Arab Spring in Egypt by Korany Bahgat;El-Mahdi Rabab;El-Mahdi Rabab; & Rabab El-Mahdi

Author:Korany, Bahgat;El-Mahdi, Rabab;El-Mahdi, Rabab; & Rabab El-Mahdi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Reintegration:

Popular sentiments and stereotypes prevailing in the new order

What is thirst but fear of thirst itself! (Omar Khayyam)

There is either a backlash against women’s rights or a fear of a backlash. But as the poet Khayyam says, the difference between the actual event and fear of that event is slight. There are rumblings of a rebellion against women. The laws that expanded and protected women’s rights and that were enacted under the aegis of the NCW with Suzanne Mubarak at the helm are now discredited as her laws. The council itself has been swept under a mat of silence. It has not, however, been dissolved, although a new council was appointed in February 2012 and a new secretary general was elected from among its members. According to the UN Women representative in Egypt, calls by gender activists to dissolve the NCW because of its ties to the old regime were silenced by fears that if it were dissolved, future governments and parliaments would not reconstitute it. This dilemma succinctly illustrates the fear that women have of rejecting the old only to find that the new is worse. Could women actually lose out in a democratic order?

The press is replete with calls to repeal progressive personal status laws, cancel women’s quotas, disband family courts, and reinstitute patriarchal laws and practices. According to Mulki Sharmani, the personal status laws were imposed by presidential fiat and are therefore inherently unjust or anti-democratic. This argument ignores the substantive impacts of these laws on gender justice. Moreover, it ignores the tremendous influence and sustained actions of women’s rights groups and of civil society, which were somewhat stifled by the NCW but continued to work. Another argument is that these laws do not conform to Islamic codes and principles. These protestations not only ignore the difference between fiqh (the interpretation by scholars of the laws of God), shari‘a (the will of God and what it signifies in terms of moral action), and maqasid (objectives, intentions), but also the fact that scholarly interpretations are by definition historical and variable. Rejection of the new personal status laws based on historical precedent is unjustifiable (Sharmani 2011).

There are also demands to change Law 10 of 2004, which created family courts, and Law 4 of 2005, which extended the legal age of guardianship and thereby permitted women to be legal guardians of their children up to the age of fifteen, for sons, or until marriage, for daughters. A new NGO called the Family Protection Association, created by retired judges from the family courts, is spearheading this challenge. The argument is that these laws, along with the khul‘ law, which granted women the right to unilateral divorce, have disempowered men to the extent that they empower women. There have been problems with visitation rights, which many Egyptians find too restrictive from the father’s point of view, but could that be a reason to permit fathers automatic guardianship for children as young as seven?

The call to reintroduce patriarchal institutions such as spousal obedience

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