On the State of Egypt (12 page)

What happened in central Cairo shows that the great collapse has already begun. Egypt is falling apart while President Mubarak, who has ruled the country for a quarter of a century and has brought it to rock bottom, is interested only in handing the country over to his son. We all have a duty to act to save our country from the bleak future that looms on the horizon, and the only way to save Egypt is through a real democracy that restores to Egyptians their humanity, their rights, and their dignity, as well as their civilized behavior.

November 5, 2006

Why Do Egyptians Harass Women?

T
he traditional answer to this question is that, although women are the victims of sexual harassment, they are themselves to blame because they wear tight or skimpy clothes that excite young men and impel them to harass women. This explanation contains a major fallacy and twisted logic: it implies that women must always take the blame, even for misconduct and crimes of which they are the victims, and that young men are merely animals unable to control their instinctive urges, such that whenever a woman in tight clothes comes into sight they pounce on her and rape her. But this argument, which unfairly blames the victim, has recently fallen apart, exposed as completely baseless. Studies have shown that more than 75 percent of the women subjected to sexual harassment in Egypt are women who wear the
hijab
. In fact video footage available on the Internet of an incident of mass sexual harassment in central Cairo two years ago shows the harassers groping a woman who is wearing the
isdal
, which covers the whole body. Besides, until the end of the 1970s it was socially acceptable in Egyptian society for a woman to wear a swimsuit that exposed parts of her body to men, and beaches and swimming pools in clubs all had girls and women going into the water in swimsuits without anyone harassing them. In fact the fashions prevalent at that time, such as the miniskirt, exposed a woman’s legs, and many women in Egypt would wear such clothes at work, at college, and on public transport. At the time short skirts aroused the disapproval of conservatives but they never encouraged people to harass women.

So it’s certain that sexual harassment is an intrusive disease that did not exist as a phenomenon thirty years ago, and that tight or skimpy clothing is in no way the stimulus for sexual harassment. The phenomenon of sexual harassment in Egypt, which has spread in recent times, undoubtedly has many social and economic dimensions. There is sexual repression, the late marrying age, unemployment, poverty, the prevalence of unregulated housing, frustration, empty lives, and a sense of unfairness. In my opinion these are all important but contributing factors, while the root cause in my view is a change in the way we see women. Throughout human history there have been two ways to think of women. There is the civilized way, where the woman is seen as a human being who happens to be female, just as a man is a human being who happens to be male. This civilized view of women acknowledges all of women’s human abilities and capacities, not just their femininity, so it leaves plenty of space for respectful human interaction. With this view, men deal with their female colleagues and female students or teachers at university as human beings and not just as women they want to sleep with. The retrogressive view of women is that they are only bodies desired by men, that women are first and last female, instruments of pleasure, sources of temptation, and machines for producing children, and that a woman’s activities, other than her functions as a woman, are secondary and marginal. The truth is that Egyptian society made great and early strides toward modernization starting in the nineteenth century, and so Egyptians very early acquired a civilized attitude of respect for the status of women as human beings. Egyptian women were pioneers in the Arab world, the first to be educated, the first to take employment, the first to drive cars and fly planes, the first to sit in parliament, and the first to hold ministerial positions.

A civilized view of women as human beings prevailed in Egypt until the beginning of the 1980s, when the country was swept by a powerful wave of fundamentalist Wahhabi thinking that offered a completely different view of women. In the eyes of the fundamentalists a woman meant a body first and last, and their main concern was to cover that body up. A few days ago a prominent Saudi sheikh called on Muslim women to wear the
niqab
with one eye opening, to keep themselves safe from furtive glances and to protect morality. This view of women as just bodies inevitably turns women into sexual prey vulnerable to attack at any time. It sees women as creatures almost without moral willpower that must always be accompanied by male relatives to protect them from others and from themselves. Seeing women as just bodies disposes harassers toward targeting them as soon as the harassers feel immune from punishment.

The regressive view of women, which is now spreading in Egypt, was unfortunately imported from desert nomadic societies that are far behind Egypt in every field of human activity. Instead of us helping those societies to progress, we have been infected by their backward ideas. The young men who come out on public holidays to harass women in the street are simply applying what they have learned about women, because, if a woman is just a body, if she represents only lust and pleasure, if she is a source of temptation, then why wouldn’t one molest her whenever one is sure of impunity? The Egyptian newspaper
al-Masry al-Youm
interviewed some of the harassers and they all claimed that any women who went out for a walk on a public holiday wanted young men to harass them. This logic is completely in line with the backward fundamentalist view of women: that women carry temptation in their blood, even if they pretend the opposite, that men must guard their women with extreme vigilance, and that any woman who goes out alone when it is crowded is no more than a fallen woman who wants young men to harass her. We have replaced our civilized view of women with a regressive view cloaked in religion in a way that has no basis in religion, and we have started to pay a heavy price for these backward ideas.

Before we urge young men not to harass women, we first have to teach them how to respect women. We have to stop discussing what women must wear and what they can take off, whether they have to cover their ears or can leave locks of hair hanging down. We have to abandon that backward view, which is in fact obsessed with women’s bodies even when its advocates pretend to be pious and call for women to be covered. We have to restore our civilized Egyptian ideas and remember that women are mothers, sisters, and daughters, the complete equals of men in abilities, rights, and duties. We have to show these young men examples of women’s professional success and intellectual distinction. They have to know about women doctors, engineers, and judges. Then they will realize that women have real abilities that are much more important than their bodies, and only then will they stop harassing women in the street.

October 22, 2008

How Should We Overcome the Temptation Posed by Women?

