Egyptian-American writer Eltahawy’s call for a sexual revolution in the Middle East has been a long time coming.
by Joanna Demkiewicz
Since the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, women have marched in protests and fought against the dictatorship, only to be stripped, groped, abused and beaten by their fellow male protestors. Women continue to inject themselves into the cause of the revolution, only to be ignored after claiming rape. Even Mona Eltahawy – Egyptian-American writer, public speaker and news correspondent – was sexually assaulted during the Tahrir Square protests. Riot police assaulted her, and also broke her arm and hand. They were never punished.
In 2012, after that experience, Eltahawy wrote an essay discussing misogyny in the Middle East and North Africa for Foreign Policy, which she titled “Why Do They Hate Us?” Eltahawy writes, “What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it’s not better than you think. It’s much, much worse.” Eltahawy calls out the Middle East and North Africa for its destructive treatment of women and claims that before a political revolution can be successful, a sexual revolution must come first.
After receiving and responding to criticisms and feedback from the article, it was clear that “misogyny in the Arab world is an explosive issue.” She decided to write a book, and aptly titled it Headscarves and Hymens: Why The Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which was released April 21.
I spoke with Eltahawy about her book, which she calls a rallying cry; the complexity of wearing and removing a hijab; #BlackLivesMatter; reproductive issues; and why, if you want to help women in the Middle East, you should focus on your own community.
Joanna Demkiewicz: The Foreign Policy article was the catalyst for your first book. Can you explain the process of developing your article into a book, and why it was important to you to continue the conversation?
Mona Eltahawy: I’ve been meaning to write a book about women’s issues and women’s rights in the Middle East for a very long time, because these are issues I’ve been covering since I began as a journalist – although, I no longer identify as a journalist; I identify as a writer – back in 1990. Women’s issues generally have always been very important to me, so it’s been a long time coming. With the [Foreign Policy] essay, and with surveying the scene after the revolution began, it became very clear to me that it wasn’t a revolution about gender issues, but it should be in order for the revolution to succeed. Because as I said in the Foreign Policy essay, and as I said over and over again in the book, we began a political revolution from the recognition that the regime oppresses us all. But as women, we have another revolution on our hands, because we recognize that the state, and the street, and the home oppress us specifically as women, so we need that social and sexual revolution to run concurrently with the political one.
[The book] was a chance for me to go into more detail [than they essay]…and it was a chance for me to answer the criticisms of people who claimed that I was generalizing and not making room for the specificities of countries within the region. But also, going from the article to the book was borne out of a rage. I mean, I’m generally an angry person anyway, but it was borne out of a particular rage that women’s issues were not figuring enough in our revolution, generally. The book was supposed to be a rallying cry to say, “Look, women’s issues are important. This is half of the population, and we’ve ignored them for too long. We cannot have a revolution unless we discuss these issues.”
JD: One of the biggest criticisms of your essay was that some interpreted it as a plea for the West to come to the Middle East’s rescue in terms of eliminating sexism and gender inequalities. Why is that assumption problematic or, at least, a misinterpretation?
ME: You know, I honestly think it’s so absurd that anyone accuses me of wanting the West to come and rescue us. I challenge anyone to bring me anything I’ve written in which I say, “Come and rescue us.” What I do is I hold Western administrations into account for propping up dictators, for continuing business as usual with dictators that they know are misogynistic and in whose countries women are treated incredibly badly, such as Saudi Arabia, for example. So I do level that criticism at Western administrations. Having done so, I never follow criticisms with, “Now you must come liberate us,” because that’s a ridiculous notion. We’re going to liberate ourselves; no one can liberate you.
I think that assumption is problematic because – you know, with second wave feminism, there was a lot of talk of white feminists claiming to speak on behalf of all feminists, and white feminists engaging in cultural relativism that veered too much on the side of, “Well, it’s their culture; we can’t criticize it” in the case of female-genital mutilation, for example. In order to counter that, some white feminists began to say, “We must now start campaigning vehemently to end these cultural practices,” which for a lot of people felt like they were stepping on the toes of local and indigenous feminists who had been working on these issues for a long time. So, I recognize the problems there, and I recognize the idea that people think this imperialism that manifests itself in invasions of countries, which also seeps into feminism. When the Bush administration, for example, was about to invade Afghanistan, Laura Bush took over the presidential radio address for that week and claimed that the U.S. was about to invade Afghanistan to liberate women from their burkas, which is a ridiculous notion. This is not why the U.S. went into Afghanistan. So, this is something that I’m very aware of, but I completely reject the notion that there are white saviors who claim to rescue us.
JD: During the Tahrir Square protests in 2011, you were reporting from the states, and you convinced CNN to remove “Chaos in Egypt” as their banner headline and replace it with “Uprising in Egypt.” What difference does a subtle language change like this make? How can U.S. media improve their Middle East reporting?
