http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060101faessay85104/isobel-coleman/women-islam-and-the-new-iraq.html?mode=print
Women, Islam, and the New Iraq
By Isobel Coleman
From Foreign Affairs
January/February 2006
Summary: Although questions of implementation remain, the new Iraqi constitution makes Islam the law of the land. This need not mean trouble for Iraq's women, however. Sharia is open to a wide range of interpretations, some quite egalitarian. If Washington still hopes for a liberal order in Iraq, it should start working with progressive Muslim scholars to advance women's rights through religious channels.
THE IMPACT OF SHARIA
Article 14 of Iraq's new constitution, approved in a nationwide referendum held on October 15, states that Iraqis are equal before the law "without discrimination because of sex." Yet the constitution also states that no law can be passed that contradicts the "established rulings" of Islam. For this reason, the new document has been condemned by critics both inside and outside Iraq as a fundamental setback for a majority of Iraq's population -- namely, its women.
According to Isam al-Khafaji, an Iraqi scholar, the document "could easily deprive women of their rights." Yanar Muhammad, a leading secular activist and the head of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, worries that the Islamic provision will turn the country "into an Afghanistan under the Taliban, where oppression and discrimination of women is institutionalized."
These criticisms are not without merit, and the ambiguity of the new constitution is a cause for concern. The centrality of Islamic law in the document, however, does not necessarily mean trouble for Iraqi women. In fact, sharia is open to a wide range of understanding, and across the Islamic world today, progressive Muslims are seeking to reinterpret its rules to accommodate a modern role for women.
Iraq's constitution does not specify who will decide which version of Islam will prevail in the country's new legal system. But the battle has already begun. Victory by the progressives would have positive implications for all aspects of the future of Iraq, since women's rights are critical to democratic consolidation in transitional and war-torn societies. Allowing a full social, political, and economic role for women in Iraq would help ensure its transition to a stable democracy. Success for women in Iraq would also reverberate throughout the broader Muslim world. In every country where sharia is enforced, women's rights have become a divisive issue, and the balance struck between tradition and equality in Iraq will influence these other debates.
In many Islamic countries, reformers have largely abandoned attempts to replace sharia with secular law, a route that has proved mostly futile. Instead, they are trying to promote women's rights within an Islamic framework. This approach seems more likely to succeed, since it fights theology with theology -- a natural strategy in countries with conservative populations and where religious authority is hard to challenge. Now that the United States has helped midwife an Islamic state in Iraq, U.S. officials would, for similar reasons, be wise to move beyond their largely secular interlocutors. If Washington still hopes to create a relatively liberal regime in Iraq, it must start working with progressive religious Muslims to advance the role of women through religious channels.
RETHINKING THE LAW
Sharia is the body of Islamic law that was developed by religious scholars (ulama) after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Meant to provide moral and legal guidance to Muslims, sharia is based on the Koran and the Sunna (the recorded traditions or customs of the Prophet). The Koran has about 80 verses concerning legal issues, many of which refer to the role of women in society and to important family issues, such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance.
Because neither the Koran nor the Sunna cover most day-to-day issues, however, after the death of the Prophet the ulama created other means for addressing them. As a last measure, qualified legal scholars could study a question, apply independent reasoning (ijtihad), and issue a nonbinding fatwa. In the eleventh century, however, to consolidate their control, the Sunni ulama crystallized their legal judgments into various schools of Islamic jurisprudence and banned ijtihad. With the gates of independent interpretation closed, the traditionalists imposed their own conservative positions on mainstream Islamic jurisprudence, and these have remained largely frozen for almost a millennium.
Some scholars, however, have continued to search for Islamic answers to the questions of modern life. Contrary to the claims of secularists who deny the compatibility of Islam and modern notions of women's rights, Islamic attitudes on the question actually vary quite widely.
According to "Islamic feminists," Islam is actually a very progressive religion for women, was radically egalitarian for its time, and remains so in some of its Scriptures. They contend that Islamic law has evolved in ways that are inimical to gender equality not because it clearly pointed in that direction, but because of selective interpretation by patriarchal leaders and a mingling of Islamic teachings with tribal customs and traditions. Islamic feminists now seek to revive the equality bestowed on women in the religion's early years by rereading the Koran, putting the Scriptures in context, and disentangling them from tribal practices.
Among the pioneers of Islamic feminism are the Moroccan writer Fatema Mernissi and the Pakistani scholar Riffat Hassan -- although neither is entirely comfortable with the label. In fact, many religious progressives prefer to distance themselves from the term "feminism" and the Western cultural baggage it brings. These scholars simply see themselves as Muslims pursuing rights for women within an Islamic discourse. Their movement already spans the globe, is growing, and is increasingly innovative. Many of its leading lights are actually men, distinguished Islamic scholars such as Hussein Muhammad in Indonesia, whose high status gives them particular credibility.
The Islamic feminists tend to focus their work on the sensitive area of family law, since it is the area of jurisprudence that has the greatest impact on women's daily lives -- and since it also leaves much room for interpretation. Take, for example, the Koran's stipulations on inheritance. One contested verse states that on her parents' death, a daughter should receive half of what her brother inherits. Progressives, however, point out that at the time of the Prophet, giving a woman any inheritance was a radical departure from Arab practice. (Indeed, it was a radical notion in much of the West as well until the twentieth century.) The progressives also note that the rule made sense in traditional Islamic societies, where women had no financial obligations, only financial rights. But today, they argue, when many Muslim women do earn a living and men do not always provide the necessary support, it is important to adapt the law to changing circumstances.
The Koran, like the Bible, also includes many multilayered, seemingly contradictory passages, and Islamic feminists tend to emphasize different verses than the traditionalists. On the sensitive subject of polygamy, for example, one verse of the Koran says, "Marry those women who are lawful for you, up to two, three, or four, but only if you can treat them all equally." Later in the same chapter, however, the Koran reads, "No matter how you try you will never be able to treat your wives equally." Many Muslim scholars today read the two verses together, as an effective endorsement of monogamy. Many tribal communities, on the other hand, focus on the former verse alone and cite it as a justification for having multiple wives.
The rules on veiling are similarly inconclusive. Progressive Muslims point out that nowhere does the Koran actually require the veiling of all Muslim women. Veiling was simply a custom in pre-Islamic Arabia, where the hijab was considered a status symbol (after all, only women who did not have to work in the fields had the luxury of wearing a veil). When the Koran mentions veils, it is in reference to Muhammad's wives. The "hijab verse" reads, "Believers, do not enter the Prophet's house ... unless asked. And if you are invited ... do not linger. And when you ask something from the Prophet's wives, do so from behind a hijab. This will assure the purity of your hearts as well as theirs." In the Prophet's lifetime, all believers (men and women) were encouraged to be modest. But the veil did not become widespread for several generations -- until conservatives became ascendant.
What all this suggests for Iraq is that Sharia is not inherently inimical to women's rights. It also suggests that the question of who gets to interpret sharia is critical -- especially on areas such as gender equality, where the letter of the law is vague.
STATUS ANXIETY
For nearly 50 years, Iraq's personal-status law provided women with some of the broadest legal rights in the region. The law, enacted in 1959, included several progressive provisions loosely derived from various schools of Islamic jurisprudence. It set the marriage age at 18 and prohibited arbitrary divorce. It also restricted polygamy, making that practice almost impossible (the code required men seeking a second wife to get judicial permission, which would only be granted if the judge believed the man could treat both wives equally). And it required that men and women be treated equally for purposes of inheritance. When he was challenged by clerics over this provision, Abdul Karim Kassem, the Iraqi prime minister at the time, responded that the verse in the Koran calling for a daughter's inheritance to be half that of a son's was only a recommendation, not a commandment.
Religious scholars were unhappy with the code from the beginning, largely because it imposed a unified standard on Iraq's population without allowing for the differences among its various religious sects. Shiite clerics, in particular, viewed it as another aspect of unwanted Sunni oppression. But the legislation played an important role in modernizing the role of women in Iraqi society. Under secular, albeit brutal, Baathist rule, Iraqi women made significant advances in numerous areas, including education and employment.
With the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in March 2003, Shiite leaders quickly made clear that they expected the new Iraq to be an Islamic state. One of their first priorities was to try to annul the personal-status law. In December 2003, a conservative contingent on the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) voted behind closed doors for Resolution 137, which canceled Iraq's existing family laws and placed such issues under the rules of sharia. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite leader of the powerful Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), held the rotating chairmanship of the IGC at the time of the vote.
Resolution 137 was worryingly vague about exactly what form of Islamic regulation would replace the old legislation, although the decree seemed to imply that each Islamic community would be free to impose its own rules on issues such as marriage, divorce, and other important family matters. This ambiguity worried not only women's groups, but also those who feared that such an Islamic free-for-all would exacerbate sectarian tensions.
Women's organizations and moderates across the country quickly mobilized against the new regulation. They held rallies, press conferences, and high-level meetings with the American authorities to make their concerns known. They even gained the support of several moderate Islamic clerics. L. Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, ultimately vetoed the IGC's resolution. But the intentions of Iraq's powerful conservative Shiite leaders -- to broadly assert sharia over a whole range of legal questions -- had been made clear.
MOSQUE AND STATE
This determination was soon directed at a new target: Iraq's constitution. Sharia quickly became one of the most contentious issues facing the drafting committee. Moderate Shiite leaders such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani insisted that they did not want to replicate Iran's theocratic system (in which clerics run most aspects of the government). But after years of brutal suppression by Saddam, the Shiites were nonetheless determined to give Islam a central role in Iraq's reconstituted state. In an August 2003 statement, Sistani announced, "The religious constants and the Iraqi people's moral principles and noble social values should be the main pillars of the coming Iraqi constitution."
The Kurds and secular Sunnis were equally adamant about keeping religion out of government. Speaking to a reporter in early 2005, Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani (shortly before he became president of Iraq) insisted, "We will never accept any religious government in Iraq. Never. This is a red line for us. We will never live inside an Islamic Iraq." Maysoon al-Damluji, president of the Iraqi Independent Women's Group, worried that "the interpretation of sharia law will take us backward." But with polls showing that a majority of Iraqis endorsed sharia, there was never really any question of whether Islam would be in the constitution; the real debate was over how much weight to give it.
Secular Iraqi women were marginalized during the drafting process. The composition of the constitutional committee reflected the results of the January 2005 national elections: about half of its 55 members came from the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), and another quarter came from the Democratic Patriotic Alliance of Kurdistan. Of the eight women on the committee, five represented the UIA, two were Kurdish representatives, and only one, Dr. Rajaa al-Khuzai, was an independent.
The committee spent months arguing over whether Islam would be the source of legislation for the country (as the religious parties wanted) or a source (a compromise sought by the Kurds and other secularists). The disagreement had not been resolved by the time the original August 15 deadline passed, and the debate spilled over into the extension period. Conservative Shiite leaders remained intransigent and threatened to scuttle talks if Islam did not get a central place in the constitution. As the arguments dragged on, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad finally intervened to avoid a stalemate. To gain concessions in other areas, he supported provisions that strengthened Islam's influence. Ultimately, the Kurds acquiesced too, both because they had other priorities to defend and because they recognized that conservative Shiites were not going to capitulate.
Article 2 of the final version of the constitution makes Islam the official religion of the state, cites it as a basic source of legislation, and says that no law can be passed that contradicts its "undisputed" rulings. Interpreting this provision will fall to the Supreme Court, which the new constitution says may include clerics; their number and method of selection were not specified, but will be defined by a subsequent law that must be approved by a two-thirds majority of parliament.
Secularists and women's advocates are also worried about Article 39, the section dealing with personal-status law. As foreshadowed by the battle in the IGC, Article 39 deems Iraqis "free in their personal status according to their religions, sects, beliefs, or choices," but leaves it up to subsequent legislation to define what this means. If Shiite leaders truly meant for the provision to give Iraqis the freedom of choice -- allowing Shiites to live under Shiite law and Sunnis to live under Sunni law -- then the progressive 1959 code may also be kept on the books for those who want it. Allowing such freedom could lead to a confusing but relatively benign system (not unprecedented in the region), under which Iraqis with legal questions could choose among different codes and court systems -- Sunni, secular, or Shiite -- depending on which they thought would give them the most favorable treatment.
Many secular Iraqis worry, however, that Article 39 will lead instead to an Iranian-style theocracy, which would severely limit women's rights in particular. Adnan Pachachi, the former Iraqi foreign minister and a secular Sunni leader, told The New York Times in August that although he agreed with much of the new constitution, he was troubled by its more overtly Islamic provisions. "They want to inject religion into everything, which is not right," he said. "I cannot imagine that we might have a theocratic regime in Iraq like the one in Iran. That would be a disaster."
