Headscarves and Hymens (23 page)

Rania, a member of the group who was in her thirties, once turned to Alaa and asked simply, “How did you do it? How did you do all of this at nineteen? I just traveled for the first time by myself last year when I was thirty-four!” Rania is the eldest member of the group, and Alaa is the youngest.

It is these conversations and the juxtaposition of experiences and struggles they produce that bring the revolution home.

“I used to believe women were second to men,” said Menna, nineteen. “My father loved to control me and my mum. Before the revolution I thought women shouldn’t step up. If I go to Tahrir I’ll get molested, harassed, everything, so I should stay home. So I did. But me and my mum went and we did everything and I do feel different. Something in me snapped.”

“Since I was a little girl, my parents told me, ‘You are free to do whatever you want, but no traveling alone,’ ” said another woman named Menna, twenty-three. “After the revolution, we protesters were belittled. They started saying, ‘Why did they go in the first place?’ We were there to defend our country. Why should I belong in my home just to serve men when they come back with a triumph?”

Our support group meets weekly. Into our space members bring their frustrations, hopes, rage, and whatever is on their mind, be it a sense of violation at street sexual harassment they endured on the way there, or the triumph of yelling or pushing or hitting someone who dared to intimidate or violate them in any way.

Several of the women related the suspicions of male friends and coworkers about what exactly we do in our support group, which some men fear only encourages a hatred of them. It’s interesting that even when just eight or nine women—we keep the group small to allow for
intimacy and for enough time for all to speak when they want—meet in the absence of men, men worry.

When I look around at the group I see women in many of the same struggles I underwent a decade or two ago. There is a direct line that connects me to these women.

I see a rage and determination that cannot be contained. There is a fierce battle raging in Egypt, and it’s not the one between Islamists and military rulers, the two factions that dominate the coverage of my country these days. The real battle, the one that will determine whether Egypt frees itself of authoritarianism, is between the patriarchy—established and upheld by the state and the street and at home—and women, who will no longer accept the status quo.

We must connect domestic violence, marital rape, female genital mutilation, and street sexual violence, and clearly call them all crimes against women. And just as we stood next to men to overthrow President Mubarak, we need men to stand alongside us now.

At the time of writing, several women are in jail as political prisoners of the el-Sisi regime. As much as I abhor their imprisonment, the detention of women such as the activist Sanaa Seif, twenty, and the human rights defender Yara Sallam, twenty-eight (both jailed for three years for violating a draconian anti-protest law), is a reminder to all that women have been and continue to be a part of Egypt’s revolution, which for too long has celebrated the names of its men over those of its women.
Sanaa’s sister Mona, twenty-eight, a scientist whose voice became known from Tahrir Square to people all over the world, cofounded No Military Trials for Civilians, which advocates against the use of military tribunals to try civilians in Egypt. Mona and Sanaa’s activism has ensured that they have become as known to those who follow our revolution as their activist brother Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who at the time of writing is in jail awaiting an appeal of a fifteen-year sentence for violating the anti-protest law. The siblings are truly the children of their parents, the veteran activist Laila Soueif and the human rights lawyer Ahmed Seif al-Islam.

Protests are not just for boys. Egyptian women have paid with their freedom, their bodies, and at times their lives to stand up to sixty years of military rule and the Islamists whom the regime was happy to portray as its only alternative, the better to scare Western allies into supporting its rule.

We will have a reckoning with our culture and religion, with military rulers and Islamists—two sides of one coin. Such a reckoning is essentially a feminist one. And it is what will eventually free us. Women—our rage, our tenacity, our daring and audacity—will free our countries.

This hasn’t been an easy book to write. Sharing some of my own experiences while I was dealing with the trauma that followed my assault was a challenge, but it was made easier to meet thanks to the support and love of many. My parents, Ragaa and Ahmed Tarif; my sister, Nora; my brother, Ehab, and his wife, Abeer; and my beloved nieces and nephews, Danah, Nour, Hanah, and Zein: thank you for your love, which has kept me sane, for watching football with me even if I’m forever Manchester United and most of you are supporters of archrivals Liverpool, for book recommendations, and for helping me see things in ways I had not considered. Your willingness to discuss and argue difficult issues with me always nurtured my feminism and my fight, even when at times we disagreed. I know parts of this book will be difficult for my family to read. I thank you ahead of time. I am grateful for my agent, Jessica Papin: your faith in me lifted me during many difficult days and nurtured this book through its many fits and starts. Thank you, Mitzi Angel and Will Wolfslau, my editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Your patience and clear-sighted handling of my words helped guide me from the fevered initial chapters to the book those chapters became.

There are many friends in many cities to thank—love to all who help me feel at home in the many places I visit. Just a few: in New York City, Dirk Eusterbrock, Janne Teller, Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinem, and Mary Jasmine Yostos, for supporting and feeding me,
lending me money, and believing I could write this book. In Cairo: Rasha Kamel, Tarik Salama, Koert Debeuf, the late Bassem Sabry, and Ahmed Ghaffar, Ayman Ashour, Amira Aly, and Yasmine El Rashidi, for endless nights of conversations, Jelly Cola on my balcony, football matches, and mind-saving music and dancing.

Thank you: Sarah Naguib, Ramy Yaacoub, and Mahmoud Salem, for coming to my aid after I was released; Nasser Weddady, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Nicholas Kristoff, Zeynep Tufekci, and all who spread the word about my detention and campaigned for my release; the field doctors who came looking for their missing colleague and found me at the Interior Ministry and tried to help; the activist who let me use his smartphone to send the tweet about my beating and detention; Alec Ross, for responding to that tweet and helping to get me released. And a big thank-you for all who tweeted #freemona and everyone who helped in any way to get me released. I am eternally grateful. Thank you, Dirk, for nursing me after my surgery. H: I’m glad you survived and I cherish the ups and downs, mostly the ups.

MONA ELTAHAWY
is an award-winning Egyptian American feminist writer and commentator. Her essays and op-eds on Egypt, the Islamic world, and women’s rights have appeared in various publications, including
The Washington Post
and
The New York Times
. She has appeared as a guest commentator on MSNBC, the BBC, CNN, PBS, Al-Jazeera, NPR, and dozens of other television and radio networks, and is a contributing opinion writer for the
International New York Times.
She lives in Cairo and New York City.

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Headscarves and Hymens
Copyright © 2015 by Mona Eltahawy.

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EPUB Edition March 2015 ISBN 9781443437981

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FIRST CANADIAN EDITION

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from the poem “A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde. © 1978, 1995 by Audre Lorde, from
The Black Unicorn
and
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde,
both published by W. W. Norton. Used herewith by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.

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