The InterDependent

In early December, a shaky, 40-second video clip began to skitter across the internet. A woman in a black abaya stands in front of a row of reinforced police cars, fearlessly looking onto a teargas-clouded street in Bahrain. The woman’s head is held erect, her hands outstretched, making the V-sign for victory, as men with heavy teargas guns circle like lions around her. A pink scarf, tied around her face to protect against the billowing blue tear gas, lends the only color to her black silhouette.

That woman in the abaya was Bahraini activist Zainab Alkhawaja, better known by her outspoken Twitter handle: @AngryArabiya. She’s a brave woman in her own right, but her image in that short clip has become an almost iconic representation of the incalculable role Arab women have played in the uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East this year. Since protests began in Tunisia last December, hundreds of thousands of unnamed women have shattered traditional gender norms, assumed public leadership roles, and been beaten, arrested and shot on the frontlines of their nations’ revolutions, from Libya to Syria. In October, three women, including Tawakul Karmon, a Yemeni protest leader, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, enshrining women’s role as revolutionaries, peacemakers and leaders.

The question today is not whether those Arab women, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder in teargas-filled squares beside their male counterparts this year, changed the course of the Arab Spring—that much is already clear. The question now is whether those same women will be able to sustain their leadership roles as their nations transition into the messy process of forming electoral democracies. So far, human rights activists say the prospects are looking rather grim, and the consequences could be doubly painful. If women continue to be excluded from transitional councils, elections and constitutional committees, so too will they be left out of the new post-revolutionary societies built in the coming months and years.

“New constitutions will come from the assemblies constructed in these elections, and it is vital that gender equality to be enshrined in the constitutions at the very beginning,” Melanne Verveer, the Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues for the U.S. Department of state said simply at a U.S. Senate hearing in November.

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There’s no single factor driving the exclusion of women in the post-revolution state-building efforts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. It’s the result of a tangle of political and social factors. One of the main problems, women’s rights activists say, is the speed at which these transitions are happening, which tends to favor groups that are already organized and seasoned in politics—which means mostly men. “Women’s groups require significant strengthening and need our help to be positioned –i.e. properly informed and briefed on opportunities—to engage in political debates,” said Lakshmi Puri, the deputy executive director of United Nations Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, at a human rights conference in Brussels in November. “Otherwise, they will lose out to other, better-organized groups that may not have gender equality on the top of their agenda.”

Local and international NGOs’ efforts to aid fledgling women’s groups are further complicated by the fact that rising female leaders in the Middle East and North Africa, like women everywhere, do not share a hegemonic ideology. Women supporting Islamist parties, which have rapidly gained popularity in recent years, and women supporting liberal parties, face different challenges, both on the political and social playing fields.

Yet another problem is that despite great strides in female education across North Africa and the Middle East in the past two decades, many women have been dissuaded from taking on leadership roles in the public and political spheres, which are still largely considered male realms. A recent report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development indicates that despite skyrocketing numbers of educated women, many still lack entrepreneurial and management skills because of a lack of training and experience.

"Traditional social and cultural norms have relegated Middle Eastern women," said Mahnaz Afkhami, the founder and president of the Women's Learning Partnership, an international NGO working on women's leadership and empowerment issues across much of the Muslim world. “They often lack the social, economic, and political power they need to overcome antagonistic groups and aggressive policy."

Human Rights Watch researcher Nadya Khalife added that the political culture in many regions across the Middle East had yet to prioritize women’s rights, or take women’s voices seriously. “The harsh reality is that women continue to be marginalized, and their rights—instead of being recognized as a critical component of reform processes intended to democratize these countries—are seen as of secondary importance and, in some cases, as bargaining chips,” she wrote in an article for Human Rights Watch last month.

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The first signs of exclusion in post-Revolution transitions are already becoming painfully clear. In Egypt, no women were appointed to the eight-member committee charged with writing amendments to the constitution, and only one female minister, who had served under Mubarak, was appointed to the interim government. While the new prime minister formed a committee to deal with the advancement of women, Egyptian women’s rights activists considered it a joke. Aalam Wassef, an activist in Cairo, called the creation of the committee “condescending.” “It’s like saying you women can have your little committee while we men do the serious business,” she told Al-Jazeera at the time.

The Egyptian elections early this month were hardly heartening. While 376 women ran for parliament, making up almost a third of all candidates, nearly all ran as independents, making up only 6 percent of the party and coalition lists. Many human rights activists, including one of Egypt’s most famous feminists, Nawal El Saadawi, boycotted the elections entirely, believing the results would be both rigged and corrupt, and lead to a backlash against women’s rights. The results, released this week, did not repudiate her rather dark prediction. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Justice Party, both of which campaigned on the promise to expand Islamic law in Egypt, took 37 percent of the vote, while the Nour Party, which is dominated by ultraconservative Salafis and promises to impose strict Islamic law dictating women’s dress and roles in society, won 24 percent of the vote.

