Headscarves and Hymens

by Mona Eltahawy

  Riyadi and her fellow activists began the public campaign to change Article 490 after they met with Morocco’s minister of solidarity, women, family, and social development, Bassima Hakkaoui, the only woman in the Islamist government elected in 2011. Hakkaoui led the efforts to repeal Article 475, which absolves a rapist who marries his victim. The success of these efforts inspired Riyadi to fight against Article 490.

  “Criminalizing sexual relations between consenting adults—regardless of their marital status—violates the right to privacy and to free expression. This provision also deters victims of rape from filing a complaint, because they could find themselves prosecuted for sexual relations outside of marriage,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Middle East and North Africa deputy director at Amnesty International.

  Following the start of the campaign to repeal the law that punishes extramarital sex, justice minister Mustapha Ramid claimed that the public was “not ready” for a more progressive approach. He has said that most Moroccan families don’t want to change existing laws and that they want the option of allowing rapists to marry underage girls to protect “family honor.” “These sexual relationships undermine the foundations of our society,” Ramid said.

  But Khadija Riyadi has reminded us why women like her—too often criticized as “extremist” and “out of touch”—are absolutely essential to the social and sexual revolution. “Laws help to change mentalities. We don’t wait for mentalities to change on their own,” she told Public Radio International. “We must do something to change mentalities.”

  Mokhtar al-Ghzioui, the editor of the daily newspaper al-Ahdath al-Maghribia, publicly supported Riyadi’s call to decriminalize sex outside marriage and said in a TV interview that he would be fine with his mother or sister having consensual sexual relations outside of wedlock. In response, a preacher named Abdullah Nahari, a resident of the city of Oujda, near the Algerian border, made a YouTube video calling for al-Ghzioui’s death. Nahari was then summoned by the local prosecutor to answer to the charge of inciting a crime. Three of Morocco’s most prominent conservative clerics, Abu Hafs, Omar al-Heddouchi, and Hassan al-Kettani, all spoke out in support of Nahari on their Facebook pages, thereby publicly backing a death threat against a journalist who had expressed his personal views.

  In October 2013 a few dozen Moroccans staged a “Kiss-In” in front of parliament to support three teenagers arrested for posting on Facebook pictures of two of them kissing. The kissing protesters said they wanted to affirm their right to public displays of affection in a country that was becoming increasingly conservative. According to the news website Middle East Online, “around a dozen couples took part in the event, which was swiftly disrupted by a small group of counterprotesters, who accused the couples of ‘atheism,’ shoved them, and threw chairs at them.” The court ultimately acquitted the teenagers, who had been accused of public indecency, but the offending couple, ages fourteen and fifteen, were reprimanded by the judge.

  Morocco is often considered more tolerant in the application of its Islamic-inspired penal code because it rarely arrests people who violate the criminalization of sex and alcohol, but this is inaccurate. The regime relies on clerics, who operate with the tacit and sometimes overt support of the regime, to issue the social censure and threats that the regime would prefer not to be seen delivering.

  “Legislative reforms to bring Moroccan law in line with international human rights standards are crucial in ensuring that women’s rights are protected, but changing the law is not enough. In a society where women do not enjoy an equal status with men, it is not only the law but also deeply ingrained societal attitudes which lead to discrimination,” said Hadj Sahraoui of Amnesty International.

  Morocco has yet to repeal Article 490. Nevertheless, the protests that Riyadi launched are important in that they have initiated the conversation necessary to combat the silence that surrounds sex. When your culture ensures you cannot figure out for yourself if, where, and when to have sex, it also ensures your silence when sex is forced upon you. It ensures that in the hierarchy of exploitation, girls and women will always be at the very bottom.

