Kafr al-Hanadwa

Why has it taken so long for Umm ad-Dunya to take its rightful place in producing a Courageous Reformist Arab Personality (CRAP)? Well, it’s about time. Nonie Darwish isn’t photogenic and lissome like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and doesn’t have the same Firsthand Experience of Suffering Bigotry and Brutality, but she’s a coup all the same, because she’s the daughter of an Egyptian military officer killed by Israeli security who went on to reject Arab nationalism completely, to the point of forming a group called Arabs for Israel (which urges Arabs and “Moslems” to support Israel’s claim to its land etc etc).

This profile paints a picture of a fairly unassuming young woman who could not bring herself to take on the role of a “martyr’s daughter” and who keenly felt the injustices and sexism towards their own that Egyptians were willing to justify even as they mobilized against injustices done to Arabs by Israel:

It is 50 years since the moment that has defined most of her life. In July 1956 a parcel bomb from Israeli intelligence killed her father. Colonel Mustafa Hafez was a Feyadeen [sic] commander, an Egyptian intelligence officer who organised lethal raids from Gaza that killed hundreds of Jews, including many civilians. The bomb was Israel striking back against a man many saw as the de facto ruler of the territory. At the time, Gaza was under Egyptian military control. Overnight, Colonel Hafez was transformed into a shahid; a martyr to the Arab cause.

After a state funeral, Darwish, along with her brother who was also injured in the blast, and her three sisters, was summoned to a meeting with President Nasser and senior officials. ‘We were asked, “Which one of you will avenge your father’s blood by killing Jews?” And we all looked at each other, my siblings and I, wondering which one of us will say “me”. I remember we were all just speechless. I felt so uncomfortable.’

Darwish was eight years old and destined for a life as the dutiful daughter of an Arab national hero. Yet remarkably, given the toxic environment of Gaza half a century ago, she rebelled. ‘In Gaza elementary school the indoctrination was incredible. It’s worse now, of course, but I remember in the playground we used to sing songs with words like: “The Arabs are our friends, the Jews are our dogs.” We were told that Jews like to kill pregnant Arab women just for fun, to see if it is a boy or a girl. I would be warned: “Don’t take any candy or fruit from a stranger. It could be a Jew trying to poison you.”‘

Her father had been killed by Jews. But the anger the young girl felt left her confused. She was surrounded by people urging her down the path of jihad. ‘It made me feel that, if I really loved my father, I’d have to avenge his death. But the knowledge that I didn’t want to kill anybody … it made me think: “Am I being loyal?” I loved my father. How come I don’t want to kill anybody even though they killed him? They filled our hearts with the fear of Jews. And when you do that to a child, hatred becomes very easy and terrorism becomes a virtue. It becomes acceptable.’

Deeply hurt by her father’s death, she confesses to many years of resentment. ‘I hated Israel. Oh God, how I hated the Jews. But now I can look at it more as a historical event. The pain and the anger have subsided and now I really understand why Israel wanted to kill my father.’

People would say, “Your father is in Heaven now. He’s a shahid, he’s a martyr. Wouldn’t you want him to be in Heaven?” But she hated the idea that he had died. ‘I wanted him to be down here with us. But I couldn’t express that openly because it was against what everyone was telling us.’ The only person Darwish felt that she could talk to openly was her grandmother. She would climb onto the older woman’s knee and reveal her true feelings. ‘I was too scared to talk to my mom, she was in so much pain. I used to say to my grandmother: “I don’t want him to be glorified, I don’t want all of this. I just want to have my father back.”‘

As she grew up, Darwish began observing the world around her with a more critical eye. She noticed the humiliations heaped on her mother as a woman without a husband. ‘It really brought home the impossible situation that society - Arab society, Muslim society - puts on women who are by themselves.’ Even buying a car as a woman was fraught. In the 1950s very few Egyptian women drove cars. Everybody said, “What kind of widow is this? Only loose women would do something like that.” And I remember my mother really suffered from criticism like that. She would say: “Isn’t it enough that we lose our husbands? Now we can’t handle our own lives?”‘

She seems to contradict herself later by expressing horror at the prevalence of hijab in Egyptian universities today and looking back fondly at the mini-skirts of her youth - perhaps she should look around to see how many muhaggabas drive their own cars these days, but anyway. An anecdote about the rumoured “honour-killing” of a maid pregnant by rape follows, and up until this point, the “supply side” of her outrage with Arab and Muslim society seems fairly understandable. Why did she not join any of the active liberal and feminist movements fighting against sexism, one wonders? Instead, she got married (to a Coptic Christian, from “a religious group long persecuted in the Arab world. Her husband-to-be had to convert to Islam before the wedding could take place: ‘Otherwise I would have been rejected by my family.’” Um, yeah, that’s the best example of oppression by religious intolerance that she comes up with) and migrated to California. The author continues:

The couple subsequently divorced and Darwish had to support her family by going to work. She has since remarried, to an American man with whom she has a daughter. It is an unremarkable story for a divorced woman by Western standards, yet one that would have been impossible in the world she left behind.

