Egyptian Women Scarred by Hate

CAIRO — Sixteen-year-old Marwa Mohammed Kamal, a good student with a bright future, had just stepped from her apartment in a working-class neighborhood when she saw the man whom she barely knew but with whom she had recently broken off an arranged marriage. He raced toward the tall, striking young woman, flinging a foul-smelling liquid on her face, arm and back.

She collapsed in searing agony--the victim of what is becoming an increasingly common attack here.

She had been burned with sulfuric acid. Three years and 15 excruciating operations later, she still is so distraught and disfigured that she combs her hair over half her face.

“I can’t describe the feeling,” Kamal says. “What happened didn’t only destroy my face, my heart was destroyed even more.”

Now, she rarely goes out.

“No one wants to see me,” she says in a disconnected voice, awaiting a future she describes as “dark, desperate and unknown.”

Sulfuric acid--or “fire water,” as it has been dubbed by many here--has become a cheap, convenient and horrible weapon for an increasing number of Egyptian men furious with wives, girlfriends or women in general.

The men involved, critics say, flee all too easily after committing their crime. If caught, they too often are not rigorously prosecuted, and the law itself provides for relatively light penalties.

But for scores and perhaps hundreds of women, acid attacks have brought lifetimes of shame, isolation and suffering.

The recent increase in such assaults across Egypt has also underscored what human rights activists see as an even greater issue--an epidemic of violence against women here.

It is fueled, they say, by poverty, male frustration and a rising tide of Islamic extremism that often seems directed at curtailing women’s choices.

Activists, for example, note that women are subject to harassment on streets here if they are considered to be improperly dressed.

They note that Egyptian society tacitly condones female circumcision, which activists call genital mutilation. It is officially illegal, but the majority of pre-pubescent girls here still must undergo the procedure because it is believed to curb their sexual urges.

Activists express their anger at the official indifference or complacency toward brutality against Egyptian women, a third of whom report in surveys that they are beaten at home and half of whom say they fear violence from their husbands.

“Violence against women is universal,” psychiatrist Aida Saif al Dawla said. “What is different here is that in another country no one could come out on television or on the radio [as some religious figures here have] and say there are situations when violence is legitimate, and this would occur without any public reaction.”

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Indeed, to Westerners, it can be startling that there has not been a greater outcry about the wave of acid attacks in Egypt: There have been 22 of them in just the past three months, police say. Doctors who have treated victims say the number is even greater.

The attacks, psychologist Mohammed Shaalan said, are carried out by men who feel powerless--economically or politically.

This breeds an anger and frustration that they transfer to women. They resent them because they believe that the women are “getting privileges because of their beauty,” he said.

He noted, for example, that the cost of wedding ceremonies and even decent apartments are beyond the means of many young men in this impoverished society. Thus, marriage--which is the only socially accepted way here of being with a woman--becomes an unattainable dream. This, in turn, breeds frustration, jealousy and rage.

Amal Abdul Hamid, one of Cairo’s leading plastic surgeons, sees the awful results at his clinic, where he has been treating two sulfuric acid burn cases a week. Besides having hideous scars, he said, 60 of his patients have been blinded in such attacks in the past four years.

“Many Egyptian men think that a woman’s beauty is everything to her,” he said. “By destroying her looks, they think they have destroyed her life.”

Shaalan theorized that men who conduct these brutal attacks are locked in a primitive, obsessive form of love.

They would “like to take in this person, totally, and if she doesn’t agree, the man’s anger becomes as great or greater than his love,” he said, adding that he has heard many male patients express fantasies of attacking unattainable lovers.

These men are saying, “If I can’t have her, nobody else will,” he said.

One assailant, angry and muttering about a broken engagement, marched through Cairo’s crowded streets with an acid-filled syringe. He sprayed the back and legs of any woman he saw who resembled his former fiance. He was never caught, though he inflicted burns on at least 50 victims, reported Al Ahram, a semiofficial newspaper.

