WUNRN
Egypt
- Islamist Parliamentarian Objects to Ban on FGM
Egypt's Azza El Garf, a longstanding female representative of the Muslim Brotherhood, strays from women's rights activists and opposes illegalization of genital cutting. She also carves a separate path on issues such as divorce and family.
CAIRO, Egypt (WOMENSENEWS) -- Azza El Garf, a prominent figure in the
Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Islamist group the Muslim
Brotherhood, offers a profile in political contradiction.
She shares her party's
family-first view of a woman's place, but at the same time plays a pioneering
role in the minuscule minority -- just 1 percent -- of women serving in the
country's post-revolution houses of parliament.
"People here think women
can be a doctor, go to university, be a teacher or an engineer," El Garf
said in a recent interview in Arabic conducted through a translator. "But
people still think 'women are no good at politics.' We want to change this
view."
She condemns the notorious
"virginity tests" that military officers and doctors are accused of
perpetrating on a group of female protesters in March 2011.
But she disagrees with Egypt's
2008 ban on female cutting, which opponents call genital mutilation. The World
Health Organization defines it as the partial or complete removal of the
external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for
non-medical reasons.
"It is a personal
decision and each woman can decide based on her needs. If she needs it, she can
go to a doctor," El Garf said, adding that the Muslim Brotherhood refers
to the practice as beautification plastic surgery. She was adamant that it was
a woman's choice, and hers alone, to have the outlawed procedure and should be
done in consultation with a trained medical professional.
El Garf insisted that
Islamists will uphold women's rights. But she also said divorce had become too
easy. By declining to specify how that affects her legal views, the comment is
likely to reinforce expectations that Islamists will seek to roll back women's
divorce rights, as Hoda Badran, chairwoman of the newly resurrected Egyptian
Feminist Union, warned in a January
interview with Women's eNews.
In 2005, Egypt passed a law
allowing Muslim women a no-fault divorce for which they can file in court
without needing permission from their husbands or male relatives.
'Egyptian Families Under
Pressure'
"Family is the most
important part of life," El Garf said. "Egyptian families are under a
pressure and that can divide them. But religion connects family members and
keeps them together."
She said the husband's job was
to feed his wife and care about his family because together they are one.
"The woman's job is to make him happy," she added. "In Western
society everybody is an individual. That system doesn't work here."
A mother of seven and a
graduate of Cairo University with a degree in social work, El Garf has been a
member of the Muslim Brotherhood for 32 years. In that time, she said, her
dreams of holding political office were never stifled by her party or her
religion. She said Islam, which preaches equality between the sexes as well as
traditional gender roles in marriage, promotes the education of women and their
place in the work force.
Her party, however, places limits
on what kinds of political participation it deems acceptable for women.
Last December, while women's
rights leaders here recruited thousands to a demonstration in Cairo against
sexual harassment and military violence against women, her Islamist party said
the march shamed female demonstrators, who should have let husbands, brothers
or fathers defend their rights.
At a March 8 gathering for her
own party's committee on women, El Garf and another female member of parliament
from her party fended off suggestions by critics in the media that women have
no real role in the People's Assembly due to their small number. The lower
house currently has eleven female members, the upper house has five. Together
they make up about 1 percent of the combined houses. Just six women have been
nominated for the 100-member constitution drafting committee.
'Quotas for Regime Puppets'
El Garf said that reserving
seats for women -- instituted in the 2010 parliament elections and then
annulled -- amounted to "decoration" because they were reserved for
"regime puppets" chosen by Mubarak's National Democratic Party.
Egypt's 16 female
parliamentarians, she said, have legitimacy that many of the women in the last
parliament did not because they were chosen by "the people." She expressed
confidence that women's numbers in parliament will grow as Egyptians see more
and more capable women taking active roles in politics and in their
communities.
Eric Trager, an American
fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that women have
little sway in El Garf's political contingent. "The Muslim Brotherhood is
a mostly male-dominated organization where all of the key decisions are made by
bodies that are entirely comprised by men," he said. "The Muslim
'Sisters' … they are not involved in the decision-making processes."
Trager is careful to avoid
lumping the Muslim Brotherhood together with fundamentalist Salafists from the
Al Nour Party, who refused to put pictures of female candidates running for
office on their posters. "One of the differences is that women are allowed
to have a public role for the Brotherhood. You did have some serious female
Brotherhood candidates; you had women's faces appearing on campaign posters,
whereas that was not the case for the Salafists."
