Sex and the Citadel (15 page)

But none of these technological advances have helped Iman. Three years into marriage, she was still waiting to conceive. She and, belatedly, her husband had been given clean bills of reproductive health; the trouble now was lack of opportunity. The tips and toys from our session had long since spent their meager worth, and by the time the revolt rolled around, she and her husband rarely slept together, he finding greater satisfaction in surfing the Net for porn and chatting up women on Facebook, for all the governmental attempts to block, even criminalize, such online entertainment. Beyond the bedroom, their marriage was on the rocks—and she was trying to reconcile herself to the prospect of his taking another wife to provide him with children. A truly downcast Iman came to rue the day she attended the sex toy talk. She pinned the blame firmly on
hasad
, the evil eye: having spoken openly about her newlywed bliss at our meeting, she reckons the envy of her sisters is the cause of her reproductive distress.

STRIKING OUT

Back at the coffee morning, Wisam, another of Azza’s sisters, sat quietly on the divan, like a shadow. Unlike the other women, whose carefully coordinated hijabs, tunics, and trousers were a blaze of color, she was dressed in black and gray. When Wisam did speak, it was in a crushed voice, with barely enough energy to describe her fatigue and low libido. As a stay-at-home mom of a young son,
Wisam was looking for something to restore her interest in life in general and sex in particular. But the source of her lassitude turned out to be something beyond boredom in the bedroom.

Like a third of Egyptian women, Wisam was on the receiving end of domestic violence. The beatings and verbal assaults started a couple of years into her eight-year marriage. Around 10 percent of married women in Egypt also experience sexual abuse; Wisam is among them, her husband pushing her into intercourse, irrespective of his state or her mood. Intimate partner violence is a common phenomenon across the Arab world, and what statistics do exist undoubtedly underestimate the scale of the problem.
¹⁰²
Wisam is in many ways typical: abuse starts early, and younger women without a job and financially dependent on their husbands are particularly vulnerable. While abuse rates are highest among poor, illiterate women, education does not necessarily protect them; both Wisam and her husband are college graduates.

One of the challenges in dealing with intimate partner violence is the extent to which women in Egypt, and many of their peers in the region, not only accept but actually condone it. In the national survey of ever-married women in Egypt, for example, around a third said a husband is justified in beating his wife if she goes out without telling him or neglects the kids; a quarter think she is asking for a hiding if she refuses him sex.
¹⁰³
Young Egyptians take a similarly hard line.
¹⁰⁴
Some will invoke Islam, saying the Qur’an allows men to discipline their spouses and obliges wives to put out: “Righteous wives are devout and guard what God would have them guard in their husbands’ absence. If you fear high-handedness from your wives, remind them [of the teachings of God], then ignore them when you go to bed, then hit them. If they obey you, you have no right to act against them: God is most high and great.”
¹⁰⁵
But these verses are subject to interpretation, and certainly do not justify the violence many women experience.
¹⁰⁶
At the heart of wife battering is Egypt’s patriarchal culture, where men are men, violence is part of the package, and a woman is raised to put up with it, her obedience in exchange for his financial maintenance. For much the same reason, little is known about the reverse situation, in which wives
assault husbands, in part because it is undoubtedly rarer than wife abuse, but also because the very idea of a turning of the tables in this way goes against prevailing notions of masculinity.

Across the Arab region, there are attempts to break this bargain. In Egypt, for example, shelters, hotlines, and free counseling and legal services, as well as a national ombudsman on women’s issues and a network of nongovernmental organizations working to put violence against women on political and personal agendas, have sprung up in recent years. But there are plenty of practical limitations to these initiatives—including a lack of awareness on the part of potential beneficiaries.
¹⁰⁷
Wisam, an educated woman living in the capital, simply did not know that such services were available; those in farther flung parts of the country are ill placed to avail themselves of assistance, even if it were readily at hand.

