Sara Hegazy and the freedom to be yourself

I am angry. I am so angry that my anger has caused my anxiety levels to intensify. I need to express my anger with the hope that this helps my anxiety.

A few days ago, a young Egyptian woman committed suicide in Canada. She had fled to Canada not long after her release from prison in Egypt, following her arrest for raising the rainbow flag at a concert in Cairo. In prison, she was tortured by her jailers and molested by her female prison mates.

Sara Hegazy was gay. She was also an atheist. She did not hide the fact that she was either. And she paid for it in every horrible way possible. Even after her death, Egyptian social media erupted into all the meanness and terribleness it can be, demanding that people refrain even from even asking for God to have mercy on her soul. Discussions ensued about the inappropriateness of expressing one’s homosexuality in a ‘religious society’ like Egypt. Why did she even raise the rainbow flag in our society, people asked. She should have been smarter than that. “Those people” have been living in society for centuries without anyone harming them, said others, as long as they don’t rub their gayness in our faces. We can’t allow them to just go around talking about their homosexuality in our society, yet others said. If we do, homosexuality will spread amongst our children like an infection.

I can’t help but take this personally.

I have experienced first-hand what it means not to be able to be one’s true self in and among one’s own society. It is pure hell. I have spent years delicately testing the waters to figure out what I can and should not say publicly, whether it is regarding my religious or my political views. The past few days are the first for me to properly express my belief that a homosexual person should not be discriminated against in any way. How ridiculous does that even sound?? I have expressed this not because I feel safe in doing so but because I feel so outraged that keeping that outrage inside of me might eat me up alive.

I feel outraged for Sara and for ANYONE who can’t just be themselves because of the discrimination of the people around them. I feel outraged by the things I hear, like: if we normalize homosexuality, what’s to prevent pedophilia from being normalized? I feel outraged that no logical response to these illogical fears that people have settles in with them in any way.

I feel outraged.

I feel outraged because I hear Muslims living abroad complaining constantly about Islamophobia and demanding constantly that they have the right to publicly and safely practice their beliefs. This means, for example, the right of a Muslim woman to wear a headscarf or a face veil, or the right of Muslims to conduct their prayers in public. If you believe, as I do, that this is a basic human right, as it is your right not to be discriminated against because of your religion, how can you possibly not see how wrong it is to discriminate against someone else for another reason? If you think it should be your right to be your true self as you believe God demands it no matter where you go on this Earth, how is it possible that you think it’s wrong for someone living a different life with different beliefs to be themselves wherever they are? How can you not see the hypocrisy in your words and actions?

I am outraged that you think your beliefs are of significantly higher importance, the only relevant beliefs, compared to the beliefs of any others.

I am outraged that, because of your beliefs, we cannot find a common ground for discussion. If something is forbidden for you, then it is forbidden for you! Don’t do it! That doesn’t make it forbidden for the rest of the world!

I am outraged because you think that it’s all right for others to believe what they want and to do what they wish as long as it’s not done publicly. As long as it’s kept a secret. Yet you wouldn’t accept this for yourself in any way. Nobody should. A Muslim woman who believes in the necessity of wearing the hijab is carrying her rainbow flag around with her, announcing proudly to the world that she is a Muslim. A person wearing a wedding ring is carrying their rainbow flag around with them, announcing to the world that they are married, something that inevitably involves having sex at some point in time. When people have weddings, they are announcing to the world their new relationship. When a Muslim man chooses a corner in a park to pray one of the five daily prayers, he is carrying his rainbow flag announcing that he is a Muslim. Why is that all right for you but not all right for anyone else?

I don’t even know if I am making sense, I am so outraged.

Why can’t people understand that living inside your head is destructive, so much more destructive than it is to let that person just ‘be’, no matter how different that being might be from your kind of being.

I heard so many times over the past few days that people should have enough social intelligence to know when it is and isn’t appropriate to let your thoughts and your true self be known. Do they not understand how self-destructive that can be?

It’s as if you are asking a person to choose between two hells: the hell of keeping yourself hidden in order to stay safe from a societal backlash, or revealing your true self to avoid the inner hell but expose yourself to an outer one.

I wonder whether these ‘religious’ people understand how their imposed ‘religiousness’ is affecting our mental health as a society. We’re a society that has everything in it and we all know it. But it’s all hidden. It’s all a huge secret that’s not really a secret. But as long as we pretend it’s a secret we think it’s all right. It isn’t. It really isn’t all right.

We need to be able to have conversations about stuff without being thrown into prison for it. We need to be able to have conversations about stuff without constantly being condemned to hell. We need to be more accepting of our differences. You do you. I’m happy for you. But let me do me and be happy for me too.

The fact that I currently live in the UK doesn’t make any of this easier, or make me feel freer. In the end, my community, my people, Sara’s people, are the people where our families and friends are, where we grew up, where we relate no matter how difficult it is to relate sometimes.

I need to have these conversations with my people. I have found it so difficult to find people outside the Arab world who are passionate about saving the world in the same ways I am. But these conversations are so difficult. And so enraging. So utterly utterly enraging.

I hope you have found peace now, wherever you are, Sara. I am so so so sorry we allowed this to happen to you. I am so so so sorry we have stayed silent. I am so so so sorry you weren’t safe to simply be yourself.

