Early on in the democratic transition, an ambitious gender parity law was introduced to ensure women would have a voice in the constituent assembly.

For some, however, this law did not go far enough. There are no gender quotas for seats in the assembly, for example. And most parties have men at the head of the majority of their lists, meaning parity on the campaign trail is unlikely to translate into parity in the body that will rewrite the country’s constitution and appoint a new government.

Al Jazeera’s Yasmine Ryan spoke to a diverse range of Tunisian women about how they have experienced the campaign period, and their aspirations for the future.

Islam Boubaher: Voting for Al-Nahda

Islam Boubaher, a 25-year-old engineering student, joined al-Nahda immediately after the uprising. Her father has been a member of the pro-democracy Islamist movement for many years.

She has been an active volunteer for the party throughout the election campaign, and was running an al-Nahda booth for students in the town of Hammam Sousse when Al Jazeera spoke to her.

On the campaign trail, Boubaher says she has encountered women who fear al-Nahda coming to power, but she believes their concern is misguided.

“Some people are convinced by al-Nahda, others are not,” she says.

“Some women are worried that they won’t be able to work and that they will be forced to stay at home.”

“But this isn’t al-Nahda’s position, otherwise I wouldn’t be out here campaigning for them.”

Boubaher hopes to launch her own business once she graduates, and says her biggest concern for the future of Tunisia is economic development.

Sana Charnine: Voting for the Democratic Modernist Coalition

Sana Charnine says she is very worried about the outcome of the vote on Sunday because of the likelihood that al-Nahda will win a large portion of the seats in the constituent assembly.

Al Jazeera spoke with her at the final rally for the Democratic Modernist Coalition (PDM), where thousands had gathered in El Menzah, north of the capital, in support for the coalition of centre-left parties which champion gender equality.

“I will be voting for the PDM because it’s a democratic coalition of several parties, and because they support freedom of expression and freedom of religion,” she said.

“I’m very afraid, there is a real risk from the Islamists. There’s only one party that scares me, al-Nahda,” she says.

“Our family is very open. We are Muslim, but open-minded and modern.”

Dhouha Trabelsi: Unlikely to vote

Dhouha Trabelsi is unsure if she will be able to join her compatriots in the country’s first genuine shot at democracy on Sunday.

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to vote, because I’ll be working,” she says.

Like many Tunisians, she is too busy trying to make a living to have much time to play an active role in the political process and does not know much about any of the political parties.

The 26-year-old will be working a nine hour shift at Baguette et Baguette, a fastfood store in downtown Tunis, the capital. Despite having a degree in hydromechnical engineering, she has been unable to find skilled, well-paid work.

For Trabelsi (no relation to Tunisia’s former first lady Leila Trabelsi), the number one concern is economic development.

“I hope things will change in every way – politically, socially and especially economically,” she explains.

Kalthoum Triki and Mounia Jameleddine: Encouraging other women to vote

Along with a group of other women in Sousse, Mounia Jameleddine and Kalthoum Triki co-founded the Karama Assocation in April, an organisation that aims to represent women across the country, especially in rural areas.

“We’re working to achieve complete equality between men and women, and to reach out to women who have no idea about their rights and [who] accept their fate,” Jameleddine said.

“We believe in democracy and in women’s progress,” Triki told Al Jazeera. “We want to maintain the rights we already have and to go further.”

In the Sousse region, Karama’s members were helping to encourage women to enrol to vote for the constituent assembly in July and August, visiting women in their homes, in shopping malls, at the beach and at festivals.

“Sousse is the second highest town in Tunisia in terms of voluntary inscriptions,” Triki noted.

After years of rigged elections under now-ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, many women have been sceptical – believing that nothing had really changed this time round, they said.

“Hopefully, when they see that this election is truly transparent, mentalities will change, because it’s not easy to make people change their minds,” Jameleddine concluded.

Om Zayed: Boycotting the election

Om Zayed is an activist for Hizb ut-Tahrir, a conservative Islamist party that calls for all Muslim nations to be united under a single caliph, or Muslim leader.

