1 00:00:00,930 --> 00:00:07,740 Thank you. Well, I must say that it's such a treat to be here. I presented yesterday at a conference here in in England, 2 00:00:08,010 --> 00:00:13,230 and it was an audience full of people who didn't really know much about family law or about Bahrain even. 3 00:00:13,410 --> 00:00:17,790 And so it's it's a wonderful opportunity to be here with a group of scholars who know what I'm talking about. 4 00:00:18,150 --> 00:00:21,600 That said, I feel like the presentation I prepared might almost be a little bit too basic. 5 00:00:21,810 --> 00:00:28,520 So if you'd like me to go into greater detail during the question answer session, please provide me with questions about nuance. 6 00:00:28,530 --> 00:00:34,200 I'd love to field them. So I also want to emphasise that I'm a historian and so therefore I'm bringing a 7 00:00:34,200 --> 00:00:38,040 different perspective to some of the discussions that came out of this morning. 8 00:00:39,180 --> 00:00:41,220 Instead of kind of looking at the nuances of the law, 9 00:00:41,400 --> 00:00:50,400 I'm looking at the ways in which the law facilitated certain governmental responses, but also responses amongst the women of Bahrain. 10 00:00:51,000 --> 00:00:58,110 And I guess by way of beginning, I should emphasise that the current political and social turmoil in Bahrain has put my research 11 00:00:58,110 --> 00:01:03,240 into the intersecting leftist and religious women's activism in the country on pause. 12 00:01:03,840 --> 00:01:07,080 I am no longer able to obtain a visa to go back to the country. 13 00:01:07,290 --> 00:01:12,429 So I am. As the introduction said of his store sizing. 14 00:01:12,430 --> 00:01:15,910 Some of the trends that I picked up in my original research in Bahrain, 15 00:01:17,230 --> 00:01:25,420 the my presentation is less about the content about about Bahrain's family law and more about how the government's attempt to codify family law, 16 00:01:25,630 --> 00:01:26,980 politicised women's rights, 17 00:01:27,160 --> 00:01:34,030 and ultimately about how the government and how the government professes a certain adherence to women's rights and principles. 18 00:01:34,390 --> 00:01:39,280 But in practice, the changes that they promised are never universally actuated. 19 00:01:39,850 --> 00:01:47,350 A point that I will return to in the conclusion. The Kingdom of Bahrain has a history of engaging women's rights on local and international levels. 20 00:01:47,590 --> 00:01:52,150 Feminism and women's rights have become the means through which the Bahraini government 21 00:01:52,270 --> 00:01:56,770 performed as adherence to international human rights and human rights doctrines. 22 00:01:57,010 --> 00:02:04,930 However, a disconnect exists between Bahrain's international attestations about women's rights and its implementation of said rights in the country. 23 00:02:05,290 --> 00:02:12,429 What I call the progressive mystique a consequence of the government's move to superficially embrace international women's rights protections, 24 00:02:12,430 --> 00:02:15,070 has politicised women's rights domestically. 25 00:02:15,730 --> 00:02:22,540 The government's attempts to codify Bahrain's family law and thereby demonstrate to the international public its women's rights protections, 26 00:02:22,720 --> 00:02:26,950 turned women's rights into a battleground between leftist and religious activists in the country. 27 00:02:28,060 --> 00:02:33,430 To give context to this paper on the government of Bahrain's progressive mystique, 28 00:02:33,820 --> 00:02:38,950 it is necessary to review the history of women's rights in the country and women's activism in the country as well, 29 00:02:39,220 --> 00:02:44,230 and record the state's responses to the changing dynamics in that relationship. 30 00:02:44,470 --> 00:02:47,860 So this is a brief glimpse of the history of women's activism in Bahrain. 31 00:02:48,820 --> 00:02:50,880 But, you know, probing deeper, you know, 32 00:02:50,920 --> 00:02:58,000 asked me to go further into some of the details if I haven't addressed them adequately as I go over them briefly. 