News

CAIRO, EGYPT - Sanaa Roshdy, 54, a housewife in Cairo, Egypt's capital, was one of many Egyptians who watched the warning message in a YouTube video that began to circulate last year named "Message From Iranian Women to Tunisian and Egyptian Women."

The video features pictures of the life of Iranian women before and after the Islamic revolution there in 1979. Depicting a reversal of women's rights with the implementation of Islamic rule after the revolution, the video warns women in Egypt and Tunisia to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to them after revolutions in both countries a year ago and Islamic groups looking to assume leadership.

"I've heard people talking about the resemblance between the Egyptian revolution and the Islamic revolution many times," Roshdy says. "It never made sense to me until I saw this video."

The video shows women's participation just as well as men's in Iran to overthrow pro-Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. But according to the video, the women were the first to be oppressed afterward in a variety of ways, including strict standards of dress.

During the time of the shah, there had been no dress code for women in Iran, as photos in the video portray. But soon after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had been a prominent political leader during the revolution, took over, he made the hijab, the headscarf worn by Muslim women,... >>>