Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution

141 Pages·2015·0.75 MB·English

by  Mona Eltahawy

HEADSCARVES
AND HYMENS
WHY THE
MIDDLE EAST
NEEDS A SEXUAL
REVOLUTION
MONA ELTAHAWY
Dedication
To the girls of the Middle East and North Africa: Be immodest, rebel, disobey,
and know you deserve to be free
Epigraph
Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your
feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with
your tongues of fire. Don’t let the pen banish you from yourself. Don’t let
the ink coagulate in your pens. Don’t let the censor snuff out the spark, nor
the gags muffle your voice. Put your shit on the paper.
We are not reconciled to the oppressors who whet their howl on our
grief. We are not reconciled.
—GLORIA ANZALDÚA, “Speaking in Tongues:
A Letter to Third World Women Writers”
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
WHY THEY HATE US
BLACK VEIL, WHITE FLAG
ONE HAND AGAINST WOMEN
THE GOD OF VIRGINITY
HOME
ROADS THROUGH THE DESERT
SPEAK FOR YOURSELF
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A Note About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
WHY THEY HATE US
I
n “Distant View of a Minaret,” the late and much-neglected Egyptian writer
Alifa Rifaat begins her short story with a woman so unmoved during sex with
her husband that, as he focuses solely on his pleasure, she notices a spiderweb
she must sweep off the ceiling and has time to ruminate on her husband’s
repeated refusal to prolong intercourse until she climaxes, “as though purposely
to deprive her.” Just before her husband reaches orgasm, the call to prayer
interrupts their intercourse, and he rolls over. After washing up, she loses herself
in prayer, and looks out onto the street from her balcony. She interrupts her
reverie to dutifully prepare coffee for her husband to drink after his nap. Taking
it to their bedroom to pour it in front of him, as he prefers, she notices that he is
dead. She instructs their son to go get a doctor. “She returned to the living room
and poured out the coffee for herself. She was surprised at how calm she was,”
Rifaat writes.
In a crisp three and a half pages of fiction, Rifaat lays out a trifecta of sex,
death, and religion that forms the pulsating heart of misogyny in the Middle
East. Here is a writer who, when she was alive, was held up by academics as an
“authentic” Egyptian woman, untainted by a foreign language—she spoke only
Arabic—and influence from abroad. It is said that Rifaat never traveled outside
Egypt, although she did perform a pilgrimage to Mecca and attended a literary
conference in the United Kingdom. She was forced by her family to marry a man
of their choice, with whom she traveled across Egypt.
Rifaat does not mince words, nor does she mollify. In the slim volume of short
stories titled Distant View of a Minaret, she introduces you to a sexually
frustrated middle-aged wife who wonders if her mother suffered the same fate
with her father, and another mother who laments her youth lost to female genital
mutilation and a society that fought her womanhood at every turn. The stories
show women constantly sublimating themselves in religion, even as this faith is
used against them by clerics and male-dominated society.
There is no sugarcoating it. We Arab women live in a culture that is
fundamentally hostile to us, enforced by men’s contempt. They don’t hate us
because of our freedoms, as the tired post-9/11 American cliché had it. We have
no freedoms because they hate us, as Rifaat powerfully says.
Yes: They hate us. It must be said.
“The fact is, there’s no joy for a girl in growing up, it’s just one disaster after
another till you end up an old woman who’s good for nothing and who’s real
lucky to find someone to feel sorry for her,” Rifaat writes in the story
“Bahiyya’s Eyes.”
Some may ask why I’m bringing this up now, when the Middle East and
North Africa are in turmoil, when people are losing their lives by the thousands,
when it can sometimes seem as though the revolutions that began in 2010—
incited not by the usual hatred of America and Israel, but by a common demand
for freedom and dignity—have lost their way. After all, shouldn’t everyone
receive basic rights first, before women demand special treatment? Also, what
does gender or, for that matter, sex have to do with the Arab Spring? It should
have everything to do with the revolution. This is our chance to dismantle an
entire political and economic system that treats half of humanity like children at
best. If not now, when?
Name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses against women
occurring in that country, abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion
that few seem willing to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more
than 90 percent of women who have ever married in Egypt have had their
genitals cut in the name of “purity,” then surely we must all blaspheme. When
Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating “virginity tests” merely for
speaking out, it’s no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal
code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good
intentions,” no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political
correctness. And what, pray tell, are “good intentions”? They are legally deemed
to include any beating that is not “severe” or “directed at the face.” What all this
means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Arab world, it’s not
better than you think. It’s much, much worse. Even after these “revolutions,”
women remain covered up and anchored to the home, are denied the simple
mobility of getting into their own cars, are forced to get permission from men to
travel, and are unable to marry or divorce without a male guardian’s blessing.
The Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East and North Africa stand
apart in their terrible record on women’s rights. Not a single Arab country ranks
in the top one hundred positions on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender
Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet’s rock bottom.
The annual report looks at four key areas: health (life expectancy, etc.), access to
education, economic participation (salaries, job types, and seniority), and
political engagement. Neighbors Saudi Arabia and Yemen, for instance, are eons
apart when it comes to gross domestic product (GDP), but only eight places
separate them on the Global Gender Gap Report, with the kingdom at 127 and
Yemen coming in at 136, the very bottom of the 2013 index. Morocco, often
touted for its “progressive” family law (a 2005 report by Western “experts”
called it “an example for Muslim countries aiming to integrate into modern
society”), ranks 129th.
It’s easy to see why the lowest-ranked country is Yemen, where 49 percent of
women are illiterate, 59 percent do not participate in the labor force, and there
were no women in parliament as of 2013. Horrific news reports about eight-
year-old girls dying on the evening of their “wedding” to much older men have
