IMAN BIBARS IS a feminist, not a women’s rights activist there’s a world of a difference between the two labels, claims the veteran advocate of women’s empowerment.

“Feminists believe there is absolutely no difference between men and women. A woman can go into any field, and if she has the training, the spirit and the freedom, she can excel,” explains Bibars, who holds a PhD in development studies and anthropology. “We don’t believe in this ‘complementary’ issue between the sexes. Individuals, human beings, complement each other it is not a question of gender.

“Women’s rights organizations, on the other hand, want to support women because they feel women are discriminated against, but there is a limit. They feel we shouldn’t disrupt the ‘harmony’ of society, which is really, in my opinion, another way of saying we are not truly equal.”

Bibars has been involved in women’s issues for close to two decades now, having founded the Association of the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW) back in 1987. One of the organization’s crowning achievements came about last year, after nearly twenty years of lobbying, when the citizenship law was passed, granting the right to citizenship to children of Egyptian women married to foreign men.

But while Bibars acknowledges that Egypt has seen many improvements on the legal front with regards to women, including the revision of the personal status law in 2000, she still worries about the future.

“When any country regresses politically and economically, women are the easiest, most visible targets. This is happening right now in Egypt and the Arab world,” she explains. “People feel they are underdogs, that they are being humiliated as Muslims, and they want to feel proud by resisting. We cannot resist by arms we don’t have them and we cannot resist through education because we don’t have it, nor do we have technology so we resist through our women by veiling them. That’s what the Islamists do. They want to send a message of power through the weakest segment of society.”

“Women have no control over their resources, bodies or even identity. You are defined as a mother, or a sister or a wife or a daughter. Sometimes you are even called by the name of your son,” she says.

Bibars claims that progress has been limited to a small circle of society. “There has been generally more of an acceptance of women in different places. Many people now think, ‘Yes, women can do this or that.’ But most of this change in attitude has been on an elite level,” she says. “Why are there not more women being voted into Parliament, for example? Because people will not vote for a woman simply because she is a woman. It has to do with the fact that most of the progress has been only at the top; it hasn’t seeped to the bottom yet. When you do advocacy alone, like some organizations do, you are only talking to the elite. You are not changing the people on the street.”

And when it comes to the workplace, women may have had it better under the command economy of Nasser than in today’s growing private sector, she claims.

“The status of women in general, on the legal and national perception level, has improved. However, employment opportunities for women have decreased,” she claims. “At the end of the ‘70s, women had equal opportunities for employment because the government employed everyone not that I agree with this but this was how it was. So women had an equal chance in government employment. Then came [Sadat’s] Open Door policy [of 1975] and the beginning of privatization, and women became perceived as an ‘economic burden.’

“Think of things women need like maternity leave, for example, or child day-care centers. The private sector doesn’t want to occupy itself with these things because it is only looking at its bottom line. It should be the duty of the state to make sure women have these things, because motherhood is also the duty of the state and the community it creates the next generation.”

In the final analysis, women in Egypt continue to be both victims and heroines, says Bibars.

“It is not very fashionable to say women are victims because some feel this implies they don’t have agency. Now, you have to say women are ‘resisting’,” says Bibars. “But women are not resisting. Resistance is getting out of the system and trying to change it from without. They are not doing this, but they are coping, and sometimes opposing, from within the system. And that is a sign of weakness, a sign of an inability to change.

“However, in spite of all of this, they have surmounted a lot of obstacles. They work very hard and insist on education for their daughters. They are harassed everywhere and by everyone, yet they continue to fight.

“That’s what it means to be a heroine. My dream is to have more women governors, parliamentarians, judges, et cetera. It should have happened within the last 20 years, not in the next 20,” she says. “But I am optimistic because we are working and living in a global world where there are many eyes on us, and we have to show people that we are up to it that [Egyptian women] can be anything they want to be.”  et