 Welcome everybody on a Monday afternoon. I want to thank you. I'm Susan Glasser and I'm the editor of Foreign Policy Magazine and I want to welcome you here to the New America Foundation, our good friends and partners, and you know I figured we get a fairly full room to have a conversation about foreign policies first-ever sex issue. I want to remind everybody before we jump right into it we are being live-streamed on New America's website and we are definitely going to get to your questions and answers in the session when we do. I hope that you'll be able to give us your your name and a little bit a sense of where you're coming from and in the meantime I know that the time is going to go pretty quickly because we have two extraordinary contributors and authors here with us today. Mona Altahaway and Karim Sajapur and in many ways their articles speak for themselves but I will let you be the judge of that and I know you all have copies of the magazine too. I just wanted to say a couple words both of welcome and explanation first to everybody before we jump right into our conversation. As I wrote in that editor's note to this issue that magazine this is something very different for foreign policy magazine we're 40 years old actually this is our 41st year this year and I think it's safe to say that in all those 41 years there never was an issue of this magazine devoted to the subject either of women or as we framed it more broadly of sex in the history of the magazine you know this is a realm of journalism and of scholarly journals in which such matters really didn't figure in until recently to the extent they did it was really as a sort of marginal aside to the kind of waiting conversations that we were supposed to have about important geopolitical issues and so you know we were pretty aware that this was this was a departure and I hope a good one and certainly an important one for us as a magazine and one thing I would say to you is that we were very determined from the beginning of launching into this issue of the magazine to make sure that it wasn't just another sort of marginalized conversation about gender or about women and so while there are a number of articles in this issue that do touch on subjects of women's political empowerment for example we have a unique survey of women political leaders that we were determined that the sex issue of foreign policy also should really go ahead and look at the third rail of this conversation which is sex itself and if you look at Mona's cover story if you look at Kareem's very powerful piece about Iran you will see that these are real discussions about the role that sex plays in shaping politics both inside countries and regions and in how we look and think about them and I think that was something that's important and that certainly has stirred up a real conversation and so what I thought we do today and certainly I'm looking forward to hearing your questions and thoughts about that in a broad sense as well as the two articles that I'm hoping we can discuss in more detail. Mona's cover story I should tell you why do they hate us the war on women in the Middle East is by far and away the most commented upon discussed viewed liked tweeted blogged about I suppose disliked article we've ever published I think informed policy certainly during my tenure right now I printed out the statistics before I came down here today right now at the most recent reckoning 54,468 people have liked this article on Facebook it has approximately 1700 comments on the site it has innumerable tweets blog posts responses counter responses responses to the responses so you know in many ways I would say that that it is in some measure achieved exactly what we hope for it when we first talked about it which was that it would convene a conversation that I think I don't believe or you know that Mona believes was really being had in a sufficient way so in that sense we couldn't be more gratified that we've used the convening power of foreign policy to convene a conversation about what is happening to women in the Middle East especially in the context of this post Arab Spring moment that we're living in and so we're gonna we're gonna turn to it to Mona about that Kareem I have to say is here not only because he has contributed really a must read piece about the sexual obsessions of around I told us but also because he is in many ways sort of the the intellectual author at least partner in crime of the of this entire issue which was born in a conversation that he and I first had I believe it was three years ago more less exactly this spring in which we talked about the extent to which sex really is is the elephant in the room it is the thing that journalists that policymakers at a very senior level at people who spend time on the ground thinking at scholars is the thing that they talk about amongst themselves and frankly don't share that conversation with you when it comes to their analysis about the region and for a variety of complicated reasons it leads to a certain kind of dishonesty it seems to me in what you know the sort of expert class has been willing to make transparent and public about their own debates about what's happening in Iran and in in the broader region and so the article that he produced which is filled with really extraordinary detail that I gave me a new way of thinking about the politics of the Islamic Republic is the three-year-old answer to that conversation and I'm going to sort of leave the weighty preamble at that there have been as I said an enormous number of critical responses both for and against if you could be that sort of zero sum about it that both of these pieces have stirred up and then there's a whole lot more nuanced you know reaction that falls just in every circle in between one thing I want to start us off with in talking with Mona is and perhaps this is not surprising an enormous amount of conversation here in the United States about well you know how does the United States figure in this you know they it seems to me Mona that they read your very carefully worded preamble the piece where you tried to sort of say like okay this is a piece about women in the Middle East we understand yes the United States has problems yes they're not a woman president yes there's issues here but this one piece is not going to be about that that didn't seem to be sufficient for certain corners of the blogs for university I do find that striking that we here in the United States always seem to want to turn the conversation into one about us but let me start out by kicking right back to you tell me a little bit about what this experience of the last week has been like for you in publishing this piece right well good afternoon every good afternoon everyone I'm very happy to be here and I've got to say that I've achieved one of my major ambitions this week and that is to get more comments than Maureen Dow does I'm very happy the the reaction to this piece has been phenomenal I mean when it first was posted on you know Sunday midnight last week and the reaction began to pick up and at first I was joking that I'd set Twitter and Facebook on fire but it's got to the stage where I go to birthday parties and people say things like oh my dad sent me this piece and my cousin sent me this piece and you know my my grocery store owner sent me this piece so it's like I've set the entire world on fire and I'm very glad because it is a long long overdue conversation and it's funny that you should mention that the people in the US seem to always want the conversation to be about them because people in the Middle East also want the conversation to be about the US because some of the reaction that I've got has been well it's not so great for women in the US either and you know I'm not an idiot I know this I've lived in this country for 12 years and you have to you'd have to be a real moron to think that women have figured everything out and that women have have overcome patriarchy and misogyny everywhere across the world I mean this is a given I do not need to write an essay in foreign policy that says women have it hard everywhere this is just you know everybody knows this but what I wanted to do for a change was to focus on my community and I think what the reaction speaks to is just how difficult it is to be a woman of color and to have to choose between all the identities you have because women are always asked to choose well no women are always asked to pledge allegiance first to the community and the community can be religion it can be ethnic background it can be a variety of things and then when women ask that community to show some of that support back they usually and invariably let down and I've gotten to the stage in my life now where you know I've done all the essays I've done so many essays and op-eds about Islamophobia and not every Muslim man in America is horrible and how my brother is a doctor who is a cardiologist who saves American lives every day and not how you know we're not responsible for 9 11 I've done all those essays I've served my community beautifully but when I turn around and tell my community it is now time to focus on me and gender rights my community goes nuts and this is what has happened over the past week so with with the revolutions I mean this is the most exciting time of my life I've been on doing the media rounds saying this now for 14 months since hosting will barric was forced to step down this is the most exciting time of my life because I'm so glad to be alive for these revolutions but I'll be damned if I watch these revolutions and not have my community pay back some of that support because women were out there on the front lines and women were out there fighting alongside men and if at this