United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton often wears a headscarf when visiting Muslim countries. It's a sign of respect. Respect is also what she has shown the overwhelming Islamist domination of Egypt's parliamentary elections. She has praised these elections as fair and legitimate and pledged her willingness to work with its Islamist winners. For this, she has been criticized by Republicans in Congress, who aren't on board with plans to engage politically and courteously with Islamists, even moderates. The Islamist win in Egypt, (and elsewhere in the Arab world), presents a challenge for U.S. policy makers who now have to craft an embarrassing about-face. How to gracefully shake hands with those you once paid dictators (such as former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak) to oppress? And how to reassure a Middle East more familiar with the Bush/Cheney doctrine: a foreign policy full of cowboy swagger that promised preventative war to any regime perceived as a threat, even if not immediate, to the U.S.? As a Muslim Brotherhood leader, Dr. Essam El Erian, told us months before the elections when asked about how he would implement “the will of the people” (represented by a conservative Islamist Parliament) if it violated the rights of minorities: “What, is the U.S. the policeman of the world?” he said, stating that we insulted him with questions about civil rights, especially when our record at home was not all that good. “I know that Americans and Europeans are frightened about democracy in the Arab world,” he said. But “you are just wanting to continue the Colonial period by another name—now that Arabs and Muslims are struggling for real independence and real democracy.” Arab nationalism has risen in response to U.S. intervention in the Middle East. The number of women wearing the hijab headscarf soared in the last years of Mubarak's presidency—to some degree, believe many political scientists, as an act of protest against Mubarak's secular and brutal kleptocracy. Today, the vast majority of Egyptian women wear a scarf that covers their hair and neck, while more and more are wearing the enveloping black nikab—a remarkable contrast to their mother's generation in the 1960s when few women covered up and even mini-skirts were acceptable. Clinton's headscarf is of course a statement, an important nuance in her approach to foreign policy and a nod to how political the headscarf has become in the Middle East. If Islamists regard the hijab as a mark of virtue and modesty, donned out of respect for men, or as 24-year-old food management consultant Malek Hesham Ramadan put it, “Women should dress modestly as a courtesy to frustrated men,” Westerners, on the other hand, find such coverings demeaning to women—an offensive symbol of repression, male control, and female subjugation. The nikab has been banned in France for just this reason, while the hijab headscarf is outlawed in French schools for violating laws that ban public expressions of religion. If political scientists are right that many Egyptian women have been using the hijab as a form of political expression, then it is possible that women who have a problem with restrictive Islamic social policies may in the future shed what they call “the veil.” But whatever the case, the hijab, and what it does or does not symbolize, is not really our fight and may even be none of our business. For those who wish to make restrictions on women's dress a human rights issue, or claim Islamists don't believe in democracy, intelligence expert and media consultant George Friedman suggests in a recent article that both neoconservatives as well as human rights activists should beware believing “that outside intervention is needed to facilitate the emergence of an oppressed public naturally inclined toward democracy and human rights.” Defining democracy in terms of freedoms and human rights, he notes, is a Western notion. El Erian disagrees however: “Democratic values were not invented in the West.” It is a first, he notes, for Egyptians, “to have a chance for a real democracy that importantly comes by their efforts and not through foreign aide,” but instead out of “our culture and not from any other, making it a real democracy.” “Please,” he says, “be quiet, observe, and support.” Maybe U.S. policy wonks should be taking their cue from Egypt's liberal and secular upper classes, who for the most part led the revolution, but who lost big, (coming in with only 15 percent in the recent election). Many of them now echo El Erian (and even Clinton) by responding with respect, hope, and a willingness to work with their more conservative and poor countrymen who have won a powerful political voice in the new Parliament: As health therapist Toutah Halwagi describes the country's new promise, and political reality: “All Egyptians are one hand in supporting democracy.” ** Colleen Gillard and Georgia Wells are journalists covering post-revolution Egypt. They blog at: EgyptUnplugged.com BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/pEyFn Tags: Bush Doctrine, Elections, featured, Islam, Protests, Revolution, SCAF Section: Egypt, Op-ed