Indeed, Iran's theocracy has been a disaster on multiple fronts, including women's rights. In the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, Iran's new government quickly suspended the country's progressive family law, disallowed female judges, and strongly enforced the wearing of the hijab. Within a few months, sharia rulings lowered the marriage age to nine, permitted polygamy, gave fathers the right to decide who their daughters could marry, permitted unilateral divorce for men but not women, and gave fathers sole custody of children in the case of divorce. Over the intervening years, Iranian activists, including some conservative religious women, have managed to soften some of the harshest inequalities. But anything approaching the Iranian system would still represent a major setback for Iraq's women.
Skeptics might wonder whether the legal debate in Iraq really matters. After all, most Middle Eastern countries have elegant constitutions guaranteeing many rights and freedoms to their citizens, yet lack the sorts of strong institutions that could defend those rights with any consistency. And indeed, Iraq may slide down this path over time. In the short term, however, the heavy U.S. presence there ensures that the political process will emphasize constitutional provisions and the rule of law. Moreover, according to an analysis by Nathan Brown, a George Washington University professor and a constitutional expert, Iraq's constitution has fewer loopholes for limiting basic freedoms than those of Iraq's neighbors. The new document also designates certain institutions, such as the Human Rights Commission and the Federal Supreme Court, to defend individual rights. Although the structural details of these bodies remain to be determined by Iraq's legislature, there is still reason to hope they will effectively defend Iraqis' freedoms.
LEARNING FROM OTHERS
No matter how effective such institutions turn out to be, the fact remains that the new constitution makes sharia supreme in Iraq. If moderates hope to advance women's rights, therefore, they will have to do it within an Islamic framework.
Fortunately, there are good precedents for such a process. Morocco, for example, recently revised its personal-status code (moudawana) but claimed to be doing so on Islamic grounds. The reforms were the result of over a decade of pressure from progressive Moroccan nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which pushed to raise the marriage age from 15 to 18, abolish polygamy, equalize the right to divorce, and give women the right to retain custody of their children. Such efforts were opposed by religious groups. But Morocco's modernizing young king, Muhammad VI (who claims to be a direct descendent of the Prophet), backed the reformers and appointed a committee to examine potential changes to the moudawana. In October 2003, he formally presented parliament with a set of sweeping revisions to the family law, defending the changes with copious references to the Koran. In fact, both religious and secular supporters of the reforms used the language of religion and Islamic jurisprudence to advocate gender equality, and despite conservative opposition, parliament approved the changes.
Indonesia provides another example of how progressive change can come from within Islam. A group called Fatayat, the women's wing of the country's largest grass-roots organization (known as Nahdlatul Ulama), now trains its members in Islamic fiqh (jurisprudence) so that they can hold their own in religious debates. An NGO known as P3M (the Indonesian Society for Pesantren and Community Development) also uses fiqh to encourage Indonesia's many pesantren (religious schools) to promote women's reproductive health and family planning. And Musdah Mulia, the chief researcher at Indonesia's Ministry of Religious Affairs, caused a sensation in 2004 by calling for important changes to sharia in areas such as marriage, polygamy, and the wearing of the hijab -- changes that she defended through meticulous references to Islamic jurisprudence. Her controversial recommendations have not yet been enacted, but they have sparked an important debate across Indonesian society that may eventually lead to significant changes.
An organization known as Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) provides another, transnational example of how women are pushing for change from within Islam. Founded in 1984 to oppose the harsh interpretation of sharia emerging in Algeria, WLUML functions by giving information on progressive Islamic systems around the world to local activists, who use the information to fight for greater freedoms. The network remains up and running today, providing women's groups around the world with powerful Islamic justifications for gender equality.
TURNING NUMBERS INTO Influence
In Iraq, unlike in many other Muslim nations, women will have a strong advantage in their fight for equality: namely, a provision in the new constitution that guarantees them 25 percent of the seats in parliament. This quota is the product of intense lobbying by women's groups, who feared being left out of the new Iraqi politics. It also has some grounding in Iraqi history. The Baathists gave women the vote and the right to run for office in 1980; within two decades, women had come to occupy 20 percent of the seats in Iraq's rubber-stamp parliament (compared to a 3.5 percent average in the region) and some prominent cabinet positions. After the invasion, U.S. policymakers were sympathetic to women's concerns that they would lose their political position in an election process dominated by conservative Shiites. Washington also wanted to support Iraqi women without directly challenging religious convictions. Instituting a quota seemed a good way to do both.
The process started with the Transitional Administrative Law, the interim constitution issued by the Americans and the IGC in 2004, which stated that women should constitute no less than a quarter of the members of the National Assembly. In the run-up to the January 2005 elections, political parties were required to field electoral slates on which every third candidate was a woman. As a result, women captured 31 percent of the seats.
At the time of the elections, some Western commentators pointed to this high level of female representation as evidence that a grand social and cultural transformation was under way in Iraq. With so many women in parliament, they reasoned, Iraq's new government would have to take a progressive stance on women's rights in drafting the new constitution and limit the role of religion. But assuming that merely having women in government would produce liberal legislation was a mistake. After all, nearly half of the women elected had run on the UIA list, and they have toed their party's conservative Shiite line.
When the constitution-drafting process began, progressive women, sensing that they would lose the battle over Islam, focused on holding on to their 25 percent quota in parliament. Several women leaders actually hoped to expand the quota (a few mentioned 40 percent as their goal) and apply it to other decision-making positions as well. But conservatives responded by attempting to have the quota phased out altogether after two rounds of elections. In the end, the quota did make it into the final draft of the constitution, which will give women in Iraq one of the highest levels of representation in the world (after all, women make up less than 15 percent of the U.S. Congress). Many of these seats may continue to be filled by female conservatives unlikely to support progressive legislation on women's issues in the near term. Over time, however, these same legislators may start advancing women's rights within an Islamic context.
The future of Islamic feminism in Iraq will depend on politicians such as Salama al-Khafaji, a dentist turned politician who is also a devout Shiite. After losing her son in an ambush, Khafaji was rated the most popular female politician in Iraq in a survey conducted in June 2005 (and was ranked the 11th most popular politician overall). As a member of the IGC, she incurred the wrath of secular women's groups by voting for Resolution 137. But Khafaji (who has pursued her political ambitions despite the objections of her husband, who divorced her as a consequence) defended her position by arguing that Islamic rules actually provide better protection to women in divorce and custody proceedings than does secular law. Khafaji sees herself as a positive force for change on women's issues; as she told a journalist last November, "I have Islamic ideas on justice, but I am moderate." And her ability to work with both secular and Islamic parties could make her an effective legislator.
The status of women in the future Iraq will also depend in large part on the strength of the country's judicial system. Here, too, there is reason for guarded optimism; although Iraq's court system needs significant reform, it does include many qualified lawyers and judges (although their expertise lies mostly in secular law, not sharia). Iraq also has a tradition of women serving as judges. The country's first female judge, Zakia Hakki, was appointed in 1959 (she is currently a prominent member of parliament). Today, women are widely accepted as judges in the Kurdish north and in the more secular parts of Baghdad.
But keeping women on the bench elsewhere will not be easy, as the story of Nidal Nasser Hussein illustrates. In 2003, the U.S. authorities appointed her the first female judge in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. The decision was met with widespread outrage. Several senior clerics quickly issued fatwas saying that under Islamic law only men can be judges, and angry protesters showed up at her swearing-in ceremony. In the face of such unexpected opposition, the senior U.S. commanding officer in Najaf decided to delay Hussein's appointment indefinitely, and she has yet to take her seat on the bench. As conservatives consolidate their control in the Shiite south, such conflicts are likely to intensify. Iraqi women should respond by invoking Islamic scholars who argue in favor of female judges.
Although having the right judges on the bench will determine the formal rights of Iraqi women over the long term, in the short term religious vigilantes, who are forcing their own fundamentalist views on Iraq's besieged population, are having the greatest impact. Over the past two years, various towns in both Shiite and Sunni areas have fallen into the hands of extremists who are imposing stringent restrictions there, such as requiring women to wear full-length veils, forbidding music and dancing, and enforcing strict segregation of the sexes in public. Many of these vigilantes are unemployed, undereducated followers of demagogues such as Muqtada al-Sadr. But at least some are reportedly also members of the police force in several southern cities (notably Basra). As their activities suggest, the greatest danger to Iraqi women stems not from any legal restrictions, but from lawlessness.
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
Although the status of Iraqi women will ultimately depend on Iraqis themselves, the United States can still play a constructive role. Washington should start by identifying and cultivating Islamic feminists within Iraq's mainstream religious parties. These women (and men) may not want to cooperate with the United States at first, and some of them will hold anti-American views. But these individuals wield far more political influence than the secular but marginalized Iraqi leaders who are popular in Washington, and the United States must learn how to work with them.
Indeed, the United States should work with Iraqi women across the religious spectrum in order to cultivate new leaders. Thanks to the quota system, there is no question that Iraqi women will continue to play a significant role in national politics in the years ahead, and Washington should help ensure that it is a moderating one. Most of the women elected to parliament will be new to politics. The United States should provide them with technical training (through organizations such as the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, an NGO that provides practical assistance to leaders advancing democracy) and help them to network across sectarian lines. Iraqi politicians should also be encouraged to work with their more moderate Iranian counterparts. The current U.S. policy of excluding Iranian parliamentarians and activists from U.S.-funded conferences in the region is counterproductive and should be abandoned.
The United States should also assist with judicial reform. This means not only helping the courts modernize technologically, but also training judges, especially women, in modern Islamic jurisprudence. These training programs could be developed in partnership with the leading institutions of Islamic jurisprudence throughout the region, and they should be open to judges from across the Muslim world.
To help women defend their rights, Washington should also educate Iraqis about what their rights are -- both under the new constitution and under sharia. A recent Freedom House report assessing women's rights in 17 Arab countries found that with the exception of Saudi Arabia, each has a constitution that formally mandates gender equality. The problem in these countries, however, is that the governments make little effort to inform the people of their rights. To avoid such a scenario in Iraq, the United States should support educational programs and a nationwide media campaign to promote better understanding of Iraqis' freedoms, under both the constitution and other laws. Washington should also encourage open dialogue on various interpretations of sharia governing personal-status laws. Religious scholars and international Islamic groups, such as Sisters in Islam and WLUML, should be invited to join and inform the discussions, which should be widely broadcast through media outlets such as Radio Al-Mahabba (a U.S.-funded Iraqi station dedicated to raising awareness on women's rights).
In the long term, female education may be the best way to advance the status of women. During the difficult decade of the 1990s, school-enrollment rates for girls in Iraq declined significantly, making Iraq one of the few countries in the world today where mothers are generally better educated than their daughters. Although reliable literacy figures are hard to come by, most observers agree that Iraq now has one of the worst gender literacy gaps in the world. As Iran, with its female literacy rate of more than 70 percent, has shown, educated women inevitably become effective advocates for their own rights. The United States should therefore champion female education in Iraq at all levels -- primary, secondary, and tertiary -- and promote adult-literacy programs for women.
In the next year, a new Iraqi parliament will be elected with the power to write laws that will shape the country for the next generation. Washington must therefore do everything it can to aid Iraqi women's groups and programs designed to help women leaders there. Efforts such as the U.S.-funded legal-education program at the University of Baghdad, where women make up 40 percent of the participants in rule-of-law seminars, should be expanded to other universities and cities across Iraq. Washington should also consider establishing a women's college in Baghdad, which could become a center of learning and critical thinking for the entire region.
The United States should also start channeling a significant portion of its reconstruction dollars to Iraqi businesswomen. Economic empowerment is a good way to boost the status of women. Despite the enormous sums of American aid flowing into Iraq, the U.S. mission in Baghdad has so far resisted having an adviser on gender issues on the ground in Iraq -- where programs to support women are actually implemented. As a result, its many gender initiatives have not been nearly as effective as they could have been.
Although the United States has now missed this and several other important opportunities to promote the role of women in post-Saddam Iraq, the imposition of sharia there was virtually inevitable. But the resurgence of Islamic law in Iraq need not be a disaster for women. Although it may well mean a short-term setback in certain rights enjoyed under Saddam, in the long run, Iraqis may manage to build a more equitable society that accommodates both Islamic principles and a modern role for women. This outcome is far from guaranteed, but it is also not too much to hope for.
