The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014

by Daniel Handler

  EL RASHIDI: You’ve often been criticized for what people see as serving Western policy makers the kinds of narratives about Egypt and the Middle East that fuel stereotypes. Are those the people you want to reach?

  ELTAHAWY: I reach people who speak English, yes, and I have a large following in America, it’s true. But I’m also reaching people who speak Arabic. A lot of people on Twitter—the very same people who were angry at me over that Foreign Policy article—they were venting on Twitter and Facebook in English. They speak Arabic, too.

  I wrote that essay understanding very well that I’m privileged. And I wrote that essay trying to look beyond my privilege. I wrote that essay to address people who are also privileged, and to ask them to look beyond that privilege.

  I was interviewed by BBC Hard Talk a few weeks ago, and one of the questions that Stephen Sackur asked me was, “After what happened to you, where they beat you and broke your bones and sexually assaulted you—don’t you think that this essay was written out of personal anger?” Of course it was written out of anger, just not the anger he was talking about. My anger was a product of the realization that if I wasn’t who I was, if I didn’t have the privileges I have, I might very well be dead. If I didn’t have a high media profile, when I sent out that tweet saying I had been arrested, Al Jazeera and the State Department wouldn’t have picked up my story. Certainly not as quickly as they did. This hashtag #freemona wouldn’t have started trending globally in fifteen minutes. I probably would have died or been gang-raped or something horrendous.

  I was so disheartened and angry by those people who verbally attacked me. We have to look beyond our privileges and see how horrendous it is to be a woman in so many parts of the Arab world. Clearly the women I’m writing about are not going to read my Foreign Policy article, and even if they did, so what? They’re not the audience. That audience, my audience, is those who know how bad it is, and yet their privilege prevents them from being outraged enough. And it’s that outrage that will make our revolution really succeed. The revolution to get Mubarak out of our heads! Mubarak is still in our heads. He’s called Morsi now!

  EL RASHIDI: I know. It feels, at times, like it’s a farce . . .

  ELTAHAWY: It is, it is! And it couldn’t have happened any other way because we had nothing else available. The revolution is not over, but it will not succeed until we get women involved, too. That’s the social and cultural revolution.

  EL RASHIDI: Many say that the Muslim Brotherhood will serve as a catalyst for the real revolution.

  ELTAHAWY: The Muslim Brotherhood is going to help really pinpoint this. You hear how Morsi talks. You hear how the Salafis talk. You see how women are addressed in the constitution. Mubarak is still up here. [Points] He’s in prison now but still terrorizing our minds. Unless we get him out of our heads the revolution is fucked.

  EL RASHIDI: Just the Egyptian revolution, or are the Tunisians and Libyans and Syrians angry enough?

  ELTAHAWY: In Tunisia, Bouazizi was angry enough to set himself on fire. And that’s the analogy I set up in my essay. And in so doing, he ignited these revolutions. The revolution he started has to be completed by women, because that’s what will create the kind of shift I talked about in the US, where half the population stood up to the old ultraconservative men.

  EL RASHIDI: You just came back from a visit to Cairo. From what you saw, what do you think it will take?

  ELTAHAWY: For the longest time, the Brotherhood has been surrounded by this protected halo of religion, which they utterly abuse. You know how sentimental people are about religion—you can’t touch it. Well, once they created a political party and moved away from just a wishy-washy ideology, then it became fair game. Once they entered politics and the dirt of politics, became tainted by politics, they came to deserve all the things we chanted last week—that the people want the fall of the regime.

  EL RASHIDI: What do we do?

  ELTAHAWY: The first step is to break the halo of the sanctity that they surround themselves with. This religious thing. Egyptians have to recognize that they are religious and have faith and that they don’t need the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis to give them this patina of faith and purity. We don’t need them to represent us religiously. The revolution will truly continue when we recognize that they are not our consciences but our elected representatives.

  EL RASHIDI: And women?

  ELTAHAWY: Well, when it comes to women, I don’t know if the shift is happening enough. I see more and more coalitions being formed and people on the ground wanting to protect women, but I also see this bizarre, bizarre rage—and these weird combinations of power and sex—in which young men who are courageous enough to face up to our brutal police force, even as they are making their escape from the shooting and the tear gas, manage to find the wherewithal to think, “I’m going to grab her ass.” How?! It leaves me speechless. That’s the shift we need to work on. We need to address this horrible cocktail, this toxic mix of power and sex. These men are high on courage and power. They are the barrier we have to address. They are the mini-Mubaraks.

  EL RASHIDI: So what happened to those mini-Mubaraks during the eighteen days of uprising in 2011? Why were they so respectful of women in the square? Because Tahrir seemed a somewhat utopic place, didn’t it?

  ELTAHAWY: I wasn’t there for the eighteen days the way you were, and I heard from people what you say—but I also heard from people that there was a reluctance to talk about any sexual assault that was happening because people didn’t want to taint the revolution. I understand that kind of power, because it took me a very long time to be able to look at the revolution objectively because it was something I, like so many of us, had wanted for such a long time. Egypt is a very misogynistic country and that was not going to go away after eighteen days. That’s the social revolution that I’m talking about, and the one that interests me much more. I’m not interested in the politics. I’m interested in the personal as political.

