Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East

by David D. Kirkpatrick

  Egyptian rights advocates maintained that they deserved the credit. Their agitation had called the attention of the West to women’s issues, they said, and that pressured Suzanne. But with scarcely any visible feminist movement in Egypt, the measures became known there as Suzanne’s Laws, and Verveer argued to Clinton that some “youth leaders” now saw the laws as “illegitimate.” The young women activists Verveer met on a trip to Cairo seemed naïve, she later told me.

  Mrs. Mubarak’s National Council of Women, though, had survived under the leadership of her close friend Ambassador Mervat Tallawy, previously its general secretary. Tallawy, then seventy-four years old, had been one of the first women to enter the Foreign Ministry, and it assigned her the job of accompanying the First Lady to events and conferences.

  “In developing countries—Arab countries—things do not come from the grass roots,” Tallawy explained when I visited her office, as though this were just a cultural quirk like the Egyptian preference for cats over dogs. She wore an enormous gold-encrusted brooch. The ring of her iPhone was a diva singing an aria.

  “On the contrary, it is a top-down approach. Either it is a monarchy or a military authority that rules the country,” she continued. So in Arab countries, “a president’s wife handles issues affecting women and children.”

  Then Tallawy launched into the legacy of Huda Shaarawi, the godmother of Arab feminism and a household name in Egypt whom I knew about already.

  Shaarawi was born in 1879 in the province of Minya to a family so powerful that her father was known as “king of Upper Egypt,” and she was married at the age of thirteen to a cousin three times her age. He helped carry her into the circle of the Egyptian political elite who were challenging British colonial rule. After World War I, Shaarawi organized women to demonstrate for independence. She traveled to Europe. She met with Western feminists. And in 1923, after returning from a conference in Rome and obtaining the approval of her son-in-law, she stunned the Arab world by disembarking from a train in Cairo without her face veil.

  She founded an organization of wealthy and politically connected women who called themselves the Egyptian Feminist Union. She persuaded philanthropists and the khedive to expand education for women and girls, and she argued, without success, against the laws that allowed polygamy and restricted divorce. But she never sought women’s voting rights, political power, or participation in Parliament. She was an elitist, pro-Western, progovernment nationalist through and through. She was celebrated for decades on street signs and in schoolbooks all over Egypt.

  Neither Tallawy nor the schoolbooks mentioned the alternative icon of Arab feminism, Doria Shafik. Born in 1908 to a middle-class family in the Nile Delta, Shafik broke all kinds of rules. In 1935, she became the first Egyptian Muslim to participate in a beauty pagent, “risking my reputation,” as she later wrote, and placing second in the contest to represent Egypt. She won a scholarship to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. For a time she became a protégé of the veil-bearing Shaarawi—until Shaarawi and her aristocratic circle blocked Shafik from joining their elite Feminist Union, evidently because of her middle-class background.

  Shut out, Shafik started her own grassroots organization, the Daughter of the Nile Union, which focused on education and outreach for poor women who worked as housekeepers, nurses, or manual laborers. She published a magazine. She set up mutual-benefit schemes like a women-run employment agency for other women. And most of all she used collective action to demand a greater role for women in public life.

  “No one will deliver freedom to the woman except the woman herself,” Shafik wrote. “I decided to fight until the last drop of blood to break the chains shackling the women of my country.”

  On February 19, 1951, on the eve of Nasser’s coup, Shafik stormed into a closed session of the all-male Parliament at the head of an army of fifteen hundred women. They seized control for four hours to demand changes to the laws on polygamy and divorce, women’s political participation, and equal pay for equal work. During a 1952 uprising against the British, she led a uniformed female militia to shut down a Barclays Bank in Cairo. Two years later, Shafik conducted a ten-day hunger strike that commanded international attention and helped win Egyptian women the right to vote (albeit, under Abdel Nasser, in meaningless plebiscites).

