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,
and it was an audience full of people who didn't really know much about family law or about Bahrain even.
And so it's it's a wonderful opportunity to be here with a group of scholars who know what I'm talking about.
That said, I feel like the presentation I prepared might almost be a little bit too basic.
So if you'd like me to go into greater detail during the question answer session, please provide me with questions about nuance.
I'd love to field them. So I also want to emphasise that I'm a historian and so therefore I'm bringing a
different perspective to some of the discussions that came out of this morning.
Instead of kind of looking at the nuances of the law,
I'm looking at the ways in which the law facilitated certain governmental responses, but also responses amongst the women of Bahrain.
And I guess by way of beginning, I should emphasise that the current political and social turmoil in Bahrain has put my research
into the intersecting leftist and religious women's activism in the country on pause.
I am no longer able to obtain a visa to go back to the country.
So I am. As the introduction said of his store sizing.
Some of the trends that I picked up in my original research in Bahrain,
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,
politicised women's rights,
and ultimately about how the government and how the government professes a certain adherence to women's rights and principles.
But in practice, the changes that they promised are never universally actuated.
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.
Feminism and women's rights have become the means through which the Bahraini government
performed as adherence to international human rights and human rights doctrines.
However, a disconnect exists between Bahrain's international attestations about women's rights and its implementation of said rights in the country.
What I call the progressive mystique a consequence of the government's move to superficially embrace international women's rights protections,
has politicised women's rights domestically.
The government's attempts to codify Bahrain's family law and thereby demonstrate to the international public its women's rights protections,
turned women's rights into a battleground between leftist and religious activists in the country.
To give context to this paper on the government of Bahrain's progressive mystique,
it is necessary to review the history of women's rights in the country and women's activism in the country as well,
and record the state's responses to the changing dynamics in that relationship.
So this is a brief glimpse of the history of women's activism in Bahrain.
But, you know, probing deeper, you know,
asked me to go further into some of the details if I haven't addressed them adequately as I go over them briefly.
So the Islamic revolution in Iran and other social factors split Bahraini women's activism into leftist and religious blocs.
And I call it leftist and religious because I don't think that the secular religious binary is particularly helpful in this country,
nor do I think that the religious or the leftist conservative binary is particularly effective.
I think that kind of disturbing the matrix and kind of moving diagonally is a much more effective means
of kind of emphasising the ways in which the women's rights movement in Bahrain has been expressed,
using both the idioms of leftist ideology and less idioms of religious ideology.
So before or in the decades following the revolution,
Bahrain's leftist activists learned to contend with a new voice in women's rights once supported by religion.
The first formal women's organisation was founded.
Religious Women's Organisation was founded in 2001, the same year Bahraini women attained the right to vote in 2005.
Leftist and religious conceptualisations of women's rights clash in a massive
demonstration concerning the codification of family law and international or,
you know, as we all know, an integral element of Sharia or Islamic law.
The final section of this presentation will explore the governmental performance
of women's rights and its influence in the implementation of family law.
So in the 1950s there was the establishment of the first.
At this time it wasn't a leftist women's organisation, just the first women's organisation.
It quickly broke off of a male charity organisation, male political organisation, because the women,
quote, believed that women's issues were specialised issues and they should be left for men.
So the women kind of understood that their their issues had a place in society.
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.
So, you know, the women in this organisation and later leftist women and even later decades religious
women in Bahrain made no such distinction between women's issues and politics,
and they established their own formal organisations in the 1960s.
There were more women's organisations. They ran preschools and literacy centres.
The charity work of women in Bahrain will kind of fall out later in the the discussion of the later parts of this presentation.
So I want to take a moment here now to emphasise that social charity work still continues in the country.
That's still a major facet of women's activism. In Bahrain, for example, you know,
their computer literacy programs that are run by women's organisations in the country and they there are organisations,
you know, in the 1950s and sixties ran educational campaigns. Those campaigns continue.
A lot of that education focuses on English education because the women who are running the organisations who are mostly of the Sunni minority,
but kind of a socioeconomic majority,
the the women who run these charity organisations understand that English is necessary to work in hospitality industry.
Which is a major. Source of income because Bahrain is the site of intra intra gulf tourism.
So in the early decades there was no governmental engagement in women's rights.
In part because Bahrain is a British protectorate, in part because women's rights were considered the domain of women.
So the 1970s. So these are women, the 1960s, late 1960s or early 1970s, kind of a decade of interesting fashion choices globally.
Excuse me. Who knows why that is going ahead.
So emphasise that the 1970s were a turning point.
Secular women's organisations who at this point had taken on a certain leftist ideology.
Campaigned against the government for the first time because the government had taken its first stance on women's rights in the country.
In 1972, Bahrain or in 1971, Bahrain attained independence from the British.
And in that same year, they passed. Essentially, women were not given the right to vote.
And women's organisations sent a petition kind of trying to emphasise that they didn't necessarily agree with gender segregated enfranchisement.