In Libya, women were also nearly entirely excluded from the National Transitional Council when it was formed in late February; of the 40 members, only two were women. In late October, days after Muammar Qaddafi’s death, NTC Chairman Mustafa Abdul-Jalil announced that certain laws, such as those restricting polygamy, would be voided on the basis of Sharia law, bringing home the statistics that have long plagued women’s rights in the Arab world. The Arab world still ranks last among regions in women’s political participation. It ranks third lowest in gender equality, and the situation is even more dire in rural regions.

Even in Tunisia, where women’s rights have been fairly robust since the 1950s, women are facing major challenges. Tunisian women succeeded in October in passing a gender parity electoral law requiring equal numbers of male and female candidates in a contest for a Constituent Assembly meant to draft a new constitution, but it was only a qualified success. Seats were assigned to party members starting from the top of their candidate lists and proceeding down. And since only 7 percent of female candidates were selected to top of their parties’ lists, women actually stood much steeper odds of being elected than their male counterparts. Only 49 of the 217 seats in the Constituent Assembly are now occupied by women, about 24 percent. And while electing nearly a quarter of women to a national governing body is not a shabby start (and is certainly a victory compared to both Egypt and Libya—not to mention the U.S. Congress) it was not the equal representation that rights activists had hoped for either.

Yet even as some human and women’s rights groups have expressed frustration and dismay at the declining role of women in post-revolution leadership roles, others say they’re hopeful about the future. Human rights activist Lina Ben Mhenni, better known as the author of the well-written, multi-lingual blog, , said that while she’s concerned about women’s roles in newly-free Tunisia, she says women shouldn’t give up the fight yet. She counsels tenacity and uncompromising demands. “Women should ask for their rights continuously, [and they] should be guaranteed immediately,” she wrote in an email last week.

Ben Mhenni suggests that progress will come in the form of local and international awareness campaigns and trainings for women interested in assuming leadership roles, and through the vigilance of both individual women and the media. Indeed, in the last year, both local and international human rights groups in North Africa and the Middle East have launched new, and ramped up old, leadership programs for women hoping to participate during this period of rapid transformation. UN Women, which just launched in 2010, has pursued aggressive advocacy campaigns for women and implemented training programs and economic support networks for women worldwide. In October, the agency invited women’s groups and government agencies to apply for grants supporting women’s political and economic empowerment.

Mehrunisa Qayyum, the founder of PITA Policy Consulting, an international development consulting firm for the region stretching from Morocco to Pakistan, says that last part—providing economic support networks for women—is particularly important. It’s also often neglected in discussions of women’s political rights and representation. “It’s a chicken-egg situation, both are important,” she says. “If you look at how many households are led by women in the region, [supporting women economically] makes sense. If you’re not advancing women’s rights, you’re not only holding the woman back, you’re holding the whole household back, and the whole society back.” The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which published a 2010 report on women and microfinance, reported that women make up 62 percent of all microfinance clients in the Middle East and North Africa—a step in the right direction.

Many other human rights groups say international solidarity is key, specifically calling for the ratification of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which was passed in 2000 and recognizes the importance of women’s representation in government and conflict resolution, and the international Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which prohibits gender discrimination on all fronts.

The most important point many local and international human rights activists seem to be saying, is that women in the Arab world need to act now. Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi, who gave the keynote address at the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society in October, echoed human rights’ activists concerns that women who do not fight to regain leadership roles now, in the wake of their revolutions, during these months of rapid and profound transition, will have the rug pulled out from under their feet. During the Iranian revolution in 1979, Iranian women “pushed for revolution, for change, but we did not have…concrete goals for what that [change] would mean for women. [We did not] set forth [goals] in the beginning [that we] made clear were uncompromisable,” she said, as a warning to women in the wake of the Arab spring. “Push for women’s rights now, and couple them with the democratic efforts you are pursuing. Don’t wait for victory for your reward, or you will not receive it.”

Shortly after the camera was turned off that day in Bahrain, Zainab Alkhawaja, the woman in the black abaya, won the battle. On that particular day, the police gave up. They put down their teargas guns, backed away their SUVs, and left her standing there, silent and victorious, at least for the time being. She, like her fellow female activists across the Arab world, may have won the battle, but as far as women’s rights are concerned, they have yet to win the war.