I tell fellow Egyptians and fellow Americans it's about us, not about them
After this week's Middle East protests we must move beyond the deceptive simplicity of the question: 'Why do they hate us?'
Protesters set fire to police vehicles during clashes with riot police near the US embassy in Cairo on 13 September. Photograph: Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters
When my father came home from Friday prayers, I was eager to know what the sermon had been about. We'd all been following three days of protests outside the US embassy in Cairo, ostensibly over a film deemed offensive to the Prophet Muhammad that was posted on YouTube. More protests were expected in several countries after Friday prayers.
"The regular imam wasn't there, so the muezzin stepped in and told us the best way to honour the prophet was to live by his teachings," my dad said. I carry that breathtaking simplicity in my emotional suitcase with me when I travel back and forth between the US, where I've lived for the past 12 years, and Egypt, the country of my birth, to which I'm returning to fight for the social and cultural revolution we desperately need in order for our political revolution to succeed.
When my fellow Americans ask me that tired question, "Why do they hate us?", my initial response is usually: "It's not about you." When a fellow Egyptian wants to talk about hating the US, I flip that response on its head and tell her: "It's not about America – it's about you." The truth is somewhere in the middle, but too many people are willing to use it as a football in an endless match of political manipulation.
For a slightly subtler response, I tell my fellow Americans that "they" don't hate them for their freedom but, rather, because successive US governments all too willingly and knowingly supported dictators who denied their populations any kind of freedom. As a US citizen, I cherish the first amendment. It's what I whipped out as I stood alongside Muslims and non-Muslims in Lower Manhattan in 2010 to defend the right of anIslamic community centre to open close to Ground Zero. We told those who opposed the centre that that first amendment was what gave them the right to protest and at the same time guaranteed freedom to worship right there on that spot.
How could a country that cherishes such freedom be so willing to support dictators all too eager to deny that same freedom to their people? Even President Barack Obama, who spoke so eloquently about dignity and freedom in his 2009 Cairo speech, disappointingly dragged his feet when it was time to decide between Mubarak and the people rising up for that very same freedom and dignity.
Anti-US sentiment has been born out of many grievances – support and weapons for such dictators as Mubarak, unquestionable support for Israel in its occupation of Palestine, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen that kill more civilians than intended targets.
And, paradoxically – or perhaps fittingly – that anti-US sentiment was played on dictators such as Mubarak, who was happy to pocket US aid in return for maintaining Egypt's peace treaty with Israel and buying US weapons, and yet used the state-controlled media to fan hatred of the US. Mubarak was adept, as were many other US-backed dictators, at playing the sane middle to the "lunatics with beards" he so often used as bogeymen to guarantee the support of foreign allies.
Mubarak is gone, and Egypt's president is from the Muslim Brotherhood movement – long vilified as the "lunatics with beards". It is at this point that I tell fellow Egyptians it's about them, and not about America.
That YouTube film – not made or distributed by the US government – was posted at least two months before ultra-conservative Salafists called for protests at the US embassy. Why? Understanding that the president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, must now occupy that same middle ground as Mubarak did, the Salafists are all too happy to flex rightwing political muscle. Why else did they call their protest in Cairo on the anniversary of the attacks on 11 September 2001?
Morsi, not wanting to concede the moral high ground, remained silent for too long, stuck between his memory of being the opposition and an awareness that he's now the president. That's what I mean when I tell fellow Egyptians that it's about us, not America.
Mubarak could and did ban films. That's why many genuinely offended Muslims in Egypt and other countries so quickly ask why the American government can't do the same. Of course, he also gave the green light to messages of antisemitism and hatred against Egypt's Christians.
As an Egyptian-American, I want both sides of that hyphen to enjoy the forms of freedom guaranteed by the first amendment, as I want both sides of that hyphen to move beyond the deceptive simplicity of the question, "Why do they hate us?"
I tell fellow Egyptians and fellow Americans it's about us, not about them
After this week's Middle East protests we must move beyond the deceptive simplicity of the question: 'Why do they hate us?'
Protesters set fire to police vehicles during clashes with riot police near the US embassy in Cairo on 13 September. Photograph: Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters
When my father came home from Friday prayers, I was eager to know what the sermon had been about. We'd all been following three days of protests outside the US embassy in Cairo, ostensibly over a film deemed offensive to the Prophet Muhammad that was posted on YouTube. More protests were expected in several countries after Friday prayers.
"The regular imam wasn't there, so the muezzin stepped in and told us the best way to honour the prophet was to live by his teachings," my dad said. I carry that breathtaking simplicity in my emotional suitcase with me when I travel back and forth between the US, where I've lived for the past 12 years, and Egypt, the country of my birth, to which I'm returning to fight for the social and cultural revolution we desperately need in order for our political revolution to succeed.
When my fellow Americans ask me that tired question, "Why do they hate us?", my initial response is usually: "It's not about you." When a fellow Egyptian wants to talk about hating the US, I flip that response on its head and tell her: "It's not about America – it's about you." The truth is somewhere in the middle, but too many people are willing to use it as a football in an endless match of political manipulation.
For a slightly subtler response, I tell my fellow Americans that "they" don't hate them for their freedom but, rather, because successive US governments all too willingly and knowingly supported dictators who denied their populations any kind of freedom. As a US citizen, I cherish the first amendment. It's what I whipped out as I stood alongside Muslims and non-Muslims in Lower Manhattan in 2010 to defend the right of anIslamic community centre to open close to Ground Zero. We told those who opposed the centre that that first amendment was what gave them the right to protest and at the same time guaranteed freedom to worship right there on that spot.
How could a country that cherishes such freedom be so willing to support dictators all too eager to deny that same freedom to their people? Even President Barack Obama, who spoke so eloquently about dignity and freedom in his 2009 Cairo speech, disappointingly dragged his feet when it was time to decide between Mubarak and the people rising up for that very same freedom and dignity.
Anti-US sentiment has been born out of many grievances – support and weapons for such dictators as Mubarak, unquestionable support for Israel in its occupation of Palestine, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen that kill more civilians than intended targets.
And, paradoxically – or perhaps fittingly – that anti-US sentiment was played on dictators such as Mubarak, who was happy to pocket US aid in return for maintaining Egypt's peace treaty with Israel and buying US weapons, and yet used the state-controlled media to fan hatred of the US. Mubarak was adept, as were many other US-backed dictators, at playing the sane middle to the "lunatics with beards" he so often used as bogeymen to guarantee the support of foreign allies.
Mubarak is gone, and Egypt's president is from the Muslim Brotherhood movement – long vilified as the "lunatics with beards". It is at this point that I tell fellow Egyptians it's about them, and not about America.
That YouTube film – not made or distributed by the US government – was posted at least two months before ultra-conservative Salafists called for protests at the US embassy. Why? Understanding that the president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, must now occupy that same middle ground as Mubarak did, the Salafists are all too happy to flex rightwing political muscle. Why else did they call their protest in Cairo on the anniversary of the attacks on 11 September 2001?
Morsi, not wanting to concede the moral high ground, remained silent for too long, stuck between his memory of being the opposition and an awareness that he's now the president. That's what I mean when I tell fellow Egyptians that it's about us, not America.
Mubarak could and did ban films. That's why many genuinely offended Muslims in Egypt and other countries so quickly ask why the American government can't do the same. Of course, he also gave the green light to messages of antisemitism and hatred against Egypt's Christians.
As an Egyptian-American, I want both sides of that hyphen to enjoy the forms of freedom guaranteed by the first amendment, as I want both sides of that hyphen to move beyond the deceptive simplicity of the question, "Why do they hate us?"
Egyptian Combats Both Army and Islamists
By KRISTEN McTIGHE
Published: July 18, 2012
CAIRO — The white scars on Mona Eltahawy’s arms are fading, but her determination to fight to bring Egypt a bright future through a constitution that broadly embraces human rights is not.
Ramzi Haidar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“A revolution isn’t finished in 18 months,” said Ms. Eltahawy at a cafe
in Zamalek, the upscale Cairo neighborhood on an island in the Nile.
“For me, the Constitution is how we are going to dismantle military
rule, and we have to fight for it to be written by Egyptians — not by
military and not by the Islamists, but by all Egyptians.”
