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Part 1  –  Part 2

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Egypt was once the pioneer in the liberation of women in the Arab world. “The Liberation of Women”, the first Arab feminist manifesto was published in Cairo as early as in 1899. And by 1920s, women were dropping veils; by 1960, the country had more female doctors than many in the West. They won the right to vote and entered politics in 1956 and even secured a ban on the horrible practice of female circumcision. At that time, a new bill called the “Personal Status Bill”, that sought to establish absolute equality between men and women was in the pipeline. Unfortunately, then came the war with Israel and the move died.

In those days of political turmoil, a conservative tide, spearheaded by Islamic fundamentalists, snatched away most of the rights women had won so far. Under a constitutional amendment in 1980, Islamic law was enshrined. As a result, women were reduced to the status no better than that of pet animals of males. For example, the practice of female circumcision was reintroduced. In medical term, it is nothing but a surgical operation that removes a part called clitoris of the female genital. At present, hundreds of Egyptian girls die every year due to excessive bleeding from the traumatic operation. In 1994, CNN telecast such an operation worldwide and sparked a heated debate in the Egyptian parliament. Egyptian Mufti, topmost religious authority in the country, appealed to members of the parliament for banning the practice. But the fanatic Islamist leader of the Al-Azhar University, Gad al-Haq Ali Gad al-Haq, promulgated a fatwa directing the Egyptians to continue the practice and the parliament also honoured his edict.

As a result of these discouraging developments, women’s rights movement in Egypt has lost steam. With the Quran and Sunnah on their side, Egyptian men now divorce their wives with simple oath or the "triple talaq", while women have to seek a divorce in the court of law, a cumbersome process that generally takes several years. At present, a third of the Egyptian women are reported to be beaten by their husbands. In such a state of affairs, delay in getting a decree of divorce from a cruel husband amounts to nothing but punitive torture. Furthermore, a divorced mother, according to Islamic law, enjoys the right of custody up to the age of 12 years for the girls and 10 years for boys, after which the child must be surrendered to their father, even if he is a brute and a sadist.

Muslims widely publicize that the Koranic law protects women’s right to property. But, in fact, it is also discriminatory, and allots them only half of the share of what a male relation gets in inheritance. They are victims of discrimination even in the court of law, where their testimony weighs only half of men’s.

Islamic criminal law is also discriminatory towards women. For example, a man who catches his wife in an act of adultery and murders her can expect a maximum jail term for 3 years, while his wife would face a life sentence for the same crime. Furthermore, according to the Islamic law in Egypt, a woman does not have the right to pass on her nationality; only the men can. As a result, nearly 80,000 Egyptian children, mostly products of temporary or mutah marriage to Arabs from the oil-rich Gulf countries, have no nationality. In fact, according to W. Muir, the most renowned Western biographer of Prophet Muhammad, this mutah or temporary marriage—sanctioned by the Koran and Sunnah—is nothing but prostitution. It may be mentioned here that in India, especially in Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh, aged rich Arab Shaikhs come to marry (mutah) young Muslim girls by paying lucrative mehr (a kind of dowry paid by grooms) to their guardians or parents. Last year, Andra police arrested a 73-year-old Arab, Mohammad Jafer Yaqub Hassan al Jorani, for marrying three teenage Muslim girls within 7th to 24th May, 2005.

Yet, the picture is not all bleak. More and more Egyptian girls are now receiving education. Between 1970 and 1998, the number of girls attending primary schools rose from 50 to 72 percent. In Oman, the number of school-going girls has more than quadrupled since 1970. In Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirate, more women than men are now attending universities. Especially, in Kuwait and Qatar, women make up about 70 per cent of the students. Female education has been dramatically improved in the Arab countries with women literacy rate at 80% in Tunisia and 100% in Jordan today. In Yemen, the illiteracy rate among young women is 54%, which is three times that of men. Still, only in 3 out of 22 Arab countries, women have the right to vote. While Arab women are working as ambassadors, Government ministers, top business executives and even army officers (in Bahrain), barely 6% of total workforce in Saudi Arabia is female. While a fifth of Algeria’s Supreme Court judges are women, they hold 15% of the top judicial posts in Tunisia.

