Headscarves and Hymens (2 page)

This clerical obsession with women’s organs continues today. My favorite recent howler: driving will damage your ovaries.

“If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards,” the Saudi cleric Saleh Lohaidan told the news
website Sabq in 2013. “That is why we find those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying degrees.”

Saudi Arabia follows an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam known alternatively as Wahhabism or Salafism, the former associated more directly with the kingdom, and the latter, austere form of Islam with those who live outside Saudi Arabia. The kingdom’s petrodollars and concerted proselytizing efforts have taken Wahhabism/Salafism global, and with it the interpretations of Islam that make women’s lives in Saudi Arabia little short of prison sentences.

Yet the hatred of women is not unique to Salafism. It is not merely a Saudi phenomenon, a hateful curiosity of a rich, isolated desert. The Islamist hatred of women burns brightly across the region—now more than ever. By “Islamists,” I intend the Associated Press’s definition: “An advocate or supporter of a political movement that favors reordering government and society in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam.” This includes the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi groups who belong to the Sunni sect of Islam, and the Shiite militias in Iraq.

The obsession with controlling women and our bodies often stems from the suspicion that, without restraints, women are just a few degrees short of sexual insatiability. Take as an example the words of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular Egyptian cleric; resident of Doha, Qatar; and longtime conservative TV host on Al Jazeera. Al-Qaradawi
supported the revolutions, no doubt hoping they would eliminate the tyrants who had long tormented and oppressed both him and the Muslim Brotherhood movement from which he springs. While al-Qaradawi, who commands a huge audience on and off the satellite channels, may say that female genital mutilation (which he calls “circumcision,” a common euphemism that tries to put the practice on a par with male circumcision) is not “obligatory,” you will also find the following priceless observation in one of his books: “I personally support this under the current circumstances in the modern world. Anyone who thinks that circumcision is the best way to protect his daughters should do it,” he writes, adding, “The moderate opinion is in favor of practicing circumcision to reduce temptation.” So even among “moderates,” girls’ genitals are cut to ensure that their sexual desire is nipped in the bud. Al-Qaradawi has since issued a fatwa against female genital mutilation (FGM), but it came as no surprise that when Egypt banned the practice in 2008, some Muslim Brotherhood legislators opposed the law. Upholding the credo of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which al-Qaradawi belongs, several of the movement’s women are on record as supporting or legitimizing FGM, including Azza el-Garf (a former member of parliament) and Mohamed Morsi’s women’s affairs adviser during his brief presidency, who called FGM a form of “beautificiation.”

Yet while clerics busy themselves suppressing female
desire, it is the men who can’t control themselves. On the streets of too many countries in the region, sexual harassment is epidemic. In a 2008 survey by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, more than 80 percent of Egyptian women said they’d experienced sexual harassment, and more than 60 percent of men admitted to harassing women. A 2013 UN survey reported that 99.3 percent of Egyptian women experience street sexual harassment. Men grope and sexually assault us, and yet we are blamed for it because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing the wrong thing. Cairo has women-only subway cars to “protect” us from wandering hands and worse; countless Saudi malls are for families only, barring single men from entry unless they produce a requisite female to accompany them. Families impose curfews on their daughters so that they’re not raped or assaulted, and yet is anyone telling boys and men not to rape or assault us?

We often hear how the Middle East’s failing economies have left many men unable to marry, and some even use this fact to explain rising levels of sexual harassment on the streets. Yet we never hear how a later marriage age affects women. Do women have sex drives or not? Apparently, the Arab jury is still out on the basics of human biology. Here is some more wisdom from al-Qaradawi: virgins must be “patient” and resist the temptation of masturbation, which he claims is “more dangerous” than male masturbation because if a virgin
inserts her fingers or other objects into her vaginal opening, she could perforate her hymen and her family and future husband will think she committed fornication by having sex before marriage.

