 Well welcome everybody. My name is Madeline Keunen and I'm a Marsh professor at the University of Vermont. And it provides me a nice home after my political life. And one of the privileges of being a Marsh professor is to invite speakers of interest to the University. Please come in. There are some couple of seats here on this side. And I had the opportunity to hear and meet Isabelle Coleman last January when I was invited to participate in the Symposium on Gender, Inequality and Emerging Markets. And I was very impressed with her presentation. Enough so that I invited her here and she kindly accepted. One incentive I confess for her acceptance is that she has a son who's a freshman at the University of Vermont who is here. And he is the oldest of five children. Don't ask how she does it. That's another lecture. I think you're in store for a very interesting perspective on what is happening in the Middle East and what role women are playing in those changes. As you can see, she has written an earlier book. Please come in and find a seat. There are a couple of seats in this first. She's written an earlier book, Paradise Beneath Her Feet. And she is now working and almost has completed a new book with the interesting title of Youth Quake. How Education and Entrepreneurship Can Save the Middle East. She has written other articles. She's been published widely. She is as a position, as you know, at the Council on Foreign Relations where she is specializing in democracy work and in the Middle East. She is also telling us what's behind the headlines, how ordinary people's lives are changing. And one of the perspectives which she will elaborate on today which caught my attention when I heard her at Oxford University was that women are also reading the Koran and finding different interpretations in the Koran which have a somewhat different perspective on the role of women in society. At the Council on Foreign Relations she's a senior fellow and director of civil and society markets and democracy programs. Newsweek named her 150 women who shake the world. Well, shake us up here at the University of Vermont. We're delighted to receive your fresh insights. Please help me welcome Elizabeth Colvin. Thank you, Madeline, Governor, for that wonderful introduction. And it is a great pleasure to be here. And yes, I think I was incented to accept because my son is a freshman at Middlebury. I think we originally organized this around a weekend. I was going to be visiting Middlebury and then the date got switched. But I'm delighted to be here nevertheless. It's wonderful. And boy, what a beautiful time of year to be in Vermont. So, thank you. It is nothing but an understatement to say that the Middle East is going through a period of profound change and transition. The Arab revolutions toppled dictators who had been in power, some of them for more than three decades. And given the young population, the youth quake in the region, many of the citizens of the countries that have experienced the revolutions, they knew no one else is their leader other than Mubarak in Egypt or Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen who had been in power for 33 years. Or Ben Ali and his predecessor, Borgiba in Tunisia. These were deeply entrenched regimes. And when they fell, there was tremendous excitement, euphoria about a better system, about a better way of life. People were talking about freedom and justice and democracy and economic opportunity. But they found that tearing down dictatorships that had been in power for decades was actually a whole lot easier than building something new in its place. And the Arab revolutions, as we know, have also unleashed conservative forces all across the region. It's no surprise to those of us who follow the region closely how well Islamists have done through the electoral process in that part of the world. They were, in many respects, the most legitimate opposition. They had been an opposition to the regimes for decades. They provided social services to people that were very important in many respects. Social services in terms of health and welfare. And of course, they also had the mosque as a place to organize and mobilize. And they were much better organized and mobilized than the liberal secular parties that originally had filled the streets in Tunis and in Cairo. And so elections, of course, delivered Islamists to power. The Muslim Brotherhood got a majority of the votes in Egypt, and the Nada party, the Islamist party in Tunisia, got a plurality of votes. Now, across the region, when you look at polls, people in the Middle East say that they want to live in a system under both democracy and Sharia. They want Islam in their lives. These are, for the most part, conservative societies where Islam is the cultural touchstone. Religion is all important. It organizes people's lives in so many ways. But people also say they want democracy. And in some cases, like Tunisia, large percentages say they want democracy. And in Egypt, you have a majority who say they want democracy, but a large percentage say they also favor Sharia. So here's the rub. How do you reconcile these two things? Can you reconcile Sharia and democracy? Under a system of Sharia, can you actually have the core components of democracy? Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion. Are these things possible? Some people would argue no. Others would argue, yeah, it is possible, but it depends how you think about Sharia and what that actually means. And the implications are not only human rights implications and democratic implications, but, of course, there are enormous implications for women because Sharia has a lot to say about women. And the way that Sharia is interpreted in conservative countries puts a lot of restrictions on women. And the implications are not only human rights implications, but they're enormous economic implications. Now, if you look at this chart, women's labor force participation in the Middle East is lower than any other part of the world. Significantly lower than Sub-Saharan Africa, lower than even South Asia. And the economic implications are enormous. The International Labor Organization did a study, and the World Bank has done studies too, where they looked at the labor force participation of women in the Middle East, and they said if the countries in the Middle East could simply close their gender gap by half in labor force participation rates, they'd be able to boost their economic growth rates