city services, and tourism industries.  The
General Union of Tunisian Workers (French acronym: UGTT)
had increasingly come into conflict with the country's
strongman, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and so its rank and
file enthusiastically joined the street protests.
Today, the UGTT continues to pressure the government
formed after Ben Ali fled to move forward with genuine
reforms.

In all of this, women opinion-leaders played an
important part.  To take one example, although like most
prominent Tunisians movie star Hend Sabry had been
coerced into supporting Ben Ali and his mafia-like in-
laws, when the anti-government rallies began she broke
with the autocrat, warning him in a Facebook post
against ordering his security forces to fire on the
protesters.  Later, she admitted to being terrified at
making such a public gesture, lest her relatives in
Tunis be harmed or she be permanently exiled from her
homeland.

In Egypt, the passionate video blog or "vlog" of Asmaa
Mahfouz that called on Egyptians to turn out massively
on January 25th in Tahrir Square went viral, playing a
significant role in the success of that event.  Mahfouz
appealed to Egyptians to honor four young men who,
following the example of Mohammed Bouazizi (in an act
which sparked the Tunisian uprisings), set themselves
afire to protest the Mubarak regime.

Although the secret police had already dismissed them as
"psychopaths," she insisted otherwise, demanding a
country where people could live in dignity, not "like
animals."  According to estimates, at least 20% of the
crowds that thronged Tahrir Square that first week were
made up of women, who also turned out in large numbers
for protests in the Mediterranean port of Alexandria.
Leil-Zahra Mortada's celebrated Facebook album of
women's participation in the Egyptian revolution gives a
sense of just how varied and powerful that turnout was.

As in Tunisia, Egyptian women make up a little more than
one-fifth of wage-earning workers -- and labor has long
been a powerful force for change in that country. Before
they began to mobilize around the Tahrir Square
protests, Egyptian workers had staged over 3,000 strikes
since 2004, with women sometimes taking the lead.
During the height of the protests against the rule of
long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak, unionized workers even
formed a new, nationwide umbrella trade union.

In Libya, women's protests proved central to the
movement of entire cities out of the control of Col.
Muammar Gaddafi, as with Dirna in the western part of
the country in February.  What makes the prominence of
women demonstrators there so remarkable is that city's
reputation as a stronghold of Muslim fundamentalism.
The abuse of women, a central issue in countries like
Libya, even burst into consciousness when a recent law-
school graduate from a middle-class family in Tobruk,
Iman al-Obeidi, broke into a government press conference
in Tripoli to charge that Gaddafi's troops had detained
her at a checkpoint and then raped her.  Her plight
provoked women's demonstrations against the regime in
the rebel-held cities of Benghazi and Tobruk.

On April 15th, Yemeni president for life Ali Abdullah
Saleh scolded women for "inappropriately" mixing in
public with men at the huge demonstrations then being
staged in the capital, Sanaa, as well as in the cities
of Taiz and Aden. In this way, the issue of women's
place in the mass protests against decades of autocracy
was, for the first time, explicitly broached by a high
political figure -- and the response from women couldn't
have been clearer.  They came out in unprecedented
numbers throughout the country, and even in the
countryside, day after day, accusing the president of
"besmirching their honor" by implying that they were
behaving brazenly.  (It is a longstanding value in the
Arab world to avoid impugning the honor of a chaste
woman.)  In other words, they turned his attempt to
invoke Arab mores about women's seclusion from the
public sphere into a rallying cry against him.

Women of a certain age who lived in the southern part of
the country found the president's taunt particularly
painful, given that they had grown up in the People's
Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), ruled by a
communist regime that promoted women's rights.  They
were not subjected to more conservative norms until
Saleh united the PDRY with northern Yemen in 1990.
Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, only about a quarter of
Yemeni women can read and write, only 17% have finished
high school, and only 5% are wage earners, though most
work hard all their lives, many on farms.  Still, in
urban areas such as Aden, Taiz or Sanaa, middle and
upper middle class women have an important place in the
professions and business, or as schoolteachers, and more
than a quarter of college students are women.

