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Once upon a time in Egypt, there was a housewife. Married and with children, her husband was forever jetting off to Germany and leaving her alone in Cairo.
Then one day she followed him. Growing suspicious of his so-called “business trips”, she turned up at his home in Germany and confronted him.
It was then that she learned the truth; that her husband was not her husband at all. In fact, he had divorced her 20 years before without even saying a word and now had an entirely new family in Europe.
According to Fatema Khafagy, a member of an NGO called the Alliance for Arab Women, the story – which is completely true – is indicative of the grossly imbalanced relationships between men and women in Egyptian society today.
Unlike the country’s women, who have to negotiate a complicated course of legal hurdles before they can divorce, men simply have to say the word ‘divorce’ three times and the marriage can be annulled.
It has led to numerous cases such as the one involving the housewife and her travelling husband, where men can divorce simply by saying so, and after notifying a local official can leave their former wives in the lurch.
It isn’t only in the sphere of life where Egypt’s institutionalised inequality is writ large. Under the nation’s inheritance laws, if a father leaves his fortune to a son and daughter, the young man will be entitled to two thirds while the woman picks up the remainder.
Benefits are also negatively sexualised against the interests of women. Through the Sadat Pension Scheme, which shells out just under £10 every month to the unemployed, men can take the cash simply by proving they are out of work. Women, on the other hand, have to prove there is no man providing for her in order to be eligible.
Fatema Khafagy said: “The whole society is built on the man spending money. In everybody’s mind, this is the way it is.”
Khafagy, whose organisation campaigns for better women’s rights in Egypt, much of the blame for the current situation lies with an archaic piece of legislation from 1929 called the Personal Status Law.
“The law says that as long as the man provides for his wife, then everything he decides on must be obeyed,” she said.
It has led, she said, to the culture of what she calls the “obedience house” – a world where the whim of every man must be obeyed, and personal desires of every women are to be disregarded at will.
Moreover the future of women’s rights in Egypt looks bleak. According to Khafagy, many female activists have “relegated” the issue of female emancipation in the quest for wider political reforms.
Even some of Egypt’s poorer women – as opposed to the more affluent, many of whom do not face the kind of problems thrown up by the legal system – often dismiss the issues. “I don’t blame them,” said Khafagy. “There is a whole stigma if you are not married or do not have a family. Why take the risk?”
Even so many are still hopeful that change will come about. Later this month a number of Egyptian NGOs which deal with issues affecting women intend to form a nationwide federation.
As the first organisation of its kind, they hope it will have the power to affect real changes as the country steers itself through the post-Mubarak political phase.
