YASMINE EL RASHIDI
An Interview with Mona Eltahawy
FROM Bidoun
MONA ELTAHAWY HAS A KNACK for inspiring hatred. Egyptian activists and bloggers have called her an alien, man-hating, woman-hating, out-of-control psychotic. Non-Egyptian bloggers have called her a Muslim Nazi bitch. Pam Geller, the fulminator behind the Ground Zero Mosque scare, called her a “fascist savage.” A cover story on “misogyny in the Middle East” for Foreign Policy—titled “Why Do They Hate Us?” and illustrated by images of nude women painted black, only their eyes showing, like human hijab—generated tens of thousands of angry words in response. Sondos Asem, the young female spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood, decried her “one-dimensional reductionism and stereotyping.” There were parodies, character assassinations, death threats. Most people would wilt in the face of all this vitriol, ridicule, and angst.
Most people are not Mona Eltahawy.
Eltahawy, a journalist-turned-pundit-activist, seems to rather enjoy it. Since the revolution broke out in Egypt on January 25, 2011, this media-savvy New York-based Egyptian has fashioned herself its global spokesperson. And in the intervening two years, she has found a new career as a provocateur. Besides her numerous articles, she has taken her activism into the proverbial street. In November 2011, she took part in the protests on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in Cairo; an ordeal with police and military intelligence followed, including a sexual assault and broken limbs. In September 2012, she defaced a Geller-sponsored advertisement in the Times Square subway station (IN ANY WAR BETWEEN CIVILIZED MAN AND THE SAVAGE, SUPPORT THE CIVILIZED MAN. SUPPORT ISRAEL. DEFEAT JIHAD) with hot pink spray paint, before being dragged off by transit police.
As with most everything else she does, these provocations are documented exhaustively on Twitter.
I should say that I went to meet Eltahawy in Harlem last November still outraged by her Foreign Policy article, and by half a dozen other things she had written. I arrived at a café near her home prepared for a fight. Mona—everyone calls her Mona, whether they like her or not—unhinges many of us with her seemingly boundless self-regard, her bluntness, her eagerness to court controversy, and her—well, her one-dimensional reductionism. But in person, I found myself disarmed by her honesty and her thoughtfulness. She has a quite nuanced understanding of the criticisms leveled against her, even as she strenuously rejects them. By the end I found myself admiring the very shamelessness and outrage that make so many of us uncomfortable.
At one point in our exchange, Eltahawy described her night in jail after the subway graffiti incident. After a period of discomfort and mutual distrust, she bonded with a cellmate, comparing life stories and tattoos. And they joked about the unlikely pair they made: the drug dealer and the protest-itute.
YASMINE EL RASHIDI: You had a day in court yesterday.
MONA ELTAHAWY: Yes, you caught me at a great time. They offered me a plea deal that would guarantee me no time in jail, but I turned it down—two days in community service and two fines, including my favorite, which is almost eight hundred dollars for the Gucci sunglasses of the woman who came between me and the ad.
EL RASHIDI: What is the exact charge?
ELTAHAWY: Charges: criminal mischief, possession of a graffiti instrument, and making graffiti.
EL RASHIDI: You woke up that morning, September 26, and thought, I’m going to spray-paint that ad?
ELTAHAWY: Oh yeah. I had business meetings that day and it was very frustrating to me that I couldn’t go immediately over to the ads that morning. But at least I had a lot of chances to tell people, “Look, I’m going to go spray-paint this ad and I might get arrested today, so don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a long time.” I was texting and direct messaging friends on Twitter all day.
EL RASHIDI: So you knew that you could get arrested.
ELTAHAWY: Yeah, and I’m still going to plead not guilty because I don’t believe I did anything wrong.
EL RASHIDI: You wanted the attention . . .
ELTAHAWY: Absolutely. I wanted to get arrested. The way I looked at it was, those ads cost six thousand dollars. I don’t have six thousand dollars. What I do have—my capital is not financial, it’s my media profile. People know who I am. So I was not in a position to create an alternative ad—people said that’s what I should have done. And in any case those alternative ads people were making, as on point as they were, weren’t challenging enough. They were too polite. I was so frustrated, especially by what was happening on Twitter.
EL RASHIDI: On Twitter?
ELTAHAWY: My initial frustration was with Twitter. People were just venting about these ads. And believe me, I love Twitter. Love it. I live on Twitter. But there are times when you hit the wall and you need to get out. Like the revolution in Egypt. Against these ads, you need people on the ground, making it socially unacceptable to be racist and bigoted. We need a revolution, not alternative ads. I’m too angry for alternative ads.
EL RASHIDI: What are you angry about? Or is it a general state of being?
