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    Growing Up Feminist in a Muslim Land
    Growing Up Feminist in a Muslim Land
    Growing Up Feminist in a Muslim Land
    Ebook130 pages1 hour

    Growing Up Feminist in a Muslim Land

    By Amira Nowaira

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    About this ebook

    This memoir by an Egyptian woman is at once a personal journey and an investigation into the political and social construction of modern Egypt. It casts a humorous, though at times a cynical, look at all those events, refusing to privilege one ideology over another or to pay homage to particular idols, figures or unquestioned modes of thinking.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAmira Nowaira
    Release dateNov 8, 2010
    ISBN9781452346632
    Growing Up Feminist in a Muslim Land

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      Book preview

      Growing Up Feminist in a Muslim Land - Amira Nowaira

      Growing up Feminist in a Muslim land

      By Amira Nowaira

      Published by Amira Nowaira at Smashwords

      Copyright 2010 Amira Nowaira

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Dedication

      To my mother,

      Whose silences were more eloquent than words.

      Contents

      Dedication

      Introduction

      Chapter 1: In my beginning is my whole life

      Chapter 2: In league with the proletariat

      Chapter 3: The Sphinx in our family

      Chapter 4: Venos and the music of the spheres

      Chapter 5: Caught between the piano and the violin

      Chapter 6: Do miracles really happen?

      Chapter 7: Badi’a: a rebel with a cause

      Chapter 8: The tribulations of being female

      Chapter 9: Season of migration to the south

      Chapter 10: Erika: the east-west suspicious embrace

      Chapter 11: The Nasser dream and nightmare

      Chapter 12: The importance of being Mahfouz

      Chapter 13: O Marx, my Marx!

      Chapter 14: The Beatles, Om Kolthoum and Egypt’s unswinging sixties

      Chapter 15: 1967: A very personal defeat

      Chapter 16: On being a bus, not a tram

      Chapter 17: How the English Department picked our brains

      Chapter 18: Nadia, Shadia and the excitements of university life

      Chapter 19: Travelling to Europe: Crossing cultural and linguistic barriers

      Chapter 20: Europe: Meeting the enemy

      Chapter 21: Is love just a four-letter word?

      Chapter 22: The sixties: Shattered icons and enduring legacies

      Introduction

      The idea of writing this memoir came to me in April 2004 as I travelled from Madison, Wisconsin, to New York. The 9/11 events were still fresh in everybody's minds and airport security was hugely tightened in an attempt to pre-empt any possible strike. Thanks to my Egyptian passport, I was selected from among a long line of travelers (who seemed mostly North American) and taken to a separate area where my person was searched thoroughly and my bags all unpacked and their contents scrutinized. As I stood watching the security man unwrap and probe my belongings, I realized that despite my age and my stated academic position, I was ultimately and irredeemably an Egyptian, a Muslim, and therefore a potential suspect. Even my gender was no extenuating circumstance in this case. The airport was simply following procedure.

      It became clear to me then that this was how the world defined, judged and boxed me. No amount of protestation was going to change that. By writing this memoir, I am trying in fact to escape the straight jacket of blind prejudice, for prejudice is often the outcome of lack of knowledge and absent channels of communication. I therefore hope that the narrative of my formative years may help create those necessary bridges of human communication.

      I realize that the title of this memoir is fraught with problems. In the first place, describing myself as a feminist may be rather presumptuous on my part, for I have done little to earn the label. In my early years, I had no idea what feminism was and would have certainly be baffled to be described in such terms. The history of feminist thought has always been associated with advocacy and activism, with women marching and demonstrating in support of their rights, be they political, social or economic. I use the word here rather loosely to refer to my growing awareness of myself as a woman with a mind of her own, and not to any involvement in political or social activism.

      This memoir is an exploration of what I should call, for lack of a better appellation, the feminist elements in my personality that grew and developed against all sorts of odds in the cultural soil of Egypt in the sixties. It is clear to me now that by going against the general drift of society I was in fact trying to eat soup with chop sticks.