Acceptability is the issue. Wisam, like most women, preferred to keep the problem in the family. Surprisingly, her sisters advised her to leave her husband; studies show that, more often than not, women counsel others to stay put, in part because of practical considerations, such as finances and child custody, and in part because they too have bought into the system and therefore tend to blame women who break with the cycle of endurance and spousal pacification.
¹⁰⁸
In Wisam’s case, however, it was her brothers, fearing for the family’s reputation and their own authority, who advised her to return to her husband.

When the abuse continued, Wisam took the unusual step of trying to file charges with the police. The law in Egypt is not exactly a woman’s best friend when it comes to domestic abuse. Although Egypt ratified a number of international agreements on human rights that cover violence against women, including the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and its constitutions over the years have included plenty of fine words about the rights of women and men, there is, as yet, no specific law covering domestic violence. Marital rape is even trickier, as it has no standing in Egyptian law, despite years of effort by women’s rights organizations to get some protection on the books.
¹⁰⁹
When Wisam tried to press charges under Egypt’s general
assault laws, the police refused to file the case, saying it was a man’s right to discipline his wife.

But Wisam, in her early thirties, was unwilling to take this lying down. After years of trying to find employment, Wisam finally landed a low-level job at a call center with one of Egypt’s mobile phone companies. And when she did that, she decided to get a divorce.

Though increasingly accessible to women, divorce is far from socially acceptable. In Egypt and across the Arab region, there is widespread nervousness over what is seen as a wave of marital breakdown, particularly among middle-class newlyweds, whose irreconcilable differences often come down to complaints of loving fiancés turned into control-freak husbands and laments that new wives are too independent and lack “old-school” attentiveness. Depending on where you look, however, official statistics don’t necessarily support gloomy predictions about divorce-induced social disintegration.
¹¹⁰
In Egypt, for example, the divorce rate has been running at between one and two divorces per thousand people for the past decade, which is actually lower than in I960.
¹¹¹
It may seem there is more divorce about, in part because rates are significantly higher than the national average in some parts of the country—Cairo, for instance—and because marital breakups have become more public, as divorced women increasingly come out of the shadows.
¹¹²

One divorcée squarely in the spotlight is Mahasin Sabir. She’s the creator and a host of Motalakat (Divorced Women’s) Radio and Facebook page. Based in Zagazig, a town north of Cairo, Motalakat has thousands of followers across the Arab world and beyond. The titles of its programs—among them
Misunderstood and Mistakes, Mother in the House
, and
Your Son as You Raise Him
—give you some idea of the preoccupations of the audience, women and men who regularly interact with Sabir via e-mail, Instant Messenger, and Facebook.

“I want to change the look for divorced women,” Sabir told me. “The woman who wants divorce is not a bad one. The woman who wants divorce is not a hooker, goes to sleep with anyone. Here in
our society, they look to the woman like that; in the courts, the lawyer, the justice man [judge], they look to the woman that she is easy to take. I want to speak to the society, the men and women. Sure, you have a girl [daughter] who is divorced, or a mother who is divorced: look to the woman who is divorced in a human way.” Her grim assessment is borne out by research: in the national survey of Egyptian youth, roughly two-thirds of young men and women said that divorcées are not respected in society.
¹¹³

Sabir speaks from the heart. After two years of unhappy marriage, she spent another four trying to break free of her husband. In the interests of her young son, she prefers not to speak publicly about the reasons for her divorce. However, she’s happy to talk about its repercussions, which is why she started blogging on her experiences in 2008, the largely positive response to which—mainly from men—led her to start Motalakat Radio.

In her early thirties, Sabir lives with her son, mother, and brother. Relations have never been good with her mother, who was vehemently opposed to Sabir’s divorce. But Sabir chooses to stay close so that her son will have a sense of belonging. “I don’t want to lose the soul of my family, but so many times I want to be on my own,” she said. This family safety net is one of the reasons women, in particular, are reluctant to marry without their parents’ approval, since many divorced women have few alternatives to moving back home if they fall out of wedlock. “A single woman to live alone? Disaster!” She laughed. “Here in our society, it is not good if she comes back late—that is to say, nine p.m.—in the family house. So many divorced women think they will not go [out], not work, to keep the image they are polite and good women.”

