Headscarves and Hymens Read online

  Whatever the fate of the bill, the obsession with women’s bodies has serious ramifications. The Gulf News reported that just days before the “bikini ban” proposal, a Kuwaiti woman lost a custody battle with her ex-husband after his lawyer showed the court a picture of her wearing a bikini in the company of another man while abroad.

  “The mother cannot be trusted to raise the children properly and the picture as an example indicates a lack of modesty and a deficiency in her morals that erode trust in her and result in public disdain as society assesses her actions morally or religiously,” the lawyer said.

  In Libya, after a revolution that brought to an end forty-two years of absolute rule by Muammar al-Qaddafi, the first thing the head of the interim government, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, promised to do was lift the late Libyan tyrant’s restrictions on polygamy. Lest you think Muammar al-Qaddafi was a feminist of any kind, remember that under his rule, girls and women who survived sexual assaults or were suspected of “moral crimes” were dumped into “social rehabilitation centers,” effectively prisons from which they could not leave unless a man agreed to marry them or their families took them back. Human Rights Watch reports that even after the overthrow of Qaddafi, many women still were being sent to “social rehabilitation” centers by their families “for no other reason than that they had been raped, and were then ostracized for ‘staining their family’s honor.’ ”

  The return to polygamy in Libya (where, as of 2013, men can take additional wives against their first wife’s will, according to Al Arabiya News) is particularly shameful because female demonstrators played a critical role in the Libyan revolution. Two days before protests planned to emulate the uprisings in neighbors Tunisia and Egypt, female relatives of prisoners who had been killed by Qaddafi’s forces in the 1996 Abu Salim prison massacre protested the detention of the attorney representing them against the Qaddafi regime. The women’s protests inspired fellow Libyans in the eastern province of Benghazi to join them, and from there the demonstrations grew into a nationwide uprising.

  Egypt’s first parliamentary elections after the start of its revolution were dominated by men stuck in the seventh century. Only 984 women contested seats, compared with 8,415 men. A quarter of parliamentary seats were claimed by Salafis, whose belief in a woman’s rights basically begins and ends with her “right” to wear the niqab, a full-face veil. When fielding female candidates, Egypt’s Salafi Nour Party superimposed an image of a flower on each woman’s face in campaign materials. Women are not to be seen or heard; even their voices are a temptation.

  Flowers instead of women’s faces, in the middle of a revolution in Egypt! A revolution in which women were killed, beaten, shot at, and sexually assaulted while fighting alongside men to rid our country of Mubarak—and yet so many patriarchs still oppress us. The Muslim Brotherhood, which held almost half the total seats in the revolutionary parliament before it was dissolved by the Supreme Court, does not believe that a woman (or a Christian, for that matter) should be president. The woman who headed the “women’s committee” of the Brotherhood’s political party has said that women should not march or protest because it’s more “dignified” to let their husbands and brothers demonstrate for them.

  It was in Egypt, too, that less than a month after President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, the military junta that replaced him, ostensibly to “protect the revolution,” detained dozens of male and female activists after it cleared Tahir Square. Tyrants oppress, beat, and torture all, we know. Yet reserved for female activists were “virginity tests”: rapes disguised as a medical doctor inserting his finger into the vaginal opening in search of an intact hymen.

  This is where the soldiers in our regimes and the men on our streets unite: they both sexually assault women to remind us that public space is a male prerogative. Security forces and civilians alike violated women in Tahrir Square, and men of the revolution—be they from the left or the right—have set us back with their insistence that “women’s issues” cannot dominate “revolutionary politics.” Yet I ask: Whose revolution?

  Lest you think it’s just Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists of Saudi Arabia whose misogyny runs roughshod over our rights, remember that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, the narrow victor of Egypt’s first presidential elections after Mubarak’s ouster, was himself ousted by the ostensibly secular defense minister Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi. El-Sisi presented himself (especially to women) as the man who saved Egypt from a terror-filled regression to the Dark Ages at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. Anyone foolish enough to believe that would do well to remember that el-Sisi approved of those “virginity tests” the military enforced on female activists.

  That is why I blame a toxic mix of culture and religion. Whether our politics are tinged with religion or with military rule, the common denominator is the oppression of women.

  Tunisia, first to rise up against its tyrant and first to push him out, emanates the brightest glimmer of hope, but it still has far to go. Tunisian women held their breath after the Islamist Ennahda Party won the largest share of votes in the country’s Constituent Assembly in 2011. Subsequently, female university professors and students reported facing assaults and intimidation from Islamists for not wearing headscarves.

  In March 2014, I went to Tunisia with the producer Gemma Newby to interview women for our radio documentary The Women of the Arab Spring for the BBC World Service. Among the women I spoke with were some who had helped draft the new constitution, including a secular lawmaker, a lawmaker from the Ennahda Party, and activists who had lobbied for the strongest possible pro-woman language in the document. Although it remains to be seen whether their efforts will translate into more than words on paper, thanks to them, Tunisia’s constitution is the first in the Arab world that recognizes men and women as equals. Unlike their counterparts in that first parliament in Egypt after the revolution, not all female Islamist lawmakers in Tunisia’s Constituent Assembly are foot soldiers of the patriarchy.

