MOROCCO’S “THIRD WAY” FOR GENDER, YOUTH, AND EQUITY: SMOKE AND MIRRORS?

Morocco has been held up as a brilliant example of progress for other MENA nations grappling with questions of gender equity and democracy, even before the Arab Spring Revolutions. Expanding a trend that was inaugurated by his father, King Hassan II, King Mohammad VI made it clear that in his Morocco, women’s concerns mattered. During the 12+ years of his reign, the King has taken concrete steps to demonstrate the ways in which women would be publicly visible, equal partners in the development of the country’s democratic institutions. Forgoing his legal right to 4 wives (under Islamic Shari’a law), he vowed that Salma Bennani, a computer engineer who he married in 2002, would be his only wife.  Breaking with tradition, he gave her a title, H.R.H Princess Lalla Salma, and made sure that she was publicly visible, not just to his Moroccan subjects, but to the entire world. In 2003, he gave his blessing to the reform of Morocco’s Moudawana, or Personal Status Laws, an impressive feat whose legwork was carried out by a coalition of secular feminists, religious authorities and Islamic organizations, human rights activists, and community leaders.  (After initially rejecting it, the Party of Justice and Development, PJD, accepted the new Moudawana in 2003).  Following the bombing of Casablanca in 2003 by a group believed to be affiliated with the Salafia Jihadia, he inaugurated a program to train women as religious leaders (murshidat) and install them in mosques in urban and rural towns across the country.  The stated goal of this program, profiled in the film “Class of 2006” by Charlotte Mangin (Producer) and Gini Reticker (Director), was to combat a rising tide of Islamic extremism in the country, and to provide a cadre of mediators to interface between the Moroccan government and the ordinary people who would, presumably, confide in these women.  He has allowed civil society to flourish, and has not sought to ban even those civil society groups that have been critical of his still-considerable power.  After the king’s June 2011 announcement of revisions to the Moroccan constitution, he appointed Abdelilah Benkirane, the head of the PJD, as prime minister in November of that year.  This move followed the PJD’s dominance in parliamentary elections, in which they won a majority of seats. To all appearances, Morocco has made great strides towards being a more progressive, inclusive, prosperous, and equitable nation.  Or has it?

The voices emerging from the Moroccan blogosphere, including the young web-activists who occupy it, are hardly sounding an optimistic or congratulatory tone about these events.   In particular, the Feb 20^th Youth movement and its supporters called attention to the ways in which old patterns of authority, exclusivity, and corruption, persist in the new Morocco.  Through large public demonstrations all over the country that began on February 20, 2011, continued throughout much of 2012, and involved a wide spectrum of disaffected Moroccans,  movement activists called attention to persistent socio-economic inequalities: the King and palace insiders continued to increase their already-significant wealth, while most ordinary Moroccans struggled to make decent lives for themselves, or languished in poverty. As the film profiling the February 20^th Youth Movement, “My Makhzen and Me”, points out, the highest 3% own 77% of the country’s wealth; half of the country’s population remains illiterate; unemployment figures hover around 30% (or much more, by some estimates); most people do not have access to adequate health care; political dissidents continue to be beaten down in the streets (which the film documents in graphic detail), imprisoned and tortured; and journals that dare to question the palace’s business dealings are shut down. During the course of filming, some of the movement’s activists were issued letters by the Interior Ministry prohibiting them from engaging in “non-authorized” protests.  Unsuccessful in that strategy, the state later adopted two other, more effective approaches. One, they sent agents to infiltrate the secret meetings of the February 20^th activists, and two, the Makhzen (the cabal of businessmen, tribal leaders, heads of security forces, royal insiders, large landowners, and high-ranking military officers and civil servants that is said to constitute the “deep state”, along with the King himself) paid poor men (the baltajiyya) to stage counter-demonstrations in support of the king and the new constitution (denounced as fraudulent by the February 20^th Movement), and to denounce the Movement as made up of subversive elements seeking to undermine the country.  In effect, the rise and decline in the profile, and thus influence, of the February 20^th Youth Movement reflects a strategy that the state has effectively wielded on several occasions: the deconstruction, co-optation, and slow dismantling of dissent.  The palace, ever conscious of maintaining its national symbolic capital, has been essentially able to remain aloof in the midst of the turmoil. This, too, is being called out by not only dissidents within Morocco, but occasionally, by elements of the mainstream foreign press.

