Sex and the Citadel (22 page)

Tipping the balance from harassment to cooperation isn’t easy.
But Abu Komsan is confident that, in the long run, the revolt will lift Egypt out of its decades-long malaise and that symptoms like sexual harassment will shift from a chronic condition to a sporadic complaint. “What is it the revolution gave? It gives people a powerful feeling that they are able to control their life and make their own decisions. Before, most of us Egyptians were very depressed and feeling they are not human. [I’m] not talking about human rights, just being human. Revolution gives people a sense of victory and dignity and hope. Definitely, this makes their behavior better.”

Better remains to be seen. But when it comes to intimate life, will it be any different? For all her hopes, Al Haq was doubtful of change beyond those who had already broken the rules. “I believe the one who was rebel before the revolution will be more rebel after the revolution. It happened for me and it happened for many friends. Maybe they won’t still be able to face the society in what they are doing, but in their social circles, they will be okay, ‘Yes, I do this; I am not regretting it.’ ” Those who publicly defy convention—like the Nude Photo Revolutionary—are largely seen as aberrations, not trendsetters. “It won’t happen in this society, a real freedom of sexual life and freedom of expression, except [when] the people are really educated,” Al Haq said. “It won’t come for years and years.” Salama was similarly doubtful. “Girls sleeping out in the square with boys, that’s a social aspect of the revolution. But this is not a social revolution. The social phase of the revolution is just starting. For these changes to take place, it’s going to need much time.”

And yet there are countless private rebellions playing out across the land, even if those at their heart don’t see them as such. “Revolution is for political matters, but not in thinking. Tradition has no relation with revolution,” Amany sighed, sinking into the shadow of a hypostyle hall. She and I met at one of the many ancient temples dotting the countryside between Luxor and Aswan, where I was on a break from the crush of Cairo and Amany was on the job as a guide. As we wandered past obelisks and statues, she shared her impressive knowledge of history and her own story of quiet uprising.

Amany is in her late twenties and comes from a lower-middle-class
family in Upper Egypt. Al-Sa’iid, as the south of the country is known in Arabic, is a famously conservative region, but times are changing. Egyptian parents increasingly want to have daughters as well as sons; they also see the value of sending their girls on to higher education, even if that means far afield, in part because educated (but not
too
educated) young women are thought to have a greater chance in the marriage stakes and to make better wives and mothers. And so Amany, who is the bright spark of her five siblings, was allowed to go away for university, but once student days were over, she had to move back home. Unlike many young Egyptians, however, she has a lucrative job, which makes her the family breadwinner now that her father is retired. Amany may hold all the financial cards, but her parents still call the shots. Every couple of weeks her mother produces a suitor, in the hope of seeing her daughter married. But Amany refuses all comers for one simple reason: she’s secretly married already.

Five years ago, Amany met Hossam, a former soldier and her brother’s friend, who comes from the north of Egypt. Hossam was quickly smitten, Amany told me, and duly appeared with his parents in tow to ask for her hand. Here Amany paused her story for a moment to show me a hieroglyph. “This is the symbol of eternal life,” she explained, pointing to an ankh. “It also represents the unity of Upper and Lower Egypt.” Sadly, no such union was in the cards for Amany and Hossam. Her parents refused him because he makes less money than their daughter and would therefore drain an income that otherwise flows to them. But their objections were also geographical. “They do not trust a lot in the men of Lower Egypt. It seems that if they [the couple] have a kind of trouble, maybe he will leave her and he will go to live up there [in the north] and marry another woman. Not peace enough in their mind,” she explained. As far as Amany is concerned, though, Hossam’s provenance is an asset. “He has a more open mind. He trusts me; he does not mind that I work with other men,” she said, comparing him favorably with her local suitors. “He is the type of the man, if you are not talking, he can read your eyes. It looks like he
had a trip through my mind. He understands me. You can’t find this type of man nowadays.”

