Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution

by Mona Eltahawy Narrated by Mona Eltahawy

Overview

A passionate manifesto decrying misogyny in the Arab world, by an Egyptian American journalist and activist

When the Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy published an article in Foreign Policy magazine in 2012 titled "Why Do They Hate Us?" it provoked a firestorm of controversy. The response it generated, with more than four thousand posts on the website, broke all records for the magazine, prompted dozens of follow-up interviews on radio and television, and made it clear that misogyny in the Arab world is an explosive issue, one that engages and often enrages the public.
In Headscarves and Hymens, Eltahawy takes her argument further. Drawing on her years as a campaigner and commentator on women's issues in the Middle East, she explains that since the Arab Spring began, women in the Arab world have had two revolutions to undertake: one fought with men against oppressive regimes, and another fought against an entire political and economic system that treats women in countries from Yemen and Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya as second-class citizens.
Eltahawy has traveled across the Middle East and North Africa, meeting with women and listening to their stories. Her book is a plea for outrage and action on their behalf, confronting the "toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend." A manifesto motivated by hope and fury in equal measure, Headscarves and Hymens is as illuminating as it is incendiary.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

02/09/2015
Egyptian-American journalist and feminist activist Eltahawy unleashes her passion and outrage at misogyny in the Arab world. Raised in Egypt and England, Eltahawy moved with her family to Saudi Arabia in her teens, when she notes she was “traumatized into feminism” by living in a country where women “were infantilized beyond belief.” Covering countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Yemen, Eltahawy highlights how women remain covered up, harassed on the street, subject to genital mutilation, and forced to get permission from a male guardian to marry or divorce. She does not shy away from difficult topics, such as the way some countries allow rapists to escape conviction by marrying their victims. Nor does she avoid her personal struggles grappling with her own sexuality, her reasons for wearing a hijab for many years, and her assault by riot police during the Arab Spring. Blaming the “toxic mix of culture and religion” evident in the modern legal codes in many Arab countries, Eltahawy is staunch (albeit single-minded) in her criticisms. But she finds hope in the “open mic initiative” in Egypt, in which women can broadcast their harassment stories; the march for women’s rights in Lebanon, led by mothers whose daughters had been murdered by their husbands; and women turning to social media in Saudi Arabia, among other examples. This is a timely and provocative call to action for gender equality in the Middle East. Agent: Jessica Papin, Dystel & Goderich. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

Turn to any page of Headscarves and Hymens and you'll find a statistic or anecdote to make your blood boil . . . [Eltahawy] has now expanded that [Foreign Policy] article into a book,Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, which blends her own story-an ideological journey toward feminism while growing up in Egypt, England and Saudi Arabia-with a sweeping portrait of what life is like for women in the Middle East. The same righteous anger that propelled her essay fuels her book. It's easy to see why she's so incensed.” —Bari Weiss, The Wall Street Journal

“Headscarves and Hymens is a small but packed manifesto, incendiary by design . . . With this book, [Mona Eltahawy] is wisely exploiting her fame to further her cause, which is the physical and emotional emancipation of Arab women . . . Eltahawy is a relentless cataloguer of all the ways the Arab world continues to cloak misogyny in religious fervor.” —Connie Schultz, The Washington Post

“Eltahawy has issued a bold manifesto for women's rights . . . For the sake of the 'double revolution' for women in the Middle East, it's a good thing that Eltahawy has remained fearless.” —Asra Q. Nomani, Ms. Magazine

“Eltahawy exposes hard truths about the current state of gender equality in the Arab world. She is brutally honest in her accounts of the oppression and violence that women regularly face . . . Eltahawy issues a rallying cry in hopes of ending the silence that too often surrounds women's issues globally. . . Eltahawy is unflinching in her look at the oppression of women in the Middle East and North Africa, but she reminds us that women are subjugated across cultures and that it should not be used as an excuse to demonize Islam.” —Stephanie Long,Bustle

“This is a timely and provocative call to action for gender equality in the Middle East.” —Publishers Weekly

“A remarkable book . . . Eltahawy is brave, determined, and at times deliberately provocative . . . Eltahawy's voice is full of energy, purposefulness and courage. Her rightful anger helps her to not shy away from difficult questions . . . Headscarves and Hymens is timely, important and much needed.” —Elif Shafak, Literary Review

“This is a powerful global feminist demand for equal rights.” —Vanessa Bush, Booklist

“In her debut book, Egyptian-American journalist and commentator Eltahawy mounts an angry indictment of the treatment of women throughout the Arab world.” —Kirkus Review

