Tawakkol Karman

Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Khalid Karman was born on 7 February 1979 in the Taiz Governorate of what was then North Yemen. She grew up near Taiz, the country’s second-largest city, which is known for its schools in an otherwise conservative setting. Her father, Abdel Salam Karman, worked as a lawyer and politician, serving as Legal Affairs Minister under President Ali Abdullah Saleh before resigning. She has two siblings: Tariq, a poet, and Safa, a lawyer who became the first Yemeni graduate of Harvard Law School and also works as a journalist for Al-Jazeera. Karman is married to Mohammed al-Nahmi and has three children. She holds a master’s degree in international security from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, an undergraduate degree in commerce from the University of Science and Technology, and a graduate degree in political science from the University of Sana’a. In 2012, the University of Alberta in Canada awarded her an honorary doctorate in international law.

Karman first gained notice in Yemen after 2005 as a journalist pushing for press freedom. In 2007, when the government denied a license for a mobile phone news service she was involved with, she led protests. From May 2007 onward, she organized weekly demonstrations calling for broader reforms. In early 2011, inspired by the Tunisian revolution that toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, she steered those protests into the larger Arab Spring movement, becoming a vocal opponent of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and demanding his removal. She was often called the “Iron Woman” and the “Mother of the Revolution” in Yemen. In 2011, she shared the Nobel Peace Prize for her nonviolent work for women’s safety and their full participation in peace-building. She was the first Yemeni, first Arab woman, and second Muslim woman to win a Nobel.

In 2005, Karman co-founded Women Journalists Without Chains (originally called Female Reporters Without Borders) with seven other female journalists. The group aimed to promote human rights, especially freedom of opinion and democratic rights. It changed its name to get a government license. Karman said she faced threats, temptations, and harassment from Yemeni authorities by phone and letter after refusing to accept the Ministry of Information’s rejection of the group’s applications for a newspaper and a radio station. The group pushed for freedom for SMS news services, which the government tightly controlled even though they weren’t covered by the 1990 Press Law. After a government review, the only service denied a license was Bilakoyood, which belonged to WJWC and had operated for a year. In 2007, WJWC published a report documenting press freedom abuses in Yemen since 2005. In 2009, Karman criticized the information ministry for holding trials targeting journalists. From 2007 to 2010, she regularly led demonstrations and sit-ins in Sana’a’s Tahrir Square. She was affiliated with Al-Thawrah newspaper when she founded WJWC and is a member of the Yemeni Journalists’ Syndicate. In 2019, she called for a treaty to end violence against women in support of the Every Woman Coalition.

During a protest in 2010, a woman tried to stab Karman with a jambiya, but supporters stopped the attack. Her brother Tariq said a senior Yemeni official threatened her life on 26 January 2011, warning her to stop protesting. Journalist Dexter Filkins later identified that official as President Ali Abdullah Saleh in The New Yorker. The Turkish government offered Karman citizenship, which she received from the Turkish foreign minister on 11 October 2012, tracing her family roots to Karaman Province in central Anatolia. In 2012, she was a panelist at the Clinton Global Initiative session “Champions of Action.” In 2019, the Asian Awards honored her as Social Entrepreneur of the Year. Like many Yemenis, she was forced to leave after the Houthi takeover of Sana’a due to the worsening security situation. From her new home in Istanbul, she continues to speak out against injustices in Yemen, including the Saudi-UAE-led coalition’s war and U.S. drone strikes. On 17 December 2020, she reported that Houthi rebels raided her home and office, looting and taking control of both.

Karman began her activism advocating for press freedoms. In 2005, during the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, she wrote that she was not calling for tyranny or bans on freedom. She was a senior member of the Al-Islah party but was suspended in 2018 after accusing the Saudi-led coalition of acting as occupiers in Yemen. She stopped wearing the traditional niqab in favor of more colorful hijabs that revealed her face, first appearing without the niqab at a conference in 2004.