Jasmin Attia | September 2022

Jasmin Attia

My mother and two aunts often lamented that in America, they couldn’t get their hands on fresh molokheya leaves. Sure, there was the Middle Eastern grocer who sold frozen packs of the viscous vegetable, but it wasn’t the same. By the time the leaves had been sealed in plastic, frozen, and shipped, their greenness had faded. On a weekly basis, the family gathered at one of the sisters’ houses. And by family, I mean cousins of cousins, their wives, children, and in-laws. For us, it was normal for fifty Egyptians to be gathered under the same roof in one of the calm golfing communities that dot South Florida. 

One night in 1986, at one of these gatherings, my cousin Janey and I sequestered ourselves after dinner in my aunt’s kitchen, which had been cleaned and abandoned. Finally in an adult-free zone, we blasted the radio and waited for our favorite song on 95.5 FM Hits Radio, “Touch Me” by Samantha Fox, which had just hit number four on the Top 40 chart. When the song came on, we danced in our tight acid-washed jeans, the scent of garlic and coriander lingering in the kitchen. We sang the refrain along with Samantha, “Touch me. Touch me,” gliding our hands along our waists and over our narrow hips. 

At that moment of exuberance, my eldest cousin came into the kitchen to make tea. She was eighteen years older and had recently immigrated from Egypt. This gave her the authority to turn off the radio and lecture us on sex and womanhood. Her lecture went something like this: Sex was a zero-sum game in which the woman was the loser every time. Therefore, a woman had to resist men at all costs until she was married. Sexual desire was something men had, not women, and expressing desire was totally unacceptable. Wanting a man to touch you was perverse and dirty. And outside marriage, any touching between a man and a woman was wrong. “It’s dirty,” she said, “and this song is dirty, and the singer is dirty.” 

Even though I hadn’t yet turned twelve, this speech of hers collided with my forming feminist sensibilities. Of course, women had desires and had every right to express them. And if sex was a zero-sum game, then how did the rules of engagement change after marriage? I didn’t understand why anyone believed these things. But as I later learned, all this wasn’t really about sex. It was about who had the right to control my body. The lecture we got that day wasn’t the first or the last of its kind. Just as the frozen molokheya was imported from Egypt, so was the collective consciousness of the Egyptian women in our family, an invisible rulebook they had brought with them that dictated their sexuality and that of their daughters. While our mothers couldn’t apply or enforce the rules exactly as in Cairo, they were hell-bent on raising us to be good, clean, virginal future brides. We would be delivered in pristine condition from our fathers’ homes to our husbands’ homes. Our bodies and minds would always be under someone else’s control. 

Throughout my teens, I fought hard against my mother’s imported mores, and because my father was the only liberal in the family, I moved away to college and lived on my own. Still, for years I believed what the women in my family had told me: women’s sexual autonomy was a Western notion. I even settled into the idea that Middle Eastern women were happy to live under the patriarchy in their respective countries. But then I took a class on Arabic literature, and my perspective changed. I discovered a long and rich history of Arab feminism. I learned that there were many women (and even some men) in the last two centuries who sought to chip away at the Middle Eastern patriarchy through their writings. 

In 1899, when Kate Chopin’s controversial novel The Awakening was published in the United States, Qasim Amin’s Tahrir al mar’a (Liberation of Women), a nonfiction narrative criticizing veiling, early marriage, and the noneducation of Muslim women, was published in Egypt. The struggle for gender equality had been underway even before Amin made the case for it. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Arab feminist associations, literary salons, and women’s magazines flourished across the Middle East. Their aim was to emancipate women both physically and intellectually, and much focus was put on education and female participation in politics and literature.

However, most Middle Eastern women still lived under a harem system in which their physical movement was strictly controlled and their faces veiled in public. Advocating for female participation in society, therefore, was predicated upon obliterating a practice which placed women in psychological and physical seclusion. 