by two full percentage points on GDP. That's enormous, enormous. Now, of course, Sharia is not the only reason that you have low labor force participation rates of women, of course not. There are many, many factors that go into that, cultural factors, historical factors. But religion is often used to justify some of those cultural factors and those conservative traditions. Now, what is Sharia? I love to quote this woman, who I write about in my book. She's a remarkable Indonesian woman, Dr. Siti Mustamulia, who is one of the country Indonesia's leading Islamic scholars. She studied at Al-Azhar in Cairo. She speaks fluent Arabic, and she's made it her life's work to push for a more progressive interpretation of Islam and Sharia in Indonesia that really accommodates a modern role for women. And she reminds her conservative critics all the time. She says, it's not a fact from heaven. And what she means by that is Sharia is not something that is written in stone. It's man-made law. Now, it is derived from religious texts. It's derived first and foremost from the Quran. It's derived from the Hadiths, the sayings and doings of Muhammad. It's derived from Islamic jurisprudence that has evolved over centuries. But ultimately, it is man-made. And why is that important? Because if it's man-made law, well, it's open to interpretation. And it can change. It's not set in stone. And in fact, countries implement Sharia in very, very different ways. Just look at this chart for one minute. Look at the marriage age for girls. Saudi Arabia, which takes the Quran as its constitution, is arguably the most conservative country on these issues. And when it comes to the marriage age of girls, they say, well, there is no legal marriage age for girls. Girls can be married off really at any age. The age of puberty. And if you read the headlines, every several months, some horrible story comes up of a girl as young as 7, 8, 9 years old in Saudi being married off to a much older man. It hits the headlines because typically her mother takes it to court to try to stop it. And the judge says no, it is the Sharia. Because in the Quran, there are references to the age of maturity being the age of puberty for girls. Morocco and Egypt, under their version of Sharia, they say no. The legal age of marriage for girls is 18. In 7th century Arabia, the age of maturity very well may have been the age of puberty, as it says in the Quran. But we live in the 21st century and the age of maturity today is widely recognized to be 18. So in keeping with the spirit of the Quran, we are setting our marriage age at 18. And that's what both countries have done. And it has been blessed by religious leaders as consistent with Sharia in both countries. Now, not to say it's not debated and contested, there are conservative religious leaders in these countries who say, ah, ah, it shouldn't be 18, it should be much lower than that. It should be puberty, it should be 9, it should be 13. They're all different versions. But you can see that there are religious leaders who say no. Our interpretation sets it at 18. And likewise on divorce or on freedom of movement or any of these other issues. And there are many of them. Religious leaders look at the Quran and can come up with one answer or something really quite different. Now, why is this important? Because right now is a time of profound change in the region. Constitutions are being written, laws are being rewritten. And the battle line is very clearly, in many respects, over women's rights. With moderates on one side and conservatives on another, really arguing over what the role of women in society should be. So in a country like Egypt where you've had a legal age of marriage for girls set at 18, in recent years, since the fall of Mubarak, you've had conservative voices saying, no, we need to change that, we need to roll that back. You've had Salafis who are among the most conservative in the country arguing for 9 as the legal age of marriage in Egypt. And I can tell you one thing with great certainty. The last thing Egypt needs right now is to set the marriage age of girls at 9. That I can assure you. But that's what they're debating as the country is about to run out of cash. They're debating whether the marriage age of girls should be set to 9. They're debating whether divorce laws should be rolled back. They're debating what role women should have politically. There are conservative voices debating whether women should be allowed to participate politically. We know though that not all Islamists and religious leaders view things the same way. As these conversations were taking place in Egypt among conservatives, and by the way, not only among conservatives, you had some of the more, quote, liberal parties in Egypt also arguing to roll back women's divorce rights and custody laws and things like that. But you had other religious leaders coming out and reaffirming women's rights within Islam. This is Grand Sheikh Tayyab of Al-Azhar, one of the most esteemed religious leaders in the country. And the women's groups got together and said, look, our rights are being debated on religious grounds. We're going to fight back in a whole multitude of ways. We're going to marshal international law. Egypt, after all, is a signatory to SIDAW, the UN Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women. So we're going to marshal international law. We're going to marshal international opinion. We're going to marshal women's mobilization in big demonstrations. But we're also going to marshal more moderate religious opinion. And women's groups over the past two years worked with Sheikh Tayyab at Al-Azhar to get him to put out a document reaffirming women's rights in Islam. He actually sat on it for a year because the political situation was so turbulent. But in June, just before the Morsi government was overthrown, they did publish the document. And it is quite interesting because it does reaffirm many women's rights within Islam. Now, this is not a new debate. Moderates and conservatives in Islam battling over what does the Quran say about women's rights. It's not a new debate. In fact, back in 1898, Qasim Amin dropped what was a literary bombshell on Cairo with the publication of his book, The Liberation of Women. And in it, he argued that for Egypt to be a strong country for Muslims around the world to regain their stature, this is in the face of colonialism and occupation and all sorts of other issues at the time, that they