ISOBEL COLEMAN is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Women and U.S. Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations
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New Hope for Women’s Rights in the Middle East
Efforts that have been made in Muslim nations such as Morocco and Indonesia to adhere to Sharia interpretations that promote women’s rights may cross over into Iraq in building a new and flourishing society. Because the new parliament in Iraq is predominantly Shia, Sharia interpretation tends to me more stringent and less favorable towards women. However, more and more Muslim countries are taking notice of women's campaigns which insist that Sharia Law is demeaning towards women only because the patriarchal system allows governments to interpret it this way.
The increased number of women seat holders in the Iraqi parliament (one of the largest woman-occupied cabinets in the world) will surely pave paths to a more democratic Iraq where men and women have equal opportunities and advantages. As more women citizens are becoming educated in Iraq and elsewhere, they will demand that their rights are recognized and represented accordingly within Islamic jurisprudence. The best way to do it, agrees Coleman, is through an Islamic discourse. Fighting subjugating roles interpreted within Islamic Sharia can only be combated through equal vindication of Islamic Law that promotes a true understanding of women’s rights. Fighting fire with fire, or playing by the ultra-conservative’s rules is the most efficient way of eradicating the ill treatment that has been instilled by custom, norms and the powerful patriarchal system in the Middle East.
-Nancy Shihadeh
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Women’s Rights EQUALS Economic Advancement
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040501faessay83308/isobel-coleman/the-payoff-from-women-s-rights.html
The Payoff From Women's Rights
By Isobel Coleman
From Foreign Affairs
May/June 2004
Summary: Backing women's rights in developing countries isn't just good ethics; it's also sound economics. Growth and living standards get a dramatic boost when women are given just a bit more education, political clout, and economic opportunity. So the United States should aggressively promote women's rights abroad. And by couching its case in economic terms, it might even overcome the resistance of conservative Muslim countries that have long balked at gender equality.
THE COST OF INEQUALITY
Over the past decade, significant research has demonstrated what many have known for a long time: women are critical to economic development, active civil society, and good governance, especially in developing countries. Focusing on women is often the best way to reduce birth rates and child mortality; improve health, nutrition, and education; stem the spread of HIV/AIDS; build robust and self-sustaining community organizations; and encourage grassroots democracy.
Much like human rights a generation ago, women's rights were long considered too controversial for mainstream foreign policy. For decades, international development agencies skirted gender issues in highly patriarchal societies. Now, however, they increasingly see women's empowerment as critical to their mandate. The Asian Development Bank is promoting gender-sensitive judicial and police reforms in Pakistan, for example, and the World Bank supports training for female political candidates in Morocco. The United States, too, is increasingly embracing women's rights, as a way not only to foster democracy, but also to promote development, curb extremism, and fight terrorism, all core strategic objectives.
Women's status has advanced in many countries: gender gaps in infant mortality rates, calorie consumption, school enrollment, literacy levels, access to health care, and political participation have narrowed steadily. And those changes have benefited society at large, improving living standards, increasing social entrepreneurship, and attracting foreign direct investment.
Yet significant gender disparities continue to exist, and in some cases, to grow, in three regions: southern Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Although the constraints on women living in these areas -- conservative, patriarchal practices, often reinforced by religious values -- are increasingly recognized as a drag on development, empowering women is still considered a subversive proposition. In some societies, women's rights are at the front line of a protracted battle between religious extremists and those with more moderate, progressive views. Deep tensions are evident in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, for example, and to a lesser extent in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Their resolution will be critical to progress in these countries, for those that suppress women are likely to stagnate economically, fail to develop democratic institutions, and become more prone to extremism.
Washington appreciates these dangers, but it has struggled to find an appropriate response. Since September 11, 2001, largely thanks to growing awareness of the Taliban's repression of Afghan women, gender equality has become a greater feature of U.S. policy abroad. But the Bush administration's policies have been inconsistent. Although Washington has linked calls for democracy with increased rights for women, especially in the Middle East, it has done too little to enforce these demands. It has supported women's empowerment in reform-oriented countries such as Morocco, but it has not promoted it in countries less amenable to change such as Saudi Arabia. Although women's rights feature prominently in U.S. reconstruction plans for Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington has not done enough to channel economic and political power to women there.
Given the importance of women to economic development and democratization -- both of which are key U.S. foreign policy objectives -- Washington must promote their rights more aggressively. In particular, it must undertake, consistently and effectively, more programs designed to increase women's educational opportunities, their control over resources, and their economic and political participation. With overwhelming data now showing that women are critical to development, good governance, and stable civil life, it is time that the United States does more to advance women's rights abroad. (Women’s right if administered by powers such as the U.S. can serve the betterment of international poverty thus alleviating pressures of poverty which elude to violence and desperate measures that we see in the face various acts of terrorism.)
A HIGH-RETURN INVESTMENT
Gender disparities hit women and girls the hardest, but ultimately all of society pays a price for them. Achieving gender equality is now deemed so critical to reducing poverty and improving governance that it has become a development objective in its own right. The 2000 UN Millennium Development Goals, the international community's action plan to attack global poverty, lists gender equality as one of its eight targets and considers women's empowerment essential to achieving all of them. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has argued that nothing is more important for development today than the economic, political, and social participation of women. Increasingly, women, who were long treated as passive recipients of aid, are now regarded as active promoters of change who can help society at large. And various studies specifically show that the benefits of promoting women are greatest when assistance focuses on increasing their education, their control over resources, and their political voice.
Although there is no easy formula for reducing poverty, many argue that educating girls boosts development the most. Lawrence Summers, when he was chief economist at the World Bank, concluded that girls' education may be the investment that yields the highest returns in the developing world. Educated women have fewer children; provide better nutrition, health, and education to their families; experience significantly lower child mortality; and generate more income than women with little or no schooling. Investing to educate them thus creates a virtuous cycle for their community.
Educating women, especially young girls, yields higher returns than educating men. In low-income countries, investing in primary education tends to pay off more than investing at secondary and higher educational levels, and girls are concentrated at lower levels of the education system than are boys. So closing the gender gap in the early years of schooling is a better strategy than promoting other educational reforms that allow gender gaps to remain. Similarly, children benefit more from an increase in their mother's schooling than from the equivalent increase in their father's. Educating mothers does more to lower child mortality rates, promote better birth outcomes (for example, higher birth weights) and better child nutrition, and guarantee earlier and longer schooling for children.
Girls' education also lowers birthrates, which, by extension, helps developing countries improve per capita income. Better-educated women bear fewer children than lesser-educated women because they marry later and have fewer years of childbearing. They also are better able to make informed, confident decisions about reproduction. In fact, increasing the average education level of women by three years can lower their individual birthrate by one child. Studies show that in India, educating girls helps lower birth rates even more effectively than family planning initiatives.
Female education also boosts agricultural productivity. World Bank studies indicate that, in areas where women have very little schooling, providing them with at least another year of primary education is a better way to raise farm yields than increasing access to land or fertilizer usage. As men increasingly seek jobs away from farms, women become more responsible for managing the land. Because women tend to cultivate different crops than their husbands do, they cannot rely on men for training and need their own access to relevant information. As land grows more scarce and fertilizers yield diminishing returns, the next revolution in agricultural productivity may well be driven by women's education.
It is no coincidence, then, that in the last half-century, the regions that have most successfully closed gender gaps in education have also achieved the most economically and socially: eastern Asia, southeastern Asia, and Latin America. Conversely, regions with lagging growth -- southern Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa -- have also lagged in their investments in girls' education. Today, illiteracy among adult females is highest in southern Asia (55 percent), the Arab world (51 percent), and sub-Saharan Africa (45 percent). Simulation analyses suggest that, had these three regions closed their gender gaps in education at the same rate as eastern Asia did from 1960 to 1992, their per capita income could have grown by up to an additional percentage point every year. Compounded over three decades, that increase would have been highly significant.
Giving women more control over resources also profits the community at large because women tend to invest more in their families than do men. Increases in household income, for example, benefit a family more if the mother, rather than the father, controls the cash. Studies of countries as varied as Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, and the United Kingdom suggest that women generally devote more of the household budget to education, health, and nutrition, and less to alcohol and cigarettes. For example, increases in female income improve child survival rates 20 times more than increases in male income, and children's weight-height measures improve about 8 times more. Likewise, female borrowing has a greater positive impact on school enrollment, child nutrition, and demand for health care than male borrowing.
These differences help explain why extending microfinance (small-scale lending with little or no collateral) to women has become such a powerful force for development. Mohammed Yunus founded Grameen Bank in Bangladesh -- and launched the microfinance wave -- by reasoning that if loans were granted to poor people on appropriate and reasonable terms, "millions of small people with their millions of small pursuits [could] add up to create the biggest development wonder." Yunus deliberately promoted microfinancing for women for reasons of equity: women are generally poorer and more credit-constrained than men, and they have limited access to the wage labor market and an inequitable share in decision-making at home. But he was also moved by sound economics: women pay their loans back more consistently than men.
Microfinance has been lauded for alleviating poverty in a financially sustainable way. But its greatest long-term benefit could be its impact on the social status of women. Women now account for 80 percent of the world's 70 million microborrowers. And studies show that women with microfinancing get more involved in family decision-making, are more mobile and more politically and legally aware, and participate more in public affairs than other women. Female borrowers also suffer less domestic violence -- a consequence, perhaps, of their perceived value to the family increasing once they start to generate income of their own.
Allowing women to participate in politics also benefits democracy -- and not only because it advances their civil rights. Intriguing new studies suggest that women in power make different policy choices than their male counterparts, with profound implications for the local allocation of public resources and, thus, for development.
Esther Duflo, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has examined the impact of a constitutional amendment that India passed in 1993, which requires states to devolve more power over expenditures to panchayats (local councils) and reserve a third of council leadership positions for women. Duflo found that when women are in charge, the panchayat invests more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to women's needs. This is not to say that women's priorities are somehow better than men's, only that they are different and that in countries in which women are neglected, putting them in charge may begin to redress the imbalance.
The research of Steven Fish, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, into why Muslim countries are generally less democratic than other countries reveals other benefits of female political participation. Fish has found that robust democracy is exceedingly rare in societies that display a large gender gap in literacy rates and a skewed gender ratio (usually a marker of inferior nutrition and health care for girls and infanticide or sex-selective abortion). He argues that societies that marginalize women generally count both fewer anti-authoritarian voices in politics and more men who join fanatical religious and political brotherhoods -- two factors that stifle democracy.
[Interestingly, this analysis shows that the wide gender gap in the Middle East among women and men may have served as a catalyst that not only hindered the emergence of democracy but also laid the foundation for the creation of terrorist organizations].
ONE AT A TIME
Given the importance of women to economic and political development, it is no surprise that they are on the front line of modernization efforts around the world. But empowering women is rarely easy: it produces tensions everywhere, because it often collides with the twin powers of culture and religion.
Today, much scrutiny is given to the impact of Islam on women, often as evidence of a deep cultural rift between the West and conservative Muslim societies. But the real cultural rift may be within the Muslim world: between highly traditional rural populations and their more modernized urban compatriots or between religious fundamentalists and more moderate interpreters of Islam. Such tensions can be felt in countries ranging from Nigeria to Indonesia, but nowhere are they starker than in the Middle East.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, may be the best-known leader to have pushed his country into modernity by transforming the role of women in society. After the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924, Atatürk promoted an aggressive program of secularization, replacing sharia with European constitutional law, prohibiting traditional Muslim dress, abolishing religious schools, and turning education into a state monopoly. Believing that women are intrinsically important to society, he launched many reforms to give them equal rights and more opportunities. A new civil code abolished polygamy and recognized the rights of women to inherit, divorce, and get custody of their children. (All of which such rights are enjoyed under jurisdiction that comes directly form Quranic interpretation). Segregation in education was ended, and women were given full political rights. By the mid-1930s, Turkey had 13 female judges and 18 female parliamentarians. It was the first country in the world to appoint a female justice to its highest court, and in the mid-1990s, a woman was elected prime minister.
Similarly, when Tunisia won its independence in 1956, President Habib Bourguiba adopted an authoritarian, top-down approach to empower women as part of broader efforts to modernize the country. In his first year, he adopted a revolutionary Code of Personal Status that greatly enhanced women's rights: it banned polygamy, required a girl's consent for marriage, raised the minimum marriage age to 17, and allowed women to request divorce. At the time, these were progressive measures not only for Tunisia, but also for the world. And they stood in especially stark contrast to the laws then in force in Morocco, which gained independence from France at the same time but adopted a highly restrictive personal status law (moudawana) that institutionalized many conservative constraints on women.