time this most exciting time of our lives we're not talking about overthrowing the misogyny and the patriarchy that in turn oppresses women will barric in the and the dictators as I keep saying oppress all of society I'm aware of this it oppresses men it oppresses children oppresses dogs it presses horses I know this but in turn that society on another level now because there's a hierarchy of of misogyny and oppression that hierarchy oppresses women and this is what I want to talk about and at that one point where I'm saying let's focus on women because if we miss this opportunity we're going to miss a historic opportunity I'm being told no let's talk about America I don't want to talk about America I want to talk about women because this is the time to talk about them in the 1950s when my feminist heroes and there are many throughout history when my feminist heroes were fighting for women's rights in Egypt after what was then called the revolution which was essentially a military coup the standard or the bar that we were talking about was up here now in Egypt and many parts of the Middle East it's down here the fight is even harder so I have to go for the jugular I have to kick where it hurts and I don't want to talk about America I'm not asking America to invade I'm asking the people in those countries themselves to be honest with ourselves to be self-critical and and by not talking about America I'm actually asking us to be empowered because when the conversation is always about America we are second in the conversation we make America much more powerful than we are I don't care about America what America says about me and my community is chatter when you make that chatter the most important part of the conversation then you have made you have degraded yourself and I think a lot of people miss this in the conversation I want to make us the focus of our conversation which is what these revolutions have been they've been about us and Mubarak and yes we've turned around and said to America five of your presidents have supported Mubarak and we're not going to have that anymore but let's take that conversation deeper and talk about what our culture what our society does to women because when we have that conversation we realize how bad things are and then we can start talking you know I think Mona you've hit on something I know we're going to keep talking about in the conversation I want to bring Karim into it but I was struck by by that very urgent tone of so much of the response we have where's the United States where's the United States and then actually it's sort of internally contradictory because the other major strand of questions or concerns for you as an author has been what about the agency of women in the Middle East which of course is exactly what you're talking about right now and often the very same critic both thinks that you haven't allowed women in the Middle East to be agents enough of your conversation at the same time they're demanding that it be more like the US and this was that from a major US blog on sort of feminist blog just today what I felt was truly missing from Elta Highway's peace with any connection between what is happening in predominantly Muslim countries and what is happening against women in the United States so this is you know very much I think out there what what Mona has flagged so I want to bring Karim into that and then we can talk about whether there is this kind of equivalence that that some feminist in the US seem to be demanding of this conversation what struck you both by the response to your piece and that Mona and perhaps there is an interesting equivalence right because there's been some controversy about your piece but at the same time the kind of visceral personal critiques have largely been absent which is interesting in its own way yeah yeah first thank you Susan for inviting me and I wanted to also salute Mona for an incredibly powerfully argued piece it's if I had an agent that probably have advised me against being on a panel entitled being the lone male on a panel entitled why do they hate me but we're giving Karim an ultimate pass here let's just stipulate that he is a lover we love you but what I thought was interesting about the remarkable reaction to Mona's piece and the much smaller reaction to my piece was the fact that I saw that among kind of the intellectual community and the Middle East Studies community and among Arab women Mona's piece was perceived as quite controversial there was a lot of people who liked it a lot of people who argued against it and when I embarked on my piece and as Susan mentioned this is a piece I've been thinking about for a very long time it's probably not wise to say I've been thinking about sex in Iran for a very long time but the reality is that you know it's an issue which I've found in every aspect of Iranian politics and so when I reached out to a lot of different Iranians males and females about this issue of sex in Iran not one person told me you're actually really off the mothers really don't care that much about sex not one person said that to me on the contrary everyone said of course they know they've long been obsessing about these issues of sexuality and one of the things I wrote was that for most Iranians the issue had become kind of so inherent to their daily interactions with Iranian official them that they actually tuned it out they said this is actually not really something that's newsworthy or noteworthy to write about the Iranian regimes of session with sex we all know this so what I found interesting was that in a way the reactions to our pieces shows you where Iranian society is perhaps vis-a-vis Arab society that in in Iran I think that you know there was an op-ed with Shirin Abadi the Iranian Nobel Peace Laureate wrote and the Wall Street Journal about six weeks ago warning Arab women against the types of kind of complacence and cultural relativism relativism which Iranian women succumb to three decades ago and warning them to be vigilant and what I saw and again again my my survey isn't scientific but it was my interpretation that Mona's piece was the reaction among Iranians especially Iranian women was overwhelmingly positive I don't know if you got that impression as well so it kind of shows you where these two societies are at that it's not being I'm not trying to be a Persian cultural chauvinist it's just by virtue of the fact that having lived under an Islamist regime for three decades which has made sex an inherently political thing part and parcel of your daily life that I think people have reached the conclusion that you know it's important to be intolerant towards intolerance if that's a way of putting it you know I think that's a really important point too is that the politics really does shape the narrative about sex which of course goes right back to you why is it that we launched into this exercise in the first place and you know I was gonna ask you Mona did you ever think a year ago you know sort of the height of the the revolution when there was a of course a lot of optimism about what a post Mubarak Egypt might look like it's really striking how quickly it's turned in a very different direction you've written a piece that my guess is you you probably didn't expect to need to have written a year ago at this time well you know I remain very optimistic about the Egyptian Revolution I remain optimistic about it because the fundamental change that it's brought about for Egyptian society and you can say the same for Tunisia and all the other countries undergoing their own uprisings and revolutions is that it's it's put fully kind of square in front of everything this idea of accountability that that the Egyptians who went out on the street and demanded that hosting Mubarak step down have essentially sent out a message to anybody now who will be Egypt's president or who will be Egypt's government that we will hold you accountable no matter who you are that never again will we allow someone to rule us for 30 years without accountability so this idea is the idea that that keeps me optimistic about the Egyptian Revolution and that's exactly the idea that's at the heart of my piece now my piece didn't just come about because foreign policy commissioned it and wrote to me and said would you like to write about women's issues I'm glad you wrote that email to me because it was a culmination of many pieces that I've been writing for the past few months because over the past year I'd written several pieces for the Guardian the British newspaper the Guardian which began with those awful so-called virginity tests that the the Egyptian military junta imposed on female activists when they clear Tahrir Square they clear Tahrir Square on March 9th and very soon after tortured most of the activists male and female but for the unmarried female activists that they that they detained they imposed a form of sexual assault that is known or otherwise called as virginity tests when those virginity tests were exposed by a young Egyptian woman I mean and talk about agency and I mentioned her in my essay when a young Egyptian woman called Salwa Hussaini just a regular working-class young Egyptian woman said I was one of the 17 young women sexually assaulted by the military this is what happened to me people just shut her down they said you're lying you're trying to make our good noble military look bad this was at a time when Egyptians were still saying that the the military and the people are one hand because they were so relieved that the military sided with the people against Mubarak even though the military at the same time that it appeared to not be opening fire on people in the way that it did in Libya and Syria and other countries the Egyptian