needed to modernize Islam. And one of the very first things he said that they needed to do was modernize the role of women. That the spirit of Islam was one that was very progressive for women at the time. The spirit of Islam, it gave women rights that they didn't have in other countries for hundreds and hundreds of years. The right of inheritance, the right to negotiate a marriage contract, all sorts of things. And what he said is we need to get back to that spirit and we need to modernize the role of women. Unfortunately, his message was very often conflated with what the western colonialists were also saying, which is you're backward because your religion is backward. And look how you treat women. You make them wear that veil, get them to take that veil off, get them to get rid of all the bad stuff you do. And what he was saying sounded close to that and it became discredited because it sounded too similar to that colonial criticism. You had another narrative that came along at the same time, which argued from a very different perspective. It said, look, we agree, we want to be strong. We want to regain our stature as Muslims. But we shouldn't follow the slavishly follow the ways of the West and have women take off their veil and liberate women. What we need to do is we need to adhere more closely to the fundamentals of our religion. We're weak because we have strayed from the fundamentals. And of course the most ardent proponent of this was Hassan al-Bana, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who came up with the slogan that Islam is the solution. And he really pressed society to hew more closely to the fundamentals of religion, fundamentalism. You had these two strains, Islamic modernization and fundamentalists. And of course what they both battled over and differed over in many respects was women. Now they were both overtaken by the secular modernizers, who in the 20th century said, I don't even want to modernize Islam. I just want to put it in a box over here. Mustafa Kamal Adaturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was the most famous of these, who as he said, I love this quote, he said what he was doing for his country was for the people, despite the people. Because they didn't like it. They didn't like having their culture and their traditions being ripped away from them. Reza Shah Pahlavi, who followed closely in his footsteps, he banned women from wearing the Chador. And there are accounts of women who didn't leave their home for four years during that time of the ban. Because they were so humiliated at the idea of stepping out in public, not wearing their covering. So this was a very top-down, very brutal approach to changing culture. And while it seemed to work, people always say, oh I was in Tehran in the 60s and all the women were wearing miniskirts. Yeah, but not outside of Tehran. And underneath, of course, Islamism was very much alive and thriving. And developing a real counter-narrative to the secular, corrupt, unjust leaders. And when those leaders fell, they were waiting in the wings. So in Iran, when the Shah was toppled, Islamists took over. Khomeini. And when the Arab revolutions toppled the secular leaders, who was waiting in the wing? But the Islamists. Now, is 2013 in the Arab countries, is it their Iran 1979 moment? Is that what we're looking at? I don't think so, for a whole variety of reasons. The first reason is Iran. You know, a lot of the Arab populations, they look at Iran, and they look at the fundamentalism that has gripped the country. And they look at what it's done to the country, and they don't aspire to that. Some may, I mean of course you've got a Sunni and Shia difference, but I'm talking about the real control of religion over the country. And they don't necessarily aspire to that. Case in point was the coup against Morsi this past summer, on the grounds that he was trying to impose theocracy on the country. But you do have secular groups and women's groups in particular who've learned from the Iranian Revolution, who've learned how they must be vigilant against creeping theocracy. And they don't trust the Islamists by any means. And they are very wary when the Islamists say, oh, we're going to have democracy. And they start looking. Actually, if you look at Iran's constitution, it's a lovely constitution. It has all sorts of rights in it. It's something that any American would be proud of, except for one clause which gives a group of religious leaders complete control over vetting laws. And therein lies theocracy. And in Egypt, that is what the Morsi government was in their constitution moving towards. Article two of the constitution under Morsi said, Sharia is the source of legislation. That is what was under the Mubarak constitution, no different. But then they inserted a couple of other articles which really made people unhappy in Egypt. Article 219 being the most specific, where it determined what sources of Sharia. And it also gave al-Azhar and religious leaders a role in vetting laws. And it made people very, very unhappy, secularists in Egypt in particular over that. The other reason, I think, is that today Islamists are not monolithic by any means. They themselves have evolved. And you have in someone like Rashid Ghanoushi, who's the head of the Nanda party in Tunisia, someone whose views have really evolved during his time in exile. He lived in London. When he returned to Tunisia, Tunisian secularists are really skeptical and frightened of this guy and what he represents and what Islamism might mean for Tunisia, which has a long history of secularism. Going back to 1956 when Borgiba took over. But Ghanoushi reiterates again and again that he wants freedom of speech, freedom of religion and women's rights. But again and again, women's rights are a fact of life in Tunisia. I have met with him on numerous occasions and I actually think he's honest when he says that. But I've also met with lots of other people in the Nanda party who I'm not convinced that they actually believe this. But they made a big decision, a critical decision early on, which was not to put Sharia in their constitution. And that was a real turning point for that country. Now, every other constitution in the region has Sharia in their constitution. Even the two constitutions that were midwifed by the United States, the Iraqi constitution and the Afghan constitution, both have Sharia prominently in their constitutions. No law can contradict Sharia in both of