I intend to contribute to the debate about Political Islam and the liberation of women in the Middle East as an activist and writer engaged in issues affecting women in the Middle East. I shall examine resistance to women’s rights in the economic and social contexts in the region and will discuss the impact of the Sharia law and Political Islam on women’s rights as citizens, on their civil liberties and on their individual freedom. I will conclude my talk with my analysis of what needs to be done.

The position of women in the Middle East has aroused much recent interest. What are the facts about the subordination of Middle Eastern women? What role does Islamic ideology and practice play in the oppression of women in the region and other societies where Political Islam holds sway?

Few would argue that the status of women in the Middle East can be understood without reference to Islam. Although the legal-religious systems of no two Middle Eastern countries are identical, women are second-class citizens in all of them. But neither can the position of women in the region be understood without an appreciation of the economic and political contexts in which they live, and of the influence of Political Islam.

There are many schools of thought in the debate about the status of Middle Eastern women. One group denies that the great majority of women in the Middle East are any more oppressed than women elsewhere. A second group says that oppression is real but is not intrinsic extrinsic to Islam and the Quran, which they say, intended gender equality, but which has been undermined by Arabic patriarchy and foreign importations.

Among many intellectuals and many in the academic world, any attempt to point at Islam, even Political Islam, in connection with the oppression of women is stamped as “Orientalism”. The defence of Islam in the face of western challenges has taken many forms, but ultimately aims to demonstrate the progressive nature of the Quran, Hadith and the Sharia, either by denying the low status of women in Middle Eastern societies or by attributing it to pre-Islamic traditions or to the conservative forces of contemporary Political Islam.

Many feminists and academic intellectuals apologize for the Islamists by saying that veiling, female genital mutilation and the savage oppression of women are not restricted to Middle Eastern societies. Some say that women who wear make up in the West are just as oppressed as those in the East wearing the veil, but it is a post-modernist kind of oppression. They say that women are inferior in all religions and it is not specific to Islam. They fail to compare conditions within Islamic states to those in the western nations, which introduced the idea of the secular state and restricted the power of Christianity over women’s lives. This attitude is apparent in the following words of Nawal El Saadawi:

“I’ve noticed that many people including professors of religion and Islamic studies, pick up one verse and say that in the Quran, God allowed men to beat women. They don’t compare it to other verses. They also don’t compare the Quran to the Bible. If you do, you will find the Bible more oppressive to women.”

According to Nawal El Saadawi, women in the Middle East are oppressed not because they live under the rule of Political Islam or belong to the East, but as a result of the patriarchal class system that has dominated the world for thousands of years. In her view, the struggle for women’s civil liberties, individual freedom and secularism have no significance. In this discourse, patriarchy as a blanket term is used to disguise the role of Political Islam in the oppression of women. Any and every aspect of women’s subordination in the Middle East is inaccurately labelled as patriarchy. Of course, the economic system and political oppression play their part in the subordination of women. But if Islam has no effect on women’s status, why is the position of women in the Middle East worse than in any other part of the world?

Resistance to Women’s Rights

Historically, wherever Islam has held political sway it has resisted women’s rights, secularism, modernism and human values. Dramatic differences between Eastern and Western society emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the Middle East, economic and social changes along with the impact of Western culture brought about forces favouring improvements in the condition of women. From the early 19th century the outcome of the process of change that Western influence set in motion was broadly positive, as the social institutions and mechanisms for the control and seclusion of women and for their exclusion from the major domains of activity in their society were gradually dismantled. But this rarely involved legal changes, rather such things as women’s education. Western economic penetration of the Middle East and the exposure of Middle Eastern societies to western political thought and ideas did little to dismantle Islamic law and its backward social institutions oppressive to women.

Changes in the law pertaining to women have met with considerable resistance. Such changes were felt by nationalist, Islamic forces to be a final invasion in the last sphere they could control against the aggressive infidels, once sovereignty and much of the economy had been taken over by the West. When the French came to Egypt with Napoleon, the wearing of the veil increased as a reaction to their presence. The Islamists saw modern values such as women’s rights as a western conspiracy accompanying the political and economic offensive, and turned to their own tradition as a cultural reaction. In the struggle to improve the condition of women, the first names associated with those struggles were male, but from the beginning women too were involved. In this period, women’s rights, particularly the issue of the veil, emerged as a central subject for national debate. For the first time in the whole history of Islam, issues such as the veil, polygamy, divorce and segregation were openly discussed in Middle Eastern society.

Public and independent activity for women’s rights became widespread in the twentieth century and modernization has improved women’s position generally. Although the success of reform was tied to economic and social changes, its immediate problems were often ideological, mainly what attitude to take to the holy Islamic law. But economic and social reality brought women in the Middle East more and more into the public sphere, and this was largely positive for women, particularly during the historical periods of nation building, secularisation and economic modernization in Turkey and Tunisia.

