Women's Rights in Egypt, After the Arab Spring, Iowa City, Iowa, April 17, 2014

- [Janet Lyness] I want to acknowledge our university and community sponsors for today's program. The University of Iowa honors program and the University of Iowa's International Programs both contribute vital time, talent and logistics to our organization. I also want to thank today's financial sponsors, Mike Carberry who is with us today and Burns Western who I don't believe I saw today. Our work is made possible by the financial support of these sponsors. Our format today includes an introduction of the speaker Our speaker's remarks and a question and answer period. You can write your questions on the cards that are found on each table and we will be collecting those at the conclusion of the speaker's remarks. Now, I am very proud to get to introduce Adrien Wing She is my friend and has been for many years Adrien is the Bessie Hutton, Bessie Dutton Murray Professor of law at the College of Law at the University of Iowa. Adrien is also the director of the University of Iowa Human Rights Center which I want to thank her personally for making sure that we still have the center at the University of Iowa, so thank you very much for that. Yes, I think she does deserve an applause for that. She is also the director of the Summer Abroad programs in France which if you haven't heard about those, you should definitely talk to somebody who has been there because they are extremely popular with law students I can tell you that. She received her JD from Stanford Law School and she joined the University of Iowa college of law in 1987. She is the author of more than 100 publications. Her US oriented work has focused on race and gender discrimination, gangs, mothering, affirmative action and the war on terrorism. Her international work has focused on two areas. Africa and the Middle East. I am very excited and very pleased to welcome Adrien Wing. - [Adrien Wing] Thank you so much Janet for that very kind introduction. When I came here I guess or shortly thereafter, Janet was a young student and of course she has done incredibly well and we are very very proud of her and everything that she has done. It's always a pleasure to speak for the foreign relations council when I was new to town, I was put on to the board new to Iowa city and it was wonderful to serve on that board and then I am also always very happy to be here at the congregational church, my grand parents, my parents and myself were all congregationalists and this past Sunday I was in Chicago for Palm Sunday at the largest congregational church in the country The Trinity Church predominantly African American and it has 8000 members and so they have three Sunday morning services so I was able to catch one where there were only maybe 2000 people in the room. So I am always happy to be in my church home. Burns Western as you heard is a co-host of this event. He called me this morning to say that one of his dear friends had passed away quite suddenly and so he was not going to be able to join us and he extends his regards to everyone and since he is my mentor and he is the reason that I came to the University of Iowa College of Law, I always must acknowledge his role, including in today's event. I must also acknowledge the UI Center for Human Rights you heard I am the new director, it's a 15 year old organization, it's been revitalized in the last year under the umbrella of the college of law but it remains multi-disciplinary and I'm very happy that we have one of the founders of the center here, Dorothy Paul, well known to all of you here. And we have I believe several board members. Raise you hand if you are a board member, yes, one, two, three, three and Dorothy herself of course, four out of our 25 board members are here so we are delighted of course to have them as well. The topic for today , I've entitled Women's Rights after The Arab Spring: The Case of Egypt because I am going to give some overview generally about what's going on with Women's rights as well as then focus on the specific case of Egypt. I teach a course at the law school called Law in the Muslim World. And so this subject, we spend many hours on and I am delighted to have some minutes with you also I should tell you, I have been doing some teaching for the Center on Aging so just a couple of days ago I taught a two hour session on women in Islam and there will be next week another two hours on Women in Islam and terrorism in Islam. So in other words I am trying to get the word out in a variety of venues to keep us all up to date with what's happening in this region of the world as you know the media has a very narrow focus so it can't do more than okay, we've got the plane crash and then we've got the boat sinking and then we have a little bit of that trial in South Africa and so right now it's not focusing at all, really on anything happening in the Middle East except maybe a tiny little bit about the failure of the Peace Process with Palestine and Israel, we are not hearing really about Syria much at all, little bit with the Ukraine, so anyway, I hope this information will interest you in learning more or keeping in touch with me because I'd be happy if you email me at the college of law to send you more links, materials, tell you things that I recommend you look at, If you want to just be able on your own to keep up with the information that is going on there because nothing is stagnant, there is a lot going on. As we all remember, 2011 was the year of the protester with the focus on the so called Arab Spring. And who knows who is this man? Anybody? Yes, is that Bill Risinger? Yes, who is it? Yes, a professor here knowing something, right? Yes, this is Mohamed Bouazizi. He is the person said to have started the Arab Spring he was a Tunisian fruit peddler and the police would not let him peddle his wares and his response to that rather than just saying , "Oh, okay I'll just go away." Was, he