Her party will not be competing in the elections after the Tunisian authorities refused to grant it authorisation, and Om Zayed is boycotting the election.

The young mother is strongly critical of women who have been advocating for existing women’s rights to be protected, especially when it comes to the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (ATFD by its French acronym).

“These women are enemies of God and his Prophet and yet they claim to speak in our name,” she told Al Jazeera.

Om Zayed denounces the rights women gained under former President Habib Bourguiba, which include the right to initiate divorce, equal pay and to access abortion facilities.

“These women call for the gains made by Tunisian women to be preserved, but what gains are they referring to?”

“The media claim that [they] represent the majority [of Tunisian women] but in reality, they only represent a tiny minority.”

Monia Bensaid: Undecided

In Jebel Lahmar, a poor suburb to the northwest of Tunis, Monia Bensaid is unsure who she will be voting for.

“There are too many parties,” she told Al Jazeera. “At first, I thought I would vote for al-Nahda, but given the recent events, I’m not so sure. I don’t trust them.”

The mother of three began to have second thoughts after she witnessed violent protests against Nessma TV.

Although al-Nahda moved swiftly to condemn the acts of violence, Bensaid is suspicious of the party’s links to the hundreds of men who came to Jebel Lahmar on October 9.

“I watched them [the protesters] from the roof of my house and I saw strange men I’d never seen before,” she said. “These people are tainting the name of Islam.”

She says she hopes politicians that are “honest and God-fearing” will be elected.

aljazeera

In what a magistrate has called an ”act of great bravery”, the girl sought a court order to stop her parents taking her out of Australia to marry a man she has met only once.

The girl, who cannot be named, approached the Legal Aid Commission in Sydney after her parents organised the wedding despite her saying she did not want to marry the man.

In the Federal Magistrates Court yesterday, magistrate Joe Harman granted an ex parte application and placed the girl on the PACE Alert system at all points of departure from Australia to prevent her parents spiriting her out of the country.

Mr Harman praised the girl’s bravery in using the legal system to challenge her parents’ authority. The girl, given the pseudonym Ms Madley by the court, was fearful of her mother’s reaction once she found out about her application, he said.

He ordered her parents not to assault, harass, threaten or intimidate her, or question her about the proceedings. ”Her actions in approaching the Legal Aid Commission, let alone this court, might be perceived as disrespectful of her parents and disobedient of there will,” he said.

He said the girl had displayed maturity not only by taking legal action to protect herself, but also in challenging part of the Lebanese Islamic culture in which she was brought up. ”It is not the right of any parent to cause their child to be married against their will, whether in accordance with the Australian law or otherwise.”

He said there was a psychological risk to Ms Madley if he did not make orders preventing her being forced into marriage she did not want, which he described as ”a principle that is contrary to all our legal processes hold dear and which would indeed, under Australian law, render the marriage void, as it is absent genuine consent.”

However, he said he was not criticising any culture that had arranged marriages. ”The arrangements proposed should not be judged or criticised from a Western perspective, but must be viewed through the eyes of those who live and appreciate that culture,” he said.

smh

The country’s government has seized copies of the album that came through the airport in Beirut late last week because they were deemed potentially offensive to the Christian population in the country, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“We collected the CDs on the grounds that the music was offensive to religion,” one official from the office of censorship told the newspaper. “They are still in our offices. We are still deciding what to do with them.”

A more specific reason for the potential ban was not given. Gaga’s second single from the album, “Judas,” was also banned on Lebanese radio in April.

According to the newspaper, a 1962 Lebanese Law states, “Distributors are prohibited from circulating media that diverges from public decency and morality, or is at odds with nationalistic or religious beliefs.”

Gaga initially ignited religious controversy in early May over her “Judas” music video, which depicts the singer as Mary Magdelene in a biker apostle gang. The 25-year-old singer denies that the video is meant to be an attack on religion.