33 00:03:01,030 --> 00:03:08,919 So the Islamic revolution in Iran and other social factors split Bahraini women's activism into leftist and religious blocs. 34 00:03:08,920 --> 00:03:14,920 And I call it leftist and religious because I don't think that the secular religious binary is particularly helpful in this country, 35 00:03:15,130 --> 00:03:20,980 nor do I think that the religious or the leftist conservative binary is particularly effective. 36 00:03:20,980 --> 00:03:26,980 I think that kind of disturbing the matrix and kind of moving diagonally is a much more effective means 37 00:03:26,980 --> 00:03:33,040 of kind of emphasising the ways in which the women's rights movement in Bahrain has been expressed, 38 00:03:33,400 --> 00:03:38,440 using both the idioms of leftist ideology and less idioms of religious ideology. 39 00:03:40,750 --> 00:03:44,469 So before or in the decades following the revolution, 40 00:03:44,470 --> 00:03:49,870 Bahrain's leftist activists learned to contend with a new voice in women's rights once supported by religion. 41 00:03:50,110 --> 00:03:52,509 The first formal women's organisation was founded. 42 00:03:52,510 --> 00:03:59,770 Religious Women's Organisation was founded in 2001, the same year Bahraini women attained the right to vote in 2005. 43 00:04:00,100 --> 00:04:03,489 Leftist and religious conceptualisations of women's rights clash in a massive 44 00:04:03,490 --> 00:04:08,290 demonstration concerning the codification of family law and international or, 45 00:04:08,290 --> 00:04:12,250 you know, as we all know, an integral element of Sharia or Islamic law. 46 00:04:12,520 --> 00:04:16,120 The final section of this presentation will explore the governmental performance 47 00:04:16,120 --> 00:04:19,570 of women's rights and its influence in the implementation of family law. 48 00:04:19,990 --> 00:04:24,550 So in the 1950s there was the establishment of the first. 49 00:04:25,930 --> 00:04:29,650 At this time it wasn't a leftist women's organisation, just the first women's organisation. 50 00:04:30,460 --> 00:04:37,660 It quickly broke off of a male charity organisation, male political organisation, because the women, 51 00:04:38,080 --> 00:04:44,000 quote, believed that women's issues were specialised issues and they should be left for men. 52 00:04:44,020 --> 00:04:51,570 So the women kind of understood that their their issues had a place in society. 53 00:04:51,580 --> 00:04:58,720 They didn't necessarily feel like being a women's wing was going to help them actuate and attain some of the changes that they wanted. 54 00:04:59,560 --> 00:05:06,879 So, you know, the women in this organisation and later leftist women and even later decades religious 55 00:05:06,880 --> 00:05:11,320 women in Bahrain made no such distinction between women's issues and politics, 56 00:05:11,320 --> 00:05:15,460 and they established their own formal organisations in the 1960s. 57 00:05:15,670 --> 00:05:19,810 There were more women's organisations. They ran preschools and literacy centres. 58 00:05:20,290 --> 00:05:28,119 The charity work of women in Bahrain will kind of fall out later in the the discussion of the later parts of this presentation. 59 00:05:28,120 --> 00:05:32,859 So I want to take a moment here now to emphasise that social charity work still continues in the country. 60 00:05:32,860 --> 00:05:37,470 That's still a major facet of women's activism. In Bahrain, for example, you know, 61 00:05:37,480 --> 00:05:44,200 their computer literacy programs that are run by women's organisations in the country and they there are organisations, 62 00:05:44,200 --> 00:05:48,130 you know, in the 1950s and sixties ran educational campaigns. Those campaigns continue. 63 00:05:48,400 --> 00:06:00,340 A lot of that education focuses on English education because the women who are running the organisations who are mostly of the Sunni minority, 64 00:06:00,340 --> 00:06:02,740 but kind of a socioeconomic majority, 65 00:06:03,280 --> 00:06:08,770 the the women who run these charity organisations understand that English is necessary to work in hospitality industry. 66 00:06:08,950 --> 00:06:15,960 Which is a major. Source of income because Bahrain is the site of intra intra gulf tourism. 