military nonetheless was detaining people Egyptian military police were torturing people I've had my own experience with Egyptian military police when they detained me for six hours after my assault in close to Tahir last year so this idea of you know touching the the the noble military Salwa Hussain basically Salwa Hussaini broke the silence and then and nothing happened nothing happened people should have been outraged that female revolutionaries were sexually assaulted by the military and nothing happened and I wrote a piece for the Guardian saying this should spark Egypt's second revolution and nothing happened and then a young Egyptian called Aliya Al Mahdi posed in the nude for her blog now compare the two here the military sexually assaults 17 female revolutionaries nothing happens a young Egyptian woman of 21 takes a picture of herself nude in her parents living room posts it on her blog and all hell breaks loose because this woman chose to be naked on her own blog you have to visit her blog to see her nudity and all hell breaks loose and she's accused of tainting the revolution and I'm sitting there thinking what is going on what is happening in Egypt that this young woman is accused of tainting the revolution when the military junta is sexually assaulting female revolutionaries we've got things upside down here and then 70% of the Egyptian parliament is now controlled by Islamists so and I'm talking about the bar that in the 1950s was here now we're talking about Salafis who control 25% of the Egyptian parliament who believe that in order to run for parliament a female candidate's face cannot be shown on posters a flower in her in place of her face is shown and we've got parliamentarians obsessed with internet porn and reducing the age at which girls can marry to 14 and I'm called the neo-orientalist native informant and I have to sit there and think what is happening to my beautiful Egyptian revolution because we have to be real here what is going on is this about we don't want to look bad we don't want people to become Islamophobic I'm very well aware of the ugly Islamophobia that exists around the world I've lived in this country for 12 years I'm very well aware of the ugly anti-Arab racism that exists but I'm also painfully aware because I've experienced it myself when I was sexually assaulted and had my arms broken in Cairo but through my own conversations and the statistics this doesn't have to be personal the statistics speak for themselves every single Arab country lies in the bottom 35 of the 135 of the global gender index this is not something I have made up it's not a figment of my imagination so we have to get to a stage where we have to ask ourselves if these are revolutions about freedom and dignity whose freedom and dignity are we talking about one thing that's been striking to me as someone who is from the outside you know sort of observing and moderating and you know in a way curating this debate as an American woman I've been you know perhaps it was predictable you tried to head off this this concert and this critique in your essay by saying listen this is going to be one essay that's not about the United States and nonetheless that hasn't stopped you know this enormous outpouring of but wait what about us what about us I mean I'm I'm really quite embarrassed in many ways I have to say as as someone who lives in the United States who does by the way think of myself as a feminist you know I'm that the editor of a magazine about world affairs and you know the idea that we're so insecure here as as women in the United States that we insist upon having a conversation about the war on us here it's just not the same thing I mean you know just last week the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia was you know very upset that we were criticizing allowing young girls to get married at the age of 12 he actually said well 10 is really appropriate I think you know and this was in the middle again of this this this sort of discussion and controversy over your article when when Blake our colleague the managing editor of FP tweeted it there was an entire blog response criticizing him for tweeting this and this was apparently denying us here in the United States the opportunity to have a debate about the war on women in the United States you know I'm sorry and I'm sure that there are people in the audience who want to weigh in on this and perhaps there are some who disagree with this but you know what there's been a lot of sexism I've experienced I'm sure you have here in the United States experience these things this is just not the same thing folks and it's it's been quite interesting and amazing to me to see this happen I mean we are not talking about a situation where we're going to legalize child rape at the age of 10 you know we're not talking about a situation in the United States where it's legal to beat your wife as long as you do it with good intentions as you point out in the piece I mean these are just not the same thing these are basic what I would consider to be human rights issues that you're discussing in your piece when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East but I cream I want to bring you here on this question of the revolution and you know sort of when politics becomes overriding in a society like Egypt or in one like Iran why women so quickly become targets this is something that the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pointed out and I think she was ready to do so just a few weeks ago she said you know there's an inevitable connection in fact between political upheaval and men in societies who immediately respond to it by wanting to control women you point out in your piece that the critique of women and whether their hair should be shown in Iran it's the same language used by the authorities to criticize the green movement protesters the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini was reacting to those who criticized Iran for the obligatory headscarf the hijab and he framed his reaction in an interesting way he said that we're not misogynist we're actually misandrists misandrists means basically we don't like men we can't he didn't use that word but basically that's how he framed it he said it's not women who are the problem men are the problem because men can't control themselves and if women go unveiled then the entire family unit will become unraveled because men will just be like these ravenous dogs that will go after women and all society will will fall apart and interestingly you know when I first started writing the article and I should acknowledge the editor I think he's somewhere here Ben Ben Parker did a fabulous job I was I was looking at the region more broadly and I was reading a lot of the writings of Sayyid Kutub whom you all know is one of kind of the intellectual fathers of the Muslim Brotherhood and that was very similar argument to what Kutub was making that basically that the family unit is integral to the health of society and it must remain intact and again Khomeini was saying that if women unveiled then it will it will cause a revolution in Iran and one of the things I pointed out in my piece was the remarkable hypocrisy of that argument because on one hand that's you know the narrative which which Khomeini that's how he frames the obligatory hijab on the other hand the Islamic Republic has this policy of the temporary marriage Muhtar marriage as you said in Arabic and Sireh as we call it in Persian which which basically are state legislated policies which make it far more easier for men to stray from their marriages so you know going back to your question of you know why do they view women as such or why is this issue of sexuality and and women's rights so so important I don't think there's one explanation you know I consulted with psychiatrists for this piece I consulted with religious scholars with political scientists and there was a whole variety of reasons I think for some of the the Salafists and people like Osama bin Laden it may be simple enough to say that the kind of views view women as is almost like property like livestock for for people like Khomeini I think it's a little bit different but I guess at the end of the day if there is one meta-narrative which which they all lead back to its control and its power that was the point that Secretary Clinton made and I think in a way it's it said Bason in both of your pieces I'm also struck just by the sort of historical consistency of what we're talking about here right like Iran and Egypt are at different stages right of their sort of revolutionary trajectory and and the narratives in in many ways fit that listening to you Mona I can't help but think of some of our own history you know here in the United States when it comes to the civil rights movement and you know I imagine having read some of that history that you would have found you know some writers of of early stage US feminist tracks in the early 1970s facing very similar criticisms from the African-American community for example you know this sort of hierarchy of discrimination of of of problems if you will and I you know it's just it's a striking thing to me that you know can can we learn from those experiences in many ways because it's it's a little bit striking this this notion that we have to reinvent the wheel all over again right yeah I have to start by saying though to respond to what you said about Secretary Clinton Susan that it disturbs me on a very deep level that Secretary Clinton knows the problem of how so many religious fundamentalists are obsessed with women and yet the US administration supports and aids and gives aid to so many governments and dictators I shouldn't say governments regimes that actively