  When I first explored my sexuality, I felt I needed to keep my personal life a secret; I needed to make my own mistakes and learn my own way through them. This is true for many women, but we must also remember that we need to leave the darkness in order to find one another. In the fight against injustice, it helps to hear truths about women’s personal lives. We need to hear not just from the women who speak out about the violations of their bodies and who, in refusing to be silenced about sexual trauma, affirm their survival, but also from the women who speak out about the pleasure of sex, and who in refusing to be silent about their needs and desires affirm their survival as well. It takes a fierce drive for survival to emerge from cultural and religious restraints and say, “I want sex. It is my right to want sex. I celebrate this desire I feel.”

  If more of us spoke out, what would happen? I know several women who, like me, spent years waiting for marriage to have sex before finally deciding to direct their own sexuality—one at thirty-one, another at thirty-two, yet another at thirty-eight. And there are others who are still waiting.

  What if more women spoke openly of their sexual frustration, that same frustration that is used to excuse and justify the behavior of men who grope and sexually violate us on the streets? These personal battles may seem far removed from politics, but what is a greater symptom of gender oppression than a girl whose genitals are cut without her consent and who then grows into a woman who does not know how her own body works, who knows so little about her body and pleasure that she wonders if she is “normal.” The more that women are prepared to tell their own stories, the stronger we will be collectively in the public arena.

  In November 2011 a twenty-year-old Egyptian woman, Aliaa Elmahdy, turned the tables on our hypocrisy and sexual repression by undressing. She took a photo of herself standing in her parents’ living room wearing nothing but stockings, red shoes, and a red hair clip. When she posted this photo on her blog, it was if she’d thrown a Molotov cocktail from the barricades of the personal. Nakedness and sex, the very things that exercise so many men in the Middle East, became her weapons of political resistance. Our bodies, so often reduced to proxy battlefields in men’s conflicts, can instead be turned into our weapons of choice.

  Elmahdy’s blog was flooded with visitors, and the vitriol against her came not just from religious conservatives incensed by female nudity but also from many liberals whom one would have expected to support her act. Instead, these liberals accused her of giving ammunition to the religious conservatives. As if clerics would ever run out of excuses for obsessing over women’s bodies! And since when do revolutions allow their conservative opponents to set the agenda?

  Some said it was not the time for Elmahdy’s audacity. But what are revolutions if not audacious? Some said that her photo would sway Egyptians against the revolution by making them think that it was indeed composed of young men and women doing drugs and having sex in tents in Tahrir Square, as the regime’s media claimed. But it is the job of a revolution to shock, to provoke, and to upset, not to behave or to be polite.

  Some complained that Elmahdy’s body was unattractive by Egyptian standards of beauty: that she was not curvy enough, that she had not shaved her pubic hair, and so on. It’s laughable that some men want even those women breaking social taboos to fit into their mold of attractive desirability.

  Far from being the immature naïf some have tried to paint her as, Elmahdy found the soft underbelly of our hypocrisy—and she kicked. She wrote on her blog: “Put on trial the artists’ models who posed nude for art schools until the early 70s, hide the art books and destroy the nude statues of antiquity, then undress and stand before a mirror and burn your bodies that you despise to forever rid yourselves of your sexual hangups before you direct your humiliation and chauvinism and dare to try to deny me my freedom of expression.”

  Elmahdy rec
eived the inevitable death threats and had to leave for Sweden. An Egyptian lawyer filed a motion to have her stripped of her Egyptian nationality, a case that did not go anywhere but that gives you an idea of how much outrage her act generated. All this woman did was take off her clothes in her parents’ living room and post a picture of it! You had to go to her blog to see it. She did not stage a naked protest in the street. Tellingly, Elmahdy received more vitriol than has ever been mustered against the sexual violence that plagues girls and women in Egypt.

