Four years to the day after the election law was changed to give Kuwaiti women full political rights it looked as though the battle had been won as four outstanding women were elected to the national parliament.
Masouma al-Mubarak, a political scientist and former professor who served as Kuwait's first female minister, came in first among the 10 candidates winning seats in the first district. Salwa al-Jasser, a professor of education at Kuwait University and head of a local NGO, took 10th place in the second district. Rola Dashti, an economist, head of a family business, and the first woman to be elected chair of a mixed-sex professional association, was seventh in the third district. Aseel al-Awadi, professor of philosophy and the woman whose 11th-place standing in 2008 convinced many Kuwaitis that a vote for a woman would not be wasted, proved her point by coming second a year later, also in the third district.
All four winners came from the three (of five) primarily urban districts but a fifth woman, lawyer Thekra al-Rashidi, got 6,635 votes in a tribal constituency. In 15th place, she drew predictions that she would follow in Aseel's footsteps next time.
The celebrations were hardly over, however, when a lawyer brought a case against the two second-district winners, Rola and Aseel, for having violated the election law – because they do not veil. A last-minute and vaguely worded add-on to the law requires female – but not male – candidates and elected officials to abide by "Islamic law". What precisely was meant was not clarified at the time but few saw it as more than a demand for separate polling stations for women and men. Yet the very vagueness of the provision opened possibilities for less generous interpretations and no one should be surprised that they are popping up, however well or poorly supported by scripture. Even before the lawsuit was filed, for example, an MP from district four, where Thekra had done so well, announced that women in the parliament "must" wear a headscarf.
That opponents of women's rights are reduced to making wardrobe attacks is partly a reflection of the quality and diversity of these new MPs. All four earned doctoral degrees from US institutions. Two are Shia and two are Sunni and one from each sect wears hijab.
It is easy to lump all the women together as "liberals", especially in light of Islamist opposition to their candidacy and election (during the campaign a Salafi cleric issued a fatwa saying it was a sin for a woman to run for office and a sin for anyone to vote for a woman). Yet they should rather be seen as the independents they claimed to be when they ran.
Indeed, another surprising outcome of this election was the voters' preference for candidates who did not run as members of a political group or bloc, but as individuals promising to represent the nation as a whole. This is similar to public opinion trends in Britain where voters are disenchanted with the present party system and top-down policy making, and want to see more attention paid to popular opinion and common, national interests by their parliamentary representatives.
The four female MPs are among the 21 "new faces" elected in 2009, a year which has also brought other upsets. Islamists were disappointed by their poor showing. The Kuwaiti branch of the Sunni Muslim Brothers did not field an official list and only one MP in the 2009 parliament is affiliated with that group. Two affiliates of the Salafin, also Sunnis, won. Others, like Waleed Tabtabai, the informal leader of the parliamentary Salafin, ran and won as independents. There are nine Shia in the 2009 parliament but seven, including both women, are secularist in their orientations and are not affiliated with a Shia group. Islamists under any label tended to garner fewer votes than the female winners, and incumbents overall had lower vote totals than many newcomers.
Although tribal groupings increased their parliamentary representation from 24 to 25, there are new faces there as well, with the promise of a woman among them next time if Thekra's strong showing in 2009 should be followed by a win.
These voting patterns strongly suggest that Kuwaitis were opting for change.
Unfortunately, they are unlikely to get it, or at least not the change many are hoping for. Last week the reappointed prime minister unveiled the line-up of the new council of ministers. Seven of the 16 were "new" in that they had not been in the previous government. Among them is a veteran cabinet member whose association with corrupt practices had forced his replacement after the 2006 election. Now he is back.
Corruption remains a hot issue in Kuwait, whose position in Transparency International's corruption perceptions index has slipped from 45 in 2005 to 65 in 2008. Among the attractions of female candidates is the general belief that they are "clean" as well as relatively untainted by "politics as usual". Being clean is unlikely to be enough to save even this parliament from confrontation with a government whose composition is a product of cynicism, if not outright mischief. Yet if enough new and old faces can resist the Balkanisation that passes for parliamentary politics in Kuwait, and look at one another as potential allies in defence of their institutions, the 2009 election might have even more astounding results in store.
* Islam
* Middle East
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/03/kuwait-parliament-women
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