Yasmin El-Rifae - Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution

Radius

Radius

A Story of
Feminist Revolution

Yasmin El-Rifae

First published by Verso 2022
Yasmin El-Rifae 2022

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217
versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-768-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-770-8 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-771-5 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: El-Rifae, Yasmin, author.

Title: Radius: a story of feminist revolution / Yasmin El-Rifae.

Description: London; New York: Verso, 2022.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022020544 (print) | LCCN 2022020545 (ebook) | ISBN 9781839767685 (hardback) | ISBN 9781839767715 (US ebk) | ISBN 9781839767708 (UK ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment (Organization) | Sex crimesEgyptPrevention. | WomenCrimes againstEgyptPrevention. | FeminismEgyptHistory21st century. | Women political activistsEgypt. | EgyptHistoryProtests, 2011-2013.

Classification: LCC HV6593.E84 E57 2022 (print) | LCC HV6593.E84 (ebook) | DDC 364.15/30962dc23/eng/20220617

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022020544

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022020545

Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Contents

Its summer in New York, and the baby-to-be is growing but does not show in the dark blue dress Im wearing. A famous writer and his wife, sitting across the table from me at a dinner party, ask me what my book is about.

I say its the story of a group that fought circles of men that attacked women over and over again while a revolution struggled to survive. The man, the writer, wants to know how this could happen, why. The woman looks at me closely, and says, Its not the same, not the same at all, but Ive felt something like that. At parties and dances, even back at school. Suddenly something would shift, youd feel a circle forming around you, and I dont know, its not the same, but there would suddenly be this menace, this threat, grabbing.

I am standing in Adams apartment in Cairo talking to Leila, whom I havent seen in two years, and she is telling me that she can no longer dance at weddings or parties, in case a circle forms on the dance floor.

Its totally irrational, but I just cant.

The space and time between Cairo and New York collapses. Mid-conversation, mid-thought.

Could it happen again? Will it ever not?

The world shows us, over and over again, that we are still being attacked. The story differs depending on who and where you arerape on campus, domestic abuse, femicide, honor killing. Language changes, new waves of feminism are commodified, battle lines shift, laws improve and regress, but the violence and the threat of it are still there.

At least sometimes when we fight back we dont have to do it alone.

This story is about a feminist intervention group that formed in late 2012, nearly two years into the Egyptian revolution, when mass sexual assaults of female protesters were spreading through Cairos Tahrir Square.

Reports of mob attacks against female protesters first appeared online. Witnesses and survivors described different levels of violence but it always seemed to start the same way: a group of men would encircle a woman, or multiple women, and from there the crowd would grow to dozens, sometimes hundreds of people. Men groped, stripped, beat, and raped women. Within the chaos of the mob around them, people fought with one another. They pick-pocketed. They tried to film what was happening on their phones. Some tried to help the victims, others joined in assault.

The revolution that had erupted so unexpectedly in 2011a revolution with all of the transcendence and promise of unstoppable, fear-breaking collective action against decades of police brutality, dictatorship, and corruptionwas now in a state of political and spiritual crisis. After Hosni Mubarak stepped down in February 2011, the military led a transitional period marked by continued state violence against prodemocracy protesters. In the spring of 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood, the most organized opposition group in the country (despite being legally banned for nearly half a century), won the first open presidential elections. Once in power, the Brotherhood abandoned the revolutions demands, pursuing its own economic and political agenda, seeing little need to make or keep allies. The movement that saw Tahrir Square as its center was now reactive, no longer moving public imagination as much as trying to hold ground, to not let go.

When the attacks against women spread, the dominant feeling among many activists was that they were premeditated. Security forces have a history of paying thugs to harass female protesters, although it had never happened on this scale. Some thought perhaps the Brotherhood was attempting to undermine street-based opposition to their government by paying men to attack women protesters. Or perhaps it was sabotage by formerly powerful members of the security apparatus who were ousted along with Mubarak.

Whatever the cause, women in Tahrir were in increasing danger of being attacked, and no one was doing anything about it until a few groups of peoplemany of us women who were ourselves attacked or had seen other women attackedbegan to organize.

The group at the center of this book was one of the earliest to form and was organized by activists who could broadly be described as leftist, many of whom already knew and had worked with one another. We started out without a name, going to the protests wearing pink ribbons around our arms so that we could spot one another in the crowds. Everything else grew from there.

We spent a long time debating what to name the group. It wasnt clear which Arabic word to use to describe what we were fighting againsttaharrosh, the most commonly used word for harassment in Egyptian dialect, didnt capture the violence of the attacks. Back then, taharrosh could mean catcalling or teasing; it was understood to be potentially harmless. We decided on the long but more accurate Operation AntiSexual Harassment and Assault, Opantish for short. With the name came Facebook and Twitter pages, and T-shirts that became our uniform with the motto A Midan Safe for All printed in Arabic on the back. (Midan means both traffic circle and public square in Arabic. Throughout the revolution it was commonly used to refer to Tahrir, a major traffic circle in downtown Cairo, which was transformed into a public square when it was occupied by protesters. I have chosen to use it in transliterated form throughout this book when referring to Tahrir.)

We created a sophisticated operational structure that, at its peak, deployed hundreds of volunteers working in specialized teams on the ground. Men and women learned how to effectively fight their way into the mobs, packed first aid material and spare clothes to carry on their backs for victims, debated whether to carry weapons. Getaway drivers mapped the best routes for avoiding military barricades when they were driving women away. In the press, we talked about the states long history of complicity in sexual violence against women, called out leftist activists and political groups for ignoring or even denying the ongoing attacks (