Tawakkol Karman
Yemeni Nobel laureate and advocate for press freedom.
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Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Khalid Karman was born on 7 February 1979 in Shara'b As Salam, Taiz Governorate, then part of North Yemen. She grew up near Taiz, the country's second-largest city, which is 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 a brother, Tariq Karman, who is a poet, and a sister, Safa Karman, a lawyer who became the first Yemeni to graduate from Harvard Law School.
Safa also works as a journalist for Al-Jazeera. Karman is married to Mohammed al-Nahmi and has three children. She earned 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.
Women Journalists Without Chains
Karman is a journalist, politician, and human rights activist. In 2005, she co-founded and now leads Women Journalists Without Chains, a group that works for press freedom and human rights. The organization was originally called Female Reporters Without Borders but changed its name to obtain a government license.
Karman has said she faced threats and harassment from Yemeni authorities because she refused to accept the Ministry of Information's rejection of the group's applications to legally start a newspaper and a radio station. The group pushed for freedom for SMS news services, which the government tightly controlled. In 2007, Women Journalists Without Chains published a report documenting press freedom abuses in Yemen since 2005. In 2009, she criticized the ministry of information 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 the Al-Thawrah newspaper when she founded the group in March 2005 and is also a member of the Yemeni Journalists' Syndicate. Karman became the international face of the 2011 Yemeni uprising, part of the wider Arab Spring. She was often called the "Iron Woman" and the "Mother of the Revolution" in Yemen.
Lore & Background
Tawakkol Karman was born on 7 February 1979 in Shara'b As Salam, Taiz Governorate, then North Yemen. She grew up near Taiz, the country's second largest city, known for its educational institutions. Her father, Abdel Salam Karman, is a lawyer and politician who served as the Legal Affairs Minister in Ali Abdullah Saleh's government before resigning. 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, she received an Honorary Doctorate in International Law from the University of Alberta in Canada. She is married to Mohammed al-Nahmi and has three children. Karman co-founded Women Journalists Without Chains in 2005 with seven other female journalists to promote human rights, particularly freedom of opinion and expression.
She gained prominence after leading protests following the denial of a license for a mobile phone news service in 2007. From May 2007, she organized weekly protests advocating for broader reforms. In early 2011, she shifted the protests to align with the broader Arab Spring movement, inspired by the Tunisian revolution.
She was a vocal opponent who called for the end of President Ali Abdullah Saleh's government. During a protest in 2010, a woman attempted to stab her with a jambiya, but her supporters intervened. According to her brother Tariq Karman, she received a death threat from 'a senior Yemeni official' on 26 January 2011, later identified as President Ali Abdullah Saleh by journalist Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker. The Turkish government offered her Turkish citizenship, which she received from the Turkish foreign minister on 11 October 2012, tracing her family origin to Karaman Province in Central Anatolia.
Reader's Guide
Tawakkol Karman's significance lies in her role as a leading figure in the 2011 Yemeni uprising and her advocacy for press freedom and women's rights. As the first Yemeni, first Arab woman, and second Muslim woman to win a Nobel Prize, she brought international attention to Yemen's struggles. Her organization, Women Journalists Without Chains, challenged government restrictions on media, including advocating for freedom for SMS news services. She stopped wearing the traditional niqab in favour of more colourful hijabs that showed her face, first appearing without the niqab at a conference in 2004, to make the point that the full covering is cultural and not dictated by Islam.
She has alleged that many Yemeni girls suffer from malnutrition so that boys could be fed and called attention to high illiteracy rates: two-thirds of Yemeni women are unable to read. She advocated for laws preventing females younger than 17 from being married. Forced to leave Yemen after the Houthi takeover of Sana'a, she continued her activism from Istanbul, speaking against the war waged by the Saudi-UAE-led coalition and U.S. drone attacks. On 17 December 2020, she reported that Houthi rebels raided her home and office, taking control of both locations after looting them.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Tawakkol Karman (CC BY-SA 4.0).
- Word definitions: the Codexery glossary, each quoted from its Wikipedia article.
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