In Morocco, the “deepest state” as professor Marc Levine dubbed it in a recent article for al-Jazeera, King Mohammad VI remains publicly visible (particularly for national commemorative and festival events), but is otherwise hidden behind his advisers and palace insiders. He does not give interviews to the Moroccan press, and only rarely to the foreign media. Despite being avowedly “politically neutral,” the palace has been criticized for the top-down approach that persists in Moroccan political, social, and economic life.  For example, critics charge that the King’s appointment of a commission to revise the constitution, instead of letting voters choose the commission themselves, set the stage for a “fraudulent” referendum (in which 98% of voters voted yes!) and ultimately illegitimate constitution. The former minister-designate for Parliament Relations, Idris Lashkar, claimed in an interview with the journal al-Safir that the government is stalling on transforming the constitutional reforms of 2011 into actual regulatory rules.  Thus, according to Lashkar, the government is still actually working according to the previous constitution. Despite this, many Moroccans remain acquiescent, if only by their silence.  Yet this does not explain the stance of many others who are not swayed by the palace’s promises of reform. The activists of the February 20^th movement continue to meet, to share ideas, and to communicate, in person, and on the web, about strategies for dealing with Morocco’s trenchant problems.  Others have given up hope, frustrated with the slow pace of reform and the PJD’s inexperienced mishandling of the process of governance. Some believe that the time is simply not right, and that another opportunity will arise. Many continue to hold out hope that the king will still enact reforms, and so want to avoid doing anything to “rock the boat”. This last group of Moroccans are characterized in the blogosphere as ignorant masses who will uncritically support the monarchy no matter what.

 Activists, including but not limited to those who participated in the February 20^th movement, are increasingly targeting the king himself, saying that the latter’s efforts at reform are mere window dressing. The reform of the Moudawana, an impressive feat, gave credence to the belief in the possibility of true reform.  Yet the NGOs and activists on the ground continue the fight to educate women about the rights this new law gives them, almost 8 years after its passage.  The back-and forth wrangling between activists and the judiciary over the legal marriage age for women (originally 18 in the 2005 Moudawana, with proposals on the table to lower it to 16, while the actual marriage age is even younger for many women, particularly in the rural areas), is one indicator of the gap between the promise of the law and the shortcomings of its implementation. The plight of the women of the Soulaliyate, an ethnic group that is entitled to common lands, calls attention to the ways in which women are deprived of their legal inheritances because of entrenched patriarchal interests. The promotion of murshidat as religious leaders, critics assert, has merely been to enforce the King’s approved brand of Islam and to keep tabs on people. There is only one female minister, who holds a political office that is widely seen as quintessentially “female” in the MENA: Bassima Hakkaoui, Minister of Solidarity, Women, the Family, and Social Development. These kinds of reforms, aimed at women’s rights, have almost all been driven from the top down, making it harder for a truly national grassroots movement to emerge (and NGOs, which have proliferated in the past decade or so, are required to be registered with the Ministry of the Interior). As for the sharing of power between the king and the PJD that was underscored in the monarch’s speech of March 2011? Critics cite this as just another way in which King Mohamed VI has effectively wielded a strategy of co-optation of his opponents and managed to retain the same amount, and degree, of power and authority as before.

This last point bears elaboration: the initial relationship between the PJD and the king was cordial, while the French and Moroccan press noted the apparently “chummy”, lighthearted exchanges between Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane and the king. Charging forward on a platform of fighting the corruption and cronyism that was stifling the country, the PJD soon found itself pinned between the Scylla of entrenched patronage networks and the Charybdis of an increasingly frustrated, agitated, and impatient population that had hung their hopes on rapid change. The PJD itself, like many of the current Islamic-oriented governments ruling the MENA has, of late, seemingly slipped back into old habits, arousing the suspicion of the palace and the population alike: while on a trip to a Qur’anic school in Marrakech last spring, Mustapha Ramid, the Minister of Justice, declared that foreigners mainly came to the city to commit “depraved” and “sinful” acts; later during that trip, he met with the with Salafist leader Cheikh Mohamad Maghraoui, a man infamous for declaring that girls should be allowed to marry at age 9. Following the March, 2012 suicide of Amina Filali, age 16, who was forced to marry her rapist, Bassima Hakkaoui was denounced for publicly claiming that in many cases, such marriages did no harm to the woman (though Ms Hakkaoui later come out in support of measures to punish rapists and give greater support  to their victims). More recently, The Minister of Communication, Mustapha el-Khalfi, made a series of announcements prohibiting the content that the Moroccan television stations, Al Aoula and 2M could broadcast (e.g. gambling, and calls to prayer in French and Spanish, among other things). Benkirane himself has been roundly criticized from all sides for a series of missteps: the Algerians accuse him of undermining efforts to normalize relations between Morocco and Algeria; youth activists charge that he has done nothing to restrain security forces, who beat, detain, and kill protesters with impunity; and ordinary Moroccans who are eager for change accuse him of being a feckless puppet of the Makhzen and the king. As for his party, the Moroccan and foreign press alike have increasingly characterized the PJD as unable to make the transition from oppositional force to governing body, suggesting, in some quarters, their (imminent) demise as a political force of any consequence.

