Four Years Since the "Blue Bra Woman" Brutality

Last month I noted the fourth anniversary of the "Battle" of Mohamed Mahmoud Street in Cairo in November 2011, a street I once lived on. But if there was any "Battle" between protesters and SCAF in the last months of 2011 that was truly iconic it was the battle of Qasr al-‘Aini Street on November 16-17, 2011. The main reason is the photo above, the notorious "blue bra woman" photo.

As the video below makes clear the woman, and I'm not certain she has ever been conclusively identified, was wearing a hijab and a black abaya. After beating her with sticks,
the soldiers (Military Police) strip back her conservative religious garb to expose her torso except for what became her iconic blue bra.

The still above shows a soldier's boot only inches from her chest. It's bad enough. The video below, for which I feel obliged to issue a "you're going to want to kill these [insert favorite expletive here]-ing bastards" warning, clearly shows him kicking her directly and forcibly twice, striking both exposed breasts. She appears to be unconscious, but one soldier at least reaches down to cover her exposure before leaving.

The fact she was in religious garb exacerbated the outrage, though there is no justification for stripping and stomping any woman. Or man, for that matter.

There was immediate outrage, but global outage has a short shelf life. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the "systematic degradation of women." Mona ElTahawy, herself sexually abused and her arms broken at Mohamed Mahnoud, argued for calling the victim "Tahrir woman," but "blue bra woman" stuck. Even the usually demure and cautious Egyptian blogger who calls herself Zeinobia used a rare obscenity for this obscenity (NSFW): We are Fucked!

It was a huge issue at the time but it was Arab Spring (well, it was December, but you know what I mean).

This went the rounds:
For a while, "blue bra woman" was both a feminist and a sexual abuse icon. Four years later she appears forgotten. So do the "virginity tests" of 2011 when the Army decided intact hymens were a matter of national security and fingers were the means of checking.These were human and sexual atrocities (including explicit rape and other violations) that should not be forgotten, but were flushed down the memory hole.

If you are prepared to see sexual brutality, here is a video.What sort of so-called "man" strips a conservatively dressed religious woman after rendering her unconscious with sticks, and then deliberately stomps on each of her breasts? (Obscene responses in the comments will not be censored, and let me know if others are remembering this atrocity. And if anyone knows what became of her, if she even survived.)

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EIPR Issues New Study on Reproductive Health and Rights in MENA

The Egyptian Initiative on Personal Rights (EIPR), marking the 20th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), has released a major new report, “Reclaiming and Redefining Rights: ICPD+20 Status of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in Middle East and North Africa”. You can read the press release here and read or download the full report (PDF) here.

The press release notes:

The report evaluates the progress made by a select number of countries in the region (six) towards fulfilling their commitments under the International Conference for Population and Development (1994)Programme of Action.  The six countries are: Egypt, Kuwait, Yemen, Palestine, Turkey and Tunisia. The report relies on data from different United Nations bodies and the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for the countries researched. The report also relies on a wide range of qualitative studies and human rights reports to support the quantitative statistics and data, as well as several interviews with activists and NGOs in the six countries mentioned.

Using several indicators to measure this progress, the report is divided into three main sections: the first covers the status of women’s rights in the examined countries as well as the health expenditure. The second part uses reproductive health indicators to measure the status of maternal care, abortion, fertility and family planning and reproductive cancers. The third part examines the states’ protection of sexual rights by monitoring sexuality education, sexually transmitted infections, HIV, early marriage, human trafficking and gender based violence in the six countries.

Launched on the occasion of the 20 year review of the Programme of Action, the reports concludes with policy recommendations for countries in the region on reproductive and sexual rights. The report highlights the importance of the commitment of the countries to ensuring and guaranteeing for its citizens and residents access to affordable and of good quality comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services. It also recommends to the countries that they review laws that limit the access to the above services for groups who need them, including women and youth.

Shereen El Feki's "Sex and the Citadel": a Landmark Book, and a Few Quibbles

[This post on a book about sexuality in the Arab world deals with mature themes and quotes some explicit language, so be advised. It's also a somewhat longer post than usual.]

Shereen El Feki's recent book  Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World is getting a lot of (deserved) attention lately, and for good reason. I'm a little late in joining in because I decided to finish the book before commenting (I'm old-fashioned), and my comments here are meant as a supplement to, rather than a reiteration of, the previous reviews. It aspires to be a tour d'horizon of sexuality in the Arab world, and given the formidable obstacles to researching that subject, it largely succeeds. It does not claim scholarly credentials as sociology or anthropology, but offers raw data for those fields; as its perhaps too cute title invoking Sex and the City and its suggestive cover art (more on this below) suggest, either the author or her publisher are trying to draw a Western audience. But it deserves a Middle Eastern audience as well.

I don't usually "review" books here (lest my personal comments be confused with The Middle East Journal's  proper scholarly reviews), but this one is making a lot of waves and, while I generally can just say you should read it, the pedant in me wants to raise a few quibbles about some historical and linguistic points, as well as review it in the broadest sense.

It's certainly not the first book on sexuality in the Arab world. There are general works such as Salah al-Munajjid's Al-Hayyat al-Jinsiyya ‘ind al-‘Arab [Sexual Life Among the Arabs] (Beirut 1975) (in Arabic); Abdelwahab Bouhdiba's La Sexualité en Islam (1975; English edition Sexuality in Islam, 2004); Joseph A. Massad's scholarly but contentious Desiring Arabs on homosexuality (Chicago 2007); a number of works by Samir Khalaf on prostitution, sexuality, and related issues; and numerous shorter studies by sociologists and anthropologists. But most of that material is aimed at an academic readership, or is difficult to access, in languages other than English, or burdened with social science jargon-speak (arguably, also a "language other than English"): and to her credit, she quotes al-Munajjid and Massad and interviews Bouhdiba at some length.

She has not aimed this book at a strictly academic audience. El Feki, who is half-Egyptian and half-Welsh, but was raised in Canada, holds a doctorate in immunology and has worked in HIV/AIDS education and was a Vice-Chair of the UN's Global Commission on HIV and the Law,  but has also been a journalist for The Economist  and Al Jazeera English, and has been a TED Global Fellow. She brings her communication skills to bear in explaining this complex subject to a non-academic, mostly Western, audience. Though her fieldwork is mostly in Egypt and Tunisia (with a bit on Israeli Arabs, the Palestinian territories, and a dash of the Gulf), her breadth is rather comprehensive: marriage, temporary or "summer" marriages, divorce, virginity,  spousal abuse, female genital mutilation, sex education, birth control, abortion, prostitution, homosexuality, and so on. It's engagingly written with wit and even humor (where appropriate, and anger when required), and a keen eye for the illustrative anecdote. She uses her expertise as a health professional but mediates it to a popular audience through her background as a journalist. The book is accessible and readable, though I have a few qualms that certain features (the topic most of all, but also the cover art and some of the language), will unfortunately guarantee the book's unavailability in the countries that most need to read it.

I'm not sure I need to argue, or El Feki needs to prove, that the Middle East is hardly a sexually well-adjusted place. Young people find themselves as mature, educated adults with few job prospects and therefore little prospect for marriage or, if they do marry, any hope of affording an apartment to start a family life on their own. Hence marriage is deferred well into adulthood, but other outlets for sexual expression are taboo. Virginity for women is sacrosanct, homosexuality criminalized. Society may look the other way on male use of prostitutes, but that too is taboo. If young elites are frustrated, more traditional classes suffer from older and more disturbing practices: child marriages, "temporary" marriages, female genital mutilation justified as "female circumcision." Most of us in the field know this, but like Middle Eastern societies themselves, we don't talk about it much, leaving that to the activists. She  addresses all these issues, and her role as a health educator gives her access to interview and sample real experiences not accessible to most of us.

