Women's bodies, women's lives

Nahla Dawoud, a Cairo banker in her late 30s, was married for three years. “They were a long nightmare, and they had to be brought to an end. Given that he would not divorce me no matter what I did, I opted for the legal right that the state offered of a court-ordered divorce,” she said.
Khulu, a court-ordered divorce at a woman's request, is something that is embedded in Islamic Sharia law but took the lobbying of women's groups over consecutive decades and finally the support of former first lady Suzanne Mubarak before it materialised.
It was a step beyond the personal status law issued under the influence of first lady Jihan Al-Sadat, that cut down the complexity and length of litigation for women pursuing a divorce in a court of law in the 1970s. It made divorce much easier and faster for women, though still not automatic, if a wife was willing to forgo her financial rights.
Lawyers working in the field of supporting women who cannot afford legal fees and who wish to pursue the court route to ending physically and psychologically damaging marriages say that at the end of the day the percentage of women who have benefited from the new legislation is quite small compared to the number who are not economically privileged enough to pursue a settlement that means financial unfairness.
However, Dawoud would argue that “something is better than nothing” when it comes to what the state will support for women to take control of their lives.
Azza Suleiman, a lawyer and women's rights activist, said that the legislation relating to the rights of women inside and outside marriage, whether as wives, mothers, widows, or divorcees, required considerable adjustment because at present it was simply not fair.
“The question here is one of citizenship: if the state says it believes that all citizens are equal, as it does, than it has to introduce equality and fairness in the law without further delay or hesitation,” Suleiman stated.
This, she argued, should be a priority for the state “with its institutions and for the parliament for the remainder of 2017”.
“Women suffer to get a divorce, and they have to go through many difficulties with custody rights or for that matter inheritance rights. The law should be revisited, and if we are to claim that 2017 is a Woman's Year of any sort, we have to see a beginning of this process as everything cannot all be done in the remaining nine months of the year,” Suleiman said.
She said that if the state was serious about the matter it would have to couple any action for legislative amendments to an awareness-raising scheme that should target public opinion and religious institutions. “Laws issued in a void are not particularly productive at enhancing rights, simply because they are shrugged off by almost everyone except the immediate victim,” Suleiman argued.

Women's bodies, women's lives
NON-AUTONOMOUS BODIES: Gynaecologist Ahmed Rashed, who sits as a consultant and advocate on several semi-governmental and non-governmental bodies that address women's reproductive health, is determined to stress the role of public awareness. This needed to be “real grassroots and thorough awareness, not just media campaigns that are shrugged off or mocked,” he said.
In his early years as a resident doctor in a public hospital in Giza, Rashed used to receive two or three girls on typical Friday shifts suffering from serious bleeding as a result of having been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM).
“A law issued in the 1950s penalises this practice, but every time I tried to report a case I was blocked, not by the family of the girl, but by the workers at the hospital. The nurses would destroy documents, or say that it would harm the family of the girl if the case was publicised, or the office worker who was supposed to take the complaint to the police station would suddenly disappear, or the policeman who should have come to the hospital would just not turn up. This sort of thing used to happen in the late 1970s,” Rashed said.
Today, Dalia Abdel-Hamid, head of the women's division at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), an NGO, argues that things have not changed significantly.
“We only get to hear of cases when the girl bleeds so much that she dies, but on a daily basis there are thousands of other women who are subjected to this violation. These cases are not reported because they don't have to be taken to a hospital with heavy bleeding, or because their bodies are cut by medical doctors or nurses at public hospitals or at home,” she said.
According to Hana Abul-Ghar, a paediatrician and founder of a care foundation for street girls (Banati), the decline in the rates of FGM that was reported a few years before the 25 January Revolution remains “insignificant and is all about the cultural and social context” at the time.
Gynaecologist Hussein Gohar, who has for years lobbied against FGM, is convinced that the state lacks the resolve to act effectively on the matter. “In the minds of legislators, doctors and law-enforcement officers, there is a particular concept of the control of women's bodies. This is part of the culture that these people subscribe to. You cannot expect them to want to abandon it easily. They might say in public that they are opposed to FGM because they think this is the politically correct thing to do, but in fact close to 90 per cent of Egyptian women are still subjected to it,” Gohar said.
Laws are never enough in and by themselves. “What we need is a national education campaign. We need to educate people and to educate doctors too for that matter,” he said. “Parents still say they take their girls to a doctor to get them ‘circumcised' to make sure that they are not subjected to infection. They think the problem is with the midwife or the nurse rather than with the practice itself.”