ME: Sadly, I think for a lot of mainstream media in a Western context, the people in the Middle East are…out of control – the default is violence, aggression and chaos. And I find that incredibly offensive, very reductive and very racist. When the revolution and uprisings began in the Middle East, I knew a lot of people in Tahrir Square who were risking their lives to stand up to the Mubarak Regime. I went on CNN to report, and I saw the “chaos” banner, and I just thought, “Are you fucking kidding me?” – excuse my language. The people of every country have the right to rise up against dictatorship, and to call that “chaos” is, first of all, dismissive of their courage, but also it refuses to put it on a parallel with things like the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution – all these uprisings that were justified because they were uprisings against dictatorship.
JD: Let’s talk veils – niqabs and hijabs. When you moved to Saudi Arabia at the age of 16, you chose to wear a veil as a way to honor your faith but also to hide your body from the explicitly wandering eyes of men. Then, approximately 9 years later, you changed your mind and stopped wearing a veil. I believe your story is an interesting example of how there are complex and varying reasons that Muslim women choose to wear a veil. Can you talk about your story and how you came to realize that wearing the veil is not explicitly a “choice”?
ME: The long and short of it is that it’s much easier to choose to wear the hijab than it is to take it off, for many reasons. Primary among those reasons is the idea that it’s more of a sin, which is what I was taught when I was younger, to have worn the headscarf and then to remove it than to have never worn it at all, because you’re considered in the strictly religious viewpoint to have found the light and by the grace of God been, you know, blessed with this idea that you are now dressed the way you’re told God wants you to dress. To reject that after having been graced with it is considered a huge sin. This is according to the religious idea that it’s an obligation to wear a headscarf, and this is an idea that I quickly moved away from, both out of personal discomfort with wearing the headscarf and with my own reading. I began reading feminist writings about the headscarf, but to actually take off the headscarf after I realized I could interpret the Koran in a different way – that was the challenge. If the choice to do something is easier than the opposite, then you have to question how free that choice is. In the book, it was the idea that taking off the headscarf is such a huge taboo that I wanted to put on the table and wrestle with.
JD: I reached out to my friend, Emma Heidorn, who is from the U.S. but has spent time in Morocco and is now living in Palestine. She wanted me to ask about your experience being both a Muslim and a feminist (since many believe these terms are contradictory), which appropriately, is at the core of “Headscarves and Hymens.”
ME: I used to call myself a Muslim feminist, but I no longer do that. I don’t want to get into theological arguments with people where I pull out the Koran and I say, “See, I can interpret this in a feminist way,” because someone can come back at me and say, “No, it means this.” I’m not interested in that. What I am interested in is all these new movements that have come about that include both Muslim feminists and secular feminists. One of them is a movement that I mention in the book called Musawah, and that is the Arabic word for “equality.” It’s a movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family that was launched in Malaysia in 2009. One of the founders of this movement is a great mentor of mine named Amina Wadud, who is an African-American scholar of Islam. Now, Amina openly identifies as an Islamic feminist, and she’s written books such as The Gender Jihad and other books in which she uses her scholarship to reinterpret Islamic teaching in a feminist way. I salute that, and I highly respect that, but I’m a Muslim and a feminist, I’m not a Muslim feminist, because I’m not interested in these arguments, which usually just end up being my word against your word.
JD: Speaking of Middle Eastern feminists, you give credit to a lot of feminists – sociologists, activists and writers – in your book. I studied feminism in college, and yet I’ve never heard of Huda Shaarawi, who publicly removed her veil in 1923 or Doria Shafik, who led 1,500 women as they stormed the Egyptian parliament in the 1950s. Why don’t we hear these stories?
ME: I think one of the main reasons we don’t hear about feminists from across the world is because we still continue to revolve around this idea that feminism is a white thing, that feminism is a Western thing. We forget that there are many indigenous variations and examples of feminism. So, it’s very important for me to remind people that we’ve had a feminist movement in Egypt since the 1920s. Sadly, those names might be new for a lot of people in the Middle East and North Africa, because they’re also not taught in school.
One of the things I was especially happy to see after the Egyptian revolution came about were the newly born women’s movements. Whenever we would have protests, especially revolving around women’s issues – especially on International Women’s Day or when we were protesting against sexual violence – women would carry pictures of women like Huda Shaarawi and Doria Shafik to remind Egyptians that, “Look, we have these feminists in our very recent history and they’ve been talking about these issues for the last century.” It’s especially important now, because I think we’re ready for a global feminist moment. I was just thinking of the five Chinese women who have been in detention in China since International Women’s Day [they were released “on bail” last week]. The fact that there were five women jailed in China because they are feminists, the fact that Indian feminists have been incredibly vocal after the Delhi gang rape, the fact that women in Kabul insisted on burying the woman who was lynched, and also, in Turkey, several months ago, when a woman was murdered after she was raped – according to Islamic guidelines, women cannot bury anyone; they attend the funeral ceremony up to a point, and then they go home – the women told the men, “No one will touch her,” because she had been raped and murdered, and they buried her. To me, that is the global feminist movement. Here in the U.S., we have #BlackLivesMatter, which was started by a black American woman.
