“In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” Said a poster splashed across 10 New York subway stations. As a mark of protest, she spray painted the lines and courted arrest. A mild throwback to her detention and sexual harassment at Tahrir Square. Meet the feisty Egyptian writer-activist Mona Eltahawy
“In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” Said a poster splashed across 10 New York subway stations. As a mark of protest, she spray painted the lines and courted arrest. A mild throwback to her detention and sexual harassment at Tahrir Square. Meet the feisty Egyptian writer-activist Mona Eltahawy.
First of all, what according to you is ‘Pan Arabism’ or the ‘Arab World’ today? Are these countries united by common goals, common struggles, or do you feel that clubbing all these countries, into one imaginary crisis block, whose people are purportedly revolting to break free, is just a convenient method of analysis. Does it stereotype and homogenize radically different groups of people?
I think where the region is experiencing some kind of Pan Arabism, is in the new sense of the word – the connections people feel watching the revolutions happen and the support …it’s not so much about connections between the governments… because Pan Arabism is something a lot of the regimes ended up imposing upon the people, so when Tunisia started, the people of the region supported Tunisia, and when Egypt started… other citizens supported… so there is a growing sense of allegiance in the region amongst the people that is very different from the fake allegiances between the regimes within the region that they pretended to have… so that is the new kind of Pan Arabism… that people themselves are looking at the various revolutions and feeling a sense of solidarity.
Tell us about your first hand experience of being in Tahrir square, during the uprising… what was the real driving force, and what remains today of it all?
I first went to Egypt after the revolution began in July. I went to join a sit-in. There was a sit-in, where people spent many days sleeping in the square. During the 18 days when the revolution began, I was in New York and I was engaged in, what I call, my media revolution, because I was on the media a lot, the international media, impressing upon people and urging them to understand the importance of what was happening in Egypt, it was a historic time and I didn’t want anyone to underestimate what was going on. And then I went back to Egypt in July to join the sit-in and then I went back in November, for a very important turning point of a clash between the revolutionaries and the police and the military on a street called Mohammed Mahmoud. This was after the police and the military very violently broke up a peaceful protest in Tahrir square… and the revolution was pushed into this street. I was in the region, for a conference in Morocco when I was supposed to go to Brussels and I cancelled that trip to join in the protests because I felt very strongly that I should be in Egypt that time. So I joined this activist friend of mine and we ended up on the street, on the frontline and we were both attacked by the security forces. They broke my left arm and my right hand and I was sexually assaulted and detained forcibly for 12 hours…6 hrs by the Interior Ministry and 6 hours by the Military Intelligence. In the period since then, I have used the attack on me as a way of highlighting how much worse it is for other people. I consider myself lucky because, I am known and very soon after I was detained, a campaign started to free me, because I had managed to get a tweet out about my detention… but if I was an ordinary Egyptian woman, who was unknown, I could very well be dead today. So I use what happened to me, as a way of highlighting the continued brutality of the security forces in Egypt.
Where the revolution stands now is that they are in a transition stage… they have had a presidential election and the current president of Egypt comes from the Muslim Brotherhood and many of us have lots of problems with him, because he doesn’t seem to represent all of the Egyptians and he continues to represent mostly his ideological allegiances of the Muslim Brotherhood and that he is not giving Egypt what Egypt needs which is more jobs, fixing the economy…The chant of the revolution was, bread, liberty and social justice… and I went back to Egypt again in January, 2012 on the anniversary of the start of the revolution and I go back to Egypt every month, and every time we have a protest, we chant, Bread, Liberty and Social justice…these were the goals of the revolution and they remain the goals of the revolution, which are not being met by the current President, so the revolution continues…But now we have to try and find another way of achieving the goals, that is just not demonstrations, but something beyond. I believe what we need is the social revolution…which is the cultural revolution… the sexual revolution… the revolution of the mind… so I have moved back to Egypt to do what I can, to help the real cause of this revolution and my main aim is to fight for women’s rights.
Your views on the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ have been very ambiguous…as I gathered from some of your previous interviews, where you said, even though it might be a more fundamentalist organisation, it still belongs to us, our country… but Muslim Brotherhood endorses someone like Mohd. El Baradei… don’t you think with such associations and their camaraderie with the Americans, they would only be carrying forward Eisenhower’s dream of ‘Arab freedom’, and would ultimately strengthen American hegemony in the Middle East?