He added that he had not been surprised by the findings shared by some anti-FGM activists that indicated an increased participation of medical doctors, and not just nurses or midwives as has traditionally been the case, in performing FGM.
It would be hard to reduce the wish of society to control women's bodies to FGM, no matter how devastating and brutal this practice is, however.
“FGM is just one of many ways in which society is subjecting women to violence, both physical and emotional, as part of controlling their bodies,” said Abdel-Hamid.
She added that access to contraceptives could also be another form of controlling women's bodies.
“For example, emergency contraceptives like the ‘the day after pill' are hard to get in Egypt because they are perceived by the relevant government bodies and also by society as a whole as a way of reducing pregnancies among unmarried women,” Abdel-Hamid said.
She added that “this attitude is based on the assumption that married women of reproductive age are on a stable form of contraception, which is not necessarily true because whether the government likes it or not some couples depend on ad hoc contraceptives where there is obviously room for error or inefficient use.”
In a country where abortion is illegal and something that is religiously looked down upon, the lack of effective access to contraceptives could be the beginning of a nightmare for a woman, married or not, who is faced with an unplanned pregnancy.
Many reputable gynaecologists would refrain from helping a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, especially if unmarried, to get an abortion. Some would not even help a married woman if they found no compelling medical evidence that the pregnancy was harmful to her health or to that of her baby.
“This is not something that I would touch for any reason other than a compelling health reason. This is my red line, and my reasons are moral and religious as well as legal,” said one.
As a result, women have to resort to backstreet abortions with less efficient doctors and in less than sufficiently hygienic or well-equipped clinics and hospitals.
Moreover, Abdel-Hamid argued that “the whole concept of providing contraceptives is designed to serve population policy rather than to provide women with legitimate control over their bodies.”
According to Rashed, the issue of reproductive rights is not just about FGM or birth control, “it is a layered matter” that has to do with women's reproductive health in general, “including the often overlooked right to get affordable vaccines and medical screenings and tests that could save millions of women a year from falling ill, often in a way that affects their bodies and lives dramatically.”
However, having worked in many parts of the country he is convinced that one key reason why women are denied their “perfectly legitimate reproductive rights” has to do with “the unfortunate fact that these women don't perceive these rights as a priority”.
“They are consumed with the overwhelming daily challenges they are burdened with, essentially in relation to their roles as mothers and wives,” Rashed said. “It is unfair, but this is the way things are. In most cases, women who have to suffer to provide basic nutrition and hygiene for themselves and their families do not have the luxury to debate choosing a contraceptive that would allow them direct control over their bodies or to ask their husbands to share this responsibility.”
“The question is more basic and is about accessing services to start with, in other words about finding a contraceptive and a medical doctor or trained nurse to help use it or have it fixed. And this is not always easy in remote villages or poor areas,” Rashed stated.
Abdel-Hamid agreed that the current economic crisis had also influenced the availability and diversity of contraceptives in Egypt and women had to worry more about them. “In most cases, it is almost never the problem of a man to stop a pregnancy or to terminate an unwanted pregnancy under unsafe conditions in the absence of the relevant legal protection for patients and doctors alike, even if the woman in question is married,” she said.
The law is not even on the side of women who suffer sexual assaults. Abdel-Hamid argued that the legal definition of rape at present falls short of including all forms of forced vaginal violation, allowing considerable unfairness if a woman decides to litigate. “If a man forces a knife into a woman's body and leaves her with a horrible cut, he cannot be charged as having raped her,” she said.
According to Mozn Hassan, an activist on women's rights and founder of Nazra, a group focused on feminist studies, it can take a lot of pressure before the forensic examination department provides women examiners to attend cases of rape instead of having violated women be examined by male doctors.
Sally Zohni, an activist working on the harassment issue, said that “there is a need to promote gender sensitivity in all the state agencies that deal with women reporting physical and sexual violence.”
“It is hard enough for women to report an assault, and one of the reasons is the awkwardness they have to deal with, for example at a police station where they can be looked up and down with sceptical eyes and unsympathetic faces before the complaint is taken down,” Zohni said.
Having worked on the matter for close to 10 years, Zohni is convinced that “society is not shocked by the fact that a man should harasses a woman, especially if this is just verbal harassment and if the woman is perceived to be wearing something provocative. This can be the case even if she is veiled and wearing a relatively form-fitting or colourful dress.”
Here, too, the socio-economic factor is hard to underestimate. Amany Abdallah, a 19-year-old university student who lives on the outskirts of Cairo, said that before her parents would agree to let her go out wearing a skirt or a dress she has to wear a pair of jeans underneath.