A writer and former Reuters journalist, who has written for the
International Herald Tribune, Ms. Eltahawy, 44, is a contemporary,
feminist version of the Egyptian intellectuals who have long been a
thorn in the flesh of their rulers — going back to the days when Britain
was the colonial power.
She was a scourge of the regime of Hosni Mubarak as a columnist and
op-ed writer, supporting the movement that eventually coalesced and
ousted Mr. Mubarak last year. She continues to haunt his successors.
She has put herself on the line for her beliefs. She was beaten and
sexually assaulted on a side street of Cairo’s Tahrir Square after Mr.
Mubarak's ouster.
Undaunted, Ms. Eltahawy continues to denounce military rule. While the
power struggle between the newly elected Islamist president, Mohamed
Morsi, and the ruling military junta plays out in the courts and on the
streets, she — like many others — is focusing on the country’s future
constitution.
Ms. Eltahawy is an example of people with connections to Egypt who have
returned to the country following the revolution and are trying to help
shape its future. Ms. Eltahawy, who was born in Port Said, Egypt, was
educated at the American University in Cairo. She was living in New York
when the revolution occurred. Unable to witness the momentous events at
first hand, she began to speak out.
“It was crushing and burning and heart-wrenching and it was driving me
insane because this is something I’ve dreamt of all my life,” said Ms.
Eltahawy. “But I was engaged in what I could by media, trying to amplify
the voices I was hearing from Egypt to make the world take our
revolution seriously.”
She made appearances on television and wrote for the op-ed pages of
newspapers such as The Guardian in Britain and The Washington Post. She
also used social media to support the revolution. Speaking out from
abroad was not enough. Soon she began traveling back to her country.
In November, clashes broke out in Cairo when security forces violently
dispersed a sit-in of family members of victims of the revolution.
Scheduled to speak in Brussels on women in the revolution, Ms. Eltahawy
canceled her appearance and flew to Egypt.
Upon arrival, she immediately went to the streets. While recording the
action with a smart phone, she was pulled into a store by plainclothes
security officers.
They held her until riot police came and beat her with batons. She
raised her arms to protect her head but both her right hand and left arm
were broken.
“I’m a feminist, but I say this again and again, I never imagined they
would beat a woman this bad,” said Ms. Eltahawy. “But it wasn’t me they
were beating up, it was Tahrir. Our bodies now are stages or substitutes
for Tahrir, and they extract this revenge on our bodies for what we
did, for the walls we broke down.”
Ms. Eltahawy alleges officers began sexually assaulting her as well.
“I had hands on my breasts, in between my legs, I was pulling hands out
of my trousers. All this time they are calling me a whore, saying ‘what
are you doing here,”’ said Ms. Eltahawy.
“A voice inside me just told me, if you don’t get up now, you are going to die.”
She says she was kept in the Interior Ministry for six hours and denied
medical treatment, despite being visibly injured. She had lost her phone
but an activist, who was there to discuss a truce between the police
and protesters, offered her his device.
When officers looked away, she was able to send a single tweet, writing, “Beaten arrested in the Interior Ministry.”
Within 15 minutes, the hashtag #FreeMona was trending globally.
Soon, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and the U.S. State Department heard about her misfortune. She was eventually released.
“I recognized I was cushioned and protected by various levels of
privilege, the fact that I am a writer, the fact that I have access to
the media, the fact that I am known, the fact that I have an American
passport,” said Ms. Eltahawy.
“If I were an average Egyptian woman, I could still be in jail, I could
have been raped, I could have been dead, so I wanted to use what
happened to me to shed light on the fact that there are so many
Egyptians that worse happens to, but they suffer in silence.”
Ms. Eltahawy continued to speak out in Egypt and abroad. In April, she
started a major controversy with an article she wrote for Foreign Policy
called “Why Do They Hate Us?” It discussed alleged hatred of women in
the Arab world.
Both conservatives and feminists criticized the article with some saying
it made sweeping generalizations and others calling it neo-colonialist.
Ms. Eltahawy, though, said people needed to be shocked.
When the firestorm settled, Ms. Eltahawy returned to speaking out on
other issues facing Egypt. Now, she is back in Egypt having returned for
the elections — although she did not vote.
“I call it boycott by divine intervention. I hated them both,” she said
of the two candidates. She says she was unable to register because of
problems with the Web site for Egyptians abroad.
Ms. Eltahawy is now focused on the constitution. She says women’s
rights, freedom of expression and freedom of religion, can and must be
protected.
“I want the Constitution to guarantee the rights of all Egyptians,
women, minorities, Christians, everyone, I want the Constitution to
guarantee a free and fair transfer of power, should our next elections
get rid of the president,” said Ms. Eltahawy.
She worries about a recent debate over language in the draft
constitution that Islamist purists want hardened to make sure judges use
Shariah, or Islamic law.
“The kind of rhetoric we are hearing from the constitutional assembly
about what religions are to be recognized, whether or not they recognize
them, that is all deeply troubling,”’ said Ms. Eltahawy.
Meanwhile, the military and the new president are jockeying for control.
Just days before the elections, the Supreme Constitutional Court — a
body composed mainly of Mubarak-era judges — dissolved Parliament.
When Mr. Morsi took office, he struck back with a decree reinstating
Parliament. The two sides are now locked in a power struggle.
Egypt’s top military officer, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, heightened
tensions with the Muslim Brotherhood when he said on July 15 that the
armed forces would not allow a “certain group” to dominate the country.
Ms. Eltahawy fears that this muscle-flexing is distracting from more important matters.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and the military junta are gearing up for some
sort of struggle,” said Ms. Eltahawy. “And I think that the ultimate
losers in the end are the Egyptian people.”
Others have voiced frustration with the drafting process.
“They aren’t focusing on things that actually matter, like the economy,
health care, all the problems we have, they aren’t prioritizing,” said
Ahmad Aggour, a blogger and supporter of the revolution.
“A lot of the discussion is being directed to things that aren’t really
important to most Egyptians,” said Shadi Hamid, a researcher at the
Brookings Institution in Doha, Qatar. “Does it really matter in the
daily lives of most Egyptians what Article 2 says about the role of
Shariah? No, it’s a symbolic debate. Has there been a real discussion
about other aspects in the Constitution? That’s been lacking in the
public discourse.”
Mr. Hamid said that Ms. Eltahawy's concerns about human rights and
women's issues are not those of the majority of Egyptians.
“The call for a bill of rights is not a popular one. It comes from an
elite group of people,” said Mr. Hamid. “The ordinary Egyptians have no
idea about what is being discussed.”
Ms. Eltahawy, though, thinks that the moment is at hand for Egypt to
shed military rule and still avoid domination by the Islamists.
“People have stood up to them in unprecedented ways,” she says. “We’re
at a position in Egyptian history where the military that has ruled us
since 1952, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest opposition group
since 1928, these longstanding institutions are facing huge challenges
and they are threatened,” she says.
So at a time when many revolutionaries feel disillusioned, Ms. Eltahawy says she remains deeply optimistic.
“After my attack, I learned the price that people pay to stand up to the
regime, and it makes me even more optimistic,” she said.
“Egypt is changed forever, we have diminished the power of the military
and the Muslim Brotherhood. We said ‘No!’, we said ‘we are going to hold
everyone accountable’, and the military and the Muslim Brotherhood both
know this,” she said.
“I think people end up focusing on the negatives and failures and we forget to say we achieved something,” she said.
==========================================================
Egyptians don't care about Hosni Mubarak's health scares 2012 June 23rd Tahrir
Mubarak might be on his back but his regime is very much on its legs, upright and determined to crush our revolution
Hosni Mubarak, pictured here in January,
'will be remembered as the most bland of those military men turned
dictators.' Photograph: Mohammed Al-Law/AP
Hosni Mubarak, our 84-year old ousted dictator, has spent
another night outside the prison cell where he's been sentenced to spend
whatever remains of his life. A health scare that began as a stroke,
according to state-controlled media, but ended up being attributed by
his lawyer to a "slip in the bathroom", ensured that he was moved into the welcoming environs of a military hospital.
It was not the first time that Mubarak has supposedly suffered a stroke, fallen into a coma, been on life support or all of the above. Ever since street protests forced the ruling military junta to put him on trial last year, he has been on the verge of death so many times that once he actually does die it is easy to imagine that the news will be greeted in much the same way as this latest health scare: we don't care.
