Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Khalid Karman (; ; born 7 February 1979) is a Yemeni journalist, politician, and human rights activist. She co-founded and leads 'Women Journalists Without Chains', a group established in 2005 to advocate for press freedom and human rights. She became the international public face of the 2011 Yemeni uprising that was part of the Arab Spring movement. She was often referred as the 'Iron Woman' and the 'Mother of the Revolution" in Yemen. She is a co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for "non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work". She became the first Yemeni, the first Arab woman, and the second Muslim woman to win a Nobel Prize.
Karman gained prominence in Yemen after 2005 as a Yemeni journalist and an advocate for press freedom, particularly following the denial of a license for a mobile phone news service in 2007, after which she led protests. After May 2007, she organized weekly protests advocating for broader reforms in Yemen. In early 2011, she shifted the protests to align with the broader Arab Spring movement, inspired by the Tunisian revolution that overthrew the government of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. She was a vocal opponent who called for the end of President Ali Abdullah Saleh's government.
Personal life 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 in an otherwise conservative environment. Karman studied in Taiz. 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 has two siblings: Tariq Karman, a poet, and Safa Karman, a lawyer and the first Yemeni to graduate from Harvard Law School. Safa also works as a journalist for Al-Jazeera. Tawakkol is married to Mohammed al-Nahmi and is the mother of three children.
Karman 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.
During a protest in 2010, a woman attempted to stab Karman with a jambiya, but her supporters intervened and prevented the attack. According to her brother Tariq Karman, she also received a death threat from "a senior Yemeni official" on 26 January 2011, warning her to stop her public protests. Journalist Dexter Filkins later identified this official as President Ali Abdullah Saleh 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.
In 2012, Karman participated as a panelist in the annual Clinton Global Initiative session titled "Champions of Action".. In 2019, she was honored as the Social Entrepreneur of the Year at The Asian Awards. Like many Yemenis, Karman was forced to leave Yemen after the Houthi takeover of the capital, 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 war waged by the Saudi-UAE-led coalition and U.S. drone attacks. On 17 December 2020, Karman reported that Houthi rebels raided her home and office, taking control of both locations after looting them.
Women Journalists Without Chains Tawakkol Karman co-founded the human rights group Women Journalists Without Chains (WJWC) with seven other female journalists in 2005 in order to promote human rights, "particularly freedom of opinion and expression, and democratic rights." Although it was founded as "Female Reporters Without Borders," the present name was adopted in order to get a government license. Karman has said she has received "threats and temptations" and was the target of harassment from the Yemeni authorities by telephone and letter because of her refusal to accept the Ministry of Information's rejection of WJWC's application to legally create a newspaper and a radio station. The group advocated freedom for SMS news services, which had been tightly controlled by the government despite not falling under the purview of the Press Law of 1990. After a governmental review of the text services, the only service that was not granted a license to continue was Bilakoyood, which belonged to WJWC and had operated for a year. In 2007, WJWC released a report that documented Yemeni abuses of press freedom since 2005. In 2009, she criticised the ministry of information for establishing trials that targeted journalists. From 2007 to 2010, Karman regularly led demonstrations and sit-ins in Tahrir Square, Sana'a.
Tawakkol Karman was affiliated with the Al-Thawrah newspaper at the time she founded WJWC in March 2005. She is also a member of the Yemeni Journalists' Syndicate. In 2019, Tawakkol called for a treaty to end violence against women, in support of Every Woman Coalition.
Political positions
Karman started protests as an advocate for press freedoms in her country. At a time when she was advocating for more press freedom, she responded to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in 2005 by writing: "We are not to call for tyranny and bans on freedom." She was a senior member of the Al-Islah party, although she was suspended from the party in 2018 after she accused the Saudi-led coalition of acting as occupiers in the country.
She stopped wearing the traditional niqab in favour of more colourful hijabs that showed her face. She first appeared without the niqab at a conference in 2004. Karman replaced the niqab for the scarf in public on national television to make her point that the full covering is cultural and not dictated by Islam. She told the Yemen Times in 2010 that:
Women should stop being or feeling that they are part of the problem and become part of the solution. We have been marginalized for a long time, and now is the time for women to stand up and become active without needing to ask for permission or acceptance. This is the only way we will give back to our society and allow for Yemen to reach the great potentials it has.