immolated himself, put himself on fire and in torching himself, he ended up dying the whole region ends up catching fire. Some people literally torched themselves, other people lit a fire that resulted in protests in a variety of countries including Egypt as we will see but it is Mohamed Bouazizi who in that horrific incidence of killing himself got the spark going. Now, what have women faced in what I now call, not the Arab Spring, not the Arab Fall, I just now call it the Arab season because it's been going on now for several years with no end in sight. Do any of you know, just maybe you've heard, maybe you remember some of the things that have happened to women in what became a revolutionary period in the region or what some people say, no it wasn't really revolution they were little revolts, whatever you want to call it. Do any of you have some examples you may have heard as to the kinds of things that were happening to women? No? Sorry? No? Rape, violence against women occurs allover the world we know, rapes occur allover the world including in Iowa City on the campus of the University of Iowa. But we saw an enhanced focus on rape occurring in the context of this revolutionary situations. This actually is a group of Egyptian young women who were all arrested because they were protesting a protest law, a law that would prevent them from protesting and in Egypt, when you are arrested, and you are brought to the court room, you are put in a cage like this. The defendant is put in a cage so this is not a unique cage for them, it is the defendant's cage and it's big enough to fit all of this particular group of women. Now, in addition to the rape issue, there are many issues that affect women and men allover the world and in this region, at this particular time, there are issues that have arisen related to clothing and who can wear what and whether they are covered or not there are issues relating to women in politics and whether they can run for office or not run whether they will be permitted to vote, there are issues ongoing related to family law, what they call personal status law and the kinds of rights women have or may not have in the Arab world generallly there is polygamy where men are allowed to have four, up to four wives but women are not allowed to have more than one husband but that's just one of the issues that's been ongoing with some people saying "Hey, we need to cut back on the polygamy" Others saying "No, it's my right as a muslim man" There are issues relating to inheritance. Under Islam, women can only inherit a half share. So your brother gets a share, you get half of that share and so as you might imagine there are some people who are, like well, this isn't fair, why can't it be different and then we've mentioned violence against women which can include a number of things. So, these are things that existed before the Arab season, continue to exist, been affected by the Arab Season and no doubt will have issues forever. In particular, during the Arab Spring, There is a number of issues that came up and I'll talk in more detail, but they include something called virginity tests, attacks that happened on women when they were protesting or commemorating International Women's Day, March 8th. There is an incident I'll show you a picture of called The woman in the blue bra incident, there have been cases of torture of women by the authorities in numerous countries, there is incident that happened concerning a maid of the Gaddafi family a son of Gaddafi, I'll tell you more about that a little later. And then when elections were held, in Egypt itself, they used to have a quota system for women and then when they got rid of the quotas, they ended up with almost no women getting elected at all and this happened in a number of countries. So women in the political realm were generally affected for the worse even though the dictator, Mubarak, may have been bad on many levels he had instituted certain things where women had achieved some involvement in the political system that has now been taken away. So these are just a few examples of specific types of things that happened in the so called Arab Spring. So I'm now going to just mention a few countries with some of the different things that were going on. I hear Yemen is a country affected by the Arab Spring. They were able to overthrow a long term dictator Yemen has often been in the US, a Western media because they are one of the countries with no minimum age for marriage which results in child brides, girls who are not even at puberty who end up getting, being forced to get married, being made to have sex and then often dying from the injuries or if they have children, their bodies can't handle it and so horrific consequences. You have child brides in many countries, even countries where the practice is illegal or where the marital age is 18, there still will be a lot of children that are nine or 10. So on the one hand that's a very negative thing but on the positive side, we had a woman from Yemen win a Nobel prize for peace. The 2011 Nobel Prize for peace. So Tawakul Karman was an important figure in the Yemeni uprising, she was one of a few women but she was on the front line and she is only the second muslim woman ever given a Nobel prize. The first women being an Iranian lawyer, named Shirin Ebadi who actually came to Iowa a number of years ago and spoke. The word Arab Spring does not include the country Turkey. Turks are Muslim but they are not Arabs. They are Turks, right? Iranians are Muslim but they are not Arabs, they are Persians so even though this country is technically not in the Arab spring, you all may be familiar that in 2013, Turkey went through a lot of uproar and so women were on the front line of protests against getting rid of some of the historic green area in the central part of the city and so this woman is being arrested and she is wearing the flag with who does anybody know who's that on the flag