The Arab State and Women's Rights

Elham Manea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136663109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Researchers studying gender politics in Arab societies have been puzzled by a phenomenon common in many Arab states – while women are granted suffrage rights, they are often discriminated against by the state in their private lives.

This book addresses this phenomenon, maintaining that the Arab state functions according to a certain 'logic' and 'patterns' which have direct consequences on its gender policies, in both the public and private spheres. Using the features of the Arab Authoritarian state as a basis for a theoretical framework of analysis, the author draws on detailed fieldwork and first-hand interviews to study women's rights in three countries - Yemen, Syria, and Kuwait. She argues that the puzzle may be resolved once we focus on the features of the Arab state, and its stage of development.

Offering a new approach to the study of gender and politics in Arab states, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of gender studies, international politics and Middle East studies.

Part I

Theoretical Framework

1 Suffrage Rights Versus Personal Status Rights in Arab States

Introduction

In general, women in Arab societies have been granted their suffrage rights quite matter of factly; the exceptions are Kuwait, which did so in 2005, and Saudi Arabia, which still has not done so. Otherwise, it was generally quite easily done. Arab countries used one of two procedures:

1. In some countries, women were automatically granted those rights as the post-colonial Arab state was established and the state gave voting rights to its citizens in general. This happened in Syria in 1949,¹ Lebanon in 1952, Egypt in 1956, Tunisia in 1959, Algeria in 1962, Morocco in 1963, Libya in 1964, Sudan in 1964, and South Yemen in 1967.
2. Other states did so when the state deemed that its society was ready for that step. This happened in North Yemen in 1970, Jordan in 1974, Iraq in 1980, Qatar in 1999, Bahrain in 2003, Oman in 2003, and Kuwait in 2005.

In either case the state, represented here by the executive power and the ruling elite, has been the chief actor that made it possible to grant suffrage to women. Within an Arab context, women did not get the right to vote as the outcome of a feminist struggle. Quite the contrary, these rights were, just as the word literally implies, given by the state or withheld by it. It was a top-down decision, as the cases of Syria, Yemen, and Kuwait illustrate.

In Syria, the government of King Faisal discussed granting women voting rights in 1920, at a time when the women’s movement was still in its nascent phase. The discussion was never acted upon as Syria came under the French Mandate and France succeeded in bringing down Faisal’s rule. These developments set the struggle for independence as the main priority of the Syrian political elites. Once independence was achieved in 1949, women were granted voting rights three years later, making Syria the first state in the Arab region to take that step. At the time, the Syrian women’s movement was not strong enough to push for suffrage rights. It was the new ruling elites who introduced these rights. They did so when they started to set up a new legal system, which essentially replicated that of the former colonial power – France.² A clear strategy or a vision about the issue of women was absent, however, and this continued to be the case until the early years of the twenty-first century. As one Syrian activist put it: “the issue of women’s rights was only discussed in a serious manner in the last four years . . .”³

In the Yemen Arab Republic, also called North Yemen, female suffrage rights were not an issue of public debate until after the republican regime was established in 1962. This was due to two factors. First, the isolation the North experienced during the theocratic rule of the Mutwakaliat kingdom precluded the development of any women’s movement capable of demanding its own rights. Second, the country experienced a decade-long civil war between 1962 and 1970; predictably, voting rights for women were not a top priority.⁴ During this civil war, five different Constitutions were promulgated, three of them temporary and two permanent. They took divergent positions on the legal status of women, reflecting shifts in the balance of power between competing political forces. All of these Constitutions contained a clause specifically stating that “all citizens are equal before the law.”⁵ It was not clear whether the concept of “citizens” included women. However, based on this article in the Second Permanent Constitution of 1970, women started to assume their political rights in the first elections that took place in 1983. The main factor that led to this inclusion, as will be discussed later, was political.

In comparison, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, or South Yemen, had a relatively strong women’s movement that started in the early 1950s.⁶ Just like its counterparts in most Arab states, this movement was mainly based in the center, i.e., in the capital of Aden, and its activities were directed mostly towards social issues, namely charity actions, and/or supporting the struggle for independence against the colonial power: Britain. Suffrage rights became a subject for public debate only in Aden in the early sixties. Few writers and political organizations even called for it publicly. These voices were later discredited and accused of being “bourgeois” or “cooperating with the colonizers” after the socialist regime established itself in the post independent state in 1970.⁷ But the new and only Marxist state in the Arab world considered the advancement of women’s rights a priority for its plans of transforming society. Granting them equal political rights was therefore only natural. Hence, Article 36 of the 1970 Constitution, which paved the way for the Socialist Party’s rule, stated that “the State guarantees equal rights to men and women in every political, economic, and social area of life and it provides in a progressive manner the necessary conditions for the realization of this equality.”⁸

When the Yemen Arab Republic and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen unified in May 1990, female suffrage rights in the new Yemen Republic were simply not an issue for the political leadership of the two previous Yemens. It was taken for granted that the new Constitution would acknowledge women’s political rights and that the new Election Law would treat men and women as equal.

