Tag: Mona Eltahawy

  • A blank space

    Pakistan censored a piece that Mona Eltahawy wrote about Muslim women and sex.

    Mona Eltahawy, an award-winning Egyptian-American journalist and campaigner for women’s rights, wrote an opinion column, “Sex talk for Muslim women”, that was published by the International New York Times on Friday.

    The article was available online in Pakistan, but the newspaper version, which should have been published in the opinion section of the local Express Tribune, was replaced by a blank space.

    Eltahawy told AFP that the decision to ban her article was an example of how Pakistan’s authorities think a woman “who claims ownership over her body is dangerous … and must be silenced”.

    Of course they do. Women get pregnant; that means they have to be controlled. Women – because they get pregnant – are property owned by men. Women have no thoughts and feelings, they’re just a blank space.

    “Where are the stories on women’s sexual frustrations and experiences?” she wrote. “My revolution has been to develop from a 29-year-old virgin to the 49-year-old woman who now declares, on any platform I get: it is I who own my body. Not the state, the mosque, the street or my family. And it is my right to have sex whenever, and with whomever, I choose.”

    That’s what they’re afraid of.

    Eltahawy said the censorship showed “a woman who disobeys and who openly claims sexual liberation and pleasure is dangerous and must be silenced” and cited a similar backlash faced by the Pakistani director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy after her documentary about honour killings won an Academy Award.

    “So many Pakistanis attacked her for making Pakistan ‘look bad’ and not enough attacked what is actually making Pakistan look bad: men who are ready to kill women for daring to believe they have the right to consent and agency over their bodies.”

    Let’s work together on that.

  • They are too tired

    The SOAS Student Union put out a statement about the process by which Mona Eltahawy was invited to speak at SOAS but then uninvited by the SU.

    An article has recently been released by the London Student regarding the alleged ‘no platforming’ of Mona Eltahawy. This allegation is untrue, and has not been discussed at any level within our Executive Body.

    Here’s the article; its source is the same as mine was: Mona’s tweets.

    It was recently suggested to us by a student that the Union put on an event with Mona Eltahawy. We approved of this suggestion and consequently were in discussions with the student about the format of the event (whether it should be in a panel format or just the speaker alone). We are happy to host this speaker.
    It is disappointing that the London Student chose to publish an article before seeking any kind of confirmation or evidence from the Students’ Union.
    UPDATE: See below a statement from Aida Balafkan & Jonelle Twum, our Part-Time Womens’ Officers (full-time students).
    “On Wednesday 4th of November, we (Aida and Jonelle) were in conversation with a student about having an event with Mona Eltahawy. We were told by the student that Mona can only be available on “9th of December after 5pm” and that she needs to know as soon as possible because Mona needs to change her travel plans if we decided to have her.

    We are both part-time officers, doing full time degrees and we can only host events if we have the time and the energy. After having a discussion with one of the Co-Presidents of the Union we decided that would be best to use this opportunity to host a panel discussion to create a dialogue. However, that meant more workload for the two of us. We tried our best to look for other panellists but again the time and energy that we had was very limited. We also find out there was no suitable room available on that specific date.

    Already working on two events for the end of November, one on a panel discussion about intergenerational feminism on 30th, having essay deadlines in December and the limited time we had, we decided to withdraw and not host any event in December. The decision was never based around whether we should have Mona Eltahawy as a guest but rather more on a combination of practical reasons mentioned earlier. We simply physically and emotionally could not organise an event in the short time we had. We can confirm that there has been no “objections” or “concerns” but rather some serious critical discussions around some of her works and views.

    There’s a difference? What exactly is that difference?

    Mona wonders why, if a panel was too difficult to organize, it had to be a panel:

    The statement goes on:

    We have never been in touch with Mona directly ourselves and the student has always been our point of contact. We are still not aware of the discussion between Mona and the student but what we can say is that we are saddened that the main reason for not going ahead with the event has been ignored.

    Again I would like to stress that we, Jonelle and I, decided not to go ahead with the event because of time and the fact that Mona had requested a quick confirmation from us which we realised we cannot give. There have been serious misunderstandings and miscommunications on all parts and we are sorry about that. Only one other member of the Union has been involved in the process (as mentioned earlier).

    It seems like a clusterfuck at best – why didn’t they just jump at the chance to hear from Mona and skip the insistence on having a panel which meant they couldn’t find the time to do it at all?

