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, known for its schools in a generally conservative setting. Her father, Abdel Salam Karman, worked as a lawyer and politician, serving as Legal Affairs Minister under President Ali Abdullah Saleh before stepping down. She has two siblings: Tariq, a poet, and Safa, a lawyer who became the first Yemeni to graduate from 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 co-founded the group Women Journalists Without Chains in 2005 alongside seven other female journalists. Originally called “Female Reporters Without Borders,” the name was changed to secure a government license. The organization works to promote human rights, especially freedom of opinion, expression, and democratic rights. Karman has 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 of text services, the only one denied a license was Bilakoyood, which belonged to WJWC and had operated for a year. In 2007, WJWC published a report documenting Yemeni press freedom abuses 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. At the time she founded WJWC in March 2005, she was affiliated with the Al-Thawrah newspaper and is also 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.

Karman first gained prominence after 2005 as a journalist and press freedom advocate, especially after the denial of a license for a mobile phone news service in 2007, which she protested. Starting in May 2007, she organized weekly protests calling for broader reforms in Yemen. In early 2011, she aligned her protests with the wider Arab Spring movement, inspired by the Tunisian revolution that ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. She became a vocal opponent of President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government and the international face of the 2011 Yemeni uprising. Often called the “Iron Woman” and the “Mother of the Revolution” in Yemen, she shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her non-violent work for women’s safety and their full participation in peace-building. She is the first Yemeni, first Arab woman, and second Muslim woman to win a Nobel Prize.

During a 2010 protest, a woman tried to stab Karman with a jambiya, but supporters stopped the attack. According to her brother Tariq, 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 her 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 took part as a panelist in the Clinton Global Initiative session “Champions of Action.” In 2019, she was named Social Entrepreneur of the Year at The Asian Awards. 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 attacks. On 17 December 2020, she reported that Houthi rebels raided her home and office, looting and taking control of both.

Karman began her protests advocating for press freedoms. In 2005, responding to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, she wrote, “We are not to call for tyranny and 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.