• Can there be democracy with marginalization?  - Rola Dashti
Women in Kuwait won their battle against the ideology of Islamic extremism and terrorism.

• Tokenism or real participation?  - Haleh Esfandiari
Women activists feel the quota system in parliaments can be an important instrument for breaking down barriers.

• Women politicians or pseudo men?  - Ghada Karmi
The issue of women's rights is one of equality, not emulation, whether emulation of the West or emulation of men.

Can there be democracy with marginalization?
 Rola Dashti

For 40 years women in Kuwait have fought for their political rights. That fight culminated in success on May 16, 2005 when women were granted the vote. In view of the fact that Kuwait has invested heavily and indiscriminately in human capital during the last 50 years so as to offer its male and female citizens free education and health, we are appalled that it also discriminated against women for so long by having only the male population participate in political life. Kuwaiti men were allowed to vote and run for various political offices, were appointed to cabinet positions, and participated in the country's decision-making process.

Why did women's involvement in the political process in Kuwait lag behind for so long? Why were women marginalized in public life? Was Islam used to empower women or to reinforce male chauvinism? Were culture and tradition a hindrance to women's activism and progress? An examination of the women's suffragist movement can provide some answers to these questions.

We perceive women as a pillar of prosperity, development, freedom, and democracy. When the women's movement began 40 years ago in Kuwait, Islamists colluded with traditionalists to limit and minimize the role of women and terrorize any member of society who strayed from their line of thinking. To such Islamists, the perfect role for women is to stay at home, raise children, take care of the house, and be subservient to their husbands--under the false pretence that this is dictated by religious requirements. Women who contradicted this perception were terrorized psychologically and socially. This is actually what happened to all of us suffragists who wanted women to play an active role in society and in the decision-making process.

For a closed society like Kuwait's, social and psychological terrorism is as bad as physical terrorism, if not worse. Women were terrorized in the name of Islam as being anti-religious to the extent of being blasphemous, anti-patriotic agents of the West, destroyers of the social fabric, anti-family, and promoters of homosexuality and adultery. We were continually and savagely attacked just because we wanted women to be involved in politics by granting us our constitutional political right to vote, run in national elections, and become active participants in public life.

The Islamist extremists managed their social terrorism and savage attacks on women by abusing Islam in order to gain support at the grassroots level from ordinary citizens who are traditionalist and conservative and whose knowledge of religion is limited. They kept slogans about how Islam respects the role of women, and how Islamists are the protectors of women and do not want them to be sexual objects. But in reality, these slogans were used simply to hide their inability to accept women as partners in development and democracy-building and to reinforce and advance male chauvinist society.

But Kuwaiti women displayed determination, will, and perseverance. They refused to allow Islamic extremists to marginalize them, limit their freedom and control their thinking and their destiny. The women of Kuwait responded to all the arguments and claims made by extremists and exposed their false Islamic pretences and their hypocritical ideological stands. Women registered an historic victory against the ideology of Islamic extremism and terrorism.

After all this, one wonders whether the pressure on women will be eased so that they can focus their energies and efforts on becoming active participants in public life and in the political arena, in order to deepen the democratic process that Kuwait has sought for decades. Unfortunately, this is not easy. Indeed, the entire Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region faces this challenge.

Two opposing winds are pulling the region in different directions. The first is the wind of destruction that is embraced by Islamic extremism: extremism as a mode of thinking, terrorism as a mode of conflict resolution, and enclosure as a mode of living. The second is the wind of hope that is embraced by liberal democrats: freedom as a mode of thinking, dialogue and peace as a mode of conflict resolution, and openness as a mode of living. Which wind will prevail depends on how we as citizens of this region act and take responsibility.

I call upon all citizens in the area who are looking for a better future for themselves and their children to work and pull together so that the wind of hope sweeps across our MENA region.- Published 28/7/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org


Dr. Rola Dashti chairs the Kuwait Economic Society and is a political activist in Kuwait.

In the last few months, Iraqi women have witnessed with dismay the erosion of Iraq's secular family law. There is serious pressure to replace it with a law based on Islam and religious law--a change that will impact negatively on all spheres of women's lives. If this occurs, Iraqi women will replicate the experience of Iranian women who lost most of their rights after the Islamic Revolution of 1978, when the family law of 1967 was replaced by a law based on the sharia.

It has taken Iranian women 27 years to regain some of those rights. The experience of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, in Iran under the Islamic Republic, and now in Iraq, is a reminder that while considerable progress has been achieved in the area of women's rights in the Middle East and North Africa, reverses are always possible. The reversion to religiously-based personal law in the new Iraqi constitution could encourage Islamic forces across the region to pressure governments to slow down measures to expand women's rights.

But the last few decades have witnessed a palpable transformation in the role of women in Middle Eastern societies. Today, except for Saudi Arabia, women have the right to vote and to be elected to parliament or to local councils in all the countries in the region--from Afghanistan to Morocco.

Kuwaiti women, among the last to secure suffrage, were enfranchised in 2005, and Afghani women will be voting in the parliamentary elections in September 2005. Participation of women in elected bodies across the region is roughly around seven percent. The number of women parliamentarians varies from one in Yemen to 13 in Iran, and 87 in the current Iraqi parliament.