 

 

Wanted: Gorgeous Lebanese Man for Scientific Research and the Head of a Certain Saudi Scholar

Yesterday I wrote a blog post about segregation of the sexes among some conservative Muslims in mosques, educational lectures and conferences.

I got some rather interesting responses to that, mainly on my Facebook page, which I only allow close friends to join.

One discussion was related in a way to the poll I had posted: “For you, is it terribly distracting to sit next to someone of the opposite sex during an educational lecture?”

I asked that question because I wanted honest answers from people: is it really true that we need to segregate the sexes so that the men and women can focus on the subject matter rather than on each other?

One female Facebook friend jokingly sent me this answer on my Facebook profile, “It depends. How good-looking is this person sitting next to me? Is he Lebanese? And most importantly is he wearing Axe for men cause the TV commercials say it makes men irresistible.”

I asked this friend, “What IF he was a Lebanese man wearing Axe? Would that mean you’d jump on him if he was sitting next to you in a lecture?”

She answered, “I cannot answer that truthfully unless u present me with this opportunity but please make sure he ‘s really good-looking so we can accurately test this theory of urs. I will atnazil [humble myself] and be ur guinea pig purely for research purposes.”

My other Facebook girlfriends and I jumped on this as an opportunity for scientific experimentation that I must admit included a lot of giggling.

One girlfriend wrote out a hypothesis for our experiment:

Hypothesis 1: Axe for men, when applied on square Leb. men, acts as a catalyst to socially unacceptable behavior in Egyptian women.

I suggested we needed a control for our experiment and that control should be an average looking Egyptian man (not as attractive as a Lebanese man to our feminine Egyptian eyes).

So friend number 2 came up with a second hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2: Axe-for-men, when applied to Egyptian men, is neutralized, resulting in a pleasant-yet-platonic effect on Egyptian women.

And I posted a wanted ad on Twitter:

A group of female friends & i will be conducting a scientific experiment based on my blog post from yesterday. We r looking for a male specimen of lebanese nationality. Must be very attractive and put Axe cologne during experiment. We will put said specimen in our midst during an educational lecture to test our ability to sit without pouncing on said specimen. Applications are open to all who fit those criteria till 5pm cairo time @NadiaE.

Of course, it doesn’t take much to be able to tell that my friends and I were just having some semi-innocent fun.

BUT, a Palestinian nanotechnologist who follows me (and who is also a good friend) did not recognize that this was a bunch of women joking around and took us quite seriously.

Quite interestingly, he supported our idea of scientifically testing the logic behind some religious edicts, or fatwas.

I spent the rest of my day spinning this around in my head. Why is it that we do not put the logic used by some Islamic scholars to test?

So if a scholar uses the logic that putting men and women together in one room can lead to men being distracted or to unacceptable behaviors, why not actually test this logic by conducting a scientific study?

Why not find out if science supports the logic behind many religious edicts?

Isn’t that a brilliant idea?

So I started looking at fatwas that prohibit the mixing of genders in the workplace. And of course, one of the first fatwas that comes up in searches now is a recent fatwa issued by Saudi scholar, Sheikh Al-Barrak. I will translate the most important part of his fatwa for you:

The mixing of men and women in the workplace and in educational institutions – and this is what modernists call for – is haram [prohibited in Islam]. This is so because it involves looking at haram [prohibited things], the prohibited unveiling of the face, the prohibited dressing oneself up [of women in front of men], prohibited talk between men and women, and all this leads to what happens afterwards.

And what causes modernists to call for such things is a tendency towards the life of the Western non-believers. Their minds [the modernists] have become westernized and they want to westernize the Islamic nation. Nay, they want to force this westernization [on the Islamic nation].

He who legitimizes mixing – and if this leads to prohibited activities – legitimizes the prohibited activities. And he who legitimates them is a non-believer. And this means he has become an apostate, in which case he should be informed [of the truth] and given the evidence and if he still [continues with the same stance] he should be killed.

YIKES!

I must warn you, this is a very extreme fatwa and even most Saudi scholars who support segregation of sexes will not say that those who support non-segregation should be killed.

But the logic Barrak uses in prohibiting mixing of sexes is similar to the logic used by many conservative Muslims all over the world. If you put men and women together in the same room (and here I’m talking about the workplace and educational institutions, for example, and not the bedroom), then bad things will ensue. Basically, they won’t be able to control themselves, or so the conservative scholars believe.

I had started out my search in wont of discovering a scientific process to test these theories. I still think this is a brilliant idea.

But as I read this fatwa a second thought came to mind.

The above logic states that when men and women are placed together in the same room their instincts of lust take over in many cases and thus in order to prevent the prohibited acts of non-marital lust we must prohibit the precursors of such lust (in this case putting men and women together in the same room).

In Saudi Arabia, where segregation of the sexes prevails, homosexual practices sometimes happen.

So using the above logic, wouldn’t that mean that putting women and women together in the same room, for example, can sometimes result in homosexual acts (prohibited in Islam) and thus we must prohibit the precursors of such acts (putting women and women or men and men together in the same room)?

And using the logic of Barrak’s fatwa, wouldn’t that mean that he who encourages women only or men only gatherings is encouraging the possibility of homosexual acts taking place, and since homosexual acts are forbidden in Islam that person is thus encouraging a forbidden act, thus becoming an apostate deserving to be killed? Would that mean that Sheikh Barrak just issued a fatwa allowing himself to be killed?

I’m just saying!