Originally published in the journal Feminist Studies here

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Attack on Feminists in Egypt: The Militarization of Public Space and Accountable Solidarity

By Nadine Naber and Dalia Abd El-Hameed

In March 2016, a series of statements, news articles, and human rights reports circulated on social media in the global north, calling for an end to the crackdown on feminists in Egypt. These calls emerged in response to news that Mozn Hassan, director of the internationally renowned grassroots feminist organization Nazra for Feminist Studies, had become the focus of an investigation by Egyptian authorities₁. While the headlines and calls for support kept firmly in place the longstanding Orientalist fixation—emanating from the global North—on attacks on women and feminists in Arab and Muslim majority countries, the fine print made it clear that the attack on Mozn Hassan and Nazra was part of a broader authoritarian attack on civil society and human rights activism in Egypt. The attack on Mozn Hassan and Nazra is not simply an isolated attack on feminism, women’s movements, women’s rights, sexual rights, women’s bodies, and/or women’s agency in Egypt. Rather, it is part of a systematic assault on any and all remnants of the Egyptian revolution, including groups and individuals critical of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his authoritarian regime, as well as on people who don’t conform to social and gender norms who can easily serve as the regime’s scapegoats.

The Crackdown

When Egyptian authorities targeted Nazra in 2016, they added the organization to their NGO funding investigation, started in 2011, which has targeted many NGOs for receiving foreign funds for activities that the authorities allege are “a threat to national security.” Included in the government’s crackdown on NGOs are the renowned El Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights, the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, and the Arab Network for Human Rights Information. All of these groups are critical of Sisi’s government, especially its violations of human rights and its intensified revival of ousted president Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarianism and neoliberal economic agenda.

El Nadim Center not only provides psychological support to the victims of torture in Egypt, it also documents these violations perpetrated by state actors and scandalizes the state’s infringements of human rights. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights documents prison conditions, police crackdowns against LGBTQ people, and the state’s violations of the constitutionally protected freedom of religion and belief. The Arab Network documents violations against freedom of expression, provides legal aid for public critics such as journalists and artists, and launches campaigns for prisoners of conscience. Nazra for Feminist Studies documents state and nonstate violence against women in public spaces and provides legal, medical, and psychological remedies to survivors of violence.

By targeting these and other NGOs that are included in the foreign funding case, the authorities are seeking to defame these organizations as agents of Western imperialism. The Egyptian corporate media and government rhetoric surrounding the case are replete with accusations of spying in Egypt on behalf of Western powers, a rhetoric that aligns seamlessly with longstanding reactionary Egyptian discourses that conflate social and political resistance and nonconformity with Westernization, colonization, and imperialism. Of course, this rhetoric obscures the Egyptian government’s own complicity in US-led imperialism, from partnering with the Israeli colonization of Palestine to hosting CIA torture camps and participating in neoliberal economic agendas that harm the majority of Egyptians in return for military and financial aid.

In addition to defaming these and other NGOs, Sisi’s government is also arresting NGO employees and other activists as well as crafting more and more laws that restrict NGO work. Consider, for instance, the case of Hesham Gaafar, the director of the Mada Foundation for Media Development, who was arrested in October 2015 and is facing charges alleging that he is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and has received bribes from foreign entities. Or the current legal restrictions that allow the government to dissolve NGOs at their discretion, appoint their own board members, approve or disapprove NGOs’ activities and grants, and curtail the freedom of assembly for Egyptian people based on a draconian protest law that bans unregistered gatherings of ten or more individuals in public and private spaces. The Egyptian authorities have banned activists from travel, used recordings of their phone calls to blackmail and defame them, threatened them with freezing their assets and calling them in for interrogation, and have even tortured and killed them.

In short, the Egyptian government’s policies are resulting in minimizing, even perhaps shutting down entirely, the public sphere and, with it, all forms of and venues for freedom of expression. As demonstrated by the case of novelist Ahmed Nagy, who was sentenced to two years in prison for apparently using “obscene” sexual content in his novel, the government’s crackdown extends beyond rights-based groups and targets people and groups for any kind of nonconformity—from gender and sexual nonconformity to critical art and journalism. The Egyptian authorities are using a variety of weapons to repress resistance and to disarm and detain journalists, protesters, and anyone challenging the status quo.

Historical context matters here. While Egypt’s ousted dictator, Hosni Mubarak (president from 1981–2011), also cracked down on activists and factions threatening his rule, it is noteworthy that the current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, took power after the Egyptian uprising in 2011, which had radically opened up public political space in the country. Dismantling all of the successes of the revolution through excessively harsh crackdowns has been fundamental to Sisi’s dictatorship. It is also noteworthy that Sisi became president in 2013 following a coup to remove Islamist president Mohamed Morsi from office and that his efforts to eradicate any perceived threats to his rule involve targeting both the former ruling party and Egypt’s most organized political faction, the Islamists.

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1. On March 27, 2016, Mozn Hassan appeared before an investigative judge who informed her lawyers that her interrogation was postponed. For more information on the case of Mozn Hassan, see https://nazra.org/en.

2. “Court Verdict Eases Restrictions on Foreign Funding for Egyptian NGOS,” Mada Masr, April 20, 2016, https://madamasr.com/en/2016/04/20/news/u/court-verdict-eases-restrictions-on-foreign-funding-for-egyptian-ngos/.

3. “Rights Groups, Public Figures Condemn Ongoing Detention of Journalist Hesham Gaafar,” Mada Masr, January 30, 2016, https://madamasr.com/en/2016/01/30/news/u/rights-groups-public-figures-condemn-ongoing-detention-of-journalist-hesham-gaafar/.

4. Brian R. Braun, “Civil Society in Egypt Still Matters,” Atlantic Council, April 22, 2016, http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/civil-society-in-egypt-still-matters.

5. See Lila Abu-Lughod and Rabab El-Mahdi, “Beyond the ‘Woman Question’ in the Egyptian Revolution,” Feminist Studies 37, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 683–91; and Sahar Khamis, “The Arab ‘Feminist’ Spring?” Feminist Studies 37, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 692–95.