      In the second place, referring to Egypt as a Muslim land may be wrongly interpreted as a denial of Egypt's multi-ethnic and multi-religious identity. Needless to say, it would be preposterous to deny the existence of other religious groups, particularly Coptic Christians, for Christian culture in Egypt in fact predates Islam by at least six centuries. By referring to Egypt as a Muslim land, I am only taking into account my own personal experience growing up in a family and a community that considered itself Muslim. Theological discussions are beyond the scope of this narrative which is more interested in the lived experience of a community that called itself Muslim.

      My attitude to Islam has always been colored with negotiation and skepticism. Most importantly, I have always refused to submit without questioning or argument. Like other human creeds, Islam requires a suspension of disbelief and demands an imaginative leap that promises to fulfill one's spiritual longings and aspirations. But to make that leap is not always easy. For those who make it, the result seems rewarding. Even as a child, I felt I was always dangling in mid-air.

      For many western minds, feminism and Islam seem not only irreconcilable but mutually exclusive. It is not my purpose here to present an argument against that. Nor is this memoir an apology for, or a defense of, Islam against its detractors. The traditional Muslim views that I grew up with insisted that there was no incompatibility between the Islamic creed and the fair treatment of women. Texts upon texts were often cited to indicate the high regard with which women were held in Islam. But the practice often gave the lie to the theory and the general attitude to women more often than not left a great deal to be desired.

      I write this memoir from the vantage point of a woman in her early sixties, although I hope that the term vantage will not be read as a self-congratulatory statement on my part for any superior knowledge or profound understanding I might have attained through the inevitable buildup of years and experiences. It should not be taken to imply any pinnacle of achievement or any peak of wisdom. I write this memoir in fact with the full awareness that I have seen far too little and understood much less. I realize and admit that I am not in any way wiser or closer to understanding now than I had been during the period I am writing about. If anything, I rather feel more ignorant and more uncertain than I have perhaps ever felt as a younger human being, when my certainties seemed as solid and as monstrously monumental as the government building standing on Tahrir Square in Cairo.

      I do not write with the authority of an historian, and neither do I claim to present a passionless or objectively disinterested view. Quite the contrary. I only write from my own exceedingly narrow and subjective perspective, which is evidently limited considering the fact that I was still young and fairly unformed during the period of time I am chronicling. The narrative will inevitably betray the innumerable biases and weaknesses that as a writer I am necessarily heir to, while claiming no authority or authenticity other than that of the suspect truth of subjective experience.

      The sixties for me was the time I grew up to consciousness and became slowly and gradually aware of the world around me. There may be nostalgia, or perhaps a sense of awe, in what I write as I revisit the self that I once was. It is a self I frequently find unrecognizable but always hopelessly laughable, a source of infinite wonder to me. While I do not disown the self that I was, I often look at it with the amazement of the explorer wandering in its routes and avenues, and repeatedly getting lost in its alleys and cul-de-sacs.

      In many ways, the sixties I experienced firsthand, living in my native city of Alexandria seemed to me to be the best of times, though unfortunately also the worst of times, to borrow Dickens's description of another, yet not so totally different, era. For us, the sixties was a time of hope, but concurrently a time of infinite despair, a time of exhilaration but also of great despondency. Although we seemed to have everything before us, we, as it turned out, had absolutely nothing ahead of us. We thought we understood what life was all about, and felt with enviable certainty that life was neatly packaged for us. For the larger part of the sixties, our enemies and our goals were as clearly defined as a properly catalogued bookshelf in a top-notch library. You took down the correctly tagged book, you pored over it, and then returned it to its place it without much fuss or hassle. But we realized rather late in the day that the neatness, the order, and the harmony were just a figment of our imagination.

      I write with many momentous events, both national and international, behind us: three major Arab-Israeli wars, three Gulf wars, a few small wars waged against Lebanon and Gaza, the collapse of a superpower and the rise of another to new global supremacy, not to mention the war against terror that I feel quite certain has terrorized all. Many presidents and kings have died since then and many more are still holding on. In the sixties, we did not have the faintest intimations that such dramatic events were about to happen in this area of the world, and neither had we the slightest inkling that they would affect us the way they did.

      I also write as a woman who, as a child and a young woman in the sixties, had great confidence that she

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