of Turkey? Yes, the founder of Turkey is Ataturk. So she is saying what the current government is doing is a disgrace to the memory and the history of Ataturk. We all know that Libya had a revolution as well, helped in part by NATO and the United States. Once again we don't hear very much about what's happening in Libya ever since we had our ambassador there killed along with some other Americans, women have had some role in trying to make a change for the better in that country. Algeria, you don't hear very much about but right now they are about to have a presidential election and there is a woman who is running for the presidency. We probably will hear nothing about that election. Algeria is an important country in the Arab world because they had a revolution against the French back in the 50s and then after that revolution, where women were on the front line, women ended up having to become housewives again. So one of the big fears whenever women move forward in a revolutionary situation, is that they will suffer the fate of Algerian women, i.e. going back to the home and the hearth after the revolution, instead of being able to use those gains to participate in what's happening. So in this very famous country in the Arab world it is significant that we have a woman who is running for the presidency. I'll mention a little bit about Syria. This was a country that before the Revolt of revolution or whatever's happening there was a very secularized country and the surveys show that many women there felt free to exercise a number of rights. Even though they did have the traditional issues with polygamy and inheritance and domestic abuse, but overall , compared to lots of other countries in the region, they were able to participate. The country was doing so well, that Vogue Magazine featured the first lady of Syria on it's cover. So this is Asma Assad who is a British Syrian and she married the man who became the president when he was getting his Ophthalmology degree. And so they had this issue and then of course when the whole country blows up, the title of the article was Rose of the Desert but many people have now compared her to Marie Antoinette because her emails which were taken by Wikileaks showed that while her country is blowing up, she is up here buying furniture in London and focusing on artwork and I'm sure she would say, "Well, let them have cake if they have no bread" You know, the same as Marie Antoinette. So you have her who had been an ambassador for a new Syria and now is maybe going to be best known as being Marie Antoinette of the 21st century. Now, during the revolt they are having in Syria, women have been involved on both sides. There are women fighting for the regime and there are women fighting against the regime and there are women who are literally being arrested, tortured, women who are fighting many Syrians have fled to Turkey mainly women and children and many of these refugee women have been raped and some of them, some of the families have sold their daughters to Arab sheikhs from the gulf because they need the dowry money and they are also afraid their daughters will be raped which would be a horrific violation of what they call family honor so they are selling many of the girls to people in the gulf. One of the leadership groups there in the exile community, the Syrian national council it does have a quota for women in it's general assembly but when they got to the top council level, no women were elected for the very top of the council. So they have some women involved, now there are so many of these groups and nobody can even say, is this group really representative but I just gave it as an example to show that during this period among this exile groups there are some of them who have focused on gender issues. You have many Syrian women who were Human rights activists and then after the revolt have had to either flee the country or go into hiding because of their efforts against the regime and this young lawyer is one of them. And then here a woman as a full member of a militia engaged in fighting. Then one of the coalition groups literally has a woman who is the co-vice president of this group and her relative was a former president of Syria before the Assad family came into power in 1970. So she is getting her legacy from her link to that relative and who knows if there is a future Syria whether or not a regime that is peaceful whether or not you will see somebody like her have a role in the government. In this period of turmoil, you are seeing Syria who had been at the top in terms of women's development has sunken down to number 19 out of 22 and has a variety of problems with so many refugees et cetera, on the other hand it has the age of 17 for the legal age to marry for girls which is a good age but like I said that's not able to really be enforced and then there are high numbers of pregnant women who cannot now of course get the proper services for them and even before the conflict only 16% of the women had jobs. This is pretty typical of the Arab World, not that many women have been in the paid workforce of course they have been in the workforce in that they are taking care of sometimes large families and doing all of the cooking cleaning and other aspects of family life. The last country I'll mention before Egypt is Tunisia. Tunisia is the bright light of the Arab world as I've said Bouazizi came form Tunisia and Tunisia is now sixth for women's rights and women are holding 26% of the seats in parliament, what's the US total? 20? 