“This is not an easy book to read-why should it be? Eltahawy's Headscarves and Hymens is a story of terrorism and torture endured by bodies as fragile as that of a five-year-old girl and as vulnerable as that of protestor splayed by soldiers stomping her bared chest. Why should it be easy to encounter Eltahawy's own testimony of sexual and physical assault meted out as punishment for resisting totalitarianism? This book is not easy because it is born out of the ongoing struggle of how women can bear witness to their own abuse and oppression while trying to shield their families, communities, nations, and faith from the ugly and dangerous presumptions of Muslim barbarism that fuel Islamaphobia. It is not easy because it forces all of us to examine our ignorance, our complicity, our silence in the face of gender violence perpetrated in the name of religion, culture, and tradition.This book is not easy to read, but it is necessary. Necessary because the warrior journalist who is Mona Eltahawy refuses to leave women crushed beneath the feet of their abusers or hidden behind their veils. Eltahawy recovers women's activism, art, voices, humanity, and demands for a revolution that makes a material difference for them, their daughters, sisters, friends, lovers, and teachers.” —Melissa Harris-Perry, host of MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry”

“‘The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really matters,' says Mona Eltahawy in this courageous blend of the personal and the academic and the political. In the hands of Eltahawy, so many silences are opened. She writes about what others have largely feared: the body politic and the body sexual. This is a ground-shaping book that defines the edge of so many vital contemporary debates. Hers is a voice simultaneously behind and beyond the veil.” —Colum McCann, author of TransAtlantic

“Mona Eltahawy brings a journalist's keen eye, a revolutionary's prophetic courage, and a feminist's incendiary intellect to this work, demolishing the last cultural relativist myths. And she writes so well that it's hard to put down this audacious, information-packed treasure about the half of the Arab world that's female. Miss this book—the real key to the Middle East—at your peril.” —Robin Morgan

“One of the most powerful books I've ever read. And will ever read. No matter where she is-in Cairo during the Arab Spring, in the Saudi Arabia of her adolescence, in Oklahoma talking about American 'purity balls' with students, in a dozen countries across the Middle East and North Africa-Mona Eltahawy skilfully dismantles the religious, political, and familial machines that maim and silence girls and women everywhere. She is fearlessly honest about her own struggles as an Arab Muslim woman-to tell or not to tell when men accosted her in public, to wear or to not wear hijab (and how to take the hijab off), to wait or not to wait to have sex until marriage. She challenges men and boys, too, to transform themselves and their societies. Her honesty, her anger, and her unrepentant joy in being alive make Headscarves and Hymensmore than an important feminist manifesto. It is a meticulously, beautifully drawn map to freedom.” —Karen Connelly

“Headscarves and Hymens is a call to arms by a woman who's plainly proud of her justified rage . . . "It is the job of a revolution to shock, to provoke, and to upset," Eltahawy writes, "not to behave or be polite." Mission accomplished.” —Marcia Kaye, The Toronto Star

Library Journal

★ 03/01/2015
Journalist Eltahawy builds on the scholarship of women such as Egyptian American writer Leila Ahmed to craft an argument about the complexity surrounding women's sexual and political identities in the Middle East. The author uses her experiences of sexual assault as well as her conflicted feelings about the hijab to unveil what she identifies as false choices for women in Islamic societies. Her juxtaposition of personal anecdotes, media analysis, and feminist theory helps dismantle many assumptions Westerners in general and Western feminists in particular have about women in the Middle East. The overarching conclusion is that a sexual revolution cannot wait. Rather than view womens' need for freedom as something to work toward after resolving other forms of turmoil, Eltahawy explains, "This is our chance to dismantle an entire political and economic system that treats half of humanity like children at best." Such a revolution will be possible when, according to Eltahawy, each woman begins to "talk about her life as if it really matters." VERDICT Based on her 2012 article in Foreign Policy titled "Why Do They Hate Us?", Eltahawy's account is a strong, insightful, and well-researched analysis of many issues connected to Middle Eastern women's autonomy (e.g., the hijab, marriage, female genital mutilation). Her personal insights set this work apart. [See Prepub Alert, 10/27/14.]—Emily Bowles, Building for Kids Children Museum, Appleton, WI

Kirkus Reviews

2015-01-28
The plight of women in the Middle East.In her debut book, Egyptian-American journalist and commentator Eltahawy mounts an angry indictment of the treatment of women throughout the Arab world. Born in Egypt, she spent her childhood in London, moving with her family to Saudi Arabia when she was 15. Her shock was immediate and visceral: "It felt as though we'd moved to another planet whose inhabitants fervently wished women did not exist," she recalls. Women could not travel, work or even go to a doctor's appointment without male approval. On buses, they were relegated to the last two rows at the back, and schools were segregated by gender. Eltahawy focuses on six areas of women's lives that demonstrate men's hostility: the demand that women enshroud their bodies in public; maintain their virginity until marriage; submit to genital mutilation; have no recourse in cases of domestic violence, rape or divorce; are forbidden to drive; and suffer dire repercussions if they dare to speak out on their own behalfs. In addition to her own experiences, the author draws upon interviews she conducted for a BBC documentary, Women of the Arab Spring, giving voice to a wide range of women, including some who perpetuate patriarchal values and others who risk their lives to oppose them. Her discoveries fuel her rage and dismay. In the United Arab Emirates, for example, women are the property "not only of their sons, but of their babies," mandated by law to breast-feed for two years. In Jordan, a rapist can avoid punishment if he agrees to marry his victim. "When I married him it was like he was raping me again…," one woman admitted. In Yemen and Saudi Arabia, girls as young as 8 can be married off to older men. Although Eltahawy's passionate book contributes to the struggle against women's oppression, in the face of endemic misogyny, the potential for revolution seems chillingly remote.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169427738
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	04/21/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Headscarves and Hymens

Why the Middle East Needs A Sexual Revolution

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By Mona Eltahawy

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2015 Mona Eltahawy
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-86547-803-9

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CHAPTER 1

WHY THEY HATE US

In "Distant View of a Minaret," the late and much-neglected Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat begins her short story with a woman so unmoved during sex with her husband that, as he focuses solely on his pleasure, she notices a spiderweb she must sweep off the ceiling and has time to ruminate on her husband's repeated refusal to prolong intercourse until she climaxes, "as though purposely to deprive her." Just before her husband reaches orgasm, the call to prayer interrupts their intercourse, and he rolls over. After washing up, she loses herself in prayer, and looks out onto the street from her balcony. She interrupts her reverie to dutifully prepare coffee for her husband to drink after his nap. Taking it to their bedroom to pour it in front of him, as he prefers, she notices that he is dead. She instructs their son to go get a doctor. "She returned to the living room and poured out the coffee for herself. She was surprised at how calm she was," Rifaat writes.

In a crisp three and a half pages of fiction, Rifaat lays out a trifecta of sex, death, and religion that forms the pulsating heart of misogyny in the Middle East. Here is a writer who, when she was alive, was held up by academics as an "authentic" Egyptian woman, untainted by a foreign language—she spoke only Arabic—and influence from abroad. It is said that Rifaat never traveled outside Egypt, although she did perform a pilgrimage to Mecca and attended a literary conference in the United Kingdom. She was forced by her family to marry a man of their choice, with whom she traveled across Egypt.

Rifaat does not mince words, nor does she mollify. In the slim volume of short stories titled Distant View of a Minaret, she introduces you to a sexually frustrated middle-aged wife who wonders if her mother suffered the same fate with her father, and another mother who laments her youth lost to female genital mutilation and a society that fought her womanhood at every turn. The stories show women constantly sublimating themselves in religion, even as this faith is used against them by clerics and male-dominated society.

There is no sugarcoating it. We Arab women live in a culture that is fundamentally hostile to us, enforced by men's contempt. They don't hate us because of our freedoms, as the tired post-9/11 American cliché had it. We have no freedoms because they hate us, as Rifaat powerfully says.

Yes: They hate us. It must be said.

"The fact is, there's no joy for a girl in growing up, it's just one disaster after another till you end up an old woman who's good for nothing and who's real lucky to find someone to feel sorry for her," Rifaat writes in the story "Bahiyya's Eyes."

Some may ask why I'm bringing this up now, when the Middle East and North Africa are in turmoil, when people are losing their lives by the thousands, when it can sometimes seem as though the revolutions that began in 2010—incited not by the usual hatred of America and Israel, but by a common demand for freedom and dignity—have lost their way. After all, shouldn't everyone receive basic rights first, before women demand special treatment? Also, what does gender or, for that matter, sex have to do with the Arab Spring? It should have everything to do with the revolution. This is our chance to dismantle an entire political and economic system that treats half of humanity like children at best. If not now, when?

Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses against women occurring in that country, abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of women who have ever married in Egypt have had their genitals cut in the name of "purity," then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating "virginity tests" merely for speaking out, it's no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband "with good intentions," no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are "good intentions"? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is not "severe" or "directed at the face." What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Arab world, it's not better than you think. It's much, much worse. Even after these "revolutions," women remain covered up and anchored to the home, are denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, are forced to get permission from men to travel, and are unable to marry or divorce without a male guardian's blessing.

The Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East and North Africa stand apart in their terrible record on women's rights. Not a single Arab country ranks in the top one hundred positions on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet's rock bottom. The annual report looks at four key areas: health (life expectancy, etc.), access to education, economic participation (salaries, job types, and seniority), and political engagement. Neighbors Saudi Arabia and Yemen, for instance, are eons apart when it comes to gross domestic product (GDP), but only eight places separate them on the Global Gender Gap Report, with the kingdom at 127 and Yemen coming in at 136, the very bottom of the 2013 index. Morocco, often touted for its "progressive" family law (a 2005 report by Western "experts" called it "an example for Muslim countries aiming to integrate into modern society"), ranks 129th.

It's easy to see why the lowest-ranked country is Yemen, where 49 percent of women are illiterate, 59 percent do not participate in the labor force, and there were no women in parliament as of 2013. Horrific news reports about eight-year-old girls dying on the evening of their "wedding" to much older men have done little to stem the tide of child marriage there. Instead, demonstrations in support of child marriage outstrip those against it, and clerics declare that opponents of state-sanctioned pedophilia are apostates because the Prophet Mohammed, according to them, married his second wife, Aisha, when she was a child.

At least Yemeni women can drive. It surely hasn't ended their problems, but it symbolizes freedom of mobility—and nowhere does such symbolism resonate more than in Saudi Arabia, where child marriage is also practiced and where grown women are treated like children their entire lives, made to obtain the permission of a male guardian to do the most basic of things. Saudi women far outnumber their male counterparts on university campuses but are reduced to watching far less qualified men control every aspect of their lives.

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Nothing prepared me for Saudi Arabia. I was born in Egypt, but my family left for London when I was seven years old. After almost eight years in the United Kingdom, we moved to Saudi Arabia in 1982. Both my parents, Egyptians who had earned PhDs in medicine in London, had found jobs in Jeddah, teaching medical students and technicians clinical microbiology. The campuses were segregated. My mother taught the women on the female campus, and my father taught the men on the male campus. When an instructor of the same gender wasn't available, the classes were taught via closed-circuit television, and the students would have to ask questions using telephone sets. My mother, who had been the breadwinner of the family for our last year in the United Kingdom, when we lived in Glasgow, now found that she could not legally drive. We became dependent on my father to take us everywhere. As we waited for our new car to be delivered, we relied on gypsy cabs and public buses. On the buses, we would buy our ticket from the driver, and then my mother and I would make our way to the back two rows (four if we were lucky) designated for women. The back of the bus. What does that remind you of? Segregation is the only way to describe it.

It felt as though we'd moved to another planet whose inhabitants fervently wished women did not exist. I lived in this surreal atmosphere for six years. In this world, women, no matter how young or how old, are required to have a male guardian—a father, a brother, or even a son—and can do nothing without this guardian's permission. Infantilized beyond belief, they cannot travel, open a bank account, apply for a job, or even get medical treatment without a man's stamp of approval. I watched all this with a mounting sense of horror and confusion.

I would mention voting rights, but back when I lived in Saudi Arabia, no one could vote. King Abdullah had said women will be allowed to vote and run for office in the 2015 elections, but it remains to be seen if clerics—such as the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, who believes that women's involvement in politics "will open the door to evil"—will scuttle that promise as they did in 2009, when only men were enfranchised in Saudi Arabia's firstever municipal elections.

Yes, this is Saudi Arabia, the country where a gang-rape survivor was sentenced to jail for agreeing to get into a car with an unrelated male and needed a royal pardon; Saudi Arabia, where a woman who broke the ban on driving was sentenced to ten lashes and, again, needed a royal pardon. So bad is it for women in Saudi Arabia that tiny paternalistic pats on the back—such as the king's promise to give women the vote in 2015—are greeted with acclaim from international observers, and the monarch behind them, King Abdullah, was hailed as a "reformer"—even by those who ought to know better, such as Newsweek, which in 2010 named the king one of the top eleven most respected world leaders. This so-called reformer's answer to the revolutions popping up across the region was to numb his people with still more government handouts—especially for the religious zealots from whom the Saudi royal family inhales legitimacy.

When I encountered this country at age fifteen, I was traumatized into feminism—there's no other way to describe it—because to be a female in Saudi Arabia is to be the walking embodiment of sin. The kingdom is unabashed in its worship of a misogynistic god and never suffers any consequences for it, thanks to the triple advantage of having oil; being home to Islam's two holiest places, Mecca and Medina; and controlling the flow of petrodollars that keep the weapons manufacturers of its Western allies happily funded.