    It’s a pretty ridiculous excuse, really – “we decided she should be on a panel as opposed to doing a talk, but we don’t have time to organize a panel, so, sadly, we had to cancel the invitation.” The solution is staring them in the face: no panel.

    Sofia Ahmed is currently busy calling Mona names on Twitter – she’s called her a “native informant” several times over the past 12 hours.

    The statement concludes:

    Our Co-President Activities & Events, Zain Dada, will now be helping to organise the event.

    So I guess it’s happening after all.

    Meanwhile, Mona says two more UK universities have invited her to talk – just her, no panel – in December. Suck it, SOAS.

  • The Mubarak in the bedroom

    An interview with Mona Eltahawy when she was in Bombay for a literary festival (at which she was on a panel with Germaine Greer).

    In Why Do They Hate Us?, you wrote about Arab feminists like Salwa el-Husseini and Manal al-Sharif. Since you’d worked with Reuters and covered the Arab Spring, do you think the media ignores women undertaking their own revolutions?
    Yes, there’s a tendency to focus only on political revolution. Reports from Egypt are all about the military and the Muslim Brotherhood. They barely look at social and sexual revolutions. But such revolutions are necessary for change. The media must start covering these too and stop the obsession with just political upheavals.

    Well you know how it is – men’s stuff is political and important, women’s stuff is just the trivial shit that only women care about.

    My feminism is secular because I’m tired of doing ‘my verse vs. your verse’. But I recognise that there are women fighting the feminist fight within religion, and I mention several of them in my book. Whether they’re Jewish, Catholic, or Hindu feminists, their work is important, because they strive to change a tradition that has no space for them. They’re demanding the right to reinterpret their religion.

    So I talk about women like Amina Wadud, the African-American scholar of Islam who, in New York, led people in Friday prayer as an imam. That’s unheard of.

    We need to be strategic and use our different fights to come together as feminists.

    …we can’t remain in our little ivory towers or citadels.
    Yeah, but when it comes to a woman’s ‘choice’ – and I use the quote marks for a reason – to cover up, whether it’s an orthodox Jewish, Muslim, Catholic or any other woman, I’m not obliged to agree just because you’re a woman and I’m a woman. I reject the concept of modesty, because it’s imposed only on girls and women. So when one says it’s her ‘choice’, I say fine, but I do not believe it’s a feminist choice.

    Choice feminism sucks.

    In the trifecta of misogyny – in the state, the street and the home – bringing the revolution home is most challenging, isn’t it?
    Absolutely. Revolution at home, against the Mubarak in the bedroom, is the hardest. Because the Mubaraks of the streets and the Mubaraks of the presidential palaces all head home. Since men act like they own public spaces, women are pushed into the house, believing they’ll be safe there. But we’re not safe at home. We’re not safe anywhere.

    What about the revolution? Is Egypt stuck?

    I believe we’ve started something irreversible. Egyptians still live under fascism, still live in a military dictatorship. It’s a military dictatorship that offers us only Islamists (the Muslim Brotherhood) as the opposition.

    I reject both. I don’t want the fascist with the gun, and neither do I want the religious fascist. I want freedom.

    We’ll continue to play the music chairs between men and men unless we make progress in the social and sexual revolution. Because unless women are free, nobody will be free.

    The SOAS SU no-platformed her.

  • Just to survive is a form of resistance

    The Guardian talks to Mona Eltahawy.

    Were you anxious about the outrage you might provoke in some quarters by speaking openly about misogyny within your own community?

    I’ve got a lot of hate… But it’s hate from people I’m glad I’m pissing off. As a woman with an opinion, you get a lot of shit.

    Are all religions misogynistic?

    Absolutely, to some degree. All religions, if you shrink them down, are all about controlling women’s sexuality… They’re obsessed with my vagina. I tell them: stay outside my vagina unless I want you in there.

    No invitation, no admission.

    You decided to wear the hijab at 15. Why?

    I wanted to wear it at 15 but my parents said I was too young, so I wore it at 16 and very quickly realised it wasn’t for me. I missed feeling the wind in my hair. When I was eating, it would constrict the way I felt I could swallow.

    Mona Eltahawy: ‘All religions are obsessed with my vagina’ | World news | The Guardian

    So you stopped wearing it at 19…

    I became a feminist while wearing the hijab and to people who challenged that I would say: “This is my way of choosing which parts of my body I show you, so that you don’t objectify me.” But I realised it was very hard to hold on to because if a man cannot do that, the problem is with him and not with me. I was changing my physical presence in order for a man not to objectify me, rather than the man working on himself not to do it.