The main thrust of legal reforms where the law is not egalitarian has been to place restrictions on divorce; polygamy and age of marriage, often making use of Islamic precedents and often by making men justify divorce or polygamy to the courts. These changes are called Islamic and Islamic courts generally retain some power. Family law is the cornerstone of the oppression of women maintained by Political Islam and by many governments in the Middle East. That Islamic family law is preserved almost intact signals the existence of enormously powerful Islamic and traditional forces within Middle Eastern societies. Calls to reformist interpretations such as stressing the ‘egalitarian spirit of the Quran’, and reshaping the Sharia by reinterpreting the Quran, were arguments that arose mainly because of a rapidly changing economy and society that was experiencing the influence of the West.

Political Islam

Political Islam is a major force that in recent decades has inflicted serious setbacks on women’s lives in the region. It is a political movement that came to the fore against secular and progressive movements for liberation and egalitarianism, against cultural and intellectual advances, and against the oppressed who are fighting for justice, freedom and equality in the region. In the 1970s, the political Islamic movement grew stronger and became more widespread. In the 1980s, the movement was supported by Western governments both as a weapon in the Cold War and in the fight against progressive movements in the region. Key features of Political Islam include opposition to the freedom of women and to women’s civil liberties, and to freedom of expression in the cultural and personal domains, the enforcement of brutal laws and traditions, not to mention killing, beheading, and genocide. In Iran, the Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan under the Taliban, Islamist regimes proceeded to transform women’s homes into prison houses, where the confinement of women, their exclusion from many fields of work and education and their brutal treatment became the law of the land. In addition, the misogynist rhetoric they have let loose in the social sphere implicitly sanctions male violence towards women.

Second Class Citizens

At present, women throughout the region are second-class citizens, being denied their full legal identities by being excluded from the rights, privileges, and security that all citizens of any country should enjoy. Unjust laws, discriminatory constitutions, and biased mentalities that do not recognise women as equal citizens, violate women’s rights. A “national” of a country, a citizen, is defined as someone who is a native or naturalised member of a state. A national is entitled to the rights and a privilege allotted to a free individual, and is also entitled to protection from the state. However, in no country in the Middle East or Northern Africa are women granted full citizenship; in every country they are second-class citizens. In many cases, the laws and codes of the state work to reinforce gender inequality and exclusion from nationality. The state is used to strengthen Islamic and tribal/familial control over women, making them even more dependant on these institutions. Unlike in the West, where the individual is the basic unit of the state, it is the family that is the basis of Arab states. This means that the state is primarily concerned with the protection of the family rather than the protection of individual family members. Within this framework, the rights of women are expressed solely in their roles as wives and mothers. State discrimination against women in the family is expressed through unjust family laws that deny women equal access to divorce and child custody.

Throughout the region, Arab women, should they choose to marry a foreigner, are denied the right to extend their citizenship to their husbands. Furthermore, only fathers, not mothers, can independently pass citizenship to their children. In many cases, where a woman has been widowed, divorced or abandoned, or if her husband is not a national in the country where they reside, her children have no access to citizenship, and are thus excluded from the rights of a citizen. These rights include access to education and healthcare, and to land ownership and inheritance. This inequality not only denies women their right as citizens; it also denies children their basic rights as human beings.

If the law is designed to protect women only within their role in the family, it will fail to protect women who are in need of protection from their families. By failing to protect women from violence such as domestic abuse, rape, marital rape, and honour killings, the state fails to provide the protection available to a full citizen. In fact, by ignoring issues of gender-based violence and by granting lenient punishments to the perpetrators of violence against women, the state actually reinforces women’s exclusion from the rights of citizens.

Family laws based on the Sharia frequently require women to obtain a male relative’s permission to undertake activities that should be theirs by right. This increases the dependency women have on their male family members in economic, social, and legal matters. For example, in many Arab countries adult women must obtain the permission of their fathers, brothers or husbands in order to obtain a passport, travel outside of their country, start a business, receive a bank loan, open a bank account, or get married. What is to be done?

Given this intrinsic animosity to equality between the sexes and to women’s rights and their role in society, how can the condition of women in these societies be improved? The answer must be to get rid of Political Islam as a precondition to any improvements in the status of women in the Middle East. The social system is based on misogyny and backwardness, and Middle Eastern women will have no cause to regret its passing. The 21st Century must be the century that rids itself of Political Islam. I believe that this will begin in Iran. The most hopeful signs and the most remarkable stimulus for change continue to come directly from Iranian women both in Iran and in exile. In Iran, women presented the first and the most effective challenge to the Islamist regime by courageously questioning the right of Islamic authority to define the conditions of their lives.

And, as ever, the answer to the question of liberating women in the Middle East is secularism, and the establishment of egalitarian political systems in the region. Secularism has been and continues to be a prerequisite for women’s liberation in the Middle East. Our objectives must be:

• The complete separation of religion from the state.
• The elimination of all religiously inspired, repressive laws.
• Religion to be recognised as the private affair of the individual. Any reference to a person’s religion should be eliminated from laws, on identity cards and in official papers.
• A ban on religious indoctrination and the religious interpretation of non-religious subjects in schools and colleges.

Azam Kamguian