CAIRO - Egyptian women have undoubtedly lost out the most in the January 25 revolution. The resignation of celebrated woman judge Noha el-Zeini should substantiate this. Noha, a member of the Cabinet's think-tank and follow-up committee, submitted her resignation in the wake of the violent clashes between Coptic demonstrators and soldiers guarding the Radio & TV Building in Maspero on Sunday October 9. She said that Prime Minister Essam Sharaf has ignored her assessment of the decline in the relations between the Copts and the authorities. She claimed that the Government would have been able to defuse the violence on October 9, if it had appreciated her committee's warnings and suggestions. No Egyptian women were chosen as members of a committee formed hours after the outbreak of the revolution by the revolutionary alliances and political movements to steer the demonstrations and plan the nation's future. Nor were there any Egyptian women in a committee formed weeks after the toppling of Hosni Mubarak to amend the constitutional articles. These constitutional amendments saw the abolition of the women's quota in Parliament. According to the Election Law, approved by Parliament under the ousted Mubarak, Egyptian women candidates were conveniently given 66 parliamentary seats to save them from having to engage in tough election battles against men. There will probably be very few women (perhaps none at all) in the first post-revolution Parliament; the (female-free) military council will surely have to plead with women to calm down and not to condemn their lack of representation in certain areas. Meanwhile, there is only one woman in Egypt's Cabinet, although there were three under the former regime. Egyptian women played a vital role during the revolution, but their reward for this has been a miserable one. The sole woman in the Cabinet is Mrs Fayza Abul Naga, the Minister of International Co-operation. Many female candidates have now decided to shy away from the parliamentary elections in November, because they are haunted by fears of violence. Many people believe that the rise of Muslim fundamentalists and radicals (locally known as Salafists) has persuaded Egyptian women to ‘wait and see'. Salafists plan to shut women up at home and throw away the key, if they (the Salafists) are officially and constitutionally given the authority to steer the nation. Salafists and moderate fundamentalist groups are solely steered and controlled by men. Fundamentalists claim that women were created to blindly follow men. Women are ordered and encouraged by distorted religious texts, by a tribal culture and by force to make life pleasurable for men. The women of today are much less fortunate than they were under Mubarak. During his 30-years in power, Egyptian women enjoyed the undivided support of his wife, Mrs Suzanne Thabet. The spouse of the disgraced president was the chairwoman of the National Council of Women, whose chief concern was to deny men time-honoured tribal authority, which mainly depended on cynically distorted religious teachings that favoured men. Under Mubarak's regime, Egyptian women overshadowed their male counterparts in society, in local conferences, at home, at work and in much else. Celebrated sheikhs belonging to Al-Azhar (the highest seat of Sunni learning) were accused of providing a religious framework for whatever Mubarak's wife suggested in favour of the fairer sex - even if her suggestions challenged religious texts. Under the Mubarak regime, former heads of Al-Azhar invoked a divorce mechanism that was apparently 1,400 years old. This mechanism gave a woman the legal power to divorce her spouse anytime she likes and for any reason. Egyptian women must be feeling frustrated. Muslim fundamentalists are likely to comprise the majority in the next Parliament. They will undoubtedly retaliate by forcing women to give up the ‘rewards' they were given under the Mubarak regime.