discriminate against women I mean Secretary Clinton will be sitting with the Saudi regime knowing how Saudi women are treated like children Secretary Clinton will go and talk to SCAF our military hunter in Egypt knowing the violations of women's rights that they've committed so Secretary Clinton says things that sound really nice but the US administration knows very well that it continues to support regimes and governments in that part of the world that treat women in the antithesis of nice so this is an important point that you're making it troubles me deeply absolutely I mean I the best of of course the the most pointed example right now is Afghanistan where you have the administration on the one hand saying we support political reconciliation process and that's going to be the only way there's going to be a settlement in Afghanistan we have to come to resolution on the other hand you have Secretary Clinton almost alone by the way out there saying the rights of women as established under the new Afghan constitution constitute a red line that's been the phrase that she's used repeatedly these are as we all know you know these are irreconcilable things to say you know this policy is not reconcilable with the idea that women's rights are a red line you can't reconcile with the Taliban and maintain women's rights as as written under that constitution and yet we're sort of like I feel like we're driving you know two parallel trains down a track and it's it's it's a fairly sort of tragic kind of slow-motion crash right yeah I think that you know one of the real challenges and I think that one of the more thoughtful responses to to Mona's piece I thought was from Shadi Hamid at the Brookings Institute who who who pointed out that you know one of the real issues is that you know in some of these places in the Arab Muslim world when there's more representative government it's going to bring about policies and laws which may be actually more hostile to women less tolerant of women you mentioned Afghanistan I remember my my current boss Marwan Mawashir who is who was the former foreign minister of Jordan we were once in a meeting with him when he was foreign minister in 2003 and he was receiving he was being criticized by a Jordanian liberal academic in the audience about why Jordan hadn't enacted sufficient reforms to bring about kind of representative government he said that you know one of the challenges in Jordan is that we have an unelected regime unelected represented unelected government officials who in many ways are more tolerant or progressive than the elected representatives you see in the parliament and he gave the example of honor killings that's when the elected representatives of the people in the parliament get their say they consistently try to enact laws that essentially make honor killings legal and it's the unelected officials you know the king who have to overturn those laws and again I think this is one of the dichotomies between Iran and the Arab world by virtue of the fact that in Iran you have had a population which has lived under repressive islamist regime for over three decades no one any more romanticizes about the prospect of joining religion and government and I think that in many parts of the Arab world maybe that that experience has to still get out of people's system I don't know if one would agree with that no many of the things you say resonate definitely in that in many parts of the Arab world feminism is considered the kind of the pet project of the first lady so some of the few concessions that Egyptian women have had over the past few years were pushed into place by Jihan Sadat for example the wife of the late dictator Anwar Sadat and most recently of Suzanne Mubarak the wife the wife of the former dictator Hosni Mubarak so we've got to a stage now in Egypt where it we're in this ludicrous situation where even so-called liberal political parties even though I don't consider them a political party to begin with because they're so old and so out of ideas but a party like the waft party which is supposed to be liberal is actively fighting alongside some Islamists one concession that Egyptian women are very happy with which they got in the year 2000 which was the right to file for divorce which interestingly enough under many interpretations of Islamic law they've had all along but many Muslim countries deny them that right so Muslim women are allowed to file for something called khola which basically means to remove yourself from a marriage if you then also renounce your financial rights once you divorce yourself from the marriage so Egyptian women got this right in the year 2000 after women's groups in Egypt had been pushing for it furiously but it's now known as Suzanne's law because it happened under Hosni Mubarak's regime and Suzanne Mubarak was head of the National Council on Women so any feminist progress that was achieved over the past 30 years is now considered part and parcel of that tainted regime and people want to throw everything out and we don't want to throw everything out I don't really care who pushed for women's right to file for this divorce at least we finally have this right but what you're saying Kenny I think this this enchantment with this mirage of Islamic states I think what's happening now with the Muslim brotherhood and the Salafi is actually a very good thing because I think it's the beginning of the end of the Muslim brotherhood it's the beginning of the end of of this dream of the Islamist ruling because what's happening is they have to choose between an ideology and a political party because being in politics will make you dirty it will taint you it will make you make concessions that as an ideology you remain above but when you're in parliament and you have to make concessions and when you have to run a country you can't remain that pure so the Muslim brotherhood is still kind of trying to reckon with all of that and so far in parliament all they've obsessed over is internet pornography banning English as a language to be taught in school and reducing the age at which girls can marry there's no talk of creating jobs there's no talk of bringing back tourism there's no talk of security on Egyptian streets these are the concerns and so according to a recent poll Egyptians who don't belong to the movement or who aren't hard core Muslim brotherhood activists 45 percent of Egyptians who said they would vote who said they had voted for the Muslim brotherhood said they wouldn't vote for them again 45 percent because they've seen them in action they've seen how they don't perform in parliament and yes they recognize they were a charitable organization that helped fill the social gaps that the Mubarak regime was not filling but when it comes to politics they don't do a very good job and they can't hide behind the victimhood that they used to hide under under the Mubarak regime now when you had the green movement in 2009 I was watching some very interesting reactions from young Muslim brothers and sisters who whose life dream was to have an Islamic state and yet they were watching young Iranian women and men getting the crap beaten out of them by the Islamic state and they were sitting there thinking do we want this and you would think that this would be a lesson that you don't want it because Iranians have been fighting to get rid of it for 30 years but we're going through it anyway and it's a necessary process we have to go through it in Egypt because they have to go through this test and they're not doing a good job but my concern is that as they're not doing a good job women are always the Achilles heel it's always really easy to concede on women wear the bargaining chips when you want to make a compromise with someone you give them women and so in Saudi Arabia when the royal family wants the continued support of the ultra zealous clerics they throw them women and they get everything else so my concern in Egypt and this is where the US administration does come in don't invade as you supposedly did with Afghanistan because you did not invade for women in Afghanistan but you sold that war as a war for women and it clearly wasn't because you're selling Afghan women out now but when it comes to Egypt when you sit down with whoever ends up representing the Egyptian people and they tell you mind your business this is our culture this is our religion when it comes to women say no it isn't because this is what ends up basically ending the conversation we don't want you to invade but we want the cultural relativism by which women are the cheapest bargaining chips to end people talk about ethical foreign policies what about an ethical foreign policy that for once says that the rights of more than 50 percent of your population are actually important to us that is ethical you know i think just a quick data point here that really shores this up go look at the representation of women in peace talks that are mediated by the way by international institutions in which the US of course plays a leading role but so do many many other countries the numbers really are incredibly relevant to this conversation because the answer is that despite women taking major roles in civil conflicts around the world in revolutions and political upheavals they're almost always cut out from the talks that really determine what the political order after the fact is going to be and that's the process i think that we're seeing very much play out in Egypt right now so okay so we're talking about politics i want to quickly go to another sort of pillar of both of your articles in different ways and and ask you to explain you know to me to each other into this group religion you know there's been a lot of back and forth about so how much is it actually