Silent No More: The Women of the Arab Revolutions

The uprisings sweeping the Arab world have toppled not only dictatorships. Gone too are the old stereotypes of Arab women as passive, voiceless victims. Over the past few months, the world has seen them marching in Tunisia, shouting slogans in Bahrain and Yemen, braving tear gas in Egypt and blogging and strategizing in cyberspace. Egyptian activist Asmaa Mahfouz, 26, became known as the Leader of the Revolution after she posted an online video call to arms, telling young people to get out onto the streets and demand justice. In Libya, female lawyers were among the earliest anti-Gaddafi organizers in the revolutionary stronghold of Benghazi.

Arabs were bemused that the Western media was shocked — shocked! — to find women protesting alongside men. “There was this sense of surprise, that ‘Oh, my god, women are actually participating!’ ” says Egyptian activist Hadil El-Khouly. “But of course women were there in Tahrir Square. I was there, because I’m Egyptian. Everyone was there. You really felt we were all one.”

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The glow of revolutionary dawn, sadly, sometimes doesn’t last until noon. When Tunisian women’s groups held a postrevolution rally in January to demand equality, thugs disrupted the gathering, yelling, “Women at home, in the kitchen!” And on March 8, a march in Cairo to commemorate International Women’s Day ended in violence, with gangs of men groping protesters and telling them to go home. “It was a horrible irony that on International Women’s Day, a march for women’s rights could face that kind of egregious harassment in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, a symbol of freedom,” says Priyanka Motaparthy, a research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch. “It was an incredibly violent way of trying to scare [the women] out of the public space.”

Women are good for revolutions, but historically, revolutions haven’t been so good for women. In 1789, French women took to the streets to protest high bread prices and the excesses of the royal court at Versailles, and they helped topple the monarchy. So potent was the symbol of the tricoteuses — the women who knitted while watching proceedings at the guillotine — that Charles Dickens immortalized them by creating Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities. Within a few years of the revolution, though, the revolutionary government had banned all women’s political clubs.

(See why Egypt and Tunisia’s revolutions are not finished yet.)

In the Muslim world, women’s rights have become a key symbol of a regime’s political stripes. Promote women’s freedom to study, work and travel freely, and you align yourself with modernizing forces; curtail it, and you placate conservatives. But when women identify with the forces of change, they are sometimes let down. In Iran, women came out in force to march against the Shah in 1979; Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini rewarded them by requiring that they wear the veil in government offices and by curbing their rights. And now, as Tunisians and Egyptians hammer out the nature of their nations’ future, women are being required to fight for their rights for the second time this year. “There is no turning back,” says Margot Badran, senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington and the author of Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences. “The violence [against the March 8 protesters] has only strengthened resolve.”

The Arab Spring’s revolutions took the region’s leaders by surprise. They succeeded — at least in Tunisia and Egypt — in no small measure because of a more diffuse, slow-burn shift under way in the previous generation: the gender revolution. Increasingly educated, organized and networked, Muslim women, using sources such as the Koran and international human-rights laws, have begun to question the prevailing political, social and religious status quo in the Middle East. Having started to challenge sexism and injustice at home and at the mosque, they were equipped to go out and protest the dictatorships.

What happens now? Women’s participation during Tunisia’s and Egypt’s transition to democracy remains a crucial litmus test of the revolutions’ seriousness of intent. Exclude women and the whole concept of sweeping away a privileged political caste crumbles. As Moroccan activist Saida Kouzzi observes, “If these countries continue to neglect the rights of the great majority of their citizens, then what good do these revolutions do?”

Already there are subtle — and not-so-subtle — signs that Arab women are being sidelined. Essam Sharaf, Egypt’s new Prime Minister, named just one woman to his Cabinet. For some women’s-rights advocates, his creation of a committee dealing with women’s advancement smacks of tokenism. “The previous regime implemented a quota system for women in parliament, but this didn’t empower women in Egypt,” says Mozn Hassan, director of the Cairo-based group Nazra for Feminist Studies, who opposes quotas or separating women’s rights from broader democratic ones.

In Tunisia, activists are concerned about the potential rise of political Islam. Sheik Rashed Ghannouchi, leader of Islamist party El Nahdha, who returned in January after decades of exile, has sought to soften his party’s line limiting women’s rights. Tunisia’s women, he says, need equality. He has supported the country’s progressive Personal Status Code, which for 20 years has banned polygamy and child marriages and guaranteed women birth control, abortion rights and equal pay.

(See TIME’s special package “The Middle East in Revolt.”)

Still, Tunisian women are worried, says Nadya Khalife, of Human Rights Watch’s women’s-rights division, in an e-mail. “Women activists want to ensure that the gains [they have] made will not be set back by Islamist groups who may call for Shari’a law or stand in their way to improve the Personal Status Code,” she says. “Already, some Islamist groups have started calling for mosques to be established in schools at the same time that women’s groups are calling for the separation of church and state.”

Wary of the fate of their Iranian sisters after their revolution, Egyptian women have been protesting against the sexism they see creeping into their country’s transitional structures. The 10-member constitutional committee, which was tasked with coming up with constitutional amendments after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, didn’t include a single woman. The civil group from which it took recommendations while preparing the amendments was called the Council of Wise Men. Women’s groups were further outraged when the committee came up with Article 75, a proposed amendment to the constitution whose wording effectively limits Egypt’s presidency to men. “Egypt’s President is born to two Egyptian parents,” it reads, “and cannot be married to a non-Egyptian woman.” When women’s groups protested, the framers argued that Arabic allows masculine nouns to include women. It didn’t wash. A coalition of 117 women’s groups called for a rewording.

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The transition period has created a divide between Egyptians who say this is a time for national unity and groups that say now is the moment for all Egyptians to press for their own interests, even if they’re viewed as special ones. Women’s-rights activists worry that if they’re silent now, they’ll never be heard. “Some people are saying, ‘Now is not the time for women’s rights, disability rights, children’s rights,’ ” says activist El-Khouly. “They claim, ‘Once there’s democracy, there will be democracy for everyone.’ But history has told us that women wait, wait, wait — and then our rights never become a priority issue.”

Beyond that, activists in Egypt and across the region insist that women’s rights are intrinsic to the people’s demands for social justice and democracy. “It’s important to see women’s rights as political rights,” says Hassan. “But we don’t expect it to be easy. Tahrir Square was a utopia, and society doesn’t change in 15 minutes.”

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