Protesters outside the Tunisian embassy in Stockholm carry placards showing Amina Tyler. AFP PHOTO/JONATHAN NACKSTRAND[/caption]
A nineteen-year-old woman should be free to publish topless photos of herself, and death threats against her need to be investigated. Tunisia is, after all, a vibrant democracy where different opinions have co-existed since the toppling of Ben Ali’s government in 2011.
Amina “Tyler”, as she is nicknamed, says that she intended to protest the oppression of women in Tunisia. This has been a recurrent sentiment since the rise of the Islamists, and it is in part well-founded: a virulent campaign is targeting feminist associations and politically active women. Calls to impose headscarves are getting louder, and the oriental niqab, unnoticeable previously, has become a frequent feature of the country’s streets.
In fact, Tunisian women enjoy some of the most progressive legal protections in the Muslim world: polygamy is banned, girls are technically independent when they come of age, and women can ask for divorce. Former first lady Leila Trabelsi was even expected to succeed Ben Ali, if the uprisings had not brought the couple down. The notorious treatment of women under the Taliban and other Islamist regimes, on the other hand, paints a gloomy picture of the future.
Radical Islamists rarely disturb feminist meetings, concentrating on secular opponents instead. The government, attentive to international reactions, strives to give a positive image, which can be amusing at times. The ruling Ennahdha party boasts of having the majority of women in the assembly, yet many of these women are mere figurative elements whose voices are never heard and whose function is to vote blindly in order to pass their party’s motions. Still, saying that women are oppressed in Tunisia is exaggerated. They control parts of the parliament, administrations, civil society and the media.
Protesting an exaggerated statement through a provocative action is wrong. It will result in a backlash. First of all, exhibitionism does not exist in the Muslim world, and a sane woman would think twice before walking down the street in mini skirt. There is a wide gap between that and nudity. Second, not everyone in the region is familiar with concepts such as feminisim or groups like FEMEN, the women’s movement founded in Ukraine in 2008. You have to look into the higher classes of society or among leftist intellectuals to find people who aware of these notions. To many Tunisians, Amina’s gesture is synonymous with mental illness—hence the rumour that spread regarding her incarceration in a psychiatric hospital. Alternatively, radicals stress descriptions of Tunisia’s feminists as morally decadent and as a menace to the society as a whole. Amina gave them a picture to illustrate this message.
A few weeks before elections in 2011, a private TV station opposed to Islamism showed an Iranian movie called Persepolis. The movie depicts the setback that Iranian secularists suffered when the the Islamic Republic was established in 1979. In a short scene, lasting a few seconds, God is depicted talking to a little girl in her bed. Sunni traditions prohibit the portrayal of God in any form, and so Islamists—mainly Salafists and Ennahdha activists—staged demonstrations against the TV station, and secularists in general, accusing them of corrupting Tunisia’s Muslim identity. Days of unrest followed, culminating in an attack on the TV station’s headquarters: the warning that the movie conveyed was not heard. The Islamist victory of October 2011 is partly attributed to this event.
Amina’s photos will be shown to gullible fathers with a warning: “This is where the miscreants are leading us!” Anyone supporting her will be accused of being a Western implant. Misogynists will recall how women enjoyed many rights under the old regime, while other freedoms were crushed. They will link Amina’s actions to that era and give all feminists the same label. They will also highlight that victims of the dictatorship received the little international support, even at the same time as Tunisia was highly regarded by many Western governments for its progressive stance on women’s rights. It will be easy, then, to make parallels with the increasing international pressures on Tunisia’s Islamist government, and the wide support Amina’s cause is gathering globally.
FEMEN in the Muslim world is all that conservative populists need for their propaganda. It is tarnishing the image of feminism and threatening women’s rights in this fragile transitional period. Amina and her ilk should read more about the history and sociology of their region, but most importantly, they should try to understand feminism from a post-colonialist perspective. Feminism contributed to the advance of Western societies in a European context. The equality of men and women is a universal value, but it has to come in the language of the people. It is a local feminism that we need, not an imported one—and Tyler is not even an Arabic name.