Enter that call to prayer and the sublimation through religion that Rifaat so brilliantly introduces in her story. Just as regime-appointed clerics lull the poor across the region with promises of justice in the next world, rather than a reckoning with the corruption and nepotism of the dictator in this life, so women are silenced by men who use women’s faith to imprison them.

In Kuwait, where Islamists fought women’s enfranchisement for years, the four women elected to parliament in 2009 were hounded by conservatives, who demanded that the two female parliamentarians who didn’t cover their hair wear headscarves. When the Kuwaiti parliament was dissolved in December 2011, an Islamist parliamentarian demanded that the new house (one devoid of a single female legislator) discuss his proposed “decent attire” law. It did not become law, but the obsession with women’s bodies continued. In May 2014,
The Washington Post
reported that an Islamist member of Kuwait’s parliament, who is head of the committee for “combating alien behavior,” said the committee had approved his proposal to ban female “nudity” at places accessible to the public, including swimming pools and hotels. The lawmaker refused to define what he meant by “nudity.” At the time of writing, the proposal had still to be approved
by Kuwait’s National Assembly and government, but it had already created a political standoff as one lawmaker, Nabil al-Fadl, said he would resign if the assembly approved the proposal, which he described as a “regression,” according to the Kuwaiti daily newspaper
al-Shahed.

Whatever the fate of the bill, the obsession with women’s bodies has serious ramifications. The
Gulf News
reported that just days before the “bikini ban” proposal, a Kuwaiti woman lost a custody battle with her ex-husband after his lawyer showed the court a picture of her wearing a bikini in the company of another man while abroad.

“The mother cannot be trusted to raise the children properly and the picture as an example indicates a lack of modesty and a deficiency in her morals that erode trust in her and result in public disdain as society assesses her actions morally or religiously,” the lawyer said.

In Libya, after a revolution that brought to an end forty-two years of absolute rule by Muammar al-Qaddafi, the first thing the head of the interim government, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, promised to do was lift the late Libyan tyrant’s restrictions on polygamy. Lest you think Muammar al-Qaddafi was a feminist of any kind, remember that under his rule, girls and women who survived sexual assaults or were suspected of “moral crimes” were dumped into “social rehabilitation centers,” effectively prisons from which they could not leave unless a man
agreed to marry them or their families took them back. Human Rights Watch reports that even after the overthrow of Qaddafi, many women still were being sent to “social rehabilitation” centers by their families “for no other reason than that they had been raped, and were then ostracized for ‘staining their family’s honor.’ ”

The return to polygamy in Libya (where, as of 2013, men can take additional wives against their first wife’s will, according to
Al Arabiya News
) is particularly shameful because female demonstrators played a critical role in the Libyan revolution. Two days before protests planned to emulate the uprisings in neighbors Tunisia and Egypt, female relatives of prisoners who had been killed by Qaddafi’s forces in the 1996 Abu Salim prison massacre protested the detention of the attorney representing them against the Qaddafi regime. The women’s protests inspired fellow Libyans in the eastern province of Benghazi to join them, and from there the demonstrations grew into a nationwide uprising.

Egypt’s first parliamentary elections after the start of its revolution were dominated by men stuck in the seventh century. Only 984 women contested seats, compared with 8,415 men. A quarter of parliamentary seats were claimed by Salafis, whose belief in a woman’s rights basically begins and ends with her “right” to wear the niqab, a full-face veil. When fielding female candidates, Egypt’s Salafi Nour Party superimposed an image of a flower on each woman’s face in campaign materials.
Women are not to be seen or heard; even their voices are a temptation.

Flowers instead of women’s faces, in the middle of a revolution in Egypt! A revolution in which women were killed, beaten, shot at, and sexually assaulted while fighting alongside men to rid our country of Mubarak—and yet so many patriarchs still oppress us. The Muslim Brotherhood, which held almost half the total seats in the revolutionary parliament before it was dissolved by the Supreme Court, does not believe that a woman (or a Christian, for that matter) should be president. The woman who headed the “women’s committee” of the Brotherhood’s political party has said that women should not march or protest because it’s more “dignified” to let their husbands and brothers demonstrate for them.

