Mona Eltahawy’s crucial cover essay for Foreign Policy (2012) needs rereading as an important corrective to the wishful thinking we’re starting to hear about prospects for women in Taliban Afghanistan.
“Name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt — including my mother and all but one of her six sisters — have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, 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…
Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet’s rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women…
Attempts to control by such regimes often stem from the suspicion that without it, a woman is just a few degrees short of sexual insatiability…
[W]omen are silenced by a deadly combination of men who hate them while also claiming to have God firmly on their side… The Islamist hatred of women burns brightly across the region — now more than ever…
The hatred of women goes deep in Egyptian society. Those of us who have marched and protested have had to navigate a minefield of sexual assaults by both the regime and its lackeys, and, sadly, at times by our fellow revolutionaries…”
And that was the Arab Spring, baby! Fasten your seat belt for the Ice Age.
October 13th, 2022 at 9:48AM
[…] sit next to them on planes and buses, erasing them and their images from the public square, making beating them legally permissible, etc. – they do want to kill […]