Excerpt from Chapter One of An American Woman Living in Egypt: Life during an Islamic takeover
Pages 19-24 The remedy for the evilness of women—the veil and circumcising!
I have a friend who is a beautiful young woman, 24-years-old, who works at my bank and who does not wear a headscarf. She is well educated and knows that wearing a headscarf is not in the Quran and that she does not have to wear one. She is called a “slut” by all her male work colleagues and puts up with constant sexual harassment. Sometimes it gets quite nasty, and they even touch her inappropriately or grab at her body.
She is a virgin and has never had any sexual activity. She dresses very conservatively. She wears loose, hi-neckline, long sleeve blouses and full-length skirts (never wears pants; therefore no “V” of her crotch is shown). I mention this because she has not behaved or dressed in any way that could be called slutty.
They call her a slut and sexually harass her because she does not wear a headscarf.
They tell her that not wearing a headscarf is “against Allah.” Even her female co-workers tell my friend that it is her fault she is harassed and that she is “asking for it” by not wearing a headscarf. But my friend knows she is not asking to be sexually harassed. She sits and does her work and never makes eye contact with her male colleagues.
Recently they have begun telling her she is an unbeliever. They are trying to terrify her into wearing a headscarf by accusing her of being an apostate.
Women in Egypt are not only faced with sexual harassment and social enforcement to force them to wear headscarves, they are brainwashed by television preachers and imams. They are told repeatedly that they must prove they are “virtuous.” How? By wearing a headscarf or veil.
Women are also told by TV imams that they have no “worth” other than being a wife and mother. They are told that once those duties are achieved, they are worthless.
They are told there is only one way to achieve “worth” at that point in their lives, after they’ve had their children, and that is to prove they are “virtuous.” Women are told they must wear the veil to prove their virtuousness to Allah.
These TV imams convince women that a woman’s body is evil, and that their entire body must be covered to prevent evil from consuming them.
Women are told that their hands must be covered, because if a woman touches something without her hand being covered, she has then dirtied that object with her evilness.
Because of this emphasis that a woman’s only worth is marriage and babies, marriage is stressed on very young girls. The pressure on girls to be married is extreme.
Most girls want to be married as soon as they turn eighteen, unless they go to university, but even then, most all university students want to be married by the time they graduate. Many are betrothed while in university or long before, and the marriage takes place immediately after graduation.
In villages, where education is not stressed, or where there are no local schools, girls marry well before the age of eighteen. To be unmarried causes great scorn from the entire village.
After marriage, the focus is to start having babies. To not get pregnant right away causes much embarrassment to a young village wife and can lead to the husband divorcing her or taking on a second wife. So, the wife’s focus is on having children and trying to gain some feeling of security and worth.
Because they marry young, by the time the children are grown, women are still somewhat young. They then become vulnerable to the TV preachers who tell them their only worth is wearing the veil to prove their virtue to Allah and to guarantee entrance to Paradise.
My husband’s youngest sister married young, had three children right away (boys), thereby fulfilling her “duties.” When all three boys were grown, she had little to do with her free time. She had no employment skills because she had married young, and unlike her sisters, had not gone to university.
All Egyptians love television, and she, like so many wives, became consumed with TV and she watched the TV preachers. Soon after this exposure she began wearing the veil.
My husband has shown me photos of his family vacationing on the beaches of Alexandria. His family owned a summer home in Alex and spent their summers there for a period of about twelve years. He has four sisters. All four sisters, including the one who now wears the veil, wore two-piece bathing suits on the beach, as did most Egyptian women during the late 1960s and up into the 1980s.
My husband comes from a family of eight children. His family has told me that no girls wore headscarves while they were growing up, and not at college either. There was no sexual harassment—it was unheard of—and unthinkable. Yet today, sexual harassment is extensive and epidemic. So, what happened?
Islam happened.
The development of wearing headscarves and the enforcement of them began in the 1980s. Now, all my nieces and nephews, of whom I have many, tell me that all girls in school wear headscarves, and many are fully veiled. I’m told that to not wear a headscarf is an invitation for sexual harassment.
Part of this problem comes from the mosque, because this is what the imams are teaching. And part of this comes from the television preachers. But the headscarf and veil are also heavily promoted inside the universities. And since the latest generations of fathers grew up during or after the emphasis on headscarves, and since they hear the imams preach anti-woman propaganda, the latest generations of fathers do not teach their sons to respect women and do not teach their sons that sexual harassment is wrong.
Besides the headscarf and veil, imams also preach that all girls must be circumcised. They teach that uncircumcised women are highly sexed and therefore want sex more often, and that this high state of arousal from not being circumcised makes them desire sex with more than one man. They are insatiable. This idea of sex with more than one man terrifies both men and women. A woman’s worth is being virtuous. A woman must be a virgin when she marries and then only have sex with one man—her husband.
The imams repeatedly preach: “Uncircumcised women are sexually out of control!”
Circumcising women is all about “control.”
Many parents I've talked to say that although they are against it, they still circumcise their daughters so that the girl will not have the problem of being unable to control her sexual desire. If a girl cannot control her sexual desire, she will be undesirable to marry. Unmarried men looking for wives do not want a girl if she's not circumcised.
Yet what is really puzzling is that nearly all newly married men complain about their bad sex life! Everyone talks about it; it's no secret. They say their wives do not enjoy sex and prefer not to do it. And that the wife only has sex because it is her duty. This attitude eventually is a turn-off for the husband. So, it makes no sense for unmarried men to want their future wife to be circumcised but they do because they’ve been told their wives will be “out of control” if not circumcised.
I have become very good friends with a Christian doctor. He says that almost every week at least one Muslim woman comes to him and asks him to fix her vagina. It is usually because the circumcising was done poorly and the women still suffer from the botched job, have chronic infections, and can barely have sex without screaming in pain. Many women come to him because they believe their dislike for sex is due to being circumcised. They come to him because they want their clitoris back.
Yet these same women keep circumcising their own daughters!
There are always several sex cream ads in the newspapers. The pictures in the ads look like ads for pornography. Many of these creams are to be rubbed on a woman's vagina to help her enjoy sex. The creams are not for lubrication, but to give the sensation of having a clitoris.
These ads are so widespread that after I married Essam, I asked him about these ads. He told me that men always talk about sex, but not like Western guys do. They talk incessantly about “not having sex.” Essam says once a month is considered a lot and a husband is lucky to get this.
Most husbands experiment with several brands of sex creams before finding out they don't work. The creams do not help the wives enjoy sex, nor want sex.
They circumcise girls to prevent them from desiring sex, but what happens is, women end up not being able to have sex comfortably, let alone be able to enjoy sex.
Circumcised women suffer chronic infections primarily because of the “at home jobs.” Circumcising is usually done in the home, and in small villages, often done by a member of the extended family. It's almost always a hack job leaving the girl horrifically damaged because they often cut more than the clitoris.
In the last few years there has been much outrage regarding a sex therapist who was trying to help young couples have better sex. For a while she had a weekly column in a major newspaper, but it caused so much anger that the paper was forced to remove her column.
She offered some good basic advice, but quite honestly, judging by the questions she received, it was obviously hopeless. The men didn't have a clue as to how to please their wives, nor did they seem to want to. They just wanted sex more often.
Many of the wives said they refused to talk to their husbands about sex because they feared it would make them appear like a bad woman. They feared if they seemed interested in sex, the husband would be suspicious of them and possibly accuse them of wanting sex with other men—or worse, they’d be falsely accused of adultery. But mostly the women complained about the pain.
Another thing I found interesting is how many women complained that they considered sex an awful chore. This may be partly due to the fact they did not marry for love and hence have no attraction to their husband, let alone passion. Many marry a total stranger. And many young girls are forced to marry men twenty to forty years older than them, forced by arranged marriages. Because these older men have established an apartment, a business, or stable income, they are considered a great choice as husband. But these are not “sugar daddy” type marriages where a young wife is treated well. These young girls are often treated like slaves.
Besides sex creams, there is an overabundance of Viagra, especially free giveaway Viagra. Viagra is given as gifts, given to fellow employees, given as bribes during elections, and given out by taxi drivers. At least once a week Essam comes home with a Viagra given to him by a taxi driver. Essam always chats up a taxi driver and tells jokes the entire ride. His reward for being a fun customer? Viagra.
Most Egyptian men don’t take Viagra for erection problems. They take Viagra thinking it will enlarge their penis to twice the size of their normal erection size. They think this supersize penis will excite the wife into wanting sex, without considering that a supersize penis would only hurt a young circumcised wife even more.
A very common theme in the Friday newspapers is a story of a girl who begs to be circumcised. The article will start by telling a story in which being uncircumcised causes a girl big trouble of some sort. Then, the story tells of her announcing to everyone that she wants to get circumcised. The end is always the same—she gets circumcised and lives happily ever after. She marries the most desirable man in her community, usually someone who is wealthy or important (or both). The moral of the story is that good things happen to girls who are circumcised!
One of the worse of these types of stories is about an uncircumcised girl who can't control herself from masturbating. Her state of horniness and desire for penis causes her to put all types of objects into her vagina. Because of this, she destroys her virginity and thereby destroys her chances of ever getting married.
These stories are always very sexy and titillating and I often wonder if they serve a dual purpose. Are they soft-core porn for the men, while simultaneously brain washing readers into condoning female circumcising?
Another popular type of story in the Friday newspapers is about an uncircumcised Christian girl who is having trouble with being oversexed. But it ends with a twist. The Christian girl converts to Islam! Islam is made out to be superior because it “protects” women from evil. These stories give the impression that Christianity is flawed.
I watched an Egyptian religious TV program about female circumcision one day. The host of the program explained that the small villages along the Nile circumcise all their girls.
The host interviewed various village women who stated they believe female circumcision is from Sunna, the religious practices established by Muhammad. They also said they believe that if a girl is not circumcised “she can't bear it” (can’t bear her horniness).
All of these village women were illiterate. The villages where these interviews took place have no schools.
While working with the Ministry of Culture I conducted research in small villages throughout Egypt. Even in villages where there are schools and women are taught to read, they don’t learn to read well enough to read the Quran (more on this later). And, few villagers have access to books on Sunna.
These women rely on “religious men” to inform them of their duties. These village women were taught these beliefs about circumcising by their local imams.
In 2005, Ahmed al-Tayib, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, stated, “All practices of female circumcision are crimes and have no relationship with Islam. It is not an obligation in Islam.”
Al-Azhar is considered the most respected source on Islamic Law and its Grand Imam is seen as the highest authority in the Muslim world. But here we are, even after it was declared by the Grand Imam to be a crime, these villagers are still circumcising their girls because their village imams continue to preach it.
And, so are the TV imams, who millions of Egyptian women watch daily.
I have a friend who is a beautiful young woman, 24-years-old, who works at my bank and who does not wear a headscarf. She is well educated and knows that wearing a headscarf is not in the Quran and that she does not have to wear one. She is called a “slut” by all her male work colleagues and puts up with constant sexual harassment. Sometimes it gets quite nasty, and they even touch her inappropriately or grab at her body.
She is a virgin and has never had any sexual activity. She dresses very conservatively. She wears loose, hi-neckline, long sleeve blouses and full-length skirts (never wears pants; therefore no “V” of her crotch is shown). I mention this because she has not behaved or dressed in any way that could be called slutty.
They call her a slut and sexually harass her because she does not wear a headscarf.
They tell her that not wearing a headscarf is “against Allah.” Even her female co-workers tell my friend that it is her fault she is harassed and that she is “asking for it” by not wearing a headscarf. But my friend knows she is not asking to be sexually harassed. She sits and does her work and never makes eye contact with her male colleagues.
Recently they have begun telling her she is an unbeliever. They are trying to terrify her into wearing a headscarf by accusing her of being an apostate.
Women in Egypt are not only faced with sexual harassment and social enforcement to force them to wear headscarves, they are brainwashed by television preachers and imams. They are told repeatedly that they must prove they are “virtuous.” How? By wearing a headscarf or veil.
Women are also told by TV imams that they have no “worth” other than being a wife and mother. They are told that once those duties are achieved, they are worthless.
They are told there is only one way to achieve “worth” at that point in their lives, after they’ve had their children, and that is to prove they are “virtuous.” Women are told they must wear the veil to prove their virtuousness to Allah.
These TV imams convince women that a woman’s body is evil, and that their entire body must be covered to prevent evil from consuming them.
Women are told that their hands must be covered, because if a woman touches something without her hand being covered, she has then dirtied that object with her evilness.
Because of this emphasis that a woman’s only worth is marriage and babies, marriage is stressed on very young girls. The pressure on girls to be married is extreme.
Most girls want to be married as soon as they turn eighteen, unless they go to university, but even then, most all university students want to be married by the time they graduate. Many are betrothed while in university or long before, and the marriage takes place immediately after graduation.
In villages, where education is not stressed, or where there are no local schools, girls marry well before the age of eighteen. To be unmarried causes great scorn from the entire village.
After marriage, the focus is to start having babies. To not get pregnant right away causes much embarrassment to a young village wife and can lead to the husband divorcing her or taking on a second wife. So, the wife’s focus is on having children and trying to gain some feeling of security and worth.
Because they marry young, by the time the children are grown, women are still somewhat young. They then become vulnerable to the TV preachers who tell them their only worth is wearing the veil to prove their virtue to Allah and to guarantee entrance to Paradise.
My husband’s youngest sister married young, had three children right away (boys), thereby fulfilling her “duties.” When all three boys were grown, she had little to do with her free time. She had no employment skills because she had married young, and unlike her sisters, had not gone to university.
All Egyptians love television, and she, like so many wives, became consumed with TV and she watched the TV preachers. Soon after this exposure she began wearing the veil.
My husband has shown me photos of his family vacationing on the beaches of Alexandria. His family owned a summer home in Alex and spent their summers there for a period of about twelve years. He has four sisters. All four sisters, including the one who now wears the veil, wore two-piece bathing suits on the beach, as did most Egyptian women during the late 1960s and up into the 1980s.
My husband comes from a family of eight children. His family has told me that no girls wore headscarves while they were growing up, and not at college either. There was no sexual harassment—it was unheard of—and unthinkable. Yet today, sexual harassment is extensive and epidemic. So, what happened?
Islam happened.
The development of wearing headscarves and the enforcement of them began in the 1980s. Now, all my nieces and nephews, of whom I have many, tell me that all girls in school wear headscarves, and many are fully veiled. I’m told that to not wear a headscarf is an invitation for sexual harassment.
Part of this problem comes from the mosque, because this is what the imams are teaching. And part of this comes from the television preachers. But the headscarf and veil are also heavily promoted inside the universities. And since the latest generations of fathers grew up during or after the emphasis on headscarves, and since they hear the imams preach anti-woman propaganda, the latest generations of fathers do not teach their sons to respect women and do not teach their sons that sexual harassment is wrong.
Besides the headscarf and veil, imams also preach that all girls must be circumcised. They teach that uncircumcised women are highly sexed and therefore want sex more often, and that this high state of arousal from not being circumcised makes them desire sex with more than one man. They are insatiable. This idea of sex with more than one man terrifies both men and women. A woman’s worth is being virtuous. A woman must be a virgin when she marries and then only have sex with one man—her husband.
The imams repeatedly preach: “Uncircumcised women are sexually out of control!”
Circumcising women is all about “control.”
Many parents I've talked to say that although they are against it, they still circumcise their daughters so that the girl will not have the problem of being unable to control her sexual desire. If a girl cannot control her sexual desire, she will be undesirable to marry. Unmarried men looking for wives do not want a girl if she's not circumcised.
Yet what is really puzzling is that nearly all newly married men complain about their bad sex life! Everyone talks about it; it's no secret. They say their wives do not enjoy sex and prefer not to do it. And that the wife only has sex because it is her duty. This attitude eventually is a turn-off for the husband. So, it makes no sense for unmarried men to want their future wife to be circumcised but they do because they’ve been told their wives will be “out of control” if not circumcised.
I have become very good friends with a Christian doctor. He says that almost every week at least one Muslim woman comes to him and asks him to fix her vagina. It is usually because the circumcising was done poorly and the women still suffer from the botched job, have chronic infections, and can barely have sex without screaming in pain. Many women come to him because they believe their dislike for sex is due to being circumcised. They come to him because they want their clitoris back.
Yet these same women keep circumcising their own daughters!
There are always several sex cream ads in the newspapers. The pictures in the ads look like ads for pornography. Many of these creams are to be rubbed on a woman's vagina to help her enjoy sex. The creams are not for lubrication, but to give the sensation of having a clitoris.
These ads are so widespread that after I married Essam, I asked him about these ads. He told me that men always talk about sex, but not like Western guys do. They talk incessantly about “not having sex.” Essam says once a month is considered a lot and a husband is lucky to get this.
Most husbands experiment with several brands of sex creams before finding out they don't work. The creams do not help the wives enjoy sex, nor want sex.
They circumcise girls to prevent them from desiring sex, but what happens is, women end up not being able to have sex comfortably, let alone be able to enjoy sex.