67 00:06:16,590 --> 00:06:20,370 So in the early decades there was no governmental engagement in women's rights. 68 00:06:20,820 --> 00:06:27,210 In part because Bahrain is a British protectorate, in part because women's rights were considered the domain of women. 69 00:06:28,770 --> 00:06:38,490 So the 1970s. So these are women, the 1960s, late 1960s or early 1970s, kind of a decade of interesting fashion choices globally. 70 00:06:43,320 --> 00:06:47,220 Excuse me. Who knows why that is going ahead. 71 00:06:47,790 --> 00:06:50,940 So emphasise that the 1970s were a turning point. 72 00:06:53,520 --> 00:06:57,900 Secular women's organisations who at this point had taken on a certain leftist ideology. 73 00:07:00,700 --> 00:07:07,390 Campaigned against the government for the first time because the government had taken its first stance on women's rights in the country. 74 00:07:08,860 --> 00:07:14,200 In 1972, Bahrain or in 1971, Bahrain attained independence from the British. 75 00:07:16,090 --> 00:07:22,510 And in that same year, they passed. Essentially, women were not given the right to vote. 76 00:07:22,930 --> 00:07:31,870 And women's organisations sent a petition kind of trying to emphasise that they didn't necessarily agree with gender segregated enfranchisement. 77 00:07:32,320 --> 00:07:40,420 So quote, We, the undersigned, undersigned, the popular societies that represent women in Bahrain, submit to the central ministries. 78 00:07:40,810 --> 00:07:46,180 Our protest of the decision to deny women the right to participate in the nomination and election process. 79 00:07:46,750 --> 00:07:51,790 Bahrain has always been the cultural, social and civilizational leader in the Gulf. 80 00:07:51,940 --> 00:07:59,170 Why is it today remove an active element of its population from participation in the march towards progress, end quote. 81 00:08:00,700 --> 00:08:07,900 And later in their their protest literature, you know, in their petition, they talked about, you know, 82 00:08:08,340 --> 00:08:17,290 that men were citing the veil and the fact that when I'm educated as a reason that they weren't allowed to vote the women in the content of the. 83 00:08:18,980 --> 00:08:23,480 Petition said, well, the Vale. We can work around. That is women's identities are obscured. 84 00:08:23,660 --> 00:08:29,630 Well, we can figure out ways of ensuring that we know who's voting as to whether or not, you know, women are uneducated. 85 00:08:29,870 --> 00:08:36,680 Well, quote, A large percentage of ignorant men also exist, men who have no independent opinions. 86 00:08:36,950 --> 00:08:41,270 The election laws do not require that men must be aware and knowledgeable before they are given the right to vote. 87 00:08:41,810 --> 00:08:42,350 End quote. 88 00:08:43,160 --> 00:08:51,440 And so, you know, the women are kind of taking apart a lot of the the doctrine that is kind of used to kind of keep them out of the electoral process. 89 00:08:51,620 --> 00:09:02,000 The women also invoked the United Nations charter that said it clearly prohibited the discrimination of electoral rights based on on sex and gender. 90 00:09:02,990 --> 00:09:09,590 And so this petition, I believe, demonstrates how leftist women in Bahrain took the ideas and concepts from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 91 00:09:09,590 --> 00:09:12,650 international law and regional discussions of Arabism. 92 00:09:13,310 --> 00:09:20,090 In order. In addition to maternal as rhetoric, they talked about raising generations, religious traditions, veiling, 93 00:09:21,350 --> 00:09:25,760 and adapted these differing discourses to their localised context and their desire for voting rights. 94 00:09:25,970 --> 00:09:30,799 The simultaneous evocation of secular discourse and religious tradition demonstrates 95 00:09:30,800 --> 00:09:36,380 that there's a false binary imposed between religious and secular on many levels. 96 00:09:36,620 --> 00:09:40,240 Dualism does not capture the nuances of women's activism in Bahrain. 97 00:09:41,230 --> 00:09:46,640 Challenging a religious leaders jurisdiction over family law was not the same as rejecting religion, 98 00:09:46,850 --> 00:09:54,380 and religious inspiration on a personal level did not mean a disregard for women's rights and or Islam. 