“This video is not meant to be an attack on religion. I respect and love everyone’s beliefs,” Gaga told MTV. “I’m a religious and spiritual person who’s obsessed with religious art. I’m obsessed with it… I believe I was put on this earth to cause a ruckus… I just want to keep making stuff that’s great and thought-provoking.”

In the video, there appears to be a love triangle between Mary Magdalene, Judas (Norman Reedus from “The Boondock Saints”) and Jesus (Rick Gonzalez from “Coach Carter” and “Reaper”) which is manefested in an erotic re-imagining of Magdalene washing Jesus’ feet.

Lebanese take part in a rally calling for Secularism in downtown Beirut on April 25, 2010. Thousands of Lebanese marched to parliament in Beirut in a peaceful rally demanding the secularisation of a state long built on sectarianism

Demonstrations are hardly unusual in Lebanon, where politics is often conducted on the streets. But the few thousand people who gathered in Beirut on Sunday to march on the country’s parliament made for an unusual sight, mostly because of what was missing. There were hardly any religious symbols or sectarian political banners among them, in a country where religion and politics are practically synonymous. But those who showed up for Sunday’s Secular Pride March bore no crosses, crescents or portraits of saints or martyrs; they carried only roses and the red and white cedar flag of the republic in protest at religion’s domination over civil and political life in Lebanon. “What’s your sect? None of your business!” they chanted.

While Lebanon has more religious diversity than any country in the Middle East — giving it a regional reputation for moderation and modernity — almost all civil matters from birth to death are governed by religious authorities rather than the state. That means, for example, that marriages between men and women of different religious backgrounds are forbidden, forcing mixed-sect couples to elope to Cyprus and Turkey in order to get married. The private religious-school system dominates the smaller public school system, and has a sectarian slant in its teaching. Jobs are doled out by the government according to sectarian quotas, and anyone who wants to run for office has to join a list controlled by a sectarian political party. “At work or anywhere else, people automatically ask you about your sect and from that they stereotype you,” says Lina, a 25 year-old student who attended the march. “In Lebanon, you can’t exist outside of your sect.”

Pure secularism as a political movement is a relatively new phenomenon in Lebanon and the Middle East, and very much outside the mainstream. In the past, secular movements were typically tied to ethnic or nationalist ones, such as the post-colonial Pan-Arab national movements that swept the region after World War II. In contrast, Secular Pride in Lebanon doesn’t yet appear to have either deep roots or a clear agenda. The marchers tended to be students from elite universities, or members of left-leaning NGOs representing a broad array of social causes such as gay rights and women’s rights, but not a broad swath of public opinion. Still, despite its limited base, secularism’s diagnosis of Lebanon’s ills remains acute.

Lebanese secular activist, holds up a banner during a march calling for secularism and the abolishment of sectarianism, in Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday April 25, 2010.

The powerful role of religion and the weak role of the state is in part the result of what Lebanese call confessionalism, a sectarian balance of power set up by French colonial overlords in the early 20th century and maintained by the Lebanese after independence in 1943. Under the Lebanese confessional system, all the country’s positions of political power are divided among the countries 18 recognized religious groups — the president must be Christian, the prime minister must be Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of parliament must be Si’ite Muslim.

But a growing number of Lebanese say that the country’s sectarian system, rather than preventing conflict between religious groups, actually encourages it, by making each sect the de-facto political rival of the other. And in the atmosphere of suspicion created by confessionalism, foreign powers have proven adept at playing Lebanese groups off against one another, resulting in cycles of war and upheaval, notably the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, and the current standoff between Iran and the U.S. over Hizballah, the anti-Israel Lebanese Shi’ite militant group.

The question of whether or not Lebanon can move beyond the colonial legacy and evolve into a post-sectarian society is important for the whole region. The ethnic and sectarian balances around which the U.S. designed post-Sadda governance in Iraq, though less rigid and codified than Lebanon’s, has had a similar effect of institutionalizing conflict and weakening the state. Many Iraqi wonder if they, like the Lebanese, are doomed to cycles of civil war.

A Lebanese activist carries a sign demanding a secular system ( Civil Marriage is not a Civil war) during a demonstration in front of parliament in Beirut April 25, 2010.