  To put it another way, “Why is violence significantly less traumatizing than our naked bodies?” Lebanese writer Nadine Mazloum asked this question after an uproar broke out over topless pictures of a Lebanese Olympic skier. Jackie Chamoun, twenty-two, was about to compete for Lebanon at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics when the photographs surfaced. (The images were taken behind the scenes during a shoot for an Austrian sports calendar, and Chamoun maintained that they were never supposed to be shared publicly.) Lebanon’s minister of sports and youth, Faisal Karami, ordered the country’s Olympic committee to launch an investigation and “take the required steps so that Lebanon’s reputation is not harmed.” (His connecting Chamoun’s body with Lebanon’s reputation reminds me of el-Sisi demanding that Egyptian judges do something about the sexual assault of Egyptian women because “Egypt’s honor” was being violated on the streets.) He even suggested that Chamoun’s father was happy with the investigation. Patriarchs are often of one mind!

  Chamoun’s pictures, and the minister’s demand for an investigation, appeared a week after Manal Assi’s husband beat her to death in Beirut. Nadine Mazloum’s question juxtaposed the different reactions to violence and nudity in her country. Luckily for Chamoun, several newspapers chided the minister, and a social media campaign called StripForJackie surfaced, including pictures of women and men posing almost nude while holding signs supportive of the skier. On its Facebook page, the movement expressed its intention to highlight that “some women are beaten or killed, others are raped, and the media shifts their attention to a confident talented beautiful woman who represents her country at the Olympic Games.”

  Lebanon is not as liberal as it often is said to be—Chamoun acknowledged this when she apologized: “I want to apologize to all of you, I know that Lebanon is a conservative country and this is not the image that reflects our culture. I fully understand if you want to criticize this,” she wrote in a statement posted to her Facebook page the day after the scandal erupted. “Now that I’m at the Olympic Games, these photos that I never saw before are being shared. It is sad. All I can ask to each of you who saw this, is to stop spreading it, it will really help me focusing on what is really important now: my trainings and race.”

  It was sad to see Chamoun apologize—Elmahdy did not apologize—but it was heartwarming to see some Lebanese defend her. There was no equivalent StripForAliaa on social media in Egypt, despite the fact that Elmahdy deliberately posed nude as a political act. The closest act of solidarity with Aliaa Elmahdy’s nude photograph that I’ve seen, although it was not meant as such, was a work of art called Tank Girl, by the Egyptian artist Nadine Hammam. The artwork shows a woman in a pink bikini top straddling a pink tank, the gun of which sprouts pink rats—an ejaculation of sorts. The piece is surrounded by the words “Go Love Yourself.”

  I saw Hammam’s Tank Girl as a direct critique of the military junta and, by extension, Egyptian society’s fear of women’s sexuality as expressed in the “virginity tests” and the assault on the woman who became known as “Blue Bra Girl.”

  Instead of Blue Bra Girl on the ground and at the mercy of soldiers stomping on her chest, Hammam has placed the tank, that most robust of military symbols, at the mercy of “Pink Bra Girl.” Instead of being forcibly spread for a military doctor to conduct a “virginity test,” Hammam’s Pink Bra Girl’s legs are wide open as a way to control the macho emblem of the powers that be in our country. With its implied “Go Fuck Yourself” and the rats ejaculating out of the gun/phallus, Hammam’s piece also seems to be saying something similar to Elmahdy’s use of nudity: that the female form is, in and of itself, a site of dissent and provocation. Elmahdy had enraged men scurrying to and fro and back again to her website, in both horror and endless fascination; Hammam had rats scurrying out of a tank’s gun, in horror but also as a sign of their titillation and climax at her provocation.

  In Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, bell hooks recognizes that it is in the place between the public and the private where the most hurt can be inflicted:

  I see how deeply connected that split is to ongoing practices of domination (especially thinking about intimate relationships, ways racism, sexism, and class exploitation work in our daily lives, hurt, dehumanized: there that ourselves are most taken away, terrorized and broken). The public reality and institutional structures of domination make the private space for oppression and exploitation concrete—real. That’s why I think it crucial to talk about the points where the public and private meet, to connect the two. And even folks who talk about ending domination seem to be afraid to break down the space separating the two.