An important sub-theme of the book is the great contrast between the candor of Arabic erotic literature in the Classical Age and the prudishness of today;  the theme recurs throughout the book and is of course not all that new, as she is well aware: she herself relies on Al-Munajjid and Bouhdiba (heavily on the latter, whom she interviews). She has brought it up in many book tour interviews. It also is a major theme of Salwa Al Neimi's 2008 novel Burhan al-‘Asal (2009 English translation The Proof of the Honey), a bestseller in Europe and in Arab countries where it wasn't banned (the Francophone Maghreb  and Lebanon: banned everywhere else). El Feki does not cite Al Neimi, at least in her bibliography or index, but the novel was an account of the erotic life of a female Arab librarian fascinated by the richness of Arab erotic literature of the classical age. I want to return in some detail to this question of the contrast between classical Islamic literature and today, since it's an area where I think that I may possibly have some comments to contribute as a onetime classical Islamic historian.

The book is a serious if at times subjective piece of reporting and analysis; but the tone is not heavy for the most part, except for the more depressing subjects like female genital mutilation or the grim prospects facing many prostitutes. gays, and other sexual outsiders in the Arab world. A blog post can't really do justice to the breadth of the coverage.

This is not a dour piece of social anthropology or feminist theory. This engaging accessibility of the book is one of its strengths, in a field where much of the literature is scrupulously academic and detached, and I emphasize it here lest readers be put off by a review like this one (supposedly a positive one, and [language warning]  using NSFW language) by  Rachel Halliburton in The Independent,

Sex and the Citadel is not, as El Feki – a trained scientist – warns, either peep show or encyclopedia. It owes as much of its zing to Foucault as to fucking. Taking the French philosopher's assertion that sexuality is "an especially dense transfer point for relations of power," El Feki has meticulously analysed what makes Arab society tick. The sexual climate, she declares, "looks a lot like the West on the brink of sexual revolution." Many of the same "underlying forces" are there, not least the struggle toward democracy, and a large youth population with different attitudes from their parents.

She's right that it's neither peep show nor encyclopedia,  but I fear the "owes as much of its zing to Foucault as to fucking" is inspired more by clever word play on the part of the reviewer than by the book itself. Foucault is only mentioned two other times in the book, other than for the quoted remark, neither time particularly substantively. Of course El Feki is not responsible for Halliburton's characterization, and I guess Halliburton was saying this is a "serious" book; but if, like me, your eyes glaze over when someone brings up Foucault, don't worry. It's much more about fucking. (Hell, it's a book about sexuality. What else would it be about?)

Like her reviewer above El Feki herself is not reticent about calling a spade a spade, or in this case fucking, fucking, and she also uses explicit language in quotes or when the context seems to justify it. In what follows I'm not censoring her: I'm an editor, not a censor. If such language offends you, please feel free to go put on some pleasant music (maybe madrigals: definitely not rap) and return after the post is done. My apologies to those offended, but dashes and asterisks cheat the author of the power of her word choice (for words do have power), and look silly to most everyone who reads modern literature or watches films and cable TV. Occasional NSFW language from this point on.

The strong language is used sparingly and judiciously but unapologetically. It's by no means omnipresent, but because it's sometimes used for rhetorical or shock effect it appears in some of the passages most quoted by reviewers. 

I can't begin to summarize all the information and anecdotes in the book, so let me turn to the area where I actually have some kind of knowledge: her discussion of the classical era of Arab literature and its erotica. She laments the lost era of Arab erotic literature, an age when sex manuals were written by religious scholars. In this she echoes Bouhdiba, whom she interviews at length. As she notes:

There is a long and distinguished history of Arabic writing on sex— literature, poetry, medical treatises, self-help manuals— which has slipped out of sight in much of the Arab world. Many of these great works were by religious figures who saw nothing incompatible between faith and sex. Indeed, it behooved these men of learning to have as full a knowledge of sexual practices and problems as they did of the intricacies of Islam. There is nothing academic about their writing: with surprising frankness, and often disarming humor, these works cover almost every sexual subject, and then some. There is precious little in Playboy, Cosmopolitan, The Joy of Sex, or any other taboo-busting work of the sexual revolution and beyond that this literature didn’t touch on over a millennium ago.

Bouhdiba sees this sexual open-mindedness as part and parcel of the intellectual blossoming of the age. At their zenith in the early Abbasid period, the Arabs were a confident and creative people, and open thinking on sexuality was a reflection of this. “It was not a coincidence that at the height of Islamic culture there was a flowering of sexuality,” Bouhdiba says. “It is a synthesis of all domains. The rehabilitation of sexuality is the rehabilitation of science within the rehabilitation of Islam.” Today, however, there is a deep vein of denial that these elements are connected, and plenty of people who want to pick and choose their history, taking what is now considered the respectable face of the Arab golden age— science and technology, for example — and leaving the rest behind. But Bouhdiba believes these facets are inseparable.

It’s easy to read too much into Arabic erotic literature. Did its openness really represent society at large, or just the notions of the sexually sophisticated elite? After all, many of the most famous books of Arabic erotica were written for rulers. Bouhdiba is convinced that these books say something more broadly about the spirit of the age. He invokes religion to illustrate his point: “These elites were never denounced by the masses; their societies accepted them more or less, maybe not actively but passively. It’s a little like Sufism, which represented an elite but was eventually accepted. (pp. 13-14: all page numbers are to the US edition.)

But the passage on this subject which has been most quoted by far (by many of the British reviewers, by the Atlantic, and a few other American reviewers willing to print "bad" words) is the last paragraph of the following passage, which I quote in its fuller context:

For example, new participants will use min orali (Hebrew for “oral sex”) and orgazma instead of the respective Arabic terms, jins fammii and nashwa jinsiyya. “When you say the word, to be able to say the word freely, it’s fifty percent of the work,” says one woman, a social worker from Haifa.“Why [do] I choose to speak about a dick in Hebrew not in Arabic? It must show something about my attitude toward things.”

Some participants lack even this choice, because they simply do not know the Arabic for many of the topics under discussion. Part of Muntada’s name— Jensaneya, which translates to “sexuality”— is a relatively new coinage that is not widely used, or even understood, by Arabic speakers. Even more basic terminology is problematic; until attending Muntada’s training courses, some participants were simply unaware that there are, indeed, Arabic words for female genitalia, having been taught to consider such subjects shameful beyond discussion. Even for those who do know some terms in Arabic, it is often in language so crude as to be unusable off the street.

This is a far cry from the days of the Encyclopedia of Pleasure and the golden age of Arabic writing on sex. One tenth-century book, The Language of Fucking, for example, mentions more than a thousand verbs for having sex. Then there are the seemingly endless lexicons for sexual positions, responses, and organs of every size, shape, and distinguishing feature. That linguistic wealth is long gone. (p.151.)

She has herself cited this in interviews as well, and while her point is absolutely correct, the pedant in me wishes she'd chosen a different book to cite. Not out of prudishness, but out of accuracy. My own discussion is going to require some scholarly discussion of Arabic words for sex. In fact, I feel an obligation to do this at some length. I'm not trying to titillate here, but if you are likely to be offended please stop reading. And bear in mind I'm doing some pedantic nit-picking here; the book still deserves the widest readership possible.

 This particular book is described thus in her footnote:

23. In Arabic, this book is known as Kitab al-Nikah fi al-Lugha, by Ibn Al Qatta’ (as detailed in Al-Munajjid, Al-Hayat al-Jinsiyya ‘ind al-’ Arab [The sexual life of the Arabs], p. 142.)

First, if this book survives at all, it is unpublished. Secondly, while she has clearly chosen a translation into English that grabs the reader's attention, her own notes translate Nikah differently elsewhere. For example, in her bibliography we find:

“Kitab al-Nikah” [Book of marriage]. In Translation of Sahih Muslim. Translated by A. H. Siddiqui. Available at http://www.iium.edu.my/deed/

Indeed, Nikah is the standard word in Islamic law and elsewhere referring to sexual intercourse, within or outside of marriage. She herself says elsewhere in her text:

The same word in classical Arabic, nikah, applies to both marriage and sexual intercourse; in Egyptian street slang, niik, an abbreviated form, means “to fuck.” Sex outside these regulated contexts constitute zina, that is, illicit relations— an offense that crosses the line of acceptability (hadd) in Islam.  (p.32)

The definitions are basically right, though nik is not "Egyptian street slang" but a classical Arabic word with cognates not only in other Semitic languages and also in Ancient Egyptian and Berber. But let me come back to that. [And strictly speaking, nik does not mean "to fuck"; it's either the imperative form of the verb or a participle, "fucking."] If she really needed to cite a work with "fucking" in its title one could suggest one by none other than the great medieval polymath Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, author of one of the most respected commentaries on the Qur'an, who wrote (among several works on sex), one that survives, has reportedly been published in Iraq (though I haven't seen it), and that is known as Kitab al-Ik fi Ma‘rifat al-Nik, which can be translated as something like "Book of the Thicket in the Understanding of Fucking," with none of the ambiguity about nik vs. nikah. (Bear in mind: El Feki's translation of nikah as "fucking" is not wrong; it's just not the only choice. Nik would be another matter, since today at least, it implies a taboo word and is best translated as such, while nikah could as easily have been translated as "intercourse" or "sex" or the like.)

The assumption that nik is a "slang" version of nikah seems fairly common among many Arabic speakers. Much work still needs to be done on Arabic etymology, but these are two different words, though semantically related. The root of nikah (نكاح) is ;نكح that of  nik  نيك  is naka ناكَ.

And the latter has its own entry in Ibn Manzur's 13th century classical lexicon Lisan al-‘Arab لسان العرب which means it certainly isn't slang. While the entry says it is equivalent to nikah, it has a full grammatical structure, even a form VI (reciprocal) verb تَنايَكَ (roughly, "fuck each other"):

نيك  النَّيْكُ: معروف، والفاعل: نائِكٌ، والمفعول به مَنِيكٌ ومَنْيُوكٌ، والأَنثى مَنْيُوكة، وقد ناكَها يَنيكها نَيْكاً.
والنَّيّاك: الكثير النَّيْك؛ شدد للكثرة؛ وفي المثل قال: من يَنِكِ العَيْرَ يَنِكْ نَيّاكا وتَنَايَكَ القوْمُ: غلبهم النُّعاسُ. .وتَنايَكَتِ الأَجْفانُ: انطبق بعضها على بعض. الأَزهري في ترجمة نكح: ناكَ المطرُ الأَرضَ وناكَ النعاسُ عينه إِذا غلب عليها. 

So there.  I'm already using enough four-letter words here not to try to translate the whole thing, and I hope the Arabic doesn't set off blockers across the Arab world : it's from the Lisan al-‘Arab, found even in Saudi libraries! [I will note that ناكَ المطرُ الأَرضَ literally means "The rain fucked the earth" and is a nice fertility image. The second example, ناكَ النعاسُ  عينه "Sleep fucked his eye," doesn't work as well, in English at least.]

Added later: I should have noted the well-known coloquial though grammatically formal common obscene proverb نيك واستنيك ولا تعلم زبك الكسل‎ which is a X form verb and means something like "Fuck and seek after fucking and do not teach your penis laziness."

What's more, while the similarities between nik and nikah might mean they descend from different dialects of pre-Islamic Arabic, nik is probably the older root: a proto-Semitic or proto-Afro-Asiatic root something like N-[vowel]-K, with the vowel usually a  or i. In Semitic languages, it seems absent in Hebrew and Aramaic, but it is found in Akkadian/Assyrian/Babylonian, with meanings relating to copulation and illicit sex. It occurs in Old South Arabian and modern South Arabian languages such as Mehri. (Not sure about Geez or Amharic: anyone?) Beyond the Semitic languages, it's found throughout the Afro-Asiatic group. N-vowel-K (probably NAK) was the standard word for copulation in Ancient Egyptian from the pyramid texts down through Demotic and is found as late as in Coptic in the sense of fornication. (The hieroglyphic includes an erect phallus, but I figure I'm in enough trouble in this post for so much strong language without reproducing it here.)

[Much later: If I got away with saying "fuck" so much I may as well show the hieroglyph. In for a penny, in for a pound (or in other words fuck it)]:

Cognates appear in Berber and, I'm told, Chadic. So one might argue that not only is nik not "slang," it has a reasonable case to be made for being the oldest "dirty word" on earth, at least that's still in use. There's a doctoral dissertation waiting to be written. I'm sure people had words for fucking long before the invention of writing (or none of us would be here), but this one looks very old. Really fucking old.
 

Perhaps I'm overreacting or showing off here, probably a bit of both. I'm fairly sure El Feki was mainly aiming for shock effect with translating the title as The Language of Fucking. While she doesn't use profanity excessively, she does use it for effect on occasion. Sometimes it's a play on words as (p.111): "Across the Arab world, female virginity — defined as an intact hymen — remains what could best be described as a big fucking deal." That works by playing on the double meaning of the word, in both its sexual and intensive sense, and sticks in the mind. As early as page 7, referring to Gustave Flaubert's visit to Egypt (a perhaps dubious choice, rather like using Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a typical example of travel writing in America), she notes that "Flaubert proceeded to fuck his way up the Nile." It makes the point memorably, and Flaubert's own description of his travels fully supports the characterization. In context the language is appropriate to the theme and used for effect. (He documents his whores in some detail, and with apparent pride and explicit detail). To be blunt, in an age when "fucking" is often used by many speakers merely as a sign that a noun will follow or just as a place filler, she only uses it in its original sense, to mean, well, just plain old-fashioned fucking. (With the arguable exception of the just quoted remark about virginity still being a "big fucking deal," but that still partakes of the original meaning in a double entendre.) It's almost refreshing in a curious way. (And maybe not all that "old-fashioned," but still used in its original sexual, not multiple other meanings.) There's an ancient story about someone who was shocked to hear  "bitch" used for a dog; these days some innocents may be surprised to hear "fucking" used for copulation.

While I don't think most mature adult Western readers will find the book's contents or language that  objectionable (at least if they've read this far without calling the Religious Police), there are a few qualms that I should note, since they will turn some readers off without even opening the book. Like the (sometimes) strong language, the title, Sex and the Citadel, while it is a clever enough play off Sex and the City, may be off-putting for some readers, and may seem clever to some and flippant to others. The cover art will deter sales of the English edition in the Arab world. This is the American cover:
As Brian Whitaker noted in his review for the Lebanese website Now:

Discussion of Arab sexuality today is often over-simplistic and when I first saw Sex and the Citadel on Amazon's website I feared the worst. Its title – a play on the popular TV series, – seemed awkwardly contrived and its cover showed a pair of Islamic crescents arranged to look like female breasts (though I'm assured that's only for the American edition).

