Women In the Middle East

[Annie]

Some are speaking out!

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110006400

Kuwait's Suffragettes
Muslim women seize the chance to claim their rights.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, March 11, 2005 12:01 a.m.

Events in the Middle East since Iraq's historic January 30 election have come in such a torrent that it is hard to find firm footing to see it all clearly. Those of us who followed the period after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall recall how opposition groups and demonstrations sprouted from barren political earth to oppose Communist governments across Eastern Europe. Something similar to this process of freedom finding new life seems to be happening now around the Middle East, and arguably one of the most important new growths bloomed this week not just in Beirut but in Kuwait City. The outburst there is on behalf of 50% of the nation's population--its women.
All this week, hundreds of women have been demonstrating outside the Kuwaiti parliament building where the all-male legislature is debating a bill that would give women the right to vote and stand in elections. Kuwait's women have tried 10 times since 1971 to secure suffrage in a nation whose politics has been dominated historically by Islamicists and tribal groups. Sheikha Al-Nasif, head of the Kuwait Cultural and Social Women's Society, said the "time for bargains, delay and excuses is over. We must get our rights now."

Meanwhile, in Washington this week, women from 15 Muslim nations met at the State Department with Laura Bush, and the subject, as it tends to be with the Bushes these days, was freedom. "The vote in Afghanistan," Mrs. Bush said, "was especially sweet for women who had the chance to finally banish their Taliban oppressors."

The correlation between the two Bush military interventions and the political rise of women in Afghanistan and Iraq is direct and obvious. But now women throughout the Islamic world are accelerating similar claims for basic human and political rights. After Mrs. Bush spoke at the State Department, 30 or so women went into a closed-door session to compare ideas and strategies. The women in the room were from the Palestinian Authority, Oman, Indonesia, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh and elsewhere.

I am not suggesting that George W. Bush is the father of women's rights in the Middle East. These freedom movements have been building slowly over time led by some remarkably brave women and with the support of many institutions. Egypt had a formal feminist movement in the 1920s. The fact remains that promoting greater freedom for these women was on the official Bush agenda before September 11. The liberation of Iraq has injected the broader women's movement with energy and immediacy that did not exist previously. If the women of the Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic world--numbering in the many millions--secure a place in the political life and public order of their nations, the years 2000 to 2008 will carry historic import equal to the immediate post-Cold War period.

What do Islamic women want? Narmin Othman, the Minister of Women's Affairs for Iraq, told me this past Saturday morning at the U.N. Plaza Hotel, "We want to be involved in the decision-making process." I asked how she squared that sentiment with the fact that some Iraqi women favor the codification of Sharia family law, which suggests degrees of inequality between the sexes. "The majority of women," she said, "believe they are equal, even if they voted for the Islamicists."
The most important point in Narmin Othman's statement has less to do with what Iraqi women believe (we will discover that in time) but that they voted on what they believed. For all the past effort put into elevating the repressed conditions of Muslim women, no real progress was ever likely in these nations absent conditions of freedom and democracy.

Nor should onlookers in the U.S. or elsewhere regard the emergence of these women as an arcane process unfolding inside the mysteries of Islamic society. There is a global security dimension as well. The deep submersion of Muslim women, especially the past 25 years, occurred with the rise of radical and militant Islamicist movements dominated by angry, resentful young males in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and post-revolutionary Iran. These movements exported their terror and demoted their women. The murder of innocent civilians corresponded with the increased compulsion to physically abuse women. In Afghanistan, abused women began to immolate themselves.

Islamic scholars can debate the fine details of what passes the Koranic litmus test regarding marriage or the veil, but the material things uppermost in the minds of Muslim women are getting educations for their children, proper health care, personal safety and adequate income. Unending global jihad will provide none of this.

The admission of Muslim women to the modern world is a delicate, complex process. It is further apace in Morocco under King Mohammed VI than under the bitter-enders in Saudi Arabia. And the template of the Western women's movement doesn't apply here; "reproductive rights," for instance, is a non-issue. But Western modernity, offering the systemic protections of civil legal codes, is undeniably present. With its action in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. expanded the opening for those Muslim women who were already willing to push their cause. After the fall of Saddam and the election of January 30, it is harder than it was for authoritarian regimes to force their women into the shadows.