WHY THEY HATE US
In "Distant View of a Minaret," the late and much-neglected Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat begins her short story with a woman so unmoved during sex with her husband that, as he focuses solely on his pleasure, she notices a spiderweb she must sweep off the ceiling and has time to ruminate on her husband's repeated refusal to prolong intercourse until she climaxes, "as though purposely to deprive her." Just before her husband reaches orgasm, the call to prayer interrupts their intercourse, and he rolls over. After washing up, she loses herself in prayer, and looks out onto the street from her balcony. She interrupts her reverie to dutifully prepare coffee for her husband to drink after his nap. Taking it to their bedroom to pour it in front of him, as he prefers, she notices that he is dead. She instructs their son to go get a doctor. "She returned to the living room and poured out the coffee for herself. She was surprised at how calm she was," Rifaat writes.
In a crisp three and a half pages of fiction, Rifaat lays out a trifecta of sex, death, and religion that forms the pulsating heart of misogyny in the Middle East. Here is a writer who, when she was alive, was held up by academics as an "authentic" Egyptian woman, untainted by a foreign language-she spoke only Arabic-and influence from abroad. It is said that Rifaat never traveled outside Egypt, although she did perform a pilgrimage to Mecca and attended a literary conference in the United Kingdom. She was forced by her family to marry a man of their choice, with whom she traveled across Egypt.
Rifaat does not mince words, nor does she mollify. In the slim volume of short stories titled Distant View of a Minaret, she introduces you to a sexually frustrated middle-aged wife who wonders if her mother suffered the same fate with her father, and another mother who laments her youth lost to female genital mutilation and a society that fought her womanhood at every turn. The stories show women constantly sublimating themselves in religion, even as this faith is used against them by clerics and male-dominated society.
There is no sugarcoating it. We Arab women live in a culture that is fundamentally hostile to us, enforced by men's contempt. They don't hate us because of our freedoms, as the tired post-9/11 American cliché had it. We have no freedoms because they hate us, as Rifaat powerfully says.
Yes: They hate us. It must be said.
"The fact is, there's no joy for a girl in growing up, it's just one disaster after another till you end up an old woman who's good for nothing and who's real lucky to find someone to feel sorry for her," Rifaat writes in the story "Bahiyya's Eyes."
Some may ask why I'm bringing this up now, when the Middle East and North Africa are in turmoil, when people are losing their lives by the thousands, when it can sometimes seem as though the revolutions that began in 2010-incited not by the usual hatred of America and Israel, but by a common demand for freedom and dignity-have lost their way. After all, shouldn't everyone receive basic rights first, before women demand special treatment? Also, what does gender or, for that matter, sex have to do with the Arab Spring? It should have everything to do with the revolution. This is our chance to dismantle an entire political and economic system that treats half of humanity like children at best. If not now, when?
Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses against women occurring in that country, abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of women who have ever married in Egypt have had their genitals cut in the name of "purity," then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating "virginity tests" merely for speaking out, it's no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband "with good intentions," no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are "good intentions"? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is not "severe" or "directed at the face." What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Arab world, it's not better than you think. It's much, much worse. Even after these "revolutions," women remain covered up and anchored to the home, are denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, are forced to get permission from men to travel, and are unable to marry or divorce without a male guardian's blessing.
The Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East and North Africa stand apart in their terrible record on women's rights. Not a single Arab country ranks in the top one hundred positions on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet's rock bottom. The annual report looks at four key areas: health (life expectancy, etc.), access to education, economic participation (salaries, job types, and seniority), and political engagement. Neighbors Saudi Arabia and Yemen, for instance, are eons apart when it comes to gross domestic product (GDP), but only eight places separate them on the Global Gender Gap Report, with the kingdom at 127 and Yemen coming in at 136, the very bottom of the 2013 index. Morocco, often touted for its "progressive" family law (a 2005 report by Western "experts" called it "an example for Muslim countries aiming to integrate into modern society"), ranks 129th.
It's easy to see why the lowest-ranked country is Yemen, where 49 percent of women are illiterate, 59 percent do not participate in the labor force, and there were no women in parliament as of 2013. Horrific news reports about eight-year-old girls dying on the evening of their "wedding" to much older men have done little to stem the tide of child marriage there. Instead, demonstrations in support of child marriage outstrip those against it, and clerics declare that opponents of state-sanctioned pedophilia are apostates because the Prophet Mohammed, according to them, married his second wife, Aisha, when she was a child.
