By Mahmoud Al Abed
English News Editor
Albawaba.com - Amman
The trial of Egyptian feminist Nawal Saadawi has prompted the latest in a series of US media reports blasting the Arab country for human rights abuses.
The wave of criticism began last month when a prominent human rights activist was sentenced to seven years in jail for accepting foreign money and defaming his homeland.
This time, Egypt is being assailed for the trial of Saadawi, a controversial feminist and writer, who has allegedly ridiculed Islamic rites.
A Los Angeles Times article this week predicted that an Egyptian court would “forcibly divorce” Saadawi from her husband of 37 years for the alleged offenses, based on what the paper calls “an obscure and rarely applied Islamic principle” called hisba.
“Now her critics are trying to take away her husband,” reads the feature.
The lawsuit is only the second time in modern Egyptian history that hisba has been sought. As in the first case, says the article, this one targets an academic whose ideas infuriate “fundamentalists.”
The report did not seek the opinion of “moderate” Muslims to see if they considered her alleged remarks or views outrageous.
However, the lawyer behind the suit, Nabih Wahsh, was quoted as saying that he was not a fundamentalist, but simply an average Muslim who "loves and respects Dr. Saadawi" but feels that he must stop her because she has crossed a red line.
"If I told her she has to wear a veil, that would not be right -- that is her decision to make," Wahsh said. "If I asked her why she was not praying, that would not be right. But if she wants to advise people not to wear the veil or not to pray, then I think I should stop her."
Saadawi's supporters told the paper that a judge's decision last week to consider the suit is another “sign of a pervasive spirit of repression in Egypt.”
“Just last month, a court sentenced a prominent Egyptian American professor, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, to seven years in prison in part because it said his efforts to promote civil rights made Egypt look bad,” said the LA Times report.
"Even a madman would not have thought to do this if he did not have support," said Sherif Hetata, Saadawi's husband. "It is linked to the general atmosphere in the country, the growth of fundamentalist culture."
Wahsh denied that he filed the suit to drum up publicity for his law practice.
The paper claims that “everything about Saadawi is a challenge to the ruling class, from her shock of uncovered shoulder-length white hair to her 40 books that delve into taboo subjects such as women's sexuality. “She calls the most prominent religious officials here ‘sexually frustrated men’ suffering from ‘sexual mania,’” says the LA Times article. “She says the practice of veiling women is a holdover from the slave trade. She rails against female genital excision, widely practiced here. And she is an outspoken critic of the government.”
But it was a March interview with a local newspaper, Al Midan, that landed her in the current predicament. Saadawi said the Muslim practice of making a pilgrimage to Mecca and kissing a stone once kissed by the Prophet Muhammad was a “remnant of idolatry," continued the report.
"It's paganism," Saadawi said during an interview Monday with the LA Times, recalling her own visit to Mecca. "I saw people kissing the stone. I was offended. Islam started by breaking stones."
The report reminds readers of another “victim” of fundamentalism.
”When those thoughts were printed, Saadawi found herself confronted by the same sort of challenge once faced by Nasr Abu Zeid, a former professor of Arabic literature at Cairo University. In May 1992, Abu Zeid presented the tenure committee with his published works. Instead of a promotion, he became the first person targeted for hisba because some fundamentalists thought he promoted atheism.”
Religious scholars contacted by the LA Times defined “hisba” as a concept mentioned in the Quran that in effect allows individuals to police their neighbors for religious piety. However, there is some dispute about who has the right to take such actions, and whether it should be restricted to the government or to clerics, it said.
In the Abu Zeid case, it first appeared that the government and the courts were on his side. But in 1996, the nation's top court declared him an apostate--someone who renounces his or her faith--and therefore not allowed to be married to a Muslim. Abu Zeid and his wife fled the country and have not returned.
“In an effort to appease fundamentalists” and still place some control on the practice, the government passed legislation that year permitting only the state prosecutor to pursue such actions. At first it appeared this law would shield Saadawi, who has explored issues such as feminism, aggression against women and girls, prostitution and Islamic fundamentalism in works that include The Hidden Face of Eve and Women at Point Zero.
When Wahsh took up the case, he was rebuffed by the general prosecutor, who said there was no evidence that Saadawi was an apostate. But the lawyer went to court and, to the surprise of everyone, including Wahsh, the judge agreed to consider the matter. A final decision is scheduled for July 9.
"I only wish she would come forward and say, 'Yes, I said these things and I regret them,' " said Wahsh, who, according to the paper, has become so prominent since filing the suit that he recently was hired to defend a newspaper editor arrested for printing 14 photographs purporting to show a Coptic Christian monk having sex with women he then blackmailed.
But Saadawi is unlikely to apologize any time soon, says the report, which calls her “a thorn in the establishment's side.”
If the judge finds against her, she and her husband are planning to go home from court and live as if the whole thing never happened. They are prepared to put the government in the awkward position of having to throw them in jail--further tarnishing its reputation internationally--or leave them alone, thus angering fundamentalists, says the report.
"We will not be separated, and we will not leave," she said.
Not that there is much reputation left to tarnish following the wave of US media criticism.
Saad Eddin Ibrahim’s conviction reaped widespread condemnation in the US media, as well as a sharp upturn in US government criticism at a time when Egypt was distancing itself from Israel and assuming a lead role in the Arab World's pro-Palestinian movement.
The jailing of the sociologist threw Egypt into the spotlight. A flurry of articles and editorials in the Western press, ranging from the Washington Post to Newsweek, quickly followed.
Perhaps the most sobering reaction to Ibrahim's sentence, which he received for embezzlement, "spreading tendentious rumors" about election fraud, and illegally accepting money from the European Union, was a blast of criticism from the US government, which provides Egypt with billions in aid each year.
"We've been expressing all along our concerns about the process that resulted in this sentence," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was quoted as saying – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