There are also signs suggesting a more positive long-term outlook.  First, the bases of many of the political parties are broadening beyond their traditional elites, exemplifying the trend of “populist politics” that brought men like Mr. Benkirane to power.  Second, Moroccans are generally more aware now of their power to force change: the increased sense of discontent many feel now will likely lead to more Moroccans putting pressure on the government and the palace to increase the pace and substance of reforms.  This could also lead to the emergence of new leadership that is better prepared to go beyond slogans and public demonstrations to tackle the day-to-day business of transformation. The recent repeal of article 475 and the removal of the country’s reservations to CEDAW suggest that the Moroccan government is responsive to the pressure that ordinary citizens and activists put on it. Much of the pressure for that repeal came from women activists, particularly the Moroccan feminist movement, which still has the power and capacity to successfully negotiate legal rights for women. Third, despite persistent gender inequalities, Moroccan women are strongly represented within the business community, and they (as well as men) have benefited significantly from successful micro credit programs like those run by al-Amana, Morocco’s largest micro-finance institution. Women are also in demand in the labor economy in the labor-intensive, light manufacturing of textiles and electronics for export (chiefly as assembly-line labor). Fourth, technology has released the genie in the bottle: it has expanded the education and awareness of Moroccans in general, and nowadays, it is more affordable for young Moroccans. This also has implications for the February 20^th Youth Movement, which, though currently in a weakened position, shows no signs of demise. Fifth, civil society is flourishing in Morocco not just in terms of its relationship with the king and Moroccan society, but also in its quest to become a more integral part of state consultations. On the other hand, some civil society organizations, particularly NGOs, which have exploded on the Moroccan scene in the past decade, have become too numerous for the state (i.e. the Interior Ministry) to adequately keep track of (although registration is officially “voluntary”).  And finally, though the king remains firmly ensconced at the top of Morocco’s chain of authority, power has been destabilized from the level of the family all the way to the top. This bodes well for the horizon of substantive reforms with the power to transform Moroccan society at most, if not all, levels, even if the pace of reform remains gradual and sluggish, at least in the short term.

Beyond the secularist vs. Islamist divide: gender justice before and after the Spring

Blogger’s note: after a long and unexpected hiatus from blogging, I am happy to say that Women and Gender in Islam is back up!  Thank you to all who provided encouragement and continued to follow this blog.

Today’s political debates on the changes happening in the post-Arab Spring MENA, continue to employ polarizing language. Casting the major sociopolitical players of the region solely in terms of “secularist” and “Islamist” is guaranteed to obfuscate rather than illuminate shared interests and possibilities for working together to address some of the persistent challenges in the region that bear upon US interests. This is only one example of the use of divisive language, but it is among the most trenchant.  One of the reasons why it is counterproductive to understanding, and building effective alliances with, the parties that have come into power within the post-Arab spring regimes of the MENA can be illustrated by looking at how past and current ruling authorities, and the civil society organizations (CSOs) that operate within these countries, have tapped the power of women.

My previous posts have explored ways in which women can engage in strategic coalition building with various stakeholders: NGOs, CSOs, political parties, academic institutions, local elites, and religious authorities. One theme that has begun to emerge from these initial points of inquiry, and that I aim to explore further over the next few months, is how the parties that have come into power in Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, & Yemen, and that have elsewhere been invited into central political processes, as in the case of Morocco and Jordan, have sought out spaces that are neither wholly Islamic nor definitively secularist, but rather, embody elements of each while transcending both.  These parties rarely, if ever, refer to themselves as “Islamist”, thus disavowing the current pejorative political connotations of the term.  But unlike their predecessors – or previous incarnations – of decades ago, they have moved beyond narrow visions of defining “orthodox” Islam and “authentic” Muslims and begun to embrace many of the institutions of democracy, even if for some, this embrace has been more in word than in deed so far.