Divorce is much less taboo in Egyptian society than it probably was at the time in the US, but anyway, she probably felt she needed more How the West Saved Me padding for her story. She lived a quiet life till fairly recently, when the opportunity for publicity shot up, and boy, did she deliver.

Her experiences are the ammunition for a powerful and sustained attack on the values of the Islamic world both on the lecture circuit and through her book, Now They Call Me Infidel, which is a bestseller in America. With its subtitle, ‘Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror’, it has made Darwish one of the heroines of the Conservative Right. What raises her above the usual rhetoric of debate is the fact that she knows of what she speaks.

On the subject of honour killings, she explains: ‘It doesn’t make sense in the West, but I can understand it. The honour of the man in the Middle East is so linked to the sexual purity of their wives and daughters. Society will shame you to death. This pressure does not exist in the West.’…

‘I come from a culture that’s very sensitive to criticism,’ she says. ‘We were never brought up to look at what we had done to cause a particular problem. It’s always about blaming others, saying, maybe it’s the next-door neighbour who did it, or, no, it’s the next town, or another country, or other religions. It’s never, “What have we done?” or, “What is our part in this tragedy?” It’s taboo. And if you do admit, “We’ve made a mistake and we are sorry for it”, you become the bearer of the sin and everything will be thrown at you.’

Her mother is still alive and living in the suburbs of Cairo, but she is now too frail to travel to America and although very little publicity has been given to her activism in Egypt, Darwish is no longer sure that it would be safe to visit. She recently turned down an interview request from the Dubai satellite channel Al Arabiya: ‘I didn’t want my family in Egypt to be upset and I didn’t want a fatwa against me.’

It has been over five years since mother and daughter last saw each other, when Darwish took her children to Egypt for the first time. ‘I was amazed at how radical it had become. When I was at university women were wearing miniskirts. Nobody was covered from head to toe like they are now. Meanwhile there was the same old poverty, embezzlement. A lot of pollution, garbage around the Nile, flies everywhere, unemployment. Yet when I opened the Egyptian newspapers I didn’t see any of this. Just America-bashing, blaming others, blaming the West.’

Returning to Los Angeles, the family spent much of the flight home discussing what they had just seen. ‘I was very depressed. Every foreign man in Egypt is viewed as the CIA, every blonde woman a Zionist spy. There is always this conspiracy. All this anger.’ They arrived home on the evening of 10 September, 2001. ‘I woke up the next morning, turned on the television and - lo and behold. Immediately I knew that this was the anger we had left behind.’ The leader of the 9/11 attacks was an Egyptian, Mohammed Atta.

Jihad, honour-killings, blaming others for one’s own problems, fatwas, deep-rooted anger that produced 9/11, yes, she certainly knows how to play to her audience. There are some moments of potential clarity on women’s rights as a priority, but she does manage to conflate social conservatism with religious requirements and blame it all on “Islam” in good CRAP fashion:

‘There are very few feminists in the Middle East,’ says Darwish. ‘Unfortunately most of the Muslim women I hear speaking are the ones saying things like, “We want Sharia law, we want the right to wear the veil,” and defend polygamy. But Sharia law is the problem that any woman in the Middle East who wants to be liberated must face. You can’t live alone - as a woman you must live with your husband or your parents. If you have sex out of wedlock you could go to prison. If you want to convert - become a Buddhist for example - you can go to jail for it. It is all a legal matter. You can actually go to court and, depending whether it is a moderate or extreme Muslim country, go to jail or be executed. When push comes to shove, Sharia law does not protect women. It’s the stumbling block, it’s what’s making Islam impossible to change.’

I had no idea you could go to jail or be executed for changing your religion or for sex out of wedlock in Egypt, does Nonie know something we don’t? It is, in any event, an outrageous exaggeration to say that there are few feminists in the Middle East and that Muslim women tend to support sharia - even Islamist feminists like Heba Raouf Ezzat have a pretty progressive view of sharia. The irony of the story is that while young women at AUC are raising awareness about women’s bodies, concerns, domination and abuse, Darwish is busy fluttering her eyelashes at an interviewer who writes about her in a rather condescending way:

A middle-aged Californian woman emerges briefly from her kitchen carrying a tray weighed down with a pot of coffee and a plate of fresh croissants and doughnuts. Moments later she is back, this time brandishing a vast slice of pumpkin pie. ‘I’m sorry,’ says Nonie Darwish, with a half-apologetic smile. ‘You are my guest. I can’t help my upbringing.’

[...]

Both [Wafa Sultan and Nonie Darwish] are unexpected radicals, the kind of middle-aged, middle-class women you might expect to be more concerned about their next hair appointment or their children’s college applications, and yet have become some of the most vehement and articulate critics of Islamic society…

There is frantic yapping. Elvis, the family’s Yorkshire Terrier puppy, races into the room. Darwish stands up to shoo him away, then instinctively begins to clear away the coffee cups. The activist takes a back seat as she notices the untouched slice of pumpkin pie. ‘Are you sure you are not hungry?’ she says. ‘Can I get you anything else to eat?’

The very image of the obliging Oriental woman.