Faced with the power of outraged women, Saleh quickly
backed off, maintaining that, as a secular Arab
nationalist, he believed they should be full
participants in the political affairs of the nation.  He
had simply been wondering aloud, he claimed, how members
of the opposition Islah Party, a fundamentalist Muslim
organization, were so willing to allow women to march in
the streets against him when they favored women's
seclusion on all other occasions.

In Syria as well, on several occasions, women have shown
their strength and bravery, turning out in forceful
demonstrations -- sometimes without men, but with their
children in tow. Near the town of Bayda, for instance,
thousands of women shouting "We will not be humiliated!"
cut off a coastal road to protest a heavy-handed
government policy in which the secret police of
President Bashar al-Assad had arrested their
demonstrating male relatives. On other occasions, Syrian
women have staged all-female marches to demand democracy
and changes in regime policy.

Protecting Women's Gains

Despite the centrality of women activists to the Arab
Spring, they have seldom been recognized as of real
significance by most of the male politicians who will
undoubtedly benefit from what they have accomplished.
It was, for example, striking that women were without
representation on the commission appointed to revise the
Egyptian constitution in preparation for September
elections, and that only one woman (a Mubarak holdover
at that) was appointed to the 29-person interim cabinet.

In addition, patriarchal forces such as Muslim
fundamentalist groups and clergy are determined that
women's rights should not be expanded in the wake of
these political upheavals.  As an omen in the wind, when
a modest-sized group of 200 women showed up at Tahrir
Square on March 8th to commemorate International Women's
Day, they found themselves attacked by militant
religious young men who shouted that they should go home
and do the laundry.

Women's groups and progressive movements are
understandably apprehensive about the possibility that,
in Tunisia and Egypt, Muslim fundamentalist movements
will become more influential in parliament and push
through laws to the disadvantage of both women and
secularists.  Yet they have been remarkably unwilling to
let such considerations deter them from embracing
democracy, something secular-leaning dictators Ben Ali
and Mubarak had warned them against.

The likelihood of an actual Muslim fundamentalist
takeover in either country remains minimal for the
foreseeable future.  In Egypt, the military government
has so far retained a Mubarak-era ban on the Muslim
Brotherhood putting up candidates under its own banner.
As a result, its candidates will run as the
representatives of other small parties.  In addition,
the organization has pledged to contest parliamentary
seats in only a limited number of electoral districts,
so as to allay middle-class fears that their goal is an
Iran-style fundamentalist takeover of the country.
Admittedly, Muslim conservatism will likely burgeon as a
political current more generally in Egypt, whatever the
shape of the next parliament, posing a challenge to
women's rights.

For instance, some Brotherhood officials have let slip
that they will indeed be working for the implementation
of a medieval form of Islamic law, which would include
the segregation of women and men in the workplace, while
the mufti or chief adviser on Islamic law to the
government in Egypt has called for a "review" of secular
personal status laws that favor women, and which had
been supported by Suzanne Mubarak, the fashionable wife
of the deposed dictator.

In Tunisia, the long years of repression under Ben Ali
left the leading fundamentalist group, al-Nahda or the
Renaissance Party, weakened.  In any case its leader
Rashid Ghannouchi has been speaking of
institutionalizing a "Turkish model" and says that,
unlike the Egyptian Brotherhood, he supports the right
of a woman to become the country's president.

In this, he is looking to former Turkish fundamentalists
like Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gul who, tired of
being imprisoned by and butting heads with the secular
Turkish establishment, founded the Justice and
Development Party.  Since coming to power in 2002, they
have fought for a pluralistic system as a way of making
a place for more traditional Muslims in society and
politics without pushing for the implementation of
medieval Muslim legal codes.

Still, as backlash reactions like the attack on the
International Women's Day protest have set in, activists
on women's issues and progressives are wondering how to
ensure that women's gains this spring not be rolled
back.  In Egypt, prominent newscaster and critic of the
Mubarak regime Buthaina Kamel has her own idea about how
to gain women's rights in a new, more democratic
environment.  She is running for president, something
inconceivable in the Mubarak era.

Even if her run gets little traction, her candidacy is
nevertheless deeply symbolic and historic -- and another
strikingly brave act by a woman in this new era in the
Arab world.  (Her decision is, of course, opposed by the
Muslim Brotherhood.) Other Egyptian women are hoping
that the constitution can be rewritten to strengthen
women's rights, and that the 64 seats set aside for
women in the previous parliament will be retained.

