The Harlem shake and a simmering Arab sexual revolution. By Doug Saunders. The Globe and Mail, March 2, 2013.
Meet a famous Arab sex therapist. By Shereen El Feki. The Globe and Mail, March 1, 2013.
The fight against sexual assault on Tahrir Square. Editorial. Your Middle East, February 21, 2013.
Syrians find love in time of war. AFP. Your Middle East, September 1, 2012.
More on Egypt and Morsi here.
Saunders:
There
was something enthralling in the sight, on Thursday night, of young Egyptians,
some clad in underwear, making rhythmic pelvic thrusts in front of the Cairo
headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Harlem Shake is an unlikely medium
of revolution, but the dance craze this week became the latest front in the
showdown between Islamic politics and the drive toward individualism and
independence.
Which
is winning? At first glance, things look pretty dark: Two years after
anti-authoritarian revolutions ruptured the Middle East and North Africa, the
forces of Islamic conservatism generally have the upper hand. Their restrictive
views, especially around matters of women, sexuality and personal life, are
beginning to manifest on the street.
Beneath
the surface, something more complex appears to be taking place – perhaps not a
whole country embracing the libertine abandon of those dancers, but an Arab
world that is making the break, however slowly and awkwardly, from the
restrictions of traditional family life.
“In
broad strokes,” the Egyptian-Canadian writer Shereen El Feki writes in Sex and the Citadel, her fascinating new
survey of the intimate lives of women in the Arab world and especially in
Cairo, “this sexual climate looks a lot like the West on the brink of the
sexual revolution.”
That is
a fairly startling statement, especially given how atrocious life is for a
majority of women in Egypt. This is a country where more than 90 per cent of
married women have had genital-mutilating operations between the ages of 9 and
12, and where a third of them believe that these clitorectomies prevent sexual
promiscuity (even though most prostitutes have undergone the procedure). It is
a place where 60 per cent of highly educated women (and three-quarters of
less-educated women) believe that women who dress “provocatively” are at fault
if they are raped – and where domestic abuse and sex assaults are measured at
levels many times higher than the worst places in the West.
Worse,
there is a highly popular belief, across the Arab world and especially strong
in Egypt, that women are fragile things in need of protection. As the Salafist
TV-star imam Mahmoud al-Masry tells Ms. El Feki, “I believe that the woman is
like a diamond, to be preserved. We do not suppress or oppress the woman – I
want to protect her.” That, of course, is the ultimate form of denigration; it
is accompanied by an equally widespread and often grotesque fetishization of
virginity.
With
those ingredients, how could anyone be hopeful? For one thing, because none of
it is timeless or inevitable: Much of the sexual conservatism, and extreme
restriction of women’s liberties (including the covering of heads) is a
development of the colonial years and their aftermath, an angry generation’s
reaction to isolation and deprivation.
But
also because Arab family life is changing very fast – especially in two crucial
ways. The first is female literacy, which has risen from less than a quarter in
1980 to about 65 per cent today. The second is family size: In 1960, the
average Egyptian woman had almost seven children; today it is 2.7, and falling
fast. This isn’t as dramatic a change as in Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, Lebanon or
the United Arab Emirates, which now have European-sized families, but it is a
crucial indicator: Everywhere in the world (including every Western country),
the moment when sexual and gender relations began to transform dramatically
followed the moment when female literacy passed above 50 per cent and family
sizes began to fall sharply.
And
wherever this change has occurred, it has been accompanied by social tension
and often political turmoil. It is, in the words of the demographer Youssef
Courbage, who has chronicled this dramatic “secularization of family life” in
the Arab world, “not at all necessary to speculate about some particular
essence of Islam in order to explain the violence now stirring the Muslim
world. That world is disoriented because it is undergoing the shock of the
revolution in modes of thought associated with increased literacy and
widespread birth control.”
This is
what Ms. El Feki has seen beneath the head scarves of Cairo: “struggles toward
democracy and personal rights; the rapid growth of cities and a growing strain
on family structures; loosening community controls on private behaviour; a huge
population of young people whose influences and attitudes diverge from those of
their parents.” It is, she says, a sexual revolution “in embryo” – visible,
sometimes, only in the odd burst of Harlem Shake.
