Poll: Do you support Amina's goal to prevent anti-women Sharia laws from being adopted in Tunisia?

[sufrommich]

6. From a Tunisian pro democracy activist:

Protesting an exaggerated statement through a provocative action is wrong. It will result in a backlash. First of all, exhibitionism does not exist in the Muslim world, and a sane woman would think twice before walking down the street in mini skirt. There is a wide gap between that and nudity. Second, not everyone in the region is familiar with concepts such as feminisim or groups like FEMEN, the women’s movement founded in Ukraine in 2008. You have to look into the higher classes of society or among leftist intellectuals to find people who aware of these notions. To many Tunisians, Amina’s gesture is synonymous with mental illness—hence the rumour that spread regarding her incarceration in a psychiatric hospital. Alternatively, radicals stress descriptions of Tunisia’s feminists as morally decadent and as a menace to the society as a whole. Amina gave them a picture to illustrate this message.

A few weeks before elections in 2011, a private TV station opposed to Islamism showed an Iranian movie called Persepolis. The movie depicts the setback that Iranian secularists suffered when the the Islamic Republic was established in 1979. In a short scene, lasting a few seconds, God is depicted talking to a little girl in her bed. Sunni traditions prohibit the portrayal of God in any form, and so Islamists—mainly Salafists and Ennahdha activists—staged demonstrations against the TV station, and secularists in general, accusing them of corrupting Tunisia’s Muslim identity. Days of unrest followed, culminating in an attack on the TV station’s headquarters: the warning that the movie conveyed was not heard. The Islamist victory of October 2011 is partly attributed to this event.

Amina’s photos will be shown to gullible fathers with a warning: “This is where the miscreants are leading us!” Anyone supporting her will be accused of being a Western implant. Misogynists will recall how women enjoyed many rights under the old regime, while other freedoms were crushed. They will link Amina’s actions to that era and give all feminists the same label. They will also highlight that victims of the dictatorship received the little international support, even at the same time as Tunisia was highly regarded by many Western governments for its progressive stance on women’s rights. It will be easy, then, to make parallels with the increasing international pressures on Tunisia’s Islamist government, and the wide support Amina’s cause is gathering globally.

FEMEN in the Muslim world is all that conservative populists need for their propaganda. It is tarnishing the image of feminism and threatening women’s rights in this fragile transitional period. Amina and her ilk should read more about the history and sociology of their region, but most importantly, they should try to understand feminism from a post-colonialist perspective. Feminism contributed to the advance of Western societies in a European context. The equality of men and women is a universal value, but it has to come in the language of the people. It is a local feminism that we need, not an imported one—and Tyler is not even an Arabic name.


http://www.majalla.com/eng/2013/04/article55240155?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Twingly%2FBlogSearchDemocracy+%28twingly+blog+search+democracy%29


We in the West need to stop pretending we know how best to create change in regions we know very little about.