Politicians in the transitional government of Tunisia,
for decades the most progressive Arab country with
regard to women's rights, are determined to protect the
public role of women by making sure they are well
represented in the new legislature. Elections are now
planned for July 24th, and a high commission was
appointed to set electoral rules. That body has already
announced that party lists will have to maintain parity
between male and female candidates.

In such a list system, you don't vote for an individual
but a party, which has published an ordered list of its
candidates.  If the list gets 10% of the vote
nationally, it is awarded 10 percent of the seats in
parliament, and can go down its ordered list until it
fills all those seats.  Parity for women means that
every other candidate on the ordered list should be a
woman, ensuring them high representation in the
legislature.  This procedure is sometimes called a
"zipper" gender quota.  Quotas for female legislators
are common in Scandinavia and in the global South.

Although the Tunisian requirement for gender parity
remains controversial in some quarters, Ghannouchi's al-
Nahda Party recently came out in support of it.  In
contrast, Abdelwaheb El Hani, leader of the newly
founded right-of-center party al-Majd, complained that
the rule was "a violation of freedom of electoral
choice," and insisted that he doubted it would be
effective in promoting women's representation.  In
contrast, the leftist al-Tajdid (Renewal) Party praised
the move as "historic" and pledged to make women's
equality an "irreversible accomplishment and an
effective reality in Tunisian political life."  Indeed,
al-Tajdid wants an explicit equal rights amendment put
into the constitution.

Giving Women a Fighting Chance 

The Arab Spring has proven an epochal period of activism
and change for women, recalling the role of early
feminists in the 1919 Egyptian movement for independence
from Britain, or the important place of women in the
Algerian Revolution.  The sheer numbers of politically
active women in this series of uprisings, however, dwarf
their predecessors.  That this female element in the
Arab Spring has drawn so little comment in the West
suggests that our own narratives of, and preoccupations
with, the Arab world -- religion, fundamentalism, oil
and Israel -- have blinded us to the big social forces
that are altering the lives of 300 million people.

Women have been aided by this generation's advances in
education and the professions, by the prominence of
articulate women anchors on satellite television
networks like Aljazeera, and by the rise of the Internet
and social media.  Women can assert leadership roles in
cyberspace that young men's dominance of the public
sphere might have hampered in city squares.

Their prominence in the labor movements and at the
public rallies in Tunisia and Egypt, moreover,
underlines how much more of a public role they now have
than is usually acknowledged.  Even the trend toward
wearing a headscarf among women in Egypt during the past
two decades has been seen by some social scientists as a
step forward.  It has been a way for women to enter the
public sphere and work outside the home in greater
numbers than ever before while maintaining a claim on
conservative ideals of chastity and piety.

Women activists of the Arab Spring have come from all
social classes, since it has been a mass movement.
Middle and upper class women often focus their political
energies on issues of political representation and on
laws affecting women's equality.  Seeking constitutional
guarantees of electoral parity is one possible way of
responding to any patriarchal political backlash.

Working class women are particularly concerned with
wages and workers' rights.  Stronger unions would
improve women's prospects for greater rights.  Women's
health, literacy, and material wellbeing are concerns of
all women.  During the age of the dictators, the
nation's wealth was often usurped by a narrow elite of
politically connected families.  A democratization of
politics could potentially lead to more state resources
being devoted to women and the poor.

Keep in mind that women such as Buthaina Kamel knew the
risks when they called for Mubarak to step down.
Whatever their patronizing appeals to feminist themes,
authoritarian regimes like Mubarak's and Ben Ali's
politically oppressed and stole from everyone in
society, including women, and they had proved
increasingly unable to deliver the social services and
employment on which women and their families
fundamentally depend for a better life.  Before, women
could be marginalized at will by the dictators whenever
they made demands on the regime.  Now, at least, they
have a fighting chance.

Shahin Cole holds an LL.B. from Punjab University Law
School in Pakistan and has lived in Egypt and Yemen.

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of
History and the director of the Center for South Asian
Studies at the University of Michigan.  His latest book,
Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised
paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the
Informed Comment website.

Copyright 2011 Shahin and Juan Cole

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