On October 23, 2011, Libya finally turned the page on Muammar Gaddafi, a colonel who had ruled the country for four decades and led it according to his own revolutionary and socialist vision, and whose regime was toppled following NATO raids on his hometown of Sirte. A few days following his demise, the eastern city of Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city, was celebrating and declaring the ultimate victory against the Jamahiriya regime. Mustafa Abdel Jalil, a former justice minister who defected from Gaddafi’s regime and was at the time the head of the National Transitional Council (NTC), announced that “any law that is inconsistent with Islamic Sharia is immediately suspended, including the law limiting polygamy.” The joy of the people in Benghazi was turned upside down. The joy experienced by Libyan women at the time had become a nightmare, particularly since women had been heavily involved in the revolution in hopes of securing more rights and freedoms. However, this was not the case.

“It was an excruciating blow and a treacherous betrayal of us Libyan women who have fought for decades for our rights only to end up in an even direr situation.” This is how Sondos, a Libyan teacher and one of the women who had taken part in the revolution in 2011, described Abdel Jalil’s speech. But neither Sondos nor most women in Libya expected this to be the outcome. On the contrary, the aforementioned statement marked the beginning of a series of arbitrary and repressive measures against women and individual freedoms.

Like other countries in the Arab region, Libyan women live in a nightmarish inferno of restrictions and procedures that curtail their rights. This, coupled with the highly conservative nature of the society and political and security instability, renders their vulnerability double and compounded. However, certain behaviors were commonplace for women in Libya, such as sitting in cafes, traveling alone, and not wearing a hijab or any particular dress code. Ironically, Sondos says, Muammar Gaddafi’s regime was the one that provided the most privileges for women.
But it appears that what used to be commonplace in Libya may be coming to an end these days: Emad al-Trabelsi, former militiaman and current Minister of the Interior in the internationally recognized, Islamist-affiliated Government of National Unity (GNU) of Abdelhamid Al-Dubaiba, announced a number of new measures during a press conference that was supposed to address the issue of smuggling, including the activation of the “Public Morality Services,” which he said would “prevent mixing between the sexes in public places,” regulate the dress code and prevent women from traveling without a Mahram. He vowed to prosecute “publishers of inappropriate content on social media platforms,” shut down cafes that serve hookah, and called on schools to “enforce the hijab for female students.”

The Hijab, a political leverage for all authorities

The history of the hijab in Libya seems to be a reflection of an even longer history of political and ideological visions, as hijab in Libya originated with the Islamic conquests and continued to spread and wane according to the country’s political contexts. During the Ottoman Empire, the wearing of the hijab was commonplace. However, following Italian colonization, the Italian authorities were focused on major cities such as Benghazi and Tripoli and sought to project a modern appearance, so they obliquely encouraged the removal of the hijab, which continued until Libya’s independence. Although the former king of Libya, Idris al-Senussi, was a leader of the Senusiyya (the Senussi Sufi order) not only in Libya but in the whole of Africa and practiced a conservative religious approach, his wife did not wear the hijab. The rest of the Libyan women were also free as to the wearing or removal of the hijab. The situation was more pronounced during the rule of the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who encouraged policies of social openness, and his female bodyguards were often unveiled. However, after the revolution and the rise of hardline religious movements and their control over a number of cities through their militias, many unveiled women were subjected to harassment, prompting them to wear the hijab for their own safety.
Millions of women in our region have long been affected by the use of the hijab as an oppressive or “liberating” instrument, which refers us to the imperative of deconstructing the relationship between the hijab and the political identity that women are at times fighting for, and against at other times. Gender studies researcher Ridha Al-Karem points out that Libyan society’s relationship with authority is an authoritarian one. The authority always imposes its concepts, decisions, and perceptions on the whole society, and the masses are always on the sidelines. Libya is faced with a political, economic and security crisis, but the authority believes that the issue lies with women in a malicious link between morality and women, as the “moral transgressions” that the Libyan Minister of the Interior spoke about were committed by men against women. But morality is linked to women, while men’s responsibility is largely omitted because women are the weakest link. Al-Karem further argues that such gender discrimination is based on a patriarchal hegemonic legacy seeing that women are not as privileged as men; the minister of the interior is seeking to construct and solidify hegemony through his domination of women’s reality.

Is there relevance to such decision?