Tunisia's enlightened policies toward women have contributed to its markedly superior record on developing human capital and economic growth. Today, the country's overall literacy rate is 70 percent (80 percent for men and 60 percent for women), compared to only 48 percent in Morocco (60 percent for men and 35 percent for women). Tunisia's better-educated work force has helped the country attract more foreign direct investment. And tens of thousands of Tunisian women have brought their families into the middle class by working in export-oriented light manufacturing and foreign service centers. Not surprisingly, Tunisia's population growth rate has been notably lower than Morocco's, which accounts in part for its stronger gains in per capita income.
The aggressive promotion of women's rights has not come without a significant backlash. Because the notion of female empowerment is often strongly associated with secularism and Western values, it has generated widespread resistance in certain societies, among both men and women. To appeal to religious conservatives, leaders throughout the Arab world have long given them significant influence over women, usually by letting them oversee family law and personal status codes. But now that the importance of women to economic and political development is becoming increasingly clear, several young, Western-educated reformist leaders -- King Mohamed VI of Morocco, King Abdullah of Jordan, and Sheik Hamad of Qatar -- are reclaiming control over these areas. These leaders are engaged in the delicate exercise of pushing women forward without alienating their still highly conservative constituencies. Their efforts were boosted by the groundbreaking "Arab Human Development Report 2002," which attributed the Arab world's economic and political stagnation in part to gender inequality.
Women in Morocco have made some remarkable advances in recent years. In the mid-1990s, with the support of the World Bank, Morocco launched a program promoting women's participation in development by increasing girls' education, health care for mothers and their children, and economic and political opportunities for women. It guaranteed that women would get 10 percent of the seats in the lower house of parliament in the 2002 elections. This quota helped raise the number of female representatives from 2 to 35 -- a notable achievement in the Arab world, which has the lowest percentage of women parliamentarians anywhere (about 3 percent). Several international organizations, including the National Democratic Institute and the UN Development Fund for Women, helped train the female candidates.
Women's groups have also been encouraged to play a more active role in Moroccan politics. In recent years, they have lobbied hard to reform the moudawana, and despite vehement opposition from fundamentalists, Mohammed VI established a "royal consultative committee" to assist their efforts. In January, the Moroccan parliament enacted one of the most progressive women's rights laws in the region, allowing women to marry without their father's consent, initiate divorce, and share with their husbands responsibility over family matters. The minimum marriage age was raised from 15 to 18, and the practice of polygamy severely restricted.
Similarly, in Jordan, King Abdullah is improving the education of women and increasing their participation in the work force and in politics. The government has eliminated any gender gap in primary school enrollment, and girls now outnumber boys in secondary and tertiary education. Queen Rania, Abdullah's wife, has actively promoted microfinance initiatives, and under her patronage, in late 2003, Jordan hosted the region's first microfinance conference. The government has also implemented limited electoral quotas, reserving 6 out of 110 seats in parliament for women.
Nowhere, however, is women's reform more startling than in tiny Qatar, an otherwise highly conservative Wahhabi state. Sheik Hamad has launched a number of political reforms, including the country's first popular elections in 1999, in which both men and women were allowed to vote and run for office. Hamad and his wife, Sheika Mouza, have also encouraged educational reform. The government hired the Rand Corporation to advise on restructuring the country's educational system, and it launched the Education City Initiative, which has invited several American universities to set up local branches in Qatar (including the Virginia Commonwealth School of Arts and the Weill Cornell Medical College). Women now make up nearly 70 percent of the country's university students. Although Qatar's population is less than a million, the effects of its reforms are likely to ripple beyond its borders.
These reforms have not gone unnoticed in neighboring Saudi Arabia, for example, where religious conservatives still maintain strict control over women's access to public life. Saudi society is nearly completely segregated: in health care, education, and the work force. Women are treated as minors: they must have a male chaperon in public, they are not allowed to drive, and they need permission from their closest male relative to travel. The Saudi government has recently agreed to issue women identity cards, but only with the permission of a male guardian. The notorious mutaween (religious police) patrol malls to ensure that women are fully covered in public. In a tragic incident in Mecca in 2002, 15 schoolgirls were killed in a fire after mutaween allegedly forced them back inside the burning building because they were not appropriately covered.
But the Mecca fire prompted a national debate over religious extremism, after which control over the education of Saudi girls was transferred from religious authorities to the Ministry of Education. And that controversy helped revive long-standing calls for change. Female literacy in Saudi Arabia has risen from 2 percent in the mid-1960s, when universal female education was introduced (over vehement protest from the religious authorities), to more than 70 percent today. Women now account for nearly 60 percent of all university students, and they increasingly question the constraints on their lives. In January 2003, Saudi women signed a petition demanding that the government recognize their legal and civil rights. These efforts are beginning to pay off. The government, risking the wrath of religious conservatives, recently offered to let women take part in elections scheduled for later this year.
The demands of Saudi women may be helped along by new economic circumstances that are fueling the pressure for change. (A joke circulating around Riyadh says that the woman most sought after these days is the one with a job.) As GNP per capita has plunged from $25,000 in 1984 to roughly $8,500 today, more Saudis are wondering why half the country's human capital should be so severely handicapped. Indeed, a World Bank study on labor markets in the Middle East indicates that the increased participation of women in the work force can raise the average household income by as much as 25 percent without raising unemployment. So it is an encouraging sign that 10 percent of private Saudi businesses today are believed to be run by women.
Still, the Saudi debate over women's rights is often a proxy for difficult and dangerous debates over civil liberties, religious extremism, and human rights more generally, which are largely stifled. Talk of women's liberation encounters powerful resistance and recurring backlashes. Women played a major role in the recent Jeddah Economic Forum, which featured a keynote address by Lubna al Olayan, a prominent businesswoman, calling for greater economic and political rights for women. But soon after the conference, Saudi Arabia's grand mufti, or highest religious authority, issued a fatwa denouncing the public role of women. (It could not have helped that al Olayan also appeared on the front page of several leading Saudi newspapers with her head uncovered.)
Fundamentalists draw such a close link between women's empowerment and Western decadence that reformists such as Crown Prince Abdullah must be exceedingly careful when they endorse the former not to appear to be condoning the latter. For now, the role of women continues to be a line in the sand between those who want to modernize the country and those who seek to impose a harsh, medieval version of Islam in the kingdom.
A FAIRER FUTURE
The Bush administration appears to recognize the importance of women to development. Women's rights have been a prominent element of its nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq and a central motif of its project to promote democracy in the Middle East. U.S. policymakers have been instrumental in pushing for women's rights in the new constitutions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Their influence has helped bridge deep cultural rifts in both countries, and it was critical in securing a 25 percent electoral quota for women there.
Although that accomplishment is significant, it was no more than a fragile first step. For Afghan women to benefit from the quota -- or from any political or economic opportunity -- they will need to become much better educated. Female literacy (defined as the ability to read a newspaper and write a letter) is well below 20 percent in Afghanistan. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has stated that Afghan girls' education is one of its priorities, and already more girls attend school than ever before in the country's history. But USAID has committed only $100 million to all education initiatives in Afghanistan over the next two years. That is grossly insufficient funding for the most pressing educational need of Afghan girls -- the training of female teachers -- especially since a large part of it is earmarked for school construction.
Women's progress since the fall of the Taliban has been significant, but it may be short-lived. Several of the powerful warlords who effectively control large swaths of the country fiercely oppose women's rights. Their militias have burned down girls' schools and pressured village leaders to prevent women from registering to vote in upcoming elections. And the United States supports these leaders, tacitly and explicitly, using their help in the hunt for terrorists. This marriage of convenience threatens Washington's policy of advancing women's rights, which will have to be pursued for another generation before the status of Afghan women improves substantially.
Washington has also compromised on women's issues in Iraq. On the one hand, it has placed women's rights high on its reconstruction agenda: U.S. officials meet frequently with female Iraqi leaders, emphasize the importance of women's rights, and have channeled several million dollars to local women's groups. (In March, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the Iraqi Women Democracy Initiative, which earmarks $10 million for leadership, political advocacy, and media training for women.) On the other hand, Washington has bowed to pressure from Shia leaders, backing down from appointing several female judges and designating only three women to the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and none to the 24-member Constitutional Committee.
The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has also vacillated on the sensitive issue of sharia. Over the past year, many Iraqis have expressed deep concern that the rights women enjoyed under Saddam Hussein's secular Baathist regime would be significantly eroded if the new government adopted sharia wholesale. Concerns intensified in December when the IGC canceled Iraq's relatively liberal Personal Status Law, placing several aspects of family law, such as marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance, under the control of religious authorities. (Critics have argued that the move proves the CPA should have appointed more women to the IGC.) During deliberations on the interim constitution, Iraqi women organized protests and U.S. civilian administrator Paul Bremer said he would veto any draft that tried to impose a rigid version of sharia on Iraq. As a compromise, the interim constitution states that Islam will be an important source of future legislation but not the only one, as Shia leaders demanded. How strenuously the United States will continue to push this issue is unclear and still a cause for deep concern to many Iraqis.
The U.S. experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq show that advancing women's rights is a complicated and delicate task, particularly in Muslim societies. But just as the United States promoted human rights even when doing so conflicted with its other strategic objectives (arms control in the Soviet Union or economic relations with China), it should now wholeheartedly promote women's rights. Washington should make sure its policy on women's rights is consistent, it should generously fund the projects it undertakes, and, where necessary, it should condition its aid to developing countries on their efforts to close gender gaps.
For the sake of consistency and credibility, the United States must promote international efforts intended to advance the role of women worldwide. It should lead the implementation of UN Resolution 1325, unanimously passed by the General Assembly in 2000, which committed the UN to giving women a greater role in peacekeeping and postconflict transitions. More important, the United States should finally endorse the 1981 Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women, the only global treaty that deals exclusively with the rights of women, which 175 countries, including every industrialized democracy but the United States, have ratified. U.S. critics of the treaty have called it "antifamily," even though nothing in it contradicts traditional family values. They have also argued that the United States does not need it, since U.S. laws go well beyond what it recommends. So why not ratify it? By failing to support the agreement, Washington undermines its professed commitment to women's rights and exposes itself to charges of hypocrisy.
[Because the U.S. is the only country that has not enforced the UN resolution that eliminates discrimination against women, the rest of the international community will not take these efforts for women seriously, if states see the U.S. as considering the convention unnecessary then efforts made by countries trying to advance women’s rights will be hindered and lacking.]
The United States should also dramatically increase funding to improve the status of women in regions where gender gaps are widest and assistance is most needed: the Middle East, southern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Given the demonstrated high returns on investments in girls' education, the United States should, as its top development priority, work to eliminate gender gaps in primary education (USAID support for basic education is roughly $250 million).
Likewise, it should expand support for microfinancing beyond its current level of roughly $200 million. Women's health and family planning deserve more funding too, particularly in countries such as Afghanistan where maternal mortality rates are alarmingly high. Adequate primary, maternal, and reproductive health care is critical to women's empowerment, especially in areas with high rates of adolescent marriage. (In those countries, the Bush administration's emphasis on abstinence is unrealistic.) Finally, the United States should use the Middle East Partnership Initiative, a $150 million program to advance democracy in the Middle East, which promotes programs for female literacy and health, as well as business and political training, as a model for more activist, pro-women policies in other parts of the world.
[Promoting democracy in these regions should incorporate full-heartedly the rights for women. Doing this will advance economic growth that the United States can benefit from. With equal rights allocated to women in these regions, we may see the decline of anti-democratic regimes that further destruct, terrorize and stifle regions across the Middle East.]
With the Millennium Challenge Account, the United States is now undertaking the largest expansion of foreign development aid in more than a generation. It should seize this opportunity to leverage its aid for the benefit of women's rights, by incorporating specific gender measures into the criteria that determine eligibility for funds. None of the 16 current criteria specifically takes account of women's status, but these could easily be adjusted. A country's maternal mortality ratio and its female primary school completion rate are both good indicators of gender equality there.
Similarly, the United States could promote respect for women's rights by making adherence to them a more explicit condition for U.S. military and economic aid. The State Department should be tasked with writing country reports tracking worldwide progress on key gender measures such as girls' literacy, maternal health, gender ratios, and political participation, much as it already does on human rights. Funding data collection on gender disparities is also important. Such information is lacking in many countries, and improving it could, by itself, help close gender gaps resulting from neglect.
"The worldwide advancement of women's issues is not only in keeping with the deeply held values of the American people," Powell has said, "it is strongly in our national interest as well." The United States has advocated women's rights as a moral imperative or as a way to promote democracy. In so doing, it might have compounded the difficulty of its task, by irking conservative religious forces or the authoritarian regimes it otherwise supports. But now Washington can also make an economic case for women's rights, which may be more acceptable to traditionalists. Promoting women's rights because they spur development and economic growth is a powerful way for the United States to advance its foreign policy in the future while minimizing the ideological debates that have frustrated it in the past.