“It is not negotiable. I have to wear jeans because they fear that someone could grab my skirt and I would be left naked. If I go out in trousers, I have to wear a pair of leggings underneath. That too is not negotiable,” she said.
Sara Hisham, also a 19-year-old university student, but living in one of the upscale compounds in eastern Cairo, is not forced into this chastity-belt-type exercise. She said that she could wear anything, including shorts and a strapless top “in the compound” if she so wished.
However, if she goes out, always in the car with her driver, “I have to be careful because, as my mother always says, it is one thing inside the compound and quite another outside it.”
Caroline Kamel changed her style into wearing loose clothes to feel comfortable in the streets of Cairo (top); Mai Badr likes colourful clothes, from the project "A Closet Full of Dreams" (left)
DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES: Independent photographer Roger Anis says that the “fear of harassment that denies women the right to dress the way they want to is a cross-sectoral issue.”
“It is not just about unveiled women or women in poor areas or young women. Most women I have met from different socio-economic and age brackets and geographic zones have shared this concern,” he said.
This prompted Anis to compile a photography project under the title “My Dream Wardrobe” in which he talked to women from different backgrounds about how they dress and how they might have wanted to dress had they not been afraid of being harassed.
One of the women who agreed to share her story with Anis is in her 20s and wears a face veil that is often black or blue. However, she likes to wear oversize colourful dresses with her niqab (face veil).
“One day, she was stopped by a bearded man who dared to spit on her in public for having violated the norms of niqab by wearing the dress. This man was convinced that he was in a position to tell a woman that he did not know and who was dressed in an ultra-conservative way what to do with her body and what to wear,” Anis said.
In the women's carriage of the metro, Dalia Hussein, a university student in perfectly conservative top and jeans and braided hair, yells angrily at a head-to-toe veiled woman for trying to force her to read a leaflet about the “right dress code for a Muslim woman”.
Having been shouted away, the woman approached other women on the relatively empty metro heading to Heliopolis, and they showed no interest but offered no angry reactions either. “I don't know who this woman is, and I don't know why it is her business to come and tell me what to wear,” Hussein said.
According to Hussein, it is not unusual to see posters advocating that “Muslim women take the veil before they die” or to see women getting on the metro to preach the “necessity of taking the veil”. “But this is not the same as this woman who decided to try to force me into reading her leaflet. It is really too much,” Hussein added.
The public debate in Egypt about religiously acceptable codes of dress for women has of late transcended typically Muslim terrain to go onto Christian grounds, with some churches asking women to “observe the dress code when attending church” and some priests declining to allow women “in inappropriate outfits to be given holy blessings”.
“I was shocked the first time I heard of it. We usually go to the church wearing a pair of trousers and a short-sleeve blouse if it is summer, but one day last summer when I was going to church I found a poster indicating that I shouldn't be attending church in long sleeves or trousers,” said Mary Seddik, a university student who attends an Orthodox church in Ain Shams, a neighbourhood in eastern Cairo. Seddik decided to ignore the matter, but as she was exiting prayers she was approached by one of the priests about her outfit.
The attitude of Seddik and other women “forced the church to drop the matter. I told one priest I would go to pray in Heliopolis if my outfits were not suitable in his church,” she said. She also argued that the more upscale the neighbourhood is in socio-economic terms, the more unlikely it is for priests to “intervene or worry about what women wear when they attend church, provided that nobody puts on a very provocative dress, which is never the case anyway,” she said.
According to Seddik, the matter has not come to an end, however, because “I find references to this issue on some Christian websites. I even once found a drawing to demonstrate the right dress code for a ‘good Christian woman', something which is unprecedented and disturbing.”
Suleiman Shafik, a researcher in Coptic affairs, admits that a growing sense of conservatism has been affecting the Coptic Orthodox Church about the way Coptic women are perceived by society. He argues that with the growing number of Muslim women taking the veil across the country, Coptic women are also being forced into a more conservative demeanour.
Viola Abdel-Messih, a teacher in her late 50s who lives and works in Imbaba, said that she had learned to change her outfits in the 1990s. “Imbaba went through a time in the 1990s when it was called the ‘Islamic Republic of Imbaba', and Christians especially women were under the spotlight so we had to be careful. I stopped wearing short sleeves, and I opted for much longer dresses and I always put my hair in a bun. This was my way of getting by without being verbally assaulted as happened to some girls and women,” Abdel-Messih said.
She did not change her way of dressing even after the end of this phase in the late 1990s. “I got used to it, and I found it more acceptable to get by in the city this way,” she said.
