Let Them Be Scandalized: An Egyptian Woman Challenges Society's Ideas of Dishonor

By Ginan Rauf

Today I am in a celebratory high-fiving irreverent mood and I have literally been dancing all over the house with that irrepressible farha that takes hold of the body when it cannot contain itself or resist the temptation to, well, dance for sheer joy. And this is decidedly not the ecstasy of prayer or the tawdry belly dance of the video clip in our image driven cyber space culture(s). This, my friends, is the taste of freedom that eludes our sanctimonious speech makers and the joy of rebellion that animates emergent communities and throws a shadow of light across the dark ages that are our night.

This is the time to celebrate Hind el-Hinnawy, a 27 year-old Egyptian costume designer who with one bold gesture scandalized a religiously conservative society wallowing in its own schizoid hypocrisy and had her baby in that ambivalent zone of civil (urfi) marriage, going on to file a paternity suit against the famous, or by now infamous, actor, Ahmed Al-Fishawy.

Al-Fishawy apparently had dabbled in religious education in an era when religious instruction has become a favorite pastime for celebrities, a highly lucrative endeavor for redeeming reputations and enhancing respectability.

With one bold gesture, and with the exquisite support of a progressive Arab father who defies all the western stereotypes of the blood thirsty honor restorer, Hind demanded that the cool dude daddy’s boy turned pious celebrity step to the fore and assume responsibility for a child conceived in legal secrecy in what has become a brilliant act of public shaming and collective awakening.

Hind’s gesture disrupts the inane trajectory of “hide, hide, hide,” even as it irreverently declares civil marriages and legal contracts a sham and a thin disguise for extra-marital and pre-marital sex in a sexually aching Nancy Ajram-watching society suffering from a severe case of denial. Perhaps the Egyptian documentary filmmaker Attiyat el-Abnoudy quoted in the The New York Times said it best: “The Importance of this case is that it is out in the open… The whole society has to question whether it is only her, or whether
the society is changing. Young people want to make love without getting married.’’

Only the beauty of Hind’s gesture is that the act of public shaming also incorporates a component of extreme self-exposure. It is a public confession of sorts enacted at great personal cost and with an eye to future possibilities. In opening herself up to the predictable torrent of public ridicule, Hind displaces the shame associated with her ambivalently legal/illegal sexual act and transfers it to the dishonorable act of concealment, as if to say, I got you, you bastard and I am not running to the secret abortion clinic or having a hymen make-over at the hypocrisy salon. The unabashed openness of her act makes of the mother a responsible adult and of the father a cowardly boy copulating in hiding.

Farha! The success of such a gesture, of course, is predicated on public response and communal support, some of which has already been forthcoming from prominent advocates of women’s rights such as Attiyet al-Abnoudy who has become the child’s God-, or perhaps more fittingly, Goddess-mother.

For me, this story bespeaks a greater hope or farha; namely, the very real and emerging possibility of energizing progressive and supportive communities throughout the Arab Islamic world who openly celebrate sexual freedom and feel no subservient compulsion to have their varied sexual lives sanctioned by religious authorities or religious law. There I said it openly. That is my confession of the day.

That is what freedom in the Arab Islamic world might look like. Why not a peace fund for DNA testing to promote sexual freedom and adult responsibility in that much maligned part of the world? And so I choose Hind el-Hinnaway and all her male and female supporters not so much celebrities of the month as freedom loving citizens of the future.

Ginan Rauf is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University currently completing a dissertation in comparative literature focusing on Arab migrant communities, including the Mizrahim. She is an Arab-American worried about the direction of her country.