those constitutions. Tunisia said, no, we're not going to do that. Now, women have also been very mobilized in Tunisia and again, vigilant for any strain, holding Nanda true to what it claims. And there was one point where Nanda members tried to insert a clause in the constitution that said, yeah, women will be complementary to men. We took to the streets in this huge demonstration to say, ah, we don't want complementary because we think that's code for unequal. We only want an equality clause. The other thing that women did that was really interesting is they fought very hard in the beginning. They mobilized for a quota in the parliamentary elections that they got through something called the zipper list where parties were required to alternate men and women on each of their party lists. And through this process, women got 27% of the seats in the new parliament, which is a whole lot more than women have in this country. And women have been quite an influential block in the parliament. Now, a lot of those women are Nanda women, but they still have been talking and keeping the idea of women's rights at the table. Egypt has not fared so well. Egypt started from a very different point. Up until recently, it had one of the largest gender gaps still in literacy rates. Two-thirds of Egyptian women are illiterate. Now, I'm just finishing up this new book. I've spent lots and lots of time in Egyptian schools over the last couple of years. And I can tell you the girls are kicking it in school today in Egypt. They're in rural areas, and there are 45 kids in the classroom. And half of them are girls, and they outperform the young boys to the point where we almost feel sorry for the boys in these classrooms. But that's a newer phenomenon. Up until 15, 20 years ago, there were some very large still disparities in enrollment rates. And culturally, Egypt is a much more conservative country than Tunisia. In Tunisia, when young men go to seek jobs, they go to France. In Egypt, they go to Saudi. And they bring back a much more conservative view of Islam. And you've seen in Egypt a lot of real opposition to women and to the idea of women's rights. Even though women were out marching with men into rear square to help overthrow Mubarak, they very quickly turned ugly. Within weeks, you had women continuing their demonstrations and men attacking them saying, now is not the time to talk about women's rights. Now this is divisive. Go home. Women's rights were also closely associated with First Lady Suzan Mubarak in a way that really tarnished the whole concept of women's rights in the post-Mubarak period. All of the progressive laws over the past 12, 13 years that have been passed in Egypt are now derisively referred to as Suzan's laws. And they're attacked from both the right and the left in Egypt as being illegitimate and outside the culture. And so women are swimming against a tide in Egypt. And you've seen unbelievable sexual violence against women. Some of it led by the state. The police and the military performing virginity tests on female protesters and really brutalizing females as a way of intimidating them and quieting their voice. But women are mobilized in a way that is, in many respects, unprecedented in Egypt. And they're coming out and marching and demonstrating and talking about sexual violence. This was something that was taboo just a few years ago. It's not that it didn't happen, but people didn't talk about it. But now it's everywhere. It's in the mainstream media. Lots of groups have formed to combat the practice. So it's not that it's going away, but at least it's being talked about. In Libya, right after Qaddafi fell, the new transitional government, you go back and you watch the press conference. It's amazing. All the soldiers were there. They were firing their guns in the air, cheering. Qaddafi is dead. Long lived the new Libya. And the transitional leader stands up and says, we're going to have a free country. And we're bringing back polygamy. And the men cheer and fire their guns. And the women are just stony, silenced. We fought for that, really. That's what we're going to start with. And actually, I happened to know that a couple of the NATO leaders got on the phone and said, hey, you know, we fought for this too. And leading with polygamy, it's just not cool. It doesn't help us out here at all. But you've seen women also in Libya mobilize, use a zipper list, get 17% of the parliament, taking a page out of their Tunisian sisters, and are trying to fight for change. In Yemen, Yemen the most, in many ways, the hardest place to be a woman. World Economic Forum just ranked all the countries. And Yemen was the worst. Even worse than Saudi, which is amazing. Really, because the status of women is so low in Yemen. And the gender gap in education is so large. And yet women played a really significant role in marching in the streets against Saleh. I was in Yemen in January of 2011 doing research on a new book. And my translator said to me, do you want to meet an incredible woman? She's down holding protests in front of the university. And I said, really? A woman? I mean, everybody wears the niqab in Yemen. And he said, yeah, come on. She wants to get rid of the president. I said, really? So I went down and there she was. The only woman in front of this sea of men holding this protest march. And she said, come back to my house and have a cup of coffee with me. And she, chatting over coffee, her three kids running in and out, I'm going to keep this up until I make the president stand down because I want to bring democracy and human rights to my country. And she said, I'm going to end up in jail or maybe they'll kill me, but I don't care. I want a better country for my children. And I was just blown away by her courage, her determination. And of course, the rest of the world was too. She won the Nobel Peace Prize. And in many ways became the face of the Arab revolutions. Time magazine put a woman on the cover for a person of the year of the Arab Revolutionary. Now, where's all this going? Am I hopeful? For a couple of reasons I am. First reason is that women are increasingly important human capital. They now make up the majority of university graduates, as they do in other parts of the world. All across the Arab world. In Egypt. In Saudi. 