Women's Rights in the Middle East

How have women’s rights in the Middle East advanced, how are women doing in terms of human rights and legal rights? What can be done to advance the progress of women’s rights in this region?

                                                Barry Gilheany

This paper describes the current state of play regarding women’s rights in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) Region.  It assesses the advances that have been made and examines factors affecting the progress of women’s emancipation in the Region.  In doing this it looks at state formation and the influence of Islam in the MENA Region as it has affected women’s rights.  It posits a way forward for women’s rights in the Region in the embrace by women’s movements of new social media technology in the context of recent events such as The Arab Spring.

It is fair to state that across the MENA Region the majority of women are still, despite recent engagement in the public sphere, treated as second-class citizens.  Grinding poverty, illiteracy and social and legal discrimination still represent substantial obstacles to the full emancipation of women (World Bank, 2013).  The following are examples of the discriminations faced by women in the personal sphere.

 In several MENA countries the legal minimum age of marriage is lower than that for boys.  For example it is 15 in both Bahrain and Kuwait and in Iran it is 13.  In Saudi Arabia and Yemen a legal age of marriage for girls does not exist. Measures to protect women from domestic violence remain poorly implemented in Egypt and Morocco  In many MENA countries including Iran and Syria, citizenship laws prevent access to property, welfare and employment opportunities for  women married to foreign men (World Bank, 2013 p.16). In Jordan, despite the fact that 50 female judges currently preside in the country’s court system, there is seemingly negligible enforcement of the penal code regarding domestic violence, rape, honour killing and female genital mutilation (Basch-Harod, 2011).

It should be emphasised that the majority of MENA countries offer constitutional guarantees of gender equality and non-discrimination but these are often undermined by conflicting and discriminatory laws as described above.  But mention should also be made of recent successful challenges to such laws by women’s groups.  For example, in 2005 the Kuwaiti Constitutional Court overturned that country’s 1962 Passport Law requiring a husband’s signature to his wife’s passport application.  The comprehensive family law reform in Morocco in 2004 striking down, among other things, discriminatory sections of the 1957 family code regarding polygamy and guardianship followed decades of campaigning by women’s groups.  (World Bank, 2013 p.17).

During the last decade also, progress has been made across the Region in the extension of women’s suffrage and in their right to run for public office. In Kuwait, women acquired full political rights in 2005.  Electoral quotas have been introduced for women in parliamentary and municipal elections and the governing bodies of all major political parties in Iraq, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories. In Tunisia, women now occupy a quarter of seats in the new Constituent Assembly. Saudi Arabia has granted women the right to vote and run for office (World Bank, 2013 pp.9-10).

Notwithstanding these recent gains, the patriarchal nature of these laws have severely impacted on the women’s participation in the public sphere, measured principally by the representation of women in legislative bodies and labour forces.  Across the Region, women hold approximately 7 per cent of parliamentary seats (World Bank, 2013 p.9).  Only 25.2 percent of women aged 15 or over participate in the labour force.   This is despite the progress made in gender specific development outcomes since 1970 – female literacy, primary and secondary school enrolment rates, maternal and infant mortality and, in the last decade, decline in fertility rates (World Bank, 2013 pp.5-7).

It is often taken as a given that the inferior status of women in MENA countries is related to the ubiquity of Islam in the Region. However Islam is not uniquely patriarchal compared to other religions nor is it monolithic.  The application of Islamic law in the Region varies from the ultra-conservative religiosity prevalent in Saudi Arabia to the secular state in Tunisia.  A potential ideological tool for the advancement of women’s rights in the MENA Region and other Muslim majority parts of the worlds is Islamic feminism. Theorists such as Omaima Abou-Bak of Morocco and Zaynab Radwan of Egypt are deconstructing the male interpretations of the Koranic texts that have caused so much gender inequality in Muslim societies and are working on issues relating to divorce, inheritance, court testimonies and adoption.  In mapping this way forward, Hatem takes issue with iconic Arab feminists such as the Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi who have described Islamic forms of dress such as the hijab as a barrier to reason.  Hatem argues that this internalised Orientalist view of the wearing of the hijab as a marker of the passivity of Muslim women ignores the empirical evidence that women who wear the hijab share the educational and career aspirations of secular Arab/Muslim women and their aspirations for marriage and family (Hatem in Makdisi, J et al , 2014).

