Egypt: A Revolution in Women’s Rights Is Not Over
On the first anniversary of Egypt’s January 25 revolution which saw the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak, Ch16 brings excerpts of Connection Point Manager Yasmina Mrabet’s interview with Dr. Laura Bier, Professor at Georgia Tech, about her thoughts on the role of Islamic feminism and the challenges and opportunities for women in post-revolutionary Egypt.
This extract is from peacexpeace.org. Views expressed are the author’s own
Given the gains made by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egyptian elections, many are asking how this will impact women’s rights. What are your thoughts on the challenges and opportunities that women might face in Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood?
I think it’s still too early in the process to tell. I think the Brotherhood is evolving and changing to respond to a political and social landscape which is itself undergoing rapid and radical transformation. A lot will depend on the results of the election and where the Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party try to position themselves within the political landscape.
The Muslim Brotherhood is no longer an outlawed organization operating in an authoritarian political landscape, but is an official political party in an emerging democracy that has to be accountable to the voting population in order to win elections. This may prompt them towards moderation on women’s issues, particularly if they chose to position themselves as a more moderate Islamic alternative to the Salafi Nour party. There’s a tendency to assume, just because the Muslim Brotherhood identifies itself as an Islamic party, that a Brotherhood parliamentary majority will signal some sort of death knell for women’s rights.
That kind of assessment begins with the erroneous yet all too common presumption that there is some fundamental incompatibility between Islam and rights for women, or that there is no way for an Islamic party to present a program which recognizes women’s civic and social rights or accords them any political agency. That’s simply not the case.
Historically, the Brotherhood has advocated for women’s education, recognized women’s right to work, and promoted a vision of marriage as a relationship based on mutual respect and affection. Nor does the Brotherhood exclude political participation of women. One of the few women who will likely be seated in the new Egyptian parliament is a Freedom and Justice Party member, and the Brotherhood’s female wing, the Muslim Sisters, has been taking a more vocal and active role in the organization than they have in decades. It will be important to see if this translates to more women being accorded real leadership positions in the party and if they will be responsive in a meaningful way to the needs and demands of their female constituencies.
What are the greatest areas of need for women in Egypt, and how can the global community help to support Egyptian women in meeting those needs?
In a lot of ways the needs of Egyptian women are the needs of all Egyptians. There needs to be a true process of democratization which includes the rights that I talked about above—the right to protest, to have their voices count in a substantive way in the political process, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom from torture. And those rights can’t only be on paper; they have to be an integral part of the practice of democratization itself.
The challenges that women face in realizing and practicing those rights may be somewhat different than the challenges men face, but the needs are the same. The actions of the military council which is ruling Egypt have demonstrated that fundamental political changes are hardly a foregone conclusion. It’s important not to assume that the revolution is over just because Mubarak is gone. In many respects, the ancient regime is still in place. Moreover, given the vast social and economic inequalities and hardships which are the reality for the vast majority of Egypt’s population, political rights will loose a lot of their meaning without an equal commitment to social justice.
The case of South Africa is instructive. Apartheid is over and the system of racialized segregation and hierarchy has ended, but to a large degree, it has been replaced by a system defined by the informal barriers of class, wealth, and poverty. If the political system changes, but the economic and social system do not, then the revolution will have failed. The best way for the global community to support Egyptian women is to respect and support the process of democratization in all of its messiness.
There are those who caution against true democracy in Egypt on the grounds that the strong showing of the Muslim Brotherhood would mean the oppression of women, Copts, and other groups. I’ve already pointed out the problems inherent in such a view. Instead of using a liberal vision of “women’s rights” as a marker of whether Egyptians deserve political freedom, we need to be asking Egyptian women themselves what they want and need, with the understanding that there’s no necessary agreement between Egyptian women themselves. Being in solidarity with Egyptian women and their revolution means doing the hard work of recognizing and valuing those differences.
Connection Point is the powerful new Peace X Peace initiative that links Arab and Muslim women with women from Western countries in a vibrant online community.
Find the full interview here.