ELTAHAWY: You know, Yasmine, over the past few weeks I’ve truly been unraveling. It was the anniversary of the attack. I went back to Egypt for it, joined the Mohamed Mahmoud Street marches and memorials on November 19. So I’ve been feeling very torn up. The past few weeks have been the worst in my life, worse even than when I was attacked. I’ve been so low on energy and inspiration. At my rock bottom. But what happened yesterday in court completely reenergized me! It brought me back to life, because it reminded me of why I did what I did. It reminded me of the many fights I’ve had—and it reminded me just how much I love to fight. I love to fight! [Laughs]
EL RASHIDI: Following you on Twitter, one might think you live to fight?
ELTAHAWY: I think that those of us who are privileged enough to travel between cultures, to travel globally—one of the ways we can be most effective is find the place where we are a minority and poke away at those places. So in Egypt, for example, it’s a minority position to say that you are secular and want to keep religion out of politics. It’s a minority position to be a radical feminist. To say that they hate us, and that is why we don’t have any rights. I’ve found that for me that’s the most effective thing, to poke at the painful places.
EL RASHIDI: But you live in America.
ELTAHAWY: Yes, and here I’m in the minority as a Muslim. So I’m a secular, radical feminist Muslim, and people have to accept that. And the spray-painting is a part of it. I mean, all the protests that have happened over the past few years—the Danish cartoons and all that—including the ones against the ads over the summer, are most visibly led and promoted by a very right wing among Muslims. And they are most visibly promoted by a very right wing among non Muslims, as well. What I try to do with my work is to place myself between the two right wings. And what I hope to do with this protest in the subway is to take that sense of ownership away from them—to say that I am offended. Even a Muslim who looks like me, with my pink hair and tattoo, who defended the Danish newspapers’ right to publish those cartoons, is offended.
EL RASHIDI: Your critics say that you conveniently switch between your many identities to suit the news of the moment. American? Egyptian? Muslim?
ELTAHAWY: We all have multiple and layered identities. The American in me, for example, believes that what I did is part of the long line of civil disobedience in this country. The only way this country has changed is through civil disobedience. From the civil rights movement to the protests against the war in Vietnam—they all involved breaking the law out of principle. And that’s what I did. I wanted to get arrested. I did it out of principle. And I would do it again.
EL RASHIDI: I knew you in 1997. You worked at Reuters, had dark hair, no tattoos, you dressed somewhat differently. And you seemed sort of . . . timid? What happened? [Laughter]
ELTAHAWY: I think I’m just much more visible in my fight now. I think what has happened in my adult life is that the fight that has always been internal has ext
ernalized itself, more and more. I mean, I wore hijab for nine years.
EL RASHIDI: Yes! I thought I had a memory of that.
ELTAHAWY: Oh yes, from sixteen to twenty-five I wore it by choice. And that speaks to the kind of pressure that women are under.
EL RASHIDI: You were pressured to cover your hair.
ELTAHAWY: We moved to Saudi Arabia from the UK when I was fifteen. (We had left Egypt for the UK when I was seven.) It was a huge, huge, shock to my system to go to Saudi. The way the men looked at me was just horrendous. We went on hajj soon after we arrived, and I was groped beside the Kaaba, as I was kissing the black stone—the heavenly white stone that was tainted black by the sins of humanity. I was fifteen, it was the first time in my life I was dressed like this—like a nun—going to perform one of the five pillars of Islam in the holiest place on earth for Muslims. And I was groped! This guy has his hand up my ass as we are doing tawaf. I had never been touched in any sexual way before—I didn’t know what to say. I burst into tears. It took me years to tell my parents what had happened. Maybe ten years. I was so ashamed, even though I had nothing to be ashamed of.
So I got very difficult and troubling messages about my body. Which is why I have a lot of trouble with niqab, because that’s how it started with me. I felt so violated I just wanted to hide. And it’s very wrong, that the way we feel we can protect ourselves is to hide. It goes right back to what’s happening to women in Egypt today—women are blamed for sexual violence. They are told, “If you cover up, you will be okay.”
EL RASHIDI: But you uncovered, eventually.
ELTAHAWY: When I put on the veil I literally thought that I was striking a deal with God—“They tell me that I should cover my hair to be a good Muslim. Well, I’ll do that, but please help me not go mad.” And I was going mad.
For many women hijab is an integral part of their identity and they’re very comfortable. I respect that. But to me it was very uncomfortable. The internal me and the external me were so far apart. It took me eight years to take it off. And the fight you see today is one I’ve had inside me all along, it just needed all this time to become so visible.
EL RASHIDI: You wrote an article in Foreign Policy last spring that made people very, very angry: “Why Do They Hate Us?”
ELTAHAWY: There was no sinister plot, like people think. It’s really simple. They wrote and asked if I would like to write a piece on women’s rights, and I said yes. And I think it’s really disingenuous of the people who are asking why I wrote it for Foreign Policy, and why in English—it got to them, didn’t it? It found its intended audience. Secondly, no Arabic-language publication would ever have published that, and none would have invited me to write it. I used to write in Arabic. I had a weekly column in Asharq Alawsat, until they banned me.
