She cites reforms that don’t get enough media attention, such as Kenya’s criminalization of female genital mutilation and Saudi Arabia’s 2013 ruling allowing women to practice law (though they still can’t drive to work). She incorporates examples of Arab women who have fought for women’s rights, from the early Cairo feminist who publicly removed her face veil in 1923 to the two Saudi female athletes who competed in the 2012 London Olympics. It’s clear Eltahawy paid attention to the critics of her original essay, for here she expands her argument beyond simplistic rants. She reminds us of the 15 Saudi girls who perished in a 2002 school fire because morality police wouldn’t let them outside without their headscarves. She writes about rapists in Jordan who legally escape punishment by forcing their victims to marry them. She tells us that Iraqi men who kill their wives never serve more than three years in prison. She talks of divorced mothers in the United Arab Emirates who automatically forfeit custody of their children once they remarry (although polygamy is legal for men). Eltahawy tells us of young Egyptian women arrested and subjected to “virginity tests.” She reports on eight-year-old girls in Yemen forced to marry older men in what amounts to legalized pedophilia. She’s expanded that essay to create this book.īlunt and angry, Headscarves and Hymens tackles every issue of women’s oppression you could think of, and some you couldn’t, across the Middle East and North Africa. Refusing to stay silent, she then wrote an incendiary essay for Foreign Policy magazine about the misogyny of Arab men titled “Why Do They Hate Us?” that provoked massive, impassioned debate. She was beaten and sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square by security forces who broke her arm and hand. And that’s just the front cover.Įltahawy is the Egyptian-American journalist who came to prominence during Egypt’s 2011 Arab Spring. Could Mona Eltahawy have chosen a more provocative title for her manifesto? Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution combines sex, religion and politics in a way guaranteed to bait, captivate or possibly infuriate.

Headscarves and hymens by mona eltahawy