Gang rape, the dark side of Egypt's protests

Last week, a 22-year-old Dutch journalist was gang-raped in Tahrir Square and had to undergo surgery for severe injuries. The assault reminds us yet again of an often overlooked aspect of the Egyptian revolution.

When Egyptians overthrew their dictator in 2011, one of the first celebratory acts in Tahrir Square included the gang beating and sexual assault of American journalist Lara Logan, who, like the Dutch journalist, landed in the hospital.

The Logan rape has always been portrayed as another unfortunate byproduct of mob violence. In fact, it was much more than that. It was a warning shot fired by men whose political beliefs are founded on a common pillar: Women must stay out of the public square.

One of the hallmarks of revolutionary victory in Tahrir Square has always been rape and sexual harassment. Mobs of men routinely set upon women, isolating, stripping and groping. No one is ever arrested or held accountable, and elected officials shrug their shoulders and blame the victims.

Vigilante groups have been organized to track the incidents. Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment, one of the groups, recorded 46 cases of sexual assaults and harassment against women on Sunday night alone -- and has added 17 more to its list that the group said happened Monday.

Egyptian women are the primary victims of sexual violence, and ultimately they are the intended recipients of the message: Stay home, your input in government and politics is not wanted.

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Raping foreign journalists -- guaranteed to attract global attention -- is merely a more efficient way of getting that message across.

When Egyptians overthrew the dictator, the Muslim Brotherhood took advantage of public hatred of the dictator to ally him with Western progressive ideals, including gender equality. Out went the nongovernmental organizations that worked to make divorce easier and inheritance laws fairer. In came the thugs who stripped and beat women in the streets.

Granted, some of these crimes against women were committed by the military and the police themselves, as women like Mona Eltahawy (a journalist whose arms were broken by soldiers) and Samira Ibrahim (a young protester who sued the government, accusing an army doctor of submitting her to a forced "virginity test") have reported.

Dina Zakaria, an Egyptian journalist, reported that the men who raped the Dutch journalist last week called themselves "revolutionists." That label should surprise no one.

If one fervently believes women should stay inside their homes and out of the business of public life, what better way to accomplish that than rampant sexual harassment and sexual assault in a country in which women's virginity and honor is the sine qua non of female participation in society?

Egyptian Salafist preacher Ahmad Mahmoud Abdullah said that women protesting in Tahrir Square 'have no shame and want to be raped.'
Nina Burleigh

Not long ago, Egyptian Salafist preacher Ahmad Mahmoud Abdullah said that women protesting in Tahrir Square "have no shame and want to be raped." The public face of the Muslim Brotherhood would never espouse such a statement. But its founding intellectual lights never hid the fact that a pillar of their planned theocracy was keeping women powerless. And their record in office is one of sexist exclusion. Women held only eight seats out of 498 (four of the eight women were from the Brotherhood party) in the disbanded Parliament.

Women made up 7% of the constitutional assembly that drafted the Egyptian constitution. No wonder then that the document (approved by referendum in December 2012) refers to women only as sisters and mothers, and only within the framework of family -- not employment or public life, even though a majority of Egyptian women work.

Egypt has always been a place where life for women is nasty and brutish, if not short. Last year, a UNICEF survey showed 91% of Egyptian women between the ages of 15-49 said they had to undergo female genital mutilation. The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality in May reported that 99.3% of Egyptian women interviewed said they had been subjected to some form of sexual violence. Rape victims almost never go to the hospital and certainly not the police. There are no medical protocols for rape, and police treat female victims as prostitutes.

Whether or not that violence is political is worthy of discussion. I believe it is. At the moment, no one even debates it. It is the elephant in the room.

As the Egyptian revolution enters another chapter, and more women get stripped and sexually assaulted in the streets while being systematically excluded from the halls of power in Cairo, it is high time for American progressives and other Arab Spring commentators to stop separating anti-female violence from the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood's revolutionaries.

