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Women’s Rights and Equality: Egyptian Constitutional Law

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Women’s Movements in Post-“Arab Spring” North Africa

Part of the book series: Comparative Feminist Studies ((CFS))

Abstract

This chapter charts the genealogy of the language of “women’s equality” in successive Egyptian constitutions, culminating in the 2012 constitution in which the liberal language of women’s rights and equality converged with Islamist political aims. In the aftermath of the 2011 revolution, the new Egypt converted the fervor of revolutionary change into the civil liberties of a new constitutionalism. This partly involved the re-institution, or re-constitution, of the existing power structure, even with the guarantee of new liberties for women. This sexual contract is the counterpart of citizenship’s social contract in a liberal secular order. Its origins lie in secular state politics (both colonial and post-colonial) that depend heavily on religion for its legitimization, religion that is said to reside in the family, in women’s bodies, in the sexual contract, and in the inviolability of private property.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Abd al-Rahman al-Shaykh, Muhammad Mustafa, and Nabil Badr, “al-Mar?a wa-l-Dustur: al-Khawf Yusaytir ‘ala al-Jami‘min Tahmish Dawr al-Mar’a,” al-Ahram, April 10, 2012.

  2. 2.

    “Sarkha al-Mar?a al-Misriyya fi Wajh ‘Dustur al-Fitna wa-l-Tamayiz,’” EgyptSoft, al-Mar?a wa-l-Dustur, accessed March 21, 2014, http://www.egyptsoft.org/new/.

  3. 3.

    Vivienne Walt, “Women’s Rights at Odds in Egypt’s Constitution Wars,” Time, December 9, 2012; Merrit Kennedy, “Egyptian Women Worry Constitution Limits Rights,” NPR, October 12, 2012; Egypt’s New Constitution Limits Fundamental Freedoms and Ignores the Rights of Women (Amnesty International, November 30, 2012), http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/egypt-s-new-constitution-limits-fundamental-freedoms-and-ignores-rights-women-2012-11-30; Egypt: New Constitution Mixed on Support of Rights (Human Rights Watch, November 30, 2012); Moushira Khattab, Women’s Rights Under Egypt’s Constitutional Disarray (Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, January 17, 2013); United Nations News Service, UN Experts Urge Review of Egypt’s Draft Constitution to Ensure Equality and Women’s Rights, UN News Centre, December 14, 2012, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=43771.

  4. 4.

    Alami, “Egypt Constitution Will Be Bad News for Women, Activists Say,” USA Today, January 13, 2013.

  5. 5.

    Holly Williams, “Women’s Equality Absent from Egyptian Constitution,” CBS Evening News, November 30, 2012.

  6. 6.

    Jumhuriyyat Misr, “al-Dustur,” December 26, 2012.

  7. 7.

    Mona El-Ghobashy, “The Metamorphosis of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37, no. 03 (2005): 373–95.

  8. 8.

    Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin): 133–35.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 147.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., 161.

  11. 11.

    Frances Hasso, “Alternative Worlds at the 2013 World Social Forum in Tunis,” Jadaliyya, May 1, 2013, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/11396/alternative-worlds-at-the-2013-world-social-forum.

  12. 12.

    Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); Mervat Hatem, “Egyptian Discourses on Gender and Political Liberalization: Do Secularist and Islamist Views Really Differ?,” Middle East Journal 48, no. 4 (1994): 661–76; Wendy Brown, “Liberalism’s Family Values,” in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

  13. 13.

    Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

  14. 14.

    Jumhuriyyat Misr, “al-Dustur,” 1956.

  15. 15.

    Jumhuriyyat Misr, “Al-Dustur,” 1971.

  16. 16.

    Sayyid Qutb, al-’Adala al-Ijtima’iyya Fi al-Islam (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1949); ‘Ali Abd al-Wahid Wafi, Huquq al-Insan fi al-Islam (Cairo: Maktabat Nahdat Misr, 1957); Muhammad al-Ghazali, Huquq al-Insan Bayna Ta’alim al-Islam wa-I’lan al-Umam al-Muttahida (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Tijariyya, 1963).

  17. 17.

    Kennedy, “Egyptian Women Worry Constitution Limits Rights.” Huda Ghaniyya, The Huda Ghaniyya, The Constitution Gives You Your Right (Cairo, 2012), http://www.ikhwantube.com/video/1671232/..