It was in Egypt, too, that less than a month after President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, the military junta that replaced him, ostensibly to “protect the revolution,” detained dozens of male and female activists after it cleared Tahir Square. Tyrants oppress, beat, and torture all, we know. Yet reserved for female activists were “virginity tests”: rapes disguised as a medical doctor inserting his finger into the vaginal opening in search of an intact hymen.

This is where the soldiers in our regimes and the men on our streets unite: they both sexually assault women to remind us that public space is a male prerogative. Security forces and civilians alike violated women in Tahrir
Square, and men of the revolution—be they from the left or the right—have set us back with their insistence that “women’s issues” cannot dominate “revolutionary politics.” Yet I ask: Whose revolution?

Lest you think it’s just Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists of Saudi Arabia whose misogyny runs roughshod over our rights, remember that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, the narrow victor of Egypt’s first presidential elections after Mubarak’s ouster, was himself ousted by the ostensibly secular defense minister Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi. El-Sisi presented himself (especially to women) as the man who saved Egypt from a terror-filled regression to the Dark Ages at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. Anyone foolish enough to believe that would do well to remember that el-Sisi approved of those “virginity tests” the military enforced on female activists.

That is why I blame a toxic mix of culture and religion. Whether our politics are tinged with religion or with military rule, the common denominator is the oppression of women.

Tunisia, first to rise up against its tyrant and first to push him out, emanates the brightest glimmer of hope, but it still has far to go. Tunisian women held their breath after the Islamist Ennahda Party won the largest share of votes in the country’s Constituent Assembly in 2011. Subsequently, female university professors and students
reported facing assaults and intimidation from Islamists for not wearing headscarves.

In March 2014, I went to Tunisia with the producer Gemma Newby to interview women for our radio documentary
The Women of the Arab Spring
for the BBC World Service. Among the women I spoke with were some who had helped draft the new constitution, including a secular lawmaker, a lawmaker from the Ennahda Party, and activists who had lobbied for the strongest possible pro-woman language in the document. Although it remains to be seen whether their efforts will translate into more than words on paper, thanks to them, Tunisia’s constitution is the first in the Arab world that recognizes men and women as equals. Unlike their counterparts in that first parliament in Egypt after the revolution, not all female Islamist lawmakers in Tunisia’s Constituent Assembly are foot soldiers of the patriarchy.

Some of Ennhada’s female lawmakers opposed the language on equality in Tunisia’s constitution. Yet, due to the efforts of others, such as Fatoum Elaswad, who insisted on working with her secular counterparts, it passed.

“When women fight, only men benefit,” she told me.

There is a lesson there.

My own feminist revolution evolved slowly, and traveled the world with me. To this day I have no idea what dissident professor or librarian placed feminist texts on the bookshelves at the university library in Jeddah, but I found them there. They filled me with terror. I understood they were pulling at a thread that would unravel everything. Now that I’m older, I can see that feeling terrified is how you recognize what you need. Terror encourages you to jump, even when you don’t know if you’ll ever land.

Before I found those books, I was depressed and suffocated by Saudi ultraconservatism but could not find the words to express my frustration at how religion and culture were being used as a double whammy against women. Those books helped me formulate questions I continue to ask to this day, questions that have made me the woman I am.

I discovered feminist writings from all over the world, but even more significantly, I discovered that the Middle East had a feminist heritage of its own; it was not imported from the “West,” as opponents of women’s rights sometimes claim. There was Huda Shaarawi, a feminist who launched Egypt’s women’s rights movement and who publicly removed her face veil in Cairo in 1923; Doria Shafik, who led fifteen hundred women as they stormed the Egyptian parliament in the 1950s and then staged a hunger strike for women’s enfranchisement; Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian physician, writer, and activist;
Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist—all fierce advocates of women’s rights. They gave me a new language to describe what I was seeing all around me. I told my parents I could not survive in Jeddah, and made plans to study in Cairo.