It might sound heartless to brush off an old man's maybe-maybe-not health issues but our hearts have been smashed, worn out and driven to the verge of death countless times by the 19 Mubaraks who comprise the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, the military junta that took over the country after the revolution forced Mubarak to step down on 11 February 2011. Mubarak might be on his back but his regime is very much on its legs, upright and determined to crush our revolution, never mind our hearts.
The miracle isn't that several times a month Mubarak falls into and out of near-death health scares, it is the Egyptians' ability to have survived the past 60 years of a military rule that has snuffed out so much of what used to make Egypt such a vibrant heart of the Arab world. Ever since a group of army officers staged a coup in 1952 and allowed one of their own to put aside his military garb and wear a suit instead to serve as our civilian dictator, the ageing generals at the helm thrive and live in comfort at the expense of our young – the majority of Egyptians are younger than 30.
When Mubarak does die, he will be remembered as the most bland of those military men turned dictators: compare him with Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar Sadat. The legacies most associated with him are a network of bridges and highways and "stability". The revolution ousted him but one of its main goals was to end military rule so our fight against him is a fight against his regime.
It is not just Mubarak who is supposedly fighting for his life; that military rule too is determined to hold on. A series of blatant power grabs over the past couple of weeks that have dissolved parliament and attempt to curb the powers of whoever is our next president, are also reminders that the military junta feels the need to remind us that it's in charge.
The Muslim Brotherhood movement – whose heart, let's be honest, was never fully into the revolution but whose candidate Mohamed Morsi might be that next president – has since Mubarak's ouster been busy with its own power grabbing and on-again-off-again ability or willingness to stand up to the military junta and for the goals of our revolution: bread, liberty and social justice.
So you'll excuse us if Mubarak's health "scares" are less significant to most people here in Egypt than they are to the foreign media. The man whose regime crushed the dreams and futures of so many Egyptians is very much alive and kicking.
For a more poignant reminder, look beyond the rollercoaster of presidential election results and rumours and witness the resumption of a trial on Monday that sets into tragic relief the price the revolution has exacted.
As Mubarak enjoys the comfort of military hospital instead of jail, eight young men will testify in the latest session of the trial of 73 suspects accused of involvement in the Port Said football disaster. On 1 February, at least 74 football fans were killed in violence after a match between Cairo team Ahly and Masry of Port Said.
Many of us believe the Ahly football fans were set upon deliberately – as police and security did nothing to end the violence – to punish their fan club the ultras for taking part in the revolution. Many people entered the stadium with weapons, the stadium's steel doors were locked during the massacre and the lights were turned off.
A survivor has described to me seeing seven of his friends being killed in front of him and carrying out 12 corpses. Many of those who died were in their late teens or early 20s. "If our hearts were crushed before Port Said, they died at the stadium," another survivor told me.
So once again, you'll excuse us if the on-again off-again health issues of an cctogenarian are not our priority. Send to a friend
It was not the first time that Mubarak has supposedly suffered a stroke, fallen into a coma, been on life support or all of the above. Ever since street protests forced the ruling military junta to put him on trial last year, he has been on the verge of death so many times that once he actually does die it is easy to imagine that the news will be greeted in much the same way as this latest health scare: we don't care.
It might sound heartless to brush off an old man's maybe-maybe-not health issues but our hearts have been smashed, worn out and driven to the verge of death countless times by the 19 Mubaraks who comprise the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, the military junta that took over the country after the revolution forced Mubarak to step down on 11 February 2011. Mubarak might be on his back but his regime is very much on its legs, upright and determined to crush our revolution, never mind our hearts.
The miracle isn't that several times a month Mubarak falls into and out of near-death health scares, it is the Egyptians' ability to have survived the past 60 years of a military rule that has snuffed out so much of what used to make Egypt such a vibrant heart of the Arab world. Ever since a group of army officers staged a coup in 1952 and allowed one of their own to put aside his military garb and wear a suit instead to serve as our civilian dictator, the ageing generals at the helm thrive and live in comfort at the expense of our young – the majority of Egyptians are younger than 30.
When Mubarak does die, he will be remembered as the most bland of those military men turned dictators: compare him with Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar Sadat. The legacies most associated with him are a network of bridges and highways and "stability". The revolution ousted him but one of its main goals was to end military rule so our fight against him is a fight against his regime.
It is not just Mubarak who is supposedly fighting for his life; that military rule too is determined to hold on. A series of blatant power grabs over the past couple of weeks that have dissolved parliament and attempt to curb the powers of whoever is our next president, are also reminders that the military junta feels the need to remind us that it's in charge.
The Muslim Brotherhood movement – whose heart, let's be honest, was never fully into the revolution but whose candidate Mohamed Morsi might be that next president – has since Mubarak's ouster been busy with its own power grabbing and on-again-off-again ability or willingness to stand up to the military junta and for the goals of our revolution: bread, liberty and social justice.
So you'll excuse us if Mubarak's health "scares" are less significant to most people here in Egypt than they are to the foreign media. The man whose regime crushed the dreams and futures of so many Egyptians is very much alive and kicking.
For a more poignant reminder, look beyond the rollercoaster of presidential election results and rumours and witness the resumption of a trial on Monday that sets into tragic relief the price the revolution has exacted.
As Mubarak enjoys the comfort of military hospital instead of jail, eight young men will testify in the latest session of the trial of 73 suspects accused of involvement in the Port Said football disaster. On 1 February, at least 74 football fans were killed in violence after a match between Cairo team Ahly and Masry of Port Said.
Many of us believe the Ahly football fans were set upon deliberately – as police and security did nothing to end the violence – to punish their fan club the ultras for taking part in the revolution. Many people entered the stadium with weapons, the stadium's steel doors were locked during the massacre and the lights were turned off.
A survivor has described to me seeing seven of his friends being killed in front of him and carrying out 12 corpses. Many of those who died were in their late teens or early 20s. "If our hearts were crushed before Port Said, they died at the stadium," another survivor told me.
So once again, you'll excuse us if the on-again off-again health issues of an cctogenarian are not our priority. Send to a friend
Back to Revolutionary Woman vs Burqa Woman
Mona Eltahawy
NEW YORK—As if further proof were needed of the intellectual as well as physical cave Al Qaeda inhabits, their new online magazine “Al Shamikha” (Majestic Woman) is the latest reminder.
As women and men, passionate for freedom and dignity, fuel uprisings and revolutions that are sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa, one wonders who wants to read that a “Majestic Woman” does not “go out except when necessary” and that she always wears a face-covering niqab for protection from the sun. Call it SPF:Niqab.
What a laughable idea when you see a photograph of a woman in niqab hugging a Coptic priest in Cairo during the Egyptian revolution that ended Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule. Try telling her or any of the other women in headscarves and those women not wearing any kinds of veil that they shouldn’t “go out except when necessary”. They would laugh at you and remind you that they marched and chanted alongside men in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemeni and most recently Gaza, the West Bank and Syria.
With such a breathtaking display of women and men power, surely Al Qaeda realizes the market — albeit the literally radical fashion niche one — is shrinking by the minute.
Al Qaeda espouses an ultra-orthodox interpretation of Islam which extols “out of sight and voiceless” as its ethos for women because it considers a woman’s face and voice objects of desire to be covered and silenced. Otherwise, the group steadfastly ignored women until it became convenient to recruit them to blow themselves and others to pieces in Iraq and elsewhere where the head-to-toe covering could get them into places men fitted with a suicide belt could not.
How on earth, one wonders, could its magazine marry such an ideology with the flipped-on-its head brew of women’s magazines: fashion, sex and starvation?
Getting a man is still the goal. The right man for a “Majestic Woman” is of course a “mujahid” (warrior in the name of Islam). In one interview, a woman extols her glorious marriage to a jihad fighter who was killed and how she broke the happy news to her children.
Flipping through its online pages, I couldn’t help but think one has to have been living under a rock inside that cave to think Al Shamikha’s market is anything but a quickly shrinking one. Al Qaeda and its message that only violence can bring about change is irrelevant. The role models for millions of young women and men — not just Muslims but all across the world — are those revolutionaries in Egypt who showed how non-violence could end decades of a dictator’s rule in just 18 days.