in the end the intertwining of religion and sex that is what we're talking about here you know we've just talked about politics and being maybe the fuse upon which this this conversation is lit but do you believe Mona that that religion is inextricable to this this cultural and political fight at least in Egypt absolutely of course it is i mean i would i would be a fool if i said it wasn't it's it's a toxic mix as i said in my essay of religion and culture it's and and the way that it's mixed that concoction is different in every country you go to you know i've been accused of of wildly generalizing and i i tried not to generalize by giving examples from each country but when you have three thousand words you can't write in write an encyclopedia about every country but where you can say a lot of these countries share similarities is that it is about the way islam mixes with a culture and and and the end result is what we see on the ground and because a lot of people will will basically get out of this question by telling you no no no it has nothing to do with religion it's all about culture it's a really dishonest answer it's about religion and culture and it's about how the two of them are used as tools together to create whatever makes you see on the ground now in some instances religion is used more and in others it's used less and clearly it's according to how each country interprets religion but when you look at most of the countries in the region take egypt again for example my country of birth again it's it's how it focuses on women the entire legal system in egypt has by and large been modernized except when it comes to family law and when it comes to family law you if you're a muslim you follow what egypt's interpretation of islamic law is and if you're a christian you follow you follow canonical law so if you're a coptic christian and you want to divorce in egypt you can't get one because the coptic church doesn't believe in divorce and some christians in egypt actually convert to islam to get a divorce and then convert back and you get a whole lot of problems from that when you're a muslim and you follow egypt's interpretation of islam the husband can basically say i divorce you three times and the wife is divorced the wife thanks to legislation in 2000 but only if she has if she's affluent because if you're an average working class egyptian woman and you have to renounce any financial rights that you gain after divorce you can't afford to ask you can't afford to remove yourself from the marriage in the way that this legislation allows you to so even this legislation that was supposed to help women only rich women in egypt can take advantage of so if you're an average working class woman in egypt you were screwed every step of the way when it comes to family law because you're talking about extremely conservative interpretations of both christianity and islam so of course it's about religion how can it not be about religion in in all the countries across the region some more than others you agree uh yeah i mean there was um one of the things i described in the piece was um finding um uh chomeini is one of chomeini's religious treaties uh in my home as a young boy i was probably 11 12 years old and i found this book from chomeini and um you know one of the things you read is that chomeini says that um if you've had sex with a camel the the meat is no longer halal and he goes into kind of great detail about issues like bestiality things like that which was both horrifying and bewildering for me as a young boy and um and so um you know you look at kind of these um these Shiite clerics who who espoused to be uh what we call marge taklid sources of emulation and this was a rite of passage which all Shiite clerics of that generation had to go through it wasn't anything uh unique to chomeini so i was speaking to one of uh my friends who himself was uh reared in ghom um whom i quote in the piece mehti halaji and he said you know the problem wasn't that chomeini addressed these issues of of you know bestiality and incest and kind of all these issues which appeared to us maybe quite loot he said that's not the problem um all religions in some ways whether it's Judaism or Christianity they've addressed these issues but the problem is that Islamic jurisprudence hasn't really modernized so if you're uh a young urban professional living in Tehran 98% of what chomeini wrote in this book is called um um clarification of questions tozil maasuel is totally irrelevant to you and you know i write in the piece that that's why uh in some ways chomeini is now increasingly the butt of jokes of iran's post-revolutionary generation i quote um a cartoonist the friend of my Nikohan Kossar who said listen you know i never ever saw a camel growing up in Tehran let alone was i tempted to have sex with one um so so so that's one point but but so in some ways it is very much about religion in other ways it's not about religion let me make a point which kind of goes to Mona's argument about how women are oftentimes kind of the first the first bargaining chip and even secular groups secular um forces often acquiesce in the face of um intolerance towards women this is kind of a very micro um anecdote to make kind of a more macro point and when i was based in Tehran several years back i remember i was at the home of a relative kind of a third cousin who is a devout atheist who has no affection whatsoever for chomeini or for the regime or for for anything related to Islamism and he was having an argument with a woman who lived above him who he claims was making too much noise and they were having some type of a spat and she came down to to talk it over with him and you know there's been an ongoing disagreement between them and she came down and she wasn't wearing the the veil and after five minutes of arguing with her and i think he was probably very much in the wrong knowing him and the woman was unrelenting he he said to her i don't argue with women who don't wear hijab and and you see that you know this is someone who doesn't believe in the hijab who hates the hijab who hates the islamic republic who is an atheist and they go and they rely on these kind of official state policies which they don't necessarily agree with but they they can use them for their own um experience on these very kind of micro issues well you know in in recognition of of the role of religion you have this term islamic feminist which some movements have come up to address as a way of recognizing that because you have so much of this based in a very conservative religious interpretation the best and most effective way to fight it is to use a more progressive interpretation there is a movement that i belong to now i i don't identify it as as an islamic feminist i'm a muslim is one thing and feminist is another and i don't combine the two but there is a movement that i belong to called Musawa which is the arabic word for equality and it's a movement that was launched in Kuala Lumpur in 2009 and it's a movement for equality and justice in the muslim family and it focuses exactly on what i was talking about family law in the recognition that family law in many muslim majority countries is extremely discriminatory towards women and they're about to move their general secretariat to Cairo and i think the timing couldn't be better because they're moving to Cairo at a time when you have this extremely conservative and a growingly conservative rhetoric when it comes to to islam and religion in the public space because of of the the preponderance of islamists in in parliament and what they try to do is they combine various ways of fighting that ultra conservative rhetoric and one of them is to employ all these islamic feminist scholars who do reinterpretations of the religion according to their own studies and scholarship of it and in some instances it does help because in egypt i mean i can see a situations in egypt where in order to fight the rhetoric of the muslim brotherhood and also fight the rhetoric of the of the salafis you might need you might feel that you have to come up with you know x y and z versus from the quran and x y and z of what the prophet said and in that instance it can be helpful because you can fight their verse with their verse but my misgivings about just fighting their rhetoric with just religion is that you get into this arm wrestling competition my verse versus your verse so we will end up getting in each of what we need to do is to establish and this has to be something and a lot of people involved in the revolution recognizes we have to establish something that that resembles here what we call avoiding the tyranny of the majority regardless of who is in power regardless of who dominates parliament there has to be a guarantee of everybody's rights minority rights women's rights gay and lesbian rights atheist rights just a bill of rights that guarantees regardless of where you stand vis-a-vis islam or christianity or god you have a right as an egyptian to to be to be free basically and and this is the kind of egypt that i want i want an egypt that recognizes the rights of everybody regardless of the beliefs of those who sit in parliament and we sit in our presidency well i think korea clearly has made an important point about you know sort of sexism and misogyny not being limited you know to the conservative clerics who are promoting these views in in egypt or iran or anywhere else for that matter if anything though it is striking that that both of your pieces detail in some very telling ways the extent to which it's almost a fusion of conservative islamic clerics with modern tools of technology with the convening power of that revolution brings you know with the the power of the