Women's Activism and New Media in the Arab World

Ahmed Al-Rawi

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438478678
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études relatives au genre

Following the Arab Spring events in 2011, a number of important women's social movements, as well as female figures and online communities, emerged to create positive change and demand equality with men. In Women's Activism and New Media in the Arab World, Ahmed Al-Rawi discusses and maps out new feminist movements, organizations, and trends, assessing the influence of new media technologies on them and the impact of both on the values and culture of the Middle East. Due to the participation of many women in the events of the Arab Spring, he argues, a new image of Middle Eastern women has emerged in the West. As a result of social media, women have generally become more effective in expressing their views and better connected with each other, yet at the same time some women have been inhibited since many conservative circles use these new technologies to maintain their power. Overall, however, Al-Rawi argues that social media and new mobile technologies are assisting in creating changes that are predominately positive. Often assisted by these new technologies, the real change makers are women who have clear agencies and high hopes and aspirations to create a better future for themselves.

Chapter 1

Cultural Values, New Media Technologies, and Globalization

Each chapter in this book delves into a different aspect of contemporary social media, highlighting its affordances and the ways in which women from diverse backgrounds have managed to use these new technologies to empower themselves. As ample ethnographic literature is available on the cultural and social aspects of women living in the MENA region, this book focuses instead on mapping new media outlets and their roles in changing the lives of women. I argue here that new technologies are assisting in creating predominately positive change, though sometimes negative consequences appear as well. In this regard, I am not an advocate of “technological determinism” (TD), which refers to the way technology determines the development of cultural values, along with subsequent social or political structural changes, or even of “soft technological determinism” (Smith & Marx, 1994), which sees technology as having a more passive role. Generally speaking, the three prevailing positions on TD include “norm-based accounts,” which explain TD as a “chiefly cultural phenomenon” independent of other social forces; “unintended consequences accounts,” which regard TD as part of the “unexpected social outcomes of technological enterprise”; and the “logical sequence accounts,” which view TD as part of “universal laws of nature” (Bimber, 1990, p. 333). Overall, I find debate over which account of TD is most influential to be irrelevant to my purposes, as I see technology as only a facilitator, where the real changemakers are women with agency and courage enough to create a better future for themselves. First, to provide proper context for the study at hand, it is important to present background information on the lives and challenges of women in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Arab Women and Their Sociocultural Context

Gender inequality is regarded as a pressing issue worldwide, as global differences between males and females continue in terms of the human development index (HDI); the largest gaps are found in South Asia, where “the HDI value for women is 17.8 percent lower than the HDI value for men, followed by the Arab States with a 14.4 percent difference and Sub-Saharan Africa with 12.3 percent” (UNDP, 2016, p. 54). Gender inequality is regarded to be the “most severe” in Arab states. UNICEF cites numerous challenges faced by women in the MENA region, including in education, legal rights, equality in inheritance, and protection from child marriages. Many countries still lag behind norms that have become conventional in most areas; for example, Sudan has not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (UNICEF, 2011). Further, the UN Women Report states that although women in the MENA region have property rights in marriage similar to those in developed countries, they do not enjoy the same inheritance rights as those that female spouses and daughters have in other countries. In fact, the inheritance rights of women in the MENA region are regarded as the worst in the world (UN Women, 2015, p. 31), as Islamic jurisdiction generally stipulates that a female gets half the amount of a male’s inheritance (Ahmed, 1992; Engineer, 2008; Esposito & DeLong-Bas, 2001, p. 38). Judith Tucker asserts that the “privileged female access to property through the dower system was counterbalanced, however, by an inheritance law that discriminated against females” (2008, p. 138).

In addition, MENA countries have the largest gap in the world between males (75–76%) and females (20–22%) in relation to labor force participation. The world average for males’ labor force participation is 77 to 81%, whereas for females it is 50 to 52% (UN Women, 2015, p. 76). Also, the World Economic Forum (WEF) frequently publishes its annual global gender gap report in which countries are ranked based on four indicators: economic participation and opportunity; educational attainment; health and survival; and political empowerment. According to WEF’s 2016 report, all Arab countries lag behind the majority of other nations in the world. Qatar ranks first among Arab countries at 119 (of 144 globally), whereas Yemen, commonly regarded as the worst country in the world in terms of gender gap, ranks dead last (World Economic Forum, 2016). According to the 2015–2016 annual report of the UN Women agency, the average female adult literacy in the MENA region is 71.16%, with wide differences across Arab countries since female literacy rate is 44% in Morocco and 45% in Yemen but 82% in Libya and 89% in Jordan (UN Women, 2015–2016). The report pointed out how women’s capabilities and rights are “economically, socially and politically disempowering” in the region with poverty influencing women’s “education, health, economic access, participation and decision making, and human rights’ enjoyment as a whole” (UN Women, 2013a, p. 13).