99 00:09:55,790 --> 00:09:58,640 So in the absence of international protections for women's rights, 100 00:09:58,820 --> 00:10:03,740 women in Bahrain were connecting their issues to international rights protections in this period. 101 00:10:03,740 --> 00:10:12,440 But the Bahraini government was not engaging in either local women's rights discussions or international women's rights discussions. 102 00:10:13,340 --> 00:10:20,389 The 1980s we see the first family law campaigns that are established by leftist organisations, 103 00:10:20,390 --> 00:10:25,430 leftist organisations that some initial response or resistance from individuals. 104 00:10:26,120 --> 00:10:29,779 So they kind of adapted their campaigns instead of, you know, just handing out pamphlets and saying, 105 00:10:29,780 --> 00:10:35,510 women, you should be for your protections, you know, under a codified family law structure. 106 00:10:35,750 --> 00:10:39,200 They instead created health centres in local communities. 107 00:10:39,200 --> 00:10:47,810 Women came to these local health centres and in the process of teaching women about certain health issues and giving them health advice and guidance, 108 00:10:47,960 --> 00:10:55,220 they also started to talk about family law. So they kind of circumvented some of the initial reticence to kind of discourse about family law. 109 00:10:56,060 --> 00:11:03,140 The 1980s, we also see the first effects of the Iranian revolution and how it really split Bahraini women's activism. 110 00:11:04,070 --> 00:11:05,780 It split activism into two veins. 111 00:11:05,990 --> 00:11:14,900 So we see, you know, the entrenched, existent leftist organisation and the emergence of a really religious idiom for women's activism, 112 00:11:15,200 --> 00:11:20,300 whereas before the only formerly active vein of activism really had been leftist and orientation. 113 00:11:21,140 --> 00:11:32,630 So after the religious turn by Bahrainis, leftist women's activists had to recalibrate many of their initiatives to target their their Bahraini women. 114 00:11:33,200 --> 00:11:39,280 That was their target population. So they, you know, had, you know, additional educational campaigns. 115 00:11:40,010 --> 00:11:47,839 And we see that the religious organisations that came out of this split in the women's movement use the same technologies. 116 00:11:47,840 --> 00:11:52,129 Essentially they used pamphlets, but they also created centres to help guide women. 117 00:11:52,130 --> 00:12:00,680 The difference between the religious centres and the kind of secular centres the secular centres were centred in health centres, 118 00:12:00,680 --> 00:12:08,450 whereas the religious women made use of modern and kind of houses centres as a place to talk about religious women's rights. 119 00:12:08,450 --> 00:12:11,560 And I can go a little bit more in-depth into that. 120 00:12:11,570 --> 00:12:15,170 One of the reasons that a lot of this politicisation of. 121 00:12:16,910 --> 00:12:20,330 Women's activism was, you know, came about in Bahrain. 122 00:12:20,570 --> 00:12:28,700 You know, this also comes about at the period end of a period of a transition from the very school of Shia Islam to the Sunni School of Islam. 123 00:12:28,700 --> 00:12:32,420 So, you know, the concurrent, larger political changes. 124 00:12:34,070 --> 00:12:41,120 Leftist women's organisations tried to engage the state on behalf of their rights, their secular rights during this period, but also, you know, 125 00:12:41,120 --> 00:12:50,210 attempted to try to codify family law in the 1980s and 1990s is really was stalled due to tremendous amounts of governmental repression. 126 00:12:50,960 --> 00:12:56,420 So, you know, the state really ignored women's claims to the rights as women during this period 127 00:12:57,590 --> 00:13:01,310 and essentially was violently suppressing any kind of political discourse. 128 00:13:01,820 --> 00:13:04,850 They continue to kind of see women's rights and political rights as distinct. 