He paused a while and then, trying to be cheerful, he said, “Would you like to hear Mohamed Munir? I have all his tapes.” He took a cassette player from his cart and added Munir’s voice as background to the sad scene. It was bitterly cold and the heater next to the cart was inadequate. We pulled our coats tight around us and blew on our hands to little effect. The customers were gone and the street was almost empty but he would have to stay until morning, as the cart owner required. I stayed a long while with him, talking and laughing. Then I took my leave and he embraced me firmly. He did not speak. We didn’t need to talk. I felt for him completely. I took a few steps away toward the square and did not look back, but he called after me in a loud voice. “Listen,” he said. I turned around and found him smiling at me and saying, “Remember me to Egypt. I miss it very much.”
Democracy is the solution.
August 25, 2009
Are Egyptians Really Religious?
For years I worked as a dentist in a large government establishment with thousands of workers. On the first day, while I was treating a patient, the clinic door opened and someone appeared. He introduced himself as Dr. Mahmoud, the pharmacist, and invited me to come and perform the noon prayer as part of a group. I declined, saying I would finish my work and then pray. We got into a discussion that almost became an argument because he insisted I abandon the patient and join the prayers, while I insisted on continuing to work. After that I discovered that Dr. Mahmoud’s ideas were widespread among the people working in the establishment. They were as devout as can be. The women all covered their hair, and at least half an hour before the noon prayer everyone stopped work completely and set about performing ablutions and spreading mats in the corridors in preparation for communal prayers. Of course they would also take part in the hajj and umra trips the establishment organized every year. I had no objection to all that because it’s a wonderful thing to be devout, but I quickly discovered that many of the people working there, although rigorous about performing their ritual obligations, were committing many serious offenses, ranging from mistreating people, lying, and hypocrisy to abusing subordinates and even taking bribes and embezzling public funds. In fact the Dr. Mahmoud who insisted on inviting me to prayers turned out later to have been tweaking the accounts and selling medicine on the side.
What happened in that establishment happens throughout Egypt: manifestations of piety are so widespread that a recent Gallup survey found that Egyptians are the most devout people on the face of the Earth. Yet at the same time Egypt leads the way in corruption, bribery, sexual harassment, fraud, and forgery. One has to wonder how we could be the most pious and the most delinquent at the same time. In 1664 the great French dramatist Molière wrote his play Tartuffe, about a corrupt man called Tartuffe who seeks to satisfy his basest desires while making a show of piety. At the time the Catholic Church raised a storm against Molière and prevented any performance of the play for a full five years. In spite of the ban Tartuffe become such a theatrical classic that the word Tartuffe is used in French and in English to refer to a hypocritical man of piety.
The question here is: Have millions of Egyptians become copies of Tartuffe? I think that the problem in Egypt is deeper than that. Egyptians really are devout, with a faith that is sincere, but many of them behave immorally without any pangs of religious conscience. Of course one must not generalize because there are many devout people in Egypt who are guided by their conscience in everything they do. The great judges who have fought for the independence of the judiciary to defend the dignity and freedom of Egyptians, jurist Noha al-Zeini who exposed the government’s election rigging, Yahya Hussein who fought a fierce battle to protect public money in the Omar Effendi deal, and many others—all of these people are pious in the true sense. But on the other hand the young men who harassed women in the street on the morning of the Feast had fasted and prayed in Ramadan. The policemen who torture innocent people, the doctors and nurses who mistreat poor patients in public hospitals, the civil servants who rig the election results in the government’s favor, and the students who cheat en masse, most of them are devout and rigorous about performing their ritual obligations. Societies fall sick in the same way as people, and our society is now suffering from a disconnect between belief and conduct, a disconnect between piety and ethics.
This sickness has numerous causes: first, the despotic regime, which necessarily leads to the spread of cheating, lying, and hypocrisy, and, second, the fact that the understanding of religion that now prevails in Egypt is ritualistic rather than behavioral, in the sense that it does not present religion as synonymous with morality but sees it as confined to the performance of a set of procedures, the completion of which qualifies one as pious. Some people will say that the formalities of worship are aspects of religion as important as morality. The fact is that all religions came about to defend human values—truth, justice, and freedom—and everything else is less important. The sad thing is that the Islamic tradition is full of evidence that ethics are the most important element of religion, but we do not understand that and we do not want to understand it. There’s a well-known story about the time when the Prophet Muhammad met an ascetic who devoted himself to worship day and night, and the Prophet asked him, “Who provides for you?” The man answered, “My brother works and provides for me.” Then the Prophet said, “Your brother worships more than you do.” The meaning here is decisive and important: that someone who works and provides for his family is more virtuous in God’s eyes than the ascetic who spends all his time worshiping but does not work.