  Some of Ennhada’s female lawmakers opposed the language on equality in Tunisia’s constitution. Yet, due to the efforts of others, such as Fatoum Elaswad, who insisted on working with her secular counterparts, it passed.

  “When women fight, only men benefit,” she told me.

  There is a lesson there.

  My own feminist revolution evolved slowly, and traveled the world with me. To this day I have no idea what dissident professor or librarian placed feminist texts on the bookshelves at the university library in Jeddah, but I found them there. They filled me with terror. I understood they were pulling at a thread that would unravel everything. Now that I’m older, I can see that feeling terrified is how you recognize what you need. Terror encourages you to jump, even when you don’t know if you’ll ever land.

  Before I found those books, I was depressed and suffocated by Saudi ultraconservatism but could not find the words to express my frustration at how religion and culture were being used as a double whammy against women. Those books helped me formulate questions I continue to ask to this day, questions that have made me the woman I am.

  I discovered feminist writings from all over the world, but even more significantly, I discovered that the Middle East had a feminist heritage of its own; it was not imported from the “West,” as opponents of women’s rights sometimes claim. There was Huda Shaarawi, a feminist who launched Egypt’s women’s rights movement and who publicly removed her face veil in Cairo in 1923; Doria Shafik, who led fifteen hundred women as they stormed the Egyptian parliament in the 1950s and then staged a hunger strike for women’s enfranchisement; Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian physician, writer, and activist; Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist—all fierce advocates of women’s rights. They gave me a new language to describe what I was seeing all around me. I told my parents I could not survive in Jeddah, and made plans to study in Cairo.

  What would have happened if my family had stayed in the United Kingdom and not moved to Saudi Arabia? Would
I have become a feminist? Would the anger that burns in me to this day have been ignited?

  I was exposed to yet more injustice when I moved to Egypt. To step outside the house where I was living with my uncle and aunt was to witness poverty on a shocking scale. Every girl living on the streets reminded me of the two-year-old sister I’d left behind in Saudi Arabia, and just how vastly different their lives were. The university I enrolled in, the American University in Cairo, was a bubble of privilege that only set in stark relief the ugliness of the poverty around me. I would take a public bus from the lower-middle-class neighborhood where I lived and an hour later I would be with people who’d been chauffeured for most of their lives. It was a crash course in Egypt’s classist society; many of my classmates acted as if there were no one suffering on the streets their chauffeured cars passed through.

  One of my professors was a columnist for a privately owned English-language paper called The Middle East Times, which had to publish in Cyprus because it was denied a license to print in Egypt. I started to freelance for the paper in 1989, reporting on human rights and women’s issues. One of my assignments took me to the launch of that year’s annual report from the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, an outfit of courageous activists who exposed torture under the Mubarak regime and advocated for victims of his police state. I met a woman in her sixties whose story has stayed with me ever since. It showed me that revolutions are long in the making; their roots embrace many people and causes.

  The woman had come to Cairo from her home in southern Egypt because her neighbors had told her that there was a group in the capital who could help her find justice. She went to the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights and told them that she ran a kiosk that sold soda and cigarettes. One day, police insisted she testify against a “car thief.” She refused, saying she didn’t know of any “car thief” and so could not bear false testimony against one. She told the organization that the police then dragged her to the precinct, where they sodomized her with the leg of a chair.

  I took home with me the annual report in which her story was included. The uncle I was living with—a physician, an educated man who followed the news and had traveled—asked to read it. He returned it to me the next morning, shaking his head. “This happens in Egypt?” was all he could say.

  Many Egyptians assumed that if they kept their backs to the wall and weren’t overtly political they would survive. To hear a story like this woman’s reminds us of the countless others who did not survive and who never got to tell their story—such as the thirteen-year-old boy arrested for selling tea bags who was allegedly so brutally tortured by the police that the coroner conducting the autopsy sobbed as he documented the boy’s wounds. How many countless, invisible victims of arbitrary police brutality were there in Egypt? How many young people—the majority of the population in Egypt, as they are in the rest of the Middle East and North Africa—felt they had no future, economically or politically? How long before the people would rise up and demand justice? “Where is the revolution?” I would ask my aunts and uncles every day.

  Twenty-three years later, in January 2011, people by the hundreds of thousands marched on Tahrir Square. I was living in the United States by then. I did not have enough money to fly back to Egypt, so I decided to do what I could for the revolution from New York City. I lived in television and radio stations, sleeping sometimes just an hour or two between “hits” (media appearances) in which I reminded U.S. television networks that five American administrations had supported Mubarak’s regime at the expense of the liberty and dignity of the Egyptian people, those same people they were now watching on their television screens rise up and demand, “Bread, Liberty, Social Justice, Human Dignity!” I persuaded CNN to remove “Chaos in Egypt” as their banner headline and replace it with “Uprising in Egypt,” after I made an impassioned appeal for them to see what was happening as a protest against oppression. This was a revolution—and it had been long in the making.