At least Yemeni women can drive. It surely hasn't ended their problems, but it symbolizes freedom of mobility-and nowhere does such symbolism resonate more than in Saudi Arabia, where child marriage is also practiced and where grown women are treated like children their entire lives, made to obtain the permission of a male guardian to do the most basic of things. Saudi women far outnumber their male counterparts on university campuses but are reduced to watching far less qualified men control every aspect of their lives.
* * *
Nothing prepared me for Saudi Arabia. I was born in Egypt, but my family left for London when I was seven years old. After almost eight years in the United Kingdom, we moved to Saudi Arabia in 1982. Both my parents, Egyptians who had earned PhDs in medicine in London, had found jobs in Jeddah, teaching medical students and technicians clinical microbiology. The campuses were segregated. My mother taught the women on the female campus, and my father taught the men on the male campus. When an instructor of the same gender wasn't available, the classes were taught via closed-circuit television, and the students would have to ask questions using telephone sets. My mother, who had been the breadwinner of the family for our last year in the United Kingdom, when we lived in Glasgow, now found that she could not legally drive. We became dependent on my father to take us everywhere. As we waited for our new car to be delivered, we relied on gypsy cabs and public buses. On the buses, we would buy our ticket from the driver, and then my mother and I would make our way to the back two rows (four if we were lucky) designated for women. The back of the bus. What does that remind you of? Segregation is the only way to describe it.
It felt as though we'd moved to another planet whose inhabitants fervently wished women did not exist. I lived in this surreal atmosphere for six years. In this world, women, no matter how young or how old, are required to have a male guardian-a father, a brother, or even a son-and can do nothing without this guardian's permission. Infantilized beyond belief, they cannot travel, open a bank account, apply for a job, or even get medical treatment without a man's stamp of approval. I watched all this with a mounting sense of horror and confusion.
I would mention voting rights, but back when I lived in Saudi Arabia, no one could vote. King Abdullah had said women will be allowed to vote and run for office in the 2015 elections, but it remains to be seen if clerics-such as the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, who believes that women's involvement in politics "will open the door to evil"-will scuttle that promise as they did in 2009, when only men were enfranchised in Saudi Arabia's first-ever municipal elections.
Yes, this is Saudi Arabia, the country where a gang-rape survivor was sentenced to jail for agreeing to get into a car with an unrelated male and needed a royal pardon; Saudi Arabia, where a woman who broke the ban on driving was sentenced to ten lashes and, again, needed a royal pardon. So bad is it for women in Saudi Arabia that tiny paternalistic pats on the back-such as the king's promise to give women the vote in 2015-are greeted with acclaim from international observers, and the monarch behind them, King Abdullah, was hailed as a "reformer"-even by those who ought to know better, such as Newsweek, which in 2010 named the king one of the top eleven most respected world leaders. This so-called reformer's answer to the revolutions popping up across the region was to numb his people with still more government handouts-especially for the religious zealots from whom the Saudi royal family inhales legitimacy.
When I encountered this country at age fifteen, I was traumatized into feminism-there's no other way to describe it-because to be a female in Saudi Arabia is to be the walking embodiment of sin. The kingdom is unabashed in its worship of a misogynistic god and never suffers any consequences for it, thanks to the triple advantage of having oil; being home to Islam's two holiest places, Mecca and Medina; and controlling the flow of petrodollars that keep the weapons manufacturers of its Western allies happily funded.
Then (the 1980s and '90s) as now, clerics on Saudi TV were obsessed with women and their orifices, especially what came out of them. I'll never forget hearing that if a baby boy urinated on you, you could go ahead and pray in the same clothes, yet if a baby girl peed on you, you had to change. What on earth made girls' urine impure? I wondered.
The hatred of women.
This clerical obsession with women's organs continues today. My favorite recent howler: driving will damage your ovaries.
"If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards," the Saudi cleric Saleh Lohaidan told the news website Sabq in 2013. "That is why we find those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying degrees."
Saudi Arabia follows an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam known alternatively as Wahhabism or Salafism, the former associated more directly with the kingdom, and the latter, austere form of Islam with those who live outside Saudi Arabia. The kingdom's petrodollars and concerted proselytizing efforts have taken Wahhabism/Salafism global, and with it the interpretations of Islam that make women's lives in Saudi Arabia little short of prison sentences.
