The Dallas audience who listened to Robin Wright, the international journalist and author, proudly commend Arab and Muslim women for their roles in the Arab Springs grasped a new image of the Twenty-First Century’s Muslim woman. As part of the World Affairs Council of Dallas-Fort Worth, which “brings international awareness and cross-cultural understanding to the North Texas community,” Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World was the title of the lecture presented on November 10th at the Rosewood Crescent hotel in Dallas.
Wright told her audience that the 2011 Arab revolts are significantly showing strong women’s and youth movements. She had covered Islam internationally for several decades and she had observed a “budding culture of change” in her 2008 book: Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East. According to Wright, rising literacy rates and education in the Arab world, especially among women, along with affordable technology tools like cell phones with cameras, social media and internet have helped Arabs to connect with the world. This has resulted in a wave of revolts against the local injustices, corruption, and oppression. Thus, Egyptians took off to Cairo’s Tahrir (Liberation) square while other Arabs initiated similar mass protests across the Arab world. What people want are new systems that are both representative and “true to their religious values.” They reject “militant jihad and the rigid formulas of the Salafis, yet they fervently embrace their faith as a defining force in the future,” Wright explained in a Wilson Quarterly article, "The Pink Hijab."
Wearing one’s faith is most exemplified in the case of the Muslim woman who observes the religious requirements of covering her hair and wearing modest loose clothing. “Hijab” is meant to literally hide a woman’s physical beauty from the eyes of men who are not family members. Wright refers to the contemporary young women observing the head cover as the “pink hijab generation” because they are “redefining what it means to wear hijab – as a declaration of activist intent rather than a symbol of being sequestered.” Islam liberated women, Wright said, as “for many young women, hijab is now about liberation, not confinement… It provides a kind of social armor that enables Muslim women to chart their own course, personally or professionally.” Furthermore, “it is an instrument that makes a female untouchable as she makes her own decisions in the macho Arab world.” Wright quotes Nabil Abdel Fattah, author of The Politics of Religion: "The veil gives women more power in a man’s world."
Women, both veiled and non-veiled, are participating in the new movements that demand pluralism and tolerance and emphasize on the fact that Islam and democracy are compatible. As Wright noticed, “the alternatives they create over time…may not be liberal in the Western mode” but they will represent a workable system that fits the Arab Muslim culture. But one thing is inevitable, women today are behind the movements and their roles will shape the future of their communities just as they did when Islam first appeared in Arabia’s Seventh Century and Prophet Mohammad and the Quran honored women as equals to men. These original values are what women aspire to across the Muslim world while reclaiming liberation that Islam historically granted them through social openness and women’s rights and mobility in public.
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