  EL RASHIDI: In a conversation with Gloria Steinem at the Hammer Museum in late 2010, an Israeli woman in the audience said that it is very easy for you to be sitting in your New York apartment speaking about the situation in the Arab world, but why aren’t you there, on the ground, fighting the fight? You got very, very angry. But many of us have wondered that—why aren’t you living in Egypt?

  ELTAHAWY: It’s a legitimate question, and I’ve been asked it many times, it’s true. But the answer is varied. First of all, I’ve reached a stage where I can get the message out about Egypt without having to be there. And there are enough people on the ground to keep all this going without me personally having to be there. It didn’t need Mona there to tip the scale. I felt at that time, during the eighteen days, I could contribute more by being here and literally shaking the media. People said I was literally jumping out of the TV. You know I would go on CNN and the BBC and I would challenge them—they had headlines like chaos in egypt and I’d said to them, “This is an uprising, this is a revolution, stop saying chaos in Egypt! This is the most important time in my people’s lives!” And then the New York Times and Michael Moore said five minutes later they changed it to uprising in egypt. If I can do that, then I feel I’m contributing much more here then there.

  But I have come to realize over the past two years that the social revolution is much more important to me than the political one, and that to do what I really want to do I have to be on the ground. So I’m actually moving back, next month.

  EL RASHIDI: Do you feel that you will get a warm reception in Egypt?

  ELTAHAWY: I don’t speak for anyone—I only speak for myself. But in doing so, and in becoming so visible with my speaking, I know I represent something that needs to be there in Egypt right now. So many young men and women come up to me, and we have these conversations that are very important. For that I need to be back. And I need to write this book.

  But in going back I can’t lose my connection to here, either. To keep Egypt on the international stage, I need to
keep my connections here. This poster that I spray-painted in New York—hardly anyone recognizes me here. But in Egypt, it was insane, insane. I was waiting for a cab in the street and a woman got out of her car and said,

  “Are you Mona? I need to shake your hand, I’ve watched that video ten times, let me give you a lift.” She stopped her car, on the corniche!

  EL RASHIDI: Could you actually tell us the story of the attack, just for the record?

  ELTAHAWY: I was at a conference in Morocco, and on the night train from Tangier to Marrakesh. It sounds very romantic, but I spent all those eight hours on the top bunk of the sleeper compartment on this train just crying, following the news from Mohamed Mahmoud Street in Cairo, where there were clashes. One woman tweeted about how this older man came up to her and said, “What are you doing here?” and she told him she was fighting like everyone else. And he said to her, “No, your place is back there in Tahrir. You’re educated—Egypt and its future need you. I’m poor and uneducated and I’m probably going to die here. After we finish what we’re doing here, Egypt needs you to rebuild it and lead it to the freedom that we’re fighting for here.”

  EL RASHIDI: Goose bumps.

  ELTAHAWY: It gives me tears just thinking about it. And then there was this awful picture of a father in a morgue who had just identified his son. It just tore me up.

  And then finally there were all these stories coming in of boys as young as twelve years old, probably street kids, some Ultras—who have my ultimate respect since they’ve been fighting the police since 2007—going into Mohamed Mahmoud knowing they might die. They were writing their mothers’ phone numbers on their arms—so that if they ended up in the morgue, people would know who to call.

  EL RASHIDI: So you went back to Cairo.

  ELTAHAWY: I’d arranged to meet an activist friend outside the Mu-gamma. Just before I left the hotel my brother called and begged me not to go to Tahrir. He said a relative of ours had just been killed. He was one of the two people who had been killed in Alexandria a few days earlier. He was in his thirties, the father of two young girls—shot dead. I promised my brother I would stay out of trouble. Instead I went straight to Mohamed Mahmoud to meet my fate.

  Well, not straight—we had to take a side street because they were blocking the Mohamed Mahmoud crossroads. We went through Bab El-Louk. There was a battle happening right at the main gate of the American University—sirens, tear gas, all this stuff. I was tweeting all this time, and at one point my friend Maged turned to me and said, “Mona, your life is worth more than a tweet, put that thing away.” So I put my phone away, and we made our way to the front line.

  And we’re there, driven by adrenaline, pushing forward, past the ambulances, ducking from the tear gas, pushing, pushing, pushing. We went literally up to the metal barrier. And so I stood up on this rock that was there and I took pictures of these bastard security guys on the other side. Then this man takes my hand and says, “Stand up and take pictures, I’ll hold you.” I thought it was a bit odd that an Egyptian man was offering to hold my hand like that, but I kept going. And then they saw us and started shooting, so I ducked, and they stopped. These guys next to us were like, “Run!” So we ducked into a tiny fast food place.

