UNDP’s Arab Human Development Report 2005 has been launched this week – this year it focuses on women in the Arab world. Next to a lot of valuable data and figures, it discusses progress and continuous discrimination of women. It makes some interesting points – for instance arguing that moderate Islamic groups with their increasing respect of human rights, minorities, internal democracy and good governance are balancing the noise that extremist Islamic groups are making in public. The report also criticizes some Arab states for claiming to have ratified international conventions, without adapting national legislation to an extent where women and men would be fully equal before the law.
Overall, the report seems to argue that it is much less Islam but rather deep-rooted traditionalism in Middle Eastern societies which is responsible for the situation of Arab women.
Hear hear! I will have a closer look at this report, but that summary seems to be a fairly good description of the situation of Arab women.
Sounds like a very interesting report. The part about tradition makes perfect sense. The West, especially the US, tends to forget that our “traditions” not so long ago produced many of the same results.
There are some scary things if one digs into this report. 43 % of Egyptians who were polled believe that the veil should be imposed on women, and one in four would deny women the right to participate in political action or hold ministerial posts……hard to believe that these views are just ‘tradition’, since the issue of the veil did not exist in its current form a generation ago. Islamist ideas, whether taught in schools, mosques or other channels has pushed back women’s rights at least 50 years.
I agree with baraka. If it was only tradition, than how could we explain opennes in 70s? The importance of traditions changes in time. The question is, why Egyptians find these particular tradidtions (ones related to women) as more and more important, while ignoring some others. It does not seem to be that all Egyptian or Muslim traditions are applyied with the same intensity. Mostly those that fit to men and MB are getting popular.
When people argue that the 70s were a more liberal time and the veil wasn’t such an issue back then, is this a function of the fact that universities and workplaces tended to contain women from more middle or upper-class families then than they do now (and with mass education more women from more traditional families are entering the workforce etc etc) or are large numbers of today’s muhaggabat the daughters of women who were more liberal and didn’t cover their hair?
The numbers of those who don’t think women have a role in public life, should cover up, etc etc are worrying, but I’d wager they aren’t distinctly Arab, you’d find similar attitudes towards women in most countries that are not Northern European or North American.
Totally agree SP. The social mobility brought by Nasser and the defeat of “reactionary” forces (the bourgeois establishment and aristocracy, not the MB and other Islamists) totally paved the way for growing conservatism. The opening up of universities to more social classes also played a role.
Now of course the question remains as to whether it’s better to have the extremely classist society of the pre-1950s or the still class-ridden (but arguably less so), more conservative society of today. Nostalgia for the monarchy does not explain away the monarchy’s feudalism compared to the social guarantees and opportunities obtained by the Nasser regime.
I am always struck that despite the fact that I know that Egypt today is very class-conscious, it is much more egalitarian in spirit and in action (see subsidies, free education, etc.) than a place that never had a socialist revolution like Morocco.
I should add also that you have to keep in mind other historical contingencies: would Egyptians have become more conservative if Italy rather than Saudi Arabia had experienced an oil boom that attracted many workers to move there? Or even if the oil had all been in Libya rather than in a place with a thriving, well-entrenched, politically powerful fundamentalist current like Wahhabism?
Issandr I am with you in looking to migration and low quality mass education as sources of growing social conservatism. But you leave me behind when you argue that the only choices Egypt had were to remain classist and oppress the poor or to open up education and start banning books and swimsuits. Surely there could have been other paths that allowed for the fruits of development like jobs and political participation to be spread more equitably. I doubt that the MB brand of conservatism would have appealed so much to people who felt they had a real stake in an open society.
I don’t think it’s a choice between feudal oppressive upper class social liberalism and popular egalitarian conservatism, or that the Islamists/Gulf-returned are responsible for everything, just wondering to what extent the college girls in sparkly colour-coordinated hijabs, denim skirts and boots are new-conservative veilers or whether they are really just pushing the limits of their conservative families and social milieux.
It would be interesting to compare attitudes about women’s public roles in the Middle East with attitudes in other countries, though.
sure, there can be some similarities traced between the attitudes in Egypt and some rather patriarchal regions in Europe,let’s say Southern Italy, Poland, Greece, etc. But, noone will ever convince me it is the same. The intensity and ubiquity of social control in Egypt is uncomparable with the most of the non-muslim world.
Above – may I suggest a trip to South Asia.
Regarding views on women’s political participation, it might be interesting to see the numbers broken down by levels of piety within Egyptian society. There have been some comparative surveys about religiosity and political attitudes for different countries in the Middle East, and in one that was carried out in 2000-2001 in Egypt, Jordan and Iran – Egyptians ranked very high on questions about religiosity and the importance of religion (over 95% believing religion to be very important), but on questions about whether a wife must always obey her husband, the number halved; and about 50% said men made better political leaders (but this was broken down by age, not religiosity). It might be interesting to compare the attitudes of young pro-veilers and older pro-veilers towards women’s political participation.
There was almost no variation across different educational levels in attitudes about the importance of the veil for women in Egypt, remarkably.
The Iranians turned out to be the most godless and progressive of the lot, by far.