  If Shaarawi delivered charity from above, Shafik made demands from below, and Abdel Nasser, like any strongman, did not approve. When she denounced his “dictatorship” in 1957, Abdel Nasser put Shafik under house arrest, shut down her magazine and union, and banned her name from the news media and history textbooks. In 1975, Shafik threw herself off a balcony to her death. Outside Egyptian feminist circles, she was all but forgotten.

  After that, virtually the only women’s movement in Egypt was First Lady feminism—the feminism of Jehan Sadat, Suzanne Mubarak, and the National Council of Women. The Egyptian government effectively banned even United Nations agencies from working in Egypt if they did not work through the First Lady’s council. Now the ouster of Mubarak seemed to threaten all that.

  Economic changes had long ago upended many gender norms by the time I arrived in 2010. Seventy-five percent of women worked outside the home. Women in the tiny elite could be doctors, lawyers, economists, entrepreneurs, or almost anything; working-class women usually worked off the books in housekeeping, farming, retailing, or menial labor. Women were the primary breadwinners in 30 percent of Egyptian households. They were divorced, or their husbands were working abroad or underemployed. (Some supposed that the male anxiety about women’s advancement contributed to harassment—blaming women for getting ahead.)

  Suzanne’s Laws had done little to alter the patriarchal culture. In 2011, women were more than twice as likely as men to be illiterate (a total of one in four Egyptians could not read or write). Also that year, under military rule, the chief judge of Egypt’s family court publicly criticized Suzanne’s Laws: the leading state newspaper reported that the judge had complained that the laws conflicted with the Quran and Sharia. This was the judge, Mohamed Ezzat el-Shazly, whom Mubarak had appointed in 2004 specifically to uphold those laws. While divorce was an absolute right for men, the judge argued, it should be granted to a woman only with the agreement of her husband.

  Suzanne’s Laws governed only Muslims, doing nothing for the Christian wives of abusive husbands. “It is very delicate,” Tallawy said with a sigh. “The pope has to agree, otherwise the government would put itself against the church and this is not advisable.”

  The Suzanne’s Law against female “circumcision” had accomplished almost nothing. Nine out of ten Egyptian women between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine had suffered genital mutilation, according to a United Nations survey. That included eight out of ten from twenty to twenty-four years old, and seven out of ten girls from fifteen to nineteen years old. It was almost as common among Christian women in Egypt—affecting three out of four—as it was among Muslims. (It is more common among Christians than Muslims in parts of Africa, but absent in some Muslim-majority countries.) Surveys backed by the U.S. government showed that 59 percent of men and 54 percent of women favored the practice.

  Many seemed to describe it, perversely, as a matter of health and hygiene. That is why our driver circumcised his daughters, he told me. A female Egyptian journalist working with me at the Times, Mayy el-Sheikh, covered a seminar on marriage counseling sponsored by a nonprofit affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s leadership officially opposed the practice, but the male “expert” in charge of the seminar told the class to consult a doctor about the possible need. Sometimes the clitoris was simply too large, he said, like an inflamed appendix.

  What solution did Tallawy, of the National Council, propose? Harsher punishments. “A firm attitude,” she said. “They should do that about everything else—the attitudes, the behavior, the wrongdoing, in driving, in using words, and in all the social issues.”

 
What did she think of the virginity tests? Tallawy made excuses for the soldiers. “We discovered that this test was an old thing. It had been a settled rule for ages, since King Farouk. And why? Because they think that this is a protection against any woman who might say that she was raped by X or Y in the military.”

  Couldn’t a woman who was no longer a virgin claim to have been raped? I asked, incredulous. Of course, Tallawy said quickly, but Egypt was different than the United States. In Egypt, “if your ID card says you are a mademoiselle, or anissa, that automatically means you are a virgin. . . .” I was too embarrassed to press the question.

  Not long before I had arrived in Egypt, a Dutch radio journalist had broadcast a translation of an Arabic advertisement for “fake hymens,” aimed at brides who sought to feign virginity on their wedding nights. The Egyptian news media reeled in shock. Mubarak’s rubber-stamp Parliament debated a ban, and the religious scholars at the state-sponsored Al Azhar Institute concluded that the devices were criminally deceitful. Commercial fraud statutes already prohibited fake hymens, they said. The ruse duped grooms.

