Headscarves and Hymens

by Mona Eltahawy

  It was not an easy search. Some men were still struggling with the chains it had taken me so long to unclasp, and I found myself moved by their personal revolutions. I would remind myself that men also struggled against sexual guilt and a socialization that produced a warped and unhealthy attitude toward women and sex. I believe—and my experience reaffirmed that belief—that girls and women bear the greater burden of this socialization. But in getting to know Egyptian men better, and in sharing my frustrations with the way our culture and practice of religion had filled us with guilt and stripped us of understanding for each other, I learned that our best allies are those men determined to free themselves of sexual guilt and refuse the false ease of gender double standards.

  In My Men, Malika Mokeddem includes an open letter to her father in which she claims that “to write about men loved freely, in spite of everyone and everything,” was the best way to speak against the conservatively religious men—she calls them “the forces of darkness”—who insist on policing women’s lives:

  I lay claim to my successive loves, including the “blasphemous” ones. They underscore my freedom of being in this world … I insist on doing it. The forces of darkness have followed me here to France. And everywhere in the West they appear in order to deny women the dignity of a legitimate existence. One of their self-appointed great thinkers—a bearded man with fangs as long as the bloody Algerian night—hems and haws on TV screens about the stoning of adulterous women. Their brigades have succeeded in loading this baggage onto the backs of young immigrant girls, putting blinders on them. It is not a given that they will have the last word, Father. There are so many of us whose only religion is the right to equality, to freedom, to love, to sexual choice.

  Writing about being loved “freely, in spite of everyone and everything” is too rare a thing in our culture. Very few people in the Arab world are willing to talk about sex that is not between a husband and a wife, and even less about sex that is not between a man and a woman. When an Egyptian friend of mine came out to me as a lesbian, she also explained why—despite long years of activism against the Mubarak regime, despite the ways she’d risked her life and career as part of that activism—she was not ready to come out to her family or the public. I told her I supported her and whatever she felt was best for her at that time, and I was honored she trusted me with her confidence. As a sexually active woman, she was challenging many of our country’s most sensitive taboos already, I knew, but with the added risk of the complication and censure that come with having sex with women in an intolerant society. There were so many forces pressing her into silence, into rendering that part of herself invisible.

  During my first trip to Beirut, in 2009, I spent my first evening at an event I had never imagined I would attend in the Middle East. At a theater on Hamra Street, two women who openly identified as lesbian took the stage and read, in Arabic and English, from a book about to be released called Bareed Mista3jil (Express mail). It was a collection of oral narratives from lesbian, bisexual, queer, and questioning women, as well as transgender people, in Lebanon. The stories involved women from across the country—rural and urban, of different faiths and sects. Some stories were about the difficulty or impossibility of coming out. Some were by people who had immigrated to Western countries only to find homophobia replaced by anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia. One of the passages described the particular challenges that lesbians face in their own culture:

  A lot more has been said about male homosexuality than female homosexuality. This comes as no surprise in a patriarchal society where women’s issues are often dismissed. And sexuality, because it touches on reclaiming our bodies and demanding the right to desire and pleasure, is the ultimate taboo of women’s issues. We have published this book in order to introduce Lebanese society to the real stories of real people whose voices have gone unheard for hundreds of years. They live among us, although invisible to us, in our families, in our schools, our workplaces, and our neighborhoods. Their sexualities have been mocked, dismissed, denied, oppressed, distorted, and forced into hiding.

  Bareed Mista3jil was published by Meem, a support community for lesbian and bisexual women formed in Beirut in 2007. “Meem” is the phonetic pronunciation for the first letter in the Arabic word methleyya, a relatively recent addition to the Arabic lexicon that literally means “same,” as in “same sex,” and refers to lesbians. (For gay men, it would be methli.) Until the introduction of those words, the only way to refer in Arabic to someone who was homosexual was with slurs, such as shaaz (“deviant”) or khawwal (“fag”). These new words are a reminder of how a culture can be led away from loaded and discriminatory language—and the on-the-ground discrimination they inspire—with the introduction of new words. For a long time we had no word for feminism in Arabic, and then nasawiya was introduced, helping us to refute the lazy accusation that feminism is a Western import. We need so many more new words in Arabic.

  Lina Ben Mhenni, the Tunisian feminist and activist, asks what the word freedom means. “When people took to the streets in December 2010, it’s true they were calling for employment, freedom, dignity,” she said. “I think they weren’t really ready to accept that freedom means all freedoms, including women’s freedom, sexual freedom, individual freedom; all freedom. They’re not ready for such a revolution.”

  A simple but explosive way to speed the sexual revolution would be the introduction of sex education in our region’s curricula. According to a 2007 report from the Population Reference Bureau, only Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, Morocco, and Tunisia include reproductive health in their national school curricula. Currently, the topic gets a cursory (if that) mention in some textbooks, depending on the country you live in and whether you go to a state-funded or a private school. Even in countries that do have sex education, teachers will often be too embarrassed to teach that section and will assign it as something students must read by themselves. Also, parents in some countries have complained that they don’t want their children, especially their daughters, to be taught anything about sex.

