Back to Revolutionary Woman vs Burqa Woman
Revolutionary Woman vs Burqa Woman
March 17, 2011
Mona 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?
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Mona Eltahawy on Egypt’s Next Revolution
The Egyptian-American activist speaks out on the dangers women still face in a changing Mideast
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.”
====================================
But then she is a great believer in the strength of principle, championing an international code of practice to govern elections in newly born democracies. Recalling that in Israel the expulsionist Kach party was disbarred from participating in elections, she wants the same principle to apply to parties in Muslim countries that use democratic means to overthrow democracy. Hitler, she remembers, came to power through the ballot box. “This would not be patronising or imperialist,” she says. “They can all do what they like. But if they want to participate in an international community they should abide by those conventions.”