64% today of university graduates are women. In Iran, it's 70%. All across the region. But even more interestingly, they make up the majority of graduates in the STEM subjects. Science, technology, engineering and math. And they outperform men significantly in the STEM subjects. It's the only region in the world that they significantly outnumber and outperform men in STEM subjects. They make up the majority of graduates in the sciences. And in some cases, the gap is large. 70% of graduates in life sciences in the Middle East are female. Now, remember that earlier chart I showed you about low workforce participation? This is a real double whammy. If you've got your most trained human capital, particularly in the sciences, and you're not utilizing their skills in the workforce, not a winning economic formula. A country like Saudi with lots of oil money, they can afford to do this for a long time. But Egypt can't, nor Tunisia, nor any of these, most of these other countries. Women are also engaging with religion in a way that they really haven't before. What Madeline was talking about. They're forming Islamic, Quranic study groups. They're just much more literate. In some countries, women are being trained as religious leaders. These are morshidats in Morocco. They're called religious guides. They can do everything the man can do, except lead the Friday prayer. I spent a day with the morshidats last year. And it's really, really interesting. They're basically social workers. And they play a very important role in their communities. And men and women find them to be very, very helpful in solving family problems and doing, from an Islamic perspective, what many of us might think of as social work. But they are very much part of the mainstream in their society. Media. Another very important lever of change. How many of you here have ever seen the show The View in America? Well, there's an Arabic version of The View called Sweet Talk. And it's a very similar format. You have four women sitting around talking about women's things, homes, cooking, children. But they also take on some very controversial subjects. They bring Islamic leaders on and ask them about Sharia and interpretations. I saw one show where they brought Islamic scholars on to debate why women are not allowed to drive in Saudi. Where in the Quran does it say women can't drive a car? They talk about sexual violence. They talk about incest, divorce, custody. A lot of these sensitive, formerly taboo issues. Some 40% of the people who watch the show are men. Okay, soap operas. I love soap operas. As a lever of change. Now, this, I know Greg is in the audience and he can probably attest to this. When I started traveling to Saudi about 12 years ago, the most popular show was Baywatch. All the Saudis watched it. They loved it. This show, you know, and I thought, when they watch Baywatch, what do they think? It must be like watching science fiction. It's so far removed from their life. This show is a Turkish soap opera. Not so far removed from their lives. Hugely popular. The main character, Muhammed, dashing, handsome, and his beautiful wife, Noor, and they have this central love story. He treats her with respect. She works outside the home. She doesn't wear a headscarf. He has only one wife and they're Muslims. And this show was watched the final episode by 85 million Arabs. Dubbed into Arabic. 85 million tuned in to watch the last show. Saudi clerics found the whole concept of the show so threatening they issued fatwa against watching this show, which of course probably accounts for the 85 million tuning in to watch it at the end. Okay. American Idol. This is a version of that. Believe it or not. Where it's called Poet of Millions. In Saudi they have people come on and recite poetry. This woman, Hisakhilal, took the show by storm a couple years ago, where she went on and recited a poem that basically took on the clerics for distorting religion. And she was really electrifying and the judges shuttered for a moment, but passed her on to the next round. Now there were death threats against the judges for doing so, but it created a moment of introspection in Saudi society where people were all talking about it. And media of course is a way of creating those debates. Saudi is the number one per capita user of Twitter in the world. One of the largest investors in Saudi is Prince Ali bin Talal. And he uses Twitter and has been recently to tweet all sorts of things, namely why women should drive in Saudi for economic reasons. He was tweeting a couple weeks ago about how the country is spending $4 billion a year to import labor and those remittances go home simply to drive women around, which he does not think is a good idea. Speaking of driving, Manal Al-Sharif started a new women's driving campaign in Saudi and the women are using YouTube. They post videos of themselves on YouTube. Now when the women attempted a driving campaign back in 1990, the state controlled the narrative. The state was able to convince people that these women were Zionist spies, CIA agents, and worse. They had their passports taken away. They were vilified. In many respects, these prominent women, 40 of them, in many respects their lives were really upended and ruined. But today, the women who are driving, it's impossible for the state to control the narrative anymore. They post videos of themselves on YouTube, often with their husbands and brothers sitting next to them. Now you're not going to see the driving ban disappear anytime soon for these efforts, but it is normalizing for people the idea of women driving and it's beginning to chip away at that incredible taboo in Saudi. Women working. I mean, you have lots of women who are breadwinners today and I can tell you it's really hard to be a breadwinner and maintain that very conservative, fundamentalist notion of women. They're in conflict with each other and you see more and more women entering the workforce, low workforce participation rate, but climbing slowly in these countries. And you have lots of women role models today, more and more, all across the region. Women who are doing all sorts of remarkable things. Business leaders, politicians, journalists, Sahar Al-Salam, a noted businesswoman in Egypt, Haifa Al-Mansur, director of a Saudi film who's got international recognition. Actually, it's a remarkable film called Wajda. I really recommend all... It's the first film filmed by a woman director in Saudi that is one international acclaim and it's in movie theaters right now. Lubna Al-Kasimi who is a tech entrepreneur who's now minister for trade in the UAE. So you've got women all... I just picked out three, but there's