Yet the hatred of women is not unique to Salafism. It is not merely a Saudi phenomenon, a hateful curiosity of a rich, isolated desert. The Islamist hatred of women burns brightly across the region-now more than ever. By "Islamists," I intend the Associated Press's definition: "An advocate or supporter of a political movement that favors reordering government and society in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam." This includes the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi groups who belong to the Sunni sect of Islam, and the Shiite militias in Iraq.
The obsession with controlling women and our bodies often stems from the suspicion that, without restraints, women are just a few degrees short of sexual insatiability. Take as an example the words of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular Egyptian cleric; resident of Doha, Qatar; and longtime conservative TV host on Al Jazeera. Al-Qaradawi supported the revolutions, no doubt hoping they would eliminate the tyrants who had long tormented and oppressed both him and the Muslim Brotherhood movement from which he springs. While al-Qaradawi, who commands a huge audience on and off the satellite channels, may say that female genital mutilation (which he calls "circumcision," a common euphemism that tries to put the practice on a par with male circumcision) is not "obligatory," you will also find the following priceless observation in one of his books: "I personally support this under the current circumstances in the modern world. Anyone who thinks that circumcision is the best way to protect his daughters should do it," he writes, adding, "The moderate opinion is in favor of practicing circumcision to reduce temptation." So even among "moderates," girls' genitals are cut to ensure that their sexual desire is nipped in the bud. Al-Qaradawi has since issued a fatwa against female genital mutilation (FGM), but it came as no surprise that when Egypt banned the practice in 2008, some Muslim Brotherhood legislators opposed the law. Upholding the credo of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which al-Qaradawi belongs, several of the movement's women are on record as supporting or legitimizing FGM, including Azza el-Garf (a former member of parliament) and Mohamed Morsi's women's affairs adviser during his brief presidency, who called FGM a form of "beautificiation."
Yet while clerics busy themselves suppressing female desire, it is the men who can't control themselves. On the streets of too many countries in the region, sexual harassment is epidemic. In a 2008 survey by the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights, more than 80 percent of Egyptian women said they'd experienced sexual harassment, and more than 60 percent of men admitted to harassing women. A 2013 UN survey reported that 99.3 percent of Egyptian women experience street sexual harassment. Men grope and sexually assault us, and yet we are blamed for it because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing the wrong thing. Cairo has women-only subway cars to "protect" us from wandering hands and worse; countless Saudi malls are for families only, barring single men from entry unless they produce a requisite female to accompany them. Families impose curfews on their daughters so that they're not raped or assaulted, and yet is anyone telling boys and men not to rape or assault us?
We often hear how the Middle East's failing economies have left many men unable to marry, and some even use this fact to explain rising levels of sexual harassment on the streets. Yet we never hear how a later marriage age affects women. Do women have sex drives or not? Apparently, the Arab jury is still out on the basics of human biology. Here is some more wisdom from al-Qaradawi: virgins must be "patient" and resist the temptation of masturbation, which he claims is "more dangerous" than male masturbation because if a virgin inserts her fingers or other objects into her vaginal opening, she could perforate her hymen and her family and future husband will think she committed fornication by having sex before marriage.
Enter that call to prayer and the sublimation through religion that Rifaat so brilliantly introduces in her story. Just as regime-appointed clerics lull the poor across the region with promises of justice in the next world, rather than a reckoning with the corruption and nepotism of the dictator in this life, so women are silenced by men who use women's faith to imprison them.
In Kuwait, where Islamists fought women's enfranchisement for years, the four women elected to parliament in 2009 were hounded by conservatives, who demanded that the two female parliamentarians who didn't cover their hair wear headscarves. When the Kuwaiti parliament was dissolved in December 2011, an Islamist parliamentarian demanded that the new house (one devoid of a single female legislator) discuss his proposed "decent attire" law. It did not become law, but the obsession with women's bodies continued. In May 2014, The Washington Postreported that an Islamist member of Kuwait's parliament, who is head of the committee for "combating alien behavior," said the committee had approved his proposal to ban female "nudity" at places accessible to the public, including swimming pools and hotels. The lawmaker refused to define what he meant by "nudity." At the time of writing, the proposal had still to be approved by Kuwait's National Assembly and government, but it had already created a political standoff as one lawmaker, Nabil al-Fadl, said he would resign if the assembly approved the proposal, which he described as a "regression," according to the Kuwaiti daily newspaper al-Shahed.
