Headscarves and Hymens (21 page)

Ironically, due to the extreme difficulty that women face when speaking out, it is a male poet who has best expressed the desires and frustrations of Arab women. The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani (1923–1998) skewered Arab societies for their hypocrisy and double standards when it came to the upbringing of boys and girls, and the disparity in the freedom to love and to desire they were allowed as they matured. Qabbani’s older sister committed suicide to avoid marrying a man she did not love, and many have theorized that this ignited the poet’s lifelong attempt to give voice to women’s subjectivities, women’s passions.

“Qabbani was not embracing fashionable causes when
he began his concentrated attack on the way women were induced, through a narrow conservative education, to deny their own humanity,” writes Salma Khadra Jay-yusi in her introduction to
On Entering the Sea: The Erotic and Other Poetry of Nizar Qabbani.
“Qabbani’s superior achievement, however, is that he not only attacked political coercion, but aimed his well-honed pen at the most sacrosanct taboos in Arab traditional culture: the sexual … He called for the liberation of both body and soul from the repressive injunctions imposed upon them throughout the centuries, awakening women to a new awareness of their bodies and their sexuality, wrenching them away from the taboos of society, and making them aware of its discriminatory treatment of the sexes, of its inherent cruelty.”

I am a huge fan of Qabbani’s poetry. But where is our female Qabbani?

She existed once. One book introduced me to the great female poets of desire in Arabic:
Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology
, compiled and translated by Abdullah al-Udhari. Moris Farhi, writing for the website Poetry Magazines, praised
Classical Poems
as follows:

The collection’s range of female poets from radically different eras is extraordinary, as is how fearlessly they speak about their desires. From the Umayyad Caliphate (603–750 CE), there is Dahna bint Mashal as she reprimands her husband:

And Bint al-Hubab boasting of her adultery:

From the Abbasid period (750–1258 CE), here is Safiyya al-Baghdadiyya:

And I’timad Arrumaikiyya (eleventh century), who implores her lover with no compunction:

What we’ve lost since the words of these bold and proudly desirous women! Conservatives will always charge that the language we use to frame our bodily desires and integrity is “Western” and blasphemous. But there has always been a language of female desire and female pride in Arabic; it is ours to reclaim.

There are also words we must remove from the Arabic lexicon on sex. It is time to stop using
girl
for females who haven’t had sex and
woman
for those who have.
Even if the sad reality is that our societies do still believe that it is a man and his penis that make us into women, we must change the language to inspire a change in attitude. That
girl/woman
distinction has ramifications beyond male sexual bluster. Rape laws are harsher in their punishment of the sexual violation of a “girl” than of a “woman,” treating a virgin and her genitals as a prize to be guarded for the right man’s arrival. The Moroccan penal code, for example, provides for harsher sentences if rape and “indecent assault” result in a woman losing her virginity. In its report on bias in Morocco’s penal code, Amnesty International says that the punishment for the rape of a woman is ten to twenty years in prison, unless the woman does not lose her virginity as a result of the assault, in which case the sentence is five to ten years.

We also must have a reckoning with the word
fornication.
In the poorer countries of the region, the average age of marriage has been rising steadily as fewer people are able to afford a home of their own or any of the other expenses associated with marriage. As more and more young people delay marriage, the blanket prohibition on extramarital sex in the Muslim world will be challenged. Do we want a society where lovers marry just to be able to have sex? What if the man and woman who wait until marriage have no sexual chemistry? These questions are forcing themselves on our societies, and only an honest and bold discussion and a willingness to break with
tradition, be it Islam or Christianity, will help us find answers.

I am not naïve enough to think that “fornication” will disappear as a concept or as a sin from either the Muslim or Christian way of life in our region. I am instead calling for a pragmatic approach to sexuality that would allow consenting adults who choose to have sex with other consenting adults the freedom to do so, with the knowledge and birth control they require to do so safely. That freedom to choose will not infringe on the freedom to choose to wait until marriage, if that is what you want. The more freedom we have, the more choices available to people. The fewer freedoms we have, the faster hypocrisy will eat away at the heart of our society.

A certain amount of privacy is necessary for autonomy, and privacy is a rare commodity in countries where the patriarch outside and the patriarch at home are constantly on your back, policing your behavior and setting curfews. Most women and men in the region live with their parents until they get married. So where can they find a private place if they want to have sex? Not at a hotel, because most hotels in Egypt demand a copy of a marriage certificate if an Egyptian checks in with someone from the opposite sex. (Ironically, this can sometimes make it easier to have same-sex relations; if you share a room with another woman, no one is likely to suspect your motivations.) In fact, in most countries in the region, including Lebanon, Morocco, and even Tunisia,
a man and a woman who want to share a hotel room can be required to produce a marriage certificate. In Lebanon, though it is not legally forbidden, an unmarried couple may be prevented from booking a hotel room under family laws. In other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, an unmarried, unaccompanied woman cannot even check into a hotel alone, never mind with a man who is not her husband.

So where do young people in love go? Cairo has become famous for the shy couples who line the bridges and sidewalks that overlook the Nile, holding hands or sometimes braving bolder moves, yet always facing the Nile, with their backs to the traffic, as if by turning away they are guaranteed a modicum of privacy. It breaks my heart to see these young men and women trying to find their way to what their hearts and bodies want, despite social and religious and political pressures of the most suffocating kind.