17? Tunisia is ahead of the US and the laws have been modified so that women can pass on their citizenship now to their husbands, that was one of the issues in the Arab world, generally men give their citizenship to their wife but women can't give it to their husbands. And they also gain the right, non-Muslim women inherit from their husbands which hadn't been allowed before. And they can have abortion within the first three months and as you might imagine for most of the countries in the region, abortion is going to be totally illegal. And they get something we don't in the US. 30 paid days of maternity leave, national policy. As we know, unless in the US your particular job happens to give you that, you don't get that as part of your bundle of rights. So, it has been a progressive country since the 1950s when the founding leader Habib Bourguiba abolished polygamy, going ahead of the values of his country and he had an age of 18 for marriage, he gave women the right to vote, to run for office and that was back in the 50s, so it's quite, so they had this kind of base when they went into their Arab Spring. And so they revised their constitution over the past couple of years and as a result of that, their constitution has clauses featuring gender equality and inclusiveness even though the economy is doing poorly on the legal side at least, there are provisions where it talks about the equality of men and women and those provisions, where are they in the US constitution? We don't have them in the US, our constitution does not have gender, it's been interpreted and we have statutes like Title 7, Title 9 et cetera that deal with gender but we are one of the few countries in the world that does not yet have gender equality in our constitution. If something is in the constitution, very hard to change, right? You don't just change a constitution. Okay, now the remainder of my time, will be focusing on Egypt, as was mentioned we had violence, we have sexual harassment, Egypt is now 22 out of 22 Arab States for women's rights, which is quite tragic. They are estimating 99.3% of the women and girls are now subject to sexual harassment, almost everyone. The virginity test, what's this thing with virginity test, what is that about, we don't have that in the US. Why would that be a big deal where they arrested women who were protesting and did virginity tests on them. What's the significance of that? In their culture you must be a virgin when you get married. If you are not a virgin, it is a stain on family honor in some families you might be killed. But certainly if you are protesting and they so called prove you are not a virgin, it is saying you are a cheap slut out protesting doing bad things and your family is bad. So, even with that stigma, this woman challenged the virginity tests of course with her father's permission and support. Unfortunately she lost that case. But she dared to speak out, even though, and her father was conservative person, he wasn't progressive or secular or anything like that. So we'll have to see what happens in her future. I told you about the girl in the blue bra incident. In Islam if you wear a hijab or a robe or some kind of long covering, this implies that you are a non-sexualized person, you should be left alone, you are very devout. So the fact that a woman wearing such an outfit was attacked like this by this police and that her robe was opened up like that to reveal her underwear is just total societal breakdown. And then there were people saying, "Why did she have on a blue bra?" She could have on whatever she wants under the long robe and they are focusing on that she has on a blue bra. So, this incident has stood out and unfortunately they did not reveal her name which would have been another shame on her family, et cetera. So you have things were like, okay you women, you want to be out there, we may strip you of your clothes out in public in addition to other attacks et cetera. Nevertheless, women have continued to come out to protest including this January when it was the third year of the anniversary of the Arab Spring for their country they continue to protest about sexual assault and if my little, I have this tiny little clip that I pray works. A lady in pink came to Cairo University dressed like that. You saw, she was fully clothed but just how she had her clothing on subjected her to that just on a campus. Imagine if that was on our campus and imagine the fear and what might be happening to women on all parts of that campus, and so that's a little bit of an example of how you can end up with 99% of women, no matter what they have on, being subjected to harassment. I already told you and showed you a picture in the beginning of how there are women who are protesting protest laws and they end up getting arrested or dropped off in the middle of the desert. Nevertheless they have formed groups to concretize their actions and so here is one of the groups which is an anti-sexual harassment. I am showing you this to show you, you should not think of Arab women as just passive victims wallowing without responding and they are facing these kinds of challenges and they are on the frontline and they are still moving forward and that we need to respect that and acknowledge that and be happy that those efforts are possible often at great risks. Here is another group talking about having safe houses and hotline numbers and certain things that did not exist at all before in Egypt but now are beginning to develop to assist women. They have had an Egyptian woman who ran for president, against Morsi who ended up getting elected and overthrown and she is a prominent journalist so she is still out there speaking. You have women that are head of NGO groups, non-governmental organizations who continue to speak out against the abuses coming out of the Morsi regime and now the interim regime. You have young women who were part of the social media aspects of the uprising, and that they are still involved, especially with their generation who communicate on the Facebook and Twitter and those aspects. Then you have very senior women, this women Dr. Saadawi is probably one of the most famous Egyptian women and she is a writer and a journalist and a doctor and an activist and she is continued to speak out even though they tried to divorce her from her own husband by trying to say that her behavior