“These men think of refusal as an insult to their dignity and manhood,” said Ahmed Magdoub, a professor at the National Center for Sociological and Criminal Research. “Hurt pride, along with built-up jealousy of women, makes him want to get revenge.”

Women’s growing economic power--with more of them now working and increasing their education--is another frequent source of tension, said Suzanne Fayad, a psychologist at the El Nadeem Center for Violence Victims. She cited one case in which a literate woman was scarred with acid by her less-educated husband simply because she refused to sign a check for him.

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“Lower-class men are financially frustrated . . . and have nothing of value to them except their manhood,” Magdoub said, adding that, “to prevent these crimes, mothers should teach their sons that women have the right to reject men, as men have the right to reject women, and that men and women are equal.”

Nabil Ezabi, head of civil security in the Egyptian Interior Ministry, stressed that Egyptian society is less violent on the whole than the United States, with fewer than 1,000 homicides a year in a country of 62 million people.

He downplayed the number of acid attacks and dismissed domestic violence as a major issue, saying it rarely reaches a point where it involves the police.

He did note, though, that the government is sufficiently concerned to be considering controls on who may buy sulfuric acid.

The insufficient official response to domestic violence starts at the lowest levels--with police, say women and human rights activists. They argue that police do not get involved in domestic violence because authorities simply do not usually consider it a crime when a man hits his wife.

Al Dawla says the light legal penalty for “crimes of honor”--in which relatives assault or even kill wives believed to be immoral or unfaithful--supports her belief that Egyptian society all but condones attacks on women.

“The legislative system of the country gives the person who kills his sister or daughter one to three years in prison for a crime [murder] that normally carries the death penalty, only because she seems to him to have disturbed the honor of the family,” she said.

Marlene Tadros, a human rights activist, said she found disturbing evidence of the breadth of the violence against women when she surveyed slum dwellers in Cairo: Almost every woman she met had been beaten; some volunteered that they considered it simply part of marriage.

“The reasons for the violence are the most amazing thing, all sorts of trivial stuff,” Tadros added. “If she is holding a glass of water and it falls from her hands and breaks, he gets up and beats her. If he doesn’t like the food, he throws it in her face and beats her. If he doesn’t have his clothes ironed, if he doesn’t have his clothes washed, he beats her.

“One of the women said . . . ‘It’s OK when he comes back and beats me. It’s better than him going out and doing something wrong on the street and venting his frustration.’ ”

To Tadros, the abuse of women here is related to larger societal problems, such as high unemployment, ignorance and the powerlessness that Egypt’s many poor feel about the chances they have to improve their lives.

“These women are very well aware” that, when they are beaten, it is their husbands “venting frustration, and that [the men] don’t have another outlet except them. They have accepted that a women’s fate is to be vented upon.”

A survey by the National Population Council found that 86% of women respondents said that husbands are justified in sometimes beating wives--if the wife, for example, refuses sex or talks back.

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Al Dawla said she believes that violence against women is increasing because of changes in values in Egypt: This society more and more is caught up in an officially promulgated Islamic ideology, intended to blunt the appeal of violent, anti-government Islamic groups.

Now, Al Dawla argues, the government comes down hard on extremists who threaten its power but gives government-paid sheiks free rein to propagandize on state television about how women ought to dress and behave.

When she was a student in the early 1970s, she noted, Egypt was more secular, and there was, for example, no question that women who went to a university would have careers. But now many Egyptians argue that women ought to stay home and raise children.

As for Kamal, her family bucked the common practice and waged a long court battle to see that her assailant was imprisoned for 10 years for splashing her with acid.

This came at a further personal cost, however, as she has been subjected to press reports laden with innuendoes that she was promiscuous or unfaithful or that she had no justification for breaking her betrothal, and, therefore, deserved to be punished.

Kamal has to written President Clinton seeking help, hoping that a plastic surgeon will hear about her case and perform the further operations that her father, a retired teacher, cannot afford.

She is stung by the intrusive curiosity of passers-by and often breaks down in tears, her father says. “This is my life and I have to go on,” Kamal says from behind the dark tresses that shroud her attempt at a wistful smile. “This is my fate.”