    After her assault by Egyptian riot police in 2011, she got tattoos.

    I realised I could use my body to send messages, not just words. When I started to read about tattoos, I found that a lot of victims of sexual abuse have them as a way of reclaiming their body, to take it back from what they [the abusers] did. So on my right arm, I have a tattoo of Sekhmet, the Ancient Egyptian goddess of retribution and sex. The way I put it, she’ll kick your ass and then fuck your brains out. She has the head of a lioness and the body of a woman. On my left arm, I have Arabic calligraphy and I have the name of the street where I was assaulted, because it became an icon of the revolution: Mohamed Mamoud street. Underneath, I have the Arabic word for “freedom”.

    She got bright red hair, too.

    You were named by Newsweek as one of the 150 ‘Most Fearless Women of 2012’. Do you consider yourself fearless?

    You know, I never ever think about that fearless, courage, brave stuff. It’s just what I do. I’m often asked, “Do you feel safe in Egypt?” and I answer: no one feels safe in Egypt. For anyone who continues to exist as a dissident just to survive is a form of resistance.

    Survive.

  • A book for the global feminist struggle

    Denise Balkissoon at the Globe and Mail talks to Mona Eltahawy.

    In Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, she dismantles what she calls the “trifecta of oppression” working against Arab women: the state, the street and the home, which “work together for their own benefit by keeping girls and women down.”

    She takes the reader to Jordan, where a man can escape a rape charge by marrying his victim; to Egypt, where unending street harassment leads families to impose curfews on their daughters; and to Lebanon, which recently decriminalized marital rape.

    It’s a must-read.

    You say many people are “all too happy to hear how badly Muslim men treat their women,” even when their own behaviour is sexist.

    It troubles me deeply that the group that speaks the loudest about the niqab and how the niqab is misogynist is the right wing, Islamophobic, xenophobic racists. My point all along has been that it is possible to talk about misogyny within my own community and also call it out in the right-wing racist community that tries to use my words against Muslim men.

    That’s one reason I do my best to amplify voices that are not in the group right wing, anti-Muslim, xenophobic racists; voices that belong to ex-Muslim and Muslim feminists and secularists and liberals. There are a lot of them, with strong voices.

    Almost an entire chapter is about your opposition to the niqab. Are you worried that in coming out so strongly, you might alienate women who consider themselves feminists and believe that wearing it is their choice?

    This idea of the niqab being feminist is an idea I totally reject. I think it directly contributes to erasing women and it directly contributes to a very dangerous idea of piety, equating it to the disappearance of women. I know there are some who oppose my position on this vehemently, and that is their right. And it’s my right to say: Just because a woman does something doesn’t mean that I have to support her.

    Actually that chapter is about the hijab, not the niqab. Mona wore hijab herself for years.

    You’ve been criticized for writing in English. Who is the book for?

    My book is in English for a very personal reason: When I was 7, my family left Egypt, and English has been my main language, through no choosing of my own.

    This is going to sound very dramatic and egotistical, but the book is for the global feminist struggle. I think this is a real moment in which women of various ethnic backgrounds can see each other standing up. You can’t take down something like patriarchy and misogyny without naming it, and I wanted to put together all of these examples and name them. I wanted to name the women who are standing up in this part of the world.

    It doesn’t sound dramatic and egotistical at all. Mona is well placed to write a book of that kind, having lived in Egypt and the UK, Saudi Arabia and the US. Certainly her book is for the global feminist struggle.

    I hope it’s a best-seller.

  • Authenticity is about more than a layer of cloth

    The NY Times has an excerpt from Mona Eltahawy’s new book as an op-ed. I reviewed the book for the next Free Inquiry; it’s terrific.

    I chose to wear the hijab at age 16, soon after my family moved from Britain to Saudi Arabia. I wanted to save my sanity, and so I struck a deal with God: I’d cover up, as I was taught a good Muslim girl should, if God would save me from a breakdown that I was sure would come in that country where women were considered the walking embodiment of sin. I wanted to hide — from eyes and hands that made going out anywhere, especially unaccompanied, hellish.

    Almost immediately, I missed the wind in my hair. When I caught my reflection in a window, I did not recognize myself. I wanted to reconcile the internal and external me, but I was to discover that choosing to wear the hijab is much easier than choosing to take it off.

