04/01/2011 05:26 PM
The Muslim Sisterhood
Visions of Female Identity in the New Egypt
By Dialika Krahe
The women of the Muslim Brotherhood played a supporting role in Egypt's
revolution, and now they want to have a hand in shaping its democratic
future. Although many wear Western clothing under their veils, use Facebook
and Twitter, and talk the talk of emancipation, they still seem to be
wrestling with what it means to be a modern Muslim woman.
Jihan, the eldest, is sitting in an armchair in her second apartment in
Cairo. A flowered veil frames her red cheeks, and a glass of apple juice
rests in her hand. She says that, Inshallah, even a woman could become
president in the new Egypt.
Arwa, the youngest, is sitting in front of a computer outside her pink
children's room in the small city of Abu Kebir, scrolling through her blog.
"Mubarak is gone," she says. "When I'm old enough, I will have a seat in
parliament, Inshallah."
Zahraa, who is between the two in age, is standing in the shadow of Cairo's
Tora Prison. She pulls her white hijab tight around her face, as if to arm
herself for the future. "Our task is to raise the nation," she says.
These are three Muslim sisters, each belonging to a different generation.
Though unrelated, they are sisters in spirit, three of hundreds of thousands
of women fighting for themselves and a new Egypt as part of the country's
largest resistance group.
Their goal is an Islamic society. They are self-confident, and their message
is clear: This is our time, too. Though we might be wearing veils, we are
just as strong as the men of the Muslim Brotherhood.
God's Justice
With each day that passes since the revolution, they gain a little more
power. Now a constitutional referendum has given all Egyptians -- including
women -- the kind of freedoms that women like Jihan, Arwa and Zahraa had
long believed impossible.
Every day since Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was toppled has been a
special day. But for Zahraa El-Shater, as she stands in front of the gates
of the Tora Prison, this particular day is one to celebrate.
Dust sweeps through the air, and wisps of clouds hang in the sky. Zahraa is
waiting for her father to be released. "This is now God's justice," she
says. "He will be free, and those who did this to us will be put behind
bars."
By "those," she means Mubarak and his cronies, but especially Habib el-Adly.
The man who was until recently Egypt's interior minister has now been
charged with corruption and sits in the cell next to her father's.
Zahraa, 34, a wife and mother of four children, is the daughter of Khairat
El-Shater, the "number three" in the Muslim Brotherhood. She is a large
woman with porcelain-colored skin and dark eyes. Her floor-length robe
almost completely hides that she is a young woman. Her mobile phone rings
nonstop. She ignores half the calls.
"You have to imagine this," she says. "My children had to witness my husband
and my father being arrested and the state security service banging on the
door at 2 a.m. and suddenly standing there in the apartment."
The Brotherhood's Other Half
Lined up next to her like a row of veiled soldiers are her sisters. They are
wearing the hijab, the traditional head covering for Muslim women, and the
niqab, the face veil that only leaves slits for the eyes. They are the other
women in the Muslim Brotherhood. All have had similar experiences. Their
eyes are fixed on the gate.
Zahraa has been a member of the Muslim Sisters for as long as she can
remember. "It isn't like you had to apply for a membership card," she says.
"We share an ideology."
The Sisterhood has been around since 1932. It is the female wing of the
Muslim Brotherhood, the shadowy Islamic organization that was repressed by
Mubarak and is feared by the West. The group is associated with words that
instill fear in the West, such as "Shariah," "jihad" and "terror."
Before the revolution, the United States classified the Brotherhood as
extremist, anti-Western and anti-Israeli. But now that the old regime has
fallen, it has become the strongest political force in the country and
portrayed itself as a democratic organization. Despite decades of
repression, the Brotherhood managed to attract hundreds of thousands of
supporters, who are now prepared to play a role in shaping Egypt's future.
About half of them are said to become women: daughters and mothers like
Zahraa, Jihan and Arwa, who are now clamoring for a new role in society.
Freedom at First Sight
The gate opens. After being imprisoned by the Mubarak regime for four and a
half years on charges of terrorism, money laundering and being a member of a
terrorist organization, there is Zahraa's father. He squints as he gets his
first look at freedom.
Zahraa wants to embrace him. A few tears run into her veil. But she is
unable to reach him. Members of the Brotherhood have quickly surrounded him
and are now shouting "Allahu akbar" ("God is great!") and "The Brotherhood
is the hope of the nation." Only a few weeks ago, they would have been
arrested.
On this afternoon in Cairo, they are holding up Egyptian flags, the same
flags the protestors waved on Tahrir Square. Zahraa says she also attended
every day of the protests. "No one in Egypt was terrorized by Mubarak more
than we were," she says.
Zahraa stands on tiptoes to get a better look at her father, but there is no
sign of joy in her face. She hardly manages to smile, looking more like
someone in shock, someone who can't believe what she's seeing. "When I think
of my father, I see him in his cell," she says, adding she has no other
images of him in her head. While Zahraa's husband was behind bars for five
years, her father was there for 12.
Visions of Freedom
Until now, the Muslim Brothers moved in the shadows of society, while the
women moved in the shadows of the Muslim Brotherhood. Zahraa belongs to a
generation of women who have known nothing but life under the regime, who
have never known what it means to be both an Islamist and free.
Now in her mid-30s, Zahraa was 5 years old when Mubarak came to power. "It's
either us or them," Mubarak argued to make the Egyptians afraid of the
Islamists. "For my entire life," Zahraa says, "I was so busy trying to get
my men out of prison and keeping the family together that I didn't even
manage to go to the weekly Brotherhood meetings. Now, everything will be
different."
When asked how she envisions the new Egypt and how free, tolerant and
pluralistic it should be, Zahraa says society was "shallow" under the old
regime. "Life consisted of nothing but eating, marrying and running off to
work," she adds. As she sees it, many Egyptian women wear the veil and go to
prayers as if it were part of some daily exercise program, but without
really living their faith.
Zahraa says that she dreams of a civilized Islamic society, of clean
streets, honesty, a country without corruption and, most of all, better
education. "There was once a horrifying study in which they tested school
graduates," she says. "Most of them couldn't even read properly."
A Woman's Place
When asked about the women of Egypt, Zahraa initially says: "I don't
distinguish between men and women. They complete each other. We were both on
Tahrir Square, men and women, right?" But then she says: "Women don't even
want to do the same things that men do." It is in their nature, she adds, to
have children, to be more emotional and to be better-suited for social
responsibilities.
Indeed, Zahraa is a long way from emancipation and resistance against men.
She says her father was in poor health while in prison. In the summers, in
particular, he suffered from the heat in his non-air-conditioned cell. "I
wanted us to suffer with him," she says, so she made her family go without
the air-conditioning in their apartment. Vicarious suffering is apparently
also a woman's duty.
Being banned from politics led the Brotherhood to become particularly active
in society. It operated hospitals, educational establishments, kindergartens
and soup kitchens. In doing so, it gained many supporters.
The Muslim Brothers were only permitted to serve in the Egyptian parliament
as independent. Many were kept under surveillance, followed and arrested.
Since the women of the Brotherhood were not considered dangerous, they could
operate below the government's radar.
This gave the Sisters a more important role. They kept the organization
alive, caring for the families of prisoners, organizing protest marches and
raising money for lawyers.
They were not permitted to be political leaders. "It wasn't possible,"
Zahraa says, "because of state security. The idea that a woman could be
arrested is taboo for the group." Besides, she says, many Muslim Brothers
feel that it's better for women to perform their "natural" duties, such as
being a mother.
A Veteran of the Older Days
The crowd pushes Zahraa's father toward the street, and he ducks into an
unfamiliar car. Zahraa pushes her way toward the car. "Who are they? What do
they want?" she shouts. She slips her arm through the open car window and
tries to grab his hand. "I thought it was a state security car," she says.
Old fears die hard.
Zahraa El-Shater, the daughter of Khairat El-Shater, is well-known among the
Muslim Sisters. Jihan al-Halafawy, 59, the eldest of the three Muslim
Sisters, also knows her story. "Zahraa is like a daughter," she says. Jihan
attended the university in Alexandria with Zahraa's father. Since her
husband was also in prison for many years, she can understand Zahraa's
fears.
The day before, Jihan and thousands of other protesters stood on Tahrir
Square to call upon the transitional government to address the unfulfilled
demands of the people. Now she is sitting in her apartment in Cairo. On the
small tables next to her are a yellow flyswatter and a rolled-up prayer rug.
Jihan is the director of a cultural center. She comes from the Mediterranean
port city of Alexandria, where she attended university, met her husband and
joined the Brotherhood. She eventually became the first Muslim Sister to run
for a seat in parliament.
Jihan was already in the group before Mubarak came to power. Unlike Zahraa,
she knows what it means to be an active Sister and to still be free. Jihan
laughs a lot. When she speaks, her cheeks are pushed upward and her eyes
become narrower. She has fond memories of the days when she joined the
Brotherhood. Her memories are a window into the past, but they might also
hold clues to the future of the Muslim Sisters.
The Turning Point of 1981
It happened after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, she says. Then-President
Anwar Sadat had issued an amnesty for the Muslim Brotherhood, and many
political prisoners were released. For the first time in a long time, the
group could speak in public. A few Brothers gave a lecture at the University
of Alexandria, and Jihan, a young student who had just started wearing a
veil, immediately felt attracted to their ideas.
After becoming a member, Jihan organized meetings, cultural events and
debates. She was responsible for the Brotherhood's women's group at the
university. Its goal was to spread the thoughts of the Brotherhood and to
provide Islamic education to the public. "We were young," she says, "and we
wanted to change the country." There were no government restrictions at the
time, Jihan says, comparing it to the kind of freedom young Muslim Sisters
are now experiencing for the first time.
When Sadat made peace with Israel, the Brotherhood rejected his decision,
and some of its member became radicalized. In 1981, Sadat was assassinated
by men thought to be former Muslim Brothers. That same year, Mubarak came to
power and Jihan's husband was arrested.
Since then, her husband has been arrested 11 more times. Though she had six
children to look after, she still managed to organize protests and mobilize
the media. Soon, she became a public figure. At the time, Egyptian society
and the West viewed the Islamists as a backward, narrow-minded organization
with structures unfriendly to women. "We wanted to prove to them that the
opposite was true," Jihan says.
A Would-Be Pioneer
In 2000, Jihan's activism eventually led her becoming the first woman to
campaign for a seat in parliament. Critics say she was merely a token woman.
At the time, one of her biggest worries was the fact that it just wasn't
common to have women debating men in public. Likewise, many thought it was
inappropriate to depict a woman's face on posters.
Realizing these problems, Jihan went to visit Islamic scholars and asked
them what she should do. When they told her that the Koran did not forbid
such things, she threw herself into her work. Though her husband was locked
up and her campaign team was arrested, she still won the first round of the
election. Nevertheless, she wasn't allowed to assume her seat after
officials claimed there had been voting irregularities.
When asked if she would run for office again today, Jihan says: "I wouldn't
want to rule out the idea, but I would rather see the new generation move to
the fore."
Today's Atypical Muslim Sister
When Jihan says this, she is thinking of young women like Arwa.
Arwa El-Taweel, the youngest of the three Muslim Sisters, is 21. She opens
the door to her house in the small Egyptian city of Abu Kebir, about 85
kilometers (53 miles) northeast of Cairo. She lives with her parents and
siblings in a house that would qualify as "nouveau riche" in Egypt. The
furniture in the living room is imitation Louis XVI, with gilded legs, and
the flower arrangements are ostentatious. Her father, a pharmacist, works in
the Gulf countries.
Arwa removes her veil. She can only do so because she's at home, she
explains, and because there are no men in the room who could marry her. She
hangs the veil on the doorknob, revealing a brown ponytail, shiny earrings
and a tight, low-cut dress. With her veil removed, she looks like a normal
teenager.
Indeed, Arwa would almost be a normal teenager if it weren't for some of the
things she says, such as: "Of course I want to become a politician" and "I
think Westerners are human beings, too." There's nothing wrong, she adds,
with cultures having differences.
The bedroom Arwa shares with her sister is furnished with pink-and-white
built-in furniture. Stuffed animals lie on the beds. Arwa says she was 16
when she decided to join the Brotherhood. She had just started a program in
media studies at the university, she explains, and she had reached a point
in her life where she was asking herself what kind of a woman she wanted to
become, what kind of a life she wanted to lead, and what her role in society
should be.
Arwa then started reading about many things -- about the socialists, about
Mubarak's National Democratic Party and about secularism in general. "But I
didn't understand how religion and politics were supposed to be separated."
Islam, Arwa says, is all-encompassing. "Everything I do and everything I am
comes from Islam," she says.
Arwa then began reading the literature of Brotherhood founder Hassan
al-Banna. "I immediately fell in love with his ideology," Arwa says. She
also read the writings of other Islamists. "But they are so strict, so
extremist," she says. "They ban all things Western from their lives, and for
them everything is evil." Arwa says ideologies like the latter do not
conform to reality, adding: "You don't have to live as if you were in the
Middle Ages to be a good Muslim."
She pulls a tattered book about the principles of the Brotherhood from the
shelf. As she flips through its pages, she says the book was the only thing
she managed to keep. "The state security agents searched our house a few
times," she says, "and took everything else with them."
A Life of Contradictions
Arwa opens her pink closets and pulls out a few evening dresses -- and a
wedding dress. "I love dressing up," she says before noting that she'll be
getting married on Friday.
The man she will marry is her second fiancé. "The first one couldn't accept
that I want a career in addition to a family," she says, "and that I want to
travel and be politically active." Even before they were married, the first
fiancé demanded that she spend more time at home. So she ended the
relationship.
Arwa says her new fiancé is different. The pair met at work. She told him
right away that she didn't intend to give everything up. She says she told
him that she just might fly to Qatar on the morning after their wedding to
attend a conference. "I think he didn't dare say anything about it," she
says.
Arwa is on Facebook, she tweets and she blogs, and she has up to 100,000
readers. "Here," she says, pointing to her photo on the computer screen.
It's a snapshot of Arwa in Gaza with a woman wearing a white veil. They are
both laughing. "Hamas," says Arwa, with a smile.
Then she looks a little shocked, as if it had just occurred to her that
perhaps a friendship with someone from Hamas might actually be too radical.
It is one of those moments when the veils of the Muslim Sisters are lifted
just a little, revealing what might be the hidden contradictions between
their tolerant words and intolerant views.
During the protests on Tahrir Square, Arwa tweeted sentences like: "Go to
Tahrir Square
either you will be liberated or you will become martyrs
Death is not the end, I swear to you by God." On Feb. 11, the day Mubarak
was toppled, she congratulated the "entire Islamic world."
When asked how she envisions her future in the new Egypt, Arwa says she
wantes "to take advantage of (her) potential," adding that this is
particularly important for women now. She wants to return to the university
and get another degree because she feels that she was short-changed under
the old educational system. Arwa says she also wants to become a good mother
and a good Muslim. And, depending on what sort of a political position the
Brotherhood can offer her, she says she wants "to be part of it," that she
wants to help shape this new society. "And maybe when I'm 30," she adds,
"I'll even get a seat in parliament."
Imagining an Islamic Democracy
On Saturday, March 19, many Egyptians -- including women -- voted in a
referendum on their new constitution. The referendum was over whether to
implement a few amendments to the constitution, such as one setting an
eight-year term limit for future presidents, one requiring parliamentary
approval for the emergency laws that Mubarak shamelessly exploited and one
that allows political independents to run for president.
Yet another goal of the referendum was to bring about new elections more
quickly. Since other parties haven't had enough time to organize themselves,
this would particularly benefit the Muslim Brotherhood. For this reason,
many activists in the revolution, including opposition politician Mohamed
ElBaradei, called on Egyptians to reject the constitutional amendment.
Arwa says that the majority vote in favor of the referendum proves that the
Egyptians really are ready for democracy. Jihan says: "This is what we have
all been dreaming of," adding that the vote's outcome shows that Egyptians
want to quickly move forward on the path to democracy.
The three Muslim Sisters' idea of democracy is that it can be an
intermediate stage along the road to Egypt's becoming an Islamic society.
The question is: How democratic will such a society ultimately be?
The revolution gave Arwa, Jihan and Zahraa both a voice and an idea of what
democracy can mean. But it did not change their priorities in life. Indeed,
being a good mother, a good wife and a good Muslim remain their top goals in
life. They might want to be emancipated -- but only to the extent that Islam
can tolerate it. They are women fighting for rights, but they are not
interested in fighting for them against men.
The Comfort of Certainty
It's late afternoon in Cairo. The city shimmers under a yellowish haze of
smog and sunlight. Zahraa El-Shater, the daughter of the freed political
prisoner, has allowed herself to be swept along by a parade of his jubilant
supporters. They tore through the Cairo streets at high speeds, the men
hanging out of the cars to wave at onlookers, honking their horns and
cheering like football fans after their team has won an important match.
They park the car in Nasr City, the district of Cairo where Zahraa lives in
a high-rise apartment building. They are expected. Someone has managed to
hang chains of colorful lights on every floor, and there are plastic flowers
at the entrance. Zahraa and her younger sister, wearing a black full-body
veil, stand in front of the door, as if to defend against intruders.
They talk about how happy they are, and they praise their freedom and their
faith. They say that everything a devout person could ever hope to know can
be found in the Koran. From under her black veil, Zahraa's sister draws a
comparison with a washing machine. "If you buy one and it doesn't work,
you'll read the manual," she says, "because you know that the manufacturer
of this washing machine knows how it works." The same thing applies to
Allah, the creator, she says. "He is the one who made us all." The Koran,
she says, is the manual Allah gave to mankind.
As the two women speak, the men gather around Zahraa's father on the street
below. They have just returned from the mosque. As they beat drums and form
circles around the parking cars, the jubilant men say the kinds of things
that make them seem so undemocratic to many people. "The Koran is our
constitution," they chant, "and jihad is our path."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
URL:
* http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,754250,00.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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