An Egyptian women’s rights activist, Dalia Ziada, gave a talk at Tufts a couple of days ago and said what we already know: that the revolution is not an egalitarian revolution, and is taking away women’s rights as opposed to expanding them.
The pro-democracy figure warns that the heady optimism that infused Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year is being slowly replaced by fear that the very political forces that helped sweep long-serving Hosni Mubarak from power are remaking Egyptian society into a rigid, religiously intolerant, patriarchal system.
“What’s happening now is the Muslim Brotherhood is coercing everything,” she said, referring to the once-banned conservative Islamic political group that now dominates Egypt’s parliament and the presidency. “What I fear is that we will be facing the Muslim Brotherhood’s theocracy with Mubarak’s autocracy.”
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“I don’t believe our revolution will succeed until one day we will have a woman president. I don’t believe there can be a democracy unless women are properly in power,” she said in a speech at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass., yesterday.
Indeed there can’t, since women are half of the demos.
…the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party agitate for policies and legislation – such as child marriage and female genital circumcision – that, Ms. Ziada argues, are contrary to the ideals of last year’s protesters…
But Egypt’s political life also mirrors traditional social norms, she acknowledged, particularly when it comes to attitudes toward women in public life. She said her organization helped run a public opinion survey not long ago in Cairo, and of the roughly 1,000 people surveyed, every one of them said they did not want a woman to be president.
“Men are telling women, ‘Go back home, it’s not your time now, we want to build democracy, you should be home,’” she said, wearing one of her distinctive brightly-colored head scarfs. “It’s not proper that the people who led the revolution are now completely out of the scene now,” she said.
No it’s not, but the outlook is grim.
I should end on a more hopeful note. I got nothin.
The report would not be complete without a description of what she wore.
Good to see traditional standards of journalism still standing!
Much the same thing happened (I think) in the Iranian revolution.
quote: “he Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party agitate for policies and legislation – such as child marriage and female genital circumcision”
how apt, a horrifying blog post about FGM on this very page…
sad, sad days we live in 🙁
I completely agree with you on this.
Yeah, I wish I had something cheerful too, but I don’t. I wonder if it will take more or less than one generation before the women of the middle east become organized enough to take back the power that rightfully belongs to them. I wish there was something more I could do.
All that the most pessimistic observer could fear seems to be coming true.
“the heady optimism that infused Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year is being slowly replaced…” Slowly?
“child marriage and female genital circumcision – that, Ms. Ziada argues, are contrary to the ideals of last year’s protesters…” What sane peson ‘argues’ otherwize?
In the power vacuum left behind by dictatorship or war, religious authority is ever ready to displace democracy. The ayatollahs in Iran, the brotherhood in Egype, the Klan in the US.
Right from the get go people were pointing this out, and yet they were all shouted down as bigots.
I,d bet that the vast majority of declared athesists in America vote for the Dems, and did so back in ’08.
Obama gave his Cairo speech wherein he mentioned a women’s ‘right’ to wear a hijab.
He declared a new begining in relations between America and the Muslim world.
He and his administtration then proceeded to throw Mubarak and others under the bus and to give the green light to the “democratic” opposition.
Along with France, the Obama administration organised some 5,000 air sorties over Libya to aid the ‘rebels’.
American consular officials are still thankful for that.
Egypt is screwed.
The only productive thing left to do is to draw up emergency evacuation plans for the country’s minorities before we start seeing a Darfur-on-the-Nile.
But that won’t happen.
Instead, we’ll give YET more aid to the country. You know, so that the MB backed gov’t can set up clinics where young girls can have their clits sliced off in safe, hygenic conditions…with or without anesthetic.
I wonder if it will take more or less than one generation before the women of the middle east become organized enough to take back the power that rightfully belongs to them.
But the “sisters” ARE organised. Egyptian women now have their very own T.V. network…thanks in large part to american aid. One staffed entirely by women, and one at which everyone, both in front of and behind the cameras, wears not just a hijab, but a niqab as well.
They cover topics such as the necessity of having your clit sliced off, how secularism is the work of *Shayten*…and the Jews and how obedience to your man, to your husband, is a sign of obedience to Allah.
And they emphasise how essential it is for all of Egypt’s women to be as liberated, as empowered and as pure as they are.