EL RASHIDI: What happened?
ELTAHAWY: They never give you a reason, they just drop you. But it might have had something to do with the anti-Mubarak Kifaya protests in 2005. I had been called into state security for an op-ed I wrote in the International Herald Tribune entitled “How Egypt Hijacked Democracy.” Anyway, the point is, I have experience with Arabic language media and I know they would never touch this subject, especially since I wanted to talk about religion and culture and how it creates this toxic mix, this mess we live in. And in the age of social media, I found that the people I wanted to reach were exactly the ones I reached, because the piece was available online.
EL RASHIDI: I woke up one morning and logged onto Facebook or Twitter or both, and that piece was everywhere.
ELTAHAWY: I know! It’s like I set the world on fire!
EL RASHIDI: So you were happy with the reaction?
ELTAHAWY: It was an interesting and gratifying and gruelling experience. The attacks were very personal. As a writer, I know that on any given day, twenty-five percent of the people will disagree with what I say. But it’s the way that they disagree that makes it really interesting. It would be an interesting experiment to change the byline on that piece and see how they would react.
EL RASHIDI: But let’s face it, the images were offensive—chosen, it seemed, by that very right-wing contingency you spoke of earlier?
ELTAHAWY: I know many people reacted in a very gut way to them, but I had nothing to do with the images. I didn’t choose them. They didn’t run them by me.
EL RASHIDI: Were you surprised when you saw them?
ELTAHAWY: You know, overall, I’m very proud of the piece. I’m very pleased with that piece. And in fact I’m going to write a book based on it over the next few months. So for those people who say I generalize and skim the surface, well, it was only three thousand words, and now I’m going to turn it into sixty thousand.
EL RASHIDI: People are going to love that.
ELTAHAWY: I want my book to be called Headscarves and Hymens, because for a very long time I’ve been working on a theory that we women from our part of the world are identified by what’s on our head and what’s between our legs—the presence or absence thereof. What do you think? [Laughs]
I obviously want to provoke. I’ve been writing for more than twenty years, I know what I’m doing. With that article, I wanted to provoke and I was very gratified by the response. I’m glad that it hit people in the gut, because it’s outrageous what’s happening. I am astounded that people are more outraged by what I wrote and how I wrote it and where I wrote it and how it was headlined than they are about what actually happened to the women I wrote about.
EL RASHIDI: We have a knee-jerk hypersensitivity to the West.
ELTAHAWY: The irony is that we have this hypersensitivity while at the same time we are always saying, “You don’t matter, you are not the center of our universe.” That sensitivity makes them the center of our universe. That’s another reason why I wrote it for FP.
EL RASHIDI: The love-hate-need problem.
ELTAHAWY: I made a point in that piece that I think is important. For that audience, which includes foreign policy pundits and diplomats—you are going to be sitting down with our government, which is largely dominated by Islamists, and they will tell you to mind your own business. That the way we treat our women is religious and cultural. That you can’t interfere. And this is where the international community has to stick to its conscience, because there are international standards by which you have to treat human beings, including women. And if you don’t treat them by those standards, then you have to be willing to say, We aren’t going to do business with you. We’re going to boycott you. This has to happen. We as women are always being sold out. We’re sold out before anybody.
EL RASHIDI: Like Saudi Arabia and America?
ELTAHAWY: Exactly! How can you have a strategic ally that treats fifty percent of its population like children? It’s gender apartheid. The world boycotted South Africa. If the world can boycott South Africa, it can divest from Saudi.
EL RASHIDI: But the US props up Saudi because of oil. And it’s now propping up the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the name of longterm stability . . .
ELTAHAWY: Absolutely. The US props up any government that will guarantee stability. They supported Mubarak before the Brotherhood. Anyone who guarantees that oil will flow freely and the Camp David agreements will remain untouched. I don’t see a sinister plot in which Obama sat down and said he would help the Brotherhood rise to power, I really don’t. What I see, and what I hate this administration for, is him asking, “Who’s going to keep everything running so that our interests aren’t jeopardized?”
And that’s where, as an American, I say, “This is a fucked-up foreign policy.”
EL RASHIDI: But you voted for Obama?
ELTAHAWY: I voted for Obama because I was standing up to the Christian Brotherhood of America. And if these old, ultraconservative fundamentalist lunatics could be defeated by a coalition of women, youth, and minorities here in this country, then why the hell can’t we do that in Egypt? That’s our responsibility. We didn’t need America to get rid of Mubarak. And please quote m
e on this—as an Egyptian American, I say, “Fuck the Americans. Who are the Americans? We are in charge. We control our destiny, not the Americans.”
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