Part of the problem is the stereotype of a divorcée as a sexual predator, on the prowl for men (and that means other women’s husbands) to slake her lust. “They have something [the idea] here she can go with any man. She is not a girl [virgin] anymore, so [it is] easy to have sex with anyone,” Sabir told me. “Men and women have stupid ideas. If she wants to go with another man, she can go early; she will not wait to be with him at night. You deal with an idiot society.” She is not expecting enlightenment anytime soon.
“Revolution did not change the society view of divorced women. Not now; maybe after two centuries.”

Sabir reckons that attitudes toward divorce in Egypt are less tolerant now than in her parents’ day. “People are more closed-minded about divorce than before. We have Wahhabi;
^‡
that is something too bad. They make our society so closed-minded; they are a disaster in our society. Egypt used to be [about] culture, art, so many beautiful things, but the Wahhabis and the [TV] channels for them, they make people think of religion, but in a bad way. They take from religion something not right.”

Such Islamic objections have been fueled by the introduction into Egyptian law of
khul’
, which allows a woman to unilaterally divorce her husband, provided she gives up her financial rights and pays back her
mahr
, among other conditions. It is one of three types of divorce in Egypt, the others being
talaq
, in which a man says “I divorce you” three times and registers this with a marriage notary, and fault-based divorce, in which wives can brave Egypt’s tortuous legal system to split from their husbands on the grounds of desertion or maltreatment.
¹¹⁴
According to Sabir, most men prefer to be dragged through the courts, which can take years, thereby deferring alimony payments and having to leave the family home to the ex-wife and kids. In the meantime, husbands can take other wives, official or not, while women are frozen in place and cannot move on unless they are formally released from marriage. Divorcées
can
go on to remarry: for all the stigma associated with divorce, they are an attractive prospect to some men, since second-time brides are not looking for all the trappings of a white wedding and a first marriage. And so
khul’
offers women a way out, though it is a hard bargain for those without independent means and considerable patience.

When it first entered the books in 2000,
khul’
sparked a fierce debate about the rightful role of women and unmasked a deep well
of male anxiety. In the wake of the uprising, conservative opponents of
khul’
have tried to limit the practice, finding new ammunition in the association of the law with the old government. Even more damning in their eyes is its connection with the former first lady, Suzanne Mubarak, who, quite aside from being part of a discredited regime, was active in promoting what many see as a Western women’s rights agenda undermining traditional Islamic values—although
khul’
has its origins in Islam in the first place.
¹¹⁵

No matter how they get out of their marriage, Sabir believes the upshot for women is a no-win situation: “[If she instigates proceedings], she is [a] bad woman, she is [an] evil woman, she broke the tie of the family. She told her husband to divorce [her], so she is [a] bad woman. From the other [side, if] the man divorces the woman, they say about her she is a loser woman, she can’t keep her house, she can’t keep her husband and keep him happy. They want her to be a clown for him, like the song, Elton John, ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.’ ”

At Motalakat Radio, divorcées are keen to talk about feelings, while their male counterparts are mainly focused on money, and how they are going to make ends meet after the breakup and its attendant financial obligations. I asked Sabir if the audience ever spoke about sex as a contributing factor to marital breakdown, given inflated expectations going into marriage and communication problems thereafter. “Half of the women want to be divorced because [they are] not happy sexually. [But] they are scared to speak about that. First from society, scared from their families, scared from their children,” she explained. “If her son asks her, ‘My mother, why did you divorce my father?’ I think he will not accept that [if she explains it was for sexual reasons]. He is a boy in Arabian society, and he has no experience of sexual life and [does] not know that is very important to human beings. He will not understand his mother. She is scared to lose her son, her family.” It is the old double standard, Sabir explained. “So the woman is scared to talk about this. But a man goes and gets another wife; he gets to be very happy, with a woman, two or three. But she [does] not have this right. She has to be sad, unhappy, and [accept] bad treatment
and just live to raise her children. Society wants her to be like that. She can’t say, ‘I have a sexual right—I want to be happy’; if she says that, they will say she is a bad woman.”