The last few weeks in the Middle East have been a story of extraordinary courage and heroism. With dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia lying in ruins and the democratic revolt now spreading to Yemen, Bahrain and Libya, it’s not too early to start thinking about what will come next.
The omnipresent fear in Western media is that the newly free countries will be taken over by an Islamist majority. This isn’t an unreasonable concern (although it hardly justifies the West’s decades of supporting brutal, repressive dictators just because they weren’t theocrats). However, I think that at least in these two countries, there’s reason for optimism.
As this article points out, and as I’ve observed previously, one of the newest and most surprising things about the protests was the huge and crucial role played by women. Tunisia, in particular, had a strong tradition of women’s rights – its female citizens were among the first of any Arab country to gain the vote – and high rates of female education and literacy. The ex-dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali gambled that this liberality would keep people pacified, but it had the opposite effect: the educated populace was more able to see his corruption for what it was and less willing to tolerate it, and women joined the marches in vast numbers. Tunisia’s women played such a crucial role in the revolution that even the country’s formerly exiled Islamists feel compelled to recognize their leadership:
Crowds of women in traditional Islamic dress welcomed the long-exiled leader of Tunisia’s Ennahda movement, Rachid Ghannouchi, upon his return to the country Jan. 30.
But, as Radhia Nasraoui, a prominent Tunisian human rights lawyer points out, unlike the Taliban in 1996 or Iran’s mullahs in 1979, Mr. Ghannouchi has felt compelled to repeatedly and publicly pledge to safeguard women’s rights in recent weeks.
“It may be tactical, but the fact that he feels he has to talk this way is a pretty good indication that wanting to roll back women rights is no way to gain support in Tunisia right now,” Ms. Nasraoui said.
Then there’s Egypt. On the surface, there’s less reason for optimism here. Before the revolution, aggressive sexual harassment of Egyptian women was routine and omnipresent, as dramatized by Egyptian director Mohamed Diab in his film 678. The savage sexual assault on Lara Logan in the aftermath of Mubarak’s fall (whether by regime supporters or opponents will probably never be known) was a highly visible example of the brutality too often tolerated in Egyptian society.
But here, too, there are some green sprouts. Chief among these was the way that women fearlessly joined the crowds in Tahrir Square (and also see my earlier post):
Fatma Emam’s mother accused her of wanting to be a man and threatened to disown her if the 28-year-old joined the protests in Tahrir Square. She went anyway.
“There are so many women who like me defied their families,” Emam said after spending five days and four nights in downtown Cairo. “The revolution is not only taking place in Tahrir, it is taking place in every Egyptian house. It is the revolution of fighting the patriarch.”
…The 25-year-old who helped spark the demonstrations with an online video, Asmaa Mahfouz, said her father refused to allow her to stay in the plaza after dark. “No girl of mine spends the night away from home,” Mahfouz said he told her.
In the video, Mahfouz said: “I, a girl, am going down to Tahrir Square. Come down with us and demand your rights.”
I know better than to believe that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood or Ennahda have completely given up their theocratic aims, whatever they say in public. But it also seems clear that they’re biding their time, not wanting to move openly unless they believe they have a good chance of success – and if the Middle East’s young secular revolutionaries remain vigilant, the theocrats may never get that chance. Now that Egypt’s women have tasted real freedom, we can hope, they won’t be quieted – they know perfectly well what they’d stand to lose from the imposition of sharia, and they have the confidence that comes of having toppled one dictatorship already.
This is why groups like the Taliban are so fanatically opposed to schools for girls. The way to keep people under your thumb is to keep them poor, isolated and ignorant – because only then can they be persuaded to believe that no change is ever possible. The more educated a nation’s people are, the more they can look beyond their own circumstances to the wider world and imagine how things could be different. This is true for both men and women, but since patriarchal religions put special emphasis on controlling women’s lives, women’s education is particularly deadly to them. That’s a lesson to keep in mind as these nations begin to rebuild themselves.