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 documentaryThe 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 had 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.
Implicit in the criticism of my essay was the charge that I want "the West" to "rescue us." Only we can rescue ourselves. I have never implored anyone else to rescue us from misogyny; it is our fight to win. I implore allies of the countries in this part of the world to pay more attention to women's rights and to refuse to allow cultural relativism to justify horrendous violations of women's rights. This is very different from calling on anyone to "rescue us."
I insist on the right to critique both my culture and my faith in ways that I would reject from an outsider. I expose misogyny in my part of the world to connect the feminist struggle in the Middle East and North Africa to the global one. Misogyny has not been completely wiped out anywhere. Rather, it resides on a spectrum, and our best hope for eradicating it globally is for each of us to expose and to fight against local versions of it, in the understanding that by doing so we advance the global struggle. When I travel and give lectures abroad and I'm asked how best to help women in my part of the world, I say, help your own community's women fight misogyny. By doing so, you help the global struggle against the hatred of women. I have written this book in that spirit; it is my flag, my manifesto that exposes misogyny in my part of the world as a way to connect to that global feminist struggle. Those countries that have managed to reduce their levels of misogyny were not created more respectful of women's rights. Rather, women in these countries have fought hard to expose systemic violations and to liberate women from them.
I have written this book at a time when more and more women of color are speaking out about misogyny and refusing to be quiet for fear of "making us look bad." Black, Latina, and Asian women from the United States have had to contend with multiple levels of discrimination-racism toward their communities and misogyny from within and without. For too long they were told that exposing the misogyny they face from within would arm the racists who already demonize the men of their communities. For their reckoning with this balancing act, I am grateful for the Black feminist bell hooks, the Black lesbian poet and activist Audre Lorde, and the Chicana feminist thinker Gloria Anzaldúa. Their work, which I quote frequently, gave me the foundation upon which to fight racism and sexism without fear of embarrassing my community.
While I am acutely aware of Islamophobes and xenophobic political right-wingers who are all too glad to hear how badly Muslim men treat their women, I'm also acutely aware that there's a right wing among Muslim men that does propagate misogyny. We must confront both, not ally ourselves with one in order to fight the other.
One of the most effective ways to do this is to listen to the voices of women from within the culture who are trying to dismantle misogyny. The women featured throughout these chapters, whose voices are part of the revolution and are essential to ensuring its success, are from within the culture, and they must be heard. The women fighting for the double revolution we need are the direct descendants of our feminist foremothers-of Huda Shaarawi, of Doria Shafik, and of the countless others whose names we might not know but whose struggles to liberate us from a host of misogynies we continue to honor. We stand on the shoulders of these women, and we must fortify our own shoulders for those to come.
I am angry for all the hundreds of thousands of other women who continue to be violated in ways much worse than I was, and who yet have no platform for sharing their experience. I want to move beyond my privilege to remember the millions of women who have none. I know nothing frightens Islamists and the equally misogynistic secular men of our societies more than the demand for women's rights and sexual freedoms-and that is ultimately what our double revolution must achieve.
Why do those men hate us? They hate us because they need us, they fear us, they understand how much control it takes to keep us in line, to keep us good girls with our hymens intact until it's time for them to fuck us into mothers who raise future generations of misogynists to forever fuel their patriarchy. They hate us because we are at once their temptation and their salvation from that patriarchy, which they must sooner or later realize hurts them, too. They hate us because they know that once we rid ourselves of the alliance of State and Street that works in tandem to control us, we will demand a reckoning.
The battles over women's bodies can be won only by a revolution of the mind. Too often women are scolded for daring to bring up "identity politics," and are urged to lay aside "women's rights" for the larger goal of solidarity or fidelity to the revolution. This is a mistake. Huge swaths of the Arab world are being remade now, with far-reaching and unguessed-at repercussions, and women and men both have an unprecedented opportunity to confront, and root out, the systemic hatred of women that reduces us to little more than our headscarves and our hymens.
We might have removed Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, but until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes-unless we topple the Mubaraks in our mind, in our bedrooms, and on our street corners-our revolution has not even begun.
Copyright © 2015 by Mona Eltahawy