In the 1920s, Huda Shaarawi, author of Harem Years, led the struggle against the harem system and veiling as a means of controlling women’s bodies. If there were a Maslow’s hierarchy of the Arab feminist struggle, then the bottom of the pyramid would be a woman’s right to control her body in its simplest forms: the right to physically move from one place to another, and the right to her own identity by appearing in public with her face uncovered. In the 1950s and 1960s, this would evolve into the struggle for a woman’s right to control her sexuality. 

In 1958, Out El Kouloub, a French-educated Egyptian writer, published Ramza, a novel about a young woman who falls in love with a man her parents do not approve of.1 That same year, Laila Baalbaki, a Lebanese-born writer, published her novel Ana ahya (I Live), in which the main character rebels against her family by teaching at a university and marrying a man of her choosing.2 These stories feature women who are not simply rebelling against the veil, but against an entire system in which they have no say in choosing their partners and lovers. Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist, dealt another blow to the practice of veiling, and made small gains toward female sexual autonomy in 1975 with her book Beyond the Veil. In her book, she examines the Islamic religious texts, including Hadith, and reinterprets them from a feminist point of view.3 

But why did women have to fight this battle? Where did the idea come from that a woman had to be hidden from view and controlled? Why did some societies take such draconian measures (and in some countries, still do) to control women’s bodies? It was clear to me after delving into literary works of Arab women that feminism wasn’t just a Western idea like the women of my family believed, nor was the notion of a woman’s sexual autonomy. If these ideas were pervasive circa 1970 in Cairo, why then hadn’t my mother and aunts gotten the proverbial memo? Why had my pubescent years in America been spent in a quasi-prison? Why had there been so much restriction on my body in particular, how I clothed it, who I allowed to touch it, where this body of mine could go? 

The answer to those questions did not come neatly packaged. Only after delving into some of the landmark works of Arab feminism did I glean some understanding of why the women in my family, and so many other women in the Middle East, didn’t buy into notions of sexual autonomy even while their sisters were leading large-scale movements for change. The simple answer is because the male-dominated governments and societies in the Middle East used every tool at their disposal, including imprisonment, to silence Arab women, especially those who promoted sexual autonomy. 

It is impossible to sum up an entire movement using a handful of books, but there are four Arab writers and activists whose works directly address sexual autonomy, which I define as a woman’s total control over her body, including her decision to marry, her choice of clothing, and her associations. The books I will be examining are Harem Years by Huda Shaarawi (written in 1930s, published in 1986), The Open Door by Latifa al-Zayyat (published in 1960), Women at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi (published in 1975), and Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy (published in 2015). 

In her introduction of Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years, Margot Badran writes: “Women lived their lives within the private enclosures of their domestic quarters. When they went out they veiled their faces, thus taking their seclusion with them.” The harem literally and metaphorically veiled women from society, “for honour was at stake. In Egypt, as in other Mediterranean societies, the honour of men and the family rested upon the sexual purity of women. A way to guard purity was by keeping women secluded.” In the early 1920s, Arab feminist writers focused on the rights of women to leave the harem, unhampered by head and face covering. Much of the writing and discourse in this period was an outcry against what Mona Eltahawy, in her book Headscarves and Hymens published nearly a century later, called “erasure.”

Influenced by her predecessors, Huda Shaarawi founded the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923, just two years after American women gained suffrage. Credited with spearheading the Egyptian feminist movement, Shaarawi was an activist writer whose first public removal of her veil marks one of the most poignant moments in the Arab woman’s attempt to reclaim her body, a first step in a long journey toward sexual autonomy. In her autobiography, Harem Years, Shaarawi describes how after she removed the veil from her face, “the waiting women broke into loud applause. Some imitated the act… At that moment, Huda stood between two halves of her life—one conducted within the convention of the harem system and the one she would lead at the head of a women’s movement.” 

While Huda Shaarawi became known as the mother of Arab feminism, her road was fraught with peril. Her memoir, translated from Arabic by Margot Badran, is laden with the injustices she endured. Shaarawi writes, with a tone of anger and sadness, about her earliest experiences of inequity, when she realizes her brother is adored and catered to by all the women of the harem while she is ignored. The eldest wife in the harem, Umm Kabira, tells her, “But you are a girl and he is a boy.” This is the explanation offered for her unequal status in society, but Shaarawi doesn’t accept it. She is further cut off from society at the age of eleven when she has her period, “suddenly I was required to restrict myself to the company of girls and women.” She explains that being separated from her male friends was a “painful experience.”

