DEAUVILLE — The lack of women’s economic and political participation, and lack of women's education, kept Arab countries from developing properly, said US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues Melanne Verveer on the sidelines of the Women’s Forum in Deauville, France. Then came the Arab Spring and “women were shoulder-to-shoulder with men in the revolutions.”

“Women were able to bring their talents and their experiences to decision-making in their countries,” said Verveer, who has held her position since April 2009. Ensuring that they continue to do so is of utmost importance and “will say a lot about the future of those countries both economically as well as in terms of democratic governance and the better future for the people,” she said, adding that both the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and women from that region are “a great focus” for her Office of Global Women’s issues.

But she warned against radical Islamist elements that are trying to hijack the Arab Spring: “Those who only have violence and violent means to achieve their goals, I think that has to be dealt with for what it is: criminal acts … Extremism and democracy don’t go hand in hand.” She said women were too often the prime targets of radical Islamists: “Women are absolute, consistent practitioners of the faith and they are angry, they are suffering from the gross misinterpretation, the hijacking from those who abuse their religion to serve their horrible ends, whether it’d be not sending girls to school or justifying violence against women and oppression … That is not religion.”

With this in mind, Verveer strongly emphasized the need to distinguish between radical Islam and Islam as a faith. “There is no contradiction between Islam as one of the world’s great religions, as the values that it espouses, and democracy.” She said women were in the vanguard of combating extremism: “What women have told me, what they ask is, how can they as Muslim women take back their religion?”