  We now know that they were mundaseen—plainclothes thugs. We didn’t know this at the time. We thought they were with us. So we ducked, ran into the shop, and all this time the guy was still holding my hand. And then he started trying to take my smartphone. And I’m like, “Leave my phone, ya hayawan, ya hayawan” (you animal). And here we are, cramped in this small place, and one of them gropes my breast! So I start hitting him. We’re being fired at and he has the headspace to grope me!? And Maged is like, “Mona, we have to go, this is not the time.” But I’m like, “No, no, I’m not done.” I was punching him so hard that one of his co-thugs actually tried to protect him from me because I was so enraged.

  And then suddenly, there were riot police around us and everyone disappeared. I thought Maged had gotten away, but they’d actually taken him to a place where he could see me being beaten, and they were beating him there.

  So I’m in the shop, and I’m thinking, it’s just me and these guys, I’m a woman, what are they going to do. Ha! Beat the living daylight out of me is what they did. They were whacking me on the head and I was trying to protect my head with my arms, which is why this bone broke, and this bone broke. [Gestures] They beat me so hard that the bone broke inward, like this.

  So after this beating, during which I dropped my smartphone, they took me into this room on their side of the barrier, where they sexually assaulted me. Hands here, hands here, hands between my legs, hands in my trousers. I’m literally plucking hands out of my trousers and saying No and they’re beating me, pulling my hair, calling me a sharmouta (slut). And in the middle of all this beating, I fall to the ground. At first I wasn’t sure if I remembered correctly that I’d fallen to the ground, but then my bum hurt so much that I knew I had. And I remember this voice inside me said, “If you don’t get up now you are going to die.” Something made me get up.

  Then they started dragging me to this street that connects to the interior ministry and they took me to this small alleyway that led to the back of the ministry, where their supervising officer, who was in plainclothes and a leather jacket, said to me, “You’re going to be fine now, you’re going to be okay,” as their hands were still all over my body.

  And into this new scenario arrives this older man in military fatigues who says, “Get her out of here.” They took me into an office inside, and the sexual assault ended. But it was just me and the men sitting there. I kept telling them my arms were broken and I needed a doctor. I could tell from the swelling. And they kept saying, “Put your fingers together, you’re fine, see.” And I’m like, “But it’s my arms that are broken, you morons.”

  And then I made a point of telling every single man who came to question me that I had been sexually assaulted. Their reactions were amazing. They’d look away, they’d stammer, they’d ignore me. They’d say things like, “For sure it was crowded.” And this judge who was there to negotiate terms of a truce with them, said, “Well, what did you expect, you have no ID.” And I’m like, “Because I have no ID I deserve to be violated?” And he’s like, “How were they to know who you were?” Which is bullshit, because they knew who I was.

  EL RASHIDI: Were you scared?

  ELTAHAWY: No, I was fed up. But I was seriously concerned that they would charge me with being a spy, because I’m a dual citizen. And I’d lived in Israel, which is extremely unpopular with many Egyptians, and it could have easily created a case by which public sympathy could be on their side.

  At one point, some activists came in to try to negotiate a truce, and one of them had a smartphone and I got him to put me on Twitter. I tweeted “beaten and interrogated at interior ministry” and his battery died literally ten seconds later.

  Then this general appears—he might have been a famous one, I don’t know—and he turns to me and asks, “Why are you here, my girl?” I was like, “I don’t know, maybe you can tell me.” I told him, “Look, can you either charge me with something, so that I can know where I stand, or let me go home since I’ve been here for six hours.” He told me I was going, and then these two military guys appear, and when I ask them where we’re going, they say military intelligence. I refuse to go. I’m a civilian, why should I? Then one of them tells me to stop this Bollywood drama, that I’m going whether I like it or not.

  So we get into a rickety jeep, every bump I’m feeling in my broken bones, until we get to the military intelligence headquarters by Tiba Mall. It’s freezing and they keep me waiting outside for two hours until the supervising officer finally sends orders to bring me in, where they blindfold me and keep asking me questions like, “You’re Jewish, right?” And I’m like, “My name is Mona Ahmed Eltahawy, where did you get the Jewish from?” And he’s says, “The file that has come with you from the Interior Ministry is filled wi
th information . . .”

  I mention this because six hours later, they have the nerve to tell me, “Look, Mona, we have no idea why you’re here.” They were playing good cop, bad cop.

  Finally some kind of officer walks in, the first thing I ask him is, “Why am I here?” and he says that it’s just a procedure to verify my identity. So we do this whole song and dance about identity again. And he keeps coming and going and disappearing for an hour, and he’d come back and be like, “Look away, look away,” which was ridiculous since I was wearing a blindfold.

  And in the middle of all this, as I’m telling him I was sexually assaulted, all he wants to talk about is the dirt on my hands. “It looks to me like you were throwing Molotov cocktails,” he said. “Look at your hands!” I told him that the dirt was from when his men were sexually assaulting me. And he says, “How do we know you’re not a spy?” Eventually I said, “No more questions. Either let me go or charge me and bring me someone from the American Embassy or a lawyer.” And he pounces: “The American Embassy? Are you ashamed of being an Egyptian? Are you renouncing your nationality?”