She has alleged that many Yemeni girls suffer from malnutrition so that boys could be fed and also called attention to high illiteracy rates: two-thirds of Yemeni women are unable to read. Advocating for laws that would prevent females younger than 17 from being married, in a statement made to Human Rights Watch, a human rights research and advocacy group, she stated that Yemen's revolution "didn't happen just to solve political problems, but also to address societal problems, the most important being child marriage." Despite most members of her party holding a different view on child marriage than her, she claims her party is the most open to women. In clarifying her position, she said:Tom Finn. "Peace prize: Women who fought and won unequal struggles. The Guardian, 8 October 2011. Retrieved 11 October 2011 from the Lexis-Nexis Database.
Our party needs the youth but the youth also need the parties to help them organise. Neither will succeed in overthrowing this regime without the other. We don't want the international community to label our revolution an Islamic one.
She has also led protests against government corruption. Her stand on the ouster of Saleh became stronger after village lands of families around the city of Ibb were appropriated by a corrupt local leader. Likewise, she says she remains independent from foreign influences: "I do have close strategic ties with American organizations involved in protecting human rights, with American ambassadors and with officials in the U.S. State Department. (I also have ties with activists in) most of the E.U. and Arab countries. But they are ties among equals; (I am not) their subordinate." Speaking before an audience at the University of Michigan, Karman summed up her belief: "I am a citizen of the world. The Earth is my country, and humanity is my nation."
She expressed support for the Palestinian people in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In May 2024, Karman stated, "The world is silent in front of the genocide and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in Gaza."
Egyptian conflict As a response to the 2012–13 Egyptian protests and the 2013 Egyptian coup d'état, Karman was supportive of protests demanding Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi's resignation on 30 June, but was later critical of the military's decisions on July 3 to oust Morsi, suspend the Constitution and bar the Muslim Brotherhood from participating in Egyptian politics, citing that Morsi was Egypt's first democratically elected leader, the constitution was supported by 60% of people who voted in a public referendum and that the coup may cause people to lose faith in democracy, allowing extremist groups to thrive. She attempted to enter Egypt to join protests against the coup but was banned from doing so by the Egyptian military for "security reasons" and was deported back to Sana'a. She later denounced the military's arrests of high-ranking Muslim Brotherhood officials and the military's use of violence on protesters at sites occupied primarily by Morsi's supporters.
Yemeni conflict Karman routinely speaks out against both the Houthi insurgency and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, calling both of them threats to Yemen's national sovereignty. She has condemned the groups for what she says are their efforts to destabilize the country and overthrow the Yemeni government. She has accused the Houthis of receiving foreign aid from the Iranian government and objects to what she believes are foreign efforts to leave the Houthis alone since they are also fighting against Al-Qaeda. After the announcement of Houthi integration into the Yemeni military, Karman stated that there shouldn't be integration if the Houthis are unwilling to surrender their weapons. As a response to the January 2015 events of the 2014–15 Yemeni coup d'état, she spoke out on what she believes is collaboration between former president Saleh and the Houthi rebels to undo the 2011 revolution by ending the transition process. Despite the civil war, Karman remains optimistic for her country's future. "It's very sad, all this killing, all this war," Karman said in an interview with the Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy in 2016. "But at the same time, we don't lose our hope, and we don't lose our vision, and we don't lose our dream."
Karman often objects to U.S. drone policy in Yemen, calling the use of them "unacceptable" and has argued that using them in populated areas violates human rights and international laws. Following an increase in the number of drone strikes in August 2013, she called for an immediate halt of all strikes, proclaiming that the bombings undermine Yemen's sovereignty and contribute to increases in Al-Qaeda recruits in the country.
Karman condemned the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, stating: "Unfortunately, this coalition deals with this war just as a battle to fire bombs and throw missiles, ignoring the consequences." She called for an "immediate cessation" of air strikes by the coalition.
2011 protests
During the 2011 Yemeni protests, Tawakkol Karman organised student rallies in Sana'a in protest against the long-standing rule of Saleh's government. On 22 January, she was stopped while driving with her husband by three plain-clothed men without police identification and taken to prison, where she was held for 36 hours until she was released on parole on 24 January. In a 9 April editorial that appeared in The Guardian, she wrote: