Empowerment

The recent election of Bahrain’s first female municipal councilor is boosting hopes among women here that they are seeing the beginning of the end to gender-based voting in this country. Indeed, even the women who failed in their own poll bids – some for the second or third time – are upbeat following the Oct. 30 win of Fatima Salman as councilor in Muharraq, the second largest city in Bahrain. Mariam Al Ruwai, president of Bahrain’s Women Union, is also raring to run again in the next polls, scheduled for 2014, despite her elimination from the first round of the recent parliamentary election.

Bahrain has made history by electing its first woman to a municipal council, as the country went to the polls for the second time in a week. Independent candidate Fatima Salman sealed victory in the second round of voting in Muharraq against male opponent Mohammed Abdulla Al Senan. She is the first woman to be directly elected to public office since Bahrain's parliament and five municipal councils were formed in 2002. Latifa Al Gaoud, the first woman to make it to parliament in 2006, was re-elected again this year - but ran unopposed both times.

This is an exclusive excerpt from the paper Ziba Mir-Hosseini gave at the October 2010 Islamic Feminism Conference in Madrid: "As the term ‘Islamic feminism’ gained currency in the late 1990s, most of those so labelled by academics and journalists rejected either the ‘Islamic’ or the ‘feminist’ part of the term. If they came from a religious background and addressed women’s rights within an Islamic frame of reference, they wanted to avoid any kind of association with the term ‘feminism’, and their gender activism was a mixture of conformity and defiance. If they came from a secular background and addressed women’s rights from within broader feminist discourses, they rejected being called ‘Islamic’—even though many of them located their feminism in Islam. Those associated with political Islam took contradictory positions and made confusing statements with respect to gender equality; for them, the wider project of gaining power and establishing an Islamic state took priority over equality and democracy. 

When Roza Isakovna Otunbayeva was selected to be President of Kyrgyzstan, she became the first woman head of state in the predominantly Muslim Central Asian region. And she also took on a mission. Her mission is to pave the way for parliamentary democracy in a country that was formerly a part of the Soviet Union. Her first task was to stabilise the situation arising out of the ethnic clashes in the southern city of Osh, which is her hometown. Her next job will be to conduct free and fair parliamentary elections, and then clear the way for her people to elect a new president.