Headscarves and Hymens (8 page)

Asked about the article in the new constitution that
guarantees equality, she said: “Equality is a practice, it’s not just about words, about having a nice clause in a constitution. Women are fighting many different types of extremism: economic extremism, cultural extremism, and various forms of violence. The real difference will come when I feel safe everywhere I go. If I stand here in the street, do you really respect me as a woman, can you guarantee my safety?”

One of the young women who attended Tahadi was a nineteen-year-old who wore a headscarf and whose mother, a hairdresser, did not. They were both happy that a clause on equality existed, but were more concerned with issues closer to home.

“The one thing I would change is the mentality, because people in the neighborhood all the time say, ‘How could you let your daughter go to [Tahadi]? It’s full of boys.’ And I say, ‘It’s none of your business, this is my daughter, she likes to go here, so I let her,’ ” the mother said.

“I’m worried about the fundamentalist and extremist groups and especially concerned when I come home late from work. Sometimes I’ll leave deliberately early so I won’t run into them. We know our religion and I understand that wearing hijab is a personal choice. Sometimes I have clients who come to the salon wearing hijab and take it off inside because they’re worried about men outside who are Salafi or from other fundamentalist groups who will look at them badly or force them to wear it.”

In modern Tunisia, and throughout the region, wearing the hijab does not remain a real choice for women, and it cannot so long as this pervasive discrimination and violence flourishes. Almost a century after Huda Shaarawi removed her face veil, we are floundering—and we will continue to flounder as long as a woman’s body remains the canvas upon which we signal our acquiescence to conservatism and patriarchy.

A
lmost 100 percent of Egyptian girls and women report being sexually harassed. A 2013 United Nations report cites the actual figure at 99.3 percent, but my friends joke that the remaining 0.7 percent had their phones turned off when researchers tried to contact them. Before leaving her home, every woman I know braces herself for the obstacle course of offensive words, groping
hands, and worse that awaits her in the streets she takes to school, university, and work. The same UN study also reported that about 96.5 percent of Egyptian women have experienced unwelcome physical contact, while 95.5 percent have been subjected to verbal harassment on the streets.

In Yemen, the activist Amal Basha published a study asserting that 90 percent of Yemeni women have experienced harassment, specifically pinching. “The religious leaders are always blaming the women, making them live in a constant state of fear because out there, someone is following them,” Basha told the Associated Press. If a harassment case is reported in Yemen, Basha added, traditional leaders interfere to cover it up, remove the evidence, or terrorize the victim.

It is worth noting that nearly all women in Yemen are covered from head to toe. I would never connect a woman’s outfit with any unwanted physical contact or verbal abuse, but our conservative societies do. The extraordinarily high incidence of harassment in Yemen gives the lie to the conservatives who claim women bring harassment on themselves by dressing “immodestly.”

In Tunisia, largely considered more socially progressive than other countries in the region, laws do little to curb harassment, and the same cultural forces perpetuate it: a taboo against speaking out, an obsession with virginity, and victim blaming. Though Tunisia enacted a 2004 law against sexual harassment, activists complain
that it places the onus on women to prove that the harassment occurs on a regular basis. The law is also tainted with moralizing language that claims to discourage the “infringement of good mores and sexual harassment.”

In Algeria, when the first workplace sexual harassment conviction was handed down, in 2012, the verdict was celebrated as an important message to Algerian women that they could seek justice. Yet the guilty party, a television executive in his seventies, was penalized with only a six-month suspended jail sentence and a 200,000 dinar fine—the equivalent of less than $3,000.

These violations continue unchecked and unabated as our governments fail again and again to make serious efforts to protect girls and women in public space. Effective laws are not the only solution, but they would at least indicate a willingness on the part of government to take seriously any sexual violations against women. In countries where there are no statutes against street sexual harassment, let alone a proper definition of it that could help women who wanted to use the law against their harassers, women are further silenced through shame and taboo.

Witness what happened when Rula Qawas, the dean of the School of Languages at the University of Jordan, assisted and advised a group of her students in her feminist theory course to make a short film about the sexual harassment experienced on the university’s campus. The film showed female students holding up signs that quoted
the verbal abuse they’d heard. After the film was posted on YouTube in June 2012, it sparked both controversy and condemnation, not against the men on campus whose sexual harassment had been exposed, but at the female students, whose film was accused of making the university look bad.

The university president fired Qawas, to the anger of activists and academics alike. One group of academics, the Middle East Studies Association, condemned Qawas’s arbitrary dismissal and urged the university president to end the “systematic and unpunished sexual harassment of female students on the university campus.”

Street sexual harassment is not exclusive to the Middle East and North Africa. It is a disturbing reality for too many women around the world. But a combination of societal, religious, and political factors has made the region’s public space uniquely dangerous for women.

Activists at the first-ever regional conference on sexual harassment, which took place in Cairo in 2009 and was attended by representatives from seventeen Arab countries, concluded that harassment was unchecked across the region because laws don’t punish it, women don’t report it, and the authorities ignore it. Sexual harassment of girls and women at work, in schools, and on the streets was driving them to cover up and confine themselves to their homes, said the activists.

According to the Associated Press, participants at the Cairo conference said men are threatened by an increasingly active female labor force, with conservatives laying the blame for harassment on women’s dress and behavior. Activists said that some women had told them they had either taken on the face veil to try to escape the constant harassment or were considering dropping out of school or work altogether.