One likely indicator of how sincerely they have moved beyond a narrow vision of Islamic polity is how such parties are incorporating women, and women’s concerns, into their emerging visions. Tunisia’s example is promising, despite the current turmoil following the assassination of opposition figure Shokri Belaid, and despite the criticisms coming from many Tunisians that the Islamic-oriented government, led by An-Nahda (Ennahda), has fallen short of the revolution’s goals. First, Rashid Ghannouchi and An-Nahda have, so far, remained true to their pledge to leave Tunisia’s progressive Personal Status Laws (governing marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance), intact.  Second, from Tunisia’s governing bodies to its (urban) streets, the country’s women are present and active in significant numbers: women hold 23% of the seats in Parliament; as of the end of 2012, 52 of the 270 seats were held by women, of whom 42 were members of An-Nahda.  And unlike some of their counterparts in Egypt, Yemen, and elsewhere, Tunisian female candidates are protected by law from being placed low on their party ballots (which would all but guarantee their electoral defeat). As a recent article by Doris H. Gray reveals, many female members of An-Nahda, too, publicly assert that women will have to be more centrally included in the process of governance to ensure the party’s survival as a political force, and they insist that An-Nahda has already begun making moves to do so.

Somewhat less encouraging is the situation in Morocco, where developments that have taken place since the February 20^th movement suggest that the pace of change is progressing slowly and haltingly.  A number of previous reforms have laid a solid foundation for gender mainstreaming and the enforcement of women’s rights, but there have also been many troubling setbacks.  For example, in 2004, a coalition of Islamic religious leaders (‘ulama) and their followers and secular feminist organizations, under the aegis of King Mohammad VI, brought welcome reforms to the Moudawana, or Personal Status Laws. Yet other laws, such as the penal code, continue to have distressing implications for girls, women, and their families.  Witness the suicide of Amina Filali, age 16, and the more recent case of a 14-year old girl, both raped and then forced to marry their rapists. Under article 475 of Morocco’s penal code, a rapist may escape prosecution by marrying his victim, and in the views of many, such a marriage also spares the “honor” of the girl.  In the summer of 2011, following King Mohammad VI’s withdrawal of Morocco’s reservations to CEDAW, Moroccans voted to accept constitutional reforms that include a commitment to gender equality, and equal opportunities for men and women to elected office.  Yet the sole female minister in the 31-member cabinet of the ruling Justice and Development Party (PJD) heads the Ministry of Family and Women’s Affairs, which has been a quintessentially “feminine” appointment in governments across the MENA, both under secular and Islamic-oriented governments.

Finally, some of the least promising trends may be found in Egypt and Libya where two of the three most transformational Arab Spring revolutions took place.  Egypt’s ruling Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) has come under fire from opponents who accuse it of having a “secret” Islamist agenda. This weakens the FJP’s ability, and resolve, to deal with increasing levels of harassment against women.  The President of Egypt, Mohammad Morsi, has publicly stated his support for women’s rights in a number of areas, including political and economic enfranchisement, legal rights, and working with secular feminist advocacy groups.  Yet he is beset by opposition on multiple sides, which often serves to undermine any concrete steps the Morsi government may take to actualize these aims.  And the Islamic Bloc (a Salafist coalition led by the al-Nur party), which won the second-highest number of seats in Parliament, has taken a decidedly strong stance against many of the women’s rights issues that activists have brought to the fore of public discourse. These include women’s political participation in any but token, weakened positions, and the imposition of particularly harsh interpretations of Islamic Shari’a law. Egypt’s civil society, already weakened under the Mubarak regime, has so far only mounted a feeble opposition to such threats.

Libya seems to be faring little better, though again, there are some encouraging signs of improvement: Libya’s 51-member (as of 2011) National Transitional Council (NTC) included only three women, while the newly elected (as of July 2012) General National Congress (GNC) comprises 33  women among its 200-member body (roughly 17%). This past January 14^th, the female members of the GNC formed a caucus to guarantee the representation of women on the committee charged with drafting the constitution, and to advocate for women’s rights and political participation, more broadly. The caucus was reportedly formed in response to other members’ calls to maintain gender segregation in the group.  If that is true, then it suggests that Libyan women, like their counterparts in Egypt and Morocco, have an uphill battle.  The lack of political institutions or a civil society prior to Gadhafi’s fall, the deep social divisions along ethnic, tribal, regional, and local lines, the tenuous hold that the GNC has on areas outside of Tripoli, and that fact that Libya remains a deeply conservative society despite women’s relatively high levels of education, labor force participation, and low birth rates, all mean that women’s concerns are likely to be sidelined unless women and their supporters are able to keep up the pressure.

