Don’t Tarnish the Revolution

On the night Hosni Mubarak was toppled from power, the crowd in Cairo’s Tahrir Square found itself liberated from all sorts of constraints: dictatorship, brutal rule, censorship, casual imprisonment, torture. And civilization. Mariam Nekiwi, a young video editor, found this out first-hand when, as her boyfriend recalled for the Los Angeles Times, “A group of men surrounded her from four directions and closed her off.”

First someone grabbed her groin, then others grabbed the rest of her body, pulling at her clothes. She couldn’t see, but she did manage to scream.

The reaction of those around her?

“People started yelling at me to be quiet,” Nekiwi told the newspaper.

They said: ‘Don’t tarnish the revolution. Don’t make a scene.’

That was just before a crowd of men began another, much more publicized round of brutality and sexual assault, this time on CBS’s Lara Logan. She was beaten by an assortment of strangers, and so battered that after being flown back to the United States, she needed hospital treatment. For days, Egyptian television had assured viewers that foreign-born journalists covering the crisis were secretly agents of the Mossad (or alternatively, interestingly, emissaries of Hezbollah). “Jew! Jew!” shouted the men who molested the helpless reporter.

Not that they needed much provocation: there were a fair number of women, non-journalists as it happens, molested in precisely the same way. A government was gone. But still very much alive was the traditional Egyptian response to foreign women, career women and traditional women, women in burkas and veils and women in Western dress: Fair game, as ever, only now the game is really on.

Don’t tarnish the revolution. In the days following the victorious efforts of the Egyptian populace, Tahrir Square, home of the revolution against political tyranny, embarked on its own special voyage through Hell. The tyranny of the mob. The tyranny of men who know women are helpless against large groups of men. The tyranny of nameless, faceless cowards who know that the mob will protect them. The difference between Mubarak and the men of the mob? No tyrant in Tahrir Square was forced by popular demand to leave the country.

But let’s not confine ourselves to Egypt. Tunisia, once ruled by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was a country best known for (a) massive corruption, which is not exactly rare in the Muslim world; and (b) women’s rights, which are, in fact, rare in the Muslim world.

As Ida Lichter writes in the Australian, say what you will about Tunisia, it had its good points. Polygamy had long been abolished. Moreover, under the much-reviled Ben Ali, things got even better for women. No one under 18 could marry. Wife-batterers got jail time. Literacy improved so much that 64 percent of Tunisian women can now read. And, adds Lichter, “Divorced mothers could be granted full custody of children and could refuse consent for the marriage of a child.”

So pleasant though it is to imagine a Muslim world where people dance in the streets to celebrate their new-found freedoms and rejoice in revolution, my suspicion is the revelry has started way too early. The women of that world may have to sit this one out.

As they always have.

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This blog post was originally published on World Affairs

Photo Credits: Flickr CC kairoinfo4u