Women wary of Islamists

Opinion: November 1, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

CAIRO, Egypt

The growing strength of Islamist political parties in the Mideast’s new democracies makes one wonder what will happen to Arab women’s rights.

I’m not talking of women in Saudi Arabia, where they are still fighting for the right to drive and are relegated to segregated workplaces, but of countries where working women have long been the norm.

Thousands of women took part in Egypt’s Tahrir Square demonstrations, and young Tunisian women played a major role in their revolution. In Egypt, middle-class women have long held professional jobs.

On this trip, I’ve met impressive Egyptian women business executives in banking, food production, and marketing. I met Tunisian women who were diplomats, engineers, professors, and pharmacists. (Forty percent of Tunisia’s doctors are women, along with 30 percent of its dentists and judges.)

Yet now that the Islamist party Ennahda has won a plurality in Tunisia, and the Freedom and Justice Party (a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot) is set to do likewise in Egypt, many active women in both countries are nervous.

Litmus test

Leaders of both these Islamist parties insist they won’t reverse women’s progress. Whether they keep their promises will be the litmus test of whether they are as moderate as they claim.

The pledge to respect women’s rights appears much more credible in Tunisia. Ennahda party leaders insist they support the family status law that bans polygamy and gives women the right to divorce, get child custody, hold property, work, and travel. Indeed, Ennahda’s top leader, Rashid Ghannouchi, told me in an interview that he would try to expand the law to ensure that women get equal pay for equal work.

“We hope (this law) can’t be rolled back,” says Lilia Labidi, a professor of anthropology and clinical psychology — who is Tunisia’s energetic minister of women’s affairs. She arrived at a breakfast meeting in a neat black pantsuit, with a large white flower pin, having just stood in line for more than three hours to cast her first vote in a free election. She had refused to jump the long queue on account of her ministerial position. (Ghannouchi jumped the queue at his polling place and was booed.)

“If Ennahda does what it says, things will be OK,” Labidi declared.

Tunisia’s election law required every other candidate on party lists to be female, so there should be a substantial bloc of women in the new constitutional assembly. Yet, even in Tunisia — where urban women are as likely to have uncovered hair as to wear head scarfs — women’s future progress is uncertain.

Many Tunisian women still live in dire situations. Labidi says that 30 percent of girls in poor areas can’t go to school — even though the law requires it — because the roads are bad and there are no buses to take them. And almost a third of Tunisian women are still illiterate.

At a time when the Tunisian economy is flailing, women’s issues may be low on the agenda. And the funds to address the problems are lacking. Labidi says her ministry has a tiny budget and a small, insufficient staff.

Nor, she believes, is the world paying enough attention. In September she left the U.N. General Assembly early because she felt no one was focused on the needs of women in the Arab Spring. She said the $700-per-night cost of her hotel room could be better spent on a project for rural women.

Veiled threat

Many secular Tunisians told me they feared that, in a bad economy, women might be pressured to give up government jobs to men. (This happened in Iraq.) They also feared that Islamists’ focus on the family may produce social pressure for women to stay home — and to veil.

Hard-line salafi groups and imams have emerged in Tunisia since the revolution; their numbers are still small, but they openly demand curbs on women’s rights. And the Ennahda rank and file may be more conservative than its leaders.

Women in Egypt need help in organizing to defend their rights, as well as to start businesses. Tunisian women need that help, too. Western governments and nongovernmental organizations should target aid and loans to empower women, and offer them training for jobs, starting small businesses, and running for office.

In this uncertain time of transition, Western countries should be helping Arab women help themselves.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.