television pulpit in the in the case of shake caradaway for example that you have perhaps legacy religious conversations right about you know donkeys and camels and so forth being fused with these with these modern methods of propagating it and giving them an even more powerful bully pulpit so i think that's an interesting you know sort of aspect of this i mean you write mona in your piece about uh shake caradaway and the persistence for example of the debates over female genital mutilation which i thought was a very revealing part of the piece absolutely we have we have a female parliamentarian who just a few weeks ago she belongs to the muslim brotherhood said that fgm is a form of beautification this is a woman so you have to ask also about the internalization of these incredibly misogynistic messages by so many women involved both in the movement and outside of the movement because at some level when you're a woman in a conservative society you recognize what you need to say and what you need to pretend to believe and maybe what you think you believe in order to exist in that society it becomes your passport to whatever you like one percent of whatever you're allowed to exist in and so you recognize what needs to be done in order to be accepted in this conservative society and sometimes what needs to be done is the internalization of things that are that are antithetical to your freedom of existence as a female in that society now you know talking about viral i think i think one very interesting um way of watching the kind of the backlash against the conservatives the conservative use of youtube and all the other things i mean young people have been using youtube and others to promote a much more liberal message but something that has come about that many people have been sending me over the past few days is a speech that Gamel Abdel Nasser gave in the 1950s i mean late 1950s early 1960s or maybe even in the 1960s and in this speech he's addressing a group of Egyptians and he claims that he had just met with the muslim brotherhood supreme guide and the muslim brotherhood supreme guide according to Abdel Nasser had said to him our aim is to have every single egyptian woman on every street wearing a headscarf and Gamel Abdel Nasser laughs and the audience laugh now if this is in the 1960s and they think it's funny because back then in Egypt hardly anyone covered her hair and when you look at Egypt today so we're talking now 40 50 years later almost every woman in Egypt covers her hair so people are sending this video of Gamel Abdel Nasser addressing Egyptians and saying they want to take us back to the era of the caliphate what are they talking about by way of social commentary on Egypt today and asking what has happened to Egypt today and basically the social conquest if you like or the social victory of this very conservative message before the islamists even got into parliament now some people have accused me of being anti islamist but i tell them some of the of the laws that i drew attention to in my essay were put into place by these nominally secular dictators that we had this law that allows an egyptian man to beat his wife with quote unquote good intentions was not put into place by the brotherhood or the salafis it was put into place by a succession of dictators that we've had in Egypt but my concern is building on this extremely misogynistic law what will the islamists do where are their laws going to take us and if we don't start fighting hard now what will happen to egyptian women that's the whole point of my piece so i want to make sure we get to your questions just quickly before we do mona i have to go back to you something i've been meaning to ask you and somehow we never got a chance to talk about this in the editing process there's a really fascinating passage in your piece where you're talking about when you lived in saudi arabia as a young woman and you talk about how you were traumatized into feminism there's no other word to describe it is what you said in the piece and you talked about this just extraordinary example that stuck with you where you kept hearing that it was impure if a baby boy were to pee on you before you went to prayers it was okay you could keep the same clothes on but if a baby girl did so you had to change your clothes and you kept wondering what on earth was there that was so impure in the baby girl that made you have to do that and i thought wow that's that's just an extraordinary moment for a girl of 15 it just must have been mind-blowing for you i didn't hear it over and over again i only needed to hear it once for it to to really hit home and we you know i was i was born in egypt and my family moved to london when i was seven and then we moved to saudi arabia when i was 15 and moving to saudi arabia from the uk at the age of 15 as a teenage girl i mean being a teenage girl anywhere at the age of 15 is incredibly difficult but moving to saudi arabia from the uk at the age of 15 was it was like someone had turned the lights off some some deep deep trauma was was struck in me and it really has made me the woman i am i mean it i would not have been the person or the woman i am if we had not moved to saudi arabia because i learned many things i mean i learned that the islam that i was brought up with my parents both moved to london so they could both get a phd in medicine so clearly i grew up in a home that believed my mother and my father could achieved you know the heights of their profession so when it comes to women's agency i had agency at home i had a mother who showed me by example that you could have a phd in medicine but outside in in saudi arabia i was getting the complete opposite message and very early on actually i wanted to wear a headscarf very soon after we move to saudi arabia because i wanted to hide i wanted to hide from the way that men in saudi arabia were looking at me because i i felt utterly objectified every minute of the day and my parents told me when i was 15 i was too young they said you're too young you're not ready but then by the time i hit 16 i honestly i fell into a deep deep depression in saudi arabia i could not handle the religious suffocation so i basically struck this deal with god i said okay listen they keep telling me that you know to be a good muslim i should cover my hair fine i'll cover my hair if you save my mind okay and i would continue to lose my mind so clearly god was not keeping his end of the deal so i discovered feminist journals at the age of 19 in my university in saudi arabia and here's another irony feminist journals at the university in saudi arabia so clearly there was some renegade female professors in saudi arabia who were beginning their revolution inside the library thank god because they helped save my mind and and that's where i was talking about the trauma you know feminism by trauma because i could not digest the the the and there's no way to talk about it other than say the hatred of women that exists in saudi arabia and feminism saved me okay that's pretty powerful stuff so i'm gonna give us a second to digest that and and i do want to get to as many questions as possible please give us your name and and tell us what organization you're with when you ask the questions so we'll start here and then here hi rachel oswald i'm a journalist mona if you could respond to i think it was a response to your article in the atlantic where they said that the the the move to the right um in muslim countries was large on on family law issues and women's rights issues was largely a result of imperialist policies that basically said okay we're gonna control your economy we're gonna control your your foreign relations but we will allow you to control the women you know the private sphere and you know then when you had autocrats take over and absolute monarchies come to power they continued that tradition kind of solving you know to the to the village elders and the um and um and whatnot so my but my thinking is is once you have parliaments even if they are islamist led having genuine power and really getting down to the day-to-day business of ruling their countries and trying to improve their economies that these issues of you know whether a woman should wear the hijab or other issues they're just they are going to fall to the bottom because they're simply not as important and they're going to be for the first time empowered with truly you know meaty issues like treaties like you know on other things and i was wondering what your response to that would be well that is the hope that when they really do get down to governing that they do focus on the things that people elected them to focus on because the the three main concerns of egyptians right now is job creation uh getting the economy back on track and feeling secure in the street because people keep hearing about car jackings and other acts of violence because our police force is not doing very good job because its job all along was always to protect the regime and not the people and we haven't seen that from from the islamist and parliament now some people say it's because the military junta doesn't give them all the freedom that they want and i agree that it's difficult to rule on the military rule but you can at least make a pretense at trying to care about the issues that egyptians have elected you to vote in or to represent them for this post-colonial argument is very interesting actually because a lot of a lot of people especially academics have thrown this post-colonial argument at me and and i've got to wonder i mean two things first of all egypt got rid of british rule back in 1956 if we wanted to put things back on track we could have but we didn't and second of all you know edward say god bless him