To my fellow Egyptian feminists

By Dina Wahba

This is written with love, respect and in solidarity.

I present in this article a brief critique of the contemporary Egyptian feminist movement. I hope that this would be considered constructive criticism and channeled in a way that would strengthen the movement.

Orientalist tropes

Nicola pratt wrote an important article published in Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies newsletter. In this article she accused the international community of using an Orientalist narrative in dealing with women’s rights in the Middle East. I couldn’t agree more with her but I would like to add to this argument that we as Egyptian feminists export an Orientalist discourse. We reinforce ideas that victimizes all women and denies them their agency as well demonize all men.

Sexual harassment discourse

We seem to be trapped into the sexual harassment narrative. As if we have no other issue pertaining to women’s rights. We don’t link sexual harassment with the global narrative pertaining to violence against women in general nor do we link sexual harassment to wider struggles. We seem to be very outspoken about sexual harassment while silent on all other issues that could be more relevant to greater groups of women and men in our society. We keep narrowing down the discourse till it became only about sexual harassment against protestors.

SOURCE: AP/ Khalil Hamra

No critique

Everyone has comments on how everyone is doing their job yet everyone is silent about it. Not quite silent they speak behind each other’s backs. They vent out in small groups in cafes. All that is bottled up comes out in the form of gossip rather than constructive criticism that could revive the movement and save it from itself. The lack of criticism is a criticism in itself!

No reading..No writing

There seem to be a lack of commitment to self education. There are no groups working on gaining knowledge or producing it except for some scholars who write some papers. However, activists seem to have lost interest in reading other feminist work or writing their own theories even if in Facebook notes. It doesn’t have to be scholarly but you have to have something to say. A different world view to present. A stand point from which you challenge reality and it should be documented somewhere so that others could read it and build on it.

We teach we don’t learn

Arrogance is a sin and for a good reason.  We keep going around the world lecturing, speaking in conferences, going around telling others how to do things. Do we listen as much? Do we invite others to speak to us about their experiences? Are we even curious? We ask others to stand in solidarity, do we extend it? 

Dealing with authority

We don’t have a clear strategy to deal with authority. Do we talk to them? Do we boycott? Do we strike deals with political parties or not? Many central questions that seem to be answered haphazardly. Recently, I was asked to speak at a hearing in the Shura Council. Asking around, I found out that my fellow feminists refused to go. Nevertheless, they agreed to appear with members of the Shura Council on Television. This perplexed me. Are we or aren’t we speaking to those in power? Are we using the media to advance our message or are we being used by the media for sensational news?

“I will support you no matter what” syndrome

We don’t like the way some of us do things but we go anyway. We participate in conferences, workshops, marches and demonstrations that we don’t approve of. I found myself going and criticizing, going and mocking, going and disapproving but always there. Because we have to stand by each other no matter, do we really have to?

The events are overwhelming. We are running from this meeting to another to this protest and that march. There is often little or no time for reflection. But maybe for the sake of the movement it’s time to ask ourselves some serious questions. It’s time to reflect. I hope that this article spurs a conversation in the Egyptian feminist movement.

With all the love, respect and in solidarity.

Dina Wahba is an Egyptian women’s rights activist who participated actively in the Egyptian revolution and has been involved in several initiatives that aim at promoting women’s rights and women representation in the political life post revolution. The Women without Borders/SAVE team met her at Trust Women Conference in London, 2012.

Misperceptions work both ways: Muslim and secular women need to work for inclusive dialogue

Greater understanding is needed between Muslim and secular women. Instead of criticizing one another's way of life, women should conduct an inclusive dialogue that recognizes the common ground that all women have. Arzu Merali of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, describes common misperceptions from both sides and why we should work to respect everyone's point of view.

They hate women, don't they?

"It must be terrible having to wear all that," a friend of mine was told last December as she attended a meeting to discuss the future of Afghanistan, particularly its women - "all that" being some baggy clothing and a headscarf. "Not particularly," she retorted, putting an abrupt end both to the conversation and to the prospect of building bridges between Muslim and secular feminists.