At twelve, Shaarawi was married off to a cousin without her consent. This experience shaped her feminist efforts in raising the minimum age in marriage and influenced the way in which future Arab feminists told their stories. 

In the 1920s, Shaarawi became involved in the first Egyptian nationalist movement aimed at ending British occupation. She says this about her private life and the nationalist movement: “The Egyptian national movement brought my husband and me closer to each other.” The theme of nationalist movements bringing Arab women more on par with their male counterparts threads through much of Arab feminist literature. We see thisboth in works of fiction, such as The Open Door, and in nonfiction works, such as Headscarves and Hymens.

By the late 1940s, Shaarawi’s work against the harem system and the practice of veiling had had a clear impact on the lives of Arab women, and profoundly affected the way in which future literary works would challenge existing boundaries. Most women were no longer compelled to wear veils, the harem system was slowly becoming extinct, and more girls attended school. Women’s participation in the Egyptian national movement and the subsequent revolution against British presence also gained them a measure of political and social freedom, but it was temporary and limited.4 Arab women were still not free to make fundamental choices for themselves. Decisions regarding marriage, sexuality, education, and employment were made for them. The cultural dictums and the laws that governed all aspects of their lives were controlled and monitored by men.5 

By the time Latifa al-Zayyat wrote her novel The Open Door, harems and mandatory veils were things of the past, largely in thanks to Shaarawi’s activist efforts. Set in Cairo in 1946, the novel tells the story of Layla, a girl from a moderately conservative middle-class family, who struggles for her independence at the same time as Egypt struggles for its independence from colonialism. (This national struggle is often referred to as the second revolution and culminated in 1952.)

Throughout the novel, Layla’s personal struggles for independence are tethered to the country’s independence. When Layla participates in a protest in 1956, training for the national guard and firing a weapon in Port Said during the Suez Crisis, she comes the closest to being equal with her male counterparts, just as Shaarawi was brought closer to her husband during the 1920s nationalist movement. But when she is negotiating her daily life, whether in school or at home, Layla is stripped of nearly all personal freedoms. This point becomes important to understanding the ebbs and flows of progress with respect to women’s sexual autonomy in general, and Mona Eltahawy discusses this further in Headscarves and Hymens. 

In the first few pages of The Open Door, Layla has her first period, and this marks the beginning of a new set of restrictions placed on her. Like Shaarawi’s real life experience, Layla is all but cut off from the outside world. Her father tells her, “Layla, you must realize that you have grown up. From now on you are absolutely not to go out by yourself. No visits. Straight home from school.” That night while in bed, Layla reflects on this unwelcome milestone, her tone bitter and sad as she realizes that her womanhood is a “prison.” 

Unlike Shaarawi, Layla is not forced into an early marriage. The acceptable age for marriage in 1946 is no longer the tender age of twelve, as it was in 1892. This was one of the mammoth strides Shaarawi and her contemporaries made. As Layla graduates from high school and starts college, she begins to have a sexual awakening, an Arab version of the one Kate Chopin describes in The Awakening. This is in contrast to Shaarawi’s memoir, in which there is no mention of sex or desire, and is perhaps a step forward in the discourse regarding sexual autonomy. 

Layla’s first fling is with her cousin Isam, who lives one floor above her. It is innocent in modern terms, but in Cairo in 1960, Layla risks a great deal when she allows him to kiss her. She describes her physical reaction to this kiss: “She felt his body touching her, and stepped back as far as she could, until she was plastered against the window frame. Isam’s features relaxed, his eyes softened, and they glowed in a way that pierced her body, a glow that came to rest somewhere unfathomable inside of her.”