Today, in most countries in the region, a handful of women also serve as ministers, ambassadors, deputy ministers, and even judges. Women still constitute a low nine percent of cabinet ministers in the region. Iraq has six women ministers, Jordan three, Bahrain two, Kuwait one, and Iran none.

Most countries in the region do not allow women to become judges, but Lebanon and Syria have a good record on women judges, while Egypt appointed its first woman judge in 2003. In Iran, women still cannot become judges, but they act as advisors to the clerics presiding over family courts.

The award of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize to Iran's Shirin Ebadi, a judge in pre-revolution Iran, for her work on behalf of women's rights and human rights focused international attention on the achievements of women in the region.

Governments in the region, ready to open educational opportunities to women at all levels and to allow women to work as long as they remain in gender-specific jobs like teaching and health services, were surprised to discover that educated women, like their uneducated predecessors, were no longer satisfied to remain at home, be good homemakers and mothers, or to confine themselves to "women's" work.

It is primarily women themselves who have pushed for wider access to education and employment, for changes in the personal status laws, and for political participation and general empowerment. Advances in women's role and rights are also due to enlightened leaders who provided support, international conventions that obligate governments to specific practices, and a multitude of conferences focusing on improvement of the status of women around the world. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women is the most important vehicle provided to women activists. Seventeen Arab countries have ratified CEDAW, though usually with reservations, especially regarding compatibility with the sharia.

Education, employment, and political participation have focused attention on personal status laws. Some women activists argue that women can be fully integrated and enjoy equal rights as citizens in Islamic societies even under existing personal and family laws. Others believe that these laws must be changed, or reinterpreted, if women are to be fully integrated into society and enjoy equal rights. This debate continues in all Islamic countries in the Middle East.

While advances are undeniable, much work remains to be done. Despite the opening up of the job market, for example, women in the region account for only 32 percent of the labor force--a low figure even among developing countries. Besides, women in the Middle East are no longer satisfied with what they regard as tokenism: an ambassador or a deputy minister here, a handful of women parliamentarians there.

Women are seeking representation and participation based on merit and qualification. Until that is achieved, a number of women activists have been pushing for a quota system. They note that without it, we would not have 87 women in the Iraqi parliament and 35 women in the Moroccan parliament. The quota system is not perfect, but women activists feel it can be an important instrument for breaking down barriers and furthering women's political participation and integration.- Published 28/7/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org


Haleh Esfandiari is director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.

A friend of mine, an American woman very active in advocating for the Palestinian cause, met the late President Yasser Arafat not long before he was taken to Paris on his last journey.

Arafat was always very sympathetic toward women's causes. It is well known that no one representing women's rights organizations would ever leave a meeting with Abu Ammar empty handed. It was perhaps therefore especially poignant that before my friend left him, he confided in her his two greatest fears for the future should he die. One was what would happen to religious pluralism. The other was the issue of women's rights.

In the Arab world today, the issue of women's rights has become something of a political football. It is not just a matter of modernity versus traditionalism, or secular versus Islamist; the issue, as so many others, has become one of the Arab world versus the West.

This is extremely unfortunate. The issue of women's rights is one of equality, not emulation, whether emulation of the West or emulation of men. But perhaps it would be useful to look at the experience of our sisters in the West to see what could be used and what should be avoided.

Back in the 1960s, female politicians in the West were focused very much on women's rights. This is no longer the case. Instead, women politicians behave more and more like pseudo men. Two examples spring readily to mind. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher very ably beat men at their own game to become prime minister and earn the reputation as an Iron Lady. In the United States today, Hilary Clinton is the most prominent female politician, and one often spoken of as a potential future president. She has become so by playing a male game better than her male competitors.

But if women are to enter politics merely to do what men do, the question is, why bother? After all, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the course of history was charted by men playing men's games by men's rules. Men's tendency to resolve conflict with violence is what has led to the frequency of war, the building of many walls and the state of the world today.

There are many women in politics today. There are a fair number of women in Arab parliaments, the Palestinian Legislative Council a notable example. But the presence of women in the halls of power is not sufficient. That is mere tokenism. What matters is the effect of that presence.

I don't want to pay flippant lip service to feminism. When we talk about equality we must talk about equality of opportunity rather than equivalence. The real reason women should be engaged in politics at all levels is not to emulate men but to bring a unique feminine weltanschauung to bear on the decision-making process.

This has never been tried. The only example I can think of where exclusively female action led to political change comes from literature. In Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the women, exasperated by their men's unwillingness to resolve an age-old conflict, decided to withhold matrimonial privileges until the menfolk agreed to end their conflict. Not surprisingly, it worked.

Arab women are several steps behind their sisters in the West with regards to claiming their rights. Insofar as it forces Arab women to focus on the issue of what their rights are, this is not a bad thing. That loss of focus in the West has led to confusion. Equal rights mean being able to bring your own perspective to bear. It does not mean doing what men do, and how they do it.

And if ever there was a time when a new perspective and a new weltanshauung was needed in politics, whether in the Middle East or globally, it surely is now.- Published 28/7/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org


Ghada Karmi is a member of BRICUP and author of "Married to another man: Israel's dilemma in Palestine".