Hani Mikhail, a driver who lives in Matariya, said that he had obliged his three daughters to dress more conservatively out of fears that they could be harassed or attacked by Muslim men. “We hear stories about young Christian girls being assaulted by Muslim men who are told that these women, not being Muslim, are legitimate subjects for such evil doing. I cannot take this risk, so I don't allow them to wear anything that I think could allow for any ideas coming into anyone's mind,” he said.
According to Shafik, “it would be unrealistic to deny that there is an apprehension among Christian families living in rural or poorer areas about their daughters, especially with the complications that can happen in cases where Muslim men may get Christian girls to leave their families or abandon Christianity in pursuit of love,” he said.
In the minds of Christian families in these surroundings, the thing to do is to force their daughters to follow ultra-conservative conduct. “If a young Christian man was to convert to marry a Muslim girl, it would not be a disaster for his family. But a woman would be a different story,” he said.
Suleiman argued that for the most part Christian women are not looked at by the state as citizens entitled to the same protections as Muslim women. “When it comes to matters of personal status, they are left out of the system and treated as subjects of the church and not as full citizens,” she said.
This was certainly the case when it came to anything having to do with any element of the life of a Christian woman “as a woman.” It also covered anything relating to her body or her right to leave an abusive husband, for example.
Abdel-Hamid is convinced that it is mostly on matters relating to women, their lives and their bodies, “or their subjugation,” that the call of Islamic Sharia law is most appealed to by the state. “We don't hear much from the state about Sharia when it comes to the right to healthcare, but we hear about Sharia constraints on the right of women to escape an abusive husband or to wear a light summer dress,” Abdel-Hamid said.
Caroline Kamel changed her style into wearing loose clothes to feel comfortable in the streets of Cairo (top); Mai Badr likes colourful clothes, from the project "A Closet Full of Dreams" (left)
NOT EASY: According to Heba Khalifa, another photographer, “it is never easy being a woman” in Egypt.
First, “there is a confused relationship between women and their bodies. Right from the beginning women are told what to do and what not to do with their bodies, and throughout their lives their successes or failures are measured by their biological achievements rather than anything else: when she started to have her period, when she got married, when she had her first baby, and how many babies she gave birth to and so on,” she said.
In a society in which women are told how their bodies should look, Khalifa says that even “biological achievement is not considered enough to spare women from extra hardships related to their bodies. We are always reminded that you have to be beautiful for your husband and you have to act like a man when outside the house. And we are always told that dark-skinned women are ugly and so are skinny or heavy women, and that it is not forgivable for a girl not to be pretty,” she said.
When women pass the biological challenge, Khalifa added, they then have to pass the achiever challenge. “A woman has to be pretty and conservative as well as a mother and a breadwinner,” Khalifa said. “And all the while the woman has to carry her body and herself in a way that is consistent with certain parameters that are made by society,” she added.
In two independent visual projects, “From Inside” and “Home Made”, Khalifa has tried to capture the ordeal of women who have to put up with these burdens. In one photograph she shows a dark-skinned woman with a crow — an ill-omen in Egyptian culture — hanging over her head. In another, she shows a woman who was never loved enough by her family because of her looks with cactus thorns, symbolically standing for emotional deprivation, above her legs to reflect on the scarcity of love in her life.
In a photograph where she appears with her daughter Ward, Khalifa reflects on the limitations imposed on her photography work and her capacity as a single mother. “The whole point of the project is about being a woman and about how hard it is to be a woman, and I think we need to reflect more on this because this is a debate we need to have,” she said.
The debate about being a woman in a society that confines a woman's role to her biological duties and constrains womanhood to the body is also the core of the 2016 book The Woman who Saved Me by breast cancer survivor Ghada Salah Gad.
In her book, Gad shares her experience of having to find answers to questions about her womanhood through painful surgery and chemotherapy that seemed to take over, if temporarily, her body as a woman.
This debate was also reflected in the 2016 book Fabulous Veils in which author Iman Refaat is inspired by the true stories of three women in early middle age and from diverse socio-economic backgrounds whose bodies and lives are forced into the framework set for them by society and the family.
Gamila, an upper-middle class wife, has to perform her duties as a mother and be ready to perform her duty as a wife even if her husband is neglectful and unkind. Fatma, from a less elevated socio-economic bracket, cannot call her husband by his first name and has to be ready to perform her marital duties with a husband who abuses her financially and physically. Madiha has to go through endless suffering before getting the consent of her family to a divorce and who since then has to maintain a conservative look to meet the standard her mother and society have of a divorced woman.
According to scriptwriter Mariam Naoum, the debate about the many hardships of being a woman in Egypt is slowly but surely finding its place in the cinema and in drama production. Over the past four years, Naoum herself has written three very successful TV soap operas dedicated to the ordeals of women who have to go through hard times either because of disappointed dreams, drug addictions or psychological problems.
