Thirteen years after they joined the revolutionary wave sweeping across the Middle East and north Africa, Syrians can say they have consigned the name of Bashar al-Assad to the history books alongside Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen. But as the past 13 years have shown in all those countries, liberation requires more than removing one man from the presidential palace. We women, especially, know that.
Today I am thinking of Razan Zaitouneh, a Syrian revolutionary who along with three of her comrades, collectively known as the Douma Four, disappeared in rebel-held territory on 9 December 2013 – 11 years less a day before Assad was toppled. Zaitouneh’s revolution targeted everyone: the Assad regime, rebel groups and Islamist militants alike.
“We did not do a revolution and lose thousands of souls so that such monsters can come and repeat the same unjust history,” she wrote to her friend and fellow human rights activist Nadim Houry, in an email dated May 2013. “These people need to be held to account just like the regime.” What good would it do to replace one oppressor with a different one?
In my work as a journalist I have interviewed women from Tunisia, Syria, Libya and Egypt about their experiences with popular uprisings. For women, there have always been two revolutions to undertake: one fought with men against the regimes that oppress everyone, and a second against the regimes on the street corner and in the bedroom that, together with the ruling regime, oppress anyone who is not a cisgender, heterosexual man. It is a reckoning with our culture and religion, with authoritarian rulers and Islamists – two sides of the coin of authoritarianism. Such a reckoning is essentially a feminist one. And it is what will eventually free us.
It should drive us all beyond rage that revolutionary imaginations almost always stop outside the home. “All those compañeros [male comrades], however radical they may be in cafes, unions and even affinity groups, seem to drop their costumes as lovers of female liberation at the doors of their homes. Inside, they behave with their compañeras just like common husbands,” the Spanish anarchist and resistance fighter Lola Iturbe wrote in 1935.
I want us to remove Assad not only from the presidential palace, but to overthrow him from the street corner and the bedroom. I want every revolution to topple not just the statues of the tyrant, but what I call the trifecta of patriarchy – the tyrant who lives in the state, the street and the home. And the hardest revolution of them all is the one at home, because all dictators go home.
As jubilant as we should be to see dictators toppled, and as thrilled as we are to see those countries stumble towards liberation and justice, however clumsily, I am painfully aware that although women may have been at the barricades beside men, post-revolution, they are in danger of losing the rights they do have.
It was all well and good to march together, to risk our lives confronting the regime, but what happens after the protest is over? What good is the revolution against the state, when the home remains the most dangerous place for women and girls around the world, including in Syria?
The women in Syria celebrating the destruction of jails and dungeons that for decades held thousands upon thousands of political opponents must be wondering when the prisons of patriarchy will also be destroyed. Girls indoctrinated along with generations of other Syrians on the infallibility of the 53-year-old Assad dynasty, only to see its collapse, must be wondering why “it’s our culture” or “it’s our religion” or whatever other excuse is given to determine what they must wear, limit their ability to move freely, or coerce them into early marriage, cannot also be dismantled.
Queer Syrians watching what they have long been told was impossible becoming possible must be wondering why their liberation from homophobia or transphobia must remain impossible.
Am I being too far-fetched? Have I let freedom go to my head? No, that is exactly where freedom should go, because the battle over women’s bodies can be won only by a revolution of the mind. Too often, women are scolded for daring to bring up identity politics, and are urged to put aside women’s issues for the larger goal of solidarity or fidelity to the revolution. This is a mistake. It is exactly now, as the opportunity to remake and reconstruct is before us, that we must tenaciously insist on liberation for all. It is when everything is up in the air that we decide what to catch.
For the revolution to liberate us all, it must be much more than regime change. I want a revolution that is far more ambitious than that. Aim higher! Demand the revolution that changes people.
Revolutions have long been about men – what they want and how they get it – because patriarchy determines the words we use and the ways we see. The laws and lexicon of human rights do not recognise that intimate partner violence is a form of torture, because it is only what the state can do to men that is taken seriously – and what men do to women is just “domestic violence”.
Similarly, revolutions are rarely counted as a success unless men can say they changed the regime – that is, snatched some of the power of the state for themselves. We are told the “real” revolution, the one that media and history books record, happens out there against the state by men and for men, and unless we change the regime, nothing has changed.
When I was writing Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, I would hear from some men that it “wasn’t the time for feminism”. “Men aren’t free either, you know,” they would tell me, without irony or a whit of understanding of patriarchy’s harms to them.
And my answer would always be: “Indeed, the state oppresses us all, men and women. However, together, the state, the street and the home oppress women.” It is the revolution against that trifecta of patriarchy that will liberate us all.
The real revolution, the real battle, is between patriarchy and women and girls. Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in the presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes – unless we topple that tyrant in our minds, our bedrooms, and on our street corners – our revolution has not even begun.
Mona Eltahawy is the author of the Feminist Giant newsletter. She wrote several articles from Syria for the Guardian in 1999-2000, including a report on the funeral of Hafez al-Assad
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