So quote, We, the undersigned, undersigned, the popular societies that represent women in Bahrain, submit to the central ministries.
Our protest of the decision to deny women the right to participate in the nomination and election process.
Bahrain has always been the cultural, social and civilizational leader in the Gulf.
Why is it today remove an active element of its population from participation in the march towards progress, end quote.
And later in their their protest literature, you know, in their petition, they talked about, you know,
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.
Petition said, well, the Vale. We can work around. That is women's identities are obscured.
Well, we can figure out ways of ensuring that we know who's voting as to whether or not, you know, women are uneducated.
Well, quote, A large percentage of ignorant men also exist, men who have no independent opinions.
The election laws do not require that men must be aware and knowledgeable before they are given the right to vote.
End quote.
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.
The women also invoked the United Nations charter that said it clearly prohibited the discrimination of electoral rights based on on sex and gender.
And so this petition, I believe, demonstrates how leftist women in Bahrain took the ideas and concepts from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
international law and regional discussions of Arabism.
In order. In addition to maternal as rhetoric, they talked about raising generations, religious traditions, veiling,
and adapted these differing discourses to their localised context and their desire for voting rights.
The simultaneous evocation of secular discourse and religious tradition demonstrates
that there's a false binary imposed between religious and secular on many levels.
Dualism does not capture the nuances of women's activism in Bahrain.
Challenging a religious leaders jurisdiction over family law was not the same as rejecting religion,
and religious inspiration on a personal level did not mean a disregard for women's rights and or Islam.
So in the absence of international protections for women's rights,
women in Bahrain were connecting their issues to international rights protections in this period.
But the Bahraini government was not engaging in either local women's rights discussions or international women's rights discussions.
The 1980s we see the first family law campaigns that are established by leftist organisations,
leftist organisations that some initial response or resistance from individuals.
So they kind of adapted their campaigns instead of, you know, just handing out pamphlets and saying,
women, you should be for your protections, you know, under a codified family law structure.
They instead created health centres in local communities.
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,
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.
The 1980s, we also see the first effects of the Iranian revolution and how it really split Bahraini women's activism.
It split activism into two veins.
So we see, you know, the entrenched, existent leftist organisation and the emergence of a really religious idiom for women's activism,
whereas before the only formerly active vein of activism really had been leftist and orientation.
So after the religious turn by Bahrainis, leftist women's activists had to recalibrate many of their initiatives to target their their Bahraini women.
That was their target population. So they, you know, had, you know, additional educational campaigns.
And we see that the religious organisations that came out of this split in the women's movement use the same technologies.
Essentially they used pamphlets, but they also created centres to help guide women.
The difference between the religious centres and the kind of secular centres the secular centres were centred in health centres,
whereas the religious women made use of modern and kind of houses centres as a place to talk about religious women's rights.
And I can go a little bit more in-depth into that.
One of the reasons that a lot of this politicisation of.
Women's activism was, you know, came about in Bahrain.
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.
So, you know, the concurrent, larger political changes.
Leftist women's organisations tried to engage the state on behalf of their rights, their secular rights during this period, but also, you know,
attempted to try to codify family law in the 1980s and 1990s is really was stalled due to tremendous amounts of governmental repression.
So, you know, the state really ignored women's claims to the rights as women during this period
and essentially was violently suppressing any kind of political discourse.
They continue to kind of see women's rights and political rights as distinct.
So while there was a ban on most formal political activism,
women's organisations were continue were allowed to kind of continue to function in the country,
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
lobby the government in the 1980s and the 1990s as working kind of like a small.
And she said that they would go to the government ministry, they'd go home, they'd go back.
And so it was kind of like this process of forming, you know,
a little line kind of like of ants going to and from the colony to try and kind of again,
it's not is not my image, but it's the image that she was using that they were small, the government was big.
And slowly but surely, they were going to attain their rights. And women in Bahrain really did enter a period of change in 2000.
2001 is a major turning point in women's rights in Bahrain.
I don't know why there's that transition there. Well, I guess I can go.
So the state, after many years of kind of being disinterested in women's rights, takes an interest in women's rights.
It just kind of is deployed in two separate ways. Women get the right to vote, you know, as the parliament is reinstated.
Parliament was dissolved in the 1970s, reinstated in 2001 as a new king came to power.
Women are given the right to vote. And I kind of argue that this has to do with the government.
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.
And I say that the government gave right to women the voting rights to women
for political means that played to both local and international audiences,
the local audience being women and trying to gain voting support from women, the international audience being,
you know, the attempt to demonstrate the nation's progressive nature in the region in an effort to secure economic alliances,
you know, for example, the Bahrain Free Trade Agreement or to kind of attract capital to the country in certain kind of ways.
So the first election cycle was in 2002. Women ran, but they achieved no success.
Many Bahrainis, in part, they achieved no success because the election was boycotted by a major segment of the population.
