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Vol. 3 · No. 1 · August 2010
© Cynthia Nelson Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies 2008
i Surfacing
An Interdisciplinary Journal for Gender in the Global South
Editor
Azita Azargoshasb
Student Editorial Collective
Lara Worcester
Karem Said
Ali Atef
Yasemin Ozer
Graphic Design
Ian Parks
Copy Editor
Azita Azargoshasb
International Advisory Board
Kamran Ali
Susan McKinnon
Andrea Cornwall
Farha Ghannam
Janet Halley
Barbara Harlow
Martina Rieker
Hanan Sabea
Amr Shalakany
Hania Sholkamy
Mariz Tadros
ii Surfacing
vol. 3, no. 1
Gender and Paradigm Shifts
Introduction: Shifting Paradigms through Gender and Sexuality
v
ARTICLES
Gendering Decent Work: Obstacles to Performativity in the Egyptian Workplace
Dahlia Hassanien
1
Diverging Femininities in the Resistance Narratives of Algeria and Palestine
Farah Channaa
16
Extended Holiday in Hurghada: Russian Migrant Women and ‘Urfi Marriage
Joanne Walby
39
Baladi as Performance: Gender and Dance in Modern Egypt
Noha Roushdy
71
“Ana Gay”: Coming to Terms with Male Gayness in Egypt
Oumnia Abaza
100
Zina of the Eye: Pornography among Male Cairene Youth
Sarah Michelle Leonard
123
iii About the Authors
Dahlia Hassanien is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender Studies at Monash
University. She holds an M.A in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo.
Her research interests include women’s employment, work/family balance, and the anthropology
of gender in the Middle East.
Farah Channaa holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the American University
in Cairo.
Joanne Walby holds an M.A. in Gender and Women’s Studies from the American
University in Cairo and a B.A. in Russian Studies from the University of Washington. Joanne
has worked in international development with extensive experience in human trafficking
programs. She currently lives in Cairo.
Noha Roushdy holds an M.A. in Anthropology from the American University in Cairo.
Her M.A. Thesis, Dancing in the Betwixt and Between: Femininity and Embodiment in Egypt, received the
Magda al-Nowaihi Award for best graduate work in 2010. Noha currently works as a researcher
with the Right to Privacy Program at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR).
Oumnia Abaza holds a B.A. in Psychology and an M.A. in Sociology and Anthropology
from the American University in Cairo. She currently resides in Cairo and works for an
international non-governmental organization, where she focuses on issues of reproductive
health, Hiv and Aids.
Sarah Michelle Leonard is an M.A. candidate in the Department of Sociology,
Anthropology, Psychology and Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. Her thesis
research concerns the intersections between masculinity, sexuality, desire and pornography and
has been presented in the US, Europe and Egypt. Sarah has also written about nationalist
sentiments, football in Egypt and Algeria, and changing practices in modern Islamic funerary
ritual in Egypt.
iv Introduction: Shifting Paradigms through
Gender and Sexuality
I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way
which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more
relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against
different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, it consists of using this
resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and
find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the
point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the
antagonism of strategies.
Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power
Performing Subjectivities
Our task in stringing together six essays with an overarching theme that could create confluence
while positioning gender and sexuality as the kind of antagonisms Foucault may have imagined in
writing these words has resulted in a focus on paradigms—disciplinary, ideological, sociopolitical
and cultural—and the matrix of power where subjects and paradigms enter into dialogue.
Against the backdrop of an ongoing financial crisis and its implications for how global processes
of subjection are made rational and strategic by the language of neoliberal statecraft and a
spectrum of normative legal frameworks and ideologies, our editorial collective has been forced
to consider whether processes of subjection are necessarily ones which produce identities, or
rather just organizational categories that are too often mistaken for identities. The question is
significant for us in two ways. The current literature on gender and sexuality can be characterized
as a binary between legalistic treatments which regard categorical subjectivities as primary ones
that are made recognizable through processes of subjection, and social construct treatments
which regard them as sociocultural codes that are assigned positionality by processes of
subjection. From within that binary, a bifurcated culture of scholarship has emerged which rarely
considers the two discourses in conversation with one another, whereas in practice the two
interplay routinely and often violently. These essays address that gap by calling attention to
gender and sexuality as embodied performances of a subjective positionality that respond to and
become informed by the legal and political implications of subjection. Through them, the issue
moves away from meta analyses of subjection and toward the microprocesses by which subjects
normalize a subjective positionality and performatively negotiate its boundaries in the spaces
between “top down” and “bottom up.” As Michel Foucault illustrated in a lifetime of work, top
down processes of subjection are not alone responsible for the production of subjectivities; they
must be met by bottom up processes through which subjects internalize and reproduce the terms
v of subjection. We read gender and sexuality as modes through which subjects can also change
the terms of subjection. In using the issue as an opportunity to draw the literature on gender and
sexuality closer to the ground where they become tangible in the daily lives of subjects, these
essays explore gender and sexuality as bottom up modes of performativity which negotiate,
transform and sometimes resist top down paradigms of subjection. Uncomfortable with the
notion that gender and sexuality should be read as symbolic and legalistic renderings of identity
per se, these essays present gender and sexuality as active modes which take on a semblance with
other everyday forms of resistance (Scott 1987) in their capacity to shift not just the various paradigms
that organize and distribute power, but also the positionality which subjection implies.
Genders, Sexualities, Modernities
Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity (1988) acts as a theoretical mainframe for this
issue overall and enables its understanding of sexuality as a similar mode of embodied
performance which becomes coded in its charge to reproduce culture, historical memory and
normative signals for inclusion and exclusion. These essays suggest several ways for bringing
Butler’s theory of performativity into reconciliation with the “moments or processes that are
produced in the articulation of cultural differences” (Bhabha 1994, 2), which in many ways
define the global age and highlight the utility of performative modes for mediating its tensions.
Rather unquestioned in Butler’s work on performativity is an assumption that an authentic and
homogenous cultural framework is being reproduced through the performance of gender codes.
Such an assumption becomes problematic for the analyses presented here, as our very framing of
gender (and sexuality) as active performances with capacities to negotiate and resist is premised
upon a confrontation between at least two cultural models. In attempting to perform gender and
sexuality strategically in their various contexts, subjects are forced to acknowledge plurality on
some level: gender acknowledges genders; sexuality acknowledges sexualities. In that sense, the
issue conceptualizes gender and sexuality as modes that are deeply tied in with the
confrontational discourses and structures of modernity, with neoliberalism as its central current
for transmission. The inseparability of these performative modes and the various modernities in
and in spite of which they are performed is one we see echoed in the global financial crisis and
the age of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin 1935) where it takes root. In recognizing gender and
sexuality as fluid, adaptable modes with a capacity to interpret the confrontations that underlay
modernities, the issue tests the limits of even disciplinary paradigms that reinforce binaries,
including Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978).
References
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. J.A. Underwood, trans.
New York: Penguin. (1935)
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. (1994)
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenological
and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40(4): 519-531. (1988)
Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8(4): 777-795. (1982)
Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1st edition. New York: Vintage Press. (1978)
Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale
University Press. (1985)
vi Gendering Decent Work: Obstacles to
Performativity in the Egyptian Work Place
by Dahlia Hassanien
Over the last two decades, Egyptian women have seen impressive growth in the range and type
of opportunities available for accessing the market, with one of the chief advancements being in
the area of human capital investments in education for women and girls (Barsoum 2004).
Completion rates among Egyptian females today in higher education levels have taken
precedence over males (CAPMAS 2008; Barsoum 2004), yet Egypt continues to have one of the
lowest female labor participation rates in the world (in Barsoum et al 2009, 3), as only 23.1
percent of Egyptian women are thought to participate in the domestic labor market1 (ELMPS
According to the International Labor Organization (ILO) the market definition of employment includes those
who are engaged in economic activity for purposes of market exchange. It further includes those who are currently
employed and actively seeking employment.
1
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1
2006). Such low levels of recognizable labor participation have caused some analysts to
characterize Egypt’s working age women (ages 15-64) as “women at leisure” (Donahoe 1999,
544), conveying an ignorance of the complex interplay between gender and work in Egypt and
elsewhere. Underscoring these characterizations are some grim statistics, however, as the World
Economic Forum has identified Egypt as one of the worst countries for women in terms of the
“gender gaps” in pay and access to economic opportunity (International Trade Union
Confederation 2008), ranking it 126th out of 134 countries (Hausman et al 2009).
Institutional quantitative rankings generally fail to reflect some important underlying
tensions on two levels. Firstly, gender gaps are approximated at the most macro level by using
current rates of visible female labor market participation to derive conclusions about women’s
ability to access market opportunities. In other words, the methodology overlooks a host of
absolutely critical social expectations and perceptions that influence women’s decision-making
with respect to market entry, while also conveying the assumption that all women who can enter
the labor market logically will. Such data also fails to draw out useful insights about gender as a
social construct which interacts and counteracts with neoliberal conceptualizations of work in
the Egyptian setting (Zulfiqar 2010; Beneria 2003; Elyachar 2005; Barsoum et al 2009), a subject
to which this essay will return.
As recently as 2009, the International Labour Organization (hereafter ILO) has
reasserted itself in an attempt to gender “decent work” as an operational concept, yet in several
ways its conceptualization still falls short of acknowledging the role gender plays in contributing
to perceptions and expectations of how work should be performed. This essay addresses these
methodological gaps by drawing on Judith Butler’s (1988) framework of gender performativity,
which she describes as a dynamic, habitual and ritual practice of embodied and performed acts
that repeat and reproduce social codes of “sanction and taboo” to perpetuate culture (Butler
1988, 1). Gender performativity enters as a useful construct for achieving the goals of this paper,
as it offers a set of tools for calling more acute attention to the reasons why “womanhood” and
“work” as competing sets of performative acts tend to compromise rather than support one
another in Egypt today.
The obstacles women face in securing quality work in Egypt’s private sector has been
widely identified as the primary reason for Egyptian women’s low participation in the labor
market (Assaad 1997; Barsoum 2004) and enduring preference for public sector work and its
host of gender responsive benefits and securities, including maternity leave, pension and health
insurance (Barsoum et al 2009). In responding to cues from NGO research across the global
Surfacing 3(1) | 2010
2
South, “decent work”2 continues to be a concept with high purchase in global development
praxis and international economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR) discourse but has only
recently begun to consider the unpaid work performed by women in the domestic sphere. The
International Labor Organization (ILO), for example, has started calling attention to the “double
burden” women face of paid work in the public sphere and unpaid reproductive labor in the
domestic. In a 2009 ILO report, the double burden is described:
Women’s participation in paid labour and access to decent work is particularly
affected by the burden of combining reproductive and paid work. This adds stress
not accounted for in traditional conceptions of decent work, which focus on paid
work and do not examine related changes in reproductive labour (Floro and Meurs
2009, 4).
The double burden paradigm attempts to make space for gender roles by calling attention to
women’s roles as mothers, wives and unpaid care laborers inside the home, and ultimately by
advocating for structures and regulations in the paid workplace which will allow working women
to honor their unpaid domestic commitments—practices like maternity leave, flexible scheduling
and health insurance are characteristic of “decent work” approaches. This essay submits that
such regulations and workplace practices are not enough to constitute decent work in a gendered
sense, as recent NGO research from Cairo suggests that Egyptian women face some important
soft obstacles in their performance of gender inside the paid workplace, including sexual
harassment, lack of respect and insults to dignity (Barsoum et al 2009). This essay argues that
where women’s performance of female gender propriety, including not just the securing of
marriage and motherhood but also the preservation of sexual modesty (hay’a), is obstructed by
certain treatments and behaviors in the workplace, a set of unique gender pressures arise that are
not yet accounted for in traditional conceptions of decent work, which tends to focus on the
structural goal of reintegrating family friendly policies as a way to ensure women’s prioritization
of domestic responsibilities (Floro and Meurs 2009, 4).
The ILO’s main strategy to gender decent work by reframing it as a double burden
between paid private sector and unpaid domestic work does help to draw women’s care
economy practices and family friendly policies back into institutional conversations about just
livelihoods for women. Yet it stops short of considering women’s need to perform femininity in
socially meaningful ways inside the workplace as a way to protect their reputation and cultural
“Decent work” and “quality work” are interchangeable concepts generally based on eight standard indicators,
including basic personal security, income security, labor market security, employment security, skills reproduction
security, job security, work security, voice representation security (Anker et al 2003).
2
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3
“honor” more broadly—particularly in country cases like Egypt’s, where codes of female
propriety determine other social opportunities for women. By failing to make space for the
particular demands and expectations relating to gender performance in the workplace, the
double burden paradigm ultimately fails to dislodge women from the patriarchal structures of a
neoliberal public sphere dominated by private sector work opportunities (Benerias 2007) and
fails to address some critical reasons for why Egyptian women retreat from paid work in large
numbers, despite rising levels of education. Moreover, the double burden paradigm runs the risk
of reinforcing a binary between paid and unpaid work, either by overstating the value of more
and better access to market opportunities or by failing to pick up on important signals in social
workplace behavior which make sense only against a backdrop of women’s perceptions of
gender performance in the workplace rather than from macro trends “relat[ing to] changes in
reproductive labor” (Floro and Meurs 2009, 43).
As the research of Barsoum et al (2009) captures well, the determinants of Egyptian
women’s participation in wage work cannot be understood in macroeconomic terms alone, as
rising private sector work opportunities and higher levels of educational investment among
women have not necessarily translated into higher labor market participation rates, even despite
a high demand for work stemming from the current global financial crisis, rising costs and
overstretched incomes (Dhillon and Assaad 2008). More nuanced measures for assessing the
role “quality” plays in contributing to women’s perceptions of private sector work opportunities
are thus urgently needed, as the double burden paradigm tends to compartmentalize notions of
quality in the workplace separately from those associated with the domestic sphere, with the
former evaluated structurally in the language of policy and neoliberal best practices (Elyachar
2005), and the latter evaluated almost exclusively through the discursive lenses of religion and
culture. I suggest here that Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity (1988) provides a
useful departure point for exploring the interplay between the spheres of paid work and unpaid
domestic work and for making plain women’s need for consistent standards of gender
performance as they travel between the two.
Despite a growing interest in the interactions and overlaps between the spheres of paid
and domestic work, the academic literature has refrained in large part from drawing causal
relationships between them in terms of women’s willingness and ability to perform gender as
part of the workplace social setting. The existing researches on decent work and women’s
double burden also pay inadequate attention to alternative influences on women’s performance
of gender, such as education. This essay hopes to expand current treatments of quality work and
women’s double burden to include important shifts in women’s social and behavioral needs,
brought on by higher levels of education and a continuing emphasis on traditional performances
Surfacing 3(1) | 2010
4
of femininity.
Gendering the Double Burden
Debates surrounding the compatibility of paid and unpaid work for women have garnered a
great deal of attention from researchers and policy makers at the global level in recent years,
making the double burden a driving concept in the institutional literature on just livelihoods for
women and gender equality more generally. The ILO, for example, tends to advocate for the
implementation of “family-friendly” labor policies in the workplace that break down the
“artificial separation of work and family” (Floro and Meurs 2010, 13). As recently as March
2010, the ILO posited that while the double burden concept is relevant to both men and women
in terms of its implications for household division of labor, a 126 percent growth in women’s
participation in wage work worldwide between 1960 and 1997 indicates an urgent need for more
refined decent work concepts which can advance a women’s labor agenda, including “workfamily initiatives” such as child and elder care, maternity and parental leave, flexible scheduling
and leave arrangements, and better home-work and distance-work opportunities (ILO 2000,
115). In drawing out its institutional “gender perspective,” the ILO reminds its audience that,
“The rise in labor force participation of women [generally since the 1970s] has induced a change
in the roles and expectations of gender, both in the family and in the workplace” (ILO 2000,
116). The Egyptian case contradicts this work in some respects, as Barsoum (2004) and Barsoum
et al (2009) suggest that increasing educational attainment rather than increased labor force
participation has influenced women’s expectations with respect to mate selection and social
standing as a result of class mobility on the one hand, and to specific gender performativity
norms in the workplace, such as the ability to observe and uphold hay’a while in the company of
male colleagues, on the other.
Research on MENA countries indicates a high premium on family honor, a social
construct widely based upon two indicators: women’s adherence to social codes for female
propriety as defined by the preservation of sexual modesty or hay’a, and the ability of each
family’s men to protect the hay’a of the women in their family (Abu-Zahra 1970, 1080-2). Abu
Nasr et al (1985) describes family honor, or sharaf /‘ird, as a primary determinant of women’s
low labor participation in the region (1985, 6), arguing that despite the growing visibility of
women in paid work positions, social perceptions of sharaf /‘ird continue to shape attitudes
about the social and moral value of certain professions as a whole. Mervat Hatem (1988)
identifies medicine, teaching and social work as professions that sufficiently conform to social
codes for female propriety and hence, as she puts it, coincide with “female temperament” (1988,
419). Some private sector work requires Egyptian women to work long hours in small
Surfacing 3(1) | 2010
5
workspaces3 and to commute between work and home (Barsoum et al 2009, 26), requiring
women to engage in public space in ways which may compromise both their personal honor and
marriageability as individuals, as well as the honor of their families (Abu Nasr et al 1985, 10).
Significantly, all of the professions Hatem (1988) considers socially appropriate for women have
historically been operated by Egypt’s public sector.
Since the 1950s and 60s, public sector employment in Egypt has been widely perceived
as something of a bastion for women’s paid work, particularly in its delivery of gender
responsive benefits and securities which enable women to assume their primary cultural function
as wives, mothers and symbolic champions of family sharaf /‘ird. According to Shaban, Assaad
and Al-Qudsi (1995), the primacy of the public sector in facilitating paid work for women has
extended far beyond Egypt and in fact tended to characterize the broader MENA region
beginning with the late 1950s (1995, 72), calling back to sharaf /‘ird as a definitive concept driving
regional attitudes toward gender propriety and labor market participation. Significant for this
analysis is how notions of sharaf /‘ird across the MENA have contributed to distinct perceptions
of women’s wage work as a particular nexus of socially sanctioned policies and modes of gender
performance.
Public sector work has taken on associations of stature in Egypt since its 1950s prime, as
the sector was strategically retooled under President Gamal Abdel Nasser to facilitate the
intentional upward mobility of a broadly strewn, modernist and socialist leaning Egyptian middle
class. Within Nasser’s vision, free and universal education became an essential sphere through
which the nation’s new values and ideologies could take root and become productive. Nasser’s
vision for Egypt grew in the spirit of the 1952 coup d’état, led by a group of military strongmen
known as the Free Officers, and has been widely recognized as an agenda which, among other
contributions, advanced Egyptian women’s place in the labor market. Nasser’s centralization of
state functions into an expansive bureaucratic network increased women’s visibility in paid work
through a spectrum of flexible government jobs offering secure employment and regulated
benefits for women’s gender specific needs. Nasser’s codification of such values in Egypt’s civil
code also helped to secure those newfound opportunities, as labor Law 91 of 1954 guaranteed
for the first time equal rights and equal wage for women (Moghadam 2003, 57). In its amended
form, Law 91 of 1959 guaranteed women workers 50 days maternity leave at a pay rate of 75
percent of their wage, protection from dismissal during leave and childcare facilities for
establishments comprised of 100 female workers or more (Zuhur 1992, 51). Nasser declared it a
“duty for women to participate in building the national economy” (in Hoodfar 1997, 105) and
Small-sized workplaces have been found to increase the probability of sexual harassment, particularly if a woman
is the only female in that workplace (Barsoum 2004). This problem is mostly experienced in the private sector
where 90 percent of non-agricultural enterprises are comprised of ten workers or less (in Barsoum et al 2009, 13).
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coupled the state’s policy efforts with some practical strategies to bring women more
prominently into the labor force, including the graduate guarantee initiative of 1962, which
assured government jobs to all university and vocational secondary school graduates and sent
women’s achievements in education and paid work toward a steady incline.
Women’s Entry into Paid Work in Egypt
Fluctuations in female labor market participation in Egypt are often interpreted in the
institutional literature as indicators of women’s trading off between work in the public and
private spheres—again, the double burden—and tends to focus on workplace policies in rather
essentialist cultural and religious terms, even among Arab scholars. In Economic and Political
Liberation in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism (1992), Mervat Hatem characterizes a popular
argument which maintains that, despite the legal and regulatory advancements women gained as
a result of Nasser’s public sector infrastructure and modern socialist ideology, perceptions of
gender propriety and divisions of labor in the domestic sphere continued to be mediated
through the languages of culture and religion in Egypt, while women remained positioned, first
and foremost, as reproducers of the modern Egyptian nation. Hatem argues that despite
significant female gains in education and employment between 1960 and 1976, when Nasser’s
“state feminism” enabled tripling women’s enrollment in primary and secondary education and
six-fold growth in the number of women university graduates (1982, 240), Egyptian women held
fast to traditional norms relating to female propriety and the division of sexual labor, in part
because this more traditional role was also safeguarded by the state. Hatem sees Egyptian
women’s mass influx into education and paid work following the 1962 graduate guarantee as
having occurred without interruption in women’s performance of unpaid domestic
commitments (1992, 242). Thus Hatem concludes that no significant shifts took place in terms
of what women expected, valued and prioritized with regard to the tradeoff between paid and
domestic work during Nasser’s presidency.
As the legal and regulatory advances of Nasser’s “state feminism” in the social sphere
came up against the country’s turn toward open market policies and neoliberal reforms under
Sadat’s program of Infitah4 in the mid 70s, and then Mubarak’s economic reform and structural
adjustment policies (ERSAP)5 in the early 90s, Hatem argues that Egyptian women retreated en
masse to the domestic sphere as the social opportunity costs of paid employment grew
Infitah, or “opening of the door” is the term used to characterize Egypt’s initial phase of economic liberalization
policies, which was ushered in by President Anwar Sadat in the 1970s.
5 ERSAP refers to the era of Egypt’s full commitment to economic liberalization with a series of structural reforms
in 1991 under President Hosni Mubarak. Egypt’s current economy is every bit a reflection of Mubarak’s ERSAP
commitments.
4
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prohibitively high, particularly inasmuch as employment lags for men6 produced changes in
women’s marriageability prospects (1992, 237). Nasser’s “state feminism,” Hatem (1992) argues,
created a kind of institutional equilibrium between promoting women’s visible and equitable
participation in wage work with strategies to ensure the economic sustainability of the Egyptian
household and, by extension, the Egyptian state. In this way, women’s unpaid work in the
domestic sphere gained an unprecedented level of visibility in Egyptian society, through which
women’s familial role took on new social and cultural value that the state and society were eager
to protect.
While Hatem (1992) does not read this new visibility as indicative of shifts in how
Egyptian women performed femininity, she does read this moment in Egyptian sociopolitical
history as having had the potential to shift attitudes toward women’s paid and unpaid work until
it succumbed to an era of neoliberal reforms and its emphasis on gender-blind productivity
(1992, 235). Homa Hoodfar (1997) argues somewhat similarly to Hatem (1992) that changes in
Egypt’s state policies toward women, work and education under Nasser and its subsequent
administrations did not offer gender responsive employment opportunities with the aim of
challenging gender practices and values, but rather to achieve the overall goal of fostering a
productive and modern Egyptian nation. As Hoodfar notes, “neither the [public sector work]
facilities nor the new educational system [under Nasser] was designed to influence the prevailing
domestic sexual division of labor” (1997, 107).
Valentine Moghadam (2003) applies a more regional logic to Egyptian women’s
collective retreat from paid work in the 1970s and 80s. Departing from the 70s oil boom, its
wide-scale migration of male Arab nationals to the Arabian Gulf for work and impressive
remittance inflows for wives and families still living in Egypt, Moghadam argues that Egyptian
women saw less utility in wage work outside the home when male wages were high (2003, 5879). As women saw less value in paid work, a supply-side shrinkage of women laborers took
shape as women returned to the domestic sphere exclusively as wives and mothers. In this
environment, Moghadam argues that Egyptian women began reidentifying with more traditional
gender norms and Islamic readings of family obligation and gender propriety, which in turn
increased the collective influence and proliferation of such norms.
Some important interplay can be found between Hatem (and Hoodfar) and Moghadam,
as each author draws attention to important disconnects between a rising need for women’s paid
and unpaid work as household incomes in Egypt deflate, and Egyptian women’s sociallyconstrued perceptions of the value of paid work. For Hatem and Moghadam both, the primary
function of Egyptian women’s engagement with paid work has been to ensure the economic
sustainability of the household unit rather than to reorder norms of gender construction and
performance. While Hatem (1992) sees potential for a reevaluation of gender norms within the
While the intersections between women’s rising education levels, labor market stagnation and obstacles to gender
performativity on the one hand and men’s performance of masculinity on the other is far beyond the scope of this
essay, the work identifies an urgent need for greater understanding of how labor market trends, particularly high
unemployment, affect men’s performance of gender and whether trends like sexual harassment may be evidence of
men’s attempt to reclaim the workplace as a space of masculinity in the face of women’s rising education and
market entry.
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historical moment of her analysis, Moghadam (2003) draws out the exclusively need-based
relationship Egyptian women held to paid work in the late 1970s and 80s. Both agree that
Egyptian women’s commitment to the performance of unpaid work in the domestic sphere as
mothers and wives went uninterrupted even as Egyptian women became more visible in paid
work positions and national labor policies. Yet questions remain as to why Egyptian women
today, even despite higher levels of education, steadily available paid work opportunities and
great economic need resulting from the ongoing global financial crisis, refrain from consistent
private sector employment in high numbers. In addressing this question, this essay examines
women’s sexual modesty or hay’a as a set of gender performance norms intended to secure
marriage, motherhood and family honor as cultural values as a possible indicator for
understanding Egyptian women’s low market entry.
Sitt al-bayt, Hay’a and Workplace Obstacles
Changes in the structure of Egypt’s economy and its advancements toward an export oriented
character have caused many women to seek out temporary formal and informal paid work
opportunities in the private sector to remediate the growing economic need that now
characterizes most Egyptian households (Radwan 2009). Yet temporary and sporadic paid work
positions rather than career trajectories still tend to be the norm, as women continue to find paid
work in the private sector costly in terms of the social injuries they are forced to endure from
male supervisors and colleagues. As the research of Barsoum et al (2009) points out, working
women referred to a lack of “respect,” “dignity” and “trust” from male colleagues in the
workplace, and frustration with sexual harassment, long hours worked and unequal, inequitable
wages paid (2009, 10-17). These experiences leave working women feeling that they have been
sexually and socially degraded by having their personal honor compromised and, in turn, are
understood to have the potential to affect working women’s marriageability, particularly women
from low and middle class family backgrounds, by making them vulnerable to rumor and loss of
sexual innocence and ultimately preventing them from achieving sitt al-bayt status.
Sitt al-bayt, meaning literally “lady of the home” or “homemaker,” is a social title taken
on by women after marriage, which carries deep social and cultural significance and invites a
standard set of shared beliefs and values about a woman’s social, cultural and spiritual role in
society. Sitt al-bayt as a female archetype has long denoted prestige and class association in
Egypt, as it has traditionally been women with more highly educated husbands and higher
socioeconomic standing who refrain from work outside the home (Rugh 1985; Donahoe 1999),
while women with lower-earning husbands are considered more likely to work for pay (Donahoe
1999). Sitt al-bayt as a model for female propriety guides women’s performance of gender
toward the goals of marriage and motherhood, and its fulfillment rests upon the protection of
female sexual modesty, or hay’a (Abu Zahra 1970). Narrative evidence gathered by Barsoum et
al (2009) indicates that Egyptian women perceive private sector work as interfering with their
ability to perform femininity in a way that preserves both sexual modesty and social class as
determined by her level of education, particularly the lack of “decent treatment” by male
employers and colleagues in the workplace in the form of harsh scolding and reprimands for
minor mistakes, assignment of menial and inferior tasks for the woman’s level of skill and
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9
position, sexually suggestive or explicit comments, gestures or touching, and insufficient pay
(2009, 11-15). These experiences challenge women’s ability to perform female gender in socially
condoned ways not simply by presenting a threat to their sexual innocence, but also by
presenting them with scenarios in which they must either directly and openly challenge men’s
power—which consequently makes them appear un-feminine in cultural terms—or suffer in
silence, as few private sector workplaces offer recourse mechanisms to women employees.
A number of authors have suggested that as Egyptian women’s educational levels rise
and economic need increases across the class spectrum, greater emphasis is placed on seeking
out educated and financially secure mates (Elbadawy 2010; Hoodfar 1997; Singerman 1995;
Rugh 1985).7 In research conducted over 2008, Barsoum et al (2009) determined that Egyptian
women’s perceptions of paid work in the private sector had deteriorated even beyond their
already low levels in 2004, when Barsoum discovered the common perception that “self
respecting women stay home” (Barsoum 2004, 13). Andrea Rugh (1985) pointed out more than
twenty years ago that strategic mate selection has conventionally been of great significance to
women with minimal education and poor job prospects in Egypt (1985, 58). Elbadawy (2010)
has also illustrated how Egyptian women’s chances of attracting a desirable mate can be
facilitated by investments in her education, which would in turn elevate her status.8 Interestingly
for this work, the narratives of working women offered in Barsoum et al (2009) also draw out
even more subtle obstacles to gender performance for Egyptian women, many of which are
unique to the differences in level of education between male and female colleagues and the
expectations of treatment which women derive from their level of education and class
association.
Women’s Retreat from Paid Work in Egypt
As the following table from the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey (2006) illustrates, public sector
employment for Egyptian women has been on a steady decline since 1998, while the number of
“ever married” and unmarried women seeking paid work in the private sector showed strong
growth through 2006.9
7
While this may suggest that Egyptian women’s higher education levels better position them to prosper in the
workplace, a continued adherence to sitt al-bayt gender performance puts the bulk of the burden to secure household
income traditionally on the male partner.
8 Although this strategy is “automatic” for middle and high income families, it is still regarded as a large sacrifice for
poor income families who could have benefited from the daughter’s engagement in labor from a young age.
Although education in Egypt is free, its quality is often poor, requiring expensive supplementary private tutoring in
many cases.
9 Data is yet unavailable for these variables in the years following the global financial crisis of 2008. Since the crisis
more women have been forced, however reluctantly, to seek out paid formal and informal work opportunities in the
private sector.
Surfacing 3(1) | 2010
10
1998
2006
Public
wage
Private
formal
Private
informal
Public
wage
Private
formal
Private
informal
Ever Married
88.3%
4.1%
7.6%
83.2%
6.3%
10.5%
Never
Married
50.4%
12.7%
37%
34.14%
20.5%
45.4%
Total
77.4%
6.6%
16%
69.9%
10.2%
20%
Source: Assaad and El Hamidi (2009) and ELMPS 2006 survey data (ages 15-64).
Growth in “never married” women’s employment may not indicate stable growth in long term
employment, but rather higher numbers of short term positions, as marriage remains a high
priority for this cohort. One key barrier to career track female employment in Egypt’s private
sector is an unfriendly regulatory environment, despite a number of legal guarantees that aim to
assist women in balancing the double burden of paid and unpaid work. Al-Bassusi and ElKogali (2001) investigate young Egyptian women’s motives for entering the labor market,
finding that costs associated with the household and preparation for marriage were common
reasons for seeking private sector employment. Other authors similarly identify rising marriage
costs as a driving cause for young women to seek employment before marriage (Singerman and
Ibrahim 2001; Amin and Al-Bassusi 2001), and argue that private sector employers in Egypt are
using such social trends among “never married” women and a lack of labor law enforcement by
the state to their advantage (Al Bassusi and El Kogali 2001; Assaad and El Hamidi 2009).
Al-Bassussi and El-Kogali assert that Egypt’s shift from the public sector to the private,
and from the production of non-tradables such as services10 to tradables, has caused many
women to lose their source of livelihood (Al-Bassussi and El-Kogali 2001, 28). Due to limited
employment opportunities for decent and flexible work for women outside of the public sector
in recent years, educated women are seemly electing not to join the labor force (Barsoum et al
2009). A number of authors have argued that women’s reservation wages11 have evidently
increased with the shrinking of public sector employment opportunities (Assaad 2003; Barsoum
et al 2009). The reservation wage is thus presumed to be below that of the public-sector wage,
but above private-sector wages (Assaad 2003, 130). As a result, Barsoum et al (2009) assert that
A sector once largely composed of women workers.
The reservation wage is the cut-off point at which individuals decide that work is preferable than other ways to
use their time (World Bank 2004, 101). For example, women with family duties may have a high reservation wage
that would be sufficient for paying for childcare, or a maid, or for purchasing products on the market rather than
making it at home.
10
11
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11
a large proportion of Egyptian women will not consider private sector employment due to the
evident barriers discussed in this paper, and instead prefer to queue for public-sector jobs or to
remain out of the labor force altogether.
Conclusion
This paper reviews Egyptian women’s employment rates through the cultural perspectives of
gender performativity, female propriety, and education. Complex interplays between these
factors have made a significant impact on Egyptian women’s choices regarding labor force
participation, particularly in the private sector. By drawing on Judith Butler’s framework of
gender performativity (1988), it has been argued that Egyptian women refrain from participation
in the labor market, in part, because of a lack of decent treatment from male colleagues and
supervisors, which interferes with working women’s ability to perform gender in ways that will
ensure their marriageability and social mobility. Much of the literature analyzing working
conditions for women in Egypt’s private sector have highlighted the obstacles women face in
performing gender, particularly for those with considerable education, including inflexible
policies making the work / family balance unmanageable, poor job security, exposure to sexual
harassment and unjust treatment, and unequal wages to male colleagues. Hence, the majority of
women employed in the private sector are recognized as never-married women who are
temporarily working as a strategy for accumulating marriage costs or while queuing for a public
sector job (Al-Bassussi and El-Kogali 2001; Wahba 2009). Although Egypt has reformed its
labor laws to support women workers, a lack of enforcement of these laws often works against
women who are employed in the private sector. Hence it is vital that the state begin providing
incentives to private sector employers to encourage them to promote gender equitable practices
in the workplace, particularly that which affects women’s marriageability and desired
performance of gender.
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Diverging Femininities in the Resistance
Narratives of Algeria and Palestine
by Farah
Channaa
Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns (Al-Subbar) (1941) and Assia Djebar’s Children of the New World
(Les Enfants du Nouveau Monde) (1962) are both novels concerned with rewriting the history of
the occupation of Palestine and Algeria respectively.1 Each work dedicates itself to exposing
the details of life under occupation and popular involvement in military experiences and civil
resistance. Wild Thorns is set in a small alleyway town in the West Bank city of Nablus less
than a decade after the July 1967 Arab defeat by Israeli forces, an event commonly referred to
by Arabs as Al-Naksa.2 Set in the small northern Algeria town of Blida3, Children of the New
Assia Djebar is the pen name of Fatma-Zohra Imalhayene.
The June 1967 war witnessed the defeat of the combined forces of Jordan, Egypt, and Syria and resulted in a
fourfold expansion of the Israeli state. In the period of only six days, Israel was able to occupy what is left of
Palestine, including Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and the Golan Heights in
Syria.