A limited understanding of religion is one of the main reasons for the decline of conditions in Egypt. For twenty years the streets and mosques of Egypt have been filled with millions of posters urging Muslim women to wear the hijab. Imagine if these posters had urged people, on top of wearing the hijab, to reject the injustices imposed on Egyptians by the ruler, to defend the rights of detainees, or to prevent election rigging. If that had happened, democracy would have been established in Egypt and Egyptians would have extracted their rights from the despotic system.
Virtue can come about in only two ways: by real piety, which is completely identical to morality, or by morality alone, even if it is not based in religion. Some years ago my late mother fell ill with cancer and we called in one of the best cancer doctors in the world to treat her, Dr. Garcia-Giralt of the Curie Institute in Paris. This great scientist came to Egypt several times to treat my mother and then firmly refused to take any payment. When she insisted, he said, “My professional conscience does not permit me to take any payment for treating the mother of a fellow doctor.” This man does not believe much in religion but his gracious and magnanimous behavior puts him at the highest level of real piety. I wonder how many of our great and devout doctors today would even think of refusing payment from a colleague.
Another example is an incident that took place in 2007. In order to improve the image of the Libyan regime around the world, an annual international literary prize was organized with a value of about $150,000 and with the name, Gaddafi International Prize for Literature. A committee of prominent Arab intellectuals was formed to choose a writer to receive the prize. That year the committee decided to award the prize to the great Spanish writer, Juan Goytisolo, who was seventy-eight years old. The surprise was that Goytisolo wrote a letter to the committee members thanking them for choosing him but also saying that he could not accept a prize from the Gaddafi regime, which had seized power in a military coup and had abused, through detention and torture, thousands of its opponents. Goytisolo turned down a prize worth $150,000 because it was incompatible with his moral conscience.
How many intellectuals or even men of religion in Egypt would turn down the prize? Which of them is closer to Almighty God: this high-minded Spanish writer, who I am confident never thought of religion when he took his brave and noble decision, or the dozens of devout Egyptians, Muslims and Christians, who cooperate with despotic regimes and put themselves at
their service, completely ignoring the crimes these regimes perpetrate against their peoples? Real piety must go hand in hand with ethics because morality without piety is much better than piety without morality, and democracy is the solution.
August 31, 2009
The Sorrows of Miss Laurence
Laurence is a French woman, a physiotherapist who had the chance to work in Egypt and was overjoyed because, like most French people, she loved Egyptian civilization and dreamed of seeing the Nile, the pyramids, and the pharaonic temples. I met Laurence in Cairo on various occasions, but when I met her again a few days ago, I was surprised to hear her saying, “I’ve decided to leave Egypt forever.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I can no longer stand being a woman on display,” she answered.
“What do you mean?”
“Every time I go out in the street, I don’t feel that I’m a human being with a mind and feelings. I feel that I’m just a body, because I’m a woman on display to everyone. Every man I meet looks at my body in an offensive manner and undresses me with his stares. I’ve started to avoid crowded places because I know that crowds mean harassment. They mean that a man’s hand is going to reach out to my breasts or my legs or any part of my body.”
“Does this always happen?” I asked.
“Invariably. If the guy can’t touch me for the crowds, he speaks to me in broken English to ask if I have a boyfriend or a husband in an attempt to sleep with me. Even the men walking on the other side of the street shout out sexual remarks, or whistle or wave at me. A dozen men started to ogle my body simultaneously, and after that I started taking the women’s carriage on the subway.”
“Do you wear revealing clothes?” I asked.
“Not at all. You’ve seen me several times and you’ve seen what I wear. I respect the culture of others and I know that Egypt is a conservative country. Even in summer when I wear a sleeveless top, I always put on a silk shawl to cover my arms.”
“Don’t you get harassed like that in France?” I said.
“Very rarely. After a year and a half in Cairo I can’t believe what’s happening. Sometimes it seems like all Egyptian men have been struck with some sexual perversion. I’ve started to be afraid of going out in the street. If I don’t have work I stay at home for whole days.”
“What are you going to do now?” I asked.
“I’m happy to have found a job in Greece, and I’m impatient to leave. At least in Greece no one will try to grope me or ogle me or invite me to bed as soon as he sees me. There I’ll feel like a human being and not a woman on show for sex.”
