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Headscarves and Hymens
On sale
21st April 2015
Price: £18.99
Written and read by the author.
In November 2011, Mona Eltahawy came to worldwide attention when she was assaulted by police during the Egyptian Revolution. She responded by writing a groundbreaking piece in FOREIGN POLICY entitled ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’; ‘They’ being Muslim men, ‘Us’ being women. It sparked huge controversy.
In HEADSCARVES AND HYMENS, Eltahawy takes her argument further. Drawing on her years as a campaigner and commentator on women’s issues in the Middle East, she explains that since the Arab Spring began, women in the Arab world have had two revolutions to undertake: one fought with men against oppressive regimes, and another fought against an entire political and economic system that treats women as second-class citizens in countries from Yemen and Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.
Eltahawy has travelled across the Middle East and North Africa, meeting with women and listening to their stories. Her book is a plea for outrage and action on their behalf, confronting the ‘toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend.’ A manifesto motivated by hope and fury in equal measure, HEADSCARVES AND HYMENS is as illuminating as it is incendiary.
(p) 2015 Macmillan Audio
In November 2011, Mona Eltahawy came to worldwide attention when she was assaulted by police during the Egyptian Revolution. She responded by writing a groundbreaking piece in FOREIGN POLICY entitled ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’; ‘They’ being Muslim men, ‘Us’ being women. It sparked huge controversy.
In HEADSCARVES AND HYMENS, Eltahawy takes her argument further. Drawing on her years as a campaigner and commentator on women’s issues in the Middle East, she explains that since the Arab Spring began, women in the Arab world have had two revolutions to undertake: one fought with men against oppressive regimes, and another fought against an entire political and economic system that treats women as second-class citizens in countries from Yemen and Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.
Eltahawy has travelled across the Middle East and North Africa, meeting with women and listening to their stories. Her book is a plea for outrage and action on their behalf, confronting the ‘toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend.’ A manifesto motivated by hope and fury in equal measure, HEADSCARVES AND HYMENS is as illuminating as it is incendiary.
(p) 2015 Macmillan Audio
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Reviews
This is a timely and provocative call to action for gender equality in the Middle East
This a powerful global feminist demand for equal rights.
This is a fascinating, can't-look-away, whistle-stop tour of the Middle East through the eyes of an angry but lucid observer. Eltahawy is brave as well as perceptive: her reports cause outrage and controversy. She blames the West as much as Middle Eastern attitudes for the lack of change, especially Western liberals who criticise imperialism and yet turn a blind eye to the cultural imperialism that doesn't push misogyny to the fore, as if there might time to sort that out later when more important matters have been "fixed".
(What are you currently reading?) Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy. I was lucky enough to interview Mona recently and she is enormously inspiring and very, very funny.
Inequality, state brutality, resentment, sexual frustration, religious indoctrination, shame culture and struggle for power . . . Eltahawy holds a match to this combustible mix . . . A brave call for gender equality
Headscarves and Hymens is useful for those who are new to the situation in the Middle East, as it's a good overview of the main social issues affecting the region.
To Eltahawy, the root of this inequality is clear: "a toxic mix of culture and religion", particularly Islam, and more particularly the spread of its ultra-conservative Saudi-style interpretation.
Informative and engaging, a brave and much needed insight into suffering which is rarely talked about openly.
Headscarves and Hymens is less a call to arms and more a protracted bellow for equality, progress and common sense.
This book should be made compulsory reading in all those schools where British Muslim girls are being groomed to go abroad to be Islamic State brides. Eltahawy is laceratingly honest about how hard it has been for her as an Arab Muslim woman to confront the institutional misogyny of her culture, to free herself of the "taboos and silence". Only when there has been a revolution in the relations between the sexes, she insists, will there ever be genuine political change in the Middle East.
'Headscarves and Hymens is an impassioned, deeply felt and affecting memoir that confronts a very real problem.
Shocking, heartfelt and well-researched
Now Eltahawy has written this fearless roar-to-arms, which sets her own experiences - including how she was groped while on Hajj in Mecca - alongside those of dozens of other women. She illustrates the misogynistic and sometimes downright barbaric attitudes towards women in the Arab world; from the Hobson's Choice of the hijab and the Saudi cleric who declared that women shouldn't drive because it damages their ovaries; to FGM and Rawan, the eight-year-old Yemeni "bride", who died of internal bleeding after being violently penetrated on her "wedding night". Sometimes we need books that will make us angry enough to want to change things. This book will certainly disturb you, and possibly make you very angry indeed - but you must read it.
Eltahawy's passionately argued case is irrefutable. But how to harness this rage to achieve real political change remains the unanswered question.
This a call to arms against misogyny in the Arab world is furiously plain-speaking.
Mona Eltahawy brings a journalist's keen eye, a revolutionary's prophetic courage, and a feminist's incendiary intellect to this work, demolishing the last cultural relativist myths. And she writes so well that it's hard to put down this audacious, information-packed treasure about the half of the Arab world that's female. Miss this book-the real key to the Middle East-at your peril.
This feisty Egyptian lady made headlines after she was arrested by police, beaten and sexually assaulted in 2011 during the Egyptian revolution. Her subsequent article for Foreign Policy magazine, Why Do They Hate Us?, was a no-holds barred attack on the treatment of women in many Arab countries. "When it comes to the status of women in the Middle East," she wrote, "it's not better than you think. It is much, much worse"
A passionate and brilliantly argued polemic....When I put down Eltahawy's deeply affecting book, I felt that a bit more Enlightenment universalism is in order. Instead of bellyaching when some idiotic man calls a woman "dear" or a hideous professor sends his student a creepy email, feminists should wake up and recognise the cruel, systematic violence that millions of women still face throughout the world.
Brave and impassioned . . . A shocking book, and one that will make anyone who has seen veiling as a cultural issue think very hard about what is really going on
Overall, however, it is the oscillation between the personal and the political that makes Headscarves and Hymens a tour de force...Sometimes we need books that will make us angry enough to want to change things. This courageous book will certainly disturb you, and may make you very angry indeed. But you still must read it.
Headscarves and Hymens is a call to arms by a woman who's plainly proud of her justified rage. She brings to mind those angry, outspoken women in the 1970s who were branded "strident" feminists - the ones who yelled, who offended, but who generated change. "It is the job of a revolution to shock, to provoke, and to upset," Eltahawy writes, "not to behave or be polite." Mission accomplished.
In her debut book, Egyptian-American journalist and commentator Eltahawy mounts an angry indictment of the treatment of women throughout the Arab world.
This is a ground-shaping book that defines the edge of so many vital contemporary debates. Hers is a voice simultaneously behind and beyond the veil.
Headscarves and Hymens is timely, important and much needed. It should be translated into many languages, especially those spoken in the Middle East. Eltahawy encourages the girls of the Middle East and North Africa to be "immodest, rebel and disobey" and know they are entitled to be free. Her book deserves to be widely read, discussed and acclaimed.
So we have a winner for book-title of 2015 @monaeltahawy's 'Headscarves & Hymens - Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution.' BRAVO