was anti-Islamic, and make her husband divorce her, very strange. Then even we've had an American whose active in the anti-war movement in the US, this is her in the US protesting against killer drones, she went to Egypt in order to go up to Palestine for a conference, she landed I guess her name was on some kind of list that must have come from the US government because she ends up getting assaulted by the Egyptian authorities and then deported and shipped to Istanbul. So very very strange kind of things but it says, you could be in another country, you could be an American and maybe how you are speaking out will get picked up by some other country if you are choosing to visit in the near future. Fears for the future, I mentioned already the Algerian backlash phenomenon that women are going to just continue to be pushed back into the house and also the bigger fear that as different Islamist parties win victories in elections, that these groups once they solidify their political base, will then turn to changing the laws which already most of them were heavily discriminating against women that they will increase the discrimination against women as they solidify, they don't do that at the beginning, because they've got to get the whole political base straight but if they stay in for a few years the big fear is that they will then take away whatever limited gains women had been able to make under regimes that might have had a lot of problems but nevertheless might have had some women's rights aspects that were positive. Now to just close since my time is just about up, what can be done to help these women? Well, what can we do here in Iowa City, what can we do as Americans, I mean there is just a laundry list you could think of lots of other things, you can ask me in the question session, I think the best thing to be done is something that many of you may have done here and many of the young people as well, and continuing to educate yourself and continuing to travel abroad. Right now Egypt's a little bit dicey, perhaps, but there is lots of other countries that you can go to and learn what's going on first hand and deal with people as people and not as images on TV. We have to be focusing on having our government putting more effort into the civil society in these countries instead of just into weaponry and assisting security aspects of a country we need to focus on the International Violence Against Women Act which was passed in the US and needs to be passed in the US and would help women globally. We need to work from the bottom up not just the top down. It would help greatly for the US if the US would ratify CEDAW which is the Women's Convention on Human Rights. We are one of only seven countries in the world that has not ratified it so it's very hard for us to stand up with a straight face in the world community, telling different countries that you should do this and you should do that when we haven't even done this very basic thing so as I said in the question period, we will see if you have other suggestions and my own sense of the future is that more Islamist victories will be occurring if women do not have quotas to get into the government in many of these countries, they will not be able to be elected that we are more likely to move backward in a number of the countries in terms of the women's rights than forward, and that speaking now as a constitutional law professor, there is an important role for constitutions and even more importantly constitutionalism, which is how does the constitution penetrate and mean something in the country and that ultimately maybe years down the way, there will be a place for truth and reconciliation, a process that has happened in South Africa and a number of other countries, it's always controversial, it's not perfect, you can't do it until you have some time but maybe even in this part of the world, there will be a time when truth and reconciliation will be used to. So with that I'll end my presentation and like to thank you very much for your time and I hope you will be willing to work together with me and the Center of Human Rights staff and board and lots of people here to move forward and assist women in the Arab world. - [Janet Lyness] You are a congregationalist but teaches and lectures about the Islam world and law. So just out of curiosity, how do you perceive the credibility of both yourself and other educators like you? - [Adrien Wing] Yes, I am not a Muslim, I make that clear to people when I am speaking, I am not speaking as a member of that faith, but I have found as a congregationalist, we are very liberal open denomination and because I was raised that way, I could look at another religion with open eyes and not condemn them as being incorrect just because I was another religion. And so I am grateful that my own spiritual and religious upbringing was progressive enough so that when I ended up going to the Middle East for the first time with my then husband, just on as a fluke, and I learned about Islam, I was fascinated by it and decided that I would get involved. If you even go to the Middle East, you will find that the Arab people like many around the world, they are very hospitable, incredibly hospitable, they'll give you their bed, their clothes, their money their food even when they don't have any. So in all my trips there, I don't know, 30, 40 trips I've been to over 100 countries, many of them lets say I've been to Egypt 20 times, I've been to Israel, Palestine over 20 times, every single time I am treated so well they know I am teaching this material, they want to help me to understand so coz I can come into the US most of them can't get a visa to come to the US, most of them couldn't afford the way to come to the US so they want me to have knowledge that I can bring it over here and be like a translator and tell people who are not Muslim, tell people not going to go to the region, what's going on so I've never had in my 32 