These examples show that some Arab states have acted on behalf of women and granted them suffrage rights even when the women did not actively petition for them. Other Arab states, however, have refrained from taking that step when they deemed it necessary. Only when they were convinced of the need for such a step, or pushed to become convinced, did they make its materialization in reality possible. Here, Kuwait is a clear case.

The Kuwaiti Constitution, promulgated a year after the Emirate’s declaration of independence in 1961, affirmed in Article 29 the equality between sexes, stating that “all people are equal in human dignity and in public rights and duties before the law, without distinction to gender, origin, language, or religion.”⁹ In 1962, however, the Constituent Assembly, assigned the task of promulgating the new state’s legal system, introduced Election Law number 35 which “required that voters be male, and excluded women.”¹⁰ While Kuwaiti observers agree that at the time, Kuwaiti society was not ready for women’s suffrage, in-depth interviews with them reveal that political reasons kept the state from granting women their voting rights. In 1999, more than four decades later, the Emir of Kuwait acquiesced to international and domestic pressure and issued a decree granting women full political rights. Still, it took the Kuwaiti Parliament six years to endorse the decree. The endorsement came after heavy government lobbying in favor of it.¹¹

Thus, the Arab state plays an indispensable role in granting women their political rights. Yet granting women suffrage rights did not necessarily mean that they could exercise these rights in reality. In a few cases the state reserved a certain quota of seats in Parliament for women (for example in Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, and in Egypt between 1979 and 1985) but otherwise, when elections were held women were rarely elected. In Egypt, women held two seats in the legislature (0.57 percent of the total) in 1957.¹² Half a century later, only four women were elected to the 454-seat Parliament in the elections of 2006 (0.88 percent).

In Yemen, women have never held more than two seats out of the total of 301 since April 1993, when the first of three free parliamentarian elections were held in the country after its unification. And in Kuwait’s two parliamentary elections after women were granted women political rights, in June 2006 and May 2008, none of the female candidates (28 in the first election and 27 in the second) were elected. This result was all the more astonishing because of the strong female electorate: women were around 50 percent of voters in the 2006 elections and 55 percent in the 2008 elections. Nevertheless, the tireless campaigning of women’s rights activists, their use of new media forms, in addition to the support of Kuwaiti liberal political groups, resulted in the historical election in May 2009 of four women to the 50 member Parliament.

This positive development is yet to be repeated elsewhere in the Arabian Peninsula. In the most recent elections in Oman, in October 2008, none of the 21 women out of a total of 632 candidates competing for 84 seats of the Shura (Consultative) Council succeeded.¹³

As it turned out, Arab society, expressing itself in the voting patterns of male and female voters, was not and is still not ready to allow women to realize their political rights fully.

But there is more to the story. The very Arab state that granted women suffrage rights, thus liberating them in the public sector at least on the legal level, made no attempt to act accordingly when it came to women’s private lives. In fact, with the exception of Tunisia in 1956 and to a lesser extent Morocco in 2004 (in addition to the formerly communist South Yemen), all the Arab states have been reluctant to modernize their family laws – which are called Personal Status Codes in the Middle East and North Africa – in a way that integrates the concept of gender equality in family relations.

These laws, whether they apply to Muslims, Christians, or Jews, have been derived mainly from their respective religious canons. The Fourth Arab Human Development Report, published in 2006 and entitled “Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World,” explored the lack of women’s empowerment in Arab states. It highlighted this point:

If legally sanctioned discrimination means disparity in the rule of law in spite of the presumed equality in legal status of citizens, then Arab personal status laws, with regard to Muslims and non-Muslims alike, are witness to legally sanctioned gender bias. This stems from the fact that personal status statutes are primarily derived from theological interpretations and judgments. The latter originate in the remote past when gender discrimination permeated society and they have acquired a sanctity and absoluteness in that confused area where the immutable tenets of religious creed interact with social history.¹⁴