This is as graphic as al-Zayyat gets, but the words glow and body are repeated throughout the novel, and it is clear she is referring to desire. It is “unfathomable” to Layla, because desire is not an acceptable feeling for a woman (the same message I received from my cousin in 1986). The theme of desire, which threads throught the narrative, is dramatized through Layla’s reactions as she seeks to contend with and understand her desires. The Open Door is viewed as a landmark in anticolonialist and feminist Arab writing, and won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. By showing her character, Layla, shaking off social codes, al-Zayyat paves the way for other women to do the same in real life. In the novel, Layla is audacious and, though these women existed, it was rare for an Egyptian woman at that time to take control of her life in the way Layla does. Both the novel and the 1963 film adaptation added momentum to a growing feminist movement fueled by literature, film, and women’s organizations, creating the ideal conditions for Nawal El Saadawi to come charging onto the literary stage, producing feminist works of fiction and nonfiction. 

Until the 1970s, no woman spoke so openly or came out so staunchly against male oppression of the female body as Nawal El Saadawi. An Egyptian writer, medical doctor, and political activist, Saadawi tackled the widespread practice of female genital mutilation (FGM).6 Thought to have begun in Ancient Egypt,7 today FGM is aimed at extinguishing female sexual desire, and it has proliferated throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Saadawi, at the forefront of the fight against FGM, served as Egypt’s Director of Ministry of Public Health from 1966 to 1972. When she published her first book, Women and Sex, in 1971, she was fired from her position, and the book was banned. Unlike Shaarawi and al-Zayyat, who advanced feminist ideas but avoided overt condemnations, Saadawi comes out full force and pays a price for it. In 1981, she went to jail for her outspokenness about what she called “crimes committed against women’s bodies.” Women and Sex is a searing criticism of genital mutilation and virginity testing, among other injustices. Saadawi also created Health, a magazine centered on female wellness in 1968, which was promptly shut down by the government. In 1982, she founded Arab Women’s Solidarity Alliance (AWSA) and served as editor of Al Nun magazine. Both Al Nun and AWSA were also shut down by the Egyptian government in 1991.8 For Egyptian society of the time, Saadawi went too far in daring to discuss women’s sexuality. It wasn’t until after Anwar Sadat’s death that she was released from prison by a young president Mubarak, presumably to signal a new Egyptian era of openness. However, Women and Sex remained banned, and her life was in danger, with multiple threats from Islamists. As a result, Saadawi fled Egypt in 1988, accepting a teaching position at Duke University. 

While in jail, Saadawi was inspired to write her first novel. Women at Point Zero is about Firdaus, a woman raised in rural Egypt who is genitally mutilated. She ends up becoming a sex worker, murders her pimp, and is finally executed. As in her first book, Women and Sex, Saadawi writes about the deeply disturbing practice of genital cutting and its devastating effects. In a later book, The Hidden Face of Eve, Saadawi writes of her own experience:

I just wept, and called out to my mother for help. But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and found her standing by my side. Yes. It was her, I could not be mistaken, in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking to them and smiling at them as though they had not participated in slaughtering her daughter just a few minutes ago.

Women at Point Zero opens with the voice of a female psychiatrist who is visiting the death row of a women’s prison to try to commute Firdaus’s sentence. Firdaus’s own account begins in a rural area of southern Egypt. Her first memory is of a young boy with whom she experiences some sexual pleasure when they lie together under the shade of a tree. This point is important, because this fleeting moment of enjoyment is the last sexual pleasure Firdaus feels, as she undergoes female circumcision shortly thereafter. 

We see here the evolution of feminist thought, particularly around female sexual autonomy. Shaarawi doesn’t mention sex or desire in her memoir. Al-Zayyat only hints at the subject of her character’s desire, and she does not mention FGM in her novel, as if the practice didn’t exist, though in reality it did, and at alarming rates. However, El Saadawi tackles the issue of FGM head-on, confronting the social and political forces that aim to fully control women by physiologically extinguishing desire. 

In El Saadawi’s novel, Firdaus is married off by her brother to a man three time her age. Like Shaarawi’s real life experience, Firdaus has no choice in the matter. She feels no pleasure during sex. When Firdaus discusses her inability to experience sexual desire, she repeatedly refers to the elusive pleasure as a “distant spot within my body.” This is similar to al-Zayyat’s reference to the “unfathomable place” inside her when she describes Layla’s experience of sexual passion. At one point, Firdaus refers to desire as something that seemed to “arise outside my body, or in a part of my being severed from it many years ago.” 