years of dealing with the Middle East, anyone from the Middle East tell me, "You need to back off, this is not your issue." I haven't had anybody from the Middle East say that, I have had Americans tell me that, that you are a black American and you should be interested in Black America and Africa maybe but you should stay out of the Middle East that's not for you people, you have your region. But no one in the Middle East said that to me and so that in itself has been wonderful and at one point I even thought of adopting a child from the Middle East and there is no adoption in Islam. And I thought actually I wasn't even as much as I know, I wasn't properly prepared for that and so I did not take it to that level and but otherwise it has been quite a journey and I have in my course now I am adding in things where I'll put in the scripture, I'm going to do a new version where I'm going to put in Christian scripture, Jewish scripture and Muslim scripture for the same point to show the similarities because the students never know when I say, well in Christianity what is this? No one ever knows. Because you just grow up in a denomination is where you go but I know all of the Islamic theology, I know their theology and I don't know the difference between Baptist, Episcopalian, Methodists, Southern Baptist, Unitarian, I could not tell you, maybe someone in the room who can tell you all of the different delineations so anyway, I need to do a better job and learn the differences myself on this and Christianity. - [Janet Lyness] Well this actually one quick one which is What are the Arab countries? - [Adrien Wing] Oh yes, I didn't put a map of the Arab countries up, the Arab world is North Africa, okay. Plus certain Middle Eastern Countries. So in North Africa you are going to have Morocco, you are going to have Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, then you are going to go and have Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, then you are going to have the Gulf and Iraq, you are going to have Saudi, all the gulf countries that will be like Saudi and Bahrain, and Yemen and Kuwait and those of the Arab countries. Verses, in that region, you have Afghanistan, let's say but they are not Arab and you have Turkey I've told you and you have Iran, they are Muslim but not Arab and so that's the Arab world. There is 22 countries and they are members of the Arab League, okay, and Arabs are 22% of the one billion Muslims. What's the largest Muslim country? Indonesia and then you got Indonesia and Malaysia and Nigeria, you got people in the caucuses, right? Places like that that we don't even think about who are Muslim people but clearly not Arab people. - [Janet Lyness] This relates a little to what you were talking about a minute ago. Our press often leads to the impression that Islam is deeply conservative throughout, does the Islam is generally Islamist, please help us understand the alternative to Islamist Islam. - [Adrien Wing] Yeah, like every religion, there is a range. So, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, so at one end of the range for Islam or the other religions will be the very secular people where yes, I am a member of this religion but I'm pretty much secular and religion doesn't affect me everyday. Then at the opposite end, are what some people would call Fundamentalists. You can be a Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or Islamic fundamentalist. I usually don't like that word fundamentalist coz it has such a negative connotation and often in the US we associate that with Arab, Muslim fundamentalist terrorist that it's all smooshed into one identity that is negative. Instead you have to look at it as at the far end you have people who in their religion are very very devout where they are trying to do a strict interpretation of their book, right? And so some of those people, a few of those people may interpret in such a way that they'll try to say "And I should engage in violence." That's only a tiny proportion of people who are in that realm. On the other hand there can be people who are many people who are atheists, and they have engaged in revolution and it has nothing to do with their religion or lack of religion, it's just that's what they are. So we use the term Islamist to refer to people who are kind of on this right conservative end of the religion and they may want to have an Islamic State like Saudi Arabia is an Islamic state. There are groups like Al-Qaeda where the different people who have gravitated to it, they are all Islamists who would like to see Islamic States in the whole region so as an example, to us, Saudi Arabia is very conservative, they are certainly Islamist but to Al-Quaeda, they are too liberal. To Al-Quaeda, the Saudis are too liberal, Al-Quaeda, think of Bin Laden would like to overthrow the Saudi regime as being insufficiently Pious, as being too tied to Western Countries and Capitalism and all of that and so they would actually like to topple that Saudi regime. So, the Islamist term usually is going to stand for a person who would like to see some kind of Islamic State but there are various sub kind of denominations kind of I would call them where people are having different types of ideas on this which I can't really go into all the details right now. - [Janet Lyness] Next question is, "When did Islam begin limiting women's rights? Originally in 632AD, Mohammed targeted or taught equality for women. - [Adrien Wing] All of the cultures in the region back then in Saudi Arabia, what became Saudi Arabia, Would be conservative, against certain right for women. Women were property, et cetera. So Islam comes in the 600s and it's quite revolutionary. It took polygamy which was unlimited like in the Bible marry as many women as you want, and said, you can only have four wives but you must treat them equally. The prophet himself only had one wife for 23 years until she passed away and he then took another wife