Headscarves and Hymens (3 page)

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.