Ascent of Women (29 page)

My bet is that they’ll get it right soon. While touring the villages in the district of Kirinyaga, I talked to three groups of men: men over seventy, who were so horrified by discussing the topic with me that they suggested we meet in the woods out of the view
of the other villagers; forty-something men; and men under thirty. The older men were outraged with the suggestion that women should have the right to say no to sex, but they admitted that sex was no longer a big part of their lives, so if the law was passed, it wouldn’t really matter to them. The men in their forties said that they’d fight the passing of the law, they’d go to Nairobi en masse, they’d march in front of the legislature. But if they lost, they’d obey. The twenty-somethings? Well, they couldn’t imagine what the fuss was about. Said one, “The young men sleep with their girlfriends. The women do as they wish. They all go to work. It’s not an issue with them.”

At a public meeting to air opinion on the proposed law, John Chigiti, a Nairobi lawyer, described the discussion of the topic as a potential win-win situation for everyone. “We need to create a critical mass that can rally around this issue. Discussions like this are the way to do that.” When a member of the public asked about backlash, Melanie Randall, a law professor from the University of Western Ontario, replied, “They’ll say the law has no place in the bedroom; that this law breaks up families and attacks men; that it doesn’t value children. Don’t let that deter you. The strength of the backlash shows the efficacy of your work.” Her advice: “Diffuse it or ignore it.”

At the end of the event, the facilitator, Judy Thongori, a family lawyer in Nairobi, spoke for everyone in the room when she said, “Ten years from now people will look back at this meeting and say, I was in the room that day; the end of marital rape started right here.”

EIGHT

The Anatomy of Change

At Tahrir Square, we broke the barrier of fear. Once that barrier is down the people can do anything.

— H
ODA
E
LSADDA
,
professor, University of Cairo

C
hange is one part nerve, two parts knowledge and three parts tenacity. The new revolutionaries know that you have to speak your truth and use the law of the land to hold the state accountable for changing the status quo and then be prepared to wait out the naysayers.

But the process begins with finding the nerve to conquer fear. That’s what happened on Egypt’s Tahrir Square during eighteen remarkable days in January and February 2011 that transformed both the Egyptians who rose up during that raucous, dangerous, joyful revolution, and Egypt itself. This is a country that traces its history back eight thousand years; it’s where the pyramids that were built about forty-five hundred years ago still stand watch, evidence of a rich and storied past. Characters like Alexander the Great and Mark Anthony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar left their impressive marks on this place. Its ancient history also boasts equality among the sexes: women could own and sell property, make their own contracts, marry and divorce, receive inheritances and pursue legal disputes in court. Some, like Hatshepsut and Cleopatra VII,
among others, became pharaohs. Contemporary Egypt is a contradictory place that has embraced equal wages for women and maternity leave but also enforces draconian personal status laws that favour men over women in marriage, divorce and inheritance.

The women of the Arab Spring want change in their personal lives, but first they needed to knock out the dictators.

Hoda Elsadda was chair of Arabic studies at Manchester University in England when the first hints of an uprising began in Tunisia. The early rumblings of change rolled into Egypt in October, and as soon as it looked as if the seeds of a similar revolution could germinate there, she took a leave of absence from her job and went home to Cairo. “I had to be here,” she told me as we sat in her book-lined office in Cairo exactly one year after the hated Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign. “I couldn’t stay away from Egypt when the changes we’d hoped would come for forty years were potentially on the doorstep.” By the time Mubarak was ousted, on February 12, 2011, she knew what her own next steps had to be. “I went back to England and resigned from my job, because now was the time to shape the future of Egypt—I wouldn’t be anyplace else.” She moved to Cairo and took a job as professor of literature at Cairo University.

