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Authors: Mona Eltahawy
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the protests in Tahrir Square. (Emam was twenty-eight years old at the time.) She went anyway.
“There are so many women who like me defied their families,” Emam told Bloomberg. “The revolution is not only taking place in Tahrir, it is taking place in every Egyptian house. It is the revolution of fighting the patriarch.”
Another Egyptian woman told me she had removed her hijab while chanting “Liberty” as she marched along with thousands of others in January 2011, because at that moment that was what liberty felt like for her.
Two women who belong to a support group for women that I started in Cairo soon after I moved back in 2013 stopped wearing the hijab after the revolution. One of them, a thirty-five-year-old, told me:
“I took off my headscarf and I began to demand rights. The revolution has made me much bolder. I’m now much more likely to speak and know I’m entitled to demand my rights, especially when it comes to men. It’smy right to have men respect me as an equal and not as a follower. What the revolution changed was our mind-set; it empowered us to say, who am I, who am I in this country and when am I going to get my rights?”
Another woman in the support group made the decision to leave home—still a huge taboo in Egypt—at the age of nineteen because her mother threatened to lock her up at her home if she removed her hijab.
It remains to be seen if these women, emboldened to unveil, will inspire more women. I hope so. I still get e-mails and messages on social media from women distressed by their struggles with their families over their hijabs. One woman I know removed temporarily her headscarf at a doctor’s suggestion to treat a scalp infection. Her outraged mother contacted a cleric and asked him if she should disown her daughter.
In Tunisia under dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, women were prohibited from veiling in state-owned schools and institutions. Fatoum Alaswad, from the Ennahda Party, told me that during her law school days she would wear a beret so that she could observe hijab but still attend university. But after Ben Ali fled Tunisia the pressure against veiling reversed. Reports began to surface that Salafists were pressuring and at times attacking women who didn’t wear the hijab. Tunisian feminist activists such as Amira Yahyaoui, who founded Al Bawsala (a first-of-its-kind watchdog in the region that monitored the writing of the constitution and threatened toname and shame constituent assembly members who tried to derail the clause on equality between men and women), explain that even though Tunisia might be more progressive than neighboring countries, it is conservative and patriarchal, especially in the smaller towns and rural areas.
Yahyaoui told me (for my BBC World Service radio documentary
Women of the Arab Spring
) that when she first asked a Salafist member of the constituent assembly a question, he refused to answer because, he said, he did not speak to women who were “naked.” I laughed and told her the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood also had called me naked. Enraged at the Salafist’s description and the way he ignored her, Yahyaoui began to undress. Horrified, he asked her what she was doing.
“I’m showing you what a naked woman looks like,” Yahyaoui answered. The man pleaded with her to stop and took her question. She told me that when the constitution passed, she looked for the Salafist and hugged him in celebration.
I met Lina Ben Mhenni, a linguistics teacher at the University of Tunis and a blogger who was active in the revolution, at a coffee shop from which she could see the Interior Ministry, where her father was tortured under the Ben Ali regime. For the previous six months, Ben Mhenni, thirty, had been under round-the-clock police protection because her name was found on an assassination list of a well-known Islamist group. Theytargeted her because she defends women’s rights, is secular, and doesn’t believe in mixing
“There are so many women who like me defied their families,” Emam told Bloomberg. “The revolution is not only taking place in Tahrir, it is taking place in every Egyptian house. It is the revolution of fighting the patriarch.”
Another Egyptian woman told me she had removed her hijab while chanting “Liberty” as she marched along with thousands of others in January 2011, because at that moment that was what liberty felt like for her.
Two women who belong to a support group for women that I started in Cairo soon after I moved back in 2013 stopped wearing the hijab after the revolution. One of them, a thirty-five-year-old, told me:
“I took off my headscarf and I began to demand rights. The revolution has made me much bolder. I’m now much more likely to speak and know I’m entitled to demand my rights, especially when it comes to men. It’smy right to have men respect me as an equal and not as a follower. What the revolution changed was our mind-set; it empowered us to say, who am I, who am I in this country and when am I going to get my rights?”
Another woman in the support group made the decision to leave home—still a huge taboo in Egypt—at the age of nineteen because her mother threatened to lock her up at her home if she removed her hijab.
It remains to be seen if these women, emboldened to unveil, will inspire more women. I hope so. I still get e-mails and messages on social media from women distressed by their struggles with their families over their hijabs. One woman I know removed temporarily her headscarf at a doctor’s suggestion to treat a scalp infection. Her outraged mother contacted a cleric and asked him if she should disown her daughter.
In Tunisia under dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, women were prohibited from veiling in state-owned schools and institutions. Fatoum Alaswad, from the Ennahda Party, told me that during her law school days she would wear a beret so that she could observe hijab but still attend university. But after Ben Ali fled Tunisia the pressure against veiling reversed. Reports began to surface that Salafists were pressuring and at times attacking women who didn’t wear the hijab. Tunisian feminist activists such as Amira Yahyaoui, who founded Al Bawsala (a first-of-its-kind watchdog in the region that monitored the writing of the constitution and threatened toname and shame constituent assembly members who tried to derail the clause on equality between men and women), explain that even though Tunisia might be more progressive than neighboring countries, it is conservative and patriarchal, especially in the smaller towns and rural areas.
Yahyaoui told me (for my BBC World Service radio documentary
Women of the Arab Spring
) that when she first asked a Salafist member of the constituent assembly a question, he refused to answer because, he said, he did not speak to women who were “naked.” I laughed and told her the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood also had called me naked. Enraged at the Salafist’s description and the way he ignored her, Yahyaoui began to undress. Horrified, he asked her what she was doing.
“I’m showing you what a naked woman looks like,” Yahyaoui answered. The man pleaded with her to stop and took her question. She told me that when the constitution passed, she looked for the Salafist and hugged him in celebration.
I met Lina Ben Mhenni, a linguistics teacher at the University of Tunis and a blogger who was active in the revolution, at a coffee shop from which she could see the Interior Ministry, where her father was tortured under the Ben Ali regime. For the previous six months, Ben Mhenni, thirty, had been under round-the-clock police protection because her name was found on an assassination list of a well-known Islamist group. Theytargeted her because she defends women’s rights, is secular, and doesn’t believe in mixing
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