Look no further than Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world where Al Qaeda does have a presence. The truly “Majestic Woman” is Tawakul Karaman. Dubbed one of Time magazine’s “16 of History’s Most Rebellious Women,” she was the first Yemeni female journalist to remove her face veil on the job. As chair of Women Journalists without Chains, she defends human rights and freedom of expression and has been protesting outside of Sanaa University every Tuesday since 2007.
Her goal — and the uprising that she helped to start on Feb. 10 after a boost of inspiration from Tunisia and Egypt — is to end the rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh, in power since 1978. Karaman has been jailed several times, including just days before the start of the uprising.
Who do you think young Muslim women are most drawn to? Al Qaeda’s out-of-sight “Majestic Woman: or a woman whose fierce majesty (Yemeni friends love to share videos of Karaman leading protests with her chants) poses one of the most serious challenges to a dictator in 33 years?
===========================================
Why are you so willing to head back into danger?” I ask Mona Eltahawy.
We’re sitting in a café on the Upper West Side of New York City, not far from her Harlem apartment, and the brutal reality of the political violence she’s been subjected to seems far away. But the fiery Egyptian-born journalist-activist has been living on the bleeding edge of history since 2005, a prominent voice in the movement that led to the dramatic Arab Spring uprising, climaxing with the 2011 fall of the Egypt’s modern pharaoh, Hosni Mubarak.
And the bleeding edge is still bloody, now that the “Arab Spring” has entered perhaps its most dangerous and unpredictable phase. In Egypt, some of the original revolutionaries, such as Mona, are now turning on the new rulers, President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood, who they believe have hijacked the uprising and betrayed its democratic ideals. Eltahawy has been there for all that and now, she tells me, she’s heading back to the streets of Cairo, where she has suffered torture, sexual assault and broken bones from beatings.
The historical stakes are high in this critical phase of the struggle. Will the hopes awakened by the Arab Spring be crushed the way they were in Iran after the overthrow of the shah?
I’d met Eltahawy a couple of months earlier, at a dinner party hosted by Jesse Sheidlower, American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Although texting is a dinner-party faux pas, even in Manhattan, her dinner companions understood her compulsion: She was urgently communicating with fellow activists who were at that moment clashing with the police in the streets of Cairo. The ongoing social media revolution leaping halfway around the world in real time.
The dinner captured her dual identity perfectly. She was dressed in a stylish black with a silver necklace representing the ancient figure of Fatima, “protection against the evil eye,” she said. And at one point she rolled up her right sleeve to show off a new tattoo on her forearm, an image of the goddess Sekhmet, one of the oldest female deities of one of the oldest civilizations on earth. “She represents sex and retribution,” Eltahawy explained. She’d gotten the tattoo to mark the place where the Egyptian secret police had broken a bone.
In the café, when I ask her about the violence she was flying back into, she is nonplused. “I have a lot of friends and family who are very concerned about me,” she says, “But I try not to think about it. I’ve already had my arms broken and I’ve been sexually assaulted, so I’m hoping they’re not going to do any more than that.”
She’s not exactly self-protective.
“Look,” she says, “it’s dangerous for everybody in Egypt right now. Everyone who wants to stand up to the government, the state, the regime, the military, the Muslim Brotherhood—call it whatever you want. And we’ve been hearing about activists who are abducted, tortured, dumped in the desert naked.” In other words, meet the new boss, same as the old boss, only worse because you helped get the new boss his job.
***
Born in Port Said to parents who were both physicians, Eltahawy studied journalism at the American University in Cairo and began her career writing for a dissident English-language Egyptian newspaper that had to smuggle its copy out to Cyprus to be printed and then smuggle it back in. She became a globe-trotting foreign correspondent for Western outlets like Reuters and the Guardian, and gradually made the transition from journalist to journalist-activist. “I used my journalism as much as I could to expose human rights abuses, to expose women’s right abuses,” she says. “I was called into State Security for interrogation several times,” she tells me. “At one point a State Security officer whose nom de guerre was Omar Sharif—though he looked nothing like the actor—showed me my security files, and he said, ‘You see how much trouble you are? These are the files to have you followed, to have your home tapped.’” She married and moved to America in 2000 (she now holds dual citizenship), continued writing but, she says, “9/11 killed objectivity for me.”
“What do you mean, it ‘killed objectivity?’” I ask.
“When 9/11 happened I thought I’m not hearing from Muslims like ourselves,” she says, meaning liberal and moderate types. “I’d only hear from old men and conservative women. So I started writing opinion pieces. I wanted to get another voice out there to show that, look, 9/11 doesn’t represent all Islam.”
Soon afterward, her marriage ended and she flew back to Cairo, where she came into contact with the beginnings of the social media protest movement there. “I went to visit my family in Cairo but also took it as a chance to meet a lot of bloggers—a new thing, bloggers in the Middle East, that I was getting to know about. And in June of ’05, one of them asked me, ‘Do you want to come to a protest?’ And I said I’d love to! And it was the first time in my life that I’ve marched in Cairo and chanted ‘Down! Down! with Hosni Mubarak!’ There were only 100 of us. People were looking at us as if we were insane.”
There has been a major ongoing debate in foreign policy and technology circles over how decisive a role social media played in the Arab Spring uprisings.
“For many years now, social media in the Middle East and North Africa were tools and weapons,” Eltahawy says. “Social media created a space that didn’t exist in the real world because the regime didn’t allow it—the space where people could connect and talk about demonstrations and talk about organizing demonstrations. But they were not the reason the revolution happened. The revolution is people out on the street, not on their computer screens. They took it out into the real world.”
“And it started with bloggers and moved to Facebook?”
“Yeah, and it was also very important the way they used YouTube. Because the police, for some twisted reason, would use their smartphones to film themselves torturing jailed people. And they would send those videos to those who knew the victim—to intimidate and humiliate. And these videos would get out, and bloggers would put them on YouTube to expose the brutality of the Mubarak regime.”
The fact that social media can be a two-way street, with the side in power using it to terrorize, is often a neglected side of the equation. But social media is an explosive force, difficult to control, and this time it backfired.
“Something very interesting happened in the summer of 2010,” Eltahawy continues, “six months before the revolution began. People have died because of police torture in Egypt for many years. But this young man in Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, Khaled Said, was beaten to death by police. And pictures of him before and after began to appear on Facebook. And this man became an icon. Why? Because he represented the background many people on Facebook came from—a comfortable, affluent background, one that had not experienced the brutality of the Mubarak regime and hoped that if they were quiet and didn’t engage politically, they would be OK. So you got all these young people on Facebook who saw him and saw that they could be him. So they began to join protests as well. That was a pivotal moment.”
***
Eltahawy takes pride that though she became an activist, a frequent TV talking head opining about the Arab Spring, she has remained a writer. Indeed, she was recently signed by the distinguished publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux to write a book about her experiences and the plight of women in the Mideast, including her opposition to female genital mutilation. (Her working title is Headscarves and Hymens.)
“When they attacked me at the end of 2011,” she tells me, “I couldn’t write because both my arms were in casts. I could only tweet and use a touchpad with one finger. I understood then that my body was as much a medium as my words. Because I would appear on television with the casts on and I would talk about what happened to me and that was just as powerful as the words that I wrote.”
I asked her to describe the assaults that had led to that point, and it was a frightening and sinister episode in the modern battle between social media protest and old-school police state tactics.
“This happened,” Mona tells me, “during protests on a street called Mohamed Mahmoud. On November 18, 2011 [nine months after Mubarak’s resignation], the army and the police very violently broke up a peaceful protest in Tahrir [Square].”
The demonstrators were marching against the military junta then ruling Egypt.
“I was traveling at the time in Morocco to give a lecture, and then I was supposed to go to the European Parliament to give a talk there about women in revolution—but with what was happening in Egypt, I couldn’t. I needed to be in Cairo to be a part of this, but also to honor the courage of the men and women on that street fighting to defend Tahrir. I was reading about stories of boys as young as 12 going to the streets, and writing their mothers’ phone numbers on their arms with Sharpies, so that if they ended up in the morgue, people would know who to call.