Then (the 1980s and '90s) as now, clerics on Saudi TV were obsessed with women and their orifices, especially what came out of them. I'll never forget hearing that if a baby boy urinated on you, you could go ahead and pray in the same clothes, yet if a baby girl peed on you, you had to change. What on earth made girls' urine impure? I wondered.

The hatred of women.

This clerical obsession with women's organs continues today. My favorite recent howler: driving will damage your ovaries.

"If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards," the Saudi cleric Saleh Lohaidan told the news website Sabq in 2013. "That is why we find those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying degrees."

Saudi Arabia follows an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam known alternatively as Wahhabism or Salafism, the former associated more directly with the kingdom, and the latter, austere form of Islam with those who live outside Saudi Arabia. The kingdom's petrodollars and concerted proselytizing efforts have taken Wahhabism/Salafism global, and with it the interpretations of Islam that make women's lives in Saudi Arabia little short of prison sentences.

Yet the hatred of women is not unique to Salafism. It is not merely a Saudi phenomenon, a hateful curiosity of a rich, isolated desert. The Islamist hatred of women burns brightly across the region—now more than ever. By "Islamists," I intend the Associated Press's definition: "An advocate or supporter of a political movement that favors reordering government and society in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam." This includes the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi groups who belong to the Sunni sect of Islam, and the Shiite militias in Iraq.

The obsession with controlling women and our bodies often stems from the suspicion that, without restraints, women are just a few degrees short of sexual insatiability. Take as an example the words of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular Egyptian cleric; resident of Doha, Qatar; and longtime conservative TV host on Al Jazeera. Al-Qaradawi supported the revolutions, no doubt hoping they would eliminate the tyrants who had long tormented and oppressed both him and the Muslim Brotherhood movement from which he springs. While al-Qaradawi, who commands a huge audience on and off the satellite channels, may say that female genital mutilation (which he calls "circumcision," a common euphemism that tries to put the practice on a par with male circumcision) is not "obligatory," you will also find the following priceless observation in one of his books: "I personally support this under the current circumstances in the modern world. Anyone who thinks that circumcision is the best way to protect his daughters should do it," he writes, adding, "The moderate opinion is in favor of practicing circumcision to reduce temptation." So even among "moderates," girls' genitals are cut to ensure that their sexual desire is nipped in the bud. Al-Qaradawi has since issued a fatwa against female genital mutilation (FGM), but it came as no surprise that when Egypt banned the practice in 2008, some Muslim Brotherhood legislators opposed the law. Upholding the credo of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which al-Qaradawi belongs, several of the movement's women are on record as supporting or legitimizing FGM, including Azza el-Garf (a former member of parliament) and Mohamed Morsi's women's affairs adviser during his brief presidency, who called FGM a form of "beautificiation."

Yet while clerics busy themselves suppressing female desire, it is the men who can't control themselves. On the streets of too many countries in the region, sexual harassment is epidemic. In a 2008 survey by the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights, more than 80 percent of Egyptian women said they'd experienced sexual harassment, and more than 60 percent of men admitted to harassing women. A 2013 UN survey reported that 99.3 percent of Egyptian women experience street sexual harassment. Men grope and sexually assault us, and yet we are blamed for it because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing the wrong thing. Cairo has women-only subway cars to "protect" us from wandering hands and worse; countless Saudi malls are for families only, barring single men from entry unless they produce a requisite female to accompany them. Families impose curfews on their daughters so that they're not raped or assaulted, and yet is anyone telling boys and men not to rape or assault us?

We often hear how the Middle East's failing economies have left many men unable to marry, and some even use this fact to explain rising levels of sexual harassment on the streets. Yet we never hear how a later marriage age affects women. Do women have sex drives or not? Apparently, the Arab jury is still out on the basics of human biology. Here is some more wisdom from al-Qaradawi: virgins must be "patient" and resist the temptation of masturbation, which he claims is "more dangerous" than male masturbation because if a virgin inserts her fingers or other objects into her vaginal opening, she could perforate her hymen and her family and future husband will think she committed fornication by having sex before marriage.

Enter that call to prayer and the sublimation through religion that Rifaat so brilliantly introduces in her story. Just as regime-appointed clerics lull the poor across the region with promises of justice in the next world, rather than a reckoning with the corruption and nepotism of the dictator in this life, so women are silenced by men who use women's faith to imprison them.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy. Copyright © 2015 Mona Eltahawy. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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