My conversation with Laurence came to an end and I felt sad. How could this happen in Egypt, a country always known for being polite to foreigners and treating them well? I referred back to surveys carried out on sexual harassment in Egypt and I found some alarming results. Last year a survey by the Egyptian Center for Human Rights Education found that 98 percent of foreign women in Egypt had experienced sexual harassment. The strange thing is that this wave of harassment is spreading alongside an overwhelming wave of superficial religiosity. All these beards, gallabiyas, blaring loudspeakers, Salafist Wahhabi television channels, religious lessons, and manifestations of piety have not stopped the sexual harassment. Why do Egyptians harass women? The traditional answer is that the women themselves are responsible for the harassment because they wear revealing clothes and incite men to harass them. This is a perverse and incoherent argument, first, because it blames the victim instead of the perpetrator; second, because it portrays men as a bunch of stray beasts unable to control their instincts—as soon as they see a bare piece of a woman’s body they pounce on her; third, because most women in Egypt now wear the hijab but this does not protect them from harassment, according to the survey I mentioned; fourth, because until the end of the 1970s Egyptian women wore very modern clothes that revealed their arms and legs but sexual harassment was much less common than it is now; and, fifth, because in France, for example, where women in general wear scanty clothing, the rate of sexual harassment is no more than 20 percent, according to the New York Times. This means that in pious Egypt, women suffer four or five times as much sexual harassment as women in secular France. In fact those societies that strictly segregate men and women, such as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, have the highest rates of sexual harassment in the world. The phenomenon in my opinion is much more complicated than the type of clothes women wear. My view is that sexual harassment is rampant is Egypt for several reasons.
One is unemployment. The millions of young men who have failed to find jobs after completing their education feel frustration and despair, and lose faith in the idea of justice, on the grounds that in Egypt causes do not lead to results. Hard work does not necessarily lead to success, academic excellence does not necessarily lead to a respectable job, and a commitment to morality does not necessarily lead to social advancement. In fact, on the contrary, moral deviance often leads to wealth. All this must push young men toward violence, and in this context psychologists say that sex crimes are not always committed in order to satisfy sexual desire and that men often engage in sexual harassment as a way to take revenge on society or to vent their anger and frustration.
Another is the difficulty of getting married in Egypt. Millions of Egyptians cannot afford to get married and, since traditions and religious injunctions (both Muslim and Christian) ban extramarital relations, most young Egyptians are sexually frustrated, which must sometimes lead them to harass women.
A third reason is the prevalence of pornographic videos and easy access to them because of the communications revolution and the spread of the Internet. In fact the harm done by pornographic material is not confined to arousing the instincts of the young, who are already repressed. It also normalizes and decriminalizes the idea of rape and removes the personal and respectful aspect of sexual relations, so that sexual harassment becomes merely an act of pleasure rather than an abhorrent crime.
The final reason is that our attitude toward women in Egypt has changed. At the beginning of the last century Egyptian women began a long struggle for liberation from the harim, for equality with men in education and employment, and for a respected position in society. Egyptian society then fell under the influence of the restricted Wahhabi reading of Islam. Although this reading is strict about covering up women’s bodies, it also sees a woman as merely an instrument of pleasure, a source of temptation, a machine to produce children, and a house servant. Everything else is less important. In fact in their defense of Islamic dress codes, some Wahhabi sheikhs have likened women to pieces of candy that must be well wrapped so that flies don’t land on them. This may be said with good intentions, but likening women to pieces of candy dehumanizes them because a piece of candy has no mind or feelings and its only purpose is to be eaten and enjoyed. So if someone wants some candy and cannot afford it, and if he has a chance to eat someone else’s candy with impunity, he will not hesitate to take the chance. This is exactly what a man is doing when he sexually harasses women in the street.
The sexual harassment of women will not stop until we revive the true open-minded Egyptian reading of Islam, which sees women as human beings who are fully capable and competent, not just as bodies or pieces of candy. The harassment will stop when corruption, despotism, and injustice come to an end, when a new political system comes about, elected by the people, giving the millions of young people their natural right to live and work and get married.
Democracy is the solution.
September 13, 2009
Why Are Religious Fanatics Obsessed with Women’s Bodies?
The Shabaab movement in Somalia controls large parts of the south and center of the country, and because officials in this movement embrace the Wahhabi ideology they have imposed their views on Somalis by force and issued strict decrees banning films, plays, dancing at weddings, soccer matches, and all forms of music, even ring tones on cell phones. Some days ago these extremists carried out a stra
nge operation: they arrested a Somali woman and whipped her in public because she was wearing a bra. They announced clearly that wearing these bras was un-Islamic because it is a form of fraud and deception. We may well ask what wearing bras has to do with religion, why they would consider them to be a form of fraud and deception, and how they managed to arrest the woman wearing the bra when all Somali women go around with their bodies completely covered. Did they appoint a special female officer to inspect the breasts of women passing by in the street? One Somali woman called Halima told Reuters news agency: