SEVEN years after the appointment of the first woman judge in Egypt, the experiment of allowing women to sit on the bench seems to have suffered a setback with the recent decision made by the nation's State Council barring the appointment of female judges in the council. The State Council is an administrative court system with jurisdiction over cases involving the State. The decision was made according to a vote by the Council's General Assembly where some 334 judges out of the total 376 rejected the appointment of female judges in the council. The judges justified their decision by the heavy burden women shoulder in taking care of their families and so should not assume this heavy responsibility of working in the judicial system. They even claimed that the step of appointing female judges in the Family Court had proved a failure.. One wonders if the respectable judges have conducted an objective study to evaluate the step of appointing female judges three years after 31 were appointed by the Supreme Judicial Council? Or have they made their judgements according to the traditional male vision of women in a conservative Oriental society? More importantly, how far this decision was influenced by the religious view that sees the appointment of women judges as violating the Sharia (Islamic law)? Although the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam highest's institution, Mohamed Sayyed Tantawi, once stated that there is nothing in the Holy Qur'an or the Sunnah (the Prophet Mohamed's words and deeds) that bars women from becoming judges, the majority of schools of Islamic jurisprudence are totally against women judges. Only the Al-Tabari and Ibn Hazm schools allow women to wear judicial robes, while the Hanafi school approves women judges at civil, personal status and financial courts, but disapproves of them at criminal courts. Those who oppose women's appointment at criminal courts base their argument on the exhausting procedures that judges and prosecutors have to follow in investigating crimes. Abdel-Fattah el-Sheikh, a member of the Islamic Research Centre (IRC) of Al Azhar, who supports this opinion, believes that women's psychological nature disagrees with this mission. El-Sheikh maintained that women are emotional and very sentimental by nature, which hinders them from taking competent decisions. "Women who get tired, anxious, angry easily, or are sometimes not in the right psychological frame of mind or biological state should not hear serious cases like criminal proceedings," added el- Sheikh. Another IRC member, Abdel-Moeti Bayoumi disagrees with this view and believes that women have the right and are qualified to be judges. "It is a fight between those who are convinced that women do not have the right, and are not qualified, to be judges and the few who are enlightened and convinced that women can be judges. But they are powerless," Bayoumi noted. In addition, women often teach law and run legal faculties even in the conservative Al-Azhar University. "Women become legal attorneys, consultants and professors," Bayoumi said, adding that their absence from top posts in public courts "is a matter relevant to the evolution of society". This religious argument should have been settled with the appointment of the first woman judge, Tahani el-Gibali in January 2003, which was followed by the appointment of some 31 judges by the Statebacked Supreme Judicial Council in April 2007. Therefore, the recent decision to bar woman judges from appointment in the State Council seems strange and unacceptable, unless the experiment really proved to have failed, according to a precise and objective study. On the other hand, if this experiment failed, we should have the courage to announce it and not stubbornly follow a Western agenda being promoted in the country under the so-called motto of “the empowerment of women”. Apart from the religious argument over this issue, I personally believe that what works in one society might not succeed in another. Besides, the steps taken to empower women in a certain society should mainly deal with the actual conditions of the majority of women in this society. Therefore, when a society, such as that of Egypt, continues to suffer a high percentage of illiteracy, around 30 per cent, most of whom women, and when families continue to force their daughters to marry at the very young age of 14 or even less, in violation of law, talking about women's right to reach the president seems a luxury. Here, one remembers how India, for example, continues to feel great pride in having Indira Gandhi as the first female prime minister in the world (1966-1977). She was re-elected in 1980 and remained prime minister until she was assassinated in 1984. However, a woman holding this highest post in this vast democratic country did not improve the status of most women on the Indian Subcontinent. Instead, until today women in India continue to suffer from gender discrimination and unfair culture traditions represented in the dowry system, under which the bride's family pays a dowry to the bridegroom. Because of this cultural tradition, many women are subjected to beatings or even loss of life at the hands of their spouse or his family if the dowry was not that much. Accordingly, having hundreds of women judges in Egypt would not actually guarantee fair judgements for women at the personal status courts. On the contrary, many of those female judges, out of eagerness to prove themselves in face of the male competitors, might show some bias against women in these cases to prove that they have no tilt towards their gender. Accordingly, applying pressure to allow women to hold high posts in society should be preceded by improving the general condition of women in both rural and urban areas of the country, together with correcting the wrong traditional thoughts dominating the Egyptian mind over women's rights and status. We should be courageous enough to filter Islamic culture from many old traditions that have nothing to do with genuine Islamic principles and, at the same time, stop reiterating Western secular thought, most of which disagrees with our Islamic culture.