The efforts of current administrations to support, and foster, gender mainstreaming and women’s rights issues, and to put an end to gender-based violence, should be measured against those of previous regimes. The enfranchisement of women has been framed since colonial times as a mark of progress and “modernity,” even though the reality of women’s rights in the Western European nations in the colonial era often did not match the rhetoric of gender justice promulgated by those nations. Yet these associations remain salient today. And it is true that efforts to enfranchise women and increase and enforce their rights since then have, overall, benefitted women in ways that even the champions of gender equality did not imagine.

However, prior to the Arab Spring, many of these efforts, particularly where they have been directed or controlled from outside, or from the top down, have been rightly criticized.  Witness the political participation of Libyan women at all levels under Gadhafi’s rule: from their activities in the Basic People’s Congresses (BPCs) and the General People’s Committees (GPCs), signs of women’s empowerment were highly visible.  While on a delegation to Tripoli in January of 2010 to assess Libya’s progress on gender equality, my colleagues and I were repeatedly reminded by our Libyan hosts that women had claimed their human rights, and that this was evidenced by such achievements as women’s high literacy rates, superior health indicators, and inclusion in the Libyan military since 1979.  Yet the responses to our attempts to find out to what extent the BPCs and GPCs could function as more than merely “advisory” bodies (whose advice, in practice, Gadhafi often ignored), or why women who had been raped were still being forced to marry their rapists (ostensibly, to preserve their “honor” in a social system that stigmatized the rape victim), were met with hostile silence from Gadhafi’s ministers, or claims that we “didn’t really understand” the freedoms that Libyan women enjoyed, especially in comparison to their neighbors in the MENA.  These efforts to demonstrate the visible signs of women’s empowerment to the rest of the world masked the difficulties women in Libya faced then, and continue to face now in the post-Gadhafi era. Women in Libya, as elsewhere in the MENA, continue to fight to exercise genuine agency and self-determination within the boundaries of sociopolitical systems that dictate by narrow parameters whether, and how, they may do so.

In Mubarak’s Egypt, too, signs of women’s empowerment were there for the world to see.  Women participated in the formal labor force under the Mubarak regime – in fact, as Sahar Nasr’s 2010 study of Egyptian women in the labor force notes, the UNDP’s Egypt Human Development Report of 2008 recorded a 7.6% rise in their participation (from 15.4% to 23%) between 2001 and 2006 and relatively low gender wage gaps in the public sector.  These signs of women’s progress even had a public champion and figurehead in the former first lady of Egypt, Suzanne Mubarak, whose National Council for Women (NCW, founded in 2000 by presidential decree) championed the cause of women’s empowerment. Yet these signs must be weighed against other, mitigating forces and circumstances. While women’s participation in the formal labor force rose, their rate of unemployment also rose (by 5.3% in that same 2001-2006 time frame), gender wage gaps remained high in the private sector, and there were several major structural barriers to women’s participation in this sector, particularly in entrepreneurship.  Critics have also pointed out that the NCW tended to benefit the “favorites” of Mrs. Mubarak, while ultimately undermining the power of civil society organizations such as NGOs  Many Egyptian NGOs were forced to either reject the funding of large donors like the UNDP and USAID to avoid having their program priorities dictated by the interests of these donors, or to accept this funding (channeled through the NCW), and refrain from addressing trenchant structural obstacles to truly “leveling the playing field”, such as corruption, cronyism, and police detentions, that prevented women and men alike from reaching their full potential in society

So the central questions remain, as the world watches: how much will the agendas for gender justice in the region be transformed into genuine and effective vehicles for social change?  To what extent will development schemes that aim to bring about the political and socio-economic enfranchisement of women in the region benefit the many rather than those who are politically connected or who best understand how to speak the language of gender equality as NGOs and international donors understand it?  Will the administration of Mohammad Morsi and the newly elected government of Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zidan end up pursuing the same, half-hearted yet geopolitically expedient schemes for enfranchising women as their predecessors?  And perhaps most important, in looking at the changes that have begun to take place over the past few years, changes that pre-date the Arab Spring, can we speak of emerging spaces for a true mainstreaming of gender empowerment in the MENA? There are some indications that this may, indeed, be the case.