In addition, armed conflicts, sectarianism, civil wars, and the refugee problem in the Arab world drastically increases the suffering of people in general and in particular women (Al-Rawi, 2010), who sometimes have more responsibilities than males, especially when the latter are killed or detained (UNHCR, 2014). In fact, women are often employed as weapons of war just for being females (UN Women, 2013a, p. 13); for example, UNHCR states that the majority of Syrian women refugees feel insecure and isolated, while the situation of Syrian women under the Assad regime is considered by Amnesty International (2016) to be horrendous. Partly due to the civil conflict that erupted in Yemen in 2015, many Yemenis face serious humanitarian challenges; for example, there have been “an estimated 17 million people at ‘emergency’ or ‘crisis’ levels of food insecurity” since early 2017 (FAO, 2017). In Iraq, ISIS enslaved non-Muslim women and allowed them to be raped with impunity for rapists; revenge rapes were then orchestrated by Shiite militias against detained women believed to be affiliated with ISIS (Taub, 2018). In short, many women living in the Arab world face multifaceted difficulties in their lives, especially those from poor families or from war-ravaged countries such as Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.

On the other hand, for the situations of many women, slight improvement has been seen in the MENA region in recent years, as will be discussed in later chapters. For instance, in 2016 “Qatar, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates each … closed approximately 64% of their gender gap” (UNHCR, 2015, p. 20). Saudi Arabia has seen a 48% increase in the number of employed Saudi women since the year 2010, partly due “to petitions and legal reforms that enable women to work in formerly closed sectors, including law, to go outside unaccompanied by men, to exercise voting rights and to be elected at certain levels of government” (UNDP, 2016, p. 113). In the following section, a brief overview of the cultural stigma surrounding the female body is presented followed by the influence of globalization and the use of traditional and social media.

As stated above, the majority of Arab women face tremendous socioeconomic challenges in their lives since most, if not all, Arab societies are characterized by their gendered relations, spheres, and roles, which shape the way people live their entire lives (Sadiqi, 2006). Within such a context, the female body has a special status as it is connected to many cultural taboos, such as the epidemic issue of ‘ayb (shame), sexual freedom, and family honor, while the values of hayaa (shyness) and modesty are important norms highlighted in both offline and online practice (Stanger, Alnaghaimshi, & Pearson, 2017). In this regard, Moroccan author Layla Al-Sulaimani rightly argues that sexual literacy in the Arab world is nonexistent since it is regarded as a taboo associated with pornography. Al-Sulaimani believes that this kind of ignorance leads to sexual desperation that ultimately results in enhancing the rape culture and street harassment (HuffPost-Arabi, 2017c). Further, Egyptian scholar and activist Nawal Saadawi emphasizes how Arab patriarchy is represented in its obsession with women’s virginity, resulting in some parts of the Arab world in a cultlike milieu (Ghanim, 2015) in which midwives are tasked with checking to confirm that a girl’s hymen is “intact on her wedding night” (Cooke, 2015). (Note that this particular cultural practice has been documented in only a few Arab countries that do not include Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan.)

In some Arab regions, the hymen is regarded as “the most cherished and most important part of a girl’s body, and is much more valuable than one of her eyes, or an arm, or a lower limb” (Abu-Odeh, 2004, p. 155). According to Layla Al-Sulaimani (HuffPost-Arabi, 2017c), a woman is often labeled as a “slut” if she is not a virgin before marriage. In some countries, including Tunisia, social pressure on Arab women who dared to have premarital sexual relationships force some of them to pay about $400 (in US currency) to “restore” their hymens (Hassaini, 2017). Such practices indicate a social hypocrisy that exists in many Arab societies, where men are permitted to have sex before marriage, and to marry multiple wives (Al-Krenawi, 2013), while women must abstain from sex, suggesting that men are in full ownership and control of women’s bodies.