3 Blida is also the town where Djebar attended boarding school before moving to Paris in 1954 to enter the
1
2
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World similarly recounts the mood of Algeria’s war of liberation from French colonialism
(1954-62) through a depiction of the events of May 24, 1956, a significant day in the early
years of the Algerian struggle. Both Wild Thorns and Children of the New World give voice to the
diverse roles women played in resistance, many of which were overlooked or silenced by the
dominant national resistance narratives being formulated at the time, yet each work frames
women’s contribution to resistance in a different way.4
As women authors writing about traditionally male-coded topics like resistance and
war, both Khalifeh and Djebar earned reputations as transgressors of sacred values among
their countrymen for trying to interpret women’s contribution to resistance action in settings
where women were still being regarded as second hand participants5 in the war experience.
While Djebar focuses on rewriting the history of Algeria’s occupation to include the
viewpoint of the women involved, Khalifeh is concerned with reproducing the harsh effects
of life under occupation, emphasizing the viewpoint of Palestinian laborers working in Israel
and portraying women almost exclusively as mothers, wives and passive sustainers of culture
in a national struggle underscored by active male sacrifice.
Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns showcases the lives of Palestinian men as workers, prisoners,
freedom fighters, and regulars on “the street.” The novel’s linear narrative is recounted by an
omniscient third person narrator and begins with the return of its main character, Usama, to
Palestine after years as a migrant laborer in the Arabian Gulf, then ends with his death during
an armed clash with an Israeli soldier. Overwhelmed by feelings of alienation and convinced
that his own people have abandoned the cause of liberation, Usama embarks upon a mission
to blow up a bus carrying both Israeli and Palestinian laborers to work in Israeli factories.6
Within this nexus of themes, Khalifeh records the events unfolding around her, offering the
reader “a panoramic view of the social scene as well as the entangled embrace of current
political and cultural issues…[that] reflect general trends of politics and ideological thinking
on the West Bank” (Siddiq 1986, 145). The society Khalifeh portrays is one both struggling to
École Normale de Sèvre.
4 Henceforth, Wild Thorns will be referred to in text citations as WT to denote the English translation, or AS to
denote the original Arabic, Al-Subbar, to allow the bilingual reader to compare the two texts. Also, Children of the
New World will be referred to as Ch to denote the English translation or LE to denote the original French, Les
Enfants du Nouveau Monde.
5 Assia Djebar wrote Children of the New World while in self-exile in Morocco following a stint in Tunisia,
returning to Algeria only after its independence in 1962. Although Sahar Khalifeh wrote her novel while residing
in Palestine, she is widely viewed among Palestinians as a secondary source on the resistance since, as a woman,
she was not involved in armed military resistance and thus unable to reflect knowledgably on the lived
experience of being a fighter.
6 The evolving dynamic between Palestinian labor and the Israeli economy is a recurring theme at the center of
Khalifeh’s novel and a topic which inspired much-heated debates in literary circles in the 1970s. For an excellent
discussion of Palestinian labor in the Israeli economy, see Leila Farakh, “Palestinian Labor Flows to the Israeli
Economy: An Unfinished Story?” Journal of Palestine Studies 32(1): 13-27. (2002)
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adjust to the devastating outcomes of Al-Naksa and one grieving the loss of a pan-Arab
security, which had served as the Palestinian mainstay in the period before 1967.7 Through
her portrayal of an increasingly disheartened Palestinian society, Khalifeh calls attention to the
systematic expunction of Palestinians8 from Israeli political and public life following Israel’s
1967 victory over Egypt, Jordan and Syria9, particularly the near complete disappearance of
Palestinian cultural and social expression (Bresheeth 2003) from Israeli public space.10 Against
this backdrop, Khalifeh presents Palestinian nationalism as it steps into the vacuum produced
by Israeli policy, where guerrilla warfare takes center stage as the sole channel of resistance
for Palestinian men. As the narrator of Wild Thorns explains, “Usama [central male character]
firmly believed that there was no longer more than one dimension to the picture, not after the
1967 defeat and the occupation that followed” (WT 88/ AS 75). Usama’s suicide mission
thus comes to symbolize a “radical shift in frame, as, refusing to ‘swallow the rhetoric’ [of
pan-Arabism] transmitted over the radio, the character decides that liberation [can] only be
achieved through guerrilla warfare” (Nassar 1997, 138). Inasmuch as guerilla tactics become
emblematic of a uniquely Palestinian identity, Khalifeh draws out this landscape as one in
which Palestinian women take on an essential yet supportive role as mothers and reproducers
of the resistance.
Assia Djebar, on the other hand, seeks to rewrite the history of Algeria’s anticolonial
struggle to include the Algerian women who participated in resistance efforts. Les Enfants du
Nouveau Monde (hereafter Les Enfants) begins with the old woman Lla Aicha’s death in a bomb
attack in the courtyard of her house on May 24, 1956, and ends with a depiction of the
Before 1967, the supranational identity characterizing the era was Pan-Arabism. Reacting to the creation of the
state of Israel in 1948, an army was assembled by the Arab League consisting primarily of forces from
Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iraq, and sent to liberate Palestine from Israeli
forces. The war itself was lost, but the Palestinians still held confidence in the Pan-Arab brotherhood of nations.
Under Egyptian President Gamal ‘Abdel Nasser (1952), Arab nationalism and, hence, Pan-Arabism took an
more radical form, became closely aligned with state socialism and rested upon the liberation of Palestine as the
ultimate symbol the ideology’s success.
8 Khalifeh captures Palestinian cynicism by replicating the radio broadcasts praising Arab nationalism and
different characters’ reactions to those broadcasts. Listening to the radio, the character Adel sarcastically reflects,
“An entire nation’s drowning while the radio goes on spewing out songs of hope and fervor, freedom, rebirth,
and the happiness of man…a man in an auditorium mouthing the glories of Arab nationhood” (WT 61/AS 57).
9 In a statement to the Sunday Times on June 15, 1969, Golda Meir, then Prime Minister of Israel, declared,
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their
country. They didn’t exist” (Baker, Zionist Quotes).
10 As Nassar (1997) notes in his essay on the June 1967 war, “Israel’s designed strangulation of Palestinian
political expression reached the whole sphere of political and cultural life. At the political level, all modes of
conventional political participation were blocked. Political parties were banned, elections were halted, and all
forms of political activity were made illegal and punished severely. Cultural strangulation, on the other hand, was
manifested in restrictions on freedom of expression, repression of education, suppression of art and literature,
and the curtailment of symbolic national expression” (1997, 139).
7
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mountain battle between Algerian rebels and the French army. Within the span of twentyfour hours on May 24, 1956, the novel’s characters cross paths either in the center of town,
called place d’arme, in one of the character’s homes, or in battle on the mountain. Like
Khalifeh, Djebar foregrounds the historical moment of revolution and resistance in the
setting of her novel (Nagy-Zekmi 2002, 1), hence Les Enfants is set in Bilda, Algeria—one of
the earliest French stations to incur attacks from Algerian resistance forces in 1954 (Zimra
2005, 202). The Algerian revolutionary movement, or Front de Libération Nationale
(hereafter FLN), having been solidified just two years before the events in Bilda, urged
Algerians of all social classes to join the armed resistance movement (Ruedy 1989, 159) and,
by late 1956, had managed not only to recruit hundreds of thousands of Algerians but also to
organize an extensive system of underground nationalist institutions (Ruedy 1989, 163)
despite a constant threat of “torture, mass arrests, destructive…military sweeps through the
countryside, and collective punishment of communities where attacks or sabotage had
occurred” (Reudy 1989, 163) by the French.
Djebar’s choice of female characters range from traditional housewives like Amna and
Cherifa to educated, more seemingly ‘modern’ women like Lila, Salima, and Hassiba. The
range of female perspectives reveals Djebar’s interest in conveying the belief that, regardless
of educational background or social positioning, all Algerian women are doubly oppressed by
French colonial infrastructure on the one hand and the dominating patriarchal order of
Algerian traditional norms on the other. By somehow transgressing the patriarchal rules of
either or both of these patriarchal institutions, Djebar’s female characters all contribute to
what Djebar sees as the more fundamental revolution of undoing patriarchal norms and, in
doing so, beginning the process of “forge[ing a] gendered identity” (Ghazoul 2007, 120). By
interweaving the domestic problems of married couples with the aims and realities of the
resistance movement, Djebar exposes the reinforcing relationship between the internal
dynamics of the patriarchal Algerian household, the masculinist principles of the Algerian
resistance movement and a racially charged French colonialism with aims to subjugate
Algerian women and men through a systematic regime of feminization and eroticization.
Thus Djebar’s female characters convey her interrelated views on feminism and political
resistance by taking various bold stances with regard to the patriarchal household in particular
and, by extension, the revolution itself.
In moving beyond the traditional roles Algerian women play in spatial and intellectual
spheres, Djebar develops a set of diverse, believable women characters through which the
“secret world” of women’s participation in the public sphere of political resistance and the
private sphere of domestic gender propriety can be explored. By bringing to light the private
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conversations, opinions, choices, and feelings of these women, Djebar transports them from
their static association with the domestic sphere into the mainstream effort of resistance and
national redefinition11—a feature of Les Enfants which sets the work drastically apart from
Wild Thorns and which many critics attribute to Djebar’s French acculturation and
cosmopolitan life experience.
Djebar uses Les Enfants to confront the masculinist biases of Algerian culture as an
insider, yet she endures significant criticism even today for performing that confrontation in
the French language. Djebar’s French education played an important role in her evolution as
a writer and was still largely atypical for Algerian girls during that period, setting her apart
almost inherently from mainstream Algerian thought at the time. Despite Djebar’s undeniable
support of the Algerian revolution, “she was still praised (and marketed) as an exceptional
product of French universities and French acculturation” (Zimra 1992, 205). Due to her
francophone training and popular reception within French colonial circles, Djebar was
regarded as suspect by most Algerians for spending the war period away from her native
country and for her perceived inability to dissimilate from French culture, language and
values. Unlike Khalifeh, whose loyalty to the Palestinian cause went largely unquestioned by
other Palestinians on account of her Arabic language authorship and her life-long Muslim
credentials for yielding to codes of Islamic gender propriety, Djebar struggled to prove herself
as an ‘authentic’ Algerian. Although French acculturation gave Djebar access to the
traditionally male-coded spheres of public space and popular writing, she attempted to
compensate for her inauthenticity by using her unique life experience to “‘[annex]’ space for
all Algerian women” (Mortimer 1997, 150).12
For a more thorough treatment of Djebar’s gender objectives in Les Enfants, see Mildred Mortimer, “Entretien
Avec Assia Djebar, Ecrivain Algerien,” Research in African Literatures 19(2): 197-205. (1988)
12 It should be noted that although Djebar’s French acculturation was liberating, many critics claim that it also
inevitably albeit unintentionally “encouraged alienation” (Mortimer 1997, 155). These critics argue that the
maturation of the female characters in Les Enfants can be looked upon as Djebar’s own process of selfvalidation. Mortimer, for example, asserts that, “Djebar’s experience…is distinctly gendered. She came to believe
that the process of Western acculturation, resulting in her mastery of the colonizer’s language and access to
public space, excluded her from most, if not all, aspect of the traditional woman’s world” (Mortimer 1997, 102).
Mortimer further argues that this emotion of exclusion motivated Djebar’s attempt to reconnect with the world
of Algerian women, thus Djebar’s effort to depict the collective experience of Algerian women compels her
toward an autobiographical style. Although Les Enfants is not as straightforwardly autobiographical as L’amour, la
Fantasia, it is not devoid of autobiographical elements and can be viewed as a representation of Djebar’s
“imaginary homecoming” (Zimra 2005, 206). In Les Enfants, for example, we learn that Lila’s father, Rachid,
challenges his own father’s wishes and decides to send his daughter to a colonial school. “Times are changing”
he asserts “and even girls need to be properly prepared” (Ch129/LE 206). The relationship between Lila and her
father in Les Enfants “bears more than an accidental resemblance to Djebar’s own circumstances” (Zimra 2005,
209). The insertion of autobiographical hints in the text is conveys the author’s attempt at (re)inclusion in her
society. Mortimer (1997) explains that this recurring phenomenon in Djebar’s work serves two primary
purposes, one of which traces her personal journey back “to the cherished maternal world of her past, where she
seeks healing and reconciliation for a self fragmented by the colonial experience” (1997, 103).
11
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In attempting to draw out the differences between Djebar and Khalifeh in terms of
each one’s personal relationship to the cultural and political context about which each one
wrote, I suggest at the outset that it is difficult for women writers of the global South to carve
out feminist niches within dominant nationalist narratives in periods of resistance without
also being forced into a confrontation with the masculinist norms which underscore that
resistance. As Ranjoo Seodu Herr (2005) explains, “...nationalism is invariably conceived in
androcentric terms, as an effort to revive the injured dignity of an emasculated nation that has
been degraded by penetration, occupation, and cultural domination of a foreign aggressor”
(2005, 137). In moving beyond the masculinist language of the Algerian and Palestinian
nationalist narratives, Les Enfants and Wild Thorns suggest two very distinct frameworks for
conceptualizing the new nation and women’s role in bringing that new nation to life.
Palestinian Resistance: Women Reproduce the Nation
The Palestinian national resistance narrative praises the reproductive capacity of mothers and
regards it as the utmost expression of femininity, such that “the specificity of Palestinian
women’s bodies is significant in [PLO publications] only when reproduction is considered”
(Massad 1995, 475). Julie Peteet (1997) adds that, in Palestine, “[g]enerativety and femininity
are inextricably intertwined; birthing and mothering are pivotal, registering femininity and
female social adulthood” (1997, 106). The emphasis on reproduction in the national
resistance narrative of Palestinians is easily drawn from the Palestine Liberation
Organization’s (hereafter PLO) publications, as well as the everyday discourses of Palestinian
popular culture. The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (hereafter UNLU) and
PLO published a series of communiqués during the first Intifada (1987-1993), all offering
evidence of the Palestinian resistance narrative’s long-held view of women as reproducers of
the virile nation. Communiqué No. 5 of the UNLU13, for example, describes mothers as “the
soil” upon which “manhood, respect, and dignity grow” (in Massad 1995, 472). This
metaphorical description implies that the fruit of the nation is male and directs women’s
participation in the nationalist movement toward the domestic sphere and away from its
public face of armed resistance. UNLU Communiqué No. 5 variously congratulates the “the
mother of the martyr and her celebratory ululations, for she has ululated twice, the day her
son went to fight and was martyred, and the day the state was declared” (in Massad 1995,
474), thus reinforcing the integral bond between motherhood, male martyrdom and the
nation. Indeed by emphasizing Palestinian women’s role as “mother of the martyr,” the
13
UNLU Communiqué No. 5 is titled Intifada Min Khilal Bayanat al Qiyada al Wataniyya al Muwahhada (Massad 1995).
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Palestinian national narrative buttresses the reproductive aspect of femininity to the extent
that it eclipses all other channels of women’s involvement in the nation’s self-definition and
self-determination.
Mainstream interpretations of the Palestinian resistance narrative holds that its
“nationalism contain[s] a pronatalist policy using population growth and demographic
pressure as an instrument through which to achieve liberation” (Amireh 2003, 756). Although
the movement’s publications following the first Intifada fail to highlight population growth as
an ex plicit national objective, earlier Palestinian nationalist discourses of the 1960s and 70s
regarded fertility as an important weapon against usurpation by Israeli infrastructure and
culture (Amireh 2003, 755). As the popular Palestinian saying goes, “The Israelis beat us at
the borders but we beat them in the bedrooms” (in Yuval-Davis 1997, 31).14 Feeling a
mounting pressure to compete with Israel in terms of bodies and numbers, Palestinians
continued to escalate the role of motherhood and reproduction in the struggle for liberation
and hence the mother became embedded in nationalist and literary narratives as a metaphor
for the land itself. As Amireh (2003) explains, “The Palestinian national narrative is
undeniably erotic and male. In it, as in the case of other nationalist narratives, Palestine is
metaphorized as a woman. The dependence of the Palestinian society on mother earth no
doubt encourages the use of such a metaphor” (2003, 750). Thus the emphasis on
reproduction can be symbolically understood as a metaphor for the female-coded land’s
readiness to be (re)possessed by the virile (and ideally male) next generation of resistance
fighters. According to this metaphorical scheme, Palestinian men risk the dual injury of lost
virility, in the case of being unable to repossess the female-coded land, and of being
feminized alongside the land, as it remains subjected to a male-coded Israeli occupation.
The loss of Palestinian masculinity emerged as a recurring theme15 in Palestinian
popular discourse in the early years of the resistance movement and has steadily evolved as an
imminent threat to the collective body politic which, as Amal Amireh (2003) put it, could only
Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, Identity Card, also illustrates the central place of family and reproduction in
Palestinian resistance discourse: “Write down: I am an Arab; My I.D. number is 50,000; My children, eight; And
the ninth is due next summer; Does that anger you?” Further, Israel itself has emphasized the importance of a
demographic majority in its own policymaking and rhetorical practice since the early 1950s.
15 Khalifeh exemplifies the Palestinian fear of lost masculinity in Abu Saber’s list of demands following a serious
injury in the Israeli factory where he works. Bleeding profusely on his way back to a Nablus hospital, Abu Saber
repeatedly asks fellow Palestinian workers Adel and Zuhdi to tell him one of the tales of the legendary Arab
hero, Abu Zayd. Suha Sabbagh (1989) argues that:
Abu Saber’s first priority is to regain a sense of dignity…as he desperately tries to escape into a
past in which he could take pride in his Arab identity over a present that places him beyond the
pale of thinghood…Abu Saber’s attempt to recapture the past becomes an abortive attempt to
reject the slave consciousness imposed on the deepest recesses of his being by what he perceives
to be as sources of authority (1989, 72).
14
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“consolidat[e] itself in defeat” (751).16 The Palestinian resistance narrative uses a masculinist
discourse to rewrite men’s sacrificially battered bodies as a commentary on sacrifice and
honor and, in doing so, transforms notions of collective defeat into a collective victory for the
nation.17
An example of the heroics of men’s bodily sacrifice is found in the ULNU's
Communiqué No. 24, which reads, “Gaza’s sons went out of their den confronting with their
bodies the occupier’s machines” (in Massad 1995, 479)18, or as Julie Peteet (1994) puts it, “To
the Palestinian, the battered body, with its bruises and broken limbs, is the symbolic
embodiment of…their determination to resist and to struggle for national independence…a
representation created with the intent of humiliating has been reversed into one of honor,
manhood, and moral superiority” (1994, 38). The resistance narrative, by transforming the
defeat of individual men into collective victories through a reiteration of Islamic scriptural
metaphors, attempts to mobilize the nation toward its own liberation. Within this frame,
Palestinian women attain their highest symbolic value as mothers by reproducing a nation of
male martyrs for the national liberation project.
Algerian Resistance: Sexual Modesty, Female Honor
Whereas the Palestinian resistance narrative casts women’s discursive value almost exclusively
in terms of its reproductive capacity, the Algerian national resistance narrative reinscribes
femininity toward a different end. Although the attainment of motherhood is similarly framed
in Algerian resistance discourse as a symbolic event in the lives of women, maternity is
primarily regarded as the fulfillment of a wife’s Islamic duty and evidence of her sexual
modesty and purity, rather than as an instrument for enhancing the nation’s demographic and
sacrificial war strategy. In other words, the discourse of Algerian resistance conveys a more
narrow interest in the societal conduct of women as indicative of women’s solidarity with the
For further discussion of the Palestinian narrative’s casting of defeat as victory, see Khalidi (1997).
Khalifeh’s work also transforms Israel’s regular imprisonment of Palestinian men into a commentary on
honor. Basil, the youngest child in the Al-Karmi family, is imprisoned for spitting in the face of an Israeli soldier
after publicly displaying his patriotic sentiments. Through this humiliation, Basil gains the respect of his people
and fellow prisoners, as one prisoner exclaims, “Congratulations, you can take it! And more! You are a man
now…May you live to get the same again, Basil…Hold your head up high and never let it fall! Prison’s for men,
Abu Al-Izz (Father of Glory)!” (WT 114-5 /AS 96).
18 The Shaheed, or martyr, is held as the quintessential masculine form in its willingness to embrace complete
physical annihilation for the cause of liberation. As Linda Pitcher (1998) explains:
His [the martyr’s] experience and perception of the occupation fundamentally alters the
relationship of his body to the world…. His body...becomes a vehicle, an expressive articulation of
… [a] psychic integrity, a self less vulnerable to the [feminization process of the] occupier. Long
before his death, the martyr has yielded the impermanence of his body to the struggle of
autonomous identity” (1998, 21).
16
17
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resistance movement, and is less fixated on the act of child bearing itself. Still, FLN
documents return time and again to an emphasis on sexual purity and modesty as conduits
for patriarchal honor. As Samira
Haj (1992) notes:
The woman’s maternal role is reinforced by the manner in which female sexuality
is viewed…female sexuality in Middle Eastern societies is defined and controlled
by the corporate body of the clan—that is, the extended family…Women are
taught early that their sexuality does not belong to them, it is not theirs to give or
withhold; it is the inalienable, permanent property of the extended family. As a
result, sexual purity and lineage honor are seen as inseparable (1992, 764).
In order to preserve an Islamic social order, the FLN imposed strict regulations on veiling
and sex-segregation to refine and in some sense re-codify female sexuality toward the
collective goal of dismantling French colonial infrastructure. Haj (1992) attributes this trend
to popular views which regard female sexuality as a potential disturbance to the Muslim
societal order, noting that, “[t]o protect the Muslim Umma (community) from Fitna (chaos)
and Keid (disorder), female power and female sexuality have to be contained and neutralized
through legal and other institutional measures (sex-segregation, veiling)” (1992, 764). The
Algerian resistance narrative emphasizes certain masculinist principles as a way to demarcate
Algerian cultural identity from French colonial influence, and religiously sanctioned female
behavior was situated at the center of this effort to distinguish.19 As in the Palestinian case,
the FLN sought to mainstream Algerian women’s performance of sexuality in such a way that
would ultimately reaffirm Algerian patriarchal honor and religious piety and, by extension, a
collective, ultimately masculine, Algerian resistance movement. As John Ruedy (1989)
describes it:
FLN cells during the war…set themselves up as guardians of male-female
propriety. Amidst the euphoria of liberation during the summer of 1962, FLN
FLN reactions to a 1959 colonial ordinance setting a minimum age for marriage demonstrate the
instrumentality of Islamic principles for demarcating Algerian identity (Lazreg 1990, 767). The FLN condemned
the ordinance, stating: “So, some Frenchmen who are also Christians…have deliberately dared tamper with the
Quran…and impose with the sword of the secular law of France on the Muslims of Algeria in their most sacred
status” (in Lazreg 1990, 767). The colonial marriage law interrupted Islamic marriage practices to some degree
and ultimately undermined the social and institutional controls on female sexuality, as:
19
The family, the realm of the father’s authority over his wife and children, was to remain intact in order for
the FLN’s claim to represent Algerian society to be valid. It was Algerian’s separate identity from France that
gave the anticolonial struggle legitimacy. The ordinance was an attempt at blurring, perhaps even erasing, that
separateness by giving individuals the right to question native family values (Lazreg 1990, 768-9).
In this sense, the secular marriage law compromised the efficacy of the FLN’s mission and caused the FLN to
secure Islamic family values through an emphasis on the sexual control of women.
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militants roamed the street intimidating single women. A woman accompanied in
public by a man other than a relative was liable to be hurried off to a forced
marriage or jailed if she refused (1989, 229).
The FLN’s imposition of such strict regulations on Algerian women’s bodies and
performance of sexuality was intended to counteract French efforts to convert Algerian
women to French culture. As Franz Fanon (1970) explains in his renowned essay, Algeria
Unveiled, the French colonial view of Algerian women was often acted out as a highly
sexualized fantasy, underscored by a desire to possess (read: rape) by “Unveiling this woman
[to reveal] her beauty; it is baring her secret, breaking her resistance, making her available for
adventure…. There is in it the will to bring this woman within his reach, to make her a
possible object of possession” (Fanon 1970, 29).20 Indeed the French strategy of luring
Algerian women away from Islamic practices and toward French ones allowed for a subtle
infiltration of Algerian life by denying the Algerian man his spiritual, political and cultural
domination over Algerian women.
Khalifeh: Politicizing Motherhood, Normalizing Sacrifice
Unlike Les Enfants, Wild Thorns pays little attention to the distinction between the resistance
narrative and its implications for feminist thought, perhaps reflecting Palestinian women’s
internalization of and support for the official discourse.21 As the rhetoric of many Palestinian
women’s organizations like the General Women’s Palestinian Union (GWPU) suggest,
Palestinian women have tended to associate their reproductive role with great cultural
integrity and honor.22 Slogans like the GWPU’s “Woman makes up half of society and gives
birth to the other half,” (in Amireh 2003, 765) convey Palestinian women’s sense of
gratification from reproduction within the context of male oriented national resistance
(Amireh 2003, 765). Amal Amireh (2003) sees Khalifeh’s inability to liberate her characters
from the masculine sway of mainstream resistance discourse as a “…reproduction of some of
the fundamental patriarchal metaphors of the hegemonic national narrative…[which] recycle
a nationalist patriarchal ideology regarding women’s bodies and sexuality (2003, 765). Many
critics similarly accuse Khalifeh’s narrative of being incapable of breaking away from the
For a closer analysis of the French colonial imagination concerning Algerian women, see Esquer, Gabriel,
“L’Algerie Vue par les Écrivains,” Simoun 25(1): 1-63. (1956)
21 On the obstacles facing Palestinian women’s efforts to develop a feminist discourse separate from the
nationalist struggle, see Rita Giacaman and Penny Johnson, “Palestinian Women: Building Barricades and
Breaking Barriers,” Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation, eds. Zachary Lochman and Joel
Beinin, Boston: South End Press. (1989)
22 For more information on the development of a feminist consciousness in Palestine after the 1967 defeat and
since the development of the modern Palestinian national movement, see Jad Islah, “From Salons to Popular
Committees: Palestinian Women 1919-89,” The Israel/Palestine Question: A Reader, ed. Ilan Pappe, London:
Routledge. (1999)
20
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patriarchal structure of Palestinian society and its resistance narrative.23 This essay argues that
Khalifeh does draw out an intentional formula for feminist thought in Wild Thorns, following
Deniz Kandiyoti’s (1987) point that it is critical to consider different modes of femininity at
work in various contexts, which “…have a direct bearing on the shaping of what we might
imprecisely label a feminist consciousness” (1987, 324). As Palestinian women became further
embedded within the rhetorical tropes of reproduction and maternity, a new channel was
opened through which women could assert themselves into the male public sphere as activists
and mothers (Peteet 1997, 105). Palestinian women entered actively into mainstream
resistance discourse by redefining motherhood as a political practice, and embraced the
sacrifice of male children in battle as the ultimate maternal service to the nation.24 25
The female characters of Wild Thorns who step out of their prescribed roles as
mothers and engage in armed struggle with the resistance are highly masculinized and
ascribed a marginal importance at best. Lina, for example, a character who joins Usama in
blowing up a bus carrying laborers to Israel, is described as a “boyish-looking girl” (WT
58/AS 55), somehow equating her androgynous physical appearance with a militant,
masculine outlook. Other nameless female characters include a middle-aged guerrilla caught
smuggling a coded message in her arm cast, who is described by the narrator as having a
“deep voice” (WT 22/AS 23).26 As she accompanies the main character, Usama, in his taxi
ride back home after the bombing, the reader surmises that Lina has neither witnessed nor
actually participated in armed activity, but merely accompanied Usama as he carried out his
attack on the bus of laborers, as if to say that to make Lina part of the attack would be to
push the metaphor too far outside the reader’s frame of comprehension.
Although Wild Thorns focuses particularly on men, Khalifeh’s subsequent novel, ʻAbbād al-Shams [The
Sunflower], is a woman-focused follow-up to Wild Thorns. In it, Khalifeh explores the difficulties Wild Thorns’
female characters faced in losing their husbands. Significantly, ʻAbbād al-Shams has not been translated into
English.
24 In her 1970 field study about the various roles mothers play in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Julie Peteet
(1997) is asked repetitively by the mothers she interviewed how many children she wished to have. When she
answers that she wants only two children, the women are baffled. They question how she will go on living if her
children died.
Peteet explains that the responses of these women “point starkly to the ever-present possibility of death with
which mothers in the refugee camps lived” (1997, 125).
25 “We Palestinian women, we have batin ‘askari [military womb]” for example, is a popular metaphor Palestinian
women use to emphasize their reproductive duty (in Peteet 1997, 114). Similarly, “We Palestinian women, we
give birth to them, we bring them up, and we bury them for the revolution” speaks to the pride women associate
with reproducing the nation of male warriors.
26 The English translation of ‘areed provided by Trevor LaGassick and Elizabeth Fernea of is “firm,” yet I submit
that it means “deep” and hence prefer my own translation above, as it points to the widely held norm in Arab
culture that soft and low voices in women indicate a high level of femininity.
23
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Djebar: Mobilizing Pleasure, Disprivileging Motherhood
Unlike Wild Thorns, Les Enfants deconstructs the Algerian narrative’s view of female sexuality
and women’s maternal role. Whereas Khalifeh politicizes reproduction and motherhood and
in some sense reproduces a gender binary with Wild Thorns by drafting female characters
exclusively within the traditional gender norms of Palestinian culture, Les Enfants confronts
the traditionalist picture of FLN rhetoric by alluding to women’s pursuit of sexual pleasure
through the narratives of several female characters. Through an intimate discovery of their
bodies, Djebar’s female characters physically and emotionally transgress both the boundaries
of their former lives as wives (but interestingly not as mothers) and the limitations placed on
them by the resistance ideologies of the time. As Winifred Woodhull (1993) notes, Djebar’s
exposition of the lives of Algerian women is “a point of take off. A combat zone. A
restoration of body. Bodies of new women in spite of new barriers” (1993, xxii). Djebar’s
literary illustration of the work’s leading female character, Cherifa, as she discovers her own
body in and through its experiences of sexual desire, comes up against the FLN’s push for
sexual modesty and its rigorous orthodoxy with regard to sexual practice and female
propriety. Through Cherifa’s physical liberation, Djebar openly confronts the resistance’s
stance on female conduct while moving into deeper questions regarding its orthodox notions
of marriage, sex, love and duty:
He moved toward her. He touched her. Cherifa didn’t understand…. He, her
husband? He, who was more of a stranger than a husband to her. She refused.
Those caresses, that accelerated breath; no, she said, no! Her entire being, her
whole body, was saying no to that blinded intimacy he was trying to stir up within
her with words that he meant to be tender but that she found insulting. No!
…she had known from the beginning that she didn’t love this man. She had also
known how to erase from her spirit any memory of their furtive nocturnal
contacts – her ‘duty as a wife,’ as they say (Ch 13/LE 31-2).
In contrast to the warm, lavish welcome that Zuhdi receives from his wife in Wild Thorns,
Cherifa meets her husband’s lust with disgust and physical revulsion. Having realized that
her sense of marital duty as a Muslim is insufficient to justify her sexual dissatisfaction,
Cherifa refuses her husband sexually and refuses to grant him children during their three
years of marriage (Ch 11/LE 28), thereby challenging the FLN’s entire working concept
of female duty in marriage. Cherifa then enters a second marriage with Youssef, which
grows into a marriage of equals. Cherifa’s forsaking of the maternal role for greater sexual
and intellectual satisfaction is portrayed as both a personal reclamation of her own body
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and a throwing off of the gender norms which obstruct her pursuit of individual
happiness. Cherifa’s satisfaction at having refused the man who could not please her is
celebrated, as “…a feeling of having faced an enemy at last, if only for an instant, and of
having been able to stand up” (Ch 14/LE 33).27 Cherifa’s episode is perhaps most notable
for its portrayal of a sympathetic male character, Youssef, who expresses regret after
forcing his sister to marry a man she does not love:
[Youssef] knows but wants to forget, for he feels responsible – responsible for the
unhappiness of a young woman who wouldn’t stop crying on her wedding day and
throughout the months that followed… Youssef could only lower his eyes, turn his
head away, and crush the remorse in his heart. …When Cherifa told [Youssef] about
herself and her first husband…he understood his sister and remembered. In the deep
waters of his wife’s eyes he saw the image of so many drowning women whose
destiny had been taken away forever and who tried to fight back (Ch 28-29/LE 54).
Djebar’s presentation of a sympathetic male consciousness in Youssef is critical for
preserving her affinity with the resistance movement. In using her feminist lens to construct a
male character that is both physically engaged in the cause of national liberation and
intellectually enlightened with regard to women’s gender entrapment, Djebar presents her
ideal male form as one ultimately capable of differentiating between gendered acts of social
solidarity and women’s social and sexual oppression. For Djebar, this distinction lies at the
center of women’s two-sided revolution. By emphasizing Cherifa’s and Zineb’s
reconceptualizations of marriage and motherhood28 to include notions of sexual pleasure and
Although women are physically bound to particular spaces, men also experience another form of seclusion
which Djebar acknowledges in her narrative:
27
Tightly squeezed like a closed fist…the old town, set beside the plane, prides itself on being the only one that
follows the roots that connect it to past generations. But frozen like this in the middle of the drift, the people
in these families don’t notice that they have been forced to close in upon themselves, in the silence of their
houses and their women…(Ch 128/LE 205).
The domestic sphere in Les Enfants is depicted as a cultural refuge for the Algerian man as he flees the public
square, which has become colonized space (Zimra 2005, 214). Djebar writes, “‘Yes, it’s almost easy to forget,’“ a
man thinks when he comes home at night and looks at his wife, whom the other one, the omnipotent master
outside will never know…. Here he is, inexplicably set free. Alone. What does it matter now, the fear that had
held him captive throughout the day” (Ch 4-5/LE 18-19). The fear of lost masculinity and lost virility that
Algerian men experienced under French colonialism enabled a greater need to secure absolute and
traditionalized male authority in the home.
28 Although Djebar ties the notion of female sexuality to pleasure; her portrayal of this ideal through a traditional
woman character is explicit. The characterization of the extremely licentious Touma, an Algerian informant,
represents an extreme example of sexual liberation. Touma is viewed by her society as a traitor, and her
uncontrolled sexual behavior and regular engagement with French men seem intended to underscore her nonalliance with the traditionalist national movement, as she is referred to as “An emancipated Arab woman (Yes,
with high heels, short skirt, a permanent wave, just like [French] women! And well stacked, too, an enticing little
brunette; she could be from Marseille or Arles…)” (Ch 90/LE 147). Through Touma, the Algerian woman
becomes the archetypal site of colonial might, as her conquest by French cultural norms and even her
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intellectual companionship, Djebar departs from French feminist traditions by pulling female
sexuality apart from the function of reproduction and into a kind of feminism that, as Gayatri
Spivak (1981) puts it, all women understand (1981, 180). In this way, Djebar takes an
intellectual position against French thought while still cultivating a feminist angle on Algeria’s
resistance by politicizing women’s sexual pleasure as a concept for mobilization.
Djebar and Khalifeh: Situating Mothers
Palestinian women engage in the politicization of motherhood by redefining their
reproductive role as a national duty. To the extent that Palestinian women have grown into a
sense of commitment to this duty, they refuse to challenge traditional Islamic gender roles in
the spheres of work, public and private space, resistance action and a host of others. It is
argued here that the Palestinian women in Wild Thorns yield to a traditional gendering of
society in exchange for a heightened significance in the domestic sphere. As a result of the
Israeli occupation, the Palestinian domestic sphere has become fixated on reproducing a male
force capable of withstanding the constant household incursions from Israeli forces. Against
this backdrop, motherhood takes on a new significance and efforts to circumvent traditional
gender roles become more costly for women and for the nation as a whole. As Samira Haj
(1992) explains, during a liberation struggle, “some theoretical positions— for example, the
family as the principal site of women’s oppression—have no resonance amongst women
whose families and communities are under assault by an occupying power” (1992, 778).