We don’t know from Shaarawi’s memoir whether she underwent FGM. Nor is genital mutilation mentioned in al-Zayyat’s novel. But we do learn from Mona Eltahawy in Headscarves and Hymens that up to the 1990s, ninety percent of Egyptian women (mostly rural) underwent the procedure. The question remains as to why Shaarawi and al-Zayyat never mention it in their works. One possible answer is that they didn’t want to deal with the societal backlash or the sort of consequences that Nawal El Saadawi later faced. If Shaarawi’s memoir is the first spark of the feminist movement in the Arab world, then Mona Eltahawy’s nonfiction Headscarves and Hymens is a hand grenade.

One day when I was about twelve, shortly after my cousin’s speech on sex and womanhood, I was watching television with my grandmother. Because she’d recently moved to the United States from Egypt and didn’t speak English, she recruited me to translate her favorite shows. When the regular programming broke to commercials, there was an ad for tampons. My grandmother was appalled. How could they market such a thing to virgins? This hymen-breaking contraption would ruin the lives of millions of girls in America, rendering them unmarriageable, and shaming their families forever. I laughed, and she became very angry with me. Hadn’t my mother discussed the hymen with me? The truth was, my mother hadn’t brought up the hymen in all her talk about virginity, although I knew what it was. However, I didn’t understand that the existence of a hymen in a woman’s body meant the difference between life and death for thousands of women in the Middle East. My mother left that part out. Perhaps it was too brutal for her to think about. 

My mother later explained to me that my grandmother had been subjected to a virginity test before her wedding, and that honor killings took place in Egypt on a daily basis (up to this day in some places), and that men killed women with impunity. I was horrified, and in the decades since, I’ve tried to understand the society that produced my grandmother, that created such fear and such submission to the patriarchy. 

Mona Eltahawy’s “Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution” was an expansion on a previous article, “Why They Hate Us” (they being Muslim men and us being women). In the book, she discusses at length domestic violence, child marriage, FGM, honor killings, the veil (or as she calls it, headscarf), the requirement for women to have male guardians in Saudi Arabia, and virginity testing. In essence, she talks about real-life experiences of women much like Layla in The Open Door or Firdaus in Women at Point Zero. A century after Shaarawi struggled for the right for a woman to leave her home unveiled, Eltahawy argues that “family and the state work in concert to reduce [the] autonomy” a woman has over her body. She cites the morality police in Saudi Arabia, the virginity testing done by Egyptian police when protestors are arrested, and a litany of laws that give men an upper hand in divorce, court testimony, and child custody. Her writing is daring and extremely inflammatory in a country where the constitution is based on the teachings of the Koran, some of which Eltahawy writes directly against. It is no surprise then that she, like Saadawi (and many other feminists) has become a target of Islamic fundamentalists who seek to punish those pushing for such freedoms, and she now lives and works in New York where she is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. 

Eltahawy’s book is a scathing criticism of misogyny, particularly in the Muslim world. It is a call for sexual autonomy in language that is unabashed and to the point. In the last chapter of her book, she argues for a society in which women are free to untether sex from marriage.

Do we want a society where lovers marry just to be able to have sex? What if the man and woman who wait until marriage have no sexual chemistry? These questions are forcing themselves on our societies and only an honest and bold discussion and willingness to break with tradition, be it Islam or Christianity, will help us find answers.

Eltahawy also tackles the issue of cultural relativism, a concept not contemplated (or nonexistent) in Shaarawi’s memoir. “When Westerners remain silent out of ‘respect’ for foreign cultures, they show support only for the most conservative element of those cultures. Cultural relativism is as much my enemy as the oppression I fight within my culture and faith.” She also addresses the argument conservatives often make in the Middle East, that feminism is a Western idea and a form of neocolonialism. She uses the vast history of Arab feminist activists and writers as evidence that Arab feminism is just as much an Eastern idea as it is Western. One example she uses is the feminist writer Alifa Rifaat, who wrote only in Arabic, and never traveled outside of Egypt. Rifaat wrote a collection of short stories called Distant View of a Minaret.9 

Like any group that challenges entrenched systems, Arab feminists have faced opposition from Arab men and women, often the very women they’re advocating for. They have faced persecution by their governments and by Islamist groups within their respective countries. But there can be no doubt that the Arab feminist movement is very much alive and growing in boldness and strength, and that it is in fact a movement by Arab women for Arab women. What started with Shaarawi’s simple act of removing her veil in the Cairo Train Station in 1923 has flourished into a dynamic body of Arab feminist literature, poignant and edgy and, most importantly, driving momentum toward female sexual autonomy. 

For example, Joumana Hadad, a Lebanese writer, is one of the most sexually expressive writers pushing the boundaries of Arab patriarchy. Her books, I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman and Superman Is an Arab, published in 2010 and 2012, respectively, challenge the patriarchal system. In 2008, she launched a magazine, Jasad, the first Arabic erotica magazine. It was shut down when critics called it “pornographic.” 

In 2020, Moroccan author, Leila Slimani, published Sex and Lies: True Stories of Women’s Intimate Lives in the Arab World. In it, she exposes the sex lives of Moroccans, and openly discusses taboos in an effort to change the dialogue around sex and push for female sexual autonomy.10 A Saudi writer, Rajaa al-Sanea, wrote Girls of Riyadh in 2005. “She tells the stories of four privileged young women, homosexuality, illegal drinking, posing as men to drive cars, illicit sex, and secret dating.” The book was banned in Saudi Arabia.11 

Given the prolific Arab feminist writers in the literary sphere, bigger strides are bound to be made. In the Middle East, attaining sexual autonomy for women is still a goal of Arab feminists, as evidenced by their most recent publications, particularly in the 2000s. But progress varies by region, and some writers have to flee their countries and write from abroad. There are also debates among feminists about what feminism and sexual autonomy mean within the context of Arab societies. However, overwhelming evidence suggests that a plethora of Arab feminist writers are still demanding sexual autonomy. The Arab feminist movement has not progressed in a straight line. There have been some setbacks, and certain movements have fared better in some countries than others. But one thing is clear: as long as Arab feminists continue to push forward, no force is likely to stop them from using the written word to demand autonomy over their bodies.

Jasmin Attia holds an MBA from the University of Rochester and an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. She is a first-generation Egyptian American. Her first novel, The Oud Play of Old Cairo, is the winner of the 2022 Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature, and is forthcoming in 2023.

Notes

1. Kouloub, Out El. 1994. Ramza. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press).

2. Fox, Margalit. 2015. www.nytimes.com. December 9. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/world/middleeast/fatema-mernissi-a-founder-of-islamic-feminism-dies-at-75.html.

3. Ashour, Radwa. 2009. “Arab Women Writ­ers.” Southwest Review pp. 9–18. —. 2008. Arab Women Writers: a critical reference guide. (Cai­ro: The American University in Cairo Press).

4. Cooke, Miriam. 1986. “Telling Their Lives: A Hundred Years of Arab Women’s Writings.” World Literature Today. pp. 212–216.

5. Eltahawy, Mona. 2015. Headscarves and Hy­mens: why the middle east needs a sexual revolu­tion. (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux).

6. Ashour, Radwa. pp. 9-18.

7. Llamas, Jewel. 2017. Female Circumcision: The History, the Current Prevalence and the Approach to a Patient. April. https://med.virginia.edu/family-medicine/wp-content/uploads/sites/285/2017/01/Llamas-Paper.pdf.

8. Krajeski, Jenna. 2011. The New Yorker. March 7. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-books-of-nawal-el-saadawi.

9. Eltahawy, Mona.

10. Nasser, Nourhan. 2017. stepfeed.com. November 6. https://stepfeed.com/10-ba­dass-arab-women-who-are-fighting-for-sexu­al-freedom-9118.

11. Nasser, Nourhan.