done little to stem the tide of child marriage there. Instead, demonstrations in
support of child marriage outstrip those against it, and clerics declare that
opponents of state-sanctioned pedophilia are apostates because the Prophet
Mohammed, according to them, married his second wife, Aisha, when she was a
child.
At least Yemeni women can drive. It surely hasn’t ended their problems, but it
symbolizes freedom of mobility—and nowhere does such symbolism resonate
more than in Saudi Arabia, where child marriage is also practiced and where
grown women are treated like children their entire lives, made to obtain the
permission of a male guardian to do the most basic of things. Saudi women far
outnumber their male counterparts on university campuses but are reduced to
watching far less qualified men control every aspect of their lives.
Nothing prepared me for Saudi Arabia. I was born in Egypt, but my family left
for London when I was seven years old. After almost eight years in the United
Kingdom, we moved to Saudi Arabia in 1982. Both my parents, Egyptians who
had earned PhDs in medicine in London, had found jobs in Jeddah, teaching
medical students and technicians clinical microbiology. The campuses were
segregated. My mother taught the women on the female campus, and my father
taught the men on the male campus. When an instructor of the same gender
wasn’t available, the classes were taught via closed-circuit television, and the
students would have to ask questions using telephone sets. My mother, who had
been the breadwinner of the family for our last year in the United Kingdom,
when we lived in Glasgow, now found that she could not legally drive. We
became dependent on my father to take us everywhere. As we waited for our
new car to be delivered, we relied on gypsy cabs and public buses. On the buses,
we would buy our ticket from the driver, and then my mother and I would make
our way to the back two rows (four if we were lucky) designated for women.
The back of the bus. What does that remind you of? Segregation is the only way
to describe it.
It felt as though we’d moved to another planet whose inhabitants fervently
wished women did not exist. I lived in this surreal atmosphere for six years. In
this world, women, no matter how young or how old, are required to have a male
guardian—a father, a brother, or even a son—and can do nothing without this
guardian’s permission. Infantilized beyond belief, they cannot travel, open a
bank account, apply for a job, or even get medical treatment without a man’s
stamp of approval. I watched all this with a mounting sense of horror and
confusion.
I would mention voting rights, but back when I lived in Saudi Arabia, no one
could vote. King Abdullah had said women will be allowed to vote and run for
office in the 2015 elections, but it remains to be seen if clerics—such as the
Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, who believes that women’s involvement in politics
“will open the door to evil”—will scuttle that promise as they did in 2009, when
only men were enfranchised in Saudi Arabia’s first-ever municipal elections.
Yes, this is Saudi Arabia, the country where a gang-rape survivor was
sentenced to jail for agreeing to get into a car with an unrelated male and needed
a royal pardon; Saudi Arabia, where a woman who broke the ban on driving was
sentenced to ten lashes and, again, needed a royal pardon. So bad is it for women
in Saudi Arabia that tiny paternalistic pats on the back—such as the king’s
promise to give women the vote in 2015—are greeted with acclaim from
international observers, and the monarch behind them, King Abdullah, was
hailed as a “reformer”—even by those who ought to know better, such as
Newsweek, which in 2010 named the king one of the top eleven most respected
world leaders. This so-called reformer’s answer to the revolutions popping up
across the region was to numb his people with still more government handouts—
especially for the religious zealots from whom the Saudi royal family inhales
legitimacy.
When I encountered this country at age fifteen, I was traumatized into
feminism—there’s no other way to describe it—because to be a female in Saudi
Arabia is to be the walking embodiment of sin. The kingdom is unabashed in its
worship of a misogynistic god and never suffers any consequences for it, thanks
to the triple advantage of having oil; being home to Islam’s two holiest places,
Mecca and Medina; and controlling the flow of petrodollars that keep the
weapons manufacturers of its Western allies happily funded.
Then (the 1980s and ‘90s) as now, clerics on Saudi TV were obsessed with
women and their orifices, especially what came out of them. I’ll never forget
hearing that if a baby boy urinated on you, you could go ahead and pray in the
same clothes, yet if a baby girl peed on you, you had to change. What on earth
made girls’ urine impure? I wondered.
The hatred of women.
This clerical obsession with women’s organs continues today. My favorite
recent howler: driving will damage your ovaries.
“If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative
physiological impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that
it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards,” the Saudi
cleric Saleh Lohaidan told the news website Sabq in 2013. “That is why we find
those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying
degrees.”
Saudi Arabia follows an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam known
alternatively as Wahhabism or Salafism, the former associated more directly
with the kingdom, and the latter, austere form of Islam with those who live
outside Saudi Arabia. The kingdom’s petrodollars and concerted proselytizing
efforts have taken Wahhabism/Salafism global, and with it the interpretations of
Islam that make women’s lives in Saudi Arabia little short of prison sentences.
Yet the hatred of women is not unique to Salafism. It is not merely a Saudi
phenomenon, a hateful curiosity of a rich, isolated desert. The Islamist hatred of
women burns brightly across the region—now more than ever. By “Islamists,” I
intend the Associated Press’s definition: “An advocate or supporter of a political
movement that favors reordering government and society in accordance with
laws prescribed by Islam.” This includes the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi groups
who belong to the Sunni sect of Islam, and the Shiite militias in Iraq.
The obsession with controlling women and our bodies often stems from the
suspicion that, without restraints, women are just a few degrees short of sexual
insatiability. Take as an example the words of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular
Egyptian cleric; resident of Doha, Qatar; and longtime conservative TV host on
Al Jazeera. Al-Qaradawi supported the revolutions, no doubt hoping they would
eliminate the tyrants who had long tormented and oppressed both him and the
Muslim Brotherhood movement from which he springs. While al-Qaradawi, who
commands a huge audience on and off the satellite channels, may say that female