Indeed nearly all distinctions between the domestic sphere and the public sphere collapsed
for Palestinians with the onset of Israeli occupation. As Julie Peteet (1997) explains:
For Palestinians, during the revolt of 1936-39 and the wars of 1948-49 and 1967,
the home was the front. Blurring the home and front …collapsed distinctions
between feminine and masculine spaces.... The continuous violation of the home
– the violent entries, searches, and demolitions …cast aside notions of the home
space as distant from the conflict (1997, 108).
The domestic sphere’s transformation into a spatial territory beyond the enemy’s reach has
advanced Palestinian domesticity itself as a source of ideological endurance and resistance for
the nation. Palestinian women have regarded their role as mothers and nurturers in the
domestic sphere as a mode of political activism, through which they can embody virtue by
attractiveness to French men seems intended to convey her untrustworthiness and her shirking of the Algerian
cause. As Yuval-Davis (1997) explains, “Women are often required to carry the burden of representations, as
they are constructed as the symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity and honor, both personally and
collectively” (1997, 45).
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diligently and patiently protecting the home front. As Linda Pitcher (1998) further notes:
Presence [in the Palestinian domestic sphere] is…stridently articulated in the
expression of Sumud, or ‘steadfastness.’ Sumud permeates the ethic consciousness
of every Palestinian…Sumud illustrates a deeply held conviction of the
Palestinians…to bear the hardships they face daily under occupation in the hope
of one day outliving the alienation, oppression, and marginalization they have
withstood for generations (1998, 26).
Through the performance of “caring labor” in an atmosphere of danger and uncertainty,
Palestinian mothers have come to exemplify the notion of Sumud and, in doing so, have
grown to perceive their domesticity as a contribution to the resistance equal in value to that
performed by men in active political struggle.
Khalifeh calls attention to the collapsing of masculine and feminine space in her
depiction of domestic incursions.29 As the Israeli army storms the home of an elderly female
character, ‘Um Usama, in search of her son, the opportunity arises for ‘Um Usama to exhibit
great courage by “reach[ing] out to the machine-gun, push[ing] it out of her way and walk[ing]
over to the wardrobe” (WT 166/AS 140). An Israeli soldier asks Um Usama if she has
become accustomed to their visits, to which she replies, “I’m used to your presence in my
neighbors’ homes. The only time I leave my windows is to go to sleep,” adding, “And who
doesn’t expect your visits these days? We’re under occupation” (WT 166/AS 140). In this
way, Khalifeh calls out certain fluidities in the domestic sphere, where women might
transcend traditional gender roles to commit more male-coded acts of resistance.
Whereas Khalifeh portrays Palestinian women as forgers of a unique political role
within the masculinist Palestinian resistance narrative, Djebar casts maternity to the margin in
her effort to highlight Algerian women’s overturning of traditional gender norms within the
revolutionary moment. Marnia Lazreg (1994) calls attention to this moment, noting that even
after the colonial era had come to an end, “women’s new image of themselves as autonomous
persons was not institutionalized in a new political agenda to upgrade women’s collective
status” (Lazreg 1994, 769). Algerian women did not challenge the FLN’s ideological framing
of women’s social role, as they themselves tended to regard female sexuality as “part of the
ideological struggle” between Algerian and French culture. Gradually, Algerian women would
Although I am using Um Usama as my primary example, Wild Thorns also depicts home demolition scenes
where the distinction between the public and private sphere is blurred. These scenes also accentuate the
Palestinian tendency to cast defeats as victories. With each house demolition, Khalifeh enables the reader to
almost hear the reverberating ululations of Palestinian women. She writes, “Then came the deafening sound of
the explosion. The great house shuddered and stones seemed to fall from the sky. Then the traditional ululations
of the women burst out; the sound of emotion, joy and sorrow filled the street” (WT 206/AS 175). The scene
not only demonstrates the tragedy/victory link, but also exemplifies Sumud as a working concept in times of
conflict.
29
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realize the extent to which Algerian resistance discourse denied them recognition in an effort
to stifle the foundlings of a women’s movement. As one female revolutionary put it, “We
thought we would earn our rights. We thought they would naturally be recognized later” (in
Lazreg 1994, 769).
Intent on maintaining a distinction between religiously sanctioned masculine and
feminine spaces, the FLN defined women’s contribution to the resistance30 according to
“conventional understanding[s] of the sexual division of labor” (Lazreg 1994, 767) in the
Soumman Platform31, which outlines women’s revolutionary duties as “providing moral support
to fighters and resisters; taking care of liaison, food supplies and sanctuary and helping
families and children left behind by those at the front, in prison or detention camps” (in
Lazreg 1994, 129). Although an estimated 10,500 women participated in the war effort32,
women’s participation in the Algerian resistance has been silenced in historical accounts of
the conflict (Amrane 1982, 126-9). As Djamila Amrane (1982) describes is, “Theirs was a
monotonous and thankless task, bereft of military glory or heroism, and yet demanding
exposure to danger” (1982, 129).
Unlike Khalifeh’s narrative, Djebar uses Les Enfants to shatter the spatial and practical
boundaries that isolate and restrict Algerian women.33 One female character, Cherifa, for
example, becomes resolved to leave her household, telling her husband Youssef that the
French army is looking for him. Although hesitant at first, Cherifa musters the courage to
leave without even the slightest understanding of the outside world, except what she could
imagine from her husband’s stories. Cherifa’s emotions while roaming the streets alone are
For more on the roles assigned to Algerian women during the revolution, see Benabdessadok, Cherifa, “Pour
Une Analyse du Discours sur la Femme Algérienne,” Diplome D’Etudes Avancées En Linguistiques, Algiers
University, Algiers. (1979)
31 The Soumman Platform is a position paper issued by the FLN on August 2, 1956.
32 This total includes 1,343 imprisoned and 949 killed in combat.
33 As early as the opening scene of Les Enfants, Djebar illustrates the restrictive nature of physical space:
In the old Arab quarters at the foot of the mountain the whitewashed houses all look alike….
Each home is at the end of a cul de sac, where after wandering through a maze of silent alleyways,
one must stop. All that can be heard is some vague whispering…. Once the soldiers have gone,
the mothers, each with her own brood, settle down again at the back of their room, on the tile
floor on a mattress. There they stay for hours on end, and through the door, with its raised
curtains opening wide onto the courtyard and fountains, they watch the spectacle the guard had
announced is about to begin: the mountain under fire (Ch 1/LE 13-4).
In the context of war, the patriarchal equation is set and simple: men battle while women watch and wait.
Women live cloistered and silent, taking care of the children and men are the masters of the public sphere.
Enclosures become both protective and silencing mechanisms. Describing the structure of these enclosures,
Clarisse Zimra (2005) writes:
30
The inner spaces are left to women: the traditional house, itself contained by the Arab district, the casbah,
(whose name means ‘fortress’, another cipher of containment). At the center, opens a patio; around the patio
a circular warren of rooms that cannot be said to be ‘open’ onto the patio; around the patio a circular warren
of rooms that cannot be said to ‘open’ onto the patio because, they, too, are contained, ‘veiled’ by a curtain.
Such endlessly concentric enclosures are the spatial metaphors of spiritual enclosure, but with an absent
female self within. Woman becomes a textual trope of absence, even when on display (2005, 70).
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31
made clear:
[Cherifa] had forgotten the danger [of the French army looking for her husband]
itself. In truth, it’s perhaps not that which drove her, but rather a gnawing desire
to suddenly know whether she could really spend her life waiting in her room, in
patience and love. That’s why she crossed the entire town, bared her presence to
so many hostile eyes, and at the end of her trek discovered that she was not only a
prey to the curiosity of men – a passing shape, the mystery of the veil accosted by
the first glance, a fascinating weakness that ends up being hated and spat upon –
no, she now knows she has exited (Ch 143/LE 228).
Cherifa’s journey into the public sphere is a metaphor for Algerian women’s liberation, as it is
through such acts that each of Djebar’s female characters becomes able to reassess her selfimage through a new relationship with the outside world.34 Hesitant to ask for directions to
her husband’s shop on her first solo journey outside the home, Cherifa finally musters the
courage to ask an Algerian schoolboy, who instantly and without provocation regards her as a
prostitute, “…let[ting] out a cheerful series of obscenities” (Ch 141/LE 224). When Cherifa
finally reaches the shop, her husband’s partner, Yehia, refuses to let her stay, finding her
suspicious for being outside on her own. Yehia finally asks Cherifa to leave, fearing her
seductive power.35
Djebar creates these metaphorical journeys as a way to disturb the classical Algerian
trope of the patriarchal family, while challenging negative correlations between women’s
public behavior and moral character. Les Enfants similarly speaks out against women’s
emotional dependency on their husbands through a questioning of spatial norms in the work.
When the character Lila is abandoned by her husband as he decides to join the resistance on
the mountain, she becomes severely depressed and lonely in her high-rise apartment and
begins to think about death (Ch 24/LE 48). The reader learns that Lila’s husband, Ali, had
constructed his understanding of marriage in a traditional way: “[Ali] expected to make an
ideal woman out of the wild young girl…[and]…persisted in wanting to shape Lila—the now
so rebellious Lila—in projecting her as closely as possible onto the absolute form he had in
Although my exploration focuses on the liberating journeys of Cherifa and Lila, they are not the only female
characters in Les Enfants to attain agency by undergoing new experiences. Amna protects Youssef by lying to her
husband, Hakim, who works for the French army – an act aligning her with the revolution (Bigelow 2003, 15).
Sixteen-year-old Hassiba is obstinate about joining the fighting on the mountain. She exclaims, “I want to shed
my blood for the revolution… I can walk! Barefoot if need be. I want to walk with the fighters. I want to suffer
with the fighters. Night and day…”(Ch 148/LE 235). Salima, a schoolteacher, is arrested and tortured because
of her connection to a revolutionary, whose whereabouts and activities she refuses to inform of.
35 In the passage Cherifa says, “‘I’m chaste…both in body and spirit.’ He remains adamant. He no longer
responds. He forces Cherifa to leave; a glance, a single glance, at the young woman’s ankles, in spite of himself”
(Ch 142/LE 225-6).
34
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32
mind” (Ch 22/LE 45). In marriage, Lila is changed from a passionate philosophy student to a
downcast and subservient wife, forbidden by Ali to work and to access the public sphere. Lila
accepts her fate, reasoning that Ali’s love for her is her sole refuge and satisfaction.
As Les Enfants progresses, however, Lila slowly escapes her isolation by reconnecting
with her past, as, “For two weeks she…drift[ed] in the dangerous waters of her recent past,
trying to pick up the thread again somewhere beyond it. She’s aware of it and has also
discovered a new desire to be in harmony with the town and find herself a place here” (Ch
154/LE 244). Lila’s sense of self had been completely dissolved into her husband’s view of
her until her slow detachment from him, as she “believed indisputably that for her there was
no way to know herself other than in love—and love was the cluster of links that enslaved
her to Ali” (Ch 182/LE 286). By visiting family and engaging old female friends in long
conversation,
Lila is eventually reborn. She discovers “that one can find oneself with the same
lucidity when one is with a friend, a comrade in arms, or an equal” (Ch 183/LE 287). Djebar
thus proposes that women free themselves and each other from the grip of patriarchy by
depending emotionally upon each other, rather than upon men. In and through her process
of self (re)discovery, Lila is able to redefine her own ideas about the revolution and
contemplates “her own commitment to national liberation” (Bigelow 2003, 13). By the end of
the novel, Lila is implicated, interrogated, and imprisoned for contributing to the cause of
Algerian national independence. Despite abuse from her interrogators, Lila is obstinate and
refuses to provide answers. Silence is no longer imposed upon Lila, but rather self-selected as
a gesture of commitment and active participation with the resistance. She is relieved to be in
prison and to have existed as a part of the revolution, saying, “So, I’m here at last” (Ch
196/LE 308).
Conclusion
Djebar suggests that the primary step to women’s liberation is a reengagement with the public
sphere, both within everyday life and with regard to resistance activities. Les Enfants presents a
spectrum of female characters who, through a dismantling of the frames set upon them by
their husbands’ sense of morality and propriety, forge new and independent identities which
they use to advance the new and independent nation. Djebar thus challenges the FLN’s
position that women should be limited to the domestic sphere and construed in traditional
terms by granting them sexual pleasure and revolutionary credentials, and by reinserting them
into the pages of Algeria’s resistance history.
Djebar attempts to release women physically, emotionally and psychically from the
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33
ideological struggle between Algerian patriarchal discourses and the discourses of French
colonialism by offering a feminist lens, arguably Western in construct, for reorienting the
revolutionary project to include a new view of women and female propriety. Djebar’s
enthusiasm for an arguably Western feminist model which perceives Muslim women as
victims of their own culture is inconveniently coupled with the implication that Western
frames for understanding liberation are somehow inherently superior or more rational.
Whereas Djebar differentiated her view of feminism from the French model by emphasizing
sexual pleasure over reproduction, critics have continued to lump her into the category of ill
placed, inauthentic and Western-centric authors who approach non-Western women from an
inquiry of, “what can we do for them?” (Spivak 1981, 155). Another reading of Djebar,
however, sees her moving toward what Gayatri Spivak (1981) identified as a kind of
international feminism that, “promotes a sense of our common yet history-specific lots”
(1981, 184).
Khalifeh, on the other hand, does not attempt to make space for a feminist
reorientation of gender roles and norms within the Palestinian resistance narrative but rather
reorients Palestinian women’s roles within its traditional gender construct as a mode of
resistance. By affirming the importance of mothers’ reproductive capacity, Khalifeh allies
herself with the Palestinian resistance movement as it is and ultimately exposes the ways in
which Palestinian mothers have transformed and politicized motherhood as a social and
political category. Together these narrative renderings of women’s contribution to the
resistance movements in Algeria and Palestine convey, as Deniz Kandiyoti (1994) aptly puts
it, that “Feminism is not autonomous, but bound to the signifying networks of the national
context which produces it” (1994, 380).
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Extended Holiday in Hurghada: Russian
Migrant Women and ‘Urfi Marriage
1
by Joanne Walby
The trope of the trafficked Russian woman is in many ways a product of the Soviet Union’s
disintegration, its ensuing economic paralysis and the rapid expulsion of willing and unwilling
women migrants that followed. A steady persistence of this trope in mainstream global
trafficking and sex work discourses has come to inform popular fears and perceptions of
Russian women seeking work abroad. Since the early 1990s, variations in these discourses have
lent themselves to the production and proliferation of an imagined, archetypal Russian woman
This essay is extracted from J. Walby, “Extended Holiday in Hurghada: Russian Women and ‘Urfi Marriage” (M.A.
Thesis, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, American University in Cairo, Egypt). (2010)
1
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subject: a destitute, invasive and hyper-sexualized slave to need rather than a mobile and rational
agent. The very suggestion that this archetypal subject should be in a position to negotiate
economic preferences and priorities of her own or to act upon private desires for real estate
ownership, more equitable and fulfilling marriage partnerships and more leisure time is
inconceivable within the existing discursive and investigative literature on trafficked and
sexscape2-bound migratory Russophone3 women from the former Soviet republics. Inasmuch as
these essentialized discourses conflate a broad set of motivations for Russophone women's
migration and engagement in sex work, they fail to move beyond a fixation with saving victims4
and into more nuanced investigations of the ways Russophone women seek out and obtain
economic viability, negotiate social and institutional mobility and satisfy their preferences and
desires beyond the borders of their homelands. This work hopes to push that discursive moment
along into less superficial pauses with an analysis of how and why Russophone women travel to
Egypt’s Red Sea resort town, Hurghada, as tourists and, increasingly often, why and how they
stay.5
Whereas human trafficking and sex work more generally in the Middle East North
Africa (MENA) region remain contentious but urgent issues for investigation, this research
suggests that the dominant discursive and policy frameworks for trafficking and sex work underattend some critical, perhaps intentional, regulatory incentives and disincentives operating on
both ends of the migration stream and, by rendering Russophone women migrants thematic
subjects rather than social and economic individuals, provide inadequate investigative tools for
getting to the heart of the why and how Russophone women relocate to and build lives in
Hurghada with relative ease. In that sense, this work shifts away from mainstream frameworks
and into the more localized complexities of Hurghada’s social and economic landscape as a
nexus of transnational and multicultural community formation, multinational tourism and real
estate growth.
Denise Brennan (2004) describes the tourist town of Sosua, Dominican Republic as a “sexscape,” in which the
destabilizing affects of global capital on less industrialized economies have limited women’s work options to
insecure and dangerous work in tourism and sex tourism (2004, 31).
3 “Russophone” rather than “Russian” is used here in order to reflect the diverse nationalities of the respondents
interviewed and of migrants relocating along Egypt’s Red Sea coast more generally. The work will use the two
terms interchangeably for the sake of ease at times, but aims to call attention to a tendency in the literature to lump
a broad spectrum of subjects haphazardly into a generic category as “Russians,” “Russian sex workers” or “Russian
migrants.”
4
See Katherine P. Averginos, “From Vixen to Victim: The Sensationalization and Normalization of Prostitution in
Post-Soviet Russia,” Vestnik: The Journal of Russian and Asian Studies 5(1): 17-39. (2006)
5 The citizenship of the women interviewed for this research included 24 from Russian Federation, 1 from Ukraine,
1 from Tajikistan, 1 from Uzbekistan. The English word “Russophone” is used to convey their varied national and
ethnic origins as well as to best conceal their identities.
2
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Two important ways Russophone women have learned to navigate Hurghada’s complex
terrain and gain access to greater degrees of mobility are by engaging in Islamic customary ‘urfi
marriages with Egyptian men and starting families with them.6 An ‘urfi marriage contract is
considered religiously binding once a couple declares their intention to marry each other, but it is
not treated as an “official” contract in the eyes of the Egyptian state unless it has been registered
with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Cairo. Unofficial ‘urfi contracts, which are most common
among migrants, is little more than a piece of paper signed off by both parties, or “a ticket for
sex” as many respondents called it, which allows couples to get a hotel room or rent a flat
together. Unofficial ‘urfi certificates can be obtained from a range of venues including, as one
respondent noted, kiosks outside Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh airport, adding, “Now, how can
anyone think that is a real marriage?” Once an ‘urfi marriage has been legalized7 and the couple
applies to register their marriage with the Egyptian Ministry of Justice8, the foreign bride
becomes eligible for a residence visa in Egypt which, unlike the tourist visa, can facilitate formal
or more stable wage and work contracts. Children born to parents with an official ‘urfi contract,
or one that has been registered with the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, become eligible
for an Egyptian national identity card, patrilineal inheritance rights and entitlements to financial
support from the father in case of divorce.
While this initial sketch of ‘urfi marriage contracts suggests that marriage may be a
relatively easy way for Russophone tourists to remain in Egypt on extended holiday, a point to
which this essay returns, this work ultimately argues that it is common for Russophone women
to migrate to Hurghada for reasons beyond work and marriage, as many informants for this
research cited a desire to “start over” after divorce, to “enjoy the sunshine” and to “find their
fate” while experiencing a different pace of life in an exotic locale—some for themselves, some
for their children from previous marriages and some for aging parents or close friends. In
Hurghada, Russophone women are able to act upon certain rational “desires” for real estate,
more flexible work opportunities and a higher standard of living due to the greater mobility
afforded to them as “white” tourists in a largely “non-white” yet foreign capital-oriented tourist
zone monitored by bribable state tourism police. Although possession of the resident visa may
allow migrant women to be considered “local” in the administrative sense, their “whiteness”
Children with patrilineal Egyptian heritage can apply for citizenship in Egypt, particularly male children.
If an ‘urfi contract is not legalized in a lawyer’s office with two witnesses present, it is considered an illegitimate
“secret marriage,” although many men believe that having an ‘urfi marriage (legalized or not) renders pre-marital sex
“lawful” and hence absolved of “sin” under Shari’a law (Abouissa 2009b).
8 Official and unofficial ‘urfi marriages also take place between Egyptian men and Egyptian women. This work will
focus in on the practice of ‘urfi marriage as it relates to unions between Egyptian men and foreign, specifically
Russophone women.
6
7
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allows them to transcend normative protocol for local behavior and dress and thus to live more
freely than most Egyptian women and men in other parts of Egypt. As they stroll along
Hurghada’s pedestrian malls, Russophone residents are mistaken for tourists and ignored by the
police, enjoying a great deal of freedom when it comes to creating their own cultural practices
and norms within the Red Sea tourist spaces. I argue that largely because of such structural and
social advantages, all of my Russophone respondents had been able, while retaining their
citizenship of origin9, to negotiate and seize upon various entry points into the local economy
and social sphere as privileged locals and, in doing so, were able to collectively influence public
space and establish distinct and lasting hybrid cultural practices and norms, not least of which is
a dynamically mobile next-generation of dual-citizen, multilingual, multicultural and
transnational children.
In heading to Hurghada in July of 2009 to conduct ethnographic interviews10, I expected
to find a dominating sex industry. Instead I discovered a complex network of relationships and
operative modes through which Russophone migrants, only a few of whom I suspect were
selling sex, constructed lives abroad. Of the 27 Russophone women I interviewed in Russian11
in Hurghada, nine claimed to have met their husbands while vacationing in Hurghada, having
been married on average five years. Ten respondents initially moved to Hurghada with local job
offers, while eight moved in search of a different pace of life, finding work and romance along
the way. Some respondents had chosen not to officially register their ‘urfi contracts, whereas
others said they were open to the possibility. Just under a third of my informants (7 of 27) were
married to non-Egyptian men, with whom they had moved to Hurghada in search of economic
opportunities. Although none of my respondents openly self-identified as sex workers, many of
my interviews pointed to a general awareness of private “working” flats where sex is being
traded or sold, as if sex work lay just below the surface of Hurghada’s social infrastructure.12 As
I have heard anecdotal evidence of “many” Russian women who move to Egypt for marriage, convert to Islam
and begin to wear the headscarf (higab) and veil (niqab). Future research could examine whether these women also
change their citizenship and how that affects their standing in Hurghada as “Russian women.”
10 I returned to Hurghada for a week of follow up interviews in September 2009.
11 All Russian to English and English to Russian translations and transliterations in this work have been performed
by the author.
12 While sex workers may be found in Hurghada’s vast matrix of informal and formal hotels, clubs, businesses,
social cliques, their status as “trafficked” women is unclear. n I asked my informants, including Russian women and
Egyptian men, about the issue of “human trafficking” and potential links with Hurghada's sex industry, many were
skeptical, citing the plethora of women on holiday as “giving it [sex] away for free”. Even dancers from a
travelling, mildly-erotic dance troupe reported that they were properly paid, provided with housing and their
manager was sensitive to allegations of prostitution, so if their mobility was controlled, it seemed to more along the
lines of a “house mother” preventing promiscuity, as I did observe the dancers socializing freely after a performance
at a popular beach club.
9
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I continued to find intermixing between Egyptians and Russophone migrants through the
practice of ‘urfi marriage and Russophone women tourists, migrants and residents engaging in
long- and short-term employment stints in Hurghada’s tourism industry13, this research shifted
further into an investigation of why and how these relationships and opportunities became not
just possible but essential instruments for extended stay in Hurghada. Following such
observations, I began to look more carefully at the sites in which Egyptian men and Russian
women gained interaction with one another and questioned whether and to what degree these
trends related to sex tourism itself.
Hurghada as Sexscape
In Egypt more broadly, the standard set of associations which often accompany Russian women
are applied to the sizeable Russophone community now living in Hurghada, a tourist town some
395 km south of Cairo along Egypt’s Red Sea coast, which has sprung up over the past 15 years
of Egypt’s aggressive state-led tourism development. Before I first visited Hurghada and
grasped the size and situatedness of the local Russophone population there, I had become
familiar with its profile as a transit hub for human trafficking circuits leading to Israel and
Europe from the Newly Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union.14 Under the
influence of the trafficking and sex work literature, I perhaps naturally assumed Hurghada would
serve as an ideal environment for observing sex work and even trafficking in Egypt. Still the
degree to which Hurghada could be considered a sexscape remained unclear until slightly later in
my research, when I began to uncover the more subtle complexities of its social, economic and
regulatory environment.
Much of the literature on sex tourism in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean renders the
female subject as non-mobile, exploited and desirous of mobility (Brennan 2006). In Hurghada,
however, Egyptian men tend to be the stationary or less mobile subjects yet are often portrayed
in online Russian and English language chat rooms as the exploitative parties, preying upon
migrant and tourist women for economic gain or social conquest. Many online chat rooms
provide lengthy discussions between Russophone women of “romances gone wrong” and
“blacklists” of Egyptian playboys who use ‘urfi to engage in duplicitous casual affairs.15 The
This does not mean that “trafficked women” don’t exist in Hurghada, only that this research supports the
argument that recent arrests in the Russian-Israeli mafia and Israel’s decision to not require visas for Russian
nationals may have slowed the trafficking of women through Egypt.
14 According to estimates from Chemonics International and USAID in Assessment on the Status of Trafficking Persons in
Egypt: Changing Perceptions and Proposing Appropriate Interventions (2007), 3000-5000 women annually were trafficked into
Israel’s sex industry between 2001 and 2005.
15
Such blacklists against Egyptian men exist in Egypt and Turkey and possibly for tourist towns elsewhere.
13
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43
portrayal of Russophone tourists and migrants in Hurghada as victims of exploitation
perpetuates an essentialist model of female sexuality as passive.16 Yet in Hurghada quite the
opposite scenario is often observed, as Russophone tourists and migrants, who are often older
than their Egyptian male partners, enjoy a higher level of economic and social mobility,
suggesting that Hurghada is something more complex than a sexscape where foreign male tourists
seek Russian sex workers. This research thus suggests that while sex may characterize certain
aspects of Russophone migrants’ efforts to turn holiday in Hurghada into extended stay, such as
in the case where ‘urfi marriage, child bearing and, yes, occasionally sex work, the notion of
Hurghada as sexscape is an easy out, as it oversimplifies some important modes of agency for
Russophone migrants themselves, while downplaying the structural and social incentives which
make their extended stay in Hurghada possible. In an effort to illustrate more fairly the ways by
which Russophone women navigate the complexities of Hurghada and advance their own
interests and desires, I provide the respondent narratives of three women, Ksenya, Katya and
Larissa.
Ksenya 17 [Ксеня]
When I first caught site of my main informant, Ksenya, at Hurghada’s bus station, I didn’t
recognize her from the online profile photo, which showed her with carrot red hair and an open,
smiling face. As taxi drivers, travelers and shopkeepers bustled around me, a woman bearing
resemblance to the Italian actress Isabella Rosselini strode toward me and directed the Egyptian
man with her to help with my bags. Her eye and lip liner, I would later realize, were tattooed-on
and her matching red patent handbag and sandals and red, orange and pink beaded necklace
made her look perpetually ‘put together,’ reminding me of the summer outfits some women put
together when heading for holiday in warmer climes. She greeted me with a smile and we
hopped into the car. As her husband drove the three of us through town, she took several calls
on her cell phone, discussing business with the caller and her husband behind the wheel,
Ibrahim, who jointly owns a perfume shop with three other Egyptians.
Though separated in age by more than a decade, Ibrahim and Ksenya met while she was
on holiday in Hurghada, taking a break from her highly paid, high-stress job at an oil company in
one of Russia’s largest cities. “It was my first day in Hurghada and I walked into his shop,”
Ksenya told me, “From that day on, he didn’t leave my side. When he proposed marriage after
only a week, I said to my friend, ‘Let’s get out of here! This guy is crazy!” Once Ibrahim had
16
See Kempadoo 2001 and O’Connell Davidson 1998 among others for further discussion of female sex tourism
and passive gender performance.
17 All respondent names are pseudonyms.
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explained that he was serious about marrying her and, in realizing she had developed feelings for
him as well, Ksenya relocated to Hurghada with her two early-teen children three months later
with a plan to stay long term. Ksenya alluded to the financial strains of a lagging tourist economy
in 2008, but was continuing with her plans to open a school for Russophone students a few
months following the interview. I hadn’t yet learned at that early point that this former
university teacher of literature had once been a black-market clothing trader in the last days of
the USSR. Taking risks on a business venture was par for the course for someone who, as a
teenager, had travelled long distances alone, dodged authorities, maneuvered successfully
through informal networks and negotiated with tough characters to make ends meet. Before
coming to Hurghada, Ksenya had been eyeing Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast and places in Turkey,
looking, she said, for a suitable climate for her son. In Hurghada, she found not just a dry
climate suitable for her son’s asthma, but also a marriage partner and economic opportunities in
the burgeoning Russophone community.
Ksenya brought private assets into Egypt when she relocated to Hurghada and chartered
the way for a network of Russian friends also interested in investing locally. Although Ksenya
and her husband, Ibrahim, rent a flat together, quite contrary to local norms in which the
husband will purchase a marriage flat, together they have invested in Cairo and Hurghada real
estate and venture initiatives, including a yacht for tourist rentals and other long term business
prospects like the school Ksenya had been planning to launch. Questions regarding decisionmaking and household finances were regarded as topics for negotiation between her and
Ibrahim, and Ksenya, like other respondents, reported regular contributions to household
expenses like rent and food, suggesting that such seemingly equitable and fluid marital finance
arrangements were more or less the norm between mixed couples, rather than the customary
local Islamic practice in which wives separate personal finances from household expenditures.
One evening I joined some of Ksenya’s Russian friends at a popular, upscale chain
restaurant featuring a women-only night, or “Den Devushek [Ladies Day].” Until 1 a.m., women
were invited to enjoy two glasses of wine and help themselves to a dessert bar, gratis. The
bartender told me this was an “experiment” meant to provide local women with a women-only
social forum, as a measure to appease Egyptian husbands and social norms. As we clustered
around the bar on red velvet stools, I spotted a young woman wearing a blue sequined minidress with plunging neckline. Although Hurghada abounds in revealing tourist beachwear, the
sequins and short length of her dress caught my attention. Later, as my acquaintances and I
strolled along the pedestrian mall that extends through the heart of Hurghada’s hotel and
shopping district, I spotted the woman in the blue dress walking alone. I asked my acquaintance
about her and where she worked. “Oh yeah, that’s Katya.” Then she raised her eyebrows
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45
meaningfully and said, “She keeps herself busy, you know?18
Katya [Катя]
A few nights later, I was interviewing two women, one an accountant from Moscow and the
second a psychologist taking “a break from hectic Moscow life” when Katya joined us. After they
discussed mutual friends for a few minutes, I was introduced to Katya as an American doing
sociological research interviews in Hurghada. Katya murmured, “Oh, yes, I’ve heard about you.”
The curiosity was mutual. I noticed her frequent glances around the shopping mall pavilion where
we sat, her smudged, hot pink mascara and the way she growled out words, which I initially
mistook for intoxication, then realized was probably just a deep and slang-peppered aesthetic,
perhaps intended to convey a rough edge. As if on cue, two women in very different styles of
dress approached our table, greeted Katya with a kiss on both cheeks and began discussing a male
acquaintance; one was an Egyptian woman dressed provocatively in a jean miniskirt, leggings and
black bustier, while the other, a Russian woman, wore a conservative flower print dress. After
they left, I allowed the conversation to drift along for a while before asking Katya if she’d like to
be interviewed about her experiences in Hurghada. She didn’t look at me when she said, “sure,”
but the studied nonchalance of her answer seemed to belie her interest and anticipation in talking
to an outsider. I wondered what kind of story she would tell.
We agreed to meet a few days later at the same café. After ordering a couple of drinks,
Katya eagerly launched into the story of how her parents divorced when she was young and her
one full brother and several half siblings. She identified herself as an “active” person and a
graduate of an institute for physical education. Katya first came to Egypt to visit her brother who
was working as an animator19 in the upscale Red Sea resort town of Sharm el Sheikh. Upon
seeing the many foreign workers there, Katya decided she would move and become a diving
instructor. When the diving instructor job failed to pan out, Katya found work as a children’s
animator, providing child-care and activities for children on vacation at the hotel with their
families. After a year or so, Katya returned home to Moscow to help her half-sister take care of a
new baby, saying, “It was a hard time because my half-sister’s mother had disappeared and we
didn’t know where she was. I decided to leave again because of tension with my mother who
didn’t like me coming home so late [from her job as a ‘go-go dancer’ in a nightclub]…sometimes
I would come home drunk.” She decided to return to Egypt, telling no one except her brother:
Literally, “on all hands, from boredom” or “на все руки от скуки.”
Hotel animators are hired to provide activities for guests, including games, exercise classes and childcare. They
sometimes also perform musical shows before accompanying hotel guests to nightclubs.
18
19
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I called him from the airport, saying I’d only be gone a month, but I’ve been here for
13 months now. Not long after I had returned to Egypt, they called me one day and
said, ‘We found her’ [half-sister’s mother] and I thought, ‘Thank God!’ but then they
said she had frozen to death on a park bench. She had been drunk.
When I asked about work, Katya said she was currently unemployed and made reference to
“having enemies” at certain hotels where she had worked as an animator and couldn’t be rehired.
When I asked how she supports herself without a job, she shrugged the question off, saying, “My
friends help me out.” Trying to steer the conversation back to Katya’s living situation, she said
only that she and her Egyptian male “roommate” managed to communicate in what little Arabic
and English she knew. Although she claims their relationship is platonic, cohabitation between
unmarried men and women is illegal in Egypt and is regularly policed throughout the country
except, perhaps, inside tourist zones. Sensing she didn’t want to provide more details on how she
got money, I listened to her monologue about family troubles and a vast network of friendships
fostered by Egypt’s tourism zones and English and Russian language online chat rooms and
social networking websites. Despite not having a formal job, Katya identified Hurghada as her
second home and said that friends from around the world come to visit her often, noting, “For
the time being, Hurghada is more or less enough for me.”
Having seen that informal work was available in Egypt’s Red Sea tourist towns, Katya
eagerly left a troubled family life in Russia, which included a marriage and divorce at the age of
eighteen. With annual trips back to Russia and occasional visits by family, Katya typifies the
“back and forth” mobility of the transmigrants one finds in abundance in Hurghada today. When
I asked about her future plans, she said, “Well, I could always get married and have kids here…or
[I] may go to Turkey for work,” while noting that Turkey was more strict about overstaying one’s
visa and that to do so could get one blacklisted from the country. Nonetheless, Katya inhabits an
important middle space in Hurghada’s social scene, somewhere between those in official ‘urfi
marriages and formal employment on the one hand, and those even further outside Hurghada’s
loose formal structures, with the latter including women who exclusively sell sex. Despite her
ubiquitous presence along the pedestrian mall and tenuous relations with other hotel animators,
Katya is able to maintain her social contacts among the women who gather for “Ladies Night”
and to negotiate her way to a better life through short-term employment stints and non-marital
bonds.
Larissa [Лариса]
Larissa claimed to be from a small town south of Moscow, “famous for [its] hand-made lace and
butter.” If it weren’t for her high-arched, inked-on eyebrows, Larissa would have reminded me
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47
of a classical picture of a Russian peasant woman with her blue eyes and blond hair pulled back,
much like a painting given to me by a friend who told me, “That is a traditional Russian beauty:
we all used to be blonde and blue-eyed before the Mongols came.” As we talked, Larissa’s eightyear old daughter, with her wavy, dark blond hair and her mother’s blue eyes, flitted about,
occasionally asking her mother questions, sometimes in English, sometimes in Russian. Larissa
bragged of her daughter’s fluency in Arabic and popularity at the mosque, where “She always
goes with her dad and all the sheikhs just love her.”
Larissa first came to Egypt in 1999 for a vacation with her female boss. The man who
she now calls her husband then worked at the hotel where she and her boss stayed and invited
her one night to the hotel’s discotheque. Over the following two weeks, their romance blossomed
and they stayed in touch after she left Hurghada. She later returned for a second visit and, when
he proposed, she accepted. They entered into an ‘urfi contract, and her husband began the
process to officially register their marriage with the Egyptian Ministry of Justice, which can take
up to six months. Eventually she received a residence visa and work permit, saying, “After we
got married, I stayed home for two months, but was bored so I asked my husband to help me
find a job.”
Larissa worked for three years in a tourism company and then moved to another firm
where she sold local excursion packages to tourists on the street for a commission. As the price
of tour packages being offered by hotels fell and her work ceased to be profitable, the firm
eventually closed. “Now I work for a real estate company that specializes in beachfront
property,” Larissa said, speaking knowledgeably about a proposed multi-million dollar luxury
resort development project, Sahl Hasheesh, to be located just 20 km from Hurghada. Her eyes
shown with anticipation as she dropped the name of the resort’s world-famous architect and
marveled over its proposed “fifteen hotels, three golf courses20 and the longest promenade in the
world!” When I asked if this trend toward luxury resorts would affect Hurghada’s tourist draw,
she said, “This is where real people live, you know? And it is cheap enough to always attract
middle-class Russians who want to go to exotic ‘Africa.’” Ultimately Larissa is an example of
how Russophone women on holiday in Hurghada almost stumble upon marriage, family and
career opportunities, rather than aggressively seeking it out. Moreover, although the extent of
Larissa’s actual involvement in local real estate development is unclear, her informed sense of
development projects and the luxury tourism industry along Egypt’s Red Sea clearly suggests her
perceptiveness regarding upward socio-economic mobility in the local environment.
20
Hurghada currently has no golf courses.
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Transnational from Above and Below
One aspect of Hurghada that makes it feel, as Katya said, like a “second home” for many
Russophone migrants is the existing Russophone population and the visibility of Russian
language and culture. In conversation with a local Russian real estate mogul who has been in
Hurghada for over 10 years, he said that Hurghada’s overall population had tripled since 2004.
Estimates place the current population at 180,000 with Russophone residents numbering 10,000
and 20,000, the latter number including those who overstayed visas.21 As a local Hurghadan
advertising company’s websites states, “…part of the population growth comes from women
who have married local men and are now raising the new multicultural generation of the city.”
Anecdotal evidence from this research further suggests that as more children and grandchildren
are born in Hurghada, extended family members and family friends from Russophone countries
spend greater amounts of time and money there, attracted by cheap real estate and a lower cost of
living than that found in Russia’s urban centers.22
Russian migrants have given Hurghada a Russified name, “Krasnomorsk”23, effectively
appropriating it as part of the Russian motherland, Rodina [родина], and highlighting all the more
the extent to which migrants from the Russian Federation have established significant roots in
Hurghada by purchasing property, opening businesses and schools and launching a local edition
of one of Russia’s preeminent newspapers, Komsomolskaya Pravda.24 As I met more of Hurghada’s
Russophone population, including Russian tourists-cum-brides and women whose relative wealth
and mobility allowed them to “start fresh” in a new place, I wanted to understand how they
adapted to life in Egypt, and recreated themselves in Hurghada’s transnational public spaces.
In her study of interactions between Dominican sex workers and European tourists in
Sosua, Dominican Republic, Denise Brennan (2004) builds upon Smith and Guarnizo’s (1998)
use of the concept “transnationalism from above,” which the authors initially used in reference to
the national liberalization policies intended to further globalism which are enacted at the state
level by state instruments, while “transnationalism from below” occurs at the micro level,
facilitate not only the flow of peoples and currency but also various informal modes of exchange
and trade, including the buying and selling of sex. One example of a policy initiative that enables
Population statistics have been gathered from www.hurghada.com and Komsomolskaya Pravda (Egypt Print Edition)
(September 8-21, 2008).
22 This is especially true of Moscow, one of the most expensive cities in the world.
23 This means “Red Sea town” in Russian and follows a typical naming convention, i.e. Chernomorsk [Black Sea
town].
24 A second Russian Language paper, Moskovkie Komsomolets, went into print in Hurghada in the fall of 2009.
21
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transnationalism from above is Egypt’s Law on Foreign Exchange 1994/230, which guarantees
an unrestricted repatriation of profits and capital in addition to trademark and intellectual
property rights for foreign firms and investors. A similar example is Law 1998/8, which initially
granted a 20-year extension on tax exemptions for foreign investments in the tourism sector, after
which profits were to be subject to a 40% tax.25 Beyond policies that enable transnational
movement of capital and finance, Brennan broadens the “transnationalisms from above” concept
to include inflows of middle class tourists from affluent states which are “central to the
accumulation of capital”, or the global North, to the Dominican Republic, where they spend
leisure time, purchase real estate, open businesses and have short term or temporary sexual
exchanges and personal relationships with local women. Brennan describes this process by which
poor and marginalized individuals cross borders for work and marriage as “transnationalism from
below” (Brennan 2004, 43) and includes within it Dominican women who travel to tourist zones
from other parts of the country to perform sex work and pursue lucrative personal relationships
with foreign tourists and migrants.
Brennan draws upon an important distinction between foreign tourists and local sex
workers in Dominican Republic as “mobile” and “non-mobile” subjects respectively, which I see
as a useful construct for examining Hurghada’s marriage market even despite the fact that many
Russophone migrants do not come to Hurghada necessarily seeking sex or marriage. The tension
between mobile Russophone women and non-mobile Egyptian men in many ways defines
Hurghada’s marriage market and, more generally, serves as an incentive for mixed couples to join
forces in other respects, such as through joint investments and business ventures. Whereas
Russophone female tourists who travel to and remain in Hurghada can be considered “mobile” in
the sense of being able to relocate from their home countries while enduring the risks of not
having a job, housing or a reliable community of personal networks and having to navigate a new
climate of laws and norms, the Egyptian men they encounter and enter relationships with are
comparatively “non-mobile,” in the sense that they earn significantly lower wages, are prohibited
from open travel by restrictive state policies toward lower class nationals and endure greater
pressure from religious and state institutions to comply with local legal, social and cultural codes
of conduct. Yet in another sense, partnerships with Egyptian men offer Russophone migrants a
greater degree of mobility in the local environment, particularly by allowing them to stay and
work more long term inside the country, and to gain access to real estate purchase and other
forms of capital investment. All of these advantages which result from partnerships with
Egyptian men are achieved through a manipulation of state policy, thus making Hurghada an
25
In 2005, Egypt’s Law 8 of 1998 was amended and the tax holiday was rescinded in favor of a 20% tax on profits.
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interesting case study in which aspects of “transnationalism from above” and “transnationalism
from below” overlap and reinforce.
One way the Egyptian state attracts both wealth from migrants’ home countries and
migrants themselves is by offering residence visas for anyone purchasing real estate over
US$50,000, a high but not unmanageable base sum if resources are pooled between families.
Some of my respondents noted, for example, that they and their Egyptian partners had pooled
resources to purchase modest flats valued around US$20,000 - 30,000, which, as one respondent
pointed out, was not a significant enough investment to become eligible for the residence visa,
requiring her to continually renew her tourist visa or risk being deported along with her son.26
The ease of ‘urfi marriage in Egypt, on the other hand, is an example of a policy incentive
which indirectly facilitates “transnationalism from below,” as Russophone migrants may turn to
marriage with Egyptian partners as a way to secure alternative venues for obtaining residency, a
more comfortable life style and work opportunity. Although ‘urfi marriage certificates are not
automatically recognized by the state and must go through a legalization process before benefits
such as residency can be secured, ‘urfi certificates can secure immediate benefits such as
cohabitation and occasionally work contracts. As one Russian woman I spoke to in Cairo
observed, her seven year 'urfi marriage meant her husband would pay for housing and provide her
with a support letter she would need to renew her visa annually and to keep her well-paying job.
For other respondents, ‘urfi marriage led to the birth of intercultural children with dual
citizenship, which can offer the additional benefit of greater security and administrative status for
themselves vis-à-vis the Egyptian state.
Flexible and Informal “Pulls”: Citizenship, Marital Status and Visa
In Flexible Citizenship (1999), Aihwa Ong suggests that political borders lessen in significance as
individuals become eligible for more than one citizenship, noting that even as these obstacles to
physical mobility become less rigorous, states continue to react to the “manipulation” of state
policies by citizens and non-citizens alike, often showing discriminatory preferences for parties
and individuals who enable foreign currency inflows. In other words, states do not necessarily
prioritize their own citizens, particularly citizens with few capital assets or those with mismatched
When I initially conducted this research in July 2009, most respondents were unconcerned about overstaying their
visas, saying things like, “The police never stop me because I'm a foreigner.” When I returned two months later in
September 2009, however, a few women expressed concern about leaving the house, as there had been a highly
publicized arrest of two Russian women for prostitution in Cairo, and two or three women said they had heard that
the police were spot-checking foreigners’ visas on the memsha [pedestrian thoroughfare in front of the Esplanade
Mall in Hurghada]. One respondent claimed to have read in an online chat room that a Russian woman married to
an Egyptian and with a child born in Egypt, was deported because her visa was not valid.
26
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skill sets in highly demand driven sectors like tourism. Many respondents for this work did not
feel their native citizenship helped them in any significant way as they built lives in Hurghada and,
in fact, the obstacles to obtaining citizenship in Egypt served to keep Russophone migrants in a
state of limbo with regard to personal status and entitlements. One respondent who had moved
to Hurghada for marriage said that she “wouldn’t bother going to the [Russian] Embassy” in case
of an accident, doubting that they “would lift a finger to help [her].”27 Another respondent
explained how she asked the Russian consul at a public meeting, asking how they could legalize
their marriage in the Russian Federation. “He dismissed my question, saying our marriages ‘aren’t
real.’ He [the consul] didn’t even answer my question and was rude!”28
Except for passport processing services provided by the Russki Dom [Russian House], a
privately owned and operated but quasi-governmental organization that runs a school and a visa
processing operation, consular services including document authentication, licensing and
legalization require applicants to travel seven hours to the Russian Embassy in Cairo—hence
informal ‘urfi certificates remain the norm in Hurghada, as many respondents considered the time
and expense of a several day trip to Cairo to be unworthy of the benefits they would gain by
registering their ‘urfi marriages. Zhanna, for one, recalled how an embassy staffer tried to talk her
out of marrying an Egyptian, saying, “You’re sure you really want to get married? Then God be
with you [because it’s a difficult process].” After four years of marriage, Zhanna had yet to
officially register her ‘urfi contract and, at the time of our interview, had been informally denied
formal recognition of her marriage by the embassy on the grounds that her six-month residence
visa had long expired. Zhanna claimed that the embassy had required a letter from her estranged
parents to “prove she isn’t married,” which she claimed no other Russian woman she knew had
been asked to provide, saying, “It’s just something new the embassy thought up to prevent
Russian-Egyptian marriages.” Either unable or unwilling to get the parental letter, Zhanna’s ‘urfi
marriage registration is stalled indefinitely, but she didn’t seem concerned, saying “In four years,
no one has ever checked my papers so living without a valid visa is no problem.”
Zhanna’s narrative illustrates Aihwa Ong’s (1999) argument that citizenship matters less
as mobility increases, particularly in the sense that her Russian citizenship and lack of Egyptian
citizenship neither facilitated an official recognition of her new marital status in Russia, nor
prevented her from feeling confident in her ability to remain in Egypt without a current visa, find
Personal interview with Ludmilla (July 2009).
Personal interview with Tamara (September 2009). Not even one year later, Moskovkiye Komsomolets published an
interview with the new Russian Ambassador to Egypt (May 22, 2010) where he answered questions from readers
about Egyptian citizenship for children born of Russian mothers and Egyptian fathers. In a follow up interview in
May 2010, one of my respondents reported that the Russian Embassy had begun allowing the Egyptian husbands of
Russian citizens to get a Russian visa without the standard third party invitation.
27
28
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employment and carry on with married life very much unphased by her status on such seemingly
critical matters. Zhanna’s narrative also illustrates Ong’s argument in the sense that both the
Russian and Egyptian states seem to react to her manipulations of policy in very particular and
self-interested ways. Whereas on the one hand the Russian state appears to obstruct the official
recognition of Zhanna’s marriage to an Egyptian29, the Egyptian state keeps Zhanna and other
migrants like her in a state of status limbo by complicating the process for obtaining a residence
visa, while also turning a blind eye to migrants with expired visas so long as they facilitate growth
in the local economy. Given such obstacles, it is not surprising that many women maneuver in
spite of and sometimes even prefer to keep their ‘urfi marriage contracts informal to sidestep
bureaucratic headaches or, more seriously, to avoid potential custody issues in case of divorce.
Tamara, a physician with a toddler fathered by her Egyptian husband, asked, “Why should I
register my marriage in Russia? There are no benefits for me since my husband would still need
to apply for a visa to visit Russia. If I got divorced, why would I want to go through the
complicated process of an international divorce?”
Egyptian law30, conversely, allows a foreign wife to obtain Egyptian citizenship after being
married to an Egyptian man and living in Egypt for five years31, with less realized conditions on
that policy being that the marriage must be officially recognized and the wife must be living
legally in Egypt for five years. Not one of my respondents held Egyptian citizenship, suggesting
that despite such seeming opportunities for “transnationalism from above,” more hidden and less
formal obstacles exist which prevent migrants, even those who hold enduring marriages with
Egyptian men, from obtaining Egyptian citizenship and the benefits it entails. A few of the
women I interviewed had children with Egyptian citizenship, having been born in Egypt,
however, yet none saw a lack of citizenship as influential for either work or marriage.32 Without
significant social or legal constraint, ‘urfi marriage allows foreign women the same freedom to
leave marriages as easily as Muslim Egyptian men might pronounce divorce.33 ‘Urfi marriage is
often criticized on grounds that it denies women their rights to financial protections from the
husband, but as non-Muslims most Russophone migrants are simply ineligible for Islamic
See Walby 2010 for further analysis of Russia’s ‘naming and shaming’ of Russian women who marry abroad.
B Pomosh’: Russiskomu cootechestveniky v Egypte [Information and Legal Directory for Russians Expatriates in Egypt].
Print Publication of the Russian Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. (2009)
31Some respondents even had the impression that the Russian Federation does not allow dual citizenship, but this is
not the case.
32 Most women purposefully birthed their children in Russia in order for them to obtain automatic Russian
citizenship.
33 In Egyptian law and Islamic custom, men can legally divorce their wives by pronouncing the words “I divorce
you” three times, whereas women must apply to civil courts to obtain a divorce.
29
30
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entitlements, making informality a kind of safeguard on the mobility of the woman and her
children should the marriage end in divorce and the woman want to return to her country of
origin.
The disregard my informants broadly showed for issues like job security and expired visas
illustrates Saskia Sassen’s (1981) important critique that state action, by way of visa and labor
policies rather than the choices of individuals, determines migration patterns. Russians choose
Egypt as a holiday destination, in part due to the ease of obtaining entry visas at the airport, and
in part due to its overall affordability and potential for longer work stay opportunities. The state’s
lax enforcement of labor and visa regulations in the tourism sector, moreover, allows many
tourists to become labor migrants when they find work in Hurghada34, and eventually to secure
certain benefits and desirable accommodations unavailable in their home countries. Aihwa Ong
(1999) argues that mobile subjects strategically situate themselves through citizenship in various
countries in order to enhance their livelihood opportunities, thus manipulating state policies and
structures to better obtain their desires and adapt to circumstances. Whereas in the case of
Russophone women in Hurghada the likelihood of obtaining actual citizenship appears to be
slim, the flexibility of labor and visa policies in Egypt do allow migrants to become situated
enough to perform cost-benefit analyses between countries in terms of the desirability of
employment, marriage and various social safety nets at a relatively minor cost to the migrants’
assets and backward social mobility.
Whereas the human trafficking literature generally identifies these desires for better
socioeconomic conditions as “push” factors drawing migrants abroad, this research sees Egypt’s
flexible visa regimes, informal employment networks, low state interference in regulating
foreigners with tourism police, affordable real estate, and externalities such as lower cost of living
and more satisfying marital arrangements which emphasize spousal support, shared resources and
family life as a set of important “pull” factors at work in drawing migrants to Hurghada. Together
these push and pull factors transform Hurghada into a space where agency is largely determined
by the degree to which personal and regulatory flexibility and capital resources can be mobilized
in the negotiation of what Aihwa Ong (1999) calls the “cultural logistics” through which actions
such as relocation or marriage in a foreign country, become “thinkable, practicable, and
desirable” (1999, 3).
34
Russians numbered highest among the 12.8 million tourists coming to Egypt in 2010.
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54
The Work | Marriage Nexus
Once a couple officially register their ‘urfi marriage contract, the wife can apply for a six-month
residence visa, which gives her additional time to find formal or informal work. It is common for
formal sector employers in Hurghada to check for a valid visa at the time of employment, but
rarely to check that it remains valid once employment is secured. Although “work not permitted”
is stamped across both tourist and residence visas, informal employers often ignore this and offer
cash payment for services rendered. Thus many respondents have continued to live in Hurghada
with expired visas since there is little consequence where stable jobs do not necessarily require
proof of “legal” residence status. In the course of this research, however, I sensed that my
informants were “fixed” in Hurghada in a number of other ways indirectly resulting from
personal status insecurity, as few would venture into Cairo or other parts of Egypt for fear of
being fined or deported.
In Anna Agathangelou’s (2004) critical study of political economy and sex in Turkey and
Cypress, she claims that the driving role of various forms of female labor within global capitalist
processes is ignored in the international political economy literature. Sex work, domestic work
and “care” work35, all typically performed by female labor and virtually unrecognized in both
theory and policy, contribute significantly to the surplus value underwriting many of the
economies to which Russophone and other migrant women gravitate in search of opportunity.
Agathangelou argues that women’s reproductive labor36 in particular enables, enhances and
preserves intimate relationships and emotional stability in societies at large while reproducing the
labor force itself. This is particularly relevant in the case of Russophone women in Hurghada in
the sense that family formation and marital bonds are primary (although not always initial) modes
through which women gain social leverage and legitimacy, both in the marriage and within
Hurghada’s broader Egyptian and Russophone communities.
Lourdes Beneria (2001) draws a correlation between the “informaliz[ation of] women’s
work” and deindustrialization processes in the global North beginning since the 1970s, which she
identifies as joint forces in fostering the slow rise of global leisure industries. The
deindustrialization trend, she argues, has been accompanied by a desire to deregulate global and
national labor markets as a way to shift employment costs away from employers and onto
laborers. This widespread deregulation of employment procedures, worker conditions and pay
has produced a labor culture of short-term jobs without benefits, informal pay agreements and a
Agathangelou (2004) describes “care” work as labor that enhances a person’s physical and emotional well-being,
such as massage, physical therapy, and home-care nursing as well as more intimate acts, like sex work (2004, 3).
36 Agathangelou (2004) defines reproductive labor as the “international sexual division of labor in which women’s
social and economic contributions are exploited, commodified and sold for cheap wages” (2004, 3).
35
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55
general atmosphere of labor expendability, as laborers become increasingly easy to replace with
incoming migrants willing to work harder for lower wages and fewer benefits. David Harvey
(2009) calls attention to the increasingly fluid deployment of capital and human resources one
finds in Hurghada, noting that, “flexibility is the modus operandi of late capitalism” (2009, 262).
And indeed it is in Hurghada, as most of my respondents had worked informally at some
point as hairdressers, house cleaners, villa caretakers, or entertainers, which included belly
dancers, go-go dancers at clubs, singers, disc jockeys, or traveling “ballet show” performers who
worked the club and hotel circuit in Hurghada and beyond. ‘Urfi marriage emerges as a relatively
easy way to bridge the security gaps created by temporary, informal work opportunities in tourism
for migrants who desire to remain in Hurghada, and facilitates an atmosphere were flexibility and
informality intersect and overlap. Hence just as capital and labor have become flexible and
mobile in Hurghada, Russian women have adapted to that tenor by developing their own
“cultural logistics” (Ong 1999, 3) in response to new opportunities. Lana, for example, is a 28year old lounge singer with a bleach-blonde pixie cut who left her Moscow office job at an
international company for a singing contract in Hurghada after her Russian husband divorced
her. Lana claimed to prefer the fluidity of informal work, finding a better trade-off in knowing
her art is appreciated. When asked how she navigates the instability of Hurghada’s entertainment
industry, often moving from job to job, Lana dismissed my suggestion that job insecurity was
somehow a negative aspect to life in Hurghada, saying, “Business here is diki [wild]. Everyone
has to watch out for herself. But at the same time, life in Hurghada is a blank page; you can
follow your own destiny.”
Just as none of my informants claimed to have come to Hurghada solely to make money,
none of them can be said, based on the entirety of their narratives, to have relocated solely for
marriage either. Wages in Egypt’s tourism industry are known to be lower or commensurate at
best with wages offered in Russia and, as some respondents noted, many migrants who come to
Hurghada for marriage, travel, and a higher quality of life part with well-paying jobs and sell or
sublet expensive apartments in their home countries to subsidize the move. Similarly, as one
young Egyptian man who is experienced in Hurghada and the upscale Red Sea resorts of Sharm
el Sheikh pointed out, many joint ventures in Egyptian tourism have been facilitated by marriages
between Egyptian men and Russophone women, as “the Russians need a local partner in Egypt,
otherwise they will pay a lot in taxes.” In essence, none of the motivations most commonly cited
by my respondents for moving to Hurghada can be said to operate in isolation but rather as a
series of trade-offs and intersections in which opportunities are gained, traded and lost in the
hope of something more desirable.
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56
‘Urfi: Convenience or Stepping Stone? An Urfi marriage document can be bought for $36. According to Al-Darby most of
the local boys, acting with dirty intentions, would bring their foreign wives-to-be (2555 years) and two witness friends (or strangers paid $10 each) to witness the
ceremony. Three signatures from the lawyer and witnesses, then the couple’s names
filled in the blanks, a few handshakes – and the marriage is done, followed by an
overnight honeymoon at the spouse’s room. The police will not trouble the couple
(Abouissa 2009a).
Although no official statistics exist on the number of ‘urfi marriages currently found in Egypt,
the ‘urfi practice has become commonplace in Hurghada and to a lesser extent in other tourist
zones, despite the social stigma attached to it in other parts of Egypt (Akinfieva 2005). While
many criticize ‘urfi as simply providing legal cover for men seeking to have sexual relations with
women outside of a more traditionally Egyptian, primary and socially recognizable marriage, it
became quite clear during the course of this research that ‘urfi provides a legal cover for migrant
women to do the very same. The proliferation of unofficial ‘urfi unions in Hurghada suggests
that more traditional Egyptian marriages may not be of interest to many tourists and foreign
residents. For women who decide to extend their stay in Hurgahda, the informal ‘urfi marriage
can facilitate housing, social networks and work opportunities with little cost or commitment on
their part.
The majority of my respondents considered ‘urfi to be a positive arrangement which
allowed them to cohabitate immediately and permanently with their husbands. Of the women I
interviewed in Hurghada, only Lana claimed to have entered an ‘urfi marriage with her Egyptian
boyfriend so they could cohabitate. “I think we [she and her Coptic boyfriend] got an ‘urfi in the
beginning, but I don’t remember …anyhow I told him I don’t want to get married, but we just
did it so we could get a flat together.” Because Lana’s boyfriend is a Coptic Christian rather
than Muslim, she has little if any legal entitlement to money or property upon the dissolution of
the marriage, but the ‘urfi marriage certificate may be enough to mollify the doorman.37
Russophone women, because they are unbound by Egyptian social customs and the familial
networks created through marriage, can leave ‘urfi marriages as easily as they would leave a
boyfriend. One woman I interviewed, for example, said that when she and her husband got into
an argument she tore up the ‘urfi contract, forcing them to get another once they had reconciled.
It is commonplace in Egypt to have a doorman, or bowwab, who monitors the foyer of an apartment building or
private home, providing “security” and keeping track of people’s movements. A mixed gender couple would
typically show their marriage papers to the landlord and bowwab when they move in together.
37
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57
Another respondent explained that since only the husband keeps a copy of the ‘urfi marriage
certificate, “it isn’t so complicated to get out of the marriage [for a foreign woman]: just tear up
the paper!” The impermanence of ‘urfi is particularly desirable for Russophone women with
children, as in Tamara’s case where her son is registered on her Russian passport and can be
flown back to Russia on immediate notice without being required to obtain her husband’s
permission before leaving Egypt with their son.
In Larissa’s case, another respondent who met her husband while on holiday in
Hurghada, the process of officially registering the ‘urfi contract was initiated immediately after it
had been signed. Many respondents reported being told by partners and lawyers that ‘urfi
contracts could not be legalized if the bride held only a tourist visa in Egypt and reflected on
being forced to obtain a letter of support from the husband in order to obtain the residence visa,
after which the marriage could be made official. Once Larissa’s marriage had finally been
legalized, however, she received a one-year visa, followed by a renewable five-year visa with
work permission. Larissa’s story is in many ways typical of how Russophone women enter into
‘urfi arrangements as a segue into more formal marriage and a more permanent stay. Mulki Al
Sharmani, Assistant Professor at the American University in Cairo’s Social Research Center,
claims that nothing in Egypt’s Personal Status Laws38 per se requires foreign, particularly nonMuslim, women to obtain an ‘urfi contract before the marriage itself can be legalized with the
state, noting, however, that an informal regime of denying marriage legalization to mixed couples
without a prior ‘urfi contract may be promoted in order to limit mixed marriages and the
extension of legal status to foreign women in Hurghada yet without taking such measures to the
level of policy.39 Perhaps because of this informal policy, all but one of my respondents claimed
to have entered into unofficial ‘urfi marriage contracts before having the marriage legalized. One indicator of legitimacy in mixed ‘urfi marriages which respondents noted often
either directly or indirectly is whether or not the bride has met her Egyptian in-laws. Ksenya, for
one, reported that she and her husband regularly visit his family in Cairo when there are family
gatherings or when they travel to Cairo on business. Another informant, Anastasia, who entered
into an ‘urfi contract with her coworker at a hotel, said she never met her husband’s family
during two years of marriage, even though his family lived in Hurghada.40 Because marriage is
legally and socially complex, particularly in the case of ‘urfi which leaves status and perception up
for a wide variety of interpretations, some of my respondents understood ‘urfi marriage as a
Personal Status laws in Egypt inform familial relations, including marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance.
Personal Communication (August 15, 2009).
40 While married, he had been conscripted in the Egyptian army. They “divorced” after his release, realizing they
had grown apart.
38
39
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58
stepping stone to official marriage with a life partner, while others understood it as an
administrative document needed to facilitate one-night stands, cohabitation, work opportunities
or other rather pragmatic ends. Ultimately this research concludes a wide variety of motivations
for and approaches to ‘urfi marriage between Egyptian men and Russophone women in
Hurghada, yet one consistent end result is an intimate intermingling of cultural norms regarding
work, marriage, family and spatial movement which produces a new and seemingly boundless
experience of transnationalism which pervades every single aspect of life in Hurghada and
extends to some degree beyond the immediate parameters of its vicinity.
Mixed Marriage and the Pursuit of Desire
Viktoriya met her husband, a hotel worker, while on holiday in Hurghada and described their
long distance courtship following her return to Russia, saying, “My husband and I talked all the
time because I had a free international phone line at my work. We talked about religion, kids
and our traditions. I’m very lucky because he’s had exposure to tourists so he’s open-minded….
We decided to pool our money and buy a flat because I didn’t want to move in with him and his
parents [since] I would have [had] to dress differently.”41 Considering her new Egyptian suitor
to be a suitable and “open-minded” marriage partner, Viktoriya decided to leave her life in
Moscow, move to Hurghada and become immersed in the Egyptian culture by learning the
language and starting a small business that caters to other Russian émigrés. Viktoriya
successfully navigates Hurghada’s social and economic arena, as Aihwa Ong (1999) put it, of
what is “thinkable, practicable and desirable,” in part, by consenting to marriage as a way to
“bridge the common divide between practice and structure” (1999, 3)—or, in other words,
between what is desirable and what is immediately achievable in the local environment. In
considering what Russophone migrants perceive as “thinkable, practicable and desirable” in
Hurghada, the role of race cannot be overstated as a factor which allows “white” Russophone
women to navigate Hurghada’s job and marriage markets with relative privilege.
In her study of women sex and domestic care workers in Turkey and Cypress,
Agathangelou (2004) asserts that “white but not white” female workers from the Russophone
countries are desirable to upper and middle class denizens of states on the periphery of Europe
“who can never be ‘white’ because race is also about class” (2004, 5)—in other words,
Russophone women are desirable in that despite the privilege of racial whiteness, they often lack
the class distinction of monetary might and thus of penetrable social influence. Thus as Julie
Although Viktoriya is a belly-dance instructor in Hurghada, she does not perform in public as per her husband’s
wishes.
41
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O’Connell-Davidson (1998) notes, “white [becomes desirable] not for color, but for economic
opportunity” (1998, 178).
This research attempts to further O’Connell Davidson’s angle on Agathangelou’s work
in the sense that while Russophone women’s “whiteness” may render them “bodies of value” in
Hurghada’s work and marriage markets, high flexibility and a low demand for security further
increase their value as marriage partners, employees and investors in the local environment, as
they thus contribute to the economy not simply the high value of race but also the most highly
sought skill in a capitalist modus operandi (2009, 262). In this way the “whiteness” of Russophone
migrants becomes desirable not just for its ability to gender race, but also in its ability to gender
class in being equated with a more upwardly and outwardly mobile package of social and marketoriented willingness and preferences.
Conclusion
The gathering wave of Russophone migrant women who arrive in Hurghada as tourists and,
through various strategies involving informal work and ‘urfi marriage, transform that holiday into
extended stay, seems to many a steady trend with no signs of slowing. Important questions
remain, however, as to how this population and its next generation of mixed children with
complex cultural, linguistic and political identities will further integrate and perpetuate both in
the setting of Hurghada itself and within a broader spectrum of fluctuating immigration,
emigration, work, marriage and citizenship policies. As long as the Egyptian state continues to
facilitate migration streams through incentivized pull factors such as lax visa, informal labor,
flexible marriage requirements and outward oriented investment schemes, Hurghada will
continue to see a mixing of cultures and is bound to yield unpredictable issues for the state to
deal with directly or indirectly. The Egyptian state continues to uphold a legal framework on
marriage, sex and gender relations which, it has been suggested here, to some degree channels
Russophone brides into unofficial ‘urfi marriages in order to limit mixed marriages, men’s legal
responsibilities to foreign partners and by extension, entitlements to Russophone women
migrants living in Hurghada. Such demands for “fluidity” and flexibility suits some migrants
well, but many are forced to invent new routes out of the margins of Hurghada’s social and
economic scene and into the kind of satisfying lifestyle which motivated many to relocate in the
first place. As this work has tried to illustrate, ‘urfi is used by Russophone tourists and residents
in a variety of ways, but ultimately for many it becomes an important structural pull factor which
can help migrants to bridge the gaps presented by informal and sometimes unstable work, an
unpredictable regulatory environment with regard to visa, and a social environment which
demands certain protocol for cohabitation and asset sharing.
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60
Whereas the motivations for and impact upon Egyptian men entering into ‘urfi marriage
contracts with Russophone migrants is far outside the scope of this work, its significance cannot
be understated in terms of making the transnational state of Hurghada today a reality. While
global transport routes and the push and pull factors touched upon in this work can also be said
to influence perceptions of migration and willingness to marry abroad, this work has tried to
highlight the significance of microdynamics in the local sphere which motive and obstruct
everyday decision making among migrants and Egyptian residents. Hurghada is but a five-hour
flight from Moscow, or the same distance as Irkutsk, Siberia’s capital, and regular, affordable
flights and flexible citizenship demands allow most women to take annual trips back to Russia,
or to host friends and family when they come for holiday in Hurghada. Moreover, as greater
numbers of children are born to these mixed marriages, grandparents increasingly purchase flats
in Hurghada, as I recall seeing brochures for housing developments that cater to retirees.
Over the past decade, the relative economic standing of Russian and Russophone
women has improved, as new skill sets and experiences have grown out of living, working,
marrying and investing abroad. This work hopes to see the current shifts in mainstream
discourses surrounding women migrants from the former Soviet Union and sex work pushed
even further, beyond Russophone migrants as passive victims and tourists behaving badly and
into a view as driving agents of globalism and cosmopolitanism who, like Ksenya, take calculated
risks, traverse borders and create transnational spaces that change what is “thinkable, practicable
and desirable” (Ong 1999, 3). Despite tendencies in the literature to marginalize and dismiss
Russophone women as hypersexualized and dangerously mobile subjects, their role as influential
social and economic entrepreneurs, mothers and economic stakeholders render them a force to
be taken seriously. As one woman put it over a cup of coffee in her villa, “You know what they
say about us Russians in Hurghada? ‘We took the city without firing a shot.’”
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Baladi as Performance: Gender and Dance in
Modern Egypt
by Noha Roushdy
January 2009:
Egyptian poet and satirist, Ahmed Fouad Nijm, a popular artistic figure in Egypt,
is heavily criticized for making a formal statement on television urging the
Minister of Culture to establish a syndicate for professional Oriental Dancers and
lamenting the slow demise of a “genuine (asil) Egyptian art.”1
April 2009:
A lawyer, member of the Muslim Brotherhood and former political detainee, Adel
Ahmed Mu’awwad, raises a motion against the Egyptian Ministers of Culture,
“Al-‘Aguz Ahmad Fouad Nijm Yunashid Wazir al-Thiqafa Insha’ Niqaba li’l-Raqisat.” (January 24, 2009)
http://www.anbacom.com/news.php?action=show&id=235 (last accessed March 10, 2010)
1
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Media, Tourism and Interior to prohibit the licensing of oriental dancers. He
appealed to the court to withhold the implementation of the Minister of Culture’s
Decision 273/1997 stipulating administrative requirements to obtaining an
oriental dancer’s license in Egypt. Mu’awwad’s motion referred to a number of
articles in the Egyptian constitution which identify “Islam” as a central source of
legislation and a quintessential reference for the protection of the family and for
insuring that woman’s right to labor does not infringe on her obligations towards
the family. It argued that Qur’anic commandments against exhibiting ‘sensitive’
bodily parts (‘awrat), debauchery and lustful practices as well as the natural
aversion of Egyptian society to such licentious practices requires that oriental
dance be dealt with as a form of prostitution since the profession of an oriental
dancer “is only taken up by prostitutes” who display their bodies revealing its
sensitive parts in public (Sherif 2009).
June 2009:
Members of the Egyptian parliament incited a public uproar by formally
denouncing “rumors” pertaining to the establishment of a high institute for
oriental dance affiliated to the Ministry of Higher Education and sponsored by
the High Council for Universities in Egypt (Younis 2009).
Al-raqs al-baladi2 is a dance form that currently occupies an unquestionably central role in various
expressions of festivity throughout Egypt. It is more commonly known in English as “belly
dance,” a term that denotes a conglomeration of related dance forms practiced in the vast
geographic region that covers North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia (Shay and SellersYoung 2005, 1).3 Al-raqs al-baladi is not the only form of dance performed in Egypt. 4 Yet, as
opposed to the region- or community-specific dances that are performed throughout the
country, al-raqs al-baladi is not commonly associated with any particular ethnic or social group
living in Egypt.5
It is the most frequently observed dance form that accompanies Arabic dance tunes
today and is performed by women and men on many festive occasions, though more regularly
This essay is extracted from N. Roushdy, “Dancing in the Betwixt and Between: Femininity and Embodiment in
Egypt” (M.A. Thesis, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology and Egyptology, American University in
Cairo, Egypt). (2010)
3 The formal reference to al-raqs al-baladi in Egypt is al-raqs al-sharqi, which is more likely a translation of the French
Danse Orientale.
4 Magda Saleh (1979) documented twenty distinct dance forms performed in Egypt at the time of her research.
These included dances that are performed by men, dances performed by women and dances in which men and
women participate.
5 It is possible to identify al-raqs al-baladi as an urban dance form with historical roots in Cairo.
2
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during festivities commemorating rites of passage.6 The most commonly represented
performance style of al-raqs al-baladi is the solo performance of female professional dancers.7
However, the performance of al-raqs al-baladi is neither limited to any particular professional
group nor confined to any particular musical genre. Egyptians learn to stylize their bodies in
tune with Arabic music at a fairly early age by mimicking grownups and professional dancers.
Performed by professional and amateur dancers, baladi dancing is not commonly
regarded as an art form in Egypt. Even though recognition of the artistic skills of highly talented
and publicly esteemed dancers is widespread and is sometimes given official status,8 this is rather
an exception to a rule that tends to consider professional performers of al-raqs al-baladi as ‘fallen
women’ and prostitutes who make a living out of exhibiting their bodies to strangers. The
practice of al-raqs al-baladi by ‘ordinary’ Egyptians is thus popularly sanctioned inasmuch as it is a
leisure activity that serves as an expression of festivity on special occasions.
The three incidents alluded to in the prelude, all of which took place in the short span of
six months in 2009, demonstrate the extreme reactions that characterize discussions of al-raqs albaladi in Egypt today. They expose intensity with which contemporary discourses scrutinize the
professional performance of a dance form, arguably the most popular in Egypt, and of its
enduring appeal that allows it to continue thriving. In this article, I look at the history of al-raqs
al-baladi throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Egypt in an effort to explain the
ways by which this particular dance came to signify art, heritage, and “everything beautiful in our
life” on the one hand, and prostitution, licentiousness and a threat to public morality on the
other.
Drawing on the literature of gender and sexuality in Egypt, particularly the works of Leila
Ahmed (1992) and Joseph Massad (2007), I locate al-raqs al-baladi in the web of overarching
socio-cultural, economic and political processes that produced the ideal modern female subject
in Egypt, against which the marginalized category of the dancer came to be defined. However, in
departure from studies that disconnect professional from non-professional performances of alraqs al-baladi, I look at both performance styles as materializations of the same regulatory logic
that established al-raqs al-baladi as a risqué dance form in the twentieth century. I thereby employ
It consists of an improvised pattern of bodily movements that heavily rely on the controlled movement of isolated
body parts, particularly through the shaking and vibrating of the upper body and the sides and on slow and rapid
whirls.
7 The Egyptian state does not register male professional dancers.
8 An example would be King Farouk’s designation of Samia Gamal as raqisat misr al-rasmiyya (the official dancer of
Egypt), Anwar al-Sadat’s presentation of Nagwa Fouad to American Foreign Minister, Henry Kissinger, during his
official visits to Egypt, and the leading role that the Egyptian Minister of Culture played in the funeral processions
of Tahia Carioca.
6
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Michel Foucault’s (1972) approach to historical inquiry by attempting to connect the
representation of al-raqs al-baladi as an “object of discourse” (1972, 49) throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries to an array of political, economic, social and cultural
processes that allowed for the emergence of al-raqs al-baladi in the form that we are familiar with
today. This form relies on three main features: it is ‘oriental,’9 ‘sexual’ and ‘feminine.’ I will
demonstrate how Orientalist literature’s identification of the dance with these three
characteristics entrapped al-raqs al-baladi in a representational framework that reflects its location
in Egypt’s modernity project.
The discussion of al-raqs al-baladi that ensues in the following essay thus focuses on the
mechanisms of control and regulation that its professional and non-professional practice were
subjected to in the modern period, and identifies it as a necessary offshoot of wider debates on
gender and sexuality that were taking place in turn of the twentieth century Egypt.
Baladi: Gender and Sexuality in Turn of the Twentieth Century Egypt
The profusion of mass media in turn of twentieth century Egypt enabled the unprecedented
emergence of gender and sexuality in public discourse as matters of national concern. As Joseph
Massad (2007) argued, it was the “European-style institutionalization of heterosexual bourgeois
monogamous marriage” that was represented as a foundational element in the civilizational
project of modernizing Arab societies (2007, 159). The ensuing debates have been the focus of
numerous studies in the past few decades that have examined pressing nationalist efforts to
reconcile local culture with Western modernization under the aegis of capitalism and the making
of the modern nation-state (Ahmed 1992; Shakry 1998; Booth 2001; Baron 2005).
These studies have clearly illustrated the way in which late nineteenth and early twentieth
century calls for women’s participation in public life through education, labor or ‘symbolic
unveiling’ were premised upon the objective of “crafting an educated housewife” (Najambadi
1998) that could mother the new generation of modern Egyptian subjects.
In Leila Ahmed’s (1992) discussion on the veil, for instance, she exposes the classspecific, male-centered limitations of gender discourse in the turn of the twentieth century. Her
argument focuses on one of the leading figures in the gender discourse, Qasim Amin, known as
“the liberator of women” in Egypt, to highlight the point that Amin’s call for the unveiling of
women was a direct result of his Western education and outlook—an outlook which ultimately
sought “the transformation of Muslim society along the lines of the Western model and for the
substitution of the garb of Islamic-style male dominance for that of Western-style male
9
As evidenced in its formal designation in Arabic.
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dominance” (Ahmed 1992, 161). By establishing links between Amin’s rhetoric and that
adopted by the colonial regime regarding the inherently inferior culture of the colonized, Ahmed
accuses Amin of “refashioning” Egyptian women along the ideals set by “Victorian womanhood
and mores” (1992, 151). As Ahmed rightly identified, Amin’s rhetoric and the popular debates
he had ignited in Egypt were centered on the wives and mothers of the upper classes, whose
public behavior was by then expected to match the decorum and aesthetic ideals of the “new
[modern] men” of Egypt (1992, 146).
Many postcolonial scholars since have come to identify the Orientalist representations of
Arab life found in European colonial literature, with which the new national intelligentsia of
Egypt had become well acquainted, as the foremost instigator of the gender and sexuality norms
one finds in Arab society today (Massad 2007, 53). Representations of Egyptian life, for instance
that found in the Egyptian exhibit of the World Exposition in Paris in 1889, shocked and
humiliated Egyptian observers who grasped the decadence of their culture through the eyes of
European perception (Mitchell 1988, 2). The inferiority of Egyptian culture thus came to be
understood as something manifest in many aspects of Egyptian social life and, as is made clear in
Salama Musa’s book, Fann al-Hub w’al-Hayat (1947),10 the relationship between men and women
in Egypt was certainly among them.
In his 1947 work, Salama Musa, a prominent Egyptian intellectual of radically secular,
socialist, and feminist convictions, wrote:
Europeans also surpass us because they learn to dance, and perceive in its practice an
exercise for love and a discipline for the instincts. The Arabic word raqs (dance) is of
Greek origin and is derived from the word “orchestra,” which means a musical
ensemble. And therefore, dance has been and still is a foreign art to Arab culture.
What this community has known of this art is limited to the practices of slave girls,
who learned to dance for the sole purpose of sexually arousing their masters. We have
inherited these lascivious moves, which our integrity following our awakening in 1919
saw fit to abolish.11 That was a fine resolution. Yet, European dance is not like ours. It
is a grand art. May the reader note that the European dancer looks up ahead as she
dances; she rises. Hence, we understand why Europeans think positively of dance and
we so negatively (Musa 1947, 81-2, my translation).
Musa is believed to have been the first Arab intellectual in the twentieth century to earnestly
discuss the contemporary sexual life of Egyptians in Arabic literature (Massad 2007, 128). He is
The title can be literally translated to “The Art of Love and Living.”
Besides this anecdote, I have not come across any study that confirmed any such abolition in this period. It is,
furthermore, unclear in Musa’s work what the abolition entailed.
10
11
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also one of the main figures in the cultural movement known as the “Arab renaissance” that
evolved in turn of the twentieth century Egypt and that pioneered the development of a modern
national culture (Gershoni 1992, 332). Musa included the excerpt noted above in his discussion
on the importance of “liberating marriage” from the shackles of tradition and custom, where he
praised marriage based on love and affection, which he associated with European practice. Musa
was especially concerned with youth and the psychological effects of segregating young men and
women.12 In contrast to European dances, according to Musa, the local dance, which Egyptians
were accustomed to, increased estrangement between the sexes and was even a cause for
homosexuality among men and women (Musa 1947, 128). Ultimately, as a dance of slave girls,
Musa believed that Egyptian dance reinforces the inferiority and objectification of the ‘free’
modern women who practice it. Musa’s views corresponded with ongoing national debates
concerning gender and sexuality in a determinedly modernizing Egyptian society, a point I return
to later.
Growing disenchantment and outright aversion to local practices by the rising middle
and upper classes in Egypt was also captured in Sawsan El-Messiri’s Ibn Al-Balad: A Concept of
Egyptian Identity (1978). El-Messiri argues that a Western-styled education and cultural outlook
engendered “an attempt to emulate [W]estern culture and to negate what was local, i.e. baladi” by
this social group (1978, 34). The following excerpt from Muhammad al-Muwalihi’s Hadith Isa
Ibn Hisham (1903), where two friends exchange opinions about their evening excursions in Cairo,
has been incorporated by El-Messiri (1978) as an appropriate representation of this attitude:
First: Are you going to keep your promise to accompany me to our friend’s to see the
famous baladi dancer (belly dancer)?
Second: Please excuse me, for it is impossible. First, this baladi dancing which awlad albalad and the fellahin enjoy, doesn’t interest me. Second, I have invited
“mademoiselle…” the famous opera singer for lunch in Azbakiya at ‘Santi (a wellknown European restaurant at that time). After that, we will go to Khan alKhalili…and some of the old areas of the city for entertainment. (in El-Messiri 1978,
35; Al-Muwailihi 1903, 20-1).
As demonstrated above, the prevailing attitude of the middle and upper classes of Egyptian
society, which also corresponded with the views of the intelligentsia towards al-raqs al-baladi,
echo the attitudes of Western travelers that were documented in Orientalist literature in the
12
For Musa, these included masturbation and homosexuality.
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preceding century. In J.A. St. John’s (1845) depiction of the local dance in his Egypt and Nubia,
he remarks:
And this is not so much art as nature; she [the female performer] becomes what she
would seem, femina simples -- uncurbed by that restraint, and moral discipline, and
religious principle, which, in Christian countries, more especially in England, subdue
and purify the passions, and elevate women into the most chaste and perfect of created things”
(1845, 272, my italics).
While St. John appears to be referring to the female dancers and singers he observes in Egypt,
his depiction nonetheless resonates with Musa’s words a century later in 1947, and is based on a
fundamental distinction between the Christian (read Occidental) and the Oriental woman. Like
St. John, Musa’s 1947 work is concerned with ‘elevating’ women and sees the degradation of
women in the culture of the local dance in Egypt. Further, Musa’s work casts Arab men as the
beneficiaries of a patriarchal culture that sexually objectifies women and undermines the
potential for love and affection in marriage, the latter of which Musa identifies as a Western
cultural norm.
Another early nineteenth century account written by a French diplomat during the
French occupation of Egypt indicates similar concerns:
Notwithstanding the licentious life of these females, they are introduced into the
harems to instruct the young persons of their sex in all that may render them agreeable
to their future husbands… It is not surprising, that with manners which make the
principal duty of women to consist in bestowing pleasure, those who follow the
profession of gallantry should be the teachers of the fair sex (Denon 1803, 234-5).
Since male European travelers were never admitted into the women’s quarters, we cannot accept
their statements as indicative of the influence professional dancers had on the private lives of
ordinary Egyptian women of the time. What becomes evident through such early depictions of
the local dance, however, is the Westerner’s “fascination with the sexual desires and lives of
Arabs” (Massad 2007, 47), which framed the performance of the local dance within its
formulation of an “imminently corporeal” Orient (Said 1992, 184). Depictions of the dance
accumulated in the nineteenth century and offered detailed descriptions of its varied
performance by the different dancers European men and women had encountered. Few
European writers were concerned with drawing out the aesthetic qualities of the dance,
preferring to dwell upon the dance’s erotic undertones. The standard European account of raqs
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baladi that prevailed and formed its signification in the first half of the twentieth century was, in
essence, the exotification of a dance that has been read as purely sexual in nature: ars erotica.
Dance in Nineteenth Century Egypt
“The Dancing Girls of Egypt”
The turn of the nineteenth century marks the beginning of Egypt’s historical encounter with
European colonialism and the establishment of the modern Egyptian state. In 1798 the French
invaded Egypt and occupied the country for three years until their defeat by British-aided
Ottoman troops in 1901. The outcome of the French defeat in Egypt was the rise of
Muhammad Ali, an Albanian general in the Ottoman army, and his appointment as viceroy to
the Ottoman sultan in Egypt in 1805. Backed by the British Empire, Muhammad Ali gradually
attained independence from the Ottoman Empire in the late 1830s after having set out to
rebuild Egypt as a modern Western-styled state. Muhammad Ali’s design for modern Egypt
consisted of the establishment of a state of law and order that would essentially convince the
British to aid his plan for complete sovereignty from the Ottoman Empire. Khaled Fahmy
(1999) noted that “[making] Egypt safer for European, and especially British merchants,
passengers and mail” was one of Muhammad Ali’s primary motivations for forwarding certain
legal and administrative reforms in Egypt during his lifetime (Fahmy 1999, 346).
Descriptions of the local dance of Egypt by Western travelers throughout the nineteenth
century recount similar observations, consisting mainly of rapid movement of the hips and vocal
and instrumental music. From as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century and through
the turn of the twentieth, Western traveler accounts used different designations for the female
dancers of Egypt. According to these narratives, there seems to have been two groups of women
in Egypt who danced for hire13: the ghawazee and the ‘awalim.14
Ghawazee were and continue to be identified as the female members of one of the
“gypsy” tribes (al ghagar) that settled in Egypt in an unspecified “past.” They are thus believed to
be from a distinct cultural background and to have no original connection to the Egyptian
peasant or townsman. There is no doubt from a variety of accounts that ghawazee were paid
dancers and they were also identified as fortunetellers and prostitutes (Von Kremer 1864, 264-5)
A third group of male dancers, known as Khawals, was also common in Egypt throughout the nineteenth century.
As natives of the country, they were distinguished from another group of male dancers known as Gink. They dance
in the same manner as ghawazee but dress slightly different. Their makeup likened that worn by women (kohl and
henna on their hands and legs) and they were often mistaken for women by European travelers. (Lane 2003, 381-2).
14 Male dancers, known as khawals, were also observed dancing.
13
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in a number of works. ‘Awalim, on the other hand, were not associated with any particular ethnic
or cultural group. The singular form of the word ‘awalim is ‘alma, or “learned woman.”15 The
‘awalim, it has been argued, were a group of female experts in the arts of reciting poetry, singing,
and playing music (Lane 2003, 355).
With almost all available nineteenth century accounts of dancers in Egypt produced by
foreigners who hardly spoke the native language, an unfortunate consequence is that their
accounts differ widely on the proper designation for female dancers. In Edward William Lane’s
The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (2003), a distinction is stressed between the public
dancers of Egypt, who are the female descendents of a particular “gypsy” tribe known as
ghawazee16, and the group of “professional singers known as ‘awalim” (2003, 355).
Although Lane contends that the ‘awalim of “an inferior class” (2003, 355) have been
observed dancing in weddings and private parties, he maintains a qualitative distinction between
the ‘awalim and the ghawazee regarding their visibility to men, their attire and their relation to the
women of the harem. While ‘awalim were hired to perform on special occasions for women in the
harem, and could only be listened to but never seen by a male audience, ghawazee performed
“unveiled” (Lane 2003, 377) “in the court of a house, or in the street, before the door, on certain
occasions of festivity in the hareem…They are never,” Lane asserts, “admitted into a respectable
hareem, but are not infrequently hired to entertain a party of men in the house of some rake”
(Lane 2003, 378-9). In other words, ghawazee were the group of singers and dancers who
performed in public venues and on public occasions such as saint’s day celebrations before both
men and women, while the performance of ‘awalim was restricted to female audiences in private
venues.
It is unclear why Lane insisted that the majority of ‘awalim did not dance while many
writers as early as the late eighteenth century had been referring to the performers of the dance
they observed in Egypt as ‘awalim (Denon 1803). I argue that it was Lane himself who did not
regard those whom he had observed dancing in Egypt as accomplished artists or learned and
skilled individuals, hence his unwillingness to identify those who dance as ‘awalim—a perception
that was apparently shared by most Western writers who recorded their observations of the
dance in Egypt over the course of the nineteenth century. Given that Lane would not have been
permitted to attend the festivities held in the women’s quarters, moreover, his reference to the
The word also refers to a scientist in Arabic.
It is indefinite how Egyptians commonly use the word ghaziyya. In general, ghawazee are dancers from designated
“gypsy” tribes (al-ghagar) whose dance is distinguishable from an Oriental Dancer. They do not perform their dance
in the traditional Oriental Dance costume nor are accompanied by a takht sharqi. Their costume is called “bulbul.”
Their dance differs in form from the dance of a professional Oriental Dancer.
15
16
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inferior class of ghawazee who danced may have been limited to those who performed danced
before men in public and not necessarily the wider community of dance performers, which
would have included those who would only perform dance before an audience of women. Lane
described the dance performance of ghawazee as follows:
Their dancing has little of elegance; its chief peculiarity being a very rapid vibrating
motion of the hips, from side to side. They commence with a degree of decorum;
but soon, by more animated looks, by a more rapid collision of their castanets of
brass, and by increased energy in every motion...The dress in which they generally
thus exhibit in public is similar to that which is worn by women of the middle classes
in Egypt in private…consisting of a yelek, or an ‘anteree, and the shintiyan
(trousers)…of handsome material. They also wear various ornaments: they eyes are
bordered with kohl (or black collyrium); and the tips of their fingers, the palms of
their hands, and their toes and other parts of their feet, are usually stained with the
red dye of the henna, according to the general custom of the middle and higher
classes of Egyptian women (Lane 2003, 377-8, my italics).
In all cases, it is clear that one of the central functions of this dance style in nineteenth century
Egypt was to provide entertainment on special occasions, most notably on weddings and saint’s
day celebrations. Private dance performances by ghawazee or ‘awalim appear to have been a
“fantasia” afforded mainly by the wealthy in Egyptian society (Leland 1870, 131). A number of
authors, moreover, have referred to an instructional role played by professional dancers (again,
‘awalim or ghawazee) in the lives of ordinary women. One author claimed that ‘awalim were
received by Egyptian families to provide instruction for the young women of the family on
“dancing, singing, gracefulness, and, in general, of all voluptuous attainment” (Denon 1803,
232). Another maintained that ordinary women in Egypt were taught the art of dancing by the
ghawazee in order to be able to “perform in their own apartments for the amusement of their
families” (St. John 1845, 268). From descriptions of private dance events that included Egyptian
or non-Egyptian residents, it becomes clear that the dance performed was familiar to the
spectators and that men and sometimes women guests often participated in the performance or
responded to the flirtation of performers (St. John 1845, 275; Duff-Gordon 1865).
‘Awalim or ghawazee, female and male public dancing had been categorized as an
“entertainment trade” since the sixteenth century and was subjected to “the fiscal control of a
tax farm” (muqata’ah of the khurdah) (Tucker 1985, 150). Again, reference to “public” should not
solely imply performances in public venues such as roads or halls that are open to the masses,
but also any non-gender-segregated setting.
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In the beginning of the 19th century, Western travelers referred to the existence of some
kind of prohibition on private female dance performances for single men. In two accounts from
the turn of the nineteenth century, the authors make mention of some kind of prohibition that
was brought to bear on their personal entourages, which consisted of single men (ghawazee and/or
‘awalim) (Denon 1803). One author even claimed that the prohibition was particular to nonMuslim men (Denon 1803, 230). That proscription may have been either too loose, too
informal or simply could not withstand the European demand for local dance performances17, as
by the 1830s performances of the local dance in Egypt were being introduced as one of the
“most interesting and remarkable spectacles in the modern capital of Egypt…of which many
travelers have made mention” (St. John 1845, 268) in Orientalist accounts of Egypt.
The 1830 Ban
Notwithstanding the growing popularity of raqs baladi among Western travelers, in 1834
Muhammad Ali, then the ruler of Egypt, issued a decree prohibiting public female dancing,
singing and sex work in Cairo. Punishment for failure to uphold the new law ranged from fifty
lashes for first-time offences to one or two years of hard labor for recurring offenses. Men
found in the company of a dancer or prostitute could avoid punishment by agreeing on a
temporary marriage to them (Lane 2003, 377). Women were typically deported back to Upper
Egypt after receiving their punishment, mainly to the towns of Luxor and Isna where many
originated (Van Nieuwkerk 1996, 32). In Upper Egypt, women were free to resume their
activities including the performance of dance for both local and foreign clienteles. The ban
served only to increase the European traveler’s fascination with and desire for the local dancers
of Upper Egypt (Van Nieuwkerk 1996, 34).18
The prohibition was shortly lifted in the 1850s during the reign of Abbas I (1849-1854),
the successor to Muhammad Ali. Female dancers were allowed to reappear in the public space
during the lift and once the ban was removed in the mid-1860s, a new tax on public dance
earnings was issued by the state in 1866 and enforced at “the discretion of the tax-farming
official” entrusted with collecting the money (Tucker 1985, 153). By the end of the nineteenth
century, female singing in Cairo was limited to a series of newly-introduced café chantant
situated in the area around Azbakiyya Garden, where women sang behind a curtain to a male
In Vivant Denon’s Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt (1803), the author stated that notwithstanding the proscription,
a request made by 200 French soldiers and a general could not be denied by their host, a sheikh in the Lower
Egyptian village (1803, 231-2).
18
For instance, the celebrated encounter between French writers Gustave Flaubert and Kutchuk Hanem took place
during the period of banishment.
17
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audience. Public dance performances were limited to a few locations along the Nile (St. John
1845, 130) while private parties, weddings and saint’s day celebrations continued to follow the
same tradition of ‘awalim and ghawazee entertainment in turn of the twentieth century Cairo.19
Scholars have offered alternative reasons for the issuance of the short-lived ban. It has
been argued, for instance, that the register had intentionally included the names of ‘respectable
ladies’ in the list of registered sex workers and other female performers suspected of engaging in
sex work, causing a social scandal (St. John 1845, 272) and a series of public protests organized
by Muslim scholars which were intended to urge Muhammad Ali to outlaw sex work in Cairo
(Tucker 1985, 152). While I do not suspect the evidence gathered for such arguments, a
thorough analysis of European traveler accounts of female dancers in Egypt, as well as a more
comprehensive reading of the political and socio-cultural transformations that were taking place
at the time, suggest that the criminalization of female public performance was part of the larger
modernization project of nineteenth century Egypt.
In his study of the development of the police force in nineteenth century Egypt, Khaled
Fahmy (1999) discusses the introduction of the disciplining mechanisms of the modern state to
Egyptian society following the European model. As previously noted, the reign of Muhammad
Ali was marked by the expressed willingness of the monarch to institutionalize a modern
conception of “law and order” in Egypt. Fahmy argues that the development of criminal records
in the mid-1800s helped introduce an understanding of the criminal, “as someone who is nearly
pre-conditioned to break the law” (1999, 360). The register of sex workers fit within this
paradigm, since public female performing and sex work, albeit legal, were administratively
associated with illegal activities, such as stealing, begging and “other professions considered
shameful” (Tucker 1985, 151).
I propose that the willingness of dancers to perform for European men, thereby
overstepping customary and then state sanctioned proscriptions against private performances for
male patrons, is one of the most evident causes of their intimate association with sex workers
and their introduction into criminal categories. Even the ‘awalim, who European traveloguer
Lane asserted had been better received and accepted in society, somehow lost their favorable
distinction from the ghawazee, since “by the 1850s [the word ‘alma] denoted a dancer-prostitute”
(Lane 2003, 35). Thus I argue that Muhammad Ali’s banishment of female performers from
Cairo in 1834 is linked to his realization that a certain impression of Egypt was being left on
European travelers, which undermined his efforts to represent Egyptians as a modern people.
European attitudes towards al-raqs al-baladi and its dancers deemed it incompatible with modern
19
See Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy and Ahmed Mahfouz’s Khabaya Al-Qahira.
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Western values and comportment due to its perceived erotic content. As Egypt remade itself to
mirror the modern values being exported by Europe, the way by which dance became
reintroduced into the public sphere of Cairo life in the late nineteenth century conformed the
Western reading of al-raqs al-baladi as an erotic dance.
Dance in Twentieth Century Egypt
The Birth of the Cabaret
The reinvention of al-raqs al-baladi in twentieth century Egypt is linked to the creation of new
public venues for dance performances. It was around the same time that the new ruler of Egypt,
Khedive Ismail (1863-1879), declared his plan to turn Egypt into a European country. Already
with the termination of Muhammad Ali’s reformation and modernization projects in 1848, the
economic development of Egypt became highly dependent on the European market and the
international economic order. Ismail’s plan included, among other things, the education of the
Egyptian elite in Europe, reform of the Egyptian school system, establishment of the first
Western-style colleges in Egypt and the introduction of Egyptian women to public education.
On the other hand, Ismail’s plan included heavy expenditure on urban planning and
infrastructure, following the model of European urban design (Cleveland 2004, 95-99). The new
physical space that was created to the west of old Cairo brought with it a new spatiality that
needs to be understood as both a “product of a transformation process and transformable itself”
(Soja 1985, 94). Cairo was to be “the expression and achievement of an intellectual orderliness, a
social tidiness, a physical cleanliness” (Mitchell 1988, 63) to earn its inclusion among European
capitals.
The area forming the border between old and new Cairo, the Azbakiyya, was put under
the spotlight in Ismail’s modernization and Westernization schemes. Inspired by Paris,
Azbakiyya was turned into a garden and “intended as the new center of the city” (Raymond
2000, 315). An opera house was constructed in the area and Azbakiyya square was turned into
“an English-style garden on the model of Parc Monceau” (Raymond 2000, 315). It included
boutiques, restaurants and cafes, all serving a multi-national, Euro-Arab public. Arabic music
was played all night in traditional cafes and the singing of ‘awalim was now performed behind a
curtain in the cafés-chantant (Leland 1873, 128).
The adjacent Muhammad Ali Street was built in 1873 to connect Azbakeyya and the
Citadel to old and new Cairo (Raymond 2000, 316). The street was intended as the center for
artists of all kinds in the Egyptian capital. It functioned as residence and meeting point for
musicians, singers and actors in Egypt since its construction and throughout the first half of the
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twentieth century. The houses of female performers were now located in Harit al-‘awalim, an
alley connected to Muhammad Ali Street. The leading ‘awalim, or ustawat, who managed groups
of singers, dancers and actresses, owned offices on the ground floors of their building, as male
customers were not to be received in the houses (Van Nieuwkerk 1996, 73).
By the turn of the twentieth century, professional dance performances were regularly
observed in the music halls and nightclubs of Cairo. Most notably, El Dorado was one of the
first music halls, where the local dance—for the first time called “belly-dance” in English—was
performed.20 Female performers in nightclubs were neither ‘awalim nor ghawazi 21, but were
identified as artistes, whose job included performing different international and local dances on
stage before socializing and drinking with customers, a practice commonly known as fath.22 The
performer, thus, received her portion of the customer’s bill of drinks she helped order, a
lucrative practice for both performer and nightclub owners.23
In the 1920s and 30s a number of female artistes started establishing their own
nightclubs, such as Badi’a Masabni, Insaf and Ratiba Rushdi, Meri Mansur and Beba. Badi’a
Masabni, for instance, established her sala (hall) in 1926 mainly from money she had made
working as actress and dancer (Danielson 1997, 48). She pioneered nightclub entertainment by
establishing a daily entertainment schedule that included a singing and dancing performance of
her own, a few other dancers, a comedian (monologist) or singer in the traditional style, a short
theatrical performance by an Egyptian or European troupe and a final singing act by a star
performer (Danielson 1997, 67). There were also early evening shows (matinees) for women since
it was not commonly accepted for women to attend night shows. Dancers were recruited and
trained by Badi’a herself.
It is important to underscore that these venues introduced some of the leading Egyptian
and Arab singers and musicians in the first half of the twentieth century and included such icons
as Farid al-Atrash and Laila Mourad (Danielson 1997, 48). This vibrant nightlife flourished at a
A central feature of turn of the twentieth century Parisian music halls that was to be emulated in Cairo was the
presentation of women as special performers of the cancan, belly dance and other striptease-like dances (Savigliano
1995, 103).
21 Since the late 19th century, we have no references to ghawazee in Cairo, and the word came to commonly
designate any rural dancer. It is important to note, however, that ghawazee, a group of women descendants of
“gipsy” tribes in Upper Egypt, most notably of the house of Nawara, and who define themselves genealogically as
such, still exist.
22 Given the nationalities of many artistes, actresses and singers at the time, it is safe to assume that a significant
segment of these women belonged to national or ethnic minority groups in Egypt (e.g. Armenians, Jews, SyrioLebanese).
23 It is important to note that nightclub performers were not legally and administratively identified as sex workers.
Sex work was a separate profession regulated and legally permitted in Egypt until its abolishment in 1949.
20
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time when Cairo was home to thousands of Europeans24, mostly British army officers, who had
remained in Egypt in the interwar period. Yet judging by the type of music performed, it is
difficult to assume that these entertainment venues were by any means limited to young
European men.
Notwithstanding the strong presence of the local dance in the artistic life of Egypt in the
early twentieth century, music halls were targeted in waves of Egyptian police raids throughout
the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. As places where male and female mixing was permitted and
promoted by the practice of fath, and alcohol heavily consumed, they were the cause of moral
outcries in the Egyptian public sphere. During the economic crisis in the 1930s, these places
were emblematic of inequality and conspicuous spending patterns of the wealthier in Egyptian
society (Van Nieuwkerk 1996, 47). During this time, the police intermittently used the law
pertaining to “scandalous acts in public,” to prohibit local dance performances. Many managers
of those nightclubs located on Emad al-Deen Street, however, escaped the law by alerting
dancers upon the sight of a police car, thus enabling the dancer to switch her performance to a
foreign dance (Van Nieuwkerk 1996, 47). These raids continued until more extensive sociopolitical and cultural unrest in Egypt led to the legal regulation of nightclub entertainment in
1951 that codified legal sanctions against the practice of fath. The law stipulated that “it is not
permitted to allow women who are employed in the public space, nor those who perform
theatrical acts, to sit with the customers of the shop nor to eat, drink or dance with them” (in
Van Nieuwkerk 2005, 79).
While nightclub entertainment continues to the present moment, by the mid-twentieth
century established musicians, singers and actors of both genders slowly moved to alternative,
safer, venues for their performances. In the course of the second half of the twentieth century,
the cinema screen came to be the major disseminator of the local dance.
Egyptian movies to be released from the mid 1930s to the mid 60s almost all consistently
included baladi dance scenes performed by some of the leading dancers of the time, who also
played leading female roles (Dougherty 2005). A significant number of movies dealt with the
character of the dancer in their plots. These often included negative portrayals and common
stereotypes about dancers, but also some positive portrayals of dancers in society. Egyptian
cinema’s depiction of the local dance was mainly centered on the “nightclub scene,” but also
included performances in wedding celebrations, on roads and in private gatherings. Movies also
depicted “ordinary Egyptian women” dancing. Until the 1960s, such roles were acted out by real
By the end of Ismail’s rule in 1872, it has been estimated that 80,000 Europeans resided in Egypt who formed a
significant segment of Egypt’s economic and political elite (Cleveland 2004, 94-95).
24
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life professional dancers. Since the end of the 1960s, however, movies about dancers or those
including dance scenes have not principally relied on professional dancers (Dougherty 2005,
167). Egyptian cinema’s crucial contribution to the culture of al-raqs al-baladi, not only in Egypt
but also across the entire Middle East, is its diffusion of the dance style that became unique to
Cairo’s nightclubs—or, the cabaret style—to the popular masses. The cinema’s power to
influence the structure of al-raqs al-baladi performances in popular venues endures even today,
while the popularization of television brought such characterizations in film into the Egyptian
household and familiarized the wider public with the cabaret style, which had originally been
observed by only a small segment of the population.25 Popular media has thus played a central
role in the normalization of local dance culture among young Egyptians and in shaping the
performance style of professional and non-professional dancers in Egypt today.
I now turn from an exposition of major historical transformations in the professional
practice of al-raqs al-baladi in Egypt in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century to
an examination of how that period affected the professional and non-professional practice of
baladi dancing in Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century.
Dance in Post-colonial Egypt: Dance as Folklore
In 1952 a group of Egyptian soldiers known as “the free officers” overthrew the Egyptian
monarchy and took over power in the country. The political and economic development of
Egypt for the following twenty years is characterized by “state-guided, state-dominated
economic growth,” as well as the adoption of socialist ideas and principles (Waterbury 1989, 57).
Under the presidency of Gamal Abd el-Nasser (1953-1970), the socioeconomic climate in Egypt
was marked by a receding foreign presence in Egypt, the dissolution of the Egyptian bourgeois
class under state socialism, and growing state support of culture and entertainment as a
harbinger of a strong Arab national identity (Danielson 1997, 173). It was this political climate
that facilitated the emergence of the local dance, for the first time, as an artistic expression of
Egyptian culture.
In the late 1950s, an Egyptian college graduate of affluent and established family
background organized the first dance troupe in modern Egyptian history that included young
men and women, all college graduates of middle class background. According to Mahmoud Rida
(1968), among the greatest obstacles that were faced in establishing a folkloric dance troupe (firqa
l’il-funun al-sha’biyya) were the associations that the very word dance (raqs) had acquired in Egypt
The playing of black and white Egyptian movies on Egyptian television channels has rendered its characters
public icons that Egyptians are familiarized with at a very early age.
