Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East

by David D. Kirkpatrick

  The state closed ranks. The prosecutor could find no witnesses or evidence. The state newspapers and their private-media allies slandered her as a loose woman. She had ripped her own clothes off, some claimed, in a scheme to smear the police. Her husband divorced her. The National Council of Women never mentioned her. Four years after the attack—two years before the uprising—she died in shame and anonymity.

  “Tell Her Father” was an old Egyptian folk song that reflected that patriarchal culture. It told the story of a wedding. “Tell her father to rest if he is worried. She is a tightly closed door lock and the key has come to it,” the lyrics run. “Tell her father to have dinner if he was hungry. Go home, father, the blood has wetted the sheets.”

  Mozn Hassan never liked the song. After Mubarak’s ouster, Hassan and Nazra for Feminist Studies saw an opening for a different kind of bottom-up, grassroots feminism, unfettered by the Mubarak government’s restrictions on fund-raising or assembly, or by the need to coordinate women’s projects through the National Council. She started organizing new cultural events, including improvisational music performances that made new songs out of the stories of women in the audience.

  One of the songs that emerged was also called “Tell Her Father”:

  Tell her father: Cry for the calamity

  She was broken by your own hands and her tears spilled on the sheets

  Tell her father they deceived you

  Her honor is not between her legs but they do not say that

  Tell her father: she’s not a commodity to be sold

  They slaughtered and the wailing was public

  Tell her father to rest if he was worried

  She is not a door lock waiting for the key

  Tell her father girls are in pain

  They shoulder their pain, and they raise their heads high.

  It was eventually recorded by a four-woman rock band, Bent al-Masarwa—Egyptian Girl—that also grew out of the Nazra performances. Soon the band was selling out shows at a Cairo art gallery. Egyptian Girl eventually released a commercial album of songs about virginity, harassment, head covering, and other gender-related subjects. “They are so cute,” Hassan later told me.

  Hassan turned thirty-two in 2011. She had grown up in Saudi Arabia while her father worked as a university administrator there. But she insisted that her childhood in the kingdom had less to do with her feminism than had watching the discrimination her mother faced as a professor of archaeology at the University of Alexandria. Hassan kept a biography, in English, of Doria Shafik in a prominent place in her Zamalek apartment. And after the eighteen days of protests drove out Mubarak, Mozn and the women at Nazra saw their chance to revitalize Shafik’s legacy.

  “We were so obsessed by the idea of a movement,” Hassan told me.

  Hassan and Nazra were the opposite of First Lady feminism. They focused most of all on expanding the public space for grassroots organizing. They started by holding training for scores of “women’s human rights defenders,” to provide legal services for female activists as well as to record their ordeals and triumphs. They advertised a national telephone hotline for women in need to reach them.

  “Some were laughing at us,” she said. “They were joking that we are searching for every stray cat in the street to call her a human rights defender. Others said ‘they are just crazy feminists’ and we should all have the same cause.”

  They collected the stories of women who suffered abuse at the hands of the police, or were abused by their families after their release. They helped foster grassroots groups like Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment, which trained men and women to police Tahrir Square and other public places, to combat sexual intimidation even among self-described “revolutionaries.”

  When a twenty-three-year-old woman named Merna Thomas complained that men dominated the graffiti scene, Nazra helped her set up seminars and design stencils to get female artists into the game. They sprayed slogans like WOMEN ARE EQUAL TO MEN around Cairo and other cities, along with graffiti portraits of notable women from Egyptian history—feminists, labor organizers, artists, writers, and so on.

  Nazra staged women’s theater productions on subjects like masculinity or sexual violence. Its “Young Feminist School” brought forty-five women and fifteen men under thirty from the provinces to Cairo for fifteen days of training in topics like women in politics, women in labor organizing, women in the arts, and violence against women. Only a few men were expelled for hitting on women.

  A “cadres” program trained women to build parties. A “political representation academy” provided sixteen female candidates of any (non-Islamist) faction with training and tactical help on steps like collecting signatures, formulating a platform, and giving public speeches. Their programs were unlike the iniatives to foster democracy that the American government sponsored. Those counted how many hundreds or thousands of candidates they moved through two-day training conferences. Nazra stuck with its sixteen women candidates from registration through voting. When the promise of parliamentary elections was finally fulfilled—later, in 2012—one of the Nazra alumnae, Sanaa el-Saeed of Assiut, became the only woman to win a seat who did not come from either the Islamist parties or the former Mubarak legislature. (Of the 23 million women who were eligible to vote, about five hundred thousand cast ballots, and of the nearly one thousand female candidates, only nine won seats in the chamber. Five of the nine were Islamist women. But that was still to come.)

  Hassan and Nazra were hardly well known in Egypt. But they represented a sea change: the rebirth of an independent women’s movement, the first since Abdel Nasser shut down Doria Shafik’s Daughter of the Nile Union. Nazra spawned independent, self-sustaining satellite groups in fifteen towns outside Cairo. Made up mostly of women who had never attended college, the Nazra satellites both reported local abuses and planned women’s events. Some, like the group in Aswan, had as many as fifty members.

  Trade unionists, free-speech advocates, and many other groups were taking advantage of the new opportunities to organize. But Americans and Europeans were always amazed by the women, Hassan told me. “The Western reaction was, ‘Wow, women are in the streets!’” She widened her eyes in mock wonder. “Duh!”

  Nazra and its women human rights defenders were also among the first to report the virginity tests, and they helped persuade three of the women to speak out by name. One, Samira Ibrahim, took the generals to court.

  * * *

  • • •

  I met Ibrahim at a gathering of rights advocates taking up her cause. She was twenty-five years old, and she wore a purple hijab printed with flowers. She neither looked me in the eye nor shook my hand. I touched the left side of my chest instead, as I had learned to do when greeting conservative women. My colleague Mayy el-Sheikh asked the questions.

  “I kept telling myself, ‘People get heart attacks, why don’t I get a heart attack and just die like them?’” Ibrahim told us. She was from a poor village near Sohag, in rural southern Egypt, where she worked at an office job for a marketing company. She and some friends had ridden a train for nine hours to join the protests in Cairo that March. They were spending the nights at an inexpensive hotel, she said, until the soldiers clearing Tahrir Square had hauled her into the Egyptian Museum.

  When she returned to Sohag after her release from military custody, her mother told her to stay silent about her ordeal if she ever hoped to marry. Ibrahim was afraid even to tell her father, an Islamist who worked as a building contractor.

  But as a young man he had been detained and beaten by the police himself, for belonging to a militant group. He recognized the electric-shock marks he saw on the skin of his daughter.

  “History is repeating itself,” he said. She told him of her ordeal, and to her surprise he said that now was the chance to take the army to court, to hold the generals accountable. “To get my rights,” Ibrahim told us.

/>   Cairo human rights lawyers filed multiple lawsuits against the soldiers on her behalf. But Egyptian news outlets reported that unnamed military sources had insisted Ibrahim fabricated the whole episode. She received anonymous phone calls at night threatening rape or murder. Critics in the news media demanded: How could she accuse patriotic soldiers of sexual abuse?

  Then General Sisi publicly defended the virginity tests. “The procedure was done to protect the girls from rape, as well as to protect the soldiers and officers from rape accusations,” he told Amnesty International. Sisi evidently expected the world to agree that, of course, only virgins could be the victims of sexual assault.

  In the first verdict on her claims, a military court exonerated the army doctor who she said had carried out the examinations. It was her word against the army’s. And her story might have disappeared there if not for another woman’s more public encounter with Egyptian soldiers that December.

  During another round of protests and clashes with the security forces around Tahrir Square, something—perhaps a Molotov cocktail or a canister of tear gas—set on fire a neoclassical library of rare books and manuscripts established by Napoleon in 1798 during the French occupation. Thousands of demonstrators fled as hundreds of soldiers swarmed forward around the burning building. A woman in a traditional dark abaya stumbled and fell, and a friend, Hassan Shahin, tried to carry her to safety.

  Before he could, a group of four soldiers in helmets and visors caught up with them and seized her. They dragged her along the pavement, ripped her gown, and pushed it over her face, exposing her jeans, torso, and bright blue bra. The soldiers kicked her and stomped her and hit her with a club for several minutes while she writhed half naked on the ground. Then they hauled away her inert body.

  It was hardly the first such attack. But this time an activist had caught it on film. Within hours the footage was everywhere. The next day, a freeze-frame photograph of a soldier’s foot coming down over the blue bra covered the full front page of a new independent newspaper named for the square, Tahrir.

  At a televised news conference, General Adel Emara of the military council insisted that the images had been taken out of context. “The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has always warned against the abuse of freedom that leads to chaos and the fall of the state instead of the fall of the regime,” he said, perhaps unwittingly echoing Mubarak’s line about the “very thin line” that “separates freedom from chaos.”

  “There is a systematic plan to demolish the state,” the general said, “to clash with the armed forces and show it in a bad and inappropriate light, using violence against protesters.”

  A female journalist tried to hold up the newspaper with the image of the beating. The general shouted her down. “Fold the paper, I know what I am talking about!” Then all the journalists started pressing. “No, I didn’t open the door for questions,” the general sputtered. “I didn’t allow for talking! If you talk again I will kick you out! . . . We are securing the state.”

  Finally an older female journalist with the state media politely raised her hand. She identified herself as “an Egyptian woman first and the senior military editor second.” Apologize and listen, she said calmly, “or the next revolution will be a women’s revolution for real!”

  Wait! the general told her, unfolding a note. The army had just learned of a new plan to attack government buildings, he said, and he steamrolled right past her.

  The attack, of course, never materialized.

  Many on television or in the papers again blamed the woman. Why didn’t she wear an undershirt? Was that a blue bra or a bikini? Why so colorful? Did her abaya have snaps instead of buttons, and did that mean she wanted to disrobe? Why was a soldier in the picture wearing a tennis shoe instead of a boot? The photo’s “genuineness is questionable,” an announcer on state television averred.

  Islamists called the photo a plot to distract from elections. “Regardless of what was written about her on the internet—about how she wasn’t wearing anything under her abaya, about who she is and what she did, or that person who said she provoked the soldiers and was lying down for them for an hour—all this doesn’t matter to me,” summed up Khaled Abdullah, an ultraconservative Islamist host.

  “The girl in the open abaya (the one with the snaps) performed a striptease show so that the cameras gush over her underwear and the poor military soldiers look like assassins who violate honor,” wrote Lamees Gaber, a female screenwriter and columnist.

  I thought she would end up like Nawal Ali, the journalist assaulted and disgraced under Mubarak. Thank God the soldiers covered her face.

  Calls circulated on social media for yet another march—#bluebra. I foresaw a fiasco. No women’s demonstration had attracted more than a few dozen people since before Abdel Nasser. The only news I expected to report from the event was more violence against the women.

  But when I got out of a car downtown, I heard a roar blocks away. The crowd was not just dozens or hundreds. It was thousands, even tens of thousands. Women of all ages, from infants to grandmothers. And they were as diverse as the city—unveiled hair, head scarves that covered only the hair, longer veils that covered the torso, niqabs that covered all but the eyes. Many held blown-up photographs of the woman in the blue bra under the boots of the soldiers. Others had made their own signs:

  IF YOU DON’T LEAVE YOUR HOUSE TODAY TO CONFRONT THE MILITIAS OF TANTAWI, YOU WILL LEAVE YOUR HOUSE TOMORROW SO THEY CAN RAPE YOUR DAUGHTER.

  IS IT A REVOLUTION OR A COUP?

  SHAME IS ASHAMED OF YOU, COWARDS.

  “Drag me, strip me, my brothers’ blood will cover me!” the women chanted. Or, “Yes, she was wearing an abaya with snaps. How could she have known that you were depraved?”

  Men were there, too. Some walked in front of the march, even waving their hands like conductors for the women to chant louder. Others walked alongside like shepherds, protecting the marchers from potential assault. Some of the signs and chants, too, were in their own way conservative, like the demands for gallantry from the men of Egypt. But the sheer number of women was overwhelming. No one had ever seen anything like it in Egypt.

  “Come down,” they cried to the balconies and upper-story windows, and at each block more and more women joined in. Male storekeepers stood in doorways, watching slack jawed as the river of women flooded past them. Public and private had been turned inside out.

  “Where is the field marshal? The girls of Egypt are here,” they chanted. “Down with military rule!” “Hureya, hureya”—“Freedom, freedom.” “Every bullet strengthens us.”

  Older activists marveled. Ghada Shahbander had demonstrated with Nawal Ali in 2005. “The wall of fear is gone,” Shahbander told me. “That is the difference the Egyptian revolution has made. And now when we march for the Blue Bra Girl, we march for Nawal Ali.”

  The woman never revealed her name. Mayy el-Sheikh chided me for calling her the Blue Bra Girl. Egyptian women, Mayy said, called her the Lady of All Girls.

  She had stirred the largest demonstration by women in modern Arab history. By the time I got back to my office that afternoon, while the march was still swelling, the generals had reversed themselves, accepted the blame, and apologized for unspecified “violations.”

  “The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces expresses its utmost sorrow for the great women of Egypt, for the violations that took place during the recent events.”

  I had never heard anything like it: the generals almost never apologized.

  The next week, Samira Ibrahim won her vindication, too. Egypt’s administrative court unexpectedly ruled in her favor and banned virginity tests. “These acts involve deliberate humiliation and intentional insult to women participating in protests” and “a violation of human rights and freedoms,” the court ruled. Never before had a civilian court ruled against the generals.

  Graffiti stencils of a floating blu
e bra and the face of Samira Ibrahim started appearing on the walls of downtown Cairo. FEAR ME, GOVERNMENT, read the sign below a blue bra hovering near the raised fist of a woman in a hijab.

  Plucky Ibrahim was an instant hero in Washington. She was precisely the sort of activist Americans had pictured leading the revolution. Perhaps the fall of Suzanne Mubarak was an opportunity for Egyptian women after all.

  The State Department invited Ibrahim to Washington to receive its International Women of Courage Award, to be presented by Michelle Obama. But Ibrahim, like Egypt, was complicated. In the summer of 2012, she wrote a Twitter post lauding a suicide bombing that killed five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. “A lot of very sweet news.”

  A few weeks later, she commended the September 11 terrorist attack. “May America burn again every year.” She quoted Adolf Hitler. “No act contrary to morality, no crime against society, takes place except with the Jews having a hand in it.”

  The State Department rescinded the invitation.

  6

  The Theban Legion

  May 7, 2011–October 9, 2011

  Why did churches look like fortresses? Why the walls of stone, the slits for windows, the guard tower? Our driver Mohamed was full of questions about Christianity. By guard tower, I learned, he meant church steeple.

  I was on my way to the Cairo slum of Imbaba, where a mob had torched two churches the previous night. Along with the risks to Israel and women’s rights, the threat to the Christian minority was a recurring fear in Western debates about the Egyptian uprising. I imagined that the former police state had kept a lid on these dark, sectarian passions for decades, and now they were boiling over. It was the kind of easy metaphor we journalists cherish.