In addition, many women in the Arab world have special status in society because they are expected to be protected and shielded from real and imagined dangers. The beginning of the 20th century witnessed many debates about the role of women in society in many parts of the Arab world, including Syria. In the early 1930s, some male leaders in Tripoli, Aleppo, and Latakia, for instance, wanted to ban women from attending movie theaters and entertainment events, as Hama’s mufti had mentioned that cinema could corrupt women’s virtues. This led to a partial leisure ban for women in 1939 (Thompson, 2001, pp. 205–207). In Saudi Arabia, cinemas have been until recently banned because they were regarded as unIslamic (House, 2012), while gender segregation inside cinemas continues to be enforced in many other Arab countries. The Egyptian cleric Yousif Al-Qaradawi, for example, “recommends that men and women should be separated when they attend cinemas” to “prevent Muslims from committing illicit activities in the darkened cinema halls” (Larsson, 2016, p. 95). Further, regular censorship of websites, including covering women’s body parts in album photos (Lakritz, 2017) and banning sexually explicit (and sometimes implicit) materials in traditional media outlets, is widespread in most Arab countries (Sakr, 2010). Media productions perceived to “threaten the social fabric, traditions, and values” (Al-Samarai, 2016) are prohibited. For example, in 2011, the Kuwaiti TV series “High School Girls” was banned on all Emirati channels during the holy month of Ramadhan. Mohammed Hayef, a Muslim thinker, mentioned that the “series portrays Kuwaiti schools as dens of vice and corrupt manners, making the girls appear to be lewd and shameless” (Calderwood, 2011). TV drama, then, according to some, is expected not to depict social reality but instead to provide a false reflection of it.

Globalization and Women’s Lives

The Arab world’s increasing contact with the West through globalization, colonization, and the postcolonial period has enhanced women’s freedom movements in the MENA region because these elements have assisted in establishing more contact with the outside world and created more awareness about women’s rights. The spread of feminist ideas coincided with the writings of famous Muslim and Arab thinkers during the Nahda period (Awakening), such as Rifa’a Tahtawi (1801–1873), Buturs Al-Bustani (1819–1883), Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani (1838–1897), Muhammed Abduh (1849–1905), Qasim Amin (1863–1908), and many others, who called for giving women different levels of freedom so that Arab societies can progress (Haddad, 1984; Karmi, 2005; Zachs & Halevi, 2009). For example, the Iraqi poet Jamil Sidqi Al-Zahawi (1863–1936) wrote poems encouraging women to remove their veils, often citing gender equality in the West (Masliyah, 1996). In this regard, one of the pioneer Arab feminists is Zaynab Fawwaz Al-‘Amili (1860–1914), a Lebanese female writer, who detailed the lives of 455 Arab women that created positive change in their cultures. Al-‘Amili also found women to blame for their deteriorating conditions since they mostly saw “themselves and their lives from the perspectives and opinions of men … [and] that they came to recognize themselves only through them” (Traboulsi, 2003). Other prominent feminists include Huda Sha’rawi (1879–1947), who publicly unveiled, especially in her efforts in establishing the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923 (Badran, 1988; Shaarawi, 1986). In the same year, the Women’s Awakening Club, regarded as the first women’s organization to be established in Iraq, was created “by a group of secular Muslim-educated middle- and upper-middle-class women, many of whom were married to political leaders and intellectuals” (Al-Ali, 2012a, p. 94). The Club was headed by Asma Al-Zahawi, Jamil Sidqi’s sister. Several other Arab countries witnessed similar awakening movements, such as Morocco, whose feminist organizations emerged “as early as the 1940s during the French Protectorate” (Ben Moussa, 2011, p. 139). These feminist efforts in the MENA region coincided with the rise of women’s press. Hind Nawfal, for instance, published The Girl, the first women’s magazine in Alexandria (1892), followed by The Beautiful Woman in Lebanon in 1909, The Bride newspaper in Syria (1910), and Layla magazine in Iraq (1923) (Ibrahim, 1996, p. 11; Al-Rawi, 2010). The latter was published by Paulina Hasoon who with Maryam Narmah are regarded as the first Iraq female journalists, thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Artist’s Statement
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Cultural Values, New Media Technologies, and Globalization
• Chapter 2 Influential Female Activists and Sociopolitical Change
• Chapter 3 Religious Activism and Online Communities
• Chapter 4 Political Activism and Social Movements
• Chapter 5 Social Activism and Civil Society
• Chapter 6 Cultural Activism and Anti-Violence Campaigns
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover