Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 7: The Working Mother

I sits with her daughter, her son and her daughter-in-law in the shade of a Nubian mudbrick dome, looking out over the expanse of Lake Nasser, created after Egypt dammed the upper reaches of the Nile. We are drinking the Egyptian hibiscus called karkade.

I is in her late 40s, early 50s, and, after a week or more of the Cairo streets, I don’t immediately read her as Egyptian, despite the fact she’s speaking Arabic. It’s because of what she’s wearing, you see.

“You know,” she says to Z. “They have ducks and rabbits in the orchard?”

We talk for a while.

“May I ask you something?” I say. She assents. “You’re Egyptian, right? Would you wear what you are wearing in Cairo?”

I’s outfit is hardly risque by Western standards. She’s wearing a white camisole with a white sleeveless waistcoat over the top, and a white skirt, fitted and flared, that comes down to mid-calf.

But hers are the first female Egyptian upper arms or calves that I have seen, and there is a glimpse of shoulder too.

“I have a car,” I says, which, coming from a woman who has the money to stay in a 60-euro a night hotel, means she also has a driver. “I don’t walk on the streets or use public transport. But, you know, this is something since the revolution. Cairo has always been…”

“I know in the 70s women could wear miniskirts in Cairo,” I say, recalling a conversation with an educated, liberal Cairene in his early 20s, retrospectively amazed by the flesh on display in family photos from before he was born. “And bikinis on the Red Sea Coast…”

In the 1950s, in fact, Cairo was considered one of the world’s stylish cities, a liberal, sophisticated capital of elegance and beauty, up there with Rome and Paris. “Yes,” she says. “But you… Now, I’m a Muslim. But for a moment I thought you were one, or married to one. You don’t need to wear all that here.”

“Yeah,” I say, losing the headscarf I have unwillingly adopted. I’ve been wearing trousers, a loose long-sleeved top layered over a shorter one and a scarf around my neck and shoulders throughout our time in Cairo.

But since covering hair for modesty has not been part of our culture for more than a century, I find the headscarf a difficult thing to wear and, further, a political act. I don’t like to wear a headscarf unless I’m in a country, such as Mauritania, where every single woman wears one.

My last ditch reserve for coping with the dual onslaught of tourist harassment and sexual harassment one faces as a visibly foreign woman in Egypt was to don a correctly-tied headscarf and invest in a wedding ring, with the aim of looking exactly what I initially read me as, a Western convert with a Muslim husband.

“You see, there was this man on the bus…” I say.

Now, I’m a big fan of public transport as a way to get around a country while seeing more of it than you would from the inside of a backpacker bus or private car, and, in fact, from the intelligent, sparky and fully covered women I met on the ferry in Aswan through to the nice chap who helped us out on the bus from Dahab, this has generally worked pretty well in Egypt.

Not in this instance, however.

He’s a rat-like little man in his 30s, I would guess, who begins his harassment by leaning across his seat to stare concentratedly across the aisle, straight into my face. I cope by putting down the large sunglasses which, like most uncovered women in Egypt, I wear more for protection against stares than against the sun.

Then he begins to look at me and suck his finger obscenely. “WHAT?” I say, loudly. This deters him for a while and I return to my book. Then there’s a tugging motion on my peripheral vision.

I sit, for a bit, my son asleep besides me, endeavouring to ignore this and focus on my book, until I’m too cross to concentrate.

F*ck this, I think. I’m b*ggered if I’m spending three hours on a bus trying to ignore the masturbator across the aisle.

I get up, and begin to storm down the bus, before realising I don’t speak enough Arabic to complain to the driver. There is one other woman on the bus, with her husband, down the far end, but I’ve identified a man in front of me as a potential defender should things turn nasty.

I turn to the masturbator. He zips up.

“You are a DISGUSTING man,” I say in my best headteacher voice. Everyone on the bus starts awake and begins to stare.

He puts his hands up defensively.