After three more years and two more tries with her parents, Amany decided to take matters into her own hands. “I found no hope of the family anymore. They will never change their mind. So I said it’s my choice, let me do my choice.” As the 2011 uprising drew to a close, she and Hossam traveled north, far from the prying eyes of home, and signed an
‘urfi
marriage contract in a lawyer’s office. For Amany, sleeping with Hossam was inconceivable without it. “We had secret marriage because we wanted to make it right before my God. Because we are Muslims, we do not want to do something that is haram.” But it was equally unimaginable to her to openly defy her parents and enter into an official marriage without their consent. “I don’t like to put my family in a critical situation. I have to obey them. I have to do all of my best to make them happy more than me,” she said. “And for reputation, their reputation, not my reputation. My father is now retired, but all of the time he is in the mosque, the famous man of religion. He is a man with a good position. [If I marry without his consent], they will say he has a very impolite girl.”

As we passed by tales of “beautiful meetings” between gods and goddesses inscribed on the temple walls, Amany told me about her less-than-beautiful life with Hossam, sneaking out of her parents’ place in quiet hours to catch some time with him at his tiny rented flat across town. As far as she is concerned, discretion is a matter of life and death. “My parents, if they find out, they will kill me. Really. It happened in my family. The sister of my grandmother, she had a relation, and they took her and one day …” Amany drew her hand across her throat like a knife. Honor killings are a shadowy subject in Egypt, and no one is quite sure of the scale of the problem.
⁷⁹
But for Amany it is far from a dying practice; the story is kept alive in her family to keep the girls in line.

Like many young women I’ve met, Amany is caught between defiance and regret. She is quietly furious with her parents for driving her to this situation, but she is also torn by guilt. “I am
now deceiving my family,” she told me sadly. “My family trust me, and I am using their trust not in a good way. I used to be so honest all of the time. I used to tell them everything happening in my life. But this thing I can’t say.” Amany’s reticence is compounded by the fact that she no longer believes her
‘urfi
marriage is Islamically sound. “I read on the Internet, some people say it is 100 percent halal, some people say 20 percent halal. So I don’t know. I told [Hossam] we need to stop to doing anything together [having sex], because maybe what we did is haram. I don’t like to continue in haram again: I have to feed poor people; I have to pray a lot; I have to go to hajj. Maybe God will forgive me.”

Amany has few hopes that her family will come around, or that Hossam will find a job in Egypt’s struggling economy. “I don’t like to think what will happen in the future. I don’t like to make myself to be sad. Keep it for God,” she said. Amany spoke as if the uprising had already passed her by, too late to make much of a difference in her life. But she has high hopes that any daughter of hers will one day benefit, and she is clear on what she, as a mother, will do. “I will never give something to my kids that makes me hard with my family. I hurt a lot from them, [because] they are thinking in a different way,” Amany said, her voice breaking. “But I will be able to understand my daughter, what she is thinking, because I am in that experience before. I will let her to choose the person that her heart chooses and her feelings choose.”

Whether Amany and her generation will, in fact, behave any differently from their parents in matters ranging from family life to Egypt’s political future is the big question. Opinion polls suggest that on many issues—particularly as they relate to gender and sex—young people across the Arab region are even more conservative than their elders. But talk to these same youth in private and they express dreams and desires that belie such stern appearances. Young Egyptians—especially young women—continue to walk a fine line between public conformity and private fulfillment. But for one spectacular moment, in the uprising of 2011, public and private aligned.

The postrevolutionary reality has not turned out as many had
hoped, and old men are once again in charge, having deftly out-maneuvered their less experienced sons and daughters. But just because they are not out in front does not mean these youth are out of sight; if they play the next decade right, study their societies, build their knowledge, and hone their tactics, then they could well bring about the change that Amany dreams of for herself and her children—starting, as we’ll see in the next chapter, with a few foundation stones.

4
Facts of Life

A clever woman can spin yarn with a donkey’s thighbone
.

—My grandmother, on making the most of what you’re given

In a blood-red basement in Cairo, I walked in on a beautiful young woman on the phone, talking sex. “Trust us,” she wrapped up with a caller. “We are dealing with people from different levels. No one will know anything.” It’s a pity he could only hear her voice, because she really was a sight: flawless olive skin and full red lips, her beautifully manicured fingers brushing back a lock of thick, glossy hair from jet-black, almond-shaped eyes. Imagine Nefertiti on toll-free. It was a quiet night, she told me; usually, there are around forty calls a day. A lot for masturbation, she said. Oral sex too, and anal intercourse from time to time.

