Seen and starting to be heard: women and the Arab media in a decade of change

Social Research, Fall, 2002 by Naomi Sakr

When the divorce controversy was raised again in 1999-2000, the Egyptian media did not present the issue as one of freeing women from injustice and oppression. With few exceptions, newspapers across the political spectrum presented the new law as a victory for women over men. The pro-government weekly Al-Usbo' carried a headline declaring: "Men's era is over." Al-Wafd, published by the leading opposition party, said of the law: "No one has a good word to say about it." A new drama serial, screened at prime time on Channel One of Egypt's government-run television, bore the title 0 Men, Unite! Newspaper cartoons showed men in chains or pushing baby buggies alongside mustachioed women (Eltahawy, 2000). Embarrassment at this coverage was sufficient in government ranks for two media women to be appointed to a newly formed 30-member National Women's Council, which was to liaise with editors and program creators to work toward more balanced portrayals in future (Mukhtar, 2000). On Al-Jazeera, in contrast, "balance" was already an article of faith, in the sense of giving both sides of any argument an opportunity to speak. This was how the channel approached the khula issue. It tackled it in two regular live phone-in talk shows, Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis (The Opposite Direction) and Bila Hudud (Without Bounds).

The edition of Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis in question, moderated by Faisal al-Qassim (a Syrian), brought together two Egyptians: Farida al-Naqqash, female head of the Progressive Women's Union, and Ibrahim al-Kholy, a male professor from the University of Al-Azhar in Cairo. They were pitted against each other, with Naqqash describing khula as a merciful release for many women. They would still lose out, she said, but at least regain some dignity. Rejecting the notion that women were interested in promiscuity or anything other than justice and equality, values that had existed in the region in a bygone age, Naqqash argued that the idealized picture of Muslim marriage painted by many telephone callers to the program did not represent reality. "Arab houses are closed," she said, and behind closed doors there is sometimes severe suffering involving "persecution, isolation and enslavement" of women. (9) Kholy, on the other hand, blamed delays in processing divorce cases on inefficiency and corruption in Egyptian courts. His answer to the problem was not to introduce khula, which he said could lead couples to blackmail each other, but to sort out the judicial system. With Naqqash maintaining that "patriarchal and class society" subjugates women to deflect attention from men's political failures, and that international humanitarian law is not a Western intellectual invasion but an amalgam of positive safeguards from many ancient and sophisticated cultures, Kholy was reduced to deriding her statements as insha (school essay composition). Battle between the two guests was raging fast and furious when Qassim announced that time was up.

A similarly hard fought contest took place in the edition of Bila Hudud entitled "Arab Women's Rights between Excess and Surrender," shown after the Egypt's National Women's Council was set up by presidential decree. The format of Bila Hudud involves a single guest, with a host, Ahmad Mansour, and questions phoned in live by viewers. The guest for this edition was Mervat Tellawi, former Egyptian ambassador and minister of social affairs who had recently been appointed secretary general of the National Women's Council. In the absence of any other challenger, Mansour took it upon himself to pour scorn on low literacy levels among Egyptian women, stand up for keeping politics as a male preserve, disparage "Western" ideas about sexual equality, and warn that women would misuse the law on khula. He even suggested that the National Women's Council was biased against men. Mansour had plenty of help in this attack from callers who were predominantly male and overwhelmingly of the view that "rights" for women would mean teenage pregnancies and the collapse of families. Tellawi was left to right for her corner virtually alone. She argued that child rearing was the responsibility of both mother and father, that states needed to maximize their woman power to withstand the challenges of globalization, that Arab women's groups had made a crucial contribution to the drafting of international human rights treaties, and that the Prophet Mohammed had given his own daughter the right to divorce. She explained the urgency of a new law to allow Egyptian mothers to pass their nationality to their children, and thanked Mansour for giving her the opportunity to say all this on television.