“Women of Tunisia are a woman and a half,” thousands of women chanted this
week during a protest march along the capital’s main boulevard, Habib
Bourghuiba. The road was named for the Tunisian republic’s first president,
known as a champion of women’s rights. “We rebelled together. We will build
Tunisia together.”
The draft constitution, formulated by a constituent assembly dominated by
Islamists, is due to be ratified in a referendum next year. Talks on the exact
wording are continuing between the Ennahda party-led government — elected after
the overthrow of dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali last year — and activists.
Article 28 assigns women “a complementary role inside the family,” which
activists describe as gratuitous, humiliating and a threat to women’s rights.
“It is demeaning and unfair to all women in Tunisia,” said Bouchra Belhaj, a
lawyer and human rights activist in the capital, Tunis. “They have placed women
into a certain category, the category of the wife who is just ‘complementary’
to her husband and nothing more.”
Activists fear the wording could herald a gradual erosion of women’s rights.
Tunisia, alone among Arab countries, permits abortion. Women of all classes
play a prominent role in public life and the economy, including as bus drivers
and police officers. Married women frequently make their own career and
lifestyle decisions. Women marched on the front lines during the street
protests that ousted Ben Ali last year and ushered in a new era of political
liberty and uncertainty. Although Tunisians across the political spectrum rose
up against Ben Ali, the Islamist Ennahda party dominated October elections for
a parliament and a constituent assembly.
Ennahda officials reject the assertion that they are trying to roll back
women’s rights in the name of Islam. The party recently acceded to secularists’
demands to exclude any reference to Islamic law, or sharia, from the
constitution’s preamble, and officials note that two other clauses in the
constitution refer to equality between men and women.
“Article 28 was never meant to rob women of their rights or freedoms,” said
Farida el-Abidi, an Ennahda member of the constituent assembly. “The word
‘complementary’ wasn’t used to substitute for the word ‘equality.’ We as
Ennahda, we follow Islam, and Islam is all about equality of men and women.”
At the same time, Ennahda faces pressure from its own socially conservative
political base as well as ultra-puritanical Salafist political parties
challenging its Islamist credentials. There are other voices clamoring to be
heard besides those of secularists. Sixty women serve in the constituent
assembly, and “every one of them has different perceptions” of the proper role
of women in civic and family life, Ennahda member Benjamina Zghulama noted in
the newspaper el-Shorouk.
Still, suspicions between Islamists and activists run high. “Even if the
constitutional panel’s intention was good, and God only knows if it is, we
still can’t accept the text,” said Sanaa Balhoubsh, of the Association of
Women’s Rights in Tunisia. “The fact is, this text demeans women and makes them
unequal or incomplete without men.”
Rights activists say they worry that Nahda’s unwillingness to bend on a mere
issue of wording bodes ill. “I sat in on a meeting with the Ennahda people, and
they absolutely refuse to change the wording,” said Belhaj, the lawyer. “Why?
Because they want to dominate the Tunisian people. They want to rob them of the
freedom they have been fighting for for so long, and we can’t let that happen.”
Ennahda’s Abidi accused some activists of seeking to tarnish the party’s
reputation.
“We encourage people to express themselves, especially after the
revolution,” Abidi said. “But what is not acceptable is to make a huge deal
about such a minor issue, especially since the intention was never to degrade
women.”