129 00:13:05,750 --> 00:13:09,170 So while there was a ban on most formal political activism, 130 00:13:09,380 --> 00:13:13,730 women's organisations were continue were allowed to kind of continue to function in the country, 131 00:13:13,940 --> 00:13:21,499 though they weren't allowed to engage in like political actions. So one one of the women that I spoke to have described the process of trying to 132 00:13:21,500 --> 00:13:26,209 lobby the government in the 1980s and the 1990s as working kind of like a small. 133 00:13:26,210 --> 00:13:30,920 And she said that they would go to the government ministry, they'd go home, they'd go back. 134 00:13:30,920 --> 00:13:34,370 And so it was kind of like this process of forming, you know, 135 00:13:34,370 --> 00:13:38,720 a little line kind of like of ants going to and from the colony to try and kind of again, 136 00:13:39,440 --> 00:13:44,030 it's not is not my image, but it's the image that she was using that they were small, the government was big. 137 00:13:44,210 --> 00:13:53,210 And slowly but surely, they were going to attain their rights. And women in Bahrain really did enter a period of change in 2000. 138 00:13:53,390 --> 00:13:56,480 2001 is a major turning point in women's rights in Bahrain. 139 00:13:57,140 --> 00:13:59,630 I don't know why there's that transition there. Well, I guess I can go. 140 00:14:01,370 --> 00:14:09,080 So the state, after many years of kind of being disinterested in women's rights, takes an interest in women's rights. 141 00:14:10,910 --> 00:14:20,809 It just kind of is deployed in two separate ways. Women get the right to vote, you know, as the parliament is reinstated. 142 00:14:20,810 --> 00:14:25,640 Parliament was dissolved in the 1970s, reinstated in 2001 as a new king came to power. 143 00:14:25,850 --> 00:14:31,100 Women are given the right to vote. And I kind of argue that this has to do with the government. 144 00:14:31,100 --> 00:14:38,690 Deploying a progressive image for the governmental ends has very little to actually do with kind of really trying to give women women's rights. 145 00:14:38,990 --> 00:14:44,630 And I say that the government gave right to women the voting rights to women 146 00:14:46,880 --> 00:14:51,050 for political means that played to both local and international audiences, 147 00:14:51,290 --> 00:14:58,609 the local audience being women and trying to gain voting support from women, the international audience being, 148 00:14:58,610 --> 00:15:05,150 you know, the attempt to demonstrate the nation's progressive nature in the region in an effort to secure economic alliances, 149 00:15:05,720 --> 00:15:13,130 you know, for example, the Bahrain Free Trade Agreement or to kind of attract capital to the country in certain kind of ways. 150 00:15:15,020 --> 00:15:20,420 So the first election cycle was in 2002. Women ran, but they achieved no success. 151 00:15:21,980 --> 00:15:30,800 Many Bahrainis, in part, they achieved no success because the election was boycotted by a major segment of the population. 152 00:15:31,400 --> 00:15:38,750 The Shia boycotted the election because of a last minute change the king had put in place to the National Action Charter. 153 00:15:38,930 --> 00:15:45,259 So the people, the Bahraini people voted 98% towards implementing the National Action Charter, 154 00:15:45,260 --> 00:15:49,610 whereby they thought that they were going to be getting a bicameral parliamentary structure. 155 00:15:49,880 --> 00:15:59,160 Both would have been. Elected by the people of Bahrain, whereas in the last at the last minute, the king changed it. 156 00:15:59,160 --> 00:16:07,920 And instead of having both party in both houses to be elected, one was appointed by the king and the second one was then elected. 157 00:16:07,920 --> 00:16:13,860 So therefore there were always 40 pro-government votes that could essentially counterbalance any of the 158 00:16:13,860 --> 00:16:20,680 progressive legislation that could have come out of the elected parliament body or the Shura Council. 159 00:16:20,700 --> 00:16:22,529 So, I mean, there's kind of tensions there. 160 00:16:22,530 --> 00:16:28,830 People have boycotted the election in in an effort to try and challenge some of this, but to little effect. 