Women's Rights in Authoritarian Egypt by Hiam Elgousi

Author:Hiam Elgousi [Elgousi, Hiam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Civil Rights, Human Rights
ISBN: 9780857727794
Google: NmKJDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-04-20T03:33:27+00:00

The status of women's rights under the existing Shariah-based legislation

During recent decades and up to the present day, Egypt has witnessed a heated debate between two key players in Egyptian society concerning the status of women: the secularists and the Islamists. The former camp advocates eliminating all forms of discrimination in the existing laws and replacing them with modern laws which provide for equality between women and men in terms of inheritance, abolition of polygamy, access to abortion, eradication of FGM, sexual freedom, and so on. Such demands have faced ferocious opposition from Islamists.

Before proceeding further with this discussion, it is important to highlight the various elements that shape and influence the relationship between the secular and the Islamist camps in Egypt. By using the word Islamist, I mean here al-Azhar scholars and other groups advocating the implementation of Shariah in Egypt. According to Nikki R. Keddie, the terms ‘secular’15 and ‘secularism’ refer to:

The term derived in Middle English from the Old French word secular (itself from the Latin saecularis), the word originally referred to clergy who were not bound by the religious rules of a monastic order [and] It was only in the nineteenth century that the word ‘secular’ came to be associated with ‘secularists’ who espoused a doctrine of ‘secularism’ - that is, the belief that religious institutions and values should play no role in the temporal affairs of the nation-state. (2003: 14)

With a quick glance at this definition, we can understand the primary reason for the clash between the secular and the Islamist groups. Both groups are calling for a completely different set of ideas, identity and vision, and above all they claim the correctness of their reasoning over each other; in other words a clash of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Therefore, it's necessary to examine the historical events that have resulted in such a clash.

‘[Dating back to] the first half of the ninth century a majority of the Egyptian population had adopted Islam through non-coercive means of Islamization on a massive scale’ (Becker 1924 cited in El Guindi 1981). Since then, Islam has remained the dominant religion in Egypt and, with the establishment of al-Azhar, it continues to influence the social, cultural and even the daily lives of Egyptians. However, with the first concrete encounters with European colonialism during the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt (1798–1801), the existing social and cultural structures of the Egyptian community were challenged. Later on, during Muhammad Ali Pasha's era, his project of modernizing Egypt through dispatching students to Europe, mainly France, to attain the latest knowledge, led to more debates being initiated by the educated elite, challenging Islam and the foundations of the Islamic community. El-Guindi explains:

Receptiveness to western secularist nationalism, reinforced by revived patriotism, began to surface and appeared to challenge Islam and the foundation of the Islamic community. This challenge came from an indigenous intellectual elite influenced by European, especially French, thought and culture. In their writings this elite expressed arguments for secularist patriotist-nationalist ideology. (1981: 472)

Along the lines of

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