Bari Weiss of the Wall Street Journal reviews Mona Eltahawy’s “Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution.”
If you are cursed to be born a girl in Egypt, there is a 90 percent chance you will have your genitals cut in the name of purity. In Yemen, there is a 55 percent chance you will never learn to read. And in the United Arab Emirates, your father or your husband can beat you and remain fully compliant with the law so long as he leaves no mark.
Yet Muslim women who point out the appalling status of women in the Middle East are often branded traitors to their culture or attention-seeking contrarians who perpetuate the worst stereotypes about Islam and the Arab world.
The Egyptian writer Mona Eltahawy was called all this and worse in 2012 when she published an article in Foreign Policy magazine titled “Why Do They Hate Us?”
She has now expanded that essay into a book, “Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution.”
Turn to a random page of this book and you will find a statistic or anecdote to make your blood boil. I will not soon forget the story of Rawan, an eight-year-old Yemeni girl who died of internal bleeding on her “wedding” night, or of Manal Assi, a 33-year-old Lebanese schoolteacher beaten to death with a pressure cooker by her husband. Ms. Eltahway also does an admirable job of highlighting unsung heroes, like Ethopian woman Genet Girma, who, during her 2002 wedding in Kembata, Ethiopia, wore a placard reading: “I am not circumcised, learn from me.” Her husband wore his own: “I am very happy to be marrying an uncircumcised woman.”
This book is far from perfect. The author rightly criticizes Westerners who let their “respect” for other cultures trump their defense of basic human rights. Yet on the very next page Ms. Eltahawy suggests that the right way for Western women to support Middle Eastern women is to “help your own community’s women fight misogyny.” But how will complaining about the pay gap in Manhattan help women subjected to humiliating virginity tests in Cairo or rape victims forced to marry their rapists in Jordan?
Still for all its flaws, this book's roar is worth listening to.
Read full review on WSJ.com.