may he rest wherever he's laying right now he came up with the theory of orientalism 40 years ago when the region was a very different part of the world than it is today but our academics especially in middle east studies and those who focus on that part of the world are stuck in this in this time frame and these theories that address a very recently post-colonial region and haven't caught up with the reality on the ground and i think they're having a very difficult time catching up with the revolutions because they did not see them coming because unfortunately their post-colonial theories fed into the very stereotypes that we the people of the region have been trying to fight all along which are the stereotypes of agency we always heard from these very same academics that are now accusing me of being a neo-orientalist that know arab exceptionalism Arabs like their strong armed leader Arabs are different egyptians are these docile people who like their pharaohs because the Nile is a very still river that runs very slowly and egyptians have a nice sense of humor that helps them buffer the horrendous dictatorship they live under it was outrageous these stereotypes were outrageous and they were they were fueled by these post-colonial theories that these academics are obsessed with meanwhile people on the ground are saying no no excuse me you like our pharaohs we don't like our pharaohs we just got rid of a pharaoh so we the people on the ground have run far ahead of these academics they're having a hard time catching up and they're basically saying could you please slow down until i come up with a theory for you and we're saying you know what when you're ready to catch up with us then we'll talk it's stunning it's stunning to me that they're watching people on the ground grab agency by the throat and say we are autonomous people and we will not wait for your theories and we will not wait for our dictators or the u.s administration or the european union to recognize our demand for freedom and dignity and they still want to sit there and discuss post-colonial theory with me it's amazing amazing you want to jump in there quickly because there was a very famous book that came out in iran i think the late 60s early 70s by a very famous leftist intellectual in iran called jalalah mad and he wrote this book called qarb zadegi which in english is translated as west toxification and he was it was basically an indictment of iran under the shaw basically you know western values and western influence permitting throughout the country and now after 34 years after the revolution jalalah mad has been someone who's been thoroughly discredited in iran and what now kind of the liberal intelligentsia in iran says listen if if if tolerance and and free speech and economic prosperity makes us west west toxified let's be west toxified you know there are some positive attributes and values we can we can get from the west and the era of the enlightenment and not all indigenous values are great okay i know i promised you there hi my name is kali and i work for the international crisis group and i live in cairo and i've been living there now for a few months and before that i lived in lebanon and i'm originally iraqi so i've sort of been all over the middle east so my question for you is mona what is it specifically about post-revolution egypt that has this sort of endemic hatred of woman that you talk about which i haven't felt in lebanon or in iraq where i've definitely felt discrimination against women that is absolutely enraging but this this sort of endemic hatred that you talk about i think is something very specific to post-revolution egypt and i was in egypt before the revolution i didn't feel it as much so i wonder is there something institutionally different about egypt and saudi in these countries and the levant and iraq and syria and some of these others and for kareem i was wondering since you're an expert on iran what is the difference when you look at iran and saudi arabia the trajectory is between shia and sunni islam for women what is it like to be a woman in iran versus a woman in saudi and does this have to do with different interpretations of islam um when you look at egypt i think it's important to look at the three or four years in the run up to the to the revolution as well i mean the mubarak regime in 2005 for example instituted this the systematic policy of sexually assaulting female journalists and activists that i describe as sexual terrorism it's beyond sexual assault when the regime uses this in a systematic way for me it's sexual terrorism and what it ended up doing was giving a green light saying basically that women's bodies are fair game and and this happened very infamously in may when egyptians were called to go and vote on a referendum to change our constitution um specifically regarding the way we elect a president because up until then it was just mubarak yes or no and in 2005 it became mubarak versus several other candidates because of this referendum and in may of 2005 was when we began to see clearly and openly even though in the past it was happening secretly with the women of the muslim brotherhood the egyptian regime would threaten to rape the say the the female relatives of wanted members of islam or wanted islamists and and in many cases they would rape them but but not openly and this was something it was like an open secret in the islamists circle but in may of 2005 they did it clearly and openly in front of everybody in this video footage to prove it but no one's to trial and no one was held accountable and what that ended up doing as i said was it gave a green light that women's bodies were fair game the next year in 2006 ordinary egyptian men went on a rampage during aid after ramadan september 2006 when they went downtown kairu and sexually assaulted ordinary women out celebrating this religious festival again no one was held accountable and the interior ministry said it didn't even happen they denied that it happened so when you when you are sexually assaulted by the regime and you're sexually assaulted by your fellow your compatriots and no one is held accountable that for me is hate that for me is a system that is out to get you and is is not interested in showing you justice and what what ended up happening with the revolution is that women were out there on the front lines with men but then you had the army the military junta using his so-called virginity tests and then women having to overcome sexual assaults in the square itself and during protests to the extent and not not just from the revolutionaries but from ordinary egyptians maybe not interested in the revolution who saw this mass gathering as a chance to go out there and harass women in ways that egyptian women face every day i mean if you lived in kairu you know how endemic to egyptian society sexual harassment and sexual assaults of women are the day the last time i was in kairu was on international women's day for a march to parliament the day before we marched through downtown kairu i was there by myself i was interviewing an artist at the swiss embassy and i was waiting for a cab and i was dressed in a long skirt and long sleeves and i felt so uncomfortable i just wanted to disappear just waiting for a cab because of the way men were looking at me and the next day i was marching with fellow egyptian women and men and i was telling another feminist this and as we're talking about this and how uncomfortable we feel in public in kairu we're surrounded by a cordon of men who are protecting our march because that's what we need in kairu sadly this is revolutionary egypt we need a cordon of men to protect our international women's day march because the year before men not involved in the revolution but ordinary men pounced on women who were demonstrating for women's rights and and attack them so if we need to be protected during a march for international women's day i think that is the answer to your question there is something about the impunity with which sexual assaults happen in egypt and no one is held accountable that permeates society and gives out a message that women's bodies are fair game and so women cover thinking it's going to protect them but it doesn't because more than 80 percent of women are covered in egypt in one form or another and they still get sexually assaulted it's not a protection so the legal system the cultural system the social system the moral system the revolution of the mind that i spoke of in the essay is what is needed to overcome this impunity by which people think my body is fair game let me say this that um when um when the 1978-79 revolution happened the iconic images the iconic faces that emerged from that revolution were the faces of bearded traditional men basically and if you look at the 2009 uprisings in iran the iconic images that emerged the iconic faces were faces of young modern educated women like uh neda or sultan the the woman who whose death was captured um on on cell phone and so i very much think that women are going to be at the forefront they are at the forefront of of any type of political change in iran and part of it you know so so contrasting with Saudi Arabia part of it is is is if you look at the the sweeping history of the last century um that in 1925 um iran had a dictator Reza Shah who banned the veil basically prohibited women from wearing the veil and in the piece i talk about my own family's trajectory kind of the trajectory of the urban middle class over that century that my grandmother who was born in 1907 um didn't have wasn't educated beyond elementary school and she wore a a chadur all of her life um of her four daughters three of them were university educated uh and and none of them wore the veil