I have long understood that our sisters in North Africa suffer terribly under the double whammy of oppressive regimes and misogynist cultures but learned about the brave girls and women who are saying "no more!" The book, its title calculated to provoke as much as the blood-red scarf that trails across its cover, is no less polemical. Cases are exposed in their rawest forms, though somewhat connoted as common incidences in the region. She is deputy editor at Devex and former production editor at Prospect. Are they “Islamists”, “a right wing among Muslim men”, “Islamists and the equally misogynistic secular men of our societies” or “the alliance of State and Street”? D&G’s hijab range is aimed at people like me – so why do I feel excluded? “Covered. Not for the horror unveiled within the book, but because as a prerequisite, the reader must have knowledge of the entire MENA region. You can sense the fury, antagonism and frustration of the writer. Thank you for your support of Prospect and we hope that you enjoy everything the site has to offer. But understanding postcolonialism allows us to include our men in the dialogue, and to let them acknowledge their behaviour. Mona Eltahawy is best known to be relatively a debateable journalist and feminist. The problem for Eltahawy is she wants it all achieved by noon on Monday and it’s something of a one-state solution. But this isn’t a historical writing about the region; it’s an opinion-led short feature about Mona Eltahawy’s book ‘Headscarves and hymens: why the Middle East needs a sexual revolution’. “Be immodest, rebel, disobey”, she urges the women of the Middle East and North Africa – though the prospects for those who do so and do not emigrate are thoroughly bleak. Go up, go out: which extension type is right for you? Brilliant, but does this look into the imprint the West had on the region? This would require the writer to look into colonialism, imperialism and postcolonial trauma. Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2015, You can't read this book without being outraged about the treatment of women in the Middle East. They hate women. Her original article provoked a passionate outpouring of criticism, as this book is certain to do, from Middle Eastern Muslim women, who resented what they saw as her “neo-orientalist”, “neocolonialist” and “Islamophobic” attempt to speak for them. The causes or the roots of these rather tremendous matters are not mentioned. This needs to change. Where more progressive laws do exist in theory – Eltahawy cites recent draft legislation against domestic violence in Lebanon – attitudes within the police, legal system and society hobble them in practice. The title is hardly Islamic. Headscarves and Hymens, by Mona Eltahawy. American-Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy came to the world’s attention in November 2011 when she was physically and sexually assaulted by police during a protest in Cairo. They are behind the hijab, the social, political and cultural oppression of it all. She rejects any possibility other than a ban on the niqab (the erasure and disappearance of women). Mona is brave and brilliant, telling her story clear and loud, Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2015. How you may ask? It reviews issues from different angles, ending with the same result; the governing bodies in the Middle East and North Africa are misogynistic and patriarchal. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Minutes later, a hand grabbed me hard between the legs, at what felt like an impossible angle. She draws from a wealth of personal and professional experience. Disabling it will result in some disabled or missing features. As a US citizen currently living in Egypt this answered many questions and raised even more. This page works best with JavaScript. Top subscription boxes – right to your door, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, See all details for Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, © 1996-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Somehow, I didn’t have the heart to … None of them said anything to the man as he swung off, and, frozen by the grotesqueness of the situation, neither did I. It is a book-length expansion of a controversial article, “Why Do They Hate Us?” – where “they” is Muslim men and “us” is women – she wrote for the US magazine Foreign Policy in 2012. At least 90% of married Egyptian women between the ages of 15 and 49 have undergone FGM, a practice that continues to cause an unknown number of deaths. Despite the mention of the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani who was enforcing women’s rights (sexual rights rather) in his work, Eltahawy makes a counter argument seeking the female equivalent of him. Creating change will require a slow process of dialogue and compromise with entrenched hostile ideologies rather than a rhetorical onslaught, however justified. Plus: Philip Collins on who's to blame for Boris Johnson, and the latest on the search for a vaccine, Liberalism—fighting for a beautiful, world-changing idea. Medusa was punished for being raped—so why do we still depict her as a monster? Most effectively in Headscarves and Hymens Eltahawy isolates, dismantles and exposes purity-piety culture, identifying its hypocrisies, its shame-pumping engine and its inexhaustible supply of self-shaming fuel within women indoctrinated by it. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in, Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2016. Activists are using the iconography of the “American martyr” to fight their own... Jessica Abrahams is a journalist exploring gender, global development and foreign aid. Mona Eltahawy later touches on “on the other side stand those Western liberals who rightly condemn imperialism and yet are blind to the cultural imperialism they are performing when they silence critiques of misogyny.” However, is cultural imperialism limited to the Middle East and North Africa only? As a rallying call though—and as a reminder of the Arab world’s own feminist movements, often under-acknowledged in the west—it has force.