[Advancing women’s rights can serve as the tool/platform from which a form of democracy palatable to the Middle East can be established. By working with those moderates who have a less strict interpretation of Islamic Law, the United States can advance its goals and foreign policy by fighting the conservatives with their own weapon of choice-Islamic Sharia.]
Isobel Coleman is a Senior Fellow on U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations
The Payoff From Women's Rights
By Isobel Coleman
From Foreign Affairs
May/June 2004
Summary: Backing women's rights in developing countries isn't just good ethics; it's also sound economics. Growth and living standards get a dramatic boost when women are given just a bit more education, political clout, and economic opportunity. So the United States should aggressively promote women's rights abroad. And by couching its case in economic terms, it might even overcome the resistance of conservative Muslim countries that have long balked at gender equality.
THE COST OF INEQUALITY
Over the past decade, significant research has demonstrated what many have known for a long time: women are critical to economic development, active civil society, and good governance, especially in developing countries. Focusing on women is often the best way to reduce birth rates and child mortality; improve health, nutrition, and education; stem the spread of HIV/AIDS; build robust and self-sustaining community organizations; and encourage grassroots democracy.
Much like human rights a generation ago, women's rights were long considered too controversial for mainstream foreign policy. For decades, international development agencies skirted gender issues in highly patriarchal societies. Now, however, they increasingly see women's empowerment as critical to their mandate. The Asian Development Bank is promoting gender-sensitive judicial and police reforms in Pakistan, for example, and the World Bank supports training for female political candidates in Morocco. The United States, too, is increasingly embracing women's rights, as a way not only to foster democracy, but also to promote development, curb extremism, and fight terrorism, all core strategic objectives.
Women's status has advanced in many countries: gender gaps in infant mortality rates, calorie consumption, school enrollment, literacy levels, access to health care, and political participation have narrowed steadily. And those changes have benefited society at large, improving living standards, increasing social entrepreneurship, and attracting foreign direct investment.
Yet significant gender disparities continue to exist, and in some cases, to grow, in three regions: southern Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Although the constraints on women living in these areas -- conservative, patriarchal practices, often reinforced by religious values -- are increasingly recognized as a drag on development, empowering women is still considered a subversive proposition. In some societies, women's rights are at the front line of a protracted battle between religious extremists and those with more moderate, progressive views. Deep tensions are evident in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, for example, and to a lesser extent in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Their resolution will be critical to progress in these countries, for those that suppress women are likely to stagnate economically, fail to develop democratic institutions, and become more prone to extremism.
Washington appreciates these dangers, but it has struggled to find an appropriate response. Since September 11, 2001, largely thanks to growing awareness of the Taliban's repression of Afghan women, gender equality has become a greater feature of U.S. policy abroad. But the Bush administration's policies have been inconsistent. Although Washington has linked calls for democracy with increased rights for women, especially in the Middle East, it has done too little to enforce these demands. It has supported women's empowerment in reform-oriented countries such as Morocco, but it has not promoted it in countries less amenable to change such as Saudi Arabia. Although women's rights feature prominently in U.S. reconstruction plans for Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington has not done enough to channel economic and political power to women there.
Given the importance of women to economic development and democratization -- both of which are key U.S. foreign policy objectives -- Washington must promote their rights more aggressively. In particular, it must undertake, consistently and effectively, more programs designed to increase women's educational opportunities, their control over resources, and their economic and political participation. With overwhelming data now showing that women are critical to development, good governance, and stable civil life, it is time that the United States does more to advance women's rights abroad. (Women’s right if administered by powers such as the U.S. can serve the betterment of international poverty thus alleviating pressures of poverty which elude to violence and desperate measures that we see in the face various acts of terrorism.)
A HIGH-RETURN INVESTMENT
Gender disparities hit women and girls the hardest, but ultimately all of society pays a price for them. Achieving gender equality is now deemed so critical to reducing poverty and improving governance that it has become a development objective in its own right. The 2000 UN Millennium Development Goals, the international community's action plan to attack global poverty, lists gender equality as one of its eight targets and considers women's empowerment essential to achieving all of them. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has argued that nothing is more important for development today than the economic, political, and social participation of women. Increasingly, women, who were long treated as passive recipients of aid, are now regarded as active promoters of change who can help society at large. And various studies specifically show that the benefits of promoting women are greatest when assistance focuses on increasing their education, their control over resources, and their political voice.
Although there is no easy formula for reducing poverty, many argue that educating girls boosts development the most. Lawrence Summers, when he was chief economist at the World Bank, concluded that girls' education may be the investment that yields the highest returns in the developing world. Educated women have fewer children; provide better nutrition, health, and education to their families; experience significantly lower child mortality; and generate more income than women with little or no schooling. Investing to educate them thus creates a virtuous cycle for their community.
Educating women, especially young girls, yields higher returns than educating men. In low-income countries, investing in primary education tends to pay off more than investing at secondary and higher educational levels, and girls are concentrated at lower levels of the education system than are boys. So closing the gender gap in the early years of schooling is a better strategy than promoting other educational reforms that allow gender gaps to remain. Similarly, children benefit more from an increase in their mother's schooling than from the equivalent increase in their father's. Educating mothers does more to lower child mortality rates, promote better birth outcomes (for example, higher birth weights) and better child nutrition, and guarantee earlier and longer schooling for children.
Girls' education also lowers birthrates, which, by extension, helps developing countries improve per capita income. Better-educated women bear fewer children than lesser-educated women because they marry later and have fewer years of childbearing. They also are better able to make informed, confident decisions about reproduction. In fact, increasing the average education level of women by three years can lower their individual birthrate by one child. Studies show that in India, educating girls helps lower birth rates even more effectively than family planning initiatives.
Female education also boosts agricultural productivity. World Bank studies indicate that, in areas where women have very little schooling, providing them with at least another year of primary education is a better way to raise farm yields than increasing access to land or fertilizer usage. As men increasingly seek jobs away from farms, women become more responsible for managing the land. Because women tend to cultivate different crops than their husbands do, they cannot rely on men for training and need their own access to relevant information. As land grows more scarce and fertilizers yield diminishing returns, the next revolution in agricultural productivity may well be driven by women's education.
It is no coincidence, then, that in the last half-century, the regions that have most successfully closed gender gaps in education have also achieved the most economically and socially: eastern Asia, southeastern Asia, and Latin America. Conversely, regions with lagging growth -- southern Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa -- have also lagged in their investments in girls' education. Today, illiteracy among adult females is highest in southern Asia (55 percent), the Arab world (51 percent), and sub-Saharan Africa (45 percent). Simulation analyses suggest that, had these three regions closed their gender gaps in education at the same rate as eastern Asia did from 1960 to 1992, their per capita income could have grown by up to an additional percentage point every year. Compounded over three decades, that increase would have been highly significant.
Giving women more control over resources also profits the community at large because women tend to invest more in their families than do men. Increases in household income, for example, benefit a family more if the mother, rather than the father, controls the cash. Studies of countries as varied as Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, and the United Kingdom suggest that women generally devote more of the household budget to education, health, and nutrition, and less to alcohol and cigarettes. For example, increases in female income improve child survival rates 20 times more than increases in male income, and children's weight-height measures improve about 8 times more. Likewise, female borrowing has a greater positive impact on school enrollment, child nutrition, and demand for health care than male borrowing.
These differences help explain why extending microfinance (small-scale lending with little or no collateral) to women has become such a powerful force for development. Mohammed Yunus founded Grameen Bank in Bangladesh -- and launched the microfinance wave -- by reasoning that if loans were granted to poor people on appropriate and reasonable terms, "millions of small people with their millions of small pursuits [could] add up to create the biggest development wonder." Yunus deliberately promoted microfinancing for women for reasons of equity: women are generally poorer and more credit-constrained than men, and they have limited access to the wage labor market and an inequitable share in decision-making at home. But he was also moved by sound economics: women pay their loans back more consistently than men.Microfinance has been lauded for alleviating poverty in a financially sustainable way. But its greatest long-term benefit could be its impact on the social status of women. Women now account for 80 percent of the world's 70 million microborrowers. And studies show that women with microfinancing get more involved in family decision-making, are more mobile and more politically and legally aware, and participate more in public affairs than other women. Female borrowers also suffer less domestic violence -- a consequence, perhaps, of their perceived value to the family increasing once they start to generate income of their own.
Allowing women to participate in politics also benefits democracy -- and not only because it advances their civil rights. Intriguing new studies suggest that women in power make different policy choices than their male counterparts, with profound implications for the local allocation of public resources and, thus, for development.
Esther Duflo, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has examined the impact of a constitutional amendment that India passed in 1993, which requires states to devolve more power over expenditures to panchayats (local councils) and reserve a third of council leadership positions for women. Duflo found that when women are in charge, the panchayat invests more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to women's needs. This is not to say that women's priorities are somehow better than men's, only that they are different and that in countries in which women are neglected, putting them in charge may begin to redress the imbalance.
The research of Steven Fish, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, into why Muslim countries are generally less democratic than other countries reveals other benefits of female political participation. Fish has found that robust democracy is exceedingly rare in societies that display a large gender gap in literacy rates and a skewed gender ratio (usually a marker of inferior nutrition and health care for girls and infanticide or sex-selective abortion). He argues that societies that marginalize women generally count both fewer anti-authoritarian voices in politics and more men who join fanatical religious and political brotherhoods -- two factors that stifle democracy.
[Interestingly, this analysis shows that the wide gender gap in the Middle East among women and men may have served as a catalyst that not only hindered the emergence of democracy but also laid the foundation for the creation of terrorist organizations].
ONE AT A TIME
Given the importance of women to economic and political development, it is no surprise that they are on the front line of modernization efforts around the world. But empowering women is rarely easy: it produces tensions everywhere, because it often collides with the twin powers of culture and religion.
Today, much scrutiny is given to the impact of Islam on women, often as evidence of a deep cultural rift between the West and conservative Muslim societies. But the real cultural rift may be within the Muslim world: between highly traditional rural populations and their more modernized urban compatriots or between religious fundamentalists and more moderate interpreters of Islam. Such tensions can be felt in countries ranging from Nigeria to Indonesia, but nowhere are they starker than in the Middle East.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, may be the best-known leader to have pushed his country into modernity by transforming the role of women in society. After the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924, Atatürk promoted an aggressive program of secularization, replacing sharia with European constitutional law, prohibiting traditional Muslim dress, abolishing religious schools, and turning education into a state monopoly. Believing that women are intrinsically important to society, he launched many reforms to give them equal rights and more opportunities. A new civil code abolished polygamy and recognized the rights of women to inherit, divorce, and get custody of their children. (All of which such rights are enjoyed under jurisdiction that comes directly form Quranic interpretation). Segregation in education was ended, and women were given full political rights. By the mid-1930s, Turkey had 13 female judges and 18 female parliamentarians. It was the first country in the world to appoint a female justice to its highest court, and in the mid-1990s, a woman was elected prime minister.
Similarly, when Tunisia won its independence in 1956, President Habib Bourguiba adopted an authoritarian, top-down approach to empower women as part of broader efforts to modernize the country. In his first year, he adopted a revolutionary Code of Personal Status that greatly enhanced women's rights: it banned polygamy, required a girl's consent for marriage, raised the minimum marriage age to 17, and allowed women to request divorce. At the time, these were progressive measures not only for Tunisia, but also for the world. And they stood in especially stark contrast to the laws then in force in Morocco, which gained independence from France at the same time but adopted a highly restrictive personal status law (moudawana) that institutionalized many conservative constraints on women.
Tunisia's enlightened policies toward women have contributed to its markedly superior record on developing human capital and economic growth. Today, the country's overall literacy rate is 70 percent (80 percent for men and 60 percent for women), compared to only 48 percent in Morocco (60 percent for men and 35 percent for women). Tunisia's better-educated work force has helped the country attract more foreign direct investment. And tens of thousands of Tunisian women have brought their families into the middle class by working in export-oriented light manufacturing and foreign service centers. Not surprisingly, Tunisia's population growth rate has been notably lower than Morocco's, which accounts in part for its stronger gains in per capita income.
