[/caption]
The scene was a relatively unremarkable one. But what happens next is pure pleasure.
Two women dressed in niqabs are sat down in a Cairo shop and chatting about their lives in Egypt. One of them is describing in forceful detail why it is that Egyptian women have the right to become president of the country if they want to.
Locking horns with the female owner of the shop, she argues that there is nothing in the Qur'an which sanctions the political domination of men over women, and contests that in modern Egypt, every woman should be able to pursue the career she chooses.
The scene - from a newly made documentary screened for the first time here in Cairo last week - turns so many Occidental preconceptions about veiled women inside out.
Here is a woman dressed head to toe in black and whose religious dedication is obvious from her recourse to Islamic doctrine. Shouldn’t she be anathema to supposedly Western styles of feminist thinking? Apparently not.
It is rendered all the more confusing by the views of the shopkeeper, a businesswoman called Suzanne. Later in the film we discover that she is something of a progressive in her own right, having overcome the objections of her family to pursue a career in retail.
She has also rejected numerous marriage proposals – including from a sheikh, who only agreed to the wedding after seeing her face and concluding she was pretty enough.
“If you’re not married by 23 it’s considered a catastrophe,” she opines, lamenting the social strictures of her country.
Yet during the debate with her niqab-wearing customers, she is the one who protests that women are not suitable to lead the country. She is then chastised by one of them, who points out there is nothing in the Koran to support this.
Directed by a first time Anglo-Egyptian film-maker, the documentary was commissioned by the United Nations and shown in a preview screening at Cairo’s Marriot Hotel last week.
It is still in its early stages of promotion and further details have not been approved for release, but it looks likely to garner wide attention. Many of the guests invited to the screening were in tears at the end, with one established director who saw it telling me it was an extraordinary effort for a debutant film-maker.
If there is any justice in the world, it deserves to be seen in every country which has an interest in understanding the complex roles of women and social hierarchy in Arab society today.
Following the overwhelmingly positive reaction, the director has applied to show the documentary at the Sundance Film Festival along with a number of other events. If more audiences have the chance to view its inspirational blend of searing story-telling and glowing humour, it will become the runaway success that it deserves to be.