Feminist writers from the MENA region (Hatem, 2014 pp.5-13; Moghadam, 1993) point to Arab state formation as the primary causal factor in the uneven advancement of women’s rights there. In the post-colonial era a ‘silent bargain’ was made in many Arab states between authoritarian regimes and upper-and middle-class women whereby these classes of women were provided with expanded rights to education and public work and were recruited as ‘femocrats’ (feminist bureaucrats) within governmental structures.  In turn Arab feminists supported these regimes which enhanced their standing as socially progressive states.  This process was especially apparent in Tunisia, Egypt, Ba’athist Iraq and Syria, Algeria and Libya (Hatem, 2014 p.12)

As the beneficiaries of these informal pacts, middle and upper class women tended to remain silent regarding the needs of working-class women.  A case in point was the criticism made, in the wake of the overthrow of her husband in Egypt in early 2011, by former employees of the National Council of Women (NCW), a body dominated by Suzanne Mubarak for three decades, that it had failed to address core socio-economic issues such as sexual harassment, equal pay and proportional representation in government (Basch-Harod, 2011 p.119).

It is in the light of these limitations of ‘state feminism’ that the participation of women’s rights activists in the various pro-democracy movements generated by the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings of 2011-12 is so critical to the advance of women’s agendas in the Middle East.  Two features of the Arab Spring (and the earlier Green protests in Iran in 2009) are especially important: (a) the presence of new information media including mobile phones and satellite broadcasts as a means of bypassing state control of the traditional news outlets (print media, TV and radio) and (b) the intertwining of women’s movements with broader social movements for social change (Gheygtanchi and Moghadam, 2014). For example, by uploading video clips to YouTube of state brutality against activists in Iran in 2009 women’s rights activists were able to change the nature of the news in the wake of the expulsion of foreign reporters after the first week of the Green Protests against the conduct of the Presidential election that year.  This use of cyberspace appears to have created the phenomenon of “accidental” feminism whereby women go online to connect with peers and then encounter social issues discussed widely on social networking sites.  A case in point is the case of Amina Filial, a young woman in Morocco who committed suicide following an abusive marriage to her rapist and which provoked many Moroccans to protest about the injustices suffered by such poor women (Gheygtanchi and Moghadam, 2014 p.37)

In these ways, cyberspace has created an opportunity structure for women activists within and across borders.  It facilitates an anonymity that enables the promotions of women’s rights issues across domestic and international social space.  Women’s access to the new media technology in MENA and their contributions to the virtual public sphere that has emerged as a result may help to transform attitudes towards women’s rights. I would argue that it is vital for women’s rights activists to tie their claims wider social and political demands for democratisation in MENA  as they have done in, for example, in the campaigns against sexual harassment and post-revolutionary exclusion of women in Egypt and in Tunisian feminists’ insistence on maintaining a presence in governance (Gheygtanchi and Moghadam, 2014 p.18).

This essay has briefly surveyed the state of women’s rights in the polities and legal systems across the countries of the MENA Region.  It has connected the unevenness of progress in this area to gendered legal codes in many MENA countries and to the nationalisation of women’s agendas by authoritarian Arab states.  It has identified route maps for women’s rights activists through transnational cyberactivism; connection to wider emancipatory struggles in the Region and through progressive interpretations of Islam. Despite with the recent chilling of the Arab Spring, the genie is certainly out of the bottle as regards women’s rights activism in the Middle East and will not be put back in again.

Bibliography:

World Bank, 2013 Opening Doors. Gender Equality and Development in the Middle East and North Africa MENA Development Report Washington DC, World Bank.

Moghadam, V, 1993 Modernising Women. Gender & Social Change in the Middle East. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Hatem, M, What Do Women Want? A Critical Mapping of Future Directions for Arab Feminisms pp.3-18 in Makdisi, J, Bayoumi, N. and Sidawi, R.,(Eds)  2014 Arab Feminism. Gender and Equality in the Middle East London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.

Gheytanchi, E. and Moghadam, V. (2014) Women, Social Protests, and the New Media Activism in the Middle East and North Africa. International Review of Modern Sociology 40(1), pp. 1-26

Basch-Harod, H. (2011) Women of the Middle East.  The Jihad Within. Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture. 17 (3/4) pp. 116-121