But he predicted that the
Muslim Brotherhood would not help women's rights take center stage or do much
to expand women's ranks in politics, business or religious councils.
"You can see the
Brotherhood's conservatism on these kinds of social issues with how they're
responding to the National Women's Council," he said. "They don't
want a National Women's Council, they want a National Family Council. I think
in these kinds of ways they're going to make women's issues more akin to family
issues, which says they have a more conservative perception than we have in
America."
Muslim Brotherhood members
have angrily opposed plans to resurrect the National Women's Council,
previously led by former First Lady Suzanne Mubarak. The council was shut down
after a fire ripped through its offices last year and was often criticized by
human rights activists as political window dressing.
The Freedom and Justice Party,
by contrast, saw it as a potent threat to family life and another arm of the
overthrown regime.
El Garf stands with her party
on this. She said a state-backed family council would serve Egyptian women
better than a women's council.
She also said she supported a
diversity of non-profit or non-governmental groups to advocate for women's
rights and to promote education, as long as groups are backed by Egyptian
donors and funds alone.
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Egypt
- Feminist Union Undergoing Reincarnation
The venerable Egyptian women's rights advocacy, the Egyptian Feminist Union, is coming back to life amid a flowering of civil-society groups. But the road ahead isn't clear for a long-dormant organization that operated under British colonial rule.
CAIRO,
Egypt (WOMENSENEWS)--Grassroots organizations have been flowering in Egypt's
first post-revolutionary year and at least one is coming back to life.
The Egyptian Feminist Union, first founded in 1923, was shuttered just shy
of 30 years later by the onset of Egyptian military rule. Now, after
registering as a nonprofit a month ago, it is ramping up to give women the
voice they've been lacking for so long, organizers say.
"We have to defend whatever rights we have and
we have to go forward to equality and equity," says Hoda Badran, chair of
the group, which represents a collection of nongovernmental organizations
tackling women's issues in every governorate. "Women should have a say if
any public issue or decision has to be made."
That mission has been made harder, if anything, by recent events. Before the Jan. 25 revolution, Badran says, the country counted three female cabinet ministers.
"Later the military council came and now it's been reduced to one. So we are going backwards," she says.
Female demonstrators in the past year have also been targeted by security forces for virginity tests, electric shock, harassment, military tribunals and open brutality during December's most recent clashes, centered in Cairo.
Little Action
Human rights groups and women's organizations have fiercely objected but little action has been taken against the accused perpetrators.
The National Council for Women, a state-run group, has said little and been criticized for trying to monopolize the handling of women's issues and stifling other organizations.
In 1952, Egypt's armed forces wrested control of the country away from Britain, ending decades of colonization. To secure control of the Arab world's largest country, Egyptian generals introduced military rule and shut down many nongovernmental organizations, including the Feminist Union. At that time, the union's mission focused on suffrage, universal education and equality under the nation's personal status laws.
Badran has a long history of taking up such causes. In the past, she served as president of the United Nation's Committee on the Rights of the Child for two terms and is a member of numerous sustainable development, cultural and child protection organizations and councils in Egypt. She has two bachelors of science degrees -- one in sociology from the American University in Cairo and the other in social work from Helwan University -- and also serves as president of the Alliance for Arab Women, a Cairo-based organization that has operated throughout Egypt since 1987 to educate and train women on their rights.
She says Egyptian women have won some rights since the 1950s, including the right to vote in 1956. But compared to their male counterparts, they remain undereducated, underemployed, politically unorganized, underrepresented in government and experience more extreme rates of poverty.
Only 1 Percent of Egypt Parliament
Women make up only 1 percent of parliament's 500 or so members. No women are in charge of running the country's almost 30 governorates.
Badran hopes to change these trends, but knows it will not be easy since the union's new status is still in its infancy.
Its first project focused on encouraging women to vote or run in Egypt's first parliamentary polls, just completed, since the fall of deposed President Hosni Mubarak.
Mohamed Zaree, a program manager for the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, says the recent parliament elections make it a good time to refocus on women's issues and to bring human rights to the table.
"Now is the time for that conversation because the members of parliament are [accountable] to voters and could play an active role in the promotion of human rights," Zaree says.
While it looks for funding, the union has been planning its activities from the Alliance for Arab Women's office in downtown Cairo. It is set to hold a women's forum in the next few months to gather groups and discuss its future as Egypt takes its first steps toward democracy.
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