Islamic Feminism

When it comes to Arab feminism, I like to point fingers to Hoda Sharaawi, who literally threw her veil off her head when returning from a women's conference in 1923 at a Cairo train station. Others joined in the action, giving the Islamic feminist movement its first first public triumph.
Islamic feminism isn't inherently the veil debate, however.

Today, the death of Neda has become one of the symbols of the protests following the June 12 elections in Iran. All she wanted, said her music teacher, was the proper vote of the people to be counted (The Times).

Ladan Bouramand, the Iranian activist, writes that the regime would not bother to use brutal forms of repression against dissidents unless it feared them deeply. Nobody would have murdered a young woman in blue jeans—a peaceful, unarmed demonstrator—unless her mere presence on the street presented a dire threat.

One thing remains true, in light of the protests making waves across Iran. It is not Twitter, not the end of the Bush administration, nor the beginning of the Obama one, but the women that have caused such a riot.

As Anne Applebaum writes, "the truth is that the high turnout was the result of many years of organizational work carried out by small groups of civil rights activists and, above all, women's groups, working largely unnoticed and without much outside help."

And in the words of Egyptian lawyer, Qasim Amin, women's liberation was a patriotic duty that would serve all Egypt, not just its females. "The evidence of history, confirms and demonstrates that the status of women is inseparably tied to the status of a nation."