  This book is my contribution to breaking that space separating the public and the private. I am a product of my culture and my faith. I am the daughter of the taboos and silences from which I fought to free myself. I am the sister of every woman struggling against the oppressive forces that have suffocated our sex lives and made them such minefields, and resolutely and tenaciously fighting against the oppressive forces that have strangled our societies politically. I am the best friend of the woman who marches in protest against the political despots outside and continues that protest against the personal despots inside.

  It is the women who connect the fight against oppressive forces outside and inside who will free our societies. We must engage in that fight while boldly breaking down the space that bell hooks speaks of that separates the public and the private. We must do so with our feet on the streets and our words, loudly chanting, “Bread, Liberty, Social Justice, Human Dignity!” This is the rallying cry of freedom on the streets and at home.

  Words are important—to fight silence, alienation, and violence. Words are flags planted on the planets of our beings; they say this is mine, I have fought for it and despite your attempts to silence me, I am still here. Just as important, words help us find each other and overcome the isolation that threatens to overwhelm and to break us. Words say we are here.

  EPILOGUE

  I want an Egypt where my daughter can walk in the streets as free as a boy. I want her to experience everything in her life and no one would look at her and say, “You’re a girl, why are you doing this?” I want Egypt to be a place where she can climb mountains, play boxing if she wants to, do anything she wants and no one would look at her and ridicule her because she’s a girl and not a boy, and at the same time, not to be always told, “May you be a bride.” That is not the goal of your life. You have to first be what you are, anything you want to be, and then be a wife and be a mother and everything you want because to be a mother, you have to be a lot of other things to deliver for your daughter.

  —AMIRA, THIRTY-TWO, SPEAKING ABOUT HER

  DAUGHTER, FAIROUZ, FOUR

  A mira is the mother who attended the Egmadi women’s self-defense workshop in Egypt. She brought with her Fairouz, who spent most of the event dancing to the music that accompanied many of the exercises, balloon in hand. What kind of Egypt will we leave Fairouz?

  I moved back to Egypt in February 2013 to write this book and to work more closely with women there. That year, the Egyptian Women’s Union, one of several newly formed grassroots feminist groups, asked me to talk to its members about sexual violence and ways to combat it. The group was actually a revived version of a union launched by the veteran Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi that had been defunct. When the Egyptian revolution began in January 2011, El Saadawi would go to Tahrir Square, where young women and men would congregate around her, i
nspired by her years of tenacious and determined advocacy for women’s liberation.

  I interviewed El Saadawi several times in the 1990s, soon after I became a journalist. She would often tell me that her grandmother was right in defining God as “freedom, justice, and love.” Those words would come back to me when I’d hear our revolution’s chant, “Bread, Liberty, Social Justice, Human Dignity.” After Mubarak stepped down, I attended El Saadawi’s talks in New York City, where she reminded the audience why she had been jailed under the Sadat regime: “I went to jail so that I could become free.”

  I was glad to see the Egyptian Women’s Union revived and to see young women and men working together on feminist issues. At the discussion I led, I suggested launching a women’s support group for consciousness-raising.

  It became especially clear why we needed such a group when a nineteen-year-old woman stood up and unleashed her frustrations. “I am full of so much rage! No one can imagine how much rage I am filled with!” she told us. She spat out those words with such force that we could indeed imagine. What a force to harness, that rage!

  The young woman—Alaa—told us that she wanted to remove her headscarf but her mother would not let her, and that her father beat her.

  “I want to run away. Should I?”

  I told her that I could not answer that question for her. But I suggested that she already knew the answer and that she had come to our discussion for a reason. As Alaa spoke, her predicament reminded me of the emotional terrorism to which too many of our families subject girls and women.

  Alaa did indeed remove her hijab and leave home, but only for a few months, because she is not yet of age according to Egyptian law, which sets adulthood at age twenty-one. She joined our support group occasionally, and some of the other members marveled at the fortitude she mustered in order to leave home—a huge step in Arab societies.