He's quite right: the stars and crescents shown as breasts only appear on the American edition, and the image just seems gratuitous, using what is usually understood as a symbol of religion to imply female breasts. (Imply? More like portray.)  But I'm really not certain the other covers are much better:  (Or are they worse?)  Umm ... yeah. Okay. One's a woman's naked body in calligraphy (apparently of various rude words) and the other is ... (clears throat, blushes) also pseudo-calligraphy.To my perhaps dirty mind, it is perhaps the most offensive of the three.

See what I mean? They're probably more offensive than the crescents/breasts, but at least took an artist's time to create. Of course, El Feki may not have chosen the cover art, or may have preferred an in-your-face message, giving the finger (or other body parts) to the Arab patriarchy. (But I don't get that sense from her text.) If an Arabic translation ever appears (and it's needed) none of these covers is going to pass muster. But then, the explicit subject matter is also going to be an obstacle in the Middle East market.  Since we're already using candid language: In an effort to draw a Western audience, and given her clear disdain for Middle Eastern prudishness, covers which essentially send a resounding "Fuck You!" message to the audience who most need to read you are not well advised.

I do hope you'll understand these quibbles as just that: quibbles, and forgive the sexual and linguistic candor I don't normally use on this blog. This is an essential book that deserves a wide readership. But this book needs an Arabic edition that (even if censored, euphemized and sanitized) makes its message acceptable to those who need it most.

Cultural Fusion We May Not Have Needed: "International Topless Jihad Day"?

As humorist Dave Barry used to say, I am not making this up: "4 April is International Topless Jihad Day!"

That is a real, genuine report (though I'm not sure about "serious") from Huffington Post UK and, as you might have predicted, #ToplessJihad now has its own hashtag on Twitter. 

Everyone who never expected to see "topless' and "jihad" used together please raise your hands. I thought so. Do you suspect someone misunderstands the meaning of one or the other of these words?

(For the sensitive or easily offended, please note that some of the quotes cited below in this post use mild slang referring to female breasts, and at least one other stronger offensive word.)

The call is coming from Femen, the Ukrainian feminist protest group who keep showing up to demonstrate topless, but they are capitalizing on the story of Amina, the 19 year old Tunisian girl who posted topless pictures of herself on the Internet. (Egypt's "nude blogger' Aliaa Elmahdy has also recently joined forces with Femen.)

Now, first of all, Amina's story has been wildly sensationalized in the West.  If you must see the pictures, go to my earlier story and follow the links. After her public protest, the usual extreme Salafi sheikh showed up to make the usual Crazy Sheikh "Fatwa" (not an Islamic fatwa but the Western press term for "anything we can get some lunatic sheikh to say to the press"). A "senior sheikh" named Adel Almi that few have heard of kindly expressed the opinion cited at left and, according to Al-Arabiya, urged that she be stoned to stop the alleged contagion. (And indeed, some other Tunisian women have indeed followed suit.)

Though some of them seem to have been deleted, there was a lot of early Twitter chatter about saving Amina, who variously "faces stoning to death" or "could face stoning" for her toplessness. Now, even if you don't much like traditional Islamic punishments, stoning is for adultery, not for topless photos, and both the Qur'an itself and all the Islamic legal schools citing the Prophet himself require four actual witnesses (absent a confession) to the actual act of copulation. Outside of an orgy this is improbable; those stoned for adultery usually are said to have confessed. And besides:

Besides, according to Wikipedia, Tunisia hasn't executed anybody for anything since 1991 and the new government has pledged to abolish the death penalty.

Also, Tunisia's beach resort towns cater heavily to French, Italian, and German tourists and some of those ladies forget to wear tops at times. This isn't really an option for Tunisians, but I'm not sure who's checking passports of topless bathers. (Interesting job, if it exists, though.)

And, just to drive the point further home,  Tunisia not only tolerates but the government regulates prostitution. I am hesitating to say as some sources do, that prostitution is "legal," but it is regulated, though limited and restricted, and the prostitutes reportedly have government IDs. No other Arab country has this level of government tolerance of prostitution; though otherwise Tunisia ranks highest in the Arab world on women's rights issues, it sometimes gets criticism on this one.

So let's say the fears for Amina's being sentenced to death by stoning are a bit exaggerated, but if the government isn't about to harm her, extremists might. Aliaa Elmahdy left Egypt and is living in Europe as a result of her protest. Amina's lawyer (self-identified, anyway) denied she was in a psychiatric institution, as some were claiming, and insisted she was safe at home.

But a major criticism of the Aliaa Elmahdy case was it got more attention than the "virginity tests" and Samira Ibrahim's resistence to them (as a hijabi conservative Muslim she was in many ways more revolutionary than Aliaa). And the sexual assaults and rapes in Tahrir got less attention than Aliaa Elmahdy, at least in the world media.

Others are saying something similar about Amina:

Before returning to the "topless jihad" day, let me add that while I support the right of protest, including protest that calls attention to sexual discrimination and abuse, I'm not sure Femen's idea of topless protest is the right one in the Arab world. Sure, it gets plenty of attention in the West. Amina has one topless picture with a cigarette and with the Arabic slogan "My body is my property; it's not anyone's 'honor' " written on her abdomen, and another in which she is topless, with two raised middle fingers, and, in English, "Fuck your morals" written on her body. (Subtle, huh?) (And as I've noted before, protesters are often more comfortable using English profanity than Arabic, as the Arabic here, though on a naked torso, is innocent enough.)  It surely does get attention, but does it preach to anyone but the already converted? Or does it just (as some Arab feminists fear) fuel the most misogynistic and atavistic fears of a conservative patriarchy and thus undercut women working on real issues of survival and opportunity? Before you fight for toplessness, protecting women (even in hijab) from groping and assault seems a higher priority. I know I don't exactly have standing to hold an opinion here, of course. Nor do I wish to see her or anyone silenced. But many Muslim women may see "Fuck your morals" as meaning "Fuck your religious beliefs," and how far does that differ from "Fuck you"? It will alienate many.

Now, for the whole "topless jihad" thing. Femen's Inna Shevchenko explains the call to "topless jihad' (Note: This gives a last name to "Amina"; I neither know if it's correct nor do I approve of publicizing it if it is)::

We have appealed to the world for support and the world has answered! The fate of the Femen Tunisia activist Amina Tyler has shaken up and united thousands of women across the globe. Amina's act of civil disobedience has brought down upon her the lethal hatred of inhuman beasts, for whom killing a woman is more natural than recognising her right to do as she pleases with her own body.  

For them, we now see, the love of freedom is the most dangerous kind of psychiatric illness, one demanding radical forced treatment in the spirit of fascist punitive medicine. The 'Arab Spring', for the women of  North Africa, has turned out to be a frigid sharia winter that has deprived them of what few political rights and liberties they enjoyed.

Stoning and flogging, kidnapping and rape, forced psychiatric treatment and other sorts of physical and psychological torture are what the new Sharia Caliphate has in store for women . . .

. . . Religious dictatorship begins by enslaving women but a woman's act of self-liberation is the first step toward destroying the sharia regime.  Topless protests are the battle flags of women's resistance, a symbol of a woman's acquisition of rights over her own body!
Femen declares 4 April the day of relentless topless jihad against Islamism!  

Show solidarity with brave Amina Tyler from Tunisia!  Come to the embassy of the Republic of Tunisia and protest topless, with "My Body Against Islamism!" written on your body, take a photo of yourself, and post it on your social network page, as well as on the Femen Facebook Fan Page at facebook.com/Femen.UA.

This day will mark the beginning of a new, genuine Arab Spring, after which true freedom, freedom without mullahs and caliphs, will come to Tunisia!  Long live the  topless jihad against infidels!  Our tits are deadlier than your stones!

Are you certain about that last part? Of all the words I've seen applied to female breasts, "deadlier" is one I'm not really sure I'd have thought of (or want to).  Also, I thought "freedom without mullahs and caliphs" came to Tunisia some time back, and stones weren't in play, but then I've seen Tunisian resort beaches, and perhaps Inna Shevchenko hasn't.

If a whole lot of people in the West want to take their tops off to support Amina on April 4, hey, I certainly won't complain, it's their right, but I doubt if it will change anything.  And I doubt if we'll see much solidarity in the Middle East itself. Sometime in the next few days (when I finish reading it) I plan to review Shereen El-Feki's new book on sexuality in the Arab world, which directly addresses some of these issues. But I feel it really comes down to the question of audience: Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina are great fodder for the Western media, but the women on the front lines are out there fighting in Tahrir Square and elsewhere against harassment and rape. Luck and safety to Amina, but more power still to the women at the front lines.

President Morsi's Tin Ear (or Incredible Bad Judgtment) Strikes Again

Back when the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces was ruling Egypt we frequently had to address the question of whether the SCAF was genuinely oppressive or just mind-bogglingly incompetent. Since the ascendancy of Muhammad Morsi, there is accumulating evidence that, while he may lean toward the first, he is exceptional at the second. I could go back and enumerate the incidents since last summer when he has said the wrong thing at a time that demanded diplomacy. Sometimes it's a gesture or the absence of one — skipping the funeral of the dead border troops or the enthronement of the Coptic Pope — or stupid denials for his Brotherhood constituency (denying that Egypt thanked Israeli President Shimon Peres for Ramadan greetings, though Israel published the greetings delivered by the Egyptian Embassy in Tel Aviv), and many instances of Mr. Morsi saying things that alienate people. His foot in mouth disease has not abated, unless hejust really doesn't care,

Yesterday, Morsi was speaking to a conference dedicated to an Initiative to Support Women's Rights and Freedoms. Please note that audience. Over the past few days there had been a series of clashes between the Brotherhood and its opponents around the MB headquarters in Muqattam. These descended into violent clashes, with each side blaming the other. Morsi chose the opportunity of his  public speech to denounce those who riot and use violence as seditious, and to promise extraordinary measures if the troubles continued. So far, pretty standard rhetoric and bluster. Both Husni Murbarak and. after him, SCAF, used to then blame foreign hands, "outside agitators," agents of some foreign power. The rhetoric may suggest, or even name, Israel and/or the US, or (under Mubarak) Iran, or (today) the UAE. Morsi didn't name names, but he used a rather bizarre, and arguably indelicate, image in evoking outside meddling. The Egypt Independent:

President Mohamed Morsy threatened Sunday that “whoever sticks his finger inside Egypt, I will cut it off.”

“I can see a couple of fingers getting inside by nobodies who have no value in this world, thinking that money can make them men,” Morsy went on in a remark that could have sexual connotations in Egyptian dialect, something that has raised criticism and led to a wave of jokes on social networking websites.

Let's come back to those "sexual connotations in Egyptian dialect" in a moment. Here's another version:

"No one in our neighborhood wants this nation to stand on its feet. I will cut off any finger that meddles in Egypt," he said alluding to alleged foreign interference. "I can see two or three fingers that are meddling inside," he said without elaborating.

Longtime readers of this blog, and most Egyptians (especially Egyptian women) should see the problem immediately. Consider:

1) President Morsi is addressing a women's rights conference.

2) This is a delicate subject. Almost nothing has angered Egyptian women more than the so-called "virginity tests" administered to unmarried female demonstrators two years ago, in which the army manually examined the women to determine if they were virgins, by, essentially, inspecting them digitally. Neither Morsi nor the Muslim Brotherhood had anything to do with that, but (while the courts denounced it and the Army said it won't do it any more), no one has ever been convicted in the violations which Egyptian women justly equate with digital rape. (There's a cruder two-word term, alliterative, that starts with "finger.")

3) Now, class, can anyone tell me why many Egyptian women might find it offensive when their President, speaking to a women's rights conference, might use imagery like "a couple of fingers getting inside" and "two or three fingers that are meddling inside"? As the Egyptian Independent article delicately puts it, it's "a remark that could have sexual connotations in Egyptian dialect."

Two questions:

1) Is there any language in which it  doesn't have sexual connotations?

2) Is Morsi: a) a misogynist deliberately insulting his audience; b) a failed comedian; c) didn't realize what he said because he is too c1) dumb, c2) incompetent, c3) naive, c4) the Manchurian candidate, or c5) all of the above?

For those who know Arabic:

As Women Fight Back in Tahrir, TV Sheikh Explains they are "Crusaders" with "Fuzzy Hair" Who "Want to Be Raped."

Now, there have been some "crazy sheikh/crazy fatwa" stories where I've debunked or at least questioned the story, but every so often a real Salafi says something so incredibly offensive and ourageous that to call him a Neanderthal would be a slur on homo neanderthalensis. This is one of those times.

Salafi preacher Ahmad Mahmud Abdullah, known as "Sheikh Abu Islam," has his own "Umma" TV station in Egypt. On Wednesday he explained what's really going on with the resistance to sexual assault in Tahrir (see my recent post on the subject):

They tell you women are a red line. They tell you that naked women -- who are going to Tahrir Square because they want to be raped -- are a red line! And they ask Mursi and the Brotherhood to leave power! ... And by the way, 90 percent of them are crusaders and the remaining 10 percent are widows who have no one to control them. You see women talking like monsters ... You see a woman with this fuzzy hair! A devil! Devils called women. Learn from Muslim women, learn and be Muslims. (text from Al-Arabiya English)

Well,thank you for clearing that up. As a husband and the father of a daughter, my first reaction is that this man is a shame and scandal to a great religion. (That is not entirely true. My first reaction is that he is an asshole, but I'm not sure I can say "asshole" here, or the obvious adjective that goes with it.*[See note below.] My second (or really third) reaction is to wonder if Egyptian law allows one to charge a man who has just given religious sanction to rape, on television.

Al-Arabiya has a video with an English translation which is at the link above; this YouTube is of the Al-Arabiya video though apparently posted by an Islam-bashing site (I can't find an embed function at the original), but I post it because this has nothing to do with Islam.

Fuzzy hair? Huh? And they're going naked to Tahrir Square? Why is the mainstream media hiding the pictures of the fuzzy-haired naked women Crusaders? And he calls the women "monsters"? I pity his wife (wives?) and daughters. This man has a TV station and all I have is a blog?

*I can, however, with a suitable language warning (as I've done from time to time), quote a third party, in this case a tweet from Egyptian-American commentator Mona ElTahawy, who gives him his due:

 Yeah. That's about right.In fact, there's a certain eloquence to "fucking misogynist shit" that I probably wouldn't have used in my own voice.

Fighting Back: Marching (and Organizing) Against Sexual Harassment and Assault in Cairo

Today's march from Sayyida Zainab to Tahrir Square was the latest women's protest against sexual harassment and assault in Egypt, and as the photo at left shows, some of them are sending the message that they aren't going to take it anymore. It's part of a visible new determination, visible in recent weeks, to push back against a long endemic scourge that many activists fear has recently taken on a more sinister aspect: they suspect it is systematic and organized.