The routinization of gender empowerment under secular regimes– which served more as “window dressing” to the world than as genuine avenues of widespread change — ultimately undermined the agency of women under Mubarak and Gadhafi.  For all the criticism that has been leveled against Islamist parties on the gender front, the secular regimes of the pre-Arab spring MENA have demonstrated, all too starkly, that secularism does not automatically entail greater women’s rights. Under the previous regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere, women’s rights functioned as a vehicle for gaining symbolic capital that translated into greater aid, and accolades, from the Western nations and large international donors. By contrast, the actors on the ground who have done the most to advance women’s rights have been the CSOs, and we should look to how governments prevent or enable them to carry on their work if we are to truly gauge the success or sincerity of their women’s rights agendas.  Certainly under Mubarak, Gadhafi, Ben Ali, and other “secular” regimes, CSOs were tightly controlled, and their agendas limited.  Morocco has fared better but criticisms of its top-down approach and the Interior Ministry’s oversight of NGO activities are valid.  If the regimes in power today make space for women’s full political and economic participation, and do not try to limit the agendas of actors on the ground to achieve greater rights and opportunities for women, even a bit of “window dressing” may produce a second spring, one that sees the goals of true enfranchisement, and gender justice, realized.

Is strategic coalition-building the ticket to securing women’s interests in the post-Arab Spring world?

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Cairo, Egypt, Egyptian, Hooria Mashour, Islam, Islamism, Nadhlat ul-Ulama, Nadia Yassine, Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Women and Memory Forum

The UN declaration that Syria is engaged in a civil war.  Ongoing tensions between the US and Iran. This weekend’s Egyptian presidential elections (tentatively won by Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi). Last week’s decision by SCAF to dissolve the Egyptian Parliament, which was dominated by Muslim Brotherhood members.  The decision by SCAF to greatly limit the new president’s power, vesting part of it (legislation, budget) in their own hands.  These stories of life in the MENA have been the focus of major news outlets in recent weeks.  And who in the mainstream media is talking about where women fit into all of this (aside from being the victims of the Assad regime’s atrocities, the losers in Egyptian politics, and – well – virtually invisible in the current debates over what to do about Iran)?  Well no one, really, at least not in any sustained manner.  If past precedent is any indication of success, strategic coalition –building will be key to women’s particular concerns remaining front and center in the dialogues and debates about the shape of the post-Arab Spring MENA landscape.

As the refrain of history as often repeated, in times of war women are welcome as supporters.  In times of revolution women are encouraged to march in the streets side by side with their male counterparts.  Even during historic elections – like the one that brought the Refah Party to power in 1980’s Turkey, or the ones held to elect new Parliaments in Yemen, Egypt, and Afghanistan, as well as a new President in Algeria in 2009 – women’s participation is noted, praised, and heralded as an indication of progress(iveness).  But once the dust has begun to settle, and seats of power have been assigned, women and their particular concerns have usually been shifted to the back burner. The very men who called on women’s support, whose rise to power was in large part due to women’s activism, often fail to stand by those same women after coming to power.

So it is up to women to claim their rights and their place in history.  These will not simply be given to them.  And strategic coalition-building is one powerful tool in the arsenal of women’s groups that is increasingly being deployed to do just that.  The importance of strategic coalition-building has been hammered home by such activists as the Moroccan Nadia Yassine, who, in a lecture delivered at a conference on “Democracy and Global Islam” at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, cited dialogue and mutual cooperation with the West as being key to developing a relationship that will enable the emergence of a democratic, free, and independent republic in Morocco that is able to avoid some of the mistakes that have plagued Western democracies.

Many other examples from the not-too-distant past suggest that strategic coalition-building among seemingly disparate groups will be key to securing women’s interests in a political landscape that is volatile at best, unwelcoming at worst.  A coalition of (state-sanctioned) Islamic religious scholars (‘ulama), secular feminists, and Islamist women secured the passage of the new and improved family law (Moudawana) in the wake of the Casablanca bombings in 2003, using the language and tools of the Islamic sciences to demonstrate that modifying this law was wholly in accordance with Shari’a.  In exile in Cairo, Amal Hassan, Yemeni activist, mother of three, domestic violence survivor, and founder of the NGO Hara’ir (“Free Women”) is seeking strategic partnerships with judges, tribesmen, Islamic religious scholars, and ordinary people to change laws that are detrimental to women’s rights in her country.  Using the Qur’an to prove that women are important members of society whose rights must be honored and respected, she has won the support of Hooria Mashour,Yemen’s Minister of Human Rights, who shares the same goals.