25
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by the mid to late 1960s. To transform popular connotations of the word “dance,” which by
then had inherited blanket associations with “hazz al-wist wa hazz al-batn” (the shaking of waists
and bellies)26 and little more, in Cairo’s nightclubs and cabarets was Rida’s ultimate goal (1968,
11). Although Rida’s troupe was first received with apathy on the part of Egyptian officials, the
recognition it earned after performing in Moscow in 1957 permitted its full-fledged endorsement
by the Egyptian state (Rida 1968, 19).
A choreographed narrative performance enacted by several male and female dancers,
Rida’s choreographies were largely inspired by the different “techniques du corps” being
observed throughout Egypt, such as the bodily movements of the traditional vendor of ‘irq sus
(chilled anise drink), the peasant plowing the land or the peasant girl carrying the ballas (the
traditional water jugs made of mud) and depicted larger motifs of the nationalist project. Nearly
all of the choreographies performed by the Rida Troupe included elements of al-raqs al-baladi,
most notably those performed by Rida’s sister-in-law, Farida Fahmy. In contrast to the cabaret
style raqs baladi en vogue at the time, which accentuated the shaking of the upper torso and was
typically performed in the two-piece costume, the choreographies of Rida softened and stiffened
the shakes, stressed movement in space and the dancer’s use of the legs, and were performed in
the traditional garments worn by provincial and urban Egyptian women.27 Rida’s folkloric
rendition of local dance was thus significant for its introduction of al-raqs al-baladi to the general
Egyptian public in theatres and entertainment venues frequented by families, and for its ability to
inspire local appreciation of dance as an aspect of Egypt’s artistic heritage (Rida 1968).
On the other hand and around the same time, dance performances in the nightclubs of
the downtown area were no longer the places one sought out for a “good” dance performance.
Gradually, nightclubs and so-called cabarets were opening throughout the city, especially in fivestar hotels and in the area around al-Haram street28 where dancing took place. Some of these
nightclubs still retained the tradition of professional performances of al-raqs al-baladi, but a
significant number had already begun to offer live music entertainment by European bands.
Morroe Berger (1961), one of the earliest researchers of al-raqs al-baladi, noted that “oldfashioned local color has become so scarce in Cairo…that a new cabaret successfully cultivates it
as folklore for sophisticates, who want to go slumming in tented, sumptuous Eastern style in the
desert just beyond the pyramids” (Berger 1961, 36). Increased inspection of dance performances
A common derogatory description of baladi dance among Egyptians is that stresses the mere shaking of the body.
Adoption of ordinary Egyptian women garments does not imply that those completely covered the body. Farida
Fahmy appeared in galabiyyas with side slits reaching mid thigh and of semi-transparent fiber (see illustration in Rida
1968).
28 Al-Haram Street which connects the Pyramids to the city was established by Khedive Ismail in the 1860s for the
occasion of the opening of the Suez Canal.
26
27
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in the second half of the twentieth century, moreover, required dancers to cover their midriff
(often with a transparent material) and, beginning in 1971, aspiring professional dancers were
obligated to follow a set of procedures to obtain the license to work as professional dancers in
Egypt from Al-Musannafat.29 The only difference between the registration process followed by
professional dancers and that followed by any employee in Egypt for most of the twentieth
century was that professional dancers were required to prove a clean record with the vice squad
before a performance license could be issued.30
The most consistent sites for professional performances of al-raqs al-baladi throughout
the twentieth century remained wedding celebrations. While the ceremonies that typically merit a
dance performance have varied by social class in Egyptian society over time, the zaffa, or the
procession of the bride to the groom, has widely and consistently been celebrated with dance
performance in Egypt. Families historically have competed over which ‘alma31 to hire the best
and most coveted lead dancer for the zaffa of a family member. When the middle classes started
holding their wedding celebrations in hotels or public halls in the 1950s and through the end of
the twentieth century, a dance performance by a hired dancer including the zaffa remained a
central feature. In fact most middle class weddings during this period featured live bands that
played Western music as an accompanying entertainment feature, which permitted guests to
dance during the celebrations.
Neoliberalism and Ascent of ‘Popular’ Culture
Following the death of Abd el-Nasser and the end of decades of armed conflict with Israel in
1973, the Egyptian state under Mohamed Anwar el-Sadat (1970-1981) slowly abandoned its
socialist orientation and paved the way for a full liberalization of Egypt’s economy. Egypt’s
massive political and economic transformation under Sadat and later under Mubarak over the
span of about twenty-five years held crucial consequences for the social and cultural life of
Egypt. The state’s enforcement of economic liberalization policies increased class disparities in
Egypt, brought about significant cuts in state spending on public services and triggered waves of
labor migration from Egypt to oil-rich Arab countries following the 1970s oil boom.
These transformations broke down the homogenous social structure that had been
propagated under Abd el-Nasser and gave rise to new communities defined by wealth and
The department for censorship and supervision of theatres, films, music, and dance affiliated to the Ministry of
Culture.
30 Dancers, however, are not syndicated and are required to carry their papers (musannafat) whenever they perform as
opposed to musicians, for instance, who obtain an identity card from their respective syndicates.
31 By the mid-twentieth century the word used was raqisa, now literally meaning “dancer.”
29
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economic practices that, in turn, began to express themselves socially through different lifestyles
and different public demonstrations of culture. The middle and working classes’ widespread
disillusionment with state policies, in combination with the regime’s mismanagement of the
public sector and the rapid upward mobility of an Egyptian nouveau riche founded upon the
nation’s new relations in international trade, served to popularize various forms of opposition to
mainstream politics and policy, most notably the rise of political Islam.
It was during this period that the Muhammad Ali Street artists’ community started to
slowly lose its control over Cairo’s entertainment industry as a rising demand for professional
dance and other forms of entertainment brought on by the new economy raised dancers’ wages
and thus presented an alternative venue for lucrative work for young women who did not care to
comply with the communal values that defined the Muhammad Ali Street dancers (Van
Nieuwkerk 1998, 55-60). The star performers of this period were thus neither brought up at the
hand of an usta (master dancer), nor affiliated to a larger community of artists as more
traditionally trained dancers had been. In fact, like their predecessors most of Egypt’s star
performers, including Suheir Zaki, Fifi Abdou, Nagwa Fouad32 and later Lucy, were migrants to
Cairo from the provinces.
Though inspired by famous classical dancers such as Tahia Carioca and Samia Gamal,
the new generation of star nightclub and wedding performers introduced significant changes to
the performance style of baladi that can be attributed to the sha’bi 33 musical genre, which
achieved an unprecedented popularity in the 1970s. Some of the new generation dancers,
particularly Nagwa Fouad and Suheir Zaki, established artistic links to the classical musical
tradition of the twentieth century by performing to the music of Um Kulthum and Mohamed
Abd el-Wahab.34 Yet it was the duet performances between dancers from this generation and
the renowned sha’bi singer Ahmed ‘Adawiya35 which ushered in a new performative style that
reflected the culture and aesthetics of the urban poor. The duet style of performance moved the
Nagwa Fouad is a Palestinian refugee in Egypt.
The word sha’bi indicates “popular culture”. In music, it refers to the musical genre that evolved in the 1960s that
incorporated traditional music from Upper Egypt into an urban musical genre that integrated newly-introduced
instruments to local music such as the accordion and the saxophone. The lyrics of sha’bi music are essentially
reflective of the difficult conditions of the working classes in Egypt.
34 In 1976 the legendary Egyptian composer, Mohamed Abd el-Wahab composed a piece called Amar Arba’tashar
(Full Moon) specifically for Nagwa Fouad.
35 Ahmed Adawiya is a native of Muhammad Ali Street. In the 1970s, he was the first native member of this
community to become an Egyptian pop star. His lyrics evoked the sentiments of Cairo’s working classes in the
1970s and 80s. These were mostly presented in working class vernacular that expressed humorous criticism of the
establishment and of the conditions of working class lovers. As opposed to the classical rhythm of popular music at
the time, the sha’bi/baladi music was upbeat and fast.
32
33
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popular baladi style of performance further away from the folkloric style that had been
performed by the educated and middle class dancers of the Rida Folkloric Troupe, and
reinscribed baladi in the social imaginary as the local dance form of the ‘unsophisticated’ lower
middle and working classes of Cairo.
It can be argued that the development of al-raqs al-baladi in the 1970s was a more baladi
aesthetic form (representative of the local culture) than the dance style that developed in the
early twentieth century. As opposed to the high heeled and Hollywood costumed performances
of the early twentieth century, later dancers like Fifi ‘Abdou popularized a performance style that
was more reflective of local working class norms. ‘Abdou’s classic performance in which she
simulates a traditional coffee shop owner dressed in male galabiyya36 and smoking the water pipe
demonstrate a more popularized style that allowed for an integration of certain movements more
associated with male dancers, such as foot stomps and dancing with a stick.37 38
Al-Raqs al-Baladi Today: Between Popularization and Globalization
The dance performances one finds in the decaying nightclubs of downtown Cairo today are no
longer the “good” dance performances one might imagine finding in the heart of Egypt’s urban
center. The limited programs offered in these places, between the hours of midnight and dawn,
consist of 30 to 60 minute dance performances (called nimar)39 that are performed by different
dancers and typically accompanied by a male singer and a small Oriental ensemble of musicians.
The clientele is usually lower-middle and working class men and sometimes a few women who
accompany them. A central feature of professional al-raqs al-baladi performances is the
performer’s acceptance of money notes40 during the performance41, as male guests will approach
The galabiyya is the name for the traditional gown worn by men and women in Egypt.
Some Western dancers identify baladi as that genre of belly dance that is performed to sha’bi music while identify
oriental dance (sharqi) as the performance style that developed in early twentieth century cabarets.
38 The mimicking of body movements and gestures typically associated with the working classes of Cairo continuous
to be observed among non-professional performers of al-raqs al-baladi in Egypt. This is particularly evident when
sha’bi music is played, as opposed to the music that is popular among the middle and upper classes (such as the
music of Amr Diab).
39 Single nimra (literally, “number”), the word used to indicate a short performance by one dancer followed by
another. The dancer thus performs a nimra in one nightclub and hurries to perform another nimra in another
nightclub.
40 The money notes are commonly referred to as nuqta, or nu’ta in Egyptian dialect.
41 Tanqeet (tan’eet in Egyptian colloquial) – as it takes place during wedding celebrations- is a form of gift giving by the
donor to the families of bride and groom. Tanqit is not particular to professional dancers and the tradition is fairly
established in the wedding celebrations of the working classes, where guests tip performers hired for the
entertainment of the celebration.
36
37
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the dancer and scatter money bills over her head.42 In most nightclubs today, the portion of
stage earnings allotted to the dancer is pre-arranged between dancers and nightclub managers.
As soon as the money has dropped to the floor, a male worker in the nightclub collects it and
inserts the notes into a money-box. The singer or dancer usually acknowledges the giver by
name, occupation and area of residence in the microphone.43 Occasionally the guest will go on
stage and dance with the dancer for a song or less.
The lack of variety in the performance styles one finds in downtown nightclubs today
reflects the complete abandonment of these places by aspiring new dance artists. Dancers
perform in the “by-now-traditional” badla, a tight and revealing traditional galabiya, or some
variation of two-piece costumes.44 Next to the largely alcohol-free beverage menu offered in
restaurants and cafes in Egypt, nightclubs principally offer alcoholic beverages. Other spaces
with regular professional dance performances that cater to a more affluent clientele—largely
tourists from Gulf Arab countries—can be found in hotels all over Egypt, as well as in the
floating boats on the Nile. The area surrounding al-Haram Street continues to house a number
of nightclubs with roughly the same programs as those found in downtown nightclubs, though
they are generally thought to be of a higher quality.
The local dance culture of Egypt also underwent significant transformations at the turn
of the twenty-first century as a result of its growing popularity among Western women.
Professional dancers of non-Egyptian origin have replaced Egyptian dancers in a significant
number of entertainment venues, particularly in the five-star hotels and expensive restaurants of
Cairo and in the touristic resorts of the Red Sea area.45 Since 2000, Egypt has started hosting a
competitive twice-annual oriental dance festival that is organized by two retired dancers.46 The
festivals offer an important venue for the sale of dance paraphernalia and Egyptian producers of
dance costumes thus flock to these events to establish contacts with foreign dancers and display
their goods. Like the private classes offered by professional dancers, however, these festivals
42Sometimes,
the money is given to a waiter in the nightclub who throws it on the dancer instead. In downtown
nightclubs, these are usually a pile of five-pound notes.
43 This is done by calling: “tahiyya li XYZ,” and mentioning his occupation and neighborhood of residence. As a sign
of generosity and an expression of the guest’s wealth and prestige, the ritual usually conceals competition among
different male guests. It is common for guests to perform the nu’ta more than once during an evening.
44 Some examples include, hot shorts and bikini top or pants with long slits reaching the mid thighs and bikini top.
45 In 2003, the Ministry of Manpower issued a law that forbade foreign dancers from performing in Egypt. The
prohibition was shortly overturned in 2005. However, foreign dancers continue to experience difficulty acquiring
legal documents that permit their performances in Cairo.
46 Rakia Hassan and ‘Aida Nour.
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mainly target foreign dancers, as high fees for registration for festivals and private classes often
preclude the majority of aspiring Egyptian dancers from participation.47
Al-Raqs al-Baladi and the Limits of the “Modesty Code”
In his obituary of Tahia Carioca, a celebrated Egyptian dancer, Edward Said (1999) noted that alraqs al-baladi is “performed inside an Arab and Islamic setting, but…quite at odds, even in
constant sort of tension with it” (Said 1999). This tension that Said and many observers of al-raqs
al-baladi rightfully identify takes root in the seeming incongruity between the stylization of the
female body as it is performed in al-raqs al-baladi and the cultural values of haya’, commonly
translated as sexual modesty, which many argue affects the everyday comportment of women in
Egypt.
As a patterned system of movement that accentuates the attractiveness of the female
body and yet is enjoyed and performed widely by different segments of Egyptian society, al-raqs
al-baladi is sometimes identified as a diversion from haya’ as it is typically outlined by scholars of
femininity in the Middle East (Antoun 1968; Abu-Zahra 1970; Hoffman-Ladd 1986; Abu
Lughod 1986; Mahmood 2005). The colorfully ornamented and often revealing outfit worn by
professional dancers during performances is the most immediate and perhaps most often
misconstrued signal to observers that the so-called modesty code is being contravened. This one
component of the dance often becomes a fixation for those who would point out that the
costume of al-raqs al-baladi contradicts standard expressions of gender and sexuality in Egypt and
the Middle East, and the essentialized understandings of femininity that are deduced thereof.
Yet to assume, as Said has done, that this tension takes root somewhere between the
dance itself and the cultural space in which it thrives is to suggest that dance is somehow
independent of culture, that al-raqs al-baladi is a product of a different culture or practice beyond
the “Arab Islamic [social] setting” in which it grew and continues to be avidly practiced. On the
contrary, this article attempts to lay down the historical trajectory of the practice of al-raqs albaladi in Egypt in an effort to advance an understanding of the dance as an ongoing exchange
with culture, and as a socially mediated performance where the rules governing normative
comportment are suspended.
Though amateur dancers are often the customers of these services offered by Egyptian dancers, the dance culture
of Egypt largely conceives of these activities as not befitting women who are not interested in becoming
professional dancers. For instance, during my fieldwork in Luxor, the musicians of the live band that accompanied
the workshop suspected every dancer to be a professional. My personal affiliation to one of them aroused “the
suspicion” of the male musicians that I am a professional dancer myself.
47
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In his reflections on the intersections of space and time in the definition of culture,
Homi Bhabha (1994) stresses the need “to think beyond narratives of originary and initial
subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation
of cultural differences” (Bhabha 1994, 2). The history I have proposed for al-raqs al-baladi is one
such narrative. Because the local dance style of Egypt is typically identified as an Oriental (as
opposed to an Occidental) dance style in the majority of Orientalist literature and even in
contemporary scholarship on the subject, I have argued that the discursive formation of al-raqs
al-baladi in Egyptian society throughout the twentieth century has been premised upon a
consideration of those episodes in modern Egyptian history when cultural and sociocultural
differences have been articulated.
The marginalization of the professional dancer in Egypt resulting from regular diffusion
of cultural identification, social categorization and professional regulation in part from the
colonial experience and in part from the national modernization project, has failed to unseat her
as an important feminine archetype, particularly among lower middle and working class women
that emulate various performance styles of the dance. Instead, the state’s attempts to
marginalize the professional dancer have produced her as a betwixt and between figure in
Egypt's modernity project: one that personifies the boundary between proper (modern) and
improper (un-modernized) feminine comportment. I have tried to show, however, that
formulations of normative behavior in Egyptian society (as in any other society) are indefinite, as
the parameters distinguishing proper from improper feminine comportment are continuously
shaped and reshaped by wider sociocultural forces. As it pertains to al-raqs al-baladi today, public
criticism tends to fixate on the costume, whereas in the mid-twentieth century it fixated on the
practice of fath, or drinking and socializing with patrons after a performance, and, earlier in the
mid-nineteenth century, on dancing in the streets. Yet no matter how much al-raqs al-baladi has
changed over the past two centuries, and regardless of whether the dancer is referred to as
ghaziyya, ‘alma, artiste, ra’asa, or fanana, the liminal positioning of this cultural form remains
constant even as what the dance itself becomes capable of expressing about Egyptian culture
continues to evolve within the confines of those spaces in which the codes of modernity remain
blurred.
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“Ana Gay”: Coming to Terms with Male
Gayness in Egypt
1
by Oumnia Abaza
Through a broad set of in-depth interviews conducted with twenty self identifying gay males
living in Cairo, this research helps piece together a more contextualized picture of the process by
which gayness is recognized and made socially recognizable among Egyptian males today. This
work conceptualizes gayness as a mode of psychosocial performativity through which the
positionality of a same sex preference is expressed within the context of a clearly defined and
routinely enforced heterosexual norm. While investigating perceptions of self, family, marriage
and gay community among self identifying gay males, this work highlights the role information
technology (IT) plays in seeking out opportunities for same sex intercourse and in formulating a
This essay is a revised excerpt from O. Abaza, “Ana Gay”: Coming to Terms with Male Homosexuality in Egypt”
M.A. Thesis, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology and Egyptology, American University in Cairo,
Egypt. (2010)
1
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performance of gayness which challenges some of Egypt’s gender and sexuality codes while
remaining observant of others. The central role of IT is underscored here to call attention to the
inseparability of gay performativity in Egypt and various notions of modernity, particularly those
taken up by the Egyptian state in its modernity project.
In approaching gayness as performance of the subjective positionality that a same sex
preference takes on in an environment of state enforced heterosexual and heteronormative
family life, the conceptual framing of this work is informed by Judith Butler’s theory of gender
performativity (1988) and Michel Foucault’s work on mechanisms of bio-power and processes
of subjection and self subjection, most aptly The History of Sexuality (1976). Foucault’s argument
that sexuality codes are made useful mechanisms of social control and surveillance not only
through top down processes of subjection enacted by states, for example, but also through
bottom up processes that cause sexuality codes to become internalized is significant in reviewing
the respondent narratives collected for this work, as respondents clearly and consistently
perceived a threat not only in their real or imagined confrontations with the Egyptian state, but
also in being recognized for a same sex preference by family and friends.
The main purpose of this research is to help reorient the existing literature around
gayness and same sex practice in the Middle East away from diagnostic medico-juridical
treatments, all of which equate same sex practice with mental illness, criminality and spiritual
perversion, and further toward a social construct paradigm. This work approaches the reluctance
of Egyptian and Arab sociologists to write about gayness and same sex practice as one rooted in
social and political norms. As many of the following respondent narratives suggest, the medicojuridical diagnostics advanced by political, religious and social institutions in Cairo have been
deeply internalized in the Egyptian setting, and negative popular views on gayness as a legal,
social and spiritual category have influenced this group of young males. The following narratives
illustrate how these respondents navigate and negotiate sexual, social and spiritual codes while
trying to balance varying degrees of compliance with social norms with the desire to formulate,
embody and perform gayness.
Findings
A qualitative research method has been used in this study to emphasize narrative perceptions of
self, personal identity and notions of difference among respondents. I conducted in-depth semistructured interviews with 20 middle and upper middle class males living in Cairo who self
identify as gay, all aged 21 to 31 years old. The selected age group was preferable for capturing
the perceptions of young adults who constitute the first internet generation. My selection criteria
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were based largely on respondents’ accessibility and willingness to participate candidly. All
interviews for this work have been performed in the Arabic language and the author has
conducted all translations to English.
Eight out of 20 of respondents (40%) were persons known to the author from gay
parties, gatherings or regular outings, while 20% of respondents (4 of 20) had not been well
acquainted with the author prior to the interviews. The remaining 40% (8 of 20) were new
acquaintances made possible by research networking. Both stratified and snowball samplings
have been used for this study. An informant helped to locate middle class respondents and
attended most of the interviews at the request of respondents. An average of three hours was
spent with each respondent, with some interviews lasting up to six hours and involving followup telephone inquiries. Some respondents expressed anxiety about being recognizable from the
details they had provided, thus highly sensitive information has been removed from the data set
presented here.
Observation was also used as a primary method for data collection during this research,
as it facilitated trust building with respondents over the course of two years of research. Due to
respondents’ general preference to maintain a low visibility and the many casual encounters I
held with my respondents during the course of this research, accuracy in representation of the
sample used and the data collected is less reliable in quantitative measures than in narrative
format. For that reason, narratives have been given priority in this data set. Approximations of
the size of Cairo’s gay cohort would have depended upon unreliable measures such as the
number of Egyptian subscribers on gay websites like Manjam2, and it cannot be assumed that all
subscribers to gay websites self identify as gay. Moreover, respondents for this research
indicated a high level of suspicion regarding gay website subscribers, as gay websites are often
sites for entrapment and observation by government agents. Confidentiality of identity was
assured to all respondents and no information provided here has been done so without their
oral consent.
Recognition of the Self as Gay 3
7 of 20 (35%) said they remembered being attracted to same sex schoolmates at a young age
The website www.manjam.com is a popular gay site with approximately 11,500 Egyptian users in May 2009,
including 4,500 from Cairo and the rest from various other Egyptian governorates.
3 Two out of 20 (10%) respondents associated their recognition of gayness with episodes of sexual molestation
during childhood. At the request of respondents, those narratives have been omitted from this work.
2
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I discovered I was gay when I was 5 years old. I had feelings toward my friends in school (Walid)
2 of 20 (10%) claimed to be attracted to men in general
When I was a kid I discovered that I was always fantasizing about men, but always older men
(Karim)
2 of 20 (10%) claimed to have realized gayness during fantasies about male actors
I was 3 years old when I felt that I was gay. I used to like an actor called Hassan Youssef and
specially the scenes in which he used to be naked (Haitham)
3 of 20 (15%) claimed to have realized gayness while watching pornography
I was in the 3rd grade when I saw my first porn with straight people. My [male] friends in the bus
used to play with each other and I used to watch them. I actually enjoyed watching them touching
each other (Mostafa)
4 out of 20 (25%) self identified as gay after having “soft sex”4 with male friends and/or family
I was 6 years old when I first felt that I was gay. My cousin used to touch me and I used to like it a
lot. I used to always wait for him to touch me. He was…12 years old (Nagy)
I was 8 years old the first time I had sex with my cousin who was younger than me but soft sex I
mean. I liked it a lot. I was not molested; we did it with consent (Khaled)
First Same Sex Intercourse and Sexual Partner
A majority of respondents claimed to have had their first same sex intercourse with male
partners who considered themselves “straight” (i.e. not gay) and who, in some cases, were
married to women at the time of intercourse or became married to women shortly after the
intercourse. More than half of respondents (60%) had their first sexual intercourse with other
men while in their teens, with the median age of first sexual encounter at 16.6 years of age.5
8 of 20 (45%) had first same sex intercourse with male family members6
So-called “soft sex” refers to sexual acts not including intercourse.
Five out of 20 (25%) respondents had first same sex intercourse while between the ages of 20 and 25, while 3 of
20 (15%) had first same sex intercourse while between the ages of 8 and 12.
6 Two respondents claimed to have first intercourse with male cousins, one with an uncle and one with a brother.
4
5
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My first sexual experience was with my cousin who is one year older than me. I was 12 years old.
We used to have soft sex at the beginning and then we started having full sexual intercourse later
on. We had sex for a couple of months (Ahmed)
My first sexual encounter was when I was 13 years old and this was with my uncle. I approached
him. He was in his early twenties. We used to have sex on a regular basis. He was my fuck buddy
for about five years. I used to have oral sex with him but he used to tell me that what we were doing
was wrong (Mourad)
5 of 20 (25%) had first same sex intercourse with male friends
My first sexual experience was with my best friend. We were once sitting together at his place and
we kissed. Then we did not talk to each other for about two months. Then we met again and we had
sex. We stayed together for six years (Hesham)
7 of 20 (35%) had first same sex intercourse with men identified over internet7
My first sexual experience was when I was 16. And this was with someone I met through the
Internet [through sharing windows]. I was excited at the idea of having sex for the first time but I
felt cheap afterwards and thought that I should not have slept with him, maybe because I was a
teenager, I don’t know…(Ramy)
My first sexual experience was when I was 22. And it was through a website called gayegypt.com.
It was horrible; he was old, end of his thirties and married. We had sex at his place (Amine)
My first experience was not great. I did not like the guy. I met him through Internet. He gave me
an appointment in the street. I wanted to know what “having sex” means. I did not like the guy
because he said that he was bisexual. We only had sex once; He did not want to see me again
(Mostafa)
Sexual Relations and Self Recognition
Many respondents related their ability to engage in sex and to associate with other men,
particularly with other self identifying gay men, with higher self-confidence and healthier body
image. For many of them, the first same sex experience opened up new opportunities and
networks of gay friends and sexual partners through internet or mutual friends.
Four of my respondents claimed to have their first same sex intercourse with “random strangers” they had met
over the internet.
7
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I’m feeling much better psychologically since I started dating guys. Before having sex I was not as
self-confident as now. I believe that the sexual experiences matter and that these have an impact on
the personality of the person (Ali)
Since I started having sex with men I am happier because at least I receive compliments. Men
appreciate me and admire me for my beauty which is vey important for me as I am not too self
confident about my physical aspect. All this to tell you that my self-confidence has been increasing
since I started to mingle with other gays (Nizar)
Self Perceptions of Gayness
18 out of 20 (90%) respondents perceived gayness as normal, even respondents who had not yet
come “out” to family and friends.
I’m very self-satisfied especially, after my parents knew that I was gay at the beginning of this year. I
perceive myself as normal, as I have my life, my interests and my friends. Being gay did not enable
me to have an active social life (Tamer)
I perceive myself as someone normal and special. I’m talented in art and only few people are
talented. I have never felt that I was abnormal (Karim)
Many respondents viewed gayness as a small part of their self identity, and most considered it a
private matter first and foremost.
Being gay is only a small part of me. I have a career, future and present plans like anyone has, but I
am different in my sexuality. I do not perceive my homosexuality as something abnormal, but rather
as a normal thing (Ali)
For me being gay has a both negative and positive side. I personally always look at the bright side. I
experience the straight life and the gay life as well. It’s like being able to see an object from different
angles. The straight people do only see one side of the coin. I think I understand life better than
straight people. Most of the gays can see things [about] you as a straight person cannot see. We gays
are much more sensitive than straight people. We can solve problems better than straight people
(Mostafa)
Many rejected associations between gayness and disease, and few respondents perceived much
difference between themselves and their “straight” peers beyond sexual preference.
I love my job very much and I love my friends and family…. I have all kinds of contradictions and
I feel its okay because I am a human being who likes men. I don’t wake up in the morning and say
I’m gay. I am normal. I don’t have a disease or an abnormality. I am just like anybody else and
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everyone has his or her own issues. Homosexuality is not one of my issues. I have other issues in life
such as feeling lonely sometimes. I have insecurities as well (Amine)
Only two respondents (10%) indicated negative self perceptions as a result of gay preference.
I am not a happy person because my parents knew about my homosexuality and since then they
became more conservative and strict with me. I lie to them constantly so that I can go out and meet
my gay friends. I am a specialist in lying and I feel really bad about myself not telling them the truth
(Samy)
I perceive myself as someone doing something that is considered as a sin—having sex with another
man, and this makes me feel bad about myself. I always have a sense of guilt when I go home and
see my parents after I had sex with a man (Hassan)
Many considered sexual preference a private matter, and a large majority of respondents said
they did not feel that they were living “in the closet.”
I feel good about myself even though I have to hide my sexual preference to my family. I don’t see a
reason why I should come out because it is very personal even if I was straight (Karim)
I don’t have a need to publicly announce my sexual interests; it is like talking about being righthanded or having brown eyes…it is apparent when people interact with me or when I talk about my
life to them (Youssef)
I don’t live in the closet, as the people I care about know that I’m gay and…I never pretended to be
straight. I don’t sit with people and…[say], “I am attracted to this girl,” but at the same time I
don’t broadcast being gay because even if I was straight I would not share my sexual experience with
anyone, and when I am in a relationship with a guy…my close friends who know that I am gay
don’t know for months that I am with someone. If someone comes and asks me whether I’m gay or
not, I would not lie because I don’t like to lie! I think it’s a big moral issue but at the same time I
don’t have to tell them the truth. I can get out of answering the question but most of the time I do
answer or give a hint (Amine)
I don’t feel I am in the closet because I have friends to talk to but I am not out to the straight world
and I have no reason to get out from the closet. I feel insecure because I am homosexual. I can chat
with someone who turns out to be from the police. I am normal and I just like guys! (Nagy)
The closet is only at home. I have only one straight friend who knows that I am gay. I tell anyone
who asks me whether I am gay or straight that I am gay, I don’t hide my sexual preference
anymore. I discovered lately that I really do not care. What can happen to me if anyone discovered? I
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figured out that it was all in my mind. And now I meet my gay friends and everything is fine. I feel
that I am wasting my time caring about the others when I don’t think that they really care about me
and about the way I feel (Taher)
Leading a Double Life
Many respondents talked about the effort it required to hide gayness, and all claimed to be
leading a double life. Even those who had come “out” to families and friends felt forced to
perform “straight” in front of family and friends or school and work colleagues, and “gay” with
gay friends only.
I am leading two different lives, but I’m mostly straight acting. When I am among girls, I act
straight so that no one knows that I am gay. All of my friends think that I am different than the
others, but no one suspects that I am gay (Samy)
I live two different lives. When I meet my gay friends, I talk freely about my desires. With my
straight friends and family, I’m still myself but I hide my needs or sexual preference for men
(Ahmed)
I am leading a double life. None of my straight friends know about the fact that I am gay. So far,
the fact that they don’t know doesn’t cause me any problem. But I prefer to hang out with my gay
friends, as I feel more comfortable. I still do have a sense of guilt religiously because it is a sin
punishable by God and socially because people around me have a very negative conception of gayness
(Nizar)
Many respondents said they tended to separate groups of friends, and most felt more
comfortable with gay friends since they could speak more freely about feelings, emotions and
desires without being judged.
None of my family members and among my colleagues at work know that I’m gay. My straight
friends know but only girls. My colleagues at work and university, as well as all of my straight other
friends, know that I am different, but in a good way (Amr)
The country here does not give me the chance to live the life I want. I feel that I am constantly under
pressure and that I am going to get arrested one day by the police. I don’t want to be judged for my
sexual preference. I want to live my sexuality freely and not have to pretend that I am straight the
whole time so that people do not look at me in a bad way. I would love it if there were gay bars and
gay clubs in which all gays can get together (Taher)
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Dating Women
12 out of 20 (60%) respondents claimed to have never dated a woman, and many said they were
“disgusted” by the female body and genitals while very much attracted to the male body.
8 out of 20 (40%) respondents claimed to have dated a woman at some point, with the majority
claiming that no sexual intercourse occurred in those relationships.
At the time of these interviews, 2 respondents were engaged to women (one for a year, the other
for three months); reportedly neither had ever touched or even kissed his fiancée. Both
indicated a strong desire to get out of the engagements, which had been arranged by their
mothers.
I dated a girl for one year and a half and I told her about my preference for men. She was American
and we had sex once. But it did not work at all. I am not into having sex with girls; I don’t enjoy
it. The difference is in the body muscles. The woman is too soft and is too easy to break
psychologically. I can make a woman cry easily. Women are not interesting. Men are more
intelligent and they have more skills in socializing. Because we are living in a conservative society it
is not easy to take a girl out whereas with a guy it’s easier. The weakness of women turns me off
(Khaled)
Emotionally I felt ok with the girl I dated but physically I was not attracted at all. I am not
interested sexually in women. Actually, a woman who is naked disgusts me; it does not turn me on.
I only like fit men and not [just] any man (Walid)
Marriage and Family
Marriage is widely viewed as the most important event in life in Arab societies. It serves as a rite
of passage into adulthood and facilitates personal and marital independence, the respect of the
community and the fulfillment of several important markers of gender propriety as it is locally
defined. As Homa Hoodfar (1997) has noted, “In…Egypt generally, like most other parts of the
Muslim world, marriage is the only acceptable context for sexual activity and parenthood and
provides the primary framework for the expression of masculinity and femininity and the
fulfillment of gender roles” (Hoodfar 1997, 52).
3 respondents expressed plans to enter heterosexual marriages despite a sexual preference for
men.
I’m afraid of ending up alone. I love babies and I might get married. I might tell my wife that I’m
gay but I’ll never marry a lesbian. If I ever get married I will keep my close friends but I will not
meet other men. I will survive because life is all about priorities. Kids are very important. I will be
masturbating because I know that sexually I will not be satisfied. I will be happy to have kids
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though. However, I will only take this step when I’ll have it with men, as I would not like to betray
my wife (Hesham)
12 out of 20 (60%) respondents noted a strong preference not to get married despite significant
pressure from families to do so. Reasons for not wanting to marry varied from money concerns
to dislike for responsibility and general discomfort with the idea of being intimate with
unfamiliar women. Fear of “ending up alone” was a common anxiety expressed by respondents
with regard to the marriage and children question.
I’m not intending to get married because I don’t like responsibilities. I will only get married for the
idea of not ending up alone. I never had a girl friend as a lover. And I don’t know if I ever will
(Karim)
My mum doesn’t stop talking to me about marriage. She has high expectations of me, as she does
not like my sister and brother-in-law. I don’t want to get married because I’m too busy and
unstable. I move a lot. I would love to have an everlasting relationship with a guy. I thought of
adoption before because I love kids. My family is conservative. They don’t see a reason why I’m not
married. They don’t stop telling me you have your job and your career so what are you waiting for?
(Amine)
‘When are you going to get married?’ Is a question that my family does not stop asking me. They
introduced me to several potential brides. I saw two brides before and, thank God, they both had
defects. I don’t want to get married but my family is stressing me out. I don’t like responsibility; I
am very selfish. I don’t want to waste my money on my kids. I would rather spend it on myself
(Nagy)
3 out of 20 (15%) said that they would prefer to marry and raise a family with a male partner if
society would allow it. All of these respondents had either spent time outside of Egypt or had
held significant relationships with foreign male partners.