“They were very well received, and they opened the door to a discussion of the issues. I think without passing any judgments that this is a key role for the cinema and drama,” Naoum said.
Previously, she had made a successful film that also approached the fine lines of women's suffering due to religious complexities or economic challenges. “I think it is fair to say that over the past few years we have seen some very good films that address and allow for a thorough debate on previously untouched areas of women's lives in a realistic and non-judgemental way, ranging from women who fail to marry because they lost virginity in premarital sex to women who are rejected by society because they test HIV positive or women who are condemned by society for being subject to harassment,” she commented.
According to Zohni, it is “exactly the role” of the media, not just cinema and drama, to bring awareness on these matters. “I would say that 10 years ago when I started working on the issue of harassment the word was still taboo, but today the matter is openly discussed on the radio. This has only become possible because of the work that has been done by film-makers and TV presenters and also because of the enormous role played by civil society,” Zohni said.
A poster on the walls of the metro
ROLE OF CIVIL SOCIETY: Zohni said the state should be working to encourage civil society to help on women's issues because this is “an area where grassroots work is essential and is basically the strength of NGOs”.
Over the past year, several NGOs, including those founded by Hassan and Suleiman, have suffered difficulties related to their work that have caused a stop to the funding upon which they are dependent, however.
“If I cannot get the necessary funding, I cannot provide shelters for battered wives, and this is not a minor problem in our society. I don't have enough funding to help women who wish to get an ID or a birth certificate issued in order to pursue the paperwork related to inheritance or alimony,” Suleiman said.
Both Suleiman and Hassan are restricted from travelling abroad at present in relation to litigation related to their organisations. According to Hassan, this has included charges such as “the promotion of the irresponsible liberation of women”.
“I honestly don't know what this means, and I am not sure if such charges are helpful to our efforts to reach out to the grassroots level on matters relating to women's status and women's rights,” Hassan said.
Similar complaints about restrictions on civil society groups, including those catering to women's rights, are made in Islamist quarters. Hoda Hussein, a doctor who used to volunteer in one of the paediatric clinics owned by the Al-Gameya Al-Shareya group, said that she often got calls from mothers who have attended these clinics seeking her help.
“The fact that these women had come to these clinics that are practically free or are almost free says a lot about the fact that they cannot afford private healthcare or access decent or even satisfactory government-provided care,” Hussein said.
The Al-Gameya Al-Shareya clinics were shut down for alleged association with the Muslim Brotherhood, labelled by the government as a terrorist organisation. A source at the Ministry of Social Solidarity who spoke on condition of anonymity said that in the case of these organisations “there were also political aspects as they are part of the political opposition.”
The organisations have not faced charges, however. A law to regulate the work of civil society organisations was passed by parliament in the autumn of last year, and it was dubbed restrictive even by some who operate strictly apolitical organisations providing healthcare and education services.
A source at the office of the prime minister told Al-Ahram Weekly that in a meeting with a group of civil society representatives, “essentially those providing healthcare and education for women and children”, Prime Minister Sherif Ismail was asked to revisit the law because it would otherwise disrupt services to those currently benefiting from services that the government cannot provide during the present period of economic hardship.
“I think we need to agree that the role of civil society in matters related to women is essential: the state needs to encourage rather than to discourage civil society to come to the forefront, especially as we are talking about 2017 as the Year of Women. The government cannot do things alone,” Zohni said.
According to Nagwa Khalil of the National Council for Women (NCW), the complementary role of state and civil society will be adequately regulated as part of the upcoming implementation of this year's strategy to improve the status of women in Egypt.
On 21 March, this strategy was signed into law by President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi. It should allow for wide-ranging action, both legal and executive, for the empowerment of women and should be executed by 2030 as part of a larger national development project.
Khalil is convinced that the president, who “committed himself from day one to the improvement of women's status in society”, will do his best to ensure the strategy is implemented. “We have seen the unprecedented appointment of a woman governor, for example, and the increasing number of women in top executive posts,” she said, meaning that the strategy, “formed by the collective views of those in government and those in civil society, will be adequately carried out”.
Abdel-Hamid is not as confident as Khalil, however, and she fears that the matter could end up in merely symbolic moves. “We have seen such promises before and not just under the current government, and we know their limitations,” she said.
For her part, Hassan, no less sceptical than Abdel-Hamid, is willing to be pleasantly surprised. She argued that “we should act as a constant reminder to the state that it has promised to make things happen. We should take the government up on its pledges and follow up on their implementation,” she commented.