The aggressive promotion of women's rights has not come without a significant backlash. Because the notion of female empowerment is often strongly associated with secularism and Western values, it has generated widespread resistance in certain societies, among both men and women. To appeal to religious conservatives, leaders throughout the Arab world have long given them significant influence over women, usually by letting them oversee family law and personal status codes. But now that the importance of women to economic and political development is becoming increasingly clear, several young, Western-educated reformist leaders -- King Mohamed VI of Morocco, King Abdullah of Jordan, and Sheik Hamad of Qatar -- are reclaiming control over these areas. These leaders are engaged in the delicate exercise of pushing women forward without alienating their still highly conservative constituencies. Their efforts were boosted by the groundbreaking "Arab Human Development Report 2002," which attributed the Arab world's economic and political stagnation in part to gender inequality.
Women in Morocco have made some remarkable advances in recent years. In the mid-1990s, with the support of the World Bank, Morocco launched a program promoting women's participation in development by increasing girls' education, health care for mothers and their children, and economic and political opportunities for women. It guaranteed that women would get 10 percent of the seats in the lower house of parliament in the 2002 elections. This quota helped raise the number of female representatives from 2 to 35 -- a notable achievement in the Arab world, which has the lowest percentage of women parliamentarians anywhere (about 3 percent). Several international organizations, including the National Democratic Institute and the UN Development Fund for Women, helped train the female candidates.
Women's groups have also been encouraged to play a more active role in Moroccan politics. In recent years, they have lobbied hard to reform the moudawana, and despite vehement opposition from fundamentalists, Mohammed VI established a "royal consultative committee" to assist their efforts. In January, the Moroccan parliament enacted one of the most progressive women's rights laws in the region, allowing women to marry without their father's consent, initiate divorce, and share with their husbands responsibility over family matters. The minimum marriage age was raised from 15 to 18, and the practice of polygamy severely restricted.
Similarly, in Jordan, King Abdullah is improving the education of women and increasing their participation in the work force and in politics. The government has eliminated any gender gap in primary school enrollment, and girls now outnumber boys in secondary and tertiary education. Queen Rania, Abdullah's wife, has actively promoted microfinance initiatives, and under her patronage, in late 2003, Jordan hosted the region's first microfinance conference. The government has also implemented limited electoral quotas, reserving 6 out of 110 seats in parliament for women.
Nowhere, however, is women's reform more startling than in tiny Qatar, an otherwise highly conservative Wahhabi state. Sheik Hamad has launched a number of political reforms, including the country's first popular elections in 1999, in which both men and women were allowed to vote and run for office. Hamad and his wife, Sheika Mouza, have also encouraged educational reform. The government hired the Rand Corporation to advise on restructuring the country's educational system, and it launched the Education City Initiative, which has invited several American universities to set up local branches in Qatar (including the Virginia Commonwealth School of Arts and the Weill Cornell Medical College). Women now make up nearly 70 percent of the country's university students. Although Qatar's population is less than a million, the effects of its reforms are likely to ripple beyond its borders.
These reforms have not gone unnoticed in neighboring Saudi Arabia, for example, where religious conservatives still maintain strict control over women's access to public life. Saudi society is nearly completely segregated: in health care, education, and the work force. Women are treated as minors: they must have a male chaperon in public, they are not allowed to drive, and they need permission from their closest male relative to travel. The Saudi government has recently agreed to issue women identity cards, but only with the permission of a male guardian. The notorious mutaween (religious police) patrol malls to ensure that women are fully covered in public. In a tragic incident in Mecca in 2002, 15 schoolgirls were killed in a fire after mutaween allegedly forced them back inside the burning building because they were not appropriately covered.
But the Mecca fire prompted a national debate over religious extremism, after which control over the education of Saudi girls was transferred from religious authorities to the Ministry of Education. And that controversy helped revive long-standing calls for change. Female literacy in Saudi Arabia has risen from 2 percent in the mid-1960s, when universal female education was introduced (over vehement protest from the religious authorities), to more than 70 percent today. Women now account for nearly 60 percent of all university students, and they increasingly question the constraints on their lives. In January 2003, Saudi women signed a petition demanding that the government recognize their legal and civil rights. These efforts are beginning to pay off. The government, risking the wrath of religious conservatives, recently offered to let women take part in elections scheduled for later this year.
The demands of Saudi women may be helped along by new economic circumstances that are fueling the pressure for change. (A joke circulating around Riyadh says that the woman most sought after these days is the one with a job.) As GNP per capita has plunged from $25,000 in 1984 to roughly $8,500 today, more Saudis are wondering why half the country's human capital should be so severely handicapped. Indeed, a World Bank study on labor markets in the Middle East indicates that the increased participation of women in the work force can raise the average household income by as much as 25 percent without raising unemployment. So it is an encouraging sign that 10 percent of private Saudi businesses today are believed to be run by women.
Still, the Saudi debate over women's rights is often a proxy for difficult and dangerous debates over civil liberties, religious extremism, and human rights more generally, which are largely stifled. Talk of women's liberation encounters powerful resistance and recurring backlashes. Women played a major role in the recent Jeddah Economic Forum, which featured a keynote address by Lubna al Olayan, a prominent businesswoman, calling for greater economic and political rights for women. But soon after the conference, Saudi Arabia's grand mufti, or highest religious authority, issued a fatwa denouncing the public role of women. (It could not have helped that al Olayan also appeared on the front page of several leading Saudi newspapers with her head uncovered.)
Fundamentalists draw such a close link between women's empowerment and Western decadence that reformists such as Crown Prince Abdullah must be exceedingly careful when they endorse the former not to appear to be condoning the latter. For now, the role of women continues to be a line in the sand between those who want to modernize the country and those who seek to impose a harsh, medieval version of Islam in the kingdom.
A FAIRER FUTURE
The Bush administration appears to recognize the importance of women to development. Women's rights have been a prominent element of its nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq and a central motif of its project to promote democracy in the Middle East. U.S. policymakers have been instrumental in pushing for women's rights in the new constitutions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Their influence has helped bridge deep cultural rifts in both countries, and it was critical in securing a 25 percent electoral quota for women there.
Although that accomplishment is significant, it was no more than a fragile first step. For Afghan women to benefit from the quota -- or from any political or economic opportunity -- they will need to become much better educated. Female literacy (defined as the ability to read a newspaper and write a letter) is well below 20 percent in Afghanistan. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has stated that Afghan girls' education is one of its priorities, and already more girls attend school than ever before in the country's history. But USAID has committed only $100 million to all education initiatives in Afghanistan over the next two years. That is grossly insufficient funding for the most pressing educational need of Afghan girls -- the training of female teachers -- especially since a large part of it is earmarked for school construction.
Women's progress since the fall of the Taliban has been significant, but it may be short-lived. Several of the powerful warlords who effectively control large swaths of the country fiercely oppose women's rights. Their militias have burned down girls' schools and pressured village leaders to prevent women from registering to vote in upcoming elections. And the United States supports these leaders, tacitly and explicitly, using their help in the hunt for terrorists. This marriage of convenience threatens Washington's policy of advancing women's rights, which will have to be pursued for another generation before the status of Afghan women improves substantially.
Washington has also compromised on women's issues in Iraq. On the one hand, it has placed women's rights high on its reconstruction agenda: U.S. officials meet frequently with female Iraqi leaders, emphasize the importance of women's rights, and have channeled several million dollars to local women's groups. (In March, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the Iraqi Women Democracy Initiative, which earmarks $10 million for leadership, political advocacy, and media training for women.) On the other hand, Washington has bowed to pressure from Shia leaders, backing down from appointing several female judges and designating only three women to the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and none to the 24-member Constitutional Committee.
The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has also vacillated on the sensitive issue of sharia. Over the past year, many Iraqis have expressed deep concern that the rights women enjoyed under Saddam Hussein's secular Baathist regime would be significantly eroded if the new government adopted sharia wholesale. Concerns intensified in December when the IGC canceled Iraq's relatively liberal Personal Status Law, placing several aspects of family law, such as marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance, under the control of religious authorities. (Critics have argued that the move proves the CPA should have appointed more women to the IGC.) During deliberations on the interim constitution, Iraqi women organized protests and U.S. civilian administrator Paul Bremer said he would veto any draft that tried to impose a rigid version of sharia on Iraq. As a compromise, the interim constitution states that Islam will be an important source of future legislation but not the only one, as Shia leaders demanded. How strenuously the United States will continue to push this issue is unclear and still a cause for deep concern to many Iraqis.
The U.S. experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq show that advancing women's rights is a complicated and delicate task, particularly in Muslim societies. But just as the United States promoted human rights even when doing so conflicted with its other strategic objectives (arms control in the Soviet Union or economic relations with China), it should now wholeheartedly promote women's rights. Washington should make sure its policy on women's rights is consistent, it should generously fund the projects it undertakes, and, where necessary, it should condition its aid to developing countries on their efforts to close gender gaps.
For the sake of consistency and credibility, the United States must promote international efforts intended to advance the role of women worldwide. It should lead the implementation of UN Resolution 1325, unanimously passed by the General Assembly in 2000, which committed the UN to giving women a greater role in peacekeeping and postconflict transitions. More important, the United States should finally endorse the 1981 Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women, the only global treaty that deals exclusively with the rights of women, which 175 countries, including every industrialized democracy but the United States, have ratified. U.S. critics of the treaty have called it "antifamily," even though nothing in it contradicts traditional family values. They have also argued that the United States does not need it, since U.S. laws go well beyond what it recommends. So why not ratify it? By failing to support the agreement, Washington undermines its professed commitment to women's rights and exposes itself to charges of hypocrisy.
[Because the U.S. is the only country that has not enforced the UN resolution that eliminates discrimination against women, the rest of the international community will not take these efforts for women seriously, if states see the U.S. as considering the convention unnecessary then efforts made by countries trying to advance women’s rights will be hindered and lacking.]
The United States should also dramatically increase funding to improve the status of women in regions where gender gaps are widest and assistance is most needed: the Middle East, southern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Given the demonstrated high returns on investments in girls' education, the United States should, as its top development priority, work to eliminate gender gaps in primary education (USAID support for basic education is roughly $250 million).
Likewise, it should expand support for microfinancing beyond its current level of roughly $200 million. Women's health and family planning deserve more funding too, particularly in countries such as Afghanistan where maternal mortality rates are alarmingly high. Adequate primary, maternal, and reproductive health care is critical to women's empowerment, especially in areas with high rates of adolescent marriage. (In those countries, the Bush administration's emphasis on abstinence is unrealistic.) Finally, the United States should use the Middle East Partnership Initiative, a $150 million program to advance democracy in the Middle East, which promotes programs for female literacy and health, as well as business and political training, as a model for more activist, pro-women policies in other parts of the world.
[Promoting democracy in these regions should incorporate full-heartedly the rights for women. Doing this will advance economic growth that the United States can benefit from. With equal rights allocated to women in these regions, we may see the decline of anti-democratic regimes that further destruct, terrorize and stifle regions across the Middle East.]
With the Millennium Challenge Account, the United States is now undertaking the largest expansion of foreign development aid in more than a generation. It should seize this opportunity to leverage its aid for the benefit of women's rights, by incorporating specific gender measures into the criteria that determine eligibility for funds. None of the 16 current criteria specifically takes account of women's status, but these could easily be adjusted. A country's maternal mortality ratio and its female primary school completion rate are both good indicators of gender equality there.
Similarly, the United States could promote respect for women's rights by making adherence to them a more explicit condition for U.S. military and economic aid. The State Department should be tasked with writing country reports tracking worldwide progress on key gender measures such as girls' literacy, maternal health, gender ratios, and political participation, much as it already does on human rights. Funding data collection on gender disparities is also important. Such information is lacking in many countries, and improving it could, by itself, help close gender gaps resulting from neglect.
"The worldwide advancement of women's issues is not only in keeping with the deeply held values of the American people," Powell has said, "it is strongly in our national interest as well." The United States has advocated women's rights as a moral imperative or as a way to promote democracy. In so doing, it might have compounded the difficulty of its task, by irking conservative religious forces or the authoritarian regimes it otherwise supports. But now Washington can also make an economic case for women's rights, which may be more acceptable to traditionalists. Promoting women's rights because they spur development and economic growth is a powerful way for the United States to advance its foreign policy in the future while minimizing the ideological debates that have frustrated it in the past.
[Advancing women’s rights can serve as the tool/platform from which a form of democracy palatable to the Middle East can be established. By working with those moderates who have a less strict interpretation of Islamic Law, the United States can advance its goals and foreign policy by fighting the conservatives with their own weapon of choice-Islamic Sharia.]
Isobel Coleman is a Senior Fellow on U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Is it Time for the U.S. to Revisit the CEDAW Treaty for the Rights of Women??
CEDAW: Treaty for the Rights of Women
The Treaty for the Rights of Women would amplify the U.S. voice in saving women's lives worldwide.
