By Mona Eltahawy

Column from Issue 15, November 10, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. 

I became a feminist in Saudi Arabia, a liberal, secular Muslim in Israel and soon after a bumble bee. Let me explain. I was born in Egypt just after the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict but I’m a foolish optimist and so I like to think I’ve moved on.

At the age of 7 I got my first lesson in being a minority, the foreigner, the outsider, when my parents moved our family to London. The next jolt came at the age of 15, when they moved us to Saudi Arabia.

My world turned upside down.

Imagine being a 15-year-old girl moving from the U.K. to Saudi Arabia. Reverse culture shock doesn’t even begin to explain it. That’s where the feminism comes in because there, on the bookshelves of my university library at the age of 19, I discovered Muslim women writers and scholars who were questioning the patriarchy that was suffocating me. The Islam I was taught and that we practiced at home certainly wasn’t the Islam I saw being practiced outside of my home in Jeddah. And those Muslim women writers saved my mind.

Did I mention I began to wear a headscarf in Saudi Arabia, at the age of 16? I chose to wear it and proudly called myself a feminist during the nine years I wore it but I chose to take it off at the age of 25, after I’d moved back to Egypt and discovered the work of the wonderful Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi and my hero the Egyptian-American scholar of divinity Leila Ahmed.

Books by those two great Muslim scholars were like a balm to my guilt-ridden conscience confused by my struggles over the headscarf and trying to find another way to declare my identity as a proud Muslim woman. Mernissi and Ahmed showed me it didn’t have to be through the headscarf.

I returned to Egypt at the age of 21. Those 14 years away had erased any memory of what it meant to be an Egyptian. What now? An early lesson in the elasticity of identity and how we knead and shape it into what we need. I couldn’t be an “Egyptian” – who defined that anyway? – and instead surrounded myself by like-minded people of equally elastic identity and launched my career as a journalist. My outsider/insider status was finally proving its usefulness.

At the end of 1997 I moved to Israel. Why? Because I wasn’t supposed to. I don’t like the idea of a place I couldn’t visit, especially as a journalist. So I became the first Egyptian to live and work in Israel for a Western news agency – talk about ultimate outsider! The first thing my neighbor in Jerusalem’s Nahlaot quarter told me was to pretend I was British. My accent would fool everyone, she said. I considered it for maybe three seconds but knew I would get a much bigger kick telling the truth, which always meant I was the first Egyptian everyone had ever met.

I became a liberal, secular Muslim in Israel thanks to my ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbors in Nahlaot. They looked just like the Saudi men and women I remembered from my time in Jeddah – the men with their big beards, the women with their modest clothing that covered their hair and most of their bodies. Attitudes towards women and modesty generally are almost identical between the two communities – when a Saudi cleric obsesses over a woman’s dress it isn’t too far removed from the ultra-Orthodox obsession with women’s appearance.

It was much easier making those deductions and seeing the toxic marriage that results from politics and religion when it’s observed in someone else’s culture and society and that year in Israel was essentially an early lesson that fundamentalists are the same everywhere and in every religion.

As for becoming a bumble bee, I first developed symptoms sometime around the summer of 2000 when I moved to the United States. The older I got, the harder it was to pack and move and start fresh. I’m as sociable as they come but making new friends in your 30s isn’t as easy at is when you’re 7. So I promised myself I’d stand still for a while and stop moving.

I didn’t reckon with my innate wanderlust – for which I blame my parents and their love of uprooting us – and with my latent desire to run, run, run – for which I blame those six years in Saudi Arabia, which felt like a life sentence. So I struck a bargain with New York City, the only place that has managed to unseat London as the queen of my heart.

Here’s our deal – NYC is the ultimate understanding lover. The more she understands my need to stray the more likely I will return to her, my perfect honeycomb. But I don’t stray out of greed. I’m a woman on a mission. Or rather a bumble bee. Over the past 10 months I have lectured in eight different countries. Or to put it more romantically, I have bounced and flitted between eight different flowers, picking pollen from one to leave on another. And, occasionally, I sting.

So as I write these columns, don’t ask me who I represent. I don’t speak for Egyptians. I don’t speak for Muslims. I speak for Mona, the feminist, liberal, secular bumble bee. •

Column from Issue 15, November 10, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report.