Last night, I trekked over to Thomas Great Hall for the first event in the Dissent, Violence, Justice series by Mona Eltahawy titled “Revolution One-ism at a Time: The Global Fight vs Sexism, Racism and Other -isms.”
Mona has an impressive list of accolades to her name but for the sake of brevity, she is famous world over as a muslim/feminist or muslim+feminist (depending on who you ask) journalist. Lots of people know her as the woman who was explaining the Egyptian revolution to the west, a title that took me, personally, by surprise but an all fairness, I wasn’t living in the west when the revolution happened.
I was interested in the talk however, because some years ago, in a debates session we had in high school, we were shown a youtube clip as a case study of how to make or break your argument. The clip in question involved two women, both of the Islamic persuasion, talking to an American news anchor and discussing opposing sides of the niqaab* debate. Mona was staunchly against it, praising France’s decision to ban it as the right thing to do, whereas the other lady denounced France from taking away from its citizens a fundamental right of choice.
Mona in this video, was the ‘bad’ debater. As we deconstructed her arguments later, we criticized them for containing blanket statements, straw man fallacies, and willful negligence of the point at hand.
The criticism that no one made but everyone thought was that she was simply being used as a mouthpiece from that section of the global liberal media that is all for muslim rights as long as they conform to their idea of what muslim or religious expression should look like.
Fast forward some five years and I see a poster for her event. Piqued, I decide to attend, albeit with some reservations still lingering in my head from that video.
When Mona walks up to the stage, I notice her fire cracker red hair. She begins to recount the story of how when she was protesting in Cairo, she was arrested. Her detainers beat her hard enough to break both her arms, sexually assaulted her, and kept her in their custody for six hours without a warrant.
She talks of how to reclaim her body both physically and emotionally, she dyed her hair red and got two tattoos. The first one, on her right forearm, is of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. According to Mona, Sekhmet is the goddess of sex and retribution and thus important to her because the friction between those two things is something Mona herself feels she encompasses as both a sex positive feminist and someone trying to reclaim her body.
Through out her talk, I hear her opinions on things that I can’t help but think need to go out to a wider audience. She talked of how sex, race, and class end up becoming the “bermuda triangle” that so many of us get lost in, something that resonated with me since in my experience rarely do people want to talk about all three at one given point. The fact that Mona did was refreshing.
She humorously retells getting arrested again, this time in New York, for defacing the now infamous Defeat Jihad subway ads. Many in the audience titter uncomfortably but her story is again about triumph, she was able to bring attention to the issue in a way few others did.
She mentions constantly talking of borderlands, of edges corners and margins, places where the oppressed often find themselves, because that is where she feels most at home.
And I realize that this is Mona’s story.
While I may not agree with all of it, and quite frankly it doesn’t matter whether I do or don’t, her politics are ultimately aimed at bringing attention to such places that people would rather never visit. And even if nothing else, that keeps the dialogue going which is enough.
Her second tattoo is incidentally of the street where she got arrested in Cairo, another place few of us would like to revisit, but one that she has reclaimed and permanently etched across her body.
*a niqaab is the face veil alternately hailed as a sign of Islamic modesty, a political/social statement, an illegal face mask, or an expression of personal choice.