Why a Treaty? Why Now?
The Treaty for the Rights of Women, formally named the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), is the most comprehensive international agreement on basic rights of women. The treaty has been ratified by 182 nations and has become an important tool for partnerships among nations to end human rights abuses and promote the health and well-being of girls.
In many countries worldwide that have ratified the treaty, women have worked with their governments in partnership to change inequitable laws: to help girls receive a primary education; to enable women to get micro-loans to set up small businesses; to stop sex slavery; to improve health care services; to secure the right to own or inherit property; and to protect women and girls against violence. (See The Treaty at Work Worldwide in this kit for examples.)
The Treaty has always enjoyed bipartisan support in the United States, but has never come before the full Senate for a vote. This unfinished business puts the United States in the company of only a handful of nations that have not ratified the treaty, including Iran, Sudan, and Somalia. As a party to the treaty, the Untied States will have a seat at the table where decisions are made about
· Women’s lives around the world and, with all other ratifying nations, will file regular reports on our progress.
· U.S. law already complies with the treaty, and to ratify it will not require the passage of a single new law. The Treaty for the Rights of Women provides us with a useful framework for improving the human rights and the rule of law internationally.
The United States should strive to be a leader and set an example for the rest of the world in its commitment to women and expanding women’s rights. The Senate and President George W. Bush should lead the United States toward joining the overwhelming majority of other countries in ratifying the Treaty for the Rights of Women, adding our strength to the work of ensuring basic human rights for women everywhere.
What is the CEDAW Treaty for the Rights of Women?Exactly how does the treaty work? How would U.S. ratification help women around the world?What is the treaty's U.S. status?
What is CEDAW?
The Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is the most comprehensive international agreement on the basic human rights of women. Created in 1979, it is an important tool for all those who seek to end abuses of women and girls throughout the globe.
Because of the CEDAW Treaty, millions of girls are now receiving primary education who were previously denied access; measures have been taken against sex slavery, domestic violence and trafficking of women; women's health care services have improved, saving lives during pregnancy and childbirth; and millions of women have secured loans or the right to own or inherit property.
Exactly how does the treaty work?
Nations that ratify the treaty commit to overcoming barriers to discrimination against women in the areas of legal rights, education, employment, health care, politics and finance. Like all human rights treaties, the CEDAW Treaty sets benchmarks within traditional enforcement mechanisms that respect sovereignty and democracy. In many of the 182 countries that have ratified the treaty, it has guided the passage and enforcement of national laws. For example:
· Uganda, South Africa, Brazil, Australia and others have incorporated treaty provisions into their constitutions and domestic legal codes;
· Ukraine, Nepal, Thailand and the Philippines all passed laws to curb sexual trafficking;
· India developed national guidelines on workplace sexual assault after the Supreme Court, in ruling on a major rape case, found that CEDAW required such protections;
· Nicaragua, Jordan, Egypt and Guinea all saw significant increases in literacy rates after improving access to education for girls and women;
· Australia and Luxembourg created health campaigns promoting awareness and prevention of breast and cervical cancers; and
· After ratification, Colombia made domestic violence a crime and required legal protection for its victims.
Much remains to be done:
· Sex trafficking: 80% of the estimated 600,000 to 800,000 victims trafficked across international borders are female and nearly half are under the age of 18;
· Education: two-thirds of the world's 771 million illiterate adults are women;
· Maternal mortality: 500,000 women die each year from pregnancy-related complications;
· HIV/AIDS: women are four times more vulnerable than men, and 1.3 million die each year;
· Violence: an estimated 25 to 39 percent of all women experience domestic violence;
· Discrimination: millions of women lack full legal and political rights;
· Poverty: 70% of the world’s 1.3 billion people living in dire poverty are women; and
· Female genital mutilation: 130 million women are victims.
How would U.S. ratification help women around the world?
The United States has long been a world leader on human rights. But, U.S. failure to ratify the treaty allows other countries to divert attention away from their neglect of women and undermines the powerful principle that human rights of women are universal across all cultures, nations, and religions. Until the United States ratifies CEDAW, our country cannot credibly demand that others live up to their obligations under this treaty. Our failure to ratify puts us in the company of Sudan, Iran and Somalia; every other industrialized country has ratified the treaty.
Ratification does not require any change in U.S. law and would be a powerful statement of our continuing commitment to ending discrimination against women worldwide. It would allow us to join with other countries to work toward the common goal of women’s equality. The U.S. already has laws consistent with the CEDAW Treaty. Under the terms of the treaty, the U.S. would submit regular reports to an advisory committee, which would provide an important opportunity to spotlight our best practices and assess where we can do better.
The United States has a bipartisan tradition of support for international standards through human rights treaties. Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton ratified similar treaties on genocide, torture, race and civil and political rights. This treaty continues that proud tradition. What is the treaty's status in the U.S.?Treaty approval requires a two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate, or 67 votes. Ratification does not require consideration by the House of Representatives.
The treaty is languishing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Chairman Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), who has indicated he is waiting for the Bush Administration to complete a review of the treaty. In 2002, the State Department notified the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the CEDAW Treaty for the Rights of Women was "generally desirable and should be ratified." Nevertheless, the Administration has not yet taken further action on the treaty; it awaits a Justice Department review about what Reservations, Understandings and Declarations may be necessary.
A coalition of over 190 U.S. religious, civic, and community organizations remain committed to supporting ratification. They include the AARP, American Nurses Association, National Education Association, National Coalition of Catholic Nuns, American Bar Association, The United Methodist Church, YWCA, and Amnesty International. In addition, a bipartisan consensus of U.S. voters has consistently supported human rights for women, showing overwhelming support for efforts to secure the rights of women and girls.
The Treaty for the Rights of Women would amplify the U.S. voice in saving women's lives worldwide.
Why a Treaty? Why Now?
Americans are united in supporting basic human rights for women around the world. A global consensus is growing on the need to address the most pressing issues affecting women and girls, especially on providing access to education and health care and ending violence.
The Treaty for the Rights of Women, formally named the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), is the most comprehensive international agreement on basic rights of women. The treaty has been ratified by 182 nations and has become an important tool for partnerships among nations to end human rights abuses and promote the health and well-being of girls.
In many countries worldwide that have ratified the treaty, women have worked with their governments in partnership to change inequitable laws: to help girls receive a primary education; to enable women to get micro-loans to set up small businesses; to stop sex slavery; to improve health care services; to secure the right to own or inherit property; and to protect women and girls against violence. (See The Treaty at Work Worldwide in this kit for examples.)
The Treaty has always enjoyed bipartisan support in the United States, but has never come before the full Senate for a vote. This unfinished business puts the United States in the company of only a handful of nations that have not ratified the treaty, including Iran, Sudan, and Somalia. As a party to the treaty, the Untied States will have a seat at the table where decisions are made about
· Women’s lives around the world and, with all other ratifying nations, will file regular reports on our progress.
· U.S. law already complies with the treaty, and to ratify it will not require the passage of a single new law. The Treaty for the Rights of Women provides us with a useful framework for improving the human rights and the rule of law internationally.
The United States should strive to be a leader and set an example for the rest of the world in its commitment to women and expanding women’s rights. The Senate and President George W. Bush should lead the United States toward joining the overwhelming majority of other countries in ratifying the Treaty for the Rights of Women, adding our strength to the work of ensuring basic human rights for women everywhere.
What is the CEDAW Treaty for the Rights of Women?Exactly how does the treaty work? How would U.S. ratification help women around the world?What is the treaty's U.S. status?
What is CEDAW?
The Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is the most comprehensive international agreement on the basic human rights of women. Created in 1979, it is an important tool for all those who seek to end abuses of women and girls throughout the globe.
Because of the CEDAW Treaty, millions of girls are now receiving primary education who were previously denied access; measures have been taken against sex slavery, domestic violence and trafficking of women; women's health care services have improved, saving lives during pregnancy and childbirth; and millions of women have secured loans or the right to own or inherit property.
Exactly how does the treaty work?
Nations that ratify the treaty commit to overcoming barriers to discrimination against women in the areas of legal rights, education, employment, health care, politics and finance. Like all human rights treaties, the CEDAW Treaty sets benchmarks within traditional enforcement mechanisms that respect sovereignty and democracy. In many of the 182 countries that have ratified the treaty, it has guided the passage and enforcement of national laws. For example:
· Uganda, South Africa, Brazil, Australia and others have incorporated treaty provisions into their constitutions and domestic legal codes;
· Ukraine, Nepal, Thailand and the Philippines all passed laws to curb sexual trafficking;
· India developed national guidelines on workplace sexual assault after the Supreme Court, in ruling on a major rape case, found that CEDAW required such protections;
· Nicaragua, Jordan, Egypt and Guinea all saw significant increases in literacy rates after improving access to education for girls and women;
· Australia and Luxembourg created health campaigns promoting awareness and prevention of breast and cervical cancers; and
· After ratification, Colombia made domestic violence a crime and required legal protection for its victims.
Much remains to be done:
· Sex trafficking: 80% of the estimated 600,000 to 800,000 victims trafficked across international borders are female and nearly half are under the age of 18;
· Education: two-thirds of the world's 771 million illiterate adults are women;
· Maternal mortality: 500,000 women die each year from pregnancy-related complications;
· HIV/AIDS: women are four times more vulnerable than men, and 1.3 million die each year;
· Violence: an estimated 25 to 39 percent of all women experience domestic violence;
· Discrimination: millions of women lack full legal and political rights;
· Poverty: 70% of the world’s 1.3 billion people living in dire poverty are women; and
· Female genital mutilation: 130 million women are victims.
How would U.S. ratification help women around the world?
The United States has long been a world leader on human rights. But, U.S. failure to ratify the treaty allows other countries to divert attention away from their neglect of women and undermines the powerful principle that human rights of women are universal across all cultures, nations, and religions. Until the United States ratifies CEDAW, our country cannot credibly demand that others live up to their obligations under this treaty. Our failure to ratify puts us in the company of Sudan, Iran and Somalia; every other industrialized country has ratified the treaty.
Ratification does not require any change in U.S. law and would be a powerful statement of our continuing commitment to ending discrimination against women worldwide. It would allow us to join with other countries to work toward the common goal of women’s equality. The U.S. already has laws consistent with the CEDAW Treaty. Under the terms of the treaty, the U.S. would submit regular reports to an advisory committee, which would provide an important opportunity to spotlight our best practices and assess where we can do better.
The United States has a bipartisan tradition of support for international standards through human rights treaties. Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton ratified similar treaties on genocide, torture, race and civil and political rights. This treaty continues that proud tradition. What is the treaty's status in the U.S.?Treaty approval requires a two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate, or 67 votes. Ratification does not require consideration by the House of Representatives.
The treaty is languishing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Chairman Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), who has indicated he is waiting for the Bush Administration to complete a review of the treaty. In 2002, the State Department notified the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the CEDAW Treaty for the Rights of Women was "generally desirable and should be ratified." Nevertheless, the Administration has not yet taken further action on the treaty; it awaits a Justice Department review about what Reservations, Understandings and Declarations may be necessary.
A coalition of over 190 U.S. religious, civic, and community organizations remain committed to supporting ratification. They include the AARP, American Nurses Association, National Education Association, National Coalition of Catholic Nuns, American Bar Association, The United Methodist Church, YWCA, and Amnesty International. In addition, a bipartisan consensus of U.S. voters has consistently supported human rights for women, showing overwhelming support for efforts to secure the rights of women and girls.
Algeria: Patriarchal May Soon Be a Thing of the Past
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/world/africa/26algeria.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
A Quiet Revolution in Algeria: Gains by Women
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
New York Times
May 26, 2007
ALGIERS, May 25 — In this tradition-bound nation scarred by a brutal Islamist-led civil war that killed more than 100,000, a quiet revolution is under way: women are emerging as an economic and political force unheard of in the rest of the Arab world.
Women make up 70 percent of Algeria’s lawyers and 60 percent of its judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more to household income than men. Sixty percent of university students are women, university researchers say.
In a region where women have a decidedly low public profile, Algerian women are visible everywhere. They are starting to drive buses and taxicabs. They pump gas and wait on tables.
Although men still hold all of the formal levers of power and women still make up only 20 percent of the work force, that is more than twice their share a generation ago, and they seem to be taking over the machinery of state as well.
“If such a trend continues,” said Daho Djerbal, editor and publisher of Naqd, a magazine of social criticism and analysis, “we will see a new phenomenon where our public administration will also be controlled by women.”
The change seems to have sneaked up on Algerians, who for years have focused more on the struggle between a governing party trying to stay in power and Islamists trying to take that power. Those who study the region say they are taken aback by the data but suggest that an explanation may lie in the educational system and the labor market.
