{"id":86603,"date":"2012-02-05T12:25:47","date_gmt":"2012-02-05T17:25:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=86603"},"modified":"2012-12-26T16:07:34","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T21:07:34","slug":"egypts-sexual-counterrevolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/02\/05\/egypts-sexual-counterrevolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Egypt’s Sexual Counterrevolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Article:<\/strong> Egypt’s Sexual Counterrevolution<\/a> by Khaled Diab in Salon.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> Half a world away from the Republican presidential primaries where candidates vie to outlaw birth control and promote abstinence, ban pornography and condemn the \u201csin\u201d of homosexuality, Egypt\u2019s first post-revolution parliamentary election was, thanks to the Islamists, dominated by similar issues.<\/p>\n

As the first anniversary of the revolution approaches this week, Egypt is facing a spate of urgent political, social and economic issues, such as mass youth unemployment, a tanking economy and a cabal of die-hard generals who just refuse to call it quits. But you wouldn\u2019t know it from listening to the discourse of Islamists, particularly the hard-line Salafist Nour party, which has focused attention on issues of \u201cmorality,\u201d including talk of banning booze, prohibiting or restricting bikinis and censoring \u201csex scenes\u201d in Egypt\u2019s vibrant film industry.<\/p>\n

Although women from all walks of life have been at the forefront of the popular uprising and are treated as relative equals by the revolutionary youth movement that has orchestrated the revolution, the burden of this moralizing, as is often the case, has fallen on the shoulders of women. This has led Egypt\u2019s secular, liberal women and feminists to look to the immediate future with a mixture of apprehension and worry.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Egyptian media spends hours and hours discussing bikinis and alcohol with presidential candidates, it tells you where women are going,\u201d says Marwa Rakha, an Egyptian writer, broadcaster and blogger. \u201cAfter the revolution, we saw women exposed to humiliating virginity tests, fired at, beaten up, arrested, molested and stripped naked by army officers. Why would I be optimistic?\u201d<\/p>\n

But why is Egypt\u2019s Islamic right so obsessed with sex and women, and seems to view both as the root of all evil?<\/p>\n

Rakha sees a cynical populist ploy. \u201cThey want attention, lights and media presence. How else will they get there unless they talk about women and their evil bodies?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are issues that people can relate to on a personal level,\u201d explains Karima Abedeen, a secular British-Egyptian living in Cairo. \u201cThey are also vague and not quantifiable and most of the people who use these issues as their platform haven\u2019t a clue about how to solve any of the other, more urgent social and political issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a more ideological plane, Muslim conservatives have successfully painted sexual liberty and gender equality as a Western import designed to weaken Egypt\u2019s Islamic identity and corrupt Egyptians. The argument is that only by embracing Islamic traditions and morals wholeheartedly can Egyptians resist Western hegemony and recaputure their past glory.<\/p>\n

\u201cFocusing on issues of morality sends a message to the community that parties like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis will protect our Islamic identity against the Western identity, which liberals try to promote,\u201d observes Gihan Abou Zeid, an Egyptian activist and feminist who is working on a book about the women who took part in the revolution. \u201cMany Egyptians believe that following Islamic orders would fix many of the current challenges that Egypt is facing.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this, Islamists and their supporters are confusing the symptoms with the disease. The reason Egyptian society is failing its people is not because it has veered too far from tradition, but because it has not embraced secular modernity enough, resulting in the relative marginalization not only of women but of young people too.<\/p>\n

Similar to America\u2019s Christian fundamentalists, Egypt\u2019s Islamists and other social conservatives are alarmed by the corrosion of the traditional patriarchal order caused by the increasing emancipation of women. The loss of centuries of male privilege, especially in the public sphere, that this entails fuels the panicky public obsession with what should be private issues, such as virginity and promiscuity. In this worldview, strong, independent women are regarded with suspicion, as if they are carrying a volatile sex bomb that will explode upon contact with freedom and shred the fabric of society in its wake.<\/p>\n

But despite the clear similarities between social conservatives in Egypt and America, the social context in which they operate is quite different. Egyptians on the whole may not necessarily be more religious than Americans, who seem far less inclined to abandon their faith than Europeans, but Egyptians interpret their faith far more traditionally.<\/p>\n