Strategic coalitions are also in evidence among elite and intellectual groups. In Egypt, the Women and Memory Forum initiated the Women and Constitution Working Group in 2011, joining it with the Coalition of Egyptian Feminist Organizations.  Like earlier approaches launched by women of the intellectual classes, these women use the language and perspectives of Islam to push a message of reform, but unlike their late 19^th-century counterparts they increasingly have the necessary grounding in the Islamic sciences and methodologies, and know how to use this knowledge to maximum effect.  In Libya, the Network of Free ‘Ulema – a group of clerics which remained clandestine under the Gaddafi regime, claims to comprise a diverse membership (doctors, intellectuals, university professors, engineers, Sufi leaders, judges, lawyers, poets, and writers, men and women, of all ages, of various tribal backgrounds, locally educated and educated abroad) drawn from among Libya’s most senior and respected religious scholars.  They have publicly praised the role women played in the revolution and declared in their press release their commitment to support all Libyans in their quest for freedom and equality, including and especially equal training and education for women.

Outside of the Arab spring countries, coalitions have been seeking to transform society from the bottom up and the top down. In Indonesia, Islamist women’s NGOs like Fatayat Nadhlat ul-Ulama have long demonstrated that Shari’a can be a force for tolerance and a basis for building a civil society.  Working with other Islamist groups like Muhammadiyah and Nadhlat ul-Ulama, each with tens of millions of members, they support over ten thousand schools and hundreds of hospitals, youth organizations and women’s movements, and their political connections have enabled them to speak out, with maximum effect, against the imposition of an Islamic state.  They have also engaged in interfaith activities, such as the Global Peace Service project, held in Indonesia on October 16, 2010, to train youth activists to participate in a number of peace initiatives at the local level.

Finally, in Turkey, coalitions among women’s groups, and between them and the state, have been active on political and social fronts for a number of years.  The Diyanet (Ministry of Religious Affairs), recognizing the importance of women’s participation in Turkey’s religious reawakening, has added over 450 Vaizes, or female preachers, to the state roster within the past five years.  The coalition KADER engaged in a campaign over the rights of women to wear the headscarf and participate in society at all levels; efforts such as these seem to have borne fruit in the past two years, with the overturn of the ban on headscarved women entering some universities and becoming more insistent on public visibility.  Last August, 2011, I wrote in Near East Quarterly online about ongoing dialogues between a new generation of liberal secular feminists and headscarved women who have chosen to reject the status quo pitting secularism against Islamism.  These dialogues mirror an increase in coalitions between non-affiliated, former Refah Party women and secularist women’s groups in the 2000s.

Where do our most opportune coalitions lie?  As the political landscape shifts towards the greater visibility and political influence of Islamist parties, the West watches with a mixture of fear and concern.  Will they become our allies or our enemies?  Once in power, will they continue to support democratic ideals, or has all this democracy talk simply been window-dressing for something more sinister to come (read: Islamic Shari’a, which for so many of its detractors is synonymous with the absence of rights for women, religious minorities, and secularists)? No one wants to see a repeat of the post-election scene in Algeria, circa 1991, when elections were halted once it became clear that Islamists were certain to dominate Parliament, leading to a bloody civil war that consumed the country for almost a decade and cost over a hundred thousand lives.  So it’s a waiting game for now.  What is clear is that strategic coalition-building will be key to navigating the as-yet unknown waters of a post-Arab Spring political, social, and cultural landscape.  And here, the activities of women’s groups in the MENA and in other Muslim-majority lands can be instructive for learning how to share power, or more to the point, how to remain influential when American influence, in particular, seems to be waning in this evolving geopolitical landscape.

Like many of the women’s groups mentioned here have realized, effective coalition-building with emerging state and non-state actors, as well as ordinary people in the post-Spring MENA and beyond will involve a process of identifying key coalition partners, working out a shared plan of action, and engaging in a process of self-assessment that will enable coalitions to endure for the long run and achieve maximum effectiveness.  First, we can build diverse, above-board coalitions with emerging forces of influence and power that cross political, religious, sectarian, and socio-economic lines when we define, and commit to, upholding certain core values.  As Secretary Clinton’s congratulatory words following Tunisia’s Islamist Ennhada Party’s strong showing in elections last fall declared, the US will work with Islamist parties that rise to power in other Arab Spring lands, provided that they adhere to certain practices and ideals that we hold sacred: reject violence, uphold basic freedoms of assembly, speech, and religion, and protect the rights of women and minorities.  Second, we must ultimately focus on long-term goals, not just short-term, expedient objectives.  Third, we must work not only on best prospects for coalitions, but on understanding and implementing best practices, wherever they may be in evidence.  This will require checking egos at the door, rejecting the tendency among and within US government agencies, for instance, to compete for credit, and will necessitate identifying and acting on each partner’s strengths, taking a backseat on certain aspects of projects, if need be.  Fourth, we must ensure a sustained, effective oversight of projects and campaigns.  Finally, we must agree to respect differences, as no effective coalition is made up of entities that share the exact same approaches, visions, and agendas, but rather, of entities that respect, and agree to mediate, differences in these areas.

