Loading ...Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution by Mona Eltahawy
One afternoon earlier this year, I stepped into the carriage of a Cairo metro train. I was on the way home from interviewing female students – all of them devout, veiled Muslims – who had been snatched off the street and sexually assaulted by police for protesting against the military regime. It was hard for them to speak openly about the attacks for fear of shaming their families and destroying their own chances of marriage.
On the journey between our meeting place and the metro station we had run a familiar gauntlet of leers, obscene gestures and comments, and I hustled into the crowded women-only carriage – one of the two per train introduced in 2007 as a measure against rising sexual harassment – feeling a familiar mix of anger and humiliation. Minutes later, a hand grabbed me hard between the legs, at what felt like an impossible angle. It was a man with no legs, swinging through the carriage on his hands to beg from the passengers. He laughed, and some of the women around us laughed too. Others looked away, wincing. None of them said anything to the man as he swung off, and, frozen by the grotesqueness of the situation, neither did I.
Unlike most of its citizens, I was in Egypt by choice, and this event doesn’t prove anything in itself – but it gives some idea of the day-to-day blend of deprivation, inequality, state brutality, resentment, sexual frustration, religious indoctrination, shame culture and struggle for power that makes up a general human suffering in Cairo of which abuses against women are a significant part.
In Headscarves and Hymens, the Egyptian-American journalist and activist Mona Eltahawy holds a match to this combustible mix. It is a book-length expansion of a controversial article, “Why Do They Hate Us?” – where “they” is Muslim men and “us” is women – she wrote for the US magazine Foreign Policy in 2012. The book, its title calculated to provoke as much as the blood-red scarf that trails across its cover, is no less polemical. “Covered. Tortured. Imprisoned. Murdered,” declares its back cover. Eltahawy’s outrage is personal, too – in November 2011, during street clashes between protesters and the security forces in Cairo, she was picked up by the police, sexually assaulted and beaten until her left hand and right arm were broken.
The abuses Eltahawy lists are shocking, and vital to record. At least 90% of married Egyptian women between the ages of 15 and 49 have undergone FGM, a practice that continues to cause an unknown number of deaths. In Tunisia – often seen as a liberal beacon in the region – 47.2% of women have suffered domestic violence; in Egypt, 99.3% of women have experienced sexual harassment. Saudi Arabian women of any age need the permission of a male legal guardian to travel, marry, work or access education, and must wear abaya robes and headscarves in public (which does not prevent 86.5% of Saudi men blaming “women’s excessive makeup” for rising harassment). Fifteen teenage girls died in 2002 when “morality police” prevented them from leaving a burning school in Mecca because they were not wearing “correct” Islamic dress.
Source: www.theguardian.com