D
ear reader,

Imagine that one day you go to your place of work and find all your colleagues wearing masks. You can hear their voices but you cannot see their faces. How would you feel? Of course you wouldn’t feel at ease and if the situation continued it would make you nervous, because we always need to see the faces of those we are talking to. Human communication is complete only when faces are visible. That has been the nature of mankind since the beginning of creation. But those who force women to cover their faces do not understand this fact.

In the aftermath of the 1919 uprising against the British occupation, the pioneering Hoda Shaarawi took the Turkish burka off her face at a public ceremony as a sign that the liberation of the country was inseparable from the liberation of women. Egyptian women were truly the pioneers for women in the Arab world: the first to be educated and to work in every field, the first to drive cars and fly planes, and the first to enter parliament and government. But at the end of the 1970s Egyptians fell under the influence of fundamentalist ideas and the Wahhabi school of thought proliferated, with the support of oil money, whether through satellite television channels owned by fundamentalists or through the millions of poor Egyptians who worked for years in Saudi Arabia and came home saturated with fundamentalist ideas. From then on, the
niqab
, or full face-veil, began to reappear in Egypt—a phenomenon that requires an objective debate. It’s a difficult question because those who advocate the
niqab
are usually fanatical extremists quick to accuse those who oppose them of calling for licentiousness and decadence. This logic is naïve and mistaken, because the choice for humans has never been between the
niqab
and licentiousness, and between the two of them there are many varieties of balanced behavior. The question here is whether the
niqab
protects men from the allure of women and promotes virtue? To answer this question, we have to bear in mind several facts.

Islam never required women to cover their faces. Otherwise, if we could not see any part of a woman’s face in the first place, why would God tell us to avert our eyes? In early Muslim society, women took part in public life, studying, working, trading, acting as nurses during times of war, and sometimes taking part in the fighting. Islam respected women and gave them rights equal to those of men. Women were oppressed only when Muslims were going through decadent times. Several months ago, the senior ulema of al-Azhar compiled a book distributed by the Ministry of Religious Endowments and entitled
al-Niqab ‘ada wa-laysa ‘ibada
(The Niqab is a Custom, not a Form of Worship). They show with evidence drawn from
sharia
that the
niqab
does not have the slightest connection with Islam. I do not believe that anyone can challenge these eminent scholars in their knowledge of Islamic precepts.

Given that wearing the
niqab
is not a divine injunction, we have a right to ask questions about its advantages and disadvantages. All ancient societies required women to cover their faces because they considered women a source of temptation and thought that vice could be prevented only by isolating and secluding them. This argument assumes that men will fall into temptation simply by seeing the face of a beautiful woman. This denies a man’s capacity to control his instincts. Besides, if women must cover their faces so as not to arouse men, what should a handsome man do? Doesn’t his handsome face equally arouse women? Should we require handsome men to cover their faces, so that men and women both wear the
niqab
? We also find that the eyes of a woman who wears the
niqab
, if they are beautiful, become themselves a powerful source of allure. So what should we do then to prevent arousal? A well-known Saudi religious scholar, Sheikh Mohamed al-Hadban, has thankfully understood this problem and advocated that Muslim women wear a
niqab
which reveals only one eye, so that women cannot possibly arouse men by the way they look. I do not know how these poor women could go about their lives, looking out on the world with one eye through a single hole.

The
niqab
prevents women from living as human beings with rights and obligations equal to those of men. How could a woman work as a surgeon, a judge, an engineer, or a television broadcaster when she is hidden behind the
niqab
, whether with one eye or two eyes uncovered? Most Saudi scholars strongly oppose women driving cars, presenting three arguments for this position: women would immodestly have to take off the
niqab
while driving; they would be able to go wherever they want, which would encourage them to rebel against their husbands and their families; and (according to Sheikh Muhammad ibn Salih al-‘Uthaymin) “women are by nature less decisive than men, have weaker sight and are less capable, and if they face danger, are unable to respond.” This is the real view of the advocates of the
niqab
and it indicates that they despise women and have contempt for their abilities. Of course they are unable to explain the overwhelming superiority women have achieved in education and employment throughout the world.

The most serious aspect of the
niqab
is that it dehumanizes women. Throughout human history there have been two attitudes toward women: the civilized attitude, which sees women as fully competent and qualified human beings, and the regressive attitude, which can be summarized as seeing her as feminine and hence limited to the role of acting as a source of sexual pleasure, as a factory for producing children, and as a maid in the conjugal home. These three roles are linked to a woman’s body rather than her intellect, and hence for them the woman’s body acquires supreme importance, while her intellect, her education, and her work, even her thoughts and feelings, are secondary, if taken into account at all.

Advocates of the
niqab
believe that to let men and women mix leads necessarily to temptation and vice, and so the only remedy for this state of affairs is to segregate the two genders completely and to make women cover their faces. If this argument is valid, then Saudi society must have done away with vice completely and forever because in Saudi Arabia segregation is total and all women are obliged to wear the
niqab
. In fact Saudis have a large organization called the Association for the Promotion of Virtue, which works day and night to monitor people’s behavior and punish them as soon as they commit the slightest moral misdemeanor. But has virtue been achieved in Saudi Arabia? Studies and statistics affirm the opposite. One study, by Dr. Wafaa Mahmoud of King Saud University, found that a quarter of Saudi children between the ages of six and twelve were victims of sexual harassment. Another study by Dr. Ali al-Zahrani, a specialist in psychiatric diseases at the Saudi Ministry of Health, has corroborated this finding.