Are you asking me whether Muslim Brotherhood has accepted America or …
I am asking your views, because you kind of seem to claim them as your own, but their allegiances to America cannot be denied…
Right… you know, Baradei did not run for President… but yes, soon after the 18 days when Hosni Mubarak stepped down, people began to wonder about the role of the Muslim Brotherhood and I continue to say that the Muslim Brotherhood are a part of Egypt. The current President got 25 % of the votes, but whenever I talk about them as being part of Egypt, I always urge people to recognise that they are a minority, not a majority. If 11 candidates run for President, the man from the Muslim Brotherhood only gets 25%, that is both an acknowledgement of what I said, that they are a part of Egypt but, they are not a majority. The majority of the Egyptians don’t want this mix of Islam and politics that the Muslim Brotherhood offer, but the fact of the matter remains now, that this President is from the Muslim Brotherhood and what he is learning now is going to be a challenge for the Muslim Brotherhood and I think he is going to change them forever… because when you are an ideological movement, it is very easy to make big and grand statements but when you are in the political arena and you become a political entity, you have to make the kind of compromises that will then hinge you as an ideological movement… because now he is the President of Egypt, not of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Egypt is an ally of the United States and United States wants a stable partner in Egypt… and that was the problem with Hosni Mubarak, because much to our chagrin and our anger as Egyptians, 5 US administrations supported our dictator, because all they cared about was stability…so as far as the Americans are concerned, they just want someone to guarantee stability, which happens now to be someone from the Muslim Brotherhood. But now the question is to the Muslim Brotherhood, how do you now accept this, because in the past you always criticised the United States of being infidel etc… so, when they were just an ideological movement they wouldn’t make compromises, but as soon as you are in the political arena, you have to make compromises.
As an Egyptian, Muslim woman journalist, activist and commentator, what do you think should be the fundamental frameworks within which we should be analyzing the contours of feminism today, and do they differ geo-politically?
It’s an old debate, whether feminism is just a western concept…. but it’s not true… if you look at Egypt, we have a long history of feminism…our feminist movement is known since 19th century. An Egyptian woman called Hoda Shaarawi… and feminism in Egypt was a direct result of this woman’s involvement…she founded the Egyptian Feminist Union… and in the 1960s we had a very vibrant feminist community fighting for the rights of Egyptian women, then there was someone called Nawal El Saadawi, who was the first woman to become Health Minister in Egypt. During the 1980s, new feminist groups were formed to counter religious fundamentalism. The New Woman Group was formed in Cairo and was mainly concerned with studying the feminist history of the country in order to determine a new programme, which would start off from where the previous one had stopped. Another organisation was the Committee for the Defence of Women and Family Rights, which was formed in 1985. This Committee was established to support the campaign for the amendment of the Person Status Code… so, we have a long line of feminism, and it is very much a part of Egypt and I really don’t agree with the concept that feminism is a western thing and doesn’t belong to cultures which are not western…Feminism, like human rights, is universal…women are oppressed everywhere… how people identify and process that, in the way that Gandhi said, that be the change you want, is what determines the contours of feminism.
Finally, your views on the social media…you seem to have this almost tempestuous love affair with twitter, with every little detail of your life being tweeted… crying, eating, laughing, looking out of the window… those most inward spaces of one’s soul is just out there…what is the nature of this relationship, personally?
When I was detained in Egypt during the revolution, I was somehow not carrying my smart phone… and when an activist came in, she had a blackberry. I sent out that tweet, and I honestly believe that tweet saved my life. But twitter has its limitations… so when there were those racist ads pasted in the New York subway station, I went out there to protest… left that twitter room to be out there. Similar things happened during the revolution in the Middle East and Africa, in order for the revolution to become something more than you and I talking on twitter, we needed to leave that virtual space, revolutions need people on the ground… this is the thing that I am learning at a personal level now.
I am not a journalist, I am a writer and I don’t work for any institution and have no institutional backing, so I feel very much alone, so I very much need the social media. I freelance for the Guardian and the Washington Post, but I don’t work for them, so if anything happens to me, they can’t do anything about it. So twitter and facebook have been great PR agencies for me.
Also I have developed great personal relationships with people in the social media…The thing about social media is that people have this false feeling that they know you, but actually they don’t really know you. So I have tried to overcome this by telling people how I really feel and if I was journalist working with any institution I would not be able to say all those things.
Sherry Turkle says that it’s like a vicious circle and the lonelier you are, you push yourself into these social media, and you feel even lonelier and…
You know, I travel a lot, and I love the fact that I can check into a hotel all alone and then I am on twitter and there are all these people around me from all over the world…
Are you scared of being alone?
I am not scared, but I enjoy the company of these people on twitter that I’ve never met, and I know that Sherry Turkle is not a fan of that… I embody everything that she finds negative in it…I do all those things, I am sitting at dinner with my friends and I tweet, but I really enjoy it. The other day, I had a conversation with many of my followers on twitter, about my ex-husband contacting me, out of the blue, and I said to them that he had been emotionally abusive and so many people supported me in wonderful ways and shared their own stories. Now this is different from sharing your life with a robot… I can understand her take on robots, because that is disturbing…
You know, there is this tribal activist Dayamani Barla who said that the more number of friends she has gathered on twitter and facebook, her friends in real life who would actually fight with her for her causes, have almost proportionately decreased!
Yes, it is a double-edged sword… something I called flaktivism, the combination of flak and activism… where people find it so easy to absolve themselves of their responsibilities… you just go on twitter and send out an angry tweet and that’s it! Yes, it is a double-edged sword and it is a difficult act of balance.
But then again, when my arms were broken in Egypt, it was difficult. Because I was a writer and what could I write with, if I had no arms? But then I used my one finger to type and tweet and my body became a medium of activism through which I communicated to people…
