Tunisian Feminist Leader: 'Femen, Please Leave Us Alone'
With their topless protest in Tunis, three Femen activists -- one German, two French -- caused widespread outrage in Tunisia last month. Representatives of the Muslim community have already expressed their anger, but now Tunisian feminists are also criticizing the women's actions.
"Femen, please leave us alone," appealed Tunisian feminist and opposition leader Maya Jribi in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE. "You risk ruining everything that we have fought for."
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Playing into the Hands of Islamists
When it comes to women's rights, Tunisia is ahead of the curve in the Arab world. There is a decades-old feminist movement, to which Jribi belongs. She leads one of the country's major political parties, the secular-liberal Republican Party, and hers is one of the loudest voices in Tunisia's Constituent Assembly. One of her central goals is making sure that women's rights are not scaled back under pressure from radicals.
"We in Tunisia have a different cultural and political context than in Germany," says Jribi. "Here, Islamists try to explain women's issues in terms of identity politics." The 'emancipated woman' is a concept of the permissive, debauched West, she says, and it doesn't work in Tunisia. "We Tunisian feminists are trying to steer the discussion away from identity. Women's rights are a social and political issue," says Jribi.
But the efforts of Tunisian women are now endangered by Femen, she complains. In their own way, the European activists are playing the game according to the Islamists' rules, she says. They are turning the emancipation of Tunisian women into a question of identity -- as well as a culture war, by dubbing their campaign "Topless Jihad."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/tunisian-feminist-leader-criticizes-topless-femen-activists-a-905603.html
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