and you only do that when things like war and other things make for shortages and so he married a woman who was 23 years older than him, no, he was 25, she was 40. Khadija was 15 years older than him and she was his employer and he was an accountant and she was a business woman. So that story which is known to every Muslim, is revolutionary in terms of how the prophet viewed women, viewed women's rights, viewed their role but the cultures that developed in that region, existed before Islam continue to exist now, have fought against those principles and will interpret the doctrines in ways that I'm sure the prophet would be shocked so for instance Saudi Arabia, women can't even drive, women have to be covered up all the time, the Koran says women cover your bosoms so on and so forth. Some countries that may mean hey, I'm in Lebanon with a dress from Paris, spike heels, push up bra but I don't have my bosom all the way out. Here is another country though like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan where the women are wearing a burka in Afghanistan from the same phrases. So that's due to culture, that's not the religion, it's how is it interpreted. So many people say it's quite a shame that today you have people interpreting these doctrines in ways that are far more conservative than the prophet himself ever would have imagined, his wife Aisha went into battle and there were other women who were in battle as warriors, that's totally different from saying you can't even drive and have to stay covered up in the house. I guess driving up in the car now would be like riding a camel or a horse into battle and his own wife was doing that so quite a change. But every religion has similar types of interpretations where there may be people interpreting it today in ways that are more conservative than whoever started that religion might have imagined. - [Janet Lyness] What is the situation for educating women in these foreign Muslim and Arab World countries? Do educated women achieve political acceptance in these countries? - [Adrien Wing] You know, it varies just like here. There are some families, they could be poor, they could be rich that have their daughters having education and other families poor or rich where they feel no, the daughter doesn't need this education. In the Western world, as you know, women are now the majority of people in higher education. In the US and Europe. But in the Middle East, these kinds of cultural norms have made a situation where men are still the dominant numbers of people who are being educated and it does not seem that it's going to be more women than men anytime in the near future because there are still so many families of every class level who will feel like my daughter doesn't need this level of education or I don't want her out of the house interacting with unrelated men where she might do something such as talking to an unrelated man that would bring family dishonor. - [Janet Lyness] I think we are about out of time but I am going to combine these last two, which is, if a woman is raped and then subjected to virginity test, is she guilty of not being a virgin and also why isn't there a virginity test for men in Tunisia? - [Adrien Wing] Well, as you know, supposedly, most young women have this piece of skin, the hymen that if they see that it's there, the doctor will say, "She is a virgin." whether she is or not, but just it's existence intact, signals virginity. There is nothing equivalent on the male body that could be looked at in the same way, plus, the system in patriarchal, so that isn't their concern, although in Islam, both men and women are supposed to be virgins. Men and women, I didn't discover that for many years. And you know we had that famous movie, the 40 year old virgin, I was over there and I said Oh that movie is so funny, they said, "What's so funny about it?" Well, the idea of a 40 year old virgin. And I was with a family where all the men were unmarried and they were all virgins and they were in their 30s and 40s. So they didn't see what was the humor because they were devout and they felt I will not have sex with any woman until I am married and if I don't marry I will never have sex. So that perspective on the other hand, you have people who, even though the woman is raped, they will blame that rape on her as there are people in the US who will blame a rape on the woman, what were you wearing, what were you saying, what were you doing and therefore will blame her whereas of course other families will say, NO she is the victim, you shouldn't blame her for what someone did so that remains a cross cultural problem and we have not solved that problem any more in Iowa City, Iowa, than they have in some of these other countries. So I think our time is over and I want to thank you all very much and please feel free to email me at the university if you'd like to follow up. Thank you. - [Janet Lyness] So unfortunately our time has come to conclusion but on behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, I want to thank Adrien Wing for here presentation on women's rights in the Arab Spring, in Egypt after the Arab Spring and also like to thank our sponsors, University of Iowa International Program, the University of Iowa Honors Program for their generous support as well as our financial sponsors Burns Western and Mike Carberry. And Adrien, as a small token of our appreciation, I am pleased to give you the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug which you probably have several by now. We are happy to give you another one and thank you so much for joining us. - [Adrien Wing] Thank you. - [Janet Lyness] Yes, should you wish to become a member of the ICFRC you can check in the back or if you want to contact us and make a tax deductible contribution, You can contact us at 319-335-0351 or mail donations directly to the ICFRC at 1120 University Capital Center in Iowa City, 52242. Thank you so much for joining us.