Women’s rights are not trivial or marginal details; they are a central issue in society, and they are the driving force of progress for nations when respected and implemented. They become a cause of stagnation when other societies trample on them and consider them mere details with no benefit behind them. Women’s rights are not details; they are everything. Human beings, whether male or female, are complete with their human rights, and humanity is fulfilled when human rights are respected.
Women’s rights are not a whim of women, as they are often depicted by the male-dominated, racist ideologies in our Arab and North African countries. The societies that give women their rights are not societies where men are dominated, as some victims of male ideologies like to promote. Rather, there is distinct social awareness and partnership in citizenship.
There are many corrupt discourses that usually spread in Arab and North African societies, claiming that addressing issues such as wars, hunger, and health should take precedence over addressing “women’s rights.” They argue that women’s rights are mere details and margins, only concerns of societies living in peace and prosperity. However, these arguments ignore the fact that without women’s rights, there can be neither true health nor lasting peace nor sustainable food security. Simply put, women represent half of society. If half of society is marginalised, how can we address the issues facing that society? Priorities are intertwined, and the search for peace, health, economy, and progress can only be achieved with the full rights of women, living as citizens in a country where citizenship is respected as a fundamental and primary law before all other laws.
For 15 centuries, we have been talking about the freedom of Muslim women or women in Islamic societies. Each time, we revisit the same lesson, a lesson consumed by successive generations, mentioning some Islamic women who engaged in trade, politics, or poetry in the history of Arabs and North Africans. For 15 centuries, we have repeated the lesson, and little has changed.
Since the era of contemporary national movements that gave rise to national independence, with national flags, anthems, and various systems varying from one country to another, socialism, monarchy, or liberalism, this has been happening in the Arab world and North Africa for about a century. Each time, with much nationalistic fervour, on national or other occasions, we mention some female activists in liberation wars, thought, or politics, yet nothing has changed, or only slightly.
We have turned female activists into museum exhibits, making them a spectacle, for political amusement and masculine boasting in religious, national, and even global occasions. All of this is to evade reality and cover up the backwardness and regression experienced by women’s rights in the age of technology and the end of traditional geographical boundaries, and the rise of symbolic capital and transcontinental corporations.
Wars are waged against political forces advocating for women’s rights either in the name of social class (economic factor) or in the name of ideology. This is either by institutionalising an economic system that considers women as second-class workers or regards them as mere consumers and non-productive arms, hence their rights are not a “priority.” Or by relying on dark ideologies, especially interpretations of religious texts that make women second-class citizens, “incomplete citizens intellectually,” “citizens with half the testimony.”
The Lie of Islamic Feminist Movements!
Contemporary Islamic feminist movements emerged primarily and strongly in Western Europe, where there is a dense and balanced Islamic community that has accumulated over approximately four generations. This community exists in countries such as Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and England. While feminist movements in the 1950s, which grew up in Arab and North African countries, demanded that women enjoy their rights as women do in Europe — rights to education, health, work, politics, culture, and art — the current contemporary feminist movement, residing in Europe, demands that Muslim women living in this Western Europe return to the traditions of the Middle Ages from which their mothers struggled to liberate them.
The Islamic feminist movement in Europe became active at a high pace with the rise of Islamist thought in these countries, allowing this organisation to penetrate Muslim communities, which also suffer from racial and cultural racism.
Over the past quarter century, especially since the early 1990s, the Muslim Brotherhood has politically and religiously mobilised in Europe and managed to become an alternative to scientific Salafism.
They seized control of Islamic cultural canters, mosque pulpits, Quranic schools, prayer rooms, and suspicious charities, among other frameworks and spaces that seem legal in the eyes of European law but are often exploited to circumvent state control.
The European left, particularly the French left, helped empower the Muslim Brotherhood to control Muslim minorities in marginalised neighbourhoods.
The pretext of the left was that the majority of the children of this social group are considered an electoral base for this flawed left. This left, which in recent years has become hostage to this Islamist trend at the level of local and regional policies, municipal and provincial administrations, has thus condemned itself through this alliance and this losing bet, signing its own death certificate.
The so-called Islamic feminist movement appeared to respond to European feminist movements, which began to demand the liberation of women’s voices and the liberation of their intellectual, professional, and physical energies in the Islamic world, primarily in the Arab world, North Africa, Turkey, and Iran. Some faces of this Islamic feminist movement tried to market the idea that the “hijab” worn by Muslim women in Europe is not imposed on them by the Islamist political currents. These currents, operating under a terrible plan, eventually lead their activists to the jihadist Salafist region. This is what happened to thousands of women and men who were recruited to join the ranks of “ISIS” in Syria and Iraq, through military jihad or sexual jihad.
The Islamic feminist movement in Europe, through the media and some political organisations and associated associations, focused on the issue of the hijab and later the burkini, which renewed the debate on the hijab of the 1990s. Some faces of this Islamic feminist movement tried to market the idea that the “hijab” is a personal conviction and purely individual matter, unrelated to the issue of restricting the freedom of Muslim women in Europe. If we agree that the hijab is a matter of personal freedom and individual choice, and it is the woman’s desire and conviction to wear it in line with her social beliefs, we respect this opinion. However, if this falls within the realm of guaranteed individual freedoms in the constitution and citizenship, then why, when any veiled woman decides to remove her hijab, also under the banner of individual freedom, is she subjected to pressure from Islamic authorities? She faces campaigns of moral and psychological defamation, is accused of apostasy, in her religion and faith?
Most of those who retract from wearing the hijab after wearing it are subjected to all forms of communal, familial, and street harassment.
They face targeted campaigns on social media. It is a psychological terrorism war. Those who wear the hijab are celebrated, and those who remove it are “sentenced to stoning”.
If a woman wears the hijab, she cannot retract from it. If she retracts from it, her fate is like that of an apostate, which may lead to murder.
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| Women in Dubai CREDIT: 2009 AFP/KARIM SAHIB |
The feminist movements in the Arab world and North Africa realised early, since the 1950s, that there is no liberation of the mind without the liberation of appearance. When we look back at the history of honourable feminist movements, we find that they combined political, social, intellectual, and economic liberation with appearance liberation, namely the art of dress.
What is now called Islamic feminist movements in Europe are working to turn back the clock of history, thus striving to tame appearance in order to tame the mind.
The subjugation of the body and the perception of a woman that her body is public property, shared in ownership by her father, brother, uncle, neighbour, parsley seller, and taxi driver… Makes her think only within the confines of the tribe, even if she were on the Champs-Élysées!
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