Elsadda was no stranger to protests, but the ones she’d been in before the Arab Spring were events with five hundred people surrounded by ten thousand police. In Tahrir Square the protester numbers kept swelling; by the end of the first day there were more of them than police. “I’m fifty-two years old. I wanted to show my support but was undecided about actually going to Tahrir Square, so I decided I would think about joining the protesters later.” In the meantime, her nieces were calling to ask her to go with them to the square. Her brother said to his daughters,
in no uncertain terms, “Don’t go.” She knew of friends who were literally locking up their children so they would not go.

Like others, she was drawn to the protest by activists like Asmaa Mahfouz, twenty-six, who put a message on her Facebook page about a week before the now-famous date of January 25, 2011. It read, “I’m making this video to give you one simple message. We want to go down to Tahrir Square on January 25. If we still have honour and we want to live in dignity on this land, we have to go down on January 25. We’ll go down and demand our rights, our fundamental rights. Your presence with us will make a difference, a big difference!” All Egyptians should come, she exhorted, “for freedom, justice, honour and human dignity.” And she added, “Whoever says women shouldn’t go to the protests because they will get beaten, let him have some honour and manhood and come with me January 25.”

Elsadda decided to go to the square on January 28, three days after the protest began. “We went—all of us together, the whole family—and we stood together for eighteen days. It was a kind of euphoria. I met all my old friends—the usual suspects in the human rights movement, the women’s movement, plus people you’d never expect, like my own brother, who became a born-again revolutionary.”

It wasn’t all fearlessness. She says she awakened every morning with some part of her dreading going to the square. “I had no illusions about the level of violence the state would use. But once there with all the others, I felt totally safe. I felt we were part of history, we were changing Egypt. We were taking a stand. It was very exciting, like an adrenalin high.”

She describes the value of being connected by a common cause: “It makes people better than each one was.” Although the
revolution is now described as the social network revolution and the youth revolution, Elsadda says it was neither. “It was the Egyptian people together who did this.” There were young and old people, some who had never seen a mobile phone joining hands with Twitter wizards. Women with their faces fully covered worked alongside secular women. “There is normally a huge gap between the rich and the poor in Egypt,” says Elsadda, “but this was eighteen days of solidarity. We shared food and water; we were united by a common cause. It tells you a better future is possible.”

She says the success was based on a single factor: “We broke the barrier of fear. There used to be so many taboos. Once that barrier is down, the people can do anything.”

~

They got rid of a dictator, but the old regime was still intact a year later when we met. “The objectives of the revolution have not been fulfilled,” Elsadda told me. “But now we have to give it time.” Justice and equality for all Egyptians is the goal, but women are working on changing the personal status laws, which contribute to such bizarre contradictions in women’s circumstances. On the one hand, the laws control the personal affairs of women; for example, a man can divorce his wife simply by saying, “I divorce you.” After fifty years of marriage, a woman can find herself out on the street. On the other hand, the country’s labour laws are among the best in the world for women and at state institutions, such as the university where Elsadda works: there, the percentage of women on the staff reflects the proportion of women in society.

Egypt’s personal status laws are derived from Islamic codes that dictate the rules of marriage, divorce and inheritance. This
legal structure is distinct from the rest of the Egyptian legal system, which is based on French civil law. During the past decade, the government has reformed some of the more egregious gender inequities in these laws, but women still face discrimination.

In 2000, when a no-fault divorce law was proposed and passed, a woman had to give up her financial rights, return her dowry and exempt her husband from any future financial obligation in order to get a divorce. Although a man could have a divorce simply by stating the desire, the so-called reform means a woman has to go to court, and she needs to prove physical harm as a reason for the collapse of the marriage. “You need a broken leg and a witness to the attack, and then you need to wait six to eight years in court,” says Elsadda. And the no-fault law contains a provision that was also a setback for women’s rights: women no longer have the right to travel abroad without the husband’s consent. What’s more, Muslim women are prohibited from marrying Christian men, and non-Muslim women who marry Muslim men are subject to Islamic law. The women who marched and shouted and stood in solidarity with the men on Tahrir Square thought that these unfair laws would be negotiable in the new post-Mubarak Egypt. But they were in for a nasty surprise.