University studies are no longer viewed as a credible route toward a career or economic well-being, and so men may well opt out and try to find work or to simply leave the country, suggested Hugh Roberts, a historian and the North Africa project director of the International Crisis Group.
But for women, he added, university studies get them out of the house and allow them to position themselves better in society. “The dividend may be social rather than in terms of career,” he said.
This generation of Algerian women has navigated a path between the secular state and the pull of extremist Islam, the two poles of the national crisis of recent years.
The women are more religious than previous generations, and more modern, sociologists here said. Women cover their heads and drape their bodies with traditional Islamic coverings. They pray. They go to the mosque — and they work, often alongside men, once considered taboo.
Sociologists and many working women say that by adopting religion and wearing the Islamic head covering called the hijab, women here have in effect freed themselves from moral judgments and restrictions imposed by men. Uncovered women are rarely seen on the street late at night, but covered women can be seen strolling the city after attending the evening prayer at a mosque.
“They never criticize me, especially when they see I am wearing the hijab,” said Denni Fatiha, 44, the first woman to drive a large city bus through the narrow, winding roads of Algiers.
The impact has been far-reaching and profound.
In some neighborhoods, for example, birthrates appear to have fallen and class sizes in elementary schools have dropped by nearly half. It appears that women are delaying marriage to complete their studies, though delayed marriage is also a function of high unemployment. In the past, women typically married at 17 or 18 but now marry on average at 29, sociologists said.
And when they marry, it is often to men who are far less educated, creating an awkward social reality for many women.
Khalida Rahman is a lawyer. She is 33 and has been married to a night watchman for five months. Her husband was a friend of her brothers who showed up one day and proposed. She immediately said yes, she recalled.
She describes her life now this way: “Whenever I leave him it is just as if I am a man. But when I get home I become a woman.”
Fatima Oussedik, a sociologist, said, “We in the ’60s, we were progressive, but we did not achieve what is being achieved by this generation today.” Ms. Oussedik, who works for the Research Center for Applied Economics and Development in Algiers, does not wear the hijab and prefers to speak in French.
Researchers here say the change is not driven by demographics; women make up only a bit more than half of the population. They said it is driven by desire and opportunity.
Algeria’s young men reject school and try to earn money as traders in the informal sector, selling goods on the street, or they focus their efforts on leaving the country or just hanging out. There is a whole class of young men referred to as hittistes — the word is a combination of French and Arabic for people who hold up walls.
Increasingly, the people here have lost faith in their government, which draws its legitimacy from a revolution now more than five decades old, many political and social analysts said. In recent parliamentary elections, turnout was low and there were 970,000 protest votes — cast by people who intentionally destroyed their ballots — nearly as many as the 1.3 million votes cast in support of the governing party.
There are regular protests, and riots, all over the country, with people complaining about corruption, lack of services and economic disparities. There are violent attacks, too: bombings aimed at the police, officials and foreigners. A triple suicide bombing on April 11 against the prime minister’s office and the police left more than 30 people dead.
In that context, women may have emerged as Algeria’s most potent force for social change, with their presence in the bureaucracy and on the street having a potentially moderating and modernizing influence on society, sociologists said.
“Women, and the women’s movement, could be leading us to modernity,” said Abdel Nasser Djabi, a professor of sociology at the University of Algiers.
Not everyone is happy with those dynamics. Some political and social analysts say the recent resurgence in radical Islamist activity, including bombings, is driven partly by a desire to slow the social change the country is experiencing, especially regarding women’s role in society.
Others complain that the growing participation of women in society is a direct violation of the faith.“I am against this,” said Esmail Ben Ibrahim, an imam at a neighborhood mosque near the center of the city. “It is all wrong from a religious point of view. Society has embarked on the wrong path.”
The quest for identity is a constant undercurrent in much of the Middle East. But it is arguably the most complicated question in Algeria, a nation whose borders were drawn by France and whose people speak Berber, Arabic and French.
After a bitter experience with French occupation and a seven-year revolutionary war that brought independence in 1962 at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, the leaders here chose to adopt Islam and Arab identity as the force to unify the country. Arabic replaced French as the language of education, and the French secular curriculum was replaced with a curriculum heavy on religion.
At the same time, girls were encouraged to go to school
Now, more than four decades later, Algeria’s youth — 70 percent of the population is under 30, researchers said — have grown up with Arabic and an orientation toward Middle Eastern issues. Arabic-language television networks like Al Jazeera have become the popular reference point, more so than French television, observers here said.
In the 1990s radical Islamist ideas gained popular support, and terrorism was widely accepted as a means to win power. More than 100,000 people died in years of civil conflict. Today most people say the experience has forced them to reject the most radical ideas.
So although Algerians are more religious now than they were during the bloody 1990s, they are more likely to embrace modernity — a partial explanation for the emergence of women as a societal force, some analysts said.
That is not the case in more rural mountainous areas, where women continue to live by the code of tradition. But for the time being, most people say that for now the community’s collective consciousness is simply too raw from the years of civil war for Islamist terrorists or radical Islamic ideas to gain popular support.
There is a sense that the new room given to women may at least partly be a reflection of that general feeling. The population has largely rejected the most radical interpretation of Islam and has begun to return to the more North African, almost mystical, interpretation of the faith, sociologists and religious leaders said.
Whatever the underlying reason, women in the streets of the city are brimming with enthusiasm.“I don’t think any of this contradicts Islam,” said Wahiba Nabti, 36, as she walked through the center of the city one day recently. “On the contrary, Islam gives freedom to work. Anyway, it is between you and God.”
Ms. Nabti wore a black scarf covering her head and a long black gown that hid the shape of her body. “I hope one day I can drive a crane, so I can really be financially independent,” she said.
“You cannot always rely on a man.”
A Quiet Revolution in Algeria: Gains by Women
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
New York Times
May 26, 2007
ALGIERS, May 25 — In this tradition-bound nation scarred by a brutal Islamist-led civil war that killed more than 100,000, a quiet revolution is under way: women are emerging as an economic and political force unheard of in the rest of the Arab world.
Women make up 70 percent of Algeria’s lawyers and 60 percent of its judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more to household income than men. Sixty percent of university students are women, university researchers say.
In a region where women have a decidedly low public profile, Algerian women are visible everywhere. They are starting to drive buses and taxicabs. They pump gas and wait on tables.
Although men still hold all of the formal levers of power and women still make up only 20 percent of the work force, that is more than twice their share a generation ago, and they seem to be taking over the machinery of state as well.
“If such a trend continues,” said Daho Djerbal, editor and publisher of Naqd, a magazine of social criticism and analysis, “we will see a new phenomenon where our public administration will also be controlled by women.”
The change seems to have sneaked up on Algerians, who for years have focused more on the struggle between a governing party trying to stay in power and Islamists trying to take that power. Those who study the region say they are taken aback by the data but suggest that an explanation may lie in the educational system and the labor market.
University studies are no longer viewed as a credible route toward a career or economic well-being, and so men may well opt out and try to find work or to simply leave the country, suggested Hugh Roberts, a historian and the North Africa project director of the International Crisis Group.
But for women, he added, university studies get them out of the house and allow them to position themselves better in society. “The dividend may be social rather than in terms of career,” he said.
This generation of Algerian women has navigated a path between the secular state and the pull of extremist Islam, the two poles of the national crisis of recent years.
The women are more religious than previous generations, and more modern, sociologists here said. Women cover their heads and drape their bodies with traditional Islamic coverings. They pray. They go to the mosque — and they work, often alongside men, once considered taboo.
Sociologists and many working women say that by adopting religion and wearing the Islamic head covering called the hijab, women here have in effect freed themselves from moral judgments and restrictions imposed by men. Uncovered women are rarely seen on the street late at night, but covered women can be seen strolling the city after attending the evening prayer at a mosque.
“They never criticize me, especially when they see I am wearing the hijab,” said Denni Fatiha, 44, the first woman to drive a large city bus through the narrow, winding roads of Algiers.
The impact has been far-reaching and profound.
In some neighborhoods, for example, birthrates appear to have fallen and class sizes in elementary schools have dropped by nearly half. It appears that women are delaying marriage to complete their studies, though delayed marriage is also a function of high unemployment. In the past, women typically married at 17 or 18 but now marry on average at 29, sociologists said.
And when they marry, it is often to men who are far less educated, creating an awkward social reality for many women.
Khalida Rahman is a lawyer. She is 33 and has been married to a night watchman for five months. Her husband was a friend of her brothers who showed up one day and proposed. She immediately said yes, she recalled.
She describes her life now this way: “Whenever I leave him it is just as if I am a man. But when I get home I become a woman.”
Fatima Oussedik, a sociologist, said, “We in the ’60s, we were progressive, but we did not achieve what is being achieved by this generation today.” Ms. Oussedik, who works for the Research Center for Applied Economics and Development in Algiers, does not wear the hijab and prefers to speak in French.
Researchers here say the change is not driven by demographics; women make up only a bit more than half of the population. They said it is driven by desire and opportunity.
Algeria’s young men reject school and try to earn money as traders in the informal sector, selling goods on the street, or they focus their efforts on leaving the country or just hanging out. There is a whole class of young men referred to as hittistes — the word is a combination of French and Arabic for people who hold up walls.
Increasingly, the people here have lost faith in their government, which draws its legitimacy from a revolution now more than five decades old, many political and social analysts said. In recent parliamentary elections, turnout was low and there were 970,000 protest votes — cast by people who intentionally destroyed their ballots — nearly as many as the 1.3 million votes cast in support of the governing party.
There are regular protests, and riots, all over the country, with people complaining about corruption, lack of services and economic disparities. There are violent attacks, too: bombings aimed at the police, officials and foreigners. A triple suicide bombing on April 11 against the prime minister’s office and the police left more than 30 people dead.
In that context, women may have emerged as Algeria’s most potent force for social change, with their presence in the bureaucracy and on the street having a potentially moderating and modernizing influence on society, sociologists said.
“Women, and the women’s movement, could be leading us to modernity,” said Abdel Nasser Djabi, a professor of sociology at the University of Algiers.
Not everyone is happy with those dynamics. Some political and social analysts say the recent resurgence in radical Islamist activity, including bombings, is driven partly by a desire to slow the social change the country is experiencing, especially regarding women’s role in society.
Others complain that the growing participation of women in society is a direct violation of the faith.“I am against this,” said Esmail Ben Ibrahim, an imam at a neighborhood mosque near the center of the city. “It is all wrong from a religious point of view. Society has embarked on the wrong path.”
The quest for identity is a constant undercurrent in much of the Middle East. But it is arguably the most complicated question in Algeria, a nation whose borders were drawn by France and whose people speak Berber, Arabic and French.
After a bitter experience with French occupation and a seven-year revolutionary war that brought independence in 1962 at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, the leaders here chose to adopt Islam and Arab identity as the force to unify the country. Arabic replaced French as the language of education, and the French secular curriculum was replaced with a curriculum heavy on religion.
At the same time, girls were encouraged to go to school
Now, more than four decades later, Algeria’s youth — 70 percent of the population is under 30, researchers said — have grown up with Arabic and an orientation toward Middle Eastern issues. Arabic-language television networks like Al Jazeera have become the popular reference point, more so than French television, observers here said.
In the 1990s radical Islamist ideas gained popular support, and terrorism was widely accepted as a means to win power. More than 100,000 people died in years of civil conflict. Today most people say the experience has forced them to reject the most radical ideas.
So although Algerians are more religious now than they were during the bloody 1990s, they are more likely to embrace modernity — a partial explanation for the emergence of women as a societal force, some analysts said.
That is not the case in more rural mountainous areas, where women continue to live by the code of tradition. But for the time being, most people say that for now the community’s collective consciousness is simply too raw from the years of civil war for Islamist terrorists or radical Islamic ideas to gain popular support.
There is a sense that the new room given to women may at least partly be a reflection of that general feeling. The population has largely rejected the most radical interpretation of Islam and has begun to return to the more North African, almost mystical, interpretation of the faith, sociologists and religious leaders said.
Whatever the underlying reason, women in the streets of the city are brimming with enthusiasm.“I don’t think any of this contradicts Islam,” said Wahiba Nabti, 36, as she walked through the center of the city one day recently. “On the contrary, Islam gives freedom to work. Anyway, it is between you and God.”
Ms. Nabti wore a black scarf covering her head and a long black gown that hid the shape of her body. “I hope one day I can drive a crane, so I can really be financially independent,” she said.
“You cannot always rely on a man.”
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