  18. 18.

    Marwa Sharafeldin, “The ‘Hareem’ of the New Egyptian Constitution,” Egypt Independent, March 15, 2012; Feminist Wire Newsbriefs, “Women’s Right in Question in New Egyptian Constitution,” Ms. Magazine, December 13, 2012.

  19. 19.

    al-Majlis al-Qawmi li-l-Mar?a, “Huquq al-Mar?a al-Gha?iba Fi Mashru’ al-Dustur,” La li-l-Dustur, November 11, 2012; “al-Dustur al-Misri Yuhammish ‘Nun al-Mar?a,’” al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 12, 2012; “Sarkhat al-Mar?a al-Misriyya fi Wajh ‘Dustur al-Fitna wa-l-Tamayiz.’”

  20. 20.

    Brown, “Liberalism’s Family Values,” 135–65.

  21. 21.

    Nathalie Bernard-Maugiron, “Personal Status Laws in Egypt,” Promotion of Women’s Rights (Cairo: Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, March 2010); Laura Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 101–121.

  22. 22.

    Asad, Formations of the Secular, 231.

  23. 23.

    Wael B. Hallaq, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 145–46.

  24. 24.

    Jihan Sadat, A Woman of Egypt (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).

  25. 25.

    Ministry of Information, Al-Mar?a Al-Misriyya: Mishwar Tawil min al-Hijab ila Asr Al-Ubur (Cairo: Public Information Council, 1976); Julinda Abu Nasr, Nabil F. Khoury, and Henry Azzam, eds., Women, Employment, and Development in the Arab World (Berlin: Mouton, 1985); Nadia Hijab, Womanpower: The Arab Debate on Women at Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Azza M. Karam, Women, Islamisms and State: Contemporary Feminisms in Egypt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997).

  26. 26.

    Hallaq, An Introduction to Islamic Law, 145–46.

  27. 27.

    International Islamic Center for Population Studies and Research, al-Azhar, Makanat al-Mar?a fi al-Usra al-Islamiyya (Cairo: International Islamic Center for Population Studies and Research, al-Azhar, 1975).

  28. 28.

    Yasmine Saleh and Edmund Blair, “Egypt Agrees Deal for $4.8 Billion IMF Loan,” Reuters, November 20, 2012.

  29. 29.

    Hizb al-Adala wa-l-Hurriyya, “General Features of the Nahda (Renaissance) Project,” IkhwanWeb (April 28, 2012), http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=29932.

  30. 30.

    Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 112.

  31. 31.

    Brown, “Liberalism’s Family Values,” 135–65.

  32. 32.

    Hizb al-Adala wa-l-Hurriyya, “Nahda Project”; Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 64–7.

  33. 33.

    United Nations Development Program, Regional Bureau for Arab States and Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, The Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World (New York: United Nations, 2005); Lila Abu-Lughod, Fida J Adely, and Frances S Hasso, “Overview: Engaging the Arab Human Development Report 2005 on Women,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41, no. 1 (February 2009): 59–60; Mark LeVine, “The UN Arab Human Development Report: A Critique,” Middle East Research and Information Project (July 26, 2002).

  34. 34.

    Heba Raouf Ezzat, Al-Mar?a wa-l-Amal al-Siyasi: Ru?ya Islamiyya (Herndon, VA: Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), 156–58.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 34.

  36. 36.

    Heba Raouf Ezzat, “Al-Quwa al-Na’ima” (Al-Jazeera Center for Studies, October 13, 2011), http://studies.aljazeera.net/files/2011/08/20118872345213170.htm.

  37. 37.

    Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2005).

  38. 38.

    Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Ten Speed Press, 1984), 111.

  39. 39.

    bell hooks, “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990); Patricia Hill Collins, “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminism Theorizing about Motherhood,” in Motherhood: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994).

  40. 40.

    Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995).

  41. 41.

    Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” The Atlantic, August 2012.

  42. 42.

    Nikolas S. Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 43, 74.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Duke University, Durham, USA

    Ellen McLarney

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  1. Ellen McLarney
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  1. Fez, Morocco

    Fatima Sadiqi

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McLarney, E. (2016). Women’s Rights and Equality: Egyptian Constitutional Law. In: Sadiqi, F. (eds) Women’s Movements in Post-“Arab Spring” North Africa. Comparative Feminist Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50675-7_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50675-7_8

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