CAIRO: The idea of celebrating Women’s Day was spearheaded for the first time during the women’s labor movements in the first decade of the 20th century. Women’s labor participation worldwide in the 1910s was minimal, but still these pioneering women took to the streets to demand higher wages and a better work environment. The percentage of females in the formal labor market has since been steadily increasing across the globe, inching closer to the indicators for males.
In Middle Eastern countries, however, according to World Bank maps on gender equality, the picture isn’t so rosy. In 2000, only 16 percent of workers in non-agricultural sectors were women in the Middle East, compared to Latin America and Asia, where it is 40 percent. With rapid economic growth, Middle Eastern countries managed to push up women’s share in the labor force to no more than 20 percent in 2005.
Yet despite sluggish numbers, much has changed for the women in the Middle East in the past two decades. To mark the long history of the women’s rights movement in Egypt, Daily News Egypt spoke to prominent Egyptian feminist and prolific writer Nawal El-Saadawi. Charting her experiences over the three presidential eras in Egypt since the birth of the republic in 1952 – the eras of Presidents Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak – El-Saadawi shared her analysis of Egypt’s recent history regarding the place of women in society.
Daily News Egypt: How would you evaluate the position of women in the Middle East today?
Nawal El-Saadawi: Whenever I hear the word Middle East I ask Middle to whom. We were named “Middle Eastern by the British colonizers in London. We were “middle to them, relatively, and India was called “Far East. Usually when I go to London now, to make a joke I say, I’m going to the ‘Middle West.’ When I go to the States, to America, I say, I’m going to the ‘Far West.’ People laugh because it’s a joke, but they don’t laugh when they say Middle East. This is a double-standard. It’s colonialism, imperialism, capitalism – it’s everything. So we need to de-colonize the language. I say I’m from Egypt; I’m from North Africa.
What has changed in the past two decades for women in Arab countries?
I feel like I’m in a jungle wherever I go. Any country with a big army, with a nuclear army, like Israel, can do anything. They can hit Iraq, they can hit Iran, they can invade Palestine, they can invade Egypt, they can do anything just like that because they have nuclear power. The same is with the United States. They have the biggest nuclear power so they can invade any country. They can invade Iraq and take the oil. And they base their aggression on a lot of lies, like democracy, humanity, human rights, and women’s rights. So it’s a lot of hypocrisy. You are asking me what happened in the past 20 years: we are going backwards because the class patriarchal system is becoming more aggressive. Greed is increasing; colonialism is increasing; war is increasing; hypocrisy is increasing; veiling of the mind and lies are increasing; and the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing everywhere. Usually class oppression goes hand-in-hand with gender oppression. Class and patriarchy are very much related in history.
But what has changed for Egyptian women?
Well, we cannot generalize. If you go to the American University, what do you see? You see rich women living like in Paris. If you go to the parties of the upper classes here in Cairo, you see women showing their breasts because this is the fashion now. And they think this is OK – this is post-modernism. I think this is slavery – it’s like veiling. Nakedness and veiling are the same: two faces of the same coin. It means women are just a body: either to be covered under religious slogans or to be naked for the free market to be just a sex object. So upper-class women in Egypt are like in Europe and the States. The very poor women are veiled, of course, and they even put the niqab [full face-veil]. This is very backward for women to show just their eyes.
But the contradictions between the rich upper classes and the poor are becoming great. It’s a class struggle, rather than a feminist struggle or a religious struggle. It’s a class struggle between the rulers, the Mubarak family, and the people around them – between the upper class people who have all the money and the very poor people. Sixty percent of Egyptians live below the poverty line on $2 a day. Here in Shubra, I see them, I talk to them. It’s like they are about to explode. They use religion, they use Islam because this is the only way to fight. They are ignorant; they don’t know anything about class and colonialism. The Islamic political groups feed them with religion and fanaticism and ask them to put the veil and the niqab. Now most of the Egyptians are very religious, very fanatic, and very ignorant. They just say Islam is the only solution.
And you see what happened with football between Algeria and Egypt. It became a war because of this ball. It’s politics. [See,] how the old Arab regimes and regimes in England and the States divert the hungry millions from understanding politics into football, into sport, so they think with their legs, not with their minds? Thousands of Egyptians were fanatic against the Algerians.
So if you ask me what the change is – the majority of women are going backwards, but there are other women going forward. In the generation of my daughter Mona Helmy, there are many writers who are fighting back. So here are the two trends: the minority is going forward; and the majority going backwards because of education and because of the government media. The media feeds the people with ignorance, especially women. It’s a struggle everywhere, not only in Egypt. When I was in Atlanta, women were frustrated even with the government of Obama.
What frustrates women in America?
Women in America are frustrated with patriarchy and religion. When I was in Atlanta we started the Global Solidarity Movement for Secular Society. We were a lot of people from Iran, Egypt, America. [We founded it] because we are fed up with religions. While I was there, the priest of the church led the people to pray to God and to Christ so that He would send rain because in Atlanta there was drought. This was happening in Egypt two centuries ago and the British accused the Egyptians of being ignorant. But when the church in Atlanta prayed to God and Christ, nobody said they were ignorant. They applauded them. It’s not only double-standard – this is backwardness.
What has changed for you in the past two decades?
I was exposed in these 20-30 years to many trials from the so-called fundamentalist groups in Egypt. The last one was just last year. I won that one. It was just because I wrote a play and they took me to court. At that time I was in Brussels at a conference and Al-Azhar, which is the government, took me to court because of the play. They threatened I will not come back to Egypt because they would revoke my passport, my Egyptian nationality. But I was lucky because the judge was fair. He read the play and he said, “I see nothing in it. So I came back. I decided to stay here and I’m continuing my struggle.
Are you optimistic about the future?
Oh yes, I’m very optimistic. When I was in prison, and Sadat said he would kill us, I was optimistic and I just laughed, saying that he would die before us. And he did and we got out. So, I am very much optimistic because I believe in the future and because hope is power.
What is the way to go forward, in your opinion?
I believe in education. When I proposed my name as a candidate for the presidential elections in 2005, in my program number one was education. We have to change education. The girl and the boy should know that they are equal, very much equal; that they should be honest, creative; and that they should have the courage to speak their mind. That’s how we can change the Egyptians.
