Interview with a Muslim Sister
AFP interviews Makarem Al Deiri, one of the only two female candidates the Muslim Brotherhood is fielding in next month’s parliamentary elections:
The only woman candidate backed by Egypt’s influential Muslim Brotherhood, the 55-year-old mother of seven insists there is no point arguing for sexual equality, as such a demand “goes against nature”.
“Women are men’s partners at all levels, but their main role is to be good mothers who look after their children,” Deiri said in Nasr City, the middle-class constituency in north-eastern Cairo where she is standing for election.
“Would women be happy if men were to stay home to look after the children while they worked outside?” she asks rhetorically.
“We believe that domestic chores are not less [than other types of work] and we oppose battling against men’s superiority to women.”
The widow of the late Muslim Brotherhood leader Ibrahim Sharaf, who was jailed from 1965 to 1974, Deiri is standing against a male candidate from the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) — Mustafa al-Sallab, a millionaire businessman in the ceramic industry.
One wonders why she is bothering to run rather than stay home to take care of her children or grandchildren. In fact, considering that she has a PhD in literature and is a professor at Al Azhar University, she must be a terrible mother. While I don’t think it’s necessarily fair or representative to zero in on her attitudes to women as AFP has in this article (I’m sure she has opinions on a lot of other issues), it’s good to see some highlighting of attitudes that the Brothers tend to obfuscate when dealing with the international press. Or, in other words, that they have the sophistication of a turnip when it comes to interpreting the role of women in society, even when it flies in the face of common sense and their members’ own experience. What are they, wahhabis?
Categories: Egypt, Political Islam.
Yeah, I was going to say…who does she think she is, taking a job outside the home instead of leaving it to some far superior male? To be fair, it’s not just the Ikhwan - all rightists have their version of the Phyllis Schlafley, running around telling women to stay at home. The eternal paradox of the anti-feminist women activist. It’s exactly the same sort of rhetoric that Hindutva women activists spout.
But interesting that the Ikhwan have chosen to run women candidates. Did all those women in the Quran study groups and personal piety movements start to itch for more activism, or is it going to be limited to the wives and daughters of Ikhwan?
Here’s a good and longer piece from Sharon Otterman.
Indeed, the sophistication of a turnip!
What’s really sad is that many highly educated people, including women, fall for the turnippy logic - they try to bridge the dissonance between their goals/life experiences and the dictates of religion/tradition by convincing themselves that women are actually better off under the old rules of religion/tradition than in modern times (when they are subject to objectification, sexual exploitation, irresponsible male family members, etc). I have spoken to very well educated women (doctors!) who insist that tradition gives them everything they want and more.
A similar logic about women and relations between the sexes is to be found among the Promise Keepers movement in the US and some pentecostal groups in Latin America.