so many. And again, the lived reality of their lives is going in an opposite direction from that conservative narrative. Now, it won't be easy. We all know Malala. And in the name of Sharia and the name of religion, people have tried to kill her. This is a battle going on. It's a battle of ideas. It's a battle of culture and mores. It's a battle of religion. It's a battle of culture that is really playing out in some very violent ways. And we'll continue to do so. This will not be an easy transition. But I really do think that women are, in a way, more mobilized, more engaged, more aware than they've ever been. And the tide of history is on their side. Thank you. Thank you for your superb talk. You've really given us insight into a world which we share on this globe. And it doesn't come from opinion. It comes from research and talking to people. We do have some time for questions. So I have a question for you. I recently read from one of my classes, Mona El-Tahoui's article, Why Thank You. Have you read it? I haven't. So I was doing a talk about Sharia, where a real class used to be next to me. We were talking about a class about, and we watched the video where Mona and El-Tahoui were talking and debating and having some debating, which is interesting how they respected each other so much, but fell in different sides, and it showed age, also, how they fell in these sides. But Mona said something about how people in isolation move their mind, their heart, and their lives. What do you think about that? That women still need, say that again, the last point. Women still need to remove the move our mind, their hearts, and their lives. The ideas that he had instilled within his brain, they need to remove that from everything they do. I think women and men, it's not just specific to women, to Egyptians. Look, the Egyptian Revolution has really proceeded and fits and starts. And I'm not a fan of the Muslim Brotherhood, by any means. They overreached. They took a 51% majority as a mandate to rewrite some very fundamental laws and push the country in a direction that it wasn't ready to go in. And you saw the backlash. You saw people react with dismay. And you saw millions of people take to the streets this summer. But I worry deeply about the direction Egypt's going in right now when you have any type of voice of opposition today being labeled as a traitor to the country, being threatened with imprisonment. Muhammad al-Baraday can't even return to Egypt. He's in exile right now. You know, you've got the Deputy Prime Minister on the defensive because he was talking about trying to have some type of reconciliation with the Brotherhood. I think my bottom line is that that page I showed you of those secular modernizers, they tried through force to put Islam in a box. And it didn't go so well. And I think that the military government in Egypt today is also overreaching. And maybe it's because they still have Mubarak in their heart. I'm glad that we have your son to thank for getting you here today. But I'm also interested in what brought you here to this topic. And I wonder if you would spend just a few minutes reflecting on how you came to this study. And I have a daughter that's interested in the Middle East. And so I'm interested in, I'm sure there are many of them here. What role do you think that Americans play, American scholars in this revolution of sorts too? So my background is political science. I have a PhD in international relations and a real focus in political economy. And I write, in addition to writing about what's going on with women in the region, I write more broadly about the political economy of the region. I've been writing a lot recently about Egypt's economy. And I would argue that the Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown as much because of economic mismanagement as anything. But when I look at the political economy of the region, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that when you under-invest in half-year population and under-utilize half-year population, it really handicaps you economically. And these are countries that have underperformed economically for the most part. They have, for their income levels, they have very bad social indicators for their income levels. And a lot of that has to do with the low status of women in these societies. And when you look at countries like Yemen and to some extent Egypt, Morocco, you really can't improve the economic fundamentals without closing some of the significant gender gaps that exist. And now countries that have on an educational front close those gender gaps, they're really struggling with how they incorporate women politically and economically. And so that's what interested me. I don't approach it from a human rights perspective. I'm not a gender studies person. I never took one course in gender studies, actually. I really approach it from an economic angle. And what can Americans do? Well, this is not our battle. This is a real battle for the heart and soul of Islam in many ways. But what the United States can do and is doing, it provides a very free and open environment for Islamic scholars to write and to argue. You know, if you read my book, a lot of the arguments that women activists are using are from very well regarded Islamic scholars who've left Egypt and Kuwait. They've left Libya and Sudan. And they now work here in this country. And their ideas are slowly, Leila Ahmed, you know, they're slowly percolating back into the region. How about this society, and can we do to support this society? Well, that means, you know, in many respects women are the backbone of civil society. And that's where you see a lot of women engaging with civil society in these countries. And if you look at some of the most successful civil society groups, and you scratch the surface, they all have an international connection. They all do. They get funding from the West. They get training from the West. They get, you know, media attention from the West that gives them credibility. You know, the woman I showed you the picture of, Muzdamulia, she's really a remarkable Indonesian Islamic scholar, she's also a civil society activist. She really pushes for women's engagement and she pushes for a more, you know, the progressive interpretation of Islam to translate into more favorable laws for women in Indonesia. And she was selected for the State Department has something called their Women of Courage Award. And maybe, I don't know, six or