A writer I hold in high esteem has reproached me for addressing the issue of women’s rights from the perspective of progress rather than of human rights. Actually, my position on the issue of gender equality is informed by a conviction that both aspects are equally important. I have always advocated the need to grant women full equality with men from both perspectives: as a prerequisite for society’s progress and as a basic human right. The two aspects are not mutually exclusive but complement one another.

There can be no doubt that the Khula’a law, which allows a woman to unilaterally repudiate a marriage, represents an important step forward. But while we applaud its enactment, we must be aware that it will remain vulnerable unless legal and constitutional guarantees are put in place to foil attempts by reactionary forces to have it repealed. Nor should our forward drive stop there. To sustain the momentum, more steps need to be taken. For example, a provision should be included in the marriage contract investing the wife with the right to obtain a divorce for prejudice, whether material or moral. More generally, it is essential to promote a cultural climate conducive to the adoption of a standard marriage contract drafted along the lines of the one entered into by the Prophet Mohamed and his first wife, Khadija bint Khuweilad, which stipulated that she could terminate the contract at any time and that he would not take a second wife.

Another equally important step forward has been the appointment of the first female judge to Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court. But again our appreciation for what is undoubtedly a commendable, if long overdue, development should not blind us to the fact that it is only a small dent in the armour of a strong patriarchal culture. The Ministry of Justice needs to sustain this forward momentum by appointing at least 25% of deputy public prosecutors from among women. It is only in this way, and not by means of a decision from on high, that it can ensure a strong presence for women throughout the judicial system.

It is not only the judicial system that needs to open its doors to women. The executive branch is required to put a programme in place aimed at appointing a large number of women as governors, deputy governors, university presidents, faculty deans and city council heads, in short, to all the public posts from which they are still excluded. In the absence of a concerted effort in that direction, proponents of the male superiority theory and other reactionary forces will have the opportunity to wipe out the progressive steps recently taken to enhance the status of women. Placing these forces before a fait accompli is the only way to prevent the cultural setback our society would suffer if the Khula’a law is repealed and the appointment of women to prominent positions is challenged.

Those who are today expounding reactionary ideas in the name of religion are worthy successors of those who supported King Fouad in the nineteen twenties in his bid for the Islamic Caliphate and who, in 1937, wanted his son Farouk to be crowned in Al-Azhar not in Parliament. They also uphold the legacy of those who attributed socialism to Islam in the nineteen sixties only to say the exact opposite a few years later. They are reminiscent too of those who, after years of telling us that war with Israel was a religious duty for Moslems, suddenly decided in the seventies that Islam enjoined us to make peace with that country, invoking a religious text to support their new pacifism: “If they lean towards peace, so too should you.” They are the same people who invoked religion to justify the infamous practice of breaking the will of recalcitrant wives by locking them up in the so-called ‘house of obedience, beit el ta’a, then reversed their position.

To these people we say: we know as much about Islamic jurisprudence as you do, and one of the first things we learnt is that it is defined as the extrapolation of judicial rulings from available legal proof. In other words, through a process of deductive reasoning that involves a human agency. This was best expressed by the great Islamic jurist Abu Hanifa in his description of Islamic jurisprudence as “a science of opinions, so that if someone comes forward with a better opinion we accept it.” Abu Hanifa accepted just over a hundred of the Prophet’s Hadiths as apostolic precepts, while Ahmed ibn-Hanbal accepted hundreds of thousands. Moreover, Abu Hanifa, known as the Supreme Imam, refused to base judicial rulings on Hadiths ascribed to just one source. The conclusion to be drawn from a thorough reading of the thousands of reference works on Islamic jurisprudence is that it is a human science that was initially established by great thinkers. These were followed by the strict traditionalists who spurned deductive reasoning altogether and insisted on a dogmatic adherence to Scripture. With their limited knowledge and lack of intellectual abilities, these so-called ‘expositers’ invested the purely human field of Islamic jurisprudence with a divine character.

The time has come to break the institutionalized concept of male superiority that colours the general attitude to women in our society. To that end, measures must be taken to safeguard the steps already taken in that direction and to prevent anyone in future from engineering a cultural setback. For, at the end of the day, the notion that men are innately superior to women is deeply entrenched in the cultural tissue of society. It is only by recognizing the existence of an organic link between people’s cultural formation and the beliefs they hold that we can understand and properly address the mentality that seeks to keep women at the same lowly status to which they have been relegated throughout much of our history. The use of religion to justify this view is a political cover for fossilized societal attitudes deriving from four sources: Bedouin customs, medieval values and a patriarchal culture that is deeply rooted in tribal society. What can we expect of men who have drunk deeply from these sources and who, moreover, have never drunk from the well of universal human culture, men whose inability to master the linguistic tools of the Renaissance keeps them isolated from the great masterpieces of human creativity?

This cultural insularity makes the absence of objectivity on the issue of women’s rights absolute. We are here before revisionism coupled with primitiveness coloured by a tribal mentality and covered with a layer of cultural isolation from the masterpieces of universal human culture. The situation is rendered even more intractable by the fact that men are clinging to the myth of their superiority over women out of a tremendous lack of self-confidence, a sense that they must at all costs defend themselves against what they see as a challenge to their supremacy.

(*) The Arabic version of this article was published at Al-Ahram Caireen newspaper on 14th March, 2004.