161 00:16:32,130 --> 00:16:38,160 So these are just some of the women that I spoke with, Mary Mitchell, why she runs. 162 00:16:38,520 --> 00:16:42,990 She's head of the Bahraini Women's Union Civil. As for it was one of the very first female candidates. 163 00:16:43,650 --> 00:16:48,030 She ran independently and then officially later was officially sanctioned by a political party, which is a first. 164 00:16:48,750 --> 00:16:57,990 And if al-Jabouri is a prominent Shiite women's activist and ran for office and was jailed for some of her activism. 165 00:16:59,700 --> 00:17:04,260 So as I was kind of emphasising the 2000 story, a real turning point for women's rights. 166 00:17:04,740 --> 00:17:10,600 2001 Let Me Get the Right to Vote. 2003 The Supreme Council for Women was created in 2000. 167 00:17:10,830 --> 00:17:15,600 It was created. It's led by Sheikh Usha Shriya, the first wife of King Hamad. 168 00:17:17,220 --> 00:17:23,550 And as you can see from some of these diagrams, it engages fully and completely women in development discourse. 169 00:17:24,330 --> 00:17:28,650 So talks about gender mainstreaming. And so I'm you know, 170 00:17:28,830 --> 00:17:36,930 I think that this is kind of the government appropriating women's rights as a means of kind of displaying a certain level of progressivity. 171 00:17:38,190 --> 00:17:39,480 So women are given the right to vote. 172 00:17:39,660 --> 00:17:46,049 They are engaging in formal women's organisations sponsored by the government in addition to their own independent organisations. 173 00:17:46,050 --> 00:17:52,170 And in 2006, two other points of performance of progressive you come about as far as my research leads me to believe, 174 00:17:52,560 --> 00:17:57,090 the government nominated Higher Bin's Rashid al-Khalifa to be the first Middle Eastern 175 00:17:57,090 --> 00:18:02,850 woman to assume the post of presidency for the General Assembly of the United Nations. 176 00:18:04,020 --> 00:18:07,710 The first woman was elected to parliament in 2006. 177 00:18:08,430 --> 00:18:12,930 And so, you know, we see that the government is enacting these these laws and, you know. 178 00:18:14,450 --> 00:18:20,419 Establishing these bodies on behalf of women's rights and performing a certain level of progressivity towards an international body. 179 00:18:20,420 --> 00:18:24,140 But this does not mean that it's registering particularly well locally. 180 00:18:25,700 --> 00:18:29,000 So they're anti family law protest in 2005. 181 00:18:30,560 --> 00:18:37,670 And I should emphasise that, you know, in many places there's probably a debate about family law and in Bahrain it's it's no different. 182 00:18:38,000 --> 00:18:43,040 You know, the process of codification doesn't mean that women who have entered into marital. 183 00:18:43,040 --> 00:18:46,070 Well, I actually will cut this out because this is much too basic for this audience. 184 00:18:47,150 --> 00:18:53,090 So, you know, just kind of emphasising that the government decided to try to codify family law kind of out of nowhere. 185 00:18:53,810 --> 00:19:03,080 On November 2nd, 2005, the Supreme Council for Women blasted the country in a poster campaign to support the codification of family law. 186 00:19:03,140 --> 00:19:07,190 The posters read A Safe Family Equals a Safe Country. 187 00:19:07,970 --> 00:19:16,070 And these, you know, billboards ran down the causeway that kind of connect or halfway down the causeway that connects Saudi and Bahrain. 188 00:19:16,400 --> 00:19:21,320 You know, it basically was a nationwide plastering of this. 189 00:19:21,320 --> 00:19:30,410 The slogan, the banners represented a woman who have demonstrated a small nuclear family of an unveiled mother, 190 00:19:30,410 --> 00:19:34,219 a father and two children, a boy and a girl also unveiled. 191 00:19:34,220 --> 00:19:39,830 So this was kind of the image that the government was representing to society and then the people in. 192 00:19:41,080 --> 00:19:47,049 If I didn't take this particularly well. As soon as these signs were hung along Bahrain's causeways and roadways, 193 00:19:47,050 --> 00:19:53,290 replacing the standard advertisements for mobile phones, retail vacancies and banks, the Islamic Scholars Council, 194 00:19:53,290 --> 00:19:54,400 a Shia clerical body, 195 00:19:54,580 --> 00:20:03,400 established a counter campaign calling for calling the Bahraini Shia to mobilise a demonstration to show popular unrest with the proposed legislation. 