Welcome back to ‘Eyb, the newsletter! In my fortnightly newsletter I write frankly on topics that I was told were ‘eyb or shameful, as a young Egyptian woman growing up in the Middle East. Sometimes I share life anecdotes, as well as what I’m currently working on. I share what I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to too!
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I don’t know about you, but I was elated when British actress and screenwriter Michaela Coel recently got a BAFTA for her drama series I May Destroy You which aired exactly a year ago on BBC.
I May Destroy You was a ground-breaking series, as it challenged our society’s notions on sexual consent. Rape and sexual assault can take place in many different ways, in many different scenarios, and some can be “less obvious” than others. Just because you consent to one sexual act, does not mean that you necessarily consent to other sexual acts following it. Just because you’ve had sex with someone once, does not then mean you automatically consent to having sex again with them afterwards. They do not automatically have the right to you just because you agreed once. And this counts for those who are in relationships or are married too.
Image from BBC iPlayer
The series was life changing for me for reasons I have rarely spoken about publicly. If you have read my book Hijab and Red Lipstick you will recall a horrific incident that the protagonist Sara is blamed for. Unfortunately, this incident is based on something that happened to me eleven years ago when I was living in the Gulf. I could not bear to tell my closest friends at the time what had happened to me, for fear of their disappointment in me. They had warned me about not dating anyone from a particular family, and I thought they were unfairly generalising so I ignored those warnings.
When my father found out from my mother and had finally calmed down - he held me to fault because I had gone on a date with the man, something that many consider not allowed in Islam, and it was technically against the law in Qatar - and then tried to see if he could seek justice for me, managing to have a conversation with the country’s chief prosecutor, he was told that: A. Opening a case could mean I end up in prison myself as I had willingly gone out with the guy, and according to the country that meant I consented to everything that followed me getting into his car, classifying it as “zina” or fornication, which is illegal there; B. Because of who it was (i.e. someone high up in the country), there was no way they could prosecute him, and C. My father should thank God I was alive as he could have killed me.
It is a widespread belief in Egypt, where my father comes from, and the Gulf, where we were living, that if you willingly go out with a man, it’s your fault if he forces himself on you. They refuse to call it rape. They will only call it rape if you are abducted by a stranger. They won’t acknowledge that for many survivors of rape it happens by someone they know, in a situation in which the former trusted the latter.
For a while I believed them - that it was my fault for going out with this person and for naively thinking that nothing more than a kiss would happen. And there are those in my faith community who would be quick to blame me too, brandishing and misusing one of the sayings of our Prophet Muhammed peace be upon him in which he said that if a man and woman are alone together, the devil is the third party.
No matter what faith background people come from, and no matter the country, people always find a way to put the blame on women. In my case it was, “You were alone with him, so it is your fault.”
A year after moving to Doha, my English girlfriend at high school was gang raped with her older sister when they went to a house party and were offered a ride home by a group of local guys. Instead of taking my friend and her sister home, the guys took them to the desert and raped them both. My friend’s parents pressed charges and managed to get their case taken to court, something rarely done there. Because house parties are illegal there and my friend and her sister had been drinking - also illegal there - they were both blamed, and the court refused to acknowledge that they had been raped. The boys walked away without punishment. Excusing rapists and blaming survivors for having been drinking is a familiar scenario world over.
Watching I May Destroy You was difficult watching for me, but I am glad I watched the entire series. After that, I finally believed that it was not my fault. I had never consented.
Hijab and Red Lipstick is available to order from Hashtag Press, Amazon, Waterstones, Blackwells, and Book Depository. If you visit your local independent bookstore regularly, you can ask them to order it in for you.
What I’ve been reading:
I recently finished reading anthology We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers edited by Palestinian British author Selma Dabbagh, and published by Saqi (check it out here.) You may remember me mentioning that my own short story, Catch No Feelings, is included in this anthology, something I am immensely proud of!
We Wrote in Symbols is a collection of 100 pieces of poetry and prose by female Arab writers across the ages - from as early as pre-Islamic Arabia, through to the Abbasid, Umayyid and Andalusion periods, to more recent times, in the 20th and 21st centuries. As well as including the work of well-known authors like Adania Shibli, Leila Slimani and Hanan Al Shaykh, it also celebrates new voices in female Arab literature. Each poem and short story is exquisitely written and testament to the high level of each contributer’s written craft.
After reading the work of the other authors, writers, and poets, I almost felt as if I had held back a little in my own story! They do not hold back, writing assertively and forthrightly about love, lust, desire, and sexuality. Some people have this misconception that as Arab women we don’t know much about sex, or that we don’t write or talk about it - this anthology proves the opposite - erotica is one of our longest standing literary traditions.
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