In the broadest sense, the West's response to the treatment of women in post-Arab Spring countries, from Egypt to Syria, says a lot about the status of women here.

We might not be able to do anything to stop violent, organized misogyny in far-off lands, but we can certainly stand up for our own principles and call it what it is.

What is the Muslim Brotherhood?

A year after Mohamed Morsy became Egypt's first democratically-elected president, millions of Egyptians took to the streets calling for him to step down.

Among the protesters' complaints was the alleged "Brotherhoodization" of the government -- the imposition of the Islamist views propagated by the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Morsy is a member.

So what is the Muslim Brotherhood?

The Muslim Brotherhood is a religious and political group founded on the belief that Islam is not simply a religion, but a way of life. It advocates a move away from secularism, and a return to the rules of the Quran as a basis for healthy families, communities, and states.

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Muslim Brotherhood headquarters burned

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The movement officially rejects the use of violent means to secure its goals. However, offshoots of the group have been linked to attacks in the past, and critics blame the Brotherhood for sparking troubles elsewhere in the Middle East. Many consider it the forerunner of modern militant Islamism.

In a 1997 study for Harvard International Review, Muslim Brotherhood Deputy Chairman Mohammad Ma'mun El-Hudaibi said the Brotherhood was based on two "key pillars."

They are: the introduction of the Islamic Sharia (way of life or principles) as the basis controlling the affairs of state and society and working "to achieve unification among the Islamic countries and states, mainly among the Arab states, and liberating them from foreign imperialism."

When was the Brotherhood created?

The Muslim Brotherhood has been part of the political scene in Egypt for more than 80 years. It was formed there by Hassan al-Banna in 1928.

Teacher al-Banna and his followers were initially united by a desire to oust the British from control in Egypt, and to rid their country of what they saw as "corrupting" Western influences.

The original Brotherhood slogan was "Islam is the solution."

What is its history?

In its early years, the group concentrated on religion, education and social services, but as its membership grew, it moved into the political sphere, organizing protests against the Egyptian government.

In the 1940s, an armed wing of the Brotherhood was blamed for a string of violent acts, including the assassination of Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi in 1948 -- shortly after he had ordered the dissolution of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Al-Banna himself was assassinated soon afterwards -- his supporters claimed he had been killed on the wishes of the government.

The movement went underground in the 1950s, and decades of oppression by successive Egyptian rulers led many of the Brotherhood's members to flee abroad, while others were jailed.

In the 1980s, the group disavowed violence and attempted to join the mainstream political process, but it was banned by the regime of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Nonetheless, the Brotherhood grew throughout the decade, as part of a general growth of interest in Islam, and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 saw a spike in membership.

In 2005, it won 20% of the seats in Egypt's parliamentary elections, running as independents. Mubarak cracked down on the group, jailing hundreds of members.

Why is it important in Egypt?

The Brotherhood is the oldest and largest opposition group in Egypt. It has had widespread support among Egypt's middle classes, and its members control many of the country's professional organizations.

Up until 2011, it was illegal under Egyptian law banning all parties based on religion. But in December that year, its political party -- the Freedom and Justice Party -- dominated parliamentary elections, winning about half of the seats up for grabs.

The group initially said it would not put forward a candidate for president, but Mohamed Morsy ran and in June 2012, became Egypt's first democratically-elected president.

Read more: Who is Mohamed Morsy?

So how successful has the Brotherhood been in power?

Morsy came to power on June 30, 2012, but since then his approval ratings have plummeted.

His government failed to keep order as the economy tanked and crime soared, including open sexual assaults on women in Egypt's streets. The chaos drove away many tourists and investors.

CNN's Ben Wedeman says the job of running Egypt today "has to be one of the most difficult jobs on Earth." He says once the Brotherhood took over, they found that much of the bureaucracy opposed them due to fears the group would impose their own supporters at every level of government.

"If you're president of Egypt and you can't trust your police and you're not sure about the army and you know that the bureaucracy doesn't like you, you're going to have a very difficult job at running this very complicated country," Wedeman said.