While we've addressed the issue here on several occasions, and women in Cairo (whether dressed in Western garb or wearing hijab or even niqab) have routinely complained of groping and harassment, since the revolution there are several disturbing new trends, including large groups of young males surrounding, stripping, and assaulting women activists. Many of the activists are convinced that these young men are organized and encouraged by elements (perhaps the government, Islamists, or remnants if the old regime) to deter and dissuade women from appearing at demonstrations. There have been numerous incidents in Tahrir Square during large demonstrations. The women's group Baheya Ya Masr has openly accused the government of involvement, and recent posts by Zeinobia seem to agree. As Ursula Lindsey recently noted, and as Amnesty International has also remarked, these attacks meet the technical definition of rape and are of a far different order than the traditional groping.

This Amnesty International Report notes the recent wave on the January 25 anniversary of the revolution:

The horrific testimonies emerging following protests commemorating the second anniversary of the “25 January Revolution” have brought to light how violent mob sexual attacks against women have happened, but have rarely been brought to public attention.

Operation Anti Sexual Harassment/Assault (OpAntiSH) is an initiative by a number of Egyptian human rights organizations and individuals set up to combat sexual harassment of women in the vicinity of Tahrir Square. It received reports of 19 cases of violent attacks against women on 25 January 2013.

Activists leading the group “I saw Harassment” told Amnesty International that they managed to intervene in a further five cases before violence escalated. Four women were assaulted inside the Sadat Metro Station and one behind the Omar Maqram [Makram] Mosque.

The Amnesty report contains some rather graphic descriptions, as does this article by Egypt Independent News Editor Tom Dale. It's grim and hard to read, but necessary. I won't quote them here but do recommend you read them. Prepare to  be angry. [UPDATE: A new Amnesty Report just today emphasizes how the lack of punishment or law enforcement encourages the violence.]

OpAntiSh, or Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment, (Facebook page here) mentioned in the Amnesty Report and in Dale's article is a recently formed ad hoc group of men and women activists seeking to counter (and to document) such attacks. They succeed such earlier efforts as the HarassMap, an interactive map tracing incidents of harassment, but they are seeking not just national but international attention. They released this harrowing, if somewhat dark, video of rescuers attempting to free a woman from a crowd of attackers. There are already subtitles in English and a variety of European languages (click CC at the left of the buttons on the lower right if captions are not defaulting on), and they are crowdsourcing translations into other languages as well. I'm also printing the narrative below the video. [Video dropped out for a few hours. It's back now.]

“This is not a fight. There is a girl stuck inside this circle. This girl is being sexually assaulted. Right now, there are 3-4 hands inside her pants, and 3-4 inside her blouse. There are about 10 people pulling at her from every direction, and there is one taking off her shoes right now so that his colleague who’s taking off her pants can do so easily. There is a man holding the girl right now and telling her he’s protecting her. The truth is he is also sexually assaulting her, and his hands are in her undergarments right now. There is a man taking off his pants to give them to her. There is another taking off his jacket, and another trying to cover her, and tens trying to stop them with knives. The men trying to help her are telling her to run. The girl is screaming and trying to tell them that those around them are not trying to help them [but] are pulling her back, that she’s scared she’s going to fall, that someone is trying to take off her pants again, but no one can hear her. This girl can’t breathe from the pushing and pulling and is about to faint, but thank God she is not wearing a scarf so they can’t strangle her with it as they did to the second girl. Or the third girl, whom they violated with a knife. Or the fourth and fifth girls that were dragged inside cars but thankfully managed to escape. Or the mother who was violated in front of her children. These girls were gang raped, publicly, for all to see. These girls did not think they would make it out alive. These girls won’t receive any visits from people heralding their heroism. Because no one wants to know about these girls. No one wants to hear [about], read [about] or see these girls. But we will not stay silent. We will not be broken. We will not be ashamed. Tahrir Square and its surrounding areas are the scenes of mob sexual assaults/rapes. Go down and help fight against sexual assaults because we have no intention of staying at home. This Midan is our Midan. This revolution is our revolution. And we will fight this battle until our dying breath.”

Today's demonstration is one small response, but the efforts of OpAntiSH to spread the details both in Egypt and abroad  may draw enough attention to pressure the authorities (at least the police, who by all accounts do nothing) to identify and constrain these mobs. At any rate, the women are at least fighting back.

"End Sexual Harassment Day" for Bloggers and Tweeters in Egypt

Egyptian bloggers and tweeters have declared today a day to post in protest of sexual harassment, after an anti-sexual harassment march by women last Friday was broken up in Tahrir square by attacks from "thugs" (baltagiyya). Though this was technically the second blogging and tweeting day against sexual harassment — the first was last year — last Friday's attack clearly exacerbated things. Tweets today are mostly found under #EndSH; a few under other hashtags, including the Arabic  لا للتحرش, and #StopSH.
The latest wave of anger has emerged in the wake of continuing attacks on women during major demonstrations in Tahrir Square. This report by Sarah El Deeb for the Associated Press preceded the most recent outrages. Then came the women's demonstration last Friday, which was attacked by unidentified baltagiyya.  Here is Sarah El Deeb's report on that attack, for Associated Press. And a video (Arabic) from Al-Masry Al-Youm.



Some of the recent blogging in English:

"Post Jan25 Random Posts," :They were Cowards and I Shall Remain."

Zeinobia, #EndSH: Again We Face Ugly Reality"

Holly Dagres, "Fight Harassment 101: Egypt's Obstacle to Ending Sexual Harassment."

 A document from the activist group nazra.org [PDF], "[Three] Testimonies  on Recent Sexual Assaults on Tahrir Square Vicinity."

Blogger identified as "Hana," "Helplessness is How They Win."

And one by a male blogger, "Helpless."

And the interactive website HarassMap remains a tool in the battle against this extensive and widespread problem.

Hands Off! (Lit., Cut Your Hands)

 Of course Egypt is not the only country in the region where women being groped in the street is all too frequent. But what is particularly alarming is the fact that security forces have regularly used such attacks as a tactic against female protesters. The notorious "blue bra woman" incident last December remains a vivid image of sexual violence tool, which led to Secretary of State Clinton's denunciation of the "systematic degradation of women" in Egypt,.

This is not just an issue that has arisen since the revolution, nor one that stems primarily from political motives. I won't ramble on about it again here, but suggest you read the testimonies of those who deal with it every day, and consider this a voice in support from a man with both a wife and a daughter.

Firestorm of Debate on Mona Eltahawy's "Why Do They Hate Us?"

If you've been on any social media in the last day or two, you're probably aware that Mona Eltahawy's powerful indictment, "Why DoThey Hate Us?," which I blogged about on Monday, has stirred up a hornet's nest of commentary. Any journalist ought to consider it a triumph to have everybody talking about his/her article and to generate multiple Twitter hashtags, but at times the controversy has gotten a bit harsh. I think the use of the term "hate" may be what proved most provocative, in its implication that Middle Eastern (she';s really mainly talking about Arab) societies hate their women. Perhaps another word (fear?) might have been less controversial, but I think controversy is the whole point of an article like Eltahawy's: you want to engage debate, so you throw a fox in among the chickens.

I'm sure I haven't seen all the responses, even all of those in English. (She says her article is being translated into Arabic and will appear, as some have criticized her for publishing in a Western publication n English). But here's a selection of responses from the last day or so: Foreign Policy itself, in whose "Sex Issue" the article appears, asked five (now six with Leila Ahmed) commentators, male and female, for their reactions, which are here.