Through his statements, al-Trabelsi seeks to shuffle the cards and evade his responsibilities in his capacity as the minister of the interior to fight lawlessness, the proliferation of weapons and the security predicaments that Libya is experiencing, and instead seeking to be self-appointed as the male guardian of millions of women by utilizing the costumes of Libyan women. In a press conference dedicated to addressing the fuel smuggling operations from Libya to Sudan, which seems a very pressing topic, he resorted to discussing the operationalization of the morality police force in order to deter immoral acts by women and impose the wearing of the hijab on female students in schools” after already being approved by the Ministry of Education, despite the fact that his statements contradict all the provisions of the Interim Constitutional Declaration regarding freedoms and rights. It is a new cycle of repression and arbitrariness that he will inflict upon all those who do not toe his line, in a country with no prospects and a multitude of crises that will not be resolved by such decisions. On the contrary, these decisions will only exacerbate the crisis and allow for further repression. Nevertheless, women are being used here as a leverage to prove one political point over another, as neither Libya’s demands nor its needs will be met by such decisions. In the same context, divergent reactions are escalating after the media uproar caused by the statements of Emad al-Trabelsi, the Minister of the Interior of Libya’s interim government of “national unity”, regarding a directive to impose the hijab on female students in schools, while the government remained mute, which dozens considered to be “contrary to the constitutional declaration that guarantees the personal freedom of citizens.”

In response to the Government of National Unity’s Minister of the Interior Emad al-Trabelsi’s announcement of far-reaching measures that would entrench discrimination against women and undermine their rights to freedom of expression, religion and belief and physical privacy, including plans to create a “morality police” to enforce the hijab, Bassam al-Kantar, an Amnesty International researcher in Libyan affairs, stated that these measures amount to threats made by the aforementioned minister of the interior to crack down on fundamental freedoms in the name of “morality”. He further described them as a serious escalation in Libya’s already stifling levels of repression against those who do not conform to prevailing societal norms. “Proposals to enforce the hijab on girls as young as nine years old, restrict mixing between men and women, and monitor young people’s personal choices regarding haircuts and clothing are not only unsettling, but are also in violation of Libya’s obligations under international law.”
“In another move aimed at violating women’s rights and equality, the Government of National Unity’s minister of the interior proposed forcing women to obtain permission from their male guardians (mahrams) before traveling abroad. He boasted of forcibly returning two Libyan women from Tunisia after they traveled without their “male guardians.” He also announced plans to establish a “morality police force” to monitor public spaces, workplaces, and personal interactions, in a blatant violation of individuals’ privacy, autonomy, and freedom of expression”. Bassam al-Kantar called on the Government of National Unity to rescind these proposed repressive measures and instead focus on addressing the country’s spiraling human rights crisis of mass arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture, and unfair trials. The rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly must be safeguarded and measures must be implemented to tackle all forms of sexual and gender-based violence and discrimination.

A war against all

Al-Trabelsi’s crackdown does not end with women’s hijabs, but rather seeks to hound them through social media, monitoring the content that women post and closing men’s barber shops that offer modern hairdressing services that aren’t to the Libyan government’s taste. A young Libyan man explains that this campaign has not been carried out by any government in the world except for the Taliban government.
Current authorities in Libya are merely trying to rehash any topics to distract public opinion from the real issues of arms proliferation, lawlessness, rising militia influence, and currency counterfeiting. “Our issue is not the morality of women, you have been to Libya and you have seen with your own eyes how maybe only one in a thousand Libyan women does not wear the hijab. The government is always looking for something to cover up its failures.” “The crisis is not a women’s crisis, the crisis in Libya is not a social, gender, ethical or moral crisis, it is a political crisis,” Sondos explained wistfully.

Amid the silence of the society and the overwhelming support for al-Trabelsi’s campaign, morality police patrols will return to the streets of Libya starting in December under the pretext of preserving society’s traditions. A variety of sources indicate that this apparatus will be assigned to the infamous Rada SDF Special Deterrence Force militia, a militia with a lengthy record of human rights violations, smuggling, extortion, and murder. It is highly perplexing that militias that have shed the blood of hundreds of innocent people, violated the rights of migrants, and engaged in human trafficking, drug trafficking, and prostitution would position themselves as guardians of virtue to further oppress women in Libya. It also seems that the new mission of the Rada militia will not be to preserve “morality” as much as it will be to blackmail and threaten women.