“I was in Tahrir Square about 24 hours,” she continues, “when I went to meet a friend. He said, ‘Do you want to go to Mohamed Mahmoud [street]?’ and I said, ‘Yes, this is why I came.’ All I remember is lots of tear gas, lots of sirens, and we kept pushing and pushing until we got to the front line. I stood on a rock to take pictures of the security, because the front line was mobbed by this kind of metal grating and then an empty space—a no man’s land—and the security people were on the other side, the police and the soldiers. So I stood on the rock and was taking pictures with my smartphone, and they began to shoot at us. I don’t know if it was live ammunition or if it was pellets, buckshot. So we all ducked.”
At this point, as often happens in espionage dramas, a kindly stranger appears to offer a helping hand.
“There was this man who said, ‘I’ll help you if you want to stand on the rock. I’ll hold your hand.’ They started shooting again so he told me and my friend, ‘Let’s go hide in this store.’
“So we’re sitting there in the store waiting for the shooting to stop, and then I noticed that this man was holding onto me and it was very strange, because men and women don’t hold hands in public in Egypt. The shooting was getting closer and closer so we ran farther into the store. More men came in. And one of the guys groped my breast.
“So I began to punch the guy who groped me, because I couldn’t believe—who gropes a woman’s breast as we’re being shot at? I mean, who?! My friend tried to pull me away. He said, ‘Mona, we’ve got to run, we’ve got to run.’ Because he could see that the police were getting closer.
“And then the riot police come and everyone runs away, and I understood that these guys had entrapped us. They were plainclothes security or thugs. And they kept us there until the police came. I thought my friend had managed to escape, but they took him to a place where he could see me getting beaten and they beat him as they were beating me.”
“Oh, my God.”
“So I was surrounded by about four or five of the riot police who had nightsticks and they were beating me. It was really painful. So to protect my head I went like this [putting her arms in front of her head], which is why my arm was broken here and my hand broke here and here. As they were beating me, my phone fell, so I didn’t have my smartphone anymore, and then they started to drag me away, and I actually said, ‘I gotta get my phone, I gotta get my phone,’ because I understood without this phone, I couldn’t tell what happened to the outside world.
“They wouldn’t let me get my phone, of course. Then they dragged me into the no man’s land where they sexually assaulted me. I had hands all over my body, I was pulling hands off my trousers. They were pulling my hair, they were calling me a whore, the daughter of a whore, everything. And at one point, I fell to the ground and something inside me said if you don’t get up now, you’re going to die. I don’t know how I got up. Because if I hadn’t gotten up—you know that picture of the woman they stripped down to her underwear and they were stomping on her in Tahrir—did you see that picture?”
“I didn’t see that.”
“It became known as ‘blue bra girl,’ it was a very unfortunate name. Because they stripped her down and she was wearing a blue bra. But the soldiers were stomping on her chest.”
“Where does this behavior come from?”
“Oh, my God. It’s rage, rage that the people rose up and were able to do something.”
“And their privileged position was being threatened as well?”
“Exactly. So I managed to get up somehow. And they drive me to the Interior Ministry and all the way, their hands are still all over my body.”
“You must have been terrified.”
“I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen to me. We passed all of these men coming out of the Interior Ministry and I thought, ‘someone is going to stop this.’ I mean, they can see what they’re doing to me. Nothing. It’s like their eyes are dead to me.
“So they take me to their supervising officer. This man in a leather jacket—plainclothes. He says to me, ‘You’re safe now. I’m going to take care of you. You see those guys over there?’ And there’s a mob of riot police just waving their arms like this. He said, ‘You know what would happen to you if I wasn’t here?’ So he’s basically threatening me with gang rape. And he’s saying this, ‘I’m protecting you,’ and their hands are still all over my body.
“This only stopped when a man from the military, an older man from the military in fatigues said, ‘Take her away.’ And I thought they were going to let me go. But they took me inside the Interior Ministry. I spent six hours in the Interior Ministry and three hours into it, an activist came from Tahrir to try and negotiate a truce, and he didn’t know me and I didn’t know him, but he had a smartphone. So I asked if I could use it.”
Here at last, Twitter to the rescue.
“By that time they weren’t paying too much attention to me, and I managed to tweet, ‘beaten, arrested, Interior Ministry.’ And that’s how I got the word out. I was told afterward that in 15 minutes, #FreeMona was trending globally. Al Jazeera and the Guardian reported my arrest and the State Department tweeted back, We hear you and we’re on this.”
America comes through, I say.
“Yes, I know! But that’s why I say I must speak about what happened to me very, very openly because I have a privileged position. Because of who I am, because of my profile, Al Jazeera, the Guardian and the State Department paid attention. How many thousands of Egyptian women and men and children go through this anonymously?”
“Very upsetting to hear.”
“I got off lightly, Ron. Human rights groups continue to document this torture to this day, despite the elections we’ve had. And this Interior Ministry where I was kept, they had cells there for what has been described as sexual torture, of men, women and children.
“Six hours into this detention—now, remember my arms are broken, yeh? I kept telling them, ‘I need medical care.’ Nothing.”
“You must have been in great pain.”
“It felt like hell. And I also told every single man who tried to talk to me or interrogate me, that I was sexually assaulted, because I wanted them to know. This is not my shame, this is their shame. Because this is how they train them.
“And then at one point, the big guy, the big boss now, dressed in a nice suit, he thought that because I look like I come from a privileged background, that we could identify. So he says to me, ‘You know those men who did this to you?’ This is the riot police. He said, ‘You know who they are? They are from the dregs of society. We lifted them up, we scrubbed them clean, and we opened the door this much in their minds.’ And he thought I was going to say ‘of course, these barbarians.’
“‘Why do you think we’re having a revolution?’ I asked him. ‘Who let them live like this?’ So I ended up defending the men who broke my arms and sexually assaulted me against this bastard who thought I was going to play the class card.”
Remarkable she had the self-possession to argue politics at such a moment.
“This is the reality of what’s happening in Egypt. But they use this against each other. They treat these men like animals and they turn them against us, and we have to break that by saying, ‘you have made them live like this and you use them against us. You are the enemy, not them.’”
“So in other words, even after Mubarak left...”
“Even to this day when we have a democratically (quote, unquote) ‘elected president.’ This happens.”
“This still goes on.”
***
A year or so ago, Foreign Policy magazine asked Eltahawy to write an essay analyzing the question of Islamists and women. She called it “Why Do They Hate Us?”
It was a play upon the title of a semi-famous post-9/11 Fareed Zakaria piece with nearly the same title, his about why the Muslim world, or at least the Islamist faction of it, “hates” the U.S. For our freedoms, he said, basically. (“Islamists” is a term used not for Muslims in general or mainstream Islam, but for extremists willing to use violence to establish theocratic regimes.)
Mona’s piece was about why she believes Islamists and their regimes hate women. Beneath the title was a graphic picture of “blue bra girl” in the process of being stomped to death. Strong stuff. As were its words: “An entire political and economic system—one that treats half of humanity [meaning women] like animals—must be destroyed.”
Tell us how you really feel, Mona.
“You still have hope then?” I ask.
“What we need even more than regime change,” she tells me, “is a social and a sexual revolution that believes in individual freedoms, that believes essentially in removing the internal Mubarak. The regime oppressed everyone—but beneath that the culture repressed women. It’s a toxic mix of culture and religion and we have to change that. And if we don’t do it, the political revolution will not succeed.
“It’s going to be a mess for a few years, but it’s a necessary mess because we have to mature....But I remain optimistic because I’m looking five to ten years from now and I’m insistent that we organize so that we provide an alternative to Islamists.”
Her sensitivity to those who she believes would conflate Islam with Islamists inspired her to take an action last year that received worldwide attention. The spark was a poster put up around New York City subway stations by a right-wing pro-Israel group. The poster attacked jihadists and labeled them “savages.”
“Did you wake up one morning and read about this?” I asked her.
“And snapped,” she said. “What really upset me was that this campaign was for me the latest example of an attempt to bully Muslims. Ever since 9/11 Muslims in this country who had nothing to do with 9/11 because the guys who took part in that came from other countries—none of them was an American Muslim. But we’ve been paying the price for it ever since.”
We talk about the disturbed woman who pushed a Hindu man in front of a subway killing him because she thought he was Muslim or Hindu and they all should be blamed for 9/11. Weirdly both Mona and I knew the unfortunate victim. “Sen!” she said. He worked in a copy shop I used. It was shocking to learn someone you knew as a gentle soul had been struck by a lightning bolt of mad hatred.