The Shia boycotted the election because of a last minute change the king had put in place to the National Action Charter.
So the people, the Bahraini people voted 98% towards implementing the National Action Charter,
whereby they thought that they were going to be getting a bicameral parliamentary structure.
Both would have been. Elected by the people of Bahrain, whereas in the last at the last minute, the king changed it.
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.
So therefore there were always 40 pro-government votes that could essentially counterbalance any of the
progressive legislation that could have come out of the elected parliament body or the Shura Council.
So, I mean, there's kind of tensions there.
People have boycotted the election in in an effort to try and challenge some of this, but to little effect.
So these are just some of the women that I spoke with, Mary Mitchell, why she runs.
She's head of the Bahraini Women's Union Civil. As for it was one of the very first female candidates.
She ran independently and then officially later was officially sanctioned by a political party, which is a first.
And if al-Jabouri is a prominent Shiite women's activist and ran for office and was jailed for some of her activism.
So as I was kind of emphasising the 2000 story, a real turning point for women's rights.
2001 Let Me Get the Right to Vote. 2003 The Supreme Council for Women was created in 2000.
It was created. It's led by Sheikh Usha Shriya, the first wife of King Hamad.
And as you can see from some of these diagrams, it engages fully and completely women in development discourse.
So talks about gender mainstreaming. And so I'm you know,
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.
So women are given the right to vote.
They are engaging in formal women's organisations sponsored by the government in addition to their own independent organisations.
And in 2006, two other points of performance of progressive you come about as far as my research leads me to believe,
the government nominated Higher Bin's Rashid al-Khalifa to be the first Middle Eastern
woman to assume the post of presidency for the General Assembly of the United Nations.
The first woman was elected to parliament in 2006.
And so, you know, we see that the government is enacting these these laws and, you know.
Establishing these bodies on behalf of women's rights and performing a certain level of progressivity towards an international body.
But this does not mean that it's registering particularly well locally.
So they're anti family law protest in 2005.
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.
You know, the process of codification doesn't mean that women who have entered into marital.
Well, I actually will cut this out because this is much too basic for this audience.
So, you know, just kind of emphasising that the government decided to try to codify family law kind of out of nowhere.
On November 2nd, 2005, the Supreme Council for Women blasted the country in a poster campaign to support the codification of family law.
The posters read A Safe Family Equals a Safe Country.
And these, you know, billboards ran down the causeway that kind of connect or halfway down the causeway that connects Saudi and Bahrain.
You know, it basically was a nationwide plastering of this.
The slogan, the banners represented a woman who have demonstrated a small nuclear family of an unveiled mother,
a father and two children, a boy and a girl also unveiled.
So this was kind of the image that the government was representing to society and then the people in.
If I didn't take this particularly well. As soon as these signs were hung along Bahrain's causeways and roadways,
replacing the standard advertisements for mobile phones, retail vacancies and banks, the Islamic Scholars Council,
a Shia clerical body,
established a counter campaign calling for calling the Bahraini Shia to mobilise a demonstration to show popular unrest with the proposed legislation.
The posters the clerics used also featured a family, a father, son and a mother and a daughter.
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.
Their call for a public demonstration was answered in force on November 9th, 2005.
100,000 marchers, which is a huge percentage of Bahrain's population.
It's about a seventh of the native population of Bahrain took to the streets.
They filled the narrow causeways, the broad highways.
They essentially I mean, traffic didn't move in downtown Manama, much like we saw with the you know, the current protest.
They occupied what used to be Pearl Square. The Pearl Roundabout.
The anti-family law crowd that day was mostly female. It was mostly Shia.
Upwards of 60,000 women join forces to protest the changing legal structure that they
thought the unqualified law they believed best protected their interests as daughters,
mothers, wives and, you know, their vision of an Islamic society.
That's not to say that there weren't women who were supporting modification at this
period on a street corner across in the Ministry of Justice on the same November day,
November 9th. 600 women gathered in support of codification of Bahrain's family law.
The debate about family law in Bahrain is manifold.
The march was primarily about family law, but family law is coded to mean so much more than pure Islamic religious family relations.
In Bahrain, a confluence of kinship ties, religious expectations,
identity politics make the debate about family law political rather than exclusively religious debate.
So in this period, we see direct governmental intervention and involvement in women's rights.
They deploy language of international human rights to try and I think, demonstrate their progressivity.
Bahrain did codify family law for the Sunnis only in 2009 while I was in the country.
So there's a split in kind of how family law is implemented.
So they can say that they have a codified family law, but it's not universally applied,
you know, as there hasn't been any kind of real move to try and codify the Shia family law,
in part because in splitting the family law structure,
they have created a system where there's less governmental dissent or protest against the government from the Shia because,
you know, they kind of conceded along family lines.
So, yeah, there's a popular backlash that this popular backlash enabled the government to say, well, the people don't want this law.
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.
The fact that they're progressive and so it kind of I'll end there and I look forward to your questions.
Thank you so much.