and of their daughters um you know none of them were the veil all of them were educated at a post grad level and religion wasn't a huge part of their life so that's kind of iran's um trajectory over the last century and of course the 1979 revolution tried to turn things in the opposite direction but i think that um Saudi Arabia's had a much different history of course than than iran and um you know whereas in iran you have uh 60 percent of university students are now women and Saudi Arabia i think there's still women are still agitating for somewhat more elementary freedoms like the right like the right to drive but i think that this is one of the i guess it's one of the critiques when we try to um capture uh the quote on quote middle east in a thousand words or two thousand words that these countries are all incredibly difficult incredibly different and have very very diverse histories and i think they will all have very um unique trajectories um which um you know you know some of them will will coincide and overlap but in many ways i think they'll have very different trajectories all right we have time for a few more questions i'm going to get someone in the back here yes you we'll try to get to you too yes thank you my name is ashro fail um i'm a ceo of a public company that has offices in egypt i'm also chairman of a nonprofit that was recently shut down in egypt um so we have interest in this topic from both sides of business side also social side i appreciate all the effort we follow you we support you um you know the the your cause is noble and and the war is justified my concern my question is we seem to uh there are three influences at play there's a political influence there's a social influence political influence on the society itself but it'll so social influence on itself and religious influence on society it seems like a lot of the issues that you described in several examples are put in one bucket and pinned maybe in one direction and one of the first rules of war is to know your enemy and i feel that the the war is not directed at the in the right area so for example when you talk about the proper way of beating women or marrying women at 14 this is religious text that's a different war uh that has nothing to do with leadership uh policy doesn't come from a vacuum and gets down past to society and say you know okay let's create uh women uh policies that are pro women i mean society itself has to kind of rise and demand that in order for policy to be created and then push down i think a lot of the examples that you gave in how parliament in egypt is well these are non-political people they came from society the reason why you're seeing their bad influence is because they are a representation of society so can can you help us kind of what is the plan for the agenda to change society because i don't think you'll be able to change religion i don't think you'd be able to influence policy unless society itself it seems in egypt as we're seeing our organization being shut down our business is impacted that society wants to be that way it's their desire to oppress women it's their that's the way society itself has nothing to do with anything else so how do you address the core how do you address society itself thank you so you're basically agreeing with my with my thesis that they hate women is what you're saying but how do we how do we fight that well i mean it's a multi-pronged war i'm not i'm not saying we should just focus on one thing first of all i'm not a policy maker so i don't know what the policy should be but when it comes to society i mean at the end of the day you know when when we first heard that salafis would be head of the education committee in parliament a lot of people thought it would be a disaster because you know the salafis are the ultra right wing they're the most conservative of the islamists in the egyptian parliament and people thought this would be a disaster especially when it came to the fields of education and then i asked a friend of mine who works with with young people in egypt is this really going to be a disaster and he said to me you know it looks in theory like it will be a disaster but seeing as the education system in egypt is really bad they're actually not going to be able to do much because once they get through how bad the curricula are once they get through the fact that there aren't enough schools once they get through the fact that the schools are overcrowded and so on and so forth but also when push comes to shove the salafis like to make a big deal about how they're going to segregate the boys and girls and they're going to teach the girls how to cook and prepare them to become homemakers and they're going to teach the boys how to be the providers but when you look at egyptian society where more than 30 percent of families are women led because these women cannot afford not to work you look at the reality on the ground and this is the society that you're talking about this is not a society that can afford to be told all girls are going to be homemakers and all boys are going to be out there making jobs or having jobs and making money so this is a society that is clearly in need of a lot of jobs and this is how you change society this is what the woman over here was saying once they get down to the nitty-gritty of ruling or the nitty-gritty of actually representing what people want them to represent them for they will have to create jobs and they'll stop obsessing over women i don't know if it's a case of waiting for society to catch up with you because if we wait for a society that hates me to finally stop hating me that's too long to wait i'm very impatient i'm not going to wait for them to stop hating me i'm going to demand those rights as a fact especially after revolution you know i didn't get my arms broken in tahrir square so i can wait for society to catch up with the fact that it's horrendous to hate me that's just ridiculous so if i have to kick that society in the butt i'll kick it but at the same time those representing me have to be real and understand that egyptians want jobs egyptians want tourism to come back egyptians want you to stop obsessing as i keep saying the christian coalition here do this as well stop obsessing over my vagina this is not what egyptians voted you to do egyptians voted you to create jobs because it's about more than sex and and family values and headscarves it's about getting the country to work again so i don't i don't have solutions you know a lot of people have criticized me because i didn't come up with solutions it's not my job to come up with solutions it's my job as a writer to poke people and say this is really wrong so i i don't know i don't have a full and complete answer to what you're saying but to combine what you asked me with what the woman before you asked there are women like samira ibrahim who tried to sue the military junta who was of that society she comes from a conservative family in southern egypt and if she had waited for societies to stop hating her she would not have sued the military junta on some very deep and fundamental level this 25 year old egyptian woman believes she deserves dignity and so she sued the military junta this is what a revolution is about it's about and revolutions are never created by a majority if we waited for the majority to create the revolution it would never come the revolution comes through a small group of very pissed off people who say this is wrong so i think we just need to get a good small core group of people in egypt to be righteously indignated about what's going on and say this is wrong and that message begins to reverberate and and the reality on the ground is we need jobs once you combine those two things together they'll stop obsessing over sex and vaginas just a quick point i don't remember who it was who said that you know one of the problems in the middle east is that the extremists go all the way and the moderates just go away and i think that you know looking back at the the history of the iranian revolution it was really a remarkable dereliction of duty on the part of the liberal intelligentsia it was really they failed the country and and so i think that if there's a lesson here the lesson isn't that you you simply acquiesce and you give up and you say well that's how the majority wanted i think retrospectively had people fought for for these values which they are sensibly championed whether it's women's rights or free speech etc the country may not find itself in the mess that it is that it is right now and you know one of the things which i'll tell you i found somewhat disappointing in the reaction to to mona's piece is that the arab world is very much at a crossroads and i think what was disappointing is that arab and muslim liberals seems to me oftentimes spend more effort fighting their fellow arab and muslim liberals rather than really championing the the the causes which they they ostensibly support you know i think we're not going to be able to end on a stronger note than this and we promise everyone here that we would wind up at five thirty the good news is that we want you to continue the conversation amongst yourselves here tonight we have some some drinks for those of you who've been kind enough to spend your time with us we hope you'll stay and engage with each other engage with our authors i i particularly really do want to before everyone gets up i want to thank mona and kareem because i think this has been an extraordinary conversation one that we don't have often enough here in washington and it's it's my privilege to host you both here and in the pages of our magazine and i hope the audience will join me in thanking both of you for really an extraordinary conversation