  I wondered if fake hymens were still around after the scandal, so a female Egyptian friend and I went on a hunt. She told me that the devices arrived from China and pharmacists procured them from the medical supply district, a crosshatch of narrow, filthy alleys off Qasr el-Aini Street near the Cairo University medical school. Rows of wheelchairs, stretchers, and treadmills gathered dust outside storefronts jammed with blood-sugar monitors, stethoscopes, and surgical clamps. Tucked into the corners of some windows, though, were handheld electrical “back massagers”—often long, narrow, and pink (but never labeled vibrators).

  Everyone was as blasé as if we were asking about dentures. “Go ask Mena. He can help you!” a middle-aged customer in a head scarf told us when she overheard our question at RFA Medica. But if I—a male foreigner—was doing the asking, the shopkeepers were all sold out just at the moment. Each suggested another store up the street. So at a medical supply shop called el-Nour—“the Light”—my friend left me outside. A recording of a Quran recitation was playing in the background, and the female store clerk giggled slightly. But she happily called the male shopkeeper.

  “Are you a patient or a doctor?” the shopkeeper asked. Did she need advice on the use of her new hymen? He offered a referral to a doctor who could help. Or perhaps my friend would like a large box of several hymens, for resale to friends, like Tupperware?

  We paid the equivalent of fifty dollars for one; I later learned that the going rate was about ten dollars. It came in a reflective foil packet about the size of a playing card. Inside was a tiny, clear-plastic rectangle full of red dye, for insertion into the vagina before intercourse. Ideally, it would burst after penetration to simulate bleeding. The bride should avoid other strenuous activities—like running or dancing—to avoid a premature rupture.

  Some brides went further. “Hymen restorations,” performed by gynecologists, could entail suturing together fragments of the hymen, or lacerating the inside of the vaginal opening to induce bleeding. “Laceration is painful and could lead to infection,” one gynecologist explained. “It takes up to a week to recover from it and it is usually done a day before the wedding. We would only do it to women who have been—I don’t know how to say this—at it for a long time. . . .” The price varied from about two hundred dollars to about eight hundred dollars, depending on how affluent the neighborhood is or how wealthy the patient, the gynecologist said.

  The mystery of virginity: are so many Egyptians unaware that not all virgins bleed, or that hymens break without sex? I heard agonizing stories of wedding-night ignorance (among Muslims and Christians alike). Yet the steady demand for virginity fabrications testified to a level of activity that defied the public prudishness.

  “Sex in the Arab world is the opposite of sports,” Shereen El Feki, a British Egyptian who wrote a book on the subject, once told me. “Everyone talks about sports but nobody plays. Sex is the inverse.”

  Feki perused the many, many lingerie shops of downtown Cairo that I never dared enter. “While the shopwindows are provocative, the sheer luridness of the stock inside is breathtaking. Mere words cannot do justice to the fevered imaginations that would create thongs adorned with plastic scorpions or a bra whose daisy-decorated cups play a tinny version of ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’ on contact,” she wrote in her book Sex and the Citadel.

  The Mubarak government controlled all public opinion polling and censored sex questions. But in surveys of Arab-speaking countries outside the Persian Gulf, more than a third of young men—sometimes much more—reported that they were sexually active before marriage, often with more than one partner. But less than a fifth of young women said that they were active at all. Either a few women were very busy, or some respondents were lying.

  Arab sexual mores, of course, always fascinated Westerners, including me. Women in tentlike black abayas and niqabs glided down the streets in little cloisters of privacy like turtles in their shells. But young women hanging out along the Nile managed to follow an Islamic code of modesty to the letter but without the spirit. They covered their hair and arms. But they wore hijabs in eye-catching fuchsia or Hermès prints, and long-sleeve T-shirts stretched tight across their chests. They tottered in skinny jeans and high heels. One might throw back her head in laughter in a circle of young men, or stroll away along the sidewalk as half of a couple.

