Arab spring-why have a revolution if nothing is going to change?

Older readers will recall the heady days of the soi disant Arab Spring in 2011. For a few heady weeks-or was it just days?-it really looked as though the courage and hopes of ordinary people might bring genuine advances where repression, particularly of women, was the norm. It takes colossal levels of courage and energy to revolt against a police state. If you are going to do it, it had better be worth it. Sadly it wasn’t in the case of Egypt, as the linked report by Wael Eskander of Open Democracy makes clear.

By the standards of some countries, Egypt is relatively enlightened. But in Egypt: no country for all women, Mael tells a tale of wildly differing standards of justice depending on class. And how the deep patriarchal attitudes of so many Middle Eastern lands still pervade Egyptian society like a cancer. No liberation will be as important as the liberation of women, both to their own societies and to the long term future of the world. Sadly the position of women in Egypt seems as dire as it was before the days of hope.

Before we dismiss the report as ” a far away country of which we know nothing” to quote Neville Chamberlain, remember how small the world is now. Oppression in one part of the world can easily be exported to another.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/egypt-no-country-all-women/

#oppressionwomen #egypt #middleeast #patriarchy