  As events unfolded, I watched hours and hours of video footage on YouTube, touching the screen as though it would connect me to the life force I was seeing on the streets in Cairo. Here was the revolution, finally!

  But for women, there have always been two revolutions to undertake: one fought with men against regimes that oppress everyone, and a second against the misogyny that pervades the region. As jubilant as I was to see a dictator toppled in Egypt and in other countries in the region, and as thrilled as I am to see those countries stumble toward democracy, however clumsily—what else to expect after so many years of oppression?—I am still painfully aware that although women may have been on the barricades beside men, they are in danger of losing what few rights they had in postrevolutionary Egypt and in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

  A 2013 Thomson Reuters Foundation poll surveying twenty-two Arab states placed three out of five countries in which revolutions had started in the bottom five positions for women’s rights. Egypt was judged to be the single worst country for women’s rights, scoring badly in almost every category, including gender violence, reproductive rights, treatment of women in the family, and female inclusion in politics and the economy. The Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power, culminating with the election of President Mohamed Morsi, posed a significant challenge to gender equality. Since Morsi’s ouster by the military, however, we have been reminded that neither Islamists nor the armed forces were great friends of women’s rights—remember the “virginity tests.”

  The Reuters poll found dismal circumstances in the other countries undergoing revolutions. In Syria, rights groups say that forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have targeted women with rape and torture, while hard-line Islamists have stripped them of rights in rebel-held territory.

  In Libya, experts voiced concern over the spread of armed militias and a rise in kidnapping, extortion, random arrests, and physical abuse of women. They said that the uprising had failed to enshrine women’s rights in law.

  It was in the “new Egypt” that I was sexually assaulted by security forces during clashes on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in November 2011—beaten so severely that my left arm and right hand were broken—and detained, first by the Ministry of the Interior and then by military intelligence, for some twelve hours, two of which I spent blindfolded. Only by virtue of a borrowed cell phone was I able to send an alert on Twitter about my situation. At least twelve other women were subjected to various forms of sexual assault during the protest in which riot police attacked me. None of them has spoken publicly about her ordeal, likely due to shame or family pressure. In December 2011, the whole world saw the photograph of the woman who became the icon of state-sanctioned abuse, stripped down to her blue bra as soldiers smashed their feet into her exposed rib cage. Lazily described as “Blue Bra Girl,” she became my Unknown Comrade—to this day we don’t know her name; women’s rights activists tell me her family has prevented her from speaking about what happened—and she inspired thousands of Egyptian women and men to march against sexual assault. The protest garnered the one and only apology so far from the ruling military junta.

  And then? Nothing, really. At the first anniversary of the Mohamed Mahmoud clashes—with Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood as president—women protesters reported that they were groped by their male counterparts as they tried to escape the security forces’ tear gas and pellets. What goes through the mind of a protester who is dodging security forces, tear gas, and blows but nonetheless pauses to grope the body of a fellow protester? Morsi remained silent as organized gangs raped and sexually assaulted women at protests with impunity. On the second anniversary of January 25, at least nineteen women were sexually assaulted, including one who was raped with a knife. All this aimed to punish women for activism and to push them out of public space. And it would not have happened unless there were societal acceptance of such assaults; it would not have happened if women did not face various kinds of sexual violence on a daily basis. It would not have happened if hatred of women ha
d not, for so long, been allowed to breathe and stretch and run so freely in our societies.

  In May 2012, I published an article titled “Why Do They Hate Us?” in Foreign Policy magazine. The reaction the article generated—by turns supportive, laudatory, and outraged—made it clear that misogyny in the Arab world is an explosive issue.

  When I write or give lectures about gender inequality in the Middle East and North Africa, I understand I am walking into a minefield. On one side stands a bigoted and racist Western right wing that is all too eager to hear critiques of the region and of Islam that it can use against us. I would like to remind these conservatives that no country is free of misogyny, and that their efforts to reverse hard-earned women’s reproductive rights makes them brothers-in-hatred to our Islamists.

  On the other side stand those Western liberals who rightly condemn imperialism and yet are blind to the cultural imperialism they are performing when they silence critiques of misogyny. They behave as if they want to save my culture and faith from me, and forget that they are immune to the violations about which I speak. Blind to the privilege and the paternalism that drive them, they give themselves the right to determine what is “authentic” to my culture and faith. If the right wing is driven by a covert racism, the left sometimes suffers from an implicit racism through which it usurps my right to determine what I can and cannot say.

  Culture evolves, but it will remain static if outsiders consistently silence criticism in a misguided attempt to save us from ourselves. Cultures evolve through dissent and robust criticism from their members. When Westerners remain silent out of “respect” for foreign cultures, they show support only for the most conservative elements of those cultures. Cultural relativism is as much my enemy as the oppression I fight within my culture and faith.

  One of the criticisms of my essay was that it was written in English. No one ever brings that up as a criticism with regard to articles that expose human rights violations or the failing economies in our region. The double standard is clear: when it comes to women’s issues, keep it between us, in a language only “we” can understand, so you don’t make us look bad.