An update on the role of women in the Arab Spring

     Okay, so it's not much of an update, but it's the best I could do.
     Having forbidden myself from losing track of the Arab Spring's heroes, and in particular its game-changing women, I ran a Google News search on Tawakul Karman, the founder of Women Journalists Without Chains, who has been leading protests in Yemen for the last three years. Tawakul - also a politician and a 32-year-old, hijab-sporting mother of three - is most certainly worthy of attention, but I was unable to find any information on her more recent than a 5/13/11 article from the Sydney Morning Herald.
     While it may not qualify as cutting-edge, the article offers a useful portrait of the revolution's female narrative.
     Some stand-outs:

     -  Zainab al-Khawaja: a figurehead in the Bahraini revolution, who went on a hunger-strike to protest the brutal treatment of her husband, father, and brother-in-law.

     - The Libyan mothers, sisters and widows of men killed in a 1996 prison massacre who protested en masse outside a courthouse in Benghazi after their lawyer was arrested, helping to set the stage for the subsequent national uprising.

     - The female protestors in Yemen (another nod to the influence of Tawakul Karman) who poured into the streets by the thousands to rebuke dictator Saleh's assertions that it was un-Islamic for Yemeni men and women to protest side-by-side.

      - Iman al-Obeidi: a Libyan women (blogged about earlier) who on March 26th broke into the Tripoli Hotel housing Western journalists to blast to the world the horrific story of her gang rape at the hands of pro-Qaddafi forces.  As Qaddafi loyalists struggled to remove her, al-Obeidi shouted to the rolling cameras, “I am not scared of anything.”

      Giving voice to the truths these women bear out, the headline of an opposition newspaper in Benghazi, cited at the start of the Herald article, offers a moving declaration:

     “The role of the female in Libya: she is the Muslim, the mother, the soldier, the protester, the journalist, the volunteer, the citizen.”

     Yet the article also raises the sobering question of whether women's transformative roles in the revolutions will result in a reciprocal transformation of their own status in society.
     While crucial, I fear the question inevitably invites speculation on what this means for the women of Islam, which distracts from the one message I always try to end on: the oppression of women is global, and so must be its dismemberment.