Levels of street sexual harassment have soared throughout the Arab world, and everyone asks why. One answer—always met with howls of denial from conservatives—is that the more women cover up, the more it lets men off the hook. The “purity culture” that exists across the Middle East and North Africa burdens girls and women with the responsibility for their own safety from sexual violence, and for ensuring they don’t “tempt” boys and men. “Purity culture” is a term I first came across in the United States, where it is used to describe the religious right’s rhetoric that stresses virginity and modesty as the way for women to attain “purity.” I find it very appropriate as a way to describe the pressures women in the Middle East and North Africa are subjected to, and it reminds us how much the global religious right wing has in common.

Nesma el-Khattab, twenty-four, a lawyer at Cairo’s Shehab Center, which advocates for girls and women, told me of the hurdles girls and women face in fighting back against street sexual harassment: “Their mother tells them cover up so you don’t face harassment. The
grandma tells them you’re a girl, don’t fight back, just shut up and take it. Their father tells them don’t speak out against harassment because those boys you spoke out against will go and beat up your brother.”

Remember the conversation I had with the woman in the niqab on the Cairo metro? Take that kind of thinking to an absurd and dangerous extreme and you end up with the leaflets that the feminist activist Shahrazad Magrabi found being distributed outside girls’ schools in the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi in 2014. She spoke to me for the BBC World Service documentary.

They begin with two bizarre monologues juxtaposed. First, a rose describes how it is easily found on every street corner, it is cheap to buy, etc. Next, a pearl talks about how special it is because it is nestled within a shell and deep under the ocean so no one can see it. In other words, the rose is not special because everyone can see it and has access to it, while the pearl is precious because it is hidden away.

“They’re doing great harm, they’re using Islam as a weapon, as a tool. They say if you’re a woman and you go out you’re going to hell,” Magrabi said.

“What I’m worried about is the way they’re feeding the people that it’s haram [a sin]; you see girls six years old wearing headscarves; you go to school and if a teacher has [boy pupils over the age of six], the teacher must cover her face to teach. I am Libyan. I was born here. I never left. What the hell are they talking about?”

This purity culture leads both men and women to unjustly blame women for the harassment they suffer. Women are criticized, and they criticize and police one another, for wearing clothes that are too tight, or the wrong color, the wrong length, the wrong style—it’s always the woman’s fault. Anything a woman does to alter her own appearance is taken as an incentive to abuse. According to a survey conducted by the Riyadh-based King Abdul Aziz Center for National Dialogue, 86.5 percent of Saudi men blame “women’s excessive makeup” for the rising cases involving molestation. In a survey carried out in 2008 by the women’s rights activist Nehad Abo El Komsan’s Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR), the majority of two thousand Egyptian men and women blamed women for bringing street sexual harassment upon themselves, saying that harassment resulted because of how the women were dressed. The ECWR also reported that 62 percent of Egyptian men admitted to harassing women. Perhaps saddest of all the center’s findings: unlike foreign women, most Egyptian women agreed that women should keep harassment to themselves, to avoid ruining their reputations.

To insist on “modesty” as a prerequisite for safety on the street is victim blaming with disregard for the facts of street sexual harassment. It also endangers the lives of women who do not dress as “modestly” as society determines they should. In the hope that men won’t hiss obscenities at us and that their hands respect the boundaries
of our bodies, we plead, “What if I were your wife, sister, or daughter?” Always the focus is on the woman, the object of the obscenities and assaults. Does she not deserve safe passage in public space unless she is identified by her relationship to a man?

We should instead be exposing and shaming the boys and men who would deny us that safety, and we should ask, “What if he were your husband, brother, or son?” The people who make our lives hell on the streets are men we know, men we are related to, and they should be the object of scrutiny instead of us.

Soon after the ECWR’s 2008 survey was published, I wrote an op-ed for a privately owned Egyptian Arabic-language daily newspaper called
Al-Masry Al-Youm,
in which I noted some of the several times I’d been groped, been followed by strangers in their cars, and had a stranger expose his genitals in my presence. The newspaper’s online comments section was filled with remarks by men who alternately asked, “Who do you think you are? Who would want to grope you?” (as if being sexually assaulted were a compliment) and “Of course you get groped, what did you expect? You took your hijab off!” In response to my writing that I was just four years old when a man first exposed his genitals to me—he had parked his car on our street in Cairo, pulled out his penis in front of me and a friend, who also was a toddler, and beckoned for us to come down from the balcony on which we were standing—one reader actually took the
time to find my e-mail address so that he could write to ask me, “What was so special about you as a four-year-old that anyone would want to flash you?”

I was stunned at the male rage that flooded the comments. Surely the rage should be ours, should belong to women? The few women who did respond left comments chiding those men who couldn’t believe how widespread street sexual harassment in Egypt had become.

“Ask your wife, ask your sister, ask your mother!” the women said.

One or two women told the enraged men something I hope terrified them: “Every morning before I leave the house, I keep my headscarf in place with pins. Those pins become my weapons against your hands on transport and on the street.”

Then there are the states that assault women directly. Such state-sanctioned, or -directed, assaults—and this leads to the nature of the misogyny that is so prevalent in our region—treat the bodies of girls and women as state property, to be sexually violated as punishment for political dissent or the dissent of one’s family members. State-sanctioned sexual assault is at times paradoxically a punishment for a perceived crossing of a societal sexual red line. It is almost as if the state wants to say,
You cannot use your body sexually, but we can.