Others who have posted essays in various places are Mona Kareem,  Samia Errazzouki, Dima Khatib, Roqayah Chamseddine, Nahed ElTantawy, Zeinobia, and a couple of male voices, Karim Malak, and Philip Brennan.

Al Jazeera English summarizes the debate as well.

UPDATE: Add Nesrine Malik at The Guardian.

A blogger visually graphing the responses here.

UPDATE II: Too  many responses to keep updating this post. As needed I'll add other links in a new post. 

I will only briefly engage this debate here: I'm not Arab, Muslim, or female, so my standing in this debate is as an outsider, though one who's spent a career in the region (and who, as the father of a daughter, thinks about these issues). As I already said, I think the word "hate" provoked much of the response; to many it seemed too strong, though it's hard to look at things like the "virginity tests" and the "blue bra" incident in Egypt (the photo of which is used to illustrate Tahawy's article online) can be explained as anything but contempt for women. Many also have taken her to task for the cover photo on the issue: a woman in black body paint to resemble a niqab, seen by many as playing to multiple Western sexist stereotypes, managing to get suggestions of nudity and full veiling into the same illustration. As an Editor, I'm well aware authors don't usually get a say in the cover art, but not everyone appreciates that.

Everyone needs to read the original article, a powerful indictment as I have said, but as the word implies, also very much a prosecutorial statement. It stands to reason there would be briefs for the defense as well, and much that lies somewhere in between those adversarial positions.

Whatever you think of Mona Eltahawy's article (and I was struck by its sad truths from the beginning), she got our attention. She threw down a gauntlet and managed to get the whole Middle East commentary community talking for a couple of days. That is what opinion journalism, informed by fact, does at its very best. And that should please the author and her editors.

Eltahawy and Sadjadpour in Foreign Policy's "Sex Issue"

Foreign Policy's May/June issue is labeled their "Sex Issue." Yes, at first encounter it seems an unlikely publication to have a sex issue, but it turns out to have some important content, not least on the Middle East. Anyone even slightly familiar with the region hardly needs to be told that the role of women is a central thread in all the culture wars now roiling the region, and that sexuality and sexual harassment are among the taboos often met with denial. So Foreign Policy has a sex issue.

In their introduction they say:

When U.S. magazines devote special issues to sex, they are usually of the celebratory variety (see: Esquire, April 2012 edition; Cosmopolitan, every month). Suffice it to say that is not what we had in mind with Foreign Policy's first-ever Sex Issue, which is dedicated instead to the consideration of how and why sex -- in all the various meanings of the word -- matters in shaping the world's politics.Why? In Foreign Policy, the magazine and the subject, sex is too often the missing part of the equation -- the part that the policymakers and journalists talk about with each other, but not with their audiences. And what's the result? Women missing from peace talks and parliaments, sexual abuse and exploitation institutionalized and legalized in too many places on the planet, and a U.S. policy that, whether intentionally or not, all too frequently works to shore up the abusers and perpetuate the marginalization of half of humanity. Women's bodies are the world's battleground, the contested terrain on which politics is played out. We can keep ignoring it. For this one issue, we decided not to.

Two of their articles are particularly noteworthy for anyone dealing with our region:

• Mona Eltahawy, "Why Do They Hate Us? The Real War on Women is in the Middle East." An angry, and powerful, indictment of the plight of women in the Middle East, with focus on the Arab world. It deserves to be read by anyone dealing with the region, male and female.

• Karim Sadjadpour, "The Ayatollah Under the Bed(sheets)." A look at sex and sexuality in Iran since the Revolution. His piece is also essential, I think.

There's much more in the issue, but these two powerful articles are a good place to start.

These issues will not go away, and it's refreshing to see them addressed directly and not sensationally.

Tomorrow: International Women's Day in Cairo This Year Has Special Resonance

Tomorrow, March 8, marks International Women's Day, but in Egypt it has other symbolism as well, since it marks a year since the demonstrations that led to the now notorious "virginity tests" that have become a rallying cry for women's rights and a black eye for the military regime. (March 16, on the other hand, is Egyptian Women's Day, marking the famous protest by women during the 1919 Revolution.) Tomorrow will be marked by a women's march to the Journalists' s Syndicate (poster at left). It seeks greater political representation after relatively few women were elected to Parliament.

Actually, at the International Women's Day last year women were harassed and cursed;  it was at the broader Tahrir Square Friday demonstrations the next day, March 9, that the first "virginity tests" were reported.http://mideasti.blogspot.com/2011/03/moment-for-outrage-abuse-of-women-in.html Throughout the troubled past year women have frequently been in the crossfire (sometimes literally, always figuratively), memorably including the searing photos of the beating and stripping of the "blue bra woman" that led US Secretary of State Clinton to denounce "the systematic degradation of women,"  Samira Ibrahim's legal fight against the Army, journalist MonaElTahawy's beating, groping and broken arms, culminating in the powerful Women's March in December. Nor, of course, is this a complete catalog of the violence inflicted on women, not just as part of the revolutionary upheaval, but as part of daily life. I've also sought to note the historical roles of Hoda Sha‘arawi, and of the first women's demonstration during the Uprising of 1919.

It has been a turbulent year for Egypt as a whole and particularly for Egyptian women, who have, however, made their voices heard. As did their great-great-grandmothers in that earlier revolution of 1919.

Women Demonstrating in 1919

A Post in Lieu of the End-of-Year Retrospective I Probably Won't Write

Sorry, I just can't resist printing this picture yet again.

This is the time of year when publications, newspapers, websites, etc, all do their "looking back on 2011" retrospectives. Does anybody actually read those? I don't, though I've written a few in my day. I'm on vacation this week; why should I write something even I don't particularly want to read?

You know what happened. Whether you called it "the Arab Spring," " the Arab Awakening," or "Why are My Loyal Loving Citizens Baying for my Scalp?" (if you were a head of state), it happened, and is mostly still happening. So far only one dead head of state, Qadhafi, but lots of dead revolutionaries, especially in Libya and Syria. It's an unfinished business.  Will Egypt's revolution end in revolutionary progress, Islamist regression, military rule, or not with a bang but a whimper? Damned if I know. Will Bashar al-Asad survive? I wouldn't want to sell him a long term life insurance policy, but who can say for sure? Will Salih ever actually leave Yemen?

Now, I think, while avoiding a "Major Stories of 2011" retrospective you won't read anyway,  I may do a collection of some of the most iconic photos of the year, but as for a retrospective, it's all in the archive. I may even list some of my own favorite posts of the year, which are mostly the historical ones. And after January 1 I may give you a summary of what the most popular posts of the year by number of pageviews were. But I don't think I'll relive the year in detail, since who needs to relive what we're still living?

I do note many changes in theme, by looking at my labels/topics list (officially "Categories" over there on the lower right). Although the sexual harassment and abuse of women is a notorious and longstanding problem in the Middle East, and the label has 12 posts in it, every single one of them is from 2011. That's not because the problem arose in 2011 for the first time, but because the revolutionary fervor and the presence of men and women together in the angry streets drove it into the forefront of our attention. Good. Women need to scream about it and men need to stop their denial and hear what they're saying. The Arab revolutions have brought such issues to the forefront, even as they have empowered the Islamists whose views are at odds with the young revolutionaries but whose presence in the streets helped bring down the old regimes.

This rollercoaster ride has just begun, I suspect. I'll talk more about it in the new year of course. Meanwhile, hang on for the ride.

