Words to ponder:
On January 24, Major Mohamed Farid, the head of criminal investigations at Mashtoul al-Souk police station in Sharqiya Province, tortured Mohamed Salem to force him to confess to a theft. This torture resulted in a fracture in Salem’s spinal column, which completely paralyzed both legs, made Salem an invalid, and led to fecal and urinary incontinence. (The Egyptian Association against Torture)
State Security headquarters in al-Arish smelled of roasting skin because of the hundreds of detainees being tortured with electric shocks. (Al-Ahali newspaper)
Human rights in Egypt have recently seen a significant transformation. (Egyptian Foreign Ministry statement)
We assure you that Ayman Nour was absolutely not beaten. The injury under his left eye came about when his face collided with the finger of one of the policemen as he was being arrested. (People’s Assembly statement)
Imagine, God forbid, what would have happened if someone less wise than President Mubarak were ruling Egypt.… It would have been a disaster. (Mustafa al-Fiki)
Citizens must be informed in advance before the water is cut off. (President Hosni Mubarak)
February 27, 2005
The Party of the Great Collapse
The official media blackout, statements from the Ministry of Interior, articles by the government’s scribes, none of them can diminish the gravity of what happened in central Cairo during the Eid holiday. More than a thousand young men gathered between Adli Street and Talaat Harb Street and started attacking and molesting women at random for four full hours. Any female who had the misfortune to be passing through the area at that time—girls, women, young and old, with or without hijab or niqab, walking alone, with friends, or even with their husbands—would have met the same fate. Hundreds of sex-crazed young men would have attacked her and completely surrounded her with their bodies, and dozens of hands would have reached out to pull off her clothes and grope her breasts and between her legs. Some people rallied round and saved one or two girls whose clothes had been torn and who were lying in the street half naked.
The girls who were assaulted were not prostitutes or delinquents, just ordinary Egyptians like my wife or your wife, my daughter or your daughter, whose only crime was to believe that we live in a decent country and to have gone out for a walk at the Eid holiday. This heinous crime took place in front of dozens of witnesses. Many photographers took pictures of it and posted their pictures on the Internet. I have seen the pictures and I grieved for my country. I will never forget the girl in the hijab who appeared in the pictures with her clothes completely shredded (though the fiends forgot to tear off her head covering) as dozens of hands groped her naked body. I will never forget the sorrowful and pained expression on her face as she was violated in the street. She resisted the assault as much as she could but in the end she collapsed.
What happened is not just a crime but also a moral and social catastrophe we need to analyze in order to understand what is happening in Egypt. First, the young men involved come from poor unplanned districts of the city, from the lowest strata of Egyptian society. Initially they gathered to buy movie tickets, but when they discovered the tickets were sold out they went on an angry rampage, smashing the facade of the Metro movie theater. When they realized there were no police in the whole area and felt that their numbers gave them strength and made them immune to punishment, they gave free rein to their primitive instincts to assault any woman who crossed their path. Once they had finished with one girl, one of them shouted out, “There’s another one,” and everyone repeated after him, “Another one, another one,” and they all rushed off to their new victim. This hysterical form of mass aggression is merely a rehearsal for the total chaos that could break out anywhere at any moment. There were reports on the Internet that what happened in central Cairo was repeated in the Delta towns of Zagazig and Mansoura over the Eid. Without doubt the young men who took part in this mass assault to satisfy their sexual appetites would turn at the first opportunity to plunder, looting, and arson.
Second, the sexual frenzy that overwhelmed these young men is not just an expression of sexual frustration. Sexual desire can often have buried within it feelings of despair, frustration, injustice, insignificance, and futility, and all of these are common among the poor in Egypt. These young men are the children of destitute, broken people who die of kidney failure or are poisoned by drinking sewage water, people who have cancer from Youssef Wali’s pesticides, people who burn to death in trains to Upper Egypt or drown on the ferries of death. They do not care if they live or die. These rampaging young men are the children of unemployment, impotence, and overcrowding. They live crammed into tiny rooms in buildings without utilities or public services. They have lost all hope for the future, hope of work, of marriage, or even of emigration abroad. They live without dignity, and any policeman can detain them, beat them, and abuse them. What is striking is that when they assaulted their victims, these young men used the same methods the police and State Security personnel use with the wives of detainees and suspects to extract their confessions. This frenzied and hysterical behavior no doubt contains a large dose of revenge against an ugly and hostile reality that does not provide the minimal conditions for a decent life. These young men, when they commit these communal acts of sexual assault, might well be taking revenge on those responsible for their wretched and degrading lives.
