One day in the summer of 1974, I was getting ready to go to the swimming pool with a mixed-gender group of friends when my mother took me aside. “Remember,” she said, “that a well-brought-up young man does not ogle women.”
I was a teenager at the time, subject to all the usual hormonal energies, but I listened to my mother’s advice and to this day observe it. But as far as Egyptian society was concerned, within a few years hers had become a voice in the wilderness.
There is scant data about the incidence of sexual harassment in Egypt before the 1970s — the phrase hardly appeared in the news media until the ’90s. That is not to say such behavior did not occur, but today it has become an epidemic. In 2008, a survey by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights found that 83 percent of Egyptian women have been the victims of sexual harassment and 46 percent experience it on a daily basis.
Some blame unemployment, poverty and the influence of pornography, but the fundamental reason, in my opinion, is the influence of Wahhabi strictures on men’s view of women.
In 1899, the Egyptian thinker Qasim Amin published “The Liberation of Women,” a book that ushered in Egyptian women’s struggle for labor and education rights. The first woman to graduate from an Egyptian university did so in 1933. In 1956, women gained the vote; six years later, Hikmat Abu Zayd became the first woman to serve in the cabinet.
For most of the 20th century, Egyptian women were respected regardless of how they dressed and were rarely subjected to harassment. But at the end of the ’70s, millions of Egyptians started migrating to the Gulf states for work. They returned heavily influenced by the Wahhabi reading of Islam, which forbids the wearing of swimsuits and obliges women to wear the hijab and keep their bodies covered.
The hijab is now so prevalent in Egypt that an unveiled woman is generally taken to be a Christian or a nonpracticing Muslim, and most swimming pools now have women-only days. But has the spread of the hijab done anything for public morality?
Some Wahhabis, in fact, deem harassment a just punishment for a woman who exposes any part of her body. “I challenge the notion that a single woman in a niqab has been molested,” said the Salafist preacher Abdallah Badr on his religious TV show, referring to the Islamic full-face veil. “The women who get harassed are those in slutty clothing.”
That assertion is simply not true. The Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights study also showed that a woman’s dress had no effect on whether she was molested; in fact, the majority of victims were veiled.
“The root cause is the contempt with which women are viewed,” said Dr. Mohamed Abdelghani, a British-based psychiatrist quoted on the BBC’s Arabic website. “Just as the man in the street sees his own rights trampled on by state-appointed officials, he does the only thing within his power and abuses or molests women.”
There has, in fact, been a malign convergence of the ways that Egypt’s religious fundamentalists and its tyrants in political office treat women. Both want them to stay in the home.
When Hosni Mubarak was president, his regime used sexual harassment to punish women who opposed him. On May 25, 2005, the police set loose a gang of thugs on a group of women demonstrators. As they assaulted the women, the goons shouted that this was Mr. Mubarak’s response to women who came out to protest.
That episode, which became known as “Black Wednesday,” established a pattern of politically motivated sexual assault that has continued after the ouster of Mr. Mubarak, through the periods of rule by the military council and the Muslim Brotherhood. For the authorities, it serves two purposes: It is designed to inspire such fear in women that they will never take part in a protest again, and it aims to smear the male demonstrators, tarring them with responsibility for the attacks.
Initially, during the 2011 revolution when millions of young men and women occupied main squares throughout Egypt, sexual harassment in the crowds was not unknown but relatively rare. But then, on Feb. 11, as Egyptians were celebrating their success, Lara Logan, a CBS News correspondent, was assaulted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, in what many regard as an attempt to discredit the revolution in the eyes of the world.
The latest of these crimes took place last month during demonstrations to mark the appointment of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as president. On this occasion, a political motive was unclear, but female supporters of Mr. Sisi were set upon by a gang as they celebrated in Tahrir Square.
One brave police officer, Mostafa Thabet, almost lost his life trying to rescue a woman whose clothes had been ripped off and who was bleeding profusely. This ugly incident set off a wave of revulsion in Egypt, and Mr. Sisi felt obliged to visit the hospitalized victim, personally apologizing for the trauma she had suffered.
One of Egypt’s largest-ever manhunts resulted in a number of perpetrators being brought to justice. The recent tough sentences for sexual assaults may deter some, but to eradicate sexual harassment we need to address the type of thinking that justifies it.
There are two conflicting views of women in Egypt: a reactionary one shared by the fundamentalists and the supporters of authoritarian government, which reduces women to no more than their bodies, and a progressive one held by the revolutionaries, who regard women as deserving full civil rights. The revolution looks to the future, whereas the reactionary outlook harks back to the past. The line of battle is clearly delineated.
Alaa Al Aswany is the author of the novel The Yacoubian Building and other books. This article was translated by Russell Harris from the Arabic.