Secularization has progressed much further in America than in Egypt, where it has been partially discredited through its association both with Western neo-imperialism and the corruption and failure of Egypt\u2019s secular dictatorships. American Christian fundamentalism is a movement founded on freedom and imperial swagger, whereas Egyptian Islamism is a reaction to weakness and decline. The people who have been stripped of power in society for decades are focusing on those few areas on which they have been able to exercise control, i.e., \u201cmorality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whereas religion is a fairly flexible and personal affair in America, in Egypt, religion, or tradition, is more often than not about conformity. And those who challenge this hegemonic view often suffer for their \u201cindiscretion,\u201d as witnessed by the massive overreaction by Egyptian society pretty much in its entirety to the decision by a bold art student, Aliaa Elmahdy, to post naked images of herself on her blog to protest the growing Islamization of society and to demand freedom of expression.<\/p>\n

This traditionalist mind-set also partly explains the paradox that, although millions of Egyptian women have entered academia and the workforce, often outdoing and outperforming men, they have not become sexually freer but have had to compromise by stressing their \u201cvirtue\u201d through adoption of the hijab. As men lose control of women in the public sphere, they try harder to control them in the family, suggests Abou Zeid.<\/p>\n

Even Egypt\u2019s secularists, although they view women more as their equals, share the Islamists\u2019 objectification of the female form. \u201cThe secularists and the conservatives are two faces of the same coin when it comes to women,\u201d concludes Rakha. \u201cMost of the politicians in both currents objectify women; one side wants to cover us and lock us up, while the other wants to strip us naked and show us off.\u201d<\/p>\n

That said, there are significant differences between the right-of-center and heterogeneous Muslim Brotherhood\u2019s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) and the Salafis. For example, Abou Zeid points to the fact that the Brotherhood is not against women working, albeit within limits, but the Salafis want them to \u201creturn\u201d to the home.<\/p>\n

The Salafis, she also adds, want to force women to cover their faces, as demonstrated by their vigilante \u201cmorality police,\u201d who have been roaming rural areas of Egypt, though, fortunately, Egyptian women have been fighting back.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Salafis are mad. They represent the very, very dark ages. The Muslim Brotherhood are not all bad,\u201d says Abedeen. \u201cI think the fact that the Salafis exist should push the Muslim Brotherhood toward a less conservative approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to the likelihood that the FJP will align itself to liberal, albeit economically conservative parties, the wind is not yet out of the sails of the secular revolutionaries who have so far spearheaded change in Egypt, as illustrated by the defiant \u201cRevolution Continues\u201d movement.<\/p>\n

One consequence of the revolution is that it has empowered the previously marginalized, namely the young and women, and made them believe that they can be agents of their own destiny. \u201cAttitudes toward women are better among the young generation, particularly the middle class, to which most of the politically active women belong,\u201d notes Abou Zeid.<\/p>\n

This is bound to widen the gap between the young generation and secularists, on the one hand, and older generations and traditionalists, on the other, leading to a more polarized social landscape. \u201cI think that women\u2019s attitudes toward themselves have changed,\u201d observes Abedeen. \u201cThe new generation of women is much stronger than older generations and is much less willing to compromise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abedeen also believes that once Egyptians see what the Islamists are like in power, they will soon fall out of love with them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am trying to stay positive and tell myself that it is natural that people should gravitate toward a more conservative option, hoping that these people will not be corrupt,\u201d she says. \u201cI am hoping, down the road, that people will realize that is not the way forward for Egypt.\u201d<\/p>\n

It will be largely up to Egyptian women to carve out their rightful place in society.<\/p>\n

\u201cLooking at Egypt now, I see a lot of courageous defiant women, but I also see millions who realize how oppressed they are, yet do nothing about it,\u201d says Rakha. \u201cIt is up to each woman on her own, in her house, at her desk, in her car, on her way to and from places. This is an individual fight whose collective gains and losses will reflect on the status of Egyptian women.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: Egypt’s Sexual Counterrevolution by Khaled Diab in Salon. The Text: Half a world away from the Republican presidential primaries where candidates vie to outlaw birth control and promote abstinence, ban pornography and condemn the \u201csin\u201d of homosexuality, Egypt\u2019s first post-revolution parliamentary election was, thanks to the Islamists, dominated by similar issues. As the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nEgypt's Sexual Counterrevolution - Prose Before Hos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Article: Egypt's Sexual Counterrevolution by Khaled Diab in Salon. 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