Read more: Morsy has few friends as deadline looms

Is there still support for the Muslim Brotherhood?

Columnist Frida Ghitis says one of the most striking things about the 2013 protests against Morsy has been the intensity of anger towards the Muslim Brotherhood.

She points out that in June 2013, more people had signed a Tamarod -- or rebel -- petition to withdraw support for Morsy than voted for him in the election -- a sign, she says that "discontent has spread beyond the liberals, or former regime supporters."

Read more: Egyptians are fed up with Morsy

Why has the brotherhood fallen out of favor?

Ghitis argues that the Brotherhood and Morsy's credibility suffered when they "repeatedly broke their word."

Ed Husain, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, points out that Morsy promised, then failed to appoint a female vice president and a Coptic Christian deputy, for example.

Read more: Give Morsy a chance to fix this

Egyptians accuse Morsy and the Brotherhood of engaging in a process of "ikhwaninzation" -- or "Brotherhoodization", Ghitis says, describing it as "a quest to take control of state institutions and impose their Islamist views on the population."

"In the first wave of elections, many voters thought if they were Muslim -- as most Egyptians are -- they should vote for the Muslim Brotherhood. And they thought secular was synonymous with atheist. Now they're discovering how religion can be exploited for power," Ghitis says.

Egyptian historian Khaled Fahmy says Morsy adopted a "hard line, exclusive approach," choosing Muslim Brotherhood members or sympathizers for powerful and not so powerful positions in his government and the broader Egyptian administration.

Read more: 'We did not risk our lives simply to change the players'

So has the Brotherhood lost its power in Egypt?

CNN's Reza Sayah says Egypt's Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood have a history of perseverance. For decades they were oppressed, sidelined, sometimes torture and even killed - most recently under the Mubarak regime, he says, but they managed to stay organized.

He says losing power after so long could be a bitter pill to swallow.

How influential is the Brotherhood elsewhere?

There are branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in countries across the Middle East and North and East Africa, including Sudan, Syria and Saudi Arabia. There is also a branch in the U.S.

Its offshoots outside Egypt are markedly more conservative in their views: The Kuwaiti branch is said to oppose the right of women to vote.

Sayyid Qutb, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s, developed the doctrine of jihad, and the radical group Hamas is believed to be an offshoot of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood.

Worry mounts in Egypt as protesters dig in heels

Tensions are running high in Egypt nearly a month after the July 3 ouster of Mohamed Morsy, the country's first democratically elected president. Here are five things to know about what's going on in the pivotal North African nation:

Anxiety is thick in Egypt amid government preparations to evict pro-Morsy demonstrators

Protesters demanding Morsy's return to power are camped out in an east Cairo neighborhood, saying they won't leave until Morsy is restored to power.

Meanwhile, those whose protests led to Morsy's ouster -- secularists and liberals -- find themselves aligned, at least in part, with the military-backed government.

Protests in Cairo and elsewhere have turned violent, with dozens killed Saturday in Cairo in clashes between demonstrators and security forces. And more violence is possible amid government warnings to pro-Morsy demonstrators to end their protests.

The country isn't spiraling out of control, Interim Prime Minister Hazem El-Beblawi said Monday in an interview to be aired on CNN's "Amanpour."

"The situation is tense of course," he said. "No one can dispute that we have a very difficult situation."

But the government is merely trying to restore order after a month of chaotic demonstrations, he said.

However, a Muslim Brotherhood coalition that opposes Morsy's ouster said those behind his removal are "threatening national security by dragging the Egyptian army into a conflict with the majority of Egyptians, and by involving the army in attacks on peaceful demonstrators, causing a breach between the people and their army."

Opinion: Morsy a victim of Egypt's revolution of the mind

"Who is in charge?" is not necessarily a simple question to answer

Since taking power from Morsy on July 3, Egypt's military has installed an interim civilian government with Adly Mansour as interim president. He issued a decree giving himself some legislative power and outlining a path toward new elections.

But Egypt's generals still wield significant power. For instance, last week it was Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the country's defense minister, not the president, who called for mass protests in support of the military, asking supporters to provide a "referendum to take firm action against violence and terrorism."

El-Beblawi said he believes the civilian government is calling the shots.

"As far as I am concerned, I feel very much in charge with my council of ministers, and I haven't seen any indication or any sign from anyone to tell me what to be done," he told CNN's Hala Gorani. "The moment I feel that the civilian government is besieged, I will put in my resignation."

Morsy remains out of sight

He hasn't been seen publicly since the military forced him from office.

The state-run EGYNews reported Sunday that an Egyptian delegation granted permission to visit him said he is being held at an undisclosed military facility along with his chief of staff and his secretary.

El-Beblawi didn't elaborate Monday on Morsy's location, but said he is being well cared for and detained in part for his own safety. Catherine Ashton, the European Union's top diplomat, was expected to meet him during her visit to Egypt Monday, El-Beblawi said.

The former president is being held in relation for a jailbreak that took place during Egypt's 2011 revolution but well before he came to power, state media reported.

Prosecutors have said the escape of Morsy and 18 other Brotherhood members, among others, was plotted by "foreign elements" including Hamas, the Islamic Palestinian Army and Hezbollah.

Morsy, who local media reports say was in prison for a single day without any formal charges against him, is accused of escaping, destroying the prison's official records and intentionally killing and abducting police officers and prisoners.

The international community is worried

Rights groups and international leaders are concerned about the violence that's already occurred, and the threat of more.

Human Rights Watch on Sunday accused the government of intentionally killing protesters. The rights group says it based its assessment on witness interviews and video footage that in some cases appeared to show security forces shooting to kill.

"The use of deadly fire on such a scale so soon after the interim president announced the need to impose order by force suggests a shocking willingness by the police and by certain politicians to ratchet up violence against pro-Morsy protesters," Nadim Houry, the group's deputy Middle East and North Africa director, said in a statement. "It is almost impossible to imagine that so many killings would take place without an intention to kill, or at least a criminal disregard for people's lives."

Ashton is visiting Egypt on Monday, hoping to help quell the violence.

"I am going to Egypt to speak to all sides and to reinforce our message that there must be a fully inclusive transition process, taking in all political groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood," Ashton said in a statement." This process must lead -- as soon as possible -- to constitutional order, free and fair elections and a civilian-led government. I will also repeat my call to end all violence. I deeply deplore the loss of life."

On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry talked with Egypt's interim vice president and foreign minister, expressing the administration's concern about the violence.

"This is a pivotal moment for Egypt," Kerry said in a statement Saturday. "Over two years ago, the revolution began. Its final verdict is not decided, but it will be forever impacted by what happens now."

Things could get uglier

The government is threatening to break up demonstrations in what could well be another bloody confrontation between demonstrators and security forces.

On Sunday, Mansour, Egypt's interim president, issued a powder-keg decree making preparations for a possible "state of emergency," the EGYnews website reported.

"State of emergency" is a loaded term in Egypt, where former President Hosni Mubarak ruled for 30 years under an emergency decree that barred unauthorized assembly, restricted freedom of speech and allowed police to jail people indefinitely.

However, Mansour's spokesman, Ahmed El Meslemani, said Monday in a televised news conference that the government has no plans to declare emergency law.

Still, the National Defense Council has issued a stern warning to protesters backing Morsy to end their protests or face "decisive decisions" for violating the law, and El-Beblawi said the government cannot stand by while protesters disrupt normal routines.

On Monday, Military helicopters dropped leaflets on pro-Morsy protesters in Rabaa al-Adawiya and appealed for them not to approach military installations and units, EGYnews said.

"We call on everyone to cooperate and respond to the instructions of the armed forces personnel in order for the security and stability of the country. No violence. Do not sabotage. No bloodshed," the leaflets read.