Changing Lebanon’s sectarian system, however, would require that a political class led mostly by sectarian warlords and their families dismantle the very source of their power. Even minor attempts at reform, such as a recent decision by the modernizing interior minister to allow people to strike their religious identity from their government records, have failed to achieve momentum. And in a country where not only politics, but also community and family are largely defined by religion, opting out of a religious identity can mean opting out of society. Secular Pride organizers such as Alexander Polikevitch hope that Internet social networking will help fill some of the vacuum. Polikevitch and his friends tested the idea of a secular movement on Facebook page, and its page immediately drew 3,000 members. But while they may feel less isolated than before, they are divided on how best to pursue their goals: Should they try and enter the political process by having secularism recognized as one of Lebanon’s religious groups, or would that simply reinforce the system they want to change? “The achievement of our goals will be a long time coming, in 20 years perhaps,” said Polikevitch. Whether Lebanon has that much time before the next war breaks out remains to be seen. Time

By Ghassan Karam, Special to Ya Libnan

It is paradoxical when the response to an effort to eliminate sectarianism is voiced in sectarian terms. That would be similar to countering an argument for integration in purely bigoted segregationist terms. Unfortunately that is the level or should I say the low level to which the standards of deconfessionalism  discourse has fallen in Lebanon.

The major fault line on which the shaky Lebanese system is built, as we have discussed many times before, is the discriminatory sectarian structure. Speaker Beri has finally decided that it is time to appoint a commission , as called for by the Taef agreement, to study the process that is needed in order to eliminate sectarianism from the state. It should be obvious that it would be difficult to find fault with such a democratic call. Such a call has created oppositions from all across the political spectrum, as is to be expected, because if implemented then it will shake the current system of political leadership to its core; as it should. The opposition was to be expected and the bankruptcy of their arguments was to be expected as well. It has been very entertaining watching one leader after another walk down the plank by adopting nonsensical positions in an attempt to critique the Speaker’s plan. Ms. Mouawad even had the audacity to state with a straight face that eliminating sectarianism is similar to eliminating democracy. Does she really expect anyone whose IQ is above 60 to take such a position seriously?  Apparently she did and it looks like she had the blessings of Patriarch Sfeir since she made her declarations after a meeting with him in Bkirki. That should serve as a strong  argument , if there ever was a need for any, why people of the cloth should confine their utterings to that which they know best, myths of creation and intelligent design.

It appears that many of the same politicians who have opposed the Beri plan were not content with the level of derision that their counter plans have produced and so they proceeded to look for newer areas to show their ignorance and farcical powers of analysis.  Low and behold they did find a new area to add to their ludicrous arguments in another Beri initiative  which calls upon the  legislature to put the finishing touches on the plan to lower the voting age in Lebanon from 21 to 18. And what do you think is the reason for their opposition? You guessed it, a purely sectarian mindset. The estimates by the Ministry of the interior is that if the voting age is to be lowered to 18 then the potential number of voters will increase by about 280,000; three quarters of whom are Moslems and the other one quarter are Christians. So one more time what do these Christian geniuses come up with to counter this other very democratic proposal? Why they come up with their own conditions to approve the lowering of the voting age. They will agree to vote for the new law provided that Lebanon adopts simultaneously a plan that grants everyone who is of a Lebanese descent the Lebanese citizenship and the right  to vote.

Do they really want to offer the 12-15 million Lebanese scattered around the world the right to vote in both national and municipal elections?  Do they really want individuals who have never been to the country , who cannot speak its language and who do not understand any of its problems to have the final say in what policies to adopt and what to reject?  Of course not. This is another purely selfish and cynical stand calculated to disenfranchise 280,000 Lebanese the majority of whom belong to a different sect. Someone should remind these politicians to be careful what they wish for, their wishes might come true and the votes from their diabolical plan might come back to haunt them.

(The writer was in the past and remains a strong vocal critic of Mr. Beri with the exception of the above two initiatives)

APodcast of the above can be heard at: ramblings11.mypodcast.com