Review: Headscarves and Hymens, Mona Eltahawy
By Sobia Abdin
Mona Eltahawy’s brave book on the sexual revolution, rather the lack of it in the Middle East, starts with a reference to one of Eygptian writer’s Rifaat’s short stories in the volume Distant View of a Minaret, where she says, “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” (1). Eltahawy does much the same: in less than two hundred and fifty pages, she introduces the world to the raw core of patriarchy in the Middle East, and by extension in the world, particularly in the Western world that successfully wraps its misogyny along with xenophobia, islamophobia, and racism to ensure that women everywhere are oppressed in at least some degree.
The first chapter in Eltahawy’s book is titled Why They Hate Us, which I am going to talk about in this article, as it summaries the premise of the book. Even as a feminist, I found the choice of words a bit confusing. Hatred? Hatred—I arrive at the answer when I delve deeper into the chapter. I had never thought of it that way. In all these years of unlearning the patriarchy that had been so concretely ingrained in me through my upbringing and of learning and relearning the many schools of thought, ideas, and discourses of feminism, I had never been able to decipher the real reason patriarchy continues to lead a flourishing life. As a student of literature and history, I had considered every possible historical explanation there could be, all of which Eltahawy neatly brushes aside with one word—hatred. It cannot be anything else but a ripe and revolting hatred for women—their rights and their freedoms—that allows human beings, both men and women, to nourish patriarchy and prevent it from dying the death it deserves.
The chapter is filled with numerous examples of hatred towards women, both by individuals and the state machinery, from domestic violence and sexual abuse to child marriage and female genital mutilation. All of these I find, unfortunately, too relatable as a woman of colour, and feel that the book should have been subtitled “Why the Coloured World Needs a Sexual Revolution”. Yet, among all these ghastly crimes, the example that I found the most shockingly unbelievable was this: “.... clerics on Saudi TV were obsessed with women and their orifices…. 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” (2).
Eltahawy answers in the very next line: The hatred of women.
Nevertheless, this is only the beginning of the many disturbing examples of patriarchal domination and exploitation of women that Eltahawy lays bare in her book. She agrees that the hatred of women is not a Saudi phenomenon and is not unique to Salafism, but exists across the Middle East. To quote, “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” (3). However, this idea is not new and is not limited to the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) region alone. In their book ‘Sexuality in Muslim Contexts’, Anissa Helie and Homa Hoodfar talk about a similar preoccupation with controlling women’s bodies across Asian countries including India, Pakistan, Iran, and China, that the dominant discourse is that, if left to their own devices, women will exploit their boundless sexualities through unconventional and socially unacceptable means (4). Nina Hoel and Sa’diyya Shaikh show in their research work for the paper titled, “Sex as Ibadah: Religion, Gender, and Subjectivity among South African Muslim Women”, how perceived sex-positive traditions of Islam were not always affirming of women, and instead co-exist with gender-biased traditions that are rooted in deeper patriarchal structures (5). This makes the reading of Headscarves and Hymens so important for every woman and girl around the globe—the hatred of women that Mona Eltahawy exposes is universal and detrimental to sexual and gender minorities everywhere—as well as for men in order to challenge their own perspectives.
Even when she draws examples of violence and oppression against women in the MENA region, Eltahawy’s references are relevant for every person who identifies as female. She provides instances of Egyptian clerics not only equating female genital mutilation (FGM) with male circumcision, but also that one should do it if they think it “is the best way to protect his daughters” and “reduce temptation”. What is even more appalling is that many women in Egypt supported the legitimizing of FGM as a form of “beautification” (6). This example resonates with al-Qaradawi’s claim that, “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”.
These incidents offer something to think about. How do these clerics maintain such control on women and also earn support from other women to do so? Eltahawy has an answer—the call to prayer. “Women are silenced by men who use women’s faith to imprison them.” Here she quotes examples of Kuwait parliamentarians’ who demanded that two female members of the parliament cover their heads, how a Kuwaiti woman lost the custody of her child to her husband for wearing a bikini, and how in Libya—after the end of Qaddafi’s absolute rule—the first thing the interim government promised was a return to polygamy even when women stood alongside men in the fight against dictatorship. However, Eltahawy warns that Qaddafi should not be mistaken for a feminist for his ban on polygamy because during his rule, survivors of sexual violence were sent to “social rehabilitation centers” (7).
Yet, Eltahawy points out, no one polices and punishes perpetrators of sexual violence, no one controls men. In a country where, according to a 2008 Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights survey, 80% women have been victims of sexual harassment, one would think the state would be taking urgent measures to ensure that women were able to access public spaces without the fear of sexual assault. However, just as this is not the case in Egypt, it is not the case anywhere in the world. As an Indian woman, I am too well-versed with the state machinery’s failure to implement laws that guarantee that no sexual perpetrator walks free.
In the end, it all comes down to the one word Eltahawy started her book with—hatred. To quote her, “Why do men hate us? They hate us because they need us, they fear us, they know how much control it takes to keep us in line… They hate us because we are at once their temptation and their salvation from that patriarchy, which they must sooner or later realize hurts them too.” (8). Unless we topple every oppressor in our parliament, our streets, our bedrooms, Eltahawy feels our revolution has not even begun.
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Eltahawy, Mona, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, Hachette UK, London, 2015, page 3-4
Ibid, page 10
Ibid, page 11
Helie, Anissa and Hoodfar, Homa, Sexuality in Muslim Contexts: Restrictions and Resistance, Zed Books, London, New York, 2012
Hoel, Nina and Shaikh, Sa’diyya, Sex as Ibadah: Religion, Gender, and Subjectivity among South African Muslim Women, Indiana University Press, 2013
Eltahawy, Mona, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, Hachette UK, London, 2015, page 12
Ibid, 15-16
Ibid, 31
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I, Sobia Abdin, identify as a Muslim woman and a feminist. This identity has been defined by my experiences of growing up in a patriarchal and Islamophobic society. While together my identity and experiences often find a voice in my writing, I also consciously make an effort to ensure that my stories are informed by a universal feeling of humanness. My writings, which include poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, have appeared in The Bombay review, The Lookout Journal, Literary Yard, Hans India, Indian Cultural Forum, Muse India, Woman’s Era, and in an anthology published by Impish Lass Publishing House.