It was during the demonstrations that followed the eighteen-day revolution—particularly on March 8, International Women’s Day—that women’s issues were brought into sharp focus on Tahrir Square. The hostility and violence unleashed against women protesters on March 8 shocked everyone. Women were harassed verbally and physically by menacing groups of men who accused them of adopting Western agendas and going against the cultural values of Egypt. Female protesters were dragged from the square and subjected to brutal “virginity tests”
by the military—some of them in front of a crowd, others reportedly in a kitchen at the nearby military headquarters.

Samira Ibrahim, twenty-five, had travelled from her small town in Upper Egypt—an eight-hour train ride to Cairo—to attend the protest. When we sat together in a café in Cairo a year later, her emotional scars were still in evidence. Clearly agitated, she fidgeted as we talked, checked her mobile every few seconds and spoke at a staccato pace. “They forced me to remove my clothes,” she said. “When I struggled, they beat me. They used electric shocks on me, and it was an officer who did the virginity test [using his fingers to find out if her hymen was intact]. I felt like I’d been raped.” Sexual violence was the tool men used to silence these female human rights defenders on the front lines.

Ibrahim is a petite woman, barely five feet tall, with cover-girl good looks and wearing model-like makeup. She turned up in jeans, with an animal-print scarf wrapped around her head in the new fashionable “big hijab” style that swirls fabric into a crownlike headdress, and carrying a shoulder bag with a slogan on it that read, “No to emergency laws, no to military rule, no to criminalizing strikes and protests.” She was feisty and furious at once. She’d made headlines when she decided to sue the military for the assault on her. And again when she won the civil case she’d brought against them. Although she was told by the military commander in charge of the men who assaulted her that the soldiers would not act that way again, the assurance wasn’t enough. According to Ibrahim, the soldiers’ description of the assault on her—claiming that a doctor had examined her hymen—wasn’t the truth. “It was an officer who sexually assaulted me,” she says. “They wanted to humiliate me. I wanted to make sure they don’t get to do that to anyone ever again.” So she lodged a complaint
against the military. “I’m not afraid of them,” she said. A month later, the military tribunal pursuing her complaint acquitted the officer accused of administering the virginity test. But Ibrahim isn’t through with them yet. She wants justice and says eventually she’ll get it by pursuing her case using internatonal law.

The line in the sand that the men drew at Tahrir Square on International Women’s Day is something the women protesters, who had stood with them through the revolution, are still coming to terms with. Elsadda says there may be an explanation for the vicious male backlash: “We followed the Western model of modernity in every way except the family. Even in the Nasser regime in 1956, when women could do everything in the public sphere, the private one was not touched. In the seventies, a woman minister in the government was actually stopped from leaving the country at the airport by a husband who felt she should stay at home. Until recently a woman needed her husband’s permission to get a passport.”

As for violence against women, Elsadda says the level is about the same in Egypt as it is in most other places. But, she cautions, changing Egyptian attitudes toward women isn’t easy.

“What I want for Egyptian women is the same thing I want for the country—equality, autonomy and fair personal status laws,” she tells me.

Although most people accuse the military of forsaking their support of the people in Tahrir Square and blame the fundamentalist Islamists for the government’s failure to fulfil the objectives of the revolution, there are two things that the revolution has accomplished for women: a sense of empowerment and bringing more women into politics. “History says women are part of the revolution, but once the political pie is divided up, the danger is
that women will be excluded,” Elsadda warns. After the protests, she joined a political party for the first time in her life. She thinks that the main challenge for women today is guarding against the backlash coming from all sides.

She raises a very interesting and little-known fact about Egyptian politics, which she calls the First Lady Syndrome. “One of the key obstacles that women’s rights activists will face in the months and years to come is a prevalent public perception that associates women’s rights activists and their activities with the ex–first lady, Suzanne Mubarak.”