Gay people can raise children as good as straight people. I witnessed this fact with two gays who had
a baby. But I did not like it because I am not used to it. I would rather have a dog than a baby
because at least the dog will always depend on me. It’s not like a child. A child could leave you at
any moment (Walid)
I believe that two men can have a healthy and long relationship. To me, marriage with a man is
important, as it is another stage of being equal. It is more about equality. I don’t need to feel that I
am a second [class] citizen. Straight people are allowed to get married and to get accepted. He can be
in my will and I can be in his will. And of course by equality I do not want people to judge me
simply because I like men (Mourad)
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If I ever get married I would want to get married to a man. I don’t want to have children. I don’t
want to get distracted from the man I love by having children. Children take too much energy and
efforts! (Taher)
I want to marry a guy and adopt children; I love children a lot. I want to give back to my
community. I want to do charity in Egypt and give back to Egypt what Egypt gave me. I would
ideally like to adopt a boy and a girl. I will teach them how to be strong and to accept differences in
people (Khaled)
Respondents who expressed a desire not to marry women said they had no attraction to the
female body or that they felt a desire to be honest and fair about their real sexual preference and
lifestyle choice.
I do love kids but I am not going to get married. I don’t like women and I tried it with women but I
had no erection whatsoever. I can see beauty and I sometimes think that some girls are very pretty
but they don’t move anything in me (Fares)
Regarding children, 20% (4 out of 20) respondents said they would like to marry women in
order to have children to keep them company and take care of them when they grow older.
These respondents talked more often about religion than the others. They also noted a disbelief
in long lasting relationships between two men. All 4 said they would cut off relations with the
gay community and try to lead a straight life at the time of marriage, even despite its challenges.
My mother wants me to get married. I don’t want to have kids and I don’t like children. I don’t
want to get married. I don’t want to have familial commitment. Marriage is a choice and I choose to
not get married at all. It’s a risk I’m taking (Ali)
I am going out with both a man and a girl at the same time because I really want to change. I want
to get married and to have kids. I believe that family and marriage are very important institutions
in the society. I am convinced that when I will grow older I will need something or someone to live for
(Samy)
The Role of Social Media
Respondents cited the internet as the most regular media forum where gay and not gay men can
meet other men and seek out opportunities for same sex encounters in Egypt. Internet and
other social media such as mobile phones facilitates gay networking among individuals and
groups and becomes an important medium for formulating what gay means in the local
environment.
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Thank god that internet exists; since I started using it I understood that I was not alone. I would
have killed myself since a very long time… The turning point in my life was when I added this guy
on MSN8 and he told me from where are you from? “Jar” or “Dar”? I said that I was from Cairo
but he was talking about which websites I am from. So he sent me both websites. I created two
profiles on the two websites...Then I started looking for “gays” who looked like my ex-boyfriend. He
was blond with blue eyes. So I started dating foreigners. I used to meet them through the internet
(Samy)
18 out of 20 respondents described their internet use as highly active, with many users gaining
access to gay explicit content, social networks and opportunities for sex online. Many
respondents noted feelings of isolation before internet access had been secured, and for many
the discovery of gay websites served as a critical turning point in ‘becoming gay.’ Gay
pornography, gay chat rooms and informational websites helped respondents to access
information and narratives from gay communities around the world allowed respondents to
discover positive expressions and experiences of other self identifying gays.
I used to use internet to meet other gays. My gay life became totally online. When I was online I felt
I had control over the person I was talking to. I was whoever I cannot be or I was not allowed to be
in real life (Taher)
My conscious realization that I prefer men came with my discovery of a website called GayEgypt.9 I
was in love with a couple of boy friends, but I never thought of me as being “gay.” I was astonished
and asked myself what is it to be gay? I always thought that men sleep with each other because of
social segregation and the fact that women are separated from men in our society. Then I realized
that there was something such as gay porn. So I started seeing men sleeping together. I used to hear
of it but I had never seen it (Amine)
Although many respondents characterized their first same sex experiences with strangers they
had met online as “not good,” most continued to use internet to meet new sexual partners.
At 15 years I started chatting on Yahoo! but I used to talk to foreigners. I did not chat a lot. It
was only to masturbate. I used to have sex online; watch gay porn and have sex with other men. My
first experience was not great. I did not like the guy. I met him through internet. He gave me an
appointment in the street. I wanted to feel what sex was (Mostafa)
2 of 20 (10%) of respondents claimed to not use internet to communicate with other gay men.
8
9
MSN is an “instant” electronic messaging service for online chatting offered by Hotmail.
Also a gay website at www.gayegypt.com.
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I used to meet men through gay dating sites, but not anymore. I prefer to meet men in real life. The
more your network grows and the more gay men you know, the easier it becomes to meet eligible gay
men. I was missing the heat of meeting people in real life, flirting, wondering who will take the next
step, etc…. and I am now enjoying this feeling of having a firsthand experience with the men I am
about to date instead of interfacing with a machine [i.e. a computer] where all you can see, if you do,
is a photo of someone that you do not know, while missing experiencing with all your senses, as there
is no voice, no physical existence, or even trust that this person is saying the truth about who they
are. You minimize the risk factor, but at the same time, it takes time to get over the addiction of
online dating, because it provides you with a shield that you can comfortably hide behind (Amine)
I don’t use internet to get to know gays because it is better to know people through other people
rather than through a machine. I have never had any profile on gay websites because I think it is
artificial. I am also scared of the police. My family counts a lot for me and I don’t want to cause
them pain (Hesham)
Respondents identified gay websites as the primary forum through which Egyptian males pursue
gay relationships. Websites like Manjam, Gaydar10 and Gay Romeo11 allow users to create personal
profiles that indicate their preferences and interests. Most of these websites allow users to
create free user profiles, while some charge fees for “extra” services, including unlimited
messaging with other subscribers (the maximum being 10 per day for regular subscribers),
special offer emails for local sex shops, access to all hidden profile content for other subscribers
to the website and multimedia profile features such as music videos. Respondents noted that
most Egyptian subscribers do not include full-face profile photos for fear of personal security
and discovery by the state as well as family and friends.
Internet has facilitated my life; it is like a catalogue from which you can choose men you like or you
are attracted to. You have profiles of “gays” with pictures and all of the specifications, blue or brown
eyes, blond or dark, top or bottom [preference in sexual positioning]... It’s like ordering something
you like (Nagy)
Internet is the only way for us to meet besides house parties: “Manjam” and “Gaydar” being the
two most famous ones [websites]. But I just show my body and not my face [for fear of
imprisonment]. It is sad and unfortunate because we don’t have the acceptance from the straight
world to exist in the world openly and by that I mean bars, cafes, or restaurants where one can meet
another guy and express his interest in him publicly. And by interest I also mean sexually. Internet
is a gate way for men to meet their sexual needs (Mourad)
10
11
Can be found at www.gaydar.co.uk.
Can be found at www.gayromeo.com.
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Despite variations in internet use, all respondents noted a preference for gay social networking
through other gay friends rather than online. Many respondents acknowledged the difficulties
resulting from online encounters, particularly the use of false identities.
Mainly, I get to meet people through people, generally. From neighbors to friends to Internet friendfinder services, [and] even to my work circles—people generally, and homosexuals specifically, if we
talk about that for this case study here. Internet is of course a tool that facilitates a certain
possibility of meeting someone, but then again it is very delusional and disembodied. It is difficult for
me personally to experience the other in such disembodied context, I prefer usually a face-to-face
social interaction, or then if it is disembodied I prefer other forms rather than Internet. With
Internet, the room for re-creating self-representation is really overwhelming, you can be anything or
anyone you want online. You are totally [uninhibited] from what you might abstain from in your
offline life (Youssef)
Perceptions of Gay and “Khawal”
The majority of respondents defined gayness as an experience in which a man is attracted to or
has “feelings for” another man without necessarily having the intention to engage in same sex.
Only one of the twenty respondents associated gayness with abnormality and sin, and that
respondent noted having been influenced by his religious family.
Gayness is what I do in bed…. It is being attracted to the same sex…. It is a man who is attracted
to another man…. It’s liking men and having the courage to say, “I like men”…. It is a struggle;
a struggle because you’re facing problems and have to try to solve them…. Gayness is having feelings
for someone who has the same sex…. It is a sexual desire…a way of life…. To be gay is to have a
different sexual preference than the majority of people…. Gayness is to be sexually and emotionally
interested in men and in men only…. It is being a special and mature person, more mature than
straight people…. Gayness to me is not about fucking or getting fucked by another man. It is about
the realization that I want to have companionship and fall in love with a man…. Gayness for me is
the same as homosexuality. I don’t care about the label you put to refer to a man who is interested
in another man. It is another dimension of existence with the whole package it comes with, such as,
emotions, sexuality, and drama…fun, sadness, etc…. It cannot be compared to a straight life and I
will use it over and over and over again. I am gay and I want to remain gay! (Mostafa)
Gayness is abnormal because if everyone is gay, there will be no procreation and life in planet Earth
will end. I’m not a happy person and I wish I were normal. By normal I mean someone who can get
married to a girl that he will not betray and with whom he can have children (Hassan)
Personally, in reference to the word gay again, or the gay identity, I think I don’t use it to describe
myself. I think my identity as a person is much more complex than being reduced into that one
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word, which is also very new, and is also very time/space context specific. The notion of sexuality is
a complex thing for me. I don’t actually see people in terms of gay and straight (Youssef)
The term khawal, generally translated from Egyptian Arabic as “faggot,” is most frequently used
in the vernacular as a derogative reference to gay men. Although respondents gave many
different definitions and uses of khawal, not one of my respondents self identified with the term.
All respondents considered the term to be very offensive and would even sometimes use it
themselves to indicate cowardice, infidelity or untrustworthiness, or to single out a generally
disrespectful or unreliable person. Some respondents equated khawal with a quality of gender
diversion in which a gay man would express “feminine” behaviors.
Khawal is someone who is not reliable. I use the word sometimes…[toward] people who disappoint
me or fail me. A khawal is someone I relied on and who let me down. It is an insult and it has
nothing to do with me (Ali)
I don’t perceive myself as a khawal. I am not a khawal! A khawal for me is someone who is not a
man. It is very pejorative and it is an insult and I use it sometimes to insult people who are bad
drivers (Taher)
A khawal for me is a drag queen, those effeminate, cheap men. It is a word that is very offending. I
actually hate effeminate men. It is a major turn off for me. A man should be a man and should not
get dressed like a woman (Haitham)
Khawal is not used in the context of a sexual orientation or preference. It comes with the girly,
feminine side of a man (Ahmed)
Gayness as Sin
19 out of 20 respondents (95%) self identified as Muslim, while one respondent (5%) self
identified as Christian.
11 out of 20 (55%) respondents talked about religion in their perceptions of gayness. These 11
self identified as “believers” who fast, perform prayer and abstain from alcohol and/or drugs
with varying frequency.
2 of these 11 respondents self identified as “believers in all of the religions,” while 2 others
claimed to not be “into” religion.
9 of the 11 respondents (all “believers” in religion) did not perceive gayness as a sin.
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If homosexuality was to be a sin I think that being with one person and being faithful to this person
is less of a sin than having promiscuous relations or betraying one’s wife (Karim)
We as gays are not sinners. Homosexuality is not like rape or sleeping with someone who does not
want [to have sex]. As long as I don’t hurt anyone and that I have feelings for this person, I think
it’s okay (Haitham)
Gay Community in Cairo
Respondents conveyed a wide range of views and beliefs about gay community, or “society” as
it is called among self identifying gays in Cairo. Respondents widely agreed that gays who
appear more detached or disengaged from “society” are better perceived within the broader gay
community living in Cairo. In other words, there is a kind of stigma attached to associations
with gay “society.” Most respondents perceived being active in gay “society” as having negative
affects on how one is treated within broader Cairo society. No respondents acknowledged a
personal connection to Cairo’s gay society.
Being in the gay community and having a lot of gay friends is not well perceived. It’s better to be
discrete than to be in the gay community. Many gays belong to the society, but they deny it. In both
cases it’s not good. When I hang out with gays who are known to be in the community I get insulted
by my gay friends (Walid)
13 out of 20 (65%) respondents associated Cairo’s gay “society” with the most derogatory
practices and qualities, including prostitution, “drama queens,” sexual perversion, gossip,
superficiality, insecurity, untruth, effeminateness and infidelity.
5 out of 20 (25%) of respondents perceived the gay community as being composed of “good and
bad” people.
2 out of 20 (10%) respondents did not believe there to be a gay community in Cairo, while one
respondent considered gay an inappropriately Western title for homosexual practice in Egypt.
The gay community is like a village in a big country. You can find everything in there, the rich, the
poor the good and the bad people. There are people who think they are different, and who therefore
do not talk to anybody, they can [say something like]: if you see this one and this one you should not
hang out with us. They feel superior to others…. The gay community is composed of different groups
or families who do gather sometimes and who have only one common point, which is being gay. As
families or groups we are still very different from one another like any group of friends (Mostafa)
The gay society is filled with good and bad people. There are good people and some others are not
good at all. That’s what I got to know over the past four years. They don’t understand what gayness
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is. They are limited and appearances are very important. They are way too effeminate and they put
themselves into trouble [and] they get insulted by other people in the street. Respect people, otherwise
people will not respect you. I personally avoid going out with the gays who are too effeminate
(Hesham)
To talk about gay community in Cairo or in Egypt…is a very problematic notion. It is not
developed enough, the way Western European models for example are. I think if I speak specifically
of the so-called gay community in Egypt, it is mostly based on sexual interests and support systems
and groups. If it doesn’t serve for finding a possible sexual partner, then it serves for giving a social
support possibility of some sorts. But, I think this is where it stops, it doesn’t aim at going beyond
that. But, this way we’re assuming there is already an established community and a clear sense of
belonging to that community, which I am not sure is the case in the context of Cairo. Again, if I
compare with other communities generally, there are more clear channels of support and negotiation
and mediation that lack in the way community is defined in Egypt generally, not to mention gay
community, which is also a very new term for me in this country. Community in itself as a notion in
Egypt is not institutionalized enough to have manifestations socially. To be honest the word gay
community in Egypt is a very romanticized notion, and perhaps unnecessary. It is possibly best
described as reverse colonialist act, or a self-colonialist act. It is a reenactment of what people perceive
what a certain Western gay community to be like (Youssef)
Coming “Out” to Family and Friends
8 out of 20 (40%) respondents claimed to be “out” to family but not necessarily friends about
their sexual orientation.
5 of these 8 respondents claimed to have told their mothers before other family members and
noted that their same sex preference had not been suspected by family members before coming
“out.” The other 3 respondents had been “outted” to family by persons other than themselves,
including police and siblings.
7 out of these 8 underwent psychological treatment at the insistence of family members after
coming “out.”
There was an incident two years ago, my sister saw my profile on Gayguy12 and she told my dad
who confronted me. But I kept denying that I was gay because I was not ready to come out by then.
Then another time someone from my family saw me with foreigners and older guys and they told my
parents who told me, ‘We know you’re not gay, but you should stop hanging out with these strange
people.’ A few months ago, my sister found some condoms in my bag. My father asked to see the
bag. I’ve shown him the bag but nothing was there. And then another time I used Internet at home
12
The website can be found at www.gayguy.it.
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and forgot to delete the website address. And I kept on denying till they opened the chat log in front
of me so I could not deny anymore (Tamer)
I went into a relationship with a guy that lasted four months. We did not have any sex during all of
this time. He used to cheat on me with seven other gays. That was the turning point so I decided not
to be gay anymore. When I broke up with him I told my sister that I’m gay and that I needed help
otherwise I will kill myself. My sister was shocked. She told me that it’s normal and that it’s a
phase that is going to end and that everything is going to be alright, but that I have to tell our
mother about it. I went to my mum and told her. She cried and started thinking that being gay was
putting on make up and wearing girl clothes. She told me, ‘I cannot take the whole responsibility so
go and tell your dad.’ I told my dad that I needed to talk to him and that I am in trouble so I told
him that I have feelings towards guys and that I want this to end. At the beginning he did not
understand. He talked to me from the religious point of view. I lied to him and told him that I did
not do anything with anyone and that I was still a virgin. He told me it’s good that I told him. He
asked me to erase all of my profiles on gay websites. He changed my phone number as well. He also
made me sit with priests so that he makes me stop being gay. He did also tell me that he will send
me abroad so that I find a cure to my disease (Samy)
No one knows in my family that I’m gay, but my mother has suspicions. She caught me once
watching gay porn. She found one of the folders I saved and she kept on asking me why I saved
them and the reasons I was doing that when I’m very religious and I go do my prayer in the mosque
and I do not drink. She told me that if I wanted to get married she could find me a bride…. In
October, my mother found another folder in which I have saved pictures of me naked. She confronted
me and I did not justify myself. She stopped talking to me for four months. Then I went and I
confronted her and now we are on good terms (Nizar)
Many respondents decided to come “out” following traumatic events and many respondents
said that their parents had denied their same sex preference after being told about it.
3 of the 12 (15%) respondents who did not come “out” to their parents claimed to have seen a
psychiatrist preemptively in order to “cure to their homosexuality,” before concluding that it
cannot be cured.
I told my mum I have feelings for men since a long time but that I was still a virgin, so they sent me
to a psychiatrist thinking that homosexuality is a mental disease that could be cured. I go to the
psychiatrist since January. I accepted to go to the doctor to give my parents hope and out of respect for
them knowing that it’s not going to work. I kept the lie in four sessions, but I said to the doctor that
I was not a virgin in the fifth session. I go there once per week (Tamer)
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I came out to my mum. She got up and kissed me on my forehead…. She told me to go and see a
doctor. The reason why I accepted to go to the doctor was for her to make sure that I made an effort.
The psychiatrist told me that I was the biggest challenge he has ever had because I did not ask for
antidepressants. The doctor told my mother that it is not a sickness and that it cannot be changed,
however there might be hope. I had few sessions but I felt it was a waste of time and money
(Mourad)
I also did go to a psychiatrist because I was depressed, but no one knows among my family and
friends. All that the psychiatrist did was to tell me that I should be more religious and that if I do
become more religious God will help me to become straight. I was not convinced by what he said and
I felt that it was a waste of time and money. I did not see him again (Hesham)
12 out of 20 (60%) respondents who had not come “out” said they did not want to, as many
were afraid to threaten their families’ happiness and public reputation, or to lose their families
entirely.
I would not like my family to know about my homosexuality. No one knows about my sexual
orientation. My family is not open-minded. I love my family and I will therefore not be able to stand
the way they will look at me (Amine)
I would not like everyone here to know that I am gay as it will not make a difference. I would love
to tell my parents that I am gay but I know that this fact will make them very unhappy (Ali)
Discrimination
All but one of my respondents demonstrated awareness of the potential dangers they faced
socially and politically because of their same sex preference. Respondents’ fears ranged from
fear of entrapment by state agents to fear of job loss, violence and dissociation from families.
Nearly all respondents were cautious of associating with other gays in settings that could attract
the attention of state police or neighbors’ gossip. Only 2 respondents did not perceive
discrimination based on sexual preference.
Our life is a bit difficult compared to a straight guy’s life. All of the society is against us: the media,
cinema and religious books always represent us as sinners, transvestites and animals who only seek
sex. Sometimes I wish we had an organization that would defend our rights and protect us from
harassment. Especially that we have gay ministers and gay celebrities that are open about their
sexual preference for men. I personally had sex with a couple of celebrities (Tamer)
I can understand that the government puts in jail male prostitutes, but not us. If they put them in
jail, I will not disagree because it is forbidden by the law, but not against us. They are very silent
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these days, but I know for a fact that they will arrest us one day in one of the gay parties I go to
(Khaled)
I got very scared the first time I met a gay guy from the Internet. I walked around the meeting point
twice to check if there was any police force or if the actual gay is a police officer or not. I’m always
very cautious when I speak with gays online. I always have doubts on whether the person I’m
talking to is a police officer or not (Amr)
I am really afraid of the police because I would not like my family to know about my homosexuality
and especially my mother as she will hold herself responsible for it I’m sure (Ali)
I feel the repression that is against us. I am always afraid of the police. I am afraid of the
discrimination that can be against me. I would not handle to get arrested. I’m afraid of the file
because I will not be able to find a descent job and I will have to leave the country and I don’t want
to leave the country (Khaled)
I don’t feel that there is a direct oppression towards me but sometimes when I read an article saying
that homosexuals are perverted I feel bad. From people when we talk about homosexuality they have
been educated to see us as ill people (Walid)
I used to chat with a guy on MSN. I was supposed to meet him but the police [were] there waiting
for me. They took me to jail for 40 days and I spent 40 days under surveillance. It was the worst
thing I have ever experienced. They beat me as they thought I was a spy because the gay I was
supposed to meet was a foreigner. One of police officers tried to fuck…me but I refused. He opened
his pants and asked me to do him a blowjob (Fares)
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Zina of the Eye: Pornography among Male
Cairene Youth
by Sarah Michelle Leonard
Pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry, and its presence has become ubiquitous across
the globe, in part due to changes in technology and new patterns of interplay between
globalized media and consumer behavior. Reflecting these trends, one finds pornography
circulating widely within the Middle East North Africa region today. However, given the
influence of popular, governmental and religious treatments of pornography and other forms
of “unsanctioned” sexual behavior and expression in moral and religious terms, the region’s
increasingly high levels of consumption and amateurist production of pornographic video clips
may come as a surprise to some. In order to demystify and understand these dynamics in the
region, this essay provides an ethnographic account of how one cohort of male youths in
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Cairo interact with pornography, information technology and various moral discourses. In
doing so, the work aims to support the production of more nuanced and more diverse
research with regard to gender and sexuality studies in the region. Beginning with an overview
of regional discourses surrounding sex and sexuality and general statistics relating to its
consumption of pornography, the work then moves into a set of interviews with five
unmarried male friends between the ages of 18 and 22 who interact heavily1 with pornography,
in order to help contextualize those statistics for the Cairene environment. The analysis of
literature, statistics and interviews presented here will be balanced out by original research
relating to emerging local negotiations of sex, gender, and Islamic purity practice in Cairo,
Egypt.
In laying a conceptual groundwork for understanding Cairo as space, I depart from
Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) argument that, “itself the outcome of past actions, social space is what
permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others” (1991, 73),
as Cairo’s social space is indeed both suggestive and prohibitive with regard to matters of sex
and sexuality. This work aims to highlight the ways in which the social and ritual space(s) of
Cairo become refashioned, not just by various global dynamics and socio-political conflicts,
but also internally through engagement with information technologies and commodity
practices like pornography, creating a landscape where actions widely construed as “profane,”
normative Islamic rituals and legalistic Islamic precepts meld into a unique and seemingly
contradictory bricolage of practices. With an eye on the statistics of pornographic
consumption in Egypt, this work ultimately argues that the pornography consumption
practices performed by this particular group of respondents reflect an increasingly normalized
set of practices and values among Cairo’s male and female youth, and that through such
practices Cairo’s youth culture is able to test the parameters of well-established traditions and
norms regarding sex, sexuality and gender constructions. Ultimately respondents’ practices of
engagement with pornography, which in many ways mirror the pornography consumption
practices of youth around the world, are presented here as part of the complex and ongoing
interweaving of the everyday and the extraordinary, rather than as something extraordinary in
of itself.
Of Masculinities and Men
Whereas women and femininities were long ignored as categories of study in the
anthropological literature until the pioneering voices of Western and Islamo-Arab feminists of
1
“Heavily” is defined as consisting of at least three to four sessions of engagement per week.
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the 1980s and 90s helped to bring women and femininities more fully into the academic
spotlight, the present cannon of Arab and Islamic works on gender and sexuality tend to
highlight women’s postcolonial voice and narrative (Sabbah 1984; Mernissi 1987; Ahmed
1992) at the expense of keeping men and masculinities elusive and far removed from the stage
of critical inquiry. Men and masculinities in the Middle East are still generally regarded as
static, even default, categories in the regional literature, and continue to be subjected to the
bias of a gender binary paradigm which prioritizes women and femininity while accepting a
monolithic formula for the gendering process among men. As Andrea Cornwall and Nancy
Lindisfarne note in Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (1994), “It is ironic that the
logic of feminism as political position has often required the notion of ‘men’ as a single,
oppositional category” (1994, 1). This positioning of men as an “oppositional, homogenous
category” which obstructs the production of new knowledge concerning not just masculinity,
but also femininity, sexuality and power (Melhuus and Stølen 1996, 56-7). In attempting to
depart significantly from these stagnations in the regional literature, this work follows the
works of Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb (2000) and Lahoucine Ouzgane (2003) in
asserting that the existing analytical paradigms for the region, in focusing exclusively on
women and femininities, ignores the rather obvious fact that patriarchal modes of subjugation
can be just as harmful to men. As Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb (2000) argue:
Work on masculinity has shown that patriarchy is both more complex, for being more
implicated in the structure of social relations than sometimes been admitted, and at
the same time not as monolithic as has been suggested. Focusing on masculinity
should not be seen as a shift away from feminist projects, but rather as a
complementary [endeavor], indeed one that is organically linked (2000, 8).
This work argues further that the existing fixation in praxis and literature with patriarchal
modes of oppression and their interruption of women’s quality of life reinforces an
essentializing and Orientalist2 rendering of patriarchal hegemony as an inherent, even
necessary, component of Arab culture and, in doing so, advances the harmful stereotype not
only that “Muslim women need saving” (Abu Lughod 2001) but also that the men and
masculinities of the region are devoid of complexity and immune to change. Within this preset
framework, men of the Middle East tend to be lumped haphazardly under the archetype of the
I am referring, of course, to Edward Said’s profound and enduring concept of Orientalism (1978), which characterizes a
comprehensive set of discursive techniques which generalize, feminize and stigmatize Asia and the Middle East as a
geopolitical monolith of erotic, exotic and irrational places and peoples, inherently “other” to the West.
2
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despotic patriarch, religious martyr or sexual deviant3, all of which take root and are most
succinctly captured by Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978).
Though Edward Said coined these remarks over thirty years ago, the need for more
diverse ethnographic work on men and masculinities in the region is urgent, as stereotypes
about Arab and Islamic notions of maleness become increasingly disconnected from the
realities of the region itself, yet increasingly visible in the farthest reaches of media technology.
This work supports the view that masculinity and gender more broadly are not monolithic
constructs, as authors like Judith Butler (1993) have written fervently to make clear, arguing
that gender must be understood not as a static and inherent human characteristic but rather a
fluid and dynamically shifting performance which can change to reflect different contexts and
different times, continuing that “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender;
... identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results”
(1993, 15). Simply put, gender is an act of performance, ritually produced and reproduced
through “a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms” (1993, 95).
Adding an important regional dimension to Butler’s framing of gender performativity, Thomas
Walle (2006) makes a useful point about the specific gendered performance of masculinities in
Pakistan4, noting that, “masculine prestige lies in crossing that border [between permissible
and forbidden behavior] intentionally, but only temporarily” (2006, 51), a point this work will
return to and play upon throughout.
Pornography and Performativity
This work identifies and approaches pornography consumption and production among male
youths in Cairo as an aspect of masculine performativity in an attempt to reflect the self
perceptions of respondents. It is not the intent of this work to name and shame male
engagement within pornographic material as somehow inherently debased or exceptional, but
to understand it within the context of local norms and performative constructs experienced
and enacted by the young Cairene males interviewed for this work. This treatment allows for
an understanding of male youths’ interaction with pornography as an embedded mode of
gendered performance that intersects with sexual expression. As such, this work attempts to
highlight the particular subjectivities at work in respondents’ perceptions of self and of selfbehavior with respect to pornography—subjectivities shaped both by Islamic discourses and
by Western debates on pornography. Respondents indicated a high degree of internal conflict
In Desiring Arabs (2007), Joseph Massad, as informed by Edward Said’s Orientalism and Michel Foucault’s post
structuralist leanings, presents a game changing analysis of deviance as a sexual categorization and discursive stigma
applied to Arab males and emerging debates on sex and sexuality in the Arab world before the 1980s as part of the
colonial process of deciphering West from East (Chapters 3-5).
4 Pakistan is arguably not the Middle East, but shared norms and values with regard to sex, sexuality and gender
propriety, somewhat similarly derived from Islamic precepts, justifies the inclusion of Walle’s observations here.
3
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between their own perceptions of sexually explicit content and deeply ingrained mainstream
treatments of pornography as morally deviant content. Many thus evaluated their own acts of
engagement with pornography within and through mainstream terminologies and systems of
value. By allowing respondents to depart from an understanding of their own actions as
transgressive or deviant, this work calls into question notions of “proper” or “Islamic” social
conduct and gender propriety for masculinities in Cairo, and questions the extent to which
mainstream views equating pornography and moral deviance help to further isolate local
masculinities along the margins of Cairo’s broader and more complex gender landscape.
This work is part of an ongoing investigation into the relationship between
pornography and youth in Cairo that started in January 2008. Information and perceptions
have been gathered largely through qualitative, open-ended, semi-structured in-depth
interviews and participant observations in and around Cairo, Egypt, although data from other
regional countries has been used to illustrate certain findings. The work focuses heavily on the
responses of five respondents from a larger pool of 15 males between 18 and 37 years of age,
who reside in urban areas and are currently exchanging, producing and/or disseminating
pornography. Of the five primary respondents referenced here, all are unmarried and only two
claimed to have had formal girlfriends. Within the wider pool of 15 respondents, three are
married, two had been previously engaged5, and a majority attested to having had girlfriends at
various points. Eleven respondents self identified as Sunni Muslim, and two as Coptic
Christians. All are native speakers of Arabic, and most also speak English or French. All but a
few respondents were interviewed in person, with some requesting that all interviews be
conducted via e-mail due to privacy and security concerns. A limited series of semi-structured
and informal interviews with Cairene women were also conducted in order to get a more
balanced gendered reading of how pornography is viewed. Seven of the 8 women interviewed
are married, all identified as Sunni Muslim and ages were staggered between 22 and 42 years
old.
I did not find gender or status as a non-Egyptian and non-Muslim to be problematic
either in conducting these interviews and gathering information, or in terms of influencing the
respondents’ sense of comfort and candor. On the contrary, my status as an outsider appeared
to render me both safe and attractive to confide in—safe because I was removed from the
normal social contexts and rules, and attractive because, as a Western woman, I was perceived
as being both more familiar with and more open to discussing issues considered locally to be
taboo and morally unsound. The scope of this research is limited both by class, as respondents
here hold an exclusively middle or upper class status in Egyptian society, and by an urban
understanding of the social and moral landscape, which naturally differs in various ways from
a rural perspective on the intersections between sex, sexuality and gender. Finally, it should be
noted that the working definition of pornography employed here is informant-driven, meaning
that anything and everything the respondents considered pornography has been included in
the sample.
Both engagements have since been broken off, however, and in case the informant’s habits with respect to
pornography were the direct cause of the split.
5
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Enter Pornography
Just as there have been gradual shifts in the region’s understandings of gender and sexuality
over time, pornography, in its many intersects with popular conceptions and constructions of
gender and sexuality, has similarly undergone change. The earliest feminist critiques of
pornography in the West, led by authors such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon in
the 1970s, were largely concerned with the negative “effects” of pornographic consumption
on men. Dworkin and McKinnon argued (1988) that pornography reinforces sexual and
cultural attitudes that demean and objectify women, and sought to legislate sexually explicit
content as a way to mitigate perverse behavior and thus minimize pornography’s affect. While
the concerns of these early Western feminists broke new ground in their day and in many ways
paved the course for certain streams of feminist thought more broadly, I argue that their
framing of pornography is ill suited for an understanding of how sexually explicit content
takes on meaning and mobility in Cairo today. In their willingness to dismiss a wide range of
sexually explicit content as inherently misogynistic, these critiques assume an overly simplified
causal interplay between words, images and behavior (Attwood 2002, 92), while severely
undermining men’s capacity for complexity in matters relating to sex, sexuality and the
performance of masculinities.
By the mid-1990s, the binary gender and sexuality paradigms through which
pornography had been consistently recast was being challenged increasingly often by second
wave feminists and emerging queer theorists in the West, who were more interested in
contextualizing pornography in terms of women’s agency and straight and gay sexual pleasure
than in legislating it out of the public’s reach. Debates around representations of sex, gender
and class as increasingly articulated subjectivities took center stage, “in particular, an insistence
that sexual politics are not reducible to gender politics and an emphasis on the instability of
‘sex’ and ‘gender’ …[and a consequent] rethinking of the possible significances of
pornographic production and consumption” (Attwood 2002, 93). In taking this evolution in
Western pornography debates seriously, this work approaches its inquiry with an interest in
trying to contextualize the interplay between pornography and pornographic consumption on
the one hand and use of information technology on the other within the cultural and sociopolitical framework of Cairo. In doing so, the work explores pornography transfer in Cairo as
a conduit through which forms of sexual expression and everyday technology impact the
production and reproduction of local masculinity norms.
The Basics: Sex, Lies and Video Clips
Understanding norms and perceptions of sex within the Middle East is vital to any discussion
of pornography in the region, as normative mainstream discourses surrounding sex, sexuality
and gender performance are heavily underscored by both Islamic and masculinist state
narratives, both of which contribute to an overwhelmingly hetero-normative and marriageoriented social-sexual landscape (Ali 2003). Frank and informative dialogue regarding sex and
sexuality in the region is often undertaken within the rubric of state-advised or development-
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sector family planning research (DeJong et al 2005). Family planning studies from across the
region provide the most methodologically transparent and sometimes only analysis of sexual
practices and relations, highlighting once again the urgent need for substantive data and critical
analysis concerning sexual mores in the region (El Nawawy 2008; El Noshokaty 2006; DeJong
et al 2005; Farag 2001). In a 2008 nationally-representative study of adolescents aged 16 to 19
in Egypt, for example, 30 percent of girls and almost 20 percent of boys could not name a
single STD or could (or would) attest to having knowledge about HIV and AIDS (DeJong et
al 2005, 2). Among respondents with limited schooling, those figures went as high as almost
38 percent for girls and 31 percent for boys (DeJong et al 2005, 2). These figures reflect a lack
of national-level sex education curriculum and infrastructure in the Middle East generally6, as
in most countries across the region, sex and reproduction are often omitted from human
biology curriculum, as teachers tell students to read “that chapter” at home (DeJong et al 2005,
48; Farag 2001, 138).
Since 2007, several high profile satellite television shows have attempted to bring sex
and sexual fulfillment in marriage back into the public eye by incorporating it into the broader
genre of “Islamic living” movements. Shows like Dr. Heba Kotb’s Kalaam Kibeer [Big Talk] use
Islamic scriptural discourse, precepts and methods of reason and justification as tools to
provide sexual education and to encourage couples to be more aware of their partners’ needs
and desires as they move toward the principle that “being a good Muslim means having good
sex”, as the popular and controversial Kotb coined it (Swank 2007, 1). Shows like Kotb’s serve
to reorient popular perceptions and discourses regarding sex and sexuality in Muslim society
by moving away from the sex-for-reproduction norm in a culturally sensitive manner, and by
presenting new, Islamically sounds ways for thinking about sexual health and fulfillment for
both men and women (DeJong et al 2005, 27). Yet even within these discursive spaces where
sex and sexuality can be discussed in terms of sexual pleasure without stigma, moralistic
prohibitions on non-heterosexual behavior and practice, premarital engagements and sexually
explicit content still persist and inevitably exclude large segments of the population from
participating in the evolving dialogue on sexuality and sexual health. The vacuum of
information created by this public unwillingness to address certain trends despite their
visibility in cultural sphere has resulted in greater knowledge seeking among Cairene youth
about sex and sexual matters in non-traditional and often less than factual sources, like friends
or on the Internet. Pornography enters into this scenario as a readily available forum for
gaining access to information about and familiarity with sex and sexuality, and enjoys the
added bonus of taking on a high commodity value in local informal social networks.