The posters also made her frustrated with social media. “I felt I hit the wall with it,” she says, because it was all atwitter about the outrage, but nothing was being done. She felt she had to take direct action—take the fight to the streets. She went out, got some spray paint, and started painting over posters.
But she didn’t black out the posters—she used pink spray paint. “People have accused me of trying to shut down speech. But I chose pink for a reason, Ron: because it was see-through. And I wanted people to see the words underneath. I considered this nonviolent civil disobedience. I love the First Amendment. I believe in the right to offend. I received my first death threat after I defended the Danish cartoons against the prophet. [Back in 2005 a Danish newspaper published a series of images of Muhammad, considered blasphemy to most orthodox Muslims.] I considered the ads hate speech.”
Eltahawy was arrested for the act. She was eventually offered a plea bargain to a minor violation but refused the deal and demanded a trial, which has yet to take place.
Ever the optimist, she is convinced she’ll win: “If a judge in New York considers hate speech [the posters] political speech then my protest of hate speech should also be protected political speech.”
While she’s been attacked for the poster action, she’s an equal opportunity offender—she’s also been attacked for making one of the most important, and courageous, statements about the vexed Israel question I’ve come across from an Islamic activist: She called the Arab world’s preoccupation with the Israel-Palestine problem “the opium of the Arabs.”
Yes, she supports the Palestinian position (she’s been attacked for tweeting support of the hunger strike of a jailed jihadist in Israel) but, she says, “getting rid of this opium would involve disenabling our regimes from using Israel as a distraction from their own crimes against us.”
Toward the end of our talk, I found myself asking her, “What made you Mona?” How did she become the unique voice she’s become. It turns out a secret stash of feminist literature in Saudi Arabia did the trick.
“I think several things [made me different],” she says. “First that I grew up with parents who were equals because my parents met in medical school. When we moved to the UK, I often say that I learned to become a minority. I understood that wow, people expect Muslim women to be nothing, but I have a mother who’s doing a PhD. What is this?
“And then we moved to Saudi when I was 15, and this was a huge schism in my life. My world turned upside down in Saudi Arabia because my frustration at the way women were so badly treated there. It finally found an outlet when I was 18 or 19 and I found ...feminist literature in the library of my university.”
“In Saudi Arabia?”
“Yeah, some professor had put feminist journals up there—[in the city of] Jeddah . It saved me. And I often say that as a woman, you either lose your mind or you become a feminist. And so I began using my mind. I fell into a terrible depression. But I was saved by feminism. That was a real pivotal moment in my life. Becoming a feminist in Saudi Arabia.”
Before she left to pack for her trip back to the violent streets of Cairo, Mona showed me again the tattoo of a goddess she had inscribed on her arm where the police had broken it. “Sekhmet,” she said, “very much a woman. The head of a lioness.”
====================================
Revolutionary Woman vs Burqa Woman
March 17, 2011Mona Eltahawy
Mona Eltahawy
Supplied Photo NEW YORK—As if further proof were needed of the intellectual as well as physical cave Al Qaeda inhabits, their new online magazine “Al Shamikha” (Majestic Woman) is the latest reminder.
As women and men, passionate for freedom and dignity, fuel uprisings and revolutions that are sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa, one wonders who wants to read that a “Majestic Woman” does not “go out except when necessary” and that she always wears a face-covering niqab for protection from the sun. Call it SPF:Niqab.
What a laughable idea when you see a photograph of a woman in niqab hugging a Coptic priest in Cairo during the Egyptian revolution that ended Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule. Try telling her or any of the other women in headscarves and those women not wearing any kinds of veil that they shouldn’t “go out except when necessary”. They would laugh at you and remind you that they marched and chanted alongside men in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemeni and most recently Gaza, the West Bank and Syria.
With such a breathtaking display of women and men power, surely Al Qaeda realizes the market — albeit the literally radical fashion niche one — is shrinking by the minute.
Al Qaeda espouses an ultra-orthodox interpretation of Islam which extols “out of sight and voiceless” as its ethos for women because it considers a woman’s face and voice objects of desire to be covered and silenced. Otherwise, the group steadfastly ignored women until it became convenient to recruit them to blow themselves and others to pieces in Iraq and elsewhere where the head-to-toe covering could get them into places men fitted with a suicide belt could not.
How on earth, one wonders, could its magazine marry such an ideology with the flipped-on-its head brew of women’s magazines: fashion, sex and starvation?
Getting a man is still the goal. The right man for a “Majestic Woman” is of course a “mujahid” (warrior in the name of Islam). In one interview, a woman extols her glorious marriage to a jihad fighter who was killed and how she broke the happy news to her children.
Flipping through its online pages, I couldn’t help but think one has to have been living under a rock inside that cave to think Al Shamikha’s market is anything but a quickly shrinking one. Al Qaeda and its message that only violence can bring about change is irrelevant. The role models for millions of young women and men — not just Muslims but all across the world — are those revolutionaries in Egypt who showed how non-violence could end decades of a dictator’s rule in just 18 days.
Look no further than Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world where Al Qaeda does have a presence. The truly “Majestic Woman” is Tawakul Karaman. Dubbed one of Time magazine’s “16 of History’s Most Rebellious Women,” she was the first Yemeni female journalist to remove her face veil on the job. As chair of Women Journalists without Chains, she defends human rights and freedom of expression and has been protesting outside of Sanaa University every Tuesday since 2007.
Her goal — and the uprising that she helped to start on Feb. 10 after a boost of inspiration from Tunisia and Egypt — is to end the rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh, in power since 1978. Karaman has been jailed several times, including just days before the start of the uprising.
Who do you think young Muslim women are most drawn to? Al Qaeda’s out-of-sight “Majestic Woman: or a woman whose fierce majesty (Yemeni friends love to share videos of Karaman leading protests with her chants) poses one of the most serious challenges to a dictator in 33 years?
===========================================
Mona Eltahawy on Egypt’s Next Revolution
The Egyptian-American activist speaks out on the dangers women still face in a changing Mideast
- By Ron Rosenbaum
- Smithsonian magazine, May 2013,
Why are you so willing to head back into danger?” I ask Mona Eltahawy.
We’re sitting in a café on the Upper West Side of New York City, not far from her Harlem apartment, and the brutal reality of the political violence she’s been subjected to seems far away. But the fiery Egyptian-born journalist-activist has been living on the bleeding edge of history since 2005, a prominent voice in the movement that led to the dramatic Arab Spring uprising, climaxing with the 2011 fall of the Egypt’s modern pharaoh, Hosni Mubarak.
And the bleeding edge is still bloody, now that the “Arab Spring” has entered perhaps its most dangerous and unpredictable phase. In Egypt, some of the original revolutionaries, such as Mona, are now turning on the new rulers, President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood, who they believe have hijacked the uprising and betrayed its democratic ideals. Eltahawy has been there for all that and now, she tells me, she’s heading back to the streets of Cairo, where she has suffered torture, sexual assault and broken bones from beatings.
The historical stakes are high in this critical phase of the struggle. Will the hopes awakened by the Arab Spring be crushed the way they were in Iran after the overthrow of the shah?
I’d met Eltahawy a couple of months earlier, at a dinner party hosted by Jesse Sheidlower, American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Although texting is a dinner-party faux pas, even in Manhattan, her dinner companions understood her compulsion: She was urgently communicating with fellow activists who were at that moment clashing with the police in the streets of Cairo. The ongoing social media revolution leaping halfway around the world in real time.
The dinner captured her dual identity perfectly. She was dressed in a stylish black with a silver necklace representing the ancient figure of Fatima, “protection against the evil eye,” she said. And at one point she rolled up her right sleeve to show off a new tattoo on her forearm, an image of the goddess Sekhmet, one of the oldest female deities of one of the oldest civilizations on earth. “She represents sex and retribution,” Eltahawy explained. She’d gotten the tattoo to mark the place where the Egyptian secret police had broken a bone.
In the café, when I ask her about the violence she was flying back into, she is nonplused. “I have a lot of friends and family who are very concerned about me,” she says, “But I try not to think about it. I’ve already had my arms broken and I’ve been sexually assaulted, so I’m hoping they’re not going to do any more than that.”
