Elizabeth Rubin: The Feminists in the Middle of Tahrir Square
[Rubin, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, writes frequently about the Middle East.]
...The story of Egyptian female power may date back to Cleopatra, but the name I heard among women and intellectuals around Tahrir (Liberation) Square was that of Hoda Shaarawi, who was in the forefront of the 1919 revolution against the British and, in 1923, famously tossed off her veil in public. It was a symbolic act of rebellion, resented by the religious establishment and too shocking for universal adoption, but Shaarawi inspired a generation with her inch-by-inch fight for women’s personal and political rights—the abolition of polygamy, the right to divorce.
Around the time Shaarawi died in 1947, a girl named Nawal El Saadawi in Kafr Tahla, a village north of Cairo, had already taken up the torch. Jailed, menaced, and exiled throughout her life, Saadawi is now 79 and could be found protesting in the square every day.
Saadawi’s father was a progressive man, an official who had taken part in the 1919 rebellion but followed the custom of having his daughter (one of nine children) married off at the age of 10. Or, rather, trying. Nawal had already fallen in love with literature. She’d read Jane Eyre and pretended to be mad when the suitors came around. She went on to graduate from medical school, become a chest surgeon, and marry a fellow student who ran off to Suez as a guerrilla fighter against the British and returned a broken man and drug addict. In the 1967 war with Israel she volunteered as a doctor in the trenches and in the Palestinian camps in Jordan. The experience radicalized her. She wrote a novel about a Palestinian fighter she’d met. In 1972 she broke even more taboos than Hoda Shaarawi did by writing Women and Sex, which dealt with female desire, religion, and genital mutilation. Unsurprisingly, it angered the religious and political authorities. By then she’d been working in the Ministry of Health for 14 years. She was dismissed, the beginning of years of persecution....
Read entire article at Newsweek
...The story of Egyptian female power may date back to Cleopatra, but the name I heard among women and intellectuals around Tahrir (Liberation) Square was that of Hoda Shaarawi, who was in the forefront of the 1919 revolution against the British and, in 1923, famously tossed off her veil in public. It was a symbolic act of rebellion, resented by the religious establishment and too shocking for universal adoption, but Shaarawi inspired a generation with her inch-by-inch fight for women’s personal and political rights—the abolition of polygamy, the right to divorce.
Around the time Shaarawi died in 1947, a girl named Nawal El Saadawi in Kafr Tahla, a village north of Cairo, had already taken up the torch. Jailed, menaced, and exiled throughout her life, Saadawi is now 79 and could be found protesting in the square every day.
Saadawi’s father was a progressive man, an official who had taken part in the 1919 rebellion but followed the custom of having his daughter (one of nine children) married off at the age of 10. Or, rather, trying. Nawal had already fallen in love with literature. She’d read Jane Eyre and pretended to be mad when the suitors came around. She went on to graduate from medical school, become a chest surgeon, and marry a fellow student who ran off to Suez as a guerrilla fighter against the British and returned a broken man and drug addict. In the 1967 war with Israel she volunteered as a doctor in the trenches and in the Palestinian camps in Jordan. The experience radicalized her. She wrote a novel about a Palestinian fighter she’d met. In 1972 she broke even more taboos than Hoda Shaarawi did by writing Women and Sex, which dealt with female desire, religion, and genital mutilation. Unsurprisingly, it angered the religious and political authorities. By then she’d been working in the Ministry of Health for 14 years. She was dismissed, the beginning of years of persecution....