Circumcised women suffer chronic infections primarily because of the “at home jobs.” Circumcising is usually done in the home, and in small villages, often done by a member of the extended family. It's almost always a hack job leaving the girl horrifically damaged because they often cut more than the clitoris.
In the last few years there has been much outrage regarding a sex therapist who was trying to help young couples have better sex. For a while she had a weekly column in a major newspaper, but it caused so much anger that the paper was forced to remove her column.
She offered some good basic advice, but quite honestly, judging by the questions she received, it was obviously hopeless. The men didn't have a clue as to how to please their wives, nor did they seem to want to. They just wanted sex more often.
Many of the wives said they refused to talk to their husbands about sex because they feared it would make them appear like a bad woman. They feared if they seemed interested in sex, the husband would be suspicious of them and possibly accuse them of wanting sex with other men—or worse, they’d be falsely accused of adultery. But mostly the women complained about the pain.
Another thing I found interesting is how many women complained that they considered sex an awful chore. This may be partly due to the fact they did not marry for love and hence have no attraction to their husband, let alone passion. Many marry a total stranger. And many young girls are forced to marry men twenty to forty years older than them, forced by arranged marriages. Because these older men have established an apartment, a business, or stable income, they are considered a great choice as husband. But these are not “sugar daddy” type marriages where a young wife is treated well. These young girls are often treated like slaves.
Besides sex creams, there is an overabundance of Viagra, especially free giveaway Viagra. Viagra is given as gifts, given to fellow employees, given as bribes during elections, and given out by taxi drivers. At least once a week Essam comes home with a Viagra given to him by a taxi driver. Essam always chats up a taxi driver and tells jokes the entire ride. His reward for being a fun customer? Viagra.
Most Egyptian men don’t take Viagra for erection problems. They take Viagra thinking it will enlarge their penis to twice the size of their normal erection size. They think this supersize penis will excite the wife into wanting sex, without considering that a supersize penis would only hurt a young circumcised wife even more.
A very common theme in the Friday newspapers is a story of a girl who begs to be circumcised. The article will start by telling a story in which being uncircumcised causes a girl big trouble of some sort. Then, the story tells of her announcing to everyone that she wants to get circumcised. The end is always the same—she gets circumcised and lives happily ever after. She marries the most desirable man in her community, usually someone who is wealthy or important (or both). The moral of the story is that good things happen to girls who are circumcised!
One of the worse of these types of stories is about an uncircumcised girl who can't control herself from masturbating. Her state of horniness and desire for penis causes her to put all types of objects into her vagina. Because of this, she destroys her virginity and thereby destroys her chances of ever getting married.
These stories are always very sexy and titillating and I often wonder if they serve a dual purpose. Are they soft-core porn for the men, while simultaneously brain washing readers into condoning female circumcising?
Another popular type of story in the Friday newspapers is about an uncircumcised Christian girl who is having trouble with being oversexed. But it ends with a twist. The Christian girl converts to Islam! Islam is made out to be superior because it “protects” women from evil. These stories give the impression that Christianity is flawed.
I watched an Egyptian religious TV program about female circumcision one day. The host of the program explained that the small villages along the Nile circumcise all their girls.
The host interviewed various village women who stated they believe female circumcision is from Sunna, the religious practices established by Muhammad. They also said they believe that if a girl is not circumcised “she can't bear it” (can’t bear her horniness).
All of these village women were illiterate. The villages where these interviews took place have no schools.
While working with the Ministry of Culture I conducted research in small villages throughout Egypt. Even in villages where there are schools and women are taught to read, they don’t learn to read well enough to read the Quran (more on this later). And, few villagers have access to books on Sunna.
These women rely on “religious men” to inform them of their duties. These village women were taught these beliefs about circumcising by their local imams.
In 2005, Ahmed al-Tayib, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, stated, “All practices of female circumcision are crimes and have no relationship with Islam. It is not an obligation in Islam.”
Al-Azhar is considered the most respected source on Islamic Law and its Grand Imam is seen as the highest authority in the Muslim world. But here we are, even after it was declared by the Grand Imam to be a crime, these villagers are still circumcising their girls because their village imams continue to preach it.
And, so are the TV imams, who millions of Egyptian women watch daily.
An American Woman Living in Egypt: Life during an Islamic takeover ~~ available at Amazon or order it from your local bookstore.