“You call yourself a Muslim? Is this ISLAM?” I say, getting into my stride. “How would you feel if someone did that to your MOTHER? To your SISTER?”

He begins to slink down the bus. “You are a DISGUSTING man,” I say, again. “No Muslim!”

“What’s the matter?” says the guy in front of me.

“Oh,” I say, and mime the offending sequence of activities, then start to grin with relief. “No problem. All sorted.”

He shrugs, sympathetic but, it appears, unsurprised, and goes back to sleep.

“What was that, Mum?” says Z.

“Oh, just some disgusting man masturbating,” I say. “Go back to sleep.”

“He looked really scared, Mum,” says Z. “I think he thought you were going to hit him.”

“So,” I say to I, by way of summary. “I’d been wearing a scarf around my neck and shoulders for Cairo, and at this point I decided I’d put it over my hair. Because Nubia is conservative.”

“You see,” I says. “This is what they want you to do. They want you to be afraid so that you cover.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘afraid’,” I say.

Because I’m not afraid. I am just sick of the constant low-level harassment and occasional higher-level incident, and I don’t particularly want to explain another one to my tween boy. “But I see your point.”

“Since the Revolution, it has been really bad,” I states. “The Brotherhood, the Islamists, they are behind all this. They encourage it. The harassment of women on Tahrir Square. The easiest way to keep women covered and at home is to harass them on the streets, so this is what they do. But here, you don’t need to be afraid.”

It’s noticeable, to me, although I have only visited the Sinai before, how very much more conservative Egypt is than it was 10 years ago, when I last visited, or 15 years ago. A conservatism that, sadly, does not extend to perverts on the bus.

Because, here’s the thing… In the “permissive” West, I could march down the bus to the driver and insist that he call police and have the man arrested. In Egypt, he moves, but stays on the bus.

As it happens, I did once report a masturbator to the tourist police, in Lombok, Indonesia: he was in his teens, and I suggested to the policeman that he speak to the parents. The policeman’s opening question? “Where is your husband?”

“You know,” I says. “There is nothing about this in Islam? Nothing that says that women should be repressed.”

“Yes,” I say, citing the classic example of Mohammed’s first wife, an older woman who ran camel trains across Arabia and hired the young future Prophet as her manager before marrying him. “Khadija was a businesswoman. But we did this in Christianity, too. Jesus had Mary Magdalene among his disciples. We wrote her out of history, said only men could be priests. The patriarchy…”

Now, “patriarchy” is not a word that I have used in a while. But Egypt does this to you.

In Cairo, an academic in his 60s, a delightful, liberal man, married to a feminist academic, asked me whether I was a feminist. This gave me pause for thought. Because I am, of course, but, most of the time, in England, I don’t need to think about whether I am or not. Our battles are, largely, already won.

“The problem,” I says. “Is that we in Egypt are where you guys were in the Middle Ages when it comes to religion.”

We wander off to meet the ducks and baby rabbits, and I shows us the organic tomatoes and aubergines growing in the shade of the orchard.

On I’s insistence, I change into a short-sleeved top. “There!” says I. “You can actually wear what you like here. You can wear shorts, if you want.”

Short sleeves, frankly, is enough for me at the moment, given that all the women I see on the streets are fully covered, a few even including their eyes, and I am trying to navigate the difficult zone between feminist values and respect for local culture.

“Are there many feminists in Egypt?” I ask, tentatively.

Egyptian feminists have been hugely visible in the Western media since the revolution, but women of any persuasion are a tiny minority on the streets, even on public transport, except for the Friday nights when you see them out with their families.

“Yes,” says I, definitively. Her daughter, who works for an NGO, nods assertively.

“I thought that there was a problem for feminism in Egypt, since the revolution,” I say. “I thought it was all very associated with Suzanne Mubarak.”

I’s daughter shakes her head more firmly. She’s a beautiful girl, wearing a full-length, loose T-shirt dress with a loose long-sleeved white cardigan over the top. “It wasn’t her,” she says. “She took credit for many, many people’s work. She did nothing.”

“What about outside the elite?” I ask, thinking of the Bedouin girl I met in Sinai, but then, also of our taxi driver’s ex-wife.

Among Egypt’s elite, the wealthy minority of educated, English-speaking intellectuals and businesspeople, feminism is relatively strong, although a two-career family remains unusual.

I want to find out about the working class.

“There is a woman who works for me. She comes to clean the house. She’s in her 20s, can’t read or write,” I says. In 2007, over 40% of Egyptian women were functionally illiterate.

“And she goes out to work while her husband stays at home, smoking.” I makes a gesture of intense disgust. “She pays him some money to look after their two children while she goes out to work.”

“Right,” I say.

“Now, she’s a feminist,” I says. “Because if the Muslim Brotherhood get their way, she won’t be able to work. And the family will have nothing to live on. And, even though she cannot read or write, she knows this.”

“So…” I am about to ask how she voted in the last election, but I forestalls me.

“She called me, during the election, because she can’t read, so she wanted to know which symbols, which pictures, she should put her mark by, so I told her,” I says. “And then, after, when she came to my house, she said, ‘Doctor I! I know that you can only vote twice, but I voted three times, because I did not want my vote to go to one of them.’ She spoiled her ballot paper, you see. As a protest…”

I’m not sure how functional a protest this is, nor whether, as a life goal, working to support a no-good husband rather than removing him from her life, is exactly feminist. But, I guess, by Egyptian standards, it is.

“Things will change for women now, after the revolution,” I says. “I’m optimistic. I believe we are coming to a new world. It has to change!”

“But,” I say. “75% of the population voted for the Islamists at the last election.”

“The Sunnis, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafis, this is not Egypt!” I says. “This is coming out of Saudi Arabia! It is not Egyptian! It is not what Egypt is!”

I have talked in-depth with two Islamist men, neither of them the bearded, hatchet-faced stereotype, who consider Egypt the true heirs to the true Islam, and Saudi Arabia corrupt and decadent (you can read these conversations here and here).

This was in the Sinai, close to Saudi, within the sphere of influence of the powers who, Vanity Fair and others have argued, sponsored 9/11, but… Egypt is the birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood, the home of radical Islam.

“And look what they have done!” I continues. “In three months of government they have done more damage to themselves than we could have done to them in years! Look at the gas crisis…”

There is a serious petrol crisis in Egypt at the moment, with queues stretching over a mile in each direction from every gas station. No one quite understands the roots of it, particularly since the nation continues to export fossil fuels.

I’ve heard explanations that run all the way from Mubarak-era loyalists dumping tankers of gasoline in the desert through to desperation for hard currency, through to interference by Israel/US/Saudi Arabia (delete according to political allegiance), through to a strategic move by the military junta, SCAF, to discredit the Muslim Brotherhood.

The result, in a very Egyptian fashion, is a vibrant black market in petrol, taxi drivers who open negotiations with Italian hand gestures and operatic wails of “MADAME! No benzine!” and, of course, yet more strain on a tanking economy with a government that cannot agree hard currency loans.

“And look at their candidate! Now, his mother is an American citizen, and he cannot stand.” (This birther controversy, after investigation, will prove to be untrue.) “They lie! They lie! They said they wouldn’t run a candidate for president. And now they do. Egyptians can SEE how much they lie.”

“But they dominate the Assembly,” I say. “And, not just that, they dominate the body that is writing the Constitution. Do you think the position of women will improve?”

“It has to,” says I. “It just has to. Because otherwise, we will need another revolution in three years time. And we will have wave, after wave, after wave of revolution until we’re free.”

“I hope so,” I say. “I really hope it does.”

More in this series:
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 1: The Coder
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 2: The Bedouin Girl
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 3: The Future Soldier
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 4: The Guide
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 5: The Businessman
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 6: The Taxi Driver