  Seedy belly-dancing nightclubs near the Great Pyramids catered exclusively to men, but a performance by a belly dancer was also de rigueur at upscale weddings, even weddings where all the female guests covered their hair. Street prostitution in Cairo was illegal but common, and there were also “summer marriages.” Those were temporary couplings of poor Egyptian women and Persian Gulf sugar daddies. The “groom” paid a dowry to the “bride,” with the understanding that he would divorce her at the end of his vacation. At one point while I lived in Egypt, the justice minister of a secular government all but codified the practice. He required any non-Egyptian man who married an Egyptian woman twenty-five years his junior to pay a seven-thousand-dollar deposit into an account for the bride, explicitly to provide for “summer brides” left behind.

  A decade before I arrived, an Egyptian-made movie called Cultural Film followed the quest of three medical students searching for a VCR and some privacy to watch a pornographic videocassette featuring Salma Hayek. They finally attempted to screen it in a mosque, and it was, predictably, a disappointment. But Cultural Film was a blockbuster: Even prudish Egyptians chuckled at their culture’s cheerful hypocrisy.

  I sometimes heard Westerners ascribe jihadist militancy to sexual frustration. The desire for martyrdom was said to derive from a Quranic verse that promised virgins in the afterlife. This notion had resurfaced so often in the West since the 2001 terrorist attacks that one dubious scholar had even named it: the “blue balls theory of terrorism.”

  It “reduces the political behavior of non-Western peoples to an elaborate mating ritual,” the scholar, Gilbert Caluya of the University of Melbourne, concluded.

  The “theory,” of course, is absurd. Egyptian friends rolled their eyes and reminded me of mythic Western stereotypes as old as colonialism: the oversexed and animalistic Arab male was the corollary to the helpless Arab female in need of Western rescue.

  After some effort I tracked down a self-described former jihadi who had immigrated to the United States and now insisted that in his youth in Cairo he had been drawn to violence by sexual frustration. “Sex-deprivation syndrome,” this onetime sufferer, Tawfik Hamid, called it.

  “You read that very sensual description of paradise, and you are willing to die for Allah just to have sex in paradise,” he told me, sitting in his apartment in Manassas, Virginia.

  In truth, he never got close to dying for anything. He had belonged only briefly to a nonviolent Islamist student movement in Cairo. Now he earned his keep telli
ng conservative think tanks, conferences, and donors about his titillating theory of Islamic jihad. An invitation to Washington after September 11, 2001, from a conservative Senate staffer had led Hamid to publishing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal (“The Trouble with Islam” was one title) and to meeting with John Negroponte, the director of National Intelligence under George W. Bush. Hamid showed me an email from Antony Blinken, a senior official in the Obama administration, thanking him for a meeting and introducing him to a senior State Department official. Hamid had gone far playing into Western stereotypes about Muslims, sex, and gender. Most feminists I met in Egypt thought those stereotypes infused Western worries about the loss of Suzanne Mubarak, too.

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  • • •

  First Lady” feminists never criticized the army, the police, the intelligence agencies, the generals, or the president. But these authorities all took advantage of the cultural stigmas around women’s sexuality. The police tormented Islamists by intruding on their wives and daughters in raids on their homes. Domestic intelligence agencies spied on female politicians or rights advocates, then used information about their personal lives for blackmail. Or they snooped on the female relatives of their targets: the photographs of ElBaradei’s daughter in a bathing suit were a mild example.

  At street demonstrations, the soldiers, police, and baltagiya could assault female activists with extra impunity. Any woman who complained would end up taking the blame. Why did she expose herself like that? Where was her father, her husband, or her brother? Who, now, would marry her?

  Female activists told me many times about the case of Nawal Ali, a journalist in her forties who happened to walk past a street protest in downtown Cairo in 2005. Dozens of police in riot gear watched in silence as thugs in civilian clothes attacked, groped, stripped, and abused the women in the crowd, including Ali. Unlike others though, Ali pressed charges.