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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 October 2000 Issue No. 504 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 October 2000 Issue No. 504
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Elections Palestine International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Travel Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A voice of their own
By Amina Elbendary
In the popular television series Al-Barari wal-Hamoul, aired earlier this year, actress Elham Shahin plays a simple peasant woman abandoned by her husband. Faced with the hardships of life on her own, she learns to read and write and takes an active role in her community. When she stands up to the unjust umda (mayor) of her village, she becomes so popular that people urge her to nominate herself for parliament. In a feel-good conclusion, she wins, and the message is clear: this year, women's political participation is in.
Amina Shafiq
Thoraya Labna
Mona Qurashi
Indeed, the 2000 election campaigns are championing and promoting the participation of women as never before, along with "youths," Copts and other groups traditionally considered "marginal" -- or at least "marginalised." Television campaigns urging the public to go to the polls have targeted women voters, as have ads sponsored by the newly-established National Council for Women (NCW), which stress women's national duty to vote and feature all faces of the "Egyptian woman": the peasant woman, the working woman, the homemaker.
Yet despite the hype that accompanied the establishment of the NCW and preceded the elections, the lists of party candidates include disappointingly few women. The ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) has only 11 women on its list -- a laughably meagre fraction of the total 444 NDP candidates. The ruling party since its inception, the NDP was expected by many across the political spectrum to be the vanguard in promoting women's political participation.
The disappointment doesn't end with the NDP roster; leading opposition parties have not fared better. The liberal Wafd party has eight women on its list and the leftist Tagammu has only four. The Nasserist party has none. And yet pre-election campaigning has witnessed an increase in the number of women candidates -- 109 in all -- with the majority running as independents and not on party lists.
The same old chicken and egg logic is used to explain -- if not excuse -- the blatant dismissal by political parties of the other half of the electorate. The argument goes that women are a liability on a party list. Opposition parties feel that if their candidates stand little chances of winning, the women among them stand even less. To risk naming a woman is to effectively give up a potential seat on an already limited list.
But why is that so? The traditional answer is that voters prefer men. Society has not yet acknowledged women's effectiveness and capabilities as decision-makers and legislators. Moreover, there are few women with strong records in political activity and public administration who seek to nominate themselves for parliament.
The number of women MPs in modern Egypt has always been extremely limited. At a conference on "Women and Political Participation," held in July under the auspices of the NCW, Cairo University political science professor Nevine Mos'ad presented a paper demonstrating that women's representation in the Egyptian parliament has traditionally ranged between 2 and 3 per cent. The only exception came in the 1979 and 1984 parliaments when the figure jumped to 8.9 and 7.86 per cent respectively. Not coincidentally, a law instituted in 1979 designated specific seats for women, but in 1986 the procedure was annulled on the grounds that it was discriminatory. Despite an increase in the number of female candidates to 87 in the 1995 elections (2.1 per cent of the total figure), only five women won seats, all of them NDP candidates. Four more were appointed by the president, bringing the total of women MPs to nine in the People's Assembly, which has 444 elected members and 10 appointed ones.
But does more women representatives really mean better representation for women? Not according to a study by Azza Wahbi, published by Cairo University's Centre for Political Research and Studies in 1995. The study failed to find a correlation between the number of women MPs and the level of their participation in parliamentary activities. The study traced the number of interpellations (questions that must be answered by cabinet ministers), requests for information, requests for debates and bills proposed by women MPs and found that having more women in parliament actually meant less parliamentary activity by women. Evidently, the quality of women's representation is also an issue to be dealt with.
Since Egyptian women gained the right to vote in 1956, only 64 women have served as MPs. Many of these representatives have been re-elected several times, and indeed, the NDP's female candidates for 2000 are for the most part old-guard. Women like former Minister Amal Osman, Thoraya Labna, Fayda Kamel and Galila Awwad have served several parliamentary terms before. One of the few new faces on the NDP list is Mariam Mustafa, who is running in Alexandria. A professor of sociology, Mustafa has experience working in local councils and projects.
Women are nonetheless breaking new ground this election, running in constituencies generally perceived as tough and, therefore, requiring male candidates. Tagammu's veteran founding member Amina Shafiq is not only contesting elections for the first time, but she is running in Cairo's Bulaq district -- generally considered a "difficult" constituency. The battle awaiting Shafiq promises to be hard, but when Shafiq went to offer her condolences to a bereaved family in Bulaq, locals were heard to comment that "she's as tough as any guy." Shafiq has a formidable record of political activity. She is an integral and founding member of the Tagammu party and has been visibly active in its ranks. She is also well known for her activism in the Press Syndicate, serving as a member of its council for several terms. She has played crucial roles in promoting freedom of expression and the rights of journalists.
This round of elections is also witnessing an increase in the number of provincial women candidates. An example is Ain El-Hayat Saleh whose life story is largely told by the television series mentioned earlier. Saleh's husband divorced her under pressure from his family because she was illiterate. After learning to read and write, Saleh devoted her career to promoting literacy among peasant women -- and men -- in her Giza village of Al-Baragil, where she is now contesting the elections as an independent. Examples also include Fayza El-Tahnawi in Minya, Nahed Hilmi in Banha and Ibtisam Abu Riham in the New Valley.
Many of the women candidates are running for the first time and are novices to political activism, although most have a background of developmental and communal service. These include Mona Qurashi, the Wafd party's "worker" candidate in the Cairo district of Qasr Al-Nil. Qurashi is founder and president of the Egyptian Society for the Development of Local Communities, based in Muqattam, which has been involved in relocating and resettling the 1992 earthquake victims.
A striking new female face in this year's elections is Jihan El-Halafawi, the candidate of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, who is running as an independent in Alexandria's Raml district. The wife of a leading Brotherhood figure, Ibrahim El-Zafarani, El-Halafawi has no prior experience in political activity. El-Zafarani, who is secretary-general of the Alexandria chapter of the Doctors Syndicate, was arrested in 1995 and tried by a military court that sentenced him to five years in prison. He was arrested again recently. Women have never been prominent in the Muslim Brotherhood's public image and the group's views on the political participation of women have traditionally been vague. It has largely been assumed that the group discouraged it. Perhaps this is what prompted El-Halafawi to seek -- and obtain -- a fatwa (ruling) from prominent Sheikh Youssef El-Qaradawi stating that it is permissible for women to nominate themselves for parliament.
Despite the increase in the number of women candidates, the election programmes of most of these women do not include a decidedly feminist -- or even women-oriented -- tone. Most follow their party programmes, if they belong to one, or else call for straightforward developmental goals and aspirations that are hardly radical or controversial -- like literacy and job opportunities. Some, like El-Halafawi, are calling for liberating women from sexist stereotypes in the media. But there are no strong calls, for example, to revise citizenship laws that deny Egyptian nationality to children with Egyptian mothers but non-Egyptian fathers. Then again, the focus of Egyptian MPs has traditionally been more parochial than national. MPs are expected to solve the local problems of their constituencies and to act as mediators between their electorate and the authorities concerned.
That a total of 109 women are standing in this year's parliamentary elections is no doubt a cause for celebration, but the real challenge lies in the road ahead. Even if a majority of these candidates win seats, there remains the question of how they will manage to represent both their nation and their sex.
Related stories:
New support for women 7 - 13 September 2000
Parliament with a difference? 31 August - 6 September 2000
Brothers forward a new image, and a sister 31 August - 6 September 2000
See Elections 2000