My friend is the founder of an NGO dedicated to penal reform. A convert to Islam, she is as British and as white as the participant who so earnestly assumed she was a victim of the Taliban and in need of liberation. No doubt the woman meant well, but no amount of good intentions justifies the way that she, like many others, berates Islam for embodying all things anti-women. This misconception predates the Rushdie era - indeed, so oppressed were we deemed to be in the 80s that even an illicit affair with Ricky Butcher in EastEnders provided an avenue of liberation.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission receives case after case of employers and educators using this image of the downtrodden Muslim woman to excuse discrimination. Muslim women are denied many opportunities on the assumption that they will - if not on a whim then by force - get married, or have many children. Or they face the horrendous dilemma of having to choose between employment and their Islamic garb.

Muslim women have become an absolute symbol of oppression, and distorted images of them permeate news coverage. While Daisy Cutters began to thunder down on Afghans last year, journalists from across the political spectrum - from Boris Johnson in the [conservative] Daily Telegraph to Polly Toynbee in the [left-wing] Guardian - maintained that it was Islam that oppressed Afghan women. Beware Muslims, they screamed in their unlikely unanimity. They hate women, don't they?

As soon as they turn their attentions to Islam, commentators become missionaries. Muslim women must be saved from a religion that reviles, objectifies and veils them. Everything is proof of this. Afghan women had to wear the head-to-toe burka (although it turns out they did not); were not allowed to work (although they did); and could not vote (nor could men under Mullah Omar's regime).

Even an Iranian (yes, Iranian) movie has become part of the iconography of the campaign to rescue the Afghan and, by extension, Islamic woman. Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar has been held up as a critique of Islam and its treatment of women. The fact that it may actually be an appraisal of the Taliban's prejudices is a subtlety grasped only by a few. It is almost impossible to find a mainstream critique of the horror of the Taliban that is not itself an Islamophobic diatribe. Muslims, who could provide such a critique, are left out of the debate. Their reactions might as well not exist.

The cartoonish realisation of long-held prejudices in the Taliban's Afghanistan has given succour to an anti-Islamic clamour that the experiences of "western" and "Muslim" women are utterly distinct. While western women are assumed to have, or at least be approaching, equality with men, Muslim women are simply the victims of terror and oppression. So unfettered are western women in this scenario that they are what, according to Johnson, "Islamic terrorists" are really afraid of.

But this language of liberation disguises an exclusionary discourse. Conversions in the west are increasing and more women than men opt for the faith. Perhaps, the argument goes, they are not able to see how oppressive their choice is. Donning the headscarf as a means of negotiating modernity invites contempt for Muslim women's non-conformity to a single vision of female emancipation. "No letters please from British women who have taken the veil and claim it's liberating," Polly Toynbee wrote not so long ago. "It is their right in a tolerant society to wear anything, including rubber fetishes." Either insane or masochistic, the motives and beliefs of Muslim women are voiced by everybody except themselves.

The polarisation and misrepresentation works both ways, however. Marginalised Muslims have accused liberal society of objectifying, reviling and unveiling women. Western society, they charge, is pornographic, voyeuristic and exploitative. The gender pay gap is shocking. None of this would happen in a truly Islamic society. Women's financial independence and property rights are absolute in Islam. No woman is considered a commodity and pornographers would face punishments.

While the gap between Muslims and the west is widening the most striking feature of each other's critiques of their treatment of women is the lack of dissimilarity. Violence, workplace discrimination, educational opportunity and a desire for basic respect from men are universal issues.

Whether we are western, Muslim, both or neither, we must wake up to the possibility that what we see as problematic for women is much the same whoever and wherever we are. Plastered over billboards, or banished from view, women are subjugated by patriarchy. Demeaning Islam excludes the voices of Islamic women and that liberates no one.

· Arzu Merali is director of research for the Islamic Human Rights Commission.

The Guardian (London) Friday June 21, 2002