Third, if such an act of mass sexual assault took place in the West, many would hurry to accuse western society of decadence and moral decay. When it happens in Egypt, it means the religiosity so prevalent today is superficial and without substance. For centuries Egypt had its own understanding of Islam, a tolerant and open-minded understanding compatible with the civilized nature of Egyptians. Egypt always managed, in quite an unusual way, to preserve its form of Islam with its openness to the world, and Egyptian women were the first in the Arab world to be educated, to work outside the home, and to win society’s respect as human beings with rights equal to those of men, at least until the end of the 1970s, when Egyptian society was subjected to a sweeping invasion of Wahhabi ideas from Saudi Arabia. One factor that led to this invasion is that President Anwar Sadat used religion to overcome the leftist opposition, and the Mubarak regime continues to support Wahhabism in order to benefit from the political submissiveness it installs in people’s minds. Another is that the price of oil increased several times over after the October 1973 war, giving Saudi Arabia more influence than it ever had before and enabling it to impose its understanding of Islam on Egypt and the Arab world. As corruption and despotism added to poverty in Egypt, millions of Egyptians flocked to work in the Gulf, and came back years later with money and Wahhabi ideas. Sectors of Egyptian society acquired Saudi customs and forms of behavior previously unknown in Egypt, such as the niqab, beards, white gowns, closing shops at prayer time, taking one’s shoes off when going into a house, and so on.
In reality the Wahhabi ideology sees women as merely vessels for sex, a source of temptation, and a means to produce children. What preoccupies the Wahhabis most is covering up women’s bodies and preventing them as far as possible from mixing in society, in order to ward off the evil of their allure. This debased view of women strips them of their identity as human beings and considers them to be merely females. It believes that women have no willpower and such a weak sense of honor that to be alone with one inevitably leads to sin. In the eyes of Wahhabis a woman is not fully competent; she cannot drive or wander around alone without a man to protect her from abduction or rape. Although these ideas purport to promote virtue, in the end they lead to a view of women as sexual prey who cannot say no or defend themselves. The man has to protect a woman from others, but if he can obtain access to other men’s women and escape punishment then he will not hesitate. Remember that in Saudi Arabia abducting and raping women and children is a frightening phenomenon and a real danger. Now we can see how until the end of the 1970s Egypt, open-minded and moderate, showed true religiosity in beha
vior and social relations, whereas now, sullen and strict about the externals of religion, the country is far removed from the spirit of Islam. All it has is a veneer, contracted like an infection from Bedouin societies that are closed, backward, and hypocritical.
This tragedy has revealed that the Ministry of Interior no longer considers protecting people to be one of its duties. The police forces that search Egyptians and hold them up in the streets for hours simply because a member of President Mubarak’s family or one of his ministers happens to be passing in a motorcade, the security agencies that abused, beat, assaulted, and dragged along the ground people who demonstrated in favor of democracy and the independence of the judiciary, all this vast apparatus of repression never thought of sending forces to secure the downtown area during the Eid holiday. In fact several policemen and a young officer appear in pictures of the incident, completely indifferent to the carnival of sexual assault raging in front of their eyes. One policeman acted as instinct should have dictated, just one policeman whose sense of honor impelled him, on his own initiative, to take off his belt and try to beat back the frenzied hordes with it. But his courage counted for nothing against their numbers and against their determination to ravage another victim. In fact the comments by the Interior Ministry on the disaster, both on the television program Ten PM and in the government newspapers, were contradictory and to a large extent inept. They denied what happened and said Kasr al-Nil police station had not received any reports of sexual assault, as though a policeman’s duty is merely to sit in a police station and wait for reports to arrive. We would like to ask Interior Minister Habib al-Adli: What would have happened if these sex-crazed young men, whom your officers left to assault Egyptian women for a full four hours, had instead been chanting slogans against President Hosni Mubarak? Would not an army of riot police have been deployed immediately to crush them? Is protecting President Mubarak from hostile chants more important to you than protecting the honor of Egyptian women?
What happened in central Cairo shows that the great collapse has already begun. Egypt is falling apart while President Mubarak, who has ruled the country for a quarter of a century and has brought it to rock bottom, is interested only in handing the country over to his son. We all have a duty to act to save our country from the bleak future that looms on the horizon, and the only way to save Egypt is through a real democracy that restores to Egyptians their humanity, their rights, and their dignity, as well as their civilized behavior.
November 5, 2006
Why Do Egyptians Harass Women?
The traditional answer to this question is that, although women are the victims of sexual harassment, they are themselves to blame because they wear tight or skimpy clothes that excite young men and impel them to harass women. This explanation contains a major fallacy and twisted logic: it implies that women must always take the blame, even for misconduct and crimes of which they are the victims, and that young men are merely animals unable to control their instinctive urges, such that whenever a woman in tight clothes comes into sight they pounce on her and rape her. But this argument, which unfairly blames the victim, has recently fallen apart, exposed as completely baseless. Studies have shown that more than 75 percent of the women subjected to sexual harassment in Egypt are women who wear the hijab. In fact video footage available on the Internet of an incident of mass sexual harassment in central Cairo two years ago shows the harassers groping a woman who is wearing the isdal, which covers the whole body. Besides, until the end of the 1970s it was socially acceptable in Egyptian society for a woman to wear a swimsuit that exposed parts of her body to men, and beaches and swimming pools in clubs all had girls and women going into the water in swimsuits without anyone harassing them. In fact the fashions prevalent at that time, such as the miniskirt, exposed a woman’s legs, and many women in Egypt would wear such clothes at work, at college, and on public transport. At the time short skirts aroused the disapproval of conservatives but they never encouraged people to harass women.
