"How women's lives were revolutionised in Tunisia"
Notice the BBC's careful choice of words:
"These Tunisians are not doing at all badly. This is one imagines they are as emancipated as any girl can get"
"He [the first president] gave ... He banned ... He introduced ..."
"He was the liberator of Tunisian women."
Women as passive creatures, victims waiting for a saviour, have no agency of their own.
Now, imagine that someone says that this or that British, French or German leader was the liberator of British, French or German women. It doesn't happen because that not how it happned. But in a country like Tunisia, Egypt or Syria, an "enlighteneed dictator" has to be there to liberate women.
If one looks at the movies, posters, photographs of Iranian university students, upper middle class Egyptian women on the beaches, meetings and social gatherings of the women of the elite, etc., of the 1950s and 1960s (google images would give an idea), a similar pattern to the one described by this BBC "Witness History" took place: "emancipation" of Arab and Muslim women in general women has to come from outside, from an enlightened dicttaor or from enlightened Western missionaries on NGO carousels.
That's why today "enlightened" Western/Westernised bourgeois women applaud Obama meeting with Malala or Amal Clooney's international endeavour. That's why Bashar al-Asad's wife was regarded (and probably still by some) a symbol of an emancipated woman, regardless of the regime's repression and its economic and social policies. That's what emancipation is for them. And similar to Boris Johnson's take on "Islam", no where one finds a link between pre-capitalist social formation and the dominance of capitalist relations; industrialisation or failure of it and bourgeois modernity or a blocked passage to such a modernity; social struggle and class structure. In sum, the path that Western European bourgeois modernity took is unique and does not apply to other societies, especially the Arab/Muslim ones.
Notice the BBC's careful choice of words:
"These Tunisians are not doing at all badly. This is one imagines they are as emancipated as any girl can get"
"He [the first president] gave ... He banned ... He introduced ..."
"He was the liberator of Tunisian women."
Women as passive creatures, victims waiting for a saviour, have no agency of their own.
Now, imagine that someone says that this or that British, French or German leader was the liberator of British, French or German women. It doesn't happen because that not how it happned. But in a country like Tunisia, Egypt or Syria, an "enlighteneed dictator" has to be there to liberate women.
If one looks at the movies, posters, photographs of Iranian university students, upper middle class Egyptian women on the beaches, meetings and social gatherings of the women of the elite, etc., of the 1950s and 1960s (google images would give an idea), a similar pattern to the one described by this BBC "Witness History" took place: "emancipation" of Arab and Muslim women in general women has to come from outside, from an enlightened dicttaor or from enlightened Western missionaries on NGO carousels.
That's why today "enlightened" Western/Westernised bourgeois women applaud Obama meeting with Malala or Amal Clooney's international endeavour. That's why Bashar al-Asad's wife was regarded (and probably still by some) a symbol of an emancipated woman, regardless of the regime's repression and its economic and social policies. That's what emancipation is for them. And similar to Boris Johnson's take on "Islam", no where one finds a link between pre-capitalist social formation and the dominance of capitalist relations; industrialisation or failure of it and bourgeois modernity or a blocked passage to such a modernity; social struggle and class structure. In sum, the path that Western European bourgeois modernity took is unique and does not apply to other societies, especially the Arab/Muslim ones.
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