Women in Tunisia’s Revolution

While the vocal position on Iran’s Green Revolution was fueled by media focus on women seeking liberation from a repressive Islamist regime, Tunisia’s revolution was a secular, popular people’s movement. Tunisians were fighting a secular oppressive dictatorship, which was a U.S. ally in the war against terror. The difference in both the media coverage and the official response was only underlined when Hillary Clinton declared on the 12th of January that Washington would not take sides.

Now that the regime has been ousted, much has been made of “the unique nature of Tunsian society” in the media. Or as as one blogger puts it, Tunsia is “much more modern than the rest of the Muslim world: You were more likely to see a Tunisian woman walking down the streets of Tunis wearing a tank top and tight jeans than wearing a burqa.”

For another commentator, this modernity was threatened by the revolution against the secular regime: “What will be the result of this? Probably an Islamic country where women have few rights. Whatever the creep president’s flaws and corruption, he was fighting that.” When reminded that this revolution is a good thing, the commentator responds “tell that to the women of Iran” apparently making little distinction between the Islamic Revolution and Tunisia’s secular, grassroots uprising. This confusion over Tunisia’s “secularity” and its uprising against a secular oppressive regime, and the simplistic binary underlying it, is incisively analyzed by Haroon Moghul in “Secular Good, Muslim Bad: Unveiling Tunisia’s Revolution.”

Tunisia’s revolution and Iran’s revolution do have one thing in common however: like the Shah, Ben Ali has fled his homeland. In a region full of “creep presidents” and dictatorships, Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution has electrified the Arab world. As part of the opposition, and as part of creating a new Tunisia, women are playing their role. The opposition leaders who are now analyzing the situation from both within Tunisia and abroad include many women, currently appearing in interviews on pan-Arab satellite TV, and at the grassroots level, women are taking part in the forming of neighborhood watches, protecting their property from Ben Ali’s forces and gangs, as well as criminals set free to add to the chaos.

As activists have stressed, this is not yet over, Tunisia has not yet achieved freedom, and what comes next politically remains unclear. However, the fact remains that an Arab regime has been toppled, not by a coup, but by a popular uprising of people, both men and women.

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