  Most parents in the region are also extremely reluctant to discuss reproduction with their children. According to a 2006 survey in Algeria by the Pan Arab Project for Family Health, 95 percent of male respondents and 74 percent of female respondents learned about puberty on their own, without instruction from parents or teachers.

  So where do our young men and women get information about sex? Nowadays, there is at least the Internet and pornography. But depending on what kind of porn they watch, viewers could be imprinted with degrading gender stereotypes and develop an understanding of sex that places male desire and pleasure at the center of sexual encounters.

  Many young people learn about sex, love, and married life from television and radio, particularly from talk shows in which clerics (of wildly varying degrees of qualification) answer questions from viewers. Sex and relationship questions are common on these programs, but the clerics inevitably address the topics with sanctimony and misinformation, and address taboo topics (contraception, homosexuality, and extramarital sex) not at all. (To get an idea of the kind of “advice” that awaits women callers, recall my father’s anecdote about the cleric who asked an abused wife what she’d done to merit her beatings.)

  Without sex education that presents sex as a positive experience—and that mitigates taboo and “dirty” associations—and without easy access to contraceptives or even basic information about birth control, sex will continue to pose a great danger to the most vulnerable in our societies: girls and women.

  A physician who specializes in obstetrics and gynecology in Cairo told me that many of her patients in both her university hospital clinic (lower-income patients) and private practice (more affluent patients) present symptoms of sexual frustration but are unable to say so boldly and clearly. When she suggests exercises the women can do with their husbands, most women say they would rather die than propose them. The women worry that their husbands will think they’re questioning thei
r virility or, even worse, that the men will believe the exercises are not from a doctor but rather from previous sexual experiences, meaning the women were not virgins when they married. In a culture that enshrines domestic violence, women risk chastisement, beating, and even death by beginning such discussions.

  Ironically, due to the extreme difficulty that women face when speaking out, it is a male poet who has best expressed the desires and frustrations of Arab women. The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani (1923–1998) skewered Arab societies for their hypocrisy and double standards when it came to the upbringing of boys and girls, and the disparity in the freedom to love and to desire they were allowed as they matured. Qabbani’s older sister committed suicide to avoid marrying a man she did not love, and many have theorized that this ignited the poet’s lifelong attempt to give voice to women’s subjectivities, women’s passions.

  “Qabbani was not embracing fashionable causes when he began his concentrated attack on the way women were induced, through a narrow conservative education, to deny their own humanity,” writes Salma Khadra Jay-yusi in her introduction to On Entering the Sea: The Erotic and Other Poetry of Nizar Qabbani. “Qabbani’s superior achievement, however, is that he not only attacked political coercion, but aimed his well-honed pen at the most sacrosanct taboos in Arab traditional culture: the sexual … He called for the liberation of both body and soul from the repressive injunctions imposed upon them throughout the centuries, awakening women to a new awareness of their bodies and their sexuality, wrenching them away from the taboos of society, and making them aware of its discriminatory treatment of the sexes, of its inherent cruelty.”

  I am a huge fan of Qabbani’s poetry. But where is our female Qabbani?

  She existed once. One book introduced me to the great female poets of desire in Arabic: Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology, compiled and translated by Abdullah al-Udhari. Moris Farhi, writing for the website Poetry Magazines, praised Classical Poems as follows:

  I cannot think of a collection that exclusively features women who boldly refuse to be voiceless in a world where the male hegemonic psychosis, in various rabid modes, seeks to enslave and usurp them … This is a collection wherein women … declare, freely and proudly, their equality with men …

  It not only includes poetry from the Jahiliyya period (the period before the advent of Islam which Muslim scholars and historians invariably—and wrongly—dismiss as a period of chaos and ignorance and, therefore, of no historical significance), but also from the seminal periods which established Islam as a vibrant, major religion: the Umayyad, Abbasid and Andalusian periods.

  The collection’s range of female poets from radically different eras is extraordinary, as is how fearlessly they speak about their desires. From the Umayyad Caliphate (603–750 CE), there is Dahna bint Mashal as she reprimands her husband:

  Lay off, you can’t turn me on with a cuddle, a kiss or scent.

  Only a thrust rocks out my strains until the ring on my toe falls on my sleeve …

  And Bint al-Hubab boasting of her adultery:

  Why are you raving mad, husband, just because I love another man?

  Go on, whip me, every scar on my body will show the pain I cause you.

  From the Abbasid period (750–1258 CE), here is Safiyya al-Baghdadiyya:

  I am the wonder of the world, the ravisher of hearts and minds.

  Once you’ve seen my stunning looks, you’re a fallen man.

  And I’timad Arrumaikiyya (eleventh century), who implores her lover with no compunction:

  I urge you to come faster than the wind to mount my breast and firmly dig

  and plough my body, and don’t let go until you’ve flushed me thrice.

  What we’ve lost since the words of these bold and proudly desirous women! Conservatives will always charge that the language we use to frame our bodily desires and integrity is “Western” and blasphemous. But there has always been a language of female desire and female pride in Arabic; it is ours to reclaim.