    I finally summoned the courage to stop wearing it in 1993, when I was 25 and had moved back to my birthplace, Egypt. For years, despite my inner doubts, I represented to others my choice to veil as a feminist one. If a woman could choose to wear a miniskirt, surely I could choose to cover my hair? I wanted people to address my mind and to not objectify me, I would say. Ultimately, I could not sustain that line of thinking because, as a feminist, I demanded that people address my mind and not objectify me, regardless of how I dressed.

    Good point, isn’t it. Why should women have to bandage their heads in order to avoid being objectified? Why can’t they just be treated as people as a matter of right, and a matter of course, instead?

    When I was a child in Egypt, none of my aunts wore head scarves. Photographs from family weddings in the 1970s show aunts with bare heads and dresses, at times standing next to belly dancers who sparkled in beaded bikinis and gauzy chiffon barely covering their legs. In today’s weddings, most of my aunts and their daughters are covered up, and there are no belly dancers.

    Isn’t that sad? Time moving in the wrong direction – back to more restraints on women instead of fewer or none.

    [T]he political revolutions that began in 2010 in the Middle East and North Africa have also inspired us to challenge social mores long taken for granted. Because I have finally been open about the fact that I once wore the hijab, I have heard from more and more women who want to unveil. “How did you take it off?” they ask. “How did you handle family pressure?”

    For some who are rejecting the hijab, it’s their first public appearance without a head scarf in five or 10 years — in one case, 30. Many directly link their unveiling with the revolution and their personal understanding of freedom. What happens in Egypt influences the rest of the region; I see the pendulum swinging the other way again.

    My head scarf came off 22 years ago, but I have never stopped wrestling with what veiling means for Muslim women. Authenticity is about more than a layer of cloth on one’s head. To be acknowledged as more than our head scarves is the right of every Muslim girl and woman.

    Headscarves and Hymens is her book.

  • The moral amnesia that develops when a dictator dies

    The Independent talks to and about Mona Eltahawy, who has a book coming out (which I get the privilege of reviewing for Free Inquiry).

    Egyptian-American Eltahawy, who lived in the UK between the ages of seven and 15, believes the radicalisation of young Western Muslims is only partly explained by a “feeling of marginalisation and alienation” and being “lost between different cultures”.

    “For some people religion becomes their only form of expression and opposition and it can take a very violent turn,” she says. “This is not a majority of people who identify as Muslim. We are showing you can still belong to this religion; you can still be a Muslim and find other ways of expressing your divisions that do not involve this horrific level of violence.”

    …

    She has just finished her first book – Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, which comes out in the UK in May. It is an extension of her essay Why Do They Hate Us?, which provoked huge controversy in 2012 for its examination of misogyny in the Arab world.

    But Eltahawy, who lived in Saudi Arabia for six years after leaving Britain, is unapologetic about its themes and condemns the hypocrisy of world leaders who flocked to pay their respects after the Saudi King Abdullah died in January.

    Damn right!

    “I am horrified by the moral amnesia that develops when a dictator dies,” she says. Saudi Arabia, where women are banned from driving and cannot go anywhere without a male chaperone, is a “black hole of misogyny” that operates a system of “gender apartheid”.

    Saudi human rights abuses, she argues, go ignored “because of oil and because they spend billions of dollars on weapons” – and also “because [the country] is home to the two holy sites of Islam”.

    Well and also because it’s only women. Meh, you know? Who cares. Women are such bitches anyway, plus they’re stupid.

    The same cultural relativism arguments – “this is their culture; we can’t touch it” – that are used to ignore abuses by Saudi Arabia are used in the UK to allow practices such as female genital mutilation and forced marriage to flourish, along with the rise of Sharia courts, Eltahawy says. Liberals in the UK have not spoken out for fear of appearing racist, leaving the field clear for right-wingers such as Nigel Farage.

    Not all liberals in the UK, but far too many of them.

    As a member of Musawah, an international group campaigning for equality and justice for women in the Muslim world, she is vocal in condemning the appalling levels of sexual violence against women.

    “Slowly and surely we are beginning to talk about something that has never been talked about before, which is sexual violence on the street against women in Egypt, either from the state or from civilians. It has reached a terrible height of horror over the past few years since the revolution began. This revolution wasn’t about women’s rights.”

    They never are. They never, ever are.