Now, if you have a mobile, and money, in the Arab world, it’s not hard to find a woman willing to provide a little aural stimulation. A good place to start is the back channels of your TV. For those tuned to an obliging satellite, surfing the far-flung spectrum brings a wave of dial-in sex ads, much to the public fury of Islamic conservatives who threaten to pull the plug. Many of these ads are foreign—Turkish, German, Thai—but there is plenty on offer in Arabic as well: Arab Sex Club, Arab XXX, Arab Babes. It’s a fairly standard service: still shots of busty, ivory-skinned nudes in various states of arousal, playing with themselves or going down on each other. For the more traditionally inclined, some of the women are wearing hijabs or niqabs—and nothing else. In a rare display of Pan-Arab unity, the flags of most countries in the region flash across the screen, accompanied by local numbers. The sound track
features sample conversations—“Ah, ah,
habibi
, more, more” and similarly encouraging words.

Back in Cairo, however, that lovely young woman at the end of the line was part of a more specialized service. She’s a doctor working with Shababna (Our Youth), a telephone help line to answer young people’s questions about health in general and sex in particular. Six days a week, twelve hours a day, two physicians—one male, one female—are standing by to answer calls and texts from across the country. “You can’t imagine the misinformation available. It’s tremendous,” said Mamdouh Wahba, a grandfatherly gynecologist based in Cairo, who founded Shababna. Wahba is head of the Egyptian Family Health Society, an NGO specializing in reproductive health, and has spent much of the past decade trying to dispel the fog of youthful confusion over sex and reproduction. It’s no joke, but you can’t help laughing with Wahba when he recalls some of the misconceptions he’s had to deal with: “They don’t wash underwear of girls and boys together just in case they get pregnant. Of course the menstrual blood is rotten blood that the body has to get rid of every month; if you don’t have your period, you are poisoned.” And then there is the stern warning that some girls, especially those from rural areas, receive on the perils of drinking tea and coffee, thought to excite them into unseemly behavior. Not to mention that old chestnut, masturbation (known as
al-‘ada al-sirriyya
, or “the secret habit,” in Egyptian Arabic) and its perils, including blindness, madness, impotence, and God’s wrath.
¹

At their tiny call center, Rania and her colleague, Ahmed, were at the ready, laptops fired up to surf the Web for additional information should young callers tax their already impressive body of knowledge.
²
These two take their jobs very seriously. “We still have a taboo around our sexual life. As a community, we believe this is our culture. And this is a big problem in our society,” said Ahmed. Rania is proud of her job: “I am here to provide service to young people, and to change wrong ideas about relationships, especially in Egypt.” Still, she preferred not to talk about her work in any great detail off the job: “I don’t tell my family. I just say I talk to teenagers about their problems.”

Those problems come fast and furious for youth—especially young women—who move beyond the social nucleus of sex within marriage. People are quick to blame them for religious or moral laxity, but to my mind, the real failing lies in the gap between the rhetoric toward, and the reality of, Arab youth. Over the past decade, there has been no end of official statements, glossy reports, multimillion-dollar projects, and high-profile conferences extolling the power and possibilities of the region’s young people. Yet those in authority, from parents to presidents, have failed to provide their sons and daughters with the basic tools of empowerment in key aspects of their lives, including that most private part—sexuality.

The fear is of the slippery slope: if young people were actually given accurate and accessible information to understand the risks and rewards of sexual life, if condoms and abortion were more easily available, if illegitimacy were less of a stigma, then this would speed the way toward
zina
—no matter the international evidence to the contrary. On this downward journey, it’s not just the ends, but the means as well that have come to be seen as haram; so that’s no to sexual education and condoms and abortion in many people’s minds, despite the scope of permissibility within Islam. While parents are clearly concerned about the influence of “modern life” on their young, from the sexual content of movies and the Internet to the decline of extended family surveillance, they are equally anxious about providing young people with the information and services to make sense of it all.