Ayoon Wa Azan (Our Women Are Demanding Rights They Never Had)

Around mid-January, an Israeli university professor was barred from accepting an award granted to her by the Israeli Ministry of Health, because women were not permitted on stage during the ceremony, and a male colleague was asked to accept the award on her behalf instead. Dr. Channa Maayan was placed in a corner with her husband, because the ultra-Orthodox Jews insist on the segregation of men and women. But if this is the lot of Israeli women, then what hope do Arab women have in achieving equality? At least, I have never heard that a woman in an Arab country was ever barred from going on stage to receive an award. However, Arab women remain second-class citizens in Third World countries, or perhaps even Thirty-Third World countries. Women in Egypt began the year 2011 with a revolution against the regime and ended with a revolution against men, after they were beaten and humiliated in Tahrir Square. As a result, last month saw the largest ever women’s demonstration in decades, in protest against assault by security men and the police against them, including subjecting them to the humiliation of virginity tests. All that these women have left is the picture of that young woman with the blue bra, as the soldiers dragger her with one chivalrously stomping on her chest. Real men, they are, and very brave indeed. But was it only that girl? I feel that for every girl that was beaten, abused and undressed on video, a thousand girls are subjected to similar things or worse without ever being filmed and the footage making its way to social media sites and so forth. From Egypt last month I move to Lebanon this month, where women staged a protest against domestic violence, including rape, and marital rape. I even heard among the demands objections to Article 522 of the Penal Code, which requires mitigation of court sentences if the rapist marries his victim. In truth, I did not imagine that such an Article even existed in Lebanon, where laws are inspired by French laws. Recently, Al-Hayat ran a story from Jordan about how a girl was forced to marry her rapist in order for him to escape imprisonment. At the time, I thought that the law was based on Jordanian tribal traditions, but now I am surprised to find that a similar law exists in Lebanon as well. If Lebanese and Egyptian women are complaining, then what do Arab women in conservative or very conservative Arab countries have to say? The uprisings in Arab republics have allowed the Islamist parties to win in parliamentary elections. This pushed the leaders of women’s movements to express fear of losing the limited freedoms they had acquired under the former regimes. In Tunisia, for instance, women had a great deal of legal protection since the days of Habib Bourguiba, and in Egypt, many laws were passed in the last two decades to protect women, laws that anti-women voices called “Suzanne’s Laws” - in reference to Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak, wife of the former president, as though she committed a crime rather than a laudable breakthrough that she deserves credit for. Lebanon is not a democratic country in spite of its reputation, and I believe that the reason for this is the confusion between democracy and personal freedom. Indeed, the latter is present in Lebanon despite the absence of democracy, and the Lebanese woman enjoys a great deal of personal freedom, allowing her to cover her head or bare it freely in either case, or cover her face or indeed wear the shortest miniskirt in the country. However, these are vacuous appearances, and the truth is that Lebanese women lack many rights. For this reason, the slogans raised by the protesters carried a more accurate picture of what Lebanese women require to attain the desired equality. As an aside, Lorna Fitzsimons, in an article entitled “Women, the Islamist Moment and Us”, called for equality for Arab women. I would have believed it were not for the fact that she is the CEO of something called BICOM (the Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre) in London. This means that she must be more concerned for Israeli women than Arab women. At least, our women are demanding rights they never had, while theirs are losing rights they had for decades, before the rise of the religiously and humanly backwards Haredim. Better than the above is the article entitled “Where are the women of the revolution, O men!” by the Jordanian colleague Hind Khleifat, in which she complained that, although women had partaken in the Arab uprisings, when the latter succeeded, men monopolized them […] Pursuit pays off in the end, I say, and we must therefore continue to pursue this issue until Arab women find -and indeed practice- their rights.