  There are also words we must remove from the Arabic lexicon on sex. It is time to stop using girl for females who haven’t had sex and woman for those who have. Even if the sad reality is that our societies do still believe that it is a man and his penis that make us into women, we must change the language to inspire a change in attitude. That girl/woman distinction has ramifications beyond male sexual bluster. Rape laws are harsher in their punishment of the sexual violation of a “girl” than of a “woman,” treating a virgin and her genitals as a prize to be guarded for the right man’s arrival. The Moroccan penal code, for example, provides for harsher sentences if rape and “indecent assault” result in a woman losing her virginity. In its report on bias in Morocco’s penal code, Amnesty International says that the punishment for the rape of a woman is ten to twenty years in prison, unless the woman does not lose her virginity as a result of the assault, in which case the sentence is five to ten years.

  We also must have a reckoning with the word fornication. In the poorer countries of the region, the average age of marriage has been rising steadily as fewer people are able to afford a home of their own or any of the other expenses associated with marriage. As more and more young people delay marriage, the blanket prohibition on extramarital sex in the Muslim world will be challenged. Do we want a society where lovers marry just to be able to have sex? What if the man and woman who wait until marriage have no sexual chemistry? These questions are forcing themselves on our societies, and only an honest and bold discussion and a willingness to break with tradition, be it Islam or Christianity, will help us find answers.

  I am not naïve enough to think that “fornication” will disappear as a concept or as a sin from either the Muslim or Christian way of life in our region. I am instead calling for a pragmatic approach to sexuality that would allow consenting adults who choose to have sex with other consenting adults the freedom to do so, with the knowledge and birth control they require to do so safely. That freedom to choose will not infringe on the freedom to choose to wait until marriage, if that is what you want. The more freedom we have, the more choices available to people. The fewer freedoms we have, the faster hypocrisy will eat away at the heart of our society.

  A certain amount of privacy is necessary for autonomy, and privacy is a rare commodity in countries where the patriarch outside and the patriarch at home are constantly on your back, policing your behavior and setting curfews. Most women and men in the region live with their parents until they get married. So where can they find a private place if they want to have sex? Not at a hotel, because most hotels in Egypt demand a copy of a marriage certificate if an Egyptian checks in with someone from the opposite sex. (Ironically, this can sometimes make it easier to have same-sex relations; if you share a room with another woman, no one is likely to suspect your motivations.) In fact, in most countries in the region, including Lebanon, Morocco, and even Tunisia, a man and a woman who want to share a hotel room can be required to produce a marriage certificate. In Lebanon, though it is not legally forbidden, an unmarried couple may be prevented from booking a hotel room under family laws. In other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, an unmarried, unaccompanied woman cannot even check into a hotel alone, never mind with a man who is not her husband.

  So where do young people in love go? Cairo has become famous for the shy couples who line the bridges and sidewalks that overlook the Nile, holding hands or sometimes braving bolder moves, yet always facing the Nile, with their backs to the traffic, as if by turning away they are guaranteed a modicum of privacy. It breaks my heart to see these young men and women trying to find their way to what their hearts and bodies want, despite social and religious and political pressures of the most suffocating kind.

  A car is the main alternative to a room of one’s own, but only for those who can afford one. From those bold enough to share sexual anecdotes, you will often hear cars described as bastions of privacy and sexual exploration. But the streets of big cities such as Cairo are noto
riously crowded, so backseat activities can result in jail sentences. In 2012, a former Egyptian parliamentarian—from the Salafi sect, vehement in its condemnation of extramarital sex—received a one-year suspended sentence and a fine of 1,000 Egyptian pounds after he was arrested when police found him “performing sexual acts” in a car on a deserted road with a young woman who, according to some reports, was just sixteen. (Other reports said she was twenty-two.) The former parliamentarian had told the police that she was his niece. The young woman received a suspended six-month sentence and was ordered to pay a fine of 500 EGP.

  In Morocco, public displays of affection have riled the regime. In June 2012, Khadija Riyadi, head of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, alongside other activists, called for the removal of Article 490 of the Moroccan penal code, which punishes those caught having sex outside marriage even if they are consenting adults. Article 490 states: “All persons of the opposite sex who are not related by marriage, and have sexual relations with each other, are punishable by imprisonment for one month to one year.” It is followed by Article 491, which concerns adultery: “Any married person convicted of adultery is punishable by imprisonment for one to two years; prosecution is pursued only on a complaint from the offended spouse.”

  According to the NGO Freedom House, in cases involving sex outside marriage, a conviction can be based on only eyewitness testimony or a confession by one of the accused. The bias against women that Morocco’s penal code encourages is more obvious when you take into account how much the law values a man’s word over a woman’s.

  “In the absence of formal evidence or a flagrant case, the man’s statement is always believed over the woman’s,” a representative of the Democratic League for Women’s Rights, a Moroccan NGO, told the magazine MarocHebdo in 2011. “Many women are therefore accused of adultery simply because they were one-on-one at home with a man other than their husband or even in a public place. Without a witness, if they are unable to prove that their relationship with that man is purely professional and void of any sexual connotation, they do not escape justice.”