seven years ago she was selected for that. And she thought long and hard about whether she should accept the award because it comes with a downside. And in the end she said, no, I'm going to take the award because my critics already call me a slave of the West and a stooge of America and, you know, worse. But when I stand up and get that award on the podium next to Condi Rice, it gives me a stature in the world that I wouldn't have. And so she did. And I really take my cue from a lot of the women I've written about who say, you know, that's for us to judge whether that help hurts or helps us more. And they're smart about that. I want to talk about the education that's been on my head. The very mind that I come from in this as well. And you mentioned a very good point of life because I've been teaching for a very long time. And I don't believe in numbers, to be quite honest, because the numbers are very high. Like I come from Jordan, like 70%, I'm highly educated. But I think a point has to be made which is very significant and crucial. What kind of education are women receiving? And that you should ponder over in your own head because basically it's a broad living, like a teacher that's going to go to the classroom and tell them what he's thinking or she's thinking. And basically it's going to be to parrot back what the teacher is saying. Education is not a lot of concern. Teaching our students how to contest, how to challenge, how to be independent, critical thinkers. So that is why we have numbers. Where do they go? Like 70% to 80%. And very mind, who are the policy makers? Who are the decision makers? And control. They dominate. So yes, they are educated, but basically they don't do anything with this education because the education is not of quality. I need someone to be able to look me in the eye and to say, you know what, what do you see? I say, you will. How many women say that? This is a bit very important. So yes, the numbers are growing in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Jordan, in Palestine, and you name it. But this is quantitative. I want a study, basically to see what these women are trying to do. That's my new book. The point you're making is a good one, but it's not just women who lack in critical thinking, it's men too. But the big change is you are seeing women now with higher literacy and numeracy skills than men. And we're seeing it across the board. And in some countries it's beginning to create a new crisis. Where boys are dropping out of school and girls are staying not only through secondary school, but through university. And this is as much a crisis for boys as it is a problem of figuring out a place for women in society. But you look at some of the Gulf countries and poorly educated young men, what opportunities do they have? In Saudi they join the Mutawah, the religious police. In the Emirates they join the police. And I can tell you from this new book I'm writing that the police academies are distraught at the quality of the low quality of male education. I mean they're not even literate anymore. And they're looking to this population to be the backbone of their police force. And they're really really concerned. So quality of education is a huge problem. You know, you're right that there is a lot of learning. But there were a lot of young people who took to the streets to ask questions and demand answers and change in a way that I think surprised a lot of people. What I've learned from you today is that it seems that Saudi Arabia is leading the charge as far as well this war against women. With that being said why is there oil industry just thriving like none other? Why isn't anybody boycotting them? You know, what we've seen in the past is boycotting has helped solve problems such as the apartheid issue in South Africa. Countries are not allowed to trade with them that solve the problem. But it seems as though oil industry is just thriving as they're the richest family probably in the world right now. We all depend on Saudi oil but that's changing rapidly. And I think you're going to see if you're reading the headlines you see a lot of friction right now between the US and Saudi. It's over Syria it's over rapprochement with Iran. But increasingly you may see it over some of the more fundamental human rights differences that divide our country too that have always been swept under the carpet because we have relied on Saudi oil and we will as a nation become more energy independent but as a world we will still depend a lot on Saudi oil for many years to come so I'm not anticipating any type of boycott movement for the Saudis but the other thing is that this as I said this is really something that has really got to come from within Saudi. Us saying you're terrible and you treat your women badly is actually not going to lead to a lot of changes in that part of the world. This is something that is a cultural shift that's happening slowly very slowly very incrementally but I really do feel that the momentum is ultimately going to be on the side of women. Here. My research into of the women's movements and I wonder if you could speak to the divisions because you alluded to something that gets called state feminism I mean only for Heba titled himself the liberator of Tunisian women but meanwhile the secular the official women's organizations that go back to the 1950s and international human rights and women's rights community are absolutely revived by the bank of women in Tunisia partly because they signed on to say the 1981 law to ban the hijab which kept religious women out of the public sphere out of colleges, out of the workforce and put them in prison and so the women's rights movement is heavily implicated by its association with Layla Banalee and the state feminism so I wonder if you could address this phenomenon of state feminism because it puts feminism in such an adversarial category with respect to the attitudes of most women in the Middle East. That's right and I alluded to it with the picture of Suzanne Mubarak in Egypt, I mean state feminism in Tunisia, in Egypt all of these countries form of top down imposed state feminism and the shocking thing is that for me, in Egypt the party that put forward the bill in parliament to roll back divorce rights for women it wasn't the Salafis it wasn't the Muslim Brotherhood it was actually the waft party which is the traditional sort of liberal party in Egypt and you can see how it's attacked from the right and the left