This practice of letting theological interpretations influence decisions on family affairs took two forms in Arab states. First, some countries, including Egypt, Bahrain, Lebanon, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, have no unified Personal Status Code, so the issue is left entirely to the judiciary, “which is heavily influenced by the conservative nature of classical Islamic jurisprudence.”¹⁵ In Egypt, for example, several personal status laws exist, some dating back to the 1920s. However, in cases where the law contains no textual provision, recourse is made to the established views of the Sunni Hanafi school of jurisprudence. Rulings made in accordance with those views could contradict the spirit of the current era and human rights. One famous example is the 1995 ruling, upheld by the Court of Cassation or Supreme Court, ordering the divorce of the Egyptian scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd from his wife, against their will, on the ground that he committed apostasy in some of his books. The court based its ruling on the Hanafi opinion that a heretic must be divorced from his wife.

Second, other Arab states, including Jordan, Algeria, Kuwait, Yemen, and Syria, have codified provisions of Islamic jurisprudence into a unified law that applies to Muslims. Non-Muslims in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq are subject to their various religious canons in family matters, except for issues related to inheritance and wardship.¹⁶ Family laws may be less discriminatory in some Arab countries than in others. As a rule, personal status laws in North Africa are more progressive than in the Arab East. However, certain characteristics are common to family law in all Arab states, with Tunisia and Morocco again the exceptions. These include, as the Fourth Arab Human Development Report maintains, the notion that men are women’s keepers and have a degree of command over their lives. This notion has been translated into laws obliging husbands to support their wives financially while ordaining their wives to obey them, laws that grant men alone the right to unilaterally divorce their wives and the right to require their return in the event of revocable divorce, and laws restricting women’s ability to marry, move, work, or travel freely without the consent of their male relatives or husbands.¹⁷

Hence, a woman may have the right to be elected to Parliament or be chosen as a minister in a government cabinet, yet this very parliamentarian or minister may not be allowed to travel outside the country with a government delegation if her husband withholds his permission! This situation may seem to be only theoretically possible, but it has occurred.

Any attempt to change the provisions of family law in a way that would accommodate women’s rights has faced strong opposition. In Syria, the Personal Status Law, which codified provisions from Hanafi jurisprudence and applies only to Syria’s Sunni Muslims, has been modified twice since it was enacted in 1953. These modifications were minor and addressed secondary issues; for example, the 2003 amendment allowed divorced mothers four years extra custody of their children, up to the age of 15 for girls and 13 for boys, before the right automatically passes to the father.¹⁸ However, calls to drastically modify the code were met with fierce resistance. One famous example was the concerted campaign launched in by many sheiks in Damascus’s mosques against the Committee of the Social Initiative, a non-governmental organization advocating for women’s issues. The impetus for this hate campaign was a scientific survey the committee carried out to gauge public opinion about the provisions of the Personal Status Code. The outcry led the Syrian government to revoke the NGO’s license.¹⁹

Reluctance to change personal status laws is not confined to the Muslim legal systems. The Syrian government is equally hesitant to modernize the religious laws governing the family matters of Syrian Christians of various denominations or to touch the church’s authority over this sphere. As a result, in each of the eight Syrian Christian denominations, the church has unchallenged power to forge or dissolve marriages. For example, according to the Law of Personal Status for the Greek Orthodox in Syria, issued in 2004, two adults who want to marry must have the approval of the woman’s guardian (father or male relative) as well as the permission of their Church pastor.²⁰ Also, the new personal status law for the Catholic communities in Syria, issued in 2006, was hailed as a landmark in addressing issues of gender equality in family matters but was criticized by the Syrian Women Observatory;²¹ it reinforced the authority of the church in family matters, and declared a woman nashiz, or disobedient, if she left her marriage residence or refused to travel with her husband to his new place of residence. It also forbids a Catholic to marry a person of another Christian denomination (marriage between a Catholic and non-Christian is not considered in the law) without permission from the head of the church.²²

In the Yemen Republic the new family law did not introduce a civil family law but instead codified the most authoritative religious provisions regarding family matters from all the schools of jurisprudence.²³ The law was considered progressive in North Yemen compared to its family law of 1978. But it was perceived as a setback for the women of South Yemen because it revoked most of the benefits they had enjoyed under their family law of 1974. After the civil war of 1...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of interviewees
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude
• PART I Theoretical framework
• PART II Arab state formation, social fragmentation, and gender politics
• PART III The Arab authoritarian state and women’s rights
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index