Opinion: Egypt: Keep the crusade for women’s rights alive
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It was inspiring to witness women protest alongside men in Egypt; at the time, it seemed like a movement within a movement. But that swell has since crashed, in great part because of Lara Logan and other female correspondents who’ve bravely and dutifully shed light on the heinous reality of living in a place that treats women like open-to-all sex organs.
And now, another reality check: In Wednesday’s Foreign section, Bob Drogin told the story of Mariam Nekiwi, a young woman who, like Logan, was also a victim of sexual harassment on the day Hosni Mubarak stepped down.
First someone grabbed her groin, she said. Other hands groped the rest of her body, pinching hard and yanking at her clothes. She was shoved one way and then the other. The frenzy was so sudden, the crush so stifling, that she could barely see. She shouted, and then screamed. The reaction was swift. ‘People started yelling at me to be quiet,’ recalled Nekiwi, a 24-year-old video editor, still shaken by the ordeal. ‘They said: ‘Don’t tarnish the revolution. Don’t make a scene.’ They said: ‘We are men. We’re sorry. Just go now.’ ‘
That’s right. Men were rendering an innocent woman helpless after they’d spent 18 days rallying against that very feeling. In that moment, those men silenced her to satisfy their own agenda. Sound familiar?
‘The respite we saw at Tahrir was temporary,’ Nehad Abul Komsan, head of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, told Drogin. ‘It means a revolution doesn’t end all our problems.’
Now, we’re left wondering not just what will become of Egypt, but also, what’ll become of its women as they remain edged out of the constitutional reform discussions. For all Hosni Mubarak’s corrupt ways, he did play a positive role in Egypt’s feminism movement, and now he’s gone.
‘The irony is that Egypt is the birthplace of Arab feminism, which in the first half of the 20th century put much energy into unveiling women,’ writes Isobel Coleman in an Opinion piece for the Washington Post. One threat, Coleman continues, is Salafism:
The rise of Salafism, a particularly conservative form of the faith propagated by Saudi Arabia, should worry Egyptian women’s groups. In recent years, tensions between secularists and Salafis have been rising, with Salafis calling for full veiling of women and gender segregation in universities. The Salafis’ following is evident in the rising number of Egyptian women wearing the niqab, the face-covering veil, long black abayas and even gloves on their hands to avoid physical contact with men. With Hosni Mubarak gone, activists will now have to contend with hard-core politics in a way that has been missing from Egypt’s Potemkin parliament. Controversial legislation, like the equal right to divorce that was passed in 2000, will come under pressure from Islamist lawmakers who fiercely opposed the bill. (Tunisia is the only other Arab country that grants women the right.) Women’s groups can no longer fall back upon a sympathetic Mubarak regime, which often sided with their cause.
What women must do, argues Rachel Newcomb in USA Today, is keep the spirit of activism alive. Yes, women have a long way to go, but they’re not starting from scratch.
In fact, they make up more than 30% of the workforce and, in some fields, such as medicine, women graduate from universities in equal numbers to men. Even so, 45% are illiterate. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report ranks Egypt 120 out of 128 countries in gender equality.
Newcomb also urges the U.S. to withhold its annual $1.5 billion aid package to Egypt if it fails to reform as a ‘truly free civil society, one in which women are allowed to take full part in the remaking of the country.’
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--Alexandra Le Tellier