So it’s certain that sexual harassment is an intrusive disease that did not exist as a phenomenon thirty years ago, and that tight or skimpy clothing is in no way the stimulus for sexual harassment. The phenomenon of sexual harassment in Egypt, which has spread in recent times, undoubtedly has many social and economic dimensions. There is sexual repression, the late marrying age, unemployment, poverty, the prevalence of unregulated housing, frustration, empty lives, and a sense of unfairness. In my opinion these are all important but contributing factors, while the root cause in my view is a change in the way we see women. Throughout human history there have been two ways to think of women. There is the civilized way, where the woman is seen as a human being who happens to be female, just as a man is a human being who happens to be male. This civilized view of women acknowledges all of women’s human abilities and capacities, not just their femininity, so it leaves plenty of space for respectful human interaction. With this view, men deal with their female colleagues and female students or teachers at university as human beings and not just as women they want to sleep with. The retrogressive view of women is that they are only bodies desired by men, that women are first and last female, instruments of pleasure, sources of temptation, and machines for producing children, and that a woman’s activities, other than her functions as a woman, are secondary and marginal. The truth is that Egyptian society made great and early strides toward modernization starting in the nineteenth century, and so Egyptians very early acquired a civilized attitude of respect for the status of women as human beings. Egyptian women were pioneers in the Arab world, the first to be educated, the first to take employment, the first to drive cars and fly planes, the first to sit in parliament, and the first to hold ministerial positions.
A civilized view of women as human beings prevailed in Egypt until the beginning of the 1980s, when the country was swept by a powerful wave of fundamentalist Wahhabi thinking that offered a completely different view of women. In the eyes of the fundamentalists a woman meant a body first and last, and their main concern was to cover that body up. A few days ago a prominent Saudi sheikh called on Muslim women to wear the niqab with one eye opening, to keep themselves safe from furtive glances and to protect morality. This view of women as just bodies inevitably turns women into sexual prey vulnerable to attack at any time. It sees women as creatures almost without moral willpower that must always be accompanied by male relatives to protect them from others and from themselves. Seeing women as just bodies disposes harassers toward targeting them as soon as the harassers feel immune from punishment.
The regressive view of women, which is now spreading in Egypt, was unfortunately imported from desert nomadic societies that are far behind Egypt in every field of human activity. Instead of us helping those societies to progress, we have been infected by their backward ideas. The young men who come out on public holidays to harass women in the street are simply applying what they have learned about women, because, if a woman is just a body, if she represents only lust and pleasure, if she is a source of temptation, then why wouldn’t one molest her whenever one is sure of impunity? The Egyptian newspaper al-Masry al-Youm interviewed some of the harassers and they all claimed that any women who went out for a walk on a public holiday wanted young men to harass them. This logic is completely in line with the backward fundamentalist view of women: that women carry temptation in their blood, even if they pretend the opposite, that men must guard their women with extreme vigilance, and that any woman who goes out alone when it is crowded is no more than a fallen woman who wants young men to harass her. We have replaced our civilized view of women with a regressive view cloaked in religion in a way that has no basis in religion, and we have started to pay a heavy price for these backward ideas.
Before we urge young men not to harass women, we first have to teach them how to respect women. We have to stop discussing what women must wear and what they can take off, whether they have to cover their ears or can leave locks of hair hanging down. We have
to abandon that backward view, which is in fact obsessed with women’s bodies even when its advocates pretend to be pious and call for women to be covered. We have to restore our civilized Egyptian ideas and remember that women are mothers, sisters, and daughters, the complete equals of men in abilities, rights, and duties. We have to show these young men examples of women’s professional success and intellectual distinction. They have to know about women doctors, engineers, and judges. Then they will realize that women have real abilities that are much more important than their bodies, and only then will they stop harassing women in the street.
October 22, 2008
How Should We Overcome
the Temptation Posed by Women?
Dear reader,
Imagine that one day you go to your place of work and find all your colleagues wearing masks. You can hear their voices but you cannot see their faces. How would you feel? Of course you wouldn’t feel at ease and if the situation continued it would make you nervous, because we always need to see the faces of those we are talking to. Human communication is complete only when faces are visible. That has been the nature of mankind since the beginning of creation. But those who force women to cover their faces do not understand this fact.
On the State of Egypt Page 9