in that country because of its association with state authoritarianism and you can read Orhan Pamuk the headscarve wars in Turkey or whatever it is women are set up as a political football and Layla Ahmed's work is very perceptive on this and the whole struggle over the veil take the veil off, wear the veil take it off, wear the veil women are very much in the cross hairs so to speak and it has been very detrimental I think to the formation of a women's movement and you have deep divisions between secular women and faith based women that I write a fair amount about in my book because it's overcoming those divisions that you'll see move forward but really not until they're able to do that okay one more maybe from over here oh no I'm happy I'll take some more but then it's on timing My name is Darius Jonathan and I have been going to Egypt every summer and I have seen the last change of government when I was in Cairo the thing that is missing in your study is the role of the family the social traditions the social ties that whatever woman is educated or not the brother who is illiterate when you said it was illiterate who went to my dresses and so on has full control over that young woman so if you don't really look at that relationship between the family and social ties and the educated women who will never reach anywhere unless those elements are changed you will never see any development in terms of women's situation in the Middle East because now families really make decisions whether that woman is educated the young brother will decide to bring this young woman to someone who is illiterate and if she wants to maintain a relationship with the family she has to abide by it and if she refuses she will be ostracized and just imagine that in Middle East ostracized by the family you will end up nowhere and no wonder you know the women who are talking really about the situation of women outside there are divisions in western institutions and so forth talking about changing the book I wrote is really about women in the Middle East who are talking about about women and women's rights not about women outside the region and you're right the family remains the all important unit which is why the battle over family law in these countries is so important and so divisive it's a battle over control and just about every country now has long passed across that Rubicon of choosing to educate girls Saudi Arabia made that decision in 1962 and I think this is a genie that's out of the bottle we're talking again and again about how education doesn't necessarily translate immediately into empowerment it doesn't but it's very hard to have generation after generation of educated women who don't begin to question some of those social norms and let's remember culture is very powerful but it's not immutable culture changes look how quickly our own culture changed over something like gay rights in America I mean boom a decade ago it was one way and today public opinion is so different on that topic and it does attitudes change and what changes attitudes soap operas what changes the way people are structured and organized family law when women are now living under a different set of laws in these countries which is why it's such an important battleground conservatives know that and that's why they fight over polygamy and divorce and custody and inheritance rights the Morsi government instead of closing the deal with the IMF is putting forward bills on divorce laws so you know it's I'm exaggerating a bit there were lots of reasons they didn't close the deal with the IMF but our culture wars pale in comparison a couple more questions over here I was curious if you have any insight into why women are drawn to those areas of math and science and why aren't men and women advancing simultaneously like why is it important together I think women outperforming outnumbering and outperforming men in the stem subjects has almost more to do with men in the region than it does with women I mean one of the things that's really striking is the difference in work ethic among men and women and particularly in the Gulf you know you have women look these are for the most part very very wealthy citizens and they you know women work hard because it's for them a source of freedom you know they like to study and they like to stay in school and work hard in that respect because it gives them more flexibility than entering into marriage at an early age and they're confined to the home and so you know I've done for this new book I'm writing lots of interviews with employers and across the board they say women have a better work ethic than men but it's so hard to employ women this is what they say it's really difficult for them so you know I think that when you look at the women in those stem subjects it has as much to do with very few men going into them because they're hard and there's one more question here so you had mentioned that you're looking at this from an economic perspective and the disadvantages of systematically oppressing women and also that it was a struggle within the Middle East because it was tied to the root of Islam but the disadvantages economically oppressing women are global so I'm wondering if you have looked into other regions of the world where women systematically oppressed and the negative implications that have existed you know when you look globally at this and yes I have a lot there women have made tremendous strides globally tremendous strides but there are three areas of the world where they have lagged Sub-Saharan Africa the Middle East and South Asia there is an overlap in some of those regions with Islam and not there's a lot of culture and tradition that has combined to I think slow women's progress it's not that they haven't had progress it's just been at a slower rate than in other parts of the world so there are lots and lots of studies that look at gender gaps and those three parts of the world have the biggest gender gaps so they have the lowest female literacy rates they have the highest fertility rates those things are highly correlated they have laws that are most unequal for men and women and you know you see religion only in some places but being used as an overlay a justification for what ultimately is what we've been talking about this evening culture and tradition and remember every region had conservative culture and tradition it's just that those three regions have changed more slowly than others thank you thank you