A car is the main alternative to a room of one’s own, but only for those who can afford one. From those bold enough to share sexual anecdotes, you will often hear cars described as bastions of privacy and sexual exploration. But the streets of big cities such as Cairo are notoriously crowded, so backseat activities can result in jail sentences. In 2012, a former Egyptian parliamentarian—from the Salafi sect, vehement in its condemnation of extramarital sex—received a one-year suspended sentence and a fine of 1,000 Egyptian pounds after he was
arrested when police found him “performing sexual acts” in a car on a deserted road with a young woman who, according to some reports, was just sixteen. (Other reports said she was twenty-two.) The former parliamentarian had told the police that she was his niece. The young woman received a suspended six-month sentence and was ordered to pay a fine of 500 EGP.

In Morocco, public displays of affection have riled the regime. In June 2012, Khadija Riyadi, head of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, alongside other activists, called for the removal of Article 490 of the Moroccan penal code, which punishes those caught having sex outside marriage even if they are consenting adults. Article 490 states: “All persons of the opposite sex who are not related by marriage, and have sexual relations with each other, are punishable by imprisonment for one month to one year.” It is followed by Article 491, which concerns adultery: “Any married person convicted of adultery is punishable by imprisonment for one to two years; prosecution is pursued only on a complaint from the offended spouse.”

According to the NGO Freedom House, in cases involving sex outside marriage, a conviction can be based on only eyewitness testimony or a confession by one of the accused. The bias against women that Morocco’s penal code encourages is more obvious when you take into account how much the law values a man’s word over a woman’s.

“In the absence of formal evidence or a flagrant case, the man’s statement is always believed over the woman’s,” a representative of the Democratic League for Women’s Rights, a Moroccan NGO, told the magazine
MarocHebdo
in 2011. “Many women are therefore accused of adultery simply because they were one-on-one at home with a man other than their husband or even in a public place. Without a witness, if they are unable to prove that their relationship with that man is purely professional and void of any sexual connotation, they do not escape justice.”

Riyadi and her fellow activists began the public campaign to change Article 490 after they met with Morocco’s minister of solidarity, women, family, and social development, Bassima Hakkaoui, the only woman in the Islamist government elected in 2011. Hakkaoui led the efforts to repeal Article 475, which absolves a rapist who marries his victim. The success of these efforts inspired Riyadi to fight against Article 490.

“Criminalizing sexual relations between consenting adults—regardless of their marital status—violates the right to privacy and to free expression. This provision also deters victims of rape from filing a complaint, because they could find themselves prosecuted for sexual relations outside of marriage,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Middle East and North Africa deputy director at Amnesty International.

Following the start of the campaign to repeal the law
that punishes extramarital sex, justice minister Mustapha Ramid claimed that the public was “not ready” for a more progressive approach. He has said that most Moroccan families don’t want to change existing laws and that they want the option of allowing rapists to marry underage girls to protect “family honor.” “These sexual relationships undermine the foundations of our society,” Ramid said.

But Khadija Riyadi has reminded us why women like her—too often criticized as “extremist” and “out of touch”—are absolutely essential to the social and sexual revolution. “Laws help to change mentalities. We don’t wait for mentalities to change on their own,” she told Public Radio International. “We must do something to change mentalities.”

Mokhtar al-Ghzioui, the editor of the daily newspaper
al-Ahdath al-Maghribia,
publicly supported Riyadi’s call to decriminalize sex outside marriage and said in a TV interview that he would be fine with his mother or sister having consensual sexual relations outside of wedlock. In response, a preacher named Abdullah Nahari, a resident of the city of Oujda, near the Algerian border, made a YouTube video calling for al-Ghzioui’s death. Nahari was then summoned by the local prosecutor to answer to the charge of inciting a crime. Three of Morocco’s most prominent conservative clerics, Abu Hafs, Omar al-Heddouchi, and Hassan al-Kettani, all spoke out in support of Nahari on their Facebook pages,
thereby publicly backing a death threat against a journalist who had expressed his personal views.

In October 2013 a few dozen Moroccans staged a “Kiss-In” in front of parliament to support three teenagers arrested for posting on Facebook pictures of two of them kissing. The kissing protesters said they wanted to affirm their right to public displays of affection in a country that was becoming increasingly conservative. According to the news website Middle East Online, “around a dozen couples took part in the event, which was swiftly disrupted by a small group of counterprotesters, who accused the couples of ‘atheism,’ shoved them, and threw chairs at them.” The court ultimately acquitted the teenagers, who had been accused of public indecency, but the offending couple, ages fourteen and fifteen, were reprimanded by the judge.

Morocco is often considered more tolerant in the application of its Islamic-inspired penal code because it rarely arrests people who violate the criminalization of sex and alcohol, but this is inaccurate. The regime relies on clerics, who operate with the tacit and sometimes overt support of the regime, to issue the social censure and threats that the regime would prefer not to be seen delivering.

“Legislative reforms to bring Moroccan law in line with international human rights standards are crucial in ensuring that women’s rights are protected, but changing the law is not enough. In a society where women
do not enjoy an equal status with men, it is not only the law but also deeply ingrained societal attitudes which lead to discrimination,” said Hadj Sahraoui of Amnesty International.

Morocco has yet to repeal Article 490. Nevertheless, the protests that Riyadi launched are important in that they have initiated the conversation necessary to combat the silence that surrounds sex. When your culture ensures you cannot figure out for yourself if, where, and when to have sex, it also ensures your silence when sex is forced upon you. It ensures that in the hierarchy of exploitation, girls and women will always be at the very bottom.