196 00:20:04,150 --> 00:20:08,650 The posters the clerics used also featured a family, a father, son and a mother and a daughter. 197 00:20:09,040 --> 00:20:16,870 But in this case, both both of the female figures were veiled, and their slogan read, Never will family be safe without following the path of God. 198 00:20:17,470 --> 00:20:22,330 Their call for a public demonstration was answered in force on November 9th, 2005. 199 00:20:23,080 --> 00:20:27,309 100,000 marchers, which is a huge percentage of Bahrain's population. 200 00:20:27,310 --> 00:20:30,730 It's about a seventh of the native population of Bahrain took to the streets. 201 00:20:30,940 --> 00:20:33,040 They filled the narrow causeways, the broad highways. 202 00:20:33,040 --> 00:20:39,699 They essentially I mean, traffic didn't move in downtown Manama, much like we saw with the you know, the current protest. 203 00:20:39,700 --> 00:20:43,420 They occupied what used to be Pearl Square. The Pearl Roundabout. 204 00:20:46,640 --> 00:20:50,390 The anti-family law crowd that day was mostly female. It was mostly Shia. 205 00:20:51,230 --> 00:20:57,110 Upwards of 60,000 women join forces to protest the changing legal structure that they 206 00:20:57,110 --> 00:21:02,179 thought the unqualified law they believed best protected their interests as daughters, 207 00:21:02,180 --> 00:21:05,630 mothers, wives and, you know, their vision of an Islamic society. 208 00:21:06,290 --> 00:21:09,529 That's not to say that there weren't women who were supporting modification at this 209 00:21:09,530 --> 00:21:13,309 period on a street corner across in the Ministry of Justice on the same November day, 210 00:21:13,310 --> 00:21:18,350 November 9th. 600 women gathered in support of codification of Bahrain's family law. 211 00:21:19,220 --> 00:21:21,470 The debate about family law in Bahrain is manifold. 212 00:21:22,010 --> 00:21:28,580 The march was primarily about family law, but family law is coded to mean so much more than pure Islamic religious family relations. 213 00:21:28,790 --> 00:21:33,320 In Bahrain, a confluence of kinship ties, religious expectations, 214 00:21:33,440 --> 00:21:38,540 identity politics make the debate about family law political rather than exclusively religious debate. 215 00:21:39,020 --> 00:21:44,810 So in this period, we see direct governmental intervention and involvement in women's rights. 216 00:21:45,020 --> 00:21:50,060 They deploy language of international human rights to try and I think, demonstrate their progressivity. 217 00:21:50,960 --> 00:21:56,840 Bahrain did codify family law for the Sunnis only in 2009 while I was in the country. 218 00:21:56,840 --> 00:22:00,110 So there's a split in kind of how family law is implemented. 219 00:22:00,290 --> 00:22:04,400 So they can say that they have a codified family law, but it's not universally applied, 220 00:22:05,780 --> 00:22:10,609 you know, as there hasn't been any kind of real move to try and codify the Shia family law, 221 00:22:10,610 --> 00:22:13,310 in part because in splitting the family law structure, 222 00:22:13,520 --> 00:22:23,690 they have created a system where there's less governmental dissent or protest against the government from the Shia because, 223 00:22:23,690 --> 00:22:26,360 you know, they kind of conceded along family lines. 224 00:22:27,170 --> 00:22:35,899 So, yeah, there's a popular backlash that this popular backlash enabled the government to say, well, the people don't want this law. 225 00:22:35,900 --> 00:22:41,570 We tried, and so they're able to kind of implement it just for the Sunnis and not for the Shia, but still for forms the international community. 226 00:22:41,720 --> 00:22:47,080 The fact that they're progressive and so it kind of I'll end there and I look forward to your questions. 227 00:22:47,080 --> 00:22:47,780 Thank you so much.