Nonetheless, baby girls are twice as likely to die as baby boys in Egypt. And “honour killing” (killing female relations suspected of tarnishing the family honour) is still a social custom in the Arab world. The UN estimated in 2000 that about 5,000 girls and women become victims of honor-killing in 14 Muslim countries, many of them in the Arab world.

Tunisia is the most advanced and progressive among the Arab countries. Back in 1950, secularist Tunisia granted women the full equality with men; polygamy was banned and women were allowed to vote, contest elections, divorce their husbands, and work in any profession etc.

But the attitude of men has changed little. Many of them marry women from the countryside as additional wives and incidents of wife-beating still remain very high. In 2004, Morocco, by the initiative of the foreign educated King Muhammad VI, adopted a progressive family status code, which grants both sexes equal rights to seek divorce and to argue before a judge for custody of children. It also has placed tight conditions on polygamy, rendering the practice virtually impossible. On the other hand, Algeria’s family status law 1984, gives men the autocratic Koranic right to divorce by oral talaq, with no obligation to the divorced wife. And the Koranic law of inheritance has been enforced. However a survey carried out in 7 Arab countries by US-based Zogby International in 2002 found 50% of the respondents considered the improvements of women’s rights a high priority. Most surprisingly, firmest supports came from Saudi Arabia, famous for its extreme phobia regarding ikhtilat, or mixing of sexes.

So, it appears that the attitude of even Saudi Arabia towards its womenfolk is changing. In May 2004, Saudi women were granted the right to hold commercial licenses; as a result, Saudi women now own a quarter of $100 billions deposited in Saudi banks. In 2001, women won the right to have their own identity cards and since January 2004, Saudi Arabian state television has started recruiting female newscasters. The Kingdom’s best known TV personality now is a woman, named Rania al-Baz, whom her husband once beat almost to death. She, instead of staying silent, what her mother and grand mother would have done, invited photographers into her hospital room to tell her tale and to show her broken face to the world. She has now formed a group to combat the abuse of women in Saudi Arabia.

Today, some 1.3 billion Muslims, according to a CIA estimate, constitute ~24% of the world population, but they publish less than 1% of world’s scientific research papers. Countries belonging to the “Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC), according to their share of world population, should have 4 million scientists and engineers; in reality, the figure is only 200,000, merely 5% of the expected number. Furthermore, the Muslims have little contribution in the high-tech fields like computer software or information technology. Islamic countries, to be at per with the world’s budget, should spend 4.7 million per year for higher education and research. But they spend as low as $120,000. Many studies have revealed severe dearth of creativity in the Muslim world. The authors of the “Arab Human Development Report 2000” have rightly traced the root cause of backwardness of the Arabs in the oppression of their womankind.

In this context, one may recall that in 1996, Islamist fanatics butchered 300 girl-children in Libya for pursuing the un-Islamic practice of attending schools; in Afghanistan, fanatic Taliban government closed doors of schools and colleges to girls and forced women out of work and to remain indoor. In December last year, Taliban gunmen killed two female teachers for educating girls, along with their mother and their grandmother. A couple of months ago, a girl was brutally killed by fanatic Muslims for attending school and another girl student Kulsooma of class IX was blinded by throwing acid in Kashmir. Schools, educating the women, are frequent targets of intimidation and attacks by Taliban terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

It appears that the condition of Muslim women in India is worse in some respect than their Arab counter parts. For example, the literacy-rate amongst them is only 40.6 percent. The Muslim community, as a whole, also remain backward as compared to rest of the Indian society.

It can be safely said that, as long as Muslims continue oppressing their women, the prospect of their advancement in civilization would also remain bleak. It is worth taking note of what India’s former President, Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam, has to say regarding this:

”As we all know, birds have two wings. Unless the both wings grow equally, the bird cannot fly. Similarly, the society has two wings, man and women. Both have to be developed equally. Then the society will fly”.