Perhaps the moderate tone adopted by some Islamist groups, signaled in part by their growing inclusion of women in ways that signal their real (and not token or symbolic) influence and authority within these groups, make them more palatable to Western countries to engage.  Time will tell if the decision to pursue strategic coalitions with these groups to do this bears positive results, both for our relationships with the Muslim world, and for women’s ability to keep their agendas from being pushed to the back burner, once again.

ADDENDUM: http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hewlett/2012/06/strategic_alliances_can_make_o.html This article, recently posted on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network speaks to the necessity of women’s strategic coalition-building and concurs with the central message of this post. Although the HBR blog post refers to US and UK women in the corporate world, it highlights the importance of partnerships as well as mentorships, the latter of which I have not explored here.  While many women in the MENA and Asia are able to break through to high-level leadership positions (such as that of head of party or head of state) because of their connections with powerful men, the aftermath of revolutions in the MENA promise to widen the scope for more women to enter into strategic alliances and mentorships with a broader contingent of stakeholders, including activist men, religious leaders, and international parties (NGO groups or the US Chamber of Commerce, for instance).  Future posts will explore the possibilities for creating effective mentorships in post-Arab Spring countries and beyond.

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Islamism: Poison or Antidote for Women’s Rights?

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Amat al-Salam Raja, Arab Spring, Egypt, extremism, Islah Party, Islam, Islamism, middle-east, Morocco, Muslim Brotherhood, Nadia Yassine, Pakistan, Red Mosque, Refah Party, Turkey, Women's rights, Yemen

Are women’s rights and Islamism (here, “political Islam”) diametrically opposed?  That is the common consensus, at least among policymakers and …

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Where are the women leaders of the Arab Spring?

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Asmaa Mahfouz, Islamic Activism, Lina ben Mhenni, middle-east, Tawakkul Karman, women and Islam

I’ve been speaking a lot with students in my Women in Islam and Gender and Islamic Activism classes about the ways in which women living in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia have become a lot more visible as social actors in the public sphere.  And I tell them that this is not a new phenomenon: women have been important social actors in the MENA, Africa and Asia for a long time.  There are a lot more women judges, activists, politicians and religious leaders out there today who are recognized — within their own communities and nations and beyond — as leaders in their respective fields than perhaps at any other time in history.  But for every Shirin Ebadi, Zainah Anwar,Benazir Bhutto or Su’ad Saleh, there are a lot more women out there that are largely unknown by the wider world, and largely ignored by the mainstream Western media.

With all of the media attention focused on the transformations in the MENA since the Arab spring began in 2011, I have to wonder why so little of it has focused on the role that women have played in bringing about these changes.  And this goes to the heart of the question that is most on my mind these days: where are all the women leaders of the Arab Spring?

While Tawakkul Karman, the Yemeni journalist, human rights activist and 2011 Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient, dubbed the “Mother of the Revolution”, has been widely recognized by the global press for her leadership, I have to think hard when asked to name another Muslim female leader of the Arab Spring as prominent as her.  And yet, they are there.  They are not nameless faces and shadowy figures whose job it is to merely stand behind and support the men in their push for freedom, but they are right out in front, taking the same risks, clamoring for their rights, and demanding the same justice and recognition.  They are women like Asmaa Mahfouz and Nadine Wahab of Egypt, Lina Ben Mhenni and Amira Yahyaoui of Tunisia, Najla Elmangoush and Amina Mogherbi of Libya. They are the many women who have been working behind the scenes to question and change the status quo, women whose husbands, sons, and fathers lost their lives during the revolutions and who are supporting their families themselves, women who fund raise, engage in relief efforts, women who support and encourage men to fight on, and women who challenge the men who tell them that now they can go back to their kitchens.  They are women who do not need us to save them or show them how to make the most of a revolution, but they do deserve our attention and recognition.

They are out there and they are transforming their neighborhoods, communities, nations, and potentially, the world.  Are we paying enough attention?