An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women’s Islamic Movements

7. Reconsidering Women’s Desires in Islamic Movements

| 151 7 Reconsidering Women’s Desires in Islamic Movements One evening in the spring of 2007, two women were sitting on a panel on either side of a faculty moderator facing an audience of students and scholars. The debate, sponsored by the political science department at the American University in Cairo, was entitled “Egyptian Women: Which Way Forward?” On the moderator’s right side was the Islamic feminist Amany Abul Fadl, dressed in shades of white and wearing a long khimar1 that extended down to her waist. On the moderator ’s left side was the liberal feminist activist Aida Seif al-Dawla, in a navy blazer and skirt. The event started with each panelist describing her views of women ’s issues in Egypt. Both Abul Fadl and Seif al-Dawla were concerned with the challenging conditions under which women labor. They both agreed that the state did not support working women and that women were not represented politically in the country. The panelists took turns answering the audience’s questions, each emphasizing her own position as Islamic or liberal with regard to the issue she was discussing . Often they were openly critical of each other’s views. Abul Fadl, an avid supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, accused nongovernment organizations (NGOs) (Seif al-Dawla works for the el-Nadim Centre for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence) of being mouthpieces of the West and of fostering Western views alien to Egyptian society. Seif al-Dawla was just as critical of the Muslim Brotherhood, maintaining that its exclusionary practices were just as discriminating as the state’s and were not conducive to democracy. She also addressed Abul Fadl’s criticism of NGOs by stating that never in her career had foreign funding forced her to pursue issues in which she was not interested, nor had 152 | Reconsidering Women’s Desires in Islamic Movements she ever felt coerced by Western agendas. Seif al-Dawla is known to be an outspoken human rights activist who has occasionally staged hunger strikes to oppose government policies. Amany Abul Fadl has a similarly turbulent history with the state. Her apartment, she recounted, had often been ransacked by government secret police because of her affiliations with the Brotherhood, which is a banned Islamist group. A few minutes into the discussion, a member of the audience asked about female genital mutilation (FGM).2 FGM is a central issue in the debate on women’s rights in Egypt and has caused public disagreement since CNN’s 1994 graphic broadcast of the circumcision of a ten-year-old girl. Even though the grand sheikh of Al-Azhar University , Mohammed Sayyid Tantawi, has declared FGM to be un-Islamic, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, a leading Muslim Brotherhood scholar, has remained neutral toward the practice. However, in 1996, a national ban on FGM was enforced by the minister of health, Ismail Sallam. This does not mean, however, that FGM is no longer practiced in Egypt, and Abul Fadl described her frustration when she was unable to convince the janitor of her building not to send his three daughters back to the village to be circumcised. She exclaimed wryly, “The janitor now regards me as not a real Muslim, even though I assured him that Islam never required girls to be circumcised. But how can I single-handedly change his perceptions when he strongly believes that it has?” Abul Fadl continued, explaining that it was difficult to dislodge ageold misconceptions and replace them with correct Islamic practices. Several hands shot up in the audience clamoring for a chance to ask Seif al-Dawla whether the NGOs she worked with had had any success in eradicating FGM. Seif al-Dawla’s reply presented another dilemma. She was critical of the state’s position, which, rather than dealing with engrained gender inequality, preferred to treat only symptomatic phenomena such as FGM. She explained that banning FGM has had even worse implications for girls whose parents, bent on ensuring their daughters’ marital future, hire practitioners of FGM who continue to perform this inhumane task under dangerous and unsanitary conditions . This in turn has increased the incidence of infection and even death for these young women. “I call for education. Education is the answer. You cannot expect people who are illiterate and uneducated to make sound decisions. Reconsidering Women’s Desires in Islamic Movements | 153 The government, which insists on keeping our population ignorant so they...