Samira Ibrahim Wins Her Case

Samira Ibrahim, the only victim of last spring's notorious "virginity tests" in Egypt who had the courage to take her case to court, has finally had her day in court, has was won her case, with the Administrative Court ordering military prisons not to perform such tests. Though the Military Prosecutor has said the decision is moot since no procedures existed for the tests and a doctor involved (unnamed) was being prosecuted, and the military could still appeal the ruling.

Samira Ibrahim's claim for compensation has not yet been argued; this decision addressed the "urgent" part of the case by ordering the procedures stopped. But it still represents a victory in that it establishes the procedure is unacceptable.

Moneltahawy on This Week's Horror: Two Interviews

After getting in three posts on Thursday that weren't about Egypt, the week's horrific events bring it back, and though I plan to leave you for the weekend with a suitable Christmas post, I have to go back to "the photo" or "the blue bra woman" or whatever you're calling it, but what Hillary Clinton called "systematic sexual degradation of women."

During the violence in November on Mohammed Mahmoud Street, where I used to live back in Sadat's day, the well-known journalist Mona Eltahawy was arrested, beaten, sexually abused,  one arm and the other hand broken, and she promised, in a tweet I printed then and will print again (strong language warning again): 





Her broken arm and hand have apparently limited her ability to deliver the blast in print that I suspect is coming,  but the whole beating/dragging/stripping of the woman in an abaya, sadly now known mostly for the blue bra she never expected the world to see, Mona Eltahawy had offered these thoughts to Wolf Blitzer at CNN and to the BBC. Both are worth watching. I still want to see her written version when she's able. If anybody can stare down SCAF, it's this tough and proud woman. As I said the last time, "I, for one, am looking forward to it. I think they finally [messed] with the wrong Egyptian woman."

Remembering the Revolution's Great-Grandmothers: Hamieda Khalil, Hoda Sha‘arawi, Safiyya Zaghlul and the Revolutionaries of 1919

Women Demonstrating in 1919

I've posted previously about resemblances between Egypt's revolution of 1919 and the ferment that brought down Husni Mubarak. Yesterday's big march by angry women evokes memories of another march some of their great-grandmothers may have joined, the first great demonstration by women during the 1919 Revolution (sometimes called an uprising by the British Occupation it sought to end, but always thawra to Egyptians.)

With the crescent-and-cross flag

Women had played a role from the beginning of the troubles, and on March 14, 1919 a woman from Cairo's Gamaliyya district, Hamieda Khalil, was killed, the first woman martyr of the revolt. Two days later, on March 16, Hoda Sha‘arawi organized a demonstration consisting entirely of women, at least 300, to march and protest. March 16 is now celebrated as Egyptian women's day. Much of what little is available about Hamieda Khalil is in Arabic, or in general accounts of women in the Revolution, and I don't know if she was ever photographed.

Hoda Sha‘arawi

On multiple occasions, however, I have posted about the pioneering Egyptian feminist Hoda (Huda) Sha‘arawi, who famously stepped off a train in Cairo in 1923, returning from a feminist meeting in Europe, without her face veil. She became the heroine and patron saint of Egyptian feminism. But as the 1919 march shows, she was an activist long before she took off the veil.

Hoda Sha‘arawi & Safiyya Zaghlul

Another early activist and feminist was Safiyya Zaghlul, wife of nationalist leader Sa‘ad Zaghlul; her husband's forced exile to the Seychelles by the British was the spark that ignited the 1919 Revolution. Sha‘arawi and Safiyya Zaghlul are shown together at right.

These women were the pioneers. I'm sure they'd applaud yesterday's March, but also be appalled that things have not progressed more and may in fact be moving backward.

Egypt: The Women's March

Today, some 10,000 women of all ages and background marched in downtown Cairo to protest military violence directed at women, including the now famous woman beaten and stripped by the military police in what Secretary of State Clinton called the "systematic degradation of women." The photos confirm the presence of young and old, clad in Western garb, hijab, or even niqab, many of them carrying the photo that went around the world.


Meanwhile the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces issued its latest communique (number 91) as it always communicates, by posting an image on its Facebook page. (Text is in Arabic.) They promised to investigate and punish those responsible for the notorious "virginity tests," and those responsible for the Maspero killings.

Um, your generalships, sirs, the "virginity tests" outrage took place last March. Thank you so much for your prompt attention. These are clearly not just the young activists of Tahrir: SCAF has riled Egyptian women. Their communique suggests that after days of suggesting that the photo was a fake, they really are starting to catch on to what happens when you kick a hornet's nest, or kick a woman whose abaya you've pulled off in a video that's gone around the world.

Here's one of many videos of the march. A line of men protected the women marchers. Not all Egyptian men are like those who so disgraced the uniform.

Secretary Clinton Denounces "Systematic Degradation of Women" in Egypt

Secretary of State Clinton yesterday: "This systematic degradation of Egyptian women dishonors the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform, and is not worthy of a great people." Fuller quote and link are below.

Neither "the photo" nor the story are going away, whatever SCAF may wish. It's being discussed everywhere,While I also blame the protesters for provoking the military to some extent, there is no excuse for this sort of behavior.

If you weren't enraged the first time you saw this photo, let me warn you that closeups don't make it any better. Sorry to subject you to the brutality again, but it gets worse with detail. Look at the closeup. The young woman is clearly wearing what appears to be a conservative abaya, and thus also hijab. Stripping her is thus even more offensive and misogynistic.

If you look at the closeup video below (though it's also visible in the more wide angle video I previously posted, and is the second video below, with the assault around (0:58), you'll see that the bastard on the right does exactly what it looks like he's about to do: kicks her directly in her breasts, twice,  at about 0:42 and 0:47 in this video. She is protected only by her now world famous blue bra. At least he's wearing soft shoes, not a jackboot. I'm sure she's grateful, if she lived. If you can stomach it, watch both videos in fullscreen  mode.





Speaking as someone who has known Egypt for nearly 40 years, worked closely with the Egyptian military for about 8, supported our $1.3 billion in aid (mostly military) till about now, but also despise misogyny, sexual abuse, and the subjugation of women, I am still outraged. SCAF says it's responding to provocateurs. I admit I think the protesters share blame here, not least for the destruction of the Institut d'Egypte, but I cannot imagine any provocation that could justify those kicks.  Secretary of State Clinton spoke out directly about the abuse of women, speaking at my alma mater, Georgetown, yesterday:

Recent events in Egypt have been particularly shocking.  Women are being beaten and humiliated in the same streets where they risked their lives for the revolution only a few short months ago.  And this is part of a deeply troubling pattern.  Egyptian women have been largely shut out of decision-making in the transition by both the military authorities and the major political parties.  At the same time, they have been specifically targeted both by security forces and by extremists.

Marchers celebrating International Women’s Day were harassed and abused.  Women protesters have been rounded up and subjected to horrific abuse.  Journalists have been sexually assaulted.  And now, women are being attacked, stripped, and beaten in the streets.  This systematic degradation of Egyptian women dishonors the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform, and is not worthy of a great people.  As some Egyptian politicians and commentators have themselves noted, a new democracy cannot be built on the persecution of women, nor can any stable society.  Whether it’s ending conflict, managing a transition, or rebuilding a country, the world cannot afford to continue ignoring half the population.  Not only can we do better; we have to do better, and now we have a path forward as to how we will do better.

Mona Eltahawy, herself a recent victim of beating, broken bones and sexual abuse at official hands, talks to CBC about the latest incident:



I hope SCAF remembers whose tax dollars are buying their equipment. Mine. I am restraining myself from expressing how angry this makes me, but not everyone is.  I'll keep strong language off here for the moment (though they're pushing me), but it's no coincidence, that this (language warning) is a popular twitter hashtag.