In her study of sex education programs on Arab satellite channels, Mai El-Nawawy
(2008) cites Egyptian academics and government officials in their readiness to identify
Egyptian youths’ engagement with pornography as one of the greatest threats to youth and to
the nation. Feeling a natural curiosity for knowledge about sex upon reaching a certain
Only Algeria, Iran, Morocco, Tunisia and Bahrain have nationally sponsored sections on family planning or
reproductive health (DeJong el al 2005, 3).
6
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biological age, many7 respondents interviewed for this work found pornographic films offered
more “useful” and judgment-free information than their parents or peers in school. The
tension between these two readings of pornography in Cairene society lays at the heart of
current local debates on blogs and talk shows, newspaper editorials and government
discourses, much of which tends to either deny pornography’s wide circulation in the Arab
world outright or frame pornography’s rapid dissemination as Western cultural encroachment.
Popular opinion observations for this research seemed to echo that unwillingness to treat
pornography consumption and production as a tangible reality with a well-established local
culture surrounding it. The notion that “Muslims do not watch porn” was a recurring
utterance in my casual conversations with Egyptian adult men and women during this
research, and conveyed an overarching view of pornography as an exclusively Western, or
sometimes Christian, problem.
Among Egyptian youth canvassed for this research, including respondents of upper
class backgrounds, there was little reluctance to confirm that Muslims and Arabs consume,
and in some cases produce, pornographic material. This discrepancy can be understood in
several ways, an important one being a generational difference in perceptions of what society
is and how social phenomena should be evaluated. Indeed several respondents considered
their parents, particularly their mothers, to have purposely cultivated an ethos of ignorance
about haram [prohibited within Islam] behavior and material. A 2008 poll at Kuwait
University, just one example of local efforts at data gathering around social-sexual phenomena
like pornography, further the point that pornography in the Arab world is here to stay. The
Kuwait University poll found that only 2.2 percent of female students and 4.7 percent of male
students reported never having looked at pornography.8 Although the Middle East does not
yet have a professional pornographic industry of the same scale as the US or Europe, this
research suggests that pornography consumption and amateurist production, including mobile
phone and webcam content, are rapidly becoming far more accessible in urban areas like Cairo
than a review of the mainstream and institutional literature in Egypt and the Middle East more
generally would suggest.
Sex on the IT
The acquisition and distribution of pornographic material as a form of entertainment media in
the Middle East has been greatly assisted by an increase in access to information technology
through Internet and mobile phones. Egypt’s Internet usage has boomed from only 120,000
users in 1998 to over 10 million users in 2009 (Budde 2009). Similarly, Egypt’s mobile phone
Of the respondents interviewed for this paper, all claimed to have retrieved the majority of their information about
sexual practices from pornographic materials. Within this broader research project, that finding was consistent among
male respondents under the age of 30, whereas older respondents tended to cite friends, family members and personal
experience as their primary sources of knowledge.
8 The survey, whilst incredibly limited in both scope and content, did suggest some interesting trends. Friends were most
likely to introduce other friends to pornographic material, while 3.4 percent of polled males admitted to looking at
pornography daily, while 12.9 percent of women reported having viewed pornography “many times in the past” (Abbas
and Fadhli 2008).
7
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market has grown steadily by about 30 percent per year, and the introduction of the 2g and 3g
high-speed networks prompted growth of nearly 70 percent in 2006 alone (Budde 2009). An
approximated 20 percent of people in the region have access to Internet, but a growing
plethora of Internet cafes in urban settings across the region has positioned the population for
impressive accessibility growth in the coming years.9 Quality and regularity of access to
modern information technology is still sharply divided along class and gender lines in Middle
East and a vast majority of users residing in urban areas are male and under the age of 35 (ElNawawy 2008, 54). Mobile phones are widely held by all classes, although mobile capacities
may vary depending on type of phone and service provider.
According to Google Trends for the year 2008, Egypt-based searches for the keyword
“sex” far out numbered those from any other nation in the world10 and has since remained one
of the top three origins of “sex” searches. A regularly cited statistic suggests that as much as
80 percent of total internet traffic from Arab countries is directed toward sexually explicit
websites.11 Yet the difficulties in obtaining statics on regional internet usage other than public
domain searches suggest that such data produced by outside sources should be taken with a
degree of caution (Kettmann 2008). Respondents identified safety and ease as the primary
advantage of using the internet to search for pornography and as the reason for such
consistently high search rates in the region. The internet allows users to view sexually explict
content and information on sex more generally without the immediate stigma of shame or
compromised personal security or social standing.
The types of sexual content being searched by users in the Middle East are striking in
their diversity and various levels of sexual explicitness. Accepting that there is a certain
deliberate logic to most pornography, that “transgressive can be sexy,” as many respondents in
some way noted, this work is particularly interested understanding, through a consideration of
the diverse range of content all classified generically as pornography, how certain boundaries
around stigma and taboo are being re-fashioned through an increase in online searches for
sexually explicit content. In 2008, for example, online searches for the terms “ass sex” and
“man sex” or “gay sex” were highest among searches originating in Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia.12 By contrast, searches originating in Western nations outnumbered hits from the
Middle East for terms like “teen sex,” “porn,” “blow job” and “dead sex,” while searches
originating in East Asian nations tended to rank highly for terms like “rape” and “forced sex.”
This compares to slightly over 40 percent in the U.S. and Europe combined (“Internet World Stats” 2008).
Google Arabic searches for the term “sex” were higher than those performed by any other language-oriented Google
engine in 2008. Interestingly, user searches for the English word “sex” (sometimes transliterated as ‫ ) ﺱﻙﺱ‬rather than
the Arabic term “‫ ”ﺝﻥﺱ‬were most popular. When using the term “‫ﺝﻥﺱ‬,” hits from Egypt were the fifth highest
globally, with Alexandria, Cairo and Giza all among the top ten cities searching for the term (Reuters 2007 and Google
Trends 2008).
11 This statistic was originally reported at a the International Summit on Internet and Multimedia in Abu Dhabi, U.A.E.
by Ramzi El Khoury in 2008, but may be an unreliable estimate based on scarce data for internet use in the region
(Jacinto 2008). 12 All data used to support these claims comes from Google Trends under each search term indicated. The original search
was conducted March 11, 2008.
9
10
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Professional pay-by-use pornographic websites in Arabic are virtually non-existent.
Several Israeli websites offering pornographic content have translated their content into
Arabic after seeing how many hits they received from Arab countries (Jaafar 2007).13 A
majority of locally produced pornography surveyed for this work came from free, open source
websites featuring message boards on which users can post pornographic pictures, link to
videos, read explicit stories, obtain sex-related medical advice or chat with other members. A
majority of these sites also make space for non-sexual content including discussions centered
on sports or music.
Still, internet is not the only venue through which pornographic material is
disseminated. Mobile phones have become a popular way of sharing and creating sexually
explicit content.14 A 2007 study commissioned by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia government
found that, in one province, almost 70 percent of all files stored on mobile phones owned and
operated by teenage users were pornographic in nature (Ghafour, 2008), findings which reflect
the youth’s attempt to break through restrictive gender and social constraints with the help of
mobile and information technology—a point this work returns to later. All respondents for
this work admitted to having seen, created and/or stored content of a sexual nature on their
mobile phones, while several admitted having created and distributed content the same way.
Respondents for this work similarly conveyed that pornographic material is regularly traded
among friends through mobile technology, and can be bought cheaply on the street in Egypt,
with DVDs containing 8 to 10 explicit video clips selling for 20 to 60 Egyptian pounds each.15
When buying off the street, however, the consumer has remarkably few options as to the type
of content, as the available supply can vary unpredictably in quantity and quality. Most of the
supply I observed featured digital pornographic materials produced in the West16, with at most
one or two clips on any given video featuring Arab or non-western actors. Many respondents
claimed to prefer internet or mobile transmissions of pornographic content, citing its higher
quality, better selection and added bonus of anonymity and security. However, locally (or
regionally) produced pornography has been gaining popularity and availability since this
fieldwork began, and a significant percentage of my respondents’ collections were non-western
in origin.
Adultery of the Eye
Sitting in a cafe one evening, an informant, Samir, pointed to the pornographic video clip
playing on a friend’s mobile phone and said disapprovingly, “That’s zina al-‘ayn!” Zina al-‘ayn is
an Islamic term that is translated most commonly as “adultery of the eye.” Zina [adultery] is
It is not easy for users to access the material, as several countries in the region have followed the lead of Saudi Arabia
in banning all Israeli websites, and users must have filtering programs in order to view content.
14
Phenomenon like “sexting,” or the creation and transmission of sexually explicit material with a mobile phone, is a
booming trend among youth worldwide, thus it should come as little surprise that youth in the Middle East are using
technology in a similar manner.
15 In September 2008, that meant around US$3.50 to 11 per DVD.
16 The material often included trademark or other copyright markings that indicated that it was produced in America.
13
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classified in various schools of shari’a by different levels of severity and includes actions like
viewing pornography, thinking lustful thoughts, masturbation and pre- or extramarital sex as
increasingly profane forms of zina.17 While Samir’s comment wasn’t the first time I had heard
the term zina al-‘ayn from respondents, it suggested a change in the way he and the others had
framed their arguments about pornography, using more typically the terms haram or ‘ayb
[shameful]. By using the stronger term zina, the act of watching pornography became imagined
as a much more religiously problematic behavior and carried with it harsher spiritual
consequences. As several respondents at the table rolled their eyes in reproof at Samir’s quip,
Samir gestured around to the clips playing on a mobile phone and television nearby, both
displaying the same scantily clad Arab pop starlet in unison and said, “It’s all zina!”
Due to the fact that pornography is either formally or informally treated as illegal
substance throughout the Middle East, there remains wide variation as to what might be
considered “pornography,” and notions of what constitutes sexual content can vary depending
on the country and even the city in question. In Egypt, for example, civil laws are still relatively
vague as to what constitutes pornography. Article 178 of Egypt’s Penal Code (Law No. 58 of
1937) states that “printed materials, manuscripts, advertisements, relieves, engraves, manual or
photographic drawings, symbolic signs or any other material or photographs violating public
morals” can all be considered pornographic. As the previous example involving Samir and his
circle of friends points out, different viewpoints of pornography exist within even the most
seemingly cohesive social milieu. Worth noting is that, although class and wealth play an
important role in determining how freely pornography and other sexually charged materials
may circulate in an area or group, low income and religiously conservative communities are
not necessarily more prohibitive with regard to the circulation of sexually explicit content than
their wealthier counterparts, and generalizations concerning degree of religiosity are hard to
make. Indeed the growing “piety movement” in the broader Islamic community, as profiled by
Saba Mahmood (2005) and Charles Hirschkind (2006), suggests that middle and upper middle
classes have responded most visibly to a “conservative” or “Islamist” message, in many ways
contradicting general assumptions both inside and outside the Islamic community that lower
income or lower class necessarily coincides with religious conservatism.
Still, relatively recent changes in digital technology and consumption behavior in the
Middle East are vital for an understanding of how various forms of institutional authority are
being reshaped in the region itself and in the wider Islamic community. Information
technology and mass media have led to drastic changes in the various ways Islamic values are
produced, disseminated, negotiated and understood, as religious knowledge production and
moral evaluation are no longer limited to a select few ‘ulema [Islamic scholars or knowledge
authorities] or even exclusive to speakers of Arabic. The “average” Muslim now has the ability
to evaluate and consume sources of religious information as they please through information
As the lesser classifications of zina are seen as making a person more likely to commit actual adultery, it is considered
best to refrain from all such activity. The reasoning comes from a popular Hadith, narrated by al-Bukhaari, that states,
“zina of the eyes is looking, the zina of the tongue is speaking; the heart wishes and hopes and the private parts confirm
that or deny it.”
17
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technology, and this very side-stepping of traditional religious authority has helped to create
the piety or da’wa movements. Information technology has thus opened up more than just new
spaces and venues for religious discourse and identity-formation, offering also an ability to
diversify debates on politics, science, and social phenomena like pornography.
Samir and the other respondents in many ways exemplify the dangers of framing
engagement with pornography and religious observance as incompatible behaviors in that,
whereas all members of the group participate actively in da’wa movements, they also collect,
distribute and produce pornography. Hence this work grew interested in the ways by which
information technologies enable both religious movements and more seemingly “profane” acts
such as pornography consumption and production. For Samir and the other respondents,
engagement with sexually explicit content and sound Islamic observance are neither mutually
exclusive nor incompatible when viewed through the lens of information technologies in that
the same technology which facilitates the Muslim call to prayer also facilitates information
gathering and social exchange through transmissions of pornographic material. Respondents’
willingness and ability to receive and process inflows of such diverse content raises important
questions about the power of information technologies to transform content through the
process of transmission and the conceptual shifts taking place in Cairene youth culture which
tolerate and make meaning from the coexistence of seemingly incompatible information. Such
questions in turn suggest that a more complex interplay between Islamic discourses, shifts in
knowledge about sex and sexuality and the technology heavy practices of daily modern life
(Lefebvre 1991) is the reality experienced by Egypt’s youth of today. In its ability to tolerate
and synthesize these poles of Egyptian life, the youth’s engagement with information
technologies calls into view the malleability of sex and gender as livable concepts and the
mediatory role pornography plays as a commodity with significant implications for both.
Accumulation, Exchange and Gift Giving
Youssef, age 22, is the nominal leader of a sub-group of the respondents, consisting of his two
cousins, ‘Alaa and Ahmad, both 21 years old, and long time neighbors Belal and Samir, aged
18 and 20 respectively.18 These young men live in a lower middle class suburb outside of
Cairo, where all have been enrolled in secondary school or university, speak some English, and
are unemployed. Having recently dropped out of university, Ahmad and ‘Alaa have begun
their mandatory military service. Their parents are public sector employees, employed in state
agencies such as Egypt’s Ministries of Education and Agriculture, and several respondents’
parents hold additional part time jobs to supplement family income. For Youssef and the
others, contact with women is limited to brief interactions with classmates or to the confines
of their family networks and outings. During the interview stage of this research, only Belal
and Youssef acknowledged having had girlfriends in the past, both relationships that lasted for
short periods of time.
18
Unless noted, all names have been changed.
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Respondents explicitly and repeatedly cited the lack of sexual activity or outlets for
sexual energies as the reason for watching and collecting pornography. As Youssef reasoned:
I’m 22. I don’t have job. I’m not going to get one. Even if I do, it’s going to take me a
long time to save up enough money to get married, assuming I find someone that
everyone [in the family] agrees to. And this isn’t America, I can’t just get a girlfriend
and have sex. So what can I do? I watch porn. My life is bad enough without having
something to get rid of my energy. Yes, it’s wrong, yes I shouldn’t do it. But my father
got married at 20, his father at 19. They didn’t have to worry about being 30 or 35 and
still unmarried and not having sex.
For all but one of the respondents, pornography collection habits escalated once private
internet access was secured, and all respondents except Samir attested to viewing pornography
at least four times a week. Samir claimed to have become increasingly religious over a period
of about six months, causing him to get rid of his pornography collection and to stop viewing
pornographic materials. This contrasted starkly with the habits of ‘Alaa and Belal, as both
admitted to looking at pornography everyday and had rather extensive and eclectic collections.
Respondents’ collections of pornographic materials were facilitated by personal computers, as
all attested to spending several hours a day searching and downloading music, spending time
on social networking sites, doing homework, or searching for pornography. Prior to having
secured private internet access, respondents’ contact with pornography had been limited to the
occasional online foray in internet cafes, the sometimes unscrambled pornographic satellite
channel, and the inheritance or barter of pornographic material from other friends.
The ways by which these respondents receive and transfer pornography underwent a
rapid shift during the course of my fieldwork. Whereas in the beginning of the research period
(January 2008) the respondents had been primarily copying material onto CDs and flash drives
or sending it via e-mail, by the summer of 2008 and the introduction of the 3G network19 in
Egypt, the group had begun searching for and sending pornographic videos and pictures via
mobile phone. Previously, the group had been using limited cellular technology to send
pornographic still pictures or sound files. But just as having private internet access increased
their consumption of pornography, the mobile phone increased and intensified the way in
which these respondents shared and interacted both with the pornographic material itself and
with each other. No longer was the interaction with pornography limited to the private space
The 3G network allows simultaneous use of speech and data services and higher data rates then with the previous
network infrastructure, and made it possible for my respondents to use their mobile phones to access the internet for
example.
19
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of home; it could now be consumed anywhere, and became a part of daily life outside of the
home. In other words, as pornography became increasingly consumed and transmitted in
public and private life, it gradually became both normalized and part of the ordinary
experience of every day (Lefebvre 1991).
Each informant except Samir attested to having sent an average of two to three
gigabytes of pornographic matter, including pictures, video and audio clips, to each other each
month through mobile phones and computers. Significantly, pornographic materials were not
offered between friends in the group in exchange for money or payment of any kind, but
rather gifted in exchange for the prestige of being able to share unique content and the
reinforcement of social bonds which could, in the logic of Marcel Mauss’ work on gift
exchange and reciprocity in The Gift (1922) enable reciprocity in the form of future content.
Mauss’ notion of the gift and several of its later renderings provide a useful framework for an
analysis of pornography consumption and production in this community in the sense that the
exchange of pornography among my respondents served the primary function of furthering
social bonds, not just among the group profiled but in their wider peer group. For example,
each time Belal received a pornographic video from one of his friends, he would either send
one of his favorite pornographic video clips or text a thank you message in return. Belal also
felt pressure, as someone known for his large and diverse collection of pornographic materials,
to one-up any gift of a new or different kind, saying, “If I get something tohfa [really cool or
amazing], I have to send [it] to my friends right away.” In this way, pornography is treated
within this group of respondents as a form of social currency rather than simply a means to
sexual gratification.
Within the wider confines of their social peer group, composed primarily of school
and family contacts, the notoriety associated with possessing a collection of pornographic
materials appears to be a double-edged sword. Conversations with several of the respondents’
classmates elicited a series of conflicting sentiments toward respondents’ efforts to obtain,
exchange and, as Belal’s example conveyed, compete in subtle ways for the best pornographic
collections. While several male classmates and one female peer considered the boys’ efforts
“cool,” a majority of the classmates interviewed considered their engagement with
pornography to be objectionable, perhaps reflecting an almost robotic averseness to behaviors
still widely perceived as haram. As one male classmate put it, “[Pornography]’s wrong. It’s
wrong in Islam, it’s against Egyptian culture, and it’s bad for women. They are stupid for
looking at it, they should study the word of God [Qur’an], and study at school because looking
at sex pictures isn’t going to do anything but make them go to hell.” One mother of another
classmate more or less took the same view, saying, “I would never let my son go out with
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them. They have no morals. They are bad [and] they are what is wrong with Egypt. It didn’t
used to be this way, but now people just don’t care, so they let them do whatever, no
consequences. But I raised my son to be different, to act good.”
Other classmates conveyed different positions on the subject. A female classmate,
Fatima, was much more openly critical than her peers. Perhaps less cautious in airing her
opinions for having spent considerable time living outside of Egypt and being of mixed
Egyptian and Kuwaiti heritage, she boldly said, “Fuck them…[the classmates who denounce
pornography] are a bunch of liars, everyone here looks at porn, the only difference is that
some talk about it and the rest lie about it.” When asked if she really meant “everyone,” she
said:
Yes, even the girls. It’s not like the boys. We don’t have the same need, but yeah,
they’ve all seen it at least once. The thing about Egypt is that it’s all about face, about
pretending to be correct. As long as you don’t get caught, as long as you don’t
embarrass your family it’s okay. It’s all bullshit, all lies, especially if you are a man.
Belal echoed some of Fatima’s feelings, saying bitterly, “[those who profess to never have seen
pornography] are just jealous and afraid. We all have computers [and] we all have cell phones.
If they say that they haven’t ever looked at sex, then they are worse liars than me. At least I am
honest about what I do.” “What about your family?” I asked him, “Do they know what you
look at?” He responded:
Yes. My father knows and doesn’t care. He feels the way that I do, that I am a man
[and thus have a man’s “need”]. The first time that my mom found out she got really
mad, screaming and crying. She made me swear on the Qur’an that I wouldn’t do it
again. But what am I going to do? So now I am careful, more than before. And when
she found some [pornography] on the computer, my father told her it was his.
When asked whether he and his father ever discussed pornography or sex, he replied, “No.
Never. But I know that he looks at it a lot too. Father like son, right?”
While the production, consumption, dissemination and exchange of pornographic
material in this context can be considered a social activity in the sense that respondents
frequently copied materials or sent internet links to favorite content to other members of the
group. Important to note, however, is that the respondents did not sit and collectively view
pornography together as a group. Hence individual collections, which ranged in size from
three or four to several hundred gigabytes, contained a great deal of overlap from informant to
informant. When asked about the significant difference in collection size, ‘Alaa recounted
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certain notions of stigma, guilt and fear of punishment, which affected him emotionally as a
self-identifying Muslim, saying “Ahmad and Samir are always destroying their stuff because
they feel that it makes them bad men.” When asked whether Samir had ever disposed of his
collection, ‘Alaa responded, “Yes, once, right after Samir got religious. He wanted us to be
better Muslims. But it didn’t last long. There is nothing else for us to do.”
The group’s use of internet and mobile phone technology highlights the complicated
relationship Egyptian male youth have with information technology, as it can be argued that
greater access to pornography through information technology serves to simultaneously
undermine and reify certain “patrimonial and patriarchal structures” (Glavanis 2008, 7-15)
which complicates known paths of gender and sexual identity formation as they would be
otherwise learned alongside other cultural and social behavioral norms. As Pandeli Glavanis
(2008) notes for the Arab world more broadly:
Arab Youth seem to have best use of this form of communication technology
primarily to enhance and deepen patrimonial and patriarchal structures as well as a
means of overcoming gender separation. In other words, the communication
technology has contributed to the rooting of contemporary Arab Youth in traditional
social systems which they are not challenging. As the mobile enabled males and
females to communicate in societies were direct contact is forbidden they have not
seen the need to challenge the status quo…Arab Youth have appropriated
technology to their own end and objectives and not as a means of challenging
restrictive social norms (2008, 15).
Inasmuch as Belal and his friends regularly used information technology to undermine certain
social taboos concerning sex and gender norms, they did not intentionally seek to restructure
or challenge the underlying discourses which render engagement with pornography one of
many deviations from a normative, religiously-coded performance of masculinity. Rather
information technology in this case allowed respondents to play with the boundaries of what
they very clearly understood to be normative masculine performance in the course of seeking
out more practically safe outlets for their sexual desire and inexpensive but highly mobile
venues for gaining social prestige among peers. Whereas Youssef and Belal, for example,
viewed restrictive gender rules, social constraints and biological drives as causes “forcing”
them to watch porn, which in turn resulted in some feelings of shame and guilt for engaging in
“wrong” behavior, neither expressed any interest in challenging or restructuring that the local
secular and sacred norms which dictate permissible from prohibited behavior relating to sex
and gendered relations. Still, there are some important signals of boundary pushing evident in
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my respondents’ relationship to information technology as a means to securing sexually
explicit content. As mentioned, the respondents sought out sexually explicit content online as
a means of gaining information and familiarity with sex, finding it unavailable elsewhere
without having to violate critical taboos and run the risk of compromising their social
reputations. Though inadvertent, the respondents’ solicitation, collection and exchange of
pornography does suggest alternative modes of value creation and knowledge seeking are
being carved out by this new generation, which in turn point to new formulas for the
performance of masculinity.
Butler (1993) and Walle (2004) converge around this point, as both call attention to the
role gender “performativity” plays in negotiating and calibrating seemly inconsistent behaviors
and values. As Walle notes in his work on dating and sexual mores among Pakistani males:
Rather than renouncing the moral standards altogether—e.g., claiming that drinking
alcohol is of no significance in judging a person's character—it seems [according to
Walle’s findings] to be important [for the men interviewed] to indicate to [their]
companions where the boundaries of publicly acceptable behaviour are drawn, and
that prestige lies in the fact that you are crossing them intentionally and temporarily.
Labeling oneself a ‘bad Muslim’ clearly indicates this; the men are fully aware of the
fact that certain activities are incompatible with good Muslim conduct, and they
probably agree with this categorisation. It is also obvious that they have no wish to
be permanently regarded as bad Muslims, but gain prestige as men, in certain social
relations, by acting thus” (2004, 101).
For the younger men in the study, the pressure to be seen as a “man” and to prove he had
“manly” needs was a strong factor in consuming pornography. The size and diversity of a
pornography collection were considered indicators of masculine urge among respondents, in
that pornography’s taboo status increased the risk involved in its possession and hence the
value of that possession and the maleness of its possessor. Many of my respondents perceived
masculinity as something characterized by an abundance of sexual need, and within that
framework many respondents felt compelled to “perform” and hence prove their own
masculinity through an extensive familiarity with and accumulation of pornography. As Walle
(2004) notes, there is also a considerable amount of prestige in knowing when to break social
mores, as Belal and ‘Alaa in particular took great pride in leading “double lives” between the
family persona and as “porn kings” among their social cohort. Moreover, all respondents
considered the lack of opportunities for sexual experience and intimacy with women and the
total absence of private space20 to be legitimizing and normalizing factors which made
The youth’s lack of social entitlement to an already small amount of private space in Cairo’s daily life was also
an influential factor in respondents’ engagement with pornography. As Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe (2005)
note in their study of Japanese adolescents, youth or peer groups often lack ownership and control over public
20
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engagement with pornography less risky, even while understanding it as culturally and
religiously haram. Significantly, many respondents noted a desire to conform to more
traditional conduct when they marry, suggesting that the interest and willingness in pushing
the boundaries of masculine gender propriety were considered temporary.
To Wudu’ or Not to Wudu’
Several months after I first met Ahmad and Samir, they started attending bi-weekly halaqat
[Islamic religious classes]. Within a two-week period, the two were able to convince the other
respondents to destroy their pornographic collections and join in regularly at a local mosque.
While Youssef, Belal and ‘Alaa eventually returned to their previous habits of collecting and
exchanging pornographic materials, the group of friends continued to attend halaqat,
performed the daily obligatory prayers, and began to reference Islamic law and Qur’anic
scripture and ‘ibadat [worship] more noticeably in daily conversation. The dichotomy between
the respondents’ new religiosity and the massive amount of pornography they continued to
consume made me curious to understand both how they reconciled these seemingly
contradictory behaviors on an intellectual level, and what ritual thresholds and preparations
became necessary as respondents’ passed between these two spaces, the sacred and the
profane. Of particular interest were the bodily, mental and spiritual preparations respondents
felt obligated to undergo before entering religious observation after engaging with
pornography.21
While sitting with Samir, Belal and Youssef one evening, I asked whether they did
anything specific after watching pornography in order to pray. Youssef said, “No,” and Belal
chimed in saying, “It depends…[hesitation]...yanni, it depends if I...you know...just look at it or
do something else [like masturbate]. If I just see a clip, then I do wudu’22, but otherwise I do
ghusl.”23 Samir, who claimed to no longer look or take part in anything related to pornography,
spaces and come under a high level of regulation and scrutiny by adults as they go about their daily tasks (2005,
131). Text messaging (and other modes of information technology) thus provides a zone of freedom and sense of
private space that may be denied to youths in other spheres of life and may allow youths to consolidate a shared
culture apart from the overriding norms of their parents or other adults. Belal confirmed this idea, saying:
...the thing about Egypt is that we don’t have space away from our parents, our families. In America, you can
get a job, you can get time away or just move away. We are expected to always be with our families, always live
them until we get married. My computer, my phone, it’s my space. My mom doesn’t know how to use them,
and so it is the only space I have to do what I ever I want.
For Belal and his friends, mobile technology and the internet were seen as venues through which new spaces
could be both appropriated and, more importantly, personalized to reflect a spectrum of curiosities and social
norms specific to youth culture. Moreover, the spaces enabled by information technology held the added appeal
of lacking, in large part, encroachment by Islamic and state discourses.
21 Before a person can perform one of the mandatory five daily prayers, they must be in a ritually pure state; this typically
requires a person to perform ablution.
22 Wudu, or the minor form of Islamic ablution, requires a person to form good niyyah [intent], and involves reciting
“Bismallah,” followed by a washing of the head, the hands up to the elbows, and finally the feet up to the ankles with
‘pure’ or flowing water (Ibn Rushd 1994, 2).
23 Ghusl is the major form of Islamic ablution, and requires a person to recite “Bismallah” and completely wash their body
in ‘pure’ water, and finally perform wudu’ (Ibn Rushd 1994, 43-5).
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nodded, saying “that’s right, [pornography] it’s shameful...da zina [it’s adultery], so you should
always do ghusl!”
Youssef, at this point somewhat insulted, reentered the conversation, saying, “No it’s
not... what do you mean zina? I’m not married! Porn, yeah it’s haram [forbidden], but it’s not
zina. As long I’m only looking, it’s no problem!” Samir, strongly disagreeing, argued, “Listen,
no matter what you do, it’s zina al-‘ayn…if you know its haram and you keep looking at it, it
becomes a major sin, so you have to do ghusl.” Youssef added a further distinction, saying,
“…If I don’t do anything, and my niyyah [intent] is good, then that’s all I need.”
The narratives above get to the heart of an impressive diversity of opinions and
rationales which underscore individual attempts to mediate the interplay between purity and
pornography, all of which can be and routinely are informed on some level by Islamic
jurisprudence [fiqh] in the popular sphere. Youssef, for example, defended his claim that as
long as he wasn’t masturbating to pornography, wudu’ and good niyyah [intent] would be
sufficient to absolve his interactions with pornography by claiming he had “[gotten] a fatwa [an
Islamic legal ruling],” to which Samir retorted, “I’ll ask Sheikh Mohsen about it,” as if to
suggest some degree of competition between them as to the authority of each one’s source.
Belal, deferring to religious observance rather than legal interpretation [qiyas], added, “The
important thing is that you are praying, and not letting shaytan [the devil] take even that away
from you.”24 For Belal, the bodily discipline of prayer became a way of disciplining both the
mind and the biological urges.
In questioning the respondents as to how each one had decided to negotiate and make
sense out of his Islamic ritual obligations, sexual activities and engagement with pornography,
each one cited a different source of knowledge for his justification. Samir and Belal preferred
to ask advice of an imam or sheikh personally, or to seek advice from television shows dealing
with matters of Islamic jurisprudence and purity. Telling why he preferred to consult religious
figures, Samir said:
The sheikhs give hard talk. They’ll tell you that you are wrong, that your behavior is
haram, and you better change before [the day of] judgment. But they also have heard the
same story [about pornography] a million times. Face it: pretty much every man looks at
it. And yeah, maybe it makes me a bad Muslim, but I am still a Muslim. Everyone has sins
that they will be judged on. But better [the sin of] porn then sex.
By contrast, Youssef preferred to investigate matters on his own on the internet, satisfying his
own particular curiosities about notions of jurisprudence and purity practices in Islam. Youssef
Ironically, when asked what would be considered the proper ritual response to a woman’s viewing of pornography, I
was told that a woman would have to perform ghusl before she could be considered resolved of impurity, consequently
the same purification practice she would be expected to perform after sexual arousal. Similar to men’s obligation to
perform ghusl instead of wudu’ after ejaculation, a woman must find moisture to be obligated to perform ghusl (Ibn Rushd
1994, 47).
24
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considered the internet a more authentic and unbiased way of gathering opinions and
knowledge on the subject, saying, “A sheikh will tell you only half the story, and only what he
wants you to know, but the internet has everyone’s opinions and you are more likely to know
the truth. I’m not as trusting as Samir and Belal.” In all of these cases, the role of information
technology in facilitating curiosities and drawing even unintended seekers casually and without
great ceremony between content as diverse as Islamic jurisprudence and pornography is
essential. Countless websites are now developed for and targeted to an Islamic audience with
these very curiosities in mind and most websites observed for this research included sections
devoted to matters of ritual purity and instruction on cleansing after interactions with sexually
explicit content. Interestingly, whereas Islamic purity laws have long been among the more
visible and accessible areas of Islamic law for average practicing Muslims, the recent
resurgence of interest in such matters online as a result of the pornography explosion marks a
significant change from even a decade ago (Bunt 2002).
Conclusion
This fieldwork attempts to convey narratives that highlight the ways by which seemingly
transgressive acts like engagement with pornography become an integral part of ordinary and
everyday behavior and gender performance. Given the available online statics for pornography
consumption rates, a significant part of the region can confidently be said to interact with
pornographic material on a regular, if not habitual, basis. Whereas the respondents in this
group expressed an interest in cutting all ties with pornography once married, this work finds
little evidence to suggest that pornography is a passing phase for the region as a whole.
Conversations with older, married respondents outside of the cohort showcased here suggest
that marriage does not necessarily change feelings of sexual frustration. One male informant,
married for about one year, remarked, “I still watch porn. It’s a habit, just like coffee in the
morning. I thought that I wouldn’t want to [after I got married] but it’s not like my wife will
do all those things that they do in videos. Sex in real life isn’t like sex in video clips.”
A review of the known variables relating to why and how pornography consumption in the
Middle East is so dynamic today results in a set of complexities. The view that young Egyptian
men are “forced” structurally into a habitual relationship with pornography holds some merit,
as the average age for marriage among men has risen by over a decade since 2000 resulting
from low employment and lingering pressure on men to perform masculinity through
demonstrations of financial security. As my respondents confirmed, moreover, pre-marital sex
is not really a safe and realistic option in Egypt. Respondents for this work, time and time
again, contrasted feelings of sexual frustration with the sexual freedoms they associated with
Western countries, considering the latter more “natural” or “humane.” Many respondents
nevertheless detailed an important distinction between desiring the freedom and access to sex
and knowledge about sex on the one hand and wanting to live in a Western culture on the
other. While many considered the sexual freedoms associated with Western countries
compelling, many still perceived the societies of the East as belonging to a higher moral rank.25
25
Most of my respondents conveyed a perception of the West as morally inferior to Islamic countries.
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This research also attempts to show how pornography satisfies more than just
biological urges for young Egyptian males. For these respondents, pornography is a tool to
learn about sex and sexual relations, a form of social capital and entertainment, and an
important set of behaviors which shape how masculinity is understood and performed.
Respondents perceived their consumption and concealment of pornography as “normal”
masculine behavior for their age and socio-economic standing and viewed it as an important
component of self identity, alongside observance of religious practice, participation in religious
functions and debates. This work has also tried to draw out the central role of information
technologies in facilitating certain shifts, negotiations and coexistence of sacred and profane
messages and content among youth. While sex and sexually explicit content as topics continue
to be delineated within very specific forums and frameworks in Egyptian society, these trends
suggest some attempts these respondents use to navigate around those restrictions without
compromising their shared values stemming from religion, attitudes toward marriage and
others. While it is not the intent of this work to argue, for example, that “Muslim women need
saving” (Abu Lughod 2001) or to push for a similar argument for Muslim men, the findings
presented here do aim to advance the body of critical research, inquiry and debate around
issues of gender, sex and sexuality in the region, both within the literature and in more popular
spheres of discourse.
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