JD: To piggy-back off of that a little… You are often asked the same question when giving lectures: “How can we help the women in the Middle East?” In your book, you say that your response is to focus on helping women in your own community. What’s your philosophy behind focusing on a person’s community, and how does doing so help connect to the global feminist struggle?
ME: Actually, that comes from the recognition that the spectrum of misogyny hasn’t been eradicated in any way. Even in the Nordic countries, which always score the highest in gender issues of various kinds, misogyny exists. So in recognizing the spectrum, rather than pointing to other parts of the world and saying, “Oh my God, it’s so bad over there” and feeling a sense of complacency, which is very dangerous, or cultural superiority, which is very offensive, it’s important for everybody to focus on your own community so you don’t lose whatever rights you have that were very hard fought for. Here in the U.S., for example, we have the issue of reproductive rights. What has happened with reproductive rights in the past few years in the U.S. is incredibly frightening. I was in Beijing 20 years ago for the U.N. Women’s Conference, and the Beijing platform is the most progressive platform when it comes to reproductive rights that we, as a global community, have ever come up with. It’s the most progressive for many reasons. In the U.S. context, it’s because of the religious right, which has succeeded in whittling away reproductive rights to the point where there are communities in the U.S. where women have no access to abortion unless they are rich, white and have a car. I mean, one example is the woman in Indiana who was sentenced to 20 years in jail for what she says is a miscarriage. So, if you’re looking at it with a context like that – where doctors are not even trained on how to give an abortion, and where women have to drive for miles in order to get one – that is what you need to focus on rather than, “How am I going to rescue women in Morocco or Saudi Arabia?” That’s the point I make.
JD: While reading “Headscarves and Hymens” I got a lot of comments about the cover. People sitting a few seats away from me would literally come over and look at the cover: “Oh, that IS what that says,” they would say, obviously referring to “hymens.” Was this your purpose in designing the cover?
ME: There were two things that were really important to me in relation to the cover. One was the title. The idea of “headscarves and hymens” is an idea I’ve been talking about for many years now. I wrote an article when Obama was first elected saying that I wished – when he said he wanted to address women’s rights in a speech to Muslims – that he wouldn’t fall into the trap of only talking about headscarves and hymens. For a long time I’ve formulated this idea that women in the Middle East and North Africa are stuck between these two paradigms of what’s on our head and what’s in between our legs. So, I really wanted the title to stay, and thankfully, my editor was really supportive of that.
The other thing I was really adamant about was that I wanted to avoid the trope of every book that’s about women in the so-called “Arab world,” and that is a woman in a headscarf with a minaret and a crescent moon on the cover. Look up any book about Arab women, and that’s always the cover. So I really wanted to go with just type – I was like, “No veil on the cover!” I really don’t like those covers; I find them to be really reductive and stereotypical.
JD: What are you currently reading? What do you go to when you feel overwhelmed by the sexism by which you are surrounded?
ME: You know, a few months ago, I was in a particularly down period. Living in Cairo is very difficult for everybody. Politically speaking and revolutionary speaking, these are difficult days. One thing that really helped me through this down time was to read Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre. I describe myself as an anarchist of the Emma Goldman school. Reading Emma Goldman, whether it’s her essays or a biography of her love life or even her autobiography, was really inspiring to me. Because I am an idealist, I’m not a pragmatist, and both of those women were idealists and anarchists, and I took a lot of encouragement and inspiration from them.
Since the revolution, I’ve really fallen off shows I’d been following. I used to watch “Mad Men,” and I had my favorite shows, but I’ve really left it all, because I’ve been so consumed by the revolution. But I’ve realized that I’m in for the long haul – you know, the whole ‘this is a marathon, not a sprint thing’ – so I’ve slowly been getting into TV shows again. I’ve been watching “Being Mary Jane” with Gabrielle Union, and I really like HBO’s “Togetherness.” I like these dramas that usually have complex and miserable relationships [laughs] that distract me from the complexity and the misery of the day-to-day.
JD: What’s one thing that women in the Middle East can do every day to dismantle misogyny in their lives? I know it’s a lot more complicated than just doing one thing a day, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Disobey in one form or another. I like the word “disobey” because I think a lot of what we have to fight against in the Middle East and North Africa is obedience and conformity. That’s why in the opening of the book I say, “To the girls of the Middle East, be immodest, disobey, rebel and know you deserve to be free.”
JD: On the flip, what’s one thing you wish men understood about women’s sexuality and being a Middle Eastern woman?
ME: I think that just as men recognized how the dictatorship that they rose up against made their lives miserable, they should also recognize that the patriarch at home – just like the patriarch in the presidential palace – makes not just women’s lives miserable, but their own lives miserable as well because of the idea of obedience and conformity and the socially constructed notion of masculinity that they constantly have to live up to. I think the recognition that feminism is good for everybody, especially in the context in which I speak, is something that needs to be emphasized over and over.
[hr style=”striped”]
Joanna Demkiewicz is The Riveter‘s co-founder and executive editor. Find her on Twitter at @yanna_dem.