She’s not exactly self-protective.
“Look,” she says, “it’s dangerous for everybody in Egypt right now. Everyone who wants to stand up to the government, the state, the regime, the military, the Muslim Brotherhood—call it whatever you want. And we’ve been hearing about activists who are abducted, tortured, dumped in the desert naked.” In other words, meet the new boss, same as the old boss, only worse because you helped get the new boss his job.
***
Born in Port Said to parents who were both physicians, Eltahawy studied journalism at the American University in Cairo and began her career writing for a dissident English-language Egyptian newspaper that had to smuggle its copy out to Cyprus to be printed and then smuggle it back in. She became a globe-trotting foreign correspondent for Western outlets like Reuters and the Guardian, and gradually made the transition from journalist to journalist-activist. “I used my journalism as much as I could to expose human rights abuses, to expose women’s right abuses,” she says. “I was called into State Security for interrogation several times,” she tells me. “At one point a State Security officer whose nom de guerre was Omar Sharif—though he looked nothing like the actor—showed me my security files, and he said, ‘You see how much trouble you are? These are the files to have you followed, to have your home tapped.’” She married and moved to America in 2000 (she now holds dual citizenship), continued writing but, she says, “9/11 killed objectivity for me.”
“What do you mean, it ‘killed objectivity?’” I ask.
“When 9/11 happened I thought I’m not hearing from Muslims like ourselves,” she says, meaning liberal and moderate types. “I’d only hear from old men and conservative women. So I started writing opinion pieces. I wanted to get another voice out there to show that, look, 9/11 doesn’t represent all Islam.”
Soon afterward, her marriage ended and she flew back to Cairo, where she came into contact with the beginnings of the social media protest movement there. “I went to visit my family in Cairo but also took it as a chance to meet a lot of bloggers—a new thing, bloggers in the Middle East, that I was getting to know about. And in June of ’05, one of them asked me, ‘Do you want to come to a protest?’ And I said I’d love to! And it was the first time in my life that I’ve marched in Cairo and chanted ‘Down! Down! with Hosni Mubarak!’ There were only 100 of us. People were looking at us as if we were insane.”
There has been a major ongoing debate in foreign policy and technology circles over how decisive a role social media played in the Arab Spring uprisings.
“For many years now, social media in the Middle East and North Africa were tools and weapons,” Eltahawy says. “Social media created a space that didn’t exist in the real world because the regime didn’t allow it—the space where people could connect and talk about demonstrations and talk about organizing demonstrations. But they were not the reason the revolution happened. The revolution is people out on the street, not on their computer screens. They took it out into the real world.”
“And it started with bloggers and moved to Facebook?”
“Yeah, and it was also very important the way they used YouTube. Because the police, for some twisted reason, would use their smartphones to film themselves torturing jailed people. And they would send those videos to those who knew the victim—to intimidate and humiliate. And these videos would get out, and bloggers would put them on YouTube to expose the brutality of the Mubarak regime.”
The fact that social media can be a two-way street, with the side in power using it to terrorize, is often a neglected side of the equation. But social media is an explosive force, difficult to control, and this time it backfired.
“Something very interesting happened in the summer of 2010,” Eltahawy continues, “six months before the revolution began. People have died because of police torture in Egypt for many years. But this young man in Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, Khaled Said, was beaten to death by police. And pictures of him before and after began to appear on Facebook. And this man became an icon. Why? Because he represented the background many people on Facebook came from—a comfortable, affluent background, one that had not experienced the brutality of the Mubarak regime and hoped that if they were quiet and didn’t engage politically, they would be OK. So you got all these young people on Facebook who saw him and saw that they could be him. So they began to join protests as well. That was a pivotal moment.”
***
Eltahawy takes pride that though she became an activist, a frequent TV talking head opining about the Arab Spring, she has remained a writer. Indeed, she was recently signed by the distinguished publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux to write a book about her experiences and the plight of women in the Mideast, including her opposition to female genital mutilation. (Her working title is Headscarves and Hymens.)
“When they attacked me at the end of 2011,” she tells me, “I couldn’t write because both my arms were in casts. I could only tweet and use a touchpad with one finger. I understood then that my body was as much a medium as my words. Because I would appear on television with the casts on and I would talk about what happened to me and that was just as powerful as the words that I wrote.”
I asked her to describe the assaults that had led to that point, and it was a frightening and sinister episode in the modern battle between social media protest and old-school police state tactics.
“This happened,” Mona tells me, “during protests on a street called Mohamed Mahmoud. On November 18, 2011 [nine months after Mubarak’s resignation], the army and the police very violently broke up a peaceful protest in Tahrir [Square].”
The demonstrators were marching against the military junta then ruling Egypt.
“I was traveling at the time in Morocco to give a lecture, and then I was supposed to go to the European Parliament to give a talk there about women in revolution—but with what was happening in Egypt, I couldn’t. I needed to be in Cairo to be a part of this, but also to honor the courage of the men and women on that street fighting to defend Tahrir. I was reading about stories of boys as young as 12 going to the streets, and writing their mothers’ phone numbers on their arms with Sharpies, so that if they ended up in the morgue, people would know who to call.
“I was in Tahrir Square about 24 hours,” she continues, “when I went to meet a friend. He said, ‘Do you want to go to Mohamed Mahmoud [street]?’ and I said, ‘Yes, this is why I came.’ All I remember is lots of tear gas, lots of sirens, and we kept pushing and pushing until we got to the front line. I stood on a rock to take pictures of the security, because the front line was mobbed by this kind of metal grating and then an empty space—a no man’s land—and the security people were on the other side, the police and the soldiers. So I stood on the rock and was taking pictures with my smartphone, and they began to shoot at us. I don’t know if it was live ammunition or if it was pellets, buckshot. So we all ducked.”
At this point, as often happens in espionage dramas, a kindly stranger appears to offer a helping hand.
“There was this man who said, ‘I’ll help you if you want to stand on the rock. I’ll hold your hand.’ They started shooting again so he told me and my friend, ‘Let’s go hide in this store.’
“So we’re sitting there in the store waiting for the shooting to stop, and then I noticed that this man was holding onto me and it was very strange, because men and women don’t hold hands in public in Egypt. The shooting was getting closer and closer so we ran farther into the store. More men came in. And one of the guys groped my breast.
“So I began to punch the guy who groped me, because I couldn’t believe—who gropes a woman’s breast as we’re being shot at? I mean, who?! My friend tried to pull me away. He said, ‘Mona, we’ve got to run, we’ve got to run.’ Because he could see that the police were getting closer.
“And then the riot police come and everyone runs away, and I understood that these guys had entrapped us. They were plainclothes security or thugs. And they kept us there until the police came. I thought my friend had managed to escape, but they took him to a place where he could see me getting beaten and they beat him as they were beating me.”
“Oh, my God.”
“So I was surrounded by about four or five of the riot police who had nightsticks and they were beating me. It was really painful. So to protect my head I went like this [putting her arms in front of her head], which is why my arm was broken here and my hand broke here and here. As they were beating me, my phone fell, so I didn’t have my smartphone anymore, and then they started to drag me away, and I actually said, ‘I gotta get my phone, I gotta get my phone,’ because I understood without this phone, I couldn’t tell what happened to the outside world.
“They wouldn’t let me get my phone, of course. Then they dragged me into the no man’s land where they sexually assaulted me. I had hands all over my body, I was pulling hands off my trousers. They were pulling my hair, they were calling me a whore, the daughter of a whore, everything. And at one point, I fell to the ground and something inside me said if you don’t get up now, you’re going to die. I don’t know how I got up. Because if I hadn’t gotten up—you know that picture of the woman they stripped down to her underwear and they were stomping on her in Tahrir—did you see that picture?”
“I didn’t see that.”
“It became known as ‘blue bra girl,’ it was a very unfortunate name. Because they stripped her down and she was wearing a blue bra. But the soldiers were stomping on her chest.”
“Where does this behavior come from?”
“Oh, my God. It’s rage, rage that the people rose up and were able to do something.”
“And their privileged position was being threatened as well?”
“Exactly. So I managed to get up somehow. And they drive me to the Interior Ministry and all the way, their hands are still all over my body.”
“You must have been terrified.”
“I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen to me. We passed all of these men coming out of the Interior Ministry and I thought, ‘someone is going to stop this.’ I mean, they can see what they’re doing to me. Nothing. It’s like their eyes are dead to me.
“So they take me to their supervising officer. This man in a leather jacket—plainclothes. He says to me, ‘You’re safe now. I’m going to take care of you. You see those guys over there?’ And there’s a mob of riot police just waving their arms like this. He said, ‘You know what would happen to you if I wasn’t here?’ So he’s basically threatening me with gang rape. And he’s saying this, ‘I’m protecting you,’ and their hands are still all over my body.
“This only stopped when a man from the military, an older man from the military in fatigues said, ‘Take her away.’ And I thought they were going to let me go. But they took me inside the Interior Ministry. I spent six hours in the Interior Ministry and three hours into it, an activist came from Tahrir to try and negotiate a truce, and he didn’t know me and I didn’t know him, but he had a smartphone. So I asked if I could use it.”
Here at last, Twitter to the rescue.
“By that time they weren’t paying too much attention to me, and I managed to tweet, ‘beaten, arrested, Interior Ministry.’ And that’s how I got the word out. I was told afterward that in 15 minutes, #FreeMona was trending globally. Al Jazeera and the Guardian reported my arrest and the State Department tweeted back, We hear you and we’re on this.”
America comes through, I say.
“Yes, I know! But that’s why I say I must speak about what happened to me very, very openly because I have a privileged position. Because of who I am, because of my profile, Al Jazeera, the Guardian and the State Department paid attention. How many thousands of Egyptian women and men and children go through this anonymously?”
“Very upsetting to hear.”
“I got off lightly, Ron. Human rights groups continue to document this torture to this day, despite the elections we’ve had. And this Interior Ministry where I was kept, they had cells there for what has been described as sexual torture, of men, women and children.
“Six hours into this detention—now, remember my arms are broken, yeh? I kept telling them, ‘I need medical care.’ Nothing.”
“You must have been in great pain.”
“It felt like hell. And I also told every single man who tried to talk to me or interrogate me, that I was sexually assaulted, because I wanted them to know. This is not my shame, this is their shame. Because this is how they train them.
“And then at one point, the big guy, the big boss now, dressed in a nice suit, he thought that because I look like I come from a privileged background, that we could identify. So he says to me, ‘You know those men who did this to you?’ This is the riot police. He said, ‘You know who they are? They are from the dregs of society. We lifted them up, we scrubbed them clean, and we opened the door this much in their minds.’ And he thought I was going to say ‘of course, these barbarians.’
“‘Why do you think we’re having a revolution?’ I asked him. ‘Who let them live like this?’ So I ended up defending the men who broke my arms and sexually assaulted me against this bastard who thought I was going to play the class card.”
Remarkable she had the self-possession to argue politics at such a moment.
“This is the reality of what’s happening in Egypt. But they use this against each other. They treat these men like animals and they turn them against us, and we have to break that by saying, ‘you have made them live like this and you use them against us. You are the enemy, not them.’”
“So in other words, even after Mubarak left...”
“Even to this day when we have a democratically (quote, unquote) ‘elected president.’ This happens.”
“This still goes on.”
***
A year or so ago, Foreign Policy magazine asked Eltahawy to write an essay analyzing the question of Islamists and women. She called it “Why Do They Hate Us?”
It was a play upon the title of a semi-famous post-9/11 Fareed Zakaria piece with nearly the same title, his about why the Muslim world, or at least the Islamist faction of it, “hates” the U.S. For our freedoms, he said, basically. (“Islamists” is a term used not for Muslims in general or mainstream Islam, but for extremists willing to use violence to establish theocratic regimes.)
Mona’s piece was about why she believes Islamists and their regimes hate women. Beneath the title was a graphic picture of “blue bra girl” in the process of being stomped to death. Strong stuff. As were its words: “An entire political and economic system—one that treats half of humanity [meaning women] like animals—must be destroyed.”
Tell us how you really feel, Mona.
“You still have hope then?” I ask.
“What we need even more than regime change,” she tells me, “is a social and a sexual revolution that believes in individual freedoms, that believes essentially in removing the internal Mubarak. The regime oppressed everyone—but beneath that the culture repressed women. It’s a toxic mix of culture and religion and we have to change that. And if we don’t do it, the political revolution will not succeed.
“It’s going to be a mess for a few years, but it’s a necessary mess because we have to mature....But I remain optimistic because I’m looking five to ten years from now and I’m insistent that we organize so that we provide an alternative to Islamists.”
Her sensitivity to those who she believes would conflate Islam with Islamists inspired her to take an action last year that received worldwide attention. The spark was a poster put up around New York City subway stations by a right-wing pro-Israel group. The poster attacked jihadists and labeled them “savages.”
“Did you wake up one morning and read about this?” I asked her.
“And snapped,” she said. “What really upset me was that this campaign was for me the latest example of an attempt to bully Muslims. Ever since 9/11 Muslims in this country who had nothing to do with 9/11 because the guys who took part in that came from other countries—none of them was an American Muslim. But we’ve been paying the price for it ever since.”
We talk about the disturbed woman who pushed a Hindu man in front of a subway killing him because she thought he was Muslim or Hindu and they all should be blamed for 9/11. Weirdly both Mona and I knew the unfortunate victim. “Sen!” she said. He worked in a copy shop I used. It was shocking to learn someone you knew as a gentle soul had been struck by a lightning bolt of mad hatred.
The posters also made her frustrated with social media. “I felt I hit the wall with it,” she says, because it was all atwitter about the outrage, but nothing was being done. She felt she had to take direct action—take the fight to the streets. She went out, got some spray paint, and started painting over posters.
But she didn’t black out the posters—she used pink spray paint. “People have accused me of trying to shut down speech. But I chose pink for a reason, Ron: because it was see-through. And I wanted people to see the words underneath. I considered this nonviolent civil disobedience. I love the First Amendment. I believe in the right to offend. I received my first death threat after I defended the Danish cartoons against the prophet. [Back in 2005 a Danish newspaper published a series of images of Muhammad, considered blasphemy to most orthodox Muslims.] I considered the ads hate speech.”
Eltahawy was arrested for the act. She was eventually offered a plea bargain to a minor violation but refused the deal and demanded a trial, which has yet to take place.
Ever the optimist, she is convinced she’ll win: “If a judge in New York considers hate speech [the posters] political speech then my protest of hate speech should also be protected political speech.”
While she’s been attacked for the poster action, she’s an equal opportunity offender—she’s also been attacked for making one of the most important, and courageous, statements about the vexed Israel question I’ve come across from an Islamic activist: She called the Arab world’s preoccupation with the Israel-Palestine problem “the opium of the Arabs.”
Yes, she supports the Palestinian position (she’s been attacked for tweeting support of the hunger strike of a jailed jihadist in Israel) but, she says, “getting rid of this opium would involve disenabling our regimes from using Israel as a distraction from their own crimes against us.”
Toward the end of our talk, I found myself asking her, “What made you Mona?” How did she become the unique voice she’s become. It turns out a secret stash of feminist literature in Saudi Arabia did the trick.
“I think several things [made me different],” she says. “First that I grew up with parents who were equals because my parents met in medical school. When we moved to the UK, I often say that I learned to become a minority. I understood that wow, people expect Muslim women to be nothing, but I have a mother who’s doing a PhD. What is this?
“And then we moved to Saudi when I was 15, and this was a huge schism in my life. My world turned upside down in Saudi Arabia because my frustration at the way women were so badly treated there. It finally found an outlet when I was 18 or 19 and I found ...feminist literature in the library of my university.”
“In Saudi Arabia?”
“Yeah, some professor had put feminist journals up there—[in the city of] Jeddah . It saved me. And I often say that as a woman, you either lose your mind or you become a feminist. And so I began using my mind. I fell into a terrible depression. But I was saved by feminism. That was a real pivotal moment in my life. Becoming a feminist in Saudi Arabia.”
Before she left to pack for her trip back to the violent streets of Cairo, Mona showed me again the tattoo of a goddess she had inscribed on her arm where the police had broken it. “Sekhmet,” she said, “very much a woman. The head of a lioness.”
====================================
