Human Rights of Women
Last week, tens of thousands of Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo on the one-year anniversary of the 2011 revolt. With Islamists winning nearly half of the seats in Parliament recently, some Iranian women caution their Egyptian counterparts to learn from their revolution, after which they say they lost rights with the formation of an extreme Islamic state.
Sanaa Roshdy, 54, a housewife in Cairo, Egypt’s capital, was one of many Egyptians who watched a premonitory YouTube video that began to circulate last year named “Message From Iranian Women to Tunisian and Egyptian Women.”
The video features pictures of the life of Iranian women before and after the Islamic revolution there in 1979. Depicting a reversal of women’s rights with the implementation of Islamic rule after the revolution, the video warns women in Egypt and Tunisia to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to them after revolutions in both countries a year ago and Islamic groups looking to assume leadership.
“I’ve heard people talking about the resemblance between the Egyptian revolution and the Islamic revolution many times,” Roshdy says. “It never made sense to me until I saw this video.”
The video shows women’s participation just as well as men’s in the overthrow of pro-Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran. But according to the video, the women were the first to be oppressed afterward in a variety of ways, including strict standards of dress.
During the time of the shah, there had been no dress code for women in Iran, as photos in the video portray. But soon after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had been a prominent political leader during the revolution, took over, he made mandatory the hijab, the headscarf worn by Muslim women.
Roshdy says that, like in Iran, women in Egypt were also freer to dress in the past.
“As a woman in my 50s, in my youth things were different,” Roshdy says. “We were all about fashion. How we dress was never about having to cover every piece of our bodies.”
But she says dress has already become more conservative in Egypt throughout the years. Validating the video’s message, she says that this will become more extreme if radical Islamists gain control of Egypt.
“Nowadays, you have to be fairly covered to walk around the streets of Egypt, and that is just because of the social standards, let alone if the country is ruled by radical Islamists,” she says. “Not that we wear scandalous clothes anyway, but it has to be a choice, not a law.”
When the Arab Spring sparked in the beginning of 2011, women’s rights and dress were never the focus. In Egypt, the focus was on what people really wanted and demanded in their protests: “bread, freedom and social justice.”
Last week marked the one-year anniversary of the Egyptian uprising. Islamists celebrated what they deemed was a successful revolution and success in recent Parliament elections. But thousands of protesters voiced disagreement, chanting instead that the revolution isn’t finished yet and demanding the removal of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the body of military officials that has been governing Egypt since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.
Iranian women warn Egyptian women to learn from what happened after the revolution in their country in order to avoid losing rights, such as freedom of dress, with the growing power of Islamists. The debate over the implementation of Shariah, Islamic law, in the next constitution has already been causing controversy in Egypt. Women worry how this will affect their rights, which they say have declined during the past generation. Still, there are some positive signs of women taking active steps to secure equality as the country’s future takes shape.
The Arab Spring revolution began a year ago in Tunisia, followed by Egypt. In the same order, the Islamists have since won majority in the parliaments of both countries.
The Freedom and Justice Party, Egypt’s leading moderate Islamic political party that was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s most influential Islamic group, won more than 45 percent of Parliament’s seats in recent elections. In second place was the even more conservative Islamic Salafi party, the Al-Nour Party. The liberal Al-Wafd Party came in third place.
Military leaders plan to step down after presidential elections by late June, but protesters are pushing for earlier elections to bring in civilian rule sooner.
With the unprecedented winning of the Islamists in Egypt, some have been using the Iranian revolution as an example for the impact this could have on women’s rights.
Dr. Susan Rakhsh, an Iranian feminist and anthropologist from the University of Oslo, talked at a lecture last month in Cairo about her experience participating in the downfall of the shah in Iran’s revolution. Rakhsh, who was an anti-shah activist, escaped Iran shortly after his removal.
Rakhsh is currently writing a book about the impact of the political changes on women’s movements in Egypt and Iran. She describes the similarities between both revolutions as “uncanny.”
“During the time of the shah, women’s independent movements were banned,” she says. “Then came Ayatollah Khomeini. He was very active and very modernized. People left and right supported him. Then the shah fell, and Khomeini came back with a hijab compulsory order.”
Iranian women fought against the mandatory veil, as 15,000 women protested in Tehran, Iran’s capital.
“We weren’t a part of a revolution that will take us back 200 years back, but people started calling us whores in the streets,” Rakhsh says. “Women’s rights weren’t important at this stage. People from left and right didn’t support us.”
She says that Khomeini’s response to the protests was that Iran was an Islamic country, so women should cover themselves. The fight lasted for a year until it became a law.
In Egypt, Sobhi Saleh, a leading figure of the Freedom and Justice